Tag: Russia

Battle for Avdiivka Over. Ukrainian Retreat Imperiled.

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The Russians have worn down the Ukrainian troops in Avdiivka to the point that a rescue mission was organized to extract the defenders before it was too late.  Now the rescuers must save themselves along with their besieged brethren.

Avdiivka has become the new Bakhmut where the Russians have ground down their adversaries in a war of attrition.  Both sides have probably lost several thousand men and now the numerical superiority of the Russians has won them the city, or what’s left of it.

The next act will be the retreat by the Ukrainian forces down the few roads that can accommodate war vehicles.  The Russians have encircled the city and the next day or so will witness whether the retreating army can escape decimation.

This war has been one long series of horrific clashes.  With western aid drying up it will be surprising if the Ukrainians manage to continue this war of attrition for much longer.

US and EU Began Preparing Ukraine for Negotiations Last Month

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So now that the US, EU and Ukraine know what we already knew six months ago they’re letting it leak out to the general public.

“The conversations have included very broad outlines of what Ukraine might need to give up to reach a deal, the officials said. Some of the talks, which officials described as delicate, took place last month during a meeting of representatives from more than 50 nations supporting Ukraine, including NATO members, known as the Ukraine Defense Contact Group, the officials said.”

The problem with those talks is they don’t include Russia.

“The Biden administration does not have any indication that Russian President Vladimir Putin is ready to negotiate with Ukraine, two U.S. officials said. Western officials say Putin still believes he can “wait out the West,” or keep fighting until the U.S. and its allies lose domestic support for funding Ukraine or the struggle to supply Kyiv with weapons and ammunition becomes too costly, officials said.”

What’s wrong with this whole picture.  We convinced the Ukrainians that between their manpower and our weapons the Russians would be crushed in months.  That is probably because we believed that Ukraine was just a foreign possession of Russia.  And they wouldn’t expend the blood and treasure to fight for it.

But there are millions of Russians for whom the Donbass is their ancestral home.  It would be like California breaking away from the US and the Mexicans living there trying to force the Anglo residents of Northern California to give up their language and culture.  If it came down to pictures of Sacramento being ethnically cleansed would it be surprising if the US stepped in and tried to annex the Anglo areas?  I don’t think so.  Well at least if we had a president who didn’t hate America.

After this I’m guessing the Baltic states and the Eastern Europeans will begin reevaluating their relations with the US, the EU and Russia.  Following the lead of the US in matters of war has been shown over the last twenty years or so to be a perilous strategy.

So the geniuses in the Pentagon and the State Department had already figured this out months ago but continued to spout all the nonsense about the breakout that was about to sweep away the Russians in Crimea.  One thing though, the reality of what will end up happening there should make it easier for the Republican House to put a stop to that $61 billion Biden wants to finish off the few remaining Ukrainian men.

I wonder where in the US Zelensky will end up retiring to?  Hopefully he’ll update his ensemble and stick to comedy but skip the piano playing.

The Truth Leaks Out of Kiev

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Up until this summer the audience in the West heard from their leaders and the media that

  • Ukraine was inflicting enormous casualties on Russia while suffering very light losses to their own troops.
  • Russia’s population was dead set against the war and only prisoners were fighting on the Russian side.
  • The Russian troops and officers were incompetent and had rock bottom morale.
  • That with the provision of advanced western weapons and training Ukraine would sweep away the Russians and recapture all of the Eastern provinces including Crimea.

During the summer and into the fall word started getting out that the Ukrainian counter-offensive, bolstered by Western tanks and other armored vehicles was suffering tens of thousands of casualties and wasn’t able to punch through the defensive lines that the Russians had prepared in Zaporizhzhia to protect Crimea from assault.  Now with the onset of winter many in America and Europe are starting to question whether the tens of billions of dollars in weapons and aid have accomplished anything more than facilitating a slaughter of Ukrainians and Russians without accomplishing anything worthwhile.

