OPINION #RUSSIA#UKRAINE 05.10.2023 - 2,659 views

4.6 (11 votes)

Russia’s “Big Push”

Illustrative image

Written by Julian Macfarlane, Tokyo based investigative reporter, writer, author, and geopolitical analyst

Everyone’s talking about it! But when exactly is that big Russian offensive—the “Big Push”—going to begin? Will the Russians be celebrating Christmas in Kiev?

Sorry to tell you–there will be no presents under the tree in Kiev for Vladimir Putin this Christmas.

And that’s not because mainstream media says Russia is losing and about to collapse. Or because Putin is a Slavic Grinch.

Keep in mind that Putin does Judo. In Judo, you don’t push. You get your opponent to do that and you use his momentum and force against him. If anything, you pull.

**Why why why?**

With the Ukrainian counteroffensive stalled and Zelensky increasingly petulant, demanding, and unpopular in the West, it might seem that the time for Russian offensive is ripe — just like Zelensky’s unwashed fatigues. The only person who seems to like Zelensky these days is Justin Trudeau may be because he doesn’t have any friends anymore in Canada. Or maybe just because he needs somebody to do coke with.

He is ripe too. Actually rotten.

Moreover….

The Ukrainians are launching a lot of terror attacks— which you would think would give the Russians good reason to finally go in and get it over with.

After all, they have the resources —a new army, somewhere between 300,000 and 600,000 already in Ukraine; plenty of missiles, drones, and of course artillery; air defense systems second to none; the world’s most advanced electronic warfare technology and even laser weapons.

Let’s not forget hypersonic technology. They are even creating hypersonic bullets!

They have upgraded their ISR including new advanced radar platforms.

Russian losses during the counteroffensive were the lowest of any time during the SMO.

Click to see full-size image

The Last Man

‘How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?’

John Kerry

The Ukrainians know how. Keep the war going—so there is no “last” man.

Ukrainian losses are now the highest since the war began– officially about 70,000 – unofficially, about double that. The number keeps rising.

The Ukrainian Army uses mostly untrained conscripts – literally cannon fodder—the number of bodies on the field, alive and dead, maintained with universal conscription and sending injured soldiers back to the front before their wounds have fully healed – not that they have much in the way of medical services to treat the wounded anyway.

With winter, Ukrainian forests are denuded of leaves, making it harder for the AFU to camouflage their assets. The ground freezes, easier for tanks, of which the Russians have many. Ukrainians have lost a lot of armor including Leopards, Challengers, and Bradleys —and soon American bargain-basement Abrams without DU armor.

Ukrainians are fighting on foot. If they try to surrender or don’t show enough enthusiasm, they are shot in the back by their Nazi commanders. The Russians are indeed killing a lot of Ukrainians, but it seems the barrier squads are killing a lot too –and more are dying through sheer military stupidity and callousness.

For the Russians, it is shooting ducks in a pond.

The missile war

Ukrainians may or may not get longer-range missiles—but it won’t make any difference.

The Ukrainians have been firing off Storm Shadow missiles in a desperate attempt to show their Western backers that they can do some damage— and all that money that they are being given, a lot of which just seems to disappear, should keep on coming.

Each missile costs $3 million—plus alpha. The “plus alpha” part is profit. With Zelensky, you know where the bucks stop. His wallet. In Ukraine, everything is for sale including your soul.

Illustrative Image

The Ukrainian strikes have indeed done some harm but so far it is of little or no military significance, thanks to Russian air defenses.

Each attack, however, generates massive Russian strikes on the bases from which the attacks originate, leading to incremental depletion of Ukrainian assets that cannot be easily replaced.

The Ukrainians try to move their assets to secondary bases, but each time they do, the Russians track them.

The Americans put up surveillance aircraft and drones to guide the missiles to target–which alerts Russian air defenses at the same time, allowing them to take down a significant percentage of the missiles. It’s an unintentional early warning system—for the Russians.

Still, the Western media are trumpeting the “successes” of Ukraine in attacking Russia itself, Sevastopol, for example—at the same time claiming Crimea is not part of Russia.

And there is talk of providing Ukraine with longer-range (190 mile) missiles—ATACMS. While Russia can shoot down ATACMS as easily as it has done other Western missile systems—a few will always get through.

So naturally everyone expects the Russians to go for the Big Push now —to take the rest of the Donbass and Kharkov, not to mention Odessa, securing the Black Sea, putting Donetsk and Crimea out of range.

S400 Anti ABM system

Yet all along the front line, the Russians are still fighting defensively, expending minimal resources. Retreating sometimes; then re-attacking. Not in a hurry.

Svechin’s operational art

For a lot of analysts, this means the Russians are just preparing for something really, really dramatic, which will come soon. These people cannot give up the idea that this SMO is somehow World War II revisited—hence the comparisons to historic World War II battles like Kursk and Leningrad.

Yet, Putin and his generals are not using World War II Russian strategy or tactics, but instead Svechin’s “operational art”— flexibly adapting offensive strategy and defensive tactics, depending on the situation.

