Showing posts with label Russia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Russia. Show all posts

Sunday, February 4, 2024

Thursday, December 14, 2023

War

 



Do you remember how experts predicted the useless, rubbish, totally not fit for service Russian army would be ejected from the Ukraine sometime last year? 

Sure you do, those stupid subhuman Slavs were all about to lose Crimea, the Donbass, Luhansk and everything else, hell, a victorious NATO/UKR combined arms battlegroup was gonna take Moscow itself, or at least make it quake and dethrone terminally sick Putin.


what useless peasants

Nice, and it seemed to be working. The idiotic peasant Russkies failed to take Kiev, in fact they retreated, and then they lost Kherson, Izium, and all the rest, just showing how corrupt and useless they were. How idiotic of Vlad Putler to nonsensically wage war against the Garden of our totally free democratic rainbow utopias. What an unhinged autocrat.

Right. 2014 STATE coup/maidan aside, things haven't been going so well for Victoria "Fat Devil Dog" Nuland, far from it. Russia hasn't collapsed, wondrously. On the contrary, they're getting stronger, with over 600k soldiers in the SMO.


good thing WWIII isn't on the table anymore

I know, a small number by historic standards, see BAGRATION, but still. And guess what? Russia manufactures stuff like artillery shells on its own soil, they have factories. No kidding, they really do, and they're churning out tanks and IFVs 24/7.

Point being, we don't. We've off-shored/asset stripped our manufacturing and can't make things like millions of steel artillery shells or ships or planes or guns or anything else needed to fight the industrial scale war which was never supposed to happen. It seems, my dear friends, that Vladimir Putin called the West's bluff.


idiotic subhumans who are going to lose any day now

England, the once great lion whose roar woke the world, has, maybe, 150 aging tanks and perhaps 12 long range artillery pieces. France, La Belle France, has, apparently, 90 serious guns, wow, and pathetic Germany has enough ammo to fight for two days on the battlefield, according to the WSJ.

Dear readers, at the risk of ad naus, I say again with emphasis: The Western Power, in particular Europe, has lied to itself for several decades, kidding itself that it will never, ever, ever have to fight a major war again. Instead, pump all that cash into vote winning migrant assets and Rainbow Baphomet take the hindmost.


huh

Seems to me, and it's just an ill-informed guess, that Christian Russia's  called out the LGBTQ+ unicorn riding godless West on this score. Of course time will tell.

Per the WSJ: 


Europe has “systematically demilitarized itself because it didn’t need to spend the money,” thanks to the lack of an apparent threat and U.S. military dominance around the globe, said Anthony King, a professor of war studies at the University of Warwick. “They have basically gone to sleep.”

 

Oops, 

LSP

Monday, July 31, 2023

The War Was Provoked?

 



The US/UK ultranarrative screams "Mad autocrat Putin invaded freedom loving Ukraine in an insane dictator power-play landgrab. So we have to stop him before he conquers the Rainbow Garden zhirself!" Or someting like that; long story short, unprovoked aggression. 

Jeffrey Sachs disagrees:


George Orwell wrote in 1984 that "Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past." Governments work relentlessly to distort public perceptions of the past. Regarding the Ukraine War, the Biden administration has repeatedly and falsely claimed that the Ukraine War started with an unprovoked attack by Russia on Ukraine on February 24, 2022. In fact, the war was provoked by the U.S. in ways that leading U.S. diplomats anticipated for decades in the lead-up to the war, meaning that the war could have been avoided and should now be stopped through negotiations.

Recognizing that the war was provoked helps us to understand how to stop it. It doesn’t justify Russia’s invasion. A far better approach for Russia might have been to step up diplomacy with Europe and with the non-Western world to explain and oppose U.S. militarism and unilateralism. In fact, the relentless U.S. push to expand NATO is widely opposed throughout the world, so Russian diplomacy rather than war would likely have been effective.

The Biden team uses the word “unprovoked” incessantly, most recently in Biden’s major speech on the first-year anniversary of the war, in a recent NATO statement, and in the most recent G7 statement. Mainstream media friendly to Biden simply parrot the White House. The New York Times is the lead culprit, describing the invasion as “unprovoked” no fewer than 26 times, in five editorials, 14 opinion columns by NYT writers, and seven guest op-eds!

There were in fact two main U.S. provocations. The first was the U.S. intention to expand NATO to Ukraine and Georgia in order to surround Russia in the Black Sea region by NATO countries (Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey, and Georgia, in counterclockwise order). The second was the U.S. role in installing a Russophobic regime in Ukraine by the violent overthrow of Ukraine’s pro-Russian President, Viktor Yanukovych, in February 2014. The shooting war in Ukraine began with Yanukovych’s overthrow nine years ago, not in February 2022 as the U.S. government, NATO, and the G7 leaders would have us believe.

The key to peace in Ukraine is through negotiations based on Ukraine’s neutrality and NATO non-enlargement.