Finally, word is now leaking out of Ukraine that the leaders surrounding President Zelensky no longer share his almost religious belief that Ukraine can win the war they are engaged in.  And the news first broke in the periodical that had declared Zelensky “Man of the Year” in 2022, Time.

In an interview with Ukrainian leaders many parts of the real story come out.

“But his (Zelensky’s) convictions haven’t changed. Despite the recent setbacks on the battlefield, he does not intend to give up fighting or to sue for any kind of peace. On the contrary, his belief in Ukraine’s ultimate victory over Russia has hardened into a form that worries some of his advisers. It is immovable, verging on the messianic. “He deludes himself,” one of his closest aides tells me in frustration. “We’re out of options. We’re not winning. But try telling him that.”

…

When I raised these claims with a senior military officer, he said that some commanders have little choice in second-guessing orders from the top. At one point in early October, he said, the political leadership in Kyiv demanded an operation to “retake” the city of Horlivka, a strategic outpost in eastern Ukraine that the Russians have held and fiercely defended for nearly a decade. The answer came back in the form of a question: With what? “They don’t have the men or the weapons,” says the officer. “Where are the weapons? Where is the artillery? Where are the new recruits?”

…

In some branches of the military, the shortage of personnel has become even more dire than the deficit in arms and ammunition. One of Zelensky’s close aides tells me that even if the U.S. and its allies come through with all the weapons they have pledged, “we don’t have the men to use them.”

Since the start of the invasion, Ukraine has refused to release official counts of dead and wounded. But according to U.S. and European estimates, the toll has long surpassed 100,000 on each side of the war. It has eroded the ranks of Ukraine’s armed forces so badly that draft offices have been forced to call up ever older personnel, raising the average age of a soldier in Ukraine to around 43 years. “They’re grown men now, and they aren’t that healthy to begin with,” says the close aide to Zelensky. “This is Ukraine. Not Scandinavia.””

And this is a Biden Administration cheerleader saying this.  If you read other sources they’re even more dire.

“Alone among his team, Zelensky seems not to understand how circumstances have changed. Shuster and TIME try their best to portray him as the last stalwart of the Ukrainian cause, but the fact that his own inner circle is the source of the torrent of revelations and complaints suggests that his immovability owes not to Churchillian resolve but rather to an impervious bunker mentality.”

What seems to be the case is the neo-cons have decided that bleeding Russia by genociding the Ukraine is a sensible policy.  Even people who despise Vladimir Putin and desire the United States to dominate in Eastern European politics should have enough basic humanity to recoil from what’s going on in Eastern Ukraine.  It’s just an update of 1914.  Meatgrinders in Bakhmut and Avdiivka are just senseless wars of attrition that kill and maim tens of thousands of men while yielding up only bombed out moonscapes to the victor.

Russia is bleeding but Ukraine is bleeding out.  Hopefully House Speaker Mike Johnson will have the good sense to put an end to this nightmarish quagmire of death.  If we stop sending them billions of dollars in “aid” the only ones who will lose will be the oligarchs that won’t be able to steal their chunk of the loot.  The rest of the Ukrainians can go back home and pick up what’s left of their lives and their future.

Statics and Dynamics

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Every chemical engineering student in my college had to take a smattering of other engineering courses to get his degree.  We took an EE (electrical engineering) course and an ME (mechanical engineering) course or two were equivalent to some of ours like thermodynamics and heat transfer (although usually our sections had some additional requirements that were specific to chemically reactive systems.  And we had to take a CE (Civil Engineering) course.  I think the text I used for the CE course was called “Statics and Dynamics.”  Here we talked about stress and strain and the different forces that needed to be calculated in order to specify the required strengths of materials used to design and construct a structure like a bridge or a dam.  And it was always stressed that a safety factor was always needed.  Even for the most cut and dry application that had been cookie cut for generations.  You always wanted the strengths of the components to be greater than any possible forces that could be credibly imagined, by some generous factor.  And the less well defined the risks the bigger the factor should be.  So, if you’re building a nuclear power plant, something that didn’t even exist within the living memory of people still alive today and which has enormous inherent risks, you don’t skimp on the materials of construction.  Ask the guy who designed the damping rods for the Chernobyl reactors.

