"The Opponent Must Always be Respected..." - Colonel (ret.) Yuri Shakalov, Sept 7th 2023
Translation of an article analyzing the current situation on Ukraine & the necessity to never underestimate your enemy
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Translator’s Introduction
Below is a translation of a blog post by the retired Russian Colonel Yuri Mikhailovich Shakalov, who blogs under the pseudonym Yuri Turkul. His blog can be found here. The original blog post is titled “Наступление ВСУ выдыхается, но как-то очень и очень медленно.” (The Offensive of VSU is Running out of Steam, but Very, Very, Slowly). It can be found here.
I thought it to be useful and important to translate this blog article because Colonel Shakalov offers a very valuable piece of wisdom, that it is always necessary to respect your opponent. A failure to properly respect your opponent risks underestimating their capabilities, which can result in either outright defeat or a victory that is much more costly than need be. This is a good piece of advice not only for war, but all spheres of life.
Often times, the greatest pitfalls people and countries fall into is underestimating their opponent. This is of course, natural. In order to build up the required confidence for any undertaking it can be useful to denigrate your rival or the challenges you expect to encounter. Having a careless disregard for the dangers ahead is often a useful quality, but if taken too far it can have fatal consequences. On the eve of Operation Barbarossa, not only did the Germans severely underestimate what the Soviet Union was capable of (Hitler famously said of the USSR,"You only have to kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down"), but German military intelligence was not even aware of just how large the Red Army was. The Germans were shocked when they encountered so many T-34 tanks, a tank that was generally superior to own panzers. If it had not been for Soviet Union’s own incompetence, the Germans would not have had the success they had. The lack of respect the Germans afforded to the USSR was a mistake that came at a great cost to not only Germany but Europe as a whole.
In February 2022 the Russians very obviously underestimated the Ukrainians, and paid dearly for this in the early months of the war. But since then the Russians have clearly learned from their mistakes and began taking their Ukrainian rivals very seriously, and as a result Russia is preforming much better than before. If anyone has underestimated their rivals, and continues to do so, it is the West. Western so-called “elites” - policy makers, academics, etc - have nothing but contempt for Russia. And even worse, these people have absolutely no knowledge of military affairs & history. The summer 2023 Ukrainian counteroffensive was very obviously going to be a repeat of the German experience in Operation Citadel - a well anticipated attack against a well prepared defender that is defeated and wastes valuable, limited supplies. Yet I doubt whether anyone in Western policy making circles knows anything about Operation Citadel. Unlike in the Cold War when the USSR was respected as a formidable rival, Russia today is treated like a cartoon villain or a dead horse to be rhetorically whipped with hysterical, moralistic outrage.
I greatly suspect that in the near future European countries will need to go to war against Russia. In my opinion, once the war in Ukraine is over Russia will seek to establish a land bridge with its exclave of Kaliningrad. This potentiality becomes all the more worse when one considers that European countries have thrown away nearly all their military equipment into the black hole of Ukraine and lacks the industrial capacity to replace it in a timely manner. But even worse, Europeans lost their martial spirit long ago. Unlike their European counterparts, the Russians were never so naive to imagine a future without war and conflict. The West not only does not take its opponents seriously, it does not even take itself seriously.
If Europe is to have any success in countering a rearmed and revitalized Russia, Europe must rearm and revitalize as well. Nietzsche’s observations are worth noting here. He said that in his day, no other country had a will equal to Russia’s, and if Europe is to have a future is must become as menacing as Russia. I think the advice of both Colonel Shakalov and Nietzsche should be heeded.
Yuri Mikhailovich Shakalov was born in 1955. From 1990 to 1993 he served as commander to the 61st Separate Brigade of Naval Infantry, a part of the Northern Fleet and based in Murmansk. Today he lives in Belgorod as a pensioner and history blogger. The 61st Separate Brigade of Naval Infantrywas formed in November 1941, and mostly fought in Karelia against Finnish and German forces. In February 2022, the unit invaded Ukraine’s Kharkov Oblast, and held positions south of Izyum on the road to Slavyansk. In the beginning of 2023 the unit was redeployed to Kherson Oblast and was tasked with holding the left bank of the Dnepr River.
“Take away a people’s history and after a generation it will become a crowd, and after another generation - an easily manageable herd”
The Offensive of the VSU1 is Running out of Steam, but Very, Very Slowly.
Our president Putin has stated that the repeatedly advertised counteroffensive of VSU has failed (his statement was made based on the report from the chief of the General-Staff2). And our Minister of Defense General Shoigu confidently confirmed this. Because we can never contradict the words of the Minister of Defense, as to not violate the article against discrediting the army,3 I will not disagree with him, but I will voice my opinion. But I want to remind us of an old Soviet army anecdote.
A young soldier asked his senior company sergeant: “Comrade Praporshchik,4 do crocodiles fly?”
“Well son, they don’t have wings do they?” – answered the senior praporshchik.
“But the commander of the company said they fly” – stated the soldier.
The senior sergeant realized that he was contradicting the company commander and said – “They fly, only above the ground.”5
Yes, and based on statements by the president of Ukraine Zelensky from the middle of December 2022 in an interview with the French television channel TF1, Zelensky stated: “I love Crimea… So with great pleasure I will arrive to our Ukrainian Crimea on the sea. It wouldn’t be bad if we arrived there by summer of 2023.” And the main advisor to the office of the president of Ukraine, Mikhail Podolyak in November 2022, when he promised that in six months’ time he would be on the shoreline at Yalta6 and guaranteed that from there he would air live on Ukrainian television.7 Today we can say that the counteroffensive of the VSU has clearly failed. Zelensky is resting and Podolyak will have to give his interview in Kiev.
