Sorting Out The Current Situation In Ukraine

BTG wipe out

The video above gives an idea of the challenge in trying to sort through what's going on in Ukraine. Its title is fairly straightforrward, "Ukraine War: 15.03.2022 Aftermath of battles in Kherson region", but you definitely can't trust the date: that appears to be when it was uploaded, and possibly even about when the drive-by video was taken, but that doen't say much about when the battle took place. It looks like the photographer was able to pass over the road in a truck, so this suggests that rubble had been cleared, bodies and body parts removed, and Ukrainian forces had already scrubbed the scene for usable trucks, supplies, ammunition, and intelligence, -- a day or more earlier, I would think.

For now, I'll trust them for the location, near Kherson. This would suggest it was a Russian thrust north from that city toward Mykolaiv along the axis in the map below:

Media accounts generally imply that this is part of an effort to reach Odesa. If it is, that ain't gonna happen. The conventional narrative that the Russians are "closing in on Kyiv" or "closing in on the land bridge" is fantasy at this point.

The big thing I noted in watching this video a couple of times is that you can see seven or eight out-of-action tanks along the road, in addition to various trucks and armored infantry vehicles. The number of tanks suggests to me, based on my efforts to educate myself, that this is a battalion tactical group:

A battalion tactical group (Russian: Батальонная тактическая группа, batal'onnaya takticheskaya gruppa), abbreviated as BTG, is a combined-arms manoeuvre unit. . . A BTG typically comprises a battalion (typically mechanised infantry) of 2–4 companies reinforced with air-defence, artillery, engineering, and logistical support units, formed from a garrisoned army brigade. A tank company and rocket artillery also typically reinforce such groupings.

. . . Each BTG has approximately 600–800 officers and soldiers, of whom roughly 200 are infantrymen, equipped with vehicles typically including roughly 10 tanks and 40 infantry fighting vehicles.

So just a minute. If a BTG has 10 tanks and I could count seven or eight out of action along the road, this means the combat effectiveness of the whole BTG was simply wiped out. Other videos that emerge from Ukraine every day suggest that a good number of the vehicles in a BTG are abandoned in operating order by fleeing Russians and driven away either by the Ukrainian army or local farmers and gypsies.

I haven't seen authoritative estimates of how many BTGs went into Ukraine in the February invasion; one number I've seen is 30. There could certainly be more, but the confirmed count of Russian tanks destroyed, abandoned, or captured in the invasion on the Oryx site as of this morning is now up to "229, of which destroyed: 85, damaged: 3, abandoned: 39, captured: 102". The Oryx site counts only those for which there is confirmed photographic evidence; it links a specific photo to each item in the tally, and it makes the point that since they're counting only those with photos, the actual numbers are greater.

In short, if there were 30 BTGs in the invasion, that means there were 300 tanks, of which 229 are no longer available as of this morning. For 30 BTGs, that would mean 18,000-24,000 men, while Russian casualty estimates at this point amount to 6,000-13,000. Another estimate says

A few days ago something like 20-30 BTGs were confirmed to have been rendered combat ineffective out of the 100-130 sent into Ukraine.

While yet another says

The claim is that 40% of units have lost their combat capability. A Russian BTG is considered ineffective if it loses just a fraction of its force. This is actually a thing that happens, because their battalion tactical groups have a certain ratio of forces of each type (unlike NATO-style battalions which Ukraine is likely using now), and if you lose just one of those forces it leaves the BTG unable to do combined-arms missions.

It appears that the drone video of the attack on a Russian column in Brovary that I linked last Thursday was also an attack that destroyed the combat effectiveness of another BTG. BTGs are the main offensive element of the Russian invasion. There are only so many of them. Nobody has been itemizing these attacks, but it's hard to avoid thinking from video evidence that Ukraine has worked out a formula for eliminating BTGs: use intercepted radio to predict their movements; stop them on the road with anti-tank missiles like Javelins, NLAWs, and Panzerfausts, and finish them with accurate artillery.

