Tag: Russia

Ukraine’s Battle of the Bulge

That’s what this desperate counteroffensive looks like to me, albeit in miniature:

Zelensky decided to launch what some Russian commentators are calling the single largest land assault into Russian territory of the entire SMO thus far. What stood it apart from the previous mid-level raids on Belgorod region and such, is that this time it wasn’t the ‘Russian Legion’ paramilitary group—made up of disgruntled traitor Russians—but rather the full force of the AFU itself, by way of the 22nd Mechanized Bridge, from what I’ve seen so far. Details are still coming in, but it’s said to have been around 3 battalions or 1 brigade in size, though some report several hundred troops for now.

The attack was decently well-coordinated and utilized the full breadth of combined arms warfare, with Ukrainian forces leading with a mass FPV drone attack, and pulling up mobile air defenses to cover the advancement.

This isn’t going to change anything on a strategic level. The historical Ardennes Offensive utilized nearly 400,000 German troops divided into 16 infantry divisions, 8 armored divisions, and 2 armored brigades and it accomplished virtually nothing except to delay the Allies a month or two.

One single mechanized brigade will not even do that. This is a PR attack conceived to give Clown World an excuse to keep laundering money in Ukraine. See, Ukraine isn’t defeated yet! Why, they’re taking the war to Russia! If we just send them another few hundred billion, they’ll take Moscow and capture Vladimir Putin!

What a stupid waste. The problem is that Russia can’t defeat Clown World by killing Ukrainian soldiers, because Clown World doesn’t actually care about Ukrainians.

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Clown World is Getting Desperate

But not so desperate that they’re willing to die right here, right now. Andrei Martynov comments on the recent revelation that the USA ordered Ukraine to stand down on what would almost certainly have been a failed attempt to assassinate Vladimir Putin:

The Ukrainian special services were preparing an assassination attempt on Russian President Vladimir Putin and the head of the country’s Ministry of Defense Andrei Belousov at the parade on Navy Day in St. Petersburg. According to Deputy Head of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs Sergei Ryabkov, whose words were aired on the Rossiya TV channel, several days before the parade, Belousov contacted US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin by phone and urged him to persuade Kyiv to abandon its plans.

I was wrong thinking that it would be either Bortnikov or Patrushev conveying this type of message to Burns, but, evidently, it took Russian Defense Minister to explain what would happen to Kiev and Washington, if D.C.’s own criminals would have even tried to do so. Kiev would cease to exist (no need to use conventional weapons) and, after some time so would D.C. with most of the US if the US would have decided to play it tough. Boys in D.C. they cannot fight real fight, neither can inbred losers in London. So, they resort to terrorism. The fact that Ryabkov specifically singled out “some other countries” is telling.

Clown World’s grand strategy has always been based in delusion. The clowns simply don’t seem to understand that neither China nor Russia are susceptible to regime change tactics of the sort that have been used dozens of times in small countries over the last 70 years. Major powers are not one-man shows; Putin’s successors will almost certainly be considerably more aggressive and less circumspect than the man himself has been.

However, it is good to know that there are still a few rational actors in command of Clown World. One hopes that they will have the perspicacity, and the courage, to admit to their inevitable defeat and surrender while it is still possible to do so.

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The Numbers Gap Grows

According to the Commander-in-Chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, by the end of the year, the Russian invasion force will have grown nearly 7x from the initial 100,000 in February 2022:

Syrskyi is Ukraine’s new commander-in-chief. His unenviable task is to defeat a bigger Russian army. Two and half years into Vladimir Putin’s full-scale onslaught, he acknowledges the Russians are much better resourced. They have more of everything: tanks, infantry fighting vehicles, soldiers. Their original 100,000-strong invasion force has grown to 520,000, he said, with a goal by the end of 2024 of 690,000 men. The figures for Ukraine have not been made public.

“When it comes to equipment, there is a ratio of 1:2 or 1:3 in their favour,” he said. Since 2022 the number of Russian tanks has “doubled” – from 1,700 to 3,500. Artillery systems have tripled, and armoured personnel carriers gone up from 4,500 to 8,900. “The enemy has a significant advantage in force and resources,” Syrskyi said. “Therefore, for us, the issue of supply, the issue of quality, is really at the forefront.”

It is this man and machine superiority that explains recent events on the battlefield. Since last autumn Ukraine’s armed forces have been going steadily backwards. One of his first acts when he got the job in February 2024 – replacing Valerii Zaluzhnyi, now Ukraine’s ambassador to the UK – was to order the withdrawal of his troops from the eastern city of Avdiivka. The retreat coincided with a six-month gap in the US supply of weapons.

