Ukraine outrage and analysis.

[welch]

Perhaps that crushing Russian offensive of February, 2023, is in trouble?

Heavy Losses Renew Questions About Russia Sustaining Its Offensive


Marc Santora
By Marc Santora
Feb. 15, 2023
Updated 11:08 a.m. ET

KYIV, Ukraine — As Russia steps up its offensive in eastern Ukraine, weeks of failed attacks on a Ukrainian stronghold have left two Russian brigades in tatters, raised questions about Moscow’s military tactics and renewed doubts about its ability to maintain sustained, large-scale ground assaults.

The fighting has also come at a cost for Ukraine, which is expending vast amounts of ammunition to repel Russia’s growing numbers of ground troops, often supported by heavy armor, artillery and close air support. That has added urgency to Ukraine’s pleas for more ammunition, while Western allies this week expressed increasing concern about their ability to meet the demand.

The battle around the Ukrainian city of Vuhledar, which sits at the intersection of the eastern front in the Donetsk region and the southern front in the Zaporizhzhia region, is viewed as one of Moscow’s opening moves of a nascent spring offensive. Though it has been playing out for weeks, the scale of Russia’s losses is only beginning to come into focus.

Accounts from Ukrainian and Western officials, Ukrainian soldiers, captured Russian soldiers, Russian military bloggers, and video and satellite images all paint a picture of a faltering Russian campaign that continues to be plagued by dysfunction.

ing the main story

Moscow has rushed tens of thousands more troops, many of them inexperienced new recruits, to the front line in recent weeks as President Vladimir V. Putin’s forces seek to demonstrate progress before the anniversary of his full-scale invasion on Feb. 24.

In attempting to capture Vuhledar, which lies near a rail line Russia uses to supply its forces, “the enemy suffered critical losses,” Col. Oleksii Dmytrashkivskyi, a spokesman for Ukrainian military forces in the area, said in an interview.

The Russians failed to take into account the terrain — open fields laden with mines — or the strength of the Ukrainian forces, he said. Two of Russia’s most elite brigades — the 155th and 40th Naval Infantry Brigades — were decimated in Vuhledar, Colonel Dmytrashkivskyi said.

In one week alone, the Ukrainian General Staff, which is responsible for military strategy, estimated that Russia lost at least 130 armored vehicles, including 36 tanks. That estimate has been supported by accounts from Russian military bloggers, whose reporting on the war is influential in Russia, and by drone footage of the destruction reviewed by independent military analysts.

Mr. Wallace on Wednesday cited reports that “a whole Russian brigade was effectively annihilated” in Vuhledar, where he said that Moscow “lost over 1,000 people in two days.” The British defense intelligence agency reported last week that Russian units had “likely suffered particularly heavy casualties around Vulhedar,” abandoning at least 30 armored after one failed assault.

Mr. Wallace told LBC News, a British news outlet, that the losses in Vuhledar showed the result of “a president and a Russian general staff that defies reality or ignores reality and simply doesn’t care how many people they are killing of their own, let alone of the people they are trying to oppress.”

Many of the captured soldiers were newly mobilized under a call-up Mr. Putin announced last September of some 300,000 recruits, while others had been recruited by the Wagner mercenary group, according to Ukrainian and Russian accounts.

In recent weeks, a rivalry between Wagner forces and the regular Russian army has opened up, with the mercenary group claiming that its fighters are more capable.


Wagner fighters have led the Russian campaign in the city of Bakhmut, 60 miles north of Vuhledar. Ukrainian forces defending the city are in an increasingly precarious position, but only after months of unrelenting Russian assaults that have come at a heavy cost for Moscow and left the city in ruins.


The Grey Zone, a Telegram channel that is affiliated with Wagner, was scathing about Russian military efforts in Vuhledar, and called for Russian commanders responsible for the losses to be held accountable in public trials.

“Impunity always breeds permissiveness,” a recent post said.

A Russian marine who survived the fight in Vuhledar told the Russian media outlet 7x7, which is based in the Komi region of Russia, that those who survived the battle were considered deserters. The marine, whose identity the news outlet did not disclose, citing the need to protect his safety, said he was part of the third company of the 155th brigade. After his unit’s failed assault, he said, only eight soldiers were left alive.

“It would have been better if I had been captured and never returned,” he said.

Moscow has continued to insist all is going according to plan. On Sunday, Mr. Putin of Russia said that the “marine infantry is working as it should. Right now. Fighting heroically.”

Natalia Yermakcontributed reporting.

