Tag: Russia

Holding the Strong Hand

European leaders shouldn’t have been surprised that Putin wasn’t concerned about Western sanctions, because it’s not like he didn’t know they were coming in response to his actions. The problem with always relying upon the same tactics is that the other side anticipates and prepares for them:

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz was surprised by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s complete lack of concern about Western sanctions shortly after the outbreak of conflict with Ukraine, Bild has reported.

In an article on Monday, the German tabloid cited a conversation between Scholz and French President Emmanuel Macron, which was revealed by journalist Stephan Lamby in his new book ‘Emergency: Governing in Times of War’.

The exchange, in which the two leaders discussed their phone calls with Putin, is said to have taken place on March 4, 2022 – just over a week after Moscow sent its forces into Ukraine.

It’s “not getting any better,” Scholz reportedly told Macron during that conversation. “Something bothers me more than the talks: [Putin] doesn’t complain about the sanctions at all. I don’t know if he did that in conversation with you, but he didn’t even mention the sanctions,” he remarked.

The French leader replied that Putin hadn’t addressed the issue of Western restrictions during phone calls with him either. After listening to Scholz, Macron replied: “Thank you, that was very similar to the conversation I had with [Putin] yesterday. I think he is now quite determined to go to the end.”

Who would have thought that enforced autarky could benefit an economy? Perhaps Putin has some economists who have explained that free trade is deleterious, rather than beneficial, to most national economies in most historical situations. This should be obvious, considering that the financial vampires literally depend upon capital movements in order to parasitize the real economies and divert coporate profits into their own coffers, but 200 years of unrestrained economic propaganda has been so effective that national leaders are actually basing their geopolitical strategy on inverted and incorrect assumptions.

I do find it mildly amusing that neither Scholz nor Macron grasped the obvious consequence of Putin’s lack of interest in discussing the sanctions that were supposed to be their devastating economic weapon. While Scholz appears to have had an inkling of why the Russian President was so unconcerned, apparently it wasn’t strong enough to look seriously into the matter or to revisit his assumptions.

We know the leaders of the Western puppet governments are retarded and totally incapable of successfully anticipating events or the obvious consequences of their actions. Putin knows they’re retarded. Xi, who is the smartest of all the world leaders according to Lew Kwan Yew, obviously knows they’re retarded.

But no one ever suspected they were this retarded.

DISCUSS ON SG

Russia: Two Predictions

ANON: Peace plan. Lines on the map stay where they are. general cease fire. Ukraine stops all pursuit of war crime stuff. Ukraine joins EU, but not NATO. Reset button over a few years on sanctions, and attempt to have a non-adversarial relationship. Security guarantees on both sides. Acceptable?

VD: No chance. There is no peace plan. WWIII is already well underway. The only reason the neocons want a peace plan with Russia is so they can focus on China. But China and Russia are perfectly aware of the divide-and-conquer plan.

ANON: So peace will come when? Russia retakes the Soviet-controlled area?

VD: Peace won’t come until the USA and NATO surrender. Right now, the USA is actively pivoting to China, but having to fend off both Iran and Africa.

ANON: Nukes will fly first in Europe

VD: I don’t think so. When push comes to shove, the USA will give up Europe. The US already is actively avoiding direct conflict with Russia and dangling “hey, keep what you’ve got” in front of them. If you read the military think tanks, they’re all screaming “CHINA CHINA CHINA!”

ANON: You are assuming that all of the various EU countries will accept Russian rule.

VD: No, not at all. Russia doesn’t need or want to rule them. They want them to stop sanctioning them economically at the US demand. The US isn’t even planning to fight Russia. They’re planning to have Poland do it.

ANON: Russia has made it clear it wants the old Soviet borders and has a right to them.

VD: Russia can take all of Europe. It could have done so before. It won’t unless the Europeans are dumb enough to force them to do it. The reason the US will let Europe go is because it’s not even strong enough to beat China alone. And China is a threat in a way Russia is not.

ANON: I’m going on the record now that Russia will not and cannot take the old Soviet borders and conquer Europe. You are wrong. You are correct that the US cannot contest the South China Sea alone, but the US, Philippines, Australia, Japan, S. Korea, and Vietnam can hold off China or make it so painful to take.

