WW3? Ukraine/US vs. Donbass/Russia

https://twitter.com/RT_com/status/1564714198294216704

https://projectavalon.net/Gorbachev.jpg

https://www.rt.com/russia/558272-gor...soviet-leader/

Mikhail Gorbachev dies at 91

Mikhail Gorbachev, the first and only president of the Soviet Union, has died at the age of 91, in Moscow.

His death was reported on Tuesday night by the Central Clinical Hospital, which said in a statement that “Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev died this evening after a serious and prolonged illness.”

According to the news agency TASS, Gorbachev was hospitalized at the very beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, at the request of his doctors, and had been under medical supervision ever since.

A divisive figure, supporters credit him with having played a key part in bringing about an end to the Cold War, while opponents accuse him of aiding in the fall of the Soviet Union and a major loss to Moscow’s prestige and global influence.

Perestroika, glasnost, private business and the presidency

Born in 1931 into a peasant family in southern Russia, in his teens Gorbachev operated combine harvesters on collective farms. His party career started early in his student years, when he studied law at Lomonosov Moscow State University. His ascent through the ranks was relatively rapid, and in 1985 he became the general secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, making him the highest ranking official in the USSR.

During his time in office, Gorbachev aimed to re-energize the stalled Soviet economy, which was riddled with inefficiency, overblown defense spending and creeping corruption. He called for urgent reorganization and modernization, but soon expanded his reform to political and social structure of the whole nation.

The policy of 'perestroika' was announced in 1986 as an attempt to reorganize the economy. More a political movement, the “restructuring” aimed to give more independence to ministries and large state-owned enterprises. It also introduced some free market-style reforms. In 1988, Gorbachev permitted establishing private enterprises in the country for the first time since Vladimir Lenin’s “New Economic Policy” of the 1920s.

Another policy proclaimed was 'glasnost'. Gorbachev aimed to bring transparency into society, ease the Communist Party’s control over the media and release political prisoners. This was a radical change, since control over public speech had previously been an essential part of the Soviet regime.

Gorbachev also proposed a constitutional change to move to a presidential system and created a new political body called the Congress of People’s Deputies. The 2,250 members were elected in the Soviet Union’s first semi-competitive parliamentary election. On March 15, 1990, following a vote in the Congress of People’s Deputies, Mikhail Gorbachev became president of the USSR.

Soviet pullout from Afghanistan, end of Cold War

Gorbachev’s foreign policy, also known as the “new thinking,” marked a period of significant improvement of relations between the Soviet Union and Western countries, replacing the era of Cold War hostilities.

In 1986, he announced plans to withdraw Soviet troops from Afghanistan, but it took three more years to complete the pullout.

The Soviet-Afghan war was a major point of criticism for the West. It also cost the Soviet Union at least 15,000 casualties, put additional strains on an already creaking bureaucratic planned economy and filled the country with veterans suffering from combat stress disorders.

The reengagement with the West paved the way for several key disarmament treaties to be signed. Moscow and Washington agreed to dismantle their intermediate-range conventional and nuclear missiles – the very precise weapons that could tempt the military into using nuclear weapons on a limited scale, but still trigger global mutual annihilation. Under Gorbachev, Moscow unilaterally stopped all nuclear tests.

Moscow’s relations with the Eastern Bloc countries also underwent a radical change. Earlier, Soviet troops always served as the final argument, should one of the countries of the Cold War-era Warsaw Pact try to shift its allegiance. But Gorbachev’s liberalization included the right of self-determination for those nations. This was jokingly called the “Sinatra doctrine” after the singer Frank Sinatra, alluding to his song, 'My Way' as countries were allowed to determine their own internal policies. A string of revolutions in 1989 ousted European Communist regimes, and in 1990 West and East Germany reunified as one country.

For his efforts in easing international tensions, Gorbachev was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990.

In a statement accompanying the award, the Nobel Committee said that the president of the Soviet Union had played a “leading role” in the international peace process.

Fall of the Berlin Wall

Gorbachev is also well-known for having played a key role in the fall of the Berlin Wall, the symbol of a split Europe and divided world in the times of the Cold War.

After the fall of the Nazi regime as a result of World War II, Germany had become two separate countries by 1949. The Federal Republic of Germany (or West Germany) was run by the Western Allies, while the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) was controlled by the Soviet Union. Berlin was located inside East Germany, but it was shared by both West and East Germany, with the Berlin Wall dividing the territories of the two states.

