Ukraine war mega thread

[pickel]

^
Ukraine was also using facial recognition software on the dead Russians to identify them, so their families could be notified.

[OhOh]

problem solved

You're welcome.

It appears to be another step to victory, has been achieved by the combined Russian military forces.



Ukraine forces pull back from Donbas town after onslaught

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) —

ANDREW MELDRUM

Wed, January 25, 2023 at 7:37 PM GMT+7·3 min read

"KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Ukrainian forces have conducted an organized retreat from a town in the eastern region of the Donbas, an official said Wednesday, in what is a rare but modest battlefield triumph for the Kremlin after a series of setbacks in its invasion that began almost 11 months ago.

The Ukrainian army retreated from the salt-mining town of Soledar to “preserve the lives of the personnel,” Serhii Cherevatyi, a spokesperson for Ukraine’s forces in the east, told The Associated Press.

The soldiers pulled back to previously prepared defensive positions, he said.
Moscow has portrayed the battle for Soledar, which lies near the city of Bakhmut, as key to capturing the entire Donbas.

The accomplishment takes the Russian forces a step closer to Bakhmut, but military analysts say capturing Soledar is more symbolic than strategic.

Ukraine’s military, which has held out in Soledar against a monthslong onslaught of superior Russian forces, has said its fierce defense of the eastern stronghold helped tie up Russian forces.

Russia claimed almost two weeks ago that it had taken Soledar, but Ukraine denied it.

Many of Russia's troops around Soledar belong to the private Russian military contractor Wagner Group, and the fighting reportedly has been bloody.

Since its invasion of Ukraine, Moscow has prioritized taking full control of the Donbas — a region made up of the Donetsk and Luhansk provinces, where it has backed a separatist insurgency since 2014. Russia has seized most of Luhansk, but about half of Donetsk remains under Ukraine’s control.

Taking control of the town would potentially allow Russian forces to cut supply lines to Ukrainian forces in Bakhmut, though the strength of Ukraine’s new defensive positions was not known.

The Institute for the Study of War, a think tank in Washington, said earlier this month that the fall of Soledar wouldn’t mark “an operationally significant development and is unlikely to presage an imminent Russian encirclement of Bakhmut.”

The institute said Russian information operations have “overexaggerated the importance of Soledar,” which is a small settlement. It also argued that the long and difficult battle has contributed to the exhaustion of Russian forces.

Perhaps more worrying for Moscow, Western military help for Ukraine is now being stepped up with the delivery of tanks.
Elsewhere, Russian forces have continued to pummel Ukrainian areas, especially in the south and east.

Russian strikes wounded 10 civilians in the eastern Donetsk province on Tuesday, Pavlo Kyrylenko, the provincial governor, said.
Five were wounded when Russian shells slammed into apartment blocks, he said.

The General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine said Wednesday that over the previous 24 hours Russian forces had launched four missile strikes, 26 airstrikes and more than 100 attacks from rocket salvo systems.

Russian forces are concentrating their efforts on establishing control over Donetsk province, conducting offensive operations around the embattled cities of Bakhmut, Lyman and Avdiivka, and the village of Novopavlivka, according to spokesperson Oleksandr Shtupun.

In addition to Donetsk, the Russian attacks struck settlements in the country’s northeastern Kharkiv and Sumy, northern Chernihiv, easternmost Luhansk, southeastern Zaporizhzhia, and southern Kherson provinces.

Meanwhile, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the Ukraine president who has gone from professional comedian to an internationally recognized wartime leader, turned 45 Wednesday.

His wife, first lady Olena Zelenska, said that though he is the same person as when they met at 17, “Something has changed: You smile much less now.”

“I wish you to have more reasons for smiling. And you know what it takes. We all do,” she wrote in a tweet."

Ukraine forces pull back from Donbas town after onslaught

[Hugh Cow]

Are we in the schoolyard? you're a liar! no i'm not you are! Jeezus wept.

[pickel]

Well look who has shown themself to be a Liar now- and a stupid one at that, because the translation had already been kindly provided by OhOh.

Did you even watch the video and see the "pretty pics" it (and you) was using as it's evidence?

