Ukraine: Breakthroughs… the vast majority of us hope…

[Maithanet]

Long way to go before we start talking about enveloping Tokmak. 

Some pro Ukrainian sources say that the offensive might start going pretty fast once it gets going.  I hope they're right.  Nonetheless, there's a lot of hard work and blood to go before Tokmak.

[Werthead]

1 hour ago, Maithanet said:

Long way to go before we start talking about enveloping Tokmak. 

Some pro Ukrainian sources say that the offensive might start going pretty fast once it gets going.  I hope they're right.  Nonetheless, there's a lot of hard work and blood to go before Tokmak.

They're starting to envelop Robotyne, although the precise line east of the city linking down to Verbove is very unclear at the moment (probably to the Ukrainians and Russians as well). Tokmak is a fair bit further south.

[Werthead]

Interesting analysis from a Russian channel that Russia has deliberately stripped troops away from the main front to Kreminna to try to establish a breakthrough to panic the Ukrainians and their allies. However, if this fails and the Ukrainians breach the front in the south, it will be a massive strategic defeat because of the lack of troops to reinforce and hold the rear. Murz also points out that Russia's plan was to hold the Ukrainians back from even reaching the main defence line, so the fact they have reached it in several places (possibly breaching a sub-line of trenches near Robotyne) is already concerning for the Russian position.

One reply deep in the comments pointing out the horrendous two-month grind through the bocage after D-Day against hugely fortified defences until one Allied formation broke through to the rear of the German lines and then it was a rout. However, there are significant deficiencies on the Ukrainian side (especially in air superiority) that may make that fanciful here.

Urozhaine, immediately adjacent to Staromaioske, is now under attack. Apparently the Russians put DPR troops into this front to help defend it, which was not a great idea. These guys are battered, have been in action for years and are not used to this kind of fighting. Also confirmation that several Russians from the 247th VDV Regiment were captured.

The Russian 96th Regiment recorded a video complaining about lack of fresh water and clothes. Shortly afterwards, the video was deleted and a bit later on an apology video was posted blaming their words on mental fatigue.

[Zorral]

Russian Cruise Ship Leaves Georgia Port Early After Being Heckled by Angry Protesters

https://www.thedailybeast.com/russian-cruise-ship-leaves-georgia-port-early-after-being-heckled-by-angry-protesters?

 

[Derfel Cadarn]

Lol.

 

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

Could the entire “Wagner Mutiny” have been a long con to attempt to claim “Wagner isn’t Russia” if Wagner pushes into Poland or Lithuania from Belarus.

[A Horse Named Stranger]

Very unlikely. Most obvious explanation still the best one.

Mutiny/attempted coup that did no work out as Prigozhin wanted to. I mean with what equipment do you think Wagner would want to invade a NATO country?

Best case scenario for Russia? NATO will not hold Russia accountable but rather rage bang Belarus for a couple of days and remove Lukashenko from power. Russia has one ally less.

There's virtually no upside for Russia in that hypothetical.

[Werthead]

 

2 hours ago, A Horse Named Stranger said:

Very unlikely. Most obvious explanation still the best one.

Mutiny/attempted coup that did no work out as Prigozhin wanted to. I mean with what equipment do you think Wagner would want to invade a NATO country?

Best case scenario for Russia? NATO will not hold Russia accountable but rather rage bang Belarus for a couple of days and remove Lukashenko from power. Russia has one ally less.

There's virtually no upside for Russia in that hypothetical.

Also a Wagner attack on NATO and Russia disavowing them gives the US, Turkey, France and every other NATO country operating in areas near Wagner the green light to liquidate Wagner bases with extreme prejudice. Turkey has to be considering the advantages of that right now.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

4 hours ago, Werthead said:

 

Also a Wagner attack on NATO and Russia disavowing them gives the US, Turkey, France and every other NATO country operating in areas near Wagner the green light to liquidate Wagner bases with extreme prejudice. Turkey has to be considering the advantages of that right now.

I can see worse things than Wagner becoming the land based equivalent of HostisHumani Generis.

[A Horse Named Stranger]

Sure, but that'd probably not be the desired outcome for Putin/Russia.

[Varysblackfyre321]

 

[Werthead]

Not clear how the hell this happened:

Russian air defences asleep at the wheel.

Meanwhile, Ukraine has taken control of a substantial stockpile of North Korean missiles, which are compatible with their GRAD launchers. There's been a mix of weapons stockpiles captured intact from the Russians on the battlefield and ships impounded at friendly ports and their contents transported to Ukraine.

