Is this Winning?
Oh my GOD! The Russians are advancing on all fronts!!! Well, I mean, not near Kharkiv, where they are retreating. And the Dnepr river has stopped them in the south. But in Donetsk, they are advancing! Below are the gains over the last two years of fighting. This is a repeat of World War I — trench warfare, where assaults are incredibly costly, and the lines don't change much. If we zoom in really closely on this map, we can make the Russian gains look significant, but it is telling that, from this level, the only labeled city that Russia has taken in two years is Bakhmut, and that cost them 50,000 men at least and an attempted Wagner coup. So, let's keep perspective here, folks. The lines in the sand are not moving much and aren't going to until one or the other army has a command and control level collapse or the country (countries) supporting each side suffers a political or economic collapse.
While conscription in Ukraine is finally picking up again, the quality of Russian troops is falling. Earlier, we saw a video from an entire unit of men who were taken from a hospital after having been wounded on the front, and they were sent back to an assault division. Below is drone footage of such men in combat positions, not evacuating and not exactly fighting but just taking up space.
Secret Plans and Rumors
The following is all based on unconfirmed reports, so take it with a grain of salt. I mentioned earlier that Russian State Advisor Tatiana Shevtsova may have defected to France. She played a major role in the money laundering operations of Shoigu and the Department of Defense, and when Belousov was appointed in Shoigu's place, her network would have fallen apart, and her crimes would be open for investigation. Russia needs to blame somebody for the failures in Ukraine, and she doesn't have the personal connections to Putin that Shoigu has.
Dmytro Gordon is a Ukrainian journalist with his own media presence. He was tried for "calls to terrorism" for broadcasting "falsehoods" about the Russian Army and was sentenced in absentia to 14 years of prison in Russia. Interestingly, his YouTube channel is mostly in the Russian language, almost like Ukrainians don't persecute or prosecute people for speaking Russian. More on that in a minute.
He reports that Russia has sent the Minister of Internal Affairs to Washington under the guise of visiting the UN (yes, in NYC) to present a Russian "peace plan." The plan includes Russia maintaining full control of Donetsk and Luhansk and partial control of Crimea but a Russian withdrawal from Kherson and Zaporizhzhia. They also want a pledge that Ukraine will not join NATO and will limit its armed forces but could join the EU.
This plan is a no-go. Russia must fully withdraw from Ukraine, and Ukraine must be armed to the teeth, while Russia's military should be limited to three guys with one rifle and one motorcycle.
While this plan is absurd, it does represent a downgrade from prior Russian demands in May, where Russia demanded all of that plus Zaporizhzhia and Kherson and no binary "dual control" of Crimea. Russia is losing, and they know it.
War Crimes
The Human Rights in Ukraine Kharkiv Network reports that a pensioner in Crimea was jailed for speaking Ukrainian in a store. The 63-year-old man, Anatoliy Holiakovych, was sentenced to 15 days in jail and a 30,000 ruble fine. During his arrest, the SMERSH unit asked the man, "Whose is Crimea." to which he replied, "Crimea is mine."
Measures of Success
During World War II the economics of the entire world were thrown into chaos as dozens of countries switched overnight to a war economy, producing planes, tanks, shells, uniforms, and all manner of items to support the war effort. The size and scale of production boggles the mind today — tens of thousands of aircraft produced in just a few years, far more than all the aircraft in all the militaries in the world today. The entire Russian air force has fewer aircraft than would have participated in a single bombing run over Germany eighty years ago.
When measuring the GDP of countries before the World War, military spending and production were separated out because it has no lasting value. Making a tank or a shell has no follow-on economic benefit like building a bridge or even making a hamburger. However, during the war and ever since, military production has been included in the GDP, inflating the value of the GDP for countries that invest heavily in military spending, like the US or Russia.
The inclusion of military spending is an interesting question. On the one hand, in places like the US, military spending often results in sales of weapons systems to other countries, and advances in technology and considerable social stability are brought about by people who join, get a GI Bill, go to school, learn some skills, and get out to see the world, visit interesting places, meet interesting people, and then… you know the rest. There is real economic benefit that comes from peacetime military spending in the United States. The majority of people who join the military benefit greatly from it, myself included.
