From Bucha and beyond, the constant of Putin fighting in Ukraine has been both CPAC unwavering loyalty to Putin and murdered Ukrainians
The dog like devotion of CPAC to Putin has gone well beyond that of a man crush to an infatuation which I never thought a US party would have for any human being. It appears that Trump trained CPAC well in that their man crush on Putin is now approaching the hysteria of the Kim cult in North Korea and for very much the same reasons
It it due to the proficiency of Putin? NOPE. He is incompetent. See this
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How did Ukraine pull off such a sudden and apparently complete defeat of Russia in an area where Russia has packed in troops and armor? There seems to be one factor that played a major role: radios.
There have been astonished reports from the beginning of the invasion that, rather than encrypted high-band military radios, Russia was using consumer-grade equipment—essentially walkie-talkies of the sort you might find at a?nearby sporting goods store. Additionally, Russian forces have often been communicating?en clair, speaking openly of positions and objectives, rather than using any sort of code.?
In Kherson, Ukraine seems to have taken advantage of this fact by issuing false orders and reports over these radio bands. Then they reportedly used jammers —?readily available for these kinds of radios, but much more difficult for real military communications —?to cut Russian forces off from one another. In all the various towns and villages in northern Kherson, Russian forces found themselves receiving a burst of orders, then they were speaking into static. Then a wall of Ukrainian armor came their way.
Isolated and confused, they began to pull back. Overall, Ukraine used Russia’s poor command and control structure, and it’s amazingly bad communications, to turn their northern defensive line into groups of frightened, confused, individuals scrambling to find a safe place.?
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In essence, Putin whom is micromanaging the war is incompetent beyond belief
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Just as Vladimir Putin declares “annexation” of four regions of eastern Ukraine amid faux fanfare following gun barrel referendums, the Ukrainian army recaptures yet another chunk of the so-called annexed territory. Meanwhile, some 300,000 military-age Russian men — the number Putin has ordered to be drafted — head for the exits, fist fights break out at military induction centers as some 20 others are torched, and a recruitment officer is critically shot. Finally, a top Russian economist?predicts , “The Russian economy is going to die by winter.”
What’s wrong with this picture?
Well, everything. It’s just that Lt. Col. Putin isn’t paying attention. Let’s hope his thug-laden?siloviki?are, and act to remove him before Russia collapses — or he orders tactical nuclear missile strikes.
We’ve seen this movie before. If history doesn’t quite repeat itself, in Russia it comes closer than most places. In the space of three generations, 1905 through 1991, Russia suffered three major political disruptions following devastating defeats in war. It will soon, I predict, incur a fourth as a shaken and cornered Putin?faces ?imminent challenges to his power from an increasingly fissured power elite and restive population.
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You would not see any of this due to the adoration, love and support CPAC gives PUTIN every day. NO siree. Don't believe your lying eyes !
As the roster of verified murdered Ukrainian citizens grows, look to more Kim style Putin worship by CPAC, and revulsion on the part of the rest of thinking humanity . If Putin looses in Ukraine by December, look to CPAC wailing about betrayal of the great PUTIN and Hitler propaganda like utterances of a "stab in the back"
Upward and onward !!!
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Russia: What Do 1905, 1917, 1991 & 2022 Have in Common? (Hint: Catastrophe)
Putin is channeling Nicholas II in leading Russia to collapse.
Putin’s Quagmire
Just as Vladimir Putin declares “annexation” of four regions of eastern Ukraine amid faux fanfare following gun barrel referendums, the Ukrainian army recaptures yet another chunk of the so-called annexed territory. Meanwhile, some 300,000 military-age Russian men — the number Putin has ordered to be drafted — head for the exits, fist fights break out at military induction centers as some 20 others are torched, and a recruitment officer is critically shot. Finally, a top Russian economist?predicts , “The Russian economy is going to die by winter.”
What’s wrong with this picture?
