Ukraine Inches Closer to Final Call-Up
Zelensky has inched closer toward the final logical conclusion of Ukraine’s mobilization journey and demographic acid test in one. In a new interview with Reuters, the doomed leader announced that an attractive new ‘contract’ for the 18-24 cohort is being designed by Ukrainian authorities:
"Combat brigades, experienced ones, together with the Ministry of Defense... are working on a contract option for young people from 18 to 24 years old... There will be a special agreement, there will be many preferences... there will be very high financial support," Zelensky said.
This is part of the recent initiative from Zelensky to tiptoe gradually toward full-on mobilization of the final youth contingent by first heavily incentivizing them, as well as tightening the yoke little by little with various provisions and constraints that remove exemption categories one at a time.
I’ve posted various videos in the past showing that a kind of ‘stealth’ mobilization of 18+ is already underway, like this one from Rada MP Dmitry Razumkov. Depending what the true scale of the stealth mobilization is, it could mean that Ukraine will face real trouble if it ever really does ‘officially’ announce an 18+ mobilization, because those reserves would have already been drained in advance.
In some ways, both Putin and Zelensky are playing the same game—Putin has refused to do another ‘official’ mass call-up, relying on various forms of ‘lowkey’ mobilization options, from prisoner labor, to volunteers and mercenaries, partly in order to keep society from souring on the war. Now Zelensky does the same, but is in far more dire straits.
In a new interview he remarked that he can’t even imagine how Ukraine will fight the war should the US cease its support:
Interestingly he mentions that US support has stayed the same but ‘no new packages’ have been announced under Trump’s administration. Experts have weighed in that this continuing line of armaments is from the Biden admin’s orders via the Pentagon’s direct support program, but nothing has come down from the White House via the president’s own drawdown authorities or other direct special aid instruments.
In fact, Trump has doubled down on his idea that any future support would have to be strictly negotiated in exchange for Ukraine’s resources, as seen in this new video from today. Watch the second half, where I spliced in Zelensky’s new comments as well, which are quite elucidating:
Isn’t it ironic that Zelensky shows a map of Ukrainian mineral wealth, suggesting that Russia is the enemy because they want Ukraine for its natural resources—yet it’s his very own primary ‘ally’ who just openly described Ukraine as nothing more than a transactional business opportunity for natural resources. The US is literally what Zelensky believes Russia to be, yet the hypocritical mask must be upheld to unjustly cast Russia as the bad guy.
By the way, in the Reuters interview Zelensky admitted that 50% of those prized rare earths Trump’s been salivating over are already under Russian control:
As one can see, the vast majority of the remaining resources will come under Russian control sometime in the not-too-distant future:
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Now Ukraine has launched a new localized offensive in Kursk which has retaken the small settlement of Cherkasskaya Konopelka, just south of Sudzha:
The enemy's forces have been accumulating in the Sumy region for several days. The reserves were attacked, including by the Iskander OTRK, many saw the video yesterday, it was posted on Telegram channels. The enemy attacked today in Kursk region, hoping for bad weather, last time he attacked during "clear skies". In total, the enemy threw up to 30 units of equipment into the next offensive, now they are knocking it out and this offensive for the khokhol will end the same way as the previous ones, that is, with defeat and heavy losses.
👉Vysokygovorit
The purpose is to give some breathing room to Sudzha, which Russian forces have been putting the squeeze on in recent weeks. The offensive reportedly saw several battalions worth of troops and an estimated ~30-50 vehicles already claimed destroyed in another turkey shoot. The Ukrainian side on the other hand claims Russian forces suffered heavy casualties as well. In this case, the Russians held the propaganda upper hand with dozens of videos of destroyed Ukrainian gear and men flooding out, including a lot of ‘rare’ items—now destroyed—like Challenger tanks, Bergepanzers, Wisent-1s and IMR-2s, which led to analysts opining that the AFU was scraping the bottom of the barrel for heavy weapons to use.
