Russia Invades Ukraine. Again by captaincrunch

REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

Russia Invades Ukraine. Again

POSTED BY: CAPTAINCRUNCH
UPDATED: Saturday, April 27, 2024 19:51
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Sunday, March 3, 2024 12:20 AM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

I guess it's not the launch, it's the programming. I imagine that since it's air-launched, if you launch it from a plane that has taken a different path and launched from a different origin it needs to be reprogrammed?

Quote:

Mission planners program the missile with the target, air defence locations and planned ground path. The missile uses a terrain-hugging flight path, guided by inertial navigation system (INS), image based navigation (IBN), terrain referenced navigation (TRN), and Global Positioning System (GPS) to the target. It is capable of navigating over long distances without GPS support.[8][9]

Upon arrival the missile commences a bunt (climb) manoeuvre to achieve the best probability of target acquisition and penetration. During the cruise portion of the flight, a high resolution thermographic camera (infrared homing) can support navigation by using IBN and for GPS-free target attack. The missile attempts to match a camera image with the planned 3D target model (Digital Scene Matching Area Correlator, DSMAC). If it cannot, it defaults to the other navigation systems, or, to avoid collateral damage, it steers to a pre-designated crash point instead of risking an inaccurate attack.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taurus_KEPD_350

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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM

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Sunday, March 3, 2024 8:03 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

A Russian Dissident’s Remarkable Courtroom Speech

Opinion by Anne Applebaum

On February 27, Oleg Orlov, a leading human rights activist at the Human Rights Center Memorial, received a two-and-a-half-year prison sentence for “discrediting the Russian army.” Following in a long tradition of Soviet dissidents before him, Orlov made a courtroom speech, addressed to those in the room and beyond. Joseph Brodsky, who later won the Nobel Prize in Literature, sparred in 1964 with a Soviet judge who asked him by what right he dared state “poet” as his occupation: “Who ranked you among poets?” Brodsky replied, “No one. Who ranked me as a member of the human race?” That exchange circulated throughout the Soviet Union in handwritten and retyped versions, teaching an earlier generation about bravery and civic courage.

Orlov’s speech will also be reprinted and reread, and someday it will have the same impact too. Here are excerpts, translated by one of his colleagues. Orlov reflected on the legalistic rigamarole in Russia that conceals the regime’s lawlessness. In fact, the law is whatever Putin dictates. Everything else, the lawyers, prosecutors, and judges, are just there for show, to pretend that there is rule of law when there is not.

Let me now speak about my current trial. When it began, I refused to participate. Thanks to that, I had the opportunity to reread The Trial, a novel by Franz Kafka, during the court sessions. The current situation in our country has a lot in common with the world that Kafka’s protagonist inhabits in the book. We live with the same absurdity and arbitrariness, camouflaged by a formal adherence to some pseudo-legal procedures.

Here we are accused of “discrediting the military,” but no one explains what this means or how it differs from legitimate criticism. We are accused of “spreading deliberately false information” without anyone bothering to prove that it is indeed false. The Soviet regime used exactly the same methods when it branded any criticism as lies. Our attempts to prove the veracity of this information are punished as crimes … We are being given prison sentences for doubting that aggression against a neighboring country is being carried out for the sake of international peace and security.

This is absurd.

Kafka’s hero has no idea, until the end of the novel, of the nature of the accusation against him. He is ruled guilty and executed anyway. In Russia, the accusation is formally announced, but it is impossible to understand it within the framework of law and logic. Unlike Kafka’s hero, we do understand why we are being detained, arrested, sentenced, or killed: We are being punished for daring to criticize the authority. That is completely banned in modern Russia.

More at https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/a-russian-dissident-s-remarkable-
courtroom-speech/ar-BB1jfx9I

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Sunday, March 3, 2024 9:46 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
I guess it's not the launch, it's the programming. I imagine that since it's air-launched, if you launch it from a plane that has taken a different path and launched from a different origin it needs to be reprogrammed?

I guess German Chancellor Olaf Scholz is frightened into inaction by Putin's threats to nuke Germany if it further aids Ukraine.

Germany confirms bugging of Bundeswehr Ukraine war talks

03/02/2024, March 2, 2024

https://www.dw.com/en/germany-confirms-bugging-of-bundeswehr-ukraine-w
ar-talks/a-68424687

Chancellor Olaf Scholz pledged a quick probe into a Russian leak of secret talks about the Ukraine war. The German military confirmed the talks were real, but couldn't rule out that the recording had been edited.

Germany's Defense Ministry on Saturday confirmed the authenticity of a recording of a confidential discussion between high-ranking Bundeswehr officers regarding the war in Ukraine that was leaked by Russian state media.

"According to our assessment, a conversation in the air force division was intercepted. We are currently unable to say for certain whether changes were made to the recorded or transcribed version that is circulating on social media," a spokeswoman for the ministry said.

The head of Russian state broadcaster RT, Margarita Simonyan, on Friday published what she said was an audio recording between German officers, including the chief of the Air Force, Lieutenant General Ingo Gerhartz.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz described it as "a very serious matter."

"It will now be investigated very carefully, very intensively, and very quickly," Scholz said on Saturday during a visit to Rome.

What else was on the audio

As aired by Simonyan on Telegram, the audio includes a discussion about whether Taurus cruise missiles would be capable of destroying a bridge, seemingly a reference to the new bridge linking Russian-occupied Crimea to the Russian mainland over the Kerch Strait.

The recording was apparently made from a video conference between four Luftwaffe officers discussing Russia's war in Ukraine.

On the audio leak, they spoke about ways German officers could supply Ukrainians with targeting information without appearing to be directly involved in the conflict with Russia.

What is on the supposed recording of German officers?

The clip also contains reference to the British having "a few people on the ground" in connection with the deployment of their Storm Shadow cruise missiles delivered to Ukraine.

German outlet Der Spiegel reported that the virtual meeting did not take place via a secure line, but via the Webex platform.

German lawmakers alarmed

"If this story turns out to be true, it would be a highly problematic incident," Konstantin von Notz, the chairman of the Bundestag's parliamentary oversight committee, told broadcast network Redaktionsnetzwerk Deutschland.

The Green party politician said it should be determined "whether this is a one-off incident or a structural safety problem."

Roderich Kiesewetter, of the center-right Christian Democratic Union and deputy chairman of the Bundestag's parliamentary oversight committee said it seemed that Russia had leaked the conversation to put pressure on Germany not to supply Taurus missiles to Ukraine.

"A number of other conversations will certainly have been intercepted and may be leaked at a later date for Russia's benefit," he told broadcaster ZDF.

Scholz has so far refused to send the Taurus missiles to Ukraine.

Earlier this week, he said the missiles range and the likely need for assistance from German Bundeswehr troops was problematic and could be construed as direct or indirect participation in the war.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova demanded that Germany "promptly" provide an explanation and claimed the audio was evidence of a "hybrid war" the West was waging on Russia.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Sunday, March 3, 2024 2:09 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

There are things people SHOULD be afraid of, and if they're not afraid, they're crazy and shouldn't be making national decisions.

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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM

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Sunday, March 3, 2024 3:34 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Would Putin stop if he wins in Ukraine? Let’s not find out.

The cost of hoping for the best from the Russian leader could cost the West dearly

By Marc Champion | Mar 3, 2024

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/commentary/2024/03/03/world/stopping-puti
n/

Addressing his nation on Thursday, a buoyant Russian President Vladimir Putin ridiculed the very notion that he might attack Europe.

Not only was that idea nonsense, he said, but it’s the West that was picking targets to attack in Russia, at the risk of nuclear Armageddon. It’s tempting to roll your eyes and move on. Yet the question of what the Kremlin does next if it wins in Ukraine is too important to ignore.

A debate is underway, particularly in Washington, on whether to pressure Ukraine into a negotiated settlement with Russia or help its continued defense. If Putin has no further ambitions beyond what he has seized in Ukraine already, then the interests of Europe and the U.S. might indeed be best served by forcing Kyiv to settle by starving it of the means to fight — as brutal a betrayal as that would be.

If Putin really is just fighting a limited defensive war, you could go further to ask why the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and its core Article V collective defense clause are needed at all. The same would go for the sudden and expensive drive to rearm in Europe.

Yet getting that calculation wrong would be catastrophic, and according to the eastern Europeans who — unlike U.S. House Republicans — have spent centuries living and fighting with Russia, it is wrong. If Putin’s goal in Ukraine is instead to restore the sway that Moscow lost with the USSR’s collapse in 1991, which he has famously described as the greatest geopolitical disaster of the 20th century, then he may pause his invasion to regroup, but he won’t stop until Kyiv is fully under Russian control.

This is the future that beckons if Putin isn’t forced to give up his dreams of joining the pantheon of the Russian Empire’s greatest leaders, regathering lands that he sees as rightfully Russian, alongside his idols Peter the Great and Catherine the Great.

After that, there would be every reason to expect a triumphant and vengeful Putin to try to recover more of the control that Russia used to wield, from the Balkans to the Baltic States. What he’s looking for, Putin said during his speech, is nothing less than a new security architecture and international order for Eurasia.

His denials of aggressive intent aren’t much help in deciding who is right. For one thing, Putin as president has repeatedly proved the skills in disinformation he learned during his KGB tenure. To name just one instance, he’d ridiculed the idea that he would invade Ukraine, right up until he ordered close to 200,000 troops over the border.

But just because Putin is a serial liar doesn’t prove he is being untruthful now. Nor does it reveal how much Russian TV propagandists routinely talk about retaking Poland or nuking London. So, what actual evidence of Putin's intent do we have?

One piece comes from the rest of Putin’s address, which — like many of his orations — was filled with pledges to keep expanding the military, protect Russian "compatriots,” continue the so-called special military operation in Ukraine, create a new security order and increase birth rates to boost the population. He made clear that he considers himself to be at war with the West, which he accused of wanting to turn Russia into a "dying space.” This, I think, he sincerely believes.

His comments, like the invasion of Ukraine itself, were a call for Russia’s growth as a great power, a centuries-long project that always had rolling geographical limits. The further Moscow's control extended, the bigger Russia was and the bigger the buffer zone it needed to feel secure.

A second piece of evidence comes from the Kremlin’s continued efforts to destabilize Moldova, a mainly Romanian-speaking ex-Soviet republic that’s now bidding to join the European Union. An opportunity to unseat President Maia Sandu, a former World Bank economist, is coming up in December, when she faces re-election.

Russia has been working hard at this for a long time. It tried turning off the country’s heat and energy, until Moldova switched to buying gas and power from Europe. It tried insurrection, organized and funded by a fugitive, Kremlin-friendly oligarch. And, according to the Moldovan government, it attempted a coup. All of those efforts have taken place since the start of the war in Ukraine and Moscow still has cards to play.

These include the separatist Moldovan territory of Transnistria, a mainly Russian-speaking region where virtually the entire population has been handed Russian passports. On Wednesday, an extraordinary session of the self-styled republic’s legislature appealed for Moscow to 'implement measures for defending Transnistria' and its 220,000 Russian citizens.

The echoes of separatist appeals for Russian intervention in Ukraine were as unmistakable as the response from Moscow was predictable: This was NATO’s fault. The alliance 'is literally trying to mold the republic into a second Ukraine,” said Maria Zakharova, the Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, stoking the greatest fear of ordinary Moldovans — that they could get drawn into the war next door. Moldova gets to the heart of Putin’s ambiguity over what Russia is and where Europe starts.

On Thursday, he described his invasion of Ukraine as a defense of the motherland and of his "compatriots” in the Donbas region, as well as in Novorossiya, an area he has defined as stretching from Kharkiv in the north of Ukraine, to Odesa in the south. Odesa, a "Russian city” Putin reiterated as recently as December, is just 40 miles from Transnistria.

"The entire Black Sea coast went to Russia as a result of the Russo-Turkish wars,” he said during his end-of-year press conference, adding rhetorically, "What does Ukraine have to do with this?” If not Odesa, then you might think that Moldova, a Romanian-speaking country where about half the population has EU passports, would qualify as Europe for Putin and would therefore be off his hit list. But no. The former Russian empire wrested Moldova from the ailing Ottoman Empire, in 1812.

If NATO does become involved in Moldova, then as with Ukraine it will be because Russia attacks it. That's something it can do only from the air for now, unless Putin attains his goals in Novorossiya (New Russia) and his army reaches Odesa. New options would at that point open — to dominate the Black Sea and project power and influence toward Romania and the Balkans.

