Tag: war

I Suspect They’re Dragging Their Feet

And it’s going to take a lot longer than 30 months once the power goes out:

Germany has agreed to provide 18 self-propelled RCH-155 howitzers to Ukraine, on top of the heavy weaponry that Berlin has already pledged to hand over, Die Welt has claimed. However, the first shipment is at least 30 months away, the outlet reported Saturday, citing the manufacturer.

In 30 months, it’s entirely possible that neither Ukraine nor the EU will exist. And I’m not the only one who is skeptical that the EU can survive being used by the US neocons to fight an economic proxy war for them.

Orban again lashed out at EU sanctions imposed on Russia over its military operation in Ukraine, saying the bloc had shot itself in the foot with those curbs. The energy crisis, which occurred as a result of those restrictions, could force 40% of European industry to shut down this winter, he reportedly added.

In his speech, the Hungarian leader also allegedly revealed that European leaders are expected to decide on prolonging the sanctions for another six months later in autumn, insisting that an attempt should be made to prevent that extension.

The way things are going now, the eurozone and the EU itself could cease to exist by 2030, Orban was quoted as saying.

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Why Russia Hasn’t Mobilized

The refusal to order the mobilization of Russian military forces has puzzled a lot of people who don’t understand what Putin is talking about when he uses the phrase “hybrid war”:

One of the most important dimensions of this war is the economic front. Europe is being driven to the brink by the energy crisis. The Wall Street Journal keyed in on what I believe to be the most apt descriptor of the crisis, warning of a “new era of deindustrialization in Europe.”

A full mobilization would be very costly for Russia’s economy, risking the edge that it currently holds in the economic confrontation with Europe. This, I believe, is the main reason that the Russian government was quick to quash rumors of mobilization today. There are other steps on the escalation ladder before going to total war footing.

There are already rumors that Russia is planning to change the formal designation of the war, from “Special Military Operation”. While that could mean a formal declaration of war, I think that is unlikely. Rather, Russia will likely give the Ukraine operation the same designation as its operations in Syria, loosening the rules of engagement and beginning to target Ukrainian assets in earnest.

We saw a foretaste of this last night, when Russia wiped out over half of Ukraine’s power generation with a few missiles. There are many more targets that they can go after – more nodes in the electrical grid, water pumping and filtration facilities, and higher level command posts. There is at least some probability that Russia begins targeting the command facilities with NATO personnel in them. Plausible deniability works both ways; because NATO is not officially in Ukraine – only “volunteers” – targeting their personnel is not an overtly aggressive act.

Russia also has many ways to boost its force deployment in Ukraine that fall short of full mobilization. They have a pool of demobilized contract soldiers that they can call up, as well as a pool of reservists that they can raise with a partial mobilization.

The Russian line is hardening. Just in the past 24 hours, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said there were “no prospect for negotiations” with Ukraine, and Putin said “Unfriendly forces are targeting us, and we must take initiative in order to succeed in confronting them.” Medvedev went even further just now: “A certain Zelenskyy said that he will not hold a dialogue with those who issue ultimatums. The current ‘ultimatums’ are a warm-up for kids, a preview of demands to be made in the future. He knows them: the total surrender of the Kiev regime on Russia’s terms”

If you believe the Russian government is utterly incompetent and duplicitous, feel free to view statements like this as bluster. But given the warning shot at Ukrainian power generation yesterday, my sense is that Russia is preparing to escalate to a higher level of intensity, which Ukraine cannot match with its indigenous resources. The only other player on the escalation ladder is the United States.

Dark times area ahead for Ukraine – and perhaps for Americans on the other front of this war.

As the Allies proved in WWII, and as the Chinese colonels recognized in their landmark Unrestricted Warfare work on military grand strategy, war is a human activity that is a subset of economics. And the battle for control of Europe will be dictated by energy resources, not by population size or tactical brilliance.

Napoleon didn’t lose to the Coalition Powers because he lacked manpower, technology, or military prowess, but because England controlled the seas. The outcome was always inevitable unless France could somehow break that control. NATO cannot defeat Russia because Russia is energy self-sufficient and Europe is not. So, the question is: how long are Europeans willing to freeze and starve at the behest of US-based neocons in the name of Ukraine?

