In article after article, the Western pro-war media attempts to excuse the downfalls of Ukrainian Armed Forces with endless apologies on temporary modifications in an ever evolving military strategy aimed ultimately at attrition. In “Ukraine Adopts Slow Approach to Counteroffensive,” the Wall Street Journal , for instance, attempts to portray Ukrainian armed forces’ swift loss of several tanks together with infantry fighting vehicles as the result of the West’s failure to provide air defense systems or lethal, fourth generation, advanced fight jets.
The article echos the sentiments of General Syrskyi. In an article published by Reuters entitled, “Ukraine war: No fast results in offensive, warns Ukrainian commander Ten Syrskyi,” the idea that Ukraine’s losses may be checked against a modification in the speed of Ukraine’s counteroffensive is relayed as part of the changing landscape of Ukraine’s war.
In the Washington Post , another Western apologist for NATO’s proxy war, describes Ukraine’s hesitation to “use the large-scale offensive tactics” the military commanders at Grafewöhr taught because “Kyiv needs more weapons to fight the war Washington wants.” In an article entitled, “Ukraine aims to sap Russia’s defenses,” the authors repeat the trope.
In an article published by the New York Times entitled, “After Suffering Heavy Losses, Ukrainians Paused to Rethink Strategy,” U.S. Defense Officials stated to the newspaper that at least 20% of the deployed equipment, weapons or armor Ukraine implemented in its initial advance in the counteroffensive has been damaged or destroyed. “Early in the counteroffensive,” the authors write, “Ukraine lost as much as 20 percent”, while the “rate dropped as the campaign slowed” due to the fact that “commanders shifted tactics.”
It is likely that the decision to reduce the cause of Ukraine’s counteroffensive to anything other than its inability to overcome Russia’s defenses accelerated shortly after Vladimir V Putin weighed in on the war.
On July 16th, 2023 the sensational Arabic daily published in Lebanon, Al-Mayadeen (i.e., الميادين) released an article detailing Vladimir V Putin’s assessment of the Ukrainian counteroffensive. The second in a series of assessments—the first being amongst a group of Russian bloggers in the Kremlin, Putin explained: “The enemy has failed to breakthrough our defenses, despite the its use of special, strategic arsenals of weapons.” [ Al-Mayadeen,“بوتين : الهجوم اوكراني المضاد فاشل,” July 16th, 2023 ]
Putin’s pronouncement, which is resonating amongst Ukraine’s partners, caused the head of Britain’s M16 intelligence agency to retaliate in an equivocally false diatribe. In an article entitled, “Putin is Humiliated, M16 Chief Says,” Richard Moore is quoted as saying, “there appears now to be little prospect of the Russian forces regaining momentum.” The momentum, according to Moore, is on the Ukrainian side—not the Russian. “In the past month,” the newspaper continued, “Ukraine has recovered more territory than Russia captured in the last year.”
Moore’s “assessment” comes amid a widening awareness of Ukraine’s failure on the battlefield. Graham Allison, who writes for the Washington Post, for instance, recently calculated the true rate at which Ukrainian armed forces are advancing on its three axes.
“If Ukrainian forces are no more successful in the weeks ahead than they have been so far, Ukraine will not recapture all of its territory for 16 years.”Although Allison makes no direct reference to Ukraine’s failure, his description of Ukraine’s rate of advance is an implicit admission of Ukraine’s doomed counteroffensive. Allison’s account is true. It aligns with the current state of the art on developments in Ukraine.
Prior to Putin’s assessment, the primary mouthpiece of the American political ruling political elite attributed the cause of Ukraine’s slowed counteroffensive to elements within the battlefield. In an article entitled, “Small, Hidden and Deadly: Mines Stymie Ukraine’s Counteroffensive,” the New York Times published on July 16th, 2023, the authors describe Kiev-Kyiv’s stalled progress as a result of Russia’s defenses. “Five weeks into a counteroffensive that even Ukrainian officials say is off to a halting start, interviews with commanders and soldiers fighting along the front indicate the slow progress comes down to one major problem: land mines.”
