Incompetent Russia Hilariously Fails to Prevent Ukraine from Losing.

Uncle Volodya says, “Mockery and derision have their place. Usually, it’s on the far side of the airlock.”

“Nonsense has taken up residence in the heart of public debate and also in the academy. This nonsense is part of the huge fund of unreason on which the plans and schemes of optimists draw for their vitality. Nonsense confiscates meaning. It thereby puts truth and falsehood, reason and unreason, light and darkness on an equal footing. It is a blow cast in defence of intellectual freedom, as the optimists construe it, namely the freedom to believe anything at all, provided you feel better for it.”

Roger Scruton, from, “The Uses of Pessimism: And the Danger of False Hope”

“Bullshit is unavoidable whenever circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about. Thus the production of bullshit is stimulated whenever a person’s obligations or opportunities to speak about some topic are more excessive than his knowledge of the facts that are relevant to that topic. This discrepancy is common in public life, where people are frequently impelled — whether by their own propensities or by the demands of others — to speak extensively about matters of which they are to some degree ignorant.”

Harry G. Frankfurt, from, “On Bullshit”

The title probably made you scratch your head for a second, because it’s what Steely Dan called ‘Pretzel Logic’ – an attempt to stick to a chosen storyline regardless the inability of assembled facts to support it. According to the Pop Culture dictionary, “…used to describe inconsistent, illogical thinking that, once scrutinized, doesn’t stand up…frequently appears in political contexts, used in an effort to call out opponents’ logical fallacies or to characterize someone’s twisted line of reasoning or justifications.”

Unless, perhaps, you work for British Intelligence, or the British Ministry of Defense. In which case it will make perfect sense – even have about it an air of immutable prophesy. Speaking of prophesy, here’s one: in the years or even decades to come, as analysis of the Russo-Ukraine war is filtered, the contribution to an accurate picture of the situation offered by the combined staffs of the establishments just mentioned will be assessed to have been as effective as if it had been provided by an equivalent number of pithed frogs.

Here’s a relevant example. “Ukraine’s counter-offensive has failed for now – the West needs a new plan”. I’m bound to ask, right out of the blocks, what makes the author assess that the failure of Ukraine’s counteroffensive – which would be comical were it not for the awful cost in human lives – needs the qualifier, ‘for now’? Is there something about the steady, spiraling downward non-progress of Ukraine’s efforts which inspires the belief that it will reverse, and turn into success? If it foundered while transfusions of money and western equipment reached a crescendo, what is the likelihood that burnout and disillusionment among Ukraine’s allies will inspire a reversal of its fortunes?

I guess I was forgetting that we are talking about the UK media, for whom loopy prognosis is as natural as moral superiority and cheap gossip. Demonstrations abound; Britain’s ‘spy chief’ – Richard Moore, head of MI6 – interpreted in the summer of 2022 that Russia was ‘running out of steam’ in Ukraine. He elaborated that Russia was increasingly having trouble finding enough soldiers, perhaps due to Putin’s policy of sending the poor and underprivileged kids from blue-collar Siberian towns to be mowed down by Ukraine’s ruthless efficiency.

“Moore also provided an estimate on the number of Russians killed in the war thus far — 15,000. He said that’s “probably a conservative estimate” and marked a “very bloody nose” for President Vladimir Putin, who expected a quick victory.

He noted that it is about the same number that Russia lost in 10 years in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

“And these are not middle-class kids from St. Petersburg or Moscow,” he said. “These are poor kids from rural parts of Russia. They’re from blue-collar towns in Siberia. They are disproportionately from ethnic minorities. These are his cannon fodder.”

Disproportionately from ethnic minorities. Perhaps he is thinking of the US Army, where blacks and Hispanics made up 37.4% of the active-duty component as of end-June 2022, according to the US Army’s own statistics. Do blacks and Hispanics comprise 37.4% of the general population in America? Mind you, that’s what pretzel logic is for – if you are a mostly-white progressive western market democracy, and have a high proportion of ethnic minorities in your ground forces…you score high marks for ‘diversity’! If you are Russia – which is also predominantly white – no matter how many ethnic minorities you have in your ground forces, they are ‘cannon fodder’ and you recruited them so as not to throw away white lives needlessly. For the record, over 80% of Russians identify as ‘ethnic Russians’ – which does not necessarily mean they are white Europeans – and the Army’s internal documents do not include ethnicity, which makes me curious what Richard Moore is using for references. Then again, he is Britain’s ‘spy chief’, so maybe he just ‘knows’. With those whole-‘nother-level instincts which made the British so good at forecasting when ‘Putin’ was going to run out of missiles.

