On Friday, the Russian Ministry of Defense announced that Russia liberated Novokalinovo in the Donetsk People’s Republic and Kiselevka and Kotlyarovka in the Kharkov region, the latest in a string of villages to fall, this rapid deterioration of the frontline was the result of the consistent work of Russian forces to grind the Ukrainians down until they had no reserves to stabilize the front line.
“As we speak, the attritional warfare model has Ukraine losing around 1,500 troops a day. This number is going up now because Russia's expanded its operations into the Kharkov region. So, you can expect this number [to] easily top 2,000 a day,” Ritter told Sputnik’s Fault Lines on Friday.
“What the Ukrainians have had to do is pull in reserves and take forces out from other fronts, including the Kharkov front and the Odessa front, to come into the battlefield where they've been eliminated, or they've been worn down and there are no replacements…what's going to happen is Ukraine will be compelled to withdraw reserves from the Kiev region and from Odessa, to go to Kharkov to fill that gap. While they do that, the Russians will then launch a second major attack somewhere in the Zaporozhye area, and Ukrainians are going to be put to the classic horns of a dilemma where if they go north they lose, they go south they lose, if they stay in the middle they lose - there's no good option for them,” Ritter explained, adding that we will then see “the total collapse of the Ukrainian army” and the “rapid withdrawal beyond the Dnepr River” to set up a new defense line, something he does not think the Ukrainians will be able to accomplish.
Eventually, Ritter predicts, “Ukrainian generals faced with the inevitable slaughter of the totality of their force will sue for peace.”
Noting that he was told by his sources back in January to expect “dramatic alterations” to the battlefield map in May, Ritter predicts that Russia will capture significant territory in Kharkov and the Donbass this month, with Ukraine’s eventual capitulation a few months later.
“They say that the Ukrainian capacity to continue cohesive resistance will collapse this summer - that’s the Russian assessment and I agree with it,” Ritter said, noting that Russia’s operations aren’t driven by “calendars” and have already allocated the resources to continue the conflict until 2027 if necessary.
The decision of what happens to Ukraine now rests solely in the hands of Russia, Ritter argued, noting that they had “very favorable terms on the table” in March and April 2022.
“Nobody has a say in this but Russia, and Russia has made that very clear… this is a decisive defeat of NATO, the European Union and the United States. It’s as decisive as you can get without them being directly involved and they can’t become directly involved because that is a suicide pill.”
Ritter added that the military aid package recently signed into law by US President Joe Biden has had “zero impact” on the battlefield. “What we’ve seen, for instance, the desperately needed 155-millimeter artillery shells were brought in from Romania on a ship, offloaded in Odessa into a warehouse and struck by two Iskander missiles. Boom, there goes a couple of billion dollars right there.”
But the biggest issue for Ukraine remains manpower, not ammunition, Ritter explained. “Today, they don’t have the manpower to waste, and there’s nobody being trained. There’s nothing there. So everybody that dies just puts Ukraine deeper into a hole… you could give the best gold-plated ammunition in the world, but it doesn’t matter if you don’t have anybody to use it.”
Also on Friday, the Russian Ministry of Defense announced that the Ukrainian military suffered 3,300 losses in the Kharkov region and the Donetsk People’s Republic alone during failed attempts to retake Novokalinovo, Kiselevka and Kotlyarovka over the past week.