As Simplicius points out, this means that Russia invaded with only 40 percent of the troops that the Western media reported. And far from running out of ammunition and tanks in two weeks, the Russians have doubled the number of tanks and tripled the number of artillery systems. Also, since about two-thirds of the initial invasion force was provided by the rebel Donbass militias, that means that as few as 30,000 Russian troops were utilized against an initial Ukranian army of 250,000 that has now been completely destroyed.

Just to make matters worse, the British, French, and US militaries have already lost dozens, if not hundreds, of soldiers in a war they supposedly are not fighting.

Colonel of the Spanish Army Reserve Pedro Baños:

So, the Russians carried out an attack on Odessa, which killed 18 members of the British Special Air Service and injured 25 more. And they tell me that French soldiers died. These are not mercenaries who are French, no, these are soldiers of the French army. They were killed in large numbers, I was told that the number was greater than in Algeria. These are scary numbers because we are talking about NATO countries.

The sooner this foolish, unwinnable war ends, the better. Vladimir Putin clearly doesn’t want to take all of Ukraine, but he will do that and more if NATO – or to be more precise, Clown World – doesn’t permit its Ukrainian puppet state to stop the bleeding and surrender.

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Sayonara, Kurils

Japan has made the mistake of further submitting to Clown World, thereby ensuring they will never get the Northern Territories back from Russia.

Tokyo will shoulder 520 billion yen ($3.3 billion) in loans to Kiev funded by proceeds from Russian assets blocked as part of Western sanctions, the Kyodo news agency reported on Wednesday citing diplomatic sources. The figure represents some 6% of the massive loan agreed by the Group of Seven natons during their summit in Italy in June. G7 leaders reached an agreement on using interest from frozen Russian funds to finance a $50 billion loan to help Kiev buy weapons and rebuild damaged infrastructure.

Japan never signed a peace treaty with the Soviet Union after WWII. And Russia has already told Japan there will be no peace treaty so long as the Japanese continue to side with NATO. This move puts Japan firmly into enemy nation status and makes it very unlikely that Russia will agree to give up the Kuril Islands. And given the alliance between China and Russia, this also means kissing the Senkaku Islands goodbye as well.

I can only assume that once Clown World begins to collapse and Japan belatedly breaks with it, the Japanese will plead that they were still being occupied by the US military and therefore unable to resist Clown World’s demands. I also doubt that will cut much ice with either China or Russia.

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Mailvox: Poland Makes a Move

From a Polish reader:

Today 08.07.2024 Prime Minister Donald Tusk signed an agreement (upon the acceptance of President Duda) with President Zelenski for military support. This agreement, as Mr. Tomasz Piekielnik says on his youtube channel, engages us in the war with Russia. Legions of Ukrainian soldiers are to be formed in Poland. Secondly, Poland will launch Russian missiles that will be hitting Ukraine. This agreement also contains records of the possibility of stationing Polish troops in Ukraine.

The agreement is kept secret from the public opinion. It could not be found on government websites or through the legal information system.

It’s possible that Poland is attempting to enmesh NATO formally into the war against Russia. Alternatively, it’s also possible that Poland is playing the Kiev regime to carve out some Ukrainian territory for itself, as a number of observers have been predicting.

In either case, it’s clear that the vulnerability being shown by the now-illegitimate Kiev regime is leading to a new phase of the conflict.

UPDATE: Confirmed, more or less.

Poland and Ukraine sign ‘unprecedented’ military agreement. Kyiv has committed to exploring new ways of shooting down all Russian missiles and drones in Ukrainian airspace that are headed in the direction of Poland together with Warsaw, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced on Monday. Zelenskyy shared the news of the security agreement in a post on X, saying the “unprecedented document” also includes forming and training a new volunteer Ukrainian military unit, the Ukrainian Legion, on Polish territory.

More word games and rhetorical legalisms aren’t going to fool anyone.

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China Puts Troops on the Ground

China appears to be warning NATO not to attack Belarus. Global Times reports Chinese troops have arrived in Belarus, on the border of Ukraine:

According to a press release from the Belarusian Defense Ministry on Saturday, military personnel from the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) have arrived in Belarus to participate in the joint anti-terrorism exercise scheduled from July 8 to 19.

The joint exercise will allow for the exchange of experience, the coordination of Belarusian and Chinese units, and the establishment of a foundation for further development of Belarusian-Chinese relations in the field of joint military training, said the Belarusian press release.

Photos released by the Belarusian Defense Ministry show the PLA troops arriving in Belarus on a Y-20 strategic transport aircraft of the PLA Air Force.

The joint drill was announced after Belarus officially jointed the SCO on Thursday, becoming its 10th member state, the Xinhua News Agency reported on the day.

This move is obviously being made in response to the buildup of NATO forces near the borders of Belarus. It’s apparent that Clown World is finding it difficult to accept the reality of its defeat in Ukraine, and is threatening to double down on its losing bet by openly sending in NATO forces.

