Footnotes from the Ukrainian "Crisis"; New High-Points in Cynicism Part IV

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Re: Footnotes from the Ukrainian "Crisis"; New High-Points in Cynicism Part IV

Post by blindpig » Tue Jul 18, 2023 6:05 pm

Lord of the Underworld: Meet the Paratrooper from North Carolina who Helped Orchestrate the War in Ukraine
By Evan Reif - July 17, 2023

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Brian Boyenger [Source: foreigncombatants.ru]

One of the great mysteries surrounding the Maidan coup and the civil war which has followed is how the rabble of soccer hooligans and neo-Nazis who orchestrated the coup were able to become an army capable of subjugating the nation so quickly.

Despite Western narratives, the Maidan was a violent coup, and their government was imposed on most of the nation by force. However, 70% of the Ukrainian Army deserted or defected after the coup. This left the new government with both a great need for soldiers and very few of them at its disposal.

The solution was to deputize the fascists who had served as storm troopers in the Maidan, but these were drunken brawlers and petty criminals, not soldiers. How can a gang of street fighters be turned, in a matter of months, into the brutal Special Tasks Patrol police who terrorized Ukraine on a scale not seen since the 1940s?

As it turns out, they had a good teacher: an American paratrooper by the name of Brian Boyenger.

The Swarm
“Men, it is time to go hunting. You’re the hunter. You’re the predator. You’re looking for the prey. Rakkasans!” – Col. Michael D. Steele

Brian Boyenger did not come out of the womb as a killer. He was a normal young man in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, before he joined the U.S. Army. It was there that he learned his trade, working under one of the most brutal commanders in the Army. Like many young Americans, he joined the Army in the wake of America’s illegal full-scale invasion of Iraq and was deployed in the country for 14 months starting in 2006 as part of the 3rd Brigade Combat Team of the 101st Airborne Division. The 3rd BCT is the remnant of the former 187th Airborne, also known as “Rakkasans,” which was merged into the 101st but retained its traditions.

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Insignia of the 101st Airborne. [Source: en.wikipedia.org]

His first lesson was Operation Swarmer, a so-called counter-terrorism operation in outlying villages near the city of Samarra, Iraq. True to the name, 1,500 Iraqi and American forces descended on the region like a swarm of locusts. The U.S. and its associated propagandists touted the operation as the largest air assault since 2003, and even George W. Bush mentioned the operation as a great triumph.

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Insignia of the 187th Airborne [Source: Wikimedia.org]

It was anything but.

Despite ominous (and entirely unsourced) claims of insurgent leadership in the raided villages, U.S. and Iraqi forces found nothing of value. Of the 48 people detained by force, 17 were released immediately, and the rest were illegally detained and then sent to prisons and black sites where torture is rampant. Iraqi intelligence claimed that several hundred weapons and bombs were found in the searches, but no evidence was ever provided of this and none of those arrested was ever charged. Journalists were not allowed to accompany the troops on this operation and were only brought in after the raid was mostly finished to witness some carefully staged propaganda.

They watched as American and Iraqi forces ransacked a family farm, making note of the emaciated cattle juxtaposed against the multibillion-dollar war machine tearing apart the modest home. Despite all their effort, the Americans and their lackeys found no weapons, no people of interest, and no contraband at this home. However, they did not leave empty-handed. After they kidnapped a family by force, raided their home, and held them on their knees at gunpoint, they helped themselves to the dinner the Iraqis were cooking before their lives were interrupted by terrorists.

American forces were baffled as to why they met no resistance on this raid. They concluded that the terrorists must have been tipped off and fled the area rather than admit the truth that they had raided and pillaged peaceful villages for no reason. American forces claimed that they did not fire a shot, and neither side sustained any casualties. As was usual for America’s illegal war, this was a lie.

Before the operation, American forces bombed the region for several nights in a row. In one instance, American forces bombed a home killing 11 civilians and two cows with a single strike. Five of those killed were children. The Americans said that they were suspected al-Qaeda, a charge for which no evidence was ever provided.

“The killed family was not part of the resistance, they were women and children, The Americans have promised us a better life, but we get only death.” – Ahmed Khalaf, brother of one of the victims

As they were wont to do, the captive media establishment simply accepted the Army at their word and thereby helped launder a terrorist raid on innocent civilians into a triumphant operation. The media’s refusal to confront the military on their deadly lies created a culture of impunity which perhaps made the 3rd BCT feel comfortable enough to commit their next crime, knowing that no one would dare challenge them.

The unit was commanded by Colonel Michael D. Steele, a veteran of America’s disastrous Somalia intervention immortalized in the film Black Hawk Down. He was known as a brutal, aggressive commander who kept kill tallies and awarded custom-engraved knives as prizes to the soldiers who had killed the most people while threatening any who refused or hesitated.

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Col. Michael D. Steele [Source: nara.getarchive.net]

Steele encouraged his men to carry out extreme violence without hesitation, teaching them that they were hunters, apex predators, and “carnivores.” He replaced language training with marksmanship, redirected all resources from development to security, and ordered soldiers to raze Iraqi homes to the ground on their raids. He ordered his men to shoot only to kill and never fire warning shots; to prepare them, he implemented a training he called “Psychological Inoculation of Combat.”

In other words, Steele had his soldiers visit morgues and ride with ambulances to desensitize them to the sight of dead bodies so they would not hesitate in battle. He even encouraged his soldiers to fight among themselves, orchestrating brawls and fistfights in the unit to weed out any “herbivores” who would not subscribe to his murderous ideology.

Day and night, body bags containing “high-value targets” killed in raids were brought back to the unit’s base where Steele personally and dutifully photographed and cataloged the dead for his killboards. However, even at the best of times, it is estimated that 90% of the Iraqis targeted by American intelligence were innocent, with little to no evidence of any misdeeds ever presented. These so-called high-value targets murdered by Steele’s thugs for prizes were usually little more than civilians in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The raids they carried out as part of Operation Swarmer were only a dress rehearsal for the real show, Operation Iron Triangle. On May 6, 2006, the 3rd BCT descended from their helicopters onto an island in the south of Lake Thantar, Iraq, near the site of a former chemical weapons plant. The factory was long abandoned, but the surrounding area had been reclaimed by local farmers.

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One of the Iraqi prisoners executed by American forces during Operation Iron Triangle. [Source: thenewyorker.com]

According to American intelligence, there was an al-Qaeda training camp in the region, so the 3rd BCT was sent in to destroy it, capture the al-Qaeda fighters and collect evidence of any terrorist activity.

They needed to look no further than the mirror. In the mission briefing, Col. Steele had given them a very simple assignment: Kill all “military-age,” a term so broad it can apply to nearly anyone. A group of soldiers did their duty to the fullest, kidnapping an Iraqi family of four in front of their spouses and mothers, then staging an escape to give it legitimacy before they executed the bound prisoners as they ran away. The bodies brought back for Steele’s killboards that night ranged from a 13-year-old child to a 75-year-old grandfather named Jasim Hassan Komar-Abdullah whose dentures fell out as Steele tried to pose his body for pictures.

Eventually, the soldiers responsible for these murders were brought to trial. Squad leader Sgt. Raymond Girouard, who gave the order to fire and tampered with the bodies to make it look like an escape, was sentenced to 10 years but paroled in less than three.

Both the shooters, PFC Corey Clagett and Specialist William Hunsaker were given a sentence of 18 years and paroled in 10. Clagett showed no remorse and said if he had it to do over again, he would have shot the women, too. Despite testimony from all the soldiers saying he had ordered them to kill all adult males and clear evidence of his fostering a culture where acts of terror were encouraged, Col. Steele was not charged with any crimes and was only reprimanded.

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Corey Claggett in Iraq. [Source: postancourier.com]

“[Sgt. Raymond Girouard] said we were going to kill the detainees, cut the zip ties off and make it look like they ran, and he said Hunsaker and Clagett were going to do it. I didn’t say anything. Hunsaker didn’t say anything. I pulled the blindfold up on one guy, down on the other. Hunsaker took his [detainee’s blindfold] off. Hunsaker told them to ‘Run.’ I told them ‘Yalla’ to get them to run faster. They didn’t run faster, so I raised my weapon. Hunsaker raised his. He shot then I shot. The way Sgt. G. ran his squad, I thought it was basically like an initiation if I wanted to be in 3rd squad. [Girouard] shut the [Humvee] door, locked it, booby-trap locked it, and said if I ever say anything—he put his weapon to me and he said if I ever say anything that he will kill me. That is what the Army is, a big gang.” – Corey Claggett, in testimony at his trial

Operation Iron Triangle started as the sort of terroristic raid that U.S. forces carried out on a nearly daily basis in Iraq. Much as it had been with previous cases like My Lai in Vietnam, this sort of violence was the norm for American forces in Iraq, and it was unique only because this time the soldiers were caught.

After spending more than a year under the tutelage of Col. Steele, Brian Boyenger was a seasoned terrorist when he arrived in Ukraine. He wasted little time in demonstrating his skills to the Ukrainian people.

Washington’s Wolf

“We were always in contact with this Bryan, he was a man of Mamulashvili. It was he who gave the orders. I had to follow all his instructions” – Koba Nergadze, Georgian mercenary and sniper

After he returned from Iraq, there is a gap in Boyenger’s history spanning the years between the Iraq war and the 2014 Maidan coup. Boyenger says he left the army at the rank of Specialist, enrolled in college, and was a student until he saw the Maidan protests and was so inspired by the heroic struggle of the Ukrainian people, he went to the embassy to ask how he could help. In his story, the process took some time to clear the legal hurdles, and he only arrived in 2015 to serve as a military instructor.

Russian sources claim that he continued his military service and entered special forces, working all over the world with Delta Force and the CIA’s Special Activities Division as a commando and sniper before his deployment to Ukraine.

Due to the nature of these sorts of units, such an accusation can never be proven. Some sources have blamed Boyenger for attacks as varied as assassinations of Russian generals, the car bombing of Daria Dugina, and the destruction of the Kerch Bridge. These embellishments are almost certainly exaggerated if not entirely false.

Regardless, Boyenger’s story is suspicious, and his actions in Ukraine are even more so. There is strong circumstantial evidence that, although he may not be Rambo, Boyenger is much more than he says.

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Boyenger in Ukraine. [Source: delfi.lt]

At the time Boyenger left for Ukraine, it was illegal for foreigners to join the Ukrainian Army. A special legal dispensation was made for Boyenger. It seems unlikely that the Ukrainian Army would bother to jump such legal hurdles for a low-ranking enlisted paratrooper with about a year of combat experience unless he brought something else to the table.

Furthermore, there is evidence that Boyenger was in Ukraine much earlier than he admits. An exposé by Italian journalists led by Gian Micalessin revealed that Boyenger was present in Ukraine as early as February 15, 2014. Georgian mercenaries hired by future Georgian Legion commander Mamuka Mamulashvili all testified that Boyenger was one of the organizers of the infamous Maidan sniper attacks. According to their testimony, in the days leading up to the attack, Boyenger was inseparable from Mamulashvili, and they were ordered to follow his commands.

At the time, Mamulashvili was a little-known figure outside of Georgian and Ukrainian nationalist circles. A former child soldier, an ally of the reviled and deposed ex-Georgian leader Mikheil Saakashvili and a veteran of both the 1992 and 2008 wars in Georgia, Mamulashvili was on the front lines of the Maidan from the beginning.

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Mamulashvili (left) and Boyenger (right) at a 2016 press conference. [Source: foreigncombatants.ru]

Mamulashvili had worked with Ukrainian nationalists before, during the 1992 Abkhaz war he fought as a child soldier alongside the neo-Nazi Argo Battalion, the armed wing of the UNA-UNSO.

Argo worked as mercenaries during the early 1990s and carried out an unsuccessful operation to rescue Mamulashvili and his father from encirclement in Abkhazia. Mamulashvili did not forget their efforts and wasted little time repaying them during the Maidan. UNA-UNSO would later co-found the infamous fascist militia Right Sector alongside a coalition of other right-wing groups.

In early 2014, the ongoing Maidan coup reached a stalemate. Time and bitter cold had driven many of the protesters on both sides back to their homes and the revolution was facing the very real danger of simply fizzling out. To prevent this, Mamulashvili needed a spark of violence to light the fire of revolution. He hatched an audacious plan to fire on the crowds and blame the attacks on the Yanukovych government. His point man for the plan was the U.S. Army-trained sniper, Brian Boyenger.

On February 20, 2014, snipers, allegedly under the direct command of Boyenger, opened fire on the crowds from the Maidan-occupied Kyiv Philharmonic building, killing dozens of both police and protesters. The plan worked, and the sniper attacks were the pivotal moment that gave the Maidan the momentum to finally depose the democratically elected Yanukovych government. While the Maidan forces quickly blamed the government for the attacks, NATO officials suspected a provocation from the beginning.

The attacks remain officially unsolved and, as the Ukrainian government destroyed all evidence, it is unlikely that those responsible will ever be brought to justice.

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Anti-government protesters run with body of man shot by sniper in apparent black-flag operation designed to discredit the pro-Russian Yanukovych government. [Source: theworld.org]

Mamulashvili has denied his involvement with the sniper attacks and writes off the entire Italian exposé as a Russian intelligence operation. While NATO sources are quick to back him up, their arguments mostly revolve around the journalists responsible working for a paper owned by ex-Italian PM Silvio Berlusconi and Gian Micalessin’s membership in the neo-fascist MSI party as a youth.

They do not mention, however, that it is proven beyond any doubt that Berlusconi was a member of Propaganda Due (aka P2) a fascist-terrorist organization operated by the CIA inside Italy to prevent the country from electing leftist or even moderate politicians. P2 was heavily involved in narcotics and arms trafficking, money laundering on an unprecedented scale, kidnapping, assassination, and at least dozens of proven acts of terrorism resulting in hundreds of known deaths with many more suspected.

For their part, the MSI has been proven in court to be heavily infiltrated and directed by Italian and American intelligence. Because of this, the party was from 1959 strongly pro-NATO and pro-EU. They supported Italian accession to the European monetary system and U.S. missiles in Sicily. The two organizations often worked together as the political and military wing of the CIA’s Operation GLADIO, designed to implement what was known as the “Strategy of Tension,” a terrorist campaign against the cause of Italian democracy.

The MSI has often stood in coalition with Berlusconi and many of its members have gone over to his Forza Italia party, including Benito Mussolini’s granddaughter, Alessandra, who is currently a member of the European Parliament.

It seems unlikely that a lifelong CIA asset and his militantly pro-NATO employee would be working with the Russians to discredit an American-backed coup.

Adding to this, Mamulashvili’s Georgian Legion is rife with neo-Nazis and other fascists from around the world. The organization even uses Paul Gray; an infamous neo-Nazi terrorist who was one of the organizers of the deadly Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally, as its English-speaking spokesman. Gray has made dozens of appearances on Fox News, proudly extolling the virtues and combat prowess of the Georgian Legion while begging for more weapons.

While Mamulashvili insists that all Legion recruits are vetted and neo-Nazis or fascists are rejected, Gray’s membership proves the Legion’s “vetting” is little more than PR to assuage the consciences of guilty liberals. Even a cursory Google search would reveal that Gray has been a member of multiple neo-Nazi terrorist groups, such as the Traditionalist Worker’s Party and Atomwaffen, who are infamous for calling in bomb threats against Historically Black Colleges and University’s (HBCU’s).

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Neo-Nazi terrorist Paul Gray during one of his many appearances on Fox News. [Source: thegreyzone.com]

The implication that Berlusconi or any other fascist would oppose the Maidan or the Georgian Legion on ideological grounds is therefore ridiculous and little more than a desperate act of projection.

It should also be mentioned that the paper responsible for this exposé, now called InsideOver, currently has journalists embedded with the Ukrainian Armed Forces and is actively reporting from the front lines of the conflict. As of the time of this article, they have released 85 videos from Ukraine on their YouTube channel, the vast majority of which were made in collaboration with the Ukrainian Armed Forces.

Even by the low standards of NATO propaganda, it beggars belief that the Ukrainian military would allow Russian agents into their midst, let alone work alongside them.

Regardless of when he arrived in Ukraine, Brian Boyenger’s hands are not clean. He was instrumental in the training and formation of the various far-right units including Azov, Right Sector, the Georgian Legion, and many others. These units are all credibly accused of countless war crimes, and many of them have even been convicted in Ukrainian courts of crimes as vile as raping children.

In 2015, Boyenger broke his usually immaculate OPSEC to chat with Swedish neo-Nazi and first-generation Azov member Mikael Skillt, once described by the BBC as a “White Power warrior,” for advice on smuggling anti-materiel weapons into Ukraine.

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Boyenger discusses smuggling anti-materiel cannons for Azov. [Source: Twitter.com]

The conversation is clear proof that Boyenger was acting with the knowledge and in the interests of the U.S. government. Boyenger openly discussed smuggling otherwise highly illegal weapons to a known terrorist on a public forum with what he says is State Department approval. Even aside from the obvious implication of the State Department arming Nazi terrorists, it seems very unlikely that a former low-ranking enlisted Army soldier would be getting this sort of approval from the government. Unless, of course, Brian Boyenger is something more than that.

Once he arrived in Ukraine, Boyenger became more difficult to track. Unlike most mercenaries in the country, Boyenger keeps his exploits quiet. He is not the type to upload his war crimes to TikTok or brag about atrocities in interviews. Most of what we know about him is due to his loose-lipped associates and even from the bits and pieces we can gather from second-hand sources, the picture is very grim.

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Boyenger sniping in Ukraine. [Source: facebook.com]

We do know that Boyenger was one of the founding members of the Georgian Legion from their press releases. Interestingly, the Legion repeatedly mentions that Boyenger was a former officer, while Boyenger had claimed to be a specialist in a Legion propaganda video. If Boyenger was indeed an officer, this would mean that his military career continued for years after Iraq, and the fact that he would try to hide this would indicate that he had a part of his military career he did not want to talk about.

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Boyenger (left, in front of truck) with Mamulashvili (center). [Source: gtarchive.georgiatoday.ge]

Someone is lying, but it is unclear who and for what purpose. Did Mamulashvili lie to make Boyenger seem more important, or did Boyenger lie to conceal that he was far more than a simple soldier? It would not be out of character for Mamulashvili, a man whose past and exploits seem to grow more outrageous with each telling, to lie to the media. The only question is what would he gain for lying in this case?

Does it matter to the readers of Ukrainska Pravda if Brian Boyenger was an officer or a specialist? Would the Ukrainian readers even know the difference? As Boyenger was vetted by both the U.S. and Ukrainian governments, Mamulashvili knows the truth, but only he and Boyenger know if he is telling it or not.

It is unlikely that we will ever learn the truth of this matter. However, we do know some details of Boyenger’s exploits in Ukraine, and this is thanks mostly to his comrade at arms and close friend, a former U.S. Army soldier by the name of Craig Lang. Together, Lang and Boyenger founded a unit made up entirely of criminals, terrorists and neo-Nazis known as Task Force Pluto.

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Brian Boyenger (left) with TF Pluto in Ukraine. [Source: Buzzfeednews.com]

Task Force Pluto
“What they’re saying is, ‘Here’s a group in Ukraine that’s going beyond ideology, they’re a militia group that’s actively recruiting for the cause. That’s appealing to people who want to promote white nationalism or preserve European-American culture. The fact that they’re fighting is in and of itself important.”– Marilyn Mayo, ADL terrorism researcher

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Craig Lang awarded a medal by the Ukrainian Army. [Source: indyweek.com]

Craig Lang’s story is even more suspicious than Boyenger’s. Lang was a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, who served in the Army until his dishonorable discharge in 2014. A few months prior, Lang had gone AWOL and driven across the country to murder his day-old son, wife, and her family by surrounding their home with landmines. Fortunately, Lang’s plot failed, and he was arrested and discharged soon after.

After some time working on oil rigs in North Dakota, Lang first came to Ukraine in 2015 while still in court for his earlier plot. It is difficult to imagine how a fugitive wanted for such serious crimes could leave the country, transit through several U.S.-aligned countries and make his way to Ukraine, where he passed an allegedly rigorous vetting process. Unless, like Boyenger, he had the blessing of the government.

What is even more suspicious is that Lang did it three times. He left Ukraine in 2018 after he became upset that the war had ebbed in intensity. He wanted action, and he thought he could find it in South Sudan. Lang and his comrade, another deserter-turned-terrorist named Alex Zwiefelhofer, attempted to sneak into the country via Kenya where they were caught and deported.

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Zwiefelhofer in his U.S. Army uniform. [Source: bloomeradvance.com]

Zwiefelhofer, the son of a police chief from Wisconsin, is another former U.S. Army soldier who went AWOL in 2016. His social media accounts were peppered with neo-Nazi memes and “jokes,” including Zwiefelhofer wearing a Hitler mustache and a shirt that said, “Help more bees… shoot refugees.”

Like many other American neo-Nazis, notably Dylan Roof, he is an open admirer of the unrecognized colonial state of Rhodesia and its savage form of apartheid. He often posted pro-Rhodesia memes on Facebook and often suggested that Rhodesia did not go far enough in the subjugation and violent exploitation of its native people.

After deserting from the Army, Zwiefelhofer attempted to join the French Foreign Legion and was denied. Despite claims of a rigorous vetting process, Brian Boyenger ignored all these red flags when he accepted Zwiefelhofer into the ranks of Task Force Pluto. Zwiefelhofer fought alongside the unit in combat operations and became friends with Craig Lang in the process. Eventually, the two became so close that Zwiefelhofer joined Lang on his excursion.

When they landed in the United States after their deportation, Zwiefelhofer was interviewed by the FBI, who found large amounts of child pornography on his phone. He was arrested and spent several months in jail awaiting trial until he bonded out and fled to Miami alongside Lang with a plan to become mercenaries in Venezuela. The new front was the latest in the long line of America’s imperial misadventures and the target of a failed “color revolution” to overthrow the left-wing Maduro government.

However, Lang and Zwiefelhofer needed money and so they put two guns for sale on the internet to help finance their journey. The two men met the prospective buyers, Serafin and Deana Lorenzo, at a church parking lot on April 9, 2018. Rather than hand over the weapons, Lang and Zwiefelhofer opened fire, killing both the Lorenzos in a hail of bullets and then robbing their dead bodies.

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Serafin and Deana Lorenzo [Source: buzzfeednews.com

Now with both money and guns, Lang and Zwiefelhofer were ready to set off for Venezuela. They tried to book passage on a ship but murdered the captain in a payment dispute. With their money gone and the walls slowly closing in on them, the two men fled Florida to the Pacific Northwest, where they split up. After disposing of the murder weapons, Zwiefelhofer returned to his home in Wisconsin and was caught about a month later.

The ever “lucky” Craig Lang easily escaped the dragnet. Four months after the murders, he drove to St. Louis, where he met with other fugitive veterans to plan a return to Ukraine. Now wanted for at least a dozen felonies, including multiple murders, Lang somehow walked through customs and immigration without anyone batting an eyelash. He even tagged himself at Kyiv Airport on Instagram.

Lang made one more attempt to return to Venezuela only a few days later. Even after charges had been filed by the Department of Justice, Lang was able to fly from Ukraine to Bogotá, Colombia, via Mexico City. In Bogotá, Lang was somehow able to convince police to sell him weapons despite his rap sheet. He paid for the guns in cash and boarded a bus to the border town of Cúcuta, which had been at the epicenter of America’s failed attempt at a coup in Venezuela.

For reasons unknown, Lang failed to cross the border for a second time. He returned to Ukraine, where he was embraced once more as an honored member of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. Even after formal charges were issued against Lang and the U.S. government had officially requested his extradition, Lang lives freely in Ukraine, where he lives with his wife and child.

The Ukrainian government has refused multiple requests to extradite Lang, and his comrades in arms in Right Sector have provided for his legal defense. Brian Boyenger’s old friend Mikael Skillt, now the head of a mercenary group, even threatened violence if Lang were extradited.

“He [Lang] has a lot of friends; he’s active in social media, he’s been involved in the war as long as anyone. If they would extradite him, there would be consequences in terms of a demonstration.” – Mikael Skillt

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Craig Lang at a court hearing with the neo-Nazi Right Sector, 2021. [Source: buzzfeednews.com]

Despite his claim to be “apolitical,” Lang often associates with neo-Nazis. Beyond his public affiliations with Right Sector, Task Force Pluto is rife with neo-Nazis and other far-rightists almost to the exclusion of all other members. Screenshots of their social media show an open admiration for Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany, the veneration of racial violence, routine use of racial slurs, and open association with other violent neo-Nazis around the world.

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One of Lang’s comrades, Kent McLellan, shows how “apolitical” he is. [Source: triad-city-beat.com]

The unit’s prolific recruitment of American neo-Nazis became so serious that it drew the attention of the U.S. Department of Justice, who began investigating the group both for war crimes committed in Ukraine, and a serious worry that its members would bring their skills back home with them.

Besides Lang and Zwiefelhofer, other members of Task Force Pluto and associated groups have already made their way back to the United States, where they are once more active in neo-Nazi groups. Task Force member Dalton Kennedy, originally of North Carolina, has returned to join Patriot Front, another of the amalgamation of the groups responsible for the deadly Unite the Right Rally. While less public today, Patriot Front remains an active neo-Nazi terrorist group, and Kennedy is still a member. He is only one of many such cases in a vast constellation of militias operating inside Ukraine.

The implication of this at the very least is that the United States government, through Brian Boyenger and the rest of its ongoing operation, is openly arming, training, and funding neo-Nazi terrorists who have killed not just Russians and Ukrainians, but also American citizens on American soil. Perhaps most worrying, the atrocities carried out by these men in America are nothing compared to those they have been doing for years in Donbas.

What price will we pay in the future, when this bloody seed grows into a tree of hatred with roots throughout the world?

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Kennedy giving a Nazi salute during a Patriot Front demonstration. [Source: ukr-leaks.com]

During their investigation, the FBI found evidence of routine, serious war crimes committed by Task Force Pluto members inside Ukraine. Leaked documents show the FBI requested detailed information from the Ukrainians on alleged crimes as ghastly as rape, human trafficking, production of child pornography, pillaging, torture and even beheading of POWs.

The FBI maintains an open investigation on many of the Task Force’s members, including Lang and Boyenger. No results have been released, and no action has been taken against anyone except Craig Lang. At least one of the members, Santi Pirtle, joined the U.S. Army upon his return to America and is currently an active-duty soldier based in Louisiana. It appears that Boyenger’s saga has gone full circle. The terrorist tactics he learned from Col. Steele in Iraq and taught to Task Force Pluto have been refined in Ukraine and are now being passed on to a new generation of U.S. Army soldiers.

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Pirtle, far right, stands behind Craig Lang alongside other TF Pluto members. [Source: buzzfeednews.com]

The Tip of the Sword

“What he confessed was this. He had not been serving God, after all, when he followed Allen Dulles. He had been on a satanic quest.

These were some of James Jesus Angleton’s dying words. He delivered them between fits of calamitous coughing—lung-scraping seizures that still failed to break him of his cigarette habit—and soothing sips of tea. “Fundamentally, the founding fathers of U.S. intelligence were liars,” Angleton told Trento in an emotionless voice. “The better you lied and the more you betrayed, the more likely you would be promoted….Outside of their duplicity, the only thing they had in common was a desire for absolute power. I did things that, looking back on my life, I regret. But I was part of it and loved being in it.” – The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government by David Talbot.

What we are seeing in Ukraine is something very familiar. Since the end of the Second World War, the United States government in one form or another has waged a campaign of terror that spans almost the entire globe. In Italy, where the young Silvio Berlusconi worked with the CIA’s P2 Masonic Lodge, the Vatican and the Mafia to destroy Italian democracy, they called it Operation GLADIO.

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Berlusconi’s P2 membership card. [Source: en.wikipedia.org]

In Turkey, they called it Counter Guerrilla. In what became the founding example of a deep state, the CIA and their Turkish allies carried out a decades-long covert operation so extensive that it was involved in three separate coups. Their activities ran the gamut from pogroms, terrorism, and torture to international drug trafficking and murder for hire. They worked together with the Italians on many occasions.

In South America, it was known as Operation Condor. The CIA conjured up an overblown guerrilla threat to justify a continent-wide campaign of terror, carried out with the help of former Nazis and America’s hand-picked fascist dictators. At an absolute minimum, it has been proven beyond any dispute in court cases that at least 50,000 were killed, 30,000 disappeared and 400,000 were imprisoned. The real numbers are likely much higher, and it is unknown how many were tortured or otherwise brutalized by the U.S.-aligned regimes. Former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro was but one of many participants in this brutal campaign, and he remains an enthusiastic supporter of the program to this day.

In Ukraine, it was called Project AERODYNAMIC. Supplies and teams of commandos were parachuted into western Ukraine to support a group of bandits, Nazi remnants, and fascist terrorists led by holocaust perpetrator Roman Shukhevych.

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Roman, front, second from left with Nazi Reprisal Battalion 201 in Belarus, 1942. [Source: en.Wikipedia.org]

After that failed, the U.S. continued to support the remnants of the Nazi collaborationist OUN and other organizations and protected their members from any repercussion. Yaroslav Stetsko, the second in command of the OUN who publicly pledged allegiance to Adolf Hitler in 1941 as his men beat Lviv’s Jews to death in the streets with hammers and axes, later became head of the World Anti-Communist League.

In this role, he received open funding and support from the U.S. government and worked alongside other fascists such as Alfredo Stroessner, Yakuza war criminals like Ryōichi Sasakawa and Yoshio Kodama, Hitler’s top commando, the Waffen-SS’s Otto Skorzeny, and the founders of the Italian MSI among many others. WACL worked as hit men, arms dealers, consultants and any other role needed to advance the cause of fascism. They were Reagan’s “third force,” able and willing to conjure up a rebellion or engineer a crackdown anywhere the U.S. government wanted.

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Stetsko (left) shakes hands with George H.W. Bush. [Source: cartagocat.wordpress.com]

In 1991, Stetsko’s widow Slava returned to Ukraine, where she founded the Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists 50 years to the day after the Lviv pogroms. The KUN later co-founded Right Sector, which helped overthrow the democratically elected Yanukovych government and then, under the tutelage of Brian Boyenger and Craig Lang, was re-formed into one of the premier reprisal battalions.

With American tactics honed from decades of brutal occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, the “punishers” brought a once peaceful nation to heel, by any means necessary.

Whatever we call these operations, the result is always the same: America creates war and chaos around the world, using it as a training ground to refine its tactics and gather personnel for the future. Entire generations of humanity are wiped from the Earth to feed the ravenous machine of American capital.

For the United States, and the corporations that so transparently dictate policy to the government, the blood and suffering of so many nations has been turned into almost endless profits for the ruling class. Beyond the arms contracts that fill the coffers of Lockheed and Raytheon, entire nations are economically subjugated by American capital. Their resources are systematically looted and, if one of the nations has nothing left to give, its people are enslaved both at home and abroad.

Ukraine is not an aberration, and it is not unique. It is only the latest in a long line of victims of America’s savage “rules-based international order” which is enforced on the world by any means necessary. The people of Ukraine and the world deserve better than this.

Our task is to find a way to defeat this monstrous system—which turns blood into money—before it is too late. As the warmongers now try to foment a new war with China, our time is running short.

https://covertactionmagazine.com/2023/0 ... n-ukraine/

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In Sicily, Top of the Mountain, Watching the New Barbarians

Pepe Escobar
July 18, 2023

You don’t need to be Seneca to observe that Sicily embodies so many perfect archetypes of Beauty that it all seems superhuman, Pepe Escobar writes.

It’s another stunning sunset in the western edge of the Sicilian coast, and I’m right in front of the Real Duomo in Erice, the pluri-millenary “Mount”, sung by Virgil in the Aeneid as “close to the stars”, and founded by the mythical homonymous son of Venus and Bute who became King of the Elimi, an ancient tribe that settled in these lands.

Welcome to a realm of gods and demi-gods, heroes and nymphs, saints and hermits, Faith and Art, who still survives as a practically intact, magnificent medieval village.

Following century after century of splendor, misery and wars, it’s enlightening to remember how Thucydides recalled “Trojans in flight” arriving with their ships in Sicily and then interacting with the Sicani and the Elimi, “while their cities carried the names of Erice and Segesta”.

And then, much later, Thucydides tells us, the Segestans took ambassadors from Athens to the temple of Aphrodite in Erice: that’s where all the cool cats of the time used to hang out.

From the apartment of Roger II, King of Normandy in Cefalu in the late 11th century, to creeks and coves scratching the shores of the deep blue Mar Tirreno; from Venus worshipped in Erice to Venus worshipped in Segesta, it was in these realms drenched in History and Mythology that I happened to follow, from a safe distance, a rather prosaic, provincial manifestation of post-modernity: a clown show in Vilnius advertised as the NATO summit.

Imagine an epigone of Dionysius of Halicarnassus, a Greek historian from the early 1st century tracking the arrival of Aeneas and the Trojans to Sicily and pointing that the Venus altar at the Erice heights was erected by Aeneas himself to honor his mother, reacting to the “ceremonial” staged by a bunch of North Atlantic upstarts, led by a declining superpower which qualifies crossroads-of-the-world Sicily as a mere AMGOT: “American Government Occupied Territory”.

Well, you don’t need to be Seneca, in first century Rome, to observe that Sicily, like nowhere else in the world, embodies so many perfect archetypes of Beauty that it all seems superhuman.

So it was impossible not to see the NATO clown show for what it was: a tawdry, trashy crypto-Aristophanes rip-off – and deprived from the slightest trace of self-deprecating humor.

A clown show falls flat

Particularly proficient among the cast of minor characters was the little sweaty sweatshirt warmonger, who was ruthlessly snubbed by the supposed A-list.

One of his helpless ministers framed the dilemma: what conditions do we need to meet to be part of the club, and who makes the rules?

Unfortunately demi-goddess Maria Zakharova, our contemporary of Mercury, the messenger of the Gods, was not available in person to quell his doubts, but she did, anyway, from afar: if you don’t know the rules of the game, that means you know nothing about the “rules-based international order”.

Once again, no one needs a PhD on Tacitus – another big fan of the temple of Venus in Erice – to know how this works.

The “rules” thing was invented by the declining hyperpower. In fact there are no rules. They make them up on the go. And they change them if the results don’t match their expectations. Tiberius – who Tacitus chronicled – would have been impressed.

The alternative to the “rules” Mafioso racket is called “international law”: a concept that happens to be duly supported by the Global South, or Global Majority.

Now let’s get to the main plot in the clown show. NATO explicitly formulated it “does not want” a war with Russia. Translation: they are absolutely terrified. More scared than if Zeus in the flesh was threatening them with a million thunderbolts (or their post-modern epigone: Mr. Khinzal).

What NATO – via the real masters, the Americans, or their piece of Norwegian wood posing as the man in charge – could not possibly admit in public is that they have less than zero resources for a real war.

Russia, on the other hand, has them – in droves.

NATO, already miserably humiliated in Afghanistan, is now being ruthlessly, methodically demilitarized, a process running in parallel to the increasingly abysmal state of the economy prevailing amongst all NATOstan members.

War? Against a nuclear, hypersonic superpower? Give us a – Thucydides – break.

Watching the New Barbarians

Then there’s the story of a major character that ended up making a big splash: the Sultan. He may be a Neo-Ottoman potentate or just a plain streetwise grifter, but in the end he got what he needed: the moolah in the coolah.

Well, not yet in the coolah: considering this is an IMF racket, the moolah will come with a zillion conditions attached.

It goes like this. Sultan is broke. Turkiye is broke. Foreign exchange reserves are going down the Bosphorus drain. So what’s Sultan to do? Miserably default? Sell what’s left of the palace gold? Or bend over backwards to the IMF?

There’s no smokin’ gun on who called who first to set up the deal. Ankara may have been promised a lifeline of up to $13 billion – in fact pocket money. The Sultan could have gotten a much better deal with the “win-win” Chinese – complete with serial BRI investment projects.

And yet he decided to play his cards with NATO, not Eurasia. Reality won’t take much time to dictate its terms. Turkiye will never be admitted into the – floundering – EU. The Americans may force Brussels to do it – remember those “rules” – but up to a point.

Selling tons of extra Bayraktar drones to Kiev – yes, it’s a Sultan family racket – won’t alter anything on the battlefield.

Yet simultaneously antagonizing the Russia-China strategic partnership and their push for Eurasia integration – via SCO, BRICS, EAEU – does alter the chessboard.

The Sultan may be condemning Turkiye to the role of extra minor sidekick – with nearly zero screen time – in the plot line that really matters: the Eurasian Century.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Moscow, reflecting on the Vilnius clown show, remarked that the world will not be turned into a “NATO globe”. Of course not: what’s ahead has been defined by Old Man Luka, the Oracle of Minsk, as the “Global Globe”.

But enough of the “rules” racket. On a splendid sunny morning, after leaving the Mare Tirreno and driving inland, I found myself right in front of the temple of Segesta, the most important center of the Elimi, one of Sicily’s original peoples before the arrival of the Greeks.

Segesta, for centuries, was allied with Carthage, and then Athens. The temple is the embodiment of absolute Doric perfection. Construction was started in 430 B.C. But it may have been abandoned twenty years later, when Segesta was captured by…Carthage.

History, always capricious, led to the site being currently named Monte Barbaro. That comes from the denomination given to Segesta by the Arabs: Calatabarbaro. Poetic justice struck again: so there I was, under the blazing sun, at the top of a pluri-millenary Barbarian Mountain, watching the New Barbarian Warmongers weave their poisonous “rules-based order”.

https://strategic-culture.org/news/2023 ... arbarians/

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Envoy: 'Rational voices' seeking Ukraine peace deal grow louder
By MINLU ZHANG at the United Nations | China Daily Global | Updated: 2023-07-18 10:35


A Chinese envoy to the United Nations on Monday said that the crisis in Ukraine stems from an "outbreak of security conflicts in Europe" and proves that pursuing absolute security, provoking confrontation and expanding military blocs "brings only turmoil and unrest to Europe and the world".

"The evolving situation on the battlefield demonstrates that military means cannot resolve the Ukrainian crisis," Geng Shuang, China's deputy permanent representative to the UN said at a Security Council meeting on the Ukraine crisis on Monday.

Geng said the continuation of the armed conflict will bring only more suffering to civilians and may even lead to unpredictable and irreparable scenarios. No matter how long the crisis lasts, it will eventually be resolved through political means, he emphasized.

The envoy pointed out that "rational voices" supporting the resumption of peace talks have become stronger and stronger. Developing countries from Asia, Africa, and Latin America all have put forward peace initiatives. They all reflect a strong will to resolve the crisis politically, said Geng.

He called on both parties to the conflict to meet each other halfway and explore solutions that accommodate each other's concerns, conform to regional realities and help bridge differences.

Geng also called for controlling the spillover effects of the crisis. It has made global food, energy and financial security more vulnerable, and developing countries will face more difficulties in achieving sustainable development goals, he said.

"Relevant countries should immediately stop imposing excessive unilateral sanctions and long-arm jurisdiction, ensure the safety and smoothness of global industrial and supply chains, increase support and assistance to developing countries, and do more things that are conducive to world economic growth.

"China appreciates the important role of the Black Sea grain transport package agreement in stabilizing the global grain market and hopes that relevant parties can properly resolve the issue of Black Sea grain transport through dialogue and consultation," said Geng.

On Monday, Russia accused Ukraine of carrying out an attack on the bridge linking the Russian mainland and Crimea, alleging involvement from the UK and the US.

On the same day, Russia suspended participation in the Black Sea grain deal just as it was set to expire.

"Unfortunately, the part of these Black Sea agreements that concerns Russia has not been implemented so far, so its effect is terminated," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said. Russia had been complaining that its demands to improve its own grain and fertilizer exports have not been met, Xinhua News reported.

"As soon as the Russian part is fulfilled, the Russian side will immediately return to the implementation of that deal," Peskov said.

While the grain initiative is out, the controversial weapons banned in more than 100 countries are now in Ukraine, which last week said it has already received cluster munitions from the US.

"The irresponsible transfer of cluster bombs can easily lead to humanitarian problems. Humanitarian concerns and legitimate military security needs should be addressed in a balanced manner, and an attitude of prudence and restraint should be exercised in the transfer of cluster bombs," Geng said.

Geng also said that nuclear safety and security needed to be ensured. "We once again call on both parties to the conflict to exercise maximum rational restraint, abide by nuclear safety conventions and other international laws, and resolutely avoid man-made nuclear accidents," he said.

http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20230 ... 16fed.html

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July 3, 2023 – 300mm rocket containing cluster bombs, launched from BM-35 Smerch multiple rocket launcher. Donetsk

U.S. using Ukraine as disposal ground for banned cluster bombs: Colonel, Karen Kwiatkowski
Originally published: Al Mayadeen on July 11, 2023 by Agencies (more by Al Mayadeen) | (Posted Jul 18, 2023)

Former Pentagon analyst and Air Force Lieutenant Colonel, Karen Kwiatkowski, has criticized the U.S. decision to provide cluster munitions to Ukraine, stating that the Pentagon is eager to unload them due to their ban in many countries. Kwiatkowski believes that the Pentagon’s interest lies in clearing old inventory to make way for more profitable weapons.

“The Pentagon’s interest seems to be in getting rid of stockpiled munitions, and these cluster bombs are honestly difficult to get rid of for-profit as so many nations have banned them,” Kwiatkowski said.

Cluster bombs are seen as a tactic to freeze off land areas, disrupt transportation lines, and establish new borders in the later stages of traditional land battles. She expressed concerns about Ukraine’s track record of restraint and accountability with other weapons systems supplied by the U.S. and its allies. Kwiatkowski also pointed out the double standards in Western media’s portrayal of cluster bomb usage.

“This U.S. decision and NATO’s flaccid acceptance of it, contrary to the policies of many NATO member states, serves as the latest example of extreme hypocrisy, and it is being observed and understood for exactly that by all of Europe, as well as the rest of the world,” Kwiatkowski concluded.

A flashback
The United States recently announced new military aid, including cluster munitions, to “assist Ukraine”, causing wide criticism from NGOs and embarrassment for some European nations.

The move by the Biden administration has been widely criticized by human rights activists and some U.S. lawmakers, with Congressman Matt Gaetz planning to co-sponsor an amendment to ban the transfer of cluster munitions to Ukraine or any other country.

Cluster munitions, which disperse multiple small explosive charges, are banned by several countries, including European signatories of the 2008 Oslo Convention.

Russia already warned the U.S. against sending the cluster munitions to Ukraine, and Russian Ambassador to the UN Vassily Nebenzia argued it would count as a bigger step toward escalating the conflict.

Late last month, the U.S. military said that despite it being banned by most countries, supplying Ukraine with cluster bombs could be useful against Russia.

https://mronline.org/2023/07/18/u-s-usi ... iatkowski/
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Re: Footnotes from the Ukrainian "Crisis"; New High-Points in Cynicism Part IV

Post by blindpig » Wed Jul 19, 2023 11:32 am

Information warfare phases
POSTED BY @NSANZO ⋅ 07/19/2023

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This week, Ukraine has finally achieved a success to boost the morale of its population and show those who are financing its war effort so generously that Kiev has not even had to give up its ultra-liberal economic policies in favor of military Keynesianism to that both the countries of the European Union and Russia are resorting to. The attack on the Kerch bridge on Monday was intended to hamper Russia's supply of Crimea. The Ukrainian government and its allies insist that the bridge is a key route for the military logistics of the Russian group in southern Ukraine, ignoring that it is the most important supply route for the civilian population. Ukraine claims that the Crimean bridge is a military installation and therefore legitimate under war conditions.

It is also true that representatives such as Mikhailo Podoliak have affirmed in the past that Ukraine has the right to attack any objective it deems appropriate on the peninsula, so the importance of the bridge for the civilian population on which Ukraine imposed a blockade that included the water supply is simply irrelevant for a government that in the last nine years has shown that it only cares about the territory and never about its residents. In any case, the argument of the military use of the bridge to make it a legitimate target can easily be applied to ports such as Odessa, infrastructures from which Ukraine attacks, possibly with the drones that it has obtained in the last year from its security partners. NATO, Russian positions in Crimea. Russian reprisals were not long in coming and on the night of Monday to Tuesday, Russian drones and missiles attacked the port of the southern Ukrainian city. In an attempt to maintain its tendency to claim to have shot down all Russian drones and missiles, kyiv had to slightly twist the facts yesterday. The damage was too evident to deny it completely, so it was decided to argue that it had been caused, not by the Russian missiles, but by "the remains of the Russian missiles", an argument that is hardly tenable, but which, even so, has been published without nuances by the western press.

This episode is not the only one in which Ukraine has been forced to maneuver and manipulate the facts to make them fit the discourse. The start of the counter-offensive in the media, many months before the military operation, was full of triumphant declarations that took for granted a decisive victory with which to subdue Russia and condemn it to negotiations in which Ukraine could finally impose its terms. It was the Leopard phaseof the media offensive of the battle for the Azov Sea. The narrative varied slightly as the moment of launching the expected attack approached -so much so that there was never the slightest doubt as to what its main direction would be, as well as its secondary ones or the final objective-, when the certainty that Ukraine did not have all the necessary weapons to carry out an offensive with guarantees. From the political class, with Boris Johnson at the helm, it was alleged at the time that the missiles could compensate for the lack of aviation to provide air coverage, which is now again proven to be essential. Knowing this, kyiv was demanding something that the West was not willing to concede. The F-16 phase beganof the battle. That was the weapon that was going to solve all problems, even those that have nothing to do with the lack of Western aviation. This is the case of the logistical challenge that Ukraine has to have a wide range of equipment with sometimes radically different maintenance needs and difficulties to integrate into its doctrine. All of these problems were evident ever since the heavy equipment shipping announcements began trickling down from kyiv's partners, but it was, and still is, taboo to mention it as lacking.

