Thursday, March 24, 2022

When Russia Fails

Or this is why: Or even this:
“Their equipment sucked,” says Milton Bearden, CIA station chief in Pakistan during the most vigorous chapters of the agency’s proxy war against Soviet forces in Afghanistan in the mid-to-late 1980s.

The Red Army’s medical kits included glass bottles that might have been holdovers from World War Two, Bearden told SpyTalk, instead of the plastic vials in use by American and other contemporary military services. Kits captured by the Afghan guerrillas “were bags of broken glass and liquid,” he said. “They could get a rocket going, but they couldn't make a ballpoint pen. That little ball bearing at the end of the pen? They couldn’t make those.”

Bearden, a highly decorated officer who retired in 1994 after 30 years and heading the Soviet/East European Division, says his cables back to headquarters increasingly describing Russian forces as a “third world army” were met with disbelief.

“The Soviet analysis people just went up in the air,” he recalled in an interview. “They said, ‘This is bullshit. You guys are making this shit up. It can't be.’” The war ended with the Red Army’s retreat from Afghanistan in 1989.

Sound familiar?  Even now analysts and pundits can't quite imagine Russia will not prevail in Ukraine.  But we couldn't prevail in Iraq, much less Afghanistan.  Why?  Because we refused to bomb cities into rubble?  We did it in WWII.  Because we weren't as brutal as Putin? Or, more likely, because controlling people who don't want to be controlled by you is harder now than it was 100 years or so ago.  Afghanistan has resisted colonization for centuries, but Iraq?  Russia cannot simply occupy Ukraine; the Ukrainians won't allow it.  Russia could no more do that than NATO could.  But Russia has the added infirmity of having a "third-world army."

“Basically, it’s a shitshow here, I’ll put it that way,” an unnamed soldier near Mykolaiv in southern Ukraine can be heard telling a colleague in a recording released by Ukraine’s Security Service late Tuesday.

After telling his friend that Ukrainian forces “tore apart” a column of Russian forces sent along with his own unit, he described complete disarray among the Russian military, with 50 percent of the unit suffering from frostbite on their feet.

“But they don’t plan to treat them in the [field] hospital,” he said.

On the fourth day of their deployment, he said, the general commanding the unit, General-Lieutenant Yakov Rezantsev, told them it’d be over quickly.

“Do you know what he told us? ‘It’s no secret to anyone that there are only a few hours until this special operation is over.’ And now those hours are still going.”

He said soldiers are complaining about having Kevlar vests that lack the hard-armor panel, but they are ignored.

“‘Comrade General, damn it, I have this situation,’” he recalled troops telling their leader. “And he just says, ‘Son, be strong,’ and then he fucks off. It’s such trash here… our own plane dropped a bomb on us,” he said.

“They couldn’t even send off the 200s here,” he said, using a Russian military term for dead bodies. “They rode with us for five days.”

“Even in Chechnya, there was nothing like this,” he said, describing the situation as a “madhouse.”

“This ‘special operation,’ damnit… with respect to homes not meant to be destroyed… it’s bullshit.” 

Belarus wants to help Russia; at least the leader of Belarus does.  The people of Belarus have other plans: 

Yeah, somewhere between 4000: And over 15000. I understand the "fog of war" when it comes to numbers; but I also think some analysts can't yet believe the Russian army is this bad.  So I tend to go with the over, rather than the under.  Either way, it's a disaster for Russia; one they entirely brought upon themselves.  The problem for Putin after this is not whether he maintains power in Russia; it's how he maintains any power outside of Russia.  There are entire countries, not just pundits and poohbahs on Twitter, paying attention to this.  They are not seeing the Russian bear, or even the Russian bear cub.  They are seeing a pathetic old man, clinging to his memories of glory.  This war is going to have far more serious repercussions than whether or not Putin reaches for the nukes (spoiler:  he won't).  And that's where the real problems begin.

Coming in late last night:
And early this morning: How 'bout that.
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