Tag: Russia

Russia Today reports a successful US missile strike on Russian troops:

Almost 90 troops were killed by a Ukrainian missile strike that hit a temporary housing area used by Russian forces in the city of Makeyevka in Donetsk People’s Republic just after midnight on January 1, the Defense Ministry announced on Wednesday. The death toll has grown to 89 people, including the unit’s deputy commander, the ministry said, as more bodies were pulled from the rubble of a vocational school where the troops were stationed on New Year’s night.

The facility was targeted by six missiles from a US-supplied HIMARS multiple rocket launcher, four of which penetrated air defenses, and hit the building at precisely 0:01am on January 1, the Defense ministry said, claiming that the launcher was later destroyed in a retaliatory strike

The Saker has a theory about why NATO is launching small missile strikes such as these in Russia:

NATO does not act just to show that it can act. There is a real, military, purpose behind these strikes. And it is not “just” to provoke Russia into some kind of response (not with tens and even hundreds of Russian missile strikes every day already taking place).

The war is already going on, the Russians are already fighting along a very long frontline, the Russian Aerospace Forces are already striking targets over the entire Ukraine, so what is there more to provoke/trigger?

I submit that there is only one thing which the Russians have not done yet, and that is the fullscale combined arms operation the Russian General Staff is obviously preparing. And since this major offensive is almost certain to happen, the only thing which such NATO strikes could affect is the timing of the attack. And since there is no way that these NATO (pinprick) strikes could delay the Russian offensive, their only possible goal would be to make it happen sooner.

Why would NATO want the Russian offensive sooner rather than later? In all its other actions, the AngloZionists have tried to draw out this war for as long as possible, so why would they want to make the Russians attack sooner rather than later?

Because the Russian General Staff is waiting for all the “ducks to be lined” up before attacking. Thus by trying to force the Russians into a premature attack date, NATO is, very logically, trying to prevent all the said “ducks” to be “lined up”. In other words, NATO is trying to force the hand of the Russian General Staff by increasing the pressure on the Kremlin to “finally take action”.

This makes sense, given the way both the Ukrainian and the “foreign mercenary” forces are taking a brutal pounding without being able to do much harm to the gathering Russian forces. It’s also possible that NATO is hoping to convince Russia to make its expected move on its own, rather than waiting for what could be a concerted effort with China launching an attack on Taiwan.

Alternatively, it’s possible that NATO wants Russia to attack before it loses what remains of its support from the Western European countries, as it would be logical to conclude that many people will rally to the flag for fear of the Russians once the winter offensive begins and the Kiev regime is forced to flee Ukraine.

Regardless, it’s unlikely that NATO is launching these HIMARS attacks simply to annoy the Russians and it’s obvious that they are incapable of accomplishing anything meaningful in a strategic sense.

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I very much doubt the Kremlin is any more persuaded of the USA not being involved in repeated attacks on Russian generals than anyone else is:

American intelligence agencies gave highly sensitive data to the Ukrainian armed forces that allowed them to track and kill a dozen Russian generals and sink the Russian flagship Moskva, a new book reveals — despite strident administration denials.

A “furious” President Joe Biden gave “presidential tongue-lashings” to CIA chief Bill Burns and other top aides in May after leakers told NBC News and the New York Times that Ukrainians had been given real-time intelligence from US sources.

“He didn’t like what he considered to be publicly taunting the Russians,” White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain told author Chris Whipple in the forthcoming book “The Fight of His Life,” out Jan. 17.

The reports of secret streams of real-time battlefield intelligence drew a furious response from the Kremlin — and instant repudiation from the Pentagon, the National Security Council, and Biden’s press office.

It will certainly be instructive to see how the Russians respond to these overt acts of war by those US intelligence agencies. Let’s face it, if there is one thing we have learned from the Russian response to the Orange Revolution and the Zelensky regime’s subsequent war on the former Ukrainian republics, it is that the Russians a) are more patient than anyone anticipates and b) respond more firmly than anyone believes likely.

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These drone attacks deep inside Russia are not going to convince the Russians that they don’t need significant buffer space between NATO and the Russian border.

A Ukrainian drone strike on two Russian airbases in the Ryazan and Saratov regions has resulted in the deaths of three service members and minor damage to two airplanes, the Russian Defense Ministry said on Monday.

