MICIMATT: The Coming Collapse of Ukraine

Ukraine's Armed Forces cannot withstand the stresses which Russia's are applying.

Published: 2024-05-15

Updated 2024-05-17: It is a pleasure when a future news article can be added as a citation for a newsletter article.

---

The Inexorable Tide

Aligning with all informed predictions, Ukraine will suffer military collapse during the northern summer. The new front which Russia has just created north of Kharkiv is yet another stress test for the AFU (Armed Forces of Ukraine). This will almost certainly be followed by another, as Russia extends its dominance across the wide fronts that it is widening.

This approach is natural when, in an attritional war, one side is ascendant. There is nothing Ukraine or anyone else can do, short of nuclear weapons, to counter this.

Full-scale Narrative

Western media's "full-scale" label for Russia's SMO is as misleading as the rest of their propaganda about the conflict in Ukraine. Russia’s SMO was executed to create a political solution which would have been achieved 5 weeks into the conflict were it not for Western intervention and the ego of Ukrainian President Zelensky. Since the Autumn, six months into the conflict when Russia recognized that the West would never allow negotiations and thus doom Ukraine 'to the last Ukrainian' to 'weaken Russia', Russia has invoked its methodology for a war which its leadership feel threatens the nation’s existence.

As Andrei Martyanov and Jacques Baud have described, Russia's approach involves the entire nation. Russia is sometimes characterized as "slow to saddle but fast to ride". That saddling involved the reinstatement of Russia's WWII era council to realign the nation’s production and economy as its Central Bank and other institutions dealt with continuous economic attacks via EU and US sanctions packages after sanctions packages. In parallel, Russia called for volunteers and began training and expanding its armed forces. There were cob-webs to be blown from the recruitment and production processes. Volunteers appeared at recruitment stations nation wide. Dormant state arms industries were revitalized.

From that first winter, after NATO led the AFU to some success, consolidated its logistics and constructed extensive defense belts in the south and east to protect those corridors while its new forces were being trained. 2023 saw the telegraphed and failed "Spring" offensive by the AFU, using everything it had asked for from the West to achieve nothing more than destroyed wunderweapon after destroyed brigade. By this stage, the economic attack on Russia had been defeated. The rest of the world had not succumbed to the West's propaganda and had use for Russia's resources and products.

As 2024 began, Russia was still receiving well in excess of ten thousand volunteers a month. The monthly total of Ukrainian dead was above twice that, while Ukraine was conscripting comparitively few. Russia was in the process of deploying year-long trained new combined armies. Ukraine was plugging battered battalions with conscripts trained for a few weeks.

By this stage Russia's production was in smooth operation. Military technical adaptations like the FAB glide bombs had been successfully trialed. Ukraine's air defenses were almost eliminated. Conversely, Russia's air defenses had been adapted to the ever changing range of longer and longer range missiles supplied to Ukraine by NATO.

Scott Ritter’s military math was in. There was only ever one result in this conflict. Its precipitous conclusion is rapidly approaching.

Another Regime Change

Andrew Kobybko recently reported on the CIA's efforts to secure a political transition in Ukraine from end-of-term President Zelensky. That term ends in a few days on May 21st. US Secretary of State Blinken has suddenly appeared in Kiev to "reassure the troops" or some other waffle. What is happening are arrangements for a political transition, most likely flinging Zelensky aside for a replacement puppet.

No Respite

Questions as to the primary purpose of the new front created by the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation (AFRF) are between an attempt to take Kharkiv and forcing the AFU to reposition resources have amounted to 'yes'. Which of these results would the AFRF not welcome? The stress for Ukraine began with replacing their commander in Kharkiv. The situation on the border with Russia was described as allowing Russia to "walk to Kharkiv".

In Moon of Alabama's latest report, Bernard provides a series of revealing quotes from General Kyrylo Budanov, the head of the Ukrainian military intelligence agency. In late April there were reports of a Russian build up across the border from Sumy, to Kharkiv's northwest. Budanov expects the next stress test to be there:

General Budanov said he expected the attacks in the Kharkiv region to last another three or four days, after which Russian forces are expected to make a hard push in the direction of Sumy, a city about 90 miles to the northwest of Kharkiv. Ukrainian officials have previously said that Russia had massed troops across the border from Sumy.

Pavlo Velycho, a Ukrainian officer operating near the Russian border in the Sumy region, said that Russian shelling of the outskirts of Sumy had recently increased.

Whatever comes, there will be no respite for the AFU.

Those new combined arms armies are being deployed to these new fronts. Russia has more of them in production and training, at an increasing rate.

