Any Day Now™, Day 817

We hesitate to bring this up, because it only goads the low-information monkeys to dig around their cages for some feces to fling to fend off Reality, but we cannot help but kick them in the crotch again by pointing out that nearly another month has passed since Ukraine was totally defeated. Which foregone outcome we were assured of, most earnestly, by people who were sure that Any Day Now™, it would inevitably be so.

At the beginning of the month, faithful Putinophiles, like Chicago Cubs fans for over a century, thought "This will finally be our season". Because Vlad said so. For only the 111th time.

Sh'yeah, right. What could possibly go wrong?

Record Russian Casualties - The Telegraph

Double bummer for the faithful Putinophiles: The Telegraph is Britistan's conservative daily, not one of the Useful Idiot-run reliably commie-tard house organs.

Three weeks later, in week 115 of "Just Two Weeks To Flatten Kiev", unlike countless promises, the only thing Putin has filled with relentless persistence are more Russian body bags (when they even bother to collect their dead).

Pretty much like every day since 2/26/22.

The lines shift a few yards each way back and forth, as they have for over 18 months, like a profoundly retarded refighting of the Somme, except less capably. History doesn't repeat, but it rhymes occasionally.

Bean-counters on both sides in 1915 thought they could win, if only they could throw enough men into the machineguns. Europe lost an entire generation disproving that monumental, and monumentally idiotic, military policy. Putin evidently hasn't played enough tic-tac-toe to learn the lesson yet.

The Usual Retards won't read this deep, but that doesn't mean "Ukraine Is Winning", unless you consider France or Belgium in 1919 what "winning" looks like. Common Core grads should probably look that one up before continuing.

It also doesn't mean we should be giving Ukraine an endless unlimited commitment, and it sure as hell means that we shouldn't send anyone there to fight their war for them*. But as we pointed out two years ago, the minute this shifted from them doing what they could with what they had, to doing what they could with what the West would supply, it meant the end of Western aid would also mean the end of Ukraine. So, before anyone advocates cutting them off, they need to answer how the tactic of pulling out down the road worked out for the U.S. in South Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq. They should show all work for that answer.

It does mean that Putin hasn't run out of toes on his feet to keep shooting yet, and that no one in his inner circle has worked up enough guts to hold a Makarov Retirement Party for the Russian Captain Ahab. Yet.

But even if Putin survives long enough to see his press-ganged mob of sad sacks somehow stumble and bumble their way into Kiev tomorrow, one has to wonder who in their right mind thinks the surviving Ukrainians would just roll over and forgive, and settle back into Russia's yoke. Let alone forecast that the rest of Eurostan and most of the world not getting cheap Russian oil would ever end sanctions or forget Russian aggression. Russia is going to be a pariah state for the next century. Enjoy that whole sh*t sandwich, and swallow every bite. Sweden and Finland have already given their answer, anchoring themselves firmly to NATO. Vlad's adventurism has managed to do more to revive NATO in two years than Reagan and the Bush family managed to do in twenty.

Salesman Of The Century props to Vlad for that, alone. 

One invasion speaks more eloquently than a thousand harangues.

The Usual Suspects will root around, and find someone like The Saker or some other tired old KGB mouthpiece to cheer them up with more bedtime fairytales about inevitable Russian invincibility, but millions of people who live in the real world, from retired shipyard workers in Gdansk to aging Tajik, Uzbek, and Pashtun tribesmen in the Kindu Kush know better. 

Maybe next year, Moscow Cubs fans. Maybe next year.

*(If anyone thinks we haven't had SF teams and military attachés there in harm's way since Day Two, and should not, you're really too naïve to be on the internet without adult supervision. The not-too-difficult trick is to remember that doesn't mean they should be covered by the 82d Airborne and TacAir. We tried that after the Gulf Of Tonkin, and it didn't work out too well. One thing does not require the other.)

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

 We Told You So Dept.:

(MOSCOW) Russian President Vladimir Putin has [inadvertently] admitted to the significant losses Russia has suffered in the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, which has been raging since February 2022.

“Putin literally admitted irretrievable losses in the amount of 363 thousand people,” said a military analyst. The purported losses would be orders of magnitude beyond those previously claimed by Russia, with the Kremlin having only officially admitted to around 6,000 troop deaths.

Despite the losses, Putin has maintained that peace with Ukraine will only be achieved “when we achieve our objectives”. This was stated during his first marathon news conference since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began.

The invasion was met with fierce resistance from the Ukrainian forces, backed by the international community. The severity of the Kremlin’s recent military reversals in Ukraine has been acknowledged by Putin. Mr. Putin insisted that Russia could “move forward” despite Western economic sanctions and political isolation stemming from its Ukraine invasion.

“Practically along the entire line of contact our armed forces are improving their situation, to put it modestly,” he said at his marathon news conference. There has been very little movement on the front line in recent months, but Russia is targeting two eastern towns in the Donetsk region, Mariinka and Avdiivka.

 Russia has claimed that Ukraine is suffering a high number of troop deaths during the war, with Putin stating in October that Kyiv had lost 90,000 troops since starting its latest counteroffensive in June. Putin also mentioned that the Ukrainian death toll was “simply huge” and at “approximately one to eight as a ratio” to Russian deaths.

Ukraine’s military success in a “small area” is described by President Putin as a last-ditch attempt to break through to Crimea. He explained that Russian forces decided to withdraw several meters into wooded areas “to save our lads” and suggested that Kyiv’s main motive is to show the West that it needs more military funding.

If you're keeping score at home, this latest series of admissions (overt and accidental)

1) Confirms that last week's declassified U.S. military estimate of Russian losses in this debacle was spot on, to three decimal places. Oops.

2) Undoes all the fanboys claiming "Russia has already won", and shoots that stupid lie right in the ass, as Putin admits they still haven't achieved any of their objectives.

3) Points out that Putin's only plan is more of what has failed for the last 22 months, just with 90% less ground military to do it.

Suck it, simps. Belly up to your party-sized sub sandwich of crow. With extra crow. Your beloved KGB-thug hero just admitted this is a generational-level fuck-up of biblical proportions for a hopelessly incompetent and ineffective Russian military. Russia has killed more of its own troops in two years in Ukraine, a country 1/4th its size and 1/10th its military strength, than the U.S. has lost in all its wars and conflicts worldwide combined from 1946-now.

And he further admitted they've been stalemated for nearly two years, despite simultaneously floating the bullshit that they've killed Ukrainian troops at an 8:1 ratio.

This is like the NY Yankees admitting they tied a Little League team 0-0, even though 7 of the other team's grade school-aged players had to go home for curfew before the game was called after maxxing out on innings.

You can keep rootin' for Putin all you want. But you'll need an entirely new line of horseshit to peddle to keep fooling yourselves. But go ahead and keep digging into it; there's got to be a Christmas pony for you under it somewhere.

Pisser for those still carrying a torch for that codswallop.

Ukraine doesn't want to return to Moscow's tender loving embrace, and never will. Like we told you nearly two years ago. And Moscow has gutted its own minimal military power in pursuit of  an epic level of failure. While the entire world sees them for the Potemkin nation, in every respect, that they've always been.

As Patton noted, "All glory is fleeting." But this level of national faceplant will last for ages.

Related: New Russian Airborne Division suffers "exceptionally heavy losses"

UPDATE: Video link corrected.

As to "no one else is reporting this recently":

Vladimir Putin says no peace in Ukraine until Russia achieves its goals | ABC News - YouTube

President Putin says Russia's goals in Ukraine have not changed - YouTube

Putin Says No Peace in Ukraine Until Russia Achieves Goals - YouTube

No peace in Ukraine until Russia's goals achieved, says Putin - YouTube

Russia’s goals in war with Ukraine remain unchanged, Putin says - YouTube

Putin: No peace in Ukraine until Russia achieves its goals - YouTube

Any Day Now™ - Day 657

WASHINGTON (Wall Street Journal) --The war in Ukraine has devastated Russia's pre-invasion military machine, with nearly 90% of its pre-war army lost to death or injury, and thousands of battle tanks destroyed, according to a newly declassified U.S. intelligence assessment shared with Congress. 

