Tag: war

Truth is the First Casualty

Ukraine reports Russia’s losses, but not its own.

12,000 Russian troops have now died fighting in Ukraine, while 300 tanks have been destroyed along with more than 1,000 armoured vehicles, 48 planes, 80 helicopters and three boats.

That’s after 12 days of combat. Let’s compare the enemy-reported losses to the self-reported losses from some famous historical battles:

  • Normandy: 87 days. 20,668 US KIA. 2,000 tanks destroyed.
  • Tarawa: 3 days. 1,009 US KIA.
  • Iwo Jima: 35 days. 6,862 US KIA. 137 tanks destroyed.
  • Battle of the Bulge: 40 days. 19,246 US KIA. 733 tanks destroyed.

So, if the Ukrainians are to be believed, they are killing 3.45x more Russian soldiers per day, in an invasion that is advancing faster than Desert Storm, the Six-Days War, or Operation Barbarossa, than the US military lost in four of its bloodiest battles of World War II.

My estimate of Russian losses after 12 days is 2,850 KIA, 9,250 wounded, and 220 tanks lost.

This is considerably higher than the 1,100 KIA I would have estimated due to the Russians utilizing their second-line troops and refraining from making efficient use of their artillery and air power. But the Russian generals are clearly saving their first-line troops and equipment for a potential future engagement with NATO forces, while taking advantage of the situation to blood and level-up the second-line soldiers. And, to Vladimir Putin’s credit, he has decided to accept a higher rate of Russian military casualties in order to reduce the number of Ukrainian civilian casualties by at least an order of magnitude.

You may wish to note that my first estimate was 250 to 500 KIA at a time when the Ukranians were reporting 9,000 KIA. The Russians subsequently reported 498 KIA for that period. The reason I set the range too low was because at the time I calculated the estimate, I did not know that the Russians were relying upon second-line troops or that they would eschew artillery and air support for the first five days of the operation.

The lesson, as always, is this: the past is prelude.

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Hostile Countries

Russia lists its confirmed enemies. This probably wasn’t a good time for the Swiss to decide to abandon their neutrality. They know it too, because the government is frantically babbling nonsense about how economically sanctioning a country isn’t not neutral. The thing about neutrality is, though, that you don’t get to define it. Like a nickname, it’s something that is only meaningful when others honor it of their own accord.

All EU member States,
The USA
Australia
Albania
Andorra
Czech Republic
Great Britain (including Jersey, Anguilla, British Virgin Islands and Gibraltar)
Iceland
Canada
Liechtenstein
Micronesia
Monaco
New Zealand
Norway
Republic of Korea
San Marino
North Macedonia
Singapore
Taiwan
Ukraine
Montenegro
Switzerland
Japan

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Russia Defeated, Glory to Ukraine

Apparently it’s all over now except for Vladimir Putin’s inevitable fall from power and trial at the Hague, if the globalist media is to be believed.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine appears to have ground to a halt with no significant territory captured despite a weekend of heavy fighting, with Kyiv’s men claiming to have taken out dozens of helicopters and recaptured a city this morning – sparking hopes that the unlikeliest of victories may be on the cards.

Putin’s men renewed their bombardments on Mariupol, Chernihiv, Mykolaiv and Kharkiv this morning as his forces also tried to surround Kyiv in preparation for an assault, but have not significantly advanced their frontline since the city of Kherson and nuclear power plant at Zaporizhzhia were captured last week.

Meanwhile the Ukrainian armed forces claimed to have destroyed up to 30 Russian helicopters that had been moved to Chornobaivka airport, near Kherson, overnight and to have retaken the city of Chuhuiv, near Kharkiv, killing two Russian commanders – Lt. Col. Dmitry Safronov, and Lt Col. Denis Glebov – in the process.

Video also emerged which appeared to show Ukrainian defence forces based in Odessa, the country’s largest port, exchanging fire with ships overnight – one of which suffers a hit. Ukraine’s ministry of defence has since claimed the vessel was destroyed.

Ukraine’s military now estimates that 11,000 Russian soldiers have been killed in fighting along with the loss of 1,000 armoured vehicles, 290 tanks, 68 helicopters, 46 planes and dozens of other piece of hardware.

