The huge gift Ukraine gave NATO and the USA, that neutralizes Putin's ability to intimidate geopolitically, if used correctly. The gift beyond price
The limits of Russian geo political power are becoming starkly apparent for all to see
A. India, as an example in a highly transactional move, is buying huge amounts of heavily discounted RUSSIAN oil shipments. The moment the discounts stop, Indian purchases will halt. Same is true in China, and in Turkey. I.e. these three countries are literally feasting off the embers of a dying Putin regime, and it is transactional all the way. This is strip mining the assets of the Putin regime, and nothing else. Some soft power, NOT.
B. Ukraine is largely neutralizing the Russian Black sea fleet as able to impinge upon Odessa and other areas, due to the Harpoon missiles, and other similar arsenal additions as of the last 3 months
C. US analysts are now being able to look beyond the artificially hyped up capacity of very elite Russian units in Iraq, and other places, and realizing the abysmal rot of the general Russian military was NOT banished in spite of over 100 billion USD investments in military assets by the Putin regime since 1999.
D. We now are able to appreciate for the first time what the Russian federation principle of "de escalation" via nuclear threats, and tactical nuclear strikes really means. in real time. Due to the bombardment of NATO, the USA and others with explicit nuclear threats, from Putin, we can gauge for the first time how insecure Putin's general staff is, with the state of Russian conventional arms preparedness, and what it means in terms of confrontation with other major powers.
E. For the first time, since the war in Biafra, in the 1960s, we are seeing explicit use of, and threats of deliberate starvation as a weapon to coerce other powers to do Putin's bidding. Before 2022, the world did not appreciate the centrality of such threats by Putin, as far as geo politics. Now we KNOW.
All this is due to the valiant, and heroic fight back by Ukraine against an invasion which is bluntly put, right up with the 1941 to 1945 holocaust, one of the worst human rights disasters in the last 200 years. We can thank Ukraine for this tutorial as to the real nature of the Putin regime and what its real capacities are
Now for the articles.
https://eduvart.blogspot.com/2022/06/vladimir-putins-navy-largely.html#ixzz7WtW9QsRU
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Vladimir Putin’s navy ‘largely neutralised” in its ability to control swathe of Black Sea
Tuesday, June 21, 2022
?The British defence secretary said on Tuesday that the ability of Vladimir Putin's navy to control parts of the Black Sea had been "largely offset by Ukraine's coastal defences".
They highlighted reports that "the first successful use of a Western-donated Harpoon anti-ship missile" sank a Russian tugboat.
The attack thwarted Russia's efforts to resupply troops on the competitive Snake Island, they added.
In its latest intelligence report, London’s Ministry of Defence said: “On 17 June 2022, the Ukrainian army claimed the first successful attack on the Russian Navy using a Western-donated Harpoon anti-ship missile.
"The target of the attack was almost certainly the Russian Navy tug Spasatel Vasily Bekh, which was delivering weapons and personnel to Snake Island in the northwestern Black Sea."The destruction of the Russian ship during a resupply mission demonstrates the difficulties Russia faces in trying to assist its forces in the capture of Snake Island."
The military intelligence briefing added: "This is the latest in a series of Russian ships, including the cruiser Moskva, damaged or destroyed by Ukraine in the conflict.
"Ukraine's coastal defense capabilities have largely crippled Russia's ability to establish naval control and deploy naval power in the northwest Black Sea.
"This undermines the viability of Russia's original invasion operational design, which was to threaten the Odessa region from the sea."
Snake Island, also known as Zmini Island, is located in the northwest Black Sea, about 30 miles off the coast of Ukraine and 180 miles west of annexed Crimea.
It has become a symbol of Ukrainian resistance in the face of overwhelming Russian power at the start of Mr Putin's February 24 invasion.
There are fears that about a dozen Ukrainian soldiers reportedly refused to surrender and told one of their warships to "go to hell" so they were killed in the Russian bombing.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy awarded them posthumously the Medal of Valor.
British and other Western defense ministers are waging an information war against Russia over the Ukraine conflict, so their intelligence information and claims must be addressed in this context.
However, the Kremlin's claims must be treated with more caution, as it does not even acknowledge that Mr Putin has waged a war in Ukraine, and his claims of denying war crimes and killing thousands of civilians completely contradict the broad description of the conflict's stance zone .
Meanwhile, Russia has warned NATO member Lithuania that it will act tacitly to defend its national interests unless Moscow quickly lifts a new ban on the transit of goods from Russia's Baltic enclave of Kaliningrad.
Ukraine acknowledged the difficulty of fighting in the east on Tuesday, as Russian troops regrouped to launch a fresh attack on the city of Severo Donetsk in the Donbas region's Luhansk province.
