I suspect that Russia will use the return of ethnically monolithic areas to their home countries as a bargaining chip to pry them loose from NATO and/or the EU....It's main interests should be integrating the Russian speaking areas, and gaining complete control over the Black Sea, which means Odessa will become Russian again ....
I think the conflict has been extremely traumatic for Russia's leadership, and not as a result of losses (absurdly overestimated by the West), but because of what the conflict has revealed about the West.
Like it or not, the conflict has burned into Russia the realization that the US cannot be trusted *at all* even in measures and agreements that are clearly in the US's interest. That's also true of the EU, where Russia has seen countries that are willing to destroy their own economies on the basis of complete delusions.
The trauma in that is the realization that Russia now must adjust to a life of continuous peril where total nuclear destruction at the hands of irrational actors can occur almost at any minute, and where no means other than "military-technical" action by Russia can be trusted to shape the physical reality within which that peril may or may not come to pass.
I think Russia has been convinced that it cannot leave any part of "Ukraine" as a fighting platform from which a delusional, aggressive US and its delusional, aggressive vassals can project force at Russia.
Any deal has to include massive restructuring of whatever is left as a "Ukrainian" entity to eradicate any trace of nazi or Russophobe influence and to ensure whatever rump state is left is totally demilitarized. It also has to include physical means of enforcement, such as Russian ownership of all shorelines and other key physical barrier protections, since the US and its vassals cannot be trusted to honor any agreement.
Given the extreme rabidness of US and Banderist Russophobia, where even a small but extremely toxic minority is enough to cause the Banderist cancer to metastasize, it is difficult to see how Russia can achieve physical security without taking over all of "Ukraine" except for whatever territory it returns to Hungary in the interest of ethnic return home.
Horror of horrors for the U.S. military industrial complex and the psychos in the CIA — PEACE could break out in the Ukraine… there’s not a single good reason for any more Ukrainians to die for Biden’s cabal.
The Ukraine need not be a continual killing field for US belligerence.
America could respect other countries (I know you’re laughing your ass off right now because it seems so absurd)…
Excellent analysis! (And answer on Russias endgame) Trust in the West and their agreements, laws, promises and handshakes is damaged for a long time to come. It will require a completely new set of leaders in the West. And an abandonment of the US containment strategy by Russia. And completely agree with you that the leadership of Ukraine must be deleted. The people of Ukraine are another matter. They didn't want war. Those who were enthusiastic and misled are more or less dead. But Ukraine cannot be allowed to become a US vassal state or join NATO. What confuses me is how you can draw these correct conclusions while believing that the current Russian strategy of slow strangulation of military power will secure a victory where Russia owns the terms. And if Russia settles for four oblasts, Crimea and a disarmed neutral Ukraine, they will be fooled again.
'"the conflict has been extremely traumatic for Russia's leadership"
Far from being traumatic, I believe for Russia there should be relief. Now, like years of beatings by a supposed loving spouse, Russia has said "No More."
Let the remaining reasoned people of Europe throw out their aged, cantankerous War Mongers. Then and only then should Russia engage in discussions of a European connection.
Let the U.S.A. go back to Isolationism in North America. For the decades of World Policeman has ruined the decent possibilities for the rest of the World and the people of the U.S.A.
Finally, let it sink in to the doubters amongst the Russian People that Europe and the American Political Class are envious of Russia's Resources, People and the Future. For balanced Democracy has a foothold within Russia, while Bolshevism has throttled the U.S.A. power structure. A nation of lies and unchecked debt has no future. Only a few more election cycles.
I agree, Russia has to put paid to the Ukraine as a possible NATO member and combatant...That's why I posit the breakup of the Ukraine into its ethnic components...which can be very useful bargaining chips...
Putin has said many times they've no interest in attacking any NATO countries. Why would they? They'll do what they've said they'll do from the very start. They won't deviate, they won't compromise this. NATO mainly America has been using very effective anti Russian propaganda & brain washing techniques got decades in Western Ukraine. They'd more than likely want the Poles, Hungarians & Romanians take back their historical areas of Western Ukraine. They may allow a small area of Ukraine to remain Ukraine as a rump state. But Odessa is a Russian city & it connects to Transnistria. The amount of resistence to the Ukrainian military in Odessa is growing rapidly every day now. The fear the facist extremists instilled in the citizens of Odessa is weakening as the Ukrainian military weakens. The vast majority of the citizens in Odessa will welcome the Russians with open arms. If & when the Russians arrive there. The Russians would prefer to not have to destroy Odessa to take it. It's a lovely city they want to keep it that way. Best way to do that, is force the complete surrender on Russian terms.
To reform the regional economy away from American control and dominance, tie into BRICS as the West's financial architecture collapses, and go back to the comfortable level of internecine inter-slav hatreds and rivalries that resembles Britain's Welsh-English-Scottish-Irish social situation.
That's my guess.
Ultimately, money talks, and money is based upon resources to extract and people to work them, which the East/Eurasia has in spades.
Last I read there is 200 trillion worth of natural resources in eastern Russia with only 15 million people. Seems like the American west 150 years ago. Why would they want Western Europe.
In the immediate vicinity are Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, Poland and Belarus. "Endgame" suppose there is no continuation of the conflict. Or that the "end" may come sometime in the next 10 years. There is no indication that Russia will be able to crack Ukraine and declare victory within the 3rd anniversary of the invasion. Unless they change the operation in some spectacular way. The countries around just want the war to turn into a phase of peace. Their economies are being damaged by the ongoing war and only creating problems. The more militant ones such as Poland and Romania will use the belligerence within NATO to get investments and bases in their own countries. Some pieces of land from Ukraine are not relevant.
Hungary and Slovakia just want this to end.
Ukraine desperately fights on and will lie, manipulate and sacrifice its population as long as the West pumps in money and war materials. Their best hope is that a crazy US president picks up the steel gauntlet and participates more actively in the war.
Russia has stated its goal but they are in the dark about the Trump presidency. All can change after jan 2025.
I think personally that the money forever being squeezed from the blood of the citizenry, will cease to flow and that or when the collective west needs to restart their primary source of revenue, that being conflict, warfare and arms sales that China will not be the location of the first such again doomed to failure, activity but the initial actions will be directed against Iran to please the true power holders in the US which are the Zionists in Israel. The starting narrative has already begun with insane claims that slaughtered before he could speak incel that supposedly attempted to kill Trump was part of some Iranian pre planned plot. Not the US intel agencies who actually want us to believe they cant figure out how to access that patsies cell phone but have as if by magic discovered the pimpled neuter was the holder of some 4 "encrypted" bank accounts in countries yet to be named. Nope not our great intelligence agencies worn down over years of trying to break Trump with a weaponized judicial system, but its those nasty Iranians to whom the collective west has never done anything untoward to. The Iranians, if you believe the current narrative are all merely rabid irrational wolves intent on the destruction of western culture and its people.
Depending on how you define them, there are always "supernatural" elements at play everywhere.
With regards to focussed-will, or "High magic" as commonly known, it is MOST DEFINITELY at play in all of those places. Fortunately, there are competing forces.
From your last report, it seemed that the advantage Ukraine has in terms of AI (thanks to the US) is quite significant and it seems like it has been effective in stopping Russia in Kharkov. If it gets deployed on the entire Front, one could imagine the situation getting worse for Russia leading to eventual stalemate (or God forbid) defeat. What do you think the likelihood is and can you expand on how Russia can defeat AI (and AI powered drones no longer susceptible to EW)? What can Russia do to stop it and what are the chances it has a big effect on the entire front.
Corollary, what do you think is the likelihood of China providing Russia with its AI developments to "even out the field" so to speak?
If you don’t mind my thoughts on this: Several years ago, Putin said, paraphrased “Whoever wins AI will rule the world”. I reflect on this because there is so little known about Russian AI; everyone believes they are a decade behind, can’t make any worthwhile computer chips, don’t publish any AI academic papers, etc. But I find this unlikely, for Putin, who cares about global power, to acknowledge the critical importance of AI, and then fail to devote financial and Human Resources to it seems highly unusual, even unlikely. It’s a bit of a fantasy, but I could imagine Putin having a Russian version of the Manhattan project focused on AI. It sounds farfetched, but it also doesn’t makes sense for Russia to acknowledge the absolute imperative of AI dominance years ago, and do nothing about it.
"I reflect on this because there is so little known about Russian AI; everyone believes they are a decade behind, can’t make any worthwhile computer chips, don’t publish any AI academic papers, etc. "
In a nutshell, the above paragraph captures the essence of why the West has so miserably failed to defeat Russia either economically or militarily. On the one hand you begin by noting that "there is so little known about Russian..." but then you immediately continue with "everyone believes..."
That's the Western paradigm that's been applied: people who know nothing about Russia nonetheless have firm beliefs that are totally false, yet they act on those false beliefs. That's especially surprising because it is easy to get extensive information on Russia for anybody who bothers to take a look.
In fact, there is a huge amount known about Russian AI as a result of the endless websites and papers and online discussions in Russia that anybody can access. They all happen to be in Russian, which is easily overcome if you don't know Russian by using the auto-translation features of modern browsers and online translation engines like DeepL. The same is true of Russia's extensive industry producing extremely worthwhile computer chips: vast amounts of information on that are online, available to read for anybody who can use a search engine together with an online translator.
My own personal opinion, as an American living in Russia who is very familiar with US IT as well as Russian IT, both software and hardware in both cases, is that Americans tend to believe US propaganda instead of acquainting themselves with reality because of three key social factors.
First, Americans often are prejudiced and jingoistic in the extreme, often even those who think of themselves as generously broad minded towards other cultures. Americans by nature seem to have a hard time believing that people in other countries can be as bright, innovative, creative, or scientific as Americans, despite all the evidence that indicates for the last 40 years or so Americans have tended to come in last in terms of smarts, innovation, creativity, and science. As a result of that jingoism, many Americans don't bother spending any effort on checking the reality of what's going on in other countries because their assumption that other countries *must* be inferior is so baked into the American psyche.
Second, Americans are exceptionally badly educated when it comes to science and math as compared to truly well-educated people in math and science. The average American has no ability whatsoever to judge whether, say, a paper written in Russia or in China on technical matters (*any* technical matters, like chip architecture or AI approaches) is ahead of, even with, or behind what's going on in the US. They don't have the education to understand what's going on in the US or in other countries, so they must rely on the opinions of "experts." But even those "experts" in the US very rarely have the personal technical skills to make their own judgements about what they find online.
Russian technical and academic papers are written to a very high standard that assumes the reader does not need to be spoon-fed. In computer science papers it is routine that both author and audience are expected to not only have extensive computer science skills, but also very high level math capabilities as found only in US doctoral programs, and also a mix of software and hardware expertise. My experience is that even experts from the US have a hard time following such papers because they usually are experts in only one of those fields, such as programming, and are not also experts in math and hardware.
The result is that almost all Americans judge the state of Russian IT technology based on things they've heard from poorly educated people posing as experts who are aggregating what in turn they've heard from other non-experts. The result is a completely inaccurate "read" that is not based on whether a particular narrative is true but is based on whether that particular narrative is pervasive. In a US full of 24/7 fake narratives that saturate all search engines and platforms, the result is a fake assessment of Russian capabilities.
Third, Americans are exceptionally lazy when it comes to doing their own research. It never fails to amaze me when I meet Americans who are dead sure they know all about the strife and long lines of people hoping to buy a bit of food in Russia that not a one of them has bothered to take even elementary measures to learn the truth about Russia. Except for Tucker, no mainstream US journalist has reported from within Russia, so Americans don't have honest, direct experience of Russia spoon-fed to them in newscast soundbites. That's where their ability to "see for themselves" about what's going on in Russia ends.
I often tell my friends in the US that they don't have to travel to Russia to do a reality check. They can use Internet. For example, any American can use Wikipedia to get a list of the 20 largest cities in Russia. They can pick a few cities in the middle of the population range and use Google Maps to pull up a map of the center of the city. It's easy to find the center of a city because there will be denser roads around the center. They can then drag and drop the little Google "streetview" person-icon into the middle of the city and "walk around" in streetview, looking around to see what they can see.
What they'll see are cities just like any other European city, with lots of high end cars, cafes, stores of every description possible, people riding bikes and walking their dogs and all that other stuff. There will be no long lines of desperate people queuing up to buy food from a handful of miserable stores, but instead an obviously first world society that's clearly doing OK. Right away you can see the US propaganda narrative about life in Russia is a lie.
I'll also suggest people do things like using translate.google.com to translate a few phrases from English into Russian and then copy/paste those phrases into search engines like Google or Yandex to see for themselves what regular life in Russia is like. For example, they can search for "top cell phone sales in Moscow" or "biggest grocery chains in Kazan" or "best deals on laptops" or whatever, and that will call up lots of links to ads from vendors. They'll see Russians have a far better choice of cell phones than Americans do, again, dispelling the fake narrative that Russians somehow suffer from fewer choices in tech than Americans.
If they want to see how Russians live, they can visit big Russian websites where real estate is sold, like realty.yandex.ru or avito.ru (and search for the Russian word for "real estate" that your online translator gives you) to take a look at many thousands of apartments or houses for sale in various cities. There are options to search by dots on a map or lists, with many listings having dozens of pictures. You can see from those pictures how people live in real life, what their homes look like, what the furniture and kitchens are, and so on in a very wide range of prices.
But Americans don't do any of the above because it involves a foreign language they don't understand, and no matter how easy it is to use Google translation or DeepL or websites, they won't be bothered to do it. They're too danged lazy to translate ads or any of the zillions of pages showing direct evidence of life in Russia. That also means they are far, far too lazy to translate what's going on in AI.
The odd reality is that the average American is quite provincial. Access to the internet and all. And they are sure they know something that just ain’t so.
Haha! Who needs Simplicius when we have John Galtsky? Excellent write and I expect Simplicius simply refer to your answer. And you point at the root of the evil; the ignorance in the West where no one bothers to seek facts for themselves.
"Who needs Simplicius" Well, we all do. The amount of research Simplicius does is awe-inspiring, and the time required for such thoughtful, in-depth, and remarkably balanced commentary Simplicius does can only be invested by a full time professional. Once S does the heavy lifting, it's a lot easier to write off the cuff commentary. :-)
The ignorance will only grow as the Jew fills the west with low iq browns. Fortunately Russia is standing strong against them and the lgbt insanity. Now just name the Jew and cut off the head.
It's really refreshing to read your comments, as someone who has over 20 years worth of researching Russian culture amongst other areas of interest in the country. I often, I mean very often find myself shaking my head in disbelief. In the total ignorance towards the country, in many cases by top Western officials. If anyone is in any doubt of the levels of education in any chosen field of work of any Russian professionals. I find a simple way of proving this. Is the levels of intelligence of any Russian politician, especially the Russian diplomats. Their ability & their professionalism, is so far ahead of all Western nations, it's ridiculous to compare them. The Young Hungarian foreign minister is an outstanding intelligent diplomat. It's no coincidence the wisest leader of all EU countries. Is by far & away Orban of Hungary. I'm glad you mentioned the other cities of Russia also. Many of these cities most haven't even heard of. Some of these cities are booming & attracting many young professionals. The opportunities for them to grow are fantastic. The science & tech parks are modern & outstanding. Heavy investment in these areas pays dividends. My interest in Russia started through my love of military aircraft. Being the son of an ex RAF servicemen in the UK. I was brought up learning & around military aircraft. From being a very young age I was always given model aircraft to assemble. Learning about all the different parts & functions. I found a completely different atitude in what was originally the Soviet way of approaching the matter. The more I learnt the more I became aware, of their function over form atitude. It works & it works very well. Ironically Ukraine was mechanical centre for the engines. The Russians have progressed massively after the break up of the Soviet Union. It's actually like they had the shackles removed. The amount of top rate engineers the Russians produce far out strips all Western countries percentage wise. We are starting to see a huge influx of youngsters from friendly foreign countries arriving in Russia to study. Which is increasing massively year on year. If anyone gets the chance to hear any of these students opinions of their Russian education. I advise you to take a listen. Russia isn't lagging behind anyone in the AI area either. I'd also say it's foreign nationals who are behind the American advances in that area. A trend which is reversing rapidly. The opportunities for these foreign nationals are appearing in their own countries. America had the advantage because of their money printing machines. That is coming to an end also. The NATO forces can't compete with Russian electronic warfare, there's a big reason for that. I could point out a huge list of Russian advantages through their education of their citizens. They're all apparent if you look closely enough.
Excellent post John-thanks. There are also "city walks" (link) where you can see Russians at play. The link here might have been shot in a big western city (minus the homeless). The Russians look like urbane, successful and sophisticated folk, don't they? Do you see many fat people here? Imagine...that the MSM lies about everything Russian! Bastards.
Also Hollywood creates massive lies about Russia, all foreign countries are depicted according to the worst stereotypes. I watched Ironman 2 yesterday where the protagonist is drinking vodka from a bottle, has the personal hygiene of a pig in a pig sty and hammers out a nuclear powered flying suite on a blacksmith's anvil.
