Thread by @HaroldWren22

I said on my last account the Ukrainian ‘counter offender’ would accomplish nothing, except the profligate waste of men’s lives & materials.

https://twitter.com/narrative_hole/status/1673406986174492674

War is ugly. This is just a bitter, unpalatable little taste. This kind of ugly fighting has been has been going on for YEARS. People forget how many men Russia threw away & used up to pacify Chechnya a generation ago.

The cold reality is, Vladimir Putin & the Russian army have a lot more men, & stuff to throw away than Ukraine does: even w/NATO proxy support. Ukraine is running out of men, not Russia. Ukraine is losing NATO armored vehicles faster than NATO can supply them. Sorry thats just…

…cold reality. Ukraine’s army is, like Russia’s, a former Soviet Army formation that never evolved. They are crudely trained conscripts- not professional armies like NATO countries. Giving them crash training in NATO tactics & vehicles cant turn them into professional…

..soldiers on par with NATO troops that drill & train & gain experience over YEARS. You have a poorly trained soviet red army style conscript army w/ advanced NATO weapons they barely know how to operate & don’t understand how to properly use.

The outcome is predetermined, inevitable. Predictable. Its what you see in this video: huge numbers of men & vehicles thrown (unready) into the Meat Grinder to be chewed up & killed, without any real hope of changing the front lines or retaking territory, or ..

..capturing/destroying large Russian forces/units. In fact, this ‘counter offensive’ that NATO is demanding & is driving will SHORTEN the war. Historical example: Hitler gambling in the Ardennes forests of belgium & france in winter of ‘44.

The tiger I & tiger II tanks, the fuel, the SS troops, the artillery.. it was all wasted, & it was irreplaceable on a counter offensive that had a 20% chance of success. Maybe. And it shortened the war in Europe by a year.

When Panzer Gruppen Piper climbed out of their Tiger I & Tiger II tanks, out of gas, and burned them, & started walking back to German lines, they left most of the men & equipment that could have been used to hold the allies back in the west for months. Maybe a year.

The Ukrainians are repeating the mistake the Germans made in the Ardennes. Worse, there’s another historic battle that is similar to this situation: Kursk.

The Germans attacked the kursk bulge in their lines on the eastern front determined to cut off the Russian field army in the salient & regain the initiative. Hitler & OKW delayed the counter offensive several times, to bring the new Panther & Tiger I tanks to the front…

…in large numbers to smash the T-34s the russians were using to great effect. For months, for Operation Citadel. In that time, the Red Army fortified the front lines with mines, anti tank & anti personnel, traps, several layers deep.

By the time Field Marshal Von Manstein’s army groups north & south launched their dual pincer attack the Red Army had fortified lines multiple layers deep, & had amassed 1.9 million men & 5,100+ tanks to go face to face with Hitler’s offensive.

The fighting was brutal, point blank, and the bloodiest tank battle in world history, up until the Coalition forces massacred the Iraqi army in ‘91. The situation in Ukraine is similar to kursk. Similar terrain, similar delay of the offensive for new equipment to come on line…

..at the front, and same Russian fortifications in depth meant to break up, stall & bog down & bleed any armored counter attack. What you saw in this video is exactly that. The lines wont shift, but many many Ukrainians, and some Russians will be thrown away in a useless battle.

The Ukrainian counter offensive will play out just as Kursk did in 1943 for the Wehrmacht. But the long term effect will be the same for Ukraine as the Ardennes counter attack in 1944 was for Germany.

And at the end of this counter offensive, those Ukrainian troops sacrificed in large numbers will be gone, & large numbers of those expensive, sophisticated armored vehicles NATO sent will be burning wrecks littering the land. And the Ukrainian army will be that much weaker.

@threadreaderapp please unroll