That’s an astonishing number of troops killed in just 11 days; in the 87 days from June 5 to August 31, 1944, the US armed forces lost 20,668 KIA in the Normandy campaign. If the globalist media is to be taken seriously, the Russians are losing soldiers in Ukraine at a rate 4.2x greater than the USA did while storming the beaches at Normandy. The Ukrainians must have some amazingly effective fortifications in place! But there is no reason to doubt these reports, since the top British military officials agree that Russia has already failed and is doomed to defeat.

Admiral Sir Tony Radakin, former leader of the Royal Navy and now Chief of the Defence Staff, added: ‘I think we’ve seen a Russian invasion that is not going well. ‘I think we’re also seeing remarkable resistance by Ukraine… Russia is suffering, Russia is an isolated power. It is less powerful than it was ten days ago. Some of the lead elements of Russian forces have been decimated by the Ukrainian response. The operation is considered at least a month behind schedule.’

If Russia is already more than a month behind schedule after only 11 days, President Putin clearly has no chance of succeeding in his objectives. He might as well surrender to the brave, sexy victor who is as independent as he is Ukrainian. Z really does stand for victory.

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Australia’s New Base

Australia announces it is building a base for nuclear submarines:

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison is set to announce the construction of a new AU$10 billion nuclear submarine base, while warning Australians that Russia’s conflict with Ukraine will “inevitably stretch to the Indo-Pacific.”

Morrison is scheduled to unveil Australia’s nuclear submarine base plans during a speech to the neoliberal Lowy Institute in Sydney on Monday, according to his speech notes cited by local media. Morrison will warn that Russia’s conflict with Ukraine will “inevitably stretch to the Indo-Pacific” and that Australia “faces its most difficult and dangerous security environment in 80 years.”

Translation: China is going to come into this sooner or later.

Notice the rhetorical shift from sanctions to military preparations. This has nothing whatsoever to do with Russian activity in the Indo-Pacific.

Refusing to rule out Australia potentially arming Taiwan in a conflict against China, Dutton said that the country’s current priority was to “deter any acts of aggression whether it’s from China or from Russia or anybody else.”

It’s a little late to attempt to deter Chinese aggression. Australia lost the war to China 56 years ago when it abandoned its White Australia policy in 1966. Now more than 10 percent of the population is Chinese.

UPDATE: China’s refusal to join the Two Minute Hate against Russia is observably making the Australian government – as well as the rest of the neo-liberal world order – very, very nervous.

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison has called on China to end its “chilling silence” over Russia’s offensive in Ukraine, stating that “no country in the world will have a bigger impact” on bringing the conflict to an end.

It’s fascinating to see how even just not giving lip service to the Promethean rhetoric frightens them.

The USA Wants War

It just doesn’t want to take responsibility for starting it. The idiot neocons in the State Department just keep piling on the provocations:

US Secretary of State Tony Blinken told CBS News on Sunday that Washington has given a “green light” to NATO members to supply Ukraine with fighter jets, and that the US would work to replace any jets sent to Kiev. Blinken spoke after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky urged US lawmakers to intervene in the ongoing conflict with Russia.

Asked whether NATO members could begin sending planes to Ukraine, Blinken said “that gets a green light.” The US’ top diplomat then said that Washington was already working with Polish officials to “backfill” any aircraft they send to Ukraine – meaning the US would replace every Polish aircraft given to Kiev with an American one.

Supplying a belligerent with military material makes the supplier a co-belligerent. This is so brazen it doesn’t even qualify as a false flag; it’s similar to how the US got itself into WWI by loading up the Lusitania with arms, then decrying the sinking of the “passenger liner” by the Germans.

But let the record show that if there is war between Russia and NATO, it was with the full knowledge and connivance of the Fake Biden administration.

And soon everyone may be able to find out why the Russians haven’t been demonstrating the capabilities of their air force or their air defense systems.

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Zelensky is No Hero

To the contrary, he’s a puppet who represents part of the problem in Ukraine, as US Army Colonel Douglas Macgregor explains to Fox News:

The Russians are causing exceedingly little damage, much less damage than we inflicted when we went into Iraq, in 1991 or again in 2003. Now I think they’re just surrounding the Ukrainian forces and they’re annihilating them. And this is inevitable. Mr. Zelensky is postponing the inevitable in the hopes that we are going to rescue him, and we are not coming. President Biden has made that very clear.

