I realize I’m growing tiresome on this topic, and repeating myself. Sorry. It’s driving me ‘round the bend.
No matter what you’ve been gathering from our frequently sloppy, often uncomprehending fourth estate, Ukraine is not losing its war with Russia. Not from where I sit. The problem is, they’re not winning, either. Or perhaps they are, actually, albeit at a glacial pace, as Putin’s war machine grinds itself down with repeated assaults on Ukrainian lines, losing unconscionable quantities of men and equipment while accomplishing next to nothing of immediate military significance. Who knows? Nobody, not the pundits, not the armchair generals (guilty), not the real generals, not the grunts in the trenches, not the political leaders, not even the intelligence analysts poring over the latest high resolution satellite imagery, can really say with any certainty which way this war is going.
Is this now a static war of attrition, with any sort of strategic breakthrough long since rendered impossible? Is Russia really able to absorb its horrendous losses, shrug them off, conduct more mobilizations, pull more Cold War relics out of deep storage, suffer even greater losses, and carry on indefinitely, in effect turning over its entire army about once a year, until Ukraine finally cracks? Or is it Russia that’s actually on the verge of cracking? Will the carnage simply continue until both sides agree that Putin’s brutal and illegal annexation of about 20% of Ukraine’s sovereign territory has to stand, and they settle into a mutually unsatisfactory, probably unstable status quo, with or without some sort of formal peace treaty that likely wouldn’t mean a whole hell of a lot anyway? If that’s the eventual outcome, will Putin think he’s won? If so, will he be emboldened to press his luck again? Will other bad actors, like China’s Xi, figure the cost/benefit of Vlad’s aggression made the whole bloody mess worthwhile, and start thinking about some conquests of their own? You can go around and around, chasing your tail all day with such questions.
Here’s the one that haunts me, though: what will happen, all across the world, if it’s generally perceived that Ukraine eventually had to fold only because America and it’s Western allies grew bored, tired, and impatient, and cut off meaningful military and economic support owing to nothing more than some complacent hedonist’s version of ennui – and what if that perception is accurate?
If that’s how this turns out, I think it might put an end to me. That might be it. I can’t think of anything, save perhaps Donald’s re-election, more perfectly contrived to gut me like a fish.
Oh, what a year this could be.
When all this started, and Putin’s outwardly formidable army started tripping all over itself and getting its ass kicked, enthusiasm for the defence and ultimate liberation of occupied Ukraine was high all over the Western world. Ukraine wasn’t just over-achieving on the battlefield, it was winning in the information space too, conducting what might be called a “meme war” that stuck it to the Russians all over social media. It was easy, actually. All they had to do was show us what was really going down on the ground; there were, God knows, an almost endless series of atrocities for the Ukrainians to bring to our shocked attention. When we all saw the substantiation for the stories of wanton destruction, rape, mass murder, looting, and systematic child abduction, we all howled in moral outrage and pledged our undying support.
Well of course we did! Only those few remaining among us who were here during World War II had ever seen anything like the utter, black-and-white absence of moral ambiguity involved in pushing back against the rampaging Russian brigands. Likewise, nobody could point to anything since 1945 that ever gave rise to such stark geopolitical imperatives. A bleak authoritarian dictatorship had just launched an unjustified and breathtakingly vicious war of aggression and conquest against a Western-leaning liberal democracy, right in the heart of Eastern Europe, right on NATO’s doorstep. What else did anybody need to know? How could we possibly let that stand, however protracted the struggle might become? We were all talking as if the only thing constraining us was the risk that we might send Putin into ape-shit paroxysms, and spark a nuclear war. It was a tricky line to walk, we all agreed, but anything we could do short of provoking WW III, we were frigging well going to do. No two ways about it.
Anyway, all the Ukrainians were asking for were the tools to keep them in the fight; when we proposed the evacuation of Ukraine’s young and inexperienced President – whose own life was unequivocally in grave danger, along with the lives of his wife and children (all of them were marked for capture and probable execution by Putin’s Wagner Group thugs, 400 of whom had been detailed to get the job done, failing which the plan was to effect the assassination by massive airstrike) – Zelensky’s response was a pure expression of physical and moral courage: the fight is here; I need ammunition, not a ride. At that, we all did a collective double-take: What? He really said that? Damn! We’d all figured the guy was a joke, remember? Way out of his depth, the poor bastard. He was a former actor and comedian, for the love of God. He’d once supplied the voice for a Ukrainian version of the animated Paddington Bear. God help him!
