As thousands of Ukrainians perish on the battlefield for the sake of their leaders’ and NATO’s ambitions, the powers that be in Kiev have sent mixed signals about their future plans.

During a meeting with Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican’s secretary of state, Zelensky appeared to consent that the Ukrainian conflict should be ended the sooner the better.

“I think that we all understand that we must end the war as soon as possible, of course,” Zelensky said while conversing with the cardinal in Kiev.

At the same time, Zelensky announced on social media that he consulted his generals about conducting attacks “behind the front line,” apparently referring to strikes into Russian territory that are often directed against civilian targets.

Kiev stubbornly continues to avoid engaging in direct peace negotiations with Russia, opting instead to continue sending thousands of press-ganged poorly trained soldiers into attacks against Russian positions and launching drone and long-range missile strikes against population centers and civilian infrastructure in Russia.

Meanwhile, Moscow has repeatedly declared its readiness to resolve the conflict peacefully through negotiations.

https://sputnikglobe.com/20240723/ukraines-zelensky-rambles-about-ending-conflict-and-launching-more-attacks-into-russia-1119476384.html

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BY Brian Berletic

A recent article appearing in the US-based Business Insider titled, “Russia’s showing NATO its hand in the air war over Ukraine,” would provide a showcase of the deep deficit in military expertise driving increasingly unsustainable, unachievable foreign policy objectives. The article summarizes a number of interviews conducted with Western“airpower experts,” exhibiting a profound misunderstanding of modern military aviation, air defenses, and their role on and above the battlefield. 

The article claims:

Russia botched the initial invasion by failing to establish air superiority from the start, and it has been unable to synchronize its air and ground forces.

This is based on the assumption that Russia could somehow establish air superiority over the battlefield and infers that had the United States and the rest of NATO been in Russia’s place, air superiority would have been established. But this is false.

Fundamental Misconceptions 

At the onset of the Russian Special Military Operation (SMO) Ukraine possessed a formidable Soviet-made integrated air defense network consisting of some of the most successful and effective air defense systems in the world. This included long-range air defense systems like the S-300 as well as mobile systems like Buk, Strela, and Osa, as well as a large number of Soviet-made man-portable air defense systems (MANPADS).

The United States and its allies have not operated in airspace as contested as Ukraine’s since the Vietnam War. Over the skies of Vietnam the US would lose over 10,000 fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters to Soviet-made air defenses employed by Vietnam’s armed forces.

In subsequent conflicts, including Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, US-led forces would face either no significant air defenses at all, or air defenses consisting of old equipment operated by poorly organized, poorly trained, and poorly motivated troops, as was the case in Iraq.

Amid the US proxy war against Damascus and the US occupation of eastern Syria, US military aviation has been confined by Syria’s relatively modern air defense network, forcing both US and Israeli warplanes to conduct the same types of stand-off strikes Russian military aviation is conducting in Ukraine.
The article would claim:

Russia has demonstrated that it’s unable to suppress or destroy enemy air defenses, fly effective counterair missions, or run complex composite air operations like those the US Air Force pulled off in the opening days of Desert Storm in 1991 and then in the Iraq invasion in 2003.

Beyond the factually incorrect nature of this statement, the obvious differences between Iraq and Ukraine appear entirely lost among the “airpower experts” interviewed by Business Insider.

The Business Insider, citing these same “airpower experts,” also claims:

On the battlefield, effective airpower should aid the advance of armored combat vehicles and infantry by striking an enemy’s strongpoints, as well as the reinforcements and supplies they depend on.

Because of the vast differences between previous US conflicts around the globe and the ongoing conflict in Ukraine now, the type of rapid maneuver warfare utilized by US-led forces in Iraq would not only be inappropriate in Ukraine, it would be disastrous. The 2023 Ukrainian offensive before which NATO trained, armed, and directed Ukrainian forces, ended in catastrophic failure, comprehensively defeated by Russian defenses utilizing land mines, artillery, multiple-launch rocket systems (MLRS), long-range ballistic missiles, a wide variety of drones, and both infantry and attack helicopters utilizing anti-tank guided missiles (ATGMs) – all elements absent among the armed forces of the various nations the US has invaded and occupied since Vietnam.

