1. Russia’s Strategic Objectives & It’s Initial Conduct of the War
Because western governments have persistently lied to their populations, not just about the causes of the war in Ukraine, but about its course and progress, it is hard to predict how their associated media will spin Russia’s forthcoming winter offensive. For representing an obvious and significant escalation of the conflict, to an impartial onlooker, it should immediately raise the question as to why the Russians began the war in such a low key fashion, originally committing only 200,000 men or 20% of their available forces to a Special Military Operation which the mainstream media has repeatedly depicted as a territorial land grab or attempt to reconstitute the old Soviet empire.
The fact is, however, that Russia has never had any intention of occupying any essentially Ukrainian areas of the country, by which I mean areas that are predominantly or, indeed, exclusively Ukrainian-speaking. For given the profound nationalism of most Ukrainians, this would only succeed in embroiling the Russian army in years of fruitless and expensive counterinsurgency operations against a population that would never accept the occupation of their land by an enemy with whom they have already shared more than three hundred years of bitter enmity. Russia’s objectives, therefore, have always been much more limited, the main ones being:
1. The liberation of those predominantly Russian-speaking areas of the country – principally the provinces of Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson – which have been severely oppressed by the Kiev regime ever since the US inspired overthrow of the pro-Russian government of Viktor Yanukovych in 2014 and the installation, instead, of an ultra-nationalist government seemingly determined to stamp out all things Russian.
2. The disarmament of a military establishment which, funded by western military aid, has been continually expanded over the last eight years until, by February 2022, it had one of the largest and best equipped armies in the world, with over 600,000 men, thereby posing a real and significant threat to Russia itself.
3. The negotiation of a comprehensive peace treaty, not just with Ukraine, but with NATO, the US and the EU, which would not only guarantee Ukraine’s future neutrality but would provide a framework for the peace and security of Europe as whole.
Because the Russians knew that a negotiated settlement, similar to that offered to the US and EU in December 2021 and flatly rejected by them, would have to be part of any long term solution, this then also had certain implications for their conduct of the war. For the Russians also knew that if Ukraine suffered significant civilian casualties or the widespread destruction of its civilian infrastructure, this would make coming to such an agreement that much more difficult. From the outset, therefore, it was decided that military operations would be almost entirely limited to those provinces Russia was intending to liberate, that every care would be taken to limit civilian casualties and that, unless absolutely necessary, no civilian infrastructure which Russia could not itself repair – which is to say, infrastructure outside of the liberated provinces – would be targeted.
This also placed enormous constraints upon the Russians’ battlefield tactics. For although they did initially launch a brief, diversionary assault on Kiev, intended to divert Ukrainian troops away from their long-entrenched positions in the south and east, instead of pressing ahead with this assault and possibly dividing the country in two, thereby cutting off the south and east from resupply, the decision to leave western Ukraine largely untouched meant that the Russians were then obliged to tackle Ukraine’s heavily fortified southern and eastern defensive lines head on, with their supply lines still intact.
In committing themselves to this strategy, however, they had one supreme advantage: a superiority of around ten to one over the Ukrainians in artillery, missiles and aircraft. This meant that they could bombard each of the strongholds to which they laid siege for days and even weeks, reducing them to smouldering ruins before they had to send in their ground troops, thereby minimising their own casualties.
One of the earliest and most decisive of these ‘cauldron’ sieges, as the Russians call them, was centred on the port city of Mariupol, situated at the southern-most tip of the province of Donetsk, on the coast of the Sea of Azov, a strategically important location in that its capture by the Russians opened up the way to form a land bridge from Russia, through Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia, to Crimea and Kherson, thereby linking up all of these provinces, along with Luhansk, to form a single contiguous, Russian-speaking region. As a result of its strategic value – or perhaps just because of the propaganda they were able to glean from it – instead of withdrawing their troops from the cauldron, as military logic would have dictated, the Ukrainians decided to continually reinforce it with ever more men and equipment, with the result that it was able to hold out for over two months.
The cost, however, was astronomical. Exactly how many men the Ukrainians lost in Mariupol we do not know because no official figures have been released, but subsequent sieges would suggest that the number was fairly sizeable, with many of the Ukrainian army’s best and most experience units, including the infamous Azov battalion, being decimated. With Ukrainian army thus significantly weakened, the subsequent siege of Sievierodonetsk, for instance, lasted only two weeks, while the siege of Lysychansk didn’t even last a week before the defenders abandoned it under the Russian bombardment.
