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Putin’s War on Donbas Could Turn Into a Nightmare

Russian T-90 tank firing its main gun. Image Credit: Russian Ministry of Defense.
Russian T-90 tank firing its main gun. Image Credit: Russian Ministry of Defense.

The Russian offensive in eastern Ukraine started on Monday night. For weeks the Russian military had been preparing for the renewed offensive in the Donbas, or the second phase of the “special military operation,” as Russian President Vladimir Putin and his advisers have called the invasion.

But the Ukrainian military is still conducting counterattacks in the region and has the potential to seriously frustrated the Russian offensive.

The Russian Goals 

The goal of the Russian renewed offensive in eastern Ukraine is to cut off the Ukrainian forces in the Donbas. To achieve this, the Russian military is launching an offensive with two axis of advance, one from the north in Kharkiv and another from the south in Mariupol.

However, despite the Russian concentration of forces in the Donbas and the Russian military’s superiority in long-range fires, the U.S. Department of Defense does not believe that a Russian victory there is inevitable.

Although the Russian military now has exponentially shorter supply routes and can feed and fuel frontline forces much quicker because of their proximity to Russia and Crimea, it is still liable to logistical problems.

Instead of waiting to mass its forces, the Russian military began the offensive without the full complement of battalion tactical groups. Instead, Moscow is replenishing and reinserting battalion tactical groups into the fight as they become available. The Pentagon assesses that there are about 78 battalion tactical groups inside Ukraine, an increase of 13 from last week.

But the Pentagon also assessed that the Russian military has dedicated 11 battalion tactical groups to the siege of Mariupol. With approximately 1,000 men in each of these combined-arms task forces, the Russians are committing about 11,000 troops to the Ukrainian port city.

According to the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense, the Russian military is still moving equipment and men to the Donbas.

“The movement of damaged equipment of the military units of the Eastern Military District continues by rail from the territory of the Republic of Belarus to the russian [sic] federation. The Armed Forces of the russian [sic] federation continue to use the airfield network on the territory of the republic of belarus [sic] in order to launch air strikes on civilian infrastructure in Ukraine,” the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense stated on Tuesday.

Ukrainian Counterattacks 

The Russian forces began their offensive with an attempt to cut off Ukrainian forces south of Izium. However, the attack was repelled by the Ukrainian forces, and the Russian troops had to withdraw to their starting positions after suffering casualties.

A day before the Russian offensive, the Ukrainian military began a series of counterattacks in the proximity of Kharkiv. Ukrainian forces attacked from the north (Kharkiv and Chuhuiv) and the south (Svyatohisk) in an attempt to cut the logistical lines of the Russians coming out from Belgorod. Should such counterattacks prove successful, the Russian forces in the north of the battlefield will be left with only one road to get supplies. And the war so far has shown that this is a recipe for disaster as Ukrainian mobile anti-tank teams can lay waste to Russian resupply convoys.

The Ukrainian military also conducted a counterattack near the town of Marinka toward Donetsk and pushed back the Russian forces who had occupied the town, forcing them to retreat.

1945’s New Defense and National Security Columnist, Stavros Atlamazoglou is a seasoned defense journalist specializing in special operations, a Hellenic Army veteran (national service with the 575th Marine Battalion and Army HQ), and a Johns Hopkins University graduate. His work has been featured in Business InsiderSandboxx, and SOFREP.

1945’s Defense and National Security Columnist, Stavros Atlamazoglou is a seasoned defense journalist with specialized expertise in special operations, a Hellenic Army veteran (national service with the 575th Marine Battalion and Army HQ), and a Johns Hopkins University graduate. His work has been featured in Business Insider, Sandboxx, and SOFREP.

20 Comments

20 Comments

  1. Bertram

    April 19, 2022 at 5:57 pm

    Russia is ready for their third strategic humiliation during their “two week” military action.

    Russian body count about to increase significantly.

  2. greenman

    April 19, 2022 at 8:49 pm

    Read another article which was very descriptive, it said that ” the Russian army could end up like a wasp trapped in syrup on the Ukrainian steppes., ”
    A new fresh angle explained that Putin was shown all the shiny weapons produced by the designers. However what Putin failed to realise was the military generally did not have those shiny new weapons. In fact Russia’s military is not much different from a second world war military. So when western countries provided sophisticated new weapons to Ukraine, this blasted the invasion force.
    The final verdict was that Russia is a bandit nation and one would not expect such a country to have anything other than bandit weapons. My own research indicates that Russia is very low in the global index of corruption number 136, below Argentina.

