Today, everyone is talking about Vladimir Putin’s forthcoming large-scale offensive in Ukraine.
The Western analysts, the Russian propaganda, the pro-war media, and the Ukrainian military leadership.
Truth be told, we must give Putin credit: he has been very good at announcements.
At every turn, a lot of people, including the experts community and the active military,
think he has some sort of a game plan, some ace up his sleeve, or some room for escalation.
The guy who grasps at straws, prioritizes circumstance over plan, and makes calls with no future in mind.
I remember vividly how last spring we all discussed the decisive "battle for the Donbas" that supposedly was
to shape the endgame of this war.
Everyone was waiting for Putin to psych up and go beast mode, so that Kyiv fell as well.
Isn’t it obvious, though, that if Putin has resorted to a call-up, to such a bad political decision, there is certainly no plan?
He’s just running around the room looking for something to throw at the enemy.
He has no reserve army and no hidden force for the "massive escalation" expected by all.
Russia’s reputation as a huge country with a storied military past works for the public
to an extent where the latter does not believe what it sees and, instead, waits for a rabbit to be pulled out of the hat.
To an extent, this is good. The threat of a large offensive motivates the Western allies to step up supplies to Ukraine.
Let them do it, as the more they do so, the closer the victory for Ukraine and Russian society.
Moreover, there is no doubt: Putin will attack again, he definitely will.
He’ll kill as many people as possible, hoping for some kind of success and getting out of a hole he’s dug himself.
But we’re not exactly interested in that — we’re interested in his real odds of succeeding almost a year into the war
and staging a massive comeback.
Let’s start things off with what Putin had a year ago and what he is left with today.
WHAT PUTIN HAD A YEAR AGO
On February 24, 2022, Vladimir Putin had not only a fresh live army.
Not only were 9,000 units of equipment were usable, and not yet on the Oryx losses list.
Not just millions of artillery shells and thousands of missiles sitting in the warehouses, and not just fumbled away and wasted.
Most importantly, in February, Putin had a surprise attack.
Moreover, this effect was not limited to the fact that the Ukrainian leadership, European politicians,
Russian citizens and elites, despite all warnings of the American intelligence, did not believe in the reality of a full-scale invasion.
The unpleasant truth is that even if President Zelenskyy had been convinced that the invasion would take place and the way it did,
he would still not have been able to adequately prepare for it.
Worse, he would have most likely behaved the same way.
He would have been forced to let the aggressor into a peacefully sleeping country.
Bringing the troops into combat readiness, sending them to the frontiers, or launching a large-scale mobilization drive —
Russia would have used any military preparations as a case for the invasion.
If Ukraine had begun an obvious preparation for a big war, the situation for many politicians — especially Westerners —
might have looked very different.
The attack would have no longer seemed treacherous or unprovoked.
That might have helped Russia sell the preemptive strike narrative to someone, like, we have a military drill here,
and our neighbor decided to fight us.
Besides, imagine if Volodymyr Zelenskyy had imposed martial law, started a call-up,
banned able-bodied men from leaving the country, stirred panic, seriously damaged the economy of Ukraine,
and shaken everyone up, and the attacks wouldn’t have happened.
As it didn’t happen both times when Russia brought its soldiers to the border.
This wouldn’t have only been the end of Zelenskyy’s political career,
but it would have also caused a political crisis with unpredictable implications for the whole country.
Many may have clean forgotten this, but Ukraine was gripped with more panic in the weeks leading up to the war than when it began.
Back then, propagandist Margarita Simonyan was having a field day, saying in her most abominable manner
that we had caused such damage to the Ukrainian economy without starting a war,
it wouldn’t have recovered from it any time soon.
It is easy to imagine what it would have been like if the Ukrainian leadership had panicked, too.
If they had taken action instead of trying to calm everyone down.
Then you could have had a country you could take over with your bare hands,
where everything was crumbling and everyone was running around with their heads on fire.
The initial plan centered around stunning the country. No one was going to seriously fight the Ukrainian army.
There was a plan to deliver a surprise attack from all sides and destroy the Ukrainian statehood.
