As winter approaches, one of Ukraine’s primary September counteroffensives, the battle for Kherson, is setting the stage for the region to witness the bloodiest battle yet of the Ukrainian war.
While Ukrainian armed forces say they have reclaimed no less than 100 towns or villages, combat continues to range in the north and west of the wider Kherson region, at the same time as the major landmarks of the region, the capital, Kherson, and the Khakovka dam, remain under Russian control, indicating that little, if any progress on the ground has actually been made.
According to the Russian Ministry of Defense, Russian forces have battled oncoming Ukraine troops to a standstill as early as the middle of October in the country’s south, inflicting “significant losses” to Ukrainian armed forces. Russians have so far held their positions during “fierce fighting” in the Kherson region on the Western side of the Dnipro facing North towards Kiev.
“The enemy made attempts to break through the defense of the Russian troops in the areas of Koshara and Pyatykhatky in the Kherson region with forces of up to three battalions, including one tank battalion,” chief defense ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov said.
“The Russian army units held their positions in fierce battles, inflicting significant losses on the enemy,” he said. [1]
However, reports in Arabic from as early as August indicate that Ukrainian armed forces have consistently failed to effectuate a change in status on the battlefield in Kherson. In the Arabic daily Al-Arabiya (i.e., “ العربية ”), the initial reports on the battle of Kherson describe Ukrainian forces as in search of a “strategic weakness” in Russia’s defenses. The actual word in Arabic is the following: “”نقطة ضعف إستراتيجية”. Since the Ukrainians have not made much ground in terms of the capital or the dam mentioned earlier, the search for “strategic weakness” beginning in August appears to have come up dry here recently. [2]
In the village of Bruskyns’ke located to the North-East of the Western side of the Dnipro around the Kherson region, Russian armed forces repelled an attack by Ukrainian armed forces, where no less than 18 Ukrainian soldiers were killed, while 4 military armored vehicles were destroyed on Saturday, October 29th, 2022. [3]
On the video uploaded to Telegram, the Ukrainian soldiers, parts of whose uniforms are drenched in their blood, are being hauled away carefully by hand in body bags under the sound of Russian swear words, random spurts of gunfire with artillery firing far in the background.
The night before, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky delivered a video address. In his video address late last Friday night, Zelensky said Russia’s mobilized soldiers “are so poorly prepared and equipped, so ruthlessly used by the command” that Russia “may soon need a new wave” of mobilization.
Recent fighting has already resulted in significant a loss of life for Russian armed forces. Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, for instance, recently admitted that a Chechen unit suffered “big losses” in the region this week. He said 23 fighters were killed and 58 others were wounded in a Ukrainian artillery attack. Kadyrov, however, claimed that his forces killed more Ukrainians than they did his.
In recent interviews with Ukrainian armed forces located on the South-Eastern outskirts of the Western-side of the Dnipro, journalists from Al Jazeera (i.e., الجزيرة ) displayed video footage of a tank crew dressed with multiple layers of thick military clothing with their tank’s tracks nearly stuck in the mud. The crew appears to be far away from he Western side of the Dnipro. It is clear that as winter continues to approach their ability to advance is subject to conditions on the ground.
During the interview the soldiers are heard saying that Russians have begun to prepare by changing positions, strengthening their flanks, digging trenches, raising bulwarks, deepening dugouts, reinforcing fortifications or engaging in regular drilling. [4] In addition, pathways leading into Kherson have been heavily mined.
Compounding the execution of NATO’s plan to rout Russian forces in Kherson before the beginning of Winter are waves of reinforcements from Russia’s mobilization of 280,000 reservists, who are joining well established Russian military positions in the region. Many of these mobilized reservist have already been deployed to the Donbas where elements of Russia’s Private Military Company, the so-called Wagner Group, have begun their training. [5]
In a recent meeting, the Minister of Defense, Sergei Shoigu, told President Vladimir Putin that 41,000 of those called up for mobilization had already been deployed to the battlefield in Ukraine. With soldiers pouring into the region, multiple evacuations of have occurred. the same time, at least 70,000 civilians are said to have crossed to the left (eastern) bank of the Dnipro river in advance of the upcoming battle.
It is clear, however, that the effects of winter, which American “experts” sought to downplay in support of a “window of opportunity” for Ukrainian armed forces in recent articles from the New York Times, are clearly beginning to take a toll not just on the mobility of their armored vehicles but also on their future prospects for a rout like the rout the Ukrainian armed forces achieved in their counteroffensive against Russian forces in the region of Kharkiv.