The very sketchy reports on the Institute for the Study of War site minimize the situation. For instance, the most recent report:

Local company- and battalion-level attacks by Russian forces northwest of Kyiv on March 14-15 likely indicate the largest-scale offensive operations that Russian forces attempting to encircle Kyiv can support at this time. Russian forces did not conduct offensive operations northeast of the city, around Sumy, and only limited (and unsuccessful) attacks southeast of Kharkiv. Russian force generation efforts, including reservist and conscript call-ups and the ongoing transport of Syrian fighters to Russia and Belarus, are unable to change the balance of forces around Kyiv within the coming week. Russian forces have not conducted simultaneous attacks along their multiple axes of advance across Ukraine since March 4 and are unlikely to do so in the next week.

The problem is that their main force components have been largely destroyed by the Ukrainians, and importing untrained, unspecialized, and unreliable Syrians and conscripts won't help, especially if they don't have the tanks and other equipment to re-form the BTGs.

The retired US general talking heads have been largely absent from the media over the past several days. I don't know if they're extending some sort of professional courtesy to their Russian army colleagues or what.

How Goes The Plebe War?

As I suggested in Sunday's post, I think the current Russo-Ukraine war is just one theater of a larger, worldwide conflict that I'm calling the Great Plebe War. This pits a current world ruling class against a broad working class that includes both traditional blue-collar workers and bourgeois professionals, while corporate upper-level managers, academics, bureaucrats, intellectuals, media, and artists are allied with more traditional rentiers and financiers in an overall gentry class.

I don't disagree with Marx in my view that the objective of the gentry is to make life miserable for the workers. The question has always been precisely how to do this and how far to go. Under the worst despots, the explicit goal is to depopulate them, and this is effectively what's going on in Ukraine, although programs to encourage abortion, transsexualism, and disintegration of families in the more genteel west differ only in degree. As with other worldwide conflicts, each theater has unique conditions.

As I said Sunday, I think the current war broke out with the Wuhan COVID lab leak sometime in the autum of 2019. The pandemic almost certainly came from that lab leak, although the full set of circumstances may never be fully understood -- it does seem likely that the work that led to the leak was funded in China by US gentry interests via prominent bureaucrats and academics and was intended to develop lethal strains of bat viruses for reasons never made clear. Anything really new here?

The same clique of prominent bureaucrats and academics appears to have seized opportunistically on the lab leak to impose a radical program of unprecedented social control involving lockdowns, social distance, prohibited gatherings, non-essential activites, masks, and compulsory vaccinations. This quickly became a worldwide phenomenon. It ended eventually as the virus strain weakened, while at the same time the radical social controls proved unable to control the virus's spread.

In hindsight -- as a priest noted just in last Sunday's homily -- a key part of the effort was to discourage religious observance by declaring church services "non-essential" and prohibiting attendance or limiting it to token gatherings. Due to the effort of observant Christians and Jews in the US, this was an early part of the campaign that failed via a US Supreme Court ruling. I think it's also significant that Ukraine President Zelensky has cited his country's religious history in his speeches rallying his people, and Pope Francis and US Catholics are prominent in supporting Ukraine, which has a substantial Catholic minority.

Contemporary with the original social control program was an alliance between the gentry and the Lumpenproletariat, the criminal class, to foster riots and social disorder. This was oddly incongruous, a program on one hand to keep the workers under near universal curfew while giving petty criminals and their enablers among the radical gentry free rein to burn and loot.

This was not a Marxist alliance -- Marx himself understood that the Lumpenproletariat is not a relilable ally for anyone, certainly not the workers, and the alliance itself was fairly brief. It was also based on the idea of conflating minorities with the Lumpenproletariat, which was insulting to the minorities in any long term. It was useful as a factor that led to the defeat of Trump in the 2020 election, but by early 2022, the Democrats understood that the Black Lives Matter and Defund the Police movements were a liability for the upcoming midterms and explicitly disavowed them.

