Clausewitz And The Culmination Point

The Institute for the Study of War site, which appears to be the most prestigious commentator on the Russo-Ukraine war, has made what strikes me as a meaningless pronouncement:

Ukrainian forces have defeated the initial Russian campaign of this war. That campaign aimed to conduct airborne and mechanized operations to seize Kyiv, Kharkiv, Odesa, and other major Ukrainian cities to force a change of government in Ukraine. That campaign has culminated.

I've noted on YouTube for the past week or two references to Clausewitzian "culmination" as a point where an attack exhausts itself. But that can take place either before it achieves its objective, in which case it's a victory for the defender, or after, in which case it's a victory for the attacker. But in either case, it leaves open the question of what happens next. Clausewitz himself seems to have recognized the problem:

The success of the attack is the result of a present superiority of force, it being understood that the moral as well as physical forces are included. In the preceding chapter we have shown that the power of the attack gradually exhausts itself; possibly at the same time the superiority may increase, but in most cases it diminishes. . . . There are strategic attacks which have led to an immediate peace but such instances are rare; the majority, on the contrary, lead only to a point at which the forces remaining are just sufficient to maintain a defensive, and to wait for peace. Beyond that point the scale turns, there is a reaction; the violence of such a reaction is commonly much greater than the force of the blow. This we call the culminating point of the attack. . . . If we reflect upon the number of the elements of which an equation of the forces in action is composed, we may conceive how difficult it is in many cases to determine which of two opponents has the superiority on his side. Often all hangs on the silken thread of imagination.

So basically, Clausewitz is saying you can look at a situation and think there may have been a culmination point, but that depends on how you see it, and you can't reliably say what will happen afterward anyhow. I had to read many such papers in graduate school. Why did the Institute for the Study of War even bother? Was it all the retired general talking heads mentioning Clausewitz and sounding smart? The Institute goes on:

The culmination of the initial Russian campaign is creating conditions of stalemate throughout most of Ukraine. Russian forces are digging in around the periphery of Kyiv and elsewhere, attempting to consolidate political control over areas they currently occupy, resupplying and attempting to reinforce units in static positions, and generally beginning to set conditions to hold in approximately their current forward positions for an indefinite time.

But Clausewitz himself says it's hard to know when the culmination has been reached, and it's just as hard to know what it means. Clausewitzian culmination is thus a sorta-kinda tautology. Why is the Institute so definite, and why is it so certain of the outcome when Clausewitz himself is neither?

My own instinctive view is that Ukrainian artillery appears to be awfully good, and Russians dug into fixed positions have supply issues. I would expect more cases like the Kherson airfield, a fixed position repeatedly attacked by Ukrainian artilery. But what do I know? They threw me out of ROTC.

In another theater of the Plebe War, Biden’s Handlers Are Preparing to Eject Him (and Kamala):

[T]he people who put Joe Biden in power—I cannot name them, but I know they are the same people who keep him in power—do not care about inflation, rising gas and food prices, COVID lockdowns or mask mandates, the porousness of our Southern border, the threat of war with Russia, or the myriad other issues that worry ordinary voters. . . . Joe Biden is an errand boy, a figurehead, in the metabolism of this great (not to say Great Society) act of political legerdemain.

. . . Why do you suppose that the New York Times has decided, finally, at this late date, to acknowledge that the story that the New York Post broke about Hunter’s laptop was true?

. . . I suspect that Joe Biden is being prepped for ejection. Exactly how it will happen I do not yet know. But he is on the threshold, or possibly has even passed the threshold, where he could appear to govern. His minders understand this. They must be the ones to replace him, otherwise they themselves risk being replaced, which would be intolerable. As I say, it’s not entirely clear yet how the defenestration will take place. Obviously, Kamala will have to be dealt with first, and she will be. Look for some ground softening stories such as the Times just served up about the laptop. They won’t be long in coming.

Seems like there's maybe a culmination taking place, not just in Ukraine, but in the whole Plebe War. But as Clausewtiz himself would tell us, "Often all hangs on the silken thread of imagination."

