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Ukraine SitRep – Avdiivka
Bakhmut is encircled. All roads in and out of it are under Russian artillery fire. Over the last three days fighting has largely stopped there. No one seems to know why the operation was halted.
There are unconfirmed claims that Ukraine is preparing a counterattack to free Bakhmut from its encirclement. That attack is supposed to go off as soon as the muddy ground has dried up a bit.
Meanwhile other encirclement has taken place in Avdiivka:
Avdiivka (Ukrainian: Авдіївка, IPA: [ɐu̯ˈd(j)ijiu̯kɐ]; is a city of regional significance in Donetsk Oblast, Ukraine. The city is located in the center of the oblast, just north of the city of Donetsk. The large Avdiivka Coke Plant is located in Avdiivka. The city had a pre-war population of 31,392 (2022 est.); in August 2022, its population was estimated at 2,500.
Avdiivka was within the claimed boundaries of the separatist Donetsk People's Republic, before Russia declared its annexation of the entire region in September 2022. During the war in Donbas, Avdiivka became a frontline city and saw a battle in 2017. During the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, heavy fighting led to Avdiivka being largely destroyed and most of its population having fled.
March 8, 2023
Source: LiveUAmap – bigger
Avdiivka is strongly fortified. Its coke plant is a strong-point. The Ukrainian army used the city to lob artillery into Donetsk city. But attempts to seize it were largely unsuccessful.
Two week ago the situation suddenly changed. The Russian airforce started to bomb Avdiivka with heavy glide bombs. At the same time an operations was launched to envelope the city from two directions.
March 21, 2023
Source: LiveUAmap – bigger
An east to west move north of Avdiivka cut the rail access to the city. Russian forces crossed the railroad and moved further west. Fighting is currently ongoing in Berdychi. South of Berdychi is Orlovka, a road crossing point (O0542, C015801, C015802) that is for now the only real supply route left for Avdiivka.
In the southwest of Avdiivka the Russian forces moved northward. They are currently trying to capture Siverne. The first progress there was stopped when on March 12 the Ukrainian 36th Marine Brigade was placed in the area.
Source: Military Land – bigger
Armed reconnaissance has also taken place into the southwest area of Avdiivka city which is made up of high rises.
The distance between the Russian positions in the southwest and in the northwest of Avdiivka is 8 kilometer (5 miles). That is sufficiently narrow for Russian artillery to interdict road traffic that goes through the area in between.
The landscape around Avdiivka is mostly featureless. There are a few slag hills that rise about 50 meter above their surrounding flatland. But they can be easily covered by artillery and are thus not really helpful for either side.
Source: Ukraine Topographic Map – bigger
This is now the second Ukrainian held area on the Donetsk front that is in operational encirclement. In both areas the Russian follow Sun Tzu's advice to not completely close off an encirclement but to leave a route out. This prevents fanatical defenses by encircled troops or it may even lead the enemy to push more forces into a hopeless position.
If the Ukrainian military had plans to relieve Bakhmut with a counterattack it now has to think of the additional problem that the encirclement of Avdiivka brings. Should it start there? Should it split the forces it had accumulated and planned to use for the counterattack in Bakhmut and start a parallel one in Avdiivka? Should it give up on one or both cities? Those are difficult decisions.
I find it likely that the Russian attacks on Bakhmut were halted after the Avdiivka development succeeded to give the Ukraine military enough time to make an error.
Time is on Russia's side while the Ukrainian military needs to show action and success to keep its 'western' support going.
@joey_n | March 22, 2023 at 09:02
First as Home Secretary from Feb 1910 – Oct 1911, and then as First Lord of the Admiralty from Oct 1911 – May 1915 Churchill bore a massive responsibility for converting the Entente Cordial into an alliance with France against Germany and Britain from a power friendly with Germany and aloof from the alliances of Europe into
a probable enemy should war come.
“Grey and Churchill believed that if France was attacked, Britain must fight. But Britain had no treaty alliance with France. Indeed, why had Britain remained outside the Franco-Russian alliance if not to retain her freedom of action? Gladstone had stayed out of the Franco-Prussian war, and the Liberals wanted Asquith to stay out of
this war. Of eighteen ministers who had participated in the Cabinet meeting on Saturday, August 1, twelve opposed war. A Liberal caucus in the House had voted 4–1 for neutrality. The Manchester Guardian spoke of “an organised conspiracy to drag us into war.”