Because Ukraine also possesses significant defense capabilities, including well-protected fortifications, minefields, artillery, and FPV (first-person-view) drones, NATO-style maneuver warfare would likewise result in catastrophic failure for Russian forces.

Russia has instead adopted a strategy of attrition. Instead of overwhelming Ukrainian positions with rapid maneuver warfare, it is grinding them down with huge amounts of artillery, MLRS, missiles, drones, and military aviation carrying out stand-off strikes using a variety of glide bombs ranging from 250 to 3,000 kilograms. While progress is slower than NATO-style maneuver warfare, it has allowed Russia to avoid the staggering losses Ukraine suffered last year during its offensive.

Ukraine is a different kind of war; thus Russia utilizes a different approach to military aviation.

The conclusion that events unfolding in Ukraine demonstrate the capabilities of Russian military aviation have been “significantly overstated,” as one expert interviewed by Business Insider put it, is a dangerous misconception. US-NATO military aviation would (and already has in Syria) demonstrated it suffers from the same limitations in airspace as contested as Ukraine’s.

Admitted Russian Advantages  

Business Insider’s article concedes there are aspects of Russian military aviation that constitute success. It mentions Russia’s extensive use of stand-off weapons – both air-launched cruise missiles as well as glide bombs (just as the US and its allies are using in Syria to avoid Syrian air defenses). The article also acknowledges Russia’s significant air defense and electronic warfare capabilities, constructing an “umbrella” protecting Russian forces, infrastructure, bases, and civilian centers.

There is one significant difference, however, between Russian and Western stand-off capabilities. Russia’s military industrial base allows it to produce missiles and glide bombs in quantities the collective West cannot match. Russia’s air defense capabilities also exist on a scale the collective West is unable to replicate.

After first claiming Russia is, “unable to suppress or destroy enemy air defenses,” Business Insider eventually admits the depleted air defense arsenals of the collective West and the inability to replenish them in any meaningful manner precisely because Russia has been able to not only “suppress” and “destroy enemy air defenses,” but also because of Russia’s ability to saturate and deplete Ukraine’s supply of interceptor missiles.  

Claims in the article that Lockheed Martin is expanding Patriot missile production to 550 a year are made without explaining that Russia is firing 4,000+ missiles at targets across Ukraine over the same period of time, meaning that 550, 650, or even 750 interceptors manufactured a year represent an entirely inadequate quantity.

And despite this fact, the article would even claim:

In Ukraine, the world has seen that Western air defenses can shoot down incoming drones and missiles when they have sufficient coverage and enough ammo, and the performance has quelled doubts about the Patriot.

This is doubtful.

The US and its allies transferred Western air defense systems to Ukraine, in part, to protect Ukraine’s power grid. In April 2024, CNN would admit that up to 80% of Ukraine’s non-nuclear power production has been destroyed. This means that Ukraine has either run out of Patriot missile interceptors, or the interceptors they have are failing to protect Ukraine’s power grid. It should be noted that the efficacy of an air defense system lies now only in its ability to intercept incoming targets, but also to be produced in large enough quantities to continue intercepting incoming targets.

The high cost of the Patriot missile system inhibits larger-scale production to meet the requirements of a large-scale and/or protracted conflict, meaning that despite its supposed performance in combat, it is still a fundamentally ineffective means of air defense.

Even before Russia’s SMO began in February 2022, the previous month Saudi Arabia’s Patriot systems had exhausted their supply of interceptors amid its ongoing conflict with neighboring Yemen. The United States’ inability to increase production forced Saudi Arabia to “borrow” missiles from neighboring nations.

