On Tuesday, US President Joe Biden stressed an urgent need to provide additional support for Ukraine as congress continues to stalemate over a potential spending bill.
Moscow has warned NATO members that supplying arms to Ukraine would effectively be “playing with fire” and doing so would hinder the possibility of negotiations between Russia and Ukraine. Few corporate media channels in the West have addressed Ukraine’s inevitable defeat to Russian forces, though one reporter found that many Ukrainians were prepared to accept the loss of their territories as a price for peace, adding that the Biden Administration needs to get on board, as well.
On Tuesday, Sputnik’s The Critical Hour spoke to Jack Rasmus, an author who has a PhD in political economy, and a former educator of economics at Saint Mary's College in California. Rasmus, who recently published an article titled, ‘Ukraine War and the Ghost of Clausewitz’, believes there is a “lot of falsification going on in the mainstream media about the war in Ukraine”.
“There's a lot of falsification going on, a lot of ideology falsification going on in the mainstream media about the war in Ukraine and what's really happening,” said Rasmus. “So, what I wanted to do was to explain some of these falsifications—and there's a number of them—and explain why it appears that Russia was winning and then Ukraine was winning, and now there's a big offensive going on. Russians are driving Ukrainians back very fast and a bigger offense is coming very soon in the spring here.”
“Russia has pretty much won this war already. But they keep covering it up, and I wanted to explain some of this using these principles of war,” he continued, “Throughout history, from Julius Caesar all the way to Mao and Giap, very clear principles of war prevail, whatever kind of war it is.”
“These principles of war have been followed by Russia and not Ukraine, and that's why Russia is winning. And in the course of it, pretty much debunk some of these falsifications about the war that have been occurring for two years now,” Rasmus said.
In his article, Rasmus writes that according to the Principles of War, a decided military advantage lies with the side that is “able to concentrate superior forces and commit that relatively superior force at the opponent’s weakest point”. Concentration of Force, then, is probably the first principle of war, he writes.
The author and educator also notes in his article that Russian forces have now increased in number along the Ukrainian front while, initially, they had just 190,000 forces covering about 1,500 miles, the Russian Ministry of Defense says it now has more than 600,000 troops. Total deployment in Ukraine could reach about 800,000 this year with continued rotations of trained soldiers. At the same time, Ukraine’s forces are estimated to be at 350,000 which includes 100,000 of reserves.
“In the Ukrainian offensive there in the fall of 2022, it was devastating, it was a total defeat. They lost hundreds of thousands, killed and wounded in that failed offensive and from 2022 into 2023 Ukraine is struggling, it's running out of manpower. It has plans for recruiting 500,000 more, which they're never going to be able to get. They're pulling people off the street, kidnapping them and everything, trying to replenish all those losses from that failed offensive a couple of years ago,” Rasmus said.
“At the same time Russia has increased its forces. The Russian Ministry of Defense admits 600,000 Russian troops are on the line and maybe 350,000 Ukrainians on the line after their losses of a couple hundred thousand. They can't recruit anymore. At the same time, Russia announced six months ago that it was recruiting through volunteers and training another 420,000 and they haven't even hit the frontlines yet,” Rasmus explained.
“The tide has turned here very clearly. And that's why there is desperation going on in the EU and in Washington, DC, and now talk in France and others about, 'oh, we're going to have to send NATO troops into western Ukraine,’” he continued.
French President Emmanual Macron has not ruled out sending ground forces to Ukraine. The president said that “nothing should be excluded” regarding that option during a press conference on Monday. His comments followed a meeting in Paris where members of the European Union and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) discussed new measures to send munitions to Kiev.
NATO allies including the US, Germany, Italy and the UK have ruled out deploying ground troops to Ukraine in a sweeping rejection of Macron’s comment on Monday. A White House official has also denied any plans to send either US or NATO troops to Ukraine.
“That's the old neocon strategy. When you're losing, you double down. And if your policies aren't working, you just do it twice as hard. And we're moving into a very dangerous period as Russia pushes the Ukrainians back significantly and retakes the provinces there in the east, the neocons in the West are going to overreact and do something very, very stupid. And, we're on the way to an even worse conflict, I think, if they do,” said Rasmus.
“The relationship of forces, both manpower and weaponry—and just the internal lines of supply and communication and the ability to concentrate forces at the front—all of these are plain from the very beginning that Russia would win this war, and of course it is unless the West continues to escalate. And I think the neocons' ultimate escalation, which they've got in their back pocket, is to use tactical nukes,” the educator said.