Now, somehow, he sounded like Winston Fucking Churchill. If this man, looking straight down the barrel of Putin’s sniper rifle, had that kind of iron in his backbone, how could we even contemplate leaving him and his brave citizens to twist in the cold wind? He needed ammunition? Hell yes, we’d give him ammunition! As much as his military could handle! As long as it took! Slava Ukraini!
Remember?
But then, we comfortable folk over here, contentedly sinking into our BarcaLoungers, and being the low-information, short-attention-spanned entertainment junkies we are, started to get restless. The sound-bites dried up, the war stopped being fun, and the whole mess began looking like a dreary, depressingly deadlocked slog that might take years to play out. So our minds started to wander. Sensing an opportunity, Putin had his trusty legion of internet trolls saturate social media with a narrative that stressed the depth of Russia’s resources, the apparently limitless capacity of the Russian people to tolerate the misery and keep feeding their sons into the meat grinder, and the long-term inevitability of Russian victory.
It goes more or less like this: the Russians have lost crap-loads of equipment and whole armies-worth of soldiers, sure, but there are plenty more of each where they came from. The Ukrainians are suffering too, and which side is better able to stick it out and triumph in a protracted war of attrition? Why, Russia, of course! Putin is patient. Putin is confident. The hotly-anticipated Ukrainian counteroffensive was a total bust. Another mobilization of 300,000 brave Russian recruits will be arriving at the front any day now. Get real! Ukraine’s position is hopeless!
They kept repeating this propaganda until it started to creep into Western media, helped along by the usual suspects. Trump, of course, was fully on-board with Vlad’s version of the story, and if Donald was singing from Putin’s hymnal, then so was the rest of the MAGAverse, from Fox and Newsmax to the gutless GOP place-holders cluttering the halls of Congress. Tucker Carlson, before he was kicked off the air for other reasons, used his bullhorn to spew anti-Ukrainian drivel at the Base every night, and others picked up the baton when he was sent packing for his defamatory sins. The Fox audience heard it over and over, every damned evening. Russia’s cause was just! Zelensky was a thug! He also dissed the entire United States when he showed up to address a joint session of Congress, and couldn’t even be bothered to clean himself up and put on a suit! Anyway, what did we care about irrelevant stuff going on way over there? We didn’t have a dog in the fight. Putin wasn’t even an enemy, God bless him. No, the real foe was right here at home, the Woke mob of hated Libs who want to replace real Americans with a horde of brown, unwashed illegals imported deliberately from a bunch of Southern Hemisphere shit-holes, in a vile Democrat conspiracy to steal the birthright of the nation’s rightful owners. Ukraine? Screw Ukraine. “It’s just a European border dispute”, said a sage Ron DeSantis, drawing upon his vast foreign policy experience.
The Base listened, rapt as usual. The Base bought it. Inevitably, even the shrinking residue of privately non-MAGA Republican politicians, their faint hearts consumed by terror of what Donald might tell the Base to do to them, also started to mouth the party line, until now we’ve got Speaker Mike Johnson, just like dear, departed Kevin McCarthy before him, asserting that it’s time to stop writing those whining ingrate Ukrainians so many blank cheques. As if that’s a reasonable, mainstream sentiment, consonant with the finest traditions of U.S. foreign policy, and exactly what George Marshall would be saying if he was still with us. Why was Biden asking us to care so passionately about the frigging Ukrainian border, when America’s own border with Mexico was a wide-open, completely unguarded frontier across which tens of thousands of “illegals”, most of them rapists and drug dealers, those that weren’t terrorists, flowed every damned day? America first! USA! USA!
And there it sits, for now. Further American aid to Ukraine is currently mired in U.S. budget limbo, as the usual round of fiscal hijinks once again threatens to shut down the entire federal government. Supposedly there’s a deal that Speaker Johnson has hammered out with the Dems, but the Freedom Caucus vows to reject it. Who knows? Every time, it’s a crapshoot whether the lights stay on. The Putin wing of the GOP might not win this time, and Ukraine may get another aid package, but the trend is clear, and Vlad discerns it just as plainly as anybody who’s paying close attention over here. Hell, at this rate we may cut the Ukrainians off even if Trump doesn’t take back the White House! Putin knew it all along. He saw what happened to the Kurds. He understands how we are: like spoiled brats with ADHD, screaming that there’s nothing new to watch on Netflix, unable to see the world except through the lens of how much it amuses us. All Vlad ever had to do was wait, and eventually we’d come through for him.
