News & views related to the war in Palestine …

News & views related to the war in Ukraine …

Last week's posts on Moon of Alabama:

• Aug 12 – Ukraine SitRep: The Kursk Incursion Was Stopped
• Aug 15 – FT Reports A Ukrainian Warcrime
• Aug 17 – Ukraine SitRep: Kursk Attack Derailed Partial Ceasefire Deal
  Related:
  – Fitch downgrades Ukraine to 'RD' – Default – Inter Affairs
  – Dmitry Trenin: This European region could be the next Ukraine – RT
  – US oil services group SLB expands in Russia as competitors withdraw (archived) – FT

• Aug 14 – U.S. Tries To Deter Iran From Taking Revenge
  Related:
  – Iran finesses its deterrence strategy – Indian Punchline
  – Hezbollah is undeterred as Lebanon braces for war with Israel – Washington Post
  – The threat Israel didn’t foresee: Hezbollah’s growing drone power – AP
  – Houthis undeterred despite US action to protect Red Sea shipping – VOA

—
Other issues:

Cont. reading: The MoA Week In Review – OT 2024-196

The Ukrainian incursion into Russia's Kursk oblast has even worse consequences for Ukraine than had been known so far.

Over the last six months, in revenge for Ukrainian attacks on Russian infrastructure, especially oil refineries, the Russian forces created serious damage on Ukraine's electricity network. Nearly every conventional power generation facility in Ukraine has been damaged. Half of Ukraine's 18 Gigawatts of electricity generation capacity has been taken offline. The damaged power stations were often also used to provide heating to large blocks of Soviet type apartments. Without power and heating it will be a very difficult winter for many people in Ukraine.

There was interest on both sides to stop the campaigns against the other sides infrastructure. An agreement about it was in the making and was possible. But, as Washington Post reports, the Ukrainian attack on Kursk blew it apart:

Ukraine and Russia were set to send delegations to Doha this month to negotiate a landmark agreement halting strikes on energy and power infrastructure on both sides, diplomats and officials familiar with the discussions said, in what would have amounted to a partial cease-fire and offered a reprieve for both countries.

But the indirect talks, with the Qataris serving as mediators and meeting separately with the Ukrainian and Russian delegations, were derailed by Ukraine’s surprise incursion into Russia’s western Kursk region last week, according to the officials.
…
The diplomat familiar with the talks said that Qatar has been discussing the arrangement for an energy strike moratorium with Kyiv and Moscow for the past two months. The official said the two sides agreed to a summit in Doha with just minor details left to be worked out.

“After Kursk, the Russians balked,” another person familiar with the talks said.

Instead of its senseless attack on Kursk Ukraine could have had an agreement that would make it possible to get through the winter without many blackouts and other interruptions. It blew that chance.

The moral uplift for Ukrainian forces created by the attack on Kursk is already waning. Russia has not pulled any of its troops involved in the attacks in the east to defend Kursk. It has instead pulled reserves from elsewhere. One of the hoped for effects of the Kursk incursion is thereby not happening.

Ukraine's attack was only made possible by pulling troops for the eastern frontline. Moreover artillery supplies, which were already problematic, have become even scarcer:

Cont. reading: Ukraine SitRep: Kursk Attack Derailed Partial Ceasefire Deal

News & views related to the war in Palestine …

Of interest:

• Haaretz Investigation: Israeli Army Uses Palestinian Civilians to Inspect Potentially Booby-trapped Tunnels in Gaza (archived) – Haaretz
• Israel is redrawing the West Bank, cutting into a prospective Palestinian state (archived) – Washington Post
• Editorial | Don't Buy the Lie That Israeli Settler Violence Is the Exception. It's the Rule (archived) – Haaretz
• “An Intricate Fabric of Bad Actors Working Hand-in-Hand” – So is war Inevitable? – Alastair Crooke / SCF
• Alastair Crooke : Is Middle East War Inevitable? (vid) – Judge Napolitano

News & views related to the war in Ukraine …

News & views not related to the wars in Ukraine and Palestine …

Of interest:

• ​The National Endowment for Democracy – What It Is and What It Does – China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs
• The Grayzone caused ‘biggest PR fiasco in history’ for US govt regime change arm, leaked emails reveal – Grayzone

The willful killing of unarmed soldiers, especially when there is a good chance of taking them prisoners, is certainly a war crime.