The intelligence assessment, according to a congressional source, says that 315,000 Russian personnel have been killed or injured since the February 2022 invasion, or 87 percent of Moscow’s prewar force of 360,000. Russia has also lost nearly two-thirds of its tank force, or 2,200 out of its 3,500 pre-invasion stock, the source said.

While it is widely known that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s military has sustained vast losses in Ukraine, the assessment provides new details about the extent of those setbacks.

If you still want to keep huffing hopeium, and/or kissing Vlad's ass, go ahead on; we don't care. If you're convinced the intel from any twenty Russian shill blog sites are giving the straight poop, shovel it down with both hands with our enthusiastic blessing.

Your delusions are your own problem, not ours.

Note this estimate, nor this blog, doesn't hereby conclude that Ukraine must therefore be "winning", for any value of that word. {Google France post-WWI if the greater concept eludes you.} And as we told you as early as May of last year, IIRC, Ukraine having shifted to dependence on the West for support continues to leave them at the entire mercy of the West not to withdraw that support.

But as we told you from days of the outset of Russia's asinine exercise in futility, the likelihood that Russia ever can score anything like a win is less likely than Bigfoot swooping onto the Capitol steps on a winged unicorn to crown Trump Emperor For Life next Novermber.

So if you'd like your reality just like your whiskey - straight up - this estimate of Russia's situation is likely a metric f**kton closer to the real story than anything else you can cobble together from your underpants.

For those of you inclined to froth and gnash your teeth at any suggestion that Russia Could Be Eating A Big Shit Sandwich despite all available evidence, and jonesing because you haven't had anything to gibber and caper about here lately, consider this your Christmas present.

But when your Any Day Now™ delusions all come crashing down, and there's nothing left to scrape out of your underpants and fling at the wall in response to the voices in your head, remember: you were given fair warning.

Related:

This figure closely aligns with data from the Dutch open-source intelligence firm Oryx, which tracks military equipment and vehicle losses through verifiable photo and video evidence.

Oryx's findings indicate that Russia's verifiable tank losses stand at 2,541, with a significant portion destroyed, damaged, abandoned, or captured by Ukrainian forces. The U.S. intelligence report also highlights the loss of 4,400 out of 13,600 infantry fighting vehicles, representing a 32% loss rate for the Russian Armed Forces. These figures are in close agreement with Oryx's documented losses of 3144 infantry fighting vehicles. The enormity of these losses has compelled Russia to take extraordinary measures to sustain its military efforts. This includes a partial mobilization of 300,000 personnel and the relaxation of recruiting standards to include convicts and older civilians.

This new intelligence from the United States not only confirms the extensive material and human losses suffered by Moscow but also provides a clearer context for understanding Russia’s setbacks in the Ukraine conflict.

As Warren Strobel of The Wall Street Journal points out, while it was assumed that Russia had incurred significant losses, these latest revelations offer a more detailed picture of the extent of the impact on Russian military capabilities.

Suck it, crybabies. 

Just Saying...

It's been awhile, and we just wanted to give the knee-jerk shit-flinging monkeys something to do before the feces build-up in their cages gets above their eyes.

It isn't like they're going to catch a clue or anything, no matter how gently we suggest they try a more nuanced tack.

Just to be sporting, we'll bet a modest sum at even odds that we can repost this again in 400 more days, with similar or worse performance by Russia's conscript army, if you can find an acceptable neutral party to hold the cash. All you monkeys will have to put your money where your mouth is to play.

What Is The Sound Of One Buttcheek Flapping?

We ask that question, because this is the most Pollyannish, "Remain calm! All is well!" load of half-assed codswallop we've seen since Russia invaded Ukraine last year.

And considering all the recokulous bullshit spewed on the topic to date, that's saying something.