VD: Here’s my prediction: China will take Taiwan without barely firing a shot. The US will not commit more than 10k additional troops to Europe. The EU and NATO collapse, and most of the current European governments are replaced with BRICS-friendly nationalist governments. The question is if any other fronts go hot. If China gets greedy, they’ll go for Australia, which will involve war with the USN. Japan, Vietnam, and S. Korea will all refuse to back the USN, Australia and the Philippines will.

ANON: We’ll see.

VD: The great unknown right now is if China and Russia mean what they say about multipolarity. Have they learned from the ultimate failures of the British and American empires or not?

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Prigozhin’s Plane Crashes

Sounds a bit sketchy. But on the other hand, has there ever been someone targeted by more interested parties across a broader spectrum before?

A private jet traveling from Moscow to St. Petersburg crashed on Wednesday in Russia’s Tver Region. The Russian Emergencies Ministry said all 10 people on board had died. Rosaviation has since said that Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of the Wagner Private Military Company, was listed among the passengers.

“The Embraer plane was flying out of Sheremetyevo to St. Petersburg. There were three crew and seven passengers on board. They all died,” an Emergencies Ministry official told TASS.

If it’s genuine, I can’t see how this will have any effect on the wars in Ukraine or Africa. And it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if he next popped up making bombastic broadcasts in Mali or South Africa.

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Smoking Their Own Supply

The Neoclowns’ collective delusion concerning the global geostrategic situation is off the freaking charts. They actually believed the recent Jeddah conference, which accomplished precisely nothing and has already been completely forgotten, was going to be the combination of Versailles and Nuremberg.

Sullivan, the national security adviser, recently brought an American delegation to the second international peace summit earlier this month at Jeddah in Saudi Arabia. India and China both sent delegations to the session, perhaps drawn to Saudi Arabia for its immense oil reserves. One Indian academic observer dismissed the event as achieving little more than “good advertising for MBS’s convening power within the Global South; the kingdom’s positioning in the same; and perhaps more narrowly, aiding American efforts to build consensus by making sure China attends the meeting with . . . Jake Sullivan in the same room.”

Meanwhile, far away on the battlefield in Ukraine, Russia continued to thwart Zelensky’s ongoing counteroffensive. I asked an American intelligence official why it was Sullivan who emerged from the Biden administration’s foreign policy circle to preside over the inconsequential conference in Saudi Arabia.

“Jeddah was Sullivan’s baby,” the official said. “He planned it to be Biden’s equivalent of [President Woodrow] Wilson’s Versailles. The grand alliance of the free world meeting in a victory celebration after the humiliating defeat of the hated foe to determine the shape of nations for the next generation. Fame and Glory. Promotion and re-election. The jewel in the crown was to be Zelensky’s achievement of Putin’s unconditional surrender after the lightning spring offensive. They were even planning a Nuremberg type trial at the world court, with Jake as our representative. Just one more fuck-up, but who is counting?

It’s like they’re getting their strategic direction from the Marvel Cinematic Universe. “We can achieve anything, so long as we do it… together!” All that’s missing is a dramatic image of Girl Power. In the meantime, here’s another fuck-up to add to the growing collection of Clown World catastrophes:

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has sent letters to Denmark and Norway assuring that the Biden government would expedite approvals for all transfers of F-16s to Ukraine. In the letters Blinken said that the F-16s would transfered once Ukrainian pilots have completed the Danish and Norwegian lead training program:

I am writing to express the United States’ full support for both the transfer of F-16 fighter aircraft to Ukraine and for the training of Ukrainian pilots by qualified F-16 instructors…. It remains critical that Ukraine is able to defend itself against ongoing Russian aggression and violation of its sovereignty.

The letters from Secretary Blinken mark the first time the Biden regime has given a hard commitment to supplying the Ukrainian military with F-16s.

Keep in mind that the only way F-16s could be useful in Ukraine is if they are nuclear-armed, and even then, the chances that they would survive long enough to get in range of any strategic Russian targets is remote. This isn’t WWII and air power is now almost entirely useless. Ten more years of technological development should be enough to mark the end of manned aircraft in war due to satellite, targeting, drone swarms, and laser technology.