Fuck me, you are a monotonous bore.

Are we in the schoolyard? you're a liar! no i'm not you are! Jeezus wept.

Sorry Hugh, but sabang has to be called out on his bullshit.

[qwerty]

Another snubski 'useful idiot'



And another-




I could go on.

As far as I can see, Kissinger has been a useful idiot for the past 55 years. I don't see any reason to change that opinion now.

[sabang]

Originally Posted by sabang
Well look who has shown themself to be a Liar now- and a stupid one at that, because the translation had already been kindly provided by OhOh.



Did you even watch the video and see the "pretty pics" it (and you) was using as it's evidence?

Fuck me, you are a monotonous bore.

Fuck me, you are a double down loser. This was fully explained in the article- translation provided by OhOh.

So far, only Al-Jazeera television has been allowed by Ukrainians to show such a refrigerated wagon, but of course only when it was transporting the bodies of Russian soldiers.

Followed by the Al Jazeera pics and video.

And the bodies are close to the Hungarian border, not in Kiev-

Just a few hundred meters from the Hungarian border, in a carefully guarded and isolated part of a railway junction,

Face it, you've been Had. Lick your wounds and try another day.

[NamPikToot]

Are we in the schoolyard? you're a liar! no i'm not you are! Jeezus wept.

why it was rightly doghoused

[bsnub]

Face it, you've been Had. Lick your wounds and try another day.

Stop trying to worm out of it. You got caught lying, full stop. You are an egregious fraud of a poster, and this not the first time you have been caught out.

[Norton]

why it was rightly doghoused

Yep and the beat goes on. Wtf, have a gratuitous Norton vid

[Norton]

Have 2. No edit.

[sabang]

Stop trying to worm out of it. You got caught lying, full stop.

Now you are lying, full stop. One of (well the only) beauty of the Doghouse is that you cannot Edit what you wrote- only a Mod can do that, or delete. Thus any intelligent or vaguely interested reader can check for themselves what has been written, alleged, and accused, over the last couple of pages.

You are the ones- specifically you and pickle- who launched the false accusation that the source I linked to (on which the Teller Report article was based) had falsely provided Al Jazeera video and youtube information, dishonestly pretending it was of the recent Ukrainian corpse find. I, honestly, said I had no explanation- because I don't read frikkin Hungarian. I asked if anyone knew how to translate it using software. OhOh to the rescue- and all was answered. The Teller report had in fact made it clear that that media was from Al Jazeera, and referred to the Russian corpses- some months back. Any reader can check this for themself, just by going back a page or two and following the discourse. They will also immediately see that it is you and your sidekick who became abusive, spouted unfounded accusations such as that I was lying- and ultimately ended up embarrassing yourselves.

So grow up, stop lying- and maybe even learn a lesson (yeh, fat chance).

[sabang]

Alastair Crooke
January 23, 2023


© Photo: REUTERS/Carlos Barria


The U.S. government is hostage to its financial hegemony in a way that is rarely fully understood.

It is the miscalculation of this era – one that may begin the collapse of dollar primacy, and therefore, global compliance with U.S. political demands, too. But its most grievous content is that it corners the U.S. into promoting dangerous Ukrainian escalation against Russia directly (i.e. Crimea).

Washington dares not – indeed cannot – yield on dollar primacy, the ultimate signifier for ‘American decline’. And so the U.S. government is hostage to its financial hegemony in a way that is rarely fully understood.

The Biden Team cannot withdraw its fantastical narrative of Russia’s imminent humiliation; they have bet the House on it. Yet it has become an existential issue for the U.S. precisely because of this egregious initial miscalculation that has been subsequently levered-up into a preposterous narrative of a floundering, at any moment ‘collapsing’ Russia.

What then is this ‘Great Surprise’ – the almost completely unforeseen event of recent geo-politics that has so shaken U.S. expectations, and which takes the world to the precipice?

It is, in a word, Resilience. The Resilience displayed by the Russian economy after the West had committed the entire weight of its financial resources to crushing Russia. The West bore down on Russia in every conceivable way – via financial, cultural and psychological war – and with real military war as the follow-through.