Now as complicated as a bridge or a nuclear power plant design is imagine designing a global nuclear deterrence system based on mutually assured destruction with something like ten nuclear nation states all of which are in various uneasy states of enmity and competition with each other and three of which possess very large stockpiles of nuclear ICBMs.  The policies needed to maintain this balanced system mostly requires that the major players do not willingly attempt to destabilize the status quo through direct confrontation with each other.  And unbelievably we got through about seventy-five years of this without a single nuclear exchange between the nuclear armed states.  A miracle.

And probably the reason it all worked was because, for the most part, the system was a defensive crouch that provided a nuclear tripwire that the Soviets were afraid to cross and at the time we were still too smart to try.  But then the Soviet Union fell and we all stopped worrying about nuclear war and both sides thought to let things lay.  And that got us to 2000.  But then 9/11 happened and the neo-cons became politically important and ever since they’ve been wondering what would happen if we could leverage those wonderful relics of the last century, the ICBMs.  So, color revolutions became the thing to do and now arming former Soviet republics is the new game.

Well, here’s the thing.  Nuclear weapons as a defensive weapon is one thing.  Nukes as a tactical offensive threat, even one that you just talk about, is a totally different animal.  In fact, instead of being a stabilizing factor it’s a powerful destabilizing one

The analogy that is the basis of this whole essay is the difference between the strength of concrete in compression as opposed to against a shearing force.  You can take a concrete pier and load it vertically with the weight of a building.  This compressive force can be enormous and the pier is completely stable and far below the maximum loading it is designed for.  But take that same pier and mount it sideways and try to use it as a beam with the same weight cantilevered and it will fail.  That material does not have the same strength laterally as it has in compression.  It will fail catastrophically.  So, the engineer designing a structure has to know the strength of a component but also the correct circumstance in which to use it.

And that’s what we’re doing.  We’re trying to use nuclear deterrence as an offensive weapon.  It’s the shield we hide behind as we snipe at the Russians behind proxies, like the Ukrainians, the Poles and maybe the Balts.  We’re playing nuclear brinksmanship and we’re playing it badly.  We’ve just given the Russians the excuse to call in proxies of their own.  Possibly Hamas is the first of these.  Maybe after them come some Lebanese or other Iranian proxies only this time inside our border.  And maybe that’s what the neo-cons are hoping for.  But it’s a stupid play.  We did the Middle East invasion game after 9/11.  It was a disaster.  If we do it again with Russia and Iran and China as our enemies it will be a bigger disaster.  The nuclear deterrence won’t deter the conventional wars.  But if we push this whole rivalry too far it might just get us the nuclear war we thought could never happen.  Brilliant political malpractice.

So, the moral of the story is, make sure you hire a competent engineer when you’re building something that your life depends on.  In our case don’t hire Anthony Blinken and Joe Biden.  They’ve got collapse written all over them.

The Real Reset

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The Global American Empire (or whatever you prefer to call it) seems to be unravelling.  In a recent Wall Street Journal article, “The Rules-Based International Order Is Quietly Disintegrating” it was noted that Western institutions like the United Nations, the G-20, the World Court, the IMF and the World Trade Organization have fallen into disrepute and are routinely ignored or disparaged.

Evidence can be seen in the recent annual opening of the UN General Assembly in which Joe Biden was the only leader of the five permanent members of the Security Council to show up at all.  Now it’s obvious why Russia’s and even China’s leader isn’t travelling to New York City.  Even ignoring the threat of attack by homeless zombies and gang bangers America’s largest city is no longer neutral territory in this new cold war.