Without finishing this phase, the cluster bombs phase has already begun , the standardization of an extremely harmful munition that will be used by a State that has used them in the urban environment and against the civilian population in the past. That ammunition is now the main hope for inflicting casualties on the Russian ranks, an argument that media outlets such as The Washington Post and The New York Times coldly use in reference to weapons banned by a significant part of Washington's allies. All this to try to avoid the reality that the battle for the Azov Sea has really entered the trenches phase .

Judging by the number of articles in which anonymous Pentagon officialsIf they are looking for arguments to explain why the pace of the Ukrainian offensive is progressing slowly, it is evident that the development of events does not respond to the initial plans of kyiv or its allies. The reproachful tone is obvious. And while some of them try to make the case that Ukraine has not yet used its strategic reserves - a limited argument considering that neither has Russia - and others hold out hope that cluster munitions will break through Russian defenses, most it simply tries to make it clear that the slowness of the offensive is not due to western weapons or their scarcity. The commercial aspect of continuing to maintain that the superiority of Western weaponry is clear with respect to the Russian one is also something obvious in several of these articles that, despite their journalistic appearance,

Another common argument is the question of attacks on the second line of Russian troops, in an attempt to destroy Russian supply lines and infrastructure, something that was expected before the start of the ground offensive, but did not occur and which has come as a surprise to the American dam, accustomed to this being the first step for the United States before launching an offensive. The fact that the military operation was planned with its Western partners makes it even more strange that the start of the battle occurred with the introduction of large columns of armored vehicles that headed, in the open, directly towards the minefields without the necessary air cover and without having previously worked on the Russian defenses. The justification and allegation that this is what Ukraine is doing now - something questionable judging by the information available and the results of these attacks - is mixed with more or less explicit criticism of the Ukrainian tactics. However,The New York Times has already resolved the contradiction between the exaltation of the Armed Forces of Ukraine as a great army that will undoubtedly achieve victory and the danger of the war entering the stalemate phase.. “In recent weeks, senior US officials have privately expressed their frustration that some Ukrainian commanders, exasperated by the slow pace of the initial assault and fearing mounting casualties among their ranks, have returned to their old ways: decades of Soviet-style artillery bombardment training instead of sticking to Western tactics and pushing harder to break Russian defenses," he wrote these days, recalling that every Ukrainian success is presented as an achievement of Western weapons and tactics, while all failure can be explained simply by appealing to the Soviet past.

"We would like to get results very quickly, but in reality it is virtually impossible," said General Oleksandr Syrskyi, who led the defense of kyiv and has been widely glorified over the past year and a half. His statement takes into account the cost for his troops to continue with the initial strategy, which undoubtedly caused heavy losses, and also the enemy he is facing. It seems clear that Ukraine's partners are asking for results in the short term, even if it has to be at the cost of increasing the level of casualties. However, that does not seem to be the main problem for Ukraine, whose military authorities are aware of Russia's potential. In the same interview with the BBC, Syrskiy also affirms that Ukraine must recover Bakhmut. kyiv, which has stopped short of officially announcing the loss of Artyomovsk, says it is ready to continue a battle that has caused huge casualties. The reason is none other than the "symbolic" of the city. Ukraine needs military success and may have chosen Artyomovsk to achieve it. In short, this is not where the Russian troops have been preparing their defense for months.

Syrskiy's current speech not only contrasts with the demands of his allies but also with the plans that were spread by all kinds of Ukrainian officers at the beginning of the media offensive. Kiril Budanov, the head of Ukraine's military intelligence and one of Ukraine's top information warriors, for example, claimed that his troops would reach Crimea before the end of spring. Reality collided head-on with the media discourse of the last seven months in the same way that Ukrainian troops collided at the beginning of June with the minefields in the gray area of ​​the Zaporozhye front.

https://slavyangrad.es/2023/07/19/fases ... more-27750

Google Translator

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Chronicle of the special military operation for July 18, 2023
July 19, 2023
Rybar

Russian troops launched massive strikes with Geran-2 drones and Kalibr cruise missiles against targets in southern Ukraine . In Nikolaev, several drones hit the oil terminal of the seaport, and in Odessa , the port infrastructure and a large oil depot nearby were hit.

In turn, the Ukrainian formations carried out one of the most massive raids on the Republic of Crimea in recent months , launching at least 32 drones. Russian air defense crews and electronic warfare units neutralized all devices on approach to the peninsula.

The situation on the fronts remains tense. The units of the Armed Forces of Ukraine continue to make attempts to break through the Russian defense in the Svatovsko - Kremensky , Vremievsky and Orekhovsky sectors . Russian troops manage to stop all attacks with concentrated small arms and artillery fire.

Nevertheless, near Kleshcheevka, the enemy, at the cost of significant losses, managed to cling to the adjacent heights. In the case of maintaining control over the hills, the defense of the settlement will become much more complicated.

At the same time, the military personnel of the RF Armed Forces advanced in the Kupyansky sector and northwest of Maryinka . The Ukrainian command is deploying additional forces to the front line, trying to contain the advance of Russian units.

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Massed strikes of the RF Armed Forces

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At night, Russian troops launched massive strikes with Geran-2 kamikaze drones and Kalibr family cruise missiles at targets in Ukraine . The Russian Ministry of Defense reported on the defeat of the bases of crewless boats and places of their manufacture in the Odessa region , as well as the destruction of fuel storage facilities with a total volume of about 70 thousand tons. The Ukrainian authorities, as expected, announced the interception of almost all air targets, and reports of damage to objects were associated with the fall of debris.

At the moment, it is more or less reliably known about hits in the following regions of the country:

Odessa : A series of explosions sounded in several areas of the city. According to preliminary information, the port infrastructure and a large oil depot nearby were hit. In addition, it was reported about the hit of ammunition on the Gepard anti-aircraft gun, but there is no evidence of this. Ukrainian air defense systems also worked in the usual manner: residents reported the fall of anti-aircraft missiles almost immediately after they were launched.

Nikolaev : Several Russian drones hit the oil terminal of the Nikolaev Sea Port. A large fire broke out on the territory of the facility, which was eliminated only in the morning. At the same time, local authorities reported artillery shelling of Ochakov , but at the moment there is no information about the targets hit.

Local residents published information about a series of explosions in Nikopol and in the Sinelnikovo district in the Dnipropetrovsk region . The media also reported on the sounds of explosions and the operation of air defense systems in the border regions of Ukraine, from where settlements in the Bryansk , Kursk and Belgorod regions are regularly shelled .

The Russian Defense Ministry and presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov have already called today's raid a "retaliation strike" for the terrorist attack on the Crimean bridge . We wrote about the failure of such a formulation in early spring. Moreover, the reason for the attack on the south of Ukraine is the withdrawal of the Russian side from the non-working grain deal. Accordingly, the ports of Odessa and Nikolaev became a legitimate military target for the RF Armed Forces. Especially when it is from the Odessa region that in most cases attacks are carried out on Russian facilities on the Crimean peninsula , including the massive raid by Ukrainian drones that took place today.

Massive raid of Ukrainian drones on the Crimea

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On the night of July 18, Ukrainian formations carried out a mass launch of drones in the direction of Crimea . Five groups of UAVs from the Shkolny airfield in Odessa took off in several directions.

Approximately, from one in the morning until early morning, Russian air defense units destroyed 17 drones from the Pantsir anti-aircraft missile and gun system and small arms near Capes Tarkhankut and Priboyny , as well as Razdolie , Olenevka and Portovoy .

Another 15 drones were suppressed by means of electronic warfare on approach to the Crimea at Capes Peschany , Priboyny and Tarkhankut . The total number of affected UAVs was at least 32 units.

Curiously, at least one reconnaissance UAV of an unidentified type took off from the airfield in Chernobaevka near Kherson , which provided visual tracking for kamikaze drones from Karkinitsky Bay. After the raid, he returned.

This attack was the most massive in recent months, but our servicemen successfully repelled it. None of the UAVs reached the target. Moreover, only a couple of drones were shot down by anti-aircraft weapons - the air defense rifle detachments achieved the greatest result, which proves their effectiveness against low-flying targets.

The situation on the front line and the fighting

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Fierce battles and artillery duels continue in the Starobelsk direction . In the Kupyansky sector, Russian units were able to advance 3 km west of Liman Pervy in the direction of Kupyansk . The Ukrainian command is deploying additional forces to the site, trying to contain the offensive of the RF Armed Forces.

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In the Svatovsko-Kremensky sector, after a successful assault on two strongholds at a height northwest of Novovodyanoe, Russian units went on the defensive. For the past two days, Ukrainian formations have been attacking positions, trying to regain lost control. To the south, positional battles are taking place in the direction of Krasnopopovka , where formations of the 411th battalion of the 141st brigade of the Armed Forces of Ukraine fired on the strongholds of the Russian army from small arms.

On the Torsky ledge, the military personnel of the RF Armed Forces "probe" the enemy's defenses, carrying out regular attacks on the positions of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Similar battles of low intensity are noted in the Serebryansky forestry . Due to the increased activity of the RF Armed Forces, the command of the Armed Forces of Ukraine began the forced evacuation of citizens from Yampol in case the front was broken. Artillery fire and UAV strikes of the Armed Forces of Ukraine are trying to hold back the advance of the RF Armed Forces. In addition, in the vicinity of Zolotye Prudy, the battalion-tactical group of the Lyut' Brigade was deployed. In total, about 600 people arrived in 12 Kirpi AFVs and 161 vehicles.

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Fierce battles continue on the flanks of the defense of Bakhmut in the Soledar direction . Russian gunners, together with units of the Airborne Forces, repulse enemy attacks in the Berkhovka area . However, in the area of ​​Kleshcheevka , the combined assault groups of the 3rd and 5th battalions of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, as a result of the most difficult battles and at the cost of heavy losses, managed to cling to the adjacent heights. The attacks of Ukrainian formations in small groups continue without stopping. The rotation of the personnel of the Armed Forces of Ukraine is regularly carried out, which allows the tactics of "meat assault" to be continued without the support of armored vehicles. The control of the Armed Forces of Ukraine over tactical heights greatly complicates the task of defending Kleshcheevka.

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In the Avdeevsky sector, sluggish battles are taking place - mainly sabotage and reconnaissance groups in the Krasnogorovka area are active . The sides are engaged in artillery duels along the entire front line.

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For two days near Marinka , fighting has been going on in the vicinity of the Krasnogorovsky air supply shaft of the Trudovskaya mine : Russian troops have established control over the facility and successfully repelled all enemy counterattacks. At the moment, less than eight hundred meters remain to the nearest buildings in Krasnogorovka .

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On the Vremievsky sector in the Staromayorsky area , enemy rolls continue. Now the village is under the control of the Russian army - the marines of the 35th detachment of the Ukrainian Navy are trying to stay on the northwestern outskirts, taking up positions in a couple of houses. In this area, the Ukrainian command, under the cover of tanks, is deploying additional units to hold positions. Artillerymen work on them. One of the tanks was destroyed north of Harvest . At the same time, assault detachments of the 36th infantry regiment of the Ukrainian Navy, under the cover of two tanks, attacked the landings north of Priyutnoye , trying to squeeze out the fighters of the RF Armed Forces from there. 40 people were transferred to the forest belt to the north-west to support the offensive.

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In the Orekhovsky sector , assault detachments of the 65th Ombre on two tanks tried to penetrate the defenses of the RF Armed Forces north of Rabotino , but to no avail. The Archangel of the Spetsnaz reports the destruction of two units. At the same time, to the east of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, they still hold the positions previously captured from the soldiers of the 7th company of the 71st motorized rifle regiment of the RF Armed Forces. According to the landings, Ukrainian formations transfer small groups of infantry and rotate. Self-propelled guns of the 128th Guards Rifle Brigade were transferred to Malaya Tokmachka and Novoselovka to support the forces of the 47th Ombre of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Also, artillery units of the 116th and 118th ombr occupied the lines on the Primorskoye - Kamyshevakha line .


Our fighters bravely hold the onslaught of the Ukrainian formations. Yes, there are small gaps in the defense, but the Ukrainian command did not achieve significant results, which forced the Marun tactical group to be withdrawn to the front line. However, regular, even continuous, surges of the Armed Forces of Ukraine exhaust our servicemen. The lack of rotation, the problem of which was raised by Major General Popov , has not gone away.

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In the Kherson direction, the Ukrainian command, after several weeks of fighting near the Antonovsky bridge , shifted its focus to the Golopristan sector . In two days, the Armed Forces of Ukraine made seven attempts to cross the Dnieper and drop DRGs on the islands of Vasilkov , Belogrudy , Maly Belogrudov and Veliky . Our fighters, having established minefields in advance, as well as artillery strikes, destroyed three boats with personnel. Four boats left for the starting area to Kizomys , and two groups of four or five people landed on Belogrudy and Maly Belogrudovo. The guidance of the Ukrainian DRGs was provided by two Bayraktar drones from the Shkolny and Uman airfields . One of them, armed with MAM-L missiles, flew too close, for which he was punished by the air defense crew of the 80th brigade over Herosky.


At the Antonovsky Bridge, the DRG of the tactical group "Thunder" of the Armed Forces of Ukraine once again tried to land on Antonovsky Island , moving along the Koshevaya River. However, the UAV operators found the boat, and the gunners worked on the DRG, forcing the enemy to withdraw. And along the coastline of the Dnieper, Ukrainian artillery and mortars, as well as copters with FOG, are intensively working. The UAF strikes do not subside, which is used by the DRG, trying to infiltrate under cover of fire.

Shelling of rear territories and residential areas

Ukrainian formations continue to fire at the border settlements of the Kursk region . In the Glushkovsky district, the village of Elizavetovka came under attack : two residential buildings and buildings on the territory of the machine and tractor yard were damaged.

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The Armed Forces of Ukraine continue to strike at the border settlements of the Belgorod region. The settlements of the Shebekinsky urban district were under enemy fire : the village of Novaya Tavolzhanka and the village of Shamino . In the latter, five local residents were injured. Four victims received minor injuries, one man was in a moderate condition with a shrapnel wound to the chest. In the Valuysky urban district, the Babka farm came under fire : a power line was damaged by fragments of shells. In addition to the settlement itself, there is also no electricity in the neighboring village of Novopetrivka. Civilians were not hurt. Emergency services went to the scene to eliminate the consequences.

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Since the very morning, Ukrainian formations have been conducting a massive shelling of settlements in the Donetsk agglomeration . In the capital of the republic, civilian objects were damaged in the Kievsky , Kirovsky , Petrovsky and Kuibyshevsky districts : in the latter, one of the direct hits on a residential building resulted in the injury of three people and the death of one woman. At the place of arrival, fragments of TR-122 missiles with a range increased to 40 km, delivered to Ukrainian formations by Turkey , were also found . In addition, Horlivka , Makiivka , Yelenovka , Yasinovataya , as well as the suburbs of Donetsk were under fire from the Armed Forces of Ukraine. According to the latest data, four civilians were killed, and at least seven more were injured.

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Ukrainian formations continue to strike at the settlements of the Zaporozhye region . The village of Burchak, Mikhailovsky district, came under fire : warehouses and the territory of the utility services base were damaged. Also, Russian air defense systems intercepted Ukrainian missiles over Molochansk and Melitopol : there were no casualties or damage. In the evening, Ukrainian formations once again fired at Tokmak from the HIMARS MLRS . Russian anti-aircraft gunners intercepted four missiles, but the remaining two hit the TV tower. According to preliminary data, civilians were not injured.

Artillery terror continues in the Kherson region : Ukrainian formations are constantly shelling Novaya Kakhovka , Sagi , Kakhovka Dnepryany , Berylivka and Novaya Zburyevka .

Political events
About several offensives of the Armed Forces of Ukraine

Former adviser to the Presidential Office Oleksiy Arestovich said that Ukraine needs to carry out two or three large counter-offensives, and preferably without pauses. According to the politician, the West does not want the loss of Ukraine, but is not interested in the loss of the Russian Federation. Here, according to Arestovich, Ukraine has a conflict with partners on whom the country is almost completely dependent.

About officers without higher education

President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky signed a law allowing military personnel without higher education, but with at least six months of combat experience, to become officers. The law, adopted earlier in March, allows during martial law to appoint sergeants and foremen to junior officer positions with the assignment of a rank. This indirectly testifies to the high losses of personnel of junior officers.

https://rybar.ru/hronika-speczialnoj-vo ... 2023-goda/

Google Translator

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Ukraine Sitrep - Reality Defeats The War Narrative

At the beginning of the war in Ukraine I pointed out that the false narrative of 'Ukraine is winning' which the 'western' propaganda steadily promoted would not win the real war on the ground.

As the war continued I made the point again and again.

*Propaganda Does Not Change The War - The Ukraine Is Still Losing - Updated - March 25, 2022
*Ukraine - War Propaganda And News Items - October 11, 2022
*No - Such Propaganda Delusions Will Not Win The War - June 07, 2023

In this week's SCF column Alastair Crooke makes the same point in much more detail.

A Bonfire of the Vanities

Hubris consists in believing that a contrived narrative can, in and of itself, bring victory. It is a fantasy that has swept through the West – most emphatically since the 17th century. Recently, the Daily Telegraph published a ridiculous nine minute video purporting to show that ‘narratives win wars’, and that set-backs in the battlespace are incidentals: What matters is to have a thread of unitary narrative articulated, both vertically and horizontally, throughout the spectrum – from the special forces’ soldier in the field through to the pinnacle of the political apex.

The gist of it is that ‘we’ (the West) have compelling a narrative, whilst Russia’s is ‘clunky’ – ‘Us winning therefore, is inevitable’.

It is easy to scoff, but nonetheless we can recognise in it a certain substance (even if that substance is an invention). Narrative is now how western élites imagine the world.
...
The weakness to this new ‘liberal’ authoritarianism is that its key narrative myths can get busted. One just has; slowly, people begin to speak reality.

Ukraine: How do you win an unwinnable war? Well, the élite answer has been through narrative. By insisting against reality that Ukraine is winning, and Russia is ‘cracking’. But such hubris eventually is busted by facts on the ground. Even the western ruling classes can see their demand for a successful Ukrainian offensive has flopped. At the end, military facts are more powerful than political waffle: One side is destroyed, its many dead become the tragic ‘agency’ to upending dogma.


Even as reality seeps out the narrative of a 'successful' western battle tactics in form of combined arms warfare gets reinforced.
Ukraine aims to sap Russia’s defenses, as U.S. urges a decisive breakthrough - Washington Post

Western officials and analysts say Ukraine’s military has so far embraced an attrition-based approach aimed largely at creating vulnerabilities in Russian lines by firing artillery and missiles at command, transport and logistics sites at the rear of the Russian position, instead of conducting what Western military officials call “combined arms” operations that involve coordinated maneuvers by large groups of tanks, armored vehicles, infantry, artillery and, sometimes, air power.
Ukraine’s military leaders argue that, lacking aviation might, they must avoid unnecessary losses against an adversary with a far larger pool of recruits and weaponry. To preserve manpower, Ukraine has fielded just four of a dozen trained brigades in the current campaign.


A new element in the narrative is that Ukraine is loosing because it does not use the glorious combined arms operations 'western' military told them to use.

Franz-Stefan Gady, from the British International Institute for Strategic Studies, has just been in Ukraine where he talked with Ukrainian soldiers and commanders at the frontline. In a Twitter thread he summarizes what he has seen but is strongly promoting the same narrative:

By and large this is an infantryman’s fight (squad, platoon & company level) supported by artillery along most of the frontline. This has several implications:
1st: Progress is measured by yards/meters and not km/miles given reduced mobility.
2nd: Mechanized formations are rarely deployed due to lack of enablers for maneuver. This includes insufficient quantities of de-mining equipment, air defenses, ATGMs etc.
2.) Ukrainian forces have still not mastered combined arms operations at scale. Operations are more sequential than synchronized. This creates various problems for the offense & IMO is the main cause for slow progress.
...
4.) Minefields are a problem as most observers know. They confine maneuver space & slow advances. But much more impactful than the minefields per se on Ukraine’s ability to break through Russian defenses is 🇺🇦s inability to conduct complex combined arms operations at scale.
Lack of a comprehensive combined arms approach at scale makes Ukrainian forces more vulnerable to Russian ATGMs, artillery etc. while advancing. So it's not just about equipment. There’s simply no systematic pulling apart of the Russian defensive system that I could observe.


The narrative element is the same as in the Washington Post. That the Ukrainians are not using our vaunted combined arms operations is the reason for their failure.

The well synchronized New York Times piece is making the same point:

But that artillery-centric approach raises questions about whether Ukraine has lost confidence in the combined arms tactics — synchronized attacks by infantry, armor and artillery forces — that nine new brigades learned from American and other Western advisers in recent months. Western officials heralded the approach as more efficient than the costly strategy of wearing Russian forces down by attrition and depleting their ammunition stocks.
Senior U.S. officials in recent weeks had privately expressed frustration that some Ukrainian commanders, exasperated at the slow pace of the initial assault and fearing increased casualties among their ranks, had reverted to old habits — decades of Soviet-style training in artillery barrages — rather than sticking with the Western tactics and pressing harder to breach the Russian defenses.


However, the narrative is wrong.

The Ukrainian do not fear increased casualties. They did try combined arms warfare in the beginning of the counteroffensive in early June. After a few days of trying again and again they noted that the attacks failed with ever greater losses and were not sustainable. A third of the tanks and other material the 'west' had sent to Ukraine was destroyed in the attempts to use 'fire and maneuver' to break through Russian mine fields and defense lines.

Ukraine then returned to the current 'mosquito tactics' where small groups of infantry soldiers try to make small progress bit by bit. The likely loss of more tanks was thus replaced with the likely loss of more lives.

The narrative element that a combined arms attack would have more success is simply false.

As Crooke explains:

The hubris, at one level, lay in NATO’s pitting of its alleged ‘superior’ military doctrine and weapons versus that of a deprecated, Soviet-style, hide-bound, Russian military rigidity – and ‘incompetence’.
But military facts on the ground have exposed the western doctrine as hubris – with Ukrainian forces decimated, and its NATO weaponry lying in smoking ruins. It was NATO that insisted on re-enacting the Battle of 73 Easting (from the Iraqi desert, but now translated into Ukraine).

In Iraq, the ‘armoured fist’ punched easily into Iraqi tank formations: It was indeed a thrusting ‘fist’ that knocked the Iraqi opposition ‘for six’. But, as the U.S. commander at that tank battle (Colonel Macgregor), frankly admits, its outcome against a de-motivated opposition largely was fortuitous.

Nonetheless ‘73 Easting’ is a NATO myth, turned into the general doctrine for the Ukrainian forces – a doctrine structured around Iraq’s unique circumstance.


In the first year of the second world war the German Wehrmacht used combined arms warfare to wage its blitzkrieg against inferior adversaries. The tactic failed two years later when it tried to break through solid Soviet defense lines.

In the battle of 73 Easting the U.S. army could repeat blitzkrieg tactics because he had air superiority, well trained troops and better weapons. But the circumstance in Ukraine can not be compared to a mobile war in the desert.

---
The Black Sea grain deal has, as we expected, ended. The Ukraine reacted to this anticipated loss with a another successful attack on the Kerch bridge. Road traffic will be hindered or blocked for two or three months but the more important rail lines along the route are still intact.

As the grain deal was expected to fail, the Ukrainians may well have thought of breaking the blockade of its harbors by asking for more ships to come. But the Russia military has now used a large drone and missile attack to make sure that the facilities in Odessa and other Ukrainian Black Sea harbors can no longer be used to load or unload ships. It thus does not make sense for any ships to go there.

---
Over the last week the ground war in east Ukraine has further intensified. In the north of the eastern contact line the Russian army has launched its own attacks. In the center and south the Ukrainians still try to break through Russian defenses. But they are losing about 700 soldiers per day with little to show for the losses.

The Russian's are again concentrating on the defeat of the Ukrainian artillery. Over the last five days they claimed to have destroyed 27 brigade level ammunition depots. Each of these should usually hold around 30 tons of shells and missiles. Thus such attacks add up. During those five days the Russians also claimed to have destroyed some 66 Ukrainian artillery pieces. It is race of what will be completely lost first, the ammunition the Ukrainian's can use or the guns that are needed to fire it.

But some Ukrainians still insist on continuing the senseless fight.

War Monitor @WarMonitors - 10:38 UTC · Jul 18, 2023
⚡️“Returning Bakhmut is a matter of honour. We have lost many of our brothers there, we simply must recapture it”— Syrsky during a BBC interview

The way too emotional interview quote is not in the writeup of the BBC interview but I still have not seen a video of it.

That Ukraine has already lost many soldiers in Bakhmut should certainly not be a reason to continue fighting for it. It has by now only symbolic value. Even it would again change hands it would not change the trajectory of the bigger war.

Ukraine is loosing that war. The Jig Is Up and NATO knows it. Ukraine will never be allowed to become a member.

A new narrative element is creeping in with talks about a ceasefire in Ukraine. It would give the Ukraine time to refit its military.

But Russia has absolutely no reason to agree to a pause in the fight. During the war its military has become larger and better and a total defeat of the Ukrainian army is only a question of time.

The U.S. and NATO will soon have lost their big proxy war against Russia.

In light of this reality the much larger, centuries old narrative of the superior West is also breaking down.

This will have global consequences for decades to come.

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This week I ask readers and commentators here for donations to keep Moon of Alabama running as it is.
If you like this site please consider to contribute.

Posted by b on July 18, 2023 at 16:58 UTC | Permalink

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2023/07/u ... .html#more

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A tip of the old hibach1 to 'b' for this one:

The Jig Is Up

This is how empire ends: not with a bang, but a whimper.

WILLIAM SCHRYVER
JUL 13, 2023

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Zelensky Forsaken

The member nations of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization — consisting of the teetering Masters of Empire and their tawdry entourage of class-stratified vassals — have just concluded a historic confab in Vilnius, Lithuania, capital of the alpha Baltic chihuahua.

In a shockingly transparent but otherwise rather banal series of events it became unmistakably clear that their grand plans to subject Russia to the “rules-based order” have come to naught.

Among others, the following consequences will ripple in the wake of this reality:

*Russia will achieve a decisive conclusion to the war on terms they dictate.

*NATO is shattered as a military alliance, and coming apart at the seams as a political alliance.

*Germany is on a trajectory of becoming a failed state, and as it goes, so will go the incoherent iron and clay mixture of the so-called European Union.

*The great myth of overwhelming US armaments supremacy has been exposed as little more than a modestly scaled boutique enterprise utterly ill-suited and ill-prepared to prosecute industrial warfare against a peer adversary.

Of course, many will immediately object:

“But the US hasn’t even employed its military in Ukraine! If the US entered this war with its awesome air and naval power, and its “best-in-class” army … well, the Russians would get pounded to dust within a few weeks.”

Well, I hope the thesis is never put to the test, because it will NOT end well.

I am now more convinced than ever that Russia’s specific strengths match and will consistently defeat the American military’s perceived strengths.

Russia admittedly does not wield an expeditionary military, but the concept and constitution of the military it has built renders it effectively unbeatable in its own neighborhood.

A little over a year has now passed since I published an essay entitled The United States Could Not Win and Will Not Fight a War Against Russia. I have recently revisited it. I felt no impulse to change a thing. Indeed, I am struck by how much it is more apropos now than it was a year ago. I believe it constitutes an essential element of understanding in relation to the geopolitical realities at work in our world circa 2023.

Since I wrote the article, there have been many twists and turns in the path of the continuing quasi-proxy war in Ukraine between the rapidly descendant American Empire and an increasingly resurgent Russia. But in early July 2022, it had, in my estimation, become undeniably evident that Russia had effectively wrecked the formidable original proxy army the empire had built, trained, and partially equipped on the foundation of Ukrainian flesh and blood, and a substantial collection of legacy Soviet implements of war.

Sure, there were still scattered potent remnants, but it had been degraded at least 60% by that point in time. Despite a few own-goals along the way, the Russians accomplished this using a force less than half the size of the one the Ukrainians arrayed against them, while inflicting severe equipment losses and at least a 7 to 1 casualty ratio.

So NATO was forced to up the ante. Aspiring to address the obvious Russian advantage in firepower, they shipped several batteries of M-777 155 mm howitzers to Ukraine, followed soon by a few dozen M-142 HIMARS rocket launchers.

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M-777 155 mm Howitzer

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M-142 HIMARS Rocket Launcher

Both weapon systems enjoyed a smattering of early successes that were ecstatically trumpeted by western media and their devout disciples around the world.

Meanwhile, tens of thousands of Ukrainian young men were being trained in NATO bases dotting Europe and the western hemisphere. They were instructed in the use of NATO equipment, and to fight the Russians according to NATO battlefield doctrine.

By mid-summer, a significant portion of this second iteration of the Ukrainian army had arrived back in Ukraine, along with hundreds of NATO infantry vehicles, mountains of ammunition — and perhaps most significantly — a substantial contingent of NATO-affiliated “volunteers” from many countries within the western alliance, notably Poland.

I am persuaded this escalatory step convinced the Russians they must immediately begin to more fully prepare themselves for the prospect that NATO would directly intervene in the war.

First they gave priority to learning how best to track down and destroy the limited-mobility M-777 howitzers. And rather than obsess unduly on targeting the elusive HIMARS launcher vehicles, the Russians instead focused on electronically jamming / spoofing the GPS sensors or otherwise shooting down the rockets with their short- and medium-range air defense systems.

(Their success in this respect has been nothing short of a revolution in military affairs. It is unprecedented in the age of aerial warfare. Yes, some missiles still get through, but not many, and typically only in the absence or on the outskirts of Russian ECM and air defense coverage areas.)

The Russians had, throughout early- to mid-2022, made significant offensive advances into the Novorossiya regions of Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk, Lugansk, and Kharkov. But as the summer waned, they began to perceptibly consolidate the entire line of contact. They then quickly brought to pass popular referenda in all but the Kharkov region — thereby formally assimilating the other four into the Russian Federation.

In mid-August 2022, the AFU began to advance against Russian forces on the western borders of the Dnieper River near Kherson. The Russians savaged the initial attacks, but then assumed a tactical-retreat posture. This continued for many weeks as they methodically contracted their lines into a bridgehead on the western part of Kherson city proper, all the while exacting severe losses on the attacking forces.

They would eventually effect an almost-flawless evacuation of twenty thousand troops and virtually all their heavy equipment to the eastern bank of the river, blow up the Antonovsky bridge, and then proceed to methodically destroy the AFU equipment, ammo, and troops on the other side with artillery and airstrikes that continue to this day.

As September rolled around, the Ukrainians (with significant numbers of NATO-affiliated “volunteers” in the vanguard) moved with an even more potent force in the Kharkov region, aiming for the strategic cities of Kupyansk, Izyum, and Kremmenaya.

Again, amid much triumphalism in the western punditsphere, as well as bitter recrimination and hyperbolic dooming from the Russian sixth column and its acolytes, the Russian high command effected what I observed to be an orderly, well-executed fighting retreat to the other side of the Oskol river, where they had prepared fortified lines and installed substantial reinforcements.

At that point, the Ukrainian offensive in the Kharkov region reached its high-water mark, and as autumn turned to winter and then to spring, every attempt to advance further — and there were a great many — was met with a decisive repulse.

Though consistently ignored by those who laud the “lightning advances” of the late-season AFU “counter-offensive” in Kharkov, the attacking Ukrainian forces were horrifically mauled between the first week of September and mid-October — and ever since.

As the Russians contracted their lines to much more defensible positions, they concurrently mobilized and commenced intensive training of several hundred thousand reservists and new volunteers; ramped up armaments production to completely unforeseen levels, and settled in for the next few months to fight a punishing war of attrition against Ukraine and its NATO benefactors — even as they simultaneously prepared to face the credible possibility of direct NATO intervention.

That said, despite a mostly defensive posture throughout late 2022 and early 2023, the Russians did launch an operation against the strategic cities of Soledar and Bakhmut that few foresaw would evolve into the bloodiest battle on European soil since the Second World War. “Surovikin’s Meat Grinder” would eventually consume many tens of thousands of Ukraine’s best remaining troops and equipment.

In the end, the second iteration of the Ukrainian army was degraded even more comprehensively than was the first.

Ukrainian air power has long-since been rendered effectively negligible. Provided with occasional but very sparse deliveries of old Soviet aircraft from the former Warsaw Pact nations, they have continued to manage occasional stand-off missile strikes, but close air support has been nonexistent.

Russian missile strikes on Ukrainian infrastructure in early 2023 served to rapidly deplete the legacy Soviet air defense systems. And all western shipments of would-be replacements have proven to be inferior to Ukraine’s old stocks of S-300 and Buk systems.

Fantastical Ukrainian and western media claims of 90%+ shoot-downs of Russian missiles notwithstanding, the Russians now routinely strike targets throughout Ukraine where and when they will.

Most debilitating of all, persistent ammunition shortages have now become acute. Original and supplemented stocks of Soviet-sized 152 mm artillery are nearly exhausted. And despite the US having coordinated the shipment of millions of NATO 155 mm artillery shells from every nook and cranny in the empire’s vast global network of bases and those of its obedient vassals, the cupboard is now bare.

What was widely (albeit fallaciously) believed to be a nearly inexhaustible supply of equipment and ammunition in the warehouses of the Pentagon and its various less-than-sovereign minions around the globe has been exposed as entirely inadequate to the demands of a real war.

It is an astonishing revelation in the eyes of a great many in the world.

And yet, it shouldn’t be.

In my July 2022 article, I prominently cited US Army Col. (Ret.) Alex Vershinin's all-important analysis regarding The Return of Industrial Warfare, which had appeared in RUSI a couple weeks previous. If you have not already done so, I highly recommend this short but powerful essay. His entire argument has now been confirmed by events.

Here in mid-July 2023, almost everything that eighteen months ago was only seen through a glass darkly is now undeniably apparent to all with eyes to see:

Far from being massively attrited, as any number of empire-compromised NATO rent-a-generals and politicians have ludicrously argued from the first weeks of the war, the Russians have employed an extremely impressive economy of force to achieve their objectives. To be certain, they have suffered losses in men and equipment that would be far in excess of anything western nations could abide. But the fact remains that the Russians have inflicted the most disproportionate casualty ratio of any major war in the modern era.

My sense of the matter is that the aggregated total of Russian, Donbass militia, and PMC Wagner combat deaths is probably in the neighborhood of twenty-five thousand.

On the other side of the line, Ukrainian combat deaths are now almost certainly in the range of 250k to 350k – at least 20k of that total occurring just since the first week of June.

The third iteration of the Ukrainian army, equipped predominantly with imported NATO armor, artillery, and ammunition, has been torn to shreds over the course of the previous six weeks of their last gasp offensive. The AFU very likely has been husbanding its scant remaining stock of NATO equipment and ammunition for one last “charge of the damned”, but otherwise Ukrainian offensive potential is played-out, and there will be no fourth iteration of a Ukrainian army to face the Russians on the field.

Meanwhile, upwards of four-hundred thousand uncommitted Russian reserves are champing at the bit to be turned loose. With Russian military industrial output now in high gear, these troops are better-equipped than any that have yet taken part in this conflict.

The Russian air force has received substantial numbers of new airframes from the production line. Attack helicopters roam the battlefield with near-impunity. Russian supply of strike drones, cruise missiles, and supersonic air-launched missiles appears to meet all its battlefield demands. Its so far modest deployment of hypersonic missiles has shown them to be extremely potent weapons that defy the attempts of antiquated western air defenses to interdict them.

This war is a lost cause for the empire and its hapless allies in Europe and around the world. And that, of course, is the unavoidable conclusion that has finally managed to seep into the otherwise dense skulls of the various participants at the recent NATO summit in Lithuania.

The Masters of Empire now face a no-win scenario. They must abandon their failed Ukraine gambit — and inexorably, over the next few years, yield to maximalist Russian demands regarding the roll-back of NATO to its pre-1997 borders — or else yield to the mad impulse of a futile attempt to subjugate Russia by force of arms in the form of direct US/NATO intervention into this war.

Either way, the decline of the empire will be radically accelerated; NATO will almost immediately cease to function as a credible military/political alliance; the EU will dissolve as a monetary/political "union"; the demise of the global dollar system will rapidly gain momentum.


And though many, if not most, find risible the assertion that these things could possibly come to pass in anything like the near- or medium-term (2 - 5 years), I increasingly expect they will be proven catastrophically mistaken.

https://imetatronink.substack.com/p/the-jig-is-up

Perhaps a bit too bullish on Russian forces: the losses not quite so disproportionate(though still horrendous on the Ukrainian side) and the Ukes still got some of that NATO equipped and trained forces left. Not enough to make a strategic difference(they ain't going to Crimean beaches) but enough for a scare if the find a weak spot(they haven't yet...).

And then, maybe, a real counter-attack.

*******

Explosion in Stary Krym
July 19, 10:26 am

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At night, something flew in (presumably drones) at the BC warehouse at the training ground in the Stary Krym region.
There was a secondary detonation.

(Video at link.)

In the area of ​​the landfill, an evacuation was announced for 2,000 people, plus the routes of movement along the highway from Kerch were changed.
Aksyonov said that the Crimea itself will cope with the elimination of the consequences.

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/8502468.html

Google Translator
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Footnotes from the Ukrainian "Crisis"; New High-Points in Cynicism Part IV

Post by blindpig » Wed Jul 19, 2023 6:14 pm

THE MOSQUITO SWARM AND THE VIOLENT PINPRICK ARE ZELENSKY PR TO BEAT NATO’S CHRISTMAS DEADLINE

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By John Helmer, Moscow @bears_with

On the battlefield the Ukraine has pioneered the Mosquito Tactic – that’s sending units of dozens of soldiers running towards Russian defence fortifications in several swarms at the same time, across a half-dozen salients up and down the line of contact. In parallel, in the air and on the sea President Vladimir Zelensky and his general staff have devised the Bloody Pinprick Tactic – that’s drones exploding on Russian targets like the Crimean Bridge or the Kremlin Senate Dome.

The purpose of both, mosquitoes and pinpricks, is warmaking as public relations, Zelensky is advertising the illusion that the Ukrainian army can win its offensive against Russia, no matter how great the loss in Ukrainian men and materiel; notwithstanding how little the impact on Russian forces.

The real target of this bloody PR isn’t the Russians. It is Zelensky’s NATO allies and paymasters who secretly warned him during the July 11-12 NATO summit meeting that the cashflow and the enthusiasm are already running down, and may be cut by Christmas. The tactic of bloody PR means making daily defeat look like imminent victory, with conditions: NATO fighter-bombers pretending to be Ukrainian; Polish troops around Lvov pretending to be the revival of the Polish-Lithuanian union of 1386; and grain carriers as warships on the Black Sea, pretending to feed the hungriest populations of the world.

Listen to the interview with Basil Valentine, TNT Radio, starting at Minute 34:10:
https://tntradiolive.podbean.com/e/john ... july-2023/
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In its statement on the Crimean Bridge attack twelve hours later, the Russian Foreign Ministry said “if the investigation finds that the surface drones that attacked the bridge are of Western origin, and that Western countries played a role in planning, sponsoring and conducting this operation, it will confirm their complicity in the Kiev regime’s terrorist activity.”

Asked to comment, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said “this is a situation we are monitoring. Ah, and I don’t really have anything in particular to offer on that, err, just, ahh, I can say that as a general proposition, of course Ukraine has to decide how it conducts this war in defence of its umm territory, its people, ahhh its freedom.”

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Source: https://www.youtube.com/ Min 14:22.

The next day the Russian Defense Ministry reported: “Tonight, the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation inflicted a group strike of retaliation [for the Crimean Bridge attack] with high-precision sea-based weapons on objects where terrorist acts against the Russian Federation were being prepared with the use of unmanned boats, as well as the place of their manufacture at a ship repair plant near the city of Odessa. In addition, in the area of the cities of Nikolaev and Odessa, fuel storage facilities with a total volume of about 70 thousand tonnes were destroyed, from which fuel was provided to military equipment of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. All targets planned for the strike are hit.” The ministry bulletin also recorded the count of killed in action for the day in the mosquito attacks came to 715.

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Fuel oil storage terminal at Ilyechevsk port, Odessa, hit by up to seven Russian missiles on July 18.

For background on the July 2022 Black Sea Grain Initiative and the role played by UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and his Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Martin Griffiths, read this.

The Christmas deadline for the Ukrainian offensive to win or die was reported here. Canadian sources claim the deadline given to Zelensky at the Vilnius summit meeting was until November.

https://johnhelmer.net/the-mosquito-swa ... more-88364

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These ‘Exclusive’ CIA Claims of Russian War Crimes Lack Both Credibility and Self-Reflection

Declan Hayes

July 17, 2023

Their authors are confusing Russian troops with Ukrainian Nazis, who have been repeatedly filmed dragging young Ukrainian men off the streets to dragoon them into MI6 agent Zelensky’s meat grinders.

The CIA’s Associated Press network’s recent exclusive on very bad deeds being done to very good Ukrainian prisoners in “Putin’s Russian gulags” forms the spine of this article. The article leads with a sketch of what we can only presume are Ukrainian prisoners aimlessly scratching at some barren patch of ground beneath a clump of trees with shovels and hoes, presumably to build trenches for Russian soldiers to lie down in. Further down, we see stock pictures of batons, electric prods, out houses and two spoons sitting atop three stacked plates.

Whatever points the article wishes to make are not helped by those childish drawings. And nor are they helped by the backstories of the three journalists and their various helpers, who knocked up this hit piece. Paris-based American Lori Hinnant is the main name behind the article; she received a Pulitzer research grant for this fiction and won a Pulitzer Prize for her previous work in muddying the relationship between ISIS and their American sponsors. Ukrainian citizens and seasoned junta apologists Hanna Arhirova and Vasilisa Stepanenko are her co-authors.

Still, just as we should not judge a book by its cover, let’s skip the graphics and the authors and look at the meat of their piece, which begins by that telling us the prisoners are awakened before dawn and, after doing their ablutions “in the bitter cold”, are carted off in “overlarge Russian military uniforms” and “in boots five sizes too big”, to spend “the next 12 hours or more digging trenches on the front lines for Russian soldiers”.

Leaving to one side their subsequent purple prose about how their “hands curled into icy claws” by day’s end, we have to assume that those Ukrainians were being deliberately punished and that the Russian officers did not care a damn about how those trenches were being constructed or by whom. In fact, that piece smacks of MI6’s hoary old line that all the Russians had were nineteenth century shovels. Given that Russia has very formidable lines of defence, we must assume that they were constructed by highly experienced Russian sappers with state of the art machinery.

The article then goes on to say that Putin (who else?) is constructing a series of gulags throughout Russia to hold “many civilians….. for alleged transgressions as minor as speaking Ukrainian or simply being a young man in an occupied region”. The authors are here confusing Russian troops with Ukrainian Nazis, who have been repeatedly filmed dragging young Ukrainian men off the streets to dragoon them into MI6 agent Zelensky’s meat grinders.

As regards speaking Ukrainian where Russian is the lingua franca or “tying a ribbon to a bicycle in the Ukrainian colors of blue and yellow” Russia’s front line troops would, like all other armies, contain rough diamonds who are best avoided and not needlessly antagonised. Though one only has to look at the almost endless litany of war crimes King Charles’ notorious Parachute Regiment have committed against Irish civilians to see that, one must note that these are assault troops, not community Bobbies against whom the best tactic is to feign friendliness and give their details back to someone, NATO’s Ukrainian proxies in this case, who might do something about it.

Although the charges these geniuses make against Russia’s front line troops are not all that different from the documented way the Parachute Regiment and other British criminal groups treated civilians in South Armagh and other IRA strongholds, unlike South Armagh, there seems to be no major visible military or civilian resistance, not even Life of Brian type graffiti, to Russian rule.

Because the authors presumably attribute this lack of resistance to the widespread use of primitive torture techniques by Russia, let’s now address that charge which “Olena Yahupova, the city administrator who was forced to dig trenches for the Russians in Zaporizhzhia” suspiciously claims is “a business of human trafficking.”

The authors are claiming that the Russians are using primitive torture/interrogation techniques that can only be validated by a desire to humiliate or sadistically torture and not, as with MI6 and The Hooded Men, to refine their torture/interrogation methods. This AP/Ukrainian narrative is a continuation of their hoary old one that the Russians are orcs, not quite humans, untermenschen to use the words of the Third Reich, who knew a thing or two about torture.

And, with the Luftwaffe’s Hanns-Joachim Scharff, inducing information out of even the hardest nuts with the gentlest and most deceptive of techniques. It simply is not credible that Russia would not use Scharff’s more sophisticated methods, which MI5 very successfully used against the Belfast IRA but prefer to run with the methods the CIA’s ISIS allies used. The Russkiys, it seems, have never heard of the good cop, bad cop routine, never mind of the techniques the legendary Scharff perfected and later passed on to the CIA and MI6. That is because the CIA and MI6, working through MI6 agent Zelensky and his Nazi enforcers, have decided to paint the Russians from time immemorial as base savages devoid of both brains and common sense.

