Ukraine Can Develop Nuclear Weapons ‘Within a Short Time’: Ex-Zelensky Aide

BY JON JACKSON ON 6/23/23 

eksii Arestovych, a former adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, said during a Thursday interview that Ukraine has the ability to quickly produce its own nuclear weapons “within a short time.”

Arestovych, who also served as an officer in Ukraine’s military intelligence service, made the remarks while speaking with Russian activist Mark Feygin…………… Arestovych has also stated that Crimea would be a major target for Zelensky’s forces during the conflict.  https://www.newsweek.com/ukraine-can-develop-nuclear-weapons-within-short-time-ex-zelensky-aide-1808663

June 25, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Ukraine, weapons and war | Leave a comment

The Silent Slaughter of the Flower of Ukraine’s Youth

Now that the Ukrainian counteroffensive is underway, it is clear that the government and its Western allies are maintaining silence to conceal the brutal cost Ukraine’s brave young people are paying.

By Medea Benjamin | Nicolas J.S. Davies / Common Dreams. June 21, 2023
 https://scheerpost.com/2023/06/21/the-silent-slaughter-of-the-flower-of-ukraines-youth/

As Ukraine prepared to launch its much heralded but long delayed counteroffensive, the media published a photograph of a Ukrainian soldier with his finger on his lips, symbolizing the need for secrecy to retain some element of surprise for this widely telegraphed operation.

Now that the offensive has been under way for two weeks, it is clear that the Ukrainian government and its Western allies are maintaining silence for quite a different reason: to conceal the brutal cost Ukraine’s brave young people are paying to recover small scraps of territory from Russian occupation forces, in what some are already calling a suicide mission.

Western pundits at first described these first two weeks of fighting as “probing operations” to find weak spots in Russia’s defenses, which Russia has been fortifying since 2022 with multiple layers of minefields, “dragon’s teeth,” tank-traps, pre-positioned artillery, and attack helicopters, unopposed in the air, that can fire 12 anti-tank missiles apiece.

On the advice of British military advisers in Kyiv, Ukraine flung Western tanks and armored vehicles manned by NATO-trained troops into these killing fields without air support or demining operations. The results have been predictably disastrous, and it is now clear that these are not just “probing” operations as the propaganda at first claimed, but the long-awaited main offensive.

A Western official with intelligence access told The Associated Press on June 14, “Intense fighting is now ongoing in nearly all sectors of the front… This is much more than probing. These are full-scale movements of armor and heavy equipment into the Russian security zone.”

Other glimpses are emerging of the reality behind the propaganda. At a press conference after a summit at NATO Headquarters, U.S. General Mark Milley warned that the offensive will be long, violent, and costly in Ukrainian lives.

“This is a very difficult fight. It’s a very violent fight, and it will likely take a considerable amount of time and at high cost,” Milley said.

Russian videos show dozens of Ukrainian tanks and armored vehicles lying smashed in minefields, and NATO military advisers in Ukraine have confirmed that it lost 38 tanks in one night on June 8, including newly delivered German-built Leopard IIs.

Rob Lee of the Foreign Policy Research Institute explained to TheNew York Times that the Russians are trying to inflict as many casualties and destroy as many vehicles as possible in the areas in front of their main defensive lines, turning those areas into lethal kill zones. If this strategy works, any Ukrainian forces that reach the main Russian defense lines will be too weakened and depleted to break through and achieve their goal of severing Russia’s land bridge between Donbas and Crimea.

Russia’s Ministry of Defense reported that Ukraine’s forces suffered 7,500 casualties in the first 10 days of the offensive. If Ukraine’s real losses are a fraction of that, the long, violent bloodbath that General Milley anticipates will destroy the new armored brigades that NATO has armed and trained, and serve only to escalate the gory war of attrition that has destroyed Mariupol, Sievierodonetsk, and Bakhmut, killing and wounding hundreds of thousands of young Ukrainians and Russians.

A senior European military officer in Ukraine provided more details of the carnage to Asia Times, calling Ukraine’s operations on June 8 and 9 a “suicide mission” that violated the basic rules of military tactics.

