In a spate of panic Zelensky somehow managed to get the Rada to return and quickly amend the anti-corruption law, which he immediately signed into force.
There are persistent rumors that he has been seriously brain-damaged in the bombing of his office, which is why the only thing he is good for is photo-shoots. He is not even allowed to speak live, all his sound bites are only reported second-hand. Wonder if he is still good for a Biden-style puppet, or not even that.
How did GQ Magazine miss out on this photo shoot? Z, hand on chin...reminiscent of Rodin's "The Thinker" statue. Thinking deeper thoughts than even the Orange TACO. Like...how in the hell am I going to get out of this cluster fuck?! Leavitt here. Note that she says (pronounces) Trump should get the "noble" peace prize instead of the Nobel Prize. Such nobility in an otherwise blithering idiot. <<link>>
It's more complicated than that. I would say roughly half of westerners have a strong sense of ethnos and despise the other half who have betrayed their own ancestors to gain favour with the alien elite. Secondarily, the westerners with a sense of ethnos suffer from a lack of self respect as they have allowed themselves to be repressed. A sad story which Native Americans understand perfectly, and the subtext of the TV show Yellowstone.
I think he is a candidate to be installed after the addicted Mr. Z goes in one fashion or another, so is Klitshchko and perhaps even Alexei Arestovich, the long-time critic of Zelensky's governance.
I guess not enough people read Vogue to make it a meaningful propaganda medium. The tool here is the cover. Vogue’s cover is the artefact that matters. I don’t read Vogue but every time they’re trying to bring someone to general awareness they make sure to push it down everybody’s throats. I know all the vogue covers that matter from the last twenty years. It’s a mark of political status, a dog whistle to align people’s opinions of a person in the right way.
Correct, it's about consensus-formation at a level above the mass public. Downstream distribution of that messaging happens automatically through social media when the Vogue story and cover get features on twitter, Instagram, etc
Black is understandable, SS color. White is probably to signify to the Ukrainian fighters "the angel of death." SS black is fashionable in Ukraine, even the beggar wears it.
I think B&W photography has become code for ‘seriousness’ and alignment with postmodern liberal values. An use equivalent to the use of purple, for instance to denote royalty and other colours used in the arts to symbolise various things.
The black uniform with a white shirt was indeed the military uniform of SS officers. Black is also a funeral color. Regarding the angel of death, this guy collects corpses. Just as the legend of the beggar Churchill was created, so the legend of this one, the beloved Napoleon of the troops, was created. Are we sure he attended the Soviet military academy and not the Ukrainian oligarchy academy? Seriously, what did he achieve when he had up to 5 times more men than Russia? Nothing, just the butcher.
Zaluzhny may need to be photographed in black and white to hide the scars from when the Russians almost got him . I wonder is he thinks he has a mandate from god like Trump...
amazing, no? but this is the method acting as candidate for head of junta. And not JUST. Every single first lady who was a Dem was on the cover of every single magazine except National Review for a year ahead of the election. They managed to make even that Buffalo Gal Michelle look reasonably attractive. Otherwise, the GOP nominees' wives were being savaged within the covers.
Trump seems to be falling into a trap. Deficit in June has been revised from $500 billion to $1 trillion. Another $2.5 trillion of debt forecast for 2025. Dollar sliding, Tbonds at almost 5%. China maintaining their export numbers at over $1 trillion surplus. Things aren't too rosey.
And right on cue, two clowns in the Senate are trying to put together a $54B aid package of new money for Ukraine. I'm sure it will pass by Christmas, just in time for the liberation of Kiev.
It would be a pretty safe bet they are part of that investigations on members of Congress getting kick-backs from the Ukraine, which of course will never ser the light of Day 🤬🤬🤬
Yeah, he’s (DT) definitely on a roll as of late. I can’t figure it out. He’s thrown in with the very same people (Neocons) who have caused him enormous problems since he got into politics in the first place. Guess it’s not that hard. Am sure they opened their wallets. They and their handlers do have unlimited funds.
For many, many years, we continue to watch revised numbers, almost every data point. None of the brilliant people reporting financial news never seem to notice/comment on this too-difficult-to-miss pattern. It's all smoke and mirrors, the question is: who is the real wizard of oz?
See all those American planes and missiles, they need rare earths. Looks like that supply is cut off. It's the west that is bleeding out as they've expended weapons in West Asia and Ukraine that can't easily be replaced. If you look at US weapons contracts its been one load of corrupt non performance. Lately SIG is in the spotlight with its spear and handguns. Resource constraints are being imposed, and not as the US imagined.
Some, for some civil purposes, redirection for other purposes, specifically military/weapons production is a no go. It's been audited for diversion, so we'll see how that works out.
Who is the world and who he has given in for real yet?
I can't see/find anything in writing yet, only press statements and it all looks to me like deception, smoke screens and numbers plucked right out of thin air without any real economical base.
For those interested, there is a guy Andy Shectman (sells metals) who did offer another possible alternative to Trump’s behavior. He said MAYBE his admin is actually trying to get the world to dump the dollar. This would be necessary in order to get around the Triffin Dilemma so that manufacturing could finally be brought back here.
Mike Adams did remind AS of Trump’s attitude which is completely counter to that theory. It’s worth a listen if you have the time. I do like Andy quite a bit. That being said I don’t hold out much hope that anything is going on aside from what our eyes and ears are telling us. We may be in deep trouble soon. I was NOT concerned about Trump starting WW3 but I sure as hell am now.
Zelensky is likely to turn up in Britain if he remains alive. The City of London will take care of him for a while then poison him and blame the Russians like they always do.
Great update. It sounds like a phase change where water heats up slowly, then suddenly turns to gas when the boiling point is reached. That time-lapse movie of Porkrosvk ought to be required viewing for the "muh slow territorial gains" crowd. Attritional war is non-linear - months of watching paint dry, then suddenly, big moves.
We are all hoping for a phase change, but we have been hearing that it is imminent for years now, and it never comes.
The non-linear aspect of attrition war only manifests itself if the winning side is ready to take advantage of it. But Russia is not. As it is now there are many wide open regions of the front that which it can pour forces into, but it is not being done.
This is because it simply does not have the forces, and it does not have them because the Kremlin refuses to mobilize, while it also has numerous other potential wars to keep in mind as possibly starting at any time, and it has to keep those in mind in terms of ground force allocation because the Russian nuclear arsenal is strictly off limits for the purposes of the protection of the country, right now it is an extremely expensive, highly technologically sophisticated museum exhibition (and one that only the RVSN and 12th GUMO are allowed to see).
You see it in Sumy -- the Ukros plugged the hole very quickly and Russia is being pushed back. Which is because Russia probably sent a couple thousand men there, not much more than that. Yes, Syrsky may have largely sacrificed Pokrovsk in the process, but it is not as if there is a real collapse of the front there, they are perfectly fine with that tempo of Russian advance.
Ukraine's purpose here is to be the kamikaze country that inflicts maximum damage to Russia while the West either prepares a crushing kinetic blow or slowly cooks the proverbial frog to completion into internal exhaustion and collapse.
As long as the rate of advance remains 20 km^2 a day (which, for the arithmetically challenged, means Ukraine won't be recovered in the next 60 years), there is no problem. That rate needs to go up to 200 km^2 a day for things to be looking any kind of optimistic. And that is still a distant dream.
When Putin announces a mobilization of another 500K to 1M, then you can get your hopes up. But that is not happening because the people who he answers to have a veto on that.
GM is our resident pessimist. Nothing is ever right to him/her. Nothing, I tell ya! For years GM have been writing that Russia would be defeated tomorrow, at best next week. For years they have been wrong.. I stopped responding to that alias as I am not sure that is not an ukie propaganda bot.
Actually I completely agree with you, the scale of the problem is too great. I don't think it will last 60 years but it could be as little as 5 more years and as much as a decade or more. Without *any* large-scale mobilisation 20 years is more probable than not unless some other dynamic enters the equation.
I wish Russia would mobilize too, but I don't see it as absolutely necessary. When Ukraine is mobilizing grandpas who probably can't even control their own bowel movements.
I think a mobilization would have more effect in signaling the West that the game is over. Put Russia on a total war footing and declare war on NATO. But I'm probably crazy.
Did you consider the slow place is intended to bleed the Ukraine backers in a war of attrition. Who in the West can build anything on time and in any volume to keep the bombs flying and the Ukrainians dying?
To be fair, it matters little to the average frustrated Russian whether Zaporozhe is part of the Russian Federation or not.
Were Putin to announce mobilization, expect a rush for the exits. Yes, the West certainly has bigger things that Ukraine on its mind, but good luck getting the average frustrated citizen of any country to die to prevent future catastrophes.
I agree to some extent that there will be not few running for the exit, as happened in the prolly most fanaticized country in the developed world, namely Israel, Allegedly, up to 1.5m (of 7m) left from Oct7,23 ti the start of the attack against Iran. After that, at least ppl in the 100k`s left until the borders to Jordan and Egypt were blocked, and even after that, many escaped by boat to Cyprus.
So sure, a mass mobilization will trigger exiles, yet prolly not more than 22/23 which were approximately 300k.
At the moment, contracts and volunteers appear to suffice, and will continue unless there is a massive NATO onslaught. For that, NATO does not appear to have the personnel, the gear, the ammonition at the moment.
Don't know when you were a kitten, I doubt you ever were. During most of my lifetime, the West was believed to be the realm of abundance.
First time I heard about shortages to some extent was during the Iraq war when it was reported that the usage of Tomahawk cruise missiles might hit the bottom of stock when expended further to such extent. That was hardly "out of anything".
We've been hearing such wishful thinking since the beginning of the war, and it is the West that keeps escalating. It beggars the imagination that there is nobody in the Pentagon, nobody in Whitehall or Munich who can tell the politicians to stop letting their mouths write checks that their asses cannot cash.
Of course I was a kitten. That's where cats come from.
The road network supporting an advance into Sumy was never sufficient to support large scale operations there for either Ukraine or the Russians.
I suspect that is the case for many "wide open" areas of the LOC. Transportation, terrain and lack of cover impose constraints along with the generally low density of forces available to either side.
The "front" is 800 or 900 miles and for the Russians there are 500-600k troops committed. The infantry centric fashion of this war will soak up manpower very quickly.
I do tend to agree generally with your assessment that Russia continues to grant Ukraine and the West time as if Russia believes time is on it's side. Maybe they know better than us. Only time will tell.
Russia continues to succeed, but it also reveals the disadvantage they operate under not having real air superiority. In any conflict with Nato, that will be the one advantage Nato/US has. Of course much of that rests on 30 or 40 major airbases scattered across Europe destroy or seriously degrade those along with a few key ports and LNG terminals and Natos plans get thrown out the window. All those targets seem ready made for Oreshnik depending on how real that system is, how many they have and what the actual destructive power of the warheads are.
To put a large airbase out of operation for an extended period probably requires 100-150 weapons impacting with some accuracy. If each Oreshnik can deliver 36 500 pound equivalent bombs with accuracy, then 5 can do the job. The entire target set of airbases might require 200 missiles - fewer in reality as other weapons are also available.
I think Russia takes the threat from Nato pretty seriously. Which may explain what appears to us to be a somewhat limited effort in Ukraine.
>The road network supporting an advance into Sumy was never sufficient to support large scale operations there for either Ukraine or the Russians.
Absolute nonsense.
The E101 from Moscow to Kiev goes between Glukhov and Shostka, one of the quietest areas of the front, and another highway runs from Kursk through Sudzha, then through Sumy and then to Kiev.
Railways run in parallel.
>To put a large airbase out of operation for an extended period probably requires 100-150 weapons impacting with some accuracy
It takes one kinetic weapon, but also something else much more important -- courage.
Maybe he should ask his buds, Ben Stiller and Sean Penn to do a "Mitty in Ukraine". How a khaki t shirt short dude wins a war and is loved by his people.
>CNN concedes these ‘small’ advances are quickly adding up:
They are adding up to a meager 620 km^2 for July, i.e. nothing remotely sufficient. We are still on course to push the Nazis out of Ukraine circa 2095 or so.
Unless there is the mother of all sudden and unexpected collapses very soon, by this time next year Kramatorsk will still not have been taken, let alone Zaporozhye city and Kherson, there will still be no buffer zone along the pre-2022 border, and Kharkov, Kiev, Odessa, etc. you can just forget about.
Because today is August 1st, which means that there are 10 weeks left with foliage still on the trees and shrubs, after which assaults again become near impossible when there is nowhere to hide from drones.
But, if history is any guidance (and we have a good sample size at this point), it is much more likely that the 5D chess grandmaster in the Kremlin will once again be caught with his pants down by a "surprise" Ukro-NATO-Nazi offensive than that Russia will make a sudden big arrow breakthrough, and then that "surprise" will again take many months to reverse, if it ever is, taking off the table whatever moves the General Staff may have had in their plans.
As a reminder, Kupyansk is only now being entered, over three (yes, 3) years later (!!!) after it was given up without a fight, even though the Russian army has been camping on the outskirts since February 2023, Volchansk still hasn't been taken after 15 months of bitter stalemate fighting, and Izyum and Balakleya are just pipe dreams at the moment.
Which is because the 5D chess grandmaster in the Kremlin continues to refuse to mobilize, as that would be oh-so-horrible for his oligarch masters, and he also refuses to do anything about the supply of materiel and men from NATO to the Ukro-Nazis.
>The authors write that after Pokrovsk, the road to Pavlograd is open.
The road to Pavlograd has been wide open for four years (and even more open for the eight years prior to that). We, together with all the exasperated Russian military experts, have been over this countless times -- who in his right mind fights a war in the most fortified places when there is this wide open space that is also much closer to one's logistics, in this case the huge much less well defended border from Kiev to Kharkov? What kind of new genius military strategy is this?
And no, it is not actually open now. Because one is supposed to win wars as quickly as possible by taking advantage of his overwhelming advantages if he has them, before the enemy can gain strength and nullify them, otherwise the enemy adapts. Which is exactly what happened here. The open terrain is good for offense under classical military thinking, but we are not in that world anymore, we are in the world of drones, where the open steppe is death, not an advantage, because there is no cover.
So yeah, next year on August 1st we will be having this conversation again and Kramatorsk will still be in the hands of the Nazis and nothing of the SMO objectives will be anywhere remotely close to having been achieved. And that is if Russia even exists by then, which is not at all guaranteed because there are many signs that NATO is planning a serious strategic move, which will again catch the geniuses in the Kremlin unprepared, as it always happens, because God forbid they ever make a proactive rather than a purely reactive move...
One would suspect the Russian leadership rightly does not want a complete victory that would imply conquering the territory of Ukraine to the Polish border.
What would be the result of that situation? Incorporate the Ukrainians as citizens of the Russian Federation? It would absolutely disrupt the political life in the country. Create a system like the Israeli, with the Ukrainians in the role of Palestinians?
Neither Russians nor Ukrainians would accept that.
I suspect that at the beginning of the SMO, Moscow only wanted to produce a change in the perception of the Ukrainian leadership, that would simply made it respect the Russian security interests.
The acquisition of new territories was a result of the actions of the populations of Donesk and Lugansk and of the Ukrainians themselves, which made impossible the return of those regions to Ukraine.
Maybe the absurd decisions of Americans and Europeans could force Russia to try and occupy the whole Black Sea coast to Transdnistria.
The only way for Russia to recover Ukraine is with the consent of the population and it can only happen long term if there is no occupation of the land by Russian troops.
It would be a very long process if at all.
Contrary to the tirades of some URSS apologists, it was the Soviet brutality in the thirties and subsequent stagnation, which made many Ukrainians want to divorce Russia once and for all and become part of the West. Putin is playing the very bad cards that history has given him. With some success and many mistakes. Time will allow the future generations in Russia, Ukraine and the world to make a final judgment.