The editor of the Times, however, could not disguise his disgust:
Saturday was a black day for everyone who knew what was going on—more than half the Cabinet rotten and every prospect of a complete schism or a disastrous or dishonouring refusal to help France. . . .
Winston has really done more than anyone else to save the situation.
Seven Cabinet members were ready to resign rather than go to war. “The Cabinet was absolutely against war and would never have
agreed to being committed to war at this moment,” wrote Churchill. Those favoring Britain’s going to war, should it come,
were Grey and Churchill, who had made commitments to France. But only the First Lord relished the prospect. On July 25, when it appeared that Grey’s call for a conference of ambassadors to halt the
slide to war might succeed, Churchill “exclaimed moodily that it looked after all as if we were in for a ‘bloody peace.’ ”
“Churchill was the only Minister to feel any sense of exultation at the course of events,” writes biographer John Charmley. On July 28, he had written his wife Clementine: “My darling one & beautiful:
Everything tends toward catastrophe & collapse. I am interested, geared up and happy. Is it not horrible to be built like that?”
That same day, the Kaiser was desperately trying to avert the war to which Churchill looked forward with anticipation. . .
By 1911, he [Hermit: Churchill] was First Lord and the most forceful advocate in the Cabinet for Britain’s immediate
entry into any Franco-German war.
With the cabinet dithering, “The First Lord took the lead. “Winston very bellicose and demanding immediate mobilization,” wrote Asquith, “occupied at least half the time.” . . . “The Cabinet sat almost continuously throughout Sunday [August 2],” wrote Asquith’s daughter Violet. “When they broke up for an interval at luncheon time all those I saw looked racked with anxiety and some stricken with grief. Winston alone was buoyant.” . . . “The key figure was Lloyd George, and Churchill played a major role in winning his support for a declaration of war,” writes Charmley. As Lloyd George vacillated, Churchill pressed him to take his stand on the issue of Belgium’s neutrality. Churchill knew public opinion would swing around to war when the Germans invaded Belgium, as they must. He believed that Lloyd George would swing with it. Churchill knew his man. . . . If the nation was going to fight, he [Hermit: Lloyd George] would stand with the nation. For Lloyd George knew that if he did not, his position as heir apparent to leadership of the Liberal Party, a position he had spent
twenty-five years building, would be lost, probably to his young rival,the First Lord. Lloyd George might then end his brilliant career as a backbencher in a Liberal Party led by Winston Churchill. . . .
After Churchill wrote a note to Lloyd George in Cabinet to “bring your mighty aid to the discharge of our duty,” the Chancellor at the August 1 Cabinet meeting, shoved a note back across the table to the First Lord: “If you do not press us too hard tonight, we might come together.” . . . “[I]f Germany had not violated Belgian neutrality in 1914,
Britain would have,” writes Niall Ferguson. “This puts the British
government’s much-vaunted moral superiority in fighting ‘for
Belgian neutrality’ in another light.” The German invasion of
Belgium enabled the British war party to put a high moral gloss
on a war they had already decided to fight for reasons of realpolitik.
As early as 1911, during the second Moroccan crisis, Churchill
had confided to Lloyd George his real reason for committing himself morally and secretly to bringing Britain into any Franco- It is not for Morocco, nor indeed for Belgium, that I would take part in this terrible business. One cause alone should
justify our participation—to prevent France from being trampled down & looted by the Prussian junkers—a disaster ruinous to the world, & swiftly fatal to our country. . .
At 11 P.M., August 4, as the ultimatum expired and the moment came when Britain was at war, a tearful Margot Asquith left her husband to go to bed, and as she began to ascend the stairs, “I saw Winston Churchill with a happy face striding towards the double doors of the Cabinet room.”
Lloyd George was sitting within with his disconsolate prime minister when, as he later told a friend:
Winston dashed into the room, radiant, his face bright, his.manner keen, one word pouring out after another how he was going to send telegrams to the Mediterranean, the
North Sea, and God knows where. You could see he was a really happy man.
