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Mainstream Media Admit – Ukraine’s Propaganda Is Full Of Lies
As a sign of the turning narrative of the war in Ukraine we find a new New York Times piece about 'disinformation' that is not about Russia but about lies from Ukraine.
Andrew E. Kramer, the NYT correspondent in Kiev, opens with an anecdote from the first weeks of the war:
Six weeks after Russia launched its full-scale invasion, Ukraine sank the flagship of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, dealing a serious blow to the enemy navy, and, a Ukrainian official said, killing the ship’s captain.
“We do not mourn,” an adviser to the interior minister at the time, Anton Gerashchenko, said.
The only problem was that the captain — or somebody who resembled him — later appeared in a video of survivors released by the Russian Navy. He had escaped his sinking ship, the Moskva, the video seemed to indicate.
Then comes a paragraph that could fit both countries but the following one it is again related to disinformation from Ukraine:
What is clear is that misdirection, disinformation and propaganda are weapons regularly deployed in Russia’s war in Ukraine to buoy spirits at home, demoralize the enemy or lead opponents into a trap. And it is often hard to know when reports are false or why they may have been disseminated.
Now, Ukraine and Russia are offering dueling narratives over whether a more senior Russian naval officer, the commanding admiral of the Black Sea Fleet, is alive or dead.
Well, in this interview Adm. Viktor Sokolov looks quite alive.
Then comes an astonishing admission:
Few military analysts, […], believe the Ukrainian military’s optimistic daily account of Russian casualties running into the hundreds that is nonetheless reported widely in Ukrainian media.
It is the first time I see a public refutation of Ukraine's laughable claims about Russian casualties in the mainstream media. It is also an indictment of the Biden administration and the Pentagon who publicly use the Ukrainian numbers.
The piece ends with a wise acknowledgement:
Mr. Gerashchenko said that, in the end, war propaganda is only effective when it accompanies battlefield successes. The missile strike on the headquarters of the Russian Black Sea Fleet last week, he said, was a “stunning success of Ukrainian intelligence and the air force that fired the cruise missiles on a supposedly well-defended site.”
“You cannot win the propaganda war without winning the real war,” he added.
Oh really? Guess who told you so:
Good to see that this obvious truth is finally sinking in.
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Yesterday the Minister of Defense in Russia, Sergei Shoigu, gave an update (in Russian) on the war in Ukraine. The speech seemed to include a time frame for the war to end (machine translation):
The United States and its allies continue to arm the Armed Forces of Ukraine, and the Kiev regime throws untrained soldiers into senseless assaults, for slaughter.
Such cynical actions by the West and their cronies in Kiev only encourage Ukraine to self-destruct."
"Under these conditions, we continue to increase the combat power of the Armed Forces, including through the supply of modern weapons and improving the training of troops, taking into account the experience of a special military operation. Consistent implementation of the activities of the Action Plan until 2025 will allow us to achieve our goals."
Shoigu expects the war to run throughout 2024 and into 2025. But if the current loss rate of the Ukrainian army continues the country will be running out of soldiers and armored vehicles before the end of next year.
—
Schadenfreude:
Nice article, b, thanks.
Posting a very long article (Yandex machine translated, with minor corrections). I hope it is ok, else please notice me and delete it.
https://www.russiapost.su/archives/338189 by Marat Khairullin about the situation on the frontline, and prospects of the war:
The main thing is at the front. How much longer to fight? About our losses, suicidal ukrops, and uplifting
by Marat Khairullin
How much longer do we have to fight — this is the most important question today, which is difficult to find an exact answer to. First of all, because Ukraine has passed a legislative decision prohibiting it from negotiating peace. This, by the way, is an interesting precedent — a country that is obviously a weaker party feels so confident in a conflict with a nuclear power that it forbids itself to look for ways of peaceful settlement.
In this regard, by the way, it is worth analyzing in detail the arguments of the Ukrov leadership from the point of view of their viability after a year and a half of war. And especially from the point of view of front-line workers — we recently discussed this issue with our planners. It turned out very interesting, I will try to make a big article on this topic in the near future. In the meantime, let’s try to find an answer to the main question, which at least showed us glimpses of the truth — in which direction it (the truth) is located.
Obviously, the most important issue here will be the question of the losses of Ukraine and ours. Of course, not decisive, but, nevertheless, influencing the final resolution of the question of the timing of the war.
So, once again, we state that it is not possible to find exact figures for the enemy’s losses — Ukraine, it seems, does not even know how many people it is losing during the fighting. First of all, because the country’s leadership doesn’t give a damn about it.
