The Pope will soon canonize Zelya because a requisite number of gauzy miracles have happened in his presence, including incapacitated soldiers able to walk again after merely seeing him. Medjugorje-caliber acts of divine healing have manifested, all wreathed in clusters of Raphaelesque clouds. The soldiers who were able to rise up from their hospital beds and walk have exhorted Zelya to keep the war going. They view him not as a false prophet presiding over false hopes, but a wonder weapon, able to bring victory to the Ukrainian people.
>A new video showing a Ukrainian Su-25 utilizing the French AASM Hammer missiles against Russian forces:
It is the end of the third, nearly entering the fourth year of a war launched with the explicitly stated purpose of "demilitarizing" Ukraine.
Read the above sentence several times, remember the stated goal of "demilitarization", draw your own conclusions.
Then also remember that Putin has the power to demilitarize both Ukraine and NATO in Europe in a day, scratch that, not even a day, half an hour, literally. But he prefers to have hundreds of thousands of Slavic grunts slaughter each other in the fields of the Donbass instead of ending it immediately.
Doesn't that make him responsible for what is happening then, and shouldn't he face some consequences?
Starting from a certain level of power, people actually completely stop being responsible for their actions before people, with rare exceptions such as revolutions and coups
Responsibility? Zelensky? Biden? Neocons? Zionists? NATO? CIA? Musk’s Starling? Blackrock? The Taxpayer who funded this war 180 billion so far, did I forget someone?
1) Moscow had full control of Ukraine in 1991. Who in Moscow allowed/caused (it was really the latter) the breakup of the USSR, and are those people responsible for what happened after that? Which was obvious to everyone -- if you go back in time, you will find plenty of open discussion in Russia about how there will be a war with Ukraine one day already immediately after the USSR collapsed. Obviously those people are responsible.
2) Moscow still was largely in control of what happened in Ukraine circa 1999/2000 when Putin took power. Then we get the Orange revolution in 2004/2005, then open Banderization started under Yuschenko, then nothing was really done to reverse it under Yanukovich, then the Maidan came, then Putin sat on his hands for another eight years until 2022. Isn't Putin at least a tiny bit responsible for those developments given that they all happened under his watch? Again, compare where things were when he took power and where they were on the eve of the SMO.
3) Then Putin half-assed the early phases of the SMO (or outright sabotaged it, if you really want to go there, by shackling the Russian army in terms of what it was allowed to do), and after that he switched back to his usual sitting-on-his-hands mode, which continues to this day. While hundreds of thousands were dying, and continue dying.
All of this is happening while he has a literal magic button he can press and make it stop in a day.
nonsense. Putin's internal situation was fragile. Now it is solid. His strategy has been almost perfect by the time being. Sure, you would have done it better.
It is the exact opposite actually with regard to internal stability.
Internally prior to the SMO there were the pro-Western traitors, but Putin had the support of the patriots.
Right now the pro-Western traitors have not gone anywhere, in fact they still drive policy to a large extent (as evident by the inexplicable self-defeating conduct of the Kremlin) but the patriotis have the knive sharpened for Putin too.
Externally the situation is also much worse. Nobody has any respect for Russia now. Or fear of it. Compare to the situation prior to the SMO
Agree with your comment on the complete idiot. Anyone with a brain knows and appreciates the incredible patience and competence shown by Putin and the Russians before launching the counterattack in Feb. 2022 they knew full well would bring on the full fury of the Anglo-American-Zionist Empire and their proxy Neonazi thugs in both Ukraine and Israel.
Zero Russians or Ukrainians, because the order would be to annihilate Poland and Romania as logistics bases, perhaps a few other NATO countries too (several of them absolutely deserve it).
Then NATO ends as an organization, as does all support for Ukraine, because nobody left alive will be willing to serve as a platform for the US to attack Russia from knowing that the Kremlin is not bluffing.
Ukraine will be dealt with at Russia’s leisure after that, with minimal losses.
How many Poles and Romanians (and Finn,. Germans, Danes, etc.) die nobody in Russia should care about — they dug their own graves with their actions over the last not just few decades, but centuries.
And the Kremlin should absolutely not care about that -- the Kremlin's duty is supposed to be to protect the lives of Russian people. What are nukes for if then there is still a large conventional war in which so many people die, on Russian territory too? They exist precisely to prevent that. Use them.
>Luckily we have Putin and not you in power
Lucky for you from your cushy situation somewhere in the West. The now numbering in the six figures dead Russians and just as many left permanently crippled, as well as their families, might be of a different opinion about how lucky they were Putin is in power.
And of course there would be no reply whats ever, certainly not a nuclear one just an instant tale between the legs of people who are just dying to be given a reason to scorch the Earth.
Of course there will be no reply, that has been gamed out extensively.
The only reason the US and the UK have escalated up to this point is that no nukes flew in the other direction. The moment they do, it will stop immediately.
Nobody in DC will sacrifice any US cities for Poland and Romania, the whole Article 5 thing is a complete bluff when it comes to nukes.
There was a major downside in doing it until last month -- it would have untied the hands of the US to deal with its own enemies using nukes, unless Russia would have stepped in to defend them with nukes (i.e. what the US is not sincerely planning to do for the NATO vassals, with the same logic and considerations applying in reverse). But then Russia just walked away from its oldest and most important ally (Syria) without trying to defend it even conventionally (even though that was in fact a good moment to solve the millednium-old geopolitical problem that is Turkey). So that whole point is moot now and it simply doesn't matter anymore. There are only two allies left -- Belarus and North Korea -- and Belarus is both under the Russian umbrella and has its own nukes too, and North Korea is capable of taking the US out on its own in a retaliatory strike if it comes to that, so it doesn't need full Russian protection.
What is left to lose then other than oligarch business interests in the West?
Syria refused to defend its own self in the end, and Russia couldn't make them.
Agreed that Russia should have made 'demonstration' strikes on the attacking countries. They didn't, and now it's clear to NATO that Russia has no red lines. This demonstrated weakness is going to lead to many unpleasant events for Russia in the near future.
Syria refused to defend itself, that much is true, but that came after years of being effectivey abandoned by Russia. The US and Turkey occupied the most important parts of the territory and Russia refused to help with recovering them.
People in the comment section just crave a long, bloody spectacle like in ancient Rome, watching gladiator fights. They’re here for the show, the drama, the carnage, and their own amusement. They couldn’t care less about the people perishing in this war. In fact, I am sure some of them, even those ZAnon types wish more deaths, especially when it involves Russian men. It’s grotesque, absurd, and utterly bizarre
But let’s not forget where the blame truly lies. The root of all this chaos is the comprador Russian government, the treacherous oligarch class, and the inept communist administration of the past. It’s a collective failure that brought us to this grim reality
GM, please keep writing. Watching you rile up these ZAnon types is, in its own twisted way, absolutely hilarious
>They’re here for the show, the drama, the carnage, and their own amusement. They couldn’t care less about the people perishing in this war. In fact, I am sure some of them, even those ZAnon types wish more deaths, especially when it involves Russian men
I've made that point myself many times. The truth of the matter is that the ZAnon types deep inside hold the same "worthless snow ni**ers" view of Russian people as the openly Russophobic Westerners. It is quite obvious when you seriously analyze their behavior. And that applies to the popular "alternative media" commentators too. Just think about how many articles there have been decrying the plight of the German economy (it's a constant thing), and then think about how many times you heard it mentioned that at least 150,000 people from Kursk were made internal refugees after the invasion (zero, that just never happened in those people's universe). Tells you all you need to know regarding who matters and who doesn't, doesn't it?
The dead and crippled just don't exist either. And the Ukrainians are at least showing them -- it's a matter of twisted pride for them -- but on the Russian side they are much more invisible. I remember seeing some time ago a Ukrainian living corpse -- full quadruple amputee, just the torso remaining, with his eyes blown out too, in his 20s or 30s (what kind of life is that for decades after?) -- and everyone was mocking him for losing everything for Zelensky. My reaction was "there are such cases on the other side too, you morons, what did they die for when the Kremlin refuses to even allow them to fight without their hands tied behind their back?", but nobody thinks about that being the reality for Russians too.
Also, until some time last year you didn't really see the consequences of the war in the form of people missing limbs on Russian streets. Now you do. And I also didn't see comments such as this one on Russian military Telegram channels:
Dialogue in the canteen of a military triage hospital:
- Oh, bro, you're missing a left leg, and I'm missing a right one, we need to go to the store together. We'll buy one pair of shoes for both of us (laughs)
- What's your size?
- 43
- and I'm 44
- Damn, I need to find another partner )))
That's the atmosphere in triage hospitals.
=========
But now it is increasingly common.
>and the inept communist administration of the past
Not all of them though -- the ones after Stalin. If only Stalin was in charge now...
I think I might be falling in love with you. 😊 Joking aside, you’re absolutely right in what you’ve said, and I share the same thoughts. Despite his mistakes, like weakening the Russian Church and delivering a significant blow to Russian culture, morality, and faith, Stalin was one of the greatest statesmen in history. Calling him a hero wouldn’t be an exaggeration. He didn’t hesitate to send his own son to his death for the sake of his country. Compare that to the Russian leaders who came after him, who betrayed their country without a second thought for the sake of their mistresses’ villas in the West. What an irony…
I’ve been reading the things you’ve write for long time, and I truly enjoy them. However lets be clear. There is no hope for Russia. Without a military coup, patriotic people will never take charge of Russia. And let’s face it, there will never be a coup, because the United States monitors the Russian army down to the lowest-ranking toilet cleaners. The moment any serious coup attempt arises like in 90s, America will immediately collaborate with the comprador elites and local traitors at the top to snuff out the spark before it ignites. In short, there’s no realistic chance for Russia to rid itself of the vampire-like comprador elites and the cancerous collaborators running the country.
But at the very least, people like you should have children. If you and others like Strelkov don’t, there’s a real danger that future generations will never know a true Russian. You and men like you are a dying breed. Over the years, the Russians I’ve met or had the chance to interact with were so mediocre that it’s hard to describe. After meeting them, I finally understood why the Soviet Union collapsed and why Russia is in such a dire state today. I encountered people who were shockingly ignorant, materialistic, greedy, and sly in the worst ways. Of course, it’s unfair to generalize based on bad examples, but I can’t help but think that Russia’s bravest men, good men died during the Great Patriotic War. Many of those left behind were the ancestors of the same type of people I described—cowards, traitors, and dishonorable individuals. These were the people who chose to run and preserve their worthless lives rather than defend their country.
The same thing is happening now. Russia’s most honorable sons are dying. The brightest, most promising, and most courageous young men are either losing their lives or being maimed so severely that they’ll never marry, or women won’t even consider them. While they pay the ultimate price, traitors in Moscow and St. Petersburg are partying in nightclubs. Just last year, Turkey and Egypt broke records for Russian tourist numbers. Russian women, in particular, squandered what little money their country had left on Mediterranean vacations with Muslim men. Isn’t it fascinating?
During the Great Patriotic War, the Soviet Union paid a tremendous price, but at least those on the frontlines found solace in knowing that everyone behind the lines was working tirelessly in factories, doing double shifts. Now, there’s none of that solidarity or shared sacrifice.
As an older brother figure, I want to give you some advice: you absolutely must get married and have a lot of children. The root of your country’s problem is that patriots die with few or no descendants, while traitors or retards continuously reproduce, filling future generations with their cowardly, greedy, stupid, dishonest, and dishonorable lineage. It would be wonderful if the next generations had at least a few real Russians left among them.
I’ll continue reading your writings, and please don’t let rude replies get to you. Those who reply rudely aren’t even human, in my eyes. At the very least, I don’t see them as human
>Without a military coup, patriotic people will never take charge of Russia. And let’s face it, there will never be a coup [...] America will immediately collaborate with the comprador elites and local traitors at the top to snuff out the spark
It's actually worse than that in terms of potential consequences -- remember what happened the last time a military coup was attempted? That was August 1991. The 1993 situation wasn't quite a military coup, and that one was indeed snuffed out the way you describe it. But in 1991 it was botched and ended up the trigger for the final dissolution of the union.
Putin and United Russia are so deeply entrenched now that if we run the decision tree of a coup, it is potentially a very, very bad idea in terms of the potential for dissolution of the federation. Presumably a lot of the local governors in such a scenario will declare loyalty to Putin and United Russia, and then it will be a struggle between the pro-coup and loyalist regions. Then the West will start air lifting soldiers and materiel to support whoever suits them (after all, they already tried that in 1918, and if they had had airlift capabilities back then, it would have gone much better for them; now they do), and their goal of breaking up Russia will be achieved.
I don't have internal information, but I assume that the military has thought about doing a coup many times already, and every time they analyze the consequences, they come to the same conclusion -- that it will have to be executed with extreme precision and decisiveness, or the above scenario will unfold. Then they get cold feet and abandon the idea.
>Russia’s most honorable sons are dying.
That is exactly what is happening indeed. Negative selection. And it indeed happened during the GPW (on the grandest scale), and prior to that during the Civil War too, which is largely forgotten now. The Civil War ended up purging through warfare a lot of the most passionate communists as well as the patriotic people on the side of the Whites (most of the not so patriotic ones departed for the West). And then the GPW wiped out a whole generation, from which there was never any recovery after that demographically and in terms of the lost creative and institutional potential.
Which is why it was an absolute must never to allow a repeat of such events.
Karaganov makes that point all the time, but often kind of in passing, when he should be stressing it constantly. Including publicly in Putin's face when they have those exchanges, but he tries to say it using parables instead, which is not working very well. He was quite happy to see the nuclear doctrine changed, but while the doctrine changed in words, nothing changed in practice -- it has been violated every day since it was adopted, and... nothing.
From one viewpoint it is, but what explains the moral (and cognitive?) weakness that displays no defense or resistance to their corrupt and deceptive wiles?
Look up the second Chechen war and how your "peaceful" patient Pootie ran that affair. The whole capital was razed to the ground with no concern for civilians, infrastructure, or " morality", Yet in Ukraine Pootie boy is inexplicably a "Hippie" . Something doesnt compute.
Let's say you have a knife and a gun. You're attacked by a knifeman. Are you impotent if you simply shoot him in the face instead of giving him an equal chance to stab you?
Your enemies will try to convince you a strong response means you're weak. Ignore them.
There have in fact been a number of covert nuclear strikes. Including by Russia in Ukraine and by NATO against Russia. On the small side and on plausiblly deniable targets (ammo depots primarily), but for everyone who is willing to believe what is right in front of their eyes rather than the official version (drone debris, ammo depots) it is clear what has been going on.
That taboo has been broken within the circles of the people making the decisions a long time ago.
Regardless, by the standards established during the Cold War events that would and should result in a guaranteed nuclear annihilation of NATO in Europe within minutes are happening many times every day, and it has been like that for many months now.
So is that the standards established during the Cold War were unreasonable, or that Putin is not doing his job?
Russia three years ago was SO much weaker, militarily, economically, geo-politically, and in terms of internal and international support for the war that is now going on. It has grown so much stronger in all these areas. Russia initially struck decisively in some very threatening areas of biological warfare and nuclear threats, neutralizing them, and then basically held on and endured, without an all-out mobilization effort. And it worked. The partitioning of Russia would now have been a fact had they overextended three years ago.
1) How strong was Ukraine three years ago and how strong is it now?
2) Whose fault was it that Russia was weak three years ago? Who had been in power for nearly a quarter of a century?
