Eastern Ukraine and Crimea "in the end" will likely end up in the fully-Russian sphere
The Ukraine fighters are bombing civilians there, preventing use of the escape corridors
That is one reality
On another front of reality,
If Putin keeps this going then he will make it unacceptable to save face, Europe will cut ties economically and that will harm Russia people who like the middle class lifestyle (and elite lifestyle). So he may "win the war" in Eastern Ukraine but lose the nation's backing because it will become ostracized like North Korea
I don't see any Russian coup or succession plan, so this could continue for a long time
âThe Ukraine fighters are bombing civilians there, preventing use of the escape corridorsâ
Do you have evidence of this or do you have as Lazy8 put it a colorful history of making shit up?
Dmitri A. Medvedev, the former Russian president and vice chairman of Russiaâs Security Council, said the country was prepared to use nuclear weapons against the United States and Europe if its existence was threatened, the latest instance of nuclear saber-rattling as Russia faces fierce resistance in Ukraine.
Widely read? I might have doubled readership with my click. And now I feel a little dirty.
Better representative of the situation? This is a good snapshot of the situation. This one focuses on military aspects. But I want to point out some obvious flaws in the article you linked.
Putin has stated repeatedly that his objective is to reabsorb Ukraine into some kind of Greater Russia, and that Ukraine is a fictional entity (that his predecessors nonetheless signed a treaty with, recognizing it as a separate state and recognizing their shared border). A month into an invasion with the full might of the Russian military behind it Russia controls less than half the ground and Ukraine continues to fight.
This is all presaged by the continued fighting over eastern Ukraine, which Russian-backed militias were still contesting 8 years into the conflict.
If a further goal was to intimidate the rest of Europe that has failed spectacularly; even Finland is considering joining NATO. Little early to take that victory lap.
Eastern Ukraine and Crimea "in the end" will likely end up in the fully-Russian sphere
The Ukraine fighters are bombing civilians there, preventing use of the escape corridors
That is one reality
On another front of reality,
If Putin keeps this going then he will make it unacceptable to save face, Europe will cut ties economically and that will harm Russia people who like the middle class lifestyle (and elite lifestyle). So he may "win the war" in Eastern Ukraine but lose the nation's backing because it will become ostracized like North Korea
I don't see any Russian coup or succession plan, so this could continue for a long time
It's widely read and discussed, what is in that piece has many good points worthy of review.
perhaps you could post something that you feel better reflects the current situation?
Widely read? I might have doubled readership with my click. And now I feel a little dirty.
Better representative of the situation? This is a good snapshot of the situation. This one focuses on military aspects. But I want to point out some obvious flaws in the article you linked.
Putin has stated repeatedly that his objective is to reabsorb Ukraine into some kind of Greater Russia, and that Ukraine is a fictional entity (that his predecessors nonetheless signed a treaty with, recognizing it as a separate state and recognizing their shared border). A month into an invasion with the full might of the Russian military behind it Russia controls less than half the ground and Ukraine continues to fight.
This is all presaged by the continued fighting over eastern Ukraine, which Russian-backed militias were still contesting 8 years into the conflict.
If a further goal was to intimidate the rest of Europe that has failed spectacularly; even Finland is considering joining NATO. Little early to take that victory lap.
So who is Larry C. Johnson? Well, he has a...colorful history of making shit up and getting Fox News to put it on the air. His wikipedia page is hilarious. Since the claims he makes are backed up by nothing but his own credibility I urge you to interrogate that.
Not under torture or anything, just read.
Trained by the CIA in disinformation and he's turned it into a full-time career.
naked capitalism linked to the story and the one below it by Gilbert Doctorow might have been in the comments.
Question 1âCan you explain to me why you think Russia is winning the war in Ukraine?
So who is Larry C. Johnson? Well, he has a...colorful history of making shit up and getting Fox News to put it on the air. His wikipedia page is hilarious. Since the claims he makes are backed up by nothing but his own credibility I urge you to interrogate that.
Todayâs New York Times âMorning Briefingâ distributed by email opens with:
Mariupol refuses to surrender
Residents of Mariupol, Ukraine, braced for renewed attacks after the Ukrainian government rejected Russiaâs ultimatum to surrender the besieged and ravaged southern port city. Efforts to reach hundreds of thousands of people trapped there remained fraught with danger
Let us note the contradiction between the headline and the body of the report. It was not the city that refused to surrender but the government of Zelensky in Kiev that did so, even knowing the consequence will be continued suffering and death of the civilian population in the time it takes the Russian forces to âneutralizeâ the kamikaze Ukrainian militants entrenched in secure hide-outs they have built up over the past eight years. These include underground passages in the cityâs many heavy industry manufacturing sites. The militants are still holding more than 100,000 residents hostage and shooting anyone trying to use the humanitarian corridors opened to them by the Russians. This we know from Russian television interviews with arriving refugees from Mariupol who managed to evade their Ukrainian captors by car or on foot. The mopping-up operation is likely to go on for more than a week to come, according to the Donbas military command, which is in charge of the task.
Further down the âMorning Briefingâ we find the following:
Kyiv: A missile strike â one of the most powerful explosions to hit the Ukrainian capital since the invasion began â turned a once-bustling shopping mall into a smoldering ruin. Russian forces are aiming artillery, rockets and bombs at civilian as well as military targets, after failing to quickly seize control of Ukraineâs major cities.
Note: âonce bustling shopping mallâ. Here the attentive reader can smell a rat. The propagandist author is speaking about the complexâs function as a commercial hub in the past tense, because he/she knows that it had ceased to be commercial and became a military operations center in time present, and was therefore perfectly acceptable as a target for Russian attack. All of this is confirmed by the death toll that other mainstream media attribute to the Russian strike: 8 dead.
