It's not every day that you read a glimpse of sudden and explosive truth about Russia, about the real state of its war against Ukraine, and what's more, it comes from the military world. It is happening while Putin's electoral propaganda is busy selling the conquest of some streets of a destroyed village (Avdiivka) as a great victory at the front, with the death of at least 15 thousand Russians – and hiding that in the meantime since the beginning of the large-scale invasion scale at least 315 thousand Russian soldiers were killed or wounded, and two-thirds of the total pre-war Russian tanks were destroyed. While the Russian economy suffers from frightening hyper-inflation on basic necessities, and even Chinese banks are starting to no longer accept transactions (in any currency) with Russian entities.
The facts are simple, written clearly in the preface to the collection of military-scientific articles “Algorithms of Fire and Steel”, which has now been reviewed and reported by the publication “Army Standard”, not an independent Russian magazine, but a related publication to the Defense sector (the founder is the Ministry of Defense television channel “Zvezda”). In this writing, as disruptive as it is technical, and totally public, without particular filters, the former Russian chief of staff Yuri Baluevskij recognizes the superiority of NATO artillery. Putin said the opposite a few weeks ago. In his speech on February 2, Vladimir Vladimirovich said verbatim: «Of course, if we compare modern NATO weapons with weapons of the last period of the Soviet era, they are somehow inferior, by the way, not always. But if we take our latest weapons, they are clearly superior to everyone. This is a clear fact.”
Baluevskij, on the contrary, makes a ruthless and realistic analysis of the state of the Russian means, celebrated by Moscow propaganda as “the most powerful army in the world”. According to the former Russian chief of staff (2004-2008) and former deputy secretary of the Security Council (2008-2012), NATO artillery systems are qualitatively superior to Russian ones. But there is much more to his analysis: «There is a qualitative superiority of NATO artillery», which cites as the main cause the transition to 155 mm guns with a 52 caliber barrel and the development of very long range projectiles.
«The special military operation – observes Baluevskij – revealed a significant delay in the national artillery and missile systems and requires their priority and radical rearmament in the coming years». With this situation, many of Putin's bluffs – which however are uncritically relaunched by many useful idiots or Western collaborators – are effectively revealed. Baluevskij also significantly downplays the air superiority that the Russians have thanks to the fact that the Ukrainians have not yet received Western F-16s. This Russian superiority is impaired and almost canceled out by the circumstance that, explains Baluevskij, the air defense has unexpectedly defeated the military aviation, which not only cannot operate en masse on enemy territory, but is also «forced to fly and base themselves carefully on their own territory. The task of effectively suppressing enemy air defenses proved virtually impossible. But her decision predetermines the further course and outcome of the air combat, and not only ».
Baluevskij was deputy group commander in Transcaucasia in the nineties, then worked in the General Staff in Moscow, and finally held the role of deputy secretary of the Security Council: he knows what he is talking about. The Russia-Nato gap, he reconstructs, is strong in the quality of the artillery which, especially the long-range and high-precision one, «has returned to the pedestal of the god of war: the number of bullets fired is almost the determining factor in combat and in operations.” Many problems, he continues, have been experienced by the tanks, they have proven to be “an easily identifiable and easily hit target”, and the task of suppressing enemy air defenses “proved to be unsolvable”. Ergo, the presumed superiority that should be given by having fighter-bombers does not exist.
The final diagnosis is terrible. Overall, Baluevsky argues, the Strategic Air Defense Forces demonstrated the failure of military development predictions and required a reassessment of the role and place of various weapons. According to him, many tactical textbooks used by Russian generals will have to be “erased from the archives”. Baluevsky does not delve into the means of electronic warfare, long-distance drones, surveillance drones, marine drones: and it seems clear that much of the Ukrainian resistance in 2024 will be built on this front, and Kyiv's ability to strike behind enemy lines with deep attacks, both on the Black Sea and in the energy complexes and critical infrastructures of the St. Petersburg region.
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