Welcome back everyone. Here’s Part 2 of the ongoing mailbag series. Once again, the comments section here is open to all subscribers, so have at it. Without further ado, let’s begin with the next batch of highly incisive questions! 21. Do you have new information, how well does work the “Penicillin" anti artillery radar with its acoustic sensors, thermal imaging and seismic detectors?
Response to Simplicius "Subscriber Mailbag Answers - 9/22/23 [Part 2]"
"highest percentage of Jews in its administration of any country on earth outside of Israel, but also the highest percentage of open Nazis in its governmental and military ranks. How’s that possible? "
Need to distinguish between "Jews" and "Zionists"? I don't know if the Jews in Ukraine's government are Zionists, per se, but given the desire to "become Israel", it would seem likely. And Zionists are fascists through and through. As President Truman said in his memoirs, when persecuted people get power they immediately become oppressors. The Zionists are Exhibit A in that regard.
"noting the timelines for progress in the past"
Utterly irrelevant to what happens when the Ukraine military collapses and the war progresses beyond the eastern Ukraine fortifications. Those fortifications and the length of the front are the only reason this war has been as slow as it has. That and Putin's desire to manage the casualty rate due to managing the Russian population reaction, plus the reaction of the economy, Russia's allies and the ROW, and the reaction of NATO. Only the latter may (or not) be relevant once Ukraine's military collapses, which, I reiterate, will happen in the next 3-6 months (and both Macgregor and Ritter agree with that timeline.)
"2-4 year projection would see Slavyansk-Kramatorsk being taken by 2025"
Ridiculous. What are you smoking? Set up a store to sell it to your readers. LOL
" b.) Ukraine doesn’t collapse and surrender from unsustainable destruction to their manpower sometime long before we reach that point of 2027 or so."
Precisely my point - except it won't be 2027, it will 2023-2024.
"More likely Ukraine will collapse and/or surrender to Russia in 2024-2025, upon which point Russia will appoint its own president, perhaps long-rumored Medvedchuk, who will oversee the newly ratified constitutional purges of all Nazi/nationalist movements, sects, cells, etc."
Yup. And after that, Russia will put a Military District in western Ukraine to counter the Aegis Ashore installations in Poland and Romania. That is the actual reason for the SMO. All the rest - the Donbass residents, de-Nazification, de-militarization, etc. are all just preconditions.
Thanks again, Simplicius, for your overview and insights.
Read yesterday in MSM, first defensive line penetrated by armored vehicles of the AFU. Any signs pointing to the veracity of the claims and, if so, to what extent?
[The whole world already talks of a peaceful resolution, but so far a concrete set of proposals hasn’t been brought forth, so there hasn’t been pressure on Russia to accept anything just yet. But in the near future, once actual concrete proposals are produced, and especially if they look somewhat reasonable on paper, then Russia will be in an increasingly isolative position to reject them.]
This is why Zelensky and his maximalist goal becomes a convenience reason for Russia to continue the war. We even see China and Brazil losing their nerves over Zelensky unreasonable demand of total Russian capitulation while India just outright snubbed him. That's why on the other side Ze becomes more and more of a liability for the US (not Neocon though because maximalist position is still their ain) as they wouldn't be able to realistically offer a "peace treaty" or even "armistice". I expect Ze to get offed first before we see any manouver to pressure Russia signing anything.
In point 26 you state: “ if NATO/U.S. doesn’t stage a massive black swan event or falseflag in order to intervene in the war and save Ukraine at the 11th hour.”
Is that even a possibility at all? Having read your analyses over the past few months, I have come to believe that Nato, and even the U.S., is in no position to contemplate a direct confrontation with Russia.
Nato/U.S. don't have the manpower nor the materiel for such an adventure, nor would there be the political will and support to stage this, Europe does not want direct involvement in a war on its continent.
