https://twitter.com/ArthurM40330824/...93488369516544
Printable View
https://www.moonofalabama.org/2023/0...-lessons-.html
Ukraine - Air Defense Lessons
This is factual:
Patriot Missiles Won’t Save Ukraine - National Interest - May 9, 2023
Patriot systems are limited to pinpoint defense of major assets and are designed to operate in tandem with air defenses engaging targets at higher and lower altitudes. Without these additions, Patriot will have too many threats to engage and the result will either be porous coverage that doesn’t protect its defended assets, or coverage that quickly subsides when Patriot runs out of interceptors.
Moreover, Patriot systems are themselves vulnerable. Operating a Patriot radar system gives away its location, making it an open target for Russian attacks. This means that Patriot is not a one-stop-shop for defending Ukraine’s military assets or its people.
Those facts were proven last night.
War Monitor @WarMonitors - 1:23 UTC · May 16, 2023
⚡️I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but after careful review of this video, it appears that the air defence battery (most likely patriot) tried to save itself, but failed. It most probably got toasted.
Embedded video
Those were expensive two minutes for the 'West':
Fennec_Radar @RadarFennec - 1:45 UTC · May 16, 2023
I counted 30 Patriot PAC-3 MSE launches here.
The FY2024 costs of these per missile is about $$5,275,000
That was $158,250,000 fired in about two minutes. And as we see, the battery or something else likely got blown up. So it failed in its mission.
Embedded video
This though is likely not true. Kinzhals are simply too fast to be hit by any of Ukraine's air defenses:
Defense of Ukraine @DefenceU - 6:40 UTC · May 16, 2023
Last night, russian terrorists attacked Ukraine with:
- 6 Kinzhal aeroballistic missiles
- 9 Kalibr missiles
- 3 ground-launched missiles
- drones
ALL TARGETS SHOT DOWN.
Glory to the Ukrainian Air Forces!
We are grateful to our partner states for strengthening our air defense capabilities.
The casualty numbers in today's clobber report by the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation may be a bit exaggerated but the general operational facts are usually true:
The Ministry of Defence of the Russian Federation launched a combined attack with long-range precision-guided air- and sea-based weapons against the AFU units, as well as depots of ammunition, weapons and military equipment supplied by Western countries.
The goal of the attack has been reached. All the assigned targets have been neutralised.
U.S.-manufactured Patriot surface-to-air missile system has been struck by Kinnzhal hypersonic glide vehicle in Kiev.
...
Fighter Aviation of Russian Aerospace Forces have shot down Su-24 and Su-25 aircraft of Ukrainian Air Force near Varvarovka and Krasnoarmeysk (Donetsk People's Republic).
Air defence forces intercepted seven Storm Shadow long-range cruise missiles, three HARM anti-radar missiles and seven HIMARS multiple-launch rocket system projectiles.
Air defence facilities have shot down 22 unmanned aerial vehicles close to Ivanovka and Yevgenovka (Donetsk People's Republic), Topolyovka (Lugansk People's Republic), Inzhenernoye, Blagoveshchenka (Zaporpzhye region), and Krynki (Kherson region).
Ukraine does not have an integrated air defense that can attack all air targets at all levels. Russia though has such an integrated system of systems. It makes for a huge difference.
Seems my cost estimate may have been low. :)Quote:
Posted by Bill Ryan
https://twitter.com/RadarFennec/stat...87607938162690
Text:
Nice job Wyatt
@DefensePolitics
coining the term "Citadel" for the dense high-rise residential sector in western Bakhmut (along both sides of Levanevskogo st).
We are fast seeing its fall.
It became more recently divided into sections known to us as "Nest", "Constructor" and "Domino".
The first & second are quickly falling (or have fallen), with UA forces retreating to Domino, pressured from RU forces on 3 sides now that fighting has reached the Children's Hospital.
The Citadel turned out not to be able to hold as well as the NW sector of Bakhmut which would allow the former's encirclement. The area around the Olympic school and Post office were fiercely and intelligently defended, and the entire low-lying area was dominated from the high ground in the north and the high rises in the Citadel itself.
