quote:

Originally posted by Anush:
These sites help some.

https://www.youtube.com/c/UATVEnglish

https://www.youtube.com/c/FeyginLive (not in English)

https://www.themoscowtimes.com/news

https://www.themoscowtimes.com/ukraine-war

https://www.cnn.com/europe/liv...-06-07-22/index.html

Even better:

https://www.armyrecognition.co..._to_ukraine.amp.html

It's only current to 19 May and includes announcements and industry offers which haven't (yet) come true like the German Leopard 1 and Marder AFVs or the British AS90 SPHs, but gives you a very good base.

And yeah, a lot of it is clearing out old depot stocks; just look at the over 30-year-old former East German MANPADS which were deadlined as unsafe to fire years ago. Even with modern missiles like Stinger and NLAW, obviously you give away those coming up to expiry first in the expectation that they'll be used immediately, since you'd otherwise have to dispose of them at cost. Then again, much of the artillery like M777, HIMARS/MLRS, Caesar and PzH 2000 is current use, and in some cases top notch.

Ukraine – The Situation (June 11)

War’s focus on Ukrainians holed up at Azot fertilizer plant while Kiev’s human rights commissioner removed for faking rape reports

https://asiatimes.com/2022/06/...e-situation-june-11/

Asia Times is initiating a near-daily Ukraine war situation report based on multiple military and think tank sources. It’s our unvarnished bid to cut through the propaganda and misinformation of all sides that contribute to the fog of war.

Summary and Overview

Heavy Mariupol-style fighting localized on the “Azot” chemical fertilizer plant continues in Severodonetsk in the Donbas salient. Militarily, it is senseless. But apparently someone on the Ukrainian side believes it makes sense politically.

Lower intensity but strategically more relevant engagements continue northwest and northeast of Sloviansk and out of the Popasna area in the direction of Bakhmut. Russia’s capture of the two transportation hubs would narrow the Donbas escape corridor for Ukrainian forces estimated at 15,000–20,000 to less than 20 kilometers.

Military activity in the Northeast (Kharkiv) and South (Kherson) is limited to continual dispersed artillery fire by Russian forces.

Mikhail Podolyak, an aide to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, told the BBC on Thursday that Ukraine is losing between 100 to 200 troops daily in the battle for the Donbas, updating Zelensky’s earlier estimate of 60–100 losses per day.

Lyudmila Denisova, the now-former Ukrainian Parliamentary Commissioner for Human Rights, has been removed by the Ukrainian Parliament for falsifying claims of rapes.

The Ukrainian Parliament noted that her work on sexual assaults by Russian troops “couldn’t be confirmed with evidence … and distracted the global media from Ukraine’s real needs.” The only interesting aspect regarding this matter is the sickening silence of most of the Western press.

A report by Ukrainian and Western intelligence officials leaked to the UK’s The Independent reveals that Ukrainian troops are suffering massive losses as they are outgunned 20 to one in artillery and 40 to one in ammunition by Russian forces.

The report also says that for the first time since the war began, there is now concern over desertions. The worsening situation in the Donbas is having “a seriously demoralizing effect on Ukrainian forces as well as a very real material effect; cases of desertion are growing every week.”

Like the concerns raised two days ago regarding the veracity of US intelligence officials’ claims that they are in the dark about Ukrainian military moves and intentions (frankly, The Situation considers that a bald-faced lie), there are doubts about the intelligence report cited by The Independent.

US intelligence likely claims ignorance so as not to be blamed for intelligence failures at a later stage and the report on outgunned and deserting Ukrainian soldiers, while probably true, may well have as its main purpose to manufacture “we told you so” evidence.

Center/East

In Severodonetsk, Ukrainian forces are using the Azot plant as their fighting position, much as they did in Mariupol with the Azovstal plant. Little will remain of the plant and the people in it after Russian artillery fire puts an end to militarily useless and morally repugnant Ukrainian leadership calls for resistance to the last man.

