Explosive Secret French Military Report Makes Shocking Admissions: "Ukraine Can't Win!"
Folks, I wanted to make this article free, but alas I’ve wedged myself into a new working schedule of at least two paid articles per month, one for each half, so this one’s got to fill the slot. But you don’t want to miss this dishy report, so I suggest for those unable to subscribe to utilize Substack’s new feature which is supposed to allow subscribers to unlock one free article to try out. Unfortunately, I don’t know how it works on the consumer’s end, precisely, or how to activate it, as it appears to be something new or still being rolled out.
It’s a 4,400 word piece, and as usual I’ve left about the first 900+ words, by my estimations, open to wet your beaks.
It’s come to light that according to sources from the French Marianne paper, Macron’s entire recent mental manqué resulted from a secret series of ‘assessments’ by the French military that not only provided an absolutely disastrous picture of the actual realities on the ground in Ukraine, but in no uncertain terms even concluded quite frankly that: “Ukraine cannot win this war militarily.”
“Ukraine cannot win this war militarily,” concludes the first report, written in the fall of 2023, following Kiev’s disastrous ground offensive. It praises the Russian forces as the new “tactical and technical” standard of how to run defensive operations and debunks the media myth of “meat assaults.”
Here’s a summary of the report from DDGeopolitics to get a quick gist:
While Macron might be preparing something disastrous, the French Armed Forces are trying to sound the alarm through the French media.
In the French publication Marianne, (https://www.marianne.net/monde/europe/guerre-en-ukraine-endurance-russe-echec-de-la-contre-offensive-ce-que-cache-le-virage-de-macron) which is very close to the French political class, French officers speaking on condition of anonymity spoke about their impressions of the war in Ukraine, the AFU and the Russian Armed Forces.
In summary, the officers speaking to the publication rated the Russian Army very highly. The Russian Army, contrary to Western media, trains its new recruits properly, organizes rotation of personnel and units in the frontline, and always mixes veterans with new recruits so the new soldiers can learn more quickly.
By contrast the Ukrainians blew their best and last chance for victory in the Summer 2023 offensive. The French Armed Forces also estimate Ukraine needs 30,000 - 35,000 new conscripts or recruits every month to keep their force levels steady but currently the Ukrainians are only inducting half that number.
The article assesses that there is no conceivable path currently to a Ukrainian military victory.
So it would appear quite plausible that Macron did in fact lose his lunch over the report from trusted military sources, which resulted in his Defcon 1 meltdown and Tourettes-like expectorations on troop deployment. Now he’s even announced plans to allegedly ‘address the public’ on the Ukraine issue tomorrow, per Le Monde paper.
But if the secret military report was damning to the AFU, it was even more damning to the uxorious petit caporal’s Grande Armée itself:
You have to read it twice to believe it—excusing the infelicities of machine autotranslation. Yes, that’s the French military calling itself an army of cheerleaders in the face of the Russian army. “Who is this guy kidding, sending us to Ukraine?” they seem to protest.
The report goes on, no less pessimistically (autotranslation formatting cleaned up a bit by me):
Planning, imagined in Kiev and in the Western staffs has proved "disastrous".
"The planners thought that as soon as the first lines of defense of Russians would have taken place, the whole of the front would collapse [...] These preliminary phases of the fundamental have been made without consideration of the moral forces of the enemy in defensive: that is to say, the will of the Russian soldier to cling to the ground," notes the report referring to "the failure of the planning" of the western camp.
That’s called “underestimation”.
And riddle me why, exactly, did the West underestimate Russia so wantonly? Oh, that’s right—because all their projections and estimations were based on totally erroneously cooked data. When you have the SBU reporting 20 shot down Russian planes per week, and 500,000 Russian casualties—or whatever the absurdity is up to now—then, I’m sorry to say, that’s going to very unfavorably skew your expectations and mission planning.
I’ve belabored it before, but I’ll say it again for the new Subscribers: the U.S. military rolled out a whole new initiative tasked specifically with integrating “open source intelligence” into its planning, giddy with possibility at the first, seemingly endlessly fruitful, ‘successes’ of this partnership with rabid pro-UA OSINT autists in the opening stanza of the war.
However, this famously proved catastrophic when reports began to trickle out that much of U.S./CIA mission planning for the grand Zaporozhye CounterOffensive™ was in fact based on outdated OSINT maps of Russia’s defenses. In short: they planned the offensive around Twitter maps made in MS Paint by light-shunning basement dwellers like Andrew Perpetua. Once the Ukrainian spearhead actually reached the lines, they realized things were quite different than their Twitter intelligence had assured, because Russian forces were hip to their over reliance on such unhygienic ‘data’ habits, and proceeded to modify many of the defensive structures and positions.
