Russia Invades Ukraine. Again by captaincrunch

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Oh, THUGR: YOU never served in combat anywhere either.

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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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Tuesday, January 30, 2024 6:16 AM

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

How Russia Stopped Ukraine’s Momentum

A Deep Defense Is Hard to Beat

By Stephen Biddle | January 29, 2024

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/ukraine/how-russia-stopped-ukraines-mom
entum

the Russians had adopted the kind of deep, prepared defenses that have been very difficult for attackers to break through for more than the last century of combat experience. Breakthrough has been—and still is—possible in land warfare. But this has long required permissive conditions that are now absent in Ukraine: a defender, in this case Russia, whose dispositions are shallow, forward, ill prepared, or logistically unsupported or whose troops are unmotivated and unwilling to defend their positions. That was true of Russian forces in Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Kherson in 2022. It is no longer the case.

The implications of this for Ukraine are grim. Without an offensive breakthrough, success in land warfare becomes an attrition struggle. A favorable outcome for Ukraine in a war of attrition is not impossible, but it will require its forces to outlast a numerically superior foe in what could become a very long war.

The German Wehrmacht of World War II is commonly considered among the modern era’s most proficient armies at the tactical and operational levels of war. Yet the German breakthrough attempt at Kursk in southwestern Russia in 1943 failed when confronted with deep, well-prepared Soviet defenses. Erwin Rommel’s German Afrika Corps failed to break through deep Allied defenses at Tobruk in Libya in 1941 despite its air superiority and a major advantage in tanks, and Rommel failed to break through deep Allied defenses at Alam el Halfa in Egypt in 1942.

In fact, it has been very rare historically for attackers to break through defenses of this kind. During World War II, Allied armies with air superiority and crushing numerical advantages still failed against such defenses in Operations Epsom, Goodwood and Market Garden and the battles of Monte Cassino, the Siegfried Line and Villers-Bocage in 1944-45. Nor did this pattern end in 1945. Iraqi armored offensives became bogged down against even moderately deep Iranian defenses in the siege of Abadan in 1980-81, and Iranian offensives failed to penetrate Iraqi defenses in depth at Basra in 1987. More recently, the 1999 battle of Tsorona between Ethiopia and Eritrea and the Israeli invasion of southern Lebanon in 2006 showed a similar pattern, with mechanized offensives making slow progress when they encountered deep, prepared defenses.

Offensive breakthroughs do happen. But they typically require a combination of offensive skill and a permissive environment created by shallow, forward defensive deployments or unmotivated or logistically unsupported defenders or both. The German invasion of France in 1940 knocked France out of the war in a month, and the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 advanced to the gates of Moscow in a season, but both offensives were enabled by shallow, ill-prepared defenses that committed too much of their combat power forward where it could be pinned down, away from the point of attack. The American offensive in Operation Cobra in Normandy in 1944 broke through an atypically shallow, forward German defense. The Israeli offensive in the 1967 War broke through Egyptian defenses in the Sinai in less than six days, but this was enabled by poor Egyptian combat preparations and motivation.

The American offensive in Operation Desert Storm of 1991 reconquered Kuwait in 100 hours, but this was enabled by fatally flawed Iraqi fighting positions and the limited skills of Iraqi soldiers. Similarly, Ukrainian offensives at Kyiv and Kharkiv in 2022 broke through shallow, overextended Russian defenses, and the Ukrainian offensive at Kherson in 2022 overwhelmed a logistically unsustainable Russian defense that was isolated on the western side of the Dnipro River.

By 2023, however, the Russians had adapted and deployed a more orthodox defense in depth without the geographical vulnerability that had undermined them at Kherson. And these better-designed defenses were garrisoned by troops who fought. Russia’s poor performance and weak combat motivation in 2022 had led many to expect Russian incompetence or cowardice or both in 2023, but the Russians had learned enough from their failures to present a much tougher target by then. Perhaps an attacker with U.S.-level skills and training could have broken through, as those who emphasize training or operational decision-making tend to imply. But a large advantage in skill and motivation is needed to breach defenses like these. Ukraine did not enjoy this in 2023, and it is unclear whether even American troops would have the skill differential sufficient for a task this difficult.

Ukraine’s prognosis depends heavily on the future of Western assistance, but even with continued aid, the conflict is likely to remain an attritional war of position for a long time to come, absent a collapse in Russian will to fight or a coup in Moscow.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
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Tuesday, January 30, 2024 5:07 PM

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Does Biden Have a Plan to Win the War in Ukraine?

It is all too easy to lay the blame on opposition Republicans for the log jam in funding for Ukraine but even when the money is released how will it be used to ensure success for Kyiv?

By Jonathan Sweet By Mark Toth | January 30, 2024, 12:29 pm

https://www.kyivpost.com/opinion/27358

President Joe Biden does not have a plan to win the war, other than to keep arming Ukraine to defend itself. The US Army’s General George Patton gave his opinion on that course of action: “Nobody ever defended anything successfully, there is only attack and attack and attack some more.”

Biden’s avowed strategy to “stand for liberty and freedom today, tomorrow, and for as long as it takes” has become a toxic recipe for just another “forever war.”

Killing more Russians will not win the war. Russian President Vladimir Putin is prepared to conscript and send more. Ukraine’s Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces General Valerii Zaluzhny acknowledged that reality in November: “That was my mistake. In any other country, such casualties would have stopped the war.”

Meanwhile, as Washington struggles to come up with a solution, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and his generals are “doggedly forging ahead and boldly implementing new military tactics” throughout the depth of the battlespace – to include Russia.

It is not the primary responsibility of Congress to present military plans to the White House. That responsibility is on the President of the United States, as the Commander-in-Chief, and his National Security team. The responsibility of Congress is to fund the plan when it is submitted. Yet three powerful Republicans penned a plan in November 2023 entitled, “Proposed Plan for Victory in Ukraine.” The proposal was submitted by Michael McCaul (R-TX), Mike Rogers (R-AL), and Mike Turner (R-OH), Chairmen of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, House Armed Services Committee, and the House Permanent Selection Committee on Intelligence respectively.

The proposal calls for the President to “present a credible plan for victory and arm Ukraine with the weapons it needs to win as soon as possible.” They have even identified “the longest-range variant of ATACMS, F-16s and sufficient quantities of cluster munitions, artillery, air defenses, and armor to make a difference on the battlefield” as part of the solution.

It is not an unreasonable request. Defensive weapons cannot win wars – and Ukraine lacks the offensive capabilities right now needed to expel Russian forces from the Donbas and Crimean Peninsula.

The President needs to embrace and build off the Republican proposal, assemble his Flag Officers – active and retired (Keane, Petraeus, Stavridis, McCaffrey, Hodges, Hertling, and H. R. McMaster, to name but a few), then put together a plan. As with any endeavor - it starts with a plan.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
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Tuesday, January 30, 2024 5:49 PM

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Russia shows no willingness to return the bodies of dozens of Ukrainian prisoners of war Moscow says died in a military plane crash in Belgorod region last week.

Kyiv has said Moscow has provided no evidence to support its assertion that 65 captured Ukrainian soldiers were aboard the Russian military transport plane, which crashed last Wednesday in Belgorod in Russia near the border.

https://en.defence-ua.com/news/update_on_the_il_76_aircraft_crash_russ
ia_is_not_ready_to_hand_over_the_bodies_and_what_does_it_mean-9348.html

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Tuesday, January 30, 2024 5:58 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
How Russia Stopped Ukraine’s Momentum
A Deep Defense Is Hard to Beat
By Stephen Biddle | January 29, 2024

Thank you, Cap'n Obvious.

Quote:
Does Biden Have a Plan to Win the War in Ukraine?
By Jonathan Sweet By Mark Toth | January 30, 2024, 12:29 pm

Short answer: NO

Quote:
Kyiv has said Moscow has provided no evidence to support its assertion that 65 captured Ukrainian soldiers were aboard the Russian military transport plane, which crashed last Wednesday in Belgorod in Russia near the border.

I guess a video isn't good enough.

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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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Tuesday, January 30, 2024 7:02 PM

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

Do you recall Russia denying it would invade Ukraine? Denial was followed by invasion:

The West’s belief that Russia could invade the Baltic nations, Sweden and Finland after Moscow’s so-styled “special military operation” in Ukraine, is absurd, Russia’s foreign minister said Tuesday.

Discussing the situation in Ukraine with the heads of diplomatic missions, Sergei Lavrov ridiculed Western concerns that Russia could go on to invade other former Soviet states, like the Baltic countries of Latvia, Lithuania or Estonia, or its neighbor Finland or Sweden. The latter two countries have either joined NATO or are expecting to gain membership.

“The mentality is [that] everything related to Ukraine must be used to inflict, as they say, a strategic defeat on Russia,” he said, according to Google-translated comments reported by Russian state news agency Tass.

“They directly say: ‘If Russia wins and defends its interests in this war, then the Baltic states, Sweden, Finland will be next’,” Lavrov added.

“The absurdity of such statements is clear to everyone, to anyone who understands history in the slightest degree and understands the goals that we openly, without hiding, announced regarding the special military operation in Ukraine.”

Lavrov repeated claims made by Russian President Vladimir Putin and other Russian officials that Ukraine was a historical part of Russia, and that Ukrainians and Russians are “one people.” He also reiterated that NATO intended to threaten the security of Russia.

NATO denies such accusations.

“We are eliminating historical injustice,” Lavrov said, adding that “we are eliminating attempts not only to rewrite the history of the peoples of our country ... [but to] turn the modern territories on which Russians and other peoples of Russia have lived for centuries into a springboard that NATO, led by the United States, would use to threaten the security of the Russian Federation.”

Kyiv rebuffs Russia’s historical claims, as it looks to restore its territorial integrity and independence following Russia’s invasion.

— Holly Ellyatt https://www.cnbc.com/2024/01/30/ukraine-war-live-updates-latest-news-o
n-russia-and-the-war-in-ukraine.html

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
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Wednesday, January 31, 2024 6:11 AM

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For Kremlin, divide with West isn’t just geopolitical. It’s moral.

By Fred Weir Special correspondent | January 30, 2024 | MOSCOW

https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Europe/2024/0130/For-Kremlin-divide-wi
th-West-isn-t-just-geopolitical.-It-s-moral

For over a decade, experts have noted that Russian political culture has been drifting away from the pragmatic, technocratic authoritarianism that characterized the first stage of the Vladimir Putin era, which was open to all sorts of cooperation with the West.

Now, it is taking a more ideological stance that sees the West as not merely a geopolitical foe but also the source of destructive moral and cultural contagion.

Russia is considering a law that will require any foreigners entering the country to sign a “loyalty agreement,” pledging not to defame Russia’s history or state institutions, nor to advocate for any “nontraditional” sexual ideas while visiting the country. Under the proposed legislation, which is being prepared by the Kremlin, there will be legal consequences for violators.

Another bill presently before the Duma, Russia’s lower house of parliament, would target foreigners and Russians living abroad for statements and actions deemed “Russophobic” – expressing hatred or contempt toward Russia or things Russian. Punishments could include confiscation of property within Russia or a ban on entering the country.

In Soviet times, there was a coherent state ideology strictly curated by the Communist Party. But Russia’s emerging order seems a mix of tough but often vaguely worded laws designed to limit critical speech and public protest, strengthen military preparedness, and ban “deleterious” Western influences such as gender-affirming care and public homosexuality. At the same time, the government is pushing an ill-defined campaign to celebrate Russia’s distinctly conservative civilizational qualities, historical greatness, and adherence to “traditional” moral values.

“This is a way of consolidating the ‘good Russians,’ the patriotic ones, around [President] Putin and the Kremlin,” says Maria Lipman, co-editor of the Russia Post, a journal of Russian affairs published by George Washington University. “The government is the main trendsetter, but there are many public actors who put forward their own initiatives, sometimes a bit too much. But in the present atmosphere, it’s unacceptable to come up with any progressive proposal, but perfectly OK to float any socially conservative idea.”

An anti-progressive atmosphere

The Duma has erected a legislative fortress aimed at blocking the penetration of Western influence, beginning in 2012 with laws against foreign-connected civil society groups. Those laws have since led to the banning of most big, internationally connected organizations and the extension of the “foreign agent” label to hundreds of groups and individuals that are critical of authority.

The pace of anti-Western measures has intensified amid Russia’s war in Ukraine, which the Kremlin has convinced most Russians is a struggle for survival against a West united in its hostility.

While the Kremlin’s legal campaign is sweeping, lower-level officials are often eager to push further with their own socially conservative proposals, says Ms. Lipman. Some regional officials have suggested measures to prohibit young women from wearing pants, while a leading Duma deputy recently suggested the restoration of traditional shop classes in which girls learn to make borscht and boys learn to use tools.

“Some of these ideas are too much, and not likely to get official support,” she says. “But they have the effect of changing the atmosphere, and driving public moods further in the same direction.”

For example, growing calls to ban abortion, despite having support of the Russian Orthodox Church, will probably not go far in a society in which women tend to be better educated than men and have been part of the workforce, with full rights to control their private choices, for about a century.

But the mounting campaign against the “propaganda of nontraditional sexual identity” is another matter. Experts say that LGBTQ+ people enjoy very little public support in Russia, and hence the intensifying measures against them have received no pushback over the past decade. Any open expression of gay identity has been criminalized, gender transition has been legally prohibited, and depictions of any “nontraditional” behaviors have been banned from social media as well as from movies and TV.

Late last year, Russia’s Supreme Court branded the “international LGBT movement” as an “extremist organization,” a move that suggests authorities believe gay identity isn’t a native trait but must be a destructive import from abroad.