It’s not so much that the West has become suddenly weaker.  That has been a slow, steady process.  What has accelerated is the sense that the American Empire is no longer an honest broker between the various nations and power blocks.  Recent behavior has demonstrated that the West has become capricious and underhanded in its dealings with other nations both large and small.  Its actions in the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, Eastern Europe and Central Asia have been heavy-handed, arrogant and clumsy.  In fact, the Africans have recently stated that whereas the Chinese provide assistance on projects, the West provides lectures on LGBTQ awareness.  And that synchs up with the recent spate of coups in West Africa and the calls for the French and the Americans to remove their troops from the region.

The larger question is where does this trend lead?  Much of America’s power is based on its reputation for stability and competency both economically and politically.  None of those things seem true lately.  The COVID lockdowns and the political theater that characterizes the Biden administration and its military actions in Afghanistan and Ukraine all reinforce the impression of a country racked with muddled thinking and dangerous instability.  Because of this the actions of the Western nations no longer seem to have the clout they formerly possessed.

The prime example is the Ukraine debacle.  The West has been using economic sanctions against Russia and military assistance to Ukraine to punish Vladimir Putin for resisting the West’s plan to weaponize Ukraine and bring a hostile military power to the very border of Russia.

Against expectations, the sanctions have failed to crash the Russian economy and instead have badly damaged the economies of several European states including Germany which received a large part of its energy supply as Russian gas until the United States sabotaged the underwater pipeline that supplied the gas.

And the war itself is not going as expected with Ukraine fighting valiantly but finding its manpower exhausted and facing economic and societal ruin through the disruptions it’s suffering through.

And the war has fostered a much closer relationship between Russia and China.  China sees what has happened to Russia with Ukraine and they recognize a similar situation for themselves with respect to America’s attitude about Taiwan.  And this strategic partnership between China and Russia is strengthened by their economic and monetary relationship in the BRICS economic grouping which in addition to those two countries, includes India, Brazil and South Africa and soon will expand to include Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

So, all in all, “the West” is facing serious challenges to its economic and military supremacy for the first time since the end of the Cold War.  And without a doubt the trouble is almost completely self-inflicted.

The article finishes with this summary of the latest woes:

“States are imploding and the rule of law is disappearing across large parts of the world. In Latin America, narco-trafficking crime organizations have infiltrated or supplanted weak states. Something similar is happening in the Sahel, with jihadist groups and bandits openly defying the authority of shambolic governments. Russia, China and Iran are happily fishing in these troubled waters, with few signs of effective Western responses to a growing security threat. The ignominious collapse of French power across Africa has been more dramatic, but the palsied incompetence of American responses to the erosion of civil order among our own neighbors is at least equally disgraceful, and equally grave.”

Up until a few years ago I would have viewed this upending of the supremacy of the Western world order with horror.  Now I think it may be for the best and may clear the way for America to return to its correct mission, serving the needs and goals of the people who live here and let the world muddle through on its own.

There’s Chatter That Ukraine Will Blow Up the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant

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Several sources are claiming that in the next couple of days Ukraine will launch a false flag attack on the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP) and blame it on the Russians in order to convince NATO to declare war on Russia.  It sounds absurd.  But then again what isn’t absurd in this world?

Do I think it’s likely?  No, but would I be shocked if they did?  No.  This is reminiscent of the Nordstream pipeline attack.  Blame it on the Russians then finally admit it was Ukraine (or maybe us).

The Ukrainian “spring” counter-offensive is not going that well.  The NATO summit is happening next week in Vilnius.  A panic over radiation would allow angry posturing to break out in Vilnius.  Probably unlikely but you never know.

Yevgeny Prigozhin Declares War on Russia

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The head of the Wagner group has headed into Russia with his army.  Is Prigozhin crossing the Rubicon?  We’ll probably know very soon.  The outcome of this mutiny cannot be predicted.

Apparently the Russian military was trying to separate Prigozhin from his troops and he decided to forestall that by starting his own war!

I would say things are spinning out of control.  What this will mean to the larger war can only be imagined.  But obviously if the CIA has been hinting about coups occurring in Belarus then possibly this is related.

Stay tuned.

Update:

Putin addresses the Russian nation about the rebellion.