I swear to God, it’s as if somebody pulling the strings out there knows who I am, knows what’s going to make me sick at heart, and has everything arranged so he can make fabulously profitable book on whether I give up and blow my own brains out.
Well let me tell you something, Mr. Malevolent String-Puller: I ain’t quitting.
Instead I’ll raise my voice, no matter that nobody can hear it. I’m going to scream, just as loudly as I can, that all this bullshit defeatism about Ukraine’s war effort is, well, bullshit. Bullshit, I say. Look at this:
This list comprises the latest Ukrainian estimates of Russia’s human and material losses. The nay-sayers will tell you that they’re inflating the numbers, but I don’t think so, not by much, anyway. Our own intelligence estimate from a couple of months back was that the Russians had suffered about 315,000 to 320,000 casualties, either killed or too maimed to ever resume military duty, and here we see Ukraine’s more recent estimate that this ghastly figure has risen in the interim to 367,000. That sounds about right to me, given the ferocity of the recent combat, and the scope of Russia’s continually fruitless assaults, which the Ukrainians have come to refer to as “meat wave attacks”.
The carnage ongoing at a number of key points along the 600-mile Eastern front almost beggars belief. Russian tactics have been appallingly bad, and the willingness of Russian commanders to keep shoving wave after wave of ill-equipped, barely-trained conscripts into the teeth of Ukrainian buzz saws is, honestly, sickening. I’ve watched the drone videos – if you never have, best you don’t start – and the poor bastards are just getting slaughtered out there. It’s as if there’s a script. A Russian column begins yet another assault over open ground, in full view of the drone surveillance, and gets into trouble straight away. First go the tanks, vanishing beneath huge fireballs as their ammunition cooks off. Then it’s the armoured personnel carriers, hit by suicide drones, usually, that get stopped in their tracks. Those not destroyed by quadcopters or guided munitions are often dispatched by land mines. Then the survivors, if any, pour out of their wrecked vehicles and try to go to ground, but invariably it does them no good. There’s nowhere to hide. Artillery lands on top of them. Drones attack them one by one, personally, hunting them like animals. It’s horrifying. I want most fervently for the Russians to be beaten, and still, the ruthless, merciless killing is often enough to make you feel ill right down to the pit of your stomach. Sometimes, when the drones bore in for the kill, men can be seen on camera falling to their knees and begging for their lives, just before the image dissolves into static. Were that you could un-see such images.
I often find myself thinking that those poor, doomed conscripts had probably been pushed off the backs of trucks only a couple of days prior, and now they’re dead, killed like cockroaches. They’re being lost at a rate of 700 – 1000+ every day. Every day.
Have another look at the chart. Just look at those tank and infantry fighting vehicle losses. Six thousand tanks! 11,000 IFVs! Are these inflated numbers? Again, maybe. Some Western intelligence estimates would cut those numbers by as much as half. Yet we know the Russians have suffered so much attrition in the ranks of their armoured divisions that they’re starting to fling antiques into the fray, and our intelligence agencies figure that it will be the better part of two decades before they can restore their forces to pre-war levels. However many they’re losing, it’s plainly, from any sensible military perspective, too damned many.
So it goes all down the list, artillery systems, helicopters, fixed-wing aircraft, and so on; the losses are verging on catastrophic.
So indeed, Ukraine’s counteroffensive was a bitter disappointment, achieving far too little, and yes, for now, the conflict has devolved into a bloody attrition slugfest. That doesn’t mean Russia is winning. It sure doesn’t mean that Putin can keep this up indefinitely. Can he raise another cohort of 300,000 conscripts? Sure, though pretty soon he won’t be able to restrict the press gangs to rounding up ethnic minorities, prison populations, and poor unwitting country boys. What happens when most of them in this next batch are all dead and maimed too, which they probably will be within a year of being deployed? Is the plan to then raise still another 300,000? Supported by which tanks? Riding in what armoured transport? Protected by which combat aircraft? If Putin really is upbeat, confident, and looking forward to a happy outcome, it can only be on account of his faith in the West’s inability to stay the course. His military is having its corrupt, incompetent ass handed to it, pretty much daily.
We must not prove him right about us.