Even though progress may have been slow during these first few weeks of the campaign, at this point, therefore, the strategy President Putin had imposed upon his commanders would appear to have been vindicated by its effectiveness. Appalled by the losses in Mariupol, in fact, the Ukrainians actually agreed to peace talks even before the city had finally fallen and, by the first week in April, they would have been prepared to sign a peace treaty based on the three Russian conditions outlined above had not the Americans despatched the then British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, to Kiev with instructions to tell President Zelenskyy to break off the negotiations, promising in return that the west would continue to provide Ukraine with military support until ultimate victory was achieved.
Whether President Zelenskyy actually believed this nonsense about ultimate victory or whether he simply thought that he had no choice but to accede to his patrons’ demands, we will probably never know. After all, he is hardly likely to admit that he knowingly allowed his country to be used as a sacrificial pawn in some greater geopolitical game in his memoirs. What the meeting in Kiev between Boris Johnson and President Zelenskyy effectively did, however, was sign the death sentences of thousands more people, most of them Ukrainians.
It also must have sunk the heart of President Putin who had had victory snatched away from him when it was almost in his hands. Still, he didn’t change his military strategy on the ground, such that the slow war of grinding attrition against set defensive positions went on. The main change was that a greater emphasis was now placed on the economic war in Europe, where Nord Stream 1 was temporarily turned off for annual maintenance and where the Europeans were told that, in future, they would have to pay for their gas in roubles, the idea being that if the EU suffered economically and its citizens went cold this winter, it would drive a wedge between Europe and the USA, leading the EU to cut off support for Ukraine and urge the Ukrainian government back to the negotiating table.
The problem was that not everyone in Moscow was happy with this strategy. Not only was it taking too long to crush an enemy that should have been despatched in weeks rather than months, thereby making the Russian military look incompetent, but the decision not to degrade Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure meant that, although the Ukrainian army had suffered enormous casualties, their ability to train and re-equip replacements, as well as get supplies to the front line, remained undiminished. In fact, with all the American aid being poured into the country, including private contractors to help coordinate logistics and train replacement troops in the use of advanced NATO equipment and weaponry, the Russians had become more or less stuck.
Worse still, in late August and early September, the Ukrainians launched two major counteroffensives, one in Kherson province, the other in a heavily forested area near Kharkiv, which was only very lightly defended and which led to the Russians withdrawing to more defensible positions, thereby conceding territory.
Nor was the humiliation of this minor defeat mitigated by the fact that, from a purely military perspective, the Ukrainian counteroffensive in Kherson was an absolute disaster, very probably costing the Ukrainian army more casualties than Mariupol. The reason for this is that north-western Kherson, to the west of the Dnieper river, is open grassland, converted to growing wheat, with no cover for the Ukrainian infantry which had to cross it under relentless artillery fire. The result was a series of assaults that went on for weeks and which were more like first world war battles than anything one would normally see in modern warfare, with wave after wave of mostly raw recruits being sent to their certain deaths.
While the Russians could thus be seen as achieving their objective of demilitarising Ukraine through the slow but unremitting annihilation of its army, however, from the point of view of the Russian general staff, the Ukrainians had not only taken the initiative but had taken control of the battlefield, leaving the Russians to merely respond to their attacks, something which was not only unacceptable to the Kremlin but to the Russian public at large.
And yet still, President Putin refused to change course, still believing, perhaps, that he could induce the Europeans to encourage the Ukrainians to negotiate. And then, on October 6th, the two Nord Stream gas pipelines were blown up and everything changed. For without the ability to turn the gas back on, the Russians no longer had any carrot to dangle in front of EU leaders, thereby leaving President Putin’s entire strategy in tatters.
2. Change of Strategy
With the possibility of a negotiated settlement now extremely remote, the Russian general staff were thus finally able to convince their president to take the gloves off. On October 8th, he therefore duly appointed General Sergei Surovikin, previously the commander of Russia’s forces in Syria, as overall Commander in Chief in the Ukrainian theatre of operations, while ordering the mobilisation of 300,000 reservists.
Contrary to what was reported in most of the western media, these were not new conscripts but former soldiers who receive a monthly stipend for remaining on the reserve list and undergoing a number of days training each year. Nor, for the most part, were they sent to Ukraine. Most of them, in fact, were deployed to non-war zones to replace active servicemen such as those of the elite parachute regiment which had previously been stationed in Syria, but which was now redeployed to Ukraine.
Because all of this took some time, however, the media ignored these ominous developments and continued to report that the Russian army had simply stalled. However, there was another reason for the Russians’ inactivity during this period which the media also ignored. This is the fact that the top soil on the Ukrainian Steppe is between three and five metres deep, which means that during the autumn, when it tends to rain quite a lot in that part of the world, the open grassland is very easily churned up by tracked vehicles and can be quickly turned into a sea of mud in which nothing is able to move, as the German army discovered to its cost in 1941.
