Getting Everything Wrong
h I was only mildly disaappointed to see absoutely no insightful commentary or update on the Ukraine war from either corporate or independent media this morning, to the point that between simple nonfeasence and eager groupthink, they're managing to get just about everything wrong. I've learned to look for more reliable and insightful open-source intelligence sources, including
- The Oryx tally of verified equipment losses on both the Ukrainian and Russian sides. As of this morning, close to 1100 tanks, armored vehicles, missile launchers, trucks, and so forth have been destroyed abandoned, and captured on the Russian side. This number is increasing on an hourly basis, with the reminder that captured equipment is refurbished and its ammunition is taken over by the Ukrainian army.
- The updates on the Ukrainian conflict on the Institute for the Study of War site. These tend to run a day or two behind, but they're at least far more accurate than media reports and assessments, including those of their US retired general talking heads. (My late father in law retired as an insurance company CEO, at which point he simply refused to talk about the insurance business. I wonder if the retired generals are the same way but still collect the network fees. Just asking.)
- I'm still trying to navigate my way through reddit threads like this one that carry far more current news than media.
- The YouTuber in the link above, an Estonian army reservist who uses his first-hand military experience to give informed analysis of developments in the war. I'll discuss this in more detail below.
- Accurate maps like this one below that make the actual military situation much clearer, showing that Russia largely occupies very narow lines of advance that depend on unreliable logistical supply that are vulnerable to Ukrainian attack.
The likelihood is increasing that Ukrainian forces could fight to a standstill the Russian ground forces attempting to encircle and take Kyiv. Russian forces also appear to be largely stalemated around Kharkiv and distracted from efforts to seize that city. Russian advances in the south around Mykolayiv and toward Zaporizhya and in the east around Donetsk and Luhansk made little progress as well in the last 24 hours. Russia likely retains much greater combat power in the south and east and will probably renew more effective offensive operations in the coming days, but the effective reach and speed of such operations is questionable given the general performance of the Russian military to date. There are as yet no indications that the Russian military is reorganizing, reforming, learning lessons, or taking other measures that would lead to a sudden change in the pace or success of its operations[.]
. . . Russian forces around Kyiv did not attempt to renew offensive operations on a multi-battalion scale on March 10 following the failure of limited efforts on March 8-9. Ukrainian forces badly damaged a Russian armored column in the Brovary area east of Kyiv, likely further disrupting Russian efforts to set conditions for offensive operations on the east bank of the Dnipro. Ukrainian resistance all along the Russian lines of communication from eastern Kyiv to the Russian border near Sumy continues to disrupt Russian efforts to bring more combat power to bear near the capital. The episodic, limited, and largely unsuccessful Russian offensive operations around Kyiv increasingly support the Ukrainian General Staff’s repeated assessments that Russia lacks the combat power near the capital to launch successful offensive operations on a large scale.
On the other hand, US media across the board -- and indeed, the BBC, Sky News Australia, and pretty much everyone else -- has taken up the uniform narrative that "Russian forces are closing in on Kyiv". By the same token, the ones that claim to be on the leading edge like CNN are claiming that the 40-mile column north of Kyiv has "dispersed" and has been "redeployed".The Estonian YouTuber above makes the same point I've noted from other sources over the past two weeks: the 40-mile column, made up largely of supply trucks carrying fuel, ammunition, and food, has long since run out of gas, and its batteries are dead. There is no more fuel to deliver; what was there was siphoned out to keep the trucks' motors running and warm the stranded troops. The food has all been eaten, and at this point, the troops who are still there are starving. As the YouTuber suggests, those who haven't slipped away and deserted are either sick or dead from hypothermia.
A problem just as big is the fact that with the Russian encrypted radio system unusable, not only are they forced to communicate in the clear, but when they use cell phones, their specific locations are given within a couple of meters. Think about it: when you call up Google Maps, the satellite will direct you to the closest Burger King because your phone is telling the satellite exactly where you are. By the same token, when a Russian is forced to use his cell phone to call his lieutenant because the radio is no good, the satellite tells the world where both he and the lieutenant are, and the Ukrainians use the GPS coordinates to call in the artillery.
It's worth noting that estimates of Russian dead in the two weeks of the war so far run from 3,000 on the very low US military side, to about 6,000 from other NATO sources, to the Ukrainian claim of 12,000. In comparison, the most dead in any month of the Viet Nam war was 6,000 in May 1968 -- but that was for a month, not two weeks. In other words, Russian casualties now are at least comparable to the worst month of the Viet Nam War for the US.
The actual narrative is anything but what the media portrays, if it chooses to cover any of the war at all.