There is a reason Russia isn’t making much use of its air superiority, and that is because it is simply too dangerous to fly over the modern battlefield. Artillery and air defense are now the order of the day.

I suspect Blinken wrote those letters in the hopes that Russia will settle for an armistice long before the pilot training can be completed and the F-16s sent to Ukraine to be shot down… assuming they can be hidden on the ground long enough to avoid being destroyed by hypersonic missiles.

Clown World isn’t just evil, it is quite literally deranged. This is the end result of eight decades of relentless lying to everyone, including themselves. Success always plants the seeds of failure, but even a two-bit drug dealer knows better than to smoke his own supply.

DISCUSS ON SG

Reality Defeats the NATO Narrative

To the surprise of absolutely no intelligent observer, the much-vaunted Ukrainian “offensive” that didn’t even manage to reach the first Russian line of defense has proven to be a failure of catastrophic proportions. So catastrophic that even the US intelligence agencies are now publicly admitting that the Kiev regime cannot win the war no matter how much help it receives from NATO:

US intelligence agencies have made a “grim” assessment of Ukraine’s ongoing counteroffensive, believing Kiev will fail to plunge south toward the Crimean Peninsula by the end of the year, according to the Washington Post.

Officials have voiced grave doubts about the Ukrainian mission in a classified intel report, the contents of which were relayed to the Post on Thursday, with the outlet citing Moscow’s “brutal proficiency” in defending captured territory.

“The US intelligence community assesses that Ukraine’s counteroffensive will fail to reach the key southeastern city of Melitopol,” the report said, adding that Kiev would then be unable to “fulfill its principal objective of severing Russia’s land bridge to Crimea in this year’s push.”

The Post report appears to echo recent revelations by investigative reporter Seymour Hersh. In a story published earlier on Thursday, he cited an unnamed US intelligence official who bluntly stated that Ukraine “will not win the war.”

The CIA warned US Secretary of State Antony Blinken that Ukraine’s ongoing counteroffensive against Russian forces would fail, and that Kiev “will not win the war,” American journalist Seymour Hersh reported on Thursday. Blinken “has figured out that the United States – that is, our ally Ukraine – will not win the war” against Russia, Hersh wrote on his Substack blog, quoting an anonymous US intelligence official.

“The word was getting to him through the Agency [CIA] that the Ukrainian offense was not going to work,” Hersh’s source continued, without specifying when these warnings began to surface. “It was a show by [Ukrainian President Vladimir] Zelensky and there were some in the administration who believed his bulls**t.”

You may recall that I told you the Kiev regime not only would not, but could not win a war with Russia. This was entirely and absolutely obvious from the start. Every single aspect of the NATO narrative was false, from Putin’s purges to Russian ammunition shortages to the existence of a popular pro-Western, anti-Putin political opposition.

In fact, the only things that have been a surprise about the war is the extent to which a) NATO countries were willing to waste money and arms, and b) Ukrainians were willing to fight and die for a foreign regime that was perfectly happy to shed their blood. If the Ukrainians had any sense of self-preservation at all, its elite 82nd Air Assault Brigade would be rounding up the NATO puppets in Kiev and putting them on trial for treason and war crimes instead of dutifully obliterating itself on three lines of sophisticated Russian defenses.

Now the Narrative is shifting, as NATO is counting on Russia’s willingness to keep what it has won and prepare to fight another war with NATO in the next ten years. One can’t discount the possibility entirely, as there might be some advantage to Russia in letting NATO pivot to China, watching the US Navy die by attrition, then rolling up what remains of Ukraine and NATO once the Europeans understand that the US military is no longer capable of bailing them out. There is a reasonable strategic case for passing the baton to China and the People’s Liberation Army while providing military aid on the African, Arabic and South American fronts.

But given the combination of future uncertainty and Russian awareness of the pure evil that drives the neoclowns, I tend to doubt that the Russians will elect to take their foot off the military gas until all of Europe has been freed from the chains of Clown World.

