Friday, February 20, 2015

Kiev Junta retreats in Defeat:



KIEV JUNTA FORCES
RETREAT IN DEFEAT

Unstable political situation
in Kiev:

Poroshenko under threat
of ouster: 




Debaltsevo Feb 19 2015



The military dimension:



The Novorussian flag is today flying over Debaltsevo as the NAF consolidates its positions inside the city which is now 100% in their possession as the remnants of the defeated Kiev Junta forces have withdrawn except for stragglers who have left their units and taken to open country to try to get back to safe ground and avoid being taken prisoner by the NAF. It is estimated that there are about 1,500 of them and they will suffer more casualties as the wintry conditions and their lack of food supplies are inimical to survival chances in open country.

By February 19 it became clear that the Svetlodarsk group of the KJF– even after pulling the reserves from the side of Artyomovsk and holding the bottleneck in the area of Svetlodarsk – could not solve the problems posed by its command and unblock the M-103 road and also capture the adjacent settlements and numerically labelled high points. Despite all of the suffered losses, it ended up being impossible for the Junta to establish full-fledged supplying of the encircled forces, so, on the background of the attempts to unblock the encircled group getting stuck, the obvious processes of degradation of organised defence began inside the pocket itself. The lack of ammunition for heavy weapons, the lack of fuel and lubricants, the decrease of the morale of the defending forces — all of this led to the fact that the NAF finally managed to finish sweeping Chernukhino and captured the majority of Debaltsevo, where yesterday they already put up the flag of Novorossia. The work on sweeping the remaining hubs of resistance and disparate KJF groups continues.


The preconditions for capturing Debaltsevo were already created even before this, especially after the capture of the Debaltsevo-Sortirovochnaya railroad station ( in the eastern part of the city), which allowed  the NAF to secure the access by assault and sabotage groups right into the urbanised area from south and south-east. At the same time the decrease of the Junta military capability for resistance led to their forces abandoning the positions to the south and to the south-west of Debaltsevo (in the Olkhovatka stronghold) and to the withdrawal of its units towards Debaltsevo, where they are closer to the way out. The Junta's problem was that it couldn’t organise a full-fledged evacuation of the encircled forces, even the attempts to break through the country roads are fraught with significant losses.


Kiev was continuing the pretence that there was no “cauldron”,  but the principal mass of the encircled forces (up to 2,500-3,000 people in combat ranks) remained still stuck inside the cauldron. The organisational conclusions already followed from the Junta: the commander of the ATO forces Popko was removed and replaced with the previously purged Vorobyov, who, apart from his screw-ups in Ilovaysk, was notable for his recent media attempts to turn himself into a replacement for the chief of the General Staff Muzhenko. However, while the latter is being covered by Poroshenko, Vorobyov is forced to clean up messes that were piled up by his predecessors. Because overall the fighting of January-February uncovered the extremely low quality of the work done by the highest command structures of the KJF, it is unlikely to get any worse for the Junta.


The last drop that led to the collapse were catastrophic miscalculations by the Kiev General Staff and the sector command, which didn't provide Logvinovo with adequate defence, the necessity for which could be easily seen right after the Junta missed a sudden strike on Uglegorsk. Furthermore, the defence of Logvinovo and the adjacent high points could have been organised using either the forces that were inside the pocket or by a timely redeployment of the reinforcements from Svetlodarsk or Artyomovsk to the area under threat. Due to this catastrophic miscalculation, in 1-2 days after the loss of Logvinovo and the interception of the communications of the Debaltsevo group, the Junta had to deploy a much bigger force in an attempt to recapture the unfortunate village than the force that would be needed to secure the defence of the village, if it were organised in its proper time. Already after the loss of Uglegorsk and entering Kalinovka the next step was obvious even for the military hobbyists. Yet, the leadership of the Kiev General Staff and the ATO command were criminally inactive (or criminally negligent), which led to the encirclement and large materiel and personnel losses.

Gorlovka-Debaltsevo area of operations. KJF(blue), NAF(red).
 

At this stage the military question of Debaltsevo has been effectively solved, the question only remained of how long would the agony last and how large the personnel losses to be suffered by the Junta will be (KIAs, WIAs, and POWs), and also the magnitude of the materiel losses. It is no longer possible now for the Junta to avoid the losses, because one way or another the January NAF offensive actually reached its goal, albeit with a major effort. The concrete result was achieved: the Debaltsevo group of the Junta was defeated. Regardless of how much of the KJF force was able to break out of the encirclement, the NAF captured a major transport hub of Novorossia (which will greatly simplify the NAF logistics and the communictions between Donetsk and Lugansk, previously under daily threat from the KJF) and defeated a large military group of the KJF, which means that a major operational success was achieved.


