It’s come to light that according to sources from the French Marianne paper, Macron’s entire recent mental manqué resulted from a secret series of ‘assessments’ by the French military that not only provided an absolutely disastrous picture of the actual realities on the ground in Ukraine, but in no uncertain terms even concluded quite frankly that: “Ukraine cannot win this war militarily.”
It’s come to light that according to sources from the French Marianne paper, Macron’s entire recent mental manqué resulted from a secret series of ‘assessments’ by the French military that not only provided an absolutely disastrous picture of the actual realities on the ground in Ukraine, but in no uncertain terms even concluded quite frankly that: “Ukraine cannot win this war militarily.”
Here’s a summary of the report from DDGeopolitics to get a quick gist:
While Macron might be preparing something disastrous, the French Armed Forces are trying to sound the alarm through the French media.
In the French publication Marianne, (https://www.marianne.net/monde/europe/guerre-en-ukraine-endurance-russe-echec-de-la-contre-offensive-ce-que-cache-le-virage-de-macron) which is very close to the French political class, French officers speaking on condition of anonymity spoke about their impressions of the war in Ukraine, the AFU and the Russian Armed Forces.
In summary, the officers speaking to the publication rated the Russian Army very highly. The Russian Army, contrary to Western media, trains its new recruits properly, organizes rotation of personnel and units in the frontline, and always mixes veterans with new recruits so the new soldiers can learn more quickly.
By contrast the Ukrainians blew their best and last chance for victory in the Summer 2023 offensive. The French Armed Forces also estimate Ukraine needs 30,000 - 35,000 new conscripts or recruits every month to keep their force levels steady but currently the Ukrainians are only inducting half that number.
The article assesses that there is no conceivable path currently to a Ukrainian military victory. So it would appear quite plausible that Macron did in fact lose his lunch over the report from trusted military sources, which resulted in his Defcon 1 meltdown and Tourettes-like expectorations on troop deployment. Now he’s even announced plans to allegedly ‘address the public’ on the Ukraine issue tomorrow, per Le Monde paper.
But if the secret military report was damning to the AFU, it was even more damning to the uxorious petit caporal’s Grande Armée itself:
You have to read it twice to believe it—excusing the infelicities of machine autotranslation. Yes, that’s the French military calling itself an army of cheerleaders in the face of the Russian army. “Who is this guy kidding, sending us to Ukraine?” they seem to protest.
The report goes on, no less pessimistically (autotranslation formatting cleaned up a bit by me):
Planning, imagined in Kiev and in the Western staffs has proved "disastrous".
"The planners thought that as soon as the first lines of defense of Russians would have taken place, the whole of the front would collapse [...] These preliminary phases of the fundamental have been made without consideration of the moral forces of the enemy in defensive: that is to say, the will of the Russian soldier to cling to the ground," notes the report referring to "the failure of the planning" of the western camp.That’s called “underestimation”.
And riddle me why, exactly, did the West underestimate Russia so wantonly? Oh, that’s right—because all their projections and estimations were based on totally erroneously cooked data. When you have the SBU reporting 20 shot down Russian planes per week, and 500,000 Russian casualties—or whatever the absurdity is up to now—then, I’m sorry to say, that’s going to very unfavorably skew your expectations and mission planning.
I’ve belabored it before, but I’ll say it again for the new Subscribers: the U.S. military rolled out a whole new initiative tasked specifically with integrating “open source intelligence” into its planning, giddy with possibility at the first, seemingly endlessly fruitful, ‘successes’ of this partnership with rabid pro-UA OSINT autists in the opening stanza of the war.
However, this famously proved catastrophic when reports began to trickle out that much of U.S./CIA mission planning for the grand Zaporozhye CounterOffensive™ was in fact based on outdated OSINT maps of Russia’s defenses. In short: they planned the offensive around Twitter maps made in MS Paint by light-shunning basement dwellers like Andrew Perpetua. Once the Ukrainian spearhead actually reached the lines, they realized things were quite different than their Twitter intelligence had assured, because Russian forces were hip to their over reliance on such unhygienic ‘data’ habits, and proceeded to modify many of the defensive structures and positions.
The report continues with praise for ol’ reliable Soviet legacy gear:
With no air support, and with Western equipment that was disparate and less efficient than the old Soviet equipment ("run-down, easy to maintain, and suitable for use in degraded mode", the report mentions), the Ukrainian troops had no hope of breaking through.Russia, they shockingly confess, is the gold standard of military defense in the world today:
"Today, the Russian army is the 'tactical and technical' benchmark for thinking about and implementing the defensive mode," writes the report.Why, I’m nearly beside myself! We were mocked for two years writing these very words, yet all along NATO military heads were secretly whispering agreement. It feels almost surreal to be vindicated in such fashion.
Notable is the fact that in previous such public distributions, of ISW, RUSI, and other propaganda farm variety, some praise occasionally managed to slip through, but rarely without the accompanying counterbalance of heavy ridicule. “Russian forces showed strength in capturing XXX town, but they did so with meat waves generating 50,000 casualties,” and so on.
But this report has nary a single critique—just simple unvarnished praise for the Russian Army’s demonstrated supremacy.