And that isn’t even true, Russia is much weaker now than it was three years ago, because nobody fears it, and in the age of strategic nukes being feared is the main source of power. Russia is now a laughing stock that everyone can mistreat however they feel like, or even outright bomb. Look at what Azerbaijan is doing now regarding the plane crash.
Then think who has directly bombed Russia so far. Let’s review the list:
1) The Ukrainians
2) The Americans
3) The British
4) The French
5) The Czech
6) Finland
7) Estonia
8) Latvia
9) quite likely Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan and Georgia too
Lots of others are itching to do it too, and why not, what is to stop them?
The Azeris also killed Russian officers in Karabakh and didn’t even really apologize.
Then there was the Kursk invasion — you have Polish forces there in substantial numbers, and actual military personnel in small numbers from several other NATO countries.
Every single one of these places that does not have its own nukes and was not a part of the USSR should have ceased to exist by now
Every other one that was a part of the USSR should have lost its independence.
If Russia was a serious country. But currently it is not. Whose fault is that?
John Sopko served as the Inspector General for the U.S. in Afghanistan, 2012=2021, and this is from his audit & report on the U.S.’s evacuation, as published in the nytimes on 2 January: “The U.S. government struggled to carry out a coherent strategy, fostered overly ambitious expectations, started unsustainable projects and did not understand the country or its people. American agencies measured success not by what they accomplished, but by dollars spent.”
Sopko summarized “a gaping disconnect between reality and what senior U.S. officials had been telling Americans for decades: that success was just around the corner.”
For Sopko, the question is, “Why did so many senior officials tell Congress and the public, year after year, that success was on the horizon when they knew otherwise?” He lauds DJT as the first president to conclude that the mission in Afghanistan was not essential to national security interests. Sopko urges politicians & the populace to probe whether the U.S. “can avoid similar results in Ukraine, Gaza, Syria and other war zones.”
Sopko notes that “a perverse incentive drove the U.S. system. To win promotions and bigger salaries, military and civilian leaders felt they had to sell their deployments, programs and projects as successes—even when they were not. Leaders tended to report and highlight favorable information while obscuring that which pointed to failure.”
We see the repetition of this, naturally, in Ukraine. Untrue stories get boosted, whether to glamorize Ukraine—like w/ the Ghost of Kiev fiction or the fable of Snake Island bravado & derring-do—or to denigrate Russia—like w/ the fabricated reliance on DPRK troops in Kursk, a lie that gets repeated at every turn. Important military strategies, like whether to retreat or not from unpromising salients, are delayed as everyone in Project Ukraine holds their breath, awaiting the next OTAN summit @ Rammstein or the next G7 meeting in Italy, calendar events where supplemental funding often get awarded. Failures or successes are calibrated to the U.S.-led OTAN timeline—and when it comes to the U.S.-led OTAN timeline there can be only successes, never failures.
Because *failure* does not lead to business transactions. In light of this, “claiming success, whether real or imaginary, is vital to obtaining business contracts.” Sopko reports soberly that “spending became the measure of success.”
Once Congress earmarked funding for military ventures in Afghanistan, the money *had* to be spent, even if the things for which the money was earmarked—like a multi-million dollar building—never got used. To *return* the funding to the public coffers was to admit you weren’t warring hard enough. More money was always being spent to justify all the previous spending, sunk-cost being what it is. Failing to *spend* signaled failure.
We find a correlate of this fiscal excess in the U.S.’s r’ship w/ Project Ukraine. The musical “Evita” captures this perfectly: “When the money starts rolling in, you don’t ask how. Think of all the people guaranteed a good time now.” Mind-boggling billions have washed through Project Ukraine, some of it sloshing back to the U.S.’s shores, enriching military contractors, bankers, Beltway politicians and the Democratic National Committee.
“Important information for measuring the success of initiatives was at times deliberately hidden from Congress and the American public, including NED-associated USAID-funded organizations.” Sopko ultimately describes a situation whereby Afghan ministries were incapable of managing direct U.S. financial assistance. He recommends setting up U.S. oversight agencies to monitor where the funding goes and to carry out periodic audits.
This latter directive won’t fly in D.C., though: the wealth-generating capacity of war is its own kind of victory.
In 20 years, Sopko states that no senior official ever told Congress or the American people that failure was a real possibility in Afghanistan.
The way the U.S. doubles-down on flooding Ukraine w/ weaponry, regardless of the cascading losses, mirrors this, the logic being that wearing Russia down over time will ultimately hand Ukraine a military victory, no matter how much time has to elapse. Nothing supports this irrational calculus. To puncture the delusion, however, means to crater the rosy narrative. The rosy narrative is what’s been propping the U.S. up for decades.
I doubt it is about ”the logic being that wearing Russia down over time will ultimately hand Ukraine a military victory”. It is not an irrational calculus. The cost of the War could be defended if US finally ”vaccinated” Europe, especially Germany, from co-operation and trade with Russia. When the Berlin Wall fell it actually weakened US when the relations thawed and eventually led to western investments in Russia and trade of natural gas/oil.
This War has ruptured all possibilities for a normal relations with Russia for decades to come. And we are not finished yet.
Listen to Trump. He said that tariff will be raised unless Europe starts to buy LNG and Oil from US. He will leave NATO if not Europe pays for ”US (mafia) protection”.
Indeed Trump may prefer peace but he prefers even more America being great again. So while he may not like this war and the US policy of war on Russia and may even try to negotiate peace he will not try to open NS again or lift the sanctions. At least I think that the chance such miracle happens is low.
The more Europe fade into oblivion the better for US. They always envied Germanys industrial strength and economic role in Europe. With Germany way down the list and France toppled in West Africa the chessboard is clear for US/UK Atlanticists supremacy. Big problem with Starmer in UK but it will be solved eventually. The goal is to turn Europe to a market for US not the other way around. 3 years into a War that has cost Russia dearly because of European weapons and soldiers of fortune/advisers in Ukraine will not be forgiven by Russia. So Europe will be mauled between US and Russia.
The Russia-Germany Gas trade was working long before the fall of the Berlin wall. Nord Stream was implemented because Ukraine caused trouble through diverting gas for own consumption without paying for it.
'America' will never "be great again." 30 some trillion dollars of debt, the bloated military/industrial complex, and a political system controlled by narcissistic billionaire plutocrats, pretty much insures that.
"To *return* the funding to the public coffers was to admit you weren’t warring hard enough."
How does one return Magic Mystery Money created out of thin air? Please to be understanding, the US government hasn't been spending "taxpayer dollars" for anything for at least two decades, probably longer, they're just running up the most colossal credit card tab in history.
Tax "revenues" don't even cover the interest. If it were "returned", it would make no difference to the taxpayers, their balls would still be anchored to a debt meat hook.
If you take the time to look up the annual receipts and spending you will see that in recent years tax receipts were between 2/3 and 3/4 of spending. For fiscal year 2022 tax receipts were a little over $4 trillion and spending a little over $6 trillion. Interest was under $1 trillion. Let's put the blame on our government for both overtaxing us and for having to borrow and print obscene amounts to cover their out of control spending.
Did you ever wonder why pundits are always presenting the national debt as a percentage of GDP? That sounds very misleading to me. A much more meaningful presentation would be as a percentage of annual tax receipts, which are the amounts actually available to pay on the debt. Which would put it at about 900%.
“The U.S. government struggled to carry out a coherent strategy, fostered overly ambitious expectations, started unsustainable projects and did not understand the country or its people. American agencies measured success not by what they accomplished, but by dollars spent.”
This covers the entirety of US foreign policy since at least 1812.
it all sounds right to me. I can observe that the same phenomenon accompanies all "post-conflict" situations. We must be shown to have done the right thing with the right outcome. I served in Panama after our invasion and installation of the puppet government we helped into power. We of the political and economic sections were under very obvious pressure to report the positive and can the negative. There were consequences for those who defied this "edict." Labor protests? Don't report on them or minimize them. And so on. It is the art of irreality.
its a business. The Pentagon generals pull billions in dirty money every year. It is a bottomless wishing well, the true cornucopia or corn of abundance. Everybody knows about it but cant do anything, because they have the weapons and are all nine eleventhed and thus act solidarilly. Inversely, the generals wont do anything about others taking their share. The bottom line is a free money mafioso theft system that the rest of the world, especially functional colonies like Germany, Japan, the Emirates, Qatar or Saudi Arabia, actually finance. I doubt Trump can, if he ever wanted to, break this mafia rule over the world. So expect more debt and more nations trying to flee this deadly scheme.
The ranchers and employees have nothing to fear from the cattle. That meme about the nature of our mammal species is perhaps the most accurate metaphor describing reality.
I remain very puzzled why the Ukrainians don't just lower the conscription age to 18, when all their allies are practically demanding it, and everyone knows it will inevitably happen.
Wouldn't calling up 18 year olds earlier rather than later be better, when inevitably they will have to be called up?
Calling up the 18-25 cohort is like eating your seed corn.
This cohort is *already* the smallest demographic in number, of any group ( so the troop numbers they contribute are less than you'd get out of the 30-40, 40-50 cohorts, who are already dead), and dead men father no children.
After they're all gone, Ukraine has no-one to make more Ukrainians (which certain people hold to be a goal of the conflict)
Simplicius has covered this "double whammy" before.
Believe it or not, there are three reasons why Z and company are dragging their feet on this.
1) to "trade" lowering the conscription age for more weapons/money and/or a security guarantee of some kind from the West
2) it'd be politically very unpopular as these are the last group of adult men left relatively unscathed besides the extremely elderly
3) the economy is barely tottering along and would be devastated by losing vast numbers of men age 18-25 (currently below the conscription age limit) who do all the industrial jobs and stuff like construction, transport, utilities, etc.
Because Ukrainians will turn on him en masse if and when he really does, and he knows it. And so do his western handlers, but they are using this an excuse to fend off his calls for their boots on the ground en masse. As in ' we can't send in our own young men to die unless you do the same....and do it first!'
This has been the sorry story of western 'backing' for this dirty war they in fact launched, a battle within the west to shout at Russia from behind some other partner's back. They trip over themselves in this game and it provides some sparse black humour. Right now they are all pushing Trump into the pseudo firing line and crowding in behind him, the odd head popping out from under his armpit to lob some grandiosity or other.
In April 2024, an autonomous American war machine, guided by Collective Biden, churned forward, whipping Congress to authorize $61bn of additional aid to Project Ukraine, regardless of the fact that intel in Kiev had already told the CIA, State Department & NSA by then that Russia was thrashing Ukraine so thoroughly on the battlefield that the war was all but lost.
While knowing that Ukraine’s prospects militarily were nil, Collective Biden told Congress that the war was in a “stalemate,” a narrative which the media boosted for months.
In April 2024, additionally, the expectation was that Joe would win a second presidential term as long as Ukraine *did not lose* the war. Moreover, Collective Biden still held out hope that the judicial assassination of DJT would work; all the lawfare cases lined up ready to kneecap DJT had not played out fully. A second term for Joe was all but assured if they could just maintain the status quo in Ukraine: media wins followed by more funding.
Even though Ukraine could not win, Collective Biden sought to escalate the conflict—and *asymmetric* warfare became the weapon of choice: hybrid attacks against Russia *within* Russia. An attack on an airfield near Murmansk was a manifestation of this, the drones launched by *Ukrainians* in Finland, as was an attack on a rocket manufacturing plant near Smolensk, the drones most likely launched by *Ukrainians* from Estonia. In early August, the Kursk Incursion was a large-scale; e example of asymmetric warfare; the intent in this case was to capture the nuclear power plant & hold it hostage in order to gain an upper hand in negotiations. Sundry targeted assassinations of high-ranking Russian military officials in Moscow or in the Moscow region were also part and parcel of the hybrid war
Success on the battlefield meant that the funding would still flow. As long as Ukraine could sell its media wins, whether asymmetric or not, it could secure another tranche of weapons. The investment had been so massively great that there was no other option: keeping the conflict going, regardless of Ukraine’s prospects, was & is certainly perverse—but when you can’t gain a battlefield advantage tactical nihilism will have to do. Moreover, the proxy, ridden hard and put away wet time after time, did not complain.
When a total defeat of Ukraine became more desirable than a negotiated peace, Collective Biden began the most cynical phase of the conflict: scuttling Ukraine. Since most of the money earmarked in the supplemental aid packages was used to pay for *future* appropriations, Collective Biden needed to keep inking MIC contracts.
The worst possible outcome, in Collective Biden’s eyes, would be an end to the war on Russia’s terms, a victor’s peace for VVP: that could never happen. By April 2024, scuttling Ukraine meant cementing permanent hostility between Europe & Russia, bridges burned so thoroughly on the continent that normal relations could not rebound for @ least a generation but most likely longer.
"cementing permanent hostility between Europe & Russia, bridges burned so thoroughly on the continent that normal relations could not rebound for @ least a generation but most likely longer."
After the destruction the Soviets endured in WW2, I don't think the Russians will be in a forgiving mood anytime soon. Looking East and aligning fully with India, Iran and China seems like the only reasonable way forward. The Euro-nazis have shown their true colors for all to see. Europe will devolve to theme park status like their fish-n-chips gobbling bros have done for decades. Silly me, I actually thought people in Western Europe were educated and had a patina of civilization. Watching these galoots bend at the knee to genuflect before Resident Ice Cream Cone just blows my mind. Trump's prospects? New boss, same as the old boss.
I've not heard this yet, and it doesn't make sense to me: "total defeat of Ukraine became more desirable than a negotiated peace". Could you expound on that?
This money is going into the generals pockets. The US is just a wild loot. I am surprised people dont kill each other in their working places. They probably do. Every day there are madmax scenes in the streets. The police are just execution squads, totally corrupt themselves. It is just a looting spree under the appereance of a nation.
Yes. The late Sergey Dorenko was no prophet, simply a geopolitical realist. I was at a real (STEM, before DEI) science institute half a century back. My professors were the most hard nosed type of realists. The consensus was that the 2020s decade we are now living in would be hell. Why? Because good models predicted now would be the inflection point between population and resources. When global resources per capita begin to decline, there is nothing for it except to fight over who has to die and who has to become poorer. As I was born before Sergey, I have nothing to complain about. Those who don't get killed and are unhappy about getting poorer and less free will be offered 'medical assistance in dying'. Canada is the future model.
First round low, HE. The gunner has preloaded HE and is pre-aiming low, because he is expecting to shoot at infantry in trenches. Pulling the trigger clears the barrel for the next round to be loaded (+1 for that)
Second round low, HE. (-1 for failing to select anti-tank, -1 for failing to raise aim point)
Third round on target, HE (+1 for recovering from initial panic, -1 for wrong ammo, again)
Fourth and Fifth rounds on target, AT. (+1 for finally getting it right, but we're nearly a minute in here)
Sixth round, glancing hit, AT. Possibly trying to hit the second tank, now obscured by the first one.
Note that whoever is in that last in line AFV is really on the ball. He's lighting up potential infantry trenches on the way, and even sends a burst at the second tank as it escapes.
I would posit that it takes multiple rounds of AT to disable armour due to the explosive reactive layer . The first round activates/destroys the e/r layer and after that they get penetration . The trick is to hit twice in the same place or get a shot in where the E/R isn't. Perhaps using HE will trigger multiple E/R packs . Perhaps Simplicius can elaborate...
Firstly this engagement takes places at ranges where you *can* hold aim on the same spot on the target, and expect to hit it.
Second, the return shot that misses/glances (as noted by our host) occurs just *after* the first AT hit, so that tank has taken 2 hits.
On the other hand that *could* have been the dying reflex of the gunner, meaning the AT shell did its job, whether it hit a cleared patch of the hull or not.
