Mark Sleboda on the new reality unfolding in Ukraine after Russia’s Kharkov retreat

“On the Barricades” s05e30

Loud in the press this week has been the major development in the NATO-Russia proxy war in Ukraine, what is described as a massive “Russian defeat” in the Kharkov region of east Ukraine. Russia’s manpower-lite and artillery-heavy military formation was forced to organize a withdrawal from Kharkov, facing multi-axis and casualty-heavy attacks from the Kiev forces, which unlike the now-destroyed Ukrainian military of some months ago, are fully equipped and operated as a NATO army manned by Ukranians. Despite evacuation efforts, this leaves behind Eastern Ukranians who will pay brutally with their lives as the Kiev bureaucracy implements what it has already announced as cleansing for anyone deemed a Russia-collaborator. There is now a massive movement of both NATO-Ukrainian and pro-Russian military building up in the south and south-east, preparing for a storm in the next weeks.

To assess this situation, “On the Barricades” has the pleasure of bringing repeat-guest Mark Sleboda onto the show for a two-part series this weekend. Mark is a former US Navy specialist, military expert, and academic who attended the London School of Economics before becoming a senior lecturer at Moscow State University.

In this first episode, hosts Maria Cernat and Boyan Stanislavski enlist Mark’s military analytical expertise to help piece together interpretations of the events in Kharkov, and to dissect the big questions that follow. He tells us about what’s happening on the ground, what military entities are engaged, what the events represent in terms of the Moscow and Kiev-NATO strategy, and what changes to the dynamic could come out of this now unstable balance of forces. We also hear updates about the role of Belarus in the war, the relevance of the renewed Azerbaijan-Armenia conflict, as well as the general mood of the Russian population toward the Putin regime and their attitude toward escalating the conflict to a full-out mobilization for war with NATO.