Kill twenty minutes, and a few brain cells, because you'll be dumber for reading the whole thing, but take one for the team and do it anyways.

Then, maybe someone who plays over yonder could ask Armchair Warlord a few pointed questions.

1) How far short of their conscription goals did Russia's planned 300K mobilization fall?

1a) Who did they get, when some 6,000,000 draftable military-aged Russian males GTFO of Dodge last year, to Anywhere But Russia, rather than be drafted, and when report after report - with Russian MoD photographic proof - of the sick, lame, and lazy, blind, crippled, and crazy were "the best they could come up with?

2) Of the 350,000 initial total ground forces they started out with last year

a) how many of them did Russia lose, KIA, WIA, DOW, crippled for life, etc., to date?

b) of the 183 nominal fieldable battalions On War Day One, how many of those were destroyed to date in Ukraine?

c) Of those Imaginary 395 maneuver battalions AW ass-trapolated exist now, where in blistering fuck did the tanks, APCs, support vehicles, AKs, shovels, mess kits, clothing, boots, and underpants needed to increase the Russian Army by 116%, and make good all combat losses in Ukraine simultaneously, generate from, other than somewhere deep inside his own underpants? 

3) If the Russians are doing an "all of the above" refit and mobilization, where in blistering fuck are all these imaginary T80s and T-90s hiding?

3b) Granting arguendo the recockulous idea that Russia has the industrial capacity to start shitting out metric fucktons of T-80s and T-90s and that they could even make enough to cover losses, why would they even bother to undertake a 3-year refit of museum-piece brew-up-at-a-flick T-62s (obsolete when Nixon was president, FFS), rather than just crank out even more metric fucktons of those world-beating T-80s and T-90s alone, instead of more cannon fodder for anything from a LAAW on up?

[Hint: "I need so many tanks, I'm going to refit those M-4 Shermans and M-48 Pattons to fight alongside my M-1A1 and M-1A2 Abrams tanks"...said no general ever.]

4) If Putin could do all of this while getting his army's ass kicked halfway back to their start lines since August, what magical new operational art have they learned while parked, or driving in reverse for the last year? Where? When? How? This is operational art via the Underpants Gnome.

Granting some of AW's mathematics, he forgets a wee bit:

A) He's accounted for exactly 0% of Russian losses to date, which even Russia acknowledges have been prodigious.

B) He imagines the Russians, who haven't been able to find their own asses four days in a row since the first day of the invasion, now possess a resurrected Marshal Zhukov, with vast Russian hordes of troops ready to sweep across the steppes like Genghis Khan. Sh'yeah; when monkeys fly outta my butt.

C) He neglects the vastly diminished capability of Russia to lay down artillery barrages, evidenced by the steadily shrinking output of rounds from the peak last summer.

D) He hasn't explained the near total lack of Russian ability to conduct combined arms attacks, ever, in any way, pretty much once since 1946.

E) He neglects to tell us where the vaunted Russian Air Force has been hiding since February 28th, 2022. Currently, there are more MiGs on Moscow milk cartons than there are seen in theater, and that's been true since last March.

F) The only Russians suffering more losses than Russian privates are Russian generals. That's also the only military demographic where Putin's body count has outstripped Ukraine's.

- - -

In short, rosiest assumptions to the fore, Russia might have been able to replace half their losses since this started. With even less experienced troops and officers, and older and more decrepit equipment - when they even have enough boots and rifles to issue to troops - fighting the same way that's seen them pushed back inexorably for a year.

Not construct an army two and a half times as big as the one Putin created in 30 years since the fall of the Soviet Union.

That's dorm-room bong-level bullshit.

And the single-most effective Russian unit to date was Wagner Group, which has been quite simply destroyed. It no longer exists. Their Spetznaz and airborne troops, the only other formations that rose to a level above mediocre, were erased last year trying to take Kiev and the nearby airport. Well-played.

And just because you write a new version of "Any Day Now" in red letters twenty feet high all over the Kremlin, it doesn't make it true.

The linked piece puts the "anal" in "analysis".