Marc Santora is the International News Editor based in London, focusing on breaking news events. He was previously the Bureau Chief for East and Central Europe based in Warsaw. He has also reported extensively from Iraq and Africa.

[karmachanic]

Now that The Ukraine is running out of ammo, NATO's run out of munitions and has no more to send, and as we well know, Russia ran out in March of last year, it should be over any second.

[Chip]

[welch]

Fiona Hill and Angela Stent on Putin's invasion of Ukraine.

[QUOTE]The Kremlin’s Grand Delusions

What the War in Ukraine Has Revealed About Putin’s Regime

By Fiona Hill and Angela Stent
February 15, 2023


https://www.foreignaffairs.com/ukrai...rand-delusions

Despite a series of blunders, miscalculations, and battlefield reversals that would have surely seen him thrown out of office in most normal countries, President Vladimir Putin is still at the pinnacle of power in Russia. He continues to define the contours of his country’s war against Ukraine. He is micromanaging the invasion even as generals beneath him appear to be in charge of the battlefield. (This deputizing is done to protect him from blowback if something goes badly wrong in the war.) Putin and those immediately around him directly work to mobilize Russians on the home front and manipulate public views of the invasion abroad. He has in some ways succeeded in this information warfare.

The war has revealed the full extent of Putin’s personalized political system. After what is now 23 years at the helm of the Russian state, there are no obvious checks on his power. Institutions beyond the Kremlin count for little. “I would never have imagined that I would miss the Politburo,” said Rene Nyberg, the former Finnish ambassador to Moscow. “There is no political organization in Russia that has the power to hold the president and commander in chief accountable.” Diplomats, policymakers, and analysts are stuck in a doom loop—an endless back-and-forth argument among themselves—to figure out what Putin wants and how the West can shape his behavior.

Determining Putin’s actual objectives can be difficult; as an anti-Western autocrat, he has little to gain by publicly disclosing his intentions. But the last year has made some answers clear enough. Since February 2022, the world has learned that Putin wants to create a new version of the Russian empire based on his Soviet-era preoccupations and his interpretations of history. The launching of the invasion itself has shown that his views of past events can provoke him to cause massive human suffering. It has become clear that there is little other states and actors can do to deter Putin from prosecuting a war if he is determined to do so and that the Russian president will adapt old narratives as well as adopt new ones to suit his purposes.

But the events of 2022 and early 2023 have demonstrated that there are ways to constrain Putin, especially if a broad enough coalition of states gets involved. They have also underscored that the West will need to redouble its efforts at strengthening such a diplomatic and military coalition. Because even now, after a year of carnage, Putin is still convinced he can prevail.

BACK IN THE USSR

One year in, the war in Ukraine has shown that Putin and his cohort’s beliefs are still rooted in Soviet frames and narratives, overlaid with a thick glaze of Russian imperialism. Soviet-era concepts of geopolitics, spheres of influence, East versus West, and us versus them shape the Kremlin’s mindset. To Putin, this war is in effect a struggle with Washington akin to the Korean War and other Cold War–era conflicts. The United States remains Russia’s principal opponent, not Ukraine. Putin wants to negotiate directly with Washington to “deliver” Ukraine, with the end goal of getting the U.S. president to sign away the future of the country. He has no desire to meet directly with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. His goal remains the kind of settlement achieved in 1945 at Yalta, when U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill sat across the table from the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and accepted Moscow’s post–World War II dominance of Eastern Europe without consulting the countries affected by these decisions.

For Russia, World War II—the Great Fatherland War, as Russians call it—is the touchstone and central theme of the conflict in Ukraine. Putin’s emphasis a year ago on ridding Ukraine of Nazis has faded somewhat into the background. This year, the victorious outcome in 1945 is his primary focus. Putin’s message to Ukrainians, Russians, and the world is that victory will be Russia’s and that Moscow always wins, no matter how high the costs. Indeed, beginning with comments ahead of his 2023 New Year’s speech, Putin has cast off the depiction of the war in Ukraine as just a special military operation. According to him, Russia is locked in an existential battle for its survival against the West. He is once more digging deep into old Soviet tactics and practices from the 1940s to rally the Russian economy, political class, and society in support of the invasion.