    There are serious rumours that Russia has been using the familiar pre invasion playbook, on kazhakstsn . Accusation of maltreatment of Russian speakers, insinuation of neo nazis, implying the Russian speakers should be hived, off in a republic.

  3. redman

    April 19, 2022 at 8:55 pm

    Read another article which was very descriptive, it said that ” the Russian army could end up like a wasp trapped in syrup on the Ukrainian steppes., ”
    A new fresh angle explained that Putin was shown all the shiny weapons produced by the designers. However what Putin failed to realise was the military generally did not have those shiny new weapons. In fact Russia’s military is not much different from a second world war military. So when western countries provided sophisticated new weapons to Ukraine, this blasted the invasion force.
    The final verdict was that Russia is a bandit nation and one would not expect such a country to have anything other than bandit weapons. My own research indicates that Russia is very low in the global index of corruption number 136, below Argentina.

    There are serious rumours that Russia has been using the familiar pre invasion playbook, on kazhakstsn . Accusation of maltreatment of Russian speakers, insinuation of neo nazis, implying the Russian speakers should be hived, off in a republic.

  4. Alex

    April 19, 2022 at 10:34 pm

    And now it becomes very interesting. The devil shows his face. Bandera Nazis helped the United States in monstrous experiments.

    Russia submitted to the UN Security Council new documents on US biological laboratories in Ukraine.

    Evidence of military-biological activities on the territory of Ukraine in violation of the Convention on the Prohibition of Biological and Toxin Weapons is accumulating. Russia has circulated the relevant new materials as an official document of the Security Council.

    The commission is conducting a study of disease outbreaks that occurred on Ukrainian territory. It is obvious that Ukraine has become a laboratory of inhuman experiments for the Pentagon.

    Documents obtained during the Russian investigation confirm the close cooperation between Ukraine and Western countries in biological research on especially dangerous infections. The work was carried out despite the risks of a biological catastrophe in Europe.
    In the period from 2019 to 2021, American scientists tested potentially dangerous biological drugs on patients in a Kharkiv psychiatric hospital. In mid-March, documents from 2015 were released confirming the participation of the Pentagon in financing military biological projects in Ukraine.

    It was noted that a network of more than 30 biological laboratories has been formed in the country. In addition, the documents show Kyiv’s plans to use drones to spray deadly substances.

    Moscow will insist on reviewing the situation with biolaboratories in Ukraine within the framework of the United Nations Security Council and the Convention on the Prohibition of Biological and Toxin Weapons.

    Documents released in 2015 confirming the participation of the Pentagon in the financing of military biological projects in Ukraine

    Lies and propaganda only work for the first time, and then the truth comes to light. Once upon a time, on the territory of modern Ukraine, the Third Reich conducted experiments on Ukrainians and the Third Reich was helped by Bandera Nazis. History is cyclical. Now there will be a new sweep of the bastards.

  5. Him

    April 20, 2022 at 5:05 am

    Troll-Alex, here’s some history:

    At the start of WW2, Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia were allies.

    i.e. at the start of WW2, Soviet Russia were the baddies.

    When Germany turned around and attacked Russia, it’s not that Russia suddenly turned into a good guy. No, it was the German-baddie attacking the Russian-baddie.

    Because of the defeat, Germany had to go through decades of saying sorry and reforming, to become a good guy. That’s why the Germans now are quite nice.

    But Russia, because they won in WW2, they never repented for starting on the baddie side. So there’s been no change from baddie-Russia into goodie-Russia. Russia remained baddie-Russia. That’s why you guys let a KGB thug be your glorious dictator for his lifetime.

    Russia now is as evil as the Soviet-Russia days, flowing from their heritage from the evil Bolshevik Revolution.

    And people like Alex and other Russians have been bred for 100 years under an evil empire, which explains their different way of thinking compared to all other goodie nations.

    One has to feel sorry for Alex, because of his breeding in a Soviet and then Putin-Totalitarian system, his mind has been shaped by a KGB culture, and he cannot think any different. It’s like a dog that has been beaten all its life – when someone tries to be nice to it, it growls.

    Ask yourself:

    1) who now is behaving like Hitler?

    2) Aside from Ukraine’s Asov battalion, if there are Nazis, where are they?

    Answer: 1) Putin, 2) in the last Ukraine election, Nazis polled about 2%. Probably more Nazi-like people in Russia.

  6. CK

    April 20, 2022 at 7:08 am

    It’s useless to talk about history with Alex. He doesn’t even know which countries were in the Allies and which in the Axis. Yes, he’s delusional, but I also think the old man might have Alzheimers, poor thing. You can see him repeating himself over and over again in every thread.

    Yes grandpa, the bandera nazis. Yes grandpa, milk is more expensive these days. Yes grandpa, kids music really is too loud. Yes yes grandpa, biological experiments in Ukraine, yes yes. Let’s get you your pills.

  7. CK

    April 20, 2022 at 8:12 am

    Actually, @redman / greenman, I got a bit carried away refuting Alex’s daily diatribes that I forgot to comment on something very interesting you said.

    It was what Russian tycoon/oligarch said yesterday, calling the war crazy.

    “The (Russian) generals, waking up with a hangover, realized that they had a shit army,” Tinkov wrote. “And how could the army be good if everything else in the country is shit and mired in nepotism, sycophancy and servility?”

    I think this reflect very well the point you tried to make. In an extremely corrupt country, where every soldier from the rank of private all the way to general gets a kickback, profits from illegal sales of military equipment, embezzlement, and so on, what did you expect from your military? This is the country that Putin has helped create, in many ways, created himself.

    The problem is that he drank his own cool aid. He saw the Moscow Military Parades and thought that modernisation and efficiency was his entire army. Lying, corrupt sycophantic generals told him what he wanted to hear.

    And then here we are.

  8. mcswell

    April 20, 2022 at 2:12 pm

    Alex, why do you even bother to post here? Everyone here is much smarter than you, and knows that everything you say is a lie.

  9. Alex

    April 21, 2022 at 12:34 am

    I like how the Banderko Nazi has already created a dozen nicknames and his ass is on fire – it’s great. And now some truth:
    The Russian army hit more than a thousand military facilities in Ukraine in a day.
    “The missile forces and artillery of Russia carried out strikes on 1,053 objects of the Ukrainian military infrastructure. Among them, 31 command posts, six warehouses of fuel and lubricants, 910 strongholds and enemy manpower concentration areas, as well as 106 artillery firing positions were destroyed.

    In turn, the operational-tactical and army aviation of the Aerospace Forces hit 73 military facilities during the night, including four command posts, 57 places of accumulation of manpower and Ukrainian military equipment, seven strongholds and four ammunition depots. Six tanks, nine armored vehicles and a battery of 152mm Msta-B howitzers were also destroyed.

    In addition, Russian air defense systems shot down two Tochka-U tactical missiles and six drones.
    In total, since the beginning of the special military operation, the following have been destroyed: 140 aircraft, 496 unmanned aerial vehicles, 253 anti-aircraft missile systems, 2388 tanks and other armored combat vehicles, 256 multiple rocket launchers, 1029 field artillery guns and mortars, as well as 2232 special military units automotive technology.

    These numbers are encouraging. The agony of the Bandera Nazis is getting brighter.

  10. CK

    April 21, 2022 at 4:23 am

    Yes, we are legion Alex, like your bandera nazis, we are everywhere and anywhere. Inside your tanks, in the wreck of the Moskva, in your manager’s office, inside churches, under Sveta’s bed, prowling, hungry for tasty troll flesh like yours. We can, after all, smell fear from thousands of kilometers away, and boy do you reek.

    Keep up the lies and the fake statistics comrade! Every frightful type of the keyboard from you brings us ever closer…

  11. Alex

    April 21, 2022 at 11:44 pm

    Almost the entire Donbas is under the control of the Donbas militia and Russian troops. And the author is not very simple.
    Along with the Russian servicemen and fighters of the DPR, they worked at the highest level, the city of Mariupol was taken completely and irrevocably. The entire territory was systematically cleared of nationalists. The administrative building of the Azovstal metallurgical plant, which is of particular strategic importance, was taken under control, and the entire adjacent territory was cleared.
    Flags of Russia, Chechnya and the Donetsk People’s Republic are hung throughout the city.
    This is complete victory.
    And somewhere in the catacombs of the Azovstal plant, Bandera Nazis begin to eat each other… A good death for the bastards.