Even in the numerous publications of the Western press, there is some confusion about this. Even a special phrase has been coined — ” insensitivity of Ukrainians to their own losses.” Insensitivity — just think about how much horror there is in this cold and polite word. How much cynicism, pain and some boundless tragedy there is in this. People who are “insensitive” to their own death are doomed. And I could actually see this “insensitivity”, for example, last night, when I was sitting at one of the battalion control points, watching our First Slavyansk Brigade work.
As soon as our advanced group of stormtroopers got close to one of the enemy’s strongholds, the Ukry, without hesitation, struck their own positions full of live Krauts, so much so that the officers in the dugout only gasped. And this is despite the fact that the officers of infantry battalions are some of the toughest guys I’ve ever met — if their souls are not flint, then they simply have nothing to do in the infantry.
And this feature of the Ukrovs — almost without hesitation, to beat on their own, if only the position did not get to us — I have been observing since the beginning of the war.
For us, normal people, to look at it from the outside is pure horror, a nightmare that suddenly became a reality.
But the Ukrainian leadership even flaunts this, for example, when it brags about its endless cemeteries in front of its owners — that’s how many people we have laid down for your interests. It is clear that the leaders of the nation, behaving so irrationally, it is useless to give any reasonable arguments about the end of the war — they absolutely do not care how many thousands of Ukrainian corpses are piled in front of them.
But the worst part is that the nation doesn’t care.
And, nevertheless, despite this terrible “insensitivity”, the question of the ratio of losses is very important, because in the end, sooner or later, there will come a time when the army of Krauts (fritsjew) so exudes itself in battles that the conveyor of the Ukrainian meat processing plant will no longer cope with the supply of raw materials to the front line.
No matter how scary it may sound from a humanitarian point of view for us (the civilizations of Dostoyevsky and Chekhov), but this is pure arithmetic.
The victory formula in the current conditions, when Ukraine has forbidden itself to listen to the voice of reason and is preparing to fight to the last Ukrainian, looks very simple — we need to inflict as many losses as possible on them, and, at the same time, lose as little as possible ourselves.
The formula is simple, but, again, it is very difficult to substitute real numbers into it. But still, let’s try it, so that at least at the level of intuition we can try to see the horizon of these events.
So, we have official figures of enemy losses, which are regularly published by our Ministry of Defense. Thanks to the fact that our friends from the TG channel Intercept Z and the Aftershock project daily reduce these figures to a simple and understandable table, we see that on average, the monthly losses of the APU in manpower are plus or minus 20 thousand people only killed.
Given that this is a very stable statistic, we can say with a high degree of confidence that we will destroy about 240 thousand enemy personnel per year.
At the same time, it is obvious that this is only the minimum level, since there are still losses from shelling in the deep rear, missing persons, those who died from wounds, and so on, which we do not see.
In other words, we can assume with a very high degree of probability that the irretrievable losses of the Ukrovs in 2023 alone will amount to about 500 thousand people. Not counting the wounded.
Now let’s estimate our losses. Unlike us, the Ukrainians do not keep such detailed daily statistics of our losses. And that, in itself, says a lot. The problem is that the Ukrovs do not have our system of detailed photo reports, on the basis of which our Defense Ministry displays the existing figures of enemy losses.
Ukry do not bother with this, but simply from time to time make some unsubstantiated statements, taking figures based on their political expediency.
Therefore, it is impossible to trust these figures of our losses, which are cited by the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Especially considering what a mess they are making at the headquarters level — this, by the way, is another topic for a large publication that I have planned for myself.
You will be very surprised, dear readers, to learn what is going on with our enemies in the system of planning and supplying troops, and how everything works for us.
You will immediately curse all our bloggers who do not get tired of shouting how bad everything is in our planning system at all levels. They didn’t see a real mess.
However, let’s return to our topic — how to estimate our losses, given that our Ministry of Defense has not published official figures for a long time. And I personally, in the conditions of military censorship, do not have the right to give even estimated figures.
Getting out of this situation is very simple: you need to analyze the real picture of what is happening.
Let’s take, for example, one of the hottest sections of the front — the Kamenskoye — Pyatikhatki — Rabochino — Verbovoe line. This particular area is held by two of our regiments of the 58th Army of the Southern Military District — 1430 and 70. These are regiments consisting mainly of mobilized children.
So, Ukry stormed Rabotino with the forces of 17 brigades (about 70 thousand people), which as a result, having lost their combat capability, were taken to the rear for re-formation.
Only in this direction, according to the same statistics of the Ministry of Defense, the enemy suffered losses of about 30 thousand people in more than three months.
Once again, the Ukry took 17 brigades to the rear, as if they had lost their combat capability,and our regiments were still standing. And I will emphasize that the losses are so insignificant that the regiments do not need to be withdrawn to the rear for re-formation.
At the same time, the military knows perfectly well what this means — the combat backbone is preserved. Since any unit that is in constant combat conditions simply will not digest fresh, untrained reinforcements — recruits simply will not withstand the blow and will run.
In other words, there is certainly a replenishment in the regiments, but it is very insignificant in terms of the percentage of experienced soldiers, so the regiment does not just maintain combat readiness, but regularly goes on counterattacks.
This is a very clear indicator — since the bleeding unit cannot regularly and steadily (once or twice a week) go on the attack.
This is exactly the same situation in other sectors of the front, in the same Kleshcheyevka, where the 51st and 136th regiments of the 106th Airborne Division of the Russian Federation worked and still work.
Or in Marinka, Berkhovka, Avdiivka and everywhere else.
For example, I know the exact figures of our losses in the last three or four weeks in my native First Slavic Brigade, but unfortunately, due to military censorship, I have no right to voice them. But again, this can be done indirectly. Let me remind you that in early September, the positions of Slavyanka were hit by fresh forces of very well-trained Marines from the 36th Brigade of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. They spent a week trying to eat through our positions from different directions. As a result, having lost more than a company, the Ukry were forced to withdraw from this direction. But our brigade has moved forward without any break and has been chewing off one enemy stronghold after another for the third week. And all this on their own, without the support of other departments, except for regular ones. And it does so to this day. And exactly the same thing is happening, for example, on the right front of the defense of Bakhmut, where our troops suddenly went on the offensive in the Berkhovka area yesterday and entered the very important village of Orekhovo-Vasilyevka. Just like that, without concentrating resources and forces, without attracting additional units — yesterday the unit was on the defensive, and today it suddenly went on the offensive. This just says that our army is in very good shape and, despite the constant attacks of the enemy, suffers such insignificant losses that they can safely move from defense to attack.
In other words, our troops have been demonstrating remarkable stability for months. And most importantly, our military has found a certain formula for conducting combat operations, which allows us to destroy the enemy at a rate of 500 thousand people a year, and at the same time bear minimal losses. And among other things, this formula contains two variables, a kind of progressive coefficients. The first of them is constantly growing — our industry is gaining momentum, which is successfully and steadily increasing the production of ammunition and new equipment. The overall state of our economy, which is feeling better and better, is also in the same ratio. Much better than before the war started. And the second coefficient is negative. It includes the systematic destruction of the Ukrainian industry, including our ever-increasing strikes. As well as the ever-decreasing support for Ukrov by Western countries, and in general, the deteriorating economy of both Ukraine and the West.
Applying these two coefficients, we obviously get a forecast according to which-losses in case of continuation of Ukraine will steadily grow, and ours will at least remain at the same level, but in the future they should become even lower. And here we can only wait for the enemy’s losses to become so high that they simply will no longer be able to resist.
The conclusion from all this is very simple — if we take only the situation on the battlefield, then we actually have nowhere to rush. But of course, there is still politics — and it can dictate its own logic of events. And here we can only hope for the reasonableness of our country’s leadership. And thank God once again that such a great strategist as Vladimir Putin is still at the helm of the state. That’s a big Amen to all of us.
And I can only add that tomorrow there will be a big front-line summary. Live in VK, and then in print in TG. As they say at the front — do not say goodbye, see you later!
Marat Khairullin
https://t.me/voenkorkhayrullin
Posted by: aquadraht | Sep 27 2023 16:36 utc | 93
Nice article, b, thanks.
Posting a very long article (Yandex machine translated, with minor corrections). I hope it is ok, else please notice me and delete it.
https://www.russiapost.su/archives/338189 by Marat Khairullin about the situation on the frontline, and prospects of the war:
The main thing is at the front. How much longer to fight? About our losses, suicidal ukrops, and uplifting
by Marat Khairullin
How much longer do we have to fight — this is the most important question today, which is difficult to find an exact answer to. First of all, because Ukraine has passed a legislative decision prohibiting it from negotiating peace. This, by the way, is an interesting precedent — a country that is obviously a weaker party feels so confident in a conflict with a nuclear power that it forbids itself to look for ways of peaceful settlement.
