The Ukraine war – Russia modifies its tactics.

Posted by Pointman on May 13, 2022 · 8 Comments 

America’s proxy war against Russia is proving to be a disaster for both America and the world in general. It’s a two-pronged attack, one being a concerted effort to destroy the Russian economy and the other one an indirect military action to kill as many Russian soldiers as possible by supplying the Ukraine with what seems an endless stream of armaments.

There are some common points to note about both approaches. The first is the propaganda they come with is first class and if you believe it, which bizarrely most seemingly sensible people do, then it’s all a great success when in fact they’re both massive failures. The second is that neither strategy was thought through or if it was, it was by people woefully ignorant of both economics or warfare.

I covered the absolutely disastrous boomerang effect of the sanctions policy on western economies in a previous piece but just to underline the realities, if you’d deposited a lump of cash in a Gazprom bank account denominated in rubles just before Russia invaded the Ukraine, you’d have become about 30% richer in the last few months alone. That’s a bet I’d let ride as well.

Basically, sanctions have crashed the dollar and every other currency in the world, except for the ruble which now looks well on the way to becoming the world’s commodity-backed reserve currency in a few years. In the West, we’re on a return to the 1970s. Stagflation. Zero or negative economic growth accompanied by run away inflation. The propaganda says we’re crippling the Russian economy but the reality is that we’re the ones who managed to kneecap ourselves.

On the military front, the propaganda assures us that the Ukraine is winning hands down. The “ghost of Kiev” is in the air shooting down 40 Russian planes a day, multiple Russian naval vessels are getting sunk by Ukrainian Neptune missiles and the defiant but fallen heroes of Snake Island have all been awarded posthumous medals for refusing to surrender and telling the invading Russian navy to fuck off before they all got blown to bits.

The only problem is that the Ukrainians have since been forced to admit there never was a ghost of Kiev, those supposedly sunken Russian warships keep stubbornly sailing into Black Sea ports unscathed and the heroes of Snake Island actually surrendered straight away and have since been freed in a prisoner exchange. It’s all lies being fed to a gullible Western media by the Ukrainian propaganda ministry via the State Department but regrettably it’s all working. It’s become almost impossible to have a conversation with normally sane people about the Ukraine that contradicts the narrative without being automatically called a stooge of Putin. Propaganda does actually work.

What’s the true situation? In the south, Mariupal is in Russian hands except for what’s left of the Azov battalion who’re hiding in the bowels of seven underground levels of a steel production facility. Penned in and starving. Kiev have assured them of two things according to one of their colonels who’s just surrendered. If they surrender, they’ll be shot but that help is on its way. There’s no help coming, especially through 90 kilometers of dug in Russians just waiting for the Ukrainians to take the bait.

In the east, the Donbass encirclement of an estimated original 60,000 Ukrainian troops is getting the softening up treatment. They’ve had no significant logistical support from their own government since the middle of March when the Russians sprung the trap. Every supermarket and warehouse has been stripped clean by starving soldiers. There’s no air cover, casualty evac, no resupply and all that’s been sent to relieve them is class C units with soldiers of an average age of 40 who the Russians and militias of the Donbass republics are just chewing up.

For the moment, the Russians are just content to rain down on them a non-stop hail of Katyushas and artillery shells while their ground attack aircraft kill anything that moves. When you’ve had enough of that treatment, starving, thirsty and you’ve got nothing to fight back with, you’ll eventually surrender. At that point, the Russian armoured columns will roll in to mop up. The pictures are horrific. What’s being done in the Donbass is a war crime, but it’s not the Russians committing it, it’s Kiev and by proxy the United States. Those men should have long ago surrendered.

As the Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Zhau said, the US is determined to “fight to the last Ukrainian”. That pretty much states the prospects of the Biden administration going into reverse gear. What’s currently happening is murder, plain and simple. At the same time, we have the reality detached maniacs in Kiev announcing nonsense like the only acceptable end to the war will be the Russians capitulating.

In the west of the country, there’s definitely been a change of plan. Instead of just using cruise missile and other projectiles against targets vital to the Ukraine’s military effort, the Russians have gone biblical hitting everything. Bridges, power plants, transmission stations, refining facilities and any utilities necessary to live a modern lifestyle. That’s not their usual style but the decision has obviously been made to move the Ukraine back to a pre-industrial stone age.

The implication is they’ve no intention of totally occupying a total mess like that but whether they take Odessa is moot. It’d landlock the Ukraine and give them another port on the black sea. They’re in no rush, so time will tell.

There are some realities about this war that Westerners really need to think about or at least take into consideration. First, it broke out because the Ukraine with the connivance of the West tried to bluff Putin. We’re going to break all our promises, join NATO, totally ignore the Minsk agreements and move to take back the ground we lost in 2014 and he won’t do anything in response. Wrong. He just invaded. Trying to bluff Putin has a very long and catastrophic history of failure.

Secondly, there never was and still isn’t a point in this war where the Ukrainian military were ever going to prevail against the sheer might of the Russians. They never stood a chance. The Red Army is just taking its own sweet time running every military asset of the Ukraine through a meat grinder. The apparently suicidal orders of Kiev to never surrender and fight to the last bullet suits them right down to the ground. Ignore all the armchair generals; the Russians are not bogged down or running behind some imaginary schedule created by a bunch of foreigners.

Thirdly, all that money being funnelled to the Ukraine is basically being stolen – in the front door and out the back. As for the armament shipments, what use is the 200 T72 tanks donated by Poland? They’re 70’s era technology. The average infantryman these days could successfully attack them with a tin opener. All the other stuff is at least twenty year old technology that simply hasn’t lived up to its sales spiel. The performance of the Javelin, Stinger and Panzerfaust 3 have been disappointing to say the least.

The modern stuff such as the Switchblade suicide drone, the Turkish Bayraktar and other sophisticated devices have proven to be very vulnerable to ECM. To restate that, the Russians seem to be able to hijack it in mid-air and send it back in your direction. Understandably there seems to be a certain reluctance by the teams charged with using them to ever fire the damn things.

Reading Russian intentions is like looking at a Matryoshka doll. Concealed inside that doll is another smaller doll and inside that another one. I’m second guessing what their intentions actually are but I think I’m not far off target. We’ll see.

©Pointman

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Filed under Article · Tagged with Donbass, Mariupol, Ukraine