Ukraine History
Key Daily Events
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Invasion of Ukraine - A Systems Perspective
Ukraine History Key Daily Events |
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This content was originally on the main webpage however, the main webpage became too large for maintenance. There are 3 webpage associated with this analysis:
As the sections are read it is important to examine the dates. The dates reflect the situation at the time of the writing. It is a snapshot in time and things may have changed over the days, weeks, months, and years.
02/25/22, periodic updates
Now that Ukraine is under attack the following is a daily log of some key events. There will be no references. The world wide media especially CNN and MSNBC are providing massive amounts of information from Ukraine and Russia using traditional journalism of reporters in the feild providing live reports. There is also Radio Free Europe Radio Liberty . Kyiv Independent
Each day President Zelensky uses social media to transmit messages that Ukraine will continue to defend their country. The messages from President Zelensky are gravely important and very inspiring affecting both the Ukrainians and the rest of the world. To understand some aspects of Ukraine see section Overview of Ukraine.
There are systems assessments provided after some of the daily events. The systems assessments are very significant. I need ammunition not a ride --- President Zelensky, days after the invasion. What a terrible systems finding. This is sad and pathetic. Since then NATO, US, and UK have been providing measured levels of equipment. President Zelensky keeps requesting equipment and as time unfolds the equipment is provided, but at great cost to Ukraine. See section Gulf War versus Russian Invasion of Ukraine.
This analysis has explanations for why the equipment is not immediately provided and it all points to bad policy based on a reactive and fearful mindset from the leadership that is denial that the world is in big trouble with Putin and Russia. Unfortunately, Putin and Russia have entered into a state of mind that historically has been refered to as insanity. History shows that there are few options when dealing with insanity of a nation state or an empire that does not realize it has not existed for a generation. See section Military Defense Systems.
Key Events and Systems Assessments
03/03/2025 It is Clear the US has shifted its policy on Ukraine
Systems Assessment: This is not part of negotiations because there are no official statements clearly stating that the USA is trying to work with Russia as part of negotiations. This is a massive USA policy shift.
It is unclear where this new reality will lead. This is a massive system change and as with all massive system changes there is massive instability. The reality is the war in Europe is distant for the people in the USA. In Europe and England the war is a harsh reality and the people are scared shitless. Both France and England have stated that they are willing to place troops in Ukraine. It is unclear if this USA move will translate into a massive war escalation where Europe and England send troops to Ukraine to deal with the Russian invasion.
Meanwhile, President Trumps' administration continues to dismantle the US Federal Government, antagonize allies, and impose new tariffs against Canada and Mexico. While Ukraine may be feeling great pain at this point, Ukraine needs to understand that the USA is in massive chaos. It is unclear if this chaos is the result of internal forces, part of a Russian destabilization program, or both. History suggests that it is both. This chaos existed in the USA prior to its entry into World War II as Nazi agents and internal forces were tearing away at the country. Eventually things sorted out in the USA.
President Trump stated that Ukraine does not hold the cards suggesting that he holds the cards. However, Ukraine holds all the cards. It is their country and they will decide what to do with the Russians with or without the USA. They have been dealing with Russia before the USA even existed. The Ukrainians hold all the cards for their country and most importantly they know this is not a stupid card game played by children. This is all out hell on earth war and they have no room for references to card games as people are dying from an evil aggressor hell bent on their destruction as a people.
Everyone stating that Ukraine will be defeated by Russia without the USA do not know the history of that region. It is possible that the Ukrainians may have already defeated Russia if the USA never got involved because the war would have quickly shifted to an insurgency with an attack on Moscow. They know the language, culture, people, and Russian military equipment. It was just a matter of will, which they quickly gained when Putin stated that Ukraine does not exist. They know that playbook. What the world may view as a worst case scenario for Ukraine may actually allow them to do what they need to do, which is turn this war into a war on Russian territory. They have already demonstrated that - and they are just a few hundred miles away from Moscow where they can blend in with the population.
What no one understands is that it was not Russian Soldiers that stopped Napoleon or the Nazi's, it was Ukrainian soldiers - as the armies needed to cross Ukrainian lands. So it is not a question of who has better soldiers, it is only a question of who wants conquest and how far are they willing to go in the conquest. Does Europe, England, and Ukraine need the USA in this fight? No. It's that simple. Will the USA regret this major policy shift? Yes, regardless of what happens in Ukraine.
Because of this new system shift, Putin and the Russians may realize that this may be an end game condition where Ukrainians are unleashed and hell bent on Russian destruction. Because of this reality Russia may be forced to return all territory back to Ukraine, withdraw their troops, and pay for the cost of the war. This is not a little country against a super power. This is a 1,000 year old people with a population number way beyond any of the previous Russian colonies. It is big, with massive resources, with very talented people. It's just that they are a peaceful people.
Ukraine will decide what they want to do - and whatever decision they make, it will be the correct decision for them!
01/05/2025 Russian Invasion Of Finland History Reality
The following image shows the World War II shipments from the United States to Russia (U.S.S.R.). This is one aspect of the history with Russia. However, there are other aspects of the history with Russia. World War II started when both Russia and Germany invaded Poland as part of the secret Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. See Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact Start of WWII. After Germany started to march on Russia, and the United States and UK was trying to determine how it might defeat Germany and Japan, the arrangement changed.
The following is an extract from Newsweek. It has been formatted into paragraphs.
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Russia's Disastrous Winter War on Finland Could Give Clues on Ukraine Endgame
Published Jan 05, 2025
https://www.newsweek.com/russia-ukraine-winter-war-finland-stalin-2008263
Joseph Stalin's 1939 invasion of Finland has been compared to Vladimir Putin's aggression in Ukraine amid questions over whether a deal that followed the Winter War could be a blueprint for a conflict eight and a half decades later. But Helsinki has warned Kyiv must not follow the lead of the agreement that followed the war started by the Soviet dictator which established the framework for what is known as "Finlandization." The 1948 Finno-Soviet treaty allowed Finland to keep its independence but at the cost of becoming demilitarized, remaining neutral and aligning foreign policy decisions with Moscow. One Finnish expert told Newsweek that such a model for Ukraine "belongs to the bin" and would only serve Putin's interests. However, Russia's war on Ukraine enters its fourth year on February 24 - one month after Donald Trump's White House return with a pledge to end hostilities quickly. Speculation about negotiations may add to the echoes of the deal that followed the World War II battles Finland fought against Moscow.
Similar Wars Eight Decades Apart
Moscow's invasions of Finland on November 30, 1939 and of Ukraine in 2022 were both preceded by failed talks, and Moscow possessing an overwhelming equipment advantage and expectations it would easily win. "Stalin, just like Putin, thought that the war would be over in just a few days," Pekka Kallioniemi, postdoctoral researcher at Tampere University in Finland and creator of Vatnik Soup which analyses Russian disinformation, told Newsweek. "The plan was that the war would be finished in about three weeks, so that Finland could be given to Stalin as a 'birthday present' on the 21st of December," he said of the conflict that started on November 30.
Moscow had demanded its neighbor, which had been part of tsarist Russia until 1917, cede border territories citing security reasons. Fast forward to 2022, Putin claimed "denazifying" Ukraine and keeping it neutral justified his full-scale invasion. "Stalin blamed the Finnish leadership as being fascist, and the idea with the invasion was to create a buffer zone between Germany and the USSR," said Kallioniemi. "The Soviets also orchestrated several false flag operations before and during the Winter War, and the war actually started after the Soviets shelled their own troops in Mainila," he said, referring to an incident in Karelia carried out by the Soviet NKVD security agency. "The Soviet army had so-called political commissars, who made sure that unmotivated soldiers didn't flee," he added. "Similar strategies have allegedly been used by PMC Wagner while sending waves of untrained soldiers to the frontlines." Finland repelled Soviet attacks and inflicted substantial losses on the invaders in temperatures as low as -45°F. "Stalin sent a lot of Ukrainian soldiers to fight against Finns with very basic equipment, and a lot of them froze to death," he said. "Photos from one of the most brutal battles, the Battle of Raate Road, resemble photos from the first months of the war in Ukraine."
'Finlandization'
Finland fought valiantly for its sovereignty but Stalin still achieved territorial objectives. This experience has informed Helsinki's warnings against Kyiv agreeing to any demands that it shelve its NATO aspirations. Finland's foreign minister Elina Valtonen said forcing neutrality onto Ukraine will not bring about a peaceful solution and Russia could not be trusted to adhere to any agreement it signs. "Let's face it, Ukraine was neutral before they were attacked by Russia," Valtonen told Reuters in November.
"Finlandization is a model that belongs to the bin," said Sari Arho Havrén, visiting scholar at the University of Helsinki and associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI). "To suggest such a model for Ukraine serves foremost Russia and Putin," she told Newsweek. "We live in a very different time, and the circumstances are entirely different. For Finland, it was a game of survival. It was seen as a temporary evil while balancing between the West and the Soviet Union." "Suggesting Finland's history as a viable model to Ukraine not only tries to whitewash Finlandization into a desirable and durable form of governance," she added.
After decades of neutrality and spurred by Moscow's invasion of Ukraine, Finland finally joined NATO in April 2023. But Arho Havrén said any so-called Finlandization deal "veils the idea that Ukraine could not be granted NATO membership," even though Ukraine has pursued Euro-Atlantic integration over the last two decades.
"The problem with the Finlandization of Ukraine is not Ukraine - it's Russia," said Konstantin Sonin, a Russian-born professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy and a vehement Putin critic. "The Finlandization of Ukraine is exactly what was tried between 1991 and 2014 in some sense," he told Newsweek. "Until 2022, Russia had enormous influence over Ukraine - perhaps more than the Soviet Union had over Finland." "If Ukrainians would be asked, 'could we go back to 2020 and somehow have a guarantee that Russia would not do what it did in 2022?' hypothetically they might have agreed to this," he added.
Ukraine's Hope for Trump
Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov's said no talks with Ukraine would happen unless Kyiv renounced reclaiming its 1991 borders. Lavrov said that Moscow was "not satisfied" with Trump's view about freezing hostilities and "transferring further responsibility for confronting Russia to the Europeans."
However, Estonia's foreign minister Margus Tsahkna expressed hope that the president-elect can make a difference, telling British newspaper The Telegraph that Trump can "become the Churchill of our times," by delivering a "long-lasting" ceasefire.
Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky also expressed optimism saying on New Year's Eve that peace "will not be given to us as a gift" and that Trump "wants and will be able to bring peace and end to Putin's aggression."
As Ukraine faced a difficult end to 2024 in which Russian forces increasing the pace of their advances on the eastern front albeit at a high cost in personnel, Zelensky had said any settlement required Western security guarantees and a NATO membership invite, which Russia rejects out of hand. "I think at this point people are ready to surrender land, but we would not surrender the land if there is no serious security agreement in place," Yuriy Boyechko, CEO and founder of the charity Hope for Ukraine, told Newsweek. "In any case, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky would have to present any proposed agreement to the country.
"Whatever Zelensky says, any type of peace treaty will have to go in front of the people in a referendum and the people will have to decide because too much blood, sweat and tears have been shed."
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Systems Assessment: There you have it - not management talking points, not lies, not bull shit - REALITY.
12/16/2024 Drone Swarms In The USA
12/12/2024 Russian Colonialism Is Not Reformable
Systems Assessment: It appears that Russian propaganda is starting to breakdown and the true history of the Russian empire is starting to penetrate the world dialog. A key issue that also must be addressed is the link between some of the worlds extremely wealthy and the Russian empire.
11/26/2024 US Election Effects
Systems Assessment (US Voting Population Demographics): The 2023 presidential election was decided by Gen X, Millennial, and some Gen Z. Reasons for the outcome will be studied for decades. No one will address: Reality TV, Punk Rock, Rap Music, Shows like Survivor, Computer Video Games. These pass time activities took away precious time where liberal arts exposure / education of classic western civilization themes could have happened. Do the stories from a civilization reflect the people or do they program the people was a key question in the last century. All these items show only extreme self interest, which is what the conservative movement is about. People motivated by higher ideals were officially labeled as zealots in the 1980s and replaced by people motivated only by money (Conservative economist James M. Buchanan criticized the concept of public interest, all organizations should employ managers motivated only by money, those motivated by job satisfaction or a sense of public duty are zealots). It is still unclear how the new administration may deal with Putin once reality sets in and real actions need to be taken.
Systems Assessment (Reality): The headlines are just getting worse. It does not matter if they are part of disinformation and propaganda.
All systems have inputs, outputs, feedback loops, with Cause and Effect. History is moved by Cause and Effect. History is a natural system. The recent US presidential election results will be analyzed for decades. However, the answer is simple - it is the conclusion of the rise of the extremely rich in the US caused by the Reagan Revolution. It's that simple. They wanted this, now they own it, and that faction must now lead the US in this time of war. The effects of this election were predictable. The mass mind was manipulated as desired by the extremely rich to get what they wanted. In 4 years the mass mind will react to reality and it is unclear what that reality may bring.
It is irrelevant what the US decides to do with Ukraine in 2025. Ukraine like all countries will decide their own fate. This also applies to the UK and Europe. If the US withdraws supplies from Ukraine, Ukraine will still continue to fight. They lost too much over the generations to stop. However, the nature of the war will change, especially if NATO should withdraw support. The loss of US support will allow Ukraine to fight this war on their own terms. They will not be hampered by others. The war will become an insurgency and the war will quickly move into Russia. The insurgency will attempt to gather as many Russian people to its side as possible. If successful, then a new nation / empire may be reborn where the capital is Kyiv not Moscow, with a new vision of the future. It might even be the rebirth of Kievan-Rus after hundreds of years. This is one possible system scenario.
The big question is - what will the new US leadership do once they are presented with this possible scenario. Most likely they will reject this scenario and think that Ukraine will lose the war and Russia will expand into Ukraine. Unfortunately that is a naive view. History will take its natural course. In many ways this is a civil war within Kievan-Rus. It is unclear how the US will be affected if Ukraine should actually win this civil war and the capital shifts from Moscow back to Kyiv.
Always Under the Threat of Russia: Ukraine's Young Leaders on The Future
Published Nov 30, 2024
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With Ukraine's fate hanging in the balance, its ambitious young people are trying to plan for their country's future - balancing their optimism with resignation ahead of a new U.S. administration and rumblings of a peace deal unlikely to satisfy officials in Kyiv.
"Unfortunately, it's likely to end [in a] frozen conflict," said Oleksandr Manachynskyi, a 22-year-old Ukrainian from the northeastern city of Kharkiv, now living in the Polish city of Krakow.
For Ukrainians inside the war-torn country and elsewhere, this means it won't really "end at all," Oleksandr told Newsweek.
Oleksandr works as a project manager for a Ukrainian non-profit, helping to plan events that pull Ukraine's youngsters into discussions on how to rebuild their country. He is one of a number of Ukrainians who see a frozen conflict as the most likely outcome after nearly three years of bitter and bloody war with Moscow. Russian and Ukrainian forces are thought to have sustained well over a million casualties combined, and while the Kremlin has slowly but steadily advanced in Ukraine's east, Russia has been slow to dislodge Ukraine's grasp on hundreds of square miles of its border Kursk region.
But much now hinges on President-elect Donald Trump's move to fulfill his repeated pledges to end the war in Ukraine in a single day once he sweeps back into the Oval Office in January.
One idea floated among officials in Trump's camp could see Ukraine pledging not to join NATO for at least 20 years, while Washington continues funneling weapons into the country to dissuade Russia from launching fresh attacks, The Wall Street Journal first reported earlier this month.
The conflict would become frozen, with Russia keeping a grip on roughly a fifth of Ukraine. A demilitarized zone would mark Kyiv's and Moscow's control down the current front lines, likely policed by European forces.
But this comes with many potential problems. European and Ukrainian officials fear a Trump-brokered deal would harm Ukraine's interests, not to mention security on NATO's eastern flank bordering Russia. Most of the conditions for the reported deal - including Kyiv sacrificing its NATO bid and conceding territory - are directly opposed to plans recently laid out by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, and still vastly unpopular in Ukrainian society.
Moscow has controlled Crimea, to the south of mainland Ukraine, since 2014, and declared in September 2022 that it had annexed the Donetsk and Luhansk regions collectively known as the Donbas, as well as the southern Ukrainian Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions. For many Ukrainians, it is still painful to think of a post-war Ukraine where Russia keeps hold of these regions, internationally recognized as part of Ukraine.
Analysts and officials are deeply wary of the long-term implications of a ceasefire and a frozen conflict. Two NATO defense ministers in the Baltics told Newsweek earlier this month that a frozen conflict could mean Russia redeploys vast numbers of soldiers to NATO's eastern flank, Moscow benefiting from a reprieve to build up its vast strength without constant Ukrainian attacks.
Russia is playing coy. Reuters reported last week that Putin was open to talking about a ceasefire deal with the re-elected president, citing five sources with awareness of the Kremlin's thinking. A deal would be off the table if it meant Moscow making major concessions over territory or allowing Kyiv to join NATO, the news agency reported.
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov quickly said that freezing the conflict "would not satisfy" Moscow, but that Putin is "ready to be contacted and to negotiate."
Among those waiting with bated breath are Ukraine's young adults, part of the One Young World global network designed to cultivate future leaders. Oleksandr, along with 26-year-old Daryna Kupriianova and Daria Dmytrenko, 29, traveled to Brussels earlier this fall, sponsored by the Croatian government to attend a summit organized by the network.
Pegged to take over influential positions in the country's legal, industrial, business and law sectors, they are trying to draw up ideas on how to rebuild a country shattered by war at a time when it's never been harder to envision what Ukraine will look like come a few months' time.
Oleksandr said he didn't believe a peace agreement could last for any chunk of time, because Russia "does not really wish to end the war for good."
Their military might is "only growing," he said. "It just can't be stopped."
Freezing the conflict gives Moscow breathing room to develop its military, before launching a fresh attack on Ukraine, Oleksandr said.
Daryna, who works to get legal advice for refugees, agrees. Under a ceasefire, "we will always be under [...] threat," Daryna, also from Kharkiv but now living in the Italian city of Milan, told Newsweek.
Kharkiv city and the region surrounding it have been pummelled by persistent Russian strikes using highly destructive glide bombs, and Moscow launched a cross-border offensive into Kharkiv back in May this year. Fighting has rumbled on along the edge of the region, including close to the city of Kupiansk, southeast of Kharkiv City.
"It's not about freezing the conflict," she said. "The conflict will not be frozen, and Russia will never be weakened until we are doing something to weaken it. Until we are doing something to defeat it."
Post-War Divides
Ukraine's post-war makeup may not be clear, but one thing is: the rebuilding process would be painstaking. After nearly three years of full-scale war, and more than a decade of battles with Russia in the east, Ukraine's society is scarred by physical bombardment and the psychological toll of the war.
"The future of Ukraine depends on the extent to which Ukraine can be rebuilt and our people can return to their homes," Oleksandr said. He describes himself as a "mediator" between those who want to help piece Ukraine back together and the officials who can make it happen.
Daria, a Kyiv native who has relocated to London with her family and is involved in Kyiv's vibrant technology scene, says it is important to carry on Ukraine's now well-established reputation in quickly developing and deploying new technology, including drones that are reconfigured every few weeks with feedback from the battlefield.
Ukraine's cemented position as a burgeoning start-up nation could help the country on the road to recovery, she told Newsweek. Making sure Ukraine's home-grown ideas can be picked up on the international stage is one way to pull "this critical and hard and tough period into one of the growth and recovery."
It will be economic opportunities like these that will help draw Ukrainians now living abroad back to the country in peacetime, Daria said.
The war in Ukraine is the largest land war in Europe since World War II, and figures from the United Nations suggest more than six million Ukrainian refugees were registered across the continent in July this year. Roughly a third of Ukraine's population has been forced to flee their homes, according to the UN.
Some have returned to the country since their initial displacement, but others have now settled abroad. The longer the war drags on, said Daria, the less likely people are to return. Economic opportunities in tech, she said, could be what is needed to bring diaspora Ukrainians home.
"If they don't have any economic perspectives in Ukraine, they will just not come back," said Oleksandr. "It's the main problem, because the economic situation in Ukraine is extremely bad and we need to [do] our best to improve it."
When entire families have relocated, it is a harder sell to return to a Ukraine that could be only just starting to recover, added Daryna. Many people now living abroad may not now have a home to come back to, and lack the funds to buy a new one, she added.
For others, the memories may simply be too painful to come back, Daryna said.
Nearly 10 million Ukrainians are thought to be at risk of, or are living with, a mental health condition in the country, the World Health Organization (WHO) evaluated in March 2024. Added on top of this are social divides between those who stayed, including deploying to the frontlines, and those who left the country.
"We have to tackle every group, every societal group differently. We have to recognize that we are diverse people," Daryna said.
But the young Ukrainians are mostly hopeful. I wish more people understood that despite the adversity, all the Ukrainians, especially young Ukrainians, they are incredibly adaptive," Daria said.
"We can't plan everything exactly," Oleksandr added. "But we have like a general model of what we want to achieve."
"This will be our task, as youth representatives - to create a comfortable environment for everyone," he said.
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Systems Assessment: This is the the largest land war in Europe since World War II between two of the largest countries in Europe. Russia decided to kill millions of Ukrainians during its Empire rule and that will never be forgotten by the Ukrainians. The amazing part is that Russia was able to subjugate the Ukrainians for as long as they did, but it appears that this generation of Ukrainians may change that in the next few years. As far as the US, this is the biggest international event impacting the US in its history, greater than WWII. The reasons are:
How Russia Prepares Children In Occupied Ukraine For War Against Their Own Country
December 03, 2024
https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-prepares-children-occupied-ukraine-war/33217789.html
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Russia is using a militaristic youth organization, Yunarmia, to foster the loyalty of teenagers in occupied parts of Ukraine and prepare them to fight in Moscow's war against their native country.
The development of Yunarmia amid the full-scale invasion is evidenced by previously unpublished documents from the Russian occupation authorities that were obtained by the Ukrainian hacker group KibOrg and provided to Schemes, the investigative unit of RFE/RL's Ukrainian Service, and its media partners.
Yunarmia, or Youth Army, was created in 2016 at the initiative of then-Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, and says it has 1.3 million members. Children as young as 8 can join its ranks by filling out a questionnaire in a mobile application.
The organization claims it facilitates the spiritual, moral, social, and intellectual development of the so-called Yunarmia cadets. It also says it "forms a positive motivation to fulfill the constitutional duty and prepares young men for service in the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation."
In 2017, Yunarmia cadets marched alongside soldiers at the May 9 Victory Day parade in Moscow, with President Vladimir Putin presiding. This year, Yunarmia children from the Russian-occupied Luhansk region took part in military celebrations in the Russian city of Novosibirsk.
Russia opened the first Yunarmia branch in the occupied territories of Ukraine in Crimea months after the organization's official formation. By September 2016, Yunarmia had spread across the Black Sea peninsula, according to Oleh Okhredko, an analyst at the Almenda Center Of Civic Education, a Ukrainian group whose activities include documenting violations of the rights of children in wartime.
In 2014, Russia occupied Crimea and fomented war in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions in eastern Ukraine - the Donbas.
'Militarized Reeducation'
Yunarmia "was created with the specific idea of the militarized reeducation of not only Russian [children] but also Ukrainian children from the occupied territories," said Kateryna Rashevska, a lawyer at the Regional Center for Human Rights, which was forced to move from Crimea to Kyiv after the Russian occupation.
By January 2022, a month before Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Yunarmia had 29,000 members in Crimea alone, according to the Russian Defense Ministry.
Ukrainian law enforcement has charged Yunarmia leadership in occupied Crimea with violating the protection of civilians guaranteed by the Geneva Conventions, citing an article that prohibits "propaganda aimed at ensuring the voluntary enlistment of civilians."
Iryna Sedova, an expert of the Crimean Human Rights Group, supports the official indictment.
"We consider the activities of this organization to violate international humanitarian law, and the leaders of this organization are committing a war crime against the residents of Crimea, and in particular, children and teenagers whom they zombify and de facto involuntarily involve in Yunarmia," she told RFE/RL's Crimea.Realities in 2022.
In response to the accusations, the head of the Sevastopol branch of Yunarmia, Volodymyr Kovalenko, said he considers the current Ukrainian government illegitimate and denied he has committed any crime.
Yet, since the invasion, some former Yunarmia members from occupied areas have joined the Russian military and fought in Russia's war against Ukraine.
Among them: Illya Zozulskiy, 23, a native of the Crimean village of Poltavka and an artilleryman who has been awarded the prestigious Zhukov Medal, according to Russian media. The Russian outlet Mash reported in January 2023 that he was one of 50 "mentors" from Yunarmia who were fighting in the war.
Zozulskiy did not respond to calls or messages from Schemes and its media partners.
Britain announced sanctions targeting Yunarmia on November 19, calling it a "Russian paramilitary organization central to Putin's attempts to forcibly deport and indoctrinate Ukraine's younger generation." It said the organization is "involved in Russia's systematic attempt to erase Ukrainian cultural and national identity."
The sanctions announcement came amid reports that the Russian military has for the first time drafted people from occupied parts of Ukraine as conscripts.
Yunarmia itself began operating in the Donbas only after Putin baselessly claimed in September 2022 that the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, along with the Zaporizhzhya and Kherson regions farther southwest, were parts of Russia. Since 2019, though, a similar group called Young Guard-Yunarmia has been in place.
In 2023, Yunarmia "houses" -- school premises adapted for firearms and sports training - were opened in Russian-occupied parts of Donetsk and Luhansk. According to documents provided by KibOrg, Yunarmia uses the school buildings free of charge, with financial backing and other support coming from the Russian federal government and the Yunarmia headquarters in Moscow.
'The Reality Of Our Region'
Schemes received a dozen school records of children living in the occupied areas from KibOrg. Most of the children listed either belong to Yunarmia or participate in its activities.
An example is an eighth grader from one of the Russian-occupied cities in the Donetsk region whose name is being withheld to protect the privacy of a minor. According to his hometown's social media page, he took part in a training camp called Guardian-2024 and won a bronze medal for disassembling and reassembling an AK-74 rifle.
Participants "practiced shooting and received basic military training, studied modern tactics and methods of warfare," according to the post. It also said that "more than 300 schoolchildren" from Russia and the Donetsk and Zaporizhzhya regions "took the oath of allegiance to Yunarmia."
Former members of Young Guard-Yunarmia from the occupied part of the Donetsk region are fighting in the war.
Stanislav Sikorskiy of Horlivka, who graduated from high school in 2018, was a member of both Yunarmia and Young Guard-Yunarmia, according to the latter's account on the social network VKontakte. After Russia's full-scale invasion, he "was in the ranks" of the Russian military and fought in battles in the Kherson region, it said.
Sikorskiy was demobilized in 2023. He did not respond to messages and calls from Schemes' media partners.
Hanna Lisovenko, also from the Donetsk region, joined a Young Guard-Yunarmia unit called Spartans in 2017, when she was 17. Her social media posts indicate she is now fighting against Ukraine as a drone operator in a tactical group of Russian military intelligence consisting mainly of Donetsk region militants involved in the war since 2014.
