SITREP: The War in Ukraine
The future looks bleak for the humans involved.
(Photograph courtesy of myself, RIP to ‘Hrulf’ on the right)
A timeline of events - the gradual destruction of morale - A long read
When I arrived in Kyiv in April of 2022, the air was filled with an optimistic glow from the locals, who had just seen the “world’s second best military” humiliated in their attempt at blitzing the capital with it’s best troops. The sensation of joy was palpable, the enemy was routing in almost all directions other than the southern Donbass. The springtime European ambiance of outdoor café terraces filled with imbibed youth reveling at the greatest battle victory of the 21st century.
Nobody understood the absolute horrors that waited ahead of the nation at this time, everyone was blinded by optimism. I was also shortsighted by this sensation as I looked to enlist in on the foreign fighting units that were seemingly going to deal a beating to retreating orcs from Mordor on the battlefield. A human safari for the better of humanity. It didn’t turn out that way for me. I left for the first time in August of 2022 deeply traumatized and less optimistic.
Morale dipped a bit over the summer of 2022 as the war transformed into a static war of artillery attrition. Western media went on ad nauseum that “Russia is going to run out of misses, artillery shells, computer chips, troops, money and will power” which buoyed this sensation of hope. I’m providing links here to major news organizations or think tanks like the Atlantic Council that got the assessments dead wrong. Many people were so poorly informed by legacy media and even think tanks.
People actually believed that Russia was going to be unable to equip their forces for wintertime operations. I don’t know, I guess it is reasonable speculation that a tropical country like Russia would have no winter wartime doctrine. A country that built infrastructure for 20% of the world’s land clearly doesn’t have an industry base…I say this with sarcasm to paint how deluded people were thinking at the start of this war. Russia was able to prepare for a long war once the summer started.
The autumn of 2022 saw the Kharkiv counter offensive which caught the Russians off guard allowing the Ukrainians to consolidate the rest of Kharkiv Oblast. That was followed by the Kherson counter offensive which was screamed about in the media but in all honesty, every military tactician at this point understands the Russians just withdrew to more defendable lines on the left bank of the Dnepr river. Either way, it was a great moment to shore up morale as Ukrainians and the world saw the city of Kherson liberated from Russian occupation.
It only gets worse in 2023
Once the battle of Bakhmut hit it’s crescendo around February of 2023 we started to understand the absolutely vile nature of this war. Prigozhin’s kremlin backed Wagner group, a quasi-state operated PMC sent hordes of Russian convicts, levied from the brutal Russian prison system (where >90% conviction rates are norm) to a meat grinder death. Images of a once flourishing small city turned into a bombed out hell scape littered with the corpses of rotting men painted the reality of the war.
The Ukrainians were outgunned, six to one but still put up a valiant defense of the city, albeit at the serious criticism of military analysts and Ukrainian brass - what was the point of sacrificing so many troops to the defense of a city that was clearly doomed? I will say it was a reasonable strategy to bleed out the Russians and make them pay for every inch they took in a city that holds no strategic value.
The spring of 2023 really brought one of the last two moments of real hope for the pro-Ukraine crowd. The spring/summer counter offensive was set to start. The goals were clear - Ukraine was to push deep into the southern Donbass direction with western tanks and “combined arms strategy”, take the city of Metipol then push down towards the Sea of Azov to eventually liberate the city of Mariupol. The Russians aren’t stupid. They also understood that .
They built up an impressive series of fortifications, if you want to think of it as a 21st century Maginot line that seems like an adequate comparison. Once the push started, we were given numerous cues that things weren’t going the way they should. Villages like Robotyne were strategic points meant to be captured in 24 hours. They weren’t. A few kilometers ahead of the line of contact, this abandoned-by-god village was supposed to be easy. Not in 24 hours, nor 48, nor 72, nor a week, but after nearly 2 months of fighting, this land was captured. No further progress, the counter offensive was effectively halted at great expense to the Ukrainians.
