by John Helmer, Moscow
@bears_with
For more than two months now, President Vladimir Putin’s orders to the General Staff have been to shorten the range of the electric war campaign to the area east of Kiev and the Dnieper River, and west of the advancing line of Russian forces. The General Staff have responded by limiting their strikes to electricity and other energy supplies for military repair and drone production plants, troop marshalling points, and logistic hubs supplying the Ukrainian forces in Kursk and along the front.
This is the Putin Pause. The General Staff have understood it to allow strikes against energy infrastructure in Kharkov, Odessa, and the Sumy region. In recent days Boris Rozhin’s Colonel Cassad blog and the daily bulletins from the Ministry of Defense have also identified electric war raids at Kharkov and Odessa.
How much of a territorial concession on the military map which Putin has directed Vladimir Medinsky to discuss in secret with the Ukrainians and Americans isn’t known. What is known is the map of the General Staff’s targets since August 26. That was the date of the last Russian drone and missile attack on electricity production and distribution in the west of the country.
Putin’s map, which he announced in his speech to the Foreign Ministry of June 14, lacked coordinates. On the one hand, Putin reiterated the objectives of the Special Military Operation he had announced on February 24, 2022, as “the protection of people in Donbass, the restoration of peace, and the demilitarisation and denazification of Ukraine. We did that to avert the threat to our state and to restore balance in the sphere of security in Europe.” On the other hand, the president said, “these conditions are simple. The Ukrainian troops must be completely withdrawn from the Donetsk and Lugansk people’s republics and Kherson and Zaporozhye regions. Let me note that they must be withdrawn from the entire territory of these regions within their administrative borders at the time of their being part of Ukraine.”
On the General Staff map, the difference between Putin’s second statement of terms and his first statement is the width of the demilitarized zone (DMZ) stretching westward to a depth calculated as the range of US and NATO-supplied artillery, drones and missiles for striking the new Russian regions and the Russian hinterland.
Because the range of drones in current use against Russia has been extended to 800 kilometres, and applying this to the direct flight distance westward from Donetsk, the DMZ to assure Russian military security should stretch to a north-south line running through Rivne and Khmelnitsky (lead image). From Donetsk to Kiev, however, is a flight distance of 600 kms; from Donetsk to Odessa, 560 kms; to Kharkov, just 250 kms. This range of drone and missile lethality threatening Russian territory puts the future of Kiev, Odessa, and Kharkov squarely in the General Staff’s sights.
How the General Staff is drawing the DMZ map to achieve demilitarization of the Ukraine in military terms is one thing. How the objective of demilitarization is being mapped in the Kremlin is quite another.
According to a well-informed military source, “the General Staff’s priority is defensibility. This is based on terrain, control of highways, bridges and railways, establishment of a land corridor to Transdnistria, and control of the South Ukraine Nuclear Power Plant (NPP), known as the Pivdennoukrainsk NPP in the Nikoalev region near Pervomaisk. The DMZ line then runs roughly northeast/southwest along the Kodyma River and highway connecting Balta on the Moldovan border with Pervomaisk. This would give Russian force deployment a defensible position with control over the major highways leading to the bridges across the Dnieper at Dniepropetrovsk and Kremenchuk. There will be no more reliance on the vulnerable bridges at Kherson and Kakhovka to ensure sound Russian logistics. Communication with Transdnistria will be ensured by control of the E58/581 highway which runs between Kherson and Tiraspol.”
“The placement of the line along this axis also puts Russian forces on higher ground in relation to Odessa and Nikolaev, so the possibility of Ukrainian/NATO forces breaching a ceasefire and being able to deploy and fire down on the Russians is neutralized.”
“Looking at this map strictly east to west, the DMZ does not satisfy the 800km in-depth requirement which correlates with the range of Ukrainian weaponry. Doing so would mean incorporating territories right up to Lvov. That’s the traditional neo-Nazi zone and it would be tough to establish and enforce demilitarization there with anything short of evicting most of the population. Decapitating the current Ukrainian leadership wouldn’t be enough. The DMZ map does, however, include Rivne and Khmelnitsky NPPs: getting the NPPs out of Ukrainian military reach is critical from a Russian security perspective. This means no Ukrainian or NATO military presence at or around any nuclear facility east of the Polish border. Indeed, a strong argument can be made by the General Staff for deactivating the NPPs altogether and reconnecting the zone to the Russian/Belorussian grid.”
Between the advancing Russian line of forces at present, across the southern reaches of the Dnieper River, to the western border of the defensible DMZ – from Zaporzhye to Pervomaisk, for example – there remain between 200 and 300 kms to be fought for.
WASHINGTON MAP OF RUSSIAN DEPLOYMENT MOVING WESTWARD AS OF NOVEMBER 3
Click on source for enlarged view: https://storymaps.arcgis.com/
The source, the Institute for the Study of War, is a Washington, DC, think tank run by the Kagan-Nuland group and Pentagon retirees.
In advertising for more US money and arms, the Ukrainian commander, General Alexander Syrsky, has called this “one of the most powerful Russian offensives since the beginning of the full-scale invasion.”
