Ukraine War

[JohnDe]

Russia's destruction of the dam that is located in Russian held territory shows that Putin and his Generals can no longer have the capacity to move forward or defend. It also shows their desperation. An advancing army does not flood land in front of them.
Instead, they have created two headaches of Ukraine forces; sending troops and equipment forward is now drastically reduced, and resources will have to be diverted to help flood victims.
The flooding has caused water restrictions to the Crimea region held by Russia.

After the dam collapse, Russian-controlled areas have been abandoned
Russian forces appear not to care about the plight of inundated residents

Natalya was one of the fortunate ones. On June 8th she managed to get a connection to speak to her friends in Oleshky, across the Dnieper river on the Russian-occupied east bank. But the news was not good. The town, which sits in lowland, south of the destroyed Nova Kakhovka dam, is one of the worst-hit of all the settlements in Kherson region. Most of it is under water. Her friends survived only by climbing onto rooftops. They had asked Russian forces to help them evacuate, but were met with indifference. “My eyes are burning from tears,” Natalya says. “I’ve been crying all night.”

Those Khersonians living on the Ukrainian-controlled west bank have been dealt a double blow of war and ecological catastrophe. But for many of them, the immediate comparison is with those living across the Dnieper in occupied territories, where prospects are even worse. People are learning about abandoned loved ones over agonising phone calls—when they manage to get a connection. In November, Russian troops pulled back from the western bank, thereby splitting families, friends and neighbours left on different sides of a line of control. Now they are also separated by a wall of dangerously contaminated water.

Gafar Safronov, who is 39, last spoke to his godmother in Oleshky on June 7th at 7pm. The scarcely audible phone call was enough to find out that she was alive—but that her ducks, chickens and pigs were not. They drowned in the flooding, which had come on too quickly for her to do anything to save them. His godmother was now on the first floor of the partly submerged building. There were even rumours of corpses floating in town. “I’m sorry, it’s hard to speak,” he says, before moving into a corner to take a handkerchief to dry his eyes.

Mr Safronov’s neighbour, Natalya Mertsalova, a 35-year-old, tells a similar story. She got through to friends in Oleshky in a short phone call on June 7th. They reported that an obese man with difficulty walking had not been able to join his wife on the roof in time. She survived, but he did not, and now his corpse is under water. Ms Mertsalova heard that Russian forces had given operational security priority over the evacuation process, closing checkpoints as they moved their heavy weaponry. “Civilians have been left on their own,” she says.

In Hola Prystan, a town further down from the dam, residents were offered an early chance to evacuate, says Anna Ivanova, after speaking to her parents who remained in the area. But at first, the flooding was not bad enough to move; many chose to follow official advice suggesting that peak water flows would come by midday on June 6th. As a result, only 30 of an estimated 6,000 people evacuated. (A Russian-installed official in Kherson claimed that the number of evacuees was much higher.) Then came inundation. Anna’s father climbed onto his roof with his German-shepherd dog and waited for evacuation. Hundreds remain in similar conditions. Locals are rescuing themselves, sailing between each other’s roofs, using any available means.

Emotions are running high, but you have to be careful about what you say on the phone to relatives on the other side, explains Inna Voronova, 52, a shopkeeper at Kherson’s once-busy Shuminsky market. A loose tongue can land them in trouble, she says: “This week, I wanted to curse Putin so badly, but I remembered that phones are monitored.” The Russians, suggests Ms Voronova, believe that many of those who did not accept earlier offers of evacuation were secretly waiting for the Ukrainians to regain control and that is why they were reluctant to evacuate. Zoya, a neighbouring shopkeeper, also originally from the eastern bank, says recent reinforcements of Russian forces in the Kherson region had been especially anxious about local intentions. The new troops have even brought their own cook, she said. “They are afraid locals might poison them.”

Dmytro Kuleba, Ukraine’s foreign minister, announced on June 8th that agreement had been reached with the UN to form new emergency groups to help evacuate people from occupied territories. That initiative will prove difficult without the agreement of the Russian side, which appears unlikely to be forthcoming amid Ukraine’s counter-offensive. A military source in Kherson said there was little that the Ukrainian side could do. “As much as we want to help, we can’t send thousands of troops to their deaths by forming a rescue mission,” she said.

