Tuesday, March 22, 2022

"Why Can’t The West Admit That Ukraine Is Winning?"

There's been a flurry of leaked or blurted reports from the Russian side on its actual casualties in Ukraine. According to the UK Daily Mail,

Russia has lost almost 10,000 soldiers in less than four weeks in Ukraine, according to its own figures.

The death toll – an incredible tally for a war that the Kremlin believed would be over within days – was published by a pro-government website, but quickly taken down.

There was speculation that it was uploaded by a pro-Ukrainian employee. Russia had previously admitted to 498 deaths – but that was on March 2.

Although this estimate is at least deniable, this still exceeds the estimates of "more than 7,000" that have been the consensus in US media, apparently based on information from the Pentagon. However, another Russian leak gives an even bigger total.

Ukraine's official current estimate of Russian deaths as of yesterday is "about 15,000", which is generally in line with the Twitter leak above.

This suggests to me that the Pentagon estimates on which the US media relies have been too conservative -- at this point, underestimating the real total by as much as 50%, which is enough to be seriously misleading. The only commentator to raise any question so far about this is Eliot Cohen, a deep-state Ivy Leaguer who was an architect of the failed Bush Jr policies in Iraq and Afghanistan. He has a current piece in The Atlantic, Why Can’t the West Admit That Ukraine Is Winning?

Analysts and commentators have grudgingly declared that the Russian invasion of Ukraine has been blocked, and that the war is stalemated. The more likely truth is that the Ukrainians are winning.

Well, if he never had the right answers, at least now he's come up with the right question. He goes on,

So why can’t Western analysts admit as much? Most professional scholars of the Russian military first predicted a quick and decisive Russian victory; then argued that the Russians would pause, learn from their mistakes, and regroup; then concluded that the Russians would actually have performed much better if they had followed their doctrine; and now tend to mutter that everything can change, that the war is not over, and that the weight of numbers still favors Russia. Their analytic failure will be only one of the elements of this war worth studying in the future.

. . . The evidence that Ukraine is winning this war is abundant, if one only looks closely at the available data. The absence of Russian progress on the front lines is just half the picture, obscured though it is by maps showing big red blobs, which reflect not what the Russians control but the areas through which they have driven. . . . Russian losses are staggering—between 7,000 and 14,000 soldiers dead, depending on your source, which implies (using a low-end rule of thumb about the ratios of such things) a minimum of nearly 30,000 taken off the battlefield by wounds, capture, or disappearance. Such a total would represent at least 15 percent of the entire invading force, enough to render most units combat ineffective.

However, the simple arithmetic I've done here suggests that although the total Russian invasion force was maybe 150,000, the actual numbers in the combat brigades doing the fighting are more like 42,000. If Cohen's estimate of those taken off the battlefield is 30,000, then the Russian brigades have fallen well below simple combat ineffectiveness. Anecdotal reports of 80% casualties in some Russian brigades seem perfectly reasonable in this context.

It's worth noting that as of late last week, the few retired US generals who were still giving prognostications in the media were saying the Russian attack would "culminate" within ten to 14 days -- but as of the weekend, all the respectable open-surce sites were declaring the attack "culminated", meaningless as that term may be, at least a week ahead of projections.

So Cohen may well have a point. On the other hand, as a career deep-stater, his conclusions are remarkably limited:

Most commentators have taken too narrow a view of this conflict, presenting it as solely between Russia and Ukraine.

True, true. But who are the actual adversaries?

Like most wars, though, it is being waged by two coalitions, fought primarily though not exclusively by Russian and Ukrainian nationals. The Russians have some Chechen auxiliaries who have yet to demonstrate much effectiveness (and who lost their commander early on), may get some Syrians (who will be even less able to integrate with Russian units), and find a half-hearted ally in Belarus, whose citizens have begun sabotaging its rail lines and whose army may well mutiny if asked to invade Ukraine.

Oh, quack, quack, quack. He goes on,

The Ukrainians have their auxiliaries, too, some 15,000 or so foreign volunteers, some probably worthless or dangerous to their allies, but others valuable—snipers, combat medics, and other specialists who have fought in Western armies. More important, they have behind them the military industries of countries including the United States, Sweden, Turkey, and the Czech Republic.

But if you ask me, the US is half-hearted at best, and neither NATO nor the EU has been unanimous. The biggest problem continues to be Joe Biden, who was making big baksheesh from Ukraine until Zelensky was voted president in 2019 and finally fired Hunter from Burisma. Biden and his deep-state allies never liked Zelensky and even as we speak are doing everything they can to delay effective aid.

The fight is much more a coalition of broad bourgeois and working-class interests in Europe and the US against an established deep-state status quo that enabled Putin for a generation. This is why the US media and politically astute generals have been maintaining a generally defeatist line on Ukraine. I would guess that Eliot Cohen's heart is with the gentry as well -- his analysis is ultimately obtuse, almost deliberately so.

posted by John Bruce @ March 22, 2022   0 Comments