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Putin’s War, Week 60. Leaked Documents, a Russian Troll Exposed, and More Pieces Fall Into Place

21 April 2023
KITDAFBS

AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris

streiff | RedState

Last week, I said I was posting the shortest Ukraine Update ever. That was until today.

The Russians have stopped all offensive operations except those around the Donbas cockpit of Avdiika and Bakhmut. There the situation remains largely unchanged, with the front lines moving back and forth dozens of meters each day. This is the last gasp of the Russian Winter Offensive that was supposed to gain control of the political boundaries of Donetsk and Luhansk and bring the whole of the Donbas region under Russian control. However, there are signs that Ukraine is moving in the direction of offensive operations, and I’ll hit on that below.

Here are some of my previous updates to enjoy.

Putin’s War, Week 59. Russia Goes ISIS and Waiting for General Mud to Take a Break

Putin’s War, Week 58. All Dressed Up and No Place to Go

Putin’s War, Week 57. Waiting for Godot.

Putin’s War, Week 56. Putin Indicted for War Crimes, Xi Visits Moscow, and Sevastopol Attacked for a Third Time

Putin’s War, Week 55. Russia Drops US Recon Drone, Ukraine Suffers From ‘Loose Lips’ as It Doubles Down on Bakhmut

Putin’s War, Week 54. More NordStream Melodrama, Russia Shows Diplomatic Weakness, and the Bakhmut Flipflop

Putin’s War, Week 53. Zelensky Blows a Big Play, Moscow Dodges a Drone Attack, and Russia’s Spring Offensive Fizzles

Putin’s War, Week 52. US and China Face off, Prigozhin Goes for the Jugular, Mystery Weapon Strikes, and Happy Anniversary

Putin’s War, Week 51. Russia’s Slow-Mo Offensive Gets Underway

Putin’s War, Week 50. The Calm Before the Storm

Putin’s War, Week 49. Waiting for the Russian Offensive

Putin’s War, Week 48. The Logjam Breaks and the Leopards Are About to Roam the Ukrainian Landscape

Putin’s War, Week 47. Gerasimov Shakes Up the Russian Army, and the Russian Spring Offensive Looms

Putin’s War, Week 46. Putin Shakes up the Army Command, Prigozhin Shows How It’s Done, and Western Tanks for Ukraine Are on the Way

Putin’s War, Week 45: Putin Declares a Cease Fire, Zelensky Gets Putin’s Terms for Peace, and if You’re Fighting a War, Leave Your Cell Phone Home

Putin’s War, Week 44. Drones Strike Russian Strategic Bomber Base…Again… Prigozhin Makes His Move

Putin’s War, Week 43. Zelensky Visits the Front Lines and Washington, Putin Tries to Push Belarus Into War

Putin’s War, Week 42. Ukraine Gets the Nod to Strike Targets in Russia and Some Tools to Do It With

Many more are available at this link.

Politico-Strategic Level

Top Secret Document Leak Roil World Capitals

One of the top stories of the past week was the leak of 100+ classified documents, some of them marked as highly compartmented top secret, containing information about US operations in places such as Ukraine (Secret Pentagon Documents Emerge on a Minecraft Players Forum, WTF?). See more coverage at Leaked Pentagon Documents Reveal Extent of U.S. Penetration Into Russian Intelligence, How Did Jack Teixeira Gain Access to the Documents He Leaked, and Why Were MSM Stories About Him Stealth-Edited?, Report: Docs Allegedly Leaked by Jack Teixeira Give Insights Into Chinese Spy Balloon That Crossed US, and Former DNI Kash Patel Confirms Jack Teixeira Would Not Have Had Access to Documents He Leaked.

This kind of document dump, with the unusual provenance first appearing on a Minecraft community Discord server and the fact that some of the documents had been altered, calls everything in the leak into question. For instance, this Washington Post story, based on the leak, claims that Egypt was going to supply Russia with ammunition, but thanks to the mad diplomatic skillz of Antony Blinken and Joe Biden, they decided to send the ammunition to Ukraine. Sorry, I have a lot of trouble believing that.

Stranger stuff has happened, though I just can’t remember when.

