Russia Invades Ukraine. Again
POSTED BY: captaincrunch
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 21:09
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Russian officials continue to hint at Russia’s interference in Western elections despite Russian President Vladimir Putin’s previous denials. Russian Security Council Deputy Chairperson Dmitry Medvedev claimed on February 3 that the West funds Russian opposition politicians in Russia and that Russia should support isolationist and anti-US political parties and politicians during elections in the West.[87] Deceased Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin sarcastically admitted to his involvement in Russian election interference in November 2022, claiming, “We interfered, we interfere, and we will interfere.”[88] Putin has previously denied Western investigations that suggest that Russia meddled in the American 2016 presidential election.[89]
https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campai
gn-assessment-february-3-2024
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Two Years Into the Ukraine War, Europe Has No Strategy
By Harrison Stetler | Feb 3, 2024
https://jacobin.com/2024/02/russia-ukraine-war-eu-aid
The European Council had last met to discuss Ukraine funding in December, when Hungary blocked an agreement. This came despite the body’s move to free up €10 billion for Budapest, nominally on the grounds that Orbán had made progress in acceding to EU demands for liberal political reforms as EU officials alleged, although it was not hard to see geopolitical priorities trumping concerns about rule of law. However, this olive branch from the European Commission only served to clear the Hungarian veto during a vote on granting Ukraine candidacy status for EU membership. Orbán left the room during the final tally, effectively abstaining from a vote that would otherwise have been vetoed by the opposition of a single member state.
In the lead-up to this Thursday’s meeting, EU officials had threatened drastic retaliatory measures against Hungary if it persisted in blocking a new European aid package requiring unanimous approval. According to the Financial Times, Commission officials were drawing up plans to provoke a run on the Hungarian currency, the forint. Orbán at first dismissed what he called “blackmail” from Brussels, but those threats appear to have been successful. The Hungarian premier retreated to the less ambitious demand that an annual vote be held on the Ukraine funding package. In the final agreement that emerged on Thursday, this was reduced to an annual debate with the possibility for a substantive review after two years. (EU countries that do not use the euro as their currency are Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Sweden. https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/050515/why-these-europ
ean-countries-dont-use-euro.asp )
But another round of propping up Ukraine’s defenses will not make up for the glaring absence of a serious strategic debate about where this conflict is going and what is to be expected of Europe’s investment in it. Instead, there has been much chest thumping and finger wagging — both at Orbán, deemed the EU’s own Vladimir Putin, or indeed anyone lured by so-called “Ukraine fatigue.”
EU powers are by no means cobelligerants in this conflict, even though they have made Ukraine’s self-defense into their own national interest. Yet by extending substantial backing they should at least be discussing what can be expected or hoped for from their engagement in the conflict. After two years of interstate war, however, talk about the contours of a possible settlement is nowhere to be found in mainstream coverage and political debate.
Much more about the EU’s jarring strategic wandering at https://jacobin.com/2024/02/russia-ukraine-war-eu-aid
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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It seems to me that our deep state -linked media has decided on a strategy for Ukraine: scrape it off and blame the EU and UK. How othwerwise to interpret the spate of articles on the EU failing to support Ukraine with enough money and weapons?
And then there is the Zelensky- Zaluzhny feud, with Budanov (internal security), Syrsky (ground forces general) and Poroshenko (oligarch and former President) circling in the background. The feud reached such a pitch, with statements that Zelensky was going fire Zaluzhny within "days" that Victoria 'fuck the EU" Nuland had to rush off to Kiev to stick things back together again. For what purpose, I don't know.
The rumors continued that if Zelensky were to replace Zaluzhny with Budanov, that would mean a change in strategy from conventional military warfare to spec ops/ terror attacks, which is Budanov's specialty. And for sure, there have been high- profile drone attacks on a Russian missile corvette and on a couple of Russian refineries fairly deep inside Russia lately.
These come as the front is falling apart in Avdiivka, Kupiansk and other places.