Churchill was exhilarated. Six months later, after the first Battle of Ypres, with tens of thousands of British soldiers in their graves, he would say to Violet Asquith, “I think a curse should rest on m — because I am so happy. I know this war is smashing and shattering the lives of thousands every moment and yet — I cannot help it — I enjoy every second.”
Said Sir Maurice Hankey, “Churchill was a man of a totally different type from all his colleagues. He had a real zest for war. If war there must needs be, he at least could enjoy it.”
A year earlier, in his book Pillars of Society, A. G. Gardiner had written prophetically of the young First Lord:
He sees himself moving through the smoke of battle — triumphant, terrible, his brow clothed with thunder, his legions looking to him for victory, and not looking in vain. He thinks of Napoleon; he thinks of his great ancestor. Thus did they bear themselves; thus, in this rugged and most awful crisis, will he bear himself. It is not make-believe, it is not insincerity; it is that in that fervid and picturesque imagination there are always great deeds afoot with himself cast by destiny in the Agamemnon role. . . . He will write his name big in the future. Let us take care he does not write it in blood.
All quotations above from Buchanan Patrick J. (2008-05). Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World. Crown. A book which relies on recently declassified archival material to cut through the propaganda and reinterpret what we know about WW II.
Posted by: Hermit | Mar 22 2023 22:54 utc | 343
Interesting article on DU from years ago. Note the author, sonar21.
Iraqi Cancers, Birth Eefects Blamed on U.S. Depleted Uranium
BY LARRY JOHNSON
Seattle Post-Intelligencer Foreign Desk Editor
Back to Alternative Reader Index
Southern Demilitarized Zone, Iraq — On the “Highway of Death,” 11 miles north of the Kuwait border, a collection of tanks, armored personnel carriers and other military vehicles are rusting in the desert.
They also are radiating nuclear energy.
In 1991, the United States and its Persian Gulf War allies blasted the vehicles with armor-piercing shells made of depleted uranium — the first time such weapons had been used in warfare — as the Iraqis retreated from Kuwait. The devastating results gave the highway its name.
Today, nearly 12 years after the use of the super-tough weapons was credited with bringing the war to a swift conclusion, the battlefield remains a radioactive toxic wasteland — and depleted uranium munitions remain a mystery.
Although the Pentagon has sent mixed signals about the effects of depleted uranium, Iraqi doctors believe that it is responsible for a significant increase in cancer and birth defects in the region. Many researchers outside Iraq, and several U.S. veterans organizations, agree; they also suspect depleted uranium of playing a role in Gulf War Syndrome, the still-unexplained malady that has plagued hundreds of thousands of Gulf War veterans.
Depleted uranium is a problem in other former war zones as well. Yesterday, U.N. experts said they found radioactive hot spots in Bosnia resulting from the use of depleted uranium during NATO air strikes in 1995.
With another war in Iraq perhaps imminent, scientists and others are concerned that the side effects of depleted uranium munitions — still a major part of the U.S. arsenal — will cause serious illnesses or deaths in a new generation of U.S. soldiers as well as Iraqis.
The dangers
Depleted uranium, known as DU, is a highly dense metal that is the byproduct of the process during which fissionable uranium used to manufacture nuclear bombs and reactor fuel is separated from natural uranium. DU remains radioactive for about 4.5 billion years.
Uranium, a weakly radioactive element, occurs naturally in soil and water everywhere on Earth, but mainly in trace quantities. Humans ingest it daily in minute quantities.
DU shell holes in the vehicles along the Highway of Death are 1,000 times more radioactive than background radiation, according to Geiger counter readings done for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer by Dr. Khajak Vartaanian, a nuclear medicine expert from the Iraq Department of Radiation Protection in Basra, and Col. Amal Kassim of the Iraqi navy.
The desert around the vehicles was 100 times more radioactive than background radiation; Basra, a city of 1 million people, some 125 miles away, registered only slightly above background radiation level.
But the radioactivity is only one concern about DU munitions.
