How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?

[billbindc]

And now the belated pivot to “it was the Americans!”. 

PS: yet more evidence that the Russians are making it up as they go along. 

 

Edited May 4, 2023 by billbindc

[Battlefront.com]

1 hour ago, billbindc said:

This. We know how utterly cold blooded the Kremlin is on a daily basis. Why show how feckless Moscow's defenses might be rather than hit a grammar school and/or nursery in Belgorod or Kursk? 

Let's look at it another way.  From Russia's perspective there are two very obvious and very sound solutions to this disastrous war that have been evident since early March 2022 -> negotiate a peace settlement *or* fully mobilize for war.  They have done neither.  Continuing the war as is has never held much chance of yielding a better result, and with each passing day even less so.  Yet this is the course they have chosen.

Similarly, the pre-war experts have expected Russia to "learn from their mistakes", such as not throwing away 10s of thousands of soldiers on pointless political objectives or having a fractured chain of command.  Yet Russia has not opted to do things like pause the fighting or properly train its forces before committing them to battle.  Yet this is the course they have chosen.

The question we need to ask, and have asked here many times, is why Putin would make such a really poor choice when Russia's very existence is on the line?  The answer we keep coming back to time and time again is that Putin is convinced that doing either logical solution (negotiate or mobilize) will end his regime.  So as bad as the status quo is by all objective standards, from Putin's perspective it's the better way to go.  In fact it might be the only way to go for many practical reasons.

What I'm getting at here is that Putin is conducting this war in a way that doesn't make sense to us until we accept that Putin knows things about the realities within Russia that we can only make assumptions about.

If Russia conducted this attack then it did so with that knowledge.  Which means the means and target of the false flag attack were chosen logically based on information we do not have.  Just like blowing up Nordstream, it doesn't need to make sense to us, it only needs to make sense to Putin.

My thinking is Putin and his goons decided that equivalent of whacking a school in Beslan was not deemed symbolically strong enough to get the effect they are looking for.  For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction thinking, if you will.  So the Kremlin was chosen as the target because that is what was needed.

As I said earlier, if this is true then it hints at things being even worse within the Kremlin power structure than we imagine it to be.  Whacking the Kremlin with a false flag attack smacks of desperation, so maybe Putin is desperate?

Steve

[Centurian52]

14 hours ago, Vet 0369 said:

Exactly this! When you look at the first U.S. air attack on Tokyo, what was the actual result, very little damage, but a major Japanese move of Air and Naval assets to protect Tokyo, at the expense of supporting the overall war effort.

And the bombing of Taranto. That did cause serious damage to the Italian fleet, but just as importantly the Italians reacted by rebasing their ships further away from where most of the action was happening, reducing the whole fleet's responsiveness.

[Kinophile]

3 hours ago, Thomm said:

5 hours ago, The_Capt said:

but hey we are just a bunch of guys sitting around chatting…

…we are just a bunch of guys sitting around procrastinating…

Fixed!

…we are just a bunch of guys sitting around prognosticating…

Fixed your Fix!

[Centurian52]

10 hours ago, Offshoot said:

Just to add, the Kremlin is claiming it took out the drones

If they wanted us to believe that (and if this was an officially sanctioned Russian op) then they should have detonated the drones somewhere in front of the Kremlin, not directly over the dome. Detonating directly over the dome is too much of a bullseye for it to be believable that they were shot down at exactly that point, before they could reach some further point.

[Centurian52]

9 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:

It is interesting to read that ISW's take on the Russian response is that it was too smooth and consistent compared to past embarrassments.  Others, however, think there was about a 12 hour delay between when the drone hit and when the message came out, possibly indicating that they had to think up a narrative because they were surprised.

ISW's take that Russia was quick to come up with a coherent message and the 12 hour delay might be completely consistent with each other if our sense of time for this sort of thing is out of whack. It is very easy to underestimate how long it should take to get something done if you don't have a lot of experience in that sort of thing (I know I don't have any experience in crafting propaganda). If coming up with a clear and consistent message for a surprise attack is the sort of thing that normally takes days, then coming up with one in only half a day might be considered pretty quick.