Although the article cites all kinds of charges Vladimir Oshenkin, a Paris-based Russian, levels against his compatriots, Oshenkin’s twitter feed is worth an investigation in its own right. Given that he claims he is on a hit list, Oshenkin, the self-proclaimed human rights’ activist, should explain why he published the pictures and car plate numbers of civilian Russian women in France and, if he regards, as MI6 agent Zelensky’s Nazi enforcers do, civilian Russian women like the late Darya Dugina as legitimate targets.

The article then cites Oleksandr Kononeko who, the Guardian claims, “oversees human rights in the security and defence sector on behalf of Ukraine’s parliament.” As Konokneko, may be seen here ratting off all kinds of anti-Russian allegations to this Swiss-based Azeri outlet, we can dismiss his remarks as being a part of his day job of defending MI6 agent Zelensky’s Nazi-run regime and smearing its enemies.

Having treated us to Kononeko’s dubious pronouncements, the authors go on to give us some human interest stories of Ukrainian bravery, tragedy and resilience in the face of the barbaric Russians. We first meet two dudes, who formed a platonic relationship because one had “a giant black Italian mastiff” and the other had “a toy poodle whose apricot fur matched his beard”.

That is the springboard to tell us of a resistance chain of brave Ukrainian prisoners, who can smuggle cell phones into Russian prisons and who can pass messages over hundreds of miles from gulag to gulag. However, such resistance would be possible only if the prisoners were a cohesive and very determined unit, as were IRA prisoners in British jails or as, for example, are the Aryan Brotherhood supremacist gang in American prisoners.

Whatever the veracity of Melitopol Mayor Ivan Fedorov’s statement that “there is no logic” to Russia’s arrest policies, there is no logic to this stupid article. Having quoted Fedorov about all the imaginary Ukrainian flags fluttering from imaginary bicycles to stick it to the Russkiys, we are then treated to a number of portraits of civilians held by Russian forces.

These prisoners include the middle-aged Olena Yahupova who, if the authors are to be believed, spent her captivity digging ditches, often for “24 hours a day when they had an inspection coming”, in the depths of the Russian winter when she was not suffering mock executions.

Yahupova, much like Rambo and other Hollywood actors, eventually escaped and “traveled thousands of miles through Russia, north to the Baltics and back around to the front line in Ukraine, where she reunited with her husband serving with Ukrainian forces”.

Although the authors interview other Ukrainians with similarly tall tales of woe, they add no light to this CIA work of fiction, which is but a bit part of their greater narrative we have seen rehashed before in their wars against Syria, Vietnam and Iraq and will continue to see until NATO, the CIA, MI6 and all their little helpers are decommissioned and assigned to other duties more aligned to their pathetic skill sets.

https://strategic-culture.org/news/2023 ... eflection/

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How the Pentagon Conducted Biological Warfare, Human Experimentation on the World on Behalf of Big Pharma
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on JULY 18, 2023

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Briefing by Lieutenant General Igor Kirillov, Chief of the Radiation, Chemical and Biological Defense Forces of the Russian Armed Forces, on U.S. biological-military activities in Ukraine and other countries.

July 18, 2023

The Russian Ministry of Defense continues to analyze U.S. military-biological activities in Ukraine and other countries.

I would like to note that the information we publish, despite strict Western censorship, has been heard by foreign media.

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Authoritative international publications such as the Times, the Guardian, the New York Post, and the Sky News channel published articles on the most high-profile topics: safety violations in U.S. bio-laboratories, the enhancement of pathogen functions at Boston University, and the transfer of unfinished Ukrainian projects to the territory of other countries.

At the same time, the United States Department of State has launched an active information and propaganda campaign to neutralize the accusations made by Russia that United States military biologists have violated the provisions of the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention. The U.S.-controlled International Science and Technology Center (ISTC) plays an important role in this effort.

This organization finances activities on the Internet to combat information about U.S. biolaboratories in Ukraine and to create a positive perception of Washington’s projects in the post-Soviet space. The ISTC has signed a contract with Wooden Horse Strategies, a U.S. consulting firm. The contract provides for the posting of relevant materials at least eight times a month, as well as monitoring and promptly responding to “pro-Russian” online publications on this topic, including blocking access.

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In addition, the operation of United States biolaboratories in Ukraine raises more and more questions among ordinary citizens and political figures in the United States itself.

For example, US presidential candidate Robert Kennedy Jr. harshly criticized the military-biological activities of the US government.

According to his statement, former U.S. President Nixon unilaterally declared the termination of the biological weapons program in 1969, but the existing developments were not destroyed.

In order to take the U.S. military establishment out of the loop, all available information and materials were transferred to the National Institutes of Health.

Kennedy emphasized the role of the Central Intelligence Agency in conducting operations related to biological weapons, the first of which was Operation Paperclip. Thus, specialists from Japan and Nazi Germany were brought to the United States after World War II to “transfer experience” in military biological research.The purpose of the project was, QUOTE: “…to develop an experimental weapons program and to bring in Japanese scientists who are the only ones who have ever used biological weapons…”END QUOTE.


Let me remind you that the Japanese developers paid special attention to the issues of the use of biological formulations, as well as the mechanisms of vector-borne disease transmission and spread.

In this regard, it is not accidental that the research organizations of the U.S. Department of Defense are interested in studying the main species of mosquitoes and ticks that carry epidemically significant infections such as Rift Valley fever, West Nile, and dengue.

We have previously noted that such research is carried out in specialized organizations, both within the United States and in biolaboratories located abroad, where in aggregate more than one hundred species of mosquitoes and ticks are being studied. Dual-use production facilities, such as the biotechnology company Oxitec, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, could be used to mass-produce vectors.

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U.S. military specialists have successfully mastered techniques for adapting and growing vectors collected in their natural habitats. The methods they have developed make it possible to produce mosquitoes and ticks infected with arboviruses in the laboratory.

Please note that the above research activities are accompanied by deterioration of the epidemic situation and expansion of vector habitats. In this case we are talking about the formation of artificial foci of natural focal infections. Given the uncontrolled nature of vector spread, entire countries and regions may be involved in the epidemic process.

For example, an increase in the number of non-endemic Asian tiger mosquitoes has been recorded in southern and central Europe. In Germany, populations of this species have established in five federal districts. Another mosquito species (Culex modestus), a vector of West Nile fever, has been identified in Sweden and Finland.

At the same time, an increase in the incidence of uncharacteristic vector-borne infections was noted in the EU countries. According to the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control, more dengue fever infected people were registered in Europe in 2022 than in the previous decade.

There was also a peak incidence of West Nile fever, with more than 1,000 cases, 92 of them fatal. The facts of Zika fever infection associated with mosquito bites were first recorded in France.

Thus, the work of American military biologists is aimed at the formation of “artificially managed epidemics” and is not controlled within the framework of the BTWC and the mechanism of the UN Secretary-General to investigate the facts of the use of biological weapons.

In the course of the special military operation, a number of documents confirming the activities of specialized research organizations of the US Department of Defense on the territory of Ukraine were discovered.


Earlier we informed you about the activities of the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research. It was noted that due to its extensive network of branches, the institute is a “supplier” of epidemically significant pathogens. Documentary materials confirming the participation of the Institute’s staff in the collection of biomaterials from the Ukrainian population and AFU servicemen during the hostilities in Donbas in the period from 2014 to 2020 were also presented.

Today I would like to dwell on the activities of the U.S. Naval Biological Laboratories (NAMRU). Of the Navy’s seven biomedical warfare laboratories, three are located outside the United States: in Italy, Cambodia, and Peru. NAMRU’s organization is also based on the establishment of an interconnected system of branches and representative offices located in areas of epidemic concern.

The Asian branch of NAMRU-2 in Phnom Penh alone analyzes more than five thousand pathogen samples annually, and a similar number of biomaterials are collected in South America.

The NAMRU-6 affiliate there has been operating under civilian cover since April 2023, under the auspices of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Latin American Branch.

NAMRU-6 activities are expected to expand to Argentina, where one of the laboratories is scheduled to be upgraded to the maximum BSL-4 biological containment level. Training for activities at the new facility is being provided by the U.S. nonprofit organization Health Security Partners.

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NAMRU-3 has been based at Sigonella Air Base in Italy since 2019. At the same time, the laboratory staff, including entomologists, microbiologists and infectious disease doctors, conduct research in natural foci of particularly dangerous infections (Ebola, dengue, malaria) on the territory of Egypt, Ghana and Djibouti.

It should be noted that the Navy’s Biological Warfare Unit in Italy supports the three U.S. strategic commands – Central, European and African, and its primary mission is CITATA: “…to study, monitor and detect diseases of military significance…”.

Thus, the organization of the work of NAMRU’s foreign branches fully corresponds to the US national interests and strategic planning documents in the field of biosecurity and is aimed at controlling the biological situation in the areas where NATO military contingents are stationed.


At the same time, the activities of NAMRU’s foreign branches are not limited to the collection and export of pathogens.

Once again, the Pentagon is trying to promote the interests of large American pharmaceutical manufacturers, which are the main sponsors of the election campaign of representatives of the Democratic Party.

I draw your attention to the document of the US Department of Defense marked “for official use”, obtained during operational activities in the liberated Ukrainian territories. It is dated 2015 and concerns the system of clinical trials of medical means of countering viral fevers. The authors of the document, among them employees of the U.S. Army Institute of Infectious Diseases, planned to create a mobile rapid response unit designed to test new drugs in the locations of the U.S. armed forces around the world.

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The project included establishing a mobile research infrastructure and training medical personnel. Standardized protocols for human clinical trials and applications for registration of medical products were developed.

The algorithms of actions were supposed to be practiced in the area of responsibility of the U.S. Africa Command, and then spread them to all foreign branches of NAMRU.

Thus, the Pentagon planned to use the United States Armed Forces to test unregistered medical products on local populations and their subsequent approval by regulatory authorities for the benefit of so-called “Big Pharma”.

It was proposed to use a network of subordinate bio-laboratories and intermediary organizations, such as Metabiota, to realize these goals.


I also draw your attention to the commercial offer of Metabiota company marked “confidential”, which was found among the documents in one of the Ukrainian biolaboratories. The proposal is addressed to the U.S. Army Research Institute of Infectious Diseases and concerns the training of infectious disease specialists in Kenya and Uganda.

The document demonstrates that the U.S. Department of Defense’s Office of Threat Reduction (DITRA), the Department of Homeland Security, as well as the U.S. Agency for International Development and a number of EU structures are involved in the study of pathogens in the countries of the African continent.

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Metabiota’s involvement in the study of the H7N9 avian influenza virus has been confirmed, as well as its leading role in the implementation of the Predict project, which studied new species of coronaviruses and captured bats that carry them in the natural environment.

We have repeatedly noted the company’s connection with the son of the current U.S. President, Hunter Biden, and government agencies. At the same time, the representatives of Metabiota themselves admit that, in fact, they are engaged in networking to ensure the work of the Pentagon and other U.S. agencies abroad.

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Employees of the Ukrainian Science and Technology Center (USTC) and other contracting organizations of the U.S. Department of Defense were actively involved in these activities.

We will focus in more detail on their role in the implementation of the U.S. biological-military program, which led to the deterioration of the epidemic situation in many regions of the world in the next briefing.

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2023/07/ ... ig-pharma/

Ukraine War Takes its Toll on UK Politics
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on JULY 18, 2023
M. K. Bhadrakumar

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Volodymyr Zelenskiy, Rishi Sunak and Joe Biden at the Nato summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, on 12 July, 2023

The NATO Summit in Vilnius on June 11-12 turned out to be an anti-climax with the fractured relationship between the regime in Kiev and the Western powers surging. What is happening is more of an implosion than a Russian conspiracy

Certainly, the announcement by the UK Defence Secretary Ben Wallace that he will be leaving the cabinet and quitting politics is much more than about himself or British politics. Wallace had a special role in the Ukraine war, being the oldest member of the British cabinet at 52, a Sandhurst-trained soldier-politician who is well-liked in the NATO establishment at Brussels and an influential pillar of the Deep State in the UK, and, most important, a British politician who had close rapport with the leadership in Kiev and could influence the war more effectively than any European leader with the exception of Boris Johnson.

Wallace made the announcement just after the NATO’s Vilnius summit where he levelled some sharp criticism against the Kiev regime, which probably echoed a widely held sentiment among the allies. Of course, he upset the regime in Kiev — and probably10 Downing Street too for being so blunt at a time when nerves were fraught as NATO’s signal was not convincing enough for Zelensky. Zelensky publicly mocked Wallace, further embarrassing the Brits.

Wallace’s exit will spawn many theories, but to my mind, President Joe Biden’s vetoing of his candidacy for the post of the next secretary-general of the NATO played a significant part. Biden’s snub must be hard to stomach at a personal level. There is some merit in Zelensky’s key aide Oleksiy Danilov reacting that Wallace’s outburst in Vilnius displayed a surfeit of “emotion.”

Why was Biden was so staunchly opposed to the British proposal nominating Wallace as the next NATO chief? Evidently, the UK saw the secretary-generalship of NATO as a leap forward in its “Global Britain” project, as it desperately gnaws its way up the greasy pole of big-power politics. And the NATO establishment was positive about it.

The fine print here is that under Wallace, the alliance system would have most certainly taken a big leap forward in overt military intervention in the Ukraine war in some form — a process that Biden would have found it difficult to calibrate in American interests rather than Europe’s, as he has been successfully doing so far.

Make no mistake that Biden’s authorisation to deploy US reserve troops in Europe is a case in point underscoring why the White House will want to continue to exercise total control over the alliance system in Europe in the short and medium term while the weakening of Russia and its eviction from the centre stage of world politics remains an unfinished business.



That said, Wallace should have no big quarrel with the US’ war strategy in Ukraine, or for that matter, with Washington’s post-cold war containment strategy toward Russia. Wallace’s departure should make no difference to the future trajectory of the war, either.

In fact, Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson alleged today that the US and UK are ultimately responsible for the latest terrorist attack on the Crimean Bridge. But, interestingly, the Foreign Ministry statement later in the day avoided finger-pointing and merely. said, “If the investigation finds that the surface drones that attacked the bridge are of Western origin, and that Western countries played a role in planning, sponsoring and conducting this operation, it will confirm their complicity in the Kiev regime’s terrorist activity.”

The statement expressed the hope that “the international community and relevant multilateral agencies will put their foot down and give a proper assessment of yet another crime committed by the Ukrainian authorities.”

Wallace was Security Minister in the Home Office under PM Theresa May during the explosive controversy regarding the attempted assassination of ex-KGB fugitive and double agent Sergei Skripal in Salisbury in 2017. It was a defining moment. Britain is yet to produce a shred of evidence to substantiate its allegation of Russian complicity but has instead quietly shoved the controversy under the carpet after pushing the ties between the two countries to a free fall from where they never recovered, while Wallace’s political career got a big boost.

Will Wallace’s departure make much difference to Britain’s involvement in the Ukraine war? The answer is no. Undoubtedly, he was next only to Boris Johnson in his commitment to bleed and inflict a military defeat on Russia. During his watch, Britain took a lead role in providing Ukraine with long-range missiles and set an example. It is virtually certain that the SAS played a key role in most, if not all, of Kiev’s attacks on Russian territory. Wallace has been a solid pillar of the Deep State — and he almost made it to 10 Downing Street.

But, on the other hand, in a potential continental war, the British army today is a pale shadow of what it used to be — with a measly stockpile of 40 battle tanks in its inventory and a standing army of 78,060 active personnel, 27,570 Volunteer Reserve and 4060 Gurkhas. Probably, it weighed on Wallace. Indeed, Wallace sought a ramping up of military spending on a “war footing”, with leading military figures and hawks within the political elite backing him.

The Times reported in February that Wallace was pressing “[Chancellor] Jeremy Hunt to increase the defence budget by between £8 billion and £11 billion over the next two years to avoid deep cuts to the armed forces. Wallace was clear in spelling out that with the war against Russia, the military had to be prioritised to confront “growing” threats.

In an interview in February with Sky News, he argued, “Maybe a peace dividend was appropriate straight after the Cold War. We had huge armies in Europe. The Cold War finished and it was right that the taxpayer who’d invested in defence got a return on that. The problem is, that continued and has continued for many decades as the threat has increased. And I’ve been very open here that the threat has increased.”

In the event, though, the UK’s annual defence budget will be £5.8 billion higher in cash terms by the end of the current Spending Review period (£51.7 billion in 2024/25 compared with £45.9 billion in 2021/22). When adjusted for inflation, the increase in defence spending over this period is expected to be just about £1.1 billion.

Who can say Wallace’s departure has nothing to do with Ukraine war?

The Guardian noted that the “similar language” used by Wallace and the US National security Advisor Jake Sullivan in Vilnius “suggested a degree of coordination and marked a rare check on Ukraine’s repeated requests for military and diplomatic help at a summit designed to step up western support for Kviv, but without offering it an immediate pathway to Nato membership, which could lead to a direct war with Russia.”

But the intriguing part is that although Wallace has powerful supporters in the US, no one intervened to discourage him from throwing in the towel and walking away from the ring.

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2023/07/ ... -politics/

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On the consequences of the completion of the grain deal for European farmers
July 19, 2023
Rybar

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Recently, John Kirby, spokesman for the US National Security Council , said that American warships will not be used to escort transport ships with grain from Ukrainian ports. Allegedly, transportation by rail and road is now possible.

What is the real situation with the export of grain?
Currently, grain is exported from the territory of Ukraine by ships along the coastline to the territorial waters of Romania, where a grain exchange is organized on the basis of the port of Constanta . There the grain is reloaded onto larger ships for delivery to the EU. Part of the grain is transported by land routes.

Since now all grain will go completely “black” without any paperwork, Kirby’s statement should be viewed as a way to formally distance himself from participation in the illegal export of grain, material and cultural values ​​from the territory of Ukraine. The grain export channels will naturally be under the control of Western intelligence services, but in the media field this will allow us to talk about the lack of supplies and try to blame the Russian side for the difficult situation on the world food market.

Who is behind the reformatting of grain logistics?
We have already written about the sale of the Belgorod-Dniester commercial sea port , as well as the port of Ust-Dunaysk . Behind these operations are the structures of the Ukrainian oligarch Vitaly Kropachev , who has extensive connections with American businessmen and politicians, formed during the division of the Ukrainian energy industry. According to the estimates of the head of the State Enterprise "Ukrainian Sea Ports Administration" (AMPU) Oleksiy Vostrikov , in the near future the expected transshipment of the Danube ports will triple . The ultimate beneficiaries of the diversion of grain flows are likely to be American companies and banks that will not openly declare their participation. First of all, we are talking about JPMorgan andBlackrock .

How will the supply of Ukrainian grain affect the EU market?
Our colleagues have repeatedly pointed out that the supply of Ukrainian agricultural products causes serious economic damage to European farmers. The EU authorities successfully pretend that this problem can be solved through loans and subsidies to farmers. In fact, farmers are being forced to take out loans that, in a normal situation, they simply would not need. Due to uncontrolled deliveries of agricultural products from Ukraine, the EU leadership, represented by the President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen , received a serious lever of influence on the entire food market in Europe.

Who benefits from the ruin of European farmers?
EU agriculture used to be a fairly autonomous and sustainable sector of the economy. The EU food market is well covered by import duties, which protect it from external dumping, and by the internal mechanism of subsidies from states. But it is this market that has become the target of multinational corporations (TNCs) such as Monsanto (controlled by BlackRock ). Deliveries of agricultural products from Ukraine are used by them as a master key to gain unlimited access to the European market, in parallel with the replacement of subsidies to farmers for loans.

Under the guise of helping Ukraine, you can collapse prices and bankrupt tens of thousands of European farmers . And after their destruction, offer already centralized supplies of agricultural products from Monsanto. Products can be supplied from Ukraine, Brazil, Canada or Argentina. In parallel, this scheme will allow promoting the narrative about the eco-agenda. Because "only agricultural products from Monsanto" will have a "correct" carbon footprint and will comply with strict ESG regulations . This will be a non-alternative offer for European consumers. And BlackRock, through Monsanto, Cargill, and Dupont, has every chance of establishing a food monopoly for Europe.

https://rybar.ru/o-posledstviyah-zavers ... -agrariev/

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Russia Ready to Supply Free Grain to African Countries -Kremlin

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Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov. Jul. 18, 2023. | Photo: Twitter/@tassagency_en

Published 18 July 2023 (10 hours 48 minutes ago)

Moscow has received confirmation from 49 countries to participate in the Russia-Africa summit.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Tuesday that Russia is offering to replace Ukrainian grain supplies to needy countries free of charge after withdrawing from the grain deal.

Speaking to reporters, Peskov said that "the poorest countries in Africa have benefited the least" from the Black Sea initiative for Ukrainian grain exports.

These issues will be discussed at the Russia-Africa summit to be held in St. Petersburg on July 27–28. "We are in contact with our African partners; these contacts will continue at the St. Petersburg summit; we are preparing and waiting for them," the spokesman noted.

According to Alexander Polyakov, deputy head of the Africa Department of the Russian Foreign Ministry, Moscow has received confirmation from 49 countries to participate in the Russia-Africa summit.


Last March, Putin promised that Russia would send free food to the neediest African countries if it had to suspend the grain deal, which expired on July 17.

The Kremlin has said that as soon as the Russian part of the agreement is fulfilled, it will immediately resume the implementation of this agreement. Moscow had repeatedly denounced the parties' non-compliance with the obligations stipulated in the document and the initiative's discordance with the stated purposes.

The country is currently working to build "stable and independent of EU whims" food supply routes for countries in need, said Kiril Logvinov, Russia's acting permanent representative to the European Union.

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Fire forces mass evacuation in Crimea, Russia

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The authorities indicated that they are advancing in the temporary evacuation of the residents of four towns near the burned military camp. | Photo: www.abc.es
Posted 19 July 2023 (5 hours 52 minutes ago)

The authorities of the Russian territory of Crimea set up a crisis center to coordinate the evacuation of civilians in the vicinity of the military camp.

A fire in a military camp on the Crimean peninsula, Russia, forced the evacuation of more than 2,000 people on Wednesday, reported the local governor, Sergei Axiónov.

The authorities indicated that they are advancing in the temporary evacuation of residents of four towns near the military camp in the Kirov district.

They also indicated that they had set up a crisis center to coordinate the evacuation of civilians and announced the closure of the highway connecting Kerch, on the Azov Sea, with Sevastopol, on the Black Sea due to the fire.


The governor of the Russian territory of Crimea has not provided information on the causes of the fire in the military camp.

The Russian authorities did not confirm the explosion of ammunition or point to possible causes of the fire.


The day before, Russia also claimed to have frustrated another Ukrainian attack with 28 drones against the Crimea region.

Since the start of Russia's military special operation against Ukraine in February 2022, Crimea has been the target of frequent air and naval drone strikes.

https://www.telesurtv.net/multimedia/ru ... -0005.html

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Re: Footnotes from the Ukrainian "Crisis"; New High-Points in Cynicism Part IV

Post by blindpig » Thu Jul 20, 2023 11:32 am

The Black Sea without agreement
POSTED BY @NSANZO ⋅ 07/20/2023

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Last week, before it was confirmed whether the Ukrainian grain export agreement was going to be extended, the last of the shipments sailed from the port of Odessa under the guarantees of what was agreed by Russia and Ukraine with Turkey and the United Nations in a separate negotiation that involved two treaties and two signatures instead of one. Although the agreement required the active collaboration of the two countries in the development of the plans, in the routes, schedules and in the records to prevent arms trafficking, Ukraine did not want to stage the moment with a joint photograph. Since the breakdown of negotiations in March 2022 in Istanbul, where the two delegations could be seen together and capable of showing a cordial relationship -perhaps excessively cordial judging by the fact that David Arajamia has gone from leading that delegation to being practically forgotten-, the little diplomacy that can exist between the two occurs either away from the cameras or through third parties. A mixture of the two was forged, for example, the agreement whereby Denis Prokopenko and other Azov commanders and units of the Ukrainian Armed Forces that had been captured in Mariupol were handed over to Turkey, a country that, after breaking its word on that occasion, is now separately negotiating a way to maintain exports through the Black Sea.

Hours after Russia confirmed, after the Ukrainian attack on the Crimean bridge, that it was ceasing its cooperation with Turkey and Ukraine and that it was once again considering the Black Sea as a dangerous scenario, Volodymyr Zelensky stated that exports would continue regardless of Moscow's position. The Ukrainian president thus wanted to show that Russia's role is irrelevant and that his government can continue to act without the guarantees that Moscow was part of that agreement. However, this bravado did not last more than a few hours and in the morning the Ukrainian administration began to demand that its partners and the United Nations force Russia to return to the defunct agreement.

The few days that elapse between the expiration of the grain export pact make it impossible to assess the effect that the new situation will have on the world market and on global food security. Although without data to support their argument, representatives of Ukraine and its allied countries have immediately begun a broad campaign to blame Russia for the risks of a worsening world situation. It is alleged, on the one hand, the increase in prices, something that represents an obvious danger for the poorest countries and, above all, for those that depend to a greater extent on imports to feed their population. The disappearance of the Ukrainian grain from the world market supposes, in effect, an upward rebound in prices due to the decrease in available product. However,

The second argument, the most widespread these days due to a conscious and organized campaign to undermine Russia's image in the countries of the global south, with which Moscow tries in many cases to recover the levels of relations it maintained with the Soviet Union, is to link the grain agreement with world food security. The idea that Russia was using starvation as a weapon is not new, and it emerged just after the naval blockade of Ukraine began in the first weeks of the war. Neither then nor now, however, did the Ukrainian hypocrisy of someone who claimed to be concerned about world food security when she had consciously acted to create a famine situation in a territory that she claimed to consider her own arise. That was the logic of the blockade of Donbass, imposed by Petro Poroshenko and continued by Volodymyr Zelensky. Poroshenko even went so far as to announce, without even trying to hide his joy, the start of “hunger riots” in the Donetsk region. Only access to the Russian border and the assistance provided over eight years by public and private institutions in Moscow prevented thosefamine riots that only existed in the mind of Petro Poroshenko really occurred or that a catastrophic humanitarian situation that did occur in specific areas of the front - Pervomaisk and other front-line towns in the RPL - spread in the first winter of war.

It is also questionable the very argument that is currently the focus of the argument of the countries allied with Ukraine, headed, as it could not be otherwise, by the United States. Both the NATO countries and António Guterres, the United Nations secretary general who waited until the last weekend of the agreement to present Russia with a proposal that was not even viable, have focused their anger on the fact that it is the most vulnerable countries in the world that are paying the price for Russia's unwillingness to comply with an agreement. All of them deliberately forget that, despite the fact that Russia had fulfilled its part, it had not received the compensation that was promised. It is not, in this case, a purely economic argument, since Russia has insisted that it is willing to deliver the grain for free to the poorest countries. As was the case with the Minsk agreements, Moscow has spent a year waiting for one part of the agreement to be fulfilled while fulfilling its own. And now it finds itself in the spotlight accused of “starving” the global south.

To be sure, the loss of market access for one of the world's top five grain producers – at least in peacetime, it is hard to gauge what the Ukrainian crop will be this year – disproportionately hurts poorer countries, though the same can be said for the absence of Russian grain from the market. This produces a situation similar to that given in the gas sector, in which the increase in prices and the loss of access to one of the main markets, the Russian one, has meant the need to go to new suppliers. And while countries that have imposed sanctions, such as those of the European Union, have managed to cover their needs by paying higher prices, they have caused an impossible situation for countries that, without having imposed sanctions, have seen how rich countries monopolized, for example, the liquefied natural gas market, causing serious energy crises in places like Pakistan or Uzbekistan. The disruptions that have occurred in the last year and a half in the grain market undoubtedly affect the poorest countries, especially those most dependent on imports.

In this situation is a country that in the last hours has appeared in the discourse of Ukraine, the United States or Canada and that perfectly reflects Western hypocrisy. This is Yemen, a country whose food security problems have not been caused or worsened by the naval blockade of Ukraine but by the blockade imposed by Saudi Arabia, whose war is only possible due to the military and logistical support of countries like the United States or the United Kingdom, which now say they are concerned about their dramatic situation. Indeed, Yemen is on the list of countries that have received Ukrainian grain in the last year. The State Department mentions two shipments delivered by the World Food Program. In one of them it is mentioned that the load could feed four million people for a month,

It is not Vladimir Putin who is starving Yemen but Ukraine's allies, who, in order to support an ally, have chosen to hide the serious situation in one of the poorest countries in the world. The cynicism of some countries that are now using this suffering to which they have been complicit for years is even greater when verifying the destination of Ukrainian exports throughout this last year. All the available information indicates that Yemen, like many other countries in need, is in the category of "others", far relegated in the list of countries that have received the most Ukrainian grain. What's more, there are three countries that have received the bulk of this product: China, Spain and Turkey. The fact that countries like Poland, Romania or Slovakia have asked the European Union to maintain the veto on Ukrainian grain also shows the weight of land exports. Ukraine must be free to trade such important products as grain. However, you cannot manipulate reality to make it fit your speech. That's what, with the invaluable help of his partners, he's doing right now.

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The Russian demand to reconnect its agricultural bank to the SWIFT system is not an impossible demand. The sanctions have made it possible to keep Russian banks connected to the international payment system so that countries, including those of the European Union, do not lose access, for example, to Russian liquefied gas. As with the Ukrainian grain, Spain is one of the countries that is taking advantage of it. The same motives that Western countries are using to demonize Russia are enough to argue that both Russian and Ukrainian grain and Russian fertilizers need to be returned to the world market. And it is not only the Russian blockade but also the disconnection of the banks and the secondary sanctions, which indirectly prevent -albeit openly conscious- Russian products from being released to the market, those that may worsen prospects for food security in the global south. Among accusations against Moscow for "weaponizing hunger", the West also seeks to hide the role it plays in making it as difficult as possible for the circulation of Russian fertilizers, as important or even more so for world food security as grain from the two countries, both major producers worldwide.

With no solution in sight, Russia confirmed yesterday that it considers the humanitarian corridor through which exports transited closed and added that it will consider each ship that transits through it as a potential suspect of carrying weapons. The countries whose flags are flown by those ships will also be considered as potential participants in the conflict. The absence of security guarantees on the part of Russia made the normal participation of commercial ships in a corridor that, in practice, had already become military unfeasible. The latest Russian threat is yet another step in an escalation of insecurity in the Black Sea, one that could have been easily prevented had the will to do so existed.

https://slavyangrad.es/2023/07/20/el-ma ... more-27758

Google Translator

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Chronicle of the special military operation for July 19, 2023
July 19, 2023
Rybar

For the second night in a row, the Russian Armed Forces launched a massive attack on the rear facilities of the Armed Forces of Ukraine throughout Ukraine. The targets included port infrastructure and warehouses in Odessa , as well as the Kanatovo airbase in the Kirovograd region .

The enemy, in turn, attacked the Crimean Peninsula . In the early morning, Ukrainian formations attacked an ammunition depot south of the airfield in the Kirov region . Local residents were quickly resettled. According to some reports, Storm Shadow or SCALP cruise missiles could have been used to strike.

Heavy fighting continues on the fronts. On the northern sector of the front, the Russian Armed Forces are confidently advancing, knocking out the enemy from strongholds near Svatovo and Kremennaya , as well as in the direction of Kupyansk . The situation near Bakhmut is stably difficult, the enemy is furiously counterattacking.

On the southern sector of the front, the situation is still tense. Enemy maneuver groups, supported by armored vehicles, are trying to push through the defenses of the RF Armed Forces, in some places this is achieved at the cost of significant losses. Western military equipment continues to burn in the steppes of the Zaporozhye region .

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Massed strikes of the RF Armed Forces

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For the second night in a row, Russian troops have launched massive strikes against targets in Ukraine, using, among other things, Geran-2 kamikaze drones and Kalibr cruise missiles. The Russian Ministry of Defense announced the defeat of military industry facilities and fuel infrastructure, ammunition depots in the Odessa region , as well as the Kanatovo airbase in the Kirovograd region .

The Ukrainian authorities called last night one of the most difficult since the beginning of the special operation and have already rushed to request additional SAMP-T or Patriot air defense systems from Western partners. Such requests are not surprising - for the second night, footage appears on the Web of how air defense units endanger the inhabitants of Odessa with their work, launching anti-aircraft missiles in the direction of residential buildings.

In Odessa , port and industrial infrastructure, as well as ammunition depots, came under fire. From the Ukrainian side, grain and oil terminals, as well as tanks and loading equipment in the ports of Chornomorsk and Odessa were reported to have been hit . The authorities also confessed to hitting an industrial facility and warehouses in the Odesa region . In addition, there were reports of the defeat of bridges across the Dniester estuary in Zatoka and across the Dniester in Mayaki - however, local residents denied this information.

Amid the strikes, Western analysts said that after the end of the grain deal, Russia imposed a naval blockade of Ukraine. Evidence of this is both the blocking of 12 cargo ships in the ports of Odessa and Nikolaev, and the absence of dry cargo ships that have entered the country since the beginning of night raids.

In the Kirovograd region, local residents reported a series of powerful explosions in the Kirovograd region . As representatives of the Russian Ministry of Defense clarified, the Kanatovo air base northeast of the city was hit. In the Nikolaev region , Russian troops hit the location of Ukrainian formations in the hotel complex in the city of Koblevo .

In the Zhytomyr region , kamikaze drones successfully overcame air defense and attacked an industrial facility. Explosions also thundered in the vicinity of Zaporozhye , Sumy and Kiev - most likely, this was the result of the work of Ukrainian air defense systems.

It is significant that the Russian authorities this time avoided wording about the continuation of "retaliation strikes" for the terrorist attack on the Crimean bridge . It is correct: such raids should not be tied to any political events, since their key rationale is the destruction of enemy infrastructure.

APU attack on a warehouse in Crimea

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At 04.30 Ukrainian formations attacked an ammunition depot south of the airfield in the Kirovsky district of Crimea . A fire broke out at the scene, and people from the surrounding villages were temporarily relocated.

Two Majors write that the Grom-2 operational-tactical missile system was used for the attack. This option is possible, but in this case it is worth remembering that the strikes from the Thunder stopped a couple of months ago.

Due to the flaws in the complex, the accuracy and efficiency of the OTRK turned out to be not so high. In recent missile raids, the Armed Forces of Ukraine used missiles converted to a ballistic trajectory from the S-200 air defense system. But they, as a rule, are knocked down.

According to some reports, Storm Shadow / SCALP cruise missiles may have been used for the strike . Even though our air defense units are adapting to them, British-French weapons are still dangerous due to their characteristics.

This version does not particularly fit the use of three missiles at once in one warehouse , but for a strike for sure (if suddenly one of them would be shot down by air defense calculations), this is possible.

And if this is confirmed, then this will be the first use of long-range cruise missiles on the Crimean peninsula.

The situation on the front line and the fighting

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Near Kupyansk, the Russian Armed Forces continue to push through the defenses north of a large settlement. Progress is on the left bank of the river Oskol River , at the same time as the destruction of the reserves drawn up by the Armed Forces of Ukraine by artillery. Despite this, the enemy is still trying to counterattack.

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The offensive of the RF Armed Forces also continues in the Svatovsko-Kremensky sector. The front is gradually moving west, despite the enemy's attempts to counterattack in the area of ​​the Kremensky forests and Serebryansky forestry. In addition, according to some reports, Belogorovka is being stormed. is being stormed , but there is no specifics at the moment.

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The situation in the Soledar direction remains tense. To the north of Bakhmut, fighting continues in the vicinity of the Berkhovsky reservoir , albeit with decreasing intensity. The enemy is trying to advance in the Dubovo area - Vasilevka area , operating in small groups with the support of light armored vehicles and artillery. The RF Armed Forces stop the attacks with artillery fire.

To the south of Bakhmut, heavy fighting is going on in the Kleshcheevka area , where the enemy is throwing more and more reinforcements, trying to hold on to the adjacent landings and the fortified area on the heights. In addition, the maneuver groups of the Armed Forces of Ukraine tried to break into Andreevka , south of Kleshcheevka. There, the enemy was stopped in the landings, where battles were going on during the day.

We also received confirmation of our information about heavy fighting for the fortified area northwest of Kleshcheevka. On the channel of the 4th motorized rifle brigade of the Russian Armed Forces @z4lpr published footage of the work of artillery on the fortified area occupied by the enemy and the consequences of multiple strikes were published. Ukrainian formations suffered heavy losses, and, apparently, at least partially rolled back, leaving many bodies and broken equipment on the territory of the fortified area. Now the fortified area, if not occupied by Russian military personnel, is at least located in the "gray zone".

In the Donetsk direction, positional clashes continue in the Avdiivka sector. Ukrainian formations from time to time try to regain control over the lost territories, but Russian units quickly stop all attacks. In the area of ​​Marinka, servicemen of the RF Armed Forces continue to fight both in the city itself and to the north-west towards Krasnogorovka .

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In the Vremievsky sector, fighting continues in the area of ​​\u200b\u200bthe Grusheva and Staromayorsky beams . Artillery of the RF Armed Forces is actively working on enemy units.

At the same time, the Ukrainian command is building up forces for a new major attack, trying to break through the Russian defenses in this sector of the front.

In the Orekhovsky sector, the enemy does not abandon attempts to roll on Russian positions in the Rabotino area . Russian troops continue to hold the settlement and destroy armored vehicles supplied by the West.

On the Kherson directionArtillery duels and enemy attempts to transfer troops to the opposite bank continueAt the same time, Russian troops are inflicting precise strikes on enemy targets in the Kherson and Berislav regions.

Shelling of rear territories and residential areas

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Ukrainian formations continue to shell the border settlements of the Kursk region . The governor of the region, Roman Starovoit, said that three arrivals were recorded in Sudzha , a residential building was severely damaged, neighboring buildings were cut by fragments, and a fire broke out. In addition, there are reports of the shelling of Guevo , however, there are no official comments and additional information yet. In Elizavetovka , according to Shot, a UAV with a drop system attacked an agricultural enterprise, hitting the machine yard of Pobeda LLC , without any casualties or damage.

Ukrainian formations continued to inflict massive strikes on the settlements of the Donetsk agglomeration : Gorlovka , Makeevka , Yasinovataya , Staromikhaylovka and Donetsk were under enemy fire . Residential buildings and civil infrastructure facilities were damaged. In the Petrovsky district of the DPR capital, 20 transformer substations were shelled, and 1,800 subscribers were temporarily without power supply. In Makiivka, a pregnant woman and a girl were injured.

In the Zaporozhye region, the Armed Forces of Ukraine fired on Vasilyevka . Buildings, roads were damaged, a gas pipe was broken.

The Armed Forces of Ukraine did not stop shelling settlements on the left bank of the Dnieper. Civilian objects were damaged in Novaya Kakhovka , Kakhovka , Saga , Proletarka , Hola Pristan and Solontsy . In addition, Ukrainian drones attacked a residential building in Novoaleksandrivka : by a happy coincidence, no one was hurt.

Political events
Statements of the Russian Ministry of Defense on the "grain deal"

In connection with the termination of the functioning of the “Black Sea Initiative” and the curtailment of the maritime humanitarian corridor, from 00:00 Moscow time on July 20, 2023 , all ships moving in the Black Sea to Ukrainian ports will be considered as potential carriers of military cargo .

The flag countries of such ships will be considered involved in the Ukrainian conflict on the side of the Kiev regime.

A number of sea areas in the northwestern and southeastern parts of the international waters of the Black Sea have been declared temporarily dangerous for navigation .

Appropriate informational warnings about the withdrawal of safety guarantees to seafarers were issued in accordance with the established procedure.

Statements by Russian President Vladimir Putin on the "grain deal"

The grain deal was concluded exactly one year ago, on July 22, 2022. Russia again and again extended this deal, showed miracles of endurance and patience .

No one in the West was going to fulfill the agreements , they only constantly demanded something from Russia - outright arrogance and unceremoniousness.

The West did everything to derail the grain deal, they spared no effort in this.

The withdrawal from the sanctions of Russian exports of grain and fertilizers to world markets has not been implemented, although Russia is ready to supply its own grain and replace Ukrainian grain, including on a gratuitous basis .

Russia is obstructed even for the donation of Russian fertilizers to the poorest countries.

The grain deal resulted in direct losses for Russian farmers in the amount of $1.2 billion.

What Russia needs is not promises and ideas about connecting to the SWIFT system as part of a grain deal, what is needed is action .

One of the basic conditions for Russia's return to the grain deal is a return to its humanitarian essence.

About new arms deliveries

Washington announced a new $1.3 billion military aid package to Ukraine. It will include UAVs, including loitering ammunition, 4 NASAMS air defense systems , anti-tank systems, 152-mm artillery shells, electronic warfare and anti-UAV equipment, tractors, fuel trucks, repair and recovery vehicles and communications equipment.

https://rybar.ru/hronika-speczialnoj-vo ... 2023-goda/

Google Translator

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From Cassad's Telegram account:

Colonelcassad
🐷#countergrunt
🪖#Opponent

On the offensive offensive and defense - the last reserves from the new mechanized brigades are leaving. So 116, 117, 118 brigades - together went to strengthen the attack on the Zaporozhye front. In addition to them, by the way, the " Offensive Guard " joined the offensive ( what is it ?). In particular, "Kara-Dag", "Spartan", "Azov" (yes, these are the basics of the National Guard of the 15th brigade of the NGU , and not the 3rd ODShBr) - deployed between Rabotino and Novopokrovka. And to the north, the Novopokroyks sent the National Guard to reinforce: 11 (Mikhail Grushevsky) and 27 (Pecherskaya).

By the way, Azov people from Turkey - they ended up in Azov NSU, which is now near Rabotino, which means there is a chance this time not to be taken prisoner.

Well, 41 brigade was sent near Kupyansk and it seems that 44 will join it soon (but not yet exactly). Our offensive in the Svatov direction has not only "eaten" part of the offensive potential of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, but now it will be more difficult to stop it.

Comparing with the so-called "leaked report" ( you can see the approximate equipment of the brigades ), which allegedly revealed the plans of the Armed Forces of Ukraine for the offensive - the image shows all the new brigades and which of them are already involved ( the location can be viewed on the map https://map-own. rf ).

offensive in the south
🟩33 mech. brigade
🟩47 fur. brigade
🟩21 brigade
🟩47 art brigade
🟩32 mech. brigade
🟩23 mech. brigade
🟩116 mech. brigade
🟩117 fur. brigade
🟩118 mech. brigade

Avdiivka
🟥142 brigade

Kleshcheevka
🟥22 bigada

Kremennaya
🟥42 brigade
🟥21 brigade
🟥32 brigade

Kupyansk
🟥88 brigade
🟥41 brigade

☑️On June 10, 1/3 was involved ( infographic )

☑️1/3 of all new brigades - is not directed to the Zaporozhye direction.

✅Accordingly, at the moment, the Armed Forces of Ukraine have involved about 2/3 of the new brigades. Moreover, the readiness of the remaining ones is questionable.

In addition, the enemy began to actively engage " separate rifle battalions ". They are sent to the front line and attached to the brigades while they send the line battalions on rotation. But more about them another time.

https://t.me/s/boris_rozhin

Google Translator

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The war in Ukraine: Towards the collapse of the West’s reputation
Originally published: Donbass Insider on July 15, 2023 by Oleg Nesterenko (more by Donbass Insider) | (Posted Jul 19, 2023)

After the bipolar world that existed from the end of the Second World War until the implosion of the Soviet Union in December 1991, the current conflict on the territory of Ukraine is the point of gravity in the process of transition between two great eras of contemporary history: the old—unipolar—that has lasted for the last 30 years and the new—multipolar—post-hegemonic, that came into being at the end of February 2022.

Although I’m not much of a follower of communist theories, I can’t help noticing that today’s events are nothing more than a modern adaptation, a reflection in the mirror of the old principle of revolutions expressed by Vladimir Lenin as long ago as 1913 in his book “The First May of the Revolutionary Proletariat“: the lower classes no longer want to live in the old way, while the upper classes can no longer govern in the old way. In other words, the impossibility for the ruling class to maintain its domination in an unchanged form. Today, the ‘upper classes’ are the Western world revolving around the United States of America and the ‘lower classes’—the rest of humanity.

Once again, history teaches the “elites” nothing and eras are replaced in the same way as a century ago: with violence.

The rhetoric about the defence of freedom, democracy and the noble, and therefore Western, values that Ukraine represents and defends are nothing more than the “Atlanticist” narratives developed via the propaganda apparatus of the mainstream media, in order to justify to the pre-formatted electoral masses the controversial initiatives undertaken by the representatives of the current power of the Americano-centric collective Western bloc. Narratives far removed from the tragic Ukrainian reality of power.

Without going into detail about the profound interests of the United States of America in the war in Ukraine that has been going on there since 2014, interests directly based on the global strategy of defending the existential elements for the American state (see my analysis “the war in Ukraine: The Genesis”), it should be noted that the achievement of their pre-established objectives was reflected in the significant politico-economic weakening of Russia on the one hand, as one of the major players vis-à-vis the petrodollar system and, on the other, as a strategic partner of China both in the economic sphere, in which the two countries have a genuine complementarity, and in the politico-diplomatic and military-technological spheres.

The Anglo-Saxon trap
The United States of America has found itself faced with an existential dilemma: on the one hand, the positive scenario for Washington in the outcome of this war is becoming more and more unattainable by the day; on the other, the Americans cannot afford not to get involved in the ongoing confrontation.