During Russia's winter holidays, I was in Moscow videotaping the shop windows near GUM & Red Square for a short visual-essay, catching reflections of the Spasskey Tower, for instance, in a jewelry store windows, decorated for the season--candy store windows, etc., whatever caught my eye & I could capture w/ my videocam's lens.
Back stateside, I shared my footage w/ friends who had never been to Russia. In one sequence, I showed kinetic puppets in a shop window, pounding away @ toys like in Grandfather Frost's workshop, and I simultaneously filmed both the window plus what was mirrored behind me, cleverly reflected in the plate glass. In this instance, it was a late-model sedan, very sleek & glossy--perhaps a 2019 Lada.
A friend blurted out, "Oh, they have new cars in Russia."
It was obvious that she had drunk so deeply from the propaganda saturation cup that she could only see Russians driving around in rust-bucket Lada Nivas from the 1960s.
Illuminating the depth of prejudgement
@ the time I was traveling to Russia, pre-pandemic, it was said that only 5% of Americans traveled there
Russia hasn't been stopped in Kharkov, only slowed down do to the fact that Ukraine plus "mercenary" (NATO) about eighty thousand troops versus fifteen thousand Russian troops .
As of late the Russians gaining, despite the disparity of the personal advantage of the Western forces. It is no longer correct to call it an Army of Ukraine as you mentioned (thanks to the US).
Plus the rest of the gang France, Poland, Romania, Georgia etc. You mentioned AI like a magic bullet, that is not known to Russia. That is incorrect in fact Russia has very advanced AI guided systems, the new S350 air defense operate exclusively on AI. As of now all Western tactic, and weaponry has failed, the only hope they have is to produce overwhelming amount of AI guided drones to score a draw, so they can bargain for some sort of agreement. That is not going to happen, the Russian EW system can eliminate most of them. Plus the Russians are producing a lot more drones, and cripple the electric grids, and transport systems in Ukraine farther. It seems that the Western forces lulled Russia in to this war utterly unprepared.
What worries me is the weapons and technology overhang, the tactical nuclear weapons and the EMP/ neutron tactical nuclear weapons, suit-case nukes, and the nuclear bombs that don't leave radiation. There are apparently EMP weapons that have not been used while Ukraine has used chemical and biological weapons. If there is always a hope in some super weapon pushing the war to a stalemate, the temptation to use these weapons will be greater, and according to Veterans Today, tactical nukes have been used numerous times. As NATO is crossing Russia's red lines with the nuclear capable F16s and cruise missiles, WHAT IS KEEPING EITHER PARTY FROM TAKING THE NEXT STEP IN WEAPONS TECHNOLOGY? And if we just limited it to hitting the other guys armies rather than cities, couldn't "our side" come out on top?
"the advantage Ukraine has in terms of AI (thanks to the US) is quite significant and it seems like it has been effective in stopping Russia in Kharkov." Nonsense on both counts.
First, Ukraine has no advantage in terms of AI. Russia's use of AI in military matters is far ahead of Ukraine's. The US likes using "AI" as a buzzword, but in terms of actual deployment Russia is ahead of the US as well.
Russia is hands down the world's IT superpower when it comes to innovation and deployment of genuinely high tech. There is no other country that comes remotely close to the depth and breadth of programming, mathematics, and computer science talent that exists in Russia. That's mainly a result of the world-leading STEM education Russia has continued to provide during the last 30 years, in contrast to the catastrophic collapse of STEM education in more backward countries like the US.
The very high level of Russian education is also a factor in setting Russia apart from other IT superpowers like India and China. What's unique about Russia is how a typical "polytech" college education produces "triple threat" students who have math skills that only a US mathematics doctoral candidate would have, physics skills that only a US physics doctoral candidate would have, and programming skills that only a US computer science doctoral candidate would have. Such combined skills are essential to advance the state of the art and to undertake advanced applications of truly difficult technology such as parallel technology and AI.
That's very different than the "script kiddie" approach in the US, where much of programming is cut and paste assembly of bits and pieces from libraries or examples on github that have been written by other people, often with little or no understanding of how the code really works. It's also why really advanced work done in Russia tends to be ahead of the US and other countries.
For example, China is by far the world leader in 5th gen and later cell phone hardware, but Russia is the leader in the software and radio physics of such technology. That's why Huawei and all the other Chinese giants have big labs in Russia, where they depend upon Russians. Such technology is a mix of heavy duty math, programming, and radio physics, and is done best when the innovator has strong skills in all of those areas.
I was at a conference recently in Russia where I heard a researcher in a panel discussion comment on a technical issue involved with a new generation of cell tower transmission facilities. What I found impressive is how he wrote out the relevant equations, talked about the physics at both chip level and electromagnetic field levels and also discussed how he had narrowed down the solutions with a "back of the envelope" calculation on his personal computer using massively parallel programming which he had jotted off himself on an Nvidia chip. Such people are routine in Russia but impossible to find in the US (or, in India or in China), and this particular researcher was a *junior* member of the team.
As for "stopping Russia in Kharkov," that has nothing to do with AI but has everything to do with Kiev stripping many other positions throughout the front of combat-effective battalions to concentrate them in Kharkov. The result is a slowdown of the Russian effort in Kharkov but a dramatic increase in Russian advances in other locations from which Kiev removed the troops that were redirected to Kharkov.
As ever, interesting insights you have John! I will not question you about what you wrote but note you on Simplicius article a couple of days ago where he expliticly declared that Ukraine has used some new AI-controlled combat command system in Kharkov that halted the Russian advance. With virtual no time-lag the system could identify, choose right type of weapon and target/destroy the threat. My self thinking it is best not to over-estimate, neither under-estimate, either part. They have surprises up their sleeves on both sides. US is a natural-born-killer State, keen on showing power and strenght through violence. Russia should never be underestimated. They have over and over showed remarkable ingenious practical and functional solutions where West almost as a rule overcomplicate their own solutions. Russians ability to adapt to the situation was something Germans soldiers learned the hard way. Now it is Ukrainians crying for mum.
I am not sure that Rus actually wanted to move much further than they have reached so far. Seems to me to be another kill box. Ok, maybe they wanted to move to Liptsy, but "stalemate" seems to be more due to numerical advantage Ukies have there, some say 8:1.
Also, lots of new Rus troops were sent there and even though they are well trained, real war is another beast and need to get used to it.
I think the key difference is, Ukraine is only achieving this by using Western resources, who still have some geniuses who created the Western systems in use today. However, our Western education systems these days do not produce those very often due to the wokeness implemented since the 1980's, and they are dying out. Whereas the Russian and Chinese and Iranian education systems focus like a laser on producing these kinds of people. A Russian friend of mine told me decades ago, in the nineties, that a Russian bachelors degree is equivalent to a Western masters, and so on, up the chain.
I can't understand why Western people don't see that the same cancerous and corrosive social degradation and designed corruption that the bolsheviks wrought in Russia, is right now being inflicted on Western social systems, and it has been emplaced and active since the 1960's, and this is not by accident, it's not just a bunch of stuff that randomly happened to all Western societies, it's a deliberate architected carefully calculated social demoralisation campaign. It's not just in our education system, but our education system is the seed, and our Western media is the fertiliser for the poisonous seeds implanted therefrom.
Note that the Bolsheviks started off with ethnic Russians, but they were taken over by another group, who weren't. Trotsky was an ethnic Russian, Lenin wasn't, e.g.
Lev Davidovich Bronstein was Trotsky's birth name. Born in the Jewish Pale, near Elizavetgrad, in Russian Ukraine.
Lenin was born Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, a quite typical ethnic Russian, with likely mixed ethnic ancestry, including ethnic Russian, and Asian blood, along with his maternal grandfather's Jewish blood, but not culture (the grandfather converted to Christianity, and raised his children as Lutherans).
A disproportionate number of the old Bolsheviks were NOT ethnic Russian, though.
You nailed it! Exactly my opinion on the topic. West is living over-time on successes from the past. Younger generations are degenerates at the worst or snowflakes at the best. As soon as one proffessional retires there is a substitute not able to do 1/5 off the work needed.
"...the "script kiddie" approach..." I have been yapping about this for ages. And people wonder how Cloudstrike can fuck up a C++ driver so badly. I've often seen tests scripts that a blind kitten can pass.
One of the "unforeseeable consequences" of being ignorant is that the ability to model system behaviors is impaired. It won't be long now before the people of the West will be forced to learn how to communicate without pocket spies (aka cell phones)
How much of a difference does the US presidential (s)election matter to the situation in Ukraine? Insofar as it seems like the various administrative bureaucracies are running the show, does it really matter (outside of the rhetoric coming out of the Oval Office) what the President wants?
I think there's certainly a big chance it WON'T matter, but clearly we can see there's at least somewhat of a decent shot that Trump will cause *some* kind of turmoil within Nato. But if you read my answer to #10 in the full mailbag, you'll note the possibility that Trump could turn out to be even worst than Harris or whoever else. So my answer essentially is that there may be no difference at all, but at least with Trump there's a decent chance he'll be a disruptor that will change the calculus. But it will all depend on what team he picks (or is chosen for him) and how much they will *allow* him to do.
To be honest, it's looking more and more like Trump would be more of the same as last time, all talk and little action. As you said, it doesn't really matter what the president wants because the administrative state in conjunction with intel agencies controls everything, including swaying the president's decision easily via their interpretations of any "intelligence" received by them. The only way to fix the situation is to flush all the intel agencies completely and totally, and unfortunately I highly doubt Trump or anyone will ever be able to do that.
What’s your 90% confidence interval guesstimate as to Russian KIA and Ukrainian KIA? I’m trying to bound the problem conceptually. Perhaps a more answerable guesstimate question is what is the 90% confidence interval on the ratio of Russian KIA to Ukrainian KIA?
I know this is a tedious question to answer because of the caveats that must necessarily accompany it.
I e been wanting to graph the daily kIA as reported by RU military; I seem to recall last summer it was 500-600; January and February it was about 759-850 UKR dead per day, now it is often 1700-2000 (which I think is largely glide bombs). But I think the trend and the increasing rate of UKR deaths and the steady or declining RU deaths may be as important as the total number or ratio…
Without complicating it, just speaking on KIA *exclusively* and nothing else, the MediaZona figures are a realistic lower bound of around 60-70k for Russia. The upper bound of 100-120k is possible, though it's more likely this would include the maimed or 'irrecoverable losses'.
Ukraine's KIA therefore is likely at the absolute minimum 150k with a more realistic being 250-350k. That being said, I don't think Ukraine's KIA exclusively is as representative of their losses as Russia's KIA. The reason is, due to poorer medical services and Russia's artillery dominance (which creates far more disabling injuries), Ukraine would likely have a far higher number of maimed/irrecoverable losses than Russia. So it's not out of the realm of possibility that Ukraine has 100-250k additional maimed while Russia has only 30-50k for instance, or something like that.
As to the ratio, I always tell people that there is only one actual non-speculative, and legitimate related figure we have that gives us an idea, which is the POW ratios. This is because POWs is the *only* figure in the entire war which *has* been officially confirmed at various times by *both sides*. And though it has fluctuated at various points, it has always been anywhere from 5:1 to 10:1 in favor of Russia, whether that's from early 2022 where it was something like 500 Russian prisoners in Ukraine vs. 3500-5000 Ukrainian prisoners in Russia, to more recent figures given by Putin as something like 1300 to 6500. There is no other loss figure in the war that has had its numbers officially confirmed to various degrees independently on both sides. Thus, to me, it represents the closest we can come to extrapolating KIA losses because no one has yet given me any convincing reason to believe why POW ratios should not more or less reflect overall loss ratios. There's only minor cases to be made like: "Ukraine executes more prisoners so of course they have less POWs" but it's absurd to suggest they execute *that many* as to skew the figures that wide. They don't really execute many anymore and only did it occasionally long ago, but so did Russians, particularly Wagner.
When Russia did the grand sweeping maneuvers in the beginning of the war one can assume they took prisoners quite easy. Therefore 1:10. Then they had to fight to encircle the Ukis and now we see more of Ukis abandon their position and given up. So it went down to 1:5 and could very well go down further unless we see more breaktrough or cauldrones formed and tightened.
Many armies have crossed the Dnieper River in times of war, in both directions, but never under current ISR conditions. Assuming the Ukrainian state did not break and its army withdrew behind the Dnieper, how much of a barrier could that river be to the Russian Armed Forces?
An Overwhelming obstacle, where only 17 bridges/dam crossings need to be blown up. And Ukraine has time for that. But Russia will have a calmer future if they manage to reach the Dnieper and create a deep security zone vis-à-vis a continued hostile Ukraine that is part of NATO.
Respectfully disagree. Two considerations come to mind:
First, thinking the Dnieper is the key barrier is a mistake analogous to the French thinking the Maginot Line was the key barrier. Russia is not limited to crossing the Dnieper any more than Rommel or Guderian were limited to attacking the Maginot line head-on. They simply went around the Maginot line, as Russia can simply go around the Dnieper by invading (again) from Belarus. To have any hope of using the Dnieper as a barrier Kiev cannot strip the very, very long Dnieper "front" of troops to defend the very long northern front with Belarus.
Second, the Dnieper is such a long front that Kiev does not have enough resources to defend it all, as it must, ISR or not. In contrast, Russia can continue to utilize the same approach it has used against a very long fortified front that Kiev had constructed on land: advance on more points than Kiev can defend, using superior firepower to assist such advances by erasing many thousands of Kiev's defenders and striking deep into Kiev's defensive infrastructure.
Blowing up dam crossings just lowers the water level to replace vast reservoirs with easily crossed river channels. Even without such lowering of water levels, Russia can punch the daylights (using 3000 kg FABS, for example) out of so many Kiev defensive points that extensive beachheads at many crossing points can be gained. That won't be without losses, of course, but Russia can attack at so many positions that significant numbers of those attacks won't be effectively opposed, especially if nazi minds are distracted by a surge from Belarus.
As I have written before. I dont think Russia is considering crossing the Dnieper. If it is possible due to panic/ routs in AFU they will run to reach the left(east) bank of Dnieper. It is a very good barrier for attacks from the West. Russia seems satisfied with the four oblasts and a demilitarization of Ukraine and/or no NATO admission. I think it is a mistake not to break through and move towards Dnieper. Russia will need a deep security zone in the future.
Time will tell. 6 months ago everyone thought that the crumbling defense at Artemovsk/Bachmut would have Russian troops in Kramatorsk by the Summer… It is going slowly either by purpose or by no choice for RF. It would be interesting if Simplicius (or you) answered my question further down the thread. What should Russia do in the coming six months?
Delving into how to overcome Dnieper, dry river-beds, FABS and so on is not meaningful. Look at Ukrainians at Krynky. All dead.
I would be really interested in hearing what S has to say on that. My guess is that Russia should continue doing what it is doing: attrit the heck out of Kiev's armies and the US's weapons while continuing with steady advances. Maybe open up a new front in Sumy province, reprising the move in Kharkov province.
Russia should also continue deep infrastructure strikes on electricity and transportation, and continue to expand its deep surveillance capability that is teamed up with fast launches on targets, like F-16s, that are detected. Russia needs to move as many anti-air assets as it can into action and to continue eliminating tube artillery and launchers that are used to strike civilian targets in Russia.
"russians consider ukrainians brothers or cousins a d they have réconciliation in mind"
Internal administrative subdivisions within the Tsarist Russian empire were always drawn more or less based on the ethnicities that lived within those regions. It made more sense to treat regions where people spoke Polish and were Catholic to be treated as part of a Polish region, and not pretend they were Russian.
When the Bolsheviks took power in typical Bolshevik disregard for anything but their ideology and reacting to short term political pressures they felt free to rearrange administrative groupings however they wanted.
Lenin and Stalin were well aware that the West was claiming the USSR was a worse dictatorship than the Tsar and was not about "freeing" the people of the former Empire, so they decided to create a bunch of fake new "republics", as if they were independent countries, to give the illusion that the USSR was a union of free and sovereign nations that had thrown off the yoke of both the Tsar and Capitalism and had willingly joined together in a new Union, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
They had plenty of propaganda material in the form of the various 'stans in central Asia, like Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and so on, but in the West they had only Belarus as a candidate new SSR and then a bunch of small states to the South in the Caucus mountains between the Black Sea and the Caspian.
Stalin, a Georgian, was from that region and felt that Lenin's plan of creating many ethnic-based SSRs would promote frictions and undo hundreds of years of imposing stability on the region, but he went along with Lenin.
Both Lenin and Stalin implemented the idea of inventing a "Ukraine" out of thin air as a "soviet socialist republic" (SSR) without any regard for the people who lived in the regions that under the Tsars had always been parts of administrative divisions based on ethnicity.
Their problem was that a "Ukraine" based on the somewhat dubious ethnicity of "Ukrainians," an ethnicity that never really existed but which plausibly might be applied to the small group of formerly Russian people who had been under Polish rule for centuries, who were mostly Catholics, and who had invented a dialect of Russian that mixed in Ruthenian would have been an absurdly small SSR in a region surrounding one or two cities in the far West.