Round II - I return to Ukraine
On the other end of the counter offensive, Ukrainian forces pushed to retake Bakhmut but met stiff resistance in villages outside of it and only really resulted in Ukraine exhausting one of it’s best units (3rd Assault Brigade) in a brutal meatgrinder. There was nothing positive to gain from this situation once the summer ended. By the time I arrived to Ukraine at the end of September 2023, it was understood this was a major failure.
I also want to emphasize - that people, especially in my generation or younger and especially in Ukraine and Russia, see a ton of actual, unedited combat footage on telegram groups. Long are gone are the days of the war correspondent needing to paint a picture of what war looks like - people are streaming it live, uploading GoPro camera footage of engagements and the publishing of this content is profitable. The brutality of war is in 4K now all over the internet and viewing it is a pastime for many people.
My second stint in Ukraine was horrible and it was foreshadowed by many events that made it seem obvious, after the fact. We will discuss my timeline of events in Ukraine in later publishing, to set the record straight. I never felt the numerous interviews I did me any real justice other than this obscure Slovenian news outlet
When I arrived in Rivne, Ukraine - a formerly calm city in western Ukraine, I was given some clues as to how bad things were. I saw more men walking around the streets on crutches and I saw a large, innumerable excess of melatonin. Foreign fighters from Latin America had come en masse. Lured by the $3000 (now 4K) monthly salary and the ability to test their combat prowess in a wartime country brought thousands of people from Colombia and Brazil. The men that went into these units suffered some of the worst casualty rates as they were used primarily as cannon fodder by unbothered Ukrainian commanders.
Everyone wants to dodge the draft and nobody is ashamed
Ukraine was facing a manpower shortage. Not because Ukraine doesn’t have enough people, but most Ukrainians do not fight in a war where everyone knows the reality. You show up to the trenches, you get hunted by drones and bombarded by artillery and if you survive you get to fight off the carnage filled enemy assaults on your trench line only to eventually retreat back to another trench line and repeat the cycle over again. People don’t want their loved ones to fight, but plenty of Ukrainians still want someone else to fight. Everyone wants their son to be the fortunate son, everyone. Civic duty shirking is pandemic in Ukraine.
Here are some rather troubling videos of mobilization - men are dragged off the streets, sometimes beaten into the cars and driven off:
Wife of fallen soldier confronts Zelensky:
This mobilization is called busification or mogilisation: bus means микроавтобус in Russian in this context (the military guys use minivans) and mogilisation is могила (grave)+ mobilization. The situation for guys who are mobilized in Russia is just as bad, I am not trying to paint Ukraine in a negative light, but rather give people an image of the grim reality of the situation for Ukrainians that isn’t portrayed in western media. I think we as a default setting assume things are horrible for Russians.
I have nothing but respect for the Ukrainians who have stood up to the cause however. These people deserve the attention, not foreign fighters seeking a new movie to star as the main character in. The mobilization age for Ukrainians is between 26-60 years of age. The average age of a Ukrainian soldier is 37. In contrast, the average age of American KIAs were 23 in Vietnam. The average age of a US soldier in WW2 was 26.
The western mindset on drafting is - ‘let’s send our young and healthiest men to fight for our country, as they will make better soldiers’. The Ukrainian and Russian mentality is - let’s not put our breeding age demographic men at risk, let’s send the unneeded first. It is not uncommon to see a 55 year old manning a trench in Ukraine. Some poor son of bitch born into this world to endure poverty and die, eviscerated in nameless eastern European village in their 50s. In the US for example, the age to join the army is generally cut off in your late 30s unless you’re like a surgeon.
The fate of the dead is troubling, but the reality of those who survive artillery wounds is also horrific and they get to return and show everyone. Brain damage from the explosions, their intestines severed from shrapnel forcing them to defecate into a bag for the rest of their life. I don’t know how I got so lucky as seemingly a dud round landed right by my face.
Everyone hates the mobilization officers as you can imagine. These bureaucrats never see combat because they paid bribes to get these positions where they are safe, but in turn, must find men to send to their deaths. Corruption is obviously rampant in Ukraine and people are paying mobilization officers to avoid the draft, especially tech worker who have the money. General laborers, those facing village poverty - all these people are fucked.