This was the second retreat from the gentry's 2020 program, following the gradual withdrawal of COVID social controls. The related phenomenon of Critical Race Theory in public schools is being defeated piecemeal in local campaigns by parents against school boards, but founded on the same flawed idea of an alliance between the gentry and the Lumpenproletariat, it is doomed eventually to full defeat.

This has effectively left two surviving elements of the program, the elimination of fossil fuels in the name of climate change and transsexualism. The effect of the Russo-Ukraine War and sanctions against Russian oil and gas has had the initial result of raising fuel prices above anything the gentry could have wished for, but this is clearly setting the stage for a major political confrontation that will likely end in the same way as the COVID social controls or the BLM riots; the gentry will eventually be forced to disavow the program.

The last survivor will likely be transsexualism. It's hard to understand why the gentry has been clinging so tightly to this program, since transsexuals are a tiny part of the electorate, while their effort has clearly been to proselytize for it as widely as they can. It is now included in US military training materials, and the battle is now engaged to eliminate it from elementary school curricula, where the gentry clearly wish to include it.

It's noteworthy, though, that the most prominent public models are currently an Ivy League male swimmer competing as a woman, and Dr Rachel Levine, a biological male awarded Woman of the Year by USA Today. An Ivy Leaguer and a bureaucrat, clearly instances of gentry self-promotion. And it's worth mentioning once again that neither climate change nor transsexualism was ever part of the Marxist program.

The Plebe War is not going well for them.

Still Not Paying Attention

The video above gives what I think is a good representation of the current state of affairs in Ukraine. It's been produced and released by the Ukrainian authorities, but I've got to conclude that from what's available from open source intelligence, it reflects what must inevitably be taking place. (Basically, anything taken from a drone is from the Ukrainian government, but the problem is that the drones don't lie.)

First, at this point, the Russians are less and less able to move. The Institulte for the Study of War's summary of yesterday's action is pretty brief:

Main effort—Kyiv axis: Russian operations on the Kyiv axis are aimed at encircling the city from the northwest, west, and east.

Russian forces did not conduct offensive operations northwest of Kyiv in the past 24 hours for the third day in a row. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces prioritized reconnoitering Ukrainian positions in preparation for resuming attacks on Kyiv.

. . . Subordinate supporting effort—Chernihiv and Sumy axis

The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces northeast of Kyiv “moved to the defense” in the last 24 hours and focused on replenishing supplies and conducting reconnaissance.

. . . Supporting Effort #3—Kherson and west:

Russian forces did not conduct any offensive actions toward Mykolayiv or Zaporizhia on March 13. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces are gathering reserves, including additional VDV (Airborne) forces, south of Zaporizhia for a likely offensive toward the city but did not conduct any attacks on March 13. Russian forces may intend to advance to encircle Zaporizhia but are unlikely to have the forces necessary to do so while Russian forces in the south remain committed to the encirclement of Mariupol.

The Estonian reservist Artur Rehi updated his report on the video from the March 9 attack in Brovary, which I discussed in this post. He apppears to have revised his estimate of this encounter and now refers to it as a "battle" in the video below:

He also collects a number of individual videos that had been on YouTube late last week and identifies all of them as vignettes of the same battle, a defeat of the Russians at the battalion level. The bottom line is that the Russians have no choice but to move their columns along Ukrainian roads, while their unencrypted radio and cell phone communications are fully monitored by the Ukraine army; the result is that Ukraine predicts their movements, and they can pick them off with anti-tank missiles, artillery dialed in on GPS coordinates, and drones at their convenience.

It seems to me that this explains the recent lack of Russian movement around Kyiv or toward Mykolayiv or Zaporizhia for days on end. But the video at the top of this post also illustrates the next step: the Russians have been in static artillery positions that they have used largely to bombard civilian targets in the Kyiv area. With Russian armor effectively neutralized, Ukraine is now moving infantry in to eliminate the static artillery, positions.

This is all happening on a daily basis, as Artur Rehi points out. The Russian armored units that continue to move are regularly ambushed by Ukraine with horrific results, while their static positions are being increasinly mopped up as well. The puzzling thing is how little of this is reparted by any US media.

