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Ukraine Update for April 27, 2022

Wednesday, April 27th, 2022

It’s been almost a month since we did the last general Ukraine-Russo War update, so let’s catch up. The biggest change is that Russia has given up on trying to take Kiev and has withdrawn all their forces in the northwest:

And here’s a timelapse map of the ebb and flow of the war:

Keep in mind the usual caveats (the map is not the territory, the difficulty of sifting truth from propaganda, etc.), but it does appear that not much has changed in the overall contours of the war since Russia’s withdrawal from the northwest. But ISW is reporting that Russia has instituted combined arms offenses, something we didn’t see much of during the opening stages of the war, and have reported minor but steady advances by Russian forces.

Here’s a roundup of war news, some of it several weeks old but potentially still of interest.


  • An awful lot of Russian infrastructure seems to be blowing up all of a sudden.

    Storage tanks at a major oil depot in the Russian city of Bryansk exploded early on Monday. Was Ukraine responsible?

    Before you answer, consider first that this is only the latest disaster to afflict Russian critical infrastructure near the Ukrainian border. Another oil depot on Belgorod was targeted by a Ukrainian helicopter strike in early April. Prior to that, Russian railway lines near the border were sabotaged. A Russian missile research center and a chemical plant also recently suffered explosions.

    These incidents all appear to fit well with Ukraine’s military strategy.

    Bryansk, 62 miles from the Ukrainian border, is beyond the range of most drone systems in Ukraine’s possession. Unconfirmed video from the Bryansk incident indicates the sound of a missile in the terminal attack phase. Considering this noise and Bryansk’s relative distance from Ukraine, short-range ballistic missiles may have been responsible. Regardless, the explosion will disrupt energy replenishment efforts for Russian military forces in Ukraine.

    The explosion also dilutes Putin’s credibility in claiming that his war on Ukraine is not a war, but rather a limited “special military operation.” When stuff keeps blowing up in Russian cities, it’s hard to convince the residents of said cities that Russia isn’t at war.

    That takes us to Ukraine’s evolving military strategy. With Russia forced to scale back its goals in the conflict, Ukraine has escalated its offensive operations in what’s known as the “deep battlespace.” This involves targeting of Russian logistics and command and control units deeper behind the front lines. Employing Western-provided drones and highly mobile small units, Ukraine is degrading and demoralizing Russia’s war machine.

    It’s not a wild leap to expect that Ukraine is now applying these same tactics over the border inside Russia. This is likely a result of British training of the Ukrainian military.

    Don’t start none, won’t be none…

  • More structure hits inside Russia:

  • On the same theme:

  • Are Belarussians also sabotaging rail lines used by Russia?

    The slickly produced video opens with an unlikely scenario. The year is 2023. Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya is the president of Belarus. And Belarus has been invited to join the European Union.

    “Fantasy? Not at all. The war Vladimir Putin started against Ukraine gives us a unique chance to change history,” the narrator says. “Russia is already losing. And without our bases, railways, and borders, Putin’s defeat will be significantly hastened.”

    The video calls on Belarusians not only to demonstrate against the war, but also to deny Russia the assets they need to prosecute it from Belarusian territory. “Blockade the aggressor at bases and supply routes. Deny them food, fuel, and freedom of movement,” it says.

    In fact, this is more than a call for action. It is actually describing something that is already happening. Since Putin’s Ukraine War began on February 24, at least 52 Belarusians including 30 railway workers have been arrested on charges of treason, terrorism and espionage for disrupting the movement of Russian troops and military hardware, according to the Belarusian human rights group Viasna.

    Alyaksandr Lukashenka’s autocratic regime in Minsk is so concerned with what has become known as “The Rail War” that it has also declared the Telegram channel of the “Association of Railway Workers of Belarus” an extremist organization.

    This railway rebellion is the most dramatic example of how Putin’s war against Ukraine is changing the political dynamic in Belarus. Lukashenka’s slavish submission to Putin, allowing the Kremlin leader to use his country as a staging ground for Russia’s assault on Ukraine, has unnerved and angered this nation of 9.4 million people.

    The only thing being Mussolini to Putin’s Hitler is going to get you is being strung up by your heels.

  • This is one of those “too good to believe” headlines: “Ukraine Now Has More Tanks Than Russia and Things Look Worse In the Future.”

    The Ukrainian battlefield of Putin’s War is incredibly lethal. In the sixty days since Putin’s three-to-four day invasion of Ukraine started, Russia has had 1,700 vehicles or major pieces of equipment destroyed and another 1,200 captured. Tanks losses numbered 560 destroyed and 214 captured, while losses of infantry fighting vehicles/armored personnel carriers come to 930 destroyed and 330 captured. These are not estimates; these are floor numbers that have been counted and geocoded. By the same methodology, Ukraine has lost at least 200 tanks destroyed and 70 captured, along with 790 infantry fighting vehicles/armored personnel carriers destroyed and 90 captured. No one really knows how many vehicles have been lost to combat damage or wear-and-tear….

    By way of scale, Russia entered the war with about 120 Battalion Tactical Groups (BTG)) representing approximately 75% of the Russian Army’s combat power as well as the cutting edge of that power. Keep in mind that this is not a Russian Army affair; there is Naval Infantry from as far away as Vladivostok as well as troops of the Rosgvardiya, or the National Guard of Russia….

    The tank losses alone represent all the tanks in 70 BTGs.

    This lethality is why the Ukrainian government has been screaming for more weapons from anyone who has them. Not just munitions, like Javelin or Starstreak, but tanks, infantry fighting vehicles, and artillery.

    Snip.

    As incredible as it may seem, Ukraine now outnumbers Russia in the number of tanks on the battlefield.

    Thanks to European resupplies, Ukraine’s military now has more tanks on the battlefield than Russia does two months into the war, according to the Pentagon.

    The delivery in recent weeks of Soviet-era T-72 tanks to Kyiv from the Czech Republic and other European Nato allies has effectively eroded Russia’s advantage, experts have claimed.

    “Right now, the Ukrainians have more tanks in Ukraine than the Russians do, and they certainly have the purview to use them,” an unnamed senior US defence official told reporters on Thursday.
    Ukraine’s armed forces have previously claimed Russia has lost more than 680 of its tanks, the majority of which were destroyed, while some changed hands after being found abandoned.

    So that’s from the Pentagon. May be true, may not be true. It’s possible Russia has cannibalized other units or (some two months into the conflict) refurbished mothballed tanks.

  • “Young Russian conscripts complain they have been given 1940s guns and are suffering heavy losses against Ukraine.” (Hat Tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit)
  • Talk about timing! This piece, published April 10, argues that Ukrainian anti-ship missiles will make the Black Sea unsafe for Russian warships.

    The way I see it (and I am in good company), the Russians will not only be lucky not to be routed from all their gains made since February 24, but are at serious risk of losing the Donbas—Luhansk and Donetsk—and Crimea, as well as having most of their current army destroyed. Talk of some sort of possible Grand New Russian Offensive in the east seem fantastical to me and others who put the big-picture together: with which troops, and of what quality (what elite unites haven’t sustained significant casualties?), and with what equipment? Will it be the remaining equipment that has already proven ineffective and easily destroyed especially by Ukraine’s western-supplied anti-tank and anti-air missiles? The units shattered and barely functional or not functional that managed to escape from Ukraine’s counteroffensives? Non-shattered but non-elite units that have also been deployed for months and are still exhausted? Conscripts almost finishing their terms? New conscripts who have never seen combat??

    Yet as major Russian ground fronts have collapsed, attention is drawn away from an area where, with not much additional assistance from the West or perhaps even with aid already just now promised, Ukraine can easily achieve a resounding victory that would combine massive substantive defeats for the Russians with tremendous symbolism and loss of prestige for Russia in addition to greatly affecting the way ground combat plays out in the south and east.

    I am talking about the near-annihilation of the Russian Navy presence in the Black Sea, including almost the entirety of the Black Sea Fleet.

    Snip.

    Russia has cannibalized its other three fleets (Northern Fleet, Baltic Fleet, and Pacific Fleet) and its one flotilla (the Caspian Flotilla) to reinforce the Black Sea Fleet and support its Ukraine effort, and, with Turkey closing the Bosporus and Dardanelles straits to the Mediterranean in early March to incoming military vessels under the 1936 Montreux Convention, that Caspian Flotilla is the only possible source of reinforcements to what is in the Black Sea, coming in though canal from the Caspian Sea, as other possible reinforcements coming in from the Mediterranean are now blocked.

    As far as sizable surface ships in the Black Sea, by mid-March there were only twenty-one, according to a “senior defense official”: just twelve naval-combat-focused ships along with nine amphibious assault ships, accompanied by numerous far smaller patrol and support boats and, of course, submarines that are harder to track.

    But that total was before the daring Ukrainian strike on the morning of March 24, which mysteriously destroyed a large Russian amphibious ship, the now sunk Alligator class Saratov,docked in the eastern Ukrainian Russian-occupied port of Berdyansk. Two other large amphibious ships, the Caesar Kunikov and Novocherkassk, were damaged and fled the port.

    So scratch one, Russia is down now to just twenty major surface vessels.

    That is not a large number.

    I had finished a version of this section before yesterday’s information that the UK and U.S. would be sending anti-ship missiles to Ukraine. But, for now, keep that low number of major Russian surface ships in mind when considering following:

    For starters, as my old War Is Boring editor David Axe notes in detail, Ukraine has been developing its own anti-ship cruise missile, the Neptune, since 2013. It began testing in 2018, and has since tested successfully repeatedly. The system has a range of 174-180 miles (280-300 km) and operates as a sea-skimmer, flying low and close to the water to make it almost undetectable until just before it hits its target. It was scheduled to be deployed this month with a full division of six launchers, seventy-two cruise missiles (more than three for each remaining major Russian surface vessel), and accompanying radar systems. But Russia’s seems to have derailed this timetable, and it is unclear when it will be able to safely deploy its system and have it and its crews be operational. Details are few and far between as Ukraine obviously would want to keep Russia guessing.

    Secondly, this must have been part of the discussion over the past month between Ukraine and NATO nations, and taking into account the issues with the Neptunes, NATO has been working to arm Ukraine with anti-ship missiles for weeks. Reports from early April indicated United Kingdom Prime Minister Boris Johnson has been keen to arm Ukraine with anti-ship missiles, that these would most likely be truck-mounted versions of its U.S.-supplied Harpoon missiles, its version having a range of 80 miles (128 km) and also capable of hitting land targets (Ukraine has actually been asking for these for some time).

    Snip.

    Russian Naval forces are hardly concentrating along the Turkish coast of the southern Black Sea: they are mostly, perhaps virtually all, off the coast of Ukraine to varying degrees in the northern half of the Black Sea or Sea of Azov, trying to offer support and, presumably, debating whether or not to launch amphibious assaults, particularly on Ukraine’s main port in its West, Odesa (the fact that they have not yet shows how confident they are in such an assault’s chances of success; Putin may not care much about throwing his soldiers’ lives away recklessly, but his larger naval vessels are expensive and take time to construct)…

    Ukraine would have excellent coverage with many of these systems. For most of these systems, many, perhaps even all, of Russia’s twenty remaining large warships in the region—including Russia’s most powerful naval ship, the Slava class cruiser Moskva—are well within striking range from Ukrainian-controlled territory. Even if Ukraine will receive only Harpoons, though they have much smaller range than the Neptunes, they should effectively prevent any Russian naval assaults if the Russians are smart (but they are not). After such Harpoons would arrive, they would still secure Ukrainian coastline and push Russian naval operating areas far from Ukrainian-controlled coastal territory (unless Russia is stupid and keeps its ships within range, inviting their destruction) all while, presumably, the Neptune rollout, training, and deployment finishes, possibly in just a few weeks if the invasion has not derailed Ukraine’s timetable.

    At this crucial moment, when Russia is desperate to turn the tide in the face of its massive failures, the soon-to-arrive unspecified anti-ship missiles have effectively killed any realistic Russian hope of a successful naval assault on Odesa or elsewhere on the Crimea-to-Moldova (where Russia illegally has some military forces in another breakaway region, Transnistria) corridor. These missiles will either prevent any assault from happening or virtually doom any would-be assault. This new round of aid with these anti-ship missiles has, thus, basically closed the gap between the Russians collapsing on three fronts and the Neptunes’ presumed deployment.

    If (and hopefully when) Neptunes can be eventually deployed, a large portion of the entire Black Sea, including both the west and east coasts of Russian-occupied Crimea—where many of Russia’s naval vessels are based and resupplied—as well as the Sea of Azov, would be vulnerable.

  • And then, five days later, this happened.

    A Russian warship that was damaged by an explosion on Wednesday has sunk, Russia’s defence ministry has said.

    Moskva, the flagship of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, was being towed to port when “stormy seas” caused it to sink, according to a ministry message.

    The 510-crew missile cruiser was a symbol of Russia’s military power, leading its naval assault on Ukraine.

    Kyiv says its missiles hit the warship. The United States says it also believes it was hit by Ukrainian missiles.

    Moscow has not reported any attack – it says the vessel sank after a fire.

