Something Big This Way Comes

Before moving ahead to the main content, I would recommend the latest and customarily expert dissection of the reality of Western promises in the domain of weapons delivery to Ukraine, to be found at New Atlas (Brian Berletic 01.12.2023).

Major Takeways from Mercouris January 12, 2023 (Mercouris 01.12.2023)

Soledar contested

Prigozhin’s claim yesterday that his Wagner group soldiers had taken the entire metropolitan area of Soledar has been contested by Ukraine which says that there are still areas of Soledar where Ukrainian forces continue to fight. Mercouris is inclined to conclude that in terms of control, then Russia does indeed have that. The Russian MOD tends to wait before a community is fully taken before formally announcing control. Prigozhin had talked of the formation of a Russian-imposed cauldron, acknowledging that Ukrainian forces were somewhere in the center of Soledar and also at the station at the western end of the town. [Russia definitely appears in command of the salt mines]. Russia appears focused on clearing the town of Ukrainian holdouts. Mercouris is of the opinion that Ukraine should at this stage order them out rather than insist they continue on with little or no hope, allowing them to die completely unnecessarily.

Bakhmut contested

The village of Opidnoye has now been fully captured by the assault forces of the Wagner Group, according to unconfirmed reports. It is a small place but it does sit astride the access road to Bakhmut from the south. It is unlikely to have been an access road for supplies to Ukrainian positions in Bakhmut, but its capture contributes to the formation of a cauldron around Ukrainian troops in Bakhmut. The move should assist capture of nearby Ivanovka which sits astride the main road from the west. There is still a struggle for Kresniagoye.

So we have the possibility of a small cauldron in Soledar, and a much larger one in Bakhmut. Ukraine is in severe crisis in this area. But Ukraine will not be pulling back from Bakhmut. Instead, it is rushing troops into the area to plug the gaps in the battle lines and trying to build up an assault force to retake Soledar. This will likely end in failure and Ukraine will sustain much heavier losses of men and machines for an unfruitful outcome, once again delaying the course of the battle, perhaps providing a few temporary headlines for the gratification of western media. Some reasonably reliable sources suggest that in order to send reinforcements to Soledar Ukraine is redeploying troops from the border near Belarus which in turn might encourage Russia to launch an assault from that area. [Ukraine’s doubling down to reinforce failure will help Russia sustain its goal of demilitarization of Ukraine].

Losses

Mercouris has seen more and more pictures of battlefields around Soledar littered with the bodies of what are reported to be Ukrainian soldiers. One brigade of airborne troops, supposedly one that received training in the UK, was destroyed in the latest fighting at Soledar, according to reliable but unconfirmed reports. 14 Ukrainian brigades, around 7,000 men, have so far been destroyed in this battle overall. Russian sources put the number much higher. Even Ukrainian troops in Soledar have lost track of their own losses. There is considerable uncertainty among Ukrainian troops as to why they are being required to defend a town which must eventually be lost. There is a recent Financial Times article that cites American military sources who are saying much the same thing, indicating increasing disquiet about Ukraine’s losses among its sponsors, when a better policy would be to retreat and create new defenses on higher ground to the west. If indeed it is true that Ukraine is rushing reserves to this area from other important defense positions then it is difficult to see the military logic.

Reshuffle of Russian Command

Surovikin (“General Armageddon,” as western media, probably incorrectly, cite his nickname) who presided over the successful retreat from Kherson, stabilization of the front lines, erection of new fortifications and a war of attrition all along the front line, was recently (in December) decorated by President Putin on his visit to Ukraine, and has become something of a folk hero in Russia.

So Surovikin is now no longer the overall commander of Russian forces in Ukraine. That position has now been given to Valery Gerasimov who was and remains Chief of Staff and has all along been Surovikin’s superior. Western media analysts have seized on this story as distraction from the bad news from Soledar, ennabling them to paint a picture of some kind of crisis in the Russian military or punishment for alleged “battlefield failures.” It is not at all clear that Surovikin has been demoted, as they presume. Surovikin is listed first as one of Gerasimov deputies, along with the recently appointed General Lapin and General (?). Surovikin remains in charge of Russian Aerospace Forces, a responsibility he has held all this time.

Western commentary is getting the shuffle entirely wrong. The Chief of General Staff appears to be stepping in now that Surovikin has completed his job in this phase of the war. Gerasimov has all along been Surovikin’s superior.

The right question to ask is why is Gerasimov taking direct control of the war now, along with his other duties. One guess is that we are going to see over the next few weeks a major offensive involving all branches of the Russian armed forced.

