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The War Is Lost – Zelenski Will Leave – The White House Has Failed
What a difference a year makes …
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bigger – bigger
Time's big new story is quite revealing:
‘Nobody Believes in Our Victory Like I Do.’ Inside Volodymyr Zelensky’s Struggle to Keep Ukraine in the Fight – Time – Oct. 30, 2023
That offensive has proceeded at an excruciating pace and with enormous losses, making it ever more difficult for Zelensky to convince partners that victory is around the corner. With the outbreak of war in Israel, even keeping the world’s attention on Ukraine has become a major challenge.
Quoting a soldier on the front of the counter-offensive, the Economist agrees:
"Left Handed", an infantryman fighting at the front between Robotyne and Verbove, says Ukrainian losses have increased to alarming levels, in part due to the work of drones. The plains of Zaporizhia have turned their back on life, he says. “It’s hellish. Corpses, the smell of corpses, death, blood and fear. Not a whiff of life, just the stench of death.” Those in units such as his own had more chance of dying than surviving. “Seventy-thirty. Some don’t even see their first battle.”
Still, Zelenski is urging them on:
But his convictions haven’t changed. Despite the recent setbacks on the battlefield, he does not intend to give up fighting or to sue for any kind of peace.
On the contrary, his belief in Ukraine’s ultimate victory over Russia has hardened into a form that worries some of his advisers. It is immovable, verging on the messianic. “He deludes himself,” one of his closest aides tells me in frustration. “We’re out of options. We’re not winning. But try telling him that.”
Zelensky’s stubbornness, some of his aides say, has hurt their team’s efforts to come up with a new strategy, a new message. As they have debated the future of the war, one issue has remained taboo: the possibility of negotiating a peace deal with the Russians. Judging by recent surveys, most Ukrainians would reject such a move, especially if it entailed the loss of any occupied territory.
The war is lost. They know it. But they are unwilling to give up.
Zelenski's people put the blame everywhere but on the those who have caused the mess. It was the 'victory' messaging by Zelenski and his crew that has led the public into utter complacency.
As Strana headlines (machine translation):
Ukraine is losing the war with the Russian Federation due to the inadequate perception of the situation by society — commander of the Armed Forces of Ukraine – Strana.news – Oct. 30, 2023
Strategically, Ukraine is losing the war because of the inadequate perception of the situation by society.
This opinion was expressed by the commander of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Dmitry Kukharchuk in an interview with Channel Five.
He claims that at the beginning of the war, all Ukrainians were ready to defend the country, there were many volunteers. But after the withdrawal of Russian troops from Kiev, the situation changed.
"Immediately after that, I noticed that there were theses in the media that we are fighting with homeless people, that the Russian army does not know how to fight, that in principle victory will be in a week or two, a maximum of a month. That first in the spring, then in the summer, then in the autumn, then in the winter, without specifying which winter, we will go to the Crimea. That the victory is basically victorious. So people were put in a warm bathroom. We have broken down the vision of reality. But it didn't happen in Russia. They began to realize that the war was not going to be easy for them. They realized that they would have to fight for a long time, " Kukharchuk believes.
He also says that the Russians are "getting stronger" every day, and if Ukraine really fought the "degenerates", it would have defeated them long ago.
"That's why we're losing. They have these processes going on, and their public readiness is much higher than that of our society. And when they talk about a nuclear bomb, a war of all against all, for some reason it seems to me that they are ready for these processes, " the battalion commander added.
Napoleon, Hitler and several other folks who had sought war with Russia, had to learn to never underestimate the depth of its resources. Now NATO, the U.S. and its European proxies, are learning that lesson.
Zelenski still hasn't. He won't concede:
The cold will also make military advances more difficult, locking down the front lines at least until the spring. But Zelensky has refused to accept that. “Freezing the war, to me, means losing it,” he says. Before the winter sets in, his aides warned me to expect major changes in their military strategy and a major shake-up in the President’s team. At least one minister would need to be fired, along with a senior general in charge of the counteroffensive, they said, to ensure accountability for Ukraine’s slow progress at the front. “We’re not moving forward,” says one of Zelensky’s close aides. Some front-line commanders, he continues, have begun refusing orders to advance, even when they came directly from the office of the President. “They just want to sit in the trenches and hold the line,” he says. “But we can’t win a war that way.”
When I raised these claims with a senior military officer, he said that some commanders have little choice in second-guessing orders from the top. At one point in early October, he said, the political leadership in Kyiv demanded an operation to “retake” the city of Horlivka, a strategic outpost in eastern Ukraine that the Russians have held and fiercely defended for nearly a decade. The answer came back in the form of a question: With what? “They don’t have the men or the weapons,” says the officer. “Where are the weapons? Where is the artillery? Where are the new recruits?”
In some branches of the military, the shortage of personnel has become even more dire than the deficit in arms and ammunition. One of Zelensky’s close aides tells me that even if the U.S. and its allies come through with all the weapons they have pledged, “we don’t have the men to use them.”
Since the start of the invasion, Ukraine has refused to release official counts of dead and wounded. But according to U.S. and European estimates, the toll has long surpassed 100,000 on each side of the war. It has eroded the ranks of Ukraine’s armed forces so badly that draft offices have been forced to call up ever older personnel, raising the average age of a soldier in Ukraine to around 43 years. “They’re grown men now, and they aren’t that healthy to begin with,” says the close aide to Zelensky. “This is Ukraine. Not Scandinavia.”
The Ukraine's old problems, foremost corruption, persist:
Amid all the pressure to root out corruption, I assumed, perhaps naively, that officials in Ukraine would think twice before taking a bribe or pocketing state funds. But when I made this point to a top presidential adviser in early October, he asked me to turn off my audio recorder so he could speak more freely. “Simon, you’re mistaken,” he says. “People are stealing like there’s no tomorrow.”
Knowing that the ship is sinking, this its probably what I would do too. Bring anything available onto my personal life raft and prepare for cutting its lines to the mother ship.
The Time piece is a signal. It announces the end of Zelenski's regime. I am sure that the National Security Council, as well as the State Department, is feverishly looking for an alternative – and for a face saving way to install it.
Someone seems to protect and promote Alexey Arestovich for exactly that purpose (machine translation):
After leaving the Presidential Office with a scandal in January 2023, Arestovich, although he began to criticize the actions of the authorities, nevertheless did it carefully until recently.
But right now, he's just slamming the ruling team.
Arestovich focuses on two things: the military decisions of the country's leadership and its domestic policy.
…
The second version: Arestovich enlisted the support of Americans who want to see more political diversity in Ukraine and are not interested in Zelensky's monopolization of power.
In favor of this version, they also use the fact mentioned above that the tightening of the rhetoric of the ex-adviser to the president's Office began after his trip to the United States. Also in this regard, they recall his interview with Gordon in early October, where he says that if the West decides to end the war without reaching the borders of 1991 and Zelensky resists this, then the president of Ukraine will be "changed" in the elections.
…
"It is possible that Arestovich is supported by a certain part of the Western elites, who care about the breadth of opinions in Ukraine. They say that the country can speak not only with Zelensky's voice, but there are also different critical opinions, " political analyst Ruslan Bortnik comments to Strana.
In its grand strategy the White House had sought to pivot to Asia. But the U.S. is – first in Ukraine, in a completely unnecessary conflict the U.S. itself has caused, and, with Gaza in flames, again in the Middle East.
In a recent talk in Australia John Mearsheimer takes a deep dive into this dilemma (video). He doesn't foresee a good outcome.
This something I’ve been meaning to ask at a forum like MoA and isn’t connected to any previous commentary, that I know of.
I continue to not understand why the RF armed forces are still fighting along the borders of Donetsk, Luhansk. Why Zaporizhzhia, Kherson, on to the Black sea coast to Odessa oblast are not well along to occupied? Why are they not have already at least occupied Kharkov (oblast if not city) and at least half of Dnipropetrovsk. Why has the [sic] Ukrainian government allowed to function, and not buildings blasted to rubble, US-UK embassies, and locations in Lvov also so destroyed?