In the series of counterattacks over the last 60 to 90 days Ukraine has lost a substantial amount of irreplaceable life. With its strategic exploitation of the land bridge overarching the entirety of its Eastern border with Ukraine from Belarus to the Black Sea forming the bulk of the annexed four regions, Russia’s strategy of deflection (retreating within the land bridge to reinforce for a delayed offensive) has left the Ukrainian armed forces with little more than a few “liberated” villages on the outskirts of Kharkiv and on the western side of the Dnipro in Kherson.
In a review of the video footage posted to Telegram, the Ukrainian armed forces have lost multiple units of heavy artillery. In a video posted to the Russian Information Agency “News” on November 5th, 2022 by the Donetsk National Republic’s Kaskad unit, a Russian lancet targets munitions, obliterating a Ukrainian M777 Howitzer. [6]
Deployed singularly rather than within a battalion, the destruction of the Ukrainian M777 Howitzer points to Ukraine’s inability to defend itself from Russian drone attacks, while, at the same time, a lack of military coordination on the battlefield Russians are more than capable of exploiting to their advantage.
In terms of the significance of Kherson, the stakes for the United States and NATO, however, could not be hirer. Analysts in France have stated that NATO’s inability to conquer Russia, and, by extension recapture the city of Kherson and its surrounding territories, would lead to a substantial loss in its standing throughout the world, especially Europe.
In a recently published article the French journal, Valeurs Actuelles, the president of the French centre for analytics at Geopragma, Caroline Galaterkos, for instance, warned that Washington’s failure to overcome Russia in the war may have devastating consequences for its ability to influence countries in Europe. “Russia’s victory in Ukraine would lead to a situation in which Washington would lose control over the “obedient but weakened, disintegrated Europe.” [7]
The military importance of Kherson cannot be underestimated. Located 340 miles south of Kiev, Kherson, a shipbuilding city, is militarily important as an access point to the Black Sea and Crimea with multiple paths to Ukraine’s southern coastline.
As Israeli military analysts have stated, “of the four regions whose independence Russian president Vladimir Putin declared through a referendum in September, Kherson is by far the most important from the point of view of strategy. [Kherson] not only controls the widest gateway of land into the Crimean peninsula (annexed in 2014) but the shores of the Dnipro, the largest river dividing Ukraine.” [8]
As the capital of the Kherson region, Kherson, the only capital Russia has captured since the start of the invasion in February, is a key component of any strategy to maintain power over the Black Sea region stretching from the South Western shores of Ukraine to the tip of the Crimean peninsula. In addition, Kherson is where the Dnipro river meets the Black Sea.
With over 32,000 tributaries with over 89 being rivers more than 100 kilometers long, the Dnipro is Ukraine’s primary source of water. [9] As more than 80% of all of Ukraine’s water supply comes directly from the river, Dnipro, control over the Dnipro is tantamount to control over Ukraine’s water resources.
With the November midterm elections coming to a close now in the United States, the desperation of the military decision makers in Ukrainian armed forces to secure a clear victory is all the more pressing, as Republicans, whom analysts predict will take both houses of Congress (despite many of the members’ complicity in Donald J Trump’s January 6th coup d’etat ), continue to threaten Biden and the Democratic Party’s blank checks for the Ukraine war with “review,” while at the same time, Zelensky’s recent pleas for military technology to countries like Israel have been met with rejection.
Similarly, European nations such as Italy, where in newly elected right wing government Berlusconi is most influential, have begun to show signs of waning support for continuing to renew shipments of negligible small arms at the same time as the government openly breaks with the “Ukraine Forever” policy of fighting to the death. Berlusconi is quoted as saying Ukraine’s peace process depended upon Ukraine’s understanding that at a certain point, “it can no longer count on arms and help.” [10]
Internally, Ukraine’s economy is reeling, plummeting the entirety of the country into a deepening humanitarian crisis. The capital, Kiev, is openly considering the evacuation of all of its more than 3 million residents for lack of critical infrastructure. Russia’s campaign of retaliation for Ukrainian armed forces’ terrorist attack on the Kerch bridge on October 8th, 2022, has resulted in the destruction of more than one third of the country’s fragile power grid, water infrastructure or plumbing, utilities vital for survival during winter. While the vast majority of Ukraine’s oligarchs, rich or upper class have already left, many of the people who remain in Ukraine are workers, whose already extremely low standard of living is now further deteriorated.