Russia hasn’t mobilized because doing so would, counter-intuitively, weaken its grand strategic position. Which, of course, is why the NATO forces are attempting to provoke it into doing so. But unless someone in Europe or the USA can introduce a new energy source, NATO cannot win this war. And it’s very clear that Putin, Xi, Modi, and the other BRICSIA leaders all understand this. And the nature of the war will become increasingly apparent as US attempts to escalate the military elements are met with energy-related escalations as well as military responses.

And apparently, some of the NATO leaders realize this too.

Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan said that Turkey’s goal is membership in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization

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Germany Doubles Down

I don’t think seizing Russian energy assets is going to convince Russia to turn on the gas and prevent Germans from freezing this winter.

Berlin is taking control of German subsidiaries of Russian oil major Rosneft, Rosneft Deutschland (RDG) and RN Refining & Marketing, putting them under trust management for six months, the German Ministry of Economics announced on Friday.

According to the ministry, control will be given to the grid regulator Bundesnetzagentur (Federal Network Agency of Germany). The ministry explained that the step was taken to ensure the operation of three Rosneft oil refineries in Schwedt, Karlsruhe and Vohburg, which was jeopardized after critical service providers, insurers and banks allegedly refused to work with the Russian company.

“The legal basis for the order was Article 17 of the Energy Security Act. According to it, a company that operates critical infrastructure in the energy sector can be placed under management if there is a specific risk that without management the company will not be able to perform its tasks that ensure the functioning of society in the energy sector, as well as if there is a risk of disruption of security of supply,” the ministry said in a statement.

Rosneft enterprises account for about 20% of oil refinery capacities in Germany, making it one of the largest in the country.

At this point, I’d be surprised if the Russians don’t start hitting targets outside of Ukrainian territory before the end of the year. The neocons wanted this war and I expect they’re going to get it good and hard. It’s not as if Putin and his generals don’t know who has been pushing for this since before 2008.

Which is the reason I just doubled our wood supply. Just, you know, in case. But why would Germany ever do something this obviously stupid? Oh, that’s why.

Last Sunday, the US ambassador to Berlin, Amy Gutmann, told the German broadcaster ZDF that she expects Germany to “take on a greater leadership role.” She acknowledged Berlin’s military assistance to Kiev, but said her expectations are “even higher.”

“So far, Germany has done what we asked for,” a US official told Die Welt on Thursday, adding that Berlin could be moving “faster.” The paper reported that Washington has “doubts” about Germany’s fundamental loyalty to Kiev, questioning whether it wants Ukraine to “win” or just “not to lose.”

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Stupid Think Tanks

A Russian leader points out that the continued escalation of NATO involvement will result in a transition from proxy war to direct war:

Western “half-wits” from “stupid think tanks” are leading their countries down the road of nuclear armageddon with their hybrid war against Moscow, former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev wrote on his Telegram channel on Tuesday. Endlessly funneling weapons and support to Ukraine while pretending not to be directly involved in the conflict will not work, added the deputy chair of the Russian Security Council.

The “security guarantees” proposal unveiled by Kiev on Tuesday was “really a prologue to the Third World War,” said Medvedev, calling it a “hysterical appeal” to Western countries engaged in a proxy war against Russia.

If the West continues its “unrestrained pumping of the Kiev regime with the most dangerous types of weapons,” Russia’s military campaign will move to the next level, where “visible boundaries and potential predictability of actions by the parties to the conflict” will be erased and the conflict will take on a life of its own, as wars always do, Medvedev argued.

“And then the Western nations will not be able to sit in their clean homes, laughing at how they carefully weaken Russia by proxy. Everything will be on fire around them. Their people will harvest their grief in full. The land will be on fire and the concrete will melt,” Medvedev wrote, before citing a Bible verse from Revelations 9:18.

“Yet still the narrow-minded politicians and their stupid think tanks, thoughtfully twirling a glass of wine in their hands, talk about how they can deal with us without entering into a direct war.

Think tanks are, by and large, pretty stupid. My belief is that the neocons driving the war with Russia have always wanted a direct war. They simply utilized war-by-proxy and hybrid war because they couldn’t get the politicians to sign on to a direct war. So unless the people or the politicians bring it to an end, they will get the war they wanted.