In 1999 the US-NATO bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade.
Why the restraint? When the people of Donetsk are still being bombed a year and a half into the war. Where is it coming from? Putin? Or is it inadequacy of RF military?
Posted by: BranDer | Oct 31 2023 21:11 utc | 166
Everyone in Russia is baffled.
Why attack Avdeevka head on, probably the most fortified place in the world, instead of attacking all along the currently frozen, but much less fortified and well defended front lines in Chernigov, Sumy and Kharkov, stretching the AFU completely, and thus making it easier in Avdeevka?
Doesn’t make any sense to me, nor does it make sense to everyone who was constantly asking these questions in Russia before the Kremlin clamped down on internal dissent this summer by jailing Strelkov and a few others (notice how the milbloggers have stopped criticizing the conduct of the war since then and have dramatically scaled down on reporting losses, which they regularly did in the past).
A few possible explanations of what is happening, some reasonably hopeful, others quite grim:
1) Escalation management plus the need to prepare properly. It is quite possible that if RU does a repeat of February 24 2022, NATO will jump in directly and take at the very least western Ukraine. And then the choice is WWIII or strategic defeat for Russia. The way to avoid that is to do a lightning quick take over of everything east of the river, plus Kiev, then go down to Odessa on the western side. But it needs to be done as quickly as possible so that NATO doesn’t have time to react. And that means overwhelming advantage over the AFU, which is to be achieved through a combination of further degrading the AFU and further building up Russian ground forces. And that has probably not been achieved yet. Remember how Putin said “If we want to go back to Kiev, we need to mobilize again”. But an open mobilization may also trigger escalation by itself, so they are doing it on the down low with volunteers and summoning people individually and slowly.
2) The forces for another front are simply not available because the Kremlin in fact refuses to mobilize for a variety of reasons (most of them not good at all), what they have right now is just enough to hold the front and attack in a few places, and it will be a very long time before the AFU is sufficiently chewed up for anything else. And there is no real plan for taking Kharkov soon.
The problem is that in both of these scenarios the strategic wisdom of expending 10-20K lives on Avdeevka is quite dubious. Why attack the most fortified place?
3) Here we get to the grim scenarios — the Kremlin is in fact looking for surrender terms and freezing the conflict because the oligarchy has won the internal fight and wants to be back sipping cocktails in Courchevel and Davos with the Western elites. Then the reason Avdeevka is attacked now is so that Donetsk can be taken out of artillery and Grad range, for political reasons — they will expend the 20K lives, then push a bit further west, perhaps to Pokrovsk (real name Krasnoarmeysk), and freeze it there. I am not sure what exactly the thinking is here — doing that will not save Donetsk from shelling, because they have already being firing HIMARS cluster missiles into Donetsk, and they have also been firing them at random civilian targets, just to terrorize the population, all the way into Alchevsk in the LNR; just moving the LOC to Pokrovsk will still leave Donetsk well within HIMARS range, and the AFU will get ever longer range weapons in the future.
The really ominous sign is that a year later the Kremlin has never mentioned Kherson city as something that will eventually be recovered. And that is a regional capital by the Russian constitution, which Putin is absolutely obliged to return under Russian control. Nothing prevented him from at least promising to do it if that was the plan, which strongly suggests that there is no such plan. That in turn means that there is no real commitment to recovering the whole of the DNR, i.e. Pokrovsk, Konstantinovka, Slavyansk and Kramatorsk, or Zaporozhye city (which too is technically part of the Zaporozhye oblast in the RF). What Kharkov/Sumy/Chernigov/Dnepropetrovsk/Poltava/Nikolaev/Odessa are we hallucinating about in that case?
Posted by: shаdοwbanned | Nov 1 2023 2:26 utc | 373
This something I’ve been meaning to ask at a forum like MoA and isn’t connected to any previous commentary, that I know of.
