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In the early morning of the first day of the war on Feb. 24, President Vladimir Putin defined the objectives of the country’s “special operation” as “protecting the inhabitants of Donbas, demilitarizing and denazifying Ukraine,” and “bringing to justice those who have committed innumerable bloody crimes.”
Continuing a Soviet tradition — the invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 and Afghanistan in December 1979 — Putin said that he had “decided on a special military operation” in response to a request from the leaders of Donbas. And he stressed that “Russia has no plans to occupy Ukrainian territories.”
Two and a half months later, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov complimented his boss, saying that the special military operation was “designed to put an end to the reckless expansion and the reckless course of total U.S. domination.” Four months later he corrected Putin: “the geographical objectives of the ‘special operation’ have changed. Now it is not only the DNR and LNR [Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics], but also a number of other territories.” And one of the generals even issued the enigmatic statement that “control over the South of Ukraine is another path to Transnistria [a Moldovan break-away state supported by Russia], where facts of oppression of the Russian-speaking population are also being observed.”
Ultimate goals multiplied in the statements of various Russian officials, from security chief Nikolai Patrushev and parliament chairman Vyacheslav Volodin, Sergei Lavrov and presidential spokesperson Dmitry Peskov, and Putin himself. Now they included “preventing war from starting on the territory of Ukraine”; “restoring the statehood of the LNR and DNR within the borders of 2014”; and “achieving a guarantee of Ukraine’s real neutral status.”
The “demilitarization” of Ukraine? In the six months of war Ukraine has received the most modern Western-made weapons worth tens of billions of dollars that it did not have before. Just the latest tranche for weapons, air defense systems, surface-to-air missiles, radars and artillery from the U.S. government was valued at $2.98 billion.
Denazification of Ukraine? It seems that no one except the Russian Chekists doing reconnaissance has seen them, and if someone else did see some Nazis, there were about as many of them in Ukraine as there are on Moscow’s Pushkin Square on Adolf Hitler’s birthday. None of the dozens of journalists from around the world who broadcast their reports from Ukraine have met any Nazis or fascists. But the rhetoric from various Russian official and quasi-official speakers makes us think that some of the thousands of recordings of Hitler’s speeches were put to good use.
Protecting the Russian-speaking population of the eastern and southern regions? Where were they protected — in the almost completely destroyed city of Mariupol, where more than 89% of the population considered Russian their spoken language? Or in Kharkiv, which has been mercilessly bombed for week after week, killing civilians, and where 95% of the population speak (spoke?) Russian? Or Mykolaiv, where over 50% of the population, according to the census, speak Russian as their mother tongue, and which is being destroyed by cluster bombs, according to a Philadelphia Inquire reporter who was just there? A curious defense strategy: pile up the corpses of the people you’re defending.
Putin, and Peskov after him, called the goal of the military operation the restoration of the self-declared Donetsk and Luhansk republics to their 2014 borders. Today Russian troops control almost all of the Luhansk region and less than 60 percent of the Donetsk. Judging by reports from the fronts, this situation is not going to change any time soon.
So, the first, second and third goals weren’t met. Maybe “U.S. dominance” in Eastern Europe has been undermined and NATO has been pushed away from Russia’s borders?
It certainly doesn’t look like it. A year before the war, in February 2021, there were 4,650 soldiers and officers under NATO command, and now there are almost ten times as many — 40,000. In the near future, the number of NATO troops will increase to 300,000. This, military analysts say, is the largest increase in NATO strength since the end of the Cold War. The border between Russia and NATO countries also doubled after Finland and Sweden joined the alliance — from 1,207 to 2,575 km.
And now — the cost. According to American intelligence, the irrecoverable losses of the Russian Armed Forces in the six months of the war amounted to 70-80,000: 15-20,000 dead (during the 9 years and 2 months of the Afghan war about 15,000 Soviet soldiers and officers were killed), and 60,000 wounded and captured (in Afghanistan over 110 months — about 35,000).
Over the six months of war, the Russian army has lost 3-4,000 tanks and armored personnel carriers. Almost all the country’s high-precision weapons have been used, and the production of new missiles is held up because they can’t get microchips and semiconductors, which are under sanctions. Anti-ship missiles and Soviet Grads, which have a range of several hundred meters, are being used for strikes.