Documenting the Collapse

Dima from Military Summary has been providing at least daily reports on the conflict from the beginning of the SMO and has possibly one of the most detailed spatially registered databases of war. The thumbnails from his last 6 reports within the last 60 hours are in the lead graphic for this article. Their full titles indicate the rapid progress which the AFRF is making:

• Kharkiv | The Russians Have Approached The First Line Of Defense | Military Summary For 2024.05.12

• The Bloom | The Russians Entered Vovchansk | Krasnohorivka Has Collapsed. Military Summary 2024.5.12

• The Russians Captured Hlyboke And Lukiantsi | Heavy Clashes In Vovchansk. Military Summary 2024.5.13

• The Bloom | 30% Of Vovchansk Captured | The Assault On Lyptsi Has Begun. Military Summary 2024.05.13

• The Russians Entered Buhruvatka, Chasiv Yar, Lukiantsi. Military Summary And Analysis For 2024.05.14

• The Bloom | Umanske Has Fallen | Breakthrough At Chasiv Yar | Lyptsi Is In Danger. MS For 14.05.2024

Budanov's assessment of just how impossible the situation for the AFU is, reads:

“All of our forces are either here or in Chasiv Yar,” he said, referring to a Ukrainian stronghold about 120 miles farther south that Russian troops have assaulted in recent weeks. “I’ve used everything we have. Unfortunately, we don’t have anyone else in the reserves.”

Questions as to whether the AFRF will suddenly execute some "big arrow" offensive have been answered by Martyanov and Ritter before: Why do that when the current strategy is working perfectly well?

There is an interesting twist of history and culture playing out in Russia. The Eternal Regiment which marches each year to honor the people of Russia who fought in the Great Patriotic War is a civilian, not government, organisation and expression. The current success of the AFRF is so obvious that men of a fighting age in Russia are scrambling to sign up so that they may have a valid claim to have been a part of this war on Russia by NATO. To return to the military math, in mid-April Ukraine's parliament has just passed a bill for total mobilization in a desperate attempt to sustain their defenses while Russia's recruitment agencies are being flooded with volunteers.

No amount of munitions will save Ukraine. You can't manufacture men.

Shuffling Deck Chairs

To what positions will these newly, forcefully conscripted Ukrainian soldiers be posted? The corruption in Ukraine is so endemic that that volumes of donated money has been siphoned off to fake companies instead of building defenses. There are no prepared positions to fall back to or defend in the north east. Quoting Bernard:

The Russian forces can easily progress because the money allocated for fortifications in the Kharkiv and Sumy regions was paid to fictitious companies without any trenches ever being built.

This repeats the same situation seen a few months ago following the rout of Avdiivka.

There is no chance that Ukraine can hold until the November elections in the US. NATO forces, if they appear, will also be destroyed. Nothing can stop that which the AFRF chooses to do. They have an entire mobilized national economy behind them. President Putin and the National Security Council are cleaning out mismanagement (corruption) from their Defense Ministry. One can imagine that Russia is embarrassed by this, but it is better to have it rectified than fester, as Martyanov expressed.

Shoigu, the previous Minister of Defence, has been promoted to Secretary of the Security Council. His replacement at Defence is an economist and the former Deputy Prime Minister, Mr. Belousov. His task will be to control military spending and to then assist reintegrating Russia’s demobilized forces back into the domestic economy.

Bernard suggested the obvious narrative which will soon be issued by the US: "We gave them a chance and they blew it". While this seems likely, it is lipstick on a pig. The US, with the complicity of their puppet Zelensky, have destroyed a nation and sacrificed an entire generation to fund their war industries and satisfy a Cold War ideology which has already been swept into the dustbin of history. They sabotaged the unanimously approved UN Security Council resolution to the initial civil war conflict, the Minsk II Accords. The US then sabotaged Germany's industry by destroying the Nordstream pipelines to profit the US gas industry. The EU's technocrats followed suit by issuing the sanctions regime against Russia which have rebounded on Europe's economies and people.

Conclusions

Bernard concludes gently that Ukraine "was pushed to its death by western delusion".

I disagree. Ukraine was knowingly destroyed for the profit of US industry. That US military, economic and geopolitical analysts are so blind to not be able to see the obvious, is part and parcel of this.

Ray McGovern calls it MICIMATT, the Military Industrial Congressional Intelligence Academia and Think Tank complex. Every single part of that complex has been involved in this destruction of a nation and a generation, willingly, from the Victoria Nuland engineered coup beginning in 2013 and every step of the way since.

or support this work via Buy Me A Coffee or Patreon.

Sources

Ukraine SitRep: An Army And Country At Their End, b., Moon of Alabama, 2024-05-14

Zelensky Blames 'the World' for Russia's Kharkiv Offensive, Dave DeCamp, Antiwar, 2024-05-16

The Kharkov offensive and the replacement of Shoigu as Defense Minister, Gilbert Doctorow, Gilbert Doctorow, 2024-05-13

Oooh, Baby!, Andrei Martyanov, Reminiscence of the Future..., 2024-05-13

Russia Hopes To Influence Ukraine's Possibly Impending US-Backed Regime Change Process, Andrew Korybko, Natylie's Place: Understanding Russia, 2024-05-07

What does Ukraine's new mobilisation bill entail?, Yuliia Dysa, Reuters, 2024-04-17

[US] NATO v Russia: 2014 - 2024, YesXorNo, 2024-03-09

Jacques Baud on the Russian Art of War, YesXorNo, 2024-04-03

The Rout of [the AFU in] Avdiivka, YesXorNo, 2024-02-23

Larry Johnson： NATO's Next Moves., Napolitano interviews Johnson, Judging Freedom, 2024-05-13

Culture

Hey Jude (Remastered 2009), The Beatles, uploaded 2018-06-17

---

Copyleft: CC0