Tag: Ukraine is losing

Guest Post by Joe Lauria

On Feb. 24, 2022 Vladimir Putin explained his country’s intentions in Ukraine in a televised speech. How has what he said then measured up to today?  Joe Lauria reports. 

It is instructive to compare Russia’s war aims expressed on Feb. 24, 2022 to the state of the conflict today — a year long war of attrition that Russia is slowly winning on the ground.

But what was unleashed a year ago today is far from settled and is fraught with supreme danger for all of humanity.

The West’s economic war, intended to spur Russians to overthrow their government, has failed spectacularly. The ruble did not collapse despite sanctions on the Russian central bank. Nor has the economy.

Instead an alternative economic, commercial and financial system that excludes the West is rising with China, India and Russia in the lead, and most of Asia, Africa and Latin America taking part. It is the start of the final collapse of Western colonialism. The sanctions instead backfired on the West, especially in Europe. The West is on the outside looking in.

The information war has failed across the world. Only the United States and Europe, which consider itself “the world,” believe their own “information.” Even The New York Times on Thursday recognized this.

Continue reading “Why Putin Went to War — One Year Later”

Via RT

Moscow could retaliate “in any way possible” should Kiev decide to strike Crimea, former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has said FILE PHOTO: Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev © Sputnik / Yekaterina Shtukina

Washington’s decision to supply Ukraine with longer-range missiles and allow Kiev to use them at will can only lead to further escalation, former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev warned on Saturday. He said the US appears not to want the Ukraine conflict to end.

Strikes against the Crimean peninsula will not force Moscow to sit down at the negotiating table, the former president said. “The result would be exactly the contrary. There would be no talks in such a case. There would only be retaliatory strikes,” he warned in an interview with Russian journalist Nadana Fridrikhson.

Continue reading “Ukraine ‘will burn’ if it strikes Crimea, Russian ex-president warns”

Via Moon of Alabama

Yesterday:

Russia launched dozens of missiles at Ukrainian energy infrastructure on Friday morning, knocking out heating systems in towns and cities across the country as temperatures dropped well below freezing and prompting the national utility to impose sweeping emergency blackouts.Russia had launched 76 missiles at critical infrastructure targets across Ukraine and air defenses managed to shoot down 60 of them, the top commander of Ukraine’s Armed Forces, Gen. Valeriy Zaluzhnyi, said in a statement.

There were 16 missiles which got through to hit their targets. The rest of the report mentioned several of the targeted areas. But those numbers added up to more than 16 missiles:

Ukraine’s energy minister, Herman Galushchenko, said that as many as nine power-generating facilities had been damaged, the Ukrinform news agency reported. He also said that corresponding stations and substations transmitting electricity had suffered damage.
…
In Kharkiv, in northeastern Ukraine, 10 missiles had hit the city, damaging critical infrastructure, local official said.
…
Missiles also damaged infrastructure and hit a residential building in the central city of Kryvyi Rih, Mr. Zelensky’s hometown.

The attack was obviously bigger than Gen. Zaluzhnyi has claimed. Or the shot down count was wrong.

That must also have been obvious to the writers and editors of the quoted piece but is not mentioned in it.

Continue reading “More Missiles, Attack Plans, Artillery Hits Morale”

Via Moon of Alabama

The Russian military is still integrating most of the mobilized 300,000+ men and volunteers. According to Putin 25% of the mobilized forces are in combat units, 25% in rear positions, while 50% train in Russia. It does not look like an imminent all out attack on the Ukrainian front lines is in the cards. The expected large winter attack may not be coming at all. Instead the new forces will rotate through the frontline and only attack locally whenever they see an opportunity.

The Russian do not need to attack. Their task is to demilitarize Ukraine. As long as the Ukrainians come to the front lines and attack the Russians their is no need to launch a large attack on them.

The map from a months ago versus today shows only a few small changes of the front lines.

November 10 2022

Source: LiveUAmap – bigger December 10 2022

Source: LiveUAmap – bigger

Continue reading “Ukraine SitRep – Catastrophic Losses, Failing Wonder Weapons, NATO Escalation”

Authored by James Rickards via DailyReckoning.com,

The war in Ukraine has been in a partial hiatus for the past two months.

But that hiatus is coming to an end as Russia prepares its next move. Today, we’re looking ahead to what’s coming next.

And here’s a hint: We could be entering a very dangerous period.

First off, the situation on the ground in Ukraine is best understood as a competition between the narrative and reality.

The narrative consists of what you hear from mainstream media, the White House, the Pentagon, and official sources in the U.K., France, Germany and both EU and NATO headquarters in Brussels.

The narrative says that the Armed Forces of Ukraine, AFU, have beaten back Russian forces and reoccupied Kherson, which lies strategically on the Dnipro River, Kyiv’s main access to the Black Sea.

Continue reading “Rickards: Putin Doesn’t Bluff”

Guest Post by Pat Buchanan

In the final days of this lame-duck Congress, before control of the House passes to Republicans in January, Democrats are expected to approve Joe Biden’s request for another $38 billion for the Kyiv regime, its army and its war. Passage of this legislation would virtually guarantee that the U.S. continues to finance this war and extend the fighting until spring.

Winter has often proven an indispensable ally of Mother Russia.

The impending winter of 1812-13 forced Napoleon’s withdrawal from Moscow, a retreat from which his Grande Armee never recovered.

The winter of 1941-42 sealed the ultimate fate of the invading armies of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich.

Vladimir Putin’s new strategy in the war he launched on Ukraine in February is to conscript the coming winter of 2022-23 as an ally of his failing army.

For weeks, there have been reports of Russian air, missile and drone strikes on power plants in every major Ukrainian city.

The false report that a Russian-fired rocket had landed in Poland, killing two civilians, came on a day when 100 Russian bombs, rockets, missiles and drones hit “infrastructure” targets across Ukraine.

Continue reading “Putin’s ‘Winter War’ on Ukraine”

Via RT

Over 4,000 pro-Kiev troops were killed in southern and eastern Ukraine in a five-day period, the Russian Defense Ministry claims

Ukrainian military casualties exceeded 12,000 during Kiev’s five-day counteroffensive, Russia’s Defense Ministry has claimed.

More than 4,000 Ukrainian troops were killed and another 8,000 injured between September 6 and 10 in the south and east of the country, ministry spokesman Lieutenant General Igor Konashenkov said during a daily briefing on Sunday.

Continue reading “Ukraine lost thousands of soldiers in counteroffensive”

Via Moon of Alabama

“We can say that today was the best ever, the second best ever, day for the Russians in the territory of Ukraine. Something must be changed. If you ask what the Russian should change, to tell the truth, I don’t know. But I believe, if they don’t change anything after this situation, that means there is no need to continue this Special Operation. Because the Ukrainians managed to collect a big number of infantry. Some sources are saying, joking of course they are joking, that now the Ukrainians these days have a so big army that the Ukrainian authorities can give them just stones. And this army is able to crack the Russians’ defense order just with stones because there are so much of them.”

The above is the opener of Dima’s Military Summary of yesterday’s events in Ukraine.

The simplistic view that “quantity has a quality of its own,” is usually attributed to Joseph Stalin, the Georgian leader of the Soviet Union during the second World War (as well as before and after).

Stalin was wrong, as the Second Battle of Kharkov, mentioned here yesterday, provides. In May 1942, near Izium, the Nazis thoroughly defeated a counterattacking Soviet force twice their forces size.

Continue reading “The Izium Withdrawal – A Catalyst For ‘Starting In Earnest’”

Guest Post by Martin Armstrong

The Ukrainian army is at least one-third larger than it was last year and some claim it has doubled in size. They have been concentrating their effort, not on the Donbas, but on Ukraine’s Kharkov region. The Russian Defense Ministry has confirmed that Russia has withdrawn its troops from multiple locations across Ukraine’s Kharkov region pulling back to the Donbas in the face of a major Ukrainian offensive in the area. The Ministry has actually stated: “In order to achieve the goals of the special military operation, a decision was made to regroup troops in the areas of Balakleya and Izyum in order to build up efforts in the Donetsk direction.”

Continue reading “Is Russia Losing?”

Via The Saker

A reader recently asked me why I have not posed any maps of the military situation in the Ukraine, and that is a fair question which I will answer below.

There are a few reasons for this, but the main and most obvious one is this: unlike the first month or two of the SMO, there are very few changes worth showing on a map.  That is NOT to say that there are no changes on the frontlines, there are, plenty, but they just don’t translate into nice looking maps.

A recent post on Moon of Alabama quoted what appears to be a leak from the Ukrainian command and which I will repost here:

Ukrainian channels are discussing what might be a leaked data from AFU General Staff:

– The AFU are only at 43-48% strength
– medical workers at their limit
– small arms and armor are not enough
– 191 thousand soldiers were killed and wounded (only AFU, not including others)
– there is not enough hydraulics and liquid nitrogen for M777 howitzers
– no one cares about the missing – there are no statistics
– the equipment transferred by the West is running out
– western weapons are operated by amateurs, since there are no qualified specialists
– no way to repair weapons on the spot due to the lack of spares and specialists – everything is sent to Poland

BTW, even with this dire report, I would caution against predicting a decisive break in morale. As with Peski, the walking wounded are sent straight back into the trenches

I would just add here that Peski has been taken.

Continue reading “Why have I stopped posting maps of the situation in the Ukraine and a few other questions”