Putin is capable of learning from setbacks and adapting his tactics in ways that are also reminiscent of Stalin’s approach in World War II, when the Soviet Union pushed back Nazi Germany in the epochal battle of Stalingrad. In September 2022, as Russia was clearly losing on the battlefield, Putin ordered the mobilization of 300,000 extra troops. He then declared that Russia had annexed four of Ukraine’s most fiercely fought-over territories: Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk, and Zaporizhzhia, transforming the military and political picture on the ground and creating an artificial redline. Putin has repeatedly made changes in Russia’s military leadership at critical junctures, and he has worked fiercely to ensure his country has enough weapons for the war effort. When Russian forces began to run out of armaments, Putin purchased drones from Iran and ammunition from North Korea.


Putin is practiced at playing people, groups, and countries against one another.

Putin has also shifted his narrative about the war several times to keep his opponents guessing about how far he might still go. He and other Russian officials, including his spokesman and foreign minister, have openly stated that the invasion of Ukraine is an imperial war and that Russia’s borders are expanding again. They have asserted that the four annexed Ukrainian territories are Russia’s “forever” but then suggested that some borders may still be negotiated with Ukraine. According to newspaper reports, they have pushed for the full conquest of Donetsk and Luhansk by March but also indicated that another assault on Kyiv could be in the offing. At this stage of the conflict, Russia’s actual war goals remain unclear.

What is clear is this: after more than two decades in power, Putin is practiced at playing people, groups, and countries against one another and using their weaknesses to his advantage. He understands the weak points of European and international institutions as well as the vulnerabilities of individual leaders. He knows how to exploit NATO’s debates and splits over military spending and procurement. He has taken advantage of European and American partisan divides (including the fact that only one third of Republicans think the United States should support Ukraine) to spread disinformation and manipulate public opinion.

At home in Russia, Putin has proved willing to allow some hawkish dissent and debate about the war, including the grumbling of pro-war commentators and bloggers who used to serve in the military. He seeks to use these debates to mobilize support for his policies. But although Putin is adept at managing quarrels, he cannot always control the content and tone of these disputes, just as he cannot control the battlefield. Some of the domestic commentary on the war has become shrill and even threatening to Putin’s position. There is speculation that Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of the Wagner paramilitary group, whose forces have been doing some of the war’s bloodiest fighting, could even seize power at some point in the future. Russia’s wartime casualties appear to be approaching 200,000. As many as one million people are estimated to have left Russia in the past year in response to the war, either because they oppose the invasion or simply to avoid being drafted. In this regard, the world has learned that there are some limits to Putin’s coercive capabilities, even if this mass exodus of dissenters seems to leave behind a more quiescent majority.

DISSUADABLE, NOT DETERRABLE

Russian opponents of the war may have had no chance of stopping Putin from invading Ukraine on February 24, 2022. And none of the United States and Europe’s mechanisms and practices for keeping the peace after World War II and the Cold War had much, if any, effect on his decision-making. The West clearly failed to stop Putin from contemplating or starting the invasion. Nevertheless, the United States’ release of declassified intelligence before February 24 clarified Russian aims and mobilization and helped the pro-Ukraine Western coalition quickly come together once the war started. Furthermore, this past year has shown that even if he cannot be deterred, Putin can be dissuaded from taking certain actions in specific contexts.

Strategic partners of Russia, such as China and India, have criticized Putin’s threats to use nuclear weapons on the battlefield. He allowed grain shipments from Ukraine through the Black Sea after complaints from the United Nations, Turkey, and African countries. Putin and the Kremlin remain committed to maintaining partner countries’ support, as was demonstrated during the G-20 meeting in November 2022 in Bali, Indonesia. Russia still seems not to want a full-on fight with NATO. It has avoided expanding its military action outside Ukraine (at least so far), including by not shelling military supply convoys entering the country from Poland or Romania. But Moscow’s aggressive rhetoric has risen and ebbed throughout the war. Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, once known as a moderate leader willing to engage with the West, now plays the role of Putin’s attack dog, periodically threatening a nuclear Armageddon.

The Kremlin is shameless in its rhetoric, and no one in Putin’s circle cares about narrative coherence. This brazenness is matched by domestic ruthlessness. Putin and his colleagues are willing to sacrifice Russian lives, not just Ukrainians’. They have no qualms about the methods Russia uses to enforce participation in the war, from murdering deserters with sledgehammers (and then releasing video footage of the killings) to assassinating recalcitrant businessmen who do not support the invasion. Putin is perfectly fine with imprisoning opposition figures while sweeping through prisons and the most impoverished Russian regions to collect people to use as cannon fodder on the frontlines.


Only 34 countries have imposed sanctions on Russia since the war started.