Built in 1961, the wall separated families and loved ones for 28 years. It was eventually toppled on the night of November 9, 1989. During a visit to West Germany earlier in 1989, the Soviet leader declared that every nation can "freely choose its own political and social system" and that Moscow would "respect for the right of all peoples to self-determination."

The fall of the Berlin Wall marked the dawn of a new age – the end of the Cold War and the bipolar world – and it paved the way for Germany’s reunification in 1990.

Collapse of the Soviet Union

The partial democratization of Soviet society under Gorbachev led to a surge in nationalist and anti-Russian sentiment in most of the 15 Soviet republics. But this drive for independence was not always peaceful. On several occasions, Moscow ordered the use of force against violent riots, as the nationalist course in certain regions was seen as capable of spawning much greater violence in the future if the government failed to act. However, the use of force only caused bigger protests.

The frozen conflicts in ethnic enclaves around the country, such as Nagorno-Karabakh and Trans-Dniester, as well as the 2008 war in South Ossetia, are the legacies of those events.

Amid growing tensions within the USSR, Gorbachev attempted to draft a new union treaty. However, a group of hardline Soviet top officials, who called themselves the “State Committee on the State of Emergency,” attempted to stage a coup and to remove Gorbachev from power to prevent the signing of the new union treaty.

Gorbachev initially denounced the move as illegal, but later the same month acknowledged it and announced his resignation as president.

Controversy, post-Soviet contributions

Gorbachev’s policies made him popular in the West, but in his own country he remains a controversial figure to this day. He is praised by many for his disarmament initiatives, the unification of Germany, instigating the fall of the Iron Curtain and ending the Cold War, as well as for granting the Eastern European countries the right of self-determination.

However, the former Soviet leader also faces significant criticism, mostly at home, from those who believe that his policies weakened the Soviet Union and its successor, Russia, and were the major cause of the collapse of the USSR.

Some critics particularly say that, by moving forward with his disarmament initiatives, including the unilateral ones, he undermined the military and industrial might of the Soviet Union, while others accuse him of failing to prevent NATO from expanding further eastwards and eventually reaching Russia’s borders.

After his resignation, Gorbachev created the International Non-Governmental Foundation for Socio-Economic and Political Studies (The Gorbachev Foundation), which is both a research center and discussion platform, as well as an NGO overseeing humanitarian charity projects.

In 1993, at the initiative of representatives of 108 countries, Gorbachev established Green Cross International, a non-governmental environmental organization, which now has offices in 23 countries around the world.

In 1999, he also became one of the initiators of the Nobel Peace Laureates Summit, which meets every year to discuss global threats, such as violence and wars, poverty, crisis situations in the world’s economy and the environment, according to the Gorbachev Foundation website.

Between 2001 and 2009, Gorbachev also co-chaired the St. Petersburg Dialogue, an annual Russian-German forum held in turn in both countries and attended by politicians, entrepreneurs and young people.

The former Soviet leader has also visited about 50 countries since 1992. He has been given more than 300 awards, diplomas, certificates of honor, and honorable distinctions, according to the Gorbachev Foundation.

Gorbachev has also written dozens of books, which have been published in 10 languages.

“I was doing my best in bringing together morality and responsibility to people. It’s a matter of principle for me. It was high time to put an end to the rulers’ wild cravings and to their highhandedness. There were a few things I have not succeeded in, but I don’t think I was wrong in my approach,” he wrote in his political article of faith, published by the Gorbachev Foundation.

https://twitter.com/Ukraine66251776/...33307085406209

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Posted by 9ideon

What's up with the reports on that Ukrainian Offensive near Kherson supposed to have started couple hours ago?

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Here's an excellent analysis of the events on the ground (and the rather awful and overwhelming losses suffered by the Ukrainians) by Alexander Mercouris.

He explains how (of course :facepalm: ) this so-called "counter-offensive", much touted by the western media, was a desperate political gambit ordered by Zelensky — but a very poor military one, almost certainly opposed by the Ukrainian military commander-in-chief Valerii Zaluzhny.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=a38ERMtBBV0

Some light relief :)

The bluster and posturing, the bullsh1t and propaganda, Ukraine is beautifully represented in that GIF of the weed usurper among the body builders, mainstream western media is a disgrace.

