Reminiscence of the Future...

Monday, March 27, 2023

In Order For Me...

... to not repeat myself while elaborating on Putin's and Patrushev's interviews, I decided to give a very short, radically insufficient, overview:

Their desperation is palpable.

Russia’s crude oil exports by sea have held above the 3 million barrels per day (bpd) mark in the past six weeks, after the EU ban on fuel imports from Russia took effect and after Moscow said it would lower its production by 500,000 bpd, tanker-tracking data compiled by Bloomberg shows. In the most recent week to March 24, Russia’s seaborne crude oil exports fell by 123,000 bpd but were still above 3 million bpd, at 3.11 million bpd, per the data cited by Bloomberg’s Julian Lee. While weekly shipments can be very volatile, tanker tracking in the six-week period to March 24 also showed a similar small decline in Russian shipments. This suggests that Russian crude oil exports have held resilient this year, and the voluntary production cut hasn’t shown yet in Russia’s crude exports to the global market. Most Russian exports are headed to China, India, or “unknown destinations” in Asia, which, history shows, usually means that the cargoes end up in one of the two biggest Asian importers of crude.

But Tolstoy left us with those insights which are true and universally applicable:

Yes, it was like a dream in which a man fancies that a ruffian is coming to attack him, and raises his arm to strike that ruffian a terrible blow which he knows should annihilate him, but then feels that his arm drops powerless and limp like a rag, and the horror of unavoidable destruction seizes him in his helplessness.

Don't expect the crowd inside the beltway ever reading this novel, let alone understanding and learning from it.

Sunday, March 26, 2023

And To Conclude This Weekend...

... with this news. If anyone wants to know where the West is headed--enjoy.

Any chance this wonderful female TSA agent will have her pay rate increased? She absolutely deserves this raise for being a bulwark against insanity.

You Don't Even Need To Know Russian...

... to understand what SMO woke up in Russian people. Look at these two twin sisters from Makeevka, 25 years old. Children, but here they are running their truck with radio comm equipment.

They can drive the tank too. To say that this wakes up a genetic memory of overwhelming majority of Russians about the Great Patriotic War is to say nothing. That is exactly what SMO woke up. The images are overwhelming and are beyond life and intellectual experiences of those (majority) people in the West who "planned" their Ukrainian debacle before 2014 and, then, in 2022. I am on record--they don't understand what they've got themselves into and why the West has been lost.

This And That.

First about this:

Russian tactical nuclear weapons might arrive in Belarus as early as this summer, Russian President Vladimir Putin revealed on Saturday. Moscow is completing the construction of a specialized storage facility for such arms, amid repeated calls by Minsk to deploy them on its soil, he added. The site in Belarus will be ready by July 1, Putin told Russia 24 TV. The president also said that Moscow does not plan to hand over control of any tactical nuclear weapons to Minsk and that it would only deploy its own arms to Belarus. He did not specify when exactly the weapons would be transported to the new site.

There is absolutely nothing sensational about it and this message is primarily for Poland, just in case. Good ol' Iskander's range is 500 kilometers (it doesn't mean that longer range Iskanders will not appear soon) and when placed slightly West of Minsk it covers exactly half of Poland and also "improves" behavior of Baltic states. Moscow and Minsk are parties to union state of Russia and Belarus and it is only natural to do militarily whatever allied countries decide to do within their borders.

Now about real economy, Putin is not bluffing:

"Поджигатели планируют направить на Украину 400 с лишним танков. Все то же самое, что и по боеприпасам. За это время мы произведем новых, и модернизируются имеющиеся тоже, свыше 1600, а общее количество танков РФ будет превышать в три раза количество танков ВСУ, даже более, чем в три раза", - добавил Путин.

Translation: "The arsonists plan to send more than 400 tanks to Ukraine. The same goes for ammunition. During this time, we will produce new ones, and the existing ones will also be modernized, over 1,600, and the total number of tanks of the Russian Federation will exceed three times the number of tanks of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, even more than three times,” Putin added.

I know, some people in Pentagon scratch their heads but, as I mentioned in my video too, the actual number of produced and modernized tanks in Russia this year may reach 3,000, with majority of them the tanks of new types, primarily of T-90M Proryv type. For T-14 Armata, nobody knows the actual number, what is known that there are now more than a hundred of them and at least couple of battalions (around 60 tanks, give and take) are training for the deployment to the front line. I am on record for years about "revelation mode". Meanwhile the fossil of Henry Kissinger also had a revelation recently when concluded that the new Cold War is much more dangerous than the old one. No shit, genius--in related news: water is wet, sky is blue and Western establishment is ignorant.

I speak about it here:

And while at it, you might as well pay attention to this decent video about British carriers, granted that some facts there are somewhat debatable, but in general it is a worthy one. Per "third" and "fourth" rules of thumb, they are tied to a business known in Russia as "Coefficient of Operational Tension" (КОН--Коэффициэнт Оперативного Напряжения) and it is the science onto itself and staffs of formations deal with that.

But there is no doubt that HMS Prince of Wales so far is an embarrassment, even when allowed for the issues of being a new design.

