There’s an aspect of the current Russia/Ukraine war that is seldom addressed.

I’ve seen analysts wondering why Ukraine isn’t tactically retreating and regrouping their forces, instead giving them the suicidal orders to stand and fight until they are destroyed or forced to surrender. One argument was that they are buying time for some kind of reinforcement army to arrive from the west and turn the tide of war, but that’s nonsense, because there isn’t any army in the West that will save them. That’s obvious from the fact that all the new weapons and reinforcements are immediately sent to the Donbass front line.

The actual reason is that their positions in Donbass have been heavily fortified over the years, and those fortifications are their greatest assets. The second greatest asset that they have is Putin’s reluctance to hit civilian targets, which they are abusing by hiding in populated areas which greatly limits Russian ability to use heavy weaponry to dig them out. Basically, it’s not really a war of equal parties; it’s a situation similar to a fox or an eagle trying to dig out a small animal that is hiding in a hole in the ground. Of course the small animal is not “tactically retreating”, because the moment it leaves the hole in the ground, it’s dead. The only place the Russians are having a problem with them is a reinforced concrete hole in the ground surrounded by apartment buildings full of innocent people. The only “tactical maneuver” Ukraine has at their disposal is to fire at Russian positions from a civilian building, and if the Russians fire back, they make a video with dead civilians and upload it to the Internet, and they wait for something to change geopolitically with the passage of time, for instance a new front opening in Lithuania or Moldova, NATO entering direct hot war with Russia and so on. Basically, they are a groundhog or a meerkat hiding in the underground tunnels, while an eagle is camping at the exit, ready to eat them if they try to make a run for it, and they are counting on something changing if they wait long enough, because it’s not like they can do much about it in any case. There have been attempts by both Ukraine and America to distract the Russians and try to force them to change the winning strategy – bomb civilians in Donbass, attack that tiny island outpost in the middle of nowhere, cook up trouble in Moldova and Lithuania, and so on; it’s not working, because the Russians actually know how to wage wars, apparently. They are very unlikely to change their pattern of action before they retake the entirety of Donbass, and before they completely destroy all the Ukrainian fortifications and troops there. Only then would I expect them to say that “phase 2” is complete, and it’s anybody’s guess what they would do next. It’s very obvious what they are doing now – they are taking their sweet time digging the groundhog from a hole in the ground, because they have all the time in the world, they don’t want to do risky things that would have them lose men and equipment, they don’t want to endanger the civilians more than absolutely necessary, and the enemy is doomed anyway so they might as well win at the smallest possible cost to themselves. It’s not like they have long supply lines that cost them money; for them, it’s basically home turf, and they have endless supplies of fuel, food and equipment. Basically, the longer this takes, the more troops they get to rotate through the war and have them gather experience, and NATO is seriously bleeding assets on the other side, in a situation where they can’t afford it.

I find it funny every time people find it surprising that Russia, “a country with the GDP the size of Italy” turned out to be able to hold the entire world economy hostage, sanctioning it proved deadly for the ones doing the sanctioning, and its currency actually appreciated significantly once it was removed from the forex markets.

The explanation is very straightforward, but not simple, and points to something vital, so I’m going to get into the weeds, so to speak.

The first aspect is that Russian economy behaves in patterns typical for 3^rd world colonies of great powers. This means that it exports mostly cheap raw materials and imports expensive industrial products. This doesn’t look like an accident, but any amount of reduction in exports and utilization of those raw materials for domestic production increases their profits significantly, which explains why Russia thrives under sanctions.

Also, the reason why Russian currency recovered is because America can’t use its financial trickery to print money out of thin air and then suck their resources dry, and export their overpriced goods back. Furthermore, due to restrictions on use of USD and EUR for international payments, RUB suddenly became highly necessary.