The attempt to shift the blame for Ukraine’s counteroffensive to an external cause is by design. Ukrainian armed forces, for instance, lack a clearly defined divisional organization. Without divisional organization, the challenge of aligning Ukraine’s military doctrine with a force structure becomes compounded. In the absence of such an alignment, the gap separating military doctrine from force structure predictably leads to collapse. Without a doubt, Ukraine’s “spring” counteroffensive is at a terminus.
In that respect, the Ukrainian “spring” counteroffensive is comparable to Germany’s 1918 counteroffensive, except in the negative. Whereas the 1918 German counteroffensives led to a successful breakthrough, especially on March 21st, 1918, as well as developments in elaborating the theory of artillery as in Bruckmüller artillery preparation, the Ukrainian “spring” counteroffensive has achieved little to nothing in the way of a military development, let alone a strategic objective.
Ukraine’s strategic objective—to breakthrough the land bridge from Zaporizhzia to Melitopul—is a catastrophe. The famous picture of burning Leopard 2A6 tanks amidst a pile of American Bradley Improvised Fighting Vehicles (IFVs) is circulated throughout the media as the defining moment of the Ukrainian “spring” counteroffensive.
It is alleged that Ukraine has held its major bridges in reserve together with more than 80% of its improvised fighting vehicles (IFVs), armor, or tanks together with artillery field pieces. Upon further investigation, there appears to be a valid military basis for this allegation.
The Leopard I tanks are equipped with a 105MM barrel. 105MM barrels are superior to the larger 120MM barrels on Leopard 2A6 tanks. 105MM barrels are “rifled,” where as 120MM barrels are “smoothbore.” The “rifled” barrels, which twist, add a range in excess of 2,000 or more feet over “smoothbore” barrels, which do not. The 105MM barrels are more accurate, since the zero procedure enables fired direction centers or tank commanders to align a crosshair with a target. Leopard I tanks are equipped with greater storage for munitions than Leopard 2A6 tanks, since 105MM munitions are smaller. In addition to storage capacity, the array of different munitions is far greater for those in 105MM than in 120MM. The added capacity alleviates the burden of logistics a towed wagon called a caisson would otherwise have to bear. The 105MM munitions offer the greatest variety of rounds, from specialized anti-tank to anti-personnel.
The greatest advantage, however, for the 105MM barrels is the ease with which NATO may standardize usage across equipment from different Member States. The Abrams MA1 tanks, for instance, are equipped with 105MM ‘rifled’ barrels. The 105MM munitions are therefore more interoperable than the 120MM rounds. Not only are they interoperable but they are also interchangeable. 105MM L118/9 field artillery pieces, for instance, may interchange munitions from a single arsenal, reducing the realtime cognitive load required to process battlefield logistics concerning munitions across arms. The reduced cognitive load, however, is not merely across arms or on the front but also in the rear. It is across the board from the factory to the field, enabling manufacturers to share large pieces of equipment, coordinate maintenance across manufacturers with AI driven predictable algorithms, or exchange parts for repairs.
These considerations, however, merely mitigate alleged Ukrainian reservations. There is no guarantee that the adoption of 105MM munitions is expected to secure the gains Ukrainian armed forces seek for NATO Member States such as the United States. Neither pausing to rethink “strategy” nor modifying the speed of the Ukrainian counteroffensive provides any basis for a belief in a Ukrainian breakthrough. Despite improvements in standardization, the Ukrainian armed forces are incapable of the victory the United States seeks against Russia.
While what remains of Ukrainian armed forces, nonetheless, continues to be an extremely lethal force, combining “Eastern European manpower” with the “technological capabilities of NATO” in an effort to reduce the “body bags” NATO Member States must avoid to quell popular outrage against any one State’s direct involvement in the Ukrainian war, the number of Ukrainians is dwindling quickly to the last.
