Western military and political leaders and mainstream media are in denial
Former CIA director and US Central Command chief General David Petraeus predicted on June 6, two days into Kiev's southern offensive, that "the Russians will prove to be more brittle than the expectation is" when faced with Western-supplied armour, also claiming that Moscow's troops were poorly trained, equipped and led and exhausted after a year on the front line without a break.
Since then, the Russian army's Vostok (East) battlegroup has destroyed at least 246 Ukrainian tanks, including 13 NATO models including the vaunted Leopard 2s, along with more than 440 other armoured vehicles, while the Ukrainian forces have suffered some 13,000 casualties.
Military analyst Mark Sleboda told Sputnik that Petraeus' statements were "blatantly false."
"First of all, Russia called up 300,000 reservists on top of the 150,000 force that they went into Ukraine with," he pointed out. "These are all people who had prior experience in the military, and then they received over eight months of training since they were called up on top of this."
He also attacked the Western view of the conflict as akin to a heroic war film.
"Some people believe this is a Hollywood movie and expect results," Sleboda noted. "No it's not. Why would we think that this is a Hollywood movie?"
"We had videos of this Kiev regime information war, which they have always prioritized over the real war," Sleboda underscored. "We had a number of Ukrainian military flashing through them, showing them all shushing us into silence, assuring us that there is a plan for the counteroffensive."
That was followed by an "obvious deepfake video" of Ukrainian military intelligence chief Kyrylo Budanov, believed hit by a Russian missile strike on his Kiev headquarters on May 29, "staring into the camera for a interminable period of time, blinking oddly at these intervals."
The military analyst predicted that once the Ukrainian offensive runs out of steam, Russia will mount a counter-offensive in the "proper use of the term."
"But it probably will not look like a big arrow sweeping Hollywood style offensive, like we've been expected to believe," Sleboda said. "I expect it will be more of the same focused on liberating the last these fortress strongholds in the Donbass."
"There won't be a big tank blitzkrieg, riding on the minefields, because we've seen how well they work for Kiev," the security expert stressed. "It will be doing what works for them, which is the slow grind of artillery and air power from above."
The analyst argued that Russia was much better prepared for a protracted conflict than the Kiev regime and its Western masters.
"Putin is definitely sending signals that Russia considers that it is in this conflict for the long term," Sleboda said, but the US and NATO as a whole "are running low on the stockpiles of many items that are essential for the Kiev regime to continue the conflict, like artillery shells."
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