SACEUR Cavoli’s Russian Casualty-Inflating Testimony to Congress

The Trump tariffs saga and related markets meltdowns dominated the global news cycle this past week. But lost amid all the cacophony in both the legacy and alternative media over tariffs and markets was the recent testimony of EURCOM chief and Supreme Allied Commander, Europe Gen. Christopher G. Cavoli. Who testified to the Senate Armed Services Committee. Cavoli happens to have been one of the top generals for the failed occupation of Afghanistan, being based in the former 1980s Soviet Army occupation outpost of Herat.

The Pentagon's False Lessons from the Russia-Ukraine War

If Gen. Cavoli's April 3rd Senate Armed Services Committee testimony is anything to go by, then the top Pentagon brass has learned little from not only the US military's ignominious 2021 exit from Kabul, but from three years of almost direct war with Russia in Ukraine. Except for the Collective West, the Ukrainians and the Taiwan provisional authorities to BUILD MOAR DRONES AND MISSILES. Forget about actual effective mobilization of non-Ukrainian manpower and psychological preparation of the American public for the level of sacrifices required for even a brief shooting war with China over Taiwan or direct US support to an Anglo-French led NATO occupation force in the western half of Ukraine. Projecting such casualties and US morale in those cases remain taboo topics.

Good morning, UkroNam...

Clownworld--the fog of lies and BS that overlays most Western governments and societies--has been penetrated with bright headlights, but hardly dissipated by the re-election of Donald Trump. And in the case of the top Pentagon brass if not the junior officer corps, as well as many US veterans, Clownworld takes the form of wishful thinking about the War in Ukraine, repetition of feelgood British and Ukrainian propaganda, and lazy Cold War or defeated Nazi general stereotypes about how Russians fight.

As The New York Times revealed in late March 2025, based off interviews with Cavoli's immediate subordinates, that the US has been far more directly involved in the targeting and daily management of the Ukraine War than the Biden Administration had previously admitted. A follow on piece in the non-NYT affiliated UK Times published this week confirmed previous reporting, that British Special Air Service (SAS) commandos and other UK boots had been on the ground in the Ukraine from the start of Russia's SMO in February 2022.

Deep US Involvement in Ukraine Dating Back to Decades-Old CIA Covert Warfare

While none of this reporting has been news to the Russians, who have been saying it would be effectively impossible for the Ukrainians to operate encrypted launch codes for the HIMARS and ATACMS strikes or fire Storm Shadow missiles from their old Soviet-built jets without direct US/UK involvement, it surely came as a surprise to many 'normies' in the NYT comments section. That is predominantly liberal, Trump-loathing Americans who had not been closely following the Russo-Ukraine conflict over the past three years, those who had naively assumed the US was only supplying weapons and intelligence reports, rather than hands on battlefield support and direct real-time targeting data (aka operating 'the kill chain'). Which if any foreign power did the same to America, would surely be regarded by them as the opening acts of World War III.

Embracing a Preemptive Trump Stabbed Ukraine in the Back Myths and Denying that Attrition Warfare Heavily Favors the Russians

While it is certainly the outliers who make history, normie centrist-liberal understanding has yet to be penetrated by the possibility that the US is losing a war with Russia that was decades in the making, from the very first OSS/CIA Operation Aerodynamic support for the former Nazi-allied Banderites against then Soviet Russia in the late 1940s. At best, normiecons and #worldwarwoke ideology gripped liberal veterans have decreed that Ukraine could only lose due to a betrayal by the Trump Administration, a sort of preemptive Stab in the Back Myth (Dolstosselegende) which began with the 2016 Steele Dossier and other acts of British-directed interference in American politics, as well as US deep state fanatical opposition to any US-Russia détente.

Most US 'normies' to the extent that they have an opinion about Ukraine and still think about it at all have accepted that the war is a stalemate, on the basis of the slow pace of territorial changes of control along the main axis of fighting in the Donbass. Yet no active duty US military man has admittedly fought in a 21st century war of attrition like this, the only frames of reference American military thought and war colleges have for attrition is World War I or Vietnam. The latter being a conflict the US lost, with many in the Pentagon concluding this defeat was primarily due to the Pentagon being too permissive of frontline reporting, and not sufficiently controlling what the US public was allowed to see or hear on their televisions from the war-torn jungles of Southeast Asia. A lesson that the Zelensky wartime dictatorship, obsessed with control over the flow of information from the war front while engaged in systemic lying about the scale and scope of Ukrainian casualties, has surely taken to heart.