The domestic ruthlessness is in turn exceeded by the brutality against Ukraine. Russia has declared total war on the country and its citizens, young and old. For a year, it has deliberately shelled Ukrainian civilian infrastructure and killed people in their kitchens, bedrooms, hospitals, schools, and shops. Russian forces have tortured, raped, and pillaged in the Ukrainian regions under their control. Putin and the Kremlin still believe they can pummel the country into submission while they wait out the United States and Europe.

The Kremlin is convinced that the West will eventually grow tired of supporting Ukraine. Putin believes, for example, that there will be political changes in the West that could be advantageous for Moscow. He hopes for the return of populists to power in these states who will back away from their countries’ support for Ukraine. Putin also remains confident that he can eventually restore Russia’s prewar relationship with Europe and that Russia can and will be part of Europe’s economic, energy, political, and security structures again if he holds out long enough (as Bashar al-Assad has in the Middle East by staying in power in Syria). This is why Russia is seemingly restrained in some policy arenas. For instance, it has vested interests in working with Norway and other Arctic countries in the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard and the Barents Sea, where Moscow has been careful to comply with international agreements and bilateral treaties. Russia does not want its misadventure in Ukraine to embroil and spoil its entire foreign policy.

Putin is convinced that he can compartmentalize Moscow’s interests because Russia is not isolated internationally, despite the West’s best efforts. Only 34 countries have imposed sanctions on Russia since the war started. Russia still has leverage in its immediate neighborhood with many of the states that were once part of the Soviet Union, even though these countries want to keep their distance from Moscow and the war. Russia continues to build ties in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. China, along with India and other key states in the global South, have abstained on votes in favor of Ukraine at the United Nations even as their leaders have expressed occasional consternation and displeasure with Moscow’s behavior. Trade between Russia and these countries has increased—in some cases quite dramatically—since the beginning of the conflict. Similarly, 87 countries still offer Russian citizens visa-free entry, including Argentina, Egypt, Israel, Mexico, Thailand, Turkey, and Venezuela. Russian narratives about the war have gained traction in the global South, where Putin often seems to have more influence than the West has—and certainly more than Ukraine has.

BLURRING THE LINES

One reason the West has had limited success in countering Russia’s messaging and influence operations outside Europe is that it has yet to formulate its own coherent narrative about the war—and about why the West is supporting Kyiv. American and European policymakers talk frequently of the risks of stepping over Russia’s redlines and provoking Putin, but Russia itself not only overturned the post–Cold War settlement in Europe but also stepped over the world’s post-1945 redlines when it invaded Ukraine and annexed territory, attempting to forcibly change global borders. The West failed to state this clearly after Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014.

The tepid political response and the limited application of sanctions after that first Russian invasion convinced Moscow that its actions were not, in fact, a serious breach of post–World War II international norms. It made the Kremlin believe it could likely go further in taking Ukrainian territory. Western debates about the need to weaken Russia, the importance of overthrowing Putin to achieve peace, whether democracies should line up against autocracies, and whether other countries must choose sides have muddied what should be a clear message: Russia has violated the territorial integrity of an independent state that has been recognized by the entire international community, including Moscow, for more than 30 years. Russia has also violated the UN Charter and fundamental principles of international law. If it were to succeed in this invasion, the sovereignty and territorial integrity of other states, be they in the West or the global South, will be imperiled.

Yet the Western debate about the war has shifted little in a year. U.S. and European views still tend to be defined by how individual commentators see the United States and its global role rather than by Russian actions. Antiwar perspectives often reflect cynicism about the United States’ motivation and deep skepticism about Ukraine’s sovereign rights rather than a clear understanding or objective assessment of Russian actions toward Ukraine and what Putin wants in the neighboring region. When Russia was recognized as the only successor state to the Soviet Union after 1991, other former Soviet republics such as Belarus and Ukraine were left in a gray zone.

Some analysts posit that Russia’s security interests trump everyone else’s because of its size and historical status. They have argued that Moscow has a right to a recognized sphere of influence, just as the Soviet Union did after 1945. Using this framing, some commentators have suggested that NATO’s post–Cold War expansion and Ukraine’s reluctance to implement the Minsk agreements—accords brokered with Moscow after it annexed Crimea in 2014 that would have limited Ukraine’s sovereignty—are the war’s casus belli. They think that Ukraine is ultimately a former Russian region that should be forced to accept the loss of its territory.


Kyiv is fighting to protect other countries.