I continue to not understand why the RF armed forces are still fighting along the borders of Donetsk, Luhansk. Why Zaporizhzhia, Kherson, on to the Black sea coast to Odessa oblast are not well along to occupied? Why are they not have already at least occupied Kharkov (oblast if not city) and at least half of Dnipropetrovsk. Why has the [sic] Ukrainian government allowed to function, and not buildings blasted to rubble, US-UK embassies, and locations in Lvov also so destroyed?
In 1999 the US-NATO bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade.
Why the restraint? When the people of Donetsk are still being bombed a year and a half into the war. Where is it coming from? Putin? Or is it inadequacy of RF military?
Posted by: BranDer | Oct 31 2023 21:11 utc | 166
Everyone in Russia is baffled.
Why attack Avdeevka head on, probably the most fortified place in the world, instead of attacking all along the currently frozen, but much less fortified and well defended front lines in Chernigov, Sumy and Kharkov, stretching the AFU completely, and thus making it easier in Avdeevka?
Doesn’t make any sense to me, nor does it make sense to everyone who was constantly asking these questions in Russia before the Kremlin clamped down on internal dissent this summer by jailing Strelkov and a few others (notice how the milbloggers have stopped criticizing the conduct of the war since then and have dramatically scaled down on reporting losses, which they regularly did in the past).
A few possible explanations of what is happening, some reasonably hopeful, others quite grim:
1) Escalation management plus the need to prepare properly. It is quite possible that if RU does a repeat of February 24 2022, NATO will jump in directly and take at the very least western Ukraine. And then the choice is WWIII or strategic defeat for Russia. The way to avoid that is to do a lightning quick take over of everything east of the river, plus Kiev, then go down to Odessa on the western side. But it needs to be done as quickly as possible so that NATO doesn’t have time to react. And that means overwhelming advantage over the AFU, which is to be achieved through a combination of further degrading the AFU and further building up Russian ground forces. And that has probably not been achieved yet. Remember how Putin said “If we want to go back to Kiev, we need to mobilize again”. But an open mobilization may also trigger escalation by itself, so they are doing it on the down low with volunteers and summoning people individually and slowly.
2) The forces for another front are simply not available because the Kremlin in fact refuses to mobilize for a variety of reasons (most of them not good at all), what they have right now is just enough to hold the front and attack in a few places, and it will be a very long time before the AFU is sufficiently chewed up for anything else. And there is no real plan for taking Kharkov soon.
The problem is that in both of these scenarios the strategic wisdom of expending 10-20K lives on Avdeevka is quite dubious. Why attack the most fortified place?
3) Here we get to the grim scenarios — the Kremlin is in fact looking for surrender terms and freezing the conflict because the oligarchy has won the internal fight and wants to be back sipping cocktails in Courchevel and Davos with the Western elites. Then the reason Avdeevka is attacked now is so that Donetsk can be taken out of artillery and Grad range, for political reasons — they will expend the 20K lives, then push a bit further west, perhaps to Pokrovsk (real name Krasnoarmeysk), and freeze it there. I am not sure what exactly the thinking is here — doing that will not save Donetsk from shelling, because they have already being firing HIMARS cluster missiles into Donetsk, and they have also been firing them at random civilian targets, just to terrorize the population, all the way into Alchevsk in the LNR; just moving the LOC to Pokrovsk will still leave Donetsk well within HIMARS range, and the AFU will get ever longer range weapons in the future.
The really ominous sign is that a year later the Kremlin has never mentioned Kherson city as something that will eventually be recovered. And that is a regional capital by the Russian constitution, which Putin is absolutely obliged to return under Russian control. Nothing prevented him from at least promising to do it if that was the plan, which strongly suggests that there is no such plan. That in turn means that there is no real commitment to recovering the whole of the DNR, i.e. Pokrovsk, Konstantinovka, Slavyansk and Kramatorsk, or Zaporozhye city (which too is technically part of the Zaporozhye oblast in the RF). What Kharkov/Sumy/Chernigov/Dnepropetrovsk/Poltava/Nikolaev/Odessa are we hallucinating about in that case?