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The Neoclowns are Doubling Down

While the Typhoid Mary of geopolitics, US regime change specialist Victoria Nuland, is busy down in Niger, attempting to forestall the opening of WWIII’s second front in Africa, it appears that the pivot to China is off for now and the Poles have volunteered to become the next man up for the slaughterhouse.

Warsaw is planning to establish a regular Polish-Ukrainian union for subsequent occupation of Western Ukraine and announced its intention to build “the strongest army” in Europe, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said on Wednesday. Poland has become the main instrument of the US anti-Russian policy and declares its intention to build “the most powerful army” in Europe, for this purpose Warsaw has started large-scale arms purchases from the US, the UK and South Korea, Sergei Shoigu said at a meeting of the board of the Russian Defense Ministry…

“Taking into account the armed forces of the Eastern European countries, about 360,000 military personnel, 8,000 armored vehicles, 6,000 artillery systems and mortars, 650 aircraft and helicopters are deployed in the immediate vicinity of the borders of the Union State,” Shoigu said during a meeting of the board of the military department.

By “Union State”, Shoigu is referring to the borders of both Russia and Belarus. So this would tend to imply that the numbers provided include Ukrainian, Polish, and assorted NATO forces. This is clearly why the Russian generals have been keeping their powder dry and their regular units in reserve, and why they have made heavy use of the Chechen light infantry and various mercenary companies, including Wagner, as well as the Donbass militia forces, in order to spare their own for the transition of the Special Military Operation into direct war with NATO.

Those border deployments may sound like a lot, but they’re not even close to enough to defend against a Russian attack, much less launch one on either Russia or Belarus. Recall that Operation Iska, launched 19 months after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, involved considerably more forces than the Germans imagined possible: 20 divisions, 15 brigades, 4,600 artillery, 500 tanks, and 900 aircraft.

While it’s almost pointless to attempt to figure out when and how the Russians are going to attack, but given their military doctrine, one can reasonably assume it is likely to be a) heavier than believed possible by the professional analysts, b) launched without any warning, and c) focused on a place that is not considered one of the most likely targets.

Consider the way in which Marshal Zhukov described the launch of Operation Iskra, which was intended to break the German siege of Leningrad.

All preparations for the operation were at last completed. The morning of January 12, 1943, was clear and frosty. General Romanovsky and I came to the 2nd Shock Army’s observation post. It was quite near the front lines, and we had a good view of the enemy’s defences in immediate depth. Columns of smoke rose here and there in the midst of the German positions. Soldiers who had been on guard duty at night when our scouts were usually active were now about to go to sleep and were lighting their stoves.

So far, silence reigned. But it was a special silence to me — the silence before an attack of historical dimensions.

In the battle, we managed to achieve a tactical surprise, though the enemy knew we were preparing to break the blockade. He may even have guessed where the Soviet troops would hit, for the shape of the front was suggestive of it. And day after day the Germans were building fortifications in the sector of the breakthrough, moving in their crack units, installing more and more guns in the bunkers built during the more than 16 months of the blockade. But when exactly we would strike, on what day and hour, and with what force, the German Command did not know.

As we learned later from prisoners, the Soviet assault which the Nazis had awaited for all of a year, came as a complete surprise to them that day, especially for its power and skill.

The Russians took 105,000 casualties in 18 days and considered it to have been a very significant strategic success.

Keep in mind that the Russians are well aware of the need to disguise the preparations and troop movements leading up to an offensive. The very successful maskirovka put into effect by the Serbian forces to hide their armor from NATO air strikes and render them generally ineffective was developed from Russian military doctrine. So even though satellite and other technologies provide massive quantities of information to NATO analysts and planners, it will not be surprising if the Russians have found a way to circumvent them somehow, at least long enough to achieve tactical surprise.

Pray for the Polish people. They don’t deserve this. They suffered enough in the last World War. But the neoclowns hate them nearly as much as they hate the German and Russian peoples, and will not hesitate to sacrifice them even more brutally than they have sacrificed the Ukrainian people.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Third Front

To be honest, I thought that Iran or Syria would be the Second Front of World War III, prior to China opening Taiwan, Korea, or even the Philippines as the Third Front. But it appears Niger may have already claimed that honor. Still, the Middle East is already drawing more US troops and ships away from the Ukrainian Front.