A second, potentially more serious hazard is created when a DU round hits its target. As much as 70 percent of the projectile can burn up on impact, creating a firestorm of ceramic DU oxide particles. The residue of this firestorm is an extremely fine ceramic uranium dust that can be spread by the wind, inhaled and absorbed into the human body and absorbed by plants and animals, becoming part of the food chain.
Once lodged in the soil, the munitions can pollute the environment and create up to a hundredfold increase in uranium levels in ground water, according to the U.N. Environmental Program.
Studies show it can remain in human organs for years.
The U.S. Army acknowledges the hazards in a training manual, in which it requires that anyone who comes within 25 meters of any DU-contaminated equipment or terrain wear respiratory and skin protection, and states that “contamination will make food and water unsafe for consumption.”
Just six months before the Gulf War, the Army released a report on DU predicting that large amounts of DU dust could be inhaled by soldiers and civilians during and after combat.
Infantry were identified as potentially receiving the highest exposures, and the expected health outcomes included cancers and kidney problems.
The report also warned that public knowledge of the health and environmental effects of depleted uranium could lead to efforts to ban DU munitions.
But today the Pentagon plays down the effects. Officials refer queries on DU munitions to the latest government report on the subject, last updated on Dec. 13, 2000, which said DU is “40 percent less radioactive than natural uranium.”
The report also said, “Gulf War exposures to depleted uranium (DU) have not to date produced any observable adverse health effects attributable to DU’s chemical toxicity or low-level radiation. . . .”
In response to written queries, the Defense Department said, “The U.S. Military Services use DU munitions because of DU’s superior lethality against armor and other hard targets.”
It said DU munitions are “war reserve munitions; that is, used for combat and not fired for training purposes,” with the exception that DU munitions may be fired at sea for weapon calibration purposes.
In addition to Iraq and Bosnia, DU munitions were used in Kosovo and Serbia in 1999.
Also in 1999, a United Nations subcommission considered DU hazardous enough to call for an initiative banning its use worldwide. The initiative has remained in committee, blocked primarily by the United States, according to Karen Parker, a lawyer with the International Educational Development/Humanitarian Law Project, which has consultative status at the United Nations.
Parker, who first raised the DU issue in the United Nations in 1996, contends that DU “violates the existing law and customs of war.”
She said there are four rules derived from all of humanitarian law regarding weapons:
Weapons may only be used in the legal field of battle, defined as legal military targets of the enemy in war.
Weapons may not have an adverse effect off the legal field of battle.
Weapons can only be used for the duration of an armed conflict. A weapon that is used or continues to act after the war is over violates this criterion.
Weapons may not be unduly inhumane.
Weapons may not have an unduly negative effect on the natural environment.
“Depleted uranium fails all four of these rules,” Parker said last week.
On Oct. 17, 2001, Rep. Cynthia McKinney, D-Ga., introduced a bill calling for “the suspension of the use, sale, development, production, testing, and export of depleted uranium munitions pending the outcome of certain studies of the health effects of such munitions. . . .”
More than a year later, the bill — co-sponsored by Reps. Anibal Acevedo-Vila, Puerto Rico; Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis.; Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio; Barbara Lee, D-Ca.; and Jim McDermott, D-Wash. — remains in committee awaiting comment from the Defense Department.
The studies
Gulf War veterans faced a wide array of potentially toxic materials during the war: smoke from oil and chemical fires, insecticides, pesticides, vaccinations and DU.
Of the 696,778 troops who served during the recognized conflict phase (1990-1991) of the Gulf War, at least 20,6861 have applied for VA medical benefits. As of May 2002, 159,238 veterans have been awarded service-connected disability by the Department of Veterans Affairs for health effects collectively known as the Gulf War Syndrome.
There have been many studies on Gulf War Syndrome over the years, as well as on possible long-term health hazards of DU munitions. Most have been inconclusive. But some researchers said the previous studies on DU, conducted by groups and agencies ranging from the World Health Organization to the Rand Corp. to the investigative arm of Congress, weren’t looking in the right place — at the effects of inhaled DU.
Dr. Asaf Durakovic, director of the private, non-profit Uranium Medical Research Centre in Canada and the United States, and center research associates Patricia Horan and Leonard Dietz, published a unique study in the August issue of Military Medicine medical journal.
