At least, that’s what Col. Macgregor thinks.
What I’m trying to say is that you have this picture on the one side of Ukrainian forces that are literally bled white, that are falling apart—not for lack of courage or any of that sort of thing. That’s nonsense. It’s simply impossible for them to mount an effective resistance against the onrushing Russians.
And then on the Russian side, you have this 21st century force, extraordinarily well-equipped, technologically savvy, essentially knocking drones out of the air with either electronic warfare or other means and moving not at high speed, but fast enough that the opposing force has no chance of recovering.
And right now they keep talking about the so-called Azov formations. I guess there’s something like four, five, six, seven, eight brigades left. I don’t know what their strength is. There’s probably not much. But these are the sort of diehard Nazis. They seem to be nowhere in the path of the Russians. I think they’ve beat a path elsewhere. So I’m not sure there’s really much in front of the advancing Russian forces.
So from a purely military standpoint, I would say this is the end of the war.
“Is it fair to say that Russia is close to achieving its military objectives in the war if those objectives are the acquisition of the four oblasts?”
“Oh, well that’s being achieved. But remember, the key thing for them has always been not so much capturing territory, but annihilating the Ukrainian forces on the ground. That’s the problem. So they’re very force-oriented in what they do. Now, we may see finally a buildup of forces in various places of 100,000 or more that are large enough and well-supplied enough that they can move deeper.
I think you’re going to see that in the direction of Zaporizhzhia. The bridges over the Dnipro are intact. Zaporizhzhia has real strategic value. If they decide to cross the river, they can go north or south from there—attacking north to Kyiv or south to Odessa. I think those are the decisions that they’re going to make now in the next couple of weeks. And we’re going to see more and more movement.
But the point is the Ukrainian force is almost annihilated. There are still some people left, and they’re not going to stop. As long as there’s anyone from these Azov units around, I would expect the Russians to plow forward. But securing the Russian areas, the Russian-speaking areas, yes—but then the next question is, what are you going to do to secure the outcome of the war? They’re going to be victorious militarily. That’s not enough. In other words, how do you come to an arrangement with somebody who is confident in the west that brings you the measure of security that you want?
All of this has been about protecting Russia. This was never about conquering territory and marching west into Poland or Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia. That’s all nonsense. And I think that’s in the back of people’s minds right now in Moscow.
The problem, of course, is that there is a very good chance that President Trump and his advisors don’t understand that the time for playing word games with Russia is over. If the USA can’t be a reliable security partner capable of keeping the Ukrainians and the Europeans under control, and there are a lot of reasons to believe it cannot, then Russia will do whatever it has to do in order to establish a sufficiently secure situation.
While I hope something useful will come of Friday’s meeting between the presidents, I am not very optimistic that anything substantive will do so. Although if the rumor of a shipment of an Israeli adrenochrome seized by Russians are factually based, one hopes that Putin will bring it to Trump’s attention.