Appearances can be deceptive. Especially if a facade is expertly laid before western audiences by a mainstream news media that has nothing to gain in telling the truth.
While the entire western world focuses on what the Ukrainians are doing in Russia’s Kursk region where they have taken control of a large number of small villages and one town of some 6,000 souls the Russian military is achieving important strategic goals in the Donbass.
In a time when Ukrainian successes have been few and far between it is natural that the incursion into Russia is making the headlines across the NATO nations that comprise its support group. Only those paying sparse attention to detail can be unaware by now that Russia is in fact fighting a NATO force in Kursk, if not sheep-dipped NATO troops themselves then a Ukrainian force that has been brought up to NATO standard lately. Taking villages where the opposition is mainly civilian is not too onerous a task for such a force.
In comparison with what has faced the Ukranians till now, across the line of contact in the Donbass Russia has confronted fortified structures and defensive lines in depth built since 2014 when the president and government of Ukraine were overthrown, much to the delight of all western political and media elites. Those structures have allowed the Ukrainian military to pour shells and missiles into the civilian-populated hamlets, villages, towns and cities of the Lugansk and Donetsk regions of the Donbass ever since that 2014 coup on Maidan Square in Kiev. Now the Russian military are taking those fortified lines down.
While the Ukrainian troops raid and loot supermarkets, spend their time throwing down Russian flags and putting up Ukrainian ones and occasionally shoot and kill civilians Russian troops have been taking significant territory and have just taken the large town of Niu York (now in the process of being renamed). The major cities of Toretsk and Pokrovsk will be next to fall. Toretsk is one of the most heavily fortified cities in the part of the Donbass still held by the Ukrainians. Russian troops entered its suburbs this week and it can only be a matter of time before it succumbs to their occupation.
The Ukrainian incursion into Russia’s Kursk region has slowed down significantly in recent days. The toll of dead and wounded among the Ukrainian forces runs from 1,500 at the lower estimate to 5,000. The path of the Ukrainian raiding parties to the north is now well and truly blocked. This was the direction that it was clear they wanted to move speedily in in order to reach and capture the Kursk nuclear power plant. That road is now well and truly blocked. In view of this the Ukrainians are attempting to expand to the west and east, but with very limited success. Meanwhile ever more Russian forces are gathering to expel them from Russian soil.
In the Donbass Russia is threatening the extremely important logistical hub that is Pokrovsk. Every day brings the Russian military ever close to their target. The Ukrainian military is fleeing before them hoping to establish better defensive position to the west. It will avail them nothing. Russia is operating to the strategy that has worked well for them thus far, that is the tactic of inexorable slow attrition. The Russian military high command have made sure that the entire 1,000km plus battleground is kept in coordination with all logistical resources in place along with enough troops to maintain them and the territory taken. The Ukrainians by contrast have applied a haphazard strategy that cannot possibly bring similar results.
Zelensky and those who take their command from him play the media game, looking for one piece of theatre after another hoping to impress their western sponsors into shelling out more of their taxpayers’ hard won cash. This has worked well up until recently when coffers and arsenals have started to run dry. Only in the last few days we have heard from Germany that it has come to the end of the road regarding emptying its state treasury into the Ukrainian money pit. The Kursk incursion is in part yet another piece of staged performance art from Zelensky and his compliant new commander, Syrsky. Like all the previous stagings the present one will provide only limited and temporary success while causing thousands of Ukrainian deaths and the destruction of military vehicles that will soon not be replaced in the same numbers by their sponsors.
While Kiev struggles to find men on the street to manhandle to the front as cannon-fodder Russia has again seen a surge in volunteers enthusiastic about receiving training in the Russian military before helping rid their nation of the recent infestation of unwelcome Ukrainians. An increasingly poorly-trained Ukrainian force will face them, one with a very limited supply of weaponry and munitions. The Russian military industrial complex is running at high gear and it can be expected that very soon the Ukrainians will pay dearly with an especially powerful and widespread missile attack all across what is left of Ukraine.
Who is winning? Clearly not the clown in Kiev, his forced are being whittled down in their thousands daily while Russia speeds on by their corpses to take ever more land and the important towns and cities that are about to fall to them within the next few weeks and months. While Zelensky fools himself and his western paymasters into endless dreams of victory the reality is that all diversion of attention toward Kursk will provide the emptiest of Pyrrhic victories possible… ultimately no victory at all. In fact a catastrophic defeat.
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