Russia’s invasion had damaged or destroyed up to 30% of Ukraine's infrastructure at a cost of $100 billion, a Ukrainian minister alleged in April 2022, adding reconstruction could be achieved in two years using “frozen Russian assets to help finance it.”
Oblivious to
the concerns of Ukraine’s politicians regarding rebuilding damaged
infrastructure of the embattled country during the war, the New
York Times reported the infrastructure sustained damage due to the myopic
policy of scorched-earth tactics deployed by Ukrainians in order to hamper
Russia’s blitz north of the capital in the early days of the war.
“The
scorched-earth policy played an important role in Ukraine’s success in holding
off Russian forces in the north and preventing them from capturing Kyiv, the
capital,” military experts confided to NY Times. During the war, “over 300
bridges had been destroyed across Ukraine” by Ukrainians themselves, the
country’s minister of infrastructure, Oleksandr Kubrakov, bragged. Elsewhere in
Ukraine, the military had, without hesitation, blown up bridges, bombed roads
and disabled railway lines and airports.
Demydiv, a
town on the outskirts of Kyiv, was flooded when troops blew up a nearby dam and
sent water surging into the countryside. Ukrainian forces flooded the area on
Feb. 25, 2022, the second day of the war. The move was particularly effective,
Ukrainian officials and soldiers said, creating a sprawling, shallow lake in
front of the Russian armored columns.
The flooding
that blocked the northern rim of Kyiv on the west bank of the Dnipro River
played a pivotal role in the fighting in early March 2022, as Ukrainian forces
repelled Russian attempts to surround Kyiv. The waters created an effective
barrier to tanks and funneled the assault force into ambushes and cramped,
urban settings in a string of outlying towns — Hostomel, Bucha and Irpin.
Even two
months later, despite the withdrawal of Russian forces north of the capital in
late March 2022, residents of Demydiv still paddled about in a rubber boat.
Despite unequivocally acknowledging the dam was blown up by Ukrainians
themselves but attempting in vain to implicate Russians, too, in the wanton act
of vandalism, the NY Times report risibly claimed “later, Russian shelling
further damaged the dam, complicating efforts now to drain the area.”
Dubious
Ukrainian claims of having repelled Russia’s assault on the capital by mounting
guerrilla warfare and deploying scorched-earth tactics to the contrary, it’s an
incontestable fact that the “40-mile-long” military convoy of battle tanks,
armored vehicles and heavy artillery that descended from Belarus in the north
and reached the outskirts of Kyiv in the early days of the war without
encountering much resistance en route the capital was simply a decoy astutely
designed as a diversionary tactic by Russia’s military strategists in order to
deter Ukraine from sending reinforcements to Donbas in east Ukraine where real
battles for territory were actually fought and scramble to defend the embattled
country’s capital instead.
In the early
days of Russia’s military campaign in north Ukraine, the Washington
Post reported in March 2022 the main threat to Kyiv appeared to be a
massive Russian convoy, about 40 miles long, approaching Kyiv from the northwest
and believed to be about 20 miles from the capital and stuck near a cargo
airport.
Despite the
wanton destruction of “over 300 bridges, blowing up dams to flood the
countryside and disabling roads, railway lines and airports” in the state of
panic by Ukraine’s security forces as contended by NY Times, the virtually
nonexistent “resistance” and subversive scorched-earth tactics had no effect,
whatsoever, on the lightning quick blitz of Russian forces north of the
capital.
All the
towns from the Belarus border to the northern approaches of the capital fell in
quick succession. Russian forces continued advancing from the northwest of
Kyiv, capturing Bucha, Hostomel and Vorzel on the outskirts of the capital by March
5, and Irpin by March 9, 2022.
Quite astonishingly,
however, instead of mounting a long-awaited assault on the capital, it was
reported on March 11, 2022, that the convoy had largely dispersed, taking up positions
in forests around the capital, before withdrawing back to Belarus after the
announcement of scaling back Russia’s military campaign in north Ukraine at
Istanbul peace initiative on March 29, 2022.
