Larry C. Johnson: "The Ukrainian Army Has Been Defeated. What's Left Is Mop-Up"

Question 1– Can you explain to me why you think Russia is winning the war in Ukraine?

Cracks in the mainstream narrative on the Ukraine war wide enough to drive a tank through

Today’s New York Times “Morning Briefing” distributed by email opens with:

Let us note the contradiction between the headline and the body of the report. It was not the city that refused to surrender but the government of Zelensky in Kiev that did so, even knowing the consequence will be continued suffering and death of the civilian population in the time it takes the Russian forces to “neutralize” the kamikaze Ukrainian militants entrenched in secure hide-outs they have built up over the past eight years. These include underground passages in the city’s many heavy industry manufacturing sites. The militants are still holding more than 100,000 residents hostage and shooting anyone trying to use the humanitarian corridors opened to them by the Russians. This we know from Russian television interviews with arriving refugees from Mariupol who managed to evade their Ukrainian captors by car or on foot. The mopping-up operation is likely to go on for more than a week to come, according to the Donbas military command, which is in charge of the task.

Further down the “Morning Briefing” we find the following:

Kyiv: A missile strike — one of the most powerful explosions to hit the Ukrainian capital since the invasion began — turned a once-bustling shopping mall into a smoldering ruin. Russian forces are aiming artillery, rockets and bombs at civilian as well as military targets, after failing to quickly seize control of Ukraine’s major cities.

Note: “once bustling shopping mall”. Here the attentive reader can smell a rat. The propagandist author is speaking about the complex’s function as a commercial hub in the past tense, because he/she knows that it had ceased to be commercial and became a military operations center in time present, and was therefore perfectly acceptable as a target for Russian attack. All of this is confirmed by the death toll that other mainstream media attribute to the Russian strike: 8 dead.

It is most interesting that this morning’s broadcast of BBC World News presents footage of the proofs from the Russian military command which the official spokesman General Igor Konashenkov showed yesterday on Russian state television: a reconnaissance drone capturing the arrival and departure of a Ukrainian military vehicle at the shopping center. Today’s BBC report directly acknowledges sotto voce that the center was being used for military purposes.

Lest the reader think that the BBC news writers have just become “agents of Putin,” the fact remains that BBC and other Western reporting retains its absolute blackout on a major feature of current Russian news reporting: the daily devastation and deaths in the Donbas republics of Donetsk and Lugansk caused by Ukrainian artillery and missile strikes from across the line of demarcation. The scenes of artillery strikes on hospitals and residential buildings in Donbas are a mirror image of what we are shown on the BBC and similar in Kiev and other major Ukrainian cities. Just as in Mariupol, the Ukrainian combatants adjacent to the Donbas are in well fortified positions that they have created over the past eight years in anticipation of this show-down and it may take carpet bombing to destroy them. But that is the subject of another essay I will issue later today.

Nor, to my knowledge, has the BBC or any other mainstream media outlet shown other proofs on Russian television that the supposed bombing damage of the theater in downtown Mariupol was a ‘false flag’ operation prepared by Ukrainian propagandists who had herded the civilians into the bomb shelter basement before blowing up the superstructure and laying the blame at the Russian attackers.

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We see the same kind of miniscule death toll from destruction of multistory apartment buildings in Ukrainian cities. In those cases, too, it attests to the fact that the civilian functions of the structures had been replaced by purely military use, meaning for embedding artillery and other strike weapons to attack Russian forces. All of this belies President Biden’s characterization of Russian military conduct as amounting to “war crimes” by its indiscriminate attack on civilian targets. Indeed, to my knowledge, such use of civilian structures to embed combatant units is itself an egregious war crime under the rubric ‘use of human shields.’

Finally, I note that the American ambassador in Moscow was yesterday called to the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs to receive written warning that Russia will sever diplomatic relations with the United States if Biden does not retract his words. The threat is very likely to be implemented, though only after the President’s visit to Brussels ends later this week. Surely the Russians do not want their cutting diplomatic ties with the United States to result in simultaneous, knee-jerk reaction of European leaders, resulting in severance of ties with all of Europe. However, that cannot be excluded at this point, when Europe is plotting to stop taking delivery of all Russian hydrocarbons, suicidal as this may be for the economies of the Old Continent.

Putin’s Killing Machine That Isn’t Working

Low morale, corruption and bad leadership define Russia's military

Fundamentally, the Russian army has turned out to be lacking, frankly, and there are three major reasons for this: poor morale, corruption and bad leadership.

