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Something Amiss
There is a war happening in Europe that is, interestingly, no longer mentioned on the first two screens of the front pages of the Washington Post and the New York Times.
bigger—
bigger
The failure of the Ukrainian counter-offensive and its lack of any viable way to win the conflict seems to be sinking in.
Who wants to write or read about the huge strategic mistake the Biden administration committed when it blackmailed Ukraine as well as its other vassals, especially when the beltway gang is strongly in favor of another Biden presidency. The alternative, another round of artificially Trump-ed up chaos, seems unbearable to them.
This despite further evidence that Biden's policies and influence were always for sale, especially to foreign bidders.
That is, by the way, another scandal that is not allowed to be on the front pages the Washington 'elite' is filling for the commons' consumption.
Let’s be honest here. Even if RU had some theoretical possibility to hit on-the-move convoys from Poland to Ukraine ( it probably can’t hit moving convoys in western Ukraine), it it much more efficient to focus their recon assets in the area near and east of Dnepr, in the most likely areas where they will be stockpiled for the end use scenario, attack and defense. That is Dnepro, Zaporozhye, Kherson, Nikolaev, Kharkov, Chasov Yar, Slavyansk, etc. It is a much smaller area to cover, but it can be covered with much more density and redundancy making finding stuff more efficient.
Within the last week they hit the train with Leopard and Bradley’s in Kharkov rail junction. So why didn’t they hit the same train in Lvov? The answer is obvious.
Posted by: unimperator | Jul 21 2023 17:50 utc | 84
Absolute nonsense.
Within 6-12 hours of that decision being made, Ukraine can be left entirely without a railway system. Let’s see how they move things around after that. But there has been pretty much zero effort towards disabling the railways, which have been running perfectly fine all along.
The road crossings that trucks are using can also be disabled and then kept disabled if attempts are made to repair them. What Ukraine did with the Antonovsky bridge. That they are at the Polish, Slovakian and Romanian borders is irrelevant — RU has spent 70 years preparing for strategic strikes not just in Westenr Europe but across the globe, this is nothing in terms of distance.
If it’s too hard to do conventionally, use tactical nukes if need be. One kiloton a kilometer inside the Ukrainian border will make a very nice hole in the roads and railways that it will take a very long time to fill in and repair (and radioactivity will have to subside first, which, because this is a ground explosion and not an airburst, will take some time).
Just do it.
Because:
Strelkov and all of Wagner, and others of a similar mindset, should all be dragged off to some factory in Siberia where tanks are manufactured.
Posted by: gT | Jul 21 2023 17:58 utc | 86
Strelkov has a largely spotless predictive record over the course of the SMO. He said the initial invasion was botched within a couple weeks of it, then immediately started talking about the need for mobilization and how if it is not done right then, RU would be soon on the defensive. And RU was soon on the defensive indeed, and in a very humiliating way too.
Then he said the partial mobilization is not enough, and that was correct too.
He repeatedly criticized the senseless frontal assaults against the strongest fortifications in the Donbass, and was correct about that too.
He was also correct that the fall of Bakhmut will not be exploited the way Popasnaya was. Accurate again — RU has been losing ground around Bakhmut ever since.
The fact is that the last proper Russian advance was more than a year ago — Severodonetsk-Lisichansk. And at the time the Russian army was mostly steamrolling the Ukrainians — Severodonetsk-Lisichansk fell within a month, and those were sizable cities of 100,000 people each. After that RU lost huge territories largely without a fight and where it moves forward, advances are measured in a couple football fields a day here and there (how is it that they have been just outside Kupyansk since January and you hear they take some village once a month, then a few months later you hear they took it again, because apparently they retreated without anyone reporting on that?). Meanwhile tens of thousands Russian soldiers are dead.
What changed?
Western weaponry flooded in, that is what changed.
And Putin didn’t lift a finger to stop it.
With that inaction he is directly responsible for the deaths of all those tens of thousands of Russian soldiers, as well as for the deaths of the couple hundred thousand Ukrainians who died in that time, most of whom are also Russians. Those would have surrendered and still be alive if they had no weapons to fight with.
I am not so naive to think that he is solely responsible for that decision — there is a powerful circle of pro-Western people in the Russian elite who are the real culprits — but he is the commander-in-chief, thus he bears the ultimate responsibility for what happens and has a duty to protect the lives of Russians, both soldiers and civilians. And he is not doing that even though the technical means are in his hands. Objective fact. Either come out and take the side of the patriots in the internal struggle within Russia, or you should suffer the same fate as Nicholas II, and rightfully so.
This week is especially infuriating. Maybe we will be proven wrong and in the next 72 hours Bankova St. will be leveled, Zelensky, Danilov, and co. will be carbonized, the Rada will be destroyed, etc. But it has been 5 days since the strike on the Kerch bridge already, so it increasingly looks like it will not be responded at all. The strikes against Odessa were all pre-planned actions after the end of the grain deal. Nothing prevented strikes on Kiev in parallel — Odessa has been hit with drones, Kalibrs, some Tu-22M-launched cruise missiles, and Oniks coastal defense batteries. Meanwhile the Tu-95s and Tu-160s have been on the ground, no Iskanders from Bryansk have been launched either. So it was not an either/or situation by any means.
