Washington Post Tacitly Admits Kiev Regime Is Losing

Click to see the full-size image

Written by Drago Bosnic, independent geopolitical and military analyst

When Russia was forced to respond to NATO’s crawling aggression by launching its strategic counteroffensive, officially known as the special military operation (SMO), top NATO commanders, such as General Mark Milley (ret), then the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, claimed that Kiev would fall “within 72 hours”. No Russian official ever said that Moscow would take over Kiev or the entire Ukraine, the largest country in Europe at the time, in just three days. However, the mainstream propaganda machine (ab)used this baseless claim to the maximum to present Russia’s SMO as some sort of a “failure” because this mythical “goal” that it never actually professed wasn’t accomplished.

Generals in the Kremlin never once had illusions that Kiev, a city of three million in which there were more police officers than soldiers in the entire Russian force that entered Ukraine at the beginning of the SMO, could possibly fall so quickly. That was simply not the goal. However, the conflict would’ve been over in mere days if the political West, particularly the United States and the United Kingdom, hadn’t torpedoed the successful peace talks that would’ve ended the SMO back in early March. And yet, according to the latest Washington Post report about the failed counteroffensive of the Kiev regime forces, NATO and the Neo-Nazi junta certainly had illusions they could defeat Russia in 24 hours and reach the Azov Sea.

The report stated that the goal for the first 24 hours was to advance 15 km, reaching the village of Rabotino and then Melitopol, severing Russian supply lines. However, as WaPo itself admitted, nothing went as planned. Minefields, muddy terrain, Russian active defense and defense-in-depth all contributed to the humiliating failure of the much-touted counteroffensive. Russian artillery, ATGMs (anti-tank guided missiles), helicopters and drones obliterated column after column that were supposed to defeat them in 24 hours. According to WaPo, by day four, General Valery Zaluzhny, “had seen enough”. Incinerated NATO hardware, including American “Bradleys” and German “Leopards”, littered the battlefield.

The report also admitted that “the numbers of dead and wounded sapped morale“, forcing Zaluzhny to stop. He then rejected American plans of massed, mechanized attack and supporting artillery fire and decided that small groups of about 10 soldiers would advance on foot. WaPo then admits that “months of planning with the US was tossed aside on that fourth day, and the already delayed counteroffensive ground to a near-halt”, further complaining that “rather than making a nine-mile (14-15 km) breakthrough on their first day, the Ukrainians in the nearly six months since June have advanced about 12 miles (19 km) and liberated a handful of villages”, while “Melitopol is still far out of reach”.

This is the second part of two reports about what WaPo called “the futile attempts to breach Russian lines, as well as the widening rift between Ukrainian and US commanders over tactics and strategy”. It’s based on interviews with more than 30 senior Ukrainian and US military officials, as well as over two dozen frontline officers and troops. WaPo listed several “key findings”, claiming that “70% of troops in one of the brigades leading the counteroffensive, and equipped with the newest Western weapons, entered battle with no combat experience”. This claim could be true, but it also seems a lot like a futile attempt to justify the humiliating failures of the extremely overhyped NATO equipment.

The report then goes on to claim that “Ukraine’s setbacks on the battlefield led to rifts with the US” and that “the commander of US forces in Europe couldn’t get in touch with Ukraine’s top commander for weeks in the early part of the campaign amid tension over the American’s second-guessing of battlefield decisions”. Each side “blamed the other for mistakes or miscalculations”. US military officials “concluded that Ukraine had fallen short in basic military tactics, including the use of ground reconnaissance to understand the density of minefields”, while “Ukrainian officials said the Americans didn’t seem to comprehend how attack drones and other technology had transformed the battlefield“.

WaPo admitted that “Ukraine has retaken only about 200 square miles of territory, at a cost of thousands of dead and wounded and billions in Western military aid in 2023 alone”, adding that “nearly six months after the counteroffensive began, the campaign has become a war of incremental gains”, a laughable euphemistic way of saying it failed, something that independent analysts interviewed by InfoBRICS predicted months ago. The report then goes on to explain the training process of the 47th Separate Mechanized Brigade at the Grafenwoehr Training Area in Germany, where US General Mark Milley was advising Ukrainian servicemen on how to effectively breach Russian lines.

Milley kept yammering on the “essence of the counteroffensive’s combined arms strategy, which called for coordinated maneuvers by a massed force of infantry, tanks, armored vehicles, engineers and artillery”. However, he never mentioned that the US and NATO would’ve never dared to launch such operations without absolute air superiority. Precisely the 47th was selected to be a “breach force at the tip of the counteroffensive” and was equipped with NATO weapons. However, WaPo claims that the men conscripted into the brigade had no combat experience, as it was a newly established unit. The Neo-Nazi junta decided that “more experienced brigades would hold off the Russians during the winter”.

