Leaked reports indicate a widespread breakdown in the Ukrainian frontlines, with units struggling to maintain combat readiness.
By Pepe Escobar
Evidence keeps piling up, via leaked reports, of an across-the-board breakdown in the Ukrainian frontlines.
Previously, we focused on the southern Zaporozhye front. Now let’s focus on Kharkov, in the northeast.
The attached document, fully verified for authenticity, is a July report to the Chief of Staff of the operational-tactical group “Sumy”.
The report essentially says that it’s impossible to withdraw two thirds of the A7383 unit from the battlefield to recover combat readiness because the remaining one third is incapable of holding the fort – which happens to extend along 55.5 km.
In parallel, recruiting was proceeding very slowly.
As of four months ago, the 127th separate territorial defense brigade in Kharkov was still equipped with 72% of personnel – 2,392 soldiers and 256 officers. Yet, crucially, the moral-psychological condition of the unit was critical – just as in the previous instance in Zaporozhye.
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So forget about recovering combat readiness: this is yet another case of a brigade – now in Kharkov – that cannot fight properly. The previous case was far from being an exception to the current rule.
The conclusion is stark: with whole brigades in critical condition, the entire Ukrainian frontline may be about to fall.
The Hundred Days Debacle
Facts on the ground point to the Russian Armed Forces (RAF) taking the initiative all along the SMO frontlines. This is recognized even by Polish and Estonian intel. Main battles are being fought on the Avdeevka-Marinka line in the DPR and the Kupyansk-Svatovo line in the LPR.
RAF has enough manpower and weapons to keep the Ukrainians under a 24/7 state of despair. Objectives remain the same: to capture the whole of DPR and LPR within their administrative borders.
In parallel, the ever-unplugged Dmitri Medvedev, Deputy Chairman of the Russian Security Council, has announced a massive increase in the production of weapons and military equipment. Medvedev constantly stresses that the capabilities of the Russian defense industry have reached an unprecedented level – and much faster than expected.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov, for his part, echoes what Foreign Minister Lavrov has been detailing for months now: Kiev – and its NATO handlers – better realize they cannot and won’t “win” in the battlefield.
Medvedev always relishes upping the ante: “The West must admit that not only Donbass and Crimea are not Ukraine, but also Odessa, Nikolaev, Kiev and practically everything else.”
That was a sharp response to former NATO Secretary- General Anders “Fogh of War” Rasmussen, who said that Kiev could be accepted into NATO “without lost territories,” referring to Crimea and Donbass.
That set Medvedev on a roll: “What then should we admit to NATO, you ask? Well, we can accept the city of Lemberg with its surroundings [the Lviv region] if they really insist there.”
This analysis focuses on “what the Russians are doing with their ongoing ‘mud season offensive’ in Ukraine, really a collection of local attacks across the length of the front line” – with the exception of Kherson.
Strategically, Russia has committed none of its own massive reserves while the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) are pressured all along the frontlines – and the Russians silently prepare a surprise knockout blow elsewhere.
A Perfect Storm of dwindling financing, weaponizing and Western “support” has darkened Kiev’s horizon, while serial Ukrainian disasters on the ground are so obvious they are even being picked up by Western mainstream media.
This ain’t no “stalemate”.
The previous analysis is only one among many that matches the breakdown of Ukrainian brigades across the frontlines – consisting “largely of units already mauled in their disastrous Hundred Days Offensive.”
The Hundred Days Offensive should rather be qualified as NATO’s Hundred Days Debacle.
The debacle is the key reason why the “Biden combo” administration is now desperately trying to impose a ceasefire: a face-saving gambit as crucial as throwing the sweaty sweatshirt in Kiev under a double-decker bus.
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Views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House.
Comments
8 responses to “This Ain’t No ‘Stalemate’: Ukrainian Frontline Breakdown, Revisited”
Pass me a Taiwan…all my other proxies seem to be folding into a domino cascade.
Lets go for bU$t.
Zelensky said to be heard mumbling whilst sipping his schnapps on a street corner, “Just give me another 20 years to breed more Ukies and restore my army to fighting strength and those Moskals will rue the day they chose to tangle with the great great grandsons of Stepan Bandera!”
The world’s biggest and best ever military machine has give Ukraine all that it asked for and more. Weakening Russia was said to be an easy task since anyway sanctions were going to cripple it. Now all of that suburb fighting equipment is being burned and blown away by the incompetent and weak Russians. How can this be? Maybe Zionist US has become distract by the problems in Zionist Israel?
The U.S. military is the most heavily armed “fighting machine,” but no one who knows the U.S. military thinks it’s the world’s best fighting machine. Burdened with hugely expensive crap such as the F-35, filled with lazy, unwilling soldiers — Rolling Stone had an article years ago in which it was clear that recruits didn’t even have to show up for work they were assigned — and always invading other countries does not equal DEFENDING your homeland!
Mr. Escobar…..this essay is more of a propaganda piece than an “analysis”. Focusing on one brigade in no way offers evidence of a breakdown all along the line of engagement and citing the unhinged Medvedev or the lying Lavrov in no way lends credibility to your thesis. Far better assessment are available from Andrew Tanner on Medium with detailed analyses of each of the four major fronts and up-to-date rather than 4 month old assessments of part of the Kharkiv front. The establishment of rudimentary beachfronts on the Kherson front bringing Ukrainian long range ATACAMS and HIMARS into play in attacks on Russian logistical formations and infrastructure are part of what it looks like is a “framing” strategy that may very well lead to the fall of Crimea in the spring of 2024. Despite increasing offensive pressure by the Russian Army in both Bakhmut and Andiivka, Russian personnel losses are mounting and their forces have had to retreat as throwing bodies is unwise military action in the face of the new high tech and conventional mines used by both sides.
What is curious to me is what prompts you to write such a propaganda piece. War is ugly and a terrible blight on not only current but future generations. The traumas are deep and longstanding and the cost in human spirit, life and in treasure is never worth the expenditure. What is your purpose for writing this nonsense which in no sense reflects the objective truth of the Russian invasion and Ukrainian resistance?
“lying Lavrov”? You apparently would not even recognize a genuine diplomat — a man considered the greatest diplomat in the world — because you have immersed yourself in the likes of Guardrails whose stepfather was a mob-connected lawyer (explains how he gets his jobs). And if you’re opposed to war, I would suggest you criticize the greatest danger to the entire world, the United States of America.
Mr. Escobar is a writer that really knows what he is talking about. Propaganda or not, true or not, it is an excellently written paper.
Get to know Pepe Escobar and you will enjoy as many do. He is on with Danny Haiphong often.
Pepe has lived (for many years) in just about every corner of this globe and knows intimately the attitudes and desires of disparate peoples across this planet. The man is fantastically widely read in history, geography, politics and even science. He knows of which he speaks on the widest range of topics. His own writings will take you, if you are willing with an open mind, from the roof of the world in the Hindu Kush to the Arctic, the deserts and the tropics, from the East to the West, and from the North to the global South. He always wants to know what makes not only individual people but entire populations of people tick, why they are different and how they are the same. One cannot score points with cheap shots against Pepe, or against Mr. Lavrov, for that matter.