It should have been left up his ass, not pulled out on the end of his thumb and polished.

Intelligence vs. Information

h/ts to both  WRSA and My Daily Kona

Item One: As noted in that graphic above from WRSA, Oz firm Spypaq is reportedly supplying UKR with 100 cardboard small, short-range drones/month.

Item Two: 100 drones/S2S missiles/month is roughly the entire production capability of Mother Russia.

Source

Mr. Garibaldi's original source for that is an article by Aviation Week & Space Technology. FWIW, their source and information reliability rating runs at A-1 or A-2 for 50+ years, unlike the MSM, or either side's propaganda wings in this conflict.

Obviously, a cardboard Spypaq AP/harassment drone is not a hypersonic Kinzhal by any wild stretch of imagination. We emphasize for the Usual Halfwit Suspects, we're not saying otherwise.

But by the same token, UKR is getting many other missile weapons from other sources (NATO, Turkey, Israel, et al), as well as building their own weapons, which underlines the lopsided nature of Russia's struggle to keep up with the rest of the world when they've been starved of importable tech for a year and a half. Help from China in that respect is apparently pure vaporware. Draw your own conclusions about the strength of that "alliance" in light of that reality.

Russia is struggling, and UKR has an embarrassment of riches, relatively speaking. (As the former captain of the RFS Moskva, or the admiral in charge of Russia's Black Sea Fleet in Sevastopol could tell you.)

And if you think Xi and ChinaInc. aren't taking copious notes of how this works in real time, with a view to how it might go for any variation of Them vs. Us over, say, Taiwan, I've got a bridge to sell you, cheap.

Each of those pieces are information.

Synthesizing them in light of each other crosses over into actual intelligence analysis.

One of these things is not like the other.

If this is news to you, you've been remiss in taking advantage of folks like Culper, over there on the right, on the blog resource list, or any number of websites where you could download for free virtually the entire unclassified assortment of current U.S. intelligence-MOS field manuals. Fix that. Adapt, or become extinct.

Remember all this when somebody tells you anything based on one article from TASS, and tries to spin it into Glorious Russian Victory, or Imminent WWIII.

Reality is quite a bit less ham-fisted, and much more nuanced.

This is why we keep telling you what we keep telling you, and it's not (and never has been) based on the latest piece of comic-book propaganda we read last.

Food For Thought

Takeaways:

1) Ukraine will never stop fighting short of annihilation. (We told you this from the get-go last year.)

2) Russia cannot afford to stop fighting. Even if Putin goes away somehow (actuarial tables, coup, whatever.) Their elites are trying to re-establish the Soviet Union borders, as a means of internal security from perceived external threats. And that typical Russian paranoia is bringing about the exact external threats that didn't exist in January of 2022. NATO is now bigger than ever, meaner, and more anti-Russian than any time since the Berlin Wall went up in 1961.

3) Half of current "Russia" isn't made up of Russians. Moscow feels this in their bones.

4) If Moscow revolts, the whole enterprise collapses.

5) Russia has a history of riding forms of government right into the smoking hole of history. {cf. both Czarist Russia, and Communist Russia.} There's no reason to think they won't ride the current system right into total collapse either. It's what they do.

6) Besides destroying 1/3 to 1/2 of their ground combat power since 2/22, Russia has driven fully a third of its draft-aged males out of the country. They've got a lot fewer folks to draft, and the people running things at every age group and demographic aren't being replaced. That's everything from farms to manufacturing to research labs to nuclear power plants - and nuclear weapons. Most of their best minds who could get out are long gone, and the actuarial brain drain accelerates with every passing year.

7) Pushing generals out of windows isn't making the Russian Army leaner and meaner. It's just cutting off its head, as Stalin's purges did to it in the 1930s. Which is why Hitler's armies were able to push them to the brink of destruction for four years before total mobilization and Western aid finally turned the tide. 