(discussed that possibility earlier here:
https://twitter.com/ZimermanErik/sta...47056173031429 & elsewhere, but still advised against it here https://twitter.com/ZimermanErik/sta...93018033491970)
Wagner, now expert in urban combat seems to be able to advance in a dense urban environment with relative ease (under the right conditions of course, not any). Ukrainian forces meanwhile, correctly defended the NW corner with everything they got, and prefer to retreat from areas of the Citadel while they remain unblocked, then remain there while they give ground in the critical NW sector.
However, if UA forces do not leave Domino pretty soon, they will face at least an operational encirclement there as well, as the NW sector including the "last line of defense" is finally collapsing.
https://twitter.com/ZimermanErik/sta...55879769903105
A new 30-minute video from The Duran, well worth watching for those who follow their analyses. Alexander Mercouris (who is very grounded, cautious and balanced), usually holds the floor.
But in this update, Alex Christoforou is clearly showing signs of frustration — which I can entirely understand. :flower:
They cover the recent gigantic explosion, very likely including a stockpile of UK-donated Depleted Uranium shells, as well as the Pope's visit to Zelensky (OMG :facepalm:), new weapons supplies, Zelensky's future, behind-the-scenes US political arguments about the war, and much more.
Russia destroys collective west weapons, as Zelensky tours Europe
https://youtube.com/watch?v=ZoelgwymkJg
Adding to the complexity of the Ukraine/Russia conflict is the fact that Americans, Poles, Ukrainians as well as ethnic separatists of the Russian Federation have long been envisionning and planning the dismantling of Russia into several (and up to 34) separate states.
I just read the French translation of an appendice to the editorial that was published in the February 2023 edition of the Italian magazine of geopolitics LIMES and that talks specifically about that fact.
Here's an English translation of the article (done mostly through DeepL translator — thus not a perfect translation, but close enough):
_____________________________________________
PLANS OF RUSSIA'S DISMANTLING
Several projects aim to dismantle Russia and divide it into several states. These projects, carried out by Poles, Americans and Ukrainians, reflect both a fear of Russia and an expansionist geopolitical vision.
The Free Nations of Post-Russia Forum, a framework for dialogue that brings together the independence demands of ethnic minorities and regional realities in Russia (and their Euro-Atlantic sympathizers—Americans, Poles and Balts), met in the European Parliament on January 31, 2023 for its fifth meeting. The group presented in Brussels its project of "decolonization and reconstruction" of the Russian Federation, sponsored by the Polish component of the European Conservatives and Reformists Party (ECR Party).
Anna Fotyga, MEP and former Polish Foreign Minister (Pis, Law and Justice party) who has been involved in the work of the Forum since its inception, reiterated its founding mission:"As in the case of the German Third Reich, the Russian Federation, as an existential threat to humanity and the international order, should undergo drastic changes. It is naive to think that Russia, after being definitively defeated, will remain within the same constitutional and territorial framework. The international community cannot adopt a comfortable position waiting for developments, but must undertake a (...) re-federalization of the Russian state, taking into account the history of its imperialism and respecting the rights and desires of its constituent nations."1DISMEMBERING THE FEDERATION
- Among the speakers at the last forum was Polish-American analyst Janusz Bugajski, a former advisor to the Departments of State and Defense, who has been called "the new Brzezinski" without good reason. His latest book, "Failed State. A guide to Russia's Rupture" has found itself in the crosshairs of the Russian press, presented as a breviary of American plans to dismember the Federation by encouraging ethnic separatism.2
- Since its inauguration (on May 8 in Warsaw), the Forum has gained notoriety and membership. The first map produced by the group (published in the 9/22 issue of Limes 3) envisioned an implosion of Russia from which more than thirty different states, delineated along disparate ethnic and cultural lines, would emerge. We reproduce an update here (color map 6): the most important change is the reduction in the size of the Moscow region in favour of new ethnic-national projects.
