So, why is this the most probable? There have been many clues, not least of which from Russian command and Putin himself:
1. Firstly and most significantly, the Russian Federation has signed the new territories of Donetsk and Lugansk into its constitution. This means they are legally bound by the highest force of law and obligation to recapture and secure these areas. They are of paramount priority. The same goes for Zaporozhe, which has been partially ratified and annexed, and of course Kherson too, though this is an exception because, while Russia controls 70-80% of
Kherson Oblast, they don’t control the city, but there’s no comfortable way to get it yet, without wasting disproportionate effort in crossing the Dnieper River.
You might argue that Russia will still win these territories in due time, even if they choose the other method like the Lvov route. That’s true, but I’m emphasizing here the obligatory urgency that is inherent in the fact that these are now actual constitutional Russian lands. How would it look if Russia ignored its own lands being occupied, while it went on a year long (or more) adventure in west Ukraine, an area it doesn’t intend to ever occupy or annex? For the duration of that time actual, legal Russian citizens would be suffering under brutal Nazi occupation forces. This is a major problem and why I believe Russia
will prioritize the liberation of these lands first rather than
last as in the Lvov option.
You could also argue that with enough men Russia could do all three options at once, or perhaps two of them—for instance a push to cut off Lvov
and the Donbass cauldron. But then, ask yourself, what would be the point of pushing Lvov if the Donbass cauldron alone would achieve the exact same objective of completely cutting off Western arms shipments to the main AFU grouping in Donbass?
Not only is there not enough manpower for both, but as stated above, the third option can achieve the same result and in an arguably better and more streamlined way if you pour all the forces there, rather than needlessly dissipating them all over the largest country in Europe, creating logistical nightmares in the process.
2. Putin himself has given us the biggest clue in an overlooked recent
statement:
He said that it’s a ‘priority task’ for the Ministry of Defense to eliminate shelling of Russian border regions, namely Belgorod, Bryansk, etc., but this can be extrapolated to also include—in accordance with past statements—the increased focus on eliminating the terror threat to Donetsk, which too is now a
constitutionally official Russian city.
One can clearly see then how the top priority of the forthcoming Russian offensive could and will likely revolve around finally freeing these de jure Russian regions from the terrorist threats that have monumentally escalated in recent months, particularly the barbaric shelling of Donetsk city which has of late become a nightly occurrence.
Recently more and more civilians have been displaced in the Belgorod and Bryansk regions of Russia as Ukraine increased shelling which has killed people and often destroyed power infrastructure, causing widespread outages in those rural regions. It’s Russia’s top priority to protect these people and regions. If Russia throws the bulk of its force somewhere west, to adventure through Lvov and Vinnytsia Oblasts, it would be viewed as a betrayal by the Russian people not only of those regions, but of Donetsk and elsewhere who have been suffering FAR too long to be asked to wait another year while the Russian army traipses around on the Polish border 1200km away. These people deserve to be liberated here and
now. And I believe Putin and his staff see it this way as well, and will commit their primary forces to the task of solving this problem
directly once and for all.
3. We’ve already mentioned how having a unified and uniform regional set of fronts would create far more effective redundancy and networking of overlapping systems, everything from radars and airforce, to Comms and C2/C3, and supply/logistics MSR’s, etc. In effect, it’s a far more
streamlined approach.
4. This route is clearly the most efficient in terms of supply/logistics, as the main MSR’s would be coming directly from Russia in the shortest and most direct possible routes: in the south corridor, directly from Crimea and Rostov, and in the north directly from Belgorod. The Lvov and Vinnytsia option requires vastly stretched supply lines that first go from Russia to Belarus, then down into Ukraine.
How about the
cons of this route? The biggest disadvantage is this route privileges Donbass and ignores Odessa. Odessa is arguably the single most critical objective in this entire war. For those that don’t know, the UK has long been eyeing Odessa as a future
NATO base which would aim to neutralize Russia in the Black Sea. In fact the U.S. and UK both have already invested billions in building up naval infrastructure in that area, one Russia destroyed in the opening of the
SMO.
Here’s a good
article on their plans:
The US and UK Have Started Building NATO Naval Bases in Ukraine
British Special Forces were confirmed long ago to be operating in Odessa, particularly in training AFU in the usage of Harpoon, Neptune, and British anti-ship versions of the Brimstone missile.