By clarifying its pro-Russian position, China is calling what any sane observer would assume to be a bluff, although it is entirely possible that the Clown Worlders are desperate enough, and insane enough, to launch an attack on Belarus while claiming that it is not an attack on Russia.

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The USA Already Lost WWIII

As I’ve been banging repeatedly on since 2004, warfare since 1940 has primarily concerned industrial capacity. Of course, the Clown World establishment doesn’t listen to me, so they’re genuinely confused and afraid now that it’s clear that both China and North Korea are formally allied with Russia, giving the sovereign nations a 100x advantage over the post-industrial financialized economies of Clown World.

Remember when the narrative was that it was Russia totally reliant on Western-supplied parts in its weaponry? Here an American general literally admits the entire U.S. military structure would collapse in a day if China issued an embargo against them:

‘If we were in a war with China and it stopped providing parts, we wouldn’t be able to build the planes and weapons we needed,’ he said.

A startling report released earlier this year revealed Chinese firms have a stranglehold across 12 critical technologies that are vital to US national security, including nuclear modernization, hypersonic and space technologies.

The study, which was carried out by defense software firm Govini, delivered a damning indictment on the American armaments industry.

‘U.S. domestic production capacity is a shriveled shadow of its former self,’ the report said. ‘Crucial categories of industry for U.S. national defense are no longer built in any of the 50 states.’

Remember when it was Russia using Western chips in all of its missiles?

Perhaps most worryingly, Govini found that more than 40 per cent of the semiconductors that sustain Department of Defense (DoD) weapons systems are now sourced from China.

How the tides have turned.

It seems the West is slowly coming to its awakening moment: it stands no chance in a long term conflict against the manufacturing powerhouse of the Russia-China-North Korea-Iran bloc.

The central problem is that the strategic geniuses of Clown World are neocons like the Kagan clan, who understand nothing of military history. Their expertise is in subjective rhetoric and subversion, not objective logic and reality. They’re like the bad guys in a Hollywood horror flick, where all that is necessary to defeat them is to refuse to believe in them and proceed as if they don’t even exist.

The astonishing thing is that the corpocracy is still exporting manufacturing capacity abroad. Just yesterday, John Deere announced that it was moving its factories to Mexico. So US manufacturing capacity is actually shrinking, just as European energy production is shrinking, while Russia, China, and North Korea are all ramping up their production of everything from ammunition to tanks.

Clown World should surrender now. But they won’t, because they don’t deal in objective reality. They never have.

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The Russian Historiography of WII

This looks like a book worth reading once I’m finished with Jack Vance’s Treasury.

The Postil (TP): You have written a trilogy on the Great Patriotic War, that is the Second World War as experienced by Soviet Union. The first part of this magisterial study will be published soon. What is your overall aim?

Michael Jabara Carley (MJC): My trilogy, as I call it, deals with the origins and early conduct of the Second World War and the Great Patriotic War (Velikaia Otechestvennaia voina). The VOV is the name given to the war in Soviet and Russian history arising from the German invasion of the USSR on 22 June 1941. My work runs from January 1930 to December 1941. My project was first entitled “A Near-run Thing: The Improbable Grand Alliance of World War II,” supported by an “Insight” research grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. My initial objective was to write a narrative history of how the USSR, Britain, and the United States, powers hostile to each other during the interwar years, became allies against Nazi Germany and the Axis. The work evolved from an envisioned single volume into three dealing with Soviet relations with the great and lesser European powers and the United States.

TP: Is there a difference between a Western historiography of WWII and a Russian one?

MJC: Oh yes, the difference is enormous. During the war, it was clear to all who had eyes to see that the Red Army played the key role in smashing the Nazi Wehrmacht and winning the war in Europe. The United States and Britain played supporting roles. After 1945 the war became an important object of propaganda in the Cold War. The new narrative was that the United States or Churchill single-handedly won the war in which the USSR was practically invisible. In the western media, histories, iconography, Hollywood films, comic books, more recently video games, the Red Army is invisible. The key moment in the war was operation Overlord, the Normandy landings, when in fact, they were an anticlimax, grand to be sure, in a war whose outcome had already been determined by the Red Army. In the context of the Cold War, it was normal that the United States would seek in various ways to rub out the memories of the Soviet role in the war, for otherwise how could you portray the USSR as a menacing communist enemy.

I’ll report back on it once I’ve finished it. It should be interesting to see if he supports or contradicts the Icebreaker theory of Operation Barbarossa.

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Slowly, Then Suddenly

I concur with the Armchair Warlord’s take on how the Russian strategy is likely to switch to a much more aggressive mode of offense when the time is deemed right.