"Putin aims to secure victory in Ukraine to demonstrate geopolitical superiority over the West and reshape the European security landscape,” including a NATO retreat to its size in the 1990s, before its eastward enlargement, Estonia’s intelligence services said in their 2024 annual report. Without NATO in the way, Moscow would be free to reassert its sphere of influence in eastern Europe, by the whole array of economic, cyber and in, the last resort, military means he has used already.

The Estonians may be wrong, but I doubt it. This is what Putin demanded in writing before invading Ukraine two years ago. It’s also what Soviet leaders and Russian czars did or sought over centuries. The best time and place to break this pattern — allowing Russia to adjust to a new status as a normal, if vast and powerful, nation-state within internationally recognized borders — is now and in Ukraine.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Monday, March 4, 2024 5:06 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Oh no!!
More fear mongering from SECOND!

*****

As usual, your posts cancel each other. Taken together, your recent posts paint a compelling picture that the CIA engineered a coup in Ukraine in 2014, and that NATO and western spooks have been weaponizing Ukraine ever since. (NYT).
SURPISE!
Isn't that what Russia has been complaining about all along?

Your posts also point to the fact that Russia was willing to leave Ukraine (except Crimea) and agree to Ukraine in the EU in exchange for neutral status, demilitarization, protection of the rights of Russian speakers, and a 5-nation security guarantee. (WSJ. BTW, Austria is neutral by agreement and they've done well for thrmselves. Ukraine could have too.)
SURPISE!
Doesn't that match Russia goals stated at the very beginning?

Now you want to drag up that whole "Russia is going to swarm the EU in an orgy of land-grabbing" nonsense? Again?

You have an light grip on logic and a nonexistant one on reality.
Come out of that dark mental space you've locked yourself into.
Get out in the sunshine, breathe fresh air, do something you can be proud of.
You'll feel better and you'll be on the road to sanity.

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM

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Monday, March 4, 2024 6:58 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

Now you want to drag up that whole "Russia is going to swarm the EU in an orgy of land-grabbing" nonsense? Again?

Unmasking the Motives: Why Russia invaded Ukraine

By John Fee | March 3, 2024

https://encyclopediageopolitica.com/2024/03/03/why-russia-invaded-ukra
ine/

Russia’s motivations for launching the largest military campaign in Europe since the Second World War remain fiercely debated. In this piece, John Fee examines an assortment of leading perspectives, including official and academic viewpoints, to determine what conclusions might be drawn.

Introduction: why does it matter to understand Putin’s motives?

From a national security perspective, how serious is a Russian military threat beyond Ukraine and how much national treasure should be committed to preparing for it? From an enterprise point of view, should one’s business be investing in costly infrastructure throughout territories that are likely to be subject to future military action? What is more, the war in Ukraine has shown there are a whole host of second and third-order consequences that will follow great power military interventions—from global food insecurity, mass migration, and rising energy prices, to name a few. For those bearing the weight of tackling such questions, it’s likely that their view is significantly shaped by their assumptions regarding the motivations underpinning Russia’s military operations in Ukraine. Hence, to examine the matter of Putin’s motives is of vital importance to preparing one’s analytical foundations for the task ahead.

Liddell Hart, a distinguished British strategist, once emphasised the need to understand opposing viewpoints on matters of grand strategy and military affairs, or “the other side of the hill.” To this end, this article examines a select range of viewpoints on Putin’s motivation for escalating military action against Ukraine on 24 February with the aim of assessing their relative worth. It is my aim to analyse Putin’s motivations without moral judgment, presenting them as I perceive them to be, rather than how I might wish them to be. Furthermore, it should go without saying that this article will fall short of capturing the sum total of available opinions on this matter. So, in acknowledgement of this limitation, I have narrowed my analysis to the four most common themes I have encountered in the realm of public opinion on Putin’s assumed motives for supporting military action in Ukraine, each examined through the perspective of a notable advocate:

1. Vladimir Putin: Russian Official Position

2. Serhii Plokhy: Imperial Russia & Tsar Putin

3. John Mearsheimer: NATO Expansion & Offensive Realism

4. Mike McFaul: Democratic Expansion & Regime Threat

I will structure each perspective in two parts: (1) to fairly represent each argument from its respective vantage point; and (2) to respond to each argument with my own views. Finally, I will synthesise my remarks to form a summary for better understanding Putin’s motive in attacking Ukraine. . . .

Beyond the Impasse: Conclusion

In conclusion, this article identified 14 key assumptions to interpret Putin’s motives for invading Ukraine. I argue that:

(1) Putin sees the advancement of liberal democracy as a strategic facade employed by the U.S. to maintain its global supremacy, which clashes with Putin’s aspirations to maximise Russia’s share of world power—particularly in its perceived sphere of influence;

(2) Putin observes a decline in U.S. power and believes it no longer possesses the capability to pursuit a unilateral grand strategy to preserve its global hegemony—leading to the conclusion that the existing international system is untenable and ripe for contest;

(3) Putin views cross-border liberal democratic expansion as a credible threat to his authoritarian regime;

(4) Putin views U.S. external influence activities in its perceived sphere of influence as acts that must be confronted—given their threat to his authoritarian regime and applicability to maintaining the U.S.-led international order;

(5) Putin views NATO as a U.S. foreign policy tool for protecting and advancing a U.S.-led international order through military means, thereby posing a credible security threat;

(6) Putin opposes NATO eastward expansion, aiming to thwart it with a dynamic and adaptable strategy that utilises carrots and sticks—situation dependent;

(7) Kyiv’s political and economic orientation toward Moscow is a grand strategy goal of Putin;

(8) Putin favoured the use of non-lethal political measures to attain this goal, until non-lethal political measures were no longer tenable for achieving it;

(9) Putin is deterred by NATO and recognises states who fall under its protection are no longer capable of being confronted within the military domain through conventional means—at the risk of nuclear confrontation;

(10) Kyiv joining NATO is a red line for Putin;

(11) Putin is promoting an ideology domestically and internationally to legitimise Russian influence and control within post-soviet territories and to counteract the spread of liberal democracy;

(12) Putin anticipated an expeditious military victory in Ukraine—through swift regime change that would lead to Kyiv’s long-term political subjugation to Moscow;

(13) Russian concerns surrounding the prevention of genocide in the Donbas played no plausible role in Putin’s decision to undertake military action in Ukraine;

(14) Russian concerns surrounding the prevention of Ukraine acquiring a nuclear weapon played no plausible role in Putin’s decision to undertake military action in Ukraine.

***

John Fee is a security intelligence analyst working in the technology sector, with a focus on identifying emerging security risks in Europe. Drawing from his experience as a former signaller in the British Army as well as living and working across Europe in a variety of security roles, John brings a holistic understanding of the European security landscape to his analysis. He is a graduate of Malmö University, where he completed a degree in Peace and Conflict Studies and International Relations.

Much more at https://encyclopediageopolitica.com/2024/03/03/why-russia-invaded-ukra
ine/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Monday, March 4, 2024 7:29 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

The Big Lesson From the Last U.S. Invasion of Russia

What the Allied intervention in the Russian civil war teaches us about Ukraine today.

By Theodore Bunzel | March 3, 2024, 6:00 PM

https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/03/03/the-big-lesson-from-the-wests-las
t-invasion-of-russia/?tpcc=recirc_latest062921

Review of A Nasty Little War: The Western Intervention Into the Russian Civil War, Anna Reid, Basic Books, 400 pp., $32, February 2024

Download all Anna Reid’s books for free from the mirrors at https://libgen.is//search.php?&req=Anna+Reid&phrase=1&view
=simple&column=def&sort=year&sortmode=DESC

Northern Russia must have felt bitterly cold to U.S. soldiers, even though nearly all were from Michigan. On Sept. 4, 1918, 4,800 U.S. troops landed in Arkhangelsk, Russia, only 140 miles from the Arctic Circle. Three weeks later, they were plunged into battle against the Red Army among towering pine forests and subarctic swamps, alongside the British and French. Ultimately, 244 U.S. soldiers died from the fighting over two years. Diaries of U.S. troops paint a harrowing picture of first contact:

We run into a nest of machine-guns, we retire. [Bolsheviks] still shelling heavily. Perry and Adamson of my squad wounded, bullet clips my shoulder on both sides. … Am terribly tired, hungry and all in, so are the rest of the boys. Casualties in this attack 4 killed and 10 wounded.

These unlucky souls represented just one prong of the sprawling and ill-fated Allied intervention in the Russian civil war. From 1918 to 1920, the United States, Britain, France, and Japan sent thousands of troops from the Baltics to northern Russia to Siberia to Crimea—and millions of dollars in aid and military supplies to the anti-communist White Russians—in an abortive attempt to strangle Bolshevism in its crib. It’s one of the most complicated and oft-forgot foreign-policy failures of the 20th century, captivatingly retold in technicolor detail by Anna Reid in her new book, A Nasty Little War: The Western Intervention Into the Russian Civil War.

The specifics of the conflict, which Reid brilliantly weaves alongside personal diaries from the participants, often feel otherworldly. Japanese troops occupied Vladivostok in Russia’s Far East. The mercurial French—at first the most hawkishly pro-intervention out of all the Allies—led the occupation of southern Ukraine, tussling with the Reds over cities now familiar to readers: Mykolaiv, Kherson, Sevastopol, Odessa. The British—who invested the most in the intervention, including 60,000 troops—were crawling all over Russia’s fringes: defending Baku from the oncoming Turks, conducting naval sabotage against the Bolsheviks in the Baltics, and ultimately evacuating the Whites from Black Sea ports as they crumbled in the face of a Red Army onslaught.

The disturbing question hanging over Reid’s excellent book is whether the West is doomed to repeat history. The intervention failed, and if you squint hard enough, today’s intervention in Ukraine may appear similarly futile in the face of a vast and determined Russia with a seemingly endless well of materiel, manpower, and political will. It’s what the far-right flank of Republicans in Congress, Viktor Orban in Hungary, and former U.S. President Donald Trump would lead you to believe. A sense of hopelessness articulated by Edmund Ironside, the British commander of Allied forces in northern Russia during the intervention: “Russia is so enormous that it gives one a feeling of smothering.”

But despite the strong historical echoes, the differences between the two interventions are more instructive than their similarities. A close study poses perhaps an even bigger question: What conditions make for a successful foreign intervention? Yes, the Allies bungled things, but in fairness, they mostly failed because of what was out of their control, rather than what was in it. The most limiting factor was their feckless (and noxious) White Russian allies, a disparate group of anti-Bolshevik socialists and incompetent former Tsarist officers who were Great Russian autocrats at heart. They had the buy-in of neither the Russian population nor, critically, Tsarist Russia’s tapestry of ethnic minorities—from Ukrainians to Balts—whom they sought to restore under Russia’s heel.

The circumstances today are much more favorable. The United States and Europe have a unified and determined partner in Volodymyr Zelensky’s Ukraine, in a struggle with blinding moral clarity. Russia’s economy may be on wartime footing, but collectively the West has significantly more resources at hand. And the task—defending a motivated Ukraine against a hostile invasion—is much less ambitious than trying to topple the government of the largest country in the world. A sober comparison of the two interventions should, in fact, fortify Western resolve that it can see Ukraine through—as long as its own political will, waning now as it did in Western capitals then, doesn’t get in the way.

The critical ingredients of any foreign intervention are clear and achievable objectives, reliable allies on the ground, an assailable adversary, material means, and the political will to finish the job. On nearly every measure, the Allied intervention in Russia was fatally lacking.

Perhaps most striking about Reid’s narrative is that it’s often unclear what exactly the Allied troops were meant to do in Russia. Yes, all Western governments loathed Bolshevism and feared its expansionist and infectious potential. But beyond that, there was little in the way of shared strategy or purpose. In fact, Western troops were initially sent to guard railways and Allied military stores in northern and eastern Russia that they feared would reach German hands. But this was slightly complicated after Germany surrendered in November 1918. As George F. Kennan put it in his masterful volume The Decision to Intervene, the “American forces had scarcely arrived in Russia when history invalidated at a single stroke almost every reason Washington had conceived for their being there.”

Zealous British officers on the ground—egged on by hawkish ministers at home such as War Secretary Winston Churchill, who nearly depleted his own political capital advocating for the quixotic Russian adventure—soon took the initiative to actively intervene and fight the Reds. In other arenas, including southern Ukraine, the mission was clearer in support of the local White forces—though France quickly lost heart and sailed home in April 1919 after it suffered a series of setbacks and mutinies.

