A dark theory for the evening. Let's talk about Russian strategy in Ukraine.
Looking at developments lately, specifically: (1) the Ukrainian casualty leak showing an astronomical 1.7M KIA/MIA; and (2) the Ukrainian collapse north of Pokrovsk - I thought should revisit a dark thought I had a while ago, namely that, "maybe the killing itself is the point of all of this."
I've said before that the Russians have fought an extraordinarily clean war in Ukraine, but it should be understood that there is a very legalistic shade on that assessment. They've killed very few civilians, and Ukrainian propagandists are perpetually beclowning themselves trying to pretend that the usual single-digit handful of injured civilians that accompany the latest attack using hundreds of standoff weapons fired into city centers (producing secondary explosions visible from outer space as military targets hidden among civilian infrastructure are destroyed with surgical precision) somehow constitute gEnOCiDe rather than some of the most well-controlled warfighting in the history of the business. There is another and far darker side to Russia's "clean" war, however.
Let us consider the fate of the Armed Forces of Ukraine - legal combatants all, whom the Russians can and do target and kill without limit. I mentioned the casualty leak earlier, but I feel this needs to have a line drawn under it - one point seven million personnel killed or missing in action in the AFU, over the course of the war. 1.7 MILLION. Seven or eight percent of Ukraine's prewar population, probably something like a quarter of the entire national cohort of military-aged males, dead or missing. Casualties on the scale of a genocide, sufficient to permanently cripple any postwar Ukrainian nation. Casualties multiple times that which I assessed two years ago as sufficient to shatter the AFU based on the experience of Nazi Germany.
This brings me to the Ukrainian collapse north of Pokrovsk two weeks ago, in which a run-of-the-mill Russian attack walked through twenty kilometers of Ukrainian defensive belts and into open country. The Ukrainian propagandists coped by whining about how the single most important front sector for the AFU had somehow "run out of infantry." But did the Russians throw in a mobile reserve to collapse the front and chase the AFU back to the Dniper, despite doubtless knowing full well what was going on? No, they did not - they consolidated in the breach and awaited the inevitable, panicked Ukrainian counterattack, in which they would have the opportunity to destroy Ukraine's remaining elite troops.
Which brings me to my conclusion. The Russians have had countless opportunities to make large advances in this war, especially recently - the Ukrainian front line is an absolute shambles and their "drone wall" tactic will falter against any serious attack. So ineffectual is the AFU that very few Russian moves at the front even face serious opposition these days, with most geolocations of Russian advances showing them already established in place and dealing with harassment by kill drones after having seized positions bloodlessly. The Russians have in fact consistently foregone breaking the front and taking swathes of ground in favor of killing the largest possible number of Ukrainian soldiers on the existing front line under the existing attritional combat dynamic.
This "tactical directive" held true even during the Battle of Sudzha-Korenevo, fought in prewar Russia. Rather than counterattacking aggressively to evict the AFU, the Russians saw the opportunity to kill gigantic numbers of Ukrainians in a trap the enemy wouldn't be able to extract themselves from for ideological reasons, and they took it. That battle ended up being nine months of hideously lopsided butchery that broke the back of the AFU.
All of this makes observing the war more than a little maddening, but it's a consistent pattern of behavior that begs for explanation. So here's my theory.
The Russian government has consistently sought to end the war via peace treaty with the existing Ukrainian government, not via regime change, outright conquest, or even killing enough of that government to find a more flexible interlocutor among the Maidanites. Putin apparently wants a treaty with Zelensky. The Russians have also consistently made demands of the Ukrainian government - and its NATO sponsors - that are absolute political nonstarters for the Maidan-era regime and which that regime, by its very nature, simply cannot accept. Russian language rights, Orthodox religious rights, demilitarization, large territorial concessions which would see the AFU surrender vast urban areas without a shot fired. And yet the Russians insist, and they're going to continue killing Ukrainian soldiers at ever-more lopsided ratios until they get their way.
Which leads me to the brutal conclusion: Putin doesn't want to see Ukraine conquered. He's never publicly expressed any desire for that. The consistent Russian policy is instead to see Ukraine - a "free" and "independent" Ukraine, having come to this impasse of its own sovereign will - utterly humiliated. Putin wants to make Zelensky put on a suit, come groveling to the Kremlin, and sign a treaty that will see the Maidanite government surrender its arms, disgorge huge amounts of territory, and reverse every single anti-Russian policy position it ever had. Ukrainian nationalism will be discredited overnight by the hands of those very nationalists, and the economically irrelevant, demographically shattered rump state will be sucked back into Russia's political orbit in a matter of days.
So of course the Russians are only advancing in the most leisurely way possible. Their goal is to place the Ukrainian government into a militarily untenable situation so as to force a flamboyantly humiliating peace treaty upon them that includes large territorial concessions beyond the line of control - the ultimate Ukrainian taboo - so as to discredit Ukrainian nationalism by the hands of the very ultranationalists who took their nation to war in the first place.
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Tom |
