Ukraine’s counteroffensive and Putin’s options

When the objective is clear even an army lieutenant can write a strategy — this is a popular military phrase used often to highlight the importance of the most critical subject of clarity of mission and objective in any form of warfare. The US and its allies have pushed back the Russian effort in the Ukrainian war with a response that is consistent and clear but is the American objective of fighting this war to its end as clear as the Americans are trying to depict?

The western media is already talking about rebuilding and reconstructing Ukraine by using the frozen Russian assets. Remember an estimated $300 billion Russian state financial assets are held in euros in Belgium, the US, the UK and Switzerland. But the critical question being left unanswered is about the end game. Has the war ended in Ukraine and if it has not how can anyone discuss Ukraine’s rebuilding and reconstruction before it ends? The war in Ukraine goes on and given the US and European countries military aid to Ukraine nobody is sure which direction it will take and when it will end. Currently Ukraine is being provided $3 billion aid per month by the US and EU countries.

Is this amount of economic and military aid even sustainable in a war that has no end in sight? What kind of military mathematics will earn Americans the world praise if they plan to utilise Russian frozen assets worth $300 billion on Ukrainian reconstruction but have failed to figure out a strategy to prevent spending three times the given amount on continuing fighting this war? From pumping in billions of dollars on unwinnable battlefields to promising reconstruction and rebuilding of the destroyed nations on the negotiating table, America’s moral compass has lost its moral bearings and the entire world is sick of its ‘put up shows’ of acting as the policemen of the world whereas in fact it is a consistent contributor to the world’s lawlessness and destruction.

In Ukraine with billions of dollars spent on an unwinnable war, all that the Americans have done in the last fifteen months is to create military conditions that only guarantee further expansion and enlargement of wars rather than their end. Nothing explains this to the world better than President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s consistent referral to the ‘liberation of the occupied territories’ for which he doesn’t seem to have any workable military strategy or plan and his botched-up counteroffensive that is keeping the entire world guessing and waiting. Russia is not Afghanistan or Iraq and so it will not only keep testing the staying power of not only Ukraine but its patrons, the US and its allies, in the conflict.

Already the World Bank reckons that over the next ten years rebuilding and reconstruction of Ukraine will cost $400 billion — this when the war is continuing and is far from being over. If the US keeps deferring the problem and only choses to contest it on the battlefield then President Vladimir Putin will also have no option but to keep pushing back his opponents’ all aggressive initiatives. For the counteroffensive Ukraine has some 500 tanks supplied by France, Germany and Great Britain which are few in number and also obsolete and no match to the military arsenals and fighting capabilities of Russian army whose military machines are larger in number and more efficient and effective.

The Russian Military Industrial Complex can produce some 1,200 to 1,400 tanks per annum (if transferred to the war footing). This would mean more military imbalance and increasing challenge to the staying power of the Ukrainian military and all its planned counteroffensives. The western media is also propagating that the long-range US supplied HIMARS batteries and Storm Shadow cruise missiles supplied by the UK will keep the Russian supply chain under pressure and prevent Russia from supplying the frontline troops during the Ukrainian counteroffensive; but with months of preparations at Russia’s disposal the Russian military seems to be very well entrenched to take on the Ukrainian counteroffensive. Will Ukraine be able to take the lost territory back from Russia or will it be ready to pay the cost in human lives is also something left to be seen.

One is reminded of corporal Hitler of German army and his rise to military power and his insistence on fighting a war that eventually grew into a global conflict. Hitler due to the absence of basic officers training and no experience in war-gaming lacked the basic military knowledge and skills needed to understand the complexity of military operations and thus led his country to painful and humiliating defeats and the eventual loss of war. President Zelenskyy is also yesterday’s comedian who has turned into supreme commander of Ukrainian armed forces and who also like Hitler lacks the basic military knowledge and is reportedly turning Ukraine into a ‘one-man-theater’ with complete disregard to recommendations from his generals whose rise in career is associated not with him but with former president Petro Poroshenko.

According to reports from western media, Ukrainian army has prepared a 60,000-strong force comprising 12 brigades against an 800km Russian defense line prepared for Ukrainian counteroffensive. Even if one imagines that Ukraine’s counteroffensive makes a headway, it will still not mean the end of war. President Putin can not only announce another round of mobilisation but can also initiate a bombing campaign on Ukrainian cities. Although bombing the cities is a military virtue of the US and the UK but President Putin may also be forced to resort to this unethical military activity. History tells us that both the US and the UK were involved in making a bombing deal in the past when Churchill and Roosevelt met in Casablanca in January 1943.

Both agreed to resort to ‘area bombing’ and ‘morale bombing’ to reduce the enemy’s population to a state of despair and to break its will to fight. Bombing raids were conducted on German cities at night as the bombers didn’t need to even see what they were bombing. The city of Dresden was reduced to a rubble when the Allied air force bombed it for three days killing over 27,000 civilians. If the Allies in World War-II could go to any limits to achieve victory, why would President Putin feel shy of standing up to the all-out western aggression that seeks to undermine the Russian military power and honour and prestige of his country.