After a month of war we, unfortunately, have to admit that we know nothing with certainty.
I don’t mean that we don’t know who would be the aggressor here and who is waging a real patriotic war, who is right and who is wrong, everything is clear in this sense.
Russia is the aggressor, and Ukraine is defending. But — we know nothing about losses.
All we can rely on is Western intelligence reports. And they say that Russia has lost at least three hundred tanks.
What is three hundred tanks? If we focus on the Soviet organizational and staff structure, then 300 tanks are three tank regiments, a whole tank division.
In 8,5 years of war in Iraq, the American army has lost less than 5 thousand men, or if we convert them into tank divisions,
just for the ease of comparison, then the Americans have lost 3 tank regiments.
In eight years and a half, if we look at all losses in living force. And Russia has lost a whole division in equipment alone.
It is hard to count dead people.
But a broken tank, an armored personnel carrier, an infantry fighting vehicle are significant objects that are visible in the photographs, they can be counted.
The crew of one tank of the T-72, T-80, T-90 types, which are in service with the Russian army, is 3 people. I.e. 300 tanks is 900 men.
It doesn’t mean that 900 people died, some could evacuate, and some equipment could be abandoned. This is just so that you could imagine the scale.
A tank doesn’t move on its own, it is a part of a tactical formation.
We know today that the main tactical unit of the Russian army in Ukraine is a battalion-tactical group, each of which includes just one tank company, and a tank company is 10 tanks.
If what the secret services of the NATO say to western publications is true, and we have a reason to trust them from experience,
then at least 30 of Russian battalion-tactical groups had lost their tanks completely.
A simple extrapolation shows no less than 3 thousands dead in just a month. And it is a very rough and the most minimal possible estimate.
All that we know for sure after a month of fighting is described by a single phrase:
never and nowhere has the Russian or Soviet army suffered such losses since 1945. Such losses in equipment, such losses in manpower.
Unfortunately we have many people eager to speculate on the topic of “look at Americans”, like America bombed Belgrad, Americans invaded Iraq and Afghanistan.
But even if you accept their completely immoral stance and forget that the Russian army is waging a war of conquest in Europe, even then it is no good:
the Americans don’t fight like that.
Let’s mention just in case: the bombings of Yugoslavia, which lasted for 2,5 months, killed less than 7 thousand people - both civilian and the military. And these are the worst estimates.
And it is 2,5 months. The current war killed more in just one month.
In the bloodiest war after WW2, the Vietnam war, a war that changed the history of the USA - the Americans lost less than 60 thousand people in 8 years.
This war caused such damage to the American political system that, as a result, it was necessary to completely eliminate the draft, and the US troops became exclusively contracted.
Plenty of films have been made about this war, it is a real scar on American history, but the intensity of losses wasn’t even close to the losses of Russia in Ukraine today.
These are the speculation for those who decided to forget that they are humans, to forget about maternity hospitals and theaters in a country that is the closest to us,
and decided to speculate on the topic of “realpolitic”. Even by this perverted logic the war is completely lost.
Yes, the Americans did a lot of garbage, but since the Second World War they have never buried their citizens so intensively.
The life of an American soldier has never been so cheap.
Now we can move on to the overall view of the previous month.
Now we can understand what, apparently, was the original plan of the Russian authorities. But a small commercial first.
Let's continue. What did the original plan for the invasion of Ukraine look like?
On the first day, missile strikes were supposed to suppress the Ukrainian air defense forces so that Russian aviation could feel free in the sky.
In the north, Kyiv was the primary target. In Gostomel, where the Antonov airfield is located, troops were landed from helicopters.
The task of the landing was to hold out until the arrival of the main forces of the Russian army.
Tank columns were coming from Belarusian-Ukrainian border through the Chernobyl exclusion zone, because this is the shortest path to Kyiv.
After that, apparently, it was supposed to use the runway of the airfield to receive boards with weapons and people - all in the immediate vicinity of the Ukrainian capital.
From the north-east, another group was moving to Kyiv through Sumy and Chernigov.
Together they should have surrounded the city and captured it.
Another important task was to block the main forces of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, which were located on the former line of contact in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions.
To do this, the armies of the self-proclaimed DPR and LPR launched a simultaneous offensive along the entire front.
And the Russian troops, striking from the north, through Kharkov,and from the south, through Mariupol, were supposed to surround the Ukrainian army,
encircle it in a huge pocket and prevent it from coming to the aid of the besieged Kiev.
In the south, from the Crimea, another offensive developed - towards Odessa through Mycolaiv, in order to cut off Ukraine from the sea.
The whole operation should have lasted, by the looks of it, for several days.
It was apparently expected that, just like in 2014 in Crimea, the Ukrainian Armed Forces would not offer a serious resistance,
and the people would greet the Russian troops if not with flowers, but neutrally at least.
There are two tell-tale signs that the plan was just that.
