On the menu today: For what feels like the first time in a long time, the news from Ukraine’s war against the Russian invaders is good — surprisingly good. The Ukrainians’ recent success vividly illuminates that one commentator’s doomsaying since the start of the war has always been a lot more about what he wanted to see, and what his audience wanted to hear, than what was actually happening. It’s one of several recent examples of people who ought to know better telling you that two plus two equals five. It’s a good thing you know better . . . right?
After a Long, Hard Stretch, Ukraine Is on the Attack against Russia
After an extensive stretch where things looked particularly grim for the cause of Ukrainian independence — check out any of my coverage from my visit in March — all of a sudden, the Ukrainians are advancing on several fronts.
A mixture of panic, confusion and defiance has spread through the region’s population after Ukraine’s troops breached the frontier to take control of at least 74 settlements in Russia’s Kursk region, according to Kyiv’s tally. . . .
Russia is withdrawing some of its military forces from Ukraine to respond to the situation inside the Russian border, U.S. officials said Tuesday, the first sign that Kyiv’s incursion is forcing Moscow to rejigger its invasion force.
Ukraine’s intelligence service announced Thursday the capture of another 100 Russian soldiers during its 10-day-old incursion into the Kursk region, describing it as the “largest mass capture” of enemy soldiers at one time, amid talk they will be exchanged for Ukrainian captives. . . .
Ukraine’s stunning move into Russia — the first such attack on the nation since World War II — appears to mark a major improvement in Kyiv’s position after a summer of steady losses.
“In a televised crisis meeting on Monday, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia flipped through a white legal pad, reading aloud from handwritten notes, suggesting that his aides did not have the time to type up a speech for him as they usually do. . . .
Mr. Putin has said nothing about the incursion since meeting with security and regional officials, a tense gathering in which the president at one point berated the Kursk governor for revealing the depth and breadth of Ukraine’s advance into Russia. Near the border, where, the authorities say, more than 130,000 people have fled or been evacuated, regional officials appeared unprepared for the crisis — prompting grass-roots aid initiatives to jump in.
CNN:
Ukrainian drones targeted four Russian airfields Wednesday in the largest such attack of the war, as Kyiv’s troops advance further into Russia following their surprise cross-border incursion that has left the Kremlin embarrassed and scrambling. . . .
Kyiv has already claimed to have control over some 1,000 square kilometers (386 square miles) of Russian territory since the start of its surprise assault.
Even during the bad days, the Ukrainians managed to regularly inflict a stunning number of casualties upon the Russians. In late June, a Russian outlet reported that 71,000 Russian soldiers had been killed; at the beginning of that month, French foreign minister Stéphane Séjourné estimated that the Russians had lost 150,000 soldiers to that point. At the end of May, British intelligence stated that it is “likely” that more than a half-million Russian soldiers have been killed or wounded in the war.
For perspective, the U.S. suffered 58,220 fatal military casualties during the Vietnam War.
As always, read the thoughts and analysis my colleague Mark Antonio Wright, here and here. When Mark isn’t editing the magazine and reminding me to send in my overdue contributions to The Week section, he’s serving as an infantry officer in the U.S. Marine Corps Reserve.
After my first trip to Ukraine, a few readers wrote in or left comments urging me to check out the assessments of retired colonel Douglas Macgregor, contending he had the real scoop. I wasn’t familiar with Macgregor, but a bit of digging illuminated the retired colonel’s very consistent assessment of how the war is going:
March 4, 2022: “The first five days Russian forces I think frankly were too gentle. They’ve now corrected that. So, I would say, another ten days, this should be completely over.”
March 15, 2022: “The Ukrainians are being crushed. Even the Washington Post and the New York Times are now finally beginning to print the truth. Their casualties are horrific. We’ve effectively seen the Russians destroy three separate armies built by the Ukrainians. And everyone is starting to wonder what’s really happening. The truth is coming out that this war was not started by Russia.”
March 17, 2022: “The war is really over for the Ukrainians. They have been grounded to bits. There’s no question about that, despite what we report on our mainstream media.”
April 21, 2022: The current fighting represents the “final annihilation of what remains of Ukraine’s best forces. . . . The Russians have never been interested in crossing the Dnieper River. They were always interested in destroying the Ukrainian forces — that job’s about through.”
July 7, 2022: “It’s [Ukraine] already effectively a failed state, it could be erased completely from the map. . . . The Russians are holding most of the cards at this point.”
July 8, 2022: “The war, with the exception of Kharkiv and Odessa, as far as the Russians are concerned is largely over.”
August 23, 2022: “The introduction of new weapon systems won’t change the strategic outcome in Ukraine. Even if NATO’s European members, together with Washington, D.C., provided Ukrainian troops with a new avalanche of weapons, and it arrived at the front instead of disappearing into the black hole of Ukrainian corruption, the training and tactical leadership required to conduct complex offensive operations does not exist inside Ukraine’s 700,000-man army.”
(The Ukrainians have no capacity for a complex offensive operation, huh?)
September 12, 2022: “This war may be over soon. . . . Right now, things are going very, very badly,” for Ukraine. . . . The Ukrainian forces are “desperate.”
In a magazine article published September 22, 2022: “As of this date, Kiev continues to oblige Moscow by impaling Ukraine’s last reserves of manpower on Russian defenses. . . . Ukrainian forces are bleeding to death in counterattack after counterattack.”