Encapsulating this ambiguity were instructions for the U.S. military intervention written personally in a July 1918 memo by President Woodrow Wilson, who was characteristically tortured by the decision and “sweating blood over what is right and feasible to do in Russia.” He opened the memo by warning that military intervention would “add to the present sad confusion in Russia rather than cure it”—yet then committed U.S. troops to aid the Czech Legion operating in Siberia and to northern Russia to “make it safe for Russian bodies to come together in organized bodies in the north.” Hardly clarifying stuff.

U.S. officers took these instructions quizzically. Gen. William Graves, in charge of the 8,000 doughboys in Siberia, was decidedly skeptical about the United States playing a role in the conflict and interpreted Wilson’s instructions as permitting him only to guard railways, not fight the Reds. He later wrote in his memoirs that he had no idea what Washington was trying to achieve. This was all to the chagrin of his more pro-interventionist British colleagues in Siberia, who instead proactively aided the Whites’ monstrously incompetent “supreme ruler,” Adm. Alexander Kolchak, a former head of the Russian Black Sea Fleet who incongruously found himself fighting deep in landlocked Siberia. (He was also, incidentally, a dead ringer for current Russian President Vladimir Putin.)

Which brings us to the White Russians. Perhaps the sine qua non of any foreign intervention, especially one as ambitious as the Western intervention in both Ukraine and in the Russian civil war, are allies on the ground. It’s the difference between the chaos that followed Western intervention in Libya and the successful intervention in the Balkans. On this score, the Whites failed miserably.

It’s hard to know where to begin. Beyond Kolchak, there was the overmatched Gen. Anton Denikin leading White forces in southern Russia, who dissembled to Allied governments about the horrific pogroms against the Jewish population of Ukraine perpetrated by Whites under his watch. And beyond operating across an impossibly large and disconnected front covering the entire periphery of Russia—a country of 11 time zones—the different White factions acted essentially as warlords, with little loyalty or coordination among them.

Just as fatal to the Whites was a conspicuous vacancy: any coherent or compelling ideology. Antony Beevor, in his fabulous new history of the Russian civil war, pins the White loss on both their lack of political program and fractious nature: “In Russia, an utterly incompatible alliance of Socialist Revolutionaries and reactionary monarchists stood little chance against a single-minded Communist dictatorship.”

Contrast all this with the Reds. They controlled the industrial heartland of Moscow and St. Petersburg, operating from the inward out with stronger interior lines of communication. It allowed Commissar Leon Trotsky—who, Reid notes, “blossom[ed] into a war leader of near-genius: shrewd, decisive and boundlessly energetic”—to hop on his armored train to shore up flagging fronts as the Whites advanced from the east and south. The Bolsheviks—though enacting ruinous economic policies and initiating the first waves of terror at home—were motivated and possessed a clear ideology that held, at least at that juncture, some appeal to the local population.

And, fundamentally, their will was much stronger than the Whites’ or the West’s. After the devastation of World War I, Allied governments feared the spread of Bolshevism but couldn’t bring their exhausted publics along with them. Here, the historical echoes are most troubling. Public support understandably flagged, and budgetary pressures mounted. As Britain’s Daily Express put it in 1919, in echoes of today’s Republican rhetoric in the United States: “Great Britain is already the policeman of half the world. It will not and cannot be the policeman of all Europe. … The frozen plains of Eastern Europe are not worth the bones of a single British grenadier.” Rolling White setbacks in Siberia and southern Russia were the nail in the coffin. Then, as now in Ukraine, foreign political support for intervention depended most on the sense of momentum on the battlefield.

The job of foreign-policy makers is to distinguish between what is in versus out of their control. To the degree that they intuit favorable conditions—allies, geography, the enemy’s vulnerability—then the task is to focus on and optimize the things they can manage: strategy and objectives, mobilizing political will, providing the materiel to support the effort, and coordinating with allies.

Despite the current pall of pessimism pervading Western capitals, today’s war in Ukraine presents some of the more propitious circumstances a policymaker could hope for—unlike those faced by the Allies during the Russian civil war. Ukraine is a worthy and competent ally, fighting to defend its territory with a highly motivated population behind it. The Ukrainian cause is a righteous one, with a Manichean quality to it easily explained to Western publics. While Putin’s personal will to win is strong, it’s clear by his actions and hesitancy to fully mobilize Russian society that he senses a ceiling on what he can ask from his population. Though Russia’s manpower and materiel are larger than Ukraine’s, the amount needed to keep Ukraine armed and in the fight is completely manageable. A $60 billion aid supplement from the United States—currently held up by far-right Republicans in the House of Representatives—is a pittance compared with the returns: holding the line on international norms; standing up for the Ukrainians and, in doing so, Western values; bogging down Russia in a strategic sinkhole and reducing its capacity to threaten the rest of NATO’s eastern flank; and fortifying the trans-Atlantic alliance. Today, Western capitals are much more united than they were in 1918, and defense coordination among them is strong. Though they can sharpen the shared sense of an endgame in Ukraine, everybody knows that the conflict will end in some sort of negotiated settlement—the questions will be on whose terms.

If the United States and its allies can avoid the pitfalls of the Western intervention in the Russian civil war—developing a clear long-term strategy, continuing to coordinate closely, and reinforcing domestic support by making the case to their own populations—then they have a real shot of prevailing over Putin. Given the auspicious conditions, the main, perhaps only obstacle to long-term success is the political will to see the job through.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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File this under #cheese_eating_surrender_monkeys

NATO has been around since 1949 and yet it still doesn’t know how to do this:

Europe's ‘Military Schengen’ Era of Military Cooperation Is Here

The first step for Europe’s common military ambitions is figuring out free movement.

By Anchal Vohra | March 4, 2024, 7:06 AM

https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/03/04/europe-military-autonomy-nato-sch
engen/?tpcc=recirc_latest062921

In late January, Germany, the Netherlands, and Poland signed an agreement to create a military transport corridor between them, giving a much needed boost to the long discussed but rarely pursued goal of improving military mobility across Europe. Siemtje Möller, Germany’s parliamentary state secretary for defense, said the corridor was taking military mobility “on the road to a true military Schengen.” It was not the first time European policymakers have floated the idea of adapting the existing visa-free movement of people and commercial goods in the Schengen zone to the movement of troops and military equipment all over Europe. But the idea is now clearly gaining momentum.

In late January, Germany, the Netherlands, and Poland signed an agreement to create a military transport corridor between them, giving a much needed boost to the long discussed but rarely pursued goal of improving military mobility across Europe. Siemtje Möller, Germany’s parliamentary state secretary for defense, said the corridor was taking military mobility “on the road to a true military Schengen.” It was not the first time European policymakers have floated the idea of adapting the existing visa-free movement of people and commercial goods in the Schengen zone to the movement of troops and military equipment all over Europe. But the idea is now clearly gaining momentum.

The idea of a military Schengen first came up after Crimea’s annexation by Russia. Ten years after Russia’s annexation of Crimea and two years after its ongoing invasion of Ukraine, Europe is realizing that it better needs to prepare for the possibility that Russian President Vladimir Putin will decide to use his military even further westward. European military officials are digging into lessons learned in the Cold War—among them are specific lessons about military mobility.

Yet, several experts, diplomats and military sources told FP that the progress is much slower than desired. “Liberalization of rules is endorsed by everyone,” Tomasz Szatkowski, Poland’s permanent representative to NATO, told Foreign Policy. “But the problem is we have been talking about it since 2015.” They said Europe has acknowledged that the tensions of the cold war era may have returned and that European countries have a “long way to go” to effectively move their men and material.

The passage of anything related to a military mission in Europe is beset with obstacles, ranging from bureaucratic hurdles and gaping infrastructural gaps that can cause decisive delays. Urmas Paet, a European Union parliamentarian from the Baltic state of Estonia and the vice chair of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, rated military mobility to three out of 10 and said currently it can take anywhere between “weeks or at least more than a week” to send supplies to the Baltic states.

The paperwork is onerous. Several approvals need to be acquired from various ministries in various countries, and at times in different regions within a nation. Most roads and bridges have been built for civilian use and are unlikely to withstand the weight of heavy military hardware. Since the central European fuel pipeline doesn’t extend to the eastern states, longer delays in fuel supply could be a decisive factor. Furthermore, the rail gauge in former Soviet states differs in size from European rail gauge, and a transfer of thousands of troops and equipment from one train to another at a time of war will make it an even more time-consuming task.

Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, a former NATO commander who was the first proponent of “Military Schengen” and likely coined the term, said the good thing is that over the last few years at least the conversation has picked up. “Now I hear ministers in various organizations talk about it, he told FP from the recent Munich Security Conference.

Hodges said the ability to move with speed at a time of crisis was a crucial part of military deterrence doctrine. The ability of an armed force to mobilize and move quickly should be visible to the enemy and deter them from attacking in the first place, he said.

“We need to have real capability, not just equipment and troops, but also the ability to move with speed, to supply spare parts, store fuel and ammunition, and the Russians have to see that we have it,” he said.

Hodges applauded the agreement between Germany, the Netherlands, and Poland as a great start and said many more such corridors are under discussion. (Bulgaria’s head of defense, Adm. Emil Eftimov, said the allies should prioritize a corridor from Alexandroupolis in Greece to Romania and another one from the Adriatic Sea through Albania and North Macedonia.)

“They want to have corridors from Greece to Bulgaria up to Romania,” Hodges added. “The purpose of all these corridors is to have a smooth route, in terms of infrastructure, but also sort out customs and all legal hurdles ahead of time.”

The German, Dutch, and Polish corridor is the first of many envisaged and is expected to identify and resolve bottlenecks, and possibly provide a template for future corridors. A senior military source who spoke to FP on the condition of anonymity said that the corridor will look into a whole gamut of issues. In peacetime, he said, it will also allow the authorities to smoothen federal processes since in Germany every Länder, or federal state, has its own set of laws for troops or any dangerous equipment passing through its territory. At a time of war, he added, the corridor will be “much more than a road.”

“A hundred thousand or more soldiers would likely be on the move at a time of crisis. They would need a place to stop, to rest, access to warehouses with spare parts and to fuel storage centers. We would also need arrangements in place to take care of war refugees in such a scenario,” he said.

That is a tall order even for three nations. Cooperation between more than two dozen member states, particularly one involving armed men and dangerous machinery, will be encumbered with countless more regulations. Defense is “a national competence,” Paet added, and “countries share what they want to share.” Countries don’t readily share details of critical infrastructure such as where and how many bridges have military load classification and can carry the weight of heavy tanks.

Rafael Loss, a defense expert at the European Council of Foreign Relations think tank, said there was no catalog of infrastructural needs. “It’s not clear what kind of infrastructure is needed and where,” he told FP. According to a report by the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) released in 2021, 90 percent of highways, 75 percent of national roads, and 40 percent of bridges in Europe are able to carry vehicles with the maximum militarily classified load of 50 tons. While the Leopard and Abram tanks—both of which proved their stealth against Russia in the Ukrainian battlefield—weigh significantly more.

“The Leopard tank weighs I think about 75 tons, and the Abrams is a little bit heavier,” Hodges said. “Most of these tanks will be transported on the back of HETs (heavy equipment transporters), and each HET weighs about 15 to 20 tons. It won’t be one tank on the road.” CEPA noted that “the combination of truck, trailer, and heavy tank could go well beyond 120 tons,” ruling out large swathes of existing infrastructure fit for military movement.

The EU has acknowledged the need for funding dual use—civilian and military—infrastructure and already approved funding for 95 such projects, although many more bid for the funds. The Polish ambassador and Hodges both said they were worried about the cut in funding allocated for the EU’s infrastructure funding vehicle, the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF), from €6.5 billion to €1.7 billion.

Rail Baltica, a transnational rail project funded through the CEF, is planning to expand Europe’s rail network to the Baltic states of Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia, which is slated to be functional by 2030. But concerns about funding have been reported by local news outlets. Moreover, there is stiff resistance from France, Belgium, and even in Germany to spend on expansion of the central European pipeline to the eastern nations that often spend a larger share of their GDP on Europe’s collective defense than much bigger economies in the continent.

The European Defence Agency, which coordinates the EU’s defense cooperation, is working on standardizing the bureaucratic processes for land and air mobility and developing a common form to simplify the paperwork. But while it’s been agreed upon by 25 member states, there is reluctance by member states who have not yet integrated these “technical arrangements” into their national processes.

It is often hard to push all 27 members in the EU and more than 30 in NATO toward a consensus, but Hodges has a reason to be hopeful since the last NATO summit in Vilnius, Lithuania. Last July, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg announced three regional defense plans—a first since the end of the Cold War. He said NATO will plan for and strengthen its deterrence in the Atlantic and European Arctic in the north, in the Baltic region and Central Europe in the center, and in the Mediterranean and the Black Sea in the south. These plans will allow NATO members to assess exact defense requirements, apportion those to different allies, and in the process understand specific logistical needs. Hodges hopes this might prove to be a “game changer.”