If you want a deeper look into the leak situation, I highly recommend reading the linked stories above. My take on it is that A1C Teixeira got his hands on some stuff he shouldn’t have and wanted to impress his little high school buddies so he posted it. I don’t think he intended for the docs to be shared beyond his little group however. Discord is not known for being a secure platform, and that’s how the docs got into the wild. The story about the former Navy petty officer posing as the ‘Donbas Devushka’ is something that bears some scrutiny, as I’m unclear as to how she’d have gotten her hands on the docs without outside (read: nation state) help.

Ukrainian Armed Forces Commander Plays Sergeant Schultz During Milley Visit

According to reports, when US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley met with Ukrainian Armed Forces Commander Valerii Zaluzhnyi in March, Milley pressed the Ukrainian general on details of his weapons stockpiles and his plans for an offensive, he might as well have been meeting with John Banner’s Sergeant Schultz character from the comedy series Hogan’s Heroes.

As leak-prone as Washington is and the way people use classified information for political gain and to settle scores with enemies, it is hard to blame him. What Zaluzhnyi needs to do is keep the supplies coming while letting Milley know as little as possible about dispositions and intentions. I suspect that Milley also wants to remain ignorant of things the Ukrainians are planning so that he isn’t to blame if they are leaked, and he can’t be blamed if targets in Russia are hit.

If I didn’t know better I’d say Zaluzhnyi was a former NCO. All of the really good ones I knew while I was in kept whatever it was they were doing from the command staff. In this case though, there is a good chance that anything told to Milley would get leaked somehow. That’s an added incentive to keep everything on the down-low.

At Least Putin Knows How to Deal With Failure

Last Friday, the Russian Pacific Fleet received orders for a no-notice exercise involving air units, anti-submarine drills, and surface missile firing. Read the whole thread.

Even though Putin hailed the exercise as a huge success

He immediately replaced the commander, Admiral Sergei Avakyants, who had been in command for a decade and reassigned him to Moscow to oversee military sports and patriotic training.

We seem to move ours to higher positions of responsibility so long as they have the correct politics, grovel at the altar of Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity, and make a sincere effort to understand “white rage.’

I’m somewhat surprised Admiral Avakyants wasn’t defenestrated. Maybe the Pacific Fleet headquarters building is only a couple of stories tall. Regardless, the Pacific Fleet drill was a flop.

Russian Troll Outed

A major pro-Russian trolling account was outed earlier in the week. “Donbass Devushka,” who alleged to be a Ukrainian native of Donbas and had been exposed to Ukrainian attacks after the first Russian invasion in 2014, turned out to be a separated/retired (I’m not quite sure which is accurate) US Navy petty officer stationed at Whidbey Island, WA. See Intelligence Leaker Jack Teixeira and the Pro-Russian ‘Donbass Devushka’ Show the U.S. Military Brass Are Not Serious.

Having been outed myself by a former colleague, I’m not a huge fan of going after individual people to just f*** with them. On the other hand, I’m a little less sympathetic when you are supporting a genocidal regime and faking your entire life. I doubt that she’s in any real trouble unless she was being paid by the Russian government or a sanctioned entity for her social media posts, but her usefulness to the Russians is definitely over.

NATO Secretary General Visits Kiev

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg made his first visit to Kiev. Part of the itinerary was visiting the site of the ongoing war crimes investigation at Bucha. More than any European head of state, Stoltenberg has been the key man in assembling the support necessary for Ukraine to defend its territorial integrity against Russian aggression.

Stoltenberg’s invitation to Ukraine to join NATO once this war ends set off fireworks in Moscow.

Some dumbhead called Mateusz Morawiecki said that Ukraine had the right to hit Russia, and that he had no worries about NATO’s war against Russia, because the latter would soon lose it. I don’t know who’s going to win, or lose such a war, but considering Poland’s role as a NATO’s outpost in Europe, this country is sure to disappear together with its stupid prime minister

Dmitry Medvedev is Putin’s tool. He regularly spouts nonsense like this on TV and social media. Unfortunately for him, he is completely divorced from reality.