In related news, Ukies begin to evacuate Avdeevka, whose "position" looked like this yesterday:

There were some convulsions by VSU on Kupyansk axis, naturally, they ended bad for VSU and when people ask me (this was the question from one of the viewers on YT) what war Russia is getting ready for producing these monstrous quantities of war materiel from shells and missiles to tanks, my answer is very simple--Si Vis Pacem, Para Bellum. Russia is preparing for facing down any threat emanating from the combined West with such military advantage that even psychopaths need to think twice. But then again, the narrative did change, noticeably. Somebody in Pentagon must know that Russian reserves have not been deployed yet. They will when and if needed. This is your primer for Sunday.

P.S. Ah, yes. Comrade Xi still didn't call Mr. Ze as Western media assured us was his intention. What could have possibly go wrong, wink, wink?

Saturday, March 25, 2023

Open Thread.

Go at it.

Friday, March 24, 2023

I Don't Know What's The Deal.

But there is very little doubt that the US illegitimately occupies part of Syria's territory and conducts a favorite business of training terrorists.

BEIRUT (AP) — A strike Thursday by a suspected Iranian-made drone killed a U.S. contractor and wounded six other Americans in northeast Syria, and U.S. forces retaliated with airstrikes on sites in Syria used by groups affiliated with Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, the Pentagon said. Activists said the U.S. bombing killed at least four people. While it’s not the first time the U.S. and Iran have traded strikes in Syria, the attack and the U.S. response threaten to upend recent efforts to deescalate tensions across the wider Middle East, whose rival powers have made steps toward détente in recent days after years of turmoil. U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said in a statement that the American intelligence community had determined the drone was of Iranian origin, but offered no other immediate evidence to support the claim. The drone hit a coalition base in the northeast Syrian city of Hasaka. The wounded included five American service members and a U.S. contractor.

I don't know who sent the "message", but this event is a great testament to a military fallacy of the American bases around the world, because not only they will continue to lose the "power projection" value but will continue to increase their value as fat and mostly indefensible targets against modern battlefield delivery systems. Nobody in their own mind would believe that US air defense systems such as Patriot PAC3 can handle a serious salvo of even relatively unsophisticated subsonic means of delivery.

Meanwhile butt-hurt BSer Sebastien Roblin "reports" based on propaganda doctored "data" from 404 that Russia... finally ran out of tanks and reactivated T-54/55 ones.

Russia is dusting off the cobwebs from military deep storage facilities in the country’s Far East, for the first time railing un-upgraded Cold War T-54B tanks westward, possibly bound for Ukraine. Now, a video of the T-54s transported by rail has surfaced.

What uneducated hack Roblin doesn't know, because with degree in "conflict resolution" and "social and global studies" you can not know anything of value, is that Russia was using older T-54/55 since War in Chechnya not for tank operations but as a very helpful artillery units for... drum roll... block posts, thus increasing their combat stability and as a good caliber response in case of attacks on numerous block posts. Generally Western pseudo-academic fields in "strategic studies", "conflict resolution" or "foreign relations" produce unemployable office plankton with minimal skills even for 7/11 janitor, but when you are also getting paid by Ukies, what kind of "reporting" one provides becomes abundantly clear. In general, SMO exposed all, without exception, US MSM and popular "alternative" media as uneducated hacks and unprofessional losers, including a large portion of the US "military experts" with hefty C.V.s in "fighting" in Iraq and Afghanistan, but with minimal expertise in modern wars and combined arms operations of scale.

But that brings us to issue of military education in the US and the new crop of America's present and future military leaders. I wrote about it before and quoted Tim Bakken:

Academic standards are also nonexistent. I believe this trend started approximately ten years ago, and it has continued to get worse. West Point has stated standards for academic expectations and performance, but they are ignored. Cadets routinely fail multiple classes and they are not separated at the end-of-semester Academic Boards. Their professors recommend “Definitely Separate,” but those recommendations are totally disregarded. I recently taught a cadet who failed four classes in one semester (including mine), in addition to several she had failed in previous semesters, and she was retained at the Academy. As a result, professors have lost hope and faith in the entire Academic Board process. It has been made clear that cadets can fail a multitude of classes and they will not be separated. Instead, when they fail (and they do to a staggering extent), the Dean simply throws them back into the mix and expects the faculty to somehow drag them through the academic program until they manage to earn a passing grade.

And this is one of very many testimonies of a collapse of professional military education in the US.

In related news, I spoke today with Vera and famous Russian REAL war reporter Marat Khairullin--the rough estimate of just wounded in and around Bakhmut is roughly 20,000. As Marat says, who spends most of his days at the front line and communicates with serious tactical and operational level officers, they all are unanimous--combat medicine in VSU ceased to exist several months ago, and just inside Bakhmut today there are more than 2,000 wounded who still cannot get even stabilization procedures. That means they will be dead in a day or two. Reality of the 404 "offensive" is absolutely not what is being portrayed by Western media. This is not from some shitty TG channels, this is from people of repute and first hand operational (forget tactical) knowledge of the combat zone. Yes, Marat is a constant presence, from the front lines, on Russian major TV networks. So, here is your SitRep of sorts for Friday.