That’s why they used expensive, scarce missiles, hardly aiming anywhere.
Therefore, the artillery and the multiple-launch rocket systems covered the area, without any clue of the presence
That’s why the planes flew above Ukraine as if they were home, ignoring the existence of the air defense system.
It was necessary to whip up a sense of a collapsed roof to eviscerate the Ukrainian state.
We were watching it from the outside, in the clips and photos, and I must admit it even shocked us.
Explosions here, helicopters there, military vehicles on the roads, sabotage groups acting in the deep rear,
landing troops in Hostomel — in the first couple of days, it seemed like the enemy was all over Ukraine,
with no clear front lines or rear.
With everything that Vladimir Putin had at his disposal on February 24 — the manpower, the military hardware, the ammunition,
the missiles, and the surprise effect — he was able to achieve only what we have all witnessed.
Let’s take a break for a an ad and we’ll continue afterwards.
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WHAT PUTIN HAS NOW
We don’t know what remains of Putin’s resources now — given the army’s corruption, there seems to be no way of knowing.
We do know something important, though.
No other country, or not even the countries of the world between them, produces as many shells, battle tanks, missiles,
infantry combat vehicles, armored personnel carriers, artillery units, gun tractors, light armored vehicles,
engineering vehicles, and so on in a year or even three years as Russia lost over the 11 months of the war.
We know that the U.S. — the country with the most powerful defense complex — produces 15,000 howitzer shells a month.
We know that “a day at the office” for the Russian army means 20,000 howitzer strikes. Per day!
We have long gotten used to Ukraine being hit with Tochka-U tactical operational missiles, S-300 anti-aircraft missiles,
and anti-ship missiles, targeting the power grid and residential neighborhoods.
But we haven’t heard of the Iskanders for a very long time, just because they were squandered in the first few weeks of the war.
Long story short, no matter how many material resources Putin had on February 24, these numbers have plummeted.
There are different estimates of the annual scale of production of new tanks and the overhaul of the old ones by Russian factories,
but none of them covers even the first month of losses.
Putin does not and will not have any surprise effect anymore. Ukraine has been at war for a year.
And, unlike Russia, in a state of real war, with a real enemy and real goals.
The Ukrainian army has grown considerably in quantity.
It is quickly rearmed and trained.
It waits for the enemy to move, and any movement of the enemy is tracked,
thanks to the highly accurate tracking by American satellites and quick relay of the information to the Ukrainian command.
This is official.
We are not in the 19th century, not even in World War II.
Recreating Marshal Rokossowski’s trick, hiding an entire battlefield unit in the woods and swamps,
only to materialize it out of thin air right in front of the enemy in the most unexpected place, is impossible today.
It will be very clear in advance what forces Russia is building up and where, where it is preparing an offensive.
Unlike a year ago, Ukraine will have no military or political reasons not to repel the enemy the way it should.
To sum it up, a year ago, Putin had abundant resources, a fresh army, an economy,
and an industry that had not yet been sanctioned.
He had a lot of reserves, from the military to the economic ones, that could be mobilized.
He invaded into a peaceful country, unprepared for the attack and unprepared for the war, both technologically and psychologically.
In less than a year, he spent everything he could and was forced to take the ultimate step: a mobilization call-up.
Now any new offensive will no longer be on peaceful cities and villages.
Wherever it happens, it will be facing fortified positions, trained and motivated Ukrainian soldiers,
provided with Western equipment and weapons.
This consideration is my fundamental argument, which is more important than anything else we’re talking about today.
Last year, Putin showed us the best he and his system could pull off in perfect conditions.
Our assessments should be based on the assumption that he cannot repeat it.
Any potential successes of a new offensive — if any — would be far worse than the previous ones.
THE "BEST" TACTIC
Today, we know the only place across the entire front lines where the Russian side shows at least some progress
is the Bakhmut direction.
Nobody can hail it as a "success" because apart from the ruins of little Soledar,
there hasn’t been much to boast about in six months.
Nevertheless, the Russian side feels much better there than on other front lines.
We detailed the way the battles are playing near Bakhmut in one of the previous videos.