Beyond that, Odessa is critical for national security for two big reasons:
1. Taking it would completely landlock Ukraine, disallowing
any future naval/maritime involvement and provocations with NATO. Though this is under the assumption that neighboring Nikolayev is also subsequently taken.
2. It would connect an all important Russian landbridge to Russia’s own Transnistrian garrison. There have many provocations there, and Moldova has recently been tapped by Lavrov and many experts as the ‘next’
Ukraine. It’s become clear that after the Ukrainian SMO is finished, Moldova (as well as some of the Baltic states) will be chosen by the scriptwriters in NATO as the next epicenter of confrontation. These small states are quite susceptible to being coerced and puppeteered, as their feckless leaders (Maia Sandu in Moldova being a particular example) are easy to bribe, blackmail, and threaten into provoking Russia.
If you recall earlier in the war, Ukrainian authorities were virtually
begging Moldova to invade Transnistria and push the Russian garrison out. Presidential advisor Podolyak also echoed these sentiments. During the siege of Mariupol and Azovstal, they even suggested to jointly invade Transnistria with Moldova in order to capture the Russian garrison, as it numbered in the similar ~2000-3000 range as the Azovstal POW’s, so that they could then use these Russian troops to exchange for their own Azovstal POW’s.
At the time, Russia clandestinely beefed up its garrison as well as it could:
But the threat of a major provocation remains from the Moldova direction. Thus it’s absolutely critical for Russia to control that corridor as soon as possible and connect their forces to Transnistria to allow resupply of the garrison. Macgregor’s Option 2 would be quickest in getting there. Option 3 would likely leave this sensitive region for last, which is the main detriment and risk of this option. However, it is likely a risk outweighed by the rewards of capturing the entirety of the Donbass and destroying the AFU’s main force.
v. Stealth Offensives and Ghost Brigades
There’s one other possibility which would apply to Option 3. That is, the slow-rolled or ‘stealth offensive’.
When most people imagine the coming Phase 2.0 operation they understandably think of D-Day or another February 24, 2022 style heavily announced, obvious mass incursion. But recently there’s been a gradual uptick of Russian pushes on every front that some believe may in fact already herald the beginnings of Phase 2.0 proper.
This AFU soldier believes it has already kicked off.
There are advantages to starting off the new offensive with a subtle, gradual creep in this way. The biggest being it reduces the risk of centralization, where overtly declared forces of massed troops march in very visible, trackable, predictable deployments akin to the infamous ‘40 mile convoy’ of yesteryear outside of Kiev. The NATO overseers who control the AFU are now unprecedentedly plugged in and synchronized with Ukrainian command, committing unseen levels of surveillance infrastructure, the vast bulk of NATO’s signal/intel gathering capabilities, to analyzing and transmitting every visible inch of the Russian army’s movements.
To launch a more stealthy, ‘undeclared’ offensive, one along every possible axis, utilizing ghost brigades of smaller forces that wear down the AFU with the ‘thousand cuts’ method, could be a strong way to mitigate NATO’s spysat and SIGINT advantages. That’s to say we may not even see one obvious “grand rush” like Feb. 24, 2022, hundreds of helicopters blacking out the skies, 40 mile convoys and huge fleets of paratrooper landings, etc. We may very well already be in the offensive, conducted in a far more clandestine fashion, hewing to the strictures of maskirovka and misdirection. After all, Russia is currently advancing nearly on every front, so why
should they do a mad berserker thunder-run like last time?
With that said, there likely will still be main thrusts that come from the north and south as per Option 3, but this is simply something to think about.
vi. Those Damnable Bridges
One of the final and most important topics is the notorious Dnieper River bridges. Will they finally come down? Does Russia even have the ability to bring them down?
First thing to know is there are a lot more of them, and they’re a lot tougher and stronger than people think. Remember how Ukraine pulverized the Antonovsky bridge for months with
hundreds of HIMARs strikes only to create little pot holes, never able to bring even a single concrete pylon down? It’s oft been said how Ukraine’s bridges were of Soviet design, created specifically to withstand everything short of tactical nukes in anticipation of a war against the U.S./NATO.
