Tag: war

Ukraine Must Surrender

We knew it was bad, we knew it was very bad, but we didn’t know it was this bad. The true wickedness and inhumanity of the UK and the European Union can be seen in their determination to force the Ukrainian Armed Forces to continue resisting the Russian victory that was already known to be inevitable back in February 2022.

Ukraine has lost 1.7 million servicemen during the special military operation, these are killed and missing in action. The information comes from the database of the Ukrainian General Staff, which was hacked by killnet.

Over three years of the special military operation, the Ukrainian army lost 1,721,000 people killed and missing in action.

118.5 thousand in 2022
405.4 thousand in 2023
595 thousand in 2024
621 thousand in 2025

A total of 1.7 million files — with full names, descriptions of circumstances and places of death/disappearance, personal data, contacts of closest relatives, and photos.

If the war isn’t ended by an unconditional surrender that provides Russia with whatever it wants, the total KIA and MIA in 2025 alone will approach one million. This has been one of the bloodiest wars in European history; the infamous 30 Years War that is cited as one of the great evils of religion only accounted for 450,000 combat deaths in 30 years.

To put this into historical perspective, by the end of the year, Ukraine will have lost as many men as Japan did in WWII. It has already lost FOUR TIMES more men than the USA lost in WWII.

It is absolutely unconscionable for President Trump to permit even one more dollar to go toward such a lost, lethal, and pointless cause. And now that the degree of losses are known, I can’t imagine that the Ukrainian people are going to suffer the Kiev regime much longer.

The reported figures far exceed official estimates. In February, Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky told CBS News that 46,000 of his soldiers had been killed since 2022, alongside about 380,000 wounded – numbers questioned in Western media. Moscow has also claimed higher Ukrainian losses, putting the toll at more than 1 million killed or wounded as of early this year.

UPDATE: By contrast, total Russian losses are independently estimated to be around 165,000. This should suffice to explain why Russia has been content to take as much time as it takes to execute the Special Military Operation, as the 10-1 kill-ratio is astonishing, particularly considering that Russia has been on the offensive without much of a numerical advantage until recently.

If these numbers prove to be more or less correct, then the SMO has essentially been the Battle of Cannea writ large and is one of the greatest strategic accomplishments in military history.

Ukraine and NATO have not only lost this war, they appear to have lost it as comprehensively as any defeated military force in human history.

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The Fake Peace Plan

Reuters reports that this is the agreement to which the Russians have concurred and which President Trump will be selling to Zelensky and the Europeans today:

Reuters publishes Putin’s proposals on Ukraine, presented to Trump at the summit:

  • No ceasefire is planned before signing a full agreement.
  • The Armed Forces of Ukraine will withdraw from the Donetsk and Luhansk regions.
  • Russia will freeze the front lines in the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions.
  • Return control of areas in the Sumy and Kharkiv regions to Ukraine.
  • Formal recognition of Russia’s sovereignty over Crimea.
  • Cancellation of at least part of the sanctions against Russia.
  • Ukraine will be prohibited from joining NATO.
  • Putin seems to have been open to Ukraine receiving certain security guarantees.
  • Official status of the Russian language in some parts of Ukraine or throughout Ukraine, as well as the rights of the Russian Orthodox Church to operate freely.

But Simplicius is, in my opinion, correct to be very skeptical that this is an accurate report.

This, if true, would obviously be a huge departure from Russia’s earlier demands. It is difficult to believe, however, because Putin already signed both Zaporozhye and Kherson at their administrative borders into the Russian constitution, and thus there is no real mechanism of abandoning those uncaptured portions.

There are a variety of angles to this. Firstly, recall that media ‘reports’ about claimed Russian concessions have been proven fake every previous time. We went through it repeatedly: a media claim is made that Putin is ready to ‘concede’, and soon after a high ranking Russian official states that all previous ‘Istanbul plus’ demands are still in place…

The only logical explanation is the above: that Russia knows no agreement can ever be reached anyway, and is thus playing for time by pretending at concessions to affect the peacemaker and transfer responsibility on Ukraine and Europe. Why can’t it be reached? Zelensky himself again just stated no uncaptured land can be ceded, as it is enshrined in the Ukrainian constitution. Previously, he’s stated many times that demilitarization is definitely out, also. Now, European “partners” have again reiterated their intent to immediately station troops on Ukraine’s territory upon the cessation of hostilities.

