Russia has a perverse reason for losing thousands of soldiers trying to take a single small city in Donbas.
NOTE: Originally published on Medium, December 13, 2022
So what’s Putin after? Simple: bleeding Ukraine.
Now, Bakhmut is a road and rail junction that, if taken, would help Russian forces advance to the north and south towards the Donetsk regional border.
That is, if they can push uphill against prepared Ukrainian defenses.
But the main reason for losing thousands of soldiers every month since summer is even simpler than that.
Simply put, Putin is pulling a re-do of the Battle of Verdun, calculating this grind will harm Ukraine marginally more than it will Russia.
And the sad truth is that he might be right.
As ever, pundits in the English speaking world are so determined to out-cheerlead Ukraine’s fight they are obscuring a very important fact about Putin’s evil war.
Anyone who reads any of my blog posts over the past year will notice a consistent thread of criticism directed at mainstream war pundits in the Anglosphere.
I accuse them of ignoring empirical evidence and solid scientific theory in order to participate in a self-destructive information war.
Not having had much military success in operations abroad over the past half century, defense analysts across the English speaking world have covered up their incompetence by cultivating certain public narratives about war and warfare.
These are spread across the media because they tend to favor American arms industry interests and make for nice television.
However, American military long ago became less of a true modern fighting force and more of a show pony for politicians to use to score political points back home.
Like France in 1940, it’s a vulnerable beast unaware of its own limitations and unprepared to bounce back after an unexpected defeat.
American military science has decayed, embracing magic technological fixes instead of badly overdue bottom-up reforms like fixing the broken officer corps and industry-cozy Pentagon culture.
The military-industrial-media complex in America creates a totally false portrait of defense affairs that relies on most people simply not having the time or patience to learn the nuances of a highly technical field.
Trained by their media talking heads and politicians to salute the flag and talk about how much they love the troops, only 7% of Americans have ever actually served.
A natural consequence of this ancient pattern, familiar to anyone who has studied the rise and fall of complex social organizations, is extreme fragility that will likely be revealed in the early days of a future conflict — with catastrophic effects.
The inability of Western military pundits to recognize the point of Russia’s multi-month offensive in and around the Donbas city of Bakhmut offers a perfect example of this degradation in action.
It is now a near-perpetual refrain in media coverage of this bloody nightmare to insist that Russia gains nothing by it.
But in reality, losing 50–100 soldiers every day is a worthwhile investment from the perspective of Russia’s military leaders.
Over the past year, Russian tactics along most of the line of contact have evolved. A wave of newly-mobilized conscripts, often termed mobiks in Ukrainian sources, are sent forward in a wave.
Their job? Force Ukrainian forces to reveal their firing positions. You can’t ignore a wave of soldiers coming at you, and have to fire back.
In doing so, you reveal your fighting position, which can then be targeted by Russian artillery or ground attacks by more competent troops.
Brutal, costly, and damaging to morale? Certainly!
But in the Russian army, soldiers are trapped. So long as they aren’t the ones being used as cannon fodder, they’re not going to push back.
The survivors of these waves are promoted into the ranks of the veterans, who become non-commissioned officers and trainers for the next wave of incoming recruits.
This system looks nothing like the way of staffing and replenishing units that Western analysts are used to because most Western armies have never been seriously pressed.
When I was training to go to Iraq — a deployment that thankfully didn’t happen thanks to being selected for officer training — I personally saw units left bereft of the gear they needed to train for the fighting in Baghdad.
I saw officers treat enlisted soldiers with such callous disregard that one of the memories forever burned into my mind is rushung with fellow soldiers through 100+ degree heat and humidity in Louisiana to pull ice from a refrigerated truck.
On a training exercise, some idiot officer had refused to let his soldiers go back to base for a water resupply, despite the outpost being literally a five minute walk away and the training mission being long over. Failing to get his soldiers a resupply in the field, several men became so dehydrated and overheated they went into heat stroke.
Back at HQ, having become “casualty” earlier in the day while role-playing as an Iraqi Army soldier, I watched and helped medical personnel fighting to save the lives of young men utterly failed by officers more concerned with scoring well on an evaluation than protecting their people.
Big officer energy, I’ll always call that, and this sort of thing is an epidemic in American corporate life, a big part of why American companies and the billionaires who run them are generally trash.
Anyway, when hundreds of thousands of people are fighting across thousands of kilometers of front, the media habit of selecting a few juicy stories to use to portray what’s going on everywhere is deeply damaging.
Isolated incidents are revealing, but don’t portray the whole truth of what’s happening any more than my one anecdote about a bad officer reflects the state of the entire United States military.
What most war pundits won’t tell you is that they’re extrapolating from insufficient data most of the time. They’re entertainers, not educators, and deliberately package analysis to be spread widely on social and legacy media as part of an effort to shape public perception of the conflict.
It has become almost a universal point of agreement among the usual suspects that Russia is simply wasting lives in Bakhmut, a position that completely ignores the lessons of history.
In particular, they have forgotten Verdun.
Back in 1916, Germany and France were locked in an ugly stalemate along the Western Front.
Germany had been on the defensive since late 1914, annihilating wave after wave of British and French troops sent over the top into murderous machine gun fire and artillery barrages.
But here’s the thing about holding a fixed line — even if you’re defending, you’re suffering casualties too.
World War One was the first truly industrial conflict, where every participant was reduced to an input.
Russia’s assault on Ukraine is a direct evolution of this new and terrible way of waging war.
Russia’s leaders make calculations in Moscow based on gross statistics. One of these is the fact that Russia has a far larger pool of reserves to draw on.
