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Ukraine – Putin On Why The War Started, Failed Attempts On Snake Island, Other Issues
Updates below (17:15 UTC)
It is Victory Day. As Ernest Hemingway said:
Anyone who loves freedom owes such a debt to the Red Army that it can never be repaid.
The most important part of Vladimir Putin's speech to the Victory Parade on the Red Square is the narrative that explains how the current war in Ukraine began. Putin is correct in seeing this as a NATO proxy war against Russia:
[D]espite all controversies in international relations, Russia has always advocated the establishment of an equal and indivisible security system which is critically needed for the entire international community.
Last December we proposed signing a treaty on security guarantees. Russia urged the West to hold an honest dialogue in search for meaningful and compromising solutions, and to take account of each other’s interests. All in vain. NATO countries did not want to heed us, which means they had totally different plans. And we saw it.
Another punitive operation in Donbass, an invasion of our historic lands, including Crimea, was openly in the making. Kiev declared that it could attain nuclear weapons. The NATO bloc launched an active military build-up on the territories adjacent to us.
Thus, an absolutely unacceptable threat to us was steadily being created right on our borders. There was every indication that a clash with neo-Nazis and Banderites backed by the United States and their minions was unavoidable.
Let me repeat, we saw the military infrastructure being built up, hundreds of foreign advisors starting work, and regular supplies of cutting-edge weaponry being delivered from NATO countries. The threat grew every day.
Russia launched a pre-emptive strike at the aggression. It was a forced, timely and the only correct decision. A decision by a sovereign, strong and independent country.
The use of 'pre-emptive strike' is somewhat misleading. In fact the Ukraine started the war on Wednesday, February 16 2022, when its forces near the Donbas republics began preparatory artillery strikes for an all out ground attack on the Donbas republics.
The February 15 report of the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine recorded some 41 explosions in the ceasefire areas. This increased to 76 explosions on Feb 16, 316 on Feb 17, 654 on Feb 18, 1413 on Feb 19, a total of 2026 of Feb 20 and 21 and 1484 on Feb 22.
The OSCE mission reports showed that the great majority of impact explosions of the artillery were on the separatist side of the ceasefire line.
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On February 19 the Ukrainian President Zelensky announced at the Munich Security Conference that the Ukraine would ditch the Budapest memorandum and all related agreements. The Budapest memorandum is about Ukraine committing to be a non-nuclear state.
Those two issues, an imminent ground attack on Donbas and the Ukraine threatening to strive for nuclear weapons, drove the Russian decision on February 21 to recognize the Donbas republics as independent states. (The legal precedence for doing such is the 'western' recognition of Kosovo as an independent state.)
Common defense agreements between the independent states and the Russian Federation were signed. Three days later, during which the Ukrainian attacks on the Donbas republics continued, Russian troops entered the Ukraine under Article 51 of the UN charter.
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Over the last days there were some interesting developments of the ground.
1. North of Karkov Russian troops are pulling back to shorten their frontline. The city will have to wait until the Donbas has been regained. The Ukraine again declares it is wining as it retakes the towns the Russians have earlier left.
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2. After heavy fighting Russian forces broke through the eastern Donbas front and conquered the heavily defended city of Popasna.
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MilitaryLand.net @Militarylandnet – 8:30 UTC · May 8, 2022
🗺️Ukrainian forces withdrew from Popasna to more favorable and fortified positions in the vicinity, the head of #Luhansk Oblast confirms #UkraineRussiaWar
The city is on a hill about 260 meters above sea level. This is about 100+ meters higher than the areas north, south and west of it. Artillery stationed on the hill will have a very good view and can reach deep into Ukrainian held grounds. It will be able to interdict resupplies on nearby roads to the Ukrainian front troops.
The Ukrainian army process of withdrawing to ever 'more favorable and fortified positions' will probably end in Lviv.
3. The Ukrainian military had launched a commando attack on Snake Island (in the semi circle 30 miles south of Odessa).
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However after previous Ukrainian air attacks Russian troops had already left the island and the Russian airforce had laid an ambush for the attack forces. The Russian Defense Ministry briefings mentioned Ukrainian losses around Snake (Zmeinyi) Island and related operations several times.
07.05.2022 (20:15):
The following have been shot down in the air near Zmeinyi Island: 1 Ukrainian Su-24 bomber, 1 Su-27 fighter jet, 3 Mi-8 helicopters with paratroopers and 2 Bayraktar-TB2 UAV. The Ukrainian amphibious assault boat Stanislav has also been destroyed.