Personally, I believe that the focus of both the USA and Russia is extricating the former from its obligations to assist Ukraine. Once the US is out of the picture, Russia can easily handle the EU-Ukraine alliance by launching new offensives and forcing the surrender on whatever terms it requires. But in order to get the USA out of the picture, there needs to be an agreement on the table to which the US can agree and to which Ukraine will not.

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Peter Turchin Kept the Receipts

One of my favorite analysts, Peter Turchin, is one of the few people who loves data even more than I do. He quite usefully chose a pair of opposite predictions concerning the Ukraine war back in 2022, one from Paul Krugman and one from Scott Ritter, and constructed models on the bases of those predictions in order to track the way the war unfolded.

Now, I could have told him that Paul Krugman’s model would be wrong, because Paul Krugman is always wrong. But that’s some high-level UHIQ pattern recognition in action; warning: do not try this at home! In the statistical world, one has to at least pretend to take his predictions seriously and give them a fair shake, even though one has a very high level of confidence that they’ll comprehensively fail.

One of the topics that I wrote about in End Times was Ukraine. After I turned the final version of the text to the publisher in late 2022, I continued monitoring the news about the course of the conflict there, because I was curious to see how well my assessment of the Ukrainian state (a plutocracy) and the war there (a proxy conflict between NATO and Russia) would fare as history unfolded. It was, thus, interesting to see that in the early 2023 the views on this conflict, and predictions about its future course, could be so diametrically opposed, depending on who was writing and what ideological background they came from. The tone in the MSM (main-stream media reflecting the official American position) was quite triumphant. But many American analysts, former military and intelligence professionals, held a very different view.

It occurred to me at that time that this difference in predictions is actually amenable to an empirical test. As long-time readers of my blog (now here on Substack, previous posts archived on my web site) know, I view ability to empirically test predictions from rival theories as key in doing Science (with a capital S). Just search my blog archive using the keyword “prediction” and you will see multiple posts on this subject. So I decided to conduct a formal test.

For concreteness sake, I selected two predictions, both based on an explicitly quantitative argument, but coming from opposite ends of the ideological spectrum. One was from Paul Krugman, channeling the official American position. The other was from another American, who is, however, considered as a “rogue actor” and a “Putin’s stooge”, Scott Ritter. You can read the actual quotes from both in the Introduction of the SocArxiv article, in which I “pre-registered” predictions of my model.

I won’t repeat the details here, because you can read them in the series of blogs I published two years ago, followed by the SocArxiv article that put it all together in a systematic manner and provided R scripts that allow others to replicate all my results.

They’re all well worth reading, although by the middle assessment, it’s already perfectly clear which of the two models, which Turchin labels the Economic Power model (Krugman) and the Casualties Rates model (Ritter), works better, although he combined elements of both into what he describes as an Attrition Warfare Model that appears to outperform both. This makes since, because what really matters most is Industrial Capacity and Male Population Demographics, both of which are presumably incorporated in Turchin’s AWM.

And he explains exactly what his AWM suggests at the moment.

As you can see (the dashed red line “We are here”), we’ve already entered the region where Ukrainian army can collapse at any moment, although this “moment,” according to the model can happen at any point between now and February 2027 (corresponding to 60 months after the start of the conflict). As I explained in my posts and the article, the final outcome is not much in doubt, but the rupture point is extremely difficult to predict. The situation is akin to seismology. For example, the recent Kamchatka earthquake of exceptional power was predicted 30 years ago, except nobody could know when it would actually strike. The Attrition Warfare Model is actually more precise than that. From its point of view, it would be a surprising outcome if Ukraine is still fighting beyond February 2027.

Note that I said, “from its [the model’s] point of view.” I emphasize that the future is unknowable in precise terms. In any case, the goal of this article was not to predict the future, but to use the method of scientific prediction to empirically test between two, or more theories.

The Attrition Warfare Model (AWM) encodes both alternative theories, (1) the Economic Power hypothesis, which predicts a win for Ukraine (Krugman) and (2) the Casualties Rates hypothesis, which predicts a win for Russia (Ritter). It is clear that the first theory will be rejected, no matter when the war ends.

Turchin’s work can be a little wonkish for the average individual to follow, but it’s not as complicated as it might look at first. He keeps things simple enough, and his writing style is clear enough, that with just a little concentration, that it’s both insightful and educational for anyone with the intelligence to be paying attention to these small matters of war, revolution, and societal survival.

