Nobody interested in the Russia-Ukraine conflict?

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Ending today with a ceasefire is exactly what Russia needs.
They are exhausted, probably unable to mount a big offensive for this spring.
However, Ukrainians are gathering and saving new resources, so they can mount something big once the mud dries.

A ceasefire now would benefit Russia only. It would prevent any counter-offensive while letting them gather new forces for an even bigger attack later.

As I said, I am in the process of analysing his content.
"The Truth is the Truth no matter where it may land."

Bakhmut seems to be lost, but "The Grand Russian Offensive" seems to be a dud overall.

The fog of war around Bakhmut is dense and it has to be.
If civilian bystanders don't know what's going on, chances are the enemy doesn't know either - it gives higher chances for success.

Probably Ukrainians are slowly retreating to the West bank. Their goal is not to hold the city but to give Russians as much losses as possible at possibly little cost for themselves - so Russians use up the mobilized forces and ammo there and become unable to strike elsewhere.
Urban defence is a good opportunity for this. That's why prolonging defense of Bakhmut can be worth it, even if finally the city is doomed to fall.

How it seems to escape everyone's notice that the main sources for Russian mega-casualties are Ukrainian or otherwise suspect and the same people are very quiet about their own casualties I don't know...

I still maintain that we will not know anything until the war is long over but certain unnamed folks need to prepare for a potential revelation that the casualty numbers they share with glee are not just wrong, but utterly wrong and deliberately misleading. All this and more in a typically long winded Ron Unz piece:

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https://www.unz.com/runz/war-and-propag ... -conflict/

Edit: audio version (27:23) of the article: https://www.unz.com/CONTENTS/AUDIO/runz ... ineWar.mp3

War and Propaganda in the Russia-Ukraine Conflict

As the title of the piece indicated, the West had effectively now taken over control of the war, and if the effort to defeat Russian President Vladimir Putin failed, American global influence might be undermined and the future of the NATO alliance called into question. Indeed, such notable foreign policy luminaries as John Mearsheimer, Jeffrey Sachs, Douglas Macgregor, and Lawrence Wilkinson have all recently raised the possibility that NATO risks disintegration, especially in the wake of Seymour Hersh’s bombshell disclosure that President Biden had illegally destroyed the Nord Stream pipelines, some of Europe’s most important civilian energy infrastructure.

So in effect, America is at war with Russia on Russia’s own border, and if we lose that war, the era of our global dominance that followed the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union might come to an end. Since the earliest days of the fighting, our electronic and social media have functioned as unrestrained cheerleaders, hailing Ukrainian victories and Russian defeats, but this WSJ article could not avoid providing a much more sobering perspective.

Although this war has been of enormous world importance, I’ve actually written very little about the details of the conflict.

I lack any military expertise and doubted that I could contribute anything useful about the fighting, which was anyway obscured by the fog of war. America’s reigning Neocon establishment totally controls the Western mainstream media and over the last few decades they have made propaganda, dishonest or otherwise, one of their most frequently deployed political weapons. Indeed, no sooner had the war broken out than social media was awash with the heroic exploits of “the Ghost of Kyiv” and “the Martyrs of Snake Island,” outright hoaxes that were widely disseminated and believed at the time.

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Putting the issue in very crude terms, I doubt whether Russian losses may be accurately estimated by aggregating and analyzing what amounted to Ukrainian propaganda-Tweets.

If the Russians had indeed suffered more than three times the Ukrainian losses in armored vehicles, with well over 500 of their tanks captured by the latter, a Ukrainian military triumph might have seemed very likely, so the Americans and their allies naturally rewarded their victorious proteges with a tidal wave of financial and military support that easily topped a hundred billion dollars.

The supposed Ukrainian achievement was certainly a remarkable one. According to Wikipedia, the largest land offensive in human history was Germany’s 1941 Operation Barbarossa, which involved fewer than 7,000 armored vehicles. But if we credit Oryx, over the last twelve months Ukraine’s doughty patriots have totally annihilated a far greater Russian mechanized force, while their own losses have been just a fraction of that. Individuals should decide for themselves how plausible such total numbers sound.