[billbindc]

32 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:

Let's look at it another way.  From Russia's perspective there are two very obvious and very sound solutions to this disastrous war that have been evident since early March 2022 -> negotiate a peace settlement *or* fully mobilize for war.  They have done neither.  Continuing the war as is has never held much chance of yielding a better result, and with each passing day even less so.  Yet this is the course they have chosen.

Similarly, the pre-war experts have expected Russia to "learn from their mistakes", such as not throwing away 10s of thousands of soldiers on pointless political objectives or having a fractured chain of command.  Yet Russia has not opted to do things like pause the fighting or properly train its forces before committing them to battle.  Yet this is the course they have chosen.

The question we need to ask, and have asked here many times, is why Putin would make such a really poor choice when Russia's very existence is on the line?  The answer we keep coming back to time and time again is that Putin is convinced that doing either logical solution (negotiate or mobilize) will end his regime.  So as bad as the status quo is by all objective standards, from Putin's perspective it's the better way to go.  In fact it might be the only way to go for many practical reasons.

What I'm getting at here is that Putin is conducting this war in a way that doesn't make sense to us until we accept that Putin knows things about the realities within Russia that we can only make assumptions about.

If Russia conducted this attack then it did so with that knowledge.  Which means the means and target of the false flag attack were chosen logically based on information we do not have.  Just like blowing up Nordstream, it doesn't need to make sense to us, it only needs to make sense to Putin.

My thinking is Putin and his goons decided that equivalent of whacking a school in Beslan was not deemed symbolically strong enough to get the effect they are looking for.  For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction thinking, if you will.  So the Kremlin was chosen as the target because that is what was needed.

As I said earlier, if this is true then it hints at things being even worse within the Kremlin power structure than we imagine it to be.  Whacking the Kremlin with a false flag attack smacks of desperation, so maybe Putin is desperate?

Steve

If you look at Putin's history, his false flags have tended to be well thought out (as you note above, from his perspective) and have a definite and defined aim. When 2014 happened, Russia rolled out an entire campaign of soup to nuts propaganda. Before this phase of the war began, Russia had a slew of false flag operations and had done a ton of media work that allowed a smooth propaganda roll out supporting the effort. But those were big ongoing events.

The infamous apartment bombings are a better analogy and were also clearly presaged and followed by defined propaganda efforts. And more to the point, the accomplished goal was to create insecurity and then follow it up with a security clampdown that showcased Putin's ability to stabilize the country and justify his regime's right to rule. 

What do we have in this situation? Two drone attacks that were not publicized. The public found out because a local Moscow Telegram channel posted the video and then it fitfully came out followed by a series of ever morphing Kremlin statements and a frantic order banning all drones in Saint Petersburg and Moscow. There was no preparatory build up and by tonight it looks like Peskov is going to blame it on an alliance between Satan and Hunter Biden. Finally, there's no actual thing Russia can reasonably do to respond. Escalating to NBC has all of the drawbacks it previously possessed while escalating in conventional terms is already going full bore. 

Unless and until we see evidence of actual planning, Occam leans strongly towards not the Kremlin.

Edited May 4, 2023 by billbindc

[Kinophile]

I suspect Tsar Putin is not so worried about the mechanics or work involved with mobilization. The MoD will fumble through, people will complain, the State apparatus will squish them and Putin will get his forces. He doesnt not give a rats *** about whining mobiks.

But a key aspect with Mobilization is that, from here on, if Putin times it wrong he will train & arm 10s of thousands of men and throw them into an escalating meatgrinder just as his economy really starts to falter.

If/then Russia suffers an operationally disjointing defeat and a imposed ceasefire/peace happens then all those experienced, organized and weapons familiar ex-mil come home to a trashed economy, oppressive security, with zero job options and oodles of bitterness. February 1917, anyone? 

But hey, if Putin is really going full cosplay on Tsar Nicky II then this is exactly what he should do, right to the bitter end, please...

 

 

[Kinophile]

5 minutes ago, billbindc said:

If you look at Putin's history, his false flags have tended to be well thought out (as you note above, from his perspective) and have a definite and defined aim. When 2014 happened, Russia rolled out an entire campaign of soup to nuts propaganda. Before this phase of the war began, Russia had a slew of false flag operations and had done a ton of media work that allowed a smooth propaganda roll out supporting the effort. But those were big ongoing events.

The infamous apartment bombings are a better analogy and were also clearly presaged and followed by defined propaganda efforts. And more to the point, the accomplished goal was to create insecurity and then follow it up with a security clampdown that showcased Putin's ability to stabilize the country and justify his regime's right to rule. 

What do we have in this situation? Two drone attacks that were not publicized. The public found out because a local Moscow Telegram channel posted the video and then it fitfully came out followed by a series of ever morphing Kremlin statements and a frantic order banning all drones in Saint Petersburg and Moscow. There was no preparatory build up and by tonight it looks like Peskov is going to blame it on an alliance between Satan and Hunter Biden. Finally, there's no actual thing Russia can reasonably do to respond. Escalating to NBC has all of the drawbacks it previously possessed while escalating in conventional terms is already going full bore. 

Unless and until we see evidence of actual planning, Occam leans strongly towards not the Kremlin.

Yup, he doesn't do False Flags by halves. He commits heavily, its in his training and mindset. After each event, and they are always significant and horrible, there's been a clear end objective and progression of escalation to get there, constantly harking back to the original op. This is disjointed, minor and functionally a fart in the political wind. 

I don't read Putin's fingerprints on this. Its too small, has no political legs and not enough people died for it to be useful.

Either he's seriously lost his game, one of his minions tried to be smart or this wasn't his idea/intention.

I dont read UKR off it either; every cross border attack has had a clear military objective directly related to ongoing ops.

[Battlefront.com]

 

1 hour ago, billbindc said:

You make the best argument that I've seen on this.

Thanks.  Unfortunately, with all things Kremlin related there's any number of possibilities out there to consider, including ones that are pretty nutty.  The one constant in all of this is Russia's extremely long history of wanting to take charge of the narrative any way it can.  The pending Ukrainian counter offensive has got a lot of Russians jittery and a lot of Westerners giddy.  The drone strike, at the very least, has given Russians something else to talk about and that might be enough motivation right there to have conducted the attack.

1 hour ago, billbindc said:

1. This shift happened with the collapse of the front around Kharkiv and accelerated after Kherson's fall. It's not coordinated with the latest event. 

Correct.  What I'm saying is that this attack is in keeping with past messaging.  This is to counter the people who think "Russia wouldn't make itself look weak" because the fact is making Russia appear vulnerable and at risk has been a deliberate propaganda angle since before the war started and, just recently, as something to be emphasized.  Therefore, this attack is consistent with recent and past Kremlin messaging.

1 hour ago, billbindc said:

2. It's been doing that since the beginning as well (remember the absurd cornucopia of evidence bust last year?). 

Correct, but the recent busts were clustered together and give the short attention span public something recent to be reminded of how tricky those Ukrainian Nazi terrorists really are.  Remember, Russia's false flag attacks in the past are almost always (always?) preceded by smaller false flag operations.  The entire start of this war was a shining example of it.  What I'm saying here is that if there was no such false flag Ukrainian terrorist cell nonsense in the previous weeks I would be LESS inclined to think the Kremlin attack was a Russian false flag operation.  But it is there, including the Crimean leadership assassination plot nonsense, so a box is checked.

1 hour ago, billbindc said:

3. See my answer above. There were far less humiliating ways to accomplish the same goal.

See previous post that Russian calculations might disagree with that assessment for reasons we can only guess at.