8) There's no aid coming this time, from anywhere, least of all China, and they're currently begging countries like the Norks and Iran for any scraps they can spare. China and India are simply buying Russian oil and gas at fire-sale prices, but it's less than half of what Europe was buying, in hard dollars, which isn't helping Russia's economy much. It's mainly just slowing the collapse.

For the perennial fucktards out there with a room-temp (at the North Pole) IQ, that isn't saying anywhere that Ukraine is "winning". Yet again, look at photos and reports from France circa 1919, and tell the class what "winning" looks like when your front yard is the front line. 

Ukraine winning looks like national survival. And week on week, them eventually regaining Crimea looks likelier and likelier, and eventually pushing Russia completely out of Donetsk and Luhansk isn't beyond belief either. 

Leaving Russia, just as after their Afghanistan debacle, with nothing to show for their effort but international embarrassment, crushing economic decay, and a large heap of dead Russian troops for their trouble.

What it does foretell is that as long as the West is resupplying Ukraine, Russian short-term prospects get bleaker by the month, and their long-term prospects died early last year. Their long-term future is as a shell of their former self, split up internally, their population gutted by war losses, refugee/draft-dodger flight, and the march of time.

Most of the -stans are already getting restless. And Putin has no one left to send if they all tell him to f**k right off.

Happy Birthday, Vlad

Signed, Everyone!

 

This Is A Gold Mine, Comedically and Militarily

 h/t Angus

Watch the whole thing.

The three minutes' summary at the end, starting at about 16:49ff, is world-class military analysis.

It's what a Pentagon briefing on Ukraine would sound like. If you outsourced the speech-writing to Dave Chapelle, Bill Burr, and Ricky Gervais. And had Brendan Gleeson (Mad Eye Moody) read it.

I'm sorry I haven't found this guy earlier, but Angus has mined a solid brick of 24k gold here.

_____

Oh, and while we're on the subject:

Like we told you, months and months ago, and time and again since then.

Help Wanted

h/t daily timewaster 

Another Day, Another Defenestration

As the Russian bureaucracy devolves into a life-imitates-art and much-less-funny Monty Python sketch, news today that another Putin-linked top Russian defense official has died of Failure To Fly, this time in St. Peterburg.

Marina Yankina, aged 58, Head of Financial Supply of Russia's Western Military District (which includes most of Russia's border with Ukraine), had gone from ordinary worker to head of her department in only the last five years, before suddenly deciding to take an impromptu flying lesson from 160' up. Various sources have claimed a number of excuses for her last flight, none of which, miraculously, seem to include the FSB pushing her out the window. Why she chose to open the window on a balmy 28° degree F. day, when there were perfectly good busses and trains to step in front of on the ground at street level, remains a mystery.

Russia hasn't had this many people from the Defense Ministry crash to earth in a year since Khrushchev ran their space program. But what the hey, any major country could have 10, 15, or even 20 defense officials all fall out of windows in any one year span, amirite? It's just bad luck.

Whatever the reasons for her plunge, yet again, while the worst place to be for Russians is in an army trench on the Ukraine front, the second worst casualty rate continues to be suffered by anyone in Putin's defense establishment.

At least if they all moved to the ground floor, they could commit suicide the old-fashioned way in Russia: seven or ten bullets to the back of the head, or toasting bread with an electric toaster while taking a hot bath.

UPDATE: Per comments below, this was possibly because someone grifted 70% of the funds for the AA defense forces in that district. Regardless of whether Yankina tried to fly to Neverneverland because she was a co-conspirator, or a whistleblower, the main point is still this: 70% of the funds allocated to equip AA forces in the Western Military District (the district supplying the bulk of the fighting forces in this year-long military debacle) didn't get where it was intended, and never made it to the pointy end of the stick for air and missile defense. Which may explain the randomly exploding bits and bobs throughout Russia proper for some months, going back to last spring. Perhaps it also explains the spectacularly underwhelming performance Vlad's drunken bumpkins have put on for the world since last February if Peter and Paul had to be robbed, and they've run out of other people's money to prosecute this invasion "Special Military Operation". And maybe even helps explain the perpetual delays in the as-yet-to-be-unleashed, someday, possibly, maybe Russian Summer Fall Winter (Spring?) Counter-Offensive, if they keep having to send more money, because the Russian stagecoaches keep turning up robbed before they arrive at the fort.

