Big serge substack

As the calendar barrels into another year and we tick away the days of February, notable anniversaries are marked off in sequence. The nature of the war changed dramatically after a kinetic and mobile opening phase. With the collapse of the negotiation process whether thanks big serge substack Boris Johnson or notit became clear that the only way out of the conflict would be through the strategic defeat of one party by the other. Thanks to a pipeline of western support in the form of material, financial aid, big serge substack, and ISR and targeting assistance which allowed Ukraine to transcend its rapidly evaporating indigenous war economy, it became clear that this would be a war of industrial attrition, rather than rapid maneuver and annihilation.

In the last 72 hours or so, the pro-Russian side of the internet has been sent into an tailspin of panic over a new Ukrainian counteroffensive which is currently being launched in the Kharkov region, with the intention of compromising the Russian army grouping at Izyum. The panic was triggered by claims that Ukraine was advancing unopposed, encircling - or perhaps even capturing - the city of Balakliya - and on the verge of cutting off supply lines to Izyum. A modest city with a prewar population of perhaps 50, people, Izyum was always slated to be a focal point in this war, due to its location at a critical intersection. The topography of northeastern Ukraine is dominated by a few critically important features which determine patterns of movement. The region is furthermore shaped by the Severodonetsk River - alternatively called simply the Donets from which the Donbas, or Donets Basin, draws its name - which snakes lazily around the plain. Izyum is a strategically crucial city because it is where the highway crosses the river; as an added cherry on top, the Oskil River - a major tributary of the Donets - confluences with the Donets less than five miles to the east of Izyum, meaning the city essentially sits directly on the intersection of all the most important geographic features of the region. A highly simplified map of the area looks like this:.

Big serge substack

Check this out me korosho drugies: bigserge. This guy is fucking hilarious. Kyive was a trap. Kharkiv was a trap. Lyman was a trap. Kherson is a trap. He never gives up! And he's kinda funny. I love it. Like Kos' son, I wanna be an airborne Ranger, I wanna be a living danger, I wanna be a flamewar troll, I wanna rock n roll but I can't caussa dk flag policy. The Ukrainians have winter uniforms that weren't corrupted away. They have washing machines and the best armaments of the most advanced economies on earth. They don't have to beg Best Korea and Iran for third rate gear.

And then the deluge comes.

It is probably safe to say that the current week June , is shaping up to be one of the most significant of the entire Russo-Ukrainian War. On Monday, all eyes were on the Ukrainian Armed Forces and their much anticipated summer counteroffensive, which began with a series of battallion level attacks across the breadth of the theater. Instead, the entire Ukrainian offensive was overshadowed by the sudden and entirely unexpected failure of the dam at Nova Kakhovka on the lower Dneiper. In any case, the legalities are not the main point here. The destruction of dams has the potential to impact civilians on a scale which is an order of magnitude higher than anything which has yet occured. Through May of this year, there were fewer than 9, recorded civilian deaths in Ukraine including both Ukrainian and Russian controlled territories. This is a thankfully low number, compared for example to the war in Syria, where over 30, civilians are killed annually , or Iraq, where nearly 18, civilians died per year in the years following the American invasion in

It has been a while since I published anything long-form commenting on the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian War, and I confess that writing this article gave me a modicum of trouble. The summer has seen fierce fighting in a variety of sectors to be enumerated below , but the contact line has shifted very little. I have been reluctant to publish a discussion of the Ukrainian campaign simply because they have continued to hold assets in reserve, and I did not want to post a premature commentary that went to press right before the Ukrainians showed some new trick or revealed a hidden ace up their sleeve. Sure enough, I wrote the bulk of this article last week, right before Ukraine launched yet another major attempt to force a breach in the Orikhiv sector. Only time will tell if these precious reserves manage to achieve a breach in the Russian lines, but enough time has passed that we can sketch out what exactly Ukraine has been trying to do, why, and why it has failed to this point.

Big serge substack

Military history writer Big Serge has published an excellent essay that explains much of what has puzzled observers of the conflict in Ukraine—why does Russia appear to be hanging back, what happened to that much touted offensive, and some other matters as well. First, however, here are some basic points that will serve as guide posts. Big Serge is an amazing commentator. For anyone else interested in the dynamics of force generation in modern armies, I'd like to suggest writings from the 's, such as John Dickinson's "The Making of an Army," for American parallels. Essentially, the US Army had the same problem as the Russians in , when the law and Constitutional interpretation decreed that the National Guard could not be sent out of United States Territory, which created a dilemma for planners on how to use it as an effective reserve or nucleus for a large volunteer army. Putin apparently either does not want to do something similar or lacks the legislative support to pass a law permitting the outright drafting of its mobilized reservists into its regular army formations. It's a fascinating inversion of the Russo-Soviet mobilization system that existed in the last century, which finds the Russian military in similar straights to the dilemma's US law placed on US Army planners in the lead up to WWI. It's destroying the Ukrainian Military, including their reserves and equipment, at a steady rate. The Ukrainian Actions, such as the terrorist attack, seem to be getting more and more disparate. Another view by William Schryver is Russia is letting the Ukrainian's mass for an offensive, so they can be wiped out:.

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Or will Beavers inherit the earth? Legality is very important to him, as we know from his criticisms of the Rules-Based Order, in which the rules are unilaterally made up on the go. The result was a Ukrainian defense in Avdiivka that was substantially outgunned. Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. The problem is that it allows Ukraine to temporarily retake settlements, which exposes the civilians in these areas to reprisal killings, such as occurred in Bucha. Thats my more reasoned comment. The latter is a ruski pun Thats practically a cognate of morgue…. The prototypical example of this is of course the Nazi-Soviet War. A breaking dam, however, massively escalates the threat to civilians. Wear and tear and the raging of the waters will erode and burden the dike until it bursts. In the opening phase of the war, Izyum was indeed a salient. This means that a given Russian unit One Ukrainian journalist at the front had this to say:.

I want to draw attention to a fine, thoughtful article by Big Serge. The Age of Zugzwang. Zugzwang, of course, is a term from chess.

On Monday, all eyes were on the Ukrainian Armed Forces and their much anticipated summer counteroffensive, which began with a series of battallion level attacks across the breadth of the theater. When Spengler warned against any invasion of Russia for reasons of space, he was, as we have since seen, right. Zaluzhny displayed a bizarre timidity, particularly throughout the Battle of Bakhmut and the Ukrainian Counteroffensive. With even a stable level of Ukraine aid struggling to get through an American congress that is suffering from Ukraine fatigue and a host of domestic crises, it seems unlikely that any by the Baltic States are in the mood to double down and begin sending daily trains full of material to Kiev. It means mass casualties, cold trenches, scarred earth, and long nights of shelling. In short, this is the phase where an offensive is exploited. This has implications for both offensive and defensive operations, which we saw very clearly in the first nine months of the war in Ukraine. The Russian power of suffering is to willingly fight wars that devolve into bat fights, knowing they have a bigger bat. Russia has been fighting an economy of force operation that aims to destroy the Ukrainian army through attrition. Any consideration, debate or ratification is just a stage-managed rubber-stamp. Flooding disproportionately affected the Russian side of the river and destroyed Russian positions. That strategic window yielded nothing. Meanwhile, indigenous Russian production has skyrocketed, with the Estonians estimating some 3. They have also been rebuilding Mariupol and Donetsk, which Ukraine tried this past week to invade again with tanks and troops that Russia destroyed.