    The blaze caused the explosion of the warship’s ammunition, Russia says, adding that the entire crew were later evacuated to nearby Russian vessels in the Black Sea.

    How bad is the truth when the lie is “No, we screwed up and sunk our own ship through gross incompetence!”

  • Ukraine not only shot down a Russian Su-35 fighter, they recovered the long-range targeting system and are turning it over to the U.S. for analysis. And the Chinese use the same system…
  • Thread: “Where is the Russian Army artillery ammunition they are fighting their “Donbas Set Piece Battle” with?”
  • The Javelin is pummeling Russian armor. Can production keep up?

    Congress is asking the Pentagon whether the Defense Production Act, or DPA, should be invoked to ensure supplies of Javelin anti-tank missile systems, as well as Stinger surface-to-air missiles, continue to flow to Ukraine. Ukrainian forces have used both of these weapons to great effect in their ongoing defense against Russia’s onslaught. At the same time, questions are growing about the U.S. defense industry’s ability to meet increased demand for these missiles, not just from Ukraine, but in the event that the U.S. military needs to acquire more of them quickly during a major future conflict.

    “To produce more of the Javelins, Stingers – all the stocks that we are using and diminishing and running low on and our allies, as well – shouldn’t we be applying the Defense Production Act?” Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat, asked Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin at a Senate Armed Services Committee budget hearing today.

    This is a stupid question. Production for high tech weapons is dependent on a wide variety of high tech components, any of which might be from outside the country, and which might or might not have considerable production lead times. If they used custom, MilSpec chips, the wait time right now is about 26 weeks on average, and the fab may or may not be based in the U.S. Optical components may also have long lead times.

  • Another day, another Russian general whacked. “The authorities confirmed the death of the deputy commander of the 8th Army, Major General Vladimir Petrovich Frolov. About it informs press office of the governor’s office.”
  • Russian troops demoralized?

  • They certainly seem to have been lied to.

  • And some are apparently refusing to return to combat.

    Putin’s call for more troops has not had the desired effect so far of inspiring Russians to enlistment offices. It’s certainly not convincing veterans to return for more of the “special military operation” non-war that Putin’s not winning, even if he isn’t quite losing it yet:

    Yelena’s son, Pavel, was serving in the Far Eastern Amur region when Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24. Almost immediately, his unit was sent to the front, and he served almost 40 days in combat. Then his unit was sent back to Russia to regroup, Yelena told RFE/RL’s North.Realities. When his unit was preparing to return to Ukraine, Pavel refused.

    “If he doesn’t want to go back, am I supposed to push him, to tell him, ‘Grab your weapon and go,’” Yelena said. “Those who haven’t been there have no right judge those who have.”

    Yelena’s son is one of a significant but unknown number of Russian contract soldiers who have refused to either fight in Ukraine in the first place or who have fought and do not want to return.

    Lawyer Pavel Chikov, founder of the Agora legal-aid NGO, has written on Telegram that more than 1,000 military personnel and National Guard troops from at least seven regions have refused to go to Ukraine.

  • Did Russian troops massacre over 300 civilians in Bucha?

    Monday’s front pages are dominated by stories of alleged atrocities carried out by the Russian military on civilians in Ukraine.

    Under the headline “Horror in Bucha”, the Guardian reports mass graves have been found in the town north-west of the capital Kyiv, as well as evidence of the killing of civilians in the nearby towns of Irpin and Hostomel.

    The attacks have led Ukraine’s foreign minister to brand Russia being as being worse than infamous terrorist group Isis, the Metro reports.

    The paper says the atrocities were “evidenced in pictures too horrific to print”, including the public execution of handcuffed people and civilians who had been driven over by tanks.

    The Daily Mirror leads with President Volodymyr Zelensky’s accusations that the deaths amount to genocide and that the Russian military was attempting an “elimination of the people” of Ukraine.

    The paper adds the executions apparently carried out by retreating troops led to 300 civilians being killed in Bucha alone.

    The Times reports world leaders have demanded Russian President Vladimir Putin should face more stringent sanctions and be prosecuted for war crimes.

    The paper says its reporters visited the sites of two “execution-style” massacres in Bucha, where Russian troops were also accused of rape and of booby-trapping dead bodies with explosives.

    Historically Russian soldiers have never been known for their tender sensibilities and strong sense of self-control…

  • More atrocity reports here.
  • Thread on Russia changing its tune Bucha massacre.
  • Russian column of tanks near Donetsk destroyed.
  • How various air cargo carriers have reacted to the Russo-Ukrainian war.
  • “Exiled oligarch calls on other Russian tycoons to break with Putin. Mikhail Khodorkovsky says they must denounce the invasion of Ukraine if they want to be above suspicion of collaborating with the Kremlin.” Good luck with that, but I wouldn’t bet the hastily privatized collective farm on it…
  • Especially when they turn up dead.

  • Though he’s not the only one calling for reform:

  • It’s good to have wealthy friends.

  • File this one under “possible but skeptical”:

  • “Russia’s 331st Guards Parachute Regiment is considered ‘the best of the best’, but BBC Newsnight has been tracing the casualties as the unit battles through Ukraine.”

  • You know my summary above about how Russia has abandoned Ukraine’s northeast? Well, they reportedly plastered Sumy with an artillery barrage today, so take all generalities with a grain of salt.
  • I totally want these:

  • The Red Dawn “Wolverines!” tank is real:

  • When France 24 does a profile on how sanctions are hurting average Russians, of course they’re going to include the shop that sells French wine.
  • Heh:

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    Posted in Foreign Policy, Military | 2 Comments »

    Is China Screwed? (Part 2)

    Tuesday, April 19th, 2022

    There more you start poking around online, the more you turn up reasons why China is screwed.

    The first installment in this series was popular. Well, there’s a lot more reasons why China is screwed.

    It’s screwed all the way down.

    First up: Demographics:

    Takeaways:

  • Remember all that talk of an “Asian Century?” Yeah, not so much.
  • “China will soon run out of people.”
  • China’s population pyramid is about to shift from a huge bulge of people in their prime earning years to one where that bulge is disproportionately elderly.
  • “Everything that made China what it is today has relied on a large, young, and productive workforce. Now, that workforce is about to succumb to biology just as every other generation has in every other country, ever.” Their demographic dividend is running out.
  • “China’s working-age cohort grew from 58% of the country in 1978 to 74% in 2010. But in less than twenty years, the UN predicts that number will be roughly back where it was in ‘78. By then, China will have twice as many seniors as children under 15.”
  • “Per capita wealth remains low, on the level of Mexico, the Maldives, and Kazakhstan. That means this mass of retirees won’t just contribute less to the economy, but will also require immense financial support — the kind China’s fractured pension and healthcare system isn’t remotely prepared for.”
  • “Unfortunately for China, the One-Child Policy has set the cultural expectation firmly at one.”
  • Replacement fertility: 2.1 children per woman. China’s official fertility rate: 1.6. “Yi Fuxian, a scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison [estimates] the true number at 1.18.”
  • “China’s preference for male babies means that between 2020 and 2060, there will be roughly 3 single men for every 2 single women.”
  • “China’s 2020 Census, [tallied] 14.65 million births the previous year — the lowest level since 1961.”
  • Japan, which is also aging, provides a best case scenario. “With a median age of 48.6, Japan is the 2nd oldest place on earth. Today, its share of the world’s manufacturing exports has fallen from 12.5% to just 5.2. Japan did not fade into global irrelevance. It’s still a great power. But it never fulfilled what once seemed certain: its rise to rival the U.S. as a superpower. And it never will.”

    • That’s part 1. Part 2 focuses on China’s out of control property market:

  • It starts off talking about the ghost cities, especially Ordos.
  • “Ordos does have an interesting story to tell. Just, not the one you might expect. The missing context, at the time, was far stranger than what the unimaginative pessimists concocted: Nearly all of these half-finished homes have owners — the vast majority of which have no intention of ever moving in.”
  • “All over China are millions of empty, some unfinished, but almost universally sold homes — not just in far-flung corners but also in Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen. Over one-fifth of all urban homes — 65 million in all — sit vacant.”
  • Skipping over description of basic CIGNx = GDP economics.
  • China relied on “a surplus of cheap labor, which means, by definition, wages are low. You can only compete with the entire rest of the world for so long — and neither do you want to. Low-value manufacturing has long since moved South, to places like Vietnam, Laos, and Bangladesh.”
  • All the long-hanging fruits of infrastructure spending have already been built.
  • “Individually, Chinese consumers really don’t spend very much — just 32% of GDP — less than half that of the US, and far below countries like Japan and Germany. Worse, this number has actually been decreasing over time.”
  • “Chinese consumers are spending, but only on one thing, something not considered ‘consumption’: houses!”
  • China’s home ownership rate “is among the highest in the world — 90% — to much of the developed world’s mid-60s. It gets much weirder, still. If you can believe it, the majority of recent purchases have been 2nd and 3rd homes. In 2018, for instance, 87% of new home buyers already owned at least one.”
  • “Because the government tightly controls how much cash is allowed to leave the country, Chinese people simply don’t have a lot of options, and of them, housing is seen as the only sure thing.”
  • Also, given the sex imbalance mentioned above, for men, home ownership = marriage.
  • “For all of these reasons, prices have risen to extreme levels. In Shenzhen, Beijing, and Shanghai, it takes 40 years of the average income to afford a home.”
  • Most are bought before construction even begins.
  • And here’s where the demographics above provide a double whammy. “The majority of homebuyers, meanwhile, are aged between 20-50 — precisely the segment China will soon lose.”
  • One huge reason for the bubble: Local governments using their control of land to balance their budgets:

    They created what are basically state-owned shell companies called “Local Government Financing Vehicles”. They gave these LGFVs free valuable land, which they then used to take out loans that local governments themselves couldn’t. The trick is that because their debt is hidden, local governments appear far healthier than they really are, while at the same time, meeting the quotas set by Beijing. Following the 2008 crisis, LGFVs transformed from a little quirk of its financial system to the backbone of local economies. If these ‘financing vehicles’ default on their loans, or if housing prices fall too steeply, local governments now have just as much to lose as homeowners. If a local government stops taking out loans, it instantly loses over a third of its revenue, causing a different kind of doomsday. So while the central government may direct local officials to control their debt, the best they can really do is feign cooperation.

  • Flu Manchu only temporarily halted home price rises, and they’re still soaring.
  • “Solutions are far too costly to assume their implementation.”

    • There are a lot more videos of China suckage, but I’ll have to split this up and get to those another time.

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    Posted in Communism, Economics, Foreign Policy | 10 Comments »

    Is China Screwed?

    Thursday, April 14th, 2022

    Here are two videos where Peter Zeihan argues that China is screwed for many reasons, not least of which is demographics.

    Takeaways:

  • One child per couple means that China is “the fastest aging society in human history, with the largest sex imbalance in human history.”
  • “They’ve run out of people of childbearing age.”
  • They were going shrink in half by 2100. “Then they realized that they had been overcounting people for some time.” Then new data moved the date moved up to 2070. And now they’re saying it will be 2050. “For that to be true, the Chinese would have overcounted the population by 100 million.” And all of those missing people are of childbearing age.
  • Their population actually peaked 15 years ago.
  • “We’ve seen a 12-fold increase in Chinese labor costs since 1991.”
  • “China isn’t getting rich, it’s getting old.” They’re facing demographic collapse within a decade.
  • Xi’s instituted a cult of personality, and silenced anyone capable of independent thought. “He knows that the country’s current economic model has failed. And he knows he can’t guarantee economic growth, and he knows he can’t keep the lights on, and he knows he can’t win a war with the Americans.”
  • Xi’s solution? “Naked, blatant, ultra nationalism. Ethnocentric ultranationalism of the Nazi style.”
  • At the top, they don’t care about keeping the lights on. “A third of the country is facing power rationing.”
  • “These are the sorts of things that you do if you know that the bottom’s falling out and there’s nothing you can do about it, and you have to shift the conversation to remain in power.”
  • “In China, money is a political good. It exists to serve the needs of the CCP.”
  • “All of the economic growth we have seen in China since 2006 is because of debt.”
  • Corporate debt is 350% of GDP, “making China the most indebted country in human history in both absolute and relative terms.” Every country that’s come within half of this has collapsed under the debt load.
  • I’m omitting discussion of how China is screwed on semiconductors (covered enough here), and also the possibility of invading Taiwan (this video was released late last year, before Russia invaded Ukraine).
  • “The Biden administration in bits and pieces is redefining strategic ambiguity, and it’s not clear to me what the endgame is here.” Well, there’s a whole lot that isn’t clear about the Biden Administration…
  • Zeihan thinks Biden might recognize Taiwan for a foreign policy win. Zeihan also thinks that both China and Russia are so weak we can wait them out. (Remember: Pre-Ukraine invasion.)
  • Zeihan dismissive of both Obama and Trump foreign policy.
  • “Joe Biden has been on the wrong side and the right side of every foreign policy decision the U.S. has made in the last 45 years, because he doesn’t have any core beliefs he tacks with the wind.”

    • Now let’s forward to March 24, where Russia’s colossal failure in Ukraine has actually made China even more screwed.