The report continues with praise for ol’ reliable Soviet legacy gear:
With no air support, and with Western equipment that was disparate and less efficient than the old Soviet equipment ("run-down, easy to maintain, and suitable for use in degraded mode", the report mentions), the Ukrainian troops had no hope of breaking through.
Russia, they shockingly confess, is the gold standard of military defense in the world today:
"Today, the Russian army is the 'tactical and technical' benchmark for thinking about and implementing the defensive mode," writes the report.
Why, I’m nearly beside myself! We were mocked for two years writing these very words, yet all along NATO military heads were secretly whispering agreement. It feels almost surreal to be vindicated in such fashion.
Notable is the fact that in previous such public distributions, of ISW, RUSI, and other propaganda farm variety, some praise occasionally managed to slip through, but rarely without the accompanying counterbalance of heavy ridicule. “Russian forces showed strength in capturing XXX town, but they did so with meat waves generating 50,000 casualties,” and so on.
But this report has nary a single critique—just simple unvarnished praise for the Russian Army’s demonstrated supremacy.
The jaw-dropping admissions continue apace:
Another observation, "the Russians have also managed their reserve troops, to guarantee operational endurance".
According to this document, Moscow reinforces its units before they are completely worn out, mixes recruits with seasoned troops, provides regular rest periods in the rear... and "has always had a coherent reservoir of forces to deal with unforeseen events".
“This is a far cry from the widespread idea in the West of a Russian army sending its troops to the slaughter without counting the cost...".
To date, the Ukrainian general staff does not have a critical mass of land forces capable of joint maneuver at corps level, capable of challenging their Russian counterparts to break through its defensive line", concludes this confidential defense report, according to which "the most serious error of analysis and judgment would be to continue to seek exclusively military solutions to halt hostilities".
We’ve said this all along: Russia provides rotations, intelligent troop management—not all the time and in fully consistent fashion, but far better than anything Ukraine or potentially even NATO armies would manage at the same conflict scale and intensity.
Here’s where we get to the future projections and general prognostic outlook:
A French officer sums up: "It's clear, given the forces at play, that Ukraine cannot win this war militarily.”
Second observation: the conflict entered a critical phase in December. According to our military sources in Paris, the Ukrainian army was forced into defensive mode. "The combativeness of Ukrainian soldiers is deeply affected," mentions a forward-looking report on the year 2024. Zelensky would need 35,000 men a month, but he's not recruiting half of them, whereas Putin is drawing from a pool of 30,000 monthly volunteers", says a soldier who has just returned from Kiev. In terms of equipment, the balance is just as unbalanced: the failed offensive of 2023 is said to have "tactically destroyed" half of Kiev's 12 combat brigades.
Woah, woah, woah—remember all the statements of mockery about Shoigu’s much-vaunted 30-50k monthly sign-ups and enlistments to build the second army group for NATO’s flank? This is the second time we’ve now had quiet Western affirmation of this fact.
That’s not to even mention their nonchalant admission that Ukraine suffers 35,000 casualties per month and only replenishes half of them. No need to even adorn the last self-evident sentence regarding Ukraine’s brigades with further commentary.
Interestingly, they also confirm our theories about the potential for Western “cheerleaders” to merely relieve Ukrainian territorials from the rear:
Since then, Western aid has never been so low. So it's clear that no Ukrainian offensive can be mounted this year. "The West can provide 3D printers to make drones or prowler ammunition, but will never be able to print men," the report notes. "Given the situation, it may have been possible to reinforce the Ukrainian army, not with fighters, but with support forces, at the rear, to free up Ukrainian soldiers for the front," admits a senior officer, confirming a "surge" of Western military personnel in civilian clothes.
Even though two American wagons, presumably used by the CIA, are hooked up to the train that runs the daily link between Poland and Kiev, the Western camp only half admits to the presence of special forces in Ukraine. "In addition to the Americans, who authorized the New York Times to visit a CIA camp, there are quite a few Brits", says a soldier, who does not deny the presence of French special forces, including combat swimmers on training missions...
On that note, yesterday we saw just another run-of-the-mill video of a new Ukrainian POW who casually admits that CIA officers commanded a mercenary group, which he saw with his own eyes:
The next portion is fairly passé, as the French would say, but I include it anyway for a few useful nuggets:
Third observation: the risk of a Russian break-through is real. This is the latest lesson to emerge from the Ukrainian front, which has French army observers in a cold sweat.