I'd further note that Russia knows *exactly* what it takes to penetrate ERA+tank hull in one hit, so one assumes that's what ammunition they supply...
APFSDS is somewhat affected by E/R as it causes a small 'wobble' in the penetrator which reduces penetration to some degree.
The preferred ammo type against other tanks is APFSDS, but you have to have them loaded in the carrousel ahead of time for a quick reload. For this mission they seem to have picked a combination of mostly HEAT and HE rounds to load it with, as only a single APFSDS round appears to have been fired. That makes sense given the mission type.
As I said to @Flabber, HEAT is *exactly* the round type that ERA is designed to defeat, so if you're expecting to face ERA protected armour, APFSDS is the way to go.
Western forces don't even have HEAT available any more (hence the Ukro complaints about Abrams) and very few have HE as a tank round.
Any HEAT in the Russian inventory is there because they don't throw stuff away, it's only use is as a backup or alternative to HE, or against non-ERA protected hard targets.
Only if the attacking/defending infantry are using very old or very under-spec single-charge AT rockets/missiles, which is likely the case as neither side was expecting to face tanks, hence why they sent in tanks. Tandem charge warheads capable of destroying tanks with ERA have existed since about the late '80s, and are decently common these days.
This would be the reason for the turtle tanks and cope cages , Drones would be carrying tandem charges probably too . The technology is developing rapidly and solutions are being worked on continuously . It will be interesting to find out some time in the future what developments have succeeded and which have not. The tanks involved in this encounter are probably very similar ex Soviet design tanks with upgrades .
Turtle tanks are solely for FPV drones of all types, and are meant to create enough standoff distance between the shaped charge detonation and the tank's actual armor as to de-focus the penetrating jet before it reaches the armor. Turtle tanks only work due to the extreme weight limitations of FPV drones preventing them from equipping large enough warheads for the extra bit of standoff distance to not matter. ATGMs and some heftier rocket launchers can easily launch warheads large enough to brute force their way through a turtle tank's armor scheme.
Based on the explosive effects of the rounds, this seems to be the actual order of types of rounds used:
1st: HE
2nd: APFSDS (likely the only one in the carrousel)
3rd: HEAT
4th: HEAT
5th: HEAT
6th: HEAT
7th: unclear, glances of enemy armour, but some indications of a HEAT round
8th: HEAT
9th: unclear, miss
Remember, they only have 20 rounds in the carrousel and pick the types they expect to need in the coming engagement to load it with. Given the mission in question, it's likely they loaded up with HEAT instead of APFSDS rounds, as the first can also be used against soft targets.
The first 3 rounds have identical "explosive effects" 2 into the ground, third off glacis.
Round 4 "white smokes" when hitting the glacis, as does round 5 +6 (which also get nice secondaries, to the cheers of the camera watchers)
Round 7 is weird, on second viewing it is merely a smoke trail, some sort of bad round.
Muzzle blast 8 does nothing down range in the camera view.
There is no 9
HEAT rounds *were* good dual purpose rounds, but are *exactly* the type of round ERA was developed to counter, to the point where there's no point making them, there's better use of the materials involved for other round types.
AT rounds now are almost universally kinetic types (hence the Ukro complaints of the limited utility of the Abrams).
So if you even *suspect* you might encounter ERA protected armour, HEAT is actually a poor choice as an alternative (but a good one as a primary, if you have some to get rid of). Better to load up at least 3 APFDS in the carousel.
Ninth round clearly fired at 2:28. If you can't even spot that, it pretty much says it all. But you manage to top it with this garbage:
"HEAT rounds *were* good dual purpose rounds, but are *exactly* the type of round ERA was developed to counter, to the point where there's no point making them, there's better use of the materials involved for other round types."
There's so much wrong in that statement it's hilarious. I'm not wasting any more time on you, kid.
Even when this war is long over, the dust has settled, and someone has written a comprehensive book about it, I'll never understand it, ever.
I thought the War of Jenkins' Ear was weird, but this one takes the cake. When else in history has a smaller, poorer country been able to go on the attack against its bigger, wealthier neighbor purely thanks to the gargantuan amounts of money and supplies it receives from its allies? Allies that, at the same time, are (virtually) not directly involved in the fight at all?
Utterly bizarre from top to bottom, including Russia capturing 20 sq km per day of Ukrainian territory while simultaneously unable to dislodge Ukraine from its OWN territory for 5+ months.
And economically, Ukraine should be dead in the water, yet it's still a) got a viable currency b) exporting huge amounts of agricultural products (including by sea!) and c) exporting electricity despite a battered power grid. WT literal F
It was a desperate punt to seize eastern Ukraine and all those resources before they went to Russia under the much delayed enforcement of the Minsk Accords. Hell, the Ukrainians even fed the west the story they could topple Russia and get control of all that value.
It is always about resources, Sam, especially for the increasingly stratospherically indebted west that does not have the resource base to back up its paper money. Imagine what will happen once the rest of the world works how to monetise all the real value it is sitting on, all on its ownsome with its own financial system. Where will that leave the tatty old western hegemon?
I'm afraid it's not just about resources, but about very personal revenge, from now generations of offenses by Russian leaders against the desires and sometimes personal wealth of Western oligarchs. If sovereignty trumps property rights, then centuries of faux nobility built from ownership contracts can go up in the smoke of an afternoon.
And then there's the spiritual angle, in which Russia survived the nihilistic kill shot of the 90s and has rediscovered faith. That stands a stumbling block to the replacement of all religions with a neo-pagan priesthood.
So if it wasn't about Ukraine and its resources, it would be able some other flashpoint. Certain people in the West are getting old, and impatient, and feel they deserve to see the realization of generations of work within their lifetime--and maybe to live forever, too, in a transhumanist future. They want it all, now, and the bodies they walk over for that everything are just a squishy foundation.
It may be so, but even if Kursk has no real value, it shouldn't take a year to kick some depleted and exhausted forces from a much, much smaller country.
Shoulda, woulda, coulda but didn't. Things are never black and white. It would definitely assist the Russians with recruitment but must surely be a political thorn.
Allowing Ukraine to stay in Kursk helps Russia to destroy military personell and material and acellerate the collapse of the Ukrainian army. It also diverts military Power from the Donbass Front.
"it shouldn't take a year to kick some depleted and exhausted forces from a much, much smaller country."
That's making assumptions which are not true. The Kiev regime gathered elite forces from nearly the entire front to send into Kursk, it spent big to send the densest concentration of foreign mercenaries anywhere in the war, and it had the direct support of US and NATO special forces. It richly equipped those forces with the best tanks and other gear it had stripped from other units along the front, including gear it had been holding in reserve. Kiev continues to send its best reserves into Kursk. There's no "depleted and exhausted forces" about it.
That's one reason why Kursk is valuable for Russia. It's a monkey fist trap for Kiev. Now that Kiev has stuck its hand into a bit of Kursk province and has grabbed a tiny bit of territory to make a fist, the only way it can withdraw is if Russia shreds the fist, which Russia is doing. Every elite soldier Kiev sent into Kursk to die is one less elite soldier who can defend any of the many towns Russia has taken since Kursk. It's also one less elite soldier left alive to defend against Russian moves deeper into Ukraine as Kiev's defensive lines collapse.
As to "much, much smaller country" that's nonsense which depends on people not knowing the ten year history of the conflict since the US overthrew the democratically elected government of Ukraine, installed a minority, unelected nazi junta in Kiev, and began flooding the new nazi overlords of much of Ukraine with hundreds of billions in money, weapons and direct support.
Russia had a peacetime army, a far smaller force than the highly militarized force which the US had built over the course of eight years for Kiev. Russia was the underdog in early 2022. Since then Russia has greatly expanded its army, but the Kiev regime has also benefitted from hundreds of billions in weapons, training, and the direct support of military personnel from the US and dozens of US vassal countries. That "much, much smaller country" benefits from over a trillion dollars in space infrastructure that includes a dozen ultra high resolution imaging satellites each of which costs more than what the US's latest aircraft carrier costs. About 100K US and NATO military personnel work full time, 24/7, on "back office" tasks essential for combat, such as targeting, building strike packages, and remote operation of missile attacks and drones by land, sea and air.
That's a formidable adversary, and Russia has its work cut out for it advancing along a 600 mile front. Russia can only do that by investing the much more limited resources it is applying to this conflict to those military settings that matter for military success. Overinvesting resources to pry a few square kilometers of almost completely empty land in Kursk is not one of those military settings.
There are some people who blow a fuse about "Kiev has taken and is holding a piece of Russia," but those folks don't realize almost the entire war is being fought on Russian territory. Kherson, Zaporozhiye, Donetsk and Lugansk regions are all Russia, and the Kiev regime continues to hold substantial territory, far larger and more important than a tiny slice of Kursk region, in those four regions. What Russia is doing to liberate Russian territory in those regions is far more important than wasting disproportionate resources to liberate a tiny piece of Kursk, especially when that tiny piece of Kursk is functioning so efficiently as a machine to kill elite nazi forces.
People often forget all the stuff behind the "action" part of the war because it what is seen. The other concern for Russia is they still have to maintain resources and defensive capabilities for the chance of NATO getting directly involved. Like much of the barriers placed around airfields, they are less about a few drones and missiles that Ukraine can toss at Russia and more about minimizing damage in a saturation attack of tomahawks.
Lauding your commonsensical reminder that Lugansk, Donetsk, Zaparozhiye & Kherson *are* Russia. It's not like they are the skim milk version of Russia, while the other regions are whole milk.
Russia is Russia.
BTW: emerging from Zelya’s interview w/ Lex, we learn that Zelya kept trying to tilt the Minsk Accord, perhaps under Macron’s manipulations, to a head-to-head dispute/negotiation between Ukraine and *Russia* instead of its original framework, which placed the fulcrum of the dispute/negotiation between Ukraine and the DPR/LPR.
Zelya told Lex he phoned VVP hundreds of times, and he made it seem on Lex's podcast that VVP was being unreasonable & non communicative [reinforcing the stereotypical trope.]
What Zelya did not reveal to Lex is that VVP told him to phone Denis Pushilin, for instance, of the DPR in order to work matters out.
Lex did not know enough about the fine points of Minsk to challenge Zelya's account.
Kursk is the Russian version of a deer feeding plot in the midwest. The Russians have got to just love how the Ukies keep coming to the killing fields of Kursk. What blooming idiots does it take to just keep sending cannon fodder for the Russians to eliminate. Putin has to be scratching his head at the stupidity of the USSA/NATO. Why would he ever want this war to come to a premature end when he's destroying the weapon stocks of the collective west?
But Axel, if your opponents are going to go to the trouble of shipping--at great expense--their most enthusiastic soldiers and hardware into range of your guns, shouldn't you let them?
It may sounds callous, but the nature of civilizational warfare is to grind the other out of existence. Killing your opponent until they're good and ready to quit is generally on a successful path to lasting peace. Land only has value if it can be exploited; this is the Russian way of war.
The Kursk offensive is good for Russia. Ukraine is sending their 'least exhausted' units to Kursk, at the direct expense of the eastern front. Kursk is farmland, whereas there are still a couple trillion dollars worth of resources being rapidly lost in the east.
What's happening in Kursk is the Ukrainians are delivering themselves to the grinder, so Russians can essentially just sit there and grind away. Russians are taking losses too, but the disproportionate grinding is happening on the Ukrainian side.
The most bizarre aspect of this whole 'conflict' to me is how a jewish comedian who plays the piano with his penis can tell a whole country of men to go pointlessly die, and they just do.
From a Russian security perspective, the most important regions are Chernigov, Sumy, Kharkov, as well as Nikolaev and Odessa. The Donbass can wait.
The pre-war map and what happened in August should be making it abundantly clear why.
Yet Putin has refused for nealry three years to do anything to seize those regions, preferring to send the Russian army to bang its head against the most fortified defense lines in the world.
Your comment hit a chord, I have been wondering the very same things since 2022. How on earth did the Russian let Ukraine capture 1000 sa. Km. Of land in Kursk to then spend months and months to partially dislodge them.
How can the country survive economically, even with massive foreign subsidies?
How can conscripts and exhausted forces continue to advance and fight without ever surrendering? Those conscripts are drafted but seem to never abandon the fights, even when stuck in cauldrons.
There is an organized retreat when soldiers receive orders from command to fall back. Ukrainian soldiers have never and will never receive such orders, because they are expected to die. They know that if they fall back from their positions without an order to do so, they are effectively deserting and will suffer the consequences - including being executed on the spot.
Hundreds of soldiers from French-trained Ukrainian brigade went AWOL before firing a single shot
Over 1,700 soldiers from Ukraine’s newly formed 155th Mechanized Brigade, trained and outfitted with great fanfare in France, deserted before reaching the battlefront, according to Ukrainian journalist Yuriy Butusov.
▪️French President Emmanuel Macron proudly announced the “elite” project alongside Volodymyr Zelensky last June. The brigade was meant to have more than 5,800 troops and be equipped with Leopard tanks and French CAESAR 155 mm howitzers. However, at least 50 members of the unit, also known as “Anne of Kiev,” went AWOL already during drills in France, Butusov wrote on social media.
▪️When the brigade was finally packed off to the front line near Pokrovsk (Krasnoarmeysk), it did not even have any drones.
“As a result, the brand-new Leopard 2A4 tanks and VAB armored vehicles suffered losses during the first attempts to use them,” according to Butusov, who added:
“The brigade’s servicemen became hostages of Zelensky’s PR project, which the authorities made no effort to actually implement competently.”
▪️Remnants of the brigade have reportedly been reassigned to other units, with Ukraine’s State Bureau of Investigation (SBI) confirming to AFP that it had opened a criminal case on the circumstances of the formation of the 155th Mechanized Brigade. The case is being investigated under “articles on abuse of authority and desertion,” Communications Adviser to the SBI Tаtiana Sapyan said.
Yes, of course it's better to desert before you get shipped to the front. How do you get back to your village/town 500km away, wearing an army uniform, without money, food or water, in the middle of winter? US/NATO command (who are really the ones running the show) expects every single Ukrainian soldier to die at the front. And the Ukrainian army is organized with the sole purpose of feeding the Russian meat grinder. Everybody knew the Ukrainians could not win this conflict, even before it started.
Some people here in this comments section wonder that this conflict does not make any sense, but what they don't understand is that according to the psychopathic logic of US/NATO command, it makes perfect sense to have Ukrainians killing Russians using NATO weapons, tactics and logistics. And of course the US MIC is more than happy about it too. And they'll pay US Congress to authorize more US taxpayers' $ billions in spending on this highly profitable conflict.
The easy answers are usually the best: Because it is in Russia's interest to keep the AFU in Kursk. The political ramifications of having the enemy on your own territory are huge. (Btw I have said so at the time; "Russia will probably be in no hurry to take back the Kusrk area")
Riddle me this: How is it even possible that the AFU can launch a renewed offensive in the Kursk area while there is only one supply route that can be reached easily from both sides by Russia recon and artillery? That offensive should not have been possible, the armor and troops should have been destroyed at least 20 miles before they got to the front. Yet they were not, why?
As I said, the easiest answers are usually the best.
"When else in history has a smaller, poorer country been able to go on the attack against its bigger, wealthier neighbor purely thanks to the gargantuan amounts of money and supplies it receives from its allies? Allies that, at the same time, are (virtually) not directly involved in the fight at all?"
Umm, many, many times? There were dozens of such proxy wars during the Cold War.