One can but hope no one sends any mystery balloons over Russia; might be that no one would notice. Bummer.

Time for a popcorn and soda run.

But hey: Massive byzantine corruption and graft? In RUSSIA?!? Who knew???

Persistence

"VICTORY! Maybe Someday..." "in a pig's ass!"

 

Any Day Now™

 

(AMSTERDAM: Moscow Times) "An elite Russian naval infantry unit made up of mostly mobilized troops has suffered a crushing defeat near the eastern Ukrainian town of Vuhledar, Russian media reported Monday, citing one of the survivors. 

The 5,000-strong 155th Guards Naval Infantry Brigade has been “nearly destroyed” after it lost up to 300 marines per day in Russia's assault on the coal-mining town, according to comments by the Ukrainian defense forces to Politico on Sunday.

A surviving marine who spoke with the 7x7 regional news site said the losses were so severe that one landing assault company had only eight men remaining, while many others were taken prisoner.

“Those who survived were said to be deserters,” the unnamed marine was quoted as saying, estimating the brigade’s losses at 500 or more men killed.

Citing his commander, the marine told 7x7 that the brigade — nearly 90% of whom were recently mobilized soldiers — did not expect to return to Russia alive or unscathed."

Relax, Put-tards: I'm sure the Moscow sources are totally lying about this latest Russian "victory". We'll all get to see how things go when Russia launches its next offensive, which launch schedule makes NASA look reliable by comparison.

Personally, I refrain from further comment, except to echo this classic Tom Hanks response to a similarly shattering turn of events:

Any Minute Now - Day 274

 

Shocked! Shocked, I Say!

The Usual Gang Of Idiots are astonished that anyone could think the Russian Army has failed, repeatedly, because of a centuries-long practice of both corruption, and official lying to cover it up, and suffering real-world consequences when they face an actual opponent willing to contest the struggle. (They should look up how well this systemic drawback served Russia from Sept. of 1941 until 1943, or from 1914 until the Russian Revolution.)

As the video above belabors, this is hardly a new thing, and once this became more than a 3-day war, and Russian leadership, political and military, realized they'd been caught believing their own press releases, Reality started bitch-slapping them around pretty hard.

The cardinal problem is that modern combined-arms warfare is the ultimate trust-based system, and it depends on brutal honesty to make decisions, penetrate what Von Clausewitz called "the fog of war", and overcome its "friction" in order to achieve victory. (In American forces, "friction" is called Murphy, and he's a sonofabitch to the foolish or careless, with the subtlety of a JDAM dropping in your foxhole.)

Commanders, as the video notes, don't get perfect God's-eye-view intelligence, at least not until it's too late to help, in most cases. So they have to be flexible, and at some point, if they want to win, they have to trust downwards, and let lesser ranks at each level have the freedom to work the problem in order to win. But the reports back up the chain have to be scrupulously truthful to inform decisions, logistics, and follow-on actions.

One Courtney Massengale being the douche he is fusterclucks the whole system. One fouled up company screws up a whole attack. And when units don't know what they don't know, think they know it all, and believe their own press releases, the outcome is generally unforgiving, and people die with surprised looks on their faces.

The Russian army is made up of an entire hierarchy of Courtney Massengales, bottom to top, and they haven't faced a near peer since 1945. And all of NATO, with 20 years in the sand box for combat ops experience, has been feeding first rate intel to Ukraine, while the Russians can't even organize getting fuel to the vehicles on the attack, or socks and boots to their men at the training depot. That's third-world level competence, right there.

Russia has spent eight months proving that to the world, day after day.

And the certified idiots yapping about "any minute now" sound like Hitler in the bunker, ordering units to attack that don't exist. Except less sane than that.

