When considering the Ukrainian war, most analysts [1] start, it seems to me, from erroneous assumptions – deliberately or through ignorance – which I believe were instilled by the United States and Ukraine, and which should be noted, because they are at the origin of an increasingly false vision of the origins and realities of this conflict and therefore of its probable outcome.
TOPSHOT - Ukrainian soldiers adjust a national flag atop a personnel armoured carrier on a road near Lyman, Donetsk region on October 4, 2022, amid the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky said on October 2, 2022 that Lyman, a key town located in one of four Ukrainian regions annexed by Russia, had been "cleared" of Moscow's troops. (Photo by Anatolii Stepanov / AFP) (Photo by ANATOLII STEPANOV/AFP via Getty Images)
It is not, let us repeat once again, about defending Russia’s positions, but about recalling certain facts and raising awareness of the narrative developed by the Americans to justify the merits of this war as horrible as it is. useless, and the major disinformation of which we have been victims in Europe, and in particular in France, for two years now.
FOUR (DELIBERATELY) ERRONEOUS ASSUMPTIONS
1. RUSSIA WANTED TO INVADE UKRAINE
We know today that the Russian battle force massed on the Ukrainian border at the beginning of 2022 numbered between 120,000 and 150,000 men depending on the sources and that the first assault wave only included around 60,000 men. Simple common sense would dictate that serious analysts had the objectivity to recognize that it was indeed a “special” military operation – which they had the right to denounce – instead of agreeing with the propaganda disseminated by Kiev, London, Washington and Warsaw aimed to make people believe in an invasion threatening all of Western Europe. The Russian troops engaged were clearly those for a limited action, therefore notoriously insufficient for a large-scale operation against a State of 603,000 km2 and 43 million inhabitants. Let us recall for the record that during their invasion of Iraq – 438,000 km 2 , 27 million inhabitants and armed forces not supported by – in 2003 [2] , the Americans committed an army of 150,000 men assisted by 45 000 British and 70,000 Kurds [3] . This first postulate therefore does not resist elementary military analysis.
2. RUSSIA HAD A POWERFUL ARMY THAT SHOULD HAVE WIPED OUT THE UKRAINIANS IN A MATTER OF WEEKS. THIS DID NOT HAPPEN, WHICH REVEALS ITS MEDIOCRITY AND THAT OF ITS LEADERS.
The Russian forces that attacked Ukraine did so with a very unfavorable power ratio of 1 to 3. They could therefore not overwhelm or crush the vastly superior Ukrainian army. Their objective was to paralyze it and force kyiv into negotiation.
Furthermore, we forget what many military experts already observed during the Cold War and until the beginning of the 2000s: the Soviet forces (despite their importance), were primarily forces prepared for defense and not for operations. external forces, unlike Western forces. We have therefore known for a long time that logistics, especially for the projection of forces, is not their strong point, which has been confirmed by the observations of numerous officers who went to Russia after the dissolution of the USSR… and by the first weeks of the “Special Military Operation”.
These defects did not improve after the fall of the Berlin Wall, as the Russian army experienced severe cuts, both in terms of budget, human resources and units. We had to wait until the early 2000s to see the start of a recovery. However, the Russian army of today is not the Red Army of yesterday, although it is its heir.
Also, we allow ourselves to think that this overestimation of Russian strength, widely relayed by the Western media, was only intended to glorify the Ukrainian resistance and humiliate Moscow, with the possible aim of provoking a rebellion against Putin and his staff.
3. RUSSIAN FORCES WANTED TO TAKE KYIV, BUT THEY FAILED.
Another nonsense. Only a fraction of the forces of the Special Military Operation were assigned to the offensive targeting the Ukrainian capital, not with the aim of conquering it, but of fixing the forces of kyiv (operative maneuver). It is totally crazy to believe that the Russians planned to conquer an urban area covering 12,300 km² – at the heart of an urban area of 28,900 km² –, bringing together a total of 4.6 million souls [4] , and once again facing to forces superior in number and installed in a territory that they knew perfectly. Those who know the extreme difficulties of urban warfare have continued to denounce this assertion by the Ukrainians and their Western mentors as totally fanciful.