Francis Fukuyama On The War

One of the independent aggregators pointed me to a brief essay by Francis Fukuyama Preparing for Defeat, which is his take on the Russo-Ukraine war. I never quite understood why there is a Francis Fukuyama, and indeed, along the line of Elon Musk's remark about Sen Sanders, I maybe thought he was deceased if I thought about him at all. The basic problem is that in 1992, he published The End of History and the Last Man in response to the Soviet Union's collapse, "which argues that the worldwide spread of liberal democracies and free-market capitalism of the West and its lifestyle may signal the end point of humanity's sociocultural evolution and become the final form of human government".

To which I have two responses. The first is, "So you're gonna quit your job and retire, right, if there's nothing more to be said?" The second is, "Tell that to Osama bin Laden." To the first, he's occupied academic sinecure after sinecure at foundations, councils, institutes, and centers-for in the three decades after he announced there was nothing more to say, and as far as I can see, he's at least made some kind of living continuing to say it. To the second, there have clearly been continuing versions of one kind or another for Soviet-era communisim, and in particular, China continues new permutations of big-power centralized authoritarianism. As to Fukuyama's continuing career, the first line of his essay says a lot:

I’m writing this from Skopje, North Macedonia, where I’ve been for the last week teaching one of our Leadership Academy for Development courses.

Which means that as a talking head, he's a C-lister. But his essay is at least a provocative example of cognitive dissonance. He begins with a few fairly perceptive points, although they're neither special nor unique:

Russia is heading for an outright defeat in Ukraine. Russian planning was incompetent, based on a flawed assumption that Ukrainians were favorable to Russia and that their military would collapse immediately following an invasion. . . . Putin at this point has committed the bulk of his entire military to this operation—there are no vast reserves of forces he can call up to add to the battle. Russian troops are stuck outside various Ukrainian cities where they face huge supply problems and constant Ukrainian attacks.

. . . The collapse of their position could be sudden and catastrophic, rather than happening slowly through a war of attrition. The army in the field will reach a point where it can neither be supplied nor withdrawn, and morale will vaporize.

. . . There is no diplomatic solution to the war possible prior to this happening. There is no conceivable compromise that would be acceptable to both Russia and Ukraine given the losses they have taken at this point.

But here's where the cognitive dissonance kicks in:

The invasion has already done huge damage to populists all over the world, who prior to the attack uniformly expressed sympathy for Putin. That includes Matteo Salvini, Jair Bolsonaro, Éric Zemmour, Marine Le Pen, Viktor Orbán, and of course Donald Trump. The politics of the war has exposed their openly authoritarian leanings.

I can speak only to Trump, as my knowledge of the others has been minimal. How has Trump ever expressed anything like "sympathy" for Putin? Most recently he's been criticized for having in the past called Putin "smart" and "a genius", but the general assessment of Putin's current state of mind is that, for instance as former Secretary of State Rice has said, he isn't the person she knew when she worked with him. As of now, Trump's position is,

“The Russian attack on Ukraine is appalling,” he told the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Orlando, Florida, on Saturday night. “It’s an outrage and an atrocity that should never have been allowed to occur.

“We are praying for the proud people of Ukraine. God bless them all. As everyone understands, this horrific disaster would never have happened if our election was not rigged and if I was the president.”

And indeed, even leftist Hollywood spokespeople like Trevor Noah understand this:

"No one was ever ignoring Donald Trump’s calls. ‘Cause if you ignored Donald Trump’s calls, you didn’t know how he would respond. Maybe he’d send an angry tweet, or maybe he’d just, like, ban your country from everything. You don’t know.

"That’s why I bet, in these situations, Biden actually wishes that he could hire Trump to step in as ‘President Wild Card.’ You know, just keep everyone on their toes. ‘Cause if Trump was calling, you best believe the UAE, they’d be racing to pick up the phone."

The fact is that Trump, however you assess him, has already played in an entirely different league from Matteo Salvini, Jair Bolsonaro, Éric Zemmour, or Marine Le Pen, and in fact he played effectively. Putin was smart enough in fact to wait until Trump was out of office to invade Ukraine, and on one hand there's an emerging consensus that this is the case, and on the other even an emerging buyer's remorse. Trump's version of populism worked, and its replacement is failing terrribly.