The fact that the NATO Member States have launched a second terrorist attack on the Kerch bridge is an act of telltale sign of desperation. A disabled Kerch bridge achieves little to nothing for Ukraine’s strategic objective in the “spring” counteroffensive. There is no benefit from the attack.
The desperation reflects the immediacy with which NATO Member States view the quickly dwindling number of Ukrainians. Although General Petreaus in a CNN interview described Ukrainians as ready to suffer more than Russians are, the endless amount of money NATO expends on Ukraine cannot breath live into the last dead Ukrainians. There are limits to “Eastern European manpower.” Ukraine’s morgues are witness to these limits.
Leon Trotsky, who developed the theory of permanent revolution in advance of several members of the socialist movement, based his theory on the idea that the bourgeoisie in an economically backwards country is incapable of carrying out a socialist revolution. The October revolution confirmed Leon Trotsky’s theory.
Alongside Trotsky’s theory is the Leninist corollary or, rather, a Leninist corollary follows by reading Lenin’s work on imperialism against Trotsky’s own. In the epoch of imperialism (where the bourgeoisie of great nation-states attempt to subject one another to the will of the most powerful, transforming the latter “from a Great Power into the World Power”), a competing superpower cannot successfully mobilize the “manpower” of a backwards nation states or “satellites” (“the small nations, who lived off the rivalry between the great ones”) as a proxy force.
The backwards nation state’s “manpower” cannot master the military prerequisites commensurate with the advanced “technological capabilities” the superpower requires for the proxy force to subdue the superpower’s competitor. Neither the birth rate nor the productive forces of the backward country keep pace with the proxy force at war with the superpower’s competitor.
In the final analysis, the combination of a backward’s nation state’s able bodied male “manpower” with the superpower’s advanced “technological capabilities” consummates in the collapse of the proxy force, thereby laying the basis for the entrance of the competing superpower into direct conflict with its competitor in a world war.
Ukraine is a backwards country, whose economy lags behind Europe. It’s military industrial complex, heavily dependent upon the former U.S.S.R’s mainland in Russia from its dissolution to the present day, is demonstrably incapable of the task required by the United States for subduing Russia not merely from the perspective of its foundries or its factories but from its nurseries. Ukrainians simply cannot produce children at a rate beyond that of the number of deaths at which the last Ukrainians continue fall.
Since the Ukraine cannot successfully fulfill the function of a proxy force, there is no reason to doubt that within the next few months, if not years (in the event of an armistice), that a greater, more direct conflict shall erupt as an immediately predictable result of the collapse of Ukrainian armed forces. The conflict, whose flashpoints are erupting in Middle Eastern countries like Syria or Iran, portends to spread well beyond the borders of the Russo-Ukraine war, from the European to the Middle Eastern continents, to the entire world.
Based on Leon Trotsky’s Leninist corollary, the only force capable of preventing the entrance of a competing superpower into a direct confrontation with the competitor’s superpower is the working class, especially the American working class.
The American working class, which is beginning to assert its own will, must continue upon the path of its willful assertion.The independent mobilization of the American working class must accelerate towards the adoption of a Marxist stance of true orthodoxy. Orthodoxy requires workers to expand the class struggle beyond merely the struggle against the bourgeoisie of this or that nation or state but against the wars the bourgeoisie plans behind the backs of its working classes the world over in schemes like the Ukraine war. Striking American workers must therefore seek to terminate the Russo-Ukraine war immediately as one of many demands in a political general strike.
As Trotsky wrote of the American working class, “now dawns the new epoch of the proletariat and at the same time of —genuine Marxism. In this, too, America will in a few jumps catch up with Europe and outdistance it. The best theoreticians of Marxism will appear on American soil. Marx will become the mentor of the advanced American workers.”
