Moscow“This does not look good. You have been fighting for four years in a war that should have lasted a week. Are you a tiger of paper?” These are the words that Donald Trump claims to have addressed to Vladimir Putin during the meeting that they both had in Alaska on August 15. At that time, the Russian army had just made an alarming breakthrough for Ukrainian troops on the Pokrovsk front in Donetsk. A month and a half later, Kíiv has managed to contain the situation, and despite the fact that he continues to suffer in some areas, the voices in Moscow grow that they are questioned that Russia is able to defeat Ukraine.
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During September, Russian soldiers have conquered 259 square kilometers of Ukrainian territory, the smallest amount since April, according to data from the Deepstate military analysis project. This is 44% less than in August and represents 0.04% of the entire Ukraine area.
Kremlin has reduced Trump’s words, saying that Russia “is not a tiger of paper, but a bear” and clarifying that “there are no paper bones.” At the same time, the official position of the Russian government, which does not tire of repeating, is that its troops carry the initiative on all fronts and that nothing can turn the dynamics of war.
However, the provocation of the US President has ended patience to one of Putin’s highest critics, Igor Guirkin. This ultranationalist colonel, guilty of having triggered the War to the Donbàs in 2014, is imprisoned for questioning the Russian President’s strategy in Ukraine, and periodically writes letters valuing the military. In one of his last texts, he first raises the following: “If we can’t win the war, maybe we have to leave it?”
Guirkin believes that the circumstances are “extremely serious” and are “constantly impaired”. “Unfortunately, I do not see any perspective of a quick victory over Ukraine, not even there,” he laments. According to the military, “someone will have to be responsible for the reckless plans, completely disconnected from the actual operational situation, which have led to serious defeats, reverses and huge losses.”
Guirkin’s complaint corresponds to the complaint recently made by a Pokrovsk Russian soldier. In a message on his Telegram channel, Aleksander Zaborovski criticizes that the foolishness of the commanders will cause all the mobilized to end up “deleted” in a maximum of two months. He explains that the pressure of the drones and the inability of the Russian army to repel them is very difficult to supply the front line, fifty kilometers from the supplies deposits. “We are now moving two by two, but if we do not control the sky, we will do these fifty kilometers over corpses. And then what?”
Russia bases much of its tactic on numerical superiority. The number of new contracted soldiers has stagnated in recent months, but it is still enough to provide the front line with many more men than Ukraine. At the same time, it also pays a very high price to move on the ground, with assault operations that leave hundreds of victims daily. And yet, it is not enough to bend Kíiv’s defensive lines. The most probable sectors, including Guirkin, believe that only with a new obligatory mobilization, such as September 2022, could the scales in favor of Moscow, but Kremlin does not seem ready to assume the political cost of this decision.
Ukrainian optimism with nuances
From Ukraine, Volodimir Zelenski is breastfeeding that the Russian Summer Offensive has been “frustrated” and has not achieved any of the goals he pursued. Ukrainian Chief Military Commander Oleksandr Sirskii claims that Moscow’s plans to create a security zone in the Sumi and Kharkiv regions in the north to move towards Pokrovsk and capture all Donetsk have not been successful.
However, Deepstate analysts relativize official Ukrainian optimism. According to his observations, there are three especially complicated points for Kíiv’s troops: the most worrying, from his point of view, is Novopavlivka (Zaporíjia), where they say that “the last decisions of staff do not inspire much hopes for improvement”; The second is Kupiansk (Kharkiv), who “if no decisions were made on time, could have ended in tragedy,” say experts, although “it is too early to say that the threat has happened”; And the third, Pokrovsk, where, although the Ukrainian army has recovered a lot of land, they conclude that “the price of each meter is much higher”.