Many years had to pass before the folly of Khruschof concerning Crimea became apparent for most observers.
That's exactly what the Russian military is methodically doing. It's no easy task, considering that NATO has deployed all of its reserves and military intelligence, along with billions of dollars, into Ukraine. The metric of territory is linear. In a war of attrition like the one in Ukraine, that metric is invalid, much less a valid way of evaluating results. The systematic destruction of an adversary's capabilities doesn't generate observable linear results of territorial conquest. Its observable results will be exponential when Russia manages to reach the critical point of collapsing the Ukrainian military. And it seems to be on the right track.
Exactly, which is why Ukraine has 1+ million dead and is kidnapping people off the streets to send as meat to the front. That wouldn't happen if the attrition wasn't working, but it is.
Ukraine had the biggest army in Europe and was financed and armed by 30+ countries. It received intelligence and support from these 30+ countries, that are literally destroying themselves to "help" Ukraine, when the whole point is actually to destroy Russia and then steal its resources. No army in the world, even less the self proclaimed "mighty" USA army, would do better than what the russian army is doing against pretty much the entire western world. Under the same circumstances, USA would bomb civillians daily and claim it was destroying the "enemy". In reality, USA has no ability to conduct a war like this on its own, which is why it needs dumb proxies like Ukraine. Proxies willing to destroy themselves, just to please USA.
The only military help Russia is getting, and still quite limited, is from North Korea and only in very specific areas / places.
Meanwhile, western aligned countries around the world send their soldiers - "mercenaries" - to fight alongside the nazis in Ukraine, by the thousands. Poland being one country that sent more of its soldiers to fight alongside the nazis. The "same" nazis that butchered thousands of polish people during the second world war...which again shows the level of ideological fanaticism that plagues the western world.
In short, yes attrition takes a while, but this is also why Ukraine has massive losses, while Russia doesn't, comparatively speaking.
And Russia is also achieving something it did not set out to do: demilitarize NATO, that is even more dependent on USA now and even USA can't keep up with the nazi needs in Ukraine.
I was not aware that in the 30s Galicia was in Poland? Where do you take this idea from?
What I said is that many Ukrainians today harbour very deep antisoviet and antirussian feelings and that the Kremlin knows that and takes it into account.
Maybe you should take a moment to look at a geo map of this area. There are almost no trees or shrubs, so foliage is irrelevant.
As for the rest, all I can say is I'm sorry you're disappointed about not being selected as Russia's supreme military commander. Perhaps next year Putin will recognize your genius and then you can lead the troops to their glorious victory.
" Putin will recognize your genius." What genius? That sour grape simpleton would lead the army in the opposite direction, just like Marshall Grouchy at Waterloo, and because of his treason, Napoleon lost. Trump would declare victory and would surely get a Nobel Peace Prize. What a nightmare!
@ GM does make many valid points and the replies descend to the level of ad hominem attacks! The key statement is "..one is supposed to win wars as quickly as possible by taking advantage of his overwhelming advantages if he has them, before the enemy can gain strength and nullify them, otherwise the enemy adapts. Which is exactly what happened here."
I've been rooting for Russia to decisively defeat Ukraine since the beginning of the SMO. It remains a puzzle how Ukraine still has the men and weapons to stop Russia's advances in each direction. We've heard Russia has total air superiority over the skies all over ukraine, and overwhelming superiority in artillery (2023-24), tanks and armoured vehicles (2022-23-24), drones (2025), personnel (2023-24-25); ukraine has depleted it's anti-air defence. And yet, the Russian army barely crawls ahead. Something does not fit. Either Putin is holding back the Russian army from going for an outright victory, or the battle conditions mean Russia is restricted to such small advances. We don't know the reality, but we can see the results. Is Putin waiting for NATO to get its act together, increase arms production, etc? In a fight if one does not go for the jugular when he has the opportunity, he is not really fighting to win.
What do you do for a living? That will largely answer our questions. What do you do for a living? That will more than answer our questions. You'd need a good street fight to understand the basics. Stick to that, experience and the gold of understanding.
Putin is holding back for reasons that can only be qualified as high treason, of the kind that requires public execution.
The reasons are that:
1) In order to win, Russia would have to transition from oligarchic capitalism back to some form of command economy. But Putin's primary mission since he was installed in power by the Russian oligarchy was to make sure the communists never came back. He is the CEO of Russia Inc. and answers to the shareholders. Naturally the shareholders do not want to move back to a command economy because that means their power and wealth would be taken away
2) Even if that wasn't a requirement and Ukraine was somehow handed on a platter without a fight, the shareholders of Russia Inc. still don't want it, because then they would have to pay for bringing it up to Russian standard and reconstruction. You see how in the Donbass you have this and that city or region in the mainland being assigned the task of paying for doing reconstruction and such and such Donbass locality. Well, now extrapolate that to the whole of Ukraine. How much would it cost and who would have to pay for it? Ordinary Russian people have been squeezed completely dry by three and a half decades of neoliberalism, flat 10% income and coporate taxes, and real capital exports to the West, the only ones you can take something from to fund that are the oligarchs. But they would rather buy themselves bigger yachts than pay for that.
3) The wealth and power of most Russian oligarchs also rests on the foundation of being the middle men between the West and Russia's resources. If Russia was to take decisive action in Ukraine (e.g. nuke the US proxies in Europe and cut Ukraine off from supplies, which Russia can do at any moment and that will not only result in no response, that is precisely the action that would ensure Russia would never be attacked again), that means a permanent break with the West. And automatically the foundation of those people's wealth and power erodes.
4) The Russia Inc. shareholders also very much like their yachts and mansions in the West and would like to go back to how things were.
For all these reasons the Kremlin has been stalling and trying to get some kind of a deal, for two decades now, and even after its 2022 bluff was called.
As you might have noticed, nothing of the above has anything to do with defending the interests of the Russian state or the safety and well-being of ordinary Russian people.
Nobody ever imagined that NATO drones, missiles and artillery would be killing Russian people every day and night somewhere not just in the "new" territory, but several hundred kilometers deep into pre-war Russia, and even as deep as Udmurtia (and it will likely get even deeper), and there would be absolutely no response. A place like Udmurtia only ever saw any kind of fighting during the Civil War in 1917-1920, and before that during Pugachev's Rebellion in 1773-1775. Otherwise it has always been so deep in the untouchable rear that since the defeat of the Kazan and Siberian khanates in the late 16th and early 17th centuries it has been completely peaceful and tranquil. No longer.
And yet the Kremlin does not react at all. Again, absolutely unthinkable previously, but reality now.
Why? Because the Kremlin does not work for the Russian people, simple as that...
@GM - I'm sorry, this reply is based totally on the ASSUMPTION that Putin is at the head of an oligarchy ruling Russia. That he does not care about the Russian people or Russia as a civilisational entity. This assumption does not stand up the repeated evidence seen over all of Putin's public life, since he first became President, that he truly cares about Russia and the Russian people. Many of the points you bring up can be explained in simpler ways that do not need us to believe in the conspiracy that you assume.
Russia does not want to make war on what it sees as its sadly misled brethren in Ukraine. Similarly, Russia does not want to make war on the West but to join it, albeit not as a supplicant.
For their parts, the Ukrainians and their Western Masters labor under no so misgivings.
"In a fight if one does not go for the jugular when he has the opportunity, he is not really fighting to win."
Is it not possible that Putin is slow walking this "war" because he knows that finally he has to deal with NATO and this business is much bigger than just flogging the piano playing comedian and his Azov running dogs? Critics of the Russians seem to assume that the Russian pantry was chock full of all the necessary weapons at the start to prosecute this war. Perhaps they had to scale up?! A mate of mine was in the Vietnam dust-up and said that when the Americans fought like hell and actually took a hill they quickly abandoned the same. To what end? Ukraine is literally Texas sized and how smart would it be to capture obscure territory and then post men and materiel to babysit vast areas? To what end? For size comparison, you can drive from east-west or north to south in Texas and take all day and never leave the state. RU is over 25x the size of Ukraine...maybe the RF has to literally ration men and weapons to manage the vast areas involved. Meantime, the wheels are coming off the Western Imperial project. Patience, grasshopper...
The central puzzle we observe is that Russia surely has the military capability to end this war quickly (without using nuclear weapons) but it does not do so. Many reasons have been put forward but after 3+ years some of them sound like excuses, not real reasons. Yes, we know that this is not about capturing territory, and yes, that is correct and smart. But that still leaves the AFU army and the Nazis in power. Destroying them is the goal of the SMO. Although I freely admit that I am but an armchair soldier and have no knowledge of real military fighting, just as an observer, something doesn't look right. Russia could have achieved those goals in short order if they REALLY wanted to. Yes, there are other reasons given for going slow. a) keep their own losses to a minimum and b) do not kill or alienate ordinary Ukrainians whom Russians consider their slavic brethren. However, there are situations when one has no choice except to fight. And if one is going to fight, one must fight to win and end the fighting quickly. One cannot start a war with a half-hearted will to fight. In a war, there WILL be casualties. A leader has to accept that. Perhaps, going slow might end up killing more Russian soldiers than a decisive blow would have done. The biggest danger of an extended half-hearted fight is that the enemy learns your tactics, finds ways to deal with your stronger weapons, build up its own army and develop new weapons. We can actually see NATO working towards it in slow motion. Giving them enough time to catch up seems foolish. If Ukraine / NATO were defeated decisively early on, the western imperial project would be totally off the rails by now. We wouldn't have to wait for each wheel to come off one by one.
Thanks Ken. Perhaps the Russians didn't have the means to execute the preferred immediate objective. They likely knew that this was a much larger, civilizational contest. I think the Ukraine foolishness became the Fascist West meets tar baby…if you remember that story. The fools really “stepped in it” this time. In the meantime, the BRICS and others in the bleacher seats get to witness how the Americans, et al in the imperial control room really operate…genocide and uninterrupted dissembling.
Thanks Ken. Perhaps the Russians didn't have the means to execute the preferred immediate objective. They likely knew that this was a much larger, civilizational contest. I think the Ukraine foolishness became the Fascist West meets Tar Baby…if you remember that story. The fools really “stepped in it” this time. In the meantime, the BRICS and others in the bleacher seats get to witness how the Americans, et al in the imperial control room really operate…genocide, uninterrupted dissembling and forever wars.
>Perhaps, going slow might end up killing more Russian soldiers than a decisive blow would have done
Unquestionably it has.
It is 120,000 dead now.
They were sieging Kiev within days back in 2022. Had there been another 200,000 men there, and had what had to be hit to paralyzed the AFU but was put off limits by the traitors in the Kremlin been hit, Kiev would have been taken, and it is absurd to claim it would have cost 110,000+ KIA under the conditions of the early war.
>Is it not possible that Putin is slow walking this "war" because he knows that finally he has to deal with NATO and this business is much bigger than just flogging the piano playing comedian and his Azov running dogs?
Would it be easier to fight NATO if the Russian army was in Drogobych and Uzhgorod, or in the current situation, when NATO is 450 km away from Moscow and firing missiles into pre-war Russian territory?
>Ukraine is literally Texas sized and how smart would it be to capture obscure territory and then post men and materiel to babysit vast areas? To what end?
1) If you do not control that territory, then the war will be fought on the territory that was officially yours prior to it. Which is exactly what has been happening
2) Everything east of Zhytomyr is historic core Russian land and has to be recovered.
3) The area west of Zhytomyr could have been left as Ukrainian in a different world we no longer live in. In the real one we inhabit, it has to be annexed and de-Ukrainized, because there are two NPPs there and a white ISIS death cult that will never stop attacking Russia, eventually with nuclear weapons too.
When Napoleon and crew finally reached Moscow, they found a torched city. Tsar Alexander 1 had vacated the city while Napoleon waited for the terms of surrender to be signed. And...waited and waited for 36 days and then packed it in. Oct 19, 1812 the French started the long winter camping trip and a return to France. The Russians left the French to deal with an onerous slog back during the Russian winter. The French, threadbare and dining on their horses. Somehow, "I think the Russians got this".
"..one is supposed to win wars as quickly as possible by taking advantage of his overwhelming advantages if he has them, before the enemy can gain strength and nullify them, otherwise the enemy adapts. Which is exactly what happened here."
That's simplistic nonsense. One is supposed to win wars by not damaging your own country if you can, keeping it healthy and growing while erasing the enemy. That's what Russia is doing.
Russia isn't fighting a general war in Ukraine, it's conducting a special military operation, a very limited form of war that uses a small fraction of the resources Russia could bring to bear in a real war, and Russia is proceeding slowly to minimize its own losses as well as civilian deaths.
Doing so allows the Russian economy to grow and for Russia to develop in the ways that really matter in defeating a rotten West: economically and socially. During this conflict Russia has gotten profoundly stronger in those areas. The transformation is truly spectacular and has made Russia so strong that it is not only defeating the entire West's economic war against Russia but it is also clobbering the best the West can throw at Russia on the battlefield in Ukraine using a small fraction of forces.
Russia is also saving the lives of millions of ethnic Russians living in the new territories and in Ukraine by not escalating to a huge war. It hasn't flattened Kiev the way the US and Israel have flattened Gaza.
Russia has also saved the lives of millions of people in Europe by not escalating to where nuclear war, either limited or general, would arise. It's not clear that can be avoided given the hate machine the US and its vassals have unleashed, but so far the credit for avoiding nuclear war goes to Russia.
You can see the difference between Russia's approach and the simplistic nonsense spouted by imbeciles (that's an accurate characterization, not an ad hominem comment, given the extreme ignorance and stupidity of the propaganda for morons offered by shills like GM) by doing a thought experiment.
It's simple. Russia could end this in half an hour and take *all* of Ukraine with about 50 relatively low yield nuclear airbursts, none of them even outside of Ukraine. That would, in literal truth, effectively de-nazify and demilitarize the nazi regime in Kiev. There would be no fallout or damage to Russia or the new territories.
But doing that would *not* meet Russia's key objectives of not contributing to the killing of ethnic Russians in Ukraine. Russia invaded to save those people, not to kill them.
Some points you make are reasonable. Russia has become stronger and united in nationalistic spirit. Yes, Russia has been careful to keep civilian deaths to a minimum. It hasn't flattened entire cities as the US loves to do. To your thought experiment, I'll add another thought experiment which does not even require use of nuclear weapons. Russia could totally erase EVERY single power generation and transmission facility in Ukraine. It can disable all the railways that bring heavy arms into Ukraine from wherever they come - Poland, Romania, etc. Destroy Odessa's harbour so that no weapons can enter Ukraine from that entry point. i.e. destroy Ukraine's ability to conduct this war. Surely Ukraine cannot last long if all this is done, and these are legitimate targets in war. Such attacks also keep Russian personnel losses low while bringing ukraine to its knees. Russia doesn't do this, which is the puzzling aspect of the conflict so far.
Of course, for all we know there may be other tactical / material reasons for not undertaking such actions. We can be sure that there are at least some bright, strategic thinkers in the Russian army command and they know what they are doing. Unless they are being deliberately hobbled by the political leadership.
A 25 ft section of rail costs somewhere around $100 and can be repaired within a few hours. Ditto for roads.
In regards to bridges look at how much effort Ukraine put into destroying the Kerch Bridge. The plyons stay completely intact and span sustains minor damage and is usually repaired in a couple of days.
Destroying all power transmission facilities would likely bring death and famine to Russian speaking Ukrainians who are effectively hostages at this point.
The Russian army is effectively fighting with one arm tied behind its back.
You are right in your data. We are not talking of taking out 25 ft sections of track. There are other, more creative ways of disabling the rail network. Obliterate the main junctions / large depots where many tracks meet and loads get trans-shipped. Destroy all the sources of power to these junctions. Accompanied by wholesale destruction of all power generation / transmission capacity. Yes, many Russian speaking Ukrainians may suffer, but this is war. Some collateral damage has to be expected and accepted if Russia wants to win.