A rabid dog as these "European" dynasties are cannot be permitted to wander around biting people, they have to be put out of their misery cleanly and quietly and that shall be done. They no more understand the forces coming up against them next than a fly crossing a road understands the speeding windscreen that turns it inside out.
>The next half year or so I expect intense efforts from certain parties to freeze the conflict. If they don’t succeed then Russia will likely use the winter to greatly degrade Ukraine’s infrastructure, particularly the power and electrical just like last winter. The official stat I’ve seen claims only 25% of last year’s damage was repaired. That means Russia could “finish off” much of their power grid this time around.
This is a laughable discussion.
Russia could have finished it off last year too. Within the first week in fact - there was no need for months of bombing.
They didn't because their was clearly a political veto on striking the actually critical points, culminating with Surovikin being removed as the general commander of the operation in early January (after which the massive strikes stopped pretty much immediately).
Do we see any signs that whatever political veto prevented Russia from:
1) Striking infrastructure and decision making centers in the first days of the war
2) Mobilizing properly on time, and not only after a full blown disaster developed
3) Hitting infrastructure and decision making centers decisively at any point ever since
4) Hitting decision making centers even after the BSF started being systematically destroyed
Has been lifted? No, and I am writing this as right at this very moment there is yet another NATO missile attack on Sevastopol, after there has been no response to any of the previous ones.
So where are these stupid expectations that Ukraine's grid will be "finished off" coming from?
Again, it could have been finished off within a week. Everyone knows what should have been struck, the lists of targets, with precise coordinates, were circulating on social media, compiled by Russian grid experts (who built the whole thing to being with). It isn't that long, you get 8-10 fully loaded Tu-95s in the air and send a dozen Iskanders, and Ukraine goes permanently dark. Not even a week now that I think about it, but more like a day.
But that never happened.
Also, the time to do that, if one was serious about winning the war, was May, not October.
First, May was just before the Great Offensive started, and if you killed the grid then, that would have had some effect on it.
Second, you want to minimize civilian suffering and that means you kill the grid when it's warm. Not when people are at risk of freezing to death in the hundreds of thousands and millions.
"The meeting place cannot be changed" is a tv series from 1970s about 1940s and in fact one of the central elements is young idealistic officer returning from the army and joining criminal police. Great series, and rare example when screen adaptation is better than the book it is adapted from. Partly due to Vysotsky who made a character castrated in the book by political fashion of the day into a genuine likable humane being.
But to the point of crime and war it all depends on circumstances. But war time usually gives a license for extreme measures and for example French as far as I remember gunned down 300 known criminals in Paris during WWI without any due process. On the other hand after the war ends soldiers come home with disregard for human life and no jobs.
>Depending how large of a meat-assault force Ukraine mobilizes this winter, Russia may even choose to continue playing defense for a while longer next year as it will be increasingly easier to destroy the enemy forces out in the open.
How much of the BSF will have been left with daily missile strikes on it by next year?
Regarding the stat that 10500 people were killed in criminal acts in 6 months, it's worth noting that Russian law is much stricter than at least U.S. law. A lot of acts are considered negligent homicide and prosecuted that would not incur criminal liability in the west. An example is a taxi driver picking up an inebriated passenger during freezing temperatures, the passenger becoming belligerent, the taxi driver ordering him out of the car somewhere that is not his destination, and the passenger freezing to death in the cold. The responsibility of the taxi driver (or a friend of the drunk guy giving him a ride) is either to get the guy someplace safe, or call the police. And there's not really any way out of that kind of thing - you'll be prosecuted for it.
On a smaller scale, both parties to a fist fight in Russia are equally liable to criminal charges, no matter who started it or threw the first punch. In my experience the police aren't very eager to chase the participants in fights down to arrest them, so the general situation is the guys involved in a fight run when the police vehicles get close. That happens somewhere I see maybe once every year or two - in front of a night club, in a courtyard with teenagers, etc.
My greatest hope is that if this totalitarian tyranny is ever taken down somewhere in the future, all the political mafia, the hidden capital fluxes in tax havens and the real ownership of the world's wealth are finally unveiled. Only then will we know the extent of the corruption we are living with.
There is a clear British offensive against India. It started with the Moon landing and now steps another significant escalation. Canada is just a British extraction colony. The point is the British empire was trying to seduce India appointing an Indian major in London and even an Indian prime minister. They have been importing Indian scientists for decades too..They want to attrack Indian capital. So something must have happened, probably Bharat refusal to follow the Ukranian script in the G20, but certainly not only that. There must be some hprizontal friction implying Britain not having what they want from Bharat. And now they are furious and using the tool that endorses economic relations underneath: blackmail, slander and force. It is likely that the Sikh leader was killed by the British in order to false flag Bharat. They did it with Skripal. It is their modus operandi and their signature. They are using puppet Pakistan too as a leverage. This is a historical breakthrough for Bharat. We enter a new age here.
"Given the fact that the Ukrainians now are goaded by the US into sacrificing immense amounts of manpower, for instance by incessantly pushing against the Surovikin line with inadequate means to do so, could it be imagined that this is an example of induced "suicide by Russia" as in "suicide by cop"?"
Given that the overwhelming majority of neocons, including Victoria Nudleman, are Jews with a deep history of Russian and Ukrainian hatred, I would suggest it is more likely a case of "murder by proxy" towards both sides of the conflict - slav against slav.
"There is clearly something very dark going on in Ukraine. Ukraine has both the highest percentage of Jews in its administration of any country on earth outside of Israel, but also the highest percentage of open Nazis in its governmental and military ranks. How’s that possible?"
Jewish Zionists encouraged and capitalised on the rise of Nazism, financing them behind the scenes and helping to remove certain political obstacles during their rise to power. Why? Nazism was the perfect solution to gaining the sympathy of the world in the effort to gain and establish the Israelii state and to promote Zionism across the world's political scene. I believe Zionism and Nazism are two sides of the same coin designed to gain global power.
Thank you for yet another excellent and informative article.
A couple of notes:
1) Rabies is carried in the saliva, not the blood.
2) Vegetation doesn't "die off" in Ukraine in the winter. Leaving aside the mountainous areas with abundant pine trees etc (which are far away from the fighting), trees and other vegetation lose their FOLIAGE during the winter, but they do not die. Combined with nearly flat terrain, this makes it extremely difficult to camouflage people or equipment since there are virtually no visual "obstacles" to hide behind outside of urban areas. A tree without leaves isn't dead, though :P
3) Excuse the length here, but there is a severe misunderstanding of Victoria Nuland's roots, so a mini family biography is necessary.
a) Meyer Nudelman (Tori's paternal grandfather) was born in 1889 and grew up in a village called "NS" (Noua Sulita in Romanian, Novoselitsa in Russia, Novoselytsia in Ukrainian, Novoselitz in German, all of which mean "New Sulitsa/Selitsa) which is nowhere close to Odessa at all, but is part of Bessarabia (as is Odessa).
NS, today, is located in Ukraine on the border with Romania and near the northern tip of Moldova in an area called (Southern) Bukovina. NS may seem like a backwater to most, but it just so happened to be at the exact juncture where the Russian Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Moldovan Principality all met, so it was kind of part of all three during Meyer's lifetime.
Meyer was a clothing merchant/manufacturer and lived in town, so was a bit of an "elite" (i.e. literate and not a rural farmer). He was a deeply religious Orthodox Jew (non-Hasidic) who spoke Russian as his native language. I don't know when he left NS to emigrate to America, but it was before 1930, and was likely as a result of all the craziness that happened during the reign of Simon Petliura. Between that and the pogroms, it's likely that his enmity would've been towards the RUSSIAN government, not any Ukrainian groups or authorities.
