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Ukraine SitRep – Zolote Cauldron Closes – Lysichansk Blocked (Corrected twice)
[Corrected (twice) below]
In the last situation report about the war in Ukraine I discussed the situation near Lysichansk.
The Ukrainian leadership is still sending new units into the Lysichansk cauldron in the east. The Russians do not mind that. Their job is to "demilitarize" Ukraine. To enclose more troops in one swoop makes that easier.
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The distance between the red Russian held area at the the top to the one at the bottom at the most narrow gap is a mere 15 kilometer or some 9 miles. There is only one open road running through it from west to east which is used for pushing resupplies to the Ukrainian troops in Lysichansk.
The map has since changed significantly:
Jun 16
Source: LiveUAmap – bigger
What developed was first a smaller cauldron around Zolote at the bottom of the map.
Jun 18
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This was a classic move done by the book.
Jun 20
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Then a battalion of Ukrainian troops that was supposed to hold the villages in the upper area of the pocket retreated. Some say they were ordered to leave, others claim they mutinited. The later is more likely as these were amateur infantry from the Territorial Defense Forces who, without sufficient support, had been send to replace better troops that were ordered back.
Jun 22
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The Russians on the eastern wing moved west to take 5 villages in one day along the pocket's northern border.
Jun 24
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That put the lid onto the cauldron which immediately began to cook the estimated 2,000 Ukrainian soldiers who were inside.
The above maps are quite rough. A more detailed one from the Russian side shows that several towns within the Zolote cauldron have not yet been cleared.
Jun 24
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In today's report the Russian Defense Ministry claims:
Successful offensive of Russian units towards Lugansk within 5 days has resulted in the liberation of Loskutovka, Podlesnoye, Mirnaya Dolina, Shchebkaryer, Vrubovka, Nyrkovo, Nikiolayevka, Novoivanovka, Ustinovka and Ray-Aleksandrovka.
Group of Ukrainian units has been completely isolated near Gorskoye and Zolotoye.
This pocket has encircled four battalions: 3rd Mechanised Battalion of 24th Mechanised Brigade, 15th Mountain Assault Battalion of 128th Mountain Assault Brigade, 42nd Mechanised Infantry Battalion of 57th Mechanised Infantry Brigade, 70th Battalion of 101st Territorial Defence Brigade, as well as an artillery group of 57th Mechanised Infantry Brigade, a group of Nazis from Right Sector organisation and a detachment of foreign mercenaries.
In total, the Gorskoye pocket has isolated up to 2 thousand people: about 1,800 servicemen, 120 Nazis from Right Sector, up to 80 foreign mercenaries, as well as over 40 armoured combat vehicles and about 80 guns and mortars.
41 servicemen abandoned their resistance and surrendered voluntarily just over the past 24 hours.
According to the prisoners, the encircled Ukrainian units are exhausted. The units are currently manned by less than 40%. Higher Ukrainian command has lost control over these units. Armament, munitions, fuel and other logistic supply is completely stopped.
Russian troops are straitening the Gorskoye encirclement by launching uninterrupted attacks at the enemy. Half of Zolotoye had been taken under control over yesterday.
Since this morning some 600 have additionally surrendered. The others will likely follow later today or tomorrow.
Also this morning the Ukrainian deputy commander for Luhansk province announced that the soldiers and foreign mercenaries who held out in the industrial area of Sevierodonetzk east of Lysichansk were told to retreat to Lysichansk. In fact a full retreat from Lysichansk further west seemed to be likely.
But that was no longer really possible for the 10-15,000 soldiers in and around the city as a bridge on the single road that leads to the west has been dropped overnight onto the railway tracks below.
Correction (19:00 utc) This sections was wrong and has been corrected. A bridge was bombed to cut the escape route from Lysichansk but it was a different one than I first wrote. That does not change the conclusion
Bridge marked in red – This map is of a different bridge.
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This map is of the bridge that was actually destroyed. It is at the north-west of the Lysichansk refinery I discussed in the previous situation report.