“Russian forces are resorting to removing nuclear warheads from old cruise missiles to fire at targets in Ukraine, according to the latest Western assessment that points to Moscow’s dwindling weapons stocks…”Whatever Russia’s intent, this improvisation highlights the level of depletion in Russia’s stock of long-range missiles,” the defense officials said on Saturday in an assessment that typically highlights Kyiv’s gains and Moscow’s losses.”

The latest western assessment, current as of almost exactly a year ago, November 26th 2022. Since then, as those who do not work for the British Ministry of Defense or British Intelligence know with a relative degree of certainty, Russia has increased production of the military hardware it expends most by anywhere from double to tenfold. Of course, that could be just another shoddy piece of Russian propaganda, as it is sourced from the industrial director of the armament complex at Rostec, Russia’s largest weapons manufacturer.

Nope; looks like ‘EU and American officials’ buy it, even elaborating that current production exceeds pre-war levels. Which kind of suggests the British analysis was wrong on the Mark Twain ‘the report of my death was exaggerated’ order of inaccuracy. Daryana! Remind me to run a search to see if sales of the ‘Magic 8 Ball’ spiked in 2022 in the UK, and if possible, how many were purchased using government expense accounts.

Anyway, let’s get back to the subject article, which introduces the marvelous premise that while even a western General going up against Russian defenses in Ukraine would be hard-pressed to improve on Zaluzhny’s performance…

“Even if one is an armoured warfare true believer, it’s still hard to picture a Western general really doing much better than Zaluzhny and his colleagues. In order to carry out a classic Blitzkrieg operation, after all, one must first get past the enemy’s front lines. This is extremely difficult to do if they are heavily manned, heavily fortified and protected by deep minefields and lots of heavy weapons.”

…the army that Ukraine has run into and slid down like a brick wall is chronically incompetent.

“The Russian army, reinforcing the impression of incompetence it has given ever since the invasion, is of course mounting a huge attack in the Avdiivka area right now.”

As of two days ago, in fact, attacks by the Russian side were intensifying, the Russian side was advancing steadily and the rubble where the town used to be was nearly surrounded, with only a single road in for re-supply. Predictably, western media are dusting off the standard accusations of ‘human wave assaults’ and wailing despairingly how useless it is to fight against a ruthless despot who cares nothing at all for the lives of his soldiers, as if Putin were the reincarnation of Xerxes.

Which reminds me of something else I intended to bring up, from Lewis Page’s self-serving and airheaded screed. He cites the massive defenses arrayed against the Ukrainians as if no mortal man could be expected to prevail against them, almost as if heavily manned and fortified defense in depth, protected by minefields and heavy weapons was some sort of backstabbing dirty trick – the sheer unmitigated malevolence of the Russians! Quite a performance, really, given how incompetent they are. Still, they did have that pause of a couple of months while the west dithered over supplying tanks and armor, and Zelensky postured and mugged for the cameras and promised the counteroffensive would be a rilly rilly big show. This allowed the Russians time to build deep defenses and sow minefields and bring up artillery, all the things meanies like them do to prevent the Forces Of Light from winning easily so twits like British Intelligence can say, “See? I told you so.”

Well, Ukraine had eight years to build defenses in Avdiivka, years in which the perfidious French and Germans pretended to take the Minsk Accords seriously and to be persuading Ukraine to do its bit to satisfy the agreements it had signed, all the while they were building up its military and training it for war. Eight years during which Ukraine constructed strong defenses which made Avdiivka ‘heavily fortified’ and ‘heavily defended’, and a strong point from which to shell Donetsk with monotonous regularity during the years Ukraine was supposedly ‘working for peace’ under the tutelage of its benign western curators, and causing by far the majority of the civilian deaths the western media agonized over before the war even started.