Lenin's and Stalin's solution to that was to arbitrarily draw borders of the proposed new "Ukraine" to include large parts of what had been Tsarist administrative divisions for Poland, Belarus, Russia, Moldova, and Romania. The biggest portion of the fake new "Ukraine" that Lenin and Stalin invented came from Russia. The people living there were, without doubt ethnic Russians, and thus ethnic Russians came to make up the big majority of "Ukrainians".
Back in 1919 those ethnic Russians had relatives throughout the rest of Russia, and given the Soviet policy of insisting that there be no internal borders between the fake new "SSR"s, those ethnic Russians continued to move freely back and forth between the various SSRs. That continued up to 1991 when the Ukrainian SSR stopped being just another state within the USSR and instead, for the first time ever in history, became a sovereign country.
Even that didn't stop the back and forth moving of Russians between those who lived in Russia and those who lived in Ukraine because in the 90's there were no border controls between the core former Soviet republics. Only extremist radicals, like the Baltics, established border controls. There really wasn't any distinction between Russians living in Ukraine (the majority of the population in Ukraine) and Russians living in Russia until the US's first regime change operation in Ukraine in 2004, which for the first time brought an anti-Russian minority into power.
So it's not that Russians consider the majority of the population in Ukraine as brothers or cousins, it's that the majority of the population in Ukraine have always been genuine relatives, as in parents, children, siblings, aunts, uncles, grandparents and such of people living in Russia. That's why there are such intensely close ties between people in Russia and the majority of the population in Ukraine.
That's why Russia has been going slow. Russia invaded Ukraine to save their kin from the minority that took power in Kiev, not to kill their kin. But the further Russia goes into Ukraine the easier it is for the majority of people in Ukraine to avoid being used as human shields by Kiev's nazis, because they have more options to escape to territory held by Russia.
As for Putin letting ethnic Russians suffer for 8 years, he had no choice. Russia invaded the moment Russia had enough strength to go to war against the US and NATO. Before then, Russia was not strong enough to defeat the US and NATO. Now it is.
What Kiev's nazis sold to Black Rock is irrelevant. None of that matters after the Kiev regime is annihilated.
Blowing up dams comes at a tremendous economic cost. The ukies blew up the huge Khakovka Dam at the Khakovka Reservoir on the Dnieper River (June 6, 2023), supposedly to prevent the Russian army from crossing the river, but more likely because the estimated USD 6 billion (IIQRC) in damages went to the Russian side of the Dneiper. Destroyed irrigation canals alone will take years to rebuild. So it was more economic terrorism than a military move. Hundreds of dead civilians, of course. As a great many sources have noted, in Ukraine and southern Russia, the western river banks are almost always high steep banks and the eastern banks are not steep at all. So flooding is a problem for the eastern side.
What do you think the ramifications could be for the western derivatives market when the BRICS lending mechanism comes online after Sergei Glaziev (writer of 'the west to move and lose' in 2016 published by the Izborsk club and the extremely active head of Eurasian Integration ie. bilateral settlements) said (I paraphrase) that credit ratings derived for applicant countries would not factor in outstanding debt to the Bretton Woods Institutions (I read debt to the west)?
(I like your current branding it reminds me of the Saker's Vineyard). Cheers.
Interesting: sounds like he's saying they will treat Western debt as nonexistent within the scope of their own system. I think such a time is still a long way's away and there are so many possibilities it's hard to predict the outcome. That's because as I understand it, China does not necessarily want the Yuan to become a dominant reserve currency but is still pushing for a possible equitable system with the West using a basket of currencies and IMF special drawing right (SDR). So to me, everything will depend on what type of maximalist direction the BRICS really end up taking, or whether, instead of completely cutting out the Western financial/monetary system via some kind of new Iron Curtain, they instead make a deal/compromise to "share the world" with the West, which would be the least destabilizing option.
Also, I recently heard a rumor that BRICS nations have decided to slow down and for now suspend the entry of new nations, which was expected at the grand summit later this October. I haven't seen this confirmed anymore, but if true then it seems China and co. want to pump the brakes, which would mean many of these large scale changes could be much further off than we thought. We'll have to wait and see.
Agreed, he's saying that Western debt won't be considered. This would negatively impact Western derivative markets, because of increased counterparty risk, even if those countries don't have a high value of derivative contracts with the West. Plans for a BRICS nation currency will slow down for awhile. If the US continues like it has recently (Joe in full senile dementia, President Kamala, clueless cabinet members Blinken, Mayor Pete, Yellen, and Sullivan for NatSec, huge debt service burden), the US dollar could lose reserve currency status all on its own. That's probably decade(s) away.
This action by Fitch's rating agency might be of interest to you. Fitch scheduled reviews for Ukraine for 7 June and 7 Dec in 2024. They did the June review, but merely 6 weeks later, on July 24, issued an off cycle update, downgrading Ukraine's sovereign debt rating ("Long-Term Foreign-Currency Issuer Default Rating") to C from CC. CC was bad ("Very High Levels of Credit Risk: Default appears probable) but C is VERY bad. It means default has begun and "payment capacity is irrevocably damaged". It started when Ukraine said it wasn't going to pay state-guaranteed external debt, specifically a 2026 Eurobond coupon due Aug 1. Also *even with all the foreign aid Ukraine is getting* debt is expected to increase to 92.5% of GDP in 2024. Fitch estimated that Ukraine would need $39 billion in 2024 but they already spent $23.1 billion before the year was half over. No surprise here: Ukraine gets bad World Bank Governance scores (WBGI) scores for rule of law, corruption, human rights, repaying debts, and political stability. WBGIs for Ukraine are the same as Gabon and Azerbaijan although both are in better fiscal shape. The WBGI score for Russia is higher than for Ukraine! https://www.fitchratings.com/research/sovereigns/fitch-downgrades-ukraine-to-c-24-07-2024
Thanks very much both, a multi billion default on western bretton woods debt and all the rest is one thing. Removing western vulture capitalists would be another.
In the recent BRICS talks witnessed by Pepe Escobar they talk about creating a parallel bretton woods structure with a basket currency with SDRs.
Now, for me, at least here is the question: Will access to this lending facility be limited to BRICS members. It would be very problematic for the current order if the 40 odd billion of 3rd world debt was jeopardised by a straightforward stream if successful applications for development money fromnthe BRICS lending facility. Especially if, as Carrera of Ecuador did they ie. Default and used Venezuelan money to buy that debt at 12.5 cents on the dollar.
I am certain that there would be problems long before access to a BRICS members lending facility was an issue. Russia has been surprisingly agile; necessity is the mother of invention in developing work-arounds to SWIFT, OFAC, and FinCEN sanctions (e.g. accepting cryptocurrency as an alternative payment for international trade, announced yesterday), just as they have advanced quickly with electronic communications protocols for weapons systems. The BRICS countries are not Russia though. Other than China... maybe. An alternative lending system etc. isn't going to happen in the near future, not unless the current one collapses. No offense intended, as this is very fun to talk about with you!
P.S. Russia can't sustain the SMO forever but Ukraine IS a mess! How will it be reconstructed? Estimates are as high as $2 trillion. That's why Fitch's downgrade of Ukraine, despite all the western money, seems significant to me. There won't be a surge of Goldman Sachs and Blackrock investment as the little green guy envisioned.
As you said, China doesn't necessarily want the yuan to be the world reserve currency at this point in time. For the US, it is essential for the dollar to remain the reserve currency because we have so much government debt. The reason that Russia was able to ramp up its economy with fiscal stimulus since the start of the SMO is because there was no government debt to speak of, merely a few hundred million dollars equivalent. Russia's central bank governor Nabiullina seems much better than Yellen. She isn't a political partisan like Yellen, isn't old like Yellen, yet she is competent had the position of governor for at least a decade.
Makes sense to slow down BRICS membership. South Africa, for example, is a mess. Incorporating some of the more developing nations of the current BRICS would be challenging enough! As an analogy: Even West Germany had trouble digesting East Germany after reunification.
Well, I don't see a BRICS lending facility as synonymous with the yuan being the worlds reserve currency. Its more (coining a phrase) 'multimodal' than that. In addition Glaziev is the polar opposite of Naibullina. He thinks that Russia 's monetary policy is driven by the Washington concensus ie a neo colonial and vulgar ideology. He is quite clear. Russias capacity for growth without unnecessary inflation is vast. He's a kindof 'Hamiltonian'. What I see is that a period of retrenchment by Russian nationalist (sovereigntist) elites and that we are going to see a doctrinally different development approach being adopted in Russia for for the multimodal world. If you read say, Lavrov. (I paraphrase.. one of the main issues in the march towards multipolarty (westphalian style indivisible security global infrastructure) is the need to ensure that the US achieves a soft landing. Well on this reading Europe won't and the US probably won't either.
I cordially assert that Russia can fight this war for the next period, say 5 years. The question is this: what on earth will the political west do, not to mention their citizens?
Lavrov is a remarkable statesman. Choosing him as foreign minister was very, very wise. He ran circles around Hillary Clinton. (Blinken is just grossly incompetent.) Lavrov is getting older now. I worry about that. Ensuring that the US and Europe achieve a soft landing would be essential. Mostly for the US, given our nuclear weapons as nuclear triad. (Truly, it was essential for the US to ensure that Russia achieved a soft landing in the 1990s rather than the rapacious 'shock therapy' of the West followed by escalating and outright hostility toward an agreeable and helpful Russia, including post-Yeltsin. That is a large part of what got all of us into the present situation!)
I don't disagree with you, that Russia can fight this war for another 5 years. It has been a month since your message. My understanding is that Putin didn't want to decimate Ukraine. If he had, he could have taken out major electric grid infrastructure all over the country using conventional weapons by July 2022. . . .as he finally did last week. The motivation for the SMO was to get Biden and NATO to back off, and to stop the harassment by rabid Banderites of ethnic Russian citizens of Luhansk and Donetsk. I digress.
A multipolar world is inherently much less stable than a bipolar world (despite the thrill I feel when you allude to the Peace of Westphalia). I'm not sure about the feasibility of multipolarity in your well-informed, well-worded comment. And yes, the political west but even more so its citizenry... the U.S. has a population of 330 million. How would they transition to a very different world order? They may have to, regardless of Russia, as the current trajectory of the U.S. doesn't seem sustainable.
Project Ukraine has flourished in an ecosystem of deception, typified most bare-facedly by the sudden *revelation* of Joe's cognitive decline: an open secret w/ which Western leaders were willing to collude. Recognizing of course that war necessitates deception, and that the cascading conflicts--against Russia; against Hamas/Ansar Allah/Hezbollah; potentially against China--will keep the collective West in a constant environment of deflection, delusion & deceit, do you see a geopolitical event already looming on the horizon, or a series of small incidents, that will create space for more reality/authenticity/truth?
You had one. If Trump had his brain blown out - no one would have believed the "lone gunman" story when all the evidence points to an incredible chain of mistakes. All had claimed a CIA conspiracy. Now we instead got a Trump effect and a complete upheaval around Biden that might lead to an even worse candidate, Harris. And what are the truths that will suddenly come out? People in the West are so full of crap propaganda and unfortunately we now have a movement in the totalitarian direction within the EU with the establishment of the Ministry of Truth.
The only type of event that can create any such thing would likely have to be major revolutions in the West, particularly in the U.S. Something like civil war, secession, etc., would be the only thing that could pry the U.S. away from the middle east and imperialism in general. But since Trump is likewise a war monger like the rest of them, and a Zionist to boot, then it's very unlikely that any such transcendental moment will occur any time soon.
There is a need for a U.S. version of the Khrushchev Secret Speech in order to purge the panegyrics of lies & propaganda which have dominated the public sphere, an Augean Stables-style cleansing of deceit & disinformation sufficient to cause a cultural reset.
Why doesn’t Russia immediately hit the NATO aid convoys as soon as they depart Poland? Or maybe they do already? Secondly, how much military aid is actually reaching the front when Russia has such aerial dominance?
I think because they destroy ('attrit') more when they get to the front. If they destroyed the hardware before, it reached the front, then there would be less to destroy as less would be sent and that would defeat the purpose of attrition. The Russian aim is clearly to get as much Nato hardware and combatants in range as possible and destroy them while keeping the supply pipelines active.
It could be that the shipments are spread out widely over time and that it is more efficient to knock them out when they reach their storage locations inside Ukraine. Waiting for them to reach the front and thus be able to do damage (before possibly being knocked out) sounds like wishful thinking pro-Russian.
However, I believe that railway lines, bridges and motorways should be bombed continuously at the border, even if it can be fixed quickly. Unfortunately, then there is a risk that civilians will be harmed, which means that Russia refrains from such measures.
Actually, Russia doesn't have air dominance in western Ukraine because it's too far away from their AWACS and stuff. Ukraine is too big, the Earth curves down too much. :)
Human intelligence assets are the best way to find the aid convoys on a border where there is a lot of traffic. I suspect that if there were too many hits on the convoys, the pro-Russian agents could be discovered. Or maybe there just aren't many agents. If I were running the Kremlin - that should become a common meme, as in: IIWRTK - I'd save the agents for later, after the SBU is less fearsome and when the Russian army is along the border and needs that humint more.
For now, the West is paying to get the supplies closer to the Russian firing ranges *and* it's an incentive for Kiev to not destroy the bridges over the Dnieper.
Because they're camouflaged in civilian trucks and blend in with the regular traffic, and it's impossible to track them in real time from their point of origin in Poland, Romania, etc., as they are loaded inside depots, and by the time they come out in the open, you don't know what's civilian and what's military. Secondly, Russia's *long range* aerial/drone assets/capabilities are decently far behind the West, and particularly the U.S. with its long endurance Reapers/Predators/Global Hawks/etc., so all those things combined makes it difficult.
However, on the closer operational front, Russia has good ISR capabilities and thus a lot of the materiel is vaporized when it reaches depots (train stations, supply/collections points, etc) in the tactical/operational depth. But Ukraine still has plenty of tricky ways of moving enough of the aid to the front.
If Trump is elected how do you think the negotiations with Russia will go? There's more than just the current Ukraine situation. The US deep state has been attacking Russia on many fronts for decades and has killed many thousands of Russians. I'm sure Putin respects Trump but he's not afraid of him.
Russia will not negotiate with the US no matter who wins the elections. Trump is the one who pulled out of the INF Treaty, began sending lethal aid to Ukraine, closed Russian Consulates and sanctioned Nord Stream II Pipelines. Whatever agreement, Treaty or anything that the Empire of Lies US signs isn’t even worth the paper it’s written on.
Pete, what you say is true except that it was not Trump who *began* sending lethal aid to Ukraine.
It started under Obama, the "magick ni***r". And before that, Soros attempted the Orange Revolution under the administration of Bush The Shrub. The trail goes all the way back to early May, 1945 - before WW2 ended in Europe - under President Truman when OSS Agent Allen Dulles (yes, that Allen Dulles) cut a deal with Wehrmacht General Gelhlen for the US to take over the German network of anti-Soviet agents in the Ukraine. Which led to a war (1945-1955) where 150,000 people were killed. CIA, West German intelligence under Gehlen and the Banderas on one side, and the Soviets on the other.
During the modern “independent” Ukraine Obama sent defensive security assistance after the US overthrew the democratically elected President Yanukovych. The CIA/NATO began their training etc from 2014. Trump began sending lethal aid.
From after the Great Patriotic War/WWII the US was funding OUN/UPA and the Bandarists/Nazis during Operation Aerodynamic in support of separatists, exactly what still continues to this day as the Empire of Lies (US) continues funding separatists (basically terrorists) throughout the world.
I think it's important to be accurate on the timeline of US ties to the Ukrainian Nazis. Lying Wikipedia would have you believe those ties did not start until June or July of 1946, more than a year after the Nazi surrender. That would be in support of the BS "mainstream narrative" that the US only started supporting the butchers of Babi Yar and Wolynia *after* Stalin had "revealed himself to be such a horrible monster", etc. No. The real timeline is that the OSS-Wehrmacht negotiations began quite a while before the surrender. AFAIK the exact timeline has never been made public, but it's obvious that such an important negotiation is not done in less that a week. US approval would have gone through Washington's bureaucracy. Perhaps the death of FDR in April paved the way for Allen Dulles to do as he pleased. Back to the timeline: It was later in May 1945 that Winston Churchill proposed Operation Unthinkable to destroy the USSR. So this hatred was kicking around and the USSR must have been aware of it long before V-E day. The US government had no reason to waste time in coming to the aid of the Ukrainians in the Gehlen Organization.. Also, US aid for Ukrainian Nazis fleeing to the west, had to have started almost immediately because the RFed Army was searching for them. The details are not in the public archives AFAIK, so we have to make the most reasoned assumptions.
I never trust WikiSHIT as they are nothing but CIA propaganda. I was banned from them for telling the truth. The SHIT stream media is also controlled by the CIA. The historical revisionism in the collective west is horrible. The US did their best to destroy the USSR even before WWII. They tried to beat them to Berlin & the hatred of Russia continues to this day. The same goes for the unnecessary nuking of Japan, so the US could subjugate them & keep the USSR out. The US also created the Taiwan debacle, all to permanently support the military industrial complex & remain the hegemon. Soon the hegemon will fall.