“This would be funny if it weren’t so sad,” says Boris Vishnevsky, a liberal deputy of the St. Petersburg city council. “They banned an organization that doesn’t exist, so no representatives were able to come forward and speak on its behalf. The effect of this absurd decision will just be to further silence the voices of anyone who has what they call a nontraditional orientation. Now they will be associated with that nonexisting extremist organization, and face criminal prosecution.”

Winning converts

Alexander Verkhovsky, director of the SOVA Center for Information and Analysis, which tracks extremist trends, in Moscow, says that much of the official worry over “woke” ideas is, ironically, inspired by Western right-wingers whom the Kremlin sees as a simpatico force.

“There are a lot of connections between Russian conservatives and especially those in the U.S.,” he says. “It seems they adopt some of their issues, such as opposing abortion and [gender-affirming care], even though these do not have very much relevance for Russian society. But it becomes part of the toolbox for propaganda and indoctrination.”

Opinion polls show that the Kremlin has been steadily winning its argument that the West is an implacable enemy whose malign influence needs to be resisted by means of strong laws, tougher social control, and vigorous propaganda.

“There is no longer a disbelief among the public when the government says the West is an enemy, as there used to be in the past,” says Ms. Lipman. “Most pro-Western liberals have left Russia since the war began and are no longer part of the internal discussion. Meanwhile Western leaders are sanctioning Russia, helping Ukraine, and openly saying their goal is to weaken Russia. Not surprisingly, Putin’s anti-Western stance has never been so convincing to the broad Russian public as it is today.”

WHY WE WROTE THIS

After years without pushing a dogma, the Kremlin is espousing social conservatism as a defense against what it perceives as an amoral West. Ironically, Moscow’s concern may be a reflection of the West’s own culture wars.

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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Wednesday, January 31, 2024 6:13 AM

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

Russia claimed Japanese islands. Yesterday, Japan countered Russian claims. Russians were instantly angered, claiming their constitution made that part of Japan forever Russian land. Where did Russia do the same? In Ukraine.

Russian Security Council Deputy Chairperson Dmitry Medvedev made offensive and inflammatory comments about Japan while asserting Russia’s rights to the disputed Kuril Islands, likely as part of wider Kremlin efforts to demonstrate Russia’s support of China against the US alliance system in the Indo-Pacific. Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida stated on January 30 that Japanese sanctions against Russia and support for Ukraine will continue but that Japan is interested in resolving its territorial issues with Russia and signing a peace treaty.[17] Japan never signed a formal peace treaty with the Soviet Union after the end of World War II.

Russian Security Council Deputy Chairperson Dmitry Medvedev responded to Kishida’s statement and claimed that the disputed Kuril Islands are Russian and that the “territorial question” between Russia and Japan about the islands is “closed” according to Russia’s constitution – referring to amendments to Russia’s constitution in 2020 that banned territorial concessions.[18] Medvedev claimed that Russia will “actively” develop the Kuril Islands and that their “strategic role” will grow as Russia stations new weapons there.[19] Russia has been installing military infrastructure on the Kuril Islands since at least 2015.[20] Medvedev used highly offensive language to imply that Russia would not negotiate with Japan about the islands and to criticize Japan’s relations with the United States.[21]

Medvedev posted these comments on his English-language X (formerly Twitter) account as opposed to his Russian-language Telegram channel, suggesting that his objective was specifically to offend Japan in the English-speaking world and posture aggressively towards the US and its allies in the Indo-Pacific. The Russian Pacific Fleet also conducted an anti-submarine exercise in the South China Sea on January 29.[22] Medvedev’s claims and the Pacific Fleet exercises are likely aimed at demonstrating that Russia is a strong Pacific power that supports China against the US alliance system in the Indo-Pacific, as the Kremlin has routinely stressed in the past.[23]

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campai
gn-assessment-january-30-2024

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
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Wednesday, January 31, 2024 1:11 PM

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

Joe Biden Is Arming Greece So Greece Can Arm Ukraine—And Pro-Russia Republicans Can’t Stop Him

‘Excess defense articles’ is a powerful authority

By David Axe | Jan 30, 2024, 09:45pm EST

https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2024/01/30/joe-biden-is-arming-g
reece-so-greece-can-arm-ukraine-and-pro-russia-republicans-cant-stop-him/?sh=4048cdb5424e

As the Republican Party’s blockade of aid to Ukraine drags into its fourth month, the U.S. government under Pres. Joe Biden has found a clever new way to give Ukraine’s forces the weapons and ammunition they need to defend their country.

It is, in essence, an American version of Germany’s circular weapons trade—the so-called Ringtausch. The United States is gifting older surplus weapons to Greece with the understanding that Greece donates to Ukraine some of its own surplus weapons.

Greek media broke the news last week. According to the newspaper Kathimerini and other media, the Biden administration offered the Greek government three 87-foot Protector-class patrol boats, two Lockheed Martin C-130H airlifters, 10 Allison T56 turboprop engines for Lockheed P-3 patrol planes plus 60 M-2 Bradley fighting vehicles and a consignment of transport trucks.

All this hardware is U.S. military surplus—and is available to Greece, free of charge, under a U.S. legal authority called “excess defense articles.” Federal law allows an American president to declare military systems surplus to need, assign them a value—potentially zero dollars—and give them away on the condition that the recipient transport them.

The law caps annual EDA transfers at $500 million. The same law doesn’t dictate the value the president assigns to surplus weapons. In a letter to Greek prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken described the ships, planes, engines and vehicles as “free concessions.”

The EDA gifts to Greece sweeten a larger arms package that includes 40 Lockheed F-35 stealth fighters, which Greece is buying for $8.6 billion. The Biden administration previously approved, in 2022 and 2023, $60 million in financing for arms-purchases by Athens.

In exchange for this largess, the Americans want the Greeks to donate more weapons to the Ukrainians. “We continue to be interested in the defense capabilities that Greece could transfer or sell to Ukraine,” Blinken wrote.

The Americans even offered a reward once the donation is complete. “If these capabilities are of interest to Ukraine, and pending an assessment of their status and value by the U.S. government, we can explore opportunities for possible additional foreign armed forces financing of up to $200 million for Greece.”

The Greek military operates, or holds in storage, an array of Soviet- and U.S.-designed weaponry that would be of immediate value to the Ukrainian military—in particular, S-300 and Hawk long-range air-defense batteries, Tor and Osa short-range air-defense vehicles and ZU-23-2 air-defense guns. Also: ammunition for all these systems.

Some or all of those weapons could be heading to Ukraine. “Political and military leadership has already given the necessary directions so that obsolete systems and equipment that are no longer used by the Greek army are transferred to Ukraine,” Kathimerini reported.

The Greek ring-transfer was a delicate one, as tensions between Greece and Turkey mean the United States usually offers both countries new weapons at the same time—and in roughly the same quantity.

So it’s no accident that, simultaneous with the Greek arms deal, the U.S. State Department cleared Turkey to spend $23 billion on 40 new Lockheed F-16 fighters and 79 upgrade kits for older F-16s, plus munitions for the fighters. The deal also was a reward for Turkey finally consenting to Sweden joining NATO.

Germany’s Ringtausch program has speeded to Ukraine scores of tanks and other heavy weapons. America’s own ring trade could do the same—potentially on an even grander scale. Greece isn’t the only country with old weapons that it might give away, if the United States offers something in return.

That Biden and his secretary of state Blinken are backing an EDA-based ring-trade should come as no surprise to close observers of American politics. Last fall, pro-Russia Republicans in the U.S. Congress made it clear they probably never will approve direct military aid to Ukraine.

The Republicans are falling in line with disgraced ex-president Donald Trump’s personal hatred of Ukraine—and equally personal fondness for authoritarian Russia.

The Republicans’ allegiance to Trump—and therefore to dictators and military aggressors—wasn’t an issue for Ukraine until they narrowly gained control of the U.S. House of Representatives in the November 2022 elections. When earlier funding for Ukraine ran out in late December, Rep. Mike Johnson—the extremist House speaker—refused to put additional aid to a vote.

So barring a legislative breakthrough, Biden can’t get the additional $61 billion in clean funding he wants for Ukraine. But that doesn’t mean he can’t honor the wishes of the majority of Americans and help Ukraine to defend itself.

Biden’s EDA authority is one of several legal mechanisms at his disposal that can free up older weapons for onward transfer to Ukraine. And while Biden could send excess defense articles directly to Ukraine, he initially is using EDA as leverage in ring trades.

Expect more of this as Republicans and Trump increasingly side with Russia in Russia’s brutal war on Ukraine. The Republicans might be eager to betray Ukraine; Biden however isn’t.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
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Wednesday, January 31, 2024 2:42 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

SECOND, when you post walls of bullcrap, nobody bothers to read it.
Just saying.

-----------
"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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Wednesday, January 31, 2024 3:24 PM

Joe Biden* isn't doing shit anyhow. His biggest accomplishment every day is not drooling all over his suits, and he fails at that most of the time.

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

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Wednesday, January 31, 2024 7:30 PM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
SECOND, when you post walls of bullcrap, nobody bothers to read it.
Just saying.

You have written approximately that same sentence hundreds of times. I got the message the first time, years past, but a different one than the one you think you are sending. The real message is that you are a retard, Signym. That's why you wrote the same message over and over. You can't stifle yourself. Your buddy 6ixStringJack sends stupid messages while under the illusion that he is communicating brilliantly. He has proved that he is a retard who, afraid of the new, left the wide world to live alone in a lower-class Trumptard neighborhood. What will he do if Trump isn't the next President? If Trump proves to be not fine? More sound and fury signifying nothing from 6ix? See this:

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Joe Biden* isn't doing shit anyhow. His biggest accomplishment every day is not drooling all over his suits, and he fails at that most of the time.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
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Wednesday, January 31, 2024 8:56 PM

Fuck Ukraine, fuck Russia, and fuck you.

Don't talk about Sigs repeating herself. I've got to listen to the same old bullshit coming out of your dumb face every single day I show up here, fucktard.

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

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Wednesday, January 31, 2024 10:39 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
SECOND, when you post walls of bullcrap, nobody bothers to read it.
Just saying.

SECOND: You have written approximately that same sentence hundreds of times. I got the message the first time, years past, blah blah blah

Why don't you take a chill pill and listen to some nice music?
Go out for a walk and enjoy some sunshine?
Cook and enjoy a good meal, or paint a picture?

Yanno, do something pleasant for a change?
Achieve some peace in your life?

-----------
"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, February 1, 2024 6:58 AM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
SECOND, when you post walls of bullcrap, nobody bothers to read it.
Just saying.

SECOND: You have written approximately that same sentence hundreds of times. I got the message the first time, years past, blah blah blah

Why don't you take a chill pill and listen to some nice music?
Go out for a walk and enjoy some sunshine?
Cook and enjoy a good meal, or paint a picture?

Yanno, do something pleasant for a change?
Achieve some peace in your life?

What? The European model of life? The EU failed its small promise, shrugged its shoulders, and made a smaller promise for 2025:

The European Union (EU) will reportedly fall short of its promise to provide Ukraine with one million artillery shells by March 1, 2024, as European leaders call on EU member states to intensify deliveries of ammunition to Ukraine. Bloomberg reported on January 31 that Western diplomats stated that EU partners will only deliver 600,000 artillery shells to Ukraine by the March 1, 2024 deadline.[20] European Union (EU) Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton stated on January 20 that the EU will have the capacity to produce one million shells per year by March or April 2024 and will ensure that it delivers the “majority” of the shells to Ukraine.[21] German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, Danish Prime Minister Metter Frederiksen, Czech Prime Minister Petr Fiala, Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas, and Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte acknowledged that the EU fell short of its promise to deliver one million shells to Ukraine by March 2024 in a letter published by the Financial Times on January 31.[22] The letter noted that new orders for artillery ammunition will not reach the battlefield in Ukraine until 2025 and urged the EU to find ways to accelerate the delivery of promised shells to Ukraine, either through provisions of existing stocks or through joint procurement efforts.[23]

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campai
gn-assessment-january-31-2024

The EU doesn't want to strain itself. It is simpler and quicker to surrender to circumstances. Let the Russians and Trumptards take what they want because they really, really want it bad.

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Thursday, February 1, 2024 7:56 AM

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France wishes to turn the Ukraine war into a welfare program for EU defense contractors.
Average Europeans are cheese-eating surrender monkeys and the Russians know it.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/ukraine-launches-massive-storm-sh
adow-missile-attack-on-crimea/ar-BB1hz7Rc

War chest funds

Leaders from the bloc’s 27 member states hope to sign off on the latest update of the European Peace Facility, a Brussels war chest used to fund arms transfers to Ukraine, at a summit on Thursday.

On the negotiating table is a €5 billion (£4.2 billion) top-up to the fund, but also a shift away from reimbursing countries’ military donations to Kyiv to financing arms production.

The latest scheme, which will only guarantee deliveries for the rest of the year, marks a step back from previous plans to finalise a four-year commitment of €20 billion.

France is pushing to ensure the money is only funnelled through European arms manufacturers in joint procurement orders by the member states.

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Thursday, February 1, 2024 8:52 AM

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Ukraine’s survival: Three scenarios for the war in 2024

Russia has gained the upper hand in its war on Ukraine. To reverse Moscow’s progress, the West will need to invest more in supporting Kyiv. With this in mind, here are three scenarios for what could happen in 2024

By Gustav Gressel | 31 January 2024

https://ecfr.eu/article/ukraines-survival-three-scenarios-for-the-war-
in-2024/

Last year, I sketched out how Russia’s war on Ukraine might unfold during the course of 2023. Since that time, the conflict has drifted towards the more negative end of expectations. Over the past year, Ukraine was unable to reverse many of Russia’s territorial gains, and by the winter Moscow had regained the strategic initiative.

