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Ukraine Finally Starts To Build Defense Lines
After wasting ten-thousands of men in hopeless battles the Ukrainian comedian has finally acknowledged that his army's performative 'counter-attacks' and hold-to-the-last-man defenses have made no sense.
Politco's Dreamer of the year finally calls for building defensive lines:
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy called for a faster buildup of major defensive lines amid Kyiv’s stalled counteroffensive and concerns that Russia could attempt to take more territory.
Zelenskiy urged greater speed and efficiency in building defenses in a video statement on Telegram after a meeting with key military and security officials Tuesday evening. He encouraged local communities to pitch in and pledged to make money available for the effort.
“Our country will definitely have enough mines and concrete,” he said. He didn’t provide details on where the fortifications would be built or how extensive they might be.
It took the Russian army several months and lots of money to build its extensive defense lines in the southeast of Ukraine.
Zelenski has neither the time nor the money to build solid lines but he wants many of them (machine translation):
According to Zelensky, he held a meeting on fortification in all major directions – first of all on Avdiivka and Maryinsky, as well as on Kupyansk and on the Kupyansk – Liman line, in Zaporozhye and Kherson regions.
In addition, fortifications will be built along the entire border with Russia and Belarus.
"We will work with our partners to strengthen our defensive lines," the president added.
Earlier, Zelensky already spoke about a "special" meeting of the Stavka, where they discussed strengthening the fortification.
Comments Strana (machine translation):
This is quite a landmark statement. It sounds like an announcement of the construction of large-scale defensive lines-similar to the one that Russia has built in the south.
And more broadly, this can be interpreted as a transition to a defensive strategy, which began to be talked about more and more often after the counteroffensive of the Armed Forces of Ukraine actually stopped, and the Russians themselves switched to large-scale attacks.
But officially, the authorities do not talk about the transition to defense, and the main thesis remains that the APU is preparing to attack, and there is no deadlock (which even the commander-in-chief Valery Zaluzhny wrote about) at the front.
Zelenski called for private companies to build the new fortifications. In the context of Ukraine that means more corruption – lots of it – as government officials will ask for kick backs for any contract they may sign. Previous attempts of privately build defense lines had ditches that were too shallow and of little utility. Some concrete was poured but in the wrong places and shapes.
There were reasons why Ukraine failed last summer to overcome the Russian defense lines. It lacked the artillery support, air-superiority and sheer mass that is required to achieve that. But Russia has all of that – an enormous amount of heavy siege artillery (200 mm and beyond), a ridiculous superiority in the number of unmanned drones and manned fighter planes and lots of new contract soldiers. Any lines the Ukrainians can build will be overcome by superior Russian forces.
Yes, passing Ukrainian minefields will be difficult. But there are ways and means to do such.
Thanks to its previous lunatic attempts the Ukrainian army has lost too many men to hold each and every line. And while the Ukrainian army will have to defend everywhere, the Russia one can choose the one or two local fronts where it wants to breach the defense lines to pass through them.
What is planned now is too little too late to save Ukraine.
Zaluzhny Talking Peace With Russia Behind Zelensky and Biden’s Backs: Sy Hersh
President Zelensky admitted this week that Ukraine’s counteroffensive failed to “achieve the desired results” and that Kiev is now in “a new phase” of the conflict with Russia. Meanwhile, Valery Zaluzhny, the general who enraged Zelensky by calling the crisis a “stalemate,” was absent from a Thursday meeting between the president and his generals.
Russia and Ukraine’s top generals have been holding secret discussions aimed at putting the Ukrainian crisis to bed, with Ukraine’s president, and the Biden administration, left out. That’s according to a new report by veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh citing informed US sources.
The negotiations, said to be spearheaded by Russian Chief of General Staff Valery Gerasimov and Ukrainian Armed Forces Commander-in-Chief Valery Zaluzhny, still have “a lot of questions” left to be ironed out, one source, a US businessman with years of experience dealing with high-level Ukrainian diplomatic and military issues in the government, told Hersh. These include what to do about war criminals, matters of citizenship, ordnance disposal, and cross border economics, as well wrangling to assure “peace with honor,” according to a second source.
Russian officials have made no official statements on the matter, and Sputnik could not independently confirm the veracity of this information at the time of writing. Moscow has repeatedly said throughout the crisis that Ukrainian membership in NATO would constitute crossing its security “red lines.”