In this regard, by the way, it is worth analyzing in detail the arguments of the Ukrov leadership from the point of view of their viability after a year and a half of war. And especially from the point of view of front-line workers — we recently discussed this issue with our planners. It turned out very interesting, I will try to make a big article on this topic in the near future. In the meantime, let’s try to find an answer to the main question, which at least showed us glimpses of the truth — in which direction it (the truth) is located.
Obviously, the most important issue here will be the question of the losses of Ukraine and ours. Of course, not decisive, but, nevertheless, influencing the final resolution of the question of the timing of the war.
So, once again, we state that it is not possible to find exact figures for the enemy’s losses — Ukraine, it seems, does not even know how many people it is losing during the fighting. First of all, because the country’s leadership doesn’t give a damn about it.
Even in the numerous publications of the Western press, there is some confusion about this. Even a special phrase has been coined — ” insensitivity of Ukrainians to their own losses.” Insensitivity — just think about how much horror there is in this cold and polite word. How much cynicism, pain and some boundless tragedy there is in this. People who are “insensitive” to their own death are doomed. And I could actually see this “insensitivity”, for example, last night, when I was sitting at one of the battalion control points, watching our First Slavyansk Brigade work.
As soon as our advanced group of stormtroopers got close to one of the enemy’s strongholds, the Ukry, without hesitation, struck their own positions full of live Krauts, so much so that the officers in the dugout only gasped. And this is despite the fact that the officers of infantry battalions are some of the toughest guys I’ve ever met — if their souls are not flint, then they simply have nothing to do in the infantry.
And this feature of the Ukrovs — almost without hesitation, to beat on their own, if only the position did not get to us — I have been observing since the beginning of the war.
For us, normal people, to look at it from the outside is pure horror, a nightmare that suddenly became a reality.
But the Ukrainian leadership even flaunts this, for example, when it brags about its endless cemeteries in front of its owners — that’s how many people we have laid down for your interests. It is clear that the leaders of the nation, behaving so irrationally, it is useless to give any reasonable arguments about the end of the war — they absolutely do not care how many thousands of Ukrainian corpses are piled in front of them.
But the worst part is that the nation doesn’t care.
And, nevertheless, despite this terrible “insensitivity”, the question of the ratio of losses is very important, because in the end, sooner or later, there will come a time when the army of Krauts (fritsjew) so exudes itself in battles that the conveyor of the Ukrainian meat processing plant will no longer cope with the supply of raw materials to the front line.
No matter how scary it may sound from a humanitarian point of view for us (the civilizations of Dostoyevsky and Chekhov), but this is pure arithmetic.
The victory formula in the current conditions, when Ukraine has forbidden itself to listen to the voice of reason and is preparing to fight to the last Ukrainian, looks very simple — we need to inflict as many losses as possible on them, and, at the same time, lose as little as possible ourselves.
The formula is simple, but, again, it is very difficult to substitute real numbers into it. But still, let’s try it, so that at least at the level of intuition we can try to see the horizon of these events.
So, we have official figures of enemy losses, which are regularly published by our Ministry of Defense. Thanks to the fact that our friends from the TG channel Intercept Z and the Aftershock project daily reduce these figures to a simple and understandable table, we see that on average, the monthly losses of the APU in manpower are plus or minus 20 thousand people only killed.
Given that this is a very stable statistic, we can say with a high degree of confidence that we will destroy about 240 thousand enemy personnel per year.
At the same time, it is obvious that this is only the minimum level, since there are still losses from shelling in the deep rear, missing persons, those who died from wounds, and so on, which we do not see.
In other words, we can assume with a very high degree of probability that the irretrievable losses of the Ukrovs in 2023 alone will amount to about 500 thousand people. Not counting the wounded.
Now let’s estimate our losses. Unlike us, the Ukrainians do not keep such detailed daily statistics of our losses. And that, in itself, says a lot. The problem is that the Ukrovs do not have our system of detailed photo reports, on the basis of which our Defense Ministry displays the existing figures of enemy losses.
Ukry do not bother with this, but simply from time to time make some unsubstantiated statements, taking figures based on their political expediency.
Therefore, it is impossible to trust these figures of our losses, which are cited by the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Especially considering what a mess they are making at the headquarters level — this, by the way, is another topic for a large publication that I have planned for myself.
You will be very surprised, dear readers, to learn what is going on with our enemies in the system of planning and supplying troops, and how everything works for us.
You will immediately curse all our bloggers who do not get tired of shouting how bad everything is in our planning system at all levels. They didn’t see a real mess.