    According to statistics on April 21, since the beginning of the operation, Russia has destroyed Ukrainian equipment: 99% of tanks and other armored vehicles of Ukraine (2410 out of 2416 vehicles that were in Ukrainian troops on February 24), 92% of military aircraft (140 out of 152), 71% of the fleet helicopters (106 out of 149), 48% of MLRS installations (262 out of 535) and so on. This does not take into account the equipment that may have entered the Ukrainian troops after the start of the special operation, but in any case, the Air Force and Air Defense of Ukraine were practically destroyed, and the Navy ceased to exist.
    In addition, the United States has reduced the number of javelins by almost a third. This is a lot for the army.

  12. CK

    April 22, 2022 at 5:06 am

    Yes Alex, and any day now, we will see pigs flying too!

  13. Alex

    April 24, 2022 at 4:53 am

    So who is losing? Obviously not Russia.

    American Colonel Martin spoke about Biden’s failure in Ukraine.

    US President Joe Biden has failed in his policy towards Ukraine. This opinion was expressed in a column on The Washington Post website by retired American Colonel Wes Martin.

    The head of the White House, as noted in the material, tried to prevent the Ukrainian conflict by diplomatic measures – and could not. The author referred to the statement of the former acting. CIA Director Michael Morell, who expressed the opinion that Biden’s attacks on Russian leader Vladimir Putin only “rallied the beleaguered Russian elite.” “Not a single citizen of Russia will put up with the fact that the main enemy of his state inspires him what kind of power in his country can be and what is not,” Martin quoted Morell as saying.

    “Proving once again that he is nowhere near Reagan, Biden publicly called Putin a ‘butcher’ and a ‘war criminal.’ through Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin,” the author of the material noted.
    Ukraine and Afghanistan are far from the only reasons why Biden’s ratings have slipped to an all-time low of 42 percent. People, Martin notes, are unimpressed by his foreign policy experience. Do not add popularity and record inflation of 8.5 percent and a sharp rise in energy prices – the harbingers of a recession.

    At the end of March, NBC News published the results of a poll, according to which 53 percent of Americans believe that the country will begin a long-term recession, which will lead to the loss of American leadership in the world. When answering the question about Biden’s ability to correctly respond to the situation around Ukraine, only 12 percent of respondents expressed complete confidence in the actions of the head of administration.

    CNN, in turn, reported that the confidence rating of US President Joe Biden has reached a record low. According to a generalized analysis of polls published by four organizations last week, the level of confidence in the US president is about 41%, and according to one of them – only 33%. This is a record low compared to all of Biden’s predecessors in the same period of the presidential term.

  14. CK

    April 24, 2022 at 6:04 am

    @Alex – deny, deflect, obfuscate. Seriously, that’s you in a book.

    Don’t look at Putin! Look at Biden! Don’t look at what we’re doing in Ukraine, look at your country! Recession, CNN, political division, look elsewhere, but please, don’t look at what is happening in Russia! Internet Research Agency script in a nutshell.

    Also, poor you man, they are making you work on Orthodox Easter? The night money Sveta brings not enough to keep you guys afloat anymore? Let me know if you need any donations. I’m sure I have a few cents lying around that will be worth a fortune in roubles!

  15. Alex

    April 25, 2022 at 10:51 am

    Yes, Russia has big “problems”:
    There is the Donetsk People’s Republic. There is the Luhansk People’s Republic. Kherson applied to Russia for a referendum to establish the Kherson People’s Republic. God bless the Ukrainians of Donbass!

  16. CK

    April 25, 2022 at 11:03 am

    Yes Alex, and Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Romania also re-applied to join the Russian Federation. In this reality, Putin has conquered his hemorrhoids, and you and Sveta live happily ever after.

    It’s nice to sit back and daydream, isn’t it? ?

  17. Alex

    April 26, 2022 at 2:24 am

    Why is Russia with the people’s militia of Donbass taking new territories of Ukraine every day? Let’s figure it out:

    The West failed to turn much of the world against Russia after the military operation in Ukraine began, columnist Howard French wrote in an article for Foreign Policy magazine.
    According to him, many states did not support sanctions against Moscow, including such large countries as India and China.

    “In fact, when counting the population of these countries, it becomes clear that the states representing the majority of humanity have not taken a position in this conflict, seeing in it the familiar echoes of the former rivalry between East and West,” said French .
    According to the observer, the international political system that took shape at the beginning of the twentieth century from the very beginning gave the countries of the “third world” the status of second-class states. As an example, he cited the colonization of Africa by European countries.