“We tried to tell them to stop these piecemeal tactics, define a main thrust with infantry support and do what they can,” he said. “They were trained by the British, and they’re playing Light Brigade,” he added, comparing the offensive to a suicidal charge into massive Russian cannon fire that wiped out Britain’s Light Cavalry Brigade in Crimea in 1854.

If Ukraine’s “Spring Offensive” plunges on to the bitter end, it could be more like the British and French Somme Offensive, fought near the French River Somme in 1916. After 19,240 British troops were killed on the first day (including Nicolas’s 20-year-old great-uncle, Robert Masterman), the battle raged on for more than four months of pointless, wanton slaughter, with over a million British, French, and German casualties. It was finally called off after advancing only six miles and failing to capture either of the two small French towns that were its initial objectives.

The current offensive was delayed for months as Ukraine and its allies grappled with the likelihood of the outcome we are now witnessing. The fact that it went ahead regardless reflects the moral bankruptcy of U.S. and NATO political leaders, who are sacrificing the flower of Ukraine’s youth in a proxy war they will not send their own children or grandchildren to fight.

As Ukraine launches its offensive, NATO is conducting Air Defender, the largest military exercise in its history, from June 12 to 23, with 250 warplanes, including nuclear-capable F-35s, flying from German bases to simulate combat operations in and over Germany, Lithuania, Romania, the North Sea, and the Baltic Sea. The exercise has led to at least 15 incidents between NATO and Russian aircraft in the skies near Lithuania.

It seems that nobody in NATO’s foreboding fortress in Brussels has stumbled on the concept of a “security dilemma,” in which supposedly defensive actions by one party are perceived as offensive threats by another and lead to a spiral of mutual escalation, as has been the case between NATO and Russia since the 1990s. Professor of Russian history Richard Sakwa has written, “NATO exists to manage the risks created by its existence.”

These risks will be evident in the upcoming NATO Summit in Vilnius on July 11-12, where Ukraine and its eastern allies will be pushing for Ukraine membership, while the U.S. and western Europe insist that membership cannot be offered while the war rages on and will instead offer “upgraded” status and a shorter route to membership once the war ends.

The continued insistence that Ukraine will one day be a NATO member only means a prolongation of the conflict, as this is a red line that Russia insists cannot be crossed. That’s why negotiations that lead to a neutral Ukraine are key to ending the war.

But the United States will not agree to that as long as President Joe Biden keeps U.S. Ukraine policy firmly under the thumbs of hawkish neoconservative desk warriors like Antony Blinken and Victoria Nuland at the State Department and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan at the White House. Pressure to keep escalating U.S. involvement in the war is also coming from Congress, where Republicans accuse Biden of “hemming and hawing” instead of “going all in” to help Ukraine.

Paradoxically, the Pentagon and intelligence agencies are more realistic than their civilian colleagues about the lack of any military solution. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Milley, has called for diplomacy to bring peace to Ukraine, and U.S. intelligence sources have challenged dominant false narratives of the war in leaks to Newsweek and Seymour Hersh, telling Hersh that the neocons are ignoring genuine intelligence and inventing their own, just as they did to justify the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

With the retirement of Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman, the State Department is losing the voice of a professional diplomat who was President Barack Obama’s chief negotiator for the JCPOA with Iran and urged Biden to rejoin the agreement, and who has taken steps to moderate U.S. brinkmanship toward China. While publicly silent on Ukraine, Sherman was a quiet voice for diplomacy in a war-mad administration.

Many fear that Sherman’s job will now go to Nuland, the leading architect of the ever-mounting catastrophe in Ukraine for the past decade, who already holds the #3 or #4 job at State as Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs.

Other departures from the senior ranks at State and the Pentagon are likely to cede more ground to the neocons. Colin Kahl, the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, who worked with Sherman on the JCPOA, opposed sending F-16s to Ukraine, and has maintained that China will not invade Taiwan in the near future. Kahl is leaving the Pentagon to return to his position as a professor at Stanford, just as China hawk General C.Q. Brown will replace General Milley as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs when Milley retires in September.

Meanwhile, other world leaders continue to push for peace talks. A delegation of African heads of state led by President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa met with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Kyiv, and President Vladimir Putin in Moscow on June 17, to discuss the African peace plan for Ukraine.