An Iskander does not cost $3 million, it costs $100-200K.
But more importantly, a 500 meter-wide and 100 meter-deep radioactive crater where once were highways and railways does not take $100 and a few hours to repair, it takes months.
"'It remains a puzzle how Ukraine still has the men and weapons to stop Russia's advances in each direction. We've heard Russia has total air superiority over the skies all over ukraine, and overwhelming superiority in artillery (2023-24), tanks and armoured vehicles (2022-23-24), drones (2025), personnel (2023-24-25); ukraine has depleted it's anti-air defence."
There is no puzzle. The reports merely represent wishful thinking. To be fair, pro-Ukrainian reports represent comparable wishful thinking.
Thanks for the update, Simplicius. It seems the Russian strategy is paying off. The pressure on Pokrovsk and the fall of Chasov Yar, which will open up Kostiantynivka from the elevated east, forces the Ukrainians to make a difficult decision. Too many hotspots along the front and not enough resources to plug the holes. Supply lines are bound to break. Funny to compare this to the German strategy in WWII. Surely it's just common sense.
I recall that Chasiv Yar was the main reason why Russia couldn't break out after capturing Bakhmut, so this is definite progress. Before long, they'll be advancing on Kramatorsk and Slovyansk, and onwards to Izyum!
Meanwhile back at the ranch... some intelligence folks in NATO think the answer would be to take Kaliningrad and use it as a bargaining chip to get Ukraine back. As in.... we'll give you Kal back if you give us Ukraine right up to the old eastern border- all if it, cool? OK, we'll take a freeze on current lines, no conditions.
Here's how they think it goes: Russians won't bomb Russians in K. We'll be safe there. Shades of the Kursk debacle, eh which involved sitting on a nuclear power plant. Still, no one steps into the same stream twice.
Except for one small thing. Russia gets all the justification it needs with its own allies to steamroller across the Baltic states to free K. Justification on the one hand, outright demands by the Russian people themselves on the other. It does not need to drop any bombs on NATO forces holed up there, although it will come to that once the war really kicks off. For starters Russia will flatten the old eastern bloc. This is what full mobilisation looks like. We will have not just a bombed out Ukraine, but a whole bunch of the former eastern bloc states smoldering away including Poland. Still they kept saying it would happen, and those making prophecies of doom are those most inclined, perversely, to bring it about.
But back in the land of the Real Hard Fight, If NATO was going boots in with Russia it would have done so before this last desperado chucking around of threats like Lear on the blasted heath. In any event, referenda should be held in the Baltics to decide if the people really want to lay down and die. That, or they get onto the streets right now and remove the greatest threat to their lives and livelihoods- their current western facing idiot leaders.
It is curious how NATO seems determined to fulfil its own prophecy that Russia will soon be at the old cold war borders. You would think that the old west has calculated that there are some NATO allies worth worth throwing under the bus, and some pundits would say that there was always going to come that time when they would become the sacrificial goat..... once Ukraine was all used up. Bye bye, Estonia. Within a grand ring fence containing the 'not real people' some are more unreal than others......
Which NATO military would assault Kaliningrad? The Baltic Harlots combined maybe can field a battalion?
Poland probably is not that stupid. And the US would need to use their territory to assemble a ground force.
Of course, Russia might use nukes in that event, well within their rights. The inflammatory language the American general, (the same genius who planned the Afghan disaster withdrawal and of course was subsequently promoted for the stellar incompetence) used for this threat is beyond the belief.
When Russian troops break through to the Dnepr the panic of the cornered rats we call our leaders will be at very dangerous and unhinged levels.
I did not say this was a serious plan. I said it was a shakespearean utterance from the blasted heath, the very antithesis of any rational thought designed to panic Russia into doing the deal the west desperately wants, before the whole Ukraine affair is a Russian fait accompli.
But I also said Russia could see its own upside in this daftness, should NATO attempt it, Russia's upside and the west's downside.
Except for the fact that more and more people say Russia is well justified in its actions, helped by insane attacks on its nuclear bombers. And it's all about perception
Oh, it sure convinced plenty of Russians in the so-called "opposition", as no one likes their grandmas chased by drones and starved to death in their own country. It actually even convinced plenty of Ukrainians that their own leadership is at least partly to blame for the mess. So bye-bye to regime change in Russia, and hello to regime change in Ukraine... "strength" does not always produce the desired outcome, just ask any rapist
Beyond defeating it, you mean? What more did Russia need to do, does Russia need to do? It is, as we all keep reminding you, winning the war in Ukraine.
Harakiri specialists need not reply to this question.
As for your point about that daft incursion into Kursk, NATO relied on mercs there. I am not sure how that would go down in K which is not an empty region of forests and lakes dotted around with peasants.
>Beyond defeating it, you mean? What more did Russia need to do, does Russia need to do? It is, as we all keep reminding you, winning the war in Ukraine.
Russia is still to this day decisively losing the war in Ukraine, both in terms of what is happening on the battlefield, and geopolitically.
Let's have our usual reminder that the official Russian condition for ending the war is Zaporozhye and Kherson and the rest stays with the Western Nazis.
But if Stalin had in 1943 asked for ending the war when he was only partially at the Dnieper, with the Nazis getting to keep Kiev, Odessa, the Baltics, etc. forever, how would we have qualified the outcome of the war?
Well, why is Putin begging for such terms then?
And on the battlefield there is no real winning at the moment. The AFU is still very far from collapse and every tiny advance takes enormous effort.
But let's go back to Kursk. Kursk was not an AFU operation, it was a full blown NATO invasion. It was NATO tanks, NATO IFVs, NATO soldiers, NATO command and control, etc.
Also, do not get fooled by how little territory they captured. Just as the intention of Operation Spiderweb was to take out the whole of Russian strategic aviation and the AWACS fleet, and that didn't happen tanks to sheer luck, the intention in Kursk was to take several sizable cities and the NPP, and perhaps even further. Not just Sudzha and 1,200 km^2 around it.
The intent mattered hugely there.
What was an absolute must for Putin to do in such a situation was nuclear strikes to physically destroy all NATO infrastructure in Europe, plus a total annihilation of Germany (i.e. do a grid bombing with nukes of the whole territory, glass everything and kill everyone) because Germany sent a lot of tanks and IFVs there, and the symbolism of that was clear. He didn't do it, and the fact that he didn't do it meant that he opened himself for much worse to come. Some of which did come:
1) Russia ate half a dozen tactical nukes at airfields and ammo depots inside pre-2022 Russia, which Putin also concealed. Sure, on the smallish side, except the one in Toropets which was perhaps more than 10 kt, that is how plausible deniability still works, but those who followed events carefully know. Which non-reaction of course opened him up for much worse even further
2) The strategic nuclear forces were attacked
3) Drone attacks are now coming from half a dozen countries, not just Ukraine
4) Not just drone attacks, there was an attempted ground invasion by DRGs to seize the RVSN base in Dombarovskii from Kazakhstan back in mid-June. Also concealed by the Kremlin, but information did come out in real time.
5) Russian commercial ships are attacked way out of theater, in the Baltics, in the Mediterranean, etc., with several of them having been sunk already
Please tell us what substance gets you on these once every couple weeks "rants" ? I mean you hate the fact that Putin has put together a leadership that has returned Russia to "super power" status. I wonder did he also take your lunch money as children?? Or is just caffeine and corporate media??
Which military? There is only one obvious answer; Poland, which has lately been building up a tank army, strictly along Guderian's principles formulated a century ago, for that express purpose. They very much are that stupid, and more so, because the type of military buildup they are pursuing is taken exactly from that blitzkrieg recipe book that has already failed against Russia in WWII, and is laughably obsolete on the modern battlefield. Tanks, infantry carriers, mines, howitzers, air support. It's as if they haven't heard of AD, drones, ECM, or even attack helicopters. They are getting ready to blitz Kaliningrad, and never stop until their armor columns reach Moscow. Or at least until their ammo runs out two weeks into the war.
"I can't see the Polish taking on the Russians." Every sensible person said exactly that before the last, what? three or four times? the Poles took on the Russians and lost their country as a result.
"hey are getting ready to blitz Kaliningrad, and never stop until their armor columns reach Moscow. Or at least until their ammo runs out two weeks into the war."
And then run screaming to the Americans to ride to the rescue.
If an attack on Klainingrad happens, it might be enough to just nip little Lithuania from the Belarus border. By Ukrainian distances standards the separation from border to border is, well, miniscule.
Note to Putin: naturally I'd like to keep Estonian intact. It has some beautiful buildings and a lovely ferry link to Finland (which I took once. A trip to remember).
They didnt dare to take over Transnistria, an easier target. So Kaliningrad, a million people city with urban combats? The casus belli? The PR justification? No need to invade the Baltics. A land connexion between Belarus and Kaliningrad would sever them from Poland. A catastrophic outcome for NATO. But who knows. The Brits are not still done with Europe. They want it burning and smoking before they can BBB it.
Isn't it amazing in the U.S. military / NATO. The absolute worst of the worst officers rise to the top solely based on how well they can polish the poles (and I do not mean Polish) of those above them. Being a failure at your actual job helps attain the rank of General bootlicker
I still don't see them having the nerve to do it, for all the reasons you state, but you are right to be worried. There is no rational planning involved here. No measuring of risks and rewards. Just emotional reactions to having propaganda defeats by puppets that failed upwards. The Empire of Lies is in a terminal condition. It has lost the capacity for dialetical reasoning, it's lies all the way down.
You are right. They started lying to others some of the time, then lying to everyone non stop about practically everything, now the practice is lying to themselves. Fortunately they do not one hundred percent believe their own lies. When they do the world will be in serious trouble.
"some intelligence folks in NATO think the answer would be to take Kaliningrad" People who try that would be making the mistake of attacking the world's largest nuclear power in a way that absolutely guarantees a nuclear response.
If NATO attempts to invade Kaliningrad, Russia will, for sure, use nukes to vaporize the attacking forces as well as all forces that threaten Kaliningrad in support of such an invasion. Anybody who tells you otherwise doesn't understand Russia.
For strikes close to Kaliningrad those will be very low yield airbursts ranging from 100 tons to a kiloton or two, and lots of them, in the range of around 200 detonations. That's to avoid generating fallout that will blow downwind either onto Kaliningrad, for strikes on forces and bases in Poland, such as Gdansk across the bay from Kaliningrad or the US Aegis facility in Redzikowo, or downwind into Belarus or Russia from forces and bases in Lithuania, like the base at Siauliai. Besides totally demilitarizing Poland and Lithuania for their direct role in an attack on Kaliningrad, almost certainly Russia will demilitarize Latvia and Estonia as well.
That's the minimum Russian response. By "demilitarize," I mean eradicating every military force on their territory, their own or NATO. I mean that literally, in the literal sense of killing off their armed forces - all of them - with low yield airbursts. Once those assholes try to strike Kaliningrad, Russia will leave nothing of them to try again either at Kaliningrad or at Russia.
Following that, I think at a minimum Russia would annex a direct land connection to Kaliningrad at the expense of whatever rump Baltic states it allowed to remain.
It's an open question just how far beyond that Russia would take its nuclear response, but people who know Russia's nuclear forces and the leadership best believe that it would be at least a 50-50 chance that Russia would denuclearize both the UK and France as well as vaporizing *all* US/NATO nuclear storage facilities in Europe, with the possible exception of the US nuclear weapons depot in Incirlik, Turkey. With part of that also being nuclear strikes using very low yield airbursts to wipe out the armed forces of Finland.
Great forensic reporting here about the Russians pressing ahead on multiple fronts, Simplicius. The Russian bear is squeezing AFU forces and grinding them down. I look forward to the Russian summer offensive.
been following Helmer @ substack for a long while, his posts are excellent. still, politely disagree on this one: it's taken waaaaaaaay too long, world wide, to express indignation about the zionists' relentless violence in Gaza, West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, heck even Iran :-((
people need and are entitled to peace: 'make love not war'.
Have the various oligarchs with names such as Mikhelson, Fridman, Khan, Abramovich, Abramov, Vekselberg, Kantor, Aven, Rotenberg, etc. been put on trial and sent to GULAG camps? Has Putin been tried for grand treason and shot publicly?
When it happens, then Russia will have changed its stance towards Israel.
But I have heard nothing of the sort, nor do I expect to.
you like to accuse leader of a Russia of treason, and as long as you continue to do that, I will sincerely doubt you are an MI6 or SBU psychological operative. A traitor, shortly.
we can go through all leaders of Russia in the last hundred or more years
and they all yielded extraordinary personal power
each of them made mistakes, and no one was a traitor
if you go back, Yeltsin, drunk, but serious man, cognisant of troubles Russia is in, aware of his responsibility, choosing and supporting Putin as a successor
Gorbachev, a mild man, a communist who was so afraid of communism that he believed anything else must be better - no, it wasn't. Refuting communism was not enough. One has to know where one is going.
Old guard, from Brezhnev to Andropov, slow thinkers, not adapting to changes in the world
Hruschev ...
Stalin
Lenin
Nikolaj II Romanov
Many of them made mistakes, but I would not call any one of them a traitor. It is not honest, GM. Each of us can find something he doesn't like, and some mistakes were extremely costly, resulting in millions of lives, whole countries destroyed, still I would not call any one of them traitor.
It is a habit, entrenched especially among individuals growing up in authoritarian states. What do I mean? In France, Great Britain, Germany, US one can quite normally say, I disagree with your positions, decisions, and since I actually think similar to the majority of citizens, I expect you, the leader, will lose next election. If elections are not the way to change who is in power, the only remedy remains crying Traitor, traitor and hoping for a violent regime change.
But in this moment what an angry GM is saying is identical to what an MI6 or SBU operative is saying. GM become a traitor, an MI6 or SBU asset.
Other motivation is a combination of self righteousness and self importance, somehow one grows stronger by insulting authority, and more powerful by insulting powerful people.
Once we solve this habit of calling whom you disagree with a traitor, and repeatedly calling Putin a traitor there are points that deserve analysis and answer.
Among bolsheviks, a significant number were Jewish, significantly more than expected according to their percentage as a population of Russia
Among new capitalists, oligarchs a significant number such as Mikhelson, Fridman, Khan, Abramovich, Abramov, Vekselberg, Kantor, Aven, Rotenberg etc. are Jewish, again significantly more than expected according to the number among citizens of Russia
GM will perhaps be able to suggest how many of the new elite inevitably being created by war, from war heroes, to generals, weapon inventors, to weapons production investors are Jewish, and what is the proportion to their number in general population.
In US similar people with similar names have a considerable influence on president, both parties, both houses of Congress and major media, so much so that some even claim they are in control. Whatever the truth they significantly influence US politics towards Russia, and Russo-Ukrainian war.
In Russia, as it gets more and more clear that this is an existential war for survival of Russia, as the national state of Russian nation and the nations living inside RF, the position of Jewish oligarchs becomes difficult in a sense that one cannot keep both supporting Russian national state and global liberal world order.
OK, if Russian oligarchs of Jewish origin stop supporting liberal world order, and give up on supporting the West, US & Britain, can they keep supporting Russia as any other Russian citizen ?
Putin has admitted that he was fooled by the West, as many other Russians, and has for too long a time waited hoping that he will somehow succeed in creating good relations with the West.
I do not see signs that Russian oligarchs of Jewish origin are less supportive of Russia than other citizens and even if it were to happen I see no signs that Putin and leadership would not be able to resolve the problem, in the best interest of Russian nation and state.
It is a difficult job to lead a nation, and as any other leader of Russia, Putin will definitely make a few mistakes, and some of them might be costly, in lives. But even if we find a mistake, I would not call him a traitor.
