The first interview with the new commander of the joint force grouping in the SMO zone, Army General Surovikin, has been broadcast on Russia 24:

– Ukrainians and we are one people, and we want Ukraine to be independent from the West and NATO and a friendly state for Russia. Our adversary is a criminal regime that is pushing Ukrainian citizens to their deaths;

– Overall, the situation in the special operation zone can be described as tense;

– The enemy does not abandon attempts to attack the positions of the RF Armed Forces, first of all, these are Kupyansk, Krasny Liman, and the Nikolaevo-Krivorozhsk directions;

– Daily losses of the enemy amount to hundreds of people killed and wounded (600 to 1000 daily);

– We do not aim at a high tempo of attack, we methodically grind down the enemy and move forward, saving the lives of our soldiers and civilians;

– The NATO leadership has been demanding offensive actions from the Kiev regime for a long time . “The Ukrainian authorities use nationalist detachments against their military, who shoot everyone who tries to leave the battlefield”;

– The Ukrainian regime is seeking to break through the Russian defenses, pulling up all its reserves to the front line, mainly inexperienced territorial defense forces. In fact, Kiev is dooming them to destruction.

– Surovikin on the Kherson region: The Russian Armed Forces will ensure the safe, already announced departure of the population under the resettlement program being prepared by the Russian government;

– The Russian grouping of troops is building up, creating reserves, and erecting defensive positions along the entire line of contact;

– High-precision weaponry strikes are being carried out against military facilities and infrastructure that affect the combat effectiveness of Ukrainian forces;

– There are reports that Kiev may use prohibited methods of war near Kherson and conducting preparations for a missile strike on the dam of the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant;

– The Su-57 fighters stand out in terms of the quality of combat use in the course of the Special Military Operation, hitting targets in every sortie;

– Russian drones have carried out more than 8,000 sorties during the special operation, with strike drones destroying more than 600 AFU targets;

– Further actions with regard to Kherson will depend on the emerging military and tactical situation, it is not easy, and difficult decisions cannot be ruled out.

Source: @Voenacher

Yesterday’s terrorist attack* is a reminder that Russia’s problems don’t start and end in Ukraine.

When not surrounded by enemies, Russia is surrounded by fragile states incapable of exercising control over what happens on their soil, easy prey to malign influence from foreign actors. Of those, Tajikistan, the presumed land of the attackers, is the worst – Literally the second poorest country outside of Africa, and just behind Haiti.

It fought for five years against islamists who continue to receive handsome funding and covert support from abroad. A basket case of an economy where half of the wealth is generated by workers in Russia sending money back to their families. The government tries to combat religious extremism with a heavy hand, but it doesn’t have control of what happens everywhere in its country. The “international community” also deeply scolds the government efforts to crack down on the islamist opposition, the “Islamic Renaissance Party,” cast by Westerners as freedom fighters. Their leaders, by the way, are based in Poland.

While all of Central Asia has similar issues, as seen for example in the number of “volunteers” who joined ISIS in the Syrian conflict, most of the terrorist incidents involving islamists in Russia had perpetrators radicalized on Russian soil. The overcrowded, squalid dorms where migrant workers spend the little free time they have are also fertile ground for the actions of such groups. Since the resolution of the conflict in Chechnya and the end of the lawlessness of the 90s, terrorist attacks and grim headlines rarely come from the Russian Muslim minorities, which form at least 6% of the country. Against the work of radicals, there are occasional arrests but as seen by today’s events they aren’t enough – Mostly small fish and actors dumb enough to get caught. The source of radicalism continues operating.

The volume of migrant workers from Central Asia is massive; without their cheap labor the Russian construction sector would particularly suffer, and making the lives of the vast majority of law abiding, non-Wahhabi Tajiks, Uzbeks and Kyrgyz in Russia even worse isn’t a solution. Just as the influx of migrants and refugees from Central America bites the USA in the back, there is no permanent solution to Russia’s problem other than the economic and social development of those places, even if they are not under the Russian government. If Russia doesn’t exert influence, and a positive influence, over those places, less benign actors such as Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the US will. That is the root of what happened today. The same West, that is low-key celebrating yet another terrorist attack on Russian soil, created, and fed extremism and undermines attempts to fight against it, such as with the accusations against China in Xinjiang.

