"One month into the Russian special operation in the Ukraine"
The Saker
The Vineyard of the Saker (March 25, 2022)
https://thesaker.is/one-month-into-the-russian-special-operation-in-the-ukraine/

First, the official version

First, here is a machine translated summary of events following one month of combat operations as posted by Boris Rozhin (aka Col. Cassad):

This above is very much the official version according to the Kremlin, so we might as well add the official Kremlin map while we are at it:

This very official map shows the parts of the Ukraine which Russia/LDNR officially control. Not only that, but it does not show which parts of the Ukrainian territory are not under real Russian/LDNR control, but which are under Russian/LDNR fire control. For both of these reasons this map very much UNDER-states the reality on the ground.

For a detailed report, see these two briefings: http://thesaker.is/speech-of-the-head-of-the-main-operational-directorate-of-the-general-staff-of-the-armed-forces-of-the-russian-federation-colonel-general-sergei-rudskoy/

Here is another map which shows some of what the Kremlin does not want to confirm:

But what does all this really mean?

I find these maps moderately useful, they show us a general tendency, but they don’t really tell the full story. As for the briefings by the Russian military, they are not very helpful since they list numbers which are not really meaningful for most people and, worse, the same event X in location A would have a totally different meaning in location B.

Of course, Russia has her own official narrative: “ours is a counterforce operation, as a rule we bypass Nazi held cities, block them, open humanitarian corridors when possible and offer the civilians to evacuate and the Ukrainian soldiers a chance to lay down arms and avoid needless casualties“. And its all true, but there is a lot this narrative does not tell.

So let’s try to try to make some sense of all this

First, the good. It took the Russians just a few hours to breakup the united Ukrainian armed forces into many smaller chunks. This was achieved by basically taking out Ukie command and control capabilities.

Then, rather quickly, the Russian invaded from several directions, quickly bypassed the fortified Ukrainian defenses, blocked the units which refused to surrender and when further. As a result, cities such as Kharkov or Sumy found themselves deep inside the Russian rear, unable to be resupplied and no hope to evacuate. In a few special cases the order was given to gradually tighten the noose around Nazi concentrations while liberating the civilians neighborhoods, this is what is going in Mariupol.

Check out this fresh map from a correspondent, Konstantin Pegov, inside Mariupol

Sorry about the ugly “War Gonzo” watermark, this is Pegov’s way to get the credit.

Okay, so, the red zone is under Russian/LDNR control. The blue zone is considered lost to the Nazis, but not cleared yet, meaning that a slow building by building, apartment by apartment, mopping up operation has to be conducted before this zone becomes red too. Finally, the yellow zone is under the control of the notorious “Azov” Nazi battalion. Before I continue, a need to clarify one thing.

There were three locations in which the Nazis decided to place their very best forces before the Russian attack:

Maps don’t really tell that story, hence they often appear not to make sense. In fact, they do, but to distinguish their real meaning, one needs to look deep into the micro-level and understand how all the different points on the map interact with each other (or not anymore!) or influence the outcomes elsewhere.

So what happens today around Mariupol is HUGELY important, but what happens in, say, Kharkov totally pales in comparison (unless you are in Kharkov, in which case the opposite is true).

I would like to add one more clarification here about the Chechen special forces.

In reality, there are no “Chechen special forces”, but a rather diverse lot of various Chechen forces which all come under the command of the Russian National Guard. This is important, because while these Chechen forces can, and have, participated in regular combat operations, the really crucial task is the mopping-up of urban areas, like the blue area in the Mariupol map above. Not only are the Chechens not sufficiently armed to conduct artillery duels or tank battles, but they are also trained in anti-terrorist and police operations, as is the entire Russian National Guard. These Chechen urban assault groups obviously interface with the Russian forces blocking the town or city the National Guard is tasked with securing and policing. Once that is done, humanitarian aid can come in while those who want can get evacuated.

That has worked pretty well.

But what has not worked at all, at least so far, is the next step: the installation of civilian authorities to restore more or less halfway decent civilian life. And here the Russians really failed to act (until today! see later).

Look at it from the point of view of a civilian in, say, Kharkov. You know that the Russians have bypassed and encircled the city. Maybe Russian forces even passed through your part of town and told you that from now on you were free. But then they all left!!! They went further to push the front even further west or south, which is their only real mission. And a few hours later, the Nazi gangs are right back where you live, and they wonder about you and how you felt about it all. And if the Russians shared some rations with you, you better hide them well, or eat them quickly and deny it all lest you be shot on the spot for “collaboration with the aggressor”.

So what went wrong here?

I will tell you what: in a “normal” war, the frontline units are always followed by 2nd line units whose task is to clear and secure the liberated areas. And I am not talking about a single cop car on patrol, I am talking about entire BRIGADES and DIVISIONS tasked with security in the rear. The truth is that the Russian special operation is NOT a “regular” combined arms offensive and that the force ratios are typically about 1:1 if not worse in favor of the Ukies. Why?

Because, except for a few very embarrassing screw-ups, Russia did not use conscripts. Russia’s war plan was to fight with small numbers of highly trained soldiers and to compensate for this numerical inferiority by having full air supremacy and using advanced standoff weapons. [emphasis added]

Yes, even the Chechens who are now fighting in Mariupol (and some near Kiev) are all volunteers, not conscripts.

By the way, there was an initial wave of volunteers in Russia too, the MoD thanked them very much but declined to use them.

Contrast that with the Ukronazis who now only have their regular armed forces (armed to the teeth and trained by the Empire of Lies for 7 years!), they also have the real, pure, Nazi units like the “Azov” in Mariupol, they even have their own Volkssturm, about 200’000 clueless civilians, but all armed with small arms, maybe some machine guns and a few PRGs.

The simple truth is that to disarm such a large number of folks is going to take a long time, be dangerous, and deeply frustrating, even if the actual military threat posed by such armed clowns is zero – they can only threaten unarmed civilians.

By the way – look at the type of weapons the Empire of Lies is pumping into the Ukraine: small arms and ammo, but also short-range anti-tank weapons, explosives, mines, etc – this is all stuff that has almost no utility on the macro-level of this war but with is ideal when you want to create and arm a stay-behind insurgency type of force. I need to explain this a tad further.

NATO stay-behind forces

During the Cold War it was the conventional wisdom that NATO would not have the means to stop the advancing Soviet forces. So NATO came up with two options: one is called FOFA and implies attacks not on the FEBA, but one on the Soviet supply lines. The second concept was the so-called “stay behind forces”. What happened is this: in many/most European countries the US used their close ties with the local intelligence services to create totally illegal armies. Of course, not “real” armies, but a secret network for agents and hardware dumps to become the core of a future resistance against the future Soviet invasion. It was initially all very pious, of course. But when the agents of these secret mini-armies began engaging in false flag attacks (like the Bologna massacre in Italy), and when the local security services got wind of these weird activities, the scandal was hard to hide, and even though the Empire of Lies presstitutes did the all they could NOT to find out who created these terrorist organizations (the US), the scandal still came out. And, of course, the illegal creation of such stay behind sabotage units also involved some very creative accounting, so folks were jailed for corruption, illegal storage of military weapons, etc. etc. etc.

As somebody who was an analyst for the Swiss Strategic Intelligence Service (SND) I can tell you three things about this phenomenon:

Since these faraway days, this has all been buried, forgotten, forgiven, denied, obfuscated, declared a “thing of the past”, etc. etc. etc. Truly, nothing whitewashes darkness like the short attention span of the serfs living in Zone A.

But, back to the Ukraine now. See my three points above? I will repeat: the key figures never got punished, there was a clear neo-Nazi ideology in those secret units and the USA ran it all.

Forward to modern-day Ukraine with a simple question: can you guess what NATO is planning for the future Ukraine?

Past behavior is the best indicator of future behavior, is that not true?

Have the Russians made at least one major miscalculation?

In short – yes. Only one, but it was a bad mistake…

I believe that their major mistake was not to bring in new administrations to run the liberated towns and to secure law and order. Clearly, the Russians knew that only a minority (albeit a big one) of Ukrainians was truly brainwashed by the Nazis. But what the Russians failed to realize, is that people who live under 7 or 8 years of Nazi terror need PROTECTION above all. In most blocked towns, the Nazis are still in control, and since the Russians do not attack the civilian infrastructure, the Nazis are the ones in charge of food, electricity, security, etc.

And since the said Nazis know that the locals hate them, this means that the only people being protected, fed, heated or treated are the Nazis themselves, the rest of the population hides in basements and hope that they have enough water and heat to survive until the promised “liberation” applies to them too.

Finally, TODAY, the Kremlin has announced the start of a major program to bring in entire administrations with repair equipment, humanitarian aid and, let’s not kid ourselves, more security forces. Good! Now let’s hope that the Russian civilians, their EMERCOM and the Russian National Guard will finally either get the not-all-too-Nazi authorities to rebrand themselves and behave (unless they personally have committed war crimes, at which point all they will get is an interrogation, possibly a trial, or a bullet on the spot).