If anyone asks, here's my theory of how this could play out. It doesn't really matter whether Kamala or Joe goes first; there must be an overabundance of undeclared baksheesh in either case, or in Joe's, no shortage of gropes, grabs, and Zucker-like behavior. Under the 25th Amendment, no matter if Kamala or Joe goes first, whichever survives must nominate a new vice president, who must be confirmed by both houses of congress. That's likely to take a while, given the pivotal role of Sen Manchin in the evenly divided Senate (indeed as well, with no sitting vice president in such a case to break a Senate tie).

In fact, if either Kamala or Joe leaves before the November election, the issue probably won't be resolved until afterward, with likely Republican majorities in both houses. Thus any nominee for vice president after the election from either Democrat survivor in the presidency would have an even harder time geting approved.

But if there's a Republican House in January 2023, Kevin McCarthy would likely be speaker. The speaker is third in line, but with no vice president approved under the 25th Amendment, he'd be number two. But with either Kamala or Joe as an unsatisfactory/intolerable president, even for the lizard people, they'd force the removal of either, with McCarthy then moving into the Oval Office. Given this scenario, I will grant Roger Kimball's implied postulate that this would be easy and quick, but only under a Kimball-like scenario.

You heard it here first.

The Plebe War Is Not Going To Plan

Something's up.

A comprehensive report about the ongoing federal probe into Hunter Biden’s tax filings published by the New York Times on Wednesday night confirmed the existence of the first son’s infamous laptop.

The puzzling thing is although the New York Post broke the story in October 2020, and other outlets have since acknowledged the laptop is authentic, that the New York Times would belatedly report it is clearly big news. But nothing has changed about the story at all, except that the Times now says it's a story. Trump's reaction is understandable:

Former President Trump said the New York Times has admitted being a part of an effort to 'rig' the election for Joe Biden with their report confirming the authenticity of Hunter Biden's laptop and its contents.

Trump said in a statement on Friday, 500 days after the November 2, 2020, general election: 'The New York Times just admitted that it participated in an effort to rig the election for Joe Biden.'

When files from the laptop were published before the 2020 presidential election, the newspaper cast doubt on its provenance, linked it to Russian disinformation, and made no public attempt to obtain and verify it.

I've been mildly interested in Trump's more recent statements about the 2020 election, as well as the evolution of January 6 coverage. The bottom line is that you don't necessarily need to believe there was specific election fraud, or at least election fraud sufficient to change the outcome, to think something was hinky about it, not least that it put quite possibly the worst president in US history into office. If you take the meaning of "rig" to imply a general effort to deceive the public on key issues, rather than a simple exercise in stuffing ballot boxes, I don't think you can claim Trump is delusional.

But why the Times's about-face? After all, it's never disavowed the Pulitzer it received for its reporting on the Ukraine famine of the 1930s. Why not just let it lie? Maybe it's this:

The attorney for Lunden Alexis Roberts - the mother of one of Hunter Biden's five children - revealed he turned over to federal investigators a 'significant amount' of Hunter's financial records and said he would be 'surprised' if he was not indicted.

Clint Lancaster, who represents Roberts, said that he was complying with a subpoena in turning over 'a significant amount of Hunter's financial records,' and that both he and Roberts were interviewed by investigators.

The pretext for the Times story was reporting that Hunter had paid a million dollars in back taxes (wait a moment - isn't Hunter broke?), but it sounds like that alone won't make his problems go away. There's an investigation involving his "financial records". That can't help but involve the Big Guy.

I think someone, maybe not even at the Times itself, but someone who tells the Times what to print, decided it was time to get ahead of the story, which sounds like it might be big, and it would only be big if the Big Guy were involved. This story raises a related question about yesterday's Psaki press conference and questions from New York Post reporter Steve Nelson

Nelson asked three questions. First, if Biden was staying out of the DOJ investigation of his son. Psaki claimed he was. Then Nelson raised the Senate report about Hunter Biden’s company, Rosemont Seneca Thornton, allegedly receiving $3.5 million from Russian billionaire Yelena Baturina, one of the richest women in Russia whose late husband used to be the mayor of Moscow. Nelson also raised a point that is not as well known — the report that Joe Biden himself had a subsequent meeting with the same woman for dinner in 2015 in Georgetown.