Bridge marked in red
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A Russian helicopter performed that mission and it now seems that there was a bigger landing of airborne troops west of the refinery.
Here is how the bridge is now said to be looking. Correction (17:30 utc): The picture does not show the bridge on the map.
Correction (19:00 utc) The picture is of the destroyed bridge but it was geo-located wrongly. But that the bridge on the map is now damaged was reported by a source that is usually correct. I still assume that it is in fact so. Again the map was wrong, not the picture of the bridge.
Sorry for this 'fog of war' confusion. The tactical effects of the incident mentioned below stays the same. [end of both corrections]
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There are still side roads and dirt tracks that can be used but the whole area west of Luhansk is under Russian fire control. The long convoy that would be needed for a retreat can not pass without being severely molested.
The big Lysichansk cauldron has thereby also been closed. Despite the still necessary cleanup of the city and two or three small villages one can state that the former Ukrainian province Luhansk, now the Luhansk People's Republic, has been liberated from Ukraine.
On the Russian side some 30-40 Battalion Tactical Groups (BTG) have been involved in the whole operation. Most of them can now resupply and rest to later be used elsewhere.
@bevin
I went onto an old revisionist site (ihr) and found a little, but their emphasis is on German/WWII revisionism.
I found nothing resembling what I seem to remember reading a long time ago, certainly not about the gold. But two items did come up. The first is a mention of what Solzenitsyn said:
“Another major political phenomenon of the present time for which explanation and elucidation must be sought in the past is a massive Jewish exodus from the Soviet Union — a sharp reversal of the trend in 1917 and the years immediately following, when Jews from all over the Western world were streaming into Russia.
“Antisemitism is forcing the biggest exodus in 500 years,” cries a headline in the London Financial Times. According to Nathan Shcharansky, a much-publicized Soviet dissident now living in the West, Jewish families have been applying for permits to leave the Soviet Union at a rate of 2000 a day and the queue of would-be emigrants could be as long as one million. Other Jewish spokesmen have put the figure at anything between two million and four million.
There is no mystery about their reasons for wanting to leave; the Jews are being blamed for the Revolution and for the population massacres that followed.
Shcharansky said in an interview with the London Times:
This is something quite different from the street-level antisemitism of the past For the first time the Russian people have realized what an awful history they have had. It is no longer Solzhenitsyn saying there were 60 million victims of state terror; now conservative Soviet historians are estimating 40 million. So the Russians have found that it was their regime that destroyed all the cultural institutions, all the moral values, and every day they see it discussed on television, and their historians tell them, and new graves are discovered. And, of course, they remember who was Karl Marx, and someone is saying that the grandfather of Lenin was Jewish… It is mother nature that the scapegoat becomes the Jew.
What Shcharansky and other Jewish leaders find most disturbing about the new antisemitism, “no longer just street- level,” is the fact that it is to be found in intellectual circles. Here, he says, it takes the form of a debate around the question of Jewish responsibility for the years of Bolshevism.”
Now I included the context of the main paragraph of interest, namely the one mentioning the sixty and forty million figure. I really do believe that Solz. is a credible figure. Do you? Or is he a disinformation person in your opinion?
The second item was about money. This article mentions the 20 millions from Schiff: https://themillenniumreport.com/2018/07/the-nyc-and-london-banker-who-financed-the-bolshevik-revolution/
“In the February 3, 1949 issue of the New York Journal American Schiff’s grandson, John, was quoted by columnist Cholly Knickerbocker as saying that his grandfather had given about $20 million for the triumph of Communism in Russia. (To appraise Schiff’s motives for supporting the Bolsheviks, we must remember, that he was a Jew and that Russian Jews had been persecuted under the Tsarist regime. Consequently the Jewish community in America was inclined to support any movement, which sought to topple the Russian government and the Bolsheviks were excellent candidates for the task. As we shall see further along, however, there were also strong financial incentives for Wall Street firms, such as Kuhn, Loeb and Company, of which Schiff was a senior partner, to see the old regime fall into the hands of revolutionaries, who would agree to grant lucrative business concessions in the future in return for financial support today.)