2) Meyer's son Shepsel Ber Nudelman (Tori's father) was born in 1930 in New York City. Unlike his Old World dad, Shepsel wanted to be more American and so he changed his name to Sherwin Nuland and dropped all of the religious Jewish stuff (basically agnostic but attended temple on high holidays sometimes). He later became a doctor, made a ton of money, and became an influential lecturer and professor at Yale University.
Sherwin was obviously 100% fluent in English, but with his parents and other relatives, he spoke Russian.
3) Tori (b. 1961) was born in New York city, but spent her childhood at a prestigious boarding school in Connecticut. In 1983, she attended Brown University where she studied Russian history and other related stuff, probably prompted by her familiarity with the Russian language (from home) and her family's genetic hostility towards the Russian "Empire."
After college, she then went to ODESSA, Ukraine (then part of the Soviet Union) where she had a job at a Pioneer Camp, where everyone spoke Russian. There's an unverified tale that she found it hilarious to toss food in the mud and make the (impoverished) kids eat it. Whatever the truth, she definitely considered herself a superior American, lording it over the brainwashed Soviet/Russian kids. She then moved on to some other shady jobs in the region to "earn her bones" as a Russia expert in the State Department slash CIA.
At some point in the 1990s, she goes on a date with Robert Kagan, who also had Jewish roots from Eastern Europe (Lithuania) that was ruled over by Russia. However, Kagan's family spoke Yiddish at home, not Russian. Not long after that, they married, and are still married today.
Kagan as well as his father (Donald Kagan) were important people at Yale, and the son was heavily influenced by Tori's father. Donald was considered an expert on "war" and geopolitics, and his son founded PNAC in 1997, which basically birthed the "neocon" movement that included folks like Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Elliott Abrams, Richard Perle and Paul Bremer who ran the GWB administration.
Once Obama came to power, the younger Kagan and Tori started migrating to the D side of the fence, and obviously Nuland is now a major figure in the Obama/Biden state department. Nuland, of course, famously was on point for the 2014 overthrow of the Ukrainian government, which she saw as "liberation from Russia's evil domination" and a great chance to expand American hegemony.
Donald was born in Lithuania in 1932, but in 1934, the family emigrated to New York City. The two Kagans were equally convinced that America was/is a superpower that must crush all rivals, especially Russia. Donald also studied at Brown University (undergraduate) and then his career path moved onto Yale, where he ended up becoming a dean, so he has a lot in common with Tori's father.
3b) I realize few people care, but the term "Bessarabia" means different things to different groups. For Russia, it refers to the Bessarabia Guberniya (a kind of semi-autonomous region of the Russian Empire), which included parts of what are now Moldova and Ukraine (including NS, the village where Meyer Nudelman grew up) as well as Odessa. To Romanians, however, it refers to only what is now Moldova (considered by them to be inhabited by ethnic Romanians), in other words, a smaller area than the Russian definition.
A hell of a lot of fighting, changes in government, etc. happened across all of Bessarabia between 1812 and 1945, and places like NS were variously part of a) Moldovan principality b) Russian Empire c) Moldovan Democratic Republic d) Romanian monarchy e) Romanian fascist dictatorship f) Soviet Union and now today g) Ukraine or the Republic of Moldova.
Incidentally, these blurred boundaries is what led to the Tatar Bunary uprising (which just celebrated its centenary), the formation of the MASSR inside Ukraine, the Nazi death camps of the Transnistria Governorate, the Soviet annexation of Bessarabia (including NS), and later the 1990 split from (Soviet) Moldova that led to the formation of the Pridnestrovian Moldovan Republic (erroneously called "Transnistria" by most outsiders) which now has Russian peacekeepers and is a prime target of the West for destruction. PMR borders the Odessa region but is nowhere close at all to NS, even though both NS and Odessa are/were part of Bessarabia.
Sorry for the length! But that's the story of Tori Nuland in a nutshell. Basically, she has little to no family history of persecution by ethnic Ukrainians but plenty of animus against Russia/Soviet Union.