At the end of 2022, Russia was in a worse predicament than Ukraine is now, but after hitting this low it found ways to fix its main problems. It began to innovate in terms of its military tactics in order to use its forces more effectively, used innovative recruitment tactics to fill its ranks, and transitioned towards a war economy to increase production of much-needed equipment.

In contrast, the West failed to enact the policies necessary to ease Ukraine’s materiel shortages. Over 2023, there was no concerted defence-industrial effort to resupply Ukraine with armoured fighting vehicles of various kinds. Even the production of ammunition is a long way behind schedule, particularly in Europe: of the 2.3 million shells used by Ukraine in 2023, only 300,000 were European. Joint European procurement initiatives on ammunition only became a reality in late 2023, and similar initiatives for military equipment will get going by 2024 at the earliest.

The time this takes to materialise exacerbates Ukraine’s dependency on American support, with the US presidential election in November likely to determine the country’s fate. While current budgetary battles in the United States and partisan fights over military assistance have kicked in earlier than expected, Europeans nevertheless failed to use the last 12 months to prepare for this turn of events. The European Union’s much-vaunted strategic autonomy goal is a mirage.

As I predicted a year ago, there is no ceasefire, no negotiation, and no stalemate. Time and again, Vladimir Putin has made clear his aim is not to conquer just 20 per cent of Ukraine. In his mind, Russia and Ukraine are one, and the existence of an independent Ukrainian nation is an anti-Russian plot cooked up through foreign interference. His speech to the Russian defence ministry last month reconfirmed this ambition. He wants to annex the eastern and southern parts of Ukraine and would likely be content to turn the remainder into an occupied puppet state, little different to today’s Belarus.

Furthermore, Putin’s political aim is to re-establish Russia as a new great power, reshaping the political order of Europe. Re-establishing the “unity” of Russia-Ukraine-Belarus is the precondition for this resurrection. A true ceasefire, or the abandonment of further attempts to conquer Ukraine, would for Putin mean not only the abandonment of his aspirations in that country, but his entire political vision for the future international order. He has invested immense resources in this gamble and will not easily reconsider, if not forced to do so. For these reasons, only binary outcomes are possible: either Russia wins or Ukraine wins.

2024 will be the most challenging time for Ukraine since the first two months of the full-scale invasion

Given Western hesitation to ramp up arms production, and the lack of planning for the period after the counter-offensive, 2024 will be the most challenging time for Ukraine since the first two months of the full-scale invasion. By mid-2023, Kyiv had more or less given up relying on the West to resupply it with what it needed to sustain the war: drones, electronic warfare systems, and armoured combat vehicles such as tanks and infantry fighting vehicles. The Ukrainian government looked at producing these locally and initiated an ambitious programme not only to resurrect Ukraine’s pre-war arms industry, but even to surpass it with the assistance of Western companies. This has met with some success, but these vehicles will not be ready until next year, and will be available in larger quantities only by 2026. On top of this, Ukraine will remain dependent on the West for aircraft, aircraft armaments, and complex air-defence missiles because the complexity of these systems does not allow domestic production. Ukraine will also remain dependent on the supply of artillery munitions from abroad because of the sheer quantity used in the war.

To this backdrop, three main scenarios present themselves.

The negative scenario

In the most negative scenario for Ukraine, Trump becomes the presidential nominee, and increasingly anti-Ukrainian rhetoric dominates US discourse. In Congress, Republicans want to see Biden fail under any circumstances and refuse to accept horse-trades to keep the supply lines to Ukraine open. Europeans still send arms, but they lack the production capabilities and reserve stock needed to make up for the US. They fail to agree on long-term funding in the European Peace Facility, or to conclude large, long-term contracts for vehicles or ammunition, meaning the production capability of the European defence industry barely changes. At the same time, European defence-industrial cooperation with Ukraine faces difficulties.

Ukrainian forces thus find themselves increasingly short of the shells and missiles they need just to maintain even defensive action. The Russian armed forces exploit this situation to increase the pressure on Ukrainian lines. Russian breakthroughs can only be contained by Ukrainian forces retreating. This pressure prevents Ukraine from properly rotating its forces in the front, leaving it unable to pull brigades from line duty to train and reconstitute them. By the end of 2024, most Ukrainian brigades are tired and exhausted.

In the absence of US deliveries, Ukraine runs critically short of surface-to-air missiles and air-to-air missiles for its fighter force. Russia exploits this by quickening the pace of strategic bombing against Ukrainian cities. Shahed drones probe local air defences, with conventional fighters following up by joining cruise missile attacks. These bombing campaigns impede Ukraine’s plans to resurrect its defence industry and replace Western combat systems with domestically produced systems. The increasingly grim outlook convinces many Ukrainians to flee. By the end of 2024, 10 million Ukrainians have fled to the EU, with numbers rising. The cost to Europeans of hosting refugees far outweighs the cost of assisting Kyiv militarily.

At the end of the year, Trump defeats Biden. Panic grips Europe, and many European capitals halt deliveries to Ukraine altogether, funnelling military supplies into their own armed forces in expectation of a US withdrawal from Europe and imminent Russian attacks on their own countries. The war in Ukraine is seen as lost by most in the West, although Ukraine itself keeps fighting against the odds.

Course correction

By the end of 2022, the Russian army had gone through its phase of weakness. Short of manpower, it had been driven off significant portions of terrain by a more agile, better motivated Ukrainian army. At that time the mood was optimistic, and a Russian defeat seemed probable. But these trends have now reversed.

The West still has agency in this war; it can still turn things around. For Europeans in particular, this means putting their money where their mouth is. The acquisition of ammunition, missiles, combat vehicles, and spare parts is severely behind schedule – not that it was ambitious to begin with. Although late in the day, Europeans can still correct this course.

More at https://ecfr.eu/article/ukraines-survival-three-scenarios-for-the-war-
in-2024/

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Thursday, February 1, 2024 10:06 AM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
SECOND, when you post walls of bullcrap, nobody bothers to read it.
Just saying.

SECOND: You have written approximately that same sentence hundreds of times. I got the message the first time, years past, blah blah blah

Why don't you take a chill pill and listen to some nice music?
Go out for a walk and enjoy some sunshine?
Cook and enjoy a good meal, or paint a picture?

Yanno, do something pleasant for a change?
Achieve some peace in your life?
What? The European model of life? The EU failed its small promise, shrugged its shoulders, and made a smaller promise for 2025:

This is every post Second makes.

His AIDS riddled ADHD brain leaves him completely able to focus on a topic for longer than it takes him to finish his last post.

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

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Thursday, February 1, 2024 10:12 AM

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Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

This is every post Second makes.

His AIDS riddled ADHD brain leaves him completely able to focus on a topic for longer than it takes him to finish his last post.

You must have flunked out of college because the Professors wouldn't give you the personal instruction you felt was your due, but rather they left it to you to make the connections in your head, all by yourself. (P.S. 6ix, you made the wrong connections in college. Make this connection: you and Signym are mistaken if you think I believe you are real. You are the meat versions of spam bots. "Trump will be fine? He will be your next President?" 6ix, do you recall writing those words thousands of times? The catchphrase with Signym is "Blah-blah-blah" written thousands of times. You two are spam bots.)

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Thursday, February 1, 2024 10:28 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

This is every post Second makes.

His AIDS riddled ADHD brain leaves him completely able to focus on a topic for longer than it takes him to finish his last post.
You must have flunked out of college because the Professors wouldn't give you the personal instruction you felt was your due, but rather they left it to you to make the connections in your head, all by yourself. (P.S. 6ix, you made the wrong connections in college. Make this connection: you and Signym are mistaken if you think I believe you are real. You are the meat versions of spam bots. "Trump will be fine? He will be your next President?" 6ix, do you recall writing those words thousands of times? The catchphrase with Signym is "Blah-blah-blah" written thousands of times. You two are spam bots.)

I didn't flunk out. I dropped out. I didn't need college. I'm doing far better than the vast majority of Americans are without it.

Trump will be fine. He will be your next President.

Fuck Ukraine. Fuck Joe Biden*. Fuck Democrat voters.

I'm going to go do some productive things. Have fun wasting more of your time in your current anguish of the day. I got shit to do.

Later loser.

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

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Thursday, February 1, 2024 2:35 PM

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Russia State TV Discusses Attacking Degenerate NATO for Moral Salvation

Updated Feb 01, 2024 at 10:16 AM EST

In a discussion on state TV channel Russia-1, Vitaly Tretyakov, a journalist and dean at Lomonosov State University, discussed launching attacks on both France and Italy.

Kremlin propagandists have routinely warned of a looming world war and strikes by Russia on NATO territory. Russian officials and guests on Russian state TV have called for strikes on both the U.S. and other NATO members.

"I don't know, is it some kind of selective approach, like we would attack this one and this one we won't attack?" Tretyakov responded. "There's always something legalized somewhere, like pedophilia, LGBT. Why would we attack them? To bring them proper, decent moral standards because they've lowered them? Apart from all other aspects: economic, feeding them, watering them, etc."

"So if we have to attack someone for salvation, there are only two countries—France and Italy—where the main wealth of European, West-European, Central-European culture is concentrated," Tretyakov said. "This is where there is something you have to save."

Newsweek has contacted Russia's Foreign Ministry for comment by email.

https://www.newsweek.com/russia-state-tv-attack-nato-nations-france-it
aly-1865971

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Ukraine's Push to Join NATO Faces Roadblocks

By Robbie Gramer, Jack Detsch | January 30, 2024, 3:58 PM

https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/01/30/ukraine-nato-membership-delay-war
-russia-alliance/

Ukraine and some of its strongest supporters are pushing NATO to formally invite Kyiv to become a member of the military alliance during a major upcoming summit, but their efforts are facing significant behind-the-scenes pushback from the United States and Germany, according to a dozen current and former officials familiar with the matter.

Kyiv has backing from Eastern European countries already in the military alliance, including Poland and the Baltic states, which view extending NATO membership to Ukraine as the most effective and least costly way to blunt Russia’s irredentist ambitions in Eastern Europe. Yet other Western NATO officials, mostly notably in Washington and Berlin, believe that it’s too soon to kick-start the process of admitting Ukraine to NATO while the country is still fighting a war against Russia.

Both the United States and Germany are top donors of military and economic aid to Ukraine. Officials in both countries insist that Ukraine should join NATO eventually, but that now isn’t the time to start the process. They said they believe the immediate focus should be on continuing to supply Ukraine with weapons and munitions to keep up the fight against Russia in the near term.

The fierce debate that is playing out behind the scenes in Washington and Brussels is existential for Ukraine and will determine the future of Europe’s security landscape as NATO continues to adjust to the reality of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s territorial ambitions.

A Ukraine in NATO could deal a death blow to Putin’s neoimperialist ambitions to annex Ukraine and possibly even further encroach on European territories. Only Ukraine’s NATO membership, some officials believe, will finally convince Russia to pump the brakes on its invasion and end the war.

Among the most vocal backers of rush-ordering Ukraine’s NATO membership invitation is Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the former Danish prime minister and NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg’s predecessor. “Very often, I hear the argument that we cannot invite Ukraine to join NATO as long as the war is going on,” he said. “I think that’s an extremely dangerous argument to use, because that de facto provides Putin with a veto over NATO and gives him an incentive to continue hostilities in Ukraine indefinitely.”

Other proponents of this view believe that bringing Ukraine into NATO sooner rather than later will be cheaper in the long run than the current Western strategy of funneling arms and munitions to Ukraine in perpetuity while keeping NATO membership on the back burner. Ukraine can only halt a Russian invasion once it is brought into the alliance’s fold, they argue.

“Delays in moving toward membership are not only pricey for Ukraine, but are also expensive for the alliance,” said Kristjan Prikk, Estonia’s ambassador to Washington.

Letting Ukraine into NATO too soon, however, particularly as large swaths of its territory are still occupied by Russian forces, could trigger a full-scale NATO-Russia conflict, given the 31-member alliance’s bedrock collective defense clause that calls for all NATO countries to defend any one country that has been attacked. The prospect of a Russia-NATO conflict turning nuclear looms in the background of these debates.

So, too, does the upcoming U.S. presidential election, where incumbent President Joe Biden looks slated to face off again against former President Donald Trump. Trump, long a critic of NATO, hasn’t said much on the campaign trail about Ukraine’s NATO membership, but many officials and experts believe he wouldn’t work to admit Ukraine into the alliance if he were elected—pushing Ukraine’s hope for joining back at least four years.

The debate also comes as some allies have begun wavering on their commitments to Ukraine, with some populist leaders in Europe, including in Slovakia and Hungary, opposing continued efforts to fund Ukraine’s war against Russia’s invasion. And a massive tranche of U.S. military aid for Ukraine is still stalled in Washington due to a political impasse in Congress.

The question of Ukraine’s NATO membership is a top agenda item for Stoltenberg, who is visiting Washington for meetings with top Biden administration officials this week.

Speaking at a press conference alongside Stoltenberg, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Ukraine “will become a member of NATO” but declined to give any specifics on the timeline of when that would happen, underscoring the debate over Ukraine’s membership that is brewing behind the scenes within the alliance.