Clearly,
commanders of the military convoy had explicit instructions to spare the city
of four million people. The indiscriminate bombardment of the densely populated
Ukrainian capital and the ensuing urban warfare against heavily armed Ukrainian
militant groups nurtured by NATO patrons would inevitably have caused thousands
of needless civilian casualties. Therefore, the Russian military’s top brass decided
to spare the rest of the embattled country and restricted Russian military
offensive on liberating Russian-majority Donbas region in east Ukraine.
While the
Russian military convoy was knocking on Kyiv’s doors, Ukrainian politicians
were so alarmed that a senior Ukrainian government official announced in the
state of panic that Ukraine must hold off Russia’s attack for the next seven to
ten days to deny Moscow claiming any sort of victory.
Vadym
Denysenko, adviser to Ukraine's interior minister, said
in March 2022: “They need at least some victory before they are forced into
the final negotiations,” Denysenko wrote on Facebook. “Therefore our task is to
stand for the next 7-10 days.” Forget about repelling the assault on the
capital, it was considered a “stellar victory” by Ukraine’s “valiant political
and military leadership” to delay Russia’s inevitable takeover of Kyiv by a
week.
Publicly
acknowledging the impending fall of Kyiv in the face of Russian blitz and
contending that Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky would soon form a
government-in-exile, which would lead a guerrilla warfare campaign from safe
havens in Poland, the Washington
Post reported in March 2022:
“The
possible Russian takeover of Kyiv has prompted a flurry of planning at the
State Department, Pentagon and other U.S. agencies in the event that the
Zelensky government has to flee the capital or the country itself. ‘We’re doing
contingency planning now for every possibility,’ including a scenario in which
Zelensky establishes a government-in-exile in Poland, said a U.S.
administration official.
“Zelensky,
who has called himself Russia’s target No. 1, remains in Kyiv and has assured
his citizens he’s not leaving. He has had discussions with U.S. officials about
whether he should move west to a safer position in the city of Lviv, closer to
the Polish border. Zelensky’s security detail has plans ready to swiftly
relocate him and members of his cabinet, a senior Ukrainian official said. ‘So
far, he has refused to go.’”
“This is a
special military operation. If Russia were fighting a full-scale war, it would
have been over long ago. This would have happened if we used the United States
customary carpet bombings and scorched land tactics, repeatedly employed by
‘the world’s most democratic Air Force’ in Yugoslavia, Libya, Iraq and Syria,” Russia’s
State Duma Speaker Vyacheslav
Volodin wrote on his Telegram channel in April 2022.
Russian
President Vladimir Putin
explained during a joint press conference with his Belarusian counterpart
Alexander Lukashenko in April 2022 that the time frame of the military
offensive in Ukraine was determined by the intensity of hostilities and Russia
would act according to its plan.
“I often get
these questions, can’t we hurry it up?’ We can. But it depends on the intensity
of hostilities and, any way you put it, the intensity of hostilities is
directly related to casualties,” said the Russian president. “Our task is to
achieve the set goals while minimizing these losses. We will act rhythmically,
calmly, and according to the plan that was initially proposed by the General
Staff.”
Putin
reiterated that Russia’s actions in several regions of Ukraine, implying
diversionary tactics deployed by Russian forces in Kyiv and Chernihiv in the
north, were intended only “to tie down enemy forces” and carry out missile
strikes with the purpose of “destroying the Ukrainian military’s
infrastructure,” so as to “create conditions for more active operations on the
territory of Donbas.”
In a bombshell
NBC scoop published in April 2022, the authors of the report alleged that
US spy agencies used deliberate and selective intelligence leaks to mainstream
news outlets to mount a disinformation campaign against Russia during the
latter’s month-long military offensive in Ukraine lasting from late February to
late March, despite being aware the intelligence wasn't credible, and sometimes
even publicizing downright fabrications.
The US
intelligence assessment that Russia was preparing to use chemical weapons in
the Ukraine War, that was widely reported in the corporate media and confirmed
by President Biden himself, was an unsubstantiated claim leaked to the press as
a tit-for-tat response to the damning Russian allegation that Ukraine was
pursuing an active biological weapons program, in collaboration with
Washington, in scores of bio-labs discovered by Russian forces in Ukraine in
early days of the military campaign.
The NBC report
noted: “It was an attention-grabbing assertion that made headlines around the
world: US officials said they had indications suggesting Russia might be
preparing to use chemical agents in Ukraine. President Joe Biden later said it
publicly. But three US officials told NBC News this week there was no evidence
Russia had brought any chemical weapons near Ukraine. They said the US released
the information to deter Russia from using the banned munitions.
“Multiple US
officials acknowledged that the US had used information as a weapon even when
confidence in the accuracy of the information wasn’t high. Sometimes it had
used low-confidence intelligence for deterrent effect, as with chemical agents,
and other times, as an official put it, the US was just ‘trying to get inside
Putin’s head.’”
The crux of
the NBC report, however, isn’t what’s being disclosed but rather what’s still
being withheld by the US intelligence community that the mainstream news
outlets are not at liberty to report on, as is obvious from the misleading NY
Times report that mounting fierce guerrilla warfare campaign and deploying
scorched-earth tactics by Ukraine’s largely conscript military and allied
neo-Nazi militant groups repelled Russia’s assault on the capital and the
Russian withdrawal wasn’t a consequence of a calculated military strategy.
Despite
being aware of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s major unilateral concession
to Kyiv, halting Russian offensive north of the capital and focusing on
liberating Russian-majority Donbas in east Ukraine, practically spelling an end
to Russia’s month-long offensive in Ukraine, US security officials, as quoted
by the corporate media, are still deceptively asserting that Russia’s pullout
from areas around Kyiv “wasn’t a retreat but a strategic redeployment” that
signals a “significant assault on eastern and southern Ukraine,” one that US
officials believe could be a “protracted and bloody fight.”
Regarding
the nefarious disinformation campaign mounted by the mainstream media on behalf
of NATO powers, the report notes: “The idea is to pre-empt and disrupt the
Kremlin’s tactics, complicate its military campaign, undermine Moscow’s
propaganda and prevent Russia from defining how the war is perceived in the
world, said a Western government official familiar with the strategy.”
By mid-March
2022, after the “40-mile-long” military convoy of armored vehicles that created
panic in the rank and file of Ukraine’s security forces and their international
backers and that didn’t move an inch further after reaching the outskirts of
Kyiv in the early days of the war, it became obvious even to lay observers of
the Ukraine War that it was evidently a diversionary tactic. But US security
agencies insidiously kept feeding false information of impending fall of the
Ukrainian capital to the mainstream media throughout Russia’s month-long
military campaign in Ukraine.
Only two
conclusions could be drawn from this scaremongering tactic: either it was a
massive intelligence failure and Western security agencies weren’t aware the
“40-mile-long” convoy approaching the capital was a ruse; or the NATO’s spy
agencies had credible intelligence since the beginning of Russia’s military
campaign that real battles for territory would be fought in Donbas in east Ukraine
and the feigned assault on the capital was simply a diversionary tactic but
they exaggerated the threat in order to vilify Russia’s calculated military
offensive in Ukraine, and win the war of narratives that “how the war is
perceived across the world.”
Even in the
weeks after the unilateral Russian
peace initiative announced on March 29, 2022, offering scaling back its
blitz north of the capital and focusing instead on liberating Russian-majority
Donbas region in east Ukraine, a task that has already been accomplished in
large measure, Western intelligence community and the mainstream media kept
warning the gullible audience Russia’s pullout from areas around Kyiv “wasn’t a
retreat but a strategic redeployment” and that Russian forces had withdrawn
back into Belarus and Russia simply to “regroup,
refit and resupply.”
Compared to 150-190,000 Russian troops deployed in Ukraine before the withdrawal process began in late March 2022, the total number of battalion tactical groups in the country stood at 78 in April 2022, all of them in the south and the east in the Donbas region. That would translate to about 55,000 to 62,000 troops, based on what the Pentagon said at the start of the war was the typical unit strength of 700 to 800 soldiers. In other words, two-third of Russian troops deployed in Ukraine were withdrawn back to Russia and Belarus by April 2022 while only one-third remained in east Ukraine battling neo-Nazi militant groups trained and equipped by the CIA.