Biden and his foreign policy team refuse to discuss these roots of the war. To recognize them would undermine the administration in three ways. First, it would expose the fact that the war could have been avoided, or stopped early, sparing Ukraine its current devastation and the U.S. more than $100 billion in outlays to date. Second, it would expose President Biden’s personal role in the war as a participant in the overthrow of Yanukovych, and before that as a staunch backer of the military-industrial complex and very early advocate of NATO enlargement. Third, it would push Biden to the negotiating table, undermining the administration’s continued push for NATO expansion.

The archives show irrefutably that the U.S. and German governments repeatedly promised to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not move “one inch eastward” when the Soviet Union disbanded the Warsaw Pact military alliance. Nonetheless, U.S. planning for NATO expansion began early in the 1990s, well before Vladimir Putin was Russia’s president. In 1997, national security expert Zbigniew Brzezinski spelled out the NATO expansion timeline with remarkable precision.

U.S. diplomats and Ukraine’s own leaders knew well that NATO enlargement could lead to war. The great US scholar-statesman George Kennan called NATO enlargement a “fateful error,” writing in the New York Times that, “Such a decision may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.”

President Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Defense William Perry considered resigning in protest against NATO enlargement. In reminiscing about this crucial moment in the mid-1990s, Perry said the following in 2016: “Our first action that really set us off in a bad direction was when NATO started to expand, bringing in eastern European nations, some of them bordering Russia. At that time, we were working closely with Russia and they were beginning to get used to the idea that NATO could be a friend rather than an enemy ... but they were very uncomfortable about having NATO right up on their border and they made a strong appeal for us not to go ahead with that.”

In 2008, then U.S. Ambassador to Russia, and now CIA Director, William Burns, sent a cable to Washington warning at length of grave risks of NATO enlargement: “Ukraine and Georgia's NATO aspirations not only touch a raw nerve in Russia, they engender serious concerns about the consequences for stability in the region. Not only does Russia perceive encirclement, and efforts to undermine Russia's influence in the region, but it also fears unpredictable and uncontrolled consequences which would seriously affect Russian security interests. Experts tell us that Russia is particularly worried that the strong divisions in Ukraine over NATO membership, with much of the ethnic-Russian community against membership, could lead to a major split, involving violence or at worst, civil war. In that eventuality, Russia would have to decide whether to intervene; a decision Russia does not want to have to face.”

Ukraine’s leaders knew clearly that pressing for NATO enlargement to Ukraine would mean war. Former Zelensky advisor Oleksiy Arestovych declared in a 2019 interview “that our price for joining NATO is a big war with Russia.”

During 2010-2013, Yanukovych pushed neutrality, in line with Ukrainian public opinion. The U.S. worked covertly to overthrow Yanukovych, as captured vividly in the tape of then U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt planning the post-Yanukovych government weeks before the violent overthrow of Yanukovych. Nuland makes clear on the call that she was coordinating closely with then Vice President Biden and his national security advisor Jake Sullivan, the same Biden-Nuland-Sullivan team now at the center of U.S. policy vis-à-vis Ukraine.

After Yanukovych’s overthrow, the war broke out in the Donbas, while Russia claimed Crimea. The new Ukrainian government appealed for NATO membership, and the U.S. armed and helped restructure the Ukrainian army to make it interoperable with NATO. In 2021, NATO and the Biden Administration strongly recommitted to Ukraine’s future in NATO.

In the immediate lead-up to Russia’s invasion, NATO enlargement was center stage. Putin’s draft US-Russia Treaty (December 17, 2021) called for a halt to NATO enlargement. Russia’s leaders put NATO enlargement as the cause of war in Russia’s National Security Council meeting on February 21, 2022. In his address to the nation that day, Putin declared NATO enlargement to be a central reason for the invasion.

Historian Geoffrey Roberts recently wrote: “Could war have been prevented by a Russian-Western deal that halted NATO expansion and neutralised Ukraine in return for solid guarantees of Ukrainian independence and sovereignty? Quite possibly.” In March 2022, Russia and Ukraine reported progress towards a quick negotiated end to the war based on Ukraine’s neutrality. According to Naftali Bennett, former Prime Minister of Israel, who was a mediator, an agreement was close to being reached before the U.S., U.K., and France blocked it.

While the Biden administration declares Russia’s invasion to be unprovoked, Russia pursued diplomatic options in 2021 to avoid war, while Biden rejected diplomacy, insisting that Russia had no say whatsoever on the question of NATO enlargement. And Russia pushed diplomacy in March 2022, while the Biden team again blocked a diplomatic end to the war.

By recognizing that the question of NATO enlargement is at the center of this war, we understand why U.S. weaponry will not end this war. Russia will escalate as necessary to prevent NATO enlargement to Ukraine. The key to peace in Ukraine is through negotiations based on Ukraine’s neutrality and NATO non-enlargement. The Biden administration’s insistence on NATO enlargement to Ukraine has made Ukraine a victim of misconceived and unachievable U.S. military aspirations. It’s time for the provocations to stop, and for negotiations to restore peace to Ukraine.


RFK Jr. comments on social media, "Brilliant synopsis of the historical context for the Ukraine War. Can anyone read this and still maintain, as the Biden administration does incessantly, that the invasion was 'unprovoked”?

I'm with RFK on this but feel free to disagree.