US sources report that west of the Donets River Russian forces continue to attempt to push through the town of Toshivka, about 8 miles south-southeast of the center of Lysychansk, the twin city of Severodonetsk. If they can push through Toshivka, they will have a substantially simpler approach to Lysychansk, as it is on the same side of the Donets River.



Russian forces out of Izyum continue to push slowly southeast towards Slovyansk and have made some small gains in the last 24 hours. According to one Russian military-associated blog, two small towns due north of Slovyansk–Tetyanivka and Pryshyb – have been captured.

Russia is also pressuring Raihorodok from the northeast. Once the siege of the Azot facility is over, it can be expected that pressure on Sloviansk from the north and on Popasnain from the south will increase to achieve closure of the Donbas salient.

South

New Russian troops reinforced by tanks are being rotated into the Kherson region. Artillery fire continued across much of the line of contact in the south. However, in The Situation’s judgment, a Russian offensive in the south with the aim of moving on Zaporizhzhia and Mykolaiv is not likely in the cards this month.

Kiev, meanwhile, has rejected a proposed Russia-Turkey brokered plan to de-mine a channel out of Odesa to allow Ukrainian grain to be shipped out. Kiev termed the deal “not credible.”

As for the most telling and impactful development this past week, an American fellow analyst and commentator picked the dismissal of Ukrainian Human Rights Commissioner Denisova and her testimony that her goal in making up gang rape stories by Russian soldiers, where she said:

“Indeed, maybe I exaggerated … When, for example, I spoke in the Italian parliament at the Committee on International Affairs, I heard and saw such fatigue from Ukraine, you know? I talked about terrible things in order to somehow push them to make the decisions that Ukraine and the Ukrainian people need … I conveyed everything that the applicants wanted to say to society and the world; that the enemies, the Russian Federation, be punished. Yes, then this vocabulary was very harsh, we discussed it … I said that, indeed, maybe I exaggerated. But I tried to achieve the goal of convincing the world to provide weapons and pressure [Russia].”

Obviously, what she did undermines the credibility of the entire Ukrainian government, President Zelensky included. All is fair in love and war? The quip by Elizabethan period writer of comedies John Lyly (careful, the multiple “y”s are not significant) may be a bit over the top in this case.

quote:

Originally posted by PASig:

Putin likes this.

quote:

Originally posted by Dwill104:
Putin Biden likes this.

Putin doesn't care. Our woes are totally self inflicted, by design by our real enemies.

China may be coming up on the outside

China will "not hesitate to start war" over Taiwan, Beijing tells US

https://www.msn.com/en-xl/news...-tells-us/ar-AAYisrt

Don't worry, the money drain that is Ukraine will be with us for some time. China must be delighted that the U.S and Russia are both committed to wasting billions in that country.

Interesting posts, gentlemen. And yet -

- Russia's had to back off from its attempt to take the western part of Ukraine, and from its attempt to take over Kiev, and has yet to bully its biggest bitch in the region - Belarus - into actually committing troops and material to Russia's invasion of Ukraine

- Russia's massed all of its forces in one offensive in the easternmost part of the country and yet is still measuring its gains in hundreds of meters - without being able to close a 15.4 mile gap between its two largest forces in Ukraine

- China's dialed 'waaay back on the amount of rhetoric and threatening feints (invading sovereign airspace, etc.) on Taiwan since Putin invaded Uktraine

- Biden's failed so badly at blaming gas and other fuel prices on Putin that he's "pivoted" to insisting the problem is western oil companies getting "excess" and "obscene" profits - which has long proven to be a failure as a Dem political strategy

quote:

Originally posted by braillediver:

quote:

Originally posted by Dwill104:
Putin Biden likes this.

Putin doesn't care. Our woes are totally self inflicted, by design by our real enemies.

