Unintended Consequences

​It is difficult for military experts to get fully-accurate facts from the fighting in Ukraine.  And then there is information available, it’s to the advantage of both sides to exaggerate some details and downplays others to their benefit.  But to experts, there are details that mean more to them than to others.  And when three separate military experts and one news story all overlap yesterday, then there is value is what these things mean to those to understand such things best.  And what these details all point to is how horribly the invasion is going for Russia.  Not that they are saying Russia will lose its invasion – it’s such a strong miliary force – but that the question is even an issue is meaningful.  And even if they do end up occupying Ukraine, the cost to Russia will be staggering.

The first comes from retired Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling yesterday when noting that the Kyiv Independent reported Russia has lost more than 10,000 troops, almost 50 planes, two boats, and hundreds of tanks and artillery pieces over just the past two weeks.

While recognizing that the figures might not be accurate, Hertling said that just being in that range is shocking.  "If these published accounts by the Kyiv Independent are even close, they are disastrous," Hertling wrote. "Having been the US 7th Army Commander, if I were the Russian Combined Arms Army Commander I’d be very worried right now. (Especially since one of the 'boats' is a warship.)"

Making this situation even more ominous for Russia, Hertling added, is that their forces haven't even yet starting the kind of urban warfare operations needed for major cities in order to take necessary control of the country.

"The Russians haven’t even entered into 'close combat' with Ukrainian forces in most cities," Hertling continued. "The RU are going to take a shellacking there."

What Hertling wrote dealt with lost armaments and munitions, and problematic movement.  But that was followed on the heels of another story of lose.  How yesterday, intelligence officials in Ukraine said that Russian General-major Vitaly Gerasimov, who is deputy commander of Russia's 41st Army ground forces, has been killed in fighting near the city of Kharkiv.  And if true that would make him the second Russian general killed within days.  The other, Maj. Gen. Andrei Sukhovetsky, also a deputy commander of the same 41st Army, was reportedly killed by a Ukrainian sniper.

But there have been other high-ranking Russian military officials reported to have been killed in recent days, as well.  These include a divisional commander and regimental commander who stories say died in the convoy of Russian tanks having difficult moving on capital city of Kyiv.

(By the way, giving credence to the story about the death of General-major Gerasimov yesterday is the subsequent story I came across about how the information got out.  It seems that when Russian soldiers destroyed a 4G tower, they lost the capability to make secure calls.  And so, they had to use local SIM cards.  And the call reporting Gerasimov's death was intercepted!  In the news story, the reporter explains that in the intercepted calls, you can "hear the Ukraine-based FSB officer ask his boss if he can talk via the secure Era system.  The boss says Era is not working. Era is a super expensive cryptophone system that @mod_russia introduced in 2021 with great fanfare. It guaranteed work 'in all conditions.'"  Apparently, the manual left out that it won't work if you destroy the necessary 4G towers.)

This range of losses -- equipment and personal -- leads into an interview, also yesterday, in Reuters with Ed Arnold, who is a research fellow for European security at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) think tank.  And the word that leaps out of his analysis (with a few caveats built in) is “unsustainable,” never a good thing for any army during a war. Mr. Arnold states –

“At the current rate of Russian losses, which are not confirmed, but we do have indications that this operation would be unsustainable within about three weeks from the Russian perspective."  

Arnold notes that what Russia would have to do is “consolidate the gains already made” and try to find a way of holding the conflict to the current lines that exist, they attempt to mobilize more forces from Russia. While Russian forces are moving in to encircle Kyiv, Arnold adds that Russia's advancement is "slow."  And says that it’s slow, as well, in the south.

“In the south, the Russian advance is continued to be slow but they're seeing a lot more successes in the south," he said. “However, at the moment, the Russian operation is going so badly, especially from logistics point of view that really Russia might just not have the numbers to make another conflict that is cold be hot again."

And all this coincides with an interview in the New York Times by Kara Swisher, who spoke with Clint Watts,

In an interview with journalist Kara Swisher for the New York Times, Clint Watts who worked for the FBI in counter-terrorism, and is currently a research fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, and frequent analyst on MSNBC.  Watts says that the growing disaster Russian President Vladimir Putin has in Ukraine is widely unpopular among Russian citizens and likely will build – and along with the sanctions which have crushed the country's economy could even possibly lead to his government collapsing in Moscow within six months – or as early as a month.

It's only a “this could possibly happen” kind of thing, but Watts details what he is seeing that is creating such a disaster on Putin’s hands.

"Militarily, even if he is successful, he’s taking casualties,” Watts says. “That will filter back home. You cannot disinformation your way out of 10,000 dead. It’s just not possible. And you’re going to have war-wounded. The mothers in Russia have always been the pushback against Putin during these conflicts. This is going to be next-level scale."

Watts also addresses that even if successful in taking over Ukraine, Russia will be unsuccessful trying to install a puppet government in a country full of insurgencies, unable to control the people.   As a result, Putin would need 800,000 soldiers (a figure he describes with the same word as Ed Arnold, “unsustainable”) just to stop the ongoing rebellion uprisings that Watts says "won't go away."

Watts then adds to all this the collapsed economy and the crushing sanctions that that are not just impacting the citizens, but also Russian oligarchs, all of which could lead to Putin losing control of his government.

"This will not settle down at home," he states, saying that when open markets, open economy and open information start shutting off, “you’re going to see two things. One, those that can flee will. Who are those that flee? Those with money. And those that stay, there’s going to be fights and wars.”  And so, while he’s worried about the immediacy of Kyiv falling, he also doesn’t dismiss the possibility of  “Moscow falling between day 30 and six months from now."

None of this means any of it will come to pass.  But when experts are independently seeing the same bread clubs and following where they lead, at the very least it's no longer Ukraine that faces the potential of a dangerous future.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine is a horrific world crisis on every level.  But it seems likely that Putin never figured that Russia would be at risk of being affected by that crisis as well as his target.