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Tuesday, August 30, 2022

Yuri Fedorov on the Ukrainian counter-offensive

 


Yuri Fedorov on The Breakfast Show said that he thinks that the Ukrainians with their attack yesterday were testing the Ukrainian defenses and the main idea was to split the Russian troops on the right bank of the Dnieper along the Inhulets river since the bridge at Darivka has also been destroyed. The Ukrainians have imposed a media silence, in order not to reveal their plans, and that more information will be revealed within 24-36 hours. Yuri Fedorov believes that there is also a  possibility that this attack might  be a diversion and that the main Ukrainian attack would come near Kharkov.

Meanwhile, in the land of Ukraine's Friend #1 …



 

Sunday, August 28, 2022

Andrei Piontkovsky: The MAD doctrine still works with Putin. Putin wants to live.

 


This quick translation from Russian is mine. (2:33 to 8:05)   

“Putin has been preparing for this war for a long time. About the doctrine developed by Putin and Patrushev I wrote already since 2009. It is based the idea that while being inferior to the West economically, in civilizational terms, in the level of conventional military forces, they could still manage to win over the West through blackmail, impudent blackmail by threatening to use tactical nuclear weapons.

Their scenario with Ukraine and the West as a whole and NATO had been repeatedly stated at different levels but most vividly it had been expressed by Putin himself when he was at the peak of euphoric victorious state on February 5 at the press conference after having met Macron. He said, yes, in conventional arms we are inferior to NATO but on the nuclear level we are superior, and we can win.

Putin has no Wunderwaffen. Perhaps he believed in this, deceived by scoundrels who spent billions of dollars in the development of new redundant and unnecessary strategic nuclear arms with which he threatened the world. The world has been living under the MAD doctrine for a while and therefore nobody had been planning for a nuclear war because it would bring nuclear destruction unacceptable to all participants.   

Putin and Patrushev decided to threaten with tactical nuclear weapons. During the confrontation with NATO when NATO superiority manifests itself (which apparently as it turned out, they understood), they threatened to use tactical nuclear weapons and were convinced that the West would get scared, capitulate and back off.

This was his plan when he faced the collapse of his Blitzkrieg during the first days of the war in Ukraine. You can well remember that they sable rattled almost daily with nuclear weapons threatening to hit the convoys destined for Ukraine through NATO countries Poland, Romania etc.

He was met with a very harsh resistance. The first to react to Putin’s threat to use nuclear weapons and of Putin’s fate in case of use, was Ukraine’s Friend #1, the leader of the Free World in support of Ukraine, Boris Johnson. When Putin threatened the possible use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine, Johnson without waiting for the US reaction, and NATO’s as a whole, reminded him that the UK was a nuclear power in its own right and would not leave without punishment Putin’s use of nuclear weapons. Later similar warnings were given at the military level, by Secretary of Defense Austin and Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff Mark Milley to Gerasimov, that Patrushev and Putin’s calculation that the West would capitulate was flawed and a response would be given, a devastating response to Russia and a response which would involve Putin himself. Translated into the language he would understand, i.e. into St. Petersburg street gang language, he was told that in case of use of nuclear weapons he would be killed. 

And you know, he understands this language. The last two-three weeks there have been in succession official statements by Russian responsible figures, both Putin and Shoigu, to that effect.  Putin in his letter to the UN conference on nuclear disarmament stated that they understood that nuclear war was impossible since there would be no winner. That is, he repeated the basic truths that have been for decades shared by all responsible world leaders since the Cuban Missile Crisis. 

Shoigu recently stated that our nuclear weapons exist only to prevent a possible nuclear attack by other nuclear countries. That is, the threat to Putin’s life works, he is not a shahid who is willing to die for his great idea, when he said: ‘we as martyrs, will go to heaven. To no paradise does he intend to go.“

***

My comment:

I do hope Piontkovsky is right. We already have Iran. 


Friday, August 19, 2022

The Ukrainian response to the Washington Post "Road to war" article

 

From the WP article  Road to war: U.S. struggled to convince allies, and Zelensky, of risk of invasion :

But Zelensky resisted calls to relocate his government and was adamant that he not panic the public. Down that path, he thought, lay defeat.

“You can’t simply say to me, ‘Listen, you should start to prepare people now and tell them they need to put away money, they need to store up food,’ ” Zelensky recalled. “If we had communicated that — and that is what some people wanted, who I will not name — then I would have been losing $7 billion a month since last October, and at the moment when the Russians did attack, they would have taken us in three days. ... Generally, our inner sense was right: If we sow chaos among people before the invasion, the Russians will devour us. Because during chaos, people flee the country.”

For Zelensky, the decision to keep people in the country, where they could fight to defend their homes, was the key to repelling any invasion.

Alexei Arestovich, an advisor to Zelensky, gives a detailed explanation why Zelensky did not call the reserves in December. ( 13 min into the video)     


Monday, August 8, 2022

Putin’s desperation

Jerusalem Post, Letters to the Editor August 8, 2022


Yonah Jeremy Bob writes in “How significant is the latest Russia-Iran satellite launch?” (August 4): “the Russian leader rarely admits actions his country takes.” Now that is an understatement! Russia for weeks denied that it was about to invade Ukraine and when it did, it denied that it ever invaded.

Russian propaganda has reached unprecedented levels, as Predrag Petrović, the researcher at the Belgrade Center for Security Policy observes following the events in Kosovo: “Somewhere around half past seven on July 31, when sirens were activated in Kosovska Mitrovica and other places in the North where Serbs live, and then barricades were erected, the information was still fresh and scarce, and militant Russian and pro-Russian Telegram channels actively entered the game, and for hours they are filled with a mixture of information, semi-information and complete disinformation and distortions.”

So, on the one hand, we have a desperate Putin who is losing the war in Ukraine, transferring troops from the Donbas to the Kherson area to prevent a Ukrainian counterattack; and on the other, we have an undeterrable Iran approaching the bomb and Russia launching an Iranian satellite.

Surely the answer to Bob’s question is a no-brainer? If this time, in contrast to 1938, the West is trying to prevent Putin from occupying Europe, they better stop Iran from destroying not only Europe but everyone. Have they learned anything from February 24?

MLADEN ANDRIJASEVIC

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