For comparison, it should be remembered that for its operation to clean up the Gaza Strip (360 km 2 , 2.6 million inhabitants), the Israeli army committed more than 180,000 men, has a total sky control and American and British assistance in intelligence gathering and munitions supply. However, four months after the start of its offensive, the IDF has still not managed to take total control, even though the Hamas fighters (20,000 men) are not adversaries comparable to the Ukrainian army formed by the NATO.
4. THE HEROIC RESISTANCE OF THE UKRAINIAN FORCES SURPRISED THE WORLD AS WELL AS RUSSIA AND SHOWS THE STRENGTH AND DETERMINATION OF THIS NATION.
This statement seems to us to be a deliberate underestimation of the Ukrainian army in order to achieve the psychological goal mentioned in point no. 2 above. Again, back to the numbers. At the start of 2022, the Ukrainian armed forces numbered 250,000 men, the second largest in volume in Eastern Europe, after the Russian army. They were further supplemented by border guards (53,000 men), the new National Guard of Ukraine (60,000) and the various internal security services. Above all, these forces had benefited, since 2014, from major assistance from several NATO countries (United States, United Kingdom, Canada), in terms of training and arms deliveries, and also received a large number of information on Russia that these countries had [5] . They were therefore professional forces, well equipped and having, some of them, combat experience having participated since 2014 in military operations against the autonomous regions of Donbass. Nothing to do with the Ukrainian “small army” sold to us by NATO and the media.
Let us add to this that the Ukrainian army had established, mainly around Donbass, very solid defensive positions, that it fought on terrain that it knew, that it was three times more numerous than the Russian attack forces, and that if they had the initiative, their offensive was widely expected.
These four postulates – rapid analysis of which makes it possible to measure that they do not stand up to the facts – therefore amount to bad faith, if not deliberate disinformation, in order to distort the perception of the conflict and discredit the conflict. the Russian adversary, a maneuver in itself of good war.
Alongside these false assertions, it is also appropriate to look at other facts, which if not distorted by the NATO-Ukrainian narrative, have been passed over in silence, because they also help to shed light on the realities of this conflict of a new day.
THE NECESSARY REREADING OF THE FIRST MONTHS OF THE CONFLICT
5. Since 2014, the Americans have continued to support Ukraine and push it to reconquer Donbass and Crimea – which are Russian lands – by encouraging its nationalism and arming it, thereby pushing the Russians in their entrenchments. Both Washington and kyiv, however, were aware of the multiple warnings that Vladimir Putin had issued from 2007 and his reactions to NATO’s aggressive advance on the margins of Russia (Georgia 2008, Ukraine 2014). Americans and Ukrainians were well aware that the Russians would not remain without reacting – while perhaps hoping for the opposite… – and that they would then have to fall into a trap: placing them in the position of aggressors and violators of international law . They have therefore continued, since the middle of 2021, to alert international opinion about the Russian threat and the risk of war (which they were provoking) as soon as they observed that Moscow was massing its troops on the Ukrainian border and carrying out military exercises there. It is ultimately possible to consider that the two adversaries “bluffed”: the Americans and the Ukrainians in thinking that the Russians would not react; and Moscow undoubtedly believes that by massing its forces on the border, Washington and kyiv would give up. But neither of these two maneuvers worked and they inevitably led to war.
6. Ukrainians and Americans knew perfectly well that by launching the operation to reconquer Donbass on February 17, 2022, Moscow would intervene in support of the threatened Russian-speaking populations. Their objective was then to bring the Russian army up against the numerous fortifications erected over the past 7 years in the south-east of the country and their numerous anti-tank means, in order to inflict a defeat. But the Russians did not fall into this trap.
7. It is unimaginable that Washington and Kiev would have decided on this provocation against Russia without the Ukrainian army being ready to resist and having made solid defensive arrangements. Once again, the – legitimate – Ukrainian resistance is not surprising and therefore paradoxically proved less effective than expected, the Russians having been able to fix part of the forces around kyiv and very quickly occupy more than 30% of the territory.
