The Russian invasion of Ukraine grinds on. So far, Ukrainian conventional forces and resistance groups have mounted a stiff defense against Russia’s numerically superior forces. The Ukrainian people, meanwhile, have rallied behind their government and seem willing to join the fight. Over the past few weeks, civilians have blocked armor with their bodies and prepared Molotov cocktails; Ukrainian women and children have started weaving camouflage netting; and civilian casualties from Russian fire are mounting. All of this is deliberately disseminated through a savvy Ukrainian social media campaign that has successfully reverberated in Western countries.
The conflict can best be characterized as what Rupert Smith has called a war among the people, in which “civilians are the targets, objectives to be won, as much as an opposing force.” It is no wonder, therefore, that many analysts and observers have urged Ukraine to adopt a strategy based on irregular warfare. Since the overwhelming Russian forces may well end up occupying at least part of the country, a Ukrainian insurgency will be part of the armed resistance. Any such insurgency will be long and bloody. But so far, most commentary on the topic has overlooked the grim but successful track record of Russian counterinsurgencies. Policymakers need to grapple with the brutal reality of Russia’s approach if they are to predict how Russian forces might react when confronted with a Ukrainian insurgency armed with advanced weaponry.
The Logic of Russian Counterinsurgency
There are two primary ways of countering insurgencies: states can either try to win hearts and minds or crush them. Both distill down to the challenge of fighting an elusive enemy hiding among the people. Modern Western military thought considers such a fight an indirect, population-centric approach hinging on the state’s ability to enhance the populace’s collaboration with the government. This assumes that strengthening the ties between people and state authorities augments the latter’s legitimacy while simultaneously weakening the insurgent’s position.
But while this approach emphasizes collaboration, there are other potential pathways toward control. Stathis Kalyvas, for example, has pointed out how the use of force can lead to more or less unquestioned dominance. Here, occupying forces can establish control through effective sanctions aimed at insurgents and their supporters. They use force to neutralize opponents and coerce people to comply with the government. Typically, the identification problem caused by the elusive nature of the opponent makes it particularly hard to target these sanctions and therefore indiscriminate violence and collective punishment are common. Thus, instead of enhancing governmental legitimacy this brutal, so-called authoritarian approach essentially revolves around gaining control through repression.
Recent Russian military campaigns in Chechnya and Syria, which featured indiscriminate violence and collective punishment, make clear that modern Russian armed forces adhere to an authoritarian counterinsurgency strategy. Moreover, an analysis of the historical track record reveals that this brutal approach has not only become a trademark of Russian counterinsurgency but has also brought unprecedented success. Of the twenty-four rebellions and insurgencies encountered between 1917 and 2017 Russia (or the Soviet Union) “won” twenty-one of these conflicts—an astonishing 87.5 percent—where “won” means that “the insurgency is militarily defeated and its organization destroyed, or the war ends without any political concessions granted to insurgent forces.” This makes Russia one of the world’s most effective modern counterinsurgents.
Ukraine may represent an outlier for Russia: unlike the Chechens, Dagestanis, and Ingush, the Ukrainians have a substantial number of conventional military units, including an effective drone air force, that are working alongside pro-Ukrainian militias, territorial defense units, and resistance groups. The Russian approach may struggle against a more professionalized insurgent force with modern weaponry. But analysts would be unwise to write Russia off too quickly.
There are five characteristics of an authoritarian approach to counterinsurgency. First, authoritarian regimes have a stronger grip on information than democracies. While these regimes are not immune to dissent, their control of information offers a powerful tool for protecting their hold on power and silencing critics.
Second, and related, an authoritarian state’s monopoly on information can be used for mobilizing mass support at home for even the most brutal of campaigns. Key here is that in the logic of the authoritarian approach, information operations focus on selling the threat of the insurgency to domestic audiences and not on winning over the hearts and minds of the local population. The aim is to demonstrate the necessity of the use of force against insurgents and their supporters.
Third is the deliberate use of massive and often indiscriminate violence. This seeks to prevent the insurgents from mobilizing popular support while simultaneously augmenting governmental control. The fragmentation of society that results from such violence denies opponents the ability to build or sustain solid ties with local communities. For this purpose, “coercive engineered migrations” might also be adopted. As a result, the insurgency will become more isolated as it is deprived of popular support and sanctuary.