"I was in Yunarmia myself, and now I serve in the army. About half of those who studied with me chose the military path. Unfortunately, many of them have already died. Some have been seriously wounded and cannot continue their service," she told Schemes' media partners. "This is the reality of our region."
Lisovenko said the "skills in handling weapons, physical training, and the history education" she acquired in Young Guard-Yunarmia proved useful during the full-scale war against Ukraine.
Zozulskiy, Sikorskiy, and Lisovenko are from parts of Ukraine that have been controlled by Russia for a decade. But Yunarmia also operates in areas that Russian forces occupied after the start of the full-scale invasion in 2022.
This past summer, its newly opened Mariupol branch held seven sessions at a camp on the Azov Sea. Among other things, the children were taught to shoot with assault rifles.
One of the camp's organizers was Valeriy Onatskiy, the head of the Department for Family and Children's Affairs of the occupation administration of Mariupol. A Schemes investigation in 2023 found that Onatskiy was involved in the relocation of Ukrainian children from the occupied territories to Russia - activity that prompted the International Criminal Court to issue an arrest warrant for Putin on suspicion of war crimes.
Occupation authorities said in November 2022 that branches of Yunarmia had also been established in the Russian-held parts of the Kherson and Zaporizhzhya regions.
The head of Yunarmia in the Zaporizhzhya region is Fidail Bikbulatov, a Russian man whom Ukrainian intelligence has accused of involvement in the mass abduction, illegal deportation, and forced transfer of Ukrainian children from occupied territories of Ukraine to Russia.
In a comment to Schemes' media partners, Bikbulatov said Yunarmia sees "its members tying their lives to military service in the future."
"We see potential in them, we expect them to become military personnel," he said. "We train them, work with them, and want them to become military men -- the Defense Ministry even provides benefits for former Yunarmia members when they join - but all this is done voluntarily."
Evidence indicates that Yunarmia's leadership judges the performance of its branches, at least in part, by the number of former members who join the Russian military.
In October, Yunarmia deputy chief Viktor Kaurov sent letters to regional branches about the mandatory annual "review competition" that said the evaluation would include two parameters: "the number of Yunarmia cadets called up for military service and enrolled in military universities" and "the number of Yunarmia cadets enrolled in military training centers."
Yunarmia's central headquarters in Moscow has not responded to requests for comment from Schemes.
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Systems Assessment: This is why the Ukrainians say that Russia will not stop with the conquest of Ukraine. The big question is why is Russia engaged in constant empire building while they claim that they are only trying to defend themselves. No one wants to invade Russia, it is too cold and life is to harsh in that location. Wealth comes from 3 sources: (1) Land, (2) People, (3) Capital. For empires, it is easier to increase wealth by conquest rather than by building wealth internally because the internal population is geared towards reaping the rewards of conquest rather than work. Empires also look for lands with more attractive climates where life is less harsh.
10/23/2024 Opinion: Ukraine’s war is the reckoning with empire Europe can no longer avoid
The following is a direct extract from the Kyiv Independent [1] which republished the text from Project Syndicate [2].
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Opinion: Ukraine’s war is the reckoning with empire Europe can no longer avoid
Ukrainians are pulling Tolstoy off their shelves, and toppling Catherine the Great from her plinth. Once Ukraine has won a peace it can live with, it will have to own the imprint of the Russian past on its soul, and then wrestle free of that past.
October 23, 2024
Thirty years ago, in a Ukrainian churchyard where my Russian ancestors are buried, I knelt beside a very old woman leaning on a stick, her hair covered in a black kerchief. Behind us stood the Russian church that my great-grandfather built on his estate and where he lies buried.
The old woman was the last villager left who could remember the time when our family lived there. She had been a young girl of six or seven, running up to the kitchen door of the big house, carrying blueberries in her apron, and receiving from my grandfather’s sister a spoonful of hot blackberry jam. After that, the Bolshevik Revolution came, my family fled, the church was closed, and Soviet agents from the city eventually confiscated the grain, took away the kulaks, and left everyone to starve. The Holodomor, the famine that Stalin inflicted on Ukraine, reduced people who had farmed the richest soil in Europe to eating grass.
Then came the war, when the Nazis set the village thatches alight and massacred the local Jewish population. The old woman sat next to me in the church and told me her story; at the end, she leaned her thin body against mine and began to howl.
I have never forgotten the sound. Whenever I hear it again in memory, I understand what the Ukrainian struggle is about. The troops fighting to hold on in Pokrovsk in eastern Ukraine, the firemen pulling civilians out of the rubble of bombed buildings in Kharkiv, and the drone pilots targeting Russian ships in the Black Sea are fighting to give themselves and their children a different history than the one that made that old woman howl.
This is what we don’t seem to understand. The Western European and American public is increasingly disengaged from their struggle. The carnage seems unbelievable --- is it really possible that a half-million Russians and perhaps nearly as many Ukrainians have been killed or wounded since the full-scale war began in February 2022? For too many, the dying could just as well be happening on another planet, and our politicians’ insistence that our security depends on a Ukrainian victory sounds abstract, thin, and less than credible.
If the Ukrainians are truly fighting for us, it is because they are fighting the last battle against European imperialism. Every other imperial power in Europe has given up its colonies and begun a reckoning with the harm that empire did to its colonial subjects and to its own people. For with empire came the invention of racial hierarchy and racially justified domination, violence, and cruelty.
These poisons still affect us, and nostalgia for vanished imperial greatness has been just as damaging. Even in America, which had no empire, but an immensely profitable global hegemony, much of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign stokes and exploits this atavistic sentiment, with its call to “make America great again.”
You can’t build democracy at home unless you dispense with empire and nostalgia for its loss. Until you do this, your politics will be consumed by deluded dreams.
* * *
"You can’t build democracy at home unless you dispense with empire and nostalgia for its loss. Until you do this, your politics will be consumed by deluded dreams."
* * *Spanish historians have told me that the final defeat of the Spanish empire with the loss of Cuba and the Philippines at the turn of the twentieth century fostered the authoritarian turn that delivered Spain to Franco and delayed the transition to democracy for two generations. Empire in Africa prevented a democratic transition in Portugal until 1974. Marine Le Pen’s right-wing movement in France began with her father’s fury at the loss of Algeria and his contempt for the democratic institutions Charles de Gaulle put in place after he withdrew France from North Africa.
When societies face up to their past, they create the possibility of a politics based in reality, not fantasy. In Britain, the Labour government of 1945 understood that it could not build democracy at home unless it abandoned India and Palestine. Germany had to be unconditionally defeated before it gave up its fantasy of an imperium across Europe and Asia.
Russia remains the one European society that has never honestly faced up to its imperial past. In refusing to acknowledge the legacy of Stalin, in failing to face up to his crimes in Ukraine, in the other “captive nations,” and in Russia itself, Russia closed off any path to its own democratic future. Its people have laid themselves open to the perpetual tyranny of a man who can only turn their sons into cannon fodder.
* * *
"Its (Russia's) people have laid themselves open to the perpetual tyranny of a man who can only turn their sons into cannon fodder."
* * *This is the lethal pathology that Ukraine is fighting in our name. When Ukraine’s citizens say they want to join Europe, what they mean is that they want to rip empire out of their souls and live as free people, liberated from a past whose memory made an old woman howl in pain.
All imperial nostalgias are best laid to rest, even benign ones like hers and mine for the sweet days of the ancien régime when my Russian ancestors kept the kitchen door open for peasant girls and gave them dollops of blackberry jam. A free Ukraine will have to make its own peace with the remnants of old Russia, like the churchyard where my ancestors are buried.
For now, Ukrainians are pulling Tolstoy off their shelves, and toppling Catherine the Great from her plinth in Odesa. Later, a more complex reckoning will fall due. You have to own all of your history, not just the parts that fit your mythologies.
Once Ukrainians have won a peace they can live with, a free Ukraine will have to own the imprint of the Russian past on its soul, and then wrestle free of that past. Only then can it begin to make a new history beyond terror, violence, and fear.
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Systems Assessment: This small opinion piece is an excellent summary of the current system state. From this foundation a new system needs to be developed as part of the eventual peace that will come.
References:
[1] Opinion: Ukraine’s war is the reckoning with empire Europe can no longer avoid, Kyiv Independent, October 23, 2024. webpage https://kyivindependent.com/opinion-ukraines-war-is-the-reckoning-with-empire-europe-can-no-longer-avoid
[2] Opinion: Ukraine’s war is the reckoning with empire Europe can no longer avoid, Project Syndicate, October 22, 2024. webpage https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/europes-last-imperialism-and-ukraines-post-colonial-future-by-michael-ignatieff-2024-10
10/18/2024 Ukraine Could Rebuild Nuclear Arsenal after Clinton, Obama Disarmed It
The following is a direct extract from Newsweek [1]. It corrects the improper paragraph breaks found on the original Internet page.
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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said his country needs NATO so it does not have to rely on nuclear weapons for protection, after former presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama helped disarm Kyiv. This week saw Zelensky discuss how, 30 years ago, Ukraine agreed to give up the Soviet nuclear weapons stored in the country, when it signed the 1994 Budapest Memorandum in exchange for security assurances from Russia, the U.K. and the U.S. At the European Council summit in Brussels on Thursday, Zelensky said: "Which of these major nuclear powers suffered? All of them? No. Ukraine (did). "Who gave up nuclear weapons? All of them? No. Ukraine. Who is fighting today? Ukraine. Either Ukraine will have nuclear weapons and that will be our protection or we should have some sort of alliance. Apart from NATO, today we do not know any effective alliances." He added: "NATO countries are not at war. People are all alive in NATO countries. And thank God. That is why we choose NATO. Not nuclear weapons." The comments come along with Zelensky's "victory plan," which includes Ukraine securing NATO membership.
It is important to note that Zelensky later clarified at a press conference that Kyiv is "not building nuclear weapons." "What I meant is that today there is no stronger security guarantee for us besides NATO membership," he said. The Ukrainian Foreign Ministry (MFA) also put out a statement on Thursday, to refute a recent report from the German tabloid BILD that claimed Kyiv was closing in on plans to build a nuclear bomb. Spokesperson Heorhii Tykhyi emphasized in the statement that Kyiv "remains a committed party" to the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, adding that Ukraine, which "has made the greatest contribution in history to international peace, security and nuclear non-proliferation, is now facing nuclear blackmail from the terrorist state of Russia."
Newsweek has contacted the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense for comment.
Former President Bill Clinton was the leader of the U.S. when Ukraine signed the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, a landmark post-Cold War deal that saw around 1,900 nuclear warheads surrendered by Ukraine's then-President Leonid Kravchuk. In return, the U.K., the U.S. and Russia agreed to respect Ukraine's sovereignty, which was violated in 2014, when Moscow annexed Crimea and again in February 2022, when Russian President Vladimir Putin began his "special military operation" in Ukraine.
Clinton backed the deal for multiple reasons, including its perceived contribution to global stability in a post-Soviet Europe, and in an effort to foster a more positive relationship between the U.S. and Russia. But Clinton has since expressed regret about the deal, as he believes Russia would not have invaded Ukraine if the country still had nuclear weapons. The 42nd president told Irish broadcaster RTE last year: "I feel a personal stake because I got them [Ukraine] to agree to give up their nuclear weapons. And none of them believe that Russia would have pulled this stunt if Ukraine still had their weapons. "I knew that President Putin did not support the agreement [then-Russian] President [Boris] Yeltsin made never to interfere with Ukraine's territorial boundaries --- an agreement he made because he wanted Ukraine to give up their nuclear weapons."
By the time Obama took office in 2009, Ukraine had already transferred its nuclear weapons to Russia and dismantled its nuclear infrastructure, as it was obligated to do under the Budapest Memorandum. In 2010, during Obama's presidency, Ukraine agreed to get rid of its stockpile of highly enriched uranium (HEU). While not weaponized at the time, this could have been used to build nuclear bombs. During the 2012 Nuclear Security Summit, Ukraine said it had removed all its HEU, which was seen as an achievement under Obama's Nuclear Security Summits, which aimed to create better nuclear security around the world.
Obama has never explicitly expressed regret the way Clinton has. In 2016, in an interview with The Atlantic, Obama said: "The fact is that Ukraine, which is a non-NATO country, is going to be vulnerable to military domination by Russia no matter what we do." He went on: "There are ways to deter, but it requires you to be very clear ahead of time about what is worth going to war for and what is not. Now, if there is somebody in this town who would claim that we would consider going to war with Russia over Crimea and eastern Ukraine, they should speak up and be very clear about it. "The idea that talking tough or engaging in some military action that is tangential to that particular area is somehow going to influence the decision-making of Russia or China is contrary to all the evidence we have seen over the last 50 years."
Newsweek has contacted teams for Clinton and Obama, via email, for comment.
The U.S. election is less than three weeks away and Ukraine is asking for NATO membership before President Joe Biden leaves office. "Our idea is that giving Ukraine (an) invitation at this moment is a political signal," Nataliia Galibarenko, Kyiv's ambassador to NATO, told Reuters. She said: "We sincerely believe that it can be part of the legacy of (the) current American administration." "If we will say that the invitation is there, for the Russian Federation, it would be like a final verdict—so that's it, so you cannot raise the stakes using this topic anymore," she added. If Ukraine joins NATO, it will be part of the U.S.-led military alliance's mutual defense pact, which sees an attack on one member as an attack on all.
NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte has said NATO and Washington had decided to make Ukraine's path to joining the alliance "irreversible" but it is unclear when this will take place. "All of this is basically building that bridge to NATO membership in the future," Rutte said.
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Systems Assessment: President Obama was focused on domestic policy and the primary effort was associated with providing universal healthcare. Russia saw that lack of focus outside internal affairs and they seized on the opportunity. History will show that both Clinton and Obama failed to see the changing international threats from Russia. There were voices in the distance providing warnings but many were still stuck in the euphoria of the fall of the Berlin Wall not realizing the 500+ year history of the Russian empire and its people. While the United States benefited from European immigrants in the last century because of Russia, the United States was caught up in 2 World Wars and domestic instability because of Russia. To ignore the history of Russia and how it impacted and continues to impact the United States is a grave fault. Something that President Obama still does not understand, however Bill Clinton now understands.
In 2014 to 2016 the Internet was filled with propaganda that Hillary would start World War III if Trump lost the presidential election in 2016 and Hillary Clinton became president. Russia knew that a president Hillary Clinton would attempt to stop their plans of conquest and side with the rising voices, such as Mitt Romney and others, expressing the new Russian threats. Trump lost the popular vote but won the electoral college count to become president. Trump did nothing to stop Russia and actually encouraged their aggressive policies and attack on Ukraine. The COVID-19 disaster allowed Russia to further exploit the times.
See sections Denuclearization for Guarantee of Territorial Integrity . Ukraine Memorandum on Security Assurances.
References:
[1] Ukraine Could Rebuild Nuclear Arsenal after Clinton, Obama Disarmed It, Newsweek, October 18, 2024. webpage https://www.newsweek.com/ukraine-volodymyr-zelensky-nuclear-weapons-protection-obama-clinton-1971253
10/17/2024 Zelensky says he told Trump that either Ukraine will join NATO or pursue nuclear weapons
Systems Assessment: Balance of Power and Cause and Effect are fundamental laws of history. When there is a balance of power there is system stability. When there is an imbalance of power there is war when toxic nation states are in the systems space. When dictators use their power to exploit the people, the people eventually rebel in a system causal loop known as cause and effect. The cause and effect cycle can lead to perpetual war and or revolution unless it is broken in some way. It was obvious that when Ukraine gave away their nuclear weapons without Russia giving away their nuclear weapons it would result in a system with a severe imbalance of power. Russia would continue to use puppet leaders in Ukraine to subjugate the Ukrainian people and if the Ukrainian people removed the Russian puppet leaders, Russia would attack Ukraine and there would be a massive war. This is not hindsight. This was known by everyone familiar with European history including all nation state policy makers.
The seeds of this war were planted when Ukraine was forced give away their nuclear weapons. They probably did this because of the Chernobyl disaster. Poland did not give away their nuclear weapons. Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan transferred all their nuclear weapons to Russia using the same mechanism of the Budapest Memorandum. The Budapest Memorandum is three documents signed individually on December 5, 1994 by the three leaders of Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan, together with the guarantor nations: United States, United Kingdom and Russia. To distinguish Kazakhstan from the other two Budapest Memorandums of the same date, it is referred to as the Budapest Memorandum regarding Kazakhstan.
When president Zelensky stated that Ukraine should either become a NATO member or pursue nuclear capabilities to protect itself, he suggested that for this war to end, a Balance of Power needs to be restored. Unstated by president Zelensky but known by all policy makers, Russian conquest of Ukraine would continue the Cause and Effect cycle within Ukraine and would expand beyond Ukraine and negatively impact the United States and its allies with a resulting perceived shift in the balance of power where new wars of aggression in Europe might start, leading to a world war scenario.
See sections Denuclearization for Guarantee of Territorial Integrity . Ukraine Memorandum on Security Assurances.
09/14/2024 Permission to use long range missiles into Russia
Missile Systems
Slave to fear: Ghosts of the Gulag haunt modern Russia
Story by AFP
September 14, 2024
https://www.voanews.com/a/slave-to-fear-ghosts-of-the-gulag-haunt-modern-russia/7784121.html
Moscow --- When Russians started being arrested for opposing the Ukraine offensive, Maria felt the same kind of fear she guessed her ancestors, victims of repression under Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, must have lived through. Now 2½ years into its military offensive, Russia has imprisoned hundreds for protesting or speaking out against the campaign -- even in private -- in a crackdown that has paralyzed the Kremlin's domestic critics. "It's not normal when you start behaving like your ancestors did. Twitching every time the phone rings ... thinking all the time about who you are talking with and what you are talking about," Maria, a 47-year-old from Moscow, told AFP.
"My fear is growing."
Leafing through a book with photos of victims of Stalin's purges, Maria pointed to her great-grandfather. Of Polish origin, he was declared an "enemy of the people" and executed in 1938 for "spying." He was posthumously rehabilitated after Stalin's death in 1953. His wife was also targeted, spending four years in the gulag, the Soviet network of harsh prison labor camps. Maria's grandmother, who had to live with the stigma of her parents being dubbed "enemies of the people," constantly worried she too would be arrested. Maria now feels a similar fear, concerned she could be labelled a "foreign agent" -- a modern-day label with Stalin-era connotations that is used to marginalize critics of President Vladimir Putin's regime.
Self-censorship
Putin's Russia also has harsher legal tools at its disposal to target its opponents. Under military censorship laws, people can be convicted for up to 15 years for spreading "false information" about the military campaign in Ukraine. In such a climate, Maria, an English professor at a university, is cautious about how she behaves and what she says in public. Outside her circle of close friends, she hides her pacifist convictions and her fondness for Ukrainian culture. She doesn't discuss politics with her colleagues, and lives in fear that somebody could denounce her for reading Western news or social media sites blocked in Russia that she accesses through a VPN. English itself is now considered an "enemy language" that raises suspicions, said Maria, who asked for her surname to be withheld. When she is reading news articles on her phone on public transport, she said she "immediately closes" the page and starts playing a game "if I realize there is a person next to me not reading anything but just looking around." Fearing her phone will be searched at passport control, she cleanses it before traveling of any chats where the fighting in Ukraine might have been mentioned. She is also afraid to wear her vyshyvanka, a traditional stitched Ukrainian shirt, in public, and shuns combining yellow and blue clothes -- the colors of the Ukrainian flag.
'Do not dare'
After a brief eruption of anticonflict rallies in February 2022, the Kremlin has since stymied almost all shows of public opposition. "People do not dare to protest, do not dare to speak out," said Svetlana Gannushkina, a prominent Russian rights activist who has been labelled a "foreign agent." Heavy sentences for regime critics along with harsh treatment of prisoners has scared many into silence, she said. Gannushkina pointed to what she called a "historical, maybe even genetic, fear" in a country that has seen multiple bouts of political repression -- from serfdom in the Russian Empire, the Bolsheviks' "Red Terror" after the 1917 Revolution and the 1930s purges under Stalin. Her Memorial group worked to preserve the memory of victims of Communist repression and campaigned against modern rights violations until Russian authorities shut it down in 2021. Through history, repression has repeatedly "divided society into those who were ready to submit and those who did not want to, understood that resistance leads to nothing, and left," Gannushkina told AFP. "History has made a kind of natural selection. ... And now we've got a whole generation of people who are not ready to resist."
'Slave to fear'
For Soviet dissident Alexander Podrabinek, 71, fear "is not an ethnic, national or genetic peculiarity" specific to Russia. "I have visited several totalitarian countries besides the Soviet Union and the situation is basically the same everywhere," he told AFP. "Fear is the main obstacle to a normal life in our country. ... Fear demoralizes people, deprives them of their freedom." "Someone who is afraid is no longer free. They become a slave to their fear, living without being able to realize their potential," he added. Podrabinek was exiled to Russia's Siberia in 1978 and then imprisoned in 1981 after writing a book on punitive psychiatry in the USSR. Despite pressure from the KGB security services, he refused to leave the country. "The only thing that can overcome fear," he said, "is the conviction that you are right."
###
Systems Assessment: Russia appears to need more weapons to take and hold Ukrainian territory. Russia is developing relationships with Iran and North Korea where they are suppliers of capability. Russia continues to escalate the war by not only taking more Ukrainian territory but also ensnaring other countries in their attack on a neighboring country. The Ukrainian response is to request to use the weapons they have to end the war. Can the weapons targets be moved, yes but not all of the targets, currently there are 250 targets. There is also the reality of bombs exploding on Russian territory. When bombs explode - Invaders wake up to reality but the Invaded fight to the death. The Ukrainians see the end of the war happening when the war moves into Russia to ultimately disable their military capability.
08/23/2024 Harris Closes Convention with Massively Strong Support of Ukraine
Systems Assessment: It is clear that the Ukrainian struggle with Russia tied together all the messages at the convention and the message was FREEDOM and we will fight for that FREEDOM. When we fight we win, we will fight until we win, that was the chant at the convention. The message was that the problem in the U.S. is the same problem in Ukraine, the fight to establish and then preserve FREEDOM. Alliances between certain U.S. elites with Russia who want to end Democracy is a big problem but it is being addressed in the U.S. just like in Ukraine.
It is not lost on U.S. leaders that Russia has been making constant threats of Nuclear attack on U.S. cities in their media and propaganda. This will never be forgotten. This tied Ukraine to the U.S. forever. The U.S. policy has been to downplay this with no mainstream media coverage so that the people would not be burdened with these threats or worse moved to immediate action.
The extremely aggressive and frightening body language of Vice President Harris as she spoke about Ukraine was a clear message to Russia and Putin. It was meant to instill fear in Russia and Putin - how dare you make Nuclear threats. It was meant to instill fear in Trump and his staff on their policy towards Russia and Putin - from the convention how dare you align with dictators and tyrants. This is no mistake and it was not a loss of control from Vice President Harris. This is a clear message to all world leaders. The U.S. always speaks softly and carriers a big stick. When the U.S. speaks loudly, something big is happening behind the scenes. Hope springs eternal but hope is not a plan. Clearly there is a plan. First the election must be won. That was the message at the convention.
This is a very difficult time for Ukraine and the U.S. The future is coming and the future of the U.S. and Ukraine are tied together in a generational conflict to preserve freedom and remove tyrants for the next generation.
08/15/2024 Ukraine Invades Russia - Continues To Take Territory 10 Days Later
Systems Assessment: Moscow is only 527 km / 327 miles from the city of Kursk. The Ukrainian border is 125 km / 78 miles from Kursk. The Ukrainians were able to push 78 miles into Russia within 2 days. It is not unreasonable to consider a scenario where the Ukrainians move on Moscow taking Russian supplies and perhaps even sympathizers with them for a full out attack on Moscow. They know the language, culture, and even the Russian equipment they may capture. It is obvious that Russia does not have real time surveillance of the area or the incursion would have never happened. It is also obvious that Russia has spread its military resources too thinly. The big question is can the Ukrainians hold the territory if they decide to dig in and stay as part of a negotiation strategy as some suggest. An alternative strategy would be to keep moving into Russia and into Moscow, but it is unclear how heavily defended Moscow may be and what the Russian army may actually do if this offensive were to take root and push forward. For example the army might just sit back and let the Ukrainians come into Moscow to fix their beloved country of Russia.
The best defense has always been a strong offense. Ukraine has been only in defensive mode. This is the first offensive move. Few aggressors ever stop a war that they have started. The war stops only when the aggressor is defeated. That has been the dilemma for the Ukrainians - how to defeat Russia. While Russian propaganda paints Belarus as an ally, the reality is that the population suffers from a dictatorship and has large numbers of Ukrainian sympathizers - they too feel they are an occupied people and their Russian friendly leaders need to go so that life can be normalized. In many ways the Ukrainian incursion into Russia is a form of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) where if Russia does not leave Ukraine, then Ukraine shifts all resources to attack Moscow directly as Ukraine is overrun by Russian troops.
This is a serious turn of events for Russia. The war has finally come to Russia.
06/13/2024 Bilateral-Security-Agreement-Between-the-United-States-of-America-and-Ukraine
Systems Assessment: This is big regardless of the presidential election outcomes. Turning away from this agreement will have massive negative consequences. This agreement will be fulfilled. This agreement is similar to John F. Kennedy's moon mission vision. The US government is now mobilizing to fulfill this agreement.
04/17/2024 House Republicans release aid bills for Israel and Ukraine
Systems Assessment: So what really happen to Speaker Johnson? A criminal trial of Trump was moving forward in New York. Headlines started to appear that Ukraine will lose the war if the US fails to approve aid. Those were all in play since February 2024. The new element was this analysis that clearly stated that the United States is at war with Russia because of the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances and that everyone in the United States that helps Russia falls into the category of giving aid and comfort to the enemy, like it or not. The language of war is very important - direct, no mixed meanings, clear statements. Management speak to push hidden agendas have no place in the life and death struggle of war.
04/08/2024 Ukraine will lose the war if US fails to approve aid
Systems Assessment: Not only will Ukraine lose the war and millions will die in the aftermath of Russian rule, but the United States will lose the war with Russia. Again the United States is at war with Russia because the United States signed the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances. Everyone in the United States that helps Russia falls into the category of giving aid and comfort to the enemy, like it or not.
Russia is in the category of an evil power driven by evil leaders. The evidence is not only the invasion of Ukraine but the way in which they prosecuted the war. They left millions of landmines across territories that they occupied. These landmines will take a generation to remove with massive costs to humanity. It took a massive military industrial complex to manufacture and distribute all those landmines. Russia is executing a 100 year plan for conquest. That is why the Ukrainians keep stating that Russia will not stop with Ukraine. They know, they have the intelligence data. So does the United States.
This lost war will not be like Korea or Vietnam where the United States will return to business as usual. It is likely that Russia will continue its march across Europe and NATO will have no choice but to enter the war with troops and equipment.
