“US intelligence agencies admit Ukrainian offensive will fail”, Aug 19, 2023, Andre Damon, WSWS, at < https://www.wsws.org/en/
“The Ukrainian nightmare”, Aug 3, 2023, Andre Damon, WSWS, at < https://www.wsws.org/en/
Introduction by dmorista: Meanwhile the NATO Proxy War to damage Russia contintues to drag on in Ukraine. The U.S. / NATO advisors and trainers tried to prepare the Ukrainian forces to use U.S. high-tech and high mobility tactics to use against the Russian forces; that are dug in in vary extensive and very tough defensive fortification and positions. Even American military analysts have had to admit that the training was too short and inadequate and there is no aircover and not enough artillery or other weaponry to support the original plan. In addition the Ukrainian forces are now largely composed of unwilling conscripts press-ganged out of cafes and markets, and then given the minimum training and sent off to suicidal missions.
The U.S., in particular, has been so severely deindustrialized that it cannot supply the needed munitions to Ukraine, let alone prepare for skirmishes with China at the same time. The Biden administration gambled on a quick resolution hoping the much delayed Spring Counteroffensive would bring victory. Now they are weighing what to do as an ongoing Ukraine War will diminish their chances of victory in the upcoming 2024 elections. Will Joe Biden fall on his Ukraine War sword as his final service to U.S. / NATO / E.U. Finance Capital. Will there be the needed resources for a war with China?? The options don't seem very good as the U.S. left does not seem to be able to mount an effective anti-war campaign against a Democratic Party President.
Sadly Ukraine's young men have suffered 50,000 amputations and probably 500,000 deaths over the past year and a half. That number of deaths is higher than those suffered by the U.S. in its nearly 4 years of fighting in World War 2, and from a much smaller population base.
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US intelligence agencies admit Ukrainian offensive will fail
Since the start of the year, the US media has promoted Ukraine’s “spring offensive” as a decisive turning point in the war.
It has become clear, however, that this offensive has produced nothing but a blood-drenched debacle. Despite the deaths of tens of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers, the Ukrainian military has failed to breach even the first defensive line set up by the Russian military.
On Friday, the Washington Post published an article reporting that US intelligence agencies have concluded that the offensive will fail to reach its main objectives of driving to the Azov Sea in order to cut off the “land bridge” to the Crimean Peninsula.
“The US intelligence community assesses that Ukraine’s counteroffensive will fail to reach the key southeastern city of Melitopol,” the Post reported, meaning that “Kyiv won’t fulfill its principal objective of severing Russia’s land bridge to Crimea in this year’s push.”
The “grim” assessment means that despite the provision of tens of billions of dollars in advanced military hardware, the offensive “fell short of its goals,” the Post writes.
Beyond detailing the scale of the debacle for Ukrainian forces, the article characterizes the role of the US in demanding a further significant escalation of the war, no matter the cost in Ukrainian lives.
The Post reported, “in the first week of fighting, Ukraine incurred major casualties against Russia’s well-prepared defenses despite having a range of newly-acquired Western equipment, including US Bradley Fighting Vehicles, German-made Leopard 2 tanks, and specialized mine-clearing vehicles.”
The article continued, “Joint war games conducted by the US, British and Ukrainian militaries anticipated such losses but envisioned Kyiv accepting the casualties as the cost of piercing through Russia’s main defensive line, said US and Western officials.”
“But Ukraine chose to stem the losses on the battlefield and switch to a tactic of relying on smaller units to push forward across different areas of the front. That resulted in Ukraine making incremental gains in different pockets over the summer.”
This is an extraordinary admission. Washington planned out an offensive operation whose success was determined by its client government in Ukraine forcing its conscript army into a massed, suicidal charge against well-defended front lines.
The Zelensky government, likely fearing a total breakdown of morale or mutiny, concluded that such a suicidal rush would not be possible, and switched to a military strategy that would result in fewer casualties, to the ire of Washington.
These statements confirm the repeated warnings of the World Socialist Web Site that the Biden administration, seeing the population of Ukraine as nothing more than cannon fodder, was determined to fight “to the last Ukrainian.”
The World Socialist Web Site wrote in May, “the imperialist powers are demanding that this weaponry be put to use in the hands of newly conscripted Ukrainian troops, many of them grabbed off the street, to be thrown at heavily fortified Russian positions…The only certain outcome of the much-hyped counteroffensive will be a further massive loss of life.”
Critically, the Post article admits that the US had known as early as February that Ukrainian forces were facing disaster. The Post writes:
The new intelligence assessment aligns with a secret U.S. forecast from February indicating that shortfalls in equipment and force strength may mean that the counteroffensive will fall “well short” of Ukraine’s goal to sever the land bridge to Crimea by August.
At the time, the contents of these documents were not seriously examined or publicized by the US media, which continued to hype the offensive as a turning point in the war.
By contrast, the WSWS pointed to the significance of documents, which revealed “significant ‘force generation and sustainment shortfalls’” and likely to yield only “modest territorial gains,” as completely puncturing the fraudulent narrative used by the Biden administration and US media to promote the latest bloodbath.
The real goal of the US, however, was to maximize the number of Russians killed, expend Russian war material, and weaken the Russian economy, using Ukrainian forces as cannon fodder.
The article quoted General Mark Milley to argue that there was an upside to the disaster. Milley bragged about how many Russian soldiers had been killed, saying, “The Russians are in pretty rough shape… They’ve suffered a huge amount of casualties. Their morale is not great.”
This was effectively a paraphrase of the declaration by Senator Lindsey Graham who boasted that as a result of US funding of Ukraine, “the Russians are dying” and that it’s the “best money we’ve spent.”