Long story short, it's World War I redux in all its bloody splendor.
A trench war where the enemy positions are stormed with a barrage of artillery and advancing waves of infantry.
A success in such a war costs an unfathomable number of lives: every hundred yards is paid with a battalion,
every mile with a division.
Such kind of war leads to battlefields riddled with bodies.
The main fighting force in the Bakhmut direction is Wagner PMC.
That is the format of the war that has made Prigozhin, Wagner’s owner, what he is today: an important person for the system.
Prigozhin conjured up a way to lead World War I-style combat in the 21st century.
He managed to recruit "free" people who could be sent in droves against the machine guns at no political cost.
He activated the convicts.
What is a convict in Russia?
According to Olga Romanova, the head of Convicted Russia (a non-profit support network for convicts),
only 10% of the inmates receive parcels of food and clothing from the outside and have onsite meetups with the family.
Another 10% receive at least letters or have some contact with the outside world.
It turns out that the remaining 80% of the Russian prison population has nobody outside the prison caring about them,
at least sending them letters.
Society-wise, those 80% are already dead. According to the same Romanova,
who has a lot of contacts among convicts and tracks their recruitment by Wagner PMC,
the big problem for many convicts is to tell their recruiters who will get paid and compensated for them in case they are killed.
It’s as tough as it sounds: the average Russian inmate has no one on the outside.
This know-how of Prigozhin makes him an asset, so he gets away with anything.
He was able to find invisible people in Russia who no one cares about and who don’t care about themselves, either.
The average Russian convict hasn’t had a good life since he was a kid.
Decent food and no mop stuck in the a*s is something that can far outweigh the risk
that most of these infantile people underestimate.
You can use these people to wage World War I-style combat, have them killed in countless numbers, and even locally succeed.
Prigozhin walks around the Russian state like an elephant in a china shop only
because he showed Putin the only tactic that worked.
The trouble for Putin is that such a tactic cannot be used for a full-fledged offensive since
the Battle of Verdun remake orchestrated by Prigozhin can’t be upscaled to the entire front.
The cost of a convict’s life for a Russian commander is zero.
And there are not so many healthy convicts left who can somehow be sent to the battlefield.
A significant number of them has already been tapped by Prigozhin in prison facilities and killed on the front.
In addition, Wagner PMC itself is not large enough to integrate, organization-wise,
an infinite number of people who they not only need to fight side by side with but who also need to be watched 24/7.
There’s a reason these people ended up behind bars and were sentenced to their terms.
They have a history of criminal behavior, they're predisposed to it,
and they’re always trying to escape when there’s no fence around them anymore.
That is, by the way, the second point that adds to Prigozhin’s importance. His know-how is useless to others.
You can’t let the same prisoners' into the regular army ranks. Ordinary soldiers and officers can’t double up as wardens.
However sick, disabled, or miserable, convicts are, above all, very dangerous people.
Will you be able to sleep in a dugout with a Ukrainian drone hovering above you about yo launch a grenade
and a guy two feet away who strangled his own mother for $10 of her retirement money?
There’s a reason why Prigozhin's people show off with elaborate executions.
If you arm scumbags, only bigger scumbags can keep them in check.
That is to say, Wagner PMC is the only unit that can use this tactic of throwing prisoners into fortified positions,
and only to the extent they can.
A march toward Kyiv or Kharkiv is definitely not in the cards.
But it is impossible to replace the convicts with anyone, using the only military tactic that brought Putin at least some success.
Because with every step up the social ladder, the price of human life will rise significantly.
THE PRICE OF HUMAN LIFE
True, mercenaries from various military companies deliberately put their lives on the line to earn a living.
These are the people that feel most comfortable at war, that don’t need an invasion of Ukraine to eagerly shoot anyone anywhere
for the money, simply because in times of peace, they have no better things to do than get wasted.
For them, just as for their families, it is obvious that sooner or later, whether in Ukraine, in Syria, in Mali,
or in the tussles of the Mexican drug cartels, they will surely end up being whacked.
For a professional mercenary, death is an occupational hazard, just like hemorrhoids in truck drivers.