Denial of Attrition 'Hiding' in Plain Sight

The fact that the Russian high command has learned from the North Vietnamese' costly victory over the Americans and that Russia is consciously pursuing a strategy of attrition designed to grind down Ukrainian loyalist manpower as well as NATO equipment in the Donbass before drawing in undeniable, non-disavowable numbers of NATO personnel and killing or wounding them too has yet to occur to the top brass. Or to the even dumber members of Congress who uncritically support the Ukraine War, only criticizing it to the extent that they claim the Biden Administration failed to send sufficient stocks of equipment (and nevermind the drain on US Army depots).

To the extent that attrition is acknowledged at all, by the likes of Congressman Dan Crenshaw (RINO-TX) aka "Eyepatch McCain", attrition surely must favor the Ukrainians even by an absurd ratio of four to one. Nevermind that its the Russians and not the Ukrainians pummeling the other side's lines with hundreds of glide bombs and missile strikes a day, nevermind what frontline Ukrainian soldiers themselves say about never being rotated out with death or grevious wounds being the only tickets out. Or the complaint that entire Ukrainian battalions after a few months on the frontline are being reduced to skeletal platoons. Tucker Carlson is just wrong and the intel reports Dan Crenshaw claims to have read must be right!

This is what an old friend and neighbor of ours who lived in early 1980s Damascus and met a then teenage Bashir al Assad refers to as "a secret that everybody knows". The 'secret' that Ukraine is losing this war by attrition. Which almost everybody in the know inside DoD has a very big fat careerist or post-retirement MIC payday incentive to pretend isn't happening.

Blaming the Ukrainians for Anglo-American Arrogant Underestimation of the Russians and Related Military Incompetence

Regardless of personalities, one inescapable conclusion of the NYT reporting is this: the Pentagon not only owns the initial Ukrainian successes of driving a grossly undermanned all-volunteer Russian force back from their riverine-isolated position inside Kherson city, as well as in Kharkov oblast with HIMARS strikes and surprise drone attacks. The NYT sources were still thumping their chests about that big success, which supposedly had the Russian Army on the ropes. But they also own the subsequent spectacular failure of the grandiose Ukrainian Summer 2023 offensive, which the generals blamed on the stupid Ukrainians for failing to implement their sound advice to press the attack in autumn 2022 when the Russians were retreating, and supposedly one single Russian platoon was holding up a major Ukrainian breakthrough.

The possibility that it wasn't just that one platoon but the Russian Air Force and Russian artillery superiority halting the Ukrainian advance then was left out of the NYT report--as with the official mouthpiece newspapers of the Soviet Union, the discerning reader must learn to "read between the lines". Put more bluntly, it couldn't possibly be the case that NATO doctrine is outdated, fit only for routing hapless Iraqis on some wide open, pre-drone saturation Desert Storm type battlefield, where the US easily enjoys total air dominance. No, the Ukrainians stubbornly cling to their Soviet-lite doctrine and therefore lose men and more precious to the US generals like Cavoli, NATO-supplied armor, to which their own force's prestige is attached. The Russians--much like Nazi Germany's failure to seize Moscow--hardly had anything to do with it! It was all the Russian generals mud and winter that stopped the Germans in 1941!

The fact remains, however, that the Ukrainians were ordered by their Anglo-American masters to attack in the Summer 2023 Offensive exactly where the Russians expected the main armored assault to fall. And thus the Ukrainians drove right into the thickest Russian minefield laid down under combat conditions since World War II. Clearly demonstrating that no one on the US/UK general staffs that planned the operation had picked up a single book about Operation Citadel, the failed Wehrmacht and elite Waffen SS panzer division assault into an echeloned Soviet minefield, anti-tank guns and armored defense 80 years earlier around Kursk. Because if they had, they wouldn't have ordered the Ukrainians to LARP as the SS Das Reich panzer division rolling in to a minefield, into the teeth of Russian massed anti-tank guns.