Yet, Russia has survived, and survived relatively handsomely. It is doing ‘okay’ – maybe better, even, than many Russia insiders were expecting. The ‘Anglo’ Intelligence services however, had assured EU leaders not to worry; it’s ‘slam dunk’; Putin cannot possibly survive. Rapid financial and political collapse, they promised, was certain under the tsunami of western sanctions.

Their analysis represents an Intelligence failure on a par with the non-existent Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. But instead of critical re-examination, as events failed to provide confirmation, they doubled down. But two such failures are just ‘too much’ to bear.

So why does this ‘failed expectation’ constitute such a world-shaking moment for our era? It is because the West fears that its miscalculation might well lead to the collapse of its dollar hegemony. But the fear extends well beyond that too – (bad as ‘that’ would be from the U.S. perspective).

Robert Kagan has outlined how external forward motion and the U.S.’ ‘global mission’ is the lifeblood of American internal polity – more than any equivocating nationalism, Professor Paul suggests. From the founding of the country, the U.S. has been an expansionary republican empire; without this forward motion, civic bonds of domestic unity come into question. If Americans are not united for expansionary republican greatness, by what purpose Professor Paul asks, are all these fissiparous races, creeds, and cultures in America, bound together? (Woke culture has proved no solution, being divisive rather than any pole around which unity can be built).

The point here is that Russian Resilience, at a single stroke, shattered the plate-glass floor to western convictions about its ability to ‘manage the world’. After the several western debacles centred on regime-change by military shock-and-awe, even hardened neo-cons – by 2006 – had conceded that a weaponised financial system was the only means to ‘secure the Empire’.

But this conviction has now been upended – and states around the world have taken notice.

This shock of miscalculation is all the greater because the West disdainfully had taken Russia to be a backward economy, with a GDP on a par to that of Spain. In an interview with Le Figaro last week, Professor Emmanuel Todd noted that Russia and Belarus, taken together, constitute only 3.3% of global GDP. The French historian questioned therefore, ‘how then is it possible that these states could have shown such resilience – in the face of the full force of the financial onslaught’?

Well, firstly, as Professor Todd underlined, ‘GDP’ as a measure of economic resilience is wholly “fictional”. Contrary to its name, GDP measures only aggregate expenditures. And that much of what is recorded as ‘production’, such the over-inflated billing for medical treatment in the U.S.’ and (said, tongue in cheek) services such as the hundreds of economists’ and bank analysts’ highly-paid analysis, are not production, per se, but “water vapour”.

Russia’s resilience, Todd attests, is due to the fact that it has a real economy of production. “War is the ultimate test of a political economy”, he notes. “It is the Great Revealer”.

And what is it that has been revealed? It has revealed another quite unexpected and shocking outcome – one that sends western commentators reeling – that Russia has not run out of missiles. ‘An economy the size of Spain, the western media ask, how can such a tiny economy sustain a prolonged war of attrition by NATO without running out of munitions?’.

But, as Todd outlines, Russia has been able to sustain its weapons-supply because it has a real economy of production that has the capacity to maintain a war – and the West no longer does. The West fixated on its misleading metric of GDP – and with its normalcy bias – is shocked that Russia has the capacity to outpace NATO’s arms inventories. Russia was billed by western analysts as a ‘paper tiger’ – a label that now seems more likely to apply to NATO.

The import of the ‘Great Surprise’ – of Russian Resilience – resulting from its real economy of production vis á vis the evident weakness of the hyper-financialised western model scrabbling for sources of munitions has not been lost on the rest of the world.

There is old history here. In the lead-up to WW1, the British Establishment was concerned that they might lose the coming war with Germany: British banks tended to lend short-term, in a ‘pump and dump’ approach, whereas German banks invested directly in long-term real-economy industrial projects – and therefore were thought to be able to better sustain war materiel supply.

Even then, the Anglo élite had a quiet appreciation of the inherent frailty to a heavily financialised system for which they compensated by simply expropriating the resources of a huge Empire to finance preparation for the coming Great War.