They are beholden to the prince of darkness, Jew or otherwise. Jews that need to hide behind "antisemitism" are like those who hide behind every other race, age, gender or 'sexual preference' card. It's all made up excuses for hate.
One's character is proof of who rules one's life.
I smile to myself every Christmas season in the West...all this talk about Peace! Ask most of them, peace means 'my way or the high way'. It's mentally deranged.
Yet another example of your failure to understand the difference between Twitter war and real war.
Kursk, after the initial attack failed, is nothing more than a massive drain on Ukrainian resources - particularly since dumbfuck Ukrainian leadership seems to think it is critical. If the dumbfuck Ukrainians wish to keep pouring resources into a firesack, why would Russia interfere?
There are... reasons... why theoretically holding that particular pocket of Russia up until now might have made sense. It hinges on the nature of gas contracts with Europe, Ukraine's role as a transit signatory, and what happens to Europe's energy supplies when Russian gas is unavailable. We are now past the Jan 1 expiry of those contracts and things in the geopolitical energy sector are shaking loose, for Europe.
Keep in mind the main reason for knocking over Assad, originally, was his unwillingness to play ball with Qatari gas pipelines to Europe.
It's all about Europe, energy control, and what happens to its industry and (perhaps more importantly) markets. Without markets you don't have brands and the products they serve, and thus don't have wealth flowing into the pockets of oligarchs and their financial intermediaries.
Now that we're past Jan 1 the main reason to keep Kursk seems to be part of the play for attention and support that Ukraine needs to make, lest Trump immediately follow through on his reflex to throw them away. There may of course be more to it all, but like the whole war, that "massive drain on Ukrainian resources" has been a pile of blood and treasure spent for a purpose--just not a Ukrainian one.
Yes, pipelines from which Ukraine has siphoned gas for decades, and collects billions in transit fees from. The contracts for those transits can only be metered via specific locations, one of which is shut down in Luhansk and the other is now occupied in Kursk. Without access to that metering the billing cannot be done correctly.
I've read, correctly or not, that Ukraine has been attempting to get Russia to sign onto new transit agreements that meter starting in Western Ukraine, which would enable them to steal as much gas as they want while subjecting Russia to contract penalties if European requirements don't flow through. Ultimately, however, Russia doesn't like cutting off its own nose and has declined to sign anything at all with Zelensky.
Remember please, at all times, that this war is about money first--for all involved in the West and Ukraine. Ideological fascism is secondary and a tool to money and power (to get money).
As a means to verify my comment's direction, watch what Russia does with and to Ukraine's gas infrastructure in coming weeks/months. If they continue ignoring it (aside from storage facilities), I may be more wrong. If they obliterate it and close that chapter on Ukraine's energy infrastructure, that's an indication the gas angle has been bearing hard on the Suja calculus. We'll see.
Wrong. Ukraine has access to these pipelines because these pipelines were originally built to supply Ukraine as well as the West - back when Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union.
Equally, you are wrong in that Ukraine has NOT been trying to renew the transit agreements.
Slovakia wants it, Russia is ok with it, but Ukraine - likely on orders from the EU - has declined to renew them.
You are also way out of touch on the actual pre 2025 gas situation: Russia has long since stopped shipping free gas to Ukraine; the gas that Ukraine is using is paid for by the European customers of Gazprom - it is simply a tax added on to the price for the gas said European customers actually receive.
Next: no, this war is not about money. If Russia only cared about money, they would not have launched the SMO as nobody - not Putin, not Nabiullina, nobody expected that the West would be so stupid as to trap Russian oligarch hot money in Russia.
Nor does Ukraine's gas infrastructure matter.
If Europe in the form of Queen von der Crazy doesn't want any EU nations to have Russian gas, then the Russians have long since found other avenues to use it or sell it. The nations that suffer as a result are Ukraine and the EU.
None of your conjectures above are based on fact or reality or even decent analysis.
Try as I might, no logic or reason I possess helps me either. Natural resources? Agricultural land? Black sea access? Military showmanship? Operational proof of new technology? All the explanations make zero sense when I weigh it against the human & environmental destruction for generations to come. Has the human race advanced to such heights?
I am left with the powers of principalities, spiritual darkness & wickedness doing what it always does: destroying Life. Every 'policy' yields death. Our true enemy.
The western puppet masters are very much directly involved in pretty much any and every case where Ukraine managed to land any significant hit on the Russians.
They are the ones aiming and firing all the real weapons after all, usually patiently and meticulously charting a course through the labyrinth of russian AD.
Without western fleets of orbital assets the Ukros would barely hit anything.
The money, well, much of it of course is gobbled up by western oligarchs, followed by ukro oligarchs, but that which actually makes it to the ground in Ukraine is used mostly not for the war effort but to keep the machinery of state going.
Without NATO handsomely paying every single public official, the ukrainian state would long be history, everyone abandoning their posts long ago.
Money is vital, but not necessarily always in the way people assume.
Obviously this kind of keeping a war going (largely) from the outsider is something that is really possible like this only in our era of modedrn hightech warfare.
I doubt it could have been done to a remotely comparable degree when some sortz of fighting mano a mano still played a decisive role and when huge armies faced each other directly instead of most of combat by necessity happening between comparatively tiny units.
Yet even so the willingness to spend the lifes of one's soldiers like water in ultimately suicidal offensives can make for a temporary and mostly optical advantage of the less cautious side.
In the end though Ukraine's publicity stuints have played into the russian strategy of slowly killing as many ukrainian soldiers as at all possible every single time.
Which is why the Russians were never in a hurry to eliminate the Kursk bridgehead and indeed welcomed the Ukros sending everything they could spare and much more right in there.
Of course our gut instinct tells us that that cannot be or that that somehow has to be an excuse of sorts (which ukrainian and NATO propaganda are counting on while being quite aware of the truth) but well, our amateur gut instincts that are informed largely by what we know or believe we know about wars long past and strategies long obsolete, are not necessarily well prepared to tell us anything about actual war strategy that may seem quite counterintuitive.
Concerning Ukraine's exports, the question is if Ukraine indeed CAN afford them, in many cases, like electricity, the answer is almost certainly no.
But not only is the government obsessed with keeping up an illusory facade of strength to foreigners at the detriment of it's own citizens, in some sectors, like quite possibly grain, they may not even have a choice.
The creditors and puppeteers do have Ukraine by the short and curlies in a myriad ways after all and if they say that they want that grain, how much is there really that Ukraine can do to resist even if it wants to?
Russia does not have to make concessions: it is winning the war. DJT is inheriting a conflict on the worst footing imaginable, made unsalvageable after 3 years of Collective Biden and OTAN destroying options & prospects. They’ve left nary a shred of hope for productive diplomacy. The U.S., as an over-stretched super power, without the resources or the political will to prolong Project Ukraine, has run aground. Russia’s conquests are accelerating rapidly. Capturing the last of Donbas’s strongholds, well-fortified since 2014, cements the battlefield dominance. Russia has arrived @ a point of massive leverage. Ukraine, a proxy ridden hard and put away wet, lacks the manpower to put up a fight.
So of course Michael Kauffman, writing as a Carnegie wonk for the BBC, urged DJT to keep the war going *as is* in an effort to attrit the Russians eventually and force them to capitulate.
Fictions & fables abound on Anglo-American news sites.
Soon Kauffman will describe how DPRK troops in Kursk have betrayed Russia and begun fighting for the Blue & Yellow.
How to format and save a PDF copy of articles like this one.
I am using Firefox. Vivaldi, a Chrome-based browser, works in the same way. I also want to format them for reading on my Kindle, so I am going to select Letter as the paper size, not A4.
These Substack articles open with the author's text, maybe with just the first few comments.
Open the linked article in your web browser. What you do first is format the article that Simplicius wrote.
If using Firefox, Toggle Reader View (F9)
Now you see a simplified version of everything, still including all the graphics. Much easier to read, no comments included.
Next, File, Print, Save to PDF
Choose a name for the article e.g. "Simplicius - End of Year Wrapup"
Save to the directory you have chosen, now in this example you have a PDF file Simplicius - End of Year Wrapup.pdf
In Firefox, toggle the Reader View back to normal
Open the Comments
Decide if you want Newest, Top first or Newest first or Oldest first and select accordingly
The comments will re-display if appropriate
Hit the End key
Load More
Repeat until you reach the very bottom of all the comments
Next Edit, Find in Page
In the search box, type expand f (or expand full)
Now see if it produces Expand Full Comment underneath various long comments and if so carry out the command
Repeat by clicking on the "Up" chevron button next to this box until you reach the top of the comments
When there are no, or no more, comments to expand, the search box (in Firefox) will turn red
Now the interesting bit where you can get creative ...
File, Print, Save to PDF
Move the cursor over to the text box that appears to the left
You will see something like, in a Simplicius article that I am reading, Page 1 of 83
Look at the display and you may first need to adjust the margins so that the text is not cut off left or right
Now, you click on the double chevron >> to go to Last Page
Think for a moment, how is the formatting? Is that last page blank?
If it is blank, you can select Custom Pages and, as an example, print 1-82
Let's say one last comment strays onto a new page. In Firefox - but perhaps not in Chrome-based browsers - you can play around with the formatting to make things fit on a page, using Scale to change it for example to 99%. Or use your Custom Pages selection to leave out that last comment.
Choose an appropriate subdirectory like PDF or a new one, e.g. Simplicius.
What you do, to save typing, is select the main article already saved to this subdirectory, click on it to insert the filename and be careful to add "- comments" at the end of it before saving the comments file
You will now have two files in this same subdirectory, Simplicius - End of Year Wrapup.pdf and Simplicius - End of Year Wrapup - comments.pdf
One final task is to merge the two PDF files (and doing that so that they are in the right order, with comments last) and then save them in similar fashion. I use Expert PDF 14 which has an easy way to re-order the PDF files so that the main article appears first, then the comments. In Expert PDF 14, this is done by Create then Merge files. That done, the combined file is saved - in this example, you will use "Simplicius - End of Year Wrapup - comments", inserting this name from the previously saved file in the subdirectory, and further edit it adding the words "with comments
Finally, you have a perfectly formatted PDF file of the article plus all the comments :
"Simplicius - End of Year Wrapup.pdf and Simplicius - End of Year Wrapup - with comments.pdf"
If you do this regularly, you can have a complete local library of Simplicius articles with all the comments - readable offline on any device.
In some cases (not Simplicius) you may want to merge several articles and comments and the way you will do this depends on the PDF software that you use. You will have to play around with the commands, formatting etc. until you have mastered everything. Once you have it right, you can format a long article together with hundreds of comments in three or four minutes.
When you have mastered all this, it's an almost automated simple routine to create PDF files of almost anything on the internet that you wish to store and keep for reference. You can also send these formatted PDF files to others.
I suggest waiting before working on the comments until Simplicius has published his next article as by then all, or almost all, of the comments to the previous article will have appeared.
Now you have a compact, offline, searchable PDF file that you can read on your computer or on your phone. I use X1 Search, which will let me instantly find any phrase inside PDF files and lead me to the local folder so that I can open it.
If you have a Kindle, you can Send to Kindle (over the internet) or copy over the files by attaching a USB cable between Kindle and computer. I find it best to set the Kindle to read the PDF files in Landscape mode. In a few days I am flying from South Africa to the US, two long flights. I shall have my Kindle and be able to read and catch up with all the valuable information and knowledge from Substack authors like Simplicius. As mentioned, these same techniques can be adapted for storing any useful information from other websites.
One last thing, if you have a Smart TV that has a Google Android operating system, you can then view these nicely formatted PDF files on your TV. I am looking into this. It seems that first I must install a PDF reader app or the Microsoft Office app on the TV. This opens some most interesting new possibilities. To get started on this, do a search for google tv pdf files.
I am using my phone to read and watch. Hardly ever my laptop. The articles and comments I am interested in, I send a screenshot or selected text to WA or mail it to myself. Far from optimal.
There's a Firefox extension called Print Edit WE. It streamlines all of the above, and offers nifty options like scaling and deleting fluff. I believe it exists for Chrome too.
from Zelya's interview w/ Lex Fridman on 5 Jan: “When I talk with Donald Trump, all the European leaders call to ask, 'How was it?' This shows the influence of Donald Trump. And this has never happened before with an American president. I tell you, from my experience, this also gives you confidence, you know, that he can stop this war. It won’t be long, because Europe will be looking at us—and we’ll be looking at Trump.”
>>
fun fact: Lex, a Muscovite, wanted to conduct the interview in Russian, but Zelya insisted on English
Here!
Yes 👍🏼
The Pope will soon canonize Zelya because a requisite number of gauzy miracles have happened in his presence, including incapacitated soldiers able to walk again after merely seeing him. Medjugorje-caliber acts of divine healing have manifested, all wreathed in clusters of Raphaelesque clouds. The soldiers who were able to rise up from their hospital beds and walk have exhorted Zelya to keep the war going. They view him not as a false prophet presiding over false hopes, but a wonder weapon, able to bring victory to the Ukrainian people.
The million+ dead probably have a different view....
>A new video showing a Ukrainian Su-25 utilizing the French AASM Hammer missiles against Russian forces:
It is the end of the third, nearly entering the fourth year of a war launched with the explicitly stated purpose of "demilitarizing" Ukraine.
Read the above sentence several times, remember the stated goal of "demilitarization", draw your own conclusions.
Then also remember that Putin has the power to demilitarize both Ukraine and NATO in Europe in a day, scratch that, not even a day, half an hour, literally. But he prefers to have hundreds of thousands of Slavic grunts slaughter each other in the fields of the Donbass instead of ending it immediately.
Doesn't that make him responsible for what is happening then, and shouldn't he face some consequences?
Make.
Shouldn't.
Starting from a certain level of power, people actually completely stop being responsible for their actions before people, with rare exceptions such as revolutions and coups
Responsibility? Zelensky? Biden? Neocons? Zionists? NATO? CIA? Musk’s Starling? Blackrock? The Taxpayer who funded this war 180 billion so far, did I forget someone?
1) Moscow had full control of Ukraine in 1991. Who in Moscow allowed/caused (it was really the latter) the breakup of the USSR, and are those people responsible for what happened after that? Which was obvious to everyone -- if you go back in time, you will find plenty of open discussion in Russia about how there will be a war with Ukraine one day already immediately after the USSR collapsed. Obviously those people are responsible.
2) Moscow still was largely in control of what happened in Ukraine circa 1999/2000 when Putin took power. Then we get the Orange revolution in 2004/2005, then open Banderization started under Yuschenko, then nothing was really done to reverse it under Yanukovich, then the Maidan came, then Putin sat on his hands for another eight years until 2022. Isn't Putin at least a tiny bit responsible for those developments given that they all happened under his watch? Again, compare where things were when he took power and where they were on the eve of the SMO.
3) Then Putin half-assed the early phases of the SMO (or outright sabotaged it, if you really want to go there, by shackling the Russian army in terms of what it was allowed to do), and after that he switched back to his usual sitting-on-his-hands mode, which continues to this day. While hundreds of thousands were dying, and continue dying.
All of this is happening while he has a literal magic button he can press and make it stop in a day.
Ah, the magic button. I suggest you stop playing with it far a day or two ;-)
nonsense. Putin's internal situation was fragile. Now it is solid. His strategy has been almost perfect by the time being. Sure, you would have done it better.
It is the exact opposite actually with regard to internal stability.
Internally prior to the SMO there were the pro-Western traitors, but Putin had the support of the patriots.