Victory is vital to the global reputation of the United States and its European partners as the world’s leading political and military power—vital to the future of Western civilisation.

What was hardly an existential element at the start of the conflict—became one with the open and radical engagement of the entire Western bloc in hostilities. There is no turning back.

Given the specific nature of the internal political situation in the United States, conditioned by its recent military defeats in Syria and Afghanistan, it was not possible for the United States to enter the war alone or only in tandem with the Anglo-Saxon world. The Anglo-Saxon world, in which it was not necessary to convince the United Kingdom to take part in the conflict, given the process initiated by China and Russia in the collapse of neo-colonial networks, particularly British ones, on the dark continent, which will ultimately have very serious repercussions for the financial system of the City of London—the traditional centre for the gigantic revenues from the exploitation of Africa’s raw materials.

In-depth work has certainly been done in Brussels. The European Union and its member countries have fallen into the American-British trap, which has stimulated the egos of the elites of the old continent with the grandeur and domination of the past. A continent that is in constant decline with the emergence of new ideological centres of gravity in China and Russia. They were offered the chance to regain their grandeur and dominance by entering into a war, believed to have been won in advance, against the new challengers.

From “blitzkrieg” to war of attrition
Initially, when the new phase of the war began, it was expected that sanctions against the Russian Federation on a scale unprecedented in contemporary history, implemented by the collective West under the patronage of Washington and supported under political and economic pressure by part of the non-Western world from the very first days of the war, would have shattered the Russian economy in a matter of months and set it on the pre-calculated path to inevitable collapse, turning Russia into a pariah state. A pariah state not for a few months or years, but for an entire future era.

However, as soon as the sanctions were introduced, worrying signs emerged of the unexpected resilience of the Russian economy, in parallel with the refusal of the major non-Western players to condemn Moscow’s initiative on the territory of Ukraine, despite the extraordinary “Atlanticist” coercion.

The United States of America found itself unable to unite the non-Western world around it in its anti-Russian project. The primary plan that should have worked against Russia in the short term, in a matter of weeks or even months, failed completely.

The collapse of the Russian economy, which did not take place, was one of the key reasons for the war in Ukraine. In particular, in order to ensure that at the major phase of the United States’ future confrontation with China, Russia could not afford any significant support for its strategic Asian partner under the threat of new sanctions that the country with an economy that was supposed to be wiped out would not be able to withstand—it was necessary to change the strategy.

American action has therefore been fundamentally reviewed from the ground up and turned towards a strategy of long-term attrition. A strategy that could not work without the initially unforeseen element: the financing of Ukrainian power on an unprecedented scale. To this end, a line of credit unprecedented in modern history was opened in favour of Kiev.

Negotiations with Russia on its knees
Some experts in the “Atlanticist” camp, echoing the slogans put out by Kiev’s propaganda to their masses, advocate as an indispensable objective the return of Ukraine to its 1991 borders, presenting it as perfectly feasible. In other words, the return to Russia and the establishment of Kiev’s power over cities such as Donetsk and Lugansk in the Donbass and Simferopol with Sevastopol in Crimea. It should be remembered that the main reason for Russia’s recovery of Crimea was the imminent danger, following the 2014 coup in Kiev, of the loss of the Russian naval base in Sevastopol and its operational takeover by NATO naval forces.

Those who seriously envisage such a scenario are nothing more than a grotesque caricature and an insult to the title of expert. There is no need to detail their position and to point out that the probability of Ukraine taking over, for example, the Russian military port of Sevastopol is infinitely lower than the massive use of nuclear weapons in the current conflict. That said, the use of the nuclear component of Russia’s defence in the current conflict is currently close to zero.

Today, the objective of the armed wing of the collective West is to win a maximum number of elements on the ground and then to negotiate from a position of strength against Russia, which is supposed to be shaken.

A disconcerting form of amateurism and ignorance of the quasi-genetic reasoning of the Russian people does not allow the authors of this strategy to understand that the key negotiation from a position of weakness, even if it were to take place, on elements vital to the Russian Federation is totally inconceivable for the latter and will never take place.

If, as a result of a series of events, Russia were, hypothetically, to be placed in a position of weakness, it would not be a negotiation, so much hoped for, more than naively, by the collective West in the face of a weakened Russia, but a retreat followed by a reconsolidation and remobilisation of the means available to the Russian Federation to return to its positions of domination of the situation.

It should be emphasised that in the current economic and military circumstances, on the one hand, of the NATO countries and, on the other, of Russia, the probability of the Western scenario being realised in the years to come is mathematically close to zero.

It is interesting to note that there are a number of highly respected American analysts, including a former head of the State Department’s foreign policy planning department, who consider that not only would a major defeat in the current Ukrainian offensive, so much promoted among the Western masses in order to keep up the momentum needed to continue financing the conflict, be catastrophic, but also a hypothetical major victory by the Ukrainian army in this undertaking would be no less catastrophic than defeat.

This type of analysis is not the sign of schizophrenia or split personality, but of a deep and lucid understanding of the processes underway: Russia’s reaction will follow and will be proportional to the need to annihilate a new serious threat.

Nevertheless, I can only reassure the analysts in question: taking into account the strategic elements of the forces of the parties to the conflict to date, there is virtually no risk that the current initiative by Kiev, pushed by its creditors, will succeed. And the likelihood of it being so successful in the long term as to cause Moscow to reconsider its strategy towards Ukraine is, quite simply, non-existent.

Breaking taboos
Today, the understanding of the reality on the ground of the operations, which differs greatly from the war plan initially envisaged, is leading the Western bloc towards a form of operational panic which is reflected in the chaotic increase in additional military aid that is totally unforeseen for the executing agent in the confrontation on the ground—the Ukrainian army.

This chaotic increase is reflected in the crossing of taboos established by the Western leaders themselves, such as the delivery to Ukraine of depleted uranium shells, Western tanks and future deliveries of American (and then European?) fighter planes, proportionally reducing the room for manoeuvre before the outbreak of direct hostilities between the Russian and NATO armies.

In particular, the specific nature of the operation of the F-16 fighter jets that will shortly be supplied to Kiev is such that it is totally impossible to carry it out entirely, autonomously, on Ukrainian territory. And depending on the proportional role of the air bases located, in particular, in Poland and Romania, in the operation of the aircraft in question—the Russian general staff will decide whether or not to bomb them. If the F-16s are refuelled with ammunition outside Ukraine, Russian strikes on the locations in question will be practically inevitable, because, according to the laws of war, the countries targeted will be considered as belligerents, direct participants in the fighting.

The U.S. military drone shot down by the Russian warplane over the Black Sea is just a modest prelude to the large-scale military confrontation that may yet take place between Russia and the Atlantic alliance and, according to current Russian military doctrine, could lead to the use of tactical nuclear weapons against enemy targets.

Les réalités du potentiel russe
For its part, Moscow’s satisfaction with the outcome of the conflict in Ukraine is also an existential issue for the Russian Federation.

A hypothetical defeat is totally inconceivable for the Kremlin, as it is for the Russian people, as it would lead directly to the internal and external collapse of the country. As a result, the West is making a serious miscalculation in believing that even a hypothetical success for the Ukrainian offensive could change the course of the war and lead to victory for the powers that be in Kiev.

The only reality is that this will only accelerate the growth of Russia’s active military forces on the front and prolong the duration of the war. The fatal outcome for Kiev’s interests is an unshakeable constant.

The return of territories in the Donetsk and Lugansk regions, including their capitals, to the control of the Kiev authorities can only appeal to minds wandering in the realms of fantasy. Similarly, talk of the return of the Crimean peninsula to the Ukrainian state is a sign of a simple lack of intelligence and a profound disconnect from reality.

Why is this?

If, hypothetically, the situation on the ground of military operations were to deteriorate to the point where there was a real danger of losing the territories of the Donbass and Crimea admitted to the Russian Federation—which has never been the case, not for a single day since 2015—Russia would commit the full extent of its military capabilities and achieve its objectives in any eventuality.

The reality, very carefully hidden by the Western powers from their public, is unequivocal: during the Second World War, Russia committed 60% of its GDP to defeat Nazi Germany. Today, without recalling the fact that the Russian economy is doing incomparably better than even the most pessimistic forecasts from the Atlantic camp had predicted, that Russia is anything but isolated from the rest of the world, that the Russian arms industry has increased its production by a factor of 2.7 in one year—I would like to recall another reality which is the answer to all the questions and doubts that may exist on the subject: to date, the Russian Federation has committed only 3% of its GDP to the war effort against NATO in Ukraine.

I leave it to you to imagine the scale and speed of the disaster for the Western camp if Russia decided to commit not 60%, but 6%, instead of 3% of its GDP to the conflict.

The reason for not further increasing the share of GDP involved in the conflict in Ukraine is very simple: the calculations show that there is no need to do so in order to achieve the pre-established objectives.

Similarly, if absolutely necessary, not hundreds of thousands, but millions of extra soldiers will be needed at the front—not an impossible task with a population of over 146 million. And it’s not the manufacture of hundreds, but thousands of new tanks and combat aircraft a year that can be industrially implemented in a relatively short space of time.

If Russia were to suffer hypothetical strategic losses on the battlefield—it would not be the long-awaited Russian retreat and capitulation that would take place—only deranged minds totally ignorant of the mentality of the Russian people could envisage such a scenario—but only the escalation of the confrontation and the significant increase in the war effort that would take place.

It is deplorable to note that the decision-makers currently in power in the West have not been able to learn the major element concerning them in the great lesson of history and greatly underestimate the unparalleled capacity of the Russian people to mobilise to defeat the enemy, as soon as the threshold of existential danger for the country is reached.

Russia is a long way from such a threshold, and I can only hope for the sake of Western countries that it will never be reached.

Civilisation risk
After centuries of influence and exposure of the non-Western world to the model of the exemplary success of Western society, we have now reached the point of exposure of an entirely different nature: that of the degeneration and destruction at increasing speed of the values and societal principles that have forged Western civilisation over the last two thousand years.

The politicians who have now seized power over most of the old continent are incapable of understanding that the rest of the world’s growing rejection of the Western model—and the war in Ukraine has only served to accentuate the process and make the masks come off, is based on the rejection of the new Western societal ideology centred on neo-liberalism and the domination of the interests of various minorities over those of the majority—which is, in itself, the project of “anti-society”.

What appealed yesterday—hardly appeals today.

Virtually all the European heads of state to date have been traitors to their nations, and one of the few great qualities they have in common is that they have exponentially increased the debts of the countries they represent, and imposed on the major interests of the nations those of the destructive minorities who are increasingly depriving the majority of their rights and freedoms, and who are at the same time showing themselves to be increasingly discontented and insatiable.

From February 2022, observing the flagrant double standards applied by the Western community, observing the totally illegal confiscation under international law, the theft of Russian financial reserves—the countries of the non-Western world are moving away from the latter at an accelerated pace, rightly realising that they may be the next victims.

The collapse of the West’s reputation as the land of law has taken place.

Following this initial collapse, the collapse of the West’s collective politico-military reputation in the eyes of the rest of the world is inevitable.

No Western commitment guaranteed by its military strength will be credible any more. The repeated prolongations of the massive investments in the war on the territory of Ukraine are only due to the attempt to nuance the major damage that the image of the “Atlanticist” power and military credibility will undergo. The unprecedented scale of investment is directly proportional to an understanding of the scale of the reputational disaster that will follow.

The motivation of the Western camp is all the stronger because behind the global reputation it is the reputation and the purely personal political future of the leaders involved that are at stake.

Nevertheless, if for the United States of America, taken separately, the interests at stake go far beyond the single element of its reputation—the war in Ukraine is merely a demonstration of an intermediate stage in the United States’ struggle for survival in its current state, which is inconceivable without the safeguarding and expansion of the monopolies and the safeguarding of unipolar political-military or, For the countries of the European Union, however, their continued involvement in the Russian-Ukrainian conflict is no more than a question of “saving face” that can still be nuanced.

So, for the EU Member States, there is an alternative path, a way out of the deep crisis of their engagement with the Russian Federation: a change of government followed by a significant rebound in national sovereignty, whose indicators today are at their lowest since 1944, and a return to the policy of protecting traditional societal values which have proved their worth and which are the only ones to be constructive and viable in the long term and the only ones not to be rejected by the rest of the world.

A change of government at the level of sovereign states, with the future political leaders stopping the military and financial assistance to the Kiev regime, coupled with a clear disengagement from the policies pursued by the predecessors now in power, who will thus largely absorb the reputational disaster.

This is the only way out of the crisis Europe is currently experiencing that is not disastrous, but which nevertheless seems highly unlikely to be achieved in the time span covering the conflict in Ukraine. This is because, at present, there is no political force in Europe that is prepared to go against the tide and run the guaranteed risk of losing the electorate, which has been over-educated and formatted by the tools of mass manipulation, such as the filtering and distortion of reality as part of the “Atlanticist” propaganda war waged by the mass media.

Choosing the future
Today, the countries of the world are faced with a strategic choice. A choice that will either leave them in the position they have been in for decades, or change their perception and role on the international stage: remain in the wake and under the direct or indirect domination of the American military-monetary power, backed by the old continent, or change the vector of their foreign policy and join the multipolar alliance which is, from now on, embodied by the members of the BRICS which, since its creation in 2006, has demonstrated itself to be a viable structure of sound economic cooperation, built on the fundamental principles of non-interference, equal rights and mutual benefit.

Contrary to the narratives propagated by the American-centric mass media, the new formula for relations initiated by the Russian Federation is winning over more and more countries that see the failure of the system of economic cooperation based on the Western model to serve their national interests.

The BRICS organisation, made up of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, represents more than 40% of the Earth’s population and more than a quarter of its GDP and surface area. In June and November 2022, three new countries officially applied for membership, two of which are energy giants: Algeria, Argentina and Iran.

Many other states have expressed interest in joining the BRICS: the United Arab Emirates, Turkey, Indonesia, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Mexico, Thailand, Nigeria, Cambodia, Malaysia, Senegal, Uzbekistan, Fiji, Ethiopia and even an EU member—Greece. Egypt and Bangladesh have been official candidates for membership since mid-June 2023.

That said, it should be noted that the BRICS are not a club whose doors are wide open to all. The new structure has no intention of repeating the serious mistakes made by other unions, notably the European Union, which brought into its ranks what can only be described as “anybody”, including direct agents of influence from the United States who destroyed the possibility of the Union’s political and economic development outside North American supervision. As an example, the application of South Korea—a country totally subservient to the West—was one of those rejected because it was incompatible with the interests and principles of the BRICS.

Despite the evidence, one of the fundamental elements of which is the unprecedented global interest in the BRICS structure vis-à-vis the G7 and even the G20, the “Atlanticist” powers continue to repeat their fanciful mantras about the isolation of the Russian Federation and its pariah status, instead of reflecting the evidence that they are frantically trying to hide from their electorate.

The choice of the French
Not only is it utopian to assert France’s strategic interests under the current 27-member Europe, in which the interests of several member states are practically the opposite of those of the French, but even a return to the Europe of Six of 1973 is hardly a salvific solution, as it is sometimes presented by certain analysts.

This is because, over the last 40 years, Germany has undergone profound changes in its long-term development doctrines and strategies which, in several key respects, run directly counter to France’s political, economic and military-industrial interests.

In this context, if France, for its part, does not take a clearly sovereignist path in the protection of its national interests vis-à-vis its participation in American-centric international blocs, in which the real role of Paris is no more than auxiliary ; if the current political elites do not learn to develop their capacity for long-term vision—there is absolutely no national project worthy of the name with a vision even for the next 15 years—the process of disintegration of France’s image as a power will only intensify and its capacity for international projection will continue to be restricted, which, in the long term, will inevitably lead to the marginalisation of the French people from the processes that are shaping the world of tomorrow.

Translation: Яннис В.Зброек for Donbass Insider

https://mronline.org/2023/07/19/the-war ... eputation/

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Ukraine’s Intelligence Behind New Sabotage on Crimean Bridge
JULY 17, 2023

Image on a cable-braced bridge that connects Russky Island and Vladivostok in the city of Russian Far Eastern part of Vladivostok, Russia, Wednesday, Sept 5, 2012. Photo: AP.

Russia’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson reports that the “Kiev terrorist regime is behind the attack on the Crimean Bridge,” with Ukrainian media confirming the statements.

Ukraine’s domestic security agency and navy were behind Monday’s incident at the Crimean Bridge, anonymous sources told AFP.

Suspilne and Ukrainska Pravda, both Ukrainian state broadcasters, also provided little specifics about an operation they alleged involved the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) and the navy, although Suspilne reported its sources as stating the bridge was struck using underwater drones.

Suspilne quoted a navy spokesperson as saying he had no such information and urging the broadcaster to wait for official announcements. Ukrainian officials did not immediately comment on the incident.

The Russian Foreign Ministry’s spokesperson said that the “Kiev terrorist regime is behind the attack on the Crimean Bridge,” adding that the “decision to attack the Crimean Bridge was made by Ukrainian officials, military with the participation of US, UK special services.”

Russia shouldn’t renew grain deal after Crimea Bridge incident: Russian senior official
In view of the attack on the bridge connecting Russia and Crimea, a top Russian politician stated on Monday that Russia should not renew the Black Sea grain deal.

A mother and father were killed and their daughter was critically injured by the explosions, according to Russian officials. Although the details were sketchy, some Russian officials blamed Ukraine. The Ukrainian administration made no quick comment.

According to Sergei Mironov, the leader of the Russian parliament’s A Just Russia party, Moscow should respond by destroying Ukrainian infrastructure, adding on Telegram “That is what we need to do, and not discuss a grain deal that helps Kiev’s rulers and their Western masters line their pockets. There can be no grain deal after another terrorist attack.”

Russia agreed to sign the Black Sea grain agreement a year ago, allowing Ukraine to start shipping food from its southern ports despite the war. However, it has repeatedly expressed doubts about agreeing to prolong the agreement, which expires on Monday.

Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov announced today, as July 17 marks the day the grain deal was set to expire, that it will not be renewed, as the parts regarding Russia were not fulfilled, and as such the deal was halted, further clarifying that the decision to halt the deal was not linked to today’s attack.

Earlier today, two people were killed and a child was injured in an “emergency” incident that took place on the Crimean Bridge while traffic was halted awaiting damage repairs.

The head of the Republic of Crimea accused on his Telegram page the “terrorist regime” in Kiev of being behind the event, which authorities called an “emergency incident” after explosions were heard in the morning.

https://orinocotribune.com/ukraines-int ... an-bridge/

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Much Ado About Nothing

A bunch of current headlines are scary:

Higher food prices and more hunger: Collapse of Black Sea grain deal poses a massive threat - CNN - Jul 18
World facing prospect of 'hunger games' as China hoards grains and Russia withdraws from deal - Indian Express - Jul 19
Russian Grain Deal: Why Moscow Is Being Accused Of Using Hunger As 'Blackmail' - Yahoo - Jul 18
Russia halts deal allowing Ukraine to export grain, in a hit to global food security - LA Times - Jul 17
Higher food prices and more hunger: Collapse of Black Sea grain deal poses a massive threat - CNN - Jul 18
Russia pulls out of Black Sea grain deal with Ukraine sparking hunger fears in poorest countries - ITV - Jul 17

...
Then there is the real world in which wheat is produced and traded internationally:

Image

The peak in summer 2022 was caused by the war in Ukraine and not natural. Since then prices have moved with the usual ups and downs towards a rather normal level. When the Black Sea grain deal ended they stayed within their previous range.

Meanwhile the main grain elevator at the port of Odessa, which presumably has been used as part of the vaunted Ukrainian air-defense, successfully interdicted a Kalibr missile.

Image

More wheat is coming to the markets from other producers than Ukraine. During the next year, even without grain from Ukraine, prices for wheat and corn may actually come down:

World wheat supplies are strong following exceptionally high exports from Australia and Russia and a rebound in Canadian shipments after droughts disrupted last year’s season. After falling for years, global stocks may finally rise in 2023. As for corn, Ukraine’s shortfall may well be filled by expected record sales from Brazil, reckons Alexis Ellender of Kpler, a data firm.

So this is much ado about nothing. Globally Ukraine just isn't important at all.

---
This week I ask readers and commentators here for donations to keep Moon of Alabama running as it is.
If you like this site please consider to contribute.

Posted by b on July 19, 2023 at 16:11 UTC | Permalink

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2023/07/m ... l#comments

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All ships in the Odessa area are military targets
July 19, 18:45

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From July 20, all ships in the Odessa area and the remaining coast of Ukraine will be considered as military targets.

Official statement of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation

In connection with the termination of the "Black Sea Initiative" and the curtailment of the maritime humanitarian corridor, from 00.00 Moscow time on July 20, 2023, all ships en route to Ukrainian ports in the Black Sea will be considered as potential carriers of military cargo.

Accordingly, the flag countries of such vessels will be considered involved in the Ukrainian conflict on the side of the Kyiv regime.

In addition, a number of sea areas in the northwestern and southeastern parts of the international waters of the Black Sea have been declared temporarily dangerous for navigation. Appropriate informational warnings about the withdrawal of safety guarantees to seafarers were issued in accordance with the established procedure.

This is really good news.

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/8504076.html
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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blindpig
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Re: Footnotes from the Ukrainian "Crisis"; New High-Points in Cynicism Part IV

Post by blindpig » Thu Jul 20, 2023 10:22 pm

Igor Alexandrov diedJuly 19, 21:39

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At the front in the Artemovsk region, Igor Alexander, known online as "Levoborod" or "Beard", died in battle.
Igor adhered to communist views and did not stand aside after the start of the war with Nazism in Ukraine.
Last year he went to the front, where he fought to the very end, dying defending Artemovsk. He did not change himself and his views.

Igor Alexandrov died

That's it guys. What we all feared came true. Our Igor is no more. No Beard.

He died in the war, died in battle on the front line, as a man and a warrior die. Killed by the fault of everyone who allowed this war and forced ordinary guys to die.

Igor knew what he was getting into when he went to war. Not by choice, but he took up arms, considering it right to be with other simple peasants, forced to carry burning chestnuts from someone else's fire. He has always been against fascism, any fascism. At the front, he always conveyed to his colleagues an understanding of the essence of things. Both in peacetime and in wartime, Igor remained a faithful, brave and kind person.

His deeds at the front and in our peaceful life are worthy of nothing but respect. He was a true friend, comrade, communist and just a very good guy. A big, kind giant who walked the earth and brought joy to everyone around. In his presence and even just when communicating online, we seemed to bask in his warmth - our Beard was so positive and cheerful.

Of course, the death of a friend is a great grief for all jozheks. But we must endure this grief and do a common cause. Igor was a real fountain of optimism and love of life, he was ready for anything for the good of people. It’s not the case to moan and tear your hair, twisting a tantrum in yourself in order to feel some kind of false relief from screaming into the void.

For us, nothing has changed - neither in ideology, nor in activity. Leaving, Igor left us his channel, which even with him became like a communal apartment. Let YouTube be closed even tomorrow, but until tomorrow it comes, the Beard channel will continue its work.

We will continue to help anyone who needs our help. In memory of Igor

And Igor himself ... he did not go anywhere. He has become more powerful than we can imagine. And Igor himself would have appreciated such a joke with a reference to Star Wars.

Those who will certainly begin to mock and dance on the bones, we will remember. Corpse eaters and vultures are always circling, looking for fallen warriors. Let's remember and not forget.

We, friends, can grieve, but we will not become limp and give up. Igor would not approve.

Farewell, dear. We will do our best not to let you down.


https://t.me/rebel_jack_review/12385 - zinc

For the left movement, this is a significant loss.
Peace to ashes.

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/8504486.html

Using tankers to attack the Crimean bridge
July 20, 12:30

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Scheme of the attack on the Crimean bridge using marine drones according to the hacker group RaHDit

unmanned boats could launch from two tankers Beks Loyal and Khudayar Yusifzade. One of the ships drifted 100 kilometers from Novorossiysk a few days before the terrorist attack on the Crimean bridge. The second tanker was to the south. After a while, the tankers met at sea.
According to the hackers, at that moment, unmanned boats were reloaded from one of the tankers to another, and another vessel was used to control the drones, which was at sea near the Crimean bridge.

Image

This scenario was listed as possible last August https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/7787523.html

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/8505401.html

Google Translator

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Leaked Files Suggest Hidden British Hand in Latest Kerch Bridge Strike
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on JULY 19, 2023
Kit Klarenberg

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A coterie of British intelligence freelancers has collaborated with Ukraine’s Security Service on plans to destroy the newly-attacked Kerch Bridge, and to target accused collaborators who Kiev is “shooting…like pigs”

On July 16, a predawn assault on the Kerch Bridge connecting Crimea with mainland Russia left two civilians dead and a 14-year-old injured. As advisors to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky hinted at Ukraine’s culpability, Russian President Vladimir Putin pointed his finger at Kiev and vowed revenge.

The attack was the second attempt at destroying the Kerch Bridge in less than a year. On October 8th 2022, a suicide attacker remotely detonated a truck bomb on the bridge, killing three and inflicting such severe damage the vehicular crossing remained closed until February this year, while railroad traffic resumed in May.

As The Grayzone revealed two days after the bombing, a cabal of British mlitary-intelligence freelancers had drafted detailed plans for destroying Kerch Bridge months earlier. The blueprints were drawn up at the behest of Chris Donnelly, a senior intelligence operative and former high ranking NATO advisor. His transnational nexus manages London’s contribution to the proxy war at arm’s length, in conjunction with the Security Service of Ukraine’s (SBU) Odessa branch.

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After an initial burst of Ukrainian public and governmental celebration in the wake of the first Kerch bombing, officials in Kiev quickly backtracked, claiming it was in fact a Russian false flag. In May this year, SBU chief Vasyl Maliuk finally admitted his agency undertook “certain measures” to carry out the attack, coercing an innocent truck driver into unwittingly and unwillingly serving as a suicide bomber.

This time, the SBU appears to have used unmanned submarines to target Kerch Bridge with explosives. A review of leaked files previously revealed by The Grayzone provides a solid basis for again blaming Donnelly’s cabal.

These files show Prevail Partners as the cutout enlisted to train a secret Ukrainian partisan army to target Russian territory with terror attacks. Prevail pledged to provide the SBU with extensive targeting expertise and technology for operations targeting Crimea – particularly, the Kerch Bridge. They also raise grave questions about whether the Ukrainian Security Service is being assisted in its criminal war on collaborators by Donnelly’s shadowy clique.

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British ‘boots on the ground’ in Ukraine

From the perspective of Donnelly’s intelligence cabal, the Odessa branch of the Ukrainian SBU Security Service was perfectly positioned to wreak havoc on Crimea. Located just over the Black Sea and filled with hardcore Maidan operatives, the unit signed a “technical support” agreement with Prevail and Thomas in Winslow (TIW), a self-described “crisis management company”, not long after Russia’s invasion.

Under the terms of the deal, Prevail and TIW conducted a “capacity assessment” of the Security Service’s capabilities, identifying areas where they could assist. The findings were then leveraged to “secure programmatic funding from the international community or donor countries.” This would cover services such as training the underground partisan army, to attack Crimea.

As part of the assessment by Prevail, representatives of the British company and TIW confidentially met in person with the Odessa SBU’s deputy director. The secret summit focused “heavily on targeting and specialist capability to support that function.” Prevail and TIW felt they could “add huge benefit” to the SBU’s existing human intelligence and electronic data capture capabilities, due to their “collective experience in targeting the adversary.” This would produce “confirmative/actionable intelligence,” enabling a range of covert and overt activities.

Among other things, the proposal called for the SBU to be taught how to “monitor coastline and Russian movement” with surveillance drones, and be granted access to satellite imagery to assist targeting in military and black operations. This would “go a long way,” a British operative remarked. The Security Service would also be taught how to “exploit encrypted data” stored on digital devices appropriated from captured or killed Russian soldiers.

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In closing, the assessment noted that in order to bring Prevail and TIW’s skills and technologies in-house, representatives of Odessa SBU “understand that with capability comes a training burden, and the need to have dedicated mentors/advisors inside their tent.”

As one Prevail staffer put it, “they seemed impressed by our willingness to establish a presence with them – support and mentorship – boots on the ground.”

Immediately after their meeting with the Security Service of Odessa’s deputy director, representatives of Prevail and TIW reached out to the government of Ukraine to outline joint plans to support Kiev’s war effort and address the SBU’s “urgent operational requirements.”

The assessment’s introduction noted that “not all points” from the Security Service’s “original ask” were discussed in the meeting. Some clue as to what this “ask” may have included could be provided by a presentation titled “Kerch Bridge info pack.” It was prepared by a “geospatial intelligence” specialist at the firm on the same day that Prevail issued its letter of intent to Kiev, in April 2022.

The proposal laid out various scenarios for blowing up Kerch Bridge. Some went far further than what actually transpired. One speculative plot involved detonating a vessel containing ammonia nitrate directly under the bridge. The August 2020 Beirut blast, which killed at least 214 people, injured thousands, and inflicted billions in property damage, was approvingly cited as an example to emulate.

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This June, as Ukraine’s heavily anticipated counteroffensive faltered in the country’s eastern flatlands, CIA Director William Burns arrived in Kiev to review a so-called “victory plan” put forward by the country’s military and intelligence directors. At the top of the agenda was “holding hostage” the population of Crimea. Just over three weeks later, Ukraine attacked Kerch Bridge for a second time.

The Ukrainian military presented CIA director William Burns with its “ideal scenario”

“holding hostage” the entire population of Crimea by bombarding it with “powerful weapons” to “gain leverage” over Russia

In other words, state terrorhttps://t.co/hUlHGP4MU2 pic.twitter.com/ye33bj7Wet

— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) July 2, 2023


While thousands of civilian journeys are conducted over the Kerch Bridge each day, the pair of Ukrainian attacks have targeted civilian areas, killing innocent people while leaving Russian forces unaffected, it is a vital artery for Moscow to supply its soldiers battling Ukraine’s counteroffensive in the south of the country. Whether Kiev’s efforts to destroy the structure amount to war crimes is therefore an open question.

Ukraine’s government has simultaneously waged a ruthless war on accused collaborators while international rights groups and the Western media look the other way. These killings constitute unambiguous crimes against humanity.

The leaked files revealed by The Grayzone show that Prevail and TIW may have provided Odessa SBU with support in identifying and locating suspects, and possibly participated in Ukraine’s violent political purge.

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Ukraine’s ‘pro-Russia’ contingent in the crosshairs

Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Kiev’s crusade against purported “collaboration and treason” has led to thousands of cases being opened. As a UN Human Rights High Commissioner report noted in June, 500 guilty verdicts have already been passed down, with penalties ranging from fines to 15 years in prison.

The Commissioner documented how many individuals suspected of collaboration have been subject to arbitrary detention and brutal torture. “Enhanced” interrogation methods recorded by the UN included beatings, electrocution, sexual violence, forced nudity, threats of genital mutilation and rape against detainees and their loved ones, threats of execution, loaded guns, and of being brought to the front line and abandoned there.

The OHCHR expressed serious concern that the Ukrainian law criminalizing “collaboration activities” does not define what these activities actually are, “or other important terms with sufficient precision so as to enable individuals to regulate their conduct and reasonably foresee the legal consequences of their actions or inaction.” Some “collaborators” simply accepted food and other aid from occupation troops. Others continued to work under occupation, as in the case of several teachers facing jail.

Curiously absent from the report was any reference to the summary murder of collaborators. Despite the Western media openly cheering these rampages, Ukrainian soldiers producing grim TikTok videos documenting their capture of suspects and even filming their subsequent murder, and officials in Kiev openly hailing the savage efficacy of state-directed hit squads conducting cleanup operations in formerly Russian-occupied territory, the openly promoted acts of sadistic political violence somehow slipped past OHCHR investigators.

“A hunt has been declared on collaborators and their life is not protected by law,” fulminated Anton Gerashchenko, an advisor to the Ukrainian Interior Ministry, in October 2022. “Our intelligence services are eliminating them, shooting them like pigs.”

Are Donnelly’s people assisting in this macabre campaign? Records of the consultation between Prevail, TIW, and the Odessa SBU’s deputy director strongly suggest so. At this early stage of the conflict, the agency already considered keeping a close eye on movements and statements of the city’s “pro-Russian contingent” to be a “top priority”, although it had so far struggled to do so effectively. The file notes:

“Tracking and monitoring of devices played a key role in the conversation. [Odessa SBU] have existing methods and capability to track phones but highlighted that they had no way to identify users. They mentioned that their capability often tracked Russian phones that led them to legitimate civilians. This is an area we can support. We discussed…alternate methods to track and monitor such as app-based technology, and they were visibly impressed and excited at the prospect.”

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The “app-based technology” referred to was Anomaly 6’s illegal global surveillance dragnet, which according to leaked documents, is being used for targeting by the Ukrainian Armed Forces. As The Grayzone has reported, Anomaly’s smartphone spying technology is nowhere near as precise as the company’s marketing material has claimed.

The risk of systemic errors that lead to the branding of innocent civilians as Russian collaborators or spies will almost inevitably cost lives. There is also the risk it could facilitate the arrest and extradition of Ukrainian refugees in Europe, given Kiev is now working with Interpol to track down suspected collaborators who fled to the European Union.

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2023/07/ ... ge-strike/

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Finland to Close Russia's Consulate in Turku

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Russian consulate in Turku, Finland, 2023. | Photo: Twitter/ @MrSisu1

Published 20 July 2023 (1 hours 48 minutes ago)

The decision was announced after a meeting between President Sauli Niinisto and the Ministerial Committee on Foreign and Security Policy.


Finland will withdraw consent for Russia to operate its Consulate General in the southwestern city of Turku as of Oct. 1, 2023.

The decision was announced after a meeting on Wednesday between President Sauli Niinisto and the Ministerial Committee on Foreign and Security Policy. The Finnish Foreign Affairs Ministry has officially informed the Russian ambassador about this decision.

Niinisto and ministerial committee noted that Russia's recent decision to close Finland's Consulate General in St. Petersburg, also scheduled for Oct. 1, 2023, was an "asymmetric response" to Finland's earlier announcement of expulsions.

The president and the committee members also addressed the status of Russia's consulate in Mariehamn, located on the Aland Islands, and took note of the current state of preparations of a comprehensive legal analysis of Aland's special status by the Foreign Affairs Ministry.


The analysis will specifically examine the status of Russia's consulate in Mariehamn, among other relevant matters.

Finnish international law experts have cautioned against hasty decisions regarding the Russian consulate in Mariehamn, given its connection to the peace treaties Finland signed with the Soviet Union in 1940 and 1947.

The Russian consulate in Mariehamn was established in 1940 after the 1939-1940 war between Finland and the Soviet Union. Currently, besides its embassy in Helsinki, Russia maintains consulates in Turku and Mariehamn.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Fin ... -0007.html

The Finns are gonna be sorry they abandoned their neutrality.

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World hunger and the war in Ukraine

It is not clear if the West will give Russia any relief on its ability to export its own agricultural products.

July 19, 2023 by Vijay Prashad

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Soybeans and grains, the record exports that had an even greater impact during the pandemic and the war in Ukraine

On Monday, June 17, Dmitry Peskov, the spokesperson for Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, announced, “The Black Sea agreements are no longer in effect.” This was a blunt statement to suspend the Black Sea Grain Initiative that emerged out of intense negotiations in the hours after Russian forces entered Ukraine in February 2022. The Initiative went into effect on July 22, 2022, after Russian and Ukrainian officials signedit in Istanbul in the presence of the United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres and Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

Guterres called the Initiative a “beacon of hope” for two reasons. First, it is remarkable to have an agreement of this kind between belligerents in an ongoing war. Second, Russia and Ukraine are major producers of wheat, barley, maize, rapeseed and rapeseed oil, sunflower seeds and sunflower oil, as well as nitrogen, potassic, and phosphorus fertilizer, accounting for twelve percent of calories traded. Disruption of supply from Russia and Ukraine, it was felt by a range of international organizations, would have a catastrophic impact on world food markets and on hunger. As Western—largely US, UK, and European—sanctions increased against Russia, the feasibility of the deal began to diminish. It was suspended several times during the past year. In March 2023, Russia’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova responding to the sanctions against Russian agriculture, said, “[The main] parameters provided for in the [grain] deal do not work.”

Financialization leads to hunger

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that his country regrets Russia’s “continued weaponization of food” since this “harms millions of vulnerable people around the world.” Indeed, the timing of the suspension could not be worse. A United Nations report, “The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2023” (July 12, 2023), shows that one in ten people in the world struggles with hunger and that 3.1 billion people cannot afford a healthy diet. But the report itself makes an interesting point: that the war in Ukraine has driven 23 million people into hunger, a number that pales in comparison to the other drivers of hunger—such as the impact of commercialized food markets and the COVID-19 pandemic. A 2011 report from World Development Movement called “Broken Markets: How Financial Market Regulation Can Help Prevent Another Global Food Crisis” showed that “financial speculators now dominate the [food] market, holding over 60 percent of some markets compared to 12 percent 15 years ago.”

The situation has since worsened. Dr. Sophie van Huellen, who studies financial speculation in food markets, pointed out in late 2022 that while there are indeed food shortages, “the current food crisis is a price crisis, rather than a supply crisis.” The end of the Black Sea Grain Initiative is indeed regrettable, but it is not the leading cause of hunger in the world. The leading cause—as even the European Economic and Social Committee agrees—is financial speculation in food markets.

Why Did Russia Suspend the Initiative?

To monitor the Black Sea Grain Initiative, the United Nations set up a Joint Coordination Centre (JCC) in Istanbul. It is staffed by representatives from Russia, Turkey, Ukraine, and the United Nations. On several occasions, the JCC had to deal with tensions between Russia and Ukraine over the shipments, such as when Ukraine attacked Russia’s Black Sea Fleet—some of whose vessels carried the grain—in Sevastopol, Crimea, in October 2022. Tensions remained over the initiative as Western sanctions against Russia tightened, making it difficult for Russia to export its own agricultural products into the world market.

Russia put three requirements on the table to the United Nations regarding its own agricultural system. First, the Russian government asked that the Russian Agricultural Bank—the premier credit and trade bank for Russian agriculture—be reconnected to the SWIFT system, from which it had been cut off by the European Union’s sixth package of sanctions in June 2022. A Turkish banker told TASS that there is the possibility that the European Union could “issue a general license to the Russian Agricultural Bank” and that the Bank “has the opportunity to use JP Morgan to conduct transactions in U.S. dollars” as long as the exporters being paid for were part of the Black Sea Grain Initiative.

Second, from the first discussions about the Grain Initiative, Moscow put on the table its export of ammonia fertilizer from Russia both through the port of Odesa and of supplies held in Latvia and the Netherlands. A central part of the debate has been the reopening of the Togliatti-Odesa pipeline, the world’s longest ammonia pipeline. In July 2022, the UN and Russia signed an agreement that would facilitate the sale of Russian ammonia on the world market. The UN’s Guterres went to the Security Council to announce, “We are doing everything possible to… ease the serious fertilizer market crunch that is already affecting farming in West Africa and elsewhere. If the fertilizer market is not stabilized, next year could bring a food supply crisis. Simply put, the world may run out of food.” On June 8, 2023, Ukrainian forces blew upa section of the Togliatti-Odesa pipeline in Kharkiv, increasing the tension over this dispute. Other than the Black Sea ports, Russia has no other safe way to export its ammonia-based fertilizers.

Third, Russia’s agricultural sector faces challenges from a lack of ability to import machinery and spare parts, and Russian ships are not able to buy insurance or enter many foreign ports. Despite the “carve-outs” in Western sanctions for agriculture, sanctions on firms and individuals have debilitated Russia’s agricultural sector.

To counter Western sanctions, Russia placed restrictions on the export of fertilizer and agricultural products. These restrictions included the ban on the export of certain goods (such as temporary bans of wheat exports to the Eurasian Economic Union), the increase of licensing requirements (including for compound fertilizers, requirements set in place before the war), and the increase of export taxes. These Russian moves come alongside strategic direct sales to countries, such as India, which will re-export to other countries.

In late July, St. Petersburg will host the Second Russia-Africa Economic and Humanitarian Forum, where these topics will surely be front and center. Ahead of the summit, President Putin called South Africa’s Cyril Ramaphosa to inform him about the problems faced by Russia in exporting its food and fertilizers to the African continent. “The deal’s main goal,” he said of the Black Sea Grain Initiative, was “to supply grain to countries in need, including those on the African continent, has not been implemented.”

It is likely that the Black Sea Grain Initiative will restart within the month. Earlier suspensions have not lasted longer than a few weeks. But this time, it is not clear if the West will give Russia any relief on its ability to export its own agricultural products. Certainly, the suspension will impact millions of people around the world who struggle with endemic hunger. Billions of others who are hungry because of financial speculation in food markets are not impacted directly by these developments.

https://peoplesdispatch.org/2023/07/19/ ... ukraine-2/

If Everybody’s Going to Join NATO, Then Why Have the United Nations? The Twenty-Ninth Newsletter (2023)

JULY 20, 2023

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Bassim Al Shaker (Iraq), Symphony of Death 1, 2019.

Dear friends,

Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) held its annual summit on 11–12 July in Vilnius, Lithuania. The communiqué released after the first day’s proceedings claimed that ‘NATO is a defensive alliance’, a statement that encapsulates why many struggle to grasp its true essence. A look at the latest military spending figures shows, to the contrary, that NATO countries, and countries closely allied to NATO, account for nearly three-quarters of the total annual global expenditure on weapons. Many of these countries possess state-of-the-art weapons systems, which are qualitatively more destructive than those held by the militaries of most non-NATO countries. Over the past quarter century, NATO has used its military might to destroy several states, such as Afghanistan (2001) and Libya (2011), shattering societies with the raw muscle of its aggressive alliance, and end the status of Yugoslavia (1999) as a unified state. It is difficult, given this record, to sustain the view that NATO is a ‘defensive alliance’.

Currently, NATO has thirty-one member states, the most recent addition being Finland, which joined in April 2023. Its membership has more than doubled since its twelve founding members, all countries in Europe and North America that had been part of the war against the Axis powers, signed its founding treaty (the Washington Treaty or the North Atlantic Treaty) on 4 April 1949. It is telling that one of these original members – Portugal – remained under a fascist dictatorship at the time, known as Estado Novo (in place from 1933 until 1974).

Article 10 of this treaty declares that NATO members – ‘by unanimous agreement’ – can ‘invite any other European state’ to join the military alliance. Based on that principle, NATO welcomed Greece and Turkey (1952), West Germany (1955), and Spain (1982), expanding its membership at the time to include sixteen countries. The disintegration of the USSR and communist states in Eastern Europe – the purported threat that compelled the need for NATO to begin with – did not put an end to the need for the alliance. Instead, NATO’s increasing membership has doubled down on its ambition to use its military power, through Article 5, to subdue anyone who challenges the ‘Atlantic Alliance’.

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Nino Morbedadze (Georgia), Strolling Couple, 2017.

The ‘Atlantic Alliance’, a phrase that is part of NATO’s name, was part of a wider network of military treaties secured by the US against the USSR and, after October 1949, against the People’s Republic of China. This network included the Manila Pact of September 1954, which created the Southeast Asian Treaty Organisation (SEATO), and the Baghdad Pact of February 1955, which created the Central Treaty Organisation (CENTO). Turkey and Pakistan signed a military agreement in April 1954 which brought them together in an alliance against the USSR and anchored this network through NATO’s southernmost member (Turkey) and SEATO’s westernmost member (Pakistan). The US signed a military deal with each of the members of CENTO and SEATO and ensured that it had a seat at the table in these structures.

At the Asian-African Conference held in Bandung, Indonesia in April 1955, India’s Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru reacted strongly to the creation of these military alliances, which exported tensions between the US and the USSR across Asia. The concept of NATO, he said, ‘has extended itself in two ways’: first, NATO ‘has gone far away from the Atlantic and has reached other oceans and seas’ and second, ‘NATO today is one of the most powerful protectors of colonialism’. As an example, Nehru pointed to Goa, which was still held by fascist Portugal and whose grip had been validated by NATO members – an act, Nehru said, of ‘gross impertinence’. This characterisation of NATO as a global belligerent and defender of colonialism remains intact, with some modifications.

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Slobodan Trajković (Yugoslavia), The Flag, 1983.

SEATO was disbanded in 1977, partly due to the defeat of the US in Vietnam, and CENTO was shuttered in 1979, precisely due to the Iranian Revolution that year. US military strategy shifted its focus from wielding these kinds of pacts to establishing a direct military presence with the founding of US Central Command in 1983 and the revitalisation of the US Pacific Command that same year. The US expanded the power of its own global military footprint, including its ability to strike anywhere on the planet due to its structure of military bases and armed flotillas (which were no longer restricted once the 1930 Second London Naval Treaty expired in 1939). Although NATO has always had global ambitions, the alliance was given material reality through the US military’s force projection and its creation of new structures that further tied allied states into its orbit (with programmes such as ‘Partnership for Peace’, set up in 1994, and concepts such as ‘global NATO partner’ and ‘non-NATO ally’, as exemplified by Japan and South Korea). In its 1991 Strategic Concept, NATO wrote that it would ‘contribute to global stability and peace by providing forces for United Nations missions’, which was realised with deadly force in Yugoslavia (1999), Afghanistan (2003), and Libya (2011).

