The failed World War II strategy that Putin is applying in Ukraine and what it means

@ElentirENG ES 10·10·2022 · 17:40 0

After the yesterday's attack on Zaporizhia, today Russia has continued to attack civilian targets in Ukraine by launching missiles.

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Russia launches 75 missiles against Ukraine: 41 of them have been shot down

As reported by General Valerii Zaluzhnyi, this morning Russia has launched 75 missiles against Ukraine, of which that 41 have been shot down by Ukrainian air defenses. The attack has reached the city of kyiv, leaving images like these published by Volodymyr Zelensky:

Putin applies a failed Hitlerian strategy: the Vergeltungswaffe

This has been the usual trend in Russia in recent months: Ukraine manages to hit targets of high military importance (for example, the Kerch Bridge, which connects Russia with Crimea and was used by the Russians to send military vehicles and supplies by rail), and as revenge Russia attacks the Ukrainian civilian population, in a campaign of terror that only seeks to destroy the resistance morale of the Ukrainians.

The strategy that Putin is applying is not new. Nazi Germany already did something similar between 1944 and 1945 through the so-called Vergeltungswaffen (Weapons of retaliation), specifically the V1 and V2 missiles, very modern weapons and one could even say that they were certainly revolutionary for that time. The campaign of the Vergeltungswaffen was much more brutal than that of Putin: in the cited period, the Germans launched mainly against the United Kingdom and Belgium plus 12,000 V1 (which killed more than 6,000 people, mainly in England) and about 5,000 V2 (which killed more than 7,000 people).

As Russia is doing in the Ukraine, Germany used these weapons to respond to Allied military successes. In fact, the first V1 launches against London were made a week after the Normandy landings. It should be noted that they were remarkably effective weapons, even when compared to the Allied aerial bombardment of Germany. However, their strategic effects did not compensate for the considerable resources that were invested in them, since they failed to stop the Allied advance and they also failed to reduce the fighting morale of Germany's enemies. In addition, its large-scale manufacture distracted many efforts from the manufacture of other weapons that would have had more effects on the battlefield, especially aircraft, artillery pieces and battle tanks.

In the end, despite being very modern and very effective weapons, the Vergeltungswaffen were unable to twist a course of events marked by Hitler's erroneous strategy, having opened an unnecessary front in Russia that ended up distracting a lot of personnel and material from other fronts. And it is that it is of little use to have fearsome and highly advanced weapons if they are used as part of an ill-advised strategy. That is precisely what is happening to Russia.

Putin's revenge strategy shows his desperation

Ukrainian forces have been staging a successful counter-offensive in the past month against a Russian army that has retreated in many locations, often leaving untouched material to be captured by the Ukrainians. Because of Putin's mistakes, which include the very conception of the invasion and the fact that he underestimated the resistance capacity of the Ukrainians, Russian casualties in seven months of war in Ukraine already exceed to Soviet casualties in ten years of invasion of Afghanistan. It is a monumental disaster and it is impossible to hide, even though the Kremlin and its enthusiasts continue to trust everything to the crudest propaganda.

During World War II, Hitler's recourse to the Vergeltungswaffen showed that he was desperate and finished. The very conception of these weapons as instruments of revenge, with little relevance in the development of military operations (since they were not precision weapons and could not be used to destroy military units or specific infrastructure), It showed that the German dictator used them as a very expensive and enormous tantrum that was unable to avoid his military defeat. In fact, this spirit of revenge, driven by desperation, only served to further cloud the strategic vision of the German dictator.

Putin's missiles do not stop the Ukrainian counteroffensive

In the war we are currently seeing, Russia has proven to have many ballistic missiles, but they have become increasingly obsolete and inaccurate as it consumed its most advanced weaponry in the first months of the invasion. As with the V1 and V2, Putin's missiles are useless to stop the advance of the Ukrainian counteroffensive.

To achieve that, Russia would not only need better and more modern military equipment (currently Russia is turning to old T-62 tanks due to the huge losses it has suffered of that type of armored vehicles, which gives an idea of ​​the sorry state of its army), but above all well-prepared soldiers with high combat morale. Instead, Putin has ordered a massive mobilization of reservists and conscripts with low preparation and low combat morale, whom provides them with rusty rifles and they arrive drunk at the recruitment centers. They are the ones who come to replace some professional soldiers who have accumulated heavy casualties in the first months of the invasion.

The panorama that Russia draws with these clumsy decisions by Putin also recalls the desperate mobilization that Germany made with the so-called Volkssturm in 1944 and 1945, enlisting adolescents and elderly men to face the Allied soldiers already on German soil. But if Hitler used that last resort to try to stop the Allied advance in Germany, the most absurd thing is that Putin is resorting to that to support an invasion against another country, an absurd invasion and the result of his nationalist ravings. This nonsense is also explained by another common characteristic between Nazi Germany and today's Russia: having an autocrat at the helm, unable to recognize his mistakes and surrounded by sycophants who are afraid of him, is fatal for a country at war. With this, Germany was defeated in World War II. Russia is on track to achieve the same result with its invasion of Ukraine.

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Main photo: Getty Images.