This weekend gone has been one of increasing desperation for Russia.
The Kursk salient has been a catastrophic graveyard of Russian ambitions. Overwhelmed by tough defences, lack of equipment, lack of manpower, terrible planning and bad commanders, all under huge pressure from Putin personally. The mud has finally arrived and the weather is worse along much of the front.
Even as Russian forces battle the elements along the entire frontline, they battle some of the toughest defences they’ve faced in a while. Ukraine is bolstered by a boost in aid from the US and increasingly effective ammunition supplies from Europe.
Part of the Russian problem is that they have time against them and they know it. The Trump administration incoming is going to change the game one way or another – and not how Russia thought it might.
Kursk is Putin’s worst nightmare because he’s made it one. He would have been better off simply containing it but instead he’s gone all in and is failing because he’s placed deadlines and demands on forces incapable of obtaining them.
In the past few days Russian equipment losses and infantry deaths have both soared back up to almost 2,000 a day in the case of the later. Kursk used up almost all of the reserves it was allocated on a relentless but stupid attack in the west of the salient. It was so badly planned and desperate that one assault tried to use the pre-July Russian defence lines to get around the Ukrainians and ended up stuck in their own tank traps- and on their own dragons teeth.
Russian attacks elsewhere have been facing harsh consequences as defenders put up more resistance. Ukrainian air force strikes using JDAMS have been possible, whereas the Russians have moved their air force so far back to avoid ATACMS strikes on their bases, finally the number of glide bomb attacks has dropped significantly. That was one of the biggest reasons ATACMS was so needed.
You all know about the economic problems now, they’re stark and they are severely impacting how Russia works. It has labour shortages in industry and manpower shortages on the front. It can’t fix one without damaging the other. The financial crisis – entirely of Putin’s own making – could cripple the country for years.
The cost of every meter Russia takes of Ukrainian land is unsustainably high. And it’s increasing with the season. Yet still the demands for more and more are constant. Price, seemingly immaterial. That is a strategy of desperation.
Abroad, Russia is facing in what it regards as its sphere of influence and its strategic ‘own back yard’, an uprising in Georgia, where I can only imagine the FSB advisors are standing behind the government and the security police telling them they only have to hold on and the crowds will eventually disperse. Yet it seems more than that this time. Fraudulent elections and corruption, policies the vast majority don’t want that keep the country bound to Russia, it’s all too much for many. They reject Russia and want it gone.
Normally Putin would have sent in his army to resolve matters but it’s somewhat occupied elsewhere with nothing spare.
In Syria Turkey has played Putin like a violin.
Turkey is heavily dependent on Russian oil and gas – Putin needs the money desperately so he can’t afford to cut it off.
The Turks have quietly trained and armed a group of rebels called the SSG – the Syrian Salvation Government. They have already captured the major northern city of Aleppo, moved south to Hamah – capturing the airfield the Russians were using to bomb Aleppo, and appear to be heading to Homs.
Russian forces were seen heading rapidly out of Hamah towards their base on the coast at Latakia. Russian aircraft bombing Aleppo from there were shot down by MANPADS.
Meanwhile Assad was said to have fled to Moscow although that was unconfirmed, following what appears to have been an attempted coup in Damascus led by a younger brother.
Russian and Syrian army forces seem to be collapsing and melting away, like they just don’t care anymore.
All of this is a sign of exhaustion. It’s exhaustion at home and abroad.
The Asimov Foundation series of books deals with the mass of people and their reactions to various stimulus over decades. Psychohistory, is in effect a mathematical model of predicting what will happen at a strategic level and what pressures can be applied to make them take place.
While none of what is happening in Russia is being pre-planned it is nonetheless a result of mass psychological behaviour given certain stimulus.
Even in dictatorships where information is controlled realities start to bite. The situation on the front when 750,000 men don’t come home again is and does have an effect on every family in Russia. Their behaviour and their reactions is changed by it. The control of information that is clearly no longer real makes people look for the truth all the more urgently. Slowly but quietly they know everything is going wrong.
