Ukraine outrage and analysis.

[Yazeh]

Idiotic question:
The media shows a line of Russian military vehicles using a road/ highway to Kyiv.
Why don't the Ukrainians attack this convoy? or why did they not pepper it with mines/ IEDs?

[welch]

On a slight tangent, I found this article about the weaponization of finance and the pros/cons of bitcoin interesting. I hadn't thought heavily about these topics before.

Missing the link, Lloyd.

Bitcoin might be one way around SWIFT, since it was intended to bypass banks, central banks, and regulations. I noticed it about 15 years ago, and it seemed a great way for drug dealers and terrorists to hide their money as they moved it. That never happened, other than as a way for Russian hackers to collect ransom. The actual crypto-currency, the one that gets "mined" day and night, is more like a Dutch tulip in the 18th Century: each unit is valuable because somebody else wants it. While a US dollar is more or less a reflection of the US GDP, and the UK pound reflects British GDP, and all the rest, a crypto-coin represents only a very long number. A unique number, but nothing else.

In its original idea, crypto might have become a way for Russian banks to pay and get paid, but has not become a payment system. There are crypto exchanges, several of them, and everything about crypto is unstable. Further, if any of the crypto exchanges tried to become the way around the banking system, SWIFT, the Fed, the Bank of England, and all the other central banks, then governments would shut them down.

[dneal]

Idiotic question:
The media shows a line of Russian military vehicles using a road/ highway to Kyiv.
Why don't the Ukrainians attack this convoy? or why did they not pepper it with mines/ IEDs?

Mines in general are a pain for a lot of reasons. Can't bury them in tarmac, and they end up killing a lot of innocent people. Forget thermobaric and cluster munitions; mines are borderline legally and there is a big movement to ban them. You have to emplace IEDs, and they work better if they're command detonated. That's hard because it's easy to get killed trying to do that. If they're trip detonated (wire, pressure, etc...), they kill indiscriminately - like mines.

My social media is lit up with memes of killing these formations lined up on the road. A-10 memes, artillery memes, etc... It's stupid for the Russians to do, and western forces would light them up. For Ukraine, it's a matter of capability and capacity. Artillery needs to be in range, but counter battery radar detects you and you get artillery rounds back for your trouble. See Here. You can attack those sorts of convoys with aircraft, but there's air defense to deal with. Like I mentioned earlier, artillery and air defense are Russia's strengths. So while they could do it (capability), they would lose equipment/aircraft they can't afford to lose (capacity). They're also in the defense, and should be setting up kill zones and destroying equipment when it enters the kill zone. Artillery has it pre-planned, they shoot and displace. U.S. Javelins and British MLAWs can easily kill armored vehicles, Stingers can easily kill fixed and rotary wing attack aviation, and RPGs (which are plentiful) can kill soft vehicles.

[Lloyd]

Geez, sorry.
https://www.coindesk.com/layer2/2022...outputType=amp

The article points out that bitcoin maintains its history. So, who will accept bitcoin that went through Russia? Without bitcoin, they can't get money in; with bitcoin, they can't get money out.

[welch]

Maybe Russian casualties will begin to trouble Putin.

Russian Troop Deaths Expose a Potential Weakness of Putin’s Strategy


By Helene Cooper and Eric Schmitt
Published March 1, 2022
Updated March 2, 2022, 10:39 a.m. ET

WASHINGTON — When Russia seized Crimea in 2014, President Vladimir V. Putin was so worried about Russian casualty figures coming to light that authorities accosted journalists who tried to cover funerals of some of the 400 troops killed during that one-month campaign.

But Moscow may be losing that many soldiers daily in Mr. Putin’s latest invasion of Ukraine, American and European officials said. The mounting toll for Russian troops exposes a potential weakness for the Russian president at a time when he is still claiming, publicly, that he is engaged only in a limited military operation in Ukraine’s separatist east.

No one can say with certainty just how many Russian troops have died since last Thursday, when they began what is turning into a long march to Kyiv, the capital. Some Russian units have put down their arms and refused to fight, the Pentagon said Tuesday. Major Ukrainian cities have withstood the onslaught thus far.