There's new 'rumor' from Mike Pompeo that Trump will make an ultimatum that if Russia doesn't take the compromise, the U.S. will unleash "every weapon" to Ukraine including $500 billion Lend Lease. If this is even remotely true, then I don't see the negotiations going well as I don't think Putin will take kindly to such an existential threat.
It seems to me entering a long period of tension that will not be resolved easily because all sides now not only have too much at stake, but are not cowed, particularly Iran etc. However, there are some rumors Hezbollah for now is willing to retreat pass the Litani river to lower tensions, though that would do so only temporarily most likely anyway. I think this is one of the 3 Great Theaters of the world where tensions will continue rising (Ukraine, Palestine, Taiwan) so don't expect any quick resolutions any time soon. Everyone will likely continue doubling down. But I will probably do a much more detailed writeup on this in near future.
My understanding is all travel of dignitaries and key gov't officials out of Kiev is by train to Poland, then flights are made out of Poland. However, there was some discussion a while back about how certain 'dark flights' have landed in Kiev occasionally, but I'm still not 100% certain on what they are, perhaps emergency military provisions of some kind. But for the most part, travel is strictly by train to Poland first.
I feel you omitted Germany quite a bit in the last posts. Maybe rightly so, since it is a big (dwindling) economical power, but a mediocre geopolitical one at best, besides serving as NATO rocket launcher, aircraft carrier and major logistics hub. There were some calls outside of the Kremlin to declare null and void the 2+4 treaty (which could be seen as basis of today's unified Germany). Now, Putin still has a soft spot in his heart for Germany, despite all the venom coming from Berlin. Will the Russian government keep this option up their sleeve until the point when things get really grim?
This question might fit along the one for the bigger central European endgame. We now have France's Melenchon calling for a withdrawal from NATO, but I think that might also imply an "EU army", to be lead by France and Germany.
Interesting question but a little off-topic. The treaty can not be reversed I think. And it is sad to see that Germany, even after the Treaty, is not a sovereign state with full control of their Nation. US is still occupying bases and hold German leaders by strings due to NSA&others compromats. To break the Treaty would also mean that Germany can claim back Pomerania, Schlesien and Königsberg (Preussen). Putin does not allow treacherous games from the Russian side as it damages their reputation in the world.
It's possible but what could they really do if they renounced the treaty? I suppose, being the avowed legalist, Putin could use such a denunciation merely as precursor for various actions against Germany in response to these coming provocations. So I do believe it's possible to use that for instance to justify strikes on German territory when the time comes, but not anything extreme like re-conquering east Berlin.
I think as you suggest it would merely play into the larger call for a grand new security architecture in Europe, with the German situation being used as proof the old structure is dead.
And you're right--von der Leyen is now calling for an EU defense shield to cover EU's airspace as a guise for a new centralized EU military command.
By the way, there's many such obscure old treaties Russia can and has used as justification. For instance, even the post-WWII treaties actually gave Russia legal rights to re-invade Europe if it was threatened/attacked by fascism, which Ukraine as inheritor of the German Nazi heritage pretty much fulfills as condition.
Yes! I was just reading about Molotov (of Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact fame). He made proposals for the USSR to join NATO, twice, in 1954. It was sincere and somewhat (maybe mostly) motivated by concern about a remilitarized Germany.
"Who downed MH17?" - The Dutch, specifically the Dutch air controllers who refused to allow it to fly over Crimea and instead routed MH17 over an extremely dangerous war zone.
The Dutch called Crimea a "war zone" because Crimeans by overwhelming margins refused rule by an unelected nazi junta in Kiev and preferred to join Russia. There was absolutely zero fighting of any kind in Crimea, but the Dutch did not want in any way to recognize authorities in Crimea, not even air traffic control.
Instead, Dutch air traffic control sent MH17 directly over the hottest active war zone in Donbass where nazi armies were trying to conquer Donbass, because over Donbass the Dutch air traffic controllers could talk to Kiev's air traffic control.
Over Donbass both sides were doing their best to shoot down anything that flew from the other side. The US kept an AWACS aircraft on station over Donbass to assist the nazis, both in their ground attack missions against Donbass and also to help in any shoot downs of supply flights from Russia delivering any assistance to the Donetsk or Lugansk republics. That AWACS aircraft picked up all details of the MH17 shootdown on radar, including the exact launch point of the missile in nazi-held territory and its trajectory. There is zero chance the US will ever release those radar tapes.
The Dutch "investigation" refused to allow Malaysia's participation and also refused to consider any "evidence" other than that provided by the nazi junta in Kiev. It ignored incontrovertible proof that the BUK missile which shot down MH17 had been transferred to Ukraine many years before and was recorded as part of the military assets seized by the Kiev junta when it took power.
Kiev's forces fired the missile that shot down MH17. There is no proof either way for the reason they shot it down. It could have been a mistake, them thinking it was a Russian plane, or it could have been a deliberate false flag operation, with Kiev knowing that with the assistance of Western post-truth media they could use the shoot down to stir up animosity towards Russia in the West.
The best informed commentators say it seems to be a mix of the two, as Kiev had long pushed "don't worry, we'll spin anything to our benefit" rules of engagement that emphasized killing anything and everything their forces could reach. Kiev's commanders were well aware that strikes on civilians were encouraged and that such strikes were routinely used to dual advantage: terrorizing Donbass, plus pinning the blame on Russia.
When it came to shooting down aircraft, the number one rule for Kiev's launchers was to shoot anything that moved, and if it turned out to be civilian or Western, no problem as that would be blamed on Russia. In that context, the difference between a mistake or a deliberate act has little relevance.
But it does have relevance for the Dutch government's decision to order air traffic routing away from Crimea and over an extremely dangerous war zone where the Dutch government certainly knew that Kiev routinely targeted civilians and encouraged attacks on civilians.
I don’t recall that they mentioned back then that Ukraine had buk missiles as well. That became very apparent when the 2 buk missiles landed in poland killing 2 people at a farm. I am dutch btw and angry with the government whose only purpose seem to have been to stimulate and increase Russophobia as you were not entitled to have a different opinion. It was forced through our troath by both government and media. And here we are in very dangerous times.
No one knows but just like 9/11 had way too many 'coincidences', this event was straight out of the CIA playbook given that it was so perfectly timed to staunch a Russian/rebel offensive that was beginning to gain (battle of Ilovaisk was a major victory for Russian side just weeks later, etc). Also all the weird elements surrounding it like rumors the plane was redirected from Kiev air traffic control to fly over the hot sector.
The whole event appears to be similar to the Bucha massacre, designed to generate int'l condemnation and sanctions for Russia and mass support for Ukraine. The West also blocked all investigations, refusing to give up black box, etc., just like they did with the Nord Stream attack, which is highly incriminating to me.
Very little is written about partisan activity by pro-Russian people in Ukraine or pro Ukraine people in Russia.
It is being reported that the cars of the people doing the forced recruiting in Odessa are being torched. Is this by Russian partisans or by Ukrainians themselves who do not want to be forcibly recruited.
What is known about partisan activity, and can this be used to find out who the people on the ground are supporting?
There r no Russian partisans in Ukraine. When actions r taken in that country counter to its illegal dictator, they r the actions of clear thinking Ukrainians. God bless them. Write nothing more on this Simplicius.
The biggest effect from pro-Russian people in Ukraine is that local populations in Russian speaking areas (most of the West, Center, and South of Ukraine) report on troop movements and military concentrations to Russia. They can do that through Internet communications like Telegram.
As for local support, people in Russian-speaking areas tend to support Russia, people in the very few Ukrainian-speaking areas (a few provinces in the West, like around Lvov) tend to support the nationalists, and most people who are left in Ukraine just want the war to stop.
You have to remember that the war has been going on for ten years, since 2014, and the opening phase of the civil war once the US put nazis in power in Kiev featured extremely brutal attacks on the Russian speaking, but unarmed, majority by a very well armed and vicious, mostly Ukrainian speaking minority. That minority rounded up and killed 15,000 of their opponents, while also engaging in some very vicious public acts, like burning to death 47 demonstrators in Odessa.
That caused a natural filtration process to happen, where many Russian speaking Ukrainians simply voted with their feet: millions of them picked up and left, moving to Russia. They had zero integration issues because they moved to an identical culture where they could buy the same brands, worship at the same church, watch the same TV programs, and speak their native language. Later on, when it was clear Crimea, Donetsk and Lugansk would remain free of the nazi junta, many ethnic Russian "Ukrainians" moved from provinces like Kharkov to the new Russian territories of Crimea, Donetsk, Lugansk, Zaporoshiye, and Kherson.
All that reduced the number of people remaining behind who might become likely partisans. If you couldn't stand the Kiev regime you could move to an alternate "Ukraine" that was free of nazis. It wasn't like occupied France in WW2 where there wasn't another "France" for people who didn't like nazis to move to. I think that's why you don't see active partisan movements. If you want to fight the nazis, you cross the border into Donbass and join the Russian army as a volunteer.
As for torching cars used by "recruiters," that's local people who don't want their fathers, husbands, sons, and brothers dragged off by nazi goons to die for Kiev. There isn't as much of that as you might expect because many of the really action-minded individuals fled Ukraine long ago. They're busy posting videos of themselves swimming in German or Spanish lakes while giving the finger to Kiev's "recruiters."
I’d suggest this; I think the vast majority of ALL the people in the Ukraine want this conflict to end. A minority pulling all levers of power in Kiev (with vast support from their western owners) are keeping a “temporary” hold on the country.
Perhaps you’re better informed on this than I; but before 2014 — Russian was THE most commonly spoken language in Ukraine. Is it the case now that in fact Ukrainian language is the most spoken? I know the junta in Kiev has tried to suppress Russian-ness throughout the country… but it’s imbedded!
I remember when I did the paperwork to bring my adopted Russian son from the Ukraine — his birth certificate was in both Russian and Ukrainian. Even back in the late 1990’s — the Ukrainian government forced us to redo his birth certificate ONLY IN UKRAINIAN. Just stupid on every level… because he was born in Sevastopol (the vast majority of which was Russian), his mother is ethnic Russian. His aunt born in Belarus.
Of course he has relatives in both Ukraine and Russia.
This hideous conflict sickens me on too many levels.
"Is it the case now that in fact Ukrainian language is the most spoken?" I don't believe so, even though ten years of brutal effort have definitely increased the proportion of people who can speak at least some Ukrainian.
I have a good friend, another American, who was part of a US mission to Ukraine in 1991/92 right after the USSR fell apart and "Ukraine" for the first time ever became an independent, sovereign country. As part of his job he had meetings with many "Ukrainian" ministers and every one of them was arranging to take lessons in the Ukrainian language. None of them spoke any Ukrainian, but they all wanted to learn at least a few words in it to further their careers.
Between 1991 and 2004 the overwhelming majority of "Ukrainians" (I keep writing that in quotes because large sections of the country never accepted that they had been unlawfully gifted as subjects to a new Ukrainian polity) spoke Russian as a native language. There really was only a very small minority, a hard knot of nationalists, around Lvov and other die-hard Banderist venues, which spoke Ukrainian.
In 2004 the US engineered its first regime change operation, to bring an anti-Russian government coalition into power. That coalition, led by people like Yulia Timoshenko, was so intensely corrupt that its popularity rating dropped to 2% by the time when in 2010 Ukrainians voted it out of power and voted in the Yanukovych administration. But 2004 was when nationalists got enough power to start shoving through provisions requiring Ukrainian be taught in schools in addition to Russian.
None of that moved the needle until the second US regime change operation in 2014, when the rise to power of a truly hard core, lethally nazi junta in Kiev made it physically dangerous for many people to speak Russian in Ukraine. The ten years since 2014 have seen extensive and harsh measures to suppress Russian language and to require the use of Ukrainian language. But even so, Russian continues to be the language spoken by the majority of Ukrainians. I think the biggest effect of the harsh measures was not to end the use of Russian but to add Ukrainian as a second language to many more people than before.
What ends up happening is that kids are forced to learn Ukrainian in school but they continue to speak Russian at home, among themselves and in any situation outside of contact by official authorities (in school, at police stations, etc).
One of the things that has held up total, forced Ukrainianization is that most of the nazis themselves speak Russian as a native language. Russian is the native language of every past Ukrainian president, including Timoshenko (who continues to speak Russian at home and in private at the office), Poroshenko and Zelensky. Zelensky had to learn to speak Ukrainian as an adult to advance his political career, and despite his talents as an actor he still speaks Ukrainian with a slight Russian accent.
People in the West don't know the WW2 history of Ukraine's nazi parties and nationalist, nazi movements. Almost everybody in those nazi parties spoke Russian, including Bandera himself who was also committed to learning and speaking Ukrainian. The truly ideologically committed ones had to learn to speak Ukrainian, which wasn't easy given the rarity of the language in Ukraine at the time: ultranationalists had to work hard to push the new myth they had invented, of a widespread use of an extremely niche language in a country where almost everyone spoke Russian, and where more people spoke German or Polish than Ukrainian. The nazi partisans who continued to fight in Ukraine after the defeat of Germany in WW2 almost all spoke Russian, not Ukrainian.
To this day, many nazi regiments like Azov have a majority of native Russian speakers. That was a point of friction between top nazi leaders and the recently assassinated nazi extremist cheerleader Irina Farion, who said anybody who did not speak Ukrainian was "biological waste" and that included even Azov nazi leaders who spoke Russian. It could be her attacks on Russian-speaking nazi leaders (and on Zelensky) contributed to her assassination as the various nationalist groups jockey for positions in Kiev, like scorpions in a bottle.
What those nazi leaders have run into is that it's not easy to teach people in their 30s, 40s, 50s, and 60s to speak Ukrainian when they and everybody around them speaks Russian as a native language. They'd just rather get on with the business of being a nazi while using whatever language is most convenient for them. Yermak, Budanov, and others at the top in the Kiev regime all speak Russian as their native language, obviously prefer to use Russian, and most have relatives living in Russia as well.
You also see the continued, pervasive use of Russian in Ukraine from all the Western video reports from reporters embedded in Ukrainian army units. What's funny is watching BBC and CNN and hearing the soldiers (and generals, like Syrsky) speaking Russian, which is translated in subtitles or in English without any mention that they've translated *Russian* speech and not Ukrainian into English. The great majority of videos I've seen show Ukrainian army units speaking Russian, not Ukrainian.
My bottom line is that while the nazis have made significant headway in their ethnic cleansing of Russian language, Russian language continues to be the majority native language, with the main effect being that significantly more people than before now also speak Ukrainian.
Apologies for the imprecision, but anecdotal evidence and comments from friends in Ukraine (all of whom live in majority Russian language regions) is all I have to go on.
What do you think is the endgame for Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Hungary, and other nations in the immediate area?
Do you think that there will be referendums and annexation or Balkanization? Transnistria, Galicia etc.
I suspect that Russia will use the return of ethnically monolithic areas to their home countries as a bargaining chip to pry them loose from NATO and/or the EU....It's main interests should be integrating the Russian speaking areas, and gaining complete control over the Black Sea, which means Odessa will become Russian again ....
I think the conflict has been extremely traumatic for Russia's leadership, and not as a result of losses (absurdly overestimated by the West), but because of what the conflict has revealed about the West.
Like it or not, the conflict has burned into Russia the realization that the US cannot be trusted *at all* even in measures and agreements that are clearly in the US's interest. That's also true of the EU, where Russia has seen countries that are willing to destroy their own economies on the basis of complete delusions.
The trauma in that is the realization that Russia now must adjust to a life of continuous peril where total nuclear destruction at the hands of irrational actors can occur almost at any minute, and where no means other than "military-technical" action by Russia can be trusted to shape the physical reality within which that peril may or may not come to pass.
I think Russia has been convinced that it cannot leave any part of "Ukraine" as a fighting platform from which a delusional, aggressive US and its delusional, aggressive vassals can project force at Russia.
Any deal has to include massive restructuring of whatever is left as a "Ukrainian" entity to eradicate any trace of nazi or Russophobe influence and to ensure whatever rump state is left is totally demilitarized. It also has to include physical means of enforcement, such as Russian ownership of all shorelines and other key physical barrier protections, since the US and its vassals cannot be trusted to honor any agreement.
Given the extreme rabidness of US and Banderist Russophobia, where even a small but extremely toxic minority is enough to cause the Banderist cancer to metastasize, it is difficult to see how Russia can achieve physical security without taking over all of "Ukraine" except for whatever territory it returns to Hungary in the interest of ethnic return home.
Horror of horrors for the U.S. military industrial complex and the psychos in the CIA — PEACE could break out in the Ukraine… there’s not a single good reason for any more Ukrainians to die for Biden’s cabal.
The Ukraine need not be a continual killing field for US belligerence.