You think the end is in sight?

The end of this phase is still a few days away. The first five days, I think the Russian forces, frankly, were too gentle. They’ve now corrected that. So I would say that in another ten days this should be completely over. But the question is, what is it that Zelensky is going to do? The Russians have made it very clear that what they want is a neutral Ukraine. This could have ended days ago if he accepted that and then they could have adjusted the borders. The eastern part of Ukraine is firmly in Russian hands, but again, the Russians are not just seizing territory, they’re destroying Ukrainian forces, that’s their focus.

Colonel, it sounds like you don’t approve of Zelensky’s stand.

I think Zelensky is a puppet. He’s putting huge numbers of his own population at unnecessary risk, and quite frankly, most of what comes out of Ukraine is debunked as lies within 24-48 hours. The notion of taking and retaking airfields, all of this is nonsense. It hasn’t happened.

You don’t think he’s a hero?

No. No, I do not. I don’t see anything heroic about the man. And I think the most heroic thing he can do right now is come to terms with reality and neutralize Ukraine. This is not a bad thing. A neutral Ukraine would be good for us as well as good for Russia. It would create the buffer that both sides want. But I think he’s being told to hang on and try to drag this out, which is tragic for the people that have to live through this.

Unfortunately for the Ukrainian people, an end to the Russo-Ukrainian conflict is not in the interest of The Empire That Never Ended to which Zelensky answers. So, the war will continue another 10-14 days, until Ukraine’s combat capabilities are completely destroyed. I did find it interesting that the colonel’s estimate of how much longer the active operations would last was so close to my own from last night’s Darkstream.

In related news, Russia warned NATO and other neighboring countries that offering airfields to Ukraine would be a good way to ensure getting bombed and invaded.

Any country offering its air fields to Ukraine for attacks on Russia may be considered as having entered the conflict, a Russia defence ministry spokesman has said. “The use of the airfield networks of these countries to base Ukrainian military aircraft and their subsequent use against the Russian armed forces may be regarded as the involvement of these states in an armed conflict,” Interfax news agency quoted spokesman Igor Konashenkov as saying.

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Why Russia is Holding Back

Both Russians and outsiders have been wondering why Russia is using second-line troops and neglecting to make use of its air forces. But Zelensky’s most recent speech demonstrates why:

As Russian forces pound strategic locations, Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky accused the West of abandoning millions of his people to their deaths at the hands of Putin’s troops.

In a bitter and emotional speech late on Friday, Zelensky lashed out at NATO powers for refusing to impose a no-fly zone over his country, warning that ‘all the people who die from this day forward will also die because of you’. He claimed the West’s hesitancy will fully untie Russia’s hands as it escalates its air attack.

NATO says a no-fly zone could provoke widespread war in Europe with nuclear-armed Russia. But as the United States and other NATO members send weapons for Kyiv and more than 1million refugees spill through the continent, the conflict is already drawing in countries far beyond Ukraine’s borders.

‘The alliance has given the green light to the bombing of Ukrainian cities and villages,’ he said, warning that ‘the history of Europe will remember this forever’. In a separate video message to anti-war protesters in several European cities, Zelensky continued to appeal for help. ‘If we fall, you will fall,’ he said.

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg had earlier ruled out the possibility of a no-fly zone, saying Western planes would have to shoot down Russian aircraft.

Russia is holding back because it is actively prepared for a full-scale war with NATO. Whether that is in anticipation of a second invasion of Eastern Europe or in response to a potential NATO intervention is impossible to say, but I guarantee you that plans for both scenarios, as well as various others, are already in place and are being updated as the conflict proceeds.

For example, no one is talking about the possibility of China attacking from the East and opening up a second front. But Russia has to have a plan or three in place to deal with that possibility, however improbable it might be. Remember, while the USA ended up utilizing certain elements of War Plan Orange, its 1924 plan for a war in the Pacific with Japan, during World War II, it also had War Plan Red on hand, which was a plan for a naval war with England that involved seizing the Great Lakes and Canadian ports, as well as a number of other plans for various scenarios that never came to pass.

