Russia is winning in Ukraine? Not according to this account it isn’t

 Thu 5:13 pm +00:00, 2 Jan 2025  2

posted by pete fairhurst 2

Source: https://slavlandchronicles.substack.com/p/your-2024-slavlands-summary-sir

While we are all still sober though, let’s not pretend that 2024 was a good year for the Russian war effort. I will give the Russian armed forces their due where it is deserved though. Yes, they’ve been crawling forward in Donbass proper for the last year, really from summer onwards. This does not mean that:

• Russian strategy has changed
• the MoD has learned from its mistakes
• de-dollarization has occurred
• Putin/Lavrov has wooed over new allies to Russia’s side
• the overall geostrategic position for Russia has improved in any way

Worse, Russia is now losing far far more men than Ukraine is losing to gain ground in Donbass.

I was watching Sofa Strategist’s latest 4 hour “sit-rep” stream and he made the claim that Russia is now losing a staggering 3x the amount of troops as Ukraine in storming the defenses of Donbass head-on and with a feverish, renewed intensity.

I do not know if I feel comfortable with the 3x figure, but I do feel comfortable reporting that the war channels that I follow have reported horrendous losses in the last 6 months, especially compared to Ukraine’s. This should make sense because they are literally storming heavily fortified strongholds head-on using suicide tactics. Ukraine’s strategy has always been to fight a defensive holding action in Donbass. That is why they reinforced these areas over the 8 years that Putin sat around sucking his thumb, yucking it up with Macron and Merkel, and demilitarizing his own army. None of the major Ukrainian strongholds in the Donbass have even been approached yet, let alone taken. Bakhmut, Adviivka, and Marinka or Ugledar, Pokrovsk and some other no-name hamlets were portrayed as lynchpin fortresses that would lead to a collapse of the Ukrainian front if they were taken.

In reality, they were just rinky-dink small towns and blown-out suburbs that had been hastily fortified and stuffed with second-rate conscripts, mostly, who were used to soak up the Russian artillery and slow down the advance.

The real nuts that would have to be cracked to retake Donbass are places like Kramatorsk or Sloviansk. But these strongholds will NEVER be taken at this point. To take Bakhmut alone cost Russia somewhere from 20K? (some say 40K) in total casualties. People were predicting that all of Donbass would be taken by Russia by the end of this year. They said that everything east of the river Dniepr would be taken by Russia the year before that. They were saying that Russia would win the war in just two months before that as well. This was and is complete nonsense. Russia cannot even take all of Donbass if it relies solely on military means. The costs of this Not-War have been absolutely horrendous, on both sides. But the Russian side has, at this point, probably lost more than Ukraine has.

Remember: the ZAnon narrative is that Russia is killing anywhere from 17 to 9 Nazi-Banderist-Satanists for every one Russian soldier.

If people found out that this wasn’t true and that the Kremlin was sending waves of people to their death in pointless, bloody, WWI-style suicide missions, the smugness and unquestioning support for Putin would evaporate. It is very very important for the propagandists that people continue believing that only 10-20K Russians have died in this war. And, at the end of the first year, the major analyst names were claiming that anywhere from 200K to 2 million Ukrainian soldiers had been killed and that Ukraine had simply run out of men. They never revised this claim and repeated the same the next year. 2024 was no different — this was supposed to be the year when the UAF collapsed because all of the men were dead. That would mean that 5-7 million UAF soldiers had died by 2024. Needless to say, this is nonsense.

Over on Russian Telegram, I’ve seen the real tally put at somewhere between 120-150K. This was based on obituary work and attrition rates within units that were extrapolated, as near as I can tell. Ukraine’s tally was similar but skewed lower. After the intensification of the Donbass offensive, I would assume that the Russian death toll has spiked drastically relative to Ukraine’s.

Now, the reasons given for this non-existent discrepancy have historically been the following:

• Russia is led by genius generals like Shoigu, Surovikin, or Belousov now
• Russia is up against a rag-tag group of unpaid, demoralized, outnumbered country bumpkins
• Russia is a far bigger country with more resources and more manpower
• Russia has far more powerful weapons, like artillery and planes and Ukraine has nothing of the kind

This last year should have disproven all of the cope-claims of the propagandists.

First off, Ukraine relieved their artillery problems the previous year, actually. In the previous year, they went on a successful offensive in Kursk and took as much territory in several days as Russia has spent the last year clawing away from them in Donbass. They’ve gotten deliveries of planes, long-range missiles, medium-range missiles, HIMARS … you name it. Because Russia refused to mobilize men and relied entirely on volunteers, they have spent most of this war fighting at a distinct manpower disadvantage the whole time.

However, over the last year, the Kremlin massively increased the pay that they were offering soldiers to be sent to Donbass. They also figured out creative ways to send police officers and other unwitting federal employees to go fight in Donbass. Whether or not they really did succeed in getting North Korean prisoner-soldiers to fight in Donbass is still a matter of debate. But they’ve also expanded their own domestic program of using convict-soldiers and have even started targeting non-Russians for recruitment, which is a good thing. This, and some poorly-timed rotations and late mobilizations means that for the first time, the UAF had less soldiers fighting than Russia.

But this didn’t prevent the successful Kursk operation.

Also, because Russia throws its advantage away storming Donbass fortifications, the UAF is able to absorb the losses and continue mobilizing. Russia has to expend more men to go on the attack than Ukraine needs to defend these positions long enough to inflict damage and then pull back to the next strong point. At this pace, it will be another year of inching forward before a battle for an actual major stronghold along the way to the Dniepr river will take place. As it stands now, the Donbass campaign is a disgusting waste of lives and resources probably designed to exhaust Russia thoroughly before the war moves into Russia proper.

Meanwhile, the bombing campaign Russia intensified dramatically in 2024. We talked a lot about this and the situation remains bafflingly bad for Russia. Kiev continues to strike deep into Russia.

There was a nuke scare in 2024 as well, but few seem to remember it.

Zelensky announced his intent to use some new medium-range NATO missiles to hit targets within Russian territory. Putin threatened nuclear retaliation if he went through with his plan. Washington and other EU governments came out shortly after encouraging Zelensky to go ahead with the attacks. He went ahead and did that.

Putin then made some more threats. He was really really serious — this time for sure! But Zelensky doubled down and hit more targets within Russia with these NATO missiles. No retaliation from Russia ever came. I mean, they blew up a factory with a “new” missile in Ukraine, I guess. But since then, everyone forgot about this supposed red line that Putin drew and now Ukraine is back to just casually bombing Russia with drones again. They might use the NATO missiles or some other, even more long-range variants when they get them and now everyone knows that Putin won’t do anything in response.

Putin’s red lines were conclusively proven to be a joke in 2024, is my point.

Also: in the last weeks, Russian tankers have started to sink for some reason.

And:

And the Russian Black Sea fleet has been whittled down to irrelevance. Kiev has won back the coast and Russian ships are no longer a factor in this war. They were mostly just used by the UAF for target practice anyway.

The biggest looming development for 2025 has to be the so-called peace deal that is being hammered out behind the scenes … allegedly anyway. I’d like to remind people that people have been rumor-mongering about ceasefires literally every single month of this Not-War so far, so take it all with a large fistful of salt.

I’ve written a lot about this particular deal, but it looks like I’ll have to write more.

There are rumors that Russian officials flying over to Washington on a special plane for talks. Here:

A Russian special flight spent two days in the United States. This is evidenced by the route of the Il-96-300 aircraft of the special flight squadron “Russia”, which is used by the top officials of the state, including the heads of the special services. At the same time, no official announcement was made about the trip of any Russian government delegation to the United States.

According to the FlightRadar service, on December 25, the special flight departed from Moscow to St. Petersburg. On December 26, the Il-96 flew from St. Petersburg to New York and then, after a short break, went to Washington. On December 28, the Russian plane flew from Washington again to New York and from there headed to Moscow.

It is known that this aircraft is used by the top Russian leadership for official flights. Thus, Dmitry Medvedev previously flew on it. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov used this special flight, for example, for a flight to the UN General Assembly session in 2023. It was also previously reported that the Il-96-300 was used by the head of the SVR, Sergei Naryshkin.

For what purposes and who exactly flew on a special flight to the United States from December 26 to 28 is unknown. The American side, like the Russian side, did not report any visits to the United States by any delegation from the Russian Federation.

Earlier today, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said that Russia is not satisfied with the proposals of Donald Trump’s team on Ukraine.

Meanwhile, I am on record predicting that Zelensky will launch another incursion into Russia this winter.

Chances are, if this does go through, it will be done with the acquiesces of Moscow as part of some deal, like it was last time. Regardless, I don’t see the situation improving for Russia peace deal or not. The current peace deal on the table surrenders 80% of Ukraine to NATO occupation. It will also give time for NATO + Kiev to prepare for Phase II of the Not-War. It may not occur in 2025, but I do believe that the goal is to end Putin’s regime via SMO like they did in Syria eventually.

As for my previous predictions and analyses made in 2024, well, just consult the archives. I think they hold up well.

Here is one you might enjoy: