In response to Eighthman@300,
Zaluzhny is no less a puppet than Zelensky, his opinions are taken under advisement — not followed to the letter. I’m sure you’ve read sufficient articles by now about Zaluzhny’s concerns being ignored by all sides; both public officials as well as battlefield commanders lower than Zaluzhny in the military hierarchy.
The real decision makers, not counting foreign advisors who are capable of applying enough pressure in some cases to influence specific decisions, are militant ideologues who formally only act in an advisory capacity to official government structures and are not themselves public figures, and the grunts who work directly under them.
The particular nature of this war only increases their influence on battlefield strategy, since battlefield engagements by necessity are conducted strictly by small autonomous groups, often in contravention to the overall strategy as envisioned by high command. This was the case with Bakhmut, where the possibility of withdrawal was first announced by both military high command and political talking heads, then withdrawn once it became clear that troops, or rather, lower level officers had no intention of following these directions.
Ironically, Russia faced similar problems in Bakhmut. If we imagine Wagner and Prigozhin, or whichever commander he was channeling in his public addresses, as being a good example of the risks inherent in this autonomous decentralized style of warfare, we get a glimpse of the horrendous decision making process for Ukrainians along the entirety of the front.
Wagner was never meant to capture Bakhmut, as per statements by Russian military analysts, but they pursued their own objectives. Failure to influence the decision making process via official channels led to a decision being made to restrict the amount of battlefield equipment allotted to Wagner, in order to thus influence the tempo at which they operated. Instead of adapting to this reality, Wagner only increased the tempo at the cost of troop casualties and launched a parallel political operation to put pressure on MOD to alter their decision. Eventually, the situation even culminated in an armed uprising.
Now, imagine that every battlegroup in Ukraine is more or less like that, with its own Prigozhin, political connections, personal influence and dual loyalties included, only their Prigozhin obviously won’t be a hot-dog salesman oligarch from St. Petersburg but an ideologically pure neo-nazi under orders from one of those Ukrainian far-right political associations that can’t get enough votes in any of their sham elections to get into parliament, but still manages to control policy at all levels in society due to strategically placed proxies.
Then imagine what Zelensky or Zaluzhny or, for that matter, foreign advisors are able to do to influence their decisions — at best herd them around the pen indirectly, being always careful not to trigger an open revolt.

Posted by: Skiffer | Jul 3 2023 16:24 utc | 303

Posted by: Greg Galloway | Jul 3 2023 10:18 utc | 259
Almost all the stuff you posted are a hodge podge of unfounded assertions and borderline New Age fantasies about the distant past. You seem to ignore basic periodization such as on the beginning of the Neolithic Age. On top of that, you added stuff about these extremely distant societies that are mostly based on the biases of those who made them, such as Marija Gjimbutas. And to top it, you connected all that to modern developments and ideologies.
In any case, all that should be left for another thread, NOT in one reserved for the subject of Ukraine (not the neolithic one).

Posted by: Constantine | Jul 3 2023 16:46 utc | 305

The relevant information is public, but little known. I will summarize the main points:
1. The risk of an armed action on the Zaporizhzhya NPP turning into a “Chernobyl” is close to zero. The structure of the Zaporizhzhya NPP is designed to mitigate even the direct hit of a tactical nuclear weapon. Although the reactor pan was destroyed, below the reactor there is a huge space of reinforced concrete (a “melt trap”) prepared to receive the fall of contaminating material and flood this massive cave with concrete.
2. The second risk, more probable, is to cause a depressurization in the circuit of the primary piping lines, through localized impacts. The consequence would be the release of radiologically contaminated water into an adjacent area of hundreds of square meters. Flooded areas would have to be decontaminated before the toxic elements penetrated the soil and spread to the groundwater table. Needless to say, in this case, you would see hundreds of decontaminators… trying to reclaim the ground.
3. The third, most probable (but crazy) risk is the explosion of hundreds of kilos of TNT with 2 or 3 kg of radioactive material, near the Zaporizhzhya NPP. Trying to divert the situation, there is the possibility of a last bet: Europa in arms.
4. Europe is trying not to be engulfed by the Hegemon’s war. Who?

Posted by: l4d8r1t | Jul 3 2023 16:55 utc | 307

Jonathan W | Jul 3 2023 9:18 utc | 246
*** “In recent years, 700,000 children have found refuge with us, fleeing the bombing and shelling from the conflict areas in Ukraine,” Karasin wrote on his Telegram messaging channel.***
No wonder NATO politicians plus .. peculiar .. groups they fanatically support (or belong in) are so furious and frustrated.

Posted by: Cynic | Jul 3 2023 17:26 utc | 309

In response to Eighthman@300,
Adding to my last post, there’s plenty of video material and various articles illustrating what the real situation is like, but the most informative and the most publicly accessible relates to two specific events. I hope you’ll excuse me for not digging up links and instead recounting them from memory, since no single piece of source material provides the full context.
The first event occurred a month or two into Zelensky’s presidency, when sporadic shelling of Donbas by Ukrainian fighters suddenly resumed, threatening to upend a planned meeting of the Minsk contact group. Zelensky went to the front-line with his camera team, no doubt hoping to score a PR victory of assuming the mantle of commander in chief, and instead went away with footage where he ineffectually argues with officers who tell him to go f himself and that they’ll do whatever they want. It is from this exchange we have the famous Zelensky quote “Hey, I’m not some shmuck. I’m 42 years old and I’m the president!”
Back in Kiev and still laboring under the illusion of primacy, Z proposes a bill that would restrict troops to firing only in response to enemy fire. The next day there are protests on the streets, the president’s office is vandalized, Z’s secret service and personal bodyguard is awol, there’s a supposed threat to his family and an interview with Dmitry Yarosh comes out with the key takeaway that if Z is serious about abiding by the Minsk agreements he’ll be hanged.
The bill is instantly withdrawn, Z does an about-face on his stance on the conflict and there’s a restructuring of his party cadres with the addition of several ex-Svoboda functionaries all in the following week. That’s about the extent of Zelensky’s power over the military and nothing has changed in this regard — there is no indication that he’s been able to cultivate Z loyalists in any Ukrainian security structures since assuming office in 2019.
On the contrary, all political and military appointments since then have the distinct appearance of being vetted by someone other than the so-called ruling party elite, since Z’s officials more than once have announced or leaked the impending removal of various figures, Reznikov being the most widely discussed example, to then go back on themselves and pretend otherwise.
The second event is probably more memorable to Western audiences of alternative media, as it featured prominently on various youtube outlets. It’s when Yevhen Karas, the leader of Ukrainian neo-nazi youth organization C14, decided to speak from the heart at some right-wing conference. The key take-away was that European support for Ukraine, which amounted to support for the Ukrainian right-wing, stemmed from the understanding that Ukrainian right-wing forces were experienced and highly motivated in the matter of killing Russians, but that it was also the only shared interest that could ever exist between the two.
Once Ukrainian nationalists were successful in implementing the final solution to the Russian question, Europe would inevitably become their next target and according to Karas everyone understood this. For this reason, nobody did or should view the West as a block that’s friendly to the Ukrainian national idea, despite what the idealistic public might think, but rather the relationship was one of temporary, conditional exchange.
Although Karas can hardly be said to be a highly influential figure all by himself, he certainly moved in the right circles to pick up on what really influential figures were thinking. I don’t doubt for a moment that his statements reflect the thinking of Ukrainian officers and decision makers. Disdain for the general public as a separate entity, distrust of proffered Western assistance but shrewd understanding of how that assistance may be utilized in accomplishing certain fundamental and ideologically motivated goals.
Imagine having to rely on this sort of extremist element to wage war and what it would take to keep it under control. It’s not as if critical Western armaments that are spent taking out hotdog stands and bus-stops in Russian controlled territory whenever possible is part of some overarching master-plan, devised in Kiev or Washington, although some high-profile ops of a similar nature undoubtedly are. But, whenever you give a small group of ideological extremists weapons capable of carrying out their idée fixe, they have a hard time containing themselves even when it degrades their overall combat effectiveness.

Posted by: Skiffer | Jul 3 2023 17:36 utc | 311

The next NATO leaders’ summit will take place July 11 to 12 in Vilnius, Lithuania.
..from the EU:

Ukraine insists on Western security guarantees and eventual NATO membership to protect it from future Russian aggression. The NATO allies are very divided on this key question, but feel a strong need to preserve unity, in both appearance and fact, at the alliance’s summit in Vilnius next month.
At the Vilnius summit, NATO will not offer Ukraine an invitation to join – but it will offer the country some sort of path to membership, a sort of ‘Bucharest plus’ that builds on the 2008 Bucharest summit promise that Ukraine will eventually join NATO.
The wording will be original, highly negotiated, and thus open to interpretation. But in the end, it will be a form of compromise that provides a perspective for Ukraine (and by extension Moldova) to understand what it needs to do to achieve membership in the future.
The unspoken US concept will be that membership will only come when the current war, or at least the current fighting, ends. That proviso, however, will likely only be implicit in the summit communiqué. . . .here

Posted by: Don Bacon | Jul 3 2023 18:02 utc | 313

Posted by: ak74 | Jul 3 2023 8:09 utc | 235
«Or, as Dmitry Medvedev has said about the British in particular:
“Britain always has been, is now, and will be our eternal enemy. At least until such time as their arrogant, despicably dank island sinks into the abyss of the sea from a wave triggered by a cutting-edge Russian weapons system.”»
Medvedev’s essay is just a rant, and a ridiculous nasty one in the idea of genociding Britain including welsh, scots and northeners, who are not entirely happy with the UK as it is.
But the geopolitical point is rather wrong as to “eternal enemy” because geopolitically the UK is (like Ireland or Iceland or Sardinia or Crete or in a slightly different form Denmark) just an european island, tightly integrated with european trade, forever, *except* during the period 1640 to 1940, when instead it was an oceanic power, like Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, France also were preying on and subsuming bow-and-arrow level third world feudal tyrannies.
For most of history except during 1640 to 1940 England was a “hanseatic” trader, exporting mostly wool and fish and tin, and importing wine and luxuries. The memory of those 300 years of “manifest destiny” (“God is an englishman”) still blinds many of them to their return to being just an european island.
Andrew Marr, “A history of modern Britain”: «The admirals fought back. ‘If we are to hold our world position, we must maintain our sea power,’ said the Admiralty. Using an argument already hopelessly out of date, the deputy director of naval planning, Captain Godfrey French, protested that a force of two major fleets, with battleships and carriers, was vital to sustain the British Empire’s status as ‘a first class power’. Battleships, he said, were needed to counter the Soviet fleet and, in the future, rather more bizarrely, the French. The Labour government was not impressed. Attlee argued forcefully that Britain was no longer America’s rival on the high seas and could not maintain large fleets.»
Churchill himself oscillated between depressing realism and flights of fantasy as in this quote:
Jean Lacouture “Le Rebelle”, 1984, Churchill to De Gaulle, 1944-06-04:
«”How can you think that we British would take a position separate from that of the United States? We are going to liberate Europe but it is because the Americans are with us in doing it. Because every time we must choose between Europe and the open seas, we shall always choose the open seas. And every time I have to choose between you and Roosevelt, I will always choose Roosevelt.”»
The contradiction here is between realizing England had become just a protectorate of the USA (“roosevelt”) and the presumptuous fantasy that the english still had the right to choose the “open seas” without asking the permission of the USA government, the new sole proprietors of those (not so) “open seas”.
England was the geopolitical enemy of Spain, France, Germany and Russia only between 1640 and 1940, when the english governments wanted european countries to be as weak as possible to protect their weak continental side to continue rampaging across the “open seas”, but now that the “open seas” belong exclusively to the USA, the continental states are actually back to being England’s best trading friends, as in Hansa and previous times, when London was the trading centre between Russia, the Baltic, Germany and western Europe and the Mediterranean.
It is amazing that the more intelligent politicians like Boris Johnson seem to understand all the above very well, and yet for purely opportunistic reasons still pander shamelessly to the “Make the English Empire Great Again” fantasies of many of their voters.

