Wagner Summarizes Bakhmut

The Marketing Director of the Wagner mercenary company provides an informative summary of its successful operation to take the city of Bakhmut from the occupying Ukro-NATO forces.

  • We fought in Bakhmut against superior forces, destroyed about 50,000 Ukrainian Armed Forces and wounded up to 70,000
  • PMC “Wagner” had 3.2 times fewer dead than the Armed Forces of Ukraine, and about 2 times fewer wounded.
  • The PMC in Artyomovsk had 50,000 people at its best, and the Armed Forces of Ukraine – 82,000, and the ratio for the assault should be 3 to 1 for the attackers.
  • During the operation, I chose 50,000 prisoners, 20% of them died, another 20% were injured.
  • The goal of Artemovsk was not Artemovsk itself, but the Bakhmut Meat Grinder. And in Artemovsk, we destroyed everyone we were supposed to destroy, we completed the task.

From this, we can glean a few useful observations. First, the Russians aren’t even using their military to accomplish their goals. Except for the initial attempt on Kiev, it appears their regular Army hasn’t suffered any significant losses at all. To date, they’ve primarily utilized convicts, Chechens, and ex-Ukrainian militia, and that has sufficed to devastate the Ukro-NATO forces.

Second, the Ukro-NATO military has been severely degraded. There is no way an outnumbered attacker should be able to drive a first-class military from prepared defenses, let alone in an urban environment. Wagner had one-fifth the number of troops the military textbooks say it required to take the city. Since it is not credible to suggest that a mercenary company consisting of convicts is a first-class organization, this suggests that the UFA forces are operating at a level more or less comparable to the Arab armies of the 1960s. This is not surprising, as conscript armies tend to be low-performance and low-morale.

Third, the Russian focus is on the enemy forces, not on the terrain. This is consistent with what Marshal Zhukov records in his memoirs of the Russian civil war and World War II. Consider the way in which Zhukov didn’t hesitate to advocate the early abandonment of Kiev in order to preserve its defenders, whereas Zaluzhnyi, like Hitler, refused to countenance the retreat from even a small, strategically meaningless city in order to conserve tens of thousands of soldiers.

Fourth, the real war hasn’t even started yet. The battle for the Donbass is little more than the opening skirmish in a much larger war between Clown World and the sovereign nations.

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Release the Deepfakes!

The US military – which is obviously active in the war against Russia despite its ridiculous denials – is trying to figure out how to deny responsibility for its own hardware which has been blown up inside Russia

US struggling to explain images of its destroyed hardware inside Russia. The Russian Defense Ministry has released footage showing American vehicles used by Ukrainian militants in Belgorod attack

US officials have denied that equipment provided to Ukraine by its western backers was used by militants to stage an incursion into Russia that left multiple civilians injured and one dead. The denials run contrary to the multiple images across social media depicting US-made military vehicles destroyed in Belgorod Region.

Given the incompetence with which NATO has been waging this war, we can safely anticipate US officials blaming “AI” and “deepfakes” for the photographic evidence of the US military’s involvement in the failed attack on Russia, followed by the release of some very weird images of destroyed nine-wheeler sporting orange camouflage paint under a pair of purple moons and various videos of Emma Watson without her clothes on.

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Zelensky Avoids Ukraine

Given the fact that the Kiev regime’s resident comedian has travelled around the world while assiduously avoiding any return to Ukraine, it appears that regime change in Ukraine may be nigh.

Weeks ago I learned that the American intelligence community was aware that some officials in Western Europe and the Baltic states want the war between Ukraine and Russia to end. These officials have concluded that it is time for Zelensky to “come around” and seek a settlement. A knowledgeable American official told me that some in the leadership in Hungary and Poland were among those working together to get Ukraine involved in serious talks with Moscow. “Hungary is a big player in this and so are Poland and Germany, and they are working to get Zelensky to come around,” the American official said. The European leaders have made it clear that “Zelensky can keep what he’s got”—a villa in Italy and interests in offshore bank accounts—“if he works up a peace deal even if he’s got to be paid off, if it’s the only way to get a deal.”

