Thinking About The Same.

Larry debunks yet another BS from WaPo regarding losses:

Denial ain’t a river in Egypt (i.e. The Nile, lame humor), but it is flowing at flood stage in Ukraine. Apparently the Washington Post reporter writing this fairy tale (published today, Saturday) did not get the news that the Russians now occupy Lysychansk and the Ukrainian troops are fleeing the area as fast as they can (hoping not to meet Russian artillery rounds). I want to focus specifically on the bogus claim that Russia is suffering just as many casualties as Ukraine. Here is a recent video of a Ukrainian unit–the 43rd Infantry Battalion–laying down their arms and being accused of desertion...  I challenge any western military toady to show a comparable video of Russian troops giving up. Good luck. It does not exist. Instead, you will find those rowdy Chechens celebrating liberating Lysychansk (with an Allah u Akbar tossed in for good measure).

We all know that no Western media outlet will accept this challenge. As I stressed in my last video--to work in Western establishment media one has to a) either make a deal with own consciousness b) be a complete psychopath ready to lie non-stop. I admit the existence of the third type--a completely sublime idiots who believe in this "freedom of speech" BS, but for the most one has to be a damaged human being to accept job at WaPo, NYT or BBC. 

Our very own Larch also makes some excellent points today precisely on this issue:

If a hundred thousand are 200s and three hundred thousand are 300s wounded, surrendered or captured, it doesn't matter much. There are hundreds of thousands of bodies available to force into service. Training for Ukies is 2-4 weeks, all important weapons systems seem to be manned by mercs, NATO advisers and PMC contractors. The Ukie tactics now are: stay in prepared defenses until they are breeched and overrun, retreat to civilian infrastructure, use human shields, fight until you have no ammo, run to the next location, second or third echelon. You'll get more ammo, some food and water, repeat until you are dead. Of course there are catastrophic losses. The US designed defenses haven't worked in a war since before WWI. They require a suicidal human frontal assault from the Russians to produce winning results. The Russians' frontal assault comes in the mode of artillery and missile strikes. They have recently added a helicopter and armed drone-based rocket, Project 305, LMAR. Helos can stand off 10-20 kilometers and blowup any target. Russians have been using these in night raids. So, the Ukies get hit 24/7. No trench, house, or armored vehicle is safe. The technology of the rocket makes it devastatingly deadly.

We all know by now that BS about "Russia sustaining huge losses" was prepared well before SMO and this narrative was "shaped" including by the US military "experts" such as Petraeus and Keane, plus other neocon losers who lost every single war in their lives but for some reason pass for "experts" on Russia which no one of them is. You get what you paid for. Real professionals knew that the thing was over once VSU was pinned down in defensive positions and was largely denied any kind of operational mobility. The "reinforcements" were gladly welcomed into what is called in Russian Fire Sack (Огневой Мешок) which is a perfect arrangement for killing the enemy which has a severely limited mobility. 

While great Western military "minds" were trying to come up with yet another fairy tale of how Russia loses to VSU, which, for all intents and purposes, doesn't exist as a competent army anymore, even Yahoo News dimwits started to notice that:

On May 28 in Arctic waters not far from Finland and Norway, Russia’s Northern Fleet blasted a missile from a frigate in the Barents Sea that was no ordinary projectile. According to Tass, the Russian news agency, the test of the Tsirkon hypersonic missile, believed to be capable of traveling nine times the speed of sound, was a success, hitting a target 625 miles away in the White Sea. The May 28 test of the hypersonic missiles, which were designed to evade air defense systems, was the 14th conducted by Russia in the previous five months and hypersonic weapons are increasingly seen as a possible threat to the U.S. and NATO. “You have failed to contain Russia,” Russian President Vladimir Putin said when he first announced his plans for the hypersonic arsenal in 2018.