In fact, the preoccupation of Russian leaders with bringing Ukraine back into the fold dates to the beginning of the 1990s, when Ukraine started to pull away from the Moscow-dominated Commonwealth of Independent States (a loose regional institution that had succeeded the Soviet Union). At that juncture, NATO’s enlargement was not even on the table for eastern Europe, and Ukraine’s affiliation with the European Union was an even more remote prospect. Since then, Europe has moved beyond the post-1945 concept of spheres of influence for East and West. Indeed, for most Europeans, Ukraine is clearly an independent state, one that is fighting a war for its survival after an unprovoked attack on its sovereignty and territorial integrity.

The war is about more than Ukraine. Kyiv is also fighting to protect other countries. Indeed, for states such as Finland, which was attacked by the Soviet Union in 1939 after securing its independence from the Russian empire 20 years earlier, this invasion seems like a rerun of history. (In the so-called Winter War of 1939–40, Finland fought the Soviets without external support and lost nine percent of its territory.) The Ukrainians and countries supporting them understand that if Russia were to prevail in this bloody conflict, Putin’s appetite for expansion would not stop at the Ukrainian border. The Baltic states, Finland, Poland, and many other countries that were once part of Russia’s empire could be at risk of attack or subversion. Others could see challenges to their sovereignty in the future.

[Rin Tin Pen]

I've been hearing a lot of folks say that, well, the US-EU-Ukr side oughtta sit down at the negotiating table with the Russians and, yeah, maybe give Russia Crimea and sign some papers and stop this war.

My opinion is that Russia, having lost 14,000 men (incl. the Wagner group deaths) since Feb. of 2022, will not want to take the bait. There is no need for them to do so. Everything is going in Russia's favor now. I think there is a good possibility the Bear will roll on to Kyiv and take the whole thing. Putin was forced into this conflict, and he doesn't want to have to repeat it in five years.

Yesterday, Medvedev tweeted, "Zelensky won't have to negotiate. He will have to sign what he is told."

[karmachanic]

Sometimes it's helpful to climb down your mountain, cross the valley, climb that mountain, and look at your mountain from that perspective.

[Chip]

Everything is going in Russia's favor now. I think there is a good possibility the Bear will roll on to Kyiv and take the whole thing. Putin was forced into this conflict, and he doesn't want to have to repeat it in five years.

Do you have a source for this?

Russian state media, perhaps?

[TSherbs]

Everything is going in Russia's favor now.

Oh, clearly not "everything." I'm not sure why you would write this. Maybe you mean "most" or "many" or "several." But not "every."

For starters, it's kind of hard to ignore all the mistakes that cost tens of thousands of lives and caused multiple purges in military leadership.

But that Russia may ultimately gain all its objectives, eventually, is still a strong possibility. Yes.

[Rin Tin Pen]

Everything is going in Russia's favor now. I think there is a good possibility the Bear will roll on to Kyiv and take the whole thing. Putin was forced into this conflict, and he doesn't want to have to repeat it in five years.

Do you have a source for this?

Russian state media, perhaps?

The Russians are gaining daily and will soon claim Bakhmut. Haven't you heard? What good news have you gathered about Ukraine? Biden will be in Warsaw, Poland, on Tuesday to tell the Ukrainians to get a move on. Meanwhile, Russians gather their troop numbers to the tune of hundreds of thousands for a spring offensive. Russians are also ramping up the production of ammo, drones, and artillery. Nuland and Blinken are worried that China will begin to supply lethal aide to Russia (as well they should because without Russia, China faces US aggression alone). The aim of the US was to maintain hegemony be precipitating Russian regime change. Putin is more popular than ever among the Russian people. That is why everyone is crying at the Munich Security Conference this year. The US-Norway bombing of the Nordstream pipelines has done irreparable harm to EU trust. When Russia claims victory in Ukraine, it will be as though a stake has been driven through the EU's criminal heart. And good riddance.

[Rin Tin Pen]

Everything is going in Russia's favor now.

Oh, clearly not "everything." I'm not sure why you would write this. Maybe you mean "most" or "many" or "several." But not "every."

For starters, it's kind of hard to ignore all the mistakes that cost tens of thousands of lives and caused multiple purges in military leadership.

But that Russia may ultimately gain all its objectives, eventually, is still a strong possibility. Yes.

I mean all the main indicators are going in Russia's favor. Sure, Russians are killed every day, but less than 50 on average. The Ukrainians are losing 8 to 10 times more soldiers, and I'm talking about KIA. Like any good leader, Putin is constantly concerned about the best array of leadership for his troops, but there have been no general 'purges' that I have head about. When a military commander errs, he may lose his job, as did, I believe, the leader of the 89 Russian soldiers killed by Ukrainians because the Ukrainians picked up the cell phone calls made by the Russians (forbidden by the Russian army), thus securing their location. You may be referring to Gen. Surovikin, whose position was changed, but he is still on the job AFAIK (i.e., not "purged").