8. The withdrawal of Russian forces from the Kiev region at the end of March 2022 is not linked to a military failure – although they encountered fierce resistance there which thwarted their progress – but to a concession from Moscow in the framework of the Istanbul negotiations [6] , as Putin confirmed during his interview with Tucker Carlson. Some continue to deny this fact, but without any argument, because the Russian forces withdrew in good order… before the Ukrainians, under the influence of Boris Johnson, decided to put an end to negotiations that were about to succeed !
9. All this is not to say that the Russians have not made mistakes. There were undoubtedly poor initial estimates of adversity, due to rivalries between intelligence services. In a recent article [7] , Andrei Kozovoi, professor at the University of Lille, mentions the fact that only three people, apart from Putin himself, would have been aware of the invasion plan decided at the Security Council from February 21: the Minister of Defense, Sergei Shoigu; the secretary of the Council, Nikolai Patrushev; and the director of the FSB, Alexander Bortnikov. The other members of this body – including Sergei Lavrov, Minister of Foreign Affairs, Mikhail Mishustin, Prime Minister and Sergei Naryshkin, head of the SVR – would have been in favor of continuing the diplomatic process. Furthermore, Andrei Kozovoi rightly recalls that since Putin’s arrival as president in 2022, the FSB has continued to gain the upper hand over other intelligence services, the SVR, but also the GRU (Military Intelligence Directorate) . The first having become discredited in Putin’s eyes following the arrest, in 2010 in the United States, of around ten illegal immigrants by the FBI; the second due to the fiasco of the Skripal poisoning, in London, in 2018. The FSB would have de facto found itself in a position of strength in the development of the decision-making process, throwing all its weight in favor of a military intervention in Ukraine. The decision to launch the special military operation – certainly considered for a long time, but not planned in as much detail as it should have been – thus seems to have been taken in an emergency. Once initiated, as all soldiers know, an operation plan never withstands more than three days of war and the Russian forces were confronted with greater adversity than they expected, which cost them dearly.
THE FIFTH (NEW) FALSE POSTULATE
10. THERE IS A REAL RISK OF WAR WITH RUSSIA WITHIN 5 TO 8 YEARS AND WESTERNERS MUST PREPARE FOR IT.
Since the end of 2023, due to the failure of the Ukrainian counter-offensive and the difficulties in supplying weapons, a new narrative has been produced by NATO: that of a risk of war with Russia over the next 5 to 8 years. Thus follow one another the alarmist declarations of the main political and military leaders of the NATO countries, in a cleverly orchestrated campaign.
– In December 2023, President Joe Biden’s top aides tell Congress that if lawmakers do not quickly vote on additional military aid to Ukraine, Russia could win the war within months or even weeks. But the Republicans continue to this day to oppose new aid of 61 billion dollars to kyiv.
– Then, on January 7, at their annual defense seminar, members of the Swedish government and senior military officials declared that the country must prepare for war with Russia.
– On January 16, the German newspaper Bild published a “confidential” document from the German general staff showing that it was seriously considering a Russian attack and describing how it was preparing to face it.
– On January 21, Dutch Admiral Rob Bauer, chairman of the NATO Military Committee, declared that the Alliance did not rule out a war with Russia: “ We are preparing for a conflict,” he announced.
– Also on January 21, German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius warned of the risk of war in an interview broadcast by the ZDF television channel, affirming that “ even if a Russian attack does not seem probable for “At the moment, our experts expect a period in five to eight years in which this could be possible .”
– On January 24, General Sir Patrick Sanders, head of the British Army , believes, in an interview with the Guardian, that British society must prepare for the possibility of war.
– On February 5, in an interview published in the tabloid Super Express , Polish Defense Minister Wladyslaw Kosiniak-Kamysz said he did not rule out an imminent war with Russia.
– Finally, on February 9, the Danish Minister of Defense, Troels Lund Poulsen, affirms, in an interview with the daily Jyllands-Posten, that Russia is capable of quickly going on the offensive and that Denmark must be ready for this scenario .
