Tag: Russia

A Canadian sniper returns from Ukraine, unimpressed:

Once lauded by the international media, a Canadian sniper known as ‘Wali’ has returned from Ukraine to Quebec, telling local media that his experience there was a “terrible disappointment.” He claimed there was inadequate weaponry, poor training and heavy losses, as well as profiteering and desertion in the ranks.

When ‘Wali’ answered Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s call in March and volunteered to fight for Ukraine, he was given lavish coverage by the Western media. A former Canadian soldier who had also volunteered to fight with Kurdish militants in Iraq, Wali was described by Spanish media as “the best sniper in the world,” celebrated by American military bloggers for “hilariously troll[ing]” Russia and praised by the New York Post for “grabbing anti-tank missiles in a warehouse to kill real people.”

However, he said that reality left him disillusioned. Back home in Quebec, Wali told La Presse on Friday that his Ukrainian commanders initially “didn’t know what to do” with foreign fighters like himself. Tired of waiting for an opportunity to fight, Wali joined the ‘Norman Brigade,’ a private unit led by another former soldier from Quebec.

However, several members of this brigade told La Presse that weapons and armor promised by the brigade’s head never showed up, and some of its members found themselves near the front lines with no protective equipment. Around 60 members of the brigade have since deserted, its commander told La Presse, and some soldiers “schemed” to steal a $500,000 shipment of American-supplied weapons and form their own unit.

Wali eventually joined a Ukrainian unit fighting near Kiev, and described having to seek out weapons, food and gasoline. “You had to know someone who knew someone who told you that in some old barbershop they would give you an AK-47,” he recounted. “Even for the meals, it is often the civilians who provide them.”

In the end, Wali said that he ended up firing two bullets into windows “to scare people,” and decided to come home shortly after two Ukrainian conscripts he was posted with in the Donbass region exposed themselves to a Russian tank and received “highly accurate” shell fire in return.

I’m surprised he managed to survive. Of course, simply telling the truth about his experience will almost certainly get him banned from social media for “disinformation”.

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And yet, we can be confident that the US military is going to screech like a violated owl when the Russians and/or the Chinese return the favor and strike back at its generals.

The United States has provided intelligence that has helped Ukrainian forces kill several Russian generals since Vladimir Putin’s troops invaded the country, senior US officials said.

The US officials said that of the approximately 12 Russian generals killed by Ukrainian forces, ‘many’ had been targeted with the help of US intelligence, reports the New York Times.

Washington has provided Ukraine real-time battlefield information on Russia’s expected troop movements and the location about Russia’s mobile military headquarters, which relocate often.

Ukraine has combined those details with its own intelligence, which includes intercepted communications that reveal whether senior officers are located within a base, to conduct artillery strikes and other attacks that have killed Russian generals.

We knew the neocons wanted war with Russia. What we didn’t know was that the US military has degenerated to the point that its leadership appears to want it too.

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Obviously, I’m very skeptical of the pro-NATO interpretation of events, but since I believe it’s important to always pay attention to what those with different perspectives think, this is one of the more relevant anti-Russian arguments presented, given that it focuses on the perceived logistics issues faced by the Russians in their special military operation. As it is said: “Amateurs talk strategy. Professionals talk logistics.”

Of course, on social media, amateurs talk tactics, strategy, logistics, and geopolitics, and all of it is nonsense. And the incessant, and ever-nonsensical propaganda from the so-called “military experts” on Fox News and CNN doesn’t help. But this logistical analysis comes with a concrete prediction, so it is worth noting.

This tweet in the thread talks about Russian Army units being tied to supply dumps closer & closer to the front lines. This is consistent & expected with high levels of attrition, both combat & operational, in the Russian Army tactical truck fleet. As the Russian tactical truck fleet diminishes, the depth of Russian break-ins gets shallower & the chance of any sort of breakthrough followed by mobile operations disappears.

“Still-continued logistics problems” boils down to not enough tactical trucks, efficiently used. The pace of operation the Putin regime insists upon means Russia simply cannot change over non-mech to mechanized logistics in the middle of the Ukraine war.