https://i.postimg.cc/SKkYK9y8/6.jpg
- For example, some representatives of the Pskov and Tver regions (former principalities not represented in the previous version) as well as the Smolensk/Smaland region announced the birth of the "East Kryvy Platform", a grouping created with the aim of "integrating the peoples of the Great Baltic" and leaning "towards the East European variant of the Euro-Atlantic path, which implies the preservation of the identity and cultural and demographic foundations of countries and peoples."4
- In the new version of the map, the Caucasian republics of Ingushetia, Ossetia and Kabardino-Balkaria also gain space and specific borders. According to their own authors, this matrix map is open to potentially infinite variations. As long as they serve a single purpose: to imagine "strategies for a controlled, constructive, and nonviolent dismantling of the last colonial empire in Europe."5
UKRAINE'S VISION OF THE DIVISION
- Russian separatists and their Euro-Atlantic mouthpieces are not the only ones engaged in such mapping exercises. On a wall in the office of Ukrainian military intelligence chief Kyrylo Budanov, photographed by journalists during an interview, is the color map 6 b. Drawn in felt-tip pen, Kiev's imagined dividing lines of Russia contest and replace the current federal borders: Japan (Япония) gets the disputed Kuril Islands, Germany (ФРГ) Kaliningrad (Königsberg), Finland (Ф) Karelia, and part of the Russian northwest. China (Китай, to which the letter К corresponds) includes all of Siberia and the Far East.
https://i.postimg.cc/tgmbc14W/6b.jpg
- In the central part of the current Federation, a "Central Asian Republic" should then be born, under the name of ЦАР (Car). Russia proper, decapitated from its eastern head, is left with the territory marked by the letters РФ (RF). In correspondence with the Caucasus, we read "Ičkerija," the name of the Chechen separatist republic proclaimed in 1991, as well as the territory that the Ukrainian parliament recently recognized as "temporarily occupied" by the Russians,6 which Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had already done for the Kuril Islands.7 The territory of the Caucasus is marked with the letters "Ičkerija," which is the name of the Chechen separatist republic proclaimed in 1991. Most importantly, the Ukrainian borders include not only Donbass and Crimea, but also the Kursk, Belgorod and Kuban regions. Budanov was asked whether the map represented Kiev's plans for territorial expansion once the 1991 borders were restored. His answer was cryptic: "Everyone sees what they want to see. Perhaps it is a rough indicator. Or maybe not."8,9
- If the first map divides the body of the Russian Federation along ethnic lines and according to the "indigenous" criterion of historical rights, the second is reminiscent of the projects for the partition of Eurasia into spheres of influence elaborated by a certain strategic current of the American apparatus.10 The first map is a map of the Russian Federation, which is not a map of the Soviet Union. Americans, Poles, Ukrainians and ethnic separatists imagine different geometries of disintegration, depending on their respective geopolitical projections.
But what is most important to note, apart from the plausibility of the scenarios that are envisaged, is precisely the dissemination and growing resonance of such maps, a sign of the recovery of the geographical dimension in the grammar of the powers that be. This return of geographical concerns perhaps also sanctions the obsolescence of the thesis of the end of history.
References/further reading:
0-Link to the original image of the two maps
1- A. Fotyga, "The dissolution of the Russian Federation is far less dangerous than leaving it ruled by criminals," Euractiv, 27/1/2023.
2- Read also: « Russie-Turquie, un défi à l’Occident ? » (Russia - Turkey, a challenge to the West?)
3- V. Nikiforova, "V SŠA obnarodovan plan razrušenija Rossii" ("In the United States was made public the plan to destroy Russia"), Ria Novosti, 9/16/2022; V. Kornilov, "It's time to abandon our illusions, the West is waging a war to destroy Russia," RT, 9/20/2022
4- Vostočno-Krivskaja Platforma, 16/1/2023, http://bit.ly/3DmRKDO.
5- From the Forum's Telegram channel, http://t.me/freenationsrussia.
6- "Ukrainian parliament declares 'Chechen Republic of Ichkeria' Russian-occupied territory," Meduza, 10/18/2022.
7- "Ukraine declares Kuril Islands Russian occupied territory", Meduza, 7/10/2022.
8- "Interv'ju - Kyrylo Budanov: Naši podrazdelenija zajdut v Krym s oružiem v rukakh" ("Interview with Kyrylo Budanov: Our units will enter Crimea armed"), http://liga.net, 26/12/2022.
9- Read also: Russia becoming a diplomatic Gordian knot for China
10- See for example Z. Brzezinski, "A Geostrategy for Eurasia", Foreign Affairs, vol. 76, no. 5, 1997.
I would again like to thank Ravenlocke and Bill for bringing so much to attention on vital emerging news items, about which there is literally zero coverage in the UK media (until, maybe, after media bosses have received instructions on what 'line' to take, on how to filter and invert the narratives).
I so seldom use mainstream media, that I keep forgetting how truly vast is the gulf between what really happens and is important, and what they are propagandizing about.