The political implications:
 
After the Junta leadership realised that no military way of fixing the situation near Debaltsevo exists, the convulsive attempts to save whatever still can be saved began. Those who got out of the encirclement started to be immediately turned into "heroes", even though just recently they were a part of a different propaganda myth about holding the "Debaltsevo bridgehead", but this myth collapsed shamefully, just like the one of "cyborgs". The "Ukrainian Stalingrad" turned into the next cauldron, which once again dealt a powerful blow to the military and the political leadership of the Junta. Despite all of its alarmist rhetoric, it is not able to augment its military rhetoric with its military successes. The defeat in the battle for the airport and in the battle for Debaltsevo effectively wiped out all of the successes that the Junta had achieved in the defence of the Peski-Avdeyevka bulge and in the area of the Bakhmutka road, where the NAF offensive was  temporarily stalled. So it is quite natural that the Junta turned on the "urge for peace" on this background and started to push the  EU  and Russia towards signing a temporary truce. Currently the Junta needs the temporary respite of the Minsk Agreement in order to put the tragic story of Debaltsevo behind it and hope to stabilise the front in the area of Svetlodarsk, after which the Minsk truce has every chance to be enacted and the military action will be paused at least until April. 


It is remarkable, but the junta could have negotiated the withdrawal of its forces out of Debaltsevo during the Minsk negotiations and subsequently present a military retreat as a sacrifice to the political compromise (arguing that Europe demanded it) and avoid the military disgrace. However, Kiev, being pushed in from behind by Washington and by the supporters of escalating the hybrid war in Ukraine, was suicidally stubborn in the Debaltsevo question, due to which the Debaltsevo question remained outside of the scope of any of the Minsk agreements. This allowed the NAF to bring the situation to its logical conclusion, delivering a quite catastrophic defeat to the Junta in the process.

Currently, Porky Pie Poroshenko, under pressure from the Ukronazis and rising popular unrest, is ready to seriously discuss the questions of deploying peacekeepers inside the buffer zone (which includes the obviously unacceptable idea for Russia of deploying them on the border of Russia with the DPR and the LPR), which is supposed to secure a more effective separation of the two fighting sides. But here the problem is that given the lack of common ground for a durable political compromise, the peacekeepers are more likely to simply reinforce the existing front line as a future state border. This is not at all in the interests of Kiev and the USA, and even less in the interests of the DPR and the LPR, but the logic of the European attempt of freezing the conflict (which gets certain understanding in Russia, which is itself interested in reducing the intensity of this conflict) doesn't rule out such a radical form of freezing the situation. From the point of view of the "territorial integrity" of Ukraine, the appearance of peacekeepers will imply that Kiev has recognised that it is no longer able to resolve the situation on its own and that its claims to Donbass are effectively supported only by the help of international organisations and by previous guarantees from the USA and the EU.


After the question of Debaltsevo has been put off the table, Porky Pie Poroshenko will likely try to use the truce to rearm his Army, so despite the public rhetoric about the "peace process", the systemic work on pushing the  possibility of weapons from the USA and its satellites into Ukraine continues in parallel. The new head of the Pentagon, unlike the previous one, is an open supporter of providing the military aid to the Junta and he has perfect relations with the Republican hawks, which includes the head of the Senate defence committee, warmonger John McCain.



Because the USA don't believe that the truce will last sufficiently long and that a political compromise will be found, they continue to work on extending the scope of the hybrid war against Russia. The primary task of the Junta is to legalise the foreign military aid and to include more modern weapons into it, including weapons of American origin. Meanwhile the Junta will have to solve the tasks of preventing its economy from crashing (the collapse of the social sphere is inevitable, but it is not worth expecting the economic collapse — the economy will be supported by implementing the cannibalistic inhuman demands of the IMF), because given subsequent worsening of the economic situation the social tensions will increase (the problem of empty wallets and huge communal bills will start enlightening the brains of the general public much faster than the flow of coffins from Donbass).