The backdrop then, is that the U.S. inherited the Anglo financialising approach which it subsequently turbo-charged when the U.S. was forced off the gold standard by ballooning budget deficits. The U.S. needed to attract the world’s ‘savings’ into the U.S., by which to finance its Vietnam war deficits.

The rest of Europe from the 19th century outset had been wary of Adam Smith’s ‘Anglo-model’. Friedreich List complained that the Anglos assumed that the ultimate measure of a society is always its level of consumption (expenditure – and hence the GDP metric). In the long run, List argued, a society’s well-being and its overall wealth were determined not by what the society can buy, but by what it can make (i.e. value coming from the real, self-sufficient economy).

The German school argued that emphasizing consumption would eventually be self-defeating. It would bias the system away from wealth creation, and ultimately make it impossible to consume as much, or to employ so many. Hindsight suggests List was correct in his analysis.

‘War – is the ultimate test – and Great Revealer’ (per Todd). The roots to an alternative economic view had lingered on in both Germany and Russia (with Sergei Witte), despite the recent preponderance of the hyper-financialised Anglo-model.

And now with the ‘Great Reveal’, the focus on the real economy is seen as a key insight underpinning the New Global Order, differentiating it sharply in terms both of economic systems and philosophy from the western sphere.

The new order is separating from the old, not just in terms of economic system and philosophy, but through a reconfiguring of the neurons through which trade and culture travels. Old trade routes are being bypassed and left to wither – to be replaced by waterways, pipelines and corridors that avoid all the choke points by which the West can physically control commerce.

The north-east Arctic passage, for example, has opened an inter-Asian trade. The untapped oil and gas fields of the Arctic eventually will fill the gaps in supplies resulting from an ideology that seeks to end investment by western oil and gas majors in fossil fuels. The North-South corridor (now open) links St Petersburg to Bombay. Another component links waterways from northern Russia to the Black Sea, the Caspian and from thence to the south. Yet another component is expected to pipe Caspian gas from the Caspian pipeline network south to a Persian Gulf gas ‘hub’.

Look at it in this way, it is as if the neural connectors in the real economic matrix are, as it were, being lifted up from the west, and are being set down in a new location to the East. If Suez was the waterway of the European era, and the Panama Canal represented that of the American Century, then the north-east Arctic waterway, the North-South corridors and the African railway nexus will be that of the Eurasian era.

In essence, the New Order is preparing to sustain a long economic conflict with the West.

Here, we return to the ‘Egregious Miscalculation’. This evolving New Order existentially threatens dollar hegemony – the U.S. created its hegemony through demanding that oil (and other commodities) be priced in dollars, and by facilitating a frenetic financialisation of asset markets in the U.S. It is this demand for dollars which alone has allowed the U.S. to fund its government deficit (and its defence budget) for nothing.

In this respect, this highly financialised dollar paradigm possesses qualities reminiscent of a sophisticated Ponzi scheme: It pulls in ‘new investors’, attracted by zero-cost credit leverage and the promise of ‘assured’ returns (assets pumped ever upwards by Fed liquidity). But the lure of ‘assured returns’ is tacitly underwritten by the inflation of one asset ‘bubble’ after another, in a regular sequence of bubbles – inflated at zero cost – before being finally ‘dumped’. The process then, is ‘rinsed and repeated’ ad seriatim.
Here is the point: Like a true Ponzi, this system relies on constant, and ever more, ‘new’ money coming into the scheme, to offset ‘payments out’ (financing U.S. government expenditure). Which is to say, U.S. hegemony now depends on constant overseas dollar expansion.

And, as with any pure Ponzi, once ‘money in’ falters, or redemptions spike, the scheme collapses.

It was to prevent the world quitting the dollar scheme for a new global trading order that the signal was ordered to be promulgated, via the onslaught on Russia, to warn that to quit the scheme would bring U.S. Treasury sanctions upon you, and to crash you.

But then came TWO game-changing shocks, in close succession: Inflation and interest rates spiralled, devaluing the value of fiat currencies such as the dollar and undermining the promise of ‘assured returns’; and secondly, Russia DID NOT COLLAPSE under financial Armageddon.