It is astonishing that Christopher Miller of the Financial Times reports of it without further comment.

How Ukraine pulled off its biggest gamble: invading Russia (archived) – Financial Times, Aug 12, 2024

As Volodymyr prepared to enter Russian territory, adrenaline ran through his veins. It was not lost on him that 81 years ago, another battle in Russia’s Kursk region marked a turning point for Europe.
…
“We entered Russian territory for the first time at 1pm on Tuesday [August 6],” Volodymyr said. “We were among the first to enter there.”

To his astonishment, his unit faced no resistance as their eight-wheeled, 20 tonne US Stryker fighting vehicle stormed across the border in broad daylight.

They soon encountered a Russian unit “sitting in the forest, drinking coffee at a table”, Volodymyr recalled. “Then our Stryker drives right into their table.

“We killed many of them on the first day,” he said. “Because they were unarmed and didn’t expect us.”

Not wanting to end up like their comrades, he added, “dozens” of stunned Russian soldiers simply laid down their weapons and surrendered.

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"81 years ago, another battle in Russia’s Kursk region marked a turning point for Europe," writes Miller. He and others should consider what that really means. If I remember correctly, the German fascists and their Ukrainian allies also committed war crimes – and lost the fight.

The Washington Post is warmongering against Iran.

It's informal CIA spokesman David Ignatius claims today that Iran is plotting to kill U.S. politicians:

Tehran has been plotting a violent retaliation campaign against the United States for years. Iran has conducted repeated assassination plots inside the United States ever since, without success, according to Justice Department documents.

Iran has applied similar methodology in most of these attacks. Iranians or their operatives who traveled to Iran have tried to recruit hit men from gangs or criminal groups. They’ve used complicated tradecraft to try to avoid detection in the United States, but, in each case, they have stumbled into the hands of the FBI.

Or the FBI has found some dimwits which fell for plots to entrap them …

Another WaPo story claims that Iran wants to interference with U.S. elections:

National security officials and researchers noted a rise in “troublesome” Iranian influence operations designed to meddle in the U.S. presidential race.

The Trump campaign has suggested Iranian hackers leaked its documents to media organizations, but no proof has emerged.
… In its recent report, Microsoft spotlighted four websites, which the company said were covertly run by Iran, masquerading as legitimate news outlets that published articles on controversial subjects including the presidential election, LGBTQ+ rights and the Israeli military campaign in Gaza.

These claims are just as bollocks as the last round of such about Russian interference in U.S. elections.

Each time such propaganda comes up is a sign that the U.S. is planning for some kind of conflict.

I doubt though that the U.S. wants a war with Iran. The news of U.S. ships and airplanes moved to the Middle East it is just trying to scare Iran into refraining from hitting Israel.

But Tehran will not do so. With the assassination of the Hamas leader Ismael Haniyeh Israel killed a foreign state guest of Iran within Iran.

It demonstrated that Israel is not deterred from such acts. If Iran leaves this without consequences Israel would start to kill Iranian politicians left and right. It is therefore determined to seek revenge:

Fereshteh Sadeghi فرشته صادقی @fresh_sadegh – 13:53 UTC · Aug 14, 2024
#Irananalysis🧵

1- Iran’s Leader Ayatollah Khamenei is determined to punish Israel for the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran. In a meeting on Wednesday he said “non-tactical retreat in any field -be it military, political or economic- will instigate divine wrath”.

2- Ayatollah Ali Khamenei says Iran’s enemies try to draw back Iranian nation by frightening them through a psychological warfare.
“Since the beginning of our revolution, they inculcated us with the fear of the U.S., the UK and the Zionist regime”.

3- Iran’s leader says “by inculcating fear and waging a psychological war, the enemy intends to force us to retreat. Our nation knows it can do great things by simply trusting itself and believing the enemy doesn’t have the upper hand, as it pretends to be superior.”

Khamenei.ir @khamenei_ir – 12:47 UTC · Aug 14, 2024
The enemy's purpose in using psychological warfare on the military front is to instil fear and force a retreat. The Quran tells us that a nontactical retreat in any field, whether it is military, political, or economic, will bring divine wrath.

4- All that said, the Ayatollah has already vowed a severe punishment for the Zionist regime of Israel.
By talking so, he literally states that Iran will face Allah’s wrath if it doesn’t respond to Israel’s crimes against Palestinians or reneges on its promise of revenge”.

