There’s no one big thematic development to cover today so we’ll just keep abreast of some side developments in preparation for the larger storms to come—so this will be a scattershot assemblage of interesting updates.
I’ll start with what is the most interesting news to me: Ukraine’s defense minister Umerov has stated in a new Reuters interview that Russia plans to insert an additional massive 200-300k troops into Ukraine...............
Zelensky mentions the now ongoing narrative about striking over the Russian border, so it’s a good time to segue into that to explain something important:
As we know, the entire West has latched onto this most ‘pressing’ issue of striking Russian territory. But I’m here to tell you: the entire thing is a giant mirage, a facade, a red herring.
First of all: Ukraine has obviously already been striking Russian territory unabatingly with a variety of weapons like the AGM-88 Harms in Belgorod, etc. Secondly, there is no real particularly exceptional damage it can do with such strikes because most Russian supply lines are along the eastern front, which is by far the largest current front—not in the north where Zelensky is currently focusing. The Kharkov operation is just a minor diversionary one for now. But the majority of the eastern rear lines, C2/3 nodes, etc., are far out of range of any possible weapon Ukraine has, including ATACMS..................
Thus, the entire thing is a sham, a totally artificial narrative created under the false guise of needing to hit Russian rear lines. In reality, the actual truth entirely revolves around needing to escalate the conflict to save the AFU, which is collapsing. It has nothing to do with hitting Russian supply lines which are way out of reach anyway, and everything to do with the escalation creep of triggering Russia’s red lines and slowly wedging NATO into the conflict.
The real hopes of this recent highly coordinated push can be broken down to two things:
1. To continue increasing pressure on Russia, to make Putin feel “cornered” and hopefully create political instabilities—which obviously has no chance of working.
2. To precondition the more sheepish and reluctant of the NATO/Western “allies” into escalating by ‘leading the way’ in showing Russia’s lines can be pushed more and more, which will allow political pressure to be applied to the most cautious EU/NATO leaders in coercing them into increasing their own involvement in the Ukrainian conflict............
The entire goal remains to subtly force as many of the reluctant Western countries as possible into escalating against Russia, to affect the image of a ‘united front’. The more that countries can stand in ‘solidarity’, the more their own citizens can be pressured and guilt-tripped into perpetual financial support of Ukraine.
The obvious way of doing that is by causing Russia to respond in some uncharacteristic way that can be declared as a ‘threat’, which will be used to galvanize this contrived Western solidarity. In short: it’s a slow, devious boa constrictor move to expand the Western coalition and its slow-drip involvement in the Ukraine war, lowering the fear threshold for continued Western involvement which—they hope—can eventually lead to the conditioning of Western publics into accepting boots on the ground to save Ukraine at the final hour..............
Telegraph provocatively titled a new article “Ukraine knows it is finished” but quickly changed it 3 times: