English Outsider: Attrition War With NATO – Attacks On Bridges In Ukraine
Wed 9:58 am +00:00, 7 Oct 2026
by English Outsider lifted from a comment
A couple of years ago Helmer had a theory about the earlier attacks on Ukrainian energy infrastructure. He reckoned those earlier attacks were not designed to wreck but to probe. To map the critical connections, assess speed of repair, and with this information prepare plans for a more incapacitating attack should that be decided on in the future.
Just wonder if the current bridge attacks are on the same lines. The Russians don’t want to wreck the bridges. They just want to know they can stop Ukrainian logistics dead if they want to. The timing of that would be critical. Not too early because that would allow time for workarounds. Not too late because it’d be difficult to do it all at once.
The attacks would be incapacitating but not destructive. The Russians will want the bridges intact later. That assumes the Ukrainians themselves won’t destroy the bridges during the end phase.
As for why the Dnieper bridges weren’t destroyed much earlier, it seemed at the start there were two reasons.
The first was an obvious one. Failing successful negotiations, the Russians knew from day one of their SMO that they had to destroy all NATO could throw at them. Proxies and equipment. Most convenient place for that was the Donbass so let the proxies and the materiel get across the Dnieper to be destroyed.
A simplistic argument, always was, but in practice that’s what’s happened. Not only is NATO now running out of men and materiel, one can look at the SMO as a systematic bleeding dry of the NATO financial resources for both. The proxies have to be funded: without Western money they’d long since have negotiated a surrender . It’s getting increasingly difficult to fund them. As for materiel, NATO’s running out of it and it’s very costly to send in more.
Had the Russians decided to bleed NATO out west of the Dnieper they’d have been fools. They’d have been running around all over a big territory looking for concentrations of men and equipment and coping with partisan warfare as they did so: it’s no accident that the training and weapons NATO supplied before the SMO was much of it for small unit fighting, as would be needed for partisan warfare, and that partisan warfare would have cost very many Russian casualties. In fact the NATO expectation at the very start was that the Russians would thus be bogged down in, as it was termed back then in the West, “Russia’s Afghanistan.”
The Russians sidestepped that scenario. Easier to let the proxies and equipment come to them, to the killing grounds east of the Dnieper, where they could be more conveniently disposed of. Hence, leave the Dnieper bridges standing.
The second reason is also obvious. It’s all very well to talk cold-bloodedly of bleeding NATO resources out and to examine how it was done. But that’s impersonal war game stuff. Doesn’t cover what it’s like for the pawns on the Grand Chessboard. Recently I linked to a video in which Havrysho details (vid) the sheer amount of destruction resulting from NATO using Ukraine as a means of attacking Russia. The destruction’s so horrendous and the death toll so great it’s quite possible Ukraine will cease to exist as a viable country.
Since ’22 the question’s been, how much longer will it last before NATO finally lets our proxies off the hook? We now have the answer. Doesn’t look as if NATO’s giving up unless it has to. US and European politicians have been encouraging Kiev to feed more proxies into the killing fields. Telling Kiev to lower the recruitment age or use women as soldiers. We are generous indeed with the lives of our proxies, as long as we need not risk our own. That’s how it’ll go as long as NATO can keep it up and as long as our proxy lasts.
Was this predictable back in 2022 and in the early stages of the SMO? Predictable, yes, but not at that time inevitable. The wholesale destruction of crucial infrastructure is not what the Russians needed or wanted to do until it became clear that NATO’s determination to use Ukraine as an attack dog, no matter the cost to the Ukrainians, had no limits.
Until that became unavoidably clear, leave as much infrastructure as possible still standing. That, I believe, is the second reason for not demolishing the Dnieper bridges early on, or at all if possible, and together with the first reason it accounts for what is often regarded as the Russian failure to do that at the start.
Looking at more than the Dnieper bridges, those reasons also partially account for the Russian conduct of their SMO to date. Failing negotiation, this was always going to be a slow grind. It was always going to take an age to wear down NATO.