    Takeaways:

  • The biggest damage that we are seeing from the Ukraine war (outside of Ukraine, obviously) is in China. Because in one month the Russians have pulled back the blinders on what has been a 50-year strategic program, the idea that China can come to global power with American sponsorship, with American indifference, that it can take Taiwan, that it can intimidate Japan, that they can dominate all of east Asia and yet not suffer economically at all. It was always ridiculous, but now it’s been shown to just be absolutely stupid.

  • No one can escape the power of global markets because of trade.
  • “The yuan is only traded internally because it’s the most manipulated currency in history. The euro confiscates bank deposits to pay for bailouts.”
  • Russia is the world’s second largest oil exporter, and it can’t export more to China because the pipes that go east don’t interconnect with the ones that go west. “The rail lines are already beyond capacity.”
  • In the west: “One way or another, those pipes aren’t surviving this year.” (Not sure that’s correct, but I’ve long thought that we should be seeing more structure hits inside Russia than we’ve seen thus far.)
  • “The stuff that goes to the Black Sea is in a war zone, so insurance companies will not give the indemnification that is necessary for vessels to operate in that area. So the only way a ship can go and dock it overseas right now is if a country gives its sovereign indemnification and takes all the risk.”
  • Primorsk, on the Baltic, is open. However: “Ship captains for the most part are refusing to go, and European dock workers are refusing to unload the cargo when it arrives. So that is still in use but not nearly as much, maybe a quarter of what it used to be before the war started.”
  • To get more oil to China: “You would have to build a fundamentally new infrastructure from the fields in northwest Siberia to Chinese population centers that is greater than the distance from Miami to Anchorage, most of which is through virgin territory that is very rugged. That’s a 10-year program minimum even with the Chinese building it.”
  • “We’re looking at the single largest removal of crude from the market ever, and in proportional terms it’s going to have a shock somewhat similar to World War II.”

  • We have insurance companies not doing it, shipping companies not doing it, dock workers not doing it and now Halliburton, Baker Hughes and Schlumberger have pulled out, and they do the technical work that makes a lot of this possible. All the super majors are gone, and we even have a couple of major projects out in Sakhalin that are probably just going to die because the Russians can’t make those projects work by themselves. Most of the oil and gas out of that goes to China, so we’re actually looking at an environment where the Chinese see reduced flows rather than increased, as Russia is just melon-scooped out of the market.

  • When the Russians fell under sanctions, everything that the Chinese thought was true about their future was laid bare as, at best, wishful thinking and bad analysis. So they are now looking east to the United States and west to the Russians in a little bit of a panic, because they are being tied indirectly to what’s going on in Ukraine. And they have now found out not only does the west’s and specifically the United States’ financial tools work very well, they now know they would work much better against China than against Russia, because at its core Russia is a commodities exporter, most notably oil, natural gas and food. China imports all those things, so if an equivalent sanctions regime was done against the Chinese, you’d have 500 million dead Chinese in less than a year from starvation.

    Here I think he overstates the case, as there are a lot of emergency avenues a communist government could pursue to stave off starvation. Like invading Mongolia and turning it into emergency farmland. Which is not to so they wouldn’t have some starvation, especially in worse-case scenarios…

  • “The Chinese have always seen themselves as anti-American [well, the commies, anyway -LP], they’ve always seen themselves as anti-Western, anti-democracy and now they’re realizing that the mood of the man in the White House determines whether their country exists.”

  • As tight as the sanctions are, as big as they’re getting, they’re nothing compared to the corporate boycotts. Almost every single company that left Russia was under no legal requirement to do so, they just didn’t want to be associated with the war. And we’re talking about those ESG, social goody two-shoes mammoth companies like Exxon and Halliburton, who are now gone, and everyone else followed. So if that happened to China, you know that’s all of their investment that matters. That’s all of their technology transfers, that’s all of their end markets. This system, if it turned against China, would be far more damning than anything we’ve seen out of Russia so far.

    • I think Zeihan overstates the case a bit, and probably immanizes the timeline of crisis more than warranted, but the demographic and economic challenges China faces are very real.

    Also keep in mind that no one in 1988 expected the Soviet Union to collapse as quickly as it did, either…

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    Posted in Communism, Economics, Foreign Policy, Military | 36 Comments »

    Biden Family Corruption Update for April 7, 2022

    Thursday, April 7th, 2022

    Now that the Hunter Biden dam has finally burst for the MSM, we’re finally getting the “Hey, the Biden family sure seems to be involved in a lot of shady business deals” stories we should have gotten well before the 2020 election if the media weren’t so in the tank for Democrats.

    A roundup:

  • Hunter and Joe aren’t the only crooked members of the Biden clan.

    While conservative heat has for three years focused on the past business activities of President Biden’s son Hunter, a key Senate Republican told CBS News this week that newly obtained banking records raise similar concerns about first brother James Biden.

    “We have people with the Biden name, dealing with Chinese business people that have a relationship to the Communist Party,” Senator Chuck Grassley, the ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee, told CBS News senior investigative correspondent Catherine Herridge. “I think James Biden was very much a part of this.”

    Bank records released by Republican senators this week indicate James Biden’s company, the Lion Hall Group, received payments from a Chinese-financed consulting group in 2018, before his brother Joe announced he was running for president. Grassley says that same year James Biden and the president’s son, Hunter, received monthly retainers totaling $165,000 — $100,000 to Hunter and $65,000 to James.

    Grassley said his team obtained the records directly from the bank where the consulting group did business. He has spent three years investigating and described James and Hunter Biden’s business dealings as “very concerning.”

    Really, who of us hasn’t received $65,000 in monthly consulting fees from a communist Chinese company?

    In a September 2020 report with Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin, Grassley alleged Hunter, James, and James’s wife Sara tapped into a line of credit Hunter set up with a Chinese business executive to purchase more than $100,000 in airline tickets, hotels and restaurants.

    Newly released records from Republican investigators show what appears to be the 2017 application for that $99,000 line of credit bearing the signatures of Hunter Biden and the Chinese executive.

    Hunter gets a $99,000 expense account. Meanwhile, HR rejects your expense report for spending $26 on lunch.

  • “Joe Biden’s Released Tax Returns Don’t Explain Millions In Income. Where Did It Come From?”

    In the week prior to the presidential election, I wrote a piece that asked the question, “Where Is Hunter Biden’s Money?” It was an important question then, even more so now. Given the legacy media’s recent validation of Hunter’s laptop that discussed a slice of equity planned for the “Big Guy” in a deal that involved an entity controlled by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), we should know if any money from it (or other foreign sources) ended up in Joe Biden’s pocket, but we don’t.

    Recall that despite then-presidential candidate Biden having bragged that he had released his tax returns with what his team called “a historic level of transparency,” the truth is that he only released his individual returns. Those returns provided no detail regarding the source of most of his income, dollars that flowed to him and his wife Jill by way of S-corporations they set up shortly after his departure from the office of vice president. Those entities, CelticCapri Corp (his) and Giacoppa Corp (hers), contained more than $13 million of the $17 million the couple had reported in income after Biden left office, most of it in the first year (2017).

    The same media that ignored Hunter’s laptop has shown a complete incuriosity about these entities, accepting the premise that Joe and Jill raked in $13 million from their book deal to generate their huge increase in income. We simply don’t know if that’s true, though. What we do know is that their book sales were dismal.

    Perhaps sensing smoke starting to build just before the election, USA Today published a “fact check” piece that attempted to support that the Bidens earned “$15.6 million … from speaking fees and book deals” in the years 2017 through 2019 and that “more than $10 million of that total income was profits from Biden’s memoir ‘Promise Me, Dad’ and $3 million in profits from Jill Biden’s book.”

    Follow the source link provided to that $10 million number, though, and you’ll end up at Joe Biden’s campaign website with financial disclosure links to only their individual returns — no S-corporation tax returns. So, in reality, readers were left with a smokescreen. (Now the financial disclosure links for 2016, 2017, and 2018 have even been changed to connect to a Democratic National Committee fundraising site via ActBlue rather than the tax documents.)

    I noted back in 2020 that, “While (Joe Biden’s) financial disclosures reasonably support the $2.7 million of net income reported by CelticCapri in 2018, a notable $8.7 million gap exists between its $9.5 million net income in 2017 and the $809,709 of disclosed income in that year from book tour and related speaking events. Since his disclosure covers only part of 2017, we lack the insight into other income that may explain it.”

    Enter (yet again) Hunter and China.

    Sens. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and Ron Johnson, R-Wisc., recently showed proof of payments from what they said were CCP-controlled firms “that prove just how connected the Bidens were and how compromised President Biden probably is.” An August 2017 wire receipt showed $100,000 sent from CEFC Infrastructure Investment to Owasco, and a copy of a November 2017 check from CEFC Limited revealed $1 million paid to Hudson West III, LLC. Both recipient entities were tied to the president’s son.

    Did any of that money, or other overseas income, go to Joe or Jill? We would know if the president provided a copy of their S-Corp. tax returns with all partner K-1’s that flowed through them. But the only detail we have is aggregate numbers reported on the couple’s individual returns.

    Read on for how there’s no way he made that money off book sales. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • How many “concerning transactions” are there? Would you believe 150?

  • “Biden wrote college recommendation letter for son of Hunter’s Chinese business partner.”

    President Biden, in 2017, wrote a college recommendation letter for the son of a Chinese executive who did business with Hunter Biden, according to emails reviewed by Fox News Digital.

    The president has repeatedly denied discussing Hunter’s business ventures with his son.

    Fox News Digital obtained emails between Hunter Biden and his business associates involved in his firm Rosemont Seneca’s joint venture with Chinese investment firms Bohai Capital and BHR.

    Hunter held a 10% stake in BHR as recently as last year, the White House previously acknowledged. Hunter’s attorney told the New York Times in November that he had since divested.

    In an email dated Jan. 3, 2017, and sent to Hunter Biden and his business associates Devon Archer and Jim Bulger, CEO of BHR Jonathan Li writes:

    “Gentlmen[sic], please find the attached resume of my son, Chris Li. He is applying the following colleges for this year,” Li writes, listing Brown University, Cornell University, and New York University.

    Remember how Biden swore up and down he never interacted with Hunter’s business partners?

  • “The Media Campaign to Protect Joe Biden Passes the Point of Absurdity.”

    In confirming that federal prosecutors are treating as “authenticated” the Biden emails, the Times story applies the final dollop of clown makeup to Wolf Blitzer, Lesley Stahl, Christiane Amanpour, Brian Stelter, and countless other hapless media stooges, many starring in Matt Orfalea’s damning montage above (the Hunter half-laugh is classic, by the way). All cooperated with intelligence officials to dismiss a damaging story about Biden’s abandoned laptop and his dealings with the corrupt Ukrainian energy company Burisma as “Russian disinformation.” They tossed in terms thought up for them by spooks as if they were their own thoughts, using words like “obviously” and “classic” and “textbook” to describe “the playbook of Russian disinformation,” in what itself was and still is a wildly successful disinformation campaign, one begun well before the much-derided (and initially censored) New York Post exposé on the topic from October of 2020.

    Not to be petty, but — well, yes, let’s be petty, just a little, and point out that many of the people who were the most pompous about this story turned out to be the most wrong, including the conga line of Intercept editors and staffers who essentially knocked Glenn Greenwald all the way to Substack over the issue. There are more important things going on in the world, but for sheer bootlicking conformist excess and depraved journalist-on-journalist venom the “Russian disinformation” fiasco has no equal, and probably needs recording for posterity before it’s memory-holed via some creepy homage to Severance, or a next-gen algorithmic witch-hunt, or whatever other federally contracted monstrosities are being readied for deployment somewhere far up the anus of Silicon Valley. For comic relief, start with the Intercept.

    Much blow-by-blow analysis of Bursima and Ukrainian investigations snipped.

    Note all this took place before the New York Post ran its October, 2020 piece about the trove of Biden emails culled from the laptop, which included an ominous email from Pozharsky ostensibly thanking him for the “opportunity to meet your father.” It’s never been verified that this meeting actually took place, but what has absolutely been verified by now — not just by the Times but via the extensive digging done by Politico reporter Ben Schreckinger in his book The Bidens — is that the laptop is, in fact, Hunter Biden’s laptop, and the emails they contain are real.

    In a just world this would be career-altering news for the parade of media figures who spent months loudly insisting the opposite, cheered the unprecedented decisions by Facebook and Twitter to restrict access to the story, and repeated the Langley-driven fiction that it was a Russian smear. The fact that none of them are bothering to comment on any of this shows that the line between the intelligence community and commercial media has blurred to the point of meaninglessness. They know everyone knows they screwed this up and are long past pretending to care. This is like someone committed to a life in sweats who eats another piece of pie at night, because what difference will it ever make? That weight is never coming off anyway.

    I long thought the decision by Facebook and Twitter to block the Post just before an election was a bigger deal than the actual story, which to me was mislabeled “smoking gun” evidence of major corruption because almost none of the information in those emails had been confirmed then. After reading this latest Times piece, which among other things confirms that Joe Biden (if not the Burisma official) was present at the infamous “meeting” referenced in the original Pozharsky email, I’m not sure so sure.