There are conflicting interpretations about all this in Russia. Former CIA analyst Larry Johnstone appears to be in some agreement with Mercouris’ speculation. Also, analyst “Big Surge” has recently speculated about the likelihood of a Russian offensive towards a number of places including Sloviansk, and Zaporizhzhia, and locations in western Ukraine.

On the question of Russian military involvement in Donbass, a great deal of the fighting continues to be the responsibility of local militia, the Wagner group, Russian paratroopers and marines. Russian tank forces, and Russian mechanized infantry have not been much in evidence up until this point, although these are being stockpiled to the rear of the front lines. Indeed, huge forces are assembling, building up in the rear, drawing on the 300,000 reserves now trained following the recent mobilization, together with 80,000 volunteers, and 9,000 Chechnyan forces.

All of this points to something big coming. General Gerasimov is now stepping in to take direct charge of all of these developments.

Fruitless Western Pressure to Negotiate Before Russian Offensive

John Helmer, one of the most interesting commentators on the war and a veteran foreign correspondent based in Moscow, has written an article on his website Dancing with Bears about certain public comments from the head of Ukraine’s security council, Alexei Danilov that he has been making over the last couple of days. Danilov comes from Lugansk. He says Ukraine is being offered the “Korean scenario,” and that he knows that Russia will offer them the “38 Parallel” option. He claims that a Russian official Dimitry Kozak, who previously was involved in attempts to more forward the Minsk agreement, has been talking in these terms to a number of former European politicians and diplomats. Kozak is supposedly expressing the view that Russia is ready to fix the current status quo and force Ukraine to a truce. The idea is a partition of Ukraine along the lines of Korea, which following the Korean War after World War 2, was divided between North and South along the 38 Parallel with a demilitarized zone between the two.

Helmer is skeptical about all of this, thinking that Danilov may be trying to preempt pressure on Ukraine from the west to accept solution ahead of a Russian offensive. He knows of no evidence of serious Moscow consideration of such an agreement. Someone in Washington is getting nervous about battlefield developments and is telling Kiev to get a truce, to stop the Russian offense in its tracks, just so that the west will have more time to rearm Ukraine.

Unsurprisingly [especially following the Merkel confirmation that Minsk was a hoax] Russia is therefore not interested in any western proposals at this stage which they would see as a ruse to delay the war until Ukraine and the west feel they are in a stronger position. Ukraine is not interested in such a proposal either, because it thinks that the result would put it in a worse position. But Danilov is anticipating some western pressure in this direction.

Financial Anti-Russian News Propaganda

Eve Smith, economics correspondent on the site Naked Capitalism refers to a Bloomberg piece that claims that the oil cap is having an effect and has pushed down the price of Urals Crude to $37.50, a 53% discount to Brent Crude.

In fact [and as a former academic expert on western news agencies I find this is extrordinary] all the actual price trackers, including Thomson Reuters, are citing the price of Urals Crude at far higher levels, from $46 to $51.60.

Mercouris says he is beginning to become very frustrated with Bloomberg which he says has been spreading a series of stories whose main purpose is to suggest that western sanctions against Russia have been more effective than they really are. The series included the now discredited story that Russian oil exports had collapsed by 50% in December. A TASS report says that Russian and oil and gas revenues have increased 7.5% month on month in December, amounting to $13.5 billion, according to statistics from the finance ministry, representing an increase of 6% year on year.

Another Bloomberg story made the speculative claim that the recent increase in Russian military production was solely responsible for why Russian industrial production generally was holding up, something the story claimed was financially unsustainable. And now Bloomberg gives a wrong figure for the price at which Urals Crude is trading.

Mercouris says that he will in future be discounting anything that Bloomberg has to say about the Russian economy even if it is based on what appear to be reliable data. There is now a consistent pattern from Bloomberg of reporting things that are entirely wrong in that specific area of data reporting in which they always used to claim they were especially reliable.

Fragmentation

On the subject of talk about fragmentation of Russia, Mercouris corrects something that he said yesterday to the effect that there is only one region of the current Russian state in which ethnic Russians are not in a majority. It turns out that there are three such regions: Tuva, Dagestan and Tatastan. The correction makes little differnce to his argument that a fragmentation of Russia would create an enormous area of instability, of great danger for the world. He does not think this will happen but the issue illustrates the mindset of many western anti-Russians. He notes that in this discourse Russians are always regarded as colonizers, not colonized, and that only non-Russians (under the US ‘rules-based’ order), are entitled to self-determination. Certainly not Russians in Ukraine (!). The same critique might apply to Serbs in Kosovo and Serbs in Bosnia. A very selective approach to decolonization.