Pax et Bonum,

LSP

Wednesday, July 26, 2023

Let's Have it Back

 



Hagia Sophia, Holy Wisdom, towers over Constantinople today, perhaps the most magnificent of Roman buildings, Imperial power set in stone under the sovereignty of Christ. Today this Cathedral overlooking the Bosphorus is a mosque.

Western Christendom, this is on you. You could have rallied to our eastern brothers and beat back the Moslem, barbarian horde. But no, First Crusade outstanding, you took a different path. The result is before us, Islam controls the Bosphorus under NATO aegis and GloboHomo apostasy grips the West.




Let's have that back, Hagia Sophia, Ἁγία Σοφία, and tell me, which Christian army's going to take it? The British, French, Germans, US and GloboHomo? Or some other force. Stand against that, when it comes and it will, at your peril.

Russia, you'll have noticed, has banned trans surgery.

 Άγιος,

LSP

Tuesday, June 27, 2023

Kino



Have you watched the video of the young UKR guys in the minefield? So horrible and let's pour scorn on the rich beyond imagining monsters accelerating this wickedness. Yes, GloboTrans Elite, I'm looking at you.




And you, all you sick parents that'd demonically trans your kids into blasphemous parodies of the male and female sex. That caveat in mind, GloboTrans was betting on a fast war, a "we'll be home by Rainbow Baalzebub" war and it didn't happen. 




Oops, Russia still has manufacturing capacity and we don't, coz we sent it all to China, which is so totally not a second or third front. Long story short, what utter blood-bathed psychos, can we vote them out? And with that let's see our armored corps thunder to DC.

Nooses down the Mall and see you at the Army & Navy.

Best,

LSP

Thursday, March 16, 2023

Wolf Truce

 



Hundreds of wolves, not a few dozen. You may not know that ferocious wolf packs savaged German and Russian soldiers in the Great War. Remarkably, both sides reportedly fashioned a truce to fight the wolves.



Here in Texas, wolves have been shot out leaving coyotes without a natural predator. You can hear them howl, ascendant.

Cave Canem,

LSP

Friday, January 20, 2023

Are We The Good Guys?

 


Sorry, persynns, but serious question. Can you pray in our public schools?  No. Do we live under a just and fair rule of law? Try not to smirk and puke at the same time. Do we have a free press or a bought and sold simulacrum of the same? Chunder. Are we a Christian nation, under God, or under Baphomet?

I'd argue and so would the monkey, who's a vicious beast, that we're the latter. Meanwhile, Russia not only flogs and imprisons P. Riot but also outlaws so-called Pride agitprop. They even have a flat tax of 13%, last time I checked, and they're building 1000s of churches.




So who's more Red, the US or Russia. That in mind, Just think on our inevitable victory parade in Red Square, all those rainbow flags flying, to say nothing of the children they've abused. Satan's victory.

I know you disagree, all you Cold Warriors, but I say good call Russia for taking on Globohomo Inc., I hope they win and ban Pedo-Pride parades everywhere.  As it goes, the rainbow West's emptying its munitions stockpile because never have to fight another conventional war ever, ever. Take note, UKLF and so-called "Conservatives."




That in mind, when UKR forces crack and fold, what then? We have billions invested, would we just walk away, like Afghanistan? Or would we quadruple down in favor of ROI? R standing for rainbow, obviously.

Readers, don't forget, it's a vicious beast,

LSP

Wednesday, June 1, 2022

The Unicorn Brigade

 



Oleksandr Zhuhan and Antonina Romanova were worried, would they be allowed back onto the front line of the Ukrainian Ost Front after a sex change and gay marriage? "I was really worried," said Antonina, formerly Anthoney, "But everyone was really kind, they recognize our pronouns."

Zhuhan, who identifies as a Cossack male and Antonina, who identifies as a Rimsky Korsakof ballerina have joined the Ukrainian Unicorn Legion, the world's first LGBTQ+1 fighting unit. "You just can't make this sh*t up," said Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.




The US wasn't far to follow, with the US Marine Corps broadcasting its support of the gay trans movement in the form of a faggy rainbow bullet recruitment poster. "The gayer we get the more lethal we become," said Sergeant First Class Glitter Fairy to Military Times.

 



But Russians weren't convinced, "I am not sure," said Hero Commander of Russia Alexandr Shoigu, "if to die laughing. Maybe it is globohomo joke."

Cheers,

LSP

Sunday, May 22, 2022

Sunday Sermon

 



Sometimes a picture's worth a thousand words or more. Haunting, one day before the Azovstal surrender by Orest. And the sermon? There's several but the immediate practical message, the application, is don't be a Nazi and hole up in a bunker as Russian guns thunder overhead. It's just not a good plan.

That's it, the sermon.

Over,

LSP

Thursday, May 19, 2022

ORCS!

 



Behold the different faces of the Orc Horde.




The vicious fangs of the woodland O Orc.




And the ferocious tusks of the V.




Some orcs fight on land as well as sea.




And yes, there's clearly hierarchy in the horde.

As of today over 1,700 mithril elves have surrendered to the orc horde been evacuated from the caverns of Asovstal to the Goblin Kingdom of Donetsk. 

Thanks, @dazbastadraw for the orc art. 

With apologies to Tolkein,

LSP

Friday, May 6, 2022

Gotterdamerung

 



On May 1, 1945, victorious Russian troops hoisted the Red Flag from the Reichstag, the heart of the Third Reich. The day after, Supreme Warlord Adolf Hitler shot himself in a death pact with Eva Braun. Germany surrendered unconditionally on May 5.




Soviet estimates for the battle of Berlin are 81,116 killed/missing and 280,251 wounded, with German casualties as high as 458,080 killed and 479,298 captured. Civilian losses may have been as much as 125,000. These figures are surely high for the German side, but an undoubtedly catastrophic loss of life occurred at the close of this titanic conflict.

Not that anyone cares, but I respect the German Army and soldier of the 1940s, the Deutsche Heere, though their cause was bad. I respect the Russian soldiers too, who took the grisly fight to conclusion.Very brave men, to put it mildly.




May 9 is fast upon us and with it the Russian Victory Parade. Will RF forces achieve significant victory over the weekend? Unlikely. But readers, let's not forget this "rule." It goes like this, do not go to war against Russia. It ends badly, see Napoleon and Der Fuhrer.

Cheers,

LSP


Tuesday, May 3, 2022

The War Dialogues



I know, this is very long for mindblog space, but check out a bizarrely rational interview/analysis of the war so far. The protagonists are Clint Ehrlich and Russians With Attitude (RWA), via IM-1776: 


Clint Ehrlich: When Russia invaded, I notoriously predicted a “Sputnik moment”. I was confident that Russia’s modernized military would win a Gulf War-style victory against Ukraine. I’ve caught a lot of deserved flak for that, but my belief was mirrored by the U.S. intelligence community, which projected that Kiev could fall within the first 72 hours of a Russian invasion, as the Ukrainian military surrendered en masse. Whether the Kremlin itself also planned for a swift victory in Ukraine is of more than academic interest. It may have a significant effect on the course of the war, since if Russia did not anticipate prolonged combat, it may have underestimated the strategic consequences of Western sanctions.

Do you believe that the Kremlin itself was caught off guard by the tenacity of Ukrainian resistance? Or was that an error more characteristic of Western analysts like myself, who arguably overlooked that military courage against invaders is a shared trait among the Ukrainian and Russian people? 

RWA: The idea that Ukraine would fall within a week was based on two misconceptions. The first one is mistaking the Armed Forces of Ukraine of 2022 for those of 2014. In 2014, Ukrainian forces in Crimea either changed sides or laid down their arms with no resistance, and even before the (extremely limited) Russian intervention the Donbass militias, who at that point were made up mostly of middle-aged veterans and volunteers, managed to rout vastly superior Ukrainian army units. The Ukrainian government admitted that at that point they had no more than ~5000 combat-ready soldiers in the standing army. The AFU of 2022, however, are a huge force (the largest in Europe, aside from Russia) in a militarized society, juiced up on eight years of NATO supplies and training, and, of course, their own efforts. The regular army is supported by a vast network of paramilitary structures in every city in the east of the country, including the formal integration of highly motivated ideological formations made up of political extremists. The reasons why people would assume that the Ukrainian army hasn’t changed are either ignorance or general slavophobia, assuming they can’t build a formidable army. A lot of people in the West believed this, and, to a smaller degree, in Russia, too. 

The second reason why so many people seemed to expect a swift Russian victory is that they judged the possible Russian performance based on the experiences of the last Western-led wars. I still maintain that if Russia had unleashed a hellish Shock & Awe campaign in Ukraine, the AFU would have disintegrated on impact, which is also exactly what it looked like in the first 12 hours of the war. Later we learned that the Armed Forces of Russia executed fewer missile and airstrikes in a month than the US did in a few days in Iraq. In living memory, no Western nation has fought a war “on its own soil”, or at least in a location where the lives of the local population mattered to them. They do not understand why Russia wouldn’t just flatten every city in Eastern Ukraine. The official (and unofficial) Russian position is that the Russian-Ukrainian population of these territories is held hostage by an irrational nationalist regime in Kiev. Of course, within such a paradigm it doesn’t make much sense to reduce population centers to rubble. Still, the Ukrainian Navy ceased to exist as a strategic force on day 1 of the war and most of the Ukrainian air force capabilities were also, if not destroyed, then severely limited. 

I do, however, believe that there were also mistakes in the Russian General Staff regarding the expectation of mass surrenders. Either these were based on the outdated Crimean experience, or on bad intelligence. I tend to think it was the latter, as Russian intelligence seems to have suffered several huge failures, certainly more than the military. In Russian culture, Ukrainians, or Malorussians, are traditionally viewed as extremely stubborn. This is a known quantity, so to speak. You know, back in 2015 there was a joke about the war: Donbass Militiaman Ivan shouts at Ukrainian soldier Taras, “Give up, you’re surrounded!”, and Taras answers “Russians don’t surrender!”. Fighting Slavs is hard. 