The limited number of Patriot systems and interceptors being manufactured represent a metric of the system’s overall “success”and, despite the Business Insider’s conclusion, should  continue to drive “doubts” regarding it.

NATO vs. Russia 

The Business Insider article admits that in a conflict between NATO and Russia, NATO military aviation would face serious challenges that simply did not exist in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and even Syria.

The article cites US Air Force (USAF) General David Allvin who noted, “in future fights, it may be possible for the US to achieve air superiority only in bursts — small windows in a specific time, place, and location where air defenses are missing, destroyed, or out of ammo.” 

USAF General James Hecker would tell Business Insider, “if we can’t get air superiority, we’re going to be doing the fight that’s going on in Russia and Ukraine right now, and we know how many casualties that are coming out of that fight.” 

Considering the advantages Russia also enjoys in land warfare capabilities, including the production of up to 3 times more artillery ammunition than the collective West, the outcome of that fight would likely mirror the same incremental defeat Ukraine itself is now suffering.

Western Failures in the Skies of Ukraine, a Microcosm of Wider, Irreversible Decline 

The same blind pursuit of profits and power that compelled the collective West to expand NATO up to Russia’s border in the first place, and deliberately create a national security threat forcing Russia’s intervention in Ukraine, has also created the crisis facing the collective West’s military industrial base making it impossible to achieve the geopolitical objectives this proxy war in Ukraine is a part of.

In order for the collective West to “succeed,” it should first reevaluate what it is even trying to achieve.

This blind pursuit of profits and power is not unlike a tropism in nature – like a tree, for example – reaching downward with its roots and upward with its branches and leaves to grow as large and as fast as possible. In the ideal environment, such a tropism can thrive. In times of drought, the means of sustaining the vast proportions that the tree took could jeopardize its own very survival.

Until the 21st century, the global “environment” was ideal for Western hegemony. The disparity in military and economic power between the West and the rest of the world favored the blind pursuit of profits and power, often in the form of empire. The West grew to gargantuan proportions. Today, the environment has changed – this disparity no longer exists – and now the West is collapsing under the unsustainable size of its own overreach.

While Western policymakers search for game-changing strategies and technologies to maintain generations of global primacy, the unsustainable nature of this pursuit becomes more precarious all while Russia, China, and the rest of the world continue to grow stronger relative to the collective West. Only a policy of shifting away from coercion and control over the rest of the world, toward constructive cooperation with the rest of the world, can avert the inevitable collapse all other stubborn empires have faced throughout history.

For the rest of the world, including Russia and its Chinese allies, the goal continues to be defending their individual and collective sovereignty from Western hegemony while carefully avoiding the triggering of a much larger conflict borne of Western desperation.

In the meantime, in the airspace above Ukraine, a microcosm of the wider failure of Western foreign policy continues to play out, not only lacking any possibility of reversing in Ukraine or its Western sponsors’ favor, but almost certainly to continue accelerating to their detriment.

https://journal-neo.su/2024/07/23/the-west-is-learning-the-wrong-lessons-about-airpower-in-ukraine/

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Valery Zaluzhny’s message is pleasing for Western elites, but terrifying for Ukrainians
Kiev’s former commander-in-chief, now ambassador to the UK, wants to turn his country into a weapons testing lab

Valery Zaluzhny, Ukraine’s former commander-in-chief, has given his first public speech in his new role as his country’s ambassador to Britain. The occasion – surely carefully chosen – was the annual Land Warfare Conference at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), the UK’s oldest and still premier military and geopolitical think tank.

It was a high-level setting; other speakers included General Roland Walker, Chief of Britain’s General Staff and Admiral Tony Radakin, Chief of the Defence Staff. Zaluzhny of course, was a high-level guest too: De facto exiled to Britain after losing a power struggle against Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky, rumors about a future return to Ukraine and a powerful position there have never died down.