And this despite that I actually wrote a book about the psychological aspects of the mass media, published a decade ago, and also available free online:
https://addictedtodistraction.blogspot.com/
Text:
Czech banks close accounts for Russians and Belarusians without warning.
It is reported that at the moment, two banks - Creditas and UniCredit Bank - have confirmed that they are canceling the accounts of Russian and Belarusian citizens. In addition, ČSOB clients also report similar practices.
https://twitter.com/dana916/status/1658554870100639746
Putin and Zelensky 'agree to meet African leaders to discuss peace plan'
By CHRIS JEWERS and AFPQuote:
Cyril Ramaphosa spoke with his Russian and Ukrainian counterparts by phone
They agreed to host 'an African leaders' peace mission' in Moscow and Kyiv
PUBLISHED: 11:11 EDT, 16 May 2023 | UPDATED: 12:21 EDT, 16 May 2023
https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2023/05...4250055529.jpg
Quote:
Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky have both agreed to separate meetings with a delegation of African heads of state to discuss a possible plan to end the war in Ukraine, according to South Africa's president.
Cyril Ramaphosa spoke with his Russian and Ukrainian counterparts by phone over the weekend, a spokesperson for his office said. They agreed to host 'an African leaders' peace mission' in Moscow and Kyiv respectively.
The leaders of Zambia, Senegal, Congo, Uganda and Egypt plan to join Mr Ramaphosa on the mission, the president said. He added that Mr Putin and Mr Zelensky gave him the go-ahead to 'commence the preparations'.
No details were provided on the possible parameters of the talks. Mr Zelensky has previously said he would not consider a peace deal to end the 15-month war until Russian forces withdraw fully from Ukrainian territory.
UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres was briefed on the African delegation's planned meetings and 'welcomed the initiative', Mr Ramaphosa said.
Of the leaders due to meet with Mr Ramaphosa, Zambia and Congo lean to support the west. Senegal and Uganda are more Russia-leaning. Egypt has sought a balanced position on the conflict.
'I agreed with both President Putin and President Zelensky to commence with preparations for engagements with the African heads of state,' the South African leader said, speaking at a press conference in Cape Town during a state visit by Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong.
'We're hoping we will have intensive discussions.'
He did not give a specific timeline for the visit or other details, saying only that the conflict had been 'devastating' and Africa 'is also suffering a great deal' from it.
African countries have been badly hit by rising prices of grain and by the impact to world trade attributed to the war.
Ramaphosa said the African leaders have been talking and consulting in recent months on how the continent can facilitate the end of the war.
'This we have been talking about as African leaders, because we concluded that conflict in that part of the world, that much as it does not affect Africa directly in the form of deaths and destruction to our infrastructure, it does have an impact on the lives of many Africans with regards to food security. Prices of fertiliser, cereals and fuel have gone up,' he said.
'Facilitated by the Brazzaville Foundation, we have been able to have these discussions, and principal to our discussions are efforts towards a peaceful resolution to the devastating conflict in the Ukraine, its cost in human lives and the impact on the African continent.'
Russia invaded Ukraine in February last year but the war has largely stalemated, although Ukraine is expected to start a counteroffensive soon to try to take back land occupied by Russia and push Putin's forces back east.
Considered one of Moscow's closest allies on the continent, South Africa says it is impartial and has abstained from voting on U.N. resolutions on the war.
The announcement came a day after Ramaphosa said South Africa had been under 'extraordinary pressure' to pick sides in the conflict.
This followed accusations from the United States that Pretoria supplied weapons to Moscow - a move that would break with its professed neutrality.
The peace mission will be the latest in a flurry of so-far unsuccessful diplomatic efforts to still the war.
A Chinese special envoy was expected to arrive in Kyiv for a two-day visit on Tuesday to promote Beijing-led peace negotiations.
Last week Guterres told a Spanish newspaper that peace negotiations were 'not possible at this moment' with both sides 'convinced that they can win.'
But Ramaphosa said the African initiative had met with 'cautious support' in Washington and a number of European capitals visited by 'facilitators' tasked with presenting the plan.
The effort could help Pretoria rehabilitate its image as a neutral player and mediator, following accusations that it has drifted towards Russia.
The commander of South Africa's ground forces was in Moscow to discuss military cooperation on Monday, in the latest of a series of incidents that critics cite as evidence of a tilt towards the Kremlin.