Those who talk about Putin’s “failure” due to Russia’s inability to decapitate the Ukrainian leadership in a single strike simply don’t understand the depth of planning that goes into any operation of this scale. In fact, it’s not dissimilar to game design, in that the event trees extend to a level of detail that most people would find impossible to comprehend, let alone keep active track of in their heads.

The Russian strategists already know that “if x, then y” for a dizzying array of possibilities. They’ve planned for this, they’ve wargamed this, and they’ve run thousands of simulations on this. It’s the EU and NATO leaderships that don’t know what’s happening, which is why you keep seeing stupid statements being made, then retracted, by various government officials. Zelensky is trying to provide the factions within NATO and the USA that have wanted war with Russia for years with enough ammunition to overcome the more sensible factions that understand why any such war would be insane and fatal for NATO, the EU, and possibly the USA.

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The Nuclear False Flag

The globohomo leaders are decrying a “Russian attack on a Ukrainian nuclear power plant” despite the absurdity of the claim.

Boris Johnson says ‘the security of the whole of Europe has been put at risk’ by Russia’s attack on Ukrainian nuclear power plant as Putin’s troops set it ablaze and seize control of the complex.

This was an obvious attempt at a false flag, as the Russian Ministry of Defense’s response proves:

The spokesman for the Russian Ministry of Defense, Major General Igor Konashenkov, issued an official statement on Friday morning concerning the shootout and fire that had occurred at Ukraine’s Zaporozhskaya nuclear power plant earlier the same day.

“Last night, an attempt to carry out a horrible provocation was made by Kiev’s nationalist regime on the area surrounding the station,” he announced, claiming the Russian troops patrolling the territory had been attacked by a Ukrainian sabotage group.

According to the spokesman, the Ukrainian forces had attacked Russian soldiers at about 2am local time, opening heavy fire from the training facility next to the power station in order to “provoke a retaliatory strike on the building.”

The Russian patrol had neutralized the group’s firing points, but the saboteurs had then set fire to the training facility as they retreated, Konashenkov said. The blaze was put out by the Ukrainian State Emergency Service’s firefighters. “At the moment of provocation, no staff members were at the facility,” he noted.

The Russians already control most of the Ukrainian nuclear facilities. Taking control of them was one of the Russian military’s primary objectives. If they had any desire to blow one or more of them up and create a Chernobyl-style situation, they have the ability do so at any time. The fact that they haven’t done so, and that they continue not to do so, is sufficient evidence that they have no desire to do so.

It is, of course, the Zelensky regime that desperately wants to shriek about atrocities in order to support its false narrative, that has the motivation, albeit not the means, to create such a catastrophe. Hence the false flag, and the dutiful “Western” complaints about the false flag.

The Empire That Never Ended loves false flags. It’s a standard element of its repertoire. Always be aware of the probability – not merely the possibility – that any apparent “atrocity” that works to its benefit has been staged.

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The Neocon Perspective

The irony of the neocons, who couldn’t hold onto Iraq or Afghanistan over the course of two decades, babbling about how Russia has failed after a single week of military operations on a grand scale, should not escape you:

Putin rolled the dice of war and didn’t beat Ukraine. This, in strategic terms, probably means he lost the campaign. In retrospect, the Kremlin’s plan consisted of an airborne/airmobile/Spetsnaz descent on Kyiv, the mission of which was to establish an airhead in the capital and capture the Ukrainian government until relieved by mechanized forces racing in from the north. An airmobile assault was attempted at Gostomel to Kyiv’s immediate north.

But things went badly wrong. The Russian battalion-sized airmobile force met stiff air defense and was immediately counterattacked by the Ukrainian mobile reserve. Unable to land follow-on forces, the paratroopers could not withstand heavy weapons and were scattered or wiped out. Equally serious for the Russians was the failure of their northern pincer to advance on schedule.

Desperate to “bag” the Ukrainian government, the Russians attempted a large-scale airborne assault for Vasylkiv Airfield to the south of Kyiv to establish a blocking position to catch withdrawing units. But this failed, with two C-17 counterpart IL-76s loaded with paratroops destroyed, and with them, two infantry companies of the Kremlin’s finest. Crucially the Russian mechanized elements trickling into Kyiv proved too weak to break through the city defense.

