by ‘Military Chronicle’
On Friday, photos appeared of a document allegedly containing details on a planned imminent Ukrainian offensive on territories controlled by Russia. The ‘leak’ coincided with suggestions that the NATO Defender 2023 exercises – planned for the end of this month – could be a cover for an operation to supply and support Ukrainian units. However, upon closer examination, doubts arise concerning the document’s authenticity.
The supposed secret plans to support an offensive by Kiev’s forces hit the internet the day before Anthony Blinken made a statement on the subject. The US Secretary of State said the operation will begin “within a few weeks.”
There hasn’t been a leak of this nature since Moscow’s military campaign in Ukraine began, over 13 months ago. It is noteworthy that the published plans contain not only a schedule for supplying Ukrainian units with NATO weapons and ammunition, but also information about the structure of the brigades and battalions allegedly preparing for the offensive.
The document, dated March 1, says Kiev’s brigades need 253 tanks, more than 380 infantry fighting vehicles and APCs, 480 vehicles, 147 artillery pieces, and 571 HMMWV armored vehicles to carry out the offensive.
The probable locations of Russian units, indicated on the combat map in red, appear to have been collected from open sources. Several pro-Kiev resources that track military operations contain almost identical information.
Also, the ratios of killed and wounded for the Ukrainian and Russian Armed Forces which initially appeared in these ‘secret plans’ have since been changed. When first posted, the losses for the Ukrainian side were underestimated at about 16,500 –17,000 people. Then (probably to be more realistic), they increased almost fivefold, up to 65,000 – 75,000. At the same time, the numbers given for Russia’s purported losses of vehicles and equipment coincide with data published by Kiev’s Ministry of Defense.
The blatant falsification of data on the readiness of Ukrainian military formations catches the eye. The document states that, of the nine supposedly to be trained up to US and NATO standards by March 31 and April 30, five of Kiev’s brigades have had zero training: these are the 82nd Airborne, the 32nd, 117th, and 118th Territorial Defense, as well as the 21st separate mechanized.
Even if only two or three companies in these brigades were trained, and self-preparation wasn’t completed, their level of training couldn’t be zero. At the same time, the highest percentage of readiness was recorded only in the 47th mechanized(40%) and the 46th airborne assault (60%).
The plan also gives perplexing figures for military equipment.
For example, out of 109 M2 Bradley BMPs sent to armed forces, for some reason only 99 are to participate in the offensive. Moreover, the vehicles are not distributed among the brigades and only assigned to one formation – Kiev’s 47th mechanized brigade, which doesn’t have heavy tanks.
Rather than Soviet T-72s or T-64BVs, this grouping has only Slovak T-55Ss with 105mm guns, which are difficult to use in a large-scale offensive.
The small, but important, errors and inaccuracies in the calculations of equipment, the adjusted accounting of losses, as well as the presence of units with ‘zero’ readiness, indicate that this document, which was issued as a ‘secret plan,’ was probably prepared and distributed not by the military but by a group of civilians, probably pro-Kiev analysts.
The purpose of this planted misinformation may be to underreport the actual number of combat-ready Ukrainian units to be deployed for the offensive or to distract attention from other events related to the real operation.
Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky met his Polish counterpart Andrzej Duda in Warsaw on Wednesday, during his first official visit to Poland since the beginning of hostilities between Russia and Ukraine in February 2022.
“You have stood shoulder to shoulder with us, and we are grateful for it,”Zelensky stated during the meeting, pledging “no borders in political, economic and – especially important – in historical terms” between the two countries.
The Polish president, for his part, promised to continue supporting Kiev in the conflict, revealing that Warsaw was ready to send all its MiG-29 fighter jets to Ukraine “in the future.” Poland has previously pledged 14 of its Soviet-made jets.
“Today we are trying to get for Ukraine… additional guarantees, security guarantees, which will strengthen Ukraine’s military potential,” Duda said, adding that Kiev had been protecting the whole of Europe from what he called the threat of “Russian imperialism.”
Poland has been one of Zelensky’s top allies, transferring assorted hardware to bolster the Ukrainian military, including tanks and self-propelled howitzers, as well as rallying international support for such deliveries. Moscow, however, has claimed Warsaw has an alternate agenda, accusing it of pushing Kiev into a military catastrophe in order to seize western Ukrainian lands.
