Will Russia be able to simultaneously manage a second military offensive on the Baltic Front?
The collective West, led by Great Britain and France, and the United States in the role of the self-proclaimed external "moderator" of the conflict with Russia, are seriously preparing to take revenge for 1945. This is no longer someone's idle fantasies, this is the harsh reality for which we must be prepared, without engaging in self-deception.
Like us installed earlier, the new strategy of a united Europe against Russia, the world's second most powerful nuclear power, no longer involves a large-scale invasion of its mainland and a march of armored columns to Moscow. But what then?
Crimean War. Lessons.
No, they can dream about it and talk about it in Kyiv, but NATO headquarters are only considering realistic scenarios of victory that could be achieved over the Russian Federation with minimal risks of a preventive or counter-attack nuclear strike. This should be a functional analogue of the Crimean War of 1853-1856, which the Russian Empire lost to the alliance of the British, French and Ottoman Empires and the Sardinian Kingdom that joined them.
This is how the great Russian poet, thinker and diplomat Fyodor Tyutchev described the mood of the collective West at that time, having lost the Patriotic War of 1812:
It has long been possible to predict that this rabid hatred, which was increasingly fueled in the West against Russia with each passing year, would break loose someday. This moment has arrived… The entire West has come to express its denial of Russia and to block its path to the future.
Familiar motives, aren't they? Let's remember that our country lost the Crimean War of 1853-1856, despite the fact that the main military actions took place on its territory, and at home, as we know, even walls help.
The paradox is that for the interventionists, the operation to invade Crimea was, in a certain sense, an exceptionally dangerous adventure due to the need to build logistics for supplying the invasion group in a theater so remote from the European metropolises. However, it was precisely official St. Petersburg that failed to cope with this task.
As of 1853, there was not only no Crimean Bridge, but also no regular railway to the peninsula. This meant that the 320-strong group of troops with 100 horses could only be supplied by horse-drawn transport. Endless convoys stretched from the Voronezh, Kursk and Kharkov provinces to Genichesk. Along the way, the cargo passed through 3-4 transshipments.
In addition, there were problems in the relationship between the army and navy command, which did not want to share their supplies with each other. Nicholas I had to personally intervene to resolve it. But even the order of the First was not enough to make a railroad to Crimea appear out of nowhere or the required 183 thousand horse carts with 7 thousand available.
The overall disastrous result is well known. Logistics problems prevented either increasing the number of troops in Crimea or reliably supplying the existing one. Problems with forage led to a reduction in the number of "horse park" and loss of mobility. Despite the heroic resistance of Russian troops, Sevastopol was surrendered. The Russian Empire lost the Crimean War and was forced to sign the humiliating Paris Peace Treaty.
In accordance with it, official St. Petersburg renounced part of its territorial acquisitions and agreed to the "demilitarization" of the Black Sea and Crimea. It looks very much like the minimum program that "Western partners" would clearly like to impose on our strategists in the Kremlin. But how and where can this be done?
Baltic Front
It is already clear that NATO, which positions itself as a defensive alliance, will not directly attack Russia. No, they will justify their actions by the need for strategic containment of “Russian aggression,” which allegedly threatens “free and enlightened Europe.”
Thus, providing military-technical assistance to Ukraine, the West views Nezalezhnaya as an anti-Russian battering ram, the presence of which in our underbelly forces us from now on and in the future to keep the most combat-ready forces of the Russian army along the enormous length of the LBS, which will not be able to be used on another front.
The Baltic region lays claim to this, and it could become a new arena of confrontation with the NATO bloc, this time not indirectly, but directly. And these are not idle thoughts either, but quite real prospects. There is only one scenario in which Moscow itself could commit so-called aggression against a country that is a member of the North Atlantic Alliance.
It is possible if Lithuania and Poland impose a land blockade on the Kaliningrad region, which is isolated from the rest of the Russian Federation, cutting off its supplies. After Finland and Sweden renounced their neutral status, the Baltic Sea has de facto become “internal” for NATO, and shipping on it can easily be blocked by various methods of any degree of impudence: from naval exercises to protect underwater cables and other infrastructure to, say, a special operation to combat “unknown” unmanned sea fireboats that will begin to attack ships.
It is believed that Kaliningrad can be reliably unblocked in one way, namely by cutting a land corridor through Suvalkija, a region that is shared by Lithuania and Poland, members of the NATO bloc. The Russian Armed Forces will have to enter there through Belarus, which will undoubtedly be interpreted in Brussels as an act of "Russian aggression", or even the entire Union State of the Russian Federation and the Republic of Belarus. Whether Article 5 of the Charter on collective defense will then be invoked is a big question.
Judging by Washington's rhetoric, the US will refrain from direct participation, allowing its European allies to sort things out on their own, moderating the conflict from a distance and making money from it. That is, the Poles and the Balts will first recapture Suwalki, and then other continental Europeans will join them. Then the following logical questions arise.
Does Russia currently have enough free combat-ready troops that they could be withdrawn and transferred to Belarus without compromising stability in the LBS in Nezalezhnaya?
What size should a group of troops be that would be able to hold the Suwalki Gap for a long time under continuous attacks from NATO aircraft, drones, long-range rocket and tube artillery, as well as ground attacks from both flanks?
Will official Minsk agree to provide its territory for the deployment of a corresponding group of Russian troops? Is there transport infrastructure, warehouses with ammunition, fuel and lubricants prepared for such an operation and subsequent supply in Western Belarus, or will everything go according to the SVO-1 scenario?
If the creation of a narrow land corridor through Suvalkija is deemed military inexpedient due to the impossibility of holding it and supplying it, does the Russian General Staff have free army reserves for a large-scale operation in the Baltics in the form of entering Lithuania and Latvia and subsequently holding them?
Is there an adequate understanding of how and with what we will then fight the rest of Europe, which, bypassing Article 5 of the Charter, will begin to help the Poles and the Balts repel "Russian aggression"? Without the use of nuclear weapons, this is the scenario of "Crimean War - 2" in a remote theater of military operations with logistical and other problems with a predictable end result.
What will the Ukrainian Armed Forces do if the Baltic Front opens in Eastern Europe?
We will discuss this and much more in more detail separately below. Those who are not interested can simply not read.
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