The piece has a pretentious title: Will the race to develop hypersonic weapons spark the next global arms race? You know what, I don't have to contain myself within the framework of basic politeness and decorum, so here it is. Most those "journos" are retards capable of re-narrating, on the level of high school or student newspaper, things which are beyond their comprehension and this title is a full proof of that. The hypersonic "arms race" has been "sparked" in 1960s with USSR developing a line of supersonic anti-shipping missiles, which went from M=1.3 in such systems as early ASMs P-6/35 to M=2.5 in P-700 and P-800 Onix and then with a very high supersonic ASMs air-launched X-31 and M=4.2+ X-32. I am on record, this "arms race" is a complex thing because while the US already lost it, it is also nowhere near the second, crucial, component of it--Anti-hypersonic weapons. US Air Defense is not even in the same league as S-400, let alone S-500, S-300V4 and S-550, let alone A-235 Nudol. 

But, of course, there would be no good reason to pen this BS article if British and French "experts", such as this boy from Chatham House--a proud bearer of a tradition of intellectual, academic and human degeneracy of British and French "elites"--wouldn't try to commence the therapeutic session. The name of the boy is Mathieu Boulègue. 

A typical product of Bologna Process and carrier of fake soft degrees in nothing, with zero affiliation with any military matters. But he surely is a sore loser. 

But while many are worried about Russia’s hypersonic weapons, Mathieu Boulègue, senior research fellow for the Russia and Eurasia Program at Chatham House, isn’t one of them. “Russia doesn’t really have working hypersonic systems,” he told Yahoo News. “I’ll be worried when Russia has a standing force of heavily deployed hypersonic systems that can actually create strategic effects in a standoff against the West. But right now, it’s just tests” of what he calls “asymmetric enablers.” Ten or 20 years down the road, “hypersonics could be a game-changer. But it’s still very early.”

The boy, obviously, lacks basic facts on the physics of hypersonics and has zero understanding of technological issues pertaining hypersonic development, but then again, he is an Exhibit A of why combined West is in a deep shit and cannot win a war against people with AK-47s and RPGs. Why the West needs enemies when it has such "experts". I have a news for him--political science IS NOT a valid academic field. Especially in terms of defense technologies which require serious STEM degrees and good understanding of the tactical, operational and strategic issues related to modern warfare--a body of knowledge which, now it can be stated with confidence, Western "elite" doesn't have. Not to mention the fact that the boy wouldn't last a year in serious military academy or STEM institution in Russia. Too hard. Here is another real professional talking about UK which is "irrelevant" as a military force, as is France, in modern world. 

So, when some ignoramus from a clownish "think-tank" wants to wax warfareish, he better choose a field of study which is not a fraud, as most of political "science", "conflict studies" and "foreign relations" in the West are today. MacGregor is spot on, defining UK's and, by default, Europe's place in today's world.

Ah, Olaf Scholz Got The Message.

Do I feel smug at this moment? Come on, I am just human with all my human flaws, can I allow myself  at least a brief moment of feeling good about myself and what I do? 

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said Russian President Vladimir Putin prepared for his war on Ukraine for at least a year before inciting it, and predicted Putin is likely to be able to maintain a drawn-out offensive for a "long time." Scholz made the comments in a Thursday interview with CBS News "Face the Nation" moderator and chief foreign affairs correspondent Margaret Brennan at the NATO summit in Madrid. The war on Ukraine has now dragged on for more than four months, and Russia is using its firepower to make incremental gains. US intelligence estimates that Russia currently holds about 20% of the country, mostly in eastern Ukraine.  "When will Russia no longer have the ability to continue this fight? When will Putin run out of weapons, run out of funds? Or can this continue for years," Brennan asked Scholz.

No one really knows, Scholz replied, but Putin's lengthy planning suggests he's prepared for a sustained war effort. "He has — he is perhaps the leader of a very great country with a lot of people living there, with a lot of means, and he is really doing this brutal war with — and he prepared for it [for] very long," Scholz said. "I think the decision to- to do this war was taken one year before it started or possibly earlier because he prepared for it. And so, he will be able to continue with the war really a long time."

