In Related News...

 ... water is wet, fire is hot. 

Russia is outpacing the arms production of the entire EU after significantly ramping up its defense industry and despite Western sanctions, the bloc’s commissioner for defense and space, Andrius Kubilius, has said. Kubilius, a noted Russia hawk and two-time prime minister of Lithuania, was approved by the European Parliament last month as the EU’s first ever defense commissioner. In an interview on Friday with the RND media group, he called on the EU to significantly expand the production of conventional weapons such as artillery and infantry vehicles, as well as long-range and precision weapons amid what he called a Russian attack threat. “The Russians have expanded their arms industry to an unimaginable extent despite our sanctions,” Kubilius stated. Russia now produces “more weapons in three months than the entire European arms industry can produce, and in six months more weapons than the entire German army has,” he added. Kubilius also cited experts who, according to him, say that Russia now produces more tanks than it uses on the front lines in the Ukraine conflict.

I want to stress, that in the last few years, a very good man, who I will not name, because I respect him, no, he is not my acquaintance--was repeating ad nauseam that Russia "with the economy the size of Spain".  Sadly, there is no such profession as a "good man", but for most people in the US "intel" community it is worth learning that Russia's economy is the 4th economy in the world and, possibly, the third. I want to stress that GDP numbers circulating in the "intel" circles are crap invented in the combined West to hide its deindustrialization and financialization of  own economies. US industrial base was in steady decline for decades now and realistically, with the exception of automotive industry (granted with huge pure assembly from import parts sector) and aerospace with naval construction... well, that's about the most important US machine building sectors. 

Now, to Khmeimim and transport aircraft--it could be that Russians decided not to maintain the base anymore and will evacuate it. Once Assad government fell, and Syrians made a choice--what's the point, to support WHO? The main objective of defeating ISIS have been met by 2020 and if Syrians want to live in misery, Russia should not waste a single Russian live or ruble on them. Russia is not Soviet Union and doesn't do charity. Simple as that. As I stated--have patience, we will know in due time.

I Am Getting Tired Writing Posts With "No Shit" Or "Duh" Titles)))

Or, if you wish with "We told you so" titles. I wrote so much about US "intel" and how it is not really an intel that I don't have time to list all those occasions. But numbers of VSU (Nazi) losses during SMO which begin to circulate now give an impression on the progress of Russian operation in 404. Of course, all this info has a massive geopolitical impact, especially on the United States which, as always, came up with absolute BS narrative which is collapsing really fast. 

Well, NYT decided to start steering clear of this whole Russia "lost in Ukraine" BS it promoted together with neocon crazies, and begins this ever familiar tune of the "intel failure". Right. 

U.S. Lacks a Clear Picture of Ukraine's War Strategy, Officials Say

Hm, how about I put it bluntly--the U.S. never had clear picture on anything, especially on Russia, or, as a private case, SMO and completely bought into Ukie propaganda, which shows a complete incompetence of the "intel" in the US. 

Avril D. Haines, the director of national intelligence, testified at a Senate hearing last month that “it was very hard to tell” how much additional aid Ukraine could absorb. She added: “We have, in fact, more insight, probably, on the Russian side than we do on the Ukrainian side.” One key question is what measures Zelenskyy intends to call for in Donbas. Ukraine faces a strategic choice there: withdraw its forces or risk having them encircled by Russia.

Oh no, it is not "hard to tell", any person with a good professional military background and knowledge of Russia would have had no problems whatsoever forecasting the outcome. But those persons in the US are excluded from media and decision making circles and the US has NO serious strategic intelligence, period. Most what numerous US "think-tanks" produce is shit. 

“I’m not sure it’s in the interest of the American public or Ukrainian public to have Ukrainians be upfront about their losses if the result is it strengthens the Russian war effort,” Biddle said. “But that means we don’t really know both sides of the story.” The United States has better estimates of Russian casualties and equipment losses, a senior U.S. official said. The Defense Intelligence Agency, for example, estimates that the number of Ukraine’s soldiers killed in action is similar to Russia’s, but the agency has a far lower level of confidence in its estimate of Ukrainian losses.

No, Mr. Biddle, you don't. You never did, in regards to Russia that is. So this BS posturing about "strategy" is just that, a BS posturing of some "experts" who sense that their BS is about to be called, as usual, and they love their pseudo-academic and "intel" sinecures trying to promote themselves as professionals, which they are not whenever it comes down to real anything: geopolitics, war, economy, what have you. The issue is systemic, it is in the American education system which is completely broken  across the board, from K-12 to Ivy League and military academies, and it is really funny listening to "intel" from people who provided "intel" on Saddam's WMD, Iraq and Afghanistan. The closing paragraph says it all.

“Everything is about Russia’s goals and Russia’s prospects for meeting their goals,” Sanner said. “We do not talk about whether Ukraine might be able to defeat them. And to me, I feel that we are setting ourselves up for another intel failure by not talking about that publicly.”

No shit, pardon my French, but there is a serious doubt now in the competence of the whole governing machine in the US, and the practical results of such a governing provide a massive body of evidence to support such an assertion. Especially so in military-intelligence field where the United States moves from one disaster to another. The narrative on SMO, in reality, is dead and the failure is not being set, it already happened. It is a fait accompli no matter how one wants to put a lipstick on the pig. As per US MSM, it is a human and professional sewer, but, evidently, it is the only thing modern US governing is--shitty PR and propaganda. It is also a distillation of a severe butt-hurt and sore-loserism when seeing how real war is conducted by professionals. The numbers of 51,000 KIA and around 60,000+ of MIA of VSU seem correct (plus-minus) and we are not even talking about sanitary ones which create a grim (for 404) picture of utter rout, as well as a real failure of Western "technology". 

In related news:

Europe could be forced to start rationing energy this winter, starting with industrial uses of natural gas, especially if the winter is cold and China’s economy rebounds, the Executive Director of the International Energy Agency (IEA), Fatih Birol, told the Financial Times in an interview. 

What can I say, maybe the West will learn finally the meaning of cause and effect, as well as the meaning of truly good intel, which, when done properly, would have told them that the combined West doesn't even know what it is dealing with. But not in my life time, I guess, if ever.