Will Today Mark An Inflection Point In The Ukraine Conflict?
Representatives of the Russian Federation and the Ukrainian government are meeting today in Belarus for another round of negotiations. President Putin sent a very strong message to Ukraine ahead of those talks. On Saturday he gave an address in which he stated:
If the leadership of Ukraine continues to do what they are doing, it will call into question the future of Ukrainian statehood, and that will be entirely their responsibility.
In effect, Putin was letting it be known that delaying tactics would prove unacceptable, as he had previously warned. Delay will call into question the very existence of a Ukrainian state in the future.
Clint Ehrlich commented:
Russia has also upped the ante by claiming that it has uncovered evidence at US operated bio-labs in Ukraine that the US and Ukraine were cooperating on bio-weapon programs. That adds to the charge that, with US assistance, Ukraine was working to develop nuclear weapons. Those charges serve the function of emphasizing that Russia views this war as existential. There’s no going back to the prior state of affairs.
In addition, Russia has issued a stern warning to NATO countries that are hosting Ukrainian warplanes. After several days of back and forth—presumably reflecting internal division in the Polish government—Poland appears to have firmly rejected any notion of being dragged into armed conflict with Russia, and specifically not by supplying warplanes to Ukraine. The Russian warning was more specifically directed at Romania, where Russia claims Ukrainian planes have fled. Some accounts I’ve seen made it sound as if Russia is claiming that Ukrainian planes have launched attacks from Romania, but that’s not certain. In any event, Russia has warned that involvement of this sort will be considered acts of war.
Russia has also issued a general warning to Ukrainian citizens to stay away from Ukrainian defense installations of any sort. These will be increasingly targeted.
As for the broader war situation, The Saker, a very pro-Russian site, offered this assessment:
It appears that there are currently not enough Russia forces to fully exploit the Russian advances over the past ten days. Alternatively, we could say that the Russian force is big enough, but that now it has to sharply increase its use of firepower to further develop its operations.
Note the qualifier “fully”. Russian forces continue to advance, and Ukrainian forces that are not pinned along the Line of Contact in the Donbas are increasingly confined to major urban areas that the Russians are isolating. It has appeared for days that closing the cauldron in eastern Ukraine was only a matter of time:
For all these reasons, here is what I suppose is in the making:
If the Ukrainian delegation agrees to a surrender, then things can be resolved with the least amount of needless deaths and suffering. However, the West will not allow the Ukrainians to surrender and those Ukrainians who might agree to talk will get shot by their own (it is happening all over Banderastan right now).
Having received a Ukrainian rejection, I believe that Russia will bring in more forces and will begin by clearing out the Mariupol and Odessa cauldrons (or “soon to be cauldrons”).
A “Ukrainian rejection” could be in the form of delaying tactics, as Putin hinted Saturday.
In at least one case (near Voznesensk) a Ukrainian counter-attack did break through the Russian defensive lines. This shows that the Russian lines are thinning out as a consequence of their own successes, and that then allows the Nazi forces to mount successful counter-attacks.
It is also quite clear that the US/NATO is offering the Ukrainians its full reconnaissance/intelligence support and that while their own networks and command posts are gone, the US/NATO continue to support Ukie operations.
This last point is what we described yesterday:
Satellite companies are restricting access to what we see over Ukraine. This allegedly follows a direct appeal from Ukrainian Deputy PM Mykhailo Feodorov to all of them. Effectively they are all providing Ukraine with live targeting data & preventing OSINT from seeing anything.
Continuing with The Saker:
For all these reasons, and failing some kind of ceasefire, the next 7-10 days ought to see a sharp increase in Russian operations not only in the air and on the ground, but also on the sea where the Black Sea Fleet will be engaged to secure the Ukrainian coast line. The Russian might also have to do something about NATO’s intel/recon support for Ukrainian forces, either overtly or with a modicum of plausible deniability.
…
Hence the Russian General Staff decided that it needed to do two things first: destroy the Ukrainian defense infrastructure and 2, encircle the Ukronazi forces in the Donbass by a envelopment/pincer movement from the south and the north. ...
