U.S. House of Reps Meltdown Puts Ukraine's Future in Jeopardy

The things being set in motion right now could spell the abrupt end of the Ukrainian conflict. Of course, we’re not going to lean into that optimistic potential too heavily, because we all know how arduously the warmongering deepstate will work towards some continuation of their goals. But it’s still important to outline the details of how close to the precipice the situation has potentially gotten.

House Speaker Mccarthy was booted out. The two frontrunners to his position are now House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (Republican, Louisiana) and Jim Jordan (Republican, Ohio). Trump himself has now endorsed Jordan which we can only assume means he’s a likely shoe-in.

Where does Jordan stand on Ukraine? It may seem an obvious answer to some, but in fact Steve Scalise is a big supporter of continuing to fund Ukraine.

Today’s Newsweek article delves into exactly this, as it’s the pressing question on everyone’s mind. It reports that Jordan is heavily against Ukrainian funding.

Jordan, a founding member of the hardline conservative Freedom Caucus, has voted against nearly all bills offering assistance to Ukraine since the Russian invasion began in February 2022

Earlier this week Jordan said the following:

Speaking to reporters in Washington D.C. earlier this week, Jordan said he won't move forward with an additional aid package for Ukraine if elected Speaker, commenting: "The most pressing issue on Americans' minds is not Ukraine. It is the border situation and crime on the streets."

And:

"Why should we be sending American tax dollars to Ukraine when we don't even know what the goal is?

As well as:

"No one can tell me what the objective is. Is it some kind of negotiated peace? Is it driving them out of eastern Ukraine? Is it driving them out of Crimea?... So until you can tell me the goal, I don't think we should continue to send money there particularly when we have the problems we have on our border so that's fundamental.

"And then, second, how is the money that's already been sent, how has it been spent? What kind of waste is going on? Those are two fundamental questions that I think the American taxpayers want to know the answers to before they send any more of their hard-earned money there."

However, it’s hard to say if Jordan will win as some odds-makers see Scalise as still ahead for the role, with Jordan in second place.

Now the major problem is that there are only a handful of calendar days left for House of Reps sessions this year, and experts believe this is not enough time to create any further aid packages for Ukraine, which would mean there cannot be any aid at all until well into next year. This will be a moot point anyway if an anti-Ukraine Speaker takes charge, particularly because of the Hastert rule, which allows a Republican House Speaker to not bring up any bills for voting unless a majority of their party agree with it. The rule works as follows, as per Wiki:

In the House, 218 votes are needed to pass a bill; if 200 Democrats are the minority and 235 Republicans are the majority, the Hastert Rule would not allow 200 Democrats and 100 Republicans together to pass a bill, because 100 Republican votes is short of a majority of the majority party, so the Speaker would not allow a vote to take place.

In short, since Republicans are a current majority in the House, a majority of Republicans would have to agree on a Ukraine funding bill in order for that to even be proposed for voting in the House. And depending on whose poll you use, the majority of Republicans seem to not support Ukraine any longer.

Yesterday Biden hinted at having another trick up his sleeve to potentially get funding, but this seems like a canard or face-saving tactic. His bag of tricks in reality is running low. For instance, the Lend Lease actually expired last month, and the presidential draw-down authority reportedly has a few billion left, but no where near as much as the full funding bill intended to give Ukraine. The Senate had reached a ‘continuing resolution’ deal for another $6B for Ukraine last week, but this was in humanitarian and government aid, not military assistance—i.e. money to simply keep Ukraine’s society running, paying their civil servants, etc.

MoA again did a thorough job covering the intricacies of the funding conundrum today. So if you want more details check out B’s article. Also, this Sputnik article gives a very thorough rundown of all the types of small funding loopholes that may be possible.

"If the funding isn't there, then unless less the president takes real drastic action and wants to basically declare martial law here in the United States, it's just not going to happen," Maloof said. "If Congress doesn't approve additional funding, it's not going to happen. Now, as I said, there may be a little bit, maybe for humanitarian purposes, but I think far less on the other side of military and more kinetic actions."

But we’ll move on to the next issue.

Ukraine and its allies are continuing to scramble for any form of hope to cling to. At a new conference at the EU Granada summit, Zelensky looked absolutely haggard and lost, mentally broken—you can really read the situation in his face:

Western press is already reporting that it was another huge bust:

It seems everything is collapsing for the Ukraine ‘solidarity front’. Ukrainian Strana.ua site reports:

“If the USA does not vote for additional funds for Ukraine, the Armed Forces of Ukraine will run out of weapons in a month and a half…”

http://Strana.ua

Putin confirmed this in his Valdai speech yesterday where he plainly said that without further supplies, Ukraine would only have a week to live.

