Posted on 10/05/2022 4:02:25 PM PDT by UMCRevMom@aol.com
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Also, check on the military map here: https://militaryland.net/ https://deepstatemap.live/en#7.5/48.340/39.569
War between Prigozhin and Putin has started. Grab some popcorn.
“War between Prigozhin and Putin has started. Grab some popcorn.”
Has that been confirmed? I had heard rumors that Prigozhin was turning against Putin. If that turns into a real feud, that will have some interesting consequences and implications.
Putin just arrested Prigozhin’s top media guy. Brutal arrest by Spetnaz, not FSB. Civil war is coming.
Kadyrov allied with Prigozhin. Popcorn time.
That’s interesting.
Putin is going to regret throwing the FSB under the bus.
“Kadyrov allied with Prigozhin. Popcorn time.”
Sounds like it!
Google national debt live.
Prigozhin and Kadyrov can destabilize the ethnic regions in a flash.
Speaking of drones. Not only have sophisticated drones designed for advanced militaries been used in this war but off the shelf drones sold to recreational enthusiasts have been armed and used with effect. Wonder if the FBI, when it is not busy hunting elusive white supremacists , raiding the homes of MAGA people and harassing pro life activists have taken notice. They track gun purchases but do they track drone sales especially by people suspected of terrorist sympathies or leanings. In 2000 the FBI was tipped off that Arab students attending at an Arizona flying school were only interested on how to fly and manuvuer a multi engine jet already in flight but cared nothing about how to land or take off. Senior FBI officials ordered the field agents to drop the investigation lest they be accused of “profiling” Let’s hope those packed open stadiums stay safe every Sunday. Does everyone feel safe knowing Merrick Garland’s an FBI are out there protecting us from threats domestic and foreign?
Putin and those around him conceived of the Russo-Ukrainian War in existential terms from the very beginning. It is unlikely, however, that most Russians understood this. Instead, they likely viewed the war the same way Americans viewed the war in Iraq and Ukraine - as a justified military enterprise that was nevertheless merely a technocratic task for the professional military; hardly a matter of life and death for the nation. I highly doubt that any American ever believed that the fate of the nation hinged on the war in Afghanistan (Americans have not fought an existential war since 1865), and judging by the recruitment crisis plaguing the American military, it does not seem like anyone perceives a genuine foreign existential threat.
What has happened in the months since February 24 is rather remarkable. The existential war for the Russian nation has been incarnated and made real for Russian citizens. Sanctions and anti-Russian propaganda - demonizing the entire nation as “orcs” - has rallied even initially skeptical Russians behind the war, and Putin’s approval rating has soared. A core western assumption, that Russians would turn on the government, has reversed. Videos showing the torture of Russian POWs by frothing Ukrainians, of Ukrainian soldiers calling Russian mothers to mockingly tell them their sons are dead, of Russian children killed by shelling in Donetsk, have served to validate Putin’s implicit claim that Ukraine is a demon possessed state that must be exorcised with high explosives. Amidst all of this - helpfully, from the perspective of Alexander Dugin and his neophytes - American pseudo-intellectual “Blue Checks” have publicly drooled over the prospect of “decolonizing and demilitarizing” Russia, which plainly entails the dismemberment of the Russian state and the partitioning of its territory. The government of Ukraine (in now deleted tweets) publicly claimed that Russians are prone to barbarism because they are a mongrel race with Asiatic blood mixing.
Simultaneously, Putin has moved towards - and ultimately achieved - his project of formal annexation of Ukraine’s old eastern rim. This has also legally transformed the war into an existential struggle. Further Ukrainian advances in the east are now, in the eyes of the Russian state, an assault on sovereign Russian territory and an attempt to destroy the integrity of the Russian state. Recent polling shows that a supermajority of Russians support defending these new territories at any cost.
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A political consensus for higher mobilization and greater intensity has been achieved. Now all that remains is the implementation of this consensus in the material world of fist and boot, bullet and shell, blood and iron.
