re: Latest Updates: Russia-Ukraine Conflict

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Getting closer to 6 months and this shite should be over

I wouldn’t even engage OML he’s like a cockroach he will never die and never go away.

British Defence Intelligence
UPDATE ON UKRAINE 26 July 2022
INTELLIGENCE UPDATE

On 24 July 2022, Russian cruise missiles hit the dock-side in Ukraine's Odesa Port. The Russian MoD claimed to have hit a Ukrainian warship and a stockpile of anti-ship missiles. There is no indication that such targets were at the location the missiles hit.

Russia almost certainly perceives anti-ship missiles as a key threat which is limiting the effectiveness of their Black Sea Fleet. This has significantly undermined the overall invasion plan, as Russia cannot realistically attempt an amphibious assault to seize Odesa.

Russia will continue to prioritise efforts to degrade and destroy Ukraine's anti-ship capability. However, Russia's targeting processes are highly likely routinely undermined by dated intelligence, poor planning, and a top-down approach to operations.

The Economist has published a list of seven recommended books on Putin. No, none of them are of the "Psychopaths and How to Recognize Them" variety, but then we don't need one. We're way past that stage.

Anyway, here they are in case your blood pressure is too low or your have a longing to be depressed about Mankind -

First Person. By Vladimir Putin. Public Affairs; 208 pages; $16 and £11.99

Vladimir Putin gave notice of who he was, and what he was capable of, in “First Person”, a transcript of interviews published in 2000, at the start of his overlong rule. In his youth, he recalled, he had been a tough little hoodlum who fought rats in the stairwell of his communal-apartment building and, later, brawled with strangers on the streets of Leningrad. “A dog senses when somebody is afraid of it,” he had learned, “and bites.” He prized loyalty and feared betrayal. He was hypersensitive to slights, to both his country and himself. He bore grudges. Sometimes the Mr Putin of “First Person” appears frank, at others, cagey and withdrawn. Few people knew him well; he was seen as a grey man, inscrutable. Read our longer review of this and other books.

Darkness at Dawn: The Rise of the Russian Criminal State. By David Satter. Yale University Press; 326 pages; $30 and £23

David Satter was among the first Anglophone analysts to gauge the evil in Mr Putin’s system. In “Darkness at Dawn” (2004) he accused the FSB, the domestic security service, of orchestrating a string of bombings in Russia in 1999 that killed around 300 people and ignited the second Chechen war—thus helping Mr Putin, who oversaw the fighting, to secure the presidency. Few were ready to digest that theory; several Russians who pursued it came to a sticky end.

The Man Without a Face. By Masha Gessen. Riverhead; 314 pages; $27.95. Granta; £20

In this polemical biography, Masha Gessen characterised Mr Putin, then set to reclaim the presidency after a pro-forma stint as prime minister, as a killer and extortionist. This version of him—a KGB thug turned mafia godfather—had been “hidden in plain sight”, but obscured by wishful thinking and that grey veneer. Death and terror were politically useful to Mr Putin, the author wrote. He made no distinction between the state’s interests and his own. Read our review from 2012.

Putin’s People. By Catherine Belton. Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 640 pages; $35. William Collins; £21.99

The gangster network that oversees Russia was definitively elaborated in “Putin’s People”. In the system of “KGB capitalism” that Catherine Belton described, government was a machine for extracting rents and expropriating assets, politics a squabble over who got them, and the president its referee. The siloviki (strongmen) were bound together by a regime of mutual blackmail, in which secrets were both weapons and liabilities; for his part, Mr Putin had spilled too much blood and made too many enemies to retire. Besides self-enrichment, the spoils were used to undermine the West, black cash sloshing around the world to fund “active measures” and the “restoration of the country’s global position”. We reviewed the book, and included it as one of our Books of 2020.

The New Tsar. By Steven Lee Myers. Vintage; 592 pages; $22. Simon & Schuster; £9.99

The author perceptively identified the Orange revolution in Ukraine in 2004 as a breaking-point. Huge protests overturned the result of an election rigged in favour of Mr Putin’s candidate. The reversal combined personal humiliation with a geopolitical rebuff; his fear of crowds, and sense of the jeopardy of democracy, were inflamed. He “nursed the experience like a grudge”, Mr Lee Myers wrote, tightening the screws in Russia, ramping up his propaganda and setting up tame youth movements to dominate the streets. Mr Putin’s bleak Chekist mindset could not admit the possibility that Ukrainians were turning West—and rejecting him—of their own volition. Convinced that the CIA had paid or cajoled them, he embarked on a spiral of meddling that culminated in the latest invasion. By 2014, thought Mr Lee Myers, he had found a “millenarian” mission as the indispensable leader of an exceptional power. “The question now was where would Putin’s policy stop?”