Let me clarify some things here. 

1. Olaf Scholz cannot be viewed as a good source of expertise on anything related to warfare, real economy and, especially so, in relation to Russia. He simply has zero qualifications, even when one considers his present post as Germany's Chancellor. What he gets are some reports from a few remaining real professionals in BND and Bundeswehr who told him, I am sure, from the get go, about REAL situation. As the unlucky fate of some Germany's top brass testifies, such as Admiral Shonbach's forced resignation, Scholz was getting more or less reliable forecasting from the very start of SMO. But...

2. Western "elites" are simply incapable to hear "bad news" on anything because most of them are petulant children with the maturity level of high schools teenagers. Enough to take a look at the "levels" of the US State Department or other people from Biden Admin who pretend to run the country. As the result of all that, once the stream of, mostly fake, "news" (a euphemism for propaganda) from Ukraine dried up, reality, including the most important one--on operational and strategic level--began to bite. It hurts, I know. 

But recall, that from the inception I warned about a complete delusion about Russia exercised in the West even by people who are supposed to know. Even deeply respected by me as a true, who he is undoubtedly, military professional and, most importantly, thinker is not free from some obvious misconceptions about Russia. Such as Early Warning ABM capabilities. But combined West miscalculated in the most important aspect of Russia--her massive real economic capability which, in turn, drives Russia's huge mobilization, both economic and military, potential. Only now this "message" begins to trickle UP in both Europe and even Washington D.C. I warned about the dangers of this miscalculations since the very inception of this blog and, of course, in here:

It is worth mentioning, that ANY, I repeat it, any intelligence or military institution in the West is not up to the task of understanding Russia's mobilization potential, which the last 4 months demonstrated perfectly. The FUBAR with delusional thinking regarding West's weapons' deliveries to Ukraine and fantastical thinking of civilian leadership of the West combined with crude and unprofessional propaganda from the US military "experts" demonstrate perfectly how incompetent they are. In the end, I warned, that using the framework of Western "economism" in application to Russia is an exercise in futility, because the same framework doesn't work on West's economy at large either. 

Beaten to death cliche ascribed to many people ranging from Churchill to Metternich that "Russia is never as strong as she looks; Russia is never as weak as she looks" is just that--a cliche. In reality, it is just that the West was never really good at understanding of military and economic potential translating into the kinetic action. Let's face it--ALL, without exception, people in the decision making circles in the US know little about the world outside and especially so about Russia--it is a systemic illness of the US body politic as a whole and it is extremely dangerous. I will repeat, again, Russia study field in the combined West and, especially in the US is an academic fraud, populated by pseudo-"academic" shysters with soft Ph.Ds and Russia "expert" community is laughable because of its sheer incompetence, based in low intellectual level. 

But, if even Olaf Scholz begins to if not see (I doubt he is that smart) to, at least, articulate some realities which really matter, then it shows a very carefully hidden from the brainwashed Western public, some major tectonic shifts at least in Europe. Europeans, I know some, are waking up to the reality that the US, namely its neocon mafia in charge of the US foreign policy, would like to see Europe burn in continental war against Russia, while the US will seat it out and then, as in WW II, will come in to claim its spoils. Neocons are one trick ponies and utterly militarily incompetent people, but even such a door mat and America's slap bitch as Scholz begins to recognize that it may end really bad for him personally (that's the main concern) and for the country which he and his government so passionately want to finish off as a nation. So, something is afoot and Scholz suddenly beginning to speak as a man who finally had his two-hour briefing on introductory level geopolitics--you know, geography, industries, military and shit like that--is a good indicator of this. So, in this case, it is a positive development. 

