For those who think I rely too much on Ukraine updates and Peter Zeihan videos, enjoy this Peter Zeihan video update on Ukraine!
Takeaways:
“Everything that the Russians were bad at before (propaganda, logistics, precision, training, maintenance, equipment), everything they were bad at before, they’re worse at now.”
Ukraine has moved from trying to stop the Russian advance with shoulder-mounted weaponry to longer-range heavy artillery, allowing them to hit ammo dumps, logistical hubs and high-value officers.
“The degree to which the Ukrainians are able to put targeting information, either from their own human network or signal intelligence that is provided by the Americans, and put it to use has been very impressive, and it has snarled the entirety of the Russian advance in both the east and the south.”
“Russia may be running out of ammunition.”
Russian doctrine calls for slow advances prepared by massive artillery barrages.
“They faced a massive industrial collapse in the 1990s that they never really covered recovered from.”
They have fought three artillery intensive wars since the Soviet collapse: two in Chechnya and then one in Syria. So now the Russians are attempting to advance over a front that’s a thousand miles long with a burn rate for their artillery in excess of 40,000 shells a day. Going through a relatively small by Soviet standards arsenal that has been acquired since the Soviet collapse, when the industrial system collapses. Well, any equipment any shells that they’re going to use that are not from that stack are things that were built before 1989, meaning that they’re in excess of 30 years old. We’ve seen reports several a year in Russia going back 30 years that, every once in a while, one of these shells [just] cooks off and the entire ammo dump goes up. It’s entirely possible that some of the explosions were seeing in places like Belograd or Western Russia are not actually being caused by the Ukrainians, but by the Russians manhandling of their own equipment. But regardless, that burn rate 40,000 a day is not something that anyone could maintain at length.
Thus Russia has been shooting at big static targets like train stations and malls. “They have the feel of being a little bit more than the Russians shooting at things to demonstrate to the world that the Russians can still shoot at things. Tanks and infantry are not following up on any of these attacks.”
“Kherson was the only major city that Ukrainians ever lost to the Russians, the only regional capital.”
“All the normal things that plague offensives are appropriate to think about here. They trigger higher casualties among the attackers than the defenders. They require more troops, They require better logistics. They’re more vulnerable to disruption. All of that stands. Also, you have to consider that this isn’t simply Ukraine’s first significant offensive in the war, but this is Ukraine’s first significant offensive ever.”
“The Ukrainians have continually surprised to the upside, and the Russians have continually surprised at the downside. So what should have been a wildly unbalanced war that should have been over four months ago all of a sudden, if not a conflict among equals, is suddenly looking like a little bit more of a fair-ish fight.”
Summary of the Kherson situation so far, including damage to the bridges, covered here and here.
No guarantee that the Ukrainians will win in Kherson, but it obviously offers them the best chance.
“If it proves that the Ukrainians are successful [Russian] forces are going to have to evacuate on foot, they are going to have to leave all of their gear behind…this would be the single biggest military transfer to Ukraine of the post-war environment, and certainly of this war…all of a sudden, the Ukrainians might actually have what they need.” Sometimes Zeihan has a tendency to overstate things, and I think he does that here. Yes, they’ll probably capture some usable heavy equipment, but the estimates I hear are some 20,000 Russian troops in Kherson, and I’m not sure how many functional military vehicles will be left in usable condition after such heavy fighting. They might well pick up significant quantities of towed artillery.
He talks about the importance of taking Nova Kakhkovka, and controlling the irrigation gates for the canals that feed occupied Crimea.
If Ukraine retakes Kherson, they might theoretically be able to take out the Kerch Strait Bridge. (Note that this is only true if they actually have the ATACMS missiles for their HIMARS that the Biden Administration says we haven’t given them yet, as I calculate a distance of roughly 179 miles from Nova Kakhkovka to the bridge.) “Crimea goes from being an incredibly strategically valuable platform that the Russians can use to launch into Ukraine proper, into the most significant military vulnerability that post-war Russia has ever had.” Eh, I think I have to go with the Atomic Bomb between 1945 and August of 1949.
