Attacked? But Comrade Kazan, was the "Special Military Operation" supposed to be one of "rescue" and liberation," and NOT an outright attack?
BTW, Comrade...
Posted on 09/08/2022 7:50:58 AM PDT by Timber Rattler
Ukrainian officials, defending their country against Russian aggressors, began doing something in July that seemed odd, even counterintuitive: They started speaking loudly and regularly about their plans to liberate Kherson—a key southern city that Russia seized only a week after invading Ukraine on February 24. Indeed, the Ukrainians telegraphed their intentions in a way that the Russians could not mistake. This was like waving a red cape at an angry, incompetent bull. Almost immediately, rumors proliferated that the Russians were racing reinforcements to Kherson to prepare for the Ukrainian attack.
Goading the Russians into doing so seems to have been the Ukrainians’ exact goal. Fighting in Kherson plays to Ukrainian strength far more than to the Russians’. Russian occupiers in eastern Ukraine’s Donbas, where the war had been concentrated from April until July, can operate very close to the Russian border, seem to have solidly functional rail lines, and are currently trying to pressure the Ukrainians from two sides at the tip of the fighting around the town of Siversk. Fighting in Kherson, by contrast, nullifies almost all of Russia’s advantages in the Donbas. The Russians are at the edge of their supply lines, while the Ukrainians can maneuver around them. Kherson is deeper into Ukraine than the Donbas, so Russian aircraft have farther to travel to reach the front lines, and that clearly makes them nervous; they prefer to fly mostly over Russia itself or its ally Belarus. Finally, the entire Russian fighting force in Kherson depends for its supplies on just a small number of bridges that span the wide Dnipro River. In recent weeks, the Ukrainians have attacked those crossings almost nightly, severely hindering Russia from moving supplies to their hard-pressed troops in Kherson.
(Excerpt) Read more at theatlantic.com ...
Goading Russians is a bit more work than that. If the Russians just lashed out in an agry fashion in response to Ukrainian provocations, Kyiv would have been flattened by strategic bombing long ago.
And Crimea would be flattened by NATO missiles launched by Ukraine and Russian boys flattened under hundreds of NATO tanks in Ukrainian hands, etc. Putin is doing all he can right now. Anything more escalation by the Kremlin just removes barriers to NATO aid for Ukraine.
Russia has lost the shooting war and now will go all in on forcing Ukraine to surrender diplomatically via the work of a Fifth Column in the west.
Actually, Biden ignored Ukraine. Putin took that as a green light. Biden’s handlers still want to partner with Putin to remove Trump’s Iran policy. To that end they are refusing to designate Russia a terrorist state.
The whole BRIC alliance is.
The Goal is simple: Lose the war but win the peace. Ukraine can get back all the lost land at the Peace Table with UK/USA and NATO Block backing them. Russia has a few aces in the hole to play. China, Weak Biden, Winter, EU going downhill fast. These are dangerous times, my friend. The USA Today is not the USA of 2009. We have been living on past glories and not keeping up. We shall be strangled by our own successes.
“No, we are in a proxy war with Russia.”
Conversely, Russia has been in a proxy war with us. And for quite a while now. They attacked Georgia because they wanted to keep Georgia from aligning with the West and then in 2014 they invaded Crimea and Donbas for the same reasons.
Russia is at war with the United States and NATO.
Thank you for saying that.
Which is why it is necessary for the United States and NATO to step up and support Ukraine. Because the fact that Russia’s war is really against the United States and NATO means that Ukraine is bearing the cost of war on our behalf.
The right thing to do is to help Ukraine defend the West from Russian imperialism.
Oh, yes and there’s this:
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☭☭☭ Soviet Russia must be destroyed. ☭☭☭
☭☭☭ Soviet Russia must be destroyed. ☭☭☭
☭☭☭ Soviet Russia must be destroyed. ☭☭☭
☭☭☭ Soviet Russia must be destroyed. ☭☭☭
☭☭☭ Soviet Russia must be destroyed. ☭☭☭
☭☭☭ Soviet Russia must be destroyed. ☭☭☭
☭☭☭ Soviet Russia must be destroyed. ☭☭☭
☭☭☭ Soviet Russia must be destroyed. ☭☭☭
☭☭☭ Soviet Russia must be destroyed. ☭☭☭
☭☭☭ Soviet Russia must be destroyed. ☭☭☭
☭☭☭ Soviet Russia must be destroyed. ☭☭☭
☭☭☭ Soviet Russia must be destroyed. ☭☭☭
☭☭☭ Soviet Russia must be destroyed. ☭☭☭
☭☭☭ Soviet Russia must be destroyed. ☭☭☭
☭☭☭ Soviet Russia must be destroyed. ☭☭☭
☭☭☭ Soviet Russia must be destroyed. ☭☭☭
☭☭☭ Soviet Russia must be destroyed. ☭☭☭
☭☭☭ Soviet Russia must be destroyed. ☭☭☭
☭☭☭ Soviet Russia must be destroyed. ☭☭☭
☭☭☭ Soviet Russia must be destroyed. ☭☭☭
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I want to re-emphasize some critical points:
1. Russia attacked Ukraine with a small force that was one-third the size of the defending Ukrainian force. Advantage Ukraine and yet, despite the fact that Russia was outnumbered, Russia steadily pushed Ukraine back, taking Mariupol, Kherson and Luhansk.