American officials had expected the northeastern city of Kharkiv to fall in a day, for example, but Ukrainian troops there have fought back and regained control despite furious rocket fire. The bodies of Russian soldiers have been left in areas surrounding Kharkiv. Videos and photos on social media show charred remains of tanks and armored vehicles, their crews dead or wounded.

The Russian Defense Ministry spokesman, Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov, acknowledged on Sunday for the first time that “there are dead and wounded” Russian troops but offered no numbers. He insisted Ukrainian losses were “many times” higher. Ukraine has said its forces have killed more than 5,300 Russian troops.

Neither side’s claims have been independently verified, and Biden administration officials have refused to discuss casualty figures publicly. But one American official put the Russian losses as of Monday at 2,000, an estimate with which two European officials concurred.

Senior Pentagon officials told lawmakers in closed briefings on Monday that Russian and Ukrainian military deaths appeared to be the same, at around 1,500 on each side in the first five days, congressional officials said. But they cautioned that the figures — based on satellite imagery, communication intercepts, social media and on-the-ground media reports — were estimates.

For a comparison, nearly 2,500 American troops were killed in Afghanistan over 20 years of war.

For Mr. Putin, the rising death toll could damage any remaining domestic support for his Ukrainian endeavors. Russian memories are long — and mothers of soldiers, in particular, American officials say, could easily hark back to the 15,000 troops killed when the Soviet Union invaded and occupied Afghanistan, or the thousands killed in Chechnya.

Russia has deployed field hospitals near the front lines, say military analysts, who have also monitored ambulances driving back and forth from Russian units to hospitals in neighboring Belarus, Moscow’s ally.

“Given the many reports of over 4,000 Russians killed in action, it is clear that something dramatic is happening,” said Adm. James G. Stavridis, who was NATO’s supreme allied commander before his retirement. “If Russian losses are this significant, Vladimir Putin is going to have some difficult explaining to do on his home front.”

Representative Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California and the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, added, “There are going to be a lot of Russians going home in body bags and a lot of Russian families grieving the longer this goes on.”

In particular, Pentagon officials and military analysts said it was surprising that Russian soldiers had left behind the bodies of their comrades.


“It’s been shocking to see that they’re leaving their fallen brethren behind on the battlefield,” said Evelyn Farkas, the top Pentagon official for Russia and Ukraine during the Obama administration. “Eventually the moms will be like, ‘Where’s Yuri? Where’s Maksim?’”

Already, the Ukrainian government has begun answering that question. On Sunday, authorities launched a website that they said was meant to help Russian families track down information about soldiers who may have been killed or captured. The site, which states it was created by Ukraine’s Ministry of Internal Affairs, says it is providing videos of captured Russian soldiers, some of them injured. The pictures and videos change throughout the day.

“If your relatives or friends are in Ukraine and participate in the war against our people — here you can get information about their fate,” the site says.

The name of the site, 200rf.com, is a grim reference to Cargo 200, a military code word that was used by the Soviet Union to refer to the bodies of soldiers put in zinc-lined coffins for transport away from the battlefield; it is a euphemism for troops killed in war.

Military aid. Several countries are funneling arms into Ukraine, while NATO is moving military equipment and troops into member states bordering Russia and Belarus, amid rising fears that Russia might try to reclaim its sphere of influence in Eastern Europe.

The website is part of a campaign launched by Ukraine and the West to counter what American officials characterize as Russian disinformation, which includes Russia’s insistence before the invasion that the troops surrounding Ukraine were simply there for military exercises. Information and the battle for public opinion around the world have come to play an outsize part in a war that has come to seem like a David vs. Goliath contest.

On Monday, Ukraine’s ambassador to the United Nations, Sergiy Kyslytsya, read out before the General Assembly what he said were the final text messages from a Russian soldier to his mother. They were obtained, he said, by Ukrainian forces after the soldier was killed. “We were told that they would welcome us and they are falling under our armored vehicles, throwing themselves under the wheels and not allowing us to pass,” he wrote, according to Mr. Kyslytsya. “They call us fascists. Mama, this is so hard.”

The decision to read those texts, Russia experts and Pentagon officials said, was a not-so-veiled reminder to Mr. Putin of the role Russian mothers have had in bringing attention to military losses that the government tried to keep secret. In fact, a group now called the Union of Committees of Soldiers’ Mothers of Russia played a pivotal part in opening up the military to public scrutiny and in influencing perceptions of military service, Julie Elkner, a Russia historian, wrote in The Journal of Power Institutions in Post-Soviet Societies.

On Tuesday, a senior Pentagon official said entire Russian units have laid down their arms without a fight after confronting surprisingly stiff Ukrainian defense. In some cases, Russian troops have punched holes in their vehicles’ gas tanks, presumably to avoid combat, the official said.

The Pentagon official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the operational developments, declined to say how the military had made these assessments — presumably from a mosaic of intelligence including statements from captured Russian soldiers and communications intercepts — or how widespread these setbacks might be across the sprawling battlefield.

Images of body bags or coffins, or soldiers killed and left on the battlefield, a Biden administration official said, would prove the most damaging to Mr. Putin at home.

Ukrainian officials are using the reports and images on social media of Russian casualties to try to undercut the morale of the invading Russian forces.

On Monday, Ukraine’s defense minister, Oleksiy Reznikov, offered Russian soldiers cash and amnesty if they surrendered.

“Russian soldier! You were brought to our land to kill and die,” he said. “Do not follow criminal orders. We guarantee you a full amnesty and 5 million rubles if you lay down your arms. For those who continue to behave like an occupier, there will be no mercy.”

Thomas Gibbons-Neff and Catie Edmondson contributed reporting. Kitty Bennett contributed research.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/01/u...ar-deaths.html

[Chip]

Seems like that 40-mile traffic jam would be a hell of a target. If only a small number of vehicles were immobilized, it would keep them all stuck in place. Good shot for partisans with anti-tank weapons or armed drones. Hit the lead tanks and fuel trucks: kaboom!

I'm recalling the Market Garden attack in WWII where the English military geniuses sent armored columns along narrow roads through wetlands, among other incredible blunders. It was intended to end the war in short order. No such luck.

"The road toward Arnhem was narrow, only wide enough for two vehicles, and German infantry men wielding Panzerfaust anti-tank weapons picked off the nine lead British tanks right at the start of their advance. Allied ground troops managed to advance only seven miles by the end of the first day."

https://www.history.com/news/operati...failure-allies

[dneal]

Those German infantrymen were in the defense and set up a kill zone at a choke point.

[welch]

An article in the NY Times pointed me to this article by Ivan Tomofeev, saying

The Russian International Affairs Council, a government-funded think tank, published an article by a prominent expert describing the war as a strategic debacle. The expert, Ivan Timofeev, said Ukrainian society would now “see Russia as an enemy for several decades to come.” He added a veiled warning directed at government officials who were now cracking down on people speaking out against the war.

The article is really an argument that their analysis, from several months before the war, had been proven right: the gains of an invasion would be tiny and the costs would be enormous.

It is in Russian, so I used Google translate. However, there seems to be a button for English. I read the short version, which is long enough. A bit of terminology: the Russian government calls this a "special military operation" and has silenced anyone or or media calling it war.

https://russiancouncil.ru/analytics-...ta-s-ukrainoy/

[Yazeh]

@dneal... much appreciated the detailed response.
@Lloyd, crypto can be blocked. That's what the Canadian government did with the Trucker's convoy...

[welch]

Geez, sorry.
https://www.coindesk.com/layer2/2022...outputType=amp

The article points out that bitcoin maintains its history. So, who will accept bitcoin that went through Russia? Without bitcoin, they can't get money in; with bitcoin, they can't get money out.

I read the article. One eye-popping claim: that before SWIFT, banks shipped gold to each other to settle trades. No. Gold doesn't move, and neither does money. Paper moves, and banks change their ledgers to "move" money from one account to another. Banks have accounts with each other: in an international payment, a bank in the US moves dollars from its own account of the payor to that of a German bank. A German bank takes Euros (or deutsche marks in the old days) from the US banks account and puts them into the account of the payee.

Legend has it that in the ancient world a guy in Phoenicia, who wanted to buy wheat from Sicily, would go to the port of Sidon. There he would give money to another guy sitting on a bench under a tree just above the harbor. This ancient banker would write out a letter to his cousin in Syracuse saying "please give my Phoenician trader this much money and deduct it from my account". Today, that Sidonian's letter is still called a Letter of Credit. The Phoenician trader would buy his wheat and ship it home. The paper moved, but gold or silver stayed in each cousin's vault.