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Tuesday, March 5, 2024 7:45 AM

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Medvedev gave a lecture on March 4 called “Geographical and Strategic Borders” at the Russian World Youth Festival.

Medvedev indicated that Russia is more interested in subjugating Ukraine’s people than taking its territory. Medvedev claimed that Russia’s “enemies constantly insist that Russia’s main goal is to seize Ukrainian lands” but, as the “riches” of Ukraine’s lands, such as wheat, steel, gas, and coal are “almost absent,” the main value that Russia seeks from its occupation of Ukraine is through controlling its people.[13] Medvedev also claimed that the concept of a sovereign Ukrainian state and the concept of a Ukrainian national identity that is not Russian must “disappear forever.”[14] ISW continues to document how Russian authorities are repeatedly engaging in large-scale and deliberate ethnic cleansing campaigns and systematically working to eliminate Ukrainian language, culture, history, and ethnicity in areas of Ukraine that Russia occupies.[15]

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campai
gn-assessment-march-4-2024

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
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Tuesday, March 5, 2024 9:54 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Fuck Ukraine.

--------------------------------------------------

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Tuesday, March 5, 2024 2:31 PM

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The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Fuck Ukraine.

The Real Reason Trump Loves Putin

A new book explores the American right’s tendency to admire and want to emulate foreign dictators.

By Franklin Foer | March 1, 2024

https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2024/03/jacob-heilbrunn-amer
ica-last-trump-putin/677609/

For nearly the entirety of the past decade, a question has stalked, and sometimes consumed, American politics: Why do Donald Trump and his acolytes heap such reverent praise on Vladimir Putin? The question is born of disbelief. Adoration of the Russian leader, who murders his domestic opponents, kidnaps thousands of Ukrainian children, and interferes in American presidential elections, is so hard to comprehend that it seems only plausibly explained by venal motives—thus the search to find the supposed kompromat the Kremlin lords over Trump or compromising business deals that Trump has pursued in Moscow.

But there’s a deeper, more nefarious truth about people on the right’s baffling unwillingness to criticize the Kremlin: They actually share its worldview. Putin worship isn’t even an aberration in the history of conservatism, merely the latest instance of a long tradition of admiring foreign dictators. Over the past century, without ever really blushing, the American right has similarly celebrated the likes of Adolf Hitler, Francisco Franco, and just about every Latin American military junta that called itself anti-communist.

The right hails these dictators as ideological comrades in the war to preserve traditional society, the values of order and patriarchy, against the assault of the decadent left. Unlike conservative politicians in the United States, these foreign leaders don’t even need to bother with mouthing encomiums to concepts like tolerance, freedom, and democracy. They can deliver reactionary politics in the unvarnished form that some hard-liners on the American right have always hoped would take root in their own country. As the journalist Jacob Heilbrunn argues in America Last, his history of conservatives’ romance with dictators, “Conservatives have searched for a paradise abroad that can serve as a model at home.”

Heilbrunn makes the interesting decision to begin his history on the eve of World War I. A primary villain in these chapters is the newspaper columnist H. L. Mencken, perhaps the most celebrated curmudgeon in the history of American letters. Walter Lippmann called him “the most powerful influence on this whole generation of educated people.” A conservative movement as such did not exist in the earliest decades of the 20th century, just a constellation of reactionary intellectuals and their wealthy patrons who nodded in agreement, nostalgic for the antebellum South and a world before mass suffrage. Mencken, the most eloquent of the reactionaries, put their cantankerous thoughts into ornate, often quite funny prose.

Mencken believed fervently in the superiority of German civilization—and in the leadership of its racist, war-mongering monarch, Kaiser Wilhelm. This reverence stemmed from ancestral pride; Mencken’s paternal grandfather came from Saxony. But his affection for Germany also grew from his disdain of American democracy, which he believed ceded control of society to mediocre politicians. By contrast, he liked that Germany was “governed by an oligarchy of its best men.” Just before America officially entered World War I, he submitted an article to The Atlantic in which he imagined that Germany might one day conquer the United States and create a new utopia on its shores. Ellery Sedgwick, then the editor of this magazine, had the good sense to reject it. “I have no desire to foment treason,” Sedgwick wrote him.

At the height of the war, Mencken worried that he might be persecuted for propagandizing for an enemy regime, so much so that he buried the German keepsakes he collected and a diary from his wartime visit to the country in his Baltimore backyard. But in the years that followed the conflict, he returned to extolling the virtues of Wilhelmine autocracy. His publication, The American Mercury—perhaps the greatest literary journal of the age and also home to retrograde political opinions—ran revisionist accounts of the war, which shifted blame away from Germany.

Looking back on World War I, there were compelling conservative reasons for considering intervention a catastrophe. Financing the war required the imposition of a federal income tax, which never went away in peacetime. And no matter one’s political stripe, the war’s staggering body count was hard to justify. But what emerged on the right in the aftermath of the fighting wasn’t a form of pacifism—rather, it was a set of conspiratorial arguments that became a dishonorable tradition of isolationism. This pattern would repeat itself at the onset of every war: The isolationists would point an accusatory finger at bankers, whom they accused of being eager to profit off bloodshed. They would describe the authoritarian enemies of the United States as helpless victims, peaceful governments minding their own business. In the course of casting the dictators as the injured party, conservatives airbrushed their records of militarism and racism. Minimizing these sins wasn’t just a matter of rhetorical convenience; it was an act of sympathy. In the case of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, a significant segment of the intellectual American right shared their racialist views about the superiority of Nordic peoples.

Heilbrunn isn’t the first to tell the story of the right’s barely submerged affinity for Hitler. Philip Roth’s great counterfactual novel, The Plot Against America, takes this affinity as its premise—as does Rachel Maddow’s recently published history, Prequel. But it’s always bracing to be reminded of how former President Herbert Hoover made excuses for Hitler before the war and how the press baron William Randolph Hearst commissioned stories by him.

The biggest fans of fascist autocracy weren’t yokels shaking their pitchforks, but cultivated patricians from the oldest New England families. Benito Mussolini’s American fan section consisted of the eminent literary critic Irving Babbitt, a legendary Harvard professor, and the modernist poet Ezra Pound. Not just Hearst but also Henry Ford and others among the nation’s richest men were some of the chief apologists for Nazi Germany. Their attraction—sometimes subconscious, but quite often stated flatly—was born of fear that America was slipping away from them, as immigrants poured into the country and mass democracy took hold. Fascism represented a hopeful example of a revanchist elite reversing the tide.

Hitler’s defeat, and the full knowledge of the horrors of the Holocaust, did little to spur the right to rethink its admiration of authoritarianism. In fact, the historian Fred Siegel once described the late 1940s and early ’50s as the moment when the isolationists attempted to exact revenge. Senator Joe McCarthy and his allies tried to tear down the reputations of the internationalist proponents of the New Deal who most fervently advocated for the war, by smearing them as Communists. But McCarthy was also waging a retrospective argument about World War II: that the Americans had no claim to superiority over the Germans. When he burst onto the scene, in 1949, McCarthy held hearings into what he described as the mistreatment of a Nazi Panzer division, on trial for murdering dozens of American prisoners of war. McCarthy speciously argued that the Germans were being tried on trumped-up evidence. Such accusations about America’s supposed abusive treatment of Nazis became a right-wing trope. Henry Regnery’s publishing house provided an outlet for criticism of the Nuremberg trials, before it went on to print books by William F. Buckley, James Burnham, and Whitaker Chambers that launched the modern conservative movement.

In its Cold War guise, the revived right made the celebration of autocrats abroad a foundation of its foreign policy. Buckley’s magazine, National Review, the flagship of the movement, published regular panegyrics to anti-communist generalissimos, heaping adoration on the likes of the Dominican Republic’s Rafael Trujillo, Portugal’s Antonio de Oliveira Salazar, and Spain’s Francisco Franco. Regardless of how many opponents they murdered or how many dissidents wasted away in their jails, they were described as the true defenders of Christendom against the heathen mob. The implication was that these dictators weren’t just on the right side of the Cold War; they possessed spine and ideological fervor that American leaders lacked.

Because the American right was so quick to extol foreign dictators in hyperbolic terms, its members were frequently treated like suckers by those regimes. During the Reagan era, the lobbyist Paul Manafort—who would go on to be Trump’s 2016 campaign chairman—made a fantastically lucrative living by trying to bolster the image of autocrats as latter-day incarnations of Thomas Jefferson. In the late ’80s, Manafort took the Angolan guerrilla leader Jonas Savimbi, a former Maoist, and whisked him around Washington think tanks, touting him as a “freedom fighter.” That label required overlooking, among other inconvenient facts, how Savimbi’s army conscripted women into sexual slavery.

The Cold War, at least, provided a plausible geostrategic case for supporting these goons—and many of the socialist movements they battled were unsavory in their own ways. In fact, one school of foreign-policy thought, embodied in the realism of Henry Kissinger, a name that goes strangely unmentioned in Heilbrunn’s book, argued that alliances with dictators made sense on purely utilitarian grounds. Aligning with Chile’s Augusto Pinochet and the apartheid government in South Africa was a matter of national interest, nothing more, nothing less. The moral calculus of realism was repugnant in its own way, because it turned a blind eye to human suffering caused by dictatorships. But it was very different from the right-wing celebration of autocracy, which was a matter of shared values. That reactionary faction of the right continued to espouse affection for dictatorship even after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when there was no longer an overriding foreign-policy justification for championing such regimes. Those affections persisted, because the impulse to find an alternative to America’s democracy persisted.

Heilbrunn’s book opens with verve, then becomes a touch slapdash as the narrative drives toward the present. Even though Trumpism is his hook, Heilbrunn spends exceedingly few pages on the subject. But the present moment should be the shocking culmination of his narrative: Foreign dictators are now thoroughly attuned to the tendency that America Last describes. How else to explain why Putin grants exclusive interviews to Tucker Carlson, or why Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán hosted a gathering of the Conservative Political Action Committee? These autocrats understand that the American right’s tendency to treat its favored leaders, domestic and foreign, with servile devotion makes it a supremely useful ally. If Trump returns to power, Putin can count on him to turn a blind eye to his military adventures, and Orbán can count on him to refrain from criticism of his power grabs.

But what makes Heilbrunn’s history, ultimately, so poignant is that the American right no longer needs to project its displaced desires onto leaders in other countries. It doesn’t have to shop abroad for a tribune who channels the movement’s deepest, most subversive desires. Trump is the foreign dictator that they craved all along.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
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Russian milbloggers responded to the sinking of the Sergei Kotov by decrying the Russian military command’s lack of response to the incident and mounting a wider critique against the bureaucratic inertia of the Russian military apparatus. Russian milbloggers alleged that this is the fourth Ukrainian attack on the Sergei Kotov since Russia’s full-scale invasion began and that the crew managed to repel similar Ukrainian attacks in July, August, and September of 2023.[8]

A prominent Kremlin-affiliated milblogger noted that the Sergei Kotov was inadequately equipped to defend itself against such an attack, and many milbloggers questioned why the ship did not have systems to defend against naval drones considering the crew had experienced similar attacks before.[9]

One prominent milblogger stated in a post published on March 5 (which has been viewed 1.7 million times as of this writing) that the Russian military command has no response to the sinking of the Sergei Kotov because no one likes to tell the truth to the military command and that the military command refuses to learn important lessons from past experiences to improve the military.[10]

Another milblogger emphasized that it would be very important for the Russian command to listen to the crew of the Sergei Kotov to improve and modernize naval vessels and defensive procedures in the future.[11]

Another milblogger responded to this assessment and claimed that the Russian command is extraordinarily unlikely to do so because of an ”administrative guillotine” in the Russian military bureaucracy that prevents such learning and innovation, as well as the command’s larger cultural proclivity to cover up mistakes instead of addressing them.[12]

The ire expressed by Russian milbloggers towards the Russian military apparatus represents a longstanding source of discontent for pro-war military commentators. Miroslava Reginskaya, the wife of imprisoned ultra-nationalist and former Russian officer Igor Girkin, posted on March 5 an archival letter written by Girkin in 2018 wherein Girkin complained about the incompetence of Russian commanders causing the deaths of Russian soldiers and called for “Stalinist level repressions” against such commanders.[13]

Girkin emphasized that all echelons of the Russian command are filled with such “scum” that contribute to “thousands of large and small disasters, based on incompetence, stupid immense greed, and disregard for people.” Girkin’s 2018 critique about the inability and lack of willingness of the Russian command to address its mistakes, internalize lessons learned, and disseminate them across the Russian military remains a central component of Russian information space critiques against the Russian military machine nearly six years later in 2024.