Mr Putin: Operative in the Kremlin. By Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy. Brookings Institution Press; 400 pages; $29.95 and £19.99

The authors saw Mr Putin’s efforts to make Russia’s economy more resilient, and to eliminate domestic opposition, as a long-haul preparation for confronting the West. His bid to undermine Western democracies through fifth columnists, bribery and kompromat was part of the same strategy. The greyness, they wrote, had always been tactical: Mr Putin was “the ultimate political performance artist”, his mercurial public persona a way to keep his adversaries off-balance. Mr Gaddy and Ms Hill—who became the top Russia adviser in Donald Trump’s National Security Council—concluded that he was more than an avaricious gangster. His objective was to survive and overcome his foes, who, in his view, were Russia’s enemies too; to that end he was waging a long, hybrid war against the West. He would pounce on weaknesses, the pair warned, and fulfil his threats. “He won’t give up, and he will fight dirty.” Yet even these authors judged that, if only for reasons of trade, Mr Putin “does not want Russia to end up being a pariah state”. Read our 2013 review of an early edition of the book.

Day of the Oprichnik. By Vladimir Sorokin. Translated by Jamey Gambrell. Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 208 pages; $16. Penguin Classics; £9.99

The book that most clearly saw where Putinism was heading was not a history or biography but a novel (first published in 2006) set in 2028. The Russia it depicts seems to exist in two time-frames at once, futuristic technology jostling with medieval barbarity and obscurantism. The country is walled off from Europe and the tsar has been restored. His word is law, but even he must “bow and cringe before China”, which (along with gas exports) props up the economy. The oprichnik of the title is one of his elite henchmen—the name comes from an order of pitiless enforcers under Ivan the Terrible. Their methods are murder and torture, their sidelines extortion and theft. Vladimir Sorokin’s satirical dystopia has come to seem more prescient than outlandish. The details are grotesque, but also, sometimes, horribly familiar. In the story, when the wall was built “opponents began to crawl out of the cracks like noxious centipedes”—imagery that anticipates Mr Putin’s dehumanisation of his critics as gnats. Chillingly, when the oprichniks gather for a debauch, one of their toasts is “Hail the Purge!”

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Glenn Greenwald, Tulsi Gabbard, and Rand Paul all blacklisted by Zelensky as Russian propagandists.

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Kentucky Senator Rand Paul and former Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard have been listed by Ukraine among a number of American politicians, academics and activists Kyiv claims have promoted "Russian propaganda."

The list was compiled by the Ukrainian Center for Countering Disinformation, founded in 2021 by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to study the impact of Russian disinformation. The center is part of Ukraine's National Security and Defense Council.

The list—which also includes retired U.S. Army Colonel Douglas Macgregor, military strategist Edward Luttwak, political scientist John Mearsheimer and journalist Glenn Greenwald—does not explain what the consequences are for those who Ukraine clearly considers responsible for promoting the Kremlin's line. But it offers explanations for inclusion on the list.

Newsweek

The article does explain how all 3 of them have promoted Russian propaganda.

MacGregor DID have credibility with military strategy and tactics, but he has never missed the opportunity to be interviewed by Putin fan boy media outlets. Since February, all of his predictions have missed what Russia would do.

Rand has his place and is correct on some issues but his father's influence on him negates that to a great extent.

FWIW, back in his hometown, he is known as Randy, and his name is Randall. His dad used Rand to get his followers to believe that he named him after Ayn Rand. The funny thing is that Ayn Rand publicly shiite all over Libertarians every opportunity she was given.

Mearsheimer is either mistaken or outright lies with some of his points of the West and Putin post 2000. Without those bastardizations, his argument completely falls apart.

Not completely related news but…

France is on schedule to complete its withdrawal of troops from Mali in mid August. This comes in the wake of a military coup last year. France and other western countries denounced the coup and the military junta in power and cut them off from a lot of economic aid. The new military junta turned to Russia’s Wagner group to help with security and told France to leave. There are now more than 1000 Wagner troops in Mali and there are already claims of civilian massacres and war crimes.

Russia is gaining influence over much of Africa in large part due to the West’s refusal to work with any non democratic regimes. The refusal to work with these regimes is shortsighted in my opinion. France and the west are handing over a lot of influence to Russia and China in resource rich and terrorist infested parts of the globe. The simple fact is that most Africans really don’t care much about who governs them as long as they can continue to eek out the measly living that they’re used to.

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This statement does not resonate. Nobody is worshipping Zelensky. It’s a false Russian argument to pretend it’s about one man.

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Zelensky took office ad the president of Ukraine in May of 2019, just over three years ago, but when you read what his critics say you’d believe he was responsible for events in 2014 and even for Ukranian atrocities during WWII.

All this is being done to make people less sympathetic to Ukraine.

But reality is Russia is at fault here. They started the conflict. It’s their nature. Whether they are led by Lenin, Stalin, Kruschev, or Putin Russia will be Russia. It’s in their DNA.

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Anyone care to refute him, because he’s clearly right.

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Remind me how Russia treats dissident journalists ?

Or should I say, someone remind Greenwald. People in his position are regularly imprisoned without trial and killed over there. He knows this. He won’t say anything about it.