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The US Defeat in Ukraine

There is no way to avoid the conclusion that 2023’s disastrous counteroffensive was a test of the USA’s ability to go toe-to-toe with Russia’s generals. Or that it was a test that they failed badly.

● Ukrainian, U.S. and British military officers held eight major tabletop war games to build a campaign plan. But Washington miscalculated the extent to which Ukraine’s forces could be transformed into a Western-style fighting force in a short period — especially without giving Kyiv air power integral to modern militaries.
● U.S. and Ukrainian officials sharply disagreed at times over strategy, tactics and timing. The Pentagon wanted the assault to begin in mid-April to prevent Russia from continuing to strengthen its lines. The Ukrainians hesitated, insisting they weren’t ready without additional weapons and training.
● U.S. military officials were confident that a mechanized frontal attack on Russian lines was feasible with the troops and weapons that Ukraine had. The simulations concluded that Kyiv’s forces, in the best case, could reach the Sea of Azov and cut off Russian troops in the south in 60 to 90 days.
● The United States advocated a focused assault along that southern axis, but Ukraine’s leadership believed its forces had to attack at three distinct points along the 600-mile front, southward toward both Melitopol and Berdyansk on the Sea of Azov and east toward the embattled city of Bakhmut.
● The U.S. intelligence community had a more downbeat view than the U.S. military, assessing that the offensive had only a 50-50 chance of success given the stout, multilayered defenses Russia had built up over the winter and spring.

The massive distance between the wargamed results and the real-world results demonstrate how absolutely inept the current state of US military wargaming is. Keep this in mind when contemplating what the military wargames predict about the inevitable conflict in the South China Sea and in the Middle East.

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The Military War is Over

At least, that’s what Col. Macgregor thinks.

What I’m trying to say is that you have this picture on the one side of Ukrainian forces that are literally bled white, that are falling apart—not for lack of courage or any of that sort of thing. That’s nonsense. It’s simply impossible for them to mount an effective resistance against the onrushing Russians.

And then on the Russian side, you have this 21st century force, extraordinarily well-equipped, technologically savvy, essentially knocking drones out of the air with either electronic warfare or other means and moving not at high speed, but fast enough that the opposing force has no chance of recovering.

And right now they keep talking about the so-called Azov formations. I guess there’s something like four, five, six, seven, eight brigades left. I don’t know what their strength is. There’s probably not much. But these are the sort of diehard Nazis. They seem to be nowhere in the path of the Russians. I think they’ve beat a path elsewhere. So I’m not sure there’s really much in front of the advancing Russian forces.

So from a purely military standpoint, I would say this is the end of the war.

“Is it fair to say that Russia is close to achieving its military objectives in the war if those objectives are the acquisition of the four oblasts?”

“Oh, well that’s being achieved. But remember, the key thing for them has always been not so much capturing territory, but annihilating the Ukrainian forces on the ground. That’s the problem. So they’re very force-oriented in what they do. Now, we may see finally a buildup of forces in various places of 100,000 or more that are large enough and well-supplied enough that they can move deeper.

I think you’re going to see that in the direction of Zaporizhzhia. The bridges over the Dnipro are intact. Zaporizhzhia has real strategic value. If they decide to cross the river, they can go north or south from there—attacking north to Kyiv or south to Odessa. I think those are the decisions that they’re going to make now in the next couple of weeks. And we’re going to see more and more movement.

But the point is the Ukrainian force is almost annihilated. There are still some people left, and they’re not going to stop. As long as there’s anyone from these Azov units around, I would expect the Russians to plow forward. But securing the Russian areas, the Russian-speaking areas, yes—but then the next question is, what are you going to do to secure the outcome of the war? They’re going to be victorious militarily. That’s not enough. In other words, how do you come to an arrangement with somebody who is confident in the west that brings you the measure of security that you want?

All of this has been about protecting Russia. This was never about conquering territory and marching west into Poland or Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia. That’s all nonsense. And I think that’s in the back of people’s minds right now in Moscow.

The problem, of course, is that there is a very good chance that President Trump and his advisors don’t understand that the time for playing word games with Russia is over. If the USA can’t be a reliable security partner capable of keeping the Ukrainians and the Europeans under control, and there are a lot of reasons to believe it cannot, then Russia will do whatever it has to do in order to establish a sufficiently secure situation.

