Russia and Ukraine

by

Vitaliy Katsenelson, who grew up in Russia and now lives in Colorado (where he works as an investment manager) has written a long 4-part essay on Russia/Ukraine.   Includes comments on what he is hearing from old friends back in Russia. Highly recommended reading.

You’ll need to register with an email address, but he only sends an email every 2 weeks or so, and it is usually interesting…hewrites primarily about investing, but also about art and music.

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366 thoughts on “Russia and Ukraine”

  1. I’ve read two of his essays and they are interesting., I was also surprised that Putin actually invaded as I thought he was likely to win the negotiations.

  2. I’d like to say I was surprised by Putin actually invading, but… There isn’t a hell of a lot that could happen on the international scene that would really “surprise” me, these days–Up to and including alien space lizards from the planet Zorp unmasking on national television to tell us they’re in charge, have been, and are now instituting the harvest plan for human organs.

    You think back on it, and just how much of the last forty years has actually been, y’know… Rational or predictable?

    Who was it telling us all those things about the inevitable triumph of World Communism, Japan, Inc., and all the rest? Oh, yeah… The “expert” class. How much of what the were saying was actually, factually correct? How much of it played out as they boldly asserted?

    Then, contrast that all with what actually happened. There’s an awful lot of things that came out of the clear blue sky, which while they were going on did not conform. And, if you note, the “expert” class jumped right in and told us all how brilliantly they’d predicted these things.

    I’m not even going to get into the number of things that I, personally, have gotten wrong. Suffice to say, there have been a lot of those.

    Upshot? I don’t think there’s much out there that we should really be surprised by, because a.) we should acknowledge that we just don’t know enough of what is going on in the shadows, and b.) that there’s a hell of a lot of chaos going on that gets a big chunk of the vote when things start happening. I mean, who knows what tipped the scales for Putin? Maybe he had a bad case of indigestion, or was just annoyed with someone/something and said “Fsck it. Invade.”.

    This is another example of the folly of strong man leadership. You put one guy in as “in charge” and you’ve got a single point of failure for bad judgments becoming “historical facts” in very short order. There’s also the factor of people not wanting to tell Mr. Strong Man the truth of things, which leads into even deeper folly. I’m sure Putin thought his forces were capable of doing what they had in the planning documents, just as I’m equally sure he was told that the Ukrainian people would rally to him. At the least, nobody disagreed with him, when he asserted these things, and given the track record for other dissenters…?

  3. The reason that Putin has decided to roll back on the Special Military Operation, I do love that title, is that he will have to kill too many civilians. The Ukrainian forces hold human shields all over Ukraine.

    Taking Mariupol was difficult because of the people the Azov brigade held around their positions. The town had to be cut up into sections to remove the civilians from the equation, and allow the killing of the Nazis there. That is mostly done, but extrapolating to the entire country, shows how many, not only Ukrainian civilians but also Russian soldiers will have to die to complete the SMO.

  4. I was surprised Putin invaded, you can look it up in the old posts here, I said no way would he do it. My reasons were pretty much all right, yet he did it anyway, so I’m humble enough to realize I just don’t fundamentally get the guy (I even explicitly dismissed the “he’s a crazy person” “reason” so don’t pull that one out).
    At this point all the advocates for “regime change” in Russia are seriously not helping. It’s one thing to bang that drum in the comment sections of random blogs, but for “important people”, they need to stfu about talk like that…

  6. From the Russian MOD on the first month:

    1. The offensive of the Russian troops disrupted the plans of the offensive of the Armed Forces of Ukraine on the DPR and LPR using artillery, missile systems and aviation.

    2. On January 22, Russian intelligence intercepted the order of General Balan about the need to complete preparations for offensive operations by February 28, so that in March the Armed Forces of Ukraine could go on the offensive.

    3. The operation is progressing according to plan.
    The main tasks of the first stage of the operation have already been completed.

    4. The main priority remains the preservation of the lives of the civilian population. Hence the tactics of high-precision strikes against the military infrastructure and armed forces of the enemy.

    5. The blockade of large cities ensures the fettering of the forces of the Armed Forces of Ukraine and does not allow the Ukrainian command to transfer reinforcements to the Donbass. The main operation at the moment is in the Donbass. In the DPR and LPR, 276 settlements have already been liberated. 93% of the territory of the LPR and 54% of the territory of the DPR were liberated. The group now defending in Mariupol has more than 7,000 people.

    6. Air supremacy was won by the Russian Aerospace Forces in the first two days of the operation. The organized air defense system, the Ukrainian Air Force and the Ukrainian Navy actually ceased to exist.

    7. Destroyed up to 70% of all military stocks of Ukraine as a result of systematic attacks on warehouses. Destroyed 30 key objects of the military-industrial complex of Ukraine. 68% of the enterprises where military equipment was repaired have already been destroyed. At the same time, since the beginning of the NMD, the Ukrainian army has already destroyed 127 bridges.

    8. All organized reserves of the Armed Forces of Ukraine have already been put into action, there are no new ones. Hence the stake on the mobilization of an untrained contingent. In Ukraine, according to the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation, 6595 foreign mercenaries are fighting.

    9. Total losses of the Armed Forces of Ukraine for the month of the operation. About 14,000 killed and about 16,000 wounded (the total losses of the AFU grouping in Donbass are 26% of the personnel). Out of 2416 tanks and armored fighting vehicles combat-ready as of February 24, 1587 were destroyed in a month. Out of 152 military aircraft, 112 were destroyed, out of 149 helicopters – 75, out of 36 Bayraktar TB2 drones, 35 were destroyed. Out of 180 S-300s and Buk M1 – 148, out of 300 radar stations for various purposes – 117.
    The Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation will promptly respond to any attempts to close the airspace of Ukraine for the Russian Aerospace Forces.

    10. According to the RF MoD, at least 10 Ukrainian naval mines are now drifting uncontrollably in the Black Sea, posing a threat to shipping.

    11. The Russian Defense Ministry transferred captured weapons to the DPR and LPR. Among other things, 113 tanks and 138 Jevelin anti-tank systems were transferred.
    More than 23,000 applications have been received from citizens of 37 states wishing to fight for the DNR and LNR. There are also a lot of such applications from Russian citizens.

  8. The one thing which has surprised me the most is that none of the usual vocal lovie, candlelit-vigil, no-nukes, give-peace-a-chance crowd are out there. No campus peace protests, no signed declarations decrying the war published in major newspapers, no demonstrations against the military, calls for negotiation … nothing. It’s like they’ve all lost their voices or something. It’s the usual dog not barking in the night.
    Which makes me wonder about how much of all that over the last forty years and longer was bought and paid for partisan activism.

  9. Sgt Mom — You are right about the strange absence of the “Give Peace A Chance” brigade. Especially now, when the stupidity of the West is pushing us ever closer to nuclear war.

    Some of the “experts” are now predicting the use of tactical nukes. They are missing the point. Russia is not going to play LBJ’s Vietnam game, “sending messages” by limited escalation. If NATO goes into the Ukraine, the likely response will be strategic thermonuclear weapons on every target worth hitting in the US and Europe. That would be consistent with the Russian approach demonstrated in the Ukraine — when they had reason to believe the Ukrainians were going to attack Crimea and the Donbas, Russia struck first.

    Yes, the silence of the peace lambs is very puzzling — especially when Roast Lamb is on the menu!

  11. No one protested Obama’s bombings in Libya, which were not just stupid but massively illegal (real American illegal, not fake international illegal), it’s been clear for a looooong time now that the “anti-war” “movement” is an astroturfed fraud.

  13. tactically he should have concentrated all of his forces on Kiev, or alternately try to hold the Donbass, but don’t do both, once you’ve secured one objective, then you go on to the next,
    even then it was a foolish plan, probably why he didn’t do it eight years earlier, the risings in luhansk, and donetsk, had the agile fingerprints of General Gerasimov, the king of hybrid warfare, we made similar mistakes in Vietnam, Afghanistan Iraq, forgetting the lessons of small unit warfare,

  14. “tactically he should have concentrated all of his forces on Kiev, or alternately try to hold the Donbass,”

    I do love this stuff, halfwit armchair generals just crack me up. ;)

  15. in the first battle of kiev, which they were smart enough not to launch in the spring, the Soviets had a 5/4 advantage about 100,000 men, and yet it was a serious defeat, the Germans had heavy armor and air compliments, this has to be at least one seminar at Frunze,

  16. Russian oligarchs having a very hard time, feeling so very isolated:
    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2022-03-25/roman-abramovich-eyes-sanction-free-dubai-property-as-russians-flock-to-uae
    Lawyers for Russian businessmen say some are attempting to move assets to the United Arab Emirates, of which Dubai is a part. Specialist aviation sites have identified jets belonging to Russian tycoons, including that of Abramovich, coming to the city, though it is not known who was actually on board. The U.K. and European Union have placed sanctions on Abramovich, but there are none imposed by the UAE.
    The UAE has taken a careful political position aimed at maintaining its ties with Russia, surprising Western officials.

    Well, if “Western officials” are “surprised” at this it’s because they’re morons.

  17. western officials who have been serving as devils advocates for the wayward wives of the emir of the uae, trying to dismantle the abraham accords,

  18. under rob malley who is the handler for foreign matters, iran and the sunni islamists, represented by turkey and qatar, are in the drivers seat,

  22. Any policy predicated on regime change is doubly stupid.

    First, there is no reason to believe that whatever replaces Putin will be better and lots that they’ll be worse.

    Second, as we saw in Iraq, in a country as big as Russia, there are millions with a vital interest in Putin’s remaining in power. Remember all the confident “experts” that proclaimed that Saddam couldn’t possibly survive his abject defeat. That didn’t quite work out, albeit he survived only long enough to end up on the gallows. I wouldn’t bet my money against Putin being in power when the Biden administration is a fading, unpleasant memory.

  23. In the interests of balance, here is a (somewhat clunky) translation of a speech on the current situation in the Ukraine by a Russian general on the General Staff. Of course, this is subject to the same cautions as all the propaganda coming out from the Ukrainian side. Trust No-One!

    https://www.moonofalabama.org/12i/midrudoc2.txt

    Interesting point made by the Russian general about the weapons provided by the West probably leaking out of the Ukraine to other neighborhoods. Are Western governments in effect arming tomorrow’s terrorists?

    “I note that not a single foreign mercenary has arrived in Ukraine in the last seven days. On the contrary, there has been an outflow. Within a week, 285 fighters escaped into Poland, Hungary and Romania, I hope without Stingers and Javelins.

    Previous experience has shown that man-portable air defence systems (MANPADS) and ATGMs are spreading out fairly quickly, along with the mercenaries who return home.”

  24. Would they be checked or carry on? Asking for a friend. If they’re exiting through Poland, they probably can’t keep their pocket knives.

  25. Is this what Brandon was telling the 82nd airborne about?
    https://summit.news/2022/03/23/secret-plan-to-send-10000-nato-peacekeeping-troops-into-ukraine
    A secret plan for a “peacekeeping mission” involving 10,000 NATO troops from different countries entering Ukraine and imposing a limited no fly zone is allegedly being prepared by the Polish government.
    Polish news outlet Onet reports that President of Poland Andrzej Duda is waiting on a green light from the White House to implement the proposal.

  26. Hunter Biden’s encrypted blackberry may have done the Ukrainian biolab deals with Metabiota, but Hunter is not the mastermind of the Ukrainian biolabs. That’s Cofer Black of Burisma.

    As we have stated before, Nellie Ohr with MITRE managed the Soviet Biopreparat scientists’ program at US National Labs. Russian Spokesman Kirillov named one lab, Los Alamos, where Lisa Page’s father worked, but many went unnamed like Livermore, Sandia, PNNL, Oak Ridge, etc.

  27. “The one thing which has surprised me the most is that none of the usual vocal lovie, candlelit-vigil, no-nukes, give-peace-a-chance crowd are out there.”

    The contrast is truly striking. If you weren’t there during the before times, movies like “Getting Straight” and “The Strawberry Statement” will give you some idea of what the “give-peace-a-chance” crowd were up to during the Vietnam years. I witnessed one of the many similar “spontaneous” peace demonstrations in Ann Arbor at the start of Desert Storm. To all appearances, nothing like that is going on today. It’s as if all these people had been infected by some virus that made them forget all about the virtues of peace and turned them into raging warmongers.

  28. Well, ya have to pay attention… Only wars that are undertaken in the best interests of the US or other Western nations are bad, ‘mmmkay?

    Nothing done by China, the Soviet Union, or anyone else can be, by definition, bad. That’s why the “anti-war” movement did nothing to oppose North Vietnam’s conventional invasion of South Vietnam, China’s invasion of North Vietnam, or North Vietnam’s invasions of Cambodia, Laos, and so forth. Their fine moral sensibilities weren’t triggered, see, ‘cos those were little brown people killing other little brown people. Same with the whole situation in South Africa–Nothing done by the Zimbabwe regime internally was worth sanctioning, because, again, little darker brown people were just doing what they do to other little darker brown people.

    It isn’t really hypocrisy-hypocrisy, it’s just that they’re possessed of finer moral fibers than you or I; they can discern these things, the things that make the difference between the US going into Iraq after a mass-murdering thug who supported terrorists, and Putin’s Russia going after Ukraine.

    The really amazing thing is, you look at how it was started with just a little seed money back in the day by the various Soviet intelligence organizations? How it’s gone on to be a self-winding set of assholes who are doing what would have been their master’s bidding, all on auto-pilot? Truly amazing, it is–I doubt that the FSB even has to make phone calls to their former proteges, any longer. They just do what they do without guidance, just like the anti-nuke assholes.

    Frankly, while I think that there’s a component of injustice to all the sanctions against Russia and individual Russians, I have to acknowledge that it is also entirely karmic–The majority of the things that have enabled these actions were either created by the Soviet intel ops or came about in reaction to them. They say that our ideals are corrupted, but who was it that actively strove to make that happen, suborning our institutions? I laugh, watching it go down. Back in the day, before all the interminable BS we’ve had happen down the years, such activities as confiscating private property would have been unthinkable, but as the governments adapted and adopted Soviet morals and means, here we are. It’s like the biter, bit. Good humor, viewed through that lens.

  29. why is the two minute hate encouraged against Russia, because it’s a two bit military dictatorship, what herman kahn called a ideological renewal regime, nowadays, that is not totalitarian like china and their social credit system, so who benefits from this dustup,

  30. At this point commies have way more power in the west than they do in Russia, they just don’t call themselves commies.
    If you gave me the option of wishing to take out the deep state (clear out the IC, corruption of Clinton, Biden, etc, revealed and they go to jail) vs taking out Putin, I pick the former every day and twice on Sunday and it’s not even a tough call.

  32. miguel at 12:21 am goes to show what happens when you post late at night. Paragraphs, punctuation, capitalization; I was afraid he’d been hacked.

    As to the substance, none of the labs does bioweapon work. They all concentrate on pulverizing or incinerating our enemies, not making them sick.

  34. “none of the labs does bioweapon work”
    Right, and no gain of function research went on at Wuhan, nope, no sir, St. Fauci told me so…

  35. after 2014, you would think that would be problematic though, after 2020, well nearly suicidal

  36. The issue about all that which I’d like explained by the parties paying for it, namely the Department of Defense, is why this research needed to be done in the first place, and if it was, why the hell they were doing it in Ukraine and China…?

    They’ll never tell us, though.

  38. I’ll bet the answer is really simple: labs in this country charge real money, the waste disposal budget for a month in a U.S. lab probably runs one of these for a year. Life is so much easier and cheaper when you can just dump it down the drain or in any handy field, stream or gutter. Bio-containment suites and suites are for wusses, and also very expensive. Your tax dollars go a lot further over there, wherever there is. And you thought the government was irredeemably profligate.

  41. Because that research is illegal in many cases and they want their name off it in others…like how the CIA funds front companies to do stuff they don’t want to have officially in house for various reasons. There’s also the money laundering aspect of course…

  42. Point I’m getting at, and not getting across… I want to see the people who signed off on all that in front of a courtroom, explaining their actions.

    Especially the Obama-era types who put the laws into place banning such research here in the US.

  43. miguel’s 1:28 link was to a story saying that gas is still flowing through Ukraine. So, both sides are in the position to curtail gas supplies to Europe at will. I predict that it will be a case of when this happens rather than if and it will be non trivial to figure out just who did it. Who will calculate that increasing pressure on Europe to end this sooner rather than later is to their advantage first? Right now it looks like Europe would increase their support of Ukraine but I wouldn’t want to bet that is what would happen. When the outage begins to pinch, I expect Europe to remember just who really controls the flow through that pipeline and it ain’t Ukraine.

  44. Ah, but as Frank Herbert pointed out to us in the novel Dune, the power to destroy something means you’ve got power over it, period.

    I rather suspect that the real reason behind all of this is the Russian desire to have complete control over that pipeline, because so long as Ukraine has the power to destroy it, they also have power over it. If that’s the case, then Russia can’t use that effectively as blackmail, because to do so would be to cut their own throat, economically.

    You really have to wonder at the ineptitude demonstrated by the various national leaders. Most of them simply don’t seem to understand the basics of their own economies, and how much they all depend on energy inputs. Germany, in particular, strikes me as supremely delusional–Why on God’s green earth would you shut down nuclear power, and simultaneously divest energy you have control over yourself? The apparent inability of these “elites” to act in the self-interest of their nations is truly something amazing to observe.

  45. I read- or at least skimmed over- those three pieces by Katsenelson. I admit, I may have missed things.

    But that said, aside from the personal anecdotes about what his Russian contacts told him, this could have been written by any random NYT reporter or a mid-level minion of the US state department.

    This is nothing more than the conventional wisdom of every western globalist. They’re all too busy patting themselves on the back thanks to their imagined moral rectitude to notice the grim problems incoming.

    I didn’t notice any mention of the incipient end of reserve status of the US dollar. No mention that a large fraction of humanity has declined to endorse sanctions. The fatuous idea that a Russian military that can’t conquer Ukraine will be able to conquer Sweden. The belief that west still has anything resembling a free press- someone please tell him about how the press that actually exists has been crucial in the efforts of the Cabal to get rid of Trump andcover up the crimes of the Biden crime family in particular and the left in general. Along those lines, it’s terrible for Putin to censor Russian media, but no mention of how Zelensky banned opposition parties in Ukraine, etc. Or for that matter, how the Biden regime has treated the January 6th protesters

    Notably, he doesn’t discuss the nuclear weapons the pariah-state of Russia has and may not have any reason not to use, since the west has apparently decided regime change is the end goal here.

    I’m not impressed.

  46. From part II:

    Not all banks were cut off from SWIFT, because Germany and Italy rely heavily on Russian gas for their power generation.

    I love this. Russia is a pariah, unless you need something. Then it’s pariah-mode off, and Russia is fine to trade with.

    No wonder most countries aren’t going along with the western sanctions.

  47. Xennady…”The belief that west still has anything resembling a free press- someone please tell him about how the press that actually exists has been crucial in the efforts of the Cabal to get rid of Trump and cover up the crimes of the Biden crime family in particular and the left in general.”

    Well, there is a big difference between the suppression of information conducted by much US media on the one hand, and the actual arrest and imprisonment (or worse) of people who express dissenting opinions, as in Russia. It’s sort of like the phase change from hot water to steam.

    There are indeed a lot of things being done by the Biden administration and by various government agencies which move us closer to the totalitarianism level, but our situation is still very, very different.

  48. “and the actual arrest and imprisonment (or worse) of people who express dissenting opinions”
    Julian Assange would like to have the floor for a moment…
    As would Tamara Lich…

  49. Well, David, what about Saint Zelensky shutting down all opposition in “democratic” Ukraine, including elected parliamentarians — and forcing all media operations under the control of his “democratic” government?

    Maybe I should have spelled that “Democratic” rather than “democratic” — because it fits.

    I have to disagree that “our situation is still very, very different”. There are bloggers with knowledge of Russia & the Ukraine who have had to shut down because of the level of threats against them for not following the official “Democratic” narrative to the letter. The US that you grew up in has gone.

  51. Update:

    1. Mariupol.
    According to local reports, the enemy’s defenses on the left bank are in a state of disintegration into separate pockets of resistance. Also, there are fights very close to Azovstal.

    2. Ugledar-Marinka.
    In Maryinka, the troops reached the waste heap dominating the area in the morning and fought with the retreating opponents. To the south of Maryinka, heavy fighting continued for Novomikhailovka.

    3. Avdeevka-Dzerzhinsk.
    Fighting continued in the Novobakhmutovka area. The enemy front, after the defeat in the battles for Verkhnetoretskoye, caved in, but was never broken through. In Avdiivka – no change.

    4. Lisichansk-Severodonetsk-Popasnaya.
    Fighting continued in the south of Rubizhne and in Popasna itself.

    5. Izyum-Barvenkovo-Slavyansk.
    The Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, having crushed the Ukrainian barrier at Kamenka, are accumulating forces on the southern bank of the Donets for further actions either in the direction of Slavyansk or Barvenkovo. There is some progress along the Izyum-Slavyansk highway. At Barvenkovo, the Armed Forces of Ukraine reported on the “capture of Gusarovka”, although no one had taken it before – the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation did not declare that they had taken Gusarovka, the battles were going north of it, east of Barvenkovo.

    6. Kharkov.
    No significant changes. The parties exchanged artillery strikes, plus continued strikes on the Armed Forces of Ukraine in the Chuguev area.

