Russian special military operation in Ukraine #60

I have said before , a war by agreement with NATO is an oxymoron . The West is involved in a war against Russia , both directly and indirectly . Russia should forget about any agreements with the West , and remind itself that this war is of an existential nature . What ? The West won't do it's a worst ? Are you kidding ? We are at a point where people are pointing nukes at each other . The West is doing it's worst , will continue to do it's worst , unless they are stopped . So Russia should do it's worst too . Here is what Russia could do right now , short of doing it's worst : ( 1 ) Destroy all Bridges on Deniper . ( 2 ) Intercept all Ukrs Ships in Black Sea . ( 3 ) Eliminate top Nazis . ( 4 ) Destroy all local and imported electricity in Ukrs . ( 5 ) Destroy all Rail and most Roads in and out of western Ukrs ...........did I miss something ?



Oh yes .....no war by prior arrangement / agreement with NATO !

ALAMO wrote:If you want to hear my opinion, anti Russian sentiments will fade away in most of the EU bigger member states pretty soon.
The reason for this is that most Russkie eaters proved to be both corrupt and incompetent.

I'm sure they will, but the real question is will Russians forget?

And no they won't, and I hope not for a very long time

Number one Europe bared its real face to Russia. That being the same face as the previous 'united' Europe during the 40s

Number two, this whole episode actually showed us that Europe needs Russia, rather more than Russia needs Europe

And so while Russians continue to have property in Europe, continue to travel there on vacation, continue to do business there - this trend I expect to decline over this decade.

pavi wrote:This part I disagree. If you are that high position as Gerasimov is you are like managing director and you can make decisions. Decisions can be justified using delibarately false arguments. Civilian leadership are like board of directors who has ultimate power but are dependent quite heavily what they have been told. Therefore you can act "badly" and take blames for your actions. Usually acting "badly" because of ****-up, but not necessarily always.

Well about the civilian leadership yes, but in terms of making arbitrary decisions for the rest of the military without providing a rationale I really am not so sure. Yes he is the captain of the ship but he has his chief mate, his chief engineer and the rest of the senior officers constantly providing input, and all of whom perform different functions on the ship and then suddenly he gives a string of orders involving all of them that don't necessarily make much sense. Or rather they will clock on to what it all means intuitively too.

I suppose what I'm saying is that there really isn't any reason to think that if there was a deliberate decision to leave open defenses in Kursk, that Gerasimov would be the sole person involved with that decision. Nor that he would have to hide anything from the civilian leadership

For those opining that Putin & co. wouldn't be cynical enough to risk Russian civilians - well this is a huge war, and one that could yet escalate further. You have to accept risk, and how many years did Russia abide by the Minsk peace process for and looked the other way while the Donbass was continuously shelled? While there was even a small chance that Minsk could be salvaged, Russia preferred to continue down that avenue and ignore Kiev killing mostly by then Russian civilians, and there was good reason for that - because with the end of Minsk would come full-scale war with the Ukraine and even more people would die.
Or you can take the Kharkov region or Kherson from which Russian forces withdrew in preference to making a stand at a disadvantage, even if it put at least a lot of pro-Russian civilians at risk. Military logic prevailed.

I think it would be nice to see (hopefully well expanded) Russia develop it's own great leisure destinations further.
From Odessa to Georgia for beach style holidays. (Caspian Sea... provided there is no Dagestani idiocy). Hot but not hideously so. Russia is brimming with ski/winter snow destinations that could be developed.
Russia has genuine wilderness style nature almost unrivalled around the World - Altai, Kamchatka, Caucuses and many many more.
Many historic cities without the gimmegrant crime of Paris, Rome, New York, LA etc.
The Far East has it's own massive development potential with 1.5 billion Chinese nearby, and over 2 billion other Asians not that far away.

If Russian oligarch money was sunk into Russia instead of Courchevel, London and the French Riviera, by now many world class destinations could have been developed further.

Additionally, Russia's partners  eg Eurasia, China, India, Arabia etc should understand that they are not respected by the West and are simply seen as prey to plunder and enslave. So why should these nations fund places like America.

Of course Russians will wish to venture outside of Russia too. So have reciprocal arrangements with friendly states and friendly peoples.

I say all this as someone half Russian blood, half Western blood.
It's generally not necessarily Western people who show the obscene hatred towards Russia. Usually it's the rotten to the core governments, and a few morons who willingly swallow what the Western gutter media spout. Even so, if I was the Ru govt, I would make top class local and friendly nation tourism a big thing, as opposed to funding its enemies.