According to a Telegraph correspondent who was in the audience, Zaluzhny’s address was mostly delivered in Ukrainian, as the ambassador’s English is, to put it bluntly, unusually weak for a diplomat, especially one sent to London. But Zaluzhny published the speech on his Telegram channel under the somewhat awkward title: “The Russian-Ukrainian War as a War of Transitional period. New patterns of the war.” This version’s also less than perfect English does make you wonder about the staff resources at the Ukrainian embassy (not a single person capable of some basic editing?), but Zaluzhny’s meaning comes through loud and clear.  

Zaluzhny started on a note of corny philosophizing and gauche confusion: After being treated to the hackneyed phrase “Si vis pacem, para bellum” (If you want peace, prepare for war), his listeners must have been intrigued to hear Ukraine’s former commander-in-chief equate killing in war with murder. Usually, that is a position associated with radical pacifism. Some may have been surprised to hear that the total number of casualties of World War I and II taken together was 60 million. Unfortunately, it was significantly higher. (Also “Carl,” not “Karl,” von Clausewitz; if you want to boast using authors you clearly have not read, at least check the spelling.) 

But World War III was Zaluzhny’s real theme at RUSI, in two respects. Ostensibly, the ambassador who used to be a general was talking about how to avoid it, but in reality the general inside the ambassador was really giving advice on how to wage it. In Zaluzhny’s defense, his idea of preserving the peace is so crude that the two aims easily converge. In his single-track mind, the only key to peace is deterrence by military power. But this total neglect of any role for diplomacy and compromise is, of course, what his Western audiences like to hear because it flatters them by mirroring their own tunnel vision.

Casting himself in what is by now a timeworn role for Ukrainian representatives in the West, Zaluzhny spoke as a sage and warner delivering a wake-up call to – why be modest? – all of humanity and in particular, “free and democratic nations.” In this context, Ukraine, for its former commander-in-chief, is a resource of a very peculiar kind. It is Ukraine’s experience in the war with Russia – or at least his interpretation of that experience – that Zaluzhny uses to claim special authority when speaking to his Western listeners and coming to conclusions that he must know are certain to be welcome.

Thus, generously offering “to share all our knowledge, experience and thoughts,” his first lesson is that “society must agree to temporarily give up a range of freedoms for the sake of survival,” because, the former general argues, modern wars are “total,” requiring “the efforts not only of the army, but also of society as a whole.” “Politicians,” Zaluzhny elaborated, “can and should mobilize society." 

This idea – often called the “whole-of-society approach” to security and defense – has, of course, been one of the main strands of NATO and EU propaganda for several years already. NATO, for instance, adopted a resolution on it in 2021; in the same year the EU’s Directorate-General for External Policies produced a policy paper on “Best Practices in the Whole-of-Society Approach in Countering Hybrid Threats.” In January 2024, the then UK Chief of the General Staff, General Patrick Sanders made the same point: a future war with Russia would require comprehensive mobilization of the whole nation. The head of NATO’s Military Committee, Dutch Admiral Rob Bauer, has long preached the same mantra, occasionally mixed with pure scaremongering about how to prep best (have a flashlight, radio, and batteries ready…) for the day the big bad Russians come. 

All of the above is part of NATO’s escalating effort to make and keep itself important and very well financed. Having helped create – by its reckless expansion – the war that is now devastating Ukraine, NATO elites would not let a good crisis go to waste. There also is something slightly comical about the crude, 1950s-style manipulation of the Western public, and something sadly comical about how a former Ukrainian commander-in-chief serves to play back Western talking points, repackaged as Ukrainian experience, to Western audiences to receive their blessing.

Yet ultimately the issue is deadly serious for two reasons. Obviously in the worst case, the current attempts to get everyone psyched up not just for war but for World War III may feature in future history books, in chapters on a prewar period. Second, there is a peacetime agenda as well. The drive toward “societal resilience”serves to justify, at a minimum, the streamlining of public discourse, the narrowing of policy debates, and the demonization of those arguing for diplomacy instead of – or at least in addition to – military solutions.

