Posted on 04/26/2022 7:09:08 PM PDT by delta7
Russian and Donbas forces have cleared the city of Mariupol except for the giant metallurgic complex of Azovstal which is held by some estimated 4,000 men, including many from the fascist Azov battalion.
On Sunday Russia opened corridors across the front line and asked for those forces to surrender. However the Zelensky government ordered them to stay and to continue to bind Russian forces which otherwise could be used elsewhere: Russia had given the Ukrainian fighters in Mariupol until Sunday morning to lay down their weapons or be “eliminated.” On Sunday, the forces at the plant ignored the deadline, and Ukrainian officials vowed that they would not surrender. In response, the Russian assault intensified, with missiles and bombs hitting the city and new attacks occurring near the plant, according to the Ukrainian military. ... Ukrainian officials said on Sunday that the struggle was not over for Mariupol, which for two months has tied up Russian troops and resources that are badly needed elsewhere. The Azovstal complex is a 2 by 2 miles industrial area. It can be surrounded and controlled by a relatively small force. Those within the area no longer have heavy artillery ammunition and presumably little other supplies. The Russian forces can see and bomb anything that moves on the open ground and can otherwise sit back and wait their enemies out.
I do not believe that holding on to Azovstal will significantly delay the upcoming second phase of the Russian operation which will surround and destroy the Ukrainian army on the Donbas front.
The Russian military has two huge advantage over the Ukrainian forces in the east. One is of course its air superiority. The other is the unimpeded supply line which allows it to get as much heavy artillery ammunition, fuel and food to its forces as it needs.
Without fuel the Ukrainian army can not move and without constant supply, especially of large amounts of artillery munitions, it can not counter Russian artillery which will be in heavy use against it.
This pictures of a former Ukrainian position show the devastating result of such a situation.
Nearly all of the Ukrainian ammunition and fuel supplies have been bombed and destroyed. What is trickling in through its western borders has difficulties to reach the eastern front and is anyway not enough to supply an actively fighting and maneuvering army.
On April 16 Russia shot down a Ukrainian military transport plane that was bringing 'western' weapons to Odessa. Today it destroyed another ammunition depot near Lviv were 'western' weapons are crossing the border into Ukraine. Some bits of fuel allegedly still reach the Ukraine through trains from Moldova. But that is far from enough.
Here is a week old report on the fuel situation: Since the beginning of the war, the number of gas stations in Ukraine has decreased three times, and private fuel consumption has decreased by about the same amount, said Sergey Kuyun, director of the A-95 consulting group.
“According to our estimates, a third of the total number of gas stations is operating, this is about 2.5 thousand stations, before the war there were 7.5 thousand. Of course, the main reason is the lack of fuel. Consumption has also decreased three times compared to the pre-war level,” he said at a closed briefing at the Media Center in Lviv on Monday.
At the same time, Kuyun noted that traders or network owners are forced to provide their most strategic and powerful facilities, located mainly in regional centers or on main routes, while peripheral stations are forced to stand idle, although there are also a lot of consumers there.
According to him, the shortage of fuel became especially aggravated after the shutdown of the Kremenchug Oil Refinery as a result of a missile attack by Russian invaders. ... On April 2, the Russian invaders destroyed the infrastructure of the Kremenchug oil refinery with their shelling, and it stopped working. The damage done daily to the Ukrainian military and military industry is huge. One can get a sense of it when one reads through the briefings of the Russian defense ministry. From today's morning brief (here in full as some have difficulties accessing the site): The Armed Forces of the Russian Federation continue the special military operation in Ukraine.
High-precision air-based missiles destroyed 16 military assets of Ukrainian overnight.
Among them: 5 enemy command posts, 1 fuel storage facility, 3 ammunition depots, as well as military personnel and equipment concentrated in Barvenkovo, Gulyai Pole, Kamyshevakha, Zelenoe Pole, Velikomikhailovka and Nikolaev.
Operational-tactical aviation hit 108 areas of concentration of Ukrainian manpower and military equipment.
In addition, 1 Ukrainian unmanned aerial vehicle was shot down by an air-to-air missile near Buda.
Army aviation destroyed 8 tanks and other armoured fighting vehicles, as well as up to a company of enemy manpower near Pashkovo, Veseloe and Illichevka.
Missile troops struck with high-precision Iskander land-based missiles. 4 arms depots and Ukrainian military equipment were destroyed, as well as 3 areas enemy manpower concentration near Popasnaya, Yampol and Kramotorsk.