    7. Chernihiv-Sumy.
    Chernihiv without significant changes. Sumy too. The Armed Forces of the Russian Federation took control of Slavutych, where today they hung the Russian flag and began to rotate personnel at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. The enemy, in turn, continued to press Trostyanets, claiming either fighting in the city or control of the city north of Akhtyrka.
    8.
    Kiev.
    Near Kiev, the situation has not changed dramatically. The troops blocking Kyiv from the west are trying to move south, the enemy counterattacks and blocks the advance in every possible way. To the east of Kyiv, fighting continued in various villages to the northeast and east of the city. Of course, there is no encirclement of Russian troops near Kiev.
    9.
    Nikolaev-Odessa.
    The situation has not changed fundamentally. The “offensive of the Armed Forces of Ukraine on Kherson” turned out to be the expected reincarnation of “Kim’s counteroffensive”. Positional battles continued on the border of the Kherson and Nikolaev regions.

    10. Zaporozhye.
    If the situation for the Armed Forces of Ukraine was stable on the Kamenskoye-Orekhov-Gulyaipole line, then to the east of Gulyaipole the situation developed more interestingly. The Armed Forces of Ukraine stated that they had recaptured Poltavka and Malinovka from the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, the capture of which the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation did not report. Moreover, Poltavka is generally located to the northeast of Gulyaipole, that is, the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation are hinting that the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation are trying to cover the group of the Armed Forces of Ukraine defending Gulyaipole. The Armed Forces of Ukraine also confirm that the RF Armed Forces control a number of villages east of Gulyaipol. The RF Armed Forces did not comment on this.

    As well some nasty stuff is starting to be revealed in the places the Nazis in Mariupol had held.

  55. Well, there is a big difference between the suppression of information conducted by much US media on the one hand, and the actual arrest and imprisonment (or worse) of people who express dissenting opinions, as in Russia.

    A fair point, today. But for how long?

    Any time the regime is threatened it discovers a new way to stomp on dissent.

    Right now, the government is going after Project Veritas using secret warrants and has been illegally spying on them. If that isn’t an attempt to stop dissent, nothing is. They’ve also arranged to get journalists fired for covering problems with the official covid narrative, as well as canceling the medical licenses of doctors for using alternative treatments. The various social media companies are famous for canceling dissenters, lately after the explicit request of the regime. The FBI has even come up with list of descriptors of badspeech, presumably so the usual suspects will know what to ban.

    There isn’t an explicit gulag yet, except for the January 6th protesters, but I figure it’s only matter of time. If I sound crazy, remember how shocking it was when Castreau decided to cancel the protesters in Canada.

    This is an iterative process. At some point, the dissent against the regime will get serious enough that the only way it can retain power is violence. Then you’ll get the Gulag, along with the mass graves all communist regimes produce.

    As usual, I hope I’m wrong.

  56. So far we have a dead, tortured female, with a swastika painted on her stomach, from where some Nazis had their little base.. I do not doubt there will be much worse to come.

  57. “I didn’t notice any mention of the incipient end of reserve status of the US dollar. ”
    First, they’ll have to come up with a plausible alternative. There aren’t a lot of candidates. The Euro is already probably on par with the Dollar. First, it has to be large enough that even very large transactions wont cause distortion and most especially, purchasing power. The host country have to have a lot of stuff you want to buy. We’ll se how the Saudi’s experiment with RMB goes. The problem for them is that China doesn’t sell that much that they need, they don’t seem that taken with cheap knock offs, especially weapons. It’s probably more of a political statement anyway. They can’t be very enthusiastic about Biden’s selling them out to the Iranians. RMB is really a very small currency outside of China and the CCP has a poor record when it comes to manipulation. Not that we and the Euros wouldn’t like to, those markets are too big to move that quickly.

  58. “First, they’ll have to come up with a plausible alternative.”
    Why? If the goal is to take the US down a peg, “not the dollar” is all “they” need. The idiots in charge of the west the past few decades are too stupid to realize not everyone wants to be in their club anymore, and their actions towards Russia are just reinforcing that for an awful lot of people. (Not that those actions aren’t reasonable, in the context of the club, they’re just not going to have the effect of wanting most countries to be in the club…)

  59. MCS: “First, they’ll have to come up with a plausible alternative [to the US Dollar]. There aren’t a lot of candidates.”

    Who outside the US needs the US Dollar? All trade is ultimately barter. The big alternative to the US Dollar is counter-trade, such as we are seeing with Saudi and China — Saudi oil for Chinese manufactured goods.

    The other use of a Reserve Currency is as an international Store of Value. But Biden* killed that dead when he sanctioned (stole) Russia’s financial reserves in the US. There is no coming back from that. Everyone around the world now knows that only a foolish country would hold its financial reserves anywhere a US Administration can steal them.

    This leaves the US with a problem, as people like Spengler have been pointing out. The US practice over the last decade or more has been to borrow money from foreigners to pay for imports from foreigners. Not sustainable! Especially since foreigners now recognize that any money they loan to the US is not reserves, it is hostages.

  65. ” If the goal is to take the US down a peg, “not the dollar” is all “they” need.”
    You miss the point of a “reserve currency”. It is nothing more than a convenience and a facilitator of international commerce. This becomes clear when you consider someone wishing to import or export from smaller countries. As it stands, both parties can conduct their transaction in Dollars or Euros fairly confident that the purchaser can buy the necessary currency at a minimal cost and the seller can convert them to his local currency at a minimal cost.

    The seller is perfectly within his rights to demand payment in his local currency, gold, or platinum pressed lanthanum. In doing so, he materially increases the cost to the buyer. His preferred currency may be nonconvertible, the situation with Chinese Yuan, and thus not available out of the country. It may a very thin currency with little in circulation internationally, therefore expensive. Gold incurs very high transaction costs since it must be physically transported and assayed. The same is true for barter but even more extreme.

    Then there are all the Dollars circulating outside of the U.S.

    I’m sure there’s a long list of parties that would like to see the Dollar’s reign end, all they will have to do is come up with something that works better. There’s a lot of inertia in the system.

  66. “You miss the point of a “reserve currency””
    I’m sick of all the condescending attacks around here. I’m not blameless I suppose but I can’t bear it anymore. I’ll take a break and say it’s for lent. Pray unceasingly and prepare.

  68. Sgt Mon: “The one thing which has surprised me the most is that none of the usual vocal lovie, candlelit-vigil, no-nukes, give-peace-a-chance crowd are out there. … Which makes me wonder about how much of all that over the last forty years and longer was bought and paid for partisan activism.”

    Probably 98.6%, Sarge.

    Living through those years, a lot of us assumed that the “Ban The Bomb” crowd and their fellow travelers were empty-headed followers of fashion being manipulated by Russian/USSR paymasters. But if the Russians had that kind of power, then surely this would be the time to turn the “peace” protests up to 11 — Have peaceniks invading the US Capitol while the media applauds? But those fiendish Russians have obviously not been able to accomplish that. Instead we get one third of the US population apparently willing to sacrifice themselves in Biden’s coming nuclear war over the Ukraine.

    The implication is that — all along — the enemy was inside the gate, occupying the commanding heights of the Democrat Party and a whole lot more. How do we defeat an Internal Enemy which has its hands glued to the levers of power and “counts” the votes in elections?

  69. I’m not saying it can’t happen or even that it won’t. It’s happened several times in my lifetime. When was the last time you were offered securities denominated in Swiss Francs? I am saying that it won’t happen this week or even this year or suddenly. What it will take is a critical mass of transactions to find some other mechanism to clear. I’m not smart enough to see what that might be but I doubt there is enough trust in the Chinese government for it to be RMB.

    The Saudis can probably manage the conversion costs and risks. All the other businesses that depend on foreign business would find that an expense they would either have to eat or cover by increasing prices. Very many of these would be in China. It’s a free market, all they have to do is come up with something that works.

    It’s been suggested that the wide dissemination of information and computers would make it possible to do instant, frictionless currency conversion on the fly. All you need to explain why that hasn’t happened is to start counting all the countries with wild differences between official and street rates.

  71. “But if the Russians had that kind of power, then surely this would be the time to turn the “peace” protests up to 11 ”” Have peaceniks invading the US Capitol while the media applauds?”

    Well, today’s Russian state is not Communist; that may have something today with it.

  72. The seller is perfectly within his rights to demand payment in his local currency, gold, or platinum pressed lanthanum.

    Tell that to the G7, who have decided it is “unacceptable” for Russia to demand payment for gas in rubles.

    Anyway, necessity is the mother of invention. It may well be hard to replace the US dollar as reserve currency but surely not impossible. I think recent events have made it clear that the globalist cabal ruling the western world isn’t any more trustworthy than the CCP.

    I’m sure the several billion people not going along with the western sanctions will be able to figure something out.

  73. I wouldn’t expect to see the usual “anti-war” crowd emerge unless and until the West actually does something gamechanging in Ukraine, like supply large modern air defences or apply sanctions that actually do something. Then they’ll be activated for sure.

    Most of the anti-war sentiment is coming from a vociferous part of the online right at the moment, mixed up with some actual Russophile activists. I don’t think it’s going to catch on, judging by the dropoff in comment rates at many sites.

  74. Key fact about the Peaceniks- they only appear when they can do damage to the actual United States and/or advance the agenda of the Deep State.

    Right now Deep State is perfectly willing to risk nuclear war to remove Putin, so no peaceniks. Whether or not the American people are so interested is not up for discussion.

    Circa 2003, after a robust and lengthy discussion about the Iraq War, the public supported the invasion. But it just wouldn’t do for America to rack up a win. Hence, peaceniks appeared to give hope to the people fighting against us and give the demonrats cover when they got the chance to throw the victory away.

    A fine example of this is Rachel Maddow. All during the Iraq War she was shrieking it was illegal, end it now, eleventy!!!! Later, the Deep State decided the Assad regime needed to go and illegally sent troops into that country. Trump wanted to remove them.

    Suddenly, Maddow was back to shrieking- but this time removing an illegal occupation force was the worst thing ever, war now, eleventy!!!!

    These aren’t anti-war, or anything similar. They’re just a paid mob that shows up and dances on command, to whatever tune is played for them.

  75. I think recent events have made it clear that the globalist cabal ruling the western world isn’t any more trustworthy than the CCP.

    Not really, the Chinese Communist Party is financially corrupt as a default status whereas the Western powers have used economic sanctions in response to aggressive war. As evidenced by the markets, people with money recognise the difference.

  76. yes, you hear the notes, and you know its the gong show, the funeral dirge for effendi kashoggi, paid for by his handler qatar, as a proxy against prince salman, who is interfering against the family business, zakat (the funding of jihad) doha hid ksm in their sewer department, for two years, they provided a safehouse for al Zarquawi, the boss of head choppers and suicide bombes, not so long ago, the UAE was funding CAIR many of the antiwar films, that bombed, partially as protection money,

  77. MCS: “I am saying that it [end of US Dollar as a reserve currency] won’t happen this week or even this year or suddenly.”

    You are correct that everything takes time. However, the beginning of the end of the US Dollar as a reserve currency is already in the rear-view mirror. When the Biden* Bozos seized (stole?) Russia’s reserve assets in the US, every other country in the world sat up and took notice.

    Money functions as a means of exchange and as a store of value. Saudi sends China oil in exchange for some currency — it has been US Dollars, but they could as easily use any other currency; then Saudi sends that currency back to China to pay for manufactured goods (manufactured goods which incidentally they could not buy from the US, because the smart guys in the DC Swamp have offshored the US factories to China).

    The important part of a “reserve currency” is the store of value. Other countries lend money to the US in various forms, (previously) secure in the knowledge that the money will be there when they need it — just like we put our money into bank savings accounts. If you found out that your bank had just seized your neighbor’s saving account, what would you do, MCS?

    As you say, MCS, the consequences of Biden*’s stupidity will take time to develop, but there is no doubt that every country in the world is now looking at how to tip-toe out the door with the savings they previously held in US Dollars. And then the de-industrialized US will face the problem of how to pay for all the essential imports we no longer make for ourselves when the producers no longer want to lend those dollars back to the US. A hard rain is going to fall.

  78. so say we don’t go nuclear, this terrain is not tenable for major land campaigns, as we discover when we revisit both the World War one and two campaign maps in the region,

  79. Most of the anti-war sentiment is coming from a vociferous part of the online right at the moment, mixed up with some actual Russophile activists. I don’t think it’s going to catch on, judging by the dropoff in comment rates at many sites.

    Interesting to see this as it is the line being pushed by the left as the agenda of the left includes extending the war until November to hide the failures of the present regime. I don’t see evidence that it is working but failure has never bothered the Alinsky left. They are sure some day they will win.

  80. Interesting to see this as it is the line being pushed by the left . . .

    Yes, I would expect the left to exploit it for all it’s worth, particularly in the US with the midterms coming up. So far it appears to be limited to the “conspiracy” subset of the right, with the mainstream being onside with seeing Putin defeated.

    As things stand the Democrats seem poised to be badly thrashed in November. The Republicans have seven months to throw it all away.

  81. So the evidence of war crimes in Mariupol is starting to emerge, but really you are far more interested in trivia.

    Anyway this war has kneecapped the global economy rater well, so I suspect part of the timing, had this in mind. Good for my gold and silver but bad for my son’s mortgage.

  82. Against all evidence, people are still talking as though there were a knife’s edge of effective difference between the establishment Republicans and the establishment Democrats. There isn’t any, so why are people still talking as though the likely replacement of Democrat establishment types in DC with their Republican peers will make some sort of difference to the outcome…?

    About the only way we’re going to see real reform in DC is if the Russians nuke the fscking place for us, while Congress is in joint session and most of the Executive and Judicial branches are right there with them.

    They won’t, of course, knowing that by doing so they’d be taking out their most effective allies. Kinda the way the leadership in WWII decided that assassinating Hitler would actually be counter-productive, in that they might get someone with some sense in replacement of him…

  83. they are going after the candidates that really mean anything like walker in georgia and vance, in ahia, (they way they spell it over there)
    yes the side that practices zachista, and runs filtration points, is surprised when war is as brutal as it can be,

  84. So the evidence of war crimes in Mariupol is starting to emerge . . .

    Russian war crimes in Mariupol have been evident for weeks. No doubt the Azov neo-Nazis have done some nasty things for the comfortably contrary fetishists to get moist in the gusset over, but small scale compared to the whole ghastly catastrophe inflicted by the brutal and stupid Russians.

  85. I could cite the case of Colonel Budanov, who raped a chechen woman, and was excused by the theatre commander General Shamanov, was acquitted at trial, eventually though they found other ways of making him accountable,

  86. Good for my gold and silver . . .

    Fortunately, gold and silver have been high for some time now so no great profit for you. If the Russians are forced to sell their $140billion worth, the price might come down.

  87. or we could go with that dutch airliner shot over ukrainian airspace by one of the errrant BUKs missile launchers, 150 civilians dead,

  88. “Fortunately, gold and silver have been high for some time now so no great profit for you.”

    I am up almost $700 an ounce in gold, and more in silver, and the party is just getting started. I have been waiting for a long time, as there has been so much sheer fraud perpetrated by the US fed. That is not working anymore and I anticipate some serious rises coming soon.

  89. “or we could go with that dutch airliner shot over ukrainian airspace by one of the errrant BUKs missile launchers, 150 civilians dead,”

    Shot down by the Ukrainians`.

  91. What happened to the Russian Air Force? They claimed to have one and I’ve seen pictures. It’s as if they got their fingers burned and decided that it wasn’t worth risking any more of their planes. They’ve had a whole month, you’d think they could have made some sort of showing even if the first few days didn’t go well.

  92. Potemkin Village, 21st Century version.

    I’m sure everything looked good, under the fly-bys, but… Reality has a way of asserting itself, and the reality is, Russia is barely a third-world country with delusions of grandeur. Putin is going to have his nose rubbed in that fact, now that his forces in Ukraine have, as we say in the trade, culminated. Now that they’re stalled, and have been in place for a week or two without serious resupply, I would look for carefully managed counter-attacks that are going to nibble those forces to death.

    Recovery of the Donbas ain’t out of the question, if the Ukrainians have staying power–Which I suspect they well might.

    Ran across this, the other day–A Ukrainian recruiting ad from around 2018. Very interesting, in terms of exhibiting mindset and culture:

    https://vimeo.com/208671491

    Compare/contrast that with our recruiting BS, where we bribe Joe and Jane Sixpack to show up for duty with all kinds of goodies. Which approach do you think gets you better soldiers…?

  93. “What happened to the Russian Air Force?”

    They claim total air superiority on day 2. So it did whatever it wanted. Certainly Stinger and other man portable stuff still works.

  94. “Recovery of the Donbas ain’t out of the question, if the Ukrainians have staying power–Which I suspect they well might.”

    It is. The entire force is pocketed and will be destroyed.

  95. They claim total air superiority on day 2.

    “We have stopped them in the rear and we are pounding them!”

    Russia claims all sorts of things which are lying bollocks (just exercises, just peacekeeping, denazification). It must make it difficult for their gurning fanboys to keep up. Russia claimed to be shooting down aircraft in week three, but now say air supremacy was acquired on day two whereupon the Ukrainian airforce “actually ceased to exist”. They can’t even lie well.

  96. they can’t even make the rubble bounce anymore, I told you some of the top ten accomplishments

  97. – MCS
    What happened to the Russian Air Force?

    It’s still flying missions (and still getting shot down – one today, pilot captured). Mostly flying at night. Their tempo of operations has been increasing.

  98. – Kirk
    Putin is going to have his nose rubbed in that fact, now that his forces in Ukraine have, as we say in the trade, culminated.

    It’s fair to laugh at them, but there’s a good chance this ain’t over. There is still a lot of force left outside theatre, and it is (on paper . . .) newer and better. The Russians are known for sending low grade forces at a target first, and following up with more power once the defenders are depleted.

    And the Rasputitsa will end eventually.

  99. “Putin is going to have his nose rubbed in that fact, now that his forces in Ukraine have, as we say in the trade, culminated.”

    You lot are going to have your collective noses rubbed in with facts. ;) Your speculations have been so far from the mark its amusing.

    Next the destruction of a big part of the Ukrainian army on the eastern front. Will that convince you? So then deals might be made, but Zelensky is a long way from any position Russia will accept.

    The sheer stupidity of Trent’s the Russians are bogged down and have no smarts at all, is somewhat mind boggling. They are there to keep a big part of the Ukrainian forces tied up. They left em’ there as bait, and since no one took it, moved on to Kyviv to play with the forces there. All they have to do is keep em’ there.

  101. Your speculations have been so far from the mark its amusing.

    At least others are speculating. You’re just parroting the latest Russian bullshit.

  103. “You’re just parroting the latest Russian bullshit.”

    Its accurate. The only accurate stuff posted here.

    David, I will try harder to contain my anger. But as you well know, I’m the one who is insulted constantly.

  104. David Foster: “stop with the insulting of contributors and other commentators.”

    I totally endorse that guideline. This should be a place for information, discussion, and polite exchange of differing assessments.

    However, the guideline must be enforced equitably. As you know, David, there have been some totally out-of-line personal attacks which you have chosen to let slide. Smacking PenGun’s hand while you ignore much worse breeches by other commentators is a very poor look for you.

    Note that I am not defending anything PenGun says. I am defending the concept of uniformity of treatment.

  106. ” The Russians are known for sending low grade forces at a target first, and following up with more power once the defenders are depleted.”

    This ain’t 1943, and it ain’t even 1968. I do not see where the Russians are going to magically produce these troops from, and if they do strip their other defensive commitments of forces, what then…?

    I think most of you are still thinking that Russia has the numbers it has classically expended to win wars. That train left the station about forty years ago, with the demographic collapse. A drafted Soviet conscript came from a family with an average of seven kids; in the 1960s, that conscript had an average of two or three siblings. Today, his parents are lucky if he’s not an only child.

    That’s a hard stop, right there: How long do you think a regime which casually expends the lives of its soldiers the way Russia is used to doing will last, in the face of that? A huge part of why the Soviet Union collapsed was what happened to them in Afghanistan: Do you think that somehow, with even worse demographics and even worse casualties in shorter amounts of time, that things will be any different?

    The “Russia Stronk” cheerleaders are going to be in for a bit of a shock over the next few weeks. Prepare to comfort them, as they wail and give vent to the lamentations of their womanly feelings for “strong man” Putin. Whatever happens, those 15,000 young men ain’t going home, and I suspect that they’re the tip of the statistical iceberg. The Russians start leaking the figures they have…? That means that things are worse, a lot worse than they’re saying. I would not be surprised to find that the actual KIA numbers at this point are approaching 20,000, with God alone knows how many wounded, POW, and MIA.

    Time was, you could do as Napoleon said and count on “…one night in Paris making up for all the losses…”. That tain’t quite so, today. Once the number of dead come home to the Russian public, I doubt they’re going to be quite as sanguine or forgiving of the regime for getting their one son killed for no good reason in the mud of Ukraine.

    I suppose they could still pull out all the stops and then “win”, but what will they have won? A multi-decadal low-level war that will bleed them dry? I really don’t think the Ukrainians are going to roll over and acquiesce to Russian domination again, especially after all this. Could happen, I suppose–With enough death squads and something on the level of the Holodomor Mk. II. Which won’t do much to help Russia’s image in the world, and will likely result in even worse sanctions and isolation than they’re getting now.

