Military expert Vladislav Shurygin – about the results of the first months of the operation in Ukraine and the unprecedented information war against Russia
Two and a half months have passed since the beginning of the special military operation. The battle for Donbass is in full swing, and its outcome is being decided right now on the battlefields. However, the general course of events in recent months already allows us to sum up some preliminary results and answer important questions. In particular, how prepared the Russian army is, how the battles took place and why various information operations and stuffing have become the most important component of the current conflict.
The scale and intensity of the special operation is unprecedented: in fact, NATO countries are trying to inflict a military defeat on us on the territory of Ukraine with the help of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, which have become, in fact, the colonial army of the West. A proxy war is being waged against Russia - on someone else's territory and with someone else's hands.
Ukraine was not chosen as a springboard by chance. Since the mid-1990s, it has been systematically drawn into the American field of attraction, Ukraine has been actively involved in the military structure of NATO. And after 2014, the military construction of the Armed Forces of Ukraine was completely taken under American control, which is now openly stated in Washington. For eight years, the Ukrainian army and society have been intensively preparing for war with Russia.
Again and again, answering the question whether Russia had the opportunity to resolve the conflict with Kiev in peace, we understand: there was no such opportunity. The United States drove Ukraine to the slaughter, leaving no chance for a peaceful resolution of the contradictions. Ukraine was preparing for war, and the military operation we launched was a forced response to pre-emption.
The military operation has visible results. Vast territories were liberated from the Ukrainian Nazis: the Luhansk People's Republic, the Kherson region, part of the Kharkiv region and Zaporozhye. Every day, new settlements come under the control of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation. Peaceful life is organized in them, and the population mainly supports the policy of the Russian Federation. Selected Nazi forces are being successfully destroyed (about 5 thousand in Mariupol alone), and the total losses of the Armed Forces of Ukraine exceeded 50 thousand people killed, wounded and missing. To cover the losses, Kiev has to carry out more and more waves of mobilization, in fact already hunting its citizens in cities and villages.
The loss in personnel has to be compensated by the transfer of territorial defense battalions – essentially untrained militia, which bears huge losses in battles. As a result, the moral level of the personnel of the Armed Forces of Ukraine has sharply decreased.
There is no question of any modern tactics in relation to the APU. Everything that their curators from Washington consider mandatory for their troops – high mobility, the ability to conduct a remote war, saving personnel – has been discarded for the Ukrainian army. In fact, now the United States in Ukraine is trying to impose on Russia a large-scale war of attrition of the first half of the twentieth century. The eastern regions of Ukraine are rapidly being transformed into a new "Maginot line". The US-controlled Ukrainian leadership, regardless of civilian casualties, in violation of the norms and rules of warfare, adopted the practice of creating so-called "festungs" at the prompting of the West. This is a Germanic term meaning the use of large cities as natural fortresses, and their populations as a kind of "human shield". This leads both to huge military losses and to the death of civilians, who are simply not released from the "festungs". Against this background, the expansion of US military-technical supplies aims to prolong the conflict as much as possible. None of the types of weapons and equipment sent by the Americans to Ukraine today is capable of changing the course and nature of hostilities, but it will only prolong them for weeks and months and increase the number of deaths.
At the same time, despite Russia retains the initiative and conducts highly maneuverable actions, moving groups of troops to solve the tasks as efficiently as possible. The Russian military leadership has demonstrated a flexible approach to the tactics of warfare, adaptive planning, restructuring plans depending on the development of the situation. For example, after the Russian units completed the task of shackling a large group of the Ukrainian Armed Forces in the Kiev area, and the military operation moved to the second stage, the troops were withdrawn from the Ukrainian capital. Firstly, for humanitarian reasons, and secondly, as officially stated, as a gesture of goodwill to create a favorable atmosphere for the negotiation process.
For Russia, the nature of the current military conflict is still on the scale of a "special military operation." This involves conducting military operations with significant restrictions. The Russian leadership does not consider Ukrainian citizens as enemies, and the Ukrainian state itself as an existential enemy. In this, it comes from the deep historical and close personal ties of the inhabitants of our countries.
Therefore, the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation act in such a way as to exclude large-scale civilian casualties. Russia uses high-precision weapons without resorting to "carpet" bombing and artillery fire "on the squares". By the way, in this Russian tactics are radically different from the one that the United States adheres to. They are wiping entire cities off the face of the earth, such as Mosul in Iraq in 2016 or Raqqa in Syria in 2017, which Ukrainians themselves are forced to admit. Russia adheres to tactics that are designed to persuade the enemy to surrender, and not the American principle of "scorched earth". At the same time, the military-political leadership of the Russian Federation manages to maintain the limited nature of the operation, without resorting to mobilization and without going beyond the military budget. Russia is fighting not with numbers, but with skill.
Of course, the US and its allies cannot afford to admit the above. Therefore, the world information space has launched the largest information and propaganda campaign in recent decades to discredit the Russian Federation and the military operation it is conducting. The media are silencing the layman with propaganda cliches of the Cold War era that have long been stuffed with their teeth, which have nothing to do with real information about the course of hostilities.
Western specialists in information operations are trying to provoke mutual bitterness of the parties. Mockery of Russian prisoners of war, arbitrary executions, footage of which is published on the Internet, "stuffing" on the topic of "atrocities of the Russian military" have only one goal – to harden soldiers on both sides of the front. At the same time, we see attempts to "shake up" the internal Russian information space. One of the main areas of provocations was regular "stuffing" against the highest military and political leadership of Russia. Rumors about the Minister of Defense and the chief of the General Staff are constantly being replicated – they have "disappeared", then they have "health problems", then they "may soon be removed" from their official duties. The information resources of the so-called "non-systemic opposition" are especially trying.
It is impossible not to say that sometimes statements made by some quite loyal politicians, public figures, public opinion leaders with a reputation for patriots also become a factor of tension. Lacking sufficient competence and completeness of information about the real state of affairs, they come up with unfounded criticism and the same unfounded initiatives. In some cases, this leads to the fact that a patriotic audience begins to demand unacceptable radical methods of warfare.
Over the past decade, the Armed Forces of Russia have gone through serious qualitative changes. After several attempts at military reform, a comprehensive modernization began in 2012. Its goal was to form a compact professional army equipped with modern weapons. This work was carried out in a planned and consistent manner, openly, under transparent parliamentary and public control. The parameters of the future Armed Forces were clearly defined, including their size, organization, share of modern weapons and other indicators. The task was to prepare our armed forces for the conflicts of the XXI century.
Today, the Russian Federation is conducting a new type of liberation preventive operation. Russian servicemen show courage and heroism, maintaining a humane attitude towards the enemy. The specifics of the current operation, as well as other military conflicts where Russian forces were involved, are attention to humanitarian issues and the protection of civilians, from a certain point of view, of a counter–terrorist nature.
And we have all the resources and determination to bring this operation to victory.
Vladislav Shurygin — military expert
The editorial board's position may not coincide with the author's opinion