As the Biden administration begins crafting the agenda for a pivotal July summit in Washington, where it will host the leaders of all 31 NATO members, the issue is exacerbating tensions between the pro-membership camp, represented by Poland and the Baltic states, and the wait-and-see camp, led by Washington and Berlin. France, which is mulling its own package of security guarantees for Ukraine separate from NATO membership, is seen as open to putting forward a formal invitation for Kyiv to become a NATO ally.

In a meeting at the State Department earlier this month between U.S. diplomats and European parliamentarians pushing for a Ukrainian invite to NATO, the U.S. diplomats urged the Europeans not to try to make Ukraine’s NATO membership an agenda item at the upcoming summit, fearing that it would bring these internal divisions into the limelight and potentially give Russia grounds to escalate its military assault in Ukraine in the short term, according to several people who attended the meeting.

But the European lawmakers, who came from several countries—including Great Britain, the Czech Republic, and Lithuania—pushed back, arguing that the best way for the United States to show leadership regarding Ukraine was to lead on membership.

“The U.S. has been telling allies, ‘look, don’t put this on the agenda,’” said Jim Townsend, a former U.S. Defense Department official for NATO policy. “They’re going to have to come up with something that is reassuring, and is something of substance for Ukraine, and is a signal to Russia that we’re not backing off.”

All of this echoes Biden’s controversial decision to push off Ukraine’s NATO membership bid at a major alliance summit last year in Vilnius, Lithuania. Just two days before that summit, Biden publicly axed the idea of inviting Ukraine to join NATO there, calling the move “premature” and insisting that Kyiv was not “ready” to join, angering Ukrainian and Eastern European officials.

In response, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky slammed the alliance’s indecision on a timeline for his country’s NATO membership as “unprecedented and absurd.”

This year, some NATO allies are advancing plans for interim security guarantees for Ukraine that would come short of alliance membership. The United Kingdom signed a deal earlier this month with Ukraine cementing military and security assistance for Ukraine that would remain in effect until it joins NATO. These agreements are modeled after U.S. relations with Israel, in which Israel gets streamlined priority in arms deals and advanced military technology. Other NATO allies, including Poland and France, are expected to follow suit.

“If Putin wins in Ukraine, he will not stop there,” British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said in a press conference with Zelensky in London this month.

But those interim security guarantees are viewed in Kyiv as a consolation prize to the real goal of NATO membership.

Even if Ukraine received a formal invitation to join NATO, there’s an open debate on when or how it could actually join if part of its territory was still occupied by Russia. There’s a loose precedent for this in NATO history; West Germany entered the alliance while it was still divided during the Cold War, with East Germany serving as the Soviet Union’s buffer against NATO on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Yet this analogy falls flat for one obvious reason: Unlike Ukraine and Russia today, West and East Germany weren’t in the midst of a full-scale war.

Then there’s the question of how long it would take Ukraine to join even if it got the coveted formal invitation. NATO members have to unanimously approve admitting any new member, a hurdle that can cause major political disputes and diplomatic headaches within the alliance. Finland and Sweden both moved to join the alliance shortly after the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Finland has since been admitted, but Sweden is still stuck in limbo after years of tortuous negotiations with Turkey. Turkey finally greenlighted Sweden’s bid earlier this month, while Hungary, led by Putin-friendly Prime Minister Viktor Orban, is the final holdout.

Getting all 31, and likely soon 32, member states to agree to admitting Ukraine is likely to be exponentially more difficult and could take years. This week, Slovakia’s populist and pro-Russia prime minister, Robert Fico, said he would veto Ukraine’s NATO membership because admitting Ukraine to NATO would mean “nothing other than a basis for World War III.”

Some experts believe that if the United States takes a strong stand on advancing Ukraine’s NATO membership, at least most of the rest of the alliance currently waffling on the issue will follow suit.

“You do have 50 shades of gray among the allies now,” said Camille Grand, a former senior NATO official now at the European Council on Foreign Relations. Yet, he added, there’s “a large group that will sort of follow whatever the U.S. direction of travel is.”

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Ukrainian forces successfully struck and sunk a Russian Black Sea Fleet (BSF) vessel in the Black Sea near occupied Crimea on the night of January 31 to February 1. The Ukrainian Main Military Intelligence Directorate (GUR) published footage on February 1 showing Ukrainian maritime drones striking the Ivanovets Tarantul-class corvette (41st Missile Boat Brigade) near Lake Donuzlav in occupied Crimea.[4] The Ukrainian Navy reported that the sinking of the Ivanovets is a significant loss to the BSF since the BSF has only three ships of its project 1241.1 (Tarantul) class and noted that Ukrainian forces previously damaged a project 1239 Bora-class corvette in the 41st Missile Boat Brigade.[5] The Ukrainian Navy stated that the Ivanovets is usually staffed with 40 personnel, and the GUR stated that Russian search and rescue operations were unsuccessful.[6] ISW continues to assess that successful Ukrainian strikes on BSF vessels and infrastructure have limited the BSF’s ability to operate in the western part of the Black Sea.[7]

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campai
gn-assessment-february-1-2024

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Russian milbloggers continued to voice frustrations about Russian forces’ continued tactical blunders during offensive operations in western Donetsk Oblast. Several Russian milbloggers criticized the Russian military command on January 31 and February 1 for failing to account for the “[drone] factor” when planning tactical assaults in response to footage posted on January 30 showing Ukrainian forces striking a column of advancing Russian vehicles and tanks near Novomykhailivka.[11] A Kremlin-affiliated milblogger noted that Ukrainian minefields are canalizing Russian routes but argued that the Russian military command still needs to stop attacking in mechanized columns due to consistently taking high equipment losses.[12] The milblogger also criticized the Russian command for failing to account for Ukrainian drone operations and to equip Russian armored vehicles with electronic warfare (EW) systems to counter Ukrainian drones.[13] Another Russian milblogger questioned how Russian commanders can fail to account for Ukrainian drones in attack plans and afford to lose so much equipment and manpower, accusing the Russian commanders of “complete stupidity and incompetence.”[14] Other Russian milbloggers seized on the discourse to advocate for continued domestic support for drone and EW production in Russia and to argue that Russian sources should not have to censor themselves if they have constructive criticism for Russian commanders.[15] The Russian military command has actively censored some Russian milbloggers in recent months for criticizing the military likely to encourage and enforce self-censorship among other Russian milbloggers.[16]

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campai
gn-assessment-february-1-2024

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Friday, February 2, 2024 1:00 PM

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Crimea Air Base Attack Sees Top Russian Air Force General 'Liquidated'

Updated Feb 02, 2024 at 9:53 AM EST

Multiple Russian Telegram channels, including Crimean Wind, reported that Russian Air Force Lieutenant General Alexander Tatarenko was killed during a Ukrainian strike on the Belbek military airfield in Crimea.

Telegram channel Public Reserve Stugna said 10 Russian military personnel were "liquidated" in the attack, including Tatarenko, the commander of the aviation unit at the Belbek air base.

Newsweek has contacted Russia's Defense Ministry for comment by email. The Kremlin hasn't commented on the reports. Moscow rarely confirms reports about the deaths of its top commanders.

https://www.newsweek.com/crimea-airbase-attack-ukraine-general-alexand
er-tatarenko-killed-1866261

A List of American Commanders in WWII Who Lost Their Lives

Relatively few U.S. generals lost their lives in World War II.

By Thomas R. Cagley | July 2005

https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/article/list-american-commanders-wwi
i-lost-their-lives/

General George S. Patton, Jr., once said, “An army is like a piece of cooked spaghetti. You can’t push it, you have to pull it after you.” He was referring to commanders being leaders as he had little use for commanders that were not out in front of their units. This attitude was the norm for American commanders in WWII, and the amazement is not that a few dozen general officers were lost, but that U.S. armed forces did not lose more!

Leaders being out front is not a unique military concept, nor exclusively that of the United States. Since the earliest days of recorded warfare, good leaders have always been at the forefront of battle.

Some nations have a unique concept of control over military leadership. This was especially evident in the Soviet Union in the years before the onset of World War II. During the war, Hitler not only directed military battles, but controlled the general officer corps to an incredible, and as it turned out, disastrous degree.

Russia and Germany Both Hard Up for Officers

A few years before World War II Soviet Dictator Josef Stalin purged the Soviet military of most of its high-ranking and experienced officers. During his frenzied attack on the officer ranks through the end of 1938, Stalin had executed at least 65,000 officers, including 13 of 15 generals of the army, 93 percent of all officers ranked lieutenant general and above, and 58 percent of all officers ranked colonel through major general. Ironically, one of the few senior commanders to survive, Dimitri Pavlov, would be executed within days of Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union because of incompetence.

During the war, Hitler executed 84 German generals, and another 135 generals were killed in action.

More at https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/article/list-american-commanders-wwi
i-lost-their-lives/

Besides Hitler and Stalin, another infamous head of government who would execute generals: Trump Accused General Mark Milley of Treason

Trump suggested that former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mark Milley be executed for the treasonous act of preventing him from starting a war to stay in office, as detailed in a long piece in The Atlantic. (In truth, and in the abstract, having the JCS chief contacting China to reassure it regarding the ostensible commander-in-chief made me a little nervous.) https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a45305390/trump-tweet-n
bc-news-mark-milley-treason/

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Saturday, February 3, 2024 3:00 AM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
When the General Staff have been discussing with President Vladimir Putin the timing of the Russian offensive to force the Kiev regime into capitulation, it has been agreed, understood, and repeated that the strategic reserves of the Ukrainian forces should be destroyed first, together with the supply lines for the weapons and ammunition crossing the border from the US and the NATO allies.

This process, they also agreed, should take as long as required with least casualties on the Russian side, as determined by military intelligence. Also agreed and pre-conditional, there should be no repeat of the political intelligence failures of the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) which precipitated the failed special forces operation known as the Battle of Antonov (Hostomel) Airport from February 24 to April 2, 2022.

Taking account of the mistakes made then by the SVR director, Sergei Naryshkin, and the subsequent mistakes of military officers around Yevgeny Prigozhin, the General Staff has also accepted that their tactical operations must run least risk of Russian casualties through March 17, the final day of the presidential election.

Reinforcing these preconditions for the timing of the Russian offensive, General Winter and General Patience have joined the Stavka meetings.

This week military sources believe there has been a turning point – on the Ukrainian battlefield, and on the Russian clock.

The daily Defense Ministry briefing and bulletin from Moscow reported last Thursday, before the Friday weekly summary, that the Ukrainian KIA (killed in action) for the previous twenty-four hours totaled 795, with the ratio of offensive tactics to defence, 3 to 3. On Monday, the KIA total was 680, the ratio 4 to 3. On Tuesday, KIA came to 885, the ratio 5 to 1. The casualty rate is unusually high; the shift to offence is recognizably new, if not announced.

The “Stavka Project”, a military briefing which is broadcast by Vladimir Soloviev, confirms the positional breakthroughs this week on several of the fronts or “directions”, as the Defense Ministry calls them, along the Donbass line; click to watch (in Russian).

In Boris Rozhin’s summary of the Defense Ministry briefing materials, published before dawn on Wednesday morning, the leading Russian military blogger (Colonel Cassad) identifies “small advances”, “slight movements”, some positional “successes”, other positional “counter-fighting”, and “no significant progress yet”. The adverb is military talk for timing.

According to a military source outside Russia, “the Russian breakthrough is beginning to happen now. It’s being coordinated with strikes and raids along the northern border. The commitment of the ‘crack’ Ukrainian brigades at the expense of other sectors shows how desperate [General Valery] Zaluzhny is to plug the holes. He knows that the target is the isolation of Kharkov, the establishment of a demilitarized ‘buffer zone’, as well as the development of a situation whereby all Ukrainian forces east of the Dnieper are threatened with being cut off… and he’s quickly running out of ammunition, not to mention cannon fodder.”

“By the end of the winter,” the source has added overnight, “the Ukrainians will barely be able to move along the roads they use to feed the front due to the Russian drone, missile, conventional air, and artillery strikes. Once they can no longer plug the gaps with mechanized units acting as fire-fighting brigades, it’s just a matter of time before the big breakthroughs and encirclements begin. At the current burn rate of Ukrainian forces, I imagine we’ll start seeing Russian tanks with fuel tanks fitted for extended range appearing and Russian airborne troops making air assaults in the Ukrainian rear within weeks.”