“This Yelena Baturina, she has not been sanctioned yet by the U.S. government. How is President Biden navigating conflicts of interest when it comes to sanctioning people who have done business with this family and can you explain to us what this $3.5 million was for?” Nelson asked.

“I don’t have any confirmation of the accuracy of that report, so I have no more further details,” Psaki declared.

How could you not know about the accuracy of the report? Either Joe Biden met with her or he did not. What did he meet with her for? That’s not a Hunter question; that’s a Joe Biden question. But Psaki refused to answer and be transparent.

The 2020 election was an opening campaign in the Plebe War, and other developments, like Putin's invasion of Ukraine, have resulted from it. Keep in mind that treason and bribery are among the high crimes and misdemeanors that can lead to impeachment. I think Ukraine news is going to fade pretty quickly, not leat because that's also not going to plan.

Another Crack At The Numbers

The video above doesn't look like it was produced by the Ukrainian government. It may or may not have been released with their approval. I find it particularly interesting, though, because it was taken by two women driving in a civilian car along the length of what must have been a Russian battalion tactical group some days afer it had been attacked by the Ukrainians. Around the third time I watched it, I realized that between the occasional remaining burned-out trucks, there are large patches of bare roadway without snow.

This says to me that there had been no snow on the ground before the battle, but it did snow soon afterward. Over a day or two following the battle, the Ukrainians were able to drive or tow away most of the Russian armored equipment, which explains the rectangular bare snowless patches in the road where the tanks and so forth had been. That's a lot of tanks. And if, unlike in some videos, there weren't a bunch of burned-out tanks, trucks, and personnel carriers left over, this suggests strongly that they're now part of the Ukrainian army.

Given the apparent size of the column that the women are driving past, my guess is that this was a battalion tactical group, which as I noted in Wednesday's post includes roughly 10 tanks and 40 infantry fighting vehicles. How can we relate this to the overall size of the Russian invasion force? The Ukrainian general staff has this estimate:

Approximately 200,000 Russian occupiers invaded Ukraine. 15,000 were killed and another 18,000-20,000 became already incapacitated.

In total, there are about 60 tactical groups operating in Ukraine now and 10 of them are in reserve.

As I've noted, estimates of the Russian BTGs in Ukraine range from 30 to 130. but 60 here is in the middle. 60 BTGs times 10 tanks per BTG is 600 tanks. The Oryx site tally, which lists only losses that can be confirmed by photos, says that as of this morning, the Russians have lost 244 tanks, of which 93 are destroyed, 4 are damaged, 41 are abandoned, and 106 are captured and presumably being refurbished for the Ukrainian army. This is a third of their combat power in tanks.

The Ukrainian presidential adviser Oleksiy Arestovich quoted at the link says, "In 10-14 days they will be forced to defend themselves".

After that will begin tactical battles for small villages and for leveling positions. At the same time, the Russian military has no reinforcements.

"Even if all the reserves are involved, they will not be able to fundamentally change the situation. Russia's loss may become real in two or three weeks."

A piece at Hot Air, which quotes the New York Times behind a paywall, says

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

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

However, the 150,000 number for Russian troops in the invasion force includes troops at all levels in all jobs. If we estimate 700 infantry in each BTG, 700 times 60 BTGs in the invasion makes 42,000 infantry total, and these will be the groups that primarily take casualties. The current conservative US estimate of Russian casualties is 7000 dead, wich makes about 17% of their combat forces, well over the 10 percent threshold cited in the link.

On the other hand, here is the current Ukrainian estimate of Russian losses:

The relevant statement was made by the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine on Facebook, an Ukrinform correspondent reports.

