Bombing The Crimean Bridge & Threatening Belarus Were Strategic Miscalculations

In hindsight, those two supplementary steps in support of their plans to invade Novorossiya – the Crimean Bridge terrorist attack aimed at crippling Russia’s military logistics and threatening Belarus in order to divide Moscow’s focus – totally backfired for Kiev and its NATO patrons.

The Ukrainian Conflict has taken an unexpected turn in recent days after Belarus accused Kiev and its NATO patrons of threatening it. Minsk claimed that they’re plotting an attack, to which end they preemptively destroyed border infrastructure and mined nearby roads in order to complicate a potential counteroffensive in that scenario. It also raised awareness about how terrorists are being trained in Lithuania, Ukraine, and aspiring regional hegemon Poland. In response, Belarus announced the formation of a joint force with Russia for protecting the western borders of their Union State.

For as much as the US-led West’s Golden Billion might believe that their Ukrainian proxy’s latest moves are to their side’s advantage vis a vis Russia, the fact of the matter is that this was a major strategic miscalculation. Their plans were evidently to open up a second front with Belarus in order to divide the reinforcements that Russia’s poised to pour into the conflict zone through its partial mobilization of experienced reservists. That was expected to weaken the front line along Russia’s newly reunified frontier between its historical region of Novorossiya and rump Ukraine.

From there, a NATO-backed but Ukrainian-fronted invasion force was supposed to smash through the line of control, though perhaps short of being overwhelming in number so as not to prompt Russia into defending itself with tactical nukes as an absolute last resort and thus setting into motion the worst-case scenario for the US’ European vassals. While those plans still remain possible, their prospects for success are now much less than they were just a few short days ago because the Golden Billion inadvertently ended up dividing its own military focus by saber-rattling along the Belarusian front.

Furthermore, Kiev’s suicide truck bomb terrorist attack against the Crimean Bridge last weekend provoked Russia into crippling that crumbling former Soviet Republic’s critical infrastructure through its own version of “shock and awe”, which further eroded that side’s military capabilities along the Novorossiyan front. In hindsight, those two supplementary steps in support of the aforementioned invasion scenario – the Crimean Bridge terrorist attack aimed at crippling Russia’s military logistics and threatening Belarus in order to divide Moscow’s focus – totally backfired for Kiev and its NATO patrons.

The end result is that it’s Kiev’s military logistics that ended up crippled and its own military focus diverted from the Novorossiyan front. On the one hand, this makes their envisaged invasion of Russia’s newly reunified borders less likely for obvious reasons, while on the other, it could also make NATO desperate enough to order their Ukrainian proxies into a last-ditch suicidal assault across that frontier. The second scenario remains plausible since the window of opportunity for them to launch an offensive is narrowing a lot quicker than they expected, meaning that they either do it very soon or not at all.

In a sense, it can thus be said that Kiev and its NATO patrons therefore unwittingly sabotaged their plans for invading Russia by counterproductively creating the conditions that resulted in the crippling of their own military capabilities and the division of their forces between the Novorossiyan and Belarusian fronts. This is an objectively positive outcome though since it reduces the chances that Moscow would be compelled to defend itself through tactical nukes as an absolute last resort by making it less likely that a NATO-backed but Ukrainian-fronted invasion force will sweep across its border.  

The irony is that Russia’s opponents controlled the escalation ladder up until this point since that newly restored world power was only reacting to their moves this whole time as part of the voluntary self-restraint connected to the limited mandate that they were given by President Putin per the terms of the special operation. Now, however, their latest escalation forced Russia to react in such a way as to flip the military-strategic dynamics and thus cripple its opponents’ escalation capabilities by destroying its critical infrastructure in parallel with dividing their forces along the Belarusian front upon bolstering it.

This was a major strategic miscalculation on Kiev and its NATO patrons’ parts. They could have either agreed to de-escalate their proxy war after Novorossiya’s reunification with Russia and related extension of that nuclear superpower’s security umbrella over those territories, taken the initiative by launching their invasion amidst the referenda prior to President Putin promising to protect the locals through all means at his country’s disposal (thus implying tactical nukes if need be), or continued to posture with respect to that aforementioned scenario and thus retained the status quo.

Instead, they blinked after President Putin warned them against going through with their invasion plans, thus sacrificing the military-strategic initiative in the process. By simultaneously orchestrating their terrorist attack against the Crimean Bridge along with threatening Belarus, they ended up provoking Russia into crippling their escalation capabilities by destroying Ukraine’s critical infrastructure together with reinforcing the Union State’s western border and thus dividing Kiev’s invasion forces in the process. The results clearly weren’t what they intended, which thus makes it all a major strategic miscalculation.