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Ukraine – Intensity Of War Has Decreased
Over the last month the war in Ukraine has become less intense.
The number of daily losses on the Ukrainian side, as provided by the Russia Ministry of Defense, has decreased from an average 2,200 per day in early November 2024 to an average of 1,600 per day in late January 2025.
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Ukraine has acknowledged that the level of violence has decreased (edited machine translation):
Over the past seven days, the number of assault operations of the Russian army on the entire front line has been significantly reduced.
This is evidenced by the data of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, according to the military telegram channel Deep State.
Just yesterday, 80 attacks by Russians were recorded, while at the peak in December, this figure had reached 292.
Deep State provided statistics on Russian attacks by month (daily average):
- November – 5,205 (174);
- December – 6,247 (202);
- January – 5,087 (164);
- 4 days of February – 381 (95)
The reasons for the decrease are unknown. It may well be weather related as a relatively warm winter has caused a prolonged muddy season which makes assaults over open land more difficult.
Another reason might be ongoing negotiations.
Ukrainian ATMCMS attacks on Russia seem to have stopped for now as have Russian attacks on Ukrainian energy infrastructure. (This observation may be deceiving though as such attacks usually appear in bursts.)
Yesterday the Russian side confirmed for the first time that diplomatic contacts with the U.S. have intensified:
"There are indeed contacts between individual departments, and they have intensified recently. But I can't tell you any other details, there is nothing else to say," Peskov told reporters, according to Russian state-owned media.
Next week General Kelloggs, Trump's Ukraine envoy, is supposed to announce further plans for peace talks over Ukraine. I do not expect any real change of U.S. strategy. Russia will have to win the war on the battle field.
Meanwhile: Europe’s Ukraine Delusion continues.
And a lecture in political history (recommended!):
Glenn Diesen and his book The Ukraine War and the Eurasian World Order in a Book Club discussion with Jeffrey Sachs (video).
There are more indications on X and TG channels that the AFU offensive around Cherkassaya Konopelka ended in disaster. It’s obvious the British ‘military experts’ were planning this attack to save their cauldron. With friends like that…
Posted by: unimperator | Feb 7 2025 9:28 utc | 139
One of the worst bloodbaths in the Kursk region. Senseless deaths on Zelensky’s orders.
Today’s report on RT
New advance by the Ukrainian military in the Russian Kursk region – repelled
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If you want to see the latest videos of the battle
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https://rtde.live/russland/236031-video-neuer-vorstoss-ukrainischen-militaers-gescheitert/
Kiev’s military has once again made a major advance in the Russian Kursk region, where it has occupied territory and towns since August 2024. According to Russia’s Ministry of Defense, this has been repelled. Video footage is available.
Video: New advance by the Ukrainian military in the Russian Kursk region – repelled© Social media
A combat vehicle from an entire column of the Ukrainian military in the crosshairs of a first-person view kamikaze drone of the Russian troops between the towns of Cherkasskaya Konopelka and Ulanok in the Kursk region (February 6, 2025. Still image from video footage)
Assault troops, armored vehicles: On the morning of February 6, 2025, the Ukrainian military sent up to two mechanized battalions in another advance – from the territory in the Kursk region, which it has occupied since August of the previous year. This is information from Russia’s Ministry of Defense. Russian media, such as the online news portal Daily Storm, provide more details, citing sources in Russia’s armed forces: From the settlement of Makhnovka in the Sudzha district, Ukrainian troops moved southeast in tanks and various armored combat vehicles towards the settlement of Ulanok, initially bypassing the settlement of Cherkasskaya Konopelka north of Ulanok, which Russian soldiers had only liberated at the turn of the year.
The presumed purpose of the advance was probably to bring the country roads running there under the control of the Ukrainian military, via which large parts of its occupation contingent, or at least those in and around Sudzha, could be supplied from the Ukrainian border region of Sumy. This assumption is obvious after a look at the map of the combat zone near the border, which shows that the Ukrainian-occupied territory in the south is not connected to the Sumy region by any major country roads that are completely controlled by the Ukrainian military.
Ulanok and Cherkasskaya Konopelka were subjected to several wave attacks by Ukrainian assault troops – but not all of them had made it by then: the contingent was discovered in time by the Russian Northern Troops, whose area of responsibility this area falls under, and was fired upon by the unit’s own fire resources and by the Russian Air Force, according to Russia’s military authorities. As of 2 p.m. Moscow time, the attacks had been repelled. In the morning, several Russian sources wrote of a column of tanks and other armored combat vehicles and around 400 Ukrainian military personnel moving along the route outlined above – before Ulanok, it had already been effectively attacked with drones and artillery, some of which is also video footage.
Losses of the Ukrainian military in terms of personnel are still unclear, while losses of military equipment are given as six tanks, three engineer and mine-clearing tanks, three infantry fighting vehicles and 14 other armored combat vehicles.
There is a lot of video footage circulating of these battles – so far almost exclusively of the use of kamikaze drones by Russian drone operators against Ukrainian military vehicles.