Please enlighten me about the "multiple purges." Also, tens of thousands of Russian lives have not been lost. The total is about 14,000. Not my numbers, but recent BBC numbers (a highly biased anti-Russian MSM source).

[Rin Tin Pen]

LOL - War-crazed neocon US Senator Lindsey Graham insulted Chinese and threatened China with sanctions: "If China provides lethal weapons, they would get sanctioned. And to the Chinese: If you jump on the Putin train now, you're dumber than dirt. It would be like buying a ticket on the Titanic after you saw the movie."

In other news, Russian navy has placed its nuclear submarines on a "High-State of Combat Readiness." Russia has also moved it's strategic bombers to an air base closer to Ukraine. Russia will conduct a "Large-Scale Nuclear Exercise" next week during Biden's visit to Poland.

[TSherbs]

The Russia Times says 10k dead. The UK says up to 60K KIA, with up to 200k total casualties.

You can go with the low numbers if you want. I don't.

[Chip]

It's a waste of time to argue with people who do not share a basis in reality.

[karmachanic]

Speaking of reality.
Here's a few lines
from Howard Kuntsler

“When we see a completely insane public policy which has become a universal dogma — such as liberal internationalism in postwar US foreign policy — we are usually looking at the rotten, ossified ghost of a strategy which in its youth was sane and effective.” — Curtis Yarvin, The Gray Mirror

After Commander-in-Chief (ahem) “Joe Biden” demonstrated our ability to shoot down a Chinese spy balloon leisurely wandering the jet stream clear across North America, he loosed the Air Force on every other menacing aerial object hovering in our sovereign skies and… Ira Tonitrus… mission accomplished! It took the President another week to admit sheepishly that the three other targets were “most likely balloons tied to private companies, recreation or research institutions,” not alien invaders from another galaxy, as regime spoxes hinted and the news media played-up for days. Note to America’s hot air ballooning community for the upcoming spring launch season: be very afraid!

If Russia was impressed by the successful balloon op, it didn’t offer any comment. Russia was busy neutralizing America’s pet proxy palooka, sad-sack Ukraine, sent into the ring to soften-up Russia for a revolution aimed at overthrowing the wicked Vlad Putin — at least according to our real Secretary of State (and Ukraine war show-runner), Victoria Nuland, in remarks this week to the Carnegie Endowment, a DC think tank.

Speaking of tanks, our NATO allies are getting cold feet about sending those Leopard-2 war wagons into the Ukraine cauldron. Something about it had a discouraging act-of-war odor, as, by the way, did blowing up the Nord Stream gas pipelines, alleged by veteran reporter Seymour Hersh — though that caper was actually against NATO member and supposed US ally, Germany. WTF? Are the doings in Western Civ getting a little too complex for comfort?

Anyway, it turns out that the thirty-one Abrams tanks America promised to Ukraine have yet to be bolted together at the tank factory. It’s a special order, you see, because we don’t want to send the latest models built with super-high-tech armor that the Russians might capture and learn from… so Mr. Zelensky will just have to cool his jets waiting on delivery, say, around Christmas time… if he’s not singing Izprezhdi Vika somewhere in Broward County, Florida, by then.

The biggest problem Russia has in resolving this conflict on its border, is doing it in a way that does not drive “JB” and his posse of war-mongers so batshit crazy that they resort to a nukes-flying, world-ending, Thelma-and-Louise type denouement. In effect, America put a bomb on Russia’s front porch and now Russia has to carefully defuse the darn thing. The prank itself was just the last in a long line of foolish American military escapades that have ended in humiliation for us, most recently the Afghan fiasco. At best, this one in Ukraine — which we started in 2014 — is on-track to sink NATO, plunge Europe into cold and darkness, and put the USA out of business.

In the meantime, America is rapidly disintegrating on the home front. Is it attempted suicide or murder? It’s a little hard to tell. Things are blowing up from sea to shining sea — food processing facilities, giant chicken barns, regional electric grids, oil refineries. The latest, of course, is a chemical spill from the Norfolk-Southern train wreck in East Palestine, Ohio, set ablaze by a conclave of government officials purportedly to keep the toxic liquids from seeping into the Ohio River watershed and beyond. Of course, in the dithering prior to lighting it up, enough vinyl chloride leached into streams feeding the big river to kill countless fish. And then torching the remaining chemical pools sent up a mushroom cloud of dioxin and other poisons that killed wildlife, pets, and chickens in the vicinity before the evil miasma wafted eastward on the wind to the densely-populated Atlantic coast.

