Donbass still on fire

By Erwan Castel in Alawat blogspot

In a war, an attrition strategy “is a strategy in which the objective is to wear out the fighting forces and enemy reserves…"

During his meeting with the OSCE leader, the new [Ukrainian] President Zelensky said on June 13 about the conflict in Donbass: “For me, this is the main goal: stop the war, stop the shooting... ”

In fact, exactly the opposite has occurred; Since the inauguration of the new US puppet of Kiev, a new murderous military escalation has been launched by Ukrainian forces [armed, trained and directed by the US] on the entire Donbass  [Russian ethnic eastern part of Ukraine] front, placing the clown-president on the same murderous path as his predecessors Turchinov and Poroshenko.

And during these early days of July, the Ukrainian forces continue their terrorism against the Donbass, with new deadly attacks against [the self-defense] soldiers of the Donetsk and Lugansk Republics, and also against the civilian population that they defend.

Of course, we are, fortunately, far from the butcheries experienced in the wars of the past, as for example during the Somme offensive of the first world war or the fire bombing of Dresden during the next world war.

However, it is now clear that Kiev, with a criminal genocidal intent, is trying to bleed the Donbass Russians, applying a strategy of slow hemorrhage all along the 470 kilometer front, and a policy of terror on the residential areas that are close to it.

Thus, north of Gorlovka, on Tuesday, July 2, 2019, the Ukrainians again bombed residential areas of the village of Zaitsevo, destroying new civilian homes.

According to the United Nations Human Rights Monitoring Mission in charge of the conflict in Donbass, between April 2014 and June 9, 2019 there have been 3,332 deaths among the civilian population of Donbass, with more than 7,000 injured. And since then, civilian casualties are experiencing another significant increase, about twenty civilians have been injured during this month of June.

    On the military side, the Ukrainian forces continue to violate the Minsk agreements on a daily basis, causing significant losses in the ranks of the Republican defense forces. Thus during the month of June between 35 and 50 militiamen have been killed on the front and dozens of others wounded by a Ukrainian strategy that seeks: on the one hand to hit precisely targeted republican positions using their artillery or anti-tank missile systems; and on the other hand to maintain offensive pressure by multiplying the “contact zones” by a systematically occupying the neutral zone situated between the lines.

In addition to bombing residential areas and Republican defensive positions, Ukrainian forces are still seeking to occupy the “gray area” between the lines, making it shrink a little more each month for three years now.

Of course, this strategy is also not inconsequential for the Ukrainian “Combined Forces Operation”, which also regularly suffers significant losses in its operations against Republican defensive positions, either by our defense forces or by the minefields that dot this “gray area”.

On July 1, in the Mariupol sector, a unit of Ukrainian naval infantry carrying out an offensive reconnaissance had 4 killed and 6 wounded during the Republican response.

Elsewhere, on the northern front of the Donetsk People’s Republic, another Ukrainian unit had to abandon an advanced position near the Gorlovka defenses.

Although the Ukrainian losses are numerically larger than those of the Republican forces, it is necessary to put them however in perspective of the existing balance of power which is about 4 for 1 in favor of Kiev and the duration during which the Ukrainian army reinforces new modern equipment and procedures.

Kiev is therefore playing the clock and the numbers, continuing to cause a slow hemorrhage of Donbass, large enough to weaken in the medium term the defensive forces whose reserves are obliged to reinforce the contact zones created by the Ukrainians (to compensate for the reaction time that has become non-existent), but too weak to provoke Russian intervention and/or to revitalize military operations on the ground, which would lead to excessive Ukrainian losses and internal and international political protest.

In the 6th century BC, the Chinese general and strategist Sun Tsu already said that “the war needs victories but does not like the duration”. This theorem is still valid and we observe here and there, when a Blitzkrieg cannot bring victory, to develop battles or even wars of attrition to which are generally added other attributes, sanitary, economic, political and media, or more recently cybernetic for example.

Russia, faithful to its measured diplomacy and its sense of proportional response, reacts to this war of attrition suffered by the Donbass, and avoiding military intervention as much as possible, with increased and progressive support of the populations of Donetsk and Lugansk, which it accompanies, and assists the modernization and military standardization, the socio-economic project and their integration within the Russian Federation first administrative, as in the recent opportunity to access Russian citizenship.

Reprinted from here

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