In concluding remarks to the Aug. 22 Reddit event with Diane Sare, Geoff Young, and Ray McGovern, former UN weapons inspector in Iraq Scott Ritter gave his assessment of the way forward for the Russian special military operation in Ukraine. Ritter dispensed with the notion that Russian forces and the allied D.P.R./L.P.R. militias are bogged down in the Donetsk region. Rather, the Russians have perfected a methodology where they grind down Ukrainian fortifications with artillery, and destroy the Ukrainian units occupying them with little loss to themselves. Ritter noted that over and over again, stories come from the Ukrainian side of the front of surviving Ukrainian troops seeing their units being destroyed and suffering massive casualties without ever seeing a Russian. “The Russians have perfected this methodology and right now we’re looking at casualty ratios of twenty to thirty, to one. That means, for every one dead Russian, you’re losing 20-30 dead Ukrainians. This is unheard of in modern warfare.”
The Russians, he said, will not abandon this method of slowly but surely destroying Ukrainian fortifications by constant artillery bombardments in favor of maneuver warfare, because if they did they would face the prospect of massive casualties, such as what happened on the Eastern front during World War II. Rather, they’ll keep playing a game of every time they make an advance, they’ll allow the Ukrainian forces to withdraw and build new fortifications so that they can fix them and destroy them again.
More broadly, Ritter said, what the Russians are making sure of is that the Kiev regime will never extend its rule over any Russian-speaking population again because of the odious nature of this regime. He said that if the word “Russian” is simply replaced with the word “Jew” in its laws banning the Russian language, Russian culture and everything Russia, then it becomes clear how odious the Ukrainian regime is. “This is a government that hates people, that hates cultures. The Ukrainian nationalists view themselves as modern-day supermen; they’re the Aryan race,” he said. “They view the Polish as subhuman; they view the Russians as subhuman. And even though people say Zelenskyy is a Jew, they view the Jews as subhuman. It’s not me saying this, they say it themselves!”
“The Russians are not going to allow these odious Ukrainian Nationalists ever again to have the armed privilege of ruling over ethnic Russians or Russian speakers,” Ritter continued. “Therefore, all territory in Ukraine, where there is a significant Russian population, historical connection, etc. will become and will forever be Russia.”
Ritter stressed that denazification doesn’t mean just killing or imprisoning the criminals who tattoo their bodies with swastikas and take up arms to murder, rape and torture Russians. It also means the termination of the ideology, which means holding Ukraine’s political leaders accountable for their crimes. It means that the Ukrainian constitution will have to be changed and the government will have to be changed. It also means that Ukraine will never be a member of NATO and will be permanently neutral.
In the end, “The defeat of the Ukrainians will be every bit as severe and without conditions as that suffered by the Japanese and the Germans in World War II,” Ritter concluded. “That’s how I think this is going to end.”