Back in World War II, Stalin demanded offensive strategy— and executed Svechin lest his ideas undermine his authority. Putin does not want to repeat his mistakes.

So it is that in Russia you must use the word SMO— even though many people reflexively still call it “war.”

Words have power. “War” evokes assumptions, expectations, and the like, based what we learned in school or college as “history”– reinforced by movies and TV—battles won and lost– force of arms, military matters.

Forget education.

Click to see full-size image

Putin wants people to think differently.

John Boyd, the 20th century’s greatest military strategist, an autistic polymath, pointed out that wars have never been just military– but moral and psychological as well– and that a fixed strategy leads to defeat. One must tear up the rulebook and make one’s own.

Which was also Svechin’s point.

Putin has gone to great lengths to define the conflict in Ukraine for what it is—a fraternal conflict – not the kind “war” between Good and Evil as presented in the movies.

In the 21st century, nuclear weapons mean there can be no total war between nuclear armed peers—which means war at this level has to be economic, cultural, and psychological – with direct military conflict minimized.

That’s why the Americans choose to fight Russia with proxies. They don’t want to die.

Letting your enemy destroy himself

Ukraine is Europe’s second largest country – it is 30% larger than Iraq. To take Iraq, the Americans had to do “shock and awe”, bombing cities like Fallujah into rubble and destroying social institutions and culture, opening the way for further violence on the part of extremists like ISIS.

If they hadn’t done that, they would’ve taken casualties, with political repercussions.

Russia wants as few casualties as possible for its own troops— but also for civilians in Ukraine —it’s brothers and sisters and cousins —who mostly speak Russian. And have much more in common with other ethnic groups in the Russian Federation than with Europeans.

The Banderite ideology is an aberration, a civilizational sickness, for which there is no medicine, other than for the disease to burn itself out, which takes time. It will die. It will self-destruct. Like a virus, however, it first attacks its host.

Each Ukrainian failure on the battlefield or at home is a symptom of the disease.

Therefore, Russia has set up a situation where the Ukrainians keep on attacking– and keep on losing both men and equipment, demilitarizing themselves, letting the disease exhausted itself.

To recover, Ukrainians must recognize the pathology of the flesh eating, Banderite infection which includes universal conscription, and an almost decade-long attempt at ethnocide in eastern Ukraine— not to mention restrictions of social and political freedom. This is a process of auto denazification.

The body politic must heal itself– or die— and hope to be reborn.

Ukraine will collapse in time, whether or not the Russians conduct an offensive. When it does, it will need the Russians. If the Russians offer help, ordinary Ukrainians will switch sides, just as the Japanese did after the Emperor surrendered. The worst Ukrainian Nazis will flee to the US and Canada or perhaps Australia and New Zealand as they did after World War II.

In other words, why do a big push now? The Neo-Nazis are destroying themselves all by themselves.

That “Big Push” will not come earlier than next year until after Putin has been reelected and before the US elections. Unless, of course, something happens to change the situation radically.

Ironically, Ukraine can only win by losing. If it actually did win, it would have no future except as a slave state exploited by the neoliberal West—just as it was once a slave state under the Poles.

Other reasons to wait

There is another reason for the Russians to put off that much talked about offensive.

Ukraine is just one battlefield in a world war—World War III.

All world wars are civilizational and start in response to historic changes in an evolving world. However, when they end, they generate new paths of change, as unintended consequences of the victory of one side or another.

For example, evolving trends in the late 19th century and early 20th resulted in World War I. No one could have foreseen the kind of world that emerged afterward.

Only in hindsight could we understand how these changes led to World War II, which like the first world war had to be fought on a different basis from any previous war, thanks to new technologies and science.

Once again, the outcomes were predictably different from what anyone expected—and that the paradoxes.

The USSR won the war militarily, but it was the US that won economically and psychologically, producing a short Golden Age for America’s Greatest Generation who were not so much great —as just lucky to fight a war with minimum losses and maximum economic and political advantage.

That Golden Age was short because it was unintended. A spin of the wheel.

World War III is yet another cultural and civilizational war — a result of social, political, economic, and technological change— just like the previous world wars —but its scope is larger. And its weapons of mass destruction are grain and fuel, technologies and ideas, more than bombs and rockets.

Make no mistake, however, it is still a war and right now Russia is in the crosshairs.

The Western elite make no secret of their goal, which is, I quote, “Russia’s strategic defeat.” What does this mean to us? This means they plan to finish us once and for all. In other words, they plan to grow a local conflict into a global confrontation.

Vladimir Putim

This is a war between an empire in decline and the rest of the world, between unipolarity and multi-polarity– between neoliberalism— economic, neocolonial exploitation — and what you might call “independent developmentalism”—local autonomy and freedom— with each country developing according to its needs and abilities, cultural values and resources.

Russia is the world’s largest country and the richest in resources. The West is driven by a new iteration of Hitler’s Lebensraum—which was, never about “living space” but about oil and metals and grain.

So Russia is the target.