The GDP question is trickier to answer, because there are several layers to the issue. The first is that the GDP was synthetically and deliberately underestimated, compared to the GDP of Western countries; for instance, Russia has a huge gray economy which is completely ignored, and if you do, it becomes hard to explain the actual purchasing power of the Russian people, which is much greater than one would guess. Also, the prices of domestically produced goods and services are quite low. Also, the credit rating agencies are an instrument of American foreign politics and are inherently fraudulent; they basically serve the purpose of making credit cheap for countries that are subservient to America, and expensive for those America wants to compete with. Russia is an especially interesting case because it had very low debt, it serviced it reliably, and its credit rating was bordering on junk. This made credit very expensive for both Russian state and Russian corporations and citizens. In an average Western country, debt is cheap and is widely used to grow businesses and finance spending. All of this increases the GDP numbers. In Russia, since debt was expensive, they had to finance growth from exports of raw materials, which is another factor that led to the smaller nominal GDP, but with the benefit of an almost nonexistent sensitivity to debt-related pressures such as the devaluation of the credit rating, which would be lethal for any Western country. Basically, by making things hard for Russia during the past decades, America in fact made Russia resilient, independent and insensitive to foreign pressure.

There’s also the question of Russian military, which is greatly underestimated in the West based on the numerical indicators. Those are even more deceptive, because Russian weapons manufacturing is designed to be incredibly cost-effective, and the weapons themselves are highly resilient and good in actual combat. Also, there’s the mistaken belief that Western weapons are technologically superior. This is not the case; if anything, it’s the other way around. The idea that Western weapons would magically change the situation in Ukraine is a complete illusion. Technologically, Russia has everything from spy satellites, rockets and aviation to drones and, for all intents and purposes, killer robots. The only thing they don’t have are the aircraft carriers, and that’s because they never had an use for them in their strategic planning. They are used for projecting power to weaker remote countries, and Russia never had any interest in that, so they made a few aircraft carriers just as a token and for experimentation, but they never invested much resources in them because they are of marginal use. It is my estimate that in any military conflict between NATO and Russia, NATO would be beaten so decisively, they would have to resort to the use of nuclear weapons. Ukraine is de facto the strongest NATO military at this point, and they are basically destroyed by Russia’s little pinky finger. America would not fare any better, because for each escalation in weapons strength and sophistication, Russia has an equal or stronger response. Each attack on Russian mainland would be matched by an attack of equal or greater magnitude on American mainland. America is neither safe nor protected from Russian retaliatory strikes, because Russia is neither Vietnam nor Iraq. America never fought an enemy that can strike their mainland at any time with whatever power they choose. That experiment would end very badly, and quickly.

There’s another important issue, perhaps the most important of all – the West is used to setting the market terms in ways that price their imports very low, and their exports very high; basically, what you produce is cheap and worthless, and what we make and export is precious and wonderful. This created an illusion of Western supremacy which ended as soon as they actually started believing their own propaganda, and sanctioned those “cheap and worthless” products, which turned out to be essential things nobody can live without in a modern society, and the stuff they make and export turned out to be trinkets with inflated brand value that nobody really needs, and are rather in the domain of “wants”. Nobody really needs an iPhone, a Mac or some fancy brand of ice cream. I’m writing this on a late-2017 Asus Zenbook, running Linux and LibreOffice, and it’s fine; it’s more than fine in fact; it would be considered alien tech in the 1990s. My new Macbook is better, but it’s not that much better that I would trip over myself and die if I had to use less advanced tech without American IP. More likely, I would shrug it off and do perfectly fine, realizing that I need America and their stuff much less than everybody thinks they do. I actually test such ideas occasionally, checking how much stuff I actually need to function in a modern society, and how much of what I have is merely “want the new shiny gadgety thingy”, and I concluded that I could do with a Raspberry Pi in a pinch, but not without electricity, diesel and gas, let alone food. Apparently, Russia produces the stuff we actually need, and the West produces the “intellectual property” in the stuff that we want; not even the actual stuff, mind you. So, the question is, could everybody survive with Chinese smartphones and laptops, but without Russian minerals and hydrocarbons? Yeah. It turns out that something is cheap when it’s abundant and you just assume it’s there, like air, but when air suddenly isn’t there for you to breathe, it becomes precious quite suddenly.

