Viktor Orban Is Right: The Counteroffensive Will Be a Bloodbath for Ukraine
However the sequence of events plays out after Kiev’s upcoming NATO-backed counteroffensive, there’s no doubt that it’ll be a bloodbath for Ukraine exactly as Orban predicted. This makes it a tragedy of epic proportions since it doesn’t have to be this way, yet there’s almost certainly no chance that the US will call everything off due to its domestic political calculations. By the time this conflict ends, there’ll be tens of thousands more Ukrainians dead, if not hundreds of thousands.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban warned that Kiev’s upcoming NATO-backed counteroffensive will be a bloodbath for Ukraine, which will predictably provoke another round of Western rants against him but is nevertheless an accurate assessment. In his view, the demographic mismatch between these two former Soviet Republics dooms the much smaller one to defeat, especially since the attacking side is usually expected to suffer three times as many casualties as the defending one.
Since he estimated that Ukraine has approximately 5-7 times less people than Russia after presumably including the millions who’ve fled from the former into his calculation, the upcoming counteroffensive could be catastrophic for its continued existence as a nation if it suffers too many losses. For this reason, Orban said that “We must do everything we can before the launch of a counteroffensive to convince the sides that ceasefire and peace talks are necessary.”
Regrettably, since “Biden’s Re-Election Hinges On The Success Of Kiev’s Counteroffensive”, the die has already been cast for purely political reasons and there’s almost certainly no chance that Chekhov’s gun therefore won’t be fired. In fact, it might even be discharged in four directions at once exactly as the Union State expects as evidenced by the warnings shared by Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenko and FSB boss Alexander Bortnikov during Thursday’s CIS security chiefs meeting in Minsk.
The first raised awareness of the West’s coup plans against him, while the second accused NATO of being behind recent acts of sabotage in their two countries. Bortnikov also added that the bloc is trying to get Moldova to join the NATO-Russian proxy war by invading Gagauzia and Transnistria. These three fronts – Belarus, Moldova, and Russia – could therefore all see action at the same time as the primary one along the Line of Contact in those former Ukrainian territories that Kiev claims as its own.
The US desperately needs its proxy to gain ground on any of those four fronts that could then be sold as a “victory” to voters ahead of next fall’s elections, which is why its leadership made the political decision to greenlight the counteroffensive despite the bloodbath that Orban predicted. All sides agree that peace talks will inevitably end the conflict, but the US won’t allow Ukraine to participate in this process until it delivers a “victory” that’ll satisfy voters’ expectations after the $75 billion that they’ve given Kiev.
Anything less could doom Biden’s re-election as well as imperial the prospects of his fellow Democrats’ who’ll also participate in the next polls. That said, the odds of Kiev holding whatever ground it might gain on any of those potential fronts is extremely low due to NATO’s “race of logistics”/“war of attrition” with Russia that Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg declared in mid-February. The dynamics are trending in Russia’s favor as proven by its victory in the Battle of Artyomovsk, which bodes ill for Kiev.
Furthermore, even UK Defense Secretary Ben Wallace acknowledged how difficult it is for the bloc to sustain the pace, scale, and scope of armed support for Ukraine in his latest interview with the Washington Post. While promising that it’ll continue in some form, he’s quoted as telling his interlocutor that “we have seen reality, which is that we are all running out”. This suggests that foreign military assistance to Ukraine will be curtailed sooner than later since there simply isn’t much left to give away.
With that in mind, it’ll be impossible for Ukraine to hold any ground that it might temporarily gain in the event that it launches a large-scale invasion of the Union State since that requires an expansion of support, not the reduction that’s expected in the coming future. Russia and Belarus would throw the full force of their combined armies towards that front to overwhelm their opponents if that happens, which could lead to the Ukrainian side’s collapse and subsequent capitulation to all of Moscow’s demands.
Even so, the US isn’t behaving as a rational actor so it might still risk that worst-case scenario that goes against its own interests, though it could also raise the stakes if that materializes by exploiting Ukraine’s military collapse as the pretext for moving NATO troops to the front lines in order to freeze the conflict. With the bloc’s forces already deployed to that country and likely remaining there indefinitely, Ukraine would therefore fall under their nuclear umbrella despite not being a formal member.
However the sequence of events plays out after Kiev’s upcoming NATO-backed counteroffensive, there’s no doubt that it’ll be a bloodbath for Ukraine exactly as Orban predicted. This makes it a tragedy of epic proportions since it doesn’t have to be this way, yet there’s almost certainly no chance that the US will call everything off due to its domestic political calculations. By the time this conflict ends, there’ll be tens of thousands more Ukrainians dead, if not hundreds of thousands.