Last week, the US envoy to Pretoria said that the United States believed weapons and ammunition had been laden onto a Russian freighter that docked at a Cape Town naval base in December.
On Tuesday, South Africa's defence minister, Thandi Modise, denied the accusation in an interview with local newspaper the Mail & Guardian.
'Everybody now sees the spook called South Africa. I can tell you that categorically, we did not send fokol, not even a piece of Chappies to Russia,' she said referring to a local popular bubble-gum brand and using an Afrikaans expletive meaning 'nothing at all'.
On Monday, Ramaphosa said South Africa would not be drawn 'into a contest between global powers' despite having faced 'extraordinary pressure' to do so.
South Africa has refused to condemn the conflict in Ukraine, which has largely isolated Moscow on the international stage, saying it wants to stay neutral.
In a veiled criticism of that stance on Tuesday, Singapore's Lee said condemning Russia's invasion was a matter of principle.
'One country cannot invade another with impunity...a clear disapproval has to be given,' he told the press conference in Cape Town, flanked by Ramaphosa.
'We remain friends with Russia but we cannot approve of what has been done'.
----------------“Zelensky is telling us that if you want to win the war you’ve got to give me more money and more stuff. He tells us, ‘I’ve got to pay off the generals.’ He’s telling us”—if he is forced out of office—“he’s going to the highest bidder. He’d rather go to Italy than stay and possibly get killed by his own people.”
Seymour Hersh: The Ukraine Refugee Question
Source: The Wall Will Fall (Vanessa Beeley's website copied from Sy Hersh's Substack)
Publication date: May 17th 2023
Last Saturday the Washington Post published an exposé of classified American intelligence documents showing that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, working behind the back of the Biden White House, pushed hard earlier this year for an expanded series of missile attacks inside Russia.
The documents were part of a large cache of classified materials posted online by an Air Force enlisted man now in custody. A senior official of the Biden administration, asked by the Post for comment on the newly revealed intelligence, said that Zelensky has never violated his pledge never to use American weapons to strike inside Russia. In the view of the White House, Zelensky can do no wrong.
Zelensky’s desire to take the war to Russia may not be clear to the president and senior foreign policy aides in the White House, but it is to those in the American intelligence community who have found it difficult to get their intelligence and their assessments a hearing in the Oval Office.
Meanwhile, the slaughter in the city of Bakhmut continues. It is similar in idiocy, if not in numbers, to the slaughter in Verdun and the Somme during World War I. The men in charge of today’s war—in Moscow, Kiev, and Washington—have shown no interest even in temporary ceasefire talks that could serve as a prelude to something permanent. The talk now is only about the possibilities of a late spring or summer offensive by either party.
But something else is cooking, as some in the American intelligence community know and have reported in secret, at the instigation of government officials at various levels in Poland, Hungary, Lithuania, Estonia, Czechoslovakia, and Latvia. These countries are all allies of Ukraine and declared enemies of Vladimir Putin.
This group is led by Poland, whose leadership no longer fears the Russian army because its performance in Ukraine has left the glow of its success at Stalingrad during the Second World War in tatters. It has been quietly urging Zelensky to find a way to end the war—even by resigning himself, if necessary—and to allow the process of rebuilding his nation to get under way. Zelensky is not budging, according to intercepts and other data known inside the Central Intelligence Agency, but he is beginning to lose the private support of his neighbors.
One of the driving forces for the quiet European talks with Zelensky has been the more than five million Ukrainians fleeing from the war who have crossed the country’s borders and have registered with its neighbors under an EU agreement for temporary protection that includes residency rights, access to the labor market, housing, social welfare assistance, and medical care.
An assessment published by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees reports that the estimate excludes roughly 3 million Ukrainian refugees who escaped from the war zone without a visa into any of the 27 European nations that have abolished border control between each other under the Schengen agreement. Ukraine, though not in the EU, now enjoys all the benefits of the Schengen pact.
A few nations, exhausted by the 15-month war, have reintroduced some forms of border control, but the regional refugee crisis will not be resolved until there is a formal peace agreement.
The UNHRC reports that free travel from Ukraine into the Baltic states and EU states in Western Europe “makes it particularly difficult to determine exactly how many Ukrainians have reached the EU in the last few months, and where they are now.”