The ‘dollar Ponzi’ falls; U.S. markets fall; the dollar falls in value (vis á vis commodities).

This scheme might be felled by Russian Resilience – and by much of the planet peeling away into a separate economic model, no longer dependent on the dollar for its trading needs. (i.e., new ‘money in’ to the dollar ‘Ponzi’ turns negative, just as ‘money out’ explodes, with the U.S. having to finance ever bigger deficits (now domestically)).

Washington clearly made a stratospherically bad error in thinking that sanctions – and the assumed collapse of Russia – would be a ‘slam dunk’ outcome; one so self-evident that it required no rigorous ‘thinking through’.

Team Biden thus has painted the U.S. into a tight Ukraine ‘corner’. But at this stage – realistically – what can the White House do? It cannot withdraw the narrative of Russia’s ‘coming humiliation’ and defeat. They cannot let the narrative go because it has become an existential component to save what it can of the ‘Ponzi’. To admit that Russia ‘has won’ would be akin to saying that the ‘Ponzi’ will have to ‘close the fund’ to further withdrawals (just as Nixon did in 1971, when he shut withdrawals from the Gold window).

Commentator Yves Smith has provocatively argued, ‘What if Russia decisively wins – yet the western press is directed to not notice?’ Presumably, in such a situation, the economic confrontation between the West and New Global Order states must escalate into a wider, longer war.

https://strategic-culture.org/news/2...gious-mistake/


[Inevitably to be followed by the usual, childish waffle- such as ad hom insults of Alastair Crooke (a very interesting author, I find)-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alastair_Crooke
And of the publishing website- "Strategic Culture", shock horror. (Like you would find this kind of analysis in anything that passes for our MSM these days!)
And quite probably, of lil' ole me- "commie" "anti-American", "War Cheerleader" and other such nonsense. BooHoo.
What I doubt you will find is any rational comment on the points made in the article. Boneheads can't do that.]

[bsnub]

So grow up, stop lying- and maybe even learn a lesson

You are clearly mentally ill.

[NamPikToot]

Have 2. No edit.

[sabang]

Thank you for your profound analysis, Professor snubski.

[pickel]

Deny, deflect, distort. Sabang has studied the Russian MO well. Too bad for him "intelligent readers" see through it.

Now go on, post some more bullshit from "sources" like Hacker DPR Joker and Intel Slava Z.

[sabang]

"intelligent readers" see through it.

Intelligent readers simply need to go back to #12392, follow the discourse from there- and they can see exactly what happened, clear as daylight. So stop treating them like unintelligent readers, or embarrassing yourself further.

If you and Muttley had any cojones, you would just man up, admit your error, and move on. I'll leave the navel gazing with you.

[pickel]

^
I hope you recieve the medication you need eventually.

[sabang]

This is the Medication you need to move on from yesterdays Butthurt, and carry on with todays. A good old fashioned polemic, written by an Irishman.



Zelensky’s Wunderwaffe Weapons

Declan Hayes
January 22, 2023


The Ukrainian war is in its end game. Checkmate is at hand, Declan Hayes writes.

March 20, 1945. With Berlin in critical danger, the Führer chooses General Gotthard Heinrici to replace Heinrich Himmler as chief of Army Group Vistula. Heinrici’s mission is to defend Berlin, which is now coming within striking distance of Red Army artillery fire, and to kick-start Zhukov’s retreat right back to Bakhmut, Moscow and Crimea, so as to give Hitler time to bring his wunderwaffe, his wonder weapons, into the fray.

Though Heinrici knows that these jet aircraft, together with the V1, V2 and V3 systems are too little and much too late, as a Prussian officer, he will do as commanded and try to forestall, for however long he can, Zhukov’s 1,500,000 troops with his 100,000,000 strong scratch army at the Seelow Heights. Heinrici, the Reich’s greatest defense tactician, has no illusions as to how either this battle or this war will end.

Late January, 2023. With the Ukrainian rump Reich in critical danger, Kiev’s comedy king orders his remaining troops to go on the offensive and kick Gerasimov out of Bakhmut and right back to Moscow and Crimea. Zelensky’s NATO buddies declare that wonder weapons are on the way, Bradley personnel carriers and advanced air defense systems that Zelensky’s child conscripts haven’t a clue how to operate or maintain.

