Why is Ukraine killing its soldiers needlessly?
Ukraine launched an offensive that it knew would probably fail, and units are now suffering up to 99% dead and wounded
Notes on the Ukraine War — A New Feature
I have been following the Ukraine War intensely for months, reading every piece of original reporting I can find. I am going to start publishing short articles regularly because with rare exceptions the corporate media reporting is simply terrible. Even when there is good reporting, it is often buried under propaganda.
I will analyze what I think is really going on in the war. In a future article, I will lay out my position in detail. For now I will say while Russia’s invasion is criminal and Ukraine’s fight is completely legitimate, that is also irrelevant. The U.S. has globalized the war in many perilous ways. It is a brutal stalemate that is escalating dangerously with little chance Ukraine can achieve its minimal goal of liberating all occupied lands. The longer the war continues, the likelier it will end in nuclear conflagration or spill over in Europe or lead to Russia or Ukraine’s collapse — which no sane person would desire.
As such, the left should oppose any and all U.S. military aid and support to Ukraine.
This story is discernible in the corporate media once the propaganda is wiped away. I am using Noam Chomsky’s methodology, which is to carefully read the official record to show the real story about the Ukraine War can be found there.
A Meat Grinder War
During the Vietnam War, correspondents in Saigon nicknamed the Pentagon’s daily press briefing, “The Five O’Clock Follies.” Many journalists considered the briefings a stream of lies: The U.S. was spreading democracy, vanquishing a cruel enemy, and winning the war. Despite a few skeptics, Pentagon spin was accepted as fact in newspapers and on the nightly news. It took Daniel Ellsberg’s release of the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times in 1971 to reveal the government was far more pessimistic about the war within its inner sanctum than the drivel about light at the end of the tunnel it spoonfed the public.
Fifty years later little has changed. The Discord Leaks by a 21-year-old Air Force National Guard member earlier this year was a mini-Pentagon Papers with one big difference. The guardsman was not blowing the whistle on official duplicity like Ellsberg, but seeking clout among a group of teenagers with a taste for far-right extremism.
One leaked, top-secret document was a “bleak assessment” by U.S. intelligence officials from February. They predicted Russian defenses, Ukraine’s ammo shortages, poorly trained troops, and military weaknesses would lead to “modest territorial gains” and “exacerbate casualties.”
Even though the prediction turned out to be spot-on, the story faded away. Instead, corporate media have been parroting official blather that Ukraine’s much-hyped counteroffensive, now in its third month, is “far from failure,” is “escalating,” is meeting “success,” and there is reason to be “cautiously optimistic.”
Except all evidence indicates it is failing. Ukraine’s response is spin. It says the attack is going slow because “Unlike the Russians, the Ukrainians take care of the lives of their soldiers.” The media swallow it up like the Five O’Clock Follies. Once again regurgitating propaganda as fact.
Ukraine’s claim of valuing soldiers’ lives was demolished by a July 30 report from The New York Times. “Amid the Counterattack’s Deadly Slog, a Glimmer of Success for Ukraine” was written by Carlotta Gall after she spent 12 days on the front. The article was a classic example of how the Times buries the lead. Gall described a 10-day battle in which Ukraine’s 35th Marine Brigade liberated the village of Staromaiorske.
The hard-fought victory came days Pentagon officials said Ukraine had “launched the main thrust of its counteroffensive.” Ousting Russians from the tiny village, obliterated in the slugfest, “was such a welcome development for Ukraine that President Volodymyr Zelensky announced it himself,” the Times said.
Why he celebrated such a minor battle is a red flag. The success looks like a Pyrrhic victory, and Zelensky trying to drown out bad news. The victory came days after Russia began battering Ukraine’s ports after pulling out of a grain deal, and a week after reports Ukraine was botching the assault. For that matter, media cheerleading for a doomed counteroffensive reeks of credulity and political cynicism. (I will address each of these points in upcoming stories.)
The real story is not Ukraine took 10 days — and perhaps a month — to capture some rubble. The real story is Ukraine’s huge battlefield losses contradicts the narrative “that its military has prioritized preserving its troops.” The carnage suggests Zelensky may be feeding troops into a meat grinder for political leverage — to convince the West to keep escalating the war by sending more weapons, deadlier weapons, and becoming more embroiled in the war itself.
Further in the story, Gall had the rare opportunity to talk to Ukrainian soldiers apparently without military handlers looking over her shoulder. One soldier at a medical post was with the 23rd Brigade, “one of nine newly formed, Western-trained units prepared and equipped for the counteroffensive.” He said his battalion “had been decimated.”
