By Lucian K. Truscott IV
Pretty much all you need to know is that you don’t sue for peace when you’re winning. You do it when you’re getting your ass kicked and you want to slither out of trouble without having to sign an unconditional surrender. Kind of like the Russian position took today in its talks with Ukraine in Turkey. We’re going to pull back from Kyiv, and let’s talk about a ceasefire, and by the way, our president is willing to meet with your president whenever we get a deal on the table.
It was right there on the faces of the guys who drew the short straw and were sent out for a press availability when the talks had concluded. Call it fear or dread or discomfort or rank humiliation, whatever it is, those two had it. One guy looked like he was headed back to his hotel room to look up Orbitz for flights out of Istanbul on any airline but Aeroflot, the other guy looked like somebody had been beating on him with a two by four. Something had happened over the last 24 to 48 hours to the Russian delegation and it wasn’t good.
I saw an interview with former Russian Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev on MSNBC around noon, and he was asked if he thought anyone in Putin’s inner circle was willing or able to bring him bad news, which was exactly the wrong question to ask. The right question was, how many remote controls do you think he’s thrown at the TVs in every room of his dacha bunker showing pirated CNN and the BBC newscasts around the clock?
Jesus, when are these Russia experts or Putin watchers going to realize that the Big Man in Moscow is a carbon copy of his pal Trump: A rampaging narcissist who only cares about how strong he looks. He doesn’t give a damn what his puppet channels in Moscow are saying about him and his war because as a dictator, he’s dictating that they portray him as a strongman and his war as a cakewalk. What Putin really cares about is how the rest of the world sees him, and right now, he and his vaunted Russian army are looking like losers.
Giving Putin bad news right now is a little bit like telling a dog that’s got a lion swinging him by the tail, “hey, Fido, watch out, there’s a lion behind you.” The only thing Putin has consumed since February 24 is bad news, and lately it’s gotten even worse. In case the infamous 40-mile stalled convoy wasn’t enough to have him climbing the walls, right after the fourth Russian general took a bullet in the chest or a piece of shrapnel in the neck, one of Putin’s other generals probably got on the blower and told him he’s got about four more weeks before what’s left of his tanks and trucks will be out of fuel and out of ammunition and sitting targets for Ukrainian fighters. That’s what his armor has been already, and that’s where the Russian army is today. They’re losing the war everywhere including Mariupol, where all they’ve done is murder civilians and barely hold onto artillery positions outside the city. In fact, today the Pentagon spokesman made a point of emphasizing not once but twice that the Russian army “hasn’t taken a single population center — not Kyiv, not Kharkiv, not even Mariupol.” If Putin wasn’t watching this bad news in real time with a translator at his elbow, he’s further gone than even I could ever have imagined.
All those red splotches showing the area Russia has taken in Ukraine are turning out to be just that: RED SPLOTCHES. Richard Engel reported from Kharkiv last night that he was astounded when he got to the allegedly besieged northern city to find supermarkets open and even a few restaurants serving customers. The center of the city was pretty heavily damaged, Engel reported, but there are whole sections that haven’t been touched. Today he reported that he heard two large explosions somewhere in the city last night, but other than that, Kharkiv wasn’t experiencing very heavy shelling.
Engel was standing there without a bullet proof vest or helmet in a city that is only 25 miles from the Russian border and 50 miles from Belgorod, a city where Russian tanks and troops had been lined up and ready to go for more than a month before the invasion. If the Russian army was an efficient fighting force, they should have been able to roll into and wrap up Kharkiv within days of crossing the border on February 24. That they haven’t been able to take the second largest city in Ukraine in over a month of fighting tells you what’s been going on in Russia’s war against Ukraine. Vladimir Putin is right now looking at his army in Ukraine suffering the kind of humiliation – in one month – that took 10 years to suffer in Afghanistan.
Constant pictures of damaged and destroyed tanks all over Ukraine are bad enough, but the last thing Putin wants to see anywhere in the world on television are images of his tanks in retreat across the Russian border. Military experts in this country have finally come to their senses and seen that Putin’s biggest miscalculation was what he thought he could accomplish using tanks and other armored vehicles to attack and intimidate the Ukrainian military. The Ukrainians, armed with American Javelins and British NLAWs, have turned Russian tanks into large steel coffins holding the dead bodies of Russian soldiers. The tank, once a fearsome weapon that spit steel and caused death and dread wherever it rolled, has been tamed. Check that: It has been beaten by Ukrainian infantry so soundly; the tank is finished as a credible weapon of war.