 

[sptrawler]

Russia's destruction of the dam that is located in Russian held territory shows that Putin and his Generals can no longer have the capacity to move forward or defend. It also shows their desperation. An advancing army does not flood land in front of them.
Instead, they have created two headaches of Ukraine forces; sending troops and equipment forward is now drastically reduced, and resources will have to be diverted to help flood victims.
The flooding has caused water restrictions to the Crimea region held by Russia.

The problem for Putin IMO, is that it isn't a good look even to the Russian general public, they must be getting fed up with their sons and daughters coming back in body bags.
I really can't see this lasting another winter, stalemates drive out a lot of enthusiasm and with social media the younger generation must be getting very restless.

 

[JohnDe]

The problem for Putin IMO, is that it isn't a good look even to the Russian general public, they must be getting fed up with their sons and daughters coming back in body bags.
I really can't see this lasting another winter, stalemates drive out a lot of enthusiasm and with social media the younger generation must be getting very restless.

I agree, but the propaganda machine must be a top-notch model. 100,000 body bags, and still no unrest from parents and families.

 

[Dona Ferentes]

What a modern war looks like.
The fight around Bakhmut. Only 8 minutes ..

Vuhledar is not Bakhmut. At least 50km away to the S

 

[Craton]

At the risk of being accused of being a kremlin lover, I would question whether indeed this can be reliably attributed to the Russians.
In a Podcast over a week ago, Peter Zeihan outlined why the Ukrainians might disable the irrigation canals, plus some background on the Russians draining the unpronounceable lake.
He also noted that the Russians had been draining the dam to historic lows for a few months.
One also needs to remember that at the very begining of the war, the Ukrainians blew up a dam called I think the Urpin River dam that is upstream of the recently blown up Kakhovka.
It should also be noted that the flooding along the river will have a greater impact on the Russian side, as its largely low lying swampy land , whereas the Ukrainian side is higher ground, and most of Kherson is well above the flood level.
The area most affected, the crimea, has been in Russian hands for a few years, and unless there is a complete rout of Russia, likely to stay in Russia's hands for some time.
So the Ukrainians can safely let the Russians deal with the potential starvation, loss of food production etc.
Like the bombing of the Nordstream plant, the politics are murky, the military and tactical advantages for all sides are mixed, and the propaganda machines on all sides are in overdrive.
As they say in the world, one of the first casualties of the war is truth.

Peter posted this in the last 24hrs and around the 4:20min mark is where he clearly states Putin's croonies did it.
The mind boggles that approx. 1 million acres of irrigated land has been swamped.

 

[mullokintyre]

Peter posted this in the last 24hrs and around the 4:20min mark is where he clearly states Putin's croonies did it.
The mind boggles that approx. 1 million acres of irrigated land has been swamped.

I missed that vid until you pointed it out.
After listening to his reasoning, it buggers up my argument completely .
Mick

 

[Smurf1976]

I missed that vid until you pointed it out.
After listening to his reasoning, it buggers up my argument completely .
Mick

I'm no military guru but on the dam I agree it's incredibly unlikely to have been a legitimate failure.

 

[JohnDe]

I agree, but the propaganda machine must be a top-notch model. 100,000 body bags, and still no unrest from parents and families.

Pretending that everything is under control in Russia
It is getting ever harder

Afew hours after the Kakhovka dam collapsed, flooding a big slice of southern Ukraine, Vladimir Saldo, who runs the Russian-occupied parts of the affected region, released a video. Standing by the window of an administrative building in military fatigues and a helmet, he tried to project an air of normality. “Novaya Kakhovka and other settlements downstream carry on [as usual]. Driving along, I saw people calmly walking the streets. Petrol stations and shops are open.” Behind him, clearly visible through the window, the floodwaters were rising in the already inundated town square.

Even back across the border in Russia, pretending that everything is normal 15 months into Vladimir Putin’s special military operation in Ukraine is becoming ever harder. A mixture of fierce repression and unrelenting propaganda have kept the public largely quiescent. But in recent weeks the war has been seeping into everyday life. In an affluent area in south-western Moscow military trucks roar past Teslas. Recruiters stationed outside supermarkets try to enlist passers-by in the army. At a speed-dating event young women complain of the difficulty of maintaining a steady relationship—because their boyfriends have been called up.

On May 30th a swarm of drones attacked Moscow. None hit its target: they were all either shot down or disabled by jamming. Some fell close to Barvikha Luxury Village, a posh suburb. Villages close to the border with Ukraine in Belgorod province have been shelled. A few have been briefly occupied by pro-Ukrainian militias making forays across the border. These incursions met little initial resistance: many of the troops who used to guard the border had been redeployed to Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine.

Lieutenants at loggerheads
There are also growing signs of disarray among Russia’s elite. For months Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the Wagner Group, a mercenary force fighting on Russia’s behalf, has been denouncing Sergei Shoigu, the defence minister, and Valery Gerasimov, Russia’s top general, as incompetent foot-draggers. But his complaints are becoming steadily shriller. He recently claimed that Russian soldiers had laid mines behind Wagner’s positions. Wagner has also released a video of a Russian officer, who looked as if he had been beaten, confessing that he had shot at a vehicle used by Wagner’s forces while drunk.

The incursions in Belgorod have especially incensed Mr Prigozhin (pictured). “Why are tens of thousands of people, our Russian guys, dying advancing towards the West? So that we could start giving away, step by step, pieces of Belgorod province, our native Russian land? Why is everyone silent about the deaths of these civilians? Where is their explanation to the Russian people that we are handing over our territories and civilians to be devoured?”

Mr Putin has a habit of provoking conflict among his subordinates to reinforce his role as an indispensable arbiter. Mr Prigozhin also serves as a useful spur to the Russian army and as a scold for rich Russians unenthused by the war. But these conflicts typically do not spill into public view. Some speculate that Mr Prigozhin could be attacking the top brass in anticipation of territorial losses in Ukraine. By denigrating the generals, he may help deflect blame from Mr Putin. Alternatively, the bickering could be a reflection of infighting between powerful factions who sense weakness on the part of the arbiter.

Mr Putin has been keeping a low profile of late, presumably to avoid any association with military setbacks. A visit to a children’s clinic and meetings with regional officials have been his only recent public appearances. His apparent lack of interest in the war and the noisy squabbling in the top ranks, whatever the reason for them, are likely to have a demoralising effect on Russia’s soldiers and civilians alike.

Russia’s propagandists have been trying to reassure the public, insisting that Russia had thwarted the Ukrainian counter-offensive before it had even begun. But their jaunty footage of destroyed Ukrainian tanks has been scorned by Mr Prigozhin and military bloggers. Big territorial losses will presumably lead to further tension within the Russian elites. A weakened Mr Putin, in turn, would probably resort to even greater repression to compensate for losses at the front. Mr Prigozhin is calling for martial law, a general mobilisation and the restoration of the death penalty.

What comes next will depend not just on the progress of the counter-offensive, but on the pliability of the elite and the mood of the broader public. Mr Putin has had little trouble suppressing dissent so far. But the many military setbacks and the public disagreements among his own henchmen make that job harder. “We are moving into uncharted waters,” an American official says. “And it is not just Ukraine that needs liberation, so does Russia.”

 

[basilio]

Peter posted this in the last 24hrs and around the 4:20min mark is where he clearly states Putin's croonies did it.
The mind boggles that approx. 1 million acres of irrigated land has been swamped.

Excellent contribution. One thing that took my interest was his discussion at the end of the segment on the massive increase in Russian bots and trolls on Twitter. This has occurred as direct result of Elon Musks opening up Twitter again for "Free Speech" . Trolls and bots are back in town.

Peter offers excellent advice on how to disengage from trolls and bots.
Never, ever respond. You will just get fed more and more rubbish
Put trolls and bots on mute. Don't block mute means they keep trying and can't get through.

Well worth checking out.

 

[mullokintyre]

lets hope that the hawks on the WSJ don't have any real affect on US polcy.

yeah, that should show em who's boss.
Mick

 

[Sean K]

This is quite a paradox, but the only thing stopping a modern world war is MAD.

Let's hope people with their finger on the button understand that if they push it, they die.

It's such a shame that nuclear energy and nuclear bombs were invented around the same time. If it was just for energy, we'd be flying to other galaxies on flux capacitors.

But, no.

Humans just have to go to war against their neighbour.

 

[JohnDe]

Another example of why unedited history must be taught in schools.

"...you cannot let the Russians believe there is profit in war..." Putin thought he would profit from a short, sharp war against his much smaller neighbour. He miscalculated, but 345,000 have been killed or injured to prove him wrong. “They will lie, they will cheat, they will do anything to win,”​

​

“What has happened is that the communists have been defeated. But the ideas of freedom are now on trial, If they don’t work there will be a reversion, not to communism, which has failed, but what I call a new despotism, which would pose a mortal danger to the rest of the world because it would be infected by the virus of Russian imperialism which, of course, has been a characteristic of Russian foreign policy for centuries.”​

​

“The independence of Ukraine is indispensable. A Russian-Ukrainian confrontation would make Bosnia look like a Sunday-school picnic.” It was March 1994 and Putin was then the discredited – almost sacked – deputy head of the city administration in his hometown, St Petersburg.​

Thirty years ago, on June 26, 1993, former first lady Pat Nixon was buried on the grounds of the Richard Nixon Library in the president’s hometown, Yorba Linda, southeast of Los Angeles.

Her husband, the disgraced former president, sobbed in the company of his Republican successors Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan and Southern Baptist evangelist Billy Graham. It was a unique display of sentiment by Nixon, who had repressed his emotions and navigated his life with lies ever since his mother caned him once for stealing biscuits.

An unidentified man stood beside him that afternoon. Very few recognised Arnold Hutschnecker. Nixon had long been a patient of his – a psychotherapist who for years had also treated actor Elizabeth Taylor. The Austrian-born expert had sought for four decades to deal with Nixon’s neuroses. In a controversial article in The New York Times in 1973, Hutschnecker had proposed that would-be political leaders in the US should subject themselves to a psychiatric assessment to gauge their fitness for the role.

Back then just a handful knew of Nixon’s secret shrink; those who did wondered if the 37th president of the US – their boss – would have passed muster.

Nixon battled to reconcile with his destiny. His knotty character was an unwieldy mix of obsessive ambition, insecurity, depression, racism and feelings of persecution. His endless lying was hardly eased by various medications and his drinking, and he was given to fits of explosive rage. A key element in who Nixon became might have resulted from that unresolved relationship with his mother. After his presidency, he admitted to a friend that although he deeply admired and loved his mother, she had never once kissed him.

His years as president are still fiercely debated and commonly receive harsh judgment.

In a C-SPAN survey of historians, Nixon in 2021 was rated 31st out of all US presidents. Yet he was rated by the University of California as probably the smartest Republican president in 50 years, with an IQ of 155.

Thirty years ago his second resurrection as the only man to resign from the Oval Office was almost complete. He had done it before. After 1960, when he narrowly lost the presidency to John Kennedy, Nixon set out to salvage what he could and rebuild his image with Americans. Second time around it took longer, but a famous front page of Newsweek in May 1986 declared: He’s Back.

Nonetheless, his detractors remained fierce. British-American commentator Christopher Hitchins said Nixon was unequivocally “the most scandalous and villainous Republican president of modern times” who turned his country into a “rogue state”. Hitchins wrote that Nixon was a “ruthless, paranoid and unstable leader who did not hesitate to break the laws of his own country in order to violate the neutrality, menace the territorial integrity or destabilise the internal affairs of other nations”.

In an obituary in Rolling Stone, persistent critic Hunter S. Thompson wrote: “Let there be no mistake in the history books … Richard Nixon was an evil man – evil in a way that only those who believe in the physical reality of the Devil can understand it. He was utterly without ethics or morals or any bedrock sense of decency. Nobody trusted him.”

Even Nixon’s remarkable post-presidential rebirth as a statesman of insight and achievement who wholly understood the subsurface nuances of the Chinese and Russians was attacked by Hitchins, Thompson and countless others.

Leonid Brezhnev and Richard Nixon after signing a treaty limiting nuclear arms.

But Nixon’s legacy also has its supporters, a growing band of not-just-Americans prepared to overlook his lies and personal shortcomings and the big one – Watergate – to champion the risk-taking one-time commander-in-chief who spent more time negotiating with the Soviet Union’s hierarchy than all other US presidents combined.

He’d first gone to the Soviet Union as US vice-president in 1959 for the American National Exhibition in Moscow, where he toured with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev a mock-up of an affordable American suburban home with all its labour-saving devices. Moving from room to room, Nixon and Khrushchev exchanged barbs about each other’s technological advancements, encounters that became famous as the Kitchen Debate. It was awkward, but the men got on and the Soviet leader agreed to visit Washington.

Thirteen years later Nixon became the first US president to visit Moscow. He met Soviet premier Alexei Kosygin and agreed to the joint Apollo-Soyuz space mission that would surprise the world three years later. Those handshakes in the stratosphere are unthinkable today.

When Reagan as president sought to negotiate with Moscow on arms reduction and to schedule a summit on neutral territory between the cold warriors, he started as a backmarker. Preparing for a radio address in August 1984, Reagan joked before the microphones were turned on: “My fellow Americans, I’m pleased to tell you today that I’ve signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.”

This did not go down well in the Kremlin. The following year, when asked why it was taking so long to arrange such a date, Reagan responded: “My problem for the first few years was they kept dying on me,” a reference to the deaths of Soviet leaders Leonid Brezhnev (in 1982), Yuri Andropov (1984) and Kostantin Chernenko (1985).

Before the famous 1985 meeting between Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev in Geneva, Reagan sought advice from Nixon on what sort of man the Russian might be. Nixon said Gorbachev was smart and would have been elevated to leadership only because he was a hard man in whom the politburo had faith. But Nixon added: “We want peace. The Soviet Union needs peace.’’ The following year Nixon went to Moscow on what was ostensibly a private trip to meet Gorbachev, who was not given to meeting yesterday’s men of the West. This was a precursor to the Reykjavik summit at which US-Soviet talks would fail but at which the groundwork was laid for the historic agreement to limit nuclear arms.

Nixon’s deep connections, by then going back almost 30 years, meant he had 100 minutes in Gorbachev’s office. It was a “detailed and frank” talk about relations between the superpowers, according to the Soviet news agency.

Nixon shakes hands with Chinese leader Mao Zedong during a visit to China in 1972.

Towards the end of Nixon’s active years he agreed to a now overlooked yet remarkable television interview with Harrison Salisbury, who had been The New York Times correspondent to Moscow in 1959 and knew of Nixon’s understanding of the Russians, his influence there and the grudging respect the Russians had for him.

Nixon explains the Russian character, warns against ever assuming they can be friends and talks of the risks for the West if it misunderstands this. He even describes the sort of leader who would be shaped to take advantage of this. Although he never lived to know or hear of Vladimir Putin, it is he Nixon so clearly describes.

Detente, he begins, is not about agreeing with Russia. It is agreeing that the countries have irreconcilable differences and then dealing with them, and of Russia understanding the West has powerful military forces and is prepared to use them if necessary.

Nixon warns that you cannot let the Russians believe there is profit in war. Clearly, in February last year, Putin thought he would profit from a short, sharp war against his much smaller neighbour. He miscalculated, but 345,000 have been killed or injured to prove him wrong. Nixon’s formula might have prevented this.

“They will lie, they will cheat, they will do anything to win,” he told Salisbury. But there was no alternative to negotiating with them. And they’d stick with a deal that was in their interests. “Russians and Americans can be friends, but the governments of US and Russia can never be friends because our goals are totally different.”

Nixon giving a speech at the White House following his resignation from the presidency after the Watergate scandal. Picture: Consolidated News Pictures/AFP

Later, in what may have been his last interview, and with the Cold War apparently over, the Soviet Union dismantled and the West victorious, Nixon warned the world again. “What has happened is that the communists have been defeated. But the ideas of freedom are now on trial,” he said.

“If they don’t work there will be a reversion, not to communism, which has failed, but what I call a new despotism, which would pose a mortal danger to the rest of the world because it would be infected by the virus of Russian imperialism which, of course, has been a characteristic of Russian foreign policy for centuries.”