At the start of the war Russian had MTLB tracked fighting vehicles being used as ambulances. Now they are using unmarked civilian cars with a sunroof for the same role. This is the bleeding out of Russian Army vehicle fleet & the Russian economy too. These symptoms are consistent with my “Russian truck fleet dead from Operational Attrition in six-to-eight weeks” prediction.

It doesn’t look like Russia’s current rates of loss will get to ‘immobilization from a lack of trucks level’. 1701 trucks isn’t even 50% of 4,000. This is part of the issue of making prediction based on straight line projections. The people you are predicting about will make changes in their operations to avoid that predicted disaster.

This doesn’t mean I’m going to be wrong at the middle-May end date of my projection, but doing a straight line projection from now says I will be. Call it a less than 25% possible outcome. We shall see in two weeks.

The fundamental problem with this truck-based analysis is that it is predicated on the same assumption that every single pro-NATO analysis I have seen contains: the idea that the Russians have thrown 100 percent of their military assets into the Ukrainian battle. This has always struck me as highly unlikely, given that even Russia’s Chinese allies are aware that the real conflict is with NATO and the neocons, that the Russians have utilized significantly fewer BTGs than originally reported, and there has been very little use of the Russian Air Force in either tactical or strategic operations.

If mobility logistics are the limiting factor, then one presumes the Russians can figure out how to obtain vehicles from their primary ally, who happens to produce 48 percent of all the heavy trucks manufactured in the world.

My assumption is that the Russian strategists are smarter and better-informed than I am. Most of the so-called “expert” analysis I have seem appears to be predicated on the idea that the Russian strategists are ill-informed and too stupid to recognize the obvious. Time will tell whose position is closer to the truth.

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The Foreign Minister of Russia points out the obvious by stating that NATO is already at war with Russia in Ukraine and correctly warns the member states that supplying weapons to Ukraine makes them belligerent parties and legitimate military targets:

Russia’s top diplomat has warned that NATO is now fighting a proxy war with Russia in Ukraine and there is a ‘very serious’ risk the conflict could turn nuclear.

Sergei Lavrov, speaking on Russian state TV last night, accused western leaders of risking a third world war by supplying Ukraine with weapons with the goal of ‘wearing down the Russian army’ – an aim he described as an ‘illusion’.

Accusing NATO and its allies of attempting to bully Russia on the international stage, Lavrov warned that tensions between east and west are now worse than during the Cuban missile crisis at the height of the Cold War.

Unfortunately, the Western leaders and diplomats appear to believe that Russia’s warnings are as baseless and irrelevant as their own rhetorical posturing as they dutifully demonstrate their suicidal, and literally proverbial, stupidity.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin travelled to Kyiv on Sunday for a face-to-face meeting with President Zelensky to discuss supplies, before pledging another multi-million dollar shipment.

Austin will also chair a meeting of more than 40 defence ministers at Ramstein air base in Germany today, aimed at securing additional supplies and coordinating efforts between allies to ensure Ukraine has everything it needs.

Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said on Monday night that he regards Russia’s scaremongering as a sign of weakness.

Russia had lost its ‘last hope to scare the world off supporting Ukraine,’ Kuleba wrote on Twitter after Lavrov’s interview. ‘This only means Moscow senses defeat.’

British armed forces minister James Heappey agreed with that assessment today, saying he does not see an imminent threat of escalation in Ukraine and dismissing Lavrov’s comments as ‘bravado’.

‘Lavrov’s trademark over the course of 15 years or so that he has been the Russian foreign secretary has been that sort of bravado. I don’t think that right now there is an imminent threat of escalation,’ Heappey told BBC Television.

‘What the West is doing to support its allies in Ukraine is very well calibrated … Everything we do is calibrated to avoid direct confrontation with Russia.’

Thinking that playing cute and coy with your public statements is somehow going to permit you to simultaneously engage in clear acts of war while avoiding being targeted by a hypersonic missile barrage is the sort of thing that only fat, soft and very stupid people can believe. Unfortunately, the last two years of The War on Covid have proven that most people across the so-called Democratic West are fat, soft, and very, very stupid.