A number of “Soviet-made” jet drones, flying at low altitude, targeted the long-range strategic aviation assets at the Dyagilevo airfield in Ryazan Region and Engels airfield in Saratov Region, according to the ministry. While they were detected and shot down by air defenses, the debris impacted the airfields, “slightly” damaging two aircraft.

Three service members were “fatally injured” while four more were taken to military hospitals for treatment.

Ukrainian drones have previously attacked the Black Sea Fleet headquarters in Sevastopol and targeted the Russian navy in Crimea, but Monday’s attack reached deep inside Russia. The Dyagilevo airfield is more than 500 km from Ukrainian-controlled territory, while Engels is about 700 km away.

Nor were these two attacks the only ones. A third attack was made on an airbase in Kursk.

An airfield in the city of Kursk has been targeted in a drone attack, according to the governor of the southwestern Russian region. The strike comes the day after two bases, in Ryazan and Saratov Regions, were targeted with similar weapons. “As a result of a drone attack, an oil storage tank caught fire in the area of the Kursk airfield. The fire is being localized. All emergency agencies are on site,” Kursk Region Governor Roman Starovoyt said in a Telegram post on Tuesday morning around 7:20am local time.

However, the drone attacks are not significant, are reported to have done very little damage, and do not appear to be much more than desperate attempts to forestall a coming Russian air campaign, presumably in support of a large-scale offensive, given the fact that they targeted air bases known to be host to heavy bombers.

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Big Serge game-theories the Russian Kherson withdrawal and reaches the obvious conclusion:

Kherson was becoming an inefficient front for Russia because of the logistical strain of supplying forces across the river with limited bridge and road capacity. Russia demonstrated that it was capable of shouldering this sustainment burden (keeping troops supplied all through Ukraine’s summer offensives), but the question becomes 1) to what purpose, and 2) for how long.

Ideally, the bridgehead becomes the launching point for offensive action against Nikolayev, but launching an offensive would require strengthening the force grouping in Kherson, which correspondingly raises the logistical burden of projecting force across the river. With a very long front to play with, Kherson is clearly one of the most logistically intensive axes. My guess is that Surovikin took charge and almost immediately decided he did not want to increase the sustainment burden by trying to push on Nikolayev.

Therefore, if an offensive is not going to be launched from the Kherson position, the question becomes – why hold the position at all? Politically, it is important to defend a regional capital, but militarily the position becomes meaningless if one is not going to go on the offensive in the south.

Let’s be even more explicit: unless an offensive towards Nikolayev is planned, the Kherson bridgehead is militarily counterproductive… In the broader operational sense, Surovikin seems to be declining battle in the south while preparing in the north and in the Donbas. It is clear that he made this decision shortly after taking command of the operation – he has been hinting at it for weeks, and the speed and cleanliness of the withdrawal suggests that it was well planned , long in advance. Withdrawing across the river increases the combat effectiveness of the army significantly and decreases the logistical burden, freeing resources for other sectors.

This isn’t that hard. And it wasn’t a difficult decision, at least not from a military perspective, because any other decision by General Surovikin would have been not only incorrect, but reprehensibly stupid. War is not a game of Risk. A general does not win a battle, much less a war, by simply moving his forces forward blindly and drawing new lines on the map. It’s entirely normal for generals to try advancing one way, decide that the terrain is not favorable, then withdraw in favor of advancing somewhere else. This is particularly true of so-called maneuver warfare, hence the term.

The optics that so concern the media are part of politics, not war-making. The only time optics matter is with regards to prospective allies deciding to enter or abandon the war, and Russia’s prospective allies could not care less how the Russians manage their lines on the Ukraine battlefield. China’s decision to move against Taiwan and Turkey’s decision to move against Greece will not depend upon whether Russia loses Kherson or takes Odessa. No matter what Russia does, Iran is unlikely to move against Israel unless Israel attacks first, although it would have moved against Azerbaijan if the NATO ally had attacked Armenia.

Moreover, the fact that NATO and the Ukrainians are so obsessed with optics while the Russians are almost entirely focused on genuine military issues is a good reason to surmise that Russia will ultimately win its war with NATO.

The Allies didn’t lose World War II because Operation Market Garden failed and they withdrew from Arnhem. And the Russians aren’t going to lose the NATO-Russian war because they withdrew from Kherson either.

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