  • The Hunter Biden laptop whistleblower says he has 450 GB of deleted material recovered from the laptop. “[Jack] Maxey says the data includes 80,000 images and videos, and more than 120,000 archived emails.”
  • “Secret Service paying over $30K per month for Malibu mansion to protect Hunter Biden.” Are cocaine and underage prostitutes the only things Hunter has to spend his own money on?
  • Except maybe fundraising…for his own father. “President Joe Biden’s chief of staff Ron Klain allegedly emailed Hunter Biden in 2012 to ask him for money for his father.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

    • If I’ve missed any important Biden corruption news, feel free to leave links in the comments.

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    Posted in Democrats, Media Watch, Waste and Fraud | 5 Comments »

    Know Who’s Bummed About Russia’s Military Failure In Ukraine? China

    Wednesday, April 6th, 2022

    A goodly part of the world is pleased about the manifest failure of Vlad’s Big Ukraine Adventure, some are indifferent to it, but only Russia, client-state Syria, and puppet-state Belarus really seem upset about it.

    Know who else is bummed? China.

    Operation Desert Storm was a turning point in modern Chinese military history. As military planners with the People’s Liberation Army watched U.S. and allied forces make short work of the world’s fourth-largest military (on paper), equipped with many of the same systems as the PLA, it became obvious that China’s quantitatively superior but qualitatively lacking massed infantry would stand no chance against the combination of modern weaponry, C4ISR, and joint operations seen in Iraq. The result was new military concepts and over two decades of often-difficult reforms, which produced the modern, far more capable, “informationized” PLA of today.

    Today, the PLA is no doubt closely observing its Russian contemporaries in Ukraine as they under-perform in multiple areas, from failing to take key targets or claim air supremacy to running low on fuel and supplies and possibly experiencing morale collapse, and surely taking away lessons that will shape its own future. Of note, Russia’s experience appears to have confirmed many of China’s recent assumptions behind its investments, such as the utility of unmanned aerial systems in high-intensity conflict, as well as the necessity for the PLA’s 2015 reforms, which aim to fix many of the issues driving Russian failure that the PLA recognizes in itself.

    Of the many issues that have contributed to Russia’s physical battlefield woes in Ukraine, one of the most important has been the lack of effective joint or combined arms operations, widely considered essential to any effective modern fighting force. Russia’s poor level of coordination between its various services and branches can only be generously described as incompetent. For example, it has repeatedly failed to provide effective air support to its ground forces or deconflict its air and air-defense forces to avoid friendly fire.

    The PLA has long had its own serious issues with joint operations. Traditionally dominated by the Army, the PLA had little success developing a truly joint force until a series of sweeping reforms in 2015 that replaced the former Army-dominated system with a series of joint theater commands. The PLA is thus aware of its own shortcomings and taking steps to fix it, but likely remains far off from being able to conduct truly effective, seamless joint operations. Efforts to conduct joint exercises are becoming more common, but most senior PLA leaders are still relatively inexperienced with joint operations, and even new officers typically do not receive joint education below the corps level. Further, it remains to be seen how far these reforms will go or to what extent they will “stick;” indeed, one reason the PLA did not attempt these reforms until 2015 was because of strong institutional pushback from the Army, whose leaders wished to retain their dominant status.

    To China, the Ukraine invasion will reinforce the importance of joint and combined arms operations, while also making clear that such operations are highly difficult to conduct in practice. Russia’s stumbles may give the PLA pause as to whether it is truly ready for all the joint elements that a successful Taiwan seizure would require, including close coordination between sea, air, and land forces.

    As well they should be. Russia shares a giant land border with Ukraine, was able to through something like 150,000 troops into the fight, and still got mauled while failing to meet their initial objectives. A giant land border is world’s away from having to conduct fiercely contested landing operations against the heavily defended island of a sophisticated, technological peer foe who’s had over half a century to prepare.

    Also, it can’t be encouraging that Russia was unable to hold control of Hostemel Airport during the early stages of the war, since airport seizures for an airbridge into Taiwan has played a large role in many wargamed invasion scenarios.

    Some paragraphs on conscript armies and information warfare skipped.

    China has also taken note of Russia’s disasterous logistics:

    Another ongoing issue has been Russia’s serious problems with poor logistics. The sight of broken-down or abandoned vehicles has become common as Russian forces run out of fuel and other vital supplies. To its credit, the PLA has also been rapidly reforming and modernizing its logistical system as part of the same broad set of 2015 reforms. As part of these reforms, the PLA has emphasized its logistics organizations and created the Joint Logistics Support Force. This force’s training has focused on cooperation with other branches of the PLA, and it has cut its teeth training to establish supply lines during natural disasters. In 2018, the JLSF launched its first major exercise, dubbed “Joint Logistics Support Mission 2018,” featuring medical drones, helicopter-dropped refueling depots, and operations in harsh and remote terrain.

    Hey, remember all that stuff I said about long land borders vs. amphibious and airborne invasion? It applies double (if not quadruple) for logistics. China can’t assume it will have complete air and sea control of the Taiwan strait, and it’s really hard to run an invasion if you’ve run out of ammo, food and fuel.

    However, while the outward manifestation of many of the issues faced by the Russian military appear to be logistical in nature, the true heart of the issue may be corruption. There are reports that before the invasion Russian military officers sold off their fuel and food supplies, and that these corrupt practices may be responsible for the stalling of a Russian tank column outside Kyiv. In this regard, the PLA has much to fear. Corruption has plagued the PLA for decades, with some PLA officers bluntly stating in 2015 that it could undermine China’s ability to wage war. Reportedly, more than 13,000 PLA officers have been punished in some capacity for corruption since Xi Jinping took power, including more than a hundred generals. This was a particular problem in the logistics sector, where there are more opportunities for corruption and links to the civilian economy.

    Yet, despite the reorganization of the PLA and widespread prosecution of corruption cases, it still appears to be a major issue. Anti-corruption efforts are ongoing, with Chinese Gen. Zhang Youxia recently calling for innovative measures to keep up the fight. But the fact that Fu Zhenghua, the man brought in to take down the corrupt former security chief Zhou Yongkang, is himself now under investigation for corruption does not bode well for the long-term effectiveness of China’s efforts. The troubled invasion of Ukraine provides a stark real-world example to Xi, the CCP, and PLA about the impact corruption can have on military effectiveness, and will no doubt cause them to redouble their anti-corruption efforts with a newfound urgency. However given its similar authoritarian system and emphasis on career advancement through patronage, systemic corruption may be baked into the system.

    China without corruption is like Norway without snow.

    But not everything is that’s made life difficult for Russia will apply to China.

    While China will benefit from Russia’s increasing reliance on its goods and services, Beijing can be expected to retool its geo-economic strategy to reduce its vulnerability to a similar nightmare scenario. For example, it will likely redouble its efforts to promote its Cross-Border Interbank Payment System—an alternative to the SWIFT international banking system—among its strategic partners and foreign aid recipients in the developing world.

    Likewise, China’s recent “Dual Circulation” economic strategy appears to be aimed at countering a decoupling from China’s trade partners. Further, Beijing has surely observed how easy it was for corporations to withdraw from Moscow. If China is to be exposed to the risk of global sanctions and corporate withdrawal, so too are countries and corporations exposed to dependence on the world’s second-largest economy, and thus the government will likely take efforts to make any sanctions or corporate turn against China as painful a prospect as possible. Either way, policymakers in Washington need to understand that the sanctions being used today against Russia are unlikely be as effective the next time around, as China is not just a different economy, but also will learn from the current conflict and adjust accordingly.

    This is undoubtedly true, and China has a much broader and more modern economic and industrial base with which to wage war. All the more reason for America to bring critical manufacturing and other economic business outsourced to China back home.

    For all these valuable lessons, there is little doubt that China has been watching the ongoing conflict with no small amount of chagrin. Chinese leaders are reportedly surprised and unsettled by the poor military performance of its Russian partners, Ukraine’s resistance, and the level of solidarity from the international community. The image of a much smaller state, against all odds, successfully resisting a larger neighbor surely sits uneasily in the psyches of CCP apparatchiks and PLA officials. It also counters the narrative of overwhelming force and grim inevitability Beijing has sought to instill in the psyches of the Taiwanese people. It is notable that early attempts by Chinese state media to capitalize on the Ukraine invasion in precisely this fashion, illustrating how the United States will surely abandon Taiwan when the chips are down, quietly ceased after the initial days of the war, when it became apparent that the U.S. was not, in fact, abandoning Ukraine. Beyond purely psychological factors, Ukraine also offers a blueprint for successful resistance via asymmetric warfare very similar to Taiwan’s proposed Overall Defense Concept, perhaps giving a jolt to a plan that most analysts agree offers Taiwan its best chance of success against the PLA but has stalled out in the face of bureaucratic resistance.

    While China and the PLA will surely watch Ukraine closely and try to take away the correct lessons, there is one uncomfortable parallel which China may be unable to avoid by the very nature of its authoritarian system. The runup to the Ukraine invasion featured multiple strategic miscalculations by Putin, driven at least in part by him surrounding himself with the yes-men who inevitably cling to authoritarian leaders, eager to please and afraid to speak truth to power. This was obvious in the visibly uncomfortable reaction of Russia’s SVR (foreign intelligence) chief as he was publicly pressured to agree with Putin in the days leading up to the war, as well as in the sackings and arrests of multiple military and intelligence officials after the war turned poorly. Authoritarian leaders have systemic problems in gaining reliable intelligence, oftentimes magnified by their overconfidence in their own singular understanding of a situation. As China continues its slide away from a system of intra-Party consensus toward a one-man cult of personality in which dissenting views are increasingly unwelcome, Xi is bound to encounter the same problem. It is unclear whether Xi will learn this lesson from Putin, or make his own similar miscalculations in the future towards China’s own neighbors.

    Dictatorships (especially communist dictatorships) greatly increase the possibility of a “Thermocline of Truth” building up between bad news and fawning yes-men fearful of making the dictator angry. There’s very little reason to believe that Xi Jinping’s chain of command suffers from the problem any less than Putin’s.

    In war, comforting lies will get your ass kicked.

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    Posted in Communism, Foreign Policy, Military | 6 Comments »

    LinkSwarm for April 1, 2022

    Friday, April 1st, 2022

    Russia pulls back, inflation soars, and the Biden Administration is all in on grooming your kids. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!

    Don’t forget it’s April Fools Day, so don’t take any wooden NFTs.

  • Russia has reportedly withdrawn its forces from Hostemel Airport outside Kiev.

    Russian forces have retreated from a Ukrainian airfield that was key to their original plan of overthrowing Volodymyr Zelensky’s government.

    Hostomel airport, just oustide Kyiv, was the scene of some of the fiercest fighting of the Ukraine war, as Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, sought to establish an air bridge to the capital.

    Control of the airport, 20km from Kyiv, changed hands several times, as Ukrainians at first defended fiercely and then attacked the Russian occupiers.

    Five weeks on, the Russians have moved out having failed in their mission, according to a senior US defence official, as it abandons plans to take the capital and shift forces to the east.

    This is a huge win for Ukraine, but it also means that surviving Russian forces can shift over to east Ukraine where the war is still hot.

  • Also: “Ukraine forces pulled off a rare attack on Russian soil Friday when two military helicopters destroyed a fuel depot in the city of Belgorod, situated roughly 40 miles north of the border with Ukraine.”
  • “Key Inflation Gauge Reaches 40-Year High.”

    A key inflation metric monitored by the Federal Reserve soared 6.4 percent in February compared to a a [sic] year ago, reaching a new 40-year high.

    The latest price surge, which affected the price of fuel, groceries and other consumer essentials, represents the largest year-over-year increase since January 1982, according to data released by the Commerce Department on Thursday.

    Not taking into account food and energy fluctuations, which tend to be more erratic and can overemphasize inflation, the personal consumption expenditures price index, the preferred inflation gauge of the Federal Reserve, jumped 5.4 percent in February from a year prior. Including gas and groceries, PCE surged 6.4 percent.

    It’s gonna get worse…

  • The Biden Administration is evidently all-in on tranny madness and grooming your children:
    
    

  • As is Disney.
  • DeSantis to Disney: You want to complain about teachers no longer being allowed to talk to kindergartners about anal sex? Fine. How about we just remove your special self-governing status? (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Speaking of DeSantis, he has some pretty sweet talent lined up for this:

  • What’s behind this creepy push for foisting transexualism on pre-teens? A long, creepy history of Marxist indoctrination.

    Through brand names like “comprehensive sex education” and one of its parent programs, “Social-Emotional Learning (SEL),” our government schools have been turned into Groomer Schools, and parents are beginning to notice. What many will not understand, however, is that this isn’t just a fluke of our weird and increasingly degenerate times. It is, in fact, a long-purposed Marxist project reaching back into the early 20th century. In this episode of the New Discourses Podcast, join James Lindsay as he explains the long history of the sexual grooming that has come into our schools through Critical Gender Theory and Queer Theory as they have crept into educational programs.

    There’s an hour long video there I haven’t watched all of yet…

  • Speaking of groomers:

  • Just how bad is the graft, waste and fraud in that $1.5 trillion porkulus bill? This bad. Look over that vast list of special subsidies and ask yourself “How many of these programs are designed to channel taxpayer money into the pockets of Democratic activists.” The answer seems to be “Most of them.”
  • “8 Joe Biden Scandals Inside Hunter Biden’s MacBook That Corporate Media Just Admitted Is Legit.” China, Ukraine, Russia, etc.
  • Republican lawmakers would like to see emails between Hunter Biden and the Obama White House.
  • White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki is leaving for MSNBC. So many angles: A.) Rats, sinking ship. B.) That revolving door between Democratic staffers and the MSM continues apace. C.) I hear she has an offer to star in Chairman of the Board 2.
  • Flu Manchu update: Asymptomatic spread is bunk.
  • “BuzzFeed News union votes to strike as job cuts loom.” I suppose that would be Amalgamated Listicle Crafters Local 106…
  • Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the supply chain: “22,000 Union Workers At 29 West Coast Ports May Strike…West Coast union dockworkers may strike if they don’t come to an agreement to replace their existing contract with marine terminals. The contract is set to expire at the end of June.” Labor strikes are yet another part of the classic winter of discontent formula the Biden Administration is using to bring back the worst of the 1970s.
  • Another part of that classic 1970s discontent record is soft on crime polices, just like those pursued by George Soros-backed DA’s like Larry Krasner.

    Philadelphia district attorney Larry Krasner has presided over a surge in violent crime, and his new policy promises more of it. Krasner recently announced plans to de-prosecute crimes for offenders aged 18 to 25, ignoring how this age group tends to contain the most violent of criminal defendants.

    Krasner’s office has established a new unit that will move some 18-to-25-year-old defendants into “rehabilitative programming” instead of seeking criminal punishments. As Krasner’s data dashboard demonstrates, “rehabilitative programming” is just a euphemism for dismissing charges. Krasner promises that the program will be limited to nonviolent offenses, including drug trafficking and other offenses. (The Philadelphia Inquirer reports that gun crimes will not be included, but Krasner has previously stated that prosecutions for illegal gun possession are “not only ineffective but unjust and racially discriminatory.” The link in the district attorney’s office data dashboard about Philadelphia’s Gun Violence Task Force takes the reader to a page that states “Article Not Found.”)

    This new program reflects Krasner’s determination not to think like a prosecutor, but instead to think like the criminal defense lawyer he was. The program was developed by Sangeeta Prasad, a fellow with the district attorney’s office who previously served as a public defender in New York, New Mexico, and Philadelphia. Before assuming her current post, she had no prior experience as a prosecutor, just like Krasner. The chief public defender for Philadelphia has called the new unit “an incredible initiative,” but Philadelphia courts were not invited to the press conference announcing the plan and stated that they were not aware of the experiment.

    The new initiative comes at an awkward time. In 2021, Philadelphia experienced the highest number of homicides in its history, and the violence is continuing in 2022. Indeed, Philadelphia homicides have risen every year that Krasner has been in office, as carjackings, shootings, and drug overdoses soar. What makes the policy more bizarre is that it runs counter to decades of criminological research. One of the iron laws of criminal conduct is the so-called age-crime curve, which demonstrates that the majority of serious crimes are committed by defendants between the ages of 15 and 25. This finding obtains around the world and has been replicated time and again.

  • Speaking of repeat offenders, Millen, Georgia police Officer Larry “Ben” Thompson quit after being caught on tape having public sex while on-duty. Fair enough, but his lengthy record of misdeeds makes you wonder why he wasn’t fired long ago, since he managed to shoot another officer in the arm (“negligent discharge”) and killed a guy in a traffic accident in route to a call. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • Nevada/Utah Ponzi scheme leads to FBI shootout. “The alleged $300 million scheme, run by a lawyer named Matthew Beasley, came to a head when FBI agents went to his home earlier this month and Beasley drew a gun on himself, before pointing it at agents, prompting them to shoot him.”
  • “[Fort Worth Superintendent] Kent Scribner will leave the district this August instead of in 2024, when his contract ends. In response to recent outcry from parents regarding Superintendent Kent Scribner’s support of CRT-based policies, Fort Worth ISD’s school board voted 7-0 to move up Scribner’s last day as superintendent to August 31, 2022.”
  • Ouch! Texas “Taxpayers’ Property Appraisals Rising 20% to 50% as Supply Chain Disruptions Meet Population Growth.” Austin-Round Rock is slated for the biggest increase, some 35.4%.
  • Don’t look now, but there’s another big Zero Day Internet infrastructure exploit out in the wild. “Spring4Shell is a remote code execution vulnerability in Spring Framework that can be exploited for remote code execution without authentication.” Spring is a Java framework that’s almost 20 years old, so the issue could potential be lurking in a lot of places…
  • Another week, another hate crime hoax. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • Speaking of false accusations of racism, Gibson’s Bakery win over Oberlin in court yet again. “A three-judge panel on the Ninth District Court of Appeals issued a unanimous decision to uphold a 2019 ruling by Lorain County Judge John Miraldi, who initially awarded the bakery more than $40 million in punitive and compensatory damages, Cleveland.com reported. However, the sum was later reduced to $25 million, though the bakery was awarded more than $6 million for lawyers’ fees.”
  • Bullet vs Newton’s Cradle at 100,000 FPS.
  • Final Destination: Schuylkill County edition:

  • The Lock-picking Lawyer fills his wife’s Beaver.
  • Huskeys be crazy:

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    Posted in Austin, Budget, Communism, Crime, Democrats, Economics, Foreign Policy, Media Watch, Military, Social Justice Warriors, Texas, unions | 1 Comment »

    What New Hunter Biden Revelations Are Coming Down The Pike?

    Thursday, March 31st, 2022

    If you followed this blog back in 2020, you know that I’ve been covering Hunter Biden’s sleazy business dealing even back before the laptop from hell revelations. So none of the latest burst of Hunter Biden stories has brought up (as far as I can tell) any new information.

    But the fact that the mainstream media is now reporting on them is new. We take it as a given the MSM ignored them in 2020 because they wanted to drag Joe Biden’s ambulatory corpse over the finish line. By why are they reporting on them now?

    One thing they’re still doing: ignoring the fact that the laptop ties Joe Biden to an international pay-for-play bribery scheme.

    After our story was censored by Big Tech and dismissed as “Russian disinformation” by Democratic prevaricator Adam Schiff, and 51 former spooks led by former CIA Director John Brennan, apparently it’s safe to admit the laptop is real and the emails we published can be easily authenticated.

    Of course, they all avoid the inevitable conclusion to be drawn from evidence contained on the laptop that the president’s drug-addled son Hunter abandoned at a MacBook repair shop in Delaware in April 2019: that Joe Biden, when he was vice president, was aware of, and intimately involved in, a corrupt, multimillion-dollar, international influence-peddling scheme run by Hunter, and Joe’s brother Jim Biden, in the countries for which Joe was point man in the Obama administration, such as Russia, Ukraine and China.

    Hunter’s laptop is a large piece of the jigsaw puzzle that leads to such a shocking conclusion.

    But despite acknowledging that the material on the laptop showed that Hunter was “trading on his ­father’s name to make a lot of money,” as CNN White House correspondent John Harwood put it, both the Washington Post and CNN were at pains to absolve Joe Biden of any involvement in the scheme.

    “There is zero evidence that Vice President Biden, or President Biden, has done anything wrong in connection with what Hunter Biden has done,” Harwood said.

    Right. Pull the other one.

    No doubt these august media organs that treated our story with sneering disregard for a year and a half have their reasons for jumping on board. For one thing, their original goal of removing President Donald Trump from office was achieved long ago, and Joe Biden is now so unpopular that his Praetorian Guard is melting away and reporting on his family is less hazardous to Beltway dinner party invitations.

    For another thing, they can’t have their audiences blindsided when the US attorney in Delaware completes his investigation of Hunter. God forbid that their readers and viewers wake up to the fact they have been misled and kept in the dark by their media outlets of choice.

    Read on for how the MSM is still omitting tons of important information (like Tony Bobulinski) from their reporting.

    One thing that is coming down the pike after Hunter Biden: a tax probe.

    A federal tax investigation into Hunter Biden is gaining momentum as prosecutors gather information from several of his associates about the sources of his foreign income, including from Ukraine, and examine President Biden’s son’s relationship with a company that handled some of his finances, according to people familiar with the matter.

    In recent weeks, prosecutors from the U.S. attorney’s office in Delaware have sought information and grand-jury testimony about the money Mr. Biden received several years ago from Ukrainian natural-gas company Burisma Holdings Ltd., and how he used that money to pay some obligations, one of those people said.

    Last month, prosecutors also extensively questioned at least one other associate of Hunter Biden about Mr. Biden’s drug and alcohol use, spending habits and state of mind in 2018, another person said, suggesting prosecutors are exploring whether such activity would present a defense against a potential criminal tax case.

    Prosecutors often seek to get such testimony on the record to secure it before the defense gets a chance to present it more favorably at trial.

    All in all, it looks like someone in D.C. is aware of some heavy revelations about to drop down on Hunter Biden, and they’re trying to get ahead of it.

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    Posted in Democrats, Media Watch | 10 Comments »

    Russo-Ukrainian War Update for March 17, 2022

    Thursday, March 17th, 2022

    Russia’s war against Ukraine grinds on. Here’s the Livemap snapshot:

    Given the usual caveats (the map is not the territory), it doesn’t seem like Russia has made much progress since my last update. Russian forces are taking high casualties as they creep closer to Kiev, and Mariupol is still in Ukrainian hands.

    Some perspective on the timelines of previous mechanized invasions:

  • In Desert Storm, the coalition forces destroyed most of the Iraqi army and air force and liberated Kuwait in 100 hours, taking less than 500 deaths. No tank personnel were killed in action.
  • In the Six-Day War, Israel seized control of Gaza, Sinai, the West Bank and the Golan Heights, some 42,000 square miles, and lost 776 soldiers in combat.
  • Twelve days after the German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, Germany controlled virtually all of Poland west of the Vistula and was rapidly surrounding the capital of Warsaw. (The Soviet Union would jump in five days later on September 17 to help the Nazis finish off the remainder of Polish resistance and annex much of Poland into the Soviet Union. I trust you know that a lot of what was Poland in 1939 is in Belarus today.) And that was back when the vast majority of German logistics support was still supplied via horse-drawn logistics. And if Gerd von Rundstedt and Fedor von Bock had trucks, and had used T-72s and T-80s rather than Panzer Is and IIs, they probably could have done it in half the time.

    • We’re now some 22 days into the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and its make other widescale mechanized land invasions look far more competent and successful.

    Now the links:

  • Here’s a quick assessment:
    • Russia is deploying reserves from Armenia and South Ossetia and cohering new battalion tactical groups (BTGs) from the remnants of units lost early in the invasion. These reinforcements will likely face equal or greater command and logistics difficulties to current frontline Russian units.
    • President Zelensky created a new joint military-civilian headquarters responsible for the defense of Kyiv on March 15.
    • Russian forces conducted several failed attacks northwest of Kyiv and no offensive operations northeast of Kyiv on March 16.
    • Russian forces continue to shell civilian areas of Kharkiv, but will be unlikely to force the city to surrender without encircling it—which Russian forces appear unable to achieve.
    • Russian forces continued to reduce the Mariupol pocket on March 16. Russian forces continue to commit war crimes in the city, targeting refugees and civilian infrastructure.
    • Ukrainian Forces claimed to have killed the commander of the 8th Combined Arms Army’s 150th Motor Rifle Division near Mariupol on March 15. If confirmed, Miyaev would be the fourth Russian general officer killed in Ukraine; his death would be a major blow to the 150th Motor Rifle Division, Russia’s principal maneuver unit in Donbas.
    • Russian warships shelled areas of Odesa Oblast on March 16 but Russian Naval Infantry remain unlikely to conduct an unsupported amphibious landing.

    (Hat tip: The Ethereal Voice.)

  • Estimates for deaths from Vlad’s Big Ukraine Adventure top 7,000:

    In 36 days of fighting on Iwo Jima during World War II, nearly 7,000 Marines were killed. Now, 20 days after President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia invaded Ukraine, his military has already lost more soldiers, according to American intelligence estimates.

    The conservative side of the estimate, at more than 7,000 Russian troop deaths, is greater than the number of American troops killed over 20 years in Iraq and Afghanistan combined.

    It is a staggering number amassed in just three weeks of fighting, American officials say, with implications for the combat effectiveness of Russian units, including soldiers in tank formations. Pentagon officials say a 10 percent casualty rate, including dead and wounded, for a single unit renders it unable to carry out combat-related tasks.

    With more than 150,000 Russian troops now involved in the war in Ukraine, Russian casualties, when including the estimated 14,000 to 21,000 injured, are near that level. And the Russian military has also lost at least three generals in the fight, according to Ukrainian, NATO and Russian officials.

    Pentagon officials say that a high, and rising, number of war dead can destroy the will to continue fighting. The result, they say, has shown up in intelligence reports that senior officials in the Biden administration read every day: One recent report focused on low morale among Russian troops and described soldiers just parking their vehicles and walking off into the woods.