Though his generals and their remaining veteran troops know that Zelensky is talking rubbish, like Heinrici, they will do as commanded for, to disobey means instant death at the hands of the SBU not only for them but for their families as well.



retired U.S. Army officer Douglas Macgregor, who is one of a small number of former NATO commanders, who consistently talk sense on Ukraine.

Although the pronouncements of all current and former NATO operatives have to be taken with a large dose of Soledar’s salts, when those statements are consistent and, when their analyses stack up with reality, as opposed to the fantasy worlds of Hitler and Zelensky, then we must listen.

Ukraine now faces the entire might of Russia’s armed forces. They are heavily outnumbered and outgunned. Their NATO masters have admitted Ukraine is only an expendable cat’s paw to maul Russia and nothing more. Ukraine’s leaders are hopelessly corrupt and they have no hopes of winning because their concept of victory is anathema to Russian General Gerasimov and the fearsome air, land and sea forces he now commands. It is time to abandon ship, to get out of Dodge and



as there is nothing more to be done.

Whatever his other faults Heinrici, unser giftzwerg, literally “our poison dwarf” (roughly, “our tough little bastard”) as his troops nicknamed him, was not a quitter. He fought valiantly, bravely at the Seelow Heights but it was, in the end, he always knew, hopeless, prolonging the Reich’s inevitable defeat at a cost of hundreds of thousands more lives.

The Battle of the Oder-Neisse began on April 16, 1945 and, though Heinrici used the tried and trusted tactics he had previously employed to steady the 4th Army’s retreat from the Battle of Moscow, the Red Army quickly cracked his first, and then his second and, finally, his third lines of defense. By April 19th, only three days after it began, the Battle of the Oder-Neisse was over, thereby opening the road to Berlin and the end of the Reich and its doped-up Führer, following the criminally needless slaughter fest of the Battle of Berlin.

As with the Seelow Heights, so also now with Bakhmut. The Russians have cracked the Nazis’ best defenses, there are no signs of the wunderwaffe weapons and all that remains is for the hundreds of thousands of young 14 and 15 year old teenagers Zelensky has drafted into his Wehrmacht to die for absolutely nothing.

If patriotic Ukrainians must take a leaf out of the Third Reich’s play-book, they should look not only at the futile Battle of the Seelow Heights but also at the July plot, when Claus von Stauffenberg tried to rid the Reich of the Zelensky of his day. Though those Ukrainians, whose loved ones have died in this needless war, will quite naturally blame Russia for their loss, like the Germans before them, they should look more closely at those like Zelensky, who profited from their grief and those in NATO who promised them wunderwaffe weapons that would allow them goose step into Moscow but didn’t even give them a shroud in which to bury their loved ones, tens of thousands of whom are listed as missing in action.

has an abundance of men and materiel to carry the day. The Ukrainian war is in its end game. Checkmate is at hand. The only sensible move now for

the General Staff of the Ukrainian Armed Forces

is to lay down their arms, to tip over their comedy king, and surrender Zelensky and the thugs of the SBU, along with their empty dreams of glory and wonder weapons, to anyone stupid enough to grant these crooks asylum.

https://strategic-culture.org/news/2...waffe-weapons/


I am not posting this to change your thinking- merely to point out that plenty of people worldwide (the majority actually) are not buying the approved NATO/ MSM narrative.

[Norton]

I am not posting this to change your thinking- merely to point out that plenty of people worldwide (the majority actually) are not buying the approved NATO/ MSM narrative.

An opinion by a former NATO General who is comparing the Ukraine to Nazi Germany is laughable. Truth is Russia is a far better candidate to be compared to Nazi Germany. Like Hitler, Vlad chose to invade the Ukraine. The Ukraine as did WW2 allies are striking back. Truth!

[sabang]

Lets face it, neither the Russian or Ukrainian regimes are models of liberal democracy. The Far Right influence in Ukraine was quite extensively commented on by MSM, before this conflict broke out (or escalated, depending on POV). That does not however mean that Ukraine, or Ukrainians per se, are Nazi. Thus, the article is a polemic.