On February 17, Kiev was forced to abandon the town of Avdiïvka, on the northern outskirts of Donetsk, which until then had been a fortified bastion. "It was both the heart and the symbol of Ukrainian resistance in Russian-speaking Donbass," stresses a report on the "Battle of Avdiivka", drawing a series of damning lessons."
The Russians changed their modus operandi by compartmentalizing the town, and above all by using gliding bombs for the first time on a large scale", the document notes. While a 155 mm artillery shell carries 7 kg of explosive, the gliding bomb projects between 200 and 700 kg, and can therefore pierce concrete structures over 2 m high.
In addition, the Russians are using sound reducers on small infantry weapons to thwart acoustic detection systems in the field. "The Ukrainian armed forces' decision to withdraw came as a surprise," says the latest report, underlining its "suddenness and unpreparedness" and raising fears that the decision had been "taken more by the Ukrainian command than by the Russians".
The bit about ‘sound reducers’ on small arms is interesting: I’m not quite sure what that could refer to other than perhaps Russia’s much-coveted AS Val and VSS Vintorez assault rifles, which feature a very unique subsonic but outsize 9x39mm round. Its subsonic characteristics make it deadly silent while retaining its extreme power and penetrative qualities. Typically only Russian special forces were gifted these rifles, but perhaps the French are noting an increase in supply. Just a month or two ago a video showed a regular soldier reportedly ecstatic over receiving one simply for a term of service milestone, so maybe they are increasing production of these:
After all, that caliber is deemed to be the ‘future’ of combat, as the U.S. Army itself is reportedly switching to a new much larger 6.8mm caliber.
We near the not-so-promising end of the report:
The Ukrainian armed forces have just tactically shown that they do not possess the human and material capabilities [...] to hold a sector of the front that is subject to the assailant's effort", the document continues.
"The Ukrainian failure at Avdiivka shows that, despite the emergency dispatch of an 'elite' brigade - the 3rd Azov Air Assault Brigade - Kiev is not capable of locally restoring a sector of the front that is collapsing", the latest report alarms.
The art of the "Maskovkira "It remains to be seen what the Russians will do with this tactical success. Will they continue in the current mode of "slowly nibbling and shaking" the entire front line, or will they seek to "break through in depth"?
"According to this analysis, after two years of war, Russian forces have demonstrated their ability to "develop operational endurance", enabling them to wage "a slow, long-intensity war based on the continued attrition of the Ukrainian army".
Well, well, well.
By the way, in light of the above about Avdeevka being the heart and bastion of Ukrainian defenses in Donbass, as a slight aside allow me to share this video seen today, where a premier WWII historian debunks the myth that Bakhmut had no strategic relevance, a claim so loudly trumpted by the pro-UA side. I highly recommend for you to watch the briskly edifying video:
The final bit of the report:
A pessimistic assessment for the future
Ukraine, 2 years of invasion, 10 years of war: "Russia is Europe's neighbor, it's not going to disappear "Is it this new strategic situation, in which the Russian army seems to be in a position of strength in the face of a Ukrainian army on its last legs, that has led Emmanuel Macron, "en dynamique", as he put it, to envisage troop reinforcements? A realistic perspective given the current operational situation, described as "critical" by observers on the ground.
So, now we see why Macron was flung into high fantods in such fashion.
Arnaud Bertrand posted a translation of this diatribe by former French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, which lambasts Macron’s “irresponsibility”:
A few highlights; he states:
“I think we are more isolated than Russia is.”
He rightly identifies the fact that the world is perched on the brink of a total epochal reorientation to a ‘new world order’ marked by isolationism and protectionism spurred by a Trump / China rift that will undoubtedly be born of the near-certain—barring black swan falseflag—2024 election outcome.
He also rightly invokes the threat of a nuclear showdown, exacerbated by the weaker security architecture of the modern geopolitical layout, compared to that of the Cold War, where deterrence and respect for each other’s interests was codified and hallowed, to a large extent. Today, however, the West has allowed itself to be totally co-opted by a new, highly invasive species of neocon that has no checks on its power whatsoever, no accountability even by the standards of the Cold War, and they are bloodthirstily apt to keep prodding the Russian bear in its most sensitive wounds until armageddon erupts.
On that note, just yesterday in his new interview with Dmitry Kiselev, Putin declaimed on this very topic:
Of course the hawks at the top pretend not to ken Russia’s existential red lines, but in reality they know full well Russia is prepared to bathe the world in nuclear fire to prevent this final existential bastion from being occupied by inimical forces. The problem is, those deepstate hawks want to escalate so badly to assuage and delay the Empire’s death throes, and the only way to retain its power is to make sure the other competitors reach the bottom first. Thus, they need to stoke global conflict to engineer a scenario where everyone else’s economic and industrial bases are destroyed or degraded even faster than that of the U.S.