President Putin showed the African leaders the 18-point Istanbul Agreement that a Ukrainian representative had signed back in March 2022, and told them that Ukraine had thrown it in the “dustbin of history,” after the now disgraced Boris Johnson told Zelenskyy the “collective West” would only support Ukraine to fight, not to negotiate with Russia.

The catastrophic results of the first two weeks of Ukraine’s offensive should focus the world’s attention on the urgent need for a ceasefire to halt the daily slaughter and dismemberment of hundreds of brave young Ukrainians, who are being forced to drive through minefields and kill zones in Western gifts that are proving to be no more than U.S.- and NATO-built death-traps

June 22, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Ukraine, weapons and war | 1 Comment

The Reverse Cuban Missile Crisis

America now plans to install tactical nuclear weapons in Romania and Poland. 

BY TYLER DURDEN. WEDNESDAY, JUN 21, 2023 – Authored by Gilbert Doctorow,  https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/reverse-cuban-missile-crisis

What I am about to say is surely known and under analysis in the American intelligence agencies. It is being used by the Pentagon to quietly change its nuclear force posture in Europe. However, we hear not a word about it in the media, not in mainstream, and not yet in alternative news.

I maintain that it is very important for it to be heard and reflected upon by the general public in the United States and in Europe, disagreeable though it may be at the start of a new week. So here goes…

Last Friday when I published my selective account of the Q&A session with President Vladimir Putin at the culmination point of the St Petersburg International Economic Forum I omitted one important issue:

how Russia will respond to the dispatch of “Ukrainian” F-16s from some air base in a NATO country into the war zone in Ukraine.  I was considering remedying that oversight on Saturday morning when a comment from one reader forced my hand. She wrote in that Italy’s daily newspaper La Repubblica quoted Putin as saying on Friday Russia will destroy such a base in response. I responded on Saturday in the Comments section that the Russian President had in fact been evasive in his comment, saying only that Russia could destroy such a base and was now taking the issue under advisement.

However, yesterday evening’s edition of the Vladimir Solovyov talk show indicates that the Republicca reporter was closer to the truth than I. A patient and knowledgeable Russian colonel in retirement who is a frequent guest on the talk show explained  that the Kremlin is now considering exactly with what means to destroy such a NATO air base, not whether to do it. And the likely means will be use of tactical nuclear weapons on a Ramstein or whatever NATO base is involved. We may say that Germany is placing itself in the bulls-eye of any escalation in the Ukraine war if it proceeds with the F-16s to Ukraine program.

Why all the fuss over the F-16s, you may ask. After all, Putin has said loud and clear that Russia will destroy the F-16s in the air just as it has been destroying the Leopard tanks and America’s Bradley armored personnel carriers while pushing back the ongoing Ukrainian counter-offensive. To understand better, we have to thank the good colonel once again. He alerted us to an important detail that you will not find mentioned in The New York Times:

the first F-16s scheduled to be supplied to the Ukrainian Air Force are from Belgium and Denmark, and are all nuclear-capable, which is not a necessary feature of these planes. 

Since the Russians are unable to determine what kind of munitions the “Ukrainian” F-16s will actually be delivering to the war zone, they must assume that they are carrying tactical nuclear bombs intended to be dropped on the Russian Army troop concentrations. The effect of such an attack could be devastating, hence the Russian threat to the air bases from which such planes are launched.

The next important revelation made during the Solovyov show came with respect to the first delivery of tactical nuclear weapons to Minsk which was marked by a visit to Belarus and interview with Lukashenko by the co-host of the Sixty Minutes news and discussion show Olga Skabeyeva. In answer to her question about where the nuclear warheads are being stored, Lukashenko said ‘everywhere.’  The meaning of this was kindly deciphered for us laymen by the colonel in retirement on the Solovyov program:  this signifies a cardinal shift in the Russian handling of tactical nuclear arms away from their traditional separation of the warheads kept in a central storage far from the delivery carriers to the method used by the U.S. military with respect to its tactical nuclear weapons in Europe. The Americans, he said stored the nukes just under the jets that would be used to deliver them.  Now in Belarus, the warheads will also be just next to the planes and Iskander missiles that will carry them. This means that the time to launch will depend only on the time for approval from the Boss. And with respect to that, Lukashenko told Skabeyeva that he had just to make a phone call to Vladimir Vladimirovich and approval would be instantaneous.