Of course, that doesn’t mean the war will end the way they assumed it would….

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Ukraine is the New Hannibal

And apparently the media would like us to believe that the recent Ukrainian offensive is the greatest military maneuver since the double-envelopment at Cannae and Vladimir Putin is now out of options. Checkmate, Putin!

Ukraine has pulled off ‘one of the greatest counter attacks in modern history’: Military expert JUSTIN BRONK says Vladimir Putin has NO good options and Russia’s entire invasion force could COLLAPSE in worst defeat since WW2.

The long awaited Ukrainian counter-offensive to retake the southern city of Kherson finally began late last month.

However, many were dismayed by the relatively cautious pace at which Ukrainian forces were advancing, and pointed out that by making it so obvious that a counter-offensive was being prepared in Kherson, Kyiv had given the Russian Army more than a month to move some of its most elite remaining units and large numbers of supporting reserve units to block it.

The brilliance of this strategy his been revealed as of Wednesday last week, as a second Ukrainian force launched a smaller scale but much more mobile counter-offensive in the Kharkiv region to the north.

After initially breaking through the Russian frontlines at the town of Balakliya, Ukrainian armoured and mechanised brigades did not stop to consolidate their gains, but instead drove rapidly throughout the next two days and nights, deep into Russian-occupied territory.

As the Ukrainian commanders urgently rushed reinforcements in to consolidate and widen the narrow corridor of liberated towns, the spearhead units isolated and then bypassed the limited Russian reserve forces that tried to halt them at the small village of Sevchenkove and reached the southern edge of the crucial junction city of Kup’yansk on Friday morning.

In less than a week, more than 3,000 square kilometres of Ukrainian territory had been liberated, massive stockpiles of ammunition, weapons and armoured vehicles captured for use by Ukrainian forces, and the entire Russian position in North-Eastern Ukraine completely destabilised.

Russian forces have not suffered such a serious and rapid military defeat on the battlefield since the Second World War.

Worse still for Putin is that fact that he has no good options for how to react now.

The majority of his potentially mobile and elite units in Ukraine are still concentrated in Kherson to the south, and are facing a serious and ongoing Ukrainian counter-offensive operation that cannot be ignored.

Furthermore, by signalling for so long that Kherson was target for liberation, Ukraine has baited Russia into accepting an attritional battle in a very militarily disadvantageous position.

If his forces stay put in the south, then the majority of Russia’s usable combat power will be trapped with their backs to the river and steadily ground down by a Ukrainian force that has much better supply lines, more troops and so can sustain an attritional artillery duel for longer.

However, if the Kherson front were to collapse, it would be such a political and military disaster coming soon after the stunning defeat in Kharkiv that Russian military morale might totally disintegrate, or Putin might even find himself threatened by discontented factions within the Russian power structure at home.

The media is reaching a level of detachment from reality that one seldom sees outside the economic news. Remember, most of the manpower being utilized in Ukraine are no more part of the Russian military than the Ukrainian forces are part of the US military. The Russians haven’t even bother to mobilize yet, which should tell you how little they are worried about the operations in Ukraine.

Except for the specialist arms supporting the militias, the Russian military is being reserved for the direct confrontation with NATO forces that is coming. Now, it may be that NATO forces are directly involved in the Kharkiv and Kherson offensives, which they actively boast about planning, or it may be that the Russians have been withdrawing to lure the Ukrainians out of their fortified positions in order to eliminate them more easily. We simply don’t know.

While estimates vary wildly, Zelenskyy said Ukraine had recaptured roughly 6,000 square kilometers – equivalent to the combined area of the West Bank and Gaza – of Ukraine’s overall land mass, around 600,000 square km. Russia had taken control of around a fifth of Ukraine since February 24.

Imagine if the media had covered the Ardennes Offensive this way.

What we know is that Russia still isn’t making use of its energy stranglehold over Europe, nor is it striking at the power plants of Germany, Poland, the UK, and other countries with which it is at war, even though doing so could probably force a complete surrender by the EU and Ukraine alike. Furthermore, Putin’s party, United Russia just won between 65 percent and 86 percent of the vote in the recent regional elections; Russian sentiment is very pro-Putin and to the extent that he is being criticized, it is because he has not prosecuted the war against NATO more aggressively.