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Furthermore, an examination of Oryx’s origins raised other troubling issues.

From the Iraq War onward, the credibility of the American government has steadily deteriorated, considerably weakening the effectiveness of its international propaganda campaigns, a central pillar of its international influence.

Then in 2014 a British blogger named Eliot Higgins established Bellingcat, supposedly an independent research organization that relied upon the objective analysis of open source materials. However, in practice his efforts seemed to almost invariably produce conclusions closely aligned with American foreign policy interests in Syria, Ukraine, and other international flashpoints. This notably including the shoot-down of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 and the alleged gas attack in Syria that Higgins himself had covered the previous year, always pinning the blame upon governments that were the targets of American hostility.

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Meanwhile, other American military experts have provided very different assessments of the course of the war.

For decades, Col. Douglas Macgregor has been regarded as a leading conservative military strategist, authoring several well-regarded books and having many dozens of guest appearances on FoxNews. After having a long career in NATO, he had been a finalist for the position of National Security Advisor, served as a Senior Advisor to the Secretary of Defense, and was nominated as U.S. Ambassador to Germany. He is obviously very well-connected in such establishment military circles, and based upon his Pentagon contacts, he has repeatedly stated that it is actually the Ukrainian forces that have suffered horrendous casualties, including as many as 160,000 combat deaths compared to far lower Russian losses of perhaps 20,000 or so. Other military experts such as Scott Ritter and Larry Johnson have expressed very similar views.

Across all of his numerous interviews, Macgregor comes across as quite persuasive and confident in his assessments of the military situation.

Given the enthusiastic, almost uniform support of powerful Western political, financial, and media interests for the Ukrainian side, I find it difficult to understand why Macgregor, Ritter, Johnson, and others would be taking such contrary positions unless they sincerely believed that they were correct. Indeed, a BBC research effort recently used social media and other open sources to identify 14,709 individual Russian service members killed in the war, a figure that seems quite consistent with Macgregor’s total estimate of 20,000.

So we have diametrically conflicting positions, with Ukrainian officials and the Oryx website claiming Russian losses have been several times greater than Ukrainian ones, while Macgregor and his allies put the ratio at perhaps 8-to-1 in the opposite direction.

I personally lean much more towards Macgregor’s perspective, but I actually doubt that the issue matters much in strategic terms. From the beginning, I’ve never regarded the operational-level details of the fighting in Ukraine as very interesting or important, and haven’t paid much attention to it. This explains why I had never looked at the Oryx website until just a few days ago.

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But although Russia’s operational progress on the battlefield has been slow and mixed, on the geostrategic level, the Russians have already won a series of major victories. China, Iran, India, Saudi Arabia, and most of the other non-Western countries have clearly moved towards Russia, which also easily surmounted the unprecedented sanctions that most had expected would cripple her economy. The reckless American destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines and the European energy crisis may eventually cause the collapse of NATO. Putin’s domestic approval rating is in the 80s, probably as high as it has ever been. And I don’t see any of these results changing if the military stalemate continues.

While the fog of war is certain and we are certainly not being given full truth from either side, I find Macgregor's estimate extremely unlikely because 1) attacking always means more losses than defending; 2) if Ukrainian losses were higher than Russsian, Ukrainian army would have been long nonexistent. The fact that it still fights against a bigger army means they fight smarter than their enemy.

Surveys in Russia are unreliable. There's a whole lot of reasons why they are even more unreliable there than in most other places in the world but let's focus on one reason: people don't feel safe to be critical of their leader if they can legally face 15 years of gulag or being sent to the frontlines. Keeping your opinion to yourself and trying just to survive is an old adaptation to the soviet - and likely even tsarist - realities. It has all the reasons to surface again now.

Europe is surviving the winter not bad (actually, EU seems right now significantly better off than Britain, thank your brexiters for cutting you from common markets), quickly developing alternative energy sources - especially Germany are busy because they had really a lot to do about it - and they're doing it.

NATO is actually strenghtening, expanding, gaining importance and reinforcing the East Flank as the result of this war. Exactly the opposite of the collapse planned by pootin.