He said those across the world who sought peace had a great stake in freedom succeeding in Russia.

“If it succeeds it will be an example for other to follow,” he said, mentioning China and other communist states. “If it fails, it means that the hardliners in China will get a new life. They will say: ‘It failed there, there is no reason for us to turn to democracy.’ ”

Then 26 days before he died, Nixon had a final opinion piece published in The New York Times. He had just returned from a final trip to Moscow. He wrote: “The independence of Ukraine is indispensable. A Russian-Ukrainian confrontation would make Bosnia look like a Sunday-school picnic.”

He wrote that any attempt to destabilise Ukraine, “to say nothing of outright aggression”, would have unimaginable repercussions for Russia’s relations with the West. “Ukrainian stability is in (our) the strategic interest (and should be a) security priority for the US.”

It was March 1994 and Putin was then the discredited – almost sacked – deputy head of the city administration in his hometown, St Petersburg. Nixon would never have heard of him.

But Putin is prosecuting the case Nixon foresaw.

Former Australian senator Stephen Loosley, a senior fellow at US Studies Centre, believes no one understood the Russians as astutely as Nixon and also praises farsighted building of bridges with China. He says the discredited former president also had an acute understanding of his nation and its elected representatives.

Nixon, a close friend of former Republican Senate leader Bob Dole, would, when returning to Washington from his California home, divert air force One to Kansas and pick up Dole and head east to the capital.

As they flew over the cities of Missouri, Illinois, Kentucky and West Virginia, Nixon would talk with deep knowledge about the local mayors and governors.

“He knew them all,” Loosley says. “And was a great student of history, but he was also quite a superb reader of other people; the tragedy is he could not read himself. And there were these very dark recesses in him. In public he could be quite reasonable and quite affable when he wanted to be, or when he needed to be, but that dark side of his personality was there.”

Loosley says Nixon’s hardline conservatism was to his advantage. “He had these impeccable anti-communist credentials. He said to Mao (Zedong) at one stage: ‘You are aware that I am anti-communist in my thinking’, and Mao said yes, he’s noticed. No Democrat could have done what he did.”

The headstone on Richard Nixon’s grave, California. Picture: Greg Bulla

Loosley believes it is impossible to imagine the Reagan administration’s success in dealing with Gorbachev without Nixon’s era of detente.

“They certainly laid the foundations for dealing with the Soviets in terms of peaceful coexistence, negotiation of treaties and so on,” he says. “Reagan built on that by pushing the Soviets very hard, strategically and economically, to a point where they could not compete with the Americans.”

Loosley says on Ukraine Nixon would have met face-to-face and made it clear to Putin that NATO would respond. “He would have read the Russians particularly well, he would have read their weakness, particularly in terms of their military and politics, and in terms of their economic underpinning.”

Both Richard and Pat Nixon died aged 81, the former president living 10 months longer than his much loved, long-suffering wife. As such he had the last word. Her headstone reads: Even when people can’t speak your language, they can tell if you have love in your heart. Next door his states: The greatest honor history can bestow is the title of peacemaker.

ALAN HOWE HISTORY AND OBITUARIES EDITOR

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/inquirer/the-resurrection-of-richard-nixon-was-one-of-the-miracles-of-politics/news-story/e086a35e64a6c03f56c20fa7a8b6f225

 

[Sean K]

Russia invade a sovereign nation against all sorts of international norms and laws but:

 

[farmerge]

Russia invade a sovereign nation against all sorts of international norms and laws but:

View attachment 158595

Are we going to have a situation of the tail wagging the dog because they are bigger than us?

 

[wayneL]

Rumours of a coup attempt in Russia

 

[wayneL]

Rumours of a coup attempt in Russia

 

[farmerge]

Better still if Putrid suffered something fatal

 

[sptrawler]

Rumours of a coup attempt in Russia

That's the problem with using mercenaries, you buy their loyalty, when the money runs out the loyalty goes with it, they look for the next employer.

 

[JohnDe]

 

[farmerge]

That's the problem with using mercenaries, you buy their loyalty, when the money runs out the loyalty goes with it, they look for the next employer.

Hmm maybe Putrid will be stretching the lacky band to breaking point with the Wagners up against his not so enthusiastic army.