Why such a hair-trigger mechanism for unleashing nuclear weapons to defend Belarus?  For an answer to that, go to Monday’s article in The Financial Times on how Poland is now preparing hundreds of Belarus fighters to go across the border and overthrow Lukashenko. To which I can only say:  Warsaw, watch out!  Lukashenko is one bold and decisive defender of his country, as his standing on the streets with a Kalashnikov in his hands when there were Western financed and promoted street demonstrations in Minsk aiming to overthrow him.

Still another item from the Solovyov show demanding our attention concerns what the good colonel calls the American response to the shipment of nuclear arms to Belarus:  America now plans to install tactical nuclear weapons in Romania and Poland.  Why, one might ask, in those two countries? For that you need only consider what the Kremlin has been saying for more than a decade about the U.S. bases set up in both countries supposedly to house anti-ballistic missile systems intended to bring down Iranian missiles fired on Europe. The Russians always objected that these installations would be dual-purpose and were a cover for placing nuclear-armed cruise missiles directed against themselves.  Now if the USA indeed puts such missiles into the two countries, the Russian claims will have been vindicated and Washington is shown, yet again, to be a blatant liar on the world stage.

Finally, the colonel gave us an invaluable insight to changes in Russian thinking on tactical nuclear weapons which we otherwise missed. I have in mind Putin’s answer at the Forum to the question of whether Russia would use tactical nuclear weapons in the Ukraine theater. Putin’s loud and clear ‘no’ was, of course, an answer to the proposals of Sergei Karaganov for preemptive and instructive nuclear strikes in his just published essay in the magazine Russia in Global Affairs. As I reported, Putin went on to say that Russia has no need to show force by some preemptive strike because everyone knows it has many more tactical weapons than the West. And while the United States has called for talks on reduction of stockpiles of such weapons, Russia will not enter into such talks, and says to the West, “fuck you,” if I may translate his rude remark in Russian into corresponding four-letter English.

That last remark brought smiles to the faces of many Russians in the audience. But it was not just theatrics, says the good colonel: in fact Russia had been talking with Americans about the possibility of reducing stockpiles, but now, in the context of the NATO proxy war it has no intention of resuming such talks.

With that I end today’s survey of our dismal progression on the way to Armageddon.

June 22, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Ukraine, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Russian MP believes Ukrainian counteroffensive will end in July – Zelensky says operation is not going well

 https://www.rt.com/russia/578360-ukrainian-counteroffensive-end-weeks-mp/ 21 June 23

Moscow’s troops are likely to repel Kiev’s offensive in July and launch an attack of their own, Andrey Kartapolov has claimed.

Kiev’s forces will exhaust their offensive capabilities in July if the current Ukrainian casualty rate persists, the head of Russia’s State Duma Defense Committee, Andrey Kartapolov, said on Tuesday.

Ukrainian troops have lost some 900 soldiers to deaths and injuries over the past 24 hours alone, the colonel general explained. According to Kartapolov, they have also lost nine tanks and dozens of armored vehicles over the same period. “If it continues at this pace, I believe we will finish repelling [this offensive] in three weeks and move on to dynamic actions ourselves,” the MP predicted in an appearance on the ‘Solovyov Live’ show.

The lawmaker claimed that Ukraine had already lost around 20,000 soldiers out of the 40,000 to 50,000 it had reportedly trained for the offensive. While he did not name his sources, he claimed the much-awaited Ukrainian operation had largely failed.

“Every tactic they have used has not worked as of now,” he said. Kiev’s troops did not advance further than the Russian forward defense area security zone and did not even reach the first defense line, the MP added.

According to the Russian Defense Ministry, over 600 Ukrainian servicemen have been killed over the past 24 hours, as Kiev’s troops continued their attacks on Russian positions. The Ukrainian forces also lost dozens of armored vehicles, as well as a dozen artillery pieces, including at least three US-made M777 howitzers, the ministry revealed in its daily briefing on Tuesday.