Immediately before SWIFT, banks communicated by telex, letter, or phone call. SWIFT just gives banks a uniform, secure, and reliable way to send "high value" messages. Think of a message as an envelope. SWIFT member banks agree on the addressing on the envelope, as, for example, a Bank Identifier Code (BIC). For their convenience, they also agree on the format of the message inside the envelope, as in, this spot has an account and that field has an amount. By having a formatted message, banks can read a message directly into a computer system. Everything is automated. Banks could also send free-text messages, but that requires someone to type the text at the sender and someone else to read it at the receiver. No way to handle 40 million messages a day.

The all-automatic all computer mechanism allows a certain amount of policing of international payments. In the US, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FINCen) of the Treasury Department demands that every bank send a copy of every payment from a foreign bank or to a foreign bank. Other countries each have an equivalent of FINCen. In addition, every bank has a list of companies it cannot touch.

[Chip]

A screenshot from the NY Times.



The apparent strategy was to zoom that surface-level force to Kyiv before resistance could be mobilized. But it's not working out that way.

A forty-mile long traffic jam has eighty miles of flank.

Another bit: info that exposed a plot to assassinate Zelensky, the Ukranian leader, and led to its failure was leaked from a Russian FSB intelligence source. Wowser!

[dneal]

A forty-mile long traffic jam has eighty miles of flank.

How many soldiers, small arms, crew served and other weapon systems do you suppose are in that 40 miles of convoy?

[Lloyd]

Around 11:30am EST on March 3rd


Sent from my SM-G991U using Tapatalk

[Lloyd]

From the NYTimes - "Last Vestiges of Russia’s Free Press Fall Under Kremlin Pressure". Unfortunate but not surprising.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/03/w...ensorship.html

(I actually remembered to include the link)

Sent from my SM-G991U using Tapatalk

[dneal]

From today's ISW brief.

The Russian military has continued its unsuccessful attempts to encircle Kyiv and capture Kharkiv. The Russians continued to attack piecemeal, committing a few battalion tactical groups at a time rather than concentrating overwhelming force to achieve decisive effects. Russian commanders appear to prefer opening up new lines of advance for regiment-sized operations but have been unable to achieve meaningful synergies between efforts along different axes toward the same objectives. They have also continued conducting operations in southern Ukraine along three diverging axes rather than concentrating on one or attempting mutually supporting efforts. These failures of basic operational art—long a strong suit of the Soviet military and heavily studied at Russian military academies—remain inexplicable as does the Russian military’s failure to gain air superiority or at least to ground the Ukrainian Air Force.

It only remains inexplicable if your explanation is that the "failing" attack is the main effort.

Meanwhile in Mariupol...

Russian forces likely seek to force Mariupol to capitulate by destroying critical civilian infrastructure and killing civilians to create a humanitarian catastrophe—an approach Russian forces have repeatedly taken in Syria

and

Russian troops have surrounded Mariupol and are attacking it brutally to compel its capitulation or destroy it.

Seems their operational art is working in another area. If the land bridge is the main effort, they're doing pretty good. Then what's going on from the north? It's just as probable that it's leverage and an opportunity, which is also classic Putin. It creates options.

Still to early to do anything than develop a hypothesis, and there're plenty of those. It could be that Ukraine is indeed putting up more stiff resistance. It could be that Russian presence is intended to draw the majority of Ukrainian defense to Kiev, to make the land bridge easier to take - while "peace talks" continue. A friend in Europe said the conscripts contract service runs out in May. So those 1 year conscripts being 3/4 through their obligation are about as trained as they're going to be. That's not much (see original article in the OP), but that's what they have. Optimal timing for a suboptimal force. Also "fodder" who are going to leave service in 2-3 months anyway. Don't need them to perform. Only need them to distract. If some die... well, that's war.

[Chip]

A forty-mile long traffic jam has eighty miles of flank.

How many soldiers, small arms, crew served and other weapon systems do you suppose are in that 40 miles of convoy?

They're spread pretty thin, two columns wide. When they're moving, they aren't able to engage with accuracy. Any blockage owing to Ukrainian attacks creates gaps. So they aren't able to concentrate their obviously superior weapons and forces in order to advance. Plus sufficient fuel. Maybe they'll get to Kyiv.

Or maybe not.