Senior White House officials have privately admitted that only weeks remain before the halt in US funding to #Ukraine️ will result in serious battlefield issues for Kiev’s forces, CNN reported on Wednesday, citing sources within the administration of President Biden

Even Arestovich is now admitting that it’s pretty much over: the West will now push for a ceasefire, and if Zelensky refuses to sign, he will be replaced by someone more amenable:

If you recall, this is exactly the scenario I predicted a while back where I wrote that this is the very reason that suddenly all sorts of “corruption” was being dug up in Ukraine, and why Lindsey Graham vehemently called for Zelensky to stick to “democratic principles” and hold elections next year. These Western handlers of his don’t actually give a damn about any ‘democracy’, what they are doing is creating a way out, hedging their bets. It’s a sword of Damocles hung over Zelensky’s head as a reminder: do what we tell you, or we will very easily replace you in the “elections”—which they have the power to ‘rig’ in any way they see fit.

In fact, thus far this entire scenario is playing out exactly as I had written about from the very first articles early this year. I had stated that by the end of this year, if Ukraine hasn’t made significant breakthroughs, the West will have no choice but to dump them because a very unsightly, politically unpopular Ukrainian ‘festering wound’ cannot be allowed to mar the Democrats’ 2024 election cycle, where it will be front and center as a key attacking point for any opposition. I posited that they’d have no choice but to wrap it up and try to spin it in as best and ‘victorious’ a light as possible, or at the least sweep it under the rug and blackhole the entire thing.

Now, we’re reaching that fateful end of year period, and it’s beginning to look more and more possible that such a scenario will transpire.

Keep in mind, it’s certainly still possible that this course will reverse. Scalise may become House Speaker and lead some major 11th hour revival bill to give an emergency $40-60B lifeline to Ukraine, Europe may rally and find some solidarity afterwards, etc. Of course, that won’t change the course of the war, but will continue delaying the inevitable outcome.

Not enough has been made of Shoigu’s nonchalant statement at the last high command meeting, that the Russian Armed Forces plan is to finish the SMO by 2025:

A couple things about that. Firstly, I saw it written recently in Western articles that Putin has progressively “down-sized” the objectives of the SMO, from deNazification to merely protecting civilians in the localized areas. Putin himself disproved such assertions at the Valdai conference yesterday when he reiterated that Russia is still complying with that goal. Putting the two together, we can say that if the Ministry of Defense predicts all objectives to be complete by 2025, and deNazification is the chief objective, it becomes obvious that the entire capitulation of the Ukrainian leadership is expected by 2025, not just some ‘local’ goals, like achieving security for Donetsk’s border, or something like that.

The thing we must realize is that trajectories are historically almost never reversed, because they represent the momentum of hundreds of millions of people’s sentiments, the gravity of entire countries and their political systems. There is almost no precedent you can think of where momentum was trending sharply toward a particular path like it is now, but then was ‘magically’ reversed. Thus we can conclude that most likely, all the current trends for Ukraine’s slow decline and loss of support will probably continue. It strains credulity to even imagine that next year Europe, for instance, will suddenly find the wherewithal to “pull themselves up by the bootstraps” and say “OK, that’s enough. We’re going to stand against Putin once and for all.”

The reason is because their own European countries are crumbling from the devastating effects this conflict has had on global economies. Their own people are up in arms; how many coalitions and governments, for instance, did you see collapse this year alone? How many top leaders were ousted from European nations? Particularly after another long, hard winter, things will only get worse. That means by next spring, it’s very difficult to imagine a situation where some newfound solidarity happens to form around pledging tens and hundreds of billions more for Ukraine.

https://www.rt.com/russia/583785-west-cant-define-ukraine-victory/

So how do I see things going? If money completely dries up, Ukraine can ‘borrow’ enough to at least partially fund its government and civil services, on a skeletal regime. As for the military, there are already very few incoming shipments. The West doesn’t even have much key systems left to give. The two most significant being tanks and artillery. In terms of tanks, almost everything that could be comfortably given has already been given. Artillery is an area where the West has never concentrated much force anyway, so none of the Western countries have had a particular surplus of artillery systems. The U.S. doesn’t even manufacture M777s anymore and that was Ukraine’s most relied-on system.