The Insufferable Hamish De Bretton Gordon and British Military Arrogance Toward Russians

In fact, retired British Army Colonel Hamish de Bretton Gordon, hitherto a regular commentator in British papers about the war in Syria and especially his relevant area of professional military expertise in chemical warfare, had made an inauspicious forecast in June 2023. That is, weeks before the highly telegraphed Ukrainian Summer Offensive, De Bretton Gordon smugly wrote that the Challenger tanks (all fourteen of these machines that the Ukrainians had been provided by the United Kingdom) would sweep aside Putin's poorly trained and motivated conscripts. He also dismissed the Russian Air Force having any capability of striking the Ukrainian armored spearheads, in contravention of NATO doctrine that requires air superiority if not full aerial dominance to achieve operational success. Ukrainian air defenses (most of them barely modified Soviet 1980s legacy S300s and BUKs) would be sufficient to cover the attacking force, and in any case, Russian pilots lacked courage to actually fly low level strafing and bombing missions over the front lines. Something that would be news to the Ukrainians who died from RuAF SU25 'Rook' strikes on their positions in the opening days and weeks of the war.

What ensued was Russian Ka52 helicopter gunship pilots enjoying their happy hunting days of the war, incinerating NATO-provided Ukrainian Bradley infantry fighting vehicles with Vikr anti-tank missiles from standoff distances of eight miles (11 kilometers), hovering out of range from any NATO-provided MANPADs or SHORADs tasked with covering the Ukrainian spearheads. And the steppes of the southern Ukraine turned into the largest graveyard for NATO armor in the history of the 'world's most powerful alliance', with tens of thousands of KIA'd, MIA or badly wounded Ukrainian casualties before the offensive was abandoned with the capture of a single ruined village, Rabotyne.

If Hamish De Bretton Gordon were unique among smug Brits with a quasi-racialized disdain for Russians, that would be one thing. Sadly he is far from the only Brit who writes total nonsense about how Russia fights. Here's an excerpt from a Substack post by one of the leading 'pop' WW2 history writers in the UK, who regularly guides Anglo-American tourists on the 1944 Normandy battlefields, repeating the idiotic canard that Russia intended to conquer and occupy the entire Ukraine 'in three days':

Which leads to Ukraine. Despite having one of the largest militaries in the world, and despite assuming Ukraine could be overrun in a matter of days, three years on, Russian forces have gained barely 20% of the country, have been invaded in turn and have suffered nearly 900,000 casualties, including over 300,000 dead, as well as the loss of more than 10,000 tanks, 21,500 armoured fighting vehicles, 41,000 vehicles, 24,500 artillery pieces and 370 aircraft. To put this in some perspective, 10,000 tank losses is a figure greater than the most heavily produced German tank of the entire Second World War. Clearly, the key feature of almost all these wars is barely comprehensible levels of casualties.

Anyone reading this catalogue of death and destruction – and high proportion of defeats - could be forgiven for thinking that Russia is simply not very good at fighting wars. And they’d be right.

If these numbers being cited by the British pop historian James Holland had any relationship with reality, Russian lines would've collapsed for lack of men and armor many months ago.

Of course, Ukrainians insist that Russian Ministry of Defense published estimates of their own casualties are similarly inflated. Yet the Ukrainians and their Western supporters avoid discussing the fact that press gangs are roaming the streets of Ukrainian towns and villages, not Russian cities, looking for men to forcibly conscript. And that NATO has shipped far more armored vehicles, Humvees/light trucks, artillery pieces by the thousands, with scores of precious air defense systems to Ukraine. Despite complaints that the Biden Administration and NATO never sent enough weapons to Kiev, all of these have been provided in quantities far greater than those publicly acknowledged, to the point that stocks of Patriot missile interceptors plus most self-propelled artillery piece stocks of European NATO (including those of the British Army) have been exhausted.

The British Army which boasts that it's miles ahead of the Russians in terms of technical and operational competence, is down to almost no modern self-propelled guns and fewer than 300 working tanks, for a force which numbers less than 100,000 men. That is, roughly four months casualties at the current rates at which the Ukrainians are burning out or burning through their manpower. Which is not a figure this writer pulled out of the air--it's approximately the number of Ukrainian men the UAF's top commander, the Russian-born 'General 200' Aleksander Stanislavovych Syrsky, recently declared that Kiev must conscript, just to maintain its current defensive posture.