A lot of questions remain unasked: is the vetting of military volunteers that poor? Especially in the case of foreign volunteers such as these supposedly are? Tajikistan is not a member of the EAEU, their citizens do not have free movement to Russia, and therefore the authorities must have some sort of record of them. Before the war in Ukraine and the importation of the “lone school-shooter” phenomenon from the US, every single terrorist attack in Russia came with those motivations. Lack of experience cannot be used as an excuse.

• Note: An act of terror at a training ground in the Bryansk region. What is known at the moment:

On the evening of October 15, 2022, two citizens of a CIS country opened fire on military personnel being trained before being sent to a special operation zone in Ukraine at the training ground of the Western Military District in the Belgorod region. According to the Russian Defence Ministry, 11 people were killed, 15 were injured and are receiving medical treatment.

It all happened during the training: the terrorists fired on the unit’s personnel but were destroyed by return fire. Three attackers were initially reported.

According to some reports, the shooting took place on the training ground in the village of Soloti. At least 100 troops may have been undergoing fire training at the time of the attack.

The air defense of Ukraine at the time of the start of the special operation was largely represented by obsolete Soviet systems. Their number was small: 250 S-300P units of various modifications and 72 Buk-M1 units.

Despite not having new equipment, with competent air defense actions of Ukraine, it could pose a big problem for the Russian Aerospace Forces, inflicting heavy losses on our aviation. In turn, Russia could completely open the sky for itself, having achieved the total elimination of Ukrainian air defense. In reality, neither side has achieved its goals.

What losses did Ukraine suffer during the 8 months of the conflict? It is reliably known that at least 200 S-300P and 30-40 Buk-M1 units were disabled. This is a lot, but not enough.

S-300P, as the country’s air defense, performs the task of protecting large cities from air attacks. Calibers, X-101, X-55, and Gerani are the main targets for the air defense system. Therefore, the Armed Forces of Ukraine create air defense bases around such cities as Kiev, Dnipro, Lvov, Kharkov, Nikolaev, and Odessa. The complexes are located in areas on the proposed flight routes of cruise missiles. The fight against them is complicated by the complete radio silence of the installations, as well as the periodic change in their location.

Buk-M1, as the air defense of the ground forces, is a cover for the ground forces of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Their main task is to create an “air defense umbrella” over the advancing columns so they cannot be defeated by Russian aircraft. Together with the widest range of other army air defense of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, Buks can protect ground forces very well. But in moments of calm at the front, they most likely help the S-300P in the defense of cities. Riding alone in complete radio silence, they are a hard-to-reach target for the Russian Aerospace Forces and can hit air targets at any moment.

Readovka has prepared a map with the possible location of Ukrainian air defense systems

via South Front

Based on data from military correspondent Alexander Kots and official Russian sources

Two trucks were involved in the terrorist attack on the Crimean bridge.

The head of the Russian Investigative Committee, Alexander Bastrykin, reported to Vladimir Putin that there is no doubt that the terrorist attack on the Crimean bridge was carried out by the Ukrainian special services. Russian and foreign citizens took part in it at various stages of preparation.

“We have already established the route of the truck, where the explosion took place. Bulgaria, Georgia, Armenia, North Ossetia, Krasnodar… The carriers have been identified. With the help of operatives of the FSB, we managed to identify suspects among those who might have been preparing a terrorist attack,” Bastrykin stressed.

Two heavy-duty trucks were involved in this operation. The cargo were 22 pallets of plastic food wraps, 9 rolls each (one pallet weighs about a ton), that arrived in the Georgian port of Poti from Bulgaria by sea. The ordering customer was a citizen of Ukraine. Then it was loaded onto a truck with foreign license numbers. The driver of the first truck communicated with the ordering customer via WhatsApp. Further, the truck went from Georgian port of Poti to Armenia, where the cargo was customs cleared according to the rules of the Eurasian Customs Union. This is a typical, unsuspicious route for truckers traveling to Russia.