Biden's* embargo on LNG exports is going to hit Germany hard, especially since they geared their economy over decades towards natural gas (once they decided to shut down their nuclear power plants after Fukushima) and we blew up their supply pipelines. We are hitting Germany so hard, it appears that the neocons not only wanted to carve up Russia, they wanted to derail that budding Russia-Germany axis too, even if they had to destroy Germany to do it. But since Germany was the EUs industrial powerhouse, and it takes energy to fuel large industry, who do they expect will make those shells and weapons for Ukraine and NATO??
Probably USA neocons had already decided that the EU NATO states were essentially parasitical, and decided to sacrifice them if necessary.
But in the long run ... the VERY long run, 25 years or so .... I think this will all backfire as reality red-pills Germans and they discover they've been hosed, and rediscover their backbone and their national interest, and will partner with Russia again, economically.
Militarily, the war is decidedly in Russia's favor. I wonder when the Russian command will decide that Ukraine and NATO are attrited enough be swarmed.
It would be interesting to set up a betting pool on the month and year we should expect to see Ukraine collapse militarily.
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger
Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM
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Quote:Are you wondering when will the Russian Army stop traffic on Boulevard Leopold III in Brussels, Belgium? Soon a glorious victory for Russia, Signym!
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Militarily, the war is decidedly in Russia's favor. I wonder when the Russian command will decide that Ukraine and NATO are attrited enough to be swarmed.
https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/topics_49284.htm
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Why Patriarch Kirill received this year’s presidential prize
By Lera Furman | 11 November 2023
https://novayagazeta.eu/articles/2023/11/11/putins-true-believer-en
Kirill is the main proponent of a special “theology of war”, which boils down to two main arguments. First, a stronger nation has the right to subjugate a weaker one that does not submit to it voluntarily. Second, entry to heaven is guaranteed for anyone who gives their life to bring about this subjugation.
Russian World
Kirill’s radical stance on the war in Ukraine understandably shocked many Christians worldwide. But it was far less surprising to anyone who’d followed the patriarch’s ideological evolution. Even before his appointment to Russia’s most important clerical role, Kirill had spent the last three decades gradually advancing a new xenophobic and isolationist religious doctrine that aligned perfectly with the prevailing worldviews of the emergent Putin regime.
A key element in Kirill’s doctrine is his belief in the so-called Russian World, which advocates the creation of a single “all-Russian nation” to include Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus, and placed under the control of the Russian Orthodox Church.
On the eve of the Russian invasion of Ukraine last year, when most people — including a majority of Russians — still believed that war could be avoided, Kirill seemed to think otherwise, warning that there was “no war without sacrifice,” after laying a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Moscow.
Last December, after thousands of civilian casualties and months of Russian missile strikes on Ukrainian cities, the spiritual leader of Eastern Orthodox Christians, Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople, officially declared the Russian World a heretical doctrine. Patriarch Kirill’s distorted theology had become, Bartholomew said, “the ideological basis of the Putin regime”.
Forging new alliances
Having denounced — and been denounced by — many Christians abroad, the Russian Orthodox Church has found new allies among the world’s Muslims, and Iranian Muslims in particular. In this regard, too, Kirill followed Putin’s lead, recalling that when asked by journalists about the attitude of Orthodoxy to Christianity and Islam, the Russian president had answered: “We are closer to Islam.” Kirill said that he agreed with Putin: “Both Islam and Orthodoxy belong to the same Eastern group.”
These comments are reminiscent of the politically convenient theology espoused by one of Kirill’s Soviet predecessors, Metropolitan Nikodim of Leningrad, who insisted rather unconvincingly that Russian Orthodoxy and atheism — the state-sponsored religious preference at the time — were similar. “Communist atheism is a system of beliefs, including moral principles, which do not contradict Christian morals,” he said.
Much more at https://novayagazeta.eu/articles/2023/11/11/putins-true-believer-en
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Known Untruths
Former prisoners fighting in Ukraine are finding out that the Russian state does in fact quite often abandon its own
08:18 AM, 1 February 2024
https://novayagazeta.eu/articles/2024/02/01/known-untruths-en
Prison inmates granted pardons or early releases from jail to serve in Russia’s Storm Z penal military units are frequently discovering that the promises made to them when they enlisted weren’t worth the paper they were written on.
