Since the very start of Russia’s special military operation (SMO), there have been several persistent overhype tropes that the mainstream propaganda machine has been pushing relentlessly. One of those is that American/NATO weapons and fighting doctrine are far superior to Russian/Soviet equivalents and that this was the reason why Moscow has such “huge losses”. Obviously, these assessments are based on multilayered lies and half-truths designed to support each other with endless media self-quoting. These propaganda tropes have been largely successful when it comes to convincing the Western public that Russia is supposedly “weak”, resulting in laughable claims that Moscow’s forces “rolled into Ukraine as the world’s second most powerful military, but ended up being the second most powerful in Ukraine”, among other things.
On the other hand, behind the scenes, the Pentagon has been in quiet panic mode, as it sees hundreds of billions worth of NATO-sourced weapons burning in Ukraine, while Russia’s investments in the SMO have not only been “surprisingly low“, but also extremely cost-effective. This is without even considering the fact that the casualty ratio of the Kiev regime forces vs. the Russian military is close to 10:1, which is absolutely atrocious given that the former has been training with NATO for over two decades now (intensively for well over a decade). In fact, according to Western sources quoting American veterans currently fighting for the Neo-Nazi junta troops, it’s precisely the Western training and equipment that’s the issue and that the sole reason why the Kiev regime has been able to hold at all is that its commanding cadre has switched back to their Soviet-era training.
Namely, according to a recent report, Ukrainian soldiers would have far higher casualties if they fought the way American forces do. A United States Army veteran, callsign Jackie, told the Business Insider that “Ukrainians would be worse off if they followed American battlefield doctrine and that they were actually better at understanding some types of modern fighting”, adding that “if we use[d] American doctrine here, we would definitely have a bad time”. Jackie took part in US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq before becoming a training contractor for the US military. After Russia launched the SMO, he decided to join the Neo-Nazi junta “to help train its troops and to fight alongside them”. Apart from the usual propaganda tropes (mandatory at this point), Jackie made several admissions, including the claim that Ukrainians are “ahead of the US in some obvious ways”.
“We don’t even have a clear doctrine for small drone use really at this time,” he told the Business Insider, adding: “The Ukrainians are quite advanced in that fact. The Ukrainians are quite ahead of us on integration of these small drone systems and small, medium drones.”
Jackie also stated that “Ukrainians had to operate in ‘guerilla stealth mode’ even when doing big operations” and that this was because their troops are “so disadvantaged as to be considered insufficient by any NATO country standard to breach the forces on that part of the line“. Ukrainians themselves are also saying the same, insisting that “they have to adjust [Western/NATO] training to survive on the battlefield”. The Business Insider claims that “Jackie’s comments mirror those made in September by a Ukrainian commander trained by US, British, and Polish soldiers”.
“If I only did what [Western militaries] taught me, I’d be dead,” the said commander stated back then.
The Ukrainian conflict shares little to no resemblance to countless US aggressions against countries around the world, as the belligerent thalassocracy is very careful not to invade any remotely capable opponents. What Washington DC usually does is enforce sanctions and isolate the targeted country first. Only then it calls upon a pack of its vassals and satellite states to invade directly. The Business Insider itself admitted this, using Afghanistan and Iraq as examples where Western troops had significant equipment and weapons advantages. It also quoted a former US Army Ranger who fought in Ukraine and said that “the fighting there was far worse than what [he] experienced in Iraq and Afghanistan“. US Army veteran Jackie also insisted that “training Ukrainian soldiers ‘from the ground up’ was not appropriate given how much the soldiers had already fought”.
These rather unusual admissions by Western combat veterans are also reinforced by the Kiev regime’s far more successful usage of Soviet-era weapons and equipment than was ever the case for NATO-sourced equivalents. Namely, the Neo-Nazi junta certainly doesn’t shy away from allowing its forces to use the Soviet military doctrine, weapons and equipment. These have proved to be a far greater threat to the Russian military, particularly on the tactical level. And yet, the successes based solely on the Soviet way of fighting were unashamedly attributed to Western systems, such as the grossly overhyped HIMARS. In the early days of the SMO, Ukrainian ATGMs (anti-tank guided missiles), such as the “Stugna-P” (based on a long line of Soviet/Russian ATGM types), performed significantly better than Western ATGMs such as the “Javelin”, NLAW, AT4, etc.
The same can be said for a plethora of other weapon systems, including regular and rocket artillery, as well as missile strikes. According to Russian military sources, even the recent attack on the headquarters of the Russian Black Sea Fleet was carried out by using the R-360 “Neptune” missile (essentially a deep Ukrainian modernization of the Soviet-era Kh-35). And yet, the mainstream propaganda machine was quick to attribute the strike to the Anglo-French “Storm Shadow/SCALP EG” cruise missile. However, Russian SAM (surface-to-air missile) systems have been quite successful in shooting down both ballistic and cruise missiles provided by the political West. In other words, Soviet/Russian warfighting is superior because it was built/conceptualized for war, while its Western equivalent is extremely efficient during military fashion weeks and in Hollywood.
Drago Bosnic, independent geopolitical and military analyst