One has to wonder whether an army of saboteurs is on the loose across the land. Considering the border with Mexico is wide open, why wouldn’t America’s adversaries send whole wrecking crews over here to mess with our infrastructure? There’s no question that people from all over the planet have been sneaking across the Rio Grande. Surely some of them are on a mission. America is filled with “soft” targets, things unguarded and indefensible — not least, tens of thousands of miles of railroad track. Of all the reasons to be unnerved by “Joe Biden’s” open border policy, this one is the least discussed, even in the alt-media. But it seems like a no-brainer for nefarious interests who might want to bamboozle and disable us.

The sad truth of this moment in history is that the USA has too much going sideways with our own business at home now to be dabbling in any foreign misadventures — and we couldn’t have picked a worse place than Ukraine to do it. The sheer logistics are implausible. The geography is lethally unfavorable. The place has been inarguably within Russia’s sphere of influence for centuries and Russia has every intention of pacifying the joint at all costs. Peace talks are apparently out of the question for our leaders. Something’s got to give, and that something is probably Western Civ’s financial system. It’s primed to blow anyway, and when it does, we’ll have other things to think about.

Reprinted with permission from Kunstler.com.

[TSherbs]

Well, that's an entertaining, snarky piece of rhetoric, for sure. Who is this person?

[Rin Tin Pen]

The Russia Times says 10k dead. The UK says up to 60K KIA, with up to 200k total casualties.

You can go with the low numbers if you want. I don't.

Turkey newspaper Hurseda Haber (Jan. 25, 2023) reveals the sad dimensions of Ukraine army losses:

157,000 Ukraine side fighters DEAD
234,000 Ukraine side fighters injured
17,230 Ukraine fighters captured
234 NATO military trainers (US and UK) DEAD
2458 NATO soldiers (Germany, Poland, Lithuania) DEAD
5360 Ukraine side mercenaries DEAD

[TSherbs]

What is the range of numbers reported by other sources?

[TSherbs]

And who is "Kunstler," I asked.

[Chip]

And who is "Kunstler," I asked.

Just your basic wingnut blowhard. . .

Kunstler is a harsh critic of both the Republican Party, describing them as "a gang of hypocritical, pietistic sadists, seeking pleasure in the suffering of others while pretending to be Christians, devoid of sympathy, empathy, or any inclination to simple human kindness, constant breakers of the Golden Rule, enemies of the common good."[5] and also the Democratic Party and their "underhanded attempts" to get rid of Donald Trump, a man whom Kunstler sees as showing "strength".[6] He was also a promoter of the concept of a so-called "deep state" working to overthrow and thwart Trump.[7] He endorsed Trump for re-election and declared that he intended to do "everything he can to prevent the Democrats from winning the election."[8]

In an interview with American Conservative, Kunstler attacked gay marriage, describing it as "cultural mischief" that would further damage "a struggling institution".[9] He is a subscriber to the conspiracy theory that the 2020 United States presidential election was fraudulent, describing it as a "fraud-inflected election" on his website, and he suggests that the 2021 storming of the United States Capitol was the work of left-wing groups.[10]

In recent times, Kunstler has had financial problems,[11] and was described as "seethingly angry" about his writing income falling to only a few thousand dollars annually because of "the tidal wave of free content on the web". In addition, his "lucrative college speaking fees" have disappeared, which he blames on "the rising hysteria on campus against threatening ideas". Kunstler now uses Patreon to crowdfund his writing.[11]

In an interview with Doug Casey published on October 13, 2021, Kunstler called the COVID-19 pandemic a "scam",[12] and on October 11 he published the debunked vaccine conspiracy theory that the vaccine would kill people "steadily over the weeks and months" and went on to name hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin as "effective" treatments.[13]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Howard_Kunstler

[Chip]

The Problem With Russia Is Russia

By Oksana Zabuzhko
Feb. 20, 2023

Ms. Zabuzhko is a Ukrainian novelist, poet and essayist.

KRAKOW, Poland — One year ago this Tuesday, Vladimir Putin recognized the independence of the Russian-backed separatist republics of Donetsk and Luhansk — effectively the starting pistol for Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which began three days later. For us Ukrainians, the world would never be the same. Yet it was another act of recognition in 2022, one largely neglected, that made my heart beat faster. On Oct. 18, Ukraine’s Parliament declared the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria “temporarily occupied by the Russian Federation.”