In this respect, Zelensky’s Ukraine, as represented by his former rival and current ambassador Zaluzhny, is the wet dream of the West’s mobilizers: a personalistic, at best semi-authoritarian regime, with no free media or opposition. And the fact that they have no shame in calling that sort of state a “democracy,”complete with the usual “vibrant” civil society, proves that they would not hesitate to do the same at home.   

If Zaluzhny’s ideas about what should be done to society are stunningly imitative, his take on the military meaning of the Ukraine War seems at least more original, if a little bombastic. He believes that the “changes which were invented on the battlefields of the Russian-Ukrainian war” are very likely to “determine the outlines of wars and the art of war in the 21st century” and to “become the foundation of the entire global security system of the future.”

Zaluzhny is probably wrong on the facts there. As I have long argued, the genocidal slaughter committed by Israel in Gaza is more likely to leave a deeper imprint on the future of “warfare” (for want of a better term). We are already seeing attempts to derive “lessons” (all the wrong ones, rest assured) from it by Western think tanks such as the RAND Corporation and, indeed, the very same RUSI where Zaluzhny gave his speech. 

But let’s set that aside and focus on what the former commander-in-chief believes to be the main military lesson of the Ukraine War. Driven by the need to survive on the battlefield, Zaluzhny argues, Ukrainian forces have invented and applied new technologies while adapting their structure and tactics to them. For him, this war therefore marks a transition, starting and foreshadowing decisive future developments. In particular – and this is a key phrase in his sales pitch – these technologies are supposed to offer a way to “fight and win against stronger armies in the 21st century.” (By “stronger,” the general here clearly must mean “larger,” because if he literally meant “stronger” – as in also technologically stronger – his statement would be self-contradictory and absurd.)

Now compare this with what the new chief of the UK General Staff, General Ronald Walker had to say at the same RUSI Land Warfare Conference. Walker also delivered a stern warning about a dangerous world out there, i.e. Russia and China, and promised to triple the effectiveness (“lethality”) of British forces within a few years, without asking for more men. His miracle fix to do so: new technology that, Walker says, will enable his army to defeat much larger forces. See a difference compared to Zaluzhny’s promises? No? Exactly. Once again, the obliging Ukrainian delivered exactly what his Western listeners wanted to hear. By now, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has publicly agreed with Walker. Congrats, General Zaluzhny: bullseye in crowd-pleasing.  

Yet, once again, there is a less farcical side to Zaluzhny’s somewhat crude opportunism. In essence, he called on his audience to see Ukraine as a laboratory where the West can develop its future military technology. Ukraine, he admitted, cannot “scale up” its inventions and innovations made in the midst of battle. Yet its Western “partners” – “users” would be a better, more honest term – have the resources needed for such upscaling, “but there is no applied and practical field to test them.”

In other words, Ukrainians can keep dying, while the West can field-test new military technologies. And make no mistake: Zaluzhny does not believe that fewer Ukrainians will be needed because the new technologies will replace them. The whole meaning of his labelling the current war merely “transitional”and not yet one of “the future” is to strand Ukraine in the worst of both worlds where, as he admits, “the only way out may be to increase the number of human resources involved in hostilities.”

And there you have it. Ukraine’s real future, according to Zaluzhny, is one where more Ukrainians will be fed into the meatgrinder of a losing war, but on the upside, the meatgrinder will be constantly modernized and updated with the newest ways of killing and dying, compliments of the West. It is one thing that this fantasy of a forever war as a forever laboratory will not come to pass. It is another that it is the real message – if you pay attention – of Ukraine’s former commander-in-chief and current ambassador in London, and future who-knows-what, when speaking to an elite Western audience. One of Ukraine’s tragedies is being abused by the West; the other being betrayed by its own leaders.

https://www.rt.com/news/601647-zaluzhny-ukraine-wests-weapons-lab/

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