Russian offensive imminent
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced today that Ukraine is expecting a Russian offensive in eastern Ukraine at any moment. Russian airstrikes yesterday hit the city of Kramatorsk, a center for resupplying the Ukrainian army to the east of Bakhmut where heavy fighting has been taking place for weeks. It is thought that the Russians will begin with heavy artillery shelling of the towns along the front lines between Donetsk and Bakhmut and follow that up with what Ukrainians are predicting will be human wave assaults using relatively untrained Russian conscripts to try to overwhelm Ukrainian defenses.
This may be why Russian artillery shelling tapered off to less than 75 percent of what it had been in recent months, presumably to conserve ammunition for the expected offensive.
In a speech yesterday on the anniversary of the defeat of the Nazi army in World War II, Putin swore that Russia will not let up until it has conquered Ukraine and called his military operations there a “war with the west.” Putin’s appointment several weeks ago of Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov to lead his war against Ukraine may have been a first step in the expected offensive.
Western nations are said to have been rushing supplies of ammunition and combat materiel to the eastern front in Ukraine in recent weeks in the expectation that Russia has been planning a new offensive. The expected offensive may also be the reason that CIA Director William Burns met recently in Kyiv with Zelenskyy and his top military officials, to prepare them with the most recent U.S. intelligence about Russian moves behind the lines in eastern Ukraine.
It’s very cold in eastern Ukraine right now, miserable weather for a war. It’s useful to remember that the Ukrainian army is miserable defending land that belongs to them, while the Russians are miserable in a place they are not familiar with, fighting a war the purpose of which they don’t understand.
Ukraine is Putin’s Vietnam. Johnson and Nixon sent in new generals to replace others that weren’t winning the war for them. Military history repeats itself too.
This very well might make the preceding year seem like a picnic. If putin can't win this war that he alone started they will string him up like Mussolini, and he knows it, so he has to be all in, there will be no cozy retirement to Sochi. He asked for this, and I pray that we are arming the Ukrainians with enough lethality that they can turn back the human waves that he's planning on using. He doesn't care any more about Russian lives than he does Ukrainian lives, and eventually, unless some disease kills him the Russians most certainly will. There are probably over 100,000 Russians who were alive and uninjured a year ago who are no longer so, there will be no place for him to hide that is truly safe. This is what happens when a country is run by someone that is insane. We are lucky that our institutions held when the POS that was our president was running amok, if he had had a brain he might have led us into a similar sewer, I guess we are lucky indeed.
This is so sad and depressing…and as usual the grunts will pay the price for their leaders’ hubris. Gerasimov will be no more successful as his predecessors and what reserves in men and material will be wasted for what? There’ll be nothing left when the spring comes just because Putin wants to preserve his “legacy” at the cost of Russian blood…