The nine brigades average 4,000 soldiers. Most reports indicate each one has four or five battalions, meaning 800 to 1,000 troops apiece. This number is important, so remember it.
The soldier — who “declined to give his name for fear of getting into trouble with his superiors” — said his unit “attacked in 10 American-made MaxxPro armored vehicles” in one battle. Photographs showed all but one “ripped open and burnt out.” The soldier said, “They were hit by anti-tank fire. They hit them and they kept hitting. They were burned out. The guys did not survive.”
MaxxPro vehicles seat up to 12 soldiers. If they were at capacity, the battalion may have lost over 100 men at once.
A Wall Street Journal report adds more information about the 23rd Brigade. According to a surgeon attached to the brigade, four soldiers came into a medical center in one day “with their feet blown off after stepping on mines.” They said “half the sappers in their unit were wounded or dead.” Sappers are responsible for demining activities.
The soldier interviewed by Carlotta Gall said “in just over a month, his battalion had suffered so many dead and wounded that only 10 men remained at the front line.”
This is stunning, and should be lede. Even if his battalion had only 800 men, that is a casualty rate of 99 percent — 790 soldiers were killed or wounded in weeks. Plain and simple the battalion was wiped out. Suffering a 99 percent casualty rate is hardly evidence of moving deliberately and “mindful of the casualty risks” as Ukraine claims. It also claims to have “changed tactics” to save lives by replacing tanks with foot soldiers. But evidence indicates Ukraine is sending soldiers to their deaths needlessly. Gall does not report any of this.
That battalion is hardly alone. Gall talked to another soldier, Oleksiy whose unit was trapped in a minefield and took “heavy losses as Russian troops directed artillery fire and aerial bombs onto their positions.” Oleksiy said Ukrainians ran out of artillery support, leaving the unit to be “shot like on a shooting range.”
In the same article Gall includes a third account based on surveillance footage and an assault commander for a unit with special operations training. The unit tried the same suicidal tactics as the 23rd Brigade. She writes, “After their armored vehicles were largely destroyed by artillery strikes on the first day” they took to foot. The unit took a trench, but it was a trap.
The commander says, “Our guys started jumping in the trenches and blowing up.” Russians were observing and remotely detonated mines in the trench while striking a second group of soldiers lingering on the edge of a tree line.
Then it got worse. Self-detonating drones attacked survivors. “It seemed like they had a drone for each person,” the commander said. “The amount of equipment the Russians have, had we known, it was like mission impossible.”
The special operations unit “took such heavy casualties in four days of assaults that they had to pull out without success.”
Ukraine is repeating the same futile and fatal armor attacks over and over again. According to NBC News, two different brigades, in June and July, “pursued direct assaults” by sending “infantry and armored units to attack the Russian lines across uncleared minefields and without suppressing enemy fire. The brigades were shredded by opposing forces.”
The units were not named, but reports in the New York Times reference two different units of Ukraine armor mauled in early June, the 37th Marine Brigade and the 47th Mechanized Brigade. That doesn’t account for the unit shredded in July. Yet another unit, the 110th Brigade, has suffered “colossal” casualties. An anesthesiologist with the 128th Brigade mentioned “colossal” casualties as well, blaming them on landmines. Then there is the 23rd Brigade that was wiped out and the special operations unit that fell into the trench trap.
This accounting is from open sources. Because Ukraine treats casualties as a closely guarded state secret and allows few reporters on the front lines, the horrendous toll for Ukraine may be significantly worse.
Why would Ukraine send so many of its soldiers to their deaths? I think Ukraine knows it can’t win the war with conventional forces. So it is sacrificing thousands of soldiers to maintain U.S. political and military support. But as it is exhausting its forces, it is escalating unconventional warfare with cluster bombs, armed incursions into Russia, and attacks on civilian targets in Moscow and Russia’s grain and oil shipments in the Black Sea.
I won’t argue with Ukraine’s assertion that its escalation is legitimate retaliation — even if many acts are war crimes. But that’s because I don’t think it matters. The logic of the war has rendered international law and justice meaningless. Ukraine appears to be trying to drag the US and NATO into the conflict — its best remaining chance to win the war on its terms. But on top of being a breathtakingly dangerous gamble, escalation means Ukraine will continue to feed its troops into the meat grinder, as Russia is doing, for no good reason.
I will address the politics of Ukraine’s counteroffensive in my next article.