Many people think the Dnieper has 3-5 bridges, as charts have circulated showing just a handful of the main ones. But in fact there are somewhere in the neighborhood of ~30+ bridges across the full length of the river, many of them even more hardened and larger, thicker, broader than the Antonovsky (particularly those inside the cities like Zaporozhe, Dnipro, Kremenchug, etc). Some of these bridges would take many cruise/ballistic missiles to take down thoroughly.
Here’s one from Dnipro. It has 6 lanes, the Antonovsky had only 4 and withstood hundreds of America’s best Wunderwaffen missiles without budging.
For comparison:
this tiny little spindle bridge in Serbia was bombed by several NATO F-16’s, dropping half a dozen of their most powerful laser-guided bombs. It took
several sorties, i.e. multiple bombing runs to destroy a bridge 1/6th the size of the above Dnipro bridge. Imagine how many bombs/cruise missiles it would take in retrospect to really put that thing out of action.
It could take hundreds of cruise missiles to bring down every bridge across the Dnieper. Low estimate 200 if you average 6 missiles per bridge to truly bring down a section and not just ‘damage the roadway/asphalt’, which could be quickly repaired. But I wouldn’t be surprised if the total required number is even much higher.
It would take an unprecedented, historical missile shock & awe campaign to take down every bridge across the Dnieper. Some question if Russia even has that many missiles to spare. They’ve been doing strikes with 60-100 missiles (Kalibrs, Kh-101’s, etc.) every couple weeks or so, but the time between strikes has recently grown, adding to the suspicions of either dwindling stocks, or perhaps the need to save up for the coming offensive (perhaps saving for these very bridges).
In late January, though, this hit the newswire:
“MI6 sent information to the President's Office and the General Staff that the Kremlin is again discussing the format with the destruction of the bridges across the Dnieper. Russia is moving towards a new phase of the war, which involves the complete destruction of Ukraine's critical infrastructure.”
So this very well could be on the agenda. The only question is
when. Does the destruction of the bridges make more sense before or
after the initiation of the cauldron?
Those in favor of the ‘before’ option believe it’s best to destroy the bridges asap, preventing all the new-fangled Western arms (Leopards, etc.) from reaching the AFU. However, the other tactic could be to wait until the Donbass cauldron is near to closing, so that you allow the AFU to first pour in the remainder of its reserves from the west of the country. Then once they’ve gone all in and put “their eggs in one basket” by flooding the Donbass with every last Ukrainian, and the cauldron is nearly closed, you would blow the bridges and trap the entire AFU inside the eastern part of the country just as they begin their mass retreat and achieve the biggest capture/surrender of enemy forces in modern, post-WW2 history.
Personally I have a feeling Russia may employ the 2nd option, if at all. However, the likelihood that they won’t blow the bridges at all is still very strong. The main reason would be that it would prohibit Russia’s own forces from ever using those bridges to cross the rivers, and seizing the full cities of Dnipro, Zaporozhe, etc., which lie 50/50 on both sides of the river. But should Russian forces ever get that far, the AFU would likely blow the bridges themselves
anyway. So if their destruction is a fait accompli either way, then one would think it in Russia’s interests to blow them early to prevent resupply or to trap the AFU in the Donbass as outlined above.
Another consideration has been reports that Russia in fact needs those bridges operational for economic reasons, partly touched on in my previous
piece. Namely that the West is highly reliant on both Russian and Chinese shipments of precious and rare earth metals which are largely transported to the West by way of railroads through Ukraine.
Reports last month claimed that NATO controllers have pressured the other countries which connect to Russia by rail in sanctioning and banning the transport/export of these specific goods via their railways, forcing Russia into using Ukraine as the only viable transport network. If you think about it, it’s quite a clever tactic in leaving Russia with no choice but to keep Ukrainian bridges (over which the railways run) functioning, thus underhandedly retaining the AFU’s ability to supply itself from the west.
If these reports are true then there’s good chance Russia will never fully destroy the bridges in order to keep its lucrative export business of those natural resources going at a time when economic interests are a priority. One can argue that this is trading lives for economic interests—and have a strong point—but that discussion’s beyond the scope of this report.
When it comes to the bridges, the final verdict for me remains very uncertain and will depend on many factors, whether it’s feasible and conducive to take them down.
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