Despite the relative calm overnight, Russian troops occupied some areas on Monday, Luhansk Governor Sergei Ghede said.
"It was the calm before the storm," he said.
Zelensky predicted that the Kremlin would ramp up its attacks ahead of an EU summit on Thursday and Friday. In his address to the nation late on Monday, he was defiant but also referred to Luhansk's "difficult" fighting in Severo-Donetsk and its twin city of Resihansk."We defend Lysychansk, Severodonetsk, this whole region, the most difficult. We have the most difficult battles there," he said.
"But we have our strong boys and girls there."
Mr. Gede said Russian troops controlled most of Severo Donetsk, where more than 500 civilians, including 38 children, had taken refuge for weeks, except for the Azot chemical plant.
He said that the road connecting Severodonetsk and Lysychansk with the city of Bakhmut was under constant artillery fire.
Rodion Miroshnik, the self-proclaimed ambassador to Russia of the Luhansk People's Republic, said his troops were "advancing towards Lysichansk from the south" and gun battles broke out in several towns.
"The next few hours should significantly change the balance of power in the region," he said on Telegram.
Mr Putin sent tens of thousands of soldiers to Ukraine on February 24 in what Moscow called a "special operation" to weaken their military and root out what it called dangerous nationalists.
It introduced a law criminalizing the dissemination of "intentionally falsified" information or reports that could discredit the Russian military.
Dmitry Muratov, co-winner of the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize and editor of the Russian independent newspaper The New Gazette, has auctioned off his Nobel Prize for a record $103.5m (￡84m) Help children displaced by war.
His newspaper, harshly critical of Putin, halted operations in Russia in March after warning about his coverage of the war.
The war has entered a brutal attrition phase in recent weeks, with Russian troops concentrated in parts of the Ukrainian-held Donbass that Russia claims on behalf of separatists.
Ukrainian officials reported Monday that three civilians were killed in Russian shelling in the Donetsk region and three others in the Kharkiv region.
A Russian missile destroyed a food warehouse on Monday in Odessa, Ukraine's largest Black Sea port, which is blocked by the Russian navy, the Ukrainian military said.
The United States and its European allies have provided Ukraine with arms and financial support, but avoided direct involvement in the conflict. However, some citizens from the UK, US and other countries volunteered to fight for Ukraine.
On Monday, the Kremlin said two Americans imprisoned in Ukraine were mercenaries who were not protected by the Geneva Convention and should be held accountable for their actions.
The comments by Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov were the first official confirmation of the detention of the two men, 27-year-old Andy Huynh and 39-year-old Alexander Drueke, according to U.S. reports.
A State Department spokesman said they had been in touch with Russian authorities about any detained U.S. citizens.
“We call on the Russian government – as well as its proxies – to live up to their international obligations in their treatment of any individual, including those captured fighting in Ukraine,” it said.
This month, a separatist court in the Donbas sentenced Britons Aiden Aslin and Shaun Pinner, and Moroccan Brahim Saaudun, to death after they were caught fighting for Ukraine.
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And this is re enforced by the following article:
https://www.businessinsider.com/how-us-intel-officials-missed-russian-military-was-hollow-force-2022-6
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US intel officials admit they didn't see that Russia's military was a 'hollow force.' Here's what they did see and how they missed it.
Stavros Atlamazoglou?Jun 20, 2022, 6:27 PM
A wrecked Russian armored personnel carrier near Kutuzivka in eastern Ukraine, May 13, 2022.?Bernat Armangue/AP Photo
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More than 100 days after Russia renewed its attack on Ukraine, and the world has seen that the Russian military isn't what it was believed to be.
The Russian force the US military and intelligence agencies believed to be a near-peer adversary hasn't shown up. The force that did appear had its main thrust blunted by smaller Ukrainian units. After taking heavy casualties and achieving few objects, Moscow pulled back its troops and lowered its ambitions.
Something was off in US assessments of Russia's military, and the Pentagon and intelligence community have admitted that they missed indications that Moscow was in fact fielding a "hollow force."
A hit and a miss
A member of pro-Russian forces jumps off a tank in the separatist-controlled town of Volnovakha in Ukraine's Donetsk region, March 11, 2022.?Alexander Ermochenko/Reuters
The US intelligence community is conducting an internal review of its processes after underestimating Ukrainian resolve and overestimating Russian military capabilities.
The faulty assessment in Ukraine comes after the Pentagon's extremely poor assessment of the Afghan military, which US leaders thought would be able to hold off the Taliban for months after the US withdrawal.
During a Senate Armed Services committee hearing in May, lawmakers questioned Avril Haines, the director of national intelligence, and Lt. Gen. Scott Berrier, the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, about their agencies' assumptions in Ukraine, focusing on assessments that Kyiv would fall in three to four days and that the war would last only two weeks.