Kiev’s large-scale offensive began on June 4. Ukrainian troops have suffered heavy losses in the attacks, which have been repelled by Russian forces, according to the Russian Defense Ministry.

Last week, it said that 7,500 of Kiev’s frontline troops had either been killed or wounded. Russian President Vladimir Putin also said last week that Kiev had lost up to 30% of the heavy equipment supplied to it by the West.

June 22, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Ukraine, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Kiev planning strike on Russia with Western-made missiles – Moscow

 https://www.rt.com/russia/578329-himars-strike-russia-shoigu/ 21 June 23,

Attacks with Storm Shadow and HIMARS missiles outside zone of active hostilities will trigger retaliation, minister has warned

The Ukrainian military leadership has plans to use Western weapons to strike parts of Russia that are not part of the active zone of hostilities, including Crimea, Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu has warned.

In particular, officials in Kiev want to use HIMARS multiple rocket launchers and Storm Shadow air-launched cruise missiles, he said. The weapon systems have been delivered to Kiev by the US and the UK respectively and, if such attacks are launched, it would escalate the NATO nations’ involvement in the conflict, according to Shoigu.

Such an operation will “result in immediate strikes against the decision-making centers in the territory of Ukraine,” he stated. The defense minister was speaking on Tuesday during a high-profile meeting in his department.

The minister also offered a brief update on the special military operation in Ukraine, stating that since June 4 Kiev’s forces launched 263 attacks against Russian positions. “All of them were repelled, the enemy failed to reach its goals,” he added.

The Ukrainian government this month launched its long-anticipated counteroffensive. So far, it has failed to achieve significant advances on the ground, according to Russian reports and to accounts in Western media.

The US and its allies have supplied Western-made military hardware worth billions of dollars in preparation for the Ukrainian operation, including main battle tanks that they’d previously hesitated to offer.

The Russian military claimed to have destroyed a significant portion of the arsenal in the past two weeks, as Ukrainian forces failed to breach minefields or to deal with Russian advantage in artillery firepower and air superiority.

The delivery in May of Storm Shadow missiles was another move to give Ukraine additional military capabilities ahead of the counteroffensive. These have a range of up to 300 kilometers (200 miles), which is superior to other weapons that Kiev has access to.

The Russian Ministry of Defense regularly reports intercepting the British-made weapons in its regular updates on the Ukraine campaign.

June 22, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Ukraine, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Ukraine’s “spring counteroffensive not making progress: will NATO resort to deploying tactical nuclear weapons for Ukraine?

Since the initiation of the United States’ multitrillion-dollar nuclear weapons buildup in 2016, the US has been working to create smaller and lower-yield “usable” nuclear weapons.

Are nuclear weapons the next red line NATO will cross in Ukraine?

Andre Damon @Andre__Damon, 16 June 2023, WSWS

Nearly two weeks in, it is clear that Ukraine’s “spring counteroffensive,” promoted for months by the US media, has made no significant headway, while the Ukrainian armed forces have taken devastating physical losses.

Ukrainian officials claim to have retaken 38 square miles since the start of the offensive. These scraps of territory have been purchased with as many as 1,000 casualties per day, putting the total at up to 12,000 since the start of the offensive. Russian officials have released video of armored vehicles being destroyed by missiles, drones and long-range artillery, including over one dozen advanced Leopard 2 tanks and Bradley infantry fighting vehicles.

For the first year and a half of the conflict, the US and NATO powers have operated on the premise that they could prosecute the war by sending ever more advanced weapons to Ukraine, while letting Ukrainians serve as cannon fodder on the battlefield.

With cold indifference to the catastrophic loss of human life, the Biden administration has sought to fight the war to the last Ukrainian. But the problem with this strategy is that NATO is running out of Ukrainians to send to their deaths.

Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers have been killed or injured so far. This is a substantial portion of the fighting-age population, leading the Zelensky government to more desperate measures to find new bodies to throw at the front lines.

Against this backdrop, the defence ministers of NATO countries concluded a two-day summit Friday aimed at finalizing plans for a military alliance between NATO and Ukraine. On Thursday, a Biden administration official told CNN that they are “open” to an accelerated plan for Ukraine to join NATO.