Clint Ehrlich: I had argued pre-invasion that the most likely scenario was a limited Russian offensive to seize the Donbas and create a land bridge to Crimea. That now seems to be Russia’s primary goal, but in the early days of the war it appeared that the Russian military was attempting to surround Kiev. There are now commentators, such as Scott Ritter and Niccolò Soldo, who insist that the forces deployed around Kiev were simply a feint to tie down the Ukrainian military while Russian and DNR/LNR forces made progress in the East. They herald this as a brilliant example of “maneuver warfare.” 

I’m skeptical of this theory for several reasons. First, the extreme aggressiveness of the Russian airborne assault on Antonov Airport in Gostomel – which cost the lives of so many elite VDV troops – seems inconsistent with a feint. Second, if the goal was simply to prevent Ukraine from reinforcing its forces in the East, Russia could simply have kept its battalion tactical groups positioned in Belarus, where they posed an obvious danger to Kiev. Third, the quantity of Russian armored vehicles that we saw destroyed around Kiev suggests that the combat effectiveness of the BTGs was significantly degraded, which is more consistent with a stalled advance than a planned feint. 

However, I admit that there are counter-arguments. Russia never initiated airstrikes or artillery bombardment around Kiev on the scale that I would expect to support a serious advance. And when President Putin announced the so-called “special military operation,” he framed it as being focused on the Donbas. Given this evidence, do you believe that the operation is going according to plan? Or do you believe that the Kremlin pivoted after a failed attempt to seize Ukraine’s capital? 

RWA: Well, several plans can exist at the same time. From what I understand, the Russian General Staff did expect a swift Ukrainian surrender as “Plan A”. That doesn’t mean that Plans B, C, D and E were made up ad hoc or given a lower priority. One possible outcome the Kremlin probably expected was a speedy capitulation & the installation of a moderately pro-Russian regime in Kiev, basically a return to the status quo antebellum of 2010-2013. I have heard from reliable sources that the plans were adjusted on day 2 or 3 of the war when it became obvious that this would not happen. 

I try not to rely too much on the grapevine for my analysis, and I don’t like implying that I have some secret sources of information in high places (I don’t, but I do know people who know people who hear things), but as far as I can tell the Russian General Staff was prepared for three or four scenarios, that included Kiev backing down (implying a timeline of a few days), the AFU disintegrating (implying a timeline of around six weeks) & the war going on as a real war (implying a timeline of roughly six months of active large-scale hostilities). Currently, the third scenario seems to be implemented. 

There is no contradiction between marching on Kiev to accept Zelensky’s surrender after two days & marching on Kiev to tie down up to 100,000 Ukrainian soldiers. Regarding the assault on Gostomel, the official casualties among the VDV vanguard are reported as 17 KIA, which was confirmed by war reporters on the ground & also private sources. Russian losses around Kiev in the first week were substantial & closer to parity than on other fronts but not catastrophic. The largest attrition was suffered around Kharkov, not Kiev.

I think it is too early to judge the Kiev operation, as its worth will be determined by the outcome of the Battle for Donbass. It is, however, noteworthy that we haven’t heard much from the AFU’s Operational Command “North” since the Russian withdrawal. I have seen no evidence of the “victorious” Ukrainian troops around Kiev being able to reinforce other parts the East or even staging some sort of counter-offensive. They don’t seem to be in the condition to do much of anything. 

Clint Ehrlich: Western analysts have been very critical of the performance of both the FSB and the Russian General Staff in this conflict. It has been argued that Russia’s investment in bleeding-edge strategic weapons, such as hypersonic missiles and the Poseidon intercontinental nuclear torpedo, has diverted both resources and attention from the more mundane capabilities needed to conduct effective combined-arms operations. 

Some of these claims relate to the maintenance standards for Russian equipment; a viral twitter thread about the alleged deficiencies of Russian tires comes to mind. Others involve allegations of poor logistics. It does seem that, in the initial days of the operation, Russian mechanized troops outraced their supply lines and left themselves vulnerable to being cut off and counter-attacked. But in the current operations in the Donbas, this does not appear to be a problem. The Russians are advancing more methodically, and this appears to be yielding better results. 

On the whole, how much credence do you give to these Western criticisms? What do you see as the worst strategic mistakes that Russia has made, and how effectively do you believe the Russian military is adapting to those errors?

RWA: The criticism of the FSB seems justified so far. There is this persistent myth about Russian intelligence being extraordinarily powerful (manipulating elections in the US, causing Brexit, etc), but the reality looks different. There seem to have been leaks to the Ukrainian side, although this could also have come directly from Western intelligence agencies. In any case, the FSB & SBU were, to a large extent, a single structure until late 2013, and the FSB seems to have done way less to “purge” its ranks of possible moles than the Ukrainians. I’ve also heard about a failed attempt to bribe the Kharkov administration into giving up the city, thwarted by SBU or possibly direct US intervention and leading to the civilian leadership being replaced by Azov-aligned radicals (the “National Corps” party). 

