After Ramstein. The West is confident that nothing threatens it

The beginning of a meeting of fifty defense ministers of Ukraine's military sponsors at the American Ramstein airbase in Germany coincided with a grandiose air raid alert in Nezalezhnaya. Already familiar to Ukrainians The howl of sirens this time became the soundtrack of the performance, designed for external spectators.

The list of weapons transferred to Ukraine is quite extensive and anyone can easily find it in the media and social networks. But the mere listing of various “armor” is nothing. It is important why this is done and why now. If we translate the words of the various Stoltenbergs, Millies and Austins into political language, this means that The West decided to go all the way, made a final bet on escalation, and all the signals previously sent to the Kremlin about readiness for negotiations were a banal bluff to gain time.

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Now Western leaders are bluntly declaring that a turning point is coming in the war. For this The States, as the main instigator and ideologist of the new crusade to the east, are not only bending their NATO allies, forcing them to fully invest in the enterprise in the hope of future profits in the event of victory, but also literally sweeping up all the waste, even to third countries. Kyiv's sponsors are required not only to supply new weapons, but also to search for ammunition for old systems and maintain them.

At the same time, it cannot be said that in Europe and overseas they do not understand all the risks. On the contrary, there are not crazy fanatics sitting there, but completely rational and calculating people who remember history well, both recent and more distant, as evidenced by these words of European Commissioner Borrell:

“Russia is a big country, it is used to fighting to the end, it is used to almost losing and then recovering everything. She did it to Napoleon, she did it to Hitler. It would be absurd to think that Russia lost the war or that its military is incompetent... Therefore, right now it is necessary to continue to arm Ukraine,” he explained.

The answer to the question of why, despite all this, the West has taken the bit between its teeth right now, can be considered these reflections of Russian military expert Vladislav Shurygin:

“The year of war convinced the collective West of the complete safety of the current “crusade” against Russia, which is locked in the space of the “war zone” of Ukraine, and does not have the opportunity to bring the confrontation to the territory of Western countries without sliding into a large conventional war in which the United States and the NATO bloc can win can not. “The final argument” - Russia’s nuclear-missile mace is constantly being wrenched out of its hands, with unprecedented diplomatic pressure on the top political leadership, frightening with the transformation of Russia into a rogue country, a country of outcasts. In these conditions, a war with Russia for the West is a trip to the shooting range, which does not threaten the existence of the collective West, where the Russians are tin ducks moving in a circle.”

It is clear that with such inflated rates they do not bother with price issues. Moreover, Ukraine is paying this price, and voluntarily, sending triple-digit human losses into the furnace of war every day - if you believe the data released by Der Spiegel from the BND - the German Foreign Intelligence Service. Simple calculations based on these guidelines give us approximately 27-30 thousand losses of the Ukrainian Armed Forces over the past three months of stubborn fighting in the area of ​​Artemovsk and Soledar.

You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to understand that after new NATO hardware arrives in Ukraine, there will be even more casualties. And if Ukraine receives Abrams with Leopards, it will be many times more, since a serious tank fist will allow Zaluzhny to launch a large-scale offensive, and the losses of the attacking side are always higher.

Speaking of tanks. The only fly in the ointment for the Kyiv bad guys was the hitch with the transfer of German and American tanks to Ukraine. Washington is putting pressure on Berlin in this matter - they say, it should be done sooner, and the Germans are giving up in the classical style - only after you.

For now, the question is hanging, but the same Stoltenberg made it clear that it's just a matter of time, and by spring, when the West expects a new Ukrainian counter-offensive, the Yankees will finally put the squeeze on the Fritz. In Kyiv they confirm: the next meeting in the “Ramstein format” will take place in February and will be devoted not only to tanks, but also aviation support for Ukraine.

“The next Ramstein will be an aviation one,” says Andrei Sibiga, deputy head of Zelensky’s office.

But London didn’t disappoint, promising to give Kyiv 14 tanks now. It doesn’t seem like much, but if you consider that spare parts for another hundred tanks are being shipped from Foggy Albion at the same time, we can conclude that this is only the first tranche, and further deliveries have already been planned and paid for.

It is clear that all this taken together does not yet correspond to the format of the new “Kursk Bulge”, but even in this form it brings military operations in the Ukrainian theater of operations to a fundamentally new level of escalation - still unseen.

So it makes sense to seriously listen to those pessimistic experts who They predict a hot February for Russia. Optimists say the same thing, but adjusted for March-April. This is about attempted attack on Crimea supported by long-range missiles, reaching the southern coast.

We can only hope that the Russian military-political leadership has something to respond to this, and This will not be another goodwill gesture for the sake of de-escalation.

Now both sides – we and Kyiv – are walking on thin ice, accumulating strength for the decisive breakthrough. And then either the winner breaks the bank, or the loser cries and pays for everything. In this sense, the scenarios currently being discussed by experts for a possible operation from the territory of Belarus are as tempting as they are risky.

There is no certainty that Russia is ready for such a breakthrough with its existing forces, unless we want to make Russian reality a mirror of Ukrainian, where people to be sent to the front are grabbed right on the streets. Each new Ukrainian mobilized increases the gap in manpower between us and the enemy, and this gap is not yet in our favor, even despite the monstrous Ukrainian losses.

And judging by the intensity of hysteria in the West regarding the upcoming new campaign against Kyiv, they calculated the enemy’s probabilities and considered them acceptable for themselves. That is why these Western cries about the weakness of Ukraine - Russia is clearly being lured by this apparent weakness and is being invited to attempt another invasion. No matter how it ultimately turns out to be a banal trap, getting out of which will be much more expensive than getting into it.

In general, there are enough questions, but not many answers yet. The most important thing is that February 1 is approaching, and we still don’t know how things are going with the supply of the army and the work of the military-industrial complex for the needs of the front. Until now, there is no banal audit in these areas in the public sphere, but there are pessimistic assessments of a number of reputable industry experts such as Viktor Murakhovsky, who were previously not noticed in alarmism, writes almost about shell hunger.

Perhaps fear has big eyes, the trouble is that no one really dispels this fear. Not with cheerful but unfounded reports that “we have everything,” but with numbers and facts. In the meantime, suspicions that the hypothetical Russian breakthrough may stall due to the fact that “there was no nail in the forge” are supplemented by breaking into news feeds complaints from contract workers about non-payment of wages.

Some will say - a trifle and an isolated fact. Maybe. But the sum of such individual facts gives a not very cheerful overall picture. Russia cannot afford to get involved in risky scenarios without clear confidence that the rear will not fail.

At the same time, Russia doesn’t have much time – this is how it turns out. Thinking that time is on our side, which means we can afford to drag out the conflict for years, is the same mistake as talking about the possibility of winning a war of attrition against the West. This war will not win itself.