Fourth is the concept of “Holding, Suppressing, Controlling.” This effectively boils down to the imposition of a police state. Physical control of territory and people gives the state the ability to monitor cooperation and trumps achieving any sense of legitimacy among the local population. When satisfied with the level of control, locally recruited paramilitary, police, and intelligence forces will gradually take over from the armed forces. This is all about imposing and sustaining an effective apparatus for punishing any dissent as swiftly and severely as possible in order to achieve a deterrent effect.
Finally, even authoritarian governments have to persuade the population to accept the new balance of power. They typically do so by interposing the state in every local societal transaction and activity and thus rendering it indispensable to public life.
The Brutal Reality of Russian Counterinsurgency
The most eye-catching feature of Russian counterinsurgency is its brutality, or more precisely its heavy reliance on massive force and suppression in the form of indiscriminate violence and collective punishment. The specific use of both methods and their interaction depends on capabilities and local regime characteristics. Historically, Russia has employed indiscriminate violence when its capabilities have been limited. In such cases the counterinsurgent was weakly rooted in the target society and local asymmetries favored the insurgency. Collective punishment, by contrast, has been most commonly observed under Russian regimes with strong capabilities and a sufficient degree of state penetration in the local population. In both cases, unquestioned dominance is achieved by unleashing brutal force on people living within the territory in which an insurgency takes place. Such efforts tend to be supported by subjecting Russian society as a whole to measures for curtailing dissent and mobilizing popular support. In fact, the Russian government’s thinking about cutting itself off from the global internet reflects a similar desire to control the information space for its domestic audience.
The use of indiscriminate firepower is generally a response to the difficulties in coordinating combined arms operations in tough terrain in which the population is mostly on the side of the insurgents. This has resulted in the primacy of artillery in Russian ground combat power in counterinsurgencies. Substituting firepower for infantry makes it possible to save soldiers’ lives by avoiding close combat. This reliance is heightened in areas where local support for Russia is elusive. During the Soviet-Afghan War, for example, massive fire support was the weapon of choice to limit risk to Russian soldiers and to compensate for the relatively low numbers of available infantry. Herat, a city that had been in guerrilla hands even before the Soviet invasion, was shelled to such an extent that three quarters of the center was obliterated. More recently, Russian airpower has been deployed to accompany conventional and thermobaric artillery in bombing the likes of Grozny and Aleppo into submission. Indiscriminate firepower is an enduring trait of the Russian approach to counterinsurgency; it will most likely be deployed in any future scenario in which insurgents hold an advantage.
When regime capabilities are strong, Russia tends to adopt collective punishment as its main vehicle for establishing control. Throughout modern Russian history, the Russian state has regularly turned to forced resettlement as one of its most extreme forms of repression in counterinsurgencies. The objective of such drastic measures is to target an insurgency’s tangible support in order to deny provision of goods and food, gathering of intelligence, and mobilization of new recruits. The application of collective punishment is also intended to set an example and deter the remaining local population from supporting insurgents. Of course, the operational challenges of this approach are manifold, and it’s unclear whether Russia would resort to such measures in Ukraine. But collective punishment remains a potential feature of the Russian counterinsurgency toolkit.
Once Russian armed forces have restored security, the results of the counterinsurgency campaign are consolidated and sustained through “reconstruction by local government.” This particular form of state building focuses on rebuilding governmental institutions by using local allies to reestablish political power according to the customs of the target society. This entails co-opting powerful leaders from within that society. Clientelism tends to result: the new local leaders remain heavily dependent on Moscow. Syria’s Bashar al-Assad and Chechnya’s Ramzan Kadyrov both epitomize the success of this approach.
A Grim Outlook
This track record suggests that if a Ukrainian insurgency materializes, any counterinsurgency effort will be aimed at establishing unquestioned dominance through the use of massive force. Russia has already sought to shape its domestic public opinion by prohibiting dissent and using state-controlled media to mobilize popular support for the war. And there are already many reports of indiscriminate firepower. This all bodes ill for Ukrainians: even without an insurgency, most characteristics that allow for the implementation of brutal authoritarian counterinsurgency are already in place. The threat of “Groznyfication” is real.
Little more is needed for the Russian armed forces to fully unleash a campaign of massive, indiscriminate violence in order to break the resolve of the Ukrainian population. Similarly, collective punishment—despite its absence in other recent campaigns—cannot be excluded as some of the preconditions are in place. Especially in areas where Russia succeeds in establishing military dominance, repression and even forced migration through refugee corridors could be an option.
