Offensive and Defensive Operations

Ukrainian troops near the front

Over the last three days, the fog has fallen on the front lines. I know there is success in the Ukrainian advance, not because I want to believe it, but because Russian mill bloggers blab. I will not share those until they are firmly in control.

So for the moment, here is a summary from Volymedia. They tend to be accurate and give us an idea of the front lines. It’s also true that using salt is appropriate in the middle of an offensive.

However, a Russian counterattack should be zero surprises:

Summary for 14–15 (17:30) June. The Armed Forces of the Russian Federation are counterattacking, the Armed Forces of Ukraine are shelling the left bank in the Kherson region. Delimkhanov and shelling of the 155th brigade

In Zaporozhye and in the south-east of Donetsk regions, the RF Armed Forces continue to counterattack the Armed Forces of Ukraine. According to Ukrainian sources, Ukrainian units left two settlements in the Tokmak area because “due to the conditions of the area, they were poorly adapted to defense.” It has not yet been possible to establish which villages are referred to.

In the Pologi area, sources from both sides say that there is no talk of encircling the city now, but the Ukrainian Armed Forces are holding positions from the west, north and east, and the Russian troops in this area have run out of steam. According to two Russian officers, they began to take out the contents of army warehouses from Pologi. Sources at the headquarters of the group have not yet confirmed this information. “Everything that was serious there was taken out back in May, there were no reports about leaving the city or such plans. There is no order from the group in this regard, ”says a staff officer of the RF Armed Forces. However, the Ukrainian military, who returned from the area on the morning of June 15, say that the Russian Armed Forces are withdrawing equipment and infantry.

The main battles are taking place in the south-east, where the RF Armed Forces continue to try to cut off the Ukrainian formations that have broken through to Krasnaya Polyana and Zeleny Guy, as well as those who are in Staromlynovka. To do this, Russian troops are trying to take the village of Makarovka (slightly north of Staromlynovka). Makarovka is being attacked from the southwest and west.

“They use tanks, MLRS, infantry. Standard tactics — shelling, attack, withdrawal. So in a circle. Tanks are used as self-propelled artillery. It is necessary to withstand another two or three days, as soon as ours squeeze them at Pologov and go east, the Russians will have to withdraw, otherwise they will be surrounded. Among the prisoners there are those whose units were stationed in the Crimea,” says the Ukrainian officer.

The Russian military confirmed our yesterday’s information that the reserves from the Crimea were indeed activated and transferred to Tokmak-Pologi and to the south of the Donetsk region.

In the Kherson region, the Armed Forces of Ukraine continue to strike with artillery and aircraft at Russian positions on the left bank. At the same time, the main forces of the Russian group in this area are concentrated 30–40 km from the Dnieper. There were no major attempts to land troops of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.

In the Kremennaya area, on June 14, HIMARS MLRS were covered by units of the 155th Marine Brigade of the RF Armed Forces. Part after reorganization and replenishment (due to losses in the Ugledar direction) was transferred to Kremennaya to replace the withdrawn units of the 76th Airborne Division there. Before being sent to the front line, senior officers, generals and guests wanted to speak to the servicemen (perhaps Adam Delimkhanov was among them). The soldiers stood in the “boxes” for about an hour, waiting for the arrival of the authorities, after which the arrivals talked to each other for about half an hour and waited for the late general. And then the whole parade was covered with rockets. That’s what the staff officers say about it. There are also rumors that Adam Delimkhanov was wounded there, and not in the Zaporozhye region. We cannot confirm or deny.

Little is known about the dead and wounded. There is a figure of 130–150 people killed and wounded. Moreover, there are more killed than wounded, since when hit by HIMARS, the dispersion of fragments is so dense that those who find themselves in the affected area usually die.

Here is the official statement from the Ukrainian side. It points precisely to what Volymedia is telling us as well. This is precisely how OSINT is done. You look for things that match on both sides:

As of now, offensive and defensive operations are ongoing in various directions.

In the east, the enemy continues to concentrate a significant amount of forces and resources and pulls up reserves from other directions. In particular, an enemy unit of amphibious assault troops was moved from the south to the east.

In the Bakhmut direction, offensive actions continue in the directions of Rozdolivka — Krasnopolivka and Brekhivka — Yagidne, there is success.

Offensive actions continue in the Berdnyansk and Mariupol directions. There is progress in all directions of attack. About a kilometer on each.

In the Berdyansk direction, fighting continues in the areas of Makarivka.

On the Mariupol direction, fighting continues in the Novodanilivka and Novopokrovka districts.

Over the course of the day, the enemy increased the number of missile and air strikes and artillery and mortar attacks.

Our troops are dealing with strong enemy resistance and their superiority in numbers of men and weapons. The enemy is trying with all his might to prevent the advance of our troops. At the same time, the offensive continues in several directions, our defenders are gradually but surely moving forward and inflicting significant losses on the enemy.

