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The Buildup To War In Ukraine – Sunday, February 13, 2022
In early 2022 Ukraine had finished the preparations for an overwhelming attack on the renegade People Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk (DPR and LNR).
Half of the Ukrainian army, some 120,000 men recruited and trained during the last 7 years, were stationed near the ceasefire line and ready to go. On the opposing side only some 40,000 men were under arms. They would have little chance to withstand an onslaught.
Russia could not let a Ukrainian attack happen. If Ukraine could regain the renegade provinces it would have been able to join NATO. Russian public opinion was decisively on the side of the Russian speaking DNR and LPR. It would surely demand an intervention. Since the 2014 coup in Kiev some four million Ukrainians had already moved to Russia. There are lots of family ties between the two countries. In sight of this Russia had put some of its own forces on alert and had moved weapons and munition to assembling points near the Ukrainian border.
The U.S. had for months warned of an upcoming Russian attack on Ukraine. It could do that because it knew the Ukraine would attempt to regain the republics by force. It knew that Russia would have to respond. On January 12 2022 CIA director Bill Burns had secretly met Zelensky in Kiev. Burns often carries messages from President Joe Biden.
On Sunday February 13 2022, after a phone call with U.S. president Joe Biden, the Ukrainian president Zelensky gave the final order for the planned Ukrainian attack.
That the decision had been made was immediately leaked in London as well as in Kiev.
In its summary of the day the Guardian listed a lot of activities that were consistent with the imminent start of a conflict. Diplomats and foreign military were moving out of Ukraine. Weapons flew in.
Tipped off by its government the British insurance conglomerate Lloyd stopped reinsurance services for anything Ukraine:
Anatoliy Ivantsiv, head of Ukrainian insurance firm Expo, told Interfax that British reinsurance giant Lloyds announced it would temporarily cease all conflict risk insurance over Ukrainian airspace from Feb. 14.
When the news of the attack order leaked in Kiev, its 'elite' oligarchs and some parliament members were ready to leave. On February 13 and the following days they fled the country:
Ukraine’s richest men are fleeing the country with their families as the number of private jet charters jump after the possibility of war spiked in recent days, according to flight traffic information posted on social media on February 13.
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Switzerland, Austria and the south of France were the most popular destinations for the charter flights.
Ukrainska Pravda stated that such an exodus on charter flights hasn’t been witnessed in six years of observations. The publication reported that planes belonging the country’s top oligarchs, including Rinat Akhmetov, Viktor Pinchuk, and Boris Kolesnikov, as having left the country. A private plane for 50 people was also ordered by Igor Abramovich, another top business figure.
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bne IntelliNews sources confirm that two residential English tutors, both British citizens, working for an MP and a businessman respectively, will leave for the south of France this week. Neither confirmed that the flights had anything to do with increased fears over an invasion, as both families travel regularly with their staff for work holidays. Even last month, when the war drums began to beat more loudly for the first time, tutors and teachers working at private schools in Kyiv reported a large number of children absent, away on holidays.
Some members of the Ukrainian parliament were also bailing out. on February 14 Kiev Independent reported:
More than two dozen lawmakers out of a total 424 MPs, who are due to attend parliamentary sessions starting this week, are not currently in Ukraine. Almost half, or 12 deputies, are from the pro-Russian party Opposition Platform-for Life, five deputies are from the presidential Servant of the People party. Most of the lawmakers, or 20 people, left the country in February.
As part of the Minsk agreement the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) had a Special Observer Mission at the ceasefire line in east-Ukraine. Over the weekend of February 12 and 13 the front had been relatively quiet:
In Donetsk region, between the evenings of 11 and 13 February, the Mission recorded 261 ceasefire violations, including 50 explosions. In the previous reporting period, it recorded 114 ceasefire violations in the region.
In Luhansk region, between the evenings of 11 and 13 February, the SMM recorded 114 ceasefire violations, including 24 explosions. In the previous reporting period, it recorded 258 ceasefire violations in the region.
The observed numbers of explosion were less than the average of the last 7 and 30 day periods. Explosions occurred on both sides of the ceasefire line.
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A great article. That is a most important piece that takes all back to the key question. Why did Russia invade the Ukraine on February 24th 2022?
SMO, pre-emptive strike, invasion, call it what you will, the reason for why that happened is crucial.
It’s crucial because the war that followed is a side issue, for all the tragedy. What was necessary was that the Russians should be provoked to military action. Given that very few in the Western publics knew of preceding events, that military action, whatever form it took, could be, was, and remains portrayed as Russian aggression.
There are very few indeed among the peoples of the West who do not believe that the invasion was an unjustified attack by a powerful country on a weaker.
And most of us had the normal reaction to such an event. We reacted indignantly to that unjustified Russian attack and still do.
I call it a scam and so it was. We were scammed by our politicians and press into believing that the Russian invasion was an act of aggression. “b”‘s article above examines that scam and demonstrates that it was not such an act. In truth, and given the circumstances along the LoC, the Russians had no choice but to take military action to protect the Donbass.