The offensive has produced a bloodbath for Ukrainian forces. Last week, The New York Times reported of the existence of a unit whose soldiers had been replaced three times.
Earlier this month, The Wall Street Journal reported that 50,000 or more Ukrainians have become amputees, citing data from Germany’s Ottobock, the world’s largest prosthetics manufacturer. This would put the level of amputations in the Ukraine war on par with those of major combatants in the First World War.
Ukraine is now the most heavily mined country in the world, with approximately 30 percent of the country or about 67,000 miles, having been littered with explosive ordnance.
The growing recognition in the US media of the failure of the counteroffensive does not lessen the danger posed by the war. Rather, there is an immense danger of the US responding to the increasingly desperate state of its proxy war with Russia with a major new military escalation.
Earlier this month, the White House requested another $24 billion from Congress for the war in Ukraine, with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken pledging to continue the war “as long as it takes.”
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The Ukrainian nightmare - World Socialist Web Site
Little by little, accounts of the true toll of the US-NATO war against Russia on Ukraine’s soldiers—many forcefully conscripted—are beginning to filter through the American media.
On Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal published an article describing levels of mass injury among Ukrainian troops that are horrendous.
The article claimed that 50,000 or more Ukrainians have become amputees, citing data from Germany’s Ottobock, the world’s largest prosthetics manufacturer. As the article explains, this would put the level of amputations in the Ukraine war on par with those of major combatants in the First World War.
The article reports, “67,000 Germans and 41,000 Britons had to have amputations during the course of World War I, when the procedure was often the only one available to prevent death.”
The number of Ukrainian troops who have died in the war is one of the most closely guarded secrets of the conflict. The number is known by the Ukrainian and American governments, but not revealed to the public. But using the data published by the Wall Street Journal, it is possible to draw certain conclusions.
During World War I, 880,000 British forces died, or 12.5 percent of those serving. If amputations among Ukrainian troops have eclipsed those of the UK in the First World War, when the procedure was far more common than it is now, this implies that the death toll among Ukrainians is in the hundreds of thousands.
The article contains another horrifying figure. The Journal reports that “between 5% and 10% of all deployed troops were killed, according to Ukrainian military estimates shared with a group of US military surgeons.” It adds, “In comparison, only 1.3% to 2% of US troops deployed in recent conflicts died in action.” In other words, the fatality rate of Ukrainian troops is up to five times greater than that suffered by American soldiers in recent wars.
This is the context in which the US military and political establishment issues its constant demands that Ukraine renew its offensive. In an article titled, “Ukrainian Troops Trained by the West Stumble in Battle,” the New York Times on Thursday explained, in the form of yet another buried lede, a major motivating factor in the United States’ insistence that Ukraine carry out wave after wave of attacks on well-defended Russian positions.
The Times wrote that “The Americans called for ‘combined arms tactics—synchronized attacks by infantry, armor, and artillery forces.’” It continued, “Western officials championed that approach as more efficient than the costly strategy of wearing Russian forces down by attrition, which threatens to deplete Ukraine’s ammunition stocks.”
In other words, given the shortage of ammunition, US officials have called for repeated assaults on Russian trenches, which have resulted in tens of thousands of casualties. Clearly, the American generals believe that Ukrainian lives are more expendable than shells.
The US media’s touting of the Ukrainian counter-offensive and Kiev’s “combined arms” offensives has been shown to be nothing but self-deluded propaganda. In reality, as recent reports in the US media reveal, US military officials knew that these supposedly sophisticated military operations, conducted without air support, would simply be World War I-style frontal assaults, resulting in World War I-level carnage.
The total failure of the counteroffensive can be inferred from the shift in tone of the US media: from triumphal declarations that the tide of the war is about to turn to desperate assertions that all may not be lost, after all.
Writing in the Guardian, Julian Borger admits that “Hopes of a rapid breakthrough proved over-optimistic in the face of entrenched defenses.” He continues: “The first casualty of the Ukrainian counteroffensive was wishful thinking. Any hope that Russian troops would abandon their trenches and flee has now been left far behind on the battlefield.”
This is coming from a newspaper that was a central proponent of such “wishful thinking.” In an article published in May by Timothy Garton Ash, the Guardian called the coming period a “make-or-break counteroffensive,” potentially bringing “a decisive Ukrainian victory.”
In words that now sound delusional, Ash compared the offensive to the victorious Normandy invasion against Nazi Germany. “Decisive Ukrainian victory is now the only sure path to a lasting peace, a free Europe, and ultimately a better Russia. This alone would be the new VE (Victory in Europe) Day.”
He mused: “If the Ukrainian army can push rapidly south to the Sea of Azov, encircle a large number of demoralised Russian forces and cut the supply lines to the Crimean peninsula, there might be some non-linear collapse of Russian military morale on the ground and regime cohesion in Moscow.”
Such claims prevailed throughout the American media. Writing in the Washington Post, David Ignatius exulted, “This assault could turn the tide of the battle for Ukraine, just as the Allied assault on the Normandy beaches altered the trajectory of World War II.”
These illusions have been shattered. “Initial Ukrainian assaults got mired in dense, overlapping minefields,” Borger writes in the Guardian. “For all the focus on the delivery of Leopards and other Western tanks in the run-up to the launch of the offensive on June 4, Ukrainian armor failed to provide the clenched fist needed to breach the lines.”
For all their talk of defending “self determination,” the US and NATO powers view Ukrainians as so much cannon fodder in their conflict with Russia. The United States has sought to weaken Russia in a bloody war of attrition with the aim, in the words of US President Joe Biden, of “turning the ruble to rubble.” This was to be accomplished through the destruction of an entire generation of Ukrainian youth, whose lives are being squandered in the name of king dollar.
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