A giant blow up similar to what happened in 1917. Yes Iranian Drones are creating problems, but what good do it do for Russia ? Not much
In response to the Putin threat to use nuclear weapons recently consider the number of Russians being dragged into a war they want NOTHING to do with
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How then should the West react to the?lines in the speech ?that were perceived as particularly provocative, such as “In the event of a threat to our territorial integrity and to defend Russia and our people, we will certainly make use of all means available to us.??This is not a bluff .”?That threat needs to be taken seriously but not overly dramatized.??
One conclusion is that the West may be in a much stronger position than it realizes.?To deal with the unlikely but not impossible nuclear scenario, the West must make it absolutely clear that in that circumstance?all Russian military forces in Ukraine would be vulnerable to attack.?And the West has the ability to cripple Russian forces with precision strikes that would put the Ukrainian army in a dominant position.
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I agree, but what we are not taking into account is a system cannibalizing itself. See this
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Yusov, spokesman for the Ministry of Defence of Ukraine, said that the ministry’s hotline has received many calls from Russians who had recently been called up and who are now asking how to surrender to Ukraine.
Source: Yusov on the 24/7 national joint newscast
Quote: "The hotline has received a lot of calls from Russians who were called up recently, and even from some who have even been called up yet. They’re calling and asking ‘What should I do if I get called up? What do I have to do, what’s the right way to surrender?’"
Details: Yusov said that in light of the recent wave of mobilisation, Russians are lacking in motivation and suffering from low morale.
Residents of Russian-occupied Crimea and occupied territories in Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts are also resorting to comparable actions.
Yusov added that Russia has run out of people who could be called up in the temporarily occupied territories of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts. The only men remaining are either sick or engaged in essential work that is vital to the region’s viability.
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What has happened, is that Putin is pushing the Russian Federation into a pre revolutionary state, and if say 100,000 "volunteers" with NO training are put into the Southern battlefield, even with the IRANIAN Drones, the "volunteers" will be massacred
The system will, with the first wave of new conscripts be at a maximum point of breaking, similar to what happened when Kerensky ignored the exhaustion of his military in 1917 and insisted upon new assaults
Take this one as a given. The first batch of "volunteers" scourged up by Putin will be MASSCRED and the revolution against Putin will blow up right afterwards
https://www.yahoo.com/news/mobilised-russians-call-hotline-ask-185500131.html
Mobilised Russians call hotline to ask how to surrender
Ukrainska Pravda
Mon, September 26, 2022 at 2:55 PM
ALONA MAZURENKO – MONDAY, 26 SEPTEMBER 2022, 21:55
Andrii Yusov, spokesman for the Ministry of Defence of Ukraine, said that the ministry’s hotline has received many calls from Russians who had recently been called up and who are now asking how to surrender to Ukraine.
Source: Yusov on the 24/7 national joint newscast
Quote: "The hotline has received a lot of calls from Russians who were called up recently, and even from some who have even been called up yet. They’re calling and asking ‘What should I do if I get called up? What do I have to do, what’s the right way to surrender?’"
Details: Yusov said that in light of the recent wave of mobilisation, Russians are lacking in motivation and suffering from low morale.
Residents of Russian-occupied Crimea and occupied territories in Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts are also resorting to comparable actions.
Yusov added that Russia has run out of people who could be called up in the temporarily occupied territories of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts. The only men remaining are either sick or engaged in essential work that is vital to the region’s viability.
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Russian occupation authorities have said that they were planning to form "voluntary" battalions in the occupied territories in southern Ukraine. At the same time, however, Putin and other Russian officials are fearful of arming residents of the occupied territories of Ukraine.
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Whereas
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Is Ukraine Putin’s Iraq?
BY HARLAN ULLMAN, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR - 09/26/22 8:00 AM ET
THE VIEWS EXPRESSED BY CONTRIBUTORS ARE THEIR OWN AND NOT THE VIEW OF THE HILL
A careful reading of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s?Ukraine speech? last week raises two contrarian questions. First, is Ukraine Putin’s Iraq??The parallels are striking.