2. At no point did Russia declare any kind of timeline for accomplishing its stated mission of demilitarization and denazification.
3. The bulk of the fighting from the Russian side is being handled by the militias from the Donbas. Russia has committed only a small fraction of its troops.
4. Despite a massive influx of western military aid, Ukraine has been unable to force the Russians to retreat. Those who want to point to the current Ukrainian offensive as a stunning success are ignoring Ukraine’s massive losses in men and equipment during the past week.Capturing a couple of isolated, unihabited rural villages is not exactly a 21st Century version of Omar Bradley’s Operation Cobra, which was led by General Patton and broke out of hedge row country in Normandy.
In short, Ambassador Taylor and other unnamed U.S. officials (both active and retired) are insisting that the United States is no longer afraid of what Russia might do. Why? Because Russia is on the ropes and struggling to stay in the fight. This is a dangerous delusion.
###
Let me suggest an alternative explanation for Russia’s slow, methodical approach in Ukraine. Russia is committed to the demilitarization of Ukraine. Russia’s current campaign not only is destroying Ukraine’s army and the tanks, planes, helicopters and vehicles, but it also is forcing the United States and NATO to strip themselves of weapons that will not be quickly replaced in the near term. In other words, without risking a direct confrontation with NATO, Russia also is weakening NATO. And Putin does not have to turn Ukraine into a smoldering, nuclear wasteland with millions of dead Ukrainians. Seems like a reasonable approach to me.
The weakening of NATO also is being accelerated with economic weapons–i.e., cutting off the sale of gas and oil. Without gas and oil, Europe’s war industry is grinding to a halt. I do not know if this is part of the Russian plan for the Special Military Operation or just a happy serendipity that serves Russia’s interests. Regardless, the effect hurts NATO.
I do not pretend to know what plan Russia’s General Staff is following. What I do know is that none of the weapons supplied by the United States and NATO have changed the strategic goal of Russia to demilitarize Ukraine and eliminate a NATO threat on the western border. That means Russia’s ability to continue moving west is not eliminated and Ukraine’s prospects grow more bleak.
Half-trained human waves across open steppe without air support and minimal artillery is a new development, I’ll grant them that.
You don't understand.
Bugtussle in Kherson Oblast is a very crucial crossroads on that two-track dirt road in the open steppe.
The Afghanistan playbook, wear them down through attrition and force the Russians and likely their next leader to abandon the quicksand they are in.
Attacked? But Comrade Kazan, was the "Special Military Operation" supposed to be one of "rescue" and liberation," and NOT an outright attack?
BTW, Comrade...
Ukraine can get back all the lost land at the Peace Table
It’s quite the opposite, actually. Russia will never negotiate away the stolen land bridge and the site of the worst war crime of the 21st century in Mariupol.
Russia has lost the shooting war and now the big push for “peace” will come from the Muscovite Kremlin and its fellow travelers. That “peace” gaslighting is a Bolshevik old saw and no more genuine now than at any time in the past 100+ years. Russian occupiers are free to leave Ukraine at any time. Nobody will stop them.
Thank you for admitting what the detractors here have known all along. This isn’t a war between Russia and Ukraine. This NATO’s war on Russia.
Provocations - that’s the language from Soviet newspapers, “Andy Jackson” whoever the hell you are.
Unfortunately for Ukraine, North Korea and Death to America Iran were already taken as allies by the counterparty.
“The only thing new in Ukraines war is their large media propaganda machinery.”
It’s not theirs.
It’s the US Dept of State and CIA in collusion with western media.
The most accomplished and refined information operation in the history of man.
Indeed they are: It’s called how many sheep can we push into a slaughterhouse before the slaughterhouse just implodes.
This is an excellent article and a good description of the invasion and current situation.
Russia has already demonstrated its ability to strike anywhere it wants to in Ukraine, including the leveling of a NATO training center filled with hundreds of foreign fighters just a few klm from the Polish border.
There is no defense for these missiles in Kiev or the collective West.
“There is no defense for these missiles in Kiev...”
Ah, but the person I replied to was talking strategic bombers, not missiles. Nice try moving the goalposts though.
For comparison, on the first night of Linbacker 2, the B-52s dropped over 14,000 mk-82s (500 pound) bombs on Hanoi.
Supposedly, Russia only has 50 of these remaining.
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