Cherkasskaya Konopelka, like Ulanok, is under Russian control, writes the Russian Ministry of Defense, but reports of its loss to Ukrainian troops have been denied. The latter, according to Russian war correspondents, were not even able to enter it – but were able to spread out in the surrounding forests and plantations, from where they first had to be prevented from advancing further and finally destroyed.
As of 9:25 p.m. Moscow time, the Russian Ministry of Defense had more precise data on the losses of the Ukrainian formations that took part in the advance: the personnel losses are estimated at over 200 dead and wounded; Kiev’s troops lost around 50 units of military equipment – including eight tanks, five infantry fighting vehicles, an armored personnel carrier and 30 other armored combat vehicles, three armored personnel carriers, a bridge-laying vehicle and more.
Operations to clear the area around the villages of Cherkasskaya Konopelka and Ulanok of scattered Ukrainian troops were still ongoing on the evening of February 6, 2025. Russia’s military authorities name the 11th Separate Airborne Division as the units and associations involved in repelling the attack and this search.
Posted by: berthold | Feb 7 2025 10:00 utc | 140
From what little I know of Russian history and of current plans of the R.U.’s leadership; it is highly unlikely that Odessa would become negotiable.
Posted by: aristodemos | Feb 7 2025 5:43 utc | 132
See, this is the problem. And not just yours, but most people’s here. In your own words, you admitted that you know little of Russian history.
If you knew a bit more of Russian history, you would know that the traitor scum that has been in power in Moscow for the last 40 years will gladly hand Odessa over in exchange for being allowed to sell Russia’s non-renewable natural resources as rapidly as possible.
How do we know that?
Because they already did it multiple times.
The USSR fell apart for one reason — late Soviet elites of the generation born in the 1940s and 1950s wanted to convert their political power into ownership over the commons. Which commons were worth many tens of trillions. So once the previous generation was too old to retain its control over power, the country was deliberately broken up in order to facilitate that most gigantic act of theft in human history, because it is much preferable to loot in peace without any oversight from the center than to always have that risk hanging over your head. Ukrainian nationalism was ultimate pushed by Ukrainian oligarchs for precisely that reason — to establish as much separation from Moscow as possible.
Moscow then made absolutely no attempt to recover cities like Odessa in the aftermath of the USSR collapse. Worse, Crimea actually voted to secede from Ukraine, but was ignored by both Kiev and Moscow. Even worse, Sevastopol had never been under Ukrainian jurisdiction, it had a special city status under direct control of Moscow. When Khrushchev transferred Crimea to the Ukrainian SSR, that did not include Sevastopol. So legally even after 1991 Sevastopol should have been part of Russia officially. But Moscow handed it over to Kiev too, until 2014.
Then in 2014 there were anti-Maydan uprisings all over the Ukrainian southeast, and everyone was waiting for Russia to step in and help. But Moscow intervened only in Crimea, and to this day it is not quite clear whether that happened because of or despite the Kremlin. In the LNR and the DNR the uprising was a success because locals organized sufficiently well from the bottom up to take over the security apparatus and then defend themselves militarily. In Kharkov and Odessa they didn’t do that and were crushed.
Most infamously, in Odessa you had the Trade Unions House massacre, which was the symbolic start of the war. Deeply symbolic in fact. Because we have spent 80 years talking about the Holocaust and gas chambers, but the even larger genocide against Russians in Belarus, Ukraine and western Russia is never mentioned. That one was done through a variety of means, but the classic was to round up whole villages into the local church, set it on fire, and burn everyone alive inside, with whoever tried to crawl out being shot. Ukrainian nationalists did that a lot too, and even more eagerly than the Germans in fact.
That is exactly what happened in Odessa on May 2 2014 too — they blockaded Russians inside the Trade Unions House, set it on fire, whoever tried to escape was finished off.
Again, remember that the images of the same thing happening during WWII are seared into every Russian’s mind through movies and history books. Later in 2024 Crocus City was done the same way, and it was likely deliberately done to send such a message too.
Moscow’s reaction? Zero support for the Russians in Ukraine, signed Minsk-1 (which put the LNR and the DNR in a very difficult tactical and operation position for a few months), then Minsk-2, all the time trying to push the LNR and the DNR back inside Ukraine. What little actual intervention there was by the Russian army in the fighting may well not even have been sanctioned by the Kremlin, but done on local initiative.
As a result Odessa was abandoned once again, as was Kharkov, and everything in between.
Looking at the way the Kremlin has been conducting the war, refusing to fight seriously and sabotaging the war effort (unfortunately, the scale of the problem is such at this point that local initiative can no longer make any difference, as strategic-level tools have to be used now), what makes anyone think Odessa is “unlikely to become negotiable”?
It has been effectively handed over already, by the firm refusal on the part of the Kremlin to seriously mobilize, to exterminate the Nazis in Kiev, and to block weapon supplies from Europe.
Posted by: ANON2022 | Feb 7 2025 12:50 utc | 152
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