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Posted by Ravenlocke

Ukraine War Is Depleting U.S. Ammunition Stockpiles, Sparking Pentagon Concern

The level of one type of combat rounds in storage is ‘uncomfortably low,’ says a defense official.......

....In the U.S., it takes 13 to 18 months from the time orders are placed for munitions to be manufactured, according to an industry official. Replenishing stockpiles of more sophisticated weaponry such as missiles and drones can take much longer.

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That's an interesting timeline, and a lengthy one if accurate.

What may need to be borne in mind, and the reason why Russia are not, and won't be running out of munitions, is that they had planned for an eventuality such as the Ukraine situation many many years in advance perhaps from even as long ago as 2014 concerning Ukraine at least.

Also, and I didn't know this before recently, Russia are using something in the region of 60,000 artillery shells a day whereas that was the sum total of artillery shells that US/NATO used in Iraq in 2003 during the (continuing) Gulf War.

That's quite some number.

https://twitter.com/AZmilitary1/stat...42222432387072

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https://twitter.com/AZmilitary1/stat...59789234491392

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https://youtube.com/watch?v=jRmtI-bOxPI

https://twitter.com/EspiritV1/status...67748832198657

https://twitter.com/EspiritV1/status...67754872012802

https://twitter.com/EspiritV1/status...28078245142531

https://twitter.com/EspiritV1/status...64906142781441

https://twitter.com/EspiritV1/status...61964522078209

https://twitter.com/EspiritV1/status...29266801938433

https://twitter.com/TheCradleMedia/s...64685936476162

https://thecradle.co/Article/Columns/14989

Ukraine: Somewhere between Afghanization and Syrianization

One year after the astounding US humiliation in Kabul – and on the verge of another serious comeuppance in Donbass – there is reason to believe Moscow is wary of Washington seeking vengeance: in the form of the ‘Afghanization’ of Ukraine.

With no end in sight to western weapons and finance flowing into Kiev, it must be recognized that the Ukrainian battle is likely to disintegrate into yet another endless war. Like the Afghan jihad in the 1980s which employed US-armed and funded guerrillas to drag Russia into its depths, Ukraine’s backers will employ those war-tested methods to run a protracted battle that can spill into bordering Russian lands.

Yet this US attempt at crypto-Afghanization will at best accelerate the completion of what Russia’s Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu describes as the “tasks” of its Special Military Operation (SMO) in Ukraine. For Moscow right now, that road leads all the way to Odessa.

It didn’t have to be this way. Until the recent assassination of Darya Dugina at Moscow’s gates, the battlefield in Ukraine was in fact under a ‘Syrianization’ process.

Like the foreign proxy war in Syria this past decade, frontlines around significant Ukrainian cities had roughly stabilized. Losing on the larger battlefields, Kiev had increasingly moved to employ terrorist tactics. Neither side could completely master the immense war theater at hand. So the Russian military opted to keep minimal forces in battle – contrary to the strategy it employed in 1980s Afghanistan.

Let’s remind ourselves of a few Syrian facts: Palmyra was liberated in March 2016, then lost and retaken in 2017. Aleppo was liberated only in December 2016. Deir Ezzor in September 2017. A slice of northern Hama in December and January 2018. The outskirts of Damascus in the Spring of 2018. Idlib – and significantly, over 25 percent of Syrian territory – are still not liberated. That tells a lot about rhythm in a war theater.

The Russian military never made a conscious decision to interrupt the multi-channel flow of western weapons to Kiev. Methodically destroying those weapons once they’re in Ukrainian territory – with plenty of success – is another matter. The same applies to smashing mercenary networks.

Moscow is well aware that any negotiation with those pulling the strings in Washington – and dictating all terms to puppets in Brussels and Kiev – is futile. The fight in Donbass and beyond is a do or die affair.

So the battle will go on, destroying what’s left of Ukraine, just as it destroyed much of Syria. The difference is that economically, much more than in Syria, what’s left of Ukraine will plunge into a black void. Only territory under Russian control will be rebuilt, and that includes, significantly, the bulk of Ukraine’s industrial infrastructure.

What’s left – rump Ukraine – has already been plundered anyway, as Monsanto, Cargill and Dupont have already bagged 17 million hectares of prime, fertile arable land – over half of what Ukraine still possesses. That translates de facto as BlackRock, Blackstone and Vanguard, top agro-business shareholders, owning whatever lands that really matter in non-sovereign Ukraine.