    The thing I don’t think the Russians quite grasp is that everything they’re doing is driving the Ukrainians deeper and deeper into separatism. This isn’t how you persuade people to live in peace with you, and it isn’t how you build “fraternal relations”. The point that everyone seems to miss in all this is that the popularity of “neo-nazi” ideology is a symptom of just how much they hate the memory of Soviet Communism and Russia. It’s a reaction, a symptom, just like it was back in WWII. Nobody else was fighting the Communists, so… The opposition quite predictably fell into the national socialist camp. Basic human nature, unfortunate as it is. I imagine that if the Holodomor had been perpetuated by some Christian sect, then the Ukrainians would have been ripe for going over to the side of hypothetical Satanist invaders, and would still look favorably on Satanism to this day. That’s just the way it goes… You want to blame someone for it, go back and have a chat with Stalin and his commissars who enforced the measures resulting in the Holodomor.

    I’m telling you this much… The Holodomor rings deeper and more viscerally for many Ukrainians than the Holocaust does for lot of Jews. The Holocaust was strangers killing strangers; in the Holodomor, the starvation enforced by the Communists made people kill their own children for something to eat. That’s a qualitatively different sort of thing, altogether–And, it won’t be forgotten for generations, either. It’s also why anti-Semitism is so strong in Ukraine, because the outward face of the Holodomor was, sadly, mostly urban Jewish in the form of the men enforcing it. At least, that’s how it got remembered… And, memory has way more force than fact.

  107. yes the point of the operation is lost on me, chechnya was one of their wayward colonies, the obshina was in competition with the bratvas from st, Petersburg and Moscow, then Islamism became the excuse, although they drove a sizable chunk of indifferent Chechens into the Wahhabi camp, one would have thought he could just close up like after a dozen days in Georgia, but that was about 14,000 casualties ago,

  108. Interesting read… Almost prescient, as a matter of fact:

    https://russiandefpolicy.com/2022/02/07/mass-fire-strike-on-ukraine/

    I went out looking for some decent numbers on conscript intakes to be looking for in the next few weeks, but it’s as opaque as usual with Russian or Soviet data. My guess is we’ll have to guess at how it’s proceeding by watching for secondary signs in the actions and pronouncements of Russian governmental figures. I rather doubt that there’s going to be a deep upswelling of patriotism among the youth, but we’ll see.

  109. yet it seems to have been scrippled on a napkin, the battle plan, having so many points of ingress into the country, proved problematic, yes german forces went north toward Moscow and south toward the Caucasus in 41, (not an example you want to follow) the terrain has been historically unpropitious to successful operations at this time, even with sizable military complement,

  110. Secondary thoughts, here… As with a lot of these things, the real danger isn’t so much when these guys are on top of things and doing well, the risks and dangers increase exponentially with their collapse. In other words, don’t worry about whether or not Russia is going to invade Germany, worry about what happens when Russia implodes again. That’s when creatures like Putin tend to lash out irrationally, same as with Hitler’s “Burn Germany to the ground…” orders at the end of WWII. Hopefully, there’s a Speer or two handy, when the time comes.

  112. It’s interesting to compare/contrast the operations between the “pacification” of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and Ukraine 2022:

    Czechoslovakia: 127,901 km2, population around 15 million in 1968. Soviet Union commits 250,000 troops, 20-odd divisions, and at least 2000 tanks. Peak strength of Warsaw Pact forces estimated to be around 500,000 men.

    Ukraine: 603,628 km2, population around 41-48 million, depending on who’s counting. Russia commits 150,000 troops.

    Do I need to point out the essential insanity, here?

  113. yes, they were doing this on the cheap, and it shows

    https://twitter.com/JominiW/status/1508277660954279941?cxt=HHwWioCyvdOive4pAAAA

    even if you focused all your forces on kiev, it would be problematic, I had always heard of Prague,but I didn’t know the dimension of what was required to accomplish it, until recently I didn’t know that Suvorov (the man who informed us about Spetznaz, had been a paratrooper there first) even then they put Dubcek out to pasture, but in 20 years you had Havel,

  114. I certainly hope you are correct about Russia’s prospects, Kirk, but I’m going to remain cautious. Russia’s ground forces were approx 400,000 (on paper . . .) and I’ve read western intelligence spokesbodies saying that Russia still has some formidible battle groups (on paper . . .) available.

    If Russia intends to destroy Ukrainian forces in the east it has to get behind them (they are not remotely surrounded currently). I won’t be surprised if there’s a renewed assault on Kharkiv (aiming for Dnipro). If you look at Russian infrastructure across the border they pretty much have to come from Belgorod, and that means Kharkiv. They may try for Dnipro from the south but so far the area is proving a slog for them.

  115. The Russians tried to break out south from their positions west of Kyiv today. The ukrainians claim to have repelled them but let’s see the map in a couple of days to see if there’s been any advance.

  116. “The Russians tried to break out south from their positions west of Kyiv today.”

    The only job the Russian forces have there, is to hold the forces arrayed against them in position. Well to keep them from interfering with the destruction of the forces arrayed against the Donbass. So they can do what they want as long as no Ukrainians leave. They are trolling them about the place. I have watched several towns taken and relinquished and I’d guess the main point is to take as few casualties as possible while fulfilling their mission.

    You guys need to play some war games or something. ;)

  117. “David, PenGun has been an obnoxious commenter here for years.”

    Certainly, but I am nearly always polite. What I say upsets you quite a bit, sometimes I am surprised how much. But I should not call people stupid etc, as that is descending to your level. I do apologize.

  118. It’s remarkable how similar the propaganda of today’s Russophobes is to their analogs prior to and during the Crimean War. Some of it is virtually identical. See, for example, issues of “The Edinburgh Review,” and “Blackwoods Magazine” published in the late 1840’s and early 1850’s. You can find them at Google Books or archive.org.

    I note in passing that Crimea was one of the last outposts of the Golden Horde, and much of the north coast of the Black Sea, including Odessa, was once included in the territory of the Ottoman Empire. These territories were conquered by Russian troops at a very high price in blood. None of this seems to matter today. I doubt that many Americans have even heard of the Crimean War.

  119. I don’t know if it’s “Russophobic” to recognize reality, which is that Russia is run by thugs.

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10660555/Roman-Abramovich-suffered-suspected-POISONING-Ukraine-peace-negotiators.html

    Yeah, that’s the Daily Mail, but there’s also the Wall Street Journal, hardly a tabloid source:

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/roman-abramovich-and-ukrainian-peace-negotiators-suffer-symptoms-of-suspected-poisoning-11648480493

    Let’s be honest, here–Russia has, over the centuries, earned every bit of the oppobrium they’ve gotten from all concerned. They’re universally loathed by their neighbors, and every one of their “acquisitions” has sought to get out from under their “caring embrace” the minute they could. Started with Poland and Finland, back after WWI, and it’s only continuing.

    The Russian insecurity is a self-fulfilling prophecy; they behave as though everyone is their enemies, and so… Everyone is. Putin could easily have made other choices, choices that would have been better for the Russian people, but he sought personal aggrandizement and enrichment for himself and his cronies. Who is paying the price for all those glittering palaces and yachts, pray tell? How much wealth has been siphoned off to buy the oligarchy their toys and mansions?

    End of the day, I rather suspect that someone like Tooze is going to go back and do a forensic audit on the Russian economy over the last thirty years, and what they’re going to find is that Ukraine was, like Poland for Hitler, an economic necessity as both another source of loot and a distraction for the populace.

    I don’t think it’s “Russophobia” any more than it’s “Islamophobia” to recognize a clear and present danger with either party. You don’t have Methodists blowing themselves up in crowded squares any more than you have Sweden invading Finland to regain the Aaland Islands or going after Norway to re-assert “Greater Sweden”. Russia could have peace and prosperity, but it has chosen other things, like mass murder and violation of international borders. Oh, and let’s not forget, killing anyone who displeases their “maximum leader”. The actual record for suspicious deaths under Putin makes the suppositions about the Clintons look tame. Polonium tea, anyone…?

  120. Update:

    1. Mariupol.
    The cleanup continues. Just a few blocks away – quite a serious advance. Over the Sea of ”‹”‹Azov, a Mi-8 helicopter of the Armed Forces of Ukraine was shot down, which, apparently, was trying to pick someone up from Mariupol before the death of the encircled group.
    Obviously, there will be no deblockade of Mariupol. The only question is whether Azovstal will be cleaned up the same way as the city, or the plant will be sacrificed in order to minimize their own losses. cleanup.

    2.Ugledar direction.
    Fighting in the area of ”‹”‹Glorious and Novomikhailovka. The grouping in this direction has intensified in recent days, so within 1-2 days we can expect further advancement to the Maryinka-Kurakhovo highway.

    3. Marinka.
    Fights in the slag heap area. The advance is still quite slow, however, the enemy is gradually retreating, having already lost part of the fortified area.

    4. Avdiivka.
    Avdiivka itself is without major changes. Fighting near Novobakhmutovka and Novoselovka on the outskirts of New York.

    5.LNR.
    Severodonetsk – no major changes. Lisichansk – similarly.
    In the southern regions of Rubizhne, there are battles with enemy DRGs. The city itself suffers from constant shelling.
    There is some progress in the Popasna area and in the city itself, but, of course, it is too early to talk about control over it.

    6. Raisin.
    The accumulation of forces on the southern bank of the Donets continues and pressure on the positions of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in the direction of Slavyansk is increasing. Serious fighting is also underway northeast of Barvenkovo.

    7. Kharkov.
    No significant changes. Fighting north and east of the city. The bulk of the fighting takes place on the outskirts of Kharkov. He doesn’t fly into the city very often. Attacks are being made on the Chuguev grouping of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.

    8. Chernihiv-Sumy.
    The pressure on Chernigov is growing, the enemy has suffered serious losses in recent days and has completely pulled back into the city. In Slavutych, the Russian administration has not yet been established; the city, like Energodar earlier, has so far only been provided with checkpoints at the entrance. Amounts unchanged. Fighting continues north of Akhtyrka near the town of Trostyanets.

    9. Kiev.
    Bucha-Vorzel-Gostomel without changes. The Armed Forces of Ukraine say that the RF Armed Forces continue to try to move south towards Vasilkov. Irpin is partly controlled by the RF Armed Forces, partly by the Armed Forces of Ukraine. No one controls part of the city. He himself suffered greatly during the fighting.

    10.Nikolaev.
    The “attack on Kherson” was expressed in the indiscriminate shelling of Chernobaevka from the MLRS and an attempt to attack with a mechanized group supported by infantry in the direction of Kherson. In the steppe, the group began to be covered with artillery, and it rolled back to Nikolaev with losses.
    In addition, the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation also threw well on the outskirts of Nikolaev, destroying several guns and MLRS, where the Armed Forces of Ukraine also had losses, after which they began to urgently collect blood in Nikolaev. The exact number of casualties in this “offensive” is unknown. Perhaps blogger Kim will tell us about this after he finishes eating barbecue at the resort.

  121. I don’t think I could win this war for Ukraine, but I could make it hell of a lot harder.

    Let Russia have Kyiv and move as much as you can east to reinforce the forces facing the Donbass. Leave a shell In the Odessa region and do the same thing, but make sure that shell is capable of killing ships. I’m sure your local CIA supply guy could help with this.

    Reinforce the main army and fight. The Nazis are good for shock troops, they believe stuff and you could make it far more difficult for a force that would prefer not to kill civilians, to really defeat you without serious losses. Much better bargaining position.

    Won’t happen. ;) Where is that scotch?

  122. Well we know how the crimean war turned out, the country has been looted like a whole fleet of galleons the socalled liberals like chubais created the oligarchs
    The journal was where glen simpson made the connections that became fusion gps most of their output re russia has been trash for a half dozen years

  123. When i was younger i thought maybe one day The land of my parents would be liberated from the yoke it had suffered for then 30 some years sadly really has intervened since then, the same bloc committee chairs and gov ministers would become oligarchs of a kind

  124. When the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact collapsed peacefully, I considered it a miracle and still do. As unpleasant as the present situation in Ukraine is, it’s a faint echo of what it might have been before Russia spent 30 years rotting away. However this ends up, the certainty is that Russia won’t be in any shape to go further. All the countries of Eastern Europe will be free to follow their bumpy destinies without having Russa to worry about.

  125. Youre presuming this doesnt drag into a wider war, already this outing is disastrous for the lives of tens of millions because things like food and fuel , luxuries you know

  126. Just goes to show the insanity of relying on unstable sources for key things like fertilizer and energy. It’s not like we didn’t know about Putin’s rather grandiose self-image; note all of the dead people who made the mistake of criticizing him or crossing him.

    Anyone willing to go to the length of poisoning a critic by using Polonium in a public venue…? That’s a sign, folks. Russia should have been ostracized back then, just like in 2014. Now that the issue has grown too big to ignore, we’re finally paying attention to it.

    Sane regimes don’t do that kind of crap. Novichok? Polonium? On another nation’s territory? What more of a sign do you need?

  127. A bullet would have been neater, in putins view litivinenko was a traitor sidling up.with the chechens we treat the likes of agee ames hanson all too nicely for spilling our secrets

  128. The quality of their wet work specialist has suffered in 12 years, this time they didnt even hit the target but everybody else

  129. Loose cannon, period.

    The thing that people need to get their heads around is that you cannot have these two-bit dipshits like Putin or Bill Gates out there playing with things like nerve agent and bio-warfare. As we can clearly see with COVID, the odds that something is going to “inadvertently” leak out or be deliberately released are simply too damn high.

    I think there needs to be an international tribunal held for all these assholes, especially these jackasses running “gain of function” testing in these “deniable” off-shore locations. If you’re not willing to live next door to the labs yourself, bubba, maybe you ought not be doing the research in the first place, hummm?

    I still find it highly suspicious that Gates was discussing coronavirus issues and potential pandemics in a TED talk back in 2017. That’s just a little too damn convenient, eh?

  130. As an aside…? I think we can see the reason why we don’t see signs of so-called “intelligent life” out there in the universe. My money is on them having reached the same point we’re at, and then they managed to kill themselves off before they ever got outside their own solar systems. It’s pretty likely that’s what we’re going to be doing here, in short order.

    Ball-park guess? Probably only about one-in-a-million intelligent species manages to avoid killing itself off at about the same point we’re at. It would explain a hell of a lot.

  131. Violence in russia makes things worse alexander 2nd the good czar was killed and there was 36years of darkness, the lenin then stalin

  132. The last century began witb the killing fields of flanders and verdun and then expanded 1,000 fold 10,000 we dont want to revisit that sad history

  134. My point was that the Russians can’t make this a wider war, they simply lack the means. They don’t have more troops, period. They have committed all the armor that would move beyond the park. They apparently can’t put more than four planes in the air at the same time. They barely have the ability to make part of Ukraine hell. Short of some sort of naked nuclear blackmail, they can’t move a mile further. What’s stopping that is the same as what’s stopped it for the last 70 years. While I wouldn’t go out of my way to test it, I believe most of the Russian deterrent is nothing but a naked bluff by now.

    We don’t have the situation where Germany is looking to grab a piece of Poland or Austria wanting to reunite with Hungary while all of this is going on. To the contrary, all of the surrounding countries are pledged to present a united and, from present example, an over whelming front.

  137. yes mariupol is far from any resupply lines, geography works against them, maybe these negotiations work like with sweden in the kosovo war, otherwise it gets very bloody very quickly,

  138. Far from advancing south of the salient, the Russians have lost ground.

    Much more interestingly, the Russians have stated that they will “decrease military activity” at Kyiv and Chernihiv. The common denominator between those two fronts is they operate through Belarus. I suspect that Lukashenko, realising the Russians are a bust, is now gently telling them it’s time to start packing. He’s got fences to mend with his southern neighbour.

  139. MCS: “My point was that the Russians can’t make this a wider war”

    So, you have information which proves Russia has no Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles?

    And we have Bidn* and his Bozos doing everything they can to make this a wider war.

    Polls say (for whatever it is worth) that 8 out of 10 Americans are concerned about the situation in the Ukraine spinning into nuclear war. Are they all wrong?

  140. terrain as trent explains is different, when the Russians advanced with heavy armor in Chechnya they did it in the deep winter, they did some fighting in the mountains, like argun, which didn’t go terribly well, either, the path was clearer from the east, in 2014

  141. The name of the game is can they hold their gains

    Other than a ceasefire, I don’t think Zelensky can accept an initial settlement that involves less than Russia withdrawing to Feb23 positions. The mainstream nationalists, let alone the neo-Nazis, won’t allow it.

  142. the Russians I mean, when they took grozny in 94, the path from sundza which was the main army base, was about 50 miles, in better weather, they approached on four axis, it was still a blood bath,

  143. “Polls say (for whatever it is worth) that 8 out of 10 Americans are concerned about the situation in the Ukraine spinning into nuclear war. Are they all wrong?”

    WTF does this matter? If you listen to Colgate, 9 out of 10 dentists prefer Crest. Does that actually mean anything?

    Citing this supposed statistic is meaningless, especially when you consider that probably 9,999 out of a 1000 Americans don’t know anything at all about warfare in general, let alone nuclear warfare. I can be “concerned” about the ship I’m on sinking, but unless I’m an actual mariner with experience of the sea, does that mean my opinion has any value or validity, in terms of risk to the ship?

    Useless stat, cited purely for emotional appeal. Survey ten thousand idiots on a subject they know nothing about, and what do you have? A waste of time, paper, and energy.

  145. “The mainstream nationalists, let alone the neo-Nazis, won’t allow it.”

    Give it a while and there will be far less Nazis. ;) That’s about when Russia will be willing to talk anyway.

  146. Here is an essay that I agree with and which explains a lot of how we got here.

    It didn’t have to be this way. I am reminded of a quote from Condoleezza Rice about the morning of 9/11. She knew that U.S. forces going to DEFCON-3 would trigger a similar escalation by Russia so she called President Putin and told him our military would be going on high alert. He told her that he knew and that he had ordered his forces to stand down. Then he asked if there was anything he could do to help. Rice recounted that she had a moment of reflection: “The Cold War really is over.” But the choices made in the aftermath of that day by people like her unleashed a destructive zeitgeist in Washington foreign policy that has led us to this point where the specter of nuclear war now hangs in the air as it did during the tensest moments of the Cold War.

  147. the pelopennessian war didn’t have to last 30 years, there were choices all along the way, cleon, alcibiades et al, I’m curious about Kennan his thesis was Soviet policy was the extension of czarist ambitions, he apprenticed at the Riga school which had no illusions about their intentions,

  148. That’s about when Russia will be willing to talk anyway.

    The Russians are already talking. And withdrawing.

  150. “The Russians are already talking. And withdrawing.”

    Yeah in Doha. ;) They have 60,000 pocketed in the eastern cauldron. They have done playing with the various holding actions, and those troops and the troops freed up in Mariupol, are going to the barby.

  151. “So, you have information which proves Russia has no Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles?”
    They have no more today and probably fewer than yesterday. Why haven’t they launched them on any given day in the last 70 years?

    Putin can get up and say; “Give us Poland or we launch our ICBM’s.” tomorrow or any other day. What would you do?

    What Putin can’t do is make a credible conventional threat. And it seems increasingly likely, his nuclear sword rattling is equally toothless.

  153. It’s not like ours is likely any better. Soviet nukes were always limited by the number of high-tech switches we’d sell them, and from what I heard related to me by knowledgeable people who worked the START inspections, a lot of their bombs were using overaged components that had been exposed to high radiation for way too long.

    The whole MAD thing was always based on a certain amount of fraud; odds are excellent that for most of the Cold War, most of the systems simply would not have worked as designed. Inertial guidance was a huge problem in a world where we didn’t have good gravity maps for the regions the missiles would overfly, and then there was the whole question of “will something stored in a silo and not maintained, then fired without full ground control… Actually work?”.

    When they test ICBMs, they take them out of a silo, truck them to Vandenburg AFB, essentially rebuild them, install specialized guidance/control equipment, then fire them north-to-south into the Pacific Test Range under full ground control, with telemetry monitoring everything the missiles do. Even so, they have a significant failure rate. Under war conditions? LOL… Come-as-you-are, baby… Those missiles get fired by a couple of tired guys who’re scared witless and who have zero control over the automated processes that they trigger, and the missiles get fired south-to-north over the North Pole, which implies a departure through the Van Allen belts and a re-entry through them. Which has never been done, and likely won’t be until the day some over-confident idiot decides to push the button.

    The reality is this: All those trillions of dollars/rubles lavished on ICBM systems? Odds are, mostly wasted–Between the questionable reliability of the basic systems, there’s the maintenance issue, and the question of whether the warheads will even function, especially on the Russian side. My guess is that the Strategic Rocket Force is even less capable than it was–When my informant was doing the START inspections, he uncovered so many instances of outright corruption and fraud that it wasn’t funny. The general attitude was, “We’ll only use these things at the end of the world, and if they don’t work because we cut corners and built dachas with the money…? Who’s going to know? What are they going to do to us?”.

    Since SAC went away in the US, I kinda suspect that the USAF has perhaps taken up some of that same attitude. Given the way they’ve been wont to lose live nukes since SAC shut down, my guess is that the standards have slipped.

    Overall, I think that if someone does decide to push the button, it’s going to be an occasion for more embarrassment than anything else. More than a few within the system have said they agree with me, when I’ve made mention of my suppositions. Gravity bombs and bombers are really about the only truly certain delivery systems, ‘cos you just don’t want to know the failure rate on SLBMs. At. All.

  154. “Gravity bombs and bombers are really about the only truly certain delivery systems”

    Well, that and hand carries across the open southern border. And let’s not forget those shipping container bombs people keep warning about.

    MCS: “Why haven’t they launched them on any given day in the last 70 years?”