The US military has deployed thousands of troops and additional naval assets to the Middle East to “deter” Iranian forces. The move comes after Washington accused Tehran of harassing commercial vessels and other “destabilizing” actions.

The US Navy’s 5th Fleet announced the decision on Monday, noting that more than 3,000 marines and sailors had arrived in the Red Sea aboard an amphibious assault ship and a dock landing vessel the day before.

“These units add significant operational flexibility and capability as we work alongside international partners to deter destabilizing activity and deescalate regional tensions caused by Iran’s harassment and seizures of merchant vessels earlier this year,” 5th Fleet spokesman Commander Tim Hawkins told The Hill in a statement.

The amphibious assault ship sent in the latest deployment, the USS Bataan, also carried additional air assets, the Navy added. Though it did not specify the systems on board, the military said that the ship can carry more than two dozen rotary-wing and fixed-wing aircraft, including the Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft and AV-8B Harrier attack jets, in addition to a number of landing craft. The smaller USS Carter Hall, a docking ship, will act as a support vessel for operations involving landings or amphibious attacks.

The usual hypocrisy is on display here. The USN’s justification for this deployment is “to defend the freedom of navigation”. While just yesterday, US Senators and neoclowns were decrying the Russian and Chinese ships that were exercising the very right that the US Navy is claiming to defend in the Red Sea.

In a statement on Saturday, two Republican Senators representing the state of Alaska – Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan – said a total of 11 ships had been detected “transiting US waters in the Aleutians,” citing a classified briefing, and labeling the activities “an incursion.”

Sullivan said it marks “yet another reminder that we have entered a new era of authoritarian aggression led by the dictators in Beijing and Moscow,” adding that he was pleased to see a robust US response involving four American destroyers.

Brent Sadler, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, has called the patrol “a historical first” and “highly provocative” considering tensions over Taiwan and the Ukraine conflict, the WSJ reported.

Of course, all of these actions are little more than gunboat diplomacy. A single destroyer and a single Marine Expeditionary Unit are not a serious threat to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps nor are they meant to be. What really has the neoclowns alarmed is that Russia and China have sent a very clear signal to Iran, Niger, and every other country that isn’t controlled by Washington DC that they are no longer afraid of the US Navy, and that any country that challenges the globalist hegemony doesn’t need to fear US-backed regime change anymore.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Price of Partiality

Switzerland is beginning to learn that no one will utilize a middleman who takes sides, as the Alpine country runs the risk of missing out on a truly historic opportunity:

The latest 32% monthly fall in commodities trading followed a 27.5% decline in April, 22% in March and double-digit negative figures going back to the start of the year. The latest figures from the Federal Statistical Office show the volume of Swiss commodities trading in freefall as the Ukraine war rages on, destabilising the shipment of grains around the world and redirecting the flow of Russian oil.

Switzerland has established itself a one of the most important global hubs for trading oil, metals and foodstuffs. Swiss-based companies handle 40% of all oil trades and have taken a 60% slice of the metals trading business, 65% in cotton, 55% in coffee and 35% in cocoa, according to the industry association Suissenégoce. The sector employs 35,000 people and contributes some 4% to the Swiss economy.

The real loss to the Swiss economy will be the opportunity cost going forward. With the inevitable bifurcation of the global economy into two unequal halves, the larger BRICS economy and the smaller WEF/SWIFT economy, the neutral Swiss were in the perfect position to serve as the central intersection where the two international economies could meet to trade. What will eventually be seen as a single-digit hit to the economy is actually a much larger loss to what the economy could have, and should have, become.

But the unbelievable myopia of the current set of Swiss politicians combined with external pressure from a Clown World caused them to throw away all of Switzerland’s natural and historic advantages in order to take the losing side in a war that neither Ukraine nor NATO could ever even hoped to have won militarily. Now that Clown World’s desperate bid to win the war with banks in lieu of tanks has failed, Switzerland finds itself categorized as an “unfriendly” state by both Russia and China and is increasingly likely to find itself excluded from consideration as a future central trading hub by all of the countries that are aligning themselves with BRICS.