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campai
gn-assessment-march-5-2024

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
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Wednesday, March 6, 2024 9:38 AM

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The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

EU proposes €1.5 billion plan to prop up defense industry

By Rudy Ruitenberg | Mar 5, 12:44 PM

https://www.defensenews.com/global/europe/2024/03/05/eu-proposes-16-bi
llion-plan-to-prop-up-defense-industry/

With each of the EU’s 27 member states in charge of its defense budget, economic nationalism has often pushed countries such as France and Germany to buy local rather than European. The resulting fragmentation has a price: A European Parliament report in 2019 found the costs of duplication in security and defense policy among the bloc are at least €22 billion a year.

“In the last two years, we have faced the situation of a defense industry without sufficient production capacity to meet the sharp increase of demand,” the European Commission’s executive vice president, Margrethe Vestager, said at the news conference. “We have been vividly confronted with a well-known structural fragmentation along national borders that limits economies of scale, and creates mistrust, while preventing genuine competition between industrial players. This entails major inefficiencies, and insufficient value for taxpayer’s money.”

From February 2022 to June 2023, EU states spent more than €100 billion on defense acquisitions, according to Vestager, who said almost 80% was spent outside the EU, with the U.S. alone accounting for more than 60%. She said spending that sort of money outside the bloc is no longer sustainable.

What matters now is that the EU defense-industrial base grows rapidly so Russian President Vladimir Putin understands “we are extremely serious,” Breton said.

He added that European defense production will not only match that of Russia — “we will do it much better.”

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
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Wednesday, March 6, 2024 9:40 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Nobody cared 2 years ago. Nobody cares now.

--------------------------------------------------

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Wednesday, March 6, 2024 9:49 AM

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The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Britain 'prepared to loan Ukraine all frozen Russian central bank assets in UK'

https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2024/mar/06/russia-ukraine-war-
live-emmanuel-macron-urges-ukraines-allies-not-to-be-cowards

Britain is prepared to loan Ukraine all frozen Russian central bank assets in the UK on the basis that Russia will be forced to pay reparations to Ukraine at the end of the war, the UK foreign secretary David Cameron has said.

He said the assets would be used as surety for the payment of the reparations.

The plan is more radical than proposals discussed in the European Union for Ukraine to be given only the windfall profits from the Russian central bank assets being held by the West. The annual windfall profits are estimated at $4bn.

Cameron told peers on Tuesday night:

There is an opportunity to use something like a syndicated loan or a bond that effectively uses the frozen Russian assets as a surety to give that money to the Ukrainians knowing that we will recoup it when reparations are paid by Russia. That may be a better way of doing it. We are aiming for the maximum amount of G7 and EU unity on this but if we cannot get it I think we will have to move ahead with allies that want to take this action.

Cameron said he did not think the bond plan would undermine the reputation of the City of London in any way.

It is the first time Cameron has spoken about the proposal openly in such detail, and probably underscores the political support the plan has in the US, but not the EU.

The plan would be especially helpful to Ukraine if the US Congress continues to block an extension of aid to Ukraine since it would provide Ukraine with a new source of funds to buy armaments, and fund its budget deficit.

The G7 has been debating for over a year whether the Russian central bank assets frozen at the time of the Russian invasion of Ukraine could also be seized without undermining faith in the international financial system.

The EU estimates around €260bn in Central Bank of Russia assets have been immobilised in the form of securities and cash in the jurisdictions of the G7 partners, the EU and Australia, with more than two-thirds of those immobilised in the EU.

Belgium is thought to have control of as much as 190bn of the assets, housed in its Euro clear financial clearing house, and is the most reluctant to follow the kind of radical plan set out by Cameron. It says it is already facing a series of court cases mainly in Russia, and its stance has the backing of France and Germany.

The US Treasury, initially reluctant to seize Central Bank assets due to the assumed sanctity of sovereign state assets, has warmed to the idea of a bond. The US is estimated to have $40 to $60bn worth of Russian assets, and the UK closer to £25bn, but no official figure has been disclosed.

The strength of the proposal is that seized assets would be deemed to have been returned to Russia after the payment of reparations. The proposal’s weakness is that it assumes Ukraine will win a military victory and a defeated Moscow will be prepared to pay reparations for the damage it caused to Ukraine, something that now seems unimaginable.

Vladimir Putin has already retaliated by seizing the assets of some US companies operating in Russia.

It is estimated Ukraine needs €100bn a year to fight off the Russian invasion, and another €50bn a year for reconstruction.

Similar appropriations of state assets have happened before, most notably the UN-sanctioned US seizure of billions of dollars of Iraqi funds that were earmarked for reparations for Kuwait after the 1990 invasion. Russia would veto any UN move to endorse the seizure of its assets

The foreign secretary said he did not think Russian President Vladimir Putin would stop at Ukraine, saying “If we allowed Russia any form of win in Ukraine Moldova would be at risk and some of the Baltic states would be at risk.”

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
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Wednesday, March 6, 2024 10:47 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Nobody cared 2 years ago. Nobody cares now.

Russia has lost 419,020 troops in Ukraine since the beginning of its full-scale invasion on Feb. 24, 2022, the General Staff of Ukraine's Armed Forces reported on March 5.

This number includes 1,070 casualties Russian forces suffered just over the past day.

According to the report, Russia has also lost
6,657 tanks,
12,688 armored fighting vehicles,
13,423 vehicles and fuel tanks,
10,258 artillery systems,
1,007 multiple launch rocket systems,
700 air defense systems,
347 airplanes,
325 helicopters,
7,863 drones,
25 ships and boats,
and one submarine.

https://kyivindependent.com/general-staff-russia-has-lost-419-020-troo
ps-in-ukraine-since-feb-24-2022/

General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine

The total combat losses of the enemy from 02/24/22 to 03/05/24 were approximately:
of personnel - about 419,020 (+1,070) persons,
tanks - 6657 (+9) units,
armored fighting vehicles / APV - 12688 (+28) units,
artillery systems – 10,258 (+48) units,
RSZV / MLRS – 1007 (+3) units,
anti-aircraft warfare systems - 700 (+2) units,
aircraft – 347 (+0) units,
helicopters – 325 (+0) units,
UAV operational-tactical level – 7863 (+18),
cruise missiles - 1917 (+1),
ships / boats / warships / boats - 25 (+0) units,
submarines - 1 (+0) units,
vehicles and fuel tanks – 13423 (+49) units,
special equipment / special equipment - 1630 (+9)
Data are being updated.
Beat the occupier! Together we will win! Our strength is in the truth!/ Strike the occupier! Let's win together! Our strength is in the truth!

https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid0sEc86hfvZF8Pajgyt
y1BczNjNVq6cSywHMaXo3dBJ7sJxfdHKWuvYdF68gs96wuul?locale=uk_UA

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Wednesday, March 6, 2024 11:07 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Caught between Trump and Putin, are European countries ready to go nuclear?

By Joshua Keating | Mar 6, 2024, 6:00am EST

https://www.vox.com/world-politics/24091566/europe-nuclear-weapons-pol
and-germany-france-putin-trump

At the height of the Cold War in 1961, French President Charles de Gaulle famously questioned the value of American security guarantees, asking then-President John F. Kennedy if the US would really be willing to “trade New York for Paris” in the event of a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. It was because of these doubts that, under de Gaulle’s leadership, France developed its independent nuclear deterrent, which it maintains to this day.

Lately, de Gaulle’s old question has started to seem disturbingly timely.

Just last week, after French President Emmanuel Macron floated the idea of European NATO members sending ground troops into Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin warned Western leaders that Russia has “weapons that can hit targets on their territory” and that they were risking the “destruction of civilization.” The takeaway was unignorable: After years in which it was a largely forgotten political issue on the continent, the continent’s leaders clearly can no longer afford to ignore the threat of nuclear weapons.

Thanks to a renewed threat from Russia as well as doubts about America’s security umbrella thanks to the potential return of Donald Trump to the White House next year, the topic of nuclear deterrence is back in a big way, and has some European leaders to talking openly about whether their countries should acquire nuclear deterrents of their own — independent from a suddenly less predictable US.

Leaders in Poland, literally on the frontline of the conflict between NATO and Russia, have proposed hosting NATO nuclear weapons on their soil. Manfred Weber, a senior German politician who leads the center-right European People’s Party, the largest grouping in the EU parliament, recently argued for Europe to develop its own nuclear deterrent. He told Politico: “Europe must build deterrence, we must be able to deter and defend ourselves …We all know that when push comes to shove, the nuclear option is the really decisive one.”

The idea of such a “Euronuke” is not new, but the fact that the discussion is being revived in a serious way is a telling indicator of Europe’s existential anxieties in the age of Putin and Trump.

More at https://www.vox.com/world-politics/24091566/europe-nuclear-weapons-pol
and-germany-france-putin-trump

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
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Thursday, March 7, 2024 7:25 AM

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The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Kremlin Spokesperson Dmitri Peskov reiterated on March 6 that Russia will only use nuclear weapons if “something” threatens Russia’s existence — a longstanding Russian nuclear weapon usage talking point.[18] Kremlin officials continue to invoke nuclear threats as part of ongoing Russian information operations aimed at weakening Western support for Ukraine and deterring Western aid to Ukraine.

Peskov also accused the West of “routinizing” the topic of nuclear war, which Peskov called “extremely dangerous” and “irresponsible,” despite the fact that it is, in fact, Russian officials, who most frequently openly threaten employing nuclear weapons.

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campai
gn-assessment-march-6-2024

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Thursday, March 7, 2024 7:33 AM

JAYNEZTOWN

Ukraine’s first lady declines Biden’s State of the Union invite

https://www.politico.eu/article/ukraine-first-lady-olena-zelenska-decl
ine-joe-biden-state-of-the-union-invitation-yulia-navalnaya/

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Thursday, March 7, 2024 9:37 AM

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The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Lithuanian intelligence: Russia can fight Ukraine 'at a similar intensity' for at least 2 years

by Martin Fornusek | March 7, 2024 9:17 AM

https://kyivindependent.com/reuters-russia-can-fight-ukraine-for-at-le
ast-2-years-lithuanian-intelligence-says/

"Russia has financial, human, material, and technical resources to continue the war at a similar intensity in at least the near term," the report drafted by the counter-intelligence State Security Department (VSD) and the military's Defense Intelligence and Security Service said, clarifying that the "near term" denotes six months to two years.

The report is here https://www.vsd.lt/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/GR-2024-02-15-EN-1.pdf

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Thursday, March 7, 2024 7:41 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

How can both of these be true at the same time?

Quote:
Russia has lost 419,020 troops in Ukraine since the beginning of its full-scale invasion on Feb. 24, 2022, the General Staff of Ukraine's Armed Forces reported on March 5.

Quote:
Lithuanian intelligence: Russia can fight Ukraine 'at a similar intensity' for at least 2 years

Answer: They can't.

SECOND, even THUGR is tired of you splattering nonsense across the topic.
Get a grip on your runaway fanaticism, willya?

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM

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Thursday, March 7, 2024 7:42 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

I think from now on I should just post lists of Ukrainian defeats and losses. Counterbalance the frothing and hyperventilating with reality.

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM

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Thursday, March 7, 2024 8:23 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Vicki Nuland's departure, and her replacement a blow to Ukraine:

Quote:
...Biden is also, to put it mildly, not a fighter, so the opportune time to leave for Nuland is now. Blinken will be with the boss to the end, like a faithful steward. Nuland does not need to transfer her portfolio to the Trumpists who hate her; who will ask unpleasant questions about her, and delve into sensitive details.

Therefore, she will transfer the portfolio to John Bass, another professional diplomat with similar views, whose track record, however, should make Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky wince. Bass is not a new clinician. More like a pathologist.

He was the ambassador to Afghanistan when the Americans fled, leaving the country to the Taliban. And as ambassador to Georgia when Washington’s protégé Mikheil Saakashvili lost power. And also as ambassador to Turkey, when President Recep Erdogan, resisting an attempted military coup, conducted a large-scale purge of American agents and agents of influence.