During a television appearance on September 22, 2022: “The Ukrainian army is bled white. . . . Tens of thousands of Ukrainian troops have been killed or wounded. Ukraine is really on the ropes and trying to create the illusion that that’s not the case.”
January 26, 2023: “Ukrainian losses — at least 150,000 dead including 35,000 missing in action and presumed dead — have fatally weakened Ukrainian forces resulting in a fragile Ukrainian defensive posture that will likely shatter under the crushing weight of attacking Russian forces in the next few weeks.”
July 2, 2023: “Ukrainian forces are on the verge of collapse, they are totally demoralized. They’ve all been killed, it’s OVER.”
July 14, 2023: “Douglas believes that Ukraine is being catastrophically defeated and it is only a matter of time before Russia assumes full control, while arguing that the West, in particular the US and Biden, are pretending to have built a powerful Ukrainian army.”
August 23, 2023: “I think all of the lies that have been told for more than a year and a half about ‘the Ukrainians are winning’ — [the] Ukrainian cause’s just, the Russians are evil, the Russians are incompetent — all of that is collapsing. . . . Ukrainians now we think have lost 400,000 men killed in battle. We were talking about 300-350,000 a few months ago. Within the last month of this supposed counteroffensive which was to sweep the battlefield, they lost at least 40,000 killed.”
(Fun fact: August 23, 2023, was the day I was in Kovel, a small city of 67,000, about 40 miles south of Ukraine’s border with Belarus, where I met with a commander in one of Ukraine’s civilian-defense units. I reported his assessment, which said that the war would be “fought for three to four years.”)
Separate from Macgregor’s doomsday predictions for the Ukrainians, in January 2024, he contended on Twitter that “at least 400 Americans have died whether they are contractors or in uniform.” That appears to be off by a factor of ten. As of February 2024, at least 40 of the 50 U.S. citizens killed in Ukraine had military experience; they were all volunteers. The U.S. State Department notes, “Our ability to verify reports of deaths of U.S. citizens in Ukraine is extremely limited.”
April 23, 2024: “The imminent collapse of the Ukrainian state and armed forces will no doubt inform such discussions.”
Macgregor’s eternal vision of Ukraine is that it is a country that is always teetering on the brink of a catastrophic, intractable defeat, but somehow never manages to get there. He has been predicting an imminent Ukrainian collapse and sweeping Russian victory for over two years now. That doesn’t mean that Russia will never win, or that Ukraine is guaranteed victory. But it does mean we should put about as much stock in Macgregor’s promises of a Russian victory as we do in ESPN’s Mike Greenberg’s assurances that the New York Jets will win the Super Bowl.
Macgregor doesn’t have a particular insight into what’s happening on Ukrainian battlefields. No, the reason people listen to him is because he tells a particular audience what they want to hear.
Almost everybody else is calling it as they see it. For a long stretch, the war has been a bloody and messy stalemate. Russia has the significant advantages of more materiel and more manpower, but the Ukrainians are really determined to not spend the rest of their lives under the Russian boot, and they’re fighting like hellions and making the most of the limited advantages they have (mostly technological ones and a hell-bent-for-leather pace of innovation).
No doubt about it, the Russian invasion has inflicted a terrible cost upon the Ukrainian people and its armed forces. No one knows the exact casualty count; in February, Zelensky put the number at around 31,000. (That’s killed in action — it doesn’t count those captured, missing in action, or wounded.) Almost everyone in Ukraine believes that number understates the true cost, but no one has a clear sense of what the real number is. Suffice to say that it is somewhere above ‘bad” and below “so bad that the Ukrainians cannot and will not keep fighting the war.”
If you want to say, “The Ukrainians have suffered great losses, and no one knows how long they’ll be able to keep fighting,” then say that. Don’t say that the war is effectively over and the Russians have already won.
To say, “The collapse of the Ukrainian state and armed forces is imminent,” or “the Ukrainians do not have the ability to conduct complex offensive operations” is to insist that two plus two equals five.
It doesn’t matter if you think that two plus two ought to equal five, or if you would feel better if two plus two equaled five, or if you think it would serve somebody right if two plus two equaled five. Two plus two equals four. No amount of arguments, spin, table-pounding, shouting, or name-calling can make two plus two equal five.
To say, “There was nobody at the plane, and she ‘A.I.’d’ it, and showed a massive ‘crowd’ of so-called followers, BUT THEY DIDN’T EXIST!” is to insist that two plus two equals five. The country has a lot of Democrats, and it’s not surprising that a whole bunch of them, thousands and thousands, would attend a rally at an airport when Air Force Two is arriving because they’re either enthused about Kamala Harris being the nominee, or just really relieved that Joe Biden is not the nominee.
To say, “It’s my personal belief, based upon a fair amount of evidence, they’re not aliens, they’ve always been here. And I do think it’s spiritual. That’s my view. And again it’s not provable, but based on the evidence. . . . If the US government has, in fact, had contact, direct contact, with these beings, whatever they are, I’ve already told you what I think they are — and has entered into some sort of agreement with them, which is the claim of informed people, it’s a very, very, very heavy thing,” is to insist that two plus two equals five.
Don’t let people tell you that two plus two equals five.
ADDENDUM: Speaking of demons and the U.S. government, thanks to “dstuewe” for his recent review of Dueling Six Demons:
If you are Gen X, you will like the comradery, recognize the jokes, and remember when you were going to be James Bond. If you aren’t, you should read this series so you can envy us. Except maybe the Bloodhound Gang. I’ve got that song stuck in my head now. Thanks, Jim.