Alt Left: Ukraine War Update June 12, 2022

Manuel Rodriguez: What is your assessment about the current situation on the ground in Ukraine? Advances have been quite slow. It seems things are not quite optimal for the Russians but not necessarily good for the Ukrainians or the West for that matter. As things are going, it seems that the Russians will have to hold on for a few months until the USA/EU collapses economically.

Russia is doing great. They’re not really going slowly at all in the core area of the Northeast Donbass. They are making amazing progress over there. The Ukrainian army is an excellent army, well-run and trained and armed to NATO standards. This is what a real war between two huge armies actually looks like. Remember the German-USSR war in WW2? This is like that. Or like WW1, trench warfare.

The Ukrainians are very well dug in in places like around Donetsk around Adviivka, Nieu York, Slaviansk, Marinka, Nova Bakhmutka, etc. There has been almost no progress on those fronts since the beginning of the war. The Ukrainians had years to dig in very deeply there and once troops are dug in that deeply, it is very hard to get them out! You just have to pound away at them with artillery forever.

If you try to storm their positions, you will get destroyed. Air power doesn’t do much good against them either. Fortifications work very well! The Ukrainians have taken big losses, especially in Adviivka, but they are still holding fast as they keep reinforcing.

On the Zaporozhye, Huilaopoye, Kherson, Khivi Rog, Nikolaev and Kharkiv fronts, not much is happening, just battles for position. Neither side is making much movement either way. Any territory the Ukrainians take is usually quickly lost. But the Russians are not making much if any progress either. Those fronts are frozen right now.

By Izium, Bakhmut, Popasna, Sovierodonetsk, Slavyansk, Kramatorsk, Liman, etc. the Russians are making dramatic gains and the Ukrainians are taking massive casualties. They just keep retreating and Russia keeps taking more and more towns and cities. The Ukrainians are outgunned 20-40-1 and they are outmanned 7-1.

The Ukrainians have probably lost ~55,000 men in this war so much. I don’t have figures for wounded but they must be high also. That figure probably includes missing. Those are incredible losses. Their forces now contain only 2

A lot are deserting or surrending to the Russians. There have been a number of prosecutions for forces desertion. The separatists are bombarding Ukrainian positions with leaflets asking them to surrender. They are also rarely rotated, whereas Russians on the front lines are rotated literally every single day!

There have been quite a few rebellions of Ukrainian troops laying down their weapons and refusing to fight. In some cases, they have been shot by officers for trying to surrender. There are many complaints of officers abandoning their troops to the wolves. Soldiers complain of lack of food, water, supplies, goggles, bulletproof vests, fuel, armored vehicles and especially artillery. Troops are given an automatic weapon with several rounds and a hand grenade and thrown up against tanks. They don’t stand a chance.

Russia has air supremacy. Ukraine has little air power and their air defenses are not very good. Both sides use drones to great effect. The Ukrainians seem to have better drones and make better use of drones to correct their artillery. Ukrainian artillery and special forces are quite good. The Ukrainians are simply outmanned and outgunned to the extreme.

The Nazi battalions are making noises of overthrowing Zelensky. The UKrainian army is being run by NATO, so really, Russia is fighting this war against all of NATO, with NATO commanders, NATO trained forces, NATO intelligence, and NATO weaponry. So envision this war as Russia versus NATO and it starts to make a lot more sense. Ukraine had their third biggest and best army in Europe! Don’t underestimate the Ukrainians.

At the start of the war, Russia had a lot of officers, generals, etc. who had obtained their positions via nepotism and connections. They performed poorly, using long convoys which were attacked to good effect by the Ukrainians. Putin replaced those commanders with those who were field-tested and had proved themselves in battle. Russia now makes good use of combined arms, which they were not doing at the start.

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There are several parties in the Duma. All of the parties outside of Putin’s party could be considered opposition, but most of the opposition is more or less pro-Putin. The anti-Putin Westernizers only have

In downtown Moscow and St. Petersburg there is a anti-Russian, pro-West youth movement, but it is not large nor is it politically active. A lot of the pro-Western Left just left the country.

It’s not true that you can’t oppose the war or Putin. An interviewer recently went out into the streets of Moscow and interviewed people, and a number of the young people were against the war, but they were not very politically active. 1

The openly treasonous pro-West, anti-Putin media was shut down, but that only amounted to a few TV stations. Medea is one of them. Note that they have been in business all this time and were only shut down for the war. In the last decade, this opposition was on Russian TV a few times a week on talk shows. The hosts were pro-government and they put the opposition on to tear up their views.