Then the trucks entered Russian territory through the Verkhny Lars checkpoint. The same one through which several thousand neoliberal Russians or common parasites fled to Georgia, fearing mobilization. The truck’s final destination was the city of Armavir, where the pallets were reloaded onto another truck, which headed toward Crimea.

The explosives were placed in rolls of plastic food wraps. it was done in such a way that it was not visible on the X-ray control, because of the multi-layer plastic.

This was apparently done in Bulgaria. Because it seems unlikely that bales of tightly twisted plastic food wraps with explosive material inside could have been repacked on the way.

This indicates that, in addition to Ukraine, intelligence services of NATO countries are apparently involved in the organization of this terrorist attack.

The Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation reports that the driver of the first truck is already testifying. Most likely, like the driver of the second truck, he was used blindly and didn’t know what he was carrying.

via Moon of Alabama (Except)

The Russian army is leading globally in its abilities to wage electronic warfare. It can disable ground based radio traffic on any frequency. It has now found ways to also disable ground to satellite connections as used by the Starlink constellation.

At the beginning of the war the Ukrainian military was supplied with thousands of Starlink ground terminals that can connect to the swarms of small Starlink satellites, which were financed by the Pentagon, but managed by Elon Musk’s companies. They allowed for communication between Ukrainian ground units as well as for general command and control of larger operations. Without Starlink the Ukrainian command will depend on cable based field telephone, runners and couriers. All of which are extremely vulnerable in an artillery rich environment.

Since 2001 Russia developed the Tirada 2 electromagnetic system which can disable ground to satellite traffic in specific areas.

Russian military in the near future can get into service systems that can disable enemy communication satellites, an informed Interfax interlocutor in the military-industrial complex said 05 January 2018. “One of the projects is Tirada 2. Development work was started back in 2001,” he said. According to him, this complex will be able to disable communication satellites from the ground. “He acts by electronic suppression. This is a multi-million dollar project,” he said. The fact that the Russian Federation is working on the creation of weapons to suppress satellites was announced on November 30 last year by Oleg Achasov, deputy head of the Federal State Budgetary Institution “46 Central Scientific Research Institute”.
…
In November 2018, the FSB called the “threat to national security” a project to cover the globe with high-speed satellite Internet.

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In 2019 an OSCE observer drone took pictures of a Tirada complex in the Donbas region.

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The disablement of the Starlink communication traffic was only a question of time. The traffic had to be analyzed to identify the frequencies and algorithms used by the transmitter and receiver. Software had to be written to implement a matching radio jamming pattern. The hardware of the Tirada system was likely already sufficient to emit the appropriate patterns on the identified frequencies.

As this system has now been proven to be effective in the field it will likely be made available on a wider scale. Russian electronic warfare equipment can already disable all ground radio traffic in specific areas. Soon all frontline communications of the Ukrainian forces will be disabled.

This is catastrophic for Ukrainian operations. Forward observers will no longer be able to correct artillery missions. Platoons and companies at the front will have no way to call for support. Higher command will have no way to coordinate larger operations in real time.

by Claudiu Secara

Part I: The Fall of Europe

Part II: The Fake War

Part III: More Evidence of the Fake Wars

Part IV: Hungary and Turkey: More on the Fake War

First published on September 1, 2022

I think that the war in Ukraine is fake. For one, everything the Ukrainians are doing is crazy. It doesn’t take a military expert to see what is pretty obvious to the open minded; they are taking one losing/suicide action after another. Their weapons are vintage WWII. Even all the arms support they are getting from NATO is vintage WWII. Supposedly because they are not familiar with the newest technology of the West. Really?!

The West spent $5 million just to overthrow Yanukovych, or Yanushefsky, or whatever clown’s name, and then prepared the Ukrainian army to take over Crimea and the Donbas, but the same West neglected to teach them in 8 years how to use a Javelin. And we are supposed to believe that?

Now, it is common knowledge that Ukraine and Poland and the Baltics are maniacs when it comes to Russia. A certain influential center of power in the West has been feeding and whipping up this paranoia for a hundred years through all sorts of covert and not so covert financing and manipulation. And then there are the Khazars, who really fantasize about their land lost to Kievan Rus. The confluence of all these factors and variables and vested interests and centers of influence flooding people’s minds certainly makes the puzzle even more mystifying.

