State of the War: Hope, Fear and the Sound of Silence

Hope lay in their fantasy that the supposed mutiny of the Wagner Group mercenaries and their “march on Moscow” was about to set off a “domino effect” (or “chain reaction,” if you prefer) that was about to topple the Putin administration and end the war. Then Ukraine would immediately and magically be transformed into the latest anti viciously Russian-hating NATO spearhead thrust into the gut of Eurasia.

It is already clear to all but the most demented – of whom of course there are far, far too many – that ain’t gonna happen.

But the Fear remains.

That is: The Great Ukrainian Counter-Offensive insisted upon by those New Napoleons President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland for so long has already failed. As we long and consistently predicted in these columns – along with many others – that it would.

Russian Security Council chief Nikolai Patrushev told a meeting of the Russian Security Council this week that Ukraine had lost 13,000 dead in three weeks of attacks that Russian commanders regarded as suicidal.

According to a Sputnik News Agency report, Patrushev said Ukraine has lost 246 tanks, including 13 supplied by the West, 595 armored fighting vehicles, 279 artillery and mortar systems, 42 multiple rocket launchers, two anti-aircraft missile systems, four helicopters, over 260 drones and 424 vehicles over the past three weeks.

Commenting on the losses, Russian President Vladimir Putin said Kiev’s Western allies seem to have cynically “decided to fight Russia to the last Ukrainian.”

Here the assessment of Stephen Bryen, a longtime champion of NATO expansion into Eastern Europe and Eurasia – should be carefully read.

I have long disagreed with Dr Bryen on major foreign policy and strategic issues over the past 20 years and may well again. But he has always been a serious scholar and a first-rate military intellect. And on the Ukraine War, he has repeatedly shown himself an analyst and figure of courage, integrity and consistent insight.

In an article in Asia Times reprinted in New Kontinent, Bryen analyzed the multiple reasons why the Ukrainian offensive failed. And he compared it, albeit on a vastly smaller scale, to the failure of the last major German Army offensive on the Eastern Front against the Red Army in July 1943, whose 80th anniversary we are about to experience.

Kursk was the crucial military pivot of all World War II. For the first time, a major German summer offensive was stopped in its tracks and smashed. The German Army in the East never attacked again. Its last major operational reserve was smashed forever. Its Panzer Tank armies, invincible for so long, were smashed too.

Then, it transpired that Hitler and his generals had woefully miscalculated even more fatefully. They never dreamed that after the enormous clash of armies, the Red Army already had such vast forces in reserve that they would start counter attacking immediately. And then, they just kept going – all the way across Central and Southern Europe. All the way to Berlin.

In the “neo-Kursk” Ukrainian offensive we have just observed, or as I have suggested in these columns – the rerun of the doomed July 1916 (107th anniversary coming up) Battle of the Somme in World War I, scores of thousands of irreplaceable patriotic and brave young men on each attacking side had their lives thrown away usually for ridiculous, repulsive or fraudulent causes.

German dead at Kursk are estimated – conservatively – at 50,000. Early Russian assessments of Ukrainian casualties in the “counter-offensive” insisted upon by Washington’s “strategic geniuses” run at 13,000. Proportionately far more serious even than the bloodbath the Wehrmacht suffered at Kursk.

If the Kursk analogy continues to hold up, as Dr. Bryen believes it will – and I agree with him – we will soon be seeing a far more formidable and aggressive Russian counter offensive.

Why then, did the Wagner mercenaries turn on Putin if they were indeed on the winning side?

We still see through a glass darkly, as St. Paul memorably put it. The fog of war is usually like that while the battles still rage. But it is clear that something provoked Russian oligarch, mercenary CEO and longtime Putin ally Yevgeny Prigozhin to switch sides.

Certainly, the regular Russian military had been using Prigozhin’s well-paid mercenaries to do the dirty and “soak up” particularly heavy casualties in hard, tough city street fighting. In the long term strategic and political contexts, this made perfect sense for the Russian government and its regular military commanders. Better let the Wagner Force mercs absorb the heavy casualties and preserve their own limited manpower (so often from single-son homes and families) in order to maintain overall support on the Home Front.

The Russian government played Prigozhin, squeezed out all the value from him, and then blocked him with some embarrassment but no serious effort when he finally woke up to the way he and his forces were being played.

But there is another interpretation for “the Great Mutiny” being openly published by serious and respected analysts in Moscow with outstanding records of credibility.

That is, that Prigozhin and his people, embittered by the way they were being used and abused – and clearly were going to be discarded – by the Russian high command, listened to eager Western voices. At least one Moscow commentator has outright claimed that Prigozhin was suborned and manipulated by the Western intelligence services – primarily the CIA and M15.

If this is true, it marks a level of desperation and reckless irresponsibility in seeking to destabilize a hostile thermonuclear superpower that should be beyond belief.

Even if it is not true, the picture is equally alarming. For even if no scintilla of evidence emerges to support the claim, it would expose a dangerous level of paranoia and elemental distrust and even hatred towards the United States – and Britain – in the Moscow leadership beyond anything that existed at the time of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. And I am old enough to personally remember it.

President Joe Biden, like the old cartoon character Mr. Magoo, continues to strut along filled with his sweetly innocent self-regard, oblivious to the suffering, chaos and inexorably catastrophic consequences that his policies continue to unleash.

Millions of people should be on the streets of every major city in the United States protesting the need to avert the Thermonuclear Armageddon that now looms over us all. 

But instead, in the haunting lyrics of Simon and Garfunkel, 

“The People Vowed and Prayed

“To the Neon God They Made.”

And the Sound of Silence rears up to engulf us all.

Janus is the Nom de Plume of a veteran US correspondent who has covered the Soviet Union and Russia for generations.