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Putin, very simply, could not have conducted a large scale mobilization at the onset of the war. He possessed neither a coercive mechanism nor the manifest threat to generate mass political support. Few Russians would have believed that there was some existential threat lurking in the shadow - they needed to be shown, and the west has not disappointed. Likewise, few Russians would likely have supported the obliteration of Ukrainian infrastructure and urban utilities in the opening days of the war. But now, the only vocal criticism of Putin within Russia is on the side of further escalation. The problem with Putin, from the Russian perspective, is that he has not gone far enough. In other words - mass politics have already moved ahead of the government, making mobilization and escalation politically trivial. Above all, we must remember that Clausewitz’s maxim remains true. The military situation is merely a subset of the political situation, and military mobilization is also political mobilization - a manifestation of society’s political participation in the state.
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The other is the interpretation that I have advocated, that Russia is massing for a winter escalation and offensive, and is currently engaged in a calculated trade wherein they give up space in exchange for time and Ukrainian casualties. Russia continues to retreat where positions are either operationally compromised or faced with overwhelming Ukrainian numbers, but they are very careful to extract forces out of operational danger. In Lyman, where Ukraine threatened to encircle the garrison, Russia committed mobile reserves to unblock the village and secure the withdrawal of the garrison. Ukraine’s “encirclement” evaporated, and the Ukrainian interior ministry was bizarrely compelled to tweet (and then delete) video of destroyed civilian vehicles as “proof” that the Russian forces had been annihilated.
Russia will likely continue to pull back over the coming weeks, withdrawing units intact under their artillery and air umbrella, grinding down Ukrainian heavy equipment stocks and wearing away their manpower. Meanwhile, new equipment continues to congregate in Belgorod, Zaporizhia, and Crimea. My expectation remains the same: episodic Russian withdrawal until the front stabilizes roughly at the end of October, followed by an operational pause until the ground freezes, followed by escalation and a winter offensive by Russia once they have finished amassing sufficient units.
Prigozhin versus Putin. There can be only one…
Here’s a story about it on Washington Compost. Propagandists in our DoD. You they’re operating at many sites, not just Facebook and Twitter.
Excerpt:
“The takedowns in recent years by Twitter and Facebook of more than 150 bogus personas and media sites created in the United States was disclosed last month by internet researchers Graphika and the Stanford Internet Observatory. While the researchers did not attribute the sham accounts to the U.S. military, two officials familiar with the matter said that U.S. Central Command is among those whose activities are facing scrutiny. Like others interviewed for this report, they spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive military operations.“
And another:
“”One diplomat put it this way: “Generally speaking, we shouldn’t be employing the same kind of tactics that our adversaries are using because the bottom line is we have the moral high ground. We are a society that is built on a certain set of values. We promote those values around the world and when we use tactics like those, it just undermines our argument about who we are.””
Pentagon opens sweeping review of clandestine psychological operations
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/09/19/pentagon-psychological-operations-facebook-twitter/
Heads up, Tucker Carlson blowing up the NordStream pipeline garbo, right....
“This may be of interest to you along these same lines showing problems for Russia of: ‘A political consensus for higher mobilization and greater intensity has been achieved. Now all that remains is the implementation of this consensus in the material world of fist and boot, bullet and shell, blood and iron.’
-https://bigserge.substack.com/p/politics-by-other-means“
Ukraine’s General Staff Operational Report: Some russia’s Mobilised Sent Back Dut to Inability to Provide Accommodation, Clothing, Food , Defense Express, war in Ukraine, Russian-Ukrainian war
October 5, 2022
“According to the information available, medical facilities of the city of Yevpatoriya (temporarily occupied territory of the Republic of Crimea) lack medical equipment for the treatment of wounded occupant servicemen.
The enemy experiences problems with certain types of supplies in process of the so-called “partial mobilisation”. Thus, the mobilised personnel were sent back from the Molkino educational center (Krasnodar Krai) to Primorsko-Akhtarsk due to the inability to provide accommodation, clothing, and food for the specified category of servicemen.
The russian occupation authorities are trying to compensate for the loss of personnel at the expense of conscription of locals in the temporarily controlled and occupied territories of Ukraine.
Thus, according to the information available, men from Luhansk do not undergo any medical examination or training and are sent to replenish the units that suffered the greatest losses immediately after mobilisation.”
“Kadyrov allied with Prigozhin”
Wow, Wow, Wow!!!!!
“Prigozhin and Kadyrov can destabilize the ethnic regions in a flash.”
Especially the Caucasus.
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