Going forward, by next year the Russians will be applying themselves to cutting off Kiev from NATO weapons supplies. As that unfolds, the Anglo-Americans will eventually move whatever puppet regime remains to Lviv. And Kiev terrorism – conducted by Bandera worshippers – will continue to be the new normal in the capital.

The Kazakh double game

By now it’s abundantly clear this is not a mere war of territorial conquest. It’s certainly part of a War of Economic Corridors – as the US spares no effort to sabotage and smash the multiple connectivity channels of Eurasia’s integration projects, be they Chinese-led (Belt and Road Initiative, BRI) or Russian-led (Eurasian Economic Union, EAEU).

Just like the proxy war in Syria remade large swathes of West Asia (witness, for instance, Erdogan about to meet Assad), the fight in Ukraine, in a microcosm, is a war for the reconfiguration of the current world order, where Europe is a mere self-inflicted victim in a minor subplot. The Big Picture is the emergence of multipolarity.

The proxy war in Syria lasted a decade, and it’s not over yet. The same may happen to the proxy war in Ukraine. As it stands, Russia has taken an area that is roughly equivalent to Hungary and Slovakia combined. That’s still far from “task” fulfillment – and it’s bound to go on until Russia has taken all the land right up to the Dnieper as well as Odessa, connecting it to the breakaway Republic of Transnistria.

It’s enlightening to see how important Eurasian actors are reacting to such geopolitical turbulence. And that brings us to the cases of Kazakhstan and Turkey.

The Telegram channel Rybar (with over 640k followers) and hacker group Beregini revealed in an investigation that Kazakhstan was selling weapons to Ukraine, which translates as de facto treason against their own Russian allies in the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO). Consider too that Kazakhstan is also part of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and the EAEU, the two hubs of the Eurasian-led multipolar order.

As a consequence of the scandal, Kazakhstan was forced to officially announce the suspension of all weapons exports until the end of 2023.

It began with hackers unveiling how Technoexport – a Kazakh company – was selling armed personnel carriers, anti-tank systems and munitions to Kiev via Jordanian intermediaries, under the orders of the United Kingdom. The deal itself was supervised by the British military attaché in Nur-Sultan, the Kazakh capital.

Nur-Sultan predictably tried to dismiss the allegations, arguing that Technoexport had not asked for export licenses. That was essentially false: the Rybar team discovered that Technoexport instead used Blue Water Supplies, a Jordanian firm, for those. And the story gets even juicier. All the contract documents ended up being found in the computers of Ukrainian intel.

Moreover, the hackers found out about another deal involving Kazspetsexport, via a Bulgarian buyer, for the sale of Kazakh Su-27s, airplane turbines and Mi-24 helicopters. These would have been delivered to the US, but their final destination was Ukraine.

The icing on this Central Asian cake is that Kazakhstan also sells significant amounts of Russian – not Kazakh – oil to Kiev.

So it seems that Nur-Sultan, perhaps unofficially, somehow contributes to the ‘Afghanization’ in the war in Ukraine. No diplomatic leaks confirm it, of course, but bets can be made Putin had a few things to say about that to President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev in their recent – cordial – meeting.

The Sultan’s balancing act

Turkey is a way more complex case. Ankara is not a member of the SCO, the CSTO or the EAEU. It is still hedging its bets, calculating on which terms it will join the high-speed rail of Eurasian integration. And yet, via several schemes, Ankara allows Moscow to evade the avalanche of western sanctions and embargoes.

Turkish businesses – literally all of them with close connections to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) – are making a killing, and relishing their new role as crossroads warehouse between Russia and the west. It’s an open boast in Istanbul that what Russia cannot buy from Germany or France they buy “from us.” And in fact several EU companies are in on it.

Ankara’s balancing act is as sweet as a good baklava. It gathers economic support from a very important partner right in the middle of the endless, very serious Turkish economic debacle. They agree on nearly everything: Russian gas, S-400 missile systems, the building of the Russian nuclear power plant, tourism – Istanbul is crammed with Russians – Turkish fruits and vegetables.

Ankara-Moscow employ sound textbook geopolitics. They play it openly, in full transparence. That does not mean they are allies. It’s just pragmatic business between states. For instance, an economic response may alleviate a geopolitical problem, and vice-versa.

