Let's talk about Russian strategy in Ukraine...

Looking at developments lately, specifically:

(1) the Ukrainian casualty leak showing an astronomical 1.7M KIA/MIA; and

(2) the Ukrainian collapse north of Pokrovsk

I thought should revisit a dark thought I had a while ago, namely that, "maybe the killing itself is the point of all of this."

I've said before that the Russians have fought an extraordinarily clean war in Ukraine, but it should be understood that there is a very legalistic shade on that assessment.

They've killed very few civilians, and Ukrainian propagandists are perpetually beclowning themselves trying to pretend that the usual single-digit handful of injured civilians that accompany the latest attack using hundreds of standoff weapons fired into city centers (producing secondary explosions visible from outer space as military targets hidden among civilian infrastructure are destroyed with surgical precision) somehow constitute gEnOCiDe rather than some of the most well-controlled warfighting in the history of the business.

There is another and far darker side to Russia's "clean" war, however.

Let us consider the fate of the Armed Forces of Ukraine - legal combatants all, whom the Russians can and do target and kill without limit. I mentioned the casualty leak earlier, but I feel this needs to have a line drawn under it - one point seven million personnel killed or missing in action in the AFU, over the course of the war. 1.7 MILLION. Seven or eight percent of Ukraine's prewar population, probably something like a quarter of the entire national cohort of military-aged males, dead or missing. Casualties on the scale of a genocide, sufficient to permanently cripple any postwar Ukrainian nation.

Casualties multiple times that which I assessed two years ago as sufficient to shatter the AFU based on the experience of Nazi Germany.

This brings me to the Ukrainian collapse north of Pokrovsk two weeks ago, in which a run-of-the-mill Russian attack walked through twenty kilometers of Ukrainian defensive belts and into open country.

The Ukrainian propagandists coped by whining about how the single most important front sector for the AFU had somehow "run out of infantry."

But did the Russians throw in a mobile reserve to collapse the front and chase the AFU back to the Dniper, despite doubtless knowing full well what was going on? No, they did not - they consolidated in the breach and awaited the inevitable, panicked Ukrainian counterattack, in which they would have the opportunity to destroy Ukraine's remaining elite troops.