Russia Rolls Out Two New Recruitment Ads

For all the woofing that goes around on the internet about the manpower advantage that Russia has, there is no denying that it is having a very hard time filling its ranks. The Russ-bots fail to grasp the fact that Russia has manpower throughout the country and that much of that manpower, such as police, border guards, customs service, the navy, the air force, the strategic rocket services, fire departments, etc., can’t be diverted to Ukraine. That’s why first Wagner Group’s Prigozhin and now the regular Army is dredging the prisons and lowest socio-economic classes for recruits.

The first one is more traditional; it pimps the pay and benefits and wouldn’t be out of place in any Western military except the US because there aren’t enough gay and trans characters in the ad.

The second one has aimed specifically at young men stuck in low-pay and low-status jobs with no future.

The tagline (0:37) is Ты ЖЕ МчжИК. Бчдъ им, which I’m told renders as something like “You’re a man. Be one.” The campaign slogan is “ты чё как не мужик?!” or (something like) “How come you’re not man enough?” The word used for “man” is Muzhik, a word loaded with social connotation in Russia depending on who is saying it to whom. I’m not sure how successful either will be given the growing disaffection with the idea of serving in Ukraine, but if I were to bet on either, I think #2 is going to appeal more to the target audience than #1.

Russian society is quite odd from a modern western perspective. And I don’t mean the hyper-woke 2023 western perspective, it seemed very odd to me back in the mid-90s when I first experienced it. There is a weird obsession with ‘manliness’ that’s at odds with the way a lot of men act in Russia. Back in the 90’s one of the worst insults a man could get was to be described as sounding like a St. Petersburg poet. It meant you were a little effeminate. Despite all that, many men worked hard to sound that way. The word ‘muhzik’ can have those same connotations depending on context. It can also mean something like ‘you’re the man’ in american slang. I’m not sure how effective these ads are going to be, it seems the SMO is becoming less popular by the day.

Russian Media Proposes Its Final Solution to the “Ukrainian Problem”

When all the fluff, and fluffers, are stripped away, the real cause of Putin’s war in Ukraine had nothing to do with NATO or Donbas or Nazis in Kiev. Instead, it boils down to resentment at the actual presence of Ukraine, a nation that Putin and Russian nationalists believe should not exist. Dmitry Medvedev, “Deputy Chair of the Security Council of the Russian Federation,” reaffirms this nearly weekly.

Now the state-owned RIA Novosti has published a story on how to solve the Ukrainian problem. Read the whole thread, open the article, right-click, and select “translate” to read the original. The synopsis is below.

The special operation revealed that not only the political leadership in Ukraine is Nazi, but also the majority of the population. All Ukrainians who have taken up arms must be eliminated – because they are responsible for the genocide of the Russian people.

Ukrainians disguise their Nazism by calling it a “desire for independence” and a “European way of development”. Ukraine doesn’t have a Nazi party, a Führer or racial laws, but because of its flexibility, Ukrainian Nazism is far more dangerous to the world than Hitler’s Nazism

Denazification means de-Ukrainianisation. Ukrainians are an artificial anti-Russian construct. They should no longer have a national identity. Denazification of Ukraine also means its inevitable de-Europeanisation.

Ukraine’s political elite must be eliminated as it cannot be re-educated. Ordinary Ukrainians must experience all the horrors of war and absorb the experience as a historical lesson and atonement for their guilt.

The liberated and denazified territory of the Ukrainian state should no longer be called Ukraine. Denazification should last at least one generation – 25 years.

Keep in mind this essay has the imprimatur of the Russian government; otherwise, it would not be published.

The Russians aren’t fighting for Christianity or to stop NATO. They are engaged in a genocide they are advertising to the world. Somehow “globalism” and “corruption” are supposed to be talismans to make people forget what they are really supporting when they assist Russia in any way.

If Russia stopped fighting the war would end, If Ukraine stopped fighting Ukraine would end. Let’s be crystal clear about this, Ukraine is fighting for its very existence. This war didn’t start because of any NATO ‘encroachment’, western interference or any other excuse the Putin fluffers care to throw out there. This war started because Putin and those around him don’t think a sovereign neighbor should exist.