If you can count on one thing for sure today as we close in on the end of the fifth week of the war, it’s this: Vladimir Putin saw the same images on his TV we saw of his negotiators and their dour looks in Istanbul. If you are a fearsome dictator, what you want to see on your negotiators are the snide smiles and puffed out chests of victors awaiting an inevitable surrender. Instead, what the world saw today was a hunch-shouldered line of pasty-faced apparatchiks suing for peace.
The Pentagon knows exactly what’s going on in Ukraine on the ground because its intelligence services can see it in Technicolor from the sky in real time, and everyone in the world has seen the NATO estimate that Russia’s army has suffered 30,000 to 40,000 casualties, and that figure is over a week old, so it’s even worse today. Volodymyr Zelensky isn’t going to give up an inch of Ukraine at those negotiations because he’s winning the war. That’s why Putin’s boys were so depressed today. The only thing left for Russia to do is pick up their dead on the way home.
Comments
Excellent analysis on how things are in uk raine today ! Will all the kings horses and all the kings men
retreat and live to fight another day ?
Simple Simon suggests
He who controls the airspace controls the war.
He who dares wins ?
Battle of Britain comes to mind a few decades ago….Lufthansa v RAF !
Will Rasputin take the pill as per his predecessors
Heil Hitler !
WW3 will be fought by drones and robots
Not by conventional military conscripts !
National service still practiced by Russia today
abolished decades ago by most of EU/UK
USA uses “conscripts” from latinoland with promise of permanent stay (green card) in USA.
WW3 will be “eco-technological”
My two cents
Kamtan UK
Western Intel Is a Force Multiplier for Ukraine. Russia’s Weakness Is a Surprise
Yossi Melman | Haaretz
Without in any way minimizing Ukraine’s heroic defense against the Russian invasion, there’s also a BEHIND-THE-SCENES HERO:
The precise intelligence the United States, Britain and other NATO countries have given the Ukrainians.
Without this vast trove of intel – and the ability to quickly put it to use in military operations – it is doubtful whether the Ukrainians could have successfully stood up to the huge force that invaded its territory on February 24.
“This quality intelligence has been a major force multiplier,” says Prof. Dmitry “Dima” Adamsky, a lecturer at Reichman University’s Lauder School of Government, Diplomacy and Strategy and author of the book “Russian Nuclear Orthodoxy: Religion, Politics, and Strategy.”
In contrast to the success of Western intelligence, Russian intelligence has been exposed for all its flaws.
The Russians were not prepared in terms of Intelligence and Doctrine.
“They didn’t understand that after 2014, the Ukrainian army had prepared itself with the aid of the United States and NATO,” Magen says. “U.S. and British intelligence have demonstrated again and again that they almost always know what the Russians are doing and planning in Ukraine.”
He believes the West has been employing a range of intelligence tools: HUMINT, SIGINT and cyberwarfare. “The help they’re giving is very proactive. There are intelligence officers in the field – in secret, of course. That is in addition to the intelligence assistance being provided by [Ukraine’s] neighbors, mainly Poland and Romania.”
One of the most obvious products of this precise intelligence has been the killing, according to media reports, of no fewer than seven Russian generals on the battlefield. That, of course, deals a blow to morale and the Russian army’s self-image. But more important is the Ukrainian army’s ability to make effective use of the intelligence it receives to wage war – mainly by using Javelin anti-tank and Stinger anti-aircraft missiles. So far, Ukraine has been supplied with some 2,000 Javelin missiles and 1,000 Stingers, and another shipment is on the way.
In addition, the Ukrainians have been given about 3,000 NLAW – next generation light anti-tank weapon – missiles from Britain. Germany, Norway and even neutral Sweden have provided some 10,000 anti-tank missiles for shorter ranges.
On the battlefield, TB2 drones have also been seen. These are used to attack Russian army positions and tanks and have been supplied by Turkey since 2019. The United States has also sent Ukraine drones, albeit smaller models; these so-called suicide (“kamikaze”) drones are no less deadly, though.