What the Kremlin did instead was to go after Kvachkov and Strelkov. So Banderites are free to do whatever they want in Kiev and Lvov but the Kremlin made sure Kvachkov and Strelkov are in jail? What does that look like, FFS?
Posted by: shаdowbanned | Jul 21 2023 19:04 utc | 108
Quote “Russian Intelligence Service slams MI6 chief for asking Russians to spy for London”. Then why does Russia not sabotage england from within – there must be disgruntled ele. Ents in police state of england. After all this is what English pirates do to others. Ultimately MI6 HQ and chelte ham must be bomded to kill all English spies who have been plotting wars against Russia.
But Russian’s are too lazy to do that and they only react (that too not often) to Anglos atrocities on Russian interest.
Kill that Moore bas-rd.
Posted by: Sam | Jul 21 2023 19:12 utc | 114
Kerch bridge was bombed twice, the dam was blown up, and you can be sure the UK had a major role in those. Both actions warranting a strategic nuclear strike under normal circumstances (i.e. Russian elites not being traitors).
They could have at the very least sent a truck full of explosive down the Channel Tunnel — exactly what was done with the bridge the first time — and that will cripple the UK seriously, plus it can be done with plausible deniability. But no, the lives and comfort of Western Europeans are much more valuable to the Kremlin that the lives of Russians.
Without Strelkov, Mozgovoi, etal… there would have been no DonBass..
He knows that Putin snatched defeat from the jaws of victory in 2014-2015
BECAUSE….
Putin feared economic collapse engendered by CIA/MI6/NSA/World Bank/IMF/USFED
BECAUSE…..
At that time….. the Russian economy was vulnerable…. The hypersonics were on the drawing boards…
Posted by: Dr. George W Oprisko | Jul 21 2023 19:25 utc | 119
It wasn’t really because of such considerations. Those are the retrospective excuses provided for decisions taken for other reasons.
They already got sanctioned over Crimea. Would they have been sanctioned even further if they took over the Donbass too? What is the difference? Ukraine’s territorial integrity was already violated. They could have taken over the whole country, annexed Novorussia, installed a puppet regime in the rest of the country, made it enter the Union State and cleared all the Banderites (which were a lot less powerful back then), and it is doubtful it would have resulted in much worse in terms of sanctions.
The reason it wasn’t done is that such an act would have meant an irreversible separation from the West. I keep explaining this here, but it keeps falling on dead ears because few people reading these pages have any real understanding of the internal political dynamics in Russia — Russia has been governed by traitors for 40 years now. People whose biggest dream was to be accepted as an equal part of the global oligarchic elite. In order to achieve that dream they sold out the country once in the late 1980s and broke it apart, which resulted in utter devastation of the kind almost never seen outside of the aftermath of a major war. The Great Depression in the US was a picnic in comparison. Putin was installed in 2000 because the situation had become just too degraded to be tolerable anymore, but a big part of his mission was to cement the position of that elite. The 1996 election, had it not been stolen, would have returned the communists in power, and at the very least something like the Belarussian system may have been installed (notice how there are no oligarchs in Belarus, only in Russian and the Ukraine), if not an outright return of the USSR (which is what the people wanted). The subsequent four years actually went even worse economically, plus there was the whole Chechnya mess. So you can imagine how dangerous the situation was from the perspective of the traitorous pro-Western elite. And indeed, while Putin disciplined some oligarchs, he largely left the post-Soviet elite untouched, and now nobody is demanding a return to the USSR — that option has been foreclosed on.
There is a strong patriotic elite inside Russia too, but it is a constant struggle with the pro-Western traitors and the patriots have never won that internal hidden war to this day.
Crimea was taken back in 2014 because there was no other option — it would have meant the NATO nuclear knife right at the throat of the Kremlin, so they had to act, for self-preservation sake. But now we know that even Crimea has been on the table in negotiations since then.
The SMO was started likely because a similar situation developed. We still don’t know what exactly happened, the suspicion is that it had something to do with nukes in Ukraine. But Putin very clearly didn’t want to do it. And recall his meeting with the oligarchs on the day of the invasion — how he was apologetic about there being no other option left and then reassuring them nothing will change in terms of relationships with the world. Well, that was an extremely ominous sign in retrospect regarding the future of the SMO — a lot had to change in terms of those relationships for the war to be won, and it didn’t. Commodities are still being exported to the West, and for peanuts too, even though cutting them off would totally cripple them; in the other direction come bombs, tanks and missiles. The war has been fought in this absurd self-defeating way ever since precisely because of the influence of that very powerful group of people who are dreaming about a return to the days of happy yachting around the world and regular weekend shopping in major Western cities for their mistresses.
Back in May things were looking up — serious strikes in the rear were carried out, rumors had it that Zaluzhny and Budanov had been killed, it seemed like the Kremlin was finally getting serious about the whole thing. But the last few weeks have reversed all that — the patriotic commanders in the army were all dismissed, and now they are going after the patriotic civilians dissenters too. So it very much appears that the traitors have gained up the upper hand in the internal fight. Precisely the opposite of what we were hoping for.
Meanwhile the Western dissident idiots cheering from the sidelines have no clue what is happening and are still praising the perfect wisdom and pure holiness of the Kremlin…
Posted by: shаdowbanned | Jul 21 2023 20:22 utc | 135
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