Some Miscellaneous But Salient Observations about the War in Ukraine
Let’s start with the obvious — Chef Prigozhin. Three days ago he was in full meltdown and vowed to take his boys and abandon the fight in Bakhmut to the Akhmat Battalion. Now, all things are swell, the Wagner Group continues to advance in Bakhmut, General Surovikin is watching over Prigozhin and Wagner continues to clobber Ukrainian positions with ample supplies of ammo. When it comes to temperamental Chefs, the irascible Gordon Ramsay, a British Celebrity Chef, is a piker compared to Prigozhin. I remain convinced that Prigozhin was doing a mega troll routine to distract the West from Russia’s true intentions.
In the aftermath of Prigozhin’s public rant, the Russian military has carried out three days of intense bombing, artillery and missile strikes on Ukrainian warehouses filled with Western military equipment and ammunition and on troop assembly areas. Russia is not giving Ukraine any breathing room to gather its forces for a long promised counter offensive.
At the start of the “Special Military Operation” more than a year ago, the Ukrainian Army outnumbered the Russians by a factor of three. Even with their advantage in numbers, the Ukrainian defenses failed to stop the numerically inferior Russian force and failed to expel the Russians from the Luhansk and Donetsk territories.
We now are being enticed to believe that Ukraine, with a numerically inferior force compared to Russia’s current troop deployment, is going to mount an offensive, despite a severe lack of tanks, armored vehicles, mobile artillery and air cover, that will drive the Russians from fortifications erected during the last six months.
Ukrainian officials persist in making wild claims about Russian defeats, low morale and catastrophic casualties. There is a very simple test you can do to evaluate the Ukrainian claim about Russia’s losses — find the social media and count the photos and videos. If Russia had suffered the number of killed and wounded cited by Ukrainian and Western officials and pundits, then it would be impossible to hide those photos and videos. Social media and smart phones are ubiquitous and grieving wives, girl friends, parents and friends are not easy to corral.