    Prior to a few days ago, there never was a US President behaving like a dangerous fool and calling for regime change in Russia. That might give a reasonable person pause for thought. And if President Putin is as paranoid and incompetent as you apparently believe, is that not even more reason for concern about how he might react if he feels threatened?

    This is a serious situation, and fools in the West keep pumping up the conflict instead of trying to de-escalate it. Really stupid!

    But feel free to keep believing the war will stay in the Ukraine and we will all be home by Christmas.

  155. “But feel free to keep believing the war will stay in the Ukraine and we will all be home by Christmas.”

    I think that’s likely. The pocket about to be destroyed contains a lot of the Nazis that are upsetting Putin.

    Its become obvious that with the extensive holding of human shields, and the Russian’s disinclination to kill civilians, they are scaling back their goals in Ukraine. As they will be able to kill most of the Nazis pretty soon, that and a bunch of territory will probably satisfy Putin, for now.

  156. The reality is this: All those trillions of dollars/rubles lavished on ICBM systems? Odds are, mostly wasted–Between the questionable reliability of the basic systems, there’s the maintenance issue, and the question of whether the warheads will even function, especially on the Russian side.

    It’s an interesting comparison to the Grand Fleet at Scapa in WWI. It finally saw action at Jutland and it was a draw with some advantage to the Germans. It was too expensive to risk at any other time.

  157. The Ukrainians hit an ammo depot in Russia (yay) near Belgorod today. Looks like they might be concerned about Kharkiv too.

  158. I rather suspect that someone like Tooze is going to go back and do a forensic audit on the Russian economy over the last thirty years”¦

    I read that book. I don’t think it applies to post-Soviet Russia. I note Russia is or was at least solvent. Per my recollection of Tooze, Nazi Germany needed to conquer for the same reason a shark needs to keep swimming- neither could continue to exist if they stopped.

    That said, you’re going to need a bigger book to tell the tale of just how badly Russia has managed to screw up the last century or so. Perhaps someone like Bernard Lewis could write a book enttled Russia: What Went Wrong?

  159. “That said, you’re going to need a bigger book to tell the tale of just how badly Russia has managed to screw up the last century or so.

    Russia’s debt ratio is one of the lowest in the world at 19.48% of its GDP. Russia is the ninth least indebted country in the world. Russia’s debt is currently at a total of over 14 billion руб ($216 billion USD). Most of Russia’s external debt is private.

    From: https://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/countries-by-national-debt

  161. some 200 times as many casualties as the georgian incursion, seems a very tragic waste, of lives,

  164. Ummm, there were 350 Russian causalities in Georgia. And we have about 5200 so far in Ukraine.

    You are off by very wide margin. Unless of course we are talking the three horsemen of madness, Twiiter, Youtube and Instagram. Then you are probably pretty close. ;)

  165. They have no more today and probably fewer than yesterday. Why haven’t they launched them on any given day in the last 70 years?”

    The successor to Satan, which made Minutemen obsolete long ago, I give you Sarmat: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RS-28_Sarmat
    Another of those unreliable hypergolic fueled missiles that are maintenance nightmares. Minuteman 3 is still a better missile 52 years after it was introduced. Some of the USAF missile guys may be the sons/daughters of the original M3 crews.

    Sarmat still is not deployed after over a decade of trying. It still has not completed a successful test flight. I put it at the same level as the Armada and the Sukhoi “stealth” fighter.

  166. every few generations they have a designer as talented as korolev, that’s not happening now,

  167. “Sarmat still is not deployed after over a decade of trying. It still has not completed a successful test flight.”

    Its supposed to be tested then put into service this year. They have never tried to fire it, so a decade of trying is ridiculous. These are the people who put your astronauts onto the ISS for a very long time, you don’t think they can get Sarmat to work? Its the thing that throws the hyper-sonic glider, either 10 heavy, or 15 light warheads.

    Satan is able to throw 10 medium weight warheads with a CEP of around 100 meters, which is why your Minutemen would just disappear if they were not launched first.

  170. “…there’s the maintenance issue, and the question of whether the warheads will even function, especially on the Russian side.”

    I would prefer not finding out the hard way whether the arsenals of the nuclear states will work as planned. I’m no expert on the delivery systems, but it’s very likely that our bombs and warheads are reliable. We have a leg up on the other nuclear powers in that regard because of our above ground experimental facilities, such as the NIF at Livermore, Z at Sandia, and DARHT at Los Alamos.

  171. “I would prefer not finding out the hard way whether the arsenals of the nuclear states will work as planned. I’m no expert on the delivery systems, but it’s very likely that our bombs and warheads are reliable. We have a leg up on the other nuclear powers in that regard because of our above ground experimental facilities, such as the NIF at Livermore, Z at Sandia, and DARHT at Los Alamos.”

    Don’t have any conversations with the people who work on these things, then. The guys who know about it all were very unhappy that we stopped doing live testing and went to simulations back in 1992, and about all you’re going to get out of some these days is a bunch of dark muttering about how simulation isn’t 100%.

    Also, factor in the general degradation in what used to be SAC and the Navy equivalent, plus the civilian agencies that manage their aspects of it all. I’ve had some very interesting conversations with people that have worked in all three areas, and none of them were what I’d term “confident” in the comprehensive system. Aspects of it, sure… The whole thing? With no notice? LOL… The average person really has no idea just how many things have to go perfectly for an ICBM to even launch, let alone fly several thousand miles over the pole and then hit something. Remember, precisely none of that has ever been exercised. Ever. Compare/contrast with the things we do exercise, like the periodic test shots towards Kwajalien. The failure rate for those is something like 20%, after overhauling everything and carefully monitoring the missiles in flight.

    If someone is ever really stupid enough to launch an ICBM or SLBM strike in a war scenario, there are going to be a lot of surprised faces at how failure-prone the whole thing actually is. Remember, none of this has ever really been exercised, and we really don’t even know what we don’t know. Friend of the family was a Boeing engineer that worked on Minuteman and the abandoned Peacekeeper, and he was highly dubious of the entire proposition behind the ICBM and SLBM systems. Get him talking about it, and you’ll get an earful about all the hand-waved assumptions made, the untested pieces, and the number of things that could go wrong just for a routine launch. The idea that they’d be able to launch 1000 missiles from a no-notice cold start and have 1000 hits was something that usually got a prolonged manic giggle out of him. He was one of the guys doing the design work, and he thought they’d be lucky if 10% of the warheads landed where they were supposed to and managed to actually detonate.

    Hell, there’s more to making the warheads work than you really want to know… The radiation from the cores does enough damage to the electronics that you’re never really certain when they’ve gone off, and even a few milliseconds of “off” when you’re talking about an implosion warhead means the thing is going to fizzle. The maintenance is critical, and cutting corners means that the ICBM that you launched expecting a great big KABOOM may well just be a particularly dirty conventional bomb when it arrives wherever it hits.

    I used to be worried about nuclear war, when I was very young. After researching it and spending a lifetime asking people questions, and learning how a lot of things really work in our much-vaunted military? I’m a lot more worried about the sort of idiocy that will come in reaction to a fizzled-out nuclear war.

  172. “Don’t have any conversations with the people who work on these things, then. The guys who know about it all were very unhappy that we stopped doing live testing and went to simulations back in 1992, and about all you’re going to get out of some these days is a bunch of dark muttering about how simulation isn’t 100%.”

    As it turns out, I am one of the “people who work on these things.” Until recently I was a classification analyst with broad authority to classify documents related to nuclear weapons. I know how the weapons in our arsenal are designed and work, and I am confident they will work, including the electronics. I don’t know who told you about the radiation from the core damaging the electronics, but whoever they are, they’re full of it. The same goes for passing in and out of the Van Allen belts. Who are all these people you’re talking to? In the event any of them actually have a Q clearance or its military equivalent, they shouldn’t be chatting with you about these things, especially if they happened to do so with a few drinks under their belt.

    There are, indeed, many at DOE and in the military who would love to resume testing. Wouldn’t you, if you were a bomb designer? The fact remains that we have a very significant advantage over other nuclear powers in the diversity and effectiveness of our above ground experimental facilities. To resume testing would be to throw away that advantage.

  173. well we really don’t want to test the proposition, but we know kim the dynasts ukrainian supplied (yes I remember that bit) are not terribly effective at targeting,

  174. The key point about a nuclear war is that we don’t ever want to get into the situation where we find out how bad or good the performance of ICBMs will be. That is why it is beyond stupid for Biden* & his Bozos to be pumping up the conflict in the Ukraine instead of trying to broker a peace settlement.

    And let’s not put blinkers on. Yes, there are undoubtedly serious questions about the real-world efficacy of old ICBMs. Still, we can go to museums and see the marine-portable (as in a fit marine with a backpack) atomic bombs the US experimented with back in the day. There have been endless discussions over the years about shipping container nukes. We know that Biden* and Congress are very happy to leave the southern border wide open (and maybe some of the smaller ports?), presumably because of simple corruption. Expect the Unexpected!

    Bottom line is that the people who are buying the Narrative and dutifully hating on Russia are failing to look ahead and think through the potential consequences of “winning” their proxy war in the Ukraine.

  175. even a mild nuclear incursion, would get our ‘hair mussed’ and seeing that will be fought in part over europe’s breadbasket,

  177. Most of what I’m pointing out is open-source–You just have to know what to look for, and grasp the implications of it. You can get a hell of a lot out of open-hearing Congressional testimony if you listen carefully and extrapolate. Precisely none of what I’m talking about is classified; what people on the “inside” have done is simply point me at those things that are already known and made public.

    Follow the process used for live ICBM test shots–It’s exactly as I describe it. What’s the failure rate on those launches from Vandenburg, under ideal conditions, again…?

    We’ve never done a test launch from an actual silo over the pole, never randomly picked a missile and just launched it, come-as-you-are–Mostly because that would be rather hard to distinguish between “live test” and “They’re starting a nuclear war…”. Also, the Soviets/Russians aren’t likely to simply provide us with a test-range to use, any more than we would for them.

    The laundry list of “crap we don’t know” is even longer than I lay out, and most of it is out there without a need for clearances. You seem to be ignorant of the entire maintenance issue, as well–You don’t just build a warhead and then it sits there, available for use, forever. The systems need constant refurbishment, not the least because of the delicacy of the electronic controls and timer switches that make implosion-type bombs work. The Soviets were limited in the number of weapons they could build for much of the Cold War due to the difficulty they had in building their own, and how few they could scam off the West for “dual-purpose” uses that diverted them into the nuclear program. The inspectors that went in after START were appalled at the condition a lot of the weapons they looked at were in, in these terms. Radiation from the bomb “pits” or cores is something that continuously degrades them, and it’s only when they’re stored separately and assembled that you avoid those problems–Something that’s not happening with ready-to-launch.

    There’s a whole industry supporting these things, and it’s continuously recycling the weapons, refurbishing them as necessary. That’s here in the US; the sloth demonstrated in Ukraine likely still extends across the entire Russian defense enterprise, just as it did back during the START days.

    I repeat–None of what I’m pointing out is at all classified, in any way. Most of the people I’ve talked to were careful to only point out the open-source data points you need to form a picture.

    And, none of them were at all happy with the blithe assurances the simulators have offered the politicians. Congressional testimony made that quite clear.

    Read up on the issues surrounding Fogbank, and educate yourself. The testing ban was one that the politicians talked themselves into, and which was never supported by the people actually doing the work. The unclassified Fogbank stuff is great humor, for anyone into the history of technology–It turned out, per the released documents, that the actual reason newly produced Fogbank wasn’t up to snuff was that improved technology was actually using input materials that were too pure; the impurities from what they used back in the old days were what turned out to be critical in producing Fogbank that worked.

    Hell, a lot of the “smaller nuclear arsenals” we have today are due to the systems simply being allowed to decay. You can’t even go out and pull a warhead from the 1980s and expect it to work, let alone any of those manufactured during the heyday of the 1960s. Why the hell do you think they’ve been pumping money into the whole thing, since the 1990s? Nukes are a wasting asset; you don’t maintain them, they won’t keep on working forever.

    As one of my informants put it, nuclear warfare is at least partially a scam; it is, however, a scam that has kept the lid on great-power conflicts for a long time.

    The actual engineers working this stuff are far less sanguine than the managers and politicians running the show, and for good reason. I don’t think we’ve really validated the new Fogbank material through a live shot, other than in simulation. So, given that fact? Who knows? That’s only one aspect of the issue. Nuclear weapons are hard, which is why it’s taking Iran as long as it has to “get the bomb”, when we did it in less than five years during WWII. Of course, those were huge weapons you’d play merry hell trying to mate up with anything like an ICBM, but there ya go… And, we didn’t have the advantage of knowing it was even possible; the Iranian bomb program is working in a world with copious open-source material for how we did it, and has access to technologies that the Manhattan Project would have wet themselves over. They still haven’t done it, after decades of work on it. That’s kind of a clue to how hard it actually is to even detonate a proof-of-concept device, let alone mass-produce the bastard and keep it operational for a few decades.

    No, there’s going to be a significant and yet unknowable amount of “Well, that didn’t work the way they said it would…” going on in the aftermath of anyone being stupid enough to push the button. Enough that I think the various parties that really know what’s going on would probably prefer to try taking out the leadership telling them to “go nuclear”, rather than deal with the likely aftermath–Which would almost certainly include their executions for malfeasance and corruption. At least, anywhere there are totalitarian regimes with nuclear programs… Here in the US, I think a lot of our stuff might actually work, but who the hell knows? The guys actually running things back when during the 1990s were very emphatic in their testimonies before Congress that they couldn’t validate designs and materials without testing. They got overruled by the politicians and managers, ‘cos “optics”.

    Which has never, ever been a recipe for success in any endeavor.

  178. Oh, and let’s not even get into the whole issue with the conventional components of the bombs needing periodic refreshment, either–The explosive lenses in nukes aren’t any less prone to degradation than the conventional warheads out in the munitions stockpiles, and if you’ve ever been handed a shaped charge manufactured in the early 1940s, along with the companion blocks of TNT of similar vintage, you’d know what I mean. It’s a really fun day, helping EOD gather up all the fragments of undetonated Comp B and TNT after your priming charge does nothing more than scatter what used to be high explosives across a demo range in Central Europe. There are modern batches of C4 we had to pull out of service, which passed initial production testing, that degraded “unexpectedly” in storage under controlled conditions. You only find these things out when you go to use them, sadly.

    Munitions of any type ain’t “forever things”. Hell, even those stone balls they used to use in bombards are prone to issues with weathering and decay… I forget which castle in Germany I was at, where some of them were cracked and spalled from exposure to the freeze-thaw cycle.

  179. yes any testing ban is a antiscience and anti technology, it really does make you wonder how long it will take the iranians to reach critical mass on their development, they do not lack for expertise, right,

  180. Kirk, it’s clear from your comments that you think you know a lot more than you really know. The people who certify the safety and reliability of the stockpile to the President and Congress every year do not do so blithely. If they did, they would quickly find themselves out of a job. The process is peer reviewed by people from the weapons labs who are not mere politicians, but have been intimately involved with weapons work, including in some cases weapons testing, for many years. DOE provides unclassified versions of the relevant documents every year. I know and have worked with many of the nation’s best weapon designers, so don’t even try to tell me that all of them, or a large percentage of them, believe we can’t certify the stockpile without testing. If that were the case, the stockpile would not be certified. Some designers did, indeed, claim that we couldn’t certify the stockpile without testing back in 1992, but they were not a majority, and the decision to end testing was hardly taken merely because of the “optics.”

    What you have written shows you have no clue about either design of modern weapons, or where the line is drawn between classified and unclassified information. You think that today we do everything with “simulations.” In fact, we have experimental facilities that can tell us with a high degree of confidence that the critical processes that must occur for nuclear weapons to detonate as designed will in fact occur.

    Do you really think that the people working at the weapons labs and elsewhere in the nuclear weapons establishment have somehow remained ignorant of all these problems you trot out as show-stoppers all these years? I assure you that you are sadly mistaken. We spend billions of dollars every year in the continual refurbishment of the weapons in our arsenal. If the people who know better really believed that all that money was wasted, and the refurbishment process was ineffective, I can assure you that they wouldn’t cover it up as a matter of “optics.”

  181. “The key point about a nuclear war is that we don’t ever want to get into the situation where we find out how bad or good the performance of ICBMs will be.”

    Nobody sane likes the mutual part of Mutually Assured Destruction but like the Dollar, nobody has come up with something better. And better most certainly isn’t knuckling under to every two bit piss pot that might have an A-bomb somewhere. So we’re left with assuring Putin that he can launch whatever he has that still works any time, just as his predecessors have been able to for 70+ years, as long as they understand that large areas of Rodinia will be converted to plasma.

    Not a pleasant thought but the alternative is giving him a blank check.

  182. Kirk searches for information and thinks that is knowledge. I doubt he will get over this terrible affliction.

    At this point I am ready to give my judgment on the war in Ukraine. An absolute master class in how to do this kind of thing. The Russians are just so good at war.

    Next is the elimination of the 60,000 troops in the Donbass pocket, which was the point of the war. Most of the Nazis are in that pocket. This is the group that has been shelling the Donbass since 2014 and has killed about 14,000 civilians there. Payback time will be just awful.

  183. MCS: “Not a pleasant thought but the alternative is giving him a blank check.”

    No, that is very blinkered thinking. Between the alternatives of launching the ICBMs or of stepping back lies the very real — indeed, normal — option of trying to find a negotiated compromise which all parties can accept.

    That is the standard normal option which Biden* & his Bozos and their predecessors have ignored. Instead, they decided to step towards the path that leads to launching the ICBMs. They organized a coup in the Ukraine and then began feeding weapons & biolabs & military training into the territory, and talked about the Ukraine joining NATO and putting offensive weapons on Russia’s border. And when Russia understandably said “Enough!”, Biden*’s Bozos ignored the signs and upped the provocation to 11. Now they have their proxy war. This cannot end well — for anyone! It is time to chose a different path.

  184. I blame alien ants (that was the conceit at the heart of brain dead, about six summers ago)

    a war on the crimean steppes, with nuclear war as the hold card, and famine and possibly zombie outbreak as the post credit scene,

  185. like they said in the departed (in martin sheens voice) ‘we practice deception, but we do not engage in self deception’ you can pulverize a city, pretend you are wiping out the nazi horde, then reality sets in,

  187. Update:

    1. Mariupol.
    Street fighting. The ring continues to shrink, but the task of completely blocking Azovstal has not yet been solved. The enemy also holds a piece of the Left-Berzhny region, the western Primorsky part of the city, the port and the factory of Ilyich. Over the past 2 days, the wounded have been evacuated from the port. Out of 6 Mi-8s and 1 Mi-24, 3 Mi-8s were shot down. The rest of the vehicles were able to deliver a certain amount of cargo to Mariupol and take out up to 30 wounded.
    The remnants of the enemy forces in Mariupol hysterically demand a deblockade, stating that without it, the defeat in Mariupol will be the greatest shame of Ukraine.

    2. Marinka.
    A little progress in the village itself. Fights in the slag heap area. Fighting also continues south of Maryinka in the area of ”‹”‹Novomikhailovka and Slavny.

    3. Carbon.
    Fighting continues north of Zolotaya Niva and in the area of ”‹”‹Velikaya Novoselka. So far, it has not been possible to get to the Maryinka-Kurakhovo highway.

    4. Zaporozhye.
    On the line Kamenskoye-Orekhov-Gulyaipole without changes. To the east of Gulyaipol, fighting was noted in the region of Malinovka and settlements to the east.

    5. Nikolaev.
    Attempts to be active in this direction cost the Armed Forces dearly, and, having suffered heavy losses, the enemy again went on the defensive. The RF Armed Forces continue to accumulate forces in the Kherson region. To the north, near Krivoy Rog and Nikopol, no significant changes were noted.

    6. LPR.
    Fighting continued in Popasnaya, the southern part of Rubizhne and on the outskirts of Severodonetsk. In general, there are no major developments.

    7. Avdiivka.
    Avdiivka itself is unchanged. To the north, the troops managed to break through the defenses at Novobakhmutovka and start fighting for the capture of the village, which should help the efforts associated with cutting the rocky road at Novobakhmutovka and Novoselka-2, as well as ensure advancement through Troitskoye to New York and further to Dzerzhinsk.

    8. Raisins.
    Limited fighting south and southeast of Izyum. Both sides are actively pulling up reserves in this direction, expecting the imminent start of active operations by the grouping of the RF Armed Forces in the Kharkov-Izyum direction. The enemy has created certain reserves in the Artemovsk area, and is also preparing Slavyansk and Kramatorsk for defense. There is also an accumulation of forces in the Pavlograd region, which will act as a strategic reserve in the upcoming battle. Kharkov – battles of local importance.

    9. Sumy-Chernihiv.
    There is a transfer of significant contingents of the RF Armed Forces to the east. It is not yet clear for what purposes they will be used – for the assault on Sumy or for moving to Akhtyrka and further to Kharkov. There is also the option of transferring part of the forces to the Kharkov-Izyum direction. The pressure on Brovary is currently decreasing. In Chernihiv – no significant changes.

    10. Kyiv.
    The Armed Forces of Ukraine declare that they were able to restore control over the city of Irpen, but at the same time confirm that Bucha, Vorzel and Gostomel are under the RF Armed Forces. Again they came up with a victory about the capture of Vyshgorod, which was already controlled by the Armed Forces of Ukraine. According to the Pentagon and the Armed Forces of Ukraine, the RF Armed Forces are on the defensive here, and part of the forces are being transferred through Belarus to Kharkov and Izyum.

