Russia's Military Strategy in Ukraine
Andrei Martyanov and Glenn Diesen
Andrei Martyanov is an expert on Russian military and naval strategy. He was born in Baku, USSR in 1963. He graduated from the Kirov Naval Red Banner Academy and served as an officer on the ships and staff position of Soviet Coast Guard through 1990. In mid-1990s he moved to the United States where he worked as Laboratory Director in a commercial aerospace group.
How will it end – or more aptly – evolve? Simply, with the surrender by the Collective West to Russia (and later to China / BRICS). It could be a long, excruciating process for the US Empire to learn to accept its inexorable decline and loss of dominance and for the newly forming structures of BRICS to become a viable alternative, backed by Russian & Chinese military superiority, economic strength, and organization. Ukraine's defeat will be one of the turning points, but there are many others and some 'criticalities' already happened (such as the 2008 financial crash). The larger question of whether the human species can evolve to avoid our own extinction is not evident.
Tiresome, tiresome, tiresome:
1. It's clear by now that Russians don't understand western psychology. Instead they've just been lucky with how the west has reacted so far. Based on Russia's past business-as-usual attitude to western escalation, the west has good reason to believe that Russia won't react to further creeping provocations, or that it'll act rationally and responsibly by avoiding retaliatory symmetry. But retaliating asymmetrically, with even more force, is the only solution to this escalation ladder. Otherwise it's death by a thousand cuts, in which the aggressor party escalates slowly, step by step, emboldened by the victim's passivity, until the victim finally either bleeds to death or reacts (note that these are the west's cuts, NOT Ukraine's). But by then, after waiting so long in the escalatory cycle, the only possible reaction may very well be one that is necessarily extreme. The point here is to cow the western enemy and put the fear of God into their tiny little minds. That's the only way to make them psychologically give up, to conclude that their bullying game is not worth the effort. Instead, the rational conflict management the Russians have been engaging, in the end, may very well work against them, and leave them without any options but to do the unthinkable. It's long past time for Russia to achieve escalatory dominance. Russia's go-slow approach doesn't even come close. And no I don't mean using nukes, although if Russia waits too long, it may have no other choice.
2. It's disingenuous, feckless, and irritating to keep repeating the tired mantra that Russia is going slow to reduce casualties, and because 'territory is not important'. Then in the next sentence the commenter will say something like Sumy is required for a buffer zone. I don't know who such pronouncements are meant to fool, the audience or themselves. Come let us reason together... just what exactly is a buffer zone? It's additional territory used to hold off the enemy at a reasonable distance so their weapons are less directly effective, and so that Russia has warning for any Ukraine incursions. If that's not the perfect example of how territory is important, then nothing is. Also one of the original reasons for this SMO was Russia's concern about medium range missiles, and how the territory of Ukraine shouldn't be used as staging sites. Lastly, territory isn't important only if your citizens living on that territory aren't important.
3. Instead of grinding it out, as if there were some holy imperative to prove you have fairly won every square inch, alternative tactics have been around for decades, i.e. end-around tactics such as in WWII (paratroops or something more modern). This effectively can bypass every little niggling hamlet and avoid the drone defenses which Ukraine has gotten quite good at.
4. This previous point is also in direct contradiction to the hopium that says sooner or later Ukraine will run out of troops. Based on past history, obviously they will not run out, especially considering that Ukraine has learned how to make maximum efficiency of those troops it does have via drones, Starlink, and seemingly insurmountable defense emplacements (Chasov Yar has yet to be taken after years of trying... "just one more week" is getting tiresome).
5. Let's be honest, the west is beating Russia in terms of psychologically manipulating them, in accordance with the long held RAND strategy of containing while overextending Russian commitments, with the intent of sooner or later finding ways to wear down Russian people and economy via an imposed guns and butter agenda.
6. The west always finds ways to escalate, as demonstrated by the Syria debacle, Baltic ship harassment, thousand of advisors, and peacekeeping forces which sooner or later will be implemented given any excuse the west can gen up. Each one of these outrages has come only because Russia has given the west time to ramp up its escalation game by going slow. What new confrontation will the west think of next? There are hundreds more possibilities, each one more surprising in its effrontery.
I swear, if one more smug, mindless ninny repeats the words, "territory is not important", they should have their mouth washed out with soap, their head dunked in a toilet, then told to write 1000 times on the blackboard, "territory IS important".