Let’s consolidate what we have learned thus far, before moving on – Russia has established a record of military incompetence, upon which it has not improved up until the referenced piece was written, about three weeks ago. Ukraine must be forgiven its inability to advance in its much-hyped counteroffensive because the Russians had a two-month holiday in which to build defenses so daunting that practically no mortal man could breach them under the absurd limitations imposed upon the gallant Ukrainians by their lily-livered allies.

At the same time, the supposedly-incompetent Russians continue a slow but measured advance which tightens a strangling grip on Avdiivka, a city the Ukrainians had eight years and billions in funding to turn into a fortress. A fortress whose capture by the attackers, as the British Defense Ministry forecasts with its usual unreasoning and casual stupidity, “looks increasingly unlikely in the short term.” When it happens, they have an easy out – we said, “in the short term”. Means in the next two days. Or whatever interval is required so we can be right.

I wish I could say Lewis Page has never been in the military – then we could just laugh and dismiss his spiteful diatribe out of hand. Unfortunately, he was; in fact, he seems to have been a bit of a one-man show – a Royal Navy officer for 11 years, part of it as commander of a small warship (probably a minesweeper or something like that), a clearance diver and a Green Beret Commando. As a Royal Navy officer, that likely means he attempted and passed the All Arms Commando Course. Quite a respectable service record. Now he is US Comment Editor at The Telegraph.

This diverse mix of experience apparently inspires him to offer the solution whereby Ukraine could easily win the war: give them whatever weapons they need, and remove the silly restrictions imposed by the western donors whereby Ukraine is not allowed to use those weapons to strike Russia itself. Gloves off, no holds barred.

At present Ukraine is allowed – nay, encouraged – to strike at Crimea using western weapons such as the British Storm Shadow and French SCALP cruise missiles, because the west believes its non-recognition of Crimea as part of the Russian Federation constitutes reality that it is not. However, whether Lewis Page realizes it or not, attacking inside the recognized borders of Russia with western-supplied weaponry would invite escalation by removing NATO’s deniability on the basis it is only ‘helping Ukraine defend itself’. A hot war gradually pulling in European NATO nations would quite possibly go nuclear. Russia remains the custodian of the world’s largest nuclear arsenal, nearly a thousand warheads more than the US inventory. At the same time, its ally, China, has embarked on a construction blitz of missile silos, with the number under construction exceeding the total number of silo-based ICBM’s operated by Russia and more than half the number of the ICBM force of the USA. They say that nobody would win in a nuclear war, we would all be losers, but that goes double for NATO.

But suppose it was a conventional war, and the west could enter it with confidence that it would not spiral into a nuclear engagement? We might as well attribute that motive to the UK, since its absurd porky-pie exaggerations and distortions go very well with its equally-absurd superiority complex. Don’t take my word for it – enjoy the prancing and poo-flinging of Hamish De Bretton Gordon, another British military expert, who claims the British Challenger tank – ‘the Mercedes BMW tank of the world’ would need at least 10 to 15 Russian T-72 tanks against it for the Russians to approach confidence of success. No, I’m not making that up.

“These are the Mercedes BMW supertanks of the world,” Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, a former commanding officer in the British army’s Royal Tank Regiment, told CBS News, adding: “I would want at least 10 or 15 T-72 survivors [used by Russia] up against one of them.”

And, of course, commentary from the obligatory unidentified but star-struck admiring ‘Ukrainian serviceman’ who claims the Challenger is a sniper rifle among tanks, that a Challenger 2 had set a world record by hitting a T-55 tank at a range of more than 5 km, and that since their arrival they were ‘basically scaring the Russians away with the sound of the engine’.

Yes, I realize the British press is to reporting what Pussy Riot is to music – but, come on. In fact, like the other tanks used by Ukraine, both western and domestic designs, the Challengers “ran into trouble against extensive Russian defenses, including artillery-covered minefields, anti-tank ditches, and dragon’s teeth that forced Ukrainian forces to push forward on foot.” The same reference assessed that the western tanks ‘have not been game-changers so far’, and that Ukraine would likely use them mostly for defense; indeed, this reference suggests the Leopards are being used as long-range artillery. Against actual artillery which far outranges them. I’d just like to inject a reminder here that it is the Russian forces which are routinely accused by the west of incompetence.

