KHAZAR OPERATION TO LIQUIDATE AS MANY ORTHODOX CHRISTIAN
UKRAINIAN SOLDIERS AS POSSIBLE, AND
RESTORE KHAZAR HOMELAND, IS NOT GOING WELL.

"So they lost 30 men and 2 Bradleys just to play some sort of vanity flag game on the Heap. For UA supporters who so excitedly posted his previous account of Russia’s mistakes in the opening assault, you can’t take one and not the other. Either both accounts are fake or you have to trust him on both, which means it proves the AFU is throwing away mountains of men for the most frivolous of reasons. If they don’t care about liquidating 30 men for a flag, imagine how many they’re throwing on a daily basis for actual relevant strategic objectives?"

TIME Magazine Profile Depicts Grim Führerbunker-Stage of Zelensky's Conflict

The talk of the blogosphere is the new devastating TIME magazine profile on Zelensky which paints the most grim, 1945 Führerbunker portrait of Zelensky yet. Bernhard covers it well on MoA, but I’m going to retread some of the same points to take the analysis into a slightly different direction of anticipating what comes next vis a vis the current political turmoil in the U.S.

First let’s cover the most salient revelations.

Zelensky admits that the entire world is losing interest in Ukraine, treating it as a TV re-run that’s on for the 10th time in a row:

“The scariest thing is that part of the world got used to the war in Ukraine,” he says. “Exhaustion with the war rolls along like a wave. You see it in the United States, in Europe. And we see that as soon as they start to get a little tired, it becomes like a show to them: ‘I can’t watch this rerun for the 10th time.’”

Members of Zelensky’s team say he’s lost the “sparkle” he once had, now arriving to give orders then coldly leaving without any fanfare or trivialities. He feels “betrayed” by his “allies,” he says.

But that’s where the frightening part comes in:

But his convictions haven’t changed. Despite the recent setbacks on the battlefield, he does not intend to give up fighting or to sue for any kind of peace. On the contrary, his belief in Ukraine’s ultimate victory over Russia has hardened into a form that worries some of his advisers. It is immovable, verging on the messianic. “He deludes himself,” one of his closest aides tells me in frustration. “We’re out of options. We’re not winning. But try telling him that.”

This is the quintessential Führerbunker moment.

They go on to say that Zelensky’s stubbornness keeps them from discussing the one big taboo subject: ceasefire.

Zelensky very forthrightly admits that if he doesn’t get further aid, Ukraine will lose:

In a very revealing paragraph, they admit that not only has the counteroffensive failed and that Zelensky will have to fire the general in charge, but that things have gotten so bad units are no longer even following orders to advance or attack:

The cold will also make military advances more difficult, locking down the front lines at least until the spring. But Zelensky has refused to accept that. “Freezing the war, to me, means losing it,” he says. Before the winter sets in, his aides warned me to expect major changes in their military strategy and a major shake-up in the President’s team. At least one minister would need to be fired, along with a senior general in charge of the counteroffensive, they said, to ensure accountability for Ukraine’s slow progress at the front. “We’re not moving forward,” says one of Zelensky’s close aides. Some front-line commanders, he continues, have begun refusing orders to advance, even when they came directly from the office of the President. “They just want to sit in the trenches and hold the line,” he says. “But we can’t win a war that way.”

Expanding on this, they recount how the order was given to retake Gorlovka, which was met with frank disbelief on the frontline, urging commanders to ask: with what?!

When I raised these claims with a senior military officer, he said that some commanders have little choice in second-guessing orders from the top. At one point in early October, he said, the political leadership in Kyiv demanded an operation to “retake” the city of Horlivka, a strategic outpost in eastern Ukraine that the Russians have held and fiercely defended for nearly a decade. The answer came back in the form of a question: With what? “They don’t have the men or the weapons,” says the officer. “Where are the weapons? Where is the artillery? Where are the new recruits?”

One interesting aspect to this admission is that some may recall several months ago, around the time of the counteroffensive, I discussed possibilities for vectors here. One thing I specifically mentioned was how Russell “Texas” Bentley was loudly urging the Russian military to send reinforcements to the north Donetsk-Gorlovka area because he felt that the southern Azov direction was just a feint, and the AFU would actually attack to try to retake Donetsk-Gorlovka. It’s interesting now to see that perhaps some of his instincts were correct.

But the dreadful article goes on, confessing that the lack of manpower has become so dire for the AFU that even if all the newfangled weapons from the West were to be delivered, Ukraine may no longer even have the men to use them:

In some branches of the military, the shortage of personnel has become even more dire than the deficit in arms and ammunition. One of Zelensky’s close aides tells me that even if the U.S. and its allies come through with all the weapons they have pledged, “we don’t have the men to use them.” 