Obviously the collective west has completely forgotten how that normal state-to-state behavior works. It’s pathetic. Turkey gets “denounced” by the west as traitorous – as much as China.

Of course Erdogan also needs to play to the galleries, so every once in a while he says that Crimea should be retaken by Kiev. After all, his companies also do business with Ukraine – Bayraktar drones and otherwise.

And then there’s proselytizing: Crimea remains theoretically ripe for Turkish influence, where Ankara may exploit the notions of pan-Islamism and mostly pan-Turkism, capitalizing on the historical relations between the peninsula and the Ottoman Empire.

Is Moscow worried? Not really. As for those Bayraktar TB2s sold to Kiev, they will continue to be relentlessly reduced to ashes. Nothing personal. Just business.

https://twitter.com/ReadovkaWorld/st...98546012372992

There's mounting evidence that the war in Ukraine could have been over by this point, but key Western backers of Kiev sought to sabotage the potential for peaceful settlement through negotiations. That's precisely what regional Ukrainian media reports concluded as early as May, soon after the UK's Boris Johnson showed up in the capital on a "surprise" visit to meet with President Volodymyr Zelensky for the first time the month prior

This is what a bombshell story in Ukrainska Pravda said at the time, but which was almost completely ignored in Western mainstream media:

According Ukrainska Pravda sources close to Zelenskyy, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Boris Johnson, who appeared in the capital almost without warning, brought two simple messages. The first is that Putin is a war criminal, he should be pressured, not negotiated with.

And the second is that even if Ukraine is ready to sign some agreements on guarantees with Putin, they [the UK and US] are not. Johnson’s position was that the collective West, which back in February had suggested Zelenskyy should surrender and flee, now felt that Putin was not really as powerful as they had previously imagined, and that here was a chance to "press him."

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitic...sia-peace-deal

• It's even Worse than we Thought, and Zelensky is laughing about it | Redacted with Clayton Morris:

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=rkppO4o-QIk

Ukrainian officials caught stealing billions of dollars in U.S. aid to their country. E.U. declares an energy emergency as Russia halts gas shipments to Germany. California tells citizens to stop charging their electric cars. And you won't believe who's in charge of the new IRS expansion.

Ukrainians attempted to seize the power plant at Zaporozhye.

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=k3_H7T5f_L0

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More on the Zaporozhye NPP attempt

https://twitter.com/AZmilitary1/stat...89722532057090

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https://twitter.com/AZmilitary1/stat...96187758071809

https://twitter.com/Ukraine66251776/...40167828144128

https://twitter.com/Russ_Warrior/sta...15168169684992

https://www.stalkerzone.org/kherson-...than-ilovaisk/

Kherson for Ukraine Becomes Scarier Than Ilovaisk

August 31, 2022

Ukrainian troops lost more than 1,200 people during the day in Nikolaev-Krivoy Rog and other regions. Up to this point, the biggest defeat of Kiev was the Ilovaisk cauldron in 2014, but even there the number of military personnel killed was less. What was the tactical plan of the Ukrainian Armed Forces and why did it result in heavy losses for them?



On Tuesday, the Russian Defence Ministry released detailed data about the losses of the Ukrainian Armed Forces during the failed attempt of the Ukrainian troops to develop a counteroffensive in Kherson and other regions. The enemy suffered large-scale losses – 48 Ukrainian tanks, 46 infantry fighting vehicles and more than 1,200 servicemen were destroyed over the past day. Thus, the attempt to counterattack was not crowned with strategic success for Kiev, but brought heavy losses to the Ukrainian Armed Forces in manpower and equipment.

The losses of the Ukrainian Armed Forces during the failure of the August offensive are comparable to those that Ukraine suffered during the breakthrough from the Ilovaisk pocket in Donbass on the same days eight years ago, military commentator Yury Podolyaka noted on his Telegram channel. “It might be a coincidence, but Zelensky launched an adventurous ‘offensive’ in the Kherson region on the Day of Remembrance of the Defenders of Ukraine, which was timed precisely with the Ilovaisk events,” Podolyaka notes. “This is, apparently, so that the days of remembrance do not multiply – in one day to commemorate both the Ilovaisk dead and the Kherson ones.”