Right now the pro-Western traitors have not gone anywhere, in fact they still drive policy to a large extent (as evident by the inexplicable self-defeating conduct of the Kremlin) but the patriotis have the knive sharpened for Putin too.
Externally the situation is also much worse. Nobody has any respect for Russia now. Or fear of it. Compare to the situation prior to the SMO
We already know you're a complete idiot. Do you have to keep proving it over and over with your ridiculous comments?
Agree with your comment on the complete idiot. Anyone with a brain knows and appreciates the incredible patience and competence shown by Putin and the Russians before launching the counterattack in Feb. 2022 they knew full well would bring on the full fury of the Anglo-American-Zionist Empire and their proxy Neonazi thugs in both Ukraine and Israel.
2025 and General Moron has learned nothing.
Wut? Putin stops but the Ukies continue? What kind of peace is that? Rhetorical question. You seem to have made up your mind.
Yes, yes, destroy the city to save the city. Any idea how many people will die or life will be devastated when Putin gives such order?
Luckily we have Putin and not you in power
>Any idea how many people will die
Zero Russians or Ukrainians, because the order would be to annihilate Poland and Romania as logistics bases, perhaps a few other NATO countries too (several of them absolutely deserve it).
Then NATO ends as an organization, as does all support for Ukraine, because nobody left alive will be willing to serve as a platform for the US to attack Russia from knowing that the Kremlin is not bluffing.
Ukraine will be dealt with at Russia’s leisure after that, with minimal losses.
How many Poles and Romanians (and Finn,. Germans, Danes, etc.) die nobody in Russia should care about — they dug their own graves with their actions over the last not just few decades, but centuries.
And the Kremlin should absolutely not care about that -- the Kremlin's duty is supposed to be to protect the lives of Russian people. What are nukes for if then there is still a large conventional war in which so many people die, on Russian territory too? They exist precisely to prevent that. Use them.
>Luckily we have Putin and not you in power
Lucky for you from your cushy situation somewhere in the West. The now numbering in the six figures dead Russians and just as many left permanently crippled, as well as their families, might be of a different opinion about how lucky they were Putin is in power.
And of course there would be no reply whats ever, certainly not a nuclear one just an instant tale between the legs of people who are just dying to be given a reason to scorch the Earth.
What color is the sky in your world?
Of course there will be no reply, that has been gamed out extensively.
The only reason the US and the UK have escalated up to this point is that no nukes flew in the other direction. The moment they do, it will stop immediately.
Nobody in DC will sacrifice any US cities for Poland and Romania, the whole Article 5 thing is a complete bluff when it comes to nukes.
There was a major downside in doing it until last month -- it would have untied the hands of the US to deal with its own enemies using nukes, unless Russia would have stepped in to defend them with nukes (i.e. what the US is not sincerely planning to do for the NATO vassals, with the same logic and considerations applying in reverse). But then Russia just walked away from its oldest and most important ally (Syria) without trying to defend it even conventionally (even though that was in fact a good moment to solve the millednium-old geopolitical problem that is Turkey). So that whole point is moot now and it simply doesn't matter anymore. There are only two allies left -- Belarus and North Korea -- and Belarus is both under the Russian umbrella and has its own nukes too, and North Korea is capable of taking the US out on its own in a retaliatory strike if it comes to that, so it doesn't need full Russian protection.
What is left to lose then other than oligarch business interests in the West?
Syrian troops outnumbered HTS 10:1 and yet refused to fight. Nothing Russia could or should do after that.
But what was it that Russia could and should have done BEFORE that?
Syria was effectively abandoned to its fate many years prior.
Syria refused to defend its own self in the end, and Russia couldn't make them.
Agreed that Russia should have made 'demonstration' strikes on the attacking countries. They didn't, and now it's clear to NATO that Russia has no red lines. This demonstrated weakness is going to lead to many unpleasant events for Russia in the near future.
Syria refused to defend itself, that much is true, but that came after years of being effectivey abandoned by Russia. The US and Turkey occupied the most important parts of the territory and Russia refused to help with recovering them.
On the rest we are in full agreement.
Are you suggesting the US suicidal ? If so, then nothing Putin tries will placate them. Therefore, its best to call their bluff now.
People in the comment section just crave a long, bloody spectacle like in ancient Rome, watching gladiator fights. They’re here for the show, the drama, the carnage, and their own amusement. They couldn’t care less about the people perishing in this war. In fact, I am sure some of them, even those ZAnon types wish more deaths, especially when it involves Russian men. It’s grotesque, absurd, and utterly bizarre
But let’s not forget where the blame truly lies. The root of all this chaos is the comprador Russian government, the treacherous oligarch class, and the inept communist administration of the past. It’s a collective failure that brought us to this grim reality
GM, please keep writing. Watching you rile up these ZAnon types is, in its own twisted way, absolutely hilarious
>They’re here for the show, the drama, the carnage, and their own amusement. They couldn’t care less about the people perishing in this war. In fact, I am sure some of them, even those ZAnon types wish more deaths, especially when it involves Russian men
I've made that point myself many times. The truth of the matter is that the ZAnon types deep inside hold the same "worthless snow ni**ers" view of Russian people as the openly Russophobic Westerners. It is quite obvious when you seriously analyze their behavior. And that applies to the popular "alternative media" commentators too. Just think about how many articles there have been decrying the plight of the German economy (it's a constant thing), and then think about how many times you heard it mentioned that at least 150,000 people from Kursk were made internal refugees after the invasion (zero, that just never happened in those people's universe). Tells you all you need to know regarding who matters and who doesn't, doesn't it?
The dead and crippled just don't exist either. And the Ukrainians are at least showing them -- it's a matter of twisted pride for them -- but on the Russian side they are much more invisible. I remember seeing some time ago a Ukrainian living corpse -- full quadruple amputee, just the torso remaining, with his eyes blown out too, in his 20s or 30s (what kind of life is that for decades after?) -- and everyone was mocking him for losing everything for Zelensky. My reaction was "there are such cases on the other side too, you morons, what did they die for when the Kremlin refuses to even allow them to fight without their hands tied behind their back?", but nobody thinks about that being the reality for Russians too.
Also, until some time last year you didn't really see the consequences of the war in the form of people missing limbs on Russian streets. Now you do. And I also didn't see comments such as this one on Russian military Telegram channels:
https://t.me/notes_veterans/21312
=========
Dialogue in the canteen of a military triage hospital:
- Oh, bro, you're missing a left leg, and I'm missing a right one, we need to go to the store together. We'll buy one pair of shoes for both of us (laughs)
- What's your size?
- 43
- and I'm 44
- Damn, I need to find another partner )))
That's the atmosphere in triage hospitals.
=========
But now it is increasingly common.
>and the inept communist administration of the past
Not all of them though -- the ones after Stalin. If only Stalin was in charge now...
please dont conflate many in the west who oppose this brother war with the jew and the ZOG of the west who will sacrifice any number of goyim
I think I might be falling in love with you. 😊 Joking aside, you’re absolutely right in what you’ve said, and I share the same thoughts. Despite his mistakes, like weakening the Russian Church and delivering a significant blow to Russian culture, morality, and faith, Stalin was one of the greatest statesmen in history. Calling him a hero wouldn’t be an exaggeration. He didn’t hesitate to send his own son to his death for the sake of his country. Compare that to the Russian leaders who came after him, who betrayed their country without a second thought for the sake of their mistresses’ villas in the West. What an irony…
I’ve been reading the things you’ve write for long time, and I truly enjoy them. However lets be clear. There is no hope for Russia. Without a military coup, patriotic people will never take charge of Russia. And let’s face it, there will never be a coup, because the United States monitors the Russian army down to the lowest-ranking toilet cleaners. The moment any serious coup attempt arises like in 90s, America will immediately collaborate with the comprador elites and local traitors at the top to snuff out the spark before it ignites. In short, there’s no realistic chance for Russia to rid itself of the vampire-like comprador elites and the cancerous collaborators running the country.
But at the very least, people like you should have children. If you and others like Strelkov don’t, there’s a real danger that future generations will never know a true Russian. You and men like you are a dying breed. Over the years, the Russians I’ve met or had the chance to interact with were so mediocre that it’s hard to describe. After meeting them, I finally understood why the Soviet Union collapsed and why Russia is in such a dire state today. I encountered people who were shockingly ignorant, materialistic, greedy, and sly in the worst ways. Of course, it’s unfair to generalize based on bad examples, but I can’t help but think that Russia’s bravest men, good men died during the Great Patriotic War. Many of those left behind were the ancestors of the same type of people I described—cowards, traitors, and dishonorable individuals. These were the people who chose to run and preserve their worthless lives rather than defend their country.
The same thing is happening now. Russia’s most honorable sons are dying. The brightest, most promising, and most courageous young men are either losing their lives or being maimed so severely that they’ll never marry, or women won’t even consider them. While they pay the ultimate price, traitors in Moscow and St. Petersburg are partying in nightclubs. Just last year, Turkey and Egypt broke records for Russian tourist numbers. Russian women, in particular, squandered what little money their country had left on Mediterranean vacations with Muslim men. Isn’t it fascinating?
During the Great Patriotic War, the Soviet Union paid a tremendous price, but at least those on the frontlines found solace in knowing that everyone behind the lines was working tirelessly in factories, doing double shifts. Now, there’s none of that solidarity or shared sacrifice.
As an older brother figure, I want to give you some advice: you absolutely must get married and have a lot of children. The root of your country’s problem is that patriots die with few or no descendants, while traitors or retards continuously reproduce, filling future generations with their cowardly, greedy, stupid, dishonest, and dishonorable lineage. It would be wonderful if the next generations had at least a few real Russians left among them.
I’ll continue reading your writings, and please don’t let rude replies get to you. Those who reply rudely aren’t even human, in my eyes. At the very least, I don’t see them as human
Thank you for the comment!
A couple points to reply to:
>Without a military coup, patriotic people will never take charge of Russia. And let’s face it, there will never be a coup [...] America will immediately collaborate with the comprador elites and local traitors at the top to snuff out the spark
It's actually worse than that in terms of potential consequences -- remember what happened the last time a military coup was attempted? That was August 1991. The 1993 situation wasn't quite a military coup, and that one was indeed snuffed out the way you describe it. But in 1991 it was botched and ended up the trigger for the final dissolution of the union.
Putin and United Russia are so deeply entrenched now that if we run the decision tree of a coup, it is potentially a very, very bad idea in terms of the potential for dissolution of the federation. Presumably a lot of the local governors in such a scenario will declare loyalty to Putin and United Russia, and then it will be a struggle between the pro-coup and loyalist regions. Then the West will start air lifting soldiers and materiel to support whoever suits them (after all, they already tried that in 1918, and if they had had airlift capabilities back then, it would have gone much better for them; now they do), and their goal of breaking up Russia will be achieved.
I don't have internal information, but I assume that the military has thought about doing a coup many times already, and every time they analyze the consequences, they come to the same conclusion -- that it will have to be executed with extreme precision and decisiveness, or the above scenario will unfold. Then they get cold feet and abandon the idea.
>Russia’s most honorable sons are dying.
That is exactly what is happening indeed. Negative selection. And it indeed happened during the GPW (on the grandest scale), and prior to that during the Civil War too, which is largely forgotten now. The Civil War ended up purging through warfare a lot of the most passionate communists as well as the patriotic people on the side of the Whites (most of the not so patriotic ones departed for the West). And then the GPW wiped out a whole generation, from which there was never any recovery after that demographically and in terms of the lost creative and institutional potential.
Which is why it was an absolute must never to allow a repeat of such events.
Karaganov makes that point all the time, but often kind of in passing, when he should be stressing it constantly. Including publicly in Putin's face when they have those exchanges, but he tries to say it using parables instead, which is not working very well. He was quite happy to see the nuclear doctrine changed, but while the doctrine changed in words, nothing changed in practice -- it has been violated every day since it was adopted, and... nothing.
I have seen folk icons, that is, icons of persons not declared to be saints, of I.V. Stalin, Tsar Ivan IV Vasilevich, and others.
For that matter, St. Xenia Peterburskaya was recognized as a folk saint, long before she was declared to be one by the official Church.
The root of all this chaos is the jew. always has been
From one viewpoint it is, but what explains the moral (and cognitive?) weakness that displays no defense or resistance to their corrupt and deceptive wiles?
Another Idiot? Crawl back under the rock you came from.
nuking isreal is the only way to really solve the jew problem. are you good with that or are you just trolling about poland, etc...
Not enough.
Look up the second Chechen war and how your "peaceful" patient Pootie ran that affair. The whole capital was razed to the ground with no concern for civilians, infrastructure, or " morality", Yet in Ukraine Pootie boy is inexplicably a "Hippie" . Something doesnt compute.
Nothing would delight NATO more than if Russia to resort to the use of nuclear weapons.
Russian impotence would be on full display.
Let's say you have a knife and a gun. You're attacked by a knifeman. Are you impotent if you simply shoot him in the face instead of giving him an equal chance to stab you?
Your enemies will try to convince you a strong response means you're weak. Ignore them.
I see your point, but nuclear weapons are views as something different.
This is more like having to resort to a bullwhip to subdue a toddler.
There have in fact been a number of covert nuclear strikes. Including by Russia in Ukraine and by NATO against Russia. On the small side and on plausiblly deniable targets (ammo depots primarily), but for everyone who is willing to believe what is right in front of their eyes rather than the official version (drone debris, ammo depots) it is clear what has been going on.
That taboo has been broken within the circles of the people making the decisions a long time ago.
Regardless, by the standards established during the Cold War events that would and should result in a guaranteed nuclear annihilation of NATO in Europe within minutes are happening many times every day, and it has been like that for many months now.
So is that the standards established during the Cold War were unreasonable, or that Putin is not doing his job?
Russia three years ago was SO much weaker, militarily, economically, geo-politically, and in terms of internal and international support for the war that is now going on. It has grown so much stronger in all these areas. Russia initially struck decisively in some very threatening areas of biological warfare and nuclear threats, neutralizing them, and then basically held on and endured, without an all-out mobilization effort. And it worked. The partitioning of Russia would now have been a fact had they overextended three years ago.
1) How strong was Ukraine three years ago and how strong is it now?
2) Whose fault was it that Russia was weak three years ago? Who had been in power for nearly a quarter of a century?
And that isn’t even true, Russia is much weaker now than it was three years ago, because nobody fears it, and in the age of strategic nukes being feared is the main source of power. Russia is now a laughing stock that everyone can mistreat however they feel like, or even outright bomb. Look at what Azerbaijan is doing now regarding the plane crash.
Then think who has directly bombed Russia so far. Let’s review the list:
1) The Ukrainians
2) The Americans
3) The British
4) The French
5) The Czech
6) Finland
7) Estonia
8) Latvia
9) quite likely Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan and Georgia too
Lots of others are itching to do it too, and why not, what is to stop them?
The Azeris also killed Russian officers in Karabakh and didn’t even really apologize.
Then there was the Kursk invasion — you have Polish forces there in substantial numbers, and actual military personnel in small numbers from several other NATO countries.
Every single one of these places that does not have its own nukes and was not a part of the USSR should have ceased to exist by now
Every other one that was a part of the USSR should have lost its independence.
If Russia was a serious country. But currently it is not. Whose fault is that?
John Sopko served as the Inspector General for the U.S. in Afghanistan, 2012=2021, and this is from his audit & report on the U.S.’s evacuation, as published in the nytimes on 2 January: “The U.S. government struggled to carry out a coherent strategy, fostered overly ambitious expectations, started unsustainable projects and did not understand the country or its people. American agencies measured success not by what they accomplished, but by dollars spent.”