MORE AT https://johnhelmer.net/breakthrough-on-all-fronts-ahead-of-schedule/#m
ore-89289

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Saturday, February 3, 2024 6:55 AM

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Russian President Vladimir Putin evoked a wide Russian social and economic mobilization reminiscent of the Soviet Union’s total mobilization in the Second World War during a February 2 speech. Putin attended the “Everything for Victory” event at the Tulatochmash plant in Tula Oblast on February 2 and promoted Russian efforts to expand its defense industrial base (DIB) to an audience of 600 representatives of various professions from across Russia.[1]

“Everything for Victory” is a Soviet-era slogan that Soviet authorities first used during the Russian Civil War and then extensively during the Second World War to promote the widespread mobilization of Soviet industry and society.[2] Putin stated that defense industrial workers in Tula Oblast are currently working under this slogan just as their grandfathers and great-grandfathers did.[3] Putin asserted that modern Russian defense industrial workers have proven themselves worthy of these “ancestors,” who won the industrial battle against Nazi Germany.[4]

Putin followed his Soviet predecessors in ignoring the critical role the US defense industry played in facilitating the Soviet victory through the Lend-Lease program. The Kremlin has previously appealed to the myths of the Great Patriotic War to reassure the Russian public that the Russian war effort will bring to bear overwhelming manpower and materiel for victory in Ukraine as the Soviet Union did for the Red Army against Nazi Germany.[5]

Putin claimed that 6,000 Russian enterprises and 3.5 million workers are part of Russia’s DIB and that 10,000 more enterprises are connected to the DIB in auxiliary or supporting roles.[6] Putin stated that in the previous 16 months, Russia’s DIB has created 520,000 new jobs; has increased the production of armored protection for personnel by a factor of 2.5; and has increased the production of armored vehicles and other equipment for combined arms warfare by an unspecified percentage.[7] Putin claimed that Russian enterprises are fulfilling the entirety of the state defense order and that the Kremlin significantly increased and fully funded the 2024 state defense order.[8]

Putin also repeatedly stressed that all of Russia’s latest weapons are superior to weapons produced by NATO countries.[9]

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campai
gn-assessment-february-2-2024

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Saturday, February 3, 2024 7:28 AM

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NATO has a munitions problem, and Europe needs to step up

By Katherine Kjellström Elgin and Tyler Hacker | Feb 1, 09:11 AM

https://www.defensenews.com/opinion/2024/02/01/nato-has-a-munitions-pr
oblem-and-europe-needs-to-step-up/

This is an urgent requirement: NATO cannot plan on Russia being too weak or distracted to be a threat. If Europe’s industrial base cannot meet these demands quickly enough to ensure NATO’s near-term readiness requirements, members should consider foreign suppliers or purchases of alternate capabilities, like novel loitering munitions or air defense solutions.

Sustained munitions requirements for protracted conflict are likely much higher than previously assessed, as NATO’s secretary general admitted last year.

Europe must foster a munitions-industrial base capable of competing with a mobilized Russian industrial base. Commentators often point to Europe’s gross domestic product being nearly eight times that of Russia, but GDP alone does not produce weapons.

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Saturday, February 3, 2024 7:53 AM

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I recently read a book by the great historian William Shirer, a book about the Third French Republic, which was between World War I and World War II. One of the most haunting parts of that book was about the failure of the European allies, particularly France and Great Britain to face Hitler when stopping him would have been relatively easy. Whenever people write to my office, asking why are we supporting Ukraine, I answer, Google “Sudetenland in 1938.” We could have stopped a dictator; we, the West, at a relatively low cost. The result of not doing so was 55 million deaths. That chapter has haunted me because it echoes so strongly in what's happening in Ukraine.

https://time.com/6591083/america-support-ukraine-angus-king/

google Sudetenland in 1938
https://www.google.com/search?q=Sudetenland+in+1938

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Sunday, February 4, 2024 6:21 AM

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Russian officials continue to hint at Russia’s interference in Western elections despite Russian President Vladimir Putin’s previous denials. Russian Security Council Deputy Chairperson Dmitry Medvedev claimed on February 3 that the West funds Russian opposition politicians in Russia and that Russia should support isolationist and anti-US political parties and politicians during elections in the West.[87] Deceased Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin sarcastically admitted to his involvement in Russian election interference in November 2022, claiming, “We interfered, we interfere, and we will interfere.”[88] Putin has previously denied Western investigations that suggest that Russia meddled in the American 2016 presidential election.[89]

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campai
gn-assessment-february-3-2024

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Sunday, February 4, 2024 6:44 AM

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Two Years Into the Ukraine War, Europe Has No Strategy

By Harrison Stetler | Feb 3, 2024

https://jacobin.com/2024/02/russia-ukraine-war-eu-aid

The European Council had last met to discuss Ukraine funding in December, when Hungary blocked an agreement. This came despite the body’s move to free up €10 billion for Budapest, nominally on the grounds that Orbán had made progress in acceding to EU demands for liberal political reforms as EU officials alleged, although it was not hard to see geopolitical priorities trumping concerns about rule of law. However, this olive branch from the European Commission only served to clear the Hungarian veto during a vote on granting Ukraine candidacy status for EU membership. Orbán left the room during the final tally, effectively abstaining from a vote that would otherwise have been vetoed by the opposition of a single member state.

In the lead-up to this Thursday’s meeting, EU officials had threatened drastic retaliatory measures against Hungary if it persisted in blocking a new European aid package requiring unanimous approval. According to the Financial Times, Commission officials were drawing up plans to provoke a run on the Hungarian currency, the forint. Orbán at first dismissed what he called “blackmail” from Brussels, but those threats appear to have been successful. The Hungarian premier retreated to the less ambitious demand that an annual vote be held on the Ukraine funding package. In the final agreement that emerged on Thursday, this was reduced to an annual debate with the possibility for a substantive review after two years. (EU countries that do not use the euro as their currency are Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Sweden. https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/050515/why-these-europ
ean-countries-dont-use-euro.asp )

But another round of propping up Ukraine’s defenses will not make up for the glaring absence of a serious strategic debate about where this conflict is going and what is to be expected of Europe’s investment in it. Instead, there has been much chest thumping and finger wagging — both at Orbán, deemed the EU’s own Vladimir Putin, or indeed anyone lured by so-called “Ukraine fatigue.”

EU powers are by no means cobelligerants in this conflict, even though they have made Ukraine’s self-defense into their own national interest. Yet by extending substantial backing they should at least be discussing what can be expected or hoped for from their engagement in the conflict. After two years of interstate war, however, talk about the contours of a possible settlement is nowhere to be found in mainstream coverage and political debate.

Much more about the EU’s jarring strategic wandering at https://jacobin.com/2024/02/russia-ukraine-war-eu-aid

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Sunday, February 4, 2024 1:45 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

It seems to me that our deep state -linked media has decided on a strategy for Ukraine: scrape it off and blame the EU and UK. How othwerwise to interpret the spate of articles on the EU failing to support Ukraine with enough money and weapons?

And then there is the Zelensky- Zaluzhny feud, with Budanov (internal security), Syrsky (ground forces general) and Poroshenko (oligarch and former President) circling in the background. The feud reached such a pitch, with statements that Zelensky was going fire Zaluzhny within "days" that Victoria 'fuck the EU" Nuland had to rush off to Kiev to stick things back together again. For what purpose, I don't know.

The rumors continued that if Zelensky were to replace Zaluzhny with Budanov, that would mean a change in strategy from conventional military warfare to spec ops/ terror attacks, which is Budanov's specialty. And for sure, there have been high- profile drone attacks on a Russian missile corvette and on a couple of Russian refineries fairly deep inside Russia lately.

These come as the front is falling apart in Avdiivka, Kupiansk and other places.

Biden's* embargo on LNG exports is going to hit Germany hard, especially since they geared their economy over decades towards natural gas (once they decided to shut down their nuclear power plants after Fukushima) and we blew up their supply pipelines. We are hitting Germany so hard, it appears that the neocons not only wanted to carve up Russia, they wanted to derail that budding Russia-Germany axis too, even if they had to destroy Germany to do it. But since Germany was the EUs industrial powerhouse, and it takes energy to fuel large industry, who do they expect will make those shells and weapons for Ukraine and NATO??

Probably USA neocons had already decided that the EU NATO states were essentially parasitical, and decided to sacrifice them if necessary.

But in the long run ... the VERY long run, 25 years or so .... I think this will all backfire as reality red-pills Germans and they discover they've been hosed, and rediscover their backbone and their national interest, and will partner with Russia again, economically.

Militarily, the war is decidedly in Russia's favor. I wonder when the Russian command will decide that Ukraine and NATO are attrited enough be swarmed.

It would be interesting to set up a betting pool on the month and year we should expect to see Ukraine collapse militarily.

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Monday, February 5, 2024 7:21 AM

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Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

Militarily, the war is decidedly in Russia's favor. I wonder when the Russian command will decide that Ukraine and NATO are attrited enough to be swarmed.

Are you wondering when will the Russian Army stop traffic on Boulevard Leopold III in Brussels, Belgium? Soon a glorious victory for Russia, Signym!

https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/topics_49284.htm

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Monday, February 5, 2024 7:22 AM

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Why Patriarch Kirill received this year’s presidential prize

By Lera Furman | 11 November 2023

https://novayagazeta.eu/articles/2023/11/11/putins-true-believer-en

Kirill is the main proponent of a special “theology of war”, which boils down to two main arguments. First, a stronger nation has the right to subjugate a weaker one that does not submit to it voluntarily. Second, entry to heaven is guaranteed for anyone who gives their life to bring about this subjugation.

Russian World

Kirill’s radical stance on the war in Ukraine understandably shocked many Christians worldwide. But it was far less surprising to anyone who’d followed the patriarch’s ideological evolution. Even before his appointment to Russia’s most important clerical role, Kirill had spent the last three decades gradually advancing a new xenophobic and isolationist religious doctrine that aligned perfectly with the prevailing worldviews of the emergent Putin regime.

A key element in Kirill’s doctrine is his belief in the so-called Russian World, which advocates the creation of a single “all-Russian nation” to include Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus, and placed under the control of the Russian Orthodox Church.

On the eve of the Russian invasion of Ukraine last year, when most people — including a majority of Russians — still believed that war could be avoided, Kirill seemed to think otherwise, warning that there was “no war without sacrifice,” after laying a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Moscow.

Last December, after thousands of civilian casualties and months of Russian missile strikes on Ukrainian cities, the spiritual leader of Eastern Orthodox Christians, Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople, officially declared the Russian World a heretical doctrine. Patriarch Kirill’s distorted theology had become, Bartholomew said, “the ideological basis of the Putin regime”.

Forging new alliances

Having denounced — and been denounced by — many Christians abroad, the Russian Orthodox Church has found new allies among the world’s Muslims, and Iranian Muslims in particular. In this regard, too, Kirill followed Putin’s lead, recalling that when asked by journalists about the attitude of Orthodoxy to Christianity and Islam, the Russian president had answered: “We are closer to Islam.” Kirill said that he agreed with Putin: “Both Islam and Orthodoxy belong to the same Eastern group.”

These comments are reminiscent of the politically convenient theology espoused by one of Kirill’s Soviet predecessors, Metropolitan Nikodim of Leningrad, who insisted rather unconvincingly that Russian Orthodoxy and atheism — the state-sponsored religious preference at the time — were similar. “Communist atheism is a system of beliefs, including moral principles, which do not contradict Christian morals,” he said.

Much more at https://novayagazeta.eu/articles/2023/11/11/putins-true-believer-en

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Monday, February 5, 2024 7:23 AM

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Known Untruths

Former prisoners fighting in Ukraine are finding out that the Russian state does in fact quite often abandon its own

08:18 AM, 1 February 2024

https://novayagazeta.eu/articles/2024/02/01/known-untruths-en

Prison inmates granted pardons or early releases from jail to serve in Russia’s Storm Z penal military units are frequently discovering that the promises made to them when they enlisted weren’t worth the paper they were written on.

Sergey Cherepanov, 34, from the Novosibirsk region in western Siberia, signed a six-month contract with the Defence Ministry on 28 April. He had nine months of his six-year term still to serve when recruitment officers turned up at his prison. He refuses to say what he was in prison for, but will say that he “committed no crime” and “had been convicted without real evidence”.

Cherepanov was one of about 150 convicts recruited from his prison on that occasion, though many others had previously opted to fight as Wagner Group mercenaries, he says. When Wagner had come to the prison to recruit new fighters, Cherepanov had not been interested. “I was sure Wagner was lying about something. I trusted the state. But it turns out the state was lying.”

He agreed to enlist due to what he called his “strong love of Russia”. The money and a pardon, he says, only played a secondary role. In the combat zone, he was appointed commander of a company of assault troops, all of whom had been at the same prison.

He refused to discuss combat missions, but did say that “wherever Storm is fighting, life expectancy is in the hours”.

On 20 May, within a month of signing his contract, Cherepanov stepped on a mine near the town of Soledar in occupied eastern Ukraine. Half his foot was blown off and his leg was broken below the knee. As is the case for most former prisoners, the hospital refused to give him the certificate he needed for an insurance payout of 3 million rubles (€30,900). To date, he has only received the 500,000 rubles (€5,150) the government pays to wounded soldiers.

Cherepanov blames the non-payment on “corrupt Defence Ministry officials” who “want to rip people off and pocket the money”. He continues to have faith in Russian President Vladimir Putin, however.

“I admit there’s a lot he doesn’t know, and he only sees what is reported to him. We have only one of him, unfortunately. The country is huge, and he is on his own. And I don’t believe for a moment that he would approve if he knew what was really going on.”

‘There’s nothing frightening about war’

Another former prisoner, Igor Kharaponov, from Kaluga in western Russia, signed a six-month contract with the Defence Ministry on 30 August, but within two months of fighting was caught in artillery fire and had to have his right leg amputated. In his case too, the hospital refused to issue the certificate required to be eligible for the insurance payout of 3 million rubles.

Kharaponov was released from a maximum security correctional facility with five years still to serve for murder. The Defence Ministry recruited 15 of the prison’s inmates to serve in its ranks.

His decision to go to war was based, he says, on his desire to “clean up his life and defend Russia”. Most former prisoners recruited into the military we spoke to used similar phrases.

Kharaponov says that “there’s nothing frightening about war”, and that, on the contrary, he enjoyed carrying out combat missions.

Military and prison life have discipline in common, but differ, according to Kharaponov, in that “there is no social rank at the front”.

“That doesn’t exist in the combat zone. We were told straight away to forget prison and codes of conduct. You can get killed for that sort of thing here. Everyone is equal in the war zone,” he says.

When asked about serial killers and cannibals being granted early release to fight in Ukraine, Kharaponov says such people should be executed or left to rot behind bars since “they would surely return to their old habits” if released. He has a different view of “ordinary killers”, however. “The only people who shouldn’t be granted early release are reoffenders.”

This was Kharaponov’s first time in prison. He is currently in hospital.

‘I’m missing two fingers’

Vlad Dyumin from Buryatia in Russia’s Far East signed a contract with the Defence Ministry on 14 October, but rather than being pardoned as Kharaponov and Cherepanov were, he was promised early release, a one-year contract that would automatically be extended until the end of the war in Ukraine, the salary and benefits of a professional soldier, and the status of a serviceman. Those who serve for six months and a pardon don’t receive such benefits.

Dyumin was serving a sentence for attempted murder. He says the case against him was fabricated, but he believes that a prior murder conviction had contributed to the court finding him guilty.

Before the prison recruitment campaign had even begun, he was sewing sacks, grenade pouches and other supplies for soldiers on the front.

About six months into his sentence, Wagner Group recruiters came to his prison but Dyumin was not considered due to the fact that he couldn’t do 40 push-ups. So he waited for the Defence Ministry recruiters instead. Like most former prisoners who enlist, he too went to war to “clean up the past”.

Like many others recruited from prisons, Dyumin was assigned to the assault forces as soon as he reached the combat zone. In one offensive, Dyumin’s detachment came under mortar fire and he lost two fingers on one hand.

He is sure that he will soon be sent back to the combat zone.

“There are people with only one leg or one eye in the forces and I’m only missing two fingers,” he explains.

‘Are we just meant to die on the battlefield?’

Denis (not his real name) from the city of Kursk in southwestern Russia signed a contract with the Defence Ministry on 13 May last year. Five months later, he stood on a mine that blew off one of his legs and sent shrapnel flying into his remaining limbs.

Denis received no compensation for his injuries.

“They promised me the mountains of gold and payouts that an ordinary professional soldier would receive, but in the end I got nothing. We were paid 100,000 rubles (€1,030) a month, rather than the 204,000 rubles (€2,100) we were promised, and some people didn’t get paid anything at all. I don’t understand, were we just supposed to die on the battlefield, and that be that?” the former prisoner asks.

Denis still had 11 years of a murder sentence left to serve.

“The prison sentence isn’t my reason for going to war. I have other reasons. I’m not the type of person who could watch civilians, including children and the elderly, suffer,” says Denis. “I could never understand the people who went to fight in order to be let out sooner.”

Denis went to war with 30 other former inmates from his prison. Before that, the Wagner Group had recruited around 100 prisoners from the same facility.

Despite his lack of experience, he was appointed commander of a platoon of 22 former prisoners upon arrival at the front. He prepared them for assault manoeuvres and took part in them himself. It was in one such assault that he stepped on the mine. He was dragged to safety from the battlefield by his comrades-in-arms and his leg was amputated the same day.

Denis refuses to say where this happened, fearing for his safety. Disclosing information about military operations could lead to him “being arrested and taken away and annulled”, he explains.

“And you know what ‘annulled’ means? It means getting shot and then being declared ‘missing in action’.”

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Monday, February 5, 2024 5:28 PM

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Trump and Ukraine

By Gideon Rachman | February 5, 2024

https://www.ft.com/content/18c5296a-f0d5-47d5-aacd-af5210d638fc

There are still many months to go before the US presidential election. But Donald Trump is already having a deeply malign effect on American foreign policy. At Trump’s behest, Republicans in Congress are blocking military aid for Ukraine.

Although the US Senate may agree an aid package this week, Republicans in the House of Representatives remain completely intransigent. As a result, it seems increasingly unlikely that military aid for Ukraine will get through Congress in the coming months — or even this year.

The consequences of that decision could be disastrous. Ukraine is already suffering from a shortage of ammunition — in particular artillery shells. That will become more acute this year, with increasingly dangerous results.

Jack Watling of the Royal United Services Institute, a frequent visitor to the frontline in Ukraine, says the situation there is now “extremely serious”. The ammunition shortage has already led to an increase in Ukrainian casualties. With no certainty about when new supplies of materiel will arrive, the Ukrainian military is finding it impossible to plan future operations.

The shortage of weaponry is also having an effect on the willingness of Ukrainians to volunteer for military service. The mounting pressure on the Kyiv government is part of the explanation for the public falling out between President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his commander-in-chief, Valeriy Zaluzhny.

One piece of positive news for Ukraine was last week’s agreement that the EU will provide €50bn in new financial support for the Ukrainian government. In a joint letter to the FT, Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany and four other EU leaders also called for an increase in European military aid.

But European production lines are not yet ready to fill the munitions gap left by the Americans. That will take until at least 2025, and makes the second half of this year potentially very dangerous for Ukraine.

Watling believes that the consequences of the munitions shortage “will initially be felt slowly and then felt fast”. He warns that “when it reaches the point that the consequences are very obvious, it will already be too late”.

Trump and his Republican party supporters do not seem to care. They are apparently prepared to risk a Russian victory — if it even slightly increases Trump’s chance of defeating President Joe Biden in November.

Some of the Republican reluctance to pass new aid for Ukraine is driven by genuine scepticism about the war. But most of the foot-dragging is simply about Trump’s refusal to give Biden anything that looks like a “win” ahead of the presidential election.

Last year, the Republicans demanded that military aid for Ukraine be tied to new measures and money for border security in the US. The Democrats have agreed. But Trump and the Republicans are refusing to take yes for an answer. Trump evidently wants to run on the idea that Biden has presided over chaos and failure — stretching from the southern border to Kabul and Kyiv.

If the freedom of Ukraine and the security of Europe are collateral damage in Trump’s bid to win back the White House, the former president seems to regard that as a price worth paying.

It is even possible that he would welcome a Ukrainian defeat — if it came in time for the presidential election and enabled him to bash home his favourite claims about the Biden administration’s weakness and failure.

Of course, Trump could not do any of this on his own. The connivance of Republicans in Congress is critical. Trump’s victories in the presidential primaries have persuaded most Republicans — always feeble in their opposition to him — that they need to fall in line even more slavishly. If he continues to demand that no aid for Ukraine goes through Congress, Republicans in the House of Representatives will almost certainly deliver for him.

Those in Washington who take American global leadership seriously are understandably aghast. Senator Mark Warner, the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, wrote on X that “If we don’t honour our commitment to Ukraine, there’s not a single nation — friend or foe — that will fully trust us again.” Bill Burns, director of the CIA, has said that for the US to abandon Ukraine now would be a mistake of “historic proportions”. The decision would be all the more incomprehensible because — in contrast to the wars in Vietnam or Afghanistan — the US military is not doing the fighting and dying.

Russia’s President Vladimir Putin must be unable to believe his luck. Except, in some ways, it is not luck but the pay-off for a long-term Russian investment. Trump calls allegations that the Kremlin worked to get him elected in 2016 “the Russia hoax”. But there is plenty of evidence of Moscow’s interference designed to favour Trump — such as the hacking and release of internal Democratic party emails in the middle of the 2016 campaign.

Even now, Putin takes any opportunity he can to stroke Trump’s out-of-control ego. Russian school textbooks have endorsed Trump’s favourite conspiracy theory that the 2020 US presidential election was stolen.

Putin has made a long-term bet on Trump. Unless there is a last-minute change of heart in Congress, that wager may finally pay out — on the battlefields of Ukraine.

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Monday, February 5, 2024 5:32 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Although Zelenskiy claims that Ukraine's army is above the 800,000 mark, that is "paper"strength. That is, what the numbers would be IF all of the formations were up to strength. Most people estimate the actual fighting force as somewhere in the realm of 450,000.

Meanwhile, Putin mentioned that the Russian military is somewhat north of 600,000. (I forget the exact figure.)

Since many people assume that Russia is going to start a major offensive "soon", applying the normal ratio of 3 attackers for each defender, that implies that Russia would need at least 1.2 million soldiers for a successful offensive. Russia isn't anywhere near that, and won't be for a long time, they may be absorbing a lot of volunteers into their military but they still have to be trained.

So, what's at the heart of Russia's confidence?

At a guess, I think it has to be Russia's current success with its local offensives with minimal personnel losses. They're waging weapons-heavy, soldier-light war. There seems to be no end to the bombs, missiles, shells, drones, and helicopters used to "prepare" the ground for an assault, and they seem to regard their armored vehicles as "use once and abandon".

Maybe the Russian army has been experimenting with and refining its tactics all along the front and they think they can achieve a big offensive with minimal losses.

-----------
"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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Tuesday, February 6, 2024 6:39 AM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

So, what's at the heart of Russia's confidence?

Ammo. Russia does not depend on European cheese-eating surrender monkeys for ammo. Plus, Putin can depend on Trump to stall for 12 months a Congressional bill paying for American ammo for Ukraine. Once Ukraine is out of ammo, Russia wins the game and takes the prize.
Trump urged Republicans Monday to reject $60 billion in Ukraine funding
https://www.france24.com/en/americas/20240205-trump-urges-republicans-
to-reject-senate-deal-on-border-measures-ukraine-aid

Ukrainian Minister of Internal Affairs Ihor Klymenko stated on February 5 that Russian forces intensified their rate of artillery strikes by nearly 25 percent over the last week and shelled Ukraine over 1,500 times, targeting over 570 settlements.[13] The New York Times reported on February 4 that, by contrast, Ukrainian forces in critical areas of the front, such as Avdiivka, are increasingly rationing shells and can therefore only target masses of advancing Russian soldiers, noting that Russian forces have apparently adapted and are now advancing in smaller groups that are harder for Ukrainian artillery to strike.[14]

Ukrainian military analyst and retired Colonel Petro Chernyk noted that Ukrainian forces possess relatively better counterbattery capabilities writ large than Russian forces, particularly because they have American AN/TPQ-36, -48, and -50 radars and the German COBRA radar system.[15] Counterbattery radars are effective in that they detect incoming fire and calculate its point of origin so that artillery forces can conduct return fire — for which artillery forces require sufficient artillery ammunition, however. A lack of artillery ammunition thus severely degrades counterbattery systems: AN/TPQ, COBRA, and other Western counterbattery systems are only as effective as the number of shells that Ukrainian forces have at their disposal to pursue the targets that counterbattery radars identify. ISW previously reported that Russian forces are benefitting from the combined dynamic of Ukraine’s ammunition shortage and its subsequent inability to conduct sufficient counterbattery warfare, and this dynamic is likely to become more acute as Ukraine’s period of shell shortages protracts.[16]

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

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, February 6, 2024 6:42 AM

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

Russia’s Adaptation Advantage

Early in the War, Moscow Struggled to Shift Gears — but Now It’s Outlearning Kyiv

By Mick Ryan | February 5, 2024

MICK RYAN is a military strategist, retired Australian Army major general, and an Adjunct Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/ukraine/russias-adaptation-advantage

Throughout the war in Ukraine, Kyiv and Moscow have waged an adaptation battle, trying to learn and improve their military effectiveness. In the early stages of the invasion, Ukraine had the advantage. Empowered by a rapid influx of Western weapons, motivated by the existential threat posed by Russia’s aggression, and well prepared for the attack, Kyiv was able to develop new ways of fighting in remarkably short order. Russia, in contrast, fumbled: a big, arrogant, and lumbering bear, overconfident of a rapid victory. The institutional shock of Russia’s lack of success, in turn, slowed its ability to learn and adapt.

But after two years of war, the adaptation battle has changed. The quality gap between Ukraine and Russia has closed. Ukraine still has an innovative and bottom-up military culture, which allows it to quickly introduce new battlefield technologies and tactics. But it can struggle to make sure that those lessons are systematized and spread throughout the entire armed forces. Russia, on the other hand, is slower to learn from the bottom up because of a reluctance to report failure and a more centralized command philosophy. Yet when Russia does finally learn something, it is able to systematize it across the military and through its large defense industry.

These differences are reflected in the ways the two states innovate. Ukraine is better at tactical adaptation: learning and improving on the battlefield. Russia is superior at strategic adaptation, or learning and adaptation that affects national and military policymaking, such as how states use their resources. Both forms of adaptation are important. But it is the latter type that is most crucial to winning wars.

The longer this war lasts, the better Russia will get at learning, adapting, and building a more effective, modern fighting force. Slowly but surely, Moscow will absorb new ideas from the battlefield and rearrange its tactics accordingly. Its strategic adaptation already helped it fend off Ukraine’s counteroffensive, and over the last few months it has helped Russian troops take more territory from Kyiv. Ultimately, if Russia’s edge in strategic adaptation persists without an appropriate Western response, the worst that can happen in this war is not stalemate. It is a Ukrainian defeat.

THE LONG GAME

After struggling during its early military operations in Ukraine, Russia adapted its command-and-control structure. In April 2022, the country appointed a single commander to oversee its full-scale invasion, jettisoning the dysfunctional, fractured system through which Moscow had run the war to that point. The result was a more unified effort, one that shifted the Russian invasion from multiple separate and uncoordinated campaigns in the north, east, and south of the country to a more synchronized approach—with the main effort clearly being the ground operations in eastern Ukraine. This led to Russian advances and the capture of cities such as Severodonetsk, in mid-2022.

Russia also changed how it conducted close combat. Early in the war, Russia employed combined arms, battalion-sized ground units that were often not strong enough and that demonstrated a limited capacity to integrate air and land operations and carry out ground combined-arms operations. But over the last 12 months, the Russians evolved away from such battalions. They are now integrating elite forces and conventional forces—and buttressing that combination with what many Ukrainians deride as a “meatstorm”: waves of poorly trained, disposable forces who can overwhelm and exhaust Ukrainian soldiers before more talented Russian troops arrive.

Some of this tactical innovation has been driven by military necessity, including the lack of time Russia had to train mobilized troops to high levels of proficiency. But some of it was informed by strategic top-down directives. The Wagner paramilitary company’s leaders helped promote the “meat tactics” approach by using convicts who signed up with the militia as disposable bullet catchers during the successful campaign to take Bakhmut. After seeing Wagner’s success with this grotesque strategy, Moscow’s forces adopted similar approaches for other battles. Russian infantry tactics have shifted from trying to deploy uniform battalion groups as combined arms units of action to creating a stratified division by forming into assault, specialized, and disposable “meat” troops.

Russian forces have adapted on defense, as well. After only lightly fortifying its positions early in the war—and thereby opening itself up to Ukrainian offensives—Moscow constructed deep defensive lines in the south during late 2022 and early 2023. Coupled with Russian improvements in shortening the time between target detection and the carrying out of battlefield strikes, the Ukrainians faced an adversary in the second half of 2023 that was very different from the one it faced in 2022. To overcome this evolved enemy, Ukraine was forced to adapt its tactics, technology, and operations, in part by sending some troops to Poland and other European countries for additional combined arms training before the counteroffensive began. But Kyiv’s efforts were still insufficient to the task of retaking more of the south.

The Russian military has also become better at protecting its vehicles. In the early days of the war, Ukraine used drones and precision missiles to successfully destroy many of Moscow’s tanks and trucks, leading to multiple embarrassing Russian defeats. But in response the country’s troops began creating improvised armor. After large quantities of Russian logistical vehicles were attacked during the advance on Kyiv, the troops began adding improvised armor on these trucks. This makeshift armor eventually gained greater sophistication with what have come to be called “cope cages”—slat armor or cage armor. Such armor first appeared on German tanks in World War II. But it has also been used in modern conflicts, including by coalition forces deployed in the 2003 Iraq war and now on Russian tanks and self-propelled artillery. These cages have helped either crush the fuses of Ukrainian antitank weapons before they hit a vehicle’s main armor or forced antitank weapons to detonate before they can penetrate the vehicle. Together, the cages have provided another layer of physical protection to Russia’s tanks and trucks, and they appear to have given their crews more confidence to operate in places where there is a high risk of drone or loitering munition attacks.

This defensive approach may have started as a tactical innovation. But eventually, the adoption of cages was systematized. The Russian Army had its units, en masse, use cages as a systemic approach to defeating loitering munitions, top-attack missiles (such as the Javelin), and drones. In 2023, Russian commanders even issued formal direction on how to construct and mount cope cages to trucks, artillery, and armored vehicles. Moscow now offers such cages on export versions of its armored vehicles.

Moscow, meanwhile, has gotten significantly better at deploying drones itself—reversing an earlier dynamic. At the start of the war, Ukraine helped pioneer new ways of using remote controlled, semiautonomous, and autonomous drones to do everything from conducting reconnaissance to dropping bombs. The country’s self-proclaimed drone army, a collaboration of government, industry, and citizen crowdfunding, gave Kyiv an especially impressive early drone advantage. But although Russia was slower in adopting drones for a wide array of purposes, it has now overtaken Ukraine with the quantity of drones and loitering munitions and its ability to use them. Moscow has done so by mobilizing its indigenous defense industry and sourcing critical technologies from overseas, despite Western sanctions. Now, it outproduces Ukraine when it comes to drone and loitering munitions. This gap will probably continue to widen.

Modern war is almost impossible without deploying large numbers of unmanned aerial vehicles while actively countering enemy drones. Russia’s use of UAVs—in concert with its defensive lines, large amounts of artillery, attack helicopters, loitering munitions, and more responsive reconnaissance and surveillance systems—was a key reason for Ukraine’s failed 2023 counteroffensive. And as Russia learns more and continues to increase its drone production, it will gain more of an advantage.

REVVING UP

Drones are not the only weapon with which Russia has flipped the script. Ukraine was an early adopter of precision weapons, or weapons that use GPS or other guidance systems to strike targets more accurately than older systems. Kyiv had to be; given the disparity in artillery and munitions at the beginning of the war, Ukraine could not afford to waste rockets and shells. But Moscow has since learned and adapted to reduce the effect of precision weapons. It has done so by better dispersing its combat forces, artillery, and logistics. It has also complicated Ukrainian targeting by using more secure means of electronic communications, including encrypted networks and older, wired tactical-communications systems.

Traditionally a strength of the Russians, electronic warfare appeared to play a minor role in the early days of the invasion. But it has returned with a vengeance. The Russian military has collaborated with its strategic defense industry to develop and deploy a variety of new and evolved vehicle- and personnel-based electronic warfare systems. These jam Ukrainian communications to break unit cohesion and slow down the country’s ability to launch attacks. Electronic warfare also cuts the link between drones and their operators, helps Russia find drone operator stations, makes it hard for Ukraine to pinpoint the location of Russia’s headquarters, and, importantly, jams or degrades the effectiveness of Ukrainian precision weapons (including High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, or HIMARS). Although Ukraine and its partners have worked hard to keep up, they still lag behind Russia’s electronic warfare capabilities, a point made by Ukrainian Commander in Chief Valeriy Zaluzhnyi in late 2023.

Perhaps the most telling area in which Russia has adapted and generated a strategic advantage is in its defense-industrial complex. The country’s September 2022 partial mobilization and other government initiatives have dramatically increased military output. Moscow has gained further arms through the contributions of North Korea, and it has bolstered its sophisticated weapons manufacturing by increasing trade with China—which has allowed Russia to acquire dual-use technologies it can no longer purchase from the West. As a result, Russia now has far more weapons and munitions than Ukraine.

To be sure, Russia is not better at adapting in every domain. When it comes to new ways of conducting long-range strikes, Kyiv has improved more than Moscow. Ukraine, for example, has developed the ability to undertake additional long-range strikes against Russian airfields, defense factories, and energy infrastructure over the past year. Whereas it was largely helpless to respond to the Russian strikes against its civil infrastructure over the winter of 2022, it now has a sophisticated capacity to respond in kind (albeit with United States–imposed limitations on using Western weapons to strike within Russia). Kyiv has used this capacity by judiciously hitting Russia, particularly in the wake of Moscow’s massed attacks on Ukraine during Christmas and New Year’s.

Ukraine has also developed an effective maritime strike capability using military and civilian sensors, long-range missiles, and successive generations of unmanned maritime drones. These sea drones are now able to fire missiles in addition to plowing into targets and detonating their warheads. As a result, Ukraine has destroyed multiple Russian warships and created a new maritime export corridor in the western Black Sea.

But these advantages may not last. As it has in other domains, Russia is likely to adapt around these Ukrainian developments. Russia, for example, is changing the composition and timing of its complex and massed-drone and missile attacks to identify weaknesses in Ukraine’s air defense system. And it has adapted some of its cruise missiles, such as the Kh-101, to fire flares as a protective mechanism against Ukrainian strikes.

CREATIVE DESTRUCTION

The Russian military complex has developed an enhanced, continually improving adaptation cycle that links battlefield lessons to Russia’s industry and strategies. This may confer on the Russians a significant military edge in the year ahead. Left unaddressed, it could become a war-winning advantage. Russia could wind up with an improved ability to strike from the sky, overwhelming a Ukrainian air defense system that is being denied sufficient interceptor missiles and making it easier for Russia to advance and terrorize Ukrainian citizens. It could, relatedly, lead to further Russian gains on the ground, with Moscow seizing more territory in the east, in particular, but possibly also in the south. Capturing Kyiv is unlikely in the short term. But ultimately, Moscow looking more to change the political calculus in Kyiv to be more favorable to Russia, rather than to physically take it.

To avoid this fate, Ukraine must construct its own strategic approach to learning and adaptation—one that can complement its remarkable history of combat adaptation. Ukrainian units can start by sharing successful adaptations with other Ukrainian units at a faster pace. Although Ukrainian units do often send lessons to brigades, which then send them to higher headquarters, the military must also emphasize lateral sharing. Exchanging lessons across units not only cuts the time needed for troops to learn; it also assists in standardizing tactics. Still, to create a better system of lateral learning (and to standardize tactics), top commanders must get involved. The highest levels of the Ukrainian armed forces will need to order troops to exchange more information.

To become better at strategic adaptation, Ukraine must also remove the institutional and timing obstacles that stand between tactical learning and doctrinal innovation and training. A key lesson from the 2023 Ukrainian counteroffensive, for example, is that the combined-arms doctrine that NATO taught to Ukrainian troops is out of date. As a result of this failure, Ukrainian individuals and units lacked the intellectual armor needed to conduct offensive operations under modern conditions. It is imperative that NATO and Ukraine speed up their sharing of combat lessons and connect them to doctrine and training institutions, so that the alliance and Kyiv can rapidly come up with better doctrines and better forms of training. NATO should, in particular, use its vast analytical capacity to help the Ukrainians quickly figure out what works. By better linking tactical lessons with strategic changes, the West could remake how this war is fought in a way that makes it much easier for Ukraine to adapt its overall war strategy.

The West must also, of course, continue arming Ukraine with advanced weapons. But although increased overall Western provisions are important, it is crucial that the West focus on producing and sending the arms most likely to provide Kyiv with a strategic advantage. It must therefore create a stronger connection between Ukrainian tactical learning and industrial production. Combat lessons must pass quickly from the battlefield to manufacturers, making it easier for soldiers to influence the production of equipment and munitions. (Ukraine and its allies should, simultaneously, try to interfere with Russia’s ability to use tactical lessons to improve defense production, including by meddling with Moscow’s supply chains.)

Finally, Ukraine must generally increase the speed at which it deploys new adaptations. One of the Russian military’s remaining key weaknesses is that it is “a structure that becomes better over time at managing the problems it immediately faces, but also one that struggles to anticipate new threats,” as a recent Royal United Services Institute report stated. This is a significant chink in Russia’s strategic armor. It means that although Russia’s ability to respond to challenges has improved, it can still be caught on the back foot. To capitalize on this disadvantage, Ukraine must introduce and systematize its new adaptations quickly, so it can inflict as much damage as possible before Russia learns how to react.

Making these improvements will not be easy. All institutions possess limited capacity to absorb change over a short period—what the political scientist Michael Horowitz calls “adoption capacity”—and the Ukrainians have already undertaken an enormous variety of adaptations in this war. It does not help that to truly work, adaptation needs to be multifaceted and comprehensive. “Emerging technology is vital to each capability,” the military historian and analyst T. X. Hammes wrote in an April report. “But, like the development of the blitzkrieg or carrier aviation, these transformational capabilities can only be realized by combining several technologies effectively and implementing them in coherent, well-trained operational concepts.” This requires good leadership, rapid experimentation, and the humility to learn from one’s mistakes.

Ukraine has no time to waste in implementing these measures. Russia has significantly improved its ability to learn and adapt in Ukraine. The longer the war in Ukraine lasts, the more Moscow will improve its strategic adaptation. The most convincing justification for improving Ukraine’s strategic adaptation and hindering Russia’s is to ensure that Ukraine does not lose the war. Russia currently holds the strategic initiative — so unfortunately, defeat is still a possible outcome.

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, February 6, 2024 8:02 AM

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

The Clock Is Ticking As Ukraine Destroys More Russian Vehicles, Faster.
The Kremlin Could Run Out Of Fighting Vehicles In Six Months.

By David Axe | Feb 4, 2024, 05:08pm EST

https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2024/02/04/the-clock-is-ticking-
as-ukraine-destroys-more-russian-vehicles-faster-the-kremlin-could-run-out-of-fighting-vehicles-in-six-months/?sh=17adf709c5e2

On each of 705 days since Russia widened its war on Ukraine, Russian forces on average have lost—destroyed, abandoned or captured—19 tanks, fighting vehicles, howitzers or other heavy weapons.

On Saturday, they lost at least 54. Another 16 were damaged. Saturday was, in other words, one of the worst days of the war for Moscow.

Open-source analyst Andrew Perpetua, who tallies vehicles losses and publishes a daily list, noted the tragic record on Sunday, after adding up Saturday’s losses. “It’s the most I've ever found in a day,” he wrote.

Ukrainian losses were light: nine vehicles destroyed, abandoned or captured and other 21 damaged.

Worse for the Russians, their losses included 16 tanks and a staggering 29 fighting vehicles and armored personnel carriers, while Ukraine’s losses mostly were trucks and civilian vehicles the military apparently was using for supply runs. The Ukrainians lost two tanks and a single APC.

To be clear: the wrecked vehicles Perpetua counted on Sunday weren’t necessarily lost on Saturday. But since he counts losses every day, the date he tabulates a loss is a useful stand-in for the actual date of the write-off. Just subtract 24 hours.

The obvious question is whether this loss-rate is sustainable for the Kremlin. The obvious answer is: no. As production of new armored vehicles continues to lag, the Russians still mostly ride in older Cold War-vintage vehicles they’ve pulled out of long-term storage.

These reserves are finite. One analyst who goes by @HighMarsed scours satellite imagery in order to track Russia’s stocks of old vehicles. In December, they concluded the Kremlin had reactivated 1,081 of its pre-war inventory of 4,811 old BMP fighting vehicles.

But of the remaining 3,730, at least 765 were “visibly broken beyond repair.”

In 2022 and 2023, according to the analysts at Oryx, the Russians lost around 80 BMPs a month. If that rate of loss had continued into 2024, while production of new BMPs also remained steady at between 30 and 40 a month, the Kremlin would’ve run out of fighting vehicles in two years or so. Say, early 2026.

The problem, of course, is that so far this year the Russians are losing more and more vehicles, faster than ever. They lost 13 BMPs—plus addition BTR fighting vehicles—in a single day, according to Perpetua’s Sunday tally.

That implies a monthly loss-rate for BMPs approaching 400. Five times the rate we observed in 2022 and 2023. At the current rate, Russia doesn’t have a two-year reserve of fighting vehicles.

No, it has maybe a six-month reserve. The uptick in losses—to levels that are far beyond sustainable for Russian forces—also is evident among tanks and APCs.

Despite pro-Russia Republicans in the U.S. Congress cutting off aid to Ukraine last fall, despite the best efforts of authoritarian Hungary to block European aid to Ukraine, despite Russia’s bigger population and bigger economy compared to Ukraine’s, despite everything, Ukrainian troops aren’t just holding. Launching drones and firing from trenches, they’re winning the war of attrition.

The even better news for friends of free Ukraine is how much ground the Ukrainians are losing as they wreck Russian assault groups: very little. In the most violent sector of the front—around Avdiivka—on one of their costliest days of the war, the Russians advanced a hundred yards in the south and three-quarters of a miles in the north.

No rational and moral commander would trade 54 armored vehicles and, according to the Ukrainian general staff, more than 800 troops ... for a few hundred yards.

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, February 6, 2024 8:18 AM

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

In air combat during World War II, five percent of pilots—the luckiest and most skilled aces—accounted for 40 percent of aerial kills, according to author and historian Mike Spick.

In ground combat in Russia’s 23-month wider war on Ukraine, this truism holds. The luckiest and most skilled fighters do a disproportionate share of the killing.

As in World War II, the aces in the Ukraine war do the most killing—and may also have a higher rate of survival thanks to the same instincts and finely-honed skills that make them such fearsome killers.

If there’s anything that can defeat the Aces, it’s the American Republican Party, which for months has refused to vote on additional aid to Ukraine. Aid that would include more Javelin missiles.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2024/02/05/one-ukrainian-paratro
oper-and-his-partner-working-alone-near-vuhledar-have-knocked-out-40-russian-vehicles-he-got-a-taste-for-blood/?sh=78d4294828eb

It's called marksmanship. Most soldiers are very poor marksmen. Their fear makes them unsuccessful killers. It is mostly dumb luck when the poor marksman gets a kill and the main reason why Armies fire tens of thousands of rounds for every kill. It is also the reason why artillery is so extremely important because, despite ridiculously poor aiming, the exploding shell can still kill if it lands in the general vicinity of an enemy soldier.

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, February 6, 2024 11:48 AM

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

Avdiivka Is About to Fall [Population 32,436 (2020), 31,392 (2022 estimate)]

Updated Feb 06, 2024 at 10:34 AM EST

https://www.newsweek.com/russia-ukraine-avdiivka-fall-donetsk-1866925

Wall Street Journal correspondent Yaroslav Trofimov, writing on Sunday that Avdiivka "increasingly looks likely to become the first Ukrainian city to fall since the capture of Bakhmut last May."

He added that the acute ammunition shortage has been caused by the U.S. Congress withholding further military aid to Ukraine.

Leon Hartwell, senior associate at the London School of Economics think tank LSE IDEAS, said that the Russian capture of Avdiivka could strengthen the position of Western skeptics advocating for a reduction in military and financial support for Ukraine.

"The seizure of Avdiivka holds significant political importance for Putin, driven by the urgent need to showcase victories for Russia ahead of the presidential election and a potential new wave of mass mobilization of soldiers."

Battle of Avdiivka (2022–present)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Avdiivka_(2022%E2%80%93present)
The fighting started on 21 February 2022

Mykola Bielieskov of the National Institute for Strategic Studies, a Kyiv-based think tank, assessed in late 2023 that the Russian capture of Avdiivka would not have a strategic impact on the overall war, but "would make the situation more tenable for occupied Donetsk as a major Russian logistics hub." The capture of Avdiivka would serve as a morale boost for Russian forces and deal a psychological blow to the Ukrainians, Bielieskov added.

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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Wednesday, February 7, 2024 6:14 AM

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

The US Army plans to significantly increase US domestic production of 155mm artillery shells and shell components for Ukraine in 2024 and 2025, should the proposed Congressional supplemental appropriations bill pass.

US Assistant Secretary of the Army for Acquisition, Logistics, and Technology Doug Bush stated on February 5 that the US Army aims to double the US monthly production of 155mm artillery shells from 28,000 shells per month in October 2023 to about 60,000 shells per month in October 2024 - if the Congressional bill passes.[11]

The US Army hopes to further increase production to 75,000 shells per month in April 2025 and 100,000 shells per month in October 2025. Bush stated that the construction of a new factory in Texas, which will “have an entirely new way” of using technology to make artillery shells, will contribute to the Army’s increased production goals. Bush noted that US shell production in part depends on US domestic production of explosive materials. Bush stated that the proposed supplemental bill includes $600 million for increasing the production of explosives at the Holsten Army Ammunition Plant in Tennessee from five million pounds of explosives a year to 13 million pounds.[12]

The proposed bill would also include $93 million to reestablish the production of M6 propellant (used to fire artillery shells but no longer in production in the US) at the Radford Army Ammunition Plant in Virginia, and $650 million would go to constructing a facility (likely also at the Radford Army Ammunition Plant) to domestically produce TNT, which the US currently does not produce. Bush stated that the proposed bill also includes $14 million to construct and recommission a black powder explosive production line in Louisiana. Such investments in US manufacturing are necessary to help support US strategic readiness by rebuilding America’s atrophied defense industrial base, separate and apart from the need to support Ukraine in its fight against Russia.

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campai
gn-assessment-february-6-2024-0

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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Wednesday, February 7, 2024 6:55 AM

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

Ukrainian Minefields Are Complicating The New Russian Offensive

By Vikram Mittal | Feb 6, 2024, 10:47am EST

https://www.forbes.com/sites/vikrammittal/2024/02/06/ukrainian-minefie
lds-are-complicating-the-new-russian-offensive/?sh=6f753f6026fc

For over a century, armies have used mines to limit the maneuverability of their adversaries on the battlefield. Recently, the Ukrainian counter-offensive was halted by an extensive network of Russian minefields. As the conflict shifts into a new phase with Ukraine on the defensive against a renewed Russian offensive, the Russian forces must now face similar challenges as they deal with Ukrainian minefields.

The Ukrainian minefields currently appear to be much less extensive than the Russian minefields, which were 20 km deep at locations. Since the Ukrainian minefields are less formidable, Russian forces are attempting to clear paths through them. However, once the Russian forces enter the minefield, they are canalized to these cleared paths. As they proceed down these paths, they can be quickly detected by Ukrainian surveillance drones and targeted by an artillery strike.

Last week, the Russians reportedly experienced minefields near Novomykhailivka in the western Donestk Oblast, where a column of armored vehicles was destroyed by Ukrainian artillery as it attempted to pass through the minefield. Russian military bloggers have reported that Ukrainian minefields are causing similar issues along the Kharkiv-Luhansk axis.

The use of minefields, though effective, does have its controversy. Unlike Russia, Ukraine signed the Ottawa Treaty, which limits the use of anti-personnel mines; however, the Ottawa Treaty does not limit the use of larger anti-tank mines, of which the Ukrainians have an ample stockpile. Indeed, Ukraine had a large pre-existing supply of anti-tank mines that it inherited from the Soviet Union, including the TM-62, TM-83, and PTM-1. The Ukrainians have also received mines from several NATO countries including the German DM-22, DM-31, and DM-1399, the French HPD-2A2, the Danish M/56, and the American RAAMS. While some of these mines are hand-emplaced, others can be put in place by mine-laying machines, yet others can be scattered from helicopters or artillery. Additionally, they differ in their detonation mechanisms, with some activated by the vehicle's pressure and others triggered by detecting the magnetic signature of an armored vehicle.

Similar to the tactic used by the Russians, the Ukrainians are combining their dated mine systems with modern drone technology. Indeed, the use of drones allows the Ukrainians to provide constant overwatch of the minefield. The Ukrainians have a vast armada of surveillance drones including systems provided by other countries, including the American Puma and the Polish FlyEye, and those that are domestically produced, including the A1-SM Fury and the ASU-1 Valkyrja. Many of these drones feature advanced optics that can see through smoke screens and other obscurants that are commonly used to hide military movements. Further, many of these systems include advanced autonomy features and long loitering times.

Given that some of the mine systems can be remotely delivered from artillery shells and helicopters, the Ukrainians have been able to emplace minefields forward of their lines. Moreover, the use of drones allows the Ukrainians to maintain overwatch of these minefields even if they are forward of their lines. If the Russians are able to push through these initial minefields and approach the Ukrainian lines, they will likely find much thicker minefields, similar to what the Russians used against the Ukrainian counter-offensive. The slow progress of the Russian assault is providing the Ukrainians with enough time to build out their defensive minefields.

The Russians will likely try to mitigate these minefields through enhancing their counter-drone technology, limiting the ability of the Ukrainians to overwatch the position. While Russian counter-drone technology, especially using electronic warfare equipment, is quite advanced, it is difficult to counter such a wide array of drones. Moreover, the Russians are reportedly not outfitting their tactical units with counter-drone technology. Additionally, Russia may change its tactics for breaching the minefields, including increased air support that would limit the use of Ukrainian artillery.

While mines remain unpopular due to their collateral damage, they are undeniably effective at shaping the modern battlefield. The slow and meticulous process of breaching and navigating through minefields exposes soldiers to enemy artillery fire, hindering the swift movement crucial for modern warfare. Last year, minefields played a pivotal role in breaking the Ukrainian counteroffensive, and this year, they are already having a significant impact on the new Russian offensive.

Vikram Mittal

I'm an associate professor at the United States Military Academy in the Department of Systems Engineering. I've taught numerous classes covering combat modeling, decision analysis, system design, vehicle dynamics, and engines. My research interests include combat simulation, model-based systems engineering, robotics, and engine knock.

Previously, I was a mechanical engineer at the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory in the Vehicles and Robotics Group. I hold a PhD in Mechanical Engineering from MIT, an MS in Engineering Sciences from Oxford, and a BS in Aeronautics from Caltech. I'm also a combat veteran and a major in the U.S. Army Reserve.

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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Wednesday, February 7, 2024 9:58 AM

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

Ukraine says Russia's Black Sea Fleet suffered debilitating losses since collapse of grain deal

Ukraine has made major gains in taking back control of the western Black Sea with a months-long campaign

By Peter Aitken | February 7, 2024 9:18am EST

https://www.foxnews.com/world/ukraine-says-russias-black-sea-fleet-suf
fered-debilitating-losses-collapse-grain-deal

The grain deal, brokered in July 2022, helped ensure that the "breadbasket of Europe," responsible for 30% of the global grain supply, would continue to ship vital grains despite a Russian blockade. Russia started attacking grain silos after ending the deal in 2023.

Instead of folding, Ukraine hit back and struck major blows against the Russian fleet, which had initially scored Russia’s strongest victories in the early stages of the invasion. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy proudly claimed at the end of the year that the fleet "is no longer capable of operating in the western part of the Black Sea and is gradually retreating from Crimea."

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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Wednesday, February 7, 2024 5:01 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

I discussed tanks and other armored vehicles already.

Tanks were a formidable weapon in WWII. Since then, many anti-tank weapons have been developed: anti tank mines, ATGMS, RPGS, drones (all with shaped charges), artillery, even helicopter gunships. I probably missed a few.

Tanks were outfitted with reactive armor, active defenses, and anti-drone EW. Even so, they don't seem to be useful to lead offensives against prepared defenses. We saw that near Rabotyno when Ukies tried to charge across a minefield, destroying so many Bradleys the field became known as "Bradley Square", and also southwest of Adiivka, when Russians tried to cross a minefield.

Really, armored vehicles only work when MOST anti-tank defenses have been neutralized and only scattered infantry is left. Or when a defense belt has collapsed and the area behind is hollow of defenses.

*****

Your focus on sharpshooting must come from first person shooter games, because a whole army of sharpshooters (or drone operators) can't stop an army that is well- supplied with a variety of both heavy and light weapons. Each weapon has its purpose. Some are used to destroy fortifications or ammo or fuel depots. Others - like TOS "flamethrowers"- can wipe out a football field of soldiers, even dug in in trenches or tunnels. Others can pick off individual soldiers or vehicles. Still others are used for deep underground command centers etc.

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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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Wednesday, February 7, 2024 8:01 PM

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

Feb 6, 2024 - Damage to Ukraine caused by the ongoing war with Russia has an estimated cost of between $411 billion and $1 trillion.

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2024/02/even-as-the-war-persists-ukrain
e-is-rebuilding-heres-how/

Signym, if Russia conquers Ukraine, then Russians and Ukrainians will pay this cost. If Russia fails to conquer, Russia can avoid the cost of rebuilding Ukraine, except for what the EU can extract. Financial institutions in the United States and Europe hold about $300 billion worth of Russian state assets that were frozen at the start of the war and which, if seized, could go a long way toward paying for the damage wrought by the invasion.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/01/30/biden-russia-ukraine-assests-bank
s-senate/

Signym, Russia has two choices:
1) it is in Russia's best interest to kill Putin now and withdraw from Ukraine, but
2) it is in Putin's best interest to continue fighting in Ukraine until he dies.

The two choices are the same: Either choice ends with Putin's death, with the only difference being how long he lives and how large a bill he leaves for Russia to pay the longer he lives.

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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Wednesday, February 7, 2024 10:03 PM

Fuck Ukraine.

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Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Thursday, February 8, 2024 3:44 AM