Ukraine War Day #446: What Will The Ukrainian Counter-Offensive Look Like?

Dear Readers:

To help us figure what the near future holds: I have this piece by authors Ivan Pankin and Igor Yakunin. This is basically a transcript of a radio interview they took with a military expert named Alexei Borzenko.

KP: Why is Zelensky postponing the [Ukrainian] counteroffensive?

Borzenko: He’s not. Zelensky is lying. They are currently in the process of gathering up their forces for the counteroffensive.

KP: Are we able to observe what they are doing?

Borzenko: Yes. Before any offensive can happen, there is a certain phase. It’s called the regrouping of forces (переброска войск). Everything that has been accumulating for the past several months, and waiting 200 kilometers from the line — all of that is now being moved up to 40 km from the line.

KP: Is this process painful for the Ukrainian Armed Forces (UAF)?

Borzenko: Of course! There are arms depots, caches, all of this stuff has to be moved. And when it does, it is out in the open. We can see it from the cosmos. And we are launching strikes against these columns, which are in the process of moving towards the front. This is how we discovered the Leopard tanks in the Kharkov area.

Alexei Borzenko speaks to KP reporters

KP: Harvest Time, in other words?

Borzenko: Once he is out in the open, the enemy can be destroyed by rockets.

KP: Examples?

Borzenko: On the night of 8-9 May, we hit over 60 targets. These mostly involved arms caches that had been brought out into the open; other technology as well, such as Howitzers. The active phase of destruction is underway.

KP: Why 40 kilometers?

Borzenko: 35-40 km is the limit of our artillery. It’s sort of near the front line, but not yet actually at the front line. Currently everything is being brought up to this boundary. The entire front line stretches for 816 km in length.

KP: So when does the offensive start for real?

Borzenko: I think, 5 days. Maybe a week. After they finish moving everything, then it starts.

KP: Any other signs and portents?

Borzenko: The Nikolaev garrison, along with Odessa and Kharkov garrisons, they have been assigned to stay back and guard Kiev. Everyone else has grabbed their shovels and they are moving towards the front.

KP: Do they outmatch us numerically?

Borzenko: At the tip of the spear they have around 200,000 maximum 220,000. That was all they could scrape up for this mobilization.

KP: What about Western Ukraine?

Borzenko: That’s a different story. Since October our forces have been digging deep into the earth and creating a powerful defense line, 60 kilometers [behind the front]. Any offensives launched are not expected to move past 30 km. But where they will strike, where they will penetrate our defenses — that we don’t yet know.

KP: So, they will definitely penetrate our defenses. And then what?

Borzenko: They may be able to penetrate up to 5-10 km somewhere along the contact front. But after that, they will get stuck.

KP: When will they get stuck?

The Russian Tu-160 is known as the “Indestructible White Swan”

Borzenko: This is the Golden Hour for our aviation. We can do unto them what we did in Aleppo, when we applied the full might of our Tu-160’s and Tu-95’s.

KP: Do we have enough bombs?

Borzenko: We have an enormous supply of bombs stationed in Crimea. And not just Crimea. We have FABs, KABs, 500s, 1000s, 2000s. Back in Soviet times we mass-produced these things, and we still have all of them.

KP: Were they converted into glide bombs? [планирующими = “programmed”]

Borzenko: Yes. These bombs cannot be shot down. They don’t appear on the radar. They don’t give off a kinetic energy or heat signal. They are invisible as they are coming down.

KP: We just heard that Kiev got ballistic missiles.

Borzenko: Yes, the Storm Shadow, these cruise missiles, they have a 500 km range. Previously, Great Britain supplied Ukraine with ATACMS. Now, these English-French rockets, they have been making them since 1994. They are the English-French analogue of the [American] Tomahawk. I saw how they worked, in Yugoslavia.

KP: And?

Borzenko: The Storm Shadow rocket is released from an airplane. It descends from a great height and carries a low profile. Just before arriving at its target, it ignites and lights up for 5 kilometers. And then it hits its target. It belongs to the category of “once and done”. It is guided by a GPS navigation system.

KP: Is there any way we can get back at London for supplying these missiles to Kiev?

Borzenko: We could shut them out of the Northern Sea route. Both military and non-military vessels. The ships are still sailing out there, for the time being. We even help them out from time to time, with our ice-breakers. By the way, Britain is very dependent on all its neighbors. We are just not making use of all the tools that we have in our toolbox.

KP: To summarize: The counteroffensive will start next week?

Borzenko: Yes, they are getting read for it. The clock is ticking. How we react, how much of them we are able to destroy out in the open, and how we will conduct ourselves once the battle is engaged, how we respond to their attack with our own counter-actions: On this will depend the rest of the course of events in Ukraine.

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9 Responses to Ukraine War Day #446: What Will The Ukrainian Counter-Offensive Look Like?

