All Russia Needs Do Now Is Wait

 

The cauldron has already been formed. It is already complete: Russia has destroyed all rail lines into Donbass, and now has full fire control (artillery and air power–especially drones) over all roads leading into the fortified regions where the Ukrainian government had amassed its forces for the planned ethnic cleansing of DPR and LPR. Nothing can get into Donbass–nor can anything get out of it–without Russian consent.

All Russia needs to do is wait, as the Ukronazis in the Donbass run out of food and ammunition and are forced to surrender. If they refuse to surrender, then it’s simply a charge up the middle, pushing the massed Ukrainian forces back to the Dnieper, all the while killing them in their bunkers with “smart weaponry” and artillery, or along the roads as they try and flee.

Also, that map Moulitsos is using is both spectacularly incomplete and just as spectacularly inaccurate regarding the current deployment of Russian forces. It looks to be about a week old, maybe older (and it was incomplete even then). For instance, the Russians as of mid-yesterday had already advanced well beyond the fronts laid out on his map.

Finally, his reasoning simply isn’t sound. The Ukrainian forces C3 systems have been entirely wiped out, so there will be no means of coordinating maneuvers of any kind, much less flank maneuvers that will require a great deal of detailed minute-by-minute intelligence–as well as a lack of ranking officers to coordinate them. The fuel reserves of all of Ukraine have been mostly destroyed, military transport has been mostly wiped out, and there are two sustained and increasingly rapid advances taking place from the east and north-east which are tying down the vast majority of the troops that would be needed for the flanking maneuvers he envisions (which are impossible, now, for reasons stated above).

Now that Mariupol has been taken, the troops there will likely be redeployed and advance into Zaporzhzhia, parts of which are already held by Russian forces. Those freed up troops may also be deployed into Donestk. For the last two days we’ve been seeing video coming out of Ukraine showing Russia deploying fresh, top-tier weaponry (tanks, artillery, rocket/missile systems, troop transports) into place for a sustained attack from the east, north-east, and south-east.

Frankly, Moulitsos’ assertion that Russian troops have been “shredded” is as laughable a fantasy as is his assertion that Russian troops were “defeated” at Kiev. The Russian troops at Kiev were sent there to hold the Ukrainian troops in place while Russia destroyed any means they might have to redeploy to Donbass and relieve or resupply the troops in the east. Once Russia had degraded Ukrainian transport, C3 capabilities, anti-aircraft/artillery power, and armor to such a level that those troops were no longer a credible means of relief or resupply, they were withdrawn and redeployed in the east, in preparation for a full run to the Dnieper.

The Russian air force now has full control of the skies over all of Ukraine, so I really have no idea where Moulitsos is getting this idea that Russian forces are “shredded.” Russia is clearly doing the shredding–or rather, grinding–here, and doing it in a methodical, determined way with an attention to detail that indicates iot will not end until their stated political objectives are achieved.

From the videos I’ve seen (50 or so, over the last three days) coming out of Mariupol, the Russian forces seem to have excellent morale and are conducting themselves in a highly disciplined, professional fashion. There are lots of videos coming out of mopping up operations by Russian forces–Kadyrov’s Chechen urban warfare commandos particularly like to post videos–and Russian morale appears quite high and determined. There are also lots of videos of long lines and big crowds of civilians welcoming the Russian forces in as liberators, thanking them for their work and celebrating their arrival.

What we see of the Ukrainian forces, they seem extremely demoralized. The Ukrainians, in contrast to the Russians, have posted videos of the torture and execution of Russian POWs, with at least one high ranking commander bragging about these executions in social media. The position of the Tochka rocket booster that detached during flight just before it landed on the train station certainly and undeniably demonstrates the direction the missile arrived from: the Ukrainian side (false flag to gain NATO sympathy, 50 dead ethnically Russian civilians). Timelines, body decomposition, and photographic evidence of the massacre in Bucha firmly determines those deaths as having occurred well after the Russian withdrawal, reprisals by the Azov battalion against Russian “collaborators” (apparently, anyone who accepted food from the “occupiers”). The “mass graves” of which there is so much talk were casualties–both civilian and military–which occurred in the sustained fighting in that suburb over the last two months, most likely from Ukrainian artillery, since the Russians were positioned between the suburb and the Ukrainian forces. Thus, the Ukrainians were firing towards the city, and the Russians away.

Then there are the interviews with citizens of Mariupol, where unspeakable crimes against ordinary civilians are being described, such as the purposeful and indiscriminate shelling of entire neighborhoods, the locking of civilians in basements while the Ukrainian forces set up firing positions in the house above, the takeover of an old folks’ home where a firing position was established on the roof and all of the residents were locked up on the first floor–then fired upon with artillery once the Ukrainians were forced to retreat–which seems to have been a pretty common maneuver, since it has been described by several witnesses from different neighborhoods. All of these tactics and war crimes are totally consistent with actions of the Ukrainian military against Donbass civilians going back to 2014.

There have already been several mass surrenders of what appear to be two or three thousand Ukrainian troops in Mariupol. The Azov battalion is, along with its foreign advisers, holed up underground in the Azovstal steel works, which they (apparently) had earlier transformed into a command base. Russian forces have sealed them in, cut off their water, and rumors have it that fire trucks, cement trucks, and anything that can carry water are being brought in with the aim of flooding the ventilation system with water until the personnel inside finally decide to surrender–or not. It’s up to them, after all.

What makes matters worse is Putin’s artificial timetable of a major victory in the Donbas by 9 May…

The Russian forces have already achieved that victory in Mariupol, and the mayor of that city has been told to begin preparations for a military parade on May 9th. That is the first of the five major cities the Russian Federation plans on liberating: Mariupol, Kharkhiv, Dniepro, Odessa, and Kiev, perhaps in that order. Kadyrov unequivocally affirmed in an interview today that the Russian federation would definitely take the fight into Kiev.

The plan, apparently, is to liberate everything east of the Dnieper and turn that over to DPR and LPR control. There is some debate whether the Russian forces will continue their advance into western Ukraine; the people who I have read tend to be divided on that based on their interpretation of what Russia means by “denazification.” Some think that such a thing can be negotiated and legally enshrined without capturing the main players and putting them on trial, while others believe that actual prosecution and trials are a necessity. I don’t know enough about the situation to have any real opinion, but my WAG would be that yes, Russia likely will fight into the West until it gets a full surrender, whereupon it will hunt down the war criminals, Nazi leaders, and Nazi funders it has identified, dictate the terms of a new constitution, and guarantee a few more cultural reforms are promulgated (textbooks, for instance).