But I think that's just it. Putin need not worry with the US as its destroying itself on almost every level with the incontinent retard at the helm. And China continues to play the longer game watching all this unfold.

DC shifts to damage control as Ukraine defense fades

One possible outcome: a Korean-style armistice, with a line between East and West Ukraine but no peace treaty

https://asiatimes.com/2022/06/...raine-defense-fades/

Having made multiple declarations that Russia would cease to be a world power after the Ukraine war, President Biden and his top officials are now focused on damage control – warning Ukraine through proxies that it will have to sacrifice territory for a ceasefire.

Speaking at a Democratic National Committee fundraiser in Los Angeles, Biden blamed Volodymyr Zelensky for allegedly not heeding American warnings about a Russian invasion:

And, folks, nothing like this has happened since World War Two. I know a lot of people thought I was maybe exaggerating, but I knew — and we had data to sustain — he was going to go in, off the border. There was no doubt. And Zelenskyy didn’t want to hear it, nor did a lot of people. Understanding why they didn’t want to hear it. But he went in.

Ukrainian officials angrily disputed Biden’s version of events, but the cat was out of the bag.

That’s a turnabout from April 25, when Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin declared in Kyiv that the United States wanted to destroy Russia’s capacity to undertake wars on this scale: “We want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine. So it has already lost a lot of military capability. And a lot of its troops, quite frankly. And we want to see them not have the capability to very quickly reproduce that capability.”

A month earlier, Biden had tweeted, “The Russian economy is on track to be cut in half. It was ranked the 11th biggest economy in the world before this invasion — and soon, it will not even rank among the top 20.”

By late May, Russian artillery had begun to reduce Ukrainian forces in the Donbas, threatening to trap Ukrainian forces in a pocket around Severodonetsk – now all but under Russian control. Pentagon observers noted that the Russians had learned to coordinate artillery, infantry, armor and air power. Ukraine began to lose 100 to 200 killed in action per day.

The first sign of a shift to damage-control in Washington came June 8 in a New York Times report by reporter Julian Barnes, quoting US intelligence officials who complained that “American intelligence agencies have less information than they would like about Ukraine’s operations and possess a far better picture of Russia’s military, its planned operations and its successes and failures.”

That is implausible, but not impossible; the United States has satellite images that reveal every detail of ground action, as well as 150 advisers on the ground as of January. Failure to assess the situation on the ground in Ukraine would imply a stupefying level of incompetence in the American intelligence community, which cannot be excluded.

A former senior CIA official, Beth Sanner, told the newspaper, “How much do we really know about how Ukraine is doing? Can you find a person who will tell you with confidence how many troops has Ukraine lost, how many pieces of equipment has Ukraine lost?” Sanner formerly was deputy director of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence – and a presidential briefer during 2017.

“Everything is about Russia’s goals and Russia’s prospects for meeting their goals,” Sanner added. “We do not talk about whether Ukraine might be able to defeat them. And to me, I feel that we are setting ourselves up for another intel failure by not talking about that publicly.”

Translated from spook-speak, Sanner’s warning about an “intel failure” means that the failure had already occurred and that the intelligence services hoped to blame the Ukrainians for it – just as Biden did in Los Angeles two days later.

Asia Times noted the implications of Sanner’s interview with the New York Times in a June 9 situation report on Ukraine.

After her retirement last year Sanner joined Harvard’s Belfer Center for foreign policy. Belfer’s most prominent scholar is Graham Allison, a prominent realist and, in his own description, Henry Kissinger’s oldest student.

Kissinger told the World Economic Forum on May 23 that “movement towards negotiations and negotiations on peace need to begin in the next two months so that the outcome of the war should be outlined but before it could create upheaval and tensions that will be ever-harder to overcome, particularly between the eventual relationship of Russia, Georgia and of Ukraine towards Europe. Ideally, the dividing line should return the status quo ante.”