Does it matter now? Whatever the rights and wrongs of it, what happened happened, and there’s nothing for us or the Ukrainians to do but live with the consequences. That early SMO has now become a bitter trial of strength between us and the Russians so why, this late in the day, examine the causes?
It does matter. For without that scam few of us in the Western publics would have backed the sanctions war. No realistic observer ever expected the military conflict with Russia to be won. That military conflict was always going to result in Ukrainian defeat. It was the sanctions war that was confidently expected to break Russia.
It hasn’t. Nor will it. It’s now time to pick up the pieces and retrieve what we can from the disaster our politicians have led us into.
I live in the UK and am I suppose the average provincial Englishman, with all the ways of looking at things that characterise my breed. Which suits me fine. But, almost by accident, in 2014/2105 and subsequently, I found myself following the events in the Donbass with close attention. So it was possible to follow the events of February 2022 with knowledge of the background. That is how I know “b’s article above is correct. Though I know none in my circle, and few in England itself it seems, who would see in that article anything but Russian apologia or propaganda.
So in that I differ from my fellows. I differ in another important respect. I have close contact with and great affection for the country I think of as my second Heimat. Germany.
English prejudices or not, I’ve wit enough to recognise that my own country plays no key role in this European disaster we are now witnessing. A lot of noise, true, but little clout. It is Germany and to a lesser extent France that occupies the key position.
It is Germany that will find itself worst hit by the blowback from the sanctions war. Worst hit, not because Germany will necessarily end up poorer than England. Worst hit because we in England have been on the path to economic failure for decades and Germany nowhere near so far along that path. Simply put, Germany will be worse hit than us because it has further to fall.
Scholz, Habeck, Baerbock, Merz. Were they in on the scam too? Or were they simply innocents towed along by Washington? I believe the former.
The Germans will not even start to extricate themselves from the position they are now in unless they start to look honestly at what their politicians did in the run up to February 24th. Of course Scholz had coalition difficulties. But he knew from the time he became Chancellor that the intention was to provoke the Russians to action, that in order to give reason to the German public for the unleashing of a sanctions war.
Part of that provocation, the most discreditable part, was the use of Ukrainian thugs wearing swastikas. Azov, Aidar, all the rest of such groups, had committed appalling atrocities in the Ukraine earlier. Had the Kiev forces got in to the Donbass there is no question of a doubt that they would have done so again. That is why Putin intervened.
I don’t see quite how the German public can come to terms with that. The distinguishing characteristic of German politics for the average German over the last many decades has been the confident assertion, “Nie Wieder!”. Will they be able to come to terms with the fact that their politicians were backing thugs wearing swastikas whose very raison d’etre was “Wieder!”
I doubt it. That is why my German friends will follow we English down.
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Note. There are one or two points above I’m not sure of. The pattern of firing across the LoC detailed above differs from that given by Baud. I believe Baud to be correct but would like that examined. I’d seen the LDNR forces put at 20,000, rapidly increased to 40 – 50,000 at or just before the start of the SMO. I believe the very start of the SMO has been insufficiently examined. That seems to have been when the Russians took the heaviest casualties. I believe it was in those first few days, too, that the fate of the Ukrainian armed forces was sealed.
I’d also hope to see the Russian attempts to get Minsk 2 implemented examined in the light of the Russian peace attempts later on in the SMO, those attempts that culminated in the failure of the Istanbul peace talks.
And a couple of things that surprised me at the time. I’m no military expert. The first was that NATO training and equipping of the Ukrainians earlier had been so much more extensive than I think most of us realised. And when one looks at the type of equipment and training given – seems mostly to have been small unit training – we can understand how it was that the Ukrainians were not only cast as our proxies. They were cast as sacrificial proxies, fit only to provoke the Russians but never to defeat them. For there was no attempt made to give the Ukrainians combined arms capability.
The other thing? Scholz’s Moscow press conference just before the start of the SMO. Seems as if he was attempting to persuade the Russians he was still aiming for Minsk 2, while knowing that was never going to happen. There’s now an attempt in Germany to cast Scholz as the hard done by moderate. Judging by that press conference he was no Washington fall guy. He was a duplicitous accomplice.
Posted by: English Outsider | Feb 14 2023 16:14 utc | 323
@ Posted by: Likklemore | Feb 17 2023 2:05 utc | 109 – Nuland outlines US goals in Ukraine: The Maidan “midwife” hopes for conquest of Crimea and regime change in Russia – RT
AND AGAIN:
In retrospect, CONSIDERING UNDISPUTABLE FACTS LIKE THIS: [https://simplicius76.substack.com/p/all-seeing-eye-can-russia-break-through%5D
“The totality of the NATO and ‘Five Eyes’ infrastructure is being utilized 24/7 as a sort of vast rear-end cloud-service and mega-processing/computational-cycle capacity for Ukraine’s frontline forces. Hundreds of satellites, including dozens of imaging ones with 5cm/pixel resolution, skim every inch and quarter of Russian territory, searching for actionable hidden targets. The data is then processed and collated by thousands of fulltime NATO/Five Eyes analysts working in distribution centers all over the world, then fed directly to the Ukrainian crews by way of Starlink and other datalinks, which Ukraine can then sub-distribute via their innovative ‘Nettle’ integrated system to feed those targets to a variety of sector artillery and other systems.”
