Bernhard About VSU Losses.

He refutes obvious BS from Financial Times:

I follow and like Adam Tooze. His Chartbooks have always good materials. This recent one on the Silicon Valley Bank crash is also fine. But I was somewhat disturbed by a recent tweet of his:

Adam Tooze @adam_tooze - 20:11 UTC · Mar 9, 2023

"Some experts worry Ukraine may be expending high-quality troops and equipment to kill mere Russian prison recruits as “cannon fodder”." Wow the language around the attritional battle at Bakhmut is getting grotesque! 7:1 ratio not good enough for you?

Link: ft.com Military briefing: Ukraine’s battle of diminishing returns for Bakhmut

Was that satire?

Moon of Alabama @MoonofA - 20:14 UTC Mar 9, 2023
Replying to @adam_tooze

7:1 to whose advantage?

He did not respond. But no, it was not satire. The linked Financial Times piece, reprinted in the Irish Times, actually quotes the Ukrainian national security chief Oleksiy Danilov as saying that the kill ratio was one to seven in Ukraine's favor.

I want to reiterate my position here: ANY, I underscore, ANY Western MSM ranging from BBC and Financial Times to WSJ, NYT and MSNBC is a propaganda outlet tasked with disseminating lies and fake "facts". Most people who work there, they are either psychopaths, or down right evil. Few ones who still retain some redeeming human qualities, work there after making the deal with own consciousness out of pure material (mortgage, car payments, life style) or even fear (family, own well-being etc.), or lack of any useful professional skills reasons. They are also slaves of the circumstances and only very few of them have enough integrity to challenge the lies, including by means of declaring that "I am not going to do this shit anymore". 

So, Bernhard counters this BS with a purely professional approach (I would have done the same):

When I was in officer school the number estimated for a big war in Europe was 75% of casualties due to artillery and aerial bombing.

Data from the European Commission, quoted by El Pais, says that Russia has a 10:1 advantage in artillery:

According to data from the European Commission to which EL PAÍS has had access, Russia fires between 40,000 and 50,000 artillery shells per day, compared to 5,000-6,000 Ukrainian forces expend. The Estonian government, which has been one of largest contributors to Kyiv’s war effort, puts the average use of artillery at between 20,000 and 60,000 Russian shells per day, and 2,000 to 7,000 Ukrainian rounds, according to a document sent to EU Member States by Tallinn, to which this newspaper has had access.

The Russian forces fire ten times the number of shells the Ukrainians can fire. In a modern war artillery fire causes 65+% of all casualties. It is thus impossible that Ukraine is losing less soldiers than the Russians.

The total ratio may well be 7 to 1 but it will certainly be to the advantage of the Russian forces side.

But minimizing the losses Ukraine has in Bakhmut seems to be a current propaganda scheme. A recent Newsweek piece quotes similar nonsense.

But this is the whole issue, honest reporting and knowledge of all relevant facts is not just not in the plans, it is physically impossible even if to assume that some people in MSM would want to report thing right and try to fight own biases the way real journalists are supposed to do. Simplest example? Sy Hersh, he repeats the same utterly incompetent BS about Holodomor, which is a mathematical and demographic impossibility, same goes even for highly respected by me Douglas Macgregor who speaks about "a million Red Army soldiers" executed by "Stalin's hedge detachments (zagradotryads)", when in reality their main task was anything BUT executing anyone, unless we are talking about open panic-mongers and saboteurs. That is why the number of "executed" is two orders of magnitude smaller than Macgregor's "million". 

But in the world where such grotesque lies continue to perpetuate, anything is possible. And Russia, for all her immense size and military power still remains the great unknown in the Western World, because it is the ONLY country which time after time beat the shit out of the best West ever could master and intellectual class in the West lives with it, whether it is aware of it, or not. That is why any iota of common sense and actual news reporting in the West becomes the event of a huge significance, because it is so rare. West views Russia same way Marshall Zhukov warned about: "We liberated them, and they will hate us for that".(c) In Russian-American case, it goes even further since Russia wasn't supposed to steal American thunder of the 19th and 20th century but she did, from battlefields to space, to education and that, especially today, underscored America's status as a newcomer. American elites cannot take it, for all truly amazing and admirable America's achievements. And "they hate us for that"(c). I am on record: America's "elite-making" machine is broken and cannot be fixed any time soon. And I am not even talking about British desperation of a pip-squeak.         

Bernhard Did An Excellent Write-up.

On this whole situation with VSU's "victories" and how Western media are beginning to recognize a horrendous truth (for them) behind demolishing of VSU, which at this stage is literally being pummeled into utter submission. Bernhard discusses fighting doctrines of Russia and NATO and notes (correctly):

'Western' doctrine, which is essentially U.S. doctrine, is betting on air supremacy. The enemy's air defenses get destroyed in first few days of the war. After that enemy formations get wiped out by applying a huge amount of aerial bombing against them. Russian doctrine never has believed in air supremacy. Russia itself has excellent air defenses so it knows what it is talking about. To destroy enemy formations Russia applies artillery, lots of it.

He also compares combat organization of the main fighting units of Russian and US armies and, again correctly, arrives to the state-of-the-affairs for VSU. 

Unless the defending forces are fully under armor or extremely well dug in, as they had been for eight years at the Donetsk frontline, they have no hope to hold out against Russian artillery. Since the Russian army broke through the immediate frontline the Ukrainians have lost the protection of fortified dugouts and are on the run.  None of the above is new and it was the reason why I and other could easily predicted that the Ukrainian army would lose the war.

