Diego Sequera and Ernesto Cazal
Today, February 24, marks the first anniversary of the Special Military Operation (SMO) launched by the Russian Federation in Ukraine, announced by its president, Vladimir Putin. There is hardly any geopolitical event of greater magnitude so far this century, which has been nurtured by major events and tectonic movements that have impacted the entire planet.
At practically all levels and in practically all spheres of geopolitics, international relations, war, economics and energy, everything has been fundamentally disrupted by a war, or the military response to an indirect, hybrid war, which had been going on for years, turning the course of the planet and its destiny upside down.
Given the overwhelmingly comprehensive nature of these movements, in this series we propose a sequence of “vignettes”, a part for the whole, to outline the elements with which preliminary balances can be drawn in a global situation that still has an open ending. In the first part, the product of a year of monitoring, coverage and study, two military points will be addressed, which, from less to more, will cover elements of greater scope in the two subsequent installments.
1. IS NATO NEARING ITS END?
With the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) towards Eastern Europe, adjacent to the Eurasian space and, therefore, the historically Russian territory (including its zone of influence), the military pressure of the United States and its cohort of trained partners on the Russian Federation was consolidated until it collided with the red lines marked by the Kremlin itself. This did not translate into an alarm but rather into an encouragement for the neoconservative factors for the preparation, provisioning and allocation of resources in the war field to Ukraine, designated since 2014 as a wedge wedge for the purpose of Western aggression on Russia.
In a generalized way, a supposed superiority of the Atlanticist alliance was consolidated in the world imaginary after decades of campaigns of assault on smaller countries and organizations (remember the Libyan tragedy, for example), which had not been disputed until a year ago, when all the logistical support in arms, ammunition and various equipment to Kiev came up against the current reality of a world that had inadvertently (for them) changed in military affairs.
The clearest expression of this is in the existing state of their military-industrial ecosystem compared to the Russian deployment. This can be illustrated, first of all, by what is available to Ukraine in terms of ammunition relative to what is deployed by Russia.
According to a report published in Sky News, the Russian army has fired an average of 20,000 artillery shells a day, compared to the 5-6,000 that the Ukrainian army fires daily. The British medium considers that “not since the great battles of World War II has artillery been used with such ferocity and intensity as it is now in Ukraine.”
There is more. A military analysis by blogger Simplicius The Thinker concludes that Russia “has launched more cruise missiles in the first year of the Ukrainian conflict than the United States has launched of its famous ‘Tomahawks’ in the entire four-decade lifespan” of that weaponry. If we can take as true the figures emanating from Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky in August 2022,, Russia has launched more than 3,500 missiles, “and since then Russia has only increased the intensity, which means that at this point the count probably exceeds 5,000. Meanwhile, the United States has launched a total of 802 Tomahawks during the entire Iraq War from 2003 onward, and about 2,300 total since the inception of the Tomahawk in the early 1980s.”
Considering that “the U.S. has an arsenal of about 4 thousand Tomahawks in total today, and in recent years, they have only produced about 100-150 of them per year,” it would not be strange then “if the Western bloc repeatedly encountered shortages of guided munitions as recently as during the Libyan conflict in 2011. Think of it this way: if Russia has launched more than 5,000 cruise missiles at Ukraine so far, which has not even moved them, imagine what 4,000 Tomahawks could do to Russia. In a direct confrontation, the United States would run out of all precision-guided missiles in no time, what would they rely on after that? Artillery?”, comments the aforementioned author.
This data clearly shows the erosion of NATO’s weapons capabilities, including those of the United States, in the face of a Russian military-industrial complex that is much more robust and productive in the face of war scenarios than its Atlanticist counterparts.
In mid-February, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, declared that “Ukraine’s current rate of ammunition spending is many times higher than our current production rate,” which “puts our defense industries under pressure”.
In short, NATO countries are running out of military supplies to arm Kiev. Sky News affirms that “some analysts” believe that the Atlantic organization “would not have enough supplies to fight Russia if it did now. Germany is reported to have ammunition supplies for two days, for example, if Russian tanks cross its borders”.
While data on ammunition is difficult to obtain and classify, Reports published in various US and European media point out that there are not enough and that production must increase. Stoltenberg so you understand: “It is clear that we are in the logistics race … A war of attrition turns into a logistics battle”.
But waiting times for some ammunition “have more than doubled”. “Europe’s factories can barely produce enough shells to meet Ukraine’s needs for a week,” according to an article published in Financial Times with the more than suggestive title “A year of war in Ukraine has dried up Europe’s arsenals”.