    In general, despite the active battles in different directions, we are now witnessing a kind of operational pause, which is associated with the need to regroup troops and pull up reserves. The main events will soon unfold in Left-Bank Ukraine, where the RF Armed Forces will strive to defeat the main grouping of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Also, I would not rule out operations in the Nikolaev direction.

    Broadcast in Telegram continues as usual here https://t.me/boris_rozhin (if you are interested, subscribe)

  188. Mariopol still holding out; doesn’t bode well for quick capture of other cities. If the defenders still possess the bigger bridges over the Kal’mius and Kal’chyk rivers and can blow them, they should do so (if they haven’t already). Ivan will have to spend more time and resources for his land bridge.

    Still fighting for the strategically vital village slag heap in Marinka after four days. Masterclass stuff, eh?

    To the east of Gulyaipol, fighting was noted in the region of Malinovka and settlements to the east.

    Not noted was that the Ukrainians liberated several of those settlements.

    The Ukrainians still hold the south of the town known in Canadian baking circles as “Raisins”. Holding this part of Izium means the Kharkiv – Sloviansk road is blocked to the Russians. Interesting that Belgorod Bob did not mention that Russian troops blew the dam of the Oskil reservoir – maybe flooding areas you’re trying to move into turns out to be embarassingly counterproductive. Still, blowing shit up is the Russian way.

    To the north, near Krivoy Rog and Nikopol, no significant changes were noted.

    Not by Bob, but elsewhere it was noted that the Ukrainians liberated eleven villages and pushed the Russians back.

    There is a transfer of significant contingents of the RF Armed Forces to the east.

    East of Sumy is Russia, so we know what those contingents are doing – retreating.

    .
    Germany declined Putin’s invitation to pay in Roubles; let’s see if he turns the gas off. Doing that in April is almost as smart as launching your invasion at the start of rainy season.

  189. Putin seems to have lost the narrative. If he wants more Rubles, all he has to do is print some. It’s the Euros that will actually buy what he needs.

  191. “Still fighting for the strategically vital village slag heap in Marinka after four days. Masterclass stuff, eh?”

    Ah war, war never changes. A great deal of what’s happening is not at all obvious, not like on youtube. ;) It will take a while, have patience. Large numbers of Ukrainian troops are dying and that’s a big part of why there is no hurry for the Russians. They are all used to this now. The entire Russian command has fought in Syria and there will be few mistakes.

    So look at it this way: We have Ukrainians and others flocking to join the fight. None of them are any good at war, how could they be, and what they are facing is very good at war. The Russians will simply conduct operations as a whole army and murder a great number of those they are facing. Keep in mind the causalities are well over 10-1 already and that will probably get worse. They are not in a hurry and not risking much at all. The opposition is pretty well the opposite.

    If you can find a map of the present situation, you might notice jaws, about to bite Ukraine in half. Now that’s unlikely, but only because that’s not the point.

    Have patience.

    “Doing that in April is almost as smart as launching your invasion at the start of rainy season. ”

    Yeah a great of that gas powers German industry, and it will be largely shut down on the second.

  192. It’s the Euros that will actually buy what he needs.

    What will buy what Yurrop needs?

    Rubles.

    Can Yurrop print rubles?

    Nope. Perhaps that explains why the ruble has now returned to its pre-invasion value. That is, the pumpernickel principalities of the anus-end of Eurasia are quietly buying rubles to buy Russian gas, so their economies don’t collapse.

    I’m sure they’ll all keep bleating for Uncle Sugar to solve this problem for them, quickly, while they hysterically attempt to tap-dance around their unwillingness to actually stop trading with Russia for things they need while they pretend to be totally cutting off the Bad Vodka Man from everything.

    Germany declined Putin’s invitation to pay in Roubles; let’s see if he turns the gas off.

    https://www.zerohedge.com/commodities/putin-signs-decree-ordering-gas-exports-be-halted-if-buyers-dont-pay-rubles

  194. What you wana bet that the “pumpernickel principalities of the anus-end of Eurasia” are paying Putin cronies in Dollars and Euros for those Rubles, none of that “pumpernickel principalities of the anus-end of Eurasia” funny money for them, they know what they’re, worth. And at what multiple of the going rate in Russia where they also know what they’re worth. You can be sure that Putin gets his cut and maybe the “Big Guy” as well. Notice how many super yachts are built in Russia, Rubles ain’t gonna buy that.

  197. The Ukrainian* attack on a fuel storage depot in Belgorod (Russia), is another indicator of the importance of Kharkiv in the coming battles. Along with the earlier hit on the ammo dump, it shows the Ukrainians are well aware of the danger.

    *There’s some talk this might be a false flag attack by the Russians to prepare public opinion for the increased war tempo, but it seems unlikley that they’d stage something that makes the Ukrainians look so good (bold, focussed strike on strategic asset with no wider civilian casualties).

    Elsewhere, the Russian roll back from Kyiv continues at great pace, so fast they are in danger of leaving rearguard units behind. It’s amazing if the Ukrainians really have liberated Ivankiv – if they’ve done so securely then a lot of Russians are going to be surrounded.

    So now it’s a race to prepare the east.

  198. Yeah a great of that gas powers German industry, and it will be largely shut down on the second.

    LOL, they have a month of reserves. Plus there’s still a lot of hydrocarbons coming in on existing Euro and Dollar contracts (some until the end of May). Plus the Kremlin has walked back Putin’s tough talk a little, making internal arrangements for Euro and Dollar payments to be coverted to Roubles.

  199. belgorof was the starting point of the kharkiv offensives in the summer of 43, the DPR took izium early in the war, but they had to give it up by the summer, so they’re are in worse shape then 8 years ago,

  201. Interesting situation in Mariupol as the Ukrainians are desperate to evacuate whoever is left in the steel plant, where the Azov brigade is doing its last stand.

    A series of desperate attempts to get some of these people out has produced a few rumours. one is that there are NATO people in there with them, and Macron has asked Putin to help.

    I dunno, we’ll see.

  202. . . . one is that there are NATO people in there with them, and Macron has asked Putin to help.

    Some Ukrainians serving in the French Foreign Legion were given leave to return home and join the defending forces. It’s possible some ended up in Mariupol. Not everyone fighting there is a neo-Nazi (Azov numbered less than a thousand before the invasion).

  203. The decision was made not to just destroy the place, which would be a much safer way to deal with the Azov rump in Mariupol. As well as being an important steel plant in the area, it would be good to find out who is in there. ;)

  204. The more I think about this Ruble wheeze, the more I wonder why it wasn’t the normal state of affairs. Now, it’s probably Putin trying to mollify his oligarchs. They’ll sell the Rubles for a small profit, say four or five times the prevailing exchange rate for Dollars and Euros, the better to loot the Russian economy. Now the oil and gas producers will have to go to these same money changers to get the Dollars and Euros to buy the technology they need, so the oligarchs make bank coming and going. The only losers are the Russian people, but hell, they’ve been losing for centuries, they’re used to it.

    The fact that the Ruble has collapsed makes the whole thing doubly insane if the welfare of the Russian economy is important. But like I say, That’s not an issue.

  205. “The fact that the Ruble has collapsed makes the whole thing doubly insane if the welfare of the Russian economy is important. ”

    It has not. Its doing remarkably well. The Ruble for gas, and the Russian bank requirement is genius really.

  206. Holy shit, Kharkiv and other places getting absolutely blitzed tonight. I’ve never seen fires like these after shelling, in open areas too. White phospherous?

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fH8NQwG52Xs

    Go to where it says Kyiv local time 0:48:00 and keep watching. Bear in mind the hills in the rear have already been hammered.

  207. A city, any city, is a big target and not hard to hit if you have weapons in range. But, as we found during WWII, it’s not militarily decisive in the short term.

  210. @ miguel cervantes

    The missiles being put in place for potentially interdicting supplies is interesting, the rest is “it’s all our fault” conspiracy bollocks / Chinese agitprop.

  211. PJF: “the rest is “it’s all our fault” conspiracy bollocks / Chinese agitprop.”

    Little bit of cognitive bias there? :)

    To keep your righteous juices flowing, here is a link to an article by Spengler (David Goldman) on a historical perspective on the current action in the (poor & highly corrupt, and seriously abused) Ukraine.
    https://asiatimes.com/2022/04/cardinal-richelieu-explains-vladimir-putin/

    “You solicited my advice, Spengler, because you cannot bear the self-satisfied moralizing of the well-meaning people who set this tragedy into motion, and you are appalled by men of action who clean up the mess left by practitioners of the politics of virtue. Get a stronger stomach if you want to see under the surface of history – including the history that is unfolding before your squeamish eyes.”

  213. Gavin, since Spengler seemed not to notice the contradiction in his piece (or just hid it in the historical cleverdickery), it is understandable that you didn’t.

    You quote the last paragraph which quite suddenly and incongruously points the finger at “the well-meaning people who set this tragedy into motion”, despite the foundation of the article being Putin’s cruel, deliberate and cynical destruction of Ukraine. This is Spengler’s “it’s all our fault” moment.

    You’ll have noticed that I find this “it’s all our fault” notion bizarre and stupid, and it really is. It’s usually a construct of the western left, because the western left do genuinely hate the west and resent its freedoms and successes. But for some reason it has infected a segment of the right, which seems to want to adopt Ann Barnhardt’s sulky loser strategy of giving up and living in a van down by the river.

  214. @Miguel cervantes

    Did you not notice the ridiculous self-contradictions in that piece? A quick bit of online search (requires French translation) will show Jacques Baud to be in the conspiracy-theorist set. His perspective may be interesting, but then so is David Icke’s.

  215. all of western civilization and that’s not an exaggeration, is being bulldozed by the same forces pushing this dustup in the caucasus, baud has thirty years experience in the swiss army, on peace keeping missions in the sudan, on the un staff hes not a hack like icke,

    the long term prospects for economic stability are dire, on a global scale, thats assuming this doesn’t escalate into a larger direct conflict, we saw what rising food prices, did in north africa, now double it, and expand it to the wider third world,

  216. A quick bit of online search (requires French translation) will show Jacques Baud to be in the conspiracy-theorist set.</i.

    Perhaps, but I've long since noticed that anyone or any topic the regime doesn't want discussed is given the "conspiracy theory" tag and then banished from the public discourse.

    As someone with no special interest in the topic of Ukrainian internal affairs- or Ukrainian anything, for that matter- I have no idea whether of not this guy is right or wrong.

    Perhaps you could explain to us specifically why he is not correct in his evaluation of the present difficulties?

  217. . . . all of western civilization and that’s not an exaggeration, is being bulldozed by the same forces pushing this dustup in the caucasus . . .

    Please define those forces.

  218. PJF: “You’ll have noticed that I find this “it’s all our fault” notion bizarre and stupid”

    Seriously, PJF. You seem to be an intelligent person. Tell me about your asessement of the actions of “Our Side” in the years leading up to the current tragedy:
    What do you make of the evidence of US involvement in the 2014 coup in the Ukraine which removed a democratically-elected government?
    What do you make of the hidden fact that the US military (MILITARY!, not Fauci) was funding at least a dozen bio-labs in the Ukraine?
    What do you make of the ignored fact that the US military was training the Ukrainian forces which were shelling & killing human beings in eastern Ukraine, resulting in thousands of civilian deaths?
    What do you make of the obvious corruption involving Biden’s son in the Ukraine — and Biden himself in stopping a Ukrainian prosecutor investigating his son?

    What you are seeing from what you inappropriately call “a segment of the right” is appropriate human total disgust at the stupid underhand dealings of “Our Guys” that resulted in this war in which human beings (some innocent, some not) are dying while the real guilty parties are living high in the DC Swamp and Brussels. We support our team — but we expected our team to have higher standards than they exhibited in the 8 long murderous years which preceded Russia’s action.

  219. Putin got in over his skies, and it’s cost him in raw numbers as well as members of the command staff, including General Gerasimov’s son, this wasn’t a well thought out war plan, but plans really work out after contact with the enemy see Vietnam or Iraq (although frankly tell me what was the objective in Vietnam) the longest war till Afghanistan

  220. Isn’t that the question? Is time on Russia’s side? Or is Putin in a race to see which he runs out of first, his army or his economy? How many irreplaceable resources have they expended? Both weapons and people. Ukraine is in position to deny Russia the income from their gas at the cost of putting their Western supporters in a real bind. Wars that don’t end quickly, (most wars) turn into a contest of staying power. If Putin had restrained himself gone after just the Eastern Ukraine and assured access to Crimea, he’d almost certainly be in a position for a longer fight. Instead, he swung for the rafters and as often happens, he may have struck out.

  221. MCS: “If Putin had restrained himself gone after just the Eastern Ukraine and assured access to Crimea, he’d almost certainly be in a position for a longer fight.”

    Not sure what information you are looking at there, MCS. The maps I see show the Russian forces doing what they said they would do (Not that anyone in the West listened) — concentrated around the Donbas (to eliminate what they call the “Nazis” there) and along the coast of the Black Sea towards Odessa (which incidentally was founded by that well-known Ukrainian Catherine the Great). They surrounded Kiev, apparently (and successfully) to tie down the bulk of the Ukrainian forces and keep them out of the main fight in the south & east. And the Russians appear to be bombing quite selectively in eastern Ukraine — hitting US military biolabs, weapons shipments, and supply bases.

    The only people who talk about Russia intending to occupy all of the Ukraine in 72 hours are the purveyors of Main Stream Media pablum.

    It is very difficult for any of us to get a good picture of what is happening through the Fog of War and the tempest of Western-provided Ukrainian propaganda. It might be unwise to count Russia out. It would definitely be more wise for Western politicians to try to resolve the conflict before a lot more people get hurt — not just in the Ukraine!

  222. That long, stalled column wasn’t anywhere near the Don. He thought he could just roll into Kiev, he was wrong. Time is the only thing that will answer the question. At the same time, anybody banking on regime change is stupid. The one thing Russians have shown over and over again is a near infinite tolerance for bad leaders.

  223. “That long, stalled column wasn’t anywhere near the Don.”

    It was a troll. You lot rattle on about Logistics like it was a secret magic trick. Positioning warfare is what you have mostly watching. Get your enemy where you want him, keep him there, while you do stuff elsewhere.

    It looks like, and this is just rumour of course, but it may be French NATO advisers trapped with the Nazis in Mariupol. That would explain Macron’s concern. ;)

  224. Regarding Jacques Baud.

    The referendums conducted by the two self-proclaimed Republics of Donetsk and Lugansk in May 2014, were not referendums of “independence” (независимость), as some unscrupulous journalists have claimed, but referendums of “self-determination” or “autonomy” (самостоятельность).

    независимость and самостоятельность are completely interchangable (try it yourself). After the referendum, Chairman Denis Pushilin said. “It is necessary [for the Donetsk People’s Republic] to form state bodies and military authorities as soon as possible.” That’s independence right there. Baud is lying.

    Moreover, OSCE observers have never observed the slightest trace of Russian units operating in the Donbass.

    Sounds convincing, but his link takes you to an interview in which it’s revealed that military vehicles are moving back and forth across the border (bear in mind that the OSCE had extremely limited access). Baud is lying.
    (OSCE original info:
    https://www.osce.org/special-monitoring-mission-to-ukraine/390179 )

    The massive increase in shelling against the population of Donbas on February 16 told the Russians that a major offensive was imminent.

    This is part of his graph which claims OSCE SMM Daily Reports as a source, attempting to give credence to an opinion. Immediately below, Baud makes the mistake of showing an actual OSCE graphic, which is much more revealing. Here’s the original, where you can zoom in and also check the data supporting it.

    https://www.osce.org/files/2022-02-20-21%20Daily%20Report_ENG.pdf

    Note the red areas (red = high intensity / yellow = low intensity) are either right on the disengagement area or (most) just inside Ukrainian territory. If you check the tables, nearly all the “ceasefire violations” are explosions, so most of the explosions are occuring at certain locations, near the “border”, on the Ukrainian side. Although most of the explosions are defined as “undetermined” (could be impacts or outgoing fire), consider where artillery is usually placed -> away from the combat zone firing in. These are likely detonations on Ukranian positions.

    Not convinced? Look on page 25 – Donetsk city center (separatist). There is not a single known impact; all the explosions are either undetermined or outgoing – that is, firing out from a city center! In fact, if you scroll through looking for the word “outgoing” you will find nearly all of them are from separatist areas.

    So, far from the uptick of “population shelling” in the run up to the invasion pointing to a Ukrainian offensive, it really looks much more like battlefield preparation by the Russians.

    And this isn’t just finding three examples out of a whole bunch, these are the obvious candiates from an article that didn’t pass the sniff test. This is what you have to do when you read some shit on the internet (or anywhere) – check it yourself, especially if it’s appealing to your sense of things. And it’s really difficult now, because the search engines have understandably buried the older stuff under the torrent of news.

    But I don’t suppose any of this will make any difference. It’s much easier to just post a link than do some work.

  225. @ Gavin Longmuir
    Tell me about your asessement of the actions of “Our Side” in the years leading up to the current tragedy:

    You first, Gavin. You put some work in to back up your generalised assertions and I’ll consider responding.

    But I will partially address this:
    What do you make of the ignored fact that the US military was training the Ukrainian forces which were shelling & killing human beings in eastern Ukraine, resulting in thousands of civilian deaths?
    because it’s annoyingly typical of the unthinking regurgitation of Russian agitprop.

    Go onto Google Earth or Google Maps (or your satellite view of choice) and take a look at the terrain on both sides of key points (Marinka is a start). Both sides are buggered. This is because, far from this ridiculous notion of Ukrainian Nazis ruthlessly bombarding poor ickle innocent civilians who just want to drink tea and pet their kittens, it has actually been a grim, low to mid intensity war with two sides of unpleasant, well armed nationalists actively engaged.

    Credibility hint: stop believing patently obvious bullshit.

  226. Something else I picked up when going through OCSE material. Throughout the Donbas conflict, tens of thousands of civilians have been crossing that border both ways, to work and to visit friends and family. When the SMM border observers dived for cover at the sound of an explosion, they noted that the queing civilians didn’t react.

  227. BTW, Gavin, don’t bother with the Biden corruption angle. I’m with you regarding those dirty bastards.

  228. And the osce is objective because?? Its as comflicted as any othet outfit see their ties to burisma which go back to 2019

  229. PJF: “it has actually been a grim, low to mid intensity war with two sides of unpleasant, well armed nationalists actively engaged.”

    So why are you so committed emotionally to “your side” being the unpleasant well-armed Ukrainian nationalists?
    Why are you not disgusted with your government for providing so much support to those unpleasant well-armed Ukrainian nationalists over the last 8 years?
    Most importantly, why are you not concerned about your government pumping up this dispute between far-away unpleasant people into what risks becoming something much worse for the world than 1914?

  230. Urban warfare is a nasty businesd this is why these wars dont end when the city falls or our afghan expedition would have ended in 2002 at the least

  231. Spengler is often too clever by half; beside the logical contradiction, his example might better have been Louis le Grand’s devastation of the Palatinate to create a buffer between his reunited provinces and Habsburgia. Pomerania was too far away to have excited any interest, and the Swedes and Habsburgs et al. had their own interests and ambitions–and very few suffering Pomeranians or Brandenburgers or Saxons had much reason to blame the French for anything, though of course that could change later.

    Nor is Putin the distant paymaster merely, while faraway barbarians contend for swamps and sandy pinelands; he’s not master of the most glittering court and dynamic cultural scene around, and he doesn’t have talented-to-the-point of genius advisors political, diplomatic, and military.

    He’s a secret policeman in over his head, not the 9-dimensional chess grandmaster his fanbois applaud.

    OTOH, why does anyone imagine that the Ukrainians, who are not exactly a remote primitive people new to the modern world, need French advisors?

    French? To advise about what? What do they know about war in that part of the world that the Ukrainians don’t?

    Serious question, and I’m as Francophile an Amurkan as you’ll find.

  232. “French? To advise about what?”

    Who knows, but Mariupol was a hive of NATO types from all over. They had a base of sorts there, and Americans and many other NATO types were seen there routinely. I’d guess the French guys did not get out in time, and picked the wrong people to hang out with. ;)

  233. Weve had twenty years of assurances that everything was going great from the same people who tell us its a done deal some of them were just freshly minted covid experts

    A month is a blink of an eye in the bloodlands a year is slightly longer

  234. Spengler is rather cold blooded about these matter emotions in this time could rise to 4000 c

  235. Weve been over much of this ground since 2014, a macabre game of volleyball with live ammo, this time the stakes are raised with the impact on a global scale

  236. Now this enterprise has been a savage waste of lives livelihoods property and other resources so cui bono

  237. Someone conjuring Richelieu should recall the rather abrupt end to the Bourbons not that long after. It’s a little hard to see his point beyond a cute literary device. Possibly to dismiss a reenactment of the Holodomor as just Russians being Russians. Someone who’s name is Goldman might want to reflect on just what other quaint European customs came to their ultimate expression in the 20th Century. Of all the notable occurrences in Europe of the last couple centuries, it’s only the peace of the last 77 years that is unprecedented.

  240. Cousin Eddie: “Spengler is often too clever by half;”

    Absolutely! His historical comparisons are entertaining — but probably not relevant.

    Rather than the war in the Ukraine going on forever, the likely progress is that Russia will do what they have repeatedly said they will do, and which is consistent with their actions to date: they will destroy the Ukrainian army (at least the unsavory elements of it) and they will secure safe boundaries for the Donbas (and probably the rest of the majority-Russian-speaking areas). Once Russia has achieved those limited military objectives, China will step forward and negotiate a peace treaty, including Chinese investment in a neutral rump Ukraine and armed Chinese “peacekeepers” permanently stationed there to keep out both NATO and Russia.