  1. Liborio Guaso says:

    At this point in the conflict, the West knows that with the Ukrainian mercenaries it cannot obtain a victory against Russia and what they are trying to do is sow chaos, terror and hatred with the current war, staying behind the curtain because they still fear what happened to Nazi Germany.
    In the absence of the much-vaunted offensive, as a consolation they gave the porn-president a tour to exhibit in the Western media the international support for his cause, even Pope Francis lent himself to the show of support for the Ukrainian Nazis.

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  2. S Brennan says:

    On Ukrainia’s use of English/French Missiles to kill and maim civilians.

    I think this is a redux of the cynical decision of England to bomb civilians in Berlin during the Battle of Britain. The purpose of which was to, distract the Luftwaffe and effectively change the character of the war. It worked. On the verge of destroying the RAF airfields, the Luftwaffe began targeting London upon the incensed orders the Hitler upon hearing that German cities were being bombed by the English. London’s “success” cost millions upon millions of civilians their lives but hey, when you have total media control, even the most obvious acts can be hidden from enough people to maintain consent.

    Here I think, London seeks to replicate their cynical ploy. The London and DC will openly act as an accomplice to murder and goad the Russ into expanding Ukrainia’s seppuku into a world war and then…blame the Russians for the war. [knowing they have ABSOLUTE control of all media outlets].

    It’s pretty high risk but, for the DC/London fools that bent on world conquest, those know-it-alls that started this war, it’s probably the only face-saving way they could avoid the life-long embarrassment of having all their schemes forcefully thrown back into their collective faces…and no matter how many civilians die as a result…that’s surely “worth it” as Madeleine Jana Korbel Albright would say.

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    • yalensis says:

      Yeah. Not that I am trying to give Hitler any advice, but it would have been more beneficial for his cause if he had kept his cool and just focused on those RAF airfields. I read somewhere that Churchill was relieved when Hitler started targeting English civilians. In a normal world, men are supposed to sacrifice their lives to protect women and children. But in a war, things get turned upside down, so the lives of the soldiers become more important than the lives of the civilians.

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      • S Brennan says:

        Agree with your take on history, though, in this case, the bombing of civilians serves a darker purpose, it’s not to protect Ukrainia’s soldiers from ruin, rather it’s to protect the vanity of DC/London’s courtier-class…lest their abject failure at world dominion subject them to ridicule from the working classes.

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  3. Liborio Guaso says:

    The radiative projectiles, now the missiles and followed by the special murderous drones of the English, these are provocations of the English who substitute the lack of courage for something else. On the other hand, the Germans are going to jump in and send special air defenses to the heirs of the Third Reich.
    All this from afar and counting that others defend them if they must fight.
    The English can no longer appeal to the famous Bengal lancers who only killed civilians.

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  4. Ye Olde Greate Springe Counteroffensive is going to happen at some point, no matter how suicidal, no matter how doomed. Nazis, historically, do not learn from their mistakes and double down on failure. The longer they postpone their counteroffensive, the stronger Russian fortifications get, and the stronger Russian fortifications get, the more the nazis have to postpone their counteroffensive to build up forces to overcome those fortifications. At this point the choice becomes simple: either persist with a suicidal attack or cancel the whole thing.

    This is not new. In 1943, the German offensive (Fall Zitadelle) on the Kursk Bulge was something even Hitler had no enthusiasm for*; it was his generals who insisted on it, using their new Tiger 1 tanks and Elefant tank destroyers. But by the time enough Tigers and Elefants had been manufactured the Soviet defences had strengthened so much more that even more German forces had to be built up, postponing the offensive more, and so on. In the end, as Alan Clark wrote in Barbarossa,

    “…(the participants) were drawn along, some euphoric, some protesting, into a project whose doom was preordained.”

    [*Clark quotes an exchange between Hitler and one of his staff:

    “Mein Führer, why do you want to attack in the East this year at all?”

    Hitler: “You’re right. Every time I think of this offensive, my stomach turns over.”

    ]

    It seems to me from reading people like Simplicius76 as well as reports from Telegram channels that the Russians actually want this nazi offensive to happen, to destroy vast amounts of Ukranazistani equipment and manpower, which would allow freedom for a Russian offensive to develop. So the logical Ukranazistani move should be to not attack at all, and even cease their incredibly costly small scale attacks. What they should do is dig in and sit tight and try to minimise their losses, dragging on the war for as long as possible, until Russia either has to try to smash through these dug in defences, accept the status quo, or give up and withdraw. But that’s the logical thing, and Ukranazistan can’t act logically because it’s the property of its Western masters. And they’re getting increasingly impatient for return on investment. For a mindset that doesn’t and can’t look beyond the quarterly balance sheet, that’s the only thing that they can do.

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  5. V.V. says:

    “They may be able to penetrate up to 5-10 km somewhere along the contact front. But after that, they will get stuck.”

    Looking like he called that right

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