One image that haunts me to this day is seeing a Ukrainian woman pushing her man in a wheelchair, covered in bandages as a freshly made double amputee. Or the posts in telegram groups where people are looking for donations of left shoes only, as the right foot is generally where you step on a land mine. I saw numerous men gravely wounded walking around the streets of Dnipro as I headed to the front.
How many people have died?
The southern counter offensive was a slaughter for the Ukrainians which some people estimate up to 30,000 Ukrainians were killed or seriously wounded. Keep in mind, Zelensky only recently admitted the amount of Ukrainians killed was upwards of 40,000. The amount of Ukrainians killed is unknown, but hundreds of thousands are wounded. One figure stated 1 in 20 Ukrainian men had been wounded in combat.
In contrast to the inflated numbers of Russians killed, which go as high as 750,000 and as low as 50,000. The BBC is stating around 140k -180k. I generally think it’s probably around 150k Ukrainians and 250k Russians based on seeing numerous estimates. Keep in mind, the rule of combat is for one killed you have five wounded. The civilian death toll widely varies, figures around 15-50K. If you’re looking for answers on material losses - there are good sources available.
There have been a lot of totally doomed operations by the Ukrainians. One that was well discussed was the river assault on the village Krynky. Where Ukrainian forces tried to establish a beach head on the left bank of the Dnepr river. It was an Normandy like beach landing attempt by Ukrainian marines, under the encouragement of the British military to open up a new front. It resulted in becoming the operation market garden of modern times.. This is a great read on it.
I left the country on the first of January 2024 and Adiivka fell after. The only major report to change in 2024 is that the Ukrainians launched a successful, but perhaps futile offensive into Russia’s Kursk oblast. Ukraine has lost a significant amount of land it gained in this incursion into Russian territory. Crazy though, we got to see Russia invaded in the 21st century.
Where the lines are now and what is to come
As you can see in the map, it doesn’t look drastically different from 2023, however 2024 was a very active year for Russian gains into Ukraine. Ukraine is gradually retreating in the donbass, village by village - at great cost to both Ukrainians and Russians. Muddy season has since paused the fighting. Russians have had a very successful push toward Pokrovsk in the Donbass also, showing just how exhausted Ukrainian units are at this point. Undermanned and underequipped, they hold on however. If the war rages on unabated, the Ukrainians could lose a lot more land.
With the election of Donald Trump, the US strategy in Ukraine will change. Under Biden, Ukraine has been spoon fed weapons and aide needed to fight off Russia. The objective was never to see Russia defeated in the eyes of Washington, but rather damage it. For Ukrainians, the defeat of Russia or it’s collapse as a nation state is the only way they could win back pre-2014 territory. Or even 2022 Territory. None of this is tenable at this point.
Where the West failed
I do not want to make this a partisan blog, but Joe Biden handicapped Ukraine and it needs to be said. I hope this will be the historical consensus. When Ukraine was asking for aircraft in 2022, they didn’t come until 2024. Biden was too afraid of escalating the conflict. These “escalation managers” saw the bleeding out of a country. Had Ukraine been given the weapon it needed at the time it needed, early 2022 - they would stand on better footing.
A classic example of his poor handling of the situation in 2022:
“It is simply not clear to us that there is a substantive rationale for it,” he added.”
We knew they needed aircraft in 2022 yet we BLOCKED our allies from donating aircraft due to the advice of these so-called “escalation managers”. Another obvious complaint would be how we sent them just trickles of our reserve tanks. We have 4,600 Abrams tanks. 2,600 of these are in service - the rest, just sitting in storage because we are hording them for some unimaginable land war to happen in Europe. This was Biden’s foreign policy - a policy of too little, too late.
I could go down the list on other hardware that could be needed - air defenses as a major European capital gets bombarded by a ruthless enemy. Or long range missiles, that was a serious debate in which Biden decided, in the right move - to allow long range strikes to happen. Again, too little too late. But remember Russia’s threats? Empty:
Russia’s threats have always been empty. None of this would be even at this stage if there was a strong international response in 2022, or even 2014 when Putin annexed Crimea and sent his military covertly to aid Donbass separatists. If we had interjected as we should have, contractually, as per the Budapest memorandums, we should be delivering on the security guarantee we promised Ukraine for giving up their Nukes.