By the Riga Summit (2006), NATO was confident that it operated ‘from Afghanistan to the Balkans and from the Mediterranean Sea to Darfur’. Nehru’s focus on colonialism might seem anachronistic now, but in fact, NATO has become an instrument to blunt the global majority’s desire for sovereignty and dignity, two key anti-colonial concepts. Any popular project that exerts these two concepts finds itself at the end of a NATO weapons system.

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ArtLords (including Kabir Mokamel, Abdul Hakim Maqsodi, Meher Agha Sultani, Omaid Sharifi, Yama Farhard, Negina Azimi, Enayat Hikmat, Zahid Amini, Ali Hashimi, Mohammad Razeq Meherpour, Abdul Razaq Hashemi, and Nadima Rustam), The Unseen Afghanistan, 2021.

The arrival of Chinese investment and the possibility of integration with the Chinese economy began to reorient many economies, particularly in Central and Eastern Europe, away from the Atlantic. In 2012, the first summit between China and central and eastern European countries (China–CEEC summit) was held in Warsaw (Poland), with sixteen countries in the region participating. The process eventually drew in fifteen NATO members, including Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czechia, Estonia, Greece, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, North Macedonia, Montenegro, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia (in 2021 and 2022, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania withdrew from the initiative). In March 2015, six then-EU member states – France, Germany, Italy, Luxemburg, Sweden, and the UK – joined the Beijing-based Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. Four years later, Italy became the first G7 country to join the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Two-thirds of EU member states are now part of the BRI, and the EU concluded the Comprehensive Agreement on Investment in 2020.

These manoeuvres towards China threatened to weaken the Atlantic Alliance, with the US describing the country as a ‘strategic competitor’ in its 2018 National Defense Strategy – a phrase indicative of its shifting focus on the so-called threat of China. Nonetheless, as recently as November 2019, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said that ‘there [are] no plans, no proposal, no intention to move NATO into, for instance, the South China Sea’. However, by 2020, the mood had changed: a mere seven months later, Stoltenberg said, ‘NATO does not see China as the new enemy or an adversary. But what we see is that the rise of China is fundamentally changing the global balance of power’. NATO’s response has been to work with its partners – including Australia, Japan, New Zealand, and South Korea – ‘to address… the security consequences of the rise of China’, Stoltenberg continued. The talk of a global NATO and an Asian NATO is front and centre in these deliberations, with Stoltenberg stating in Vilnius that the idea of a liaison office in Japan is ‘on the table’.

The war in Ukraine provided new life to the Atlantic Alliance, driving several hesitant European countries – such as Sweden – into its ranks. Yet, even amongst people living within NATO countries there are groups who are sceptical of the alliance’s aims, with the Vilnius summit marked by anti-NATO protests. The Vilnius Summit Communiqué underlined Ukraine’s path into NATO and sharpened NATO’s self-defined universalism. The communiqué declares, for instance, that China challenges ‘our interests, security, and values’, with the word ‘our’ claiming to represent not only NATO countries but the entire international order. Slowly, NATO is positioning itself as a substitute for the UN, suggesting that it – and not the actual international community – is the arbiter and guardian of the world’s ‘interests, security, and values’. This view is contested by the vast majority of the world’s peoples, seven billion of whom do not even reside in NATO’s member countries (whose total population is less than one billion). Those billions wonder why it is that NATO wants to supplant the United Nations.

Warmly,

Vijay

https://thetricontinental.org/newslette ... d-nations/

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Foreign Affairs Barrage of Baloney on Ukraine is Keeping the Phoney War Going

Martin Jay

July 20, 2023

Zelensky is not the leader who is going to negotiate peace with Russia, not now, not any time, Martin Jay writes.

Foreign Affairs magazine had a brief moment of attention beyond its normal limited elitist audience when it asked the question: “Should Ukraine Negotiate With Russia?” It presented the reader with a tome of reading which expanded on this subject and, at first glance, appeared to present a salient perspective on what we should all now accept is an unofficial ceasefire declared by Ukraine after running out of the requisite material needed for war: ammo.

Of course, it wasn’t a ceasefire declaration at all. I was humouring you and no one can blame me for this given that the quality of articles published by Foreign Affairs.

What absolute garbage these articles were! Broadly speaking, they all revolved around one incumbent theme which is boring at best and delusional at worst: that the U.S. was still a super power and held higher values that Russia and its president.

The mere idea that President Zelensky is even in a position to negotiate a peace treaty is hilarious. But what will have you wetting yourself when you wade into the pantheon of paternalistic claptrap is how the authors fail to acknowledge that the war in Ukraine is slowly being lost by Ukraine and its NATO partners and that it is for Russia to bite the bullet and make a number of concessions before it crawls on its knees to NATO bosses and asks for forgiveness.

The authors make the point that before the West can consider peace talks Russia has to reduce its activities around the world — code for “stop making more friends and allies” — by which point western elites would allow it to return to the “table of responsible nations”.

This delusional narrative, some might argue, is what got the West in the mess it’s in, in the first place as the stellar inability to look at realities on the ground and where the U.S. is in the world today, brought us to 130 billion dollars of U.S. cash blown on supporting a war which neither the West nor Ukraine can win. The mere idea that the West holds the high moral ground and that it is for Russia to clean its act up before it can be allowed back in as a guest member to the country club is hilarious.

These responsible nations, we should not forget faked a false flag attack in Sarajevo in the summer of 1995 just so illegal NATO air strikes could “win” the war with Milosevic; these same countries entered Afghanistan and after twenty years of fighting the Taliban had to leave with their tails between their legs after putting the enemy finally in power. And let’s not forget the U.S. army storming Baghdad and within hours looting Saddam’s gold, or even the oil which is stolen every day from Northern Syria and sold on the open market every day — all assisted by U.S. troops.

Hardly shining examples of morality at its finest. And yet, reading the articles, we are led to believe that not only is the West the only real power which matters, but that there is much to negotiate in Ukraine and even much more than Russia can do.

The idea of a Korean War armistice is dismissed by our authors who fail to grasp that the fortified line that the Russians have built is holding very well and that, in fact, it will be very hard if not impossible for Russia to even entertain the idea of a brokered peace settlement if Moscow is required to surrender any of the land captured and held. Foreign Affairs authors at least concede though that it is time to talk to Russia and this is the right time, at least so we have to assume that they understand the tenets of warfare which is that you have to have at least twice the number of soldiers the enemy has, be equipped to the teeth and have experienced army officers who can lead from the front if you are to stand any chance of taking any villages which are in Russian hands.

The admission from Biden that Ukraine “is running low on ammo” was clumsy and must have had Pentagon generals throwing their hands in the air. The problem with this delusional standpoint though is not only that the American elite are completely out of touch with the realities of the war there but that Zelensky in any case is not the leader that we might have thought he was; he’s not the leader who is going to negotiate peace with Russia, not now, not any time. And so the articles and certainly their titles, are stupid as they show the reader immediately how woefully misinformed the writers are and what cocoons of delusion and disinformation are accommodating them.

In the 1970s, when the American press were free to report on the Vietnam war, a writer called Michael Herr wrote Dispatches which alarmed a number of these same elitist types who couldn’t understand why with all the firepower the Americans had they couldn’t at any time of the war consider themselves even vaguely winning. The only certainty about the war in Ukraine is how the West repeatedly miscalculates and misinforms itself and this article is a very good example of what is wrong with the critical thinking, who is doing such thinking and where everything is heading: a messy, undignified exit like Vietnam, Afghanistan and to some extent Iraq is inevitable and just one look at the NATO photo of Zelensky looking bewildered, alone, lost and confused gives a clue to just how soon this is to happen. America needs a new Michael Herr to report the dark truth about the war. Only then will these elitist draft dodgers at Foreign Affairs get even a grip on reality before they indulge in more of this soiled keyboard folly which they probably call journalism.

https://strategic-culture.org/news/2023 ... war-going/

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As Ukraine bleeds, British defence minister looks to a new life

Those eagerly packing Ukrainians off to fight for Nato can tend their gardens and sleep well in their warm beds, impunity guaranteed.
Eva Roberts
Wednesday 19 July 2023

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As British foreign minister Ben Wallace steps down to ‘spend more time with his family’, he does so safe in the knowledge that, far from being held accountable for his many and grievous crimes, he will be ampy rewarded for them.
The following article is reproduced from The Indicter with thanks.

*****

The recent notice of resignation by the British defence minister Ben Wallace provides another insight into how impunity operates inside British imperialism. Mediocrities rising to positions of tremendous influence in the imperialist British parliamentary system are free to wreak unimaginable havoc upon the world, only to return to a cosy life, tending their vegetables.

Wallace will be able to water his cabbage patch almost certainly knowing that black markets in Europe are seizing British weapons in Ukraine, and passing them into the hands of killers for use against innocents, including very possibly Wallace’s own people.

He can bake to his heart’s content, knowing that residues of depleted uranium contained in shells he shipped to Ukraine can be ingested by mothers carrying unborn children.

But in his garden, all will be well. The soil will be pure. He can enjoy time with his loved ones and think about the Ukrainian homes where there are no sons at the breakfast table, no fathers, no husbands, no brothers. Their bodies are still rotting in muddy ditches in a faraway land Wallace once supplied with deadly weapons, funded by his own people whose cupboards were bare and who were pulling out their own teeth as a trip to the dentist cost too much.

Wallace no doubt will profit nicely from his memoirs, or from speaking at dinner parties of the rich and well-connected, or pursue a successful new career knowing that a generation of Ukrainians are shell-shocked, suicidal, deprived of childhood, or severely disabled, most likely limbless. From his comfy chair, enjoying tea and crumpets, he can watch the destruction of Ukraine through the Nato game of ‘We might let you join our club if you kill enough Russians – but for now you must die for the right to join our club – and here are a few more weapons to keep you busy with that.’

Wallace can think about how his boss, Boris Johnson, pressured Ukraine to abort a peace settlement with Russia last spring and the human cost of that warmongering manoeuvre.

Those eagerly packing Ukrainians off to fight for the Nato dream know only too well the squalid cost to life their actions have caused. But they can tend their gardens and sleep well thank you in their warm beds, impunity guaranteed. Their titles are coming, and their bank accounts are fat. British imperialism rewards.

And those other mediocrities of Parliament, fearing the mention of peace as political suicide, and, kept in check by Nato’s war-addicted corporate media hounds, are complicit in this bloodbath, the latest and most terrifying savagery of the British imperialist class.

https://thecommunists.org/2023/07/19/ne ... n-wallace/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Footnotes from the Ukrainian "Crisis"; New High-Points in Cynicism Part IV

Post by blindpig » Fri Jul 21, 2023 12:14 pm

Threat escalation
POSTED BY @NSANZO ⋅ 21/07/2023

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The consequences of the breakdown of the Ukrainian grain export agreement announced by Russia hours after Ukraine attacked the Crimean bridge continue to be the center of discourse in both Moscow and Kiev. On Monday, Russia accused Ukraine of taking advantage of the humanitarian grain export corridor to launch maritime drones with which it caused significant damage to the Kerch bridge and two fatalities, the father and mother of a minor who are now the source of ridicule for the most radical Ukrainian nationalists on social media. The attack, coupled with a series of proposals by the United Nations secretary-general that came too late and lacked viability, confirmed what until the previous week seemed the most likely option, that Russia leave the agreement. Only the words of Vladimir Putin, who last Friday was open to renewing the agreement, and the premature announcement by President Erdoğan, who took the extension for granted, briefly changed appearances. Until now, despite failing to unlock its fertilizer exports, connect its agricultural bank to the SWIFT international system or reopen the Togliati-Odessa pipeline for the export of fertilizers, Russia had given priority to the benefit of the agreement in the form of control over the Black Sea transit and also to avoid the propaganda campaign against it that is taking place right now.

Russia's withdrawal from the agreement quickly launched the propaganda campaign that presents it as the only culprit for the possible worsening of world food security and the increase in grain prices. Moscow bears part of the responsibility for the consequences of the blockade of Ukrainian grain, but the West also bears responsibility for placing more obstacles on Russian agricultural products - through secondary sanctions and market disconnection - than on its gas or oil. Unlike with grain and fertilizers, the disappearance of Russian oil and gas from the world market would have serious consequences for the economy, causing far more to the countries that impose the sanctions than the price increase that has occurred. Economic interests are an important factor in this war not only for Moscow.

Watching the UN's inability to find the solution it promised to unlock Russian fertilizer exports, Russia has not only demanded compliance with that part of the agreement but has tried to insist that Ukrainian grain was not the basis of world food security as Kiev propaganda repeated. Moscow has done so by appealing to export data, which showed the limited weight of shipments to countries in the global south, and insisting that the attitude of countries like Poland, which banned the sale of Ukrainian grain to protect its producers, showed that Ukraine was prioritizing sales to developed countries while presenting itself as the world's savior from hunger.

Once the agreement expired, it was clear that Ukraine would try to find a formula to maintain its exports. It was also true that, as The Wall Street Journal wrote, no shipping company "in their right mind" would risk sailing through what until Monday was a safe shipping corridor "without guarantees". The threat of being mistaken for a military ship was obvious without the need for Russia to make explicit its threat to consider any ship transiting to Ukrainian ports as a potential shipper of military material. Making that threat explicit, which had already been made clear enough with the withdrawal of guarantees, might have been intended as a warning to potential cargo ships willing to risk their lives to arrive, in exchange for a good amount, at Ukrainian ports. However, the statement has provided yet another argument for Ukrainian propaganda.

Yesterday, in his line of using all events produced in the country to demand new weapons from his partners, Mikhailo Podolyak once again insisted on the importance of Ukraine in the World Food Program and, in the same sentence, reiterated his usual demand for long-range missiles and anti-aircraft defenses. Over the past three days, Ukraine has suffered heavy missile attacks against Black Sea ports. The end of the agreement for the export of grain means for Russia the loss of control that guaranteed it to participate in the registration of the cargo that transited through the Bosphorus, thus avoiding the possibility of Western weapons reaching the Ukrainian coasts. That control has disappeared, so ports like those of Odessa or Nikolaev have automatically become a target for Moscow. Ukraine has taken advantage of the year of absence of danger of naval combat to obtain from its partners weapons with which to attack, for example, the ships of the Russian Black Sea fleet in the Crimea or the Kerch bridge. kyiv now has longer-distance missiles than it did a year and a half ago, when it was able to hit and destroy the Moscva, one of the flags of that fleet.

The danger in the Black Sea is much higher now than it was a year ago, as is the difficulty for Russia to impose a blockade, which it did achieve in the first months of its military intervention. Hence the emphasis that it has placed in recent days on its attacks against Ukrainian port infrastructure, in which it has used Onix missiles. The images that have been shown these days prove the effectiveness of the attacks, confirmed by the fact that not even Ukraine, accustomed to claiming to have shot down all or practically all of the Russian missiles and drones, has so far tried to convince the public to have shot them down.

Ukrainian propaganda has taken two other general lines. First, and consistent with its performance over the past nine years, it has accused Russia of planning to torpedo ships transiting the Black Sea in order to later accuse Kiev. The argument is nothing more than the repetition of something that Ukraine has constantly repeated throughout the Donbass war: each Ukrainian bombardment was, according to Kiev, a false flag to tarnish the image of the Ukrainian army. Ukraine used the same argument to accuse Russia of the bombing of the Elenovka prison or the Zaporozhie nuclear power plant, both under Russian control. Yesterday, Ukraine upped the ante and embraced the Russian threat to shipping as its own. According to the Ukrainian navy, any ship that transits to Russian Black Sea ports or to ports it considers to be Ukrainian, that is, those in Crimea, will be considered as potential carriers of military equipment. kyiv repeats the Russian threat, although with a difference: in the part of the Black Sea under Russian control, there is also civilian transport. Ukraine is perfectly aware of this. After all, this has been the suggested means of transport for the Russian population of Crimea to leave the peninsula.

It is no coincidence that Oleksiy Danilov, one of the spokesmen for this suggestion of abandonment of the peninsula, was in charge of verbalizing the second line of propaganda. Ukraine has not had time to suggest to its partners that they exercise protection for Ukrainian exports. Even before that request was made, Washington had already denied the possibility of escorting the ships to and from Ukrainian ports. Dmitro Kuleba clarified yesterday that Ukraine is ready to "risk life" to continue exports. He does not do it for the good of the world population but for his own benefit. Ukraine has not been able to appeal to the United States, so the president of the National Defense and Security Council has addressed the United Nations directly, who has demanded the creation of a humanitarian corridor protected by heavy weapons. Once again, Ukraine is taking advantage of the situation, in this case the greatly increased danger in the Black Sea, to try to involve its partners directly in the war.

https://slavyangrad.es/2023/07/21/escal ... more-27768

Google Translator

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Chronicle of the special military operation for July 20, 2023
July 20, 2023
Rybar

For three days, Russian troops have been inflicting massive strikes on the port infrastructure of Odessa . Also, military facilities of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in Nikolaev and Sumy were hit today .

In turn, Ukrainian formations continued to use drones to attack the Crimean Peninsula . Two devices were neutralized in the Gvardeisky area, however, in Razdolnoye , the arrival of a drone led to the death of a teenage girl.

A tense situation remains on the fronts: while units of the RF Armed Forces are conducting a creeping offensive in the Starobelsky direction , the enemy managed to take up several landing positions near Bakhmut in the direction of Yagodnoye .

In the Ugledarsky , Vremievsky and Orekhovsky sectors, Russian troops continue to hold the line, steadily destroying Western-supplied armored vehicles. And in the Kherson direction, attempts by the Armed Forces of Ukraine to land troops on the islands in the area of ​​​​Gola Pristan are successfully suppressed by artillery fire.

Not without tragic events: near Krasnohorovka , our colleague, the author of the Misha in Donbas telegram channel, Mikhail Luchin, died in fierce battles .

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On the massive missile attack on the military infrastructure of Ukraine

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For three days, Russian troops carried out missile and bomb strikes on the objects of the Armed Forces of Ukraine on the territory of Ukraine .

In Odessa , the port infrastructure, air defense position areas, locations of Ukrainian formations and ammunition depots were hit. In the area of ​​​​the administration of the Odessa Sea Port, the left building of the building of the Vostok bank branch received significant damage: the choice of target did not cause surprise among local residents - people in military uniform were repeatedly noticed there earlier.

A series of explosions also sounded in Nikolaev : according to the Russian Ministry of Defense, fuel infrastructure facilities and ammunition depots of the Armed Forces of Ukraine were hit. At the same time, the Ukrainian media are actively disseminating footage of damaged residential buildings. Some of the photographs show marks from shrapnel, which happens when hit by anti-aircraft missiles. Taking into account the fact that the strikes were planned on the infrastructure, it is unlikely that the RF Armed Forces used shrapnel ammunition that did not have a high penetrating ability.

In Sumy , a Russian drone attacked the place of deployment of Ukrainian formations on the territory of a children's camp: the second floor of the building was completely destroyed, a large fire broke out at the facility. In addition, a UAV attack on Semyonovka in neighboring Chernihiv Oblast was also reported .

The situation on the front line and the fighting
Positional clashes continue near Novoselovsky and Torsky in the Svatovsko-Kremensky direction , Russian fighters do not allow the enemy to regroup, striking at the routes of rear supplies. In Serebryansky forestry, the situation has not changed significantly: both sides are exchanging artillery strikes, and sabotage groups are working.

Fierce battles continue on the flanks of Bakhmut in the Soledar direction . Detachments of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, using the tactics of "meat assault", managed to gain a foothold on the heights near Kleshcheevka and increase pressure on the units of the RF Armed Forces defending in the village.

The control of the Armed Forces of Ukraine over the prevailing heights makes it easier for the Ukrainian formations to develop a further offensive on Kleshcheevka , and on the southern flank of Bakhmut as a whole. Due to the lack of reserves, the RF Armed Forces have not yet been able to carry out counteroffensive operations in this area and seize the initiative.

On the northern flank in the Berkhovka area , Ukrainian detachments managed to take up several landing positions in the direction of Yagodnoye . Also, the Armed Forces of Ukraine advanced near the M-03 highway in the Orekhovo - Vasilievka area . The enemy, at the cost of heavy losses in manpower and equipment, is trying to realize the plan to encircle Bakhmut and intensifies the onslaught, transferring all new reinforcements to the flanks.

Positional clashes and artillery duels continue in the Donetsk direction . Northwest of Maryinka, Russian units are fighting fierce battles on the outskirts of Krasnogorovka . In the same place, as a result of an enemy counterattack by paratroopers of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, one of our comrades, Mikhail Luchin, the author of the Misha channel in Donbass , was killed this morning , presumably as a result of a strike by Ukrainian cluster munitions.

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In the Ugledar sector, Ukrainian formations, supported by three tanks and infantry fighting vehicles, tried to attack the positions of the 36th motorized rifle brigade and the 155th brigade of the Russian Pacific Fleet near the forest belt north of Nikolsky . Russian units detected the enemy's movement in advance and delivered aimed artillery strikes at him, destroying two infantry armored vehicles.

The remaining units of armored vehicles drove into the mine-explosive barriers, as a result of which they were blown up. The wrecked equipment was finally destroyed by dropping grenades from the UAV. Having suffered significant losses, the Ukrainian formations retreated to their original positions. In the Ugledar direction, relative calm is observed relative to others: along the entire front line, the parties are engaged in artillery duels, the Russian Aerospace Forces are actively working.

For a long time, the Ukrainian command has been accumulating strength and today decided to test the strength of the Russian defense, but did not succeed. Subversive and reconnaissance groups continue to operate in the landings, while anyone's advancement is difficult due to the dense mining of the area.

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In the Orekhovsky sector, the enemy's assault detachments at night attempted to swoop in to occupy the positions of the Russian army north of Rabotino . However, the fighters of the RF Armed Forces successfully repulsed the attack with accurate artillery and ATGM strikes.

Despite this sortie, the situation on the direction has slightly stabilized. The intensity of attacks has decreased, which may be due to the large losses of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in manpower and equipment. In the units of the 47th Ombre, there is a shortage of assault formations, and in the 2nd Battalion of the 33rd Ombre, since June 8, the number of only officially confirmed killed was 162 people.


There are also losses in the jet division of the 65th Ombre of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, which, due to the ongoing offensive on Rabotino , was moved closer to the front line, which led to the destruction of both personnel and equipment. Now the Armed Forces of Ukraine along the LBS are waiting for the transfer of reinforcements to the front line. A new assault group of the 128th Guards Rifle Brigade arrived at Lobkovoe . At the same time, all activities are carried out under the cover of artillery and aviation.

Due to the need to strike at the rear of the RF Armed Forces, some aircraft of the Armed Forces of Ukraine fly up close enough to the front line. According to preliminary information, a Ukrainian Su-25 was shot down a few days ago north of Orekhov .

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In the Kherson direction , the Armed Forces of Ukraine have shifted the focus of the offensive and attacks on the islands in the area near Gola Pristan and near Kherson . The intensity of artillery and mortar fire on the coastal zone and islands increased dramatically: from 20 to 30 raids on average.

Yesterday, DRGs from the Grom tactical group tried to land on Buryakovy Island in three boats, moving along the Konka River . However, enemy detachments were discovered and destroyed by concentrated fire (three boats with personnel up to 15 people).

Also, a detachment of the Armed Forces of Ukraine on two boats moved out of the vicinity of Tyaginka, trying to gain a foothold near the settlement of Krynki . Artillery immediately worked on them, and the DRGs retreated to their original positions.

Now the Armed Forces of Ukraine are conducting artillery preparation along the Dnieper . The purpose of this is still unclear, since a massive crossing of the Dnieper River looks unlikely at this stage. However, the intensity of missile strikes by tactical aircraft and HIMARS MLRS is high. And the main goal, apparently, is to defeat the rear facilities of the RF Armed Forces.

Shelling of rear territories and residential areas

[imghttps://rybar.ru/wp-content/webp-express/webp-images/uploads/2023/07/20230720111127-d87adcdb-1200x848.jpg.webp[/img]
In the morning, a Ukrainian drone struck the urban-type settlement of Razdolnoye in the northwest of the Crimean peninsula . Several administrative buildings, a cultural center, a children's center, a furniture store and a restaurant were damaged. Windows were shattered in several residential buildings and a kindergarten.

The girl died as a result of the attack. With multiple shrapnel wounds, she was hospitalized in the Central District Hospital, but it was not possible to save her. A state of emergency has been declared in the village. Car traffic is limited on the central street, operational services continue to work in the incident area.

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Later, the Armed Forces of Ukraine again used drones to attack the Crimean peninsula. Two devices were neutralized in the area of ​​​​the Gvardeiskoye settlement : the calculation of the Pantsir air defense missile system destroyed an aircraft-type UAV, another drone was suppressed by an electronic warfare unit, no one was injured.

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Ukrainian formations continue to strike at the border settlements of the Kursk region . At least seven shells were fired at the village of Tetkino , as a result of which three residential buildings burned, operational services extinguished the fire. The water tower was also damaged, but the settlement maintains a stable water supply, and there are no casualties among the population.

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The Armed Forces of Ukraine do not stop striking at the border of the Bryansk region . According to Shot, a Ukrainian drone attempted to attack a communication tower in the village of Chernozemny Gorodok , but crashed into a structure and collapsed. The drone was quickly neutralized, there were no casualties or damage.

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The Armed Forces of Ukraine continue to shell the border area of ​​the Belgorod region throughout the day . This time, the villages of Murom and Nekhoteevka fell under enemy fire . Three houses and power lines were damaged. In the Krasnoyaruzhsky district, the village of Vyazovoe came under fire : windows were shattered, facades and roofs in four private households were slashed, and a utility building and a gas pipeline were also damaged. In the Graivoronsky urban district in the village of Smorodino , three residential buildings, power lines, a gas pipeline and one of the premises of an agricultural enterprise were damaged, there were no casualties among the civilian population.

Ukrainian formations continue to inflict massive strikes on the Donetsk People's Republic . Damaged residential buildings and infrastructure facilities in Donetsk , Makiivka , Horlivka and other settlements in the region. In Staromlynovka, two civilians were injured - they were provided with all the necessary medical assistance.

In the Kherson region, the enemy again attacked settlements on the left bank of the Dnieper. Residents of Novaya Kakhovka, Kakhovka, Kardashinka, Staraya Zburyevka and Alyoshek were subjected to shelling . According to preliminary information, there were no casualties.

Political events
On the supply of 155-mm ammunition from Bulgaria to Ukraine

Before the pro-European government came to power in Sofia in June this year, the former leadership of Bulgaria repeatedly reported that the state was not going to join the production of 155-mm shells for Ukraine. Former Bulgarian Economy Minister Nikola Stoyanov argued in March that the country did not have the capacity to produce them, except that it could only be tried "on an experimental basis".

However, according to documents recently published in the US Federal Procurement System (FZS), it turned out that Bulgaria had been manufacturing and supplying the US with 155-mm shells all this time. Back in January, the US Department of Defense announced that Northrop Grumman and Global Military Products would compete for $552 million orders for 155mm munitions through 2027. Recently released FCF documents have shown that most of the funds - $402 million - have already been allocated to Global Military Products. The country where the ammunition comes from is also indicated there - Bulgaria.

Thus, despite all the excuses of the Bulgarian politicians, it turned out that Bulgaria has large production capacities for the manufacture of 155-mm shells. And under a $402 million contract, you can buy up to 800,000 of them at $500 apiece.

On the decision of the Ukrainian command to attack Russian ships in the Black Sea

The Ukrainian Ministry of Defense stated that it would consider ships moving in the Black Sea in the direction of Russian seaports as carrying military cargo.

From 05.00 on July 20, Ukraine prohibits navigation in the areas of the North-Eastern part of the Black Sea and the Kerch-Yenikal Strait due to danger.

The decision of the Ukrainian department is nothing more than a response to a similar decision of the command of the RF Armed Forces to ban the movement of ships to Ukrainian ports. It is extremely curious how the Ukrainian authorities are going to act in relation to merchant and cargo ships.

Given the lack of any explanation, any ship heading for Russia could be hit. Of course, Ukrainian units will not try to destroy all surface objects, but they may well damage several of them to intimidate and demonstrate their capabilities. In addition, they will not have problems with guidance and target designation due to the constant activity of NATO intelligence in the Black Sea.

This should be taken into account, including when planning attacks on maritime targets, which are not limited to Odessa , but also extend to Izmail and Kiliya .

On military assistance to Ukraine

EU foreign ministers have agreed on a new long-term $22.4 billion military aid package for Kyiv. The head of European diplomacy, Josep Borrell , said that the EU will "significantly expand the resources" of the European Peace Fund to increase the supply of military equipment for the needs of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Until 2027, Ukraine will annually receive five billion euros for the purchase of weapons, including IRIS-T and SAMP/T air defense systems.

https://rybar.ru/hronika-speczialnoj-vo ... 2023-goda/

Google Translator

(Other images at link.)

*******

Exit from the grain deal. Consequences
July 20, 20:24

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Exit from the grain deal. Consequences

1. The Russian Defense Ministry made it clear today that attacks on Ukrainian ports will continue. Previously, they were protected by the grain deal, now there are no obstacles.

2. The US and Turkey have moved away from the topic of escorting ships to Ukraine and are discussing land routes more. Ukraine itself declares that it is ready to pay for the risks from the passage of ships to Odessa. Without escort, this is up to 1-2 sunk / damaged ships, not to mention attacks on port infrastructure and terminals. However, there will certainly be attempts to test the Russian reaction in the hope that there will be no reaction.

3. In turn, Ukraine threatens to attack Russian civilian ships in the Black Sea. Most likely they will try to attack ships with maritime drones and aerial drones. This threat should not be underestimated. The defeat of the coastal military infrastructure must be intensified.

4. Grain prices on world markets continue to grow. Accordingly, Russian grain producers will earn extra money from this growth. Negotiations on a grain hub in Turkey can be expected in August, when negotiations between Putin and Erdogan are likely to take place.

5. The US and the EU do not give grounds to believe that they intend to fulfill the 5 Russian conditions under which the grain deal can be extended. The next meeting of the UN Security Council regarding the grain deal will not change anything significant in this situation. The coordination center in Istanbul has already been disbanded. There are no prerequisites for extending the deal on the previous terms.

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/8506495.html

Google Translator

*********

Weak Propaganda Talk

From the Ukrainian Pravda, July 20, 2023 (machine translation):

The Ukrainian military in the south is advancing hundreds of meters every day - the National Guard

Every day, the Ukrainian military makes a gradual movement several hundred meters to the south and southeast.

Source: Military Media Center , which cites the words of the director of the department of planning for the use of the Main Directorate of the National Guard of Ukraine, Colonel Mykola Urshalovych

Direct speech: "In extremely difficult conditions of mined terrain and enemy fire... our assault groups, supported by tanks and artillery, continue their gradual movement to the south and southeast, displacing the invaders from Ukrainian land. Our soldiers and officers are literally gnawing through the enemy's defenses.

Every day we advance several hundred meters."

Prehistory:

Earlier, the commander of the Ground Forces of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Oleksandr Syrskyi said that although the counteroffensive is taking place more slowly than it would be desirable, the Defense Forces are still advancing daily with battles at a distance of 500 m to 1 km.


The Ukrainian counteroffensive began on June 5, 2023. The (Ukraine friendly) LiveUAmap on that day looked like this:

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Forty five days have passed since the counter-offensive was launched. Today the map looks like this:

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In the eastward direction just south of Bakhmut/Artyomovsk open fields and some tree rows at a depth of 6,000 meters changed hand. No settlement was taken. In the southern direction during the 5,500 meter advance of the Ukrainians south of Velyka Novosilka six small, empty settlements were taken. (Small = one is literally named 'Five huts'). In the most western part, south of Orikiv, the advance was some 7,000 meter with two small settlements.

Over the last days the front lines in the south have not moved at all. The fighting north and south of Bakhmut has been back and forth for a while and the frontline there is somewhat not defined and largely not really moving.

All attacks came to a halt in the security zone before the real and hardened Russian defense lines.

Forty five days times 'several hundred meters' are at least 9,000 meter. That hasn't been reached anywhere.

The aim of the counter-offensive was to reach the Sea of Azov, some 100 kilometer south of the frontline. At the current speed it would take the Ukrainian army 1,000 days (and many more soldiers and material than it has) to reach it.

Why do General Syrskyi and Colonel Urshalovych think they can fool the Ukrainian people and their soldiers with such weak propaganda talk?

Posted by b on July 20, 2023 at 15:11 UTC | Permalink

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2023/07/w ... .html#more

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GOING AGAINST THE GRAIN, SEPARATING THE WHEAT FROM THE CHAFF – THIS IS HOW THE NEW BLACK SEA CAMPAIGN WILL GO

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By John Helmer, Moscow @bears_with

Officially speaking, the Russians ended the year-long Black Sea Grain Initiative by refusing to renew it on July 17.

Practically, it has been doomed for weeks. The Ukrainian attacks on the Togliatti-Odessa ammonia pipeline (June 8) and the Taman ship-loading terminal (June 2); Ukrainian efforts to use the grain carriers in the United Nations-supervised sea corridor to conceal imports of weapons and the launch of naval drones aimed at the Crimean Bridge, Russian Black Sea fleet vessels, and other shore targets; the refusal of the NATO states to lift their sanctions against the Russian trade to implement the terms of the original UN agreement — at the same time as they are stopping Ukrainian exports from entering the European Union (EU) at dumping prices – this is what killed the deal.

That it had benefitted the Ukraine and the EU states more than it benefited Russia has not been an obstacle to Russian renewal of the terms until now, but too embarrassing for the EU states to admit, and their media to report.

President Vladimir Zelensky’s spokesman said the Russians are now attempting “to destroy the ability to supply food to the countries of the global south”. This line of Russia at war with the world was picked up by Josep Borrell, the EU’s foreign minister: “If this grain is not only stopped but [also] destroyed . . . this is going to create a huge food crisis in the world…The ministers will have to discuss how to proceed, but there is only one solution: to increase the military support to Ukraine. If they are being bombed, we have to provide anti-aerial capacities.” “Hundreds of thousands of people, not to say millions, urgently need the grain from Ukraine,” echoed the German Foreign Minister, Annalena Baerbock, “which is why we are working with all our international partners so that the grain in Ukraine does not rot in silos in the next few weeks, but reaches the people of the world who urgently need it.”

The UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres repeated that Russia’s war in the Ukraine was a war against food supplies, low wheat prices, and survival from starvation worldwide. “Today’s decision by the Russian Federation will strike a blow to people in need everywhere.” “Struggling people everywhere and developing countries don’t have a choice. Hundreds of millions of people face hunger and consumers are confronting a global cost-of-living crisis. They will pay the price.”

White House officials claimed the Russians are weaponizing food. “Russia’s decision to resume its effective blockade of Ukrainian ports and prevent this grain from getting to markets will harm people all over the world,” National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby said at a White House briefing.

These claims aren’t true. They are “clashes with shippers’ reality”, a Bloomberg report acknowledged. Like almost every scheme the corruptly clever Zelensky (lead image, left) and the corruptly stupid Joseph Biden (right) have devised in the current war, the conversion of the fight for Odessa and Ukraine’s other Black Sea ports into a war to starve the hungriest peoples of the world is failing.

Instead, the battle for Odessa has begun where the electric war to turn off the city’s lights left off. The end of the Black Sea grain initiative will profit the Russian grain and fertilizer exporters by a big margin, compared to the past year; the neediest country importers will gain from direct Russian shipments at low to zero price; and the Ukraine will lose, not only its remaining ports and their trading and shipping infrastructure, but also its sea lanes southward.

At the same time, Ukraine’s neighbours in the European Union (EU) are closing the river lanes, roads, and rail lines to Ukrainian grain exports northward and westward. That’s weaponizing food – but the Europeans are doing it to protect their own farmers.

The Russian naval blockade was officially announced by the Russian Defense Ministry on July 19.

“Due to the termination of the operation of the Black Sea Initiative and the curtailment of the maritime humanitarian corridor, from 00.00 Moscow time on July 20, 2023, all vessels traveling in the Black Sea to Ukrainian ports will be considered as potential carriers of military cargo. Accordingly, the flag countries of such vessels will be considered involved in the Ukrainian conflict on the side of the Kiev regime. In addition, a number of marine areas in the north-western and south-eastern parts of the international waters of the Black Sea have been declared temporarily dangerous for navigation. Relevant information warnings about the withdrawal of safety guarantees to seafarers have been issued in accordance with the established procedure.”

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The corridor created by the Istanbul agreements of July 2022 was 320 nautical miles long connecting Ukraine’s ports of Odessa, Chernomorsk and Pivdennyi/Yuzhny with an inspection area inside Turkish territorial waters. While transiting the maritime humanitarian corridor, the UN centre coordinating the operation said, “no military ship, aircraft or unmanned aerial vehicle may approach within a radius of 10 nautical miles of any vessel engaged in the Initiative and transiting the corridor.” Source: https://www.dailysabah.com/

Zelensky replied, claiming he has asked for UN and Turkish support to run the gauntlet against the blockade. “The Black Sea Grain Initiative can and should continue to work – if not with Russia, then without Russia. The grain export agreement – an agreement with Turkey and the UN [sic] – remains in force. I have sent official letters to the President of Turkey and the UN Secretary General with a proposal to extend the work of the Black Sea Grain Initiative or its equivalent in a trilateral format – that way it is most reliable. Ukraine, the UN and Turkey can jointly ensure the operation of the food corridor and the inspection of ships.”

The western insurers, who have been imposing US and EU sanctions to stop Russian grain and fertilizer shipments for the past year, have now imposed a stop for cover of Ukrainian cargoes. ““No sane owners will call there uninsured,” Bloomberg quoted the Greece-based Doric Shipbrokers SA, which has been sending vessels through the UN sea lane for the year of the grain agreement. Without the protection of the safe corridor “the Ukraine trade is dead.” “I don’t think shipowners will go to the Ukrainian ports until the corridors are reestablished — it’s not safe to do so,” another Bloomberg shipping source announced.

In the Russian assessment Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan will not risk his navy to escort Ukrainian grain vessels. “Especially if we recall that in 2022-23, Turkey was the leader among other importers of Russian food by a large margin. 12.6 million tonnes, of which 11.3 million are cereals. For comparison: only 3.2 million tons of food shipments left Ukraine for Turkey during the period of the deal.”

According to the UN data tabulation for the Black Sea Grain Initiative, Turkey’s 3.2 million tonnes was the third largest beneficiary of the year-long shipping deal. China, with 8 million tonnes, came first; Spain second with 6 million tonnes. Italy and the Netherlands followed with 2 million tonnes each. The UN also reports that 80% of the shipments from the Ukraine went to the EU states, Israel, Japan and other high-income countries.

In other words, this has been a UN programme for lowering grain prices to feed the rich states in the alliance against Russia. Guterres and his associates at the UN have been dissimulating this from start to finish.

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https://www.un.org/

World Food Programme (WFP) shipments of 725,000 tonnes represent the share of the Ukrainian grain exports which went to the neediest countries – just 2.2% of the total. The list of these WFP countries, and the volumes of grain they received, can be found at the same UN source.

Over the past year commercial costs and logistic factors have independently restricted the Ukraine from exporting more grain on land routes, truck and rail. No more than 15% of the country’s total exports went that way. But even that limited volume has triggered Polish and other bans. The reaction of the Polish government to the termination of the UN sea corridor has been to reemphasize that Poland’s priority is to protect itself from the Ukraine. “The war in Ukraine is having an increasingly serious impact on the agricultural market,” Prime Minister

Mateusz Morawiecki said on Wednesday. “This is having a negative impact on Poles, which is why we have imposed an embargo on goods from Ukraine. In a couple of months, the EU intends to reopen the borders for the import of grain from Ukraine. We do not agree to this, we will not open the borders, and we will not allow the destabilization of our economy. We are obliged to protect Polish interests and our agriculture.”

Poland, along with Hungary, Slovakia, Bulgaria and Romania negotiated a side deal with the EU in May, according to which they would lift their ban on the Ukrainian exports in exchange for €100 million in EU funding and assurances that Ukrainian shipments would only pass through the five countries on their way to other destinations.”

The new Russian military campaign, combining blockade at sea with targeted destruction of port infrastructure is aimed at landlocking the Kiev regime. Zelensky “can at least beg an aircraft carrier group from Biden to escort grain carriers and drag her into the Black Sea, spitting on the Montreux Convention,” commented Nikolai Storozhenko in Vzglyad. “But what’s the use of it if the ports can’t ship?”

In the analysis to follow, Vzglyad reporter Olga Samofalova explains what the impact will be on the Russian grain and fertilizer trades. The translation into English is verbatim; illustrations have been added.

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Source: https://vz.ru/


July 18, 2023
How the cancellation of the grain deal will help Russian exporters
Cancellation of grain deal will make life easier for Russian exporters
Text: Olga Samofalova

There will be no more grain deal. Russia has puts an end to this issue. However, this is not such sad news for Russian grain exports and budget revenues. Moreover, this deal initially brought Russia only damage, according to the Russian Grain Union. Will the rejection of the grain deal turn out to be even more beneficial to our exporters?

The Russian side no longer intends to conduct any negotiations on the resumption of the grain deal. The decision to terminate cooperation in this format is final, said Dmitry Polyansky, First Deputy Permanent Representative of the Russian Federation to the UN. Earlier, the Russian Foreign Ministry announced the termination of the grain deal and notified Turkey, Ukraine and the UN about it.

Russia agreed to this, because during the year of the deal’s existence and its extension three times, the terms of the deal were not fulfilled. None of the five system tasks stipulated by the memorandum with the UN has been completed. Formally, Russian exports of food and fertilizers are not subject to Western sanctions, but difficulties arise due to general restrictions on payments, logistics and cargo insurance.

In response to the grain deal, Russia was waiting for the easing of these restrictions on Russian grain and fertilizer exports. In particular, it was assumed that the Rosselkhozbank [Russian Agricultural Bank] would be connected to the SWIFT system again, which would facilitate financial transactions with customers. Supplies of spare parts for agricultural machinery, as well as logistics and transportation insurance were also to resume. The issue of ammonia supplies via the Togliatti–Odessa ammonia pipeline was supposed to be resolved, but now this issue is off the agenda, since the pipe was recently blown up.

The problem is that Western countries do not consider the Russia–UN memorandum an integral part of the grain deal, although they have recently started talking about possible concessions, for example, about reconnecting a subsidiary of the Rosselkhozbank to SWIFT.

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Source: https://news.un.org/

At first glance, it may seem that this could seriously affect the export of Russian grain and fertilizers. After all, during the UN programme, an export record was set. Last agricultural year, from July 2022 to June 2023, Russia exported a record 60 million tonnes of grain, of which 47 million tonnes was wheat. Whereas a year earlier, in the 2021-2022 agricultural year, Russia exported only 38.1 million tonnes of grain. Export revenue in 2022 amounted to $41 billion, according to the Ministry of Agriculture.

However,by itself the cancellation of the grain deal does not cause any harm. The reason is simple — nothing changes for Russian goods at all, since no concessions were made during the grain programme. Throughout the year when the deal was in effect, all the restrictions on finance, logistics and insurance for our companies were in effect. Russian exporters had to work with these restrictions and look for ways to circumvent them, living in the expectation that something was about to change and the restrictions would be lifted. But everything remained in the same place, so whether there is a deal or no deal – this makes no difference to them. Thus, Russia achieved record grain exports over the past year not because this grain deal was in effect (its influence is deceptive), but thanks to a high harvest and the rapid adjustment of companies to new working conditions with restrictions.

Buyers of our grain will continue to receive wheat as before, even after the cancellation of the grain transaction scheme. All contractual obligations will be fulfilled, the fight against world hunger will continue, the Union of Grain Exporters said.


“For Russia, the closing of the deal itself will not lead to negative consequences, since it initially brought Russia only damage”, said Arkady Zlochevsky [right], president of the Russian Grain Union. According to the expert, such a deal should not have been concluded from the very beginning. According to the Russian Grain Union, during the year of the grain deal, the Russian grain industry alone lost more than $1 billion, not counting the loss of the fertilizer companies.

Earlier, in an interview with RIA Novosti, Zlochevsky said that because of the grain deal, a price discount was formed on the supply of Russian wheat in relation to the prices of international competitors: the difference was from $10 to $20 per tonne of wheat, and at peaks it reached $79 per tonne. The closing of the grain deal will allow the prices of Russian grain to return to fair levels, although this may not happen immediately, Zlochevsky believes.

The grain deal, on top of everything else, brought down world food prices. “Even a superficial analysis suggests that the beginning of hostilities in Ukraine gave rise to a significant price rally of food on the world market. In March 2022, the FAO (Food and Agriculture Association of the United Nations) composite price index rose to 160 points, and for grain and vegetable oils it turned out to be about 170 and 210 points, respectively. However, after the launch of the grain transaction, the price level began to decline, and in June 2023, the average value of the FAO grain price index was 126.6 points,” says Maxim Maximov, Associate Professor of the Department of Corporate Governance and Innovation at the Plekhanov Russian University of Economics.

In Maximov’s opinion, if there had been no grain deal, then Russia could probably have received comparable revenues from the sale of a smaller volume of exports at higher prices (while maintaining the trend of rising food prices).

Accordingly, the final cancellation of the deal may raise food prices. On Monday, world grain prices began to rise on the Russian termination news. However, Maximov is in no hurry to say that this is a stable and steady trend for price growth. “FAO forecasts say that world grain stocks will show an increase of more than 2% by the end of the 2023-2024 season. At the same time, the price level and the amount of grain on the world market in general will depend on how supplies from Ukraine will be carried out after Russia withdraws from the grain deal,” Maximov says.

