Reposted from https://simplicius76.substack.com/p/sitrep-9423-first-challengers-burn

SITREP 9/4/23: First Challengers Burn as East Continues to Rise in Power

SEP 4, 2023

Today once more we start with the ever-important undercurrents, which are the actual significant drivers of the developments beyond the ongoing tactical vagaries of the battlefield.

Putin had a meeting with Erdogan where he reiterated Russia’s stance on the grain deal—that it cannot go forward until Russia’s demands are resolved. Putin mostly spoke about the economic factors related to this, however adjacently Shoigu released a statement on the military side; namely, that part of the deal was Ukraine cannot build or launch offensive naval drone strikes from the port areas, which he says they have been doing.

But beneath this surface level arbitration, the real weight shifted around new deals between Russia and Turkey, which further develops the multipolar expansion. In particular, the two countries laid out a plan by which Russian grain will be facilitated by Turkey in the future as well as, even more importantly, the beginning of talks between Russia-Turkish banks to initiate trade in national currencies.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has underscored the importance of switching to national currencies in bilateral trade with Russia. He made these comments during his meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Sochi on Monday.

“I believe that the fact that the heads of our central banks will meet here today is important from the point of view of a step towards the transition to national currencies in bilateral relations between us,” the Turkish president stated.

Now rumors circulate that Turkey has asked Iran for help in obtaining an invitation to the BRICS. Considering that we now know that China and several of the BRICS powerhouses wanted more members but were forced to compromise with India’s vision, it’s quite possible that Turkey will be on the agenda for the next round of invitations. And since they’re already beginning initiatives for national currency settlements, this will fit hand-to-glove with the BRICS global de-dollarization drive.

On top of this, Russia is now taking its relationship with North Korea to the next level, which will strengthen both countries and create an even more weighty regional power bloc to negate NATO’s growing expansion into a “Pacific NATO”. Not only is Russia sending a delegation to North Korea’s next military parade but they’ve now invited Kim Jong Un himself to visit Russia for further strengthening of military ties and signing of weapons manufacturing deals:

This follows other ‘below the surface’ developments which continue accelerating the rapid multipolarity and de-dollarization movement:

Meanwhile, both China and Saudi Arabia have been dumping US treasuries:

Europe is panicking over the BRICS expansion, with Borrell calling for an emergency expansion of the EU, hoping the addition of 10 new members can boost the dying totalitarian relic:

“The European Union must prepare for a new enlargement, which will lead to the entry of 10 new states, it is necessary to consider the time frame for their admission” — Borrell

Meanwhile President Xi has snubbed the G20, stating he will not be attending but will instead send a lesser delegation. Some jumped to conclusions that this is really a snub to India, where the G20 will be held, but some Western publications have wisely gleaned the true motivation:

The Sirius Report writes:

Xi not attending the G20 has absolutely nothing to do with India and everything to do with him personally refusing an audience with Biden and China’s disdain for his administration’s ongoing dysfunctional attitude and approach towards Beijing.

For that to change, something seismic would have to happen in the next few days, which seems highly unlikely.

Ironically enough, India itself fired a shot across the bow of Western led global frameworks when Modi again repeated calls to the colonialist UN to “accept new realities,” particularly that of allowing India as the most populous state in the world on the UN Security Council.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi called on the United Nations to reform in line with 21st century realities to ensure the representation of voices that matter, according to an interview published on Sunday.

A “mid-20th century approach cannot serve the world in the 21st century”, Modi, who will host a summit of the Group of 20 big economies from next weekend, told the Press Trust of India news agency.

With the situation in Africa getting worse by the day for the Atlanticist order, the global shift is becoming ever more tangible.

//

In Ukraine the biggest development continues to happen around the growing mobilization threat. It’s now all but certain that a new repressive press-gang regime will take effect this fall. A plethora of documents and information continues to pour out in this vein, as well as further underlining evidence of unprecedented ongoing losses.

All sorts of ‘exemptions’ are being cancelled. Anyone with a medical exemption is now being forced to re-process as this crazy video illustrates.

Some as yet uncorroborated sources even claim that strictness will be relaxed on a slew of serious diseases in order to make eligible as many Ukrainians as possible:

This is in conjunction with confirmation that several countries are cooperating in forcibly extraditing Ukrainian ‘refugees’ of military age back home, particularly Poland and Germany:

And here’s BILD:

Autotranslation:

But you also would affect thousands, possibly tens of Thousands to Germany, the refugees Ukrainians. According to the Federal Ministry of the interior (as of February) after the beginning of the Russian attack war 163,287 male, military capable of Ukrainians entered Germany (dated: February 2023).

Not to mention that women are now being forced to register at the enlistment office:

➡️Starting from October 1, 2023, female workers in the medical and pharmaceutical fields will be required to register with the military enlistment offices.

➡️Women in other professions can voluntarily choose to register. Women can register if they are fit for military service due to age, up to 60 years old, and their health condition, which is determined by the Medical Examination Commission

Reportedly, one Ukrainian deputy even proposed a bill to reduce the draft age to 17, so they can begin harvesting up all those young teens for the slaughter:

⚡️⚡️⚡️The deputy from the Ukrainian party “European Solidarity” Sofya Fedina submitted a bill to reduce the draft age to 17 years

While we are talking about military service, but it is well known that after its completion, soldiers are not allowed to go home, referring to “martial law”.

This is illegal, because officially Ukraine is not waging war. Nevertheless, young guys are forced to sign a contract with the Ukrainian Armed Forces in various ways, and several cases of suicide have already been known when Ukrainians who did not want to fight chose such an extreme measure.

17 years old is still teenagers. And now they will be sent to the front.⚡️⚡️⚡️

And there’s reports that mass prisoners are being released from the west of Ukraine and used to replenish losses in the ongoing offensive.

And why is this all going on?

Well, to answer we continue to get more and more confirmation of not only the mass losses Ukraine is suffering, but the disparity in losses between the AFU and Russian forces.

Join me in this brief, grisly tour through the latest:

Firstly, there was an interview with a Polish volunteer to Ukraine who had some very shockingly eye-opening things to say:

💥💥💥”A Pole on the difficult situation in Ukraine: ‘They have no one to fight‘: A Polish volunteer in an interview told what is really happening with the counterattack.”

“Slawomir Wysocki, a Pole who regularly travels to Ukraine with humanitarian aid, told how tragic the situation is: ‘For several months they have only breached the first line of defence. The human losses on the Ukrainian side are huge. Western equipment is burning like matches. Things are much worse than is commonly imagined.

I counted the graves in Lviv. In the old part of the cemetery there are about 100 graves, in the new part – more than 600. In the villages this proportion is colossally different. When I drive by, I see cemeteries along the streets. Each has up to a dozen new graves. There are flags near each one, they are easily recognisable. There are more than two thousand graves in Kharkov. These losses can no longer be hidden.

Two months ago I was full of optimism about Kupyanskaya. Now we are still managing to hold our ground. It seems that the Russians are doing everything they can to reach Kupyansk, where they will take up their positions for the spring offensive.”

[How do Ukrainians feel about the Russian defence system?] They are terrified. They know that the Russian army has already foreseen everything. The defence system was built by construction companies. It’s not a peasant swinging a shovel to build a trench. Companies came in, poured concrete, made fortifications in the style of the Maginot Line. And there are three or four such lines. Ukrainians say there are five mines per square metre. You can’t put your foot on the ground without one of them exploding.

[With such a situation at the front, with ever-increasing losses, are there still people willing to defend their homeland?] There are none. They are looking for them on the streets. There are “round-ups” in Lviv, people are taken from construction sites, from bars. Recently I witnessed such a situation at the bus station in Lviv. Five policemen stood and checked everyone who wanted to leave Lviv. Eight people were detained in this way. Many of the reasons for the current mobilisation situation originate in Bakhmut. It was such a drain, such a meat grinder that there was no one left to fight”.💥💥💥

As to the mine situation, it may sound like he’s exaggerating but a new video from the Ukrainian perspective shows exactly what he’s talking about:

As to the losses, here’s a new account from a Ukrainian military source in the Klescheyevka direction:

And this new BBC video on Ukrainian losses is a must watch for anyone still in doubt:

It’s a companion piece to this BBC article:

Notice how openly the MSM is now reporting on this.

Hell, just look at how Ukrainians are now discussing getting out of being mobilized:

Well…better than being dead, I guess.

Additionally, there have been some interesting new insights in regard to Ukrainian POW exchanges in particular, which gives us an inside look into what the real loss disparities between the two sides are.

Recall the important point I had made a while back: losses on both sides are semi-subjective things and the numbers can be fudged with selective stats from one side or the other. This is because one side hasn’t released official losses since last summer, and the other side has never released official losses.

However, POW statistics are the only statistic that has actually been at several points released by both sides—which means it’s the only statistic that allows us a measure of insight in comparing the losses of both sides. I had already said many times before that Russia takes upwards of 5-15x more POWs than Ukraine takes of Russian troops, depending on the time. For instance, there was a time that Ukraine officially confirmed having around ~2500 Russian POWs when Russia verifiably had over 12-15k+ Ukrainian ones.

POW to KIA ratios are obviously relative in the same way WIA to KIA are, which gives us an idea of the two sides KIA ratios as well.

And now we have further confirmation of this vis a vis the POW angle. Not only does this AFU spokesman confirm that they don’t have enough Russian POWs for the exchange fund, i.e. to equally exchange them at the same rate with the Ukrainian POWs held by Russia:

🇺🇦🤡 The Kiev regime does not have so many prisoners of war to crank out the “all for all” exchange – Ukrainian Ombudsman Dmytro Lubinets.

“There is a figure, we do not name it publicly. What about the exchange fund – I constantly hear this question from relatives. We publicly said yes, we have problems with the exchange fund.

This means that we do not have enough Russian prisoners of was, whom we want to exchange for Ukrainian prisoners of war. They exist, the number is not enough, and this is also a problem,” said Lubinets.

First of all, this plays into the hands of Russia, since any negotiations take place in a dominant position, and even an agreement on unequal conditions demonstrates a desire to meet and reach compromises, putting the lives of fighters as a priority.

If we didn’t have the above admission from Ukraine itself, we may consider this as some sort of cheeky exaggeration on the Russian’s behalf. But in fact now we can see it’s true.

Ukraine is demanding 15 of their own men for a single Russian soldier. This gives you an idea of the types of loss ratios we’re seeing. Recall that these numbers actually back the rough ratio I gave from long ago where Ukraine had a couple thousand Russian POWs while Russia had as many as 15k Ukrainian ones.

Clearly, the loss ratios are consistent with this. I believe Putin recently again stated that the loss ratios in the offensive have been higher than 10:1 in Russia’s favor.

Tons of new videos bear this out, as well—in regard to the POWs. Just in the past 4-5 days alone, there have been dozens of AFU captured as confirmed on video; if we count the ones not on video there are probably hundreds. Meanwhile almost nothing from the Ukrainian side. Look for yourself, here’s just a small sampling of recent captures this past week: Video 1, Video 2, Video 3, Video 4, Video 5, Video 6, Video 7, Video 8, Video 9. And there’s many more. In that same time period I’ve seen maybe 1 Ukrainian video showing the capture of a couple Russian troops somewhere—supposedly.

In one of them the Russian captor even says the 6 POWs they’re showing on video are in addition to 14 they captured the previous day which they didn’t film.

That’s on top of the endless losses happening at the same time, like here, here, here, and here. In short, it’s a slaughter. Just watch the BBC piece posted earlier—even the female morgue workers had to watch their own husbands stream back to the morgue from the frontline. This is mass genocide from the psychopathic Narco-fuhrer regime.

An account doing visual confirmations of AFU losses has counted this just for the month of August:

Visually confirmed Ukranian losses for the Month of August 2023, according to

@OsintArmor daily loss counter
Tanks- 113
IFVs- 199
APCs-64
4×4 (MRAPS Mostly)- 75
Artillery- 154
Air Defense- 11
Radar/EW- 15
Supply/Transport- 74 + Train Echelon
Aircraft- 4
Helicopters- 3
Engineering Vehicles- 5
Boats- 5
Unknown- 38

Total= 760 confirmed losses.

Is Ukraine getting some licks in too? Sure, they’re getting a little here and there. For instance, the Bayraktar drone has come back into action for the first time in what—nearly a year now?—scoring 2 or 3 new kills on Russian forces in the Kherson region where a few Russian units are overextended on the Kinburn spit, those small islets in the gray no man’s zone.

One of the hits was on a small crewed boat which likely generated some casualties, another on an empty truck parked under a tree, and one on an artillery SPG which seems to have missed—take a look at the ‘heat’ signature to the right of the unit, the bomb seems to have hit the ground next to it. A drop in the bucket compared to the losses inflicted daily on the AFU. Plus, I wouldn’t be surprised if the TB2 footage is fake/old, rolled out now in desperation to buoy flagging morale.

Edit: the hit on the artillery SPG is already confirmed a fake: the timestamp above shows August 2022. How can we trust the rest of the hits when Ukraine is desperately and connivingly interspersing 1 year old footage?

But Western press is now trumpeting that Ukraine is finally making big gains, despite all these losses, and has even breached Russia’s vaunted “first line” of the Surovikin defense. Is that true?

Here is where they are according to a Ukrainian officer source:

More:

The below video is geolocated to the area that corresponds to the map above, i.e. the road leading straight into Verbove:

Yes, a Ukrainian meat assault all on foot is being sent past the “dragon teeth” toward the Russian trenches. Remember how I recently outlined their new tactic multiple times, where, after losing heavy amounts of armor, they are now resorting to just throwing lightly armed meat assaults with no vehicle backing for any desperate break through? You can see this above.

By the way, you can use this map to follow along. You see that double layered line there? The first one under the red circle, which they claimed to have “breached” is a tank ditch.

The breach was supposedly thus far just a forward scouting unit that basically attempted to “sneak” past the line but was repelled by artillery, suffering heavy losses as per the video above.

They barely even have the equipment to breach the actual tank ditches and dragon’s teeth there, which is why they’re simply sending meat assaults on foot to get blasted apart.

In fact, their Leopard and other heavy tank breachers in general have taken such attrition that, in a serious downgrade, they’re now apparently rolling out MRAP MaxxPro breachers:

M1224 MaxxPro MRAP vehicle with a Spark II modular mine roller system during an exercise of the 58th Independent Motorized Infantry Brigade of the Armed Forces of the Ukrainian regime.

Of course, we’ve already been seeing several Stryker ESV (Engineering Support Vehicles) with LWMR rollers destroyed as well:

So, have they really “breached” the first Surovikin line? I’d say no. They’re simply sending barely armed cannonfodder to die right on top of what is hardly even construed as the line.

However, there are indications that they are trying to refit and gather a new armored fist to make another attempt to punch through. They’re still collecting their broken units in the rear, reconstituting the destroyed brigades from the last attempt. The rumor is now the following:

How they are planning the “breach” to work is, they are now sending territorial defense type of low grade meat assault units to try to make a breakthrough while keeping their good brigades, the 82nd, 47th, etc., back in the rear, waiting with the Challenger 2 and Leopard tanks. Once the meat units pile up enough of their own corpses on the Surovikin line to constitute a “break through”, they intend to send the band-aid-and-banana-peel-held-together main brigades through.

The other component of the “strategy” is that these territorial meat units whose only objective is to just die on the 1st line, are meant to “exhaust” the Russian defenders, rather than actually break through in any meaningful way.

For those interested, the way the AFU structures its frontline force here goes as follows:

Back to the enemy’s tactics. What is typical of the actions of the Armed Forces of Ukraine on the line of contact-how the counter-offensive forces are layered:

– Up to 15% of the personnel on the list of units is located directly in the frontline positions on the LBS and strong points (at a distance of 1-5 km, in the immediate rear). As a rule, these are not assault groups. These units ensure the withdrawal of storm troopers to the front, conduct surveillance and aerial-visual reconnaissance.

– At a distance of 5-10 km from the LBS, at strong points and in shelters (mainly in forest belts), up to 35% of the units ‘ manpower is located. They form the basis for the formation of groups of reinforcement, evacuation, and tactical reserve of storm troopers.

– In the rear areas at a distance of up to 15 km from the front line, the remaining 50% of the personnel of the units are located. They are used to place stationary objects and buildings with basements. It is on their base that assault detachments are formed. Despite the use of a layered system of distribution of troops on the LBS, the enemy was not able to minimize losses among personnel and equipment on the front line due to the concentrated fire of our artillery and minefields. 

