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Ukraine continues to press forward with its counteroffensive in Kharkiv that has the Russian army on the verge of collapse. The Ukrainian troops have maintained the pressure despite Russia launching air strikes against power plants in retaliation. Straight Arrow News contributor Peter Zeihan says that while it is too soon to know if this is a true turning point in the war, Ukraine’s push in Kharkiv has devastated Russia’s military position.
Excerpted from Peter’s Sept. 12 “Zeihan on Geopolitics” newsletter:
The Ukrainians so far have basically destroyed all functional Russian military formations in the Kharkiv province in the country’s east. And they are now in the process of doing some mopping up and moving into Luhansk and Donetsk, which were those two provinces that the Russians invaded back in 2014 and declared to be independent republics. The government of Luhansk seems to have dissolved and the military of Luhansk Republic, which is the illegal fiction that the Russians created to justify the current invasion, seems to have dissolved as well.
The Russians are not retreating. This is not moving your tanks and orderly formations to get to a more defensible border. The military has crumpled. Izium, which was the location that the Russians spent the last two months trying to seize and ultimately did, and has been the forward military base for most of their operations in eastern Ukraine, has been captured by the Ukrainians. And not just captured, captured intact.
The Russians did not even get on trucks to drive…try to drive away because the Ukrainians were using drones to hit trucks on the highway. They simply left their equipment and ran. And it appears in most cases the only reason that the Ukrainian assault is not happening more quickly is that they are waiting for Russians on foot to run to the next town, tell everyone that the Ukrainians are coming so that those troops can get off their equipment and run. So we’re not just seeing a broad-scale collapse of the entire Russian military position in these areas; we are seeing them abandoning every piece of equipment that they have brought in and stored up for the last six months as part of their effort to go onto the rest of Ukraine. So in the case of Izium specifically, that is enough tanks, artillery, ammo, and fuel to supply 10 to 20,000 men, making it the single biggest arms transfer we have seen since World War II in the days of Lend-Lease. It’s just that it’s from the Russians to the Ukrainians.
That one day has transferred more weapons to the Ukrainian military than everything that NATO has done to this point. And it seems to be par for the course that there are dozens of instances like this on a smaller scale. Now, for those of you who have been cheering for the Ukrainians, I don’t want you to get overly excited here. We have seen this before. The Russian military is not well trained. It is not well equipped. Its logistics suck. They can’t fight outside of rail systems because that’s how they transport all of their material. And that’s one of the reasons why the Ukrainians are doing so well here, is that they’ve taken out some of the rail depots or captured them and leaving the Russians to know that they’ve been completely cut off from resupply and reinforcement.
However, however, however, however, however…Russia has won about half of the wars that it has fought and in every single one of the wars that it has fought –that it has won – there have been moments like what is going on right now. Because what happens is the Ukrainians or sorry, the Russians move in, they get sucker-punched. Superior forces in terms of either number or more likely technology and logistics and moral and training, destroy them. The Ukrainian position – geez, sorry…the Russian position collapses, the Russians retreat or more likely that military division is simply obliterated, and then back in mother Russia, there is a bit of a regeneration and a new force comes in with different tactics and different leadership and better equipment. And then the numbers turn.
Remember that the Russians still, at least on paper, have a military force that’s over 10 times the size of Ukraine. They’ve got more tanks, they’ve got more artillery, they’ve got more aircraft. Everything on paper suggests that this is still the Russians’ war to lose. So yeah, they’ve had a really crappy week and a lot of us are cheering that this continues, but we should not bet on that.