On Tuesday, the head of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), Sergey Naryshkin, claimed that Poland’s military assistance to Ukraine was actually part of a secret land grab plan aimed at certain territories that historically belonged to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which today are part of Ukraine.
“Seizing control of the western territories of modern Ukraine, the so-called Kresy [‘borderlands’ in Polish], is the coveted dream of the Polish nationalists,”Naryshkin said, adding that Warsaw sees “the collapse of Ukrainian statehood after a military defeat as a condition for implementing this idea.”
Over the course of the ongoing conflict, Naryshkin has repeatedly warned of the alleged Polish designs on Ukraine’s territory. Warsaw, however, has denied such claims, dismissing them as an information warfare operation.
Hacker DPR Joker writes :
I get the impression that the Moldovan authorities want life in their country to become as bright and extreme as in Ukraine. They are slowly but surely getting involved in this war because that is what their American masters want. I am not against the war; I am just always amazed at the stupidity of people who voluntarily let the war happen on their territory. I’m sure psychology has a definition for this. I’ll ask my psychologist when I meet him.
In the training center of a brigade of special purpose “Fulger” of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Moldova, which is located in the suburbs of Chisinau, foreign mercenaries together with servicemen of Ukraine pass( learn) training and coordinate combat. Regular instructors at the center conduct only sniper training; other military disciplines are taught by NATO instructors. Since February 20, about 1000 mercenaries from Romania have arrived at the center for training and combat training. A part of Romanian mercenaries has been sent in the second half of March to the territory of the Transnistrian Moldovan Republic, but usually all those who have passed training and combat training at this center are transferred to Belgorod-Dnistrovskiy, Odessa Region.
The NATO instructors who have been spotted at this center have previously been seen in Donbass training the AFU in 2020-2021. When relevant, I will show you photos and video of these beauties at this Fulger Brigade Center. But I don’t remember how I got my hands on it all. either from my spies at this center or among the Romanian mercenaries, or because of the center’s disregard for cybersecurity. Ах-ха-ха-ха-ха-ха-ха-ха-ха…
by Gilbert Doctorow via Gilbert Doctorow
I direct the attention of my Russian speaking subscribers to the video recording of an important and most timely speech delivered this morning by President Alexander Lukashenko to the Parliament and nation of Belarus.
The speech is long and I suggest that you start listening from minute 20 when Lukashenko sets out his proposal for the immediate cessation of hostilities in Ukraine with no further movements of troops or military equipment by either side and for the opening of peace talks without preconditions.
After a brief recapitulation of what led up to the conflict in Ukraine and of his own deep involvement in efforts to snuff it out nine years ago through what we know as the Minsk Accords, Lukashenko goes directly to the present moment. Now, when, as he says, more than half a million casualties have been suffered by the armies at war. Now, when units at the front line on both sides have lost the appetite for more pointless deaths. Now, when the Russian war potential has not yet been fully unleashed. Now, when the risks of escalation grow before our eyes.
He asks the most famous question in Russian political thinking for more than a hundred years: Что делать? What is to be done? And he makes a passionate plea for Peace.
You, at Harvard, who hosted the Pretender to the Belarus throne Tikhanovskaya in Cambridge last week, Tikhanovskaya, who is backed by the pro-war Lithuanians and Poles: may you hang your heads in shame.
Belarus has an incumbent President at work in Minsk and he is doing his very best to bring peace to our very dangerous times.
Have a look: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQSZ0nzgESo
Post Script:
I did not put this in my essay, but you may find it useful to know:
First, there can be no doubt that Lukashenko conferred with Putin before making his appeal for an immediate cease fire. This is not because Putin fears defeat on the battlefield. It is because he has lost confidence in the sanity of the American political leadership and does not want to be goaded into further escalation.
Second, if you listen to Lukashenko’s arguments in the video you are astounded. He is saying that on the front lines the soldiers on both sides understand that they are being sent to their deaths for NOTHING. He says that Ukrainians are warning Russians of attacks about to be launched and Russians are doing the same for the Ukrainians who are maybe 50 meters away from them.