Still, major (relatively speaking) Ukrainian force concentrations have dug in and are ready for long urban combat operations in at least the following cities: Odessa, Dnepr and Kiev. Could the Russian military evict the Nazis from these cities? Yes, Mariupol is being cleaned up as we speak, but only at a high human cost (on all sides) and by bringing in more firepower (on the ground and in the air).
Thus, because of the high human cost of urban warfare, which appears to have been the fallback Ukrainian strategy pretty much all along, The Saker is predicting Russian escalation. That was always in the cards, but as a second and less preferred option.
Underlining all this, and the idea that today may mark an inflection point, are the statements made by the Russian military spokesman, summarized by Gilbert Doctorow at You Won’t Know What Hit You and Why:
In particular, one vitally important 3.30 minute video of Russian military spokesman Igor Konoshenkov yesterday and this morning remains accessible on YouTube I will detail below what he was saying, because the messenger and the message concern whether you and I will live to see another day.
Konoshenkov’s points in this video were the following:
1) Russia has now destroyed the entire Ukrainian air force that remained within the confines of Ukraine
2) There are also Ukrainian fighter jets that left the country and are now parked in Romania and other neighboring countries. If these planes are allowed by local authorities to take off from Romania, etc. and enter Ukrainian air space, Russia will consider the country from which they took off as a co-belligerent and will take appropriate action against them. The subtext is that Russia is ready to make missile strikes against NATO airfields that transgress the rules of war.
I think all of this was thought out in advance.
3) Russia is now about to destroy all military industrial complex factories in Ukraine and has formally warned all employees of these factories to leave the premises and stay away
4) Russia has received documentation from Ukrainian health authorities on the production of biological weapons (anthrax, Siberian plague and much more) by Ukrainian labs in Kharkiv and elsewhere in cooperation with the United States. Stocks of such weapons were being stored in direct violation of international conventions. On 24 February, in advance of the start of Russia’s ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine, the Ukrainian health authorities destroyed these illicit biological weapons. However, Russia has obtained the official documentation certifying this destruction of what should never have been there. Moscow is now studying this documentation, which indicates United States participation in the development of the biological weapons and will publish the incriminating documents, starting from yesterday.
5) Russia has also obtained documentation proving that Ukraine, in cooperation with the United States, was since the presidency of Petro Petrushenko, actively developing nuclear weapons, including “dirty” nuclear devices using readily available fuel from its reactors. Such activity was going on in the Zaporozhye nuclear plants, and it is very likely that the fire reported at a ‘training unit’ adjacent to an active reactor two days ago related to destruction of incriminating papers, if it was not otherwise a ‘false flag’ operation to allege a Russian attack on the power station, in violation of international law.
From this list, the most threatening to European peace in the immediate days ahead is point 2, regarding Ukrainian aircraft based outside of Ukraine and being assigned missions to fly back into Ukrainian air space to thwart Russia’s ongoing military offensive. This bears directly on the patently insane plans of Secretary of State Blinken to allow the Poles to transfer to Kiev, its stock of Soviet era MIGs for missions into Ukraine.
It does appear that the Poles asked themselves the relevant question: Is the US willing to go nuclear over Poland? The answer should be a clear, No. Which also suggests that, if the US isn’t willing to go nuclear over Poland, then it’s almost certainly not willing to go conventional.
Globalist forces are frantically working the Info Warfare levers, but on the ground Putin is moving ahead and appears to be about to escalate.
M. K. Bhadrakumar
@BhadraPunchline
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Europe can't take Blinken's bullying anymore. So far today, leaders of UK, Germany & Netherlands have openly told Blinken "Nyet" apropos his move to sanction Russia's energy exports! Interestingly, Boris Johnson most forceful. Europe in revolt that US is wrecking their economies!
Note that these appear to be conditions for a ceasefire--not for a permanent peace:
Russia has told Ukraine it is ready to halt military operations “in a moment” if Kyiv meets a list of conditions, the Kremlin spokesman said on Monday.
Dmitry Peskov said Moscow was demanding that
1. Ukraine cease military action,
2. change its constitution to enshrine neutrality,
3. acknowledge Crimea as Russian territory, and
4. recognise the separatist republics of Donetsk and Lugansk as independent states.