So, what we can safely conclude is that this is just more “Ghost of Kiev” war fiction meant to justify the constant flow of money and arms to Ukraine, albeit on a grander scale.

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A Second Front

Although not the one we were anticipating.

ITEM: Azerbaijan officially confirms it is systematically striking targets on the sovereign territory of Armenia.

ITEM: Armenia is triggering CSTO article to request assistance from Russia amid Azerbaijani attack on the Republic of Armenia.

Azerbaijan won the 2020 Nargorno-Karabakh war and is supported by NATO, so it’s pretty obvious that this is an attempt to increase the pressure on Russia in the aftermath of the recent Ukrainian offensive. However, I doubt more war by proxy is going to impress the Russians, especially when they are already directly targeting Germany with their rhetoric.

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The EU Lost

The complete uselessness – actually, worse than uselessness – of the European Union can be seen in the way that it managed to lose a war in which it wasn’t even involved.

The EU has suffered severe political and economic damage from its handling of the situation in Ukraine, and can already be declared the loser in the conflict, the speaker of Hungary’s National Assembly claimed on Sunday.

Laszlo Kover, who is a member of Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s Fidesz party, accused Brussels of failing to prevent the conflict through political means, with the result that it’s “unable to restore peace diplomatically.”

“Under external pressure, the EU is acting against its most basic economic interests and should already be considered a loser, regardless of which of the parties directly involved in fighting will declare itself the winner,” he said. Powers outside Europe are trying to condemn the bloc’s members to “military vulnerability, political subjugation, economic and energy incapacity, financial indebtedness and social disintegration,” with Brussels helping them to achieve this goal, the parliament speaker claimed.

The EU is grappling with soaring natural gas prices, the prospect of energy shortages in winter and spiking inflation in the wake of sanctions it imposed on Russia over its military operation in Ukraine.

The EU will surrender to Russia this winter, the USA permitting. And if the USA does not permit, several more member-states will follow Britain out the exit.

UPDATE: There is now a reasonable chance that Russia will declare war on Germany. And justifiably so. Fortunately, the Germans are already in such an energy-deprived state that a few targeted missile strikes against key power plants of the sort that were launched against Ukraine yesterday would probably suffice to bring Berlin to its knees.

Germany has crossed a red line with Russia by sending arms to Ukraine, Moscow’s ambassador in Berlin said on Monday. The decision undermined decades of reconciliation since the end of World War II and the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, the diplomat added.

“The very fact that the Ukrainian regime is being supplied with German-made lethal weapons, which are used not only against Russian military service members, but also the civilian population of Donbass, crosses the red line,” Ambassador Sergey Nechaev said in an interview with Izvestia newspaper.

He added that Berlin should have known better, “considering the moral and historic responsibility that Germany has before our people for the Nazi crimes.”

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Remember, Hope is a Virtue

While there is an alliance to save the world from the global satanists of the Were-West, I am, personally, more than a little dubious about this particular description of it. But there are most certainly anomalies extant that tend to weaken the mainstream perspective.

“When Donald Trump publicly left office for the optics, that was the signal for the real global take-down operations to begin. None of what has occurred since 2021 January could have occurred with Trump in office. We would have certainly been plunged into a civil war by this point. I think Roe vs Wade would have been all that would have been needed.

“The reason that we had to have a ‘Deep State’ plant in office is because we needed the optics, because we are going to have to right this boat, eventually. Donald Trump is the president of the United States of America today and he has been since January 20th, 2017. Donald Trump began his second term sometime between November the 7th and November the 14th, 2020.

“Donald Trump has never left but he had to leave publicly to allow this operation to occur. He’s going to have to come back publicly to salvage things after we’ve awakened people and accomplished all of the goals we needed to accomplish before we take the conflict overt.

“Joe Biden, by the way is not – I said earlier he’s a Deep State plant. Joe Biden’s job is to Judas-Goat all of the Deep State plants in the US Government and bureaucratic agencies. Joe Biden’s job is to help them think that they’ve won, basically.