    Insert the usual “anonymous sources” caveat. Though I suspect the estimates of overall Russian deaths is on the low side.

  • Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky asks U.S. congress for a no-fly zone. I don’t blame him for asking one bit. But it would be a dangerous escalation on the part of the United States and NATO to attempt to implement one.
  • The tiny problem with offering Putin an “offramp” from his Ukraine invasion: he doesn’t want one.

    We’re witnessing a particularly unexpected set of circumstances.

    One: The vaunted Russian army is proving to be a shadow of its former self.

    While the Russian pounding of Ukrainian cities increases, Kyiv remains in Ukrainian control, and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky is still, at minimum, safe enough to record videos of himself walking to a hospital to visit wounded Ukrainian soldiers. In just three weeks, the Russian military has likely suffered more killed, wounded, and captured than the U.S. and U.K. did combined over the course of 20 years in Afghanistan. One site attempting to track the damage calculates that the Ukrainians have destroyed, damaged, or captured more than 1,200 Russian military vehicles and shot down or otherwise damaged 15 helicopters, 13 fixed-wing aircraft, six drones, two fuel trains, and more than 400 support vehicles.

    If the Russian army was marching across Ukraine as planned, the Russians would not be attempting to recruit Syrian mercenaries.

    This doesn’t mean that 200,000 Russian troops, with all their support vehicles, tanks, artillery, guided-missile systems, jets, helicopters, etc., cannot kill many Ukrainians and inflict extraordinary damage on the cities and homes and critical infrastructure of Ukraine. But it does mean that the Russian army is hampered by severe logistics problems, poor intelligence and tactics, persistent communications problems, awful morale, faulty equipment, and long-expired rations. Some significant portion of the great fortune that Russia spent to upgrade its military over the past two decades was skimmed off the top and diverted into someone’s pockets.

    Polina Beliakova, a senior research fellow at the Center for Strategic Studies at Tufts University, contends that Putin’s wealthy allies were stealing from the military and shortchanging the troops right under Putin’s nose:

    Most companies responsible for providing food to the Russian military are connected to Yevgeny Prigozhin — the patron of PMC Wagner, the mercenary organization, and sponsor of the Internet Research Agency, which has been accused of meddling in the United States elections. Several years ago, Prigozhin’s companies were accused by Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny of forming a cartel and gaming the state’s bidding system for defense orders, receiving contracts for several hundred million dollars. The quality of food and housing in the Russian military is reportedly worse than in its prisons, with unreasonably small meals and some carrying harmful Escherichia coli bacteria.

    Putin is now learning that hard lesson of former U.S. secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld, “You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time.”

    The army Russia has is nowhere near as effective as Putin thought it was. And the Eastern Europeans have noticed:

    “Today what I have seen is that even this huge army or military is not so huge,” said Lt. Gen. Martin Herem, Estonia’s chief of defense, during a news conference at an air base in northern Estonia with Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff. General Herem’s colleague and the air force chief, Brig. Gen. Rauno Sirk, in an interview with a local newspaper, was even more blunt in his assessment of the Russian air force. “If you look at what’s on the other side, you’ll see that there isn’t really an opponent anymore,” he said.

    Two: The Russian economy continues to freefall.

    The Russian government announced that they intend to pay back their debts in now-almost-worthless rubles. The Moscow Stock Exchange will stay closed until at least March 18. The Financial Times’ European banking correspondent, Owen Walker, says the Russian Ministry of Finance can keep the big Russian banks going for a while, but in the end, the Russian companies will have no money coming in from countries enacting sanctions.

    Maybe India can help with this problem, but it will cost Russia; the Indian government is reportedly interested in buying Russian oil at a discount. Russia not only wants economic assistance from China, but has reportedly asked for military assistance as well, in the form of drones.

    Three: Despite all of this, Putin is not only undeterred, he wants to double down.

    Back in 2014, when Russian military forces moved into Crimea and annexed it, then-secretary of state John Kerry and other Obama administration officials kept talking up the option of a “diplomatic off-ramp” that would end Russia’s military occupation. Those proposals never went anywhere; Kerry seemed to be in denial of the fact that Putin was on precisely the highway he wanted to be on, headed toward exactly the destination he wanted. Putin wasn’t looking for an “off-ramp.”

    Today, you hear the same refrain — that if the West just tried hard enough, it could find some “diplomatic off-ramp” that would be acceptable to Putin:

    Axios: “President Biden now faces a great unanswered question — how to give Vladimir Putin an off-ramp to avoid even greater calamity.” The Irish Times: “While the prospect of a ceasefire in the short-term may seem remote, there will come a point where Putin needs an off-ramp. The West can keep applying pressure on Putin while showing him that a negotiated peace is there for the taking.” NPR: “Diplomats are trying to find an off ramp to Putin’s war in Ukraine.”

    How can Putin make it any clearer? He doesn’t want an “off ramp!” He doesn’t want to end his war, he wants to win his war. He doesn’t care how gargantuan a price he or his country must pay in blood and treasure to achieve victory. To a certain degree, Putin is dealing with the sunken-cost fallacy. He has already committed so much, nationally and personally, into this war that he cannot accept a relatively modest prize of Donetsk and Luhansk and a guarantee that Ukraine would never join NATO. Russia’s big sacrifices in this war means Putin must bring home a big prize to justify the bloody endeavor.

  • A Chinese analyst is pretty grim in his analysis of Putin’s chances of success.

    1. Vladimir Putin may be unable to achieve his expected goals, which puts Russia in a tight spot. The purpose of Putin’s attack was to completely solve the Ukrainian problem and divert attention from Russia’s domestic crisis by defeating Ukraine with a blitzkrieg, replacing its leadership, and cultivating a pro-Russian government. However, the blitzkrieg failed, and Russia is unable to support a protracted war and its associated high costs. Launching a nuclear war would put Russia on the opposite side of the whole world and is therefore unwinnable. The situations both at home and abroad are also increasingly unfavorable. Even if the Russian army were to occupy Ukraine’s capital Kyiv and set up a puppet government at a high cost, this would not mean final victory. At this point, Putin’s best option is to end the war decently through peace talks, which requires Ukraine to make substantial concessions. However, what is not attainable on the battlefield is also difficult to obtain at the negotiating table. In any case, this military action constitutes an irreversible mistake.

    2. The conflict may escalate further, and the West’s eventual involvement in the war cannot be ruled out. While the escalation of the war would be costly, there is a high probability that Putin will not give up easily given his character and power. The Russo-Ukrainian war may escalate beyond the scope and region of Ukraine, and may even include the possibility of a nuclear strike. Once this happens, the U.S. and Europe cannot stay aloof from the conflict, thus triggering a world war or even a nuclear war. The result would be a catastrophe for humanity and a showdown between the United States and Russia. This final confrontation, given that Russia’s military power is no match for NATO’s, would be even worse for Putin.

    3. Even if Russia manages to seize Ukraine in a desperate gamble, it is still a political hot potato. Russia would thereafter carry a heavy burden and become overwhelmed. Under such circumstances, no matter whether Volodymyr Zelensky is alive or not, Ukraine will most likely set up a government-in-exile to confront Russia in the long term. Russia will be subject both to Western sanctions and rebellion within the territory of Ukraine. The battle lines will be drawn very long. The domestic economy will be unsustainable and will eventually be dragged down. This period will not exceed a few years.

    4. The political situation in Russia may change or be disintegrated at the hands of the West. After Putin’s blitzkrieg failed, the hope of Russia’s victory is slim and Western sanctions have reached an unprecedented degree. As people’s livelihoods are severely affected and as anti-war and anti-Putin forces gather, the possibility of a political mutiny in Russia cannot be ruled out. With Russia’s economy on the verge of collapse, it would be difficult for Putin to prop up the perilous situation even without the loss of the Russo-Ukrainian war. If Putin were to be ousted from power due to civil strife, coup d’état, or another reason, Russia would be even less likely to confront the West. It would surely succumb to the West, or even be further dismembered, and Russia’s status as a great power would come to an end.

    II. Analysis of the Impact of Russo-Ukrainian war On International Landscape

    1. The United States would regain leadership in the Western world, and the West would become more united. At present, public opinion believes that the Ukrainian war signifies a complete collapse of U.S. hegemony, but the war would in fact bring France and Germany, both of which wanted to break away from the U.S., back into the NATO defense framework, destroying Europe’s dream to achieve independent diplomacy and self-defense. Germany would greatly increase its military budget; Switzerland, Sweden, and other countries would abandon their neutrality. With Nord Stream 2 put on hold indefinitely, Europe’s reliance on US natural gas will inevitably increase. The US and Europe would form a closer community of shared future, and American leadership in the Western world will rebound.

    2. The “Iron Curtain” would fall again not only from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea, but also to the final confrontation between the Western-dominated camp and its competitors. The West will draw the line between democracies and authoritarian states, defining the divide with Russia as a struggle between democracy and dictatorship. The new Iron Curtain will no longer be drawn between the two camps of socialism and capitalism, nor will it be confined to the Cold War. It will be a life-and-death battle between those for and against Western democracy. The unity of the Western world under the Iron Curtain will have a siphon effect on other countries: the U.S. Indo-Pacific strategy will be consolidated, and other countries like Japan will stick even closer to the U.S., which will form an unprecedentedly broad democratic united front.

    3. The power of the West will grow significantly, NATO will continue to expand, and U.S. influence in the non-Western world will increase. After the Russo-Ukrainian War, no matter how Russia achieves its political transformation, it will greatly weaken the anti-Western forces in the world. The scene after the 1991 Soviet and Eastern upheavals may repeat itself: theories on “the end of ideology” may reappear, the resurgence of the third wave of democratization will lose momentum, and more third world countries will embrace the West. The West will possess more “hegemony” both in terms of military power and in terms of values and institutions, its hard power and soft power will reach new heights.

    Nor is he thrilled at China’s chance might fare in this scenario:

    4. China will become more isolated under the established framework. For the above reasons, if China does not take proactive measures to respond, it will encounter further containment from the US and the West. Once Putin falls, the U.S. will no longer face two strategic competitors but only have to lock China in strategic containment. Europe will further cut itself off from China; Japan will become the anti-China vanguard; South Korea will further fall to the U.S.; Taiwan will join the anti-China chorus, and the rest of the world will have to choose sides under herd mentality. China will not only be militarily encircled by the U.S., NATO, the QUAD, and AUKUS, but also be challenged by Western values and systems.

    His advice to China? Cut Putin loose and join the west:

    China cannot be tied to Putin and needs to be cut off as soon as possible. In the sense that an escalation of conflict between Russia and the West helps divert U.S. attention from China, China should rejoice with and even support Putin, but only if Russia does not fall. Being in the same boat with Putin will impact China should he lose power. Unless Putin can secure victory with China’s backing, a prospect which looks bleak at the moment, China does not have the clout to back Russia. The law of international politics says that there are “no eternal allies nor perpetual enemies,” but “our interests are eternal and perpetual.” Under current international circumstances, China can only proceed by safeguarding its own best interests, choosing the lesser of two evils, and unloading the burden of Russia as soon as possible. At present, it is estimated that there is still a window period of one or two weeks before China loses its wiggle room. China must act decisively.

  • Speaking of China: “China has refused to supply Russian airlines with aircraft parts, an official at Russia’s aviation authority was quoted by Russian news agencies as saying on Thursday, after Boeing (BA.N) and Airbus (AIR.PA) halted supply of components.” Coincidence? Probably.
  • Analyst Ben Hedges says the next ten days (eight now) will decide the war.

    The Russians are in trouble, and they know it. That’s why they have reached out to China for help and why they are now recruiting Syrians.

    Russian generals are running out of time, ammunition, and manpower. That’s not based on any inside intelligence — it’s clear from open source information and my own experience. I could be way off, but I am confident of this assessment.

    An essential caveat to my assessment is that we, the West, led by the US, must accelerate and expand the support we are providing to Ukraine on the scale and with the sense of urgency of the Berlin Airlift (June 1948-May 1949). They need the weapons and ammunition to destroy the rockets, cruise missiles, and long-range artillery that are causing most of the damage to Ukrainian cities, as well as the intelligence to locate those systems, and the ability to hit Russian Navy vessels that are launching cruise missiles into cities from the Black Sea and the Azov Sea.

    The time challenge for Russia is not just military. The effects of sanctions are growing — Russia may soon default on $150bn of foreign currency debt —and Russian domestic resentment is also growing (we should remember that it’s unusual as well as extreme brave for ordinary people to protest in Putin’s Russia and for television editors to suddenly interrupt their own programs waving anti-war placards.) We should do all we can to fuel that discontent and to let courageous Russians know they have our support.

    Ammunition shortages

    The Russians are experiencing ammunition shortages. Their transition to attrition warfare is driving up consumption rates beyond what they had planned and what they can sustain. They will still have a lot of the conventional artillery and so-called dumb bombs. But as we know from past US military operations, the most sophisticated munitions are very expensive and so more limited in availability. The Russians are likely to be having the same experience; in addition, they thought the campaign would end within a few days so large stocks were probably not prepared. Wartime consumption always exceeds planning numbers, and urban combat exacerbates that. Sanctions will also have assisted —Finland and Slovenia used to provide some munitions to Russia, and those have now stopped.