The Stavka has placed a heavy emphasis on efficiency in this war. Many Russian decisions at the operational-strategic level can be explained simply by their seeking the most efficient means to inflict mass casualties on the AFU with the lowest risk to themselves. Thus, any decision to transition to high-speed, mobile warfare from low-speed, positional war can be expected to follow that rubric. In other words, the Russians will launch an offensive to rout the AFU after its back is broken in positional war, rather than attack seeking to “change the game” and defeat the Ukrainians in mobile war. The “game” heavily favors the Russians and they’re not in a rush to change it!

The difference between these scenarios can be seen quite easily by comparing two very successful offensives: Operation Bagration in 1944 and the 1975 Ho Chi Minh Offensive. Bagration routed the once-mighty Army Group Center – at the cost of 180,000 killed in action, three times the total Russian death toll of this war. I’m sure the Russians would much prefer the 8,000-strong butcher’s bill of North Vietnam’s war-ending 1975 operation – and they have the strategic insight to see that modern Ukraine, as a corrupt and deeply dysfunctional garrison state propped up by endless foreign aid, is far more akin to South Vietnam than Nazi Germany.

So what does this look like in practice? The Russians are going to keep poking and prodding in their usual methodical way until part of the line collapses “in depth,” and then all hell is going to break loose.

It seems most observers have forgotten that the Russians have already shown great flexibility in their approach to the Special Military Operation in Ukraine. The initial gambit was a high-risk, low-cost decapitation strike at Kiev combined with support for very rapid advancement into the Donbass by the separatist militias backed by Russian air and artillery support. Only when the limits of that approach were reached did they switch to using Chechen and mercenary light infantry to storm fortified locations like Bahkmut, after which they switched again to the brutal, but low-risk attrition warfare we’ve been seeing over the last year.

Therefore, it is correct to anticipate another change in grand tactics, (the more proper term in this context as the strategic objectives remain unchanged) which will primarily depend upon whether a) the Ukrainian Armed Forces break under the relentless attritional pressure or b) if NATO ground forces are sent in to prevent the UFA from breaking. Remember, the Russian strategists will comprehensively plan for all possible situations, not merely the particular scenarios that the enemy media deems most likely.

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Why Putin Waits

Simplicius explains why the Russians are in no hurry to finish off the Ukrainian resistance:

Everyone understands the dry points of Putin’s demands, which he has articulated over the course of months, about deNazification, keeping to current battlefield gains and ‘realities’, etc. But the single most important point which has flown completely under the radar, and which I believe is actually the very heart of Putin’s proposal, is hinted at in the earlier video where he says that mere ‘ceasefires’ are inadequate, and that he is seeking a permanent solution of some kind.

He didn’t specify there, but he has before—multiple times. What Putin alludes to is that in order to end the Ukrainian war for good, Russia will take no less than a re-working of the entire European security framework. This is why he harps on Zelensky’s illegitimacy, it’s because Putin wants to build up to the fact that there must be a far larger, overriding framework of guarantors which is immutable and inviolable, rather than flimsy and ephemeral like Zelensky.

What Putin is seeking is revolutionary: he wants to re-establish a whole new, modern Westphalian Peace. He wants the Ukrainian war to be the linchpin of a new global security system that plays into all the recent BRICS declarations of ‘reworking the UN’ and every other major global institution. Putin wants to reshape how the entire international system functions vis-a-vis their security relationships; in essence, it would be the first new concrete paradigm of the post-Cold War and ‘Iron Curtain’ era.

So for all those people who are asking: what is the ultimate price Putin is willing to pay to give up Russia’s maximalist aims in Ukraine—would he do it for the basic terms of demilitarization, no joining NATO, and all that? Not likely: because there is no way to guarantee Ukraine’s adherence to any such agreements. The only way to end the war would be a reworking of the entire system in such a way as to give Russia credible confidence in the new system holding indefinitely. It would take, as I said, a new Westphalian framework that institutionalizes new, much broader realities of what countries can and cannot do in overreaching via provocative actions against one another. If you really listen to Putin’s speeches and statements on this issue, this is the secret he’s intimating—though not very loudly or aggressively, for now. The reason for that is likely because he knows it’s too ambitious of an opening ‘ask’, and he would prefer to first lure the parties in via basic conditions before escalating it to the logical conclusion when it comes to the issue of: how do we realistically guarantee such conditions between parties?

This is why Putin is likely in no great rush to end the war: in order to effect such an ambitious world-reshaping plan, he knows the current political class has to first be waited out.

As I’ve been pointing out from the beginning, Putin knows he’s not at war with Ukraine. He’s not even at war with the USA or the West. He’s at war with Clown World, and there are safer, easier ways to defeat his enemies than to wade through literal continents of armies to do so. He understands, as does Xi, that time is on his side.

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