Russian special military operation in Ukraine #25

crod wrote:

Backman wrote:Mark Sleboda with a good summary. He says that there's gonna be the biggest battle in the war yet in the south east.

He also says that Russia has to take out the Kiev regime. But they weren't because they wanted to signal that they were still open to the idea of the war being limited.

But’s that’s ok because isn’t that where the main thrust of the RF are based along with the reserve build up?

PapaDragon wrote:

Why were they even wasting time burying them?

Just send the photos to family members, take DNA sample for paper pushers and burn that trash where it lies so it doesn't spread disease

crod wrote:

Lmfao Papa, with little doubt you were born with a lump of flint in lieu of a heart.

Ukraine: Somewhere between Afghanization and Syrianization
Ukraine is finished as a nation - neither side will rest in this war. The only question is whether it will be an Afghan or Syrian style finale.
By Pepe Escobar
August 30 2022


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.
The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of The Cradle.

Podlodka77 wrote:
I am ashamed that this "mountaineer" is my countryman. Alamo, you'll sooner reach the next nearest star than explain anything to him. A complete idiot...

Hole wrote:

The other side, from an Saker article:

caveat emptor wrote:Chemezov's lapdog, Dmitri Shugaev is a head of Federal Service for Military-Technical Cooperation. Corrupt and inept POS.

https://ria.ru/20220916/bpla-1817468462.html

Russia has the best drones, said the head of the FSMTC

The head of the FSMTC Shugaev: Russia has no problems with drones, we have the best.
SAMARKAND, September 16 - RIA Novosti. Russia has no problems with drones, they are the best and there are enough of them, said Dmitry Shugaev, director of the Federal Service for Military-Technical Cooperation.
"We don't have a problem with drones. We have the best drones. We have the most amazing drones," he told reporters.
When asked if there were enough of them, Shugaev said that "we have enough of everything."
Earlier, some media and Telegram channels disseminated unconfirmed information that fragments of a drone, outwardly similar to an Iranian kamikaze drone, were allegedly found in the Russian special operation zone in Ukraine . Commenting on these reports, Shugaev urged to believe only statements from the Ministry of Defense.

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

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.

Dr.Snufflebug wrote:The only major demographical changes in Crimea for 130-ish years have been the influx of Ukrainians during the USSR, and of course Stalins deportation of Tatars during WW2 (as they were accused of collaborating with the Nazi occupiers, which in all honesty was to a large extent absolutely true, but the mass deportation remains a crime, and Russia recognizes it as such, hence the damages paid and the annual remembrance day)

Sujoy wrote:Having suffered a massive defeat in Ukraine, the U.S is now trying to set Russia's southern border on fire
Azerbaijan is invading Armenia
Tajikistan is fighting Kyrgyzstan
Taliban are shelling Uzbekistan
Chechen opposition is unifying
Georgia is contemplating a referendum on taking back Ossetia
Kazakhstan is necking with China

Sujoy wrote:Having suffered a massive defeat in Ukraine, the U.S is now trying to set Russia's southern border on fire

Azerbaijan is invading Armenia

Tajikistan is fighting Kyrgyzstan

Taliban are shelling Uzbekistan

Chechen opposition is unifying

Georgia is contemplating a referendum on taking back Ossetia

Kazakhstan is necking with China

Sujoy wrote:Having suffered a massive defeat in Ukraine, the U.S is now trying to set Russia's southern border on fire

Azerbaijan is invading Armenia

Tajikistan is fighting Kyrgyzstan

Taliban are shelling Uzbekistan

Chechen opposition is unifying

Georgia is contemplating a referendum on taking back Ossetia

Kazakhstan is necking with China

dionis wrote:Alright, seriously this time, who came up with this 10-15% number for Russian military involved in Ukraine?

flamming_python wrote: or Modi encouraging Putin to seek peace during their talks in Samarkand.
I mean it. Check out their mounds of articles just about that 1 sentence from Modi; out of all other things Putin & Modi discussed.

dionis wrote:Alright, seriously this time, who came up with this 10-15% number for Russian military involved in Ukraine?

So the IAEA pulled a WADA and demanded Russia stop military activity around the Zaporozhye nuclear power plant. It said nothing about Ukr shelling and military activity including attempts to seize the plant. wrote:

kvs wrote:All the chicken littles polluting this thread will have anyone more rational think that "gains" by Kiev are irreversible.
How much of Kharkov region will Ukria be able to hold once its army is broken in Donetsk?   As usual the center of the
action which is in Donetsk is ignored to facilitate propaganda narratives.   The Kiev regime's attempt to seize Kherson
failed utterly.   But this is not important according to the chicken little propagandists and some side show in Kharkov
is supposedly the pivotal moment of the war.  
This is Kiev regime social media excrement that is flooding this forum.

Hole wrote:
Another mighty sophisticated western war machine captured by