    “It was the work of the work and cotton in the people of sugar unpaid smelted and all made of American colonies profitable Europe, and the so- rich for “Old the World” new and millions did ,” the author emphasized.

    French urged not to ignore the heightened sense of justice among the former colonized peoples.

    “The whole world” with Ukraine 🙂

  18. CK

    April 26, 2022 at 7:21 am

    Well Alex, if that is the case, we wish you the best of luck with your new Chinese masters. I hear they are very kind to minorities.

  19. Alex

    April 29, 2022 at 9:34 am

    If someone wants to know the truth about the civil war in the Donbass, about all the atrocities of the Bandera clean-ups and why Russia was forced to intervene, then it is better to watch films by independent journalists. There are already many such journalists who fight for truth and freedom. For example, a documentary by the German journalist Wilhelm Domcke-Schulz.

    A documentary film about the war crimes of the Bandera Nazis during the period of Russia’s special military operation to denazify and demilitarize Ukraine is in production. It will be a real information bomb, where the war crimes of Bandera Nazis will be shown and proved.

    The documentary “Remember Odessa” tells how the Bandera Nazis burned Ukrainians alive and other heinous war crimes.

    The documentary “To Live and Die in Donbass” tries to fill this gaping information gap in the West. He looks into the tormented soul of the inhabitants of Donbass, who really want only one thing – to live self-determining according to their own rules and values. Not submitting to foreign forces and ideologies.

    In the east of Ukraine, in the Donbass, a war has been raging since the beginning of 2014. A civil war that claimed more than 15,000 lives over the years, including several hundred children. They had to die, because the national-fascist coup government in Kyiv, funded by the West, trained and militarily heavily armed, would not tolerate any resistance to their illegitimate rule, no matter the cost.

    Therefore, in April 2014, the putschists deployed the Ukrainian army, supported by dozens of right-wing extremist volunteer battalions, and have since bombed city centers, residential areas, schools, hospitals and infrastructure, killing civilians.

    This perennial crime has gone completely unnoticed by the Western public. Politicians and the media avoid this topic and reports about how the devil pours holy water. Because a public discussion about the crimes of the Ukrainian regime would reveal only one thing – with what mass murderers and terrorists the so-called “west of values” in Ukraine has a common language, if only to defend their goals and interests.

    Lend-lease is a commodity loan, and not cheap: for all the ammunition, equipment and food supplied by the United States, many future generations of Ukrainian citizens will pay. Zelensky is driving the country into a debt hole.

  20. CK

    April 29, 2022 at 2:21 pm

    Ah, I see your tactic. You add a little shitty first paragraph so it doesn’t detect your duplicate post. Is this what it has come to now, you just posting the same exact post 2, 3, 4, 5 times per article?

    Wow, did they run out of paper in Russia, Alex? You guys can’t print new material? Literally using the same lines, over and over again, and now in duplicate in every post!

    Are you so defeated you can’t even come up with anything new? How sad. Now the idiot is talking about lend-lease at the end of his post, because he literally just copy + pasted it from another thread, with zero relevance to this one.

    Here’s a reminder:

    If someone wanted to know the truth about anything in Ukraine Alex, the last person they would go to is you.

    Paragraphs and paragraphs of bollocks, dubious claims about “independent journalists”, random documentarians, conspiracy theorists, deluded claims that of course, have no backup, lie after lie after lie.

    Classical Kremlin troll approach. Just flood the internet, the comments, the media, with tosh, doesn’t matter what it is, just make sure you write some old nonsense. Make sure to say the claim is supported by some dude in Germany, France, the states. If it’s a “documentary” (usually from youtube) then the better.

    Anything that victimises Russia, always the victim, always the bullied, never the problem. It’s always the Nazis. It’s always some pseudo-historical point.

    Anyone that has had the misfortune to study your “tactics” sees the forest for the trees, the pattern of lies, disinformation, blanketing of random claims, deflection, obfuscation, and other words beyond your vocabulary.

    It’s hopeless Alex. Your lies are as short as your intellect. What a pathetic job, to sit in your government shed, spreading your pathetic, government lies.

    A pathetic job for a truly pathetic man. A better match could not be made in heaven.

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