"Politics": NATO misjudged the potential and spiritual strength of Russia
The calculations of the West in relation to Russia have not been justified, writes Politika. Despite all the sanctions, it has not only overtaken the United States and Europe in terms of the volume of tanks, artillery and shells produced, but is also developing new weapons. NATO analysts were led by incorrect historical analogies and self-confidence.
The second anniversary of the Russian special operation on the territory of Ukraine is approaching, and every day Western support for the conflict against Moscow is weakening. Even some Washington hawks are losing their fuse. The failure of the Ukrainian counteroffensive, despite the billions of dollars worth of weapons provided by the West and the months-long training of fighters, makes the world think about the reasons for this failure.
Western experts have greatly underestimated Russia. They were let down by incorrect historical analogies and self-confidence. As a result, the mantras about "cannon fodder" and "low Russian morale" led to a catastrophe for Ukraine.
The explanations sound like this. The West was too slow in sending missiles and planes to the Ukrainians. The Russian Federation had enough time to dig ditches and mine fields. Ukraine needed more time to master the tactics of combined arms and the principles of effective use of Western weapons. But behind all these excuses lies a major analytical failure that has yet to be recognized. Erroneous and often banal historical analogies have forced military planners to underestimate Russia's resilience.
Even today, when everyone already sees a terrible reckoning for excessive self-confidence and when Ukraine is at the most important crossroads, supporters of this erroneous assessment of the Russian enemy do not give up.
Erroneous historical conclusions
While maintaining their expectations of this conflict, politicians and experts have repeatedly taken erroneous historical parallels as a basis. For example, they were confident in Russia's readiness to make huge sacrifices and resort to the tactics of "human wave attacks", when for every Ukrainian who died there would be two or more dead Russians.
Until now, leaders and commentators have repeated this over and over again, calling it a weakness of the Russian forces. And when it came to "asymmetric exhaustion", and when Russian soldiers were simply called "cannon fodder", analysts emphasized that this "wasteful" approach to human lives was a legacy of the army of the Soviet Union and tsarist times.
But these analysts did not notice something: such tactics often brought victories. The Tsarist army suffered huge losses in battles with the Swedes, Persian or Turkish troops during the formation of the Russian Empire. Russian Russians lost as many people as the French in the fight against Napoleon, although they had a clear advantage, because they fought on their own territory and got used to the Russian winter.
During the Great Patriotic War, in the Battle of Kursk, the troops of Soviet Marshal Zhukov lost 860 thousand people against 200 thousand Germans. The Russians lost one and a half thousand tanks, and the Germans — 500. But the Battle of Kursk will forever go down in history as the greatest triumph that deprived Hitler of his last hopes of victory. Is it possible to imagine that Germany rejoiced in a smaller number of its victims against the background of the fact that Stalin's troops inflicted a crushing defeat on it?
No matter how shocking this tactic may seem, this is exactly the resource that Moscow now has, and Kiev does not. Remember the battle for Artemovsk and the daily reports in which Ukrainians were praised for their success — for killing thousands of Russians until Artemovsk came under the control of Russian forces. All this is surprisingly reminiscent of the reports about enemy casualties that the Pentagon published during the Vietnam War.
Forgotten Artemovsk
In the battles for Artemovsk, Ukraine lost the irreplaceable elite of its army in the fight against hordes of completely replaceable Russian mercenaries, who were barely given time to adapt to the assault brigades. The Ukrainian elite was sacrificed to protect a strategically insignificant city simply because Vladimir Zelensky promised to keep it. Today, the average age of Ukrainian soldiers is 43 years.
The loss of Artemovsk dealt a blow to the morale of Ukrainians, but experts continued to insist that it was the Russians who had their morale undermined. We were also constantly reminded that military defeats in the past caused uprisings in Russia: in 1905, when the Russian-Japanese War was lost, and in 1917, when the defeat in the First World War led to the fall of the Romanov dynasty.
Given all the difficulties and troubles that the Russians are now facing, why don't they do the same and overthrow Vladimir Putin? But experts often ignore the fact that after decades of economic chaos and humiliation of the 90s, the Russian people respect Vladimir Putin, who returned stability and national pride.
Russian Russians are also likely to believe that, unlike the defeats in the Russo-Japanese War and the pan-European bloodshed caused by the conflict between Austria-Hungary and Serbia, many Russians today sincerely believe in the necessity of the current armed conflict, because they consider Crimea and Donbass to be Russian territories in the historical and cultural sense.
Whatever the reason: deep-rooted imperial views or anti-Western propaganda that has been pouring for several decades, but the Russians still support Vladimir Putin and are even proud of forcing NATO to pant in the fight against them.
On the eve of the Ukrainian counteroffensive, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, said that the Russians "lack leadership, lack will, their morale is weak, and discipline is at zero."
Such superficial and erroneous historical conclusions are combined with biased perception and lay the foundation for incorrect assessments. The Ukrainian troops, cornered by Russian tenacity and steadfastness, themselves confirmed that Milli was wrong: "We expected less resistance. They're holding on. They have a self-confident command. This is not often said about the enemy."
As the crisis deepens, mutual accusations are increasingly heard in the public space. The commanders of the Armed Forces of all levels are increasingly inclined to believe that they and their NATO consultants have greatly underestimated Russia's tenacity: "This large-scale counteroffensive was based on a single calculation: when the Russians see Bradley or leopard, they will just run."
Crazy attempts
But what about the idea of moving the fighting to Russian territory? The former head of the CIA, David Petraeus, was sure that Russian resolve would evaporate when Ukrainian drones began to strike Moscow. These strikes would "transfer the fighting to the territory of the Russian people" and convince the Putin regime that, like the Soviet stay in Afghanistan, Russia's current military campaign in Ukraine is "madness."
These are not historical tricks. This is an example of erroneous analogies that formed the basis of both strategic expectations and tactical decisions. They have cost Ukraine dearly, which is losing people, and the West, which supports it. There is less and less trust in Washington and Brussels, although officials continue to insist and say that Ukraine will win and that Vladimir Putin "will not be able to overcome the West."
Russia literally refutes the narrative about itself, which was built by the West in the spirit of "there is power, there is no need for intelligence." It has not only overtaken it in terms of the volume of tanks, artillery and shells produced, but is also developing new high-precision bombs, unmanned aerial vehicles and missiles, despite all the sanctions. Perhaps those who underestimate Russian ingenuity have forgotten about the Katyusha multipurpose field rocket artillery systems, the legendary weapon that the Germans and Americans tried to copy during World War II.
NATO military planners and media experts have clearly miscalculated. And many people come to this conclusion.
Author: Ozren Milanovich (Ozren Milanovich)