1 hour ago, billbindc said:

4. If this were the case, the simplest path would be to declare war on Ukraine and open up full conscription. Russia hasn't gone there and isn't signaling it will. Why not? Because it's political dynamite and because the state lacks the capacity to effectively process and arm another large wave absent significant aid from outside (i.e. Xi). That hasn't happened.

But this is exactly my point.  Putin knows he needs to get another 300k minimum into uniform (or at least track suits) and to the front soon, but he doesn't think he can do it under the current set of political circumstances.  Therefore, he needs to change the current set of political circumstances before mobilization.

1 hour ago, billbindc said:

5. Agreed. But absence of options doesn't create new ones. Putin made a deal with Russians and he's breaking it. Any Russians who care to can simply turn on their tv and watch Solovyev catalogue the disaster. It also contradicts the essential logic of the regime. Putin's Russia has always been based on de-mobilizing political action. It's not a movement government and...as we've seen...it has been careful to trim the sales of would be mobilizers like Girkin/Dugin/etc.

From any action there is a risk of an unanticipated reaction.  Granted.  But look at the reality.  Life for the average Russian already sucks more than it did last year and objectively it has been sucking a little more each year since 2011.  This is something Putin can't change because it's already happened.  Now the economy is on the verge of cratering and he knows it.  Putin needs to figure out some way to shift attention and blame away from him and put it somewhere else.  Blaming the West and Ukraine is the logical choice.  What else is there to do?

1 hour ago, billbindc said:

6. I think the reality on US/EU aid is that the only real limiting factors have been initial fears of nuclear/regional escalation in the beginning and subsequent needs to curb what China feels like it would be justified in providing to Moscow. A couple of Mavic drones conducting a demonstration attack over the Kremlin simply won't affect any of that. In fact, China isn't particularly well known for putting good money in after bad.

Similar to what I said in the previous comment.  Putin has tried all his traditional ways of gaining an advantage and none of them have worked as such.  However, he has made some progress in putting doubt in some people's minds and getting the natural isolationists in various countries to become more vocal.  A successful counter offensive is going to do the opposite and it is probable that is what Ukraine is going to have.  Which means that Putin has to do something if he wants to see the West's support weaken.  It's all going to look desperate to us no matter what it is, such as blowing up his own gas pipeline, so the Kremlin strike is not outside of that paradigm.

1 hour ago, billbindc said:

 

The far simpler explanation is that Putin isn't a guy who intentionally embarrasses himself and his regime for nebulous and perhaps unrealizable gains and that Ukraine just showed quite clearly to the Russian population that it actually holds escalation dominance in their arena of the war.

As with Nordstream, we'll know soon enough.

We should know soon enough, but hopefully it will just be a mild point of curiosity.  I'm hoping that we might soon be speculating as to how Putin fell out a window in a windowless bunker

Steve

[billbindc]

7 minutes ago, Kinophile said:

Yup, he doesn't do False Flags by halves. He commits heavily, its in his training and mindset. After each event, and they are always significant and horrible, there's been a clear end objective and progression of escalation to get there, constantly harking back to the original op. This is disjointed, minor and functionally a fart in the political wind. 

I don't read Putin's fingerprints on this. Its too small, has no political legs and not enough people died for it to be useful.

Either he's seriously lost his game, one of his minions tried to be smart or this wasn't his idea/intention.

I dont read UKR off it either; every cross border attack has had a clear military objective directly related to ongoing ops.

My wild guess is that this is an affiliated but essentially independent Ukrainian operation. Kyiv would always want deniability for the obvious benefits we can see in the furious finger pointing that's going on. And the goal is to demonstrate to Russians that the war is going south, fast, which is not going to be a goad for conscription in any way. 

To your point about the last Czar above...I asked a Russian origin journalist I know on the day the war started what they thought would happen ultimately. The response: "Nicholas II?". 