However, he ensured a stable influx of offensive group reserves to the LBS, counting on an exhausting effect. This is typical for the entire front line. It is especially evident in the areas of the most acute battles: Zaporozhye and South-Donetsk sectors of the front, Bakhmut (Artemivsk) direction. The only area where this system has not been implemented is Kupyansky.

But despite the massive unprecedented losses, how worried should we be that Ukraine continues to still make some incremental progress? For instance, Boris Rozhin writes the following in this regard, particularly vis a vis the announcements of various invalids being mobilized:

Ukraine’s plans to enlist the “limited fit” in the army are a common development for any country leading a general mobilization. Conscripts with this category of validity usually fall into the rear units and divisions that support the activities of troops at the front: repair, security, transport, and others. The key effect of conscription of these categories is the ability to throw all those fit for combat to the front, without leaving them in the rear, where they can be replaced by people with certain restrictions.

How effective does this work? The Armed Forces of Ukraine continue to advance despite all the problems, including because they can maintain the number of troops at the front, and the absolute dominance of military propaganda and the ideology of hatred make it possible to keep some loyal and others afraid.

The problems begin when units equipped with limited servicemembers have to be thrown into the first line, as happened with the Germans at the end of the war, when the Volkssturm of teenagers, old people and disabled people went into battle, supporting the fairly thinned Wehrmacht. (Boris Rozhin)

The thing is that, the advances they’ve made so far are not even close to what even the most die-hard pro-Z analysts expected. After last year’s Kharkov and Kherson incidents, most analysts cautiously forecasted the AFU being able to make it down at least toward Tokmak if not further.

Personally, I’m not worried at all with their level of advancement so far. In some zones it did reveal certain ongoing deficiencies on the Russian side, which are being worked on and corrected—particularly on the Staromayorsk front. However, in general the cost-to-gain ratio of the exchange is very good in Russia’s favor thus far.

The common thought question though is: “Sure, they’re taking a lot of losses, that’s a given. But what if they can keep sending endless men and taking endless losses until they inch forward toward Crimea/Mariupol/etc.?”

That’s not possible, and won’t happen.

Why?

Because:

It’s costing them far too much equipment for far too little territory. It’s your prerogative to argue they have endless manpower—maybe they do—and that’s fine. But they most certainly don’t have endless armor and equipment. They’ve been so depleted there that videos continue to show them literally impaling themselves on foot on Russia’s defenses near Verbove, after jogging for 5km from their deployment point.

They simply don’t have the equipment to make it down that far down with the current level of attrition. Sure, they’re getting new tanks in an emergency bid to keep them afloat. But it’s a whopping 10 Abrams on the way, with another whopping 10 Leopard 1A5s. This is hardly a day’s worth in a major armor ‘push’ for them.

Now, maybe they can hold out during fall/winter, accumulate huge amounts of new armor over the course of the next 6 months and then I will concede they could stand a chance to push much farther. But that’s only if Russia decides to do literally nothing in that entire period, and I highly doubt that’s going to be the case. As soon as it senses blood and sees AFU near-exhaustion, Russia will likely launch something of its own—whether that’s an actual full-fledged offensive to advance or simply to batter and finish off the actual AFU materiel/personnel we don’t know yet, but they won’t simply let them sit and accumulate armor.

In fact, there haven’t been many missile strikes from Russia lately and an AFU spokesman days ago said they believe Russia is currently saving up a huge amount of cruise missiles for a big fall/winter strike campaign where they intend to decimate the AFU’s rears and infrastructure; I agree.

The few times they have used them recently, there were big losses, as below from a few days ago:

WELDERS: An accurate missile strike by the Russian Armed Forces destroyed the placement point and training camp of the Ukrainian military in the Selidovo area. In this camp, the command of the 53rd Separate Infantry Division of the Armed Forces of Ukraine placed a recently arrived replenishment from among the mobilized people who were supposed to be thrown into battle near Avdiivka. According to our data, about a hundred Ukrainian soldiers were killed. Even Ukrainian commanders do not know the exact number of dead right now. Many of the bodies are still buried in the rubble and cannot be identified.

I’ll finish this section off with the following someone posted:

As the classic saying goes, “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.”

Borodino 1812

Borodino 1941

Rabotino 2023

And while Napoleon and von Bock were lured by warm winter quarters in Moscow, Zelensky’s proteges (similar to Napoleon, but with a nuance) are faced with plowed forest clearings in the field or ruined cellars in Rabotino.”

//

Let’s turn to a final few sundry items.

New satellite photos confirmed the damage: 2 planes at the Kresti airfield in Pskov were destroyed:

The only bad news is it is claimed by a Ukrainian OSINT account one of them was a more rare IL-78 MIDAS refueler, of which Russia has much less than Il-76s.

At the same time, Ukraine released a video from a controllable/FPV drone which overflew the airport and confirmed that the strikes actually happened from Russian territory:

Remember all the hand-wringing and pearl-clutching about how Russia’s air defense could have failed so badly as to allow drones to fly 600km from Ukrainian territory? Or the concern-trolls accusing Putin of being weak by allowing NATO to bomb Russian airfields from Estonia/Baltics?

Well, along with the video, Budanov himself now confirmed it was done from Russian territory just like I had outlined as one of the likely possibilities in the last article, where I posted the CNN report showing how they’ve literally confirmed that Ukrainian saboteurs are being sent into Russia with drones they can launch from within Russian territory:

The strike on the Pskov airfield was delivered from the territory of the Russian Federation, said the head of the GUR Budanov in an interview with The War Zone project.

“We are working from the territory of Russia,” Budanov said and declined to give other details.

He says that “two (Russian Il-76 aircraft) were destroyed and two seriously damaged.”

The publication received images from a drone with an infrared camera from the GUR, which confirm this statement.

We do not really believe in an attack from the territory of the Russian Federation, because it is one thing to launch a separate copter, and quite another to organize a massive raid. It is necessary to involve a lot of people (who will certainly be detected), cars, drag drones, charges. And all this in enemy territory near a military facility. The story is far from reality.

Unfortunately, such attacks are very difficult to stop because a saboteur hidden somewhere right outside the airfield outer fence can launch such a drone and hit the aircraft literally within seconds, giving any air defense virtually zero time to react. And now that FPV drones can have upwards of 10-15km extended ranges, he doesn’t even have to be anywhere near the fence/perimeter. He can fly the FPV drone literally skimming the ground at 10ft altitude for many kilometers right into the base. There’s next to no way of stopping this with modern technology.

The closest and strangest thing Russia has attempted to do so is covering Tu-95s with car tires at another base:

Many have laughed and ridiculed them, while others have pointed out that the U.S. has allegedly done the same thing in Afghanistan and/or Iraq. Either way, it’s a stop gap for now that’s not meant to totally stop any and all strikes but at least give some mitigation, even if it’s a small percentage.

And by the way, here’s a new captured Ukrainian who shows how the U.S. feeds Ukraine targets to strike inside Russia—he has a whole phone full of them:

If you’re interested in more info on this, read my article on the Delta Leaks that goes into much more detail on how this works:

US/NATO ISR Addendum: Deep Dive Into The Delta Leaks

SIMPLICIUS THE THINKER

·

MAR 3

In two previous articles I’ve mentioned not only the overwhelming C4ISR that the West commands in Ukraine, but also specifically the series of leaks which corroborated this, and gave us the insight into how their systems actually operate, and to what granularity they are transmitting the essential data to on-the-ground Ukrainian forces.

Read full story

Next:

In the last article we discussed at length the myths revolving around Russia’s command and leadership abilities, professionalism, etc. A new video has shown what’s claimed to be a more ‘veteran’ Russian unit conducting a successful combined arms assault that underscores many of the points my article made. Note the professional organization, the coordination between various units like FPV strike drones which are integrated directly into the platoon/company level. The poster even mentions that “FPVs are now [standard] part of Russian motorized infantry assault training.”

This is reportedly the 5th Separate Motorized Rifle Brigade of the 1st Army Corps of RF forces, previously known as a unit of the DPR militia.

How more veteran russian units conducts assault actions these days. After a short artillery bombardment of the enemy trenches IFVs role in. 1 lost to directional mines. Infantry take up positions and force UA out of the trench .FPVs acting as super accurate fire support.

Speaking of drones, Ukraine is said to be receiving new AI FPV drones from its allies which are capable of locking onto a target at the terminal phase and tracking it on its own even if/when the signal fails. I’ve mentioned before such drones are unjammable because there is no longer any outgoing/ingoing signal feed you can “jam” because the drone is doing all its own processing and kill chain internally.

On top of that, Ukraine is coating drones with poison in some sectors:

📣 A message from a [Russian] fighter who is in the Kherson direction.

✅ The drones that the crests are launching at us have begun to be impregnated with chemicals that can lead to death. For example, as it was in my unit: they launched a copter at our positions, after it landed, we somehow did not pay attention to strange points. The lad who picked him up after an hour and a half began to vomit, his temperature rose and he became very dizzy. After a couple of days in the hospital, he recovered, he said that he was diagnosed with poisoning. As a result, after landing the drones, it is necessary to check the absence of left spots, as it can be chemistry and be taken only in defense!

And further speaking of drones, new footage has shown a Russian Mi-28 Nighthunter / Havoc chasing a large Ukrainian drone and getting a guns kill on it with its onboard 30mm Shipunov 2A42 autocannon. Both from the Mi-28’s POV and that of the drone:

Next:

On the topic of mobilization: while Ukraine goes into overdrive in their own mobilization push, Russia has signaled the opposite direction. Duma deputy Gurulev stated:

⚡️⚡️⚡️There will not be a new wave of mobilization in Russia. Andrey Gurulev, member of the Defense Committee of the State Duma of the Russian Federation, said the following:

“I broke my tongue to say that we have gone the other way. We have a plan for 420,000 military personnel under contract, which we must implement by the end of the year … What kind of mobilization are we talking about?”⚡️⚡️⚡️

This is in conjunction with a new update from Medvedev regarding Russia’s “stealth mobilization” numbers. You’ll recall that I’ve been keeping tabs on the figures each month. The current tally is as follows:

DMITRY Medvedev: 

According to the Ministry of Defense, since January 1, about 280 thousand people have been accepted into the ranks of the Armed Forces for a contract. Some of them are people who were in the reserve, some are volunteers and other categories. “According to the Ministry of Defense, since January 1, about 280 thousand people have been enlisted in the Armed Forces,” he said at a meeting on Sakhalin, adding that some of them are volunteers, and some are in reserve.

Last time it was about 240-250k, so it’s only natural it’s up to 280k now that we’ve learned they’re gaining upwards of 40k men per month.

Now as to Gurulev’s statement about 420k under contract by the end of the year. This appears in line with earlier articles from this year:

If they have 280k new ones now, there are 4 months remaining until the end of the year—that’s 40k per month x 4 = 160k expected more contracts to be signed. That means 280k + 160k = 440k.

Gurulev says the goal is just shy of that at 420k. That means by the end of this year, Russia expects to have 420-440k completely new contract soldiers, which are ones that signed up only from January of this year. This is a ‘stealth mobilization’ even 150% greater than last year’s September call up.

Though it sounds miraculous, recall that Ukraine claims an intention to call up upwards of 500k this fall/winter, so we’ll see who actually wins the mobilization race. If you read the beginning of this article, you’ll note most of the ones they’ll end up calling up are likely syphilitic invalids with hepatitis; either that or 17 or 60+ year olds. Not exactly an ideal combination.

Along that topic, another retired general who’s now a Duma deputy, Lt. General Viktor Sobolev, has created a stir by remarking that when Russia conquers Ukraine, they should in fact absorb the whole state and make Kiev the new capital of all of Russia:

What do you think about that? Cockamamie, or does he have a point?

Of course we know such zany suggestions are normal for the Suvok hardliners, but it’s an interesting thought.

Speaking of Russian generals. There are two new important updates.

Firstly, General Popov’s father has apparently spoke out and confirmed that his son has been sent to Syria, which confirms that Popov has in fact been ‘removed’ from command of the 58th army. This is allegedly in reprisal for his complaints about the MOD on the southern Zaporozhye front.

At the same time, Surovikin was seen for the first time since June 24th in a new photo with his wife:

The “scoop” is that this appears to be in Sochi or elsewhere in Russia, and that the photo was “allowed” to be released now that Prigozhin is “cleaned up” and that saga is over. Slowly, the Russian MOD will reportedly allow Surovikin to inch back into the public awareness, perhaps with a new position of some sort.

The “TMZ” of Russian Telegram states the following:

A VChK-OGPU source says that Surovikin was allowed to leave the place of house arrest on August 26, when the issue with Prigozhin was already finally closed, and Surovikin himself finally unconditionally accepted the conditions of his further peaceful existence. Almost immediately, he flew with his wife to Sochi, to the same facility from the FBK investigation. When he managed to return is not clear, unless, of course, the photo was taken, as stated, in Moscow, and not in Sochi.

According to the source, the successful resolution of claims against Surovikin became possible thanks to Sergei Chemezov and Sergei Kiriyenko. On the initiative of the latter, today’s photo of Surovikin and his wife was launched on the network. According to the results of media measurements of the reactions of the population to the “return” of Surovikin, the Presidential Administration will make a presentation for Putin, where they will emphasize the correctness of the decision to drop the charges against the people’s favorite.

It is noteworthy that Gennady Timchenko made no effort to release Surovikin, which indicates the desire of the oligarch to isolate himself from his ties with Wagner and Surovikin.

I don’t have too much commentary to add for now. I’ll let a few more developments on this accrue and give fuller thoughts later. For now, “it is what it is,” but it does seem to signal the slow ‘denouement’ of the post-Prigozhin/Wagner saga back towards low tension normality.

Next:

A small curiosity:

The Florida-based neo-Nazi group ‘Blood Tribe’ was seen praising Ukraine on video yesterday:

Behind their leader Chris Pollhaus, you can see the infamous tattoo-faced Nazi heart-warmingly called ‘Boneface’.

Boneface, it turns out, had already served in Ukraine under the Azov battalion:

But most interesting is the video here where he nonchalantly reveals that it was infact the CIA that sent him to Ukraine.

So the CIA is sending American Nazis to fight for Ukrainian Azov Nazis? Who knew! And people call us conspiracy theorists.

Full report here for anyone interested, where you can hear him say the above in English: “It wasn’t the FBI but Central Intelligence that sent me to Ukraine”:

Next:

Earlier I’d mentioned how Ukraine pulled its feeble Leopard fleet off the line so the kitties can lick their wounds while the meatshields took a turn. Here we see the remaining Ukrainian Leopards have now—in a case of ultimate tragi-comedy—been replenished with Soviet-era Kontakt-1 ERA bricks:

Of course, some of them have already been destroyed just as quickly:

And now, as of this writing the very first confirmation of a destroyed British Challenger 2 appears to be hitting airwaves:

I haven’t even had a chance to truly dig into and examine it, but on first glance it’s looking like it—and there were only 14 of these things sent.

Remember this now risible headline?

Cue the laughter.

Next:

September 1st was the anniversary of the Beslan school massacre of 2004, where terrorists killed nearly 200 children, while heroic Russian spetsnaz saved many others. School children in Russia to this day honor the day by releasing white balloons:

One of the girls was only a baby when she was rescued by a spetsnaz member, and invited him for a reunion at her graduation seventeen years later:

🇷🇺❤️ These two photos were taken 16 years apart.

All grown, Alena Tskaeva invited Elbrus Gogichaev, who carried her, as a six-month-old baby, out of the Beslan school 1, where her mother and older sister died in September of 2004, to her school graduation in May of 2021. 🇷🇺❤️

Russian heroes 🤍💙❤️

Lastly, I’ll leave you with this heartwarming video of Putin recounting a story to schoolchildren on first day of school recently:

---

Tonight I’m gonna party like it’s 1929:

The proportional rate of growth of a firm (or entrenched army) is independent of its absolute size. It gives rise to a firm size distribution that is log-normal or power law.

The result is efficient, mature, multi-layered, and resilient network.

Against this redundant structure comes the Zhou Regime’s pet – the AFU – ordered to just blow through it.

Here is Big Serge to explain how it is all breaking down – literally: https://bigserge.substack.com/p/escaping-attrition-ukraine-rolls

********

Escaping Attrition: Ukraine Rolls the Dice

The Zaporizhia Summer Blockbuster

AUG 29, 2023

It has been a while since I published anything long-form commenting on the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian War, and I confess that writing this article gave me a modicum of trouble. Ukraine’s much anticipated grand summer counteroffensive has now been underway for about eighty days with little to show for it. The summer has seen fierce fighting in a variety of sectors (to be enumerated below), but the contact line has shifted very little. I have been reluctant to publish a discussion of the Ukrainian campaign simply because they have continued to hold assets in reserve, and I did not want to post a premature commentary that went to press right before the Ukrainians showed some new trick or revealed a hidden ace up their sleeve. Sure enough, I wrote the bulk of this article last week, right before Ukraine launched yet another major attempt to force a breach in the Orikhiv sector.