So much for Russian attempts to win local hearts. As for converting local minds, thus far, Russian troops seem to enjoy little support across Ukrainian society. But it is not hard to imagine that under the pressure of brutal violence some local agents might start to collaborate in order to establish a new political order in occupied territories. The Russians have almost certainly already identified potential candidates for co-optation.
The outlook is especially grim if the Ukrainian war develops into a full-blown insurgency. Such an insurgency will prove costly to the Russian armed forces, but the costs for Ukrainians may well be much higher. For now, the challenge for the irregular warfare community is to identify the best ways to offer resistance tactics, techniques, and procedures in the face of a likely Russian counterinsurgency—all while trying to limit the costs to Ukrainian civilians.
Dr. Martijn Kitzen is a senior nonresident fellow with the Irregular Warfare Initiative and a professor at the Netherlands Defence Academy where he holds the chair of irregular warfare & special operations.
Major Marnix Provoost, MA is an infantry officer in the Royal Netherlands Army and a PhD student at the Netherlands Defence Academy, examining the analogies between state formation and insurgencies.
The views expressed are those of the authors and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense, or that of any organization the authors are affiliated with, including the Dutch Ministry of Defence.
Image: Russian troops in Aleppo, 2016 (credit: Russian Ministry of Defense, via Wikimedia Commons)
The bear is fat weak and mordibly obease or a skinny white boy who can't fight. If Russia can't defeat a 20th century military, they stand no chance against most of NATO.
Yours and comments by many "experts" reveal that existence of NATO itself and constant fears of re-creating of Russian Empire are nothing but a lie. Really, if Russia is so weak and inept why everyone around her is so fearsome, why is that necessary to supply Ukraine with so many weapons, why was it needed to make Ukraine either MATO member or US territory based on everything that transpired over the last 30 years and during this war? You cannot have it both ways. Someone benefits from repeating those lies. It's not those who're dead or suffering. Those who benefit are those who get rich out of any conflict anywhere.
What is wrong with killing Putin Puppets for capitalistic fun and profits bought with Russian ineptitude ?
You seem to be losing the point in there that here we have a Country:Ukraine that simply don't want to be under the Iron Curtain – ever again.
They are outnumbered by russian forces at leas 3-1. Why else would they need so much arms.
Russia has saved a 650billion war kitty through totalitarian might and withholding aid from ITS OWN PEOPLE,
We are talking about a country with 15% Poverty (21million people) yet the Leader owns a 250million mansion and a 160million Yacht.
That doesnt add up.
This assumes that NATO remains united and Russia limited to it current format.
Putin hopes that a conquest of Ukraine will give him Ukraine's defense industry and resources (including titanium and uranium) and demoralize the West, especially countries like Baltic Republics, Poland, Slovakiax Romania, and Bulgaria.
That would allow him to rebuild the old sphere of influence of Soviet Union.
The Ukrainian people has a much higher morale. Russia has, estimated, lost alread 10 to 20% of the canon fudder. Inclluding a number of generals and colonels.
Today the Nato and western countries including Germany are sending a massive amount of arms to the Ukraine.
It is my opinion Putin 's war is a lost one.
There already internal issues for Putin. He has placed at least 2 fsb members in house arrest.
High placed people are already leaving the country.
This dis not happen in al the other war's. Therefore this war is different than the others.
Putin is probably going to use nuclear tactical weapens. But that means already a totally different situation and not comparable to the other wars.
This article is one if the few rational assessments in the media. We keep cheering on Ukrainian military resistance when it means the ever increasing destruction of the society. The western media and Zelesky are in a pollyanish denial. Putin, Russia and tactical nuclear weapons are not going to be defeated. Putin is not going to back down. He’s ‘all in’ in this war. The only question is: to what level does he escalate the destruction?
The Ukrainian people have become a sacrificial lamb ‘to make points’. It’s disturbing how Ukraine’s leader has been granted sainthood when all of this could have been avoided or mitigated. Everyone keeps equating Putin with Hitler or Stalin when at the same time forgetting what those two psychopaths were capable of.
"Everyone keeps equating Putin with Hitler or Stalin when at the same time forgetting what those two psychopaths were capable of."