Regarding the General Staff, my understanding is that operational command in the initial phase of the conflict was held by officers with combat experience in Syria — which makes sense, as that is the “freshest” combat experience available to the Armed Forces of Russia, but it also led to several costly mistakes that were later corrected, e.g. the large military convoys that were appropriate in a desert area with a technologically inferior enemy, but vastly inappropriate in urban or forest areas with an enemy who has a virtually endless supply of ATGMs. Russian vanguard troops outpacing supply lines in the first days is also an established fact and this led to a majority of the casualties in the earliest phase of the war. This, too, was corrected, and doesn’t seem to be a problem anymore. 

During the current phase of the war, the Russian military can rely on its established doctrine — artillery supremacy. There aren’t as many civilians on the Donbass contact line as there are in Kharkov or Mariupol, which further “unchains” the Russian forces and lets them use CAS, cruise missiles & MLRS in a more unrestricted way than on other fronts. 

Regarding logistics & vehicle losses, Western analysts have made some ridiculous assessments. It is definitely not the strongest aspect of the Russian military, but I’ve seen no evidence of the catastrophic failures purported by the “BrOSINT” class. The loss of BTRs without loss of life is not really a problem. There are tens of thousands of those things in Russia. We’ve described the war as a “Late Soviet Tech Genocide” before. The attrition is extreme in material terms, but it doesn’t matter, as the supplies are basically infinite. The Armed Forces of Russia also seem to be holding back newer & better vehicles. E.g. I’ve only seen the T-90 two or three times on photos so far and the modernized BMP-1AM “Basurmanin” only once. 

Another strategic mistake I’d like to point out is the insufficient integration of the Donbass People’s Militias into the Russian military structure. I don’t know if this is out of some misplaced respect for the Republics or another reason, but their military forces should have been completely integrated into the logistics and command structure of the Armed Forces of Russia. While the latter seems to work out on the operational level (both strategic and tactical), the former does not, which leads to supply problems and other challenges that could have been easily avoided. 

Clint Ehrlich: It’s interesting that you mention the gulf between perception and reality when it comes to Russia’s intelligence capabilities. To some extent, I think this is a relic of the Cold War, when the KGB did seem to consistently get the better of the CIA when it came to recruiting and identifying moles, and when it developed a legendary reputation for listening devices, such as the passive-cavity resonator embedded in the Great Seal of the United States that was gifted to U.S. ambassador W. Averell Harriman. 

After the Cold War, this mythos of superhuman competence persisted with the powers attributed to the FSB, SVR, and GRU. Obviously, the height of this was the hysteria in the wake of the 2016 election. I never gave credence to the claims that Russia had either interfered in the election tabulation or that it had significantly shaped public discourse in the United States. However, I did have what I would describe as a healthy respect for Russia’s information-warfare capabilities, and its willingness to invest significant resources in messaging both at home and abroad. 

That is perhaps the single area where I have been most surprised by Russia’s underperformance during the war in Ukraine – that is, it seems that the most decisive victories for Ukraine have been in the area of molding international perception. Looking at not just the traditional Western media landscape but also the social-media commons of e.g. Twitter and Facebook, one is tempted to conclude that “Russians can’t meme.” 

It sounds funny, but the Ukrainian messaging effort (amplified, of course, by Western intelligence) has had real consequences for Russia, in terms of both the severity of the economic sanctions that foreign powers have been persuaded to impose, as well as the quantity of military aid that they have offered. Have you been surprised by the results of the information-warfare battle that we see playing out? How much of a role do you believe it has actually had in the progression of the conflict? 

RWA: The misconception that modern Russia is somehow good at information warfare, propaganda & ideology-building is a recurring theme on our podcast. I’ll grant that only very few people on this planet truly know the extent of the shadow war going on between the intelligence agencies, so any criticism of an intelligence agency’s capabilities shouldn’t be viewed as something definitive.

However, it really looks like the people tasked with courting Ukrainian elites on behalf of Russia have failed miserably, or, more likely, didn’t do their job at all and just pocketed the money. This first became apparent (in my opinion) in 2014 when it turned out that the “Create pro-Russian movements in Ukraine” department at whatever government agency was responsible for that didn’t do anything and all the actual pro-Russian organizations were grassroots. It looks like the situation hasn’t improved at all. The “aesthetics” of the Crimean operation were pretty good — “polite people”, cats, all that stuff. But since then not much happened. 

I have always maintained that the “information war” sphere in Russia is occupied by people who are incompetent, stupid and useless. In times of war, PR/propaganda and intelligence work merge into one big chaotic maelstrom of lies and information management. The Kremlin’s “media people” are already pretty bad in times of peace, but in the current situation it has become clear that they are terrifyingly unsuited for their jobs. I saw this coming, to be honest. What I didn’t see coming is how strong the grassroots replacement for the “official” people would be. 

Much of this will become public knowledge only after the war (or never), but it’s really crazy what people are achieving with zero resources running on pure enthusiasm. Crowdsourced Russian OSINT is in direct communication with the Armed Forces, providing public geolocation and other services. There are several Telegram bots where pro-Russian locals (or simply locals who don’t like being used as human shields) can send coordinates and photos of Ukrainian targets like strongpoints, ambushes, hidden repair workshops, artillery positions, etc. The Novorossiya underground also actively supports the Russian war effort with intel. There are many examples like this of “media” warping into something physical, something kinetic. A few well-placed photoshopped images actually managed to cause real-life panic several times. The “red mark” thing, a rumor among Ukrainians that “traitors” and “saboteurs” were marking buildings to be bombed with tags or lasers, distracted Ukrainian authorities and security forces for a whole month — and it was started by a Donbass activist. 