The Russian advance, particularly at the Pokrovsk Bulge, is slower and more methodical. Operationally, the Big Serge blog describes the “Russian momentum…parsing through the thin Ukrainian defences on the southern line while simultaneously advancing down the ridge line from the Selydove-Novodmytrivka axis towards Andreyevka, which forms the centre of gravity pulling in both Russian pincers. Ukraine is facing the loss of the entire southeastern corner of the front, including Kurakhove, in the coming months…by the end of 2024, they [Russian forces] will be on the verge of completely wrapping up the southeastern sector of the front, pushing the frontline out in a wide arc running from Andreyevka to Toretsk. This would put Russia in control of some 70% of Donetsk oblast, and set the stage for the next phase of operations which will push for Pokrovsk and begin a Russian advance eastward along the H15 highway, which connects Donetsk and Zaporozhye.”
THE BATTLE OF THE POKROVSK BULGE
Click on source to enlarge view: https://bigserge.substack.com/
For an interview with a Pokrovsk native, read this.
Strategically, this analyst claims, “we end up with a picture where Ukraine’s overarching strategic concept would appear to be pulling in two directions. Verbally, [acting President Vladimir] Zelensky has tied the prospects for negotiations to a de-escalation of the war on Russia’s part (while excluding categorically any negotiations relevant to Russia’s own war aims), but Ukraine’s own actions – attempting to double down on both long-range strikes and a ground incursion into Russia – are escalatory, as are the various demands made of NATO in the peace plan. There’s a certain measure of strategic schizophrenia here, which all stems from the fact that Ukraine’s own concept of victory is far beyond its military means. Western observers have suggested that a prerequisite for negotiations ought to be the stabilization of Ukraine’s defences in the Donbass – which in substance means containing and freezing the conflict – but the Ukrainian effort to expand and unlock the front with the Kursk incursion runs directly contrary to this. The result is that Ukraine is now waging war as if – as if NATO intervention can eventually be provoked.”
Big Serge is an American approach, Russian military sources believe, and it underestimates the neo-Nazi, race war doctrine which is driving both Ukrainian and US strategy in the present war. “It’s much the same strategy as the Germans developed and bent the entire will of the country toward — a fascist, racist, imperialist, colonial project. We know it by the names of Generalplan Ost, New Order, Drang nach Osten, and Lebensraum. It’s a strategy that has been absorbed, coopted, and adopted by the US-led West. The theory of victory is that via economic sabotage, Fifth Columns, terrorism, invasion, mass murder, destruction of infrastructure and social cohesion, and anti-Russian, anti-Orthodox racism, Russia will be destroyed. As the years have gone by and the war has unfolded, it has become obvious that there is little to no purpose for the Ukraine as anything but a base of operations for the wider western neo-Nazi project.”
Can the American neo-Nazi project be stopped by a DMZ established by the Russian offensive?
According to Putin announcing the Special Military Operation on February 24, 2022, “I would like to additionally emphasise the following. Focused on their own goals, the leading NATO countries are supporting the far-right nationalists and neo-Nazis in Ukraine, those who will never forgive the people of Crimea and Sevastopol for freely making a choice to reunite with Russia… Comrade officers, Your fathers, grandfathers and great-grandfathers did not fight the Nazi occupiers and did not defend our common Motherland to allow today’s neo-Nazis to seize power in Ukraine… The purpose of this operation is to protect people who, for eight years now, have been facing humiliation and genocide perpetrated by the Kiev regime. To this end, we will seek to demilitarise and denazify Ukraine.”
Four months ago, in his restatement of his end-of-war terms, Putin repeated that demilitarization and denazification remain parallel operational objectives. He claimed the terms of the Istanbul agreement he instructed Vladimir Medinsky to sign in March 2022 “meant that a law would be adopted in Ukraine banning Nazi ideology and any of its manifestations. All of that was written there.”
Putin added that his terms for Istanbul-II are “I repeat our firm stance: Ukraine should adopt a neutral, non-aligned status, be nuclear-free, and undergo demilitarisation and denazification.”
Outside the Kremlin there is no military source who believes that denazification of the Ukraine can be implemented and enforced by “a law banning Nazi ideology and any of its manifestations”. Leaving Kiev and Lvov outside the DMZ, the sources believe, would amount to abandoning denazification of the Ukraine in Russian strategy.
Redrawing the DMZ map in the lead image, withdrawing Russian red territory eastwards, creates a zone for the negotiation to come of the denazification objective. The future for Sumy, Kharkov, Poltava, Dniepropetyrovsk, Nikolaev, and Odessa will depend on this.
THE PINKING OF UKRAINE
“One thing is certain,” comments a military source, “there can be no denazification along the new Russian/Ukrainian border without depopulation – a true sanitary zone. No one lives there. No one except on Russian state business visits there. Absolutely no Ukrainian, including the diaspora, is permitted under any circumstances. This means crossing the Dnieper again and pushing the Ukrainians back to Nikolaev – if not further.”
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