By Scott Ritter
June 29, 2022:
Information Clearing House
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Consortium News
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For
a moment in time, it looked as if reality
had managed to finally carve its way through
the dense fog of propaganda-driven
misinformation that had dominated Western
media coverage of Russia’s “Special Military
Operation” in Ukraine.
In a stunning admission, Oleksandr Danylyuk,
a former senior adviser to the Ukrainian
Ministry of Defense and Intelligence
Services, noted that the optimism that
existed in Ukraine following Russia’s
decision to terminate “Phase One” of the SMO
(a major military feint toward Kiev), and
begin “Phase Two” (the liberation of the
Donbass), was no longer warranted. “The
strategies and tactics of the Russians are
completely different right now,” Danylyuk
noted. “They are being much more successful.
They have more resources than us and they
are not in a rush.”
“There’s much less space for optimism right
now,” Danylyuk concluded.
In short, Russia was winning.
Danylyuk’s conclusions were not derived from
some esoteric analysis drawn from Sun Tzu or
Clausewitz, but rather basic military math.
In a war that had become increasingly
dominated by the role of artillery, Russia
simply was able to bring to bear on the
battlefield more firepower than Ukraine.
Ukraine
started the current conflict with an
artillery inventory that included 540 122mm
self-propelled artillery guns, 200 towed
122mm howitzers, 200 122mm multiple-rocket
launch systems, 53 152mm self-propelled
guns, 310 towed 152mm howitzers, and 96
203mm self-propelled guns, for approximately
1,200 artillery and 200 MLRS systems.
For the past 100-plus days, Russia has been
relentlessly targeting both Ukraine’s
artillery pieces and their associated
ammunition storage facilities. By June 14,
the Russian Ministry of Defense claimed
that it had destroyed “521 installation of
multiple launch rocket systems” and “1947
field artillery guns and mortars.”
Even if the Russian numbers are inflated (as
is usually the case when it comes to wartime
battle damage assessments), the bottom line
is that Ukraine has suffered significant
losses among the very weapons systems —
artillery — which are needed most in
countering the Russian invasion.
But even if Ukraine’s arsenal of Soviet-era
122mm and 152mm artillery pieces were still
combat-worthy, the reality is that,
according to Danylyuk, Ukraine has almost
completely run out of ammunition for these
systems and the stocks of ammunition sourced
from the former Soviet-bloc Eastern European
countries that used the same family of
weapons have been depleted.
Ukraine is left doling out what is left of
its former Soviet ammunition while trying to
absorb modern Western 155mm artillery
systems, such as the Caesar self-propelled
gun from France and the U.S.-made M777
howitzer.
But the reduced capability means that
Ukraine is only able to fire some
4,000-to-5,000 artillery rounds per day,
while Russia responds with more than 50,000.
This 10-fold disparity in firepower has
proven to be one of the most decisive
factors when it comes to the war in Ukraine,
enabling Russia to destroy Ukrainian
defensive positions with minimal risk to its
own ground forces.
Casualties
This has led to a second level of military
math imbalances, that being casualties.
Mykhaylo Podolyak, a senior aid to Ukrainian
President Volodymyr Zelensky,
recently estimated that Ukraine was
losing between 100 and 200 soldiers a day on
the frontlines with Russia, and another 500
or so wounded. These are unsustainable
losses, brought on by the ongoing disparity
in combat capability between Russia and
Ukraine symbolized, but not limited to,
artillery.
In recognition of this reality, NATO
Secretary General Jen Stoltenberg announced
that Ukraine will more than likely have to
make territorial concessions to Russia as
part of any potential peace agreement,
asking,
“what price are you willing to pay for
peace? How much territory, how much
independence, how much sovereignty…are
you willing to sacrifice for peace?”
Stoltenberg, speaking in Finland, noted that
similar territorial concessions made by
Finland to the Soviet Union at the end of
the Second World War was “one of the reasons
Finland was able to come out of the Second
World War as an independent sovereign
nation.”
To recap — the secretary general of the
trans-Atlantic alliance responsible for
pushing Ukraine into its current conflict
with Russia is now proposing that Ukraine be
willing to accept the permanent loss of
sovereign territory because NATO
miscalculated and Russia —instead of being
humiliated on the field of battle and
crushed economically — is winning on both
fronts.
Decisively.
That the secretary general of NATO would
make such an announcement is telling for
several reasons.
Stunning Request
First, Ukraine is requesting 1,000
artillery pieces and 300 multiple-launch
rocket systems, more than the entire
active-duty inventory of the U.S. Army and
Marine Corps combined. Ukraine is also
requesting 500 main battle tanks — more than
the combined inventories of Germany and the
United Kingdom.
In short, to keep Ukraine competitive on the
battlefield, NATO is being asked to strip
its own defenses down to literally zero.
More telling, however, is what the numbers
say about NATO’s combat strength versus
Russia. If NATO is being asked to empty its
armory to keep Ukraine in the game, one must
consider the losses suffered by Ukraine up
to that point and that Russia appears able
to sustain its current level of combat
activity indefinitely. That’s right — Russia
just destroyed the equivalent of NATO’s main
active-duty combat power and hasn’t blinked.
One can only imagine the calculations
underway in Brussels as NATO military
strategists ponder the fact that their
alliance is incapable of defeating Russia in
a large-scale European conventional land
war.