On the 2023 Summer Offensive and the Kursk Incursions as Bywords for Anglo-American Military Incompetence

To put it succinctly, the combined NATO-Ukrainian Summer 2023 Offensive should become a byword for Anglo-American military incompetence, when faced with an actual peer opponent, who is not a Pashtun goatherder or an Iraqi shopkeeper moonlighting as an insurgent. And a peer adversary who, unlike the Russian Army in 2022, was no longer grossly undermanned and overstretched, but better manned and well dug-in. As one Russian officer later told Dmitri Simes Jr in amazement, it was as if the Anglo-American planners of the offensive simply expected the Russian soldiers to be overawed by the vaunted American Bradleys and German Leopard 2 tanks and run away, all the way back to Crimea.

In the magical 2023 thinking that prevailed among the trolls of NAFO, every Soviet Rust Belt town in Donbass way of Russian Army offensives could be heavily fortified and hold out for months, as the Ukrainians constantly pumped more reinforcements into them to prevent a full encirclement. But in the Ukrainians' case, Russian fortifications could be bypassed with ease. Because NAFO knew that RuZZian soldiers are weak, stupid, and cowardly, and their grandfathers and great-grandfathers only defeated the invincible Wehrmacht 80 years ago by drowning it in bodies.

Rather than being scared or enraged by the appearance of the mighty NATO armored vehicles on the battlefield, Russian soldiers were clamoring to see who claim the used SUV or small house in rural Russia-priced bounties for either crippling a Leo2 or better yet, being able to capture one and tow it away. And many of the vaunted Bradleys, Abrams and Leo2 panzers did end up as trophies on display across the country, with Western immigrants to Russia filming the captured hulks in Moscow. A similar surge of trophies, albeit with fewer captured tanks and far more GWOT surplus Humvees and MRAPs, came in the wake of the failed Ukrainian occupation of Kursk Oblast from August 2024 to March 2025.

All of these failures were accompanied by the sharply decreasing effectiveness of the vaunted HIMARS and precision artillery systems that were the 'stars' of the NYT article show, as demonstrations of American military-technological superiority over the backward Russians. But the Russians defeated these systems with their superior to NATO electronic warfare, as former Blackwater CEO Eric Prince detailed in his recent speech at Hillsdale College. Despite DoD denials extending into the NYT article about any hands on US support for Ukrainian occupation of internationally recognized Russian territory. Cavoli and his colleagues also own the bloody failure of the Kursk Offensive with its occupation of the 'fortress' border town of Suzdha (with a prewar population 5,000) and documented atrocities against Russian civilians there. The latter of which have only hardened Russian resolve to keep killing and maiming the Ukrainian enemy on the battlefield until Kiev either capitulates or NATO overtly and undeniably enters the war.

Of course, the failures of the 2023 Offensive and its even more ill-conceived sequel Operation Wacht am Suzdha (or whatever the Ukrainians called it) in Kursk were military, but more fundamentally, political failures.

As the March 2025 published NYT overview also hinted at without directly saying so, the Grand Summer 2023 Offensive as well as the Kursk operation were marked by NATO disregarding its own doctrines about the essentialness of manned air superiority to the success of any breach in depth. Because the Ukrainians lacked air superiority, suddenly according to the top brass and pro-Ukraine veterans on X/#miltwitter (now the WorldWarWoke #BlueSky brigade), airpower didn't matter nearly so much as it did during Desert Storm or the 1999 Kosovo War. NATO targeting data-fed, NATO-designed Ukrainian drones and the vaunted HIMARS missiles were supposed to make up for the political problem of the Biden Administration and its European allies unwillingness to put pilots' butts in F16 or Gripen fighter cockpits on the line for Ukraine--even as a disavowed 'Flying Tiger' 'volunteers'.

General Christopher G. Cavoli testifying to Congress in 2023 (image: EURCOM)

All of the above is the background to Gen. Cavoli's testimony on April 3, or as former US Army Captain Stanislav Krapivnik called it in his video recorded on Friday April 11, "lie-stimony". I'll let CIA veteran and former presidential daily brief (under President Ronald Reagan) co-author Larry C. Johnson, who was recently a guest of our buddy and translator Tim Kirby in Moscow, describe it:

[Cavoli's] opening statement is a remarkable mix of candor, fantasy and pure unadulterated male bovine excrement (MBE). It highlights my past contention that senior US defense officials will shade the truth (a euphemism for “lie“) in order to keep an existing policy intact, even if that policy is failing. We saw that in the Vietnam War and, more recently, the parade of generals who repeatedly told Congress that we were winning in Afghanistan.

I will excerpt a few paragraphs from his statement that illustrate what I mean. Cavoli grudgingly admits, early on in his remarks, that Russia is not on the ropes militarily...