In related news, a neocon rag laments: 

Ukraine’s forces have received less training over the recent weeks, which impacts their capacity to operate some advanced weapons systems, magazine Foreign Policy (FP) reported on Friday, citing sources. Since the launch of Russia's military offensive in the neighboring country in late February, Ukraine has been constantly asking its Western partners to provide them with more heavy weapons and to do so as quickly as possible. However, as a senior US defense official told FP, “the drumbeat of faster, faster, faster” does not always work well because “the Ukrainians needed to have the training to be able to effectively use these systems.” Meanwhile, the Ukrainian officials cited by the FP, complained on the one hand about the “too slow” pace of Western aid but, on the other hand, admitted that “beyond training for the HIMARS (High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems) and Western artillery, military training for their troops has dipped in recent weeks, leaving them unable to operate more advanced systems.”

Well, no shit geniuses. Main explanation (among few others) is the fact that VSU losses are catastrophic and most capable and smartest have been simply killed. It is a Volkssturm phase for 404, and it is accelerating as I type this. But you see, if those who matter would have been learning in their respective programs something of value and really tried, they wouldn't have to deal with this severe cognitive dissonance and they would have chosen a much more constructive and realistic approach to Russia and we all wouldn't be witnessing what we witness today, not to mention listening (reading) to old fool Kissinger's definitions of victory or loss for Russia. How this artifact is still around and is taken seriously by anyone is a complete mystery to me, but then again--at this stage the West needs to "arrange" face saving measures and not get involved with nuclear exchange with Russia as many neocons want.

Mosfilm Finally Decided...

To upload a whole of Bondarchuck's masterpiece War and Peace. And here is the deal, apart from mind-boggling battle scenes throughout the whole movie, the Battle of Borodino--a horrifying mutual slaughter of Russian and French which became the bloodiest single day battle in history--the portrayal of this battle, as well as its eve is nothing which ever will be repeated in our life time and no CGI will ever be able to substitute these 40 minutes of the greatest war movie ever made. 

It is incomparable in conveying both the savagery and, in the same time, dark magnificence of the action. In about 8 hours of battle roughly equal (around 120,000 each) French and Russian Armies sustained by different estimates 90,000 casualties. Owen Connely in his excellent Blundering to Glory gives numbers of 37,000 Napoleon, 51,000 Russians, if I am not mistaken. Now you can experience it in full. I watched it fist time as a 9 year old boy. It was a rerun (again sold out) in many movie theaters with separate showings in the course of two days. In movie theater, on the big screen and sound the experience was overwhelming. It was also the first genuine artillery battle in history. So, enjoy if you will.

They Should Dissolve Most Of US "Higher Education" As Useless...

 ... Including very many military "educational" and "national security" programs because they are taught by amateurs and people, including from Pentagon, who have no clue of the subject. This is what happens when much of your military history is a fantasy created in Hollywood. 

I always talk about it. When elites' "knowledge" of strategy is derived primarily from entertainment (I am sure some in the US State Department believe in the superpowers which Marvel movies show) this is the inevitable result. They still cannot come to grips with the fact that VSU doesn't exist anymore. The Kiev regime begins to draft 22 year old women now and even disabled people.

 

Here is the military draft paper given to one such a girl in Nikolaev area. Now, her relatives are screaming about how this could be. Well, they had no problem with their regime killing people in LDNR for eight years, including shelling kindergartens and maternity wards--deal with it. As per Western so called "elites"--they are human garbage good for nothing, let alone knowing how to fight a real war. But I warned about it for years. Somebody explain to Jake Sullivan or Tony Blinken what real war is. I know they have no clue.

Friday Tarkus With Rachel Flowers.

Well, you all know that I am not peacenik. In fact, I detest them, but I am also not a war hawk--I hate war. And let me tell ya, USSR was THE place for progressive rock music. So when Emerson, Lake and Palmer Tarkus came out in 1971 it eventually made it to the USSR and captured imagination of more mature people and, by the mid-1970s, in my teens, it was an album which you HAD to know and hear among many other incredible things which were pouring from the West and were blowing our universes apart. Recall... And this album cover...

