As Ukraine prepared to launch its much heralded but long delayed counteroffensive, the media published a photograph of a Ukrainian soldier with his finger on his lips, symbolizing the need for secrecy to retain some element of surprise for this widely publicized operation.
Now that the offensive has been underway for two weeks, it is clear that the Ukrainian government and its Western allies are maintaining silence for quite a different reason: to conceal the brutal cost Ukraine’s brave young people are paying to recover small scraps of territory from Russian occupation forces, in what some are already calling a suicide mission.
Ziko, Viewsridge, CC BY-SA 4.0
February 24, 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine
Western pundits at first described these first two weeks of fighting as “probing operations” to find weak spots in Russia’s defenses (which it has been fortifying since 2022 with multiple layers of minefields, “dragon’s teeth,” tank-traps, pre-positioned artillery, and attack helicopters that can fire twelve anti-tank missiles each).
On the advice of British military advisers in Kyiv, Ukraine flung Western tanks and armored vehicles manned by NATO-trained troops into these killing fields without air support or de-mining operations. The results have been predictably disastrous, and it is now clear that these are not just “probing” operations, but the long-awaited main offensive itself.
As a Western official with intelligence access told the Associated Press on June 14, “Intense fighting is now ongoing in nearly all sectors of the front . . . This is much more than probing. These are full-scale movements of armor and heavy equipment into the Russian security zone.”
U.S. General Mark Milley warned that the offensive will be long, violent, and costly in Ukrainian lives.ukraine offensiv
Other glimpses are emerging of the reality behind the propaganda. At a press conference after a summit at NATO Headquarters, U.S. General Mark Milley warned that the offensive will be long, violent, and costly in Ukrainian lives. “This is a very difficult fight,” Milley said. “It’s a very violent fight, and it will likely take a considerable amount of time and at high cost.”
Russian videos show dozens of Ukrainian tanks and armored vehicles lying smashed in minefields, and a military adviser in Ukraine confirmed that it lost thirty-eight tanks in one night on June 8, including some of the newly delivered German-built Leopard IIs.
Rob Lee of the Foreign Policy Research Institute explained to The New York Times that the Russians are deploying powerful weapons in the areas in front of their main defensive lines, turning those areas into lethal kill zones. If this strategy works, any Ukrainian forces that reach the main Russian defense lines will be too weakened and depleted to break through and achieve their goal of severing Russia’s land bridge between the Donbas region and the Crimean Peninsula.
Russia’s Ministry of Defense reported that Ukraine’s forces suffered 7,500 casualties in the first ten days of the offensive. If Ukraine’s real losses are a fraction of that, the long, violent bloodbath that Milley anticipates will destroy the new armored brigades that NATO has armed and trained, and serve only to escalate the gory war of attrition that has destroyed the cities of Mariupol, Sievierodonetsk, and Bakhmut, killing and wounding hundreds of thousands of young Ukrainians and Russians.
Public Domain
The Charge of the Light Brigade
Thomas Jones Barker, 1877. Defense Academy of the United Kingdom. Oil on canvas.
“We tried to tell them to stop these piecemeal tactics, define a main thrust with proper infantry support and do what they can,” a senior European military officer in Ukraine told Asia Times . “They were trained by the British, and they’re playing Light Brigade,” comparing the offensive to a suicidal charge into massive Russian cannon fire that wiped out Britain’s Light Cavalry Brigade in Crimea in 1854.
If Ukraine’s “Spring Offensive” continues on to the bitter end, it could be more like the British and French Somme offensive, fought near the French River Somme in 1916. After 19,240 British troops were killed on the first day, the battle raged on for more than four months of pointless, wanton slaughter, with more than one million British, French, and German casualties. It was finally called off after advancing only seven miles and failing to capture either of the two small French towns that were its initial objectives.
The current offensive was delayed for months as Ukraine and its allies grappled with the likelihood of the outcome we are now witnessing. The fact that it went ahead regardless reflects the moral bankruptcy of United States and NATO political leaders, who are willing to sacrifice young Ukrainian soldiers in a proxy war that they would not send their own children or grandchildren to fight.
As Ukraine launched its offensive, NATO conducted Air Defender, the largest military exercise in its history, from June 12 to 23, with 250 warplanes, including nuclear-capable F-35s, to simulate combat operations in and over Germany, Lithuania, Romania, the North Sea, and the Baltic Sea. The exercise has led to at least fifteen incidents between NATO and Russian aircraft in the skies near Lithuania.
It seems that nobody in NATO’s foreboding fortress in Brussels has stumbled on the concept of a security dilemma, in which supposedly defensive actions by one party are perceived as offensive threats by another and lead to a spiral of mutual escalation, as has been the case between NATO and Russia since the 1990s. As Richard Sakwa, an emeritus professor of Russian and European politics, wrote in 2014, “NATO exists to manage the risks created by its existence.”
These risks will be evident in the upcoming NATO Summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, on July 11 and 12, where Ukraine and its eastern allies will be pushing for Ukraine’s membership in the alliance. The United States and western Europe insist that membership cannot be offered while the war is raging and will instead offer “upgraded” status and a shorter route to membership once the war ends.
The continued insistence that Ukraine could one day be a NATO member can only prolong this conflict.
The continued insistence that Ukraine could one day be a NATO member can only prolong this conflict, as this is a red line that Russia maintains cannot be crossed. That’s why negotiations that lead to a neutral Ukraine are key to ending the war.
But the United States will not agree to that as long as President Joe Biden keeps U.S.-Ukraine policy firmly under the thumb of hawkish neoconservative desk warriors like Antony Blinken and Victoria Nuland at the State Department and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan at the White House. Pressure to escalate U.S. involvement in the war is also coming from Congress, while Republicans accuse Biden of “hemming and hawing” instead of “going all in” to help Ukraine.
Paradoxically, the Pentagon and intelligence agencies are more realistic than their civilian colleagues about the lack of any military solution. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has called for diplomacy to bring peace to Ukraine, and U.S. intelligence sources have challenged dominant false narratives of the war in leaks to Newsweek and journalist Seymour Hersh, telling Hersh that Blinken and Sullivan are ignoring genuine intelligence and inventing their own, just as the neocons did to justify the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Meanwhile, other world leaders continue to push for peace talks. A delegation of African heads of state led by President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa met with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Kyiv, and President Vladimir Putin in Moscow on June 17, to discuss the African peace plan for Ukraine.
Putin showed the African leaders the eighteen-point Istanbul Agreement that a Ukrainian representative had signed back in March 2022, and told them that Ukraine had thrown it in the “dustbin of history,” after the now disgraced former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson told Zelenskyy the “collective West” would only support Ukraine to fight, not to negotiate with Russia.
The catastrophic results of the first two weeks of Ukraine’s offensive should focus the world’s attention on the urgent need for a ceasefire to halt the daily slaughter and dismemberment of hundreds of brave young Ukrainians, who are being forced to drive through minefields and kill zones in Western gifts that are proving to be no more than U.S.- and NATO-built death-traps.