But in the phrase "professional mercenary," both words matter.
He is a pro. He won't die senselessly, and he won't be an easy target for a Ukrainian machine gun.
Professional mercenaries can’t be used as cannon fodder. First of all, because they are a scarce commodity.
Second, because they will soon dump such an employer and land another job that involves firearms.
The next level are contract soldiers who also appear to be professional military.
Death is part of their job description, too, and it’s socially acceptable. But we understand everything.
We understand that the average Russian contract soldier isn’t the one who deliberately decided to have war for a job.
It is a young man from a backwater town who was choosing between working
at a car wash for $200 and living in the barracks for $400 plus benefits.
And here we go again. First, there are far fewer contract soldiers than what Putin needs for a large-scale offensive,
and he has already got many of those croaked over the past year.
Second, contractor soldiers aren’t that different from civilians in that their death is noticeable.
The next level are the mobilized fighters.
Those are civilians, and most of them were convinced they would end up in an adult military camp.
Neither for them nor for their families is death a routine job duty. The death of each of them raises questions.
But who cares about these questions, after all?
There is a much worse effect for Putin.
If the fate of this mobilization campaign is to resemble that of the Verdun battle and if only a few of them get back alive
and in one piece — which will be the case if they are used the way convicts are — a new mobilization drive will be hard to conduct.
Mind you, the mobilization is necessary, both to attack and to simply man the front line units.
The faster the cemeteries grow in provincial towns, the higher the motivation of the most apolitical
and loyal people will be not to hide in basements but also to surf the web and try to get
to the bottom of what is going on in the grand scheme of things.
The costliest category, though, which they try hard not to involve, are the conscripts.
Since there’s nothing worse for public opinion than an obituary with a picture of a teenager in it.
Chubby cheeks don’t go well with a black ribbon.
It was during the first phase of the war that we saw these IDs with mugshots of 14-year-olds because in Russia,
you must turn 20 to have your passport changed.
And, apparently, according to some closed polls, it shocked the public so that Putin had to admit the problem
of sending conscripts to the front lines and demand publicly that this practice be stopped.
WHAT WILL THE NEXT OFFENSIVE BE LIKE?
Let’s sum up the odds of a new offensive. First, Vladimir Putin will start it much worse off than a year ago.
From an army that didn’t bother to count shells, missiles, and equipment,
he degenerated to an army that is lacking ammunition so much so that he is forced to look for it in North Korea.
He can’t physically afford the war he started on February 24 now, a year later.
Second, at the big contest of ideas for escalation, which included the massive shelling of infrastructure,
only one thing worked for Putin: infantry pressure in the style of World War I.
Now this tactic has reached its peak. Western sources have already lost track of casualties,
and Mediazona is putting out obituaries at record-breaking rates.
But this whole tactic is based on using people who can be killed without political consequences,
and they are running out of such people.
Upscaling this practice to the entire front lines and to launch an offensive by masses of manpower not only
on Bakhmut requires mass mobilization, recruitment of millions (not a million, literally millions).
The Russian Federation does not have the resources to do so, neither organizational,
nor military, to supply those people, nor political.
Third, the way the modern war is fought, the Ukrainian side knows in advance where Putin will attempt an advance
and what forces he will use, and therefore it will be able to respond in due fashion.
We see time and again that the Western allies are aware of the threat of Putin’s offensive and are rapidly stepping up
the arms supply.
Whatever Putin may have come up with, he has been attrited over the year, while Ukraine, on the contrary, has strengthened.
There is no doubt that Putin will attempt another advance. The price of this war for him is a matter of power and life.
He will squeeze out of Russia everything he can to reach a remotely acceptable end.
He will not stop killing people as long as the Russian political system allows him to do so.
There is no real question of whether Putin will succeed in his new offensive.
If you have difficulty climbing the stairs, you’re an unlikely candidate for a pole vaulting champ.
If it failed a year ago, it won’t work this time, either.
The only question is how long the Russian political system will be squandering lives on both sides
to serve up the whims of a failed elderly emperor.
See you tomorrow!