America could respect other countries (I know you’re laughing your ass off right now because it seems so absurd)…
Well-detailed, John Galtsky
I can't imagine a scenario where OTAN has *any* presence in fig-leaf Ukraine after Russia attains its Victor's Peace
Forza, Uncle Putin
Excellent analysis! (And answer on Russias endgame) Trust in the West and their agreements, laws, promises and handshakes is damaged for a long time to come. It will require a completely new set of leaders in the West. And an abandonment of the US containment strategy by Russia. And completely agree with you that the leadership of Ukraine must be deleted. The people of Ukraine are another matter. They didn't want war. Those who were enthusiastic and misled are more or less dead. But Ukraine cannot be allowed to become a US vassal state or join NATO. What confuses me is how you can draw these correct conclusions while believing that the current Russian strategy of slow strangulation of military power will secure a victory where Russia owns the terms. And if Russia settles for four oblasts, Crimea and a disarmed neutral Ukraine, they will be fooled again.
'"the conflict has been extremely traumatic for Russia's leadership"
Far from being traumatic, I believe for Russia there should be relief. Now, like years of beatings by a supposed loving spouse, Russia has said "No More."
Let the remaining reasoned people of Europe throw out their aged, cantankerous War Mongers. Then and only then should Russia engage in discussions of a European connection.
Let the U.S.A. go back to Isolationism in North America. For the decades of World Policeman has ruined the decent possibilities for the rest of the World and the people of the U.S.A.
Finally, let it sink in to the doubters amongst the Russian People that Europe and the American Political Class are envious of Russia's Resources, People and the Future. For balanced Democracy has a foothold within Russia, while Bolshevism has throttled the U.S.A. power structure. A nation of lies and unchecked debt has no future. Only a few more election cycles.
I agree, Russia has to put paid to the Ukraine as a possible NATO member and combatant...That's why I posit the breakup of the Ukraine into its ethnic components...which can be very useful bargaining chips...
This is the key issue I think because it sets the political and military compass.
Putin has said many times they've no interest in attacking any NATO countries. Why would they? They'll do what they've said they'll do from the very start. They won't deviate, they won't compromise this. NATO mainly America has been using very effective anti Russian propaganda & brain washing techniques got decades in Western Ukraine. They'd more than likely want the Poles, Hungarians & Romanians take back their historical areas of Western Ukraine. They may allow a small area of Ukraine to remain Ukraine as a rump state. But Odessa is a Russian city & it connects to Transnistria. The amount of resistence to the Ukrainian military in Odessa is growing rapidly every day now. The fear the facist extremists instilled in the citizens of Odessa is weakening as the Ukrainian military weakens. The vast majority of the citizens in Odessa will welcome the Russians with open arms. If & when the Russians arrive there. The Russians would prefer to not have to destroy Odessa to take it. It's a lovely city they want to keep it that way. Best way to do that, is force the complete surrender on Russian terms.
To reform the regional economy away from American control and dominance, tie into BRICS as the West's financial architecture collapses, and go back to the comfortable level of internecine inter-slav hatreds and rivalries that resembles Britain's Welsh-English-Scottish-Irish social situation.
That's my guess.
Ultimately, money talks, and money is based upon resources to extract and people to work them, which the East/Eurasia has in spades.
What Russian resources other than gas?
Last I read there is 200 trillion worth of natural resources in eastern Russia with only 15 million people. Seems like the American west 150 years ago. Why would they want Western Europe.
Interesting to see Simplicius answer.
In the immediate vicinity are Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, Poland and Belarus. "Endgame" suppose there is no continuation of the conflict. Or that the "end" may come sometime in the next 10 years. There is no indication that Russia will be able to crack Ukraine and declare victory within the 3rd anniversary of the invasion. Unless they change the operation in some spectacular way. The countries around just want the war to turn into a phase of peace. Their economies are being damaged by the ongoing war and only creating problems. The more militant ones such as Poland and Romania will use the belligerence within NATO to get investments and bases in their own countries. Some pieces of land from Ukraine are not relevant.
Hungary and Slovakia just want this to end.
Ukraine desperately fights on and will lie, manipulate and sacrifice its population as long as the West pumps in money and war materials. Their best hope is that a crazy US president picks up the steel gauntlet and participates more actively in the war.
Russia has stated its goal but they are in the dark about the Trump presidency. All can change after jan 2025.
I think personally that the money forever being squeezed from the blood of the citizenry, will cease to flow and that or when the collective west needs to restart their primary source of revenue, that being conflict, warfare and arms sales that China will not be the location of the first such again doomed to failure, activity but the initial actions will be directed against Iran to please the true power holders in the US which are the Zionists in Israel. The starting narrative has already begun with insane claims that slaughtered before he could speak incel that supposedly attempted to kill Trump was part of some Iranian pre planned plot. Not the US intel agencies who actually want us to believe they cant figure out how to access that patsies cell phone but have as if by magic discovered the pimpled neuter was the holder of some 4 "encrypted" bank accounts in countries yet to be named. Nope not our great intelligence agencies worn down over years of trying to break Trump with a weaponized judicial system, but its those nasty Iranians to whom the collective west has never done anything untoward to. The Iranians, if you believe the current narrative are all merely rabid irrational wolves intent on the destruction of western culture and its people.
Thats my guess.
Simplicius, do you believe there are supernatural forces at work in the world today in the various hot spots like Ukraine, Middle East, etc?
Reptilians are not concentrated at DC if you ask me.
Depending on how you define them, there are always "supernatural" elements at play everywhere.
With regards to focussed-will, or "High magic" as commonly known, it is MOST DEFINITELY at play in all of those places. Fortunately, there are competing forces.
From your last report, it seemed that the advantage Ukraine has in terms of AI (thanks to the US) is quite significant and it seems like it has been effective in stopping Russia in Kharkov. If it gets deployed on the entire Front, one could imagine the situation getting worse for Russia leading to eventual stalemate (or God forbid) defeat. What do you think the likelihood is and can you expand on how Russia can defeat AI (and AI powered drones no longer susceptible to EW)? What can Russia do to stop it and what are the chances it has a big effect on the entire front.
Corollary, what do you think is the likelihood of China providing Russia with its AI developments to "even out the field" so to speak?
Thanks,
Scipio
If you don’t mind my thoughts on this: Several years ago, Putin said, paraphrased “Whoever wins AI will rule the world”. I reflect on this because there is so little known about Russian AI; everyone believes they are a decade behind, can’t make any worthwhile computer chips, don’t publish any AI academic papers, etc. But I find this unlikely, for Putin, who cares about global power, to acknowledge the critical importance of AI, and then fail to devote financial and Human Resources to it seems highly unusual, even unlikely. It’s a bit of a fantasy, but I could imagine Putin having a Russian version of the Manhattan project focused on AI. It sounds farfetched, but it also doesn’t makes sense for Russia to acknowledge the absolute imperative of AI dominance years ago, and do nothing about it.
"I reflect on this because there is so little known about Russian AI; everyone believes they are a decade behind, can’t make any worthwhile computer chips, don’t publish any AI academic papers, etc. "
In a nutshell, the above paragraph captures the essence of why the West has so miserably failed to defeat Russia either economically or militarily. On the one hand you begin by noting that "there is so little known about Russian..." but then you immediately continue with "everyone believes..."
That's the Western paradigm that's been applied: people who know nothing about Russia nonetheless have firm beliefs that are totally false, yet they act on those false beliefs. That's especially surprising because it is easy to get extensive information on Russia for anybody who bothers to take a look.
In fact, there is a huge amount known about Russian AI as a result of the endless websites and papers and online discussions in Russia that anybody can access. They all happen to be in Russian, which is easily overcome if you don't know Russian by using the auto-translation features of modern browsers and online translation engines like DeepL. The same is true of Russia's extensive industry producing extremely worthwhile computer chips: vast amounts of information on that are online, available to read for anybody who can use a search engine together with an online translator.
My own personal opinion, as an American living in Russia who is very familiar with US IT as well as Russian IT, both software and hardware in both cases, is that Americans tend to believe US propaganda instead of acquainting themselves with reality because of three key social factors.
First, Americans often are prejudiced and jingoistic in the extreme, often even those who think of themselves as generously broad minded towards other cultures. Americans by nature seem to have a hard time believing that people in other countries can be as bright, innovative, creative, or scientific as Americans, despite all the evidence that indicates for the last 40 years or so Americans have tended to come in last in terms of smarts, innovation, creativity, and science. As a result of that jingoism, many Americans don't bother spending any effort on checking the reality of what's going on in other countries because their assumption that other countries *must* be inferior is so baked into the American psyche.
Second, Americans are exceptionally badly educated when it comes to science and math as compared to truly well-educated people in math and science. The average American has no ability whatsoever to judge whether, say, a paper written in Russia or in China on technical matters (*any* technical matters, like chip architecture or AI approaches) is ahead of, even with, or behind what's going on in the US. They don't have the education to understand what's going on in the US or in other countries, so they must rely on the opinions of "experts." But even those "experts" in the US very rarely have the personal technical skills to make their own judgements about what they find online.
Russian technical and academic papers are written to a very high standard that assumes the reader does not need to be spoon-fed. In computer science papers it is routine that both author and audience are expected to not only have extensive computer science skills, but also very high level math capabilities as found only in US doctoral programs, and also a mix of software and hardware expertise. My experience is that even experts from the US have a hard time following such papers because they usually are experts in only one of those fields, such as programming, and are not also experts in math and hardware.
The result is that almost all Americans judge the state of Russian IT technology based on things they've heard from poorly educated people posing as experts who are aggregating what in turn they've heard from other non-experts. The result is a completely inaccurate "read" that is not based on whether a particular narrative is true but is based on whether that particular narrative is pervasive. In a US full of 24/7 fake narratives that saturate all search engines and platforms, the result is a fake assessment of Russian capabilities.
Third, Americans are exceptionally lazy when it comes to doing their own research. It never fails to amaze me when I meet Americans who are dead sure they know all about the strife and long lines of people hoping to buy a bit of food in Russia that not a one of them has bothered to take even elementary measures to learn the truth about Russia. Except for Tucker, no mainstream US journalist has reported from within Russia, so Americans don't have honest, direct experience of Russia spoon-fed to them in newscast soundbites. That's where their ability to "see for themselves" about what's going on in Russia ends.
I often tell my friends in the US that they don't have to travel to Russia to do a reality check. They can use Internet. For example, any American can use Wikipedia to get a list of the 20 largest cities in Russia. They can pick a few cities in the middle of the population range and use Google Maps to pull up a map of the center of the city. It's easy to find the center of a city because there will be denser roads around the center. They can then drag and drop the little Google "streetview" person-icon into the middle of the city and "walk around" in streetview, looking around to see what they can see.
What they'll see are cities just like any other European city, with lots of high end cars, cafes, stores of every description possible, people riding bikes and walking their dogs and all that other stuff. There will be no long lines of desperate people queuing up to buy food from a handful of miserable stores, but instead an obviously first world society that's clearly doing OK. Right away you can see the US propaganda narrative about life in Russia is a lie.
I'll also suggest people do things like using translate.google.com to translate a few phrases from English into Russian and then copy/paste those phrases into search engines like Google or Yandex to see for themselves what regular life in Russia is like. For example, they can search for "top cell phone sales in Moscow" or "biggest grocery chains in Kazan" or "best deals on laptops" or whatever, and that will call up lots of links to ads from vendors. They'll see Russians have a far better choice of cell phones than Americans do, again, dispelling the fake narrative that Russians somehow suffer from fewer choices in tech than Americans.
If they want to see how Russians live, they can visit big Russian websites where real estate is sold, like realty.yandex.ru or avito.ru (and search for the Russian word for "real estate" that your online translator gives you) to take a look at many thousands of apartments or houses for sale in various cities. There are options to search by dots on a map or lists, with many listings having dozens of pictures. You can see from those pictures how people live in real life, what their homes look like, what the furniture and kitchens are, and so on in a very wide range of prices.
But Americans don't do any of the above because it involves a foreign language they don't understand, and no matter how easy it is to use Google translation or DeepL or websites, they won't be bothered to do it. They're too danged lazy to translate ads or any of the zillions of pages showing direct evidence of life in Russia. That also means they are far, far too lazy to translate what's going on in AI.
The odd reality is that the average American is quite provincial. Access to the internet and all. And they are sure they know something that just ain’t so.
Haha! Who needs Simplicius when we have John Galtsky? Excellent write and I expect Simplicius simply refer to your answer. And you point at the root of the evil; the ignorance in the West where no one bothers to seek facts for themselves.
"Who needs Simplicius" Well, we all do. The amount of research Simplicius does is awe-inspiring, and the time required for such thoughtful, in-depth, and remarkably balanced commentary Simplicius does can only be invested by a full time professional. Once S does the heavy lifting, it's a lot easier to write off the cuff commentary. :-)
Agree.
The ignorance will only grow as the Jew fills the west with low iq browns. Fortunately Russia is standing strong against them and the lgbt insanity. Now just name the Jew and cut off the head.
It's really refreshing to read your comments, as someone who has over 20 years worth of researching Russian culture amongst other areas of interest in the country. I often, I mean very often find myself shaking my head in disbelief. In the total ignorance towards the country, in many cases by top Western officials. If anyone is in any doubt of the levels of education in any chosen field of work of any Russian professionals. I find a simple way of proving this. Is the levels of intelligence of any Russian politician, especially the Russian diplomats. Their ability & their professionalism, is so far ahead of all Western nations, it's ridiculous to compare them. The Young Hungarian foreign minister is an outstanding intelligent diplomat. It's no coincidence the wisest leader of all EU countries. Is by far & away Orban of Hungary. I'm glad you mentioned the other cities of Russia also. Many of these cities most haven't even heard of. Some of these cities are booming & attracting many young professionals. The opportunities for them to grow are fantastic. The science & tech parks are modern & outstanding. Heavy investment in these areas pays dividends. My interest in Russia started through my love of military aircraft. Being the son of an ex RAF servicemen in the UK. I was brought up learning & around military aircraft. From being a very young age I was always given model aircraft to assemble. Learning about all the different parts & functions. I found a completely different atitude in what was originally the Soviet way of approaching the matter. The more I learnt the more I became aware, of their function over form atitude. It works & it works very well. Ironically Ukraine was mechanical centre for the engines. The Russians have progressed massively after the break up of the Soviet Union. It's actually like they had the shackles removed. The amount of top rate engineers the Russians produce far out strips all Western countries percentage wise. We are starting to see a huge influx of youngsters from friendly foreign countries arriving in Russia to study. Which is increasing massively year on year. If anyone gets the chance to hear any of these students opinions of their Russian education. I advise you to take a listen. Russia isn't lagging behind anyone in the AI area either. I'd also say it's foreign nationals who are behind the American advances in that area. A trend which is reversing rapidly. The opportunities for these foreign nationals are appearing in their own countries. America had the advantage because of their money printing machines. That is coming to an end also. The NATO forces can't compete with Russian electronic warfare, there's a big reason for that. I could point out a huge list of Russian advantages through their education of their citizens. They're all apparent if you look closely enough.
Excellent post John-thanks. There are also "city walks" (link) where you can see Russians at play. The link here might have been shot in a big western city (minus the homeless). The Russians look like urbane, successful and sophisticated folk, don't they? Do you see many fat people here? Imagine...that the MSM lies about everything Russian! Bastards.
https://youtu.be/ylzHuZ-pnq8?si=Km2IsF6ia7YPZlIv
Also Hollywood creates massive lies about Russia, all foreign countries are depicted according to the worst stereotypes. I watched Ironman 2 yesterday where the protagonist is drinking vodka from a bottle, has the personal hygiene of a pig in a pig sty and hammers out a nuclear powered flying suite on a blacksmith's anvil.
GREAT comment!! Makes me wish there was an award to award it
During Russia's winter holidays, I was in Moscow videotaping the shop windows near GUM & Red Square for a short visual-essay, catching reflections of the Spasskey Tower, for instance, in a jewelry store windows, decorated for the season--candy store windows, etc., whatever caught my eye & I could capture w/ my videocam's lens.
Back stateside, I shared my footage w/ friends who had never been to Russia. In one sequence, I showed kinetic puppets in a shop window, pounding away @ toys like in Grandfather Frost's workshop, and I simultaneously filmed both the window plus what was mirrored behind me, cleverly reflected in the plate glass. In this instance, it was a late-model sedan, very sleek & glossy--perhaps a 2019 Lada.
A friend blurted out, "Oh, they have new cars in Russia."
It was obvious that she had drunk so deeply from the propaganda saturation cup that she could only see Russians driving around in rust-bucket Lada Nivas from the 1960s.
Illuminating the depth of prejudgement
@ the time I was traveling to Russia, pre-pandemic, it was said that only 5% of Americans traveled there
Russia hasn't been stopped in Kharkov, only slowed down do to the fact that Ukraine plus "mercenary" (NATO) about eighty thousand troops versus fifteen thousand Russian troops .
As of late the Russians gaining, despite the disparity of the personal advantage of the Western forces. It is no longer correct to call it an Army of Ukraine as you mentioned (thanks to the US).
Plus the rest of the gang France, Poland, Romania, Georgia etc. You mentioned AI like a magic bullet, that is not known to Russia. That is incorrect in fact Russia has very advanced AI guided systems, the new S350 air defense operate exclusively on AI. As of now all Western tactic, and weaponry has failed, the only hope they have is to produce overwhelming amount of AI guided drones to score a draw, so they can bargain for some sort of agreement. That is not going to happen, the Russian EW system can eliminate most of them. Plus the Russians are producing a lot more drones, and cripple the electric grids, and transport systems in Ukraine farther. It seems that the Western forces lulled Russia in to this war utterly unprepared.
