Below are some excerpts, but I recommend reading the full article at the Edward Slavsquat Substack site. Note: Bolding is in original. – Natylie

By Marko Marjanović, Edward Slavsquat Substack, 4/1/22

….Russia pulling units from everywhere to make Donbass a by-the-books operation with a massively positive correlation of forces is not good news for Ukraine. It was far better for Ukraine when the enemy was spread out over numerous axes, none of them strong enough to deliver a decisive blow.

I wrote that the danger for the Russian side was that it would become a hostage of its almost-success at Kiev. Logic dictates that an operation that has stalled and where chances of success are low should be scaled down and cannibalized to beef up more promising operations. But its forces having advanced so far and having come so near, it wouldn’t be an easy decision to pull them back.

And yet that is exactly what the Russians have done. They have made the tough call.

It is the correct call but it surely wasn’t easy to make. To voluntarily relinquish territory your forces had bled to take — that can’t be easy, no matter how strategically justified.

I am in awe of the sheer ruthlessness of Russia’s withdrawals.

The Sumy ambition abandoned. The Nikolayev ambition abandoned. The Chernigov ambition abandoned. The Kiev ambition abandoned.

I have been writing for three weeks now that Russia’s effort was very cleary too diluted over too many axes and sectors. (I would have started even earlier but early on there were so many other things that were also wrong.) I wrote that single-minded focus on the Ukrainian military center of gravity (which happens to lie in the Donbass) offered the best chances of success. These radical adjustments are evidence that Russia’s generals thought the same….

….Everyone old enough to remember February 24 will remember that the war kicked off with the Russians fighting in kid gloves. Air strikes were nearly absent, there was no targeting of barracks with cruise missiles, and the units racing to Kiev were trying to avoid fighting wherever possible, bypassing resistance rather than confronting it. That the initial Russian effort, of which the drive on Kiev was the centerpiece (tying up as many Russian units as all the other efforts combined), was primarily concerned with degrading the Ukrainian military (the strongest grouping of which lay far away in Donbass) is nonsense. It was exactly the other way around. The initial plan was focused on testing if the Ukrainians state could be made to unravel without having to go after its military and killing tens of thousands of Ukrainian servicemen.

If MoD was truthful it would have said:

“We tried something (politicians/ideologues made us). It didn’t work. So now we’re going to make radical adjustments and try something else.”

But that wouldn’t have exactly pacified the homefront, would it?

….The unforced Russian withdrawal around Kiev has pro-Ukrainian Westerners seeing Russians “pushed back” and even a “Russian rout“. They will be surprised when Ukrainian gains in the north are not followed up by Ukrainian gains in the south but by Russian gains and forced Ukrainian retreats.

They do not seem to fully understand that what is happening is Russia switching from a fanciful non-military Plan A (which indeed failed), to a by-the-books Plan B, and that this demands radical redeployment of troops to correspond to the shift of focus from the political to the military center of gravity.

Meanwhile pro-Russian Westerners have similarly discredited themselves. It wasn’t so long ago that “former CIA” Larry C Johnson was telling us that “the Ukrainian army has already been defeated. What’s left is a mop-up.”

….No. Exactly wrong. The Ukrainian military has not been defeated. That is exactly why the Russian military is having to be recalled from Kiev for Donbass. To create a grouping of forces strong enough to decisively defeat the large Ukrainian military concentration there.

Johnson’s fellow fantasist Scott Ritter didn’t opt for blowing up Russian success beyond all proportion. Instead he moved the goalposts so far as to still be able to proclaim the failed Russian drive on Kiev a 5D success.

He spins a tale where “200,000 Russian attackers” faced “600,000 Ukrainian defenders” and therefore needed a Kiev “feint” to prevent the Ukrainians from moving their allegedly ginormous forces to where Russia didn’t want them.

First of all this is pure revisionism. Nobody in the first week of the war, when the Russians were clawing ever closer to Kiev and were making a point of calling Zelensky illegitimate, thought the Kiev operation was about anything other than Kiev. All this stuff about a “feint” only ever hit the light of day when the effort stalled and failed.

Secondly, it is dishonest arithmetic. It is comparing apples and oranges. You can’t take just the forces actually committed for one side but the theoretical total for the other. The 100,000 Ukrainian territorials do not venture outside the oblasts they are raised in. Likewise there are still plenty of Ukrainian brigades, active-duty and reserve, in western and central Ukraine that have not been committed. Moreover the reserve is supposedly over 200,000 strong but that is a paper strength and it is unclear how much of that can actually be constituted and in what timeframe. Zelensky only issued the order for the reserve to mobilize on February 23 so when the Russians rolled in precisely zero of that reserve was in the field. The Russians were absolutely not outnumbered 3 to 1. In the border areas where battles were taking place they were the more numerous ones.

Ritter claims the Russians needed the “feint” against Kiev to break out from Crimea and isolate Mariupol but that was accomplished in all of 5 days (before Ukraine could even stand up its reserves). Yet the Kiev “feint” continued for weeks after that. *Why?*  (You could make the claim it continued on to discourage Ukraine from reinforcing Donbass but then why is it being radically scaled-down now? The Donbass battle is still ongoing and the Ukrainian communication lines to Donbass are still open as their force there remains un-encircled. How does withdrawing from around Kiev *now*, and even telegraphing the reduced posture in advance, possibly square with the notion that sitting outside Kiev was absolutely vital to prevent “the more numerous” Ukrainians from reinforcing Donbass??)…

Read full article here.