At this point, however, the appearance of some of Ukraine’s last remaining premier brigades, which had previously been held in reserve, confirms that the axes of Ukraine’s attack are concretized. Only time will tell if these precious reserves manage to achieve a breach in the Russian lines, but enough time has passed that we can sketch out what exactly Ukraine has been trying to do, why, and why it has failed to this point.

Part of the problem with narrating the war in Ukraine is the positional and attritional nature of the fighting. People continue to look for bold operational maneuver to break the deadlock, but the reality seems to be that for now some combination of capability and reticence has turned this war into a positional struggle with a plodding offensive pace, which far more resembles the first world war than the second.

Ukraine had aspirations of breaking open this grinding front and reopening mobile operations – escaping the attritional struggle and driving on operationally meaningful targets – but these efforts have so far come to naught. For all the lofty boasts of demonstrating the superior art of maneuver, Ukraine still finds itself trapped in a siege, painfully trying to break open a calcified Russian position without success.

Ukraine may not be interested in a war of attrition, but attrition is certainly interested in Ukraine.

Ukraine’s Strategic Paradigm

For those that have been following the war closely, what follows will probably not be new information, but I think it is worth thinking holistically about Ukraine’s war and the factors that drive their strategic decision making.

For Ukraine, the conduct of the war is shaped by a variety of disturbing strategic asymmetries.

Some of these are obvious, like Russia’s much larger population and military industrial plant, or the fact that Russia’s war economy is indigenous, while Ukraine is entirely reliant on western deliveries of equipment and munitions. Russia can autonomously ramp up armaments production and there are abundant signs from the battlefield that the Russian war economy is beginning to find its groove, with new systems like the Lancet present in increasing abundance, and western sources now admitting that Russia has successfully serialized a domestic version of the Iranian Shahed Drone. Furthermore, Russia has the asymmetrical capacity to strike Ukrainian rear areas to an extent that Ukraine cannot reciprocate, even if they are given the dreaded ATACMs (these will give Ukraine the range to strike operational depth targets in the theater, but they can’t hit facilities in Moscow and Tula the way Russian missiles can strike anywhere in Ukraine).

With significant Russian asymmetries in population size, industrial capacity, strike capability, and – let us be blunt – sovereignty and decision-making freedom, an attritional-positional struggle is simply bad math for Ukraine, and yet that is precisely the sort of war in which it has become trapped.

What is important for us to understand, however, is that the strategic asymmetry goes beyond physical capacities like population base, industrial plant, and missile technology, and extends into the realm of strategic objectives and timelines.

Russia’s war has been deliberately framed in a fairly open-ended way, with goals largely tied to the idea of “demilitarizing” Ukraine. In fact, Russia’s territorial objectives remain rather nebulous beyond the 4 annexed oblasts (though it is safe to say that Moscow would like to acquire far more than just these). All that to say, Putin’s government has deliberately framed the war as a military-technical enterprise focused on destroying the Ukrainian armed forces, and has shown itself to be perfectly free to give up territory in the name of operational prudentia.

In contrast, Ukraine has maximalist goals that are explicitly territorial in nature. The Zelensky government has been open about the fact that it aims – however fanciful this may be – to restore the entirety of its 1991 territories, including not just the four mainland oblasts but also Crimea.

The confluence of these two factors – Ukrainian territorial maximalism combined with asymmetrical Russian advantages in a positional-attritional struggle – forces Ukraine to seek a way to break open the front and restore a state of operational fluidity. Remaining locked in a positional struggle is unworkable for Kiev, partially because Russia’s material advantages will inevitably shine through (in a fight between two big guys swinging big bats at each other, bet on the bigger guy with the bigger bat), and partially because a positional war (which amounts essentially to a massive siege) is simply not an efficient way to retake territory.

This leaves Ukraine with no choice but to unfreeze the front and try to restore mobile operations, with an eye towards creating some asymmetry of their own. The only feasible way to accomplish this is to launch an offensive aimed at severing critical lines of Russian communication and supply. Contrary to some suggestions that were popular this spring, a large Ukrainian offensive against Bakhmut or Donetsk simply did not fit the bill.

Frankly, there are only two suitable operational targets for Ukraine. One is Starobils’k – the beating heart at the center of Russia’s Lugansk front. Capturing or screening Svatove and then Starobils’k would create a genuine operational catastrophe for Russia in the north, with cascading effects all the way down to Bakhmut. The second possible target was the land bridge to Crimea, which could be cut by a thrust across lower Zaporizhia towards the Azov coast.

It was probably inevitable that Ukraine would select the Azov option, for a few reasons. The land bridge to Crimea is a more self-contained battlespace – an offensive in Lugansk would occur under the shadow of the Belgorod and Voronezh regions of Russia, making it relatively more difficult to put significant Russian forces out of supply. Perhaps even more significant, however, is Kiev’s complete obsession with Crimea and the Kerch Bridge – targets that hold hypnotic sway in a way that Starobils’k never could.

Again, this may sound like fairly intuitive review, but it’s worth contemplating how and why Ukraine ended up launching an offensive that was widely telegraphed and expected. There was no strategic surprise whatsoever – a definitely real video of GUR chief Budanov smirking didn’t fool anyone. The Russian armed forces certainly weren’t fooled, as they spent months saturating the front with minefields, trenches, firing emplacements, and obstacles. Everyone knew that Ukraine was going to attack toward the Azov Coast, specifically with an eye towards Tokmak and Melitopol, and that’s exactly what they did. A frontal attack against a prepared defense without the element of surprise is generally considered a poor choice, but here is Ukraine not only attempting such an attack but even launching it against a backdrop of global celebration and phantasmagorical expectations.

It’s impossible to make sense of this without understanding the way that Ukraine is shackled by a particular interpretation of the war to this point. Ukraine and its supporters point to two successes in 2022 where Ukraine was able to retake a substantial swathe of territory, in Kharkov and Kherson oblasts. The problem is that neither of these situations is portable to Zaporizhia.

In the case of the Kharkov offensive, Ukraine identified a sector of the Russian front that had been hollowed out and was defended only by a thin screening force. They were able to stage a force and achieve a measure of strategic surprise, due to the thick forests and general paucity of Russian ISR in the area. This is not to mitigate the scale of Ukraine’s success there; it was certainly the best uses of forces available to them and they did exploit a weak section of front. This success is hardly relevant to circumstances in the south today; mobilization has ameliorated Russia’s force generation problems so that they now longer have to make hard choices about what to defend, and the heavily fortified Zaporizhia frontline is nothing like the thinly held front in Kharkov.

The second case study – the Kherson counteroffensive – is even less germane. In this case, Ukrainian leadership is rewriting history in record time. The AFU banged its head on Russian defenses in Kherson for months throughout the summer and autumn last year and took atrocious losses. An entire grouping of AFU brigades was mauled in Kherson without achieving a breakthrough, and this even with Russian forces in a uniquely difficult operational disposition where they had their backs to a river. Kherson was only abandoned months later due to concerns that the Kakhovka dam might fail or be sabotaged (for those keeping score, it did in fact end up failing), and due to Russia’s need at the time to economize forces.

Again, this can easily be misconstrued as arguing that Russia’s withdrawal from Kherson did not matter. Obviously, abandoning a hard-earned bridgehead is a major setback, and retaking west-bank Kherson was a boon for Kiev. But we need to be honest about why it happened, and it plainly did not happen because of Ukraine’s summer counteroffensive – to underscore this, recall that Ukrainian officials openly wondered if the Russian withdrawal was a trick or a trap. The question is simply whether Ukraine’s Kherson offensive is predictive of future offensive success. It is not.

So, we have one case where Ukraine identified a lightly defended section of front and ran through it, and another where Russian troops abandoned a bridgehead due to logistical and force allocation concerns. Neither is particularly relevant to the situation on the Azov coast, and in fact an honest reflection of the AFU’s Kherson Counteroffensive might have given Ukraine second thoughts about a frontal assault on prepared Russian defenses.

Instead, Kharkov and Kherson have both been presented as proof positive that Ukraine can shatter Russian defenses in a straight up fight – in fact, we still have no examples from this war of the AFU defeating strongly held Russian positions, particularly post-mobilization when Russia finally began to resolve its manpower deficiencies. But Ukraine is caught in the grip of its own particular story about this war, which has imparted unearned confidence in its ability to conduct offensive operations. Tragically for mobilized Ukrainian Mykolas, this has dovetailed with a second swagger-producing mythology.

A major selling point for the Ukrainian counteroffensive has been the assessed superiority of the AFU’s big-ticket donations from the west – the main battle tanks and infantry fighting vehicles. Since the first deliveries were announced, there has been no shortage of boasting about the many superior qualities of western models like the Leopards and Challengers. The suggestion has essentially been that skilled Ukrainian tankers are only waiting to be unleashed once they get behind the wheel of superlative western builds. My personal favorite motif has been the practice of dismissing Russian tanks as “Soviet Era” – neglecting to note that the Abrams (designed 1975) and the Leopard 2 (1979) are also Cold War models.

It must be stated, again, that there is nothing wrong with western tanks. The Abrams and the Leopard are fine vehicles, but confidence in their game-changing capabilities stems from a mistaken assumption about the role of armor. It must be appreciated that tanks always have been and always will be mass-consumption items. Tanks blow up. They are disabled. They break down and are captured. Tank forces attrit – much faster than people expect. Given that the brigades prepared for Ukraine’s assault on the Zapo line were significantly understrength in vehicles, it was simply irrational to expect them to have an oversized impact. This is not to say that tanks aren’t important – armor remains critical to modern combat – but in a peer conflict one should always expect to lose armor at a steady clip, especially when the enemy retains fires superiority.

One can see, then how a measure of hubris can easily creep in to Ukrainian thinking, fueled by a healthy dose of desperation and strategic need. Reasoning from a distorted understanding of its successes in Kharkov and Kherson, emboldened by their shiny new toys, and guided by an overriding strategic animus that requires them to unlock the front somehow, the idea of a frontal attack without strategic surprise against a prepared defense really could seem like a good idea. Add in the good old fashioned trope about Russian incompetence and disorder, and you have all the recipes for an imprudent roll of the dice by Ukraine.

The Misfire

So now we come to the operational minutia. For a variety of reasons, Ukraine has chosen to attempt a frontal assault on Russia’s fortified Zaporizhia front, with the intention of breaching towards the sea of Azov. How can this be accomplished?

We had a few clues early on, accruing from a variety of geographic features and alleged intelligence leaks. In May, the Dreizin Report published what was purported to be a Russian synthesis of Ukraine’s OPORD (Operational Order). An OPORD functions as a broad sketch of an operation’s intended progression, and the document shared by Dreizin was billed as a summary of Russia’s expectation for Ukraine’s offensive (that is, it is not a leak of Ukraine’s internal planning documents, but a leak of Russia’s best guess at Ukraine’s plans).

In any case, in a vacuum it was anybody’s guess as to whether Dreizin’s OPORD was authentic, but we’ve subsequently been able to cross-check it. This is because of the other, even more infamous leak from earlier this spring, which included the Pentagon’s combat power build plan for Ukraine.

NATO was very generous and built Ukraine a mechanized strike package from scratch. However, because this mechanized force was cobbled together with a variety of different systems from all corners of the NATO Cinematic Universe, Ukraine formations are uniquely identifiable by their particular combination of vehicles and equipment. So, for example, the presence of Strykers, Marders, and Challengers indicates the presence of the 82nd Brigade in the field, and so forth.

Thus, despite Ukrainian pretensions of operational security, it’s actually been trivially easy for observers to know which Ukrainian formations are in the field. There have been a few deviations from the script – for example, the 47th Brigade was supposed to field the Frankenstein Slovenian M55 tanks, but in the end the decision was made to send the underpowered M55’s to the northern front and the 47th was deployed with a contingent of Leopard Tanks originally operated by the 33rd Brigade. But these are minor details, and on the whole we’ve had a good sense of when and where specific AFU formations get on the field.

Based on identifiable units, the Dreizin OPORD looks very close to what we actually saw at the onset of the Ukrainian offensive. The Dreizin OPORD called for an assault by the 47th and 65th Brigades on the Russian lines south or Orikhiv, in the sector bounded by Nesterianka and Novoprokopivka. Directly in the middle of this sector is the town of Robotyne, and sure enough that’s where the first big AFU assault came overnight on June 7-8, spearheaded by the 47th Brigade.

Now, from this point it becomes difficult to evaluate the Dreizin OPORD simply because Ukraine’s attack became instantaneously derailed, but one thing we can say is that Dreizin’s source was correct about the order that Ukrainian units would be introduced into battle. Based on this, we can flesh out the OPORD and feel pretty safe wagering that this is what the Ukrainians were hoping to achieve:

The intention seems to have been to force a breach in the Russian line using a concentrated armored assault by the 47th and 65th Brigades, after which a follow on force of the 116th, 117th, and 118th would begin the exploitation phase, driving for the Azov Coast and the towns of Mikhailivka and Vesele to the west. The objective was clearly not to get bogged down in urban fighting attempting to capture places like Tokmak, Berdyansk, or Melitopol, but to bypass them and cut them off by taking up blocking positions on the main roads.

Simultaneously, a lesser – but no less critical – thrust would come out of the Gulyaipole area and drive along the Bilmak axis. This would have the effect of both screening the main advance to the west and wedging the Russian front open, splintering the integrity of the Russian forces caught in the middle. Overall, this is a fairly sensible, if ambitious and uncreative plan. In many ways, this was really the only option.

So what went wrong? Well, conceptually it’s easy. There is no breach. The bulk of the maneuver scheme is dedicated to exploitation – reaching such and such a line, taking up this blocking position, masking that city, and so forth. But what happens when there’s no breach at all? How can such a catastrophe occur, and how can the operation be salvaged when it comes untracked in the opening phase?

Indeed, this is precisely what has happened. Ukraine finds itself stuck on the edge of Russia’s outermost screening line, spending substantial resources trying to capture the small village of Robotyne, and/or bypass it to the east by infiltrating the gap between it and the neighboring village of Verbove. So instead of that rapid breach and turning maneuver towards Melitopol, we get something like this:

We could be generous and say that Robotyne is the last village before the Ukrainian attack reaches the main Russian defensive belt, but we’d be lying – they will also have to clear the larger town of Novoprokopivka, two kilometers to the south. Just for reference, here’s a closer look at the mapped Russian defenses in the battlespace, based on the excellent work of Brady Africk.

The discussion about these emplacements can get a little muddled, simply because it’s not always clear what is meant by that popular phrase “first line of defense.” Clearly there are some defensive works around and in Robotyne, and the Russians chose to fight for the village, so in some sense Robotyne is part of the “first line” – but it is more proper to speak of it as part of what we would call a “screening line”. The first line of continuous fortifications across the front is several kilometers further south, and this is the belt that Ukraine has yet to even reach, let alone breach.

As of this moment, it appears that Russian troops have lost total control of Robotyne but continue to hold the southern half of the village, while Ukrainian troops in the northern half of the village remain subject to heavy Russian shelling. We should probably at this point consider the village to be continuously contested and a feature of the gray zone.

Now, a quick note about Robotyne itself and why both sides are so determined to fight for it. It seems rather odd on the surface, given that the Russian preference in 2022 was to make tactical withdrawals under their fires umbrella. This time though, they are fiercely counterattacking to contest Robotyne. The value of the village lies not only in its location on the T-0408 Highway, but also its excellent perch on top of a ridge. Both Robotyne and Novoprokopivka lie on a ridge of elevated ground which is as much as 70 meters higher than the low-lying plain to the east.

What this means is fairly simple; if the AFU presses forward in attempts to bypass the Robotyne-Novoprokopivka position by pushing into the gap between Robotyne and Verbove, it will be vulnerable to fire on the flanks (particularly by ATGMs) by Russian troops on the high ground. We already have seen footage of this, with Ukrainian vehicles being taken in the flank by fire from Robotyne. I am highly skeptical that Ukraine can even attempt an earnest assault on the first defensive belt until they have captured both Robotyne and Novoprokopivka.