Response to Simplicius "Subscriber Mailbag Answers - 9/22/23 [Part 2]"
"highest percentage of Jews in its administration of any country on earth outside of Israel, but also the highest percentage of open Nazis in its governmental and military ranks. How’s that possible? "
Need to distinguish between "Jews" and "Zionists"? I don't know if the Jews in Ukraine's government are Zionists, per se, but given the desire to "become Israel", it would seem likely. And Zionists are fascists through and through. As President Truman said in his memoirs, when persecuted people get power they immediately become oppressors. The Zionists are Exhibit A in that regard.
"noting the timelines for progress in the past"
Utterly irrelevant to what happens when the Ukraine military collapses and the war progresses beyond the eastern Ukraine fortifications. Those fortifications and the length of the front are the only reason this war has been as slow as it has. That and Putin's desire to manage the casualty rate due to managing the Russian population reaction, plus the reaction of the economy, Russia's allies and the ROW, and the reaction of NATO. Only the latter may (or not) be relevant once Ukraine's military collapses, which, I reiterate, will happen in the next 3-6 months (and both Macgregor and Ritter agree with that timeline.)
"2-4 year projection would see Slavyansk-Kramatorsk being taken by 2025"
Ridiculous. What are you smoking? Set up a store to sell it to your readers. LOL
" b.) Ukraine doesn’t collapse and surrender from unsustainable destruction to their manpower sometime long before we reach that point of 2027 or so."
Precisely my point - except it won't be 2027, it will 2023-2024.
"More likely Ukraine will collapse and/or surrender to Russia in 2024-2025, upon which point Russia will appoint its own president, perhaps long-rumored Medvedchuk, who will oversee the newly ratified constitutional purges of all Nazi/nationalist movements, sects, cells, etc."
Yup. And after that, Russia will put a Military District in western Ukraine to counter the Aegis Ashore installations in Poland and Romania. That is the actual reason for the SMO. All the rest - the Donbass residents, de-Nazification, de-militarization, etc. are all just preconditions.
Thanks again, Simplicius, for your overview and insights.
Read yesterday in MSM, first defensive line penetrated by armored vehicles of the AFU. Any signs pointing to the veracity of the claims and, if so, to what extent?
[The whole world already talks of a peaceful resolution, but so far a concrete set of proposals hasn’t been brought forth, so there hasn’t been pressure on Russia to accept anything just yet. But in the near future, once actual concrete proposals are produced, and especially if they look somewhat reasonable on paper, then Russia will be in an increasingly isolative position to reject them.]
This is why Zelensky and his maximalist goal becomes a convenience reason for Russia to continue the war. We even see China and Brazil losing their nerves over Zelensky unreasonable demand of total Russian capitulation while India just outright snubbed him. That's why on the other side Ze becomes more and more of a liability for the US (not Neocon though because maximalist position is still their ain) as they wouldn't be able to realistically offer a "peace treaty" or even "armistice". I expect Ze to get offed first before we see any manouver to pressure Russia signing anything.
In point 26 you state: “ if NATO/U.S. doesn’t stage a massive black swan event or falseflag in order to intervene in the war and save Ukraine at the 11th hour.”
Is that even a possibility at all? Having read your analyses over the past few months, I have come to believe that Nato, and even the U.S., is in no position to contemplate a direct confrontation with Russia.
Nato/U.S. don't have the manpower nor the materiel for such an adventure, nor would there be the political will and support to stage this, Europe does not want direct involvement in a war on its continent.
A rabid dog as these "European" dynasties are cannot be permitted to wander around biting people, they have to be put out of their misery cleanly and quietly and that shall be done. They no more understand the forces coming up against them next than a fly crossing a road understands the speeding windscreen that turns it inside out.
>The next half year or so I expect intense efforts from certain parties to freeze the conflict. If they don’t succeed then Russia will likely use the winter to greatly degrade Ukraine’s infrastructure, particularly the power and electrical just like last winter. The official stat I’ve seen claims only 25% of last year’s damage was repaired. That means Russia could “finish off” much of their power grid this time around.
