There’s been all that talk about the upcoming Ukrainian offensive, and I keep waiting for people in the West to figure it out, but I’m afraid it’s not happening, so I’ll describe why such an offensive is simply impossible. I mean, it’s possible, but it’s an incredibly suicidal idea.

To put it simply, the way Ukrainians fought this war so far can be divided into two main tactical modes. The first is to dig into concrete installations surrounded by civilians, and make themselves extremely hard to dig out, and force the Russians to kill their own civilians in the process. The examples of this are Mariupol and Bakhmut. The second tactical mode is to use American satellite imagery in order to see what positions are poorly defended by Russians, and make a breakthrough there.

Both tactical modes are the result of battlefield realities: first, the Russians own the sky, they own the option of heavy bombardment, they see everything with satellites, AWACS planes and drones, and facing them in the open means facing a superior army without an element of surprise, which means annihilation. The second battlefield reality is that Ukraine consists mostly of vast empty landscapes – both forests and agricultural land and fields. Those vast swathes of land are basically indefensible, you can’t have enough military coverage to be able to protect every spot against a concentrated attack, and to add insult to injury, the Russians tend to be using extremely low numbers in this war, and I guess it’s called special military operation for a reason, because they aren’t using troop concentrations sufficient to make it a proper war, and on the other hand it’s not a police intervention either. This means that the Russians can’t defend the entire length of the front against a concentrated pin-point attack, and both sides need to give up open land immediately, because any non-fortified static troop placement will immediately find itself under enemy fire. This also explains why the Russians chose to withdraw from certain positions; open land is costly to defend, and you gain nothing except the ability to brag about controlling more land. The corollary is that the war is about controlling key fortified junctions, and after those fall, you also lose huge swathes of land that surround them. Also, the two sides see the war differently; the Ukrainians try to control as much land as possible in order to present this as a victory. The Russians, on the other hand, intend to destroy the enemy, and see control over the land as a result of that; controlling much land before the enemy has been destroyed isn’t necessarily something that incurs benefits, especially if you have a large “fifth column” to contend with on the territory you control, as they did in Kherson city, where a significant minority of the population is virulently pro-Ukrainian and created so much problems for the Russians that they decided to give the city up and destroy the concept of Ukrainian state and nationality first; policing crazy people at this point was more trouble than it was worth.

To put it in simple terms, the Ukrainians want to take the land and genocide the Russians from it. The Russians want to destroy the genocidal Ukrainian ideological leadership and pacify the country so that it is no longer a threat.

This makes any Russian withdrawal a moral issue, because the Ukrainians will kill all “collaborators” (read: normal people) on this territory. This happened in Bucha, it happened in Kherson city, and in many other places. Also, at any point where the Ukrainians get close enough, they will deliberately target Russian and pro-Russian civilians; they even targeted their own prisoners of war in order to discourage surrender. Wherever the Russians take control, they try to establish normality and civility; however, the part of the population that has been infected by the mental virus of Ukrainianism constantly create trouble there, and the Russians have no clear idea of what to do with them. They don’t want to kill them, and nothing else seems to work.

What does this mean to the possibility of offensive warfare by both sides?

As for the Russians, I’m not even sure that they themselves know what they want to do. For them, it’s more about what they don’t want: they don’t want the Americans to continue occupying and indoctrinating increasingly closer countries and installing virulently anti-Russian “democratic” zombies there, not to mention American bases and nuclear-war installations. They also don’t want to cause a nuclear war with America. In addition, they don’t want other countries to dictate what they can or cannot do in their own sphere of interest, for instance trying to restrict trade and the flow of money. Other than that, I’m not sure that they either know or care. They are in the process of figuring out what they are, and so far they can’t decide between the Imperial/Orthodox past and the Soviet past, trying to own the legacy of both, and integrate it with what they see as the good things that came from the West – capitalist economy, freedom of expression, democracy and so on. Unfortunately, this process of figuring out what they are is being interrupted by the West, which would prefer Russia not to be at all, which unfortunately makes it all-but-certain that the most radical, violent and determined fractions within Russia will prevail, because that’s what happens when the country and nation are under attack by a foreign enemy. This means that the goals and methods used by Russia in this war might suddenly change, from the current careful and indecisive approach, to a sledge hammer of genocide that will simply wipe out everything in its path, when they have had enough of this bullshit. This means that the Russians are exclusively limited by political will and ideology, and militarily they can do whatever they want, when they decide that they want it enough to pay the price required for freedom.

The Ukrainians are a different matter. Ideologically, they have no problem with any kind of murder, torture, genocide or plunder required to attain their goals, which are to kill all Russians and create a Ukrainian fake nation with a fake history in their place. Their problem is that they have no military or industrial capacity for any such thing, which necessarily makes them an instrument of the West. They also sustained heavy losses and simply don’t have the manpower left for offensive warfare. They supposedly have 12 brigades trained by the West, in reserve for the “spring offensive”, but if you have in mind that they lost 35 brigades in Bakhmut, and they presently don’t count brigades at more than 50% of conventional numbers, it becomes obvious that they can’t perform serious offensive actions against any position the Russians are willing to defend, and the Russian goal won’t even be to defend a position, as much to kill those 12 “brigades” of virulent Nazis, and once this is done, simply march to Kiev and take over. The Russians won’t fight the Ukrainians over some field, they intend to destroy the hostile Ukrainians, and the easiest way to weed those out is to wait for them to come to you with guns and try to kill you. Then you turn them into graves and repeat the process until they stop coming. At this point you march to Polish border and establish the Democratic Republic of Ukraine as a member of the Russian federation, the way it historically always was.

So, why exactly is it technically impossible for the Ukrainians to perform an offensive? First of all, they don’t have the high ground, which at this day and age means supremacy in space and air. In space, the Americans provide the Ukrainians with all the data, but the Russians see everything as well, so things are equal in that regard. However, the Russians control the air, and for all intents and purposes, the entire Ukraine is a Russian-managed no-fly zone. Whatever flies there is either Russian, or a target. To prepare for an offensive means to stage fuel, weapons, ammunition, food and men close to the point where you want to make a breakthrough. As you do the staging, the enemy does the watching, and when your warehouses and barracks are full, they blow them up. This is what’s been happening in the recent weeks, to great effect, and to a point where the Ukrainians no longer have anything to do the offensive with. Also, when you assemble all those troops, tanks and stuff, it’s very visible from orbit, and a very nice and fat target for the Russian cruise missiles and airforce. On the other hand, the Russians can assemble whatever forces they want in the background, and the Ukrainians can’t do anything about it. This means that the Ukrainians can’t technically perform significant offensive operations, and the Russians can, but whether they actually do it depends on their strategical assessment of the wider war with the West, and their intents on the international scene.