Not always, especially in more modern conflicts with modern weaponry.



Depends which numbers for Russian casualties you are using. As stated in the article the Ukrainian army had half a million men on the day of invasion - that's a lot of casualties to inflict in one year by outnumbered Russian forces. But then again, we have reports (and some pictorial evidence) of baby faced teenagers and old men being press ganged into service by Ukrainians. That suggests something has gone seriously wrong. Also if Ukrainian casualties are lower than Russia's why don't they give a number? Even a fake one?



No doubt, though the latest was a BBC attempt to survey social media for deaths of soldiers. Not some sweating Russian official reading a teleprompter.



On the surface and in the short term. Its longer term prospects are heavily wrapped up in the fate of this conflict and how bifurcated the world economy is going to be.

Neither of the armies has this level of technological superiority over their enemy.

At the day of the invasion, Ukrainian army had around 200 thousand active personnel and it started mobilisation after the attack. I don't know where you took this half a million from.

They do. The last official number was 13 thousand in December.
https://www.ukrinform.net/rubric-ato/36 ... arted.html
Probably very heavily manipulated (I expect i.e. not counting the wounded and missing) and I see no reason to trust it at all but it does exist.

Of course a lot depends on the outcome of this war.
Yet another reason to be active about it.

Why do you think they are so reticent about Ukrainian losses?

It's from the article I just linked, which we are supposedly discussing. The paragraph in whole was:

In hindsight, Russia’s failure to win a quick, decisive victory should not have been too surprising. For example, I’d been entirely unaware that Ukraine actually had an enormous regular army, more than three times the size of Germany’s, and far larger than that of any European NATO country. Much of Ukraine’s military was fully trained to NATO standards, and including reserves and the National Guard, Ukraine deployed more than a half-million ground troops, outnumbering the attacking Russian forces by around 3-to-1, with many of its best units heavily entrenched in strong defensive positions. Under such challenging circumstances, it’s quite understandable that the Russians have required a year of heavy fighting to gain ground against the stubborn Ukrainian defenders, with the latter heavily backed by supplies and assistance from America and the rest of NATO.

Regular information war.
Protecting morale and not giving the enemy feedback on effectiveness of their actions.

3-to-1 outnumbering, NATO training and strong defensive positions would effect in 8-to-1 losses on the Ukrainian side despite the rule of thumb being the defender's losses are significantly lower?
Not plausible. Not holding together at all.

I hope that's exactly what it is. But I am always drawn back to the Syrian war. The big failure of America and its rebel allies in that particular proxy war was the failure to lay the groundwork for their false flag. When the news came that Assad had gassed a bunch of children with accompanying video evidence, everyone who knew anything about that war (and had a triple digit IQ) immediately asked "Why? He was winning the war. Why would Assad do the only thing that could provide pretext for Americans to enter the war which could conceivably snatch defeat from the jaws of victory?"

Trump didn't fall for it - probably his finest hour and perhaps only redeeming act.

Now here we are being told that Putin is dying, the Russians are using shovels to beat enemy soldiers to death because they have no bullets, while being strafed by the Ghost of Kiev and taunted by the soldiers of Snake Island over the radio. I fear this excessive propaganda is the groundwork for a false flag mass casualty attack that will be blamed on the Russians which will provide pretext for every country that wants to get more directly involved.

Recall that most modern weapons can be fired from safe distance. When your tactics are bomb/missile/shell everything to dust then advance over the ruins - casualties need not be that high. Looking at some of the photographs, that might be what is happening in many places.

I don't know enough about Syria and Assad to have a strong opinion but I know quite a lot about Ukraine - I've been there, I know plenty of people from there, I've been observing social processes there since around 2000.
The scenario you draw is very unlikely - it's not their goal.

That would require overwhelming technological superiority - or else the attacking army would be shelled exactly the same way, while unable to take advantage of prepared defensive positions, landmines and terrain.

Again, I hope you are right. But if I hear about a convenient chemical or a nuclear attack in Ukraine I am going to be immediately suspicious.