In the meantime, fresh recruits would form new brigades, receive NATO training and then be used in the then-upcoming counteroffensive, although WaPo claimed that “even the most battle-hardened brigades were now largely composed of drafted replacements”. The leadership of the 47th was also “strikingly young”, the report claims, stating that its commander was just 28 years old and his deputy was 25. However, their youth had been billed as “an advantage”, because they were supposed to “absorb NATO tactics unaffected by the Soviet way of war that still infused parts of the Ukrainian military”. Needless to say, it was precisely this “absorption of NATO tactics” that led to the disastrous losses during the counteroffensive.

In fact, even NATO commanders were forced to admit that this constantly denigrated “Soviet way of war” is actually superior to anything the political West has been able to devise since the (First) Cold War. WaPo even admitted that “Ukrainian soldiers thought the American trainers didn’t grasp the scale of the conflict against a more powerful enemy”, pointing out that countless drones, fortifications, minefields, etc. were not taken into account. Ukrainian soldiers who brought their own drones were rebuffed, as the training programs were predetermined and didn’t include drones. It should be pointed out that it’s certainly true that the political West is completely unable to fight a remotely capable or well-trained opponent.

For the most part, the belligerent power pole uses what can only be described as the “vulture tactics”, where a relatively powerful opponent is attacked only after it has been completely drained by decades of sanctions, coups, civil wars and other forms of subterfuge and orchestrated instability. The political West made the Kiev regime think that fighting Russia would be equivalent to their own countless invasions of relatively helpless opponents. The overall arrogance of NATO and its Neo-Nazi junta puppets went so far that they pompously announced the counteroffensive as if it was already a done deal, completely eliminating any chances of retaining the element of surprise, a critical aspect of warfare.

“We thought it was going to be a simple two-day task”, WaPo quoted a “Bradley” commander going by the call sign Frenchman.

The report then goes on to admit that Russian soldiers were well-prepared for the counteroffensive and refused to retreat, fighting heavily to maintain their positions, even under intense artillery fire. Then, somewhat astonishingly, an attempt to push for some standard war propaganda backfired in a single statement by a Ukrainian commander regarding fighting at Klescheyevka.

“Klishchiivka is actually a cemetery of equipment and Russian troops,” WaPo quoted the Lyut Brigade’s commander, police Colonel Oleksandr Netrebko, who then added: “Every square meter of liberated land is covered with the blood of our men.”

Obviously, this is pretty self-explanatory. WaPo then admits that repeated failures led to growing frustration among US officials “who became increasingly agitated over the summer that Ukraine was not dedicating enough forces to one of the southern axes, given the American view of its strategic value”. There were also major differences in the thinking of American top brass. WaPo further admits that General Christopher Cavoli, the Head of the US European Command, was a proponent of a much more cautious approach, which contrasted Milley’s “more optimistic, motivational tone”. However, Cavoli allegedly “couldn’t reach Zaluzhny during part of the summer, a critical phase of the counteroffensive”, the report claims.

WaPo cited “three people familiar with the matter”, but admitted that Cavoli declined to comment on the issue, while a “senior Ukrainian official noted that Zaluzhny spoke to Milley, his direct counterpart, throughout the campaign”, which directly contradicts the previous claim that Zaluzhny couldn’t be reached. The report then goes on to point out the growing frustration that Milley expressed directly to Zaluzhny, allegedly asking him: “What are you doing?” On the other hand, the Kiev regime was insistent that the West simply wasn’t giving them the air power and other weapons needed for a combined arms strategy to succeed. Olha Stefanishyna, Deputy Prime Minister for European and Euro-Atlantic integration complained:

“You want us to proceed with the counteroffensive, you want us to show the brilliant advances on the front line. But we do not have the fighter jets, meaning that you want us to throw our soldiers, you know, and accept the very fact that we cannot protect them,” to which she then added (after receiving a negative response): “We heard … ‘We are fine that your soldiers will be dying without support from the sky.'”

This is certainly true. The political West has been (ab)using hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians as cannon fodder against Russia while heavily exploiting their country. In addition, the weapons that were supposed to be “game changers” turned out to be nothing more than a ludicrous myth of the non-existent Western “technological superiority”. Even WaPo, one of the most prominent outlets of the mainstream propaganda machine, was forced to admit this, while the Neo-Nazi junta officials suggested that a lot of weapons that were relevant in 2022 were not delivered and that this hasn’t changed. In the meantime, the battered 47th brigade was transferred to fight in the Avdeyevka area, where the Russians are advancing.