THE MOVEMENT OF WHEAT PRICE FUTURES, CHICAGO EXCHANGE

Past five years
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Past month
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Past week
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Source: https://www.google.com

During the grain deal, the Ukraine was able to export about 33 million tonnes of grain by sea. The withdrawal of such a large volume of grain from the world market, of course, cannot but affect prices. However, it is unlikely there will be such losses. Now the options for sending Ukrainian grain by sea will be limited, but the Ukrainians can continue to send ships through their waters at their own risk. In addition, Ukraine has other ways of sending grain – by rail and by road. This, of course, is unlikely to appeal to Poland and other EU agricultural countries, since Ukrainian grain settling in Europe greatly knocks down prices there and ruins European farmers. However, the EU will have to solve this problem on its own.

Maximov believes that in the medium term, the price of grain will still rise, and this opens up a certain window of opportunity for our exporters to increase export revenue.

Finally, the understanding that the grain deal is in the past can help by itself. This awareness will allow Russian companies not to hope for the lifting of restrictions and more actively build workarounds for the trade with the understanding that the sanctions situation will last for a long time.

“The termination of the grain deal makes it possible to carry out the necessary restructuring of logistics routes and use the North–South route with maximum load with access to Asian and African markets through Iran. The development of this direction seems to be key for the level of food exports from Russia. This scenario will not only preserve the level of export earnings, but also supply grain, food and fertilizers to the poorest countries of the world. That is, to realize the same goals that were laid in the foundation of the grain deal, but were shamelessly ignored by our former partners”, says Maximov.

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Source: https://en.wikipedia.org

As for the export of Russian mineral fertilizers, this has decreased by about 15% due to the general sanctions restrictions. However, in 2023 Russia is gradually restoring fertilizer exports, and this year it may reach supply levels comparable to the record figures of 2021 of almost 38 million tonnes, Andrei Guriev, head of the Russian Association of Fertilizer Producers (RAPU) said in May. And again, it’s not just been the grain deal, but the fact that fertilizer producers needed more effort and time to change buyers from unfriendly to friendly, to agree on payment, logistics and insurance. There was a tougher situation with delivery restrictions, for example, via the ammonia pipeline. More tangible progress in these matters is expected this year, hence such high export expectations.

That is, in general, the cancellation of the grain deal may be beneficial for Russian exporters and the budget. However, negative consequences are also possible, which go more into geopolitics. And it’s not that poor countries will not be able to get Ukrainian grain. Of the 33 million tonnes of grain that Ukraine exported through the Black Sea ports during the year of the deal, only less than 3% were exported to the poorest countries, according to the Foreign Ministry. The fight against hunger on the part of Ukraine is used, rather, as a red flag and for making the deal more important than it was.

However, it is important for Russia to maintain friendly relations with Turkey, China and other friendly countries. And theymay not be exactly thrilled at the rise in world grain prices. This generally adds to their problems and adds to internal inflation. So, our partners also buy Ukrainian grains; for example, China is 30% dependent on corn imports from Ukraine.


Therefore, Russia’s decision to suspend participation in the grain deal may be revised as a result of negotiations, though for this to happen there must be the possibility to achieve at least part of the requirements that would facilitate the export of grain and fertilizers for Russian business – this outcome is not ruled out by Olga Belenkaya, head of the Macroeconomic Analysis Department of the Moscow brokerage, Finam.


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Re: Footnotes from the Ukrainian "Crisis"; New High-Points in Cynicism Part IV

Post by blindpig » Sat Jul 22, 2023 11:50 am

Wagner's Belarusian exile
POSTED BY @NSANZO ⋅ 07/22/2023

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From the new and improvised base of his private army, in a semi-exile he claims will only be temporary, Evgeny Prigozhin has addressed his soldiers for the first time. The message was, at the same time, a welcome to his troops in this new, and hopefully brief, phase in Belarus, as well as a statement to the world that Prigozhin himself has been in charge of distributing through channels related to him. Since his interventions abroad gained presence, communication has been an important part of Wagner's strategy, first without excessive prominence for its owner and, later, with an open tone of exaltation of Prigozhin as absolute leader. That importance has grown exponentially in the last year and especially since the battle for Artyomovsk, led by Wagner's infantry, made the private military company the protagonist of the only ongoing battle in Ukraine. Prigozhin used the Battle of Artyomovsk informatively and politically.

After the two defeats in the autumn of 2022, Russia needed a victory and the press focused on Wagner's soldiers, always accessible to journalists and ready to escort the media to the vicinity of the actual battle, to recount, with a certain epic tone, the development of the war. Despite the declarations of Prigozhin, who tried to award himself and his army the achievement - questionable in any case considering the time taken, the casualties suffered and the destruction caused by the battle - of the capture of Soledar, Wagner's troops never fought alone. Prigozhin twisted reality by stating that only Wagner was fighting in the area when, in reality, paratroopers and other Russian units were also involved in the fighting. The same thing happened in Artyomovsk,

The mutiny on June 24, the negotiation process that prevented the point of no return from a battle, and everything that has happened since reflects Wagner's real importance to the Russian state. In a text published by one of his related media, Wagner tries to explain his reason for being and points out what his future may be. Prigozhin and his army have always claimed to be soldiers of President Vladimir Putin, a way of declaring their allegiance to one part of the state, but leaving the door open to disown another. Prigozhin's anger has always been directed at the Defense Ministry, especially Minister Sergey Shoigu and Chief of Staff Valery Gerasimov. The friction is not new and is not due solely to the alleged lack of ammunition for the fight in Artyomovsk that he denounced for weeks,

The first head-on clash between the interests of both parties occurred in 2018 in Syria, when Wagner's troops and their Syrian allies tried to storm positions controlled by the United States and its allies. Through the usual channels of communication between the two countries - of which only Russia is in Syria legally, invited by the internationally recognized government - the US commanders contacted the Russians seeking an answer to the question of whether Russian troops were attacking their positions. Faced with the refusal of the Russian command in Syria, the United States chose to make an example of these troops and used all its means to teach a lesson and a warning.in the form of a massacre in which he used means well above those rationally necessary. In the United States, there are those who wanted to see in this confrontation the first battle between Russian and American troops since Vietnam and an episode in which the United States possibly killed more Russian soldiers than in any episode of the Cold War. The attitude of the Russian command in Syria and the Ministry of Defense in Moscow, by action or omission, was also a warning to Wagner and a way of emphasizing to the company his position on the scale of military power.

Prigozhin has seen in the war in Ukraine the perfect showcase to finally launch his challenge to the Ministry of Defense after a latent conflict that the country's military authorities have allowed to grow until it exploded publicly and internationally with a video riddled with outbursts in which the owner of Wagner dispatched himself against the entire establishmentmilitary and denounced, not only the lack of ammunition for his troops -a logistical problem that is not only limited to Wagner-, but also the corruption of the system. At the meeting held in the Kremlin just five days after the failed mutiny, Wagner insisted on his availability to continue serving the country and its president, something present in the company's ideology since its origins. In a document handwritten and signed by Prigozhin and Utkin, two of the three founders of Wagner, one of the points was precisely loyalty to "VVP", Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, and to the State.

However, that loyalty does not extend to the Defense Ministry, against which Prigozhin continues his particular crusade. Downplaying the country's march, Prigozhin insisted on his message in Belarus in his severe criticism of the military command. Ever since he came out of the shadow to which he himself had condemned himself after years of denying his role in Wagner and the very existence of this private army, Prigozhin has worked on creating a character that contrasts with the forms of the Ministry of Defense and its minister. The increasingly vulgar language used in his video communications against Shoigu or in his visits to prisons, the images of which were leaked by Wagner's communication team, seeks to position himself as a man of the people., a self-made ex-convict facing those who have spent years inside the obsolete, according to Prigozhin, military structures of a State that needs Wagner's participation for its war effort.

Before his soldiers and his communication apparatus, Evgeny Prigozhin announced a brief stay in Belarus and pointed to Africa as the company's next destination. The reality is that the presence of Wagner, sometimes hand in hand with the State and other times in economic adventures that only benefit Prigozhin and his closest circle, is still necessary for Russia, which in the current conditions could hardly replace Wagner groups in countries like the Central African Republic, Libya or Mali. Nor can Russia afford to give up the large army that Prigozhin has managed to create, largely with the connivance of the State, which has opened the prison doors for him, the main source of recruitment.

Although the situation has more doubts than certainties, it is evident that Wagner has handed over to the Ministry of Defense the heavy weapons that he had and that, partially disarmed, the bulk of the soldiers who have survived the battle are now in Belarusian territory. However, it is equally evident that the Ministry of Defense is trying to recover part of those troops. The figure of 30,000 troops who would have accepted the offer of the military structures to continue their service has been mentioned, a figure that Wagner denies. With the publication of an interview with one of its commanders, the company has tried to deny that figure and deny that a significant part of the demobilized troops have chosen to sign a contract with the State.

Prigozhin has also insisted on the message with which he started the riot on June 24, when he stated that the front had collapsed and that Shoigu and Gerasimov were lying to President Putin in their analysis of the front. In his Belarusian message, the owner of Wagner leaves the door open for the return of the company to the Ukrainian front, yes "when we don't have to embarrass ourselves." Without elaborating, Prigozhin insisted that "what happens at the front is a shame that we have nothing to do with" in his attempt to present Wagner's absence as a voluntary departure and not the consequence of a political and military move gone simply wrong. Prigozhin did not withdraw troops from him to rescue them from an unfair situation in which they were being used as cannon fodder. This week, Wagner has published his casualty figures, which include 22,000 deaths, the vast majority in a single battle, a figure that Prigozhin is interested in exaggerating, so it must be taken into account simply as a communication from one party. However, as could be seen from the footage in which he explained to the prisoners that their positions would be front-line, where death is a real possibility, Prigozhin always knew what the conditions were and never complained about the tactic. His complaint was the lack of ammunition, an argument that, as could be seen on June 24, really hid some personal political aspirations regardless of the well-being of the troops and even at the expense of the war effort of the State that he claims to defend.

In one of the communications published this week, Wagner affirms that it is the ideology - Russian nationalism, which is not even the only ideology present in the group anymore considering that the company has had to open up to a massive recruitment that makes it impossible to carry out an ideological profile of the applicants - that differentiates the company from others with which it is usually compared, mainly Blackwater and Executive Outcomes, a pioneer in the privatization of the war in Africa in the first years after the end of the Cold War. In the years in which Wagner, and especially Prigozhin, have shown interest in only two aspects: a supposed personal loyalty to President Putin and enrichment at the expense of the natural resources of the countries in which he has obtained contracts and where he has also sought to convert the military and economic presence into political influence. The first aspect points to an attempt to turn the company into a kind of Varangian guard, the Viking guard of the Byzantine emperor. The second, the thirst for wealth and political ambition in the name of guaranteeing Russia the foreign presence expected of a great power, is reminiscent of the East India Company, an army that became a state, rather than Blackwater, an army in the service of a state. Of course, Wagner has inherited from Executive Outcomes, a company formed from the remains of the army of Apartheid South Africa, the modus operandi of offering their combat or pacification services in exchange for mining concessions.

https://slavyangrad.es/2023/07/22/el-ex ... more-27775

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Chronicle of the special military operation for July 21, 2023
July 22, 2023
Rybar

Chronicle of the special military operation for July 21, 2023

Ukrainian formations are increasing their presence in the border areas of the Kharkiv and Sumy regions, simultaneously resettling civilians. This may indicate the preparation of a large-scale provocation or even an attempt to attack in the Kursk , Bryansk or Belgorod regions.

Fights of varying intensity are going on along the entire front line. In the Kupyansk area , the RF Armed Forces are advancing with battles. In turn, on the flanks of Bakhmut, the Armed Forces of Ukraine are trying to gnaw through the defenses. The Ugledar direction has become more active . In the Kherson and Zaporozhye regions, there is a relative decline in enemy activity, which, meanwhile, does not stop sending reinforcements.

Attacks on the Ukrainian military infrastructure in the rear areas continue. The Russian Armed Forces attacked the area of ​​the bridge in Zatoka and other areas of the Odessa region with missiles, but Ukrainian censorship has so far effectively prevented the emergence of information about the affected objects.

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Strengthening of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in the border area

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While a slight lull arose on most of the front, in the Sumy region, the Armed Forces of Ukraine continued to transfer forces to the border with the Belgorod and Bryansk regions.

The other day, a tank column from Sumy , as well as three self-propelled guns, passed through Trostyanets to the east. At the same time , forced evacuation of citizens continues from Slavgorod , Grabovsky , Popovka in the Sumy region and Volchansk in the Kharkiv region.

From the Volchansky district alone, the authorities of the Kharkiv region plan to take out about 194 thousand people. Settlement points are organized in the rear areas of the two regions.

After a raid on July 15 by Chechen fighters in Sereda , detachments from the battalion "named after Sheikh Mansur" took up a waiting position in Volchansk. Also, Chechen mercenaries showed up in Smyach with D-30 howitzers and 120-mm mortars.

Also, along the border in the Sumy region, the number of subscribers with SIM cards of Polish operators has increased. Probably, detachments of Polish mercenaries were drawn to the Russian territories.

About a week ago, Belarusian mercenaries from the Kalinovsky battalion and the “Pahonia” formation arrived at the junction of the Chernihiv and Sumy regions. According to the intercept, the DRG from their composition conducted reconnaissance in the Chernozemny Gorodok area.

Judging by the concentration of Ukrainian formations and mercenary units, in the coming weeks, the Armed Forces of Ukraine are planning to carry out massive attacks on the territory of the Belgorod and Bryansk regions. Probably, sorties will be coordinated in time with the offensive in other directions.

The strike of the RF Armed Forces on Zatoka

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The Russian armed forces continue to strike at the infrastructure of Odessa, which, as the Russian mission to the UN said today, is the place of deployment and replenishment of the Armed Forces of Ukraine with Western weapons.

Photos of the strike near the railway bridge in Zatoka appeared on the network. The footage shows smoke a little to the west of the lift span.

Previously, they repeatedly tried to strike at the bridge itself , but serious damage to the object could not be achieved. This time, the target was probably the port-point "Bugaz", where the infrastructure is located, suitable for placing and launching marine UAVs.

The situation on the front line and the fighting
Northeast of Kupyansk , Russian troops continue to advance from Liman Pervy , despite UAF counterattacks. After securing at the Molchanovo railway station, the RF Armed Forces stormed the positions of the 14th brigade in the landings west and south of the village.

Separate collisions are also noted north of Sinkovka . The other day, Russian units destroyed a warehouse with ammunition of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in the village.

Due to the deteriorating situation in Sinkovka, assault detachments of the 13th battalion of the 95th airborne infantry brigade of Ukraine were transferred to Sinkovka to conduct a counteroffensive on Liman 1st.

Also, formations of the 3rd brigade arrived in Zapadnoye , and the forces of the 41st mechanized brigade were stationed in Kupyansk and its environs. In addition, assault groups of 121 troop troop units were moved from the Limansky sector.

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Fierce fighting continues on the flanks of Bakhmut . Detachments of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, using the tactics of "meat assault", are increasing pressure on the units of the RF Armed Forces defending in Kleshcheevka .

The control of the Armed Forces of Ukraine over the tactical heights allows the Ukrainian formations to continue the offensive. The enemy constantly transfers new reinforcements to the line of contact and attacks in small groups of 10 people. Due to the lack of reserves and rotation, the RF Armed Forces have not yet been able to seize the initiative. Nevertheless, the airborne troops successfully repel all enemy attacks, regularly take prisoners and destroy the equipment of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.

Today, our information was confirmed that the Armed Forces of Ukraine advanced near the M-03 highway in the Orekhovo-Vasilyevka area .

The enemy's plan remains unchanged - to surround Bakhmut by breaking through the defenses on the flanks.

In the area of ​​Maryinka, the situation has not changed significantly. Positional battles continue on the western outskirts of the destroyed city, both sides are actively using FPV drones and artillery to strike at the front line.

In the Avdeevsky direction , Russian tankers hit strongholds from closed positions, UAV operators correct the work, thanks to which it is possible to avoid return fire and save the vehicle’s service life.

Enemy activation continues on the Ugledar sector of the front. Yesterday, the Armed Forces of Ukraine attempted an attack in the area north of Nikolsky , but were discovered and destroyed by artillery and anti-tank systems.

Today Voin DV @voin_dv reported that the enemy was gathering in landings north of Vladimirovka , but was opened and subjected to artillery strikes. As a result, the Armed Forces of Ukraine suffered losses in personnel and one armored combat vehicle was destroyed.

This may indicate a change in the vector of attention of Ukrainian formations to the east, since no significant progress was made in the Zaporozhye region and the Vremievsky sector.

Near Bolshaya Novoselka , the enemy attempted an offensive from Rovnopol , however, having suffered losses in equipment and personnel, he was forced to retreat to their original positions.

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In Zaporozhye , the situation is still without significant changes. However, enemy activity at the front line has increased - there is a transfer of people and firepower in preparation for the attack.

In the coming days, Ukrainian formations are considering an attack on the Zaporozhye nuclear power plant , operating from Nikopol and Osokorovka . The most trained MTR groups have already been moved to these areas, and the coordination of actions will be carried out by special forces officers of the British Armed Forces .

Along the Zaporozhye region, at least one Bayraktar operates on a regular basis from the airfield in Dnepropetrovsk , which provides guidance for artillery and MLRS.

In the Orekhovsky sector, the enemy made attempts to attack Rabotino again all yesterday, and also on the night of July 21 . Now the units of the Armed Forces of Ukraine are regrouping for the next offensive.

In anticipation of a new wave, the RF Armed Forces launched strikes against enemy concentrations in Stepovoe , Malaya Tokmachka and Novodanilovka . At the same time, the accumulation of forces, ammunition and equipment continues in Novaya Tokmachka.

Despite the presence of forces in the Kamensky and Orekhovsky sectors, the command of the 10th AK of the Armed Forces of Ukraine moved the artillery unit of the 116th Ombre to Belogorye , which may indicate a possible activation in the Pologovsky sector of the front.

The situation in the area of ​​the Antonovsky Bridge remains tense, however, due to bad weather and heavy rains, enemy activity has decreased. Rocket artillery is working against enemy sabotage groups, and an active counter-battery fight is underway.

Shelling of rear territories and residential areas
Ukrainian formations continue daily shelling the border area of ​​the Kursk region .

The enemy fired 25 shells at the village of Tetkino, Glushkovsky district . The shells damaged power lines, the settlement is partially de-energized.

At least eight shells of the Armed Forces of Ukraine were fired at the village of Krasnooktyabrsky , there were no casualties or damage to infrastructure.

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Ukrainian formations continue daily shelling of border settlements in the Belgorod region .

The village of Ilek-Penkovka came under fire : several cars, a residential building, as well as power lines and a gas pipe were damaged. In addition, the enemy fired on the villages of Vyazovoe and Grafovka in the Krasnoyarzhsky region. Shell fragments damaged a residential building and power lines.

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Throughout the day, Ukrainian formations have been attacking the civilian infrastructure of the Donetsk agglomeration .

In the capital, strikes were made on residential buildings in Kievsky , Kirovsky , Kuibyshevsky and Petrovsky districts, one woman was injured, five houses were damaged.

In addition, the Armed Forces of Ukraine shelled Gorlovka , Zaitsevo , Staromikhaylovka and Yasinovataya , there is no information about casualties and destruction at the moment.

The terror of the civilian population of the left bank of the Kherson region continues. The civilian infrastructure of Novaya Kakhovka , Kakhovka , Bolshaya Kardashinka and Hola Pristan .

Political events
Statements by Russian President Vladimir Putin at an operational meeting of the Security Council

Main theses:

Western curators in Kiev do not hide their disappointment with the results of the so-called counter-offensive.

Ukraine is depleting its mobilization resource . Stockpiles of Western weapons are depleted and technological capabilities are limited.

The command of the special operation shows professionalism, soldiers and officers courageously perform their duty, and Western "invulnerable" equipment burns perfectly on the battlefield.

Public opinion in Ukraine is gradually changing, and the population is “gradually coming to its senses”, and attitudes in Europe are also changing.

Prolonging the Ukrainian conflict is beneficial for the elites US elites.


The independence of Poland after the Second World War was largely restored thanks to the participation of the USSR.

The western territories of today's Poland are Stalin's gift to the Poles.

Russia sees that the Kiev regime is ready to use any means to "preserve its corrupt nature."

Traitors in Ukraine are ready to “open the gates” for foreign influential forces in the West and sell the country again.

Polish leaders appear to be seeking to form a coalition under the NATO umbrella to intervene in the conflict in Ukraine and take a large piece of territory for themselves.

Poland also wants to seize part of the land in Belarus , unleashing a war by the Poles against the Union State automatically implies a war against Russia.

Putin instructed the head of the Foreign Intelligence Service, Naryshkin, to monitor Poland's plans for Ukraine.

Poland seized part of Lithuania, seized its historical lands from Russia and participated in the division of Czechoslovakia, taking advantage of the civil war.

Russia will fight back with all available means in the event of Western aggression against Belarus.

On the production of ammunition for UAVs in Ukraine

The government of Ukraine has adopted a resolution opening the market for the production of ammunition for UAVs. Manufacturers will receive a legal framework for mass production, requirements and restrictions for production, concessions with the testing and operation of ammunition.

In addition, this may serve to formalize the legalization of foreign supplies - it will be enough to "re-paste nameplates" and account for one's own "developments" so as not to give rise to statements about the intervention of foreign states.

On the supply of weapons to Ukraine

Germany will provide Ukraine with a new package of military assistance with the first 10 Leopard 1A5 tanks, machine guns, more than a thousand 155-mm shells, a bridge system, communications, intelligence, 100,000 first-aid kits.

https://rybar.ru/hronika-speczialnoj-vo ... 2023-goda/

(Other images at link.)

Google Translator

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An Attack on Belarus Will Mean an Aggression on Russia: Putin

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A Wagner fighter and a Belarusian soldier in Belarus, July 20, 2023. | Photo: Twitter/ @LauraWalkerKC

Published 21 July 2023

President Putin said that his country will respond to any aggression against Belarus with "all the means" available.

On Friday, President Vladimir Putin warned Poland that an attack on Belarus will mean "aggression" against Russia. These statements occurred after Poland announced the deployment of military units near the Belarusian border.

"As for Belarus, it is part of the State Union. An aggression against Belarus will mean an aggression against the Russian Federation. We will respond to it with all the means at our disposal," Putin said during a meeting of the Russian Security Council.

Poland decided to reinforce the security of its eastern flank with two military units after the Wagner Group began monitoring the border between Belarus and Poland this week.

Putin also denounced plans by Poland and Lithuania to create a grouping of regular forces whose goal would be to occupy western Ukraine.

"The outlook is clear. If Polish units enter, for example in Lviv or other Ukrainian territories, they will stay. By the way, forever," he warned.

Putin accused Poland of wanting to form "a kind of coalition and directly interfere in the conflict in Ukraine" in order to recapture what they consider to be "historical territories" in western Ukraine.

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"It is well known that they also crave Belarusian territories," he said, accusing the leaders of some Eastern European countries of turning "Russophobia" into an instrument of their domestic policy, which "strongly fan the flame of war."

For this reason, Putin considered "a very dangerous game" to use Poles, Lithuanians and "everyone who is necessary" as "cannon fodder."

"The authors of these plans should think about the consequences," Putin warned and ordered Sergei Narishkin, head of the Foreign Espionage Service (SVR), to closely monitor developments in that area.

According to Narishkin, the reason for these plans by Poland is that in Warsaw they are coming to the conclusion that "the defeat of Ukraine is only a matter of time."

In this regard, Putin insisted that Kiev's Western backers are "clearly disappointed" with the Ukrainian counteroffensive, in which "tens of thousands" of enemy soldiers would have been killed.

He also noted that the arsenals of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) are "largely depleted" while the rates of weapons production in the West do not allow it to rapidly replenish weapons and ammunition on the front lines.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/An- ... -0008.html

Ukraine Endangers Navigation in the Black Sea, Russia Says

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Cargo ships at the Black Sea, July 2023. | Photo: Twitter/ @farmdocDaily

Published 21 July 2023 (8 hours 43 minutes ago)

The Zelensky regime announced all ships in Black Sea waters bound for Russian ports will be considered suspected of transporting military materiel.


On Friday, Russia denounced that Ukraine endangers navigation in the Black Sea with its declaration that it will consider all ships heading for Russian ports military objectives.

"Unpredictable actions and, moreover, Kiev's involvement in terrorist acts certainly create a potential threat in this area," Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov said without specifying the scope of his statement.

He insisted that the "Kyiv regime does not disgust anything and therefore these statements directly pose a danger."

"The situation demands a deep analysis, an analysis of our institutions that are related to this issue. Only after that can conclusions be drawn and recommendations made," Peskov said when asked if Moscow sees risks to its exports through the Black Sea.


On Thursday, the Ukrainian Defense Ministry announced that from July 21, all ships in Black Sea waters bound for Russian ports or controlled by Russian authorities will be considered suspected of transporting military materiel.

Previously, Russia declared as military objectives those ships that enter the Black Sea and are destined for ports controlled by Ukraine.

On Friday, the Kremlin also announced that the Russian Navy carried out exercises to destroy ships in the Black Sea with missiles and isolate its northwestern area, which Russia closed to shipping after the conclusion of the grain deal.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Ukr ... -0007.html

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US supply of cluster bombs to Ukraine shows limitations of liberalism: Foreign Policy
Xinhua | Updated: 2023-07-21 09:13


NEW YORK -- The Joe Biden administration's controversial decision to supply Ukraine with cluster munitions is a telling illustration of liberalism's limitations as a guide to the U.S. foreign policy, reported Foreign Policy on Wednesday.

"The administration's rhetoric extols the superiority of democracies over autocracies, highlights its commitment to a 'rules-based order,' and steadfastly maintains that it takes human rights seriously. If this were true, however, it would not be sending weapons that pose serious risks to civilians and whose use in Ukraine it has criticized harshly in the past," said the report.

"But as it has on other prominent issues, those liberal convictions get jettisoned as soon as they become inconvenient," it noted. "This behavior shouldn't surprise us: When states are in trouble and worried that they might suffer a setback, they toss their principles aside and do what they think it takes to win."

When they turn to foreign policy, therefore, liberals tend to divide the world into good states (those with legitimate orders based on liberal principles) and bad states (just about everything else) and blame most if not all the world's problems on the latter, it said.

Liberalism allows Americans and their closest allies to tell themselves that what's good for them will be good for everyone else as well, but it has at least two serious flaws: universalist pretensions and fragility of liberal convictions, which have prevented the success rate of U.S. foreign policy from any improvement, it added.

http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20230 ... 17aa2.html

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Why the Ukraine Conflict Will Unravel NATO and Biden
JULY 20, 2023

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Leaders of the NATO member countries at the group’s summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, on July 11, 2023. Photo: Doug Mills/The New York Times.

By Radhika Desai – Jul 18, 2023

The proxy war on Russia is the centre piece of Biden’s foreign policy of uniting the world’s ‘democracies’ against ‘autocracies’, particularly China and Russia. He boasts repeatedly of uniting US allies, most in NATO, as never before. Though the real unity is spotty at best, until recently, the rhetoric seemed to work. No longer. At its recent Vilnius Summit, NATO’s disunity bubbled over, though not for the reasons most discussed in the press. The real reasons are rooted in developments that threaten to unravel not only Biden’s strategy, but also NATO.

Discordant strains were amply discussed in the run up to the summit. Members could not decide on any successor for Jens Stoltenberg. While the leaders of Australia, Japan, New Zealand, and South Korea attended the summit for the second year, and while the final communique reiterated NATO’s concerns about ‘the systemic challenges posed by the PRC to Euro-Atlantic security’ and its commitment to ‘boosting … shared awareness, enhancing … resilience and preparedness, and protecting against the PRC’s coercive tactics and efforts to divide the Alliance’, President Macron led (a not inconsiderable) opposition to establishing a permanent NATO presence in the East Asian region with an office in Tokyo. Though Finish membership was approved, President Erdoğan opposed Sweden’s membership until Biden offered him not only F-16s but also an IMF loan from aboard Air Force One.

Most spectacularly, while members once again promised to increase defence expenditure and production, and while the alliance made various commitments to supporting Ukraine in its war with Russia, not only did the clamour to induct Ukraine into NATO fail, but NATO proved unwilling even to commit to a timetable for entry. President Zelensky called this ‘absurd’ and the US administration called him ungrateful in return.

Though this serious spat ended in Zelensky’s expressions of gratitude, a sense of foreboding could not be avoided. Atlanticist commentators still worried about the prospect of a disengagement between the US and Europe in case of a Trump victory or disagreements over China. However, even these worries don’t suspect how close such a disengagement is today or the reason for it: that Biden is about to lose his military wager in Ukraine. That is bound to end Biden’s project of uniting US allies, the closest thing there has been to a Biden Doctrine.

Always a work-in-progress, NATO unity has got more difficult as US power has declined. In recent decades, its chief glue has been US military power. If it too ceases to bind – as is clear from the string of military failures culminating in the humiliating exit from Afghanistan – then the self-sacrifice Biden has demanded, and some extent received, from the Europeans on Ukraine – is the dime on which the future of US leadership over what remains of its allies and of its chief instrument, NATO, will turn.

The weak ties that bind NATO
Understanding such imminent fundamental change requires a return to fundamentals beneath the appearance of NATO unity.

The much-vaunted Article 5 may state, famously, that ‘an armed attack against one … shall be considered an attack against … all’. However, if you think this obliges all members to rush to the defence of attacked members with all they’ve got, think again. The article specifies further that each ally will ‘will assist … by taking forthwith … such action as it deems necessary [emphasis added]’. So, allied solidarity turns out to be a moveable feast, meaning only what each member country ‘deems necessary’.

On the matter of the US commitment to Europe, which NATO is held to powerfully instantiate, even the early Cold War commitment to defend Western Europe against the big bad Soviet Union, amounted, practically, to schemes that were ‘always far-fetched and recognised as such’.

If you are shocked, consider this: the US ‘aided’ Europe during the two World Wars on a more or less commercial basis, vastly increasing its economic and financial clout at the expense of ‘allies’. Ruinously for them, it demanded repayment of its war loans after the First World War and, equally ruinously, demanded policy alignment after the Second.

Europe can thank its stars that the critical aid and immense sacrifices of Soviet and Chinese forces ensured victory in the Second World War, and that the alleged threat of an imminent Soviet attack on Western Europe was little more than a figment of the very hysterical US imagination that has kept its military industrial complex is such fine fettle down the decades.

What the US wants from NATO
Some argue that NATO was primarily directed against the ‘enemy at home’, left and popular forces and NATO certainly sports a disingenuous record of this. However, it leaves out the international dimension.

Long and hard as US leaders wished to dominate a capitalist world, history unfortunately gave them the opportunity to attempt it just when such domination had become impossible: with the rise of Germany, the US itself and Japan, the capitalist world had already become multipolar by the early twentieth century. No single power could dominate it. Worse, the Russian Revolution, soon followed by the Chinese, took vast swaths of the world out of the capitalist world entirely.

Undaunted, the US persisted, using NATO in attempts to dominate Europe. In the apocryphal words of its first Secretary General, Lord Ismay, it aimed ‘to keep the Americans in, the Germans down and the Russians out’ of Europe.

During the Cold War, the US was reasonably successful, though not without considerable European stroppiness: the Europeans demanded gold over dollars throughout the 1960s, eventually forcing the US to break the dollar-gold link in 1971; De Gaulle removed France from NATO’s integrated command in 1966; and Brandt engaged in his Ostpolitik of better relations with the Eastern Bloc. Though many think inter-imperialist rivalry died after the Second World War, it seems to live on such European behaviour.

The Cold War ended neither in unipolarity not in any ‘peace dividend’. US economic decline became visible soon thereafter and the US sought to compensate for economic decline with military aggression. In the circumstances, Europe proved increasingly open to creating autonomous security structures which, inevitably, involved improved economic and security relations with Russia.

With its aims unchanged even as its capacities declined, the US had to thwart such European impulses. It succeeded with its military intervention in Yugoslavia, chiefly by demonstrating the effectiveness of its superior air power and this success ensured that henceforth eastward EU expansion would normally be accompanied by NATO expansion. However, this was no stable arrangement.

Why the US can’t get it
No mere ‘realist’ assertion, the European impulse towards autonomy stemmed from historical differences between the continental European and the Anglo-American economies, the one productively rather than financially oriented the other financially and commercially rather than productively orientated. Four decades of neoliberalism found the latter productively emaciated and more reliant on predatory and speculative finance than ever.

These differences had already made NATO unity hard to contrive and US economic decline only made it more so. As it lost economic attractiveness for Europe (while, moreover, China and Russia gained it), as the US relied on military projection only to fail more and more spectacularly, European impulses towards autonomy were re-surfacing, with President Macron calling NATO brain dead at the alliance’s 2019 summit.

This was the context in which Biden wagered on winning the proxy war in Ukraine as a prelude to then waging one on China. Knowing that Europe, already reluctant to go to war with Russia, would be even more reluctant (for sound economic reasons) to join any anti-Chinese venture, Biden sought so resolutely and completely to sunder Europe from Russia and bind it to the US through the Ukraine war that it would have no choice but to go along with the US on China later.

However, this enterprise got off to an unpromising start and is now unravelling.

Marshalling unity even against Russia was hard, involving as it did inflicting a great deal of economic pain on Europe. Even with the Biden Administration’s historical luck of having astonishingly compliant leaderships in so many capitals, pre-eminently Berlin, NATO unity over Ukraine conflict has been more a show than a reality, with a minimum of real and maximum of show compliance. Sanctions have generally been confined those that hurt the least, leaving so many western companies still operating in Russia one wonders what the fuss is all about. Weapons supplies have focused on those that are easiest to spare, often obsolete, leaving Ukraine with a ‘Big Zoo of NATO equipment’ that is hard to deploy or repair efficiently.

Why defeat in Ukraine will unravel NATO, and Biden
Both prongs of Biden’s strategy – sanctions and military action by proxy – were, it is now clear, delusional. The first, famously expecting to reduce the ruble to rubble and to push the Russian economy ‘back to the stone age’, had become a manifest failure by the end of 2022 if not earlier. As for the second, despite the billions in military assistance, despite exhausting Western weapons stockpiles, despite discovering the quantitative and qualitative limits to Western weapons production capacities notwithstanding astronomically expensive military industrial complexes, despite ever more deadly weapons now including cluster bombs, despite reliance on neo-Nazi battalions, despite US and Ukrainian willingness to incur macabre levels of Ukrainian and mercenary casualties, it has been clear for some time that Ukraine is losing and has no prospect of winning.

President Biden acknowledged this in his turnaround on offering Ukraine membership of NATO or even giving it a timetable for the same and his new-found insistence that not only should things not be made easy for Ukraine to join, not only should Ukraine demonstrate progress on requisite reforms, but it should conclude a peace treaty with Russia before it can join NATO, a point repeated more than one by Jens Stoltenberg at Vilnius.

This is the Biden administration’s off-ramp from the Ukraine conflict, one he also needs thanks to the unpopularity of war at home amid an election campaign about to do into full swing.

In the face of this military defeat, patching up no other differences in NATO will matter. The US has only military might to offer allies. So, Biden’s impending military failure in Ukraine is likely to prove the effective undoing of NATO. If the US cannot ensure military victory, its utility to Europe can only be limited. And if Biden’s has failed in this intermediate Russian stage, it can hardly go onto its final, Chinese one.

https://orinocotribune.com/why-the-ukra ... and-biden/

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Something Amiss

There is a war happening in Europe that is, interestingly, no longer mentioned on the first two screens of the front pages of the Washington Post and the New York Times.

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---

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The failure of the Ukrainian counter-offensive and its lack of any viable way to win the conflict seems to be sinking in.

Who wants to write or read about the huge strategic mistake the Biden administration committed when it blackmailed Ukraine as well as its other vassals, especially when the beltway gang is strongly in favor of another Biden presidency. The alternative, another round of artificially Trump-ed up chaos, seems unbearable to them.

This despite further evidence that Biden's policies and influence were always for sale, especially to foreign bidders.

That is, by the way, another scandal that is not allowed to be on the front pages the Washington 'elite' is filling for the commons' consumption.

Posted by b on July 21, 2023 at 14:26 UTC | Permalink

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2023/07/s ... .html#more

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Strelkov was arrested for 2 months
July 21, 21:48

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The court arrested Strelkov until September 18 under Article 280 (Part 2) for inciting extremist activities on social networks. The court rejected the option of replacing the pre-trial detention center with house arrest. The maximum possible term is 5 years.

In addition to the arrest of Strelkov, today the list of foreign agents includes: Konstantin Borovoy
(without Novodvorskaya, it’s completely rotten)
Mikhail Kozyrev (Rain)
Pavel Sulyandziga (former member of the RF OP) Alexander Litvinov ( administrator of the Planerka TV channel) RF and authorities. The Deputy Head of the Ministry of Digital Development Parshin was fired. He is involved in a large-scale corruption case.

PS. Pavel Gubarev, who was detained at the court, where Strelkov was discharged for 2 months in a pre-trial detention center, has already been released. Heap today.

Eh, a good soldier with bad politics.(In case you didn't know, a raging monarchists.)

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/8509760.html

Lithuania admits leak of documents on internal security of NATO summit in Vilnius
July 21, 21:47

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In the continuation of the material "Leaky security of the NATO summit" https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/8486132.html

1. The Lithuanian Security Service has officially confirmed the leak of secret documents on the organization of the NATO summit and the authenticity of the documents published by hackers.

2. The investigation into the circumstances of the leak is still ongoing. So far (according to statements) it has not been possible to establish reliably where the leak came from.

3. The amount of damage is still being assessed. The damage turned out to be more massive than originally thought.

In fact, because of leaky Ukrainian networks, from where hackers and intelligence agencies regularly pull tons of secret documents, the security of the summit of NATO heads of state was compromised, for which tens of millions of dollars were spent. Actually, this clearly shows why the Americans do not give their "allies" in NATO information on the organization of their own internal security, since they perfectly understand who they are dealing with.

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/8509658.html

List of requirements of the Russian Federation for the resumption of the "grain deal"
July 22, 14:41

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A list of official Russian requirements, the fulfillment of which will make it possible to resume the grain deal.

1. A real, not a speculative conclusion from the sanctions on the supply of Russian grain and fertilizers to world markets.

2. All obstacles for Russian banks and financial institutions that serve the supply of food and fertilizers must be removed.

3. Deliveries to Russia of spare parts and components for agricultural machinery and the fertilizer industry should be resumed.

4. All issues with the charter of ships and insurance of Russian export food supplies must be resolved, all logistics of food supplies must be provided.

5. Unhindered conditions must be provided for expanding the supply of Russian fertilizers and raw materials for their production, including the restoration of the operation of the Togliatti-Odessa ammonia pipeline.

6. Russian assets related to the agricultural industry should be unlocked.

7. There must be a restoration of the original humanitarian nature of the grain deal. It should work in the interests of countries in need, and not make rich countries even richer "

In recent weeks, the list of requirements has expanded from 5 to 7. Their fulfillment by the West looks extremely unlikely. Erdogan does not have the resources to influence the West in these matters. Therefore, the likelihood of extending the grain deal on the same terms is vanishingly small.

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/8511470.html
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Footnotes from the Ukrainian "Crisis"; New High-Points in Cynicism Part IV

Post by blindpig » Sat Jul 22, 2023 10:28 pm

Donetsk communist leader: ‘No democracy in Ukraine’

‘Here we will stand until victorious; no one will leave our homeland.’
Steve Sweeney
Friday 21 July 2023



Steve Sweeney interviews Boris Litinov, head of the Donetsk republican branch of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation.

Topics discussed range from Comrade Litinov’s views on the split in the international communist movement over the war in Ukraine, his thoughts on the effect of western propaganda on the communist and trade union organisations in Britain, and on why the workers in the Donbass fight so fiercely against their foe.

He notes that the Communist party issued a call for a united antifascist front against the Nato-led nazification of Ukraine in 2022, well before the launch of the special military operation. Defending this position, he explains that “a call to fight fascism is the duty of all communists” – with fascism in Ukraine being represented by the Ukrainian nazis fighting on behalf of global imperialism.

Comrade Litinov stresses that the Donbass has a long and proud communist tradition. During the Great Patriotic War, there was a slogan: ‘Communists, forward!’ Explaining that this slogan resounds to this day, he firmly believes that, if there are facists on workers’ doorstep, the communists will always be the first line of defence.

Asked whether he is aware of the lines of Communist Party of Greece (KKE) and the Communist Party of Britain (CPB) on the proxy war in Ukraine, as well as the position of many trade unions in Britain, Comrade Boris expresses sympathy; these organisations, he says, have fallen victim to the one-sidedness of western propaganda and have lost the ability to see clearly.

The KKE characterises the conflict as an ‘interimperialist war’, and the CPB has gone to great lengths to distance itself from what it describes as a ‘Russian invasion’ for ‘Putin’s war’, following Stop the War‘s demand of ‘Russian troops out’.

https://thecommunists.org/2023/07/21/ne ... interview/

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Russia says navy carried out live fire exercise in Black Sea
China Daily | Updated: 2023-07-22 07:33

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This grab taken from a handout footage released by the Russian Defence Ministry on July 21, 2023 shows a Russian Black Sea Fleet warship firing a cruise missile during drills in the Black Sea. [Photo/Agencies]

MOSCOW — Russia's navy carried out a live fire exercise in the Black Sea, Moscow's defense ministry said on Friday, days after the Kremlin declared it would consider ships traveling to Ukraine through the waterway potential military targets.

A missile boat from Russia's Black Sea Fleet carried out live firing of anti-ship cruise missiles at a target ship in the northwestern part of the Black Sea, Russia's defense ministry said in a statement on Telegram.

"The target ship was destroyed as a result of a missile strike," it said.

Ships and fleet aviation had also worked out actions to isolate the area temporarily closed to navigation, and also carried out a set of measures to detain offending ships, it added.

It did not specify exactly where the exercise had taken place.

After pulling out of the Black Sea grain deal, the Kremlin said on Wednesday it would consider cargo ships destined for Ukraine via the Black Sea potential military targets.

Moscow on Wednesday also banned traffic on the northwestern and southeastern parts of the sea.

Ukraine also said it had prohibited navigation on "the northeastern part of the Black Sea and the Kerch Strait" near Crimea, making navigation in most of the Black Sea perilous for vessels.

On Friday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky dismissed the country's ambassador to the United Kingdom, Vadym Prystaiko.

On the battlefield, Ukrainian forces are using US-supplied cluster munitions, the White House said.

The United States provided the weapons to Ukraine for the first time earlier this month.

The weapons, which disperse up to several hundred small explosive charges that can remain unexploded in the ground, are banned by many countries because of the long-term risks they pose to civilians.

Telling illustration

Foreign Policy magazine criticized on Wednesday that Washington's controversial decision to supply Ukraine with cluster munitions is a telling illustration of liberalism's limitations as a guide to the US' foreign policy.

"The administration's rhetoric extols the superiority of democracies over autocracies, highlights its commitment to a 'rules-based order', and steadfastly maintains that it takes human rights seriously. If this were true, however, it would not be sending weapons that pose serious risks to civilians and whose use in Ukraine it has criticized harshly in the past," the report said.

"But as it has on other prominent issues, those liberal convictions get jettisoned as soon as they become inconvenient. This behavior shouldn't surprise us: When states are in trouble and worried that they might suffer a setback, they toss their principles aside and do what they think it takes to win."

When they turn to foreign policy, liberals tend to divide the world into good states (those with legitimate orders based on liberal principles) and bad states (just about everything else) and blame most if not all the world's problems on the latter, it said.

Liberalism allows the US and its closest allies to tell themselves that what is good for them will be good for everyone else as well, but it has at least two serious flaws: universalist pretensions and fragility of liberal convictions, which have prevented the success rate of US foreign policy from any improvement, it added.

http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20230 ... 17db6.html

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Ukraine Nationalizes Russia-Linked Sense Bank

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A branch of Sense Bank. | Photo: Twitter/ @globeandmail

Published 21 July 2023 (22 hours 29 minutes ago)

This bank's majority shareholder is the billionaire Mikhail Fridman, who has been the target of Western sanctions for keeping ties with Russia.

On Friday, the Ukrainian government adopted a resolution to withdraw the Russia-linked Sense Bank from the market and nationalize it.

"The procedure of the bank's nationalization, including the appointment of a new management, will be ensured as soon as possible for its smooth operation," the Ukrainian government stated.

The Finance Ministry will temporarily take control of the bank, and seek to attract private investors once the martial law in the country comes to an end, it said.

The resolution was adopted after the National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) proposed to nationalize the bank, saying that the owners of the financial institution are Russian citizens, who were put under Ukrainian and international sanctions.


Sense Bank, formerly known as Alfa Bank, is among the largest financial institutions in Ukraine, and is included in the NBU's list of systemically important banks.

Regarded as the main commercial lender operating in Ukraine, Sense Bank is owned by ABH Holdings, an institution through which billionaire Mikhail Fridman controls 33 percent of the bank's shares.