Posted by: Blissex | Jul 3 2023 20:03 utc | 315

Posted by: Skiffer | Jul 3 2023 17:36 utc | 313
Your post is probably one of the one the best I have seen on MoA, as it is well informed, in a reasonable tone. Some additions:
«Zelensky went to the front-line with his camera team, no doubt hoping to score a PR victory of assuming the mantle of commander in chief, and instead went away with footage where he ineffectually argues with officers who tell him to go f himself and that they’ll do whatever they want. It is from this exchange we have the famous Zelensky quote “Hey, I’m not some shmuck. I’m 42 years old and I’m the president!”»
That’s pretty much the defining moment of his presidency.
«Z proposes a bill that would restrict troops to firing only in response to enemy fire. The next day there are protests on the streets, the president’s office is vandalized, Z’s secret service and personal bodyguard is awol, there’s a supposed threat to his family and an interview with Dmitry Yarosh comes out with the key takeaway that if Z is serious about abiding by the Minsk agreements he’ll be hanged.»
Indeed and worse:
https://en.hromadske.ua/posts/how-poroshenko-passed-the-unpopular-donbas-special-status-law
«What happens when laws regarding Donbas are passed in an open session? The country found out on August 31, 2015. That day, the parliament passed in its first reading constitutional changes granting the Donbas special self-governance. Because the law was perceived as recognizing the Kremlin-backed separatists and would give them certain rights, many Ukrainians flocked to the parliament building to protest. Protests soon grew into clashes with the police, and clashes turned into casualties: a member of the nationalist Svoboda party threw a grenade at national guardsmen, killing four. Two dozen more people were wounded.»
https://original.antiwar.com/ted_snider/2023/02/26/ukraine-the-violence-before-the-violence/
«Dmytro Yarosh, the leader of Right Sector, a coalition of several far right paramilitary organizations, told Time in 2014 that Right Sector had “amassed a lethal arsenal of weapons.” Ishchenko says they had “[a]t least 1,500 handguns, rifles, machine guns, hand grenades, and other weapons.” But it is what Right Sector was willing to do with those weapons that went so underreported. The goal of the Maidan protests was to remove Yanukovych from power in a coup. And the nationalists were prepared to use those lethal weapons to do it. The far right militias seized regional and city administration buildings all over central and western Ukraine. “These seizures were typically accompanied,” Petro reports, “by declarations that, if Yanukovych refused to relinquish power immediately, these regions would secede.”»
The fascist ruthenian militias are so extreme that Poroshenko, who started the war of aggression (“sponsored” by Obama) against the people of the Donbas with the Mariupol massacre of 9 may 2014, has been put on trial for treason in Ukraine for having dared to sign the Minsk treaties, even if he had done so only to deceive the Donbas and the RF.
«It’s when Yevhen Karas, the leader of Ukrainian neo-nazi youth organization C14, decided to speak from the heart at some right-wing conference. […] Once Ukrainian nationalists were successful in implementing the final solution to the Russian question, Europe would inevitably become their next target and according to Karas everyone understood this. For this reason, nobody did or should view the West as a block that’s friendly to the Ukrainian national idea, despite what the idealistic public might think, but rather the relationship was one of temporary, conditional exchange.»
Ah interesting, indeed the fascist ruthenian militias regard pretty much everybody else as inferior races, and during WW1 and WW2 the followers of Bandera, Dontsov, Shukhevych, Stsyborsky massacred with equal zeal everybody else.
«But, whenever you give a small group of ideological extremists weapons capable of carrying out their idée fixe, they have a hard time containing themselves»
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Posted by: Blissex | Jul 3 2023 20:36 utc | 317

In response to Blissex@319,
Thank you for those valuable additions. Much appreciated.

