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The Ukrainians have launched a highly-anticipated counteroffensive, coming after weeks of targeting Russia’s supply lines with western weapons. At the center of the battle is Ukraine’s southern Kherson region, where Ukraine claimed this week it killed more than 200 Russian soldiers and destroyed a half-dozen ammunition depots. After some weeks away from discussing the war, Straight Arrow News contributor Peter Zeihan is back with an in-depth status update and an analysis covering Russia’s continued weaknesses:
It’s been about five weeks since I talked about the war in general. We’re now going to talk about where we are today.
The single biggest takeaway of the last five weeks is that everything — I mean everything that the Russians were bad at before — propaganda, logistics, precision, training, maintenance equipment, everything that they were bad at before — they’re worse now. The Russian offensive has stalled pretty much everywhere. And there’s two big reasons for this.
The first and the most spectacularly — and in many ways impressively — is in the past six weeks Ukraine has shifted the type of war that it is fighting. They’ve gone from predominantly trying to arrest the Russian advance with things like stingers and javelins, you know, shoulder-mounted weapons to an ever-increasing number and ever-increasing style — heavier artillery that has enabled Ukraine to increasingly strike deep behind enemy lines, blow up ammo dumps, destroy logistical hubs, damaged infrastructure, and even get to the point of assassinating military leadership.
Some of the Wagner bases — these are Russia’s mercenaries — have been just destroyed and other places they’ve found out that a number of officers were getting together for a happy hour and they hit the bar.
The degree to which the Ukrainians are able to put targeting information either from their own human network or signal interest intelligence that is provided by the Americans, and put it to use, has been very impressive, and it has snarled the entirety of the Russian advance in both the east and the south.