Sopko summarized “a gaping disconnect between reality and what senior U.S. officials had been telling Americans for decades: that success was just around the corner.”
For Sopko, the question is, “Why did so many senior officials tell Congress and the public, year after year, that success was on the horizon when they knew otherwise?” He lauds DJT as the first president to conclude that the mission in Afghanistan was not essential to national security interests. Sopko urges politicians & the populace to probe whether the U.S. “can avoid similar results in Ukraine, Gaza, Syria and other war zones.”
Sopko notes that “a perverse incentive drove the U.S. system. To win promotions and bigger salaries, military and civilian leaders felt they had to sell their deployments, programs and projects as successes—even when they were not. Leaders tended to report and highlight favorable information while obscuring that which pointed to failure.”
We see the repetition of this, naturally, in Ukraine. Untrue stories get boosted, whether to glamorize Ukraine—like w/ the Ghost of Kiev fiction or the fable of Snake Island bravado & derring-do—or to denigrate Russia—like w/ the fabricated reliance on DPRK troops in Kursk, a lie that gets repeated at every turn. Important military strategies, like whether to retreat or not from unpromising salients, are delayed as everyone in Project Ukraine holds their breath, awaiting the next OTAN summit @ Rammstein or the next G7 meeting in Italy, calendar events where supplemental funding often get awarded. Failures or successes are calibrated to the U.S.-led OTAN timeline—and when it comes to the U.S.-led OTAN timeline there can be only successes, never failures.
Because *failure* does not lead to business transactions. In light of this, “claiming success, whether real or imaginary, is vital to obtaining business contracts.” Sopko reports soberly that “spending became the measure of success.”
>>Nota bene:
Once Congress earmarked funding for military ventures in Afghanistan, the money *had* to be spent, even if the things for which the money was earmarked—like a multi-million dollar building—never got used. To *return* the funding to the public coffers was to admit you weren’t warring hard enough. More money was always being spent to justify all the previous spending, sunk-cost being what it is. Failing to *spend* signaled failure.
We find a correlate of this fiscal excess in the U.S.’s r’ship w/ Project Ukraine. The musical “Evita” captures this perfectly: “When the money starts rolling in, you don’t ask how. Think of all the people guaranteed a good time now.” Mind-boggling billions have washed through Project Ukraine, some of it sloshing back to the U.S.’s shores, enriching military contractors, bankers, Beltway politicians and the Democratic National Committee.
“Important information for measuring the success of initiatives was at times deliberately hidden from Congress and the American public, including NED-associated USAID-funded organizations.” Sopko ultimately describes a situation whereby Afghan ministries were incapable of managing direct U.S. financial assistance. He recommends setting up U.S. oversight agencies to monitor where the funding goes and to carry out periodic audits.
This latter directive won’t fly in D.C., though: the wealth-generating capacity of war is its own kind of victory.
In 20 years, Sopko states that no senior official ever told Congress or the American people that failure was a real possibility in Afghanistan.
The way the U.S. doubles-down on flooding Ukraine w/ weaponry, regardless of the cascading losses, mirrors this, the logic being that wearing Russia down over time will ultimately hand Ukraine a military victory, no matter how much time has to elapse. Nothing supports this irrational calculus. To puncture the delusion, however, means to crater the rosy narrative. The rosy narrative is what’s been propping the U.S. up for decades.
I doubt it is about ”the logic being that wearing Russia down over time will ultimately hand Ukraine a military victory”. It is not an irrational calculus. The cost of the War could be defended if US finally ”vaccinated” Europe, especially Germany, from co-operation and trade with Russia. When the Berlin Wall fell it actually weakened US when the relations thawed and eventually led to western investments in Russia and trade of natural gas/oil.
This War has ruptured all possibilities for a normal relations with Russia for decades to come. And we are not finished yet.
Listen to Trump. He said that tariff will be raised unless Europe starts to buy LNG and Oil from US. He will leave NATO if not Europe pays for ”US (mafia) protection”.
Indeed Trump may prefer peace but he prefers even more America being great again. So while he may not like this war and the US policy of war on Russia and may even try to negotiate peace he will not try to open NS again or lift the sanctions. At least I think that the chance such miracle happens is low.
The more Europe fade into oblivion the better for US. They always envied Germanys industrial strength and economic role in Europe. With Germany way down the list and France toppled in West Africa the chessboard is clear for US/UK Atlanticists supremacy. Big problem with Starmer in UK but it will be solved eventually. The goal is to turn Europe to a market for US not the other way around. 3 years into a War that has cost Russia dearly because of European weapons and soldiers of fortune/advisers in Ukraine will not be forgiven by Russia. So Europe will be mauled between US and Russia.
The Russia-Germany Gas trade was working long before the fall of the Berlin wall. Nord Stream was implemented because Ukraine caused trouble through diverting gas for own consumption without paying for it.
Yes, I know. DDR was an entity before 1991. But capacity was also a problem. Circumventing Ukraine primary.
'America' will never "be great again." 30 some trillion dollars of debt, the bloated military/industrial complex, and a political system controlled by narcissistic billionaire plutocrats, pretty much insures that.
For sure but sometimes a dead horse dont know its dead.
"To *return* the funding to the public coffers was to admit you weren’t warring hard enough."
How does one return Magic Mystery Money created out of thin air? Please to be understanding, the US government hasn't been spending "taxpayer dollars" for anything for at least two decades, probably longer, they're just running up the most colossal credit card tab in history.
But they are spending taxpayer dollars, it's just that they're running up a colossal credit card tab in addition to the taxpayer money they spend.
Tax "revenues" don't even cover the interest. If it were "returned", it would make no difference to the taxpayers, their balls would still be anchored to a debt meat hook.
If you take the time to look up the annual receipts and spending you will see that in recent years tax receipts were between 2/3 and 3/4 of spending. For fiscal year 2022 tax receipts were a little over $4 trillion and spending a little over $6 trillion. Interest was under $1 trillion. Let's put the blame on our government for both overtaxing us and for having to borrow and print obscene amounts to cover their out of control spending.
Spending isn't debt.
Did you ever wonder why pundits are always presenting the national debt as a percentage of GDP? That sounds very misleading to me. A much more meaningful presentation would be as a percentage of annual tax receipts, which are the amounts actually available to pay on the debt. Which would put it at about 900%.
Because they like lying as much as possible. GDP is an absolute bullshit "metric".
“The U.S. government struggled to carry out a coherent strategy, fostered overly ambitious expectations, started unsustainable projects and did not understand the country or its people. American agencies measured success not by what they accomplished, but by dollars spent.”
This covers the entirety of US foreign policy since at least 1812.
it all sounds right to me. I can observe that the same phenomenon accompanies all "post-conflict" situations. We must be shown to have done the right thing with the right outcome. I served in Panama after our invasion and installation of the puppet government we helped into power. We of the political and economic sections were under very obvious pressure to report the positive and can the negative. There were consequences for those who defied this "edict." Labor protests? Don't report on them or minimize them. And so on. It is the art of irreality.
its a business. The Pentagon generals pull billions in dirty money every year. It is a bottomless wishing well, the true cornucopia or corn of abundance. Everybody knows about it but cant do anything, because they have the weapons and are all nine eleventhed and thus act solidarilly. Inversely, the generals wont do anything about others taking their share. The bottom line is a free money mafioso theft system that the rest of the world, especially functional colonies like Germany, Japan, the Emirates, Qatar or Saudi Arabia, actually finance. I doubt Trump can, if he ever wanted to, break this mafia rule over the world. So expect more debt and more nations trying to flee this deadly scheme.
its the jew - and trump is controlled by it
are of jewish faith
who from judah never were
yet pass for semite
It's not as if Victoria Nuland will have to cut back on the butter-and-egg money as a result of Ukraine.
It's not as if Lindsey Graham's nonexistent kids will get drafted and thrown into combat.
So why should they care?
The ranchers and employees have nothing to fear from the cattle. That meme about the nature of our mammal species is perhaps the most accurate metaphor describing reality.
If Russia was a serious country, right at the moment when those ghouls stood on that stage in Kiev, an Iskander/Zircon should have paid them a visit.
The Israelis did it with Iranian generals and diplomats in Syria and Lebanon, so it is clearly allowed. If the same rules apply to everyone...
It could have, of course, been played as a "oops, sorry, collateral damage, like the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, we didn't mean it" too.
I remain very puzzled why the Ukrainians don't just lower the conscription age to 18, when all their allies are practically demanding it, and everyone knows it will inevitably happen.
Wouldn't calling up 18 year olds earlier rather than later be better, when inevitably they will have to be called up?
Calling up the 18-25 cohort is like eating your seed corn.
This cohort is *already* the smallest demographic in number, of any group ( so the troop numbers they contribute are less than you'd get out of the 30-40, 40-50 cohorts, who are already dead), and dead men father no children.
After they're all gone, Ukraine has no-one to make more Ukrainians (which certain people hold to be a goal of the conflict)
Simplicius has covered this "double whammy" before.
Believe it or not, there are three reasons why Z and company are dragging their feet on this.
1) to "trade" lowering the conscription age for more weapons/money and/or a security guarantee of some kind from the West
2) it'd be politically very unpopular as these are the last group of adult men left relatively unscathed besides the extremely elderly
3) the economy is barely tottering along and would be devastated by losing vast numbers of men age 18-25 (currently below the conscription age limit) who do all the industrial jobs and stuff like construction, transport, utilities, etc.
Because Ukrainians will turn on him en masse if and when he really does, and he knows it. And so do his western handlers, but they are using this an excuse to fend off his calls for their boots on the ground en masse. As in ' we can't send in our own young men to die unless you do the same....and do it first!'
This has been the sorry story of western 'backing' for this dirty war they in fact launched, a battle within the west to shout at Russia from behind some other partner's back. They trip over themselves in this game and it provides some sparse black humour. Right now they are all pushing Trump into the pseudo firing line and crowding in behind him, the odd head popping out from under his armpit to lob some grandiosity or other.
It will happen, just that Zelenskii wants to look like he is putting up a fight.
Points to Uncle Sam.
"They made me do it!"
typo : Zelensky wanted 500k total troops drafted in 500k but ended up only drafting 200k
In April 2024, an autonomous American war machine, guided by Collective Biden, churned forward, whipping Congress to authorize $61bn of additional aid to Project Ukraine, regardless of the fact that intel in Kiev had already told the CIA, State Department & NSA by then that Russia was thrashing Ukraine so thoroughly on the battlefield that the war was all but lost.
While knowing that Ukraine’s prospects militarily were nil, Collective Biden told Congress that the war was in a “stalemate,” a narrative which the media boosted for months.
In April 2024, additionally, the expectation was that Joe would win a second presidential term as long as Ukraine *did not lose* the war. Moreover, Collective Biden still held out hope that the judicial assassination of DJT would work; all the lawfare cases lined up ready to kneecap DJT had not played out fully. A second term for Joe was all but assured if they could just maintain the status quo in Ukraine: media wins followed by more funding.
Even though Ukraine could not win, Collective Biden sought to escalate the conflict—and *asymmetric* warfare became the weapon of choice: hybrid attacks against Russia *within* Russia. An attack on an airfield near Murmansk was a manifestation of this, the drones launched by *Ukrainians* in Finland, as was an attack on a rocket manufacturing plant near Smolensk, the drones most likely launched by *Ukrainians* from Estonia. In early August, the Kursk Incursion was a large-scale; e example of asymmetric warfare; the intent in this case was to capture the nuclear power plant & hold it hostage in order to gain an upper hand in negotiations. Sundry targeted assassinations of high-ranking Russian military officials in Moscow or in the Moscow region were also part and parcel of the hybrid war
Success on the battlefield meant that the funding would still flow. As long as Ukraine could sell its media wins, whether asymmetric or not, it could secure another tranche of weapons. The investment had been so massively great that there was no other option: keeping the conflict going, regardless of Ukraine’s prospects, was & is certainly perverse—but when you can’t gain a battlefield advantage tactical nihilism will have to do. Moreover, the proxy, ridden hard and put away wet time after time, did not complain.
Because the proxy’s puppet was well-paid too.
>> Nota Bene:
When a total defeat of Ukraine became more desirable than a negotiated peace, Collective Biden began the most cynical phase of the conflict: scuttling Ukraine. Since most of the money earmarked in the supplemental aid packages was used to pay for *future* appropriations, Collective Biden needed to keep inking MIC contracts.
The worst possible outcome, in Collective Biden’s eyes, would be an end to the war on Russia’s terms, a victor’s peace for VVP: that could never happen. By April 2024, scuttling Ukraine meant cementing permanent hostility between Europe & Russia, bridges burned so thoroughly on the continent that normal relations could not rebound for @ least a generation but most likely longer.
"cementing permanent hostility between Europe & Russia, bridges burned so thoroughly on the continent that normal relations could not rebound for @ least a generation but most likely longer."
After the destruction the Soviets endured in WW2, I don't think the Russians will be in a forgiving mood anytime soon. Looking East and aligning fully with India, Iran and China seems like the only reasonable way forward. The Euro-nazis have shown their true colors for all to see. Europe will devolve to theme park status like their fish-n-chips gobbling bros have done for decades. Silly me, I actually thought people in Western Europe were educated and had a patina of civilization. Watching these galoots bend at the knee to genuflect before Resident Ice Cream Cone just blows my mind. Trump's prospects? New boss, same as the old boss.
the west is a colony of the jew. stop this silly nazi stuff already.....
thats the easy way... The jews just grew on a rotten ground. Remember covid. That gave the right picture of what the west is.
What is the single ethnicity on this planet with the character string 'nazi' in their name?
I've not heard this yet, and it doesn't make sense to me: "total defeat of Ukraine became more desirable than a negotiated peace". Could you expound on that?
This money is going into the generals pockets. The US is just a wild loot. I am surprised people dont kill each other in their working places. They probably do. Every day there are madmax scenes in the streets. The police are just execution squads, totally corrupt themselves. It is just a looting spree under the appereance of a nation.
Great video from 2015.
Yes. The late Sergey Dorenko was no prophet, simply a geopolitical realist. I was at a real (STEM, before DEI) science institute half a century back. My professors were the most hard nosed type of realists. The consensus was that the 2020s decade we are now living in would be hell. Why? Because good models predicted now would be the inflection point between population and resources. When global resources per capita begin to decline, there is nothing for it except to fight over who has to die and who has to become poorer. As I was born before Sergey, I have nothing to complain about. Those who don't get killed and are unhappy about getting poorer and less free will be offered 'medical assistance in dying'. Canada is the future model.
There are lots of resources. Fighting over them is hardly an innovation, no matter what or where they are.
My observations re: the tank v tank battle
First round low, HE. The gunner has preloaded HE and is pre-aiming low, because he is expecting to shoot at infantry in trenches. Pulling the trigger clears the barrel for the next round to be loaded (+1 for that)
Second round low, HE. (-1 for failing to select anti-tank, -1 for failing to raise aim point)
Third round on target, HE (+1 for recovering from initial panic, -1 for wrong ammo, again)
Fourth and Fifth rounds on target, AT. (+1 for finally getting it right, but we're nearly a minute in here)
Sixth round, glancing hit, AT. Possibly trying to hit the second tank, now obscured by the first one.
Note that whoever is in that last in line AFV is really on the ball. He's lighting up potential infantry trenches on the way, and even sends a burst at the second tank as it escapes.