08.05.2022 (10:45):
A Ukrainian naval corvette of project 1241 has also been destroyed near Odessa.
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During the night, Russian air defence means destroyed 2 more Ukrainian Su-24 bombers and 1 Mi-24 helicopter of the Ukrainian Air Force over Snake Island, and also shot down 1 Bayraktar-TB2 unmanned aerial vehicle near Odessa.
A total of 4 Ukrainian aircraft, 4 helicopters, including 3 with paratroopers on board, 3 Bayraktar-TB2 UAV and 1 Ukrainian Navy amphibious assault boat have been destroyed in the area during the day.
08.05.2022 (19:30)
Russian air defence means have shot down 1 Bayraktar-TB2 unmanned aerial vehicles near Zmeinyi Island.
09.05.2022 (12:45)
Oniks high-precision missiles launched by Bastion coastal missile system near Artsiz, Odessa region, have destroyed Ukrainian helicopters at a bounce platform.
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Three Ukrainian unmanned aerial vehicles, including two Bayraktar-TB2, have been hit over Snake Island.
(Bounce platform is a mistranslation for a helicopter supply pad that is not a full airport.
The operation was quite costly for the Ukrainian side. Besides the 60+ paratroopers who were killed during the assault one of the helicopter also had the deputy commander of the Ukrainian navy on board. Today it was announced that Col. Ihor Bedzai was killed in action when his helicopter came under Russian airforce fire.
More than 4 helicopters, 4 jets and 6 Bayraktar drones were lost for zero gain. The U.S. is in the process of giving the Ukraine a total of 16 Mi-17 transport helicopters that were originally supposed to go to Afghanistan. At the current Ukrainian rate of losses such supplies, just like others, will not last for long.
Under the current circumstances Snake Island is of little military value. It seems that the sole point of the Ukrainian operation to retake it was to create a propaganda item for today's Victory Parade. It now is one but for the Russian side.
Update 17:15 UTC:
The last briefing (09.05.2022 (19:15) by the Russian Defense Ministry (published after the above post) again mentions Snake Island:
According to the updated information, 6 Mi-8 and Mi-24 helicopters have been destroyed during the night near Artsiz in Odessa Region near the Chervonoglinskoe military airfield by Onyks high-precision missiles from the Bastion coastal missile system.
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On 7 May, on direct orders from Zelensky, the Ukrainian General Staff, with the direct involvement of advisers from the USA and Britain, planned a major provocation to seize Zmeiny Island.
Over the past two days, the Kiev regime has made several desperate attempts to land air and sea assaults on Zmeiny Island, which is important for controlling the northwestern part of the Black Sea.
The Ukrainian provocation was thwarted as a result of the competent actions of a Russian Armed Forces unit on the island. The enemy suffered heavy losses.
4 Ukrainian airplanes, including 3 Su-24 and 1 Su-27, 3 Mi-8 helicopters with paratroopers on board, and 1 Mi-24 helicopter have been shot down in the air while repelling the attacks near Zmeiny Island.
Within two days, 29 Ukrainian UAVs have been shot down in the air, including 8 Bayraktar TB-2 strike UAVs. Meanwhile, 4 Bayraktar drones have been shot down this afternoon.
Also, 3 armoured Ukrainian amphibious assault boats carrying Ukrainian naval personnel were destroyed during an attempted landing on the night of May 8.
As a result of Zelensky's thoughtless provocation, more than 50 Ukrainian saboteurs have been killed at sea and on the coast during the landing and attempts to consolidate on the island.
24 bodies of dead Ukrainian servicemen were left on the shore of Zmeiny Island.
Context: U.S. breaking off W. Europe from EurAsia, keep it on-side, extract wealth, maintain current Western social order.
@Previous thread, 231:Sushi…who laid out a very good summary of “then: uni-polar post-WW2 world” and now “emergent multi-polar world” focused on cultural and economic dimensions. One point he made that I’d like to re-post for consideration:
[the Wests] Need[s] to move away from Fossil Fuel mechanized supply chains to electrification and low emissions supply chains. A complex and rapidly evolving area of debate but includes such things as China’s development of pedestrian centered cities linked by high speed levitated rail.