But there is another conclusion that these
numbers reveal — that no matter what the
U.S. and NATO do in terms of serving as
Ukraine’s arsenal, Russia is going to win
the war. The question now is how much time
the West can buy Ukraine, and at what cost,
in a futile effort to discover Russia’s pain
threshold in order to bring the conflict to
an end in a manner that reflects anything
but the current path toward unconditional
surrender.
The only questions that need to be answered
in Brussels, apparently, is how long can the
West keep the Ukrainian Army in the field,
and at what cost? Any rational actor would
quickly realize that any answer is an
unacceptable answer, given the certainty of
a Russian victory, and that the West needs
to stop feeding Ukraine’s suicidal fantasy
of rearming itself to victory.
Enter The New York Times, stage
right. While trying to completely reshape
the narrative regarding the fighting in the
Donbass after the damning reality check
would be a bridge too far for even the
creative minds at the Gray Lady — the
writing equivalent of trying to put
toothpaste back in the tube. But the editors
were able to interview a pair of erstwhile
“military analysts” who cobbled together a
scenario that transformed Ukraine’s
battlefield humiliation.
‘Military Analysts’
They described a crafty strategy designed to
lure Russia into an urban warfare nightmare
where, stripped of its advantages in
artillery, it was forced to sacrifice
soldiers in an effort to dig the resolute
Ukrainian defenders from their hardened
positions located amongst the rubble of a
“dead” city — Severodonetsk. [Ukraine forces
withdrew from the city Friday.]
According to Gustav Gressel, a former
Austrian military officer turned military
analysts, “If the Ukrainians succeed in
trying to drag them [the Russians] into
house-to-house combat, there is a higher
chance of inducing casualties on the
Russians they cannot afford.”
According to Mykhailo Samus, a former
Ukrainian naval officer turned think-tanks
analyst, the Ukrainian strategy of dragging
Russia into an urban combat nightmare is to
buy time for rearming with the heavy weapons
provided by the West, to “exhaust, or
reduce, the enemy’s [Russia’s] offensive
capabilities.”
The Ukrainian operational concepts in play
in Severodonetsk, these analysts claim, have
their roots in past Russian urban warfare
experiences in Aleppo, Syria and Mariupol.
What escapes the attention of these
so-called military experts, is that both
Aleppo and Mariupol were decisive Russian
victories; there were no “excessive
casualties,” no “strategic defeat.”
Had The New York Times bothered to
check the resumes of the “military exerts”
it consulted, it would have found two men so
deeply entrenched into the Ukrainian
propaganda mill as to make their respective
opinions all but useless to any journalistic
outlet possessing a modicum of
impartiality. But this was The New York
Times.
Gressel is the source
of such wisdom as:
“If we stay tough, if the war ends in
defeat for Russia, if the defeat is
clear and internally painful, then next
time he will think twice about invading
a country. That is why Russia must lose
this war.”
And:
“We in the West…all of us, must now turn
over every stone and see what can be
done to make Ukraine win this war.”
Apparently, the Gressel playbook for
Ukrainian victory includes fabricating a
Ukrainian strategy from whole cloth to
influence perceptions regarding the
possibility of a Ukrainian military victory.
Samus likewise seeks to transform the
narrative of the Ukrainian frontline forces
fighting in Severodonetsk. In
a recent interview with the Russian-language
journal Meduza, Samus declares
that:
“Russia has concentrated a lot of forces
[in the Donbass]. The Ukrainian armed
forces are gradually withdrawing
to prevent encirclement. They
understand that the capture of
Severodonetsk doesn’t change anything
for the Russian or the Ukrainian army
from a practical point of view. Now, the
Russian army is wasting tremendous
resources to achieve political
objectives and I think they will be very
difficult to replenish…[f]or the
Ukrainian army, defending Severodonetsk
isn’t advantageous. But if they retreat
to Lysychansk they’ll be in more
favorable tactical conditions.
Therefore, the Ukrainian army is
gradually withdrawing or leaving
Severodonetsk, and upholding the combat
mission. The combat mission is to
destroy enemy troops and carry out
offensive operations.”
The truth is, there is nothing deliberate
about the Ukrainian defense of
Severodonetsk. It is the byproduct of an
army in full retreat, desperately trying to
claw out some defensive space, only to be
crushed by the brutal onslaught of superior
Russian artillery-based firepower.
To the extent Ukraine is seeking to delay
the Russian advance, it is being done by the
full-scale sacrifice of the soldiers at the
front, thousands of people thrown into
battle with little or no preparation,
training, or equipment, trading their lives
for time so that Ukrainian negotiators can
try to convince NATO countries to mortgage
their military viability on the false
promise of a Ukrainian military victory.
This is the ugly truth about Ukraine today —
the longer the war continues, the more
Ukrainians will die, and the weaker NATO
will become. If left to people like Samus
and Gressel, the result would be hundreds of
thousands of dead Ukrainians, the
destruction of Ukraine as a viable
nation-state, and the gutting of NATO’s
front-line combat capability, all sacrificed
without meaningfully altering the
inevitability of a strategic Russian
victory.
Hopefully sanity will prevail, and the West
will wean Ukraine off the addiction of heavy
weaponry, and push it to accept a peace
settlement which, although bitter to the
taste, will leave something of Ukraine for
future generations to rebuild.
Scott Ritter is a former U.S. Marine Corps
intelligence officer who served in the
former Soviet Union implementing arms
control treaties, in the Persian Gulf during
Operation Desert Storm and in Iraq
overseeing the disarmament of WMD.