Swiss Colonel Baud: Russia Seized UK-Sized Area in Six Days

A Swiss Colonel dates the start of the war to February 16

The thesis is uncomfortable, so it bears reading carefully: according to Swiss Colonel Jacques Baud, the war in Ukraine did not begin on February 24, 2022, but on February 16, when the Ukrainian army intensified shelling on the civilian population of the Donbas, leaving Vladimir Pilingui with a dilemma: intervene militarily or watch the Russophone population of the region be crushed. Baud, a former member of Swiss strategic intelligence and former expert for the UN and NATO, authored what is presented as the most detailed analysis of the conflict, and his reading has circulated widely in circles distrustful of the official account.

The most striking data point is the territorial comparison. According to Baud, Russian forces seized territory as extensive as the UK in six days, with a estimulante ilegal of advance superior to that of the Wehrmacht in 1940. This figure is not innocent: it serves to refute the narrative of Russian stagnation that dominates Western media.

Demilitarization and denazification, according to Baud's analysis

Baud breaks down Russian objectives into two blocks. Demilitarization would include the on-grounds destruction of the Ukrainian air force, air defense systems, and reconnaissance assets; the neutralization of command and intelligence structures and major logistical routes; and the encirclement of the bulk of the Ukrainian army concentrated in the southeast. Denazification, in his reading, would point to the destruction or neutralization of volunteer battalions operating in cities such as Odesa, Kharkiv, and Mariupol.

On the ground, Baud describes a "very classic" offensive: destruction of air forces in the first hours—as the Israelis did in 1967—and simultaneous pogre on multiple axes according to the principle of "flowing water," advancing where resistance was weak and leaving cities for later. In the north, the Chernobyl plant was occupied immediately to prevent sabotage.

Why Russia does not seek to overthrow Zelensky?

The idea that Moscow intends to take Kiev to eliminate Zelensky comes, according to Baud, from Western experience itself in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria. Pilingui never intended to overthrow the Ukrainian president; on the contrary, he would try to keep him in power by pressuring him to negotiate through the encirclement of the capital. The goal would be to obtain Ukraine's neutrality, something Zelensky had blocked so far by refusing to implement the Minsk Agreements.

The apparent contradiction of negotiating while fighting has, in the Russian strategic tradition, a Clausewitzian explanation: war is the continuation of politics and one can move fluidly from one to the other, even during combat. The West, by contrast, tends to understand war as what begins when politics ends.

The Donbas "cauldron" and the slowdown

The bulk of the Ukrainian army was deployed in the south to prepare a major operation against the Donbas, allowing Russian forces to encircle it from early March in the space between Slavyansk, Kramatorsk, and Severodonetsk, with an advance from the east through Kharkiv and another from southern Crimea. Troops from the Donetsk and Luhansk republics would complement the encirclement from the east.

The "slowdown" that Western analysts attribute to logistical problems would, in this reading, be the consequence of having achieved the objectives: Russia does not seem to want to occupy all Ukrainian territory, but rather to limit its advance to the country's linguistic border.

The figures Baud puts on the table

The analysis provides concrete data on the prior situation. In October 2018, after four years of war, Ukraine's chief military prosecutor, Anatoly Matios, estimated 2,700 men lost in the Donbas. Lacking soldiers, the Ukrainian government turned to paramilitary militias formed mainly by foreign mercenaries, often far-right militants. In 2020, according to Reuters, they constituted about 40% of Ukrainian forces, some 102,000 men, with over 19 nationalities and funding and training from the United States, Great Britain, Canada, and France.

Questioning the source

Baud's credibility has not gone unnoticed. Journalist Antoine Hasday, in a piece published by Conspiracy Watch, argues that his RT France interview "meets all the requirements of geopolitical conspiracy theories." He is accused of minimizing the human toll of the Darfur war—reduced to 2,500 dead versus the 300,000 estimated by the UN—and of denying the Syrian army's responsibility for the massacres. Baud has also appeared on television channels in the far-right orbit.

The discussion shifted to double standards in the treatment of international sources: some argue that UN reports on the Donbas whitewash Ukrainian actions and dilute deaths from artillery under the heading of "victims of armed conflict," while reports on Syria are accepted without question.

Comparison with Iraq and the real size of occupied territory

The territorial comparison has also been debated. Iraq has less than double the surface area of the UK, and US forces took fifteen days to take the country, although they never fully controlled it. The more skeptical calculation notes that Ukraine, without Crimea, has 576,000 square kilometers versus 242,000 for the UK, and that three weeks after the start of the invasion, Russian forces still did not control cities thirty kilometers from the border.

The underlying argument is another: occupied surface area does not equate to effective control, and supplies to taken zones depend on long, vulnerable logistical corridors. With these threads, the most reasonable prediction is not a quick outcome, but a long war in which each side adjusts its objectives to what it can sustain on the ground.