A bit more context-setting before I make the main points:
We barflies are engaging in some concern-trolling about “what will Europe do, what’s their role in West’s section of this emerging multi-polar world? Expensive energy, no eastern markets (Russia and China), systematic wealth-extraction by West’s capitalist elites…lookin’ grim”
Main points:
I suggest that our concerns about W.Europe’s welfare are a bit overblown. West Europe is very, very wealthy. Highly educated, motivated workforce, full infrastructure build-out, food self-sufficient, politically fairly stable. Yes, they have to ID a new econ role in the world that leverages these strengths, and those strengths are considerable. Yes, they have to re-cast the political relationship with the U.S.
Why would they not be able to do that? Because they’re “owned” by the U.S.? It doesn’t take long for people to forget the past, maybe even forget the present, and start asking “what have you done for me lately?”
Italy, France, Germany, Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland have full capacity to re-design their economy. They had enormous motivation already (automation .vs. middle class issues, energy dependency, climate change) and now they have way more motivation – their extant mfg’g capacity and export markets just got whacked by geopolitics. Whacked good.
Now let me bring in Sushi’s excellent point. I ask Sushi’s forbearance, as I am going to extend his point possibly a bit further than he intended. The West’s installed economic physical plant is bordering on obsolete. Energy and materials input costs are going to rise fast, and environmental crisis are going to force economies to address “externalities” (costs fobbed off onto the public via pollution, waste-streams, etc). I recognize that many barflies disclaim “environmental concerns”, but I’m not one that does. They are going to exert massive effect in short order.
Ag, transport, materials sourcing (mining, etc.) sectors are exceedingly wasteful. They also are so automated and efficient that they contribute almost nothing to employment, and less every day.
These increasing input-costs and forced attribution of “externalities” to the source will force major redesigns of economies.
Why is this relevant? Because W. Europe may well be the first Western economy to do the redesign. Their existing economic infrastructure just got a massive “write down” – it’s much less “economic” to operate than it was say… a year ago, and that condition may be a durable one.
W. Europe’s situation has changed massively. They are capable of change on all counts, and their motivation to change just increased by an order of magnitude, at least.
After war-fervor subsides, and I expect that it will in a year or two, there will be an economic reckoning, and I expect that reckoning to be an economy-design reckoning.
We can play war-games, profiteer from “defense”, and posture and blather for a while, but some aspects of economics are almost physics – realities ultimately win out. Thermodynamics (how much work-done do you actually derive from your energy use) and entropy (concentrations of materials tend to get dispersed) are starting to bite.
The West, wagons circled or not, has aged, nearly obsolete econ infrastructure. It can’t swipe Russia’s materials, and extract rents from it. The ponzi-scheme inflows (rents extracted from colonies) are coming to an end.
The West is now face-to-face with thermodynamics, entropy, and the caustic social forces of wealth concentration.
Posted by: Tom Pfotzer | May 9 2022 17:22 utc | 15
@35 njet
You apparently thinks I’m a Green Liberal that speaks lofty phrases, but can’t back up the rhetoric with concrete proposals. For the benefit of readers that don’t speak German, I provide here a (hopefully accurately) machine translation of njet’s remarks to me @35:
You would be a perfect speechwriter for the GREEN warmongers at their next party congress, Mr Pfotzner. To come up with something sworn in the direction of “innovation”, “opportunity” and “departure”, without even a concrete idea of what this new start should actually consist of. Shit, the main thing is hope. Germany will have to wait a long time for the Chinese economy to deliver yesterday’s stuff.
I’m not going to comment on the interaction between the German and Chinese economies. I’ll just focus on what the German economy (as proxy for N. Europe) may – and maybe will likely – do. The U.S. economy will delay the redesign of our economy as long as possible (via extracting wealth from “colonies”).
1. Fossil fuels. Most fossil fuels get used for electricity generation (coal) and motor transport (oil for Internal Combustion Engine “ICE”). Most air pollution is a result of ICE and coal-generated electricity. Most electricity is used for home and business HVAC, secondarily for mfg’g.
1.1 Potential (likely) solutions:
Retire ICE, replace with electric motors (simpler, much more energy efficient). Eliminate office- and retail-commute in metro areas (telework’s efficacy / desirability demonstrated during Covid). Insulate homes, upgrade HVAC equipment to latest performance level.
2. Materials. Most materials use is once-and-done. Notable exceptions are aluminum, steel, lead (easy to recover). Right now, we dig up, refine, transport, manufacture, transport-again, retail, transport-again, use at home/business, transport-again, dispose at landfill or sewer-to-estuary. Once and done.