The “status quo ante” implies that Ukraine will make territorial concessions to Russia—a phrase that Kissinger did not use.

But NATO’s General Secretary Jens Stoltenberg, who has taken a hawkish stance towards Russia since the inception of the war, spelled out the conditions for peace on June 12 at a press conference with the president of Finland:

“Peace is possible in Ukraine. The only question is how much are you willing to pay for this peace. How much are you willing to sacrifice land, independence, sovereignty, freedom and democracy. And that is a very difficult moral dilemma.”

The Ukraine government responded to Stoltenberg with a denial that it was willing to concede any territory at all.

One possible outcome that’s been floated in the American media and closely considered in Moscow is a Korean-style armistice, with an armistice line between East and West Ukraine but without a peace treaty.

Jong Eun Lee of American University wrote May 12 in The National Interest: “Nearly three months into a war, could Ukraine be convinced that a similar armistice is preferable to continued war? The burden is on the United States and the world to convince Ukrainians … that their security threats would not worsen in the future, and that their territorial losses could be restored in the future.”

An armistice would allow Ukraine to deny that it had given up claims on territory held by Russia. Although the proposal has been studied in Moscow, Russia has little motivation to accept it while it is gaining ground.

Some European countries, meanwhile express buyer’s remorse about the acquisition of Ukraine as a full-fledged member of the European family. The Netherlands and Denmark have raised objections to Ukrainian membership in the European Union, widely proposed as a response to the Russian invasion.

According to Bloomberg News, a diplomatic note from Denmark to the European Commission stated that “Ukraine does not sufficiently meet the criteria related to the stability of institutions that guarantee democracy, the rule of law, human rights, respect and protection of minorities. Kyiv will need to fundamentally improve its legislative and institutional framework to make progress on all these fronts.”

The prospect of a reversal in Washington and the shift in sentiment towards Ukraine among some of the smaller European Union members leave the German government in a tricky position. Under American pressure, German Chancellor Olaf Scholze and Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock have agreed to provide heavy weapons to Ukraine.

That policy is deeply unpopular; according to a May 5 poll, 57% of Germans believe that heavy weapons deliveries to Ukraine would lead to an expansion of the war to other countries in Europe, versus 34% who support heavy weapons deliveries. Scholz appears to have caved in to American pressure to give military backing to Ukraine at exactly the moment when the Americans themselves are starting to express doubts.

The next several weeks of fighting will give the Ukraine government a different perspective. By one US military estimate, Ukraine has suffered up to 70,000 casualties (10,000 killed, 40,000-50,000 wounded, and about 10,000 prisoners). It is running out of the old Soviet ammunition for most of its heavy weapons, and it cannot move Western weapons to the front fast enough in the face of Russian artillery and missile – couldn’t even if the West were to supply it.

If the formula that Kissinger and Stoltenberg propose returns to the Western agenda, the warring parties will in effect return to something like the Minsk II framework – which the United States sabotaged in the advent of the present war. A peace agreement is deeply to be desired, but the character of any possible peace will make clear that the war was unnecessary to begin with.

If the two parties settle for a line of demarcation and "truce" then anything like a "Minsk II framework" would already be fatally undermined.

As for the doubts, well, the two sides have been bogged down for a while.

Financing Putin’s war: Fossil fuel imports from Russia during the invasion of Ukraine

Fossil fuel exports are a key enabler of Russia’s military buildup and brutal aggression against Ukraine. The Russian Energy Export Tracker is a project developed by CREA to bring light to details of energy exports from Russia and how they changed after the invasion of Ukraine. We do that by tracking detailed ship movements and pipeline flows in as much detail as possible.



https://energyandcleanair.org/financing-putins-war/

quote:

Originally posted by braillediver:
Putin doesn't care. Our woes are totally self inflicted, by design by our real enemies.

Yes...
The United States, as founded, as a place of liberty and self-government is being destroyed internally by debt and deficit spending. Based upon the ideas of socialism/communism.