Read the whole thing, it is an excellent write up from Moon of Alabama. 

In related news, as was anticipated, the US decided not to play with fire and the danger of own annihilation and stopped any silly talks about sending HIMARS to 404 and it is all for the better. The US still wants to send some kind of MLRS (maybe even same HIMARS) but with much shorter range munitions. As Dmitry Medvedev noted today: 

«Разумно. Иначе при атаке на наши города Вооруженные силы России исполнили бы свою угрозу и нанесли удары по центрам принятия этих преступных решений. Часть из них находится совсем не в Киеве. Что дальше – объяснять не надо»

Translation: Makes sense. Otherwise, upon attacks on our cities, Russia's Armed Forces would have delivered on their threat to strike these criminal decision making centers. Part of those centers is located absolutely not in Kiev. What would follow--no explanation is needed. 

So, there you go. Meanwhile VSU continues to do what it was doing for the last 8 years--using civilians as human shield an shelling civilian areas of liberated cities and towns in Donbass. In other news, Denmark and Netherlands decided not to pay for Russian gas in Rubles. Sure, no problem.

The threat of cutting off gas supplies, if not being paid in Rubles, is taking another casualty. Russian gas giant Gazprom has announced that it will stop gas supplies to the Netherlands by Wednesday, in a reaction to the refusal by Dutch energy trader GasTerra to pay in rubles.

Evidently, the concept of money and paying for goods and services is still not developed in these two nations at this stage of their historic development, but, I think, in a few centuries they may figure this principle out and whatever will be left of them will join the family of civilized nations. Same goes for the present CIA big honcho William Burns (the US so called "diplomat"), who tries to wax Russia "insiderish" but fails miserably due to an extremely low professionalism of the current US "diplomacy" and "foreign service", so, he triers himself as Putinologist--a euphemism for ignorant US "diplomats" who, as it is normal now, know nothing about Russia. Even after being ambassador to Russia as Burns did.  So, he states:

Half of Washington, D.C., is in the business of analyzing Vladimir Putin’s every word and move these days. But when CIA Director William Burns speaks of the Russian leader, an autocrat waging a brutal war on Ukraine, his words carry unusual weight. Putin is the epitome of a “peculiarly Russian combination of qualities”: “cocky, cranky, aggrieved and insecure,” Burns has written. The Kremlin chief is “an apostle of payback,” Burns has declared.

But even this sophomoric "journalism" from Politico notes:

Burns may be a good Putinologist, but even he didn’t predict how much the Russian leader would scramble the Biden administration’s foreign policy agenda.

I have news for these US "diplomats" and "journos"--there are NO real "Putinologists", let alone good level specialists on Russia, anywhere in D.C. Because there is no US diplomacy as art and as noble profession in principle. Most what US foreign policy establishment, including its "elite" schools produces as its "diplomats" is a grey mass of under-educated ignoramuses who learn absolutely nothing about outside world and the same goes pretty much to any institution in D.C., including CIA. Burns is not an exception. 

It is the clock-work of the US "elite" education and selection mechanism which is completely broken and, as a result, produces people who are utterly unqualified to carry out any tasks related to any actual governance, be it in political, economic, diplomatic or military spheres. So, whenever the phrase such as "but even he" is used nowadays I always smile, "even they" in D.C. drove the United States to the precipice due to their corruption, careerism and lack of any professionalism. May be they should stop trying to be "Putinologists" and concentrate on their immediate professional responsibilities, instead of spewing PR BS through media which are as ignorant and amoral as they are. Nah, not gonna happen...

The Saker Adds To A Broadside.

The Saker people wrote a good retort to Western (Ukie) canards about timeline. Replying to continuous US MSM BS about "the plan" Saker's staff concludes:

The US and its allies spent 8 years building up the military the Ukraine had at the beginning of Russian military operations in February 2022. This Ukrainin military failed to prevent Russian forces now from shaping the battlefield in Donbas creating the conditions for Ukrainian forces there to be cut off, encircled, and systematically destroyed. After 8 years – this was the best the US and its allies could do to prepare Ukraine. Despite the urgent (reported) flood of weapons and money into Ukraine now along with remedial training programs – nothing now can be done better or quicker than over the past 8 years – Russia is removing Ukrainian combat capabilities off the battlefield faster than the Ukraine and its allies can replace or regenerate it.

They also note this wide-spread BS about Putin's "apology" to Israel, which, of course, was primarily a figment of imagination of the Israeli media. In related topic, Bernhard of MoA continues to develop the thesis, with which I agree completely, that:

The geniuses (not) at the National Security Council want to goad Russia into direct attacks on U.S. forces or interests. That would give the U.S. an excuse to further escalate the war in Ukraine into an open confrontation. It would also diverts the attention away from domestic problems.

Generally, I don't see anymore any need to rely on any idea on warfare and geopolitics coming from the US (forget dumbfvcks from EU) Establishment, because, frankly, they are utterly incompetent and are one-trick pony capable only of manipulation of public opinion. That is it.

Babylon Bee...

 LOL))) Two Minute Hate

This is too close to reality... For those who don't remember:
 

Or, as Bernhard of MoA states correctly:

The war to 'weaken Russia' is going badly for the 'west' and the U.S. can do little to change that. The midterm election will likely see a huge loss for the Democrats. They need an emotional issue to incentivize their voters to go to the polls. Abortion rights may do that for a certain group of voters.

What can I say, quoting one of the greats (you know, Marx): history repeats itself  first as a tragedy and then as a farce.