RandomCommenter

The point I was making was only that for the first two assaults, the militia mowed the Brits down. Howe somehow rallied the Brits to have a third go and the militia had run out of ammunition, were thirsty, tired, and then they broke. You would not have expected a third attempt to succeed where the first two had been so disastrous. That is my analogy to the Russian lines in the South. They are holding, they are holding ... until they don't. The troops manning those lines have been there for weeks now without relief. They do seem to have plenty of ammunition. I question the quality of nutrition and sleep they are receiving. Human beings have a breaking point and I feel like these lines may suddenly collapse. Agreed r.e. all your other points. It was Breed's Hill but has come down to the public as Bunker Hill. And for sure it was a pyrrhic victory. The British lost about a quarter the troops they had in Boston and reinforcements were 3,000 miles away. Also it showed the Americans that militia (not to mind the mooted continental army) could stand up to red coats. And of course the most important long term outcome of that battle was, in my opinion, the promotion of Howe. It is my personal opinion that Howe made a series of errors in New York and that a different, more aggressive, British commander could have won the revolutionary war for the British right there (although even if they won that war in 1776 they were never going to hold America long term, there would just have been another revolution ten or twenty years later).

Here's hoping that the Ukrainians already have cluster munitions deployed in quantity in the North for those 100,000 Russian mobiks. They would make good sunflower fertiliser (although I wouldn't like to try to harvest the oil amongst the left over cluster bomblets).

It's what we're all praying for. A line that looks solid, that has held for months only because commanders refuse to allow forward troops to retreat at all, even if they should, that deploys blocking squads to shoot people who do retreat. Such a line can look like it is holding until it suddenly collapses. Think back even to the American stand on Bunker Hill where the first two British attacks held and then suddenly there was nothing to repel the third attack.

Exactly this. It would undermine the article 5 protections for all members.

What I am proposing is: Win the war, take the territory they want Renounce forever whatever territories they do not want or reclaim. There is no territorial dispute. Sign a peace treaty making peace on these terms Then Ukraine is not at war. There is no territorial dispute. They join NATO and know they have a reliable peace now. Of course, the problem with this is that it depends on Russia signing a peace treaty. So it gives Russia the power to say no, to keep lobbing in one cruise missile a month to continue the war and they can force Ukraine to stay outside of NATO. So the Russians need to be defeated enough that they will accept to sign a peace treaty. Or we need to hold our noses and offer the Russians enough concessions that they determine that signing a treaty could be in their interests. These could be things like relaxing sanctions, increasing trade or even (I hate to say it actually) forgoing some Russian war criminals facing justice for their crimes. Appeal to the self interest of the people on top. In reality the best way to get there is still a crushing military defeat that collapses the Putin regime and then try to make peace with the next government. So in a certain sense these discussions are a distraction. All the effort now needs to focus on defeating Russia. I thought that this article was interesting in teh FT (sorry, it is behind a paywall): Western capitals must keep lines open to Moscow What would a press secretary in a Russian embassy in the west be forwarding to the Kremlin these days? The question was posed to me by a German official early in Ukraine’s counteroffensive. I was reminded of this during the Nato summit last week — and even more so after the revelation of talks between former US officials and Russian diplomats. As Nato debated the future of Ukraine, the British media were so obsessed with a scandal involving a BBC presenter that the summit barely made a front page. So yes, happy times for Russian diplomats in London keen to relay to the Kremlin the message they know it wants to hear of a distracted, narcissistic UK. The German official was being playful but making an essential point: it is all too credible to picture Vladimir Putin still being fed self-reinforcing lines. What mileage is there for an aide to tell him the truth? ... The west needs to let Moscow know how serious we are in our resolve. It also needs to work out who to talk to and who to trust, after long years in which the value of Russia expertise has been downgraded in western foreign ministries. In recent history, time and again autocrats have shown a stunning capacity for misreading their enemies’ intentions, and vice versa. Slobodan Milošević and Saddam Hussein spring to mind. Somehow the west has to pierce the self-delusion shrouding Putin’s court. I may of course be underestimating the spine of Russia’s press secretaries. But even if so, we need more not fewer back-channels. https://on.ft.com/3Di0qef

There is in fact precedent for this (not that I am advocating it as a policy, I believe Ukraine should restore its territorial integrity). Finland springs to mind. Russia occupies about 10% of Finland but Finland has made it clear that it no longer considers those occupied territories disputed and it has just joined NATO. Germany too. They no longer consider Königsberg disputed. And they are in NATO. So I would say that Ukraine has full freedom of maneuver to determine how it wants to handle its occupied territories. Maybe it wants to retake Crimea and the land bridge (to make clear that Russia is defeated, to remove the dagger pointed at the heart of Ukraine that Crimea would always be and to control the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea and remove the threat from Odesa). But maybe it is not too pushed about certain areas of Donetsk and Luhansk where the population would be hostile and the economy is thoroughly ruined. Those decisions will be up to the Ukrainian people and government to take. But as to whether they could join NATO without recapturing all their territory, if they came out and said (with societal consensus) that they no longer dispute those territories, then, yes, clearly they should be allowed join NATO.