But the VSU is still continuing to attack and has had some success on the front. The VSU captured around 155 km2 of our territory, while we only took 60 km2 of Ukrainian territory in Kharkov Oblast.8 The offensive by the VSU has not halted and they have not withdrawn into a defense in depth posture,9 and our forces remain on the defensive. It is far too early to make rosy statements in my opinion.
The war according to television talk shows and the war in the trenches in forward positions – these are very different things. I knew front line soldiers who were still serving in the Soviet army. My two grandfathers came home from the war as invalids. One missing six fingers from his hands, and one without any toes on his right foot. And neither of them talked about the Germans disparagingly. I read memoirs of front line soldiers, who had fought not in the ensembles or served as typographers, but in the trenches. I read memoirs by our generals and nowhere did I encounter insults addressed towards the Germans. Only in the year 1980 did films and books appear depicting the Germans as idiots. It was then the slogan appeared; a medal for fighting and a medal for work come from the same metal.
And currently when I see, as on talk shows, in some mass media and bloggers who write about victory being near, about the demoralization of the soldiers in the VSU, that the VSU only goes on the attack only under the influence of drugs, that our military personnel are cracking Western armored vehicles like there are nuts and running them down, to me this all raises doubts about whether these people understand what war is. Just a little, little more and we will be in Kiev. They are only talk shows and this must be understood. But this causes disgust in me.
I remember the history of the Great Patriotic War. Before the war we had planned to fight on foreign territory.10 A song went as such; “thundering with fire, glittering with the brightness of steel…”. But the years 1941 and 1942 showed us that you should never underestimate your opponent, or you will pay a very cruel price. In 1941 the Germans created several encirclements; at Kiev, at Smolensk and major one in the Baltic countries. After the successful counteroffensive by the Red Army at Moscow in the winter of 1941, our leadership decided a turning point had been reached in the war. The decision was made to carry out attacks across a wide front in 1942. The result for our army was grievous; the 2nd Shock Army was encircled on the Volkhov Front, we were unsuccessful at Rzhev, we were encircled and defeated at Kharkov, defeated in Crimea, the enemy entered Stalingrad and the Caucasus (in 1941-42 we lost 3.5 to 4.5 million men as prisoners, which was even more than the number of Germans we took as prisoner after their capitulation). Our underestimation of the enemy11 ended very badly for our army. It must be remembered, that the Germans reached Stalingrad in a year, while we took three years to reach Berlin. Some of the reasons it took us so long of a journey to reach Berlin are not entirely good traits among us as a people – boosting and underestimation of difficulties.12
The Germans also had planned in 1941 to finish off the USSR within a few weeks, but after their failure to take Moscow they made several conclusions. After Stalingrad, they realized the difference between the Fuhrer’s speeches and war in the trenches.
Thus I think that to have talk shows about the Special Military Operation13 where the enemy is belittled is not very fair, especially when our “regroupings”14 from Kharkov and Kherson are considered, where territory that we liberated in the course of three months was given away in just a few days. Here I will state my opinion: it is too early to speak of victory.
Yes, Russia will win, she has never been defeated by anyone, but we should not spend our time underestimating our enemy,15 the opponent must always be respected. Then losses will be fewer and victory will come sooner.
Dear reader. If you are interested in the history of the Russian army, the history of the Cossack hosts (there were about 50 of them in all of Russia’s history) and irregular formations made up of the various peoples of Russia, subscribe to the channel and you can find in articles in the category section on this channel, about the Cossack communities, about irregular formation of the peoples of Russia. You will find out how the officers prepared for these wars and other interesting facts from the military history of Russia. (The link again, for interested readers)
Armed Force of Ukraine (Вооружённые Силы Украины)
General of the Army Valery Vasilyevich Gerasimov
In March of 2022 Russia adopted censorship laws criminalizing any speech that “discredited” the army. In other words, in Russia it is a criminal offense to say or publish “fake news” about the armed forces
Rank equivalent to a NCO
The meaning of this anecdote is that when your superiors forbid you from contradicting them, the only possible way to tell the truth is to put it in a way that outwardly agrees with them. Thank you to Theognis of Megara for explaining this to me.
A popular resort city on Crimea, on the peninsula’s southern coast
Source provided by Shakalov: https://dzen.ru/a/ZPZ_yRpdEnCdoyKA
Original says: “не ушли в глубокую оборону”
Both the General Staffs of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union had planned to never fight a war on their own soil, and instead all conflicts should be preempted and fought on foreign soil. There were several reasons for this. If a war was fought in foreign territory, then the Russian Empire or Soviet Union would be spared from any damage inflicted upon local infrastructure, population settlements, etc. But the chief reason was that both the empire and USSR feared that the restive non-Russian populations on the frontier would side with the invader, and thus to prevent a foreign enemy from joining forces with an internal rebellion, all wars were to fought beyond the frontier. It also should be worth noting, that on the eve of Operation Barbarossa, the Red Army was deployed in an offensive manner, and this partially is what allowed the Germans to achieve such amazing success during the operation, because the Red Army was not prepared for defensive actions. See “The Russian General Staff in Asia” by Alex Marshal, and “Stalin and the Struggle for Supremacy in Eurasia” by Alfred Rieber” for more on this
The original term used here is “Шапкозакидательство”. I had to research this term, and the best explanation I found was: “There was even a term "shapkozakidatelstvo" most accurately reflects a false idea of the enemy.”
“бахвальство и шапкозакидательство”
The political correct term for the war. Also known as SMO (СВО)
Russia was forced to retreat from these regions, but the Russian Ministry of Defense described the actions differently
но шапкозакидательством заниматься не стоит
I thought the guy made sense until "Russia will win, she has never been defeated by anyone" which is doubly delusional. Russia has low odds of wining this war and it has lost plenty of wars.
Maybe he says the occasional stupid stuff so he will seem patriotic?