“Between February 24, 2022 and March 18, 2022, the enemy’s total combat losses were as follows: 14,200 troops, 450 tanks, 1,448 armored fighting vehicles, 205 artillery systems, 72 multiple launch rocket systems,” the report states.

In addition, the Ukrainian military destroyed Russia’s 43 anti-aircraft warfare systems, 93 aircrafts, 112 helicopters, 879 motor vehicles, three boats/cutters, 60 fuel tanks, 12 unmanned aerial vehicles and 11 special equipment units.

It's worth noting again that the Oryx site tallies only losses that can be confirmed by photos of individual items. Oryx notes this and says, "the amount of equipment destroyed is significantly higher than recorded here," so there is no reason specifically to doubt the Ukrainian general staff estimates -- but if the general staff says Russia has lost 450 tanks, this is in fact more than two thirds of the tanks in the original invasion force of 60 BTGs by their estimate.

Indeed, I've got to say that just judging from the video drive-bys of burned-out columns on YouTube, this estimate seems entirely reasonable, and based on that, the other numbers in the Ukrainian estimate seem in line as well.

I'm wondering if Russian collapse may come sooner than estimates of two to three weeks.

Leadership Vacuum

Although Ann Coulter is some years past her sell-by date, having veered from Trump is the Messiah to Never Trump in the meantime, her current take on Ukraine is representative of all too many on the right:

Until the war in Ukraine, the Democrats were facing midterms after having spent the previous two years mandating masks and an endless series of vaccinations — even for the vaccinated or previously infected.

, , , What could even Stalin’s media do with that record?

. . . By now, the media have whipped the public into such a frenzy over Ukraine that a majority of Americans want the U.S. to start shooting down Russian planes, starting World War III with nuclear armed power.

A small price to pay for Democratic dominance.

I'm not sure where to start with this. The media was reporting on the war for the first two weeks, when the narrative was universally about the 40-mile column about to close in on Kyiv. Once Ukraine began to demonstrate success, as far as I can tell without actually risking brain damage by watching the news shows, they've dropped most coverage -- the retired US general talking heads have all left YouTube, for instance. The 40-mile column has evaporated, and the farmers and gypsies are towing away the lighter weapons.

A web search on "russian advance stalled" brings up an unbelievable 2 million hits. As far as I can tell, nobody is actually whipping up war fever; they're too busy congratulating Dr Rachel Levine for getting Woman of the Year. A lot of thinkers on the right, though, agree with Coulter Biden is somehow going to hitchhike on President Zelensky to rescue the 2022 midterms. Someone ought to send them this meme and others like it:

Nobody is taking Biden's or Psaki's claims that he's been marshaling support for Ukraine behind the scenes seriously. He may be making a feeble effort to ride a Zelensky wave -- that is, as long as he doesn't actually have to do anything to ride it. Don't want to start World War III, after all. The public understands this fully, especially after the on again-off again-green light debacle over the Polish jet fighters.

The real issue right now is the public doesn't want Trump back; it doesn't want President Pence or President DeSantis; it badly wishes it could somehow hire President Zelensky. That guy has already made Putin look like a monkey. He'd finish the job on Biden too if it weren't for the fact that he can leverage the US congress to push Biden to send more aid. At least for now, Xi just isn't worth his time.

It's intriguing that in recent weeks, both Hillary Clinton and Mitt Romney sent up trial balloons to see if there might be chances of them making another presidential bid. Those both fell with a thud, but the fact that they would even consider it is a reflection of how little actual leadership there is in this country right now. I don't rule out that we'll hear from Al "Release My Second Chakra" Gore next.

If I were Mike Pence, I'd be beating feet to the Ukraine-Polish border, maybe even paying a visit to Kyiv. That would boost the chances of any other prospects, too. If Biden himself were to do it, that could even boost his own chances -- the issue is first, that he's too lazy, second, that he'd find a way to say exactly the wrong thing. Best to keep him in Delaware.

Let's Go Brandon! Godspeed Zelensky! Glory to Ukraine!