I hate to comment when Steve asked to give the topic a rest. But there has been a lot of talk about Byzantium, so I couldn't resist adding that Moscow as the "third Rome" (has anyone ever heard such rubbish?) always wanted control of Constantinople / Istanbul. Russia had every intention of expanding westward until it was stopped. They would have happily gobbled up Romania, Bulgaria, the Balkans, European Turkey. They invaded the Danubian Principalities in 1853 and this was an unprovoked war of expansion into the West. Russia has expanded an average of 50 square miles a day, every day, since the reign of Ivan the Terrible. That's the sixteenth century. No other nation is as consistently greedy of their neighbors territory as Russia. The only people that came close were the British for the 200-300 odd years of their imperial hubris. But the Russians are still at it today.

He is the one Tory I have time for.

https://on.ft.com/46qBb6X ‘Traitors must be shot’: Vladimir Putin’s truce with Wagner teeters on edge (sorry, the FT article is behind a paywall but the gist of it is below). Please use the sharing tools found via the share button at the top or side of articles. Copying articles to share with others is a breach of FT.com T&Cs and Copyright Policy. Email licensing@ft.com to buy additional rights. Subscribers may share up to 10 or 20 articles per month using the gift article service. More information can be found at https://www.ft.com/tour. https://www.ft.com/content/8c247cb9-c14b-4fd6-94d6-300655c35c1e Armed Wagner fighters roam Voronezh in southern Russia eating shawarmas. Yevgeny Prigozhin is back to ranting against the defence ministry — while treason charges against the warlord still stand. Two days after the Kremlin struck a deal to end Wagner’s armed uprising, the truce is teetering on the edge, with growing questions in Russia over whether the bargain will hold. The Kremlin has seized billions of roubles in cash and gold bars from Prigozhin, squeezing Wagner’s finances. But some fervent loyalists of President Vladimir Putin are proposing even more unforgiving solutions. “I am fiercely convinced that in wartime, traitors must be shot,” said Andrei Gurulyov, a prominent pro-war MP, on state television on Sunday. “Whatever fairy tales they tell you, the only way out for Prigozhin is a bullet in the head.” The first indication of the deal’s fragility came on Monday, when state newswires cited sources saying that — contrary to Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov’s promises — Prigozhin was still under investigation for organising the mutiny. The leak suggested Russia wanted to maintain pressure on Prigozhin, who resurfaced hours later in a voice message and claimed his mutiny had been a simple act of self-preservation. The insurrection was to stop Wagner being dismantled on July 1, he said, and contrary to reports, his fighters would not be joining the regular armed forces. I know that Steve and others on here are convinced that Prigozhin or whoever is pulling his strings "won" and that we will see Shoigu and Gerasimov replaced and Putin reduced to a puppet. Time will tell. In my personal opinion, it is equally likely that Putin will renege on the deal and give Prigozhin a nice cup of tea or push him out a window. And the point I want to make is the following - if this happens, it will demonstrate one more time for those blind enough or deluded enough to have not got the memo yet - that there is absolutely no point negotiating with or concluding a deal with Putin, Lavrov, Peskov and the rest of their murder gang. I hope that the coming double-cross of Prigozhin will end forever any talk of the usual suspects in the West who suggest that Ukraine should negotiate some sort of "end of the war" with this gang. The war can only end either with the utter defeat of Russia or some kind of negotiated settlement with whatever the new regime will be after Putin's downfall. Negotiating with Putin's gang is literally a waste of time.

I would be concerned at that 35% of Americans who have an unfavorable view of NATO. In fact that tracks quite closely to a hardcore 35% who support "you know who" no matter what (for example I believe him when he says he could shoot someone on 5th Ave and not lose support). So what I am saying is 35% opposition to NATO in the US, with the potential for people representing that view getting control of Congress or the White House is a worry to me. I hope I don't start the thread going off topic (again) into US politics here but I just assumed that support for NATO in the US was higher than this.