    The alternative is a Korean-type situation, with a war that never officially ends although the bullets mostly stop flying.

    Zelensky will probably have to go in order for the fighting to end; all it would take would be a NYT expose on Zelensky’s almost-certain deep involvement in Ukrainian corruption. Notably, even the execrable Kamala is now on record contradicting Biden*’s warmongering statements about Putin. Perhaps Biden* too will have to be replaced in order for peace to reign once more in the Ukraine.

  241. It’s not just Azov fighting in Mariupol; there are regular Ukrainian marines there. No idea about the supposed French connection; I’d still say UKrainian members of the French Foreign Legion (on leave) are the most likely candidates.

    Of course, the real info is Mariupol still holding out. The fall seems inevitable but there’s little incentive to give up. I hope they took some bridges out.

  243. Once Russia has achieved those limited military objectives, China will step forward and negotiate a peace treaty, including Chinese investment in a neutral rump Ukraine and armed Chinese “peacekeepers” permanently stationed there to keep out both NATO and Russia.

    I agree and here is an interesting discussion of the situation in Ukraine.

    In the end, the price will be high, but Vladimir Putin will likely achieve the goals he set for himself. We have pushed him into the arms of China. His ties with Beijing have solidified. China is emerging as a mediator in the conflict”¦. The Americans have to ask Venezuela and Iran for oil to get out of the energy impasse they have put themselves in””and the United States has to piteously backtrack on the sanctions imposed on its enemies.

    This is all on Biden and his regime. Of course, it began with Obama but this is Obama 2.0.

  245. Eddie: “I don’t see Chinese boots on the ground at all, at all.”

    You may be right. But if we assume that the Ukrainians are going to insist on some kind of foreign peacekeeper element to ensure their post-war security, who else is there apart from China?

    Obviously not the US. Obviously not any of the Europeans. Those would be unacceptable to Russia. Not the useless untrustworthy UN. So it comes down to the Indians, the Pakistanis, or the Chinese.

    I guess China would volunteer because any peace deal will likely involve major Chinese investment to rebuild the Ukraine. China is apparently already the Ukraine’s largest trading partner, and the Ukraine has a role in China’s Belt & Road plan. Plus the Chinese would love the symmetry of Chinese troops in Europe as payback for the “Century of Humiliation” the evil Europeans piled onto China. The Euros would not like it — but they don’t matter anymore.

  246. I wouldn’t pay to see miguel’s article but it lost me in the first paragraph where it called both Brzezinski and Blinken “very smart”.

    Mike K’s looks like a regurgitation of Baud, here identified as a Swiss intelligence officer with NATO. Switzerland isn’t part of NATO.

    So no and no.

  247. In the real world, Russia would be about as likely to want a strong Chinese presence in Ukraine as American. Get over the idea that China and Russia are friends.

  248. it was the link that established that this piece of territory had changed hands over a number of years,
    open your eyes, there is a tacit alliance between the two, something that hasn’t formally been in place, since 1971,

  250. You might believe that, I doubt Putin does. there are still Chinese claims on territory seized in the 19th Century by the Tsars. Still Chinese according to official Chinese policy. Where have we heard that before? Xi is into causing trouble for the West, nothing more, he wont hesitate a moment from stabbing Putin in the back. I don’t think Putin is stupid enough to want a possible enemy on both ends. Isn’t that what this was supposed to be about in the first place.

  251. So I mention the marines fighting in Mariupol and a whole bunch of them surrender.

    The Russians appear to be building large forces around Izium. If they’re going to attack Sloviansk from there instead of via Kharkiv it could prove interesting in the same way as their attack on Kyiv. The road infrastructure between Izium and Russia is poor, and it’s poor over in that part of Russia too. Maybe they’ve repaired the railway. They’re evacuating the town of Borova that the railway runs through, and it may be for the purposes of making it a logistics centre. But between there and Izium (and the road to Sloviansk) is a bridge that looks to be one vehicle wide . . .

  252. MCS: “I don’t think Putin is stupid enough to want a possible enemy on both ends.”

    There is no question about that, but in the real world people often find themselves having to choose the Least Unacceptable Alternative.

    The Ukraine does not want to be partitioned — but that is obviously going to be the outcome (short of Global Thermonuclear War). Russia does not want rump eastern Ukraine to become a military threat to it. And rump Ukraine definitely will want external security guarantees against any future Russian aggression. Any peace deal will have to involve a credible third party stationing armed peacekeepers in rump Ukraine to keep out both NATO and Russia.

    You are right, MCS, that Russia would definitely rather not have Chinese peacekeepers. But China would be “less unacceptable” than the UN (worthless) or the unfriendly nations of the US, UK, France, Germany. Be constructive! Who else would you suggest as peacekeepers?

  253. A realist would point out that NATO peacekeepers would be infinitely more likely to abide by whatever agreement is reached and infinitely less likely to misbehave. Both of which is guaranteed by using “peacekeepers” with an their own agenda and a thoroughgoing deeply implanted racism directed against all non-Chinese.

  254. Who do they report to, the ones who imposed draconian lock downs thaf crippled the middle class and killed hundreds of thousands who are full in on this criminal energy fraud which will bring famine to minions who think human rights are a dead letter except when it comes to deviant sexual practices and rampant drug use, who have a disdain for traditional morality that is thr common element

  256. PJF,

    Thanks for taking the time to write the post about Baud, which I quote from below:

    Moreover, OSCE observers have never observed the slightest trace of Russian units operating in the Donbass.

    I think I agree that Baud is lying. This assertion from him just doesn’t seem credible to me- and it has been stuck in my head since I read it.

    Why wouldn’t there be Russian units and their vehicles in the Donbass? Russia plainly has and had an interest in the area.

    Should I similarly be surprised that there are American vehicles in Germany? I think not.

    That said, it doesn’t change my evaluation of events. There are Russian shills just as there are Ukrainian shills, and this war is still not a struggle we should be involved in, or paying to prolong.

  257. If you believe that Russia and China are enemies, intent on the subjugation of the West, (not to mention each other) as I do, then anything they find distasteful or unpleasant can’t be all wrong. It can be stupid, like some sort of armed intervention, but shipping Ukraine some manpads and ATGM’s is cheap. As generally waseful and mismanaged as Iraq and Afghanistan were, at least we were fighting the jihadis over there, not here. I expect we’ll come to appreciate the difference.

  258. MCS: “A realist would point out that NATO peacekeepers would be infinitely more likely to abide by whatever agreement is reached and infinitely less likely to misbehave.”

    Come, on, MCS — Be Serious! A big part of the current casus belli was Zelensky’s insistence on joining NATO versus Russia’s insistence that the Ukraine not join NATO. Consequently, the suggestion of NATO “peacekeepers” in a post-war neutral Ukraine would be a total non-starter from the Russian perspective. Any peacekeepers would have to be from a Third Party nation.

    You are undoubtedly right that after China has completed its current program of taking down the US (mostly by suborning politicians, media scum, and academics), Russia is likely to be the next item on the Chinese menu. If we actually had a real American government in the US, someone might actually like the Machiavellian concept of arranging for Chinese troops in the Ukraine on Russia’s eastern border.

    The mystery remains that none of the “leaders” of the West seem to have any interest in trying to bring the war in the Ukraine to an end — before it spirals into something much wider and much worse. Ever wonder why?

  259. what are the uses of this war, it makes food and fuel expensive if not unaffordable, it allows another opportunity for censorship, and cancelling of anyone not sufficiently on board, so why would they stop

  260. When navigating by dead reckoning, especially when confounded by fog, one learns to not only recognize clues but interpret them and weight the degree of reliance on them.

    The fog of war is no different. Repetition of shibboleths, emphasis of memes–especially when that emphasis occludes confrontational analysis–eventually pulls away at least the edge of the curtain of concealment.

    Mike K’s link 4Apr 3:44 p.m. deserves exactly the response MCS 4Apr 5:49 provided. It, and the link below, provided more revelation than intended, even absent juxtaposition with differing narratives.

    https://medium.com/@kravchenko_mm/what-should-russia-do-with-ukraine-translation-of-a-propaganda-article-by-a-russian-journalist-a3e92e3cb64

    Ironies abound. As is usually the case in human squabbles from domestic differences to nations at war, the more one learns, the more they become convinced they cannot discern a totally pure party. And the more they, if self-aware, develop some humility regarding their own life.Those are certainly my takes on what’s developed in Ukraine. However, the claim that Russia is noble fails for far more than that reasoning. The links = res ips locutor.

    Moreover, the commie troll plaguing our conversation to advance Russian nobility, while I join whoever it was that appreciated his commentary as revealing, does, well, reveal. Some unspeakable vileness. He assumes that nobody in the ChicagoBoyz community has direct links to folks in Ukraine who might provide first hand testimony, folks who make serious observations supporting the “no pure party” conclusion while simultaneously testifying to what they personally see. Bluntly put: the mass rapes, the stacks of bodies, the execution-style elimination of civilians are real. Not made up. And not done by Ukraine.

  261. Mike K’s link 4Apr 3:44 p.m. deserves exactly the response MCS 4Apr 5:49 provided. It, and the link below, provided more revelation than intended, even absent juxtaposition with differing narratives.

    I certainly have to respect a person like you who knows exactly what is going on in Ukraine. I certainly don’t. I do try to read reports that come from fairly reputable people, not propaganda. We are deluged by propaganda from both sides.

  263. Orban is anathema to the globalists at the EU. He is almost as toxic as Trump was. Boris Johnson should take lessons from him but I suspect that this will push him closer to Putin. The Biden regime and the EU seem determined to reduce our allies.

  264. The Ukrainian marines in Mariupol have denied surrendering to the Russians, so that story and video may have been fabrication. Real story – Mariupol still resists on day 41.

    There are some rump Russian forces left around Putyvl and Buryn in the northeast. I mention it because there don’t seem to be any roads out left available to them, and some difficult terrain. So they may get a mauling and have to leave a lot of equipment. Hopefully the population’s proximity to Russia means there won’t be the appalling murders seen in the northwest.

    . . . the commie troll plaguing our conversation to advance Russian nobility . . .

    I’ll admit I miss the Belgorod Bob updates. The constant advance across the Marinka village slag heap is still constant after nine days (the Russians have resorted to indiscriminate bombardment); perhaps reports will resume when the Russians are doing more advancing than retreating (sorry, 4D chess redeployments).

    If the story about Putin wanting a big win before the May 9th Victory day parade is true, then the Russians may continue to be stupid. Their actions south of Izium so far are in keeping; pushing insufficient forces outward and getting them ambushed. But this is just the start of “Special Military Operation” MarkII so it’s too early to tell.

  265. The financial world may be upended by Biden’s foolish actions with Russia.

    The Bank of Russia’s move to link the ruble to gold and link commodity payments to the ruble is a paradigm shift that the western media has not really yet been grasped. As the dominos fall, these events could reverberate in different ways. Increased demand for physical gold. Blowups in the paper gold markets. A revalued gold price. A shift away from the US dollar. Increased bilateral trade in commodities among non-Western counties in currencies other than the US dollar.

    They have no idea of what they have done because leftists are illiterate in economics.

  267. “. . . volodyas czarist chess moves . . .”

    What makes you think Putin’s geopolitical strategy is any more thought out than his war strategy?

    Zerohedge is clickbait apocalypse p0rn, being fairly described as having predicted 200 out of the last 2 resessions. My ad blocker saves my eyes now, but it used to carry a lot of “buy gold” promotions next to articles mentioning “Increased demand for physical gold”.

  268. “A big part of the current casus belli was Zelensky’s insistence on joining NATO versus Russia’s insistence that the Ukraine not join NATO.”

    Ukraine is ineligible for NATO membership and will remain so for as long as they have a border dispute with Russia. To prevent Ukraine from joining NATO, all Russia had to do is……nothing at all. This invasion has nothing to do with NATO membership.

    “I’ll admit I miss the Belgorod Bob updates.”

    What happened to Penny anyway? Did he get banned? I was so looking forward to his explanation of how Russia minimized civilian casualties in Bucha and Borodyanka.

  269. It’s been long enough that there aren’t many witnesses left to testify about the joys of being “liberated” by a Russian army. I’ve heard that nearly every female above the age of around five in Eastern Germany was raped. The rest of Eastern Europe didn’t get off much better. I wouldn’t want to bet that a Chinese occupation would be better.

  270. Mkent: “Ukraine is ineligible for NATO membership and will remain so for as long as they have a border dispute with Russia.”

    That is a bit revisionist. Go back and look at what NATO countries were saying publicly before Russia’s action. None of them were saying that the Ukraine would have to stop its 8-year long civil war in the east and fix its relations with Russia before it could be considered for NATO membership. And now we peons learn that NATO/US has been actively involved over the last 8 years in supplying & training Ukrainian forces which were killing Ukrainian citizens.

    There are no White Hats in this situation. We can’t do anything about the Ukrainian kleptocrats or the Russians — but it is really frustrating that we can’t do anything either about “Our Guys” and their dirty hands.

  272. Go back and look at what NATO countries were saying publicly before Russia’s action.

    Link, Gavin? Note that it requires all NATO members to agree to accept a new country. Even if, say, Poland was keen to permit Ukraine, there is no way France, Germany or the UK would consider admitting a country that is partly occupied by, and engaged in conflict with, Russia. Just not happening.

    Yes, there was a lot of positive talk (irresponsible, in my view) about Ukraine joining but it was always generalised and there were always obstacles.

  275. Mike K– exactly as I see it.

    From the article cited (best assessment on this engagement I’ve encountered:

    “The United States will not allow Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to enter negotiations with Vladimir Putin.”

    “Russian President Putin knows the only group he could negotiate with are in the United States. However, that truth would expose the puppet strings, so the United States government must play the pretend game.

    The position of Volodymyr Zelenskyy as a puppet to the U.S. State Dept and Intelligence Community interests, is inherent in the Pentagon position. If Zelenskyy was free to make decisions, Austin and Milley could not be so assured as to put a timeline on the Ukraine conflict.

    This context becomes increasingly important as we look at how the media are positioning all resources to support a protracted war. Anyone who is not 100% pro war in Ukraine, for whatever length of time the DoS/IC determine is needed, is immediately cast as a Putin apologist.”

    “What makes this conflict a little more interesting, is the need for the U.S. to control the information. We have seen the initial first phases of their control with Big Tech saying they will not permit anything that does not follow the official U.S. government narrative on social media.”

  276. PJF: “Yes, there was a lot of positive talk (irresponsible, in my view) about Ukraine joining [NATO]”

    It was worse than irresponsible — it was provocative. Hence it was a giant mistake. It will be up to future historians to determine whether that mistake was due to the incompetence of Western “leaders”, or their arrogance, or their deliberate desire for a war to disguise their past financial stupidity.

    It is tragic that with every foolish additional step our “democratically-elected” “leaders” take, they increase the probability those historians will be writing in Chinese.

  277. “those historians will be writing in Chinese” laments the guy who thinks Chinese peacekeepers will be welcome in the Ukraine.

    It is Putin who has strengthened the Chinese hand. Just as Hitler’s actions led to a strong Soviet empire and a state for the Jews, and BushCo’s stupid invasion of Iraq led to a strong Iran, this gambit is likely to weaken the instigator(s) and strengthen the defenders.

  278. Ugh, more conspriracy theory to suck time.

    If Zelenskyy was free to make decisions, Austin and Milley could not be so assured as to put a timeline on the Ukraine conflict.

    They can’t, and didn’t, put a “timeline” on the conflict. It’s their job to present their best estimate of what will happen. “Years” is not an unreasonable assessment if you believe that Russia is both incapable of achieving a quick victory and unwilling to give up.

    What is not being advanced is any discussion of a diplomatic resolution or negotiated settlement. Milley’s defense request is predicated on a position that no diplomatic solution will be advanced. This is a key part of both General Milley and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s testimony.

    Diplomatic resolution / negotiated settlement is not in Milley’s or Austin’ s remit. Milley’s defense request should be made on the basis that a settlement might not happen even if one is attempted.

    Anyone who is not 100% pro war in Ukraine, for whatever length of time the DoS/IC determine is needed, is immediately cast as a Putin apologist.

    Lol, how can anyone have been “immediately cast” for not being 100% behind something that hasn’t even been determined yet? They’re just pulling stuff out of their ass.

    We have seen the initial first phases of their control with Big Tech saying they will not permit anything that does not follow the official U.S. government narrative on social media.

    Where did they say that? When does it begin? Social media is crawling with conspiracy gibberish and Russophilia.

    What is it about this stuff that apparently makes it so convincing?

  280. “Defenders, onlookers, and string-pullers.”

    IMO Putin has put himself in hock to Xi, and any help from the Chinese will come at a very very high price now that Plan A has fallen apart so publicly.

    Perhaps another Time of Troubles is in store for Muscovy.

  281. I guess it is very hard for some people to see our government, or section of it, as bad guys,

    Maybe this will help.

    Support for Maxey’s claim of the U.S. government taking action to cover-up the laptop material, is found in the example of him uploading specific searchable database files of the material into drop boxes in international file saving sites. However, as shared by the Daily Mail, “after about an hour, the links were taken down.”

    (Daily Mail) [”¦] Maxey said he believes the US government was hunting down files from the laptop posted online and flagged them to the companies.

    ‘There were five drop boxes: two in the United States, one in New Zealand, two in the UK. All the same drop boxes in which they tell us child pornography is shared around the globe without any consequence because they can’t look at it.

    ‘These are all Five Eyes countries, English speaking countries in an intelligence sharing agreement. And they were all ripped down.

    ‘”‹”‹So this means that our intelligence services, who still have not even acknowledged that they have Hunter Biden’s laptop, were obviously diligently doing cache searches across the internet to find out if any of this stuff was being released. (read more)

    If you want truth about US politics, you have to go to UK newspapers.

  282. PJF: “It’s their [Austin & “General” Milley] job to present their best estimate of what will happen.”

    Yeah! They did such a great job of that in Afghanistan!

    In a real military, after a cosmic-level mistake like the Afghanistan withdrawal debacle, Private Milley would be cleaning toilets for the rest of his career. On the other hand, in the Chinese military, he would probably have been taken down to the soccer stadium and publicly shot.

    There is no reason now for anyone to take any “best estimate” from Milley seriously.

  283. well milley vannilli doesn’t have a clue, but the presence of qatar in all these ops, which was the winner of the Arab Spring in Egypt and Libya at least for a while

  286. @ Gavin Longmuir

    I quite agree that Milley is incompetent, but that wasn’t relevant to my post. Although it shouldn’t be his job, it is his job. And don’t forget, it was Conservative Tree House that said he was assured putting timelines – I said he couldn’t be.

    As to Milley’s estimates, they’re useless. In early Feb he predicted the Russians would take Kyiv in 72 hours. Now he’s saying years.
    https://uk.news.yahoo.com/milley-apos-ukraine-war-prediction-120811754.html?guccounter=1

    One of Trump’s worst hires, and failures to fire.

  287. @ miguel cervantes

    I went back through that Meaning in History blog looking to see how well previous assessments had aged:

    https://meaninginhistory.substack.com/p/ukraine-sitrep-day-10?s=r

    It’s really quite laughable, and should be taken into account when considering current output. Compare that great sweeping map of Russian victory on day 10 with the Russians with Attitude tweet showing alleged overunning of “important Ukrainian positions”. Tiny. After six weeks. Not much different to PenGun’s two week battle for the Marinka slag heap.

    Oh, and the Ukrainians are already pushing the Russians back over the Kherson oblast border. His current assessment is already wrong.

  288. On a more pessimistic note, my earlier guess that the Russians had repaired the cross-border railway adjacent to Izium has been confirmed by the Ukrainians. That means the Russians can move a lot more heavy equipment into that area than by road. There doesn’t seem to be anywhere occupied further south than Borova to unload the trains, so I’m sticking with my guess that they’re turning that evacuated town into a staging post.

    Ukrainian special forces damaged a railway between Crimea and Melitipol in the south; maybe they can do similar between Borova and Russia. If they have any ballistic missiles left, a hit on the bridge over the reservoir near the town would do wonders.

    I still feel there isn’t enough infrastructure to amass enough combat power in the area to take Sloviansk. The armour buildup noted near Kursk would still indicate another attack on Kharkiv.

    Mariupol still resists.

  290. Seems like a good time to commend Prof. Martin van Creveld’s Kindle offering “I, Stalin.”

    A great pairing with his earlier “Hitler in Hell.” Overviews of the lives and achievements of the dictators in the form of first-person apologia. No footnotes, just well-informed and psychologically acute studies of two consequential outsiders to bourgeois Europe.

    I, Stalin is particularly relevant to current discussions.

  291. A very good (and long) discussion of Russian culture and mind set by a Finnish intelligence officer.

    What Will Happen to Russia?

    The period of stagnation will continue until Putin leaves. Or there will be a harsher period, Stalin’s time part two. Another purge. Development stops and repression begins, the Iron Curtain. Or the whole system will collapse as it did in 1991. Or Russia democratizes, which I personally don’t believe. Or it polarizes with Westernizers and Slavophiles, the west and the east will begin to struggle with each other again.

    I talked earlier about princes. Today we have a tsar who is infallible and he will eventually retire, probably. A new tsar will be elected to replace him. The prince must be a tough guy. He needs to be able to guarantee a peaceful rest of the life for the retiring tsar. Just as Putin guaranteed Yeltsin’s life, so that Yeltsin could live in peace from all legal action until he died.