Nuclear Talk

It’s back. We have Russians saying that the West is not afraid of nukes. Here is some of a long piece written by a Russian historian, Sergei Karanagov. Knowing how even academia writes what is pleasing to the Systema, this is hardly accidental. As usual, go to the site on Chrome and get it fully translated it:

Russia and its leadership seem to be facing a difficult choice. It becomes increasingly clear that a clash with the West cannot end even if we win a partial or even a crushing victory in Ukraine.

It will be a really partial victory if we liberate four regions. It will be a slightly bigger victory if we liberate the entire East and South of present-day Ukraine in the next year or two. But there will still remain a part of it with an even more embittered ultranationalist population pumped up with weapons―a bleeding wound threatening inevitable complications and a new war.

Perhaps the worst situation may occur if, at the cost of enormous losses, we liberate the whole of Ukraine and remain in ruins with a population that mostly hates us. Its “redemption” will take more than a decade. Any option, especially the latter one, will distract our country from making an urgently needed step to shift its spiritual, economic, and military-political focus to the east of Eurasia. We will get stuck in the west, with no prospects in the foreseeable future, while present-day Ukraine, primarily its central and western regions, will sap managerial, human, and financial resources out the country. These regions were heavily subsidized even in Soviet times. The feud with the West will continue as it will support a low-grade guerrilla civil war

This setup is dangerous. He is telling us that it’s Cold War again. Perhaps we will go hot. This is not accidental. We have heard things like this from Dmitry Medvedev as well. So it seems Russia is now ready and willing to remain in a state of war.

It’s not a surprise.

What came next is nearly a Marxist análisis as you can get these days. But having seen and read this over the years, it is what it is:

To stop this snowballing downward slide, the West has temporarily consolidated itself. The United States has turned Ukraine into a striking fist intended to create a crisis and thus tie the hands of Russia―the military-political core of the non-Western world, which is freeing itself from the shackles of neo-colonialism―but better still blow it up, thus radically weakening the rising alternative superpower―China. For our part, we delayed our preemptive strike either because we misunderstood the inevitability of a clash, or because we were gathering strength. Moreover, following modern, mainly Western, military-political thought, we thoughtlessly set too high a threshold for the use of nuclear weapons, inaccurately assessed the situation in Ukraine, and did not start the military operation there successfully enough.

Failing internally, Western elites began to actively nourish the weeds that had come through after seventy years of well-being, satiety, and peace―all these anti-human ideologies that reject the family, homeland, history, love between a man and a woman, faith, commitment to higher ideals, everything that constitutes the essence of man. They are weeding out those who resist. The goal is to destroy their societies and turn people into mankurts (slaves deprived of reason and sense of history as described be the great Kirgiz and Russian writer Chengiz Aitmatov) in order to reduce their ability to resist modern “globalist” capitalism, increasingly unfair and counterproductive for humans and humanity as a whole.

Incidentally, the term globalist is highly antisemitic. It stands for Jews. It’s used by the American far right as well. And in this case, it matters little what came first, the chicken or the egg. Now to the nuclear talk:

Therefore, it is necessary to arouse the instinct of self-preservation that the West has lost and convince it that its attempts to wear Russia out by arming Ukrainians are counterproductive for the West itself. We will have to make nuclear deterrence a convincing argument again by lowering the threshold for the use of nuclear weapons set unacceptably high, and by rapidly but prudently moving up the deterrence-escalation ladder. The first steps have already been made by the relevant statements of Russian President and other leaders: the announced deployment of nuclear weapons and their carriers in Belarus, and the increased combat readiness of strategic deterrence forces. But there are many steps on this ladder. I have counted about two dozen. Thing may also get to the point when we will have to urge our compatriots and all people of goodwill to leave their places of residence near facilities that may become targets for strikes in countries that provide direct support to the puppet regime in Kiev. The enemy must know that we are ready to deliver a preemptive strike in retaliation for all of its current and past acts of aggression in order to prevent a slide into global thermonuclear war.

He gets cute by half with this statement as well:

Morally, this is a terrible choice as we will use God’s weapon, thus dooming ourselves to grave spiritual losses. But if we do not do this, not only Russia can die, but most likely the entire human civilization will cease to exist.

There is a strange belief that the United States will not launch because it will want to protect itself. So for my Russian readers, the fascist Japanese leadership thought the same thing before Pearl Harbor, that the US would fold.

Here is what the US will do. You launch a preemptive strike; we launch. It’s game over. The fact that Russian intellectuals are now writing this signals that Russia is ready to commit suicide. This is mutually assured destruction, MAD for short.

He has one thing right. Human civilization, as we know it, will be over. As Albert Einstein once wrote, I paraphrase: “I don’t know how world war three will be fought. But the fourth will be fought with sticks and stones.”

Flashing nukes is a sign of weakness. And as I keep saying, while we will assume all of the Russian arsenals works for MAD, with the epic corruption of the Russian armed forces, I wonder, and I am not alone, how many are dirty bombs? Granted, one working will ruin your day… and you launch, we launch. None is going to wait to see if Russian nukes work, or not.

Western weapons, not just American, are getting the TLC they need. There is no need to flag them like a bully.