But the facts on the ground are not as complex. We have learned that an expeditionary force of around 100,000 Russians is basically annihilating the Ukrainian army of some 700,000 men. More or less. OK. They have better weapons. Maybe they are better motivated. They have better satellites and spying capability. But what is quite unmistakable is that the young and capable Ukrainian men are being slaughtered like in an abattoir, by the hundreds, in one sweep.

There is a level of Kabuki theater in the way the war is being conducted. If it weren’t so tragic for the poor Ukrainian boys and fathers, it would be almost farcical. Here is how it goes. The Ukrainians are attacking in the so-called offensive across the open steppe, without any cover from either artillery or air power (neither of which their side has). The Russians retreat from the line of contact and let the Ukrainians advance. Once the two are well separated, the Russian artillery starts the slaughter. Sometimes it is joined by air bombing. It all is pretty clean and sanitized for the Russians, but not so for the Ukrainians. Quite cynical.

The West keeps inciting this Ukrainian death cult and makes promises that are totally inconsistent with their actions. The Germans provided the much-advertised Gepard-1 tanks. But they are not really tanks. They are souped-up armored cars used to impress potential village rioters. For more, click here. But when it comes to the real German tanks, such as the Leopard-2, the decision is clear. No such tanks are available for the dying Ukrainians.

But how about the much-ballyhooed billions and trillions of dollars provided by the Biden administration? They were used to bail out the US banking industry, not the Ukrainians. Only a few billion, maybe, made it through the channels that actually provide obsolete weapons.

Now we have the energy crisis in Europe. Even Erdogan told them: “Putin made it clear: ‘If you do this, then I will do that.’ And Putin uses all the means and weapons at his disposal. The most important of them is natural gas. I think Europe will spend this winter with serious problems. We don’t have such a problem.”

It is contrary to any adult mind to not think half a step ahead. “Sanctions against Russia will not be lifted due to the gas crisis,” the German FM said. Foreign Minister Baerbock believes that Russia “threatens the energy security of Germany” and it is possible to get rid of the threat only by completely freeing itself from fossil energy…

I think we can all hear Putin laughing at them… Poor people ruled by certified crazies and housewives who are making their lives unbearable. For what purpose? The people have no clue.

Meanwhile, last but not least, both the US and especially Russia are using the fake war to test their latest war gadgets on the guinea pigs which are the willing but sacrificial Ukrainians. Why? I think in order to clear the country of the unrepentant, of the troublemakers, of the insubordinate and difficult-to-discipline East Europeans.

Kill a chicken to scare a monkey. The end of the lesson will reverberate to some other famous troublemakers, the Poles, the very self-infatuated and provincial Baltics, and to all of those holding anti-Russian feelings. It is a way to educate the masses and steer the new Europe toward integration with Russia.

The Ukrainians are condemned to be slaughtered just the same as the Western European youths were slaughter in the trenches of Verdun and the Marne and on the shores of Dunkirk, in WWI. Next time around the Eastern Europeans will be ready to join the already-trained Westerners.

✔️ Biden said: “It will be done,” and it was done. There is no doubt about that. People will say, “Oh my God! Russia did ,it” Who is saying this? The propaganda services. There is one country that has done it. And that’s the US, which has fulfilled the promise made by the American president.

✔️ It is clear here that this attack was carried out by the US. Just the day before, the streets of German cities were full of protesters who were speaking out against their government’s policy, the policy of strangling Germany. With industry shutting down, energy prices skyrocketing and a long and cold winter ahead. And the citizens of Germany said: “Stop this nonsense! Turn on Nord Stream 2.” 

✔️ These rallies would go on and one of two things would happen. Either the German government would have turned on Nord Stream 2, or it would have been overthrown and replaced by people who would have turned on the pipeline. And from an American point of view, this is very dangerous. Germany is a key ally in exercising American hegemony. The US has chosen to abandon gas pipelines. And whatever the Germans want, it is no longer going to happen. That was the purpose of this operation.

