By David Sole
Ukraine grabbed headlines recently as this proxy for the United States and NATO carried out dramatic military actions in the war with the Russian Federation.
On December 17 Russian Lt. General Igor Kirillov and his assistant were killed when a bomb hidden in a motor scooter exploded in a residential neighborhood in Moscow. Gen. Kirillov headed the Radiation, Biological and Chemical Defense Forces of the Russian Federation. Responsibility for the assassination was taken by the SBU – Ukraine’s Security Service claiming the general “a legitimate target.” Only a day later Russia announced it had arrested a 29-year-old Uzbek man who reportedly admitted planting the bomb on orders of Ukrainian agents.
The very next day Ukraine launched a massive long-range missile attack on the giant Kamensky Combine in Rostov province in southern Russia. Six U.S. supplied and operated ATACMS and four British/French Storm Shadow long-range missiles were directed at the chemical complex. The Russian Ministry of Defense reported that its air defense forces shot down all ten of the incoming missiles while debris from one damaged an auxiliary building near the plant.
The Russians were quick to respond. The pro-Ukrainian Kyiv Independent reported that Russian missiles hit Kiev, the nation’s capital city, targeting the “SBU command center and a missile manufacturing plant.”
Occasional missile attacks and assassinations, however, cannot win a war. Ukraine’s situation on the ground is getting more and more desperate. The Guardian is only the latest of Western media sources to raise the alarm about Ukraine’s deteriorating military. On December 21 that pro-Ukrainian news source admitted that Ukraine’s “Depleted army is increasingly made up of older men” and “faces difficult decisions over acute shortage of frontline troops.”
The Guardian reporter interviewed Ukrainian officers who said “The people we get now are not like the people who were there in the beginning of the war … Recently we received 90 people, but only 24 of them were ready to move to [frontline] positions. The rest were old, sick or alcoholics….and can barely hold a weapon. Poorly trained and poorly equipped.”
Ukrainian air defense units have had to send trained specialists to fill infantry shortages. One officer reported that “I’m left with those aged 50-plus and injured people. It’s impossible to run things like this.” A recent public opinion poll “found that 46% of respondents agreed that there was ‘no shame in evading military service.’” Only 29% thought evading was shameful.
A look at the long line of contact shows Russian forces advancing on all fronts. The battle for the critical military hub city of Pokrovsk now has Russian units at the very edge of the city while other Russian units are closing in from around the south, east and north in intense fighting.
In the Kursk province, Russian forces have been constantly pressing in on the Ukrainian units that originally seized a sizable area in their surprise August incursion. But they have stalled and are suffering major losses of troops and heavy weaponry daily. Some reports estimate that Ukraine holds only about 30% of the original territory it seized. That remaining area is sparsely populated and of no military value. Ukraine’s stubborn efforts to hold that territory only adds to its critical shortage of troops and equipment in the main areas of combat further south.
While fighting continues, both sides, no doubt, are also waiting to see what Donald Trump will do following his January 20 inauguration to the US Presidency. It isn’t clear, however, that Trump can or will make any real changes to the military situation, despite campaign promises to do so. Russia’s successes on the battlefield will strengthen its original demands of its Special Military Operation to demilitarize Ukraine, denazify Ukraine’s military and win concrete guarantees that Ukraine will not be permitted to join the anti-Russian NATO Alliance.
Be the first to comment