Calling a leader a traitor immediately disqualifies you GM from serious discussion, because you are objectively helping the enemy. Pointing out mistakes, even mistakenly, discussing strategy, commenting on decisions, every tin is acceptable, in internet but there is a line that divides you from being a useful idiot of MI6, and it would stop doing it.
If you consistently place the interests of a foreign country (Israel) above those of your own, and suffer one catastrophic geopoliticial defeat after another because of that, then yeah, you are a traitor.
That is the very definition of what grand treason is.
At least the Americans get to control the Middle East by working for Israel. There is some synergy on interests there.
the danger of throwing accusations, aside from presenting oneself as an idiot,
is actual blocking of your own understanding
It makes you less able to see the obvious
this is a typical GM, you feel so obsessed with accusing Putin
that you use this accusation in a situation where it obviously does not fit
Look again GM
everybody in the region, except Russia, is either obeying and serving Israeli state
or using Israeli plans for Greater Israel as an excuse to push his own agenda
US obeying Israel
Europe obeying ISrael
Britain pretending to obey Israel, pushing its own agenda
So called allies of Syria as an Arab and Moslem state
fellow Arabs
Egypt, bought by American (Israeli controlled) money,
a government close to Islamic brotherhood and Turkey, elected on free elections, overthrown by CIA organised coup, and now under control of US/Britain/Israel, no help to Syrian,
Jordan, a British invention, under western control, houses US bases, hunts antiIsraeli drones
Turkey, loud mouthed antiIsraeli warrior, under the table supplying oil and gas, dividing Syria, organising antiIranian outpost in Azerbaijan, no help to Syrian, active enemy of Syria
now in control ,of most of Syria, ridiculed by Israeli air attacks on all Syrian bases, weapons. When Putin's Russia was defending skies of Syria, Israeli jets have never dared to enter Syrian airspace, they shot rockets, missiles from over Lebanon, and Mediterranean, and were not flying over Syria to attack Iran - all of that is now, possible when Turkey, great Islamic warrior state controls most of Syria.
Gulf Arabs and Saudi Arabia - American friends and allies
Russia and Iran were the only allies of Syria, and they simply had not enough power, a coalition of MOslem, Arab forces led and organised by the West was stronger.
Syria was a high quality, diplomatic and military engagement that used Russian strength, but first and foremost intelligence to keep a state going, that was viciouly attacked by all its neighbours, Israel, Arab, and Moslem neighbouring states.
It is a clear example of imperial politics, Divide et impera, divide and rule, invented by Romans, practiced by British, and now taken over by Americans.
This is a world war GM, Russia is fighting, that is exactly why it is called Special military Operation. Because it is a SMO as a part of World War Three, the Great Antimperial war.
And it this war the best answer is not nukes.
Russia is not alone, it has to forge, create an alliance - China, Iran and Russia and North Korea are obviously in this together as military allies, but all BRICS are in this economically.
>there haven't been GULAG camps in Russia for half a century.
1) And where has that taken the country?
"При мне такой х... не было" is a meme for a reason
2) There are in fact penal colonies in Siberia still to this day, most of them former GULAG sites. Mostly in somewhat warmer places than Kolyma (so it was back in the days too though), but still quite unpleasant.
Navalny died in Kharp, which is a former GULAG camp.
Khodorkovsky was sent to Krasnokamensk, which is a mining site near the Chiense border, and is a literal labor camp.
There is still one in Norilsk, and still a couple around Magadan, a lot of them in Perm and Komi, multiple sites in Murmansk, Arkhangelsk, Yakutia, etc.
Lots of options.
Also, modern technology opens up new possibilities. We could have a GULAG reality show, where we send the crooked oligarchs to Norilsk and have a 24/7 live stream of their emaciated bodies and frozen hands digging through the permafrost with while the guards whip and beat them up. Would be very educational. But it will never happen...
"Netanyahu and his generals should be brought before an international tribunal. Russia will support any nation that calls for justice for the victims of Gaza."
As for the Nobel prizes, first, the one in Economics is fake and has nothing to do with the original prizes set up by Mr. Nobel, and its name has change twelve(!) times so far. Two of the previous "Nobel Prize in Economics" winners set up LTCM, a supposedly invincible hedge fund that went bankrupt in less than four years.
And yes, two people have won two (real) Nobel prizes before: Marie Curie, whom I assume needs no introduction, and Linus Pauling, a genius of a man who was vilified and had his name largely erased because he dared question medical orthodoxy. I don't want to get your paymasters at Stripe upset but anyone with a serious illness should do their own research on what Pauling discovered about health.
I used to be a neighbour of Linus, early 1980s would see him doing his morning walk down San Antonio Road in Los Altos, CA looking very jaunty wearing his trademark Tam O'Shanter. Linus was in his 80s then and looking great. He was a lion among men.
The Ukrainians deserve considerable credit for doggedly hanging on against superior forces, but at some point this war is going to turn into Saigon in 1975.....
Ukrainians are very brave and excellent fighters... We see it every day, throwing themselves into TCK vans, beating up recruiters who try to stop them because the van is full. How could people rounded up in the street be excellent in combat? You're missing reading numerous testimonies in the columns of the Ukrainian and Anglo-Saxon press. Just one question: have you ever been inside a barracks?
"The Ukrainians deserve considerable credit for doggedly hanging on against superior forces,"
Are you talking about the Ukrainians in Donbass who doggedly hung on against huge nazi armies financed by billions in US $ and assisted by US forces, like the US AWACS aircraft that guided nazi aircraft on cluster bombing missions against population centers in Donbass?
The Ukraine war is a *civil* war. The people in the four new territories, and Crimea, were all "Ukrainians". The so-called "Ukrainians" are also mostly ethnic Russians.
Those "Ukrainians" now fighting for Kiev are mostly people fighting with a gun to their back. They were conscripted involuntarily and if they try to flee or surrender they get shot by the small minority that are nazi true believers who are the Kiev junta's enforcers.
By overwhelming majorities the people of Ukraine in the last free and fair nation-wide election back in 2010 chose an administration that strongly rejected the nazi/oligarch coalition's plan to become the West's battering ram against Russia. Six billion dollars, mountains of arms, and the direct military support of the US overthrew the results of that election in 2014 when the US destroyed the democratically elected government of Ukraine and put an unelected minority junta into power in Kiev.
They then financed that junta with tens of billions of dollars and mountains of weapons and yet more military support, the CIA creating and training the junta's feared intelligence gestapo, just like the US helped Somoza create a feared gestapo in Nicaragua and also likewise supported the US's puppet dictators in so many other lands.
When a minority is backed by the US and has all the weapons, they really can dominate a far larger majority. As for "superior forces", Ukraine at the beginning of 2022 had over 500,000 men under arms with a lavishly equipped army. They had prepped an invasion force of 130,000 men to invade Donbass and wipe out those Ukrainians still clinging to freedom. Russia invaded with a mere 80,000 men. Russian forces were the underdog in that conflict, not Ukraine. They invaded in what was a desperate bid to protect ethnic Russians in Donbass from being slaughtered in the US's planned ethnic cleansing operation, and they invaded at the earliest possible time that Russia could take on the entire West.
So no, I don't give any credit to the nazi scum doggedly hanging on to their gold mine of skimming billions off the hundreds of billions of bucks shoveled into the Kiev regime or to the willingness of the dwindling hard-core nazi brigades to slaughter the people of Ukraine to keep those bucks flowing and their evil ideology in power.
Instead, I give credit to the people of Donbass and Russia for doggedly hanging on against the superior financial power of the collective West and for putting their lives on the line to protect their kin from nazi evil.
It's interesting that you brought up the issues in Seversk. I've been wondering what was going on in that region going all the way back to when Bakhmut fell. It seemed like something clearly strange was going on in that area considering it was so close to Bakhmut and seems like a region they really need to secure if they plan on pushing west in that northern/central area. I Wonder if the issues are related to the large forest north of it and maybe impacting drone warfare.
A cursory glance at the force disposition seems to tell the story. The Ukrainian unit in the area is an elite 81st Airmobile Brigade, while the Russian forces are mostly BARS units and some ex-LPR '2nd Army Corps' ones, which are usually not up to snuff with Russian regulars.
The huge forest north of the Siversky-Donets river, anchored in its center at Serebrianka, was a huge nationalist (Azov and others) training ground for a decade before the SMO. It's their base of military operations - one reason it's been so difficult to take, as they get the best weaponry and have stayed fully supplied throughout.
That forest to the north of Seversk is crossed by the Siversky-Donets river, and turns into swampland near the river. Russians controlled the forest and the northern side of the river up until the Autumn 2022 Ukrainian Kharkhov counteroffensive. In summer or spring 2022 Russians actually tried an amphibious crossing of the river to the south, towards Seversk but it ended up badly (famous scrap metal cemetery photos). At the time it was probably realised that they didn't have the manpower to guard the extended frontline which went to Chuguev, Blakleya and Izyum, and at the same time launch assaults.
After the Kharkhov counteroffensive, the Russians got stuck assaulting the town of Bilogorivka and its extensive salt mines, which lie closer to Lisichansk than to Seversk. In addition, the northern side of the Siversky-Donets river and its forest was lost, and Ukrainians populated the area with mortar and drone teams, and hideouts for ranger-type special forces. Without controlling that forested and swampy northern flank, it's disadvantageous to progress towards Seversk. Not to mention that the next city west of Seversk is Sloviansk, which is supposed to be the war's final boss, the epilogue.
So in short the Russians couldn't pass a stronghold town, had lost control to the forest and river to the north (which also worked the other way, as good cover for the Russian Liman-Oskil northern front), and a victory wouldn't achieve anything meaningful other than locally straightening the front, as they need at least to control the whole course of the Oskil river, to be achieved by way of their northern advance, in order to even think about a siege of Sloviansk. Thus the Central Donbass front after Bakhmut was unprioritized in late 2023, and the focus shifted to liberating the outskirts of Donetsk city.
There was a scandal at the end of last year where the Russian general in charge of that front was submitting false reports up the chain of command, claiming to make steady progress. It finally got to the point where what command was claiming was under Russian control was completely absurd, and the situation was investigated. That general was moved to a training position deep inside Russia and a competent general put in place.
Since that time, movement has been steady - but the Serebrianka forest on the northern front of Siversk has been a nationalist stronghold since before the 2014 coup. Azov and others are dug in deep in that forest, and use it as their base of military operations and training throughout Ukraine.
That's a quote worthy of a CIA intern. That article is nowhere near "great." It basically rehashes the PR tropes about Russian history that western leaders throw out for mass consumption.
He's looking suspiciously undead in that photo.
There are persistent rumors that he has been seriously brain-damaged in the bombing of his office, which is why the only thing he is good for is photo-shoots. He is not even allowed to speak live, all his sound bites are only reported second-hand. Wonder if he is still good for a Biden-style puppet, or not even that.
Apparently he was heard to say "Does my bum look big in this?"
How did GQ Magazine miss out on this photo shoot? Z, hand on chin...reminiscent of Rodin's "The Thinker" statue. Thinking deeper thoughts than even the Orange TACO. Like...how in the hell am I going to get out of this cluster fuck?! Leavitt here. Note that she says (pronounces) Trump should get the "noble" peace prize instead of the Nobel Prize. Such nobility in an otherwise blithering idiot. <<link>>
https://youtube.com/shorts/JdGIKaIEnFg?si=JKOjSUi3QuSuvbBM
Remembering that Alfred Nobel invented dynamite! Trump "invented" nobility. Just ask him.
Unbearable to listen to Leavitt here☹️
It's more complicated than that. I would say roughly half of westerners have a strong sense of ethnos and despise the other half who have betrayed their own ancestors to gain favour with the alien elite. Secondarily, the westerners with a sense of ethnos suffer from a lack of self respect as they have allowed themselves to be repressed. A sad story which Native Americans understand perfectly, and the subtext of the TV show Yellowstone.
alien elite = jew. name the jew...
Looking at the black and white Zaluzhny - did Ukraine run out of everything, including color?
I think Zeluzhny is a diversion, and he should count his blessings that he's out of it....
I think he is a candidate to be installed after the addicted Mr. Z goes in one fashion or another, so is Klitshchko and perhaps even Alexei Arestovich, the long-time critic of Zelensky's governance.
food crisis? If I am poisoned, it would be by all sides of the debate, which is what I read. And there is a lot of poison there.
The question is does Zaluzhny look black in those pants?
big asses are BIG in Ukraine, on both man and woman. It shows how filled with heart-attack specialties their UKRAINIAN BORSHCHT is.
LOL but seriously, Vogue? who reads it?
I guess not enough people read Vogue to make it a meaningful propaganda medium. The tool here is the cover. Vogue’s cover is the artefact that matters. I don’t read Vogue but every time they’re trying to bring someone to general awareness they make sure to push it down everybody’s throats. I know all the vogue covers that matter from the last twenty years. It’s a mark of political status, a dog whistle to align people’s opinions of a person in the right way.
Correct, it's about consensus-formation at a level above the mass public. Downstream distribution of that messaging happens automatically through social media when the Vogue story and cover get features on twitter, Instagram, etc
c'mon, man, the men are reading Vogue in their trenches.
😂😂😂
Anna Wintour. And every airhead rich girl and Hollywood slut.
What is the meaning of glamour?
A B&W magic shot to make someone 'in vogue' and 'out of the ordinary'.
What does it mean to be in vogue?
A way of thinking that is currently popular... comes into vogue... to become popular in a particular time and place.
Black is understandable, SS color. White is probably to signify to the Ukrainian fighters "the angel of death." SS black is fashionable in Ukraine, even the beggar wears it.
I think B&W photography has become code for ‘seriousness’ and alignment with postmodern liberal values. An use equivalent to the use of purple, for instance to denote royalty and other colours used in the arts to symbolise various things.
The black uniform with a white shirt was indeed the military uniform of SS officers. Black is also a funeral color. Regarding the angel of death, this guy collects corpses. Just as the legend of the beggar Churchill was created, so the legend of this one, the beloved Napoleon of the troops, was created. Are we sure he attended the Soviet military academy and not the Ukrainian oligarchy academy? Seriously, what did he achieve when he had up to 5 times more men than Russia? Nothing, just the butcher.
Well, none of them can do Stalin's khaki trench coat - too recognizable. So, it's either green goblin or black goblin pj.
CCG,
Zaluzhny may need to be photographed in black and white to hide the scars from when the Russians almost got him . I wonder is he thinks he has a mandate from god like Trump...
This is loon-levels of interpretation. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
amazing, no? but this is the method acting as candidate for head of junta. And not JUST. Every single first lady who was a Dem was on the cover of every single magazine except National Review for a year ahead of the election. They managed to make even that Buffalo Gal Michelle look reasonably attractive. Otherwise, the GOP nominees' wives were being savaged within the covers.
but doesn't he look all cuddly, like a big fat teddy bear? And YET, he is a ferocious fighter!
@Norma Brown
Et Thieu, Zaluzhny?
No, it's fashion phptpgraphy.
It was a rhetorical, sarcastic question:-)
So was mine :-)
Zaluzhny has probably been the most dishevelled-looking person in the news cycle for years, since the war started.
The British and Vogue have lost all their self-awareness if they want to make us look at Zaluzhny as a trendy metrosexual.
Their propaganda has really jumped the shark on this one
Yes, the most disheveled and greasy looking.
Trump seems to be falling into a trap. Deficit in June has been revised from $500 billion to $1 trillion. Another $2.5 trillion of debt forecast for 2025. Dollar sliding, Tbonds at almost 5%. China maintaining their export numbers at over $1 trillion surplus. Things aren't too rosey.
And right on cue, two clowns in the Senate are trying to put together a $54B aid package of new money for Ukraine. I'm sure it will pass by Christmas, just in time for the liberation of Kiev.
Yep. Grab the loot and turn it into gold and silver before the USSA piggybank collapses.
It would be a pretty safe bet they are part of that investigations on members of Congress getting kick-backs from the Ukraine, which of course will never ser the light of Day 🤬🤬🤬
What does Linsey do with all that laundered money he gets?
He attends gay balls with his rent-a-boy dates.
It will pass well before any liberation of Kiev.
WWIII is coming, Trump having been mousetrapped by his own ego and The Sunk Cost Fallacy.
Yeah, he’s (DT) definitely on a roll as of late. I can’t figure it out. He’s thrown in with the very same people (Neocons) who have caused him enormous problems since he got into politics in the first place. Guess it’s not that hard. Am sure they opened their wallets. They and their handlers do have unlimited funds.
Trump is weak, stupid and easily manipulated.
The rest of the world's leaders are certainly not acting this way toward him.
They fear American power, but Trump is being mousetrapped into war, the victim of his own fool mouth and The Sunk Cost Fallacy.
Anyone who gets elected as American President is either accepting the views of the deep state and putting his best face on it
or gets killed
Trump is alive and looking weak, stupid and easily manipulated.
It's not an act. He really is a moron and an unfunny clown.
For many, many years, we continue to watch revised numbers, almost every data point. None of the brilliant people reporting financial news never seem to notice/comment on this too-difficult-to-miss pattern. It's all smoke and mirrors, the question is: who is the real wizard of oz?
A trap? What about his bullying the world into submission?
The Chinese have Trump by the balls.
And Netanyahoo has Trump in a dog leash. Trump may have the EU mental midgets bowing to him, but he in turn bows deeply toward his Zionist masters.
This became clear when he suddenly did absolute turncoat move about Epstein - the moment after his boss Bibi visited him.
See all those American planes and missiles, they need rare earths. Looks like that supply is cut off. It's the west that is bleeding out as they've expended weapons in West Asia and Ukraine that can't easily be replaced. If you look at US weapons contracts its been one load of corrupt non performance. Lately SIG is in the spotlight with its spear and handguns. Resource constraints are being imposed, and not as the US imagined.
The supply is not cutoff since they already have an agreement with China over rare earth's.
Some, for some civil purposes, redirection for other purposes, specifically military/weapons production is a no go. It's been audited for diversion, so we'll see how that works out.
Who is the world and who he has given in for real yet?
I can't see/find anything in writing yet, only press statements and it all looks to me like deception, smoke screens and numbers plucked right out of thin air without any real economical base.
Bullying the world? Trumpy is Lindsey GrahamCracker's GIMP 🤣🤣🤣
Trump is weak, stupid and easily manipulated.
For those interested, there is a guy Andy Shectman (sells metals) who did offer another possible alternative to Trump’s behavior. He said MAYBE his admin is actually trying to get the world to dump the dollar. This would be necessary in order to get around the Triffin Dilemma so that manufacturing could finally be brought back here.
Mike Adams did remind AS of Trump’s attitude which is completely counter to that theory. It’s worth a listen if you have the time. I do like Andy quite a bit. That being said I don’t hold out much hope that anything is going on aside from what our eyes and ears are telling us. We may be in deep trouble soon. I was NOT concerned about Trump starting WW3 but I sure as hell am now.
https://banned.video/watch?id=688b87598585f42430338a5e
Oh, I love that remark, right at the beginning : “you cannot cover it up with any khaki blazer” — we will see, as the blind said to a deaf one.
And if this guy is not carried off to the front by sunrise that means Zelensky is losing it.
Zelensky is likely to turn up in Britain if he remains alive. The City of London will take care of him for a while then poison him and blame the Russians like they always do.
Great update. It sounds like a phase change where water heats up slowly, then suddenly turns to gas when the boiling point is reached. That time-lapse movie of Porkrosvk ought to be required viewing for the "muh slow territorial gains" crowd. Attritional war is non-linear - months of watching paint dry, then suddenly, big moves.
We are all hoping for a phase change, but we have been hearing that it is imminent for years now, and it never comes.
The non-linear aspect of attrition war only manifests itself if the winning side is ready to take advantage of it. But Russia is not. As it is now there are many wide open regions of the front that which it can pour forces into, but it is not being done.
This is because it simply does not have the forces, and it does not have them because the Kremlin refuses to mobilize, while it also has numerous other potential wars to keep in mind as possibly starting at any time, and it has to keep those in mind in terms of ground force allocation because the Russian nuclear arsenal is strictly off limits for the purposes of the protection of the country, right now it is an extremely expensive, highly technologically sophisticated museum exhibition (and one that only the RVSN and 12th GUMO are allowed to see).
You see it in Sumy -- the Ukros plugged the hole very quickly and Russia is being pushed back. Which is because Russia probably sent a couple thousand men there, not much more than that. Yes, Syrsky may have largely sacrificed Pokrovsk in the process, but it is not as if there is a real collapse of the front there, they are perfectly fine with that tempo of Russian advance.
Ukraine's purpose here is to be the kamikaze country that inflicts maximum damage to Russia while the West either prepares a crushing kinetic blow or slowly cooks the proverbial frog to completion into internal exhaustion and collapse.
As long as the rate of advance remains 20 km^2 a day (which, for the arithmetically challenged, means Ukraine won't be recovered in the next 60 years), there is no problem. That rate needs to go up to 200 km^2 a day for things to be looking any kind of optimistic. And that is still a distant dream.
When Putin announces a mobilization of another 500K to 1M, then you can get your hopes up. But that is not happening because the people who he answers to have a veto on that.
Maybe he is simply trying to avoid panic among the population or the flight of young people across the borders, as has happened in Ukraine.
Doubtful. The Russians are behind Putin, this is existential for them.
But didnt Russia capitulate long ago? Dont let yourself praising the Russian leadership decisions... Ever.
GM is our resident pessimist. Nothing is ever right to him/her. Nothing, I tell ya! For years GM have been writing that Russia would be defeated tomorrow, at best next week. For years they have been wrong.. I stopped responding to that alias as I am not sure that is not an ukie propaganda bot.
Actually I completely agree with you, the scale of the problem is too great. I don't think it will last 60 years but it could be as little as 5 more years and as much as a decade or more. Without *any* large-scale mobilisation 20 years is more probable than not unless some other dynamic enters the equation.
I wish Russia would mobilize too, but I don't see it as absolutely necessary. When Ukraine is mobilizing grandpas who probably can't even control their own bowel movements.
I think a mobilization would have more effect in signaling the West that the game is over. Put Russia on a total war footing and declare war on NATO. But I'm probably crazy.
No, the West will proclaim it evidence of Russian collapse.
Russia uses it's best weapons means that Russia is desperate.
Russia doesn't use its best weapons means that Russia is afraid.
You get the idea. And it works.
Silly me, thinking that reality changes the lies from spin doctors and script writers at the CIA.
Did you consider the slow place is intended to bleed the Ukraine backers in a war of attrition. Who in the West can build anything on time and in any volume to keep the bombs flying and the Ukrainians dying?
To be fair, it matters little to the average frustrated Russian whether Zaporozhe is part of the Russian Federation or not.
Were Putin to announce mobilization, expect a rush for the exits. Yes, the West certainly has bigger things that Ukraine on its mind, but good luck getting the average frustrated citizen of any country to die to prevent future catastrophes.
I agree to some extent that there will be not few running for the exit, as happened in the prolly most fanaticized country in the developed world, namely Israel, Allegedly, up to 1.5m (of 7m) left from Oct7,23 ti the start of the attack against Iran. After that, at least ppl in the 100k`s left until the borders to Jordan and Egypt were blocked, and even after that, many escaped by boat to Cyprus.
So sure, a mass mobilization will trigger exiles, yet prolly not more than 22/23 which were approximately 300k.
At the moment, contracts and volunteers appear to suffice, and will continue unless there is a massive NATO onslaught. For that, NATO does not appear to have the personnel, the gear, the ammonition at the moment.
We've been hearing that the West is out of everything from catnip to burrito coverings since before I was a kitten.
Yes, that is the counterpoint.
Don't know when you were a kitten, I doubt you ever were. During most of my lifetime, the West was believed to be the realm of abundance.
First time I heard about shortages to some extent was during the Iraq war when it was reported that the usage of Tomahawk cruise missiles might hit the bottom of stock when expended further to such extent. That was hardly "out of anything".
The first serious report about Western shortcomings was in https://www.rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/commentary/return-industrial-warfare by Sergey Vershinin from British RUSI in June, 2022. Were you a kitten, then?
We've been hearing such wishful thinking since the beginning of the war, and it is the West that keeps escalating. It beggars the imagination that there is nobody in the Pentagon, nobody in Whitehall or Munich who can tell the politicians to stop letting their mouths write checks that their asses cannot cash.
Of course I was a kitten. That's where cats come from.
The road network supporting an advance into Sumy was never sufficient to support large scale operations there for either Ukraine or the Russians.
I suspect that is the case for many "wide open" areas of the LOC. Transportation, terrain and lack of cover impose constraints along with the generally low density of forces available to either side.
The "front" is 800 or 900 miles and for the Russians there are 500-600k troops committed. The infantry centric fashion of this war will soak up manpower very quickly.
I do tend to agree generally with your assessment that Russia continues to grant Ukraine and the West time as if Russia believes time is on it's side. Maybe they know better than us. Only time will tell.
Russia continues to succeed, but it also reveals the disadvantage they operate under not having real air superiority. In any conflict with Nato, that will be the one advantage Nato/US has. Of course much of that rests on 30 or 40 major airbases scattered across Europe destroy or seriously degrade those along with a few key ports and LNG terminals and Natos plans get thrown out the window. All those targets seem ready made for Oreshnik depending on how real that system is, how many they have and what the actual destructive power of the warheads are.
To put a large airbase out of operation for an extended period probably requires 100-150 weapons impacting with some accuracy. If each Oreshnik can deliver 36 500 pound equivalent bombs with accuracy, then 5 can do the job. The entire target set of airbases might require 200 missiles - fewer in reality as other weapons are also available.
I think Russia takes the threat from Nato pretty seriously. Which may explain what appears to us to be a somewhat limited effort in Ukraine.
>The road network supporting an advance into Sumy was never sufficient to support large scale operations there for either Ukraine or the Russians.
Absolute nonsense.
The E101 from Moscow to Kiev goes between Glukhov and Shostka, one of the quietest areas of the front, and another highway runs from Kursk through Sudzha, then through Sumy and then to Kiev.
Railways run in parallel.
>To put a large airbase out of operation for an extended period probably requires 100-150 weapons impacting with some accuracy
It takes one kinetic weapon, but also something else much more important -- courage.
"pour forces into" Man you still think modern warfare is being or should be fought like it was fought 100+ years ago.
As far as the west's final blow, would that be a nuke?
Will the idiotic western regimes be willing to send their armies to die for Banderaland?
If the best army NATO put together was not able to break through the Russian fortifications in 2023, what makes you think the current EU armies will?
The current EU armies lack the motivation and battle hardness that the Banderites have. I really doubt they would be willing to die for Ukraine.
The Battle of Porkrosvk is not a movie, otherwise we would see Volodymir in the main role.
Maybe he should ask his buds, Ben Stiller and Sean Penn to do a "Mitty in Ukraine". How a khaki t shirt short dude wins a war and is loved by his people.
I remind you that his outfit is no longer khaki but SS black
A jew? Interesting.
Where did you see mention of a Jew?
Zelensky.
He’s an actor, so it’s all costume dept. Mostly he seems to be about the money/grifting, his ideology is mamon.
He would sell mom (in French, maman) for mamon.
>CNN concedes these ‘small’ advances are quickly adding up:
They are adding up to a meager 620 km^2 for July, i.e. nothing remotely sufficient. We are still on course to push the Nazis out of Ukraine circa 2095 or so.
Unless there is the mother of all sudden and unexpected collapses very soon, by this time next year Kramatorsk will still not have been taken, let alone Zaporozhye city and Kherson, there will still be no buffer zone along the pre-2022 border, and Kharkov, Kiev, Odessa, etc. you can just forget about.
Because today is August 1st, which means that there are 10 weeks left with foliage still on the trees and shrubs, after which assaults again become near impossible when there is nowhere to hide from drones.
But, if history is any guidance (and we have a good sample size at this point), it is much more likely that the 5D chess grandmaster in the Kremlin will once again be caught with his pants down by a "surprise" Ukro-NATO-Nazi offensive than that Russia will make a sudden big arrow breakthrough, and then that "surprise" will again take many months to reverse, if it ever is, taking off the table whatever moves the General Staff may have had in their plans.
As a reminder, Kupyansk is only now being entered, over three (yes, 3) years later (!!!) after it was given up without a fight, even though the Russian army has been camping on the outskirts since February 2023, Volchansk still hasn't been taken after 15 months of bitter stalemate fighting, and Izyum and Balakleya are just pipe dreams at the moment.
Which is because the 5D chess grandmaster in the Kremlin continues to refuse to mobilize, as that would be oh-so-horrible for his oligarch masters, and he also refuses to do anything about the supply of materiel and men from NATO to the Ukro-Nazis.
>The authors write that after Pokrovsk, the road to Pavlograd is open.
The road to Pavlograd has been wide open for four years (and even more open for the eight years prior to that). We, together with all the exasperated Russian military experts, have been over this countless times -- who in his right mind fights a war in the most fortified places when there is this wide open space that is also much closer to one's logistics, in this case the huge much less well defended border from Kiev to Kharkov? What kind of new genius military strategy is this?
And no, it is not actually open now. Because one is supposed to win wars as quickly as possible by taking advantage of his overwhelming advantages if he has them, before the enemy can gain strength and nullify them, otherwise the enemy adapts. Which is exactly what happened here. The open terrain is good for offense under classical military thinking, but we are not in that world anymore, we are in the world of drones, where the open steppe is death, not an advantage, because there is no cover.
So yeah, next year on August 1st we will be having this conversation again and Kramatorsk will still be in the hands of the Nazis and nothing of the SMO objectives will be anywhere remotely close to having been achieved. And that is if Russia even exists by then, which is not at all guaranteed because there are many signs that NATO is planning a serious strategic move, which will again catch the geniuses in the Kremlin unprepared, as it always happens, because God forbid they ever make a proactive rather than a purely reactive move...
Perhaps you haven't yet understood what the war of attrition is all about. You're still attached to the territory.
In this war the most vital goal was to eliminate the proxy ASAP so that it cannot be used as such.
Eliminating the proxy is key.
But it can only happen when Russian troops control the Polish border
How and when is that going to happen given what the Kremlin currently is (not) doing?
To control the enemy, all you have to do is strip him naked, both militarily and economically. There's no need to take control of his kitchen.
One would suspect the Russian leadership rightly does not want a complete victory that would imply conquering the territory of Ukraine to the Polish border.
What would be the result of that situation? Incorporate the Ukrainians as citizens of the Russian Federation? It would absolutely disrupt the political life in the country. Create a system like the Israeli, with the Ukrainians in the role of Palestinians?
Neither Russians nor Ukrainians would accept that.
I suspect that at the beginning of the SMO, Moscow only wanted to produce a change in the perception of the Ukrainian leadership, that would simply made it respect the Russian security interests.
The acquisition of new territories was a result of the actions of the populations of Donesk and Lugansk and of the Ukrainians themselves, which made impossible the return of those regions to Ukraine.
Maybe the absurd decisions of Americans and Europeans could force Russia to try and occupy the whole Black Sea coast to Transdnistria.
The only way for Russia to recover Ukraine is with the consent of the population and it can only happen long term if there is no occupation of the land by Russian troops.
It would be a very long process if at all.
Contrary to the tirades of some URSS apologists, it was the Soviet brutality in the thirties and subsequent stagnation, which made many Ukrainians want to divorce Russia once and for all and become part of the West. Putin is playing the very bad cards that history has given him. With some success and many mistakes. Time will allow the future generations in Russia, Ukraine and the world to make a final judgment.