That is to say, the person who inherits all the Ukrainian problems from Nuland is not very fortunate, but he certainly knows how to destroy the evidence and seal the premises. But this is exactly what Nuland and Biden need in Ukraine

https://johnhelmer.net/nothing-in-nulands-life-became-her-like-the-lea
ving-of-it/#more-89522

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM

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Friday, March 8, 2024 2:20 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Quote:
Originally posted by JAYNEZTOWN:
Ukraine’s first lady declines Biden’s State of the Union invite

https://www.politico.eu/article/ukraine-first-lady-olena-zelenska-decl
ine-joe-biden-state-of-the-union-invitation-yulia-navalnaya/

She mad she can't live that Kardashian lifestyle off the US Taxpayer anymore.

--------------------------------------------------

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Friday, March 8, 2024 7:51 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
How can both of these be true at the same time?

Quote:
Russia has lost 419,020 troops in Ukraine since the beginning of its full-scale invasion on Feb. 24, 2022, the General Staff of Ukraine's Armed Forces reported on March 5.

Quote:
Lithuanian intelligence: Russia can fight Ukraine 'at a similar intensity' for at least 2 years

Answer: They can't.

SECOND, even THUGR is tired of you splattering nonsense across the topic.
Get a grip on your runaway fanaticism, willya?

In WWII, Russian deaths ran into the tens of millions, and yet Russia kept fighting at greater and greater intensity. At the end of WWII, Russia even started a new front in Japan. (By the way, Japan is still demanding Russia return the land it stole on the last day of WWII.) I'm pretty sure that Russia can keep fighting despite less than a million deaths in Ukraine. As far as anyone knows, guys like Stalin and Putin don't even notice how many people are killed since it is all meaningless statistics to politicians. "If only one man dies of hunger, that is a tragedy. If millions die, that’s only statistics" - Stalin

The Kuril Islands dispute, known as the Northern Territories dispute in Japan, is a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia over the ownership of the four southernmost Kuril Islands.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuril_Islands_dispute

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
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Friday, March 8, 2024 7:59 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
I think from now on I should just post lists of Ukrainian defeats and losses. Counterbalance the frothing and hyperventilating with reality.

Why only Ukrainian defeat? Russia has ambitions for European defeat:

A senior Russian officer has warned of a full-scale war in Europe

Colonel-General Vladimir Zarudnitsky, head of the Russian army’s Military Academy of the General Staff, made the comments in an article for “Military Thought”, a defence ministry publication, the state RIA news agency reported on Thursday.

“The possibility of an escalation of the conflict in Ukraine - from the expansion of participants in ‘proxy forces’ used for military confrontation with Russia to a large-scale war in Europe - cannot be ruled out,” RIA cited him a saying.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/russia-ukraine-war-put
in-zelensky-motorcade-b2508436.html

"Macron has said, 'there are no more red lines, there are no more limits' in terms of supporting Ukraine (Le Monde). Then that means, Russia has no more red lines left for France," Medvedev wrote.

The Kremlin official then added, "In hostem omina licita," a Latin phrase that roughly translates as "everything is legal if it is done to an enemy."

https://www.newsweek.com/putin-ally-warns-frace-russia-red-lines-18771
15

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Friday, March 8, 2024 8:29 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Putin Ally Suggests Nuclear Strikes on 3 NATO Members

By Isabel van Brugen | Mar 08, 2024 at 4:49 AM EST

https://www.newsweek.com/russia-nuclear-nato-countries-solovyov-187718
8

An ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin has suggested launching nuclear strikes on three members of the NATO military alliance—France, Germany and the United States.

State TV host Vladimir Solovyov, one of the most prominent figures in Kremlin-backed media, floated the idea on his show Evening with Vladimir Solovyov. The Daily Beast's Julia Davis shared an excerpt of the broadcast on Friday on X, formerly Twitter. Newsweek has contacted Russia's Foreign Ministry for comment by email.

"Pundits on Vladimir Solovyov's show pontificated which Western cities should be the first to be targeted with nuclear strikes. Some of their top choices: Paris, Marseille, Lyon, Hamburg, Munich or Garmisch-Partenkirchen and the United States in general," wrote Davis.

The idea that a nuclear war could break out amid the conflict in Ukraine has been floated by numerous Russian officials, including Dmitry Medvedev, Russia's former president and prime minister. Putin said in September 2022 that Russia was prepared to use nuclear weapons to defend its "territorial integrity", and the topic is regularly discussed on Russian state TV.

Kremlin propagandists have routinely warned of a looming world war and strikes by Russia on NATO territory over aid and weapons provided by the Joe Biden administration and members of the military alliance to Kyiv.

Solovyov began by railing against France, shortly after French President Emmanuel Macron said there are "no limits" to Paris' support for Kyiv.

"The goal of France is not just getting free resources from the territory of Russia, but the destruction of Russia. The final solution of the Russian question," he said. "Why do I think that we should carry out a strike against the West? Because I can see right through them! They say 'Russia can't tell us how to help Ukraine!' It's not for you to dictate how Russia can respond!"

Another guest on the show, Andrey Sidorov, deputy dean of world politics at the Moscow State University, told Solovyov that the issue is "not whether or not to use nuclear weapons."

"The issue is against whom to use them. You often talk about France or Great Britain," said Sidorov.

Solovyov responded: "That's right, France, Germany, Poland, Great Britain."

"That's not the main issue," Sidorov repeated. "There is another country that presents a danger which stands behind all of the aforementioned ones."

"I mean the United States. Unlike other countries you mentioned, it can present an existential threat to Russia," he continued. "The issue is, either we start it and conduct the first strike, no one ever rejected an idea of a disarming strike."

Solovyov said he was undecided on where exactly Russia should attack with nuclear weapons.

"I just can't decide: Paris or Marseille? What should we destroy in Germany for their Taurus? Maybe Munich? Maybe we should have an audience vote, see which cities are they willing to spare," said Solovyov.

The Putin ally added: "The level of humanity's madness has reached its limits, the West won't stop at anything. We should harshly fight against it with all the forces and means at our disposal."

Last week, during Putin's annual State of the Nation address in Moscow, the Russian leader warned that his "strategic nuclear forces are in a state of full readiness."

"Russia won't let anyone interfere in its internal affairs," he warned.

His remarks came after Macron suggested that NATO members could send ground troops to Ukraine. Other NATO allies, including the U.S., ruled out doing so after Macron's suggestion.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
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Friday, March 8, 2024 2:58 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Ukraine: Has the US Lost Yet Another Proxy War?

7 March 2024 by Larry Johnson 77 Comments

Short answer, YES!! Just like the proverbial chicken without a head, the United States is running around headless and incapable of navigating a way out of a confrontation with Russia. A confrontation that the United States cannot win. But, based on Biden’s speech tonight, the United States is going to double down on a losing hand. The Biden team apparently have decided they cannot afford a loss in Ukraine before the election so they are likely to green-light more risky terrorist attacks inside Russia, oblivious to the repeated warnings from Putin and his national security team that Russia will strike back.

You want to know how bad it is? Russian soldiers posted a video today begging Biden to send more M1 Abrams tanks to Ukraine and promising to give him 10% of the bonuses they will earn for destroying those tanks. That, my friends, is world class trolling. The following video shows the Ukrainians launching a desperate retreat across an open field and suffering devastating casualties

MORE AT https://sonar21.com/ukraine-has-the-us-lost-yet-another-proxy-war/.

Saw the video, since taken down by YouTube (nah! No censorship there!)

You'll have to go to rumble for it now.

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM

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Friday, March 8, 2024 8:23 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Putin Worries About The Russian Death-rate and Marks International Women's Day By Reminding Women What They're For

By Kate Nicholson | March 8, 2024

https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/vladimir-putin-international-wo
mens-day-russia_uk_65ead686e4b026052a533c14

In November, Vladimir Putin suggested women should start having eight or more children to “preserve” the old traditions, saying increasing the population would be “our goal for the coming decades”. He just put out a message to mark International Women’s Day – but did not quite seem to understand the purpose of the annual occasion.

The Russian president’s video statement, released on Friday, urged women to focus on “the bearing of children.”

Putin’s message on Friday told women that their “greatest gift that nature has endowed you with [is] the bearing of children” – even more so than their “beauty, wisdom, and generosity” – according to the translation shared on the Kremlin’s official website.

He added: “Motherhood is a glorious mission for women.

“A difficult and critically important mission, but also a source of so much joy and happiness.

“Family remains the most important thing for any woman, no matter what career path she chooses or what professional heights she attains.”

He said raising children “is what matters most” for a woman, adding: “The family is the bond that has ensured continuity from generation to generation, and consideration and respect for women and motherhood are an integral part of our traditions.”

While the president did also acknowledge the women who are serving in the Ukraine war, this is not the first time Putin has called upon women to focus on childbirth.

Francis Scarr @francis_scarr
Putin’s message for his female compatriots on International Women’s Day:
Thank you very much if you’re fighting for me in Ukraine. The rest of you, get cracking! We need more babies!
Mar 8, 2024
https://twitter.com/francis_scarr/status/1766016841783063018

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
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Friday, March 8, 2024 8:34 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

Quote:
Ukraine: Has the US Lost Yet Another Proxy War?

7 March 2024 by Larry Johnson 77 Comments
Saw the video, since taken down by YouTube (nah! No censorship there!)
You'll have to go to rumble for it now.

I know who Larry Johnson is:
Johnson is "best known for spreading a hoax... in 2008 that Michelle Obama had been videotaped using a slur against Caucasians". Johnson claimed that Republicans were in possession of the tape and it "is being held for the fall to drop at the appropriate time." No such tape exists. Johnson said that, according to one of his sources, the McCain campaign "intervened and requested the tape not be used." Johnson lied.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_C._Johnson#Michelle_Obama_hoax

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
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Friday, March 8, 2024 10:39 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

SECOND is best known for posting lies and libel and making terroristic threats. He does this multiple times a day.

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM

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Friday, March 8, 2024 10:55 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

So I've been trying to figure out what's next for Ukraine.

Putting the pieces together...

The CIA burned its own Ukraine program, via the NYT.

Vicki Nudelman, mother of Project Ukraine and The Greatest Counteroffensive, apparently got pushed out of the State Department, and the people promoted above her, and her replacement, are best known for being China hawks and pinching off unsuccessful projects respectively.

Miley, the Army General who had the most (funding) to gain from Project Ukraine, was replaced by an Air Force guy who probably has no interest whatsoever.

Biden* barely spoke about Ukraine as an ongoing project, only using the topic to attempt to bludgeon Trump and supporters.

Zaluzhny, Nudelman's acolyte, was booted out of Ukraine's military top job.

Meanwhile, before she left, Nudelman made dark threats about "nasty surprises" for Russia (signalling a shift from economic and industrial war to terrorism

Macron is still flogging his "French boots on the ground".

More than likely, Taurus missiles are already in Ukraine. Can probably say the same for ATACMS and F-16s.

So how much of this is just random verbal firing to cover an actual retreat?

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM

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Saturday, March 9, 2024 6:21 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Even if Russia's army isn't a particularly good one, it won't matter if Ukraine's defenses crumble, war expert warns

By Ella Sherman | Mar 8, 2024, 2:14 PM CST

https://www.businessinsider.com/russian-army-good-bad-wont-matter-if-u
kraine-defenses-crumble-2024-3

The Russian military isn't the formidable juggernaut it was once thought to be, but without strong defenses and key support, Ukraine is dangerously vulnerable to a force that can still inflict serious damage, an expert is warning.

Ukraine may still have more to lose as Russia continues advancing onward after capturing Avdiivka.

The Russian army has an ineffective command structure, relies on outdated Soviet-era systems, many of which it has pulled out of storage, and puts troops in the field who are woefully unprepared for combat, but it's also increasingly adaptive and has significant resources, though some material advantages are diminishing with the pace of its operations and losses.

"Erosion of Russia's equipment and ammunition advantages will matter very little if Ukraine is not resourced to defend itself in 2024," wrote Carnegie Endowment for International Peace senior fellow Dara Massicot in Foreign Affairs.
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/ukraine/time-running-out-ukraine

And, "it will not matter if Soviet-era tanks are less capable and survivable if Ukraine is not given the supplies to destroy them," she said. "It will not matter if foreign artillery shells have a higher 'dud rate' than domestic versions, if Russian forces can maintain a firepower advantage of around five to one, and Western production and delivery delays continue."

Ukraine is rapidly running out of resources, and if it cannot acquire the appropriate equipment and build strong defenses in time, then the Russians may easily plough through.

Russia's momentum following its months-long fight to capture Avdiivka is strong enough to help its military advance further, and since its costly victory there, it has already taken more land, including three nearby villages within a week.

