Russia Invades Ukraine. Again
POSTED BY: captaincrunch
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 21:09
VIEWED: 562266
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At U.S. behest, Ukraine held off anniversary attacks on Russia
Shane Harris, Isabelle Khurshudyan
In February, with the first anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine days away, officials in Kyiv were busy making plans to attack Moscow.
Maj. Gen. Kyrylo Budanov, the head of the country’s military intelligence directorate, the HUR, instructed one of his officers “to get ready for mass strikes on 24 February … with everything the HUR had,” according to a classified report from the U.S. National Security Agency. Officials even mused about a sea-based strike using TNT in the Black Sea port city of Novorossiysk, a largely symbolic operation that would nevertheless demonstrate Ukraine’s ability to hit deep inside enemy territory.
Back in Washington, officials were secretly monitoring the Ukrainians’ plans. The White House had long worried that attacks inside Russia could provoke an aggressive response from the Kremlin.
On Feb. 22, two days before the anniversary, the CIA circulated a new classified report: The HUR “had agreed, at Washington’s request, to postpone strikes” on Moscow. The documents, part of a trove of classified information allegedly leaked on a gaming server by a 21-year-old member of the National Guard, don’t explain precisely who interceded and why the Ukrainians agreed to stand down.
But they offer a specific example of a broader tension that has characterized much of the war: Ukraine, eager to bring the fight to Russia’s home turf, is sometimes restrained by the United States, which has tried to avoid escalating the conflict into a direct fight between U.S. and Russian forces. Some U.S. officials see attacks on Russia, particularly if they involve U.S.-supplied weapons, as highly risky operations that Russian President Vladimir Putin could find so threatening that he resorts to using tactical nuclear weapons.
And yet mysterious explosions and drone strikes continue to happen in Russia. Ukrainian officials are often coy about the incidents, hinting that they’re responsible without directly taking credit.
“The Earth is round — discovery made by Galileo,” presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak wrote on Twitter in December after an attack on the Engels-2 air force base, deep inside Russia. “If something is launched into other countries’ airspace, sooner or later unknown flying objects will return to departure point.”
Operations on foreign soil fall under the HUR’s purview. Budanov, an ambitious 37-year-old general and rising star in the Ukrainian military, doesn’t acknowledge that his agency is behind the attacks. But he has warned they will continue.
“This shattered their illusions of safety,” Budanov told The Washington Post in January. “There are people who plant explosives. There are drones. Until the territorial integrity of Ukraine is restored, there will be problems inside Russia.”
Budanov did not comment for this article. U.S. officials did not comment on the leaked documents about anniversary strikes.
Privately, U.S. and European officials express their admiration for Budanov. But they also say his audacity sometimes makes them nervous.
On Feb. 13, the day that the NSA document said Budanov had instructed one of his officers to be ready for an operation presumably aimed at Novorossiysk, the United States repeated its public advisory for citizens in Russia to leave the country immediately. It’s not clear that the warning anticipated an aggressive Ukrainian strike, but it appears to reflect a level of concern in Washington about attacks around the anniversary.
Budanov is known for bold claims and pronouncements, which many Western officials regard skeptically. He has said that Putin is terminally ill, an assertion that U.S. intelligence officials have rejected, and that he uses multiple body doubles. Budanov exudes confidence that Ukraine will prevail over Russia — and soon. He has said that Crimea, the highly fortified peninsula Russia illegally annexed in 2014, must be returned to Kyiv this summer. The leaked documents show that the U.S. intelligence communi
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Senior US and EU officials assess that Russian President Vladimir Putin would remain unwilling to negotiate in response to a successful Ukrainian counteroffensive. The New York Times (NYT) reported on April 24 that a senior European official stated that the chances of Putin “backing down” in response to a successful Ukrainian counteroffensive are “less than zero.”[1] The official stated that Putin would likely mobilize more soldiers to fight in Ukraine. US Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs Celeste Wallander said that there is “very little evidence” to suggest that Putin would alter his strategic goal of subjugating Ukraine “politically, if not fully militarily.” US National Security Council Spokesperson John Kirby told Voice of America on April 25 that the US is increasing security assistance to Ukraine because the US expects that Russia will attempt to go on the offensive as the weather improves.[2]
A Ukrainian military official claimed on April 25 that Ukrainian forces are achieving “impressive results” in counter-battery combat against Russian forces on the Russian-occupied eastern (left) bank of the Dnipro River.[3] Spokesperson for the Ukrainian Southern Operational Forces Nataliya Humenyuk stated that Ukrainian forces hit and destroyed Russian artillery systems, tanks, armored vehicles, and air defense systems. Humenyuk added that Ukrainian forces are working to clear the frontline on the east bank in a “counter-battery mode.” Humenyuk added that Russian forces are evacuating civilians from the Dnipro River bank area to move in Russian units, which is simplifying Ukrainian operations.
Russian milbloggers continued to issue vehement denials on April 25 that Ukrainian forces established sustained positions on east (left) bank Kherson Oblast. The milbloggers amplified textual reports and video claims from Russian military personnel claiming that Ukrainian forces are not on east bank Kherson Oblast and that the situation is under control.[36]
https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campai
gn-assessment-april-25-2023
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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Funny how SECOND's post about the Haze of Propaganda is followed by .... the haze of propaganda. with such scaremongering golden oldies as "The Russian Hordes at your Doorstep!" "Duck and Cover!" and "The Evil Emperor Ming Pootin!"
Oh, and let's not forget TRUMP! and TRUMPTARDS!
Sheesh.
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger
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Quote:Signym, I'm pretty sure you didn't even read what you are attacking. Try reading this one all the way to the end:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Funny how SECOND's post about the Haze of Propaganda is followed by .... the haze of propaganda. with such scaremongering golden oldies as "The Russian Hordes at your Doorstep!" "Duck and Cover!" and "The Evil EmperorMingPootin!"
Oh, and let's not forget TRUMP! and TRUMPTARDS!
Sheesh.
Q: You write that there were "myriad" indications that the 2022 war in Ukraine was not a war as Russia's General Staff would wage it. So how has the execution of the current war differed from what you would have expected from Russia's military?
A: The Russian military, after all, has this very intellectual approach to war fighting, with lots of deeply tedious journal articles being written about it and a very clear, almost methodological approach to actually how they would fight a war, and in particular, they categorize wars along a whole kind of spectrum, and they have different ways in which they would address each type of war.
Now, a war in a country of more than 40 million people is obviously going to be a serious conflict, at the very least a regional war. And according to how Russian military doctrine suggests you'd approach that, you would have, first of all, a long buildup, you would set up carefully structured elements to plan it, to ensure that there's a clear chain of command, to assemble all the various means, whether it's soldiers or ammunition or whatever else, needed for it.
People would spend months preparing something like this, and then when the war starts, you would start with a massed — they call it a MRAU — a massed rocket-artillery strike to shatter every element of the other side, even before your forces roll across the border. And then when they do roll across the border, you would have one clear overall commander who actually has one vision of how the war can be won.
None of that was actually present in this conflict. There was no real concept of what this war would be because Putin didn't think there was really going to be a war. There wasn't the establishment of the specialized structures. There wasn't the long-term planning. There weren't all the necessary logistics in place. There wasn't a central commander. I mean, essentially, it broke every single rule, and that's simply because, as far as Putin was concerned, this was not going to be a war. He genuinely seems to have believed that Ukraine, this noncountry, would not be defended by its own people and it would basically fall apart at the first push.
More at https://www.businessinsider.nl/how-putin-spent-20-years-rebuilding-rus
sias-military-and-then-just-simply-destroyed-it-in-ukraine-according-to-an-expert-who-watched-it-happen/
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 appears to be continuing a deliberate depopulation campaign in occupied areas of Ukraine in order to facilitate the repopulation of Ukrainian territories with Russians. Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Malyar stated on April 26 that Russia is trying to change the ethnic composition of Ukraine by actively conducting a large-scale resettlement of people mainly from poorer and remote regions of Russia into Ukraine.[1] Malyar noted that the most intensive efforts are ongoing in occupied Luhansk Oblast and remarked that Russia is also deporting Ukrainians and forcibly resettling them in Russia.[2] ISW previously reported on specific instances of Russian authorities overseeing the depopulation and repopulation of areas of occupied Ukraine, particularly in occupied Kherson Oblast over the course of 2022. Ukrainian sources remarked in October 2022 that Russian authorities in then-occupied parts of Kherson Oblast deported large groups of Ukrainian residents to Russia under the guise of humanitarian evacuations and then repopulated their homes with Russian soldiers.[3] Russia may hope to import Russians to fill depopulated areas of Ukraine in order to further integrate occupied areas into Russian socially, administratively, politically, and economically, thereby complicating conditions for the reintegration of these territories into Ukraine. ISW has previously assessed that such depopulation and repopulation campaigns may amount to a deliberate ethnic cleansing effort and apparent violation of the Geneva Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.[4]
https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campai
gn-assessment-april-26-2023
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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Comments made by Russian officials and prominent voices in the Russian information space continue to highlight a pervasive anxiety over potential Ukrainian counteroffensive actions. Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin remarked on April 26 that as soon as weather conditions improve in Bakhmut, Ukraine will launch a counteroffensive, which may coincide with Russia’s May 9 Victory Day holiday (the commemoration of Soviet victory over Nazi Germany in 1945).[14] A prominent Russian milblogger insinuated that Ukraine may be planning counteroffensive actions in order to ruin May 9 celebrations in Russia.[15] The invocations of May 9 suggest that the Russian information space continues to place symbolic importance on dates associated with Russia’s Great Patriotic War, which continues to shape discourse on the prospects of the war. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov stated during a press conference in New York on April 25 that discussions about the potential for negotiations after a successful Ukrainian counteroffensive are ”schizophrenic.”[16] Increasingly despondent and panicked rhetoric emanating from prominent information space figures suggests that the Russian information space has not yet settled on a line about how to address significant and growing concerns about the near future.
https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campai
gn-assessment-april-26-2023
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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Intelligence leaks show the US and NATO are throwing away victory in Ukraine
Opinion by Stephen Blank, Ph.D., a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI). He is a former professor of Russian national security studies and national security affairs at the Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. Army War College and a former MacArthur fellow at the U.S. Army War College.
For the last two weeks, commentators have eagerly reported on the massive intelligence leaks in the U.S. But few analyses have seen fit to “connect the dots” or discuss what these leaks mean for actual policy.
For example, one highly publicized leak contended that Ukraine’s long-awaited counteroffensive will likely not be as successful as expected, in no small measure due to an insufficiency of arms. Specifically, Ukraine was unlikely to gain more than “modest territorial gains because Kyiv was facing significant “force generation and sustainment shortfalls.” Beyond this, other intelligence assessments revealed that Ukraine’s air defenses were in danger of collapsing, thereby giving Russia uncontested air superiority.
Yet, nobody seemed to write that allied dithering, i.e. not only the U.S. but also European procrastination, was more than a little responsible for this state of affairs. Despite the fact that these leaks also underscored Washington’s possibly unprecedented intelligence penetration of the Russian government, intelligence and military, the crippling and increasingly unsubstantiated fear on both sides of the Atlantic that Russia might escalate still holds allied governments in thrall and also prevented the decisive, timely delivery of necessary weapons and training to Ukraine’s army after its successful September offensive.
Thus, there is good reason to argue that allied fears of giving Ukraine tanks, air and air defense assets prevented it from obtaining those weapons and then extending its offensive and administering what might have been close to a decisive defeat to Russian forces. Instead, Moscow gained time to mobilize new forces, construct defenses in depth across the entire front and even launch its own offensives, which are increasingly seen as futile.
Nevertheless, thousands of people on both sides were killed, and much more destruction was wreaked upon Ukraine.
The cumulative assessment coming out of these leaks fails to acknowledge Western fear and the absence of any coherent strategic response to the crisis. This fear and incoherence undoubtedly contribute to fortifying Putin’s resolve that Ukraine and/or its allies will lose heart or collapse before he or Russia does, a conclusion that appears to be reinforced by the statements and threats of such loyalists and/or sycophants like Nikolai Patrushev and Dmitry Medvedev. Thus, even if Putin is living inside a self-constructed bubble, we are not doing enough to exploit that situation and achieve a decisive victory that will secure Ukraine, ensure European security and administer a stinging and decisive defeat to the Sino-Russian alliance.
The failure of both Washington and Brussels to state their strategy suggests the absence of one or fear of victory, both of which are grist for Putin’s mill. He, his entourage and intelligence assessments that we know are biased to accord with his prejudices will invoke demonstrations in Europe due to energy and economic issues, and public opinion polls that show declining support for Ukraine will be used as justifications for prolonging the war to save his power.
Therefore, Washington and Brussels must not only proclaim a strategy and vision and then implement it, but they must also take it to their electorates and win public support for it. This strategy goes beyond giving Ukraine the weapons it needs now. We must also reinvigorate Western defenses and defense industrial bases to meet the Russian threat by creating a superior conventional deterrent for NATO from the Arctic to the Black Sea. The fact that Germany still cannot create even minimal conventional forces is not just a bad jo
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lol
Money well spent, huh?
Quote:
Intelligence leaks show the US and NATO are throwing away victory in Ukraine
Thank you for admitting what I've been saying all along. This is US's and NATO's war with Russia.
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Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.
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Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:Quote:Yanno, one of us should face a big climb-down, and I don't think it's going to be me.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
As usual, you (and the media you plagiarize) misquote, take out of context, exaggerate, and lie.
Yanno, just like your posts about "Trumptards", "6IX" and "Russian troll" are sheer malicious lies.
I interpret your posts as the bullshit that they are.
Have a nice day
THUGR: Hey comrade. This isn’t rocket science. Things are happening, the media is reporting it, and you and Jack say the opposite. That makes you a moron, simple. A Mike Lyndall, Rudy Giuliani, and Fox news type moron. You prove that with every post.
Comrade, you faced that big climb-down here years ago. Being a moron, you just don't get it.
T
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Quote:Throwing away victory does NOT mean what you think it means. Back in September, Ukraine was close to decisively defeating Russian forces but NATO would NOT give Ukraine the long, very sharp knife (ammo) to cut the Russian Army's throat so that it would never again be a threat to anybody. Why? NATO feared victory would mean "escalation", the secret code word for the scary yet fake concept of Russia attacking NATO with nukes once Ukraine murders the Russian Army. Russia wouldn't have nuked NATO, but fear kept NATO from supplying the ammo Ukraine needed to finish the job by driving Russia out of Crimea. So now there is a stalemate rather than a resounding victory for Ukraine that could have been had back in September.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
lol
Money well spent, huh?Quote:
Intelligence leaks show the US and NATO are throwing away victory in Ukraine
Thank you for admitting what I've been saying all along. This is US's and NATO's war with Russia.
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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