2.1: Potential (likely) solutions: design products for re-use / reclamation. Design products to last. Re-design supply-chains for re-use, not single use. Put mfg’g (or at least matls warehouse) right next to reclamation center. Eliminate landfill, repurpose facility as reclamation / mfg’g center). Distribute manufacturing to be close to end-use-point to facilitate mat’l re-use. Economics of mfg’g has changed substantially last 40 yrs. Given advances in CAD/CAM, 3D-printing, etc. it is possible to do this and retain much mfg’g efficiency, and gain comparable-or-better full-supply-chain energy-use and mat’l sourcing efficiency.
3. Energy sourcing. Holding aside the nuclear-gen possibility – and nuke’s got a lot of merits – another alternative is solar and wind. “But it’s intermittent!”. Yes. So convert intermittent energy inputs into a fuel, store the fuel, and use the fuel to generate energy when sun/wind isn’t providing. What fuel? Methane or ammonia. Germans are great, great chem and industrial plant engineers. Use the talent. Methane (CH4)is natural gas; pipelines already in place. Ammonia (NH3) is harder to handle, but atmosphere is 80% nitrogen, plenty feedstock. Ammonia and methane fuel cells extant now, can be used to convert fuel to electricity on-demand.
OK, that’s enough to provide enormous industrial boom-times for N. Europe. It would solve, or certainly help-solve their energy-competitiveness, manufacturing, export-market (differentiated and highly desirable products, needed world-wide), and internal energy needs for the forseeable future. There’s your “concrete”.
Now, let’s hear you rebut those points. Let’s see if _you_ can do any concrete-work.
The spelling of my name is “Pfotzer”, not “Pfotzner”.
Posted by: Tom Pfotzer | May 9 2022 19:36 utc | 79
@80 Roger: Yes to all. Sometime one of us should do a quick energy-loss estimation for the supply chain of row-crops (corn, soy) thru human-food-input, or better yet thru to the point of exit at sewage treatment plant into the estuaries.
Think about how heavy fertilizer is, how heavy corn is, how far it’s transported, the efficiency of ICE (about 35%), the feed-to-food conversion of the typical beef steer (10 inputs to 1 food output), the energy input of processing, refrigeration, distribution, packaging…and then the human’s gastro-system conversion efficiency (what, maybe .2 ingestion-conversion-blood sugar or cell proteins efficiency?) and then all that gets flushed into the rivers, no NPK reclamation, just contamination.
Consider those (several!) _miserable_ efficiency coefficients: several ICE trips, each at .35, steer input-to-food production .1, some more trips – distribution and retail-to-home, human input-to-body-mass conversion efficiency of .2….it’s a wonder if our food systems end-to-end conversion is better than 2%. The numbers would be similar / slightly better for pork & chicken, a little better than that for veg and fruit, since they need less production inputs per unit output.
That conversion efficiency is really, really bad. We should be horrified at that miserable level of performance.
Think about this: this row-crop-beef/pork supply chain is _the_ core industry for N. & S. Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Illinois, Indiana, Missouri, good bit of NY, PA, Ohio, WVA, VA, N & S Carolina’s economy. Add in Ag’s supply chains (tractors, fuel, railroad, highways, trucks, fertilizer plants, Potassium and Phosphorus fertilizer)….that’s a whopping big part of our U.S. economy. All to drive a core “business process” whose end to end efficiency is _maybe_ 2 percent.
Horrific. No wonder we’re so screwed.
And that’s just one econ sector, altho I did commingle some transport / distribution aspects.
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James – thx for the head’s up re: Sushi’s gender. Sushi – sorry, I’ll try to pay better attn, it just got by me.
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Chu Teh – sounds good. Not sure how to do it, but there’s no question that there’s a whole lot of energy avail in space.
I do believe very much in the innovation and imagination capacity of humans. Not all of them, of course, or we wouldn’t have to spend our time raging about nuke wars and frittering away our environment because we’re too stupid (present company excepted, of course) to find our bottom with both hands. There is that.
I’m all for moving UN to Damascus. Then the Syrians could charge Israelis double for admission, maybe more, until the Golan / Palestine gets un-stolen back to its rightful owners.
I’m not a big fan of the We Are The Chosen People philosophy, wherever it happens to manifest.
Posted by: Tom Pfotzer | May 9 2022 21:06 utc | 96
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