A little mood-setter:
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Meanwhile the DailyMail published another ‘leaked’ Trump ‘peace plan’:
As per usual, it has zero chance to be accepted by Putin, even if it’s real.
The only real question at this point, as the Duran folks just asked in their latest program, is whether Trump will ‘escalate’ or walk away. In a new interview with NYT, Keith Kellogg reportedly said that Russia’s current sanctions ‘pain level’ is at about a 3 out of 10, and that Trump has much more room to raise that ‘pain level’ by putting sanctions pressure on Russian oil and gas.
Sanctions enforcement on Russia are “only about a 3” on a scale of 1 to 10 on how painful the economic pressure can be, Kellogg said. The US sanctions themselves — such as those targeting Russia’s lucrative energy sector — are nominally twice as high, but there is still room to ratchet them up.
“You could really increase the sanctions — especially the latest sanctions [targeting oil production and exports,]” he said. “It’s opened the aperture way high to do something.
If this is the only bolt left in Trump’s quiver to ‘hurt’ Russia, then I’m afraid the US stands little chance of persuading Putin. Most of the West and Ukraine’s actions against Russian energy industries ironically end up only helping Russia by raising oil prices, which drowns Russia in record profits; e.g. Ukrainian drone attacks on Russian oil refineries. But with the Munich conference coming up, Kellogg promises we’ll soon learn more details of Trump’s actual ‘peace plan’ in the near future.
One wonders if the Trump administration will continue the tradition of sparing the one special governor in upcoming sanctions packages:
Kellogg did, however, demonstrate a farthing of common sense in the interview:
“For Russia, this is kind of in their DNA in military operations — basically, you’re in an attrition fight,” he said. “If you look at history, you’d never want to get into an attrition fight with the Russians, because that’s how they fight. They’re used to it. I mean, this is a country that was willing to lose — and did — 700,000 in the Battle of Stalingrad in six months, and they didn’t blink an eye.”
“And so the pressure just can’t be military. You have to put economic pressure, you have to put diplomatic pressure, some type of military pressures and levers that you’re going to use underneath those to make sure [this goes] where we want it to go,” he explained.
Let’s be honest: ultimately, the only option left for the US that could even remotely affect the inexorable Russian advance is for Trump to announce a major, direct military intervention in Ukraine. For obvious reasons, I don’t think it will come to that, though Trump could attempt to pull some trump card by threatening a kind of reverse Pristina Airport gambit to land troops somewhere on the other side of an imagined ‘DMZ’. But without a gargantuan logistics tail in the west of the country, it would simply never be convincing to anyone, not least of which the Russian general staff. To even remotely threaten Russian forces you’d need not only a vast amount of deployable manpower but the ability to sustain them over credible periods of high intensity exchanges.
But as I said, even though it’s not likely, it’s the only thing Trump could possibly do to thwart Russia. No amount of sanctions could possibly stop the Russian forward march, nor a limp wet-napkin European response featuring some kind of light ‘rapid deployment force’ on the other side of the river. As such, Trump is left with only digging a deeper hole for himself, as the longer he waits to extricate himself from this conflict the more painful it will be for his legacy.
The Duran team made a good point in mentioning that Trump has a rare golden opportunity—albeit a short window, at that—to pull the plug on US involvement with this war amidst the deafening turmoil of the USAID scandal and the avalanche of related upheavals. He momentarily has the democrats dazed and in total disarray, with the CIA and other major subversive-foreign-enemy agencies in the process of some paralyzed convulsions that would allow Trump to act as desired. The longer he waits, the more he allows the smoke to clear and his opponents to gather their footing, organizing back into coherent formation against his most impactful policies.
