by Oui
Wed Mar 15th, 2023 at 04:27:00 PM EST
Covered by b @MoA
Finally some truth about the real state of the Ukrainian military is sneaking into main stream media. It is as bad, still not fully disclosed, as we have described it again and again.
The opening paragraph:
The quality of Ukraine's military force, once considered a substantial advantage over Russia, has been degraded by a year of casualties that have taken many of the most experienced fighters off the battlefield, leading some Ukrainian officials to question Kyiv's readiness to mount a much-anticipated spring offensive.
That spring offensive is as likely to happen as the announced relief campaign to unblock Bakhmut. The later is bogged down in mud which will only become worse over the next few weeks.
Ukraine - Media Start To Acknowledge Reality
Covered by b @MoA
Finally some truth about the real state of the Ukrainian military is sneaking into main stream media. It is as bad, still not fully disclosed, as we have described it again and again.
The opening paragraph:
The quality of Ukraine's military force, once considered a substantial advantage over Russia, has been degraded by a year of casualties that have taken many of the most experienced fighters off the battlefield, leading some Ukrainian officials to question Kyiv's readiness to mount a much-anticipated spring offensive.
That spring offensive is as likely to happen as the announced relief campaign to unblock Bakhmut. The later is bogged down in mud which will only become worse over the next few weeks.
Ukraine - Media Start To Acknowledge Reality
I don't agree with b @MoA ... the battle stalemate is more like two beaten dizzy boxers hanging in the ropes, just clobbering one another. War is damn stupid where diplomacy would have prevented this war with two sides would have been willing to listen to one another ... read the UN Charter about the quest for peace between neighbours. NATO is not a neighbour, but an asset of US military aggression.
The danger of downplaying the Ukrainian battlefield toll | Responsible Statecraft |
Are Americans supporting a policy of brutal attrition based on incomplete and skewed Western coverage of the war?
"Ukraine will win." Some variation of this has become the unofficial mantra of U.S. policy toward the Ukraine war, asserted in countless columns, interviews and speeches, ones often pledging open-ended U.S. commitment to the Ukrainian war effort and chiding policymakers for not sending greater quantities and more escalatory types of weapons.
It was partly on this basis, in fact -- that with enough support, Ukraine could militarily defeat a Russia weaker than many thought -- that then-UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson reportedly urged against peace talks early in the war.
This attitude has been bolstered by the unconfirmed information that's trickled out publicly about the significant damage inflicted on the Russian military. Besides the disastrous loss of equipment -- including half of its usable tanks and as much as 8 percent of its active tactical combat aircraft, by one estimate-- the consensus among Western officials about Russian casualties seems to have settled on a staggering 200,000, with more killed than in all of its other post-World War II conflicts combined.
Yet this central claim of an almost certain Ukrainian military victory over chastened Russian forces is asserted in the absence of one key measure of the military situation: verifiable battlefield losses. From the beginning of the war until now, Ukraine has, like Russia, treated its casualties as a state secret, one so closely guarded that not even U.S. intelligence and officials, who advise the country's leadership on military strategy and assist in war planning, know exactly how many Ukrainians have been killed and wounded over the past year. This is even though, as one Ukrainian officer told the Wall Street Journal in a recent piece about the grinding battle for the city of Bakhmut, "the war is won not by the party that gains territory, but by the party that destroys the armed forces of the adversary."
The best we have are various estimates. In November, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley publicly estimated that Ukraine had "probably" seen more than 100,000 soldiers killed or wounded and 40,000 civilians killed, echoing EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen's own public admission that month, which she was forced to retract as supposedly inaccurate in the ensuing public outcry.
EU Statement ammunition production for Ukraine
In the shadow of US militarism. the influence of the EU is waning