When Trotsky returned to Petrograd in May of 1917 to organize the Bolshevik phase of the Russian Revolution, he carried $10,000 for travel expenses, a generously ample fund considering bthe value of the dollar at that time. Trotsky was arrested by Canadian and British naval personnel, when the ship, on which he was traveling, the S.S. Kristianiafjord, put in at Halifax. The money in his possession is now a matter of official record. The source of that money has been the focus of much speculation, but the evidence strongly suggests, that its origin was the German government. It was a sound investment.
Trotsky was not arrested on a whim. He was recognized as a threat to the best interests of England, Canada’s mother country in the British Commonwealth. Russia was an ally of England in the First World War, which then was raging in Europe. Anything, that would weaken Russia – and that certainly included internal revolution – would be, in effect, to strengthen Germany and weaken England. In New York on the night before his departure Trotsky had given a speech, in which he said: “I am going back to Russia to overthrow the provisional government and stop the war with Germany.” (A full report on this meeting had been submitted to the U.S. Military Intelligence. See Senate Document No. 62, 66th Congress, Report and Hearings of the Subcommittee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, 1919, Vol. II, p. 2680.) Trotsky therefore represented a real threat to England’s war effort. He was arrested as a German agent and taken as a prisoner of war.
With this in mind we can appreciate the great strength of those mysterious forces both in England and the United States, that intervened on Trotsky’s behalf. Immediately telegrams began to come into Halifax from such divergent sources, as an obscure attorney in New York City, from the Canadian Deputy Postmaster-General and even from a high-ranking British military officer, all inquiring into Trotsky’s situation and urging his immediate release. The head of the British Secret Service in America at the time was Sir William Wiseman, who, as fate would have it, occupied the apartment directly above the apartment of Edward Mandell House and who had become fast friends with him. House advised Wiseman, that President Wilson wished to have Trotsky released. Wiseman advised his government and the British Admiralty issued orders on April 21st, that Trotsky was to be sent on his way. (“Why Did We Let Trotsky Go? How Canada Lost an Opportunity to Shorten the War”, MacLeans magazine, Canada, June 1919. Also see Martin, pp. 163-164.) It was a fateful deecision, that would affect not only the outcome of the war, but the future of the entire world.
It would be a mistake to conclude, that Jacob Schiff and Germany were the only players in this drama. Trotsky could not have gone even as far as Halifax without having been granted an American passport and this was accomplished by the personal intervention of President Wilson. Professor Antony Sutton says:
President Woodrow Wilson was the fairy godmother, who provided Trotsky with a passport to return to Russia to “carry forward” the revolution… At the same time careful State Department bureaucrats, concerned about such revolutionaries entering Russia, were unilaterally attempting to tighten up passport procedures. (Antony C. Sutton, Ph. D.: Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution, published by Arlington House in New Rochelle, NY, 1974, p. 25)
And there were others, as well….”
So this shows the truly extraordinary level of support from very different sources, hardly any of whom cared a fig for communism, rather were bent on collapsing Russia.
I suspect the same thing is going on today: Ukraine is not about Ukraine or Donbass per se, rather it is being used as pretext for collapsing Western societies, much of it being coordinated, as in 1917 era, by seemingly disparate networks who are ostensibly on opposing sides. The more things change…..
This article goes into millions of Marks from Germany going into the Bolshevik coffers:
“Meanwhile, in 1921, in the democratic Weimar Republic the renowned social democrat Eduard Bernstein published in his party’s central organ Vorwaerts an article headed “A Shady Story.” In it, he related that as far back as December 1917, he received an affirmative answer from “a certain competent person” to the question of whether Germany had given money to Lenin.
According to his data, the Bolsheviks alone were paid more than 50 million German marks in gold. Later, this sum was officially mentioned during the session of the Reichstags committee on foreign policy. Responding to the accusations of libel from the communist press, Bernstein suggested that they sue him, after which the campaign instantly stopped.
