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Ukrainian Counteroffensive
The Ukrainians have started the counteroffensive. We don’t have solid information on how it is going in any specific way, but one key indicator is the Russian response: they blew up a major dam (and thus its 351MW generator), endangering the nuclear power stations that rely on it for cooling water. This suggests desperate panic and a “burn it all down” mindset.
Even Russia’s erstwhile allies are licking their chops. The lapdog who runs Belarus? He says he wants part of Russia. All those predictions I have been making about Russia being carved up by separatists within and invaders without? I think they will come true. Russia is ridiculously weak and powerless. Totalitarian states must have the credible threat of force to retain power. If you rely on Might to Define Right, but you no longer have the former…
Russia appears to be breaking things out of pure spite. After all, the dam was the source of Crimea’s fresh water, and now Crimea has none. Not too smart. If a radioactive cloud emerges from the huge nuclear facility, Russia is downwind.
Things might start happening VERY quickly now.
Published in General
Also curious about how he spells his first name. Igor.
That’s Eye-gor!
Well, I suppose “Yehor” would be more in keeping with his last name, the “enko” ending of which denotes Ukrainian ethnicity.
Yup. Here’s the story (bolding mine):
“Australia, the US and Ukraine are discussing sending 41 Royal Australian Air Force F/A-18 Hornets to Kyiv helping fulfil part of President Volodymyr Zelensky’s request for fighter jets, rather than sending them to the scrapheap as planned.“
https://www.afr.com/politics/federal/retired-raaf-fighter-jets-could-be-sent-to-ukraine-20230605-p5de0h
the coalition supply Ukraine just keeps expanding…..now including recent Russian allies:
Staying forever sounds pricey. If not forever, then it is a matter of timing and method of withdrawal to minimize “costs”. But you probably don’t mean money. It is better that the Taliban are fighting with the Iranians than Americans. It is kind of off-topic, but feel free to post your cost-benefit analysis of various Afghan scenarios.
It’s a method that’s not exclusive to the Russians. The Ukrainians blew up a damn in order to slow down the Russian advance toward Kiev in February last year. Heck, even the U.S. employed said method, back in 2017 in Syria:
“Near the height of the war against the Islamic State in Syria, a sudden riot of explosions rocked the country’s largest dam, a towering, 18-story structure on the Euphrates River that held back a 25-mile-long reservoir above a valley where hundreds of thousands of people lived. … members of a top secret U.S. Special Operations unit called Task Force 9 had struck the dam using some of the largest conventional bombs in the U.S. arsenal, including at least one BLU-109 bunker-buster bomb designed to destroy thick concrete structures, according to two former senior officials. And they had done it despite a military report warning not to bomb the dam, because the damage could cause a flood that might kill tens of thousands of civilians.”
As for opportunity, the Russians have been pretty much in control of the dam in question all along, to the extent that they were recently able to repair some of the damage to it from Ukrainian shelling, in order to open up a few of the sluices and release some of the reservoir water that, over the past month or so, had been accumulating to dangerous levels (17 extra meters’ worth, apparently) due to the Ukrainians’ sending extra water downstream via dams further up the river which they control. IOW, if the Russians wanted to cause massive flooding in order to stall/thwart an impending Ukrainian counter offensive in Kherson, all they needed to do was open up more sluices. No “Boom!” necessary.
But, with all that said, I like your “48 hour rule” suggestion.
If staying in Afghanistan might have deterred Putin from invading Ukraine, just the costs SO FAR of that alone might have funded staying in Afghanistan “forever.” And that cost would have been spread out over many years.
That would be a clever thing for Zelensky to say if he planned to blow up the dam
I remember that the ‘body count’ was in the headlines nearly every day during the Vietnam war. We were killing them at a much higher rate than them killing us. We were annihilating them.
We lost.
Excerpts from the FT article linked in the above tweet:
“Aleksandar Vučić has traditionally backed Moscow and refused to align with western sanctions on Russia after its full scale invasion of Ukraine. But in a change of tack, the Serbian president said he was aware of US government reports that Serbian ammunition has ended up in Ukraine via intermediaries and that he had no plans to stop that. “Is it possible that it’s happening? I have no doubts that it might happen,” Vučić told the Financial Times. “What is the alternative for us? Not to produce it? Not to sell it?”
The pipeline funnelling Serb ammunition to the Ukrainian front has been a crucial factor in a noticeable shift as the US, Nato and the EU recently backed Serbia in a recent flare-up of ethnic tensions in Kosovo, according to three western diplomats in the region.“
IOW, the U.S./NATO said to Serbia “We’ll help you with your Kosovo problem, and you help Ukraine get some more ammo. Savvy?” To which, of course, Serbia said: “OK. Thank you.”
Geopolitical “sausage making” 101.
There are some PR problems with the Ukraine military.
You have the situation somewhat backwards- here it is the Russians who can can leave(like the USA in Vietnam)- the Ukrainians (like the Vietnamese) can’t. In Vietnam, the side with the lower losses was the one who could most easily leave (ie the USA). In this war, the side with the greater losses (Russia)is the one who can most easily exit. For the Ukrainians it’s an existential struggle-it isn’t for Russia -despite Putin’s claims (but it might be existential for him).
I guess I’d better go off and catch up on my Hohol. Gotta get that culture!!
All I mean is that the body count is meaningless.
Indeed. Especially since no one can possibly know whether this war has even reached its “middle”, let alone its “beginning of the end” stage yet.
Just as long as you make sure not to step over the “cultural appropriation” line, for beyond it lay in wait the Fire-Breathing Cancellation Dragons of No Mercy and No Quarter Given!
Prigozhin complained that the armed forces of Ukraine broke through the defense line in several areas of the front. Because of this, the leader of the PMK “Wagner” asked the Kremlin to announce a general mobilization, saying he needs at least 200,000 soldiers, Russian telegram channels write.
Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic said he was not opposed to his country selling ammunition to intermediaries who send them to Ukraine.
The Financial Times writes that such statements are a sign that Russia’s staunch Balkan ally is turning west.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz called the explosion of the Kakhovskaya hydroelectric power station a “new dimension” of the war of the Russian Federation against Ukraine.
Scholz told the European Forum in Berlin that the destruction of the dam “is in line with how Putin is waging this war.”
“This is in tune with many of the crimes committed by Russian soldiers in Ukraine, and is part of the military operations during which civilian objects were attacked – cities, villages, hospitals, schools,” Olaf Scholz said.
Israel accuses Russia of destroying the Kakhovska hydroelectric power station.
“According to our estimates, it was Russia they blew up the dam,” Foreign Minister Eli Cohen said.
“Support for the rebels [in the Belgorod region of Russia] is growing. This applies to both those willing to take part in the armed struggle against Putin, and to local residents who ask for protection,” Yusov, a representative of Ukrainian military intelligence said.
Hardly meaningless, but clearly not deterministic. A better example would be WW2- the Soviets suffered much higher losses than Germany but won. But again, they were the ones who couldn’t exit…
Prigozhin provides his assessment. And it is that the Ukrainians are advancing and succeeding on multiple fronts.
And he adds, near the end, what I have been saying for over a year: once Russian weakness is clear, others will come and take pieces of the country.
The huge difference between the two civilizations is clear when on the Ukrainian controlled side of the flooding huge effort is expended to save every human being and every animal caught in the flooding. But on the Russian controlled side of the flooding, people are left to die on their rooftops and their children freeze to death.
The Ukrainian side values human life. The Russian side places no value on human life.
ADDED: Putin’s Russia is ISIS with snow.
Also Mongol.
Edited to add:
And Nazi.
Banks in Kazakhstan and Armenia, both nations formerly part of the Soviet Union, began to block payments for electronics for Russian companies.
They block payments for processors, micro circuits and other electronics supplied through parallel imports. The blocking of these payments is related to the 10th round of United States sanctions on Russia.
Also, Hong Kong banks are now blocking such payments.
Haven’t we been hearing that it’s just about over for well over a year, now? That Side A or Side B is just about to collapse?
Did anyone predict that it would still be grinding on like this for so long?
I don’t believe anything anybody says about it any more. Call me when the shooting stops.