While I hope something useful will come of Friday’s meeting between the presidents, I am not very optimistic that anything substantive will do so. Although if the rumor of a shipment of an Israeli adrenochrome seized by Russians are factually based, one hopes that Putin will bring it to Trump’s attention.

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Ukrainian People Want Surrender

But the illegitimate Kiev regime that rules over them at the behest of Clown World rejects the will of the people.

There’s some interesting and vital data which was released last week, just ahead of this coming Friday’s historic Trump-Putin summit in Alaska, which will focuse on finding a solution to ending the Russia-Ukraine war, though the US leader has just tempered expectations by calling it a “feel-out meeting”.

Gallup released a poll last Thursday which demonstrates a dramatic shift in Ukrainian public opinion, with 69% of the population now favoring a negotiated settlement to end the grinding war as soon as possible. General war weariness has long been a feature of the conflict, which has been raging for over 540 days at this point, and has taken at least tens of thousands or possibly hundreds of thousands of lives. Many Ukrainians fled abroad during the first year, and huge amounts of people are still internally displaced in the war-ravaged country.

The fresh Gallup poll found that just 24% support continuing the fight until achieving a military victory, which is a stark reversal from views held at the start of the war more than three years ago.

And yet this undefined goal of ‘pushing on until victory’ seems to remain the Zelensky government’s policy. The Ukrainian leader has shown no signs whatsoever of being willing to make significant compromise to find a lasting truce, including on territorial concessions.

There was a similar Gallup survey of the Ukrianian population closer to the beginnign war, in 2022. At that early point Gallup found that 72% of Ukrainians wanted to keep fighting, while just 22% supported peace talks.

But since then Russia’s strategy has become clear – to use its overwhelming manpower and artillery and missile supply to steadily grind down Ukraine’s dwindling manpower and resolve. It has become a war of attrition, and Russia has shown itself steady and prepared for such a long conflict. And this is probably why the same survey found that Ukrainians’ hopes for swift admission into either the EU or NATO are fading.

The more evident it becomes that Russia is ‘winning’ the war – the less that the West’s political establishment wants to risk, also amid fears of potential run-up to direct confrontation between NATO and Moscow.

Ukraine should have accepted the deal it was offered by Russia in 2022, the one that it foolishly turned down at the recommendation of Boris Johnson in the mistaken belief that NATO was able to successfully fight a land war with Russia. And it should have offered to surrender a year ago, when the inexorable math of military production had made it clear that attrition warfare heavily favored Russia and its allies in BRICS.

The best realistic outcome of this week’s meeting between the US and Russian presidents is for President Trump to agree to withdraw all military and financial support for both Ukraine and the EU and to announce his intention to ask the US Senate to withdraw from NATO. That’s really all that President Putin needs to force the delusional people running the EU NGO and the Kiev puppet regime to deal with the military reality they are presently facing.

The sooner this war ends, the sooner the great conflict between Clown World and the nations can proceed to the next theater.

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The Irrelevant EU

It’s really remarkable to see how the European Union is doubling down on its own irrelevance:

EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas has called for more pressure on Moscow ahead of the summit between Russian President Vladimir Putin and his US counterpart, Donald Trump.

Foreign ministers of the bloc’s member states held an urgent video-conference on Monday, after it was announced that the Russian and US leaders will meet face-to-face in Alaska on August 15 to discuss the Ukraine conflict and other issues.

Following the discussions, Kallas issued a post on X to offer the bloc’s “support for US steps that will lead to a just peace” between Moscow and Kiev.

“Transatlantic unity, support to Ukraine and pressure on Russia is how we will end this war and prevent future Russian aggression in Europe,” she insisted.

Transatlantic unity, support to Ukraine, and pressure on Russia has been the entire US-UK-EU strategy since February 2022. It has completely and comprehensively failed. How is more of the same going to do anything but ensure the total destruction of Ukraine, which is absolutely unnecessary given that all Russia really wants is the five regions it has already annexed, plus Odessa?

Words. All these people have is words. Why did anyone ever pay any attention to them?

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Ukrainian Defenses Collapse

Hal Turner is reporting news that should show up soon on Simplicius and elsewhere if true:

There is an unexpected development in the Russia-Ukraine Conflict: The Ukrainian Defense has collapsed at the city of Pokrovsk.

