A Few Observations on the Russo-Ukrainian War

Here are a few points I have been emphasizing during my recent radio and video media interviews about the war in Ukraine.

1. Russian forces have badly underperformed in their invasion of Ukraine primarily due to the fact that Putin made the decision not to send sufficient numbers of troops, tanks and combat aircraft and to refrain from using any of Russia's most powerful weapons including cyber, super EMP weapons, tactical nukes or chemical weapons which would likely enable him to defeat Ukraine in a single day and annex the eastern and southern half of Ukraine. While some low-level war crimes are occurring on both sides, there is no evidence that Russian President Vladimir Putin has ordered Russian military forces to systematically target civilians thus far.  The UN Human Rights Commission has stated that it has confirmed that at least 2,072 civilians have been killed during the first 53 days of Russia’s illegal war of aggression in Ukraine. If Russia were deliberately targeting civilians we would have expected to see a death toll 10-50 times higher by now. However, it is likely that many if not most of these civilians were died as a result of collateral damage particularly given the fact that most of the heaviest fighting to date has occurred in urban combat with Ukrainian forces shooting from buildings with civilians in them.

2. The U.S. national policy dialogue is being poisoned by Ukrainian propaganda claiming massive Russian war crimes and atrocities. This is generating mass anti-Russian hysteria among the U.S. public and causing US policymakers to conflate Ukrainian national security interests with our own even though they are very much oppositional given that Zelensky is doing everything he can to get the US and NATO into a Third World War with Russia which would inevitably escalate to the nuclear/EMP level. President Biden, the Democrats and neoconservative Republicans in Congress are calling for the US to escalate Biden's undeclared economic war and proxy war against Russia in Ukraine threatening to provoke Russia into escalating to the nuclear level and potentially destroy both the U.S. and NATO in a nuclear/EMP first strike. In my opinion, they have become more irrational actors than Putin himself and are acting as if they were Ukrainian agents. I am writing an article in which I am seeking to elaborate more on this subject, which I hope to publish in the next week or two. I assess that if the extremely dangerous, risky and foolish Biden war policy is left unchanged, there is a 40% chance that it will result in the Russian use of tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine.

3. Biden has issued a number of unprecedented and extremely provocative statements which may provoke Russia to attack the US homeland with cyber/EMP weapons targeting our critical infrastructure or even nuclear weapons. These include telling our troops in Poland he is sending them to Ukraine, that he would respond to a Russian use of chemical weapons in Ukraine with the use of chemical weapons against Russia and that he is trying to collapse the Russian economy, bleed the Russians dry in Ukraine by sending massive numbers of weapons to Ukraine and calling for the overthrow of Putin and for him to be tried as a war criminal. Under Russian military doctrine, if Putin views these as existential threats which he very well might, he can escalate to the nuclear level to defeat us.

4. There are five most probable outcomes of the war in Ukraine and three of them include the likely use of Russian nuclear weapons. They are:

1) “Frozen Conflict”

2) A Negotiated Peace Settlement

3) Prolonged Stalemate

4) Ukraine retakes the Donbass

5) World War III between the U.S. and Russia

I am hoping to publish an article in The National Interest later this week that discusses these most likely outcomes in much greater detail. The bottom line is that there is no chance that Russia doesn’t win the war in Ukraine because if they fall short of reaching their objective of capturing the rest of Donetsk province they will follow Russian military doctrine to “escalate to de-escalate” with tactical nuclear weapons to win an overwhelming victory over Ukraine and force them into an unconditional surrender. Paradoxically, the longer the Biden administration succeeds in prolonging the war in Ukraine and the more it is able to help Ukraine win tactical victories over Russian forces, the higher the chances Putin will use nuclear weapons and the worse the outcome will be not just for Ukraine but for NATO as well.

5. Rather than escalate our war with Russia to a direct conflict, the U.S. national security interest is to mediate a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine as quickly as possible to end the increasing risk that the war will spread to the US and NATO and escalate and then normalize our diplomatic and trade relations with Russia and sign a mutual security agreement with them to try to neutralize their military alliance with Communist China. 

David T. Pyne, Esq. is a former U.S. Army combat arms and H.Q. staff officer with an M.A. in National Security Studies from Georgetown University. He currently serves as Deputy Director of National Operations for the EMP Task Force on National and Homeland Security and is a contributor to Dr. Peter Pry’s new book Blackout Warfare. He also serves as the host of the Defend America Radio Show on KTALK AM 1640 and as Editor of “The Real War” newsletter at dpyne.substack.com. He may be reached at emptaskforce.ut@gmail.com