The results have been impressive. It is believed that anti-tank and drone attacks have destroyed more than 1,000 Russian tanks and armored vehicles, and hundreds of trucks.
The Ukrainians have also excelled at shooting down Russian aircraft. Stinger missiles, which the United States provided to the Mujahideen fighters in Afghanistan in the 1980s, made their name thanks to their ability to shoot down Soviet planes and helicopters. Since then, the Stingers have undergone improvements. They are fired from the user’s shoulder and are relatively easy to use.
In addition to these missiles, Pentagon sources say the Ukrainians have at their disposal Russian S-300 air defense systems – some of which they acquired in secret, deceiving operations in recent years.
The Kinzhal hypersonic missile, the pride of Russian high-tech, has not performed impressively, to say the least, and hasn’t been used extensively. At the moment, it is being employed mainly for psychological warfare, to “shock and awe” the enemy, rather than to inflict unprecedented, huge damage.
Some estimates say that at least 10,000 Russian troops have been killed so far, in addition to thousands wounded. Ukrainian losses are considerably less, running at about 3,000 dead and thousands wounded.
Magen says he believes Russian President Vladimir Putin when he speaks of a “special military operation” rather than a war.
“He and his generals believed they would succeed in gaining control of Kyiv in short order by using 10,000 airborne troops, including military intelligence [GRU] commandos. They tried to seize control of Hostomel Airport [northwest Kyiv], but the Ukrainians – who were equipped with good intelligence – were waiting for them and expelled them.”
The result, according to Magen, was that the Russian army was forced to enter into land combat prematurely, without adequate intelligence, planning or logistics, and with less well-trained troops.
Magen says he has seen signs of problems at the top in Russia: Between the army and the intelligence services, and between Putin and the oligarchs.
“Russia is a classic case of the nexus between political power and capital. It’s a corrupt country, a kleptocracy, and, of course, that reaches down into the army. The sanctions that the West has imposed are strategic and personal. Everyone is being harmed and the oligarchs are angry at Putin.”
One way or another, it is pretty clear right now that the Ukrainians will not join NATO’s military alliance. Even Zelenskyy has made that clear. Instead, Ukraine will try to join the European Union, will be deemed neutral in some fashion or another – in the style of Finland, Switzerland, Austria and Sweden – but under no circumstances will it agree to disarm and be demilitarized.
If the war continues, it is reasonable to assume that more territory will be torn from Ukraine, perhaps even to the point that the country is divided into two halves. But, as Magen sees it, “whatever the consequences of this tragic war, RUSSIA WILL EMERGE DEFEATED.”
Eddie in the UK wrote:
Why are we still bothering to entertain narratives of liars deceivers and evildoers?
In 1918 US Senator Hiram Warren Johnson is purported to have said:
The first casualty when war comes is truth.
However, this was not recorded. In 1928 Arthur Ponsonby’s wrote:
‘When war is declared, truth is the first casualty’.
(Falsehood in Wartime) Samuel Johnson seemed to have had the first word:
‘Among the calamities of war may be jointly numbered the diminution of the love of truth, by the falsehoods which interest dictates and credulity encourages.’
(from The Idler, 1758)
Peter Brooke, Mewmachar Scotland
Gonsalves wrote:
I hope it is true. If it is true, it is very promising and I hope the Ukrainians will stop at the Russian border.
Kamtan:
Lufthansa is a commercial air line. What you meant to say is Luftwaffe which was the German Air Force in WWII.
Lufthansa was intentional…
Sarcastically German !
British sense of humour !
K uk
Gonsalves: I guess they did not read the Memo!!
Regional Chief Says Ukraine Strikes Fuel Depot In Russian City Of Belgorod
https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-belgorod-fuel-depot-fire-ukraine/31780891.html
We are told that Raasputin is going to cut off gas to Europe if we don’t pay up in roubles . Honestly it’s so desperate now . The child benefit has gone up by 65 p a week to feed your Child but they have let refugee s into the country when people can’t feed themselves because of the 50 percent increase in fuel yesterday we had snow .there is a woman who makes blankets from old empty chip packet and she converts into the plastic blankets and hands out to people living on the streets .this is third world great Britain