Thus, the failures of the government are being compensated by the people — at least a little bit, directly on the frontlines. When it comes to international “information warfare”, there is quite literally nothing. Which is why it’s so funny when people accuse us of being paid propagandists or something like that. If the Russian government had the foresight & capacity to put intelligent young people in charge of its intelligence & information policies, everything would look very different and, who knows, maybe this war could have been avoided in the first place. 

I don’t know how much impact the Ukrainian social media success really has on the military situation. I honestly don’t believe that it’s a lot. People in the West are generally more gullible when it comes to media than Russians; they largely believe whatever they’re told. And it’s not like public opinion in European countries or the US has any direct impact on the war, either. We’re probably closer to open war between NATO and Russia than at the height of the Cold War, and no one was asked. Just look at the NFZ PsyOp with something like 3/4 of polled Americans saying that they support the creation of a No-Fly Zone while being completely unaware that this would mean actively shooting down Russian jets. Likewise, the weapons shipments are just decisionist war policy and not the result of some democratic process. 

In any case, going off the deep end with regards to propaganda may just turn out to be a mistake for Kiev. You already have Presidential advisors commenting on that are very clearly authentic and filmed by Ukrainian soldiers on Ukrainian positions complaining that they aren’t being given the means to more effectively fight Russians, claiming that these are actually POWs who are being forced to tell lies about their officers abandoning them. But these soldiers have families and friends. The 3000-4000 Ukrainian POWs who don’t exist according to Kiev also have families and friends. So do the thousands upon thousands of Ukrainian soldiers who were KIA. There are protests at recruitment centers in Western Ukraine, people’s phones are being searched and confiscated if they read the “wrong” Telegram channels in Nikolayev. It’s extremely hard to keep up this disinfo regime. Kiev had remarkable success in unifying the information stream and e.g. keeping information about damage from missile strikes to a minimum. But the worse things get, the harder this will be. And when the cracks start to show, all the Western PR agencies in the world won’t be able to reconcile the lie and the reality on the ground. 

What’s actually the most worrying thing here is Western leadership ostensibly “getting high on their own supply”. If intelligence agencies, whom I assume to have a realistic picture, withhold information from “policymakers” and the latter as well as “thought leaders” base their reasoning on laughably wrong propaganda takes written up by the BrOSINT crowd – stupid things can happen. But they may also not, because, it kind of doesn’t matter anyway. When was the last time you heard someone mention Kiev lying about Ukrainian pilots flying combat missions from Polish territory in NATO jets? 

Clint Ehrlich: From a practical perspective, the most important question is how the war in Ukraine ends. What do you see as the most likely scenario for ultimately ending hostilities? What would the minimum politically acceptable “victory” be for President Putin?

I have warned that if Ukraine persists in attempting cross-border strikes into Russia, the political calculus within the Kremlin in favor of full-scale national mobilization could shift, particularly if those attacks kill a large number of Russian civilians. If that were to happen, the manpower advantage that Ukraine enjoys on the ground would rapidly be eroded by the introduction of large numbers of Russian conscripts, who would no longer be legally prohibited from taking part in hostilities. 

Do you find it plausible that President Putin would be willing to take this step? If so, would you expect Russia’s ambitions to remain limited to securing the Donbas, or do you believe that a fully mobilized Russia might seek to march on Kiev and achieve complete regime change in Ukraine? 

RWA: Why would Russia have to mass mobilize conscripts? Only around 1/5 to 1/4 of Russia’s active duty personnel is currently in Ukraine, a special cadre of combat-ready reservists has been created earlier (“БАРС” – “Combat Army Reserve of the Country”) and the reserves number two million in total. The total manpower pool of the National Guard + Active Duty + Reserves exceeds 3,5 million. It is extremely hard to imagine a situation in which that wouldn’t be enough, so “total national mobilization” is out of the question. Ukraine, currently on the third wave of mobilization, is de facto fighting two peacetime military districts. The manpower question is purely political, not a question of available resources. As to how acceptable it would be domestically to send more troops into Ukraine – I think the Kremlin is being extremely cautious about it and might be walking into a backlash of public opinion being vastly more hawkish than Moscow leadership itself. In any case, a mobilization is certainly possible, but would most likely only apply to reservists outside of some doomsday scenario. 

As to how the war might end, that is a very good question. I believe what the Kremlin would have liked best is the “neutral, friendly, independent, antifascist Ukraine” dreamed up by Russian pundits back in 2013 during the Euromaidan protests. Putting some kind of Yanukovych or Medvedchuk type person on the Bankovaya would require a minimal amount of real investment in terms of political, social and economic capital, and would also solve exactly zero of the long-term strategic problems. 