Many years had to pass before the folly of Khruschof concerning Crimea became apparent for most observers.
That's exactly what the Russian military is methodically doing. It's no easy task, considering that NATO has deployed all of its reserves and military intelligence, along with billions of dollars, into Ukraine. The metric of territory is linear. In a war of attrition like the one in Ukraine, that metric is invalid, much less a valid way of evaluating results. The systematic destruction of an adversary's capabilities doesn't generate observable linear results of territorial conquest. Its observable results will be exponential when Russia manages to reach the critical point of collapsing the Ukrainian military. And it seems to be on the right track.
Exactly, which is why Ukraine has 1+ million dead and is kidnapping people off the streets to send as meat to the front. That wouldn't happen if the attrition wasn't working, but it is.
Ukraine had the biggest army in Europe and was financed and armed by 30+ countries. It received intelligence and support from these 30+ countries, that are literally destroying themselves to "help" Ukraine, when the whole point is actually to destroy Russia and then steal its resources. No army in the world, even less the self proclaimed "mighty" USA army, would do better than what the russian army is doing against pretty much the entire western world. Under the same circumstances, USA would bomb civillians daily and claim it was destroying the "enemy". In reality, USA has no ability to conduct a war like this on its own, which is why it needs dumb proxies like Ukraine. Proxies willing to destroy themselves, just to please USA.
The only military help Russia is getting, and still quite limited, is from North Korea and only in very specific areas / places.
Meanwhile, western aligned countries around the world send their soldiers - "mercenaries" - to fight alongside the nazis in Ukraine, by the thousands. Poland being one country that sent more of its soldiers to fight alongside the nazis. The "same" nazis that butchered thousands of polish people during the second world war...which again shows the level of ideological fanaticism that plagues the western world.
In short, yes attrition takes a while, but this is also why Ukraine has massive losses, while Russia doesn't, comparatively speaking.
And Russia is also achieving something it did not set out to do: demilitarize NATO, that is even more dependent on USA now and even USA can't keep up with the nazi needs in Ukraine.
I was not aware that in the 30s Galicia was in Poland? Where do you take this idea from?
What I said is that many Ukrainians today harbour very deep antisoviet and antirussian feelings and that the Kremlin knows that and takes it into account.
You mean people that were adults in the thirties? Not very relevant today. Born around 1910? Not that many today, I presume.
Maybe you should take a moment to look at a geo map of this area. There are almost no trees or shrubs, so foliage is irrelevant.
As for the rest, all I can say is I'm sorry you're disappointed about not being selected as Russia's supreme military commander. Perhaps next year Putin will recognize your genius and then you can lead the troops to their glorious victory.
" Putin will recognize your genius." What genius? That sour grape simpleton would lead the army in the opposite direction, just like Marshall Grouchy at Waterloo, and because of his treason, Napoleon lost. Trump would declare victory and would surely get a Nobel Peace Prize. What a nightmare!
@ GM does make many valid points and the replies descend to the level of ad hominem attacks! The key statement is "..one is supposed to win wars as quickly as possible by taking advantage of his overwhelming advantages if he has them, before the enemy can gain strength and nullify them, otherwise the enemy adapts. Which is exactly what happened here."
I've been rooting for Russia to decisively defeat Ukraine since the beginning of the SMO. It remains a puzzle how Ukraine still has the men and weapons to stop Russia's advances in each direction. We've heard Russia has total air superiority over the skies all over ukraine, and overwhelming superiority in artillery (2023-24), tanks and armoured vehicles (2022-23-24), drones (2025), personnel (2023-24-25); ukraine has depleted it's anti-air defence. And yet, the Russian army barely crawls ahead. Something does not fit. Either Putin is holding back the Russian army from going for an outright victory, or the battle conditions mean Russia is restricted to such small advances. We don't know the reality, but we can see the results. Is Putin waiting for NATO to get its act together, increase arms production, etc? In a fight if one does not go for the jugular when he has the opportunity, he is not really fighting to win.
What do you do for a living? That will largely answer our questions. What do you do for a living? That will more than answer our questions. You'd need a good street fight to understand the basics. Stick to that, experience and the gold of understanding.
Putin is holding back for reasons that can only be qualified as high treason, of the kind that requires public execution.
The reasons are that:
1) In order to win, Russia would have to transition from oligarchic capitalism back to some form of command economy. But Putin's primary mission since he was installed in power by the Russian oligarchy was to make sure the communists never came back. He is the CEO of Russia Inc. and answers to the shareholders. Naturally the shareholders do not want to move back to a command economy because that means their power and wealth would be taken away
2) Even if that wasn't a requirement and Ukraine was somehow handed on a platter without a fight, the shareholders of Russia Inc. still don't want it, because then they would have to pay for bringing it up to Russian standard and reconstruction. You see how in the Donbass you have this and that city or region in the mainland being assigned the task of paying for doing reconstruction and such and such Donbass locality. Well, now extrapolate that to the whole of Ukraine. How much would it cost and who would have to pay for it? Ordinary Russian people have been squeezed completely dry by three and a half decades of neoliberalism, flat 10% income and coporate taxes, and real capital exports to the West, the only ones you can take something from to fund that are the oligarchs. But they would rather buy themselves bigger yachts than pay for that.
3) The wealth and power of most Russian oligarchs also rests on the foundation of being the middle men between the West and Russia's resources. If Russia was to take decisive action in Ukraine (e.g. nuke the US proxies in Europe and cut Ukraine off from supplies, which Russia can do at any moment and that will not only result in no response, that is precisely the action that would ensure Russia would never be attacked again), that means a permanent break with the West. And automatically the foundation of those people's wealth and power erodes.
4) The Russia Inc. shareholders also very much like their yachts and mansions in the West and would like to go back to how things were.
For all these reasons the Kremlin has been stalling and trying to get some kind of a deal, for two decades now, and even after its 2022 bluff was called.
As you might have noticed, nothing of the above has anything to do with defending the interests of the Russian state or the safety and well-being of ordinary Russian people.
Nobody ever imagined that NATO drones, missiles and artillery would be killing Russian people every day and night somewhere not just in the "new" territory, but several hundred kilometers deep into pre-war Russia, and even as deep as Udmurtia (and it will likely get even deeper), and there would be absolutely no response. A place like Udmurtia only ever saw any kind of fighting during the Civil War in 1917-1920, and before that during Pugachev's Rebellion in 1773-1775. Otherwise it has always been so deep in the untouchable rear that since the defeat of the Kazan and Siberian khanates in the late 16th and early 17th centuries it has been completely peaceful and tranquil. No longer.
And yet the Kremlin does not react at all. Again, absolutely unthinkable previously, but reality now.
Why? Because the Kremlin does not work for the Russian people, simple as that...
@GM - I'm sorry, this reply is based totally on the ASSUMPTION that Putin is at the head of an oligarchy ruling Russia. That he does not care about the Russian people or Russia as a civilisational entity. This assumption does not stand up the repeated evidence seen over all of Putin's public life, since he first became President, that he truly cares about Russia and the Russian people. Many of the points you bring up can be explained in simpler ways that do not need us to believe in the conspiracy that you assume.
GMs BS is standard 'foreign agent' propaganda or classic "liberda". Same things Navalnii was trying to push.
Russia does not want to make war on what it sees as its sadly misled brethren in Ukraine. Similarly, Russia does not want to make war on the West but to join it, albeit not as a supplicant.
For their parts, the Ukrainians and their Western Masters labor under no so misgivings.
I agree. Of all GM’s points it’s the open roads and intact rail lines into the country that are the real headscratchers.
"In a fight if one does not go for the jugular when he has the opportunity, he is not really fighting to win."
Is it not possible that Putin is slow walking this "war" because he knows that finally he has to deal with NATO and this business is much bigger than just flogging the piano playing comedian and his Azov running dogs? Critics of the Russians seem to assume that the Russian pantry was chock full of all the necessary weapons at the start to prosecute this war. Perhaps they had to scale up?! A mate of mine was in the Vietnam dust-up and said that when the Americans fought like hell and actually took a hill they quickly abandoned the same. To what end? Ukraine is literally Texas sized and how smart would it be to capture obscure territory and then post men and materiel to babysit vast areas? To what end? For size comparison, you can drive from east-west or north to south in Texas and take all day and never leave the state. RU is over 25x the size of Ukraine...maybe the RF has to literally ration men and weapons to manage the vast areas involved. Meantime, the wheels are coming off the Western Imperial project. Patience, grasshopper...
The central puzzle we observe is that Russia surely has the military capability to end this war quickly (without using nuclear weapons) but it does not do so. Many reasons have been put forward but after 3+ years some of them sound like excuses, not real reasons. Yes, we know that this is not about capturing territory, and yes, that is correct and smart. But that still leaves the AFU army and the Nazis in power. Destroying them is the goal of the SMO. Although I freely admit that I am but an armchair soldier and have no knowledge of real military fighting, just as an observer, something doesn't look right. Russia could have achieved those goals in short order if they REALLY wanted to. Yes, there are other reasons given for going slow. a) keep their own losses to a minimum and b) do not kill or alienate ordinary Ukrainians whom Russians consider their slavic brethren. However, there are situations when one has no choice except to fight. And if one is going to fight, one must fight to win and end the fighting quickly. One cannot start a war with a half-hearted will to fight. In a war, there WILL be casualties. A leader has to accept that. Perhaps, going slow might end up killing more Russian soldiers than a decisive blow would have done. The biggest danger of an extended half-hearted fight is that the enemy learns your tactics, finds ways to deal with your stronger weapons, build up its own army and develop new weapons. We can actually see NATO working towards it in slow motion. Giving them enough time to catch up seems foolish. If Ukraine / NATO were defeated decisively early on, the western imperial project would be totally off the rails by now. We wouldn't have to wait for each wheel to come off one by one.
Thanks Ken. Perhaps the Russians didn't have the means to execute the preferred immediate objective. They likely knew that this was a much larger, civilizational contest. I think the Ukraine foolishness became the Fascist West meets tar baby…if you remember that story. The fools really “stepped in it” this time. In the meantime, the BRICS and others in the bleacher seats get to witness how the Americans, et al in the imperial control room really operate…genocide and uninterrupted dissembling.
>Perhaps the Russians didn't have the means to execute the preferred immediate objective.
Whose job was it to prepare?
Between 2014 and 2022 there war only eight years. Totally insufficient time, right?
And it was in fact known there would be a major such war since 2005 the latest, not 2014.
Thanks Ken. Perhaps the Russians didn't have the means to execute the preferred immediate objective. They likely knew that this was a much larger, civilizational contest. I think the Ukraine foolishness became the Fascist West meets Tar Baby…if you remember that story. The fools really “stepped in it” this time. In the meantime, the BRICS and others in the bleacher seats get to witness how the Americans, et al in the imperial control room really operate…genocide, uninterrupted dissembling and forever wars.
>something doesn't look right
Indeed.
>Perhaps, going slow might end up killing more Russian soldiers than a decisive blow would have done
Unquestionably it has.
It is 120,000 dead now.
They were sieging Kiev within days back in 2022. Had there been another 200,000 men there, and had what had to be hit to paralyzed the AFU but was put off limits by the traitors in the Kremlin been hit, Kiev would have been taken, and it is absurd to claim it would have cost 110,000+ KIA under the conditions of the early war.
So fucking around and firing off missiles for four years does NOT deplete Russian weapons or munitions?
>Is it not possible that Putin is slow walking this "war" because he knows that finally he has to deal with NATO and this business is much bigger than just flogging the piano playing comedian and his Azov running dogs?
Would it be easier to fight NATO if the Russian army was in Drogobych and Uzhgorod, or in the current situation, when NATO is 450 km away from Moscow and firing missiles into pre-war Russian territory?
>Ukraine is literally Texas sized and how smart would it be to capture obscure territory and then post men and materiel to babysit vast areas? To what end?
1) If you do not control that territory, then the war will be fought on the territory that was officially yours prior to it. Which is exactly what has been happening
2) Everything east of Zhytomyr is historic core Russian land and has to be recovered.
3) The area west of Zhytomyr could have been left as Ukrainian in a different world we no longer live in. In the real one we inhabit, it has to be annexed and de-Ukrainized, because there are two NPPs there and a white ISIS death cult that will never stop attacking Russia, eventually with nuclear weapons too.
When Napoleon and crew finally reached Moscow, they found a torched city. Tsar Alexander 1 had vacated the city while Napoleon waited for the terms of surrender to be signed. And...waited and waited for 36 days and then packed it in. Oct 19, 1812 the French started the long winter camping trip and a return to France. The Russians left the French to deal with an onerous slog back during the Russian winter. The French, threadbare and dining on their horses. Somehow, "I think the Russians got this".
"..one is supposed to win wars as quickly as possible by taking advantage of his overwhelming advantages if he has them, before the enemy can gain strength and nullify them, otherwise the enemy adapts. Which is exactly what happened here."
That's simplistic nonsense. One is supposed to win wars by not damaging your own country if you can, keeping it healthy and growing while erasing the enemy. That's what Russia is doing.
Russia isn't fighting a general war in Ukraine, it's conducting a special military operation, a very limited form of war that uses a small fraction of the resources Russia could bring to bear in a real war, and Russia is proceeding slowly to minimize its own losses as well as civilian deaths.
Doing so allows the Russian economy to grow and for Russia to develop in the ways that really matter in defeating a rotten West: economically and socially. During this conflict Russia has gotten profoundly stronger in those areas. The transformation is truly spectacular and has made Russia so strong that it is not only defeating the entire West's economic war against Russia but it is also clobbering the best the West can throw at Russia on the battlefield in Ukraine using a small fraction of forces.
Russia is also saving the lives of millions of ethnic Russians living in the new territories and in Ukraine by not escalating to a huge war. It hasn't flattened Kiev the way the US and Israel have flattened Gaza.
Russia has also saved the lives of millions of people in Europe by not escalating to where nuclear war, either limited or general, would arise. It's not clear that can be avoided given the hate machine the US and its vassals have unleashed, but so far the credit for avoiding nuclear war goes to Russia.
You can see the difference between Russia's approach and the simplistic nonsense spouted by imbeciles (that's an accurate characterization, not an ad hominem comment, given the extreme ignorance and stupidity of the propaganda for morons offered by shills like GM) by doing a thought experiment.
It's simple. Russia could end this in half an hour and take *all* of Ukraine with about 50 relatively low yield nuclear airbursts, none of them even outside of Ukraine. That would, in literal truth, effectively de-nazify and demilitarize the nazi regime in Kiev. There would be no fallout or damage to Russia or the new territories.
But doing that would *not* meet Russia's key objectives of not contributing to the killing of ethnic Russians in Ukraine. Russia invaded to save those people, not to kill them.
Some points you make are reasonable. Russia has become stronger and united in nationalistic spirit. Yes, Russia has been careful to keep civilian deaths to a minimum. It hasn't flattened entire cities as the US loves to do. To your thought experiment, I'll add another thought experiment which does not even require use of nuclear weapons. Russia could totally erase EVERY single power generation and transmission facility in Ukraine. It can disable all the railways that bring heavy arms into Ukraine from wherever they come - Poland, Romania, etc. Destroy Odessa's harbour so that no weapons can enter Ukraine from that entry point. i.e. destroy Ukraine's ability to conduct this war. Surely Ukraine cannot last long if all this is done, and these are legitimate targets in war. Such attacks also keep Russian personnel losses low while bringing ukraine to its knees. Russia doesn't do this, which is the puzzling aspect of the conflict so far.
Of course, for all we know there may be other tactical / material reasons for not undertaking such actions. We can be sure that there are at least some bright, strategic thinkers in the Russian army command and they know what they are doing. Unless they are being deliberately hobbled by the political leadership.