However, let’s return to our topic — how to estimate our losses, given that our Ministry of Defense has not published official figures for a long time. And I personally, in the conditions of military censorship, do not have the right to give even estimated figures.
Getting out of this situation is very simple: you need to analyze the real picture of what is happening.
Let’s take, for example, one of the hottest sections of the front — the Kamenskoye — Pyatikhatki — Rabochino — Verbovoe line. This particular area is held by two of our regiments of the 58th Army of the Southern Military District — 1430 and 70. These are regiments consisting mainly of mobilized children.
So, Ukry stormed Rabotino with the forces of 17 brigades (about 70 thousand people), which as a result, having lost their combat capability, were taken to the rear for re-formation.
Only in this direction, according to the same statistics of the Ministry of Defense, the enemy suffered losses of about 30 thousand people in more than three months.
Once again, the Ukry took 17 brigades to the rear, as if they had lost their combat capability,and our regiments were still standing. And I will emphasize that the losses are so insignificant that the regiments do not need to be withdrawn to the rear for re-formation.
At the same time, the military knows perfectly well what this means — the combat backbone is preserved. Since any unit that is in constant combat conditions simply will not digest fresh, untrained reinforcements — recruits simply will not withstand the blow and will run.
In other words, there is certainly a replenishment in the regiments, but it is very insignificant in terms of the percentage of experienced soldiers, so the regiment does not just maintain combat readiness, but regularly goes on counterattacks.
This is a very clear indicator — since the bleeding unit cannot regularly and steadily (once or twice a week) go on the attack.
This is exactly the same situation in other sectors of the front, in the same Kleshcheyevka, where the 51st and 136th regiments of the 106th Airborne Division of the Russian Federation worked and still work.
Or in Marinka, Berkhovka, Avdiivka and everywhere else.
For example, I know the exact figures of our losses in the last three or four weeks in my native First Slavic Brigade, but unfortunately, due to military censorship, I have no right to voice them. But again, this can be done indirectly. Let me remind you that in early September, the positions of Slavyanka were hit by fresh forces of very well-trained Marines from the 36th Brigade of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. They spent a week trying to eat through our positions from different directions. As a result, having lost more than a company, the Ukry were forced to withdraw from this direction. But our brigade has moved forward without any break and has been chewing off one enemy stronghold after another for the third week. And all this on their own, without the support of other departments, except for regular ones. And it does so to this day. And exactly the same thing is happening, for example, on the right front of the defense of Bakhmut, where our troops suddenly went on the offensive in the Berkhovka area yesterday and entered the very important village of Orekhovo-Vasilyevka. Just like that, without concentrating resources and forces, without attracting additional units — yesterday the unit was on the defensive, and today it suddenly went on the offensive. This just says that our army is in very good shape and, despite the constant attacks of the enemy, suffers such insignificant losses that they can safely move from defense to attack.
In other words, our troops have been demonstrating remarkable stability for months. And most importantly, our military has found a certain formula for conducting combat operations, which allows us to destroy the enemy at a rate of 500 thousand people a year, and at the same time bear minimal losses. And among other things, this formula contains two variables, a kind of progressive coefficients. The first of them is constantly growing — our industry is gaining momentum, which is successfully and steadily increasing the production of ammunition and new equipment. The overall state of our economy, which is feeling better and better, is also in the same ratio. Much better than before the war started. And the second coefficient is negative. It includes the systematic destruction of the Ukrainian industry, including our ever-increasing strikes. As well as the ever-decreasing support for Ukrov by Western countries, and in general, the deteriorating economy of both Ukraine and the West.
Applying these two coefficients, we obviously get a forecast according to which-losses in case of continuation of Ukraine will steadily grow, and ours will at least remain at the same level, but in the future they should become even lower. And here we can only wait for the enemy’s losses to become so high that they simply will no longer be able to resist.
The conclusion from all this is very simple — if we take only the situation on the battlefield, then we actually have nowhere to rush. But of course, there is still politics — and it can dictate its own logic of events. And here we can only hope for the reasonableness of our country’s leadership. And thank God once again that such a great strategist as Vladimir Putin is still at the helm of the state. That’s a big Amen to all of us.
And I can only add that tomorrow there will be a big front-line summary. Live in VK, and then in print in TG. As they say at the front — do not say goodbye, see you later!
Marat Khairullin
https://t.me/voenkorkhayrullin
Posted by: aquadraht | Sep 27 2023 16:36 utc | 94
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