The report says the “vast majority” of the Ukrainian refugees are women and children, and one third of them are under the age of eighteen. Seventy-three per cent of the refugees of working age are women, many with children.
A February analysis of the European refugee issue by the Council on Foreign Relations found that “tens of billions of dollars” in humanitarian aid were poured into Ukraine’s neighbors during the war’s first year. “As the conflict enters its second year with no end in sight,” the report says, “experts worry that host countries are growing fatigued.”
Weeks ago I learned that the American intelligence community was aware that some officials in Western Europe and the Baltic states want the war between Ukraine and Russia to end.
These officials have concluded that it is time for Zelensky to “come around” and seek a settlement.
A knowledgeable American official told me that some in the leadership in Hungary and Poland were among those working together to get Ukraine involved in serious talks with Moscow. “Hungary is a big player in this and so are Poland and Germany, and they are working to get Zelensky to come around,” the American official said.
The European leaders have made it clear that “Zelensky can keep what he’s got”—a villa in Italy and interests in offshore bank accounts—“if he works up a peace deal even if he’s got to be paid off, if it’s the only way to get a deal.”
So far, the official said, Zelensky has rejected such advice and ignored offers of large sums of money to ease his retreat to an estate he owns in Italy. There is no support in the Biden Administration for any settlement that involves Zelensky’s departure, and the leadership in France and England “are too beholden” to Biden to contemplate such a scenario.
There is a reality that some elements in the American intelligence community can’t ignore, the official said, even if the White House is ignoring it: “Ukraine is running out of money and it is known that the next four or months are critical. And Eastern Europeans are talking about a deal.”
The issue for them, the official told me, “is how to get the United States to stop supporting Zelensky,” The White House support goes beyond the needs of the war:
“We are paying all of the retirement funds—the 401k’s—for Ukraine."And Zelensky wants more, the official said.
“Zelensky is telling us that if you want to win the war you’ve got to give me more money and more stuff. He tells us, ‘I’ve got to pay off the generals.’ He’s telling us”—if he is forced out of office—“he’s going to the highest bidder. He’d rather go to Italy than stay and possibly get killed by his own people.”“All of this talk is being reported and is now flying around inside the American intelligence community, but, as usual,” the official said, “it’s not clear to the intelligence community what the president and his foreign policy aides in the White House know of the reality” of the European discussion about finding a way to end the war.
“We are still training Ukrainians how to fly our F-16s that will be shot down by Russia as soon as they get into the war zone."
The mainstream press is dedicated to Biden and the war and Biden is still talking about the Great Satan in Moscow while the Russian economy is doing great. Putin can stay where he is”—in power—“despite his failure to wipe Ukraine off the map as an independent state. And he thought he would win the war with just one airborne division”—a sardonic reference to Russia’s failed effort in the first days of the war to seize a vital airport by parachuting in an attack force.
“Europe’s problem,” the official said, in terms of getting a quick settlement to the war, “is that the White House wants Zelensky to survive while there are others”—in Russia and in some European capitals—“who say Zelensky has got to go, no matter what,”
It’s not clear that this understanding has gotten to the Oval Office. I have been told that some of the better intelligence about the war does not reach the president, through no fault of those who prepare the often contrary assessments.
Biden is said to rely on briefings and other materials prepared by Avril Haines, director of National Intelligence, since the Biden Administration came into office. She has spent much of her career working for Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, whose ties to Biden and agreement with him on matters pertaining to Russia and China go back decades.
The one saving grace for some in the community, I have been told, has been CIA Director William Burns. Burns was ambassador to Russia and deputy secretary of State and is seen as someone “who has come around” in opposition to some of the White House’s foreign policy follies. “He doesn’t want to be a rat on a sinking ship,” the official told me.
On the other hand, I have been told, it’s not clear to those in the CIA who prepare the President’s Daily Brief that Joe Biden is a regular reader of their intelligence summary. The document is usually three pages.
Decades ago I was told—by someone who begged me not to write about it at the time—that Ronald Reagan rarely read the PDB until Colin Powell, then in the White House, began reading it to a video recorder. The tape would then be played for the president.
It’s unclear who, if anyone, might take the initiative as Biden’s Colin Powell.