The shortage of hardware has forced the Russian army to scavenge for weapons, transfer them by quasi-trade ships from the military base in Syria, buy drones from Iran, and even consider North Korea’s offer to buy artillery from them.
The situation with manpower is even worse. Due to their heavy losses, Russia is carrying out “voluntary mobilization.” According to various estimates, 30-35,000 volunteers have been sent to training camps with subsequent deployment in the active army. Soldiers are also being recruited from high-security prisons and deployed in private security companies. Battalions that carried out peacekeeping duties in Nagorno-Karabakh and troops from de facto annexed South Ossetia are also being sent to the front.
Each day of the war costs taxpayers about $500 million. In July, Finance Ministry statistics showed a federal budget deficit of 892 billion rubles, a drop of 22.5% in oil and gas revenues despite high energy prices, and a nearly 30% drop in revenue from tax collection. The expected loss of GDP by the end of the year is 8%, with a further contraction of the economy over the course of a year and a half or two years. These are the calculations for the summer of 2022, when many private Russian banks can still to conduct transactions with the rest of the world and the country is not cut off from SWIFT. But there can be no doubt that the West will choke the Russian economy before it begins to be choked by its own declining level of technological development, and the Russian military-industrial complex will no longer a threat to Europe and the world.
An investigation by Washington Post journalists indicates that Putin’s initial goal was to totally occupy all of Ukraine.
This seems strange, given that Stratfor military analysts played out five or six scenarios for Russia’s war with Ukraine back in 2015 and concluded that the Russian Armed Forces would need between 91,000 and 135,000 troops just to seize the so-called left bank of Ukraine and an equal number to hold the occupied territories. The total is 182,000 to 270,000 troops needed. Military analyst Alexander Goltz wrote in a 2014 article for The New Times that Russia would need at least 100,000 troops to hold southeastern Ukraine alone. Note that both analyses came out before the Ukrainian Armed Forces were reformed and equipped with the most modern weapons.
Today there are approximately 170,000 Russian soldiers and officers on the Ukrainian fronts, and 20% of Ukrainian territory is occupied. A simple extrapolation shows that Russia would need about a million men to occupy and hold the entire country. Meanwhile, Commander-in-Chief Vladimir Putin signed an order to increase the army by 137,000 starting on January 1, 2023.
My Moscow sources who met with Putin on the eve of the military operation do not believe that the Federal Security Service deceived the Russian president by convincing him that everything was ready by Feb. 24 for a quick capture of Kyiv or a blitzkrieg. This was much discussed in the first months of the war and recently covered by the Washington Post.
First of all, they said that in the week before operation began, Putin listened to a variety of people, both those who supported the war and those who opposed it. It is highly unlikely that Chekists or army officers gave him false information, but they probably gave him the information that he wanted to see.
Secondly, they say that there was no plan for the army to occupy the entire country. The goal was to eliminate President Vladimir Zelensky (or force him to leave the country), and then, the KGB officers thought, there would be a domino effect: mayors and regional leaders would either run or swear allegiance to Russia in droves. The logic was as follows: Yanukovich, a “tough guy” with experience of prison and gangster capitalism, was so frightened by the Maidan demonstrations away in 2014 that he fled the country. So what could anyone expect from “that clown Zelensky”? The fact that Zelensky did not leave, did not surrender, did not ask for peace came as a great surprise to Putin: the habit of thinking that the world is run like it is in Russia and that politicians everywhere are a priori greedy and opportunistic has once again let the Kremlin down.
Then what does Putin want? “To tear Ukraine to pieces,” said a source at the top of the Russian political elite. “But now I think the Kremlin is ready to codify the status quo,” said another. That is, Putin is ready for peace talks concerning a map in which 20% of Ukrainian territory is controlled by Russian troops.
I am often asked why there is no widespread anti-war protest in Russia. My answer is to cite the figures quoted by OVD-Info. More than 16,000 people have been detained and over 20,000 cases were opened under Article 20.2 of t