    In exactly the same way, Putin is now looking for such a prince. Medvedev is too soft. He can’t do it. There are two candidates. One is Alexey Djumin. The Russian princely story requires that the prince is a hero. Before he becomes the infallible tsar he must be the hero. He is somehow heroic. Djumin is heroic, he has been awarded the title of Russian hero. He rescued Yanukovych from the clutches of fascists in Kiev. That is, he led the Yanukovych rescue operation from there when, according to the story, the fascists came to power in Kiev. He earned the title of Russian hero.

    He was a major general and Deputy Minister of Defence. He has earned the hero’s cloak, and he is safe in Tula. He has been castled. (Russian chess gamers like to castle.) Djumin has been castled there to the Tula area to wait. It is close to Moscow. In an area where nothing should go wrong, i.e., the hero will no longer do anything wrong before Putin goes. And he waits there, learning administration in a good Tula district.

    The second candidate, Yevgeny Zinitsev, is currently Minister of Emergency Situations.

    Zinitsev died in 2021, leaving Djumin as a possible successor.

  292. Is the Finnish military/academic describing Russia — or the US under the DC Swamp?

    “Another point is that, when you reach a certain position, you are entitled to a certain amount of corruption. That is, a certain degree of power gives you the right to a certain degree of corruption, too. At a lower rank, you didn’t get to steal that much. The higher you get, the more you get to steal.”

    “The Tsar knew better than the people themselves what was good for the people.”

    “A vast percentage of Russians get all their information from television. These television channels are under the control of Putin and his close associates. Therefore, Russians receive filtered information.”

    “The only task for and within the state leadership is to stay in power.”

    In fact, it seems that most of the guy’s comments could apply to most of the members of the United Nations. Sadly!

  293. I don’t see development in the future for Russia. It sure won’t come from China, they are strictly exploiters and extractors.

    When the Soviet Union collapsed, some optimists in the West saw what looked like an opportunity. Some have commented here. On paper, it looked promising, an educated industrialized work force, a developed transportation infrastructure, an appealing lack of environmental regulation to name just a few attractions. Sadly, very little if any of that worked out. There isn’t room here to go into all of the reasons for this but two of the important ones were the unfathomable corruption and not least, that as these optimists were flying in looking for deals, every Russian that could scrape together air fare was waiting to board the return flight out, never to return. The corruption sure isn’t better and the exodus has not abated, let alone reversed.

    So it looks like Russia’s fate is to have what’s left stolen either by their “rulers” or outside vultures.

  294. Gavin seems to be describing members of the uniparty, mostly Democrats but by no means all. If Putin ever decides to send a thermonuclear ICBM, we could ask that it be directed to Washington DC.

  295. If our “leaders” keep making stupid provocations instead of seeking ways to bring the conflict to an end, there will be (is now) a non-zero probability that Russia will push the button. My guess is that they will target every major city in the US with two exceptions — Miami, because a lot of Russians have a soft spot for that city; and the DC Swamp, because the Swamp Creatures are already destroying the US more effectively than even thermonuclear warheads.

  296. …Miami, because a lot of Russians have a soft spot for that city…

    When I heard about Backfire bombers in Venezuela my first thought was that Homestead Air Force Base, after decades of irrelevance, may now be a target.

  297. Gavin,
    Why would they do that, knowing in advance that large areas of Russia would also be converted to radioactive plasma?

  298. If Putin keeps running his mouth and in conjunction with the debacle in Ukraine, he might convince us that a preemptive strike would be largely unanswered, therefore, winnable. I have a lot more faith on our guys than his. Remember we have never pledged, no first use, as if that would mean anything.

  299. If Putin keeps running his mouth and in conjunction with the debacle in Ukraine, he might convince us that a preemptive strike would be largely unanswered, therefore, winnable.

    In other words, you are advocating a nuclear attack upon a large and also nuclear-armed nation on the other side of the planet, presumably on behalf of a third country, with which we have no formal relationship. Bribery doesn’t count.

    Now I don’t want to be rude- but are you out of your mind? Have you thought about the problems this might bring upon the United States? Do we get to have a debate about this in Congress- or would the Deep State simply assume consent because the public hasn’t risen up in armed rebellion against murdering millions of foreigners?

    I’m guessing that last. We’ll stumble into nuclear war because the rich people who think they’ll make money from regime change in Russia are all-in, because they are a set of grifting fools, while the people who are worried about getting killed by war have had enough of the regime’s endless wars of choice. No thanks.

    Why would they do that, knowing in advance that large areas of Russia would also be converted to radioactive plasma?

    I’m not Gavin, but I have an answer- perhaps because they’d rather die on their feet then live on their knees.

    One of most despicable things I’ve had to read about recently was Justin Trudeau bleating on about freedom, just days after seizing the bank accounts of protesters in Canada. I get the sense that for people like him, freedom has the same sort of meaning as it did to plantation owners in the Antebellum South- other people work so that they are free to do whatever they like.

    Hence, having watched the conduct of the western ruling class over the last few years, I have my doubts that foreigners see the US and its EU protectorates as any sort of bastion of freedom. Certainly there is no reason for the people ruling Russia to think that, not least because they’ve likely seen all the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop.

    Regardless, we should be trying to end the war, not scheming to make it infinitely worse.

  300. MCS: “Why would they do that, knowing in advance that large areas of Russia would also be converted to radioactive plasma?”

    One could equally ask the question — Why would your “leaders” in the US make themselves belligerents in the war in the Ukraine by pumping in weapons & providing targeting information knowing in advance that this could lead to the entirety of the US being converted to radioactive plasma?

    The idiots in charge in the West seem to imagine that their proxy war in the Ukraine is a mirror image of Vietnam — where Russia pumped in weaponry while Americans died. The Russians saw how that ended for the US. Why would they allow themselves to fall into the same trap?

    The major point is that there is a very real risk, MCS, of you and me and everyone else finding that we are on the front lines of a global thermonuclear war triggered by the corrupt Ukrainian kleptocrats’ 8-year conflict against other Ukranian citizens. If we had smart leaders in the West, they would be working to defuse the conflict. Instead, the war is being pumped up by idiots like that Truss woman in the UK who does not even know her Baltic from her Black Sea.

  301. as one of the last free outlets in North Oceania, Canada , small dead animals they have codified the state of emergency against the truckers, they also have banned foreign ownership of property, for 10 years, but Canadian assets are likely going to be a weak class going forward, the UK Defense Minister said two weeks ago, they were running out of Javelins, they were being shipped and expended at such a high rate,

  302. Gavin,
    Why would they do that, knowing in advance that large areas of Russia would also be converted to radioactive plasma?

    I have been reading about the Russian missile defense system around Moscow. We lost interest in missile defense after Reagan but the Russians did not. Russia is big, 11 time zones, and the population is a lot smaller than in WWII. Putin might be willing to trade.

  303. Not advocating, merely pointing out that the trash talk can go both ways. It wouldn’t be irrational to decide that if Russia was governed by the sort of suicidal lunatic embodied in Putin’s statement, we would be prudent to take every advantage available to us. A first strike being one of them.

  304. MCS, that was my point about Russian missile defenses. They took seriously Reagan’s idea of missile defense while the Bushes, the Clintons and Obama did not. The Moscow defenses are particularly dense. More here. They seemed to think a first strike possible while we did not.

  305. MCS: ” trash talk can go both ways.”

    Indeed! As I keep trying to emphasize, there are no “Good Guys”, no “White Hats” in this situation.

    We can’t do much about the Ukrainian kleptocrats who have bought the Biden family and waged war against their own Russian-speaking civilians for a period longer than the American Civil War. We can’t do much about the Russian government, whether we see them as provoking or having been provoked. But it is heart-breaking that we can do nothing about the insane stupidity & ignorance of those who call themselves Western “leaders”.

    The situation in the Ukraine could get out of hand very quickly, and spill over to your neighborhood. All it would take is an attack on a US weapons shipment in Poland and we would be on the slippery slope to World War III. Such an attack is becoming increasingly probable as the West keeps pumping in weapons. Maybe some Russian commander exceeds his orders by deciding to eliminate the Western weapons before they are used against his troops. Or — more likely — maybe the evil Ukrainian kleptocrats stage another false flag by attacking the Western convoy in Poland to drag NATO into saving their worthless skins.

    When the world is this close of the edge of a much wider, much more destructive war, our “leaders” ought to be working hard to defuse the situation. But they are not. We may all pay a heavy personal price.

  306. As you say, we had the opportunity to protect DC and failed to carry through. The system in Alaska is limited and more or less “aimed” at North Korea. This gives us even more reason to consider a first strike since that would guarantee that our command and control would be undegraded.

    Then there’s the issue that sort of sapped the enthusiasm from our pursuit of target based missile defense. It was pretty clear that anything we could build wouldn’t be 100% effective so all it would take to counter it would be to assign enough warheads to insure a few got through. At around a megaton each, it wouldn’t take many.

    We would presumably deploy our submarines in the Arctic to allow as little warning as possible with the first missiles aiming for their command and control with our land based missiles coordinated to catch as many of their warheads as possible in their silos.

    Like I said, two can play the trash talk game and I’m pretty sure we could carry it off a lot better, push comes to shove. There’s a subtle difference between mutually assured destruction and a suicide pact, but there is a difference. Not a pleasant prospect but one we seem to have come back to.

  308. there are excuses why we don’t do things, donald rumsfeld rip, 25 years ago, warned about the threat of ballistic missiles from north korea, china, et al, he was ignored by the likes of general cartright, later a sacrificial lamb in the leak of the stuixtnet system, obama famously kowtowed to putin, on missile defenses in eastern europe, particularly after the decapitation of the kazyinski cabinet, in place of the more maleable tusks,

  309. . . . the corrupt Ukrainian kleptocrats’ 8-year conflict against other Ukranian citizens . . .

    . . . the Ukrainian kleptocrats who have . . . waged war against their own Russian-speaking civilians . . .

    . . . the Russian government . . .

    . . . maybe the evil Ukrainian kleptocrats stage another false flag . . .

    The repetition of absurd, previously-discounted blood libel falsehoods and the hysterical contrast in language when referring to the two sides is very revealing. Who benefits by westerners being made scared of the conflict? The same as benefits from a negotiated settlement that forces concessions from one side only.

    It’s similar to what Instapundit says about leftie peaceniks – they’re not anti-war, they’re on the other side.

  310. Or we can just say; “Fine Vlad, whatever you want.”

    Yeah, that’s a good summary of what all these Brosheviks are promoting.

  311. I have my doubts that foreigners see the US and its EU protectorates as any sort of bastion of freedom. Certainly there is no reason for the people ruling Russia to think that . . .

    It’s amazing how many of them, Russians included, make the journey to go to those places, sometimes at great jeopardy. Not many Finns were fleeing to Russia at the start of this.

  312. if they were Bolsheviks much of the west would not be bothered by the matter, as only muggeridge or robert conquest, really noted the holomodor to any real extent, and there are still apologists at mont clair state or sheila fitzpatrick, one of whose prize pupils was nellie ohr
    future CIA contractor with Fusion GPS, so lets be very clear on the matter,

    most of the gerontocracy that reigns in the Capitol, like Pelosi Kerry and Biden, had no real qualms about Brezhnev, or Chernenko, nor the scribes like strobe talbott,

  314. the upa for all their faults (and there successors seem intent on repeating them, neadlessly) held off the Polish and Soviet Armies in the carpathian mountains, for four years, somewhat like the escambray front did against fidel in the era after Giron Beach,

  315. one of the few academics who had any real grasp of the soviet mindset was the late richard pipes, his judgement was dismissed because as a Pole what would he know about Soviet perfidy, this was the argument that Soviet tools like Talbott and Scheer raised against him and General Rowny,

  316. This may be the stupidest thing I’ve read in a long time:
    https://nypost.com/2022/04/09/putin-may-use-ukraine-war-to-meddle-in-us-politics-report/

    “Russian President Vladimir Putin might use President Biden’s support for Ukraine as a reason to interfere in upcoming American elections, US intelligence officials have assessed.”

    As if he needed a special reason. It doesn’t seem to occur to these “intelligence” officials that they are being paid to stop that.

  317. The repetition of absurd, previously-discounted blood libel falsehoods…

    Falsehoods? Blood libel? Says who?

    I’ve already noted my opinion that one pro-Russian source is nonsense- but I’ve also been aware that the blessed Ukrainians have been outed as a thoroughly corrupt regime by such Russian propaganda outfits as the New York Times. In my view neither the corrupt Russian regime nor the corrupt Ukrainian regime is owed a single thing by the American people. I think we should allow those regimes to kill each other until they have both had their fill of killing. Perhaps then the survivors will recall that they were once countrymen, or perhaps they won’t. Regardless, I don’t care what happens to either bunch, my concern is the fate of the United States.

    Who benefits by westerners being made scared of the conflict?

    What? By “westerners” I can only assume you mean “Americans,” because for all intents and purposes all the dying in defense of Western Civilization has been done by Americans since well before most westerners alive today were born.

    Yes, I know that there were various detachments of European soldiers deployed in support of the Afghanistan and Iraq adventures- but despite the individual bravery of these soldiers their home governments generally wanted nothing to do with these deployments- and I still recall how the British government refused to send their soldiers into Basra during the Iraq War, because it understood a lot of them would have been killed.

    The same as benefits from a negotiated settlement that forces concessions from one side only.

    My problem here is that I don’t give a rat’s anus about either side. I have real trouble figuring out why I’m supposed to favor one side over the other in this squabble involving foreigners I don’t care about. Unlike Mitt Romney or Joe Biden, I’m not getting a kickback from the foreign aid payments American taxpayers are forced to send to Ukraine- of course at gunpoint, because that’s how the regime rolls- hence I feel no reason to pretend I care about the outcome.

    Except, of course, I don’t want to see my country nuked because the idiot grifters of the regime think they’ll be able to grift yet more wealth from Russia if they can replace Putin.

    It’s similar to what Instapundit says about leftie peaceniks – they’re not anti-war, they’re on the other side.

    I’m on the side of the American people. I think we have spent more than enough blood and treasure attempting to make the world safe for…well, what’s the slogan this war?

    I’m now well into my Smedley Butler phase- war is a racket- and I want no more of it. If Ukraine et al want the Russian regime replaced, let them pay the butcher’s bill.

    Leave us out of it.

  318. It’s amazing how many of them, Russians included, make the journey to go to those places, sometimes at great jeopardy. Not many Finns were fleeing to Russia at the start of this.

    It’s not amazing, because when they emigrate they’re paid in dollars and euros, which almost always nets them a vast raise. For now.

    They may or may not care about the culture of the country they move to- and very often the whole reason they’re allowed in is because the local establishment realizes full well that the polices that local regime is enforcing are not popular with the natives.

    Foreign votes are a great help at retaining power.

  319. Falsehoods? Blood libel? Says who?

    I say. I said it above in response to Gavin Longmuir. I listed the examples. Examples by him, not by you.

    Your isolationist stance has been noted. It’s a perfectly reasonable opinion.

  320. PJF — Old fruit, you are getting to be a bore. For you, the clock started and the world began when the Russian army crossed the border into the sections of the Ukraine that had been under attack from the innocent Ukrainian Government for 8 long years. Oops! I did it again — I was supposed to say when the Russians invaded the peaceful Ukraine.

    Ignoring everything that happened before your world started does not make you a better Ukrainian devotee — it makes you blind. Equally, recognizing the context in which Russia involved itself in the Ukrainian civil war does not make one a Russian supporter — it makes one a realistic observer of a far-off foreign situation.

    We have to be careful about the Rah! Rah! propaganda over the Ukrainian situation. Clearly, the Political Class is trying very hard to get the empty-headed followers of fashion on board for active involvement in a war on the other side of the world which should be no concern of Americans — a war which will not stay on the other side of the world if our Political Class continues on its current path. Time to use your head, PJF.

  322. Ironically one of pipes star pupils fiona hill enabled the russian hoax through her detailee igor danchenko (she was also the one that cautioned against sending weapons to ukraine) a counterpart to steele in british intelligence

  323. Oops! I did it again . . .

    Yes, Gavin Longmuir, you did. Repeating the lie doesn’t make it true.

    Since Russia seized Crimea and fomented rebellion in the east there has been a low grade war going on. The Ukrainians built substantial defensive positions to stop more of their territory being stolen. Far from this lazy, idiotic notion of the “evil Ukrainian kleptocrats” heartlessly shelling their own people (just for a laugh?), the Ukrainians have been defending their land (and resources) from further Russian theft. As has been mentioned before, attacks were going both ways. It was a war. The same war as the current invasion.

  324. PJF — How does it benefit yourself to ignore the facts? The roots of the Russian decision to intervene in the Ukrainian civil war run deep back into time. When you pretend that that history does not exist, the only person you are fooling is yourself.

    Remember that you are not supporting your local soccer team by going Rah! Rah! for the Ukrainian leadership. This is a very serious geopolitical situation where the resulting “soccer riot” could end up destroying much of Western civilization. This is a time for clear-headed thinking, and honest evaluation of the facts.

    Some people seem to want to see thermonuclear war — and if they don’t get sensible soon, they may get their wish. Those of us who want to see an end to the conflict need to recognize that this is not a black & white situation. We need to understand the background in order to find a path to defusing the conflict.

  325. Funny how your “path to defusing the conflict” always comes down to giving Putin everything he wants. That, just as with your average three year old, never seems to result in lasting peace.

  326. MCS: “Funny how your “path to defusing the conflict” always comes down to giving Putin everything he wants.”

    Don’t be shy, MCS! Come on — be constructive. What is “your” proposed path to defusing the conflict?

  327. Once the bullets start flying, the easy answers are gone. There isn’t any more appetite for some sort of ground support from our NATO allies than here and considering their capabilities, that’s just as well. As a practical matter, we can’t provide more sophisticated weapons than we already have. The Ukrainians wouldn’t be in a position to deploy a Patriot battery for example. Their late Warsaw Pact allies may still have some hardware that they are familiar with like those Migs or a few tanks.

    The true scope of the Russian debacle is starting to be apparent back in Russia, the cost of the sanctions is just starting to bite and the Russian energy leverage is less every day. I doubt Putin is in any immediate jeopardy but he doesn’t exist in a vacuum either. He’s running out of just about everything, he most especially doesn’t have the deep reserves of cannon fodder that have made previous Russian “victories” possible and filled innumerable graves in the past. If he has significant troop reserves, the time to deploy them is long past. Now his troops in the field have been fighting for a month. I’d bet his material situation is even more dire than his personnel. A man may driven forward at gun point, not so a broken tank.

    All Ukraine can do is not collapse. As long as they don’t, Russia continues to bleed. Ukraine has been served ample notice that any sort of surrender will not end their bleeding, merely grant license and scope to the Russians for further depredations. As long as the Ukrainians can shoot back, they have a vote.

    Time is not on Russia’s side. Ukraine’s situation is probably looking up with the “withdrawal” from Kiev. Russia still doesn’t seem to be able to put more than a couple of planes in the air at a time. Thus they lose the ability to project force into the interior except by using expensive and ever diminishing missiles.

    My proposed path is to just continue on the path we have stumbled upon. Let’s not get in the way of Russia’s further decline.

  328. My proposed path is to just continue on the path we have stumbled upon. Let’s not get in the way of Russia’s further decline.

    Holy fscking sweet jebus. Forgive me for once again butting in a conversation Gavin is having with someone else- but we haven’t merely stumbled upon this path and we aren’t somehow getting in the way of Russia’s decline by potentially ceasing to support the Deep State’s efforts to overthrow the present Russian regime. Russia has enthusiastically embraced decline, without our input. Putin’s various actions may or may not be working to reverse that, but I don’t care.

    We are actively and willfully taking a side against Russia, costing us many billions of dollars, inspiring various nations to ditch the US dollar as a medium for trade, and potentially causing Russia to use nuclear weapons against us and Europe. This wasn’t a clumsy stumble, it was a deliberate policy decided upon years ago. There has been a clip going around on twitter, with John McCain and Lindsay Graham declaring that Ukraine’s struggle was our struggle, etc- and that 2017 was going to be the year of offense against Russia. Side, taken, years before Russia invaded the Deep State’s Ukrainian playground.

    The true scope of the Russian debacle is starting to be apparent back in Russia, the cost of the sanctions is just starting to bite and the Russian energy leverage is less every day.

    How do you know this? Russian news sources are apparently now blocked throughout the entire west- so how do you what is actually happening in Russia?

    https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2022/04/09/brics-ministers-of-finance-hold-a-meeting-it-is-time-to-replace-western-financial-trade-mechanisms-and-remove-the-dollar/

    I suspect MSNBC isn’t giving you the whole picture. But your mileage may vary, as the saying goes.

    Thank you for the opportunity to vent. You too, PJF.

    I hope I’m wrong and you’re both right.

  329. Dominoes are falling from lebanon to peru, kind of the way the opening to the road warrior shows us

  330. “We are actively and willfully taking a side against Russia, costing us many billions of dollars”
    Not many billions, maybe a hundred million or so, pocket change. Russia has stolen a rope, tied one end to a tree, the other around their own neck and stepped over a cliff, the least we can do is stand out of the way. We’re supposed to run away and hide every time they rattle their nuclear skeleton? We have paid many billions of dollars to be able to counter that with the only plausible answer anyone’s been able to come up with since Trinity. Maybe “Star Wars” would have offered a more palatable alternative, we’ll never know. You play nuclear brinkmanship with the weapons you have.

    Accusing me of watching MSNBC is a step too far, in an earlier age, I’d be forced to demand satisfaction. The internet leaks both ways, just as the Russians know we are saddled with the most inept government since Buchanan, we can see the funerals of the heroes returned from the front in the zinc coffins. We can see the empty shelves.

  331. MCS: “My proposed path is to just continue on the path we have stumbled upon. Let’s not get in the way of Russia’s further decline.”

    Not much of a plan, is it? The path we have stumbled upon is to become an active belligerent, albeit with limited presence on the ground. And apparently the big hope is that the Ukrainians will bleed out Russia, albeit at very high human cost to themselves. Then the hope is that Russia will quietly accept defeat, and go home. That could happen, but it does not seem at all likely.

    We are all limited by the fog of war and by the tidal wave of Western-financed pro-Ukrainian propaganda — we know we are being lied to, big time! But we do know that the noble Ukrainian government spent 8 years failing to win a civil war against under-equipped Ukrainian citizens in the east. Who will bleed out faster — the Ukrainians or the Russians?

    We also see the relentlessly increasing anti-Russian rhetoric from NATO — fighting words as well as fighting weapons. It is much more likely that if Russia starts to lose this war, it will strike back at those sideline belligerents. If President Putin is replaced, it is almost certain that he will be replaced by someone who is more hard-line, someone more willing to take the fight to the countries that are propping up Ukraine’s rather undemocratic rulers.

    The great risk is that we have stumbled once more into 1914. Rather than foolish bravado and wishful thinking, we in the West should be striving to defuse the conflict. Any other course is madness.

  332. There has been a clip going around on twitter, with John McCain and Lindsay Graham declaring that Ukraine’s struggle was our struggle, etc- and that 2017 was going to be the year of offense against Russia. Side, taken, years before Russia invaded the Deep State’s Ukrainian playground.

    Well, Twitter clips. Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014. And the “side” was taken against Russia long before that, ever since it was clear the Russian Federation was going to do its best to be USSR MkII.

    As to the BRICS thing, they’ve been trying to set up an alternative to the US$ based economy long before the current unpleasantness. It’s their own agenda, whatever the US does or does not do; whether it is weak or strong.

    Elvira Nabiullina, governor of the Russian Central Bank, in 2014:
    “BRICS partners the establishment of a system of multilateral swaps that will allow to transfer resources to one or another country [ . . . ] If the current trend continues, soon the dollar will be abandoned by most of the significant global economies and it will be kicked out of the global trade finance. Washington’s bullying will make even former American allies choose the anti-dollar alliance instead of the existing dollar-based monetary system.”

    What’s amazing is how easily this Russian propaganda has made its way into the minds of ostensibly conservative, patriotic Americans.

  333. To call it a plan is a wild exaggeration I admit. Of course, I was no more consulted in the run-up than anyone else here. It’s more that things are proceeding painfully and bloodily in a direction I believe is long term positive, with Russia’s ability to create problems further diminished. It’s pretty clear that the Ukrainians are going to fight any way they can for as long as they can or until some solution acceptable to them presents itself and I don’t have a problem with supplying them with weapons.

    At the same time our erstwhile allies have been given a solid kick toward looking to their own defense rather than depending on us. Talk about untold billions of dollars down the drain.

    As I said, right up to the point where Germany starts eyeing Alsace or Silesia, positive though painful and bloody.

  334. Interesting to see the Russians issuing “terrorist” alerts in Crimea and inside Russia. This follows fighting and sabotage well behind Russian lines in the last couple of days, including in Donetsk city. The alerts could just be anxiety or some form of agitprop, but maybe Ukrainian special forces have gone deep.

  335. The financial consequences of the economic war on Russia, just got more complicated.

    the global financial system appears to be the larger issue.

    From the outset of the Russian military operation into Ukraine, it was obvious the western alliance was intent on an almost ‘all or nothing’ confrontation with Russia. The only limits to what the alliance was willing to do was trigger a nuclear showdown though direct military action against Russia to protect the non-NATO country of Ukraine.

    The NATO and western government response was a fast system of financial sanctions intended to cripple the Russian economy. However, Russia responded to those actions with countermoves on the trade front, beginning to establish the first ever non-Euro and non-dollar-based trade system. In essence a financial trading system created by the BRICS group (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa).

    See if Germany can avoid paying in rubles for gas. Biden is trying to convince India to play along. It’s a ZOOM call so he can still have his teleprompter ready.

  336. this is the language of the opposite powers, see the postil piece, which was illuminating on the strength and weaknesses of the various forces, the system arises from similar roots, kuchma and yeltsin who presided over the creation of the oligarchs in the 90s, hydras of similar nationalisms, navalny is perhaps the only figure who was uncorrupted by the post soviet system, that chubais and co, put into motion,

  337. The financial consequences of the economic war on Russia, just got more complicated.

    Not according to that conservativetreehouse piece, which is just a repeat of their usual “OMG, WEF vs BRICS – the dollar is falling” diatribe with a hilariously flimsy link to Finland and Sweden potentially joining NATO. There is absolutely nothing new there about a wider financial impact of sanctions on Russia.

    “This outlook puts Sweden and Finland essentially in a position of choosing banking sides. NATO supporting the maintenance of Euros and Dollars, and the BRICS group, representing almost two thirds of the world population, fighting to go in another direction.”

    LOL

    Hey guys, what should we do? Join proven NATO to protect ourselves against our demonstratively beligerent and aggressive, and frankly batshit, neighbour – or financially join with a set of upstart kleptocrats, communists and economic basketcases? Yeah, wow, I mean there’s that longstanding defensive alliance that’s already beaten the Russians once – but look at all those peeeople.

  338. I wonder just how much wheat and other grain Russia was in the habit of getting from Ukraine? The Russians have caused more than one famine, could they be on the way to another?

    The most common destinations for Ukraine’s exports are China, Poland, Russia, Turkey, and Egypt.
    “https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/these-are-ukraines-top-trade-partners/ss-AAVAox2”

    So yeah, At least Russia will be competing with all these for grain. Wonder if Australia takes Rubles?

  340. Yeah, wow, I mean there’s that longstanding defensive alliance that’s already beaten the Russians once – but look at all those peeeople.

    Ignoring the problem is one way to deal with it. We have a regime of economic illiterates upending the world economic system that has favored us since Bretton Woods. I don’t plan to be here in 10 years. Good luck to you,.

  341. Big Picture-the usual half truths and less than half truths dressed up as gospel. Who wouldn’t take anything Saddam said to the bank, he only wanted a few little pieces of Kuwait, for now. He may have been an implacable foe of Iranian terrorism but only because it interfered with his own. Whoever’s opinion that is, he’s welcome to it and I’m free to call BS. Whatever was right or wrong about our Iraqi adventures, the world became a better place the moment he drew his last breath.

  342. Maliki the iranian puppet selected by sulemaini (who liz cheney paid out, thats why she was as sad as the rancors keeper) godfather of the islamic state was better i tend to doubt thar

  343. Not many billions, maybe a hundred million or so, pocket change.

    Wait, what? We just sent Ukraine something like $15 billion worth of aid and I have no idea how much we sent them them before that, aside from the $6 billion to pay for the coup that replaced the pro-Russian government.

    We’re supposed to run away and hide every time they rattle their nuclear skeleton?

    I’d suggest we stop meddling in the internal affairs of foreigners so they have no reason to “rattle their nuclear skeleton.” I’d also suggest we spend money of developing enough advanced weaponry that our foreign adversaries think they have no hope of defeating or successfully nuking us. Instead, the regime has been busy antagonizing almost everyone while simultaneously working hard to weaken the actual US military- so much so that we don’t even have hypersonic missiles, unlike Russia.

    Accusing me of watching MSNBC is a step too far, in an earlier age, I’d be forced to demand satisfaction.

    Yeah, sorry about that. I literally typed in the first mainstream media outfit that popped into my head without thinking about how nasty it was to accuse any intelligent person of watching that idiotic channel. My bad.

  344. Well, Twitter clips. Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014. And the “side” was taken against Russia long before that, ever since it was clear the Russian Federation was going to do its best to be USSR MkII.

    So just when did it become clear to the Deep State that Russia was attempting to become USSR II? I recall no sign of such a thing before the pro-Russian government of Ukraine was overthrown, which was followed up directly by the Russian move into Crimea, etc.

    I found that clip striking because it backed up claims that the Deep State has been working for regime change in Russia for a good long time. I recall reading of such a policy years ago, including the claim that Yeltsin retired unexpectedly because he wasn’t successful enough at resisting attempts by the globalist cabal to do to Russia what they’ve done to the United States.

    When I see Lindsay Graham screaming to a Ukrainian audience that their struggle is our struggle, 2017 is going to be the year of offense against Russia, etc, I think it gives credence to the idea that the longstanding goal of the Deep State has been regime change in Russia all along.

    As to the BRICS thing, they’ve been trying to set up an alternative to the US$ based economy long before the current unpleasantness.

    In my opinion, those efforts failed because not many folks saw any particular need to stop using the US dollar, any more than people in Russia saw any reason to not use VISA credit cards.

    That’s now changed. You should know why.

    What’s amazing is how easily this Russian propaganda has made its way into the minds of ostensibly conservative, patriotic Americans.

    Uh-oh. Am I now guilty of badthink, because I don’t agree with the regime’s policy of attempting to overthrow a foreign government far away that I don’t care about? Are you going to report me to the KGB- oops, I mean the FBI- as a traitor?

    It’s sort-of amazing how dissent goes from the highest sort patriotism to treason, depending upon which political party is in power.

  345. It’s sort-of amazing how dissent goes from the highest sort patriotism to treason, depending upon which political party is in power.

    Yup, and those of us concerned about little kids being groomed in school are “obsessed with pedophilia.” Projection is almost as powerful as sex in driving behavior.

  346. Xennady: “I found that clip striking because it backed up claims that the Deep State has been working for regime change in Russia for a good long time.”

    Interesting detailed background on that comes from Stephen F. Cohen’s book “War With Russia?”, published in 2019 but essentially a collection of talks he gave over several years on WABC radio’s “The John Batchelor Show”, warning about the Deep State/media provoking trouble with Russia. A key point about Cohen’s writing is that it is not 20/20 hindsight — he was reporting what he saw about the way things were going at the time. Here is something he wrote on April 2, 2014 — 8 years ago:

    “A new Cold War divide is already descending in Europe — not in Berlin but on Russia’s borders. Worse may follow. If NATO forces move towards Poland’s border with Ukraine, as is being called for in Washington and Europe, Moscow may send its forces into eastern Ukraine. The result would be a danger of war comparable to the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.”

    Eight years later, our “leaders” have pushed us all onto that road. Patriotism is not mouthing Rah! Rah! for the Ukrainians; it is doing what little we can to change the direction of our own “government” which has deliberately engineered today’s very dangerous situation. The USA should now be trying to de-escalate the situation, not make it worse.

  347. You’re too busy wittering on about the “deep state” to have noticed that the “deep state” has been trying to cave to the Russians for weeks. They, and the Germans, are the ones pushing for a deal to snatch certain defeat from a possible victory. What else would you expect from such a vile set of corrupt and craven surrender shills.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4QoRME6VbM
    Note: when Keane says “Boris Yeltsin”, he means Boris Johnson.

    You’re getting your way (this was always on the cards, as I mentioned when I first started commenting).

  348. PJF: “a deal to snatch certain defeat from a possible victory”

    What does that “possible victory” for the Ukrainian kleptocrats look like, PJF? Would ordinary Ukrainians perceive it as victory?

    Yes, we can imagine a full open military campaign by NATO (foreigners on Ukrainian soil) which would push back Russia. But how would Russia react to a more blatant intervention of NATO in the conflict? It is fairly obvious that Russia cannot back down. NATO involvement will lead to global thermonuclear war — and that will not be good for us ordinary people in the Ukraine, in Europe, in the US, and in Russia.

    The only rational course of action now is to work towards a settlement and a cessation of the violence. But rationality has been thrown out the window. It is 1914 all over again in the killing fields of Europe.

  351. The victor will, as always be decided by whichever side collapses. The Russians probably have the wherewithal to occupy some part of Ukraine indefinitely, but a much smaller part then they now claim. What they can’t do is somehow force Ukraine to capitulate. They took their best shot at that and came up far short.

    Ukraine probably lacks the power to totally eject the Russians but can make the continued occupation very expensive.The Russians will have to shrink the area under dispute to what they can defend.

    So, no victory and no peace for anyone for some period of time, possibly years. It will take Russia years to rebuild the material lost and expended though I think their personnel problem might be past saving. They may buy some Chinese knock offs, but that will take money that they will find increasingly hard to get. The Ukrainians will be beholden to their new Western allies, a relationship that is bound to get more complicated as time goes on. Ukrainian corruption didn’t magically end when the Russians crossed the border. Their personnel problem is about as bad as Russia’s.

  352. “It is 1914 all over again in the killing fields of Europe.”

    You might be thinking 1914, but the Europeans are thinking 1938, while Putin is thinking of
    the betrayal in 1991. Does anyone think, or just hope that Putin will stop at Eukraine?

  353. MCS: “Ukraine probably lacks the power to totally eject the Russians”

    Considering that the Ukranian government had been prosecuting a nasty civil war against the Russian-speaking minority in the east for 8 long years, causing thousands of civilian casualties, without succeeding in eliminating (Can we echo Biden* and say “genociding”?) that minority — it is probably an excellent guess that Ukrainian forces will fail to eject the Russians.

    There are no White Hats in this situation, but the more we learn about the Ukraine, the less respect I have for their “leaders”. Definitely not worth having your neighborhood nuked for them.

    This conflict between Ukrainian nationalists and Russian-speaking Ukrainians seems to have analogies to the long-running Catholic/Protestant conflict in Ireland. The solution to the conflict there was partition of the island. Partition of the current territory of the Ukraine looks like a realistic solution to stopping the fighting before it goes global & nuclear.

  355. The Ukrainians get to decide. If some settlement that they find acceptable comes forward, they will probably take it. We’ll have to see if some sort of “cease fire” is arraigned. These always mean that the shooting will restart anytime one side thinks they have an advantage or can blame it on the other.

    Since it’s Ukraine’s border, the Russians are free to withdraw at any time without any realistic chance that they would be pursued. As long as they are on the wrong side, they’re fair game. That’s the way borders work.

  356. Yup, and those of us concerned about little kids being groomed in school are “obsessed with pedophilia.” Projection is almost as powerful as sex in driving behavior.

    This sort of thing always reminds me of Abraham Lincoln’s Cooper Union speech. He made what I take as a joke about the South acting as a highwayman robbing a stagecoach who complained that if the victim didn’t give him what he wanted, he’d shoot him- and then the victim would be a murderer.

    Let the pedophiles shriek that normal people are obsessed with pedophilia when we object to it. And then let’s have an election on that issue, like Abraham Lincoln did.

    Eight years later, our “leaders” have pushed us all onto that road.

    No disagreement to this comment, but I’d just like to take the opportunity to mention that since the war began I’ve seen multiple examples of people who’ve essentially predicted exactly what has happened. Good evidence that the Deep State knew full well what the outcome of their policies would be, if they continued them. Hence, also, that they wanted this war.

    You’re too busy wittering on about the “deep state” to have noticed that the “deep state” has been trying to cave to the Russians for weeks.

    I find this hilarious. We have the senile “leader of the free world” bleating on about war crimes and genocide, while billions of dollars worth of “aid” and weapons are delivered to Ukraine, now including items not offered before along with even moar intelligence data to be used against the military of a country with which we are supposedly not at war. We have yet another government overthrown (in Pakistan) after Deep State threats, along with attempts to dictate to India what India’s Russian trade policy should be. We’ve even seen the Deep State bleat at China.

    This isn’t what caving in to the Russians would look like. If the Deep State actually wanted to end this war, all it would have to do would be to tell Zelinsky, behind the scenes, that he would stop getting fresh infusions of wealth and weapons unless he agreed to a deal.

    Anyway, I’d just like to make mention of a few historical bits that may or may not interest all the folks enraged that Russia dared attack the Deep State’s money laundering hub.

    I think the aforementioned Deep State is using a tactic that goes at least as far back as the Mexican War- that is, arrange events such that your desired adversary attacks you, instead of you having to attack them. This happened prior to the Mexican War, the Civil War, World War II- and now this war.

    Believing that, I have no interest in further subsidies of American wealth delivered to Ukraine, for any reason.

  357. It might be just a coincidence, never underestimate the incompetence of Russian sailors, but the Moskava, a missile cruiser and the flag ship of their Black Sea is being towed back to port on fire if it doesn’t sink. The Ukrainians are taking credit for a missile attack that looks plausible. Considering the state of Russian ship building and maintenance, it’s launched it’s last missile.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qLCeh-zjrI

  358. it is their flagship, but then it’s 43 years old, it’s survived the Georgian war, and the Syrian engagement, which was the US Navy ship, that had that terrible act of negligence in the late 80s,

  359. MCS: “never underestimate the incompetence of Russian sailors”

    That may well be true, MCS, but a little humility on our part might be in order.

    After all, the Brits — whose Royal Navy used to Rule the Waves — lost HMS Sheffield to an Argentinian missile attack in the Falklands war. And the US Navy lost the hugely valuable amphibious assault ship USS Bonhomme Richard to fire while not under attack by anyone, and actually tied up in San Diego harbor.

    Even without an enemy in sight, the Norwegian navy frigate HNoMS Helge Ingstad managed to collide with a tanker as big as an island — it is called “doing a Fitzsgerald” after the US Navy destroyer which failed to notice a container ship in its path. Both of those incidents might have had something to do with female deck officers — perhaps not a problem in the Russian navy.

    Make a mistake on land, and there is a chance one can walk away. The sea is a much less forgiving environment.

  360. I didn’t say or imply anything about our navy. There is no shortage of evidence that we have very serious problems and have had for a long time. Nothing happens overnight. It remains to be seen whether or not we are still capable of designing and building ships. The last few we tried have been more or less disasters.

  361. And while we are on the humility kick, let’s not forget that even the Iraqis (!) managed to hit the USS Stark with two missiles in the Persian Gulf — and that was back in 1987 before the US Navy sacrificed competence to wokeness with trannie admirals and over-promoted female pilots who have not quite got the hang of landing an F-35 on a carrier.

    With all that said, I do hope you are right, MCS, that the fire on the Moskva was due to Russian incompetence rather than to enemy action. Because if Russia concludes the loss of the ship was due to NATO missiles transported recently into the Ukraine, the possibility of a significant escalation in the war cannot be ruled out.

    Know your enemy, as Sun Tsu wrote all those years ago. That is very difficult for us in the West, where the media feeds us mostly cartoon characters and propaganda. Maybe Putin is as evil as the same media told us Trump was. But people who can understand Russian present a different picture — Putin is being criticized in Russia for being too cautious and unwilling to do something like the 78 day bombing of Yugoslavia which NATO did when we attacked that sovereign nation in 1999.

    Here is an interesting link from someone who understands Russian. Worth reading, even if one is all-in for the Ukrainian team. Know your enemy:

    https://gilbertdoctorow.com/2022/04/14/the-russian-way-of-war-part-two/
    “As regards military action, the consensus of the panelists was also in favor of all-out war on Ukraine, to hell with collateral civilian casualties. The war must be ended quickly, decisively and with minimum further Russian casualties. Period. As several noted, it is highly likely that television viewers are also confused by Russia’s ‘softly, softly’ approach till now. While they trust the Commander in Chief, they want more decisive action in the air and on the ground.”

  363. Im reminded of the northern war that charles x11 waged with peter the. Great around 1703, at one point peter was willing to deal but that time passed and sweden lost out.

  364. Well, that sounds like a dutiful recitation of Russian rationalization for this debacle. My feeling is that if they had any more, they’d have done something about Kiev fiasco rather than just turning tail and dragging what they could back to the border. They’re tapped out, They’re out of men, out of pretty much everything. They can probably maintain some sort of presence in Eastern Ukraine as long as they’re willing to pay the price of fighting an insurgency. Still waiting to see more than two or three Russian planes in the air at the same time.

    While our navy has some problems, no other navy in the world can support the same tempo of operations and deployments within an order of magnitude. Neither the Russian nor Chinese navies are capable of operating more than one or two ships at a time out of sight of their home port.

  365. In a weird coincidence, one of these Slava-class ships visited Norfolk just before I left. I happened to read article in a navy publication about what was observed of the insides. What I recall jumping out at me was the near complete absence of damage control equipment, at least compared to US Navy ships of the time. Hence I wouldn’t be surprised that this- the renamed Slava– sank after damage of the sort that many US ships survived easily, simply because the crew lacked enough tools to do anything about it.

    Also- since I’ve just read someone claiming this event is a “game changer”- anyone remember how the sinking of the Nationalist cruiser Baleares by Republican destroyers changed the course of the Spanish Civil War?

    Me neither.

  366. It’s not a game changer but it is adding a big increment to the cost and undeniable evidence that the Russian military isn’t some sort of unstoppable juggernaut anymore. Russian doctrine has always been that individual units don’t matter, there will be an bottomless deluge of manpower behind them. This doesn’t translate well to sea power. It really doesn’t translate at all when your whole army has around 200,000 men deployable. This just isn’t the Soviet Army that could lose 6,000 tanks in a single battle and keep coming.

    Where this does translate is to Taiwan where there are hundreds if not thousands of capable anti-ship missiles deployed. Let’s hope Xi’s taking notes. Imagine D-Day when every ship was under continual attack form more than 100 miles out? Didn’t think so.

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