🇺🇸🤡 Antony Blinken struggling with basic math…
50,000 square miles subtract 8,838 square miles = 41,162 square miles.
Even the most basic mathematician can see this is not "half of 50,000 squared miles." pic.twitter.com/AfYd7tt1Jk
— DD Geopolitics (@DD_Geopolitics) September 10, 2023
Guest Post by Moon of Alabama
The New York Times repeats claims by the Ukrainian government that it ‘liberated’ Robotyne. The account though is more pessimistic than earlier reports:
Ukraine’s military said on Monday that its forces had retaken the southern village of Robotyne, a tactical victory that underlines the immense challenge Kyiv’s counteroffensive faces in punching through deep and dense Russian defenses.
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[T]he Ukrainian counteroffensive that began in early June has advanced only a few miles southward to reach Robotyne, in intense fighting with heavy casualties and equipment losses, and a similar distance on another axis to the east. The ultimate target of the thrust to Robotyne is the city of Melitopol, about 45 miles farther south, and more layers of Russian defenses lie in the way.
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About 15 miles south of Robotyne lies the Russian-controlled city of Tokmak, a road-and-rail hub whose recapture would be strategically significant.But satellite images show that to reach Tokmak, Ukrainian forces will have to breach two more Russian defensive lines made up of trenches, dense minefields, earthen berms and anti-tank barriers.
Those defense lines are not an easy problem to solve. They are on the hills following the contours of the land while the Ukraine army has so far stuck to the low lands.
Kiev is being used to wage war on “our shared past, culture and everything Russian,” the foreign minister has said
Washington and Brussels have openly unleashed a hybrid war against everything Russian, dropping their masks after decades of pretending to be civilized international partners, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in an interview with International Affairs, published on Saturday.
“Many of our former partners have been concealing their Russophobic nature under the veil of hypocrisy, but have now shown their true face in all its glory,” he said. “However, there is also the flip side of the coin here, since the Global Majority saw the true face of those who went as far as [to] aspire to a monopoly in defining the so-called universal values.”
Continue reading “West has shown its ‘true Russophobic face’ – Lavrov”
Authored by Seymour Hersh via Substack
It’s been weeks since we looked into the adventures of the Biden administration’s foreign policy cluster, led by Tony Blinken, Jake Sullivan, and Victoria Nuland. How has the trio of war hawks spent the summer?
Sullivan, the national security adviser, recently brought an American delegation to the second international peace summit earlier this month at Jeddah in Saudi Arabia. The summit was led by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, known as MBS, who in June announced a merger between his state-backed golf tour and the PGA. Four years earlier MBS was accused of ordering the assassination and dismemberment of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, for perceived disloyalty to the state.
Authored by Dave DeCamp via AntiWar.com,
A Western official told CNN in an article published Tuesday that it’s “extremely” unlikely that Ukraine will make progress in its counteroffensive in the coming weeks that will alter the balance of the war with Russia.
“They’re still going to see, for the next couple of weeks, if there is a chance of making some progress. But for them to really make progress that would change the balance of this conflict, I think, it’s extremely, highly unlikely,” an unnamed senior Western diplomat said.
“Humanity” is the key difference between Ukrainians and Russians, who are “Asians,” Aleksey Danilov claims
Russians are “Asians” and, therefore, lack the “humanity” that Ukrainians purportedly possess, Aleksey Danilov, the head of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, has claimed.
The top official made the remark as he spoke live on Ukrainian TV, which has been heavily censored and turned into a state-approved “broadcasting marathon” amid the ongoing conflict.
“I’m fine with Asians, but Russians are Asians. They have a completely different culture, vision. Our key difference from them is humanity,” Danilov stated.
Continue reading “Asians are less ‘humane’ – Ukrainian security chief”
Guest Post by Moon of Alabama
Yesterday I linked to a fresh NY Times piece about the horrors of the war in Ukraine.
It has a somewhat uplifting headline and the first few paragraphs describe an Ukrainian ‘success’.
Amid the Counterattack’s Deadly Slog, a Glimmer of Success for Ukraine
Recapturing the village of Staromaiorske was such welcome news for the country that President Volodymyr Zelensky announced it himself. But formidable Russian defenses have stymied progress elsewhere.
The piece is accompanied by this staged photo which shows some trashed uniform on a dirt road with two boots put next to it.
The body of a Russian soldier outside a village in the Zaporizhzhia region of southern Ukraine this month.
Credit… Tyler Hicks/The New York Times
I wonder what the editors thought when they came up with it.
Continue reading “Ukrainian Soldiers Tell Of High Losses For Little Gains”
Guest Post by Martin Armstrong
Ukraine is a complete disaster. I have been warning that our sources from UKRAINE, not Russia, have been warning that the country is on the brink of collapse. The American Neocons are being confronted with the fact that there NEVER was any chance that Ukraine would defeat Russia and putting this high-heel questionable gender dancer in high heels in charge of war was in itself a war crime. There is absolutely no war Ukraine can win anything. This is why Zelensky has been so desperate o drag in NATO because he knows they cannot retake the Donbas no less defeat Russia. The American Neocons were hoping to weaken Russia so they could contrive some scheme to justify going in for the kill.
Continue reading “Ukraine Complete Disaster – Neocons Lose Again?”
Guest Post by Moon of Alabama
At the beginning of the war in Ukraine I pointed out that the false narrative of ‘Ukraine is winning’ which the ‘western’ propaganda steadily promoted would not win the real war on the ground.
As the war continued I made the point again and again.
In this week’s SCF column Alastair Crooke makes the same point in much more detail.
Hubris consists in believing that a contrived narrative can, in and of itself, bring victory. It is a fantasy that has swept through the West – most emphatically since the 17th century. Recently, the Daily Telegraph published a ridiculous nine minute video purporting to show that ‘narratives win wars’, and that set-backs in the battlespace are incidentals: What matters is to have a thread of unitary narrative articulated, both vertically and horizontally, throughout the spectrum – from the special forces’ soldier in the field through to the pinnacle of the political apex.
The gist of it is that ‘we’ (the West) have compelling a narrative, whilst Russia’s is ‘clunky’ – ‘Us winning therefore, is inevitable’.
It is easy to scoff, but nonetheless we can recognise in it a certain substance (even if that substance is an invention). Narrative is now how western élites imagine the world.
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The weakness to this new ‘liberal’ authoritarianism is that its key narrative myths can get busted. One just has; slowly, people begin to speak reality.Ukraine: How do you win an unwinnable war? Well, the élite answer has been through narrative. By insisting against reality that Ukraine is winning, and Russia is ‘cracking’. But such hubris eventually is busted by facts on the ground. Even the western ruling classes can see their demand for a successful Ukrainian offensive has flopped. At the end, military facts are more powerful than political waffle: One side is destroyed, its many dead become the tragic ‘agency’ to upending dogma.
Guest Post by Alastair Crooke
Hubris consists in believing that a contrived narrative can, in and of itself, bring victory. It is a fantasy that has swept through the West – most emphatically since the 17th century. Recently, the Daily Telegraph published a ridiculous nine minute video purporting to show that ‘narratives win wars’, and that set-backs in the battlespace are incidentals: What matters is to have a thread of unitary narrative articulated, both vertically and horizontally, throughout the spectrum – from the special forces’ soldier in the field through to the pinnacle of the political apex.
The gist of it is that ‘we’ (the West) have compelling a narrative, whilst Russia’s is ‘clunky’ – ‘Us winning therefore, is inevitable’.
It is easy to scoff, but nonetheless we can recognise in it a certain substance (even if that substance is an invention). Narrative is now how western élites imagine the world. Whether it is the pandemic emergency, the climate or Ukraine ‘emergencies’ – all are re-defined as ‘wars’. All are ‘wars’ that are to be fought with a unitary imposed narrative of ‘winning’, against which all contrarian opinion is forbidden.
Guest Post by Martin Armstrong
The American Neocons have been pushing for weapons and everything they can muster. They tell Ukraine they MUST get back the Donbas even though the people there are ethnically Russian and not Ukrainian. This would be like Mexico invading Texas, claiming it was their former border even though Americans live there. The Neocons want to believe that Russia is weak, so that is all they tell the press. How else to get Americans to support another endless war like they did in Vietnam?
Continue reading “The Truth About Ukraine’s Failed Counteroffensive”
Guest Post by Scott Ritter
The unfulfilled goals and objectives from last year’s meeting in Madrid loom over the Atlantic military alliance. When the membership meets in Vilnius this week, normalizing failure might best describe the most that can be accomplished.
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg and Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda, on June 26. (NATO)
The leaders of NATO’s 31 constituent member states have begun to assemble in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, for the alliance’s 33rd summit, an event that has come to symbolize the military organization’s increasingly difficult task of transforming political will into tangible reality.
Since the Wales Summit of 2014, when NATO made Russia a top priority in the aftermath of the Russian annexation of Crimea, and the Warsaw Summit of 2016, when NATO agreed to deploy “battlegroups” on the soil of four NATO members (Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania and Poland) in response to perceived Russian “aggression” in the region, Russia has dominated the NATO agenda and, by extension, its identity.
The Vilnius summit promises to be no different in this regard.
Guest Post by Jim Kunstler
“…the Permanent State lacks the courage to take hard decisions – to say to Moscow, ‘Let us put this unfortunate episode (Ukraine) behind us. Dig out those draft treaties you wrote in December 2021, and let’s see how we can work together, to restore some functionality again to Europe’.” — Alasdair Crooke
When you deny what is self-evident, you are at war with reality, and that never ends well. This is the ultimate disposition of our country’s years-long misadventure in maximum dishonesty. The American administrative Blob has not just lied about everything it does, but used the government machinery at hand to destroy everything it touches in a terminal-hysterical effort to cover up its misdeeds — including especially its crimes against its own people.
Guest Post by
A Dutch paper tells me that PM Mark Rutte is “very disappointed” that Switzerland has decided not to deliver 96 more tanks, that belong to Swiss “defense company” Ruag, and which Germany, Holland and Denmark wanted to purchase, to send to Ukraine. The 96 would have come on top of another 100 they also apparently bought for the same purpose. Neither would make any difference for the outcome of the battle. 100 tanks is nothing. The only thing we know for sure is that 96 more tanks will kill 96xY more people. But of course Rutte is not the only EU and NATO “leader” who thinks the way he does. They all do, except Orban and perhaps Serbia’s Vucic. But Biden, Blinken, Macron, Scholz, you name them, they all say the same thing: we must deliver more guns, tanks, jet fighters. US “top general” Mark Milley chimes in:
The minister accused foreign militants of using civilian infrastructure
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has accused Ukraine of allowing foreign mercenaries and Western generals to use civilian infrastructure to fight against Russia, and has vowed to destroy these groups.
Speaking at an online briefing on Friday, Lavrov said that Russia has “not seen confirmation of a single fact of deliberate shelling of civilian targets by the Russian army.” He claimed, however, that the Ukrainian side has been “violating international humanitarian law and committing a war crime by allowing mercenaries, Western generals and instructors to use civilian objects to hold all sorts of meetings.”
Continue reading “Russia will destroy foreign fighters and Western generals in Ukraine – Lavrov”