This will be the content of the upcoming NATO summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, whether through Ukraine directly joining NATO or in the form of the provision of “security guarantees.”

The real issue, however, is not Ukraine entering NATO, but NATO “entering” Ukraine through a vast escalation of its involvement in the war. The only reason for accelerating Ukraine’s entry into NATO is to create the framework for such an escalation.

The entire credibility of NATO has been staked on an effort to hurl the Russians over the border, generating a crisis that would lead to the collapse of the Putin government. The logic of escalation leads inexorably to direct NATO intervention in the conflict.

Every time the US and NATO powers have claimed they would not do something in Ukraine, they have gone ahead and done it, from the provision of battle tanks and fighter jets, to weaponry that has been used to attack Russian soil.

What will be the next “red line” that NATO will cross in response to the deteriorating military situation in Ukraine? There are several possibilities:

First, the creation of a “no-fly zone” and the direct engagement of Russian forces by NATO aircraft.

Second, the direct deployment of NATO troops into the war zone.

And third, the deployment or even use of tactical nuclear weapons by NATO to prevent a Russian victory in the conflict.

It is worth noting that during the Cold War, the US geopolitical strategist Henry Kissinger, recently the subject of media adulation on the occasion of his 100th birthday, once described the use of tactical nuclear weapons to avert a disaster precisely like that faced by Ukrainian forces.

In his 1957 book Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, Kissinger argued for the deployment of nuclear weapons in frontline combat and their use on the battlefield by the United States in the struggle to prevent advances by conventional forces.

“Limited nuclear war,” that is, nuclear war that does not lead to global annihilation and “Mutually Assured Destruction,” Kissinger argued, “is in fact a strategy which will utilize our special skills to best advantage, and it may be less likely to become all-out than conventional war.”

He argued that such a war would be “improvised in the midst of military operations [and] would be undertaken under the worst possible conditions, both psychological and military,” i.e., precisely the conditions now developing in Ukraine.

Rather than targeting “the largest centers of population,” Kissinger argued, nuclear weapons could be used as part of warfare “based on small, highly mobile, self-contained units” aimed at “depriving aggression of one of its objectives: to control territory.” He continued, “Small, mobile units with nuclear weapons are extremely useful for defeating their enemy counterparts or for the swift destruction of important objectives.”

There was one overwhelming flaw in Kissinger’s strategy. It assumed that those targeted by US nuclear weapons would restrict their own responses and that escalation would be contained. But for all their evident insanity, Kissinger’s doctrines have, in fact, been a major inspiration for the current US nuclear strategy.

Since the initiation of the United States’ multitrillion-dollar nuclear weapons buildup in 2016, the US has been working to create smaller and lower-yield “usable” nuclear weapons.

A 2015 paper by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) noted, “The scenarios for nuclear employment have changed greatly since the ‘balance of terror’ between the two global superpowers.” As a result, the “second nuclear age” involves combatants “thinking through how they might actually employ a nuclear weapon, both early in a conflict and in a discriminate manner.”

In 2019, Foreign Affairs published an article entitled “If You Want Peace, Prepare for Nuclear War” by Elbridge Colby, one of the principal authors of Trump’s 2018 National Defense Strategy. Colby wrote, “The risks of nuclear brinkmanship may be enormous, but so is the payoff from gaining a nuclear advantage over an opponent.

“The best way to avoid a nuclear war,” Colby continued, “is to be ready to fight a limited one.”

The 2022 US Nuclear Posture Review makes clear that the US reserves the right to use nuclear weapons to achieve any kind of national objective. It declares, “Although the fundamental role of US nuclear weapons is to deter nuclear attack, more broadly they deter all forms of strategic attack, assure Allies and partners, and allow us to achieve Presidential objectives if deterrence fails.”

The US and NATO powers have staked their entire credibility on the objective of inflicting a strategic defeat on Russia…………….  https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/06/17/bwxw-j17.html

June 20, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Ukraine, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Ukraine sustains massive single-day losses – Russian MOD

 https://www.rt.com/russia/578244-ukraine-heavy-casualties-mod/ 19 June 23

Kiev’s forces have lost over 1,000 soldiers and 20 tanks in a single day across the frontlines, the Russian Defense Ministry claims

Ukrainian military forces have sustained heavy casualties across the frontlines during the last 24 hours, the Russian Defense Ministry has said. Russia’s Zaporozhye and Donetsk regions have seen the most intense fighting, with Kiev losing more than 800 soldiers in those regions.