What I think Fukuyama misses is that Ukraine is just one theater of an ongoing war that started around the time of the Wuhan lab leak: I would call it the Plebe War, or the Great Plebe War, which pits established and corrupt elites against the broad working class, which includes the bourgeois middle, but not the gentry. Ottawa and Kyiv have both been the sites of recent battles; Kenosha and Portland farther in the past. Fukuyama, even if he's a faded member, is nevertheless of the gentry.

It's worth noting that Biden's policy was effectively to look the other way at Putin's intent at first, while when forced to impose sanctions, to make lemonade out of lemons by using them as an excuse to impose massive fuel price increases on the working class, which was always his policy objective irrespective of Putin. Fukuyama seems blissfully unaware of this. History is still happening.

Putin Purge Maybe

With Russia clamping down on information inside the country, it's hard to evaluate what's leaking out about internal developments. But moving from most reliable to least:

• In the wake of Putin's acknowledgement that conscipts had been sent to fight in Ukraine against his explicit orders (and apparently against Russian law), "materials have been sent to the Chief Military Prosecutor's Office to verify and legally assess the actions and punish officials responsible for failure to comply with this order," according to the Kremlin's military spokesman. The claim has been made that these conscripts have already been withdrawn, and the search for scapegoats is now under way.
• There are multiple versions of a story that the heads of the Fifth Service of the OSB, the section of the FSB ex-KGB that oversees foreign intelligence, have been placed under house arrest, ostensibly for misuse of funds.
• There may have been a larger-scale raid of multiple FSB offices by "both FSO, Federal Protective Service of the Russian Federation [and] ФСО – Putin’s own security service". The sketchy understanding I have is that the ФСО, "Federal Guard Service of the Russian Federation, is a federal government agency concerned with the tasks related to the protection of several high-ranking state officials, mandated by the relevant law, including the President of Russia, as well as certain federal properties." It seems to serve as an oversight agency over the FSB with the specific duty of protecting Putin from coup attempts from within the FSB.
• Least reliable is a rumor that "Putin is said to have sacked eight top generals in anger over the slow pace of the Ukraine invasion."

The most detailed speculation is over the house arrest of the two key intelligence officials:

The Fifth Service of the FSB, Russia’s main intelligence service, has been targeted and the leadership placed under house arrest, according to the authors’ sources.

Its head, Colonel-General Sergei Beseda, and his deputy were being held after allegations of misusing operational funds earmarked for subversive activities and for providing poor intelligence ahead of Russia’s now-stuttering invasion. The operation has hit serious obstacles, not least fierce resistance by the Ukrainian armed forces and the unity of the population, including most Russian-speakers, behind President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his government.

The Fifth Service was responsible for providing Putin with intelligence on political developments in Ukraine on the eve of the invasion. And it looks like two weeks into the war, it finally dawned on Putin that he was completely misled. The department, fearful of his responses, seems to have told Putin what he wanted to hear.

However, the problem may have gone beyond the issue of just telling Putin what he wanted to hear. According to a series of Ukraine government tweets (Budanov is Brigadier General Kyrylo Budanov, Ukraine's defense intelligence chief):

Intelligence knows almost all the plans of the invader. "As soon as ideas are born in high offices, we immediately know about them," Budanov said.

31 enemy battalion-tactical group lost combat capability in two weeks. "These are terrible, unprecedented losses for the Russians," Budanov said.

The loss of personnel and equipment amid economic problems due to sanctions has led to the fact that only Vladimir Putin and the Minister of Defence of the Russian Federation Sergei Shoigu are in favor of continuing the war.

“Even the generals are overwhelmingly opposed to the war, the whole environment is trying to stop it one way or another - someone is even sabotaging the orders of the top military leadership” Budanov said.

According to a post at the Reddit Ukraine war thread,

It's been confirmed that the West has high level agents in both the Russian FSB and military version the GRU. I mean very high, like Cabinet level.