Even FIFA and the Olympics could find themselves in jeopardy soon if all of the BRICS nations pull out of the global sports associations in solidarity with the banned Russian athletes and teams. Given that the Saudi Sports Agency has already proven that it can leverage its money to swiftly take over an entire sport with its LIV Golf maneuver, both the opportunities to a Sino-Russian-Saudi alliance and the vulnerabilities of the existing organizations are obvious to even a casual and indifferent observer.

The only hope the Swiss have of taking a central place in the future bipolar world economy is a rapid and sincere commitment to an official neutrality that is firmly established in the national constitution. The choice should be obvious given the near failure of UBS, the failure of Credit Suisse, the PGA Tour partnership, the Nigerois war for economic independence from France, the economic contraction of Germany, the coming surrender of NATO and Ukraine, the pivot of the US military toward China, and the ongoing collapse of the European Union.

The existing Atlanticist economic order is simply not going to survive in its current form, so seeking to curry its favor is not only unproductive, but self-destructive. And no redefinitions of what “neutrality” actually is will fool anyone, especially not those nations whose corporations and citizens are subject to material sanctions. Only those whose positions are inherently untenable need to redefine words in order to justify their positions.

The problem is that a generation of politicians who have been accustomed to regard the USA and the EU as the Sun and Moon for three decades are probably incapable of grasping the geostrategic realities of a world in which those two entities combined amount to nothing more than the junior side of the Great Bifurcation.

It is a real pity that the Swiss journalists who daily peruse this blog looking for ammunition to discredit and deplatform me will not quote me on this particular subject, because it is vastly more significant to them, and to those they seek to influence, than anything I have said that violates their precious Narrative.

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Past His Sell-By Date

It’s clear that NATO is preparing to jettison Zelensky and blame the Russians for his “assassination”; the neoclown media is openly discussing how Zelensky will be replaced as the head of the Kiev puppet regime in an article that reads as if it was written by Henry II.

“Will no one rid of us this troublesome beggar?”

Given the stakes, and the risk, it is little wonder Ukrainian officials tend to brush off requests to discuss what would happen were Russia to succeed — or they decline to go on the record, worrying the topic appears far too macabre.

And yet, despite the reluctance to publicly engage with the question, there is a plan in place, according to interviews with Ukrainian officials and lawmakers as well as analysts. Indeed, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said as much: “The Ukrainians have plans in place — that I’m not going to talk about or get into any details on — to make sure that there is what we would call ‘continuity of government’ one way or another,” he told CBS news last year.

Ukraine’s Parliament chairman Ruslan Stefanchuk | STEPHANE DE SAKUTIN/AFP via Getty Images
Formally, under the constitution, the line of succession is clear. “When the president is unable to fulfill his duties, the chairman of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine [the Ukrainian parliament] takes over his responsibilities,” said Mykola Knyazhytsky, an opposition lawmaker from the western city of Lviv. “Therefore, there would be no power vacuum.”

The chairman of the Verkhovna Rada — Ruslan Stefanchuk, a member of Zelenskyy’s Servant of the People party — doesn’t have an especially high trust rating in opinion polls. It is around 40 percent, less than half of Zelenskyy’s. And he’s not popular with opposition lawmakers.

“But I don’t think it matters,” said Adrian Karatnycky, a nonresident senior fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center. “There’s a strong leadership team and I think we would see collective government,” he added.

The governing council would most likely consist of Stefanchuk as the figurehead, along with Andrii Yermak, the former movie producer and lawyer who’s the head of the office of the president, Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba and Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov. Valery Zaluzhny would remain as the country’s top general.

Karatnycky said he would hope to see a role for TV personality Serhiy Prytula, who now runs major charitable initiatives and has a sky-high public trust rating.

Ukraine’s plan if Russia assassinates Zelenskyy, POLITICO, 1 August 2023

Zelensky has nothing to fear from Russia. He’s one of the Russian military’s greatest assets, as he successfully convinced NATO to throw away their donated forces in a manner that has done about as little damage to Russia as possible; Faramir’s cavalry charge against the fortified position of Mordor’s archers in the Jackson film was equally well-conceived and did just about as much harm to the defenders.