I HAD COMMENTED NOT LONG AGO [see- Posted by: cegnovelty-esq | Feb 5 2023 21:51 utc | 104] THAT:
“…My expectation at the onset was that Russia would have finished their task in Ukraine within one month, applying the “killing the ant with a sledge hammer”, knowing that the US and its allies will mess things up for them if allowed time to mobilize and enter the conflict as they had done since…. …THE RUSSIAN LEADERSHIP MUST ACT DECISIVELY NOW TO GET THIS MONKEY OFF THEIR NECK. This grinding-it-out type of warfare (in the context of a superpower) is, to say the least, absurd and embarrassing! …And Russia seems to me, by a general assessment of its responses so far in Ukraine, to be doing more of the talk (complaining) than a decisive action to save its soul from this rampaging hegemonic war empire….”
YOU SEE, TO BE VICTORIOUS (WITHIN THE CONTEXT OF THE SHORT & LONG-TERM OBJECTIVES OF THE RUSSIAN SMO), THERE WAS A REAL NEED AT THE EARLY WEEKS OF THE SMO TO HAVE TOTALLY FINISHED-OFF THE MANPOWER/WAR-INFRASTRUCTURE OF THEIR UKRAINIAN-PROXY SUCH THAT THE NATO & ‘Five Eyes’ MASSIVE INTEL SUPPLY WOULD HAVE BEEN FORECLOSED. This Russia-Ukraine war is distinguishable from the US-Afghanistan, Iraq or even Vietnam only by the fact of being a direct cross-border war to the Russia Army. In this case therefore, massive decapitation strikes and subsequent deployment of Special Forces to capture whoever still remained the Kiev regime would have done the job swifter and at little cost to Russian military manpower and equipment. In such a scenario, Russia would have since been in total occupation of Ukraine, a strong position from which facing whatever the US-NATO throws at it thereafter (militarily/sanctions) would be strategically-convenient, so to say, (incomparable to the current situation where NATO have vast and easily accessible parts of Ukraine to “waybill” their ammunition and mercenaries for Zelensky). In fact, you recall that Western leaders like Borris Johnson had already planned for Zelensky to flee abroad to form a “government-in-exile” as early as March 2022.
How about that!
Just being retrospective!
But it did not happen that way, and even now it’s not looking like the “killer-punch” will ever be applied by Russia, eventhough it still remains an implementable option now since NATO have not yet deployed/joined the war theatre DIRECTLY. Well, for whatever reason or fear (of nuclear exchanges), I ALWAYS BELIEVE THAT THE US/NATO WILL NOT GIVE UP THEIR PROVOCATIONS BASED ON THEIR ASSESSMENT OF RUSSIA’S STATE OF MIND IN THE COURSE OF PROSECUTING THIS WAR.
Nevertheless, as an enlightened and unrepentant believer in “indivisible security” of nations, “spheres of influence” of Superpowers, multipolarism and anti-hegemony, I WILL ALWAYS SUPPORT RUSSIA’S QUEST TO EXTRICATE ITSELF FROM THE AVOWED COMMITMENT OF THE US WAR EMPIRE, i.e. “to defeat and weaken Russia such that it will not be able to exert power (militarily, economically, politically and even culturally) beyond its boarders”. IT IS A TASK EVERY NON-DELUDED, NON-HOODWINKED AND NON-USA-COMPLIANT SOVEREIGN NATION LIKE DPRK & IRAN MUST COMMIT TO DEFEND FOR THE SAKE OF POSTERITY. (Note: I have realistic reservations about China’s strong commitment to this cause holistically, regardless of the Taiwan quagmire).
I always wish the Russian Federation well in leading this fight against the evil bully called USA.
NOW GUYS, YOU CAN BEGIN YOUR NAME-CALLING FUN – Troll, or Whatever!
Remember, that’s more of the reason we always condemn the West’s MSN. My question is: Can’t we show that we are different here- accomodating other divergent, somewhat opposing but thoughtful views/comments? I suppose that we’re all in the same boat against the unipolarist-hegemony. Mutli-dimensional viewpoints do enrich every discourse. After all, without the benefit of such divergent viewpoints they receive, the political/military heads that prosecute this SMO wouldn’t be modifying their strategy/tactics from time to time.
LET’S ALWAYS SEE OTHERS’ COMMENTS WITH A CIVIL, DECOROUS & THOUGHTFUL MINDSET. HOSTILITY IN THIS REGARD IS A SELF-INHIBITING APPROACH!
Posted by: cegnovelty-esq | Feb 17 2023 18:37 utc | 349
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