Born in Ukraine, this Russian-Israeli businessman is under Western sanctions for allegedly maintaining ties to the Kremlin after the start of the special military

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Ukr ... -0013.html

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Russian journalist killed in Ukrainian cluster bomb attack

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A year ago, Zhuravliov was awarded the 'Golden Pen' award for his courage in carrying out his journalistic profession. | Photo: Sputnik
Published 22 July 2023 (47 minutes ago)

Three other journalists have been injured in the area of ​​the Russian special military operation.

The correspondent of the RIA Novosti agency Rostislav Zhuravliov died as a result of a Ukrainian artillery impact in the zone of the Russian special military operation, sources from the agency reported this Saturday at the scene of the events.

The Russian Ministry of Defense confirmed that the Armed Forces. of Ukraine launched an attack against a group of reporters, where the journalist who also worked for Sputnik lost his life.

In addition, Sputnik photo correspondent Konstantin Mikhalchevsky was injured in the attack, as were two correspondents for the Russian newspaper Izvestia.


Zhuravliov was preparing a report on the use of cluster bombs by kyiv and was hit precisely by the submunitions of this type of weapon after the impact of a Ukrainian projectile.

The shelling occurred near the town of Piatijatki, where a group of journalists was traveling in a civilian car.

According to the acting governor of the Zaporizhia region, Evgeny Balitsky, Zhuravliov died when the Ukrainian armed forces hit the vehicle with cluster munitions.

https://www.telesurtv.net/news/rusia-uc ... -0005.html

Google Translator

Denounces Ukrainian attack with drones in the Crimean peninsula

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"In the Belgorodsky district, 21 artillery shells and three cluster munitions from a multiple rocket launcher system were fired at the town of Zhuravliovka." | Photo: twitter @HHungduc
Published 22 July 2023 (23 minutes ago)

Separately, Ukrainian forces have launched a massive artillery attack, including three cluster munitions, against a village in Russia's Belgorod province.

A drone attack caused several explosions in an ammunition arsenal in central Crimea, according to the head of the Ukrainian peninsula, Sergei Axiónov, while the town of Zhuravliovka, in the Belgorod province, was the target of an artillery attack with a total of 21 shells.

In the first case, the detonation at the ammunition depot occurred as a result of a drone strike in the Krasnogvardeisky district in Crimea, Axionov said.

“According to preliminary data, there are no damages or victims,” he wrote on his Telegram channel.


According to the authority, the decision was made to evacuate residents within a radius of five kilometers from the emergency site to temporary accommodation centers.

"To minimize the risks, it was also decided to suspend traffic on the Crimean railway," the political chief said.

The head of Crimea hopes that the consequences of the state of emergency will be eliminated "in a short time".

Meanwhile, Ukrainian forces have launched a massive artillery attack, including three cluster munitions, against a village in Russia's Belgorod province, local governor Vyacheslav Gladkov said.


"In the Belgorodsky district, 21 artillery shells and three cluster munitions from a multiple rocket launcher system were fired at the town of Zhuravliovka."

"The town was also attacked with a kamikaze drone and bombarded with a grenade launcher: 10 shots were fired," the governor said on his Telegram channel.

It also indicated that "nine artillery shells and two grenade launchers were fired at the town of Shchetinovka," located in the same district.

"The enemy also dropped an explosive device from a drone. There were no casualties or damage to any of the settlements in the district," Gladkov said.

https://www.telesurtv.net/news/rusia-uc ... -0006.html

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Ukraine’s Agent Zelensky… a Puppet Show Produced by the West

July 21, 2023

Ukraine has become a massively indebted colony of Western capital that will be enslaved for decades to come.

A two-part investigative documentary published this week by Scott Ritter is a must-watch for anyone harboring delusions about Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky. And not just about Zelensky but the entire NATO-fueled conflict in Ukraine with Russia.

The report comprehensively charts the transformation of a former comedian actor into a political leader who has brought his country to its knees in a bloody war of attrition with Russia.

Even people who have long been aware of Zelensky’s perfidious role will find Ritter’s investigation fascinating for the granular details and its overall geopolitical analysis. Based on original research as well as interviews with former Ukrainian officials and other respected Western analysts, Ritter presents a searing indictment of “Agent Zelensky”.

It’s an astounding story of betrayal, corruption and audacious manipulation of public perception in the West. Ritter, a former U.S. Marine Corps intelligence officer and latterly an internationally respected independent analyst, provides an A to Z survey of Zelensky and how he has been groomed and micromanaged by American and British intelligence agencies to deliver Ukraine as a colony for Western geopolitical interests. This “Ukraine Project” has been in the works since the country became independent in 1991 after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. But under Zelensky there has been something of a Final Act.

In the West, Zelensky has been lauded and lionized by mainstream media, parliaments, Hollywood and even the Vatican as a brave defender of Ukrainian democracy and sovereignty against “Russian aggression”. His image has been carefully crafted with puff pieces in Western media like CNN (a major PR machine). His wife adorns the cover of fashion magazines wearing expensive clothes even as her husband dons military fatigues like a costume from central casting. This corny imagery is all part of the puppet show and psy-ops that his Western intel handlers have orchestrated. Unfortunately, too many in the West have bought into the soap opera. Although, there are signs that the plot is wearing thin from too many reruns and cliches.

Ritter pulls back the curtain on this charade to reveal the sinister intrigue and production. Only a cocaine-addled actor could pull off such a tawdry theater, and to the critical eye, there is little doubt that Zelensky is most of the time high as a kite in performing his CIA and MI6-scripted lines for Western public consumption.

Before becoming president, Zelensky starred in Servant of the People, a Ukrainian hit drama about a fictitious ordinary man who went into politics and became a national leader based on his denunciations of corruption in the establishment. In real life, a year before the 2019 Ukrainian elections, a party named Servant of the People was newly formed and Zelensky ran for the president on a platform railing against corruption and vowing to bring peace to Ukraine. That was five years after the CIA-backed Maidan coup in Kiev which ushered in a radical regime that launched a civil war against the Russian-speaking Donbass region (now part of the Russian Federation). The art imitating life here speaks of Western orchestration.

Elected with 73 per cent of the vote (a clear sign of popular demand for peace), Zelensky immediately changed his tune. He ramped up anti-Russian policies, including eradicating the Russian language spoken as a first language by a third of the Ukrainian population, including by Zelensky himself.

The betrayal was a testament to the fact that Agent Zelensky was from the outset a servant of Western intelligence and the geopolitical agenda ordained in Washington and London. The ultimate objective for the Western puppet masters was to use Ukraine as a battlefield for a proxy war against Russia and to fight it to the last Ukrainian. Zelensky has delivered on his task with the blood of his countrymen who have been led to slaughter like sacrificial lambs.

During the past four years performing as “His Excellency”, Zelensky has fulfilled multiple other tasks for his Western handlers. They include:

*Eliminating the Russian language, literature and culture.
*Splitting and suppressing the Ukrainian Orthodox Church to banish historic Russian links and disorient many ordinary Ukrainians.
*Erasing and rewriting history to denigrate Soviet military liberation of Ukraine during the Second World War, while elevating Ukrainian fascist collaborators of the Nazi Third Reich, including valorizing figures who had been instrumental in executing the Holocaust and mass murders of Slavs, Poles and others. Zelensky’s personal Jewish heritage was a calculated attribute aimed at confounding Western public understanding of this particularly obscene betrayal.

Zelensky has suppressed opposition media, journalists and political parties in order to expedite the turning of Ukraine into a tool for Western control and as an anti-Russian proxy. So much for “shared Western values” that the American and European leaders continually eulogize him for.
Selling off Ukraine’s prodigious farmland to American agribusiness – a sell-off that is in complete violation of the country’s constitution barring such foreign ownership.
Turning Ukraine into a laboratory for U.S. biowarfare experimentation and a testing ground for Western military weapons.
Preparing Ukraine for a NATO-sponsored military offensive against the Donbass region in March 2022, which Russia preempted with its intervention in February of that year.
The list goes on of other sordid tasks fulfilled by Agent Zelensky. All of it is meticulously documented. The upshot is that the Ukraine has become a massively indebted colony of Western capital that will be enslaved for decades to come.

The comic actor-president has been well-remunerated for his egregious betrayal. He owns several overseas luxury properties where he no doubt intends to spend his retirement after political office. Here, however, Ritter raises a grave question about whether 45-year-old Zelensky will indeed be permitted to retire quietly given that he knows so much about the dirty game his Western handlers have been playing. Like so many other foreign leaders who have been used in the past by Washington and London, Zelensky may find himself disposed of like a rag doll.

In the meantime, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians have been killed or maimed in the proxy war with Russia and their country has been destroyed, riddled with corruption and infested with Nazi death squads. This is all part of the long-term, nefarious imperial plan in Washington and London to weaken Russia while also subjugating the rest of Europe to Anglo-American capital. The plan hasn’t quite worked out like that since Russia has blown the charade with its formidable military power and geopolitical maneuvers to frustrate the Western agenda.

Nevertheless, the truly despicable thing about the Ukraine puppet show is that the Western producers have in their machinations and string pulling brought the world to a precipice of all-out war with Russia and a potential nuclear Armageddon if this show spirals any further out of control.

Scott Ritter’s expose of Zelensky and the Western agenda in the Ukraine war should be viewed by every citizen in the West. It is a damning indictment of Western rulers and what this proxy war is all about.

https://strategic-culture.org/news/2023 ... d-by-west/

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JULY 21, 2023 BY M. K. BHADRAKUMAR
Storm clouds gathering in the Black Sea

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Turkish President Recep Erdogan (L) and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky (R) with President Biden & NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg (C), NATO Summit, Vilnius,July 11, 2023

The NATO Summit in Vilnius (July 11-12) signalled that there is absolutely no possibility of talks to settle the Ukraine war in a foreseeable future. The war will only intensify, as the US and its allies still hope to inflict a military defeat on Russia although that is clearly beyond their capability.

On July 14, Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of US joint chiefs of staff said that Ukraine’s counteroffensive is “far from a failure” but the fight ahead will be “long” and “bloody”. Milley has a reputation for speaking what the White House wants to hear, no matter his professional judgment.

Indeed, on July 19, the Biden administration announced additional security assistance of about $1.3 billion for Ukraine. The Pentagon said in a statement that the announcement “represents the beginning of a contracting process to provide additional priority capabilities to Ukraine.” That is to say, the US will be using funds in its Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative program, which allows the administration to buy weapons from industry rather than pull from US weapons stocks.

According to the Pentagon, the latest package includes four National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile Systems (NASAMS) and munitions; 152 mm artillery rounds; mine clearing equipment; and drones.

Meanwhile, in an ominous development, no sooner than Russia let the UN-brokered grain deal expire on July 17, Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky disclosed that he had sent official letters to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan suggesting to continue the grain deal without Russia’s participation.

On the very next day, Kiev followed up with an official letter to the UN’s International Maritime Organization spelling out a new maritime corridor passing through Romania’s territorial waters and exclusive maritime economic zone in the north-western part of the Black Sea.

Evidently, Kiev acted in concert with Romania (a NATO member country where the 101st Airborne Division of the US army is deployed). Presumably, the US and NATO are in the loop while the UN’s imprimatur is being arranged. It goes without saying that the NATO has been working on a new maritime route in the Black Sea for sometime already.

This is a serious development, as it seems a precursor to involving the NATO in some way to challenge Russia’s domain dominance in the Black Sea. Indeed, the NATO’s Vilnius Summit Communiqué (July 11) had forecast that the alliance is gearing up for a vastly enhanced presence in the Black Sea region, which has been historically a Russian preserve, where its has important military bases.

The relevant para in the NATO Communiqué said: “The Black Sea region is of strategic importance for the Alliance. This is further highlighted by Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine. We underline our continued support to Allied regional efforts aimed at upholding security, safety, stability and freedom of navigation in the Black Sea region including, as appropriate, through the 1936 Montreux Convention. We will further monitor and assess developments in the region and enhance our situational awareness, with a particular focus on the threats to our security and potential opportunities for closer cooperation with our partners in the region, as appropriate.” [Emphasis added.]

Four things need to be noted:

one, the Ukraine conflict has been singled out as the context; the focus is on Crimea;
two, “freedom of navigation” means an assertive US naval presence; reference to the 1936 Montreux Convention hinted at the role of Turkey, both as a NATO member country and the custodian of the Dardanelles and Bosporus straits;
three, the NATO flags its intention to enhance its “situational awareness,” which as a military term involves 4 stages: observation, orientation, decision, and action. Situational awareness has two main elements, namely, one’s own knowledge of the situation and, secondly, one’s knowledge of what others are doing and might do if the situation were to change in certain ways. Simply put, the NATO surveillance of Russian activities in the Black Sea will intensify; and,
four, the NATO seeks closer cooperation with “our partners in the region” (read Ukraine).
Most certainly, a new maritime route in northwestern and western regions of the Black Sea along Romania, Bulgaria and Turkey (all of whom are NATO member countries) will cut off the Russian garrison in Transnistria (Moldava) and would boost Kiev’s capability to strike at Crimea. The NATO involvement would complicate any future Russian operations to liberate Odessa as well, which is historically a Russian city.

Apart from the huge legacy of culture and history, Odessa is a port head for the industrial products of Russia and Ukraine. The Togliatti-Odessa ammonia pipeline (which the Ukrainian saboteurs blew up recently) is one of the best examples. The 2,471 km pipeline, the longest ammonia pipeline in the world, connected the world’s largest ammonia producer, TogliattiAzot, in Russia’s Samara region with Odessa Port.

In strategic terms, without control over Odessa, NATO cannot have force projection in the Black Sea region or hope to resurrect Ukraine as an anti-Russia outpost. Nor can NATO advance toward the Transcaucasus and the Caspian (bordering Iran) and Central Asia without dominating the Black Sea region.

And for the same reasons, Russia cannot afford to cede the Black Sea region to the NATO, either. Odessa is a vital link in any land bridge along the Black Sea coast connecting the Russian hinterland with its garrison in Transnistria, Moldova (which the US is eyeing as a potential NATO member.) In fact, Crimea’s security will be endangered if hostile forces establish themselves in Odessa. (The attack on the Kerch Bridge in October 2022 was staged from Odessa.)

Clearly, the entire US project on the new maritime route is intended to pre-empt Russia from gaining control of Odessa. It factors in the strong likelihood that with the Ukrainian offensive floundering, Russia may soon launch its counter-offensive in the direction of Odessa.

From the Russian perspective, this becomes an existential moment. The NATO has virtually encircled the Russian Navy in the North Sea and the Baltic Sea (with the induction of Sweden and Finland as members). The freedom of navigation of the Baltic Fleet and the dominance in the Black Sea, therefore, become all the more crucial for Russia to freely access the world market round the year.

Moscow has reacted strongly. On July 19, Russian ministry of defence notified that “all vessels sailing in the waters of the Black Sea to Ukrainian ports will be regarded as potential carriers of military cargo. Accordingly, the countries of such vessels will be considered to be involved in the Ukrainian conflict on the side of the Kiev regime.”

Russia has further notified that “the north-western and south-eastern parts of the international waters of the Black Sea have been declared temporarily dangerous for navigation.” The latest reports suggest that the Black Sea Fleet of warships are rehearsing the procedure for boarding foreign ships sailing to Ukrainian waters. In effect, Russia is imposing a sea blockade of Ukraine.

In an interview with Izvestia, Russian military expert Vasily Dandykin said he would now expect Russia to stop and inspect all ships sailing to Ukrainian ports. “This practice is normal: There is a war zone there, and in the past two days it has been the scene of missile strikes. We’ll see how this will work in practice and whether there will be anyone willing to send vessels to these waters, because this is very serious.”

The White House has accused Russia of laying mines to block Ukrainian ports. Of course, Washington hopes that the NATO moving in as the guarantor of the grain corridor, replacing Russia, would have resonance in the Global South. The Western propaganda caricatures Russia as creating food scarcity globally. Whereas, the fact of the matter is that the West didn’t keep its part of the bargain reciprocally to allow the export of Russian wheat and fertiliser, as has been acknowledged by the UN and Turkey.

What remains to be seen is whether beyond the raging information war, any NATO country would dare to challenge Russia’s sea blockade. The chances are slim, the daunting deployment of the 101st Airborne Division in next-door Romania notwithstanding.

https://www.indianpunchline.com/storm-c ... black-sea/

I kinda doubt that the entire 101st is stationed in Rumania. Perhaps a brigade, formidable enough with scads of attack choppers and airmobile infantry.
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Re: Footnotes from the Ukrainian "Crisis"; New High-Points in Cynicism Part IV

Post by blindpig » Sun Jul 23, 2023 12:44 pm

new versions
POSTED BY @NSANZO ⋅ 07/23/2023

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The increase in tension due to the crossing of naval threats between Russia and Ukraine after the Russian withdrawal from the grain export agreement have overshadowed this week both the development of the situation at the front and other political aspects that have taken a backseat. The Ukrainian reaction to the breach of the agreement, which in practice makes it impossible for any shipping company in its right mind to transit through a naval corridor mined and at risk of being torpedoed, has basically been to demand the maritime equivalent of the airlift with which the United States broke the blockade of Berlin in 1948. Oleksiy Danilov has gone so far as to demand a humanitarian corridor with armed United Nations ships to defend Ukrainian grain from Russian attacks, an unfeasible proposal that would make any participating country part in the conflict,

In the last two days, Russia has wanted to stage the seriousness of its threat with some "maneuvers with live fire" carried out in the Black Sea. The Russian navy used a Moskit missile to destroy a ship. Symbolically, he chose for this an old Ukrainian navy ship, lost by the State in 2014 with the rest of the Crimean peninsula and that Moscow did not return to Kiev in the nine years of tension between the two countries for control of the territory. The Ternopil was destroyed and its images distributed. Moscow is aware of the seriousness of the situation and has wanted to show that its warnings are not purely symbolic or red lines that it is willing to let pass. Slightly different are Ukrainian threats to attack any Russian ships heading for Black Sea ports.

Mikhailo Podoliak, the influential adviser to the President's Office, did not even specify whether the threat referred only to cargo ships or whether Ukraine also considers passenger transport to be a legitimate objective, which Kiev has suggested as a way for the unwanted population to leave Crimea, that is, the Russian or pro-Russian population that the Ukrainian government has considered alien for the past nine years. This is important information given the reaffirmation that Ukraine is going to continue trying to destroy the Kerch bridge as it tried last Monday with a maritime drone. The bridge, together with the construction of a modern airport in Sevastopol and the improvement of the battered roads of the peninsula, It is the great work that Russia has carried out since it regained control of the territory in 2014 and it has been a clear objective for Ukraine since its construction was considered. kyiv went from denying Russia's ability to carry out a work of such magnitude to denying its existence and promising its destruction, which it has attempted unsuccessfully on two occasions.

In the first one, he sent the truck driver to death who, without knowing that he was transporting explosives, was simply doing his job. The second attempt this week indicates that Ukraine now has drones donated by its British allies and suggests that such actions could increase as a form of pressure on supply lines and the Russian population of Crimea as attempts to attack military bases and powder magazines on the peninsula also increase. To this end, Ukraine continues to demand longer-range weapons from its allies. In a virtual appearance at the Security Forum in Aspen, Colorado, President Zelensky confirmed, for the first time openly and officially, that the Kerch Bridge is a priority target that "must be neutralized."Eastern Front , and look for the weapons with which to carry out those blows that isolate Crimea from conventional Russia.

The Kerch Bridge has proven to be vulnerable to blasts. The first attack resulted in significant damage to one of the vehicle lanes and serious damage to the most important part of the bridge for military supply: the railway. On this occasion, the damage has been minor. Much further from its goal, Ukraine cannot repeat what was achieved on the older, worn-out, narrower and closer to the front Antonovsky bridge. On that occasion, kyiv used its newly received HIMARS to incessantly pound the bridge until it was impassable. This option is unfeasible in Crimea, especially considering that Ukraine is unable to bring the front closer to its final objective with its counteroffensive. Hence, the only option is to demand from its partners more powerful and longer-range weapons with which it makes it clear that it would attack a target that is, for Russia, a clear red line. With his actions and especially with his speech, Zelensky and his entourage are once again demonstrating that all the containment that his international partners and creditors sought in the first months of the war are behind them. The only line the United States is unwilling to cross is that of direct involvement, hence containment has now been limited to keeping the war on Ukraine's internationally recognized borders.

Ukrainian threats have not been limited to ships transiting to Russian ports but have extended to a naval blockade of Crimea, empty threats, not because of Ukraine's unwillingness to carry out such acts but because of its lack of capacity to do so. Ukraine has already imposed a blockade of Donbass with which it aspired to use starvation to achieve what weapons had not achieved, the subjugation of the population, and has shown its willingness to endanger the civilian population, especially that of the territories considered unfair, where the adjective "Russian" or "pro-Russian" justifies any action. But kyiv simply does not have the means for constant monitoring or the weapons with which to carry out the acts it promises,

This foreign dependency is not limited to aspirations to attack Crimea, located much further from the front than kyiv and its partners would have liked. It is excessively premature to describe the summer counteroffensive as a failure, despite not having achieved a single one of its objectives or any notable military success in the more than six weeks since the Zaporozhye front was reactivated. Ukraine has shown that it has weapons with which to cause casualties and material damage in the Russian rear and now has cluster munitions with which to threaten Russian trenches and front towns. Everything indicates that, like other miracle weapons that have appeared on the front lines in the past,

This week, the attacks on Crimea have allowed Ukraine to give its partners and its most demanding population a series of victories more media than real. Given the interest of showing Russia as a vile aggressor that seeks to use hunger against the world, the ban on showing images of the consequences of the Russian bombings seems to have been partially and temporarily lifted. Kiev has even admitted that it was unable to shoot down a large part of the Russian missiles that have been fired this week against ports such as Odessa or Nikolaev, an attitude that contrasts with the usual practice of claiming - generally falsely - to have shot down practically all or all of the Russian missiles. The current Ukrainian propaganda requires serious damage to port infrastructure to continue claiming that Russia is fighting against the whole world.

However, even the media in countries like the UK are starting to show concern about the lack of Ukrainian progress on the front. For example, The Telegraph, who claimed at the end of May that “Putin is terrified by the Russian counter-offensive” and on July 3 that “Russia's time is running out”, now writes that “the Ukrainian counter-offensive is failing and there are no easy solutions”. The increasing tone of reproach that is being reached in the press has forced Volodymyr Zelensky to modify his speech again, but the Ukrainian president seems to have already opted for a new version with which to justify the lack of progress. If over the last few months Ukraine had implied that it was its foreign partners who were putting pressure on Kiev to start the counter-offensive quickly, the problem has now turned out to be the opposite: Ukraine wanted to start the offensive in the spring, but it was not possible. That was not the Ukrainian speech then, but no one is going to demand consistency in the narrative from Zelensky. The problem, as usual, was the lack of material. "Frankly, we did not have enough ammunition or weapons or properly trained brigades," the Ukrainian president now says, adding another twist to his excuses.

"By starting somewhat later, we can say, and it is the truth shared by all the experts, that it was the moment that Russia took advantage of to undermine all of our territory and build several lines of defense," he declared, twisting reality practically to the point of insult. It is perfectly well known that the construction of the Russian defense on the southern front began after the withdrawal from Kherson, in the fall of 2022. It was then that Russian reporters were already talking about the construction of trenches and fortifications that finally gave rise to the so-called "Surovikin line", built in the weeks in which the general was in command of the special military operation .. Command returned to Valery Gerasimov in the second week of January 2023. The laying of mines in the fields is an even less credible excuse considering the role they have played in this war since 2014. Ukraine had announced its offensive and, bragging about receiving tanks with which to advance on Crimea, had anticipated the direction in which the large armored columns would inevitably run into Russian minefields. A great military preparation was not necessary to be aware of it. The problem, perhaps, is that Volodymyr Zelensky and his entourage have come to internalize the invincibility discourse of Western tanks in such a way that they did not expect the Russian mines to wreak havoc on their armored columns.

On the front, Ukraine is pressing on Zaporozhye and on the flanks of Artyomovsk, where Ukraine insists that Russian troops are "semi-encircled," a curious term for a situation where Ukrainian troops are to the west of the city and Russian troops are in the city and all over the territory to the east. But kyiv needs to justify progress and recover that "semi-encirclement" that it already used last May and that was as unreal then as it is now. "The enemy is experiencing a shortage of fresh ideas, already convinced of the lack of effectiveness and efficiency of his small-step offensive," Alexander Jodakovsky, founder of the Vostok battalion, wrote yesterday, who still does not consider Ukraine or its offensive for dead. “There is a shortage of ammunition and a drop in the motivation of the troops of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, but the enemy, despite everything, He still has reservations, so we can't relax. Realizing that its potential is declining, the enemy is looking for ways to use it more vigorously,” he added in a description that can be applied to military strategy as well as political and informational strategy.

https://slavyangrad.es/2023/07/23/nueva ... more-27781

Google Translator

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Chronicle of the special military operation for July 22, 2023
July 22, 2023
Rybar

Ukrainian formations delivered another blow to the Crimean peninsula . For the first time, British Storm Shadow cruise missiles were used for the attack - they hit the ammunition depot and the storage of petroleum products.

A tense situation remains on the line of contact. The enemy continues to put pressure on the flanks of Bakhmut , units of the RF Armed Forces hold defensive lines. On the Orekhovsky sector in the Rabotino area , the Armed Forces of Ukraine carried out another attack on our positions, but with losses they were forced to retreat.

Attacks on the civilian infrastructure of the Kursk , Belgorod , Kherson regions and the DPR continue: unfortunately, there were casualties and injuries. At the same time, Russian military commander Rostislav Zhuravlev was killed near Pyatikhatki in the Zaporozhye region as a result of the shelling of the Armed Forces of Ukraine with cluster munitions , and three more journalists were injured.

APU attack with Storm Shadow missiles in Crimea

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Today, Ukrainian formations fired two British Storm Shadow cruise missiles at the Oktyabrskoye village in the Krasnogvardeysky district of the Crimean peninsula. An oil storage facility and an ammunition depot of the Black Sea Fleet were hit: a large fire broke out in the incident zone, local residents report sounds of secondary detonation. The authorities announced the evacuation of the population within a radius of five kilometers from the scene to temporary accommodation. To minimize risks, traffic on the Crimean railway was suspended. According to the latest information, there were no casualties.

The incident was the first time that Storm Shadow long-range missiles were used to strike targets in the Republic of Crimea. Previously, the Armed Forces of Ukraine released this type of ammunition along the Chongar bridge , which connects the region with the Kherson and Zaporozhye regions. Against the background of the preparation of the Ukrainian command for the second phase of the offensive, attacks on the rear facilities of the Russian troops will only increase, including along the Crimean bridge, as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said yesterday .

The situation on the front line and the fighting

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In the Kremensky sector, Russian paratroopers are advancing in the area of ​​\u200b\u200bSerebryansky forestry, FPV drones are used in enemy trenches.

Also, another Slovenian M-55S tank, which was recently transferred to the Ukrainian side as part of military assistance, was destroyed in the direction.

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On the flanks of the Soledar direction, the RF Armed Forces carried out counterattacks on the flanks of Bakhmut : in the south in the Andreevka region and in the north-west in the Orekhovo - Vasilievka region , where on the eve of the Ukrainian formations managed to take several positions near the M-03 highway.

Despite the fact that the attacks were repulsed, such attacks by Russian paratroopers and special forces help to deprive the enemy of the offensive initiative in certain areas. A raccoon from Kherson reports that from the side of Bogdanovka, the Armed Forces of Ukraine attempted to attack Berkhovka with the support of armored vehicles. As a result of the work of Russian artillery, one tank and one infantry fighting vehicle were destroyed, after which the enemy was forced to retreat.

Meanwhile, heavy fighting is going on in Kleshcheevka . Russian fighters in a dense defense repulse the assault groups of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, entrenched on the adjacent heights. The advancing Ukrainian units are being hit by mortars and artillery. Also, State Duma deputy Alexander Borodai , who was carrying humanitarian aid on the southern front, came under fire from a tank , there were no deaths, several people were injured.

In the Marinka area , positional clashes continue on the western outskirts of the destroyed city.

In the Avdeevka direction , the situation has not changed significantly; Russian artillery, supported by UAV operators, is inflicting fire damage on the entrenched enemy.

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On the Vremievsky sector on the night of July 22, the Armed Forces of Ukraine made another attempt to attack Urozhaynoye . The advance of small maneuverable groups in armored vehicles was detected on the outskirts of the village, as a result of which artillery and aircraft hit the attackers. Enemy losses amounted to two armored combat vehicles and up to 30 personnel.

Units of Ukrainian formations also attacked the outskirts of Staromayorsky . However, under artillery fire, the enemy had to retreat. Regardless of the losses, the units of the Armed Forces of Ukraine continue the tactics of wearing down Russian fighters with constant surges, in the hope of depleting the units of the RF Armed Forces and opening gaps in the defense.


In the Orekhovsky sector, enemy assault detachments launched three attacks on Rabotino using a large number of armored vehicles.

The Russian Armed Forces met the advancing detachments of Ukrainian formations with coordinated actions of army aviation, artillery and infantry. As a result, the Armed Forces of Ukraine lost at least four tanks and five armored vehicles. In addition, Russian units timely detected the movement of a column of armored vehicles and infantry from Malaya Tokmachka , as a result of which they were hit by fire.

The situation in the Kherson direction is still tense: the Ukrainian command is making attempts to transfer troops to the opposite coast and islands in the area of ​​​​the Golopristan area. Russian troops strike at the identified enemy boats, preventing them from landing. At the same time, the crews of the army aviation of the Russian Aerospace Forces are actively working, hitting the positions of the Armed Forces of Ukraine on the right bank of the Dnieper. Rocket artillery does not stop working against enemy sabotage groups in the area of ​​​​the Antonovsky bridge, preventing them from gaining a foothold in the area.

Shelling of rear territories and residential areas

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The Armed Forces of Ukraine once again attacked the border settlements of the Kursk region. At least five shells were fired at the village of Tetkino , information about the destruction and casualties is being specified. The Sudzha checkpoint was also fired upon , according to preliminary information, there were no wounded.

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Ukrainian formations continue daily shelling of border settlements in the Belgorod region According to local residents, the enemy fired at least six shells at Repyahovka , and power lines were damaged. Later, Dronovka was shelled , but there were no reports of casualties or damage.

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Throughout the day, the Armed Forces of Ukraine have been carrying out artillery terror of the civilian population of the Donetsk agglomeration. In the capital, nine residential buildings in the Petrovsky , Kirovsky , Kuibyshevsky and Kiev regions were damaged by strikes , one woman died, two more were injured.

Luhanske , Mikhailovka , Makiivka and Yasinovataya were also hit by the blow , one man was injured, he is receiving the necessary assistance.

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Today near Pyatikhatki in the Zaporozhye region Rostislav Zhuravlev, a military commander of the RIA Novosti news agency and the author of the @nezhurka channel, was killed by artillery shelling from the Armed Forces of Ukraine .

The car with the journalists was hit around 12:00 pm, believed to be cluster munitions . Three more colleagues were injured, their condition is assessed as moderate.

Rostislav died from his wounds during the evacuation, he will be buried in Yekaterinburg.

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The artillery terror of the civilian population of the left bank of the Kherson region continues. The enemy fired at least 36 shells at the residential area of ​​Golay Pristan , Korsunka , Kardashinka , Kostogryzovo and Peschanovka .

Political events
On future arms supplies to Ukraine

Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said on Fox News that Ukraine is likely to receive F-16 fighters towards the end of this year. However, the American official noted that at the moment Ukraine needs more artillery, ammunition, as well as air defense systems and tanks.

In addition, the West is interested in the prompt restoration of the equipment of the Armed Forces of Ukraine damaged during the offensive. Thus, the Minister of Defense of Poland announced the opening in the country of a center for the repair and maintenance of Leopard tanks supplied to Ukraine.

At the same time, The Washington Post, citing US officials, writes that at the moment the Biden administration is firmly committed to refusing to send long-range American missiles to Ukraine. According to the publication, the Pentagon believes that Kiev has other, more pressing needs than ATACMS, and fears that sending enough weapons to Ukraine to make a difference on the battlefield will seriously undermine US readiness for other possible conflicts.

On the corruption case of the ex-military commissar of Odessa

The State Bureau of Investigation of Ukraine has charged the ex-military commissar of Odessa, Yevgeny Borisov . He is accused of illegal enrichment and deliberate evasion of service. So, the former military commissar only last year enriched himself by more than 188 million hryvnias. According to the facts of the revealed violations, he faces up to 10 years in prison.

The situation was commented, among other things, by the President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky . He argued that every such corruption offense in the military hierarchy would be punished with inevitable liability. Zelensky also announced a large-scale inspection of the Ukrainian military registration and enlistment offices to identify characters similar to Yevgeny Borisov .

Despite a number of populist statements designed to reduce the degree of tension in Ukrainian society, the bribe-commissar seems to avoid real punishment. Apparently, Borisov has already fled from the investigation far beyond the aisles of Ukraine.

Rybar

https://rybar.ru/hronika-speczialnoj-vo ... 2023-goda/

Google Translator

(Other images at link.)

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The U.S. Wars Against Russia And China Have No Economic Logic Attached To Them

The U.S. politician Zbigniew Brzezinski was a hardliner with a (neo-)liberal core. He had a wide influence on U.S. policies:

Brzezinski is the author of The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives, a 1997 book on geopolitics that was based on Mackinder’s Heartland Theory. Brzezinski argued that the US could retain global supremacy only if it prevented the emergence of a single power on the World-Island.

The Brzezinski Doctrine remains influential in the US foreign-policy establishment. His protégés, among them Ukrainian émigré Victoria Nuland, undersecretary of state for political affairs, are a powerful voice in the US State Department.


Brzezinski had argued that without Ukraine, Russia would be unable to rule the Asian heartland and could not challenge U.S. power.

But I just learned via a Pepe Esobar essay about Henry Kissinger's visit and a potential great power war with China, that Brezezinski had in later years changed his mind:

“The Grand Chessboard”, published in 1997, before the 9/11 era, argued that the US should rule over any peer competitor rising in Eurasia. Brzezinski did not live to see the living incarnation of his ultimate nightmare: a Russia-China strategic partnership. But already seven years ago – two years after Maidan in Kiev - at least he understood it was imperative to "realign the global power architecture".

In a longer piece published in 2016 in American Interest, Brzezinski indeed argued for great power cooperation:

A constructive U.S. policy must be patiently guided by a long-range vision. It must seek outcomes that promote the gradual realization in Russia (probably post-Putin) that its only place as an influential world power is ultimately within Europe. China’s increasing role in the Middle East should reflect the reciprocal American and Chinese realization that a growing U.S.-PRC partnership in coping with the Middle Eastern crisis is an historically significant test of their ability to shape and enhance together wider global stability.
The alternative to a constructive vision, and especially the quest for a one-sided militarily and ideologically imposed outcome, can only result in prolonged and self-destructive futility. For America, that could entail enduring conflict, fatigue, and conceivably even a demoralizing withdrawal to its pre-20th century isolationism.

The U.S. did not follow Brzezinski's advice. It alienated China by launching an economic war against it and pushed the Ukraine into a proxy-war against Russia that was supposed to destroy Russia's capabilities. In consequence Russia and China united their capabilities against their common new enemy, the United States of America. We will see during the next years if the consequences Brzezinski foretold for the U.S. under these circumstances will come into light.

It is interesting that the old rivals and political opponents Kissinger and Brzezinski have late in their lives come to the same conclusions.

As Stephen Roach in his take on Kissinger's visit to China states:

For several years, Kissinger has expressed great concern over the worrisome state of the US-China relationship. As far back as late 2019, he warned that that the United States and China were already in the “foothills of a new cold war.” Given the trajectory of conflict escalation in the ensuing four years, there is a new urgency to his concerns. In the Chinese readout of this week’s meeting with [Defense Minister] Li Shangfu, Kissinger is reported to have said. “Neither the United States nor China can afford to treat the other as an adversary. If the two countries go to war, it will not lead to any meaningful results for the two peoples.”

Opposition to the U.S. bi-partisan policy of economic warfare against China is now also coming from the bigwigs of the U.S. economy:

Leaders of the largest US chipmakers told Biden officials this week that the administration should study the impact of restrictions on exports to China and pause before implementing new ones, according to people familiar with their discussions.
During meetings in Washington on Monday, Intel Corp.’s Pat Gelsinger, Nvidia Corp.’s Jensen Huang and Qualcomm Inc.’s Cristiano Amon warned that export controls risk harming US leadership of the industry. The Biden officials listened to the presentations but didn’t make any commitments, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the talks were private.


Economic logic provides that the U.S. (and European) economy would be better off by avoiding a conflict with Russia and China. But, as Micheal Hudson explains, this now gets overwritten by national security preferences which have remarkable conseqences:

Instead of isolating Russia and China and making them dependent on U.S. economic control, U.S. unipolar diplomacy has isolated itself and its NATO satellites from the rest of the world – the Global Majority that is growing while NATO economies are rushing ahead along their Road to Deindustrialization. The remarkable thing is that while NATO warns of the “risk” of trade with Russia and China, it does not see its loss of industrial viability and economic sovereignty to the United States as a risk.

This is not what the “economic interpretation of history” would have forecast. Governments are expected to support their economy’s leading business interests. So we are brought back to the question of whether economic factors will determine the shape of world trade, investment and diplomacy. Is it really possible to create a set of post-economic NATO economies whose members will come to look much like the rapidly depopulating and de-industrializing Baltic states and post-Soviet Ukraine?

This would be a strange kind of “national security” indeed. In economic terms it seems that the U.S. and European strategy of self-isolation from the rest of the world is so massive and far-reaching an error that its effects are the equivalent of a world war.


The question is really why the U.S. is doing this harm to itself instead of following Brzezinski's and Kissinger's advice. As Yves Smith says in her preface to Hudson's piece, it is a quite bizarre spectacle:

One of the subthemes of the latest offering from Michael Hudson on the bizarre spectacle of the US escalating against China is puzzlement that the West is not operating in its best interest. Lambert has been chewing over this conundrum too.
Perhaps it’s that they really do believe their propaganda, and still don’t recognize that the military and economic clout of the US/EU bloc on a relative basis isn’t anywhere near substantial enough for them to push the rest of the world around. But you think their self-delusion would have started to crack with the failure in their efforts to pressure many countries, such as India and South Africa, to side with the US and condemn Russia’s actions in Ukraine, and now with the supposedly superior US/NATO war machine not performing too well.

Another possibility is the so-called Iron Law of Institutions, that individuals and interests are operating to maximize their own position, with little/no concern to the impact on the system.


I have come to the conclusion that the main actors in this game, the Bindens, Blinkens, Sullivans and their bipartisan supporters, are driven by a blind ideology that has dismissed or replaced global realities with wishful thinking.

The failure of their sanctions against Russia should have demonstrated to them that the real word is by far not the one in which they believe to be living. They however are now repeating their errors by waging a similar war against China.

It will not end well for the people they are supposed to lead.

Posted by b on July 22, 2023 at 17:12 UTC | Permalink

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2023/07/t ... .html#more

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A sobering front-line analysis of the Ukrainian counteroffensive
July 22, 16:34

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A sobering front-line analysis of the Ukrainian counteroffensive


The Drive, an American web resource, published an interesting article by Howard Altman "A Sobering Analysis Of Ukraine's Counteroffensive From The Front", which contains critical thoughts about the offensive actions of the Ukrainian armed forces, expressed by a senior researcher at the British International Institute for Strategic Studies (International Institute for Strategic Studies - IISS) and the Center for New American Security (Center for New American Security - CNAS) Franz-Stefan Gadi after his trip with a group of military analysts to the war zones in Ukraine.

A team of military analysts recently visited the front lines in Ukraine to get up close and personal with the most brutal ground war in Europe in generations. After spending time with Ukrainian forces fighting under massive Russian artillery salvos, helicopter and tank attacks, drone strikes and minefields, one of them returned with a sharp assessment of why the Ukrainian counter-offensive is moving more slowly than some expected.

Franz-Stefan Gady, a senior fellow at the Institute for International Strategic Studies and the Center for a New American Security, says it became clear to him after his trip to Ukraine that the country is struggling with how to use its forces. Once in combat, Ukrainian troops sometimes display poor tactics and a lack of coordination between units. In doing so, they have to contend with still deeply entrenched bureaucracy, strife, and constant reliance on "Soviet-style thinking." And then there are the Russians who “put up tough resistance.”

Conversely, there is no single reason - such as a lack of more Western weapons, including long-range weapons systems and additional mine-clearing equipment - that would be the reason for the "lack of progress," the analyst argues.

“The narrative that Ukraine’s progress so far has been slow only because of a lack of arms supplies and support is one-sided and not shared by the military we spoke to who are actually fighting and in command on the front lines,” Gadi said in an analytical Twitter post that he published on July 18 and which is detailed later in this article .

Let's not forget that the United States and its allies have already provided Ukraine with tens of billions of dollars worth of military aid with promises to keep deliveries.
Meanwhile, Ukrainian officials have pointed to minefields in particular as a key factor in the pace of advancement, but Ukrainians say they are making slow but steady progress.

Gadi visited Ukraine with a group that included Konrad Muzyka, an independent defense analyst specializing in Russia and Belarus and director of Rochan Consulting; Rob Lee, Senior Fellow at the Institute for Foreign Policy Studies, and Michael Kofman, Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment and Chief Fellow at the CNA.

It's one thing to study conflict, Gadi said, but it's priceless to get into a war zone and talk to those who fight there.

“We have formed an informal research group to get a better understanding of the war based on field research,” Gadi told The War Zone on July 19. “We just think it was important to go there to really get a feel for what was going on and talk to people to get a sense of the environment, to get an idea of ​​the people involved in these fights on the Ukrainian side, to see the terrain and so on.”

This allows researchers to "always come back with lots of new ideas that you can't get from afar," Gadi said. “We always come back with more new data that we can use in our analysis to get a better idea of ​​the conflict. So we went to different parts of the front line.”

According to him, during the visits they visited the Zaporozhye region and Donbass, although he declined to provide more specific details.
Gadi shared the group's thoughts in a long 16-part tweet that is as insightful as it is concise.

Here are Gadi's conclusions:

1.) By and large, there is an infantry battle (squad, platoon and company) with artillery support on most of the front line. This has several implications.

First: Progress is measured in yards/meters, not kilometers/miles due to mobility restrictions.

Second: Mechanized formations are rarely introduced into battle due to the lack of means to ensure their maneuver. This includes an insufficient number of demining equipment, air defense equipment, anti-tank systems, etc.

2.) Ukrainian forces have not yet mastered combined arms combat on a scale. Their actions are more sequential than synchronized. This creates various problems on the offensive and, in my opinion, is the main reason for the slow progress.

3.) Ukrainian forces defaulted to a strategy of attrition, relying on sequential fire rather than maneuver. This is why cluster munitions are critical to maintaining the current intensity of the fire: it weakens the Russian defenses to a degree that allows for maneuver.

4.) As most observers know, minefields are a problem. They limit the room for maneuver and slow down the advance. But much more than the minefields themselves, Ukraine's ability to break through Russian defenses is affected by Ukraine's inability to conduct complex combined arms operations at scale. The lack of a large-scale integrated combined-arms approach makes Ukrainian forces more vulnerable to Russian ATGMs, artillery, etc. on the offensive. So it's not just about weapons. I simply did not observe any systematic destruction of the Russian defensive system.

5.) The nature of this offensive is likely to change only if there is a more systematic approach to breaking through the Russian defenses, perhaps combined with a severe degradation of Russian morale, which could lead to a sudden or gradual collapse of the Russian defenses. I suspect that in the absence of a sudden collapse of the Russian defenses, this will remain a bloody struggle of attrition, with the gradual introduction of reserves in the coming weeks and months.

6.) There is limited evidence of systematic deep attacks [meaning long-range missile strikes] that methodically destroy Russian C2 [command and control] / [depots] of ammunition.Despite rationing on the Russian side, ammunition is available to them, and the Russians seem to have a pretty good ISR [information, observation, reconnaissance] of the battlefield.

The Russians also had no need to deploy operational reserves to repel Ukrainian attacks. There is also evidence of a reduction in the impact of HIMARS strikes due to effective Russian countermeasures (this is important to keep in mind in relation to assessing any potential tactical impact of the delivery of ATACMS missiles).

Russian forces, even if severely weakened and out of ammunition, are likely to be able to delay or repulse Ukrainian platoon or company-level attacks unless these attacks are better coordinated and synchronized across a wider front line.

7.) The quality of Russian troops is different. According to the Ukrainians we spoke with, attrition has hit them hard, but they are defending their positions well. They were quite flexible at the tactical level and generally defended themselves in accordance with the Soviet-Russian doctrine.

8.) Artillery [ammunition] rationing in Russia is real and is happening in reality. Ukraine maintains firepower in barrel artillery, while Russia maintains superiority in MLRS in the south. However, only one local fire superiority in some calibers is not enough to break through the Russian defenses.

9.) The additional influx of weapons systems (e.g. ATACMS, air defense systems, tanks, infantry fighting vehicles, etc.), while important for sustaining the war effort, is unlikely to have a decisive tactical impact without adaptation and better integration.

Ukraine will have to better synchronize and adapt current tactics, without which Western weaponry will not be tactically decisive in the long run. This is happening, but the work is going slowly (most of the NATO-style military would have even more problems with this than the Ukrainians, in my opinion).