All Western media is available on the Net to any Russian who can read those languages and the stations like Medea have now set up in Europe and broadcast from there. Twitter is open to Russians and it is full of anti-Russian propaganda. I read Russians all of the time on the Net, and the ones who post are all hip to all of the Western news about Russia, but they simply don’t believe it. But it’s not like they only hear one side of the story!

Putin is probably not killing those oligarchs who are committing suicide and murdering their families. Perhaps this has to do with money. Putin doesn’t really bother those people, but he doesn’t care much about oligarchs either. The Russian people mostly hate them, which is why it is laughable that the West is sanctioning these guys as Russia and Putin already don’t like them as it is.

The Communist Party is the largest opposition party, with 1

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3 thoughts on “Alt Left: Ukraine War Update June 12, 2022”

  1. Those were my thoughts. It seems that the Ukranians’ highly effective use of drones and accurate missiles/artillery is due to having direct ISR from USA. They seem to have delivered NATO troops in the form of mercenaries to man up specialized equipment like jets and the new howitzers.

    It looks like the Ukrainians in the Donbass area are going to be attritioned eventually, looking at the situation.

  2. That’s why this war is so “fascinating” not just due to its geopolitical stakes but from an analytical point of view.

    It gives a return to high intensity warfare, since the last 30 years were mostly insurgency/asymmetrical type conflicts. It’s quite an achievement for the Russians considering that this is not just a proxy war where the proxy is a near-peer level of capability along with high support in intelligence along with equipment and foot soldiers but also have to deal with a “war economy” that tries to preserve their manpower and material that is outmatched 15-to-1 against NATO.

    The fight is going to carry along for some months more, but I have some ideas. The change of tone of the MSM along with the Biden administration saying that they don’t have anything to do with the conflict and that everything is Zelenski’s fault tells me they have been “defeated”.

    This is in the sense that the material facts and situation in the ground says that their aimed objectives are not possible. Said objectives would be to bog down the Russian army with a quagmire proxy conflict along with conducting an economic siege that would end with regime change culminating with dividing Russia in five or more pieces.

    I think that the first mistake is that they assumed that everyone would join the economic siege under pressure. They didn’t count that an important number of countries would say no either due to solidarity or economic self-interest (don’t deprive their country of food or fuel to please their gang leader) or for more selfish reasons such as the Gulf monarchies preferring the current high oil prices.

    I thought that USA had a secret deal with the Saudis before banning Russian fuel?

    Looking at it from afar, said economic siege tactics wouldn’t be a good plan in the first place against a country that provides a significant part of food and fuel to the planet.

    First, that is not easy to embargo a resource-exporting country, especially if these are essential goods.

    Second, the consequences are that said resources would be a lot more expensive, including on their own sanctioning countries and would end up compensating Russia with higher revenues. That is not to say Russia went completely unscathed. They have many vulnerabilities and really need industrialize and get production in the hand of the state.

    The dislike against oligarchs is probably a legacy from the Soviet era. The 90’s probably also helped on that attitude.

    Do you thing that #Metoo is dying? With the Johnny Deep/Amber incident, it seems that automatically believing women making accusation against a man is going to be discredited. The feminist leadership had a chance to dismiss Amber when her lies began to be very obvious and public, yet they insisted on giving her vocal support, which is not going to look good.

    Almost every oil/gas provider country is refusing to sell products for cheap. That’s the cool thing about cartels. They organize so the only losers are the consumers.

    It seems that the only winners country-wise are China and India. China is importing massive amounts of oil at important discounts since Russia doesn’t have much bargaining power. India is buying big amounts of crude oil and reselling it as refined oil at exorbitant prices to the EU.

    There is a third hypothesis about the surrounding of Kiev. The intel guys told the Russians leaders that the Ukranians would give up easily. They thought that surrounding Kiev would scare Zelensky to resigning and make the Ukrainian army give up. Obviously, things didn’t happen as expected, so they switched to make it to divert Ukrainian forces from the east. This is a mix of the two theories that say that the Russians either did it as a feint or failed on their objectives, which are pro and anti Russian arguments respectively.

  3. Robert, where do you stand on the massacre at Bucha? This is what Wikipedia says

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bucha_massacre

    It says that around 1000 bodies were recovered from the town. Summary executions, civilians shot at point-blank range. Looks like the Russians did a number on the Ukies.

    Of course the Russian side of the story is that the Ukies staged a false flag. But I find it difficult to believe that they would kill their own women and children so mercilessly.

    Surely Russian troops are capable of mini-genocides like this, just like the troops of any other country are.

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