NEW BOT Телеграм, страница

One year ago, the Ukrainian army began its incursion into Kursk oblast.

It's initial objective was extremely audacious: they wanted to rush towards the Kursk Nuclear Power Plant, capture it and take it hostage. I think they themselves understood that this mission had very low chances of success, but why not try. It failed, of course.

Their second objective was to capture and hold as much territory as possible, to use as a "bargaining chip" in negotiations. The Russian side simply refused to even entertain the possibility of negotiating for Kursk oblast territories. This objective failed, too.

Their third objective was to get Russia to divert resources from the Donbass to Kursk oblast. It was a gamble. If the Russian General Staff had panicked and pulled troops from the Donbass to prevent territorial losses in Kursk oblast at any cost, the Ukrainians could've stabilized their lines east of Pokrovsk.

The Kursk incursion was accompanied by sophisticated, massive PsyOps. They sent tiny special forces groups in civilian clothes deep into Kursk oblast, taking pictures and then leaving again without ever being noticed, and then released those photos in a slow trickle to create the impression of advances well beyond what they actually achieved.

The goal was to influence Russian public opinion & thereby pressure Russian decision-making. But Russian command did not panic. They accepted the sacrifice of losing people and territory in Kursk oblast in exchange for keeping up the operational tempo in the Donbass. A great diversion of resources would have made it impossible to collapse the Ukrainian lines east and south of Pokrovsk, to capture New York, Toretsk, Krasnogorovka, Ugledar, Selidovo, to advance into Kurakhovo, and so on, and so on. This Ukrainian objective failed, too.

Conceptually, this operation was a Ukrainian attempt to outplay the nature of this war. It was a playground for them to employ the network-centric, opportunity-based, light infantry type of warfare that NATO had been training them for; a sandbox where they didn't have to deal with the realities of the infantry-artillery meat grinder, a place where an audacious platoon could perform miracles. Of course, reality caught up with them.

The final Russian offensive in Kursk oblast was beautiful, almost erotic; it was the most well-coordinated, widest movement we had seen in years. A conceptual victory of Soviet-Russian operational art.

In retrospect, it was clear that all Ukrainian objectives would fail. It was a desperate gamble, an attempt to try something new. It ended in disaster for the AFU. They took colossal casualties they could not afford; they sped up their brigades being chewed up in the Donbass rather than slowing it down; they gave Russia a new, battle-tested ally; they consolidated Russian civil society to an entirely new level; by committing numerous atrocities against civilians in Kursk oblast, by behaving like medieval Tatar slave raiders who rape, murder and kidnap, they killed the last drops of mercy the Russian army had for yesterday's "brothers" -- many Russian units in the area operated on no-quarter-given orders, and those all came from below, not from the top.

It was a costly mistake. To quote Ernst Jünger: "When Spengler warned against any invasion of Russia for reasons of space, he was, as we have since seen, right. Even more questionable become each of these invasions for metaphysical reasons, insofar as one approaches one of the great sufferers, a titan, a genius of suffering power. In its aura, in its sphere of influence, one will become acquainted with pain in a way that far exceeds any imagination."

Subscribe to Russians with Attitude

❤1🔥1

53 viewsHans G. Schantz, 10:13