As Germany was in a bad need of friendly relations with Soviet Russia, the discussion of this topic in the press ended abruptly.
Aleksander Kerensky, one of the Bolshevik’s chief political opponents, deduced from his own investigation of the case, that the sums received by the Bolsheviks before and after coming to power totaled 80 million German marks in gold (the equivalent of the present-day hundreds of millions, if not billions, hryvnias).
As a matter of fact, Ulianov-Lenin never even tried to conceal this from his party colleagues. Thus, in November, 1918, at the meeting of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee (a Bolshevist quasi-parliament), the Bolshevik leader said: “I am often accused of having carried out our revolution with German money; I do not deny it, but instead, with the Russian money, I’m going to carry out the same revolution in Germany.”
And he tried to do so, throwing away tens of millions of roubles. However, he failed: the German social democrats, unlike their Russian counterparts, saw which way the wind was blowing and managed to arrange for a timely assassination of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. This was followed by the disarmament of the “red guards” and physical extermination of their leaders.”
( Article: https://day.kyiv.ua/en/article/history-and-i/lenin-money-revolution )
Now I understand these snippets don’t constitute definitive proof of anything and I only searched for a few minutes. In reading through this material I remembered why I didn’t go further years ago. (I also never studied WWI in depth for the same reason.) It’s because to do the subject matter justice clearly I would need to spend at least a year if not much more. I do not wish to do that for personal reasons so prefer to remain ignorant of huge swathes of detail.
That said, I think some things are generally true, though admit I might be the victim of slick misinformation (for that is always the case with historical information no matter how respectable or widely read the source, let alone the controversial and not widely read ones). Namely:
The Russian revolution was funded by powerful western interests in both US, UK and Germany even though UK and Germany were at war.
After the revolution and during several different phases a huge bloodbath ensued involving the murder of dozens of millions, most of whom were Christian Russians and many of the organizers of the terror waves were Jewish.
And one point I have been making which some here feel is incorrect but I will say it again: this widespread takedown of a powerful nation which according to some accounts was the richest in Europe at the time, involving extreme mass murder of millions did not go unnoticed in Europe even if our histories today make little mention of it. Nationalism was in part a response to the threat of communism which openly wished to overthrow all monarchies, private property, religion and hereditary wealth, title and status. No doubt many approved of such goals, but I doubt many approved of butchery. So this is not meant to be a huge point or to make excuses for any excesses the later fascist regimes may have perpetrated but it does suggest that such things didn’t arise willy nilly or were the product of genetically caused racial hatreds and other silly self-serving theories. No, enmity was earned.
In sum, there was a concerted effort to collapse many different polities at once in the WWI – WW II period. The same thing seems to be happening now under cover of a kinetic war.
Second: tens of millions were murdered. Let’s hope the same thing is not in the cards, but with biowarfare against civilian populations in the mix these days, that possibility clearly exists, except now maybe billions not tens of millions. There is also the possibility of nuclear war. China has been practicing mass lock downs, maybe against covid, maybe for another reason.
Third, we must not be trapped or fooled by old stories, rather learn from them so as not to repeat the same mass
formation group psychosis which creates hell. We can and must find a way to do better. The problem of course is you can go back and back with enmity to the Chapter of Genesis. So ideally a new way forward must be found in which such ancient hatreds are not foundational. Most of us don’t feel any hatred for anyone, however all of us can be persuaded into it by skillful propagandists.
I am sorry I couldn’t find anything about the gold. Maybe it was a false story, but I just cannot remember the source. I saved many articles and online books but had a hard disk accident a few years ago and lost it all and now it’s much harder to find such materials plus I am now loth to try. I really don’t enjoy the subject matter. Indeed, will try to avoid raising it here any more. We are all entitled to our various opinions and since mine are not rock solid certain about these vast topics, there is no real need to keep chipping in with them.
All best..
Posted by: Scorpion | Jun 26 2022 3:51 utc | 338
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