One might say Girkin is in quite a pickle.
(OK, OK. I know it’s spelled gherkin. Consider it a phonetic pun).
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I consider barred cell windows still standing to close to a window for the critic.
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We knew open windows in Russia were very dangerous. Turns out pilots now need to be cautious who they transport…
He had to know his days were numbered. No way would I have boarded a plane that flew anywhere close to Russian airspace. Of course, this is all speculation, for now.
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Spaghetti western stand off…putin >> military >> intelligence >> >> >> etc…
Other events have pushed Ukraine off the front pages lately, but there is still a lot going on.
The Russians have launched a major offensive near the town of Andiivka. According to credible reports, the Russians have taken massive losses. There is lots of open source videos of Russian columns just getting obliterated. We often think of this war in terms of ground won and lost, but the ability to generate and maintain forces is equally important. I wonder how much gas Russia has left in the tank.
Ukraine has also successfully crossed to the left of the Dnieper river and established a bridgehead in one location.
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Refreshingly honest, perhaps?
Ukraine’s Military Intelligence immediately claimed responsibility for the assassination.
“Yeah, it was our operation,” Andriy Cherniak, representative of Ukraine’s Military Intelligence Directorate, also known as GUR, told POLITICO in a phone conversation about the car bomb attack.
…
GUR revealed the exact address where Filiponenko lived in Luhansk and added that Ukraine’s spies knew where other high-profile collaborators were living in the occupied territories.“All war criminals will be punished,” GUR said.
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Keep your eye on the Russian internal inflation rate. The numbers matter honest or not as the barometer keeps climbing. The barometer climbing a lot is the honest part.
Their central bank can only print to pay the military and buy equipment.
Putin has gone well past the point of his expiration date.
Nothing will stop this war until the Russian military goes in real terms unpaid.
Beginning of the end?
Economic sanctions on Russia is a leaky sieve as not all the world’s nation are on board. India remains a big Russian oil consumer. Thus the Russian war effort continues onward. Western officials’ promises of reinvigorating their own defense industries have collided with bureaucratic and supply-chain bottlenecks. Russian munition production still is much more than what the West can produce [1]. We have thus far lost the industrial war.
MSM along with US & EU officials questions whether Ukraine can prevail.
Ukraine today finds itself worse off than it was last November. Its troops are exhausted and depleted, its weapons stocks are running low, and Western publics are more polarized over providing further support.
This was foreseeable. A year ago, when Ukraine had the momentum — having routed the Russians in Kharkiv and Kherson — Gen. Mark A. Milley, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, suggested a negotiated settlement to the war. Like Zaluzhny, he made an explicit comparison to World War I, noting that early on in that war it became clear that it was “not winnable anymore, militarily.”
Ukraine’s counteroffensive appears to have stalled, just as wet and cold weather brings to a close the second fighting season in Kyiv’s effort to reverse Russian aggression. At the same time, the political willingness to continue providing military and economic support to Ukraine has begun to erode in both the United States and Europe. These circumstances necessitate a comprehensive reappraisal of the current strategy that Ukraine and its partners are pursuing.
[1]
Russian manufacturers are making up to 7 times as much ammunition as Western arms makers, Estonian defense official says
A couple weeks ago, I reread a book I last read something over 50 years ago. It is about a situation that many wrote off as hopeless. A few farsighted people thought differently, and changed, both a micro, and macro, situation.
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Officials also have said they would be providing 155mm artillery shellsfrom the War Reserve Stockpile in Israel, which is designed to provide the U.S. military a ready weapons supply in the region and also to give Washington the ability to quickly arm Israeli forces. Previously the Biden administration has tapped that reserve to replenish American stocks in Europe, under stress because of the war in Ukraine.
The Pentagon declined to say whether it has gone ahead with its plan to provide Israel 155mm shells from that reserve.
“While we will not provide specific details on sources and movement of particular munitions, we remain confident in our ability to balance the need to support Israel, Ukraine and our NDS simultaneously,” Deputy Pentagon press secretary Sabrina Singh said in a statement, referring to the U.S. national defense strategy.
I call Bullshyte on Sabrina’s statement.
Our nation is unable to supply Ukraine. We are now suppose to supply Israel also?
I believe the Ukrainian situation is more dire than what is happening in Israel-Palestinian conflict.
For those interested in viewing a WW2 convey movie; I would recommend Tom Hanks “Greyhound” flic.
FDR made a destroyers-for-bases deal with England providing 50 WW1 era destroyers [4 stackers].
It is winter time in Siberia already. The Russians and Ukrainians are going nowhere in the trench warfare for the next six months.
The US has already won in Russia.
Winning in Ukraine happens later.
We do not have good figures for Russian inflation but it decapitate Putin next year. He is in big trouble.
If you study the war map for where the trenchlines stand in Ukraine nothing is really moving but the energy of the stalemate is deadly for the Russians. The army really is getting paid less and less in terms of inflation back in Russia. In the next revolt, Putin will be too weak to survive.