What Iran will do, and when, is of course the question everyone is asking and for which there will be no answer until Iran strikes.

The waiting alone has an effect:

As our nation waits passively for two weeks and counting to see whether, when and how devastatingly Iran and Hezbollah will choose to attack us, in order to “avenge” the killings of two terror chiefs bent on our destruction, we Israelis feel like the hapless, helpless playthings of other, more powerful forces. This is not an acceptable situation for the revived Jewish nation. And it points to the untenable lack of a strategy by our leadership for restoring national security more than 10 months after the October 7 Hamas invasion, slaughter and abductions.

Will Israel response to whatever Iran might do?

If it decides to do so, and if it causes severe damage, the war will further escalate into conflict which Israel, even with U.S. help, will not survive.

On its seventh day the Ukrainian army incursion into the Russian Kursk oblast seems to have come to a halt. The front-lines are hardening and the Russian side is using its artillery and bombing predominance to push it back.

There are three Ukrainian brigades involved plus a number of battalions that have been dispatched away from their brigades involved in other parts of the front. The 80th and the 82nd paratrooper brigades are the main forces. They have partly been trained in Britain and Germany and are using western equipment. The 22nd mechanized brigade is the third major unit. Then there are some five to ten battalions from various other brigades.

The Economist reports (archived) on the operation from a hospital in Sumy:

[T]he accounts from Ukraine’s wounded suggest it has not been a walk in the park, and remains risky. The hospital ward reeks of the sacrifice: soil, blood, and stale sweat. Foil burn-dressings line the corridor. In the yard, the patients, some wrapped like mummies from head to toe in bandages, smoke furiously. Angol, a 28-year-old paratrooper with the 33rd brigade, looks like a Christmas tree. His left arm is immobilised in a fixation device. Tubes, bags and wires protrude from his body. He was also about 30km into Russia when his luck ran out. He isn’t sure if it was artillery or a bomb that hit him. Maybe it was friendly fire; there was a lot of that. All he can remember is falling to the ground and shouting “300”, the code for wounded. The Russians had been on the run up to then, he insists, abandoning equipment and ammunition as fast as they could.

That the Russia border troops have taken to run is not astonishing. They were mostly conscripts and not armed sufficiently to withstand an armored onslaught:

Some aspects of Ukraine’s operation appear to have been meticulously planned. Operational security delivered the element of surprise, a crucial aspect of warfare. “We sent our most combat-ready units to the weakest point on their border,” says a general-staff source deployed to the region. “Conscript soldiers faced paratroopers and simply surrendered.” But other aspects of the operation indicate a certain haste in preparation. All three soldiers quoted in this article were pulled, unrested, from under-pressure front lines in the east with barely a day’s notice.

The Ukrainian army moved in with the best troops it still had plus some extras scrapped from the bottom of its barrel. Russian units which have been moved to the border have put a halt to the Ukrainian movement. Mobile reconnaissance platoons the Ukrainians have been sending down the roads to outlaying towns have mostly been eliminated. The huge progress seen on some Ukraine friendly maps now looks much smaller. Some 30 small settlements have been captured but even the local administration center Sudzha, with previously 6,000 inhabitants, has not been fully conquered.

A new Ukrainian attempt today to cross the border at the Kolotilovka checkpoint in the Belgograd region has failed and the Ukrainian units involved there have taken losses.

Cont. reading: Ukraine SitRep: The Kursk Incursion Was Stopped

News & views related to the war in Palestine …

News & views related to the war in Ukraine …

Last week's posts on Moon of Alabama:

• Aug 5 – Markets Down – Risks Up
  Related:
  – A tale of two bubbles – Asia Times
  – Geopolitical Risk and Decoupling: Evidence from U.S. Export Controls – New York Fed

• Aug 6 – Gaza As A New(?) Western Method To Wage War
  Related:
  – The Radicalization of Israel’s Military – New Yorker
  – The World Court has ended the Oslo ruse – Mondoweiss
  – U.S. will fund Israeli unit accused of gross human rights abuses – Washington Post
  – Israel’s use of ‘dirty diplomacy’ to force the resistance to surrender – E.J. Magnier
  – Amnesty investigation claims US-made weapon used in two Israeli airstrikes in Gaza that killed 43 civilians – CNN

