Virtually all mainstream US and European media have acknowledged that Ukraine’s counteroffensive has bogged down, with Kiev and NATO failing to dent Russia’s defensive lines. Ex-US Marine and geopolitical analyst Brian Berletic gives Sputnik fresh insights into what’s happening, why, and one possible way out of the quagmire for Ukraine.
The White House rushed into preemptive damage control mode on Friday amid backlash over President Joe Biden’s controversial decision to send cluster munitions to Ukraine.
“The Ukrainians are running out of ammunition,” Biden said in a media interview. “This is a war related to munitions, and they’re running out of that ammunition and we’re low on it,” he added. Under Secretary of Defense Colin Kahl confirmed to reporters that the US would try to get the cluster munitions to Ukraine “in a timeframe that is relevant for the counteroffensive.”
But the latest news from the front suggests otherwise, with Ukrainian frontline commanders and grunts telling Western media that they’re running low on everything from vehicles and ammunition to man portable air defense missiles, while the much-advertised NATO main battle tanks once expected to turn the tide have actually been pulled back from the front after taking losses.
Still, over a month into the offensive, Ukrainian and NATO officials and most media continue to assure that the battles have been “probing attacks,” and that, in Kahl’s words, the “majority of [Kiev’s] combat power for this fight has not yet been brought to bear.”
“You don’t do probing actions with your best tanks, your best infantry fighting vehicles,” Brian Berletic told Sputnik’s New Rules podcast.
“You do that with forces that are in a certain way ‘expendable.’ And then you follow that up with your best forces to exploit any gains that they might make. They have not been making gains. They’ve been mired in these minefields. And I think what we’re actually watching is a failure to plan for and properly breach these minefields. And it’s being passed off as merely probing actions ahead of the main offensive,” the former Marine said.
NATO Training Hasn’t Turned Ukraine’s Troops Into Super Soldiers
According to Russian Defense Ministry figures, between the beginning of June and July 9, Ukraine has lost close to 1,250 armored vehicles (including tanks), nearly 950 other military vehicles, 29 rocket artillery launchers, 425 pieces of artillery and mortars, two air defense systems, over 500 drones, 22 airplanes, and six helicopters.
It was “extremely unrealistic” from the start on Kiev’s part to imagine that going into the counteroffensive with NATO-trained troops and NATO equipment would somehow transform their forces into an invincible army, Berletic said.
“We have to remember that even though NATO trained Ukrainian troops ahead of this offensive, they did so in a very abbreviated manner. They’re handing them equipment that they then have to learn to use, which usually takes six months to a year to actually effectively learn how to use. And they’re doing this in a training session compressed into just a few weeks. You cannot accelerate something like this. If you rush training, it’s going to play out disastrously on the battlefield,” the former Marine explained.
“There is a reason why the United States trains, say, an entry-level tanker, for six months before they join their unit and begin further training there with their unit. The US military gets these soldiers only for four years. They want to maximize the amount of time they’re actually out doing their job. If they could train them faster, they would. They can’t,” he added.
Mounting Losses
Berletic agrees with the assessment made publicly by Pentagon officials that the Ukrainian military still has more offensive potential left than it has exhausted to date.
But at the same time, he noted, “they have a finite amount of artillery, ammunition to support these pushes that they’re making along the line of contact. And the longer [it] takes for them to make a breakthrough, the less artillery ammunition they’re going to have to exploit those breakthroughs and to consolidate their control over any new territory that they gain.”
At the end of the day, Berletic says, wherever the offensive stops, the end result is going to be a spent Ukrainian force “that’s going to need to be completely replaced, just like NATO has had to do for Ukraine following last fall’s Ukrainian offensives.”
Exhaustion Strategy
Playing on US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s comments last year about the US having the goal of “weakening” Russia in the proxy war in Ukraine, Ukrainian military officials and US media have recently brought up the strategy of “exhausting” Russia’s reserves as one of the goals of the counteroffensive. The reality, according to Berletic, is that Kiev and its NATO patrons are the ones facing exhaustion.
“They have not even made it up to the first defensive lines of Russia’s fortifications. Are they exhausting Russia or are they exhausting themselves?...The balance of power in terms of equipment, trained personnel and ammunition have always been in favor of Russia, especially after the mobilization last year, where some 300,000 reservists…were called up by the Russian government and committed to the special military operation. I believe that Russia was well aware of the scale of this offensive. They are prepared for it. Their military industrial output is prepared to handle the material costs of defending the line of contact,” he said.
Moscow, Berletic believes, is treating the conflict as “a multifaceted war of attrition,” based on its defensive strategy and heavy use of its near-total advantage in air power, and standoff-range missiles and drones.
Russia’s MIC Outproducing Collective West Reminded of the improvements which have been made in the availability of Russian missiles and drones over the past year, a fact now seemingly recognized even by the media arm of the US State Department, Berletic said these changes seem to demonstrate that the West’s sanctions strategy has failed utterly.
“This is a direct contradiction of everything the Western media has been saying about the sanctions taking a toll on the Russian economy, stripping the Russian military industrial complex of necessary inputs. It doesn’t seem that it has done any of that, and we’re seeing even seemingly the Western media now incrementally admit that...[Russia is] outproducing the collective West, US, and Europe combined in terms of artillery ammunition, things like drones, even long-range precision weapons,” the observer noted.
Additionally, he said, while the West seems to just be “grabbing anything they have lying around and sending it to Ukraine,” Russia’s military industry has been “adapting to the realities on the battlegrounds” and digging in for the long haul.
“There’s been talk recently of sending cluster munitions to Ukraine. If people read the details of that story, they’re actually talking about 155 mm artillery shells that are cluster munitions. And they’re sending that not because it’s some capability that Ukraine needs, it’s because they are out of the high-explosive artillery shells that Ukraine has been using all along. They’re out of that. They’re just sending whatever they have left in their inventory,” Berletic said.
Kiev’s Way Out of ‘Disastrous’ Counteroffensive
Taking stock of the fact that the counteroffensive is clearly not moving in the direction that Kiev and NATO hoped it would, Berletic said that “the whole premise of launching this offensive in the first place” has proven to be “a disastrous decision.”
“There really are no good options left for Ukraine in the middle of this offensive except to stop it and go to the negotiating table, which I don’t think that they’re going to do,” the observer said. Instead, Kiev is likely to continue throwing troops at Russian defenses, perhaps making breakthroughs and taking territory here and there, but at the cost of “catastrophic losses,” which will leave them in a vulnerable position in the end
“We do see them playing games politically. Stories about the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant, looking for some sort of pretext to internationalize the conflict and get NATO involved directly one way or another. And this is very similar to the US proxy war in Syria. They used the pretext of Syria using chemical weapons as an excuse to get involved more directly. Ultimately, that didn’t work. But the US military is still there in eastern Syria, nonetheless. And I think they have something very similar planned for Ukraine, because it’s very clear that this offensive is not going to work out the way they wanted,” Berletic summed up.
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