The Russo-Ukrainian War of 2021-present has entered a new phase. In the wake of the Ukraine’s hybrid/asymmetric attack on Russia’s strategic bomber fleet (a.k.a., Operation Spiderweb), Russia is getting its revenge in the smartest way possible. Russia has begun a massive, month-long air/missile/drone campaign that is systematically attacking command and control centers all over the country. The latest was a Russian X-22 missile attack on a former drilling rig disguised as a seaborne command and control center. A Tu-22M3 Backfire bomber launched the X-22 cruise missile where it reached Mach 4 and then dove into the command center and obliterated it. There are dozens of videos out now on reputable sites indicating this campaign is ongoing and will continue.
Couple that withpolling data coming out of the Ukraine where 73.2 percent of Ukrainians polled believe the conflict should end along the current line of control, and it just gets worse.
This is very, very bad news for Ukraine. This might not be the beginning of the end, but it is the end of the middle.
The site for reasonably unbiased updates is Military TV. But, viewer beware, this is uncensored warfare.
UPDATE: At the St. Petersburg Economic Forum, which I watched in Russian — the translators often miss subtle points. Putin was talking about how Russia always respected Ukraine’s right to independence, and he gave an enormous amount of context in his answers, but, when it came to discussing Russia’s army moving into new regions in relation to Ukraine’s independence, he did so in the Russian past perfect aspect. Russian verbs have tense. But they also have aspect, meaning is an action fully completed, or temporarily or ongoing, etc. Putins use of the past perfect aspect signifies to me two things: 1) Putin has come around to the necessity of destroying the Zelensky regime, and the will of the Ukrainian people, and; 2) Following on logically, peace will not be negotiated; it willl be dictated, and there is fuck all Ukraine can do now except suffer for the deceitful sins of the West.
UPDATE 2: Medvedev just announced that Ukraine will not be allowed to enter the EU. At one time, Russia was fine with Ukrainian EU membership — so long as it remained militarily neutral, like Austria. In Medvedev owns words (apologies in advance for the terrible translation): “Brussels today is a real enemy of Russia. In such a distorted form, the European Union is no less a threat to us than the North Atlantic Alliance. Therefore, the complacent slogan, “Join anywhere but NATO” must be adjusted. Thus, the so-called Ukraine in the EU is a danger for our country. There are two ways to stop this danger: A) Either the EU itself must realize that it does not need the Kiev quasi-state, in principle, or a certainly preferable; B) There is simply no one to join the EU.”
Medvedev is always the one who lets the trial balloon loose, so it is only a matter of time until Putin makes options A and B into official Russian policy.
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“Winning” is a complex analysis. It’s more than just the battlefield or the battlefield must be expanded to include the economy and much more.
Senator Makarov put his life on the line speaking truth to power, something that is pretty much extinct in Russia these days, at the St Petersburg forum. He made them ALL so uncomfortable. They know he speaks the truth and they know he is now a dead man walking.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1WkmuxS86k
Feral Finster
“Couple that with polling data coming out of the Ukraine where 73.2% of Ukrainians polled beleive the conflict should end along the current line of control and it just gets worse.:”
Has it not been obvious that nobody cares what people in Ukraine think or want. A farmer doesn’t take an opinion poll of his livestock.
Olivier
For those who find hour-long videos excruciating, what did Makarov say?
ZenBean
“Medvedev just announced that the Ukraine will not be allowed to enter the EU.”
I’m not sure that’s smart. Ukraine will never be an EU member anyway. It will spent eternity in EU ascension hell, being forced to enact unpopular legislation it doesn’t get to vote on while being the denied the full financial perks of membership (basically Reichsprotektorat 2.0). Under those conditions, it won’t take long for Ukrainians to elect a neutralist-populist Eurosceptic that will repair ties with Russia. This would occour quite organically and would then have a legitimacy that an anti-Europeanism enforced by Russia would always lack.
Obviously, Ukraine’s western core Banderastan would not take that path. Those people are a lost cause, everything that used to be part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (the “Belt of Butt-hurt”) is.
elkern
IMO, the end of the war will be very good news for the vast majority of the people of Ukraine, despite the psychological ‘pain’ of accepting defeat and partition. In “The West”, there will be much gnashing of teeth – especially perfect TV teeth – but again, peace will mean better lives for most people.
OTOH, I’m concerned that if/when Russia “wins”, it will get sucked into a long, drawn-out occupation in areas where native Ukrainians will be glad to work with CIA/MI6/etc to bleed Russia. It will be better to install a puppet government in a “Rumpkraine”, but that can only be temporary (decades at best?), and it won’t be cheap. Russia would need to expend resources (cheap/free energy, at least), but that’s far better than losing a thousand soldiers each year to CIA ‘partisans’.
(also, thx to ZenBean – well said)
Feral Finster
@elkern
The one thing that all successful insurgencies have in common is a young population. Even more than conventional warfare, guerilla warfare is a young man’s game.
The median age in Ukraine is over 40. And that statistic from before the war started.
Oakchair
@ Feral Finster & elkern
Likewise, from 2022-2024 the population of Ukraine fell by 25%. There is a reason Ukraine needs to press gang people into the military. It’s because those who want to actually fight are mostly gone.
A successful guerrilla war or insurgency also depends on good will among the non-fighters. How will the mothers and sisters feel about an insurgency after their husbands and brothers were forced to die for a lost cause?
Mark Level
Thank you to SPK for a well-researched and thoughtful guest post, after the last one went off the rails due to the sudden appearance of Hofstadter’s “Paranoid Style” in American politics with a bizarre hypothesis about future Asiatic invaders taking over the (broken, corrupt, surrounded by 2 oceans) USA. So if there is a “curse of the guest poster”, it didn’t apply here, where clearly solid research was done and the result is a coherent and useful overview.
There are only 7 posts as of this writing, the first from a paranoid and off-topic hater of “Asiatics” (under which he evidently groups Russians, as the 3rd Reich did), the final post is from Oakchair. The subsequent 6 posts all make cogent points which I’d like to respond to. To the first poster, I will simply say The Fat Lady is Singing, writing’s on the wall, crying in your beer only goes so far, maybe you should keep that to yourself and not impose it on others?
I want to address the demographic issue, and the economic one, for whatever will remain of “Ukraine”, the Border, as the name literally means. (And no, it doesn’t mean the border with Poland.)
Given that Ukraine was universally recognized by all the important authorities up until Feb. 22, 2022 to be the most corrupt (NYT & WaPo, among others) and poorest country in Europe, it will now be left, as a failed US proxy, in even more miserable circumstances.
How many of those who escaped to Poland, Germany, the UK, etc. will return? I think most of us know it will be very few. Unless they are forcibly expelled, most will know that they and their children will have a better future in the (sinking, but still “developed”) areas of Europe than in whatever portion of the former Ukraine remain. The Russians will likely end up with 8 Oblasts, most importantly including Odessa, which will make Ukraine land-locked and even poorer than it was in 2022, when it was the ONLY former Soviet Republic which had not grown one iota viz GDP since 1991.
I appreciate ZenBean’s point that admitting Ukraine to the EU would simply be a drain, and apart from funding pointless wars, the EU bureaucrats don’t seem very keen on helping the economically depressed. Look at how Merkel’s Germany destroyed and looted the economies of Greece, Portugal and Spain earlier in this century. The EU leadership is, like the IMF and World Bank, all about Austerity for the Plebs and free rein (& reign) for the Banker Elites. They won’t want a depopulated Ukraine, it doesn’t pay.
Which leads me to wonder– Will Blackrock hold onto all the farmland it bought up under Zelensky’s generous changing of the laws banning sales to foreigners? What about the properties and businesses Goldman Sachs holds there?
It would be a supreme irony if, after Western Ukraine decided that the Reds were evil for defeating the Reich (which they imagined they somehow belonged to), and foolishly fought as a proxy against a far bigger Neighbor they could never defeat, the widespread poverty under foreign economic occupiers led to some type of nascent Communist insurgency. But history does have its ironies.
They can live like the Irish did in the 19th Century under British rule, with intermittent starvation while their foodstuffs are shipped abroad, or they can accept that they are Slavs and not “Aryans” and perhaps recover some sovereignty after a struggle.
Whatever happens, they made a bad bargain with the Devil, and payment is due. Kind of like the Hmong who sided with the US during the Vietnam war, it is unwise to sell out your immediate neighbors, has bad outcomes only ahead.