Hersh’s sources also told him that Zaluzhny’s bombshell interview in a British business magazine last month in which he admitted that Ukraine’s counteroffensive had reached a “stalemate” and that there would be no “deep and beautiful breakthrough” was “arranged” after Zaluzhny and Gerasimov had spoken several times.
The interview and accompanying op-ed written by Zaluzhny were “carefully orchestrated” by the Ukrainian commander to send a message to the Ukrainian government and the “madman who staked his life upon winning politically and militarily” at the helm that “the war is over and we want out,” according to a US official Hersh says was involved in the early stages of the general-to-general discussions.
“So the message that was sent to Zelensky is that we are going to have talks with the Russians with or without you and they are going to be military-to-military. Your neighbors are fed up with you, especially Poland and Hungary, and they want their Ukrainian refugees to go back to a peaceful country,” the official said. The state of Ukraine’s collapsed economy and the question of “how do you operate a country with no GNP?” was also driven home, the source added.
The US president and his foreign policy team have been left out of the talks, and “the White House is totally against the proposed agreement,” according to the US official who spoke to Hersh. “But it will happen. Putin has not disagreed,” the source said.
Zelensky has reportedly been told that “this is a military-to-military problem to solve and the talks will go on with or without you,” if need be. “We can finance his voyage to the Caribbean,” the official added.
Zelensky-Zaluzhny Spat
Hersh’s story comes after a month of escalating tensions between Zaluzhny and Zelensky after the publication of Zaluzhny’s interview and article in Western media on November 1, with Ukraine’s president first adamantly insisting that the conflict with Russia was “not a stalemate,” and emphasizing emphatically to US media that he would never negotiate with Moscow and Russian President Vladimir Putin under any circumstances.
The behind-the-scenes battle has come to include sackings of Zaluzhny allies, the mysterious bombing death attack of one of his aides, and a poisoning attack against Marianna Budanova, the wife of the Ukrainian military’s Main Intelligence Directorate chief.
On Thursday, Zelensky appeared to change his tune regarding the fate of Ukraine’s counteroffensive, saying it “did not achieve the desired results” as quickly as expected, that Kiev will be shifting to “a new phase of war” as winter sets in, and mobilize resources to build fortifications in Zaporozhye, Ukrainian-occupied areas of Donetsk, Kherson, Kharkov, Sumy, Chernigov, Kiev, Rovno and Volyn.
Meanwhile, Commander Zaluzhny was conspicuously absent from a meeting between Zelensky and his generals during a visit to a command post in Kharkov region.
One factor that the Hersh story did not account for is Ukraine’s neo-Nazi problem. Veteran international relations expert Gilbert Doctorow told Sputnik this week that notwithstanding the political rivalries or conflicts in Kiev, they are just “a tempest in a teapot” given the power of the neo nazi thug “grey cardinals” mobilized during the 2014 coup, who can and will do everything in their power to block any peace deal.
Posted by: Hersh post | Dec 1 2023 19:37 utc | 80
The ingredient that triggered the private talks is a shared understanding that Putin would not object to a settlement that fixed borders according to where the troops were in place when the peace talks ended. Russia would be left with unchallenged control of Crimea and, pending an election to be held under martial law in March, with essential control of the four provinces, or oblasts, that Russia annexed last year: Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and the still embattled Kherson. In return—in a concession not foreseen—Russia, that is, Putin himself, would not object to Ukraine joining NATO.
In a November 1 interview in the Economist: Valery Zaluzhny, commander-in-chief of the Ukraine army, stunned the editors by acknowledging that his war with Russia is “into a stalemate. It would take a massive technological leap to break the deadlock.” The general revealed that his troops had advanced by less than eleven miles since the much advertised Ukrainian counteroffensive against Russia got under way early last summer. “There will be most likely no deep and beautiful breakthrough,” Zaluzhny said. “The simple fact is that we see everything that the enemy is doing and they see everything we are doing. In order for us to break this deadlock we need something new, like the gunpowder which the Chinese invented and which we are still using to kill each other.”
The interview made headlines around the world—it’s news when the general running a war announces the war is deadlocked—and, of course, it enraged Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, and the general publicly apologized for his remarks.
But Zelensky is still running the country, and it is known in some quarters in Europe that Russia and Ukraine are now engaged in serious peace talks. Zelensky is resisting such talks and has announced he will seek re-election on a platform that calls for a full withdrawal of Russia from Ukraine before any peace talks can resume. The country is currently under martial law, so elections cannot take place. Zelensky continues to mobilize troops for the Ukrainian army, with a reported new call-up of those between the ages of seventeen and seventy.
