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Putin just gave a speech on Russian TV where he said essentially the same thing as Suslov said in the last post.

Putin said that Russia just tested a ballistic missile with a new non-nuclear hypersonic warhead that he claims is impossible for Western ABM defenses to intercept, by striking a major Ukrainian arms manufacturing complex.

I'd say that it was a restrained response to Ukrainian use of American and British long range weapons on Russian installations. Russia could have used their hypersonic missile warheads against Ramstein or Spangdahlem (US air bases in Germany) which would have caused American military casualties and perhaps triggered a direct military confrontation between the US and Russia. My guess is that Putin wants to avoid more direct combat with the US (and the possibility of it going nuclear) before Trump takes office and moves Washington away from a war track onto a negotiation track (even if Kyiv doesn't like that since it would mean settling for something short of total Ukrainian victory, whatever that means).

https://x.com/RadioGenoa/status/1859680249140871557

The idea of Sanctions originally was to slowly tighten down on the economic system that funds Russia in warefare, it was done as a passive approach to try to get Putin to realise that the majority of the world didn't want him war mongering. Since the passive method hasn't generated expediant results, its likely that doubling down on support and weapons was likely a measure to generate further pressure.

(personally I would of suggested that Russia would be facing 1 week of sanction for every day stealing Ukrainian territory. That might not seem like much although I did consider 1 month per day, bu the war has been going over 1000 days, thus 1000 weeks or 19+ years of sanctions.)

If there seems to be no pressure to them (considering they continue to do whatever they want) then it only makes sense to unrestrict and do the things that should be done over time, otherwise everything is only a lesson in futility since everything would be undone but one yahoo and a simple penstroke.

Putin said Russia was still ready "to resolve all contentious issues by peaceful means. But we are also ready for any development. If anyone still doubts this, it is in vain. There will always be a response."

Personally, I would suggest pulling the plug on the NATO expansion. Never should have happened in the first place. Give up a little territory and STFU.

(Nov 22, 2024 02:36 AM)Secular Sanity Wrote: [ -> ]Putin said Russia was still ready "to resolve all contentious issues by peaceful means. But we are also ready for any development. If anyone still doubts this, it is in vain. There will always be a response."

Personally, I would suggest pulling the plug on the NATO expansion. Never should have happened in the first place. Give up a little territory and STFU.

I don't know about NATO expansion, however I do know that Russia had been messing around with Europe and UK for decades. (such as the 2008 crash where Russia was "bailing out" countries after causing the crash in the first place, interfering in Brexit, attempted assasinations through poisonings in the UK, bombing european ammunition stockpiles, espionage throughout europe etc.)

Collectively the effects Russia has had should likely have caused an "Article 5" (If it's possible on Economic grounds) but the governments wanted to pretend everything was alright... especially with the money Russia was willing to trade (bribe) for influence.

The West has been slow-walking aide for nothing but a stalemate, at best. I guess Europe has been fine with Ukrainians dying, so long as it keeps Russia attention there, and no further afield. Something eventually has to give. Either the West has to go all in for some kind of "victory," or we need an off ramp to peace. No one wants Russia to take Kyiv.

Everyone was fine with Russia taking Crimea under Obama. So I'm not sure some compromise on territory is the worst thing that could happen.
As long as Europe is such a big customer of Russian oil and LNG, they're basically funding the war.

(Nov 22, 2024 02:36 AM)Secular Sanity Wrote: [ -> ][...] Give up a little territory and STFU.

The crazy thing is that is what the Lord Protectors would have tolerated back in February 2022, just before Ukraine demonstrated that it had a backbone. Heck, they would have been passive about Russia turning the whole country into a puppet state.

But being completely quiet would have been just as impossible for them then as now. Due to the impetus of their moral superiority, the Lord Protectors are compelled to lecture whatever barbarian is offending their sensibilities -- whether homegrown or foreign. A missionary's work is never done. Whereas the Soviet Union was once the biggest exporter of left-wing values, today it is the US (or the West at large).

Apparently, rewinding to that former attitude of "que sera, sera" is unacceptable. Ukraine is like some AI or robot that abruptly demonstrated back in early '22 that it had consciousness or a soul. So now the ex Eurotrash zombie has to be saved. Its spiritual status cannot be trampled on to the extent of allowing Putin to keep any captured territory at all.

This new member of the congregation will lose the current pastor's sponsorship come January 20, and that fate is distasteful: The sheep becomes vulnerable to the practical callousness of Trump. Perhaps long-range missiles are only the tip of the Arrakis sandworm, as the Biden administration's shepherdly fretting intensifies into December and past New Year's.