The "Last stand gulch" rhetoric, compared directly to delusional Hitler and his Reich, is of course straight out of a Russian nationalist playbook, but it may not be entirely untrue. I've put my cards on the table- I don't think the latest promised supply of arms is going to meaningfully change the battlefield arithmetic.

[bsnub]

former NATO General

Not even close to a General. A former Colonel who is considered a disgrace to have ever worn the uniform by his peers. He has been wrong about literally everything, just like the clown who posted the crap propaganda piece.

[misskit]

Putin’s Former Speechwriter Predicts Military Coup in Russia

A former Kremlin aide is warning that as Moscow blindly pursues its bloody conquest in Ukraine, the situation at home is quietly heading towards a military coup.


Abbas Gallyamov, Vladimir Putin’s former speechwriter, says the conditions are already there for a full revolt.


“The longer the war drags on, the clearer its pointlessness becomes,” Gallyamov writes in a new column for opposition media outlet Mozhem Obyasnit.


The Russian public has largely begun to realize that the Kremlin’s dream of toppling the Kyiv “regime” is not going to happen, Gallyamov notes, and the consolation prize of new “Russian” territories is not winning anybody over.


Discord is also growing in the military, he argues, where “[Wagner boss Yevgeny] Prigozhin has completely discredited the regime in the eyes of service members with his rhetoric, and anger at the authorities allowing a criminal to walk all over them is growing stronger.”

Putin’s cunning, “macho” image has also disintegrated, Gallyamov writes: “As problems pile up in the country and the army that the authorities are unable to solve, Putin is more steadily transforming in people’s eyes from a great strategist to an ordinary, second-rate dictator.”


After months of widespread reports on Russian troops rebelling against their commanders, going public with complaints about top military brass, or deserting the war altogether, Gallyamov notes that all it takes to light the fuse of a full military coup is a little more organization.


“It must be understood that the vast majority of commanders in the army of an authoritarian nation are not staunch supporters of the authorities, but run-of-the-mill opportunists,” he argues.


So once a revolt begins and “yesterday’s loyalties” vanish, military commanders will fight for whoever seems most likely to win, according to Gallyamov. “If complaints against authorities seem convincing to [a commander], then he will most likely decide that that [regime] will not stand against a wave of public anger. And if that’s the case, there’s no reason not to join.”


In addition to the myriad reports about troops revolting against and in some cases even attacking their own commanders, thousands more Russian soldiers have voluntarily handed themselves over to Ukrainian authorities to avoid taking part in the war.


A representative for a Ukrainian hotline called “I Want to Live” told The Guardian on Thursday that a total of 6,543 Russian troops had called up seeking to surrender to the Ukrainian government in a span of about four months.


“During the liberation of Kherson, we had calls from Russians and they told us, ‘Just save our souls because we got stuck somewhere in the mud, our battalion is totally crushed, we have 10 soldiers left, please take us from this mess,” Vitali Matvienko was quoted saying.


He did not say how many of those phone calls led to completed surrenders.


While Russian troops had once bragged about what they were sure would be a lightning-fast takeover of Ukraine, ordinary Russian citizens are now instead seeing a steady drip of death at home, with billboards going up advertising funeral services for “Cargo 200,” a military term for those killed in action.


Incidentally, Russia’s funeral services industry may be one of the only sectors of the economy to hit the jackpot in the war, even as other industries suffer from international sanctions.


The Insider reports that the industry is blowing up at a record pace and crematoriums are “growing exponentially.”


The owner of a crematorium in Novosibirsk told the outlet there’s so much demand he’s planning to open a whole new military section in the spring.


“Everything will be in the military style, we’ll even set up a cannon,” he said, adding that manufacturers had also begun offering camouflage coffins and “a lot of military paraphernalia.”


Although they may not prove that popular. “Apparently for the relatives it has bad associations,” he said.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/obsess...ire?ref=scroll

[sabang]

Here we go again.

[39TG]

Seems plausible to me. Russia is in deep deep shxt.