Instead, we have to step up, goddammit. We have to meet this challenge. I’m growing increasingly exasperated at the penny packets of weapons we’re sending, and the pace at which we’re sending them. We’ve finally trained them to fly the F-16? Super. Why are we transferring somewhere between 40 and 60 of the things to the Ukrainian Air Force? At this point, the USAF can’t spare another couple of hundred? A bunch can’t be transferred straight from squadron service, just as over 100 front-line F-4s and A-4s were back in 1973, when Israel’s back was against the wall? O.K., what about the ones in storage, then? Christ knows how many older F-16s are sitting under the baking Sun at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Arizona, the famous USAF desert “boneyard”. Look:
There are rows of these things stretching for thousands of yards in all directions. You know what becomes of them? Every year, a few are pulled out and refurbished to serve as unmanned high-performance targets. Yes, targets. Maybe we could find a higher, better use? I know they’re in mothballs. I know they’re not the latest marks. I know a lot of them have been cannibalized for spare parts. I know it’s a slow and involved process restoring them and making them fit for duty. I know. Now, tell me how many might have been made operational by now if we’d started in on the project two years ago, when we should have. Tell me why we shouldn’t now begin, however belatedly, to get the process rolling. And don’t talk to me about obsolescence. Compared to what? The aged MiGs and Sukhois with which the Ukrainians are currently making do? Nope. You can stow that bull-huckey, Jack. Anyway, it doesn’t matter if they’re not all the latest and greatest. They could still be highly useful. I remember when F-16As, the initial marks with the old engines, baseline electronics, and early model radars, were winning NATO bombing competitions against the Royal Air Force’s elite dedicated strike aircraft. Could the old A model reef into a 9G turn? Yup. Could it carry several tons of bombs? Oh yes. Could it handle the latest stand-off weapons? I’m not sure, probably not, as currently configured, but since the Ukrainians are jury-rigging Soviet-era MiG-29s and SU-24s to haul 21st century NATO ordinance, maybe something can be coopered together? Worth a try, right? They’ll do the heavy lifting. They’re good at that sort of thing.
And look, why is Australia still storing 48-odd comprehensively updated F-18Cs, all of them awaiting disposal? Has it occurred to nobody that it might be better to gift them to Ukraine, rather than cut them into scrap, or put them into the deep freeze?
I speak rhetorically. It has, of course, occurred to many among the analysts I follow. I first saw it brought up over 18 months ago, and the best of them keep on bringing it up, over and over, sometimes almost pleadingly.
Yet nothing happens. Those potent Hornets, not 5th generation stealth fighters but still highly effective and versatile fighter/bombers, certainly better than anything Ukraine has now, are still sitting there, inert, doing nobody any good, waiting to be chucked on the junk heap. There’s been no official suggestion that we ought to be training Ukrainian fighter jocks to fly them, just as they’re finally learning to fly F-16s. Why the f#@k not? I still find it hard to believe we’re going to let these precious assets go to waste.
Look at this:
Miles upon miles of tanks, M-1s and older M-60s. All the same comments apply. If the argument is that most of them aren’t up to the modern specs, so what? Neither are they vastly inferior to the 1950s vintage T-55s that the Russians are hauling out of their boneyards. If the contention is that these things can never really be made serviceable again, then why in God’s name are they being kept this way, by the thousand? If we’d started in on the effort when the first Russian tanks made their ham-fisted thrust toward Kiev, couldn’t we have had a couple of hundred up and running by now? Whatever – shouldn’t we begin, right this minute, and with all appropriate urgency, the process of bringing as many of these metal monsters back to life as possible, just as fast as we can?
What’s going on?
I’ll say again what I’ve been saying in this space for months, or maybe even for years, by now: the front line in the war to defend Western liberal democracy is now situate in eastern Ukraine. The battle, in which we all have a critical stake, is ongoing. Right now. In the Donbas. On the Eastern bank of the Dnipro. In and around Avdiivka. That’s where the clash of civilizations is raging, while we sit here, big, fat, dumb, and happy. We can do so much more to help Ukraine beat Putin’s increasingly threadbare forces. Russia is not winning. Ukraine is not losing. Not yet. Not ever, if we’re in this the way we ought to be. We’re growing frustrated? We’re getting weary? Really? Christ almighty. There are brave citizen soldiers dying by the thousand right now to uphold the values and institutions we claim to hold sacred. We’re not being asked to do anything beyond throw money at the problem. We can’t even do that much anymore? Are we, finally, that full of shit? It’s enough to make you weep.
Let’s face facts. Even if we do right by Ukraine for as long as it takes, as things stand this war probably won’t be resolved for a long, long time, barring developments that none of us can anticipate. It may be years yet. There’s no guarantee of victory, no matter what we do. We have to accept that. We have to be able to hang in there as long as the people of Ukraine are willing to keep fighting and dying for their right to exist as a culture and free society. Can we? All I can know for sure, at this point, is that if we fail this acid test, we deserve every awful thing that happens next.
the needlefish 