Edited May 4, 2023 by billbindc

[_Morpheus_]

Hromadske took an interview from the folks from K2 (you remember the video where the tank destroy the tranches from 10 meters).
PS: they are claiming, that wagner lost ~600 people at that position within short period of time.

English subtitles are available.

 

Edited May 4, 2023 by _Morpheus_

[sburke]

34 minutes ago, Kinophile said:

But a key aspect with Mobilization is that, from here on, if Putin times it wrong he will train & arm 10s of thousands of men and throw them into an escalating meatgrinder just as his economy really starts to falter.

I think the training and arming piece might be a reach.

[sburke]

1 hour ago, Battlefront.com said:

If Russia conducted this attack then it did so with that knowledge.  Which means the means and target of the false flag attack were chosen logically based on information we do not have.  Just like blowing up Nordstream, it doesn't need to make sense to us, it only needs to make sense to Putin.

Steve

and even if it makes sense to him, it doesn't mean it still isn't stupid even with those facts.

[dan/california]

28 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:

I'm hoping that we might soon be speculating as to how Putin fell out a window in a windowless bunker

Line of the the day, I am lucky I wasn't holding coffee.

[sburke]

31 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:

We should know soon enough, but hopefully it will just be a mild point of curiosity.  I'm hoping that we might soon be speculating as to how Putin fell out a window in a windowless bunker

Steve

Ha I was once accused by a cop of breaking windows in a windowless storage shed!

[kluge]

1 hour ago, Centurian52 said:

ISW's take that Russia was quick to come up with a coherent message and the 12 hour delay might be completely consistent with each other if our sense of time for this sort of thing is out of whack.

IMO, a good chunk of the delay can be chalked up to the fact that the incident occurred in the dead of night. Propaganda is best delivered when audiences are awake. The several hour delay between the incident and the start of major news broadcasts would have given officials extra time to prepare a semblance of a coherent message.

[Kinophile]

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/may/04/ukraine-residents-kherson-prepare-for-curfew-after-night-of-heavy-shelling

Its the Guardian, and the title is grammatically silly but...

 

[The_Capt]

5 hours ago, billbindc said:

My wild guess is that this is an affiliated but essentially independent Ukrainian operation. Kyiv would always want deniability for the obvious benefits we can see in the furious finger pointing that's going on. And the goal is to demonstrate to Russians that the war is going south, fast, which is not going to be a goad for conscription in any way. 

To your point about the last Czar above...I asked a Russian origin journalist I know on the day the war started what they thought would happen ultimately. The response: "Nicholas II?". 

Well if it was a Ukrainian op, it was poorly played.  I mean you have to follow up with IO exploitation (which we should be hearing by now).  Right now it looks like a pretty sad little UAV popped off aND scratched some roofing tiles on the old dome.  Weak tea, and worse looks weak too.  No HVT, no big drama like they had on the bridge or those airfields last year.  It is more likely to play into Russia's narratives and anyone could see that one coming.  Could be on outside job but it was amateur if it was - unless there are some big pieces we are not seeing but I am also leaning towards The Razor.

[NamEndedAllen]

4 hours ago, billbindc said:

As with Nordstream, we'll know soon enough.

We don’t know who did it, and likely won’t for quite a long time, if ever. (See links below) What we can better understand is “Cui Bono”…Who Benefits? But the symbolism is clear: the essence of Russia herself is under attack by the untermensch.
**Ukraine? Doubtful. Obvious reasons include enraging the Russian public (see futility of WWII The Blitz, bombing N. Vietnam, etc). Escalating European fears of a widening war etc. Embarrassing the USA after repeated messages not to stage deep attacks into Russia and Moscow. And little benefit. Does the Ukrainian public really need to be further pumped up against Russia?    
**Russian Partisan groups? “If you strike the king, you must kill him”.                                               **Putin? Good reasons have already been outlined here and widely by analysts elsewhere, not only at ISW. Not least is the likelihood that he has done this before. Some may not know about or have forgotten Putin’s infamous rise to power during the Chechnya’s War. To achieve his lofty goal, Putin likely staged multiple false flag slaughters of his own people.