Nobody knows who it is though for obvious reasons, but certain leaks could only be known by Putin's inner circle... Such the exact locations of the Chechen Battalion in Ukraine and all the assassination attempts they were ordered to carry out to kill Zelensky, including precise details and timing of the operations, which all ended in failure and the entire Chechen Battalion being wiped out within a day.

A lot of the FSB dislike Putin so it isn't particularly surprising... There was a purge in one of the five major "FSB towers" literally just yesterday but the leaks continue.

I make no representation as to the accuracy of these reports, except to say that they do appear to be consistent with what a reaaonable person can conclude from general battlefield news.

I've observed from history generally that despots tolerate corruption among their subordinates, since it's a handy tool for eliminating them when they've worn out their usefulness. If a dragnet of the FSB finds reasons to purge key people, "misuse of funds" can be a handy charge that avoids raising too many embarrassing questions about what really happened.

Getting Everything Wrong

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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.
  

Here's the latest estimate from the Institute for the Study of War site as of yesterday afternoon:

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.

Piecing Together Bits Of Information

The video above was viral on YouTube and elsewhere this morning, although the version here carries subtitles with an English translation of the Russian radio communications. It's been known for at least a week that the Russian radio encryption system isn't working in Ukraine, so that the Russians must communicate in the clear, a major intelligence exposure that probably led to the Ukrainian ambush of this column in the first place, which I assume took place yesterday, March 9.

The commander of the regiment who was killed, referred to in the radio chatter, was Col Andrei Zakharov, who had been awarded the Order of Courage by Vladimir Putin in 2016.

The map below is from the Institute for the Study of War site and provides a context for the attack's location. (It's worth pointing out that, as with all such maps of the Ukraine invasion, the areas colored pink overstate the territory under Russian control; as the video above makes clear, their control basically extends as far as the sides of the roads their columns occupy at a particular time, and the Ukrainian army is able to operate freely within those areas.)

The attack took place in Brovary, which is shown on the inset map of the Kyiv area, at the western tip of a narrow "assessed Russian advance". The ISW summary of action in the area does not make a reference to this battle, but it says generally,

Main effort—Kyiv axis: Russian operations on the Kyiv axis are aimed at encircling the city from the northwest, west, east.

Russian forces have likely begun renewed offensive operations that ISW has been forecasting, but at a lower level of intensity and a smaller scale than we had anticipated. Individual Russian attacks at roughly regiment size reported on March 8 and March 9 may represent the scale of offensive operations Russian forces can likely conduct on this axis at any one time. [The radio chatter in the video says this was a regiment size atack.]

. . . The Ukrainian General Staff reported fighting all along the Russian line of communication from near Sumy to Nizhyn and even further north toward Hlukhiv, which is nearly at the Russian border. This continued fighting likely indicates that the Russians are struggling to consolidate control over this lengthy line of communication and that Ukrainian forces are actively contesting it. That phenomenon may partially explain the relative paucity of Russian activity reported in Kyiv’s eastern outskirts in the past 24 hours.

That the fairly major encounter east of Kyiv in the video isn't mentioned in this summary suggests it may have taken place after the summary was written. However, we may conclude that this does represent "the scale of offensive operations Russian forces can likely conduct on this axis", and it suggests Ukrainian forces are capable of routing a force of that size.

However, my impression from videos in recent days has been that the Ukrainans have been attacking much smaller Russian forces, which represent more usual Russian activity as suggested in the assessment above. The video below shows Ukrainian soldiers driving one captured tank away, along with footage of cleanup in another armored vehicle following the ambush. We may assume the kitchen detergent has been used to clean blood from the interior, as the vehicle will now be reused by Ukraine against the Russians.

I noticed a help-wanted ad in English on Facebook yesterday from a Ukrainian company advertising for people to come work on its contract with the Ukrainian army to refurbish captured Russian equipment for Ukrainian use. It promised lots of overtime. I assume this will be the destination for the equipment in this and other videos.