Ukraine military is now sending urgent messages to the townspeople telling them they have “less than two days” to pack up and evacuate.

The same is happening in Kupyansk – Seversk and soon in Konstantinovka..

It appears that Russians will take all 4 settlements more or less at the same time; basically merging 4 operational crisis sectors into a strategic disaster for Kiev.

Russia has made a major breakthrough in the Ukrainian defense on the Pokrovsk axis!

Ukraine simply does not have enough people to hold the lines anymore. Russians find a weak spot and can just drive ahead.

In the Dobropillia area, Russian troops have broken through the front to a depth of more than 11 kilometers, finding weak spots in the Ukrainian Armed Forces’ defense. Such huge advances previously were unheard of.

It appears the long-expected breakthrough appears to have taken place, which no doubt accounts for President Trump’s abruptly-compressed timeframe to meet with President Putin later this week.

UPDATE: Looks legit. From a UFA commander’s public tweet addressed to Zelensky.

The front line as a stable line of combat does not actually exist. Pokrovsk and Myrnohrad are almost surrounded. Kostiantynivka is half-surrounded. The enemy is advancing towards Kramatorsk and Druzhkivka.

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Russia Gets Alaska Back

The decisions of the US presidents in the lead-up and progress of the Special Military Operation have been so uniformly retarded and suboptimal that it won’t surprise me in the least if Putin walks away from the upcoming talks in Alaska with Alaska.

Steve Witkoff’s visit to Moscow has marked a striking shift in American rhetoric. Just a couple of months ago, in June and July, Donald Trump was threatening the Kremlin with new sanctions and issuing ultimatums. Now the agenda includes a Putin-Trump summit scheduled for August 15 in Alaska. This 180-degree turn has been accompanied by leaks hinting at possible deals and a return to the “thaw” in relations we last saw in the spring.

If the meeting goes ahead, the Russian president will come to it in a far stronger position than he did a few months ago. Back in the spring, Trump’s push for a peace deal looked like a personal whim, and the so-called ‘party of war’ and globalists still had cards to play: Senator Lindsey Graham’s sanctions package, fresh US arms deliveries to Ukraine, and the proposals floated by French President Emmanuel Macron and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer about sending Western troops to Ukraine.

Now it looks as if Trump is the one coming back to Vladimir Putin – driven by the failure of his oil embargo. On top of that, there’s an appearance – an illusion, perhaps – that Putin is backed by a united BRICS front, something Trump’s own moves have helped bring about. Whether that front actually exists, or can survive for long, is another matter. But at this moment, one of Trump’s key pillars of leverage looks shaky, if not entirely knocked out from under him.

The USA is in the process of failing and it’s only a matter of time before it starts actually losing territory. 2025 would be a little ahead of schedule, but at this point, very little would surprise me, no matter how stupid and unlikely.

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Fifth Time’s the Castastrophe

Now this just might be the USA’s Syracuse Expedition:

Today’s White House ceremony that featured the leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan signing an agreement to end their conflict, with Armenia coughing up major territorial concessions, is just an extension of the plan the US tried to execute against Russia using Ukraine as a proxy.

While not included in the agreement, Armenia reportedly plans to withdraw from CSTO by early 2026. (The CSTO is the Russian founded military alliance in Eurasia consisting of six post-Soviet states: Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, and Tajikistan.) Moreover, the US also reportedly secretly promised NATO membership to Armenia and Azerbaijan for signing on to this deal, which would give NATO access to the Caspian Sea by virtue of the Zangezur corridor.

And here is the kicker (if true): Some telegram channels claim that US troops are set to be deployed in Armenia within the next 48 hours. In other words, rather than ratchet down tensions and reduce the threat of NATO, Trump is signing off on a plan to continue the NATO encirclement of Russia. So yes, Trump is setting the stage for World War 3 if he is serious about adding Armenia and Azerbaijan to NATO.

They tried to add Georgia. Then they tried to add Ukraine. Then they did add Finland and Sweden. And now they’re going to try to add Armenia and Azerbaijan in order to “encircle Russia”?

That sounds like a very good way to ensure that the Russian empire adds a few new oblasts.

Deploying American troops on foreign soil is not the safeguard it once was. After the failed attacks on Iran, I very much doubt that Russia, North Korea, or China regards them as anything but easy and obvious targets.

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