So far, the official said, Zelensky has rejected such advice and ignored offers of large sums of money to ease his retreat to an estate he owns in Italy. There is no support in the Biden Administration for any settlement that involves Zelensky’s departure, and the leadership in France and England “are too beholden” to Biden to contemplate such a scenario. There is a reality that some elements in the American intelligence community can’t ignore, the official said, even if the White House is ignoring it: “Ukraine is running out of money and it is known that the next four or months are critical. And Eastern Europeans are talking about a deal.” The issue for them, the official told me, “is how to get the United States to stop supporting Zelensky,” The White House support goes beyond the needs of the war: “We are paying all of the retirement funds—the 401k’s—for Ukraine.”

And Zelensky wants more, the official said. “Zelensky is telling us that if you want to win the war you’ve got to give me more money and more stuff. He tells us, ‘I’ve got to pay off the generals.’ He’s telling us”—if he is forced out of office—“he’s going to the highest bidder. He’d rather go to Italy than stay and possibly get killed by his own people.”

It will be interesting to see how long Zelensky lasts once he returns to Ukraine – if he returns to Ukraine.

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The Battle for Bakhmut is Over

One year after Russian forces reclaimed Mariupol, they have expelled the forces of the Kiev regime from Bakhmut. As Simplicius notes in his most recent sitrep, the frantic retroactive denial of the city’s importance, contradicting all the previous posturing of Zelensky and his globalist backers, has begun in earnest, thereby underlining the veracity of the Russian assertions.

None of the tricks worked. All the endless distractions, diversions, deflections, and myriad attempts to pry our eyes from the inevitable, massive humiliation for NATO forces in Bakhmut—or is it Artemovsk now?—using every tool in their possession, from diversionary strikes on civilians on Russian border towns, to outright political assassination to steal headlines and steer public attention: none of it worked.

Bakhmut today has fallen on the exact one year anniversary of the fall of Mariupol on May 20th, 2022. And not surprisingly, the posture adopted by the UA supporters is the same exact energy as before: cringe, cope, excuse-making. “Bakhmut’s mission is accomplished,” they say, swallowing sobs.

It’s a long article, but the most interesting part to me is the connection he draws between the talk of the expedited delivery of F-16s to Ukraine and the anticipation of the failure, or even the nonexistence, of the Ukrainian spring offensive that is supposed to justify continued support for the Kiev regime in the West. It is very apparent that support for Kiev is faltering everywhere from Berlin to Washington, even as support for Russia is growing across Africa and Araby.

But while Clown World’s realists are looking for a negotiated exit which may or may not be possible, the neoclowns who started the whole thing are as rabidly aggressive as ever. Hence the F-16 gambit, which has been dreamed up to provide the basis for an argument in favor of Ukraine’s eventual success after the inevitable failure of the UFA “offensive” becomes undeniable in August or September.

However, I’d be remiss if I didn’t note Simplicius’s observations on the incapacitation of the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, Valerii Zaluzhnyi, who was seriously wounded on May 8th during a visit to a command post by a Russian missile. The fact that the deputy Minister of Defense for the Kiev regime is now talking openly about the possibility that Russia “intends to assassinate” Zaluzhnyi strongly implies that the wound was fatal and he is already out of the picture.

While Ukraine has other generals, the fact that the UFA’s Commander-in-Chief has been taken off the board will likely factor in to the eventual decision of various countries like France and Germany to throw in the towel sooner rather than later. There was never any significant desire for war with Russia on the part of any European country outside of Poland and the UK, and what little there was is gone in the aftermath of Russia’s relentless string of victories on the military, economic, and diplomatic fronts.

Anyhow, read the whole thing for a much more realistic perspective on the current situation than you will read in any mainstream media publication.