When it was clear Zelensky, and hence the Ukrainian government, could not be bagged and was quite capable of retreating in good order to fallback positions in the West, it was obvious that Putin could not conclude the campaign with the political time and the military forces at hand. At this, the diplomatic floodgates opened, with even China urging a diplomatic solution, and much of the world, scared to death of a third world war, timidly then more forcefully chiming in.

Ukraine has not won, not in the military sense. It has lost territory, suffered significant losses to soldiers and civilians, and endured massive property damage. But crucially, it has not lost — and that may be enough.

Playing for an immediate checkmate doesn’t come off doesn’t mean you lose the game. It certainly doesn’t mean that your plan failed either. It’s just an aggressive opening gambit from which you proceed with your primary plan if, as you must always anticipate, you fail to get lucky and score an easy win. The strike battalion’s failed attempt to decapitate Ukraine’s foreign leadership on the first day of the operation was no different than the US Air Force’s attempt to bomb Saddam Hussein at the beginning of the 2003 Iraq campaign.

After all, it’s not as if the defeat at Arnhem, the famous “bridge too far” which caused the failure of Operation Market Garden, prevented the Allies from defeating Germany. It just meant that the war ended in May 1945 instead of before Christmas 1944, and that the Soviets took Berlin instead of the Americans.

Those with even a modicum of familiarity with military history are aware that the Russian operation is a model of near-textbook efficiency, bypassing the cities and enveloping enemy units by striking on multiple fronts.

Russia has already won the first battle of the Global Crusade, as the outcome of the Ukro-Russian war is no longer in any doubt, but the war between The Empire That Never Ended and the free nations of the world is very, very far from over.

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The Lies Never Stop

It’s no surprise that most people believe the nonsense being pushed by the anti-Russian globalist media, because it never stops even when directly contradicted by the very headlines of the story containing the false narrative:

Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, issued a video address to the nation in the early hours of Thursday, giving an upbeat assessment of the war and calling on Ukrainians to keep up the resistance.

‘We are a people who in a week have destroyed the plans of the enemy,’ he said, in the clip posted on social media. ‘They will have no peace here. They will have no food. They will have here not one quiet moment.’

Zelensky did not comment on whether the Russians have seized several cities, including Kherson. ‘If they went somewhere, then only temporarily. We’ll drive them out,’ he said.

He said the fighting is taking a toll on the morale of Russian soldiers, who ‘go into grocery stores and try to find something to eat.’ He added: ‘These are not warriors of a superpower. These are confused children who have been used,’ while giving the death toll at 9,000 Russian troops. The US believes the toll is actually around 6,000. Moscow has admitted only 500 deaths.

His assessment of the Russian attack was shared by several US defence analysts who said the campaign had been mismanaged, under-supplied, ineffective, and led to Moscow suffering much-higher casualties in the first few days of fighting than had been anticipated.

Now, on the Darkstream two nights ago, specifically episode 838 Separating Fact from Fiction, I estimated that Russian KIAs were between 250 and 500 troops, based on the number of troops involved in the operation and historical comparisons to the Six-Days War of 1967, Kuwait in 1991, and Iraq in 2003. The official Russian figure of 498 is therefore highly credible, and tends to reflect the way in which the Russian forces are not utilizing their air supremacy or their artillery to minimize their own casualties, because they are observably attempting to minimize civilian casualties.

Both the 6,000 and the 9,000 Russian KIAs reported by the USA and the Ukrainians, respectively, are obvious fiction. There is absolutely no way to rationalize what would amount to 31,500 casualties – as the ratio of wounded to KIA is normally around 3.5/1 – with the fact that the Russian forces are observably advancing through Ukraine at speeds comparable to “the most lethal and fastest ground combat formation in history”, the US 24th Infantry Division, which lost only 16 soldiers while advancing about 206 km from its position in Saudi Arabia to its final position west of Al Basrah in 100 hours, during which time it was responsible for the famous “Highway of Death”.

I note that Melitopol, which fell to Russian troops in less than 48 hours, is 161 kilometers from the Crimea. Kherson, the fall of which headlined the article linked above, is 418 kilometers away from Donetsk. This indicates that the Russians are actually moving faster than “the fastest ground combat formation in history” did.

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