Ukraine’s Promised Spring Offensive Ain’t D-Day

I invite you to do a thought experiment. Would the Ally invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944 have succeeded if Eisenhower, Churchill and Roosevelt had announced they planned to attack the French coast in June? How effective would the Allied force have been if the Germans launched devastating air and missile attacks on the troop assembly points in South East England? You don’t have to be Carl von Clausewitz or Sun Tzu to come up with the answer. The Normandy invasion would have failed.

So why are Western pundits pinning their hopes on a dramatic Ukrainian success in its highly publicized upcoming offensive when everyday there is news from Ukraine of massive Russian air strikes with missiles and drones on Ukrainian military bases, assembly points and warehouses for vehicles and weapons? Tonight’s Telegram is like the movie Ground Hog day with a new string of reports about Russian strikes across the breadth of Ukraine:

Explosions in Kirovograd region, alarm in central Ukraine

There are explosions in Kiev. According to preliminary information, a swarm of Russian drones strikes critical infrastructure facilities in Kiev and the Kiev region. The air defense is trying to shoot down the wave of attack, unsuccessfully. Local authorities urge everyone to hide in shelters.

The Chernihiv, Cherkasy and Kirovograd regions are also waiting for the arrival of Russian UAVs.

Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko reports explosions in the capital and urges to stay in cover

The Russians are targeting military targets, not civilians, and these attacks are taking a toll on Ukrainian troops and materiel. The mounting casualties in Ukraine also include a growing list of Americans. The guys who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan are learning the hard way that Russia is not a bunch of goat herders sporting 50 year old Kalashnikov rifles. The Washington Post produced an article for Memorial Day recounting the deaths of five Americans in Ukraine (sorry, it is behind a paywall).

Earlier this month, a plane carrying the remains of Marine Corps veteran Grady Kurpasi arrived on U.S. soil, bringing a measure of closure after 13 months of work to bring him home.

In Mobile, Ala., the mother of Cooper Andrews, a retired Marine Corps sergeant killed around Bakhmut on April 19, is fighting to have her son’s remains brought back to the United States.

Memorial Day hits “much harder this year, for obvious reasons,” said Alex Potter, whose husband, Pete Reed, was working as a humanitarian medic in Ukraine when, on Feb. 2, his ambulance was hit by a suspected Russian missile.

Nick Maimer, 45, who had served two decades in the Army, taught English in Spain before Russia’s invasion, he told the Idaho Statesman last year. His “moral compass” guided him to Ukraine, he said. . . .

His death, apparentlyin a building collapse somewhere near the besieged city of Bakhmut earlier this month, was disclosed in a poorly lit video showing Wagner mercenary group leader Yevgeniy Prigozhin.A close associate of Russian President Vladimir Putin, Prigozhin and his private army have assumed a lead role in the war. In the video, he stands near a lifeless body and taunts the United States. In his hands is a notebook holding Maimer’s Idaho driver’s license and Veterans Affairs card.

The two military officers, crisply attired in blue dress uniforms, ascended the front porch of a single-family home. One clutched a vinyl case containing an ornate white urn and, within, the ashes of Army veteran Andrew Peters.

Andrew Peters, like many other American volunteers in Ukraine, had been affected by the televised images of civilian suffering and by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s appeal to military veterans worldwide for help repelling the Russians. . . .

Memorial Day resonates differently this year, he added, with heartache because of his son’s death. But the father knows the situation isn’t quite the same as if Andrew had been killed while in the U.S. military, and he has balked at suggestions from friends that his son’s name should be added to a local memorial that recognizes U.S. troops killed in combat, he said.

I view these men as victims of the U.S. propaganda campaign that portrayed Ukraine as an innocent suddenly attacked, without cause, by the ravaging Russian hordes. That was and is a lie. I give these men the benefit of the doubt that they put their lives on the line to help an underdog without understanding the longstanding NATO effort to weaken and destroy Russia.

If we could go back in time I would have invited these departed souls to watch Andrei Martyanov. Maybe his straight talk could have given them pause: