The word “fan” comes from fanatic. Think about the average sports fan. How rational is he about the object of his fanaticism? It’s one thing in sports, it’s another thing entirely in war, where irrationality is usually deadly. From Scott Ritter at consortiumnews.com:
Despite what some “defense analysts” may be telling Western media, the longer the war continues, the more Ukrainians will die and the weaker NATO will become.
Main square of Severodonetsk, Ukraine, February 2018. (Visem, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)
For a moment in time, it looked as if reality had managed to finally carve its way through the dense fog of propaganda-driven misinformation that had dominated Western media coverage of Russia’s “Special Military Operation” in Ukraine.
In a stunning admission, Oleksandr Danylyuk, a former senior adviser to the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense and Intelligence Services, noted that the optimism that existed in Ukraine following Russia’s decision to terminate “Phase One” of the SMO (a major military feint toward Kiev), and begin “Phase Two” (the liberation of the Donbass), was no longer warranted. “The strategies and tactics of the Russians are completely different right now,” Danylyuk noted. “They are being much more successful. They have more resources than us and they are not in a rush.”
“There’s much less space for optimism right now,” Danylyuk concluded.
In short, Russia was winning.
Danylyuk’s conclusions were not derived from some esoteric analysis drawn from Sun Tzu or Clausewitz, but rather basic military math. In a war that had become increasingly dominated by the role of artillery, Russia simply was able to bring to bear on the battlefield more firepower than Ukraine.