This is a laughable discussion.
Russia could have finished it off last year too. Within the first week in fact - there was no need for months of bombing.
They didn't because their was clearly a political veto on striking the actually critical points, culminating with Surovikin being removed as the general commander of the operation in early January (after which the massive strikes stopped pretty much immediately).
Do we see any signs that whatever political veto prevented Russia from:
1) Striking infrastructure and decision making centers in the first days of the war
2) Mobilizing properly on time, and not only after a full blown disaster developed
3) Hitting infrastructure and decision making centers decisively at any point ever since
4) Hitting decision making centers even after the BSF started being systematically destroyed
Has been lifted? No, and I am writing this as right at this very moment there is yet another NATO missile attack on Sevastopol, after there has been no response to any of the previous ones.
So where are these stupid expectations that Ukraine's grid will be "finished off" coming from?
Again, it could have been finished off within a week. Everyone knows what should have been struck, the lists of targets, with precise coordinates, were circulating on social media, compiled by Russian grid experts (who built the whole thing to being with). It isn't that long, you get 8-10 fully loaded Tu-95s in the air and send a dozen Iskanders, and Ukraine goes permanently dark. Not even a week now that I think about it, but more like a day.
But that never happened.
Also, the time to do that, if one was serious about winning the war, was May, not October.
First, May was just before the Great Offensive started, and if you killed the grid then, that would have had some effect on it.
Second, you want to minimize civilian suffering and that means you kill the grid when it's warm. Not when people are at risk of freezing to death in the hundreds of thousands and millions.
"The meeting place cannot be changed" is a tv series from 1970s about 1940s and in fact one of the central elements is young idealistic officer returning from the army and joining criminal police. Great series, and rare example when screen adaptation is better than the book it is adapted from. Partly due to Vysotsky who made a character castrated in the book by political fashion of the day into a genuine likable humane being.
But to the point of crime and war it all depends on circumstances. But war time usually gives a license for extreme measures and for example French as far as I remember gunned down 300 known criminals in Paris during WWI without any due process. On the other hand after the war ends soldiers come home with disregard for human life and no jobs.
>Depending how large of a meat-assault force Ukraine mobilizes this winter, Russia may even choose to continue playing defense for a while longer next year as it will be increasingly easier to destroy the enemy forces out in the open.
How much of the BSF will have been left with daily missile strikes on it by next year?
Point 28: “it was just announced that ATACMS is apparently a no-go, so that’s already a major hole in their plans.”
Is that still the case? https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/us-will-send-ukraine-atacms-long-range-missiles-biden-tells-zelenskiy-nbc-2023-09-22/
Regarding the stat that 10500 people were killed in criminal acts in 6 months, it's worth noting that Russian law is much stricter than at least U.S. law. A lot of acts are considered negligent homicide and prosecuted that would not incur criminal liability in the west. An example is a taxi driver picking up an inebriated passenger during freezing temperatures, the passenger becoming belligerent, the taxi driver ordering him out of the car somewhere that is not his destination, and the passenger freezing to death in the cold. The responsibility of the taxi driver (or a friend of the drunk guy giving him a ride) is either to get the guy someplace safe, or call the police. And there's not really any way out of that kind of thing - you'll be prosecuted for it.
On a smaller scale, both parties to a fist fight in Russia are equally liable to criminal charges, no matter who started it or threw the first punch. In my experience the police aren't very eager to chase the participants in fights down to arrest them, so the general situation is the guys involved in a fight run when the police vehicles get close. That happens somewhere I see maybe once every year or two - in front of a night club, in a courtyard with teenagers, etc.
My greatest hope is that if this totalitarian tyranny is ever taken down somewhere in the future, all the political mafia, the hidden capital fluxes in tax havens and the real ownership of the world's wealth are finally unveiled. Only then will we know the extent of the corruption we are living with.