Posted by: shаdοwbanned | Nov 1 2023 2:26 utc | 374
What’s near Kupyansk?
Tamans have the enemy by the throat
Front-line report 10/31/2023 from journalist Marat Khairullin
At first glance, it seems that there is a lull in the Kupyansky direction. Using which the Ukrainians are trying to counterattack. But in reality the situation is much more interesting.
Yesterday the enemy tried to attack southwest of Sinkovka, losing 4 tanks – two of which were Leopards. The meaning of this attack for the Ukrainian Armed Forces was an attempt to dislodge our troops from a previously occupied position, which is very convenient for an assault on the key village of Petropavlovskoye in the Kupyansk direction. Which, in fact, opens the road to Kupyansk.
It should be noted here that the Ukrainian Armed Forces are increasingly experiencing a shortage of armored vehicles. Only this can explain that the Ukrainian Armed Forces drove the slow-moving Leopards into an open field without any cover, where they were destroyed by our fighters.
The slow-moving Leopards were supposed to cover the advance of the landing column, which was heading to storm the specified position.
As a result, they themselves were destroyed, as well as several armored vehicles. According to official estimates of our Ministry of Defense, the enemy lost up to 60 people in this battle.
If we talk about the general situation in the Kupyansk direction, then it is very bad for the enemy.
In the last two or three weeks, our famous 2nd Motorized Rifle Division of the First Tank Army, the famous Taman Division, has moved up to the first line.
Moreover, this was not done secretly, but in an openly demonstrative manner. And this is very annoying for dill.
The fact is that this elite division is designed for offensive operations and is armed with a powerful tank fist from the latest T-90.
Considering the action unfolding in the neighboring Krasno-Limansky direction, where ours have been continuously and very strongly pressing the Ukrainian positions for the second week, inexorably grinding down the most important position area for the Ukrainians, this creates a very unpleasant situation for the Ukrainian Armed Forces – they are forced to keep very large reserves near Kupyansk, which are like air to them needed in other sectors of the front.
Actually, this is precisely why the Ukrainians are trying to counterattack here, in order to dislodge our forces from their original positions where we prepared to attack.
These are attempts to delay the inevitable here – to prevent our troops from going on the offensive again.
This situation, by the way, is very typical for the entire front line – due to constant pressure and threats on most of the front line, the Ukrainians are in a desperate situation with reserves.
This, for example, has already begun to directly affect the course of hostilities.
Near Avdeevka, our troops have been moving forward in all directions for the fifth day – tonight my First Slavic Brigade took the next enemy strongholds, capturing a very important positional area.
And the day before (the battle lasted for three days), Slavyanka took and cleared one of the most vile positions in her area called Quarry. And today she not only held it, but also took the next milestone, moving forward. I will give the details of these battles in the form of an essay a little later.
On the other side of Avdeevka, in the area of the Coke and Chemical Plant, ours also took several enemy positions, advancing close to the perimeter of the plant.
And the Ukrainians cannot counter anything to this yet – the Bakhmut scenario, when the crests instantly responded to our every advance with a flurry of continuous counterattacks, does not work here.
Today they can no longer afford this: in order to organize massive counterattacks, they need time to pull up reserves from somewhere. Those who were transferred here last week are obviously not enough. But there are simply no reserves. This is actually why the Ukrainian Armed Forces are launching regular suicidal attacks near Kherson, in order to somehow distract our troops from the pressure in the North.
But these attempts look frankly pathetic. Just like the efforts of ukropaganda to create horror in the information field, recently more and more anonymous supposedly soldiers from the front line have appeared who talk about huge losses, for example, near Avdiivka.
This means only one thing – the Ukrainians are no longer in a good place, since their propaganda has begun to take such steps. There is nothing else to cling to – the creativity is over. Just like the dill themselves.
Well, thank God, we will continue in the same spirit.
Posted by: maratpost | Nov 1 2023 6:28 utc | 399
What’s near Kupyansk?
Tamans have the enemy by the throat
Front-line report 10/31/2023 from journalist Marat Khairullin
At first glance, it seems that there is a lull in the Kupyansky direction. Using which the Ukrainians are trying to counterattack. But in reality the situation is much more interesting.
Yesterday the enemy tried to attack southwest of Sinkovka, losing 4 tanks – two of which were Leopards. The meaning of this attack for the Ukrainian Armed Forces was an attempt to dislodge our troops from a previously occupied position, which is very convenient for an assault on the key village of Petropavlovskoye in the Kupyansk direction. Which, in fact, opens the road to Kupyansk.
It should be noted here that the Ukrainian Armed Forces are increasingly experiencing a shortage of armored vehicles. Only this can explain that the Ukrainian Armed Forces drove the slow-moving Leopards into an open field without any cover, where they were destroyed by our fighters.
The slow-moving Leopards were supposed to cover the advance of the landing column, which was heading to storm the specified position.
As a result, they themselves were destroyed, as well as several armored vehicles. According to official estimates of our Ministry of Defense, the enemy lost up to 60 people in this battle.
If we talk about the general situation in the Kupyansk direction, then it is very bad for the enemy.
In the last two or three weeks, our famous 2nd Motorized Rifle Division of the First Tank Army, the famous Taman Division, has moved up to the first line.
Moreover, this was not done secretly, but in an openly demonstrative manner. And this is very annoying for dill.
The fact is that this elite division is designed for offensive operations and is armed with a powerful tank fist from the latest T-90.
Considering the action unfolding in the neighboring Krasno-Limansky direction, where ours have been continuously and very strongly pressing the Ukrainian positions for the second week, inexorably grinding down the most important position area for the Ukrainians, this creates a very unpleasant situation for the Ukrainian Armed Forces – they are forced to keep very large reserves near Kupyansk, which are like air to them needed in other sectors of the front.
Actually, this is precisely why the Ukrainians are trying to counterattack here, in order to dislodge our forces from their original positions where we prepared to attack.
These are attempts to delay the inevitable here – to prevent our troops from going on the offensive again.
This situation, by the way, is very typical for the entire front line – due to constant pressure and threats on most of the front line, the Ukrainians are in a desperate situation with reserves.
This, for example, has already begun to directly affect the course of hostilities.
Near Avdeevka, our troops have been moving forward in all directions for the fifth day – tonight my First Slavic Brigade took the next enemy strongholds, capturing a very important positional area.
And the day before (the battle lasted for three days), Slavyanka took and cleared one of the most vile positions in her area called Quarry. And today she not only held it, but also took the next milestone, moving forward. I will give the details of these battles in the form of an essay a little later.
On the other side of Avdeevka, in the area of the Coke and Chemical Plant, ours also took several enemy positions, advancing close to the perimeter of the plant.
And the Ukrainians cannot counter anything to this yet – the Bakhmut scenario, when the crests instantly responded to our every advance with a flurry of continuous counterattacks, does not work here.
Today they can no longer afford this: in order to organize massive counterattacks, they need time to pull up reserves from somewhere. Those who were transferred here last week are obviously not enough. But there are simply no reserves. This is actually why the Ukrainian Armed Forces are launching regular suicidal attacks near Kherson, in order to somehow distract our troops from the pressure in the North.
But these attempts look frankly pathetic. Just like the efforts of ukropaganda to create horror in the information field, recently more and more anonymous supposedly soldiers from the front line have appeared who talk about huge losses, for example, near Avdiivka.
This means only one thing – the Ukrainians are no longer in a good place, since their propaganda has begun to take such steps. There is nothing else to cling to – the creativity is over. Just like the dill themselves.
Well, thank God, we will continue in the same spirit.
Posted by: maratpost | Nov 1 2023 6:28 utc | 400
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