“If Ukraine is going to win this war, this is how it’s going to start.”
This entry was posted on Thursday, September 1st, 2022 at 6:19 PM and is filed under Foreign Policy, Military, video. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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3 Responses to “Peter Zeihan on The Kherson Counteroffensive”
[…] headquarters of the Ladies in White ‘gifted’ with Afro-Cuban witchcraft hex bomb BattleSwarm: Peter Zeihan on The Kherson Counteroffensive Behind The Black: NASA awards SpaceX new $1.4 billion contract to launch its astronauts, On Mars […]
This isn’t an offensive. It is a strategy. Think of the Anaconda Strategy.
Cost/benefit of having the Russians leave beats having to bag and tag them. Plus – and this is a critical consideration – a prolonged degradation to failure of the Russian Invasion allows time for domestic policy and leadership considerations to happen in the Kremlin.
Vice Putin realizing he has failed and lashing out.
The long-term question is what happens outside Ukraine; the Russians rail systems are reliant on imported bearing cartridges, and they’re starting to run out. Then, the increase in energy prices in Europe are going to lead to unrest of some sort, and many of the governments now supporting Ukraine and the half-ass sanctions on Russia are going to fall.
Trump warned the Europeans, they blew him off. That’s how we got here, and the likelihood is that all of these oh-so-sanctimonious environmental types are going to wind up against a wall somewhere (at worst), and the policies that they pushed are going to be repudiated.
Here in the US, we have the same sort of idiots mandating feel-good ideas like banning fossil-fueled transportation by 2020 and 2025. Brilliant idea, that–Especially when you look at the way they’re not doing any of the requisite infrastructure work to make it happen. California would need, by some estimates, around 35 new nuclear plants to support all the electrical demand they’ll have with total electrification, plus upgrading all the grid. Nobody has a plan to actually, y’know… Do that, or have any idea at all how to pay for it, but they’re gonna mandate “no new fossil-fuel powered vehicles” anyway.
I foresee a whole lot of electoral wipeouts for the greenies, at the least. At the worst? Burning at the stake.
[…] headquarters of the Ladies in White ‘gifted’ with Afro-Cuban witchcraft hex bomb BattleSwarm: Peter Zeihan on The Kherson Counteroffensive Behind The Black: NASA awards SpaceX new $1.4 billion contract to launch its astronauts, On Mars […]
This isn’t an offensive. It is a strategy. Think of the Anaconda Strategy.
Cost/benefit of having the Russians leave beats having to bag and tag them. Plus – and this is a critical consideration – a prolonged degradation to failure of the Russian Invasion allows time for domestic policy and leadership considerations to happen in the Kremlin.
Vice Putin realizing he has failed and lashing out.
The long-term question is what happens outside Ukraine; the Russians rail systems are reliant on imported bearing cartridges, and they’re starting to run out. Then, the increase in energy prices in Europe are going to lead to unrest of some sort, and many of the governments now supporting Ukraine and the half-ass sanctions on Russia are going to fall.
Trump warned the Europeans, they blew him off. That’s how we got here, and the likelihood is that all of these oh-so-sanctimonious environmental types are going to wind up against a wall somewhere (at worst), and the policies that they pushed are going to be repudiated.
Here in the US, we have the same sort of idiots mandating feel-good ideas like banning fossil-fueled transportation by 2020 and 2025. Brilliant idea, that–Especially when you look at the way they’re not doing any of the requisite infrastructure work to make it happen. California would need, by some estimates, around 35 new nuclear plants to support all the electrical demand they’ll have with total electrification, plus upgrading all the grid. Nobody has a plan to actually, y’know… Do that, or have any idea at all how to pay for it, but they’re gonna mandate “no new fossil-fuel powered vehicles” anyway.
I foresee a whole lot of electoral wipeouts for the greenies, at the least. At the worst? Burning at the stake.