Ori Goldberg @ori_goldberg – 9:01 UTC · Aug 10, 2024

1/ The massacre at the Al-Taba'een school is a crime and a horror. It is genocide. Leaving civilians no choice but to take refuge at a school and then bombing it is a crime even if Yahya Sinwar was hiding in the building. How does such dehumanization come into being? —>
…
8/ This is what we've been doing since there was an "us" here. In the name of "security" we have been establishing supremacy. We would be secure when "they" knew and accepted that their place was out of our sight. They were here at our indulgence. The whole thing was ours. —>

• Aug 7 – Ukraine SitRep: Incursion Towards Kursk
• Aug 9 – Ukraine SitRep: Kursk Campaign Designed To Keep War Going
  Related:
  – The logic of Ukraine’s Kursk offensive – Spectator
  – Ukraine gambles with Kursk invasion of Russia – Asia Times
  – Invading Russia is Zelensky’s riskiest decision yet (archived) – The Times

> President Zelensky’s personal fingerprints are all over it. It’s been an open secret in Kyiv for many months that the president was pressing his military chiefs to launch a summer offensive.

Given Ukraine’s manpower and resources problems, they were hesitant. But Zelensky is desperate to reverse the narrative that Ukraine is losing its war. <

• Aug 10 – The Sanctions Are Working

—
Other issues:

Cont. reading: The MoA Week In Review – OT 2024-190

In March 2022 I predicted some consequences of the sanctions imposed on Russia:

The first [map] shows the countries which banned Russian airplanes from their airspace. Russia in turn denied its airspace to operators from those countries. It will cost quite a bit for U.S. and EU airlines as their flight times and cost to and from Asia, which typically fly through Russian airspace, will now increase. Carriers from Asian countries will now easily out-compete U.S. and European airlines on these routes.

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As British media reported yesterday:

Cont. reading: The Sanctions Are Working

The (former) President of Ukraine Vlodomir Zelenski recently made some ambivalent remarks about potential peace talks:

Volodymyr Zelensky told the newspaper "Le Monde" that he does not rule out holding a referendum on the future of Ukrainian territories to end the war, but "it requires the will of the Ukrainian people."
…
According to the president of the country, Ukraine should not liberate all its territories by "force and weapons," because this option "costs us a lot of time and human lives." Zelensky added: – We can return our territories through diplomatic means.

This is another groundbreaking statement from the Ukrainian leader. On July 22, he said in an interview with the BBC that Ukraine is ready to negotiate the end of the war with Russia, even if Vladimir Putin leads the latter. According to the president of Ukraine, the most essential thing in this matter is a genuine desire for peace on terms consistent with international law.
…
He added that the "hot" stage of the war could end before the end of 2024, but the peace plan must be fully agreed with Ukraine's allies "so that no one plays with their own initiatives for ending the war."

It was and is doubtful that Zelenski really wants to make peace. In talks with the Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban he had pointed to a theory of victory over Russia. As Orban explained (machine translation):

Cont. reading: Ukraine SitRep: Kursk Campaign Designed To Keep War Going

News & views related to the war in Palestine …

News & views related to the war in Ukraine …

News & views not related to the wars in Ukraine and Palestine …

Yesterday the Ukrainian army started an attack on Russia from the northern Sumy region into the Russian Kursk oblast. Two to three Ukrainian brigades are involved. They progressed some 5 kilometer but immediately took severe casualties and losses of equipment due to Russian air force action. But over night the Ukrainian troops dug in and this morning tried to expand their holdings by attacking the city of Sudzha.

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The Russian military says that the Ukrainian attack has been stopped. Reserves in the region have been activated and will remove the Ukrainians from Russian terrain. There is no doubt that this will, within a day or two, be achieved.

The Ukrainian operation makes little sense. It is well known that Russia has plenty of forces in the area. It will not need to stop its attacks in the Donetsk region to counter the Ukrainian forces near Sumy.

In 1943 the German attack on Kursk was launched for a similar reason – to divert Russian forces from attacking in the Donetsk region. It ended in utter defeat.

Even pro-Ukrainian commentators are aghast about this obvious waste of men and resources:

Tatarigami_UA @Tatarigami_UA – 14:23 UTC · Aug 6, 2024

The situation in the Pokrovsk direction is critical, with defenses in several areas collapsed and yet to stabilize, largely due to a shortage of personnel. Diverting nearly a brigade to launch an assault on Kursk Oblast, which lacks strategic sense, borders on mental disability.

Well, General Budanov, the head of the Ukrainian military intelligence and reportedly responsible for this operation, is known to be a fool.