This would all be a tough nut to crack under ideal circumstances, with a variety of engineering problems to mediate, obstacles designed to funnel the attacker into firing lanes, perpendicular trenches to allow enfilade fire on advancing Ukrainian columns, and robust defenses on all the major roadways. But these are not the best of circumstances. This is a tired force that has exhausted much of its indigenous combat power, which is attempting to organize the attack using a piecemeal and understrength assault package.

Several factors conspired against the Ukrainian offensive, and synergistically they have created a bona fide military catastrophe for Kiev. Let us enumerate them.

Problem 1: The Hidden Defensive Layer

At this point, we need to acknowledge something that everybody missed about Russia’s defense. I previously expressed high confidence that Ukraine’s forces would be unable to breach the Russian defenses, but I mistakenly believed that the Russian defense would function according to the classic Soviet defense-in-depth principles (elucidated in great detail by the writings of David Glantz, for example).

Such a defense, put simply, is open to the idea that the enemy will breach the first or even second lines of defense. The purpose of the multilayered (or “echeloned” in the classic terminology) defense is to ensure that the enemy force gets stuck as it tries to break through. It may penetrate the first layer, but as it goes it is continually chewed up by the subsequent belts. The classic example is the Battle of Kursk, where powerful German panzers broke into the Soviet defensive belts but subsequently became stuck as they were ground down. You can think of this as being analogically similar to a Kevlar vest, which uses a web of fibers to stop projectiles: rather than bouncing off, the bullet is caught and its energy is absorbed by the layered fibers.

I was actually quite open to the idea that Ukraine would generate some penetration, but I anticipated them getting stuck in the subsequent belts and sputtering out.

What was missing from this picture – and this is a credit to Russian planning – was an unseen defensive belt forward of the proper trenches and fortifications. This forward belt consisted of extremely dense minefields and strongly held forward positions in the screening line, which the Russians evidently intended to fight for fiercely. Rather than breaking through the first belt and getting stuck in the interstitial areas, the Ukrainians have been repeatedly mauled in the security zone, and the Russians have consistently counterattacked to knock them back when they do manage to get footholds.

In other words, while we expected Russia to fight a defense in depth that absorbed the Ukrainian spearheads and shredded them in the heart of the defense, the Russians have actually shown a strong commitment to defending their forwardmost positions, of which Robotyne is the most famous.

On paper, Robotyne was expected to function as part of a so-called “crumple zone”, or “security zone” – a sort of lightly held buffer that puts the enemy through pre-registered fires before they bump into the first belt of continuous and strongly held defenses. Indeed, a variety of aerial and satellite surveys of the area taken before Ukraine went on the attack showed Robotyne laying well forward of the first solid and continuous Russian fortification belt.

What was missed, it seemed, was the extent to which the Russian defenders had mined the areas on the approach to Robotyne and were committed to defending within the security zone. The scale of the mining certainly seems to have surprised the Ukrainians, and creates a strain on Ukraine’s limited combat engineering capabilities. Even more importantly, the dense mines have created predictable avenues of approach for the Ukrainian forces, which force them to repeatedly run through the same gauntlet of fires and Russian standoff weaponry.

Problem 2: Insufficient Suppression

The signature image of the first great assaults on the Zapo Line has been columns of unsupported maneuver assets, being raked with Russian fires, both ground based (rocketry, ATGMs, and tube artillery) and from air platforms like the Ka-52 Alligator attack helicopter. One of the more startling aspects of these scenes was the way Ukrainian forces would come under heavy fire while still in their marching columns, taking losses before they ever deployed into firing lines to begin their assault proper.

There are myriad reasons for this. One is the now blasé issue of Ukrainian munition shortages. Consider the following items of interest. In the runup to Ukraine’s counteroffensive, Russia waged a heavy counter-preparatory air campaign that knocked out large AFU ammunition dumps. Ukraine’s initial assaults collapse in the face of heavy and unsuppressed Russian fires. The United States decides to transfer cluster munitions to Ukraine because, in the words of the president, “they’re running out of ammunition.” Add in the degradation of Ukrainian air defense, which allows Russian helicopters to operate with great effect along the contact line, and you have a recipe for disaster. Lacking the tubes to suppress Russian fires or the air defense to chase away Russian aircraft, the AFU opened their offensive by disastrously pushing forward unsupported maneuver elements into a hail of fire.

Problem 3: Russian Standoff Weapons

It’s crucial to understand that the Russian toolbox is fundamentally different than it was during the battle for Kherson last year, due to the rapidly expanding production of a variety of Russian standoff weapons – most notably the Lancet and the UMPK glide modifications for gravity bombs.

The Lancet in particular has been a star performer – there are claims that the trusty little loitering munition is responsible for nearly half of Russia’s artillery kills – and has filled a crucial capability gap that troubled the Russian army episodically throughout the first year of the war. Contrary to some western assessments that Russia simply could not manufacture drones in sufficient quantities, production of the Lancet has been successfully ramped up in a short period of time, and mass production of other systems like the Geran are coming online as well.

The proliferation of the Lancet and similar systems means, in a nutshell, that nothing within 30km of the contact line is safe, and this in turn disrupts the AFU’s deployment of critical support assets like air defense and engineering, magnifying their vulnerability to Russian mines and fires. In fact, we’ve increasingly seen Ukrainian artillery use decline in the Robotyne area due to the threat of lancets (they seem to be transferring tubes to other fronts), and the AFU is favoring the use of HIMARS in the suppressive role.

Problem 4: Repetitive Lines of Approach

Because the AFU failed to breach the Robotyne sector on their first attempt, they’ve been forced to continually move up additional units and resources to hammer on the position. This has particular implications, both in the sense that AFU forces must continually traverse the same lines of approach to contact, and in the fact that they are using the same rear area to assemble and stage their assault forces.

This makes the burden on Russian ISR (Intelligence, Surveillance, Reconnaissance) significantly easier, since the AFU has no effective way to disperse or hide the assets that they are bringing forward to the assault. Staged Ukrainian forces and material have been hid repeatedly in the villages immediately behind Orikhiv, like Tavriiske and Omeln’yk, and Russia is able to strike rear area infrastructure like ammunition depots because – to put it simply – there are only so many places these these assets can be staged when you are repeatedly assaulting the same 20km wide sector of front.

We recently had Ukrainian Deputy Minister of Defense Hanna Malair complaining that the 82nd Brigade – newly deployed to the Orikhiv sector – had been hit with a series of Russian airstrikes in its staging areas. According to her, this was because of poor OPSEC revealing the brigade’s location to the Russians. But this really makes very little sense; the entire area of operations around Orikhiv is perhaps 25km deep (from Kopani to Tavriiske) and 20 km wide (from Kopani to Verbove). This is a small area that has seen a huge amount of military traffic along the same roads throughout the summer. The idea that Russia needs insider information to know that they ought to surveil and attack targets in this area is absurd.

Problem 5: Fragile Brigades

It actually takes significantly less damage to “destroy” an operational level unit than people think. A unit can become a combat scratch off at 30% losses (with some variance depending on how those are allocated). This is because when people hear the term “destruction”, they think that means total losses. Sometimes that’s how the word is used in colloquial conversation, but what matters for officers trying to manage an operation is whether or not a formation is combat capable of the tasks being asked of it – and those capabilities can vanish much more quickly than people realize.

This is particularly the case for the Ukrainian mech package, for a variety of reasons. For one, as we discussed in previous articles, these brigades started the fight well understrength (remember, for example, that the Ukrainian 82nd Brigade has only 90 Stryker AFVs, while an American Strkyer Brigade is supposed to have 300). Additionally, the cobbled together nature of these brigades – and the total lack of indigenous sustainment systems like repair and maintenance – means that the Ukrainians will naturally have to cannibalize these vehicles. They’ve already started designating “donor” vehicles that are written off completely to be stripped down for parts. The nexus of these two facts is that Ukraine’s mechanized brigades are understrength on vehicles to begin with, and will have an abysmally poor recovery rate, with hidden attrition behind the scenes due to cannibalization.

What this means is that when we heard admissions by mid-July that Ukraine had already lost 20% of its maneuver assets, there is an associated catastrophic decline in combat capability. The lead brigades – which chewed through 50% or more of their maneuver vehicles – can no longer shoulder combat tasks appropriate for a brigade, and the Ukrainians are forced to feed in their second echelon units prematurely.

At this point, partial elements of at least ten different brigades have been deployed in the Robotyne sector, with the 82nd likely to join them soon. Given that the NATO combat power build plan only included 9 NATO trained brigades, plus a few reconstituted Ukrainian formations, it’s safe to say that blooding all of them over a 71 day fight just to break into the screening line was not in the plan.

Staring at the Abyss

I’ve seen a variety of analysts and writers lately arguing that the insertion of additional Ukrainian units into the Robotyne sector signals the next phase of the operation.

This is nonsense. Ukraine is still mired in the first phase. What has happened is instead that the attrition of their first echelon brigades has forced them to commit their second (and third) wave to complete the tasks of the opening phase. The initial attack, led by the 47th Brigade, was intended to create a breach in the Russian screening line around Robotyne and advance to the main Russian belt further to the south. They failed, and the additional brigades earmarked for exploitation – the 116th, 117th, 118th, 82nd, 33rd, and more – are now being systematically fed in to keep the pressure on.

These brigades have not been destroyed, of course, simply because they are not being committed in their entirety, but rather as subunits. Nevertheless, at this point Ukrainian losses make up the better part of a whole brigade, distributed around the broader package, and over 300 maneuver elements (tanks, IFVs, APCs, etc) have been scratched off.

We need to say this very explicitly. Ukraine has not moved on to the next phase of their operation. They are stuck in the first phase, and have been forced to prematurely commit portions of the second echelon that was earmarked for later action. They are slowly but surely burning through the entire operational grouping, and so far they have not breached Russia’s screening line. The great counteroffensive is turning into a military catastrophe.

Now, this does not mean that the operation has failed, simply because it is still ongoing. History teaches us that it is unwise to make definitive pronouncements. Luck and human factors (bravery and intelligence, cowardice and stupidity) always have something to say. However, the trajectory is undeniably towards abject failure at the current moment.

So far, the AFU has shown some adaptability. In particular, we’ve recently seen them shift away from pushing forward unsupported columns of mechanized assets – instead they’ve been leaning on small dismounted units, trying to slowly push forward into the space between Robotyne and Verbove. The move towards dispersal is intended to reduce loss rates, but it also reduces the probability of a dramatic breakthrough even further and marks the temporary abandonment of decisive breaching action in favor of – once again – creeping positional warfare.

We would be remiss if we failed to note that there have been meaningful Russian losses in all of this. We know that the Russian forces in the Robotyne sector have required rotation and reinforcement, including with elite VDV and Naval Infantry units. Russia has taken counterbattery losses, it has lost vehicles in counterattacking action, and men have been killed holding their trenches. The initial assault groups that the Ukrainians threw in had a lot of combat power, and the fighting was very bloody for both sides. It’s not a one-sided shooting gallery, but a high intensity war.

But therein is the crux of the matter – Ukraine seems unable to escape the attritional and positional war that it finds itself in. It sounds all well and good to proclaim a return to “maneuver” warfare, but if there is an inability to breach enemy defenses, this is only an empty boast, and the nature of the struggle remains attritional. When the question becomes “will we breach before we run out of combat power”, you are not maneuvering. You are attriting.

In my series of articles on military history, we’ve looked at a variety of cases where armies tried desperately to unlock the front and restore a state of operational maneuver, but when there is no technical capacity to do so, these intentions do not matter one bit. Nobody wants to be trapped on the wrong side of attritional mathematics, but sometimes what you want does not matter at all. Sometimes attrition is imposed on you.

In the absence of the capabilities required to successfully breach Russia’s prodigious defenses – more ranged fires, more air defense, more ISR, more EW, more combat engineering, more more more – Ukraine is trapped in a rock fight. Two fighters are swinging bats at each other, and Russia is a bigger man with a bigger bat.

Two Bad Copes

Amid a clear misfire and growing strategic disappointment, two new suggestions have increasingly crept into the conversation – “copes”, if you will, that are utilized as a narrative comfort to explain why the Ukrainian operation is actually going just fine (despite nearly universal acknowledgment in the west that the results have been lackluster at best). I would like to briefly address each of these in turn.

Cope 1: “The first stage is the hardest”

You frequently see it argued that all the AFU has to do is break open the Russian screening line, and the remainder of the defenses will fall like dominos. The general thrust of this argument is that the Russians lack reserves and that the subsequent defensive lines are not adequately manned – just break open the first line, and the rest will fall apart.

This is probably a comforting thing to tell oneself, but it’s rather irrational. We could talk, for example, about Russia’s doctrinal schema for defense in depth, which prescribes liberal allocation of reserves at all depths of the defensive system, but it’s probably more fruitful to point at more immediate evidence.

Let us simply consider Russia’s behavior over the last six months. They have spent a tremendous amount of effort constructing echeloned defenses – are we really to believe that they did all this only to waste all their combat power fighting in front of these defenses? Nor is there any evidence that Russia is having trouble supplying the front with manpower at the present moment. We’ve seen continued rotations and redeployments amid an overall process of military enlargement in Russia. Indeed, of the two belligerents, it is Ukraine that seems to be scraping the barrel for manpower.

Cope 2: “Get within firing range”

This is the more fantastical story, and it represents a radical ad-hoc shift of the goalposts. The argument is that Ukraine doesn’t actually need to advance to the sea and physically cut the land bridge, all it has to do is get the Russian supply routes within firing range to cut off Russian troops. This theory has been advance liberally on Twitter X and by personalities like Peter Zeihan (a man who knows nothing about military affairs).

There are many problems with this line of thought, most of which stem from an inflated notion of “fire control.” To put it simply, being “in range” of artillery fire does not imply effective area denial or severed supply lines. If that were the case, Ukraine would be unable to attack out of Orikhiv at all, since the entire axis of approach is within Russian firing range. In Bakhmut, the AFU continued to fight long after their main supply routes came under Russian shelling.

The simple fact is that most military tasks are conducted within range of at least some of the enemy’s ranged fires, and the idea that Russia will collapse if the AFU manages to put a shell on the Azov coastal highway is fairly ridiculous. In fact, Russia’s main rail line is already within range of Ukrainian HIMARS, and the Ukrainians have successfully launched strikes on coastal cities like Berdyansk. Meanwhile, Russia strikes at Ukrainian sustainment infrastructure with regularity – yet neither army has collapsed yet. This is because ranged fires are a tool to improve attritional calculus and further operational goals – they do not magically win wars just by tagging the enemy’s supply roads.

Let’s be charitable though, and indulge this line of thinking. Suppose the Ukrainians managed to advance – not all the way to the coast, but far enough to bring Russia’s main supply routes within range of artillery. What would they do? Wheel up a battery of howitzers, park them at the very front line, and begin firing nonstop at the road? What do you think would happen to those howitzers? Counterbattery systems would surely set upon them. The idea that you can just haul up a big gun and start taking potshots at Russian supply trucks is really quite childish. Putting enemy forces out of supply has always required physically blocking transit, and that’s what Ukraine will have to do if they want to cut Russia’s land bridge.

The Distraction

I am cognizant of the fact that I would be raked over the coals if I failed to discuss a secondary area of Ukrainian effort, farther to the east in Donestk oblast. Here, the Ukrainians have worked their way a good distance up the highway out of the town of Velyka Novosilka capturing several settlements.

The problem with this “other” Ukrainian attack is that it is, in a word, inconsequential. This axis of advance is operationally sterile in a very fundamental way, as it involves pushing groups up a narrow corridor of road that doesn’t lead anywhere important. As in the Robotyne sector, the AFU is still quite some distance from any of the serious Russian fortifications, and to make matters worse the road and settlements on this axis lay along a small river. Rivers, as we know, flow along the floor of the terrain, which means the roadway sits at the bottom of a wadis/embakement/glacis, choose your terminology. In fact, the road network as such consists of nothing except a single-lane roadway on either side of the river.

My reading of this axis is essentially that it was intended as a feint to create some semblance of operational confusion, but when the primary effort on the Orikhiv axis turned into a colossal misfire, the decision was made to continue to press here simply for narrative purposes. Ultimately, this is simply not an axis of advance that can exert a meaningful influence on the wider war. The forces deployed here are relatively miniscule in the grand scope of things, and they aren’t going anywhere important. Certainly, a thin, needlelike penetration is not going to drive more than 80 kilometers down a single lane road to the sea and win the war.