This is one hell of a window of opportunity to announce F35s going to Ukraine. Just saying ...

Off topic of Nova Kakhova but I thought this blog post by Lawrence Freedman was worth sharing. "Salami Slicing, Boiled Frogs, and Russian Red Lines" https://open.substack.com/pub/samf/p/salami-slicing-boiled-frogs-and-russian?r=ypt3l&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email It's basically much the same content as Perun's video this week on escalation but I think it's worth a read.

Not to re-open a topic that had previously been discussed to death on here. But I thought this story was interesting and worth sharing. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/18/us/politics/airman-jack-teixeira-classified-secrets.html Air Force officials caught Airman Jack Teixeira taking notes and conducting deep-dive searches for classified material months before he was charged with leaking a vast trove of government secrets, but did not remove him from his job, according to a Justice Department filing on Wednesday. On two occasions in September and October 2022, Airman Teixeira’s superiors in the Massachusetts Air National Guard admonished him after reports that he had taken “concerning actions” while handling classified information. Those included stuffing a note into his pocket after reviewing secret information inside his unit, according to a court filing ahead of a hearing before a federal magistrate judge in Worcester, Mass., on Friday to determine whether he should be released on bail.

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2023/04/13/us/documents-leak-pentagon

I believe that this expression goes back to the Treaty of Limerick of 1691. (See here if interested for example http://www.irishidentity.com/stories/limericktreaty.htm) Although I understand that the French maintain that they had the expression even before then. (Apologies, paxroma and astrophel had already answered this)

I'm reading a book at the moment, Overreach: The Inside Story of Putin and Russia’s War Against Ukraine by Owen Matthews. https://www.amazon.com/Overreach-Inside-Russias-Against-Ukraine-ebook/dp/B0B79FVY1J One thing I read last night, which I had wondered about at the time was why the US stopped Poland sending some 1980s era Mig fighter jets back I think it was in May last year or thereabouts. I mean it just didn't make sense to me. According to the author, there was a backdoor between the US and China where China asked the US to stop the handover of these aircraft in exchange for China putting pressure on Russia to take nuclear weapons off the agenda. I don't know if it's true or not. But if so, it's interesting. Sometimes the US is juggling interests that are not visible to us at the time.

https://www.irishtimes.com/ireland/2023/03/31/russian-ships-return-to-west-coast-despite-appearing-to-depart-for-africa/ Next Nordstream incident in the works? Russian government vessels equipped with technology capable of interfering with subsea cables have returned to the west coast (of Ireland) after appearing to depart towards Africa earlier in the week. The two Russian flagged ships, the Umka and the Bakhtemir, caused alarm among defence officials late last week when they were spotted engaging in unusual manoeuvrers off the Galway coast, in the vicinity of a newly opened subsea communications cable.

But what do you do when drones go miniature? A swarm of tiny drones controlling remote artillery with a very long range?

Just to mention that this story is also detailed in depth on the Guardian which is not paywalled like the Washington Post is.

I know that this is a little off topic of Ukraine (although with Xi and Putin getting in to bed together both questions end up being a little interrelated), but one thing that Taiwan has done is to place the semiconductor factories directly behind the most likely invasion beaches. So that China cannot do a contested landing on those beaches without destroying the factories. For example: https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/taiwan-china-chips/