There is a clear British offensive against India. It started with the Moon landing and now steps another significant escalation. Canada is just a British extraction colony. The point is the British empire was trying to seduce India appointing an Indian major in London and even an Indian prime minister. They have been importing Indian scientists for decades too..They want to attrack Indian capital. So something must have happened, probably Bharat refusal to follow the Ukranian script in the G20, but certainly not only that. There must be some hprizontal friction implying Britain not having what they want from Bharat. And now they are furious and using the tool that endorses economic relations underneath: blackmail, slander and force. It is likely that the Sikh leader was killed by the British in order to false flag Bharat. They did it with Skripal. It is their modus operandi and their signature. They are using puppet Pakistan too as a leverage. This is a historical breakthrough for Bharat. We enter a new age here.
"Given the fact that the Ukrainians now are goaded by the US into sacrificing immense amounts of manpower, for instance by incessantly pushing against the Surovikin line with inadequate means to do so, could it be imagined that this is an example of induced "suicide by Russia" as in "suicide by cop"?"
Given that the overwhelming majority of neocons, including Victoria Nudleman, are Jews with a deep history of Russian and Ukrainian hatred, I would suggest it is more likely a case of "murder by proxy" towards both sides of the conflict - slav against slav.
"There is clearly something very dark going on in Ukraine. Ukraine has both the highest percentage of Jews in its administration of any country on earth outside of Israel, but also the highest percentage of open Nazis in its governmental and military ranks. How’s that possible?"
Jewish Zionists encouraged and capitalised on the rise of Nazism, financing them behind the scenes and helping to remove certain political obstacles during their rise to power. Why? Nazism was the perfect solution to gaining the sympathy of the world in the effort to gain and establish the Israelii state and to promote Zionism across the world's political scene. I believe Zionism and Nazism are two sides of the same coin designed to gain global power.
Thank you for yet another excellent and informative article.
A couple of notes:
1) Rabies is carried in the saliva, not the blood.
2) Vegetation doesn't "die off" in Ukraine in the winter. Leaving aside the mountainous areas with abundant pine trees etc (which are far away from the fighting), trees and other vegetation lose their FOLIAGE during the winter, but they do not die. Combined with nearly flat terrain, this makes it extremely difficult to camouflage people or equipment since there are virtually no visual "obstacles" to hide behind outside of urban areas. A tree without leaves isn't dead, though :P
3) Excuse the length here, but there is a severe misunderstanding of Victoria Nuland's roots, so a mini family biography is necessary.
a) Meyer Nudelman (Tori's paternal grandfather) was born in 1889 and grew up in a village called "NS" (Noua Sulita in Romanian, Novoselitsa in Russia, Novoselytsia in Ukrainian, Novoselitz in German, all of which mean "New Sulitsa/Selitsa) which is nowhere close to Odessa at all, but is part of Bessarabia (as is Odessa).
NS, today, is located in Ukraine on the border with Romania and near the northern tip of Moldova in an area called (Southern) Bukovina. NS may seem like a backwater to most, but it just so happened to be at the exact juncture where the Russian Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Moldovan Principality all met, so it was kind of part of all three during Meyer's lifetime.
Meyer was a clothing merchant/manufacturer and lived in town, so was a bit of an "elite" (i.e. literate and not a rural farmer). He was a deeply religious Orthodox Jew (non-Hasidic) who spoke Russian as his native language. I don't know when he left NS to emigrate to America, but it was before 1930, and was likely as a result of all the craziness that happened during the reign of Simon Petliura. Between that and the pogroms, it's likely that his enmity would've been towards the RUSSIAN government, not any Ukrainian groups or authorities.
2) Meyer's son Shepsel Ber Nudelman (Tori's father) was born in 1930 in New York City. Unlike his Old World dad, Shepsel wanted to be more American and so he changed his name to Sherwin Nuland and dropped all of the religious Jewish stuff (basically agnostic but attended temple on high holidays sometimes). He later became a doctor, made a ton of money, and became an influential lecturer and professor at Yale University.
