Peloni: As per usual, this will not end well for Ukrainians in the front lines.
It’s very difficult to imagine how Ukraine can prevent any further Russian advances after this.
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The Russian Ministry of Defense announced on Sunday that their forces had entered Ukraine’s Dnipropetrovsk Region, which Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov confirmed is part of Putin’s buffer zone plan. This was foreseen as early as late August once the Battle of Pokrovsk began but has been achieved even without capturing that strategic fortress town. Russian forces simply went around it after breaking through the southern Donbass front. This development puts Ukraine in a dilemma.
It’ll now have to simultaneously fortify the Dnipropetrovsk front together with the southern Kharkov and northern Zaporozhye ones in case Russia uses its new position to launch offensives into any of those three. This could put serious strain on the Ukrainian Armed Forces as they’re already struggling to prevent a major breakthrough in Sumy Region from Kursk. Coupled with depleting manpower and questions about continued US military-intelligence aid, this might be enough to collapse the frontlines.
To be sure, that scenario has been bandied about many times over the past more than 1,200 days, but it nowadays appears tantalizingly closer than ever. Observers also shouldn’t forget that Putin told Trump that he’ll respond to Ukraine’s strategic drone strikes earlier this month, which could combine with the abovementioned two factors to achieve this long-desired breakthrough. Of course, it might just be a symbolic demonstration of force, but it could also be something more significant as well.
Ukraine’s best chances of preventing this are for the US to either get Russia to agree to freeze the frontlines or to go on another offensive. The first possibility could be advanced by the carrot-and-stick approach of proposing a better resource-centric strategic partnership than has already been offered in exchange on pain of imposing crippling secondary sanctions on its energy clients (specifically China and India with likely waivers for the EU) and/or doubling down on military-intelligence aid if it still refuses.
As for the second, the 120,000 troops that Ukraine has assembled along the Belarusian border according to President Alexander Lukashenko last summer could either cross that frontier and/or one of Russia’s internationally recognized frontiers. Objectively speaking, however, both possibilities only stand a slim chance of success: Russia has made it clear that it must achieve more of its goals in the conflict before agreeing to any ceasefire while its success in pushing Ukraine out of Kursk bodes ill for other invasions.
The likelihood of Ukraine cutting its losses by agreeing to more of Russia’s demands for peace is nil. Therefore, it might inevitably opt, whether in lieu of the aforesaid scenarios or in parallel with one or both of them, to intensify its “unconventional operations” against Russia. This refers to assassinations, strategic drone strikes, and terrorism. All that will do, however, is provoke more (probably outsized) conventional retaliation from Russia and thus painfully delay Ukraine’s seemingly inevitable defeat.
With an eye towards the endgame, it appears as though an inflection point is about to be reached or already has been in the sense of irreversibly shifting the military-strategic dynamics in Russia’s favor. It’s very difficult to imagine how Ukraine can extricate itself from this dilemma. All signs point to this being impossible, though the conflict has already surprised observers on both sides before, so it can’t be ruled out. Nevertheless, it’s a far-fetched scenario, and it’s more likely that Ukraine’s official defeat is nigh.
Hi, Adam.
Here he is!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ItmwDkDGHWs&list=PLbVjowC3ZHaflOHG-7Scd2z08IUc2KAiN
I’m checking him out – but first, a sandwich…
The Ukrainian sites, as well as the site of Constantine Samoilov, who has emerged as the principal voice of the Russian opposition on YouTube (he is Russian, not Ukrainian) , claim that Russia’s economy is in dire straits and close to comlete collapse. Many American and British websites, such “Joe Blogs,,” echo these claims, citing official Russian government statistics to support them. They claim there is run-away inflation, a rising number of corporate bankrupsies, and Russian governmetn takeovers of numerous corporations that are no longer operating at a profit. They claim that there is a severe labor shortage, since so many Russian men are serving at the front, and.or have returned home with severe disabilities such asparalysis from the next down (what is the correct name for this diability?) or at least from the waste down, serious brain damage, and similar conditions that make it impossible to hold down jobs. Other problems include an increase in elderly people who are owed retirement pensions, and the incresing decrease of working-age Russians, who are required to pay for these pensions by means of their taxes. Finally these Western, opposition-Russian and Ukrainian sites claim that Russian revenues from the sale of petroleum products to overseas markets, described as a major source of revenue for the Russian state as well as petroleum-producing corporations, has fallen substantially over the past year, partly because of the falling price of petrolem on international markets, and also because their largest trading partner, China, has been forced to cut back on its purchases of Russian petroleum products because of China’s own economic problems (China is said to be suffering a severe economic recession).
From the Ukrainian alternative universe: The Ukrainian and pro-Ukrainian media have increasingly, over the past few weeks, been adopting a “triumphalist” tone, describe numerous Ukrainian victories and feats of arms in Ukraine’s war with Russia. These perspectives are supported by numerous accounts of Russian factories, including arms production factories, oil storage facilities, oil refineries, Russian airbases and the aircraft at these bases, and Russian military ships and oil tankers in the Black Sea. The Ukrainian websites do concede that the Russian are continuing to make progress on the front lines, but claim that their progress has slowed in recent weeks, The Ukrainian cities such as Kharkov and Prokrofsk are described as holding out heroically under Russian bombardments and seige, something like the way Leningrad and Stalingrad held out against the brutal Nazi seiges during World War II. They also describe massive and vicious Russian bombing, shelling, drone attacks, manned bomber attacks and missile attacks directed at Ukrainian cities, and claim that these attacks are directed exclusively at civilian targets, such as residential building and power plants providing civilian communities with electricity and heat. The Ukrainians claim that these attacks do not target Ukrainian military facilities, but only innocent civilians. In spite of these admissions that the Ukraine is taking a terrible pounding from a vicious, utterly inhumane Russia, the Ukrainian web sites are also predicting that a Ukrainian military victory is in sight. They base this claim on what they describe as huge Russian losses of soldiers (“warm bodies”) and equally heavily military equipment of all kinds, including tanks. The Ukrainians also claim that the Russian economy is near collapse, there is run-away inflation in Russia, that most Russians, other than wealthy, politically connected “elites” can not longer afford the basic necessities of life, such as food and rent. All of these Russian problems, the Ukrainians claim, will force Russia to surrender and accept a negotiated peace on mainly Ukrainian terms, in the near of at least middle-term future.
Adam
To sum up your massive posting to hide the venal role of the Green Goblin, nominally a Jew and the thing about that promoted by every Neocon as such, you are delusional.
Start to book yourself into the nearest looney bin. I mean that sincerely
@Adam
And yet it remains the Ukrainians who continue to lose ground, whose deficiencies in men, munitions and morale are not impacted by the Ukrainian attempts to affect such exclusively NATO interested targets as the Russian strategic nuclear bomber fleet. Now Russia has begun taking ground in an entirely new Oblast. How is it that Russia will be forced to accept Ukrainian terms if Ukraine continues to lose ground, Ukrainian propaganda not witstanding. Only the front line troops will will feel the effects of this tragedy continuing. Very sad.