Well, everything. It’s just that Lt. Col. Putin isn’t paying attention. Let’s hope his thug-laden?siloviki?are, and act to remove him before Russia collapses — or he orders tactical nuclear missile strikes.
We’ve seen this movie before. If history doesn’t quite repeat itself, in Russia it comes closer than most places. In the space of three generations, 1905 through 1991, Russia suffered three major political disruptions following devastating defeats in war. It will soon, I predict, incur a fourth as a shaken and cornered Putin?faces ?imminent challenges to his power from an increasingly fissured power elite and restive population.
As I write this, Ukrainian forces have liberated the Donbas city of Lyman and are closing in on the major southern hub of Kherson — cities the residents of whom Putin just days ago affirmed, were now “Russians forever.”
Unfortunately for the Russian president, Kyiv has a different view,?declaring ?the sham referendums, “null and worthless.”
Moreover, demoralized Russian troops, of whom up to 80,000 are estimated to have been killed or wounded in Ukraine, are reporting the truth to friends and loved ones back home, as evidenced by?this ?phone conversation of a son with his mother recently intercepted by Ukrainian military intelligence:
“We’re just standing here, getting f*cked everywhere.”
“What kind of special operation is this? They’ve f*cked up 50,000.”
“No one understands what’s in his (Putin’s) bald f*cking head.”
And?this ?from another son to his mother:
“Remove him from the post of the president. Nobody needs this war.”
Ukraine?reports ?some 2,000 Russian men have called their hotline with instructions on how to surrender.
“What we might be at here is really at the precipice of really the collapse of the Russian army in Ukraine. A moral collapse,” former U.S. National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster?told ?CBS.
“No amount of shambolic mobilization, which is the only way to describe it, no amount of annexation, no amount of even veiled nuclear threats can actually get [Putin] out of this particular situation,”?said ?retired Army Gen. David Petraeus on ABC on Sunday. “He is losing, and the battlefield reality he faces is, I think, irreversible.”
Beyond Their Peter Principle Threshold: Putin Channeling Tsar Nicholas II
One almost gets the sense that Vladimir Putin is channeling Tsar Nicholas II. Both held power undemocratically and way too long. Both were out of touch with their people. Both presided over an empire of rot. Both proved to be feckless, galactically incompetent and venal. Nicholas met his comeuppance before a firing squad. Putin’s ultimate fate is still being written. I’m no Nostradamus, but Creedence Clearwater Revival captures the moment: “I see the bad moon a-risin'.”
An avid believer in “alternate facts” history, Putin, naturally, is learning nothing from Nicholas’s disastrous handling of Russia’s wars with Japan in 1904-1905, nor the Central Powers in World War I. On the contrary, he seems to be doing his best to replicate it in his mindless “special military operation” against Ukraine.
Rejecting diplomacy out of hand, in 1904 Nicholas blundered into conflict with the upstart Japanese, whom he?derided ?as “Asian small yellow monkeys.” In the same vein, Putin dismissed diplomacy to launch a war of aggression against Ukraine, which he?insisted ?was “not a country.”
Nicholas doubled down after the Japanese destroyed the Russian Far East fleet, sending his Baltic Fleet to battle the Japanese, who promptly sank it too. The Ukrainians have sunk Russia’s Black Sea flagship?Moskva, along with 14 other vessels. Putin is doubling down with his ill-fated mobilization of at least 300,000 largely unmotivated men, a move Ukraine President Zelensky?derided ?as a “mobilization to graves.”
As the Russo-Japanese War dragged on, the tsar called up over a million undisciplined, unmotivated and under-trained reservists, whose brawling?resulted ?in 123 major outbreaks of violence, ranging from simple “mob disorders” to all-out riots, looting, assaults on police and military personnel, refusals to board troop trains, and destruction of infrastructure. In 1904, regular troops were deployed 67 times to subdue rioting reservists. Initial popular support for the war evaporated.