Conclusion: Finger Pointing

One of the surest signs that Ukraine’s counteroffensive has taken a cataclysmic turn is the way Kiev and Washington have already begun to blame each other, conducting a postmortem while the body is still warm. Zelensky has blamed the west for being too slow to deliver the requisite equipment and ammunition, arguing that unacceptable delays allowed the Russians to improve their defenses. This strikes me as rather obscene and ungrateful. NATO built Ukraine a new army from scratch in a process that already required greatly truncating the training times.

On the other hand, western experts have begun to blame Ukraine for supposedly being unable to adopt “combined arms warfare”. This is really a very nonsensical attempt to use jargon (incorrectly) to explain away problems. Combined arms simply means the integration and simultaneous use of various arms like armor, infantry, artillery, and air assets. Claiming that Ukraine and Russia are somehow cognitively or institutionally incapable of this is extremely silly. The Red Army had a complex and extremely thorough doctrine of combined arms operation. One professor at the US Arms School of Advanced Military Studies said: “The single most coherent core of theoretical writings on operational art is still found among the Soviet writers.” The idea that combined arms is some foreign and novel concept to Soviet officers (a caste that includes the Russian and Ukrainian high command) is ridiculous.

This issue is not some sort of Ukrainian doctrinal obstinacy, but a combination of structural factors rooted in the insufficiency of Ukrainian combat power and the changing face of warfare.

It’s frankly a little silly to say that Ukraine needs to learn about “combined arms” when they are very simply lacking important capabilities that would make a successful maneuver campaign possible – namely, adequate ranged fires, a functioning air force (and no, F-16’s will not fix this), engineering, and electronic warfare. The issue very fundamentally is not one of doctrinal flexibility, but of capability. By way of analogy, this is a bit like sending a boxer out to fight with a broken arm, and then critiquing his technique. The problem is not his technique – the problem is that he’s injured and materially weaker than his opponent. So too, the problem for Ukraine is not that they are incapable of coordinating arms, the problem is that their arms are shattered.

Secondly – and this, I admit, is rather shocking to me – western observers do not seem open to the possibility that the accuracy of modern ranged fires (be it Lancet drones, guided artillery shells, or GMLRS rockets) combined with the density of ISR systems may simply make it impossible to conduct sweeping mobile operations, except in very specific circumstances. When the enemy has the capacity to surveil staging areas, strike rear area infrastructure with cruise missiles and drones, precisely saturate approach lines with artillery fire, and soak the earth in mines, how exactly can it be possible to maneuver?

Combined arms and maneuver are predicated on the ability to rapidly concentrate enormous fighting power and attack with great violence at narrow points. This is probably impossible given the density of Russian surveillance, firepower, and the many obstacles they have put up to deny Ukrainian freedom of movement and scleroticize their activity. The main examples of maneuver in recent western memory – the campaigns in Iraq – have only tenuous relevance to circumstances in Zaporizhia.

Ultimately, we have returned to a war of mass – particularly massed ISR assets and fires. The only way Ukraine can maneuver the way they want is to break open the front, and they can only do this with more of everything – more mine clearing equipment, more shells and tubes, more rocketry, more armor. Only mass can crack open a suitable breach in the Russian lines. Otherwise, they are stuck in a positional creep through the dense Russian defenses, and criticizing them for being unable to grasp some sort of magical western notion of “combined arms” is the strangest sort of finger pointing.

So, whence goes the war from here? Well, the obvious question to ask is whether we believe Ukraine will ever have a more potent assault package than the one they started the summer with. The answer clearly seems to be no. It was like pulling teeth to scrape together these understrength brigades – the idea that, following on a defeat in the Battle of Zaporizhia, NATO will somehow put together a more powerful package seems like a stretch. More to the point, we have American officials saying fairly explicitly that this was the best mechanized package Ukraine was going to get.

It does not seem controversial to say that this was Ukraine’s best shot at some sort of genuine operational victory, which at this point seems to be slowly trickling away into modest but materially costly tactical advances. The ultimate implication of this is that Ukraine is unable to escape a war of industrial attrition, which is precisely the sort of war that it cannot win, due to all the asymmetries that we mentioned earlier.

In particular, however, Ukraine cannot win a positional-attritional war because of its own maximalist definition of “winning.” Since Kiev has insisted that it will not give up until it returns its 1991 borders, an inability to dislodge Russian forces poses a particularly nasty problem – Kiev will either need to admit defeat and acknowledge Russian control over the annexed areas, or it will continue to fight obstinately until it is a failed state with nothing left in the tank.

Trapped in a bat fight, with attempts to unlock the front with maneuver coming to naught, what Ukraine needs most is a much bigger bat. The alternative is a totalizing strategic disaster.

“Be all that you can be”

It’s coming up on another presidential election year — so time to spin up another pandemic?

Tale as old as time, death as old as rhyme: When the rich play God, it’s the poor who die.

Indeed, let’s reprise a Dan Sirotkin, a damaged soul, and replay his thoughts regarding CoVid-19 1.0: https://harvard2thebighouse.substack.com/p/understanding-covid-19-and-seasonal

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Golden Silkworms in Pandora’s Box

Why understanding COVID-19 and Seasonal Influenza as Quasispecies Mutant Swarms reveals the Quantum Origins and Cryptic Fates of Human Pandemics.

APR 1, 2021

What happens when dangerous and unproven scientific research techniques meet the military-industrial complex? Are modern research scientists still controlled by any code of ethics at all?

Is the COVID-19 Pandemic an inevitable product of the “Publish-or-Perish” mentality that’s turning both academia and popular journalism into factory farms whose primary goal is monetization – not the public good?

Answering these questions will reveal the ties that bind together the histories of mysterious military illnesses, the emergence of HIV, the source of the 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic, anal swabs, COVID-19’s origins, Original Antigenic Sin, both the SARS and MERS Outbreaks, the 2009 Swine Flu Pandemic, as well as experimental but profitable vaccination protocols – all to the fates of those who would put fame and fortune over human life and academic ethics.

SPOILER ALERT: SARS-CoV-2 is a circulating vaccine-derived-coronavirus (cVDCV) borne from work originally done at UNC, the only institution on earth that’s publicly been attempting to design a live-attenuated vaccine for SARS, where they also pioneered engineering the SARS-like chimeric coronaviruses that would be needed as templates for attenuation, and did their best to ignore or circumvent restrictions on gain-of-function research – obfuscation that’s still ongoing as they refuse to disclose genomic details relating to lab accidents that occurred during the above publicly-funded research.

Notorious researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology were associated with this controversial work on coronaviruses, and attempted to continue it with an experimental oral live-attenuated SARS-like vaccination program for the Chinese Military without accounting for the quantum nature of the underlying quasispecies behavior – once they realized what was going on and deattenuation was already occurring out-of-control after the Wuhan Military Games, they reopened contact with Dr. Charles Lieber due to his work on virus-distinguishing nanowires, eventually leading to his arrest and the beginning of the largest and most coordinated cover-up in world history.

Carried-out by the pharmaceutical and defense entities involved in this research, both of which want attention pulled away from serial passage and experimental vaccine work, as do the billionaire class that wants to use gain-of-function research for unrestricted tinkering into the human genome at the Broad Institute.  

Tale as old as time, death as old as rhyme: When the rich play God, it’s the poor who die.

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Part I – Monkeys and Manias.

    Few things are more terrifying than being an exhausted fat kid about three-quarters of the way into your first 5k cross-country race when it’s being hosted at Fort Detrick, and you spent the previous night reading about the possibility of Ebola-infected monkeys escaping from military research facilities just like this one – potentially setting off a global pandemic as depicted in The Hot Zone.

So as the last few hundred yards go into a gully stretching past fencing that’s ominously topped with several rows of concertina wire, and your left calf starts cramping right as something rustles angrily towards you in the overgrowth behind the fence, you realize that you can in fact keep going after you think you feel the hot hungry breathe of a pandemically diseased lab monkey growing closer – ready to bite you and start an infection that results in blood violently fountaining out of your mouth and anus like some kind of terrible reverse-hemorrhagic Chinese-fingercuffs, uncontrollably spraying nearby runners with the disease and seeding a global pandemic and the death of millions.

Even for a fat kid, that’d be a heavy burden to bear, and so you keep running until you reach the finish line, glancing over your shoulder as you collapse into the grass to make sure no Ebola-crazed simians are after you. But the good news about finishing a cross-country race in last place is it means no one else is coming – definitely no escaped monkeys, and so it seems safe to forget about escaped lab animals and pandemics, at least for a little while. 

Most kids of the past couple generations growing up with a parent involved with scientific research were probably more aware than most of their friends about the plight of lab animals, since at some point watching The Secrets of NIMH probably got you thinking about the suffering that can be shared by all intelligent creatures. But then a few years later, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles likely put a lighter spin on the whole idea, and you don’t worry about technological progress so much. And then maybe later on down the road there was some exposure to factory farming, a different side of the same industrialized hyper-populated coin, and some dabbling in vegetarianism until the smell at the National Capitol Barbeque just became too much. 

However at some point you realize that modern civilization doesn’t happen without humans bending Nature to our will as much as we possibly can, in a way that’s a defining characteristic of civilization itself, and you go about your life. Luckily for many of us, we were born into an era of modern medicine that’s demonstrated mankind’s inherent superiority over whatever Nature can throw at us, starting with plant domestication and animal husbandry forming the underpinnings of civilization itself, and continuing until today where farm animals are packed into once unimaginable densities, and laboratory animals are getting shanghaied into sprouting entire human organs to and having our genes spliced directly into them so they can be used for vaccines and other medical wonders.

But it turns out, under the wrong conditions, some the same principles which make the established childhood vaccination protocols so important and so safe can begin to rub up against the hubris of our modernity, and start to smolder. And when it begins to sense enough smoke, a very ancient miasma begins to unfurl from its slumber, soon noticing the burning hunger that’s been building since the last time we woke it up with our collective drive for domination and plunder.

The science underpinning modern medicine would’ve seemed like magic just a few generations ago, and even understanding the mechanisms behind many phenomena – it still often does. And yet modern science seems to have forgotten about one of the older lessons in magic, which was likely rooted in a fundamental understanding of the natural order of things: Nothing comes without its price.

Then in the latter part of 2019, a stark reminder of this natural balance would appear in Wuhan, China and soon spread to the rest of the world in the first recorded pandemic created by a coronavirus in human history. But to understand what it’s trying to tell us, it’s important to try and hear what it was trying to say the first few times around.

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1.      “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.”

     Although the speech this quote immediately elicits occurred a few decades before the War of the Roses, Shakespeare’s appropriation of it ensured that it would’ve been running through the souls of the soldiers fighting there just as it was during the Battle of Agincourt a few decades later. And although these words were addressed to English troops, these conflicts documented for the first time that there was a much more influential and mysterious band of brothers on the battlefield besides the ones doing the fighting – as the emergence of a bizarre illness was used by one of the English Lords as a reason to pull out of the battle shortly before it began, almost certainly changing the tide of the entire war, and all of our shared history.

1485 marked a temporary end to the successional struggle for England’s crown, but also the start of a series of five mysterious endemics that came to collectively be known as the English Sweat, which seemed to be heavily correlated with previous periods of heavy rainfall followed by intense human activity. By 1604 it had become such a ubiquitous force across England that the Bard mentioned it intentionally in another play, this time as a central force of social decay: “…what with the war, what with the sweat, what with the gallows, and what with poverty.”

Part of the terror it inspired was due to its lethality, it would typically kill its victims within 24 hours – chills, tremors, fever, a rash, sweating, then the Reaper – and its mortality rate is generally agreed upon to have been somewhere between 30% and 50%. The second horrifying factor was its apparent genocidal intent – for reasons that have never been explained at all until now, the English Sweat got its nationality not only because that’s where it began, but because as many historical observers inquisitively noted: It only ever appeared to kill the English, every other nationality appeared to be spared while on English soil.

And since its outbreaks often began in direct correlation to war, other nations would call it “Military Fever” when it sparked up on their soil, the moniker it took as one of its more continental strains killed Mozart. This martial connection was an inescapable one to make, as this first outbreak followed the victorious army back to London, where it burnt across the public throngs gathered in the thousands around their barracks to celebrate the victory.

Then, during its 1508 occurrence, it would demonstrate an important demographic flashpoint as its embers would float across the English Channel and land at the Pas-de-Calais. Yet even here across the Channel and on French land, it would still only kill the English. Burning white-hot when it appeared, the English Sweat appeared in intervals of roughly either 10 or 20 years, not targeting the young and vulnerable or old and infirm like most diseases, but instead the “middle-aged, professionally active section of the population,” or those gathered in close quarters like the military and monks.

The English Sweat is the first modern record of a paradoxical immunological puzzle being linked to a military setting, but it certainly wasn’t the first disease, and wouldn’t be the last riddle.

       1.1 War is a disease.

     Human influenza can be traced with reasonable certainty back to the Trojan War over 3,000 years ago, the first time it appears to enter the historical record with any reliability. A millennium or so later around the time of the Late Bronze Age Collapse, smallpox would leave its scars on a mummified Pharaoh, and other diseases suspected to be tularemia and the plague would also ravage those ancient battlefields.

Once the Roman Empire emerged, its armies too eventually fell victim, along with the empire itself, to wave after wave of diseases. One of the most lethal, the Antonine Plague, was thought to have started during the siege of a Mesopotamian city and then spread across the entire Empire – likely smallpox or one of its close relatives helping bring another Empire into an early grave.

And over 500 years after the English Sweat emerged, the world’s militaries would still be battling disease as much as each other, and in 1954 the U.S. Navy and Marines would begin their influenza vaccination programs since the inescapably packed conditions of ocean-bound naval vessels made for giant Petri dishes, mimicking the conditions found on commercial farms – making an airborne pathogen like influenza the primary concern since by the 20th century, modern militaries and societies have largely learned to remove intermediate animal vectors like mice.

So in 1996 when the military noticed that the USS Arkansas suffered a serious outbreak of influenza that affected at least 42% of her crew despite the fact that 95% had been properly vaccinated prior to departure, scientists were left largely scratching their heads. All of their analysis seemed to indicate that the vaccine should have covered the strains that were circulating, and so there didn’t seem to be any answer as to why so many seamen got so sick.

However in the decades to come it’s the exact same puzzle that would be faced on densely packed poultry farms where influenza transmission is also inescapable, and its an answer that will unlock the origins of both the 1918 Spanish Flu as well as the COVID-19 Pandemic with a combination that involves the inevitable consequences of a world that grows continually more densely packed with humanity, and the never-ending push to develop new and improved experimental vaccines for profit and plunder.       

Microbiology first took the world by storm in 1880 when Louis Pasteur demonstrated that it was microbes – invisible to the naked eye – which were responsible not only for the sickness and disease which haunted the poor and unfortunate, something no one really worried about too much, but also led to the destruction of silk and wine farms.

Now that luxury items were demonstrated to be targeted by microbes in addition to the poor, the world took notice – since now dollar signs could be placed on the science. Not for the first time, and certainly not the last.

Although it became a bit of a long road, Pasteur had stumbled across the theory of attenuation after he used some of the chicken cholera that he’d been using to basically just Mengele chickens to death with, which had been laying out exposed to the elements, to dose some chickens with, and then went on summer vacation. Returning to his lab, the chickens exposed to the weakened virus were the only leftover poultry, so by default he chose them for the first round of testing his full-strength strain of cholera against, and noticed that not only did they survive – they hardly even got sick.

Realizing that leaving the cholera out in the elements had effectively weakened it and allowed the chickens exposed to its weakened form to develop resistance to it without killing them, Pasteur coined the term “attenuation” to describe a lesser version of the process that took his name, of totally sterilizing something – Pasteurization. So it was attenuation, originally of the cholera bacteria, that allowed for bespoke live-attenuated vaccines (LAVs) to first be designed against bacteria and then against viruses. Prior to this, variolation could only offer protection against a virus if a safe close cousin was hosted by livestock like with cowpox and smallpox, but mastering attenuating LAVs opened the door to creating extremely effective vaccines for every single virus out there.

So although the scientific world took a fair amount of convincing, Pasteur eventually demonstrated the efficacy of his chicken cholera LAV, and would eventually devise an ingenious LAV against the rabies virus that was sent through rabbit cells to weaken it down, that could even be used post-exposure on both dogs and humans. Rabies was likely the easiest target to attenuate down into a LAV because it presents to often in its highly-pathogenic and zoonotic state, as the virus drives its host to the horribly hallmark of foamy madness that makes this highly-pathogenic state – which displays the full range of epitopes the immune system would need to learn to target – so easy to identify and get samples from. Other LAVs were either created from viruses that also naturally presented in their highly-pathogenic state, like the highly lethal strain of Yellow Fever used for its LAV, or would use multiple strains to mimic this state and present the full range of epitopes that way, the strategy taken against Polio.