Hitler: Germany in the 1920s was a beaten down and humiliated nation, forced to pay reparations to the allies. Hitler came and told Germans "be strong, be proud." Then he saw Poland and said "see those Germans there? We must go protect them."
Putin: Russia in the 1990s was a beaten down and humiliated nation, forced to watch as former neighbors fell under the sway of European society and politics. Then Putin came and said to Russians "be strong, be proud." Then he saw Ukraine and said "see those Russians there? We must go protect them."
The similarities are too close for my taste. As for genocide, we know what Putin thinks about the "scum and traitors" who criticize him. How will he react to a Ukrainian population that refuses to love him? Or how is he reacting now, if even only some of the reports of atrocities are to be believed?
yes, all this is so typical of the famous Dutch courage and military morale, which they had last proved so victouriously at Srebrenica.
That's why they won in Afghanistan, right?
exactly
City leveling x years = effective? Ok, West Point.
Putin will grow as aggressive as he is allowed to grow. Analogies with 1930-ies Germany are striking.
Hitler used Austrian conscripts and Czechoslovakia's armaments to invade Poland, France and eventually Soviet Union…
Pure uninformed garbage.
This might be the most convoluted mishmash of confused modern doctrine I have witnessed thus far.
Following any advice contained would be the equivalent to executing a checklist to failure.
The authors repeatedly refer to 'Russians mounting a counterinsurgency in Ukraine'?
If you are an officer and do not understand the doctrinal conflict of the previous statement,
you should retire your commission immediately.
As you are a hazard to the lives of the subordinates under your command.
For The Record
An insurgency is an active revolt or uprising against the governing body of a sovereign nation.
To suggest Russian forces would be "counter insurgents",
this would delineate Ukraine as somehow 'owned or governed' by Russia.
Thus the authors are simply spouting uninformed advice
or they are flying a false flag
and lending credence to the Russian narrative that 'the Ukraine' has always belonged to Russia.
Given the deluge of false doctrine created by the United States in the last decades to justify a completely failed strategy of counter terrorism,
there is no surprise in the confusion regarding Irregular Warfare which abounds throughout the western world.
Insurgencies existed Iraq and Afghanistan because the insurgent forces were rebelling against the central governments of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Ukrainians are not rebelling against the Ukrainian government,
they are repelling a foreign invader.
I am not sure why any lawful military theorist would wish to plot a path to Russian victory
but if one were to do so,
Russia should execute a counter guerrilla campaign to counter the tactics of armed and organized irregular resistance.
However that is a misnomer as well,
as no modern nation has successfully mounted a counter guerrilla campaign to any modicum of success.
Traditional wars of invasion and conquer,
to seize resources or territory by force,
are simply not compatible with the human and sovereign rights held by majority of world nations today.
This type of ruthless competition is an archaic vestige of man's predilection to conflict.
Furthermore, Russia's 'annexation' of the Crimea was not due to military might.
Russian agents fulminated an insurgency and [convinced] ethnic Russians to rebel and succeed from Ukraine.
Counter guerrilla and counterinsurgency are two diametrically opposed types of conflict,
requiring two differing paths to persevere against the adversary.
The inability of American strategists, military and intelligence leaders to recognize these truths is why US forces failed so miserably in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Instead of performing Foreign Internal Defense and advisement to aid either nation in countering the insurgencies mounted against them,
US led actions would be best characterized as infantry based counter guerrilla actions
against a civilian populace without regard to either Iraq's or Afghanistan's sovereignty.
However unilateral US only counter terrorism operation were the true instigating or fulminating actions which invigorated insurgent resolves.
This article, and others like it expressed by incompetent officers and doctorates,
truly showcases how western military forces are bereft of any meaningful understanding of modern warfare.
Specifically, its published inclusion on the MODER WAR INSTITUTE belays how the admins of this website,
and the military theorists at West Point,
fail to understand modern warfare and strategy.
This analysis would probably be relevant if the capabilities of the Russian military were where everyone thought they were four weeks ago. Unfortunately, that is not the case. Conditions on the ground continue to change day by day, hour by hour, in favor of the Ukrainian military. As the west continues to funnel military aid into the country and western sanctions increase, squeezing Russia's economic ability, Russia will not be in a position to execute even a semblance of counter insurgency campaign outlined above. For Russia to prosecute a counter insurgency campaign, the Ukrainian people would have to begin fighting from the standpoint of insurgents and it doesn't look like that will happen anytime soon. The analysis in this article is a historical review and not very relevant to the current capabilities of the Russian Military, the Ukrainian military, or the situation on the ground.