    Manpower shortages

    The Pentagon has said that 50% of Russian combat power was committed in Ukraine. At the height of our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, we were about 29% committed. And it was difficult to sustain that.

    This plays directly into the discussion of the encirclement of Kyiv. Russia does not have the manpower or firepower to encircle the Ukrainian capital, let alone capture it.  I have been to Kyiv several times.  I was there in Kyiv five weeks ago, met President Zelenskyy.  It is a very large, dense major urban center on the banks of one of Europe’s largest rivers. It is a difficult, complex urban terrain.

    The Ukrainians are going to be able to keep it open and prevent encirclement, especially if we can get the flow of weapons and ammunition up to the levels needed. There will be, unfortunately, be increasing attacks on the city by air and ground systems, and many more innocent Ukrainian citizens will be murdered, injured, or displaced.  But I don’t believe it will fall.

    Russia’s dilemma is only worsened by its combat casualties. Although I am always skeptical about enemy body counts, I do believe the numbers of dead are in the thousands (possibly in the 5,000-6,000 range suggested by US sources) and the numbers of wounded much higher. The modern battlefield is extremely lethal, especially for poorly trained or disciplined soldiers. These are very high numbers for just the first two weeks of war and many come from Russia’s elite units — they are hard to replace (and the Kremlin won’t be able to conceal these losses from the Russian public and all those for long.)

    Reports of low morale, dissension between commanders, mutiny on at least one vessel, desertion, and so on, all within the first two weeks are indicators of major manpower problems. And in pure numbers, the Ukrainian armed forces still outnumber or closely match Russian forces actually on the ground in Ukraine.

    There is no suggestion that the Russians have big units lurking in the woods somewhere (and the Pentagon has said it sees no signs of significant reinforcements.) So it’s apparent that the notional 900,000 strength of the Russian military is a hollow number.  Their public call for 16,000 troops from Syria and elsewhere indicates this. Employment of “stop loss” by Russia on conscripts whose time is about up is another indicator. The Ukrainian diaspora is flocking home to help the fight; Russians are not coming back home — and indeed, many are leaving to avoid Putin’s fight.

  • Related: “Ukraine Is Doubling Its Army, While Russia Scrapes The Barrel For Reinforcements.”

    Russia paused its offensive in Ukraine in recent days in order to rush in reinforcements and rebuild shattered units.

    The problem, for the Kremlin, is that Ukraine is doing the same—and potentially to much greater effect. As the wider war in Ukraine enters its fourth week, the Russian army might be able to restore some of the combat power it has lost to poor planning, poorer execution and heroic resistance by the Ukrainian armed services.

    But Ukraine almost certainly can double its fighting strength.

    That mobilization imbalance, the consequence of strong foreign support for Kyiv, the natural logistical advantages any defender enjoys against an attacker and—most importantly—Ukrainians’ incredible determination to fight, has led one analyst to a perhaps surprising conclusion.

    Russia “can’t win this war,” wrote Tom Cooper, an author and expert on the Russian military.

    The Russian army built up a force of nearly 200,000 troops with thousands of armored vehicles before launching its assault on southern, eastern and northern Ukraine on the night of Feb. 23.

    The invasion force encountered stiff resistance. Not only from the 145,000-person regular Ukrainian army, but also local territorial defense forces and even everyday people who improvised weaponry or found other ways to slow the Russians. Digging ditches. Destroying bridges. Texting Ukrainian artillery units with the locations of approaching Russian tanks.

    As the war enters its fourth week, the Russian offensive has stalled. And the scale of Russian losses is becoming clear. The Kremlin on March 2 copped to losing fewer than 500 troops killed in action and another 1,500 wounded. The Ukrainian defense ministry a few days ago posited a much higher total: a combined 12,000 Russians “lost”—presumably meaning killed, wounded or captured.

  • Kurt Schlichter suggests caution.

    From the perspective of someone who actually trained Ukrainian troops in Ukraine, commanded US forces, and attended the US Army War College – though it’s kind of the Chico State of war colleges – the whole way our elite is approaching the crisis is an epic clusterfark. Don’t believe anything anyone tells you – and certainly, sanity check whatever I’m telling you, too – most of these insta-experts on intra-Slavic conflict know absolutely squat-ski. Moreover, their remarkably dumb observations and credulous acceptance of conventional wisdom, which has proven long on conventional and short on wisdom, are being presented without any kind of strategic context. They don’t know where this crisis came from and certainly have no clear notion of where they want it to go beyond the vague and unhelpful idea that they want Putin (which they use interchangeably with Russia) to “lose” without knowing what that even means.

    Biases are important, and here are mine. I sympathize with the Ukrainian people, partly because I worked with them and partly because I was an end-stage Cold Warrior who came up training to fight Russians. I understand that this mess is not merely the result of Putin being bad or Trump being insufficiently anti-Putin, like LTC Sausage and the rest of the failed foreign policy elite and regime media insist. Putin’s badness plays a part, but he’s merely exploiting thousands of years of bloody history, of ethnic hatred, and of Orthodox mysticism, as well as totally misguided and poorly-considered Western interference. The idea that we could just make Ukraine part of NATO and the Russians would just lump it is remarkable for its dumbness, but it is fully in keeping with our foreign policy elite’s unbroken track record of failure since the old-school military’s victory in the Gulf War…

    The expectation was that the Russian forces would smash through, surround the Ukrainian forces pinned down facing the Russians in the occupied regions to the east, and isolate the main cities. I did not expect them to go into the cities immediately since Russians 1) generally bypass hard defenses; 2) they have bad experiences with city fighting (Stalingrad, Grozny); and 3) that would not necessarily be necessary. It would not be necessary if the idea was to neutralize the main Ukrainian combat formations and force the government in the cities to capitulate, then have the West pressure the Ukrainians to accept a ceasefire and “peace” that recognized Russian gains and ended the idea of Ukrainian allying with the West. In fact, that is pretty much what the Russian “peace plan” consists of. But that did not work for a couple of reasons.

    First, the Russians did not fight as well as expected. You should always treat the enemy as if it is the best possible enemy. We did in the Gulf. We prepared to fight elite Republican Guard divisions of highly trained and motivated soldiers using top-shelf Soviet equipment and tactics. None of that was so; we crushed an entire national army in 100 hours.

    The Russians are poorly-led, with very weak synchronization among maneuver forces and fires. Their plan is okay – in fact, you look at a map, and it’s obvious what they would do. But their gear is badly-maintained, and their troops are unsuited to the task of supporting a rapid advance. Look at all the evidently intact gear simply abandoned by the side of the road. Lots of it looks like it broke down (note all the flat tires). Much of it seems to have run out of gas. And, of course, lots of stuff had been blasted apart.

    That’s the second part of the equation – the Ukrainians fought back hard. If you are a Lord of the Rings nerd, think of the Ukrainians as the dwarves. Not super-sophisticated but tough and ready to fight, and also often drunk.

    If you want to see the future of this war, look at videos of Ukrainian infantry patrolling near the front. Every second guy has an anti-tank weapon, like a Javelin or some other system, and the rest are carrying spare missiles. Mechanized forces unprotected by infantry are vulnerable to ambush by anti-tank teams. The Russian armor outstripped its ground pounders and is getting pounded itself. Further, Ukrainians seem to have success with drones firing anti-tank weapons. The war is not going to be won by conventional battalions of Ukrainians operating with conventional aircraft. It will win with light infantry and drones armed with missiles.

  • The Russian occupation is none too gentle on Ukrainian civilians.

    Russian soldiers have shot people dead in the street as they took over Ukrainian villages, according to fleeing residents.

    Soldiers shot randomly at buildings, threw grenades down roads and went from house to house confiscating phones and laptops, witnesses said.

    Online groups created for family members or friends looking for information about people in affected areas are receiving hundreds or even thousands of requests a day.

    One witness, Mykola, described how soldiers arrived in Andriivka, a village near Kyiv. “They threw grenades down the street. One man lost his leg and the next day this person died,” he said. “They then came down the central street and started shooting at the windows and hit one woman. Her children managed to hide.”

    Mykola lived within walking distance of his brother, Dymtro. “My brother came out the house with his hands in the air. They beat him and then executed him in the street,” he said.

    Dymtro’s wife said she saw the killing of her husband from a window. She said she also witnessed their neighbour being killed in the same manner. Dymtro’s daughter believes both were shot because they had earlier helped the Ukrainian army as volunteers.

    Mykola said they wanted to bury his brother, but his wife feared the soldiers would shoot them. “The next day they went house by house, confiscating phones and laptops,” he said. At this point, 3 March, there was no electricity. “Those who came into our house behaved OK. But they told us that it’s good you have a cellar, collect some water, because you’re going to be bombed for six days.”

  • What happens if Putins lets his tacnukes fly.

    On Monday, United Nations secretary general António Guterres warned that, “Raising the alert level of Russian nuclear forces is a bone-chilling development. The prospect of nuclear conflict, once unthinkable, is now back within the realm of possibility.”

    As hyperbolic as that claim may seem, the circumstances that would spur the Russians to use a tactical nuclear weapon are starting to fall into place. As laid out yesterday, the war is going badly for the Russians. Advances are moving slowly, when they’re moving at all, and casualties are mounting. The Russian economy is collapsing. Something’s going to break; it’s just a question of what breaks first.

    This newsletter has repeatedly discussed the official Russian military doctrine, “escalate to deescalate” — that is, “If Russia were subjected to a major non-nuclear assault that exceeded its capacity for conventional defense, it would ‘de-escalate’ the conflict by launching a limited — or tactical — nuclear strike.” In other words, Russia’s official strategy when losing a war is to escalate it by using tactical battlefield nukes in order to “deescalate” it on terms favorable to Russia.

    It isn’t likely that Russia will launch or detonate a tactical nuclear weapon yet. But it also isn’t unimaginable anymore. Apparently, Putin and the Russian military have been thinking about this option for a long time. In 2014, Ukrainian defense minister Valeriy Heletey said that, “The Russian side has threatened on several occasions across unofficial channels that, in the case of continued resistance they are ready to use a tactical nuclear weapon against us.”

    This assumes, of course, his nukes still work. The United States is going to spend some $634 billion this decade maintaining its nuclear deterrent. Put it another way, the U.S. spends more money maintaining nuclear weapons in a given year than Russia spends annually on its entire military. Thermonuclear weapons (not fission-only tactical nuclear weapons) require regular Tritium refresh. Fission weapons still require battery and explosive refresh, and I’m not clear on the schedule.

  • Explosions reported in multiple Belarus cities. Could be supply hits. Could also be false flag operations
  • “A Ukrainian Town Deals Russia One of the War’s Most Decisive Routs. In the two-day battle of Voznesensk, local volunteers and the military repelled the invaders, who fled leaving behind armor and dead soldiers.”

    A rapid Russian advance into the strategic southern town of 35,000 people, a gateway to a Ukrainian nuclear power station and pathway to attack Odessa from the back, would have showcased the Russian military’s abilities and severed Ukraine’s key communications lines.

    Instead, the two-day battle of Voznesensk, details of which are only now emerging, turned decisively against the Russians. Judging from the destroyed and abandoned armor, Ukrainian forces, which comprised local volunteers and the professional military, eliminated most of a Russian battalion tactical group on March 2 and 3.

    The Ukrainian defenders’ performance against a much-better-armed enemy in an overwhelmingly Russian-speaking region was successful in part because of widespread popular support for the Ukrainian cause—one reason the Russian invasion across the country has failed to achieve its principal goals so far. Ukraine on Wednesday said it was launching a counteroffensive on several fronts.

  • “A fourth Russian general has been killed in fighting in Ukraine, according to reports on Tuesday. Ukrainian Interior Ministry adviser Anton Gerashchenko announced the death of Major General Oleg Mityaev.”
  • A look inside an abandoned Russian field kitchen truck. Hope you like onions:

  • Russia is headed toward a $150 billion default.
  • Though Russia did manage to pay $117 in dollar-denominated bonds today.
  • Another sign of how poorly things are going for Russia: “Kremlin arrests FSB chiefs in fallout from Ukraine chaos. The defenestration of several senior spies is a sign of Putin’s growing fury towards the intelligence services.” Traditionally the position of dictators who went to war with their own security service has been…precarious.

    • Other recent Russo-Ukrainian War links:

  • Why Russia Can’t Achieve Air Superiority
  • The Problem With That “Russia Sought Military Aid From China” Story
  • Ian McCollum on Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine and Civilian Firearms Ownership

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    The Problem With That “Russia Sought Military Aid From China” Story

    Monday, March 14th, 2022

    I found the news story that Russia sought military aid from China for its bogged down invasion of Ukraine pretty interesting.

    Until I dug a little deeper.

    Russia has turned to China for military equipment and aid in the weeks since it began its invasion of Ukraine, U.S. officials familiar with the matter told The Washington Post.

    The officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject, did not describe what kind of weaponry had been requested, or whether they know how China responded.

    The development comes as White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan plans to travel to Rome on Monday to meet with his Chinese counterpart, Yang Jiechi.