It is most interesting that this morningâs broadcast of BBC World News presents footage of the proofs from the Russian military command which the official spokesman General Igor Konashenkov showed yesterday on Russian state television: a reconnaissance drone capturing the arrival and departure of a Ukrainian military vehicle at the shopping center. Todayâs BBC report directly acknowledges sotto voce that the center was being used for military purposes.
Lest the reader think that the BBC news writers have just become âagents of Putin,â the fact remains that BBC and other Western reporting retains its absolute blackout on a major feature of current Russian news reporting: the daily devastation and deaths in the Donbas republics of Donetsk and Lugansk caused by Ukrainian artillery and missile strikes from across the line of demarcation. The scenes of artillery strikes on hospitals and residential buildings in Donbas are a mirror image of what we are shown on the BBC and similar in Kiev and other major Ukrainian cities. Just as in Mariupol, the Ukrainian combatants adjacent to the Donbas are in well fortified positions that they have created over the past eight years in anticipation of this show-down and it may take carpet bombing to destroy them. But that is the subject of another essay I will issue later today.
Nor, to my knowledge, has the BBC or any other mainstream media outlet shown other proofs on Russian television that the supposed bombing damage of the theater in downtown Mariupol was a âfalse flagâ operation prepared by Ukrainian propagandists who had herded the civilians into the bomb shelter basement before blowing up the superstructure and laying the blame at the Russian attackers.
****
We see the same kind of miniscule death toll from destruction of multistory apartment buildings in Ukrainian cities. In those cases, too, it attests to the fact that the civilian functions of the structures had been replaced by purely military use, meaning for embedding artillery and other strike weapons to attack Russian forces. All of this belies President Bidenâs characterization of Russian military conduct as amounting to âwar crimesâ by its indiscriminate attack on civilian targets. Indeed, to my knowledge, such use of civilian structures to embed combatant units is itself an egregious war crime under the rubric âuse of human shields.â
Finally, I note that the American ambassador in Moscow was yesterday called to the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs to receive written warning that Russia will sever diplomatic relations with the United States if Biden does not retract his words. The threat is very likely to be implemented, though only after the Presidentâs visit to Brussels ends later this week. Surely the Russians do not want their cutting diplomatic ties with the United States to result in simultaneous, knee-jerk reaction of European leaders, resulting in severance of ties with all of Europe. However, that cannot be excluded at this point, when Europe is plotting to stop taking delivery of all Russian hydrocarbons, suicidal as this may be for the economies of the Old Continent.
Low morale, corruption and bad leadership define Russia's military
John SweeneyJohn Sweeney is a British investigative journalist who's worked for The Observer newspaper and the BBC's Panorama and Newsnight series
March 17, 2022
Fundamentally, the Russian army has turned out to be lacking, frankly, and there are three major reasons for this: poor morale, corruption and bad leadership.
Letâs start with the dead. A former British army special forces officer passing through Kyiv this week offered his analysis: âTheyâre not looking after their dead, and an army that does that tends to lose.â Morale of the Russian soldiers is low, poor, rotten â pick an adjective. The proof of that is the litter of corpses in Russian uniform after any major battle. A British man who has been serving in the Ukrainian army for some years said that five years ago, when the Russians attacked in the east, near Donetsk, one of the Ukrainians was killed and his body was in no manâs land. An officer insisted on a raiding party going in to get the body. âAfter that, our morale was very strong. We knew that even if we were going to die, our mates would look after us.â
The Russian army doesnât look after its own. What goes for the dead goes for the injured too. Five years before the 2022 invasion, U.S. Army Capt. Nic Fiore wrote in a study of the Russian-Ukrainian war from 2014: âMedically, BTGs have very limited professional medical-evacuation (medevac) and field-treatment resources. Their inability to quickly get wounded soldiers advanced care increased deaths due to wounds, which had a large psychological effect, made their commanders more adverse to dismounted risk and reduced a BTGâs ability to regenerate combat power.â
In war, quantity is quality. The Russians hit Ukraine with 200,000 troops. But the Ukrainians have 200,000 in their armed forces and a further 100,000 in the police and other trained militia, even before you start counting the tractor drivers among the many willing volunteers. Invaders need a 3:1 ratio to defenders, so the Russians needed close to 1 million troops to have a good chance of winning. Which is why they are losing.
The Ukrainians say that 13,700 Russians have died. These numbers are impossible to verify, but pictures of the dead and the battles the Russians have lost suggest this number is not absurd. Out of caution, letâs assume the number of Russian dead to be 10,000. There is a rule of thumb that for every corpse, there are three injured soldiers. That would point to 30,000 injured or running away, so itâs likely that the Russians have lost 40,000 of their fighting force in the first three weeks of the war. Thatâs a fifth of the force they started with: not good for the collective spirit.
The Ukrainian website Euromaidan Press got hold of letters from Russian soldiers who have fought in the war refusing, point-blank, to go back. Sgt. Sapar M. Mirapov wrote to the commander of Military Unit #61899: âI consider it impossible to redeploy due to the unitâs poor organization, lack of communications and technical capability. , I arrived without understanding what I was doing there, without any explanation. I donât want to be âcannon fodder.â â
exactly, you are either with me all the way, even when I commit war crimes, bomb civilians, kill children, or, if you don't, you are a traitor to your own country.
exactly, you are either with me all the way, even when I commit war crimes, bomb civilians, kill children, or, if you don't, you are a traitor to your own country.