It’s not called a counter insurgency when the Ukrainians are still in control of the government. This conflict is Foreign Internal Defense against Russian invaders. The authors attempt at instilling COIN doctrine into the current situation misconstrues the nature of the conflict.
This analysis brings up some interesting points and much needed comparisons to Russia's previous counterinsurgency operations. Its failure to consider the scale and scope of the current conflict, and cultural ties between the Ukrainian and Russian populations, however, leaves it deeply flawed.
Chechnya has approximately 1/100th the population of Russia and has a GDP per capita 1/5 as large as Russia's. Hence its resources, were about 1/500th as large as Russia's. Furthermore, Chechnya's combat efforts were in no way supported by the West, neither with direct material support, nor with sanctions targeted at Russia. Finally, the West was essentially uninterested in the conflict in Chechnya, seeing it largely as an internal Russian matter. Russian losses in Chechnya were in the ballpark of 10,000 over a period of a decade.
Syria's population is about 17 million, about 1/8th the population of Russia while its GDP is around 1/40th of Russia. The Syrian opposition never controlled more than a fraction of the country, and very little of the urban and industrial infrastructure so these numbers do not represent the resources available to the opposition. Opposition population was closer to 5 million with a GDP scarcely larger than perhaps $10B USD, less than 1/150th of Russia. While some support from Western and Middle Eastern powers was delivered, it was at levels very much smaller than we are currently seeing in Ukraine. Russian losses were in the range of a few hundred over 3 years of active fighting. This is in the context of the Syrian regime forces doing the vast majority of the on-the-ground fighting and Russian assistance being mainly in the form of bombing with air supremacy.
Contrast this with the situation in Ukraine. Ukraine has a GDP about 1/10th the size of Russia and a population about 1/3 the size of Russia. Meanwhile, billions of USD in arms and aid from the West are flowing into the Ukraine each month. In annualized terms military support for Ukraine is unlikely to be less than $10B USD/year. And of course Western interest in the Ukraine conflict, and sympathy for Ukraine is extremely high which has resulted in punishing sanctions against the Russian economy.
Before the Ukraine conflict the Russian military budget was approximately $62 billion. This number will likely be increased, but the certain contraction of the Russian economy in recession and Putin's need to maintain social programs means the Russian military budget cannot expand by much. Indeed, as efforts to move the West away from dependence on Russian oil and gas progress, income from petro-exports will decline. Factor in the need to support its sprawling military infrastructure and the resources available for the Russian military to prosecute the invasion and ongoing occupation cannot be much larger than $10-20B/year. In comparison, the Ukrainian military budget over the past few years was approximately $6B USD/year. Add in the $10B USD/year flowing in from outside and Ukrainian military resources are in the range $10-20B USD/year.
Pre-war Russian military personnel were about 1,000,000 active duty soldiers and 2,000,000 reserves. Ukrainian active duty were about 200,000 with reserves of about 1,000,000, many or all of which would be activated as the conflict progresses.
How do these facts affect the analysis of a possible Russian counterinsurgency operation? Simply put, Russia has the resources and will to successfully suppress a small insurgency with an opponent less than 1/100th its size. It has no experience dealing with near-peer insurgencies. The above comparisons show that in the context of this war Russia and the Ukraine can be considered peer or near-peer adversaries.
Costs to the Russian military will indeed be high, prohibitively so. One month into the Ukraine war the Russian military has lost about 10,000 soldiers, about the same as it lost over a decade in both Chechnya and Afghanistan. In Syria, Russia lost perhaps a few hundred military personnel over a period of 3 years but with hardly any exposure to risk. In addition Russia has lost 5-10 generals in Ukraine, an unprecedented number in a single month.
We can take two extremely naive guesses at the expected Russian losses due to a decade long conflict in Ukraine. First, simply scaling the first-month numbers over a 10 year insurgency would imply an expected loss of approximately 1,000,000 Russian soldiers. Second, scaling the loss in Chechnya by the ratio in resources available, gives 10,000*250=2.5million (this is assuming Ukraine has approximately 1/2 the resources available to Russia, compared to 1/500 in the case of Chechnya. From the lesson in Syria we would expect 1,000 Russian losses over a decade multiplied by 150 (ratio in resources) and multiplied by some risk factor (Russian troops would have to be on the ground, not simply bombing from safety). If the risk factor is 5 (probably low!) We would expect 750,000 Russian losses over a decade in Ukraine.