When you turn out to need someone for basic survival, and they don’t need you very much at all, it means that, for all intents and purposes, they are more powerful and important.

I’ve seen all those people in the West saying it’s so bad the Russians have an artillery advantage over Ukraine, let’s send Ukraine more artillery to give them more of a chance.

At this, I raise my eyes to heaven and think, God, kill me now, please, I can’t listen to those idiots any more, I need a vacation.

But let’s do it slowly so that even the average person in the West, who’s been living on a diet of celebrity gossip and CNN, can understand it.

Why do people use artillery in a war? The answer is, it’s the most cost-effective way of sending bombs across to the enemy. You basically spend the cost of ammunition, and the gun is cheap and re-used, with low maintennance. In comparison, aviation is a very expensive way of doing it; you have the cost of training a pilot throughout his career and the risk of his death or capture, you have an aircraft that goes through fuel like crazy, and needs maintennance, meaning parts and support crew. The rockets are even worse, because the airplane at least is re-used unless it’s shot down, and a rocket is a sophisticated device that is destroyed after a single use.

Why do people not use artillery in a war? First, it has limited range by definition. In the first world war they tried to make longer range guns, but it proved to be a bad idea because the barrels of those guns wore out so quickly that they had to have bigger calliber rounds for each firing. They were also stationary or tied to the railroads, and so on. Basically, the bigger the gun, the less cost/effective it is, and it creates more problems than it solves, which is why people made airplanes and rockets for solving the artillery range issues. The second problem with the artillery is that it’s a good target if the enemy has active airforce and/or long range rocket systems. Basically, in a modern war, you don’t ever hope to really use the artillery because you have to count on the fact that your enemy is going to see it as soon as it’s in a firing position, and then they’re going to pulverize it.

So, why is Russia using artillery? They are using it because they destroyed the enemy’s airforce within the first few hours of the war. Then they pulverized it more for good measure. If Ukraine had any long-range weapons that could be used against Russian artillery or airforce, it was destroyed very quickly because it was a threat that limited deployment of Russia’s cheaper and cost-effective systems. The only thing Russia couldn’t take out were the intelligence/recon systems because Ukraine outsourced those to America, and one would need to take out the American satellite network in order to prevent Ukraine from precisely targetting Russian weapons and command points. It’s doable, but they decided against it at this point because it would escallate things beyond the point that was deemed cost/effective in the current situation. So, basically, Russia is using the artillery because it’s the most cost/effective way of sending bombs to the enemy, and the enemy has no effective counter-measures.

Why can’t Ukraine use the artillery? Because unlike Ukraine, Russia can use long-range missiles and airforce, because it has total control over the sky of Ukraine, meaning that anything other than their own stuff flies there, it gets shot down instantly. NATO can’t change this situation because their stuff would get shot down as easily and quickly as the Ukrainian stuff, and that would escallate the situation past the point they deem acceptable at the moment. Essentially, if Ukraine deploys its own artillery to counter Russian artillery, Russian airforce destroys it as soon as it is deployed, unless there’s excessive risk to the civillian population. If the position has air defences that make it hard for the airforce, the Russians use Kalibr missiles to pulverize the air defences first, and then send the airforce to pulverize the artillery. Since only the Russians can do that, whatever artillery NATO sends to reinforce the Ukrainians will simply be destroyed following the same principle.

Basically, the reason why Russia can use the WW1 equipment is because they stripped down their enemy so much, that it makes no sense to use the expensive ways of delivering bombs when cheapest ones will do; they are basically optimizing warfare for cost-effectiveness. No, they didn’t run out of the sophisticated missiles, but you won’t use your iPad to swat flies if you have a slipper handy, either. They use the expensive stuff when nothing cheaper will do, but once they moved in with the artillery, you know the war is basically over, because in modern warfare the artillery is so easy to take out, you never get to use it unless you already reduced your enemy to the point of late 19^th century.

To conclude, the idea that Ukraine needs more artillery to counter Russian artillery supremacy is incredibly stupid and people saying this are idiots.