Russia-Ukraine Slavgrinder Ramps Up Into Overdrive

The pace of Russian territorial gains in Ukraine has sped up slightly in the second half of 2024.

The average daily gain from January through June was 5 km2. (On a 480-kilometer front that is the equivalent of advancing 1 kilometer along 1% of the front.)

The average daily gain rose to 7 km2 in July, 15 km2 in August and September, and 19 km2 in October. (This is not counting Kursk where 1000 km2 was lost in August, of which 500 km2 has since been recovered.)

May 1 — October 31

The 19 km2 per day, or 580 km2 in a month (the equivalent of advancing the entire front by 1.2 kilometers) is still modest, but it is a four-fold increase on what was being achieved in the first half of 2024.

What has changed?

Has fighting become easier and resistance lighter? Have Ukrainians been exhausted to a point where they’re now falling back quicker?

Maybe, but let’s take a look at the whole picture.

Throughout the first half of 2024 Russia’s losses held steady. About 3000 new death notices were being discovered online each month, which corresponds to something like 5000 monthly killed. (Not all killed end up with an online obituary, especially the older fighters above 40.)

Then we see a steady rise. 3800 found death notices in July and August corresponding to some 6000 deaths in each of the months. Rising to 4200 obituaries and 6700 deaths in September, and 4800 notices and 7700 real deaths in October:

Ukrainian-reported figures for glide bomb impacts and daily attacks are also rising.

This all indicates that around June the Russian side went into overdrive, steadily increasing tempo every subsequent month. This greater frequency of assaults and a greater willingness to take losses is at least a part of the explanation of why the pace of Russian gains has increased, rather than just a decline in Ukrainian ability to resist.

These new gains are cheaper in lives relative to territory than before, but still extraordinarily costly. A square kilometer in October cost the Russians 13 dead on average — or put differently, each fallen soldier advanced Russian control by 11 soccer fields. (Up from 4 soccer fields January-June.)

There isn’t remotely the chance that the ground being taken is worth this much blood, and yet a call has been made to pour even more blood into it.

Naturally, the utility of these attacks isn’t in the meager territorial gains they result in, but in the attrition, pressure, and demoralization it is hoped they impose on the Ukrainian army and society.

And there is plenty of evidence that the Ukrainian army and society are under immense strain and showing cracks. To name just two, desertion is now being talked about openly in Ukraine as a major problem. Also, that new legislation would result in a sustained mobilization uptick that would allow Kiev to start clawing back against the Russian numerical advantage is something no longer anyone believes.

At the same time, all this pressure is only really meaningful if it down the line results in a collapse that eventually pays off all these losses. If it means that down the line the Ukrainians break and the Russians are able to there on advance with relative ease and very cheaply. Failing that it’s not all that meaningful beyond the staggering loss of life it represents.

Also, even should such a breakdown occur it doesn’t follow that brute-forcing a meatgrinder to get there made any sense. Let’s consider this. Yes, if the Ukrainian forces along the active front could be ground down to let’s say 50 percent of their present effectiveness this would radically transform the battlefield in southeast Ukraine. However, anyone can also see that achieving this grinding attrition has to involve death on a massive scale on both sides.

And yet, the same effect could be had for 0 deaths if only there existed another 0.5 million Russian troops that could open a second theater along the 700 kilometers of the presently inactive and thinly manned state border to the north. (Except the active Sudzha and Vovchansk sectors.)

This would force the Ukrainians to pick between the Russians rolling up the north unopposed, or urgently redeploying vast forces from the south to limit them. This redeployment would then see the Ukrainians at half their present strength in both of the two theaters, radically shaking up the correlation of forces in the south to Russia’s advantage before anyone even needed to die.

The 480 kilometers from the Dnepr to the old border that is heavily manned and fortified sees all the action (green), but the old 700-kilometer state border that is covered by light screening and sentry troops is allowed to remain idle (purple). Though there are no mountains anywhere, Russia wages the war as if an invisible obstacle channels all of its effort to the 480-kilometer bottleneck

Russia has 5 times the population, why is it deadset on creating a favorable force correlation through grinding attrition, when it could have had the favorable ratio it seeks with much greater certainty, and at a much lower cost to its people, by just taking force generation seriously?