Alright, enough one-sided POV on this. I can understand why the Russians were continuously angered by their loss of their regional influence in Europe. I can imagine nobody in 1991 was imagining Latvia would host NATO troops. Or that there would be a NATO flag planted in Ukraine. We use our power to maintain favorable governments across the world, Russia is going to want to do the same in it’s own backyard. It’s the brutal reality of geopolitics - it doesn’t care about morality, it’s always been conducted through the lens of realpolitik since 1945. Kissinger just minted that name (realpolitik) for a situation that already was.
This foreign policy disaster puts an ominous cloud over NATO’s eastern flank, as we seem uncommitted to deliver security that is needed for our allies. Poland has every right to wonder - if once again, they will be abandoned by the Anglo-Saxon tribe? Imagine, for the sake of history, Roosevelt calmly negotiated with Stalin and handed over an allied nation to Stalin.
Looking forward, towards peace
There are no metrics which can show Ukraine making a sweeping counter offensive to recapture occupied territory unless Russia implodes. This is like holding your breath for the demise of an empire. Continuing the fighting creates the risk of a larger, global conflict or simply putting the Ukrainians in a worse position than they are now. It can always get worse, the Russians could fight for Kharkiv, Kherson, Zaporizhye. The Ukrainian economy could worsen, or Ukraine could lose another 100,000 men with the auspices of governing destroyed land.
Aspects of what the Trump administrations potential peace deal might look like are obvious - freezing the war at the line of contact. The devil is the details however - at what cost? What guarantees will Ukraine get that this won’t happen again in the near future? At a minimum, a NATO peacekeeping force needs to be established at the front.
Trump’s proposal, whatever origins of it’s motivations, are at least a step in the right direction. I will not fault him for bringing forward the dialogue. Even several NATO states leadership have stated the return to pre-2022 borders in not realistic and we need to look at a solution. Harris didn’t offer a solution to the war, it would have been Biden’s policy continued. A slow bleeding out of a great Slavic nation. Imagine, there were still people in autumn 2024 beating the drums saying Ukraine is going to take back Crimea…It has been in Russian hands since 2014 and even before then, it was an autonomous oblast with a massive Russian military presence.
I don’t like how populism played a heavy part in the motivation for seeking peace though. Extremely tedious and complicated geopolitics has become a subject of popcorn politics by the ilk of JoJo Brogan and his troop of primates. The whole situation involving Russia has shown how rotten American conservative talking heads are like Tucker Carlson - a complete traitor. Fringe internet personalities now have a voice in international relations. Diplomacy is a place for technocrats, not the people.
Ukraine doesn’t need to be a five year war. Ukrainians refugees need to be motivated, if not forced back to Ukraine to rebuild their country. Ukraine has and continues to have a demographic crisis while Ukrainian refugees consume resources in European welfare states. Reconstruction contracts need to be given out, in favor of American, British and Polish businesses. Peace can be sought to the benefit of the west. This peace has to be at the benefit of Russia too. We cannot make this a Versailles repeat. Peace must always be profitable.
Ukraine with it’s new borders can be rebuilt back and made better. So long as the west does not agree to demilitarize Ukraine, it can be strong. Ukraine will never agree to that anyways. The imperative is to at least put a halt to the bloodshed. When the police are called to a fight, the objective isn’t to serve justice, it’s to break up the fight.
Meanwhile, we must ponder the fate of men who return home from the battlefield. When you take a man who works in a factory for $450 a month and give him a rifle and tell him to fight for $3000-4000 a month, he won’t want to go back to the factory. He will never truly leave the battlefield. Russia and Ukraine will have to cater to millions of men with horrific cases of PTSD for the next 60 years. War - a tragedy, humanity - a word for a species ashamed of it’s past.
It's the same old theme, since 1916
In your head, in your head, they're still fightin'
With their tanks and their bombs and their bombs and their guns
In your head, in your head, they are dyin'