Keith Emerson, before he committed suicide--often the plight of true geniuses--knew of Rachel Flowers. A blind girl who was born 15 weeks premature. Here is Rachel blowing my and others minds by doing a condensed version of Tarkus in no less that legendary Whiskey a Go Go 10 days ago. Not only she is a music genius, she kept alive what always was truly good and now classic music. As late John Lord of Deep Purple once stated: "We are as valid as anything by Beethoven." It was the time of the titans and it is as valid as anything by Beethoven. Just listen...

Rachel shows why it is true. I was blown away and not just by her genius but by understanding how incredible this music was and is. Happy Friday.

Mike Krupa And His Excellent Piece.

My Polish friend Mike Krupa penned an excellent piece on Polish dissident voices. 

Dr. Jacek Izydorczyk served as Poland’s ambassador to Japan from 2017 to 2019, and he currently teaches law at the University of Łódź. The esteemed professor was one of the first former diplomats to openly criticize the Polish government’s pro-war agenda after hostilities began in Ukraine. Izydorczyk is blunt and to the point: “It is in the interest of Poland to end the war as soon as possible, because whether it is a full-scale World War III or just a local war with Polish participation, it means the destruction of our country and the death of thousands, if not millions of our citizens.” The former diplomat believes that Polish and U.S. interests are not identical in Ukraine, despite the massive media propaganda campaign claiming the contrary. And while not advocating for totally abandoning the formal alliance with the United States, Izydorczyk does see the need for an immediate rebalancing towards “a minimum of assertiveness and defense of one’s position.” The Polish citizenry, Izydorczyk points out, should not hesitate to put pressure on the current government of the Law and Justice party, whose members “have been brought up on blind hatred of Russia and such absurdities as the cult of Napoleon and his expedition to Moscow.”

It is also notable, as Krupa writes:

Wielomski believes that in the current geopolitical situation, Poland has two options: either to be a transmission and trade-belt on the Beijing-Moscow-Berlin-Paris axis and benefit from it, given its geographical location, or become nothing more than “a spoiler of the United States in Eurasia.” The Polish elites chose the second option. “They may be right; but I, for one, was not convinced. To be frank, they didn’t even try to convince anyone, because after 1989 there was no debate on this issue in Poland. The government was taken over by people who had been in opposition until 1989 and who took money from the CIA for their activities, pacifying not only opposing views but even calls for a debate on this issue.”

Pay attention to a geopolitical arrangement which should have been but never materialized. In general, read the whole thing--it is excellent.  

Hey, Give Fox A Credit.

Where the credit is due. How many of such broadcasts are done in Europe by a huge main-stream media? Zero. 

But then again, Biden Admin's (read: neocons and fanatics) "math", "economy" and "military art" is not a subject for scientific inquiry and logical explanation, because it is, obviously, from some parallel universe where normal physics, math and causality principles do not exist as we know them. 

In related news, it takes two to tango. 

A newly set up state Russian company will take over the rights and obligations of Sakhalin Energy Investment Co., the joint venture running the Sakhalin-2 oil and gas project, Reuters reported today. This could mean a forced exit from the project for Shell and Japan’s Mitsui and Mitsubishi, which are minority shareholders in Sakhalin Energy Investment Co. Shell already said it would leave the project a few months ago and has since then been looking for buyers for its stake in Sakhalin-2. According to earlier reports,  a sale could be made to a group of Indian companies.The Japanese companies, however, have not announced intentions to leave the project. In fact, earlier this year, Japan’s economy, trade and industry minister, Koichi Hagiuda, said that the Sakhalin-1 and Sakhalin-2 projects “are essentially important for energy security because the projects allow Japan to procure supplies below the market price, especially amid current high energy prices.”

As I am on record for decades: Russians are very wrong people to fuck with. Russia will continue to respond to the US stealing Russia's assets (numbered in $300 billion) and all this is just the warm up.