The United States also knows that Russia has attacked the United States in the first ever massive cyber war where the Internet was used to attack a country, divide its people, and compromise people in positions of authority like congress and other elected officials with money, disinformation, and likely other techniques. The billionaire class will do what they have always done, just like in World War II where some will side with the dictators and anti-democracy tyrants and some will side with the United States and democracy. As previously stated the giant will soon awaken, toss out its compromised politicians and do what must be done because there will be no choice. It would be much better to solve the problem now as President Biden has stated multiple times. The intelligence data is there, the analysis is there, the plans and alternatives are there with the costs to the United States with each scenario.
Costs in this analysis has nothing to do with money. Money is irrelevant in the life and death struggle of war.
03/11/2024 Statement of the Permanent Synod of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church In light of the interview of Pope Francis Conducted by Radio Television Suisse
March 11, 2024
Statement of the Permanent Synod of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church In light of the interview of Pope Francis Conducted by Radio Television Suisse
We do not yet have a full version of the interview given by Pope Francis to the RTS (Radio Television Suisse) that apparently will be published only on March 20. According to the Holy See Press Office, the reference to a "white flag" in the interview is a summons to negotiations not to a surrender by Ukraine. In the conversation, the Holy Father speaks not only about the Russian war against Ukraine but also the war between Israel and Hamas. As he has done repeatedly, Pope Francis calls for negotiated settlements of armed conflicts.
In this regard we would like to reflect not upon the Pope's statement but upon the point of view of the victims of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. It is important to understand the position of most Ukrainians.
To anyone on the ground in Ukraine it is clear that the citizens of Ukraine are - as we stated during our meetings with the US church leaders, politicians, and diaspora communities in the Washington, DC, Philadelphia, and New York city - "wounded yet unbroken, tired yet resilient." Ukrainians cannot surrender because surrender means death. The intentions of Putin and Russia are clear and explicit. The aims are not those of one individual: 70% of the Russian population support the genocidal war against Ukraine, as does Patriarch Kirill and the Russian Orthodox Church. The expressed objectives are articulated in concrete actions.
In Putin's mind, there is no such thing as Ukraine, Ukrainian history, language, and independent Ukrainian church life. All matters Ukrainian are ideological constructs, fit to be eradicated. Ukraine is not a reality but a mere "ideology." The ideology of Ukrainian identity, according to Putin, is “Nazi.”
By calling all Ukrainians (who refuse to be Russians and accept Russian rule) “Nazis,” Putin dehumanizes them. Nazis (in this case Ukrainians) have no right to exist. They need to be annihilated, killed. The war crimes in Bucha, Irpin, Borodianka, Izium, and in other places occupied by Russian forces have illustrated for Ukrainians (and to all people of good will) the clear purpose of this war: to eliminate Ukraine and Ukrainians. It is worth mentioning that every Russian occupation of Ukrainian territory leads to the eradication of the Ukrainian Catholic Church, any independent Ukrainian Orthodox Church, and to the suppression of other religions and all institutions and cultural expressions that do not support Russian hegemony.
Ukrainians will continue to defend themselves. They feel they have no choice. Recent history has demonstrated that with Putin there will be no true negotiations. Ukraine negotiated away its nuclear arsenal in 1994, at the time the third largest in the world, larger than that of France, the UK, and China combined. In return Ukraine received security guarantees regarding its territorial integrity (including Crimea) and independence, which Putin was obliged to respect. The 1994 Budapest memorandum signed by Russia, the US, and the UK is not worth the paper on which it was written. So it will be with any agreement "negotiated" with Putin's Russia.
Notwithstanding the suggestions for need for negotiations coming from representatives of different countries, including the Holy Father himself, Ukrainians will continue to defend freedom and dignity to achieve a peace that is just. They believe in freedom and God-given human dignity. They believe in truth, God's truth. They are convinced that God's truth will prevail.
The bishops of the Permanent Synod of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, meeting in the USA:
His Beatitude Sviatoslav,
Major Archbishop of Kyiv-Halych
Father and Head of the UGCC
Most Reverend Borys Gudziak,
Ukrainian Catholic Archbishop and Metropolitan of Philadelphia
Most Reverend Wlodzimierz Juszczak,
Bishop of the Eparchy of Wroclaw–Koszalin
Most Reverend Bohdan Dzyurakh,
Apostolic Exarch in Germany and Scandinavia
Most Reverend Josaphat Moshchych,
Bishop of Chernivtsi
March 10, 2024
Systems Assessment: This is the key takeaway: Ukrainians will continue to defend themselves. They feel they have no choice. Recent history has demonstrated that with Putin there will be no true negotiations. Ukraine negotiated away its nuclear arsenal in 1994, at the time the third largest in the world, larger than that of France, the UK, and China combined. In return Ukraine received security guarantees regarding its territorial integrity (including Crimea) and independence, which Putin was obliged to respect. The 1994 Budapest memorandum signed by Russia, the US, and the UK is not worth the paper on which it was written. So it will be with any agreement "negotiated" with Putin's Russia. - and there is the harsh reality.
The other harsh realities are:
03/07/2024 Joe Biden’s State of the Union address on March 7, 2024
This is how President Joe Biden started the March 7, 2024 State of the Union speech:
In January 1941, Franklin Roosevelt came to this chamber to speak to the nation. And he said, “I address you at a moment unprecedented in the history of the Union”. Hitler was on the march. War was raging in Europe. President Roosevelt’s purpose was to wake up Congress and alert the American people that this was no ordinary time. Freedom and democracy were under assault in the world. Tonight, I come to the same chamber to address the nation. Now it’s we who face an unprecedented moment in the history of the Union. And, yes, my purpose tonight is to wake up the Congress and alert the American people that this is no ordinary moment either. Not since President Lincoln and the Civil War have freedom and democracy been under assault at home as they are today.What makes our moment rare is that freedom and democracy are under attack at — both at home and overseas at the very same time. Overseas, Putin of Russia is on the march, invading Ukraine and sowing chaos throughout Europe and beyond. If anybody in this room thinks Putin will stop at Ukraine, I assure you: He will not.
But Ukraine — Ukraine can stop Putin. Ukraine can stop Putin if we stand with Ukraine and provide the weapons that it needs to defend itself. That is all — that is all Ukraine is asking. They’re not asking for American soldiers. In fact, there are no American soldiers at war in Ukraine, and I’m determined to keep it that way. But now assistance to Ukraine is being blocked by those who want to walk away from our world leadership.
It wasn’t long ago when a Republican president named Ronald Reagan thundered, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” Now — now my predecessor, a former Republican president, tells Putin, quote, “Do whatever the hell you want.”
Systems Assessment: Just prior to the invasion of Ukraine in 2022 President Biden went on national TV to alert the world that Russia will be invading Ukraine. No one believed that would happen, even the Ukrainians. Russia did indeed invade Ukraine - the Intelligence agencies had all the data and Biden listened to their assessments. Today Intelligence agencies still have all the data. Russia has started a major war like it or not and the United States is in a war with Russia. Almost on a daily basis Russia threatens the United States with Nuclear attack while claiming their people will be safe in Russian shelters. The intelligence agencies have even more data than what the Russians have publicly stated.
The war started in 2014 when Russia invaded Ukraine not with an army like in 2022 but with disinformation, propaganda, and eventually men wearing strange green uniforms. They captured and control the Ukranian Crimean oil and gas fields. They also caused massive chaos within Ukraine by breaking their territorial integrity. It would be like the United States losing Texas and California to an invading nation.
Did the United States bring this on itself and the world? Yes. Did the Europeans and UK bring this on themselves? Yes. The question now is - what is the path forward. How will Russia be stopped from plunging the world into a massive war with massive death and destruction?
As for the obstructionists in the current Republican party, they are irrelevant. History is moving quickly and the system will soon push them aside into obscurity. The current Republican party will not survive what they unleashed. The question is when will a new Republican party in the United States surface and what will be the makeup of that new Republican party. It cannot be a party of billionaires. They are responsible for the destruction of the current Republican party. Perhaps it will be normal people with conservative but intelligent views and philosophies. The problem is the conservative platform has been tossed into the trash heap of history. Reduced taxes for the rich and trickle down economics started to fail miserably in the late 1980's. That is why the Republican party embarked on an approach of lies, to keep feeding the billionaire beasts, who are now closely aligning themselves with Russia and don't care if Democracy fails. This is not unlike what happened in the run up to World War II. The super rich at the time were also aligning themselves with dictators and did not care if Democracy failed. However, there was another super rich contingent in the United States and they picked a different path. They rolled out the New Deal and helped end World War II with the destruction of the anti-democracy movements in the United States and in Europe.
This is a very bad time. This generation is being challenged. There will be an event that will be as massive as Perl Harbor, it can not be avoided because the people are asleep and there is massive war. Choices will need to be made, and it will not include the useless obstructionists in the Failed Republican Party.
The United States is at war with Russia. Putin is correct in that regard. The war started in 2014 because of the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances signed by the United Sates, where Ukraine agreed to give away their nuclear weapons in return to just ensure their territory would not be invaded. Russia invaded and so we are at war with Russia because of this agreement. It's that simple. Everyone in the United States that helps Russia falls into the category of giving aid and comfort to the enemy, like it or not. See Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances.
This can all stop immediately if Russia removes all its troops from Ukraine and the conquered territories. Russia completed development of the Ukrainian oil and gas fields and that should be a relatively simple business negotiation. Paying for war reparations, which will be enormous, is a problem.
War is a life and death fight for survival and money is irrelevant. Russia made the false connection between its existential survival and NATO as part of a massive propaganda scheme to justify its invasion of Ukraine. Russia openly and constantly threatens the United States with Nuclear attack. That is an existential threat to the United Sates. Multiple dictators and billionaires have stated that Democracy is dead. That is an existential threat to the United Sates.
President Biden has alerted the world that the sleeping giant is about to be awakened.
08/20/2023 Ukraine to receive 42 fourth-generation F-16 fighter jets from the Netherlands and Denmark
Systems Assessment: The jets should have been immediately provide to Ukraine. This is not hindsight. This is a major policy mistake that is now being corrected. Russia was not playing games with the Ukrainian people and the Ukrainian territory. The West thought that Russia was engaged in a game that would be temporary and fade even though they were constantly warned by those closest to the situation that this was not a game and it would not fade. It is possible that the Trump era had done significant damage in the U.S.A. and that damage is now finally being corrected. It is still no excuse. There are enough seniors in the U.S.A. that should have acted. The same scenario and result applies to the entire Republican Party. The seniors went silent. It is difficult not to see a potential connection between the massive damage in the Republican party and the weak policy towards the Russian massive invasion of Ukraine. It appears that the Republican party has been compromised as part of a larger broader Russian strategy and that compromise is rooted in the Trump movement. It is part of history that the Republican platform was modified to be more friendly towards Russia during the first election of Trump. It is part of history that Trump attempted to blackmail President Zelensky. It is part of history that Trump held several secret meetings with Putin where there are no documented records. It is part of history that Trump was damaging NATO and shifting the U.S.A. towards Russia as part of a major policy shift that he alone was enacting without notifying the people.
07/21/2023 Russian Naval Blockade Risks Starving 6 Million People
Systems Assessment: Russian claims that this is about the Ukrainian attack on the Kerch Bridge is just bullshit. Russia is continuing to attempt to stop the Ukrainian offensive. It is not clear what Ukraine will do with the Kerch Bridge. While Russia uses long range missiles to attack Ukraine the Ukrainians have no such capability because NATO has not provided them with those key military capabilities. It is obvious that NATO is making a serious mistake if they expect Ukraine to win this war. Russia has a massive war machine, NATO has a massive war machine, Ukraine has no war machine because they accepted peace decades ago when they gave away the Nuclear weapons in exchange for a simple agreement to ensure their territorial integrity.
Ukraine Map and Other Countries |
Looking at the map it appears that Rostov-On-Don and the Kerch Bridge are strategic Russian supply lines. When the Wagner group took Rostov-On-Don it clearly sent a message to Moscow that the point of the war could end overnight because Crimea would lose its vital Russian supply lines. Crimea would be cutoff with only Ukraine to supply its key living necessities.
07/17/2023 Russians Flee Crimea After Kerch Bridge Strike as Queues Stretch for Miles
How Ukraine Can Retake Crimea US General Ben Hodges 4/24/2023
It began with Crimea, it will end with Crimea --- Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in 2022.
The following interview with retired Lieutenant General Ben Hodges, former commanding general of the US Army Europe, identified the need for Crimea to be part of Ukraine and he laid out a three phase approach to seize Crimea. From his analysis removing Russia from Crimea would end the war and result in Russia sending its troops back home. Quotations and his recurring name in the text were removed for an easier read. The source is provided at the end of this section.
[SOURCE]
https://www.newsweek.com/russians-flee-crimea-kerch-bridge-strike-explosion-queues-traffic-jam-miles-1813468
https://www.newsweek.com/how-ukraine-retake-crimea-us-general-ben-hodges-russia-counteroffensive-1796264
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/07/17/russia-ukraine-war-news
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/07/17/crimea-bridge-kerch-ukraine-russia
Systems Assessment: We don't know what the ultimate Ukrainian strategy for defeating the Russians in Ukraine might be but we do know that they are fighting for their survival. Crimea has lost its water supply with the Russian destruction of the Kakhovka hydroelectric dam. Smart Russians know that by the Fall they will have serious water issues and they are leaving Crimea. To solve the water issues will require an end to the war. So the Russians are cutting their losses. It is unclear how much property was stolen from the people living in Crimea by the Russians, but it is probably significant. After 10 years there has been property turnover which means some Russians will take a huge financial hit if they purchased the properties prior to 2022 from their Russian counter parts. So there will be denial and resistance to leave Crimea by some percentage of Russians. The original Russians are probably long gone with cash in hands.
So the big question is what will Ukraine do?
Ukraine does not need the Kerch Bridge that links Crimea to Russia. Destroying the bridge is a scenario that has obviously been considered. It is difficult to see the downside from Ukraine's perspective if they decide to destroy the bridge. There is concern that Russian civilians will be unable to evacuate from Crimea, however there is still an evacuation route through the land route. This land route is hundreds of miles and it goes through a war torn region of Ukraine that the Russian civilians will experience for themselves as they make their painful journey and see what was done in their names.
There are two approaches that the Ukrainians might use for the counter offensive. The first is to take over the territory that is the land bridge as suggested by Lieutenant General Ben Hodges. The second approach is to destroy massive sections of the Kerch Bridge that links Crimea to Russia so that it cannot be used for months. Removing the Kerch Bridge would cut civilian supply channels to Crimea making life difficult for the occupying Russian population not used to suffering. The big question is which approach would result in the most lives saved while also ending the war as quickly as possible. Cutting off Crimea from the mainland is not a new tactic, it has been used in previous wars. The new variable is the Kerch Bridge. Removing the Kerch Bridge might have the same impact as cutting off Crimea from the traditional land route because the land route is in the middle of a massive war suggesting that civilian supplies would not survive the journey.
Map of Russian Supply Lines to Crimea |
Based on the Map of Russian Supply Lines to Crimea, it is obvious why Ukraine keeps asking for long range weapons and F16 fighter jets. Currently they have no weapons that would allow them to shutdown the Russian supply lines to Crimea. Their only alternative is a horrible ground war where territory is taken until the Road To Crimea is reached and destroyed or fully controlled by Ukraine. The biggest issue is that Russia has all the weapons it needs in this and any other war it decides to start. NATO also has all the weapons it needs to defend and stop any war that Russia may decide to start. This sad history, including the lack of proper weapons for Ukraine will be discussed by school children for generations.
From retired Lieutenant General Ben Hodges, former commanding general of the US Army Europe: "... the bottom line is, they are not willing to say we want Ukraine to win." The hidden power structure and agreements are obviously throttling Ukraine's ability to defend itself and it has cost hundreds of thousands of lives with millions of refugees and children that will be forever devastated from this evil undertaking.
Observation: The reach of the Russian nobility of autocratic rule with unchecked power established hundreds of years ago is far and wide - from Trump and many members of the US Republican party to leaders in countries like China, India, and various African nations. No wonder they behave so arrogantly. It was never about Communists like the former Russian empire, NAZIs like the former German empire, Predatory Socialists like the former Russian empire, or Predatory Capitalists like the current Russian empire, it was and is about the ruling power structures that adopt whatever words are needed to accomplish their goals of absolute power and the destruction of equality, self determination, liberty and freedom that are the foundations of inalienable rights. Ukraine keeps communicating that simple message to the world. The question is are the people listening.
07/15/2023 Ukraine Mulls Crimea Conundrum: You Cannot Punish Everyone
[REF] https://www.newsweek.com/ukraine-crimea-russia-collaborators-purge-tamila-tasheva-1813033
07/15/2023 Russian Forces Scrambling To Keep Crimea Control
07/14/2023 Thousands of Ukraine civilians are being held in Russian prisons
07/03/2023 Millions face deportation, loss of property after Putin's forced passportization order
06/28/2023 Missile attacks on civilians continue unabated
Systems Assessment: The Wagner mutiny was NOT about stopping the war against Ukraine. It was about a different strategy to execute the war. Given the Wagner history, that strategy is probably based on more force against Ukraine, although it is unclear what form that strategy might include.
Originally I had more to offer but then I pulled the content because I thought I had no right to say those words. However, after reading an assessment from Timothy Snyder: Prigozhin's March on Moscow Ten lessons from a mutiny, June 25, 2023, [https://snyder.substack.com/p/prigozhins-march-on-moscow], I decided to add back the content.
The Wagner mutiny was NOT about stopping the war against Ukraine. It was about a different strategy to execute the war. Given the Wagner history, that strategy is probably based on more force against Ukraine, although it is unclear what form that strategy might include. There are hints on the Internet that tactical nuclear missiles might be part of that strategy, however using such force on the battlefield is not very effective because troops are highly dispersed. Tactical nuclear missiles would lead to massive casualties only when used in civilian population centers. This would likely lead to a quick and massive NATO military response that would probably end the war in a few days and cause the Russian leadership to fall into total chaos, something that NATO does not want because of Russia's nuclear weapons. The issue is how to deal with the aftermath of this catastrophic situation.
The Russian people really need to wakeup and understand what is really happening. They, the Russian people are the aggressors, they need to stop, they need to take responsibility for what is happening, they are responsible for their leaders both in and out of government. The centuries old Russian people approach of shutting up and keeping their heads down while the worst in their society take control will not work because things are just very bad. Sadly the good people of Russia who know right from wrong have no choice but to get involved to stop their failed policies (yes they also own it) before this horrible disaster gets worse. It must be done peacefully and intelligently so that Russians do not start harming other Russians. They are their own family. They are also family to Ukrainians and other peoples in the world, but they have forgotten that simple fact.
The answer for Russia is simple - just pull out all the Russian troops from all of Ukraine. Then talks can begin to address a lasting peace between Ukraine and Russia. It will be hard after the devastation in Ukraine but this is the only strategy for Russia at this point in time that will work in the best interest of Russia. All other strategies will not work and will only harm Russians for generations.
Imagine if the Russian policy had been to use Ukraine as a bridge between East and West rather than a barrier and a colony to be abused. People in Russia would be working, traveling, studying, and vacationing around the world. People in the EU and the rest of the democratic world would be working, traveling, studying, and vacationing in Russia. There would be no talk of war. Children could play in peace and not fear what may come. Russia can make this happen, they are in control, it is their choice.
START Excerpt - Timothy Snyder
How to understand Yevgeny Prigozhin's march on Moscow and its sudden end? Often there are plots without a coup; this seemed like a coup without a plot. Yet weird as the mercenary chief’s mutiny was, we can draw some conclusions from its course and from its conclusion.1. Putin is not popular. All the opinion polling we have takes place in an environment where his power is seen as more or less inevitable and where answering the question the wrong way seems risky. But when Putin’s power was lifted, as when the city of Rostov-on-Don was seized by Wagner, no one seemed to mind. Reacting to Prigozhin's mutiny, some Russians were euphoric, and most seemed apathetic. What was not to be seen was anyone in any Russian city spontaneously expressing their personal support for Putin, let alone anyone taking any sort of personal risk on behalf of his regime.
The euphoria suggests to me that some Russians are ready to be ruled by a different exploitative regime. The apathy indicates that most Russians at this point just take for granted that they will be ruled by the gangster with the most guns, and will just go on with their daily lives regardless of who that gangster happens to be.
2. Prigozhin was a threat to Putin, because he does much the same things that Putin does, and leverages Putin's own assets. Both the Russian state itself and Prigozhin's mercenary firm Wagner are extractive regimes with large public relations and military arms.
The Putin regime exists, and the cities of Moscow and St. Petersburg are relatively wealthy, thanks to the colonial exploitation of hydrocarbon resources in Siberia. The wealth is held by a very few people, and the Russian population is treated to a regular spectacle of otherwise pointless war -- Ukraine, Syria, Ukraine again -- to distract attention from this basic state of affairs, and to convince them that there is some kind of external enemy that justifies it (hint: there really isn't).
Wagner functioned as a kind of intensification of the Russian state, doing the dirtiest work beyond Russia, not only in Syria and Ukraine but also in Africa. It was subsidized by the Russian state, but made its real money by extracting mineral resources on its own, especially in Africa. Unlike most of its other ventures, Wagner's war in Ukraine was a losing proposition. Prigozhin leveraged the desperation of Russia's propaganda for a victory by taking credit for victory at Bakhmut. That minor city was completely destroyed and abandoned by the time Wagner took it, at the cost of tens of thousands of Russian lives.
But because it was the only gain in Russia's horrifyingly costly but strategically senseless 2023 offensive, Bakhmut had to be portrayed by Putin's media as some kind of Stalingrad or Berlin. Prigozhin took advantage of this. He was able to direct the false glory to himself even as he then withdrew Wagner from Ukraine. Meanwhile he criticized the military commanders of the Russian Federation in increasingly vulgar terms, thereby preventing the Russian state (and Putin) from gaining much from the bloody spectacle of invaded Ukraine. In sum: Wagner was able to make the Putin regime work for it.
3. Prigozhin told the truth about the war. This has to be treated as a kind of self-serving accident: Prigozhin is a flamboyant and skilled liar and propagandist. But his pose in the days before his march on Moscow made the truth helpful to him. He wanted to occupy this position in Russian public opinion: the man who fought loyally for Russia and won Russia's only meaningful victory in 2023, in the teeth of the incompetence of the regime and the senselessness of the war itself.
I'm not sure enough attention has been paid to what Prigozhin said about Putin's motives for war: that it had nothing to do with NATO enlargement or Ukrainian aggression, and was simply a matter of wishing to dominate Ukraine, replace its regime with a Moscow-friendly politician (Viktor Medvedchuk), and then seize its resources and to satisfy the Russian elite. Given the way the Russian political system actually works, that has the ring of plausibility. Putin's various rationales are dramatically inconsistent with the way the Russian political system actually works.
4. Russia is far less secure than it was before invading Ukraine. This is a rather obvious point that many people aside from myself have been making, going all the way back the first invasion of 2014. There was never any reason to believe, from that point at the latest, that Putin cared about Russian national interests. If he had, he would never have begun a conflict that forced Russia to become subordinate to China, which is the only real threat on its borders. Any realist in Moscow concerned about the Russian state would seek to balance China and the West, rather than pursue a policy which had to alienate the West.
Putin was concerned that Ukraine might serve as a model. Unlike Russians, Ukrainians could vote and enjoyed freedom of speech and association. That was no threat to Russia, but it was to Putin's own power. Putin certainly saw Ukraine as an opportunity to generate a spectacle that would distract from his own regime's intense corruption, and to consolidate his own reputation as a leader who could gather in what he falsely portrayed as "Russian" lands. But none of this has anything to do with the security of Russia as a state or the wellbeing of Russians as a people.
The Putin of 2022 (much more than the Putin of 2014) seems to have believed his own propaganda, overestimating Russian power while dismissing the reality of the Ukrainian state and Ukrainian civil society -- something no realist would do. That meant that the second invasion failed, and that meant (as I wrote back in February 2022) that it would give an opportunity to a rival warlord. Prigozhin was that warlord and he took that opportunity. This might have all seemed abstract until he led his forces on a march to Moscow, downing six Russian helicopters and one plane, and stopping without ever having met meaningful resistance. To be sure, Wagner had many advantages, such as being seen as Russian by locals and knowing how local infrastructure worked. Nevertheless, Prigozhin's march shows that a small force would have little trouble reaching Moscow. That was not the case before most of the Russian armed forces were committed in Ukraine, where many of the best units essentially ceased to exist.
5. When backed into a corner, Putin saves himself. In the West, we worry about Putin's feelings. What might he do if he feels threatened? Might he do something terrible to us? Putin encourages this line of thinking with constant bluster about "escalation" and the like. On Saturday Putin gave another speech full of threats, this time directed against Prigozhin and Wagner. Then he got into a plane and flew away to another city. And then he made a deal with Prigozhin. And then all legal charges against Prigozhin were dropped. And then Putin's propagandists explained that all of this was perfectly normal.
So long as Putin is in power, this is what he will do. He will threaten and hope that those threats will change the behaviour of his enemies. When that fails, he will change the story. His regime rests on propaganda, and in the end the spectacle generated by the military is there to serve the propaganda. Even when that spectacle is as humiliating as can be possibly be imagined, as it was on Saturday when Russian rebels marched on Moscow and Putin fled, his response will be to try to change the subject.
It is worth emphasizing that on Saturday the threat to him personally and to his regime was real. Both the risk and the humiliation were incomparably greater than anything that could happen in Ukraine. Compared to power in Russia, land in Ukraine is unimportant. After what we have just seen, no one should be arguing that Putin might be backed into a corner in Ukraine and take some terrible decision. He cannot be backed into a corner in Ukraine. He can only be backed into a corner in Russia. And now we know what he does when that happens: record a speech and run away.
(And most likely write a check. A note of speculation. No one yet knows what the deal between Putin and Prigozhin was. There are rumblings in Russia that Sergei Shoigu, Prigozhin's main target, will be forced to resign after accusations of some kind of corruption or another. There are reports that Prigozhin was given reason to be concerned about the lives of his own family members and those of other Wagner leaders. I imagine, personally, that one element was money. On 1 July, Wagner was going to cease to exist as a separate entity, at least formally speaking. It like all private armies was required to subordinate itself to the ministry of defense, which is to say to Shoigu. This helps to explain, I think, the timing of the mutiny. Were Wagner to cease to function as before, Prigozhin would have lost a lot of money. It is not unreasonable to suppose that he marched on Moscow at a moment when we still had the firepower to generate one last payout. Mafia metaphors can help here, not least because they are barely metaphors. You can think of the Russian state as a protection racket. No one is really safe, but everyone has to accept "protection" in the knowledge that this is less risky than rebellion. A protection racket is always vulnerable to another protection racket. In marching from Rostov-on-Don to Moscow, Prigozhin was breaking one protection racket and proposing another. On this logic, we can imagine Prigozhin's proposal to Putin as follows: I am deploying the greater force, and I am now demanding protection money from you. If you want to continue your own protection racket, pay me off before I reach Moscow.)