Provided that Russian forces are inflicting at least a third as many casualties as they’re taking, this loss rate can be sustained almost indefinitely and will slowly drain Ukraine’s fighting strength.
Putin’s long-term game plan for Ukraine is coming into view. While giving most of his army time to recuperate and train up incoming reserves, units comprised of conscripts drawn from occupied territories and rural Russia get poured into the meat grinder.
Ukraine, meanwhile, is forced to keep a substantial force fixed in place holding the line. To support its infantry, Ukraine relies on the long-range firepower offered by western artillery systems to punish Russian batteries that open up in support of their troops.
This uses up copious quantities of ammunition, which is in increasingly short supply. It also increases wear and tear on equipment.
The same was true in Verdun, hundreds of thousands of shells dumped on trench lines and ammunition depots, too many of them still alive to this day, waiting to explode under some poor farmer’s tractor.
Meanwhile, Ukraine’s civilian population is heading into the depths of winter facing inadequate supplies of electricity, heat, and even water. Likely by using decoys and drones to absorb many of Ukraine’s defending missiles, Russia keeps slipping enough precision weapons into Ukrainian territory to maintain the assault on civilian infrastructure.
Now, is Russia’s strategy optimal, humane, or likely to deliver a breakthrough? Nope on all counts!
But it is a dangerous gambit for Ukraine, which now faces growing threats on multiple fronts. By pressing Belarus to prepare for war, Putin forces Kyiv to maintain defenses sufficient to prevent another march on the capitol later this winter.
Russia is boosting its arsenal of Iranian drones and likely tactical ballistic missiles, too, as it seeks a counter to HIMARS rocket strikes.
Something very important to remember about industrial warfare is that any moment your opponent isn’t actively losing people and equipment is one they’re getting stronger.
Putin is preparing his Orcs for another round of major offensives to be unleashed at the right moment. They will be better organized and prepared to achieve their objectives.
His goal remains identical today to what it was back in February: destroy Zelensky’s government.
But now, he plans to do what he ought to have from the beginning: win in Donbas, then move to attack other fronts.
Over the long run, Putin’s personal survival likely depends on breaking Ukraine apart. In the medium term, he needs to secure the territories he’s already annexed, in the hopes this along brings down Kyiv.
But if that doesn’t work, Putin will keep up the pressure indefinitely. He has no other option but to escalate until he is removed — or Ukraine’s allies cave.
As they already have on several key points, and likely will again in the future. Refusing to give Ukraine weapons “that can strike into Russia,” as US President Biden so pitifully terms it, is a testament to the success of Putin’s nuclear blackmail thus far.
It’s frankly perverse and dishonest to pretend that a HIMARS rocket with a 100km range isn’t a weapon capable of hitting Russia. Not giving Ukraine combat jets to protect its own airspace appears to be part of the same strange and arbitrary rule.
Failing to equip Ukraine’s land forces with modern tanks and infantry fighting vehicles appears to be part of this nonsense too.
Too many western leaders, especially Joe Biden, want to roll the clock back to 2021 and put the conflict in a box while Russia appears to be on the back foot.
They know full well that there is now a fundamental incompatibility between what Ukraine’s people will accept as a settlement and what Putin’s regime can without falling to a coup.
That tension, when it snaps in 2023, may yet trigger a nuclear exchange.
If and when Ukraine is able to threaten Crimea directly, Putin will be in a corner where the only way out, given his past rhetoric, will probably be a demonstrative nuclear strike.
His goal will be to see if the US is truly willing to engage in an open war. Putin’s recent statement that Russia might consider a US-style preventative strike is best seen as a reply to US commentators threatening conventional strikes on Russian forces operating in Ukraine.
In diplomatic-speak, this is his way of warning the US that any attack on Russian forces would be seen as the prelude to a broader assault on Putin’s regime, likely triggering a nuclear response.
The game of chicken is only getting more dangerous, hence the media’s shift to either ignore Ukraine or present Russia’s defeat as inevitable.
Bakhmut is becoming symbolic of this need to keep the public in the dark about the future of the conflict in Ukraine.
Russia is still in this thing to win, and for the moment is content to bleed Ukraine and tie down its forces to limit its counterattack potential over the winter.
Putin can see attitudes shifting in the United States, just as I’ve been warning would happen for months.
While having brutally underestimated Ukraine, Putin’s bet that many formerly colonized countries around the world would be too burned by the memory of Iraq and every other past US intervention to trust America completely has paid off handsomely.
He has successfully driven a wedge between Ukraine and other developing countries around the world that should be on its side — a hazard of having America and Britain as some of your most vocal supporters.
In any case, Putin knows that American leaders are desperate to fixate on China in order to keep the American people distracted from the ongoing collapse of their own country.
The more America and Russia fall apart internally, the closer he will embrace the fight between Moscow and D.C.
And so a new geopolitical order will be born, as the survivors of the Second World War destroy each other trying to sustain the dead postwar order.
The fighting for Bakhmut, which has left it and neighboring towns in utter ruins, is part of a greater trend in this war.
Like the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, this fight has taken on a life of its own and will continue until someone runs out of troops and gear.
Putin is banking on Ukraine hitting a wall first. And the lack of full support for Ukraine, perhaps best evidenced by the inexplicable reluctance to give it even Patriot air defense systems that can’t possibly pose a threat to Russia, gives him hope.
So the bloodletting in Bakhmut will continue. And if Russia wins, it will repeat the fight in Siversk, Kramatorsk, Sloviansk and perhaps even Kharkiv.
Want Russia to lose?
Arm Ukraine now. Full stop.