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Time is Running Out

This is probably why the Russians never launched a winter offensive. Because there is no need for Russia to launch an offensive in order to win the war in Ukraine. All they need to do is hold their positions, methodically destroy everything that is thrown at them, and reportedly, within five months, the flow of military material to the Ukraine regime will stop and its NATO-funded military will collapse.

Ukraine has five months to demonstrate some “advances” to the US and other Western backers, to convince them of its plans for the conflict with Russia, the Financial Times reported on Thursday, citing several European and American officials.

Washington is entering an election cycle and has to show that the massive military support the US and its allies have been providing to Ukraine has not been in vain, the paper also said.

“It is important for America to sell this war as a successful one, as well as for domestic purposes to prove that all of those aid packages have been successful in terms of Ukrainian advances,” a European official told the FT.

The polls show that public support for Ukraine is waning in the US, and President Biden’s administration has to show that the tens of billions of dollars it spent on assistance for Kiev made a major difference on the frontlines, the media outlet said.

According to FT sources, Washington believes the next five months are critical to the outcome of the conflict. “If we get to September and Ukraine has not made significant gains, then the international pressure on [the West] to bring them to negotiations will be enormous,” another source told the FT, on condition of anonymity.

Patience is one thing the Russian military has always had, dating back to the days when Kutuzov let Napoleon take Moscow, knowing that the French Emperor couldn’t possibly hold it. It doesn’t matter if NATO sets a deadline five months from now or elects to completely exhaust themselves before giving up, the Russians are perfectly capable of waiting as long as it takes for their enemies to give up.

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Death of a Patriot

Simplicius analyzes Russia’s recent destruction of at least one Patriot missile battery:

Here’s what is known so far: Russia was said to have conducted a layered, multi-vectored attack which came from various sides including north, east, and south, which included both Geran drones as screening cover, Kalibr missiles, Kh-101s, and finally the Kinzhals. The attack also likely included other cheaper types of drones as decoys to saturate the air defense, and in fact Kiev does attest to that, as in their official ‘shoot down’ graphic they include several drones they comically ID’d as Orlan ‘Supercum’ which was later changed to ‘Supercam’.

First, let’s break down how such an attack happens. Most logically, the cheaper decoy drones are sent in first to see if they can bait out any of the air defense into opening up on them. Kiev would try to use only its less important SHORAD (Short Range AD) systems against them, such as German Gepards and any Tunguskas/Shilkas and such that they might have.

Next would come the cruise missiles in order to bait out the true high value AD that may have held back with the first wave, and which Ukraine’s SHORAD systems may be useless against. Once the Patriot/SAMP-T/Iris-T/NASAMs/Crotale, etc., start opening up on the cruise missiles, Russia will be watching as closely as possible, with a variety of methods, in order to try to identify the air defense positions. I’ll get to those methods a little later.

It should be stated that there are certain positions Russia already knows are likely, and are prefigured into their search matrices. For instance, Mim-104 Patriot system is an extremely complex and large system, you can’t just set it up anywhere, like in the middle of an apartment building courtyard or something like that. These systems not only require a lot of room but also, since they are much less mobile than drivable units like Gepards and such, they are preferably situated somewhere that doesn’t have a lot of civilian ‘eyes’ in the area, so that no one films or rats them out, whether accidentally or not.

This leaves only a few real, solid choices where you can put such a system. And they are almost always put in airports, as an example. It comes as no surprise then that during the attacks on 5/16, word now has it that two of the Patriots were located at Zhuliany airport in Kiev and one at or near the Zoo.

Coordinates: 50.452699, 30.459805

As for the airfield “Zhulyany”, footage from the surveillance camera got into the Network. In the video, you can clearly see the launches of 32 missiles (a total of 16 for each launcher), as well as the work of barreled anti-aircraft artillery – apparently, the Patriots were covered by the Gepard.

After the ammunition load was used up, an explosion was heard: the Russian “Kinzal” managed to hit the positional area, despite “Patriots” and one “Gepard”. One was destroyed, the second was seriously damaged, but survived. The third launcher escaped damage.