This is yet another reason why Mariupol is so important: there are major Russian National Guard forces involved in the mopping up of the last Nazi pockets of resistance there. But as soon as the blue and yellow zones turn red (this could take a while, several days, possibly a week) those National Guard forces will become available to denazify other cities, smaller ones, less well-fortified ones, and with a much smaller Nazi/normal person ratios.

Does the strategy chosen by the Russians make sense?

Only time will show, but I would argue that yes.

I would argue that the first phase of that war lasted about a day or so. That was the phase that turned unitary Ukrainian armed forces into many isolated groups unable to coordinate their actions or support each other in combat.

The second phase of the war lasted about 3 weeks. During that phase, the fronts did advance, the Russians had some successes, but that was not the point. During this phase of the war, the Russians secured air supremacy and then proceeded to methodically do two things:

So first the Ukies were held incommunicado. Then they were isolated into many smaller groups. Then they were blocked and/or encircled. And now the Russians are basically waiting for the Ukrainians to either 1) surrender or 2) die. And this is important: while there have been numerous Ukrainian attacks and counter-attacks, none of them have had any tactical impact, not even locally. And in the few cases where the Ukrainians did advance, they were mostly destroyed with a combo of artillery and close air support.

Horrible as this may be, but the outcome of this phase depends on the following: which will run out first, the supplies of the Ukrainian forces or the water/heat for the trapped civilians?

If the Ukrainian supplies run out first, we will see a total collapse of the operational cauldron in the Donbass. In this case, it will require a major, huge, Russian humanitarian operation to save all those who are still alive.

If civilians begin to die en masse, the Russians will have no choice but to use their heavy weapons to kill as many Nazis as quickly as possible and then send in relief convoys.

That is the dilemma the Russian General Staff must tackle. I don’t envy them.

Mariupol is a done deal, really.

And since most of the residential areas have been freed, people are being treated and evacuated, there is no time pressure to clear the Nazis out, especially since the Nazis are now basically in one specific industrial area. However, the building by building, apartment by apartment mopping up operation must continue until the Russians are fairly sure that most civilians have been removed from the blue zone. After that, a few well-placed missiles into the Azovstal complex ought to finish off the last remaining Nazis.

So what could the next phase of the war look like?

Take a look at this Readovka map (as of yesterday):

I chose this map because it shows the current “fronts” (the colored squares).

What I added are the following three black areas:

Areas one: central Ukraine including major cities like Dnepropetrovsk, Zaporozhie, Poltava or Cherkassy. Even Kiev is still connected to that zone (albeit barely).

Area two: Odessa cauldron.

Area three: mini-Banderastan?

Here is the deal, at least as I see it: the Russians cannot deal with these three black zones before they *truly* liberate the red parts of the map. And by “truly” I mean that these regions, towns and cities have to be very substantially (albeit not totally) denazified, a new administration must take over and a semblance of civilization and law and order must be restored.

I also added a red line from roughly Kiev going south and another one, roughly from the south end of the Odessa cauldron in the general direction of Kiev. I made them meet about in the middle. This is purely conceptual. While I am sure that Russian reconnaissance units and Aerospace Forces are present in that area and that the Ukrainians must be trying to hide as best can be, this is NOT land Russia controls or even blocks (too big for that anyway).

You could think of it as a “hotly contested no-man’s land” with fortified areas scattered across it.

For these reasons, I do not currently see the Russians committing major forces towards this move, but as soon as Odessa is not only blocked but fully encircled and the Donbass cauldron collapses, a new major cauldron will form, this time including all the cities I listed above.

Conclusion: time and manpower

Question: why should the Russians choose to go fast? To save the civilians in blocked/encircled towns and cities? Yes, I would agree with that. Except that the Russian armed forces are not in the Ukraine to repair power stations. Which means that a substantial increase in manpower, including many civilians, is the only situation in which speed might be desirable. Like in Mariupol today. Or Kharkov.

But once the red zone is finally truly liberated and the basic signs of civilization return, should the Russians go fast elsewhere? Let’s look at our three black circles again:

Area one, central Ukraine: the Russians have total air superiority, the Nazis have no mobility, tenuous supply routes, and their stores have been depleted by weeks of bombing. I do not see any need for the Russian to hurry into this one, lest it becomes the problems the Russians ALREADY have experienced in their zones of putative “liberation”, scores of dead civilians, and substantial losses. Because no matter how large and populated that zone is, it has no future, it will be surrounded like all the other parts of the Ukraine during phase one of the operation. This also means that a political solution would be INFINITELY preferable to a hard storming of cities like in the first Chechen war.