Operational Level

There are a lot of signs that Ukraine is putting pieces in place for an offensive. Leopard tanks and Bradley IFVs have arrived and are in the process of repainting to Ukraine’s vehicle color scheme. Training at the battalion level is taking place in secure Ukrainian maneuver areas. The Germans suddenly transferred a Patriot battery to Ukraine this week, just as the first class of Ukrainian air defense troops was finishing training at Fort Bliss Sill, OK. There are also examples of shaping operations taking place. Supply dumps and troops concentrations behind the lines are receiving more attention. One of the most significant shifts is the number of destroyed Russian electronic warfare and radar units. The Open-Source Intelligence site offers intriguing analysis.

Week 60. Leaked Documents, a Russian Troll Exposed, and More Pieces Fall Into Place

This is a classic shaping operation to deprive the Russians of counterbattery, air defense early warning, and electronic collecting and jamming capability. The arrival of Patriot will allow less capable systems to be moved forward and create a high-threat environment for Russian aircraft. In addition, the new Gepard and Avenger systems will be able to prevent Russian drones from seeing Ukrainian assembly areas and movements.

I’m going to take this opportunity to try to temper some expectations. There has been much talk of huge UA gains with the upcoming offensive. I don’t see a lot of huge gains for a couple of reasons. First and foremost, the battle area has condensed quite a bit. Last fall when the UAF rolled up large sections of Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk and Kherson oblasts the Russians were stretched thin. Second, the Russians have built up an impressive series of fixed fortifications. There are lines of trenches that run nearly the length of the line-of-contact. I expect to see some movement in Zaporzhiazhia oblast and some clean-up so to speak in the areas of the three listed above. Fortunately it seems the UAF is not sending out the new western tanks and IFVs piece-meal and look to be forming new maneuver units with them. The ground is still wet and muddy but is starting to dry. Once the bezdorizhzhia is done, the UA counteroffensive will kick off in earnest, until then expect to see more shaping operations.

Prisoner Exchanges Continue

Prisoner-of-war exchanges continue. This week 130 Ukrainian combatants were exchanged for an undisclosed number of Russians.

Are Atrocities Only Committed by the Russian Army on Days Ending in “Y”?

Last week I posted about a graphic beheading of a Ukrainian soldier by Russian troops. Another video displayed last week, though not included in my post, was of several heads of Ukrainian soldiers on posts near Russian positions. Aleksandr Cherkasov, a Nobel Laureate and Russian human rights advocate who now lives in exile, says it is all in a day’s work.

And we know the Wagner Group has routinely committed atrocities in Syria.

Taken in context with the internationally vetted massacres at Bucha and other places, it is hard to disagree.

Northern Front

Kharkiv

Donbas

Bakhmut Still Holds

Weeks after being assured by Gateway Pundit that Bakhmut had fallen, it was shocking to find there is still fighting there.

The lines are approximate and in constant flux.

Sloviansk Targeted by Russian Missiles

Sloviansk is nowhere near a combat zone, and the missiles struck nowhere near military targets. These strikes have no other purpose than to terrorize and make life miserable for the residents.

Southern Front

Zaporizhzhia

On Easter Sunday, the Russians Target Ukrainian Churches

This is Russia lashing out because the Kremlin controlled Moscow Patriarchy was evicted from several churches in Ukraine.

Rear Areas

Russia

Belgorod Electrical Transformer Complex Damaged

This could conceivably be an accident. What makes it curious is that the transformer substation had heavy-duty transformers needed to power the electric freight trains supplying the Russian Army in Ukraine. There is no admission of hostile action by the Russians or claims of responsibility by the Ukrainians, which is par for the course.

And in other news, a RU Su-34 pilot dropped a bomb on Belgorod yesterday. Accidentally. It damaged a large apartment block and left a huge crater. Karma is a bitch. . .

What’s Next?

We wait. The Ukrainians have a plan that they are keeping close to their vest. The fact that we haven’t seen Bradley IFVs involved in meaningless skirmishes shows that the Ukrainians might have overcome that strong temptation to give everyone a little of the “good stuff” and are hoarding it to use in a coordinated offensive.

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