US, NATO and Ukraine Organize Peace Summit Without Russia

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This is hilarious.  Apparently the West will end the Ukraine war without involving the Russians.  Maybe they’ll leave a transcript of the terms in Vladimir Putin’s e-mail in-box so he won’t accidentally violate them.  I’m sure he’ll want to know that he’ll be handing back the provinces that he’s annexed and surrender himself to the Hague for war crimes prosecution.

“Kyiv has made a concerted effort in recent months to engage with countries such as China, Brazil and India. Ukraine is ready to talk with all countries and hear their opinions, Yermak said, including representatives of China and Brazil, who visited this month.
Zelensky’s 10-point peace plan calls for restoring Ukraine’s control over its territory, returning prisoners of war and prosecuting war crimes. It also proposes addressing nuclear safety, which it says is compromised by Russia’s occupation of a nuclear power plant, and food security, by protecting grain exports that are hampered by Russia’s invasion.”
I kind of doubt China will be coming on board for this farce.  I’m not so sure about India either.
This is my favorite line:

“The process is not possible without the whole world, including the leaders of the global south,” said Yermak, who is Zelensky’s top adviser.”

The whole world except the country they’re actually at war with.  Delusional and in fact embarrassing.

The Ukraine War Approaches Its Climax

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Now that the Battle of Bakhmut is over everyone is wondering what the next step will be in this war.  Currently there have been incursions into Russia proper by Ukrainian forces.  It is being claimed by the Ukrainians that the attackers are Russian partisans who want to overthrow Putin’s government.  But a number of the attackers were captured and these turned out to be Ukrainians.

In the last few weeks there has been a significant increase in missile and drone attacks by both sides.  Drone attacks on Moscow and missile attacks in Kiev have become a common occurrence.  Today the word is the Russians hit the Ukrainian Defense Intelligence headquarters to take out the Ukrainian and Western brains behind the drone attacks on Moscow.  Now whether they succeeded in destroying the headquarters or decapitating the military intelligence organization is completely unknown.  What is clear is that this is all moving toward an escalated war where more than just the front-line troops are impacted.

The Russians have been concentrating on disrupting the anticipated “spring” offensive.  The most notable effort has been a string of missile attacks on large ammunition depots, some apparently so enormous that seismic readings as high as 3.5 on the Richter Scale have been detected.  But they’ve also been attacking large troop emplacements.

In the last few weeks, the western press has been hinting that the spring offensive may not provide a significant change in the status quo and that maybe it’s time for a negotiated settlement.  But there’s no indication by either side that negotiations are even possible.

So, it looks like sooner or later we’re going to hear about full-scale military operations with the battle tanks and other equipment that the West has donated and with the troops they trained over the last six months.  One thing that can be said is that this will be the decisive series of battles of the war.  The Ukrainians will be expending the last reserves of their prime manpower.  If they are to deal a decisive defeat to the Russians it will have to be now.  Otherwise, they will be without the troops and even without the artillery ammunition they would need to continue the war against the larger and better equipped Russian forces.

I expect that the Russians will be hunkering down behind their defensive works and will make the Ukrainians pay very dearly for a frontal assault on these positions.  But without a doubt if the Ukrainians go all out to break through these lines the casualties on both sides will be enormous.  So, what we will see is a reenactment of the kinds of battles they fought in World War I; massive artillery bombardment and frontal assaults on heavily reinforced positions.  But added to this will be massive tank attacks by the Ukrainians and modern missile and drone attacks by both sides.

So, either way this goes the Slavic peoples are about to experience a tragic blood-letting.  And essentially the US State Department and the CIA are the authors of this tragedy.  It will be interesting what the fruits of this decision will be for us.  We handed the Ukrainians tens of billions of dollars’ worth of weaponry.  I wonder which of our enemies will be provided with Russian weapons to pay us back.  I hate to think of the Mexican drug cartels with several billion dollars’ worth of drones and missiles loose inside of our non-existent southern border.  But that’s a distinct possibility.  And who will we have to blame but our own government.