An Iskander missile costs about $3 million.
A 25 ft section of rail costs somewhere around $100 and can be repaired within a few hours. Ditto for roads.
In regards to bridges look at how much effort Ukraine put into destroying the Kerch Bridge. The plyons stay completely intact and span sustains minor damage and is usually repaired in a couple of days.
Destroying all power transmission facilities would likely bring death and famine to Russian speaking Ukrainians who are effectively hostages at this point.
The Russian army is effectively fighting with one arm tied behind its back.
You are right in your data. We are not talking of taking out 25 ft sections of track. There are other, more creative ways of disabling the rail network. Obliterate the main junctions / large depots where many tracks meet and loads get trans-shipped. Destroy all the sources of power to these junctions. Accompanied by wholesale destruction of all power generation / transmission capacity. Yes, many Russian speaking Ukrainians may suffer, but this is war. Some collateral damage has to be expected and accepted if Russia wants to win.
An Iskander does not cost $3 million, it costs $100-200K.
But more importantly, a 500 meter-wide and 100 meter-deep radioactive crater where once were highways and railways does not take $100 and a few hours to repair, it takes months.
So the Russian economy cannot grow unless there is a war on?!?
Take notes GM
Yes, some valid points surrounded by tons of nonsense.
"'It remains a puzzle how Ukraine still has the men and weapons to stop Russia's advances in each direction. We've heard Russia has total air superiority over the skies all over ukraine, and overwhelming superiority in artillery (2023-24), tanks and armoured vehicles (2022-23-24), drones (2025), personnel (2023-24-25); ukraine has depleted it's anti-air defence."
There is no puzzle. The reports merely represent wishful thinking. To be fair, pro-Ukrainian reports represent comparable wishful thinking.
Indeed, that is the only logical conclusion.
Ils totalisent un maigre 620 km^2 pour juillet, soit rien de suffisant. Nous sommes toujours en passe de chasser les nazis d’Ukraine vers 2095..
You seem to still be dealing with the trauma of being abandoned at birth. I understand why AI is essential to humanity's survival.
Is the secret reserve army Ukraine totally has to do this big offensive you described in the room with us right now?
good report and overview.. thank you!
Thanks for the update, Simplicius. It seems the Russian strategy is paying off. The pressure on Pokrovsk and the fall of Chasov Yar, which will open up Kostiantynivka from the elevated east, forces the Ukrainians to make a difficult decision. Too many hotspots along the front and not enough resources to plug the holes. Supply lines are bound to break. Funny to compare this to the German strategy in WWII. Surely it's just common sense.
I recall that Chasiv Yar was the main reason why Russia couldn't break out after capturing Bakhmut, so this is definite progress. Before long, they'll be advancing on Kramatorsk and Slovyansk, and onwards to Izyum!
Meanwhile back at the ranch... some intelligence folks in NATO think the answer would be to take Kaliningrad and use it as a bargaining chip to get Ukraine back. As in.... we'll give you Kal back if you give us Ukraine right up to the old eastern border- all if it, cool? OK, we'll take a freeze on current lines, no conditions.
Here's how they think it goes: Russians won't bomb Russians in K. We'll be safe there. Shades of the Kursk debacle, eh which involved sitting on a nuclear power plant. Still, no one steps into the same stream twice.
Except for one small thing. Russia gets all the justification it needs with its own allies to steamroller across the Baltic states to free K. Justification on the one hand, outright demands by the Russian people themselves on the other. It does not need to drop any bombs on NATO forces holed up there, although it will come to that once the war really kicks off. For starters Russia will flatten the old eastern bloc. This is what full mobilisation looks like. We will have not just a bombed out Ukraine, but a whole bunch of the former eastern bloc states smoldering away including Poland. Still they kept saying it would happen, and those making prophecies of doom are those most inclined, perversely, to bring it about.
But back in the land of the Real Hard Fight, If NATO was going boots in with Russia it would have done so before this last desperado chucking around of threats like Lear on the blasted heath. In any event, referenda should be held in the Baltics to decide if the people really want to lay down and die. That, or they get onto the streets right now and remove the greatest threat to their lives and livelihoods- their current western facing idiot leaders.
It is curious how NATO seems determined to fulfil its own prophecy that Russia will soon be at the old cold war borders. You would think that the old west has calculated that there are some NATO allies worth worth throwing under the bus, and some pundits would say that there was always going to come that time when they would become the sacrificial goat..... once Ukraine was all used up. Bye bye, Estonia. Within a grand ring fence containing the 'not real people' some are more unreal than others......
Which NATO military would assault Kaliningrad? The Baltic Harlots combined maybe can field a battalion?
Poland probably is not that stupid. And the US would need to use their territory to assemble a ground force.
Of course, Russia might use nukes in that event, well within their rights. The inflammatory language the American general, (the same genius who planned the Afghan disaster withdrawal and of course was subsequently promoted for the stellar incompetence) used for this threat is beyond the belief.
When Russian troops break through to the Dnepr the panic of the cornered rats we call our leaders will be at very dangerous and unhinged levels.
I did not say this was a serious plan. I said it was a shakespearean utterance from the blasted heath, the very antithesis of any rational thought designed to panic Russia into doing the deal the west desperately wants, before the whole Ukraine affair is a Russian fait accompli.
But I also said Russia could see its own upside in this daftness, should NATO attempt it, Russia's upside and the west's downside.
Why would it not be a serious plan?
NATO invaded Kursk a year ago, Putin did nothing in response
Except for the fact that more and more people say Russia is well justified in its actions, helped by insane attacks on its nuclear bombers. And it's all about perception
I doubt that the Kursk incursion convinced anyone not already convinced.
Oh, it sure convinced plenty of Russians in the so-called "opposition", as no one likes their grandmas chased by drones and starved to death in their own country. It actually even convinced plenty of Ukrainians that their own leadership is at least partly to blame for the mess. So bye-bye to regime change in Russia, and hello to regime change in Ukraine... "strength" does not always produce the desired outcome, just ask any rapist
Beyond defeating it, you mean? What more did Russia need to do, does Russia need to do? It is, as we all keep reminding you, winning the war in Ukraine.
Harakiri specialists need not reply to this question.
As for your point about that daft incursion into Kursk, NATO relied on mercs there. I am not sure how that would go down in K which is not an empty region of forests and lakes dotted around with peasants.
>Beyond defeating it, you mean? What more did Russia need to do, does Russia need to do? It is, as we all keep reminding you, winning the war in Ukraine.
Russia is still to this day decisively losing the war in Ukraine, both in terms of what is happening on the battlefield, and geopolitically.
Let's have our usual reminder that the official Russian condition for ending the war is Zaporozhye and Kherson and the rest stays with the Western Nazis.
But if Stalin had in 1943 asked for ending the war when he was only partially at the Dnieper, with the Nazis getting to keep Kiev, Odessa, the Baltics, etc. forever, how would we have qualified the outcome of the war?
Well, why is Putin begging for such terms then?
And on the battlefield there is no real winning at the moment. The AFU is still very far from collapse and every tiny advance takes enormous effort.
But let's go back to Kursk. Kursk was not an AFU operation, it was a full blown NATO invasion. It was NATO tanks, NATO IFVs, NATO soldiers, NATO command and control, etc.
Also, do not get fooled by how little territory they captured. Just as the intention of Operation Spiderweb was to take out the whole of Russian strategic aviation and the AWACS fleet, and that didn't happen tanks to sheer luck, the intention in Kursk was to take several sizable cities and the NPP, and perhaps even further. Not just Sudzha and 1,200 km^2 around it.
The intent mattered hugely there.
What was an absolute must for Putin to do in such a situation was nuclear strikes to physically destroy all NATO infrastructure in Europe, plus a total annihilation of Germany (i.e. do a grid bombing with nukes of the whole territory, glass everything and kill everyone) because Germany sent a lot of tanks and IFVs there, and the symbolism of that was clear. He didn't do it, and the fact that he didn't do it meant that he opened himself for much worse to come. Some of which did come:
1) Russia ate half a dozen tactical nukes at airfields and ammo depots inside pre-2022 Russia, which Putin also concealed. Sure, on the smallish side, except the one in Toropets which was perhaps more than 10 kt, that is how plausible deniability still works, but those who followed events carefully know. Which non-reaction of course opened him up for much worse even further
2) The strategic nuclear forces were attacked
3) Drone attacks are now coming from half a dozen countries, not just Ukraine
4) Not just drone attacks, there was an attempted ground invasion by DRGs to seize the RVSN base in Dombarovskii from Kazakhstan back in mid-June. Also concealed by the Kremlin, but information did come out in real time.
5) Russian commercial ships are attacked way out of theater, in the Baltics, in the Mediterranean, etc., with several of them having been sunk already
The rest, much much worse, is yet to come.
"Russia is still to this day decisively losing the war in Ukraine, both in terms of what is happening on the battlefield, and geopolitically." quote.
I could not read any further than this! You should not have started with such howler, but with your argument.
Please tell us what substance gets you on these once every couple weeks "rants" ? I mean you hate the fact that Putin has put together a leadership that has returned Russia to "super power" status. I wonder did he also take your lunch money as children?? Or is just caffeine and corporate media??
Between invading a hyper-armed city and almost uninhabited wooded marshes...
Putin did not do what was HOPED FOR he would do, nuke some European city or something of the sort, thus all the disappointment
we are talking about NATO, Neanderthal Ant Terrorist Organization?
You are obsessed with nuclear power while Russia has Star Wars weapons.
Doesn't matter what you have if you are too compromised to ever use it.
Which military? There is only one obvious answer; Poland, which has lately been building up a tank army, strictly along Guderian's principles formulated a century ago, for that express purpose. They very much are that stupid, and more so, because the type of military buildup they are pursuing is taken exactly from that blitzkrieg recipe book that has already failed against Russia in WWII, and is laughably obsolete on the modern battlefield. Tanks, infantry carriers, mines, howitzers, air support. It's as if they haven't heard of AD, drones, ECM, or even attack helicopters. They are getting ready to blitz Kaliningrad, and never stop until their armor columns reach Moscow. Or at least until their ammo runs out two weeks into the war.
I'd say their focus is on Gallicia rather than Kaliningrad. I can't see the Polish taking on the Russians.
"I can't see the Polish taking on the Russians." Every sensible person said exactly that before the last, what? three or four times? the Poles took on the Russians and lost their country as a result.
You really do not know the Polish mentality.
"hey are getting ready to blitz Kaliningrad, and never stop until their armor columns reach Moscow. Or at least until their ammo runs out two weeks into the war."
And then run screaming to the Americans to ride to the rescue.
Poland will do whatever the Americans command. Nothing gives a pole greater delight than his Master's orders.
If an attack on Klainingrad happens, it might be enough to just nip little Lithuania from the Belarus border. By Ukrainian distances standards the separation from border to border is, well, miniscule.
Note to Putin: naturally I'd like to keep Estonian intact. It has some beautiful buildings and a lovely ferry link to Finland (which I took once. A trip to remember).
They didnt dare to take over Transnistria, an easier target. So Kaliningrad, a million people city with urban combats? The casus belli? The PR justification? No need to invade the Baltics. A land connexion between Belarus and Kaliningrad would sever them from Poland. A catastrophic outcome for NATO. But who knows. The Brits are not still done with Europe. They want it burning and smoking before they can BBB it.
>They didnt dare to take over Transnistria, an easier target
It works both ways.
You have no idea what the Kremlin is not doing because of the threat to Transnistria.
You must know much more than me being a Kremlin insider… ;)
The star corporal who speaks of it is the one who was fleeing ahead of his troops towards Kabul airport, the Taliban cavalry on mopeds chasing them.
Isn't it amazing in the U.S. military / NATO. The absolute worst of the worst officers rise to the top solely based on how well they can polish the poles (and I do not mean Polish) of those above them. Being a failure at your actual job helps attain the rank of General bootlicker
jew tools are promoted....
And yet it is US, British and French bombs and missiles raining on Russian soldiers and cities, but absolutely nothing is going the other way.
Which establishes a very clear hierarchy of power.
I still don't see them having the nerve to do it, for all the reasons you state, but you are right to be worried. There is no rational planning involved here. No measuring of risks and rewards. Just emotional reactions to having propaganda defeats by puppets that failed upwards. The Empire of Lies is in a terminal condition. It has lost the capacity for dialetical reasoning, it's lies all the way down.
You are right. They started lying to others some of the time, then lying to everyone non stop about practically everything, now the practice is lying to themselves. Fortunately they do not one hundred percent believe their own lies. When they do the world will be in serious trouble.
"some intelligence folks in NATO think the answer would be to take Kaliningrad" People who try that would be making the mistake of attacking the world's largest nuclear power in a way that absolutely guarantees a nuclear response.
If NATO attempts to invade Kaliningrad, Russia will, for sure, use nukes to vaporize the attacking forces as well as all forces that threaten Kaliningrad in support of such an invasion. Anybody who tells you otherwise doesn't understand Russia.
For strikes close to Kaliningrad those will be very low yield airbursts ranging from 100 tons to a kiloton or two, and lots of them, in the range of around 200 detonations. That's to avoid generating fallout that will blow downwind either onto Kaliningrad, for strikes on forces and bases in Poland, such as Gdansk across the bay from Kaliningrad or the US Aegis facility in Redzikowo, or downwind into Belarus or Russia from forces and bases in Lithuania, like the base at Siauliai. Besides totally demilitarizing Poland and Lithuania for their direct role in an attack on Kaliningrad, almost certainly Russia will demilitarize Latvia and Estonia as well.
That's the minimum Russian response. By "demilitarize," I mean eradicating every military force on their territory, their own or NATO. I mean that literally, in the literal sense of killing off their armed forces - all of them - with low yield airbursts. Once those assholes try to strike Kaliningrad, Russia will leave nothing of them to try again either at Kaliningrad or at Russia.
Following that, I think at a minimum Russia would annex a direct land connection to Kaliningrad at the expense of whatever rump Baltic states it allowed to remain.
It's an open question just how far beyond that Russia would take its nuclear response, but people who know Russia's nuclear forces and the leadership best believe that it would be at least a 50-50 chance that Russia would denuclearize both the UK and France as well as vaporizing *all* US/NATO nuclear storage facilities in Europe, with the possible exception of the US nuclear weapons depot in Incirlik, Turkey. With part of that also being nuclear strikes using very low yield airbursts to wipe out the armed forces of Finland.
Great forensic reporting here about the Russians pressing ahead on multiple fronts, Simplicius. The Russian bear is squeezing AFU forces and grinding them down. I look forward to the Russian summer offensive.
So do I. 🤣
lol, Mikey.
Which summer are you referring to, 2028? Because the current one is more than halfway over.
lol that’s a good point. To Denis’s defense I didn’t realize it either lol. 🤷♂️
There are indications that Russia may have finally changed its stance toward Israel, as I discuss at the beginning of my latest article, focussing on the Middle East: https://open.substack.com/pub/geopolitiq/p/has-russia-finally-changed-its-stance
What do you think about it?
PR
Actually, most of the indications are not coming from PR at all. If you read my article and John Helmer's post linked therein, you will understand.
been following Helmer @ substack for a long while, his posts are excellent. still, politely disagree on this one: it's taken waaaaaaaay too long, world wide, to express indignation about the zionists' relentless violence in Gaza, West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, heck even Iran :-((
people need and are entitled to peace: 'make love not war'.
I understand. Anyway, we will see how things go, but Gideon Sa'ar is hitting on Russia again on X: https://x.com/gidonsaar/status/1951220583544369564
See also this post by Andrei Martyanov: https://smoothiex12.blogspot.com/2025/08/this-is-rich.html
Martyanov's a gem too!