The Junta will attempt to reach the end of the truce with a rearmed army with replenished personnel, which they will try to bring up to 100-120 thousands (in Donbass). Another problem will be to compensate the current losses of armoured vehicles, which will be especially difficult to do given those few relatively modern examples that were lost in the winter campaign — they will be replaced by the restored vehicles from long-term storage warehouses and also by various military junk from Eastern Europe. All of this will require new purchases of weapons and materiel from the Junta leadership, as well as further deployment of military industry and rear support services so that it will attain relatively long-term capabilities for conducting a hybrid war.

The Junta has pretty much no chances of a military victory —the offensive and counter-offensive efforts by the Junta ended up being impotent despite its overall numerical superiority. So, in the nearest perspective the Junta will focus on strategic defence, counting that military and political, economic, or other pressure from the USA and its EU/NATO satellites on Russia will force the Kremlin to give up its positions in Ukraine, a forlorn hope indeed now that the Novorussians have inflicted such a reverse on the Junta and Washington’s schemes.


Within the confines of this logic, Kiev will most likely violate the cease-fire when they think they have the opportunity and the military action will resume so that the war, which is so convenient for the USA, they hope, can be continued. But, this calculation ignores the hostility of the electorates in the EU/NATO countries which are growing their support for new parties of both left and right and threatening the overthrow of the entire Neo-liberal project and the Brussels Dictatorship which is currently the source of the bankrupt Junta’s finances.


Wednesday, February 18, 2015

Ukraine: Debaltsevo Falls.....



KIEV JUNTA'S HUMILIATING
DEFEAT AS DEBALTSEVO
FALLS TO NOVORUSSIANS:




After two days of the fiercest fighting so far in the Ukrainian conflict the strategic city of Debaltsevo, northeast of Donetsk, has fallen to the Novorussian Armed Forces of the People’s Republics of Donetsk and Lugansk.

Debaltsevo is now mostly (80%) in Novorussian hands and the Junta forces are in full retreat to the south of the enclave.  It appears that the Junta forces were unable to provide the kind of resistance they showed in Peski recently. The cauldron "lid" has now closed on Debaltsevo from the north and the Junta forces are either surrendering or fleeing south where there is quite literally nothing for them to do there but to wait until they run out of food and ammo as their supply routes from Kiev are now completely cut off.



Kiev was still insisting  today that there is no cauldron but only a "bridgehead".  But, nobody buys the Junta propaganda anymore and the mothers and wives of the KJF troops caught in the cauldron are trying everything they can to force the Junta High Command to accept the Novorussian offer of an evacuation corridor.  They began a protest in front of the General Staff building in Kiev, then blocked traffic.  In a particularly poignant moment one of the women put a megaphone next to a cellphone to amplify the voice of her son/husband calling from the cauldron and announcing that they had only about 3 hours of supplies left.
This is truly disastrous news for Poroshenko and the Junta in Kiev.  Their policy of denying the facts of the situation made it impossible for their forces to get out while it was still feasible. 


Up to half of all the relatively combat capable units of the Ukrainian military have been surrounded in this cauldron and that means that 50% of the Ukrainian army is now gone.   While Poroshenko and the Junta propagandists tried as hard as they could to completely deny the very existence of the cauldron, thanks to the Internet and the Russian TV channels most of the population in Junta-controlled Ukraine now know that they are being lied to.  That means that the regime is losing what little credibility it might have had with the general public.  It follows that there will be a lot of very ugly recriminations from all sides of the political spectrum in Kiev about who is guilty for the  latest military disaster. There could be a savage reaction from the Ukronazis and blood on the streets of Kiev in the next few days as Svoboda and Pravy Sektor militants turn on the regime. Reports have come in saying that Porky Pie has already evacuated his family to Germany.


Novorussian information sources are reporting that the Junta is trying to assemble three battalion tactical groups  north of the cauldron to try to rescue the surrounded forces, but this will be too little too late.  The Novorussians  now inside Debaltsevo, will deeply dig in and they have enough forces to prevent any forward movements of KJF troops from the West.  Collapsed morale and defecting troops have produced yet another humiliating defeat for the Junta in Kiev.


Last ditch efforts by Mutti Merkel and Porky Pie appealing to President Putin to restrain the Novorussians have fallen on deaf ears. Putin advised that the Ukrainian forces should surrender and withdraw from the enclave forthwith.


The Ukrainian people now know that the despicable Junta has betrayed them and that their masters in Washington care nothing about the appalling casualties suffered by the civilian population and the troops in this bloody and unnecessary conflict contrived to serve only Washington’s imperialist policies.