They are not saying Ukraine will achieve victory and drive the Russians out. Only that Ukraine will survive as a country and will be supplied with weapons and financial assistance by the taxpayers of the United States for decades. And this is probably their optimistic outlook.


Ukraine Will Survive and the US is Preparing to Arm it for Years, Says Pentagon’s Hicks

https://www.defenseone.com/pol...tagons-hicks/368129/

U.S. defense leaders believe Ukraine will survive Russia’s invasion and are already planning on how to arm the country for the long-term, said the Pentagon’s No. 2 civilian official.

“I think what we can assure ourselves today is that there will be a country called Ukraine. It will be a sovereign country and that country will have a military that will need to defend it,” Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks said Monday. “And so as we look ahead, we're thinking through what are the kinds of capabilities that the Ukrainians need to protect themselves over the long term.”

Facing the challenge of supporting Ukraine, modernizing the U.S. military to deter China and doing so in the midst of rising inflation and a possible recession, the Pentagon’s No. 2 civilian leader laid out how the Defense Department is attempting to tackle multiple unprecedented challenges at once, in an exclusive interview during the 7th annual Defense One Tech Summit.

The United States announced two weeks ago that it would begin sending long-range artillery systems, helicopters, and other additional heavy weapons to Ukraine as part of a new $700 million arms package. But, said Hicks, the department is also trying to take a longer-term approach to supporting Ukraine, five, 10, and 20 years into the future.

quote:

Originally posted by wcb6092:
They are not saying Ukraine will achieve victory and drive the Russians out. Only that Ukraine will survive as a country and will be supplied with weapons and financial assistance by the taxpayers of the United States for decades. And this is probably their optimistic outlook.

Great, The US subsidizes every third world country and resident in the world right now (or wants to), so what's one more middle eastern country to help bleed the treasury dry. But that's Ok, I'm sure Americans will just continue to live under crushing inflation where simple staples, gas, and housing are beyond the reach of most people. The American Dream re-defined. How does that saying go, "They'll have nothing and they'll like it".

It's a quagmire we rushed into with ridiculous enthusiasm. Bizarre that we're volunteering to put ourselves on the hook for billions in future aid...unfuckingbelievable that voters are so easily manipulated. If voters don't smarten up, this country will not get the benefit of a long, gradual decline.

We have been in a long gradual decline for at least 14 years.

Donald Trump managed to get things turned around somewhat but the liberal forces are embedded in federal offices.

quote:

Originally posted by bdylan:
It's a quagmire we rushed into with ridiculous enthusiasm.

What makes it a quagmire? They've been bogged down for a couple of weeks and both sides are convinced that being bogged down won't last more than a couple of months. Could it become one? Sure. But what makes you think that we're already there?

quote:

They are not saying Ukraine will achieve victory and drive the Russians out. Only that Ukraine will survive as a country and will be supplied with weapons and financial assistance by the taxpayers of the United States for decades. And this is probably their optimistic outlook.

The purpose of the Modern Millie, woke military is no longer to fight to win. The purpose of the military is to funnel money into Democrat coffers, laundered through their friends at the defense contractors. It's the "military industrial complex" and it's why they have purged old-school war fighters and conservatives from the military. It's the same thing with Big Pharma.

quote:

Originally posted by Il Cattivo:

quote:

Originally posted by bdylan:
It's a quagmire we rushed into with ridiculous enthusiasm.

What makes it a quagmire? They've been bogged down for a couple of weeks and both sides are convinced that being bogged down won't last more than a couple of months. Could it become one? Sure. But what makes you think that we're already there?

One big clue might be that Army planning is looking at 'long term' help for Ukraine 20 years in the future. Also, just common sense. Russia owns the neighborhood, has plenty of oil money, and has short supply lines in Ukraine. Our money is destined for that shithole unless we elect new leadership or the Russians do somehow manage to prevail.