Area two, Odessa: same deal, Odessa is almost totally blocked and sooner or later the city will be surrounded. It is, alas, quite possible that the city will have to be taken like Mariupol, because of the very same “ingredients”: a generally pro-Russian city run by Nazi thugs whose reign of terror gets worse with every day. I hope and pray that the city surrenders, but I am not holding my breath and IF it has to be taken like Mariupol then, again, by all means, the Russians should go as slow as possible.

Area three, mini-Banderastan: does Russia even need it? Some say that the only way to go is to get the Russian tanks nicely aligned along the Polish border. Other say to forget it, let the local Nazis create their Russenrein Banderastan and have fun. Such a mini Banderastan would be supervised by a Nazi Gauleiter (Polish or Ukie – same difference) on behalf of the USA Heimat and its Eurocolonies. This is really no big deal, because the entire EU has now been turned into a Nazi Reichsgau administrated by the Anglos, and that is the real danger for Russia.

Will the Empire of Lies intervene in the mini-Banderastan?

Yes, absolutely. The question is HOW. The options range from a Polish invasion of the Lvov region (which, after all, is historically Polish!) to the use of this mini-Banderastan the way the US used Pakistan during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. In theory, there could be even a deal made between the US and Russia: the USA take the mini-Banderastan, the central Ukraine is not invaded, but is verifiably disarmed and denazifed, it becomes neutral and gets on probation: “behave or Iskander”. The Odessa region joins the (now much expanded) LDNR, the entire Black Sea coast is liberated (*truly* liberated) and the LDNR then decides of its future by means of referendum.

But I have to admit that when I hear the verbiage from Zone A, I am not holding my breath. For the Poles, this is a historic opportunity to show their unbelievable military prowess, get some land, a cheap labor force, and the chance to pretend to be a “European leader”. And how different is the rest of Europe? Meh… As we say in Russian, “these folks have all been anointed with the same (Nazi) oil”. So it ain’t the stupid and, frankly, ridiculous Poles the Russians need to “convince”, it is all the NATO and the USA.

I hope that I am wrong, but I do not see any argument which Russia could use to “convince” our wonderful European neighbors than either an Iskander inside a NATO member state (I vote for Poland!) and/or a total disconnection from any Russian energy supplies.

Putin already did the second thing, but elegantly: by forcing payments in Rubles he forces each country in Europe to make its own choice. And those who will pay in Rubles, thereby bypassing THEIR OWN sanctions, won’t volunteer to attack Russia or the Ukraine. [emphasis added]

Which leaves those who won’t. They are the ones who are so totally batshit crazy that they rather have their own population and economy suffer from cataclysmic consequences than negotiate *anything* at all with Putin’s Mordor. They are the ones who might need a “little extra argument” possibly in the form of a hypersonic missile.

I am not suggesting bombing Mons or London, not even Warsaw or even a major Polish military base. But something of real value to the Poles and with a minimal amount of victims. Ideally, a location “well-protected” by US air defenses (like the Saudi refineries, if you recall). Just ONE Iskander in the right location, and our western neighbors will tone down their verbiage, by a lot.

And here is the key point: the “convincing argument” will not be the landing of a Russian missile in Poland, no.

The real “argument” which might bring them back to reality is the NATO reaction AFTER that strike: a lot of hot air, threats, protests and various troop movements (like that hilarious EU rapid reaction force of 5’000 soldiers) and much more, but not a single Anglo or EU soldier taking the war to Russia! Why?

Because NATO has only two options:

Which do you think “Biden”, Johnson or Macron will pick?

Small reminder: “Biden” already deals with major crises with the PRC, with Iran, with the KSA, not to mention the humongous economic crisis looming over the entire planet!

Do you see these leaders of the “indispensable civilization” take the war to the Russians? IF they do, Mons will be next, and they know that.

Which leaves us with the real, true, bona fide, certified demonic agents who are willing to do anything, including 9/11 or MH-17, to try to “cancel Russia”. Right now, that demonic choir is all singing the same tune: Russia is about to commit a chemical attack against innocent Ukrainian civilians.

Will that fly?

You betcha it will!

After Gouta, Skripal, MH-17 and Navalnyi, we know for a fact that most of people in Zone A are what is called shit-eaters (comemierdas) in Spanish: folks who, like baby-chicks in a nest, just can’t wait for mommy and poppy to feed them by puking up some “food” into the wide open mouths. And nevermind that, unlike the USA, Russia has verifiably destroyed all her chemical weapons (as had Syria!), and nevermind that such a terminally stupid atrocity would serve NO Russian interests whatsoever (but then, neither did the self-evident idiocy of the MH-17 narrative prevent the shiteaters to eat it all, and even ask for seconds!).