The general break in global supply chains, the lack of investment in the European military defense field, the own difficulties to achieve a kind of synergy between arms production companies in the area of Atlantic influence and the competition for contracts that could justify the absorption of costs while austericide is consolidated as the economic navigation chart of the European Union, They increase the industrial difficulty that reveals NATO’s challenge to the objectives set in a war of attrition with Ukraine as a pivot.
According to the Kiel Institute, NATO countries have supported Kiev to the tune of more than $110 billion, including $38 billion in arms.
The Joe Biden government has also given Ukraine a reason not to send long-range missiles to the battlefield: it is concerned that it does not have enough for itself “and would harm the preparation of the US military for a future fight, “according to a report of Political. At the same time as the Center for Strategic and International Studies ( CSIS, one of the think tanks most important on the Washington, D.C. circuit., categorically accepts that the United States’ weapons inventories need to be “rebuilt” because they are “in crisis,” a logistical replacement that “will take many years”.
The contrast of the picture described with respect to the Russian defense industry is stark. President Vladimir Putin, in a speech on the occasion of Defender of the Fatherland Day on February 22, confirmed that “troops will receive state-of-the-art equipment with the industry rapidly increasing production of the entire range of armaments,” adding that “we will continue to supply our troops with the most advanced equipment.” This involves new strike systems, reconnaissance and communication means, drones and artillery systems. He also noted that Russian defensive capabilities would be strengthened based on the combat experience gained.
Public relations statements and campaigns, coupled with the military doctrines of each side, take the stage on site, at least in the case of Russia, which shows a healthier arms muscle than that of the American and European powers, which is demonstrated on the battlefield. Sustaining, production and manufacturing power sets the balance in favor of Moscow, which works 24 hours in this strategic area, which has allowed it to overshadow NATO’s arms manufacturing potential in many key areas, and that is exemplified in the ammunition spent and the challenges that Americans and Europeans have in supplying military equipment to Ukraine.
The U.S. does not stand a chance of coming out on top in scenarios of wars against powerful regular armies. Russian military analyst Andrei Martyanov, a graduate of the Sevastopol academy who maintains the blog “Reminiscences of the future,” has written a series of books exposing how the revolution in Russia’s military affairs has undermined U.S. hegemony in this area so dear to its imperial imagination. But not only has it lost the competitive edge: the U.S. military is not tailored to the military needs witnessed in the world today. Its structure is limited to the war capacity of smaller warlike organizations and not to what has been developed by the Russian power.
But Martyanov’s point that the structure of the post-industrial U.S. military reflects its post-industrial, financialized, export-driven dollar system economy and debt inflation can also be directed at NATO as a multinational military entity, with Washington as the undisputed leader of the alliance. Its production capacity is limited by the crisis experienced by the Eurozone economy, whose industrial configuration is almost totally dependent on Russian energy, at least until the imposition of European Union (EU) “sanctions”.
Just as the EU was not prepared to cut off Russia’s energy flow to Europe, NATO did not foresee the consequences that a lacerated economy could have on its military-industrial complex. A prolonged indirect war against Russia would have required the organization to overhaul its member armies and, consequently, its industrial complexes, something it did not do, and the effects are noticeable today.
In view of the military-industrial crisis at the heart of the United States and Europe, opinions about a possible end of NATO are increasingly heard in the media and on digital platforms. In Sweden (a country whose rulers aspire to join the North Atlantic Treaty), publicist Lars Bern argued in an interview with SwebbTV that Europeans underestimated “the Russian military industry enormously: the speed with which the Russians produce new projectiles and missiles”, while the opposite effect to the interests of the United States and the organization it leads may be brewing: “When the Russians brought in troops, they said they would demilitarize Ukraine. But do you know what they are doing now? They are demilitarizing NATO.”
Consider that the United States will no longer be able to hold on to Europe as a power in the military area, a factor that would indicate that NATO’s transcontinental wars will end in the near rather than distant future. The war in Ukraine and the Dombas would confirm this scenario, as the Russian offensive increases in power and tactical deployment.
The combined military-industrial capabilities of the two and a half dozen countries of the Atlanticist bloc cannot compete with those of their Russian adversary, the latter capable of maintaining the same pace, scale and scope of the ongoing OME despite the economic, financial and trade war against it. Some thirty countries cannot do so collectively. The “logistics race” conditioned by the “war of attrition” that Russia is winning on the ground would force NATO to finally yield in the contest for military supremacy, ultimately undermining its own legitimacy and operational capability as an offensive warfare organization.