Unable to even contemplate beginning their winter offensive until the ground froze, the Russians therefore spent most of October and November using their air superiority to destroy Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure, including its electricity grid, communications networks and main command and control centres, the objective being to make it more or less impossible for the country to function normally and hence resupply its army. Other than this, the only thing of note that happened during the whole of November was something rather surprising, it being the Russian withdrawal from western Kherson, including Kherson city. After two months of repeatedly repelling Ukrainian assaults, and after first evacuating around 115,000 of the area’s Russian-speaking population, the Russian army just packed up and left.
Again, the media reported on this as if it were a major victory for the Ukrainians, with no mention of the rather sinister fact that Kherson city was now largely empty, with only its Ukrainian-speaking inhabitants left behind, as can be seen in the published photographs of their joyous celebrations, in which one or two civilians are shown in the foreground, but where most of those in the background are soldiers. A more reasoned interpretation of this development, therefore, would be that, in his planning for his winter campaign, General Surovikin viewed western Kherson as a strategic cul-de-sac on which it was not therefore worth expending further resources. Just as importantly, perhaps, it also provided an opportunity to tie up another sizeable portion of the Ukrainian army. For on finding Kherson city virtually empty, the Ukrainians simply couldn’t resist occupying it, thereby trapping themselves in yet another cauldron, as became clear a few days later when the shelling began.
The real question this strategic withdrawal raises, however, is what General Surovikin actually has planned for Ukraine once the frost has set in and he can start manoeuvring the 540,000 troops he currently has massed on Ukraine’s borders. And in my view he has three main options.
Option A is more or less to just carry on the war of attrition in the east which the Russians have been fighting up until now, except with more men and more of everything else. In fact, we have already seen this happening to some extent around Bakhmut, which the Ukrainians have been tenaciously defending all autumn for the very good reason that it is one of the last major strongholds they have left in their last line of defence before the road opens up all the way to the Dnieper river. The additional men which the Russians have been able to commit to the siege, especially after the withdrawal from Kherson, has consequently caused the Ukrainians to desperately reinforce its defence with yet another 10,000 men, mostly Poles and Romanians in Ukrainian uniforms.
This, however, reveals the weakness of Option A. Because while the Ukrainians can continue to reinforce and resupply their eastern front, they may still be able to keep the Russians bogged down, even with their superior numbers. A better option, therefore, Option B, would be for the Russians to cut off this resupply and reinforcement by doing what they should have done back in February, which is to stop anything crossing the Dnieper river from west to east. This could be achieved either by an attack from Russia in the north – anywhere east of the river – or by an attack from Zaporizhzhia or east Kherson in the south – or, indeed, by a combination of the two – the objective being to seize the entire east bank of the Dnieper and stop anything crossing from west Ukraine, which would not only have the effect of preventing supplies and reinforcements reaching Ukrainian troops in the south and east, but would also cut off their retreat to the west, with the result that eventually, after running out of food and ammunition, they would either have to surrender or be wiped out.
Another advantage of this plan is that, with the troop levels now available to the Russians, it would be both relatively easy to implement and more or less without risk. Yes, Ukraine’s northern border with both Russia and Belarus has been significantly strengthened since the Russians so easily breached it in February, but it is more than a thousand kilometres long. And with most of their army tied up in the south and east, the Ukrainians simply do not have enough men to defend it, making this option the simplest and most obvious.
The problem with it, however, is that it would not prevent supplies reaching western Ukraine, which means that the Ukrainians could simply deploy whatever troops they could muster in the west to defend the west bank of the Dnieper and just sit there until they built up their forces once again courtesy of the Americans. Worse still, the Americans, themselves, could now get involved.
I say this because, throughout the autumn, they have been talking about a ‘coalition of the willing’ putting boots on the ground in Ukraine. In addition to the Americans, themselves, this would probably include contingents from both Poland and Romania. With the American 101st Airborne division currently stationed in Poland, it is quite possible, therefore that they would be able to assemble an expeditionary force of between fifty and eighty thousand men with a few days and have its first elements deployed to the west bank of the Dnieper within a week.
Nor would there be much risk to the Americans in doing this. For the mere fact that the Russians withdrew from western Kherson in November would seem to indicate that they have no plans to cross the river again. Having Americans and Russians stare at each other across the Dnieper is therefore unlikely to lead to an actual shooting war. What it would lead do, however, is another interminable cold war, with the Dnieper river becoming the new Berlin wall, which is exactly what the Americans want.
I say this because, as I explained in my previous essay on this subject, ‘The Curse of Bretton Woods & The Real Reasons for the War in Ukraine’, America’s sole objective in provoking and then further stoking this war has been to make Russia a pariah state with which the entire the entire western world would therefore refuse to do business, thereby precluding the possibility that the west would ever buy Russian commodities in roubles and preserving the petrodollar as the sole currency in which to make such trades. By seeming to come to Ukraine’s aid at its moment of direst need, but having no way to prevent the country from being partitioned, the US would thus create the conditions in which sanctions could be imposed in perpetuity on the perpetrators of this heinous crime, the fortified Dnieper river serving as a symbol to the whole world of Russia’s evil.
In fact, the only way in which Russia could avoid this outcome with any certainty is to adopt Option C, which is to invade western Ukraine from the outset, not from the south, which has already been ruled out, but from Belarus, the objective being to seize Lvov, just twenty kilometres from the Polish border, which would effectively prevent all aid and supplies entering Ukraine, and which would fairly quickly force the Ukrainian government to surrender on whatever terms the Russians dictate.
The problem with this option, however, is that it is not without risks. Lvov is around 200 kilometres from the Belarusian border, which would therefore result in a fairly long supply line, to the defence of which the Russians would therefore have to devote a fairly large proportion of their overall force. Worse still, the Americans might still decide to intervene, even though this would mean placing American and allied troops directly in the path of the Russian advance and would almost certainly result in a shooting war between the two which the Americans could not win. This is not just because, with fifty to eighty thousand men, they would be heavily outnumbered by two or three hundred thousand Russians, but because, having gifted so much weaponry and ammunition to Ukraine over the last nine months, they do not have enough ammunition stockpiled in Europe to sustain a hot war with Russia for more than a few days. Faced with almost certain defeat, therefore, they would either have to retreat back into Poland or resort to using battlefield nuclear weapons, thereby risking a nuclear war.
Faced with such a prospect, you might therefore wonder why the Americans would even contemplate intervening in such circumstances. It is quite possible, however, that they would feel they had no choice. For to stand by and do nothing while the Russians seized the whole of Ukraine would not only reveal them to be impotent but would mean that they had provoked and then encouraged their European allies to a support a war which they could not see through to a successful conclusion. Not only would this very probably lead to the breakup of NATO – the Europeans having had their economies severely damaged by such short-sighted and inept American leadership – but, following the debacle in Afghanistan, the US would lose a huge amount of prestige, influence and indeed power around the world. Russia would not only be seen as the top dog militarily but as the more attractive strategic partner, able to supply its allies with commodities, including as oil and gas, which, many countries might now be willing to pay for in roubles: the very outcome which this whole war was designed to prevent.
3. So Which Option Will The Russians Choose?
Because there are so many risks attached to Option C, and because the Russians actually withdrew from the west bank of the Dnieper in November, I believe, therefore, that President Putin will choose – or has already chosen – Option B. Having conducted the war with such caution and restraint up until now, it would also be completely out of character for him to suddenly throw caution to the wind and risk the destruction of everything he has achieved over the last twenty years: twenty years which have seen Russia recover from the state of near economic collapse it was in under President Yeltsin and attain the state of relative prosperity it currently enjoys.
What’s more, Option B has a lot to be said for it. Admittedly, it will allow the Americans and Europeans to continue demonising Russia for the foreseeable future; but it will nevertheless achieve the Russians’ primary objective of liberating most of the Russian-speaking areas of the country. It may not provide for complete Ukrainian disarmament, but if the Dnieper river becomes the de facto border between west and east, it will bring the Ukrainian army under a substantial degree of American and NATO control. Finally, it may not produce a peace treaty between Russia and the west, but it may bring about the next best thing: an indefinite stalemate.
More importantly, it is not the end of the story. And as I have said elsewhere, the Russians are very good at playing the long game. They will therefore be looking at the mountains of debt on which most western countries are sitting, the raging inflation which western countries cannot bring under control because they cannot raise interest rates high enough without causing a debt crisis, and the west’s dependence on imports, not only of commodities but of manufactured goods, and they will be asking themselves how long these zombie economies can keep themselves going by simply printing money and lending it to themselves before the whole make-believe edifice of financialisation collapses. And when it does, not only is Russia likely to be the last man standing but, self-sufficient and isolated from the west’s financial contagion, it is likely to be the only man standing. And then we shall see what we shall see.