A Russian blogger says an entire Russian artillery battalion has been destroyed in the Vremevsky area (Staromlynivka axis) in the past two months.

Official Ukrainian sources claiming that the Kreminna-Lyman offensive has been halted. Some scepticism in other quarters.

[Ran]

3 hours ago, Werthead said:

Not clear how the hell this happened

Saw elsewhere that some Russian Twitch streamer was randomly streaming herself sleeping and got woken up by the explosion. Really eerie: https://www.twitch.tv/cymanneth/clip/EagerSincereDaikonKlappa-yh97c5tgK40mF-j8 

[Zorral]

Russia Takes Its Ukraine Information War Into Video Games
Propaganda is appearing in Minecraft and other popular games and discussion groups as the Kremlin tries to win over new audiences.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/30/technology/russia-propaganda-video-games.html

Quote

.... These games and adjacent discussion sites like Discord and Steam are becoming online platforms for Russian agitprop, circulating to new, mostly younger audiences a torrent of propaganda that the Kremlin has used to try to justify the war in Ukraine. ....

 

[Wilbur]

Perun's latest covers the Black Sea elements of the conflict.

 

[Zorral]

Inside the Wagner Group’s Armed Uprising
How Yevgeny Prigozhin’s private military company went from fighting alongside Russian forces in Ukraine to staging a mutiny at home.
By Joshua Yaffa
July 31

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/08/07/inside-the-wagner-uprising

Quote

 

.... Wagner was a rumor before it was a brand,” Candace Rondeaux, the director of an open-source intelligence program at the think tank New America, told me. Even for experts, identifying the group’s precise origins has been tricky. In the early two-thousands, the Kremlin, as part of an effort to modernize the Russian armed forces, began considering the use of private military companies. Tens of thousands of security contractors were then working in Iraq for the U.S. government, under the command of private firms like Blackwater. The former Russian military official told me, “The idea was that Russia also needs such a structure to operate in places where the official participation of the Russian armed forces is impractical for political reasons.”

In 2014, Russia annexed Crimea and mounted a covert invasion of the Donbas, in eastern Ukraine, under the guise of a separatist uprising. The Kremlin needed to dispatch combat-seasoned troops while maintaining the fiction that it was not intervening militarily. “Things were very messy on the ground,” Ilya Barabanov, a Russian investigative journalist who is working on a book with Korotkov about Wagner, said. “A bunch of armed formations and battalions with unclear allegiances and command structures were running around all over the place.” One of them was a unit called Wagner.

Wagner’s fighters were mostly former members of élite Russian military units. “The selection process was tough,” a senior Ukrainian intelligence official told me. “From thirty candidates, they might take two or three.” But those who made the cut were paid about two hundred thousand rubles a month (approximately five thousand dollars), which was more than ten times what an ordinary member of the Russian Army might earn. They trained at a base in Molkino, in southern Russia, that abuts a facility belonging to the G.R.U., Russia’s military-intelligence directorate.

The name Wagner came from the call sign of its first commander, Dmitry Utkin, a former lieutenant colonel in the G.R.U., who is said to be a fan of the German composer Richard Wagner. For Utkin, the appeal went beyond just admiration for the “Ring” cycle or “Parsifal”; Wagner was Hitler’s favorite composer, and Utkin was known to exhibit fascist sympathies. A former Wagner fighter told me that Utkin greeted subordinates by saying “Heil!” and wore a Wehrmacht field cap around the unit’s training grounds. The Dossier Center, an investigative outlet funded by the exiled oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, published internal Wagner documents, which showed that Utkin occasionally signed his name with two lightning bolts—the insignia of the Nazi S.S.

If Utkin was Wagner’s commander in the field, then Prigozhin was its C.E.O., financier, and bureaucratic champion. Prigozhin was born in Soviet Leningrad, now St. Petersburg, in 1961, nine years after Putin. As a teen-ager, he took up with a gang of petty thieves who robbed apartments. One night, in 1980, the gang mugged a woman on a dark Leningrad street. Prigozhin was sentenced to thirteen years in prison and served nine. His release coincided with the final stage of the Soviet Union’s slow-motion collapse, and, for his next act, he launched a hot-dog business. He and his associates mixed the mustard in the kitchen of his apartment, while his mother counted the profits—as much as a thousand dollars a month, a significant sum for most Russians at the time.

Prigozhin quickly expanded into supermarkets and a catering business, and, in 1996, he opened the Old Customs House, one of St. Petersburg’s early high-end restaurants. . . . 