One very illustrative episode came several days ago when it was revealed that the very first Leopard tanks just returned from repair in Poland after nearly four months.

BREAKING: First Leopard returns to Ukraine after being repaired in Poland, after nearly 4 months! Today, Polish media are reporting the completion of repairs and the return to Ukraine of the first repaired Leopard 2A4 tank, which was damaged during the summer counter-offensive.

It's October 2nd. The first Leopards, let me remind you, were damaged back in early June. That is, almost FOUR MONTHS have passed since the damage. And all because in Ukraine there is no, and cannot be, a base for their repair.

And from here, all damaged Leopards, as well as Challengers and then Abrams, will then be transported to Poland or even further and repaired. And all this will be MONTHS. But you need to understand that most tanks are not destroyed immediately, but are damaged many times before. And every time, the NATO military equipment needs to be taken to Europe for repairs. And according to Ukrainian channels, they have more than a third of their supplies of such “shortfalls”. And all of them are currently undergoing repairs... in Poland or the Baltic states. But the T-72 or T-64, for example, can return to the same Armed Forces after approximately the same repair in just a few weeks. That is, there seem to be tanks and there are a lot of them and they have not been destroyed, but when the Ukrainian Armed Forces need them, in fact they are not there. Logistics …

To highlight this point, take a gander at the official Wikipedia for the German PhZ 2000 howitzers supplied to Ukraine. Note the sheer amount of logistics problems, from damaged systems to completely inadequate repair pipelines that likely take as long or longer than the Leopards above:

Such issues were being faced at the height of funding and arms support, now imagine how catastrophic the situation will be at a time of scarcity when nothing else is forthcoming.

So given these setbacks, some expect Russia to launch a sweeping heroic offensive to finish off the enfeebled Ukraine and proclaim final global victory over NATO. That’s not quite what will happen.

There’s a reason Shoigu has given 2025 as the ultimatum for the war. Recall that for a long time, Russia has had the world’s most powerful military supercomputer, which sits in the literal basement of the MOD in Moscow.

This means that the Russian MOD has likely already completely gamed out the Ukrainian conflict to its very end. The way the situation is currently developing makes it quite simple for a supercomputer to estimate the natural trajectory and timetables of the conflict.

I believe that the MOD has calculated precisely the things we’ve discussed here. That deteriorating support will leave the Ukrainian army completely defenseless by next year. It can continue to soak up damage simply as a quotient of its leadership’s sadism for another few months up to a year after that, and then 2025 will see its natural end.

More granularly, it means Russia will use this winter to unleash devastation on Ukraine’s infrastructure and rear lines. Recall that Russia has massively beefed up its space ISR capabilities this past year with a dozen or more significant military satellite launches which included opto-electrical and SAR radar satellites, as well as communications and SIGINT detection ones. In May of 2024 Russia is set to launch its first commercial opto-electrical satellites, akin to MAXAR. Not to mention that Roscosmos is launching the Gryphon project consisting of a 136 satellite constellation that will “monitor the entire earth’s surface”.

Particularly as defoliation occurs this winter, Ukrainian forces will increasingly be sitting ducks to Russia’s new ISR capabilities. These include the previously announced new A-50U AWACS as well as Russia’s now mass-produced GMLRS for the Smerch/Tornado-S system, which has recently been decimating Ukrainian rear lines, staging areas, etc.

A brutal hell will be unleashed on Ukraine’s dug in units this winter. In the meantime, Russia’s ground forces will be growing rapidly in size. Recall Shoigu’s ongoing stealth mobilization. Putin had just updated the numbers, which now stand at roughly 350,000 total enlistments for the entire year, with the previous month having 50,000 sign ups (recall months prior to that had 15-30k sign ups per month, which grew steadily).

Further recall that the stated goal was to have ~420,000 new enlistments by the end of the year, which appears to be on track to be met. Now extrapolate that into next year. With Russia’s increased production, ISR capabilities, the complete collapse of Ukrainian funding from the West—it all means that Ukraine will be savaged by long range attacks all through winter until spring, at which point Russia may have an additional 600-700k troops (the ~420k by end of this year plus 40-50k per month signs ups for January 2024, Feb, March, April, etc.).

That means by spring of 2024 Russia could already have a 1 million strong army of actual professional, contracted troops (not counting the hundreds of thousands of conscripts it additionally has). By that I mean the current 350-450k plus the additional 600k+ that will have been added by spring 2024.

So does that mean Russia will launch a massive Operation Uranus style offensive next summer? No.