Russian artillery units hit 315 Ukrainian assets overnight.
18 command posts, 22 artillery batteries, 1 OSA-AKM anti-aircraft missile system, as well as 275 enemy strong points and areas of concentration of enemy manpower were hit.
Russian air defence means shot down 3 Ukrainian combat aircraft in the air: 2 MiG-29 fighters near Izyum and 1 Su-25 near Avdeevka.
11 Ukrainian unmanned aerial vehicles were also shot down in the air near Klimovo, Nevelskoe, Novotroitskoe, Izyum, Panteleimonovka, Sladkovodnoe and Yasnoe. 10 large-calibre rockets fired by Ukrainian multiple rocket launchers at Chernobaevka were intercepted.
In total, 139 aircraft, 483 unmanned aerial vehicles, 250 anti-aircraft missile systems, 2,326 tanks and other armored combat vehicles, 254 multiple launch rocket systems, 1,004 field artillery and mortars, as well as 2,184 units of special military vehicles of the Armed Forces of Ukraine were destroyed during the operation. This has now been going on daily for more than a month. While the precision of the above numbers is somewhat uncertain I do not think that they are exaggerated by much. Yesterday there was no particular heavy fighting and the equipment destroyed on that one day alone was already more than what the US has in total promised to send.
That means that the military destruction and defeat of the Ukrainian forces in the country's east is all but assured.
What then is the strategy that government in Kiev and its overlords in Washington DC are following? Why has the Ukraine not given up? Why didn't it continue to negotiate with the Russian side?
Is their hope that their daily over the top 'Russia is losing' propaganda will create enough political momentum for a large scale NATO intervention?
That would end in a disaster for the NATO forces.
Russia is obviously prepared for it. It has so far held back large parts of its own forces. Russia has at least 12 tactical missile artillery brigades, each with 36 Iskander missile launchers and 144 fire ready missiles. Only three of the those brigades plus a third of two other ones have so far been committed: Three brigades, or a total of 36 Iskander launchers (two missiles each plus two resupply missiles per launcher) were deployed to Belarus as part of the buildup to war in Ukraine. Two additional brigades (12 launchers) were also assigned to Russia's Southern Military District and moved forward in the area of Belgorod near the Russian border; and to the area of Krasnodar, south of Ukraine. Most of the Russian airforce has likewise been held back.
On March 24 the Pentagon claimed that Russia was running out of precision munitions. However, if the Russian defense ministry report is correct, at least 16 precision air ground missiles and 7 Iskander were used just yesterday. To me that does not sound like 'limited supplies'.
Other issues:
Since Saturday Gonzalo Lira, who has been reported from Kharkov, is no longer reachable. He seems to have been captured or killed by the Ukrainian Gestapo-like SBU. Sadly I had expected that. Doing hours of Youtube live streams when your enemy controls the internet in your area is not very smart.
A picture of the damaged Russian cruiser Moscwa was published today.
The Russian cruiser was damaged last week and sunk. The ship is listing and so it must have additional damage below its waterline. The picture shows fire midships on its port side where two of its close-in weapons systems and their ammunition storages are. The ships crane is deployed right above that area. The large anti-ship missiles towards the bow and the S-300 air defense launchers behind the deckhouse seem intact. The port side life rafts are no longer where they were and must have been launched. That means that a significant part of the crew likely got off the ship alive before it sank.
The picture does not tell us what has happened. Was this an accidental ammunition explosion as Russia had first claimed or was the ship hit by Ukrainian (or British?) anti-ship missiles as the Ukraine is claiming? We will have to wait for further reports to know that.
Of course the MSM is full of propaganda. We don’t have free presses. We have press (and increasingly TV) news that is tailored to an intransigent editorial line.
But hey, the free world has spent decades extolling the moral value of having that distortion baked into preset narratives. It’s in our DNA to have that.
With no hint of irony or self awareness, we laughed at North Korea for having ludicrous biases in its news, we laughed at Baghdad Bob.
We are not immune to propaganda just because our news is a freer market. There’s just a bigger diet of confirmation biases.
We ought to be far more immune to propaganda because we have the privilege of being allowed to scrutinise to the narratives we might disagree with as well as scrutinise the ones we do agree with.
We have that luxury. Russians don’t anymore and you can see what that’s led to. A leader who literally told the head of the UN last night that Russia has no military operation going on in Mariupol... BUT UKRAINIANS INSIDE AZOVSTAL NEED TO SURRENDER TO THE RUSSIAN FORCES OUTSIDE.