Let’s start with the dead. A former British army special forces officer passing through Kyiv this week offered his analysis: “They’re not looking after their dead, and an army that does that tends to lose.” Morale of the Russian soldiers is low, poor, rotten — pick an adjective. The proof of that is the litter of corpses in Russian uniform after any major battle. A British man who has been serving in the Ukrainian army for some years said that five years ago, when the Russians attacked in the east, near Donetsk, one of the Ukrainians was killed and his body was in no man’s land. An officer insisted on a raiding party going in to get the body. “After that, our morale was very strong. We knew that even if we were going to die, our mates would look after us.”

The Russian army doesn’t look after its own. What goes for the dead goes for the injured too. Five years before the 2022 invasion, U.S. Army Capt. Nic Fiore wrote in a study of the Russian-Ukrainian war from 2014: “Medically, BTGs have very limited professional medical-evacuation (medevac) and field-treatment resources. Their inability to quickly get wounded soldiers advanced care increased deaths due to wounds, which had a large psychological effect, made their commanders more adverse to dismounted risk and reduced a BTG’s ability to regenerate combat power.”

In war, quantity is quality. The Russians hit Ukraine with 200,000 troops. But the Ukrainians have 200,000 in their armed forces and a further 100,000 in the police and other trained militia, even before you start counting the tractor drivers among the many willing volunteers. Invaders need a 3:1 ratio to defenders, so the Russians needed close to 1 million troops to have a good chance of winning. Which is why they are losing.

The Ukrainians say that 13,700 Russians have died. These numbers are impossible to verify, but pictures of the dead and the battles the Russians have lost suggest this number is not absurd. Out of caution, let’s assume the number of Russian dead to be 10,000. There is a rule of thumb that for every corpse, there are three injured soldiers. That would point to 30,000 injured or running away, so it’s likely that the Russians have lost 40,000 of their fighting force in the first three weeks of the war. That’s a fifth of the force they started with: not good for the collective spirit.

The Ukrainian website Euromaidan Press got hold of letters from Russian soldiers who have fought in the war refusing, point-blank, to go back. Sgt. Sapar M. Mirapov wrote to the commander of Military Unit #61899: “I consider it impossible to redeploy due to the unit’s poor organization, lack of communications and technical capability. , I arrived without understanding what I was doing there, without any explanation. I don’t want to be ‘cannon fodder.’ ”

Putin's pre-war moves against U.S. tech giants laid groundwork for crackdown on free expression

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Russian agents came to the home of Google's top executive in Moscow to deliver a frightening ultimatum last September: take down an app that had drawn the ire of Russian President Vladimir Putin within 24 hours or be taken to prison.

Google quickly moved the woman to a hotel where she checked in under an assumed name and might be protected by the presence of other guests and hotel security, according to people with knowledge of the matter. The same agents - believed by company officials to be from Russia's FSB, a successor to the KGB intelligence service - then showed up at her room to tell her the clock was still ticking.

The unnerving encounters, which have not previously been disclosed, were part of a broader campaign that Putin intensified last year to erode sources of internal opposition - moves now helping him maintain his hold on power amid a global backlash over the invasion of Ukraine.

In a single year, Putin had his political nemesis Alexei Navalny imprisoned after a poisoning attempt failed to kill him; pushed independent news outlets to the brink of extinction; orchestrated a Kremlin-controlled takeover of Russia's Facebook equivalent; and issued "liquidation" orders against human rights organizations.

Amid this internal offensive, Putin also moved to bring foreign technology companies to heel. Moscow deployed new devices that let it degrade or even block Russians' access to Facebook and Twitter, imposed fines totaling $120 million on firms accused of defying Kremlin censors, and ordered 13 of the world's largest technology companies to keep employees in Russia and thus exposed to potential arrest or other punishment for their employers' actions - a measure that U.S. executives refer to as the "hostage law."

On their own, these moves were seen as disparate signs of Russia' descent into authoritarianism. But they also laid the groundwork for the Soviet-style suppression of free expression now underway in Russia, much as the months-long military buildup set the stage for the invasion of Ukraine.

Putin's crackdown has accelerated in recent weeks. Facebook and Twitter have been knocked offline by the government for millions of Russians. News outlets that survived state harassment for years shut down this month in the face of a new law imposing prison time of up to 15 years for spreading "fake" news - understood to be anything contradicting the Kremlin's depiction of a "special military operation" unfolding with precision in Ukraine.

To Russian activists, the impact has been devastating.

In describing Vladimir Putin and his inner circle, I have often thought of a remark by John Maynard Keynes about Georges Clemenceau, French prime minister during the first world war: that he was an utterly disillusioned individual who “had one illusion — France”.

Something similar could be said of Russia’s governing elite, and helps to explain the appallingly risky collective gamble they have taken by invading Ukraine. Ruthless, greedy and cynical they may be — but they are not cynical about the idea of Russian greatness.