That’s not to mention that France under Macron is ambitiously trying to take the European leadership pole position from a waning, regressive Germany, and is attempting to out-compete Russia to the max on a variety of fronts, particularly given the bitter rivalry in Francophone Africa:
To finish off on the French strain, here’s a fire-spitting speech from Fabien Roussel, National Secretary of the French Communist Party, on the refusal to vote in favor of support for Ukraine:
He openly warns that France is stumbling into war, and scathes the assemblymen for being pro-war while the majority of French citizens are against it.
And French MEP Thierry Mariani breaks down just how much blood and treasure the Ukrainian aid will rob from the French citizenry:
In light of the above revelations, we can now bring the events of the past two days into better clarity. Ukrainian forces once again staged a series of provocations on the Russian border, after gathering a tight fist of ‘elite’ vanguard forces in an attempt to bulldoze their way into Kursk and Belgorod region for a superficial photo-op.
As the French report confirmed, Ukraine has no real chance of winning militarily—a fairly quotidian fact us astute observers have long passed over, of course—and so must resort merely to psyops and fabricated ‘media victories’.
A representative of the ‘Russian Legion’ which attempted to storm the border admitted openly in an interview that the provocation was staged entirely in the aim of disrupting the upcoming Russian presidential election, starting on March 15th:
Meanwhile, another terrorist group released a ‘threatening’ video stating their plain intention of blowing up Russian polling centers:
The slant of the provocations could not be more clear.
Laughably, they pretend to be ‘fighting for democracy’, by threatening to blow up Russia’s democratic election. It’s obvious what Zelensky’s amateurishly hamfisted attempts to destabilize Putin’s re-election are all about.
We’ve asked this question before, but: if Ukraine really can’t win the war militarily, then what is even the point of such destabilization attempts and psyops?
The answer is: the war was never about defeating Russia militarily to begin with. No one in the farthest flung flights of delirium could possibly imagine Ukraine to win a conventional dust-up against Goliath. The war was always about gradually seeding the on-the-ground conditions for the destabilization of Russian society and government such that a Russian maidan could overthrow Putin and install a Western candidate.
But just as Russian security services blundered and underestimated the West’s indoctrinating grip on Ukraine in the first blush of the war, conversely Western intel agencies vastly overestimated their ability to destabilize Russia, and even more vastly underestimated the resolve and solidarity inherent to a Russian society stewing in decades of resentment for the betrayals and humiliations of the rotten ‘90s.
And if that should fail: the other Plan B of the war is simply to draw it out long enough to foment the conditions for other European nations to enter into direct conflict with Russia such that everyone wicks up as much economic damage as possible, except the U.S. as per the usual MO utilized to great effect during WWI and II.
But it does increasingly appear like the event’s grand curtain call has been set for early next year, particularly given what Viktor Orban just revealed about his recent Mar-a-lago confab with Donald Trump:
That’s right, Trump assured him he’ll end the war by immediately cutting off the spigot: not a penny more for Ukraine, which will not be able to survive without U.S. aid.
This is also one of the cited reasons that Europe has animated into such a frantic scramble to fill the vacuum they sense is soon to come. But let’s be honest, the U.S. provided by far the lion’s share of the aid, and without it Ukraine stands no chance to survive.
That means any major psyops and destabilizing events the globalists have in mind, which includes embroiling Europe in a war with Russia, have about 9 months left to get off the ground. Thus the panic:
“Give everything to the Ukrainians? We have already given up 40% of our artillery. However, we must not forget that we do not have many of them." -- French Army General Francois Chauvency.
"What are we going to give in 2024, other than emptying what we have in our barracks, in our regiments, and giving it to the Ukrainians? That is, if there was a violent clash in one form or another, what would our soldiers come out with? With nothing."
But on the count of European solidarity, it’s now well-established insider fact that far flung rearmament ambitions are as illusory as gibes of “Russia’s weakness”, outside the backdoor whisper rooms that brought us the likes of today’s highlighted article. As example: the new Sputnik article emphasizes the recent grand gestures are nothing but pipe dreams:
The European Commission’s newly proposed strategy to coordinate its military industries to tackle the “existential threat” posed by Russia is, above all, a pipe dream, Colonel Jacques Hogard, who served 26 years in the French Army as an airborne officer in the Foreign Legion and the special forces, told Sputnik.