As the United States was propelled into the second Iraq war ?20 years ago over weapons of mass destruction (WMD) that did not exist, Putin’s?manufactured arguments ?for invading Ukraine to protect the people of Donbas and Crimea from Kyiv’s “neo-nazi” repression resonated with similarly fraudulent arguments. Most Americans accepted the?George W. Bush? administration’s reasons for the invasion. So too, many Russians?believe ?or have chosen not to reject Putin’s deceit.
Further, as George W. Bush used the fatuous “mushroom cloud argument ,”?Putin? repeats it for home consumption.?He?asserts? that Western states “have even resorted to nuclear blackmail. I am referring … (to) high ranking representatives of the leading NATO nations on the admissibility of using … nuclear weapons against Russia.”?Really?
Putin is also recreating the?U.S. “surge” in Iraq,?calling up ?300,000 reservists.?But unlike the U.S. surge, this one may prove a Potemkin village.?It takes considerable?time to recruit , retrain, equip and deploy these forces, probably longer than the General Staff in Moscow has calculated.?Russia?cannot provide? adequate logistics for its forces in Ukraine.?How will it provide basic food, shelter, training, weapons, equipment and other support for this cohort that on paper is 50 percent larger than the number of troops in Ukraine?
Russia also?lacks generals ?with the competence of America’s??in Iraq, such as David Petraeus, to execute a surge.?And unanswered is whether Russian protests against the call-up and de facto draft will have an impact.?The U.S. public initially supported the Iraq War despite the absence of WMD.?More likely, Russian security and police forces will?quickly contain any riots and major protests.
The second question is that while the speech was?interpreted ?in the West as escalatory, threatening the use of nuclear weapons and an energy embargo to shatter NATO cohesion, is there an alternative explanation??Could that threat have been a form of?maskirovka ?(deception) concealing Putin’s real aim of ending the war through forced negotiations??The “tell” could have been Putin’s previously undisclosed claim of?Kyiv’s representatives? initially voicing “a positive response to our proposals” for a settlement.
To non-Russians, Putin’s accusations of?NATO? wielding a nuclear threat are preposterous.?NATO is a defensive alliance, possessing a relatively small number of so-called tactical nuclear weapons.?Nowhere has any NATO leader even intimated using nuclear weapons: Quite the opposite. And Presidents Biden and Putin have agreed that?a?nuclear war ?can never be won and must never be fought.??
Other than invention, how could Putin possibly have concluded that NATO was overtly making a nuclear threat??The answer actually makes sense to a Russian, especially a paranoid one. U.S.?military strategy? since the Obama administration has been “to contain, deter and, if war comes, defeat” potential enemies led by Russia and China.??
As a world war almost certainly would be nuclear, Moscow perceives this strategy as a direct nuclear threat to it.?And, the U.S. has?deployed nuclear capable B-52? bombers in proximity to Russia as a show of force. Moscow has regarded these deployments as a direct nuclear threat.?Perhaps Washington and Brussels did not consider this reaction.
How then should the West react to the?lines in the speech ?that were perceived as particularly provocative, such as “In the event of a threat to our territorial integrity and to defend Russia and our people, we will certainly make use of all means available to us.??This is not a bluff .”?That threat needs to be taken seriously but not overly dramatized.??
One conclusion is that the West may be in a much stronger position than it realizes.?To deal with the unlikely but not impossible nuclear scenario, the West must make it absolutely clear that in that circumstance?all Russian military forces in Ukraine would be vulnerable to attack.?And the West has the ability to cripple Russian forces with precision strikes that would put the Ukrainian army in a dominant position.
There is another conclusion. As recommended last week, a?three-pronged strategy ?must be implemented that combines diplomacy with judicial use of force.?If the speech was indeed a long-term Russian commitment to stay the course as the U.S. did in Iraq, we are prepared for that option.?But if the speech signaled another course of action, that must not be ignored either.
Harlan?Ullman?is senior adviser at the Atlantic Council and the prime author of “shock and awe.”?His latest??book is?“The Fifth Horseman and the New MAD: How Massive Attacks of Disruption Became the Looming Existential Danger to a Divided Nation and the World at Large.”? Follow him on Twitter @harlankullman.
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Andrew Beckwith, PhD