Ukraine’s critical communications and cyber security infrastructure is collapsing and falling short on payments.
A Russian affiliated cyber warfare agency compromised the security of one of Ukraine’s command officers’ laptops. The compromised laptop enabled the hacker to capture a screencast of a program called “Delta.”
According to the information gathered thus far on the program, “Delta” is a program that gathers battlefield data into a centralized platform for planning, executing or reporting on military engagements. [11, 12, 13]
Designed as a Software as a Service platform for command officers to develop a comprehensive view of a war, “Delta” tracks the major aspects of a war such as its battles, the troops in those battles, the pieces of heavy artillery, armored vehicles, or major aircraft. It is unclear whether the hacker managed to gain access to the source code of the program. But the “Delta” hack indicates that the efforts of British and American intelligence, who have only just recently announced their active participation in Ukraine’s cyber security, to extend protection to Ukrainian military leaders is precarious, if not altogether unsuccessful.
Faced with compromised cyber security, Ukrainian armed forces have also lost critical access to Elon Musk’s Starlink system as recently as October 24th after more than 1,300 Starlink terminals went offline.
Supposedly arising from a dispute over who would pay for more than 1, 300 terminals, each costing around $2,500 per month for each unit to remain operational, the problem appears to be more a matter of the larger question of continued support for the war in Ukraine rather a question over who is to pay.
Ukraine recently submitted a request to the British Ministry of Defense, which recently began to signal its unwillingness to continue support the £350 incentive for housing fleeing refugees, to pay for Musk’s StarLink system in Ukraine.
“We support a number of terminals that have a direct tactical utility for Ukraine’s military in repelling Russia’s invasion,” a British official told CNN.
“We consider and prioritize all new requests in terms of the impact contributions would have in supporting Ukraine to defend its people against Putin’s deplorable invasion.”
After being rejected by the British Ministry of Defense, Ukraine turned to the Pentagon. “Negotiations are very much underway. Everyone in our building knows we’re going to pay them,” a senior Pentagon official exclaimed, adding that the Defense Department wants to get something in writing “because we worry [Musk] change his mind.”
The terminals, among which are small satellite dishes, connect to SpaceX’s constellation of satellites orbiting the earth and not only give troops and civilians access to the Internet but have been used with lethal effect, providing the necessary logistical infrastructure for real-time targeting with Ukraine’s drones and artillery.
It is hard to imagine that the Pentagon, which is responsible for ensuring billions upon billions of dollars have been approved in Congress for Ukraine’s war effort, would allow the more than 1,300 terminals from the Starlink system to go offline over a contract dispute with Elon Musk, especially when these terminals are critical for Ukraine’s military capabilities. It appears that internal discussions within the Pentagon itself point to the fact that after more than four months Ukraine may not be up to the task.
Along with the Starlink terminals, the region’s cellular communication infrastructure appears to be down. On October 31st, 2022 photos showing the destruction of at least six cellular towers along the West Bank of the Dnipro.
In what appears to be a reflection of highly advanced plans based on Ukraine’s failure, for the entrance of the United States into open conflict with Russia, on October 22nd, 2022, Brig. Gen. John Lubas, deputy commander of the 101st Airborne Division in Romania, said the deployment of his unit to Romania was not for a training event, but a “combat deployment,” adding that his troops “need to be ready to fight tonight, depending on how the situation escalates across the border” in Ukraine.
The sensational Arabic daily, Al Mayadeen (i.e., الميادين ), which headlines the Ukrainian war as “Russia and the Atlantic” (i.e., روسيا واطلاسي ), an obvious nod to the word in NATO, has taken as the starting point of World War III the deployment “Screaming Eagles’” to the border of Ukraine in the East of Romania. It is the first time since World War II the unit has been deployed to Europe. [14]
The mere fact that the United States has deployed the “Screaming Eagles” is a sign not only of the war’s escalation but of a loss of confidence in Ukrainian armed forces’ ability to carry out Washington’s will effectively, at the same time the move reveals fears over the possibility that Russia may attempt to open a Northern front with an attack on Ukraine from its border with Belarus which not only provides a hub of logistics (for the repair of Russian armed vehicles such as tanks) but is amassing troops along its southern border with Ukraine.
