Russia's three-week parade formation blitz through Ukraine continues to rage on or near Ukraine's border with Russia. Russia's military is bleeding out and its economy is creaking. How long will either--and Russia's people--last under this pressure? Is America the only hope Russia has left? Maybe. But not in the way so may claim is true.
The war goes on. Even though attention is focused on the war with Iran. The Ukrainian counter-attacks in the Pokrovske sector seem to have expanded beyond just local counter-attacks in the ground it has liberated. I'd like to hope there is potential to get big enough to call it a counteroffensive. But I suspect the Ukrainian attacks will culminate and flow into a Russian spring offensive.
Let's talk greatest geopolitical mistake in history, shall we?
Four years after Russian dictator Vladimir Putin launched his blitzkrieg "special operation" to seize and annex every square kilometer of Ukraine, the former KGB colonel finds his corrupt, ineffectual but relentlessly murderous regime in a 21st-century military, economic and political quagmire.
Putin told his oligarch devotees the special operation would take three weeks at most.
While other costs have piled up, this one should be fatal to Putin:
"Total Russian losses since 2022 have been 1.4 million dead, disabled and missing." StrategyPage estimated Russian forces have suffered 400,000 casualties in the last 12 months and are currently "losing up to 35,000 soldiers a month." Mediazona researchers confirm by name 200,000 Russians military dead. Russia's government provides no figures. Two hundred thousand named dead makes a 400,000 death toll plausible.
Ukraine has suffered 55,000 military dead and some 300,000 wounded. Fifteen thousand civilians have been killed and 42,000 wounded.
Are Russians really fine with this debacle that has expended Russia's military on folly? A debacle that risks actual Russian territorial integrity by an actual threat? And it doesn't have to be invasion. Russia is falling so far, so fast that China may be able to quietly demand de facto control of key parts of Russia's Far East territory. How could Russia resist?
Russia is increasingly dependent on China for economic support and help in rebuilding an economy ravaged by more than four years of war in Ukraine. China is willing to help, but not as an ally but as a patron for its new Russian client state. China seeks to turn Russia into a vassal state.
How much more time does Putin have to save Russia--and his own life--with a hard choice that reflects the real world? Does Putin really want to risk the people around him being less paranoid than he is?
I don't really think China sent Putin as a plot against Russia. But the stupidity in Moscow is just mind boggling. Good Lord, could any foreign plot have harmed Russia more than Putin has?
Unless the seemingly pointless American peace talks with the Russians are just a cover for hammering out the terms of a Russian flip from aligning with China to America that ends Russia's war on Ukraine and hostility toward NATO.
Hey, if Stalin could go from Hitler's enemy to his ally and then back to enemy again (but earlier than Stalin thought), why not this kind of realignment?
NOTE: ISW updates continue here.
NOTE: Also, I put war-related links and commentary in the Weekend Data Dump on Substack. You may read my posts on Substack, at The Dignified Rant: Evolved.