✔️ That doesn’t punish Russia, it wasn’t supplying gas anyway. It just watched the Germans commit voluntary suicide. 

✔️ What happened was the US committed an act of war against its European allies. There is no other way to look at it. This is so stupid! It is destroying Europe. We used to call Tony Blair America’s poodle, now I don’t know what to call Europe. It’s some kind of indecent word! It’s demeaning to Europe! I don’t know what the US will get out of it. Because whatever short-term gain Biden might get, this operation will have long-term consequences.

Russian wounded fighters who came from Liman and are now in Valuiki say that Ukrainian Nazis attacked in a chain near Liman yesterday. “I was furious, a crowd of about 30 people came out of the forest, formed a chain, and came at us, I started working on them with a machine gun and an AGS grenade launcher, and everyone from our position started fucking with them, I saw bullets hitting people, they fell, but like crazy they kept coming. Then when many of them fell, those who stayed started running away. How many we killed, I don’t know, but many of them were killed. An hour later another crowd came out of the same forest, under the cover of BMP, our mortar started working on them and we started shooting at them. They left again. Then we were hit and I was wounded, I thought they were on drugs because they were being mowed down, but they were walking.”

This story indirectly confirms that junkie Zelensky gave the order to take Liman at any cost before signing an agreement on the incorporation of new territories into the Russian Federation.

Yes, Captagon is a hell of a drug. You can cut off the hand of the man with bullets, and he would still go as if nothing happened. Like their German predecessors with Pervitin. But even that didn’t help.

Just so everyone can start to understand the strengths and the frailties of the Ukrainian mob-army:

Wagner PMC has been storming Artyomovsk (Bakhmut) with 1/3 the force of the Ukrainian defenders, and daily they take territory—urban territory—away from the numerically superior defending force: A block here, half a block there, the progress is steady and inevitable.

Ukrainians had been attacking Krasny Liman with a 12-1 numerical advantage (6000 vs. 500 defenders) and could not clinch anything of note until the Russian reinforcements came—all the advances had been concentrated in the sparsely-defended rural areas where the Russian army was forced to withdraw and conduct a maneuverable defense.

The strength of the Ukrainian army is that it’s, in comparison, a mob. It’s weakness is that it still is—despite the training and equipment—still largely a mob. That will change with time, but so will the Russian numbers.

Think on that. (Gleb Bazov)

◾The information from this text was first published in The Guardian

By David E. Hoffman February 27, 2004.

◾In January 1982, President Ronald Reagan approved a CIA plan to sabotage the economy of the Soviet Union through covert transfers of technology that contained hidden malfunctions, including software that later triggered a huge explosion in a Siberian natural gas pipeline, according to a memoir by a Reagan White House official.

Thomas C. Reed, a former Air Force secretary who was serving in the National Security Council at the time, describes the episode in “At the Abyss: An Insider’s History of the Cold War,” published by Ballantine Books. Reed writes that the pipeline explosion was just one example of “cold-eyed economic warfare” against the Soviet Union that the CIA carried out under Director William J. Casey during the final years of the Cold War.

At the time, the United States was attempting to block Western Europe from importing Soviet natural gas. There were also signs that the Soviets were trying to steal a wide variety of Western technology.

“In order to disrupt the Soviet gas supply, its hard currency earnings from the West, and the internal Russian economy, the pipeline software that was to run the pumps, turbines, and valves was programmed to go haywire, after a decent interval, to reset pump speeds and valve settings to produce pressures far beyond those acceptable to pipeline joints and welds,” Reed writes.

“The result was the most monumental non-nuclear explosion and fire ever seen from space,” he recalls, adding that U.S. satellites picked up the explosion. Reed said in an interview that the blast occurred in the summer of 1982.

Reed said he obtained CIA approval to publish details about the operation. The CIA learned of the full extent of the KGB’s pursuit of Western technology in an intelligence operation known as the Farewell Dossier. Portions of the operation have been disclosed earlier, including in a 1996 paper in Studies in Intelligence, a CIA journal. The paper was written by Gus W. Weiss, an expert on technology and intelligence who was instrumental in devising the plan to send the flawed materials and served with Reed on the National Security Council. Weiss died Nov. 25 at 72.