“Over the past day, enemy losses in the Southern Donetsk and Zaporozhye directions amounted to more than 800 Ukrainian servicemen, 20 tanks, four infantry fighting vehicles, [and] 15 armored fighting vehicles,” the military stated on Sunday during a daily media briefing. The ministry did not elaborate on whether its figures for casualties includes those killed and injured or fatalities exclusively.

As well as these setbacks in personnel and equipment, Ukrainian troops also lost two US-made M777 howitzers and several Soviet-made artillery systems, the military added.

The immediate vicinity of Donetsk city has also seen intense fighting, with Ukrainian forces losing over 200 soldiers on this axis, according to the ministry. The Russian military has destroyed multiple soft and armored vehicles on the outskirts of Donetsk, it also said, as well as two major ammunition stockpiles to the northwest of the city.

The ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine has intensified after Kiev launched its long-heralded counteroffensive in early June. Thus far, the Ukrainian military has failed to make any major gains, sustaining heavy losses in the process and losing large amounts of Western-supplied hardware. According to the estimates of Moscow’s military, some 7,500 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed or wounded amid the counteroffensive effort.

June 20, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Ukraine, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Milley Predicts Long, ‘Very Violent’ Ukrainian Counteroffensive

by EDITORJune 16, 2023

Milley and Austin led a meeting of military officials in Brussels on Thursday.

By Dave DeCamp / Antiwar.com  https://scheerpost.com/2023/06/16/milley-predicts-long-very-violent-ukrainian-counteroffensive/

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley predicted Thursday that Ukraine’s counteroffensive will be long and “very violent” following a meeting of military officials in Brussels.

Milley made the comments when asked how long he expects the counteroffensive to last, saying it was “premature” to put a timeline on the battle. “This is a very difficult fight. It’s a very violent fight, and it will likely take a considerable amount of time and at high cost,” Milley said.

The Biden administration has been pushing for the violent counteroffensive as it’s explicitly opposed to a ceasefire and peace talks, a position Secretary of State Antony Blinken outlined earlier this month.

Milley claimed Ukraine has been making “steady progress,” but the battle lines have not changed much since Ukraine launched the assault early last week. According to The New York Times, it’s been three days since Ukraine claimed any gains, and Ukraine’s deputy defense acknowledged it was “very difficult to advance” in the southeast.

Asia Times reported on June 10 that American and European military observers in Ukraine described Ukraine’s attempted counteroffensive as a “suicide mission” because of the way they were attacking Russia’s positions.

“If you want to conduct an offensive and you have a dozen brigades and a few dozen tanks, you concentrate them and try to break through. The Ukrainians have been running around in five different directions,” a senior European officer told Asia Times.

“We tried to tell them to stop these piecemeal tactics, define a main thrust with proper infantry support and then do what they can,” the officer added. The report said Ukraine lost 38 tanks, including numerous German-made Leopard 2 tanks, on June 8 by sending them into minefields without deploying mine-clearing vehicles first.

The US has already announced a new weapons package to replace Bradley and Stryker armored vehicles that Ukraine has lost in the offensive, and Ukraine has been asking for more tanks, including the Leopard 2.

Speaking alongside Milley on Thursday, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin downplayed Ukraine’s losses, claiming that Russia was showing different pictures of the same damaged vehicles. “This is a war, so we know that there will be battle damage on both sides … I think the Russians have shown us that same five vehicles about a thousand times from 10 different angles. But quite frankly, the Ukrainians have — still have a lot of combat capability — combat power,” he said.

At the conference in Brussels of military officials from more than 50 countries, known as the Ukraine Defense Contact Group, Austin stressed the need to support Ukraine for the long-term. He said the Netherlands and Denmark shared the progress they’ve made on training Ukrainians on F-16s, but it’s still unclear how many of the US-made fighter jets Ukraine will receive.

June 18, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Ukraine, weapons and war | 2 Comments