What many of us who have been paying attention long ago concluded and beautifully articulated by Simplicius The Thinker here:
"So: Ukraine was taught in “the NATO way”, BUT…apparently NATO is actually incapable of fighting without air superiority. Woops! Seems like that’s something which should’ve been noted up front to the poor AFU lab rats, no? The fact is, the entire ‘NATO training’ canard is a hoax perpetrated by cynical Western rulers for nearly a decade now. It’s been widely noted from the early parts of the Donbass war, 2014 and onward, by AFU soldiers themselves, that NATO trainers in fact were inferior to the Ukrainian troops they purported to be training. The reason is: their ‘knowledge’ is merely theoretical, and what one quickly learns on the battlefield is that nothing surpasses the real life, first hand experience of a blooded warrior, who has actually seen fighting, not in the stuffy pages of a textbook, but in the gruelling chaos of the trenches themselves."***
Namely: that NATO has never actually ever fought a real war.
NATO is an irrelevance, defunct, impotent: a stymied ideological construct and on its way to a slow and painful death.
To wit:
https://avalonlibrary.net/Tintin/NATO_impotence.png
And this, from 2017.
Bumbling NATO Instructors on the Brink of Getting Laughed Out of Ukraine - 14:21 GMT 26.03.2017 (Updated: 18:58 GMT 26.03.2017)
The full StP article 'Analyzing Kofman-Lee's Urgent New Op-Ed' can be read here
More details of the destruction of the Kiev Patriot battery continue to emerge. 6 Ukrainian bloggers who helped release the video clip are facing years in prison. (And Ukraine is looking very silly now with its continuing claim that Kinzhal Russian hypersonic missiles were shot down. :))
https://t.me/thecoppermountain/4065
https://t.me/intelslava/47800
https://t.me/intelslava/47785
https://t.me/intelslava/47787
More evidence that the giant explosion in Khmelnytsky released depleted uranium radiation, now blowing to the northwest:
https://t.me/DDGeopolitics/63438
https://youtube.com/watch?v=ScIjdUQH2gA
Douglas Macgregor - Underestimating Russia: Arrogance and Misjudgment
Text:
Elon Musk's dad Errol: "We are being brainwashed to be told that Ukraine is good and Russia is bad and yet they have found multiple bioweapon laboratories belonging to the United States in Ukraine.....
...Ukraine is led by a stand-up comedian who became president," which he finds to be "extremely odd...
He echoes his son's sentiment regarding Joe Biden, saying that "he's obviously not running the United States....The United States must be, it appears to me, as being run by a bunch of misfits who are getting revenge for having been treated as misfits over the years."
https://twitter.com/DAVID_STOIC1/sta...12304601141250
What an eye-opener and infuriating! This applies to absolutely everything and not limited to defence matters. When you look at the chaos everywhere and the actual work our MPs are doing to ruin the bloody country, it's glaringly obvious that to be in the Cabinet you have to have degrees in Incompetence, Negligence and Bumbling.Quote:
Posted by Tintin
Drone video released by Ukraine shows Bakhmut in ruins
https://youtube.com/watch?v=T9fDOL87S1w&ab_channel=GuardianNews
Very similar to recent video of Marinka - so tragic . . .
About Douglas Macgregor last video
Twice the "reporter" say "my father" about Donald Trump, Macgregor say once "your Dad"
I read all people comments about this video and only once came "Trump Jr."
I must missing something...but for me is new this "Trump Jr." got a reporter job...
does he have a channel or something?
for example: mark 25:50
Escobar: What's Behind Prighozin's Sound & Fury?
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitic...ins-sound-fury
THE UKRAINE REFUGEE QUESTION by Seymour Hersch
https://seymourhersh.substack.com/p/...fugee-question
Thanks for this information about contamination (and to Ravenlocke)
Question: Does anyone know a competent and honest source about what kind of contamination would be *expected* from such a massive explosion of depleted-uranium/ "DU" shells?
I had read (when the UK first decided to escalate the conflict by supplying them) that they were alpha-radiation emitters - which are very short-range/ very destructive particles, but can't be detected by Geiger counters; but the source stated that DU was not a gamma-radiation emitter (i.e. the common type of radiation, the 'x rays' that are detected by a Geiger counter).
However, I am not confident about the validity of my sources, and maybe gamma radiation is produced by DU shells in sufficient amounts to cause dangerous contamination when very large numbers are exploded in one place?
Does anyone know?
... Donald Trump Jr. :Quote:
Posted by Vicus
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osIctttStQU