Clearly losses in the millions are absurd and causalities could not scale like this. Still, it is difficult to imagine Russian losses lower than 100,000 over 10 years (this would be less than 1/10 the current rate!). This number of losses does not include the wounded, which would likely be 4-5 times larger. 500,000 wounded soldiers would be impossible to hide, even given the current media and social controls in Russia. It is also important to note that the Russian invasion and occupation of Afghanistan was ended (largely due to internal pressures) when the cost in dead and wounded soldiers was judged too high. The costs in Ukraine are already at or nearing this point but have not been felt yet by the Russian population. Reports suggest that many (or even most) families of Russian casualties have not yet been notified. It is inevitable that families will eventually find out the fate of their sons.
As Dr. Kitzen and Major Provoost rightly state, Putin’s likely strategy will be to use the same counter insurgency tactics as Russia has employed in the past. Civilian casualties will be extremely high.
There are, however, very significant differences between the cited examples (Grozny and Aleppo) and the situation in Ukraine. First, Grozny is essentially the only city in Chechnya. The next largest city is almost 10 times smaller. Attacking and leveling Grozny was logistically simple and psychologically potent. It represented the destruction of the living spaces and livelihood of almost 1 out of 4 Chechnyans.
In the case of Syria, Aleppo is again the largest city, and of the 23 cities above 50,000 inhabitants, only a handful were in opposition hands. The loss of Aleppo was a devastating blow to the opposition and widely seen as the turning point in the war.
The situation in the Ukraine is very different. While Kyiv (with a population similar to prewar Aleppo) is the largest city in Ukraine, it is not nearly so dominant, There are 15 cities with a population over 300,000 and almost 90 cities with a population above 50,000. In comparison in Syria there are only 5 cities above 300,000 population and about 20 above 50,000. Just leveling Kyiv and a handful of cities would not have nearly the same crushing impact as the loss of Grozny and Aleppo did.
To obtain similar results Russian forces would need to “Groznify” dozens of cities. While the Russian population was largely acquiescent with the leveling of Grozny and eastern Aleppo, it is difficult to believe that the leveling of dozens of cities populated by fellow Slavs would be considered acceptable. Bluntly put, Grozny and Aleppo are populated by “swarthy” Moslems with no cultural connection to Orthodox and white Russians. This is not the case in the Ukraine. Again, while Russian media and social controls are strong, they could not prevent at least some distaste for the war from percolating into Russian society. We can already see this in the continued protests against the war in Russia and the numbers of Ukrainians with family in Russia. While some may not believe their Ukrainian relatives, many do and more will do so when families are broken by death.
In summary, while Putin is very likely to ramp up brutality against civilians in his attempt to suppress the Ukrainian resistance, it is unlikely that this tactic will be anywhere near as successful as it was in other conflicts. This is a war the the Russian bear cannot win. The most likely scenario is a grinding quagmire imposing unacceptable costs on Russia. While the costs on Ukraine and its citizens are likely to be much higher, they have so far been willing to accept high costs in defense of their homeland and appear likely to continue in their resolve.
I find this extremely uncompelling, and would like to see a list of those 21 insurgencies Russia/USSR won.
First of all, how many of those were insurgencies in the 1920's or immediate post-WWII period, when the types of weapons that have made insurgencies so deadly to occupiers came into common use?
Second, how many of them took place within the borders of the state itself? Defeating an insurgent group within your borders that
a. May not be popularly supported
b. Cannot receive support/refuge from a neighboring state
bears little resemblance to what Russia would face in Ukraine today. Yes, the Soviets defeated insurgency in Ukraine in the 1920s and 1940's. But those insurgents could hardly tap into the national or international resources that a Ukrainian insurgency could tap into today. Just as an example, there were far more Ukrainians serving in the Red Army than there were among the Banderists in the post-war period, and the Banderists themselves had no neighboring states to support or supply them. Does anybody think that Russia will find itself in the same situation today?
Ukraine could have instead declared Kharkiv and Mariupol to be Open Cities like Kherson apparently made itself. Even Pope Francis was asking that Kyiv would be so declared, when it seemed to be under imminent attack. Instead, the Kyiv government chose to make them battlegrounds.