Upon deployment in Manchuria, Russian troops engaged in looting, murdering civilians and rape. Russian officers were at a loss to control their men, who often disobeyed orders. Add to this: inferior technology, bickering commanders, poor combined arms coordination and supply chain blockages that held up provision of men and matériel. Having not adequately prepared for its long distance, imperialist war, the tsar and his military leadership had failed to build the apparatus needed to manage the great numbers of mobilized men, who lacked food and equipment once deployed. This all repeats itself today in Ukraine.
There were at least 211?mutinies ?toward the end of 1905, another 202 in 1906. One-third of the infantry regiments the tsar used to quash civilian unrest mutinied. (Pay close attention. Should mutinies by Russian troops break out in Ukraine, the writing is on the wall.)
By the time Nicholas sued for peace in 1905, Russia had?lost ?an estimated 34,000 to 53,000 men, with a further 9,000–19,000 having perished from disease and some 75,000 captured.
Nicholas’s needless war of choice with Japan sparked turmoil in Russia. The economy deteriorated, resulting in food shortages. Russia was viewed internationally as a great power in decline. Popular unrest led to the massacre of hundreds of protesters by the tsar’s Imperial Guard in January 1905.
The resultant outrage brought on limited reforms, notably creation of the Russian Duma. But the imperial regime was severely weakened. Nicholas limped along in power until he was given yet another chance to display his incompetence in World War I. What Russia was able to achieve in sheer manpower, it largely squandered with poor leadership and egregious systemic inefficiencies in that war.
The Russian economy, blocked from Europe’s markets in the First World War, came under great strain, with soaring inflation and food shortages, leading to popular unrest followed by severe government crackdowns, including massacres of civilians. The rot at Russia’s core extended to the undersupplied and poorly led armed forces, demoralized by major military defeats, encompassing 2 million dead. Mutinies broke out, starting with the Petrograd garrison. Officers, many incompetent, risked losing their lives to their own disgruntled troops as much as to the enemy. Nicholas’s taking direct command of the armed forces only exasperated matters. (Putin reportedly is overriding military leaders in issuing direct orders to army field commanders.) Many of the tsar’s own previously dependable Cossacks, whom he used to suppress protesters, defected to the Bolsheviks.
British historian Edward Acton?writes ?that “Nicholas undermined the loyalty of even those closest to the throne [and] opened an unbridgeable breach between himself and the public opinion.” The tsar had lost the support of the elites as well as the Russian people, setting the stage for his overthrow.
And the rest, as they say, is history.
Moscow’s Blunder into Afghanistan
And history, again, repeated itself in yet another ill-chosen conflict undertaken by Kremlin leaders, one which occupied years of my diplomatic career: Afghanistan. The Soviet Union’s ten-year military quagmire in that country resulted in some 15,000 killed-in-action and over 50,000 wounded as well as public malaise and a failing economy that hastened the downfall of communism and the breakup of the USSR in 1991, two years after Moscow withdrew its forces.
Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev described the war as “bitter and painful.” Public disapproval of the conflict had increased from 25 percent to 40 percent in three years, according to a declassified CIA?analysis . Some 48 percent of party and government apparatchiks and 66 percent of the intelligentsia “disapproved of the war.”?
The CIA further reported that the Afghan war had sparked “at least 15 major demonstrations” in the previous four years. Most touching for me were those by the Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers, women who courageously protested to the authorities the loss of their sons. One mother?wrote , “The Afghan War is not the Great Patriotic War, such as it was for our fathers. That was a people’s war, everyone understood it. But in this war I didn’t find any logic or commonsense, and so it was doubly hard.” Similar sentiments are being expressed by mothers of Russian soldiers today.
The Costs of Not Heeding History
Revise the dates, change out the characters, make a few other tweaks, and the above historical scenarios broadly lay out Vladimir Putin’s inevitable demise, and, potentially, the geographical breakup of Russia. The main variable is not if, but when. In each of the disastrous interventions I’ve described, Russian leaders’ hubris and incompetence, and the military’s failures, reflect forward on Putin’s own shambolic decision-making. Conflating his all-knowing person with the state (“l'état, c'est moi”), facing imminent defeat in Ukraine, he now risks laying bare before the Russian people his own misrule. This then invites challenges to his leadership by those who, thus far, have kept him in power. He must now realize he faces an existential quandary, with the question: Is it too late to avoid Nicholas’s fate?