All declare that faced with the threat, defense budgets and arms purchases must be increased without delay [8] . Obviously, there is little question as to who benefits from this political-media maneuver [9]
However, regardless of the fact that Vladimir Putin was very clear on this point during his interview with Tucker Carlson [10] , demographic and military realities show that this hypothesis is totally unrealistic and is, once again, propaganda, in the aim of maintaining at all costs the cohesion of NATO, which is beginning to crack, and above all to frighten public opinion who clearly see what the outcome of the war and the deplorable economic consequences it has caused will be for them.
Figures and facts are stubborn and speak for themselves. And the gap between the reality on the ground and the discourse of Westerners and Ukrainians continues to grow. We are therefore in full political delirium and have the right to wonder if those who govern us – like those who comment on this conflict – are stupid, incompetent, bought or irremediably won over to American neoconservative ideology, because they defend more the interests of Washington than those of their own country [16] ! The question remains open…
[1] Including the excellent Emmanuel Todd – whose latest work ( La Défaite de l’Ouest, Gallimard, Paris, 2024) is remarkable in every way – who sometimes gets lost when he approaches military questions.
[2] Operation launched despite very clear opposition from the UN and illegal under international law.
[5] Eric Schmitt, Julian Barnes & Helen Cooper, “Commando Network Coordinates Flow of Weapons in Ukraine, Officials Say”, New York Times , June 25, 2022. Greg Miller and Isabelle Khushudyan, “Ukrainian spies with deep ties to CIA wage shadow war against Russia”, The Washington Post, October 23, 2023.
[6] See on this subject my editorial n°62, “When the fog of war begins to dissipate”, February 2023 (https://cf2r.org/editorial/quand-le-brouillard-de-la-guerre -starts-to-dissipate/).
[7] Andrei Kozovoi, “Putin or the intoxicated drug addict” International Politics , n°178, Winter 2023. This article, which provides interesting elements, is unfortunately discredited by its crude anti-Putin orientation. The author goes so far as to attribute responsibility for the assassination of Daria Dougina to the FSB… even though the Ukrainian SBU clearly claimed responsibility!
[8] The only dissenting voice, the French Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces (CEMA), General Thierry Burkhard declared, on January 22, during a conference at the Sorbonne, that “whatever the outcome of the war in Ukraine, Russia has already suffered a strategic defeat. (…) The Russian army is in a critical state. It no longer constitutes a threat to NATO ” (https://www.opex360.com/2024/01/24/pour-le-chef-de-la-british-army-la-societe-britannique-doit- prepare-for-the-eventual-of-war/).
[9] In 2023, US arms exports increased by 56% compared to 2022 according to the US State Department. It is essentially the war in Ukraine which explains this record increase.
[10] When Tucker Carlson asked him if he could “imagine a scenario in which you send Russian troops to Poland ,” Vladimir Putin replied: “Only in one scenario, if Poland attacks Russia. We have no interests in Poland, Latvia or anywhere else. Why would we do this? We simply have no interest (…) . There is no question of it ,” he added.
[14] It should be remembered that Russia cannot concentrate all its forces in Europe because it must ensure the security of its borders and its immense territory.
[16] For the last two, we offer two answers that we borrow from Emmanuel Todd in his latest book:
– “ If the citizens of Europe, and particularly of France, do not know where their leaders’ money is, the NSA knows it and knows that these leaders know it. In all honesty, I can’t really say to what extent the data collected by the NSA helps hold Western elites in check; I also do not know to what extent this institution can actually achieve private accounting, nor what its storage capacities are. But it is enough for the European elites to believe in his power to be very cautious in their relations with the American master ” ( op. cit., p. 189);
The details of the peace deal presented today by US special envoy Steve Witkoff are consistent with the report in the Financial Times discussed in my previous article and with Larry Sparano in the posted interview. Putin will halt the Russian advance prior to driving Ukrainian soldiers out of all of the territory that has been reincorporated into Russia. It appears to be the case that the borders between Russia and Ukraine will be the current front line, so Putin is withdrawing Russia’s claim to the Russian territories still under Ukrainian occupation.
Russia and the US seem near a Ukraine peace deal. Kyiv’s role may be moot.
President Donald Trump’s hopes of securing a quick Ukraine peace deal hang in the balance after Washington’s envoy, Steve Witkoff, held his fourth Kremlin meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin Friday.