Everything indicates that even the business of war in all its fullness could not save the Atlantic alliance from an almost certified defeat as of today, taking into account that it is the main American companies that see how their coffers are filled with profits while the Europeans, as vassals, complain about the situation and recognize, despite the fact that in this sense the balance of capital is on the North American side of the Atlantic. All the while Russia strengthens its position as a military power..
2. THE BAKHMUT LANDSCAPES OR WHAT A WAR OF ATTRITION LOOKS LIKE IN THE 21ST CENTURY
Broadly speaking, at least since Iraq 1991, with the mutation of armed conflicts, the means of media coverage and its diffusion have also mutated. If in 1991 live wars were premiered by CNN, with its greenish images, product of the rudimentary night vision of those times when missile loads fell on Iraqi targets difficult to see (perfected later, as we saw, with the first charges against civilian infrastructure in 2003), and if in the meantime Libya and Syria were wars of social networks, mainly YouTube and Twitter, the Russian-Ukrainian conflict is, by far, the war by Telegram.
A strange dialectic between Western censorship and citizen initiatives resulting from the inadequacy and/or deficiency of the usual media coverage, the incessant production of information via Telegram has represented a little-studied revolution in communication.
The profuse number of channels and sources, sometimes chaotically compiled, has been a source that seems to reduce even more the lapses of real-time monitoring, since the range between the frank disinformation or propaganda colludes with follow-ups, analysis and even opinions of the highest level and seriousness, offering a nervous mosaic of references for consultation that given its quantity (and variable quality), produces a classic situation of informative opulence: the voluminous, even pantagruelic, informative offer makes practically impossible an “orderly” follow-up of political events, but especially military ones, which finally does not end up “informing” anything if it is done automatically.
Granular war tracking does not help newcomer open source (OSINT) virgin nerds to be able to reliably measure battles so easily, see shore to ongoing situations, or by their torrential constancy, fish out and give their fair value to various newsworthy or not so newsworthy but very specific facts about the battlefield. To this must be added the propagation and military and civilian use of drones and cell phones on the very line of contact and on the very long front line, offering an additional layer of audiovisual archive that redefines the information landscape by its level of detail.
Contrasting it with the coverage of the war against Syria practically a decade earlier, the simultaneity of fronts, theaters of operations, triumphs and setbacks becomes an almost carnivalesque affair: the coverage of the battle of Aleppo, in 2016, regardless of the sources, were fewer parts that had to be joined to have a clear idea about the development of events, especially in its last stage.
So, for the practical purposes of this paper, to talk about the military situation, everything will be focused on a single battle, today the most important, which in a way offers a synthetic or general measure of what has been the mechanics of military operations, on both sides, in broad strokes.
We are talking about the battle of Bakhmut (or Artiomovsk, as it was called during the Soviet era), in the central Dombas, in the Donetsk oblast, now a Russian province. Of all, the highest point on the entire mapping of south-southeastern Ukraine at the moment, on a map that in recent months, since the Russian withdrawal from the town of Kherson, on the right bank of the Dnieper River, very little has moved in any significant direction on the more than one thousand kilometers of contact line.
The city, located northeast-central Donetsk, in addition to being one of the most fortified points in the entire Dombas, including the salt mines of (the now liberated) Soledar, is a critical road, automotive and railway junction, where the main roads connecting the region converge, where the main supply lines for the Ukrainian army are established in the area. On the other hand, the city and its surroundings in the north and south constitute the dividing line between the territories under control on one side and the other.
In all directions it communicates with such important urban concentrations as Severdonetsk and Lyman in the north, in Lugansk with the city of Donetsk in the south, in the northwest with Slavyansk and Kramatorsk.
In this sense, for both it has a cardinal strategic importance: once Bakhmut was liberated, the concentrations of Slavyansk and Kramatorsk would remain in order to, in essence, liberate Donetsk and to a great extent the Dombash. It was in Slavyansk that the military uprising against the coup government in Kiev began in 2014, and it is probably there that the Dombash campaign will end.
Bakhmut/Artyomovsk has been in the crosshairs since at least May 2022. The Wagner Private Military Company (PMC), a group now declared a criminal entity by the United States and one of the notorious bête noires for the West, has operated predominantly (but not exclusively) on that front, on a par with Ranzam Kadyrov’s Chechen units.
But it has been since mid-late November that it has become the most important flashpoint of the whole war at the moment. It would be foolhardy and false to claim that the rest of the battlefield has remained static, but it is here that a decisive battle is being fought for all, even if at the moment Ukrainian government spokesmen pretend to qualify it as an unimportant city.
How it has been approached by the media mainstream global, compared to the version that is handled, let’s say, from the pro-Russian field, it is in tune with the treatment that all the other great episodes have received, narratively adjusted:
- The city is a decisive battlefield
- there the Ukrainian forces stop and push back the different “human waves” of the Russian Federation and the Wagner group,
- Bakhmut has incalculable strategic value and that is why it will always be a bastion that will defend itself until the last,
- it is not true that the Russian offensive is successful,
- the destruction that makes the city a devastating lunar landscape it is exclusively Russian work,
- As a result of problems and failures, there are major conflicts and differences between Wagner and the Russian regular units ( or Dombás militias ),
- internal quarrel escalates to a clash between leaders, in this case Wagner’s Yevgeny Prigoshin and the Russian Defense Ministry,
- Despite Russian advances, a millimeter of Bakhmut will not be ceded,
- Bakhmut has no strategic value any
- and it is possible that sometime Ukraine gives up this unimportant square.
Any monitoring of the combat year will repeatedly come across nervously colorful and unverified matrices claiming that Russia is running out of missiles, or artillery, that it has two weeks of inventory left, that Ukrainian “counterattacks” (Kharkov, Kherson) have been withering and irreversible, that the Russian army (and allies) is actually composed of kidnapped conscripts, common criminals and fanatical units (Chechens), that at any moment there will be a coup d’état in Moscow, that Putin has cancer, that he is terminally ill, that he suffers from dementia, etc. And that Russia is losing thousands of soldiers and mercenaries daily in Bakhmut.
But this string of unverifiable assertions is not describing or analyzing the reality on the battlefield; it is useful to note the degree of propaganda or narrative urgency that continues to lend meaning and controlled emotion to Western audiences. Much may be said of the rough and tumble, sometimes inaccurate or anti-climactic, reporting of the Russian Ministry of Defense and orbiting broadcast sites, but it has always been in a superior measure adjusted to reality.
Is Bakhmut important or not for the Ukrainian military?
Here one should not lose sight of the fact that by breaching, slowing down or omitting the 2015 Minsk II agreements, Kiev and NATO used the time gained to reform and re-structure the army, but also to fortify and establish defensive lines in the areas they controlled of the Dombas, foreseeing the scenario of the probable (and inevitable?) direct military intervention by Moscow.
In that sense, as seen in the graph below, several defensive axes are visible. Again, any point-by-point monitoring of the Dombas campaign will give an account of how it has been precisely these fortified defense lines that over the past year have been taken down by the Russians and allied militias in Donetsk and Luhansk.
Map of the four lines of contact on the border with Luhansk (Photo: Big Serge).
Bakhmut/Artyomovsk is located on the third effective and solidly fortified line, before a fourth and last one (Slavyansk, Kramatorsk, Konstantinovka), the least consolidated and which had the least time to strengthen, in relation to the previous defensive belts.
On the other hand, let us consider what the media also say when referring to the city in question, a strategic point of interconnectivity with the different exits-entrances to the region.
By December 22, the Forbes correspondent stated that on the Russian side, according to the author of the article (who does not go out of the established line), 40 thousand common prisoners died in human waves crashing against the best eight brigades of the whole Ukrainian army: the 60th and 71st infantry brigades; the 24th, 57th, and 58th mechanized brigades; the 4th tank brigade; the 46th airborne brigade; the 128th mountain brigade.
To this list must be added the conscript battalions of the territorial guard, paramilitary formations and numerous foreign mercenary units.
On the other hand, it is estimated that in just over three months of intensified fighting, every four hours a new combatant enters the defense of the city (which is still neither completely surrounded nor besieged), with a figure of 45 thousand dead on the Ukrainian side (one of the most sober estimates), with 400-500 casualties per day, among the dead, wounded and surrendered.
Despite the schizoid narrative cycle that goes from Bakhmut as a great defensive bastion to an absurd “symbolic and political” battle for the Russians obsessed with a not very strategic enclave, such a bloodletting, in which the best Ukrainian units, plus 26 other units that would make 34 brigades in total, have been put into play (and must have already withdrawn), would it make any sense to make such an effort for such a little thing? And if, as they want to try to say, the bleeding of troops and resources is on the Russian side, when would it stop?
Cutting through the curtain of narrative noise with which they try to cover the battle, an Australian mercenary, identified only by the pseudonym “soldier X”, interviewed by an Australian video blogger currently following the war in Ukraine, who in his statements clearly establishes that he is a special forces soldier with respectable tactical knowledge, reveals that Ukraine is losing, that the Russians, especially Wagner, are not primitive military formations as the European logic says (“garden” of Borrell), that Ukraine is losing, that the Russians, especially Wagner, launching human waves of common prisoners activating their “Mongolian hordes genes” (as if it were first real, and second something “bad”), but a capable, well-organized and quite creative army.
He also admits, for his part, with the benefit of his veiled identity, that although the Wagner PMC in particular is not without casualties, those suffered by the opposing side are greater.
Taking into account that admission that comes directly from an authoritative voice and not from a mili-dilettante hack working for a magazine dedicated to following and extolling great fortunes, the former presenting a frankly bleak picture, let’s add another analytical layer to this.
A little more than three months have passed in which the imprint of the combat has been a very slow advance (sober voices estimate that Bakhmut will be completely liberated in March-April, among them Prigozhin himself, Wagner’s leader), in which each position is methodically occupied after a softening with artillery on the positions in the first line of defense, and then a coordinated advance, has been leading to what has been stated up to now. Methodical slowness on the one hand translates into a systematic depletion of troops and resources on the other, in an area that can basically be understood as a fixed. What does that tell us?
Serious specialists would speak of a static war of positions, and consequently of a war of attrition where the logistic and combat capabilities of the Ukrainian army are gradually crushed, in a single point of the cartography of the war. It is to be understood as the dispatch of units and brigades from other sides of the front “dealing” exclusively with this point on the map, weakening others and wearing down even more the operational capacity. A permanent and sustained degradation of inventories, with a replenishment increasingly difficult to achieve, especially in the times when it is needed.
The battle of Bakhmut is then a black hole through which men and indispensable armament systems, almost irreplaceable at this point, which are necessary for the future battles, fall and disappear, daily.
On the other side we havena group of allied formations that, maximizing the asymmetric advantage of superiority in artillery fixed in a position to the enemy, at a notably lower cost, maintain numbers and armament systems in reserve for the next steps, after a methodical destruction of the offensive and defensive possibilities of the opponent.
In the classical sense, Maneuver warfare. Actions of “distraction” force the opposing side to devote resources and attention to a single point while others are weakened, worn out, eventually facilitating the advance of the opponent in other theaters of operations, since units that were in better capacities to defend or attack at this point, are fixed in another. Such as it was done with the pseudo-siege to Kiev at the beginning of the war, to give only one eloquent example.
In essence, what is happening in Bakhmut projected on a larger scale, has been the logic and nature of the Russian campaign in the Dombas from the beginning: slow, prone to distort its development as that of a military action offering “few results” according to the Western media, where it is Russia that is being bled.
Under that argument, throughout 2022 the Ukrainian military has consisted of variations of armies being dismantled and then re-raised with foreign assistance, “destroying the pre-war force in the initial months, then fighting units that were resupplied with Warsaw Pact inventories, and now a degrading force that is largely dependent on Western systems.”
It is likely that by now many of these elite units have been evacuated or rotated and that a higher percentage of the Russian army, the Donbas militias and the Wagner group are mainly facing conscripts, which makes the scenario even more tragic in in which countless recruits with little military preparation or readiness for combat are being systematically eliminated or deactivated.
Prigozhin himself, in an interview, confirms that the purpose of Bakhmut and the essential function of Wagner is precisely to be “the main point of attraction” that allows troops elsewhere to “operate comfortably” since the task is precisely to make this mining town a “meat grinder”, alluding to the constant influx of Ukrainian and NATO “cannon fodder”.
Thus, finally, we can use Bakhmut first as the imprint of what has been the fundamental tactic to confront Ukraine and NATO, how this effort despite the deliberate misreporting by the mainstream media has the results it has, what are the urgencies of Ukraine-West, where its military forces are being slowly, methodically and gradually suppressed, and why the desperation to continue transferring new inventories of artillery systems, tanks, anti-aircraft batteries, etc., no matter the cost.
Bakhmut is the reduced scale reproduction of the Dombas campaign, whose resolution, at least for this specific mission, will be the point of no return, as there is no anxiety or rush of the Russian Federation army to achieve its strategic objectives, since demilitarization, denazification and protection of the Dombas population are moving forward. The three main objectives of the Special Military Operation.
Translation by Internationalist 360°
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