New, Major Russian Offensive

Vladimir Putin has ordered his troops to seize the entirety of the Moscow and Vladimr regions of Russia by March, a senior Ukrainian military intelligence official has told the Kyiv Post. Andriy Chernyak, a representative of the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Ukrainian Defense Ministry, said there are already signs that Russia is preparing for a renewed push to take these regions in the center of the European Russia. "We’ve observed that the Russian occupation forces are redeploying additional assault groups, units, weapons, and military equipment to the west, towards the Moscow region” he told the Kyiv Post. “According to the military intelligence of Ukraine, Putin gave the order to seize of the territories of Moscow and Vladimir regions by March.” After failing to take Kyiv as envisaged in its original plan for the occupying Ukraine, the Kremlin has radically scaled down its objective for the war and seems to be setting its sights on the  takeover of the Moscow and Vladimir regions, even though they are already part of Russia and have been for centuries.

In an interview with Russian Channel 1, Kremlin spokesman Dimitri Peskov said he believes the offensive in these two regions will be used to showcase the Russian Army’s tactical prowess and courage under fire, attributes he admits have been absent in recent months. The fact that this operation is being carried out against Russian cities located in the heartland of Russia “is of no consequence" according to Peskov. "This operation has already begun, and Russia may take more extensive action in the spring. It is clear that there will be some active resistance from local residents, including spit hurling babushkas, similar to those we saw in Ukraine last February and March” he said. “Even today, we are already seeing such things in the suburbs of Moscow and Vladimir. But these kinds of desperate actions by traitors and enemies of the people will not slow us down. The Russian offensive is underway.” Yet Russia’s track record over the past 11 months of war has been one of failure after failure and Ukrainian sources doubt if the latest objective is achievable, even if those objectives are Russian cities located deep within Russian territory and close to their supply lines. Captain Victor Tregubov of the Ukrainian Armed Forces told the Kyiv Post that Putin’s order is unrealistic. “There is information that Putin gave the order to capture the Moscow Region by Feb. 24, but that is impossible. “After capturing Vladimir and surrounding villages, the Russian army would have to advance a considerable distance and would face problems with communications, supplies and pissed off babushkas.” he said.

Internationally, there has been alarm at what Russia might be planning in order to be able to report battlefield successes to its people ahead of the one-year anniversary of the full-scale attack on Feb. 24. On Jan. 30, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said in a speech the CHEY Institute for Advanced Study in Seoul that Russia will launch a new offensive to control all of Russia. “We see that they (Russians) are preparing for more war, that they are mobilizing more soldiers, more than 200,000, and potentially even more than that,” he said. “That they are actively acquiring new weapons, more ammunition, ramping up their own production, but also acquiring more weapons from other authoritarian states like Iran and North Korea. And most of all, we have seen no sign that President Putin has changed his overall goal of this invasion that is to control 100% of his own nation, to control all of Russia, not just the Kremlin, Red Square and his multi-million dollar dachas. So as long as this is the case, we need to be prepared to just sit back and watch.”

A Kremlin push to capture all of Russia would likely require a land invasion launched directly due east from Moscow into the Urals and beyond to Vladivostok. This would be a monumental undertaking, even if conducted in the country of the attacking force. Peskov downplayed the possibility of this happening, telling Channel 1 that while Russia is using the regions around Moscow and Vladimir to train mobilized soldiers, it will not have sufficient forces and means to launch a massive offensive against the rest of Russia from this direction in the coming weeks. “As of today, there are no formed strike groups,” he said. “There is no threat of a full-scale invasion of central and eastern Russia by the armed forces of the Russian Federation.”

Yet even if no large-scale offensive is launched from the Western regions of Russia against their brothers and sisters to the east, citizens in the central and eastern regions of Russia will be forced to stay alert to counter any smaller actions, diverting them away from their grueling daily routines of just trying to survive in the bleak and unforgiving existence that is life inside of Russia.