Firstly, from the very beginning the Russian authorities were thinking not about military engagements, but about how to maintain order on captured territories, specifically in Kyiv.
This is why a column of Rosgvardia moved to the Ukrainian capital ahead of tanks on the first day, and was destroyed in Irpin, a suburb of Kyiv.
But the supply of the Russian army with fuel and food was organized very badly, because no one imagined that this army would have to engage in heavy fighting.
A few days later, logistics had to be adjusted, and columns of fuel trucks stretched along Ukrainian roads became easy prey for the forces of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
Apparently, it was assumed that Kyiv would be taken, and that Zelensky would flee to the West or just be killed during the assault on the administration building.
After that, a certain pro-Russian acting would be sworn in. a president with whom Putin would sign some kind of agreement on the denazification and demilitarization of Ukraine.
They even spoke about Yanukovich, like he’s alive and still legitimate.
This puppet governor would recognize Crimea as Russian, and DPR and LPR as independent states.
The plan turned out to be unrealistic. In almost all directions, events did not go as expected.
For starters, the Ukrainian air defense and air force were not destroyed, and they still exist, a month later.
Russian aviation still manages to control the sky, but loses planes and helicopters every day, hundreds of them were shot down according to Ukrainian data.
Capturing Hostomel and the “Antonov” airport wasn’t easy for the paratroopers.
There were heavy battles during which the Mriya, the largest aircraft in the world, was destroyed.
The airport itself was also very badly damaged and is now unable to receive transports.
The tank column from the North passed through the Chernobyl exclusion zone, approached Kyiv and stopped.
Further advance would mean a complete catastrophe and defeat, like it happened in 95 in Grozny.
In the north-east the Russian troops encountered heavy resistance from the defenders of Kharkiv.
They were unable to capture the city, and it was too dangerous to bypass it and leave it in the rear, so the advance stopped here as well.
Russian artillery began shelling Kharkov, and for the first time we saw the horrific footage of shells hitting residential buildings and killing civilians.
However, this was only the beginning of the nightmare.
In the south, the situation developed in the most favorable way for the Kremlin for a while.
There were no large forces of the Armed Forces of Ukraine here, and the offensive proceeded quite quickly.
Already on February 26, Russian sappers blew up a dam that prevented water from entering Crimea from the Dnieper through the North Crimean Canal.
On 3rd of March the Russian and the DPR troops met near Mariupol and encircled the city.
The biggest tragedy of the war began - the siege of Mariupol.
In three weeks of the siege, the city was virtually wiped off the face of the Earth, its residents were forced to hide in basements from constant shelling.
There is a real humanitarian catastrophe: there is no water, no food, no medicine.
It is impossible to even estimate the number of civilians killed, but it's in the thousands.
Without a doubt, the Siege of Mariupol will become the symbol of this war, like the Siege of Leningrad became the symbol of the Great Patriotic War.
And still the Russian army failed to take Mariupol.
The desperate resistance of Mariupol and Kharkiv residents put an end to the plans of creating a pocket for the Armed Forces of Ukraine in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions.
The armies of the DPR and LPR continue their offensive from the depths of the Donbass - they regularly report on the capture of small settlements,
but they cannot break through the fortifications on the former line of contact, which Ukraine has been building for eight years.
Another part of the Russian group advanced from Crimea and into the west, heading for Odessa.
Here, a month later, it is stuck near Mykolaiv and is unable to neither capture the city, nor to bypass it.
The main and, in essence, the only success of the Russian army happened in this direction: Kherson, a regional center with a population of approximately 300,000, was captured.
However, mass rallies against the invaders are constantly held in Kherson, which have to be suppressed by force. Pro-Russian power has not yet been established here.
The current situation has developed not today, but in the first decade of March.
Since then, the front has actually froze, there has been no development anywhere except Donbass, but even there it is going very slowly.
Neither the Russian, nor the Ukrainian army is capable of turning the war.
So what will happen next? To understand that, one needs to look at the state of the Russian army.
The Russian group, if you count both armed forces and Rosgvardia, had 150,000 men at the beginning of the invasion.
Another 40,000 were in the armies of DPR and LPR. 190,000 men is less than the Ukrainian army had at the start of war,
and surely it’s less than it has now, after the beginning of mobilization into Ukrainian Armed Forces and into Territorial Defense Forces.
Official data on losses were announced to us only once, in early March, then the Ministry of Defense announced about five hundred dead military personnel.
The Ukrainian side claims that around 15 thousands of Russians were killed.
The western experts call figures from 7 to 12 thousand, so we can take a figure of at least 10 thousand dead as a consensus value.
It is a horrific number.
In just one month the losses of the Russian army are comparable to the losses in two Chechen wars and Afghanistan - and these conflicts lasted for a decade each.
If calculated as a percentage of the total number of troops, today every day Russia loses more soldiers in Ukraine than the Red Army lost every day during the Great Patriotic War.
According to Ukrainian sources, which were partially confirmed by now, 6 generals and a deputy commander of the Black Sea Fleet have already died.
This is too comparable to the ten-year Afghan war, and speaks volumes of monstrous problems with command and control - generals have to manually lead on the front lines.
This happens when the troops don’t want to fight and without a high-ranking person nearby, they scatter or refuse to join the battle.
Everything is not so well with equipment and armament. A large number of tanks, artillery and planes were destroyed.
Missiles are running out - Ukraine is being bombed with Tochka-U missiles, which were put into service back in 1975.
The missiles were declared obsolete, replaced by more modern Iskanders, decommissioned and sent to storage.
It’s not much better with supplies either.
We are already used to videos showing Ukrainian tractor drivers dragging away Russian equipment abandoned due to lack of diesel fuel.
There are reports of cases of frostbite among soldiers of the Russian armed forces.
According to the Forbes estimates, since the beginning of the war Ukraine gained 43 more tanks.
74 tanks were lost by Ukrainian Armed forces in battles, but 117 were captured.
And it’s just tanks - there were reports of Ukrainians capturing a wide variety of different equipment.
In addition to that, the Russian group in Ukraine apparently has no single commander.
No matter what you call it, a war or a special military operation, there has to be one man in charge, who would make operational decisions about the actions of the troops
and coordinate the work of the commanders of individual sectors.
And it cannot be Putin or Shoigu, it has to be a military man with experience, who would do this job and this job alone.
Neither the experts nor the American intelligence know who this man is.
So either he doesn’t exist, or he doesn’t manifest his presence in any way.
This creates two problems.
Firstly, the already not very large grouping has already been significantly reduced -
after all, in addition to the dead, there are still those who were captured and wounded.
Second, the morale of the troops is failing, they lose the ability to solve serious problems and do anything at all.
Therefore, the main task now for Putin is to restore at least the initial strength and morale of the group through replenishment.
More or less combat-ready units from all over Russia, as well as from South Ossetia and, according to some reports, peacekeepers from Nagorno-Karabakh are being drawn to Ukraine.
The most logical for the Kremlin would be the entry into the war of the Belarusian army.
It has 45 thousand people, that is, in theory it can make up for all the losses.
However, there are several complications here.
Firstly, the Belarusian army uses only outdated equipment from the times of the USSR. Secondly, it has absolutely no combat experience.
Thirdly, the Belarusians have absolutely no motivation to participate in this war that was started by Putin for unknown reasons —
the Belarusians do not want to pay for other people's ideas with their lives and turn into war criminals.
There were also exotic ideas like bringing in mercenaries from the Middle East.
Shoigu claimed that 16,000 Syrians were ready to go to fight in Ukraine, but that’s all nothing but words for now.
Solving issues with the replenishment and supply of troops takes time.
And time works for Ukraine.
It just has no problem with the formation of a motivated reserve.
The weapon for this reserve is being readily supplied by the western countries.
It will take some time to train them,
but very soon the recently mobilized Ukrainian army will be ready for a counteroffensive.
Many experts believe that Putin will begin to escalate the situation now, in order to turn the situation in his favor.
He doesn’t have many options here. One of them is to cause so much unacceptable damage to Ukraine that its leadership will have to accept surrender.
The range of options here is wide enough: the use of chemical weapons while putting the blame on Ukrainians themselves,
the use of tactical nuclear weapons, and finally, launching a massive assault on cities with the remaining forces and causing maximum damage to living quarters and to civilians,
much like it is happening in Mariupol now.
All this, of course, is sheer madness.
A senseless war, without any goals, reasons or objectives. A war of aggression, shameful for its participants.
Such a war, the meaning of which will never be explained, and participation in which will have to be kept silent.
A war that is not just senseless, but a lost one too.
The Ukrainian Armed Forces, and it became obvious by now, did now allow the Russian army to succeed in any of its objectives.
Speeches of propagandists speak quite eloquently about this.
We raise a brow - and Ukraine will understand it all! Have no illusions! We will take Kyiv!
A quick solution is out of the question, because we are up against an army that is second only to our own in Europe.
Russia started this war. Russia is responsible for this war.
It is because of Russia the peaceful citizens of Ukraine suffer, and because of unexplainable and inexcusable actions of the Russian leadership the Russian soldiers die.
A few more months of a war like this and Russia will be left without an army.
Meanwhile a propagandist hysteria is developing in Russia. Letter Z and its usage show all signs of swastika at the minimum.
The meaning is the same, but due to the complete lack of enthusiasm among Russian citizens, it has to be drawn by janitors, and you will not see it anywhere except at officious events.
The unnecessary, senseless, insane bloody war. This is what Vladimir Putin will be remembered for in the world.
How many more lives can he take before he gives up power? This is what we will find out with you in the coming months.
Till tomorrow.