🧵Ukraine War Thoughts – 2022_11_17
There are increasing signs the narrative field is being sown to condition the public mind for Zelensky's predestined fall from grace.
Ukrainian leadership is exuding desperation.
They know the true score.
They know time is running out.
1/
They know their autumn “conquests” were Pyrrhic in the extreme – many thousands of casualties and severe losses of equipment without ever inflicting a meaningful defeat on Russian forces, who are content to fall back to prepared lines to await the next wave of cannon fodder.
2/
They know and are humiliated by how the Russians effected, with impressive speed and negligible cost, the withdrawal of over 20,000 troops and their equipment from Kherson, over what were (allegedly) acutely vulnerable and tenuous lines of communication across the Dnieper.
3/
They evacuated all their armor and vehicles, leaving only 18 unsalvageables.
Meanwhile, the Ukrainians were so psychologically marred by the mauling they’d been taking for weeks that they remained convinced for a couple days that the Russian retreat was a ruse and a trap.
4/
Tracked vehicles were able to cross the (allegedly) impassable Antonovsky bridge, which had been the favorite target of the AFU’s little HIMARS toys, even as the interception rate regularly exceeded 80%.
GMLRS rockets pack a mere 23 kg of high explosive in their warheads.
5/
Once the withdrawal was completed, Russian demolition experts brought down the venerable old Soviet bridge good and proper.
Indeed, the Russians have now greatly accelerated their systematic “decommunization” of Ukraine’s legacy Soviet infrastructure – their very lifeblood.
6/
Because of the well-designed, well-built, and redundant Soviet energy generation and distribution grid, Ukraine enjoyed a surfeit of energy since 1991 – which they put to little productive use, and exported the abundant surplus for cash.
Much of it is now a smoldering heap.
7/
As the US did ostentatiously in Iraq – comprehensively degrading all Iraqi infrastructure assets – the Russians are finally giving Ukraine similar treatment here in late 2022.
One might say they are "Saddamizing Ukraine" in advance of something big soon to follow.
8/
Despite the irrepressible faith of Ukraine supporters, the AFU has suffered massive irreplaceable losses, even as Russian strength is peaking.
There have been numerous thinly veiled recent admissions of this by official voices stretching from Warsaw to Berlin to Washington.
9/
In a final futile attempt to prove themselves worthy of direct NATO intervention, Ukraine has sacrificed almost all its offensive potential for a militarily meaningless few square kilometers of Kharkov and Kherson oblasts.
And, in this weakened state, winter is upon them.
10/
The ubiquitous deceptions of the #EmpirePropagandists notwithstanding, Russia is not on its last legs. Quite to the contrary, they appear to have finally gotten deadly serious about prosecuting this war. How that manifests itself on the battlefield remains to be seen.
11/
I predict Surovikin will remain content to savage Ukrainian offensive moves as long as Zaluzhny is willing to keep launching them.
But the moment that waning offensive impulse manifests exhaustion, THAT is when General Armageddon is most likely to strike.
12/
And the biggest question that now remains is: what will the empire do in response?
Will they resign themselves to the humiliation of a Russian triumph over imperial designs?
Or will the #EmpireAtAllCosts cult attempt something rash?
Let us pray it is the former ...
13/end
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