There have been rumors for some time that Russia was planing to repeat in Sumy the diversion it has achieved in the Kharkiv region. North of Kharkiv Russian forces crossed the border into Ukraine, progressed some 10 kilometer and dug in. The Ukrainians had to pull troops from the Donetsk front to counter the threatening Russian move towards Kharkiv. The diversion of Ukrainian troops enabled Russian breakthroughs in the Donetsk region.

The current Ukrainian attack from Sumy towards Kursk is giving Russia the perfect pretext to launch another incursion into Ukraine.

Two to three Russian brigades could move towards Sumy, dig in and destroy any counterattacking Ukrainian units. Whatever units the Ukrainians would throw in to stop a Russian incursion towards Sumy would be missing in other parts of the front where they are urgently needed.

We have seen a myriad of reports about systematic torture and murder in Israeli concentration camps, aka prisons, for Palestinians.

These reports come even from prime media which generally serve as outlets of the ruling class. There are by now so many of these reports that there is no doubt that they are real.

• Inside Israel’s torture camp for Gaza detainees – 972mag, Jan 5 2024
• Strapped down, blindfolded, held in diapers: Israeli whistleblowers detail abuse of Palestinians in shadowy detention center– CNN, May 11 2024
• Inside the Base Where Israel Has Detained Thousands of Gazans – New York Times, June 6 2024
• ‘More horrific than Abu Ghraib’: Lawyer recounts visit to Israeli detention center – 972mag, June 27 2024
• Blindfolded, bound and beaten: Palestinians tell of Israeli jail abuse – BBC, August 5 2024

However there have been no political consequences from those reports. I have also not seen or heard any western politician or any editorials condemning the Israel over these reports. To my best knowledge no western country has punished the Zionist government over such behavior.

This even as it is obvious who the main people responsible for this are. Everyone knows and talks about them:

Musa ‘Aasi, a 58-year-old painter-decorator and father of four, said he heard guards beat 38-year-old Tha’er Abu ‘Asab to death in a neighbouring cell at Ketziot in November. One guard told 50-year-old Firas Hassan, from Bethlehem: “We are livestreaming this for Ben-Gvir”.

Ben Gvir’s spokesperson said the minister was “proud” of his prison policy, and that it was in line with international law. “The conditions of the terrorists imprisoned in Israeli prisons have been tightened to the minimum required by law. In accordance with the minister’s policy, the terrorists do not receive the improved conditions they received in the past,” they said.

The Guardian fails to refute those lies from Ben Gvir's spokesperson.

The Palestinians will continue to be tortured and killed. And all their families – in fact – every Palestinian in Gaza shall be killed:

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich implies he believes that blocking humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip is “justified and moral” even if it causes 2 million civilians to die of hunger, adding however that the international community won’t allow this to happen.

“We are bringing in aid because there is no choice,” Smotrich says at a conference in Yad Binyamin hosted by the Israel Hayom outlet. “We can’t, in the current global reality, manage a war. Nobody will let us cause 2 million civilians to die of hunger even though it might be justified and moral until our hostages are returned. Humanitarian in exchange for humanitarian is morally justified, but what can we do? We live today in a certain reality, we need international legitimacy for this war.”

As no one, Smotrich claims, will let the Zionist kill 2 million civilians by hunger at once, it must be done slowly. By now some 10% of the once 2.3 million people in Gaza are likely already dead – killed by bombs or by the consequences of the war the Zionist are waging against them.

Moshe “Bogie” Ya’alon, a former Chief of Staff of the IDF, who also served as Israel’s Defence Minister, is quoted by Alastair Crooke as saying this.

“When you talk about Smotrich and Ben Gvir: They have a Rabbi. His name is Dov Lior. He is the Rabbi of the Jewish Underground, who intended to blow up the Dome of the Rock – and before that the buses in Jerusalem. Why? In order to hurry up the ‘Last War’. Do you [not] hear them talking in terms of the Last War; or of Smotrich’s concept of ‘subjugation’? Read the article he published in Shiloh in 2017. First of all, this concept rests on Jewish supremacy: Mein Kampf in reverse”.

Smotrich and Ben Gvir are sitting right in the cabinet. But has any western country even blocked their travel or entry or sanctioned them?

Why is this allowed to happen?

Cont. reading: Gaza As A New(?) Western Method To Wage War