"We assessed their capacity to face the size of the Russian forces that were amassed on their border was going to be very difficult for them," Berrier said of the Ukrainians.
Ukrainian troops walk toward the city of Irpin, northwest of Kyiv, March 13, 2022.?DIMITAR DILKOFF/AFP via Getty Images
"What we did not see from the inside was sort of this hollow force" that lacked an effective non-commissioned officer corps, leadership training, and effective doctrines, Berrier said of the Russians. "Those are the intangibles that we have got to be able to get our arms around as an intelligence community to really understand."
Pressed by lawmakers, Berrier said that the DIA would take a hard look at what it had missed by stressed that in "the totality of the entire operation there were a lot more successes than failures."
While US intelligence agencies misinterpreted the effectiveness of the Russian and Ukrainian militaries, they provided accurate information about Russia's intentions in the months prior to Russia's attack, which began on February 24.
Those accurate assessments — many of which the White House has released to allies and the public — helped rally international support for Ukraine and burnish the US's credibility.
How the US assesses foreign militaries
Russian troops in the Victory Day parade for the 71st anniversary of the victory in World War II, in Moscow's Red Square, May 9, 2016.?REUTERS/Grigory Dukor
Intelligence analysts face several hurdles when assessing the capabilities of an adversary.
"When you deal with a foreign actor, analysts can fall prey to a number of mental traps, from confirmation bias, availability bias, or even favoring existing analytic lines over new information," Michael E. van Landingham, a former Russia analyst at the CIA, told Insider.
"Analysts constantly have to try to check themselves and each other through a variety of formal and informal analytic methods to make sure they are not making an error of judgement," van Landingham added.
US intelligence agencies rely on several intelligence collection methods to feed the analytical process.
Human intelligence, the most traditional method, can be the most valuable, depending on the source, as it can provide direct insight into an adversary's plans and intentions. Signals intelligence is gathered from intercepts of electronic communications.
Russian battle groups at the Pogonovo training area on January 26, 2022.?Satellite image ?2022 Maxar Technologies
Open-source intelligence, the new kid on the intelligence block, cobbles together publicly available information from sources like press reports or social media. Imagery intelligence draws on images taken by satellites or aircraft to document an adversary's movements.
Analysts rely on all of the above methods to inform policymakers, but analysts — and policymakers — have to accept that they will seldom know the complete picture.
Collection gaps are often wider and murkier when dealing with adversaries that are skilled at deception and counterintelligence, especially the Russian security services, which are known for their aggressive and complex methods.
"Collection gaps result from a lack of total information. Perhaps you lost access to a technical source or never had it. Perhaps you lack a human perspective on high-level deliberations," said van Landingham, who is founder of risk-analysis and research firm?Active Measures.
"In any event, many policymakers will demand more information than you could hope to get, or there is a critical 'known unknown' that prevents an analyst from having high confidence in a judgement," van Landingham added.
Stavros Atlamazoglou is a defense journalist specializing in special operations, a Hellenic Army veteran (national service with the 575th Marine Battalion and Army HQ), and a Johns Hopkins University graduate.
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And all that Russia has left is to be the petrol station, of the world for all the corrupt allies of the Putin regime whom want to feast off Putin's dying regime
See this
https://www.wsj.com/articles/india-tells-oil-companies-to-load-up-on-discounted-russian-crude-11655825650
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SHARE
India Tells Oil Companies to Load Up on Discounted Russian Crude
Purchases by state-owned companies could limit the pain for Moscow from Western sanctions over the invasion of Ukraine
Video: EU Leaders Pledge to Ban Nearly All Russian Oil Imports
Video: EU Leaders Pledge to Ban Nearly All Russian Oil Imports
Play video: Video: EU Leaders Pledge to Ban Nearly All Russian Oil Imports
European Union leaders agreed to block 90% of Russian oil imports by year-end. The embargo faced opposition from countries highly dependent on Russian crude, especially Hungary. Photo: Olivier Matthys/Associated Press
By?Anna Hirtenstein?and?Benoit Faucon
June 21, 2022 11:34 am ET
The Indian government has asked state oil companies to scoop up huge volumes of cheap crude from Russia, according to industry executives, strengthening commercial ties with the country even as the West tightens?sanctions on Moscow.
Western countries have sought to hamper Russia’s ability to use its vast oil and gas exports to fund the war in Ukraine. The emergence of India as a major buyer of Russian oil has the potential to take the sting out of the sanctions. Other nations, including China and Turkey, have also stepped up their purchases of Russian oil, though?the country’s exports?remain below prewar levels.
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That is called transactional alliance, cubed. No such discounts would leave NO entries for Russian oil in either Turkey, China, or India.
Andrew Beckwith, PhD