And as fate would have, the very first life that revolutionary live-attenuated vaccine saved was of a little boy who would grow up to be the man who would refuse the Nazis entrance into Pasteur’s crypt, committing suicide fifty-five years after the scientist had saved his young life, in an attempt to keep his genius out of Nazi hands. But unfortunately for undesirables everywhere, the Nazis wouldn’t need Pasteur’s ideas to inflict levels of suffering that only the organization and mechanization of the industrial world could make possible, and during World War II the Japanese would use another pathogen Pasteur had devised a vaccine against – anthrax which the Japanese military first tested on POWs – to kill enemy troops for the first time, as the Chinese became the first victims of the modern age of intentionally-isolated biological warfare. 

But back in 16th century England, it wouldn’t be until 1551, the start of its last endemic, that the English Sweat appears to have dissipated from history. The best guess scientists have come up with for its entire mysterious existence is that it was caused by a rodent-borne RNA virus known as a hantavirus that causes hemorrhagic fever, since rodents would’ve been expected to proliferate after heavy rainfall, can transmit hantaviruses through their wastes or bites, and the clinical presentations largely line up. However this is very much a guess, since nothing about hantaviruses – or any pathogen as they’re currently understood – can yet explain why only the English were targeted, nor the way isolated pockets of the diseases would flare up independently from each other, and then each endemic would burn with apparently random intensities of sickness and death, with no apparent pattern of transmission across time or location.

Although it would flare up at population centers, there was no evidence of anything resembling the steady and mostly linear transmission of a pathogen that would be expected from typical immunological modeling – especially not how it could possibly drift from England across the Channel at the Pas-de-Calais, and decide to only kill the Englishmen gathered there. Unfortunately, since genomic sequencing was still a few hundred years away, it’s unlikely we’ll ever know for certain where the English Sweat came from, or where it went.

However there’s a chance that if we stare hard enough into this historical miasma, we’ll be able to hear our future squeaking back at us.   

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2.      “Appear weak when you are strong, and strong when you are weak.”

     Although it was once considered eradicated, in recent years an increasing number of cases of poliomyelitis – polio’s terrible paralytic curse – have emerged in the developing world after remnants of the three highly attenuated Oral Polio Vaccine (OPV) live-attenuated virus strains used to inoculate children managed to escape into the population, circulating and mutating and deattenuating enough to eventually establish active human infections.

This novel global phenomenon would’ve been anticipated by the late U.S. Army Major Dr. Albert Sabin, who served in the Pacific Theater and designed the OPV-LAV protocol in the 1950s to compliment the inactivated vaccine which didn’t quite seem to be enough to fully eradicate the slippery disease. Dr. Sabin would’ve been well-aware of the risks involved with attempting to design a LAV against RNA viruses like Polio, since back in 1935 an experimental polio LAV had deattenuated back to full neurovirulence, and killed five of the several thousand children inoculated with it in Philadelphia.

So several years later in the 1950s, Sabin was careful to make sure the three strains he chose for his viral swarm would be unable to reassemble themselves to fully-virulent polio after it’d been attenuated down into a LAV – since the risks of improperly designing an experimental LAVs had been readily apparent for years, even all the way back then.

Even before today’s age of bespoke genetic engineering, live-attenuated vaccines were seen as extremely delicate and immunologically volatile. The slow unpredictable specter of deattenuation had already shown itself in that orphanage, however history would demonstrate that it wouldn’t be anywhere near enough horror to prevent the envelope from being pushed until the friction lit it on fire. In a few more decades, the profound and intense risks around attempting to splice the genes from an animal virus into Sabin’s perfectly-good OPV-LAV vaccine would trigger the Asilomar Conference, at which point the scientific community thought they had things under control – but more about that in just a few moments.

So to be fair, it took nearly three-quarters of a century after its initial design and implementation, until 2017, for Sabin’s OPV-LAV to deattenuate enough to create more new cases of polomyetis than natural polio, and even then it was only handfuls of each. In the meantime, untold millions were saved from debilitating paralysis, and the disease has been all-but eradicated except in these small pockets of deattenuated vaccine-derived polio virus (VDPV). Sabin’s protocol was invented to complement the existing approach which used an inactivated strain attenuated past the point of death, which provided broad protection but not as effectively as Sabin’s interwoven three live-but-neutralized-strains in the oral OPV protocol that took his name. His LAV was meant to be the last nail in Polio’s coffin: It provided a more effective vaccine to protect troops from a disease that thrived in crowded military conditions, and the public health community with the last tool they’d need to eradiate the virus.

In theory.

However the paradoxical phenomenon of paralytic polomyetis reassembling itself within vaccinated populations has exploded since 2017, and by 2019 there were 176 cases of polomyetis derived from the OPV strain worldwide when only 33 had been seen the year prior, and outbreaks of poliomyelitis have recently been seen in Egypt, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, the Philippines, and Madagascar.

       2.1 – Memories of virulence gone past.

    This paradoxical ability, for attenuated viral strains to deattenuate back into their original fully-virulent parent strain – much like the T-1000 was able to mercurially reassemble itself in the sequel to The Terminator – can be explained by examining polio and other RNA viruses not as discrete linear genotypes transmitted on by discrete strains, but instead as quasispecies mutant swarms of virions which carry distinct but complimentary sets of alleles, which work in concert in real-time to establish and expand infections. One of the first empirical changes that comes once you consider an RNA virus as a quasispecies swarm is that at any point in time, all the extant variants’ genomes form a collective probability cloud that serves as the smallest selective unit, as opposed to using individual virions or any single extant genome in a population, the classical approach. 

This quasispecies viral swarming is an amorphous behavior that describes the search for fitness that occurs as each successive generation of the swarm produces wider spectra of mutations, with the term “quasispecies” specifically describing “distributions of non-identical but related genomes subjected to a continuous process of genetic variation, competition, and selection, and which act as a unit of selection.” Each of these distributions can be considered as overlapping clouds of allelic statistical possibilities, each of which represents the spectrum of mutations that can be expected to emerge within a set number of generations – so their ratios will be constantly changing over successive generations and in different settings.

This type of effect has just begun to be explored within the classical model, by quantifying the antigenic waves that shimmer across the surface of quasispecies mutant swarms as they shift between the host populations, and using these measurements to indirectly measure the quasispecies swarm itself. These antigenic waves have been observed to shift between populations of viruses and host during the search for adaptation, and after intense mathematical analysis this model concludes that if an antigenic wave is transmitting itself to many different hosts all at once and spitting-off multiple “lineage speciations,” so the overall complexity of the quasispecies swarm is increasing, it’s likely to continually build on itself until either transmission stops or new variants fail to emerge.

However this field is in its infancy, and besides without fully sampling a COVID-19 infection to get a completely representative sample of its quasispecies infective swarm, it will be impossible to accurately calculate anything at all.

The linear model of virology that’s been classically used presents the illusion of control, it entirely ignores the reality that the process of sampling a virus from a live host and then isolating it within a Petri dish so it can be studied and quantified is an extremely rough and loose process. And there is evidence that today’s commonly used metagenomic tools are in fact missing many of the extant viral strains, since “the large proportion of low-frequency variants and their dynamic change in frequency (e.g., by comparing sequential samples from a virus replicating in cell culture or in a live host organism) currently being revealed by ultra-deep sequencing portray a level of complexity not contemplated in the concept of genetic polymorphism of population genetics, at least as classically formulated.”

So hopefully scientists trained in the classical model can be honest about the reality that the tools they’ve always used are incredibly rough and might well be missing some of the nuance going on. Unless each and every scientist out there can confidently state that nothing about how this pandemic has unfolded has surprised them.

      2.2 – “We don’t need no water…”

     With viruses replicating continually once a successful infection has set in and begun to smolder, the most-fit variant for a given tissue will predominate in that exact tissue when a sample is taken only from it. However, although only one variant will appear in the smoky quasispecies mutant swarm infecting this tissue-type, the smoldering infection will be continually throwing off new variants which represent different points in the possible mutational spectrum – some of which will be better adapted to neighboring tissues, and others acting as accelerants for the predominate variant, and intensifying its virulence.

Granted, the temperatures involved are in far different ranges, but a recent pre-print demonstrates that SARS-CoV-2’s various strains’ spike-proteins’ ability to infect different types of cell tissue changes depending on the temperature, with far different virulence at about 91-degrees Fahrenheit than at about 99 degrees depending on the strain involved. And further adding to the novel coronavirus’s potential for immunological conflagration, is the the fact it’s able to replicate 10-times more efficiently than SARS-CoV in the average temperature encountered in our upper respiratory tracts.

The idea of different variants acting as accelerants isn’t commonly used, but it fits the language humans have historically used: Infections sparking up out of nowhere, and burning through populations, and diseases appearing suddenly from sinister gaseous miasmatic vapors. And it fits the picture presented by the overall biochemistry: Successful viral entry into a cell requires the same underlying chemical principles of entropy and heat exchange as sparking and maintaining a fire, where just like a fire: a viral infection will begin destroying its host to make more of itself. Also demonstrating that it works via immunological conflagration, SARS-CoV-2 appears to prefer to begin its infection in the relatively hospitable nasal cavities that can host infections at low temperatures, before different variants are produced which allow it to invade tissue deeper in the body which require variants able to infect and biochemically burn at hotter temperatures.

And just like one gas acting as an accelerant for another’s combustion can be modeled mathematically by looking at their relative binding tendencies to different elements and how they react at different concentrations, the mathematical inevitability of quasispecies mutant swarms fully exploring their mutational spectrum and finding variants to fuel their spread isn’t any different. It’s only the language that varies, as the literature currently describes the positive selection from quasispecies mutant variants resulting in “hitchhiking” between mutations on variants in the same swarm, the exact same concept as different variants and their mutations acting as accelerates for each other during gaseous chemical combustion.

So if this model was accurate, we’d expect the first notable beneficial mutation – D614G – to fit within it pretty well. And it turns out, this variant’s adaptive advantage in fact comes from handling the body’s chemical temperature more effectively, allowing quasispecies clouds hosting it to create a “hotter” infection.

Or in a more classical sense, quasispecies mutant swarms likely depend on a sort of accidentally eusocial viral altruism to prosper. Variants don’t exist in a vacuum, they work with their close cousins to most-effectively invade new tissue-types, and so “internal interactions of cooperation or interference can be established in what has been called the social behavior of viral populations.”

As one study revealed, although its usually possible to identify a majority consensus sequences from a sample of hosts infected by COVID-19, the sample had a broad median variant count of 23, with nearly 250 different variants found in total. And considering that about half of the observed mutations thought to have a significant impact on gene expression and samples differing throughout the day even in the same organ system, as well as the fact that barely 2% of the minority variants were found to overlap at all between any two hosts – the inherently nebulous quasispecies mutant swarming nature of SARS-CoV-2 begins to coalesce even more.

Finally, although it’s hasn’t been studied as much yet, this more combustion-based model turns the current models of viral fevers on its head – instead of fevers emerging as the body’s attempt to fight off the virus, fevers may be viruses’ way of allowing for infections to spread into different tissue types deeper in the body. And so although they may appear to reduce the ability of the first infecting low-temperature variant to occupy the nasal tissue where it usually lands, as this is happening variants which can infect warmer tissue are pushing their way deeper into the fevered body.

And with any virus, but especially with coronaviruses, it’s important to keep in mind that hidden within their large genomes are entire suites of accessory genes which only appear functional while actually living inside their hosts, in vivo, and whose function won’t be observable within the virtual environment in lab Petri dishes, in vitro: “the coronavirus group-specific genes are not essential for growth in cell culture but function in virus-host interactions.”

Incidentally, another paper attempting to immunize against that highly-airborne coronavirus goes on to explain that when an experimental spike-protein only vaccine was tried against a highly-airborne feline coronavirus – immunoglobulin was thrown out of wack and 80% of the kittens it was administered to died inside a month. But don’t worry, Big Pharma has crossed its collective fingers and is hoping really, really hard that this exact same phenomenon doesn’t occur at some point down the road within human populations vaccinated with a spike-protein only vaccine against our novel highly-airborne coronavirus.

But this effect can’t be expected to appear immediately with SARS-CoV-2, since like all deattenuating LAVs it won’t reach full virulence until it’s fully reconstituted itself back to its original full-strength form – an enigmatic process that’s explained below, and which is still ongoing as transmission events occur in their millions all across the Earth.

So although SARS-CoV-2 may not seem terribly virulent in its initial chronic stage yet, you should probably keep in mind that attenuating the LAV for Yellow Fever took hundreds of passages through five different types of cells – including those from monkeys, mice, and chickens – in a process invented about 100 years ago. Meaning this novel coronavirus likely has a very long way to go before it can reconstitute itself back to its original strongest viral swarm, since it almost certainly went through an even more extensive attenuation process involving cutting-edge modern virological technology developed over the intervening century.

And it’s worth taking a moment to point out that the Yellow Fever virus used for this attenuation wasn’t exactly a naturally occurring virus, it was the result of sending the highly-pathogenic “Asibi” Yellow Fever virus – with a 95% kill rate in monkeys – through serial passage, until a chimeric recombinant virus now called 17D, which presumably expresses a wide range of genes, was produced – ideal since those genes would provide the necessary signaling-flags for our immune system to target after it’s attenuated down into a LAV. Which is very close to what Ralph Baric was doing serially passaging SARS-like viruses at UNC to see which genes got swapped around, but more about that soon. And in the case of Sabin’s first LAV for Polio, that version of OPV required three different strains to get all of the necessary epitopes, or immunology signaling-flags, which accomplishes the same affect as an artificial chimera expressing all of those epitopes at once would.

Within their hosts in vivo, examining RNA viruses as quasispecies mutant swarms reveals that “viral types and subtypes are just the ‘tip of the iceberg’ of a more profound and fundamental phenomenon: the continuous dynamics of mutant generation, competition, selection and random events which push viral quasispecies towards diversification.” However the complete nature of a quasispecies mutant swarm will never be revealed inside of the petri dish, or any lab at all unless ethics rules are adjusted, since without a population of live hosts to transmit between, an RNA virus will never use the variant potential of its entire genome and reveal the full extent of its quasispecies swarming abilities.

So long as an RNA virus is able to find new hosts to infect and so can continue replicating, its quasispecies mutant swarm won’t attenuate upon continual replication and new host introduction, and its mutational cloud will continue to grow in diversity as the swarm grows in variant-derived complexity. And as these quasispecies mutant swarms get larger, by definition they also become more variegated, and eventually more virulent once transmission begins. 

        2.3 – Time for life to spark.

     Avian influenzas don’t magically attenuate over time on crowded industrial poultry farms, they’re now ubiquitous and growing more virulent there because the population densities involved mean that the quasispecies swarms of the avian influenzas infecting them have an unlimited supply of hosts and so never stop mutating toward highly pathogenic states, where a 50% fatality rate can be a best-case scenario. In a sense there’s an immunological pressure that slowly begins to build after population densities become unnaturally high, until it explodes with the emergence of a highly pathogenic strain that burns through an entire farm, generally killing at least half the flock and sometimes all of it.

The passage of time is a critical concept in quasispecies viral swarming behavior, as with enough generations a single viral genome of every major class of RNA virus has been shown to eventually give rise to a distribution of possible mutants which represent variation that is not immediately apparent from its genome. Whereas genomes made from DNA carry much of the code for the variation that exists in a given population even though each and every individual does not express it in a given lifetime.

RNA viruses replicate constantly inside of their hosts and do not have episodic sexual exchanges like most DNA-based organisms, underlying the fundamental need to approach RNA viruses from the ongoing and amorphous quasispecies perspective which views their evolution as the shifting spectrum formed from ratios of alleles in competition and cooperation, more than the largely polarized expectations of the discrete haplotypes found with DNA heredity. In a broad sense, the behavior of a mutant cloud of 100 variants with a relatively narrow spectrum attempting to infect human tissue over the course of a day, would roughly represent the genetic activity of a tribe of several hundred people attempting to survive in their environment over the course of dozens of generations.

And in a sense, the process of mammalian fertilization can be seen as a short term and accentuated mutant swarm. Although only one gamete is required to fertilize the egg, it does not complete its journey alone and needs its motile brethren to deal with host immune defenses and act as cannon fodder. So although quasispecies swarms always have multiple extant variants inside any one host at a given time, and mammalian zygotes host just one DNA-based genome, a mammalian father producing multiple offspring is also diffusing his genome into a swarm of variants – the winner is just declared one generation at a time.