Of course, one could argue the opposite side, that Trump cannot just yet dump Ukraine because he hasn’t drained the swamp enough to protect himself, or get rid of the embedded deep state neocons who would put up credible roadblocks. As such, he may be biding his time to continue flushing out these deep state limpets first, before really bringing the hammer down. For instance:
With the arrival of Donald Trump in the White House, Washington is rapidly reviewing its policy on Ukraine. All Pentagon employees have already been dismissed and removed and the USAID responsible for this track has been liquidated, and Trump himself made it clear: the previous level of financial and military support for Kiev should not be expected.
As for the ‘leaked plans’, Julian Roepcke per usual didn’t take kindly to them:
In fact, Julian has been asking some very ‘uncomfortable’ questions of late, here tongue lashing a pro-UA ‘analyst’ who was confabulating ‘major’ Russian losses on the front:
Roepcke appears mostly correct here—100-200 total daily casualties is about 50-100 KIA, which accords much closer to reality than common Western numbers; as can be seen, even the stalwarts are slowly coming around after three years of being drubbed by increasingly warped propaganda from their own side.
A Ukrainian politician recently had the same ‘awakening’:
Anna Konstantinovna Skorokhod, a Ukrainian politician, said that the Russians would have ceased to exist long ago if they were to believe the official figures, where for every dead Ukrainian there are 10 dead Russians and for every wounded, there are 17 wounded Russians.
I advise Zelenskyy to stop listening to idiots and demand reliable data.
And a last important video on this count—a Ukrainian officer describes how only 10% of Ukrainian KIA are ever removed from the field:
Think about it—it lines up with a lot of Ukrainian “official figures”, even Zelensky’s so called 40,000 dead: those are the officially retrieved and identified dead, while the real amount could be 400k or more, as per the above.
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To get back to the Kellogg interview at the start as a fitting capstone, allow me to quote one last thing he said:
“Very frankly, both sides in any negotiation have to give; that’s just the way it is in negotiations,” he said. “And that’s where you have to find out, ‘OK, where is this at? What’s acceptable?'”
“Is it gonna be agreeable to everybody? No. Is it gonna be acceptable to everybody? No. But you try to run this balance,” he added.
This perfectly encapsulates the totally clueless nature of the Trump team, which is merely fumbling around in a theatrical ‘show’ of global leadership that is nothing more than bad Kabuki theater. Why would Russia have to adhere to the “rules of negotiations” as if it’s some kind of board game? Russia is winning, Ukraine is running out of men—there really isn’t much more to it than that. Russia doesn’t have to “give” anything at all, and if Kellogg really believes so he’s as flaky as his breakfast namesake.
This is really amateur hour, with an old, decaying Hegemon desperately trying to show a shell-shocked, polycrisis-ridden world that it’s still “got the goods”, and can push people around without having to actually make a real effort at solving complex problems, instead resorting to throwing up a front of inane and nonsensical ‘logic’ like a drunk ex-champ winging air punches to impress a few booze-hunched barflies.
Guess they’ll have to learn the hard way that draining a few beltway NGOs does not undo decades of terminal atrophy, nor give a reality TV star and casino tycoon military primacy over the pedigreed war council of a great power.
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This whole fiasco reminds me of Berlin 1945…soon there will be parades of old men and young boys marching to the front. This is insane! Both Ukraine and the West have nothing…absolutely no leverage. The best that can be done is to end the war, accept the territorial losses and forget NATO. There has been enough death and the stealing from the US taxpayer. Ukraine never was of importance to our national security. Time to face the music.
"Isn’t it ironic that Zelensky shows a map of Ukrainian mineral wealth, suggesting that Russia is the enemy because they want Ukraine for its natural resources—yet it’s his very own primary ‘ally’ who just openly described Ukraine as nothing more than a transactional business opportunity for natural resources. The US is literally what Zelensky believes Russia to be..."
Just when you think you can't be more disgusted by the actions of the USSA...they say "hold my beer." Don can use the purloined resources to build a beautiful, double-plus-good resort on the mouldering remains of the people formerly known as Gazans. Real evil shite going down in the clear light of day.