Sorting Out The Current Situation In Ukraine

BTG wipe out

The video above gives an idea of the challenge in trying to sort through what's going on in Ukraine. Its title is fairly straightforrward, "Ukraine War: 15.03.2022 Aftermath of battles in Kherson region", but you definitely can't trust the date: that appears to be when it was uploaded, and possibly even about when the drive-by video was taken, but that doen't say much about when the battle took place. It looks like the photographer was able to pass over the road in a truck, so this suggests that rubble had been cleared, bodies and body parts removed, and Ukrainian forces had already scrubbed the scene for usable trucks, supplies, ammunition, and intelligence, -- a day or more earlier, I would think.

For now, I'll trust them for the location, near Kherson. This would suggest it was a Russian thrust north from that city toward Mykolaiv along the axis in the map below:

Media accounts generally imply that this is part of an effort to reach Odesa. If it is, that ain't gonna happen. The conventional narrative that the Russians are "closing in on Kyiv" or "closing in on the land bridge" is fantasy at this point.

The big thing I noted in watching this video a couple of times is that you can see seven or eight out-of-action tanks along the road, in addition to various trucks and armored infantry vehicles. The number of tanks suggests to me, based on my efforts to educate myself, that this is a battalion tactical group:

A battalion tactical group (Russian: Батальонная тактическая группа, batal'onnaya takticheskaya gruppa), abbreviated as BTG, is a combined-arms manoeuvre unit. . . A BTG typically comprises a battalion (typically mechanised infantry) of 2–4 companies reinforced with air-defence, artillery, engineering, and logistical support units, formed from a garrisoned army brigade. A tank company and rocket artillery also typically reinforce such groupings.

. . . Each BTG has approximately 600–800 officers and soldiers, of whom roughly 200 are infantrymen, equipped with vehicles typically including roughly 10 tanks and 40 infantry fighting vehicles.

So just a minute. If a BTG has 10 tanks and I could count seven or eight out of action along the road, this means the combat effectiveness of the whole BTG was simply wiped out. Other videos that emerge from Ukraine every day suggest that a good number of the vehicles in a BTG are abandoned in operating order by fleeing Russians and driven away either by the Ukrainian army or local farmers and gypsies.

I haven't seen authoritative estimates of how many BTGs went into Ukraine in the February invasion; one number I've seen is 30. There could certainly be more, but the confirmed count of Russian tanks destroyed, abandoned, or captured in the invasion on the Oryx site as of this morning is now up to "229, of which destroyed: 85, damaged: 3, abandoned: 39, captured: 102". The Oryx site counts only those for which there is confirmed photographic evidence; it links a specific photo to each item in the tally, and it makes the point that since they're counting only those with photos, the actual numbers are greater.

In short, if there were 30 BTGs in the invasion, that means there were 300 tanks, of which 229 are no longer available as of this morning. For 30 BTGs, that would mean 18,000-24,000 men, while Russian casualty estimates at this point amount to 6,000-13,000. Another estimate says

A few days ago something like 20-30 BTGs were confirmed to have been rendered combat ineffective out of the 100-130 sent into Ukraine.

While yet another says

The claim is that 40% of units have lost their combat capability. A Russian BTG is considered ineffective if it loses just a fraction of its force. This is actually a thing that happens, because their battalion tactical groups have a certain ratio of forces of each type (unlike NATO-style battalions which Ukraine is likely using now), and if you lose just one of those forces it leaves the BTG unable to do combined-arms missions.

It appears that the drone video of the attack on a Russian column in Brovary that I linked last Thursday was also an attack that destroyed the combat effectiveness of another BTG. BTGs are the main offensive element of the Russian invasion. There are only so many of them. Nobody has been itemizing these attacks, but it's hard to avoid thinking from video evidence that Ukraine has worked out a formula for eliminating BTGs: use intercepted radio to predict their movements; stop them on the road with anti-tank missiles like Javelins, NLAWs, and Panzerfausts, and finish them with accurate artillery.