“Joe Biden died March 31st 2019. The actor currently playing Joe Biden was installed by the White Hat Q Clearance Alliance in 2020, in such a way that the optics carried forth of the Presidency being stolen from the People of the United States, which is what had to happen. Joe Biden’s job, along with many other plants is to reveal the actors around them and help uproot them. I would say that he’s done a good job so far…

“Folks, I know that a lot of people have said that the war is won – and the war is won, in a sense. But right now, we are going through the mop-up phase and the mop-up phase is a dreadfully tough one, because that’s when they pull out all their dirty tricks. When you’ve cornered an animal, it fights the hardest. When you’ve cornered an animal that has nothing to lose, that’s where they’re at. They’re a cornered animal.

“The heads of the snakes were cut off early on; the Phoenician Families; some of them made deals, stayed alive a little bit longer than the others; some were executed immediately. The command structure has been neutered but the structure, itself has remained intact and we’re allowing that structure to crumble, so we can expose it and that is what we’re going through right now. That’s what we’re living through right now.

We know something is going on beneath the surface, but we really don’t know who and we also don’t know why. As an intellectual exercise, shake off your disappointment at Trump failing to cross the Rubicon and permitting the fraudulent 2020 election to stand, and consider what we know to be facts:

  • The high weirdness in Washington DC with the National Guard after the election.
  • The speed of the collapse of the neo-liberal world order.
  • The relative quiet in the Middle East.
  • The unexpected Supreme Court victories.
  • The strangeness surrounding the details of the Biden inauguration.
  • The Biden body doubles and general weirdness of the Biden hires.
  • The fake quasi-Nazi backdrop of Biden’s recent speech.
  • The disappearance from the public eye of many major figures in banking and in tech.
  • The recent deaths of Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip. (Yes, I know they’re old.)
  • The Russian invasion of Ukraine.
  • The excessive reaction of the neocons and the Western governments to what essentially amounts to a minor border dispute in Ukraine.
  • The growing intensity surrounding the Taiwan situation.
  • Trump’s endorsement of, and enthusiasm for, the vaxx.

Put together, none of these things prove anything, but they do tend to weaken the conventional narrative. The one thing that sticks out more than anything to me and puzzles me is the vaxx. So, here is a very random and most likely controversial thought – what if the vaxx was utilized to permit the hot shots to target the people of the machine embedded in the population?

That might explain why there were more hot shot lots distributed in Republican states than in Democratic states.

In any event, we’ll know this particular hopium is nonsense if Donald Trump is not arrested and China does not invade Taiwan before the end of March 2023.

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Play Stupid Energy Games

Win the prize of a cold, dark winter and an angry citizenry:

Russia is deliberately sabotaging the Nord Stream 1 natural gas pipeline to spite the EU, European officials have claimed, questioning Moscow’s explanation for an indefinite delay in restoring service.

State-owned energy giant Gazprom informed its European customers on Saturday that it could not safely resume operations until it had fixed “oil leaks” discovered in a major turbine during a maintenance operation.

Nord Stream was set to come back online just after midnight Saturday morning after three days of maintenance. The leaks, reportedly affecting “cables connected to speed meters of a rotor,” were discovered during a technical inspection with the turbine’s German manufacturer Siemens. Moscow had earlier warned that the pipeline’s operation was threatened by sanctions, which had created a shortage of spare parts.

However, Siemens argued the company had alternate turbines at the compressor station where the leak had been discovered and could use one of those in case of a real emergency. “Such leaks do not normally affect the operation of a turbine and can be sealed on site,” they claimed.

European Commission spokesman Charles Michel condemned what he called Russia’s “use of gas as a weapon,” declaring it would not “change the resolve of the EU” as the bloc works toward “energy independence.”

Commission press service chief Eric Mamer slammed the “fallacious pretenses” he claimed Gazprom had used to shut down the pipeline, holding it up as proof of both their “cynicism” and their “unreliability as a supplier” and suggesting Moscow “prefer[red] to flare gas instead of honoring contracts.”

German parliamentary foreign affairs committee chair Michael Roth denounced the shutdown as “part of Russia’s psychological war against us” and accused President Vladimir Putin of “violat[ing] contracts without scruples….even at the expense of his own economic interests.”