What worries me is the weapons and technology overhang, the tactical nuclear weapons and the EMP/ neutron tactical nuclear weapons, suit-case nukes, and the nuclear bombs that don't leave radiation. There are apparently EMP weapons that have not been used while Ukraine has used chemical and biological weapons. If there is always a hope in some super weapon pushing the war to a stalemate, the temptation to use these weapons will be greater, and according to Veterans Today, tactical nukes have been used numerous times. As NATO is crossing Russia's red lines with the nuclear capable F16s and cruise missiles, WHAT IS KEEPING EITHER PARTY FROM TAKING THE NEXT STEP IN WEAPONS TECHNOLOGY? And if we just limited it to hitting the other guys armies rather than cities, couldn't "our side" come out on top?
"the advantage Ukraine has in terms of AI (thanks to the US) is quite significant and it seems like it has been effective in stopping Russia in Kharkov." Nonsense on both counts.
First, Ukraine has no advantage in terms of AI. Russia's use of AI in military matters is far ahead of Ukraine's. The US likes using "AI" as a buzzword, but in terms of actual deployment Russia is ahead of the US as well.
Russia is hands down the world's IT superpower when it comes to innovation and deployment of genuinely high tech. There is no other country that comes remotely close to the depth and breadth of programming, mathematics, and computer science talent that exists in Russia. That's mainly a result of the world-leading STEM education Russia has continued to provide during the last 30 years, in contrast to the catastrophic collapse of STEM education in more backward countries like the US.
The very high level of Russian education is also a factor in setting Russia apart from other IT superpowers like India and China. What's unique about Russia is how a typical "polytech" college education produces "triple threat" students who have math skills that only a US mathematics doctoral candidate would have, physics skills that only a US physics doctoral candidate would have, and programming skills that only a US computer science doctoral candidate would have. Such combined skills are essential to advance the state of the art and to undertake advanced applications of truly difficult technology such as parallel technology and AI.
That's very different than the "script kiddie" approach in the US, where much of programming is cut and paste assembly of bits and pieces from libraries or examples on github that have been written by other people, often with little or no understanding of how the code really works. It's also why really advanced work done in Russia tends to be ahead of the US and other countries.
For example, China is by far the world leader in 5th gen and later cell phone hardware, but Russia is the leader in the software and radio physics of such technology. That's why Huawei and all the other Chinese giants have big labs in Russia, where they depend upon Russians. Such technology is a mix of heavy duty math, programming, and radio physics, and is done best when the innovator has strong skills in all of those areas.
I was at a conference recently in Russia where I heard a researcher in a panel discussion comment on a technical issue involved with a new generation of cell tower transmission facilities. What I found impressive is how he wrote out the relevant equations, talked about the physics at both chip level and electromagnetic field levels and also discussed how he had narrowed down the solutions with a "back of the envelope" calculation on his personal computer using massively parallel programming which he had jotted off himself on an Nvidia chip. Such people are routine in Russia but impossible to find in the US (or, in India or in China), and this particular researcher was a *junior* member of the team.
As for "stopping Russia in Kharkov," that has nothing to do with AI but has everything to do with Kiev stripping many other positions throughout the front of combat-effective battalions to concentrate them in Kharkov. The result is a slowdown of the Russian effort in Kharkov but a dramatic increase in Russian advances in other locations from which Kiev removed the troops that were redirected to Kharkov.
As ever, interesting insights you have John! I will not question you about what you wrote but note you on Simplicius article a couple of days ago where he expliticly declared that Ukraine has used some new AI-controlled combat command system in Kharkov that halted the Russian advance. With virtual no time-lag the system could identify, choose right type of weapon and target/destroy the threat. My self thinking it is best not to over-estimate, neither under-estimate, either part. They have surprises up their sleeves on both sides. US is a natural-born-killer State, keen on showing power and strenght through violence. Russia should never be underestimated. They have over and over showed remarkable ingenious practical and functional solutions where West almost as a rule overcomplicate their own solutions. Russians ability to adapt to the situation was something Germans soldiers learned the hard way. Now it is Ukrainians crying for mum.
I am not sure that Rus actually wanted to move much further than they have reached so far. Seems to me to be another kill box. Ok, maybe they wanted to move to Liptsy, but "stalemate" seems to be more due to numerical advantage Ukies have there, some say 8:1.
Also, lots of new Rus troops were sent there and even though they are well trained, real war is another beast and need to get used to it.
I think the key difference is, Ukraine is only achieving this by using Western resources, who still have some geniuses who created the Western systems in use today. However, our Western education systems these days do not produce those very often due to the wokeness implemented since the 1980's, and they are dying out. Whereas the Russian and Chinese and Iranian education systems focus like a laser on producing these kinds of people. A Russian friend of mine told me decades ago, in the nineties, that a Russian bachelors degree is equivalent to a Western masters, and so on, up the chain.
I can't understand why Western people don't see that the same cancerous and corrosive social degradation and designed corruption that the bolsheviks wrought in Russia, is right now being inflicted on Western social systems, and it has been emplaced and active since the 1960's, and this is not by accident, it's not just a bunch of stuff that randomly happened to all Western societies, it's a deliberate architected carefully calculated social demoralisation campaign. It's not just in our education system, but our education system is the seed, and our Western media is the fertiliser for the poisonous seeds implanted therefrom.
Note that the Bolsheviks started off with ethnic Russians, but they were taken over by another group, who weren't. Trotsky was an ethnic Russian, Lenin wasn't, e.g.
Huh?
Lev Davidovich Bronstein was Trotsky's birth name. Born in the Jewish Pale, near Elizavetgrad, in Russian Ukraine.
Lenin was born Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, a quite typical ethnic Russian, with likely mixed ethnic ancestry, including ethnic Russian, and Asian blood, along with his maternal grandfather's Jewish blood, but not culture (the grandfather converted to Christianity, and raised his children as Lutherans).
A disproportionate number of the old Bolsheviks were NOT ethnic Russian, though.
I could be wrong on Trotsky, thanks for the correction.
You nailed it! Exactly my opinion on the topic. West is living over-time on successes from the past. Younger generations are degenerates at the worst or snowflakes at the best. As soon as one proffessional retires there is a substitute not able to do 1/5 off the work needed.
Still living off stolen third reich tech
Exactly. The Jew is the problem. Until the west is released from that parasite the 3d world depression will continue
No it's not Judaism, it's Zionism.
Jews are fine in my book.
Zionists aren't.
Big difference.
No difference - 90% + Jew support Israel and the greater Israel project.
Explain what you think the difference is.
"...the "script kiddie" approach..." I have been yapping about this for ages. And people wonder how Cloudstrike can fuck up a C++ driver so badly. I've often seen tests scripts that a blind kitten can pass.
One of the "unforeseeable consequences" of being ignorant is that the ability to model system behaviors is impaired. It won't be long now before the people of the West will be forced to learn how to communicate without pocket spies (aka cell phones)
"likelihood of China providing Russia with its AI developments"
Also consider that the West may eventually figure out a way to "force" China to stop aiding Russia in a significant way.
How will they do that while simultaneously sanctioning them? It doesn't bode well for persuading the opposing side when you threaten them lol
It might depend upon the nature of the threat.
How much of a difference does the US presidential (s)election matter to the situation in Ukraine? Insofar as it seems like the various administrative bureaucracies are running the show, does it really matter (outside of the rhetoric coming out of the Oval Office) what the President wants?
Presidents are not in charge anywhere, the financial gurus are.
Zion don vs genocide Joe. It matters not as the same tribe runs them both.
I think there's certainly a big chance it WON'T matter, but clearly we can see there's at least somewhat of a decent shot that Trump will cause *some* kind of turmoil within Nato. But if you read my answer to #10 in the full mailbag, you'll note the possibility that Trump could turn out to be even worst than Harris or whoever else. So my answer essentially is that there may be no difference at all, but at least with Trump there's a decent chance he'll be a disruptor that will change the calculus. But it will all depend on what team he picks (or is chosen for him) and how much they will *allow* him to do.
To be honest, it's looking more and more like Trump would be more of the same as last time, all talk and little action. As you said, it doesn't really matter what the president wants because the administrative state in conjunction with intel agencies controls everything, including swaying the president's decision easily via their interpretations of any "intelligence" received by them. The only way to fix the situation is to flush all the intel agencies completely and totally, and unfortunately I highly doubt Trump or anyone will ever be able to do that.
Wise answer. Trump will not save the Word.
Simplicius, what do you think will happen to the US at the end of this movement to a multipolar world?
What’s your 90% confidence interval guesstimate as to Russian KIA and Ukrainian KIA? I’m trying to bound the problem conceptually. Perhaps a more answerable guesstimate question is what is the 90% confidence interval on the ratio of Russian KIA to Ukrainian KIA?
I know this is a tedious question to answer because of the caveats that must necessarily accompany it.
Or choose whatever confidence interval makes sense.
I e been wanting to graph the daily kIA as reported by RU military; I seem to recall last summer it was 500-600; January and February it was about 759-850 UKR dead per day, now it is often 1700-2000 (which I think is largely glide bombs). But I think the trend and the increasing rate of UKR deaths and the steady or declining RU deaths may be as important as the total number or ratio…
not a graph, but you might like--
https://mskvremya.ru/article/2023/1520-poteri-ukrainy-za-vremya-spetsoperatsii
Without complicating it, just speaking on KIA *exclusively* and nothing else, the MediaZona figures are a realistic lower bound of around 60-70k for Russia. The upper bound of 100-120k is possible, though it's more likely this would include the maimed or 'irrecoverable losses'.
Ukraine's KIA therefore is likely at the absolute minimum 150k with a more realistic being 250-350k. That being said, I don't think Ukraine's KIA exclusively is as representative of their losses as Russia's KIA. The reason is, due to poorer medical services and Russia's artillery dominance (which creates far more disabling injuries), Ukraine would likely have a far higher number of maimed/irrecoverable losses than Russia. So it's not out of the realm of possibility that Ukraine has 100-250k additional maimed while Russia has only 30-50k for instance, or something like that.
As to the ratio, I always tell people that there is only one actual non-speculative, and legitimate related figure we have that gives us an idea, which is the POW ratios. This is because POWs is the *only* figure in the entire war which *has* been officially confirmed at various times by *both sides*. And though it has fluctuated at various points, it has always been anywhere from 5:1 to 10:1 in favor of Russia, whether that's from early 2022 where it was something like 500 Russian prisoners in Ukraine vs. 3500-5000 Ukrainian prisoners in Russia, to more recent figures given by Putin as something like 1300 to 6500. There is no other loss figure in the war that has had its numbers officially confirmed to various degrees independently on both sides. Thus, to me, it represents the closest we can come to extrapolating KIA losses because no one has yet given me any convincing reason to believe why POW ratios should not more or less reflect overall loss ratios. There's only minor cases to be made like: "Ukraine executes more prisoners so of course they have less POWs" but it's absurd to suggest they execute *that many* as to skew the figures that wide. They don't really execute many anymore and only did it occasionally long ago, but so did Russians, particularly Wagner.
Btw, you can research more but here's an example: Zelensky admits 500 Russian POWs in early 2022: https://kyivindependent.com/zelensky-says-500-600-russian-soldiers-taken-prisoner/
While Russians cite holding 5000 Ukrainian ones at roughly similar time https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/separatist-leader-more-than-5000-ukrainian-prisoners-held-breakaway-region-tass-2022-05-27/
And btw, there's Russian TG channels that have published the lists of all thousands of Ukrainian POWs' names, I believe 8-10k at one point.
When Russia did the grand sweeping maneuvers in the beginning of the war one can assume they took prisoners quite easy. Therefore 1:10. Then they had to fight to encircle the Ukis and now we see more of Ukis abandon their position and given up. So it went down to 1:5 and could very well go down further unless we see more breaktrough or cauldrones formed and tightened.
Many armies have crossed the Dnieper River in times of war, in both directions, but never under current ISR conditions. Assuming the Ukrainian state did not break and its army withdrew behind the Dnieper, how much of a barrier could that river be to the Russian Armed Forces?
An Overwhelming obstacle, where only 17 bridges/dam crossings need to be blown up. And Ukraine has time for that. But Russia will have a calmer future if they manage to reach the Dnieper and create a deep security zone vis-à-vis a continued hostile Ukraine that is part of NATO.
Respectfully disagree. Two considerations come to mind:
First, thinking the Dnieper is the key barrier is a mistake analogous to the French thinking the Maginot Line was the key barrier. Russia is not limited to crossing the Dnieper any more than Rommel or Guderian were limited to attacking the Maginot line head-on. They simply went around the Maginot line, as Russia can simply go around the Dnieper by invading (again) from Belarus. To have any hope of using the Dnieper as a barrier Kiev cannot strip the very, very long Dnieper "front" of troops to defend the very long northern front with Belarus.
Second, the Dnieper is such a long front that Kiev does not have enough resources to defend it all, as it must, ISR or not. In contrast, Russia can continue to utilize the same approach it has used against a very long fortified front that Kiev had constructed on land: advance on more points than Kiev can defend, using superior firepower to assist such advances by erasing many thousands of Kiev's defenders and striking deep into Kiev's defensive infrastructure.
Blowing up dam crossings just lowers the water level to replace vast reservoirs with easily crossed river channels. Even without such lowering of water levels, Russia can punch the daylights (using 3000 kg FABS, for example) out of so many Kiev defensive points that extensive beachheads at many crossing points can be gained. That won't be without losses, of course, but Russia can attack at so many positions that significant numbers of those attacks won't be effectively opposed, especially if nazi minds are distracted by a surge from Belarus.
As I have written before. I dont think Russia is considering crossing the Dnieper. If it is possible due to panic/ routs in AFU they will run to reach the left(east) bank of Dnieper. It is a very good barrier for attacks from the West. Russia seems satisfied with the four oblasts and a demilitarization of Ukraine and/or no NATO admission. I think it is a mistake not to break through and move towards Dnieper. Russia will need a deep security zone in the future.
Time will tell. 6 months ago everyone thought that the crumbling defense at Artemovsk/Bachmut would have Russian troops in Kramatorsk by the Summer… It is going slowly either by purpose or by no choice for RF. It would be interesting if Simplicius (or you) answered my question further down the thread. What should Russia do in the coming six months?
Delving into how to overcome Dnieper, dry river-beds, FABS and so on is not meaningful. Look at Ukrainians at Krynky. All dead.
"What should Russia do in the coming six months?"
I would be really interested in hearing what S has to say on that. My guess is that Russia should continue doing what it is doing: attrit the heck out of Kiev's armies and the US's weapons while continuing with steady advances. Maybe open up a new front in Sumy province, reprising the move in Kharkov province.
Russia should also continue deep infrastructure strikes on electricity and transportation, and continue to expand its deep surveillance capability that is teamed up with fast launches on targets, like F-16s, that are detected. Russia needs to move as many anti-air assets as it can into action and to continue eliminating tube artillery and launchers that are used to strike civilian targets in Russia.
Bottom line: more of the same.
I hope there is another answer where the West will face "realities" so severe in 6 months that they end their part in the conflict without a whimper.
Make sure Iran receives nuclear weapons, the houthis and Hamas receive unlimited weapons shipments.
You are right from a strictly military point of view
But it éludes several crucial Factory
1- russians consider ukrainians brothers or cousins a d they have réconciliation in mind
Public opinion dont accepté too much suffering being inflicted
2- Putin has Always bene very soft and will cave in or mitigate AT one Point
Remember how hé let russians speaking ukrainians suffering during 8years and tried irrelavant négociations including Minsk 1 and 2
Hé was forced to intevene in 2022 to avoir donbass being genocided Gaza style by Nato a d Black Rock
Think about thé colossal amounts of ressources in russians. Speaking régions already sold to Black Rock and co
"russians consider ukrainians brothers or cousins a d they have réconciliation in mind"
Internal administrative subdivisions within the Tsarist Russian empire were always drawn more or less based on the ethnicities that lived within those regions. It made more sense to treat regions where people spoke Polish and were Catholic to be treated as part of a Polish region, and not pretend they were Russian.
When the Bolsheviks took power in typical Bolshevik disregard for anything but their ideology and reacting to short term political pressures they felt free to rearrange administrative groupings however they wanted.
Lenin and Stalin were well aware that the West was claiming the USSR was a worse dictatorship than the Tsar and was not about "freeing" the people of the former Empire, so they decided to create a bunch of fake new "republics", as if they were independent countries, to give the illusion that the USSR was a union of free and sovereign nations that had thrown off the yoke of both the Tsar and Capitalism and had willingly joined together in a new Union, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
They had plenty of propaganda material in the form of the various 'stans in central Asia, like Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and so on, but in the West they had only Belarus as a candidate new SSR and then a bunch of small states to the South in the Caucus mountains between the Black Sea and the Caspian.
Stalin, a Georgian, was from that region and felt that Lenin's plan of creating many ethnic-based SSRs would promote frictions and undo hundreds of years of imposing stability on the region, but he went along with Lenin.