This is absolutely unknown to the likes of Ritter and MacGregor whose brilliance in military theory is irrelevant to the situation at hand. This, and the whole impassioned plea for a ceasefire, are totally ignored in the scrap of propaganda in today’s New York Times entitled “Belarus, echoing Russia, raises the prospect of nuclear conflict’ by their lead reporter for Eastern Europe, Andrew Higgins, based in Warsaw. The editors of the NYT must have 100 meter deep bomb shelters for themselves and family when they publish their war mongering texts that knowingly misinform their readership and refuse to follow the off-ramp that L. has just showed them.
by Sergey Markov
Zelensky celebrates the anniversary of the liberation of Bucha. I remember what happened there.
1. On March 31, Russian troops left Bucha. The National Guard of Ukraine went there. Everything was fine in Bucha for 3 days.
2. After 3 days on April 2, British polytechnologists from Bucha decided to make a fake piece of the “war crimes of the Russian occupiers”.
3. Bucha was chosen, because in English it is consonant with the word Butcher, a bloody butcher.
4. The National Guard of Ukraine and the SBU shot about a hundred pro-Russian and ordinary citizens in different cities for taking humanitarian aid from Russian troops. Their bodies were scattered picturesquely along the streets of Bucha.
5. Western media were invited and they made fake reports about the alleged atrocities of the Russian troops. In violation of the norms of honest journalism, the media did not check the statement of the Ukrainian authorities.
6. The PR of the propaganda provocation in Bucha was led by Zelensky’s adviser Arestovich.
7. For a year now, the Ukrainian authorities have not provided lists of victims in Bucha. It is clear why. Because there are many pro-Russian people among them.
8. The massacre in Bucha and the fake production is one of the brightest and most obvious war crimes of the Zelensky regime and its leadership and of the US and British intelligence services.
“A country that has overthrown so many governments in Africa and has led so many coups in Africa and other parts of the world . The country that has killed so many of our leaders in Africa and other parts of the world The assassins of Patrice Lumumba, the assassins of Kwame Nkrumah, the assassins of Nasser, and the assassins of Muammar Gaddafi will come today to teach us about democracy. A country that was built on brute force, on the enslavement of other human beings, on the humiliation of Africans, and on the exploitation of Africans will come today to teach us democracy. If you have no respect for the dignity of others, if you do not respect the sovereignty of other countries, you cannot claim to be the “champion of democracy.”
This month, Russia and China are sparking new jitters in Washington. That is primarily because of their stage-managed displays of diplomatic unity, around Ukraine and much else.
But it is also down to money: during a visit by Xi Jinping to Moscow last week, Vladimir Putin pledged to adopt the renminbi for “payments between Russia and countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America”, in a bid to displace the dollar.
And this comes as Moscow is already increasingly using the renminbi for its swelling trade with China and embracing it in its central bank reserves, to reduce its exposure to “toxic” — American — assets.
Does this matter? Until recently, most western economists would have said “heck, no”. After all, it has long been assumed that the closed nature of China’s capital account is an impediment to wider use of its currency.
But right now Putin’s announcement is packing an unusually emotional punch. One reason is that concerns are afoot that this month’s US banking turmoil, inflation and looming debt ceiling battle is making dollar-based assets less attractive. “The dollar is being debased in order to fund the bank bailouts,” an economist said.
………
But the other factor sparking unease is that even before Xi’s visit to Moscow, the Saudi government announced that it will start invoicing some oil exports to China in renminbi. Separately, France just did its first liquid natural gas sale in RMB and Brazil has embraced the currency for some of its trade with China.
There is absolutely no sign that these token gestures are hurting the greenback right now. Yes, the dollar’s proportion of global reserves has sunk from 72 per cent in 1999 to 59 per cent, as central banks increasingly diversify their investment funds and discard currency pegs. And it is also true that the advent of wholesale (bank-to-bank) central bank digital currencies could theoretically accelerate this diversification by making it easier for non-American central banks to deal directly with each other in their own currencies.
A decade ago, it was widely assumed that another factor underpinning the dollar was the “stickiness” of trade invoicing patterns, as Gita Gopinath, deputy head of the IMF, has noted. But the CEPR paper suggests this might now be slowly shifting — as Chinese trade has expanded in recent years, RMB use has risen too.
So much so, in fact, that it now exceeds euro-usage for trade invoicing, which is “striking, given China’s low degree of capital account openness”, the CEPR says. And it argues that “contrary to conventional wisdom, lack of capital account openness may not fully prevent the RMB from playing a stronger role as an international and reserve currency”.