This fundamentally amorphous nature of RNA virus genomes means that the quasispecies approach invalidates the idea of a singular “wild type” isolate genome with one immutable nucleotide sequence described as the contagion at any one moment in time. Because under this approach, every RNA virus is by definition a swarming ever-changing mutant cloud of quasispecies virions, in part because “RNA viruses, whether replicating in changing or static environments, keep a sustained level of genetic heterogeneity that maintains their capacity to respond to constraints.” This results in a quantum uncertainty around exactly which section of the cloud is being observed at any one moment, a cloud which will be different the next time you sample it regardless of how representative you think the sample you first sampled was.

This more statistical and fundamentally quantum approach to exploring the evolution of RNA viruses was suggested by Francis Crick to Dr. Manfred Eigen over an otherwise uneventful breakfast in 1971, and seemed promising given the results already obtained by Sol Spiegelman and colleagues from serial transfer experiments of RNA taken from a virus that infects bacteria in a closed system, which demonstrated Darwinian behavior in vitro. Eigen applied a statistical framework to Darwin’s expectations, and formulated an origin of life that used the replication and adaptability of self-organizing macromolecules to argue that they may have served as something akin to proto-RNA.

With an apparent drive towards complexity and the ability to self-replicate, RNA viruses form quasispecies clouds or swarms which evolve towards a composition and a mutation rate that leads to the ratio of variants with various levels of fitness for adaptation to its host population, values that are subject to change as the living and variable ecosystem of individuals they are being hosted in itself changes. These early findings were reinforced about half a century later, when in 2021 nuanced experimentation on molecules composed of just a few repeating units, whose behavior was expected to mimic the chemical precursors of RNA and DNA, displayed the ability to undergo a quasi-selective process involving the selection of more stable and ordered elementary structures based on even the most miniscule selective pressures, accompanied by the overall reduction in randomness which would be expected from complexifying life.

It’s not proof, but the fundamentally quantum behavior underlying quasispecies mutant swarms likely helped spark life itself. And this wouldn’t be the first-time quantum effects showed up in fundamental biological processes, as they’ve been identified as playing roles in a vast array of fundamental processes: photosynthesis, tadpole maturation, human smell, and avian navigation, and are beginning to show flickers within neurobiology as well as Sir Roger Penrose has proposed that human consciousness emerges from neural-anatomical structures with ability to host quantum behavior.

And so it shouldn’t come as a surprise to find a fundamental framework from physics making its way into some fundamental biology as well, as our understanding of the forces in play becomes more granular and the math more precise.

    2.4 – The price of Original Sin.

     Although quasispecies theory is framed within a world of infinite possible generations, this approach to viral population genomics examines a virus not as any one discrete immutable genome, but instead as nebulous and mercurial quantum clouds of variants looking to find the highest shared fitness among a given population of hosts, variants which are able to swarm together in search of the highest collective fitness, looking to burn hotter than the host can defend itself against in a perpetual immunological arms-race.

And as masterfully captured in the case of the OPV-LAV strains which are able to deattenuate back to fully virulent polio like the T-1000 merging from thousands of shattered bits back into a whole, RNA viruses also seem to carry a “memory” of this past peak fitness state which doesn’t fade with time, a memory they are able to use as a selective shortcut when looking for the most adaptive mutations back to their original state.

This apparent memory of past viral fitness, the ability for an RNA virus to reassemble itself into its fully virulent original full-strength viral V-1000 form, may have evolved as a counterbalance to Original Antigenic Sin, a form of defensive host immune memory which causes many vertebral immune systems to produce bespoke ancestral antibodies tailored to mount an immune defense against the original example of any given class of virus, even when a different species within the same class infects it.

The best example of this is the mercurial H1N1 influenza variant behind the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic, which effectively formed the V-1000 godfather that gave birth to the 1957, 1968, and 2009 H1N1 pandemics that began in different regions of the world. Oddly, even though it is the most contemporary outbreak and is separated from the original H1N1 strain by nearly a century, the 2009 H1N1 strain is the only one that targets the same blood-based receptor signified by H1, as opposed to H2 or H3. As Original Antigenic Sin would predict:

“When the 2009 pandemic virus emerged in humans with a swine H1 HA gene descended from, and still closely related antigenically to, the 1918 pandemic virus, extensive cross-protection between the 2009 and 1918 pandemic viruses was demonstrated in experimental animals (12–16). Interestingly, 1918 virus-specific [antibody-producing] B-cell clones could also still be recovered from very elderly survivors 90 years after their exposure to that virus but before their exposure to the 2009 pandemic virus.”

And so, Original Antigenic Sin may be evolutionarily entangled with the quasispecies memory which appears to allow RNA viruses to return to full virulence much more quickly than they should statistically be able to, in the sense that they each may have evolved to counterbalance each other as organisms and their communities increased in complexity.

RNA viruses have demonstrated this V-1000 ability not just after vaccine attenuation, but following bottleneck events as well – so if a minority population of the quasispecies mutant swarm is separated from the rest of the population when their shared host population is itself bottlenecked, and this subset of the quasispecies cloud doesn’t contain any examples of the original V-1000 fittest full-strength variant, quasispecies memory would allow this refugee cloud to quickly produce V-1000 variants. While Original Antigenic Sin would help protect older members of the host population who had been exposed to the V-1000 strain years ago, but who would face fresh exposure once this refugee swarm made its way back to full V-1000 strength.  

Viral quasispecies have been observed to exhibit this sort of complimentary swarming behavior and the accompanying memory, which appears to allow an RNA virus to search for and find deattenuating mutations within cell cultures as variants are passaged across the full populational spectrum: Within individual hosts as different organ systems make better homes for discrete variants, across local populations of a few individuals, and nearly simultaneously across geographically disparate populations of hosts as well.

This scalable, fractal nature of this phenomenon was definitively illustrated during the 2017 influenza season by a study which observed the temporally parallel evolution of the exact same set of mutations among the variants competing within individual immunocompromised patients, fighting for selection among clusters of hosts, and emerging simultaneously across the entire globe as well. Additionally, no matter which scale is used, quasispecies behavior follows the Wright-Fisher expectations of selection-mutation equilibrium when allele frequencies are calculated – meaning they within the expected probability curves even when counted across generations – and should be considered a viable approach for examining the behavior of any RNA virus.

And the underlying fractal nature of the COVID-19 pandemic is starting to be explored as well, as researchers have noted the self-similarity underlying fractal patterns being shared by infections across different cities, and started to use the power-laws underlying fractal kinetics to anticipate more of the seemingly isolated and unpredictable outbreaks, which are really just the result of the quasispecies swarms beginning to coalesce within populations where infections have been smoldering for days or weeks already – the nature of COVID-19’s ability to spread asymptomatically by definition means that apparently isolated clusters of infections will emerge with fractal tendencies instead of the linear ones classical virology typically assumes.

So instead of the classical model’s assumptions of outbreaks progressing roughly linearly as one distinct variant outcompetes the last and then jumps from host to host, what’s really happening is something closer to the edges of the an ever-mutating Mandelbrot Set pushing up through the surface of a vast ocean of hosts – pandemics are a kaleidoscopic of variants emerging in disparate regions as the swarm explores new combinations of possibilities, not the linear progression of variant from one host to the next.

With the seasonal flu claiming roughly one-quarter to a half-million lives worldwide each and every year, creating one of the most predictable strains on public health efforts across the entire planet, and with SARS-CoV-2’s pandemic killing at least two-million in its first year in the course of infecting at least one-hundred million more and counting, while leaving many of those it doesn’t kill with nebulous constellations of insidious long-term side-effects – there may be no two viruses whose effects are so historically constant and immediately salient, but so unpredictably modeled and explained. Additionally, the 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic stands as the single deadliest immunological event in recorded human history, claiming some 50 million victims, and drawing eerie parallels to today, when again an unusual airborne RNA virus has again emerged without any definitive source and created another global pandemic that has ebbed, but shown no sign of receding just yet.

And so, examining all RNA viruses, but especially the potentially pandemic seasonal influenza as well as SARS-CoV-2 and the COVID-19 Pandemic it’s causing within the quasispecies framework presents possible explanations for a litany of paradoxical and mercurial behaviors from each virus: The inexplicable appearance and sudden disappearance of the 1918 pandemic influenza, where the 2009 Swine Flu likely started, SARS-CoV-2’s burgeoning ability to evade our immune systems and vaccines, failures of influenza vaccine trials in naval settings as well as the failure of the FluMist vaccine which functioned more efficiently than an ATM for the researchers involved than anything else, the novel coronavirus’s emergent pattern of convergent epistatic mutations across continents, the near disappearance of the seasonal flu across much of the world in 2020, and other more subtle peculiarities demonstrated by each virus.

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Beyond all that, the reason you probably haven’t heard of quasispecies mutants swarms before is tied directly into the start of COVID-19’s ongoing pandemic, as well as the fact that every legacy media outlet on earth seems to simply be acting as stenographers for either one group of scientists who have been huffily insisting that a laboratory origin is a conspiracy theory, and as a public relations team for another group of “scientists” who are pretending to be indignant about the lack of a real investigation from the WHO – when the WHO’s been transparently serving as a mouthpiece of the CCP since January 2020 – while actively sidelining the seminal peer reviewed literature, and trying to make the scientists behind it disappear.

Which certainly has nothing to do the interest every intelligence nation on earth has on this virus, especially the French who helped design and build the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the Americans who pioneered the technology at the University of North Carolina under the supervision of Dr. Ralph Baric.

Because obviously pharmaceutical companies and the defense industry are very open about what they’re doing, and wouldn’t do things like influence photogenic and charismatic junior scientists to spin things a certain way while behaving with no regard for academic ethics, or recruit narcissistic media personalities to act like they understand science they have no fundamental grasp of or degrees in, all while cosplaying as a low-rent Iron-Man. 

You’d think if Science was the goal, then if the scientist who was the literal architect of the database which every other scientist on the entire planet has spent the past 20 years using to compare the most minute difference between genomes – that if Science was the goal and he’d also been the lead author of the first peer-reviewed paper to examine a possible laboratory-engineered origin of SARS-CoV-2, then you’d have heard his name just once in the legacy media, right?

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Rent a room down the rabbit-hole?

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3.      “Learning to swarm, but they ain’t got wings.” 

    Instead of viewing an infection as primarily caused by a singular genome or a discrete haplotype that is reliably reproduced and inherited, using quasispecies behavior to analyze RNA viruses means starting from the observation that they’re ubiquitously composed of mutant swarms of variants, which respond to host immune defenses nearly in real-time by intermittently producing virions with slightly altered genomes in each and every generation. Then a minority of those variants are quickly able to find the first immunological weaknesses, prove to be adaptive, and reach fixation if they provide enough of an advantage either in the current tissue-type, or in a neighboring one – often by complimenting the variants around them in ways that are impossible to anticipate until they happen.

At any given time following the moment that an infection’s first successful embers take hold within a tissue, every host will always be hosting multiple variants of any given strain of any given RNA virus – and so it’s highly imprecise and profoundly counterproductive to refer to any single host as being infected by just one variant’s genome, or even to the existence of a set “wild type” at any point in time in any given population. Depending on which organ is being sampled, and even what time of day it is – the composition of the quasispecies swarm is a shifting cloud of amorphous variability.

Even time itself clearly influences COVID-19 infections, as scientists have noted that infections appear to be twice as virulent around 2pm compared to the lowest times of day. One genome will often be in the majority within any major organ system across an entire population of relatively healthy non-immunocompromised hosts, so nations which only or primarily use nasal samples will erroneously conclude that one variant exists across an entire population, when dozens of other variants are hidden as minorities in other organ systems.

Sampling only noses will only reveal the dominate variant in nasal tissue, which will be shared across hosts in a population, even though multiple other variants will likely be present in other organ systems but not presenting in the nasal cavities. At any given time, the average host will have different slightly-altered variants of the same strain infecting each of their different organ systems, and so sampling nasal, pulmonary, intestinal, and fecal samples predictably demonstrates that after any meaningful amount of time each host will always be infected by multiple variants, especially once the infection spreads past the first type of tissue it infected. 

This becomes the most apparent in immunocompromised patients who are also stricken with influenza, or those stricken with COVID-19 – both highly contagious respiratory RNA viruses with pandemic potential. In the case of COVID-19, although the popular press has presented the narrative that immunocompromised patients infected by the novel coronavirus are themselves creating new variants, a more granular analysis of their cases as well as those of immunocompromised influenza patients, makes it clear that because immunocompromised patients are mounting a weaker defense, each organ system is less able to constrain a mutant swarm to only produce the type of variant best suited for it – resulting in immunocompromised patients presenting as representative kaleidoscopes of the extant variants in a population. Curiously, the persistence of OPV live-vaccine strains in immunocompromised patients is also well-documented, where they produce the same kaleidoscope of variants and can use the same Terminator-like effect to reassemble themselves into a V-1000 form, what are called highly-diverged immunodeficient vaccine-derived polio viruses (iVDPVs).

And in crowded institutional settings like orphanages, these vaccine-derived V-1000 viruses are beginning to present the troubling problem of blocking the efficacy of existing vaccinations and innate immunity across the entire population. The emergence of these extraordinarily immune-evasive VDPVs are a stark reminder that a LAV going-wrong is just about the worst-case scenario as far as genetic experimentation goes. And strangely, the actual variola virus used for the production of the first viral LAV, which was attenuated to combat smallpox, has been lost to history just like the original “Asibi” Yellow Fever virus and its 17D derivative used to make the Yellow Fever LAV.

The practice of variolation, rubbing tissue from livestock infected with a virus related to smallpox onto humans to effectively vaccinate them, had been in practice throughout Asia for hundreds of years before it was finally industrialized for mass consumption by “The Father of Immunology,” Edward Jenner, in 1786.

Although the process or variolation, the earliest version of formal controlled vaccination, is usually explained by using cowpox’s close relationship to smallpox allowing it to accidently inoculate dairymaids against the later deadly disease, Jenner didn’t actually use cowpox to derive his live-attenuated vaccine.

We have no idea what he used.

  3.1 – “We must rebuild us. We have the technology.”

The virus he did use is casually referred to as Variola in the literature, however no one actually knows precisely what it was. It wasn’t actually smallpox, it wasn’t cowpox, but it was over 99% similar to a bovine virus that also likely would’ve provided immunity against smallpox. However it’s important to note that even from the start, the creation of a live-attenuated virus will lead to strains whose ability to reassemble themselves into an original V-1000 form likely won’t be quite perfect, and in the case of iVDPVs the deattenuated strains appear more virulent and drug-resistant, and have the ability to interfere with existing immunity.

Healthy patients are able to mostly keep variants segregated within the organ systems they are most suited to, meaning that only pulling nasal samples from everyone can create the illusion that only one variant is circulating within a population, since the variant best suited for that tissue will generally be the most prevalent in that one tissue. On the other hand, immunocompromised patients are unable to enforce these barriers and the ratios of different variants created by them, and display all of the extant variants which due to less-effective immune systems, are able not only to spread between organ systems, but to replicate more evenly in each of them as well.

This can make it seem as if immunocompromised patients are producing new variants, when in fact all that is happening is that the ratios between variants are much more evenly represented among their organ systems, and so each variant more likely to show up in the sampling done of immunocompromised patients, which may often be more precise as well. Meaning immunocompromised patients only appear to host more variants, when in reality all that is likely happening is that the nature of their weakened immune systems makes it harder to keep variants segregated into each organ system, and so widespread testing of healthy individuals and their organ systems would reveal the same range of segregated variants that is in fact extant in the rest of the population, but which remains cryptic in everyone except in immunocompromised patients, whose organ systems are unable to keep variants segregated to each organ system.

Immunocompromised patients’ inability to keep variants segregated in their best-suited organ systems likely also plays a role in their relapses, as the quasispecies mutant swarm can get greatly reduced in overall numbers with treatment, but as soon as weakness is sensed it will begin reconstituting itself. And especially bad news for immunocompromised patients is that diverse quasispecies mutant swarms allow can allow viruses to pass through the blood-brain barrier and replicate inside the brain itself.

So immunocompromised patients are not necessarily producing more variants, however they can reliably serve as something of a fractal Rosetta Stones about the composition of the mutant cloud in the rest of the community, since their inability to constrain the infection leads to variants which will usually only thrive in one type of organ system in a healthy host being able to reproduce and thrive in many different organ systems. This was definitively shown in 2017 which used an immunosuppressed influenza patient and their community to demonstrate that the patient held a rough approximation of all the diversity found around him, with each variant roughly keeping to its best-fit organ system. And in the case of an airborne virus, becoming airborne in the first places appears to hinge on finding the proper mutations which allow it to colonize pulmonary tissue, where virions can be aspirated via coughing and sometimes even by just regular tidal breathing.