You recall how many videos I’ve posted recently showing frontline commanders and Ukrainian pundits specifically highlighting this? More and more voices have risen from the ranks of the AFU recently stating that they are flat out running out of men. This included the countless videos explaining how soon the entire population will have to be mobilized, man, woman, and child.

[...]

It’s something that’s been echoed over and over recently by many of the more serious and ‘aware’ pundits on the Ukrainian side, which I’ve covered here repeatedly: Ukraine was defeated by its own Western propaganda.

After the very military-strategically brilliant and gutsy move to pullback Russian forces from Kiev last year in order to shorten lines and concentrate all forces in a much smaller area, the Western pro-Ukrainian propaganda mills went into overdrive. They thought Russia was ‘on the run’ and had hoped that they could deliver a final “finishing blow” by way of propaganda, which would collapse Russian societal morale and lead to some kind of overthrow that would end the SMO.

But these people sadly knew very little about military doctrine or strategy. What Russia did was carry out an absolutely simple and pedantic textbook reorientation of forces with a clear logic. In fact, that moment should have been an extremely chilling maneuver for Ukraine. It should have signaled: “Uh oh…this means Russia is taking its gloves off.” The initial thunder-run on Kiev was merely a brazen attempt to avoid bloodshed and see if the conflict could be ended fast and early. But not having worked, Russian military planners clearly knew that now the entire operation had to be shifted into actual war footing, rather than mere enhanced special operations raid.

Everything changed from that point on. Pro-Ukrainians should have keyed in on this and realized the heavyweight was now removing his gloves. But instead, what they did was run with the propaganda that Russia is a defeated, cowardly, inept, and completely helpless paper tiger. This propaganda “worked” incredibly well, too well—but the problem is, it worked on the wrong side.

Instead of convincing Russians of it, it convinced the Ukrainians and Western public that the war had already been won, that Russia could never recover from this brutal “loss” (which was not a loss in the slightest but a strategic maneuver and concentration of forces). Since then, no one in Ukrainian society thought to take the war seriously anymore and Ukraine’s own “rear” end had dropped out, while Russia’s rear in fact throttled up into overdrive, in terms of the galvanization of society to supporting the troops and military machine top to bottom.

Now, the most aware pro-Ukrainian pundits are desperately trying to steer their flock back to rational thinking—but it’s too late.

In fact, this will be studied for generations as an example of a massive propaganda fail—a propaganda campaign which destroyed its own side by way of inadequate attenuation and nuanced micromanagement of perceptions. They instead did a bruteforce method of flooding every which way without concerning themselves with who the propaganda was actually negatively affecting.

I’ve posted videos for months where Ukrainian soldiers from the frontlines begged civilians to stop exaggerating and underestimating Russian forces. They said over and over that this is disrespectful to the AFU who are dying by the yacht-load every day to these so-called toothless “Orcs” and “homeless drunks” which Russian soldiers were characterized as being. But to no avail. One can likely blame the infantile NAFO movement as the chief culprit in this.

But the Times report goes on to underline the losses:

Since the start of the invasion, Ukraine has refused to release official counts of dead and wounded. But according to U.S. and European estimates, the toll has long surpassed 100,000 on each side of the war. It has eroded the ranks of Ukraine’s armed forces so badly that draft offices have been forced to call up ever older personnel, raising the average age of a soldier in Ukraine to around 43 years. “They’re grown men now, and they aren’t that healthy to begin with,” says the close aide to Zelensky. “This is Ukraine. Not Scandinavia.”

The article veers into corruption with the same old stories that we all know are ever-present. The only interesting take away is that Arestovich later commented on the article, not only agreeing with the corruption bits but painting Zelensky in exactly those lone, detached dictator tones:

MoA believes Arestovich could perhaps be undergoing preparations as replacement, posting this article which discusses the various theories for why Arestovich is suddenly ‘allowed’ to so sharply criticize the ruling regime.

And why would they release such a damning TIME report now? Some believe it’s merely done to light a fire of urgency under the U.S. Congress—as if to say, “look how bad things are, we need that budget pushed through ASAP!”

It could be, though I think it’s also a desperate bid to regain global sympathy after the world’s reserve of it went to the Israeli situation the past few weeks. The TIME editors likely thought by showcasing the ultra-grim reality of the Ukrainian front, they could turn the world’s attention back onto Ukraine out of sheer guilt. In essence, a last ditch attempt to guilt trip the world into re-engaging with Ukraine.

So how does all this dovetail with the ongoing mess in U.S. Congress?

The latest from ZeroHedge still points to a complete deadlock.

(read more)

ALERT
Ukrainian officials released the kickback numbers they gave US politicians pic.twitter.com/TNx7kDFF7Z