Nobody foresaw in February 2022 that Russia’s special operation would descend into a protracted “war of attrition” that just passed two and a half years last month. This occurred because all sides underestimated each other and there were some shortcomings in hindsight with the campaign’s initial stages, which readers can correspondingly learn more about here and here. Nevertheless, many members of the Alt-Media Community (AMC) remain convinced that this was actually the plan all along.
In their minds, everything is proceeding according to some “5D chess master plan” wherein all setbacks and challenges are just an attempt by Russia to “psyche out” its opponents, but average folks are supposedly unable to understand the intricacies of such complex strategy. As QAnon’s followers say, “trust the plan”, but the plan has actually changed since everything began. It’s now known from the spring 2022 draft peace treaty that Russia sought a swift end to hostilities and not a protracted conflict.
Decisionmakers truly believed that their lightning-fast advance through large swathes of Ukraine had successfully coerced Zelensky into agreeing to Russia’s security guarantee requests related to the restoration of its constitutional neutrality and scaling back its armed forces to a practically symbolic level. Russian troops were in Kiev, Chernigov, Kharkov, and Sumy Regions, and they also had a presence across the Dnieper in Kherson Region and parts of Nikolaev Region too, though logistics were stretched thin.
It was because the Anglo-American Axis understood how fragile their foe’s logistics were that Boris Johnson went to Kiev to convince Zelensky to keep up the fight with the expectation that the Ukrainians could then capitalize on this weakness to push Russia back towards the border. This plan worked and Russia was expelled from all the abovementioned areas after its logistics were severed. The only reason why they were overextended to begin with was to provoke Ukrainian decisionmakers into panicking.
It was admittedly a gamble, and one that was supposed to manipulate them into agreeing to Russia’s terms for peace, particularly their country’s demilitarization. Likewise, perpetuating the conflict was also a gamble as well since the Anglo-American Axis thought that the combination of unprecedented sanctions and Ukraine’s expected counteroffensive would succeed in forcing Russia to fully withdraw. Neither expected that their respective gambles would fail and a “war of attrition” would follow.
Evidence in support of this explanation is plenty. To begin with, Russia wouldn’t have overextended its logistics if the plan all along was to bait Ukrainian forces into firing range as part of some prolonged demilitarization strategy. Ukraine could have been comfortably but very slowly demilitarized without even crossing the border at the beginning, with Russia only advancing after its enemy was worn down. As is known, that’s not how everything unfolded, and anyone claiming otherwise is being dishonest.
Supplementarily, Russia’s large-scale withdrawal from Kiev, Chernigov, and Sumy Regions as a “goodwill gesture” made it appear weak and disorganized to most observers other than those with a psychological need to believe in “5D chess master plan” conspiracy theories for whatever their reason may be. Even worse, this “goodwill gesture” was then followed by its forces being pushed out of the parts of Nikolaev Region that they advanced into as well as Kharkov Region and the western part of Kherson Region.
Top Alt-Media influencers at the time claimed that these moves were all part of some cunning plan to envelop the advancing Ukrainians in a series of cauldrons, after which Russia would steamroll through Eastern Ukraine up to the Dnieper and then decisively end the conflict. That also never came to pass. In fact, the aforesaid developments were all due to Ukraine capitalizing upon Russia’s overextended logistics from the initial stage of the conflict, which led to physical and especially reputational losses.
Another point is that the West didn’t ramp up its military-industrial production in the years preceding Russia’s special operation even though the scenarios of an intensified Donbass Conflict or even a Russian military intervention in all of Ukraine were openly being discussed by their media and think tanks. The West either thought that Russia could be deterred, that the odds of it winning were so high that it wasn’t worth planning for a protracted war, or that unprecedented sanctions would quickly lead to its defeat.
In any case, they were clearly caught just as much off guard by the “war of attrition” that followed the initial phase of the special operation as Russia was, with neither being ready for this. Russia could have more easily taken out all of Ukraine’s bridges across the Dnieper early on if was really planning for a protracted conflict, but it didn’t for the reasons explained here. It’s now too late since those bridges are better defended and Russia doesn’t have as many extra missiles to spare to saturate all of them.
Drone warfare also evolved so rapidly that each side took larger losses than expected as they learned the hard way how best to adapt to this revolution in military affairs. This whole time, Russia continued to advance in Donbass, which confirms that its forces kept coming to Ukraine’s instead of letting Ukraine’s come to it like many in AMC now claim. It’s enough to recall the Battles of Artyomovsk/Bakhmut and Avdeeva to see that the plan has been and still continues to be to move forward at literally all costs.
The pace of Russia’s advances has quickened as a result of it winning the “race of logistics”/“war of attrition” with NATO as explained in the two preceding hyperlinked analyses, thus setting the stage for the impending Battle of Pokrovsk that could be a game-changer on the Donbass front as argued here. Observers should remember that some of the territory through which Russia is advancing is just open fields that place its troops at greater risk, but capturing and holding that land is still considered worth it.
The same calculation was seen when Russia pushed into Kharkov Region from the north last spring after previously withdrawing in 2022. Although it didn’t advance that far, the official objective was to carve out a buffer zone for protecting Belgorod Region from cross-border terrorist raids and shelling. Those who insist that the “war of attrition” was Russia’s plan all along, with the corollary that Russia is sitting back and letting Ukrainian forces come to it instead of coming to them, can’t cogently account for this.
What appears to have happened among many in the AMC over the past two and a half years is that they found themselves forced into a narrative dilemma by a combination of events and trolling pressure. The indisputable setbacks that accompanied the first nine months of the special operation from its beginning in February 2022 to Russia’s withdrawal from the western half of Kherson Region across the Dnieper that November deeply disappointed them. This was made all the worse by trolls mocking them and Russia.
Calmly acknowledging these setbacks and trying to account for them in order to better understand what happened wasn’t done by many since community gatekeepers smeared that as “dooming” and lending credence to anti-Russian propaganda. An alternative reality was therefore created where everything unfortunate was chalked up to some grand “5D chess master plan” conspiracy theory that average people supposedly can’t understand but are still obliged to never question for reasons of dogma.
One conspiracy theory led to another till an ecosystem of lies was created for explaining everything that happened over the past two and a half years, with the most recent conspiracy theories building upon the older ones and everything thus being dependent on believing the manufactured narrative in its entirety. Questioning one claim leads to questioning those that followed and so on till the alternative reality that was created is dismantled in full, which gatekeepers fear would lead to mass demoralization.
People should be mature enough to accept that no country is perfect, not even their favorite one like Russia, and that setbacks are an unavoidable part of every military conflict. The “5D chess master plan” conspiracy theory is intellectually insulting and debunked by the factual evolution of this conflict. To be clear, Russia is winning since the military-strategic dynamics continue trending in its favor, but it improvised a lot to get to this point. It’s about time that the AMC honestly relates how this happened.