This is the most important part to understand about how military operations, or warfighting in general, work. The number one rule in war is that you always want to fight with as much of a disadvantage to your enemy as possible. If you have twice the amount of men that he has, this is great. But you know what’s even better than twice the men? Three times the men. And what’s better than three times? Four times, and so on.

The point is that, you want as big of an advantage to yourself as possible. Sure you can launch an offensive with double the men and still win, but it will incur a certain amount of losses to yourself. If you are pressed for time, then that may be a good trade off, and a decision can be made. But if time is on your side, why launch with twice the men, when you can launch with three times and make it even more decisive for yourself?

The point is that Russia will continue accumulating this gigantic ground army while its industries work to actually supply them with required armor and armaments. This can still take all of 2024 to do in sufficient quantities. While Russia is churning out tanks, artillery, arms, etc., for this massively increasing army all throughout 2024, its Recon-Fire-Complex and Recon-Strike-Complexes will be working on grinding down the Ukrainian army, infrastructure, etc., to a bare minimum, just pulverizing them into dust. They can do this leisurely all throughout 2024 without needing to worry about anything, especially if funding truly does dry up.

This Russian military blogger agrees:

In essence he’s advocating for keeping the current status quo, simply grinding them down and gaining an increasing advantage in every way possible.

I likewise advocate for such a strategy. Another reason is that, the main types of weaponry most effective for defense is not in low numbers in the AFU. I.e. things like ATGMs, drones, mines, etc., there’s no real issues with as those are fairly plentiful in the world in general. That means a Russian offensive can still suffer large unneeded losses. There’s no real purpose to do that when you can methodically grind down your enemy to a pulp, and then sweep in to finish off the remnants in very comfortable and controlled fashion.

Does delaying the war potentially buy time for the West to think of some black swan provocation to completely unseat Russia in some unforeseen way, like a nuclear falseflag, etc.? Of course. But the trade off is still better than the alternative. No one strategy is absolutely perfect—it’s all about balancing the pros and cons of each. There are certainly many risks in prolonging the conflict, but the rewards outweigh them, just like the risks of the alternate strategy outweigh those of the methodical one.

Also let me mention that I don’t think it’s possible to launch a massive “surprise” offensive these days, with the types of AI-enhanced ISR present. That means if Russia had plans for some monumental big arrow offensive any time soon, you would know about it just like the West knew Russia was ready to launch a huge invasion in February 2022 because the unprecedented armor buildups on Ukraine’s border were readily visible.

Right now, no source on the Ukrainian side is seeing any such build up, apart from a moderate one in the Kupyansk direction. That’s why I do believe Russia will continue increased offensive efforts in Kupyansk that may surge into something even larger throughout winter, but that’s likely all we’ll see in that regard. There may be localized offensives like in Avdeevka (perhaps with Wagner, as we’ve discussed), Ugledar, etc., but no big arrow war-ending blitzkriegs.

So, to summarize:

Thus far my predictions are coming true about the West’s support flagging toward the end of this year. They will likely still find some money, but it will come in decreasing spurts and may completely peter out by the first quarter of 2024.

In that case, Ukraine will be faced with a major choice, to buck the West’s diktats and continue defiantly fighting with or without any munitions, or to give in and push for a ceasefire with Russia. The options will be:

1. If Zelensky wants to make a hero and martyr of himself, which is likely the case, he’ll attempt to keep on fighting but may face mutiny and military overthrow of his government. If not—because the situation is not dire enough yet—they will be forced to dig in defensively and simply earn their media victories through “bleeding Russia” in minor guerilla skirmishes or asymmetric attacks. But their offensive days will be over because they will have no appropriate tools for that—no heavy armor, low to no artillery, and maybe even low amounts of light armor like APCs, IFVs, IMVs, ICVs, AFVs, etc.

2. The West manages to convince him to beg Russia for a ceasefire. Russia makes performative gestures to show that it’s a amenable to peace, but Russia’s demands will not be satisfied in the slightest, at which point they will continue combat. Medvedev commented on this just days ago when he referenced that any negotiations would have to start from new “realities”, which means new Russian territories amongst other things:

3. Zelensky will defiantly attempt to continue the war to put on a courageous face and the West may be forced to invoke plan Z to eliminate him, whether through elections or a ‘different’ way. At that point it will make little difference because Russia will be ruthlessly grinding down the AFU anyway.

The most important thing to remember is that both Europe and particularly the U.S. may face unprecedented, historic levels of societal upheaval next year. By middle and end of next year, they may not be in any position to even bother with Ukraine in the slightest. Europe’s economic woes are getting disastrous, and the U.S. election has strong chance to turn far worse than people imagine, which could break out into civil war or something approaching it.

These scenarios are related because everything inside Ukraine is done on the very fragile hopes binding the Ukrainian future with that of the West. If and when the Ukrainian society and government perceives the West itself facing upheaval, the true moment of reckoning will hit them that they themselves stand no chance. At that point, there will likely be strong pushes toward reconciliation with Russia of some kind, which could end with surrender or military coup and overthrow.

As a last point, what if the opposite happens, and the West does manage a final lick of solidarity and influx of support to Ukraine? We also must remember that Ukraine has “plans” to reportedly mobilize upwards of 500k “men” by spring time.

The problem is, as I highlighted last time, is that the issues have already created such a backlog of need that even if some newfound unity is achieved, Ukraine will have now gotten so far ‘behind’ militarily and logistically that it will hardly do much for them. Every major political decision chain has a very long lead time from start to finish. By the time decisions are made, funding is secured, types of arms and materiel are agreed upon, then shipped, then actually arrive to be used on the frontline, months and months of time transpires where a hapless, denuded Ukraine undergoes sadistic savaging by Russian military might.

Just today Ukraine’s Pravda reported the following:

"Thousands of engineers have toiled over the summer months to repair broken equipment, and better air defences could help mitigate the impact of the war as temperatures begin to drop. But there has been neither the money nor the time to complete preparations for the winter," the Reuters writes.

I’ve said before that some reports claim only 25% of destroyed energy infrastructure from last winter was repaired.

Another report says:

Ukrainian National guardsmen will be forced to buy winter uniforms at their own expense due to fraud when concluding state contracts for its purchase, President of the All-Ukrainian Association of Employers of Light Industry Alexander Sokolovsky made such a warning.

He said that the National Guard of Ukraine has signed a contract for sewing winter uniforms for 193 million hryvnia ($ 5.3 million) with the firm "Trade-Prim", which does not have its own sewing production and which is engaged in agriculture. The contract was concluded bypassing the Ukrainian system of tenders for public procurement Prozorro, the head of the association added.

According to him, the founders of the company are being followed by a "trail of accusations of fraud attempts." Sokolovsky said that the National Guard has signed a contract for the supply of summer military uniforms with the intermediary company "Chevron-Kiev", which also does not have its own production facilities. According to the head of the association, the company was supposed to deliver 48 thousand sets, but at the beginning of October it was able to deliver only 1 thousand. The National Guard bought fabric for sewing uniforms abroad for 60% more expensive than the one offered by Ukrainian weavers, he added.

But could all this just be over-exaggeration? Last year we heard the same things, that Ukraine will be pulverized all winter, that their infrastructure will be totally destroyed and the army will be so demoralized that they will not be able to fight on.

Certainly humans in general are far more resilient than we sometimes give them credit for. Ukraine won’t necessarily be on its knees after this winter. But it will all depend on how much kinetic pressure Russia puts on them. As I said, I don’t expect large offensives to be launched, but Russia has to be able to do major strike damage on Ukraine’s increasingly defenseless (from a heavily attritioned air defense shield) assets.

If Russia happens to use the winter as a “breather” from an exhausted foe, then it may give the AFU time and space to somewhat reconstitute themselves for at least some performative meat-assault efforts in the spring. Russia must pressure them heavily with strikes all winter to really set the proper tempo for next year.

After that, as I said, I foresee Ukraine putting on a tough face to stoically pretend it’s resisting Russia’s onslaught throughout 2024. Just like a starving, dying man can eke out a last few days to make some sort of vanity statement, a defenseless Ukraine can take perhaps another year of heavy pounding, which coincides with Shoigu’s 2025 vision.

If they haven’t collapsed by then, with a massive new army Russia may very well pull the ‘big arrow’ trigger in 2025 to finish them off with another offensive on Kiev and elsewhere. It’s all about softening them up, tenderizing your meat, so to speak, so that when the moment comes it’s effortless and not costly.

The most important point for now is for Russia to continue building its offensive potential, all while continuing to attrition Ukraine in its totality, infrastructure-wise, military, etc. Russia is creating such a strike disparity that it will eventually negate the chief conundrum of modern warfare, that of the inability to advance due to issues of ubiquitous ISR. Russia’s RCS/RFS is now getting so powerful that it is simply going to strike Ukraine into a debilitated stupor.