The very sketchy reports on the Institute for the Study of War site minimize the situation. For instance, the most recent report:

Local company- and battalion-level attacks by Russian forces northwest of Kyiv on March 14-15 likely indicate the largest-scale offensive operations that Russian forces attempting to encircle Kyiv can support at this time. Russian forces did not conduct offensive operations northeast of the city, around Sumy, and only limited (and unsuccessful) attacks southeast of Kharkiv. Russian force generation efforts, including reservist and conscript call-ups and the ongoing transport of Syrian fighters to Russia and Belarus, are unable to change the balance of forces around Kyiv within the coming week. Russian forces have not conducted simultaneous attacks along their multiple axes of advance across Ukraine since March 4 and are unlikely to do so in the next week.

The problem is that their main force components have been largely destroyed by the Ukrainians, and importing untrained, unspecialized, and unreliable Syrians and conscripts won't help, especially if they don't have the tanks and other equipment to re-form the BTGs.

The retired US general talking heads have been largely absent from the media over the past several days. I don't know if they're extending some sort of professional courtesy to their Russian army colleagues or what.

How Goes The Plebe War?

As I suggested in Sunday's post, I think the current Russo-Ukraine war is just one theater of a larger, worldwide conflict that I'm calling the Great Plebe War. This pits a current world ruling class against a broad working class that includes both traditional blue-collar workers and bourgeois professionals, while corporate upper-level managers, academics, bureaucrats, intellectuals, media, and artists are allied with more traditional rentiers and financiers in an overall gentry class.

I don't disagree with Marx in my view that the objective of the gentry is to make life miserable for the workers. The question has always been precisely how to do this and how far to go. Under the worst despots, the explicit goal is to depopulate them, and this is effectively what's going on in Ukraine, although programs to encourage abortion, transsexualism, and disintegration of families in the more genteel west differ only in degree. As with other worldwide conflicts, each theater has unique conditions.

As I said Sunday, I think the current war broke out with the Wuhan COVID lab leak sometime in the autum of 2019. The pandemic almost certainly came from that lab leak, although the full set of circumstances may never be fully understood -- it does seem likely that the work that led to the leak was funded in China by US gentry interests via prominent bureaucrats and academics and was intended to develop lethal strains of bat viruses for reasons never made clear. Anything really new here?

The same clique of prominent bureaucrats and academics appears to have seized opportunistically on the lab leak to impose a radical program of unprecedented social control involving lockdowns, social distance, prohibited gatherings, non-essential activites, masks, and compulsory vaccinations. This quickly became a worldwide phenomenon. It ended eventually as the virus strain weakened, while at the same time the radical social controls proved unable to control the virus's spread.

In hindsight -- as a priest noted just in last Sunday's homily -- a key part of the effort was to discourage religious observance by declaring church services "non-essential" and prohibiting attendance or limiting it to token gatherings. Due to the effort of observant Christians and Jews in the US, this was an early part of the campaign that failed via a US Supreme Court ruling. I think it's also significant that Ukraine President Zelensky has cited his country's religious history in his speeches rallying his people, and Pope Francis and US Catholics are prominent in supporting Ukraine, which has a substantial Catholic minority.

Contemporary with the original social control program was an alliance between the gentry and the Lumpenproletariat, the criminal class, to foster riots and social disorder. This was oddly incongruous, a program on one hand to keep the workers under near universal curfew while giving petty criminals and their enablers among the radical gentry free rein to burn and loot.

This was not a Marxist alliance -- Marx himself understood that the Lumpenproletariat is not a relilable ally for anyone, certainly not the workers, and the alliance itself was fairly brief. It was also based on the idea of conflating minorities with the Lumpenproletariat, which was insulting to the minorities in any long term. It was useful as a factor that led to the defeat of Trump in the 2020 election, but by early 2022, the Democrats understood that the Black Lives Matter and Defund the Police movements were a liability for the upcoming midterms and explicitly disavowed them.