(Dec 20, 2024 01:51 PM)Zinjanthropos Wrote: [ -> ]Many vids on YouTube suggesting the NK’s are not very good soldiers and are getting annihilated at every turn. Are they really that bad? Are they actually involved much?

Yeah, I've also heard that the Norks have suffered comparatively high casualties.

Or at least the Ukrainians are saying that, since Ukraine is the only source of information on the war that Western media use. All Russian sources are dismissed as propaganda simply because they are Russian and often banned outright. (I used to compare the Ukrainian claims against those of Rybar, an independent Russian channel with good sources in the Russian military, until it was silenced.) Which leaves us having no choice but to base our view of the war on Ukrainian propaganda alone.

(I'm sure that the Pentagon has their own independent assessments, but they are classified.)

So working on the assumption that the Nork casualties are as heavy as claimed, several thoughts come to mind.

First, the North Korean army has no combat experience.

Second, the North Korean military has regular forces and elite forces. The elite forces are chosen for their loyalty to the regime and might be quite fanatic, thinking of Kim Jong Un as semi-divine. They are given the best equipment and the best training. I'm sure that they are the ones with North Korea's small stockpile of nuclear weapons.

The regular forces are composed of poorly fed, poorly trained conscripts from the villages. Their "loyalty" comes from knowing that if they don't follow orders unquestioningly, their starving families back home will be sent to the labor camps. And I think that North Korean military doctrine is to use these numerous but less reliable troops for human wave attacks and things like that. High losses don't bother Pyongyang at all.

And I would guess that the soldiers that Pyongyang sends to the Ukraine war aren't their best troops. They are expendables.

Third, the Russian commanders probably know all that and might be using the Norks for assaults where high casualties are expected and where they are under pressure from Moscow to keep Russian losses as low as possible.

The Institute for the Study of War is a high-profile American think tank with very close ties to the US military and to the CIA. (The ISW includes a number of very prominent retired generals and a former CIA director.) Here is their current assessment, based once again largely on Ukrainian claims.

First the Kursk incursion. In the map below, the blue area in Russia's Kursk Oblast is the area acknowledged by Russia to still be held by Ukraine. The red area is area once held by Ukraine at the height of their offensive, and acknowledged by Ukraine to have been retaken by Russia. The yellow are areas that Russia claims to have retaken, but not acknowledged to have been lost by Ukraine.

Both sides agree that the Russians have taken the small town of Lyubimovka and that they are right outside Malaya Loknya. If Malaya Loknya falls, about all that Ukraine will retain are Sudzha and some farmland.

So the Ukrainians are very much on the defensive in Kursk where they are struggling to hold on to the Russian rural area they seized in their surprise 2024 summer offensive.



nsNS

Most of the fighting in the Ukraine War continues to be on the eastern front, in Donetsk Oblast. Here's the ISW's view of the current situation, which probably coincides closely with the views of the US deep state, given who the ISW are.

The Ukrainians appear to be on the defensive all along the eastern front. Nowhere are they succeeding in recovering territory from the Russians, who appear to be advancing (albeit slowly) in multiple places.

The green circles are where fighting is taking place, with the size of the circle proportional to the intensity of the fighting. The main area where the Russians are slowly but inexorably advancing is west of the large city of Donetsk (the capital of the oblast and the largest city in Ukraine that the Russians hold, approx. 900,000 population). The Russians appear to be encircling some Ukrainians on three sides about 20km directly west. I expect these Ukrainians to soon withdraw from this increasingly exposed position.



A big Russian goal in this area, a little to the north, is a large road/rail junction called Pokrovsk. Some commentaters seem to think that if the Russians take Pokrovsk, the Ukrainian hold on southern Donetsk oblast might start to collapse. And the Russians appear to have achieved a breakthrough to the south of Pokrovsk, that might put them in position to start encircling it as well. Russian military doctrine seems to be to encircle enemy strongpoints (they call them "cauldrons") and blast them from all sides until the enemy withdraws. Here's a more detailed view of the situation near Pokrovsk.

(ISW map)

Today, January 6, 2025, Ukrainian armored forces counterattacked on the east side of their Kursk salient. The Ukrainians claim to have captured a couple of small villages northeast of Sudzha but appear to have only advanced a few miles. The Russians claim that their attack helicopters and drones have destroyed a significant quantity of NATO supplied armor, including a number of British supplied Challenger tanks. The ISW (Pentagon and Ukraine aligned) is saying that the Ukrainians are using electronic warfare more effectively in combined arms operations than in the past to disrupt Russian drones (likely with American supplied jammers is my guess).

The Russians are said to still be unsure if this new Ukrainian push is the real deal, or just a diversion.

Meanwhile the Russians continue their own slow advance west of Donetsk and south of Pokrovsk, where the Ukrainian positions look increasingly threatened.