Both Lenin and Stalin implemented the idea of inventing a "Ukraine" out of thin air as a "soviet socialist republic" (SSR) without any regard for the people who lived in the regions that under the Tsars had always been parts of administrative divisions based on ethnicity.
Their problem was that a "Ukraine" based on the somewhat dubious ethnicity of "Ukrainians," an ethnicity that never really existed but which plausibly might be applied to the small group of formerly Russian people who had been under Polish rule for centuries, who were mostly Catholics, and who had invented a dialect of Russian that mixed in Ruthenian would have been an absurdly small SSR in a region surrounding one or two cities in the far West.
Lenin's and Stalin's solution to that was to arbitrarily draw borders of the proposed new "Ukraine" to include large parts of what had been Tsarist administrative divisions for Poland, Belarus, Russia, Moldova, and Romania. The biggest portion of the fake new "Ukraine" that Lenin and Stalin invented came from Russia. The people living there were, without doubt ethnic Russians, and thus ethnic Russians came to make up the big majority of "Ukrainians".
Back in 1919 those ethnic Russians had relatives throughout the rest of Russia, and given the Soviet policy of insisting that there be no internal borders between the fake new "SSR"s, those ethnic Russians continued to move freely back and forth between the various SSRs. That continued up to 1991 when the Ukrainian SSR stopped being just another state within the USSR and instead, for the first time ever in history, became a sovereign country.
Even that didn't stop the back and forth moving of Russians between those who lived in Russia and those who lived in Ukraine because in the 90's there were no border controls between the core former Soviet republics. Only extremist radicals, like the Baltics, established border controls. There really wasn't any distinction between Russians living in Ukraine (the majority of the population in Ukraine) and Russians living in Russia until the US's first regime change operation in Ukraine in 2004, which for the first time brought an anti-Russian minority into power.
So it's not that Russians consider the majority of the population in Ukraine as brothers or cousins, it's that the majority of the population in Ukraine have always been genuine relatives, as in parents, children, siblings, aunts, uncles, grandparents and such of people living in Russia. That's why there are such intensely close ties between people in Russia and the majority of the population in Ukraine.
That's why Russia has been going slow. Russia invaded Ukraine to save their kin from the minority that took power in Kiev, not to kill their kin. But the further Russia goes into Ukraine the easier it is for the majority of people in Ukraine to avoid being used as human shields by Kiev's nazis, because they have more options to escape to territory held by Russia.
As for Putin letting ethnic Russians suffer for 8 years, he had no choice. Russia invaded the moment Russia had enough strength to go to war against the US and NATO. Before then, Russia was not strong enough to defeat the US and NATO. Now it is.
What Kiev's nazis sold to Black Rock is irrelevant. None of that matters after the Kiev regime is annihilated.
Blowing up dams comes at a tremendous economic cost. The ukies blew up the huge Khakovka Dam at the Khakovka Reservoir on the Dnieper River (June 6, 2023), supposedly to prevent the Russian army from crossing the river, but more likely because the estimated USD 6 billion (IIQRC) in damages went to the Russian side of the Dneiper. Destroyed irrigation canals alone will take years to rebuild. So it was more economic terrorism than a military move. Hundreds of dead civilians, of course. As a great many sources have noted, in Ukraine and southern Russia, the western river banks are almost always high steep banks and the eastern banks are not steep at all. So flooding is a problem for the eastern side.
What do you think the ramifications could be for the western derivatives market when the BRICS lending mechanism comes online after Sergei Glaziev (writer of 'the west to move and lose' in 2016 published by the Izborsk club and the extremely active head of Eurasian Integration ie. bilateral settlements) said (I paraphrase) that credit ratings derived for applicant countries would not factor in outstanding debt to the Bretton Woods Institutions (I read debt to the west)?
(I like your current branding it reminds me of the Saker's Vineyard). Cheers.
Interesting: sounds like he's saying they will treat Western debt as nonexistent within the scope of their own system. I think such a time is still a long way's away and there are so many possibilities it's hard to predict the outcome. That's because as I understand it, China does not necessarily want the Yuan to become a dominant reserve currency but is still pushing for a possible equitable system with the West using a basket of currencies and IMF special drawing right (SDR). So to me, everything will depend on what type of maximalist direction the BRICS really end up taking, or whether, instead of completely cutting out the Western financial/monetary system via some kind of new Iron Curtain, they instead make a deal/compromise to "share the world" with the West, which would be the least destabilizing option.
Also, I recently heard a rumor that BRICS nations have decided to slow down and for now suspend the entry of new nations, which was expected at the grand summit later this October. I haven't seen this confirmed anymore, but if true then it seems China and co. want to pump the brakes, which would mean many of these large scale changes could be much further off than we thought. We'll have to wait and see.
Agreed, he's saying that Western debt won't be considered. This would negatively impact Western derivative markets, because of increased counterparty risk, even if those countries don't have a high value of derivative contracts with the West. Plans for a BRICS nation currency will slow down for awhile. If the US continues like it has recently (Joe in full senile dementia, President Kamala, clueless cabinet members Blinken, Mayor Pete, Yellen, and Sullivan for NatSec, huge debt service burden), the US dollar could lose reserve currency status all on its own. That's probably decade(s) away.
This action by Fitch's rating agency might be of interest to you. Fitch scheduled reviews for Ukraine for 7 June and 7 Dec in 2024. They did the June review, but merely 6 weeks later, on July 24, issued an off cycle update, downgrading Ukraine's sovereign debt rating ("Long-Term Foreign-Currency Issuer Default Rating") to C from CC. CC was bad ("Very High Levels of Credit Risk: Default appears probable) but C is VERY bad. It means default has begun and "payment capacity is irrevocably damaged". It started when Ukraine said it wasn't going to pay state-guaranteed external debt, specifically a 2026 Eurobond coupon due Aug 1. Also *even with all the foreign aid Ukraine is getting* debt is expected to increase to 92.5% of GDP in 2024. Fitch estimated that Ukraine would need $39 billion in 2024 but they already spent $23.1 billion before the year was half over. No surprise here: Ukraine gets bad World Bank Governance scores (WBGI) scores for rule of law, corruption, human rights, repaying debts, and political stability. WBGIs for Ukraine are the same as Gabon and Azerbaijan although both are in better fiscal shape. The WBGI score for Russia is higher than for Ukraine! https://www.fitchratings.com/research/sovereigns/fitch-downgrades-ukraine-to-c-24-07-2024
Thanks very much both, a multi billion default on western bretton woods debt and all the rest is one thing. Removing western vulture capitalists would be another.
In the recent BRICS talks witnessed by Pepe Escobar they talk about creating a parallel bretton woods structure with a basket currency with SDRs.
https://sputnikglobe.com/20240610/pepe-escobar-the-three-key-messages-from-st-petersburg-to-the-global-majority-1118891306.html
Now, for me, at least here is the question: Will access to this lending facility be limited to BRICS members. It would be very problematic for the current order if the 40 odd billion of 3rd world debt was jeopardised by a straightforward stream if successful applications for development money fromnthe BRICS lending facility. Especially if, as Carrera of Ecuador did they ie. Default and used Venezuelan money to buy that debt at 12.5 cents on the dollar.
Oh and how will Ukraone be reconstructed?
I am certain that there would be problems long before access to a BRICS members lending facility was an issue. Russia has been surprisingly agile; necessity is the mother of invention in developing work-arounds to SWIFT, OFAC, and FinCEN sanctions (e.g. accepting cryptocurrency as an alternative payment for international trade, announced yesterday), just as they have advanced quickly with electronic communications protocols for weapons systems. The BRICS countries are not Russia though. Other than China... maybe. An alternative lending system etc. isn't going to happen in the near future, not unless the current one collapses. No offense intended, as this is very fun to talk about with you!
P.S. Russia can't sustain the SMO forever but Ukraine IS a mess! How will it be reconstructed? Estimates are as high as $2 trillion. That's why Fitch's downgrade of Ukraine, despite all the western money, seems significant to me. There won't be a surge of Goldman Sachs and Blackrock investment as the little green guy envisioned.
China renminbi (yuan?) became part of the IMF basket of currencies with Special Drawing Rights back in 2015, see here https://www.imf.org/en/News/Articles/2016/09/29/AM16-NA093016IMF-Adds-Chinese-Renminbi-to-Special-Drawing-Rights-Basket Regardless, I think China still chooses to keep the yuan mostly pegged to the US dollar because of trade advantages.
As you said, China doesn't necessarily want the yuan to be the world reserve currency at this point in time. For the US, it is essential for the dollar to remain the reserve currency because we have so much government debt. The reason that Russia was able to ramp up its economy with fiscal stimulus since the start of the SMO is because there was no government debt to speak of, merely a few hundred million dollars equivalent. Russia's central bank governor Nabiullina seems much better than Yellen. She isn't a political partisan like Yellen, isn't old like Yellen, yet she is competent had the position of governor for at least a decade.
Makes sense to slow down BRICS membership. South Africa, for example, is a mess. Incorporating some of the more developing nations of the current BRICS would be challenging enough! As an analogy: Even West Germany had trouble digesting East Germany after reunification.
Well, I don't see a BRICS lending facility as synonymous with the yuan being the worlds reserve currency. Its more (coining a phrase) 'multimodal' than that. In addition Glaziev is the polar opposite of Naibullina. He thinks that Russia 's monetary policy is driven by the Washington concensus ie a neo colonial and vulgar ideology. He is quite clear. Russias capacity for growth without unnecessary inflation is vast. He's a kindof 'Hamiltonian'. What I see is that a period of retrenchment by Russian nationalist (sovereigntist) elites and that we are going to see a doctrinally different development approach being adopted in Russia for for the multimodal world. If you read say, Lavrov. (I paraphrase.. one of the main issues in the march towards multipolarty (westphalian style indivisible security global infrastructure) is the need to ensure that the US achieves a soft landing. Well on this reading Europe won't and the US probably won't either.
I cordially assert that Russia can fight this war for the next period, say 5 years. The question is this: what on earth will the political west do, not to mention their citizens?
Lavrov is a remarkable statesman. Choosing him as foreign minister was very, very wise. He ran circles around Hillary Clinton. (Blinken is just grossly incompetent.) Lavrov is getting older now. I worry about that. Ensuring that the US and Europe achieve a soft landing would be essential. Mostly for the US, given our nuclear weapons as nuclear triad. (Truly, it was essential for the US to ensure that Russia achieved a soft landing in the 1990s rather than the rapacious 'shock therapy' of the West followed by escalating and outright hostility toward an agreeable and helpful Russia, including post-Yeltsin. That is a large part of what got all of us into the present situation!)
I don't disagree with you, that Russia can fight this war for another 5 years. It has been a month since your message. My understanding is that Putin didn't want to decimate Ukraine. If he had, he could have taken out major electric grid infrastructure all over the country using conventional weapons by July 2022. . . .as he finally did last week. The motivation for the SMO was to get Biden and NATO to back off, and to stop the harassment by rabid Banderites of ethnic Russian citizens of Luhansk and Donetsk. I digress.
A multipolar world is inherently much less stable than a bipolar world (despite the thrill I feel when you allude to the Peace of Westphalia). I'm not sure about the feasibility of multipolarity in your well-informed, well-worded comment. And yes, the political west but even more so its citizenry... the U.S. has a population of 330 million. How would they transition to a very different world order? They may have to, regardless of Russia, as the current trajectory of the U.S. doesn't seem sustainable.
Project Ukraine has flourished in an ecosystem of deception, typified most bare-facedly by the sudden *revelation* of Joe's cognitive decline: an open secret w/ which Western leaders were willing to collude. Recognizing of course that war necessitates deception, and that the cascading conflicts--against Russia; against Hamas/Ansar Allah/Hezbollah; potentially against China--will keep the collective West in a constant environment of deflection, delusion & deceit, do you see a geopolitical event already looming on the horizon, or a series of small incidents, that will create space for more reality/authenticity/truth?
You had one. If Trump had his brain blown out - no one would have believed the "lone gunman" story when all the evidence points to an incredible chain of mistakes. All had claimed a CIA conspiracy. Now we instead got a Trump effect and a complete upheaval around Biden that might lead to an even worse candidate, Harris. And what are the truths that will suddenly come out? People in the West are so full of crap propaganda and unfortunately we now have a movement in the totalitarian direction within the EU with the establishment of the Ministry of Truth.
The only type of event that can create any such thing would likely have to be major revolutions in the West, particularly in the U.S. Something like civil war, secession, etc., would be the only thing that could pry the U.S. away from the middle east and imperialism in general. But since Trump is likewise a war monger like the rest of them, and a Zionist to boot, then it's very unlikely that any such transcendental moment will occur any time soon.
There is a need for a U.S. version of the Khrushchev Secret Speech in order to purge the panegyrics of lies & propaganda which have dominated the public sphere, an Augean Stables-style cleansing of deceit & disinformation sufficient to cause a cultural reset.
Why doesn’t Russia immediately hit the NATO aid convoys as soon as they depart Poland? Or maybe they do already? Secondly, how much military aid is actually reaching the front when Russia has such aerial dominance?
I think because they destroy ('attrit') more when they get to the front. If they destroyed the hardware before, it reached the front, then there would be less to destroy as less would be sent and that would defeat the purpose of attrition. The Russian aim is clearly to get as much Nato hardware and combatants in range as possible and destroy them while keeping the supply pipelines active.
It could be that the shipments are spread out widely over time and that it is more efficient to knock them out when they reach their storage locations inside Ukraine. Waiting for them to reach the front and thus be able to do damage (before possibly being knocked out) sounds like wishful thinking pro-Russian.
However, I believe that railway lines, bridges and motorways should be bombed continuously at the border, even if it can be fixed quickly. Unfortunately, then there is a risk that civilians will be harmed, which means that Russia refrains from such measures.
Actually, Russia doesn't have air dominance in western Ukraine because it's too far away from their AWACS and stuff. Ukraine is too big, the Earth curves down too much. :)
Human intelligence assets are the best way to find the aid convoys on a border where there is a lot of traffic. I suspect that if there were too many hits on the convoys, the pro-Russian agents could be discovered. Or maybe there just aren't many agents. If I were running the Kremlin - that should become a common meme, as in: IIWRTK - I'd save the agents for later, after the SBU is less fearsome and when the Russian army is along the border and needs that humint more.
For now, the West is paying to get the supplies closer to the Russian firing ranges *and* it's an incentive for Kiev to not destroy the bridges over the Dnieper.
Because they're camouflaged in civilian trucks and blend in with the regular traffic, and it's impossible to track them in real time from their point of origin in Poland, Romania, etc., as they are loaded inside depots, and by the time they come out in the open, you don't know what's civilian and what's military. Secondly, Russia's *long range* aerial/drone assets/capabilities are decently far behind the West, and particularly the U.S. with its long endurance Reapers/Predators/Global Hawks/etc., so all those things combined makes it difficult.
However, on the closer operational front, Russia has good ISR capabilities and thus a lot of the materiel is vaporized when it reaches depots (train stations, supply/collections points, etc) in the tactical/operational depth. But Ukraine still has plenty of tricky ways of moving enough of the aid to the front.
If Trump is elected how do you think the negotiations with Russia will go? There's more than just the current Ukraine situation. The US deep state has been attacking Russia on many fronts for decades and has killed many thousands of Russians. I'm sure Putin respects Trump but he's not afraid of him.
Russia will not negotiate with the US no matter who wins the elections. Trump is the one who pulled out of the INF Treaty, began sending lethal aid to Ukraine, closed Russian Consulates and sanctioned Nord Stream II Pipelines. Whatever agreement, Treaty or anything that the Empire of Lies US signs isn’t even worth the paper it’s written on.
Pete, what you say is true except that it was not Trump who *began* sending lethal aid to Ukraine.
It started under Obama, the "magick ni***r". And before that, Soros attempted the Orange Revolution under the administration of Bush The Shrub. The trail goes all the way back to early May, 1945 - before WW2 ended in Europe - under President Truman when OSS Agent Allen Dulles (yes, that Allen Dulles) cut a deal with Wehrmacht General Gelhlen for the US to take over the German network of anti-Soviet agents in the Ukraine. Which led to a war (1945-1955) where 150,000 people were killed. CIA, West German intelligence under Gehlen and the Banderas on one side, and the Soviets on the other.
During the modern “independent” Ukraine Obama sent defensive security assistance after the US overthrew the democratically elected President Yanukovych. The CIA/NATO began their training etc from 2014. Trump began sending lethal aid.
From after the Great Patriotic War/WWII the US was funding OUN/UPA and the Bandarists/Nazis during Operation Aerodynamic in support of separatists, exactly what still continues to this day as the Empire of Lies (US) continues funding separatists (basically terrorists) throughout the world.