Simplicius has worked out that Ukraine may be already down to as little as only 100 tanks remaining to its entire armed forces.

The offensive is now about 2 months old and was of a highly elevated intensity. That means it’s not out of the realm of possibility that their losses were double the rate at 150-200 per month, which would put us at 400 after 2 months. Finally, given that we had come to the ~500 number earlier, subtracting the new ~400 losses would mean that the AFU would be at an absolutely dire state of only 100 remaining tanks. Even if we give them the benefit of the doubt and say perhaps it’s a bit higher at 200-300 left, this is much less than it sounds given that it represents as little as two weeks’ worth of losses in current high intensity combat levels. If my numbers are even remotely close then that is disastrous. It would mean the AFU is on the verge of collapse.

Which, of course, is why the more hawkish neoclowns have already made the decision to give up on the Russian front. So if they get their way and succeed in forcing NATO to pivot to war with China, Zelensky will be a major liability and embarrassment to the governments of the West. This very public warning shot across Zelensky’s bow may, in fact, be the first sign that the pivot to China is underway and will soon be followed by an announcement about NATO-Russian negotiations.

UPDATE: CNBC confirms the new narrative on Zelensky.

Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky’s conduct is a source of annoyance in Washington, CNBC reported on Wednesday. Zelensky angers his American backers by ignoring their orders and issuing ever-greater demands, anonymous officials told the network.

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The Final Phase

Col Douglas Macgregor believes the Ukrainian Army is breaking down and that the war, at least in its current form, is in its final phase.

I think the Ukrainians have lost probably somewhere between 300,000 and 350,000 dead on the battlefield. How many wounded is anybody’s guess, at this stage all we know is that the hospitals are full, there’s no room left. The Ukrainian Army is having great difficulty evacuating wounded in many cases.

I think the Ukrainian Army itself is breaking down. Many units have simply melted away. Some have gone over to the Russians, not because they wanted to join the Russians, but they said, look, you know, we’ve got very little ammunition left, we’ve got lots of wounded. We’ve contacted our superiors, they say
they can’t evacuate us so we’re going to surrender. Yeah, I think we’ve almost reached the end game,
we’re certainly in the final phase of this war.

Assuming that Macgregor is reasonably correct, the question is whether the neoclowns double down and send in the Polish Army as well as whatever US forces it can muster, or whether they’ll take the best deal they can get from Putin before pivoting to take on China. The latter is looking more and more likely; the bat signal has observably gone out and the media has already begun the unwieldy process of making a 180-degree narrative shift:

When Edward Luttwak speaks, world leaders listen — and now they must consider heeding his advice on Ukraine. Luttwak has been advising world leaders, including U.S. presidents, since the 1980s…

Luttwak believes that despite all the talk in Washington and in other Western capitals about “unwavering support” for Ukraine, Western leaders, including President Joe Biden, seek a negotiated settlement with Russia. The much-anticipated Ukrainian offensive has stalled. Russia’s government survived a scare by the Wagner Group, and its troops are fighting better now than in the first year of the war. Historically, “when Russia goes to war they always mess up” at first, Luttwak says, but “as the war goes on Russians fight better,” and that is what is happening now. Top U.S. officials, like CIA Director William J. Burns, recognize this fact and have advised Biden accordingly, which is why Biden poured cold water on the Ukraine-in-NATO suggestion. Putin, Luttwak noted, has also publicly pulled back from the “nuclear threat” in a signal to Ukraine and the U.S. that a negotiated solution is possible.

Luttwak also contends that Ukraine’s leaders also know that a negotiated peace is the most realistic scenario for ending the war. U.S. leaders, according to Luttwak, want a Russia–Ukraine settlement precisely because of the more significant geopolitical threat of China in the western Pacific. This is in line with what former Pentagon official Elbridge Colby has suggested.

Edward Luttwak: The U.S. Must End the Russia–Ukraine War, THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR, 28 July 2023

More about this anon. I’ve been reading a collection of pre-2001 essays edited by Robert Kagan, and ironically enough, it appears that thanks in large part to his wife, the neoclowns have inadvertently managed to bring about the very thing they most feared, a strong geostrategic alliance between Russia and China.

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