Anatomy of MIM-104 Patriot Destruction, Simplicius, 18 May 2023

If it hasn’t become clear by now, the reason Russia and China are refusing to take the offensive is because the NATO forces, which chiefly consist of the US military and its resources, are being rapidly and irreparably drained in the current environment. There is, therefore, no reason to take an aggressive stance so long as the NATO forces are throwing themselves into the vortex of assured destrucution.

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Clown World Incoherence

A longtime opinion-leading clown performs a 180 on Ukraine’s membership in NATO:

Former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger has signalled a U-turn in his views on Ukraine’s prospective NATO membership. The veteran politician told The Economist that he now believes peace in Europe cannot be achieved without Ukraine joining the US-led military bloc.

Last fall, Kissinger insisted that “it was not a wise American policy to attempt to include Ukraine into NATO.” He said the bloc’s eastward expansion since the fall of Soviet Union in 1991 had essentially removed Russia’s historic “safety belt,” but insisted that was no justification for Russia’s “surprise attack” on Ukraine.

However, in his interview on Wednesday with the British outlet, the politician, who turns 100 on May 27, suggested that “for the safety of Europe, it is better to have Ukraine in NATO.” He acknowledged that he currently finds himself “in the weird position that people say, ‘Look at him, he’s changed his mind. Now he’s for membership of Ukraine in NATO.’”

The reason for such shift is “twofold,” Kissinger said. “One, Russia is no longer the conventional threat it used to be. And, secondly, we have now armed Ukraine to a point where it will be the best-armed, most modern country and with the least experienced leadership in Europe,” he explained.

Translation: Kissinger has gotten the message that Clown World has gone all-in on Ukraine. They believe their Clown World Order will fall anyhow if Russia defeats Ukraine, so they might as well take the risk of direct conflict and an open Russia-NATO war. Because NATO is no longer anything more than Globohomo’s Rainbou Army.

Clown intellectuals like Kissinger, Kagan, and Kristol never “change their minds” in response to changing circumstances. Notice that none of the negative points upon which Kissinger based his previous opinion have changed. What they do is their masters’ tea leaves and adjust their public narrative accordingly.

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No Jets for Ukraine

AC contemplates the military utility of nonexistent weapons systems:

The UK will not give Ukraine any jets since it does not have jets to spare, but it will help Ukraine get F16s from other countries if they can find any, and then train them on them, although one problem there is the UK does not actually have any F16s to train them on. It sounds like we are at the point where we are now offering Ukraine imaginary weapons we are sure we will find someday.

Of course, not being a military historian / geomilitary strategist like myself, AC has clearly missed the salient issue here, which is the way those nonexistent weapons now being allocated to Ukraine were already been committed for non-use in a war with China over Taiwan island by RAND and the US military wargamers.

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The Treason Interview

The Washington Post omitted significant sections of its recent interview with Vladimir Zelensky. From Russia Today:

The Washington Post has deleted a large tract of an interview with Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky in which he lashed out at alleged “traitors” in his ranks. RT is publishing the entire section that the US newspaper would rather keep hidden.

The following section appeared in an interview with the Ukrainian president published on Saturday. By Sunday it had been removed with no explanation. After discussing a trove of recently leaked Pentagon documents, which revealed – among other things – that the US monitors Zelensky’s communications, the newspaper presented him with a fresh allegation that has not yet been reported in the US media.

Note that Evgeny Prigozhin is the founder and head of the Wagner Group, a Russian private military company currently fighting in the Donetsk People’s Republic.

WaPo: The documents indicate that GUR, your intelligence directorate, has back-channel contact with Evgeny Prigozhin that you were aware of, including meeting with Evgeny Prigozhin and GUR officers. Is that true?

Zelensky: This is a matter of [military] intelligence. Do you want me to be convicted of state treason? And so, it’s very interesting, if someone is saying that you have documents, or if someone from our government is speaking about the activities of our intelligence, I would also like to ask you a question: With which sources from Ukraine do you have contact? Who is talking about the activities of our intelligence? Because this is the most severe felony in our country. Which Ukrainians are you talking to?