The answer of course is its leader Vladimir “Procrastinator” Putin. If on day 3 of the war he had come clean that the SMO had failed, ramped up defense spending to 20% GDP and decreed a rolling mobilization of 300,000 every four months, he could have had by now, not just 0.5 million additional troops, but 2 million and would get to dictate any peace without even having to use this army (since his primary interest is in redefining Ukraine’s status, the territorial conquests are just a stick to beat it with).

Consider this: for each soldier who perishes another 1.5 are discharged due to wounds. Thus 7700 KIA in a month means the total irrecoverable loss to the military of roughly 19,000. From January through June this figure would have been 12,000.

The monthly intake is some 28,000. So where in the first half of the year intake minus running losses still left a surplus of 16,000 monthly, this has been halved to 9,000.

In other words, the extra pressure on the Ukrainians and the increase in the pace of gains from 5 km2 daily to 19 km2 daily also comes at the price of halving the already meager rate at which the force is able to expand.

In essence, Russia doesn’t have the numbers (because Putin determined not to raise them) to flip the paradigm and dissolve the meatgrinder, but there is just enough inflow to allow feeding the grinder, so feeding time it is.

The Ukrainian intake has gradually declined to 21,000 monthly from the 35,000 spike in June. Their physical losses are somewhat lower than the Russian, but they have a greater flight problem, so at current tempo they can barely cover running losses, they can’t grow at all.

So the trajectory is negative for Ukraine, further deterioration is ahead (which isn’t the same as collapse), but it’s like, really, this is what we’re doing now? Just feeding the grinder, this is the big idea?

Let’s just shred up 400-500 Slavs daily with little idea of how or when this ends, to really stick it up to the satan-worshipping transgender NATO Atlanticists?

There are two sides to a war. One is mobilizing resources for war, the other is marshaling the resources thus raised on the battlefield. The mobilization part is free of death. Assign any amount of resources for war and it doesn’t cause anyone to die. The dying happens in the usage part. And the more evenly matched the mobilized resources of the sides are, the more protracted the clash, with more death for everyone involved.

Thus a leader concerned with his people’s survival will be radical on the mobilization side, and conservative on the usage side. He will mobilize early, at a breakneck pace, and to a titanic scope. But he will hold back on offensive action until he has a vast cohered mass at his disposal, and then send it all in together with all the odds stacked in its favor.

But mobilization — while death-free and life-saving — has the downside that it requires payment upfront for an effect that won’t be available until later. But using what has already been pressed into service offers the opposite — it bestows a benefit right now for spending something that is already paid for.

And so a people cursed with a ruler particularly cowardly, aimless, and feckless is liable to experience the exact opposite of the optimal — extreme tardiness on the mobilization side, coupled with the extreme eagerness to throw every little bit that is mobilized into the furnace immediately for even the tiniest effect in the present. — Resulting in a piecemeal, broken-up effort along the time axis.

Except for a 6-month period in 2023 there hasn’t been a day in this three-year war that Russia hasn’t been on the offensive on at least a portion of the front, just relentlessly battering against fortifications in an endless flow of tactical assault. But meanwhile it hasn’t mobilized, except the one time in 2022 when it became apparent she would lose the war if she didn’t.

The result today is that a nation of 150 million, at war with a country of 35 million, is three years down the line somehow losing 7700(!) souls monthly, each dying for: 11 soccer fields, a small amount of pressure exerted on the enemy, and the dubious hope that one day down the line opposition must capitulate or crumble.

The extreme short-termism and cheap-skating by Vladimir “The Undertaker” Putin results in just the opposite of the hoped for. A trickle of effort that is just small enough for the smaller enemy to mostly parry and absorb — and thus in the long-term far more death for much less attained.

A fitting strategy for the cunning judo master who holds that the 190 million East Slavs are all one people, has for a quarter of a century now jealously monopolized power over 145 million of them, and the best he could accomplish with all of that is… a civil war between them with a quarter-million dead and counting. A true 7D move that only super-intelligent robots many centuries after our time will even just faintly begin to understand the genius of.