Sergey Cherepanov, 34, from the Novosibirsk region in western Siberia, signed a six-month contract with the Defence Ministry on 28 April. He had nine months of his six-year term still to serve when recruitment officers turned up at his prison. He refuses to say what he was in prison for, but will say that he “committed no crime” and “had been convicted without real evidence”.
Cherepanov was one of about 150 convicts recruited from his prison on that occasion, though many others had previously opted to fight as Wagner Group mercenaries, he says. When Wagner had come to the prison to recruit new fighters, Cherepanov had not been interested. “I was sure Wagner was lying about something. I trusted the state. But it turns out the state was lying.”
He agreed to enlist due to what he called his “strong love of Russia”. The money and a pardon, he says, only played a secondary role. In the combat zone, he was appointed commander of a company of assault troops, all of whom had been at the same prison.
He refused to discuss combat missions, but did say that “wherever Storm is fighting, life expectancy is in the hours”.
On 20 May, within a month of signing his contract, Cherepanov stepped on a mine near the town of Soledar in occupied eastern Ukraine. Half his foot was blown off and his leg was broken below the knee. As is the case for most former prisoners, the hospital refused to give him the certificate he needed for an insurance payout of 3 million rubles (€30,900). To date, he has only received the 500,000 rubles (€5,150) the government pays to wounded soldiers.
Cherepanov blames the non-payment on “corrupt Defence Ministry officials” who “want to rip people off and pocket the money”. He continues to have faith in Russian President Vladimir Putin, however.
“I admit there’s a lot he doesn’t know, and he only sees what is reported to him. We have only one of him, unfortunately. The country is huge, and he is on his own. And I don’t believe for a moment that he would approve if he knew what was really going on.”
‘There’s nothing frightening about war’
Another former prisoner, Igor Kharaponov, from Kaluga in western Russia, signed a six-month contract with the Defence Ministry on 30 August, but within two months of fighting was caught in artillery fire and had to have his right leg amputated. In his case too, the hospital refused to issue the certificate required to be eligible for the insurance payout of 3 million rubles.
Kharaponov was released from a maximum security correctional facility with five years still to serve for murder. The Defence Ministry recruited 15 of the prison’s inmates to serve in its ranks.
His decision to go to war was based, he says, on his desire to “clean up his life and defend Russia”. Most former prisoners recruited into the military we spoke to used similar phrases.
Kharaponov says that “there’s nothing frightening about war”, and that, on the contrary, he enjoyed carrying out combat missions.
Military and prison life have discipline in common, but differ, according to Kharaponov, in that “there is no social rank at the front”.
“That doesn’t exist in the combat zone. We were told straight away to forget prison and codes of conduct. You can get killed for that sort of thing here. Everyone is equal in the war zone,” he says.
When asked about serial killers and cannibals being granted early release to fight in Ukraine, Kharaponov says such people should be executed or left to rot behind bars since “they would surely return to their old habits” if released. He has a different view of “ordinary killers”,
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Trump and Ukraine
By Gideon Rachman | February 5, 2024
https://www.ft.com/content/18c5296a-f0d5-47d5-aacd-af5210d638fc
There are still many months to go before the US presidential election. But Donald Trump is already having a deeply malign effect on American foreign policy. At Trump’s behest, Republicans in Congress are blocking military aid for Ukraine.
Although the US Senate may agree an aid package this week, Republicans in the House of Representatives remain completely intransigent. As a result, it seems increasingly unlikely that military aid for Ukraine will get through Congress in the coming months — or even this year.
The consequences of that decision could be disastrous. Ukraine is already suffering from a shortage of ammunition — in particular artillery shells. That will become more acute this year, with increasingly dangerous results.
Jack Watling of the Royal United Services Institute, a frequent visitor to the frontline in Ukraine, says the situation there is now “extremely serious”. The ammunition shortage has already led to an increase in Ukrainian casualties. With no certainty about when new supplies of materiel will arrive, the Ukrainian military is finding it impossible to plan future operations.
The shortage of weaponry is also having an effect on the willingness of Ukrainians to volunteer for military service. The mounting pressure on the Kyiv government is part of the explanation for the public falling out between President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his commander-in-chief, Valeriy Zaluzhny.
One piece of positive news for Ukraine was last week’s agreement that the EU will provide €50bn in new financial support for the Ukrainian government. In a joint letter to the FT, Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany and four other EU leaders also called for an increase in European military aid.
But European production lines are not yet ready to fill the munitions gap left by the Americans. That will take until at least 2025, and makes the second half of this year potentially very dangerous for Ukraine.
Watling believes that the consequences of the munitions shortage “will initially be felt slowly and then felt fast”. He warns that “when it reaches the point that the consequences are very obvious, it will already be too late”.
Trump and his Republican party supporters do not seem to care. They are apparently prepared to risk a Russian victory — if it even slightly increases Trump’s chance of defeating President Joe Biden in November.
Some of the Republican reluctance to pass new aid for Ukraine is driven by genuine scepticism about the war. But most of the foot-dragging is simply about Trump’s refusal to give Biden anything that looks like a “win” ahead of the presidential election.
Last year, the Republicans demanded that military aid for Ukraine be tied to new measures and money for border security in the US. The Democrats have agreed. But Trump and the Republicans are refusing to take yes for an answer. Trump evidently wants to run on the idea that Biden has presided over chaos and failure — stretching from the southern border to Kabul and Kyiv.
If the freedom of Ukraine and the security of Europe are collateral damage in Trump’s bid to win back the White House, the former president seems to regard that as a price worth paying.
It is even possible that he would welcome a Ukrainian defeat — if it came in time for the presidential election and enabled him to bash home his favourite claims about the Biden administration’s weakness and failure.
Of course, Trump could not do any of this on his own. The connivance of Republicans in Congress is critical. Trump’s victories in the presidential primaries have persuaded most Republicans — always feeble in their opposition to him — that they need to fall in line even more slavishly. If he continues to demand that no aid for Ukraine goes through Congress, Republicans in the House of Representatives will almost certainly deliver for him.
Those in Washington who take American global leadership
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Although Zelenskiy claims that Ukraine's army is above the 800,000 mark, that is "paper"strength. That is, what the numbers would be IF all of the formations were up to strength. Most people estimate the actual fighting force as somewhere in the realm of 450,000.
Meanwhile, Putin mentioned that the Russian military is somewhat north of 600,000. (I forget the exact figure.)
Since many people assume that Russia is going to start a major offensive "soon", applying the normal ratio of 3 attackers for each defender, that implies that Russia would need at least 1.2 million soldiers for a successful offensive. Russia isn't anywhere near that, and won't be for a long time, they may be absorbing a lot of volunteers into their military but they still have to be trained.
So, what's at the heart of Russia's confidence?
At a guess, I think it has to be Russia's current success with its local offensives with minimal personnel losses. They're waging weapons-heavy, soldier-light war. There seems to be no end to the bombs, missiles, shells, drones, and helicopters used to "prepare" the ground for an assault, and they seem to regard their armored vehicles as "use once and abandon".
Maybe the Russian army has been experimenting with and refining its tactics all along the front and they think they can achieve a big offensive with minimal losses.
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger
Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM
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Quote:Ammo. Russia does not depend on European cheese-eating surrender monkeys for ammo. Plus, Putin can depend on Trump to stall for 12 months a Congressional bill paying for American ammo for Ukraine. Once Ukraine is out of ammo, Russia wins the game and takes the prize.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
So, what's at the heart of Russia's confidence?
Trump urged Republicans Monday to reject $60 billion in Ukraine funding
https://www.france24.com/en/americas/20240205-trump-urges-republicans-
to-reject-senate-deal-on-border-measures-ukraine-aid
Ukrainian Minister of Internal Affairs Ihor Klymenko stated on February 5 that Russian forces intensified their rate of artillery strikes by nearly 25 percent over the last week and shelled Ukraine over 1,500 times, targeting over 570 settlements.[13] The New York Times reported on February 4 that, by contrast, Ukrainian forces in critical areas of the front, such as Avdiivka, are increasingly rationing shells and can therefore only target masses of advancing Russian soldiers, noting that Russian forces have apparently adapted and are now advancing in smaller groups that are harder for Ukrainian artillery to strike.[14]
Ukrainian military analyst and retired Colonel Petro Chernyk noted that Ukrainian forces possess relatively better counterbattery capabilities writ large than Russian forces, particularly because they have American AN/TPQ-36, -48, and -50 radars and the German COBRA radar system.[15] Counterbattery radars are effective in that they detect incoming fire and calculate its point of origin so that artillery forces can conduct return fire — for which artillery forces require sufficient artillery ammunition, however. A lack of artillery ammunition thus severely degrades counterbattery systems: AN/TPQ, COBRA, and other Western counterbattery systems are only as effective as the number of shells that Ukrainian forces have at their disposal to pursue the targets that counterbattery radars identify. ISW previously reported that Russian forces are benefitting from the combined dynamic of Ukraine’s ammunition shortage and its subsequent inability to conduct sufficient counterbattery warfare, and this dynamic is likely to become more acute as Ukraine’s period of shell shortages protracts.[16]
https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campai
gn-assessment-february-5-2024
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Russia’s Adaptation Advantage
Early in the War, Moscow Struggled to Shift Gears — but Now It’s Outlearning Kyiv
By Mick Ryan | February 5, 2024
MICK RYAN is a military strategist, retired Australian Army major general, and an Adjunct Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/ukraine/russias-adaptation-advantage
Throughout the war in Ukraine, Kyiv and Moscow have waged an adaptation battle, trying to learn and improve their military effectiveness. In the early stages of the invasion, Ukraine had the advantage. Empowered by a rapid influx of Western weapons, motivated by the existential threat posed by Russia’s aggression, and well prepared for the attack, Kyiv was able to develop new ways of fighting in remarkably short order. Russia, in contrast, fumbled: a big, arrogant, and lumbering bear, overconfident of a rapid victory. The institutional shock of Russia’s lack of success, in turn, slowed its ability to learn and adapt.
But after two years of war, the adaptation battle has changed. The quality gap between Ukraine and Russia has closed. Ukraine still has an innovative and bottom-up military culture, which allows it to quickly introduce new battlefield technologies and tactics. But it can struggle to make sure that those lessons are systematized and spread throughout the entire armed forces. Russia, on the other hand, is slower to learn from the bottom up because of a reluctance to report failure and a more centralized command philosophy. Yet when Russia does finally learn something, it is able to systematize it across the military and through its large defense industry.
These differences are reflected in the ways the two states innovate. Ukraine is better at tactical adaptation: learning and improving on the battlefield. Russia is superior at strategic adaptation, or learning and adaptation that affects national and military policymaking, such as how states use their resources. Both forms of adaptation are important. But it is the latter type that is most crucial to winning wars.
The longer this war lasts, the better Russia will get at learning, adapting, and building a more effective, modern fighting force. Slowly but surely, Moscow will absorb new ideas from the battlefield and rearrange its tactics accordingly. Its strategic adaptation already helped it fend off Ukraine’s counteroffensive, and over the last few months it has helped Russian troops take more territory from Kyiv. Ultimately, if Russia’s edge in strategic adaptation persists without an appropriate Western response, the worst that can happen in this war is not stalemate. It is a Ukrainian defeat.
THE LONG GAME
After struggling during its early military operations in Ukraine, Russia adapted its command-and-control structure. In April 2022, the country appointed a single commander to oversee its full-scale invasion, jettisoning the dysfunctional, fractured system through which Moscow had run the war to that point. The result was a more unified effort, one that shifted the Russian invasion from multiple separate and uncoordinated campaigns in the north, east, and south of the country to a more synchronized approach—with the main effort clearly being the ground operations in eastern Ukraine. This led to Russian advances and the capture of cities such as Severodonetsk, in mid-2022.
Russia also changed how it conducted close combat. Early in the war, Russia employed combined arms, battalion-sized ground units that were often not strong enough and that demonstrated a limited capacity to integrate air and land operations and carry out ground combined-arms operations. But over the last 12 months, the Russians evolved away from such battalions. They are now integrating elite forces and conventional forces—and buttressing that combination with what many Ukrainians deride as a “meatstorm”: waves of poorly trained, disposable forces who can overwhelm and exhaust Ukrainian soldiers before more talented Russian troops arrive.
Some of this tactical innovation has been driven by
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