Sherwin was obviously 100% fluent in English, but with his parents and other relatives, he spoke Russian.
3) Tori (b. 1961) was born in New York city, but spent her childhood at a prestigious boarding school in Connecticut. In 1983, she attended Brown University where she studied Russian history and other related stuff, probably prompted by her familiarity with the Russian language (from home) and her family's genetic hostility towards the Russian "Empire."
After college, she then went to ODESSA, Ukraine (then part of the Soviet Union) where she had a job at a Pioneer Camp, where everyone spoke Russian. There's an unverified tale that she found it hilarious to toss food in the mud and make the (impoverished) kids eat it. Whatever the truth, she definitely considered herself a superior American, lording it over the brainwashed Soviet/Russian kids. She then moved on to some other shady jobs in the region to "earn her bones" as a Russia expert in the State Department slash CIA.
At some point in the 1990s, she goes on a date with Robert Kagan, who also had Jewish roots from Eastern Europe (Lithuania) that was ruled over by Russia. However, Kagan's family spoke Yiddish at home, not Russian. Not long after that, they married, and are still married today.
Kagan as well as his father (Donald Kagan) were important people at Yale, and the son was heavily influenced by Tori's father. Donald was considered an expert on "war" and geopolitics, and his son founded PNAC in 1997, which basically birthed the "neocon" movement that included folks like Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Elliott Abrams, Richard Perle and Paul Bremer who ran the GWB administration.
Once Obama came to power, the younger Kagan and Tori started migrating to the D side of the fence, and obviously Nuland is now a major figure in the Obama/Biden state department. Nuland, of course, famously was on point for the 2014 overthrow of the Ukrainian government, which she saw as "liberation from Russia's evil domination" and a great chance to expand American hegemony.
Donald was born in Lithuania in 1932, but in 1934, the family emigrated to New York City. The two Kagans were equally convinced that America was/is a superpower that must crush all rivals, especially Russia. Donald also studied at Brown University (undergraduate) and then his career path moved onto Yale, where he ended up becoming a dean, so he has a lot in common with Tori's father.
3b) I realize few people care, but the term "Bessarabia" means different things to different groups. For Russia, it refers to the Bessarabia Guberniya (a kind of semi-autonomous region of the Russian Empire), which included parts of what are now Moldova and Ukraine (including NS, the village where Meyer Nudelman grew up) as well as Odessa. To Romanians, however, it refers to only what is now Moldova (considered by them to be inhabited by ethnic Romanians), in other words, a smaller area than the Russian definition.
A hell of a lot of fighting, changes in government, etc. happened across all of Bessarabia between 1812 and 1945, and places like NS were variously part of a) Moldovan principality b) Russian Empire c) Moldovan Democratic Republic d) Romanian monarchy e) Romanian fascist dictatorship f) Soviet Union and now today g) Ukraine or the Republic of Moldova.
Incidentally, these blurred boundaries is what led to the Tatar Bunary uprising (which just celebrated its centenary), the formation of the MASSR inside Ukraine, the Nazi death camps of the Transnistria Governorate, the Soviet annexation of Bessarabia (including NS), and later the 1990 split from (Soviet) Moldova that led to the formation of the Pridnestrovian Moldovan Republic (erroneously called "Transnistria" by most outsiders) which now has Russian peacekeepers and is a prime target of the West for destruction. PMR borders the Odessa region but is nowhere close at all to NS, even though both NS and Odessa are/were part of Bessarabia.
Sorry for the length! But that's the story of Tori Nuland in a nutshell. Basically, she has little to no family history of persecution by ethnic Ukrainians but plenty of animus against Russia/Soviet Union.
After trashing the iconic Naval HQ on Sevastopol, I imagine the Russians will pick an equally iconic target to destroy.
Very poor AD though.