The US supply of munitions to Ukraine is close to catching up with the summer demand for offensives.
In a rare admission, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has gone public about the reduction in the supply of artillery shells to Ukraine, telling reporters that deliveries of the munitions have “really slowed down.”
The 155mm artillery shells are arguably the most important munition for Ukraine in its war with Russia.. Ukraine has always been outmatched by Russia’s superior artillery firepower, however this imbalance, which is key on the battlefield, is set to get worse.
U.S. arms companies are ramping up production. However, according to The Economist, U.S. output of 155 mm shells in 2025 “is likely to be lower than that of Russia in 2024.”
President Zelenskyy, in comments to journalists Thursday said “warehouses are empty” in allied nations which have been supplying Ukraine with the shells.
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In another thread, I mentioned that I reread, only a couple weeks ago, a book about that program. Reading the letters from Churchill in the book, imploring FDR to make the ships, along with modern aircraft, small arms, ammo, and field guns, available, urgently, I was struck by the similarity to the current situation. In one exchange in the book, a critic of the deal said to Admiral Stark, Chief of Naval Operations, words to the effect “we need those ships to fight for us, if we get into the war”. Stark replied “they are fighting for us now”.
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Ahh, staggeringly ill thought out pseudo thinking within such a historical context, linked with patriotic kneejerk posturing, is a potent repeating them.
david fb
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And, we are hearing the same thing about Ukraine now.
And another bit of that sort of provincial thinking. I was reading a page on FB dedicated to Studebaker the other day. Most of us are familiar with the GM built CCKW deuce and a half truck, produced during WWII. Studebaker built a similar truck, most of which were sent to Russia on lend-lease. Someone questioned whether the Soviets returned those trucks, or paid for them, his implication being the Soviets were shirkers. I pointed out the objective was to keep the Soviets in the fight, and killing Germans. The Soviets did most of the heavy lifting against the Germans. The US and UK had about 400,000-500,000 military dead each, against all foes, in that war. The Soviets suffered 9-10 Million military, and another 25M civilians dead in that war. If the Soviets had to drop out of the war in 42-43, due to the lack of means to continue the fight, guys, including my uncle, would have a much harder fight on their hands when they hit the beach on June 6th.
Steve
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The exhaustion of two years of fighting, the continued loss of life at the front and frustration at the slow pace with which western partners continue to provide weaponry have combined so that for the first time since the early stages of the war, some voices have quietly pondered the possibility of ceasefire negotiations, while accepting they would be risky and could benefit Russia.
Then there is the horror unfolding in the Middle East, which has taken attention away from Ukraine and slowed down flows of ammunition.
“The choice is very simple. If we are ready to send another 300,000 or 500,000 lives of Ukrainian soldiers to capture Crimea and liberate Donbas, and if we get the right number of tanks and F16s from the west, we can do this,” Omelyan said. “But I don’t see the 500,000 more people ready to die and I don’t see the readiness of the west to send the type and quantity of weapons we would need.”
The Financial Times has reported that the Ukrainian military’s manpower shortages are such that the Zelensky government has set up checkpoints to aid in tracking down potential draft evaders .
Older men have increasingly been showing up on the front lines, which has also long been an open secret, but now the military is calling on men who had previously been exempt from service based on medical waivers.
Commander of the armed forces, General Valeriy Zaluzhnyi, told FT of ongoing struggles to establish and train a proper reserve force: “However, our capacity to train reserves on our own territory is also limited,” he said. “We cannot easily spare soldiers who are deployed to the front, [and] Russia can strike training centers . And there are gaps in our legislation that allow citizens to evade their responsibilities.”
https://archive.is/I9nkf
Ukrainian officials and western analysts say it is not just a question of numbers but of fitness, capability and skills. The average age of Ukrainians at the front and those trained by western allies has been 30-40, rather than more usual 18-24, said Jack Watling, senior fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, a UK think-tank.
“Ukraine can’t adopt the Russian way of war, which focuses on attrition, as Moscow will be able to outspend Kyiv in almost every aspect, from military production to being able to sustain higher losses,” he said.
Actually, Ukraine refuses to adopt the Russian way of war. If they did, Moscow and St Petersburg would be filled with collapsed buildings from repeated attacks by missiles.
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It is also the US way of war.
As US Air Force commander Major-General Emmett O’Donnell put it at a Senate hearing at the time: “Everything is destroyed. There is nothing standing worthy of the name… there were no more targets in Korea [to bomb].” US psychological warfare still refers to US genocidal crimes in the Korean peninsula as the “Korean War”.
Kissinger decided to intensify the secret tactical bombing of Cambodia, which had started under Johnson in 1965, into a ruthless campaign of carpet bombing that continued until 1973.
In early March 1969, Kissinger told Nixon: “Hit them!” By 1973, between 150,000 and half a million Cambodians were killed. Kissinger callously described the excessive bombing by saying: “We would rather err on the side of doing too much.”
Only if you think it is reasonable to compare USA 1945 to Russia 2023 …
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