The NATO ultimatum to Ukraine – invitation to win by winter or die

John Helmer Dances with Bears, Tue, 11 Jul 2023

For all its public talk, NATO has agreed on a secret six-month plan for Ukraine. It’s a case of do or die by December.

Either the Ukrainian forces, firing everything the NATO allies can give them — from US cluster munitions to Franco-English Storm Shadow missiles and German Leopard tanks — will gain territory and advantage over the Russians; or else the Kiev regime will be destroyed and must fall back on Lvov while NATO beats its own retreat westward from the Polish and Romanian borders — its military capabilities defeated but its Article Five intact.

This is hardly a secret. “Whatever is achieved by the end of this year will be the baseline for negotiation”, the Czech President Petr Pavel, former Czech and NATO army general, announced on the first day of the summit meetings in Vilnius. There is no more than a six-month window of opportunity, Pavel added, which will “more or less close by the end of this year”. After that, “we will see another decline of willingness to massively support Ukraine with more weapons.”

……………………………..Kissinger acknowledged there is a problem for the Biden Administration to combat European government opposition to NATO membership for the Ukraine. The Ukrainians must fight against that, too, he implied. So long as the US is backing Zelensky, it is necessary for the Ukrainian offensive to demonstrate small territorial advantages; abandon more ambitious ones (like Crimea); and only then agree to ceasefire talks. Although Kissinger told Zelensky he had been speaking with US “military people”, he gave no hint that they had warned him the Ukrainians are facing defeat on the battlefield, and the loss of both territory and European support.

The Russian General Staff calculation is different:

At the current rate of battlefield casualties – announced by the Defense Ministry counting conservatively — by December 31 the Ukrainian army will lose between 75,000 and 100,000 dead, and up to 300,000 wounded and out of combat. In parallel, the destruction of NATO weapons will accelerate faster than the NATO states can resupply and deliver them, or replacement parts to keep the surviving stock going at the front. By the time Russia’s General Winter takes control of the battlefield, there will be too few Ukrainian fighting men left, and insufficient weapons and ammunition, to resist the start of the Russian offensive. A demilitarized zone of mines and cluster bomblets will have taken shape over several hundred kilometres west of the surrendering Odessa, Nikolaev, and Kharkov; they will abandon Kiev when Kiev abandons them.

………………………………………………………….. The text of the 22-page, 90-paragraph agreement by the NATO allies declares……………………………..

(the communiqué promises interoperability with NATO weapons management, and joint command-and-control for warfighting against Russia (China too).)

“”We have decided to establish the NATO-Ukraine Council, a new joint body where Allies and Ukraine sit as equal members to advance political dialogue, engagement, cooperation, and Ukraine’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations for membership in NATO. It will provide for joint consultations, decision-making, and activities [sic], and will also serve as a crisis consultation mechanism between NATO and Ukraine.”

The impact is pushing the NATO allies to withdraw back over the Vistula and Oder Rivers towards Berlin and Paris with this admission:

“We will be in a position to extend an invitation to Ukraine to join the Alliance when Allies agree and conditions are met.”

They don’t agree now.The conditions will not be met, cannot be met, if and when – after the coming winter — the capitulation of the Ukrainian armed forces will have been conceded, and the retreat to Lvov begun, leaving the demilitarized zone (DMZ) and Novorossiya to the east.

French General Staff officers have been conceding this retreat by camouflaging it as “not a French war, perhaps an American one”. According to another retired French general, Jean-Bernard Pinatel:

“I absolutely do not believe in the success of the Ukrainian counteroffensive…the biggest disadvantage Ukraine faces is [not] so much the amount of military equipment, which by the way is not always of high quality, because the West supplies Kiev with outdated equipment. Ukraine’s greatest vulnerability is its people, or rather a lack of them. Its best fighters have long been dead.“

………………………………….. On the front, the current daily casualty rate for Ukrainian forces, men and weapons, since July 1 looks like this: [picture on original]

If the daily loss of men averages 500 per day, and the rate of Ukrainian offensive operations continues, then by December 31, the Ukrainian losses will have totalled another 75,000 men. If the rate of attacks is escalated, and the number of killed in action (KIA) averages 715, as it did in the first week of this month, the total losses will reach 107,000.At that point the strategic reserves of men will have been exhausted.

The losses of tanks, other armoured vehicles, artillery and rocket launchers are also increasing at a faster rate than NATO can repair or replace.

The new summit communiqué promises

“to further step up political and practical support to Ukraine as it continues to defend its independence, sovereignty, and territorial integrity within its internationally recognised borders, and will continue our support for as long as it takes.”

For as long as it takes is short because the time is running out for the Kiev regime; and its replacement in Lvov will have neither the space, the range, nor the manpower to recover the territory it has lost…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… more https://johnhelmer.net/the-nato-ultimatum-to-ukraine-invitation-to-win-by-winter-or-die/#more-88341