I think it's important to be accurate on the timeline of US ties to the Ukrainian Nazis. Lying Wikipedia would have you believe those ties did not start until June or July of 1946, more than a year after the Nazi surrender. That would be in support of the BS "mainstream narrative" that the US only started supporting the butchers of Babi Yar and Wolynia *after* Stalin had "revealed himself to be such a horrible monster", etc. No. The real timeline is that the OSS-Wehrmacht negotiations began quite a while before the surrender. AFAIK the exact timeline has never been made public, but it's obvious that such an important negotiation is not done in less that a week. US approval would have gone through Washington's bureaucracy. Perhaps the death of FDR in April paved the way for Allen Dulles to do as he pleased. Back to the timeline: It was later in May 1945 that Winston Churchill proposed Operation Unthinkable to destroy the USSR. So this hatred was kicking around and the USSR must have been aware of it long before V-E day. The US government had no reason to waste time in coming to the aid of the Ukrainians in the Gehlen Organization.. Also, US aid for Ukrainian Nazis fleeing to the west, had to have started almost immediately because the RFed Army was searching for them. The details are not in the public archives AFAIK, so we have to make the most reasoned assumptions.
I never trust WikiSHIT as they are nothing but CIA propaganda. I was banned from them for telling the truth. The SHIT stream media is also controlled by the CIA. The historical revisionism in the collective west is horrible. The US did their best to destroy the USSR even before WWII. They tried to beat them to Berlin & the hatred of Russia continues to this day. The same goes for the unnecessary nuking of Japan, so the US could subjugate them & keep the USSR out. The US also created the Taiwan debacle, all to permanently support the military industrial complex & remain the hegemon. Soon the hegemon will fall.
Zion don will do what his Jew masters tell him. Russia will stay the course.
There's new 'rumor' from Mike Pompeo that Trump will make an ultimatum that if Russia doesn't take the compromise, the U.S. will unleash "every weapon" to Ukraine including $500 billion Lend Lease. If this is even remotely true, then I don't see the negotiations going well as I don't think Putin will take kindly to such an existential threat.
Not really a question. Can we get more of your thoughts of the is Israel/Gaza situation? Predicted outcome?
It seems to me entering a long period of tension that will not be resolved easily because all sides now not only have too much at stake, but are not cowed, particularly Iran etc. However, there are some rumors Hezbollah for now is willing to retreat pass the Litani river to lower tensions, though that would do so only temporarily most likely anyway. I think this is one of the 3 Great Theaters of the world where tensions will continue rising (Ukraine, Palestine, Taiwan) so don't expect any quick resolutions any time soon. Everyone will likely continue doubling down. But I will probably do a much more detailed writeup on this in near future.
Zelenskyy obviously does a lot of international travel. Does he fly from Kiev? Often wondered about logistics in light of the danger.
My understanding is all travel of dignitaries and key gov't officials out of Kiev is by train to Poland, then flights are made out of Poland. However, there was some discussion a while back about how certain 'dark flights' have landed in Kiev occasionally, but I'm still not 100% certain on what they are, perhaps emergency military provisions of some kind. But for the most part, travel is strictly by train to Poland first.
I feel you omitted Germany quite a bit in the last posts. Maybe rightly so, since it is a big (dwindling) economical power, but a mediocre geopolitical one at best, besides serving as NATO rocket launcher, aircraft carrier and major logistics hub. There were some calls outside of the Kremlin to declare null and void the 2+4 treaty (which could be seen as basis of today's unified Germany). Now, Putin still has a soft spot in his heart for Germany, despite all the venom coming from Berlin. Will the Russian government keep this option up their sleeve until the point when things get really grim?
This question might fit along the one for the bigger central European endgame. We now have France's Melenchon calling for a withdrawal from NATO, but I think that might also imply an "EU army", to be lead by France and Germany.
Interesting question but a little off-topic. The treaty can not be reversed I think. And it is sad to see that Germany, even after the Treaty, is not a sovereign state with full control of their Nation. US is still occupying bases and hold German leaders by strings due to NSA&others compromats. To break the Treaty would also mean that Germany can claim back Pomerania, Schlesien and Königsberg (Preussen). Putin does not allow treacherous games from the Russian side as it damages their reputation in the world.
That's interesting, I hadn't seen that one so I had to look it up: https://pravda-en.com/world/2024/02/22/334394.html
It's possible but what could they really do if they renounced the treaty? I suppose, being the avowed legalist, Putin could use such a denunciation merely as precursor for various actions against Germany in response to these coming provocations. So I do believe it's possible to use that for instance to justify strikes on German territory when the time comes, but not anything extreme like re-conquering east Berlin.
I think as you suggest it would merely play into the larger call for a grand new security architecture in Europe, with the German situation being used as proof the old structure is dead.
And you're right--von der Leyen is now calling for an EU defense shield to cover EU's airspace as a guise for a new centralized EU military command.
By the way, there's many such obscure old treaties Russia can and has used as justification. For instance, even the post-WWII treaties actually gave Russia legal rights to re-invade Europe if it was threatened/attacked by fascism, which Ukraine as inheritor of the German Nazi heritage pretty much fulfills as condition.
Yes! I was just reading about Molotov (of Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact fame). He made proposals for the USSR to join NATO, twice, in 1954. It was sincere and somewhat (maybe mostly) motivated by concern about a remilitarized Germany.
Who downed MH17?
Oh, this would be a good one for Simplicius's long-form, well documented essays.
It will take a long time--if ever--for the truth to come out about many things. Is ten years enough for this one?
Ukraine mistaking it for a Russian plane. WHITE, BLUE, RED.
US have it all on tape from satellites but are not releasing any data. Russia does the same.
"Who downed MH17?" - The Dutch, specifically the Dutch air controllers who refused to allow it to fly over Crimea and instead routed MH17 over an extremely dangerous war zone.
The Dutch called Crimea a "war zone" because Crimeans by overwhelming margins refused rule by an unelected nazi junta in Kiev and preferred to join Russia. There was absolutely zero fighting of any kind in Crimea, but the Dutch did not want in any way to recognize authorities in Crimea, not even air traffic control.
Instead, Dutch air traffic control sent MH17 directly over the hottest active war zone in Donbass where nazi armies were trying to conquer Donbass, because over Donbass the Dutch air traffic controllers could talk to Kiev's air traffic control.
Over Donbass both sides were doing their best to shoot down anything that flew from the other side. The US kept an AWACS aircraft on station over Donbass to assist the nazis, both in their ground attack missions against Donbass and also to help in any shoot downs of supply flights from Russia delivering any assistance to the Donetsk or Lugansk republics. That AWACS aircraft picked up all details of the MH17 shootdown on radar, including the exact launch point of the missile in nazi-held territory and its trajectory. There is zero chance the US will ever release those radar tapes.
The Dutch "investigation" refused to allow Malaysia's participation and also refused to consider any "evidence" other than that provided by the nazi junta in Kiev. It ignored incontrovertible proof that the BUK missile which shot down MH17 had been transferred to Ukraine many years before and was recorded as part of the military assets seized by the Kiev junta when it took power.
Kiev's forces fired the missile that shot down MH17. There is no proof either way for the reason they shot it down. It could have been a mistake, them thinking it was a Russian plane, or it could have been a deliberate false flag operation, with Kiev knowing that with the assistance of Western post-truth media they could use the shoot down to stir up animosity towards Russia in the West.
The best informed commentators say it seems to be a mix of the two, as Kiev had long pushed "don't worry, we'll spin anything to our benefit" rules of engagement that emphasized killing anything and everything their forces could reach. Kiev's commanders were well aware that strikes on civilians were encouraged and that such strikes were routinely used to dual advantage: terrorizing Donbass, plus pinning the blame on Russia.
When it came to shooting down aircraft, the number one rule for Kiev's launchers was to shoot anything that moved, and if it turned out to be civilian or Western, no problem as that would be blamed on Russia. In that context, the difference between a mistake or a deliberate act has little relevance.
But it does have relevance for the Dutch government's decision to order air traffic routing away from Crimea and over an extremely dangerous war zone where the Dutch government certainly knew that Kiev routinely targeted civilians and encouraged attacks on civilians.
I don’t recall that they mentioned back then that Ukraine had buk missiles as well. That became very apparent when the 2 buk missiles landed in poland killing 2 people at a farm. I am dutch btw and angry with the government whose only purpose seem to have been to stimulate and increase Russophobia as you were not entitled to have a different opinion. It was forced through our troath by both government and media. And here we are in very dangerous times.
No one knows but just like 9/11 had way too many 'coincidences', this event was straight out of the CIA playbook given that it was so perfectly timed to staunch a Russian/rebel offensive that was beginning to gain (battle of Ilovaisk was a major victory for Russian side just weeks later, etc). Also all the weird elements surrounding it like rumors the plane was redirected from Kiev air traffic control to fly over the hot sector.
The whole event appears to be similar to the Bucha massacre, designed to generate int'l condemnation and sanctions for Russia and mass support for Ukraine. The West also blocked all investigations, refusing to give up black box, etc., just like they did with the Nord Stream attack, which is highly incriminating to me.
Lastly, little known is the fact that Ukraine airforce similarly "accidentally" shot down a civilian airliner in 2001 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siberia_Airlines_Flight_1812
Very little is written about partisan activity by pro-Russian people in Ukraine or pro Ukraine people in Russia.
It is being reported that the cars of the people doing the forced recruiting in Odessa are being torched. Is this by Russian partisans or by Ukrainians themselves who do not want to be forcibly recruited.
What is known about partisan activity, and can this be used to find out who the people on the ground are supporting?
There r no Russian partisans in Ukraine. When actions r taken in that country counter to its illegal dictator, they r the actions of clear thinking Ukrainians. God bless them. Write nothing more on this Simplicius.
The biggest effect from pro-Russian people in Ukraine is that local populations in Russian speaking areas (most of the West, Center, and South of Ukraine) report on troop movements and military concentrations to Russia. They can do that through Internet communications like Telegram.
As for local support, people in Russian-speaking areas tend to support Russia, people in the very few Ukrainian-speaking areas (a few provinces in the West, like around Lvov) tend to support the nationalists, and most people who are left in Ukraine just want the war to stop.
You have to remember that the war has been going on for ten years, since 2014, and the opening phase of the civil war once the US put nazis in power in Kiev featured extremely brutal attacks on the Russian speaking, but unarmed, majority by a very well armed and vicious, mostly Ukrainian speaking minority. That minority rounded up and killed 15,000 of their opponents, while also engaging in some very vicious public acts, like burning to death 47 demonstrators in Odessa.
That caused a natural filtration process to happen, where many Russian speaking Ukrainians simply voted with their feet: millions of them picked up and left, moving to Russia. They had zero integration issues because they moved to an identical culture where they could buy the same brands, worship at the same church, watch the same TV programs, and speak their native language. Later on, when it was clear Crimea, Donetsk and Lugansk would remain free of the nazi junta, many ethnic Russian "Ukrainians" moved from provinces like Kharkov to the new Russian territories of Crimea, Donetsk, Lugansk, Zaporoshiye, and Kherson.
All that reduced the number of people remaining behind who might become likely partisans. If you couldn't stand the Kiev regime you could move to an alternate "Ukraine" that was free of nazis. It wasn't like occupied France in WW2 where there wasn't another "France" for people who didn't like nazis to move to. I think that's why you don't see active partisan movements. If you want to fight the nazis, you cross the border into Donbass and join the Russian army as a volunteer.
As for torching cars used by "recruiters," that's local people who don't want their fathers, husbands, sons, and brothers dragged off by nazi goons to die for Kiev. There isn't as much of that as you might expect because many of the really action-minded individuals fled Ukraine long ago. They're busy posting videos of themselves swimming in German or Spanish lakes while giving the finger to Kiev's "recruiters."
There are also Ukrainians who moved from E Ukraine to W Ukraine and are now facing discrimination.
Slow learners.
Idealistic, naive.
Very well said!
I’d suggest this; I think the vast majority of ALL the people in the Ukraine want this conflict to end. A minority pulling all levers of power in Kiev (with vast support from their western owners) are keeping a “temporary” hold on the country.
Perhaps you’re better informed on this than I; but before 2014 — Russian was THE most commonly spoken language in Ukraine. Is it the case now that in fact Ukrainian language is the most spoken? I know the junta in Kiev has tried to suppress Russian-ness throughout the country… but it’s imbedded!
I remember when I did the paperwork to bring my adopted Russian son from the Ukraine — his birth certificate was in both Russian and Ukrainian. Even back in the late 1990’s — the Ukrainian government forced us to redo his birth certificate ONLY IN UKRAINIAN. Just stupid on every level… because he was born in Sevastopol (the vast majority of which was Russian), his mother is ethnic Russian. His aunt born in Belarus.
Of course he has relatives in both Ukraine and Russia.
This hideous conflict sickens me on too many levels.
"Is it the case now that in fact Ukrainian language is the most spoken?" I don't believe so, even though ten years of brutal effort have definitely increased the proportion of people who can speak at least some Ukrainian.
I have a good friend, another American, who was part of a US mission to Ukraine in 1991/92 right after the USSR fell apart and "Ukraine" for the first time ever became an independent, sovereign country. As part of his job he had meetings with many "Ukrainian" ministers and every one of them was arranging to take lessons in the Ukrainian language. None of them spoke any Ukrainian, but they all wanted to learn at least a few words in it to further their careers.
Between 1991 and 2004 the overwhelming majority of "Ukrainians" (I keep writing that in quotes because large sections of the country never accepted that they had been unlawfully gifted as subjects to a new Ukrainian polity) spoke Russian as a native language. There really was only a very small minority, a hard knot of nationalists, around Lvov and other die-hard Banderist venues, which spoke Ukrainian.
In 2004 the US engineered its first regime change operation, to bring an anti-Russian government coalition into power. That coalition, led by people like Yulia Timoshenko, was so intensely corrupt that its popularity rating dropped to 2% by the time when in 2010 Ukrainians voted it out of power and voted in the Yanukovych administration. But 2004 was when nationalists got enough power to start shoving through provisions requiring Ukrainian be taught in schools in addition to Russian.
None of that moved the needle until the second US regime change operation in 2014, when the rise to power of a truly hard core, lethally nazi junta in Kiev made it physically dangerous for many people to speak Russian in Ukraine. The ten years since 2014 have seen extensive and harsh measures to suppress Russian language and to require the use of Ukrainian language. But even so, Russian continues to be the language spoken by the majority of Ukrainians. I think the biggest effect of the harsh measures was not to end the use of Russian but to add Ukrainian as a second language to many more people than before.
What ends up happening is that kids are forced to learn Ukrainian in school but they continue to speak Russian at home, among themselves and in any situation outside of contact by official authorities (in school, at police stations, etc).
One of the things that has held up total, forced Ukrainianization is that most of the nazis themselves speak Russian as a native language. Russian is the native language of every past Ukrainian president, including Timoshenko (who continues to speak Russian at home and in private at the office), Poroshenko and Zelensky. Zelensky had to learn to speak Ukrainian as an adult to advance his political career, and despite his talents as an actor he still speaks Ukrainian with a slight Russian accent.
People in the West don't know the WW2 history of Ukraine's nazi parties and nationalist, nazi movements. Almost everybody in those nazi parties spoke Russian, including Bandera himself who was also committed to learning and speaking Ukrainian. The truly ideologically committed ones had to learn to speak Ukrainian, which wasn't easy given the rarity of the language in Ukraine at the time: ultranationalists had to work hard to push the new myth they had invented, of a widespread use of an extremely niche language in a country where almost everyone spoke Russian, and where more people spoke German or Polish than Ukrainian. The nazi partisans who continued to fight in Ukraine after the defeat of Germany in WW2 almost all spoke Russian, not Ukrainian.
To this day, many nazi regiments like Azov have a majority of native Russian speakers. That was a point of friction between top nazi leaders and the recently assassinated nazi extremist cheerleader Irina Farion, who said anybody who did not speak Ukrainian was "biological waste" and that included even Azov nazi leaders who spoke Russian. It could be her attacks on Russian-speaking nazi leaders (and on Zelensky) contributed to her assassination as the various nationalist groups jockey for positions in Kiev, like scorpions in a bottle.
What those nazi leaders have run into is that it's not easy to teach people in their 30s, 40s, 50s, and 60s to speak Ukrainian when they and everybody around them speaks Russian as a native language. They'd just rather get on with the business of being a nazi while using whatever language is most convenient for them. Yermak, Budanov, and others at the top in the Kiev regime all speak Russian as their native language, obviously prefer to use Russian, and most have relatives living in Russia as well.
You also see the continued, pervasive use of Russian in Ukraine from all the Western video reports from reporters embedded in Ukrainian army units. What's funny is watching BBC and CNN and hearing the soldiers (and generals, like Syrsky) speaking Russian, which is translated in subtitles or in English without any mention that they've translated *Russian* speech and not Ukrainian into English. The great majority of videos I've seen show Ukrainian army units speaking Russian, not Ukrainian.
My bottom line is that while the nazis have made significant headway in their ethnic cleansing of Russian language, Russian language continues to be the majority native language, with the main effect being that significantly more people than before now also speak Ukrainian.
Apologies for the imprecision, but anecdotal evidence and comments from friends in Ukraine (all of whom live in majority Russian language regions) is all I have to go on.
Fantastic insight John! Me learning a lot.
Why the over use of ‘Nazi’ when this is a Jew war. Run by Jews like zelensky nukand kagan etc. azov was formed by Jew.