There must be a backstory when a commanding general tells a prominent magazine that his and Russia’s army are locked in a stalemate. And here it is, as told to me by two Americans with direct knowledge of these matters.
The interview with the Economist was arranged, as the editors of the magazine were not aware, after a series of general-to-general communications with Valery Gerasimov, who has been the chief of the general staff of Russia’s military since 2012. He is also Russia’s first deputy minister of defense. Gerasimov was especially close to US Army General Martin Dempsey, who served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under President Barack Obama from 2011 to 2015. Dempsey and Gerasimov initially met many years earlier at social events when both were captains and commanded opposite tank units in West and East Germany.
One American official involved early on in the general-to-general talks told me: “This was not a spur-of-the-moment event,” he said. “This was carefully orchestrated by Zaluzhny. The message was the war is over and we want out. To continue it would destroy the next generation of the citizens of Ukraine.”
The official acknowledged that “there is no question” that Zaluzhny “had some help in deciding to go public from some key Americans.”
“What was the objective of this amazing story?” the official asked. “To get the Ukraine leadership”—meaning Zelensky and his coterie—“to agree to a settlement and to realize that to continue the war was self-destructive.” He said that there was what he called “a bigger objective”: to get the Ukrainian citizenry “to the point where they would agree to negotiations” to end the war.
Meanwhile, on the Russian side, the official said, “Gerasimov also realized that from a military perspective the war in Ukraine was a destructive stalemate.” The Russian general “finally convinced Putin that there was no victory to be had. The Russian losses were disproportionate.
“But how to convince Zelensky?” the official said. “He is a madman who staked his life upon winning politically and militarily. He is an obstacle to a settlement, and he has many allies in the Ukrainian military. So the message that was sent to Zelensky is that we are going to have talks with the Russians with or without you and they are going to be military to military. Your neighbors are fed up with you, especially Poland and Hungary, and they want their Ukrainian refugees to go back to a peaceful country,”
The other issue facing Zelensky, the official said, is economic: “How do you operate a country with no GNP?”
The deal now on the table for Zelensky, the official said, offers the possibility of Russian support for Ukraine to finally be allowed to join NATO. Crimea would stay in Russian hands, and there would be freely monitored Russian presidential elections in the four partially occupied oblasts claimed by Russia. Two weeks ago Putin signed legislation that allowed voting in those provinces to be held under martial law.
“The White House is totally against the proposed agreement,” the official said. “But it will happen. Putin has not disagreed.” It is thought that Putin will “want to make a deal.”
There is much work left to do on many details of the proposed agreement, the official said. He provided a daunting list: “War criminals on both sides. Citizenship. Compensation. Ordnance disposal. Cross-border economics. Access and, most importantly, the political cover story. Neither side wants to be blamed for a ‘sellout’ and are looking for peace with honor. Trying to put the toothpaste back into the tube won’t be easy, but most important to prevent future flare-ups. We have all winter to work it out and some good folks lending a hand.”
The official told of a recent encouraging sign. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov recently asked to be invited to the NATO international security conference that took place this week in Montenegro. “He was extended an invitation and accepted,” the official said. “The United States was informed but not given a veto.”
A second American , whose information comes from overseas, confirmed that Russia might be willing to “allow Ukraine to join NATO,” but he added an important caveat. Under the tentative agreement, NATO would have to commit to “not place NATO troops on Ukrainian soil.” The agreement also would not allow NATO to place offensive weapons in Ukraine, but defensive weapons systems would be permitted.
The American added that Russia would agree, were the proposed peace talks to succeed, to rejoin the Comprehensive Nucear-Test-Ban Treaty from which it recently withdrew. It also would agree to remove its military from areas near the Baltic states and Moldova.
He told me that the proposed settlement has inherent logic because of the on-the-ground military realities. Russia, like Ukraine, he said, has been unable to launch penetration attacks deep across the war’s current front. “They tried but failed. Inefficient and wasteful as its military is, Russia can hold on to territories they have conquered in eastern Ukraine. And we are heading into the winter months, during which the mud and snow make any progress impossible.”
The two generals may continue to talk and Putin may indeed be interested in a settlement that gives him permanent control of Crimea and the four provinces he has claimed, but Zelensky remains the wild card. The American official said that Zelensky has been told that “this is a military-to-military problem to solve and the talks will go on with or without you.” If necessary. the American official told me, “We can finance his voyage to the Caribbean.”
Posted by: more Hersh | Dec 1 2023 20:17 utc | 87
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