领英推荐
The opinions and characterizations in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily represent official positions of the U.S. government.
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And here is the carnage in Ukraine
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Daily Kos Staff
Tuesday October 04, 2022?·?10:25 AM EDT
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It would be possible to write a post today that was simply a list of villages and towns liberated by Ukrainian forces. And it would still be long. From Kherson to Kharkiv—and at nearly every stop in between—Russia’s army is in retreat, Ukrainian forces are advancing, and the speed of the change is incredible. Kos was right on when he stated back at the end of August that?the Russian Army had culminated. But I don’t think he, or Volodymyr Zelenskyy, anticipated just how extensively, and how rapidly, that Russian army would collapse.
In parts of both Kherson and northern Kharkiv, Ukrainian forces don’t seem to be so much fighting their way past Russian defenses, as they are …?strolling into town. And if there’s any shortage the Ukrainian army may be facing at the moment, it could be a shortage of Ukrainian flags.
The spacing and attitude of the?guys in this platoon that they are?not simply free from enemy fire, but astoundingly relaxed.
The advance that began over the weekend in Kherson was initially focused on the western bank of the Dnipro River, but has since become a general rout?all across the northern area that was previously occupied by Russia. As kos pointed out yesterday, not everything has gone perfectly. A column of Ukrainian vehicles was destroyed outside Davydiv Brid, and an effort to occupy that town was apparently forced to retreat across the river under withering fire.?
But on Tuesday, the advance from the north has been so rapid, that it’s unclear if Davydiv Brid is still being seriously contested.
Ukraine has advanced over 20km on both the east and west of this area. So far that Davydiv Brid could soon be taken from the north, rather than the west. The bridgehead that Ukraine established across the Inhulets River, and fought so hard to maintain, is just a few kilometers away from being incorporated into this general southward advance.
How did Ukraine pull off such a sudden and apparently complete defeat of Russia in an area where Russia has packed in troops and armor? There seems to be one factor that played a major role: radios.
There have been astonished reports from the beginning of the invasion that, rather than encrypted high-band military radios, Russia was using consumer-grade equipment—essentially walkie-talkies of the sort you might find at a?nearby sporting goods store. Additionally, Russian forces have often been communicating?en clair, speaking openly of positions and objectives, rather than using any sort of code.?
In Kherson, Ukraine seems to have taken advantage of this fact by issuing false orders and reports over these radio bands. Then they reportedly used jammers —?readily available for these kinds of radios, but much more difficult for real military communications —?to cut Russian forces off from one another. In all the various towns and villages in northern Kherson, Russian forces found themselves receiving a burst of orders, then they were speaking into static. Then a wall of Ukrainian armor came their way.
Isolated and confused, they began to pull back. Overall, Ukraine used Russia’s poor command and control structure, and it’s amazingly bad communications, to turn their northern defensive line into groups of frightened, confused, individuals scrambling to find a safe place. As of mid-day Tuesday in Ukraine, the advance seems to be continuing. In fact, there are reports that the towns at the center of the “in dispute” area above—Novovoskresenske,?Chervone, and neighboring villages—have already been liberated.
Russia has a large number of forces west of the Dnipro, and Ukraine is bound to run into a serious defensive line eventually. There is still about 50km between currently known positions and that bridge at Nova Kakhovka. It’s very unlikely that Ukraine will just keep strolling. But already, Ukraine has liberated something close to 900 square kilometers in north Kherson.
Oh, and another convoy of Russian vehicles being loaded onto a barge near Nova Kakhovka reportedly discovered that it was HIMARS O’clock. Whether this barge was heading into, or out of, Kherson isn’t clear.