The study is believed to be the first to look at inhaled DU among Gulf War veterans, using the ultrasensitive technique of thermal ionization mass spectrometry, which enabled them to easily distinguish between natural uranium and DU.
The study, which examined British, Canadian and U.S. veterans, all suffering typical Gulf War Syndrome ailments, found that, nine years after the war, 14 of 27 veterans studied had DU in their urine. DU also was found in the lung and bone of a deceased Gulf War veteran.
That no governmental study has been done on inhaled DU “amounts to a massive malpractice,” Dietz said in an interview last week.
The activist
Dr. Doug Rokke was an Army health physicist assigned in 1991 to the command staff of the 12th Preventive Medicine Command and 3rd U.S. Army Medical Command headquarters. Rokke was recalled to active duty 20 years after serving in Vietnam, from his research job with the University of Illinois Physics Department, and sent to the Gulf to take charge of the DU cleanup operation.
Today, in poor health, he has become an outspoken opponent of the use of DU munitions.
“DU is the stuff of nightmares,” said Rokke, who said he has reactive airway disease, neurological damage, cataracts and kidney problems, and receives a 40 percent disability payment from the government. He blames his health problems on exposure to DU.
Rokke and his primary team of about 100 performed their cleanup task without any specialized training or protective gear. Today, Rokke said, at least 30 members of the team are dead, and most of the others — including Rokke — have serious health problems.
Rokke said: “Verified adverse health effects from personal experience, physicians and from personal reports from individuals with known DU exposures include reactive airway disease, neurological abnormalities, kidney stones and chronic kidney pain, rashes, vision degradation and night vision losses, lymphoma, various forms of skin and organ cancer, neuropsychological disorders, uranium in semen, sexual dysfunction and birth defects in offspring.
“This whole thing is a crime against God and humanity.”
Speaking from his home in Rantoul, Ill., where he works as a substitute high school science teacher, Rokke said, “When we went to the Gulf, we were all really healthy, and we got trashed.”
Rokke, an Army Reserve major who describes himself as “a patriot to the right of Rush Limbaugh,” said hearing the latest Pentagon statements on DU is especially frustrating now that another war against Iraq appears likely.
“Since 1991, numerous U.S. Department of Defense reports have said that the consequences of DU were unknown,” Rokke said. “That is a lie. We warned them in 1991 after the Gulf War, but because of liability issues, they continue to ignore the problem.” Rokke worked until 1996 for the military, developing DU training and management procedures. The procedures were ignored, he said.
“Their arrogance is beyond comprehension,” he said. “We have spread radioactive waste all over the place and refused medical treatment to people . . . it’s all arrogance.
“DU is a snapshot of technology gone crazy.”
Birth defects in Iraq
At the Saddam Teaching Hospital in Basra, Dr. Jawad Al-Ali, a British-trained oncologist, displays, in four gaily colored photo albums, what he says are actual snapshots of the nightmares.
The photos represent the surge in birth defects — in 1989 there were 11 per 100,000 births; in 2001 there were 116 per 100,000 births — that even before they heard about DU, had doctors in southern Iraq making comparisons to the birth defects that followed the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in WWII.
There were photos of infants born without brains, with their internal organs outside their bodies, without sexual organs, without spines, and the list of deformities went on and on. There also were photos of cancer patients.
Cancer has increased dramatically in southern Iraq. In 1988, 34 people died of cancer; in 1998, 450 died of cancer; in 2001 there were 603 cancer deaths.
On a tour of one ward of the hospital, doctors pointed out boys and girls who were suffering from leukemia. Most of the children die, the doctors said, because there are insufficient drugs available for their treatment.
There was one notable exception, a young boy whose family was able to buy the expensive drugs on the black market.
Al-Ali said it defies logic to absolve DU of blame when veterans of the Gulf War and of the fighting in the Balkans share common illnesses with children in southern Iraq.
“The cause of all of these cancers and deformities remains theoretical because we can’t confirm the presence of uranium in tissue or urine with the equipment we have,” said Al-Ali. “And because of the sanctions, we can’t get the equipment we need.”
Posted by: First Time Poster | Mar 22 2023 23:51 utc | 345
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