Posted by: Skiffer | Jul 3 2023 20:48 utc | 319

In response to John Kennard@316,
I realize I got a bit sidetracked in my last post, bogged down in the pre-history, never actually getting to Karas and the right circles. You’ll forgive the verbosity, but the rise of neo-Nazis in Ukraine is a difficult topic for me to be brief on since I simply know too much about it, some from personal experience.
C14 was or is one of several youth wings of Ukrainian neo-Nazi organizations, both domestic, such as Right Sector and international, such as Misanthropic Division. These organizations primarily recruited from orphanages, ostensibly to provide after-school activities. C14 mainly dealt in older kids, teenagers and the like, but there were organizations geared also towards pre-teens and others that acted as daycare for the really young, although the names escape me — often something innocuous like Camp This&That. C14 is an outlier here, given that it was intended for a more mature and ideologically prepared demographic.
Building on what I’ve described about the organized crime origin story of Ukrainian neo-Nazi orgs, these youth wings were likewise employed in criminal activity. When word came down from parent organizations, the kids would be used to stage protests, destroy property, conduct shoplifting sprees or act as couriers, as a service to paying customers. Who these customers were, whether oligarchs, local politicians, SBU or agents of foreign intelligence services — that’s another story.
As a note, this activity was documented well before the outbreak of hostilities in Eastern Ukraine, which served to militarize these youth organizations further. Added to the curriculum post 2014 was a stronger ideological emphasis and combat training for children as young as 7 years old.
Now Karas, as leader of C14, one of the most active and widely employed groups after Maidan to exert political pressure, would have been in constant contact with the various leaders of neo-Nazi parent organizations and potentially even the odd customer who paid for their services. There were also at one point rumors that C14 was working sidegigs outside of the general hierarchy, but that might be unreliable. That’s one.
The second point is that the large number of children who passed through these youth organizations are, by this point, grown up combatants and officers. Some undoubtedly have been promoted to higher stations and political posts. One such youngster, to give an example, initially became Zelensky’s spokesman at the start of the incumbency, but had to resign after a scandal of his appearance and speech at some neo-Nazi gathering refused to die down — can’t remember his name for the life of me. Beady-eyed lizardman. Anyway, Karas undoubtedly made friends with plenty of prospective young career Nazis through the organization.

Posted by: Skiffer | Jul 3 2023 21:36 utc | 321

***… but now that the “open seas” belong exclusively to the USA, the continental states are actually back to being England’s best trading friends, as in Hansa and previous times, when London was the trading centre between Russia, the Baltic, Germany and western Europe and the Mediterranean.***
Snags there — a Russia absurdly “sanctioned” … neonazi-NATO controlled, aggressive Baltic basket cases which cannot even retain most of their own populations … a still US occupied and now pathetically lobotomised and servile Germany … and a western Europe that’s just a grovelling bunch of Washington yes-persons entrapped in its “EU”.
Plus a “Mediterranean” full of would-be illegal invaders.
Interesting choice of “best friends” for England. But given the inherently gangrenous nature of the UK political Establishment, yes they probably are.
*** “Make the English Empire Great Again” fantasies of many of their voters.***
No, most by far of voters do not think that way at all. They’re merely fed up of being used as chamber-pots and doormats. Only the establishment political class and its mass-media try to project such anachronistic Victorian fantasies, as some sort of (fake) liberal justification for part of their own charade of empty drivel, false promises and covertly treacherous agendas.

Posted by: Cynic | Jul 3 2023 22:37 utc | 323

Blissex | Jul 3 2023 20:58 utc | 322
(re self styled “revolutionaries” of late 1960s)
*** They were hugely bribed with massive redistribution upwards from the lower classes.***
In the UK, lots of well paid jobs in the ever expanding so-called “race relations” industry.
Likewise all sorts of “diversity”, thought-policing and supposedly problem-solving roles.
Plus cronyism amongst themselves, and the sheer pleasure of being able to use (State backed) ‘political correctness’ as a weapon or censor against any critics and dissidents.

Posted by: Cynic | Jul 3 2023 23:13 utc | 325

Posted by: The Dolphin | Jul 4 2023 7:19 utc | 328
There are many great global legacies of the 60s.
A huge legacy for Americans was ending the draft, no one has to send their children to war any more. My family had sacrificed young men every generation since the Civil War

Posted by: SwissArmyMan | Jul 4 2023 7:28 utc | 327

I realized already by 1989 that all of the eco-nimby stuff marketed by MSM to the so-called “environmentalists” and “hippies” was just a huge sociological psyop cover for the massive labor offshoring event. It couldn’t have been pulled off without the massive price rises in western (mostly urban) real estate values Michael Hudson is mostly correct.

Posted by: Wisco | Jul 7 2023 1:03 utc | 329

LoL, anyone else remember in the 1970s people still actually cared about “littering”? That fake native American actor on TV commercials with tears in his eyes over “littering”. Now look what we have.

Posted by: Wisco | Jul 7 2023 2:31 utc | 331