I could almost feel the UNSG’eyes pop out at the sheer idiocy of Putin’s statement.
Being wedded to one side of the propaganda no matter how obviously wrongheaded it gets, while insisting the other side only lies no matter how well evidenced its case is, turns smart people into fools.
Consider the statement that Zelenskyy has ordered the people in a sealed off bunker surrounded by Wagner and Kadyrovites, to do ANYTHING. It’s as stupid ass a stupid ass claim as Putin’s statement that there is no military operation in Mariupol.
HOW IS HE SENDING THEM THEIR ORDERS THROUGH THE RUSSIAN OCCUPYING FORCES? ESP?
More importantly, who is saying Zelenskyy still has that much command and control? This stinks of Russia getting its excuses in early if they open the bunker and walk in to find a few hundred severely injured soldiers who couldn’t flee or fight if they wanted to, and a thousand unarmed civilians including preschool kids.
“Zelenskyy wouldn’t let them leave” my arse. “The Ukes have been told the foreign fighters have been ordered to offer no quarter” is far more credible because they heard that from the Kremlin directly in the very first “surrender by morning or you’re all combatants and we’ll show no mercy” ultimatum back in March.
Any such opinion (based upon scant evidence) is perforce bold.
It is also easy for Zelensky to suggest our involvement when the USA and NATO states aren't his country, either.
Zelenskyy has "skin in the game," and is therefore entitled to cry for help, disparage fecklessness, etc.
I'd like the shooting in both directions to stop.
And I'd like to have a unicorn that shoots rainbows out of its ass. So I guess that you and I are in similar situations.
Regards,
We’ve already exceeded the emotionally aggressive FReeper limit. But you definitely kill it on the grammar corrections — plenty of vacancies there.
You should have no problem with any articles or blogs being posted since you post twitter articles and such all he time from what you consider reliable sources just as others think theirs are.
Hard understanding how people see Ukraine army winning this war on any front. Russia continues to bomb and destroy wherever Ukraine has military equipment etc. ..often in transit. Their forces are working with old and new rifles etc they cannot get parts for or mix...and advanced equipment they don’t have enough trained to use... And their held up or surrounded where a battle insues on the ground.
Russia withdraws from areas to go to their next objective yet Ukraine reports this as their regaining lost areas or cities as if they’ve won. How silly.
I’m way outside the box of functional knowledge on this issue. I’ll take your word for it.
I agree with your first statement.
The first sentence of your third paragraph was confirmed indirectly by the UN Secretary General yesterday, forcing even Lavrov to admit that it is indeed the case that Ukrainians have not violated Russian sovereignty or its territory, but Russia certainly has violated Ukrainian sovereignty territory.
Mariupol’s commander, Delimkhanov has publicly said that his orders came from Kadyrov and Putin, and they were, “[the] special operation to destroy and clear Mariupol”.
The video of Delimkhanov’s speech is widely available, unedited. So if you want any concrete evidence that Putin’s mission in Mariupol had nothing whatsoever to do with “liberating” Mariupol’s Russian citizens, you’ve got it. Putin even honoured Delimkhanov after he said that. If Putin had ordered ANYTHING ELSE, Delimkhanov would’ve got a dressing down, not a medal. People have been thrown out of a seventh storey window for wilfully misrepresenting putting Putin in a bad light in a way that Putin doesn’t like.
“Putin broke the 1994 Budapest agreement with his invasion of Crimea in 2014.” Absolutely, but then so did every other party to the agreement. Also... The first breach of the agreement was actually BEFORE the invasion of Crimea.
In December 2013 Yanukovych single-handedly binned the planned EU Free Trade Agreement that he’d been co-sponsoring since that February, and arbitrarily signed an agreement to lock his country’s finances to Russian state financial support instead. Moreover, he did it without even consulting a Parliament that was overwhelmingly supportive of the EU FTA (as Yanukovych had been only a month earlier).
So we know the exact date that Putin first broke the Budapest Memorandum. It was 17th December 2013. We know where Putin did it - in Moscow, at the 6th Interstate Consultation. We know roughly how he did it - Yanukovych was compromised and coerced. We know what the point of that coercion was - to exploit massive financial problems in Ukraine, and force Ukraine into rejecting a EU free trade solution in favour of Ukrainian finances being forever locked to Moscow.