The battle in Kherson is set to be a decisive military battle with far reaching military, political and economic consequences in its aftermath. In light of the circumstances, the likelihood of NATO led Ukrainian armed forces prevailing against Russian troops in its counteroffensive in Kherson is much less now than any time before. Based on the current alignment of forces throughout the region, the weather, the current state of the Ukrainian armed forces, Ukrainian armed forces stand to lose the battle for the Kherson region. With Russian and Ukrainian armed forces clashing at multiple flash points throughout the region, Kherson is therefore set to become one of the bloodiest yet. It is a widely held belief that neither side is set to emerge victorious without significant casualties. [15, 16]
But there is absolutely nothing inevitable about the battle of Kherson. The mere fact that both sides have been engaged in minor skirmishes over the course of the past four months indicates just how tentative the battle actually is. The impending bloodbath is therefore entirely preventable.
Just like the battle of Kherson, the Ukrainian war itself must be stopped before a catastrophe greater merely a bloodbath happens.
The imposition of NATO’s imperialist militarism, recklessly pursuing its geopolitical agenda no matter what the consequences may be, on the Ukrainian people pits Ukrainian soldiers as cannon fodder against Russian economic or mobilized conscripts who have few places to hide from the increasingly desperate actions of the Putin’s regime, Russian oligarchs, or corrupt regional leaders such as Kadyrov in Chechnya that find no other means than to respond with escalation upon escalation, the logical outcome of which threatens not just south Eastern Europe but the world with nuclear war.
Workers around the world must take into consideration not just the deadly consequences of the Ukraine war on either side of the battlefields of Kherson or wherever else they may occur during the conflict but the immensely terrifying scenario in which one of the major actors in the war, not a single one of which has thus far lamented the loss of any a single Ukrainian soldier, decides to break with the longstanding tradition of Mutually Assured Destruction to launch a nuclear missile.
Just as Russian workers, peasants, or soldiers intervened to bring an end to World War I, the greatest intervention of the working class in the history of mankind just 105 years ago to the day, the international working class’ intervention in the Ukraine war is more than powerful enough to put an end to NATO’s rapid escalation of the war into a deadly, nuclear World War III.
References
[1] – [“Russian forces hold the line in Kherson as Ukraine counterstrikes,” aljazeera.com, 10/16/22]
[2] – [“معارك عنيفة تدور جنوبا.. والجيش الأوكراني يواصل هجومه المضاد” ; alarabiya.net, August 31st, 2022]
[3] – [ “Укронацисты на Херсонском направлении постоянно несут большие потери”, https://t.me/Stremousov_Kirill/650, October 29th, 2022]
[4] – [“Ukraine says southern offensive complicated by weather, terrain”, YouTube, October 28th, 2022]
[5] – [“Die Kremltruppen bereiten sich mithelfe von Soldern der “Wagner-Gruppe” auf weitere Offensiven der Ukrainer vor – und greifen dabei auf uralte Techniken zuruck,” Der Spiegel, October 25, 2022]
[6] – [“Кадры поражения дроном “Ланцет” американской гаубицы М777, используемой украинскими военными на Николаево-Криворожском направлении, появились в распоряжении РИА Новости” ; t.me/rian_ru/184527, November 5, 2022]
[7] – [“La “guerre pour l’Ukraine” ou le vertige de la soumission”, valuersactuelles.com, 10/21/22]
[8] – [ “ באוקראינה מזהירים מהקרבות בחרסון זה מה שהרוסים יכולים להשיג ”, maariv.co.il, 10/26/22]
[9] – [“Водні ресурси басейну Дніпра становлять близько 80 % загальноукраїнських. Дві третини території країни забезпечує Дніпро водою, зокрема 30 млн людей, 50 великих міст і промислових центрів користуються водою Дніпра.”
[10] – [“Residents Stocking Up in Kherson as Armies Prepare for a Battle” ; New York Times, November 4th, 2022]
[11] – [“Хакер рассказал о том, как взломал системы управления украинскими войсками” ; ria.ru, November 1st, 2022]
[13] – [“Хакер Джокер заявил, что планы командования ВСУ раскрыты” ; ria.ru, November 1st, 2022]
[13] – [“Хакер сообщил, что взломанную программу DELTA делали по стандартам НАТО” ; ria.ru, November 1st, 2022]
[14] – [ “ الحرب العالمية الثالثة بدأت وسباق روسي مع الزمن لتلافي الكارثة“, almayadeen.com, 10/23/22 ]
[15] – [“Французский аналитик Галактерос: победа России обернется для США огромными потерями,” ; riafan.ru, October 27th, 2022]
[16] – [“ما بعد خيرسون.. قراءة ميدانية للمحاور القتالية في الحرب الأوكرانية”, almayadeen.net, 11/8/22]