WaPo: I talked to officials in government, but these documents are not from Ukraine, they are from…

Zelensky: It doesn’t matter where the documents are from. The question is with which Ukrainian official did you talk? Because if they say something about our intelligence, that’s treason. If they say something about a specific offensive plan of one general or another, this is also treason. That’s why I asked you, which Ukrainians are you talking to?

WaPo: About these specific documents? You are the first person I am talking to about them.

Zelensky: Okay.

WaPo: And I can read you what information exactly there is about Prigozhin and the GUR. On February 13, Kirill Budanov, chief of Ukraine’s Main Directorate of Intelligence, informed you about a Russian plan to destabilize Moldova with two former Wagner associates. Budanov informed you that he viewed the Russian scheme as a way to incriminate Prigozhin because “we have dealings” with him. You instructed Budanov to inform Moldovan President Maia Sandu, and Budanov told you that the GUR had informed Prigozhin that he would be labeled a traitor who has been working with Ukraine. The document also says that Budanov expected the Russians to use details of Prigozhin’s secret talks with the GUR and meetings with GUR officers in Africa…

Zelensky: Listen, to be honest, well, you just read something, you say something. I just don’t understand where you get it, whom you talk to and so on. You talk about how I met with Budanov. This suggests that you – how do you put it? It looks like you have people who have some records or you have some evidence or you have something, because that’s what it looks like.

Here are the Zelensky ‘treason’ quotes the Washington Post deleted, Russia Today, 14 May 2023

It’s becoming increasingly apparent that Zelensky knows the days of the Kiev regime are numbered. Both the USA and the UK are taking bigger and bolder risks with their anti-Russian activity while the media clowns are cranking their narrative machine up to eight or nine in the hopes that they can somehow alter the situation through their word spells.

And, in the meantime, both China and Russia are saying less and less, even as the Russian Air Force begins to strike more heavily at targets in western Ukraine. It feels as if something has to break soon, but what and when cannot be known with any degree of confidence.

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Not the Next Ukraine

Taiwan makes it clear that it has no intention of permitting Clown World to sacrifice it in the name of containing or deterring China.

Taiwan Minister of National Defense Chiu Kuo-cheng (邱國正) on Monday said that the armed forces would not tolerate the destruction of any Taiwanese facility, in response to a suggestion by U.S. Congressman Seth Moulton that the U.S. should warn China that it would “blow up” Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) if it attacked Taiwan.

At a conference organized by the California-based think tank Milken Institute in May, Moulton was asked what deterrence effect U.S. chip policy could have on China, to which he responded, “the U.S. should make it very clear to the Chinese that if you invade Taiwan, we’re going to blow up TSMC.” U.S. defense policy advisor and former government official Michele Flournoy quickly countered his remark, saying that if TSMC was destroyed, there would be a “two trillion dollar impact on the global economy within the first year” and “you’d put manufacturing around the world at a standstill.”

Before a session of the Legislative Yuan on Monday, Chiu was asked by the media to comment on Moulton’s statement. Chiu said that anyone who wants to bomb any facility in Taiwan, regardless of whether it is meant for defensive purposes, has exceeded defense norms, reported Liberty Times. The defense minister said that the armed forces are responsible for defending Taiwan and its people, materials, and strategic resources. Therefore, “if they want to bomb this or that,” the armed forces will not tolerate this kind of situation, Chiu said.

It’s very much for the good of the people of Taiwan island that their leadership is taking this stand. No doubt they’ve seen what the foreign leadership of Ukraine has done to the people of Ukraine, and even the most rabid proponent of independence would prefer reunification to that.

I still anticipate that the reunification of Taiwan with the mainland will eventually be as peaceful as the reunification of Hong Kong proved to be. Sure, there will be protests and much criticism from the globalist media, but ultimately, it should be possible for both Chinese parties to accomplish the inevitable without war or even violence.

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