Potemkin Military: Chapter 2,075

 Like We Keep Telling You Dept.:

Behold! Russian military excellence explained, in 20 minutes:

Fielding as front-line gear such things as 130-year-old bolt action rifles, pot metal and foam body armor, cardboard and plastic helmets, broke-dick 60-year-old rust-bucket tanks, and endless further examples of Russian endemic corruption, manufacturing mendacity, and bureaucratic incompetence all combine to explain Russia's underwhelming military performance since February. It also explains where those Putin-crony oligarchs with mega-yachts found the dough. And belatedly, why, with a nominal 5:1 advantage over NATO in tanks at the height of the Cold War, the Russians still felt inferior and under-armed. It was because they knew 80% of those tanks were vaporware, and the 20% they did have other than the annual May Day Parade dog-and-pony show examples were total p.o.s.

The main differences between Putin-philes and Cubs fans are that once every 108 years, Cubs fans have something to cheer about, and the Cubs never tried to take over Indiana.

If Mack Sennett had written the script for the Moscow Military Morons, he couldn't have done any better serial comedy.

Vlad's Going To Need More Mobilization Guys...

 

Apparently, things continue to go so well for Russian forces, that Sr. Col. Vadim Boyko, above, one of the military masterminds behind Putin's wildly successful mobilization earlier this fall, went to his office, where he then shot himself five times, using four different Makarov pistols. Quite a feat normally, but under Putin's regime, one far too easily accomplished every day. Not to worry though. Crack Russian criminal investigators have ruled it another tragic suicide of another heroic Russian senior mobilization officer, heartbroken over the continued Russian success in Ukraine.

This appears to be much like the "suicide" by hanging some weeks back of the officer who then apparently cut himself down, and then dumped his own body in a nearby field.

It's now anyone's guess whether Ukrainian artillery or Putincide are killing more Russian soldiers every week. But it is fun to watch.

And clearly, Russian Roulette rules have now been changed to using multiple bullets in multiple guns, all at the same time. Who thought that was sporting?

дерьмо!

"Kherson Oblast is Russian territory forever."

forever: adverb 1. six weeks (Russian)

Russian Army moves another 23 miles!

Um...backwards.

Yet another in an endlessly long line of bummers for Vladophiles.

The Winter Of Their Discontent

 

Plus ca change

Putin's fanboys with UDS will argue anything but reality, but no matter how hard they try, they can't beat the tale of the calendar.

If this was going well for Russia in any way, we wouldn't be talking about Ukraine as an independent country going into November of a year when they invaded it in February.

Things are nowhere near over, and that's exactly the point: Russia, on paper, should have been done with this before March 1st.

Hitler conquered France in 40 days. (To be fair, the Germans were only going up against the French, but you get the point.)

Russia can't even hold onto the territories they'd infiltrated since 2014, and will hold even less than they do now by the time this conflict hits 40 weeks. (Common Core grads: that would be in 5 weeks from now.) They stand a very good chance of even going backwards, and having to cough up Crimea as well, for the second time since 1989, perhaps as a Christmas present to Zelensky and the people of Ukraine. IOW, had they just sat there in February and done nothing, they'd have 60,000 more soldiers alive, 1200 more tanks, an extra airborne brigade available, and still have a Black Sea Fleet they could sail back and forth to Syria. Just by not starting this war. 

Against a country with only 1/10th their military strength.  

This level of military performance by Russia is why you can count their notable military victories in the last 300 years on your thumbs.

And at current trajectory, Russia wouldn't be any worse off than right now if we switched sides, and then abandoned them like Afghanistan.

Team Putin. 24/7, for 243 days and counting.

Maybe things will be better for Russia tomorrow. Outcomes can always change in war, sometimes rapidly (just ask the crew of the Moskva), and very well may multiple times before this ends. They certainly have for Russia since September 1st, let alone since February 23rd. But they're not showing anything new, and all those conscripts seem to be just so much cannon fodder. Now they're hoping Iranian drones will help them out.

Dear Putin Rooters: Lucy Van Pelt called. She wanted to know if you'd like to practice kicking some field goals.