Due to the inherent complexity of balancing all of the competing and complimentary biological processes which they interact with, mutant swarms are by definition difficult to define exactly at any one moment in time, and so several variables must be considered at once when quantifying them. The five factors that regulating the formation of effective quasispecies mutant swarms in RNA viruses are: “the average number of mutations per genome, virus population size, genome length, mutations needed for a phenotypic change, and virus fecundity.” And with virus population size, genome length, and virus fecundity all being some of the highest ever recorded in history for our novel coronavirus, three separate doors have been opened wide – allowing SARS-CoV-2 to establish extraordinarily robust quasispecies mutant swarms all across the globe.

Additionally, despite the fact that SARS-CoV-2 began with an extremely efficient proofreading enzyme and a much lower mutation rate than polio and many other coronaviruses, the mutation rate regulated by that proofreading enzyme should be only one of five factors which should be considered when assessing quasispecies mutant swarming behavior.

Beyond that, it appears that some of SARS-CoV-2’s non-structural proteins may quickly accumulate the in-frame deletions which by definition would not be caught by the proofreading enzyme at all, allowing it to cryptically mutate beyond the immune system’s surveillance. Or as the mayor of one Italian city racked by the virus described its behavior in general terms: “This is the demonstration that the virus has a sort of intelligence. We can put up all the barriers in the world and imagine that they work, but in the end, it adapts and penetrates them.”

And alarmingly, many signs point to the possibility that this not-so-friendly neighborhood novel coronavirus has already formed the robust and epigenetic quasispecies mutant swarms which can allow variants isolated by bottlenecks as well as attenuated vaccine variants to remember past fitness states learned while part of an earlier swarm, since some kind of convergent evolution already appears to be occurring and “the same COVID-19 mutations are appearing in different places.”

This allows a hasty return to the peak virulence of their original V-1000 form through exposure to repeated hosts, since enough replication events will lead to a swarm of complimentary variants. This ability to learn and obtain a “memory” of a past fitter variant has been explored the most fully with OPV reverting back to virulent Polio by Dr. Adi Stern and his team at Tel Aviv University, but it has also emerged in Foot-and-Mouth Disease Virus (FMDV), and hepatitis C. 

This paradoxical phenomenon seems to allow quasispecies mutant swarms to find the most adaptive variants far more quickly than they should be able to statistically, and allows them to quickly remember how to neutralize host defenses, creating more virulent infections and viral mutant swarms which are much more dangerous – an interaction that has been playing out on poultry farms and during military vaccine trials for decades.

This apparent ability to have learned the most adaptive ratio of variants for a mutant swarm to effectively infect a host population and return to it is one of the hallmarks of quasispecies mutant swarms, however the complete failure of the FluMist live-attenuated virus nasal vaccine at the community level, paradoxical results obtained from some military vaccine trials, and the difficulties of properly vaccinating poultry farms reflect another nebulous ability of quasispecies mutant swarms that relies on the effects of quasispecies memory.  

And it is one that, when combined with all of the implications of quasispecies viral memory, provides the best explanation for the origins and fates of both the 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic as well as our current COVID-19 Pandemic.

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4.      The Golden Silkworm.  

    In ancient China, there was a tradition of developing a special poison called Gu by throwing as many venomous creatures as you could find into a jar and sealing them in, letting them kill each other in a knock-off zoonotic Thunderdome until only one was left. Also known as a “golden silkworm,” the lone surviving creature was then thought to host a “demonic poison” since every other creature’s venom was thought to be concentrated within it. According to Chinese folklore, this golden-silkworm could then mutate itself into any number of other animals – retaining its lethal ability no matter what form it took.

So it turns out that the concept of manipulating nature in an attempt to create unpredictable and unnaturally powerful weapons is nothing new. However, this ancient practice took a modern turn about 50 years ago, creating a threat to humanity that may have just reemerged from its container once more.

Back in 1977, a very peculiar epidemic began to sweep across Russia. Once scientists had isolated it, they discovered it was a rather unique strain of what’s come to be known as the H1N1 Swine Flu, a mutated variant of the virus that had caused the 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic. That pandemic was caused by a flu with genes of avian origin, so it’s odd that this H1N1 variant was named a “Swine Flu,” right?

But since as the 1918 Pandemic was occurring scientists noticed it could jump into and kill pigs, they figured pigs had something to do with its origins, understandably since genomic sequencing wasn’t exactly readily available back then. Additionally, this particular variant of the H1N1 Swine Flu had something quite distinctive about its genome. And since it was so unique, going forward the H1N1 family will now be called the H1N1 Longpig Flu, which will make perfect sense in just a little bit.

At the time, the Soviet Union was employing tens of thousands of scientists designing every possible flavor of biological weapon, an expansive weapons program with a spotty safety record – pathogens were known to leak out of Soviet labs almost regularly. And Soviet scientists were reported to bring dead research animals home for dinner, meat was far from readily available in the USSR at that time, which parallels the reports of scientists in Wuhan smuggling dead lab animals out to sell for a few extra bucks on the street.

And as far as lab leaks go, China’s labs have leaked the SARS virus four times just in recent years. Even more specifically, a delegation from the State Department visited Wuhan’s Institute of Virology in early 2018 and asked for more resources for the lab since “the new lab has a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory,” going on to emphasize how grave the consequences would be if a lethal virus managed to escape that lab.  

So it’s probably important to consider that the original highly-pathogenic virus which SARS-CoV-2 was attenuated down from won’t be anything like any known or natural virus at all. Unlike rabies and Yellow Fever which can be isolated from wild animals in their highly-pathogenic state as they cause obvious illness, the process of forcing SARS-CoV-2’s original ancestor into a highly-pathogenic state – possible using a method close to the apocryphal golden silkworm involving feeding an endless supply of mammalian hosts to the virus to mimic the population density of poultry farms – would’ve created an entirely novel coronavirus unlike anything the world has ever seen.

And the very start of that process would like something like the experiments done at UNC, splicing difference viruses together to see what your new coronavirus chimeras might do.

       4.1 – “Always keep the muzzle pointed in a safe direction.”

    Lab leaks are nothing new for high-level virology labs across the world, and provide an avenue for COVID-19’s entrance onto the world stage that is just as viable as a natural zoonotic transmission – it isn’t and has never been a conspiracy theory. And leaks tend not to happen entirely randomly, the odds they occur are roughly paired with the pace of research into specific types of viruses.

For example, earlier in the 70’s before the Soviet H1N1 Longpig Flu leak, “the swine flu scare… [had] prompted the international community to reexamine their stocks of the latest previously circulating H1N1 strains to attempt to develop a vaccine,” which was seen to have increased the odds that someone, somewhere would make a mistake and leak an altered strain of the virus out of their lab. This increased pace of research mirrors recent times, when scientists have been investigating and trying to understand the supposedly impending threat posed by coronaviruses for years, capturing as many unique strains from the wild as they could, and mixing and matching their genomes in the lab.

In the years that followed the 1977 engineered leak, genetic analysis looking to determine where this particular strain of H1N1 Longpig Flu came from found something rather odd: It was very similar to strains of H1N1 that hadn’t been in circulation for decades, and seemed to be the product of “sequential passage in an animal reservoir,” which was determined since its genome seemed to be the combination of two strains, one of which hadn’t been in circulation for decades – making recombination in a laboratory the only plausible explanation beyond time travel. Curiously, although it seems to do almost everything else, COVID-19’s genome doesn’t appear to time-travel either, however it appears so distant from any related coronavirus that it’s been placed in its own clade, an isolated branch way out on its own in the viral family tree – meaning it’s the lone example of its kind, and doesn’t clump together with all the other known coronaviruses.

An increased pace of research into the H1N1 Longpig Flu back in the 1970s increased the odds that a mistake would happen until one eventually did, and a “leak” occurred. So maybe it’s worth keeping in mind that our current pandemic was preceded by years of research into coronaviruses everywhere from the University of North Carolina to the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s Disease Engineering Technical Research Center, and its related facilities.

And these capabilities have been further accelerated a massive push by the Chinese military to expand their biotechnological capabilities as well specific events like by a massive international conference meant to study a potential pandemic caused by a hyper-virulent strain of coronavirus, Johns Hopkins’ Event 201. This international conference was funded primarily by the World Economic Forum as well as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and occurred in October 2019, just weeks before the nominal assumed start of COVID-19’s outbreak.

Leading up to 1977, an increased pace of research into strains of the flu was seen to increase the odds that an accidental leak would occur until one did – so shouldn’t the same logic should be applied to the start of our pandemic today?

Why is almost everyone today assuming that the increased pace of research means scientists anticipated this outbreak, instead of causing it? Wouldn’t an increased pace of research also increase the odds that a leak of a lab-modified coronavirus would occur, just like an increased pace of research precipitated the emergence of the engineered H1N1 Longpig Flu back in 1977?    

       4.2 – Nothing to see here.

   The historical precedent of mysterious vaccine-like illnesses is that they are often linked to novel military-related vaccine programs, and their leaks are regularly covered up. For instance, the 1977 H1N1 Soviet Longpig Flu variant had been demonstrated as engineered, almost certainly by serial passage, by a paper in 1981, after every possible government denied any involvement at all for years.

And yet this paper remained hidden within the literature for 20 years, when after several months “arguing like two Jews over the last Torah,”

1 Sirotkin & Sirotkin linked that paper definitively demonstrating an engineered origin to the modern discussion of gain-of-function engineering during the COVID-19 Pandemic, which is ongoing at the time of this writing.  

Hopefully at the time of your reading right now it isn’t like a decade later, and this sucker’s still going strong. Man. Luckily, if there was any possibly at all for something as dystopian as that, surely everyone who had any information at all would be coming forward to help explain what’s going on. And that seems pretty much impossible, the virological community has circled their wagons and assured us that the idea of a lab being involved is either extraordinarily rare, or a conspiracy theory. Likewise, the academic intelligentsia has finally mustered the courage for some literary bukkake aimed at the WHO’s face, with an insipid letter pointing out well after one-hundred million infected and nearly three-million dead and a year has passed that a legitimate investigation needs to occur. Way to go, tigers – Team America World Police would be proud.

But Le Monde is the only newspaper or legacy media outlet on earth that has reported about or linked to the first and only peer reviewed paper which outlines how gain-of-function research may have played a role in the creation of both the virus itself and how it got subsequently got out of the lab. It highlights serial passage and its historical links to vaccine development and the mink’s close-cousin the ferret, and wasn’t written by any academic or research institution, or any of the scientists or institutions that’ve been involved with and profited from gain-of-function research for potential weapons or vaccine development. It was written by an ex-con and his dad and submitted in April of 2020, early enough to start a meaningful discussion that of course this thing might plausibly have escaped from a lab.

And it’s not like the link between ferrets and gain-of-function work is any secret, or hard to find if you’re a journalist even halfway trying to look:

“Although different animal models are used in vaccine studies, the most appropriate model for studying SARS is ferret since it develops the typical clinical signs, viral replication patterns and lung pathology compatible with that of SARS pathogenesis in humans.”

Because if the general public was aware that was legitimately on the table, it’s been demonstrated that public health measures would’ve been more easily followed. Plus there’s the common sense observation that it’s one thing to tell people to wear a mask because of some nebulous natural illness that doesn’t make most people all that sick, and quite another to tell them to wear a mask because this virus may effectively have been weaponized and we have no way at all to predict what its long-term effects might be or when it will take a turn for neurovirulence.

Wonder why that discussion never happened? A paper gets peer-reviewed and published, and then it’s almost like it doesn’t exist at all to the legacy media, or to the academic world which happily sidelines its existence and authors?

Take a moment to read just a snippet of his dad’s resume below, and compare that to the background of every talking head you currently see still on television having been demonstrably wrong for the past year and counting – almost all of whom have collected many thousands if not millions of dollars from some combination of the defense industry, the WHO, or pharmaceutical companies. Who would you trust?

My father contracted for a few months with one pharmaceutical company decades ago because his government salary didn’t seem like it’d be able to put two kids through college, other than that he has been a simple civil servant since he left the University of Tennessee after his second asshole kid broke his wife’s tailbone on the way out.

So why do you have no idea who this guy is, but see a regular parade of people telling you how okay it’s all about to be – all with completely public and often incredibly lucrative conflicts of interest, ever-present in the media, getting the science totally wrong and endangering you with their idiocy while they’re doing it? Why haven’t you heard from this guy?

“A 40 year PhD in Microbiology and designer of dbSNP, with nearly 20 years of molecular wet-work who’d previously taught molecular virology at the University of Tennessee and worked within the Theoretical Biology Division of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. At the time of his retirement from government service, he had more years working for GenBank than any other staff member – with his 28 years of service on the world’s premiere DNA sequencing database making him one of the most experienced scientists on the planet when it comes to managing and analyzing genomic sequences.”

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5.      “You are not your fucking khakis.”

    Unlike SARS-CoV-2, whose only encounter with humanity lead to an immediate global pandemic, small polio endemics have been plaguing humanity for millennia. However it has never established anything beyond endemic infections of less than 100,000 hosts at a time, and often far less than that. Far more profligate, SARS-CoV-2 instantaneously created a pandemic the moment it touched humanity, infecting over 100 million hosts in its first year by flashing across a world that is interconnected with international travel that has ebbed but not stopped throughout our pandemic. And although the functional impact of many mutations is still being determined, SARS-CoV-2 has already created a half-dozen distinct variants displaying difference vaccine sensitivities, transmissibility, and lethality – a number that only grows as surveillance is widened.

The nature of our interconnected planet as well as SARS-CoV-2’s ability for asymptomatic airborne transmission has created the possibility for quasispecies mutant swarms, previously most closely studied infecting local endemic populations of hosts, to begin occurring on a much wider pandemic scale as they burn across humanity – as there is nothing to stop a variant in Buenos Aires from simultaneously emerging in Moscow, as several already have made that enigmatic genetic chorus across the globe. 

The phenomenon of quasispecies viral swarming memory was starkly illustrated in vitro by Dr. Adi Stern from Tel Aviv University in 2017 using polio’s attenuated oral vaccine, OPV, as it worked its way back towards creating VDPVs.

The polio virus’s tendency for its once-virulent live-attenuated vaccine strains to find an accelerated evolutionary pathway back to virulence appears to be shared by other viruses and their LAVs as well, and in OPV’s case it appears that the first requirement is for three “gatekeeper” mutations to occur, which cause an increased replication rate in the variants carrying them. Curiously, although the experiments took place in tissue cultures lacking all the natural immunological pressure of a host’s full immune system and also the chance to recombine with endogenous viruses, four of the seven fitness-enhancing mutations were still found after passage through tissue culture:  

“Interestingly, we discovered that the combinations of mutants were fitter than the sum of each mutant’s effect on its own, suggesting a synergistic epistatic interaction between all three mutations.”

And ever more noticeably, these gatekeeping mutations clearly violated the norms of expected evolutionary behavior, which makes intuitive sense when you consider that the process of attenuating a virus down through passaging is highly unnatural, so the return trip back to its original state would be equally unnatural on the way back :

“While past studies have assumed that parallel substitutions typically represent the fixation of positively selected mutations, the huge number of substitutions observed in parallel linages seems improbable and challenges this assumption. Instead we propose that several factors… lead to an unusual large number of parallel substitutions, which are not necessarily under positive selection.”

After these gatekeeper mutations have emerged and the reverting virus effectively passes through them, the next step usually involved recombination with an endogenous human hepatitis virus, however a functionally equivalent set of mutations conferred by recombination also emerged without any apparent recombination in some of the samples. Finally, a third wave of less predictable mutations would epistatically work together to slowly bring the once-attenuated OPV strain back to full virulence, where it could now establish the paralytic effects of poliomyelitis.

And, much like COVID-19 has established infections in immunocompromised patients which appear to pump out an unusually high number of variants, polio exhibits this exact same propensity, as do HIV and influenza, and many other classes of RNA virus – although this orderly gatekeeping has only been directly observed with reverting OPV so far.

In parallel to strains of SARS-CoV-2 from disparate parts of the world all exhibiting the same convergent and epistatic mutations despite having no apparent interaction with each other, OPV has done the same thing not just across geographic distance but across many years as well – in Egypt an OPV strain