"Russian forces have very few reasons not to continue their assaults," Massicot said. "By persisting, they maximize momentum before the ground thaws and mud returns, take advantage of understrength Ukrainian forces as they ration equipment, and engaging Ukrainian forces before they have time to fully dig in."

Massicot argued that if Ukraine cannot build a strong defense and get the support it needs, the problems with Russia's military won't matter. "It will not matter if Russian long-range precision-strike missile production has reached its zenith — or if, as Ukrainian officials say, Western sanctions are reducing the quality of Russian missiles," she wrote.

Ukraine has been waiting for additional US aid for months, as it still requires approval in Congress, and it has not built the kind of defenses around Avdiivka and some other areas of the front it needs.

Massicot, along with other experts, has been an advocate of the "hold, build, strike" strategy in which Ukraine would defend and dig in enough to "hold" off Russian forces and weaken them through heavy attrition. Ukraine could then "build" its military through training and manufacturing with the help of Western aid.

The "strike" element would see Ukraine hit Russian logistics and capabilities, sapping its strength. Ukraine could then continue its offensive operations. Western support is key though.

"Without these urgent steps, Ukraine's rationing of ammunition will continue through the spring and summer," Massicot wrote in her Foreign Affairs article. "Facing continual Russian attacks, undermanned units could become increasingly hollowed out and lose the ability to defend themselves. Unless immediate changes are made, this is the path that Ukraine and the West are on."

On a smaller scale, Ukraine has found alternatives. Using Crowdfunding to purchase expensive equipment is one short-term solution for Ukraine's military that has been successful so far; however, it's hard to tell whether enough money can be acquired on a consistent basis for tools and equipment that cost thousands of dollars.

Some Western partners remain supportive, but the Ukrainian military is in a tough position. It's at a point where it will need to dig in and fortify defensive lines while under Russian fire. This dangerous environment will make construction increasingly challenging. And it's still facing tremendous shortages in the critical resources needed to stay in this fight.

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Time is running out for Ukraine

By Dara Massicot | March 8, 2024

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/ukraine/time-running-out-ukraine

Russia uses cash incentives and expensive social guarantees to attract volunteers. To meet quotas, authorities also use coercive methods such as conducting raids on factories, dormitories, and even restaurants looking for men to enlist, and pressuring immigrants and inmates. Russia is recruiting foreign fighters—and soon possibly foreign felons—into its ranks as well. Recruiting convicts may have already passed the point of diminishing returns. Before the war, the population of Russia’s prison system was stable at around 400,000 to 420,000. By 2024, that number had declined to 266,000, almost certainly as a result of recruiting by the Russian military and by private mercenary companies such as Wagner.

The remaining convicts may not be available to enlist, either, because Russia typically employs around 100,000 prisoners at any given time to help with persistent labor shortages across the country. Russian authorities estimate a shortfall of 4.8 million domestic workers. These shortages extend across multiple industries and a majority of Russian regions. Labor pools that were tapped to resolve past shortages—migrants, prisoners, students—are now needed for the war or for conscription. Unfortunately, Russia’s looming manpower challenges in 2025 and beyond will matter very little if the brute-force tactics of Russian troops exhaust and overwhelm Ukrainian units in 2024.

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Saturday, March 9, 2024 9:03 AM

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Czech Republic backtracks on finding cash to buy 800,000 shells for Ukraine

The country’s president and prime minister are putting forward very different figures on how much ammunition the country has procured.

By Laura Kayali | March 8, 2024, 4:08 pm CET

https://www.politico.eu/article/czech-republic-backtracks-on-finding-c
ash-to-buy-800000-shells-for-ukraine/

The Czech Republic has raised enough money to buy only 300,000 rounds of ammunition for Ukraine — not 800,000 as previously suggested by the country's president.

"We have managed to raise enough money to buy the first batch of 300,000 artillery shells. However, our goal is to deliver much more!" Czech Prime Minister Petr Fiala posted on X, contradicting an earlier statement by President Petr Pavel.

On Thursday, Pavel told journalists that his country secured enough money to buy 800,000 artillery shells outside the EU for ammunition-starved Ukraine.

Prague is leading an initiative to purchase 500,000 155 mm and 300,000 122 mm caliber artillery shells for Kyiv.

Overall, 18 countries have agreed to finance the purchases within the Czech-led initiative. While some governments — including from Norway, Belgium and the Netherlands — have announced actual financial commitments, others, such as France and Germany, haven't provided exact figures.

Jacopo Barigazzi and Veronika Melkozerova contributed reporting.

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Saturday, March 9, 2024 6:48 PM

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Russian Weatherman Says Conditions 'Ideal' for Nuclear Strike on NATO

Updated Mar 09, 2024 at 5:24 PM EST

https://www.newsweek.com/russian-weatherman-says-conditions-ideal-nucl
ear-strike-nato-1877580

"Today, the weather is ideal for conducting nuclear strikes against NATO countries," Tishkovets said. "The air currents are directed in non-traditional ways, not from the west to the east, but the east to the west. The radioactive clouds will travel towards those countries that are sending arms and mercenaries to fight against our army."

He added: "The death of our guys shouldn't be the price of victory. We should move up to a higher level of escalation."

Andrey Sidorov, deputy dean of world politics at the Moscow State University, told Solovyov on his show that the issue is "not whether or not to use nuclear weapons." He said: "The issue is against whom to use them. You often talk about France or Great Britain."

Solovyov responded: "That's right, France, Germany, Poland, Great Britain."

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Saturday, March 9, 2024 7:06 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

On the frontline...

There are two more cities mentioned as being heavily fortfied: Ugladar "gift of coal") and IIRC Krasnahorivka.

Curiously, that isn't where Sirsky is pushing the most troops, or where the fighting is hottest.

At the moment, Ukraine is suffering the heaviest losses just west of Avdiivka (was an extremely well fortified city and a linchpin of Ukraine's defense line). The fighting is in three "prongs", each prong containing a village. Just beyond those villages is a north-south river, and beyond that is a north-south road that is important for Ukrainian logistics. So Russians pushing westward are backing Ukrainian troops against the river. If Russia crosses the river and takes the road, it will cripple Ukrainian logistics in the Avdiivka/Donetsk City area. It also aims at Krasnahorivka.

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Sunday, March 10, 2024 7:28 AM

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US officials reportedly told CNN that Russia considered using “tactical or battlefield” nuclear weapons in Ukraine in 2022 – during the same time Russia conducted an intense information operation aimed at the West about Russia potentially using a nuclear weapon against Ukraine to deter Western support for Ukraine. CNN reported on March 9 that two senior Biden administration officials stated that the United States began “preparing rigorously” for a potential Russian “tactical or battlefield” nuclear strike in late 2022 after collecting intelligence indicating that Kremlin officials at various levels were discussing this possibility.[10]

The United States reportedly contacted multiple high-level Kremlin officials, discussed the issue with US allies, and asked China and India to discourage Russia. CNN reported that one US official assessed that Chinese and Indian public statements were a “helpful, persuasive factor” that showed Russia the costs of their potential decision. The sources reportedly stated that the United States believed that significant Russian territorial or personnel losses in Ukraine could have been a “potential trigger” for a Russian tactical nuclear strike as the Kremlin viewed areas of occupied Ukraine, such as Kherson City, as Russian territory and potentially viewed the loss of such territories as a direct threat to the Kremlin or the Russian state – one scenario in which Russia would contemplate using nuclear weapons.

CNN reported that US officials believed that the Kremlin may have tried to use claims that Ukraine intended to use a “dirty bomb,” which Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and other Kremlin officials were reportedly promoting in conversations with Western military and political officials at the time, as “cover” for a Russian tactical nuclear strike. Shoigu and other Kremlin officials routinely publicly promoted claims about a Ukrainian “dirty bomb” in October 2022 as part of an information designed to deter Western security assistance to Ukraine following Ukrainian forces’ rout of Russian forces in Kharkiv Oblast in September 2022.[11]

Ukrainian forces have transgressed Russia’s nuclear “red lines” several times over the course of the war with no Russian nuclear strike, indicating that many of Russia’s “red lines” are most likely information operations designed to deter Ukrainian and Western action to defeat Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Ukraine’s liberation of Russian-occupied territories during counteroffensives in eastern and southern Ukraine in fall 2022 and subsequent Ukrainian strikes against occupied Ukraine violated Russia’s “red lines.”[12] Sweden’s and Finland’s NATO accession also violated Russia’s so-called red lines. ISW continues to assess that Russian nuclear use in Ukraine remains highly unlikely.[13]

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campai
gn-assessment-march-9-2024

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Sunday, March 10, 2024 9:26 AM

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The Russian military cemeteries laying bare the 'huge cost' of the Ukraine war

Satellite images show the price conscripts are paying, say experts, as one site sees graves quadrupling in two years

By Sean Rayment | 9 March 2024 • 5:46pm

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2024/03/09/russia-cemeteries-ex
panding-army-losses-ukraine/

Satellite pictures capturing the massive expansion of Russian military cemeteries prove the “huge cost” of the Ukraine war for Moscow’s army, according to experts.

The “startling” pictures show cemeteries linked to elite units such as the Guards Airborne Division, the Guards Motorised Division and the Wagner Mercenary group have all grown substantially in size since the invasion began in February 2022.

Although Russia does not provide a death toll for its soldiers, the pictures – provided by Maxar Technologies and obtained by The Telegraph and National Security News – add weight to Western estimates of significant losses.

Images of just one section of Moscow’s Tula cemetery, for example, show the numbers of graves have roughly quadrupled between October 2021 and April 2023.

The nearby Bogorodskoye cemetery has had a whole new section added during that time, apparently tripling its size.

Both are near Ryazan, in western Russia, where units of the 106th Guards Airborne Division are based, according to Maxar, a private US-based satellite company.

Troops from that division took part in the opening battles of the war in Ukraine and also later fought in operations in the Bakhmut area along with Wagner forces.

Western intelligence estimates suggest that as many as 20,000 Russian troops could have been killed in the fight for Bakhmut.

Col Philip Ingram, a former British Army intelligence officer and Nato planner, described the images as “startling”.

They show “the huge price Russian conscripts are paying”, he said.

“I am not surprised at the clear growth in cemeteries near bases as Russia is losing more than 900 troops a day at the moment for minimal territorial gains.

“The Russian losses in the battle for Avdiivka, where over 16,000 of their soldiers died are testament to that.”

Estimates of the number of Russian soldiers killed fighting in Ukraine vary enormously.

A recent study by Mediazona and Meduza, two independent Russian media outlets, suggested it was up to 88,000 as of the end of 2023.

They based their numbers on public obituaries and official inheritance records.

That estimate tallies with the British Ministry of Defence, which estimates that up to 70,000 have died.

The US thinks the figure could be as high as 120,000, while Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky last month suggested it was 180,000.

Russia does not supply official death tolls.

Around a quarter of Russian soldiers killed are in regular military units, another quarter are newly mobilised troops or volunteers, and the rest are convicts, part of private contractor groups or unknown, according to recent research by The Economist.

“The reality for the Russian people is that the expansion of the size of these cemeteries doesn’t fully reflect the true numbers of Russian dead,” said Col Ingram.

“Many bodies are left where they fell on the battlefield.

“The recovery and repatriation of Russian dead is not a priority as it keeps the true extent of the casualties away from public gaze and saves the Russian government paying compensation to families.

“This year will likely see casualties from both sides reach the one million in total mark.

“I should imagine that the cemeteries will either grow in size again or new ones will have to be developed.”

Other cemeteries shown in the images include Blyzhnie cemetery, near Feodosiya, Crimea, and Mikhaylovsk cemetery, near Stavropol, also in Crimea.

Both are associated with the 7th Guards Airborne Division, which has been involved in the Ukraine war since the start.

Troops from the unit took part in the southern Ukrainian offensive and the battles of Kherson and Mykolaiv that month, where they are reported to have suffered heavy losses.

The same unit lost 49 soldiers a single day last year.

The elite Russian paratroopers were serving with 247th VDV Regimen, part of the 7th Guards Airborne Division, when they were killed in a battle close to Staromayorske, a village in Donetsk.

Russian media reported in March 2022 that the division’s commanding general, Andrei Sukhovetsky, was killed in combat.

Alabino cemetery is linked to units which make up the 2nd Guards Motorised Rifle Division.

The cemetery appears to have been expanded to house graves belonging to troops from the division, who have died in the war.

The division took a small part in the northern Ukraine offensive of the 2022 Russian invasion, and in the failed month-long Siege of Chernihiv.

During the siege in February 2022, over 150 soldiers from the unit were killed and around 300 were captured by Ukrainian forces.

Bakinskaya and Berezovsky cemeteries are linked with the Wagner Group and are believed to contain the graves of many of its dead fighters.

Both cemeteries have exhibited significant expansion since February 2022.

Up to 21,000 Wagner fighters are believed to have been killed since the start of the war.

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Monday, March 11, 2024 7:26 AM

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A new book about Western journalists’ experience in Moscow during World War II sheds light on the problems of media manipulation and self-censorship in coverage of Russia today.

By Jonathan Steele | March 21, 2024 issue

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2024/03/21/the-party-line-the-red-hot
el-alan-philps/

There are two big stories that decision-makers around the world are following and that foreign journalists in Moscow would cover if they were there. One is the state of Russian public opinion. How strong or weak is ordinary Russians’ support for Putin’s war in Ukraine? Do Russians feel it is their president’s war, or is it, as Putin says, the West’s war on Russia? In other words, is it a war of choice, into which Putin blundered by misjudging the scale of Ukrainian resistance? Or is it a war of necessity, which Russia must not lose?

The second question is: How does decision-making work in the Kremlin? Is Putin an unpredictable autocrat like Stalin? Or does he have to balance the demands of powerful constituencies, like the resource-extracting oligarchs who control the economy, the security services, and the uniformed military who don’t want the ignominy of defeat? The mutiny led by the leader of the Wagner Group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, last summer briefly opened a window into the complexity of the pressures on Putin. Now it has shut again, and Western analysts remain divided over how to understand the situation.

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Monday, March 11, 2024 7:34 AM

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What the Russians didn't figure out in time

By Vazha Tavberidze | March 10, 2024 13:36 GMT

https://www.rferl.org/a/interview-us-colonel-crowther-nato-troops-ukra
ine/32855871.html

Crowther: I wrote a chapter in a book about Russian hybrid warfare. Putin has threatened to invade Poland, Romania, and the Baltic states. He threatened to invade Finland and Sweden if they agreed to join NATO. He threatened to invade Norway for hosting U.S. troops, Poland and Romania for hosting ballistic-missile-defense facilities, any European country hosting U.S. missiles, and has threatened or exercised the use of nuclear weapons on Denmark, Poland, the Baltic [states], the U.K., Sweden, Ukraine, the EU, NATO, and the United States. He has threatened to nuke all of those countries, [but] he hasn't done it once.

RFE/RL: You think he's bluffing? All the way?

Crowther: Nuclear weapons are the only thing keeping Vladimir Putin at the big-boys' table. This is the only thing that prevents him from being just a vassal of the Chinese. It's literally the only threat he has left. In January 2022, people talked about Russia having the second-best military in the world. Well, right now, it's been revealed that they're the second-best military in Ukraine, right?

He has no threats left. His basket is empty. He can't threaten, like he did with Georgia, a military intervention, because he's just got no military left. Honestly, it's really hard to threaten somebody with political warfare: "I'm going to do information operations in your country, irritate your people." That just doesn't [work] well, right? All he's got left is nukes to threaten with, and so he's very liberal with threatening the use of nuclear weapons. [But] I think if NATO forces hit Russian territory, he would use a nuclear device, absolutely.

RFE/RL: He was quite emphatically underlining in [his State of the Nation] address [on February 29] that there would be nuclear consequences if a move such as that Macron was hinting at occurred. Do you believe that's also another bluff on Putin's part?

Crowther: He threatened to nuke Sweden and Finland if they joined NATO.

RFE/RL: OK, so the biggest counterargument to [Macron's] idea that all those Western capitals have is that [deploying troops] would basically make them a party to the war. Would that not happen?

Crowther: This is the discussion about letting Ukraine into NATO, because this buys a piece of that war for NATO. If you read the rules about joining the European Union and NATO, it says they have to have good neighborly relations. So that is one of the things that's interpreted as a "finalized boundary."

The Russians didn't figure this out in time to keep, say, the Baltic states out, but they figured it out in time to keep Moldova, Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Georgia out. All you've got to do is occupy a square meter of your neighbor, and all of a sudden they are not eligible to join NATO or the European Union.

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Monday, March 11, 2024 7:39 AM

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A Ukrainian military official confirmed that Russian forces are conducting strikes in Ukraine with improved glide bombs. Ukrainian Tavriisk Group of Forces Spokesperson Captain Dmytro Lykhovyi reported on March 10 that Russian forces struck Myrnohrad, Donetsk Oblast, with three universal interspecific glide munition (UMPB) D-30SN guided glide bombs that Ukrainian forces initially originally assessed were S-300 missiles.[1]

Lykhovyi stated that improved UMPB D-30SN guided glide bombs essentially convert Soviet-era FAB unguided gravity bombs to guided glide bombs. Russian forces had previously used unguided glide bombs as recently as January 2024.[2]

ISW recently observed Russian milbloggers claim that Russian forces began conducting strikes with FAB UMPB guided glide bombs, as opposed to using unguided glide bombs with unified planning and correction modules (UMPC), in unspecified areas in Ukraine.[3]

A Russian milblogger claimed that UMPB guided glide bombs have a guidance system that includes a noise-resistant GLONASS/GPS “Comet” signal receiver and folding wings similar to a Kh-101 cruise missile.[4]

Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian forces can launch UMPB guided glide bombs from aircraft and ground-based multiple rocket launch systems (MLRS) such as Tornado-S and Smerch MLRS.[5] A Russian outlet claimed that Russian aviation is currently launching UMPBs without jet engines, but that Russia anticipates employing UMPBs with jet engines in the future.[6] Russian milbloggers claimed that UMPB guided glide bombs with a jet engine and fuel tank, currently absent from aerial glide bombs with UMPC, will allow Russian aviation to drop guided glide bombs from a lower altitude “similar to air-to-surface cruise missiles” and increase the maximum strike range to 80-90 kilometers.[7] Russian milbloggers claimed that the increased range of UMPB guided glide bombs will allow Russian Aerospace Forces (VKS) to increase the depth of strikes on Ukrainian positions without risk from Ukrainian air forces detecting or destroying Russian fixed-wing aircraft.[8] Russian milbloggers claimed that the Russian defense industrial base (DIB) is attempting to mass-produce UMPB guided glide bombs.[9] Russian forces will likely attempt to serialize production of UMPB guided glide bombs and increase their use across the frontline.

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campai
gn-assessment-march-10-2024

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Monday, March 11, 2024 8:06 AM

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'Germany and France are drawing two completely different conclusions from the war in Ukraine'

The differences between Paris and Berlin reflect the domestic political weaknesses of Olaf Scholz and Emmanuel Macron, but what remains at stake is both countries' self-image.

By Stefan Meister | March 10, 2024, 4:00 pm (Paris)

https://www.lemonde.fr/en/opinion/article/2024/03/10/germany-and-franc
e-are-drawing-two-completely-different-conclusions-from-the-war-in-ukraine_6604289_23.html

From Germany's point of view, Macron, who is making more and more declarations, as he did at the last conference on Ukraine in Paris on February 26, is acting inopportunely and without consulting his partners. Conversely, there is less and less understanding in Paris of Germany's cold feet, and on such important issues as the future of the European Union, energy and defense, there are fundamental differences in position.

While Germany has become the second-largest supplier of arms to Ukraine after the United States, France remains a distant 14th. To criticize the German chancellor for always doing too little, too late in this conflict is therefore in no way in line with reality. On the other hand, Scholz's communication style, particularly on the issue of the Taurus missiles, has once again highlighted the chancellor's hesitations and delays, not to mention the recent leaks in the German army which led to a minor crisis at the top of the state.

The German government is making no secret of its growing irritation at Macron's desire to position himself as Europe's leader. One gets the impression that Germany doesn't want to take the reins, and that France is incapable of doing so.

In Berlin, Macron's statement that sending NATO troops to Ukraine could not be ruled out was the last straw. It undermined the German chancellor's approach of not provoking Russia and not allowing German or Western troops to be involved in the conflict. There are historical reasons for this caution: Germany has never before won a war against Russia, and the German public, increasingly weary of the conflict, tends to favor a diplomatic solution.

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Monday, March 11, 2024 4:24 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Eurocrats and the Euro political and military classes apparently woke to realize that America is trying to slide out of Project Ukraine.

More important than "self image" is the question "What are we going to DO about it?"

Russia already prepared for open war with NATO. (That's why they have an army over 1 million. Only a part is in Ukraine.)

NATO, OTOH, hasn't prepared for the inverse. So a lot of squawks and feathers are flying into the air.

Hungary and Slovakia don't want to be part of it. France and the Balts are making the loudest noises about troops in Ukraine. The rest of Europe is somewhere in between, with Italy and Germany being more skeptical while Poland and Czechia are considering the concept.

Taking Macron at his word, let's assume that he sticks together a "coalition of the willing" and does on of several things:

Place "fast reaction" troops in Moldova, ready to intervene militarily should Russia approach Odessa, OR

Place "non-combatant" (i.e unofficial "peacekeeping/ tripwire/ sacrificial) troops in cordons around Kiev and Odessa. OR

Support terrorist strikes against Russian civilian targets.

What then?

In the first case, combatants will simply be killed along with Ukrainian combatants and that will be the end of that. I don't see the USA jumping in to protect France etc from their own military folly. Probably not a viable option.

The second case is a little more problematic. IF the coalition is able to scare up enough people to act as "human shields", it would be politically difficult for Russia to bomb them and explain this to its allies and friends. Also, if Russia does bomb them, it might generate enough outrage among the American public to force a USA intervention. Not sure of the Russian response. Maybe militarily take every place but, and force a surrender? Needs more thought.

In the third case ... Well, if western nations are stupid enough to get involved in strikes on Russia, Russia has the option of sending a few (non nuclear) missiles their way. I don't see this as a viable option.

-----------
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Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM

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Monday, March 11, 2024 5:26 PM

THG

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

Russia already prepared for open war with NATO. (That's why they have an army over 1 million. Only a part is in Ukraine.)

SIGNYM

I can hardly wait. It'd be over in a few days.

T

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Monday, March 11, 2024 6:09 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

Russia already prepared for open war with NATO. (That's why they have an army over 1 million. Only a part is in Ukraine.)

THUGR: I can hardly wait. It'd be over in a few days.

Of course. But not the way you think.

You were predicting that Ukraine was going to win, remember?

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM

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Monday, March 11, 2024 6:15 PM

THG

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

Russia already prepared for open war with NATO. (That's why they have an army over 1 million. Only a part is in Ukraine.)

THUGR: I can hardly wait. It'd be over in a few days.

Of course. But not the way you think.

You were predicting that Ukraine was going to win, remember?

SIGNYM

You say I was, no, I am saying Ukraine is going to win. And it would end the way I've said if Russia tangles with NATO. In a few days, maybe a week.

One more thing I'm sure of comrade. Talking facts with a liar is a fools errand.

T

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Monday, March 11, 2024 6:51 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Russia already prepared for open war with NATO. (That's why they have an army over 1 million. Only a part is in Ukraine.)

THUGR: I can hardly wait. It'd be over in a few days.

SIGNY:
Of course. But not the way you think.
You were predicting that Ukraine was going to win, remember?

THUGR: You say I was, no, I am saying Ukraine is going to win. And it would end the way I've said if Russia tangles with NATO. In a few days, maybe a week.
One more thing I'm sure of comrade.

Talking facts with a liar is a fools errand.

Indeed.

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM

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Monday, March 11, 2024 11:09 PM

THG

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

Russia already prepared for open war with NATO. (That's why they have an army over 1 million. Only a part is in Ukraine.)

THUGR: I can hardly wait. It'd be over in a few days.

SIGNY:
Of course. But not the way you think.
You were predicting that Ukraine was going to win, remember?

THUGR: You say I was, no, I am saying Ukraine is going to win. And it would end the way I've said if Russia tangles with NATO. In a few days, maybe a week.
One more thing I'm sure of comrade.

Talking facts with a liar is a fools errand.

Indeed.

SIGNYM

Russia Advances in Ukraine With 'Staggering Magnitude' of Losses: Petraeus

Moscow's "incremental" victories in Ukraine are coming with "incredible" human losses, former CIA director and U.S. Army general David Petraeus has said, as Kyiv marks two years of full-scale war with no end in sight.

Russian President Vladimir Putin appears fully committed to his military effort in Ukraine, in which Kyiv and Western intelligence and defense agencies believe that Moscow has suffered some 300,000 to 400,000 casualties.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/russia-advances-in-ukraine-with-s
taggering-magnitude-of-losses-petraeus/ar-BB1iXteU

Yup...

T

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