If there is regime change in any European nation then I'm all for ties. Because you would want to strengthen them and weaken the adversary which is the West as a political and military bloc.

We may well see some of the other Eastern European countries drifting out of the Western orbit adopting at least neutrality and a friendly attitude to BRICS, similar to Hungary's. Bulgaria perhaps.
But the point is that you can't count on it. Russia has to be ready to keep distancing itself from all of Europe, and it has to use all that money and energy to expand ties with other BRICS members, with the Middle East, with ASEAN, and so on.

Escobar: So What Really Happened In Kursk?
Tyler Durden's Photo
by Tyler Durden
Sunday, Aug 18, 2024 - 12:35 PM

Authored by Pepe Escobar,

An extremely serious debate is already raging among selected circles of power/intelligence in Moscow – and the heart of the matter could not be more incandescent...

To cut to the chase: what really happened in Kursk? Was the Russian Ministry of Defense caught napping? Or did they see it coming and profited to set up a deadly trap for Kiev?

Well-informed players willing to share a few nuggets on condition of anonymity all stress the extreme sensitivity of it all. An intel pro though has offered what may be interpreted as a precious clue: “It is rather surprising to see such a concentration of force was unnoticed by satellite and drone surveillance at Kursk, but I would not exaggerate its importance.”

Another intel pro prefers to stress that “the foreign intel section is weak as it was very badly run.” This is a direct reference to the state of affairs after former security overseer Nikolai “Yoda” Patrushev, during Putin’s post-inauguration reshuffle, was transferred from his post as secretary of the Security Council to serve as a special presidential aide.

The sources, cautiously, seem to converge on a very serious possibility: “There seems to have been a breakdown in intel; they do not seem to have noticed the accumulation of troops at the Kursk border”.

Another analyst though has offered a way more specific scenario, according to which a hawkish military faction, spread across the Ministry of Defense and the intel apparatus – and antagonistic to the new Minister of Defense Belousov, an economist – let the Ukrainian invasion proceed with two objectives in mind: set a trap for Kiev’s top enemy commanders and troops, who were diverted from the – collapsing – Donbass front; and put extra pressure on Putin to finally go for the head of the snake and finish off the war.

This hawkish faction, incidentally, regards Chief of the General Staff Gerasimov as “totally incompetent”, in the words of one intel pro. There’s no smoking gun, but Gerasimov allegedly ignored several warnings about a Ukrainian buildup near the Kursk border.

A retired intel pro is even more controversial. He complains that “traitors of Russia” actually “stripped three regions from troops to surrender them to the Ukrainians.” Now, these “traitors of Russia” will be able “to ‘exchange’ the city of Suzha for leaving the fake country of Ukraine and promote it as an inevitable solution.”

Incidentally, only this Thursday Belousov started chairing a series of meetings to improve security in the “three regions” – Kursk, Belgorod and Bryansk.

Hawks in the siloviki apparatus don’t make it a secret that Gerasimov should be fired – and replaced by fabled General Sergey “Armageddon” Surovikin. They also enthusiastically support the FSB’s Alexander Bortnikov – who de facto solved the extremely murky Prigozhin affair – as the man now really supervising The Big Picture in Kursk.
And the next one is Belgorod...

Well, it’s complicated.

President Putin’s reaction to the Kursk invasion was visible in his body language. He was furious: for the flagrant military/intel failure; for the obvious loss of face; and for the fact that this buries any possibility of rational dialogue about ending the war.

Yet he managed to turn the upset around in no time, by designating Kursk as a counter-terrorist operation (CTO); supervised by the FSB’s Bortnikov; and with an inbuilt “take no prisoners” rationale. Every Ukrainian in Kursk not willing to surrender is a potential target – set for elimination. Now or later, no matter how long it takes.

Bortnikov is the hands-on specialist. Then there’s the Overseer of the whole military/civilian response: Alexey Dyumin, the new secretary of the State Council, who among other previous posts was the deputy head of the special operations division of GRU (military intel). Dyumin does not respond directly to the Ministry of Defense nor the FSB: he is reporting directly to the President.

Translation: Gerasimov now seems to be at best a figurehead in the whole Kursk drama. The men in charge are Bortnikov and Dyumin.

The Kursk P.R. gambit is set to massively fail. Essentially, the Ukrainian forces are moving away from their lines of communication and supplies into Russian territory. A parallel can be made with what happened to Field Marshall von Paulus at Stalingrad when the German Army became overextended.

The Russians are already in the process of cutting off the Ukrainians in Kursk – breaking off their lines of supply. What’s left of the crack soldiers launched into Kursk would have to turn back, facing Russians both at their front and back. Disaster looms.

Irrepressible commander of the Akhmat special forces, Major General Apti Alaudinov, confirmed on Rossiya-1 TV that at least 12,000 Ukrainian Armed Forces (UAF) entered Kursk, including a lot of foreigners (Brits, French, Poles). That will turn out to be a “take no prisoners” on a massive scale.

Anyone with an IQ above room temperature knows Kursk is a NATO operation – conceived with a high degree of probability by an Anglo-American combo supervising the Ukronazi cannon fodder.

Anything Kiev does depends on American ISR (intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance) and NATO weapons systems of course operated by NATO personnel.

Mikhail Podolyak, adviser to the sweaty green T-shirt actor in Kiev, admitted that Kiev “discussed” the attack “with Western partners”. The “Western partners” – Washington, London, Berlin – in full cowardly regalia, deny it.

Bortnikov won’t be fooled. He succinctly stated, on the record, that this was a Kiev terrorist attack supported by the West.

We are now entering the stage of hardcore positioning combat bound to destroy villages and towns. It will be ugly. Russian military analysts remark that if a buffer zone had been preserved way back in March 2022, mid-range artillery activity would have been restricted to Ukrainian territory. Yet another controversial decision by the Russian General Staff.

Russia will eventually solve the Kursk drama – mopping up small Ukrainian groups in a methodically lethal way. Yet very sensitive questions about how it happened – and who let it happen – simply won’t vanish. Heads will have to – figuratively – roll. Because this is just the beginning. The next incursion will be in Belgorod. Get ready for more blood on the tracks.

flamming_python wrote:
I'm sure they will, but the real question is will Russians forget?
And no they won't, and I hope not for a very long time
Number one Europe bared its real face to Russia. That being the same face as the previous 'united' Europe during the 40s
Number two, this whole episode actually showed us that Europe needs Russia, rather more than Russia needs Europe
And so while Russians continue to have property in Europe, continue to travel there on vacation, continue to do business there - this trend I expect to decline over this decade.

Yeah you are right, but there is another side of this coin.
Europe has shown its face not only to Russia but to the Europeans first of all.
It is a monster that has nothing to do with the ideals that were the core of integration.
A privileged caste of bureaucrats that is blown off from the realities of regular European, and leading own compatriots to some sort of madness that replaced European ideals and values.
They will answer for that sooner rather than later.

The "failure of Russian intelligence" theory is not credible. We do not need the whole apparatus to function on some superior plane of existence. We just need base
level workers engaged in routine monitoring of available observation platforms. For Kursk to be a failure, it would require that this work was not carried out for long
periods of time. I suppose this fits the racist NATzO stereotypes about drunk Russians (note how Ukrs stopped being drunks once NATzO got control of them) but it
is not a real theory and instead is a masturbatory fantasy projection.

Pepe Escobar can sample "experts" but there is no balance in the mix. Only some of them are right and the rest are wrong.

According to Lukashenko, Ukraine has 120K men stationed near Belarus border. So apparently Ukraine has plenty of men to send to other regions like it did in Kursk.

Why doesn't Russia destroy these 120,000 men?

Arsenic wrote:Why doesn't Russia destroy these 120,000 men?

Incompetence.

For whatever reason, Russian authorities are holding back for nothing other than to extend the amount of deaths and blunders of their own.

The Russian military is capable. But for whatever reason, the high command is just sitting still. Putin was apparently visibly angry, meaning that even he is aware of the **** ups.

Arsenic wrote:Why doesn't Russia destroy these 120,000 men?

If they launched attacks from Belarussian territory that would make Belarussian territory legitimate targets for Ukraine.

Luka likely told Moscow he doesn't want to get involved directly military so there will be none of russian troops using his land for attacks against Ukie forces, remember Russia and Bela are two different countries

There could be also the idea that Lukashenko is full of shit in order to make it sound like Belarus is more important than it really is.

So who knows.

Lukashenko is interested in staying in power. And making territory of Belarus part of the war will not help him with it. In february 2022, when Russians gambled and tried to win it all in maneuvering war, they used Belarus territory as staging ground. Now, when Ukraine has a ready defense on the border, territory of Belarus in a depth of at least 20-30 kilometers would become a part of active hostilities with inevitable human and material losses.
Second thing, is that when Russia didn't win a war fast in 2022, he decided to take more of a wait and see approach.

Arsenic wrote:Why doesn't Russia destroy these 120,000 men?

Why don't they destroy 10k in Kursk? It is a rhetorical question.

caveat emptor wrote:

Arsenic wrote:Why doesn't Russia destroy these 120,000 men?

Why don't they destroy 10k in Kursk? It is a rhetorical question.

The 10K are all scatttered so it will take some time to mop them up. They will get droned when they go out to take a shit. The 120K in Belarus probably have encampments and are in larger clusters, but that is probably 800-1000km away unless you attack from Belarus. So they would have to use kaliber missiles or SU 34 with a long flight over Urkaine (which it can do) we are talking 4h mission to deliver FABs.

sepheronx wrote:

Arsenic wrote:Why doesn't Russia destroy these 120,000 men?

Incompetence.

For whatever reason, Russian authorities are holding back for nothing other than to extend the amount of deaths and blunders of their own.

The Russian military is capable. But for whatever reason, the high command is just sitting still.  Putin was apparently visibly angry, meaning that even he is aware of the **** ups.

It isn't that. It is the bureaucratic technocratic legalistic state that everything gets bogged down in. And the one time they allowed someone to work outside of it , Prigozin happened.

All militaries are like this to an extent.

caveat emptor wrote:

Arsenic wrote:Why doesn't Russia destroy these 120,000 men?

Why don't they destroy 10k in Kursk? It is a rhetorical question.

Its a dumb rhetorical question. They are scattered in small groups in huge forests and abandoned towns. And they snuck in from huge forests and abandoned towns from across the border. Which has no natural barriers. Has anyone not learned anything about this war yet

Backman wrote:

It isn't that. It is the bureaucratic technocratic legalistic state that everything gets bogged down in. And the one time they allowed someone to work outside of it , Prigozin happened.

All militaries are like this to an extent.

Don't know.

When you got both Pepe Escobar and the Duran saying that Putin was visibly angry, and I notice he was visibly angry, means that things really didn't go to plan and someone fucked up severely.

Then when I'm reading various Russians response and how they keep saying that the upper command are useless twats with no experience or as Caveat said, full of medals but never faced combat, then gives me indication it was gross incompetence.

Now they are busy trying to clear this area. Smart thing was that they declared all three regions as part of the CTO.

Now let's see what Ukraine does with its soldiers bordering Belarus. Even if they don't have 120K troops near Belarus, if they even have troops there to begin with, says a lot more than Russia being caught with its pants down in Kursk.

Mobilizing more troops mean more men that do not making money but burning money, i.e. double burden on the economy and it will affect the morale of the public. Despite the patriotic sentiment, being sent to the battlefield and having the risk of coming back in coffins is a heavy emotional toll for both the soldiers and their families.

So unless there is life or death situation such as when USSR was invaded by Nazi back then, it is better to not up-scaling the mobilization.

There have been many stories about the war fatigue even amongst the ranks of the ones that fight for justice, such as volunteers abandoning the front-line troops and went back to home due to their own issues, or ex-soldiers became criminals due to economic difficulties after the war, etc etc. Which requires a lot of understanding, skill and navigation and a compassionate heart to solve.

Real humans are people with independent hearts and minds, not mindless units in RTS games for you to command as your will.

Look at the speech of Belousov went he just assumed the position of Defense Ministry and you can see that he briefly mentioned the issues I just listed.

sepheronx wrote:

Arsenic wrote:Why doesn't Russia destroy these 120,000 men?

Incompetence.

For whatever reason, Russian authorities are holding back for nothing other than to extend the amount of deaths and blunders of their own.

The Russian military is capable. But for whatever reason, the high command is just sitting still.  Putin was apparently visibly angry, meaning that even he is aware of the **** ups.

I would not say incompetence, more just frugality. Why waste munitions destroying troops that your enemy has to keep in reserve to defend against a possible attack from that direction? Putin and his generals were expecting that they were facing competent commanders who would not drain the forces defending their capital for silly side shows into cow pastures. That's not a for whatever reason, its just that Putin thought the Ukes would hold their forces near Kiev to prevent encroachments from Belarus. So please, why waste munitions against a force in being when you have forces at the front that require more attention. However, I am sure these formations will soon get attacked.