Will they do anything? Not directly.
But they slow down at work because they see no point in going faster. They drink more to avoid the truth – vodka sales up 23% year on year. You see how this goes. A malaise of war weariness sets in.
And more to the point the dictatorship is overwhelmed by events and problems all at once – every day is something bad, nothing good, it lashes out using exotic missiles that deliver nothing just to create the aura of fear. An aura that for Ukraine has worn off months ago, and finally the West seems to have become almost immune to.
Putin has cried wolf too many times. He’s lost his touch.
The hour is always coldest and darkest before the dawn. For Ukraine that hour is now. I feel the tide of change is coming. The breaking point for Russia is near. Something has to give.
The Analyst
militaryanalyst.bsky.social
Slava Ukraine!
The Military Analyst 
it really seems like the breaking point is near, as you say. I wonder if general Kellog feels this too. Something I wish the reporters would look for.
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Thank you. Are you still convinced the Kursk attack was wrong? It does seem like it was a good idea now. The equipment and manpower losses are staggering.
I watched a movie recently called The Bunker. It seems that Putin is going to be in a similar situation in the not so distant future.
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I do think the concept and reasoning behind the attack was wrong when they launched it. They clearly had no real strategy for it, and it didn’t deliver what they expected in the time frame they expected.
As I said, eventually the Russians would come for it and they did – so far taking back around 55% of what Ukraine took.
However you can trust the Russians to mismanage and screw up even the best advantages and Ukraine exploited that brilliantly –
and continues to do so.
The Russians have broken under pressure and Ukraine is running rings around them.
In this Ukraine got lucky and they have used it to their advantage. In war you take what you can get – but you have to see it and they have.
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I have been bitter with how Biden has betrayed the Ukrainian people after grandstanding with Zelenski at the memorial to the fallen in Kyiv. Jake Sullivan will forever be remembered as the agent of betrayal within our own government imo. I actually feel ashamed of voting for Biden, but the only alternative was a born nazi with the family patronym of Drumpf and his family’s own nazi past. His father had been outed for participating in Nazi rallies in NY before WW2. But wanted to post up this article from the Atlantic that came in my mail. Should turn up in a search for the Atlantic>>
He treated the conflict as a crisis to be managed, not a war to be won.
By Phillips Payson O’Brien
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I blame Jake Sullivan for reinforcing Biden’s natural instincts and going too far the other way.
Biden learned from the Cold War and used his knowledge – and understanding of that time, of which he was a key player in the senate.
What Biden made the mistake on was thinking Russia now under Putin is essentially the same as Russia under the Soviets. He failed to remember that Russia then was a collective leadership post-Stalin. Now it’s a one man show and he just didn’t understand Putin’s mentality.
There are also long standing beliefs in the US military-intelligence and State Department, as well as in the senate, that an intact Russia is essential to prevent its vast nuclear arsenal falling into dozens of new states with their own nuclear weapons and immature leadership with dozens of mini-Putin’s in charge. That’s considered a nightmare scenario and it’s closer now than it’s ever been in my view.
Treating Putin as viable and not as a fear mongering threat maker with no backbone was the real mistake. It should have been the US drawing red lines and sticking to them. Not the other way round.
Either way it’s history now. We can but make the best of it. Trump has an opportunity but he’s just as likely to blow it and blame everyone else.
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23 percent increase in vodka sales – if that is actually an amount consumed, that is huge expecially if considering the millions of Russians that self exiled to avoid the war and the ones killed or serving on the war front. I know pastors in Cuba who have been to Russia as protestant missionaries who are waiting for Russia to collapse so they can return and do more missionary work.
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That was actually from Russian official statistics published in November
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This whole war could have been avoided if NATO had not turned chicken and withdrew in 2021/22. Biden, Merkl and Trudeau let Putin walk in.
Instead, they should have lived up to the Budapest Accord and said “come get us!”
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