The same cannot be said of Russia. Even in peacetime, the level of psychological and physical abuse in the military was astounding, and the long-term damage from that experience scars people for life. College is free in Russia for those who can get into university through merit, so there is no educational benefit to joining. Russian conscripts are not given specialty schools, so there is no skill training, either.
During wartime, it is even worse. Making a small number of artillery shells and innovating new and impressive ways to kill people does have some fall-on effects, but simple mass production of the simplest types of shells has no lasting benefit for a country's economy—it is a sunk cost. Simply burning the money would be more efficient from an economic standpoint. Then, at least, the workers could find something productive to do, and there would be a mountain of brass and steel that wasn't wasted on shells.
Thus, today, we are left with a picture of the Russian economy that is distorted beyond recognition. First, there is almost no data available, and what data there is comes from Rosstat, which is at best "unreliable." Dictatorships tend to inflate their economic reports and are able to do so because they are less than transparent. The US could try to do something like that, but it would fail because there are too many independent measures that wouldn't line up. In a dictatorship, those independent measures don't exist. Then, the picture is further distorted by the inclusion of military spending, which is at least 40% of the Russian government budget and at least 8% of GDP, but again, these numbers are subject to interpretation, depending on what people include as "war spending."
Are subsidies to industries that are failing because of sanctions "war spending." Are the losses at Gazprom included? What about damaged oil refineries? Are those deducted from GDP? Not currently. Perhaps they should be.
China And Russia
Africa has been so enthusiastic about the recent pivot from European colonialism to Chinese and Russian colonialism, and the effects are already seen. Those pro-Africans who live safely in the West love to decry the crimes of the French, British, and Dutch from history and have opened their arms to welcome the crimes of the Chinese and Russians in the future, all from the safety of their apartments in Paris and New York, of course. The reality is much more grim.
African Defense Force reports that Chinese mining operations in Congo and elsewhere are destroying lives, saying that China is "child labor, horrific working and living conditions as well as systematic evictions of residents who live on its vast (land grant) concessions."
Russia's colonial activities, most often cloaked behind the operations of groups like Wagner, have been documented for years by Philip Obaji Jr.
The Africans have made their bed — now they have to lay in it. Perhaps it's not too late, and perhaps there is still a chance for Africa to take control of its own destiny. Let's hope so, for their sake, for I think they will find that, and I'll have to disagree with Noam Chomsky here: ALL colonialism is bad, not just Western colonialism.
Defectors
In April, the Russian Volunteer Corps concluded its harassment in the Belgorod region, and a member of a Storm Z unit, "Anton," deserted his unit. Earlier, he had fought near Kupyansk. He gave an interview under the guise of anonymity in which he described the situation on the front.
"Everything there is fucked up. They should have provided basic things. At least one set of clothes. While we were being processed, while they were taking us to the clothing warehouse… And there, all the workers were covered in trash. The officers are 50/50, but the senior staff falls short of Yeltsin's level. (Yelstin was famously a drunk.) All the clothes were from the 60s and didn't fit. Extortions began immediately. 500 rubles there, 500 rubles here. We chipped in two or three thousand for spare parts for equipment. They came up with some stupid story, saying that due to the fact that our reserve battalion is stationed in Kaliningrad, there are difficulties in delivering spare parts here, so we need to chip in for them ourselves. What nonsense, guys?"
"Of the six hundred people in his unit, after two months of assaults, forty remained alive. "I spent two months in this pussy cutter near Kupyansk. This is just some kind of extermination. From one company, 5–6 people return alive. The technology was also screwed up. In the end, we were simply mixed with the prisoners and were simply driven, driven, driven."
I recommend reading the whole article. He paints a vivid, grim reality.
Losses on the Front
Andrew Perpetua mentioned that he is working overtime again, and I would like to thank him for his efforts. Yesterday was a record day for recorded losses on the front lines. I'm going to post the whole image below so that the scope of things becomes clear.
On that note, I'm going to have to get back to my real life. Today I'm going to be traveling all day, but I look forward to reading all of your wonderful comments soon!
Oh, one more thing. BBC had a funny map they published. It's just a mistake, but it's a funny one. Poland is … expanding.