6. The top participants were fascists, and fascists can feud. We don't use the term “fascist” much, since the Russians (especially Russian fascists) use it for their enemies, which is confusing; and since it seems somehow politically incorrect to use it. And for another reason: unlike the Italians, the Romanians, and the Germans of the 1930s, the Putin regime has had the use of tremendous profits from hydrocarbons, which it has used to influence western public opinion. All the same, if Russia today is not a fascist regime, it is really difficult to know what regime would be fascist. It is more clearly fascist than Mussolini's Italy, which invented the term. Russian fascists have been in the forefront of both invasions on Ukraine, both on the battlefield and in propaganda. Putin himself has used fascist language at every turn, and has pursued the fascist goal of genocide in Ukraine.
Prigozhin has been however the more effective fascist propagandist during this war, strategically using symbols of violence (a sledgehammer) and images of death (cemeteries, actual corpses) to solidify his position. Wagner includes a very large number of openly fascist fighters. Wagner's conflict with Shoigu has racist overtones, undertones, and throughtones -- on pro-Wagner Telegram channels he is referred to as "the Tuva degenerate" and similar.
That said, the difference between fascists can seem very meaningful when that is all that is on offer, and it is absolutely clear that many Russians were deeply affected by the clash of the two fascist camps. That said, it is important to specify a difference between Putin and Prigozhin's fascism and that of the 1930s. The two men are both very concerned with money, which the first generation of fascists in general were not. They are oligarchical fascists -- a breed worth watching here in the US as well.
7. The division in Russia was real, and will likely endure. Some Russians celebrated when Wagner shot down Russian helicopters, and others were astonished that they could do so. Some Russians wanted action, others could not imagine change. Most Russians probably do not care much, but those who do are not of the same opinion. Putin's regime will try to change the subject, as always, but now it lacks offensive power in Ukraine (without Wagner) and so the ability to create much of a spectacle. Russian propaganda has already turned against Wagner, who were of course yesterday's heroes. The leading Russian propagandist, Vladimir Solovyov, recruited for Wagner. The son of Putin's spokesman supposedly served in Wagner. Although this was almost certainly a lie, it reveals that Wagner was once the site of prestige.
It might prove hard for Russian propagandists to find any heroes in the story, since for the most part no one resisted Wagner's march on Moscow. If Wagner was so horrible, why did everyone just let it go forward? If the Russian ministry of defense is so effective, why did it do so little? If Putin is in charge, why did he run away, and leave even the negotiating to Lukashenko of Belarus? If Lukashenko is the hero of the story, what does that say about Putin?
It is also not clear what will happen now to Wagner. The Kremlin claims that its men will be integrated into the Russian armed forces, but it is hard to see why they would accept that. They are used to being treated with greater respect (and getting paid better). If Wagner remains intact in some form, it is hard to see how it could be trusted, in Ukraine or anywhere else. More broadly, Putin now faces a bad choice between toleration and purges. If he tolerates the rebellion, he looks weak. If he purges his regime, he risks another rebellion.
8. One of Putin's crimes against Russia is his treatment of the opposition. This might seem to be a tangent: what does the imprisoned or exiled opposition have to do with Prigozhin's mutiny? The point is that their imprisonment and exile meant that they could do little to advance their own ideas for Russia's future on what would otherwise have been an excellent occasion to do so. The Putin regime is obviously worn out, but there is no one around to say so, and to propose something better than another aging fascist.
I think of this by contrast to 1991. During the coup attempt that August against Gorbachev, Russians rallied in Moscow. They might or might not have been supporters of Gorbachev, but they could see the threat a military coup posed for their own futures. The resistance to the coup gave Russia a chance for a new beginning, a chance that has now been wasted. There was no resistance to this coup, in part because of the systematic political degeneration of the Putin regime, in part because the kinds of courageous Russians who went to the streets in 1991 are now behind bars or in exile. This means that Russians in general have been denied a chance to think of political futures.
9. This was a preview of how the war in Ukraine ends. When there is meaningful conflict in Russia, Russians will forget about Ukraine and pay attention to their own country. That has no happened once, and it can happen again. When such a conflict lasts longer than this one (just one day), Russian troops will be withdrawn from Ukraine. In this case, Wagner withdrew itself from Ukraine, and then the troops of Ramzan Kadyrov (Akhmat) departed Ukraine to fight Wagner (which they predictably failed to do, which is another story). In a more sustained conflict, regular soldiers would also depart. It will be impossible to defend Moscow and its elites otherwise. Moscow elites who think ahead should want those troops withdrawn now. On its present trajectory, Russia is likely to face an internal power struggle sooner rather than later. That is how wars end: when the pressure is felt inside the political system. Those who want this war to end should help Ukrainians exert that pressure.
10. Events in Russia (like events in Ukraine) are in large measure determined by the choices of Russians (or Ukrainians). In the US we have the imperialist habit of denying agency to both parties in this conflict. Far too many people seem to think that Ukrainians are fighting because of the US or NATO, when in fact the situation is entirely the opposite: it was Ukrainian resistance that persuaded other nations to help. Far too many people still think the US or NATO had something to do with Putin's personal decision to invade Ukraine, when in fact the character of the Russian system (and Putin's own words) provide us with more than enough explanation.
Some of those people are now claiming that Prigozhin's putsch was planned by the Americans, which is silly. The Biden administration has quite consistently worked against Wagner. Prigozhin's main American connection was his hard work, as head of Russia's Internet Research Agency, to get Trump elected in 2016. Others are scrambling to explain Prigozhin's march on Moscow and its end as some kind of complex political theater, in which the goal was to move Prigozhin and Wagner to Belarus to organize a strike on Ukraine from the north. This is ludicrous. If Prigozhin actually does go to Belarus, there is no telling what he might improvise there. But the idea of such a plan makes no sense. If Putin and Prigozhin were on cooperative terms, they could have simply agreed on such a move in a way that would not have damaged both of their reputations (and left Russia weaker).
Putin choose to invade Ukraine for reasons that made sense to him inside the system he built. Prigozhin resisted Putin for reasons that made sense to him as someone who had profited from that system from the inside. The mutiny was a choice within Putin's war of choice, and it exemplifies the disaster Putin has brought to his country.
END Excerpt - Timothy Snyder
06/25/2023 Russia has lost 224,630 troops in Ukraine
Systems Assessment: Dragging out the war by limiting supplies to Ukraine has led to massive casualties, massive Ukrainian Infrastructure destruction that will need to be rebuilt, and massive instability within Russia and the world. It is unclear what history will say about the situation. History will not be kind to the slow and measured equipment provided to Ukraine.
As far as Russia, they have massive internal problems that they need to resolve. It is because of these massive internal problems that they caused this needless and disastrous war. Only the Russian people can solve their internal problems. No one can help them, they must help themselves and quickly. What is clear is that war is not the answer and invading Ukraine was not only immoral, unethical, and evil, it was just plain stupid. There is an old saying: you can bring a horse to water but you can't make him drink - in other words you cant't fix stupid. Either the horse wakes up or it dies. The same is true for the Russian people. Ukraine is not Russian. It never was. This is like the other republics in Russia, they are not Russian, they just decided to be part of the Russian federation because it makes sense for them to be part of the federation. In the case of Ukraine there is too much damage from the Communists and now the Oligarchs for them to ever consider being part of the Russian federation or even the Russian sphere of influence. Perhaps in 2 generations things may change, but not now. The current Russian power structure blew it as they say in the US. They ran some insane model from medieval times thinking they could use extreme brutality to make the Ukrainian horse drink Russian water. What Russia failed to realize is that the Russian water offered to the Ukrainian horse was poisoned and the Ukrainians knew it from the very hard lessons learned over the past 100 years.
The Wagner rebellion is probably the final wakeup call for the Russian people. Russia needs to stop this war now and remove the Russian troops from Ukraine. Then they need to work with the Ukrainians to rebuild Ukraine and build a lasting peace for their children. The clock is running out. The next rebellion is coming and it is all internal to Russia. So will there be a massive purge within the Putin regime? If the purge happens will it be to continue the same policy of war and threatening the world with Nuclear War or will it be a new policy of peace and withdraw from Ukraine? Time will tell.
It is time to make assessments on China, India, and the African nations that are enabling Russia in this war. They need to make some serious decisions. Currently they are only acting in their own self interests and not considering the big picture. Their leaders are not failed leaders yet, but they are approaching a point where they need to understand that their short term self interests will do massive harm to their culture and people. The same is true for the financial interests in the US, UK, EU and elsewhere that continue to enable the Russian war machine. President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has repeatedly stated more sanctions and tougher sanctions.
What can be worse than a War in Ukraine? How about a collapsed Russian empire in chaos with nuclear weapons in the hands of renegade Russian troops and power brokers that will target anyone including their friends to get what they want.
Ukraine will not allow itself to be subjugated and occupied, that is clear at this point. Russia is in big trouble, their policy of war has failed miserably. Russia needs a new direction and that direction is NOT war.
06/24/2023 Prigozhin To Leave For Belarus In Agreement Reached With Kremlin After Wagner Chief Halts March Toward Moscow
06/23/2023 Rebellion in Russia
05/19/2023 US signals to allies it won’t block their export of F-16 jets to Ukraine
Systems Assessment: In March 2022 Alexander Vindman Former Director for European Affairs for the United States National Security Council, President Volodymyr Zelensky, and others stated:
Russians are using bombers and ballistic missiles. To counter the Russian weapons, Ukraine needs appropriate weapons: UAVs - Predators and Reapers with air to air and air to ground missiles, Loiter munitions that stay up there and hunt for targets, Long range anti tank munitions, Coastal defense missiles. The US response is becoming bureaucratic and paternalistic. The - No they can't handle it mentality is misplaced. Ukraine only needs a crash course on setting up and running systems, maintenance will come later because this will be months. There is decision paralysis, defeatism, why risk is still some residue - why risk wider involvement. The policy of incrementalism is a slow death and it will get the US involved in a wider war later on, it is a disaster.
Fear of Russian aggression towards the West is totally misplaced. Russia can't get into a wider war because they are bogged down in Ukraine. Russia unlikely to do full mobilization. They cannot win a war against NATO because NATO is massive against Russia and they know it. Russian commanders don't want their families to die via nuclear war because of MAD. Putin has been enabled because there have been no consequences, this needs to stop, it is the only way for real negotiations to begin.
The longer this goes on the higher the risk the US gets involved. Give the Ukrainians equipment to establish their own no fly zone. A No Fly Zone eventually will be established if the world sees 10s of thousands of civilian casualties. Ukrainians should be provided the weapons they need to establish their own No Fly Zone. Even if it is not as good as what could be established. It is better than nothing, which is what they have now - nothing.
There is a need to re-establish cold war communications systems to let the Russian people know what is happening in Ukraine.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky received a standing ovation after he quoted Winston Churchill and William Shakespeare in a speech to the United Kingdom's House of Commons. We will not give up and we will not lose. We will fight until the end at sea, in the air. We will continue fighting for our land, whatever the cost. To be or not to be, adding, Thirteen days ago this question could have been asked about Ukraine, but now, absolutely not. It is obvious, we will be. It is obvious, we will be free.
Since that time Army Lieutenant Colonel Vindman has stated that Ukraine will eventually get the weapons they are requesting. History has proven him correct. The war will eventually end. Ukrainians have been around for over 1000 years. They will be around after this war. See section Ukraine History.
05/11/2023 Britain becomes first country to supply Ukraine with long-range missiles
04/23/2023 Sunday: Paris, Kyiv, Baltic states dismayed after China envoy questions Ukraine sovereignty
Systems Assessment: China is reacting to massive policy changes to bring manufacturing back into the USA and Canada and other Democracies around the world. This is a big policy shift. Taiwan and Russia are only one item happening in this unfolding history. The USA may not be able to displace the China supply chain overnight, however Canada, Mexico, UK, and other Democracies can displace the China supply chain overnight. China is panicking and positioning for negotiations.
See 03/24/2023 Friday: Remarks by President Biden and Prime Minister Trudeau of Canada in Joint Press Conference. This is a partial extract.
PRIME MINISTER TRUDEAU: There’s long been a bit of a weakness, I think, to our argument that we’ve made over the past decades as Western democracies that says that our model is the best one, it leads to the most prosperity. But so much of our model --- we sort of turned our back to the fact that it relied on cheap imports ---
PRESIDENT BIDEN: Bingo.
PRIME MINISTER TRUDEAU: --- of goods or resources from parts of the world that didn’t share our values and weren’t responsible on the environment or on human rights or on labor standards.
And what we are doing right now is showing that we can and will build resilient supply chains between us and with friends around the world that adhere every step of the way to the values that we live by, that make sure that there are good jobs for workers in communities, urban and rural, right across our continent; there are good careers for kids long into the future, not in spite of a changing world, but because of that changing world, and how well we are positioned to see the future and meet the future.
We have learned that Capitalism does NOT lead to Democracy and shared values.
03/24/2023 Friday: Remarks by President Biden and Prime Minister Trudeau of Canada in Joint Press Conference
Systems Assessment: China is also reacting to massive policy changes to bring manufacturing back into the USA and Canada and other Democracies around the world. This is a big policy shift. So China is reacting.
Right now, we’re in a time where --- Joe talked about it as an inflection point; I think that’s exactly right. We can feel the global economy shifting --- shifting in very real ways towards lower carbon emission technologies, cleaner tech, great jobs in the natural resource and manufacturing industries that are going to be increased on our continent after years of outsourcing and offshoring. There is a real opportunity for both of us.
Whether it’s moving forward on critical minerals that the world is understanding they can no longer rely on places like China or Russia for --- that they can rely on Canada to be not just a purveyor of ores, but of finished materials that will be built in environmentally responsible, union or good middle-class jobs --- wages, strong communities, and the kind of leadership that the world is increasingly looking for.
There’s long been a bit of a weakness, I think, to our argument that we’ve made over the past decades as Western democracies that says that our model is the best one, it leads to the most prosperity. But so much of our model --- we sort of turned our back to the fact that it relied on cheap imports ---
PRESIDENT BIDEN: Bingo.
PRIME MINISTER TRUDEAU: --- of goods or resources from parts of the world that didn’t share our values and weren’t responsible on the environment or on human rights or on labor standards.
And what we are doing right now is showing that we can and will build resilient supply chains between us and with friends around the world that adhere every step of the way to the values that we live by, that make sure that there are good jobs for workers in communities, urban and rural, right across our continent; there are good careers for kids long into the future, not in spite of a changing world, but because of that changing world, and how well we are positioned to see the future and meet the future.
That’s why it’s so exciting to be able to work alongside Joe in these challenging times where we know we are better positioned than just about anyone else. And those friends of ours who share our values and our democracies around the world will benefit from the strength and the relations they have with us. And those who choose to continue to turn their backs on the environment, on human rights, on the values of freedom and dignity for all, will increasingly not be able to benefit from the growth that our societies, that our communities are creating every single day.
Taiwan and Russia are only one item happening in this unfolding history. The USA may not be able to displace the China supply chain overnight, however Canada, Mexico, UK, and other Democracies can displace the China supply chain overnight. China is panicking and positioning for negotiations. It is now accepted that Capitalism does NOT lead to Democracy or the shared values of Democracies around the world. This is a major revelation and invalidates the policies of massive outsourcing in the 1980's.
This also signals the unfolding reality that economic dependencies does not stop aggression and full scale massive war.
02/20/2023 Monday: Biden Visits Ukraine
Systems Assessment: It is unclear how Russia can prevail. Putin and his power elite made a terrible mistake. The USA power elite made their decision and they will not allow Russia to win this war. As far as President Biden, he has established his legacy and it always will be known as a great legacy. NATO is stronger than ever with two new countries requesting entry into NATO. Ukraine is fighting to its death with no end in sight.
China and India are at a cross roads. They need to think very carefully. If they decide to side with Russia they will diminish significantly in the 21st century. Russia will not prevail in Ukraine even if China begins to provide Russia offensive weapons.
The USA public divisions stimulated by Russian agents and Russian propaganda are irrelevant.
Estimates are that Russia has committed 97% of its military and this Spring and Summer will be very hard for Ukraine but it likely will be a disaster for Putin and his power elite.
Those who suggest that this will become a long war if China should start to provide offensive weapons do not realize the USA power elite will end this soon.
This is a done deal.
President Theodore Roosevelt's foreign policy in the last century was based on the simple phrase of - "speak softly and carry a big stick". There is always the desire for redemption and peace but if none is possible, the Big Stick will end the disaster. This is historic and this is frightening for all, but in reality the Russians should be the most terrified for what they have done and their refusal to stop. It is their fault. They invaded another country that had no military and they refused to stop even after massive damage and death.
The Russian people need to start to figure out how they will pay to rebuild Ukraine, deal with their criminal leaders, and build a peaceful future for their grand children. The damage is now 2 generations long.
Background For The Young
What many do not realize today is that the USA established the massive military industrial complex to deal with the potential threat directly from Russia. That threat has now become reality. This is not a proxy war. This is for real, as Russia has clearly stated the desire to reestablish the Russian Empire and topple the west. This is no joke, this is unlike any of the previous wars except for World War II. The USA power elite have dreaded this time for 2 generations and that is why they prepared. Unfortunately for this generation it is here now. The USA and NATO will not step away. Russia's only alternative is to completely withdraw from Ukraine including the lands previously conquered (Crimea, etc.). They now have the additional burden of paying for rebuilding Ukraine and delivering their leaders charged with crimes against humanity. This is horrible but this is reality. If you want to know where all your parents and grand parents taxpayer money went, it went into this Big Stick; It is the biggest stick on the planet and its one and only purpose was to deal with Russia should they again cause massive havoc. You may ask why, what did the previous generations know. They knew that Russia with Germany started World War II when both Russia and Germany invaded Poland as part of the secrect pact called: Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact Start of WWII.
Even though Putin has publicly stated the desire to reestablish the Russian empire, the NATO encroachment propaganda makes its way into the dialog. The question that defenders of Russia never ask is why would all these countries want NATO protection. What do they know, what have they experienced, so that they risk their very survival to join NATO. Poland provided an answer on Tuesday 02/21/2023 when they stated - look we faced Germany and Russia before and with a German attack you lose your freedom but with a Russian attack you lose your soul.
12/25/2022 Sunday: Ukrainian Orthodox Church
Systems Assessment: According to the CIA database, there are multiple churches in Ukraine: there are the Ukraine Orthodox churches that includes the 1. Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU), 2. Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church (UAOC), and the 3. Ukrainian Orthodox - Moscow Patriarchate (UOC-MP), and 4. Ukrainian Greek Catholic church. See section Overview of Ukraine.
The following is from the Archeparchy of Philadelphia Ukrainian Catholic Church:
Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, also called Ukrainian Catholic Church, largest of the Eastern Catholic (also known as Eastern rite or Greek Catholic) churches, in communion with Rome since the Union of Brest-Lytovsk (1596). Byzantine Christianity was established among the Ukrainians in 988 by St. Volodymyr) and followed Constantinople in the Great Schism of 1054. Temporary reunion with Rome was effected in the mid-15th century, and a definitive union was achieved at Brest-Lytovsk in 1596, when Metropolitan Michael Ragoza of Kyiv and the bishops of Volodymyr, Lutsk, Polotsk, Pinsk, and Kholm agreed to join the Roman communion, on condition that their traditional rites be preserved intact. The Orthodox did not accept the union peaceably; and the bishops of Lviv and Przemysl, as well as the Orthodox Zaporozhian Cossacks, opposed the re-union. In 1633, the Metropolia of Kyiv returned to Orthodoxy, while Lviv joined the union in 1702, and by Przemysl in 1692.
The partition of Poland at the end of the 18th century brought all Ukrainians, except those in the province of Galicia, under Russian control; and by 1839 the tsarist government had forcibly returned the Ukrainian Catholics to Orthodoxy. Galicia meanwhile came under the domination of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and in 1807 it was organized into the Metropolia of Lviv. With the occupation of Galicia by Soviet army in 1939, all church activity was suppressed, and the hierarchy was interned. In 1944 the Soviet authorities began to put pressure on the Ukrainian bishops to dissolve the Union of Brest-Lytovsk. On their refusal, they were arrested and imprisoned or deported. A spurious synod in 1946 broke the union with Rome and “united” the Ukrainian Catholics with the Russian Orthodox. Not until December 1989, during the general liberalization of Soviet life, was the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church again made legal.
A great number of Ukrainian Catholics immigrated to the Americas and western Europe between 1880 and 1914 and again after World War II. They are organized into the Metropolia of Canada, with the sees of Winnipeg (metropolitan see), Edmonton, Saskatoon, and Toronto, and the Metropolia of the United States, with the metropolitan see in Philadelphia and the eparchies of Stamford, Connecticut, and St. Nicholas of Chicago. Also, there are eparchies in Argentina (Buenos Aires), Australia (Melbourne), Brazil (Curitiba), France (Paris), England (London), and Germany (Munich).
[ref: https://ukrarcheparchy.us/ukrainian-church]
There is confusion in the US about the various Ukrainian churches and their affiliations. There is the Russian Orthodox Church based out of Moscow and the Ukrainian Orthodox Church based out of Kyiv. When the Soviet Union collapsed the churches resurfaced along with the Ukrainian Orthodox - Moscow Patriarchate (UOC-MP).
The Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church (UAOC) was reestablished in 1990, right before the fall of the Soviet Union. The UAOC, in its contemporary form, has its origins in the Sobor of 1921 in Kyiv, shortly after Ukrainian independence. On December 15, 2018, at the Unification Council, the UAOC and the UOC-KP, along with metropolitans from the UOC-MP, unified into the Orthodox Church of Ukraine. Metropolitan Epiphany (former bishop of the UOC-KP) was elected as the new Metropolitan of Kyiv and All Ukraine. This is the Ukrainian Orthodox Church based out of Kyiv.
The Ukrainian Orthodox - Moscow Patriarchate (UOC-MP) is a remnant of the Soviet Union and Russian Empire and it allowed Russians living in Ukraine to maintain both their Ukrainian and Russian identities. Sadly the Russian Orthodox church with Patriarch Kirill is sided with the Russian war machine. This compromises and drags the Ukrainian Orthodox - Moscow Patriarchate (UOC-MP) church into this horrible Russian war.
This is a critical finding because Russia has decided to engage in full out war that even includes religious leaders. The statement from Patriarch Kirill in Moscow - Today, Donbas is the front line of defense of the Russian world - the Russian world is not only Russia - it is everywhere where people who were brought up in the traditions of Orthodoxy and in the traditions of Russian morality live - is sad. Patriarch Kirill should be immediately invited to visit war torn Ukraine.
12/23/2022 Friday: Attacks to Weaponize Winter and Break the Spirit of Ukrainian People Failed
Systems Assessment: This analysis has been silent on the brutal Russian missile attacks on the Ukrainian people and infrastructure because it is documented by media from around the world. It does not matter if the Patriot Missiles are still unable to stop the terror attacks because the attacks to weaponize Winter and break the spirit of the Ukrainian people has failed. The Ukrainians are still celebrating their holiday season. They now have more reasons to celebrate because this was a terrible week for Russia and its' war machine. Russia failed in their attempts to disrupt US policy towards Ukraine. It is hard not to imagine that this is the beginning of the end of this brutal Russian regime. See section: President Zelensky Address to US Congress 12-21-2022.
The following is a direct extract from the Kyiv Independent, December 23, 2022, and is just an example of the historical record that the Russian people will face after the war.
*** EXTRACT START ***
NATO chief skeptical about Russia-Ukraine peace talks
In an op-ed for the Financial Times, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg accused the Kremlin of using “invitations to negotiations” as a mere pretext to buy time for Russia to ready itself for a new offensive against Ukraine. “Russia hopes to freeze the war to allow its forces to regroup, rearm and try to launch a renewed offensive,” he wrote in an op-ed. The NATO chief described 2022 as “a year of dismal failure for (Russian) President Vladimir Putin,” saying the Russian leader has underestimated both Ukraine and the unity of NATO. He added that Putin “is ending his year of failures with more cruelty against Ukrainian civilians, cities, infrastructure and health facilities.” “It was (Vladimir) Putin who started the war. He can end it today by getting out of Ukraine. Right now, he shows no signs that he is seeking real peace,” he said. Stoltenberg argued that Russia has demonstrated a “willingness to take large numbers of casualties,” going so far as to conscript over 200,000 additional servicemen in recent months and sourcing weapons from authoritarian regimes like Iran. In a similar statement in early December, the White House expressed skepticism about the possibility of dialogue with Moscow by saying, “Putin has shown absolutely no inclination to be interested in dialogue of any kind.” The Institute for the Study of War, a U.S.-based think tank, stated on Dec. 2 that Russia would stand to gain from negotiations with Ukraine and Western countries that included a ceasefire, as it would allow the country to regroup and prepare its military for further attacks on Ukraine. Ukraine has made it clear that it will not enter into talks with Russia unless the latter returns all occupied territories, including Crimea peninsula, which was illegally annexed by Moscow in 2014. In mid-November, President Volodymyr Zelensky presented a 10-point peace plan to end Russia’s war in Ukraine. The plan envisages preventing ecocide in Ukraine, punishing those responsible for war crimes, withdrawing all Russian troops from the territory of Ukraine, restoration of Ukraine’s territorial integrity, and the release of all prisoners of war and deportees. The proposals also call for ensuring energy security, food security, and nuclear safety. “If Russia opposes our peace formula, you will see that it only wants war,” Zelensky then said. The Kremlin dismissed the proposal by ruling out withdrawal from Ukraine by the end of 2022. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said on Dec. 13 that Kyiv needs to accept new territorial “realities,” which include Moscow’s illegal “annexation” of four Ukrainian regions - Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk, Luhansk, and Kherson oblasts.
Putin asks Russia’s defense industry to make more weapons for his war in Ukraine
Russian President Vladimir Putin urged his defense industry leaders to increase their production and ensure that the country’s military receives all necessary weapons, equipment, and hardware for fighting in Ukraine as quickly as possible. “It’s also important to perfect and significantly improve the technical characteristics of weapons and equipment for our fighters based on the combat experience we have gained,” he said on Dec. 23. The comments came a day after he described the Patriot air defense system - the most advanced air defense weapon in the U.S. arsenal that will be provided to Ukraine after Kyiv’s long plea - as an “outdated weapon” that Russia will be able to counter. “The Patriot is quite an outdated system, it doesn’t work as well as our S-300 (surface-to-air) missiles,” Putin told journalists. “We’ll take this into account. It’s just a way to prolong the conflict... They want to supply the Patriots. Let them supply them - we’ll crack them (like nuts).” This week, Putin also pledged that Russia would invest “unlimited” funds in its military. Since Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, it has lost control of approximately half of the territory it initially seized, Reuters noted. Additionally, Russia has left behind or lost a significant amount of military equipment, including over 3,000 tanks, and has lost 100,950 troops, according to Ukraine’s General Staff.
Thousands of civilians allegedly tortured by Russian troops during occupation
The Prosecutor General’s Office said on Friday that some 54 torture chambers have been discovered in territories recently freed from Russian occupation. In response to a request from the Zmina human rights center, prosecutors revealed that they are currently investigating more than 5,079 cases of torture, bodily harm, or other inhumane treatment believed to have been carried out by Russian troops. The office also disclosed that 855 criminal investigations have been launched into war crimes against children, including ten cases of sexual violence. The bodies of killed civilians and torture chambers have been found in various settlements in areas regained by Ukrainian forces. In October, the Ukrainian Reintegration Ministry reported that around 1,000 bodies - both military personnel and civilians, including children - had been exhumed in recently liberated settlements. Following the liberation of the southern city of Kherson in November, Dmytro Lubinets, the Ukrainian parliament’s Commissioner for Human Rights, said he was “shocked” by the scale of torture Russian forces inflicted on the residents. He also reported that even children were kept in the torture chambers.
Russian attacks across 7 Ukrainian oblasts kill 5, injure 14
Russian attacks on seven regions in eastern and southern Ukraine have resulted in five deaths and 14 injuries, according to local authorities. The majority of casualties occurred in the eastern Donetsk Oblast, where four civilians were killed, and seven more were injured, said Governor Pavlo Kyrylenko. The attacks also damaged five houses, a college, and a high-rise in the region. In the Kharkiv Oblast, near the border with Russia, missiles and artillery were used to attack settlements. Five people were injured, Oleh Syniehubov, the oblast governor, said. In the Zaporizhzhia Oblast, a missile strike hit a private house with two children inside, though they survived the attack.
Thaisa Semenova
National reporter
Thaisa Semenova is a national reporter at the Kyiv Independent. She worked
as a staff writer for the Kyiv Post until November 2021.
*** EXTRACT END ***
12/21/2022 Wednesday: President Volodymyr Zelensky Addresses Joint Meeting of Congress
Systems Assessment: This was big, it was of massive historical proportions. It is clear that the sides have been drawn for history to see.
Pictures are worth a thousand words.
Only 86 out of 213 House Republicans were present. Representatives Matt Gaetz, Lauren Boebert, Andrew Clyde, Diana Harshbarger, Warren Davidson, Michael Cloud and Jim Jordan attended but repeatedly remained seated during standing ovations. Republican Representatives Matt Gaetz of Florida and Lauren Boebert of Colorado have both demanded an end to aid for Ukraine. This is a legitimate policy difference that the American people must ultimately decide via their votes. As far as the Republicans that did not attend as part of a political obstructionist stunt - Future generations will study these events and they will be forever cast as very poor representatives. It is one thing to attend and be respectful and polite but yet have a difference of opinion on policy. It is another to snub a leader, that is an ally, in the middle of a massive war, whose people are dying everyday, that was invited to a major US Congressional meeting. Outside of a family crisis, the missing Republicans had an obligation to the American people to attend, it is their jobs and they failed miserably.
Reporters should be asking the following questions from all those that did not attend: Why did you not attend? Do you side with Russia and Putin in this War? Do you plan to support further aid to Ukraine, if not why not? We have spent trillions of dollars on defense and specifically in preparation for a war that is now in Ukraine, do you now propose that we reduce our defense budget because there is no longer the threat from Russia and if so what do we tell our Ukrainian and NATO Allies? Do you believe Democracy is the future or Autocracy, do you know the difference? Let them state their cases and see if their constituents agree. It is unclear if those not attending fall into the category of aiding and abetting the enemy in a time of war, but it is a reasonable question to ask and discuss.
For the full speech transcript see section: President Zelensky Address to US Congress 12-21-2022. See section Molotov Ribbentrop Pact Start of WWII.
The Ukrainians will continue to fight for their country even if US policy should change. These are possible scenarios if the radical Republicans change US policy and Ukrainian support stops:
Unfortunately, if the US policy is changed, the scenarios will lead to a massive escalation of the war. This is the same scenario that unfolded with the start of WW II. Although Russia initially thought the Ukrainians would not fight, their initial thoughts have been proved wrong. The Ukrainians will not stop fighting especially since Russia has inflicted so much death and destruction on Ukraine. This is a time of great challenge.
As of December 2022 the American people are feeling some of the shocks of the war associated with food and energy price increases. However, they are not feeling the costs of arming Ukraine. The US military budget for 2023 is $773 billion and the current costs to support Ukraine are a fraction of this budget. US aid to Ukraine totals $68 billion in 2022, and the White House has asked Congress for another $37.7 billion. In the spring of 2023, the new Republican controlled House will consider aid in the context of the administration's proposed budget. The world cannot look to marginal and stupid leaders at this time.
Equating dollars with death and destruction from a military war started by an out of control power is beyond any cost benefit analysis and is immoral. The Ukrainians have plainly stated the case: Pay now and we will do the fighting here and stop this aggression here, or pay later with new massive aggression and attacks on Democractic states around the world by non-Democractic states watching closely and waiting. This new military threat posed by Russia on the US is beyond any cost benefit analysis. A key question to ask for those fixated on cost benefit analysis is what is the benefit offered by Ukrainians engaged in the fight - the benefit is priceless, it is beyond any measurable level.
This is war. This is what war is like. Cost benefit analysis are irrelevant as survival is at stake. Those that are attacked do not want war, but what does one do once the war is started by an out of control nation state that attacks with military weapons and refuses to stop? This is the horror of war and why war must never take root by an aggressor. The reality is the Russians should have been stopped in 2022 as soon as they placed military equipment that sat for weeks on Ukrainian soil. This is the point the Ukrainians are trying to make. Stop the aggression immediately, do not wait. From the Ukrainians the message is - we Ukrainians waited thinking Russia would not attack and look what happened - even though US intelligence was stating what was about to happen, they were correct. The costs of waiting are beyond anyones imagination. Escalation continues and all exit points are lost. Generational hate and the desire for revenge is established.
The lesson from WW II that the Ukrainians keep trying to communicate is that appeasement failed then and it is failing now in this century. They are trying to communicate that this is a war between Democracy and Non-Democracy states just like prior to WW II. The Non-Democracy states are publicly stating that they are the future and they want control. This is the same scenario that was unfolding prior to WW II and the US was engaged in an active debate if it made sense to maintain its Democracy as Totalitarian Fascists and others were making their cases to abandon their Democracy. Eventually the US and Great Britain selected Democracy and they stated their reasons - Democracies are messy and slow but they self correct when the leaders go out of control, while totalitarian regimes fail because there is no way to remove leaders that go out of control, and these out of control leaders destroy their nations and their people. According to the Ukrainians, this is where Russia is at this point in history. President Zelensky stated that the Russian people must defeat the Kremlin in their minds if they are to be free.
On November 15, 2020 President Zelensky offered a 10 point peace plan:
Chief among President Zelensky's requests was for G20 leaders to use their power to make Russia abandon nuclear threats and to implement a price cap on energy imported from Moscow. He also called for an all for all prisoner swap with Russia, saying: Thousands of our people - military and civilians - are in Russian captivity. We must release all these people, we must unite for the sake of the only realistic model of the release of prisoners - all for all.
12/19/2022 Monday: US House January 6 Committee Recommendations To Charge Trump with Crimes
Systems Assessment: Coups to seize power are not new. There is a great deal of knowledge about how coups unfold. The most significant knowledge is that the first attempts at a coup rarely work. Further coup attempts are made until there is success, unless they are immediately stopped so that no further attempts are possible. In the US there are 2 other Presidents that engaged in attempts to seize and maintain power:
Each generation is tested and one of the tests that surfaces is the assault on Democracy. There is a big difference between people fighting for freedom and corrupt officials attempting to seize total power.
Today there is a massive challenge with Autocrats, Kleptocrats, and Theocrats who reject Democracy and engage in massive brutality to ensure they gain and stay in power. The most horrific example in 2022 is the Russian attack on Ukraine by Russia, where Putin has stated that there is no such country or people as Ukraine and Ukrainians and is thus engaged in a massive genocide, all because the people of Ukraine are fighting for Democracy. Internationally, Putin is constantly threatening the use of Nuclear weapons to stay in power and prevent Ukraine from receiving the weapons that they need to stop the war and end the Russian campaign against Ukraine.
Today US historians suggest that Trump was embolden because Richard Nixon was never held accountable for his crimes. They clearly state that unless Trump is indicted and held accountable there will be further coup attempts and more importantly the Democracy in the US will fail. They point to the many anti-democratic republicans that have been elected in the recent elections. This generation in the US is being tested to hold on to their Democracy.
Early in the Russian invasion of 2022 on Ukraine, the Ukrainians introduced the concept of the language of war. The Ukrainians clearly state their case and immediately stop any attempts to deflect away from the facts. The January 6 committee used the same approach of using the language of war. The statements are very direct and stop any attempts to deflect away from the facts. The anti-democratic republicans engaged in the opposite dialog, which is nothing more than propaganda to avoid, deny, deflect, and obstruct from the facts. The situation in the US is very serious and yes not only are the Ukrainians watching, but the the people of the world are watching, including those that are attempting to keep themselves in unchecked absolute power.
As far as the Ukrainians, they clearly state that they will fight for their country regardless of what happens in the US. They clearly state that they are fighting for Democracy for all the people in the world. They know what their challenge is and they have chosen their path. They rose to their challenge and their occasion. It is unclear if Americans will rise to their challenge and their occasion.
This problem in the US has been festering for decades. The rule of law and enforcing laws against corporations and the rich has been eroding and began in the massive corporate changes that started in the 1980's. By the mid 1980's many managers within some corporations were retaliating against employees pointing out problems and using statements like - This is not a Democracy. How and why these changes happened within US corporations is another subject, but it is clear that there is a direct connection between those movements, the Republican party that tended to support the rich, and what is happening in the US today with the assault on the US Democracy. It is almost as if some of the corporations were an early testing ground on how to overthrow the Democracy in the United States of America.
12/05/2022 Monday: Republicans Compromised by Russian Propaganda
Systems Assessment: It is easy to make a speculative connection between what is happening in Ukraine and the United States with Russia as the common source. Trump uses the same propaganda and disinformation techniques as Russian officials. A lunatic fringe in the United States has fully accepted Russian propaganda and is currently engaged in terrorist activities against it own country. The Russian war with Ukraine clearly has gone beyond the Ukrainian borders and in the case of the United States is not just economic but includes massive political and criminal disruption in the United Sates. The Russian war has significantly escalated beyond Ukraine and Russian media even claims they are at war with the United States.
When Putin uses the term denazification he is refering to removing nationalist movements and not referencing Germany and the Nazis of World War II. This is a severe blunder on the part of journalists from around the world that did not clarify what the term means from the Russian perspective. Russia does not view itself as a nation state but as a Federation with the use of extreme force when regions get out of line and become nationalistic demanding their freedom. See section Ukrainian Russian Borders and Internal Areas.
When Putin uses the term socialist he is refering to democracy where the people decide their fate. Democracy is a social system that does not rely on kings, dictators, or the rich to rule over the people. From the Russian perspective this is a socialist system. Once again this is a severe blunder on the part of journalists from around the world that did not clarify what the term means from the Russian perspective.
Ukraine destroying the sources of missiles is a key element of an air defense system. There is no other choice to reduce the probability of missiles reaching their targets. See the systems assessment from 10/11/2022 Tuesday. For more on air defense see section Air Defense Background.
There is a bigger issue. The reality is there are only 2 ways the war in Ukraine ends - Either Russia wins or Russia loses. The only way for Russia to lose is for the current leaders to either decide to stop or for their figure head, Putin to be removed from office, which will cause the others to stop. This war could escalate where Ukraine decides to march on Moscow acquiring and using Russian weapons and even military personnel as part of a multi million man army attack on Russia. Unlike the Russians, the Ukrainians are now fully trained on using both NATO and Russian military equipment. That significantly shifts the military balance. This is a terrifying scenario but one that is known in Russia, Ukraine, and all other countries. Putin keeps referencing Nuclear weapons and the west keeps calling for negotiations. This is not Vietnam or Korea as Russia and others may think. This is not a war with the United States or Americans, proxy or otherwise. This is a war with Ukraine and the Ukrainians are very angry.
11/24/2022 Thursday: Olena Zelenska Tells World Ukraine Will Endure
Systems Assessment: Olena Zelenska basically stated that they are prepared to fight this war for 2-3 years if it means eventual entry into the European Union. They have had it with Russia. Even if they never join the European Union they will never again accept Russian subjugation.
11/15/2022 Tuesday: President Zelenskyy Offers a 10-Point Peace Plan
11/11/2022 Friday: Kherson Liberated From Russian Army
10/11/2022 Tuesday: US Provided NASAMS Systems to Go Operational
Systems Assessment: It is possible that this system once delivered in sufficient quantity may provide the air defense shield that Ukraine has been requesting since Russia started sending long range missiles into Ukraine. Air defense is not just trying to intercept an incoming missile but also destroying the source of an incoming missile. The concept is simple, one missile may make it through but then there will be no future missiles from that location. It does not matter if they are mobile. The missile source will be destroyed. All this is reduced to probability of intercept. The probability of intercepting a missile in flight is significantly less than the probability of destroying the source of the missiles, again a key air defense element. Basically the probability of missile intercept might be Pmi ~ 50% while the probability of destroying the missile source is Pms ~ 99%. Ukraine is being provided the capability to intercept missiles in flight but not the capability to destroy the missile source because it would involve strikes within Russian territory including Russian ships. It is a numbers and distance time problem. If the missiles are traveling long distances, and a sufficient number of intercepting missiles can be used to intercept an incoming missile, then the Pmi might increase to 85%. However, this is not a full up air defense system.
There is a reason why Russia keeps spewing the rhetoric to not attack Russian soil. It is because a full up air defense system would end the war overnight. Russia would be stopped cold as their missile sources would be destroyed with each launch of one of their missiles into Ukraine. Russia knows this, NATO knows this, the UK knows this, and the US knows this. The problem is what would be the next Russian move with the inability to win the war in Ukraine using conventional weapons. It appears that policy makers are using the tactic to exhaust Russia to the negotiating table. Does Russia have the same air defense systems that can strike against missile sources, yes, but it would not matter as Russian ships are destroyed and missiles cross the Russian border and take out Russian fixed and mobile missile sites.
Large numbers of Russian dissidents are fleeing Russia. The current Russian leadership is allowing them to leave because they know that those people would put a stop to this sooner rather than later. However, not all are leaving and those that are staying will be key players in stopping the war and changing the direction of Russia. It is just a matter of time.
10/04/2022 Monday: HIMARS and other Weapons to Ukraine
10/03/2022 Sunday: US and NATO Response to Russian Nuclear Threats
10/02/2022 Saturday: Russia Has Stolen $530 Million in Ukrainian Grain
09/30/2022 Friday: Russias Role in starting WW II and Propoganda in 2014
Systems Assessment: The Russian propaganda was massive in 2014 when the world was convinced that the territory taken by Russia was not Ukrainian territory. The world is quickly learning that Ukrainians were forced to live under a tyrannical regime that is equal to or worse than all other tyrannical regimes in world history. This invasion and its causes will be studied and discussed for decades and form the dialog of many future generations seeking freedom, liberty, justice, and the moral high ground. Russia as a country and a people is now permanently scarred and it will take generations for it to recover and find a normal path of peaceful existence. Russia faced a similar situation when it joined with NAZI Germany to invade and split Poland between Russia and Germany. This was lost to world history as the allies needed to have Russia join their side in order to defeat NAZI Germany.
09/12/2022 Monday: Ukraine Stuns Russia With Counteroffensive
Systems Assessment: The Russian propaganda was massive in 2014 when the world was convinced that the territory taken by Russia was not Ukrainian territory. The world is quickly learning that Ukrainians were forced to live under a tyrannical regime that is equal to or worse than all other tyrannical regimes in world history. This invasion and its causes will be studied and discussed for decades and form the dialog of many future generations seeking freedom, liberty, justice, and the moral high ground. Russia as a country and a people is now permanently scarred and it will take generations for it to recover and find a normal path of peaceful existence. Russia faced a similar situation when it joined with NAZI Germany to invade and split Poland between Russia and Germany. This was lost to world history as the allies needed to have Russia join their side in order to defeat NAZI Germany.
07/05/2022 Tuesday: Who Will Pay to Rebuild After the War
Systems Assessment: The cost estimate is incomplete because it does not include the costs associated with the people. They have died, lost their health, lost their their faith in humanity, and will never be the same. A cost analysis was performed in March 2022 and the costs were estimated to be $1,931,500,000,000 with a statement that the bill needs to be sent immediately to Russia. Apparently they ignored the bill. Using modern weapons designed to fight a European war causes massive damage. War Costs and Reparations.
While Russia has been engaged in this effort for decades with other countries, all the other countries were small in comparison to Ukraine. Although the population of Ukraine has dropped over the decades because of actions from Russia, it is the largest land mass country in Europe and it stands to reason that there is a large amount of infrastructure and housing. Russian Empire Needs.
06/30/2022 Wednesday: Finland and Sweden to join NATO
Systems Assessment: What is happening in Russia is what has happened in many US companies. Toxic and very stupid trust fund babies take control of a company and come in making demands that destroy the company. It is rare when there is a recovery, but it does happen in some instances. Those that have lived through these scenarios note the insanity of the situation as massive devastation happens for short term gains. A common analogy is that management takes a shot gun and blows off their own balls. A crude analogy but very effective in communicating the situation. It appears that the Russian trust fund baby class has done the same to Russia.
05/13/2022 Friday: First War Crimes Trial of a Russian Soldier
05/12/2022 Thursday: Finland's President Niinisto and Prime Minister Marin called for the country to apply for NATO membership
05/11/2022 Wednesday
05/10/2022 Tuesday
05/09/2022 Monday
05/08/2022 Sunday - Mothers Day
05/07/2022 Saturday
05/06/2022 Friday
05/02/2022 Monday Day 68
05/01/2022 Sunday Day 67
Systems Assessment: The following are two key article extracts that clearly summarize the horrible situation. The systems assessment is that the world is in big trouble. Russia has been running a massive production war machine to manufacture huge numbers of military weapons while the world was not watching. It is clear that they have had plans in place for decades. It is very clear that the US Trump administration and the Republican party will receive devastating assessments in history.
In February 2014 Russia invaded and in March 2014 annexed the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine. This event took place after of the Ukrainian Revolution of Dignity and marks the start of the Russain War against Ukraine. President Obama was dealing with massive Republican obstruction and the administration was unable to deal with this massive threat to world stability and massive threat to the US. Mitt Romney was the only voice of reason sounding the alarms in the Republican primaries. It was in 2016 that the Republican party changed its platform on Russian aggression and war attacks.
President Trump may have been involved with a change to the Republican Party campaign platform that watered down support for US assistance to Ukraine. Diana Denman, a Republican delegate who supported arming US allies in Ukraine, claimed that Trump aide J.D. Gordon said at the Republican Convention in 2016 that Trump directed him to support weakening that position in the official platform. Ultimately, the softer position was adopted.
Trump said on the campaign trail that he didn't want World War III over Ukraine. And he wanted better relations with Russia. The change to the Ukraine platform in Cleveland attracted attention because it raised questions about whether it might have been evidence of communications between Russians and the Trump campaign, or was intended by the Trump team as some kind of a signal to the Russians about their willingness to accommodate them. This is similar to what Nixon did with North Vietnam when he announced a secret plan that would end the war if he were elected. President Johnson upon learning of this clearly stated that this was treason but he also stated that he did not want to tear the country apart and begin treason charges against Nixon (we were at war with North Vietnam).
What has become clear is that at the time of the 2016 convention, Russia was running a broad series of active measures against the US presidential election that included clandestine outreach by human agents and an overt information campaign on social media. That wasn't known to the public then, but FBI and Congressional investigators looked into whether anyone in the Trump camp helped the Russians who were attacking the election.
Trump won the 2016 presidential election. At the time the Internet was filled with articles that if Mitt Romney were nominated as the Republican candidate and elected President or Hillary Clinton were elected president then World War III would start. The US had a buffoon in the Whitehouse for 4 years and this empowered Russia to continue with their long term plans of empire.
It is clear that this is first a problem for the EU, then the UK, then the US, and finally the rest of the world. It is unclear why the EU was not on top of this very bad cancer that had taken root that we now see as a nation state, Russia, that has gone insane. It is probably the age old denial syndrome, because the times are good and the realty is too horrible to think about and address. Reality is now here. No one can run and hide.
*** START EXTRACT ***
Russian Draft Document Gives New Clues To Russian Plans For Occupied Ukrainian Regions
[Ref https://www.rferl.org/a/ukraine-fake-referendums-russia-draft-document/31828617.html, April 30, 0222]
A draft document prepared by top officials with Russia’s ruling political party calls for a new state named Southern Rus to be created from some regions of Ukraine occupied by Russian forces.
News of the proposal, obtained by Schemes, an investigative project of RFE/RL’s Ukrainian Service, comes as fighting rages in Ukraine’s eastern and southern regions, with Russian forces pressing an offensive on multiple fronts against fierce Ukrainian resistance.
It also comes with Russian officials signaling an intention to stage referendums in parts of Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk regions, much of which have been under the control of Russia-backed separatists for nearly eight years, as well as another region, Kherson.
The vote would be aimed at uniting occupied regions with Russia, similar to what happened in Crimea in 2014.
Just days before the February 24 invasion of Ukraine, President Vladimir Putin announced that Russia would recognize the Donetsk and Luhansk regions under separatist control as independent states; a declaration that Kyiv, and much of the rest of the world, dismissed.
The draft document obtained by Schemes, titled The Manifesto Of The South Russian People's Council and dated April 16, does not specify which occupied territories would make up the new state of “Southern Rus.”
The name “Rus” is derived from the name given to loosely organized lands in the 8th to 10th centuries that were first controlled by a kingdom in Kyiv, until power shifted to Moscow, leading to the creation of Russia.
But the manifesto declares that Ukraine lost legitimacy after the 2013-2014 Maidan revolution, which culminated in the ouster of President Viktor Yanukovych. Russia has long tried to argue that the street protests were a coup d’etat, and that the government was taken over by “Nazis” and “Banderites” -- a reference to the 20th century Ukrainian nationalist leader, Stepan Bandera.
“In response to terror and the totalitarian imposition of the ideology of Nazism and Bandera by the former State of Ukraine, we, in the form of the South Russian People's Council, take power into our own hands and establish a new state of Southern Rus,” the document says.
“We recognize the Russian language, as well as the Ukrainian dialect, as the native language and the language of interethnic communication, with the equality of all languages and nationalities,” the text reads.
The document’s sketch for a new “Southern Rus” state echoes earlier language promoted by Putin and other top Kremlin officials, who called for the establishment of “Novorossia” -- another historical concept referring to lands, mainly in Ukraine, that were previously part of the Russian Empire in the 18th and 19th centuries.
"We are building our state on the basis of the understanding of the historical and genetic kinship and unity of the tripartite Russian nationality -- Ukrainians, Belarusians, and Russians -- fraternal friendship, and mutual assistance,” the document states.
'Kherson Is Waiting For Liberation'
Metadata for the word document identified by Schemes indicates that Roman Romanov, top official with United Russia, was either author of the document, or involved in its creation. United Russia is the Kremlin-affiliated party that dominates Russia’s parliament and the country’s political life.
Officials who spoke to Schemes anonymously said the document was later passed to aides of Konstantin Malofeyev, a wealthy and influential Russian businessman who has been instrumental in financing and supporting separatist efforts in the Donbas for years.
Malofeyev was sanctioned by the United States and the European Union in 2014 for his role in the annexation of Crimea. He was indicted in early April for trying to evade those sanctions.
Neither Romanov nor United Russia’s secretary-general, Andrei Turchak, could be reached for comment by Schemes. Malofeyev refused to discuss the manifesto when contacted, and hung up the phone, saying he did not communicate with journalists.
The online news site Meduza reported this week that the Kremlin was considering holding two referendums in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions on May 14 and 15.
Meduza said another referendum may also be staged in Kherson, a region that is just north of Crimea and is partially occupied by Russian forces.
"Unfortunately, there have been rumors that the occupiers are preparing something [in Kherson] for the first days of May.” Hennady Lahuta, the head of the region’s military administration, told RFE/RL. “Either a 'referendum' or whatever else you want to call it.”
“I can only say this: the entire Kherson region is waiting for liberation. It is Ukrainian,” he added. “It wants to live in a united, peaceful, glorious, conjoined Ukraine.”
'How About We Cut Off Your Ear?': Ukrainian Teen Describes Family's 'Filtration' By Russian Troops
[Ref https://www.rferl.org/a/ukraine-russia-filtration-violence-threats/31829588.html, May 01, 2022 ]
Maria Vdovychenko says she'll never forget the conversation she overheard before being screened by Russian soldiers as she and her family were fleeing the siege of Mariupol.
"What did you do with people who didn't pass the filtration?" one of the soldiers asked.
"Shot 10 and stopped counting -- not interested," came the reply.
Traveling with her mother and younger sister, the 17-year-old Vdovychenko and her father were two of an estimated 30,000 Ukrainians so far to undergo "filtration," Moscow's alleged campaign to catch and punish perceived enemies or others deemed somehow unreliable from among the war's refugees.
Accusations have followed that Ukrainians ensnared in the occupation forces' vetting are being killed or "disappeared," or forcibly deported to Siberia and other Russian destinations, in the latest indication of possible war crimes by Russia in the 9-week-old offensive.
Moscow has denied committing atrocities and routinely blames Ukrainian forces for civilian deaths and other abuses in a war that Russian censorship prohibits from being described as a "war" at all.
'My Legs Started To Tremble'
Ukrainian officials have accused Russian forces of transporting hundreds of thousands of civilians from shattered Ukrainian cities, taking their documents, and putting them in so-called “filtration" camps, before moving them to Russia.
Vdovychenko told Current Time that her family's experience was not of any kind of filtration "settlement" but a bottleneck to screen families like hers.
Her family had waited two days and nights in their car to leave Mariupol, a strategic port city on the Sea of Azov, which local officials now say has been essentially "razed" by weeks of bombardment and its remaining occupants deprived of electricity, gas, and water.
"There was a column of hundreds of cars," Vdovychenko said. "You can't even use a toilet. Your legs are swollen. Your whole body hurts."
Her mother and her 12-year-old sister were both spared the filtration, even though the Russians had made it known that anyone 14 or over would be screened.
She said she had steeled herself for a "very difficult" ordeal but was terrified to find herself alone in a room with five armed men, while her father was undergoing his own interrogation, which included a beating.
She was fingerprinted, her documents scanned, and her smartphone scoured for signs of disloyalty to the forces currently occupying wide swaths of her homeland.
Then, when it seemed to be nearly over, one of the men appeared to allude to rape, which Human Rights Watch (HRW) and other groups say has become a feature of Europe's biggest military invasion since World War II.
"My legs started to tremble when a soldier who was lying on a mattress said: 'Don't you like her? There will be more women later. We'll find something,'" Vdovychenko said. "They didn't like me, and they just kicked me out."
She said she wasn't allowed to wait with her father, who was bullied and beaten and at one point asked by an interrogator: "How about we cut off your ear?"
He didn't know how the interview ended, Vdovychenko said, since he said he was struck in the head and only regained consciousness on the pavement outside.
More than two dozen checkpoints later, with no more "filtration" along the way, she and her family eventually reached territory controlled by the Ukrainian government.
"Even the sky was different there. It was clean. There was none of that dust that's kicked up and hangs in the air from the explosions. We started to hope that we can settle our lives. We deserve it, after all those horrors. We really wanted to live."
Accusations Of 'Disappeared'
Vdovychenko's story and other accounts collected by RFE/RL highlight the emerging pattern of a crude and brutal process by Russian and separatist forces to vet fleeing Ukrainians for people who might have worked as civil servants, soldiers, police, or security officers.