Have the various oligarchs with names such as Mikhelson, Fridman, Khan, Abramovich, Abramov, Vekselberg, Kantor, Aven, Rotenberg, etc. been put on trial and sent to GULAG camps? Has Putin been tried for grand treason and shot publicly?
When it happens, then Russia will have changed its stance towards Israel.
But I have heard nothing of the sort, nor do I expect to.
GM
you are a SBU asset. A traitor.
are you a jew?
GM
you like to accuse leader of a Russia of treason, and as long as you continue to do that, I will sincerely doubt you are an MI6 or SBU psychological operative. A traitor, shortly.
we can go through all leaders of Russia in the last hundred or more years
and they all yielded extraordinary personal power
each of them made mistakes, and no one was a traitor
if you go back, Yeltsin, drunk, but serious man, cognisant of troubles Russia is in, aware of his responsibility, choosing and supporting Putin as a successor
Gorbachev, a mild man, a communist who was so afraid of communism that he believed anything else must be better - no, it wasn't. Refuting communism was not enough. One has to know where one is going.
Old guard, from Brezhnev to Andropov, slow thinkers, not adapting to changes in the world
Hruschev ...
Stalin
Lenin
Nikolaj II Romanov
Many of them made mistakes, but I would not call any one of them a traitor. It is not honest, GM. Each of us can find something he doesn't like, and some mistakes were extremely costly, resulting in millions of lives, whole countries destroyed, still I would not call any one of them traitor.
It is a habit, entrenched especially among individuals growing up in authoritarian states. What do I mean? In France, Great Britain, Germany, US one can quite normally say, I disagree with your positions, decisions, and since I actually think similar to the majority of citizens, I expect you, the leader, will lose next election. If elections are not the way to change who is in power, the only remedy remains crying Traitor, traitor and hoping for a violent regime change.
But in this moment what an angry GM is saying is identical to what an MI6 or SBU operative is saying. GM become a traitor, an MI6 or SBU asset.
Other motivation is a combination of self righteousness and self importance, somehow one grows stronger by insulting authority, and more powerful by insulting powerful people.
Once we solve this habit of calling whom you disagree with a traitor, and repeatedly calling Putin a traitor there are points that deserve analysis and answer.
Among bolsheviks, a significant number were Jewish, significantly more than expected according to their percentage as a population of Russia
Among new capitalists, oligarchs a significant number such as Mikhelson, Fridman, Khan, Abramovich, Abramov, Vekselberg, Kantor, Aven, Rotenberg etc. are Jewish, again significantly more than expected according to the number among citizens of Russia
GM will perhaps be able to suggest how many of the new elite inevitably being created by war, from war heroes, to generals, weapon inventors, to weapons production investors are Jewish, and what is the proportion to their number in general population.
In US similar people with similar names have a considerable influence on president, both parties, both houses of Congress and major media, so much so that some even claim they are in control. Whatever the truth they significantly influence US politics towards Russia, and Russo-Ukrainian war.
In Russia, as it gets more and more clear that this is an existential war for survival of Russia, as the national state of Russian nation and the nations living inside RF, the position of Jewish oligarchs becomes difficult in a sense that one cannot keep both supporting Russian national state and global liberal world order.
OK, if Russian oligarchs of Jewish origin stop supporting liberal world order, and give up on supporting the West, US & Britain, can they keep supporting Russia as any other Russian citizen ?
Putin has admitted that he was fooled by the West, as many other Russians, and has for too long a time waited hoping that he will somehow succeed in creating good relations with the West.
I do not see signs that Russian oligarchs of Jewish origin are less supportive of Russia than other citizens and even if it were to happen I see no signs that Putin and leadership would not be able to resolve the problem, in the best interest of Russian nation and state.
It is a difficult job to lead a nation, and as any other leader of Russia, Putin will definitely make a few mistakes, and some of them might be costly, in lives. But even if we find a mistake, I would not call him a traitor.
Calling a leader a traitor immediately disqualifies you GM from serious discussion, because you are objectively helping the enemy. Pointing out mistakes, even mistakenly, discussing strategy, commenting on decisions, every tin is acceptable, in internet but there is a line that divides you from being a useful idiot of MI6, and it would stop doing it.
If you consistently place the interests of a foreign country (Israel) above those of your own, and suffer one catastrophic geopoliticial defeat after another because of that, then yeah, you are a traitor.
That is the very definition of what grand treason is.
At least the Americans get to control the Middle East by working for Israel. There is some synergy on interests there.
It is the exact opposite with Putin.
GM
there are no facts supporting your accusations
you are like a child enjoyng playing with his own private parts
you cannot resist the urge to accuse Putin
whatever we discuss, you are back to the same accusation
obsessed with Putin, you have some kind of Putin Derangement Syndrome
PDS
>there are no facts supporting your accusations
What happened in Syira since 2012?
GM
the danger of throwing accusations, aside from presenting oneself as an idiot,
is actual blocking of your own understanding
It makes you less able to see the obvious
this is a typical GM, you feel so obsessed with accusing Putin
that you use this accusation in a situation where it obviously does not fit
Look again GM
everybody in the region, except Russia, is either obeying and serving Israeli state
or using Israeli plans for Greater Israel as an excuse to push his own agenda
US obeying Israel
Europe obeying ISrael
Britain pretending to obey Israel, pushing its own agenda
So called allies of Syria as an Arab and Moslem state
fellow Arabs
Egypt, bought by American (Israeli controlled) money,
a government close to Islamic brotherhood and Turkey, elected on free elections, overthrown by CIA organised coup, and now under control of US/Britain/Israel, no help to Syrian,
Jordan, a British invention, under western control, houses US bases, hunts antiIsraeli drones
Turkey, loud mouthed antiIsraeli warrior, under the table supplying oil and gas, dividing Syria, organising antiIranian outpost in Azerbaijan, no help to Syrian, active enemy of Syria
now in control ,of most of Syria, ridiculed by Israeli air attacks on all Syrian bases, weapons. When Putin's Russia was defending skies of Syria, Israeli jets have never dared to enter Syrian airspace, they shot rockets, missiles from over Lebanon, and Mediterranean, and were not flying over Syria to attack Iran - all of that is now, possible when Turkey, great Islamic warrior state controls most of Syria.
Gulf Arabs and Saudi Arabia - American friends and allies
Russia and Iran were the only allies of Syria, and they simply had not enough power, a coalition of MOslem, Arab forces led and organised by the West was stronger.
Syria was a high quality, diplomatic and military engagement that used Russian strength, but first and foremost intelligence to keep a state going, that was viciouly attacked by all its neighbours, Israel, Arab, and Moslem neighbouring states.
It is a clear example of imperial politics, Divide et impera, divide and rule, invented by Romans, practiced by British, and now taken over by Americans.
This is a world war GM, Russia is fighting, that is exactly why it is called Special military Operation. Because it is a SMO as a part of World War Three, the Great Antimperial war.
And it this war the best answer is not nukes.
Russia is not alone, it has to forge, create an alliance - China, Iran and Russia and North Korea are obviously in this together as military allies, but all BRICS are in this economically.
Strategic patience instead of angry reaction.
Not to nitpick, but there haven't been GULAG camps in Russia for half a century.
But you knew that, I'm sure. What do inflammatory statements accomplish?
I think GM is a Stalinist.
>there haven't been GULAG camps in Russia for half a century.
1) And where has that taken the country?
"При мне такой х... не было" is a meme for a reason
2) There are in fact penal colonies in Siberia still to this day, most of them former GULAG sites. Mostly in somewhat warmer places than Kolyma (so it was back in the days too though), but still quite unpleasant.
You can look at the list:
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Список_пенитенциарных_учреждений_России
Navalny died in Kharp, which is a former GULAG camp.
Khodorkovsky was sent to Krasnokamensk, which is a mining site near the Chiense border, and is a literal labor camp.
There is still one in Norilsk, and still a couple around Magadan, a lot of them in Perm and Komi, multiple sites in Murmansk, Arkhangelsk, Yakutia, etc.
Lots of options.
Also, modern technology opens up new possibilities. We could have a GULAG reality show, where we send the crooked oligarchs to Norilsk and have a 24/7 live stream of their emaciated bodies and frozen hands digging through the permafrost with while the guards whip and beat them up. Would be very educational. But it will never happen...
Lavrov:
"Netanyahu and his generals should be brought before an international tribunal. Russia will support any nation that calls for justice for the victims of Gaza."
Where did you find this statement? Source?
@ dhdh: so what was last year's ICC's judgement for then?
Wow, good news for a change!
As for the Nobel prizes, first, the one in Economics is fake and has nothing to do with the original prizes set up by Mr. Nobel, and its name has change twelve(!) times so far. Two of the previous "Nobel Prize in Economics" winners set up LTCM, a supposedly invincible hedge fund that went bankrupt in less than four years.
And yes, two people have won two (real) Nobel prizes before: Marie Curie, whom I assume needs no introduction, and Linus Pauling, a genius of a man who was vilified and had his name largely erased because he dared question medical orthodoxy. I don't want to get your paymasters at Stripe upset but anyone with a serious illness should do their own research on what Pauling discovered about health.
I used to be a neighbour of Linus, early 1980s would see him doing his morning walk down San Antonio Road in Los Altos, CA looking very jaunty wearing his trademark Tam O'Shanter. Linus was in his 80s then and looking great. He was a lion among men.
Don't forget Von Hayek won the economics Nobel back in the late seventies, so sometimes they get it right. They even gave one to Friedman.
Those days were of course long ago.
The Ukrainians deserve considerable credit for doggedly hanging on against superior forces, but at some point this war is going to turn into Saigon in 1975.....
The Ukrainians are very brave and excellent fighters. If they were not in overall command by our US imbecil generals they would be more effective.
That said, what a waste of life and destruction of a country. The west has zero consideration for human suffering.
Ukrainians are very brave and excellent fighters... We see it every day, throwing themselves into TCK vans, beating up recruiters who try to stop them because the van is full. How could people rounded up in the street be excellent in combat? You're missing reading numerous testimonies in the columns of the Ukrainian and Anglo-Saxon press. Just one question: have you ever been inside a barracks?
It seems like the British have been more in the driver's seat of Ukrainian disasters than the U.S., like Kursk.
Its even worse, they are being controlled by Syrskyi
I am dreaming of a white Christmas
For sure. They are Russians
"The Ukrainians deserve considerable credit for doggedly hanging on against superior forces,"
Are you talking about the Ukrainians in Donbass who doggedly hung on against huge nazi armies financed by billions in US $ and assisted by US forces, like the US AWACS aircraft that guided nazi aircraft on cluster bombing missions against population centers in Donbass?
The Ukraine war is a *civil* war. The people in the four new territories, and Crimea, were all "Ukrainians". The so-called "Ukrainians" are also mostly ethnic Russians.
Those "Ukrainians" now fighting for Kiev are mostly people fighting with a gun to their back. They were conscripted involuntarily and if they try to flee or surrender they get shot by the small minority that are nazi true believers who are the Kiev junta's enforcers.
By overwhelming majorities the people of Ukraine in the last free and fair nation-wide election back in 2010 chose an administration that strongly rejected the nazi/oligarch coalition's plan to become the West's battering ram against Russia. Six billion dollars, mountains of arms, and the direct military support of the US overthrew the results of that election in 2014 when the US destroyed the democratically elected government of Ukraine and put an unelected minority junta into power in Kiev.
They then financed that junta with tens of billions of dollars and mountains of weapons and yet more military support, the CIA creating and training the junta's feared intelligence gestapo, just like the US helped Somoza create a feared gestapo in Nicaragua and also likewise supported the US's puppet dictators in so many other lands.
When a minority is backed by the US and has all the weapons, they really can dominate a far larger majority. As for "superior forces", Ukraine at the beginning of 2022 had over 500,000 men under arms with a lavishly equipped army. They had prepped an invasion force of 130,000 men to invade Donbass and wipe out those Ukrainians still clinging to freedom. Russia invaded with a mere 80,000 men. Russian forces were the underdog in that conflict, not Ukraine. They invaded in what was a desperate bid to protect ethnic Russians in Donbass from being slaughtered in the US's planned ethnic cleansing operation, and they invaded at the earliest possible time that Russia could take on the entire West.
So no, I don't give any credit to the nazi scum doggedly hanging on to their gold mine of skimming billions off the hundreds of billions of bucks shoveled into the Kiev regime or to the willingness of the dwindling hard-core nazi brigades to slaughter the people of Ukraine to keep those bucks flowing and their evil ideology in power.
Instead, I give credit to the people of Donbass and Russia for doggedly hanging on against the superior financial power of the collective West and for putting their lives on the line to protect their kin from nazi evil.
It's interesting that you brought up the issues in Seversk. I've been wondering what was going on in that region going all the way back to when Bakhmut fell. It seemed like something clearly strange was going on in that area considering it was so close to Bakhmut and seems like a region they really need to secure if they plan on pushing west in that northern/central area. I Wonder if the issues are related to the large forest north of it and maybe impacting drone warfare.
A cursory glance at the force disposition seems to tell the story. The Ukrainian unit in the area is an elite 81st Airmobile Brigade, while the Russian forces are mostly BARS units and some ex-LPR '2nd Army Corps' ones, which are usually not up to snuff with Russian regulars.
Have the 10th Mountain Assault Brigade been withdrawn?
The huge forest north of the Siversky-Donets river, anchored in its center at Serebrianka, was a huge nationalist (Azov and others) training ground for a decade before the SMO. It's their base of military operations - one reason it's been so difficult to take, as they get the best weaponry and have stayed fully supplied throughout.
That forest to the north of Seversk is crossed by the Siversky-Donets river, and turns into swampland near the river. Russians controlled the forest and the northern side of the river up until the Autumn 2022 Ukrainian Kharkhov counteroffensive. In summer or spring 2022 Russians actually tried an amphibious crossing of the river to the south, towards Seversk but it ended up badly (famous scrap metal cemetery photos). At the time it was probably realised that they didn't have the manpower to guard the extended frontline which went to Chuguev, Blakleya and Izyum, and at the same time launch assaults.
After the Kharkhov counteroffensive, the Russians got stuck assaulting the town of Bilogorivka and its extensive salt mines, which lie closer to Lisichansk than to Seversk. In addition, the northern side of the Siversky-Donets river and its forest was lost, and Ukrainians populated the area with mortar and drone teams, and hideouts for ranger-type special forces. Without controlling that forested and swampy northern flank, it's disadvantageous to progress towards Seversk. Not to mention that the next city west of Seversk is Sloviansk, which is supposed to be the war's final boss, the epilogue.
So in short the Russians couldn't pass a stronghold town, had lost control to the forest and river to the north (which also worked the other way, as good cover for the Russian Liman-Oskil northern front), and a victory wouldn't achieve anything meaningful other than locally straightening the front, as they need at least to control the whole course of the Oskil river, to be achieved by way of their northern advance, in order to even think about a siege of Sloviansk. Thus the Central Donbass front after Bakhmut was unprioritized in late 2023, and the focus shifted to liberating the outskirts of Donetsk city.
There was a scandal at the end of last year where the Russian general in charge of that front was submitting false reports up the chain of command, claiming to make steady progress. It finally got to the point where what command was claiming was under Russian control was completely absurd, and the situation was investigated. That general was moved to a training position deep inside Russia and a competent general put in place.
Since that time, movement has been steady - but the Serebrianka forest on the northern front of Siversk has been a nationalist stronghold since before the 2014 coup. Azov and others are dug in deep in that forest, and use it as their base of military operations and training throughout Ukraine.
American Thinker had a great article here on why Russia NEEDS TO KEEP UP THE WAR
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2025/07/perpetual_russian_wars.html
That's a quote worthy of a CIA intern. That article is nowhere near "great." It basically rehashes the PR tropes about Russian history that western leaders throw out for mass consumption.
“That's a quote worthy of a CIA intern.”
Ha! Love it.