In the case of Mariupol, the Azov Battalion – which models itself on the WW2 Nazi 2nd SS Das Reich Division which massacred villages both in Russia and (Oradour, 10Jun44) France – the Russians have accused Azov of committing atrocities, and even Democrat U.S. Congressmen wanted it declared a terrorist organization at one point – would not allow that, and is fighting to the death there, taking civilians down with them. The Russians claim Azov/Ukraine positions fired on buses evacuating civilians.
Unlike Stalingrad, Mariupol has no supply & reinforcement source across a Volga River to keep its defense going and the Russians now control the Sea of Azov on all shores and the Kerch Strait.
I suspect the Russians will kill every Azov they find. (One Azov recently killed was a kickboxing champion.)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/03/28/ukraine-kyiv-russia-civilians/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/03/14/neo-nazi-ukraine-war/
The Ukraine War has just stopped "grinding."
Apparently pumped up by battlefield success like he was pumped up in Munich by the Europeans and made his foolish remark suggesting Ukraine get nukes, Zelensky has attacked a fuel depot in Belgorod *Russia*, and it's now a completely different war.
That is, the Ukrainians have just directly gone to war against a nuclear superpower.
Our atom bombs ended World War 2, and now the Russians can threaten and/or use such to end this war.
What Russia now does to Ukraine within it is none of our – or NATO's – business, and if we try to make it so, the nuclear holocaust we Cuban Missile Crisis Baby Boomers grew up in dread of is inevitable … and our political … careerists … have been criminally negligent regarding civil defense protection for us … for our families.
Whether or not the Russians demand Unconditional Surrender remains to be seen, but Zelensky firing his 2 security chiefs tells us the Ukraine high command is justifiably worried.
Meanwhile, Biden&Blinken's motives (which I have identified) for wanting this war and opposing the fair security treaty to avoid it have risen to 9:
1. To return the world to an economically and politically (and militarily) segregated bipolar Cold War state, to safeguard Western economic and political hegemony. The old New World Order shtick.
2. To pursue the World War 2 strategy of knocking off the European opponent before the Asian opponent, to regain for the U.S. and West strategic military hegemony.
3. To have a major war to finally get that Democrat war powers dictatorship Joe Biden, John McCain, and Joe Lieberman tried to get in 1999 just using our Kosovo war as the pretext, and the Washington Post has already eagerly hailed Joe Biden to be a “wartime president.”
4. Consistent with the Democrat line that Trump and the Republicans were and are pro-Russian to the point of treasonous, to politically polarize Americans into “pro-war patriots” vs. “anti-war traitors” – the latter like myself being rational, realist dissidents opposing the holocaust their pro-superpower-war policy is propelling us into.
5. To have a neocon “major war” to spur the economy. (Tyler Cowen, NY Times.)
6. To “re-unite” the Country with – what else? – a war, except there won’t be anything left of it/us to re-unite.
7. Regime change, hoping that the Russian people will rebel politically, especially if the war appears to be going badly as it appears it is. Except Russia has now declared martial law.
8. To deflect public attention away from charges that Joe and Hunter Biden were themselves involved in corrupt Ukraine machinations.
9. To deflect public attention away from the Ukraine government’s illegitimacy – being a coup government – and its Nazi backers.
And before the war started, Joe Biden was talking up the war happening to Zelensky’s great nervousness.
Only minor injuries, and it was a civilian installation, and the Ukrainians seem to be denying responsibility, so it might have been a false flag … or if those were Ukrainian helicopters, the Ukrainians are now scared as they should be in either case.
Whichever it was, it will still be used to escalate the war.
If only 2 helicopters were involved, there is also the possibility a 3rd party, giving the Ukrainians deniability and the West possible grounds to intervene to "protect" them.
Well this is interesting given the recent news about the massive civilian killings being discovered in recaptured areas of Ukraine by its armed forces. the Russians are truly disgusting in the way they just kill any living thing regardless of age, gender, or affiliation with the enemy forces. These people didn't deserve that end and i hope the brainwashed people in Russia come to realize the truth to whats going on.
It would actually be very interesting to see a write up on the control the media has on the Russian civilian population and how they have been seriously actually brainwashed into thinking they are saving the Ukrainian people from Nazis its insane!!!.