Other Ukrainians displaced by the war have talked of weeks awaiting screening at "pre-filtration" sites, perilous escapes on foot to avoid "filtration," and Russian roundups within Mariupol to interrogate civil servants and other local workers.
Many observers are increasingly concerned at reports that some of the detainees have been deported to Siberia or Russia's Far East, or simply "disappeared" after being tortured and handed over to Moscow's separatist allies in eastern Ukraine.
Moscow has acknowledged relocating more than 1 million Ukrainians since President Vladimir Putin launched the all-out invasion on February 24 -- deportations that critics suggest violate the laws of war.
Ukrainian officials have accused Russian forces of transporting hundreds of thousands of civilians from shattered Ukrainian cities, taking their documents, and putting them in the “filtration" camps, before moving them to Russia.
Lyudmyla Denisova, the Ukrainian parliament's commissioner for human rights, says at least four "filtration" camps are operating near Mariupol.
The U.S. ambassador to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), Michael Carpenter, told the OSCE's Permanent Council on April 28 of "harrowing" accounts from the camps.
He said local leaders, activists, journalists, and religious leaders were being abducted, tortured, and sometimes killed by Russian forces.Carpenter cited "credible reporting" indicating that Russian soldiers are detaining and "brutally interrogating" them for suspected links to Ukraine's government or independent media. Some of the detainees are then being sent to separatist-held territory in Donetsk and "reportedly disappeared or murdered."
He predicted a "wave of abuses" against perceived opponents ahead of "sham" referendums to assert claims to areas under Russian control.
One Ukrainian who lost his home and business in a town near Mariupol before fleeing with his wife and two sons one month into the siege told RFE/RL's Donbas.Realities about his screening at the hands of Russian forces encircling the city.
The man, who asked RFE/RL not to identify him by name, eventually made his way to Russia, then to Latvia, Poland, and finally to the Czech Republic.
He was required to undergo "filtration" in the village of Bezimenne in order to travel across territory held by the Russia-backed separatists in the Donetsk region.
His wife and his elderly mother were similarly screened.
After waiting for two days, a process he said was accelerated in a special line for cars with children, the Russians confiscated his smartphone and downloaded information from it, and asked him questions about his views on a number of topics.
"How do you feel about [those in] power? Where have you been? What do you know?" he said. "Like they used to do in the KGB."
*** END EXTRACT ***
04/30/2022 Saturday Day 66
04/29/2022 Friday Day 65
04/28/2022 Thursday Day 64
04/27/2022 Wednesday Day 63
04/26/2022 Tuesday Day 62
04/25/2022 Monday Day 61
04/24/2022 Sunday Day 60
04/23/2022 Saturday Day 59
04/22/2022 Friday Day 58
04/21/2022 Thursday Day 57
Systems Perspective 04/21/2022: Using the language that surfaces during war where there is no room for confusion, where clear communications is key, the Russians destroyed themselves. They not only have they killed people in Ukraine, destroyed Ukrainian cities and towns, they also have caused starvation in the world because Ukraine will be unable to export food to 200+ million people. Today they could have been peacefully vacationing in Crimea, working to feed the world in the ports of Mariupol and Odessa, traveling to and from Ukraine while engaged in business, visiting family and friends. Instead they did the invasion in 2014 and escalated the war to such a level were these people will not be able to live together for generations. What a disaster. This generation is plagued with people that have become massively wealthy around the world like Putin and the Russians behind the war, and they have gone insane. Their insanity is the same insanity that was World War I and World War II.
04/20/2022 Wednesday Day 56
04/19/2022 Tuesday Day 55
04/18/2022 Monday Day 54
04/17/2022 Sunday Day 53
04/16/2022 Saturday Day 52
Systems Perspective: Multiple US Radio stations backed by Russia is not a free speech issue. This is an ownership issue where a foreign government has taken control of US radio stations because of funds propping up the radio stations. The problem is that this translates into defacto ownership of these radio stations, which could not exist without the Russian funding. It is clear that these radio stations are controlled and owned by a foreign government. The licenses should be immediately pulled by the FCC and the matter handled by the courts. The FCC should not be second guessing what the courts might decide. They must error on the side of protecting the people from significant harm in a time of full scale war that threatens the US. It is also unclear why the US sanctions have not stopped the Russian funding of these radio stations. See section Russian Propaganda.
04/15/2022 Friday Day 51
04/14/2022 Thursday Day 50
04/13/2022 Wednesday Day 49
04/12/2022 Tuesday Day 48
Systems Assessment 04/12/2022
History is moved by cause and effect. When historians analyze history they always think in terms of cause and effect. This is a fundamental systems perspective and that is why true historians can make excellent systems engineers. For years as a young person taking history classes we were always asked what caused World War I and World War II, the massive wars that shaped the last century. All types of reasons were identified and greatly debated in class. No one at the time pointed to money. In the end I concluded that all wars were traced to money. By then I was now in University and not studying history, but in general conversation, if the topics of war arose I would point to money as the cause of all wars. Today, most make great arguments outside of money for why wars start. Even in the current Russian Ukrainian war there are arguments for why the war started with Ukraine. The reality is this war started because of money. It is simple, Ukraine is a source of wealth that was being stripped by Russia for generations. The Ukrainians decided to stop this stripping of wealth and threw out their Russian puppet government. The Ukrainians had a TV show about this corruption and its star is now President of Ukraine who ran on a platform to finally remove all corruption. What is not stated clearly is that Ukraine was in the final stages of removing all Russian corruption that was in place only to make money and lots of money for a few Russians and Ukraine was being devastated by this stripping of wealth. There are media stories abut this, but until now few were able to see the big picture.
04/11/2022 Monday Day 47
04/10/2022 Sunday Day 46
04/09/2022 Saturday Day 45
Systems Analysis 04/09/2022
It was reasonable for Ukraine to expect that they should have been given the same level of defense in 2014 and in the follow on of total invasion in 2022 that was provided to Kuwait when Iraq invaded and annexed Kuwait in 1990. Throughout the Cold War, Iraq had been an ally of the Russian Soviet Union, and there was a history of friction between Iraq and the United States. The operations were code named Operation Desert Shield (2 August 1990 - 17 January 1991) during the buildup of troops and Operation Desert Storm (17 January 1991 - 28 February 1991) during the combat phase. The Russian Soviet Union condemned Baghdad's aggression against Kuwait, but did not support the United States and allied intervention in Iraq and tried to avoid the conflict.
The US and the UN gave several public justifications for involvement in the conflict, the key item being the Iraqi violation of Kuwaiti territorial integrity. In addition, the US moved to support its ally Saudi Arabia, whose importance in the region, and as a key supplier of oil, made it of considerable geopolitical importance. Shortly after the Iraqi invasion, US Defense Secretary Dick Cheney made the first of several visits to Saudi Arabia where King Fahd requested US military assistance. During a speech in a special joint session of the US Congress given on September 11, 1990, US President George Bush summed up the reasons stating that: Within three days, 120,000 Iraqi troops with 850 tanks had poured into Kuwait and moved south to threaten Saudi Arabia. It was then that President Bush decided to act to check that aggression.
This is why the Ukrainians are bewildered by the response they have received from their allies.
The US response to the invasion of Kuwait was massive.
The US Navy dispatched two naval battle groups built around the aircraft carriers USS Dwight D. Eisenhower and USS Independence to the Persian Gulf, where they were ready by August 08, 1991 . The US also sent the battleships USS Missouri and USS Wisconsin to the region. A total of 48 US Air Force F-15s from the 1st Fighter Wing at Langley Air Force Base, Virginia, landed in Saudi Arabia and immediately commenced round-the-clock air patrols of the Saudi - Kuwait - Iraq border to discourage further Iraqi military advances. They were joined by 36 F-15 A-Ds from the 36th Tactical Fighter Wing at Bitburg, Germany. The Bitburg contingent was based at Al Kharj Air Base, approximately an hour south east of Riyadh. The 36th TFW would be responsible for 11 confirmed Iraqi Air Force aircraft shot down during the war. Two Air National Guard units were stationed at Al Kharj Air Base, the South Carolina Air National Guard's 169th Fighter Wing flew bombing missions with 24 F-16s flying 2,000 combat missions and dropping four million pounds (1,800,000 kilograms; 1,800 metric tons) of munitions, and the New York Air National Guard's 174th Fighter Wing from Syracuse flew 24 F-16s on bombing missions. The military buildup eventually reached 543,000 troops, twice the number used in the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Much of the material was airlifted or carried to the staging areas via fast sealift ships, allowing a quick buildup. As part of the buildup, amphibious exercises were carried out in the Gulf, including Operation Imminent Thunder, which involved the USS Midway and 15 other ships, 1,100 aircraft, and a thousand Marines. In a press conference, General Schwarzkopf stated that these exercises were intended to deceive the Iraqi forces, forcing them to continue their defense of the Kuwaiti coastline.
The Gulf War began with an extensive aerial bombing campaign on January 16, 1991. For 42 consecutive days and nights, the coalition forces subjected Iraq to one of the most intensive air bombardments in military history. The coalition flew over 100,000 sorties, dropping 88,500 tones of bombs, which widely destroyed military and civilian infrastructure. The coalition launched a massive air campaign, which began the general offensive code named Operation Desert Storm. The priority was the destruction of Iraq's Air Force and anti-aircraft facilities. The sorties were launched mostly from Saudi Arabia and the six carrier battle groups (CVBG) in the Persian Gulf and Red Sea. The next targets were command and communication facilities. Saddam Hussein had closely micromanaged Iraqi forces in the Iran - Iraq War, and initiative at lower levels was discouraged. Coalition planners hoped that Iraqi resistance would quickly collapse if deprived of command and control. The air campaign's third and largest phase targeted military targets throughout Iraq and Kuwait: Scud missile launchers, weapons research facilities, and naval forces. About a third of the coalition's air power was devoted to attacking Scuds, some of which were on trucks and therefore difficult to locate. US and British special operations forces had been covertly inserted into western Iraq to aid in the search for and destruction of Scuds.
Iraqi anti-aircraft defenses, including man-portable air-defense systems, were surprisingly ineffective against enemy aircraft, and the coalition suffered only 75 aircraft losses in over 100,000 sorties, 44 due to Iraqi action. Two of these losses are the result of aircraft colliding with the ground while evading Iraqi ground-fired weapons. The USAF F-117 Nighthawk was one of the key aircraft used in Operation Desert Storm.
The war marked the introduction of live news broadcasts from the front lines of the battle, principally by the American network CNN. There were daily broadcast of images from cameras onboard American bombers during Operation Desert Storm. The Gulf War had three of the largest tank battles in American military history. The live images showed that the US stealth aircraft were able to completely bypass the air defense systems.
Based on the history of the Gulf War it was reasonable on the part of the Ukrainians to expect that there would be a similar response to the invasion of Ukraine. However that did not happen. History will speculate for generations why there were differences. Not widely known, but when Kuwait was initially invaded, President Bush stated that the US was not interested in the fall of Kuwait suggesting that the US would do nothing. Within days policy completely changed and the US was going to war in an effort similar to World War II. It was terrifying. It is unclear what happened. There is a complete media void, but having lived through that history, it is clear that these events occurred. The primary reasons for the poor response to Ukraine will include:
See section Gulf War.
04/08/2022 Friday Day 44
Systems Assessment 04/08/22
The following extract summarizes the current situation.
[ref: https://www.rferl.org/a/breedlove-nuclear-fears-west-deterred/31791020.html]
*** EXTRACT START ***
Former NATO Commander Says Western Fears Of Nuclear War Are Preventing A Proper Response To Putin
A former top NATO commander has said Western fears "about nuclear weapons and World War III" have left it "fully deterred" and Vladimir Putin "completely undeterred" as the Russian leader pursues his increasingly brutal invasion of Ukraine."We have ceded the initiative to the enemy," Philip Breedlove told RFE/RL's Georgian Service in a recent interview.
Breedlove is a retired four-star U.S. Air Force general who led U.S. forces in Europe and served as NATO's supreme allied commander from 2013 to 2016.
RFE/RL: Has NATO done enough to help Ukraine? Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has asked for more weapons.
Philip Breedlove: In my opinion, we have not. In warfare, you want to deter your enemy, you want to have the initiative and not give the enemy the initiative. And we have ceded the initiative to the enemy. There's a lot more we need to do in the role of being a provider. We have not gotten a medium- and high-altitude air defense there yet, we have not gotten coastal-defense cruise missiles there yet. I do not yet understand why we haven't gotten MiGs [fighter jets] there that other nations want to give them. So, there's a multitude of things even inside our restricted sort of format that we still need to do.
RFE/RL: Zelenskiy has told NATO leaders to never again tell him that Ukraine's military does not match NATO standards. Just how good is the Ukrainian Army?
Breedlove: Well, they're showing us just how good they are. They're magnificent. They have prepared a defensive depth. And they have thought very hard about how to fight with a smaller and less well-provided-for force against a larger and much heavier mechanical force. And it has worked so far like a charm and, of course, it means they use up a lot of ammunition and military weaponry and that's where the West now has to step up its game and give the Ukrainian military what it needs to fight.
RFE/RL: Iraq, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Libya are all places where NATO, a defensive alliance, intervened in the past to stave off a humanitarian catastrophe. Is the reason it has not done the same in Ukraine boil down to Moscow having nuclear weapons?
Breedlove: As I mentioned before, the bottom line is we in the West, certainly my nation, and NATO, are completely deterred in this matter. We have been so worried about nuclear weapons and World War III that we have allowed ourselves to be fully deterred. And [Putin], frankly, is completely undeterred. He has switched into the most horrific war against the citizens of Ukraine, it is beyond criminal at this point.
If you remember what all Western leaders were saying for weeks, if he does this, then we'll do that. That is the definition of ceding the initiative to the enemy and being reactive to what the enemy does. You do not want to do what we have done, which is become deterred, and cede the initiative to the enemy.
RFE/RL: What message is NATO signaling, if any, as a result?
Breedlove: Well, the message I worry about is the message to the Iranians, to the North Koreans, and to the Chinese. We're going to have to deal with Mr. Putin now, and we're going to have to reestablish deterrence and we're going to have to regain the initiative. And we're going to have to send Mr. Putin a strong message that the West doesn't stand for what he's doing.
If [Russia] was the second-best [army] in the world, it didn't send its first team to this fight.
If then we do that, we may be able to re-deter the Iranians, the North Koreans, and the Chinese but right now, the message we're sending to the entire world is if you get a nuclear weapon, you're going to have a certain reaction from the West and certainly from the United States...[that's all]. And I don't think that's the message we want to send them.
RFE/RL: How do you rate the Russian armed forces in Ukraine?
Breedlove: On the battlefield, it's speaking for itself. If it was the second-best [army] in the world, it didn't send its first team to this fight, because this fight has not been executed well. A few things that we completely expected from the Russians are clearly not there. We expected the Russians to fight what we in NATO call the combined-arms fight -- integration of land, air, and sea, an overarching game plan that plays out on the battlefield -- and this hasn't been apparent.
The other thing that is interesting is how little role the Russian Air Force has played. It's been stymied by Ukraine's limited surface-to-air capabilities. We thought Russia could do combined arms. We thought Russia could do suppression of enemy air defense. And we've seen neither and we had assumed that Russia knew how to do this. If they do, it has not shown up in Ukraine.
RFE/RL: What about other factors, including the morale of Russian troops?
Breedlove: There are clear indications that the morale of the Russian troops is poor. Early in the war, a long-range platoon, which in our military are some of our toughest guys, they surrendered in northeast Kharkiv, and one of the first things out of their mouth was, "Do you have any food?"
Another problem for the Russians is medical care for the wounded. Our troops know we're going to bring them off the battlefield, no matter what, and we're going to have medical care for them, and they're going to have something to eat every day and occasionally something hot to eat. That kind of army has good morale, and we see indications that those are all problems for Russia.
RFE/RL: You said on March 2, "Capturing Kyiv is Russia's biggest and most important target." A month later, they aren't even close to anything like that. What could Russia's realistic military objectives be at this point?
Breedlove: They had a plan that they thought was going to take two, maybe three days. They planned around that, which means I think they made a lot of mistakes about what they brought to the fight. They obviously didn't bring enough supplies, and they did not have plans for getting supplies. And if they thought they would be welcomed here, now it is clear that Russia has made an enemy out of everybody in Ukraine. There's nobody there going to be waving Russian flags for them anywhere after what they have done to Ukraine and the Ukrainian people.
We should not accept anything that President Zelenskiy doesn't want.
So, I think that possibly we will see Russia change its goals. I believe we may be entering into a phase where Russia is trying to better its negotiating position. And I believe that also -- that's a little bit of the goal of President Zelenskiy -- [the goal] is to get on the counteroffensive and start taking back some ground to better his negotiating position. We all hope and pray that we can come to a negotiated settlement.
But, selfishly, I'll tell you that we should not accept anything that President Zelenskiy doesn't want. This is not about what the West wants for Ukraine right now. This is about what Ukraine and President Zelenskiy want for his people. And I think he should demand all of Ukraine's lands back. We should not try to force him into something less than that.
RFE/RL: Do you think there is anything that would make Putin halt his invasion of Ukraine?
Breedlove: If he comes across force, he will stop. And frankly, that's what Ukraine is working at doing now. There is still a lot of ugliness ahead. But if there were others to enter, and Mr. Putin ran into steel, I believe he would stop. If Mr. Putin continues on his criminal path, and does something crazy, like biological, chemical, or nukes, as the nations have said, he may get a different response.
One of the things they [Russia] do is weaponizing refugee flows; they've got [millions of] people headed into Europe.
Secondarily, in my opinion, sanctions have never changed Mr. Putin. Sanctions have hurt Russia. They've hurt the Russian people. They've hurt the Russian economy. But they have never, ever changed Mr. Putin's actions. But the sanctions now are so tough and getting tougher every day. I still do not believe they will change Mr. Putin, but they may change those around Mr. Putin. I used to say that [a plot] would never happen. But frankly, Mr. Putin is causing so much suffering for his people. And they are beginning to learn what is really going on in Ukraine. And now I wouldn't bet my paycheck on that.
RFE/RL: Is there any realistic off-ramp that the West could offer Putin at this point?
Breedlove: I do not believe there's a realistic off-ramp that we could offer Mr. Putin that is acceptable to Mr. Zelenskiy. That's why I said before: I am strong-minded and I want to use my voice to say we have no business telling President Zelenskiy what he should and should not do in these negotiations. He needs to make his decisions for his country. Zelenskiy is a wartime leader, we see a real wartime leader there. If he chooses to say, "No, I'm not relinquishing these currently occupied lands," then I'm behind President Zelenskiy in that.
RFE/RL: Is there a potential risk that Putin could turn Ukraine into a European version of Syria?
Breedlove: Russia's way of fighting when they can't win outright is exactly what you saw in eastern Syria. It's exactly what you see in Mariupol. If I can't defeat your military, I'm going to murder and terrorize your civilians.
And one of the things they do is weaponizing refugee flows; they've got [millions of] people headed into Europe. And remember what happened with the refugee flows before in Europe, it created all manner of political problems, dropped a couple of very important and strong governments. And so by making them the problem of all the nations of NATO along the border, this is the new Russian way of war. And we cannot allow it to stand.
RFE/RL: Is there a danger that as the conflict drags on that the rest of the world could become desensitized, paying less attention to what is going on in Ukraine?
Breedlove: I do believe that people are getting -- the one word is tired. The other is incensed. The other would be angry at what they're seeing play out. If you've been watching the polls in America, it's up to now 62 percent of Americans believe we should be doing more in Ukraine.
And that number has been rising because of the atrocities that we're seeing every single day, the absolute heinous criminal activity of Mr. Putin and his forces. We're watching it play out on TV every day, and the American people are getting tired of it. And I would guess that that's happening in other places around the world as well. So, I do believe that, that we are not going to get desensitized, we're just going to get more angry.
*** EXTRACT END ***
04/07/2022 Thursday Day 43
04/06/2022 Wednesday Day 42
04/05/2022 Tuesday Day 41
Systems Perspective 05/05/2022
During the Soviet offensive in March and April 1944, the Ternopil was encircled. In March 1944, the city was declared a fortified place (Gates to the Reich) by Adolf Hitler, to be defended until the last round was fired. The stiff German resistance caused extensive use of heavy artillery by the Red Army on March 7 - 8 resulting in the complete destruction of the city and killing of nearly all German occupants. Unlike many other occasions, where the Germans had practised a scorched earth policy during their withdrawal from territories of the Soviet Union, the devastation was caused directly by the hostilities. Finally, Ternopol was occupied by the Red Army on April 15 ,1944. After the second Soviet occupation, 85% of the city's living quarters were destroyed.
The horror of war and what happens in war is a terrifying fact. That is why war should always be avoided. Massing 200,000 Russian soldiers on the border of Ukraine and then having a 40 mile convoy sit for weeks is when the actual war crimes against humanity began. Every country has a ground and air defense zone that should never be penetrated. Once war breaks out it is over and horror and terror is the sad result. This history will be written for hundreds of years. Defending the Ukrainian border would not have been a war, it would have been a massive defense before a war could actually start. This war was allowed to start by inaction of NATO, the US, and the UK which had written and unwritten agreements with Ukraine.
The following is a severe assessment but it must be stated.
It is clear that NATO, US, and UK do not see any foreign policy self interest in having Ukraine stay independent. From their perspective there is nothing in Ukraine for them and they see no disadvantage if Ukraine is eliminated and consumed by Russia to just become Russians. It is only a population of 44 million people that in the previous century everyone just called Russians. The cultural genocide from the last century did not happen but it does not matter. Through the centuries Ukraine has been conquered by Russian, Polish, German, and other armies. It is possible that the people from Europe seeking freedom and liberty in the US were inspired by the plight of the Ukrainians through the centuries, the fight is too hard and pointless, just flee away from the maniacs. Ukrainians have talked about Democracy in the abstract for generations. Perhaps the source and inspiration for Democracy owes its debt to the the plight of Ukraine and their long held dreams of Democracy. However, dreams of freedom, liberty, democracy do not align with todays system of extreme self interest, the same self interest that has driven NATO, US, and UK policy and actions towards Ukraine since 2014 when Russia invaded Ukraine and split the country. The same self interest that allowed a 200,000 man army to invade and devastate a country and a people.
04/04/2022 Monday Day 40
04/03/2022 Sunday Day 39
04/02/2022 Saturday Day 38
04/01/2022 Friday Day 37
Systems Assessment 04/01/2022
Ukrainian President Zelensky has clearly stated that it is time for a new approach to ensure global security. The wars of the past prompted the previous generations to create institutions that should protect us from war, but unfortunately they stopped working. The Ukrainians and the world see it. So, we need new institutions and new alliances that are a coalition of peacekeeping countries. This is a direct challenge to NATO. This new Alliance needs to do far more to counter the carnage and devastation by the Russian invasion. [16]
NATO faces both moral and strategic realities in Ukraine with 4 million refugees, 10 million displaced people, and massive destruction of infrastructure and cities totalling over $2 trillion dollars as of March 22, 2022. The NATO, and US obligation to protect Ukraine is clear because Ukraine answered calls for support in military operations in the Balkans, Afghanistan, and Iraq. [16]
NATO’s advantages over Russia are overwhelming. Its force includes 3.5 million active duty military and civilian personnel, the allied defense budgets collectively exceed $1.2 trillion and include the world’s most advanced weapons systems. Russia, fields only 900,000 military personnel, its budget totals between $150 billion and $180 billion, and Russia’s economy is barely one twenty-fifth the size of that of NATO allies and partners. [16]
The Alliance has held back because of fear of Putin’s threats of escalation. His nuclear threats has led allies to remove their forces from Ukraine, convinced them that a no-fly zone should be off the table, and even blocked the transfer of Polish MiG-29 fighter jets to Ukraine. If Putin achieves victory in Ukraine, he will pursue his empire ambitions and move against other European nations, possibly even those in NATO, as he has repeatedly warned. The more the Alliance backs away from exercising its power to help defend Ukraine now, the more Putin is emboldened and the more NATO’s credibility will be lost in the eyes of its front line Central and Eastern European member states. NATO needs to ensure Putin’s defeat in Ukraine. [16]
President Zelensky’s plea is from a Democratic European nation having its sovereignty attacked by massive military force, something the world has not witnessed since World War II. The outcome of this conflict will define not only the future of European security but also NATO’s relevance as an institution. [16]
History is moved by cause and effect. The cause of this war is the desire to rebuild an empire that has been clearly stated repeatedly over several years. The effect of not challenging this vision is continued empire expansion by any means including war and cultural genocide.
References:
[16] Why NATO should establish a humanitarian no-conflict zone in Ukraine, March 23, 2022, New Atlanticist, Ian Brzezinski, https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/expert/ian-brzezinski.
03/31/2022 Thursday Day 36
Systems Assessment 03/31/22
Russia is not negotiating in good faith. Russia has invaded Ukraine and Ukraine has been in defense mode. Ukraine was denied entry into NATO so an invasion of Ukraine into Russia can not be interpreted as a NATO invasion. There comes a time when the best defense is a strong offense. It is unclear if the war will find its way into Russia. Just like there are Russians in Ukraine, there are Ukrainians in Russia.
03/30/2022 Wednesday Day 35
Systems Assessment 03/30/22
The Russo-Ukrainian War is an ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine that began in February 2014 following the Ukrainian Revolution of Dignity. It initially focused on Crimea and parts of the Donbas that were internationally recognised as part of Ukraine. The first eight years of the war included the Russian annexation of Crimea (2014) and the war in Donbas (2014 - present) between Ukraine and Russia. The Ukrainians lost 14,000 people in this phase of the war. Following a Russian military build up on the Russia Ukraine border from late 2021, the conflict expanded when Russia launched a full scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022.
US policy was set by the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances and the US was providing military equipment to Ukraine in 2019. Trump as part of some bizarre internal political strategy attempted to blackmail the Ukrainian Government and President Zelensky in 2019 and denied the Ukrainians weapons unless certain statements were release about would be President Biden and his family. This action was effectively aiding and abetting Russia in times of a war that the US was associated with and bound by an agreement with Ukraine.
Trump was impeached but never arrested, tried in a court of law, and held accountable. In years to come when children study what caused the massive invasion by Russia of Ukraine, Trump will be a key figure as one of the causes of the war. He enabled Putin and continues to enable Putin even in March 30, 2022. This does not let NATO, the UK, and the USA off the hook with their poor policy choices, which enabled Putin to expand on and act on his vision of a new Russian Empire, which he disclosed for years. It also does not let the people of Russia off the hook who accepted the grand vision of a new Russian Empire. This is a very sad point in history but not new. Unfortunately in the last century the Germans were fed a vision of empire and greedily accepted that vision. It is a constant of history and care must always be taken to ensure such toxic visions do not take root. It looks like this generation is once again about to live through a very difficult lesson.
