Eine interessante Meinung

Zu den Erwartungen über den Verlauf der Kämpfe in der Ukraine findet sich auf der Seite »Moon of Alabama« ein interessanter Kommentar, der es verdient, auch auf diesem Blog gebracht zu werden als

Gastkommentar

von English Outsider

We cannot, I believe, understand what the Russians are about without taking into account how we in the West expected this war to go in early 2022. We expected the Russians to very quickly get caught up in a guerilla war in Ukraine.

It would have been a very ugly guerrilla war. Much like the one we kept going in the ’50’s last century in the same area. Same hatreds around. Same passionate intensity. Same brutality. Same heavy level of casualties. Probably worse. There were said to be seven hundred thousand Ukrainian soldiers around in February 2022 and that’s a whole lot more than Bandera had.

This time round? The weapons and training we had supplied to the Ukrainians before February 2022 were not at all suited to full scale combined arms war. An all-out military clash between the two sides could only have resulted in a quick Ukrainian defeat. That was what was expected. But afterwards?

Afterwards, Russia’s Afghanistan in Ukraine. The term was often used back then in the West. We expected a quick military defeat followed by Russia’s Afghanistan.

With the men trained in small unit fighting, hundreds of thousands of them, and equipped with just the weapons needed for localised ambushes and attacks. The weapons we supplied in quantity to the Ukrainians pre-SMO were of little use against a sophisticated modern army, but very useful indeed for partisan warfare,

It’d have been a nightmare, particularly in the West where nationalist or anti-Russian feeling is strongest. Anything from killing Russian soldiers individually – we saw that not long ago when a Russian soldier was knifed in the back as he was walking through the street – to an RPG attack on a passing convoy.

Since it’s a mixed population just about everywhere it’d have also been a mess of locals killing each other and informers and brutal Secret Police work. Northern Ireland cubed, given the weaponry around and the number of fighters involved, and no keeping the lid on it.

That’s what was confidently expected for the Russians in 2022. Since we confidently expected the sanctions war to cripple them as well the Russians would have been at their wits end to know how to cope with it. They probably would not have.

The Russians sidestepped all that. That was what took all the military analysts and experts by surprise.

No shock and awe sledgehammer attacks, the way we think a war should be fought. Just a quick dash to incapacitate the Ukrainian forces and ward off the threat to the Donbass. Some patient hostage release type work down in Mariupol. Nothing much else. They stayed out of areas where the fighters could have made their lives a permanent misery. Instead they hunkered down behind strong defensive lines and let the fighters come to them.

Which those fighters have been doing in quantity and will continue to do in quantity until most of them are dead. Those who are getting mown down in terrible numbers as they attempt to get up to the Surovikin line are those we expected to be hiding behind hedges or in alleyways and taking pot shots at occupying Russian soldiers or Russian speaking neighbours.

They occupied only the areas of Ukraine where they had strong local support. Even there there have been incidents. A man with a knife or explosives and murder in his heart can do a fair bit anywhere. But a guerilla fighter in largely hostile territory is a fish out of water. He can be coped with. Guerilla fighters with at least some local support are a different matter. Those areas the Russians stayed out of and probably will.

Unless the Poles come in or unless there’s some “Coalition of the Willing” nonsense, I expect the Russians will continue to sidestep trouble in this way as long as they can. All this grand talk of “broad arrow offensives” and the like isn’t for them. No doubt, were they prepared to take heavy casualties and brave the unforeseeable risks of war, they could get to Lvov tomorrow. But to what purpose? To find themselves caught up in ugly police actions and permanent insurrection? They’d be fools.

Of course if they were interested in grabbing territory, they’d have to be fools. You want land, you have to kill or drive out or suppress local resistance whatever the cost. It’s just how it works and has worked in Europe for centuries.

And there are some in Russia who do think in terms of grabbing territory, just as there are those in Poland who dream of grabbing land round their way, and all over that blood-soaked stretch of Eastern Europe there are men and women cherishing similar revanchist visions.

And there are those in Kiev – I’ve seen the broadcasts – who do very much want the Donbass and make no bones about the fact that to get it, and to get it permanently, they’re going to have to kill or drive out many of those who live there.

And those who cherish such visions attribute them to others. That’s where we in the West go wrong. We attribute motives to the Russians that I’m quite sure actuate many Russians but that don’t actuate them all and certainly don’t actuate those in the Kremlin. We reckon the Kremlin’s going in for straight old-fashioned land grabbing and will do more if it can. We see the entire war as a land grabbing venture in the normal European style.

And I reckon in his heart of hearts, if we could ever get a straight answer out of him, Girkin sees it like that too and many of his ilk.

And if that's really what it's all about then let the blood flow as it must, because it always does flow in Europe when there’s land grabbing going on.

But I don’t think that’s what the Kremlin, and most Russians, are after. They simply want a country next door where the locals don’t get hammered if they happen to speak Russian and which the West can’t use any longer as a means of annoyance. They don’t want the fuss of occupying hostile territory and the cost of running it.

We in England still have to pay billions a year, permanently, to keep the two sides in Northern Ireland from each others throats and to keep them all fed and warm. As well as still having security personnel all over the place to keep the lid on it all. With little criminal enclaves here and there where law enforcement officers daren’t go except in force. And building “peace walls” sixty foot high to stop the locals throwing stones or worse at each other. And on top of that having the rest of the world looking on and thinking we’re still on the old colonial tack.

That, but many many times worse, is what the Russians don’t want to have next door in remnant Ukraine. And until we in the West stop using the locals in Ukraine as a means of “unbalancing and over-extending” Russia, they’ll keep stubbornly working away until they don’t have it. That's when it will end.

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