Just yesterday there was a large strike on Kharkov, reports of a major mercenary and Aidar gathering destroyed. Each day now we’re seeing powerful pinpoint Iskander and Tornado-S strikes on a variety of significant assets like staging points of troop concentrations or large warehouses and depots full of materiel. It will eventually turn into an overwhelming wave that will paralyze the Ukrainian armed forces.

Today prominent Ukrainian ‘reserve officer’ and military expert Tatarigami wrote a pleading message to all pro-Ukrainian followers, urging them to stop this perverse ‘hopium-filled’ and destructive optimism, which actually harms the AFU.

The message is long, but here’s just part of it to give you an idea:

Not to mention more and more Ukrainian troops continue surrendering in droves, a clear portent of things to come. Today alone another mass surrender of around ~20 AFU occurred:

And if you recall my saga about the special Volga 149.200 channel, made by Russian troops to allow Ukrainians a safe and secure way to surrender, there continues to be indication that a ming-boggling amount of UA troops have taken this opportunity. The latest comes from Russia’s TASS which states that over 10,000 have already surrendered just since the channel’s launch this June.

The number beggars belief but one must recall that at this point, Russia has no possible incentive or reason to greatly exaggerate its figures—for what? Even the West now regularly, grudgingly admits that Russia is “winning the information war”. And no one can question anymore that Russia is winning the ground war. So why exaggerate? Russia has nothing to prove nor anyone to convince, which makes such staggering figures all the more breathtaking. This winter, those numbers can but increase.

To offset this, Ukraine is forced to mobilize the increasingly young or old, just look at this pathetic new video of what appears to be a reluctant and terrified teen boy being taught grenade throwing in a Ukrainian trench:

Or this video of a quite literally legless man drafted by the AFU into “limited” service since he can still likely pilot a drone or maybe man a gun turret of some sort:

As a last thought: many people remain skeptical that such a conflict can be decisively finished by Russia. They point to a variety of past wars which have gone on indefinitely at an intractable stalemate, whether it’s WW1 or the Iraq-Iran war of the 80s, more recently.

But the chief difference is that most of those wars had extreme parity between the two sides, with very similar casualty levels—thus they remained stuck as neither side could break the parity in any one given area, whether it’s quality of troops, materiel production, etc. From what I recall, the Iran-Iraq war had almost identical casualties on both sides.

This war is nothing like those. What we are seeing is something that has hardly ever happened before because of the unique circumstances of this conflict, where you have primarily two completely mismatched forces, but one of them is artificially propped up in a variety of ways, and only appears to be punching way above its weight from certain misleadingly ephemeral metrics or perspectives.

It’s almost like putting a 240lbs heavyweight boxer in the ring against a 110lbs twerp wearing a “fat-suit”. Yes, there were certain points of this conflict where the casualties at times seemed to approach near parity, for instance parts of Bakhmut (not all of it), but as a generality, Russia is inflicting an absolutely disgusting kill ratio that’s sometimes 5:1, 10:1, and most recently even 20:1. Total KIA is now likely around 40-60k on the Russian-allied side to anywhere between 250-500k on the Ukrainian side. If Ukraine was not getting historic levels of monetary and arms support, it would instantaneously collapse.

Thus, modeling this conflict after previous conflicts between equally matched foes is completely wrong—and any “conclusions” thereby reached are utterly flawed. Please show me which side in WW1 or any other war had a disparity of 30 planes vs. 3000, 500 tanks vs. 5000-15,000, or 5000 daily shells fired vs. 50,000, etc. This scale of disparity simply doesn’t exist in previous warfare—it’s unheard of. That means don’t be surprised if the conclusion also comes in a manner you’ve never seen before, and which completely confounds and breaks the minds of ‘military experts’ like Kofman and Lee and the rest of the Twitter armchair dilettantes.

I think some people imagine the current war to be this fruitless Battle of Somme style stalemate, or Verdun with its attempt to “bleed the enemy white” via attrition. But like I said, WW1 had equal sides. The Russo-Ukrainian war has a 400lbs gorilla simply sitting and gaining weight while a mouse pumped up on cocaine nibbles at its toes. There is little comparison.

Anyway, a lot of the foregoing can be visualized in this video. I believe the numbers are off in their totality, but not as much in their respective proportions and relations to each other, which still gives a fairly interesting perspective on how the previous year has been nothing more than a Russian military build up as a precursor to the killing blow:

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