03/29/2022 Tuesday Day 34
03/28/2022 Monday Day 33
03/27/2022 Sunday Day 32
Systems Assessment 03/26/22
While President Biden stated that the struggle between Democracy and Autocracy will take years, the Ukrainians do not have years. They are lucky if they can hold out the next few months without the weapons they are requesting. President Zelensky was very clear that President Biden, the US, NATO, and the leaders of the EU know this reality. The Russian army has pulled back to defend their artillery positions. They are getting ready to bomb Ukrainian cities into oblivion as the West watches.
The invasion of Poland in 1939 was an attack on the Republic of Poland by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union and it marked the beginning of World War II. The German invasion began on September 01, 1939, one week after the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between Germany and the Soviet Union, and one day after the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union had approved the pact. The Soviets invaded Poland on September 17, 1939. The campaign ended on October 6, 1939 with Germany and the Soviet Union dividing and annexing the whole of Poland under the terms of the German-Soviet Frontier Treaty.
German forces invaded Poland from the north, south, and west the morning after the Gleiwitz incident. Slovak military forces advanced alongside the Germans in northern Slovakia. As the Wehrmacht advanced, Polish forces withdrew from their forward bases of operation close to the German Poland border to establish more defense lines to the east. After the mid September Polish defeat in the Battle of the Bzura, the Germans gained an undisputed advantage. Polish forces then withdrew to the southeast where they prepared for a long defence of the Romanian Bridgehead and awaited expected support and relief from France and the United Kingdom. Those two countries had pacts with Poland and had declared war on Germany on September 03, 1939; in the end their aid to Poland was very limited. France invaded a small part of Germany in the Saar Offensive, and the Polish army was effectively defeated even before the British Expeditionary Force could be transported to Europe, with the bulk of the BEF in France by the end of September.
On September 17, 1939, the Soviet Red Army invaded Eastern Poland, the territory beyond the Curzon Line that fell into the Soviet sphere of influence according to the secret protocol of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. This made the Polish plan of defence obsolete. Facing a second front, the Polish government concluded the defence of the Romanian Bridgehead was no longer feasible and ordered an emergency evacuation of all troops to neutral Romania. On October 06, 1939, following the Polish defeat at the Battle of Kock, German and Soviet forces gained full control over Poland. The success of the invasion marked the end of the Second Polish Republic, though Poland never formally surrendered.
On October 08, 1939, after an initial period of military administration, Germany directly annexed western Poland and the former Free City of Danzig and placed the remaining block of territory under the administration of the newly established General Government. The Soviet Union incorporated its newly acquired areas into its constituent Byelorussian and Ukrainian republics, and immediately started a campaign of Sovietization. In the aftermath of the invasion, a collective of underground resistance organizations formed the Polish Underground State within the territory of the former Polish state. Many of the military exiles who managed to escape Poland subsequently joined the Polish Armed Forces in the West, an armed force loyal to the Polish government in exile. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasion_of_Poland.
03/26/2022 Saturday Day 31
Systems Assessment 03/26/22
The Ukrainians do not have years. They are lucky if they can hold out the next few months without the weapons they are requesting. President Zelensky was very clear that President Biden, the US, NATO, and the leaders of the EU know this reality. The Russian army has pulled back to defend their artillery positions. They are getting ready to bomb Ukrainian cities into oblivion as the West watches.
US President Joe Biden ended the speech in Warsaw Poland with for Gods sake this man [Putin] cannot remain in power. This is a direct call for regime change in Russia. In Ukraine people are very aware of their history of grandmothers in Russian Gulags and young people that have died in the invasion of 2014. This speech is an inflection point in the war. Russia and Putin have been put on notice that there will be regime change in Russia. It does not matter that the White House released a statement backing off on the original words spoken by President Biden.
It was a remarkable statement that would reverse stated US policy, directly countering claims from senior administration officials, including Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who have insisted regime change is not on the table. It went further than even US presidents during the Cold War, and immediately reverberated around the world as world leaders, diplomats, and foreign policy experts sought to determine what Biden said, what it meant and, if he didn’t mean it, why he said it. Shortly after the speech, a White House official sought to clarify the comments. “The president’s point was that Putin cannot be allowed to exercise power over his neighbors or the region. He was not discussing Putin’s power in Russia or regime change,” the official said.
The difference is that this war is worse than any event during the cold war, even the Cuban missile crisis because this is a massive shooting war that has destabilized the world.
03/25/2022 Friday Day 30
03/24/2022 Thursday Day 29
03/23/2022 Wednesday Day 28
03/22/2022 Tuesday Day 27
Transcript
https://transcripts.cnn.com/show/ampr/date/2022-03-22/segment/01
*** EXTRACT START ***
Interview With Kremlin Press Secretary Dmitry PESKOV;
Interview With Bellingcat Executive Director Christo Grozev;
Interview With Washington Post Global Opinions Writer Jason Rezaian. (not
included below)
Aired 2-3p ET Aired March 22, 2022 - 14:00 ET THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED. [14:00:00]
CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CNN INTERNATIONAL HOST: Hello, everyone, and welcome to AMANPOUR. Here's what's coming up. (BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
AMANPOUR (voice-over): The Kremlin's view of the war, an exclusive interview with Dmitry PESKOV, President Putin's chief spokesperson and close confidant. He spent more than 20 years at the Russian president's side. Then: in a war of information, getting the facts with the Russia investigator for open source intelligence site Bellingcat. Plus: JASON REZAIAN, JOURNALIST DETAINED IN IRAN: It is very, very fishy. And I think, by keeping it quiet, we haven't done her any favors.
AMANPOUR: Jason Rezaian, "The Washington Post" journalist formally detained in Iran, talks to Hari Sreenivasan about the case of the American basketball star Brittney Griner, who has been held in Russian custody since mid-February. (END VIDEOTAPE)
AMANPOUR: Welcome to the program, everyone. I'm Christiane AMANPOUR in London. As the war in Ukraine rages into its fourth week, a huge question remains: What is Russian President Vladimir Putin thinking? What is the endgame? If anyone knows, it is my first guest tonight, Dmitry PESKOV, who has served as Putin's chief spokesman for more than two decades. And he's been at Putin's side throughout his rise to power. He is a close confidant. It's a relationship that's made him also a high-profile target for Western sanctions. And Dmitry PESKOV is joining me now from Moscow for this exclusive interview.
Dmitry PESKOV, welcome to the program. Can I start by asking you -- we're, as I said, nearly four weeks into this war. You, by all intelligence, I guess, experts, are somewhat stalled, certainly around Kyiv and in other parts. There seems to be low morale amount amongst your troops. There seems to be equipment breakdowns and command-and-control issues. My first question is, what does President Putin think he has achieved in Ukraine to date?
DMITRY PESKOV, KREMLIN PRESS SECRETARY: Well, first of all, not yet. He hasn't achieved yet. And we're speaking about special military operation that is going on. And it is going on strictly in accordance with the plans and with purposes that were established beforehand. And, of course, well, first of all, I think we have to speak about the reasons for this operation, I mean, because speaking about the morale against -- amongst our military, of course, you operate data and information coming from different media and from your intelligence. But you would probably have to doubt this information. You have to doubt it, and you have to think twice whether it is true or not.
AMANPOUR: Well, here's the thing, Mr. PESKOV. Intelligence that really predicted the invasion turned out to be true, despite what you all told us from the Kremlin. So, let's just get past that. We have also heard civilians and journalists who've seen Russian troops and who've recounted. But that's -- that's -- be that as it may, when you say he hasn't achieved, President Putin hasn't achieved yet, what do you foresee? Because this was going to be, according to your own side, in the press, in the state- sponsored media in Russia, a pretty quick operation. It was even suggested that, within a couple of days, that -- quote, unquote -- "Ukraine would return to" -- quote, unquote -- "mother Russia." What has gone wrong? And what do you see for the next phase of this?
PESKOV: Well, of course, no one would think from the very beginning about a couple of days. It's a serious operation with serious purposes. And I think, if we try to remember those purposes, those main goals of the operation, it's to get rid of the military potential of Ukraine. And, actually, this is why our military are targeting only military goals and military objects on the territory of Ukraine, not civil ones. Russian military are not hitting civil aims, civil targets. [14:05:00] Number two is to ensure that Ukraine changes from anti-Russian center to a neutral country. And, in this sense, let's remember that, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, actually, the neutral status was fixed in a declaration of independence of the country. Number three, to get rid of the nationalist battalions and nationalist regiments who are now actually, who are now opposing Russian troops, who are now trying to cover themselves under the shield of civilians, thus paving a way for civil casualties.
AMANPOUR: Dmitry...
PESKOV: And also...
AMANPOUR: Yes?
PESKOV: And, also -- I beg your pardon, if you let me -- and also to ensure -- to ensure that Ukraine acknowledges, acknowledges the fact that Crimea is also an untakable part of Russia, and that People's Republics of Luhansk and Donetsk are already independent states, that Ukraine actually has lost them after the coup that happened in 2014.
AMANPOUR: OK. So, basically, you are putting and laying out the original demands from President Putin, which I understand seem not to have changed. Let us talk about civilian infrastructure. Look, I know you guys say that you're not targeting civilians. And you have just told me it was a special military operation, which is, I know, what the Kremlin military censorship demands. It is a war and it is an invasion. And we're all watching it all over global television, no matter what you tell your own people. There are so many civilian targets that it's hard to count them right now. And you may deny it, but even the Chinese, Dmitry, even the Chinese, who are your friends, have expressed a very, very deep concern about civilian targets. Let me just read what the Foreign Ministry has said. It is "deeply grieved to see the conflict between Ukraine and Russia and highly concerned about the damage done to civilians." They are very, very concerned. Those are your friends, the Chinese, not weirdo journalists or anybody who's actually watching it with their own eyes and can tell the truth. So, what is -- the real question is, what is President Putin's strategic goal in blasting the civilian infrastructure of places like Mariupol, which we are watching turn to smithereens, for the last several weeks now? What's the strategic goal?
PESKOV: Well, the strategic goal is to clear up the Mariupol from nationalistic regiments who are there, and in a heavily covered environment, and so -- and, by the way, they're simply not letting people out from the city, from the town. And this is a problem, because now we're receiving lots of refugees coming from there. And they simply tell us -- they're eyewitnesses. They simply tell us that they were used like a shield. They were used under heavy bombardment. And then those nationalists, they were -- they were killing people who would want to leave the city. And now the main goal is to get rid of those bad guys there.
AMANPOUR: Dmitry, we also have reporters who are quite close to Mariupol. And they are watching, because, actually, some civilians are getting out right now. And they obviously tell a completely different story, that they have been prevented from getting out. And we know that any attempt to establish any kind of humanitarian corridor has collapsed under the weight of Russian shelling, even when you give assurances. There is no food going in. And your own Defense Ministry said these last few days that only if Mariupol surrenders will they allow food, water medicine to go in there. I have -- I have covered a siege, probably the longest in modern history, the siege of Sarajevo. So I know the playbook very, very well. So, the question is, why are they then coming out and telling -- telling us that? But, also, there are reports that Russia is taking civilians and citizens from Mariupol, taking them over to Russia, and, in some cases, putting them way out in the hinterlands and to work, in perhaps work camps, I don't know, but putting them to work.
PESKOV: No, this is not true. This is not true. It's a fake. It's a fake. And then -- well, believe me, we're all living, well, not under the -- not only under the circumstances of military operation. We're living in a severe informational war, in a war of fakes. [14:10:00] And then -- well, you have to -- you have to know the situation from the outside -- or from the inside. And, sometimes, it's very hard to understand what is going on there. So, and -- if you are a journalist. And we're receiving operation there from our military -- information. And then we know what is being said by the people who are -- who are, well, led by those nationalist regiments to leave the city. And then -- so, it's very desperate stories that they are telling us.
AMANPOUR: Why do you think most Russians who are able to get out of these horrendously besieged areas and horrendously shelled areas, why do you think they're fleeing west, they're trying to get out to other parts of Ukraine and to the west, rather than fleeing to Russia, if -- if they feel so safe with you? Why do you think that's happening?
PESKOV: Part of them is going eastwards. Part of them is going westwards. It's a choice of people. And no one is making any obstacles.
AMANPOUR: Let me put it this way, then. Let's just say you believe all of this. You have just talked about a disinformation war. Russia is known to have perfected the disinformation war ever since it was the Soviet Union. Russian propaganda is incredibly effective, incredibly effective. Let's just say that your people believe it. Let's just say that they believe all this stuff that you have said as a reason for this war, for this invasion, whatever you call it, special military operation. How then do you -- how then do you square the circle that something like 90 percent of the Ukrainian people, asked, believe that they will win, and that barely a single one of them has collaborated, has surrendered, has shown anything other than a fierce patriotic fervor to hold onto their country and to hold onto their sovereignty and their Ukraine? Are you surprised? Is the president, President Putin, surprised by that?
PESKOV: Well, first of all, you are mistaken. There are Ukrainians who are collaborating. There are Ukrainians who are in cooperation with our military. There are Ukrainians who would like to avoid any casualties and who are in contacts with our military, whether they like it or don't. But they understand, because it was declared that, if you don't -- if you don't aim our -- target our military, if you're not trying to kill them, no one is going to hurt you. We will hurt, but we will hurt those nationalistic Nazis. We will hurt Nazis, not ordinary people and civil people. It is forbidden to target civil people for our military. So, and then, partly, partly, they are in cooperation with our guys. So, you are simply mistaken. And speaking about propaganda, starting from a great school of the Soviet Union, I would say that masterpieces of propaganda that we're witnessing now in the West is a good school for us. And we're not that good pupils. I mean, I can even ask you why -- why, for example, CNN is that single- sided in covering this story.
AMANPOUR: Well, you lead me then to -- I wasn't going to get there. But if you would allow journalists to come into Russia, and actually report this in a truthful way, rather than heavily military censorship, we would be able to report much more of your side. But let's park that for the moment, and let's carry on. President Putin -- first and foremost, you have seen it, Dmitry. I know that you're watching international news. I know that you watch it, whatever the Russian people see. You have seen the Ukrainian people refuse to surrender. Every single time your forces issue an ultimatum, not an invitation, an ultimatum, they simply refuse to surrender. And I'm not talking about troops. I'm talking about old men and women. I'm talking about young people. I'm talking about kids. They just won't surrender. This is something that has surprised and impressed, actually, the whole world. So, let me just quickly ask you again, what is the endgame? Is it to occupy Ukraine? Can you actually do it with the number of troops that you have? Do you really think that, even if you win a battle here or there, that you can win a long war?
PESKOV: Occupation is not among the aims of the operation that were stated.
AMANPOUR: Right. OK. Well, that's that answer then. Let me ask you, again, about -- we're trying to get to the truth, right, Dmitry? So, I'm going to -- actually, let me -- let me just ask. Do you see President Putin often? I mean, you're his spokesperson. You -- you know, we know that you're obviously a close official, a close confidant. Do you see him often? [14:15:05] When was the last time you saw him?
PESKOV: Well, we are in contact on daily basis.
AMANPOUR: Face to face? Sorry. It's just interesting.
PESKOV: Sometimes -- sometimes face to face, sometimes on the telephone. It's -- it doesn't matter.
AMANPOUR: I want to ask you this question about the Ukrainians, because several analysts are watching. And they have listened to what President Putin has said about mother Russia, about a fraternal Ukraine or a Ukraine that doesn't exist and has no right to exist. And they're wondering whether the president is getting very angry with the Ukrainians. They're wondering whether there's a -- there's sort of a punishment against the Ukrainians being leveled. I spoke with the Finnish president, Sauli Niinisto, who, as you know, has met many times with President Putin. And he described to me what he felt was a sense of growing, I'm going to use -- well, hatred is what he said, by President Putin for the Ukrainian people, for the Ukrainian leadership now.
PESKOV: No, he's not angry with Ukrainians. And no one here in Russia is angry with Ukrainians. He's angry with the -- those people in Ukraine who want to be part of NATO and who want to deploy nuclear -- American nuclear missiles on their territory. And he is angry with those people in Ukraine who forbids people to speak Russian in their country, including those Russians who are living in Ukraine for ages. He is angry with those people in Ukraine who carries symbols of Nazis on the streets of Kyiv and Lviv. And he's crazy with the -- he's angry with the Ukrainians and those people in Ukraine who would want to -- who would want to speak with the world, with Minsk negotiations group, years and years, without implementing any obligations. It's a fact...
AMANPOUR: Well, look, President Putin tore up the Minsk Accords by deciding to do what he wanted to do. And, as you know, Zelenskyy has already said several times in the last few weeks that he knows there is no NATO on the table for Ukraine. So, all the other things are presumably negotiable, what you have just said about neo- Nazis and signs and languages. But you know also that neo-Nazis or ultranationalists, which do exist there, are a very, very small group that barely won any percentage in recent elections. So, it's kind of a straw man. But you mentioned nuclear. You know better than I do that Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons in 1994 to Russia, and Russia was meant to defend it, according to the agreement in Budapest -- Bucharest or Budapest -- I'm sorry, I can't remember -- not to attack it. But it's President Putin who has put the nuclear card on the table. Can you tell me and tell the world whether you believe President Putin has tried to scare the rest of the world and Ukraine by mentioning the nuclear option? Can you tell me that? And can you tell me that he would never use a nuclear weapon?
PESKOV: Two things. I would disagree with you, firstly. President Putin was not the one who ruined Minsk Accords.
AMANPOUR: OK.
PESKOV: That was Ukrainian side. This is number one. Number two, Ukrainian, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, handed in all the nuclear weapons to the Russian Federation. But, unfortunately, in the year of 2022, just a couple of months ago, in Munich conference, President Zelenskyy started to speak about possibility of generating nuclear arms on the territory of Ukraine. And, most probably, you have witnessed that. (CROSSTALK)
AMANPOUR: I was actually there, Dmitry.
PESKOV: Yes.
AMANPOUR: And I actually interviewed him. I do remember him saying: Look what we have got for giving up our nuclear weapons. And the real issue is now what do you expect other countries to do when you ask them to give up their nuclear weapons? Because territorial integrity and sovereignty has been violated. Again, even your friends the Chinese have said they respect every nation's territorial integrity and sovereignty, including Ukraine's. Could I quickly ask you, though? I need to ask you this, because the world is afraid, and I want to know whether Putin intends the world to be afraid of the nuclear option. [14:20:01] Would he use it?
PESKOV: President Putin intends to -- intends to make the world listen to and understand our concerns. We have been trying to convey our concerns to the world, to Europe, to the United States, for a couple of decades, but no one would listen to us. And before it is too late, it was a decision to start -- to launch a special operation, military operation, to get rid of entire Russia that was created next to our borders.
AMANPOUR: What? To get rid of Russia?
PESKOV: Anti-Russia, because Ukraine -- actually, Ukraine started to be -- it was formed by the Western countries, anti-Russia.
AMANPOUR: Oh, OK. OK.
PESKOV: This is the problem.
AMANPOUR: Look, Ukraine is a country, sovereign. It's recognized by the United Nations. It's been around for a very, very long time. But I just want to know. I want to ask you again, is President Putin -- because, again, the Finnish president said to me that when he asked Putin directly about this, because President Putin has laid that card on the label, President Putin said that, if anybody tries to stop him, very bad things will happen. And I want to know whether you are convinced or confident that your boss will not use that option.
PESKOV: Well, we have a concept of domestic security, and, well, it's public. You can read all the reasons for nuclear arms to be used. So, if it is an existential threat for our country, then it can be used, in accordance with our concept.
AMANPOUR: Well...
PESKOV: There are no other reasons that were mentioned in that text.
AMANPOUR: So, you are basically saying only an existential threat to your country. I still don't know that I have got a full answer from you. And I just -- I'm just going to assume that President Putin wants to scare the world and keep the world on the tenterhooks. What about chemical and biological weapons? The United States has said that they have -- they believe that there's intelligence that a frustrated President Putin, lack of progress on the ground, may be preparing to use chemical or even biological weapons against Ukrainian troops, civilians or its leadership.
PESKOV: Well, unfortunately, we have a very strong reason to believe and a very strong evidence that United States have been developing biolabs programs on the territory of various countries around the Russian Federation, including the territory of Ukraine. And this is quite -- quite a sophisticated and quite a dangerous biolab program that was led, top secret, by American specialists.
AMANPOUR: OK.
PESKOV: This is reality that we're facing.
AMANPOUR: Well...
PESKOV: And when it comes to biological and chemical weapons, we don't have these weapons anymore. In the year of 2017, if I'm not mistaken, it was destroyed completely, in accordance with international agreements.
AMANPOUR: Dmitry PESKOV, the United States and allies completely deny that. Basically, there are no Ukrainian biological weapons laboratories, not near Russia's border, not anywhere, says the U.N. ambassador, only public health facilities proudly supported and recognized by the U.S. government, the World Health Organization, and other governments and international institutions. They believe this is part of your disinformation campaign, which confuses issues. Can I ask you the following? Before the invasion, yourself and several other high-ranked Russian officials denied to the whole world that there was going to be anything like this and accused all the rest of the world of being hysterical. In November, you responded yourself, saying: "Such headlines are nothing more than empty, unfounded escalation of tension. Russia poses no threat to anyone." Your E.U. ambassador, Chizov, eight days before the invasion says: "I can assure, as far as Russia is concerned, there will be no attack this Wednesday. There will be no escalation next week or the week after or next month." And your deputy foreign minister, Sergei Ryabkov, shortly after negotiations with the Americans and other side in January said the following. And here's his sound bite. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) SERGEI RYABKOV, RUSSIAN DEPUTY FOREIGN MINISTER: I do believe that there is no risk of a larger-scale war to start to unfold in Europe or elsewhere. [14:25:02] We do not want, and we will not take any action of aggressive character. We will not attack strike, "invade" -- quote, unquote -- whatever, Ukraine. (END VIDEO CLIP)
AMANPOUR: Dmitry, those are emphatic denials of any such intention very close to the day of the invasion, and as what now turns out to be very accurate intelligence was telling everybody that this was going to happen. So, I guess I can't ask you why the lies, but what I want to ask you is, after all those lies, how do you expect Russia at the highest levels to be taken seriously now? What can one believe about what's coming up next and about what you all say about what -- what's next in terms of negotiations or the situation on the ground?
PESKOV: Well, yes, we have said it. And we have said that hoping, hoping that Ukraine will never get prepared for strike against Donbass. Yes, we have said that hoping that, at the end, that, at the end, there will be a breakthrough in Normandy process, Normandy format. And -- but, after that, in a couple of days, there was perfectly clear for us, there was perfectly clear for our military specialists that Ukraine was going to launch an offensive against Donbass, that Ukraine, by the way, before the end of the operation, Ukraine have concentrated more than 120,000 military personnel at the border, at the division line. And there were clear signs that an offensive was going to -- to start. So, this was the reason. This was the reason. Like elsewhere, like everyone in the world, until the last moment, we never wanted to believe -- we never wanted to believe that -- to that grave sense, no one would listen to our concerns. No one would warn Ukrainians not to do that. No one would push Ukrainians towards the solution within a framework of Normandy process. But no one -- no one did that.
AMANPOUR: OK. Well, there are all these foreign leaders. We know that both presidents went to France to talk about this. None of the intelligence that we heard suggested any such buildup by Ukrainian forces, in fact, the opposite, with President Zelenskyy saying, no, no, no, no, it's not going to happen, stay calm. In fact, Western intelligence was concerned there wouldn't even be a defense from Ukraine, that they hadn't even been prepared for what was coming their way. Are you, is the president surprised at the level of defense and resistance by the Ukrainian forces?
PESKOV: Well, near the Donbass, actually, the level of resistance in Donbass shows that they were quite well-prepared, but they were not well- prepared for the defense. They were preparing for offensive operations. This is the case.
AMANPOUR: OK. All right. Well, here's the thing. They have held you off for nearly four months -- four weeks. Who knows what's going to happen in the future, but you are a much more powerful military. So that constitutes resistance and defense in most -- in most understandings of that. Can I finally ask you? Alexey Navalny has been sentenced, I believe, to nine years in maximum security. People on the streets of Russia have been hoovered up and detained somewhere in the region of, according to the CIA, some 14,000 to 15,000 Russians. You have prevented independent news organizations from calling it a war, from describing anything about it, other than the Defense Ministry line and the Kremlin line. My question is, what are you so afraid of, of Navalny, of journalists, of the truth? What is there to fear?
PESKOV: No. Well, Navalny -- Navalny is a prisoner. He's a prisoner. He had his first sentence. Now he's got his second one. And he's blamed -- and it is proven by the prosecutor's office that he's blamed for fraud. So, it's purely economical crime. He was collecting money by his foundation from citizens, regular citizens of Russia, and also from abroad, and he was spending part of that money for his personal purposes. This is fraud in our country. And he was supposed to be punished. [14:30:06] And no one is afraid of him. It's -- if people is a criminal, he should be in prison. This is the same thing that is happening in the United States and in European countries.
AMANPOUR: I know you say that. I know the prosecution says that, but the people who allegedly claim that he was taking their money and using it for himself then said on the stand they had been forced to make -- to make those testimonies. So, listen, Dmitry PESKOV, I appreciate you being with us. It gives us something of an understanding from your side. And I hope we can continue the conversation as we watch this war unfold. Thank you so much.
PESKOV: Yes, I would be pleased to do that.
AMANPOUR: My next guest is one of the leaders of the open-source investigative organization known as Bellingcat. The site gathers and verifies information from public data to find things that others don't -- often miss rather. You may recall, they work in Syria where they uncovered evidence chemical weapons attacks by President Assad against his own people. And now, they're tirelessly working to track, verify or debunk information surrounding the war in Ukraine. Christo Grozev is Bellingcat's executive director and lead Russian investigator, and he's joining me now. Christo, welcome to the program. Obviously, Russia is what you work on most, and particularly now. What would you say you got from what my conversation with Dmitry PESKOV right now about what's going on the ground?
CHRISTO GROZEV, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, BELLINGCAT: Well, first thing I got is that you have extreme patience, and I admire you. I would not have been able to sustain that conversation. But what I understand is that Mr. PESKOV is probably not really aware of what Russia's strategy is and what Russia's revised strategy after the initial failures is because his answers did not make any sense. And I do think that that reflects a broader understanding that only a very small group of people close to Putin, most militarized (INAUDIBLE) or power elite are aware of what he thinks, and probably that is the extent of Mr. PESKOV. But what we do is we try to track the evidence of war crimes or evidence of civilian harm. We focused nearly 100 percent of Bellingcat's activity since the start of the war into that. We sometimes divert into debunking the random claim that Russia puts or Ukraine puts out, regardless which country puts forward unsupported claims. But essentially, all after our efforts are going to focused on chronically logging and preserving for judicial investigations, evidence of civilian harm. So, that's what we do now.
AMANPOUR: So, let me -- before I get to those details, can I just ask you whether you also see what American intelligence seems to be seeing, that they say somewhere, you know, between seven and maybe 9,000 Russian soldiers have been killed. You know, they're also suggesting that a number of generals have been killed. Are you able at all to open-source or geolocate any of that?
GROZEV: This is not our main activity. We did start at the beginning tracking casualties on the Russian side. But we have to focus fully on tracking civilian harm. The numbers that are put forward by the Ukrainian side, which is about 12,500 are a bit high based on what we see. We do see numbers that are more in the 8,000 to 10,000 range. And we understand that domestically, within the Russian military command, they're also acknowledging about 5 ,000 deaths at this point. This comes from several sources inside Russia to us. And I do think that 8,000 to 9,000 is the right number at this point.
