The fourth day of the Ukrainian counteroffensive yesterday towards Russian defensive lines in Zaporizhzhia appears to have involved some 20,000 soldiers (one thousandth of Ukraine’s remaining population) backed by many tanks (including German Leopards), howitzers, artillery vehicles, hundreds of infantry fighting vehicles and so on. It involves crossing into uncleared mine fields, without air support or sufficient artillery backing, and without yet engaging with principal layers of Russian fortifications.
No strategic objecties have yet been accomplished, to my knowledge.
Losses are reportedly very heavy. There are also Ukrainian pushes in southern Donetsk, around Bakhmut, and Belgorod (where another 500 artillery shells have landed on residential buildings over the past few hours). If 4,000 Ukrainian soldiers had been killed or wounded by the end of Day 3 (by contrast with Russia’s 300), I will not be surprised if another 4,000 Ukrainian losses will be added by the end of Days 4 and 5 with a similarly disproportionate discrepancy compared with Russian losses as we saw on Days 1-3.
In addition, there has been what is presumably a Ukrainian terrorist attack on an ammonia pipeline near Kharkov which will likely have the effect of scuppering plans for an extension of the Turkish negotiated grain deal, reducing food production in the region (already impacted by the recent Ukrainian destruction of the Nova Kharkovka dam which has reduced the flow of irrigation water on the Russian controlled eastern bank of the Dnieper) and reducing food production in the world generally, thus increasing food prices and contributing to global levels of starvation.
Russia is the biggest exporter to the world of fertilizer of which a major component is ammonia. This is sent out to the world from Odessa (providing another reason why Russia would want to seize Odessa) and then through the Dardenelles. The pipeline had already been shut down by Ukraine and Russia had been campaigning for its reopening as a condition for extension of the grain deal. Ukraine has now blown it up. So, end of the grain deal and end of whatever advantages to Ukrainian agricultural exports that the grain deal offered them. Huge amounts of ammonia now cover the forest areas around Kharkov, and these clouds are already negatively impacting Ukrainian troops and settlements in the area.
This follows, as I have said, what is now almost certainly Ukraine’s responsibility for the destruction of the Nova Kharkovka dam - something that is in line with a previous pattern of Ukraine’s destruction of its own infrastructure, including the blowing up of dams, as a means of holding back possible Russian advances.
Ukraine continues to release more Dnieper water downstream from the Dnieper Hydroelectric plant (above the now damaged Kharkovka dam) in order to widen the area of resulting flooding on the Russian-controlled east bank. In 72 hours, the water levels may fall back to normal or lower levels and at that stage - some Russian commentators anticipate - an attempted Ukrainian amphibious crossing can take place under more favorable conditions than heretofore (i.e. given the absence of now flooded-out Russian positions and inoperable minefields that the floods will have left behind). The absence of a Russian presence that might otherwise have threatened a Russian crossing and chase will also expedite the movement of Ukrainian troops from Kherson area to join the Ukrainian counteroffensive forces in Zaporizhzhia.
Increasing food prices will add to the economic pressures on Europe as the Eurozone in general and Germany in particular enter into recession, soon to be joined by the UK, and possiby, further down the line, the US.
These are the results, mainly, of the collective west’s suicidal neocon proxy war with Russia over Ukraine. Food prices are a principal driver, along with fuel prices, of high European inflation rates which in turn have prompted Europe’s financial response of higher interest rates. These in turn add further pressue to the overall economic crisis that will be consolidated by Russia’s agreement with Saudi Arabia to cut back, again, on oil production. This has been necessary because of falling oil prices which, in turn, have been caused by Europe’s voluntarily-induced recession, German deindustrialization, and by a slower-than-expected recovery of the Chinese economy in the context of decoupling from western markets.
Coupled with an increasingly gloomy economic outlook, the collective west (and, of course, Ukraine, which is almost entirely dependent on money and weapons from the collective west) now stares directly into a weapons crisis … notably, a crisis in the provision of shells of all kinds, including the vital 155mm shells used in most advanced missile systems. (Like the German Iris-T advanced missile system that Ukraine just deployed to the front and which has been destroyed, almost immediately, by Russian Lancet missiles).
Congressional representatives in Washington are being advised that US stocks of shells are now so low that they threaten US ability to fight a major war (hallelueh!). The US has already dedicated 2 million shells on the altar of Ukraine and Ukraine has consumed all of them. US monthly production of shells is currently around 20,000 a month, whereas Ukraine has recently been using them up at a rate of 130,000 a month. This discrepancy is totally unsustainable. The European contribution of shells at around 4,000 a month is neligible.
Instead of all of this encouraging a pivot to realism in Washington, the Biden/Blinken-led neocon cabal is proposing to escalate to another level by putting pressure on the next NATO meeting in Vilnius, Lithuania, by way of Anders Rasmussen, a former NATO secretary general and former prime minister of Denmark. Rasmussen is proposing that if NATO cannot agree collectively to a deployment of NATO troops into western Ukraine, then an alliance of the more evangelical NATO warmongering powers (including Poland, the Baltics and a few others) should take action of their own.
The presumption that Russia will hold back from firing on these NATO troops seems implausibly silly. It may be that the anticipated purpose of such a deployment would be to try to impose some form of “frozen conflict” solution. This will not find favor in Moscow, in my view, which is not only currently winning the conflict, but finds itself under pressure from its more nationalist right wing whose influence has been bolstered by the terror war conducted by Ukrainian Nazis and their few Russian affiliates against villages of Belgorod (principally by artillery fire - which further drains Ukrainian shells; the insurgents appear to have been rounded up or routed), and the growing conflict between Prigozhin and Shoigu.
The NATO meeting in Vilnius on July 11 and 12 will consolidate positions both among (1) the realist elements of NATO political and military elites who are cognizant of the extent to which they have been converted into Washington puppets and groomed for battlefield extinction in circumstances in which Russia has the most imporant military advantages and most advanced nuclear weapons and has at its back a newly militant China and BRICS alliance and (2) the coalition of (2a) European civilizational ideologues, the crusaders (if not the conquistadores) who see themselves as saviours of the world for “democracy”, and “freedom,” and for the right to intervene and cause existential havoc in any country that does not enjoy their divinely inspired favor, under such pretexts as human rights, womens rights, LGBT rights almost all other forms of identity rights - the upholders, no less, of general virtue and goodness, and (2b) neocon war profiteers who understand that the current conflict is no longer just an existential battle for the Russian Federation and eastern civilizations but is becoming, as a direct result of their own greed and stupidity, an existential battle for Europe, one in which the US will stand back and even take some comfort from.
If their arms capacity is finally running out, hallelujah indeed. And well said to all of it - thank you again! It would be nice if the rest of humanity didn't have to go extinct from these murderous psychotic games, not to mention the mass delusion that cheers them on.