Meanwhile, in the north…
For the last three weeks, I’ve been jokingly referring to the area around Lyman as the “Greater Tri-Oblast Area,” the kind of place where you can imagine that the morning news comes with a farm report and there’s a rivalry among high school sports teams. But if you look at the map above, the days of the Tri-Oblast Area are definitely numbered.?
That’s because there are no Russian-occupied locations remaining in northern Donetsk Oblast, and Ukrainian forces are within a few kilometers of clearing all of Kharkiv Oblast. Very soon now, the whole story in the north will be entirely taking place in Luhansk Oblast, as Ukraine moves toward Svatove and beyond.
There have been advances in many different areas, with movement toward Svatove from the north, west, and south. Over along the Oskil River, Ukrainian forces moved north of Borova, coming within 5km of closing the gap to the area liberated by the force moving south from Kupyansk, and it’s not clear that there is any actual Russian presence remaining in that 5km.?
The most significant single location liberated on Monday was probably Makiivka. This location is not only along the road that formerly supplied the Russian forces that were camped for so long in Lyman, it was one of four locations that were reportedly being reinforced and fortified with defensive positions to act as a brake on Ukrainian movement toward Svatove. That …?didn’t work.
Now that Makiivka has been liberated, I’ve removed the special markers I had put around these four locations, because it seems that this new defensive line may be as illusory as the previous one that supposedly ran through Borova.
The blue circle north of Kreminna represents an area where Ukrainian forces apparently reached the P66 highway and have blocked traffic along that route, but haven’t yet reported taking a town along this route. Expect that to change very soon, as it looks like Ukrainian forces are pressing both north and east from Makiivka.?
There are so many localities being liberated in this area alone, that I’m absolutely certain the map is woefully out of date. What’s clear at this moment is that the Russian forces reportedly packing up gear in Svatove better hurry. Because they’re about to be hit from all sides at once.
I didn’t yet make a map, but there are also advances in the south, and Ukrainian forces are hinting that there’s about to be big movement. So don’t be surprised if this counteroffensive, which is already turning to a contest in just how quickly Ukraine moves forward and raises flags, becomes a more general rout.
At this rate, Ukrainians are going to be wishing Putin had made his declaration months ago.
METERS VS TOWNS
Back in Russia, one commentator has noticed something we’ve been talking about for weeks.
A RUSSIAN ATTACK ON THE DONBAS ENDS IN SPECTACULAR DISASTER
This is a message that seems as if it could have been written at any time in the last three months.
It translates as “Our troops repelled Russian attacks in the areas of Viymka, Mayorsk, Spirne, Ozeryanivka, Bakhmutske, Kamianka and Ternovy Pody.” Many of these towns have been attacked multiple times a day, every day, and still, the Ukrainian positions hold.
But in the south, near?Yehorivka, one Russian attack was more than “repelled.” It was obliterated.
A LIBERATION PARADE
This is far from all. Expect updates.
This had already happened before I finished typing that it could happen.?
There isn’t a map currently online that is accurate.?
I’m already going?with an?updated map. It’s not just the merger with?the Inhulets bridgehead and the liberation of Davydiv Brid, but the continued roll through the villages at the center of this area.?
One word of caution: Exciting as this is, Russia does seem to be pulling back, rather than getting obliterated or surrendering in place. So the density of Russian troops and equipment can be expected to increase as they’re compressed into a smaller area.?
The three towns highlighted here are supposedly locations where Russian forces have gathered and are trying to create a defensive line. The locations make some sense, as each is on a highway intersection and together they guard the northern approach to?Berislav / Nova Kakhovka. Are these locations really more secure, or will they evaporate as easily as the supposed defensive line in Kharkiv. Stay tuned.
Ukraine continuing to make sure that the Kherson fight happens with the resources each has on hand.?
SNIP
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Andrew Beckwith, PhD
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/30/opinion/putin-russia-ukraine.html