One year and 318 days of the war have passed. Today’s ISW maps are like two drops of water like yesterday’s, and I have nothing to say about it – except that it is very good.
Today, Julian Roepke, a military columnist for the German newspaper Bild, wrote (rather emphatically) that Vladimir Putin’s winter offensive has failed.
He writes: “Three months have already passed since Russian forces launched their offensive in the Donetsk and Kharkiv regions. So far, the Russian military has failed to achieve anything, apart from the deaths of thousands of its own soldiers and the loss of more than 400 pieces of military equipment. Russia is still as far from capturing Kupyansk in Kharkiv region and Avdiivka in Donetsk region as it was last October.
North of Avdiivka, Russian soldiers are bogged down near the small village of Petrovske – the Ukrainian army is holding its defenses with the help of kamikaze drones and Bradley armored personnel carriers. For several months there are no major changes on this section of the front, so the Russians are not yet able to encircle Avdiivka.
North of Kupyansk, which Ukrainian forces liberated in the fall of 2022, the Russian army is stuck near the village of Senkivka. Here, tank companies of the Russian Armed Forces are running into minefields one after another, losing equipment. Russian soldiers are primarily fought with cluster munitions and grenades that are dropped from drones.
The question remains open as to how long Ukraine will be able to hold off the Russian army’s advance and whether the AFU fighters will have enough ammunition to do so. Russian attacks involving thousands of soldiers in November and December were followed by smaller clashes that have been ongoing for the past week. Russia will obviously have to gather reserves again before it can once again go on the offensive”.
In my opinion, the statement that the situation in the Avdiivka area and near Kupyansk has not changed in any way since October is not quite true. But, to be fair, we have to admit that the changes are so minimal that if Russia has advanced to its goal of gaining possession of these settlements, it is barely a quarter of what it intended, and the price it has paid for this advance is such that it is not clear whether it needs these settlements at such a price.
And if Russia continues to pay such a high price for every village or town, then not only the Russian army, but even the People’s Liberation Army of China will not be enough to reach the borders of the Russian Federation so arrogantly described in its miserable Constitution.
True, other experts say that Putin is preparing a new offensive either to Kupyansk or to Kharkiv. But if this hypothetical offensive follows the same pattern as the previous ones, it will suffer the same fate.
It is written in the textbooks on management theory: one of the most common, elementary mistakes of any manager is an attempt to repeat unsuccessful experience over and over again and for some reason expect a different (successful) result.
Although it would be logical to assume that if as a result of some sequence of steps you got a negative result, then in order to get another, positive one, it is necessary to change this sequence, and not to repeat it again and again.
However, the Russian school of military leadership is based, apparently, on a dialectical approach, and its calculation is based on the fact that the number of homogeneous attempts will change into a new quality and the wall, if it is pierced with the forehead, on some N+1 attempts will still break through. It does not matter what number of human brains will remain on this wall.
“Great” Zhukov, one of the creators of this school, as it is known, put killed and wounded at the end of 1942 – beginning of 1943 in the Rzhev meat grinder almost one and a half million of his soldiers – against 350 thousand German soldiers. As a result of this “great victory” the Red Army took the city of Rzhev, which before the war (in 1940) was home to 56 thousand people (today it is home to 55 thousand).
This “victory” had no strategic significance, and we all know that the Red Army offensive in the summer of 1943 began in a completely different place, namely – at the Kursk Bulge.
And you say Bakhmut or Avdiivka… Shoigu and Gerasimov are pathetic first-graders. They are still growing up to Zhukov’s mountains of corpses! But I think they (with the help of the AFU, of course) can still try to show us their military genius… After all, it is no coincidence that for the last decade the main motto of Putin’s Russians has been the ringing cry “we can do it again!”. So they are repeating it. Why are we surprised? Everything is fair.
But Ukraine and (no less importantly) its allies seem to have figured out Putin’s dialectical approach, which is based on repeated repetition of the same maneuver in the expectation of taking the enemy by force.
British Foreign Secretary David Cameron said today: “Together with our allies, we want to make it very clear to Putin that his wait-and-see policy will not work with us. We are ready to support Ukraine in 2024, 2025, 2026, we are ready to give that support because this is the biggest challenge of our generation. I don’t want to go into details about the number of shells and other things, but the combined GDP of our coalition countries is 25 times larger than Russia’s, so it should not be impossible for us to significantly increase industrial production”.
He also said that the UK will soon announce the size of its aid package to Ukraine in 2024. In an interview with The Sunday Telegraph last December, Cameron said that London plans to keep its aid to Ukraine at the same level (about three billion dollars) in 2024 at least.
Today, Friedrich Merz, leader of the Bundestag’s largest opposition faction and head of the CDU/CSU bloc, said that “Olaf Scholz should show more determination on the issue of supplying Ukraine with long-range Taurus missiles”.
Something tells me that a breakthrough is about to happen and Western aid will flow to Ukraine again. However, it has never stopped coming from Europe.
Glory to Ukraine!🇺🇦
Several Arab countries and Turkey are ready to coordinate efforts with the United States to rebuild Gaza, determine the territory’s political future and achieve long-term peace, security and stability in the region, U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said Monday.
With this in mind, he arrived in Israel today, having previously visited several Arab countries and Turkey. I think this is a very good result that gives hope that the Gaza Strip will finally be able to get rid of the Hamas dictatorship and replace it with an administration that will think about the needs of the Gazans and not about plans to destroy Israel.
I❤️🇮🇱