@niggle,
I would posit that it takes multiple rounds of AT to disable armour due to the explosive reactive layer . The first round activates/destroys the e/r layer and after that they get penetration . The trick is to hit twice in the same place or get a shot in where the E/R isn't. Perhaps using HE will trigger multiple E/R packs . Perhaps Simplicius can elaborate...
There is evidence to support your supposition.
Firstly this engagement takes places at ranges where you *can* hold aim on the same spot on the target, and expect to hit it.
Second, the return shot that misses/glances (as noted by our host) occurs just *after* the first AT hit, so that tank has taken 2 hits.
On the other hand that *could* have been the dying reflex of the gunner, meaning the AT shell did its job, whether it hit a cleared patch of the hull or not.
I'd further note that Russia knows *exactly* what it takes to penetrate ERA+tank hull in one hit, so one assumes that's what ammunition they supply...
All we know for sure at this distance is who won.
are the russians firing primary heat or apds at other tanks? seems apds is not affected by E/R
APFSDS is somewhat affected by E/R as it causes a small 'wobble' in the penetrator which reduces penetration to some degree.
The preferred ammo type against other tanks is APFSDS, but you have to have them loaded in the carrousel ahead of time for a quick reload. For this mission they seem to have picked a combination of mostly HEAT and HE rounds to load it with, as only a single APFSDS round appears to have been fired. That makes sense given the mission type.
As I said to @Flabber, HEAT is *exactly* the round type that ERA is designed to defeat, so if you're expecting to face ERA protected armour, APFSDS is the way to go.
Western forces don't even have HEAT available any more (hence the Ukro complaints about Abrams) and very few have HE as a tank round.
Any HEAT in the Russian inventory is there because they don't throw stuff away, it's only use is as a backup or alternative to HE, or against non-ERA protected hard targets.
Only if the attacking/defending infantry are using very old or very under-spec single-charge AT rockets/missiles, which is likely the case as neither side was expecting to face tanks, hence why they sent in tanks. Tandem charge warheads capable of destroying tanks with ERA have existed since about the late '80s, and are decently common these days.
@Thermalvision,
This would be the reason for the turtle tanks and cope cages , Drones would be carrying tandem charges probably too . The technology is developing rapidly and solutions are being worked on continuously . It will be interesting to find out some time in the future what developments have succeeded and which have not. The tanks involved in this encounter are probably very similar ex Soviet design tanks with upgrades .
No.
Turtle tanks are solely for FPV drones of all types, and are meant to create enough standoff distance between the shaped charge detonation and the tank's actual armor as to de-focus the penetrating jet before it reaches the armor. Turtle tanks only work due to the extreme weight limitations of FPV drones preventing them from equipping large enough warheads for the extra bit of standoff distance to not matter. ATGMs and some heftier rocket launchers can easily launch warheads large enough to brute force their way through a turtle tank's armor scheme.
Based on the explosive effects of the rounds, this seems to be the actual order of types of rounds used:
1st: HE
2nd: APFSDS (likely the only one in the carrousel)
3rd: HEAT
4th: HEAT
5th: HEAT
6th: HEAT
7th: unclear, glances of enemy armour, but some indications of a HEAT round
8th: HEAT
9th: unclear, miss
Remember, they only have 20 rounds in the carrousel and pick the types they expect to need in the coming engagement to load it with. Given the mission in question, it's likely they loaded up with HEAT instead of APFSDS rounds, as the first can also be used against soft targets.
Problems with your observations.
The first 3 rounds have identical "explosive effects" 2 into the ground, third off glacis.
Round 4 "white smokes" when hitting the glacis, as does round 5 +6 (which also get nice secondaries, to the cheers of the camera watchers)
Round 7 is weird, on second viewing it is merely a smoke trail, some sort of bad round.
Muzzle blast 8 does nothing down range in the camera view.
There is no 9
HEAT rounds *were* good dual purpose rounds, but are *exactly* the type of round ERA was developed to counter, to the point where there's no point making them, there's better use of the materials involved for other round types.
AT rounds now are almost universally kinetic types (hence the Ukro complaints of the limited utility of the Abrams).
So if you even *suspect* you might encounter ERA protected armour, HEAT is actually a poor choice as an alternative (but a good one as a primary, if you have some to get rid of). Better to load up at least 3 APFDS in the carousel.
Ninth round clearly fired at 2:28. If you can't even spot that, it pretty much says it all. But you manage to top it with this garbage:
"HEAT rounds *were* good dual purpose rounds, but are *exactly* the type of round ERA was developed to counter, to the point where there's no point making them, there's better use of the materials involved for other round types."
There's so much wrong in that statement it's hilarious. I'm not wasting any more time on you, kid.
fantastic article - wow that video at the end is something eh ?
That video at the end is something else.
The video at the end is one of the most impressive predictions I’ve seen…
Even when this war is long over, the dust has settled, and someone has written a comprehensive book about it, I'll never understand it, ever.
I thought the War of Jenkins' Ear was weird, but this one takes the cake. When else in history has a smaller, poorer country been able to go on the attack against its bigger, wealthier neighbor purely thanks to the gargantuan amounts of money and supplies it receives from its allies? Allies that, at the same time, are (virtually) not directly involved in the fight at all?
Utterly bizarre from top to bottom, including Russia capturing 20 sq km per day of Ukrainian territory while simultaneously unable to dislodge Ukraine from its OWN territory for 5+ months.
And economically, Ukraine should be dead in the water, yet it's still a) got a viable currency b) exporting huge amounts of agricultural products (including by sea!) and c) exporting electricity despite a battered power grid. WT literal F
It was a desperate punt to seize eastern Ukraine and all those resources before they went to Russia under the much delayed enforcement of the Minsk Accords. Hell, the Ukrainians even fed the west the story they could topple Russia and get control of all that value.
It is always about resources, Sam, especially for the increasingly stratospherically indebted west that does not have the resource base to back up its paper money. Imagine what will happen once the rest of the world works how to monetise all the real value it is sitting on, all on its ownsome with its own financial system. Where will that leave the tatty old western hegemon?
This is what it is all really about.
Exactly.
I'm afraid it's not just about resources, but about very personal revenge, from now generations of offenses by Russian leaders against the desires and sometimes personal wealth of Western oligarchs. If sovereignty trumps property rights, then centuries of faux nobility built from ownership contracts can go up in the smoke of an afternoon.
And then there's the spiritual angle, in which Russia survived the nihilistic kill shot of the 90s and has rediscovered faith. That stands a stumbling block to the replacement of all religions with a neo-pagan priesthood.
So if it wasn't about Ukraine and its resources, it would be able some other flashpoint. Certain people in the West are getting old, and impatient, and feel they deserve to see the realization of generations of work within their lifetime--and maybe to live forever, too, in a transhumanist future. They want it all, now, and the bodies they walk over for that everything are just a squishy foundation.
"Russia capturing 20 sq km per day of Ukrainian territory while simultaneously unable to dislodge Ukraine from its OWN territory"
Russia is capturing Ukraine's most valuable territory, and also very strategic territory, whereas the Kursk salient is neither.
@abcdefg,
Agreed. Kursk is a death trap . The civilian population would be mostly gone and all targets are ranged in . The Germans found that out in WW2...
It may be so, but even if Kursk has no real value, it shouldn't take a year to kick some depleted and exhausted forces from a much, much smaller country.
Shoulda, woulda, coulda but didn't. Things are never black and white. It would definitely assist the Russians with recruitment but must surely be a political thorn.
Allowing Ukraine to stay in Kursk helps Russia to destroy military personell and material and acellerate the collapse of the Ukrainian army. It also diverts military Power from the Donbass Front.
150-200,000 internal refugess, thousands of civilians slaughtered after not being able to escape on time.
It's hard to even decide which is worse -- if it was deliberately allowed or if it was due to the usual apathy and incompetence.
"it shouldn't take a year to kick some depleted and exhausted forces from a much, much smaller country."
That's making assumptions which are not true. The Kiev regime gathered elite forces from nearly the entire front to send into Kursk, it spent big to send the densest concentration of foreign mercenaries anywhere in the war, and it had the direct support of US and NATO special forces. It richly equipped those forces with the best tanks and other gear it had stripped from other units along the front, including gear it had been holding in reserve. Kiev continues to send its best reserves into Kursk. There's no "depleted and exhausted forces" about it.
That's one reason why Kursk is valuable for Russia. It's a monkey fist trap for Kiev. Now that Kiev has stuck its hand into a bit of Kursk province and has grabbed a tiny bit of territory to make a fist, the only way it can withdraw is if Russia shreds the fist, which Russia is doing. Every elite soldier Kiev sent into Kursk to die is one less elite soldier who can defend any of the many towns Russia has taken since Kursk. It's also one less elite soldier left alive to defend against Russian moves deeper into Ukraine as Kiev's defensive lines collapse.
As to "much, much smaller country" that's nonsense which depends on people not knowing the ten year history of the conflict since the US overthrew the democratically elected government of Ukraine, installed a minority, unelected nazi junta in Kiev, and began flooding the new nazi overlords of much of Ukraine with hundreds of billions in money, weapons and direct support.
Russia had a peacetime army, a far smaller force than the highly militarized force which the US had built over the course of eight years for Kiev. Russia was the underdog in early 2022. Since then Russia has greatly expanded its army, but the Kiev regime has also benefitted from hundreds of billions in weapons, training, and the direct support of military personnel from the US and dozens of US vassal countries. That "much, much smaller country" benefits from over a trillion dollars in space infrastructure that includes a dozen ultra high resolution imaging satellites each of which costs more than what the US's latest aircraft carrier costs. About 100K US and NATO military personnel work full time, 24/7, on "back office" tasks essential for combat, such as targeting, building strike packages, and remote operation of missile attacks and drones by land, sea and air.
That's a formidable adversary, and Russia has its work cut out for it advancing along a 600 mile front. Russia can only do that by investing the much more limited resources it is applying to this conflict to those military settings that matter for military success. Overinvesting resources to pry a few square kilometers of almost completely empty land in Kursk is not one of those military settings.
There are some people who blow a fuse about "Kiev has taken and is holding a piece of Russia," but those folks don't realize almost the entire war is being fought on Russian territory. Kherson, Zaporozhiye, Donetsk and Lugansk regions are all Russia, and the Kiev regime continues to hold substantial territory, far larger and more important than a tiny slice of Kursk region, in those four regions. What Russia is doing to liberate Russian territory in those regions is far more important than wasting disproportionate resources to liberate a tiny piece of Kursk, especially when that tiny piece of Kursk is functioning so efficiently as a machine to kill elite nazi forces.
Exactly.
What a well crafted and accurate explanation.
People often forget all the stuff behind the "action" part of the war because it what is seen. The other concern for Russia is they still have to maintain resources and defensive capabilities for the chance of NATO getting directly involved. Like much of the barriers placed around airfields, they are less about a few drones and missiles that Ukraine can toss at Russia and more about minimizing damage in a saturation attack of tomahawks.
edit added "that Ukraine"
Lauding your commonsensical reminder that Lugansk, Donetsk, Zaparozhiye & Kherson *are* Russia. It's not like they are the skim milk version of Russia, while the other regions are whole milk.
Russia is Russia.
BTW: emerging from Zelya’s interview w/ Lex, we learn that Zelya kept trying to tilt the Minsk Accord, perhaps under Macron’s manipulations, to a head-to-head dispute/negotiation between Ukraine and *Russia* instead of its original framework, which placed the fulcrum of the dispute/negotiation between Ukraine and the DPR/LPR.
Zelya told Lex he phoned VVP hundreds of times, and he made it seem on Lex's podcast that VVP was being unreasonable & non communicative [reinforcing the stereotypical trope.]
What Zelya did not reveal to Lex is that VVP told him to phone Denis Pushilin, for instance, of the DPR in order to work matters out.
Lex did not know enough about the fine points of Minsk to challenge Zelya's account.
On top of it all, Lex is a Zelya fan boi.
I think it's a deliberate trap to wear down the afu's best forces which Russia is doing
Kursk is the Russian version of a deer feeding plot in the midwest. The Russians have got to just love how the Ukies keep coming to the killing fields of Kursk. What blooming idiots does it take to just keep sending cannon fodder for the Russians to eliminate. Putin has to be scratching his head at the stupidity of the USSA/NATO. Why would he ever want this war to come to a premature end when he's destroying the weapon stocks of the collective west?
But Axel, if your opponents are going to go to the trouble of shipping--at great expense--their most enthusiastic soldiers and hardware into range of your guns, shouldn't you let them?
It may sounds callous, but the nature of civilizational warfare is to grind the other out of existence. Killing your opponent until they're good and ready to quit is generally on a successful path to lasting peace. Land only has value if it can be exploited; this is the Russian way of war.
The Kursk offensive is good for Russia. Ukraine is sending their 'least exhausted' units to Kursk, at the direct expense of the eastern front. Kursk is farmland, whereas there are still a couple trillion dollars worth of resources being rapidly lost in the east.
What's happening in Kursk is the Ukrainians are delivering themselves to the grinder, so Russians can essentially just sit there and grind away. Russians are taking losses too, but the disproportionate grinding is happening on the Ukrainian side.
The most bizarre aspect of this whole 'conflict' to me is how a jewish comedian who plays the piano with his penis can tell a whole country of men to go pointlessly die, and they just do.
From a Russian security perspective, the most important regions are Chernigov, Sumy, Kharkov, as well as Nikolaev and Odessa. The Donbass can wait.
The pre-war map and what happened in August should be making it abundantly clear why.
Yet Putin has refused for nealry three years to do anything to seize those regions, preferring to send the Russian army to bang its head against the most fortified defense lines in the world.
Make that make sense...
Your comment hit a chord, I have been wondering the very same things since 2022. How on earth did the Russian let Ukraine capture 1000 sa. Km. Of land in Kursk to then spend months and months to partially dislodge them.
How can the country survive economically, even with massive foreign subsidies?
How can conscripts and exhausted forces continue to advance and fight without ever surrendering? Those conscripts are drafted but seem to never abandon the fights, even when stuck in cauldrons.
Etc etc
Anti retreat forces are generally deployed to prevent retreats. Most often nationalist battalions with NATO 'advisors'.
There is an organized retreat when soldiers receive orders from command to fall back. Ukrainian soldiers have never and will never receive such orders, because they are expected to die. They know that if they fall back from their positions without an order to do so, they are effectively deserting and will suffer the consequences - including being executed on the spot.
Seems it's better to desert before you get to the front.
https://t.me/geopolitics_live/40260
Hundreds of soldiers from French-trained Ukrainian brigade went AWOL before firing a single shot
Over 1,700 soldiers from Ukraine’s newly formed 155th Mechanized Brigade, trained and outfitted with great fanfare in France, deserted before reaching the battlefront, according to Ukrainian journalist Yuriy Butusov.
▪️French President Emmanuel Macron proudly announced the “elite” project alongside Volodymyr Zelensky last June. The brigade was meant to have more than 5,800 troops and be equipped with Leopard tanks and French CAESAR 155 mm howitzers. However, at least 50 members of the unit, also known as “Anne of Kiev,” went AWOL already during drills in France, Butusov wrote on social media.
▪️When the brigade was finally packed off to the front line near Pokrovsk (Krasnoarmeysk), it did not even have any drones.
“As a result, the brand-new Leopard 2A4 tanks and VAB armored vehicles suffered losses during the first attempts to use them,” according to Butusov, who added:
“The brigade’s servicemen became hostages of Zelensky’s PR project, which the authorities made no effort to actually implement competently.”