“But tanks have nothing close to the range of standard artillery. A Leopard tank’s 120mm cannon has an effective range of about 2.4 miles, while an M777 howitzer has a 13-mile range, more than 5 times as far.”

And it’s not just armor. NATO’s foolhardy all-in policy of stovepiping weapons and ammunition to Ukraine, in simpleminded faith that it will defeat Russia for the west, has left its own power-projection combat capability in a state the the commander of US Air Forces in Europe (USAFE) described this past summer as “dreadfully below where we need to be.”

“If you look at the US itself  — and let’s not just talk about the munitions we recently have given away to Ukraine — but we’re [at] roughly half the number of fighter squadrons that we were when we did Desert Storm,” Hecker said, pointing to a similar decline in fighter strength for the UK. “So we don’t have nearly what we had at the heart of the Cold War. Now you add that we’re giving a lot of munitions away to the Ukrainians — which I think is exactly what we need to do — but now we’re getting dangerously low and sometimes, in some cases even too low, that we don’t have enough. And we need to get industry on board to help us out so we can get this going.”

In fact, if Russia was thinking of kicking NATO’s ass, there would be no time like the present. Factor that into your martial wet-dreams, why don’t you?

Let’s wrap up. NATO – the poodles, as usual, doing their jerky marionette dances in obedience to the Washington puppet-master – has stacked failure on top of failure. Sanctions were supposed to wreck Russia. Well, they didn’t, and now except for niche shortages like Parmesan and Camembert, the Russian economy is stronger than ever, and has never been so out of reach of western influence. The Americans blew up the Nord Stream pipelines, and now European industry is tanking for lack of cheap energy. The price of manufacturing collapse will be security of supply, export ability and job creation.

“Losing manufacturing capacity means losing jobs, and that — said Luc Triangle, general secretary of the IndustriALL European Trade Union, which represents manufacturing workers — has “political consequences.”

“We are not exaggerating when we say that European industry — starting with the energy-intensive industries on the frontline — is facing an existential crisis,” Triangle said. The same “existential” threat applies to the 8 million workers in the energy-intensive sector, IndustriALL has warned.”

Europe’s confronting of gas prices that are around six times the average price of the previous ten years means that energy has become more expensive for everyone who is not a self-sufficient major exporter. As we have discussed before, energy impacts every facet of modern commercial life, from manufacture to packaging to shipping to delivery, and consequently North American food prices are out of control. Restaurants have raised their prices as high as they dare, and are still staring into the face of insolvency. For anyone who has not yet glimpsed where this is heading…these are all things that were supposed to happen to Russia. Gun, meet own foot.

And, yes, the war. The war the west maneuvered Russia into, now fairly-well understood to have been deliberately escalated and an early agreement scuppered by Boris Johnson, thanks to the confession of David Arakhamia, the parliamentary leader of Zelensky’s “Servant of the People” party who led the Ukrainian delegation in peace talks with Moscow. Decidedly too much a buffoon to have been acting on his own, Johnson was ‘highly likely’ to have been doing the bidding of Washington, which has been obsessed with Russia’s destruction since the two were allies in the Second Great Unpleasantry. The war Washington is no longer certain it can continue to support. Another embarrassing failure the west is forced to cover with ridiculous made-up statistics about the fearful death toll and jaw-dropping loss of equipment experienced by Russia – see? We didn’t lose! It worked! Russia is being destroyed! They’ll never recover!

You lost. And the more frantically you try to paper it over or insert hand-waving distractions, the more foolish and ineffectual you look. Whoso diggeth a pit shall fall therein: and he that rolleth a stone, it will return upon him. But the costs were borne by Ukraine, who is the one that will probably never recover. I hope the remaining Ukrainians are able to understand who was responsible. Perhaps the final paragraph of that Responsible Statecraft piece will act as a guide.

“The decision not to seriously pursue a viable diplomatic solution to the war in Ukraine has been a disaster for that country and its inhabitants. The only mild consolation is that it could offer a vital lesson for the United States and other NATO states to apply to and prevent future conflicts — if we dare learn it, that is.”