Let’s get this straight. Europe has a perfectly operational natural gas pipeline, Nord Stream 2, that it refuses to use. Russia has, quite reasonably, decided that it’s not interested in continuing to provide natural gas to the same countries that are a) sanctioning its people and b) arming and funding the Ukrainian war against Russia on the terms of those enemies.

Can you even imagine how many contracts have been violated by the European sanctions against Russia? This anti-Russian rhetoric is as ineffective as it is retarded. Frankly, I’m astonished that the Russians didn’t shut down the pipeline months ago.

Then again, it is rather amusing to see the Russians slowly dialing up the pain while simultaneously pretending that there is nothing they can do about it. As an award-winning cruelty artist, I have to say that I tend to approve of the sadistic diplomacy they have applied to this situation.

Germany’s initial Energy Saving Ordinance, in effect for the next six months:

  • Retail stores may no longer keep their doors open throughout the day to reduce electricity consumption for air conditioning when it is hot outside — and for heating on cold winter days.
  • Public buildings and monuments have to go dark at 10 p.m.
  • Illuminated advertising must be switched off after 10p.m., with only a few exceptions. If advertisements serve traffic safety, they remain switched on, for example, at railroad underpasses. Street lamps also remain on, and store windows may continue to be illuminated.
  • Monuments and other buildings may no longer be illuminated at night. At least not for purely aesthetic reasons. However, emergency lighting will not be switched off, and illumination is permitted for cultural events and public festivals.
  • In public buildings, halls and corridors will generally no longer be heated, and the temperature in offices will be limited to a maximum of 19 degrees. In places where heavy physical work is performed, temperatures will be even lower in the future. However, the restrictions do not apply to social facilities such as hospitals, daycare centers, and schools, where higher air temperatures are essential for the “health of the people who spend time there,” according to the Economy Ministry.
  • Cutting back on warm water. Likewise, in public buildings, instantaneous water heaters or hot water tanks should be switched off if they are mainly used for washing hands. Exceptions are made for medical facilities, schools, and daycare centers. Some cities go even further. There, the showers in swimming pools and sports halls will remain unheated.
  • Private pools may no longer be heated with gas and electricity, except for rehab centers, recreational facilities, and hotels. The new regulations will initially apply until the end of February.

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TikTok On the Clock

We’re going to owe an apology to the dead generals of WWI, whose famously idiotic refusal to reconsider their preferred strategies and tactics led to massive quantities of unnecessary bloodshed suddenly looks like military genius compared to the European generals of Clown World.

TikTokers and YouTubers could help the EU drive a wedge between the Russian government and the people, Germany and France have reportedly told other members of the bloc.

Ideas on how its members could influence Russian citizens were formulated in a document circulated ahead of this week’s high-level EU meeting in Prague, Bloomberg reported on Monday. The plan is meant for discussion behind closed doors, but the news agency said it had studied the document.

Berlin and Paris suggested enrolling popular video bloggers on platforms including YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, Telegram, and VK to help disseminate EU-funded teaching courses on “media literacy,” according to Bloomberg. The courses will supposedly explain to Russians why they should dismiss “Russian propaganda” and trust “independent information” that counters what the Russian government says.

This is a vivid demonstration of how those who possess the ability to influence others confuse it with the possession of actual power over others. It also underlines the complete helplessness of the European elite in the face of Russian economic and military power, to say nothing of their failure to grasp the comprehensive collapse of their neo-liberal ideology.

At this point, who can possibly take these lunatics seriously? How is every single government in the European Union not getting voted out of office in the next election?

“We’ve sent in the Redditors! We’ve provided our proxy troops with more money, weapons, and supplies than the US Marines ever had in the South Pacific! Nothing is working! What else can we do?”

“What about the Americans?”

“What about them? They want us to send in our troops before they’ll commit any of their own forces.”

“The sum total of our combined militaries couldn’t stand up to the Chechens, forget the Russian regulars!”

“Well, who else is there?”

“Guys, guys, you’re going about this all wrong! See, this is an INFORMATION war. We don’t need soldiers and artillery and ammunition. What we need is EDUCATION! Education and choreographed dance routines!”

“O. M. G. You are SO right!”

“That’s BRILLIANT!”

“You don’t… you don’t mean – “

“I do indeed. Send in the TikTokers!”

“Checkmate, Putin!”

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