The ludicrous, inept, missile attacks on Ukraine have proven one thing and one thing only – Russia has lost this war. At this rate, they’ll be throwing snowballs and sending strongly worded text messages by December.
They might as well. The war is going incredibly badly for Russia. According to some analysts, the Russian forces in Kherson, a significant part of their total strength, are “under siege” and/or falling to bits. These troops can’t pull back thanks to those bogus referendums, and they can’t actually retreat across the Dnepr with no bridges.
Infrastructure can be replaced. Apparently, that hasn’t occurred to Moscow. It looks like this sprinkle of missiles is in retaliation for the Kerch bridge incident. So Russia has wasted whatever missile power it had left largely for the sake of appearances.
Even less impressive, Putin is said to have folded to pressure from pro-war groups. These groups have been talking more about who to blame than the war lately. These are the very people he’s been using to support him, now telling him what to do? Not a great look.
Meanwhile, back at the disasters…
Russia’s diplomatic position is as usual going from terrible to worse. Global condemnation obviously isn’t an issue for Russia, but maybe total failure is. Things are actually worse than they seem. The Russians are clearly completely out of ideas. They’re stuck in a mess of their own making, making it worse, and apparently have no clue how to proceed.
The missile strikes change absolutely nothing on the battlefield. On the ground, it’s basically all over. More mistakes are inevitable as the Russians try to pretend they have any tenable positions or any real offensive power. The much-cited 120 Battalion Tactical Groups are long gone. Russian troops have been routing on a daily basis. Russians along the border are now worried they might get invaded by Ukraine (why bother?) and there’s not much to stop them.
Russia’s one remaining rock-throwing capability, missiles, is clearly shrinking fast. These strikes used up a lot of available capacity. It’s been some time since the Russians used any long-range missiles, and now they have a lot less of them for no result.
Nor are the strikes particularly effective. The actual missile strikes did far less damage to Ukrainian cities than the Russian artillery has done to Donetsk and Luhansk, which are utterly devastated. Talk is cheap enough. Rebuilding those areas will be a very expensive decade-long exercise. You can’t talk cities back to life.
If Russia was trying to do everything possible against its own best interests, this is exactly what it’d look like. It’s an unholy mess, a graveyard of pointless rhetoric as much as of tens of thousands of Russian soldiers.
In military terms, the one and only lasting achievement has been the total destruction of Russia’s credibility. Even now, the Russians are persisting in attacks in the area of Sloviansk and Kramatorsk. Meanwhile, to the north, Isyum, the northern pincer of the failed offensive, has been taken by the Ukrainians, behind them.
(This military idiocy is fairly typical of dictatorships. Delusions and wishful thinking replace any sort of real-world information when the wheels fall off. Near the end of WW2, a single German division was supposed to “advance” on its own to a location in eastern Germany. To do so, it would have only had to fight its way through about 60 Red Army divisions to take up a defensive position which hadn’t existed even in theory for weeks. Sound familiar?)
Meanwhile, Belarus is talking about massing Russian troops in Belarus to avoid getting Belarus involved in the war. Massing what? Snowmen? How? Where are these troops to come from, Disneyland?
The shopping list of internal disasters is lengthy. Conscription in particular is producing a messy response all throughout Russia. In Dagestan, police opened fire on protestors against the draft.
The economy cannot possibly be fully functional. Revenue from oil will get eaten up by the costs of the war and basic government operating costs. Inflation will corrode purchasing power progressively and severely over time. Destroyed trading relationships won’t suddenly reappear either.
Russia cannot continue this war for long. This obsession with the past is leading to a very grim, all-too-familiar impoverished future. The Soviet Union isn’t coming back. If you’ve got no other options, there’s always sanity.
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Disclaimer
The opinions expressed in this Op-Ed are those of the author. They do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of the Digital Journal or its members.