10.) The above is also true for actions to overcome mines and obstacles.Additional demining equipment is needed and will be useful (especially portable demining systems), but is not critical without better integration of fire and maneuver at scale.

Again, I can't stress enough how difficult this is to pull off in wartime.

One-sided explanations for failures (eg lack of demining equipment) do not reflect reality. For example, some Ukrainian attacks were stopped by Russian ATGMs before they even entered the first Russian minefield.

11.) There is a shortage of artillery barrels [to replace them] [in the Armed Forces], which is difficult to solve, given the pace of their production and delivery times.

12.) So far, Ukraine's approach to this counter-offensive has consisted primarily of direct attacks on Russian positions, supported by rudimentary deep strikes. And no, these direct attacks are not just reconnaissance attacks.

13.) There is evidence of tactical cyber operations supporting the closure of kinetic chains of destruction. This is cyber intelligence that helps identify and track targets on the battlefield. Starlink remains absolutely key to Ukrainian command and control.

14.) The quality of the Ukrainian officers and non-commissioned officers we met seems to be excellent, and morale remains high. However, there are some problems with the quality of the troops, arising from the recruitment of increasingly less able-bodied and older men.

15.) The narrative that Ukraine’s progress so far has been slow only because of a lack of arms supplies and support is one-sided and not shared by the military we spoke to who actually fight and command on the front lines.

16.) It goes without saying that in a war of attrition, more artillery ammunition and armaments are always needed and must be constantly supplied.Western support for Ukraine must certainly continue, as there is still the prospect that the counter-offensive will succeed. But the front line soldiers we spoke to know only too well that the lack of progress is most often due to the specific use of forces, poor tactics, lack of coordination between units, bureaucratic red tape/strife, Soviet-style thinking, etc... - and the Russians putting up stiff resistance.

We asked Gadi to dig a little deeper into a couple of the comments he made.

On July 18, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the United States Armed Forces, General Mark Milley, told reporters thatThe US and its allies have trained 17 brigade combat teams — 63,000 Ukrainian troops — in combined arms combat. Other brigades are in the training phase.

But Ukraine is having trouble on the battlefield executing these coordinated large-scale actions because of the tight training timelines when it faces "one of the most powerful armies in the world," Ghadi told us.

Ukraine “probably does a lot of combined arms operations at the small unit level, but I think it needs to scale up,” he said.

The US is “probably expecting some results with all the help and military hardware it has provided,” Gady said. -“The main idea here was to train mechanized brigades equipped with Western weapons in combined arms combat. I think this approach has had some setbacks. I'm not sure it failed across the board. I think it just needs a more concerted effort."

However, Gadi was quick to point out that “no Western armed forces can carry out this kind of combined arms action on a large scale, with the exception of the United States. But even the United States military will find it very difficult to break through these defensive layers, because no Western army in the world currently has the experience of breaking through the defenses in depth that the Russians have built in southern and eastern Ukraine.”

For a long time, since they first arrived on the battlefield in Ukraine, the M142 HIMARS high-mobility missile systems have acquired an almost mythical status for Ukraine. The GMLRS they fired had a longer range (about 50 miles) than the available Ukrainian MLRS or cannon artillery, and had a devastating effect, especially on Russian logistical hubs.

But Russia has found ways to counter the GMLRS, Gadi said when asked to elaborate on what he said in his post.

“Russian electronic warfare seems to be affecting the successful application of GMLRS,” he told us. - "The Russian layered integrated air and missile defense seems to have had an impact too, and it has also been able to shoot down some of those GMLRS."

As a result , "I think it's fair to say that the HIMARS effect from last summer is definitely over," Gady said. “So I think we should keep this in mind when we think about other long-range precision munitions that have been provided to Ukraine. Russia will sooner or later find opposition to them.”

The views put forward by Gadi and his colleagues provide a far more sober picture of the Ukrainian counteroffensive than what emerges from official statements from Kyiv and the Pentagon.

When asked to sum up his assessment, Gadi told us the following.

“This is a hard-fought battle characterized by high rates of attrition, and Ukrainian forces are slowly getting results,” he said. “The potential for Ukrainian military success still exists.”

Gadi said he and his colleagues would provide more information about their trip to Ukraine in the future.

https://bmpd.livejournal.com/4727822.html - zinc

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/8511631.html

Ukrainian crossbows in Odessa
July 23, 10:00

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At night, during the Russian strike with cruise missiles on military targets in Odessa, the air defense of the Armed Forces of Ukraine has traditionally worked out in the city. 2 or 3 S-300 missiles fell on the territory of Odessa. One of them flew into the local cathedral, which was partially burned.

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Characteristic traces of striking elements of an anti-aircraft missile.


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And here is a hole in the roof through which an anti-aircraft missile entered.

There was also an arrival in one of the residential areas in the yard. Hits on the military and port infrastructure, of course, tend not to show. Those who filmed the last arrivals were already sent to the front in the form of cannon fodder.

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/8513208.html

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"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Footnotes from the Ukrainian "Crisis"; New High-Points in Cynicism Part IV

Post by blindpig » Mon Jul 24, 2023 12:00 pm

An increasingly dangerous war
POSTED BY @NSANZO ⋅ 07/24/2023

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The first phase of the counteroffensive that Ukraine and its allies had prepared for spring and that was going to change the course of the war to definitively consolidate the initiative in their favour, both the Ukrainian and US authorities seem to have announced this weekend a second and much more decisive phase, or that is their hope, of the Ukrainian attack on the southern front, having failed without achieving any notable objective. Despite the excessive and premature Russian triumphalism, whose president has already declared the offensive a failure, the Russian military authorities must be aware that Ukraine has not yet introduced a significant part of the troops trained abroad into its strategic reserves over these months.

The serious tactical failures committed by the Ukrainian military authorities and their Western bosses have allowed Russia to defend itself with solvency and prevent the passage of the large armored columns that tried to break into the Surovikin line in the first days of the attack in early June. The Ukraine had not even preceded the attack with a series of operations to undermine Russian logistics as expected, so perhaps for a surprise effect that was never going to work, it moved forward with its Leopards and Bradleys, without air cover or in the shadow of a major artillery strike on enemy positions, to collide with the minefields laid for months by Russian troops in preparation for the defense.

The reasons for the failure are obvious and largely predictable: despite an immense supply of powerful Western weaponry, Russian troops have great artillery capacity and air superiority in an area where an elaborate defense has been prepared for months. The front has been configured in such a way that the Russian troops no longer have, as if they had in Kharkov or Kherson, the possibility of carrying out a tactical withdrawal. Any withdrawal on the central front at this time could mean a dangerous break in a compromised sector, hence the meticulous preparation of the defensive fortifications. Despite prayers and appeals, including a call for volunteers to fly the desired F16s, which according to Zelensky would give Russia the finishing touch, the United States has not yet given approval for the shipment of its fighters. "The right circumstances are not present," he has come to allege, adding that Russia "still has some anti-aircraft defenses." The reality is that both Russia and Ukraine had powerful anti-aircraft defenses before the war, which is why aviation has not been the central element of the conflict. For political and commercial reasons, the United States cannot afford to risk its F16s in an offensive where their fate was possibly the equivalent of Leopard tanks and Bradley armored vehicles in the early days of the offensive. In recent days, Washington has given signs that the F16 could arrive in Ukraine before the end of the year, unconfirmed and future promises that would arrive too late for the current offensive.

Since the attack on the Kerch bridge took place exactly one week ago, Ukraine has again begun to sharpen its aim against logistics nodes, rear-guard military bases, mainly in Crimea, and powder magazines. All of this, together with this time of stoppage to rebuild the failed tactic in the initial phase and the statements by both Zelensky and Antony Blinken, point to a new Ukrainian attempt to break through the front in the central sector of Zaporozhie. The attrition tactic that the Ukrainian troops have applied against the Russians since the resounding failure of the armored invasion has not yielded great results either, despite the hopes placed on cluster munitions.

Neither the fact that the treaty against its use bears the name of the capital of one of the great defenders of Ukraine, Canada, nor the prohibition of this ammunition in a significant part of the allied countries has made it difficult to send and normalize its use. Nor have the words of Hun Sen, president of Cambodia, a country that has suffered and continues to suffer the consequences of cluster munitions, been taken into account. “It will pose a serious threat to Ukrainians for years, even centuries, if cluster bombs are used in the Ukrainian territories occupied by Russian troops,” he wrote, adding that Cambodia is still fighting half a century later to clear its land of cluster bombs used by the United States in its covert war.

Hun Sen's warning was never going to be taken into account, nor were the timid complaints, mainly to cover the file, from countries like Spain, where, in the past, the fight against antipersonnel mines or cluster munitions has been considered central to pacifist causes. In a context of offensive, the calls for a ceasefire and for negotiations were completely overshadowed by the facts and demonized by the Ukrainian authorities, whose Foreign Affairs Minister described them as “absurd”. The only peace plan is total war in which the West continues to supply ever heavier and more dangerous weapons to mercilessly attack Russian troops regardless of the consequences.

On July 18, one of the most important columnists in The Washington Post David Ignatius wrote that "for the United States and its NATO allies, these 18 months of war have been a strategic success at relatively little cost (except for Ukraine)." The cost of the war is being higher for the European countries than for their American ally, especially in terms of loss of access to cheap Russian energy, but also in industrial shortages and loss of strategic autonomy. For Washington, however, indirect participation in the Ukrainian war is a profitable business in which its large companies improve their market position. The United States is managing to wear down Russia, an important ally of China, its real rival, while achieving increasing submission from the countries of the European Union. All this without risking its economy or its soldiers. As Condoleeza Rice and Robert Gates wrote a few months ago, the United States has a partner "willing to bear the consequences of war so that we do not have to bear it ourselves in the future." Are the benefits of warproxy , in which the economic cost is bearable and the damages fall on that proxy , which only deserves a clarification in parentheses.

“In a year and a half of conflict, landmines, along with unexploded bombs, artillery shells and other deadly products of war have contaminated an amount of Ukraine similar to the size of Florida or Uruguay,” The Washington Post wrote this weekend.. This description does not take into account the 2014-2022 conflict, the real start of the contamination of the Donbass soil with all kinds of mines that, over the years, have caused civilian casualties. The article, which qualifies Ukraine as "the most heavily mined country in the world", also does not take into account the Lepechtok anti-personnel mines scattered by Ukraine for months in urban areas and large towns such as the city of Donetsk. However, it is representative of those costs, which are not only economic and will always be borne by the civilian population of the country at war. “The transformation of Ukrainian land into perilous wastelands is a long-term calamity on a scale experts have rarely seen and one that could take years and billions of dollars to eliminate,” the article added.

With war the only way forward, Antony Blinken has announced that Ukraine is preparing to use its main forces on the offensive. It would be the introduction of the brigades trained during these months abroad. “And when all the forces that have been trained in recent months and the equipment that we have supplied to them from around 50 countries are deployed and go into action, I think all of this is going to make a significant difference and lead to change,” said the US Secretary of State. Volodymyr Zelensky, who has once again insisted on the need to receive aviation and long-range missiles that the United States has once again denied him, has shown himself along the same lines, possibly because of the certainty that they would be used against Crimea in an act that could only escalate. The increasing use of Russian missiles in areas less protected by air defenses is posing a serious problem for Ukraine, which has sought to protect its capital but may have exposed places like Odessa, where even triumphant Ukrainian reports do not claim to have shot down even half of the Russian missiles. The Ukrainian offensive, the threats of future attacks, the coups in Crimea and the end of the grain export agreement have increased military activity and also the danger. A few days ago, Yury Ignat, Ukrainian aviation spokesman, admitted the use of anti-aircraft defenses in urban areas, an added danger for the population and civil infrastructure. "Everything we have now - both the old Soviet-made and what our partners have supplied us - is insufficient to make Ukraine a semicircle of air defense so that not a single mouse can get through," he said. And when asked whether the air defenses could not be moved away from residential neighborhoods, he replied that “there is no other way to defend a city than to deploy air defense systems closer to it”.

The military escalation, which is currently concentrating on the Zaporozhye front line, but also in Crimea and Odessa, entails a notable increase in risk for the civilian population, as has been seen both in Kerch and in Odessa, a development of events that is practically inevitable from the moment that war to the end was chosen as the only way out of the conflict. The deaths in Crimea or the damage to houses and the Orthodox cathedral in Odessa - possibly the result of anti-aircraft defenses, not a Russian missile, which would have caused much greater destruction - are the consequence of this, a part of the "relatively low cost (except for Ukraine)".

https://slavyangrad.es/2023/07/24/27787/#more-27787

Google Translator

******

Chronicle of the special military operation for July 23, 2023
July 23, 2023
Rybar

Russian troops again launched a series of rocket attacks on targets in several districts of Odessa . Ukrainian air defense systems not only failed to repel the attack, but also fired anti-aircraft missiles at civilian targets, damaging, among other things, the Spaso - Preobrazhensky Cathedral .

In the Soledar direction, the enemy intensified attacks on the positions of Russian troops on the northern and southern flanks of the Bakhmut defense . Near Klescheevka , at the cost of significant losses, Ukrainian formations managed to gain a foothold on the adjacent heights - now the parties are fighting fierce battles on the outskirts of the settlement.

In the Zaporozhye direction, all attempts by the Armed Forces of Ukraine to break through the Russian defenses were thwarted by small arms and artillery fire. Nevertheless, the Ukrainian command continues to carry out raids on the positions of the RF Armed Forces, intending to further wear down the Russian units.

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On damage to the Transfiguration Cathedral and other objects in the center of Odessa

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Tonight, Russian troops launched a series of missile attacks on enemy targets in several districts of Odessa .

As in previous raids, there was an abnormal operation of Ukrainian air defense systems, as a result of which anti-aircraft missiles hit civilian infrastructure instead of intercepting air targets.

One of such affected objects was the Spaso-Preobrazhensky Cathedral of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (MP), the largest Orthodox church in the city.

The damage footage leaves no doubt: a hit by Russian missiles used in the raid would have led to the complete destruction of the building, while the warhead of the anti-aircraft ammunition caused only serious damage, leaving characteristic traces of shrapnel.

Another evidence of the involvement of Ukrainian air defense in the attack on the object is a video published by local residents of how one of the anti-aircraft missiles leaves the trajectory and falls on the cathedral.

In view of the obvious futility of the idea of ​​using the information about the destruction of the cathedral, the Ukrainian media are shifting their focus to the damage to the buildings of the historical center, appealing that part of the Old Town is included in the UNESCO heritage list .

The situation on the front line and the fighting

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In the Kupyansky sector, Russian troops continue to expand the zone of control near Liman Pervy . In recent days, the enemy has been driven out from several strongholds in the areas of Masyutovka and Sinkovka .

In addition, the Lancet UAVs hit the Crab howitzer with an accurate strike in the Kupyansk area . Also, according to some reports, the landing units of the RF Armed Forces at the turn of Kovalevka - Karmazinovka - Novovodyanoe went on the offensive, active clashes are underway.

At the same time , the Military Informant reports that Russian units were able to successfully cross the Zherebets River and occupy a number of heights on the other bank, thereby expanding and deepening a 5 by 7 km bridgehead in the Svatovsky area. In addition, according to a number of data, developing offensives from Karmazinovka , assault units of three motorized rifle brigades captured several strongholds of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.

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Fierce battles continue on the flanks of Bakhmut in the Soledar direction . After ousting units of the RF Armed Forces from several positions in the north-west in the Orekhovo - Vasilevka region , the Russian fighters attempted to conduct a counterattack towards Grigorovka , but could not advance. The Armed Forces of the Russian Federation with an accurate missile strike hit the location of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in Chasov Yar , where members of the Ukrainian formations were being treated and restored.


On the southern flank, the enemy came close to Andreevka . Assault groups of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, previously entrenched on the adjacent heights, enter the outskirts of Kleshcheevka and engage in a shooting battle with the defending Russian fighters. The advantage of Ukrainian formations in air reconnaissance, constant reinforcements in manpower and armored vehicles, as well as the absence of the need to reckon with losses, allow the Armed Forces of Ukraine to move slowly. Russian servicemen are steadfastly holding the line on the southern flank, but once again we would like to draw your attention to the fact that the lack of rotation and sufficient work of electronic warfare seriously complicate the combat mission.

At the Maryinsky and Avdeevsky sections, the situation has not changed significantly. Positional clashes continue on the entire sector of the front, artillery and strike drones are actively working on both sides.

In the Ugledar sector, the enemy is making harassing attacks with small forces in the direction of Vladimirovka and Nikolsky dachas . Russian troops identify enemy concentration areas and disperse them with massive artillery fire.

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In the Vremievsky sector, the enemy continues to try to wear down the Russian defenses, regardless of losses. The assault group of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, numbering about 10 people, attacked Urozhayne, however, having suffered losses, was forced to retreat. Ukrainian formations lost two armored vehicles.


In the direction of Staromayorskoye, the enemy brought out another small maneuver group, which was met and dispersed by artillery fire. Another offensive attempt was thwarted in the Priyutnoye area - a detachment of the Armed Forces of Ukraine tried to attack from the side of Levadny . As a result, Ukrainian formations lost one armored vehicle.

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In the Orekhovsky sector, the enemy's assault detachments continue to attack Rabotino . The Armed Forces of the Russian Federation managed to timely reveal the movement of a column of armored vehicles of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in the direction of the village, as a result of which a fire defeat was inflicted on the enemy.

Ukrainian formations also used remote mining in the Rabotino area. In addition, a small detachment of the Armed Forces of Ukraine attempted an offensive from Pyatikhatki, but was destroyed by ATGM crews of the RF Armed Forces.

In the Kherson direction, Russian troops continue to strike at members of Ukrainian formations in the area of ​​the islands and near the Antonovsky bridge . Nevertheless, it is not possible to knock out the APU at the moment.

In addition, the Russian Lancet drone hit the Skyguard Aspide air defense system, damaging the radar station and one of the machines of the complex. This was the first confirmed case of incapacitation of the Spanish complex in the special operation zone.

Shelling of rear territories and residential areas

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In the Bryansk region, Ukrainian formations fired at the border Suzemsky district . In the village of Polevye Novoselki, one residential building and a power line were damaged. One man received shrapnel wounds - he was taken to the district hospital, where he was provided with all the necessary medical assistance. The village of Pavlovichi was also temporarily left without electricity .

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The Armed Forces of Ukraine continue daily shelling of the border areas of the Kursk region . The enemy fired 16 shells at the village of Tetkino , several residential buildings were damaged, no one was injured. The village of Krasnooktyabrsky also came under fire , a power line and an uninhabited house were damaged, the neighboring village of Veseloye was partially de-energized , no one was injured.

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Ukrainian formations continue to strike daily at the border settlements of the Belgorod region . Local residents reported shelling of the villages of Repyahovka and Dronovka , but there is no official information about the victims and damage.

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The Armed Forces of Ukraine do not stop shelling the Donetsk agglomeration every day . In the capital of the region, strikes damaged at least seven residential buildings in the Kievsky , Petrovsky , Kirovsky and Kuibyshevsky districts , one man was injured. In addition, the civilian infrastructure of Yasinovataya , Gorlovka , Makiivka , Oleksandrivka and Staromikhaylovka came under fire : unfortunately, one man died from shrapnel.

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That night, Ukrainian formations continued shelling the civilian infrastructure of the Kherson region . At least 27 cannon artillery shells were fired at several settlements. As a result of the shelling suffered: Novaya Kakhovka , Kakhovka , Peschanovka and Proletarka .

Political events
On the supply of arms to the Armed Forces of Ukraine

The Wall Street Journal and The Guardian speculated that the UAF offensive could stall due to a lack of ammunition and air power. According to publications, the delays in Western arms supplies to Ukraine played into the hands of the Russian army.

Nevertheless, for the Russian reader, such articles in the Western press should be taken as a call for the continued militarization of Ukraine. Thus, US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken spoke about the difficult nature of the Ukrainian offensive, and then promised to transfer F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine within a few months.

At the same time, it was reported that the German concern Rheinmetall plans to supply the Ukrainian Armed Forces with 300,000 shells for Gepard anti-aircraft systems . The first batch of ammunition will be delivered to the Armed Forces of Ukraine in the coming weeks, and by the end of the year the total number of ammunition delivered will reach 40,000.


In addition, British mobile launchers of Brimstone guided missiles based on the Supacat vehicle arrived in Ukraine. The photo shows a fragment of a video made in one of the Ukrainian cities in the spring of this year. In addition to the Brimstone carrier, a MAN 4 × 4 HX60 truck with ammunition was also included in the frame. Apparently, the UK handed over these vehicles to Ukrainian formations at least in early 2023, although some could have arrived in the country even earlier via a land corridor from Poland or Romania.

On the upcoming meeting of the Ukraine-NATO Council

President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky addressed NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg with a request to convene an emergency meeting of the Ukraine - NATO Council .

The meeting will be held on July 26 at the level of ambassadors. The reason for the meeting was Russia's withdrawal from the grain deal. The parties will discuss the prospects for transporting Ukrainian grain through the Black Sea, as well as recent events on the Black Sea coast of Ukraine.

https://rybar.ru/hronika-speczialnoj-vo ... 2023-goda/

Google Translator

(Other images at link.)

******

THE NATO GENERALS KNOW THE WAR AGAINST RUSSIA IS LOST – THE PENTAGON FIRES SMOKE TO SCREEN THE RETREAT

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By John Helmer, Moscow @bears_with

Soldiers lay down smoke on the battlefield to conceal their movements, advancing or retreating, from the troops on the other side.

In the US Army manuals for warfighting with smoke, there are four kinds for the battlefield (lead image) – obscuring smoke which is aimed at blinding the enemy so he can’t see what you have coming for him; screening smoke which is laid down between you and your enemy, so he can’t see what you are doing in your positions; protecting smoke which is aimed at disrupting the laser and other targeting systems of the other side’s artillery and rockets; and marking smoke whose purpose is either to pinpoint targets for air attackers or rear artillery, or identify safety positions on a rapid-movement battlefield.

With the White House in the lead, in the war the NATO allies are fighting against Russia to the last Ukrainian, an entirely new kind of smoke has been used – it’s the blowback smoke which blinds its users. On the Ukrainian battlefield this smokescreen conceals nothing from the Russians. Instead, it is being used to deceive the NATO country media, voters, and parliaments which must agree to subscribe the money to pay the Ukrainians to fight, and supply them with NATO ammunition, weapons, intelligence, and support services, including credits and cash. Vladimir Zelensky, the Ukrainian president best known for career comic turns — the most famous of which was playing a piano with his penis (screened, protected, marked) — is the master of the blowback smoke on the present battlefield.

A day ago, he told the Ukrainian deputy prime minister of Canada, Chrystia Freeland: “we are approaching a moment when relevant actions can gain pace because we are already going through some mines locations and we are demining these areas.” The calculated ambiguities – “moment”, “approaching”, “relevant”, “can”, “pace”, “some” – are the smoke. The blowback was started by Freeland who told Zelensky that how his counteroffensive was going against the Russians is “the question in the minds of everyone here [and] the preoccupation of all of your friends in the world”. Zelensky’s smoke was invited by Freeland to blind the world, especially their friends.

In this week’s War of the Worlds discussion with Swiss Army Colonel Jacques Baud, this tactic is exposed, and in its place evidence revealed of the French and other allied general staffs trying to find their way off the battlefield, as Zelensky forces are destroyed, along with the best of US, French, British and other NATO weapons. The programme was pre-recorded on Thursday.

Less than twenty-four hours later at a virtual session of the Russian Security Council, President Vladimir Putin made an unusual introduction to the closed-door plans of his military, security and intelligence chiefs. “It is clear today,” Putin said, referring to the Americans, French, Germans, and British, “that the Western curators of the Kiev regime are certainly disappointed with the results of the counteroffensive that the current Ukrainian authorities announced in previous months. There are no results, at least for now.”

“The whole world sees that the vaunted Western, supposedly invulnerable, military equipment is on fire, and is often even inferior to some of the Soviet-made weapons in terms of its tactical and technical characteristics.”

Then on the topic of Poland and Galicia, Putin makes the most important statement by a Russian leader in more than a hundred years. Putin warns the Polish government, together with the Lithuanians, not to make a troop move on Galicia’s capital Lvov, as the Germans had done in 1941. He also warns Berlin not to imagine they can recover the old Prussian or the more recent Third Reich sway in those territories.

Between the lines also, Putin issued an invitation to two of the ruling factions in Kiev – the military command and the Lvov Banderites – that they should remove Zelensky quickly, before they lose what will be left of their territory, after the Russian Army goes on the offensive. If they want to keep Galicia, “this, I repeat”, Putin said, “is in the end their business. If they want to relinquish or sell off something in order to pay their bosses, as traitors usually do, that’s their business. We will not interfere in this.”

Putin’s smoke signal carried a subliminal meaning. He didn’t identify the Biden administration. Instead, he implied that Zelensky is the Americans’ underboss; and that if the Ukrainians want to survive the war in which everything made in America is “on fire”, the Ukrainians don’t have long.

Colonel Jacques Baud returns from the first discussion on air on July 15. For elaboration and analysis of that interview, read this.

Listen to the new discussion here: https://tntradiolive.podbean.com/e/colo ... july-2023/
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Source: https://tntradiolive.podbean.com/

The Battle of Odessa has begun, Baud says. But Russian strategy for the major cities remaining east of the Dnieper River which will be Russian at war’s end does not involve city siege or urban fighting, like Mariupol, he adds, citing Robert Mardini, the Swiss director of the International Red Cross.

Russian war correspondents reporting on the opening missile barrages against Odessa last week confirm this targeting. When a grain storage terminal was hit, Boris Rozhin (“Colonel Cassad”) reported “an important detail, despite all the tantrums in Ukraine and [NATO], even according to official Ukrainian data, there are no civilian deaths. Despite the large number of incoming. This indicates the high accuracy of the strikes and once again shows that the Russian Federation does not purposefully strike at the civilian population. Unlike the Ukraine.”

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“Map of missile and drone strikes against targets in Odessa as published in Ukraine. Once again, I would like to draw your attention to the fact that with all the wealth of destructive means involved, not a single civilian was killed during the strikes. They operated like clockwork.” https://t.me/boris_rozhin/92539

To understand the impact of the electric war on the Odessans, and the way the Stavka in Moscow is calculating the city will switch sides as soon as the Kiev regime’s control is broken, read this.

From the northern front, where Russian and Belarus forces are creating the concentration, or the smokescreen for potential offensives aimed at Chernigov, Suny, Poltava, and Kiev, comes the news from the new Wagner camp at Tsel, Belarus. An old military base which has been revived, it is about 100 kilometres southeast of Minsk; about 200 kms northwest of Chernigov and the Ukrainian border.

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Source: https://www.bbc.com/

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Source: https://www.bbc.com/

A video clip has been published on the internet in which the soundtrack reveals the unseen Yevgeny Prigozhin speaking to a group of Wagner soldiers; the location appears to be the new Tsel camp. The film also marks the first public appearance, also unseen, of Dmitry Utkin, the military commander of Wagner; from the applause which greeted his remarks, he is a more popular figure among the troops than Prigozhin. Listen to the recording here, If blocked in some areas, this is an English-language version.

“If anyone doesn’t know,” Utkin can be heard introducing himself in Russian. “I am the Wagner. Many thanks to everyone for the work done, thanks to this work, the name PMC [private military company] Wagner has thundered all over the world. This is not the end, but only the beginning! The biggest work in the world that will be done very soon! [In English] Welcome to hell!”

More guarded as double-talk goes was the joint press conference at the Pentagon on July 18. In their remarks Austin and Milley were beating a US retreat.

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Left to right: Lieutenant-Colonel Dmitry Utkin; Defense Secretary General Lloyd Austin; JCS Chairman General Mark Milley.

Asked to respond to Ben Wallace, the British defense minister and the first NATO official of active rank to reveal publicly the allies’ doubt towards Zelensky and his regime, Austin was asked by a reporter: “Secretary Austin, you talked about the alliance and the contact group being together. But publicly, there seems to be a bit of fraying. Defense Minister Wallace last week said that he had told his Ukrainian counterparts that, quote/unquote, ‘We are not Amazon, and that they should show us some appreciation.’ Do you agree with the sentiments that Secretary Wallace expressed?”

Austin stumbled in reply: “You know, we’re just off of — just back from the summit in Vilnius, and what I witnessed in Vilnius was indeed unity and cohesion, in every meeting that I sat in. And so I would — it’s the same thing that I witnessed today as I talked to ministers of defense and chiefs of defense. That unity is still there. There’s no question that we have provided Ukraine a lot, we, the international coalition. Ukraine is in a fight, and we have to remember that, when you’re in a fight, you want everything that you can get your hands on. And so that’s to be expected. Ben Wallace and I have worked along with coalition partners over the last year or so on this particular issue, and Ben has done a lot to enable and to help the Ukrainian military. And so he’s been a great partner. But, again, I continue to see unity and cohesion. I continue to hear ministers say that we’re going to support Ukraine for as long as it takes.”

Austin was camouflaging the opposite of what he was trying to say. General Milley then let slip the loss of NATO confidence in the battlefield performance of US and NATO weapons and the Ukrainian army. “So Missy, the — I’d offer two things. One is, you know, what’s the military problem to solve here with the air power? And it’s control of the airspace, and you can do that two ways. You can do that air-to-air or you can do that from the ground to the air. In terms of the most effective and efficient and cost-effective way to do that right now for the Ukrainians is from ground to air through air defense systems, and that’s what they’ve been provided from the beginning if this war ’til now. And that’s important, because what you want to do is protect those assault forces from Russian close-air support and/or attack-helicopter support, and they’ve got air defense systems, the Ru- — Ukrainians do, that can do that.”

Milley almost admitted the truth. It has been the “Ru[ssians]”, not the “Ukrainians” who have demonstrated their superiority in countering and destroying every NATO air defence weapon on the battlefield and around the cities – the most important of which is the US-made Patriot.

“The casualties that the Ukrainians are suffering on this offensive are not so much from Russian airpower; they’re from minefields, minefields that are covered with direct fire from anti-tank hunter-killer teams, that sort of thing. So it’s minefields. So the problem to solve is minefields, not the air piece right this minute. And that’s what the coalition is trying to provide them: additional mine clearing, MICLICs, line charges, Bangalores — that sort of thing, in order to continue to work their way through the minefields.” This was Milley introducing the US decision not to supply F-16 fighter-bombers to the Ukraine.

“So I’m confident that they can do this, and especially if they execute the tactics, techniques and procedures that they’ve been taught, which they are doing, and execute these operations at night, which would deny the Russians the ability to use any of their airpower anyway. So the real problem is the minefields. It’s not right now the airpower. Now, having said that, just do a quick math drill here. Ten F-16s are $2 billion, so the Russians have hundreds of fourth- and fifth-generation airframes. So if they’re going to try to match the Russians one for one, or even, you know, two-to-one, you’re talking about a large number of aircraft. That’s going to take years to train the pilots, years to do the maintenance and sustainment, years to generate that degree of financial support to do that. You’re talking way more billions of dollars than has already been generated.”

“So the key thing is to focus on air defence, focus on the blocking-and-tackling sort of offensive combined arms maneuver, which is artillery, as both long-range and short-range artillery, and then get in your engineers and your mine-breaching equipment. That’s the kind of stuff they need. That’s what they want. That’s what they’re asking for. When I talk to [Ukrainian chief of the general staff, General Valery] Zaluzhny, that’s what he’s asking for, so”.

Milley is also revealing that for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Zaluzhny is in line, not President Zelensky.

The new US and NATO decision not to allow the deployment of the F-16s in the war has followed the declaration on July 12 by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov that the aircraft is a nuclear-capable attacker and would be treated as such. Milley was ambiguous in his retreat, but three days later, on July 21, the National Security Advisor Jacob Sullivan was categorical. “Ukrainian emphasis on securing supplies of advanced fighter jets for the counteroffensive was misplaced, because strong Ukrainian and Russian air defences had prevented air power from playing a significant role in the conflict, Sullivan said. ‘The view of our military commanders is that the notion that F-16s would play a decisive role in this counteroffensive given that fundamental reality . . . They have a different view than what you have heard from some Ukrainian voices,’ he said.”

The Russian warning to Warsaw on Galicia beat the Poles to the punch, and to the retreat. On Friday afternoon, Warsaw time, the former prime minister Beata Szydlo issued the bluntest statement yet against the Kiev leadership.

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Source: https://twitter.com/BeataSzydlo

“The statement of the Prime Minister of Ukraine Denys Shmyhal,” Szydlo said in a tweet published in both Polish and English, “is simply unfair to Poland. After all, such an experienced politician as the head of the Ukrainian government must understand how much Poland has done to help Ukraine, rescuing the country at the moment of greatest danger. Mr. Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal also knows that Ukraine was supposed to transit its agricultural products to third countries through Poland. Meanwhile, Ukrainian producers of grain and other foodstuffs – mark you, large corporations owned by oligarchs, not farmers – decided to seize the opportunity and flood Poland with their products. Such behavior has nothing to do with friendship and cooperation. In fact, the Prime Minister of Ukraine should apologize to Poland for unfair practices, rather than making theses that harm Poland and Polish-Ukrainian relations. For the government of the Law and Justice Party [PiS], the most important thing is the welfare of Polish citizens and the Polish economy, including agriculture. The Polish market must and will be protected from unfair practices”. For more detail on the Polish and European Union embargo on Ukrainian grain exports and the UN scheme for Kiev’s grain profiteering, read this.

The Kremlin posted Putin’s speech to the Poles at 13:05 Moscow, 12:05 Warsaw. The Russian president had spoken several hours before the Polish ex-prime minister and head of the Polish delegation in the European Parliament broke cover. “Have our friends in Warsaw forgotten,” Putin said. “We will remind you.”

“Now the fire of war is being strenuously kindled. In particular, they use for this the ambitions of the leaders of some Eastern European states, who have long turned hatred of Russia, Russophobia, into their main export commodity and into an instrument of their domestic policy. And now they want to warm their hands on the Ukrainian tragedy. In this regard, I cannot but comment on what has just been said: and the reports that have appeared in the press about plans to create a certain so-called Polish-Lithuanian-Ukrainian connection.”

“That is, we are not talking about some gathering of mercenaries — there are enough of them already there, and they are being destroyed – namely, about a regular, assembled, equipped military unit that is planned to be used for operations on the territory of Ukraine. Including for allegedly ensuring the security of modern Western Ukraine, and in fact, to call a spade a spade, for the subsequent occupation of these territories. After all, the prospect is obvious: if Polish units enter, for example, Lvov or other territories of Ukraine, then they will remain there. And they will remain forever.”

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Source: https://ipn.gov.pl/

This is the official Polish version of the history, issued three days after the commencement of the Russian Special Military Operation. In Putin’s version, “They [the Zelensky regime] will trade everything: both people and land. Just, by the way, like their ideological predecessors, the Petliurists, who in 1920 concluded so–called secret conventions with Poland, according to which, in exchange for military support, they gave Poland the lands of Galicia and Western Volhynia. Even today, such traitors are ready to open the gates for foreign owners and once again sell Ukraine. As for the Polish leaders, they probably expect to form a coalition under the NATO umbrella and directly intervene in the conflict in Ukraine in order to then tear off a fatter piece for themselves, to regain, as they believe, their historical territories – today's Western Ukraine. It is well known that they also dream of Belarusian lands.”

“By the way,” Putin responded with the Russian history, “there will be nothing new. Let me remind you that after the defeat of Germany and its allies, following the results of the First World War, Polish units occupied Lvov and the adjacent lands that then belonged to Austria-Hungary. Poland, instigated by the West, also took advantage of the tragedy of the Civil War in Russia, annexed some historical Russian provinces. Our country, which was then in a difficult situation, was forced to conclude the Riga Treaty in 1921 and actually recognis the rejection of its territories. And even earlier, in 1920, Poland seized part of Lithuania – the Vilna Region, the territory around modern Vilnius. It seems that together with the Lithuanians they fought against the so-called ‘Russian imperialism’ and as soon as the opportunity turned up, they immediately cut off a piece of land from their neighbours. Poland, as you know, also participated in the partition of Czechoslovakia as a result of the Munich agreement with Hitler in 1938. Completely occupied Tesin Silesia.”

“In the 20-30s of the last century, in the so-called Eastern Districts of Poland – and this is the territory of Western Ukraine, Western Belarus and part of Lithuania – there was a strict polonization and assimilation of local residents; there was a suppression of national cultures, Orthodoxy. I would also like to remind you how such an aggressive policy ended for Poland as a result. It ended with the national tragedy of 1939, when Poland was thrown by the Western Allies to the German war machine and actually lost its independence and statehood, which was restored to a great extent thanks to the Soviet Union. And it was thanks to the Soviet Union, thanks to Stalin’s position, that Poland received significant lands in the West, the lands of Germany. This is exactly the case: the western territories of present–day Poland are Stalin’s gift to the Poles.”

What Stalin gave away, Putin was saying, the Russian Army is prepared to take back – unless Zelensky and the Americans are removed.

Moscow sources express their surprise that the Anglo-American media have failed to report Putin’s remarks and appreciate their significance. “Are the British and Americans all at the beach?” asked one of the sources familiar with the matter. “More likely they realise the game is up for Zelensky. Maybe they are advising him to plan a fake coup to cover his escape, and promising to have the aircraft warmed up in Poland to take him out.”

https://johnhelmer.net/the-nato-general ... more-88392

That was a cheap shot by Putin against Stalin, lacking the context which would make Putin look stupid.Couldn't help himself I guess:The resurgence of ideas, practices and historical significance must gall the class he rules for.

Even as Stalin felt it necessary to make concessions to the past in the interest of overall morale so history repeats itself. As the liberalization of the ROC in those times led to increased social power for that body so the 'unfortunately necessary' proper recognition of communist practices and personalities will lead to something more potent than mere nostalgia.

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Resourcefulness was not enough
July 23, 17:35

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The American media explain the collapse of the summer offensive of the Armed Forces of Ukraine with the "lack of resourcefulness" of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
A little earlier in Kyiv, they whined that the reason for the failure of the offensive was that Western equipment was delivered late.
There is a search for those responsible for the failure of the strategic plan for the summer campaign.

Resourcefulness was not enough

When Kiev launched a massive counter-offensive, Western officials knew that the Armed Forces of Ukraine did not have enough training or firepower to “push out” Russian troops. Nevertheless, they hoped that the Ukrainians would prevail thanks to their "courage and resourcefulness." But these hopes did not come true , writes The Wall Street Journal.

According to the publication, "deep and deadly" minefields, an extensive system of fortifications and Russian aircraft largely blocked the advance of Ukrainian troops. Therefore, the current campaign of the Armed Forces of Ukraine runs the risk of reaching a dead end, leading to losses in manpower and equipment without a significant change in pace.

As the likelihood of any significant Ukrainian success declines this year, Washington and its allies"an alarming prospect of a protracted conflict" looms. It will require a huge amount of modern weapons and training "to give Kyiv a chance to win."

Many in Washington believe that the Biden administration fears the negative impact of the Ukrainian conflict on the re-election of the American president, and therefore is cautious about the amount of support for Kyiv. At the same time, among European leaders, on the contrary, there is a growing number of those who believe that in order to ensure security on the continent, Russia “must lose,” the publication claims.

But the regional military lacks the resources to meet Ukraine's growing needs. Moreover, according to Western diplomats, the EU and Britain are unlikely to significantly increase support for Kyiv if they feel resistance from the United States, The Wall Street Journal draws attention.

Tensions between Volodymyr Zelensky and US officials at the recent NATO summit in Lithuania also testify to the shift in sentiment among Western allies. The failure to counter Russian defenses has convinced many experts that Ukrainian forces need more training for complex military maneuvers, stronger air defense systems and much more armored vehicles.

Western military doctrine states that an attacking group must outnumber the defending enemy by at least three times, and also skillfully use a combination of air and ground forces. Kiev troops lack the size, skills and resources to follow these instructions , according to The Wall Street Journal.

According to the publication, the Armed Forces of Ukraine hoped to find weaknesses in Russian fortifications. Instead, they unexpectedly stumbled upon "impassable minefields", becoming targets for Russian aircraft and missiles.

The Ukrainian army does not have enough Western air defense systems to deploy them near the front line. In addition, US Patriots and other large, less mobile systems are vulnerable to Russian drone attacks.

Kyiv hopes that the F-16 will help the Armed Forces of Ukraine seize the initiative in the air dominated by Russian aviation. But Biden has not yet given the necessary approval for the supply of American fighter jets, and it will take months to establish a logistical chain to support and repair aircraft.

Analysts say the first F-16s could hit the battlefield early next year. But their impact on the situation will depend on many factors, including the number of aircraft delivered, the complexity of their on-board equipment and weapons systems. Incorporating modern fighter jets into combat plans is also a huge challenge and requires a different level of synchronization in Ukrainian operations, warns The Wall Street Journal.

https://russian.rt.com/inotv/2023-07-23 ... ukraincev- Zinc

Today, the Armed Forces of Ukraine again severely raked at Pyatikhatki and Rabotino, losing several Leopards and Bradleys. Again resourcefulness is lacking.

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/8514153.html

Not a big difference
July 24, 14:27

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Clearly about the difference between the arrivals of anti-aircraft and cruise missiles.

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/8516132.html

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From the Telegram account of Cassad:

Colonelcassad
Ukrainian air defense against Odessa - substandard anti-aircraft missiles are becoming an increasingly serious problem for the Armed Forces of Ukraine

During the night combined attack on the port infrastructure of the Kiev regime, eyewitnesses observed the extremely unsuccessful operation of enemy air defense. At least two anti-aircraft missiles left the trajectory and hit the city itself. And these are only those that clearly got on the video - eyewitnesses report a larger number of faulty ammunition.

One of these missiles hit the Holy Transfiguration Cathedral. Although Russia was immediately blamed for this attack, the nature of the damage clearly indicates that they were inflicted by an anti-aircraft missile. Ukrainian sources themselves posted photos with traces of damaging elements on the net, after which they began to bashfully rub them.

In total, five air defense missiles that fell on the center of Odessa are reported. Perhaps this is an unprecedented case for the entire time of massive strikes on the territory of Ukraine - before, so many Ukrainian anti-aircraft missiles did not fail after launch.

The explanation for this is quite simple - Odessa, as we wrote earlier, covered itself according to the residual principle, because the "grain deal" protected it better than any "Patriot". Most likely, it was also replenished with anti-aircraft missiles for the S-300 complexes in a non-priority order.

In general, the shortage of missiles for Soviet air defense systems is becoming an increasingly burning problem for the Armed Forces of Ukraine.Deliveries of Western complexes simply do not keep up with the needs of Kiev, and there is not enough ammunition for them - we have previously pointed out the limited US capabilities to replenish Patriot PAC-3 missiles .

More and more often, the Armed Forces of Ukraine have to use substandard missiles, risking hitting their own cities. I would not like to flatter myself ahead of time, but the forecast for Ukrainian anti-aircraft gunners is extremely unfavorable. There is simply nowhere to get new missiles for Soviet complexes, so in the foreseeable future they will have nothing to shoot with.

In the meantime, enemy air defense is bombing Odessa worse than the RF Armed Forces are doing, whose strikes are selective and directed primarily against military targets and infrastructure.

***

Colonelcassad
❗️Enemy losses in the Kherson direction in the period from 01-23 July 2023

🔻In July of this year, we observed the enemy's attempts to cross from the Right to our Left Bank of the Dnieper. Today, representatives of the command of the Dnepr group of troops reported that from July 1 to July 23, the armed formations of the Kyiv regime during the fighting in the Kherson region lost:

💥up to 880 personnel;
💥more than 30 boats;
💥two tanks;
💥six self-propelled and 22 towed howitzers;
💥two multiple launch rocket systems;
💥more than 30 mortars;
💥one anti-tank missile system;
💥one command vehicle;
💥two command posts;
💥three radar stations;
💥two installations of electronic warfare;
💥seven warehouses.

🔻This is reliable data, confirmed by means of objective control. Additional confirmation is overcrowded hospitals in the Kherson, Nikolaev and Odessa regions.

🔻Most of all, the enemy laid down his people in an attempt to force the Dnieper both in the area of ​​​​Kinburg Spit and in the area of ​​\u200b\u200bAntonovsky Bridge. From a military point of view, dachas near the Antonovsky Bridge are a hopeless place. A tiny shootable patch turned into a bloody meat grinder.

***

Colonelcassad
⚡️As for the night strike in Odessa and Nikolaev, you need to understand the following.

1. The Armed Forces of Ukraine have long placed and stored weapons and ammunition in ports and, most likely, were confident that these stocks were safe due to the grain deal.

2. Night detonations in Odessa allow us to conclude that everything brought to the ports, probably for the “South” grouping of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, was stored as tightly as possible. Some warehouses in the port area are still burning.

3. The volume of destroyed ammunition and equipment is still difficult to comprehend, however, if weapons and ammunition were critical for the Armed Forces of Ukraine, Kyiv will urgently request more in the near future.

4. To compensate for the supply of destroyed weapons, you will have to spend a significant amount of time. Considering that a significant part of the shells of 152 and 155 mm caliber, as well as other weapons, go to the area of ​​the Ukrainian offensive literally from the wheels, the Armed Forces of Ukraine will have to change the scheme and method of delivery, and this is additional time, which is not there. And this is not counting the problems with the preparation of unmanned boats, which will now be even more difficult to assemble and launch.

https://t.me/s/boris_rozhin

Google Translator

Google Translator
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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