@youblacksoul

By Sergey Poletaev, co-founder and editor of the Vatfor project.

Just the other day, Moscow sharply upped the ante in the stand-off over Ukraine: it gave the go-ahead for referendums in territories formerly controlled by Kiev and announced a partial military mobilization. It also again issued a reminder that its actions are backed by the world’s most powerful weapons. This was immediately dubbed “nuclear blackmail” in the West.

So why are we hearing these hints over and over again? Is Russia really prepared to use such force, or is it just a form of verbal deterrence?

First, since the end of the Cold War there has been an imbalance between Moscow’s nuclear power, its economic capabilities, and its political weight in the world. Secondly, these weapons of mass destruction are perceived by our former adversaries as a relic of the past rather than a relevant factor in international relations, today.

Russia, on the contrary, sees the nuclear arsenal as the basis of its sovereignty and has assumed that as long as we were still a great power in nuclear terms, we could also claim to be important in terms of foreign policy, even as an economic dwarf. It was the presumption of being a great power that determined our actions in Ukraine and throughout the post-Soviet space.

This difference in perception is the fundamental reason for the Ukrainian crisis, and it’s why we and the West cannot find any common ground to at least try to kick-start some sort of agreement.

Russia does not pretend that the West shares its views on Ukraine. If there were such illusions a decade or more ago, they have long since dissipated. The Kremlin now seeks to push Washington and Brussels out of the country, which it considers to be part of its vital interest zone, and if this fails, it hopes to reformat Ukraine as a state and remove its potential as a threat.

In this endeavor, Moscow doesn’t care what others think.

The West is stubborn, and this means Moscow’s years-long attempts to settle the matter with little blood spilled have failed. In the interim, things have only gotten worse, and we are now in the eighth month of a large-scale conflict in Ukraine, with Kiev having lost control over five regions since 2014.

We also have two armies facing each other, one with the largest country on earth at its rear and the other with the most powerful military bloc in history providing huge support.

By raising the stakes and again mentioning nuclear weapons, Russia is telling the West:

• The harder you push us and the more you drag us into this conventional conflict in Ukraine, the closer the nuclear scenario will be, both tactically (strikes against specific targets in the theatre of operations) and strategically (intercontinental missiles). The more you try to pin us down, the less choice you will leave us.
• There can be no winners in a nuclear war. So, your military victory in Ukraine is impossible. Thus, you have two options: either continue to help Kiev or withdraw your direct backing. Ukraine will lose either way, and you can lose with it, or you can limit your involvement – and survive.

It could be argued that the Kremlin’s vague hints are not aimed at finding détente, but rather are about promoting increased uncertainty and forcing the opponent to think about exactly where the red lines are drawn.

Firstly, for Russia, the number one military objective is to defeat the Ukrainian army (AFU). The Kremlin seems confident that after partial mobilization we can deal with the AFU and its western rear. But it is not certain that we will be able to handle the Western-supplied systems which have been deployed.

Secondly, it is likely that clear messages are being conveyed through closed channels to Western counterparts about what Moscow considers totally unacceptable. In any case, NATO has been very careful in its expansion of arms deliveries and has so far categorically not allowed its weapons to hit Russia’s core territory and Crimea, while also still not intervening with its air force and air defense.

What’s next? Well, there are three scenarios. Let’s label them by appropriate moods.

Black: In response to our actions, NATO raises the stakes again and intensifies its level of engagement to defeat Russia on the battlefield. This is the route to nuclear action, although there are still many more bridges to cross first.

Grey: Freezing the conflict in its current state with the perpetual non-recognition of Russia’s new borders. This leaves Ukraine torn apart and left to prepare for more fighting down the road, with ties between Russia and the West severed for many years.

Sunshine: For this to happen, awareness of the reality of the nuclear threat must become clear to the Western leadership. Then, and only then, will they lose interest in Ukraine. When it comes to Russia, on the other hand, it will make sense to restore relations, now in the full knowledge of what lines can’t be crossed in the future.

Then and only then can we finally move on.