After all, it notes, a $200bn offshore RMB market has already emerged — and the currency is being “use[d] in invoicing and settling China’s foreign trade and payments” and “a global network of clearing and payments”.
Moscow will only be satisfied with the surrender of Kyiv … and the West
This is how one can comment on today’s words of Deputy Foreign Minister of the Russian Federation Mikhail Galuzin.
Conditions that Kyiv must fulfill:
ensuring the neutral and non-bloc status of Ukraine, its refusal to join NATO and the EU
confirmation of the non-nuclear status of Ukraine
recognition by Kiev and the international community of “new territorial realities”
demilitarization and “denazification” of Ukraine
protection of the rights of Russian-speaking citizens, the Russian language and national minorities
ensuring free cross-border movement with Russia
cancellation by Ukraine and the West of anti-Russian sanctions and withdrawal of claims, termination of prosecutions against Russia, its individuals and legal entities
restoration of the legal framework of Ukraine with Russia and the CIS
restoration – with the money of the West – of the Ukrainian civilian infrastructure destroyed by the Armed Forces of Ukraine after 2014.
A comment. This is an ultimatum. And, not only to Kyiv.
Which, like the previous one, obviously will not be executed. So, then there will be a third (harder).
And so on, until either official Kyiv (or whoever will be there later) agrees to it, or … (and which is very likely) the state of Ukraine disappears from the political map of the world.
Expert opinion. Director of the Institute for Political Studies Sergey Markov, author of the Markov Logic telegram channel, on the reasons for the lack of a Russian offensive in Ukraine.
Information resources write about Bakhmut, but in Bakhmut, according to Yevgeny Prigozhin, practically only the Wagner PMC is fighting. And where is the huge Russian army? This is a grouping of up to half a million people, taking into account the 300,000 previously mobilized. Where is she? Is it broken into platoons and is fighting local battles along the entire vast section of the 1,000-kilometer front?
No, it is believed that this army, including 300 thousand mobilized, was created in order to attack, to conduct a large strategic offensive in Ukraine. But this offensive was expected in December, January, February. Winter passed, but the Russian big offensive never happened. Why?
There are several versions, explanations of this main riddle. The first version is the weather. The thaw continued throughout the winter, there was no solid ground, so the possibilities of an offensive were noticeably hampered by weather conditions. Now everyone will be waiting for the start of summer weather and solid ground?
The second version is the unpreparedness of the Russian army. This has its own logic, because one of the main reasons for the failure of the Russian army was the lag of our army behind the Ukrainian one in the number of soldiers, weapons, and shells. It is logical that, having failed because of this shortcoming, the leadership of the Russian army wants to accumulate huge reserves. However, apparently, the Russian economy was unable to fulfill these orders of the Russian army, failed to arm 300,000 people for a major offensive operation.
The third reason is that attempts are being made to militarily secure the conditions for an offensive. Air support is very important for the offensive. So far, however, Russian aviation has no dominance. The Ukrainian air defense system does not allow aviation to turn around, probing and preparations are underway to suppress the Ukrainian air defense system. It takes a long time.
The fourth possible reason is some strategic dangers. At a time when everyone is expecting a Russian offensive, but it is not happening, the Ukrainian army is being armed at the same time. It turns out that if the Russian army starts to advance, then trained Ukrainian reserves hit it, and the Russian army finds itself in a difficult situation.
It may be easier to wait for the Ukrainian offensive that will inevitably occur. And then defeat the Armed Forces of Ukraine, ensuring the collapse of the entire Ukrainian front. This is to some extent a repetition of the possible format of the Battle of Kursk.
The fifth possible explanation is the search for weaknesses in the Ukrainian defense. The Kiev General Staff has repeatedly pointed out that the Russian army carries out many small strikes, probing for weaknesses. Such, by the way, was the Ukrainian tactics last autumn. Then the Armed Forces of Ukraine found a gap in the area of Balakleya, Izyum and Kupyansk – it was there that Ukraine delivered its main blows. Perhaps the Russian army cannot yet find these weak points.
Some believe that the catastrophic loss of time is the style of the current military campaign, that Russia is simply used to it. They say that this is due to some internal mechanisms.
Some Western analysts believe that Russia is incapable of a major offensive for a variety of reasons, including economic ones.
Surely we will hear different versions, but after a while we will definitely find out about the true reasons. Everything hidden becomes clear.