Alas, that train has left the station. By now, anything short of securing Donbass + historical Novorossiya will be unambiguously seen as a defeat by the Russian public. “Securing” can mean anything here, either the creation of a unitary buffer state, new People’s Republics or full annexation. In strategic terms, that would also be more intelligent than trying to annex anything beyond it. Leaving a rump state with no access to the Azov & Black Seas, with no infrastructure or industry and full of political radicals with an astonishingly large supply of weapons is, on the one hand, a permanent danger for Russia and doesn’t solve the “NATO weapons on our borders” problem, but on the other hand it creates a gigantic black hole for the West to pour hundreds of billions of dollars into without accomplishing anything. 

I don’t know what is planned, but it’s becoming obvious that Kherson oblast and the parts of Zaporozhye oblast under Russian control are slowly being integrated into the Russian socio-economic sphere, so I believe some form of annexation or at least separation from the hypothetical rump state is likely. It kind of depends on what happens in Western Ukraine/Galicia. There are persistent rumors about Poland being interested in establishing control over some of its “historical territories”, and any kind of situation like this could lead to a sudden avalanche of forced territorial concessions.

Regarding retribution against “symbolic” actions like strikes on Russian territory, I believe that the General Staff isn’t guided by such principles. They are gradually raising the intensity of missile strikes and grinding down the AFU – getting distracted by stuff that makes patriotic bloggers mad would be profoundly stupid. This is probably correct, but it reflects badly on the public mood. On the other hand, a big part of the Russian government apparatus still doesn’t seem to accept the reality of being at war with NATO, and the Ukrainian attacks in Kursk & Belgorod are forcing them to. 


You'll note: However, it really looks like the people tasked with courting Ukrainian elites on behalf of Russia have failed miserably, or, more likely, didn’t do their job at all and just pocketed the money. And again: I have always maintained that the “information war” sphere in Russia is occupied by people who are incompetent, stupid and useless.

Good heavens, Gogol and Dostoevsky live!

LSP

Sunday, May 1, 2022

Chevalier, Mult Estes Guariz

 


May Day, workers of the world unite. And with that can you hear the voices of Charles Martel, Raymond, Godfrey, Tancred, and Robert? We're taught, today, to scorn the first Crusade, how evil of them to fight for the Cross and the Faith. The same people, who by the way hate Christianity, urge us to fight for Democracy.

Point being, you fight for what you most believe in and what is that; friends, family, unit? Yes indeed, but beyond that what? What idea or cause would you go to war for. And this is an issue, not least for the West which has ditched objective value and truth for opinion, read power.

So here we are, about to give Ukraine $33 BILLION to defeat the Russian Orcs in the name of the freedom to have trans bathrooms. Ahem, get even richer than we already are.

You'll be amazed to know that Russia's military budget is some $20 billion.

Cheers,

LSP

Saturday, April 30, 2022

Fighter Jets

 



Free Constantinople 




Slay the Dragon




There was war in heaven




Quis ut Deus?


Imagine, if you can, angelic force, pure intellect beyond our space and time. Word to the wise, don't be on the wrong side of that implacable determination.

God Bless,

LSP 

Sunday, April 10, 2022

Warning Graphic

 


Good question, RWA. In the meanwhile, this thing slugs itself out with ferocious intensity and Europe would like to fuel the fight in terms of arming the Ukraine. But here's the thing, Europe doesn't have any more guns to give. They have barely enough ammo to supply their own armies as it is, much less the degenerate Zelensky proxy.




So how will it all pan out? Who knows, but I'll go out on a limb and call maybe you shouldn't have gambled on never ever having to fight a war again. Yes, UK, I'm looking at you and while we're at it, maybe it's a good idea for an island to actually have a navy. Just a thought.

Kursk,

LSP

Tuesday, March 29, 2022

A Little Z

 



Germany, that bastion of free thought and liberty has banned the letter Z from its lexicon because Putin hate speech. No more Z for Germans, the wicked letter's like the swastikas carved into the chests of people in the basements of Mariupol.




No, none of that. But hold on, when do we stop, when the whole of the alphabet's banned? Do the math. No such thing as men and women, no such thing as numbers, no such thing as truth or humans themselves, only the will to power.

We stand against this satanic evil,

LSP

Monday, March 14, 2022

Yet More War

 


Religious leaders around the world, like Justsin Welby, Pope Francis and Foley improbably named Beach have condemned Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Quite right too, we hate war, but consider. Imagine you were Head of State, a veritable Vladimir Putin.

Imagine, and then consider your borders. Would you put up with, if you had a choice, a hostile power financing and controlling bioweapons labs in a neighboring state and threatening to join a military alliance against you? 



It sounds weird and preposterous, but that's exactly what we've been doing. Gay Pride Ukraine and big woke Trannie Corp's gonna take down monster Putin and turn Russia into a rainbow utopia.

A utopia in which you will WEF own nothing and be happy because your bathrooms are multisexual. That would be the West and the Zelensky Ukraine we're all cheering for. The Moscow Patriarchate says no, and so do Russia's MLRS which are pounding Karkov tonight with furious abandon.




Maybe the dividing line is simple if not easy. Who do we support, the apostate Rainbow West or its opposite?

Your Call,

LSP