This was the second retreat from the gentry's 2020 program, following the gradual withdrawal of COVID social controls. The related phenomenon of Critical Race Theory in public schools is being defeated piecemeal in local campaigns by parents against school boards, but founded on the same flawed idea of an alliance between the gentry and the Lumpenproletariat, it is doomed eventually to full defeat.

This has effectively left two surviving elements of the program, the elimination of fossil fuels in the name of climate change and transsexualism. The effect of the Russo-Ukraine War and sanctions against Russian oil and gas has had the initial result of raising fuel prices above anything the gentry could have wished for, but this is clearly setting the stage for a major political confrontation that will likely end in the same way as the COVID social controls or the BLM riots; the gentry will eventually be forced to disavow the program.

The last survivor will likely be transsexualism. It's hard to understand why the gentry has been clinging so tightly to this program, since transsexuals are a tiny part of the electorate, while their effort has clearly been to proselytize for it as widely as they can. It is now included in US military training materials, and the battle is now engaged to eliminate it from elementary school curricula, where the gentry clearly wish to include it.

It's noteworthy, though, that the most prominent public models are currently an Ivy League male swimmer competing as a woman, and Dr Rachel Levine, a biological male awarded Woman of the Year by USA Today. An Ivy Leaguer and a bureaucrat, clearly instances of gentry self-promotion. And it's worth mentioning once again that neither climate change nor transsexualism was ever part of the Marxist program.

The Plebe War is not going well for them.

Still Not Paying Attention

The video above gives what I think is a good representation of the current state of affairs in Ukraine. It's been produced and released by the Ukrainian authorities, but I've got to conclude that from what's available from open source intelligence, it reflects what must inevitably be taking place. (Basically, anything taken from a drone is from the Ukrainian government, but the problem is that the drones don't lie.)

First, at this point, the Russians are less and less able to move. The Institulte for the Study of War's summary of yesterday's action is pretty brief:

Main effort—Kyiv axis: Russian operations on the Kyiv axis are aimed at encircling the city from the northwest, west, and east.

Russian forces did not conduct offensive operations northwest of Kyiv in the past 24 hours for the third day in a row. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces prioritized reconnoitering Ukrainian positions in preparation for resuming attacks on Kyiv.

. . . Subordinate supporting effort—Chernihiv and Sumy axis

The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces northeast of Kyiv “moved to the defense” in the last 24 hours and focused on replenishing supplies and conducting reconnaissance.

. . . Supporting Effort #3—Kherson and west:

Russian forces did not conduct any offensive actions toward Mykolayiv or Zaporizhia on March 13. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces are gathering reserves, including additional VDV (Airborne) forces, south of Zaporizhia for a likely offensive toward the city but did not conduct any attacks on March 13. Russian forces may intend to advance to encircle Zaporizhia but are unlikely to have the forces necessary to do so while Russian forces in the south remain committed to the encirclement of Mariupol.

The Estonian reservist Artur Rehi updated his report on the video from the March 9 attack in Brovary, which I discussed in this post. He apppears to have revised his estimate of this encounter and now refers to it as a "battle" in the video below:

He also collects a number of individual videos that had been on YouTube late last week and identifies all of them as vignettes of the same battle, a defeat of the Russians at the battalion level. The bottom line is that the Russians have no choice but to move their columns along Ukrainian roads, while their unencrypted radio and cell phone communications are fully monitored by the Ukraine army; the result is that Ukraine predicts their movements, and they can pick them off with anti-tank missiles, artillery dialed in on GPS coordinates, and drones at their convenience.

It seems to me that this explains the recent lack of Russian movement around Kyiv or toward Mykolayiv or Zaporizhia for days on end. But the video at the top of this post also illustrates the next step: the Russians have been in static artillery positions that they have used largely to bombard civilian targets in the Kyiv area. With Russian armor effectively neutralized, Ukraine is now moving infantry in to eliminate the static artillery, positions.

This is all happening on a daily basis, as Artur Rehi points out. The Russian armored units that continue to move are regularly ambushed by Ukraine with horrific results, while their static positions are being increasinly mopped up as well. The puzzling thing is how little of this is reparted by any US media.