The western media employ the term “oligarch” to describe super-wealthy Russians in general, including those now wholly or largely resident in the west. The term gained traction in the 1990s, and has long been seriously misused. In the time of President Boris Yeltsin, a small group of wealthy businessmen did indeed dominate the state, which they plundered in collaboration with senior officials. This group was, however, broken by Putin during his first years in power.

Three of the top seven “oligarchs” tried to defy Putin politically. Boris Berezovsky and Vladimir Gusinsky were driven abroad, and Mikhail Khodorkovsky was jailed and then exiled. The others, and their numerous lesser equivalents, were allowed to keep their businesses within Russia in return for unconditional public subservience to Putin. When Putin met (by video link) leading Russian businessmen after launching the invasion of Ukraine, there was no question of who was giving the orders.

The force that broke the oligarchs was the former KGB, reorganised in its various successor services. Putin himself, of course, came from the KGB, and a large majority of the top elite under Putin are from the KGB or associated state backgrounds (though not the armed forces).

This group have remained remarkably stable and homogenous under Putin, and are (or used to be) close to him personally. Under his leadership, they have plundered their country (though unlike the previous oligarchs, they have kept most of their wealth within Russia) and have participated or acquiesced in his crimes, including the greatest of them all, the invasion of Ukraine. They have echoed both Putin’s vicious propaganda against Ukraine and his denunciations of western decadence.

As Russia plunges deeper into a military quagmire and economic crisis, a central question is whether — if the war is not ended quickly by a peace settlement — Putin can be removed (or persuaded to step down) by the Russian elites themselves, in order to try to extricate Russia and themselves from the pit he has dug for them. To assess the chances of this requires an understanding of the nature of the contemporary Russian elites, and above all of Putin’s inner core. (...)

Above all, for deep historical, cultural, professional and personal reasons, the siloviki and the Russian official elite in general are utterly, irrevocably committed to the idea of Russia as a great power and one pole of a multipolar world. If you do not believe in that, you are not part of the Russian establishment, just as if you do not believe in US global primacy you are not part of the US foreign and security establishment. (...)

Facebook Introduces 'Call In Drone Strike' Button You Can Click On All Russian Profiles 

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MENLO PARK, CA—Facebook made waves this week after announcing they would temporarily be lifting their ban on calls to violence as long as the violence is directed towards Russians. Now in an exciting new update, Facebook will allow users to directly commit actual violence against Russian people with a new "call in drone strike" button.

"As leaders in the tech industry, it's very important to use our vast and terrifying power to connect people, disseminate trustworthy information, and sometimes kill people we think need to be killed," said CEO Mark Zuckerberg. "Since our entire culture decided overnight it's ok to hate Russian people now, we want our users to be able to join in that hatred together. That's why we're proud to add this cool new 'drone strike' button!"

Clicking on the "call in drone strike" button will immediately signal one of Facebook's 10,000 brand-new predator drones to track down and blow up the Russian of your choice. Users with successful kills will receive a special edition Ukraine flag icon to display on their profile.

Facebook has said they will keep the changes in place until the next international hysteria gives everyone a new group of people to hate.

Do the masks make you feel confident?!?

‘He's lashing out’: U.S. sees ‘broadening’ of Putin strategy in Western Ukraine strike

National security adviser Jake Sullivan says strike near NATO territory “does not come as a surprise to the American intelligence and national security communities.”

National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan listens during a virtual meeting in the Roosevelt Room on March 1. | Anna Moneymaker-Pool/Getty Images

By BRIANNA CRUMMY

03/13/2022 10:41 AM EDT National security adviser Jake Sullivan on Sunday said an early morning Russian missile strike in western Ukraine just 11 miles from NATO territory “does not come as a surprise” but could present a turning point in the Kremlin’s strategy.

China just publicly warned Russia it’s time to end the Ukraine war

Very publicly. How publicly? In an opinion piece in The NY Times saying Russia needs an “off-ramp” from the highway to hell that is the Ukrainian invasion.

Imma highlight the part that matters. It’s the part where the writer calls Russia an “economic burden” to China.

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But who’s the writer? Probably some hopeful airhead like Tom Friedman, right?

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Oh.

This a warning from Beijing to the Kremlin, make no mistake. We can quit you, Vlad! You’ve had your fun, now it’s time to declare victory and go home.

Whether it makes any difference is another question.

YouTube said it would globally block all channels associated with
Russian state-funded media, including RT and Sputnik, citing a violation
of its policy of “denying, minimizing or trivializing well-documented
violent events.” The company also said it would remove others’ videos
that violated the policy. It had previously been blocking videos from
state media in Europe.

• Nickolas I passed away on March 2nd
  
• Stalin died on March 5th
• Chernenko died on March 10th
• Alexander II was killed on March 13
• Nickolas II removed from power on March 15th
• Ivan the Terrible died March 18th
• Pavel I was killed with an ashtray on March 24th

March, Don't let us down!