AMANPOUR: Can you talk to me about the civilian targeting? I mean, the Russians are absolutely clear in everything they tell the world, we do not target civilian infrastructure. And yet, we see before our eyes what's happened to Mariupol, what civilian targets are hit in other cities, including in Kyiv, and, you know, the number of dead and wounded. But there's a very sophisticated way that they have of saying, well, this person is a fake and that person is a fake, and it was all actors and it was all staged. Can you get beyond that given that there's not many independent journalists in Mariupol?
GROZEV: We try to. So far, we've gathered more than 400 incidents of civilian harm. Of those about 10 percent, 40 of them represent egregious civilian harm incidents, which could have been prevented, should have been prevented with care and compliance with military rules of engagement. What we're seeing is a neglect on the Russian side of the traditional military rules of engagement that are meant to avoid civilian casualties. Every war will have collateral damage of civilian casualties. What is particular here is that the Russian side does not make the effort. And one makes -- one may believe that actually is part of their strategy to terrorize the population in order for pressure to build up on the government to come to some sort of a compromise with Kremlin. [14:35:00] But what we see is not only evidence of targets that have zero military infrastructure importance such as schools, hospitals and theaters, as we have seen recently, administrative buildings, but we also see some explanation for why that is happening. There are a lot of intercepted phone calls that are being published by the Ukrainian Security Services and we were able to verify a small portion of that, the ones where they publish also the phone numbers of the calling parties. And we hear a lot of Russian officers and soldiers talking to their loved ones in Russia complaining about the plight that they're in, and actually, informing their wives, of their spouses that they have been given instructions to ignore the duty of care to civilians, to actually not even pay attention to whom they're shooting as long as somebody is in their line of view. And this would explain also the total neglect for civilian casualties when artillery or other missile shelling is taken -- is implemented.
AMANPOUR: Well, that is quite extraordinary information to be able to have. Just very briefly and finally, you did a lot of investigation, Bellingcat did, in Syria and you saw the pattern. Are we seeing some of the same pattern now?
GROZEV: Yes. We're seeing a pattern of, well, first of all, disinformation and continuous industrial scale fabrication of fakes. What we're seeing is a slightly different direction of the fakes coming from the Russian government. They're mostly meant for domestic audience. They kind of have given up on trying to convince the world. They did make some ludicrous claims such as the Russian ambassador to the Netherlands showed up on a program on Dutch TV and claimed that the two different women who were victims in the Mariupol Maternity Hospital, one of whom died, he showed the photographs of these completely two different women and claimed that both of them are a crisis actor, the same one at that. So, they're doing some ill-advised international attempts with most of the -- most of this information is targeting a domestic audience. What we see is also terrorizing civilian areas that have a particular emotional effect such as hospitals, and I think that that may be part of the strategy to terrorize the population as opposed to an incident.
AMANPOUR: Thank you for being with us. Christo Grozev, thank you very much, of Bellingcat. Too often, ordinary citizens get caught up in the days' geopolitical dramas. Take the recently released Anglo-Iranian aid worker Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe who was held for six years held by Tehran and the American basketball star Brittney Griner who is being detained right now in Russia since its war on Ukraine, rather a little before. Our next guest has experienced these cruel tactics firsthand. Jason Rezaian writes for the "Washington Post Global Opinions" and while serving as the paper's correspondent in Teheran, he spent 544 days unjustly imprisoned on trumped up charges by Iranian authorities. And here he with Hari Sreenivasan discussing how to help those who are too often used as bargaining chips.
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03/21/2022 Monday Day 26
03/20/2022 Sunday Day 25
Systems Assessment 03/20/2022 Day 25
It is clear that Ukraine should be provided with the MIG-29 aircraft offered by Poland.
03/19/2022 Saturday Day 24
Systems Assessment 03/19/2022 Day 21
Some are suggesting that this is the start of World War III. Others are suggesting that this is the start of World War 2.5, which is really World War III but without nuclear weapons. Both are completely wrong. This is a continuation of World War II.
When World War II ended the agreements in Yalta drew artificial boundaries and tossed whole countries into the Russian Empire known as the Soviet Union. When the Soviet Union collapsed many of those countries regained their independence and were able to join NATO and become part of the EU. Ukraine was unable to do that and continued to be a colony of Russia. While it is true that Russia shares many cultural elements of many countries in the region including Ukraine, there is one massive difference, Russia replaced its totalitarian rule of the Czars with totalitarian rule by dictators while all the other countries shed those cultural and political systems and instead embraced Democracy deep in the last century.
Refugees in the US thought as late as the early 1960s that the betrayal at the Yalta conference would be reversed and that they would be able to return home. By 1965 it was clear that it would not happen and they adapted as best as they could to their new homes. As difficult as it was to adapt in these new lands they had one great element in common; Democracy and the love of freedom and liberty that was part of the cultural heritage and deeply embedded in their very souls. Everywhere they went they would remind everyone including the Americans about democracy. So the words spoken by President Zelensky about Democracy are not new words. They are words that were spoken by his grand parents and deeply rooted in the Ukrainian souls.
In many ways Ukraine and Russia are like the US and Great Britain, except with the US and Great Britain they both have culture and political systems that do not accept dictators. Unfortunately for Ukraine and Russia, they have a completely different culture and political system where one embraces dictators and rejects the rule of law when it gets in the way. In many ways this is the same challenge that the West is facing with a class of super rich that thinks they are above the law and can act like dictators when it suits their needs. Until the Russian people realize that they still have not shed their Czar and they reject grand ideas and plans for Empire where only an elite few in Russia benefit, Ukraine and Russia will never reach an agreement where Russia rules over Ukraine.
The connection between the super rich in the West and Russia is very real. They have been affecting US policy towards Ukraine for decades. The most recent example is when Trump illegally compromised US policy towards Ukraine and was impeached. President Zelensky is not wrong that the Ukrainian fight is a fight about Democracy versus Totalitarianism around the world. It is not the first time the US had a serious internal split in times of very serious war. The last time was World War II when some of the US super rich sided with fascism and the Nazis. It was very difficult for the US to maintain control and that is one of the primary reasons why the US sided with Russia in World War II. They knew that they could control the communists in the US after the war but they would be unable to control the fascist and Nazis if they won the war. The American Democracy would come to an end. So the US went to bed with a demon rather than the devil.
When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014 I shared an office with a retried US enlisted Navy person who served his country for decades around the world and in many military missions. When the topic of the Russian invasion of Ukraine surfaced I did a quick search of the military capability of Russia and Ukraine in terms of numbers of assets and my question was who will help Ukraine because they have no military assets and they gave away their nuclear weapons in exchange for protection. His response was that the US will not help because people have to be willing to fight and Ukrainians are unwilling to fight. I did not tell him about the villages, towns, and yes cities that were removed from the face of the earth during World War II and how millions died and millions of others were scattered across the globe as they fought in World War II. I did not tell him about the massive numbers of people arrested and sent to Siberia or just killed during the cold war. I just thought to myself, what a smug military person protected by massive technology and resources not really seeing the horror of massive war that destroys whole civilizations.
For those who think that the current Russian behavior is justified or new are in for a rude awakening.
03/18/2022 Friday Day 23
03/17/2022 Thursday Day 22
03/16/2022 Wednesday Day 21
Systems Assessment 03/16/2022 Day 21
The S-300 is a series of initially Soviet and later Russian long range surface-to-air missile systems. The S-300 system was developed to defend against aircraft and cruise missiles for the Soviet Air Defence Forces. Subsequent variations were developed to intercept ballistic missiles. The S-300 system was first deployed by the Soviet Union in 1979, designed for the air defence of large industrial and administrative facilities, military bases and control of airspace against enemy strike aircraft. The system is fully automated, though manual observation and operation are also possible. Components may be near the central command post, or up to 40 km away. Each radar provides target designation for the central command post. The command post compares the data received from the targeting radars up to 80 km apart, filtering false targets. The central command post features both active and passive target detection modes. The S-300 is regarded as one of the most potent anti-aircraft missile systems currently fielded. It is mainly used in Asia and Eastern Europe, including three NATO member countries: Bulgaria, Greece and Slovakia. An evolved version of the S-300 system is the S-400, which entered service on 28 April 2007. Target detection range 180 - 360 km. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-300_missile_system.
The AeroVironment Switchblade is a miniature-sized loitering munition drone developed by AeroVironment. It is designed as a kamikaze drone, being able to crash into its target with an explosive warhead to destroy it. The Switchblade is small enough to be carried in a backpack and can be launched from a variety of ground, maritime, and air platforms. Two variants exist, the Switchblade 300 and the Switchblade 600. The larger Switchblade 600 loitering munition weighs 50 lb (23 kg) but is man-portable and can be set up in 10 minutes. It is designed to fly out to 40 km (25 mi) in 20 minutes, then loiter for another 20 minutes (giving it an 80 km (50 mi) total range) and attack at a 115 mph (185 km/h) dash speed, carrying an anti-armor warhead designed to neutralize armored vehicles. A touchscreen tablet-based fire control system can manually or autonomously control the munition, and it is secured through onboard encrypted data links and Selective Availability Anti-Spoofing Module GPS. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AeroVironment_Switchblade.
MQ-9 Reaper (Predator B) is an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) capable of remotely controlled or autonomous flight operations for the United States Air Force (USAF). The MQ-9 is the first hunter-killer UAV designed for long-endurance, high-altitude surveillance. In 2006, the then - Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force General T. Michael Moseley said: "We've moved from using UAVs primarily in intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance roles before Operation Iraqi Freedom, to a true hunter-killer role with the Reaper. The MQ-9 is a larger, heavier, and more capable aircraft than the earlier Predator; it can be controlled by the same ground systems used to control MQ-1s. The aircraft is monitored and controlled by aircrew in the Ground Control Station (GCS), including weapons employment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Atomics_MQ-9_Reaper.
The Predator is an American remotely piloted aircraft (RPA) that was used primarily by the United States Air Force (USAF) and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Conceived in the early 1990s for aerial reconnaissance and forward observation roles, the Predator carries cameras and other sensors. It was modified and upgraded to carry and fire two AGM-114 Hellfire missiles or other munitions. The aircraft entered service in 1995, and saw combat in the war in Afghanistan, Pakistan, the NATO intervention in Bosnia, 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, the Iraq War, Yemen, the 2011 Libyan civil war, the 2014 intervention in Syria, and Somalia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Atomics_MQ-1_Predator.
03/15/2022 Tuesday Day 20
Systems Assessment 03/15/2022 Day 20
After 1991, the post-communist countries of eastern Europe, particularly Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia, found themselves in an uncertain security environment. Nearby Yugoslavia was falling apart, and they had their own potential border disputes. Most of all, though, they had a vivid memory of Russian imperialism. They did not believe Russia would remain weak for ever, and they wanted to align with NATO while they still could. “If you don’t let us into Nato, we’re getting nuclear weapons,” Polish officials told a team of thinktank researchers in 1993. “We don’t trust the Russians.”
03/14/2022 Monday Day 19
03/13/2022 Saturday Day 18
Systems Background 03/13/2022 Day 18
A Battalion Tactical Group (BTG), is a unit deployed by the Russian Army that is kept at a high level of readiness. A BTG includes a battalion (typically mechanized infantry) of 2 to 4 companies reinforced with air-defence, artillery, engineering, and logistical support units, formed from a garrisoned army brigade. A tank company and rocket artillery also reinforce such groupings. BTGs were the mainstay of Russia's military attack in Ukraine from 2013 to 2015, particularly in the Donbass war. As of August 2021 Russia had about 170 BTGs. Each BTG has approximately 600 - 800 officers and soldiers, of whom roughly 200 are infantry, equipped with vehicles typically including roughly 10 tanks and 40 infantry fighting vehicles.
The number of confirmed deaths in the Russo-Ukrainian War (Donbas and Crimea) from the UN are 13,100 to 13,300 Ukranians with 3,393 Ukranian Civilians killed between 6 April 2014 to 31 January 2021. According to the Ukrainian government 14,000 Ukranians were killed by 13 May 2021.
03/12/2022 Saturday Day 17
Systems Assessment 03/12/22: Day 17
It is clear that Russia does not care about any economic sanctions. They are engaged in a full out war with Ukraine and they expanded the war to include the destruction of multiple Ukrainian cities and the mass killing of civilians.
The current system being used by the West has had no effect on the Russian war machine that has attacked Ukraine. There have been multiple attempts at negotiations and the Russian demands have not changed since the start of the war. After each negotiation attempt, the war was expanded and became more brutal.
It currently appears that the West is hoping that Russia will stop its military invasions with Ukraine and that the war will not expand into NATO countries. The Ukrainians are suggesting that this war will expand and that World War III has started.
The Ukrainians are requesting weapons that the West is afraid to provide because the West does not want to provoke Russia into expanding the war to include NATO. The Ukrainians are suggesting that the only way to stop Russia from invading NATO countries is to defeat them decisively in Ukraine and that can only happen with effective weapons.
The West thinks that if Russia is bogged down in a massive generational guerilla war in Ukraine, that Russia will be unable to invade NATO countries.
Some suggest that the war will end if Russia is able to penetrate the Ukrainian capital, raise the Russian flag and President Zelensky is arrested, killed, or flees Ukraine.
The West is hoping that China, India, and or Turkey can convince Putin to stop the war. This is unlikely. At the beginning of this section are possible peace treaty terms.
03/11/2022 Friday Day 16
03/10/2022 Thursday Day 15
03/09/2022 Wednesday Day 14
03/08/2022 Tuesday Day 13
The following includes media chatter as policy and Ukrainian weapons needs becomes the focus.
03/07/2022 Monday Day 12
03/06/2022 Sunday Day 11
03/05/2022 Saturday Day 10
Systems Assessment 03/05/22: Day 10
It is clear that Ukraine was not provided the needed military equipment to defend themselves against the Russian invasion. The question is why? History has been written. If Ukraine falls, future generations will not be kind to all the players, including those that were supposed to help them fight the Russians.
Ukraine needs missile defense systems immediately. Some have claimed that this is not possible because it would take years to establish. That is a lie. There are many mobile missile defense systems available from many countries around the world. For example, the AN/TPQ-36 Firefinder radar and AN/TPQ-37 Firefinder radar. No training is required by the Ukrainians. They are smart and well versed in high technology. All these systems are intentionally designed to be operated by soldiers at the 5th grade to 9th grade level. They are available and easy to deploy because that is their purpose.
Hughes AN/TPQ-36 Firefinder weapon locating system is a mobile radar system developed in the mid-late 1970s by Hughes Aircraft Company and manufactured by Northrop Grumman and Thales Raytheon Systems, achieving initial operational capability in May, 1982. The system is a "weapon-locating radar", designed to detect and track incoming mortar, artillery and rocket fire to determine the point of origin for counter-battery fire. It is currently in service at battalion and higher levels in the United States Army, United States Marine Corps and Australian Army. Also Turkish Army, Portugal and Ukrainian Army are among the users. The radar is typically trailer-mounted and towed by a Humvee. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AN/TPQ-36_Firefinder_radar.
The Hughes AN/TPQ-37 Firefinder Weapon Locating System is a mobile radar system developed in the late 1970s by Hughes Aircraft Company, achieving Initial Operational Capability in 1980 and full deployment in 1984. Currently manufactured by Thales Raytheon Systems, the system is a long-range version of “weapon-locating radar,” designed to detect and track incoming artillery and rocket fire to determine the point of origin for counter-battery fire. It is currently in service at brigade and higher levels in the United States Army and by other countries. The radar is trailer-mounted and towed by a 2-ton truck. A typical AN/TPQ-37 system consists of the Antenna-Transceiver Group, Command Shelter and 60 kW Generator. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AN/TPQ-37_Firefinder_radar.
Skyshield Air-defence system is a modular, light weight, Short Range Air Defense (SHORAD) system developed by the Swiss corporation Oerlikon Contraves (now a subsidiary of Rheinmetall of Germany). The successor to the Skyguard defense system, Skyshield is intended to rapidly acquire and destroy threatening aircraft and missiles, as well as to fulfill a C-RAM role. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyshield.
Iron Dome is a mobile all-weather air defense system developed by Rafael Advanced Defense Systems and Israel Aerospace Industries. The system is designed to intercept and destroy short-range rockets and artillery shells fired from distances of 4 kilometers (2.5 mi) to 70 kilometers (43 mi) away and whose trajectory would take them to an Israeli populated area. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Dome.
The Phalanx CIWS (pronounced "sea-wiz") is a close-in weapon system for defense against incoming threats such as small boats, surface torpedoes, anti-ship missiles and helicopters. A land variant, known as the LPWS (Land Phalanx Weapon System), part of the C-RAM system, has recently been deployed in a short range missile defense role, to counter incoming rockets, artillery and mortar fire. Once engaged it automatically detects and destroys all incoming threats. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phalanx_CIWS.
FAAD C2 is a battle-proven C2 system, deployed in several theaters of operation for the C-UAS and C-RAM (Counter-Rocket, Artillery and Mortar) missions for its proven performance and flexibility that enables easy integration with available sensors, effectors and warning systems to launch rapid, real-time defense against short range and maneuvering threats. https://asc.army.mil/web/portfolio-item/anmpq-64-sentinel-2 . https://man.fas.org/dod-101/sys/land/wsh2013/114.pdf.
Air Defense Background
Air defense systems are categorized as tactical or strategic. Tactical systems are used on the battle field. They are mobile systems designed to destroy incoming rockets, artillery, and mortar rounds. Some mobile systems are also strategic. Strategic air defense systems are meant to deal with aircraft and long range missile attacks. For example they are set to defend an ADIZ (air defense information zone) or detect and destroy a ballistic missile. Strategic systems are typically hardened fixed sites.
Counter rocket, artillery, and mortar, abbreviated C-RAM or counter-RAM, is a set of systems used to detect and/or destroy incoming rockets, artillery, and mortar rounds in the air before they hit their ground targets, or simply provide early warning. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counter_rocket,_artillery,_and_mortar.
A counter-battery radar (alternatively weapon tracking radar or COBRA) is a radar system that detects artillery projectiles fired by one or more guns, howitzers, mortars or rocket launchers and, from their trajectories, locates the position on the ground of the weapon that fired it. Such radars are a subclass of the wider class of target acquisition radars. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counter-battery_radar.
An Air Operations Center (AOC) provides command and control of air operations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Operations_Center. They operate with Regional Operations Centers (ROC) and Sector Operations Control Centers (SOCC) depending on the country and its air defense needs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Aerospace_Defense_Command . https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Aerospace_Defense_Command#/media/File:NORAD_Region-Sector_Map.jpg.
The following is old information but its still applies. The companies and system names have only changed and expanded.
There are fixed site systems, land mobile systems, below sea level, and sea level systems. RCA worked on the sea level systems (things that float). Hughes did the NATO fixed site systems and the NATO mobile systems. The fixed site systems are underground and above ground with massive redundancy. Hughes also did the US JSS system. As part of these fixed site systems, the air traffic control systems can be "switched" to air defense mode. So all the sensors and command and control assets of a country merge in time of war but it is the military systems that are designed to survive and are the primary systems while the civilian components only add to the capability. Think in terms of sensors and more eyes. The US has hundreds of air traffic control sensors and ~20,000 civilian air traffic control eyes looking at the sky 24/7. This is in addition to the military staff sitting at their command and control centers using their their sensors and the merged ATC sensors.
This is why Hughes provided international air traffic control systems. These systems were designed to be air defense systems and if a country could not take delivery of the air defense elements, it could be quickly augmented with those element at the first sign of war. Most systems like Korean ATC and Japan Badge-X did / do air traffic control, but they are also full fledged air defense systems. In the 1960's Israel had this type of system and it was credited with winning the war in the 196x attack. This was for countries that could not afford separate air traffic control and air defense systems. They are also small land mass areas where it does not make sense to have 2 separate systems. Think boundaries and interior area. By the time you protect the boundary (ADIZ) the interior is covered so just use it for civilian ATC in peace time.
Mobile systems are designed to be quickly deployed and unlike fixed sites they are designed to deal with the close in battle. They perform air defense (aircraft), missile defense, mortar defense, and land based defense. The key is that they are mobile and can be pre-placed. They also form the forward air defense components of the air defense system with connectivity to the central systems. There are SOC (Sector Operation Centers), Air Operations Centers (AOC), and Forward Air Defense (FAD) locations as deployed elements.
Aegis is designed to protect a battle group and in the end the aircraft carrier. They have long range missile defense and gun capability. So they can attack a country from the sea. Their air defense is associated with protecting the aircraft carrier, which has the lethal aircraft and weapons, and it is accomplished with the CIWS. When placed on land, its air defense is limited to a small area associated with the CIWS. So it would need to be placed in each city.
Systems Assessment of Ukraine Current Situation
Ukrainian cities should have had multiple mobile air defense systems. They are obviously missing. The more of these systems that are activated the lower the number of successful missile strikes. So, Ukraine has been hit with 500+ missile strikes. Either the Russians launched 2,000 - 5,000 missiles or Ukraine does not have enough of these missile defense systems. A key element was for the west to educate the Ukrainians on military systems, what to expect, and the needed defense systems. That apparently did not happen, the facts are clear and now part of history.
Journalism in the West from outlets like MSNBC and CNN have started to fail and support false narratives that compromise the Ukrainians. Talking heads are appearing moving the topic to a no fly zone. None of the journalists have asked questions associated with what military equipment has been provided and what is needed. There is no LIST being shown to the people of the world. However, the Russian military knows that list. At least one Ukrainian has attempted to bring up this topic but the MSNBC host immediately switched the topic to the humanitarian crisis and then personalized it to ask about the Ukrainian persons family. The discussion was shutdown. However, the Ukrainian did say we need military equipment to protect the air and that he is not a military person and does not know what equipment is needed.
What a terrible finding. This is sad and pathetic.
03/04/2022 Friday Day 9
Systems Assessment 03/04/22: Day 9
The EU is being significantly impacted with the massive entry of Ukrainian refugees, which are mostly woman and children that will not be able to easily enter a workforce and support their exile. This suggests massive social services costs for the EU. The EU has stated that they realize that Ukraine is defending them against Russia and are glad to open their borders and provide the needed assistance to refugees. The USA has adopted the same refugee policies as the EU - 3 years.
A talking head on MSNBC has suggested that Putin wants to only reconstitute Czarist Russia, which is only the country of Ukraine. This suggests that once Ukraine falls the war will end. This does not explain Georgia and Syria and it will not explain the Baltics or Poland. This is irresponsible journalism because once the statement was made, follow-up questions were not asked, instead an opinion was offered that suggests that this makes sense. Management damage control will not stop this war. Those that are not engaged in journalism must be removed from their implied journalistic roles. The obvious follow-up question are: What current countries fall into the geographic area of Czarist Russia and do you think Putin knows that map and has that list? Isn't this cultural genocide? Are you advocating for cultural genocide? Are you advocating for the resurgence of empires?
If Ukraine falls and Putin stops the Russian internal unrest, the conquest will continue into NATO starting with the Baltics. At that point it will be the EU that will be honoring NATO. The scenario is well known and is part of the WW I and WW II history. It is only if the EU starts to fall that the UK will be dragged into the war and then the USA. It is all dependent on the size and will of the Russian war machine. Is this war machine as deadly as the German war machine in the previous century? Currently there is equipment and social will supporting the Russian war machine.
03/03/2022 Thursday Day 8
Systems Assessment 03/03/22: Day 8
Ukraine does not have adequate defense systems to protect against missile attacks. It is unclear why they have not been provided with effective air defense systems. These are the same types of systems used in Israel to defend their civilian areas from missile attacks. For example:
Media has started to ignore the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances signed by the USA, UK, and Russia, like it never existed. Others are saying that it is irrelevant and that the only agreement that matters is NATO. This is a sad and horrific turn of events. If the USA and UK walked away from the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances it is unclear what may happen if Russia enters into NATO territories associated with the new countries that recently entered into NATO. There is the original NATO block and then the new entries. President Biden has clearly stated that the USA will defend every inch of NATO territory.
Country |
NATO Entry |
Russian Invasion |
Population (million) |
Russia |
NA |
NA |
144 |
Belarus |
NA |
NA |
9.4 |
Ukraine |
Rejected by NATO |
2014 part 2022 full |
44 |
Georgia |
No |
2008 |
10.6 |
Syria |
No |
2015 |
17.5 |
Bulgaria |
2004 |
Risk Phase 1 |
7 |
Estonia |
2004 |
Baltic State Risk Phase 1 |
1 |
Latvia |
2004 |
Baltic State Risk Phase 1 |
2 |
Lithuania |
2004 |
Baltic State Risk Phase 1 |
2.8 |
Romania |
2004 |
Risk Phase 1 |
19 |
Slovakia |
2004 |
Risk Phase 1 |
5.5 |
Slovenia |
2004 |
Risk Phase 1 |
2 |
Albania |
2009 |
Risk Phase 1 |
2.8 |
Croatia |
2009 |
Risk Phase 1 |
4 |
Montenegro |
2017 |
Risk Phase 1 |
0.6 |
North Macedonia |
2020 |
Risk Phase 1 |
2 |
Poland |
Yes |
Risk Phase 2 |
38 |
East Germany |
Yes |
Risk Phase 3 |
16 (2016) |
EU |
Yes |
None |
447 |
UK |
Yes |
None |
62 |
USA |
Yes |
None |
330 |
03/02/2022 Wednesday Day 7
Systems Assessment 03/02/22: Day 7
It appears that US policy is to exhaust Russia, so that if Ukraine falls and Russia enters into a NATO country, the Russian military will be significantly diminished. The US has stated that they do not want to corner Putin, where the only option left is nuclear. However, the policy assumes that the military would actually follow nuclear strike orders. The policy also fails to consider that if Putin fails with an attack on a NATO country, he would feel trapped with no other option than a nuclear option. This suggests that the US strongly believes that Russia will fail in Ukraine, otherwise the next step would be a NATO strike. This is a significant cause and effect finding.
Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov (September 1939 to 19 May 2017) was a lieutenant colonel of the Soviet Air Defense Forces who played a key role in the 1983 Soviet nuclear false alarm incident. On 26 September 1983, three weeks after the Soviet military had shot down Korean Air Lines Flight 007, Petrov was the duty officer at the command center for the Oko nuclear early warning system when the system reported that a missile had been launched from the United States, followed by up to five more. Petrov judged the reports to be a false alarm, and his decision to disobey orders, against Soviet military protocol, is credited with having prevented an erroneous retaliatory nuclear attack on the United States and its NATO allies that could have resulted in a large scale nuclear war. An investigation confirmed that the Soviet satellite warning system had malfunctioned. Because of his decision not to launch a retaliatory nuclear strike, Petrov is often credited as having "saved the world" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov.
03/01/2022 Tuesday Day 6
02/28/2022 Monday Day 5
02/27/2022 Sunday Day 4
02/26/2022 Saturday Day 3
02/25/2022 Friday Day 2
02/24/2022 Thursday Day 1
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