[manoeuver]

Here's a guy with some interesting takes. This is the first I've read of him so I don't have a thorough read on his biases (some are clearly on display.)

https://tomluongo.me/2022/03/02/opening-salvos-tossed-putin-next-moves-ukraine/

There's a lot to it, this guy posits the Ukraine invasion is the first overt step in Putin's plans to destabilize the West's entire financial system.

I don't know if I buy that. So far it's among very few cogent explanations that don't include Putin as some kind of pure evildoer or suffering some psychiatric malady.

I do get the feeling Putin knows what he's doing, and keeping us guessing is an enjoyable part of the plan.

[TSherbs]

Here's a guy with some interesting takes. This is the first I've read of him so I don't have a thorough read on his biases (some are clearly on display.)

https://tomluongo.me/2022/03/02/opening-salvos-tossed-putin-next-moves-ukraine/

There's a lot to it, this guy posits the Ukraine invasion is the first overt step in Putin's plans to destabilize the West's entire financial system.

I don't know if I buy that. So far it's among very few cogent explanations that don't include Putin as some kind of pure evildoer or suffering some psychiatric malady.

I do get the feeling Putin knows what he's doing, and keeping us guessing is an enjoyable part of the plan.

Thanks for posting this. It is interesting. Time will tell.

[dneal]

Here's a guy with some interesting takes. This is the first I've read of him so I don't have a thorough read on his biases (some are clearly on display.)

https://tomluongo.me/2022/03/02/opening-salvos-tossed-putin-next-moves-ukraine/

There's a lot to it, this guy posits the Ukraine invasion is the first overt step in Putin's plans to destabilize the West's entire financial system.

I don't know if I buy that. So far it's among very few cogent explanations that don't include Putin as some kind of pure evildoer or suffering some psychiatric malady.

I do get the feeling Putin knows what he's doing, and keeping us guessing is an enjoyable part of the plan.

The guy gets an A for creativity. Some of it is Alex Jones levels of "out there". He starts with: "This isn’t a war for Ukraine, it’s a war for the future of the entire world. Ukraine represents the hill both Davos and Russia have chosen to live or die on."

Yeah, I don't think so.

Some of it is just wrong, like "No one is willing to actually send arms to Ukraine." There are plenty of people willing to sell arms to Ukraine. There's a lot of money to be made.

This map (if Putin really wants everything up to the Dnieper), isn't bad. Too early to tell, and I don't think it's likely; but who knows.

Latest-Map-of-Ukraine.jpg

[Chip]

[QUOTE=welch;357252]

One eye-popping claim: that before SWIFT, banks shipped gold to each other to settle trades. No. Gold doesn't move, and neither does money.

Actually, quite a lot of US dollars were shipped (bundled on pallets, yet) to Iraq and Afghanistan.

How the US sent $12bn in cash to Iraq. And watched it vanish

The US flew nearly $12 billion in shrink-wrapped $100 bills into Iraq, then distributed the cash with no proper control over who was receiving it and how it was being spent.

The staggering scale of the biggest transfer of cash in the history of the Federal Reserve has been graphically laid bare by a US congressional committee.

In the year after the invasion of Iraq in 2003 nearly 281 million notes, weighing 363 tonnes, were sent from New York to Baghdad for disbursement to Iraqi ministries and US contractors. Using C-130 planes, the deliveries took place once or twice a month with the biggest of $2,401,600,000 on June 22 2004, six days before the handover.

Details of the shipments have emerged in a memorandum prepared for the meeting of the House committee on oversight and government reform which is examining Iraqi reconstruction. Its chairman, Henry Waxman, a fierce critic of the war, said the way the cash had been handled was mind-boggling. "The numbers are so large that it doesn't seem possible that they're true. Who in their right mind would send 363 tonnes of cash into a war zone?"

The memorandum details the casual manner in which the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority disbursed the money, which came from Iraqi oil sales, surplus funds from the UN oil-for-food programme and seized Iraqi assets.

"One CPA official described an environment awash in $100 bills," the memorandum says. "One contractor received a $2m payment in a duffel bag stuffed with shrink-wrapped bundles of currency. Auditors discovered that the key to a vault was kept in an unsecured backpack.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/feb/08/usa.iraq1

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/09/10/9/11...ghanistan.html