    Sullivan told CNN that the administration was “communicating directly, privately to Beijing, that there will absolutely be consequences” for any Chinese efforts to assist Russia in evading sanctions.”

    Do you see the problem? It’s right there in the first sentence.

    Russia has turned to China for military equipment and aid in the weeks since it began its invasion of Ukraine, U.S. officials familiar with the matter told The Washington Post.

    “Officials familiar with the matter.”

    Remember that phrase?

    Remember that phrase (and similar ones) a lot from those endless “sources say” hit pieces on President Trump that turned out to be complete garbage made up out of whole cloth?

    Because of that, we can never take anonymously sourced pieces that promotes the latest Democratic Media Complex line at face value ever again. How can we be sure you’re not making things up again?

    We can’t.

    We can never take any anonymously sourced piece in the Washington Post at face value. So we have no idea if Russia sought military aid from China or not.

    That’s the problem with institutional trust. Once it’s gone, it can’t easily be replaced.

    Any time you read “source says” in a piece in an MSM outlet, you should read that as “just trust me, bro!”

    And we don’t.

    And absent a clean sweep in management and a complete turnover of current staff, we never will again.

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    Russo-Ukrainian War Update for March 8, 2022

    Tuesday, March 8th, 2022

    At this point, there seems to be no indication that Russian forces are measurably closer to their goal of controlling all of Ukraine.

    Here’s a LiveMap snapshot.

    From a pure strategic viewpoint, those Russian tendrils snaking toward Kiev from the northeast look like a bad idea, since there’s no way to protect their supply lines.

    (Always remember that the map is not the territory, and that both sides are working hard to put out propaganda, though the Russians seem to be manifestly incompetent at it.)

  • Here’s a fascinating thread reportedly leaked from an active Russian FSB (successor to the KGB) analyst about how badly everything is screwed up.

    I assume that’s Ramzan Kadyrov, corrupt head of the Chechen Republic, former resistance fighter against Russia who defected in 1999 and was appointed by Putin in 2007. Bit of a jihadist scumbag to boot, and just a generally nasty piece of work. I assume by “Kadyrov’s squad” they mean the Kadyrovtsy, the militia forces under his direct control.

    Some tweets about who could they even get post-Zelensky to sign a treaty (Medvechuk? Tsaryova? Yanukovich?) snipped.

    I don’t agree with every conclusion (I doubt the war will produce worldwide famine), but it’s still worth reading the whole thread.

  • “Cheap Chinese tires blamed for Russian convoy unable to reach Kyiv.”

    Cheap Chinese tires have been blamed for a Russian convoy of armoured vehicles being unable to reach Kyiv.

    Yesterday, the Ministry of Defence issued an update revealing that a convoy of Russian tanks advancing on the capital of Ukraine remained 30km from the centre of the city having made little progress over the previous three days because of “Ukranian resistance, mechanical breakdown and congestion.”

    Karl Muth, an academic based at the University of Chicago and a self-described tire expert, took to Twitter to set out a theory blaming cheap Chinese tires for the slow advance of Russian vehicles.

    “Those aren’t Soviet-era heavy truck radials,” Muth said, commenting on a photo of a Russian army vehicle with ripped tires.

    Instead Muth believes the trucks use “Chinese military tires, and I believe specifically the Yellow Sea YS20.”

    “This is a tire I first encountered in Somalia and Sudan. it’s a bad Chinese copy of the excellent Michelin XZL military tire design,” he continued.

    Former pentagon staff member Trent Telenko also got stuck into the debate and said “poor Russian army truck maintenance practices” has created a risk of equipment failure.

    “When you leave military truck tires in one place for months on end. The side walls get rotted/brittle such that using low tire pressure setting for any appreciable distance will cause the tires to fail catastrophically via rips,” Telenko said.

  • Morgan Stanley analyst says that Russia is heading toward debt default as soon as April 15. Those are dollar-denominated bonds, which means they can’t be paid with devalued rubles.
  • Hundreds Of Thousands Of Global Hackers Are Banding Together To Disrupt Russian Military, Banking And Communication Networks.

    There are reportedly more than 400,000 “volunteer hackers” helping Ukraine fight its cyberwar against Russia.

    Victor Zhora, deputy chief of Ukraine’s information protection service, told Bloomberg last week that Ukraine was putting up a “cyber resistance” against its invasion that would work to try and weaken Russia.

    Zhora said: “Our friends, Ukrainians all over globe, [are] united to defend our country in cyberspace. [Ukraine is working to do] everything possible to protect our land in cyberspace, our networks, and to make the aggressor feel uncomfortable with their actions.”

    He also said that volunteers were helping Ukraine obtain intelligence in order to fight back at Russian military systems.

    They are also trying to get the message out to Russian citizens, who have been Fed a starkly different narrative from their government than the rest of the world has seen play out. Volunteers are working to “address Russian people directly by phone calls, by emails, by messages” and “by putting texts on their services and showing real pictures of war.”

    There aren’t 400,000 real hackers around the world. But 10,000 hackers and 390,000 script kiddies can sill do a lot of damage…

  • What breaks first?

    The Russian invasion of Ukraine will end when one or more of four things breaks:

    • the Russian supply lines;
    • the Ukrainian ability to effectively resist;
    • the Russian economy;
    • the patience of some armed individuals around Putin.

    We’re already seeing a lot of the first and third…

  • Is the Russian air force incapable of complex operations?

    More than a week into the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Russian Air Force has yet to commence large-scale operations. Inactivity in the first few days could be ascribed to various factors, but the continued absence of major air operations now raises serious capability questions.

    One of the greatest surprises from the initial phase of the Russian invasion of Ukraine has been the inability of the Russian Aerospace Forces (VKS) fighter and fighter-bomber fleets to establish air superiority, or to deploy significant combat power in support of the under-performing Russian ground forces. On the first day of the invasion, an anticipated series of large-scale Russian air operations in the aftermath of initial cruise- and ballistic-missile strikes did not materialise. An initial analysis of the possible reasons for this identified potential Russian difficulties with deconfliction between ground-based surface-to-air missile (SAM) batteries, a lack of precision-guided munitions and limited numbers of pilots with the requisite expertise to conduct precise strikes in support of initial ground operations due to low average VKS flying hours. These factors all remain relevant, but are no longer sufficient in themselves to explain the anaemic VKS activity as the ground invasion continues into its second week. Russian fast jets have conducted only limited sorties in Ukrainian airspace, in singles or pairs, always at low altitudes and mostly at night to minimise losses from Ukrainian man-portable air defence systems (MANPADS) and ground fire.

    Snip.

    While the early VKS failure to establish air superiority could be explained by lack of early warning, coordination capacity and sufficient planning time, the continued pattern of activity suggests a more significant conclusion: that the VKS lacks the institutional capacity to plan, brief and fly complex air operations at scale. There is significant circumstantial evidence to support this, admittedly tentative, explanation.

    First, while the VKS has gained significant combat experience in complex air environments over Syria since 2015, it has only operated aircraft in small formations during those operations. Single aircraft, pairs or occasionally four-ships have been the norm. When different types of aircraft have been seen operating together, they have generally only comprised two pairs at most. Aside from prestige events such as Victory Day parade flypasts, the VKS also conducts the vast majority of its training flights in singles or pairs. This means that its operational commanders have very little practical experience of how to plan, brief and coordinate complex air operations involving tens or hundreds of assets in a high-threat air environment. This is a factor that many Western airpower specialists and practitioners often overlook due to the ubiquity of complex air operations – run through combined air operations centres – to Western military operations over Iraq, the Balkans, Libya, Afghanistan and Syria over the past 20 years.

    Second, most VKS pilots get around 100 hours’ (and in many cases less) flying time per year – around half of that flown by most NATO air forces. They also lack comparable modern simulator facilities to train and practise advanced tactics in complex environments. The live flying hours which Russian fighter pilots do get are also significantly less valuable in preparing pilots for complex air operations than those flown by NATO forces. In Western air forces such as the RAF and US Air Force, pilots are rigorously trained to fly complex sorties in appalling weather, at low level and against live and simulated ground and aerial threats. To pass advanced fast jet training they must be able to reliably do this and still hit targets within five to ten seconds of the planned time-on-target. This is a vital skill for frontline missions to allow multiple elements of a complex strike package to sequence their manoeuvres and attacks safely and effectively, even when under fire and in poor visibility. It also takes a long time to train for and regular live flying and simulator time to stay current at. By contrast, most VKS frontline training sorties involve comparatively sterile environments, and simple tasks such as navigation flights, unguided weapon deliveries at open ranges, and target simulation flying in cooperation with the ground-based air-defence system. Russia lacks access to a training and exercise architecture to rival that available to NATO air forces, which routinely train together at well-instrumented ranges in the Mediterranean, North Sea, Canada and the US. Russia also has no equivalent to the large-scale complex air exercises with realistic threat simulation which NATO members hold annually – the most famous of which is Red Flag. As such, it would be unsurprising if most Russian pilots lack the proficiency to operate effectively as part of large, mixed formations executing complex and dynamic missions under fire.

    Third, if the VKS were capable of conducting complex air operations, it should have been comparatively simple for them to have achieved air superiority over Ukraine. The small number of remaining Ukrainian fighters, conducting heroic air-defence efforts over their own cities, are forced to operate at low altitudes due to long-range Russian SAM systems and consequently have comparatively limited situational awareness and endurance. They ought to be relatively easily to overwhelm for the far more numerous, better armed and more advanced VKS fighters arranged around the Ukrainian borders. Ukrainian mobile medium- and short-range SAM systems such as SA-11 and SA-15 have had successes against Russian helicopters and fast jets. However, large Russian strike aircraft packages flying at medium or high altitude with escorting fighters would be able to rapidly find and strike any Ukrainian SAMs which unmasked their position by firing at them. They would lose aircraft in the process, but would be able to attrit the remaining SAMs and rapidly establish air superiority.

    Russia has every incentive to establish air superiority, and on paper should be more than capable of doing so if it commits to combat operations in large, mixed formations to suppress and hunt down Ukrainian fighters and SAM systems. Instead, the VKS continues to only operate in very small numbers and at low level to minimise the threat from the Ukrainian SAMs. Down low, their situational awareness and combat effectiveness is limited, and they are well within range of the MANPADS such as Igla and Stinger which Ukrainian forces already possess. The numbers of MANPADS are also increasing, as numerous Western countries send supplies to beleaguered Ukrainian forces. To avoid additional losses to MANPADS, sorties continue to be primarily flown at night, which further limits the effectiveness of their mostly unguided air-to-ground weapons.

    (Hat tip: Chuck Moss.)

  • How Russian propaganda has sold some of the Russian people on Project Z. But Russian troops are finding things quite a different story. Warning: Bodies, and at about 18 seconds in one, I think strewn body parts:

  • Report that Russian special forces are furious with Putin.

    “Sources have been telling me, sources that are well connected to the Russian Security Services, that the offensive is not going well, that some special forces, the Russian Spetsnaz, are furious because they have been sent into battle without proper support, and many of them have been killed. They say that the national guard forces and the regular army, the national guard forces include those Chechen units, that two of them are not coordinating on the field. And that the overall battle plan is somewhat disjointed in that it’s partly a plan for war and partly a plan for peacekeeping and so-called de-Nazification of this country. And it has led to a lack of cohesion,” Engel reported.

    “A lot of this goes back to the man who’s behind it all, Vladimir Putin, who I’m told is now increasingly isolated, is just taking advice from his inner circle, that there are only about three people who matter right now,” Engel continued. “And that speech, you mentioned it a short while ago, that Putin gave yesterday — bizarre location, speaking at Aeroflot, to a group of flight attendants. He sounded incredibly angry. He sounded detached. He was talking about how the Ukrainians here are machine-gunning people, that they’re driving around in cars packed with explosives, jihadi-style. And he went very deep and repeatedly on this theme that they’re fighting against the Nazis. It was the angriest I’ve ever seen him.”

    This is from a couple of days ago. Have Spetsnaz pissed off at you doesn’t seem like a good long-term survival strategy for a Russian leader. On the other hand, this report probably deserves some skepticism, since it fits too easily into what we would like to hear about the situation, so some salt is in order. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • “Ukraine says it has RE-TAKEN Chuhuiv city and killed two high-ranking Russian commanders during the battle.” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • After nearly two weeks of criticism, the Biden Administration just announced a ban on Russian oil and gas purchases.
  • “A Complete Summary Of All Russia Sanctions And Developments.” Read on for exciting blow-by-blow summaries of foreign exchange surcharges and debt repayment details…
  • Russia may nationalize foreign-owned factories.
  • Aeroflot stops flying to foreign destinations to keep most of their leased airliners from being repossessed.
  • What rolls down stairs/alone and in pairs/and up-armors your Russian truck? Caveat: They call this improvised armor, but it could also be on-hand materials for traction in muddy areas.
  • “Russia-Ukraine war to cripple semiconductor industry globally.” Ukraine supplies a lot of neon, which is used as a carrier gas in certain wavelength DUV lasers in photolithography. (Details here.)
  • Ukraine President Zelenskyy sounds like he may be ready to negotiate.

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