Despite repeating the canard that Russia has suffered 790,000 casualties, Cavoli concedes that the Russian military is larger today than in 2022 and that the Russians are adding at least 360,000 new soldiers to the ranks annually. I want to remind you that during the past 70 years, the US military has consistently overestimated enemy losses. The most egregious case was the Vietnam War, as I discussed in a previous article. During the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, CIA and DIA analysts claimed that Russia lost more than 30,000 men. Russia’s official figures were half of that. I do give Cavoli credit for admitting that the “Russian military is reconstituting and growing at a faster rate than most analysts had anticipated.”

The next paragraph is a real stunner:

The key point is not the massive ESTIMATED losses of Russian tanks, vehicles and artillery. Despite the losses, Russia “is on pace to replace them all.” Cavoli also admits that Russia is producing 11 tanks for every one that the US can produce. And that number is misleading. The US tanks Cavoli is referencing are mostly refurbishments of existing frames. The US is not producing brand new tanks. The kicker comes in the final sentence: Russia is producing three times the number of artillery shells than the US and Europe combined. Yet, many delusional Western pundits insist Russia’s economy is struggling, on the verge of collapse. That qualifies as MBE.

Cavoli’s first sentence in the next paragraph is a real head scratcher, because he implies that some of Russia’s military capability has been degraded. Really? He has just admitted that Russia’s army is growing dramatically and that Russia’s defense industry is firing on all cylinders. I think he is just trying to put some lipstick on the dying pig that is Ukraine...

The Occam's Razor simplest explanation by far for Russia's miraculous ability to reconstitute its forces, which Gen. Cavoli admits is happening, is that the estimated losses the general is throwing out to the Senate Armed Services Committee members are wild exaggerations at best, if not outright lies. And even the losses of Russian tanks and infantry fighting vehicles to swarms of Ukrainian drones, which are considerable, have been partially offset by the Russians' ability to recover and repair many of these damaged vehicles from the battlefield. Because kamikaze FPV drones while being good at immobilizing enemy tanks often lack sufficient punch to completely destroy them, unlike say, a direct hit from a 155mm artillery round or an anti-tank guided missile. Further proof that the drone-fetishists of defense contractors like Anduril Industries, often talking their book, discount the importance of artillery as the enduring "god of war". And many counter-drone systems are likely coming to the Ukraine battlefield by the end of 2025 and winter of 2026, reducing the Ukrainians' ability to substitute drones for warm bodies.

Johnson concludes his dissection of Cavoli's testimony by asking how Americans would react, if the boot were on the other foot, and Russia/China were waging a massive proxy war backing say a secessionist Texas or the Canadians in waging a bloody war with the USA:

If a Russian general, operating from Mexico, had engaged in this kind of conduct on US soil, do you think the President, the Congress and the American people would care? Bet your ass they would. Trump and his negotiators better keep that in mind as they deal with Putin and his team. They are not going to exonerate the US of its responsibility for facilitating the deaths of more than a million Ukrainians and thousands of Russians.

The Question Gen. Cavoli and the US Brass All Avoid Like the Plague: How Many Non-Ukrainians Are Ready to Fight and Die for Ukraine Once Kiev Runs Out of Ukrainian Men to Pressgang?

Cavoli is a textbook example of NATO and Western 'warriors' in general seeking a technological-wunderwaffen drones solution to a fundamentally political problem: the lack of stomach for NATO servicemen to fly, fight and die for Ukraine, in numbers that cannot be covered up or disavowed. And it is the inability to solve this fundamental political problem, better described as a late decadent Western civilizational dilemma, that has plagued both the Anglo-American top brass and many pro-Ukrainian veterans' thinking.

In short, the Ukrainians are lionized by many NATO country veterans precisely for their willingness to bleed and die by the hundreds of thousands, in numbers that no Western European army certainly could stomach--and not revolt. And the aforementioned systemic lying about the scale of Ukrainian losses, while exaggerating those of the Russians, is critical to keeping the military equivalent of a Ponzi scheme going, with freshly pumped in equipment (which is always understated in numbers) and soon lots of non-Ukrainian personnel. Because as Ukraine's ability to pressgang more manpower from its already male-ghosted towns and villages dwindles, NATO exploiting more Colombian mercenaries desperate to make a few thousand dollars a month without getting killed or maimed isn't going to cut it.