Ukraine Invasion: Part 34

[MagicFox]

Welcome all 🇺🇦

More evidence of chaos documented in thread below. Igor Sushko also reporting this morning road blockages and military vehicles in Moscow (again, this seems to happen a lot). He suggests it's an anti-coup force.

@sairomri (Reuters): We reviewed more than a thousand pages of Russian military documents left behind in a command bunker in Balakliia, Ukraine. The documents shed new light on Russia's chaotic retreat from the Kharkiv area in Sept. Thread with some of our findings twitter.com/saitomri/status/1585228271662166016?s=46&t=nABQMAw-FZIr9xRz3-e2xg

The Prince Potemkin thing is SO WEIRD

Some positive news coming out of the International Energy Agency (being reported on CNN for those interested).

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine could accelerate the world’s transition to a more “sustainable and secure energy system” as Moscow’s fossil fuel exports continue to decline, the International Energy Agency (IEA) said in a report Thursday.

In its annual World Energy Outlook, the IEA found that international energy markets are in the midst of a “profound reorientation” as “countries adjust to the rupture of Russia-Europe flows,” predicting that global emissions could now peak in 2025.

The agency also found – for the first time in the history of its modelling – that global demand for every type of fossil fuel is “set to peak or plateau” before levelling off in the mid-2030s.

@blueshoes here's hoping that it is just speculation on twitter. I don't think any of these reports are confirmed yet. Although Belarus's warning to Ukraine not to provoke them is concerning.

In the Catholic and Orthodox Churches, it's tradition to have body parts of Saints within those church buildings and artifacts, so Putin must be extending this to other revered persons.

news.sky.com/story/ukraine-latest-news-putin-facing-inevitable-defeat-in-kherson-as-west-rejects-moscows-dirty-bomb-claims-12541713?postid=4747612#liveblog-body

Speech from Putin at 2pm (unclear from article of its 2pm local time or UK time).

Every time I hear he's giving a speech I get a grey hair

Just having a look its a statement (confirmed 2pm UK time so 4pm Moscow time) to a leading Moscow thinktank. He gives it annually and it closes their Annual Meeting. Its open to foreign journalists and he will take questions etc.

The title of the summit this year is “A Post-Hegemonic World: Justice and Security for Everyone” - The meeting will be attended by 111 experts, politicians, diplomats and economists from 41 countries, including Afghanistan, Brazil, China, Egypt, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Iran, Kazakhstan, Russia, South Africa, Turkey, the United States, Uzbekistan, and others (according to the Programme on their website - valdaiclub.com/events/own/19th-annual-meeting-of-the-valdai-discussion-club/)

Putin's statement will follow the below session today:
Session 10. The World That Crumbled: Lessons for the Future From the 2022 Military-Political Crisis
The institutions of world governance that were established in the second half of the twentieth century and provided a certain framework for international players are no longer working. The situation in world politics has returned to the historical norm: chaotic competition, which can only be limited by the balance of power of the opposing sides. Will there ever be a new system of rules and governance structures? What could it look like? Or has the year 2022 opened up a period of indefinite and dangerous instability?

Something not terribly pleasant from the World Service this morning: it seems that after Trump's decision to get out of Afghanistan in a precipitate way for the benefit of his friends in the Taliban, a large number of US- and UK-trained members of the Afghan special forces were left behind, and have been being hunted down and murdered by the Taliban ever since. Russia is now recruiting them. This is bad news because these men are good at what they do, and will be grateful to Russia for their rescue and a nasty addition to the actually-capable Russian forces, what there is of those.

I think this is one for @MissConductUS but I without knowing a lot more wouldn't automatically assume they are on a level of "Special" comparable with the like of Delta/SAS/SBS etc

Hopefully they are more on a par with the Russian "SF"..

To add to the above - Just done a bit of digging around- I assume this is the story the World Servivce was covering.

taskandpurpose.com/news/russia-recruit-afghan-commandos-ukraine/?utm_campaign=dfn-ebb&utm_medium=email&utm_source=sailthru&SToverlay=2002c2d9-c344-4bbb-8610-e5794efcfa7d

Thanks, notim! That article indicates that it's less dire than it sounded on the BBC. I think I must have been using the wrong search terms when I looked for anything about it.

>what do you mean 'parts of' his body.

Yes. Other bits were already elsewhere. So far as I understand, Kherson was the main tomb and S Sebag M talks about being shown his skull.

Meanwhile Ksenia Sobchak seems to have fled to Lithuania.

Putin was her dad's bag carrier when Anatoly Sobchak was St Petersburg Mayor. He is also her godfather.

Ksenia, now 40, is one of those strange members of the Russian elite who is now an opposition figure but (up to today perhaps) has seen herself as being safe from harm. Former socialite (as It Girl as one could have been in a Russian sense) and recently TV anchor / personality / politician / Putin critic. She came third in the 2018 election with a reported 2% of the vote (1 million plus).

Navalny and Sobchak [see image] once sparred over who should join the other as barely-tolerated opposition leaders. Like Navalny, she had an achingly Russian prettiness.

Calling Putin Sobchak's bag carrier isn't a fantasy, though it is certainly a running joke. Here he is as the bag boy with the briefcase.

Correction, she came 4th in the 2018 election. Results are always: 1 Putin (or Medvedev), 2 Communist. 3 Liberal Democrat (anything but) 4. An individualist opposition figure and so on.

Putin / Medvedev /Yeltsin always win. Then come the tolerated parties and candidates. Well, perhaps not in 1996 when Zyuganov may well have got more votes than Yeltsin, according to - among other things - something Medvedev once let slip. There is always clear fraud in Russian elections. One wheeze was to make polling place webcams show how open things are, giving Navalny the chance to point out all the blatant ballot box stuffing.

Here's Putin and Sobchak being frostily formal.

I thought about commenting on this last night. Trump was never friends with the Taliban. Trump also never does anything out of friendship. Trump might feign friendship if he wants something from you. It's all about self-interest. In this case, Trump had campaigned for President with a promise to end the longest war in US history. It also fits in with his generally isolationist, "what's in it for me" mindset that had him questioning the NATO relationship. He was also quite frank about his dislike for and distrust of Muslims.

@notimagain is correct. Afghan SF (who had many Taliban infiltrators, by the way) were better than the regular Afghan troops but nowhere near the level of training and lethality of American, British and European SF. The best thing we can do about their possible recruitment by the Russians is to speed up the resettlement settlement process if they want to come to the US.

Another consideration is that unless they speak Russian, it will be impossible for them to fight effectively under Russian command.

Thanks, notimagin. Definitely one for MissConductUS as well.

Reassuring quotes from your link:

"Even though the Russian military has faced severe manpower shortages due to combat losses that has forced Russian President Vladimir Putin to order a partial mobilization, some experts have expressed doubts about the notion that Russia could use Afghan commandos to fight the Ukrainians.

For one thing, no visual evidence has emerged to show that Afghans are fighting in Ukraine despite the fact that nearly every detail of the conflict has been highly documented on social media, said Luke Coffey, a senior fellow with the Hudson Institute think tank in Washington, D.C.

The Ukrainians are very savvy on social media and in the PR campaign, so if they did uncover this, I think they would no doubt expose it,” Coffey told Task & Purpose. “That doesn’t mean that the Russians aren’t considering it, but I think it would be very difficult for them to pull off. I think it would be very difficult for them to recruit enough former Afghan commandos or soldiers to have a meaningful impact on the ground in Ukraine.”

Another issue is that Afghan commandos would immediately face a language barrier if they arrived in Ukraine to fight for Russia, said Glen Howard, a Russia expert and president of the conservative Jamestown Foundation think tank in Washington, D.C.

“How would Afghan commandos talk to Russian superiors — in Pashto or Dari — as they are engaging in combat operations?” Howard told Task & Purpose. “How would any kind of foreign mercenaries operate in this combat environment linguistically? Sure, they may speak Russian, but I think they would get more in the way than actually help Russian combat operations.”"
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Fuck me, last years address at this event. Y Putin lasted over 3hours!

MissConductUS, our posts crossed. Thanks for your thoughts. That makes sense and is in line with the article too.

@MMBaranova lol at photos of Putin being a bag boy.

Thanks also to you, @miceonabranch and @Natsku for explaining about Potemkin's parts. Still a weird thing to do.

Putin has just started speaking. Only an hour and 20 mins late...

Trying to catch what I can of this but what a pile of contradiction, lies and excuses so far.

How can you tell that Putin is lying. Answer: his lips move.

Eastern Front noise today.

Whilst most of the twitter chatter has been about Svatove, its slightly different today.

Talk (coming largely from Russian sources) is that an attack is imminent further south just North of Kremina (on the road south of Svatove). Twitter is suggesting that this is actually more likely as Svatove has been more heavily fortified and thus is harder to attack and Russian defenses are weakner in between the two towns.

There was geolocated footage yesterday in a village not far from where this is thought likely which shows Ukraine are closing in on this area.

I’m a long time lurker but rarely post as I have little that’s knowledgable to add. Grateful to all of the informative posters who continue to contribute to this thread.

Just watching Putin now.

Special mentions for the UK and Liz Truss are as ever designed to make us twitchy though we of course mustn’t rise to the bait, but I’m just a little nervous about Putin highlighting Poland and the supposed ethnic Russians there who are apparently appealing to him for ‘help’. Another country ‘crying out for liberation’ <sarcasm> by Putin and all that might entail?

Thoughts?