French Army Colonel Jacques Hogard elaborates:
“The EU, whose initial vocation as a peacemaker in Europe has completely slipped and transformed into a warmonger, is seeking to exist, in the face of the visible disengagement of the United States in Ukraine. It clumsily tries to find a way out of the trap into which the Americans have made it fall. But in reality, 'defense Europe' is a dream. Born from a desire to bring the Franco-German couple together, this dream has never had the slightest beginning of concrete realization,” Hogard stated.
The pundit elaborated by pointing to the TIGER III, MAWS, and CIFS programs that were all successively “abandoned by Berlin, either to adopt purely German solutions or to turn to American equipment.”
Funny he should mention EU warmongers: here’s Germany’s Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann in her element with an unhinged Orwellian philippic precisely on this bent:
He goes on to highlight the deepening split between France and Germany:
Franco-German relations have spiraled since the summer of 2023, with personal tensions running high between President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, Hogard pointed out.
“The French and German leaders have continued to publicly display their deep disagreements, which result from two opposing visions and two competing ambitions in terms of defense. We can clearly see in these conditions that the European Commission's plan is a wishful dream which is not about to begin to come true even at a minimum," he said, pointing to the "harsh reality of an obsolete European Union, which is very likely not to survive the current crisis."
This plays to what I’ve enumerated in the last few articles: much of NATO’s lipsmacking spiels have been nothing more than empty feel-good morale-boosting exercises. In reality, virtually nothing has been signed in two years between European nations vis a vis all the much-drummed-up mutual defense initiatives to invest in Ukraine’s armaments. A large part of the reason is owed to the simple fact that, beneath the front-facing PR banter of interchangeable nomenklatura gophers like Josep Borrell, most of the faceless bureaucratic peanut gallery instinctively understands the realities on the ground—those same realities from the painful French military confessional today. Which are that Ukraine has no real military chance, and that all the stagey antics of the plastic EU pompadour-class stiffs, like the Von Der Leyens and Stoltenbergs, are just a kind of hopeful performance art, a scripted charade, a kabuki theater of desperate globalist war hawks and beholden defense contractor stakeholders powdering and rouging each other’s cheeks to the glazed-eyed delight of their clinking, absent retinue.
As a final note, to bring it full circle back to the French report’s admission of Soviet legacy gear’s superiority in the face of the vagaries of the Ukrainian conflict, I bring you the full UK Sun report of the British Challenger 2s, referenced last time with only photos. I urge you to watch this entire video, and listen to the frank admissions about the West’s most vaunted military hardware. Echoes of WWII, anyone?
The accompanying article makes it even clearer. It states that not only are the tanks massively overweight, and thus constantly getting bogged down in the famous velvet of Donbass’s black soil, they are also hangar queens with extreme reliability issues, particularly in their ‘much-vaunted’ gun barrels and attendant mechanisms:
But a bigger problem is reliability. Five have broken down and Kayfarick said spare parts from Britain sometimes take months to arrive and he had a shortage of skilled mechanics to keep the hardware fighting fit.
Well, that’s not very reassuring…
Remember the famous early footage of M1 Abrams tank deliveries to Ukraine, which showed the barrels were janky and broken before they had even been used?
But the most candidly revealing part of the article?
Why does that so closely resemble the findings of the French military in the opening report?
But he said Ukraine’s top brass were torn between “the completely different approach of the Soviet school and the Nato school of fighting.”
So, NATO’s gear is meant to be sparingly used for the occasional mincing volley at targets from afar, and preferably from hidden positions not requiring much relocation of the ungainly machines afterwards. Soviet tanks, on the other hand, are knock-down-drag-out, jack-of-all-trades street brawlers—everything is clear now!
And, as historian David Glantz noted in the earlier comparison video, little has changed since WWII.
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Simplicius if it helps, attach a copy of this report to your next article as an "appendix" for context. Honestly, I've no clue what Substack allows for length or word count. Whatever works.
Your work is a benefit. The more it is available the better. As a subscriber, helping you do that is my goal. We still get the first look :)
Anyway, you're knocking it out of the park, or hitting the upper 90 every time (pick your metaphor). Thank you.
I partially disagree that there is a behind the scenes knowledge of reality. While some have been saying the truth, overwhelming political power was held with the neocon factions.
I think what we are seeing is this: the generation of leaders who were young during ww2 and who understood the real capacity and capability of Russia (or USSR), knew well enough that you simply cannot fight them. You may have tactical victories but will endure a massive defeat - eventually. And so they avoided a fight with them at all costs. Those leaders all retired and died. The new generation is undergoing the most epic example of FAFO that I have ever seen. And a whole generation of Ukrainian men are paying with their lives as a result