This unfortunately means the guarantors of Budapest - the UK and USA especially - should’ve done something significant the minute Putin declared the interim government post-Euromaidan illegitimate. We didn’t. So Putin invaded Crimea. We still didn’t do anything significant. Russia sponsored DPR and LPR self-declarations of independence, again violating Ukrainian sovereignty - we still didn’t react. Then Russia invaded. And finally the guarantors of Budapest started thinking, “we probably ought to do something because now Putin really is taking the piss.”
Perhaps you haven’t noticed that Ukraine is larger than Chechnya. Putin has leveled as many towns as his poor conventional logistics allow. He has killed thousands of civilians but you want us to applaud the KGB thug for not killing more. The real story here is that Putin has been repeatedly humiliated by Ukraine’s military who are fighting for home and hearth against invaders.
Ri-ight! There is absolutely no historical precedent for an underdog, defending his homeland from a foreign invader, emerging victorious over a numerically superior foe!
None whatsoever!
After all, Ukraine only has about 50 countries, representing a combined 90% of the world's high-tech armaments production and GDP, on its side!
And the impact of the West's economic sanctions has been near zero.
/mordant sarcasm
Regards,
Regarding ‘underdog’ precedent, there’s the ever tenacious Afghanistan...
Regarding Ukraine, the Western inertia insinuates guilty writ large. But that’s not our concern...
West is just now beginning to send heavy weapons to Ukraine.
'First American howitzers bound for Ukraine arrive in Europe as US troops begin training Ukrainians on the cannons'
https://www.legion.org/news/255598/first-american-howitzers-bound-ukraine-arrive-europe-us-troops-begin-training-ukrainians
'Poland confirms the supply of its own of T-72 main battle tanks to Ukraine'
https://www.armyrecognition.com/defense_news_april_2022_global_security_army_industry/poland_confirms_the_supply_of_its_own_of_t-72_main_battle_tanks_to_ukraine.html
Uke Must get USA and NATO into the war—Look for more “Atrocities” real or imagined. A “Chemical attack of a school” or a small nuke—even a Russian-built rocket hitting Poland. The CIA or MI-5 could do it to start the war. Heck I wouldn’t put it past Biden to blow up a Texas City with a “Russian” Nuke (or mira-lago Florida) to stimulate a nuke exchange and reduce the population and help China become the dominant power on the planet. The rich have bomb shelters.
The side that is going to get the upper hand will be the side that can re-constitute its forces first. We know that Russians are re-deploying their battered assault units back to the Donbass seemingly in an attempt to salvage a more limited war aim. What we don’t know is to what extent the Ukraine is rebuilding its own reserve forces. They are getting western arms, but we don’t yet see evidence of a large counteroffensive being organized. Perhaps that will happen in the Summer months?
That's pretty rich coming from the ukeQueen of Propaganda.
Breaking news: crappy blogger has an opinion
The plan is for Ukraine to start causing trouble in Moldova who has a yuge stash of old Soviet weapons and overload Russia with another front. Maybe even work to get NATO involved.
All this since the visit of Blinkin and Austin, Obamas boys orchestrating more chaos.
How long did it take for the US to enter WWI? WWII? (33 months and 17 months, respectively.) From the time of the UK’s and France’s declaring war on Germany of September 3, 1939 until actual ‘war’ with German forces on May 10, 1940, nine months passed. Unlike television and movies, wars don’t start and end in an hour, or hour and a half.
The US military has sent 1/4 of its Javelin missile stock and 1/3 of its stock of Stinger missiles to Ukraine. US and NATO supplies are being drawn down and sent to Ukraine. It does work for the former Warsaw Pact nations belonging to NATO. They can give their 30 year old materiel to Ukraine and get new, Western ‘toys’ from NATO, the US primarily.
Or, perhaps you are ‘on side’ with Führer und Reichskanzler Klaus Schwab of the WEF’s plans to run the world? You want to be a slave to fascists like Schwab, Bill-zebub Gates and the WEF? Well, bully for you! MOST THINKING HUMANS DO NOT! I’ll die on my feet, rather than existing on my knees, thank you very much!
The problem with your logic is that there should be no delay in the US joining the war since by your own claims they are chomping at the bit for it. This has been the narrative for 3 months now. In 6 months when the war is long over and the Rdskies are pushing up sunflowers, you’ll still be whining about the US imminently going to war.
Fair reporting? It smacks of pro-Russia propaganda.Not much mention of Russkie losses.
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