I should explain. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Chechnya was one of the two autonomous republics of the newly independent Russian Federation that claimed independence. (The other one was Tatarstan.) But world leaders were by then quite fed up with the discovery that all those union republics that they had for decades regarded simply as administrative units of Russia — Ukraine, Georgia, Kazakhstan and others, still harder to pronounce — appeared to be real things. The West’s shock at this new geography meant that independent Ichkeria had not the slimmest chance of recognition.

The dismemberment of the Soviet empire was duly halted at the borders of the Russian Federation — at the cost of two devastating Chechen wars, for which the Kremlin was given a free hand both domestically and internationally. As a result, Chechnya-Ichkeria became a testing ground for the military strategy now applied against Ukraine: state terrorist warfare.

What if, I keep asking myself, Russia’s new totalitarianism had not been so lightheartedly overlooked by the rest of the world in the 1990s? Back then, to spare humanity the rise of a new Hitler, it would have been enough to let Russia go on peacefully shrinking under proper international control. Alas, the West agreed to blame Communism alone for all the atrocities of the Soviet regime. Russian imperialism was never identified as a problem.

Could this have been — as my war-honed anticolonial acuity prompts me to believe — a case of latent imperialistic solidarity? Was it guilty pleasure that for decades made the elites of the former Western empires smile indulgently, rather than shudder, when faced with the brazen colonial supremacy with which Moscow was treating its non-Russian subjects? I fail to see any other reasonable explanation for why so many in the West clung to the irrational belief that democratic transformation in Russia was just around the corner.

Yet Russia will not become a democracy until it falls apart. That’s because Russia is not really a nation-state but the same premodern multiethnic empire living on geographic expansion and resource looting as 300 years ago — and is thus doomed to reproduce, again and again, under whatever ideological cover, the same prison-ward-like political structure that alone keeps it together.

One intellectual holdover from the imperialistic 19th century is the idea that preserving the Russian empire would be less catastrophic, in terms of humanitarian consequences, than recognizing the right to life of dozens of peoples whose lot under Moscow’s rule was never anything other than dogged survival, under the threat of extinction. This prejudice helped the empire to survive twice in the 20th century, in 1921 and in 1991. It is high time to rethink it.

I remember only too well how the specter of extinction was stalking Ukraine through the 1970s and early 1980s, until the Chernobyl disaster finally broke our social paralysis and pushed Ukrainians to take our security into our own hands. In those police years, those who dared to speak Ukrainian in public could be at any moment humiliated with the Russian colonialist phrase “Govorite po-chelovecheski!” (“Speak human!”) If you heard it once and were unable to respond — any discontent about the superiority of everything Russian was labeled Ukrainian nationalism, the worst political crime of the time — you could never forget the experience.

Looked at closely, this war on Moscow’s part is a monstrously enlarged version of the Ukrainian purges of the 1970s (Operation Block, as it was known in the K.G.B. files): same language, same techniques. The only difference is the scale. Those purges were selective and unostentatious, whereas nowadays each of the thousands of Russian rockets that have so far hit our cities howls the same message — “Speak human!” — at the highest possible pitch. Ukrainians respond with the glorious phrase from the defenders of Snake Island. We will survive the Russian Federation, just as we survived the Soviet Union.

But not every nation once in Moscow’s grip proved so lucky. That is why our Parliament, 30 years later, recognized Ichkeria. We have been there: We know what it is like to be sentenced to disappear as a nation, with the rest of the world taking no heed.

And the same story is repeating itself. The disproportionately large conscription among Russia’s ethnic minorities in 2022, a form of ethnic purge of potentially mutinous regions, was not half as widely discussed as the plight of Moscow office workers fleeing abroad. The women’s protests against mobilization in Dagestan and Yakutia, too, were tellingly headlined in the world media as protests in Russia.

With a sigh, I recall that’s how Chernobyl was discussed in 1986, as a nuclear catastrophe in Russia. Thanks, but no. Never again, please; the age of imperialism is over. If there could be any positive result found in the 12 months of this horrific war — in tens of thousands of people murdered, raped and mutilated, in millions of lives ruined, in the best black soil on earth littered with mines, in innumerable treasures of cultural heritage turned to debris — it would be that we Ukrainians have all together, in a united effort of resistance, proved that non-Russian lives matter.

It is good news, for that was not the case before, certainly not in the past century. It gives all those who speak human, with no quotation marks, hope for the future.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/20/o...e=articleShare