Right now the Empire of Lies is making noises about IF Russia uses chemical munitions, THEN we will do something totally terrible to Russia, like sending in the Polaks into Lvov under NATO aircover to “save the few remaining survivors” or something equally asinine.

Unless you have been living under a rock, or can only use one synapse at a time, you must at least know that the following are all true:

Then there is the bigger picture, the one which really matters:

• The Empire of Lies feels that this is the very last chance to survive, they know that if the Russians, the Chinese the Iran and and, really, most of the planet prevails they are finished forever. This assumption is correct.
• The goal of the Empire of Lies is to cancel Russia. Completely. This is a truly genocidal plan made stronger by the conviction by the leaders of this Empire that this is the only and last chance to finally find a “Final Solution” to the “Russian problem”.
• The reaction of the West (total, terminal, genocidal “cancellation”) of everything Russian stunned most Russians who did know that there was no love lost between Russia and the West, but who were stunned to be singled out for total annihilation is something which 1) all Russians are intimately familiar with and 2) are now fully aware of.

That is why I wrote yesterday that Russia is in FULL WORLD WAR TWO MODE.

This is the kind of music video which now is very popular on the Russian social media:

The Best Hell March (video)

Bravo leaders of the West, you have FINALLY convinced a majority of Russians that your hatred for us is total, that no matter how ugly, petty and useless, your actions are, you are so overwhelmed with hatred for us that even your serfs VOLUNTARILY engage in numerous acts of anti-Russian racism, discrimination and other expressions of hate.

This anti-Russian hate is so prevalent, that now expressing hatred for Russia and Russians has now become of virtue signaling! Even for musicians, athletes, students and even grade school kids (I personally know cases).

And, guess what? We heard and understood. Millions and millions of us.

Our biggest failure has always been our inability to imagine our enemy’s level of hatred.

Oh, we knew that the 3B+PU base their entire identity and (imagined) history on the hatred of everything and anything Russian. Of course, we knew that the 3B+PU were all artificial creations of the West, but we sort of assumed that their hateful insanity was limited to a few, small, freak countries, but that most “normal” Europeans were not AT ALL like that. Oh no! Eurolemmings are civilized and hate Nazis, right? RIGHT?

And that was stupid on our part: how could the West be any different from the 3B+PU when that same West is the one who created the 3B+PU in the first place!

Then, for 300 years or so we were ruled by a massively westernized class. And after 1917, one massively westernized class replaced another one. WWII opened our eyes to some degree, but by the time Khrushchev and his gang came to power, the West was gradually crushing the CPSU ideologically and, especially, the Soviet Nomenklatura who, I would argue, sold out to the West, as an entire class, between 1980 and 1991, then that self-same Nomenklatura rebranded itself and the nightmare of the 1990s began.

And in the “democratic” 90s, most Russian youth only wanted jeans and hamburgers. But even that exsanguinated, impoverished, and confused Russia was a threat. So the US ordered the Russian Parliament to be shelled by tanks and thousands murdered in the following days. Then came the Chechen war, and the satanic attack on the Serbian nation. And most of us still were dozing off, hoping for a good salary in dollars and many holidays in Antalia.


Crusader or Nazi – same difference


And then came Putin, who not only did a lot of things, he talked to the Russian people, often for hours in a row, convincing, convincing and convincing.

But even Putin, the Eurasian Sovereignists and the 6th columnists together could not achieve what the Empire of Lies finally did: truly and profoundly rekindle the memory of WWII, even amongst the Russian youth. Now instead of jeans, they want to go to the front!

I would call that a “Hezbollah moment”.

And now, we shall never surrender, least of all to a sorry gang of Nazi pigs and Crusaders!

So it is not the Ukraine that we plan to denazify. It’s the planet.

The Empire of Lies gave Russia absolutely no choice.

For eight terrible years Russia had to retreat on all fronts because we needed to develop the military and industrial “toolkit” to take you on frontally.

Now we have.

And, unlike you, we are fully prepared to die, if needed, in defense of our civilizational values, our faiths and our country.

Are you ready to die for your wokeness, diversity and Satan?

I guess that we will soon find out.

Andrei

PS: tomorrow and Sunday I will be on the road, attending my faraway parish, so while my team will run the blog, I don’t expect to have the time to post analyses or even comment until Monday, maybe Tuesday. The text above (over 5’700 words) is, I hope, controversial and relevant enough to keep the blog going until my return.