During the second week of July, Russia had a 'resting' break of their Ukraine invasion (here). Let us think about what it means:
- Putin does not care at all about the well-being of his troops (here, here, here, here, ); He obviously does not care about them getting some time to recover physically and mentally. Therefore, it means that the true reason is that the Russian army has exhausted its current ability to wage war.
- Replacement of Russia's military resources is being performed during this pause. However, old hardware is replacing disabled newer one (here)
- Thinking that it is strategy to "fool" the Ukrainian army and further attack while they least expect it is ridiculous as the past 150 days have shown that the Ukrainian do not rest.
- This 'pause' is strongly correlated with the Ukrainian army using HIMARS to annihilate a large number of ammunition depots (here, here, here)
Analysis:
- While being massively over gunned, the Ukrainian army has performed extremely well and has shown to be extremely effective and ingenious at destroying Russian military capacity (here, here)
- The very few new longer-range HIMARS artillery pieces provided (8 as of mid-July 2022) have caused devastating blows to the Russian army (here, here, here)
- Russian's GLOCs are exposed and must be taken out by the HIMARS asap (see all GLOCs within 75km of front-line where HIMARS can hit them).
- Free-world-provided armement is vastly superior to whatever the Russian has.
- If the U.S. were to provide long-range missiles (300km) for the HIMARS, the reachable targets would be 'war-ending': the Kerch bridge, which is the primary GLOC for Russia to support Crimea. The military infrastructures and depots in Sevastopol which are enabling the Black Sea Fleet. All GLOCS East of Kharkiv.
- Putin has demonstrated that he is all teeth, no bite; unable to disrupt any of the Free-World's GLOCs as he stated he would, conducting false flags operations that are failing miserably, empty escalation threats despite Free World's armement inflicting terrible cost to Russian military capacity.
- Still, no NATO "foot on the ground" is best strategy as it makes any attempt for Putin to sell an escalation of this military operation into a full-blown war impractical and improbable.
- The elephant in the room: it is abundantly clear that not only can the free world turn the tide of the Russian invasion, but the effect of 8 HIMARS have proven that it would be easy to do so. Doubling the committed 20 HIMARS deliveries, to 40 to 50 HIMARS/M270, and providing the 300KM range (MGM-140 ATACMS) to get to the depots and high-value targets that are further out would be 'war-ending'.
Deprived of ammunition and fuel, the Russian artillery, tanks, and infantry would become useless despite their numbers.
Getting Ukraine 100 of the A10 Warthogs that the U.S army want to get rid of anyway, to clear the close and near front-line of artillery, tanks and infantry would lead to Ukraine victory by Christmas.
I think that the fear in the U.S. administration is that if there were to be an obvious and sudden change of course in the war, Putin would then be using his propaganda machine to sell the idea that the West wants to invade, and he would then be able to convince Russians to support and join the fight. By having armement coming in at a slow drip, there's no punctual identifiable 'turning-point', and therefore, no justification for Putin's escalation. Just a grinding war (the boiling frog theory), until stalemate where Russia has exhausted all its resources. It could also be that the US want to see Ukraine "win" (aka stalemate) with the minimum number of US armement possible, which would make Putin's embarrassment greater and would then accelerate his destitution as the nationalist Russian supporters would blame the failures on him.
But the death toll is going to be far greater, and there is no way that Ukraine will regain all the lost territory unless they are provided with significantly more Western weapons.