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In which it is observed that the predicted uprising of the people against the Russian forces simply has not happened:

In the early parts of the SMO, a big deal was made by Kiev around this mythical partisan mobilization that was set to take place. Glorious campaigns of patriotic partisan fighters were heralded in various posters and clips, Molotov cocktail campaigns were paraded on western news channels and we were told that every Ukrainian citizen would rise up against the Russian invader. Each day there was a new announcement, such as Zelensky’s bid to pay citizens tens of thousands $$$ of dollars (funded by the West / CIA of course) for anyone who can kill/capture a Russian soldier or demonstrably destroy a Russian tank or armored vehicle. Similarly, upwards of $1 million dollars was offered to Russian servicemen who would defect and turn over their tank or plane to the AFU.

Not only did any of this ever take place, in fact we saw last time that it was the AFU itself who began selling their tanks to the Russians for Rubles. But the main point to be made is that the giant, widespread partisan uprising was in fact a complete and utter failure. Not only is the vast majority of the Ukrainian citizenry utterly apathetic/ambivalent towards their own armed forces, but there are more and more signs of internal uprisings and new anti-Kiev regime partisan ‘underground cells’ being formed in cities like Nikolayev and Kharkov. One in Kharkov even released a video, their faces masked, promising an uprising against the AFU forces holding them hostage, once Russian forces begin fully taking the city.

The truth is, the longer the conflict goes on, the more the Ukrainian citizenry turns against their own forces and government, not only because of mounting evidence of the AFU’s crimes against their own citizens/civilians but simply because they tire of the war and were never passionate about the utterly corrupt Zelensky regime and its criminal military forces anyway.

After the initial one or two Molotov videos against RF troops in the first week of the war, we never again saw any citizens attacking Russian troops and in fact see the opposite each day. Now whenever we see new Russian missile strikes filmed by Ukrainian citizens, it’s very often accompanied by a complete ambivalence or even quiet jubilation from the people filming.

It has to be recognized that the grand promised awakening of the Ukrainian state, and the large scale partisan uprising was a complete failure – just hollow psyop attempts from the Zelensky regime.

Why hasn’t it happened? Because many, if not most, of the people in the affected areas view the Zelensky regime as the enemy, not the Russians.

Now, the observations above could be dismissed as pro-Russian disinformation, were it not for the fact that the Zelensky regime is clearly alarmed by the possibility that Russia will permit the people of liberated/occupied Ukraine to freely vote on whether they would prefer to be governed by Moscow or Kiev. Which means that the information is legitimate, and the Special Military Operation is genuinely popular with the majority of the people of southern and eastern Ukraine.

“Ludmila Denisova, Ukrainian Parliament’s Commissioner for Human Rights, says that the Russians are planning to hold an independence referendum in Kherson during May 1-May 10 to create another DNR and LNR like statelet in southern Ukraine. Ballots are reportedly being printed.”

“Crimean Tatars support the inclusion of Kherson and Zaporozhye regions in the Crimean Federal District. The Crimean Tatars proposed to recreate the Crimean Federal District with the inclusion of the south of Ukraine. This statement was made by the head of the regional national-cultural autonomy of the Crimean Tatars Eyvaz Umerov.”

“Residents of the Kherson and Azov parts of the Zaporozhye regions of Ukraine, who once belonged to the Tauride province together with Crimea, speak of their desire to return to Russia, because they no longer want to be under the yoke of Ukrainian nationalists

“At least 2/3 of the residents of southern Ukraine, in particular, Kherson oblast, parts of Nikolayev oblast and Zaporozhye, would vote in favor of joining Russia, if an appropriate referendum were to be held”, says Crimean senator of the Russian Federation Council Sergei Tsekov

Today Ukraine threatened that if ‘Russia holds a referendum for the Kherson People’s Republic, then Ukraine will withdraw from all negotiations with Russia.’

People don’t vote for people who “occupy” them, as the USA has learned in Iraq and Afghanistan. They prefer to vote for people who “liberate” them. Naturally, this application of self-determination and democracy will be condemned by the so-called Western democracies as “an attack on democracy”.

And this is why Russia has steadily refused to describe its actions as a war. Because, from the start, it has been signaling the people living within the Ukrainian borders that it has no desire to go to war with anyone who regards themselves as being Russian.

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