Speaking of negotiation options and culmination, I found this one of the better blog posts out there on the topic. https://samf.substack.com/p/still-bakhmut?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Surovkin is fired! I guess he's lucky he didn't fall out of a window From FT Russia demotes ‘General Armageddon’ after battlefield failures Valery Gerasimov replaces Sergei Surovikin, who was appointed in October as head of Ukraine campaign Russia has replaced Sergei Surovikin after barely three months as head of its Ukraine campaign following a succession of battlefield setbacks and failure to turn the war in Moscow’s favour. Surovikin, whose nicknames include “General Armageddon”, will be replaced by Russia’s highest ranking military officer, Valery Gerasimov. Surovikin will stay on as one of his deputies. The reshuffle — the second since the start of the full-scale invasion in February, comes after the Russian army lost ground to a Ukrainian counteroffensive and sparked a domestic backlash over a deadly strike against newly mobilised conscripts in a barracks in east Ukraine on New Year’s Day. When he was appointed to the top job in October, the 56-year-old Surovikin was expected to turn round Russia’s flagging assault through escalation and brutal tactics developed during his leadership of the country’s forces in Syria. But in those three months Russia lost control of the southern town of Kherson, the only regional Ukrainian capital it had managed to capture, and struggled to provide basic equipment, accommodation and modern weapons for the 300,000 men it began conscripting in September. Together with deadly military mistakes — such as the housing of hundreds of conscripts in a single building in the town of Makiivka, leading to the deaths of dozens in a rocket strike by Kyiv — territorial losses have led to harsh rebukes from the Russian pro-war rightwing. Surovikin also oversaw an intense campaign of strikes on civilian infrastructure in Ukraine, regularly knocking out electricity in cities but not shaking up the balance of power on the front line. Gerasimov, Russia’s 67-year-old chief of the general staff and its deputy defence minister, will take over as leader of the Joint Forces Group in the zone of the “special military operation”, the name Moscow gives to its invasion of Ukraine, which has entered its 11th month. Oleg Salyukov, commander of the ground forces, and Alexei Kim, deputy chief of the general staff, were also appointed deputies to Gerasimov. Russia’s defence ministry said the appointment of Gerasimov was a “raising of the status of the leadership” of the military force in Ukraine, a move “associated with the expansion of the scale of tasks to be accomplished”. These tasks, it said, included “the need to organise closer co-operation between branches and services of the armed forces” and an “increase in the quality of all types of provision, and the effectiveness of management of troops”. Since March, when Russia recorded its biggest gains, the territories seized and occupied by Moscow’s forces have more than halved in size, following significant losses in Kharkiv in the north east, and Kherson in the south. Russian pro-war analysts were sceptical that the reshuffle would solve the problems its army is grappling with, which include inflexible and hierarchical leadership, equipment shortages and poor provisions. “The sum doesn’t change by changing the places of its parts: this is the only thing that can be said about Gerasimov’s appointment,” wrote Rybar, a pro-Kremlin military analysis channel with more than a million subscribers on Telegram, and is run by a former member of the defence ministry press service. The closest Russia has come to a battlefield victory since July has been its current push forward in the salt mine town of Soledar, near Bakhmut in Ukraine’s east. But that fight has also revealed the faultlines dividing Russia’s forces in Ukraine. Evgeny Prigozhin, head of the Wagner private military contractor group, has insisted publicly that it is his men, rather than the regular armed forces, who have been fighting in the area. Some of Prigozhin’s men have recently shared videos in which they criticise Gerasimov and the general staff for equipment shortages. Russia’s defence ministry on Wednesday said its troops were also fighting in Soledar: “Units of the Russian Airborne Forces have blockaded Soledar from the north and south, assault detachments are fighting in the city, the Air Force is striking at the strongholds of Ukrainian troops.” Recommended News in-depthWar in Ukraine ‘Untrainable’: Russian army faces backlash over conscripts’ death in Ukraine attack A person close to Russia’s defence ministry said the move to appoint Gerasimov as the leader of Russia’s regular forces in Ukraine reflected organisational struggles at the heart of the war effort, rather than a new direction. “They are just shuffling the deck because they are in a dead end and have no idea what to do,” the person said. “These guys are all old men pushing 70 and they don’t know how to fight a modern war.” The person likened the reshuffle to a classic Russian parable about a group of forest animals who form an incompetent instrumental quartet and ask a nightingale for advice, only to be told: “Arrange yourselves any way you like; it will make no difference. You will never become musicians.” But Sergei Markov, a pro-Kremlin analyst, said Surovikin would retain a crucial leadership role on the ground, as Gerasimov would remain in an office position in Moscow. However, by giving control of the operation in Ukraine to the army’s chief of general staff, the defence ministry hoped to reduce bureaucratic delays, seen as a critical disadvantage compared to Kyiv’s more nimble structure. “The defence ministry hopes that this will allow the army to dramatically increase the speed of decision-making,” Markov wrote. The ministry could have been inspired by the Wagner group, he said. “Thus, the success of Wagner and Prigozhin forces the Russian army to fight differently, in a more modern way,” Markov wrote on social media.

I just wanted to post this here, a fund raiser for Paul Whelan who is still in a Russian labor camp https://www.gofundme.com/f/h9p9w-free-paul-whelan

Yes, you were not wrong. She was arrested on Feb 17. https://people.com/sports/brittney-griner-russia-arrest-and-trial-timeline/

Personally I'd love to see an operative from the US or an allied nation arrange a little "accident" for this guy Victor Bout in a few months. Maybe we could find a window for him to fall out of.