https://news.yahoo.com/bloody-czar-did-false-flag-175812204.html

https://www.hudson.org/national-security-defense/vladimir-putin-1999-russian-apartment-house-bombings-was-putin-responsible

https://www.rferl.org/a/putin-russia-president-1999-chechnya-apartment-bombings/30097551.html

[Huba]

Now here's something that can easily put the attrition war on it's head. A pulse jet powered "Peoples missile" that (save for the guidance electronics) can be churned out by the thousands in small handicraft workshops. Here's what the creators write about it on Twitter:
 

Quote

The Mass production factor may be achieved due to the affordable technology and comparatively low production cost of the engine and most of the missile's structural components. 
Idea of "TREMBITA" People's Small Cruise Missile" is not limited to hitting the occupational army's facilities. It is also about exhausting the enemy's air defense resources with very cheap mass production missiles. 
Mass production factor may be achieved due to the affordable technology and comparatively low production cost of the engine and most of the missile's structural components.
The missile's main engine – the pulsejet engine runs on common gasoline. The missile is launched by a solid propellant booster or a pneumatic catapult.
Under the project, these labor-consuming tasks must be diversified engaging small production facilities all over Ukraine (basic tools and garage workshops will suffice). That is why, the project's name is People's Missile.
The missile is  earmarked for salvo firing of 20 to 50 missiles at effective depth of 50 to 140 km, i.e., the area where the enemy concentrates the top priority targets protected with russian air defense systems.
he cruise missile's most expensive elements are electronic hardware and software of the navigation and guidance set. These technologies will not be shared with the volunteer contractors in order to prevent any unauthorized information leakage.

Here's a video about it:

Assuming they are able to procur enough guidance modules (which I assume will be mostly of civilian type, so easily available), I don't see any why this project wouldn't be feasible? The costs are minimal, it is way simpler than Shaheds, the technology was largely proven 80 years ago already.
And it should be easily scalable both in volume built, and in size/ performance.

Edited May 4, 2023 by Huba

[Haiduk]

Huge BOOM was at 2:40 of night today. Preliminary not only Shakheds attack on Kyiv was repelled, but some missiles were shot down - no official info to this time. There are rumors, that ballistic type missiles were used on Kyiv this night, but they were intercepted by Patriots in first time. But this is not confirmed yet. 

Air raid alarm was announced hour ago. Some recon drone was shot down over Maidan half hour ago. But it suspicious looks like UKR PD-2, but it could be and Mugin-5  

 

Edited May 4, 2023 by Haiduk

[NamEndedAllen]

https://www.ft.com/content/bf892731-2f1c-4c52-b90b-b44ca1911263 A Russian spy network has acquired sensitive technology from EU companies to fuel Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine even after a US-led crackdown on the covert smuggling ring. The network — set up to procure goods ranging from microchips to ammunition — has managed to obtain machine tools from Germany and Finland despite US sanctions imposed in March 2022, a Financial Times investigation has found.  

 

Edited May 4, 2023 by NamEndedAllen

[A Canadian Cat]

27 minutes ago, The_Capt said:

Right now it looks like a pretty sad little UAV popped off aND scratched some roofing tiles on the old dome.  Weak tea, and worse looks weak too.

Unless...

In general I am not too concerned about the "who done it" speculation but I did have one thought, as I was reading some of the posts here: how will this effect Putin's participation in the May 9th parade? It struck me, that the drone explosion was powerful enough to take out Putin and whomever was unlucky to be standing next to him - if it had gone off over the spectator stands at the May 9th parade.

So, before this Putin was looking forward to the prospect of a drone or three flying over the parade and being a nuisance. Now he has to pick his least favourite body double to go stand and watch the parade.

 

Are we there yet?

[Letter from Prague]