Recall that in mid-August 2014, the offensive of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, the National Guard and the irregular nationalist battalions “Azov” and “Dnepr-1” in the Donetsk region with an attempt to reach the Russian border was stopped by the DPR militia led by Aleksandr Zakharchenko, Mikhail Tolstykh (Givi), Arsen Pavlov (Motorola) and Aleksandr Khodakovsky. By August 26, 2014, Ukrainian troops were trapped in a cauldron near the city of Ilovaisk, and during an attempt to break out the UAF and the nationalist battalions suffered extremely serious losses.

The official reports of the Ukrainian Defence Ministry included 366 dead, but the investigative commission established by the Verkhovna Rada at that time concluded that the army lost more than a 1000 (killed). The head of the commission, a deputy of the then convocation of the Rada from “Batkivshchyna” Andrey Senchenko, in an interview with LigaBusinessInform, called the Ilovaisk defeat at that time “the most severe defeat of the Ukrainian forces”.

“The Ukrainian Armed Forces of Ukraine have suffered the biggest one-time losses in recent months,” Igor Korotchenko, editor-in-chief of the National Defence magazine, told the VZGLYAD newspaper. However, he links Zelensky’s decision to launch a counteroffensive not with the Day of Remembrance of the Defenders of Ukraine, but with the EU summit being held in Brussels at the level of the heads of military departments and the Foreign Ministry. “In particular, the issue of further assistance to Ukraine from the EU is being discussed there. It was for this meeting that Zelensky demanded a counteroffensive, counting on military success,” Korotchenko believes.

READ: UAF Corpses Discovered near Debaltsevo After Latest Failed Breakthrough Attempt

“However, the offensive turned into senseless death and further escalation between Zelensky and the commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces Valery Zaluzhny, so Kiev was left with a broken trough,” the source believes. We will remind that the opinion is expressed that General Zaluzhny warned the political leadership of Ukraine in advance that an attempt by the UAF at a counteroffensive in the Nikolaev-Krivoy Rog direction would end in failure. “It was a completely senseless massacre, in fact, Ukrainian servicemen were used as cannon fodder. And their lives are on Zelensky’s conscience,” Korotchenko stressed.

“Such a huge number of victims for the Ukrainian Armed Forces suggests that the tactics of the military-political leadership of Ukraine and the Ukrainian Armed Forces have not changed since the Ilovaisk pocket.

Like back then, Petro Poroshenko, and now Zelensky herded their fighters to slaughter – for the sake of creating a beautiful picture about a ‘counteroffensive’, about ‘Ukraine’s fight on the front line of all Europe against the ‘horde of orcs’.

Probably, the figures of losses and video recordings of military operations will then be presented to the leadership of Western countries in order to bargain for new supplies of weapons and money,” says Aleksandr Perendzhiev, an associate professor of the Department of Political Science and Sociology of Russian Economic University of G. V. Plekhanova and member of the Expert Council of Officers of Russia.

“Another goal of Zelensky, apparently, was the desire to rehabilitate himself for the recent defeats of the Ukrainian Armed Forces in other parts of the front,” the expert believes. “Such a victory would be widely spread throughout the entire Ukrainian and Western media space. But winning was probably a fallback for him – losing was just as good. Now, according to his plan, the West will be horrified by the number of victims among Ukrainian soldiers, and then active assistance to Kiev will resume,” the source added.

READ: The St Petersburg Forum Speech the West Didn’t Expect

The PR offensive of Ukrainian troops in the south was prepared on a grand scale, experts admit. For the first time in five months, a fully-fledged enemy offensive was attempted on this sector of the front, said military commander Roman Saponkov, who is in the special operation zone. “The Ukrainian Armed Forces used quite large means. Up to 20 tanks and up to 2 infantry battalions were deployed at each of the three sites,” the source said.

It should be noted that exactly the same number of tanks – 20 units – was assigned to the UAF formation that unsuccessfully tried to break through the front in Donbass, near the village of Kodema near the town of Bakhmut (DPR). “In the area of Kodema, the enemy attempted a counteroffensive, it was successfully repelled, 20 tanks and 30 militants were destroyed,” Eduard Basurin, deputy head of the DPR People’s Militia department, said on Tuesday. Also, judging by the description, in both cases – during the offensive on Kherson and in the battles near Kodema – the UAF used diversionary strikes.

The rest of the article,

https://www.stalkerzone.org/kherson-...than-ilovaisk/