 

Further down in the story, in the details of how he moved from essentially a hotdog stand to the top restaurant in Russia, we get this:

Quote

.... In photographs from the era, Prigozhin is often seen hovering over a table in a dark suit, plucking a cloche from a dinner plate. But he was also known to be a demanding, even abusive, boss. “He created a beautiful image in the front of the house,” a person from the St. Petersburg restaurant scene said. “But he achieved this with frightful methods.” The man had heard accounts of Prigozhin berating and hitting members of his staff, and, in one instance, tying a chef to a radiator in the back of the establishment. ...

The reason I bring this up, is the closing sentence to the above quoted paragraph:

"(Prigozhin did not respond to a request for comment.)"

Somehow, the idea the author reached out to Prigozhin for a confirmation of denial of the above quoted behavior, somehow, I dunno, surprised me? 

The article is particularly good in its detailing of Wagner in Africa, particularly its deep involvement in the Sudanese wars and take-overs of resources there and the Central African Republic.  This section feel particularly pertinent considering Putin's Big Confab with African "leaders" stretching across the continent's mid-section from East Africa to West Africa, and the Wagner involvement in the Niger coup.

Edited July 31, 2023 by Zorral

[Werthead]

The situation on the Svatove-Kreminna-Lyman front is becoming clearer, thanks to the Deep State Telegram channel's analysis (Deep State has proven fairly reliable at deciphering Russian Telegram posts). The Russian offensive secured a fairly big chunk of territory, but most of this was in open fields and countryside where they did not have time or equipment to dig in. Ukrainian counter-attacks from their secondary lines of defence proved effective at dispersing Russian troops where they tried to start building expanded defences. This resulted in the identification of an expanded "grey zone" between the main lines. In the last few days Ukrainian forces have pushed back into this grey zone and retaken their former defensive positions, particularly on the Svatove axis. The situation appears to have stabilised, but the Russians could always reinforce and try again. What might be causing hesitation there is how many troops they might need to relocate to the southern front to stop a Ukrainian breakthrough.

1 hour ago, Zorral said:

The article is particularly good in its detailing of Wagner in Africa, particularly its deep involvement in the Sudanese wars and take-overs of resources there and the Central African Republic.  This section feel particularly pertinent considering Putin's Big Confab with African "leaders" stretching across the continent's mid-section from East Africa to West Africa, and the Wagner involvement in the Niger coup.

The reading of the confab is interesting. There seems to be a feeling that certain African leaders have seen Russian weakness as a moment to try to maximise gains and concessions from Moscow because they know Putin is keen to portray himself as a friend of the global south and a statesman, which he can't do if nobody supports him. So they bargained hard for debt relief, military support, cheap military goods and (where practical) energy supplies, and additional support for Wagner.

Even so, African leaders felt emboldened to demand more. Ramaphosa in particular seemed angry about the collapse of the grain deal and has been pushing hard for it to be restored, which of course puts Putin's plan to destroy Ukraine's port infrastructure under increased pressure.

Putin looks like he wants to create a new, mildly escalatory phase of the war where he recruits hundreds of thousands more troops behind the scenes via his tweaking of the draft laws, re-arm with supplies from North Korea and Iran, and spend the winter hitting Ukraine's energy infrastructure again, maybe harder than last year. He also wants to try to push back on western weapons supplies, by creating uncertainty over the Belarus-Polish/Lithuanian border area, being more willing to risk open aggression against the US in Syria and holding out for the US election next year to hopefully completely change the rules of the argument.

[Derfel Cadarn]

Not seen verification, but allegedly a battalion of Kadyrov’s Chechens got slaughtered.

If true, we shoukd post 1-min long silent vidoes on tiktok

https://twitter.com/sarahashtonlv/status/1685950856846331904?s=46&t=YQ5EoXBFy9mUDmV3PkLqIg

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

9 minutes ago, Derfel Cadarn said:

Not seen verification, but allegedly a battalion of Kadyrov’s Chechens got slaughtered.

If true, we shoukd post 1-min long silent vidoes on tiktok

https://twitter.com/sarahashtonlv/status/1685950856846331904?s=46&t=YQ5EoXBFy9mUDmV3PkLqIg

That Chechens are fighting for Russia given what the Russians did to Chechnya is unfathomable to me…

[Werthead]

2 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

That Chechens are fighting for Russia given what the Russians did to Chechnya is unfathomable to me…

There's also quite a few Chechens fighting for Ukraine.

More bizarrely, Kadyrov seems to be pretty sanguine about this, or at least he was at the start of the conflict.