▪️Remnants of the brigade have reportedly been reassigned to other units, with Ukraine’s State Bureau of Investigation (SBI) confirming to AFP that it had opened a criminal case on the circumstances of the formation of the 155th Mechanized Brigade. The case is being investigated under “articles on abuse of authority and desertion,” Communications Adviser to the SBI Tаtiana Sapyan said.
Yes, of course it's better to desert before you get shipped to the front. How do you get back to your village/town 500km away, wearing an army uniform, without money, food or water, in the middle of winter? US/NATO command (who are really the ones running the show) expects every single Ukrainian soldier to die at the front. And the Ukrainian army is organized with the sole purpose of feeding the Russian meat grinder. Everybody knew the Ukrainians could not win this conflict, even before it started.
Some people here in this comments section wonder that this conflict does not make any sense, but what they don't understand is that according to the psychopathic logic of US/NATO command, it makes perfect sense to have Ukrainians killing Russians using NATO weapons, tactics and logistics. And of course the US MIC is more than happy about it too. And they'll pay US Congress to authorize more US taxpayers' $ billions in spending on this highly profitable conflict.
Yes. Ukrainians are mercenaries and mercenaries are expected to die on command. That's what they're paid to do.
The only problem is the people holding the pocketbook did not expect the adventure to be so expensive. Their budget has been totally blown out.
This are mainly foreigners there
The easy answers are usually the best: Because it is in Russia's interest to keep the AFU in Kursk. The political ramifications of having the enemy on your own territory are huge. (Btw I have said so at the time; "Russia will probably be in no hurry to take back the Kusrk area")
Riddle me this: How is it even possible that the AFU can launch a renewed offensive in the Kursk area while there is only one supply route that can be reached easily from both sides by Russia recon and artillery? That offensive should not have been possible, the armor and troops should have been destroyed at least 20 miles before they got to the front. Yet they were not, why?
As I said, the easiest answers are usually the best.
"When else in history has a smaller, poorer country been able to go on the attack against its bigger, wealthier neighbor purely thanks to the gargantuan amounts of money and supplies it receives from its allies? Allies that, at the same time, are (virtually) not directly involved in the fight at all?"
Umm, many, many times? There were dozens of such proxy wars during the Cold War.
Really? Which ones specifically?
US supported UK in the falklands
The US and the UK are the same country. Think of them as one large mafia family business and things get clearer.
They are both colonies of the Jew
They are beholden to the prince of darkness, Jew or otherwise. Jews that need to hide behind "antisemitism" are like those who hide behind every other race, age, gender or 'sexual preference' card. It's all made up excuses for hate.
One's character is proof of who rules one's life.
I smile to myself every Christmas season in the West...all this talk about Peace! Ask most of them, peace means 'my way or the high way'. It's mentally deranged.
Yet another example of your failure to understand the difference between Twitter war and real war.
Kursk, after the initial attack failed, is nothing more than a massive drain on Ukrainian resources - particularly since dumbfuck Ukrainian leadership seems to think it is critical. If the dumbfuck Ukrainians wish to keep pouring resources into a firesack, why would Russia interfere?
There are... reasons... why theoretically holding that particular pocket of Russia up until now might have made sense. It hinges on the nature of gas contracts with Europe, Ukraine's role as a transit signatory, and what happens to Europe's energy supplies when Russian gas is unavailable. We are now past the Jan 1 expiry of those contracts and things in the geopolitical energy sector are shaking loose, for Europe.
Keep in mind the main reason for knocking over Assad, originally, was his unwillingness to play ball with Qatari gas pipelines to Europe.
It's all about Europe, energy control, and what happens to its industry and (perhaps more importantly) markets. Without markets you don't have brands and the products they serve, and thus don't have wealth flowing into the pockets of oligarchs and their financial intermediaries.
Now that we're past Jan 1 the main reason to keep Kursk seems to be part of the play for attention and support that Ukraine needs to make, lest Trump immediately follow through on his reflex to throw them away. There may of course be more to it all, but like the whole war, that "massive drain on Ukrainian resources" has been a pile of blood and treasure spent for a purpose--just not a Ukrainian one.
Sorry, but your comment makes zero sense.
If Ukraine wanted to stop the transit of Russian gas into Europe - the pipelines run from Kursk region THROUGH UKRAINE.
Or don't you know that?
Yes, pipelines from which Ukraine has siphoned gas for decades, and collects billions in transit fees from. The contracts for those transits can only be metered via specific locations, one of which is shut down in Luhansk and the other is now occupied in Kursk. Without access to that metering the billing cannot be done correctly.
I've read, correctly or not, that Ukraine has been attempting to get Russia to sign onto new transit agreements that meter starting in Western Ukraine, which would enable them to steal as much gas as they want while subjecting Russia to contract penalties if European requirements don't flow through. Ultimately, however, Russia doesn't like cutting off its own nose and has declined to sign anything at all with Zelensky.
Remember please, at all times, that this war is about money first--for all involved in the West and Ukraine. Ideological fascism is secondary and a tool to money and power (to get money).
As a means to verify my comment's direction, watch what Russia does with and to Ukraine's gas infrastructure in coming weeks/months. If they continue ignoring it (aside from storage facilities), I may be more wrong. If they obliterate it and close that chapter on Ukraine's energy infrastructure, that's an indication the gas angle has been bearing hard on the Suja calculus. We'll see.
Wrong. Ukraine has access to these pipelines because these pipelines were originally built to supply Ukraine as well as the West - back when Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union.
Equally, you are wrong in that Ukraine has NOT been trying to renew the transit agreements.
Slovakia wants it, Russia is ok with it, but Ukraine - likely on orders from the EU - has declined to renew them.
You are also way out of touch on the actual pre 2025 gas situation: Russia has long since stopped shipping free gas to Ukraine; the gas that Ukraine is using is paid for by the European customers of Gazprom - it is simply a tax added on to the price for the gas said European customers actually receive.
Next: no, this war is not about money. If Russia only cared about money, they would not have launched the SMO as nobody - not Putin, not Nabiullina, nobody expected that the West would be so stupid as to trap Russian oligarch hot money in Russia.
Nor does Ukraine's gas infrastructure matter.
If Europe in the form of Queen von der Crazy doesn't want any EU nations to have Russian gas, then the Russians have long since found other avenues to use it or sell it. The nations that suffer as a result are Ukraine and the EU.
None of your conjectures above are based on fact or reality or even decent analysis.
Try as I might, no logic or reason I possess helps me either. Natural resources? Agricultural land? Black sea access? Military showmanship? Operational proof of new technology? All the explanations make zero sense when I weigh it against the human & environmental destruction for generations to come. Has the human race advanced to such heights?
I am left with the powers of principalities, spiritual darkness & wickedness doing what it always does: destroying Life. Every 'policy' yields death. Our true enemy.
May God have mercy on us.
Amen, bro.
Because the West is using its treasure and Ukrainian blood, at least for the time being.
The western puppet masters are very much directly involved in pretty much any and every case where Ukraine managed to land any significant hit on the Russians.
They are the ones aiming and firing all the real weapons after all, usually patiently and meticulously charting a course through the labyrinth of russian AD.
Without western fleets of orbital assets the Ukros would barely hit anything.
The money, well, much of it of course is gobbled up by western oligarchs, followed by ukro oligarchs, but that which actually makes it to the ground in Ukraine is used mostly not for the war effort but to keep the machinery of state going.
Without NATO handsomely paying every single public official, the ukrainian state would long be history, everyone abandoning their posts long ago.
Money is vital, but not necessarily always in the way people assume.
Obviously this kind of keeping a war going (largely) from the outsider is something that is really possible like this only in our era of modedrn hightech warfare.
I doubt it could have been done to a remotely comparable degree when some sortz of fighting mano a mano still played a decisive role and when huge armies faced each other directly instead of most of combat by necessity happening between comparatively tiny units.
Yet even so the willingness to spend the lifes of one's soldiers like water in ultimately suicidal offensives can make for a temporary and mostly optical advantage of the less cautious side.
In the end though Ukraine's publicity stuints have played into the russian strategy of slowly killing as many ukrainian soldiers as at all possible every single time.
Which is why the Russians were never in a hurry to eliminate the Kursk bridgehead and indeed welcomed the Ukros sending everything they could spare and much more right in there.
Of course our gut instinct tells us that that cannot be or that that somehow has to be an excuse of sorts (which ukrainian and NATO propaganda are counting on while being quite aware of the truth) but well, our amateur gut instincts that are informed largely by what we know or believe we know about wars long past and strategies long obsolete, are not necessarily well prepared to tell us anything about actual war strategy that may seem quite counterintuitive.
Concerning Ukraine's exports, the question is if Ukraine indeed CAN afford them, in many cases, like electricity, the answer is almost certainly no.
But not only is the government obsessed with keeping up an illusory facade of strength to foreigners at the detriment of it's own citizens, in some sectors, like quite possibly grain, they may not even have a choice.
The creditors and puppeteers do have Ukraine by the short and curlies in a myriad ways after all and if they say that they want that grain, how much is there really that Ukraine can do to resist even if it wants to?
Russia does not have to make concessions: it is winning the war. DJT is inheriting a conflict on the worst footing imaginable, made unsalvageable after 3 years of Collective Biden and OTAN destroying options & prospects. They’ve left nary a shred of hope for productive diplomacy. The U.S., as an over-stretched super power, without the resources or the political will to prolong Project Ukraine, has run aground. Russia’s conquests are accelerating rapidly. Capturing the last of Donbas’s strongholds, well-fortified since 2014, cements the battlefield dominance. Russia has arrived @ a point of massive leverage. Ukraine, a proxy ridden hard and put away wet, lacks the manpower to put up a fight.
So of course Michael Kauffman, writing as a Carnegie wonk for the BBC, urged DJT to keep the war going *as is* in an effort to attrit the Russians eventually and force them to capitulate.
Fictions & fables abound on Anglo-American news sites.
Soon Kauffman will describe how DPRK troops in Kursk have betrayed Russia and begun fighting for the Blue & Yellow.
Michael Kauffman the jew -
will be funny when VVP laughs at trump about ending the war in 24 hours. Heres hoping Russia takes odessa and grinds the trump ZOG's nose in it....
One of your best. The ending video was so prescient.
Not prescient in the Paul Atreides sense, just cold calculated unblinking realism.
How to format and save a PDF copy of articles like this one.
I am using Firefox. Vivaldi, a Chrome-based browser, works in the same way. I also want to format them for reading on my Kindle, so I am going to select Letter as the paper size, not A4.
These Substack articles open with the author's text, maybe with just the first few comments.
Open the linked article in your web browser. What you do first is format the article that Simplicius wrote.
If using Firefox, Toggle Reader View (F9)
Now you see a simplified version of everything, still including all the graphics. Much easier to read, no comments included.
Next, File, Print, Save to PDF
Choose a name for the article e.g. "Simplicius - End of Year Wrapup"
Save to the directory you have chosen, now in this example you have a PDF file Simplicius - End of Year Wrapup.pdf
In Firefox, toggle the Reader View back to normal
Open the Comments
Decide if you want Newest, Top first or Newest first or Oldest first and select accordingly
The comments will re-display if appropriate
Hit the End key
Load More
Repeat until you reach the very bottom of all the comments
Next Edit, Find in Page
In the search box, type expand f (or expand full)
Now see if it produces Expand Full Comment underneath various long comments and if so carry out the command
Repeat by clicking on the "Up" chevron button next to this box until you reach the top of the comments
When there are no, or no more, comments to expand, the search box (in Firefox) will turn red
Now the interesting bit where you can get creative ...
File, Print, Save to PDF
Move the cursor over to the text box that appears to the left
You will see something like, in a Simplicius article that I am reading, Page 1 of 83
Look at the display and you may first need to adjust the margins so that the text is not cut off left or right
Now, you click on the double chevron >> to go to Last Page
Think for a moment, how is the formatting? Is that last page blank?
If it is blank, you can select Custom Pages and, as an example, print 1-82
Let's say one last comment strays onto a new page. In Firefox - but perhaps not in Chrome-based browsers - you can play around with the formatting to make things fit on a page, using Scale to change it for example to 99%. Or use your Custom Pages selection to leave out that last comment.
Choose an appropriate subdirectory like PDF or a new one, e.g. Simplicius.
What you do, to save typing, is select the main article already saved to this subdirectory, click on it to insert the filename and be careful to add "- comments" at the end of it before saving the comments file
You will now have two files in this same subdirectory, Simplicius - End of Year Wrapup.pdf and Simplicius - End of Year Wrapup - comments.pdf
One final task is to merge the two PDF files (and doing that so that they are in the right order, with comments last) and then save them in similar fashion. I use Expert PDF 14 which has an easy way to re-order the PDF files so that the main article appears first, then the comments. In Expert PDF 14, this is done by Create then Merge files. That done, the combined file is saved - in this example, you will use "Simplicius - End of Year Wrapup - comments", inserting this name from the previously saved file in the subdirectory, and further edit it adding the words "with comments
Finally, you have a perfectly formatted PDF file of the article plus all the comments :
"Simplicius - End of Year Wrapup.pdf and Simplicius - End of Year Wrapup - with comments.pdf"
If you do this regularly, you can have a complete local library of Simplicius articles with all the comments - readable offline on any device.
In some cases (not Simplicius) you may want to merge several articles and comments and the way you will do this depends on the PDF software that you use. You will have to play around with the commands, formatting etc. until you have mastered everything. Once you have it right, you can format a long article together with hundreds of comments in three or four minutes.
When you have mastered all this, it's an almost automated simple routine to create PDF files of almost anything on the internet that you wish to store and keep for reference. You can also send these formatted PDF files to others.
I suggest waiting before working on the comments until Simplicius has published his next article as by then all, or almost all, of the comments to the previous article will have appeared.
Now you have a compact, offline, searchable PDF file that you can read on your computer or on your phone. I use X1 Search, which will let me instantly find any phrase inside PDF files and lead me to the local folder so that I can open it.
If you have a Kindle, you can Send to Kindle (over the internet) or copy over the files by attaching a USB cable between Kindle and computer. I find it best to set the Kindle to read the PDF files in Landscape mode. In a few days I am flying from South Africa to the US, two long flights. I shall have my Kindle and be able to read and catch up with all the valuable information and knowledge from Substack authors like Simplicius. As mentioned, these same techniques can be adapted for storing any useful information from other websites.
One last thing, if you have a Smart TV that has a Google Android operating system, you can then view these nicely formatted PDF files on your TV. I am looking into this. It seems that first I must install a PDF reader app or the Microsoft Office app on the TV. This opens some most interesting new possibilities. To get started on this, do a search for google tv pdf files.
Thank you very much for that. Learn something new every day.
I am using my phone to read and watch. Hardly ever my laptop. The articles and comments I am interested in, I send a screenshot or selected text to WA or mail it to myself. Far from optimal.
There's a Firefox extension called Print Edit WE. It streamlines all of the above, and offers nifty options like scaling and deleting fluff. I believe it exists for Chrome too.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/print-edit-we/
from Zelya's interview w/ Lex Fridman on 5 Jan: “When I talk with Donald Trump, all the European leaders call to ask, 'How was it?' This shows the influence of Donald Trump. And this has never happened before with an American president. I tell you, from my experience, this also gives you confidence, you know, that he can stop this war. It won’t be long, because Europe will be looking at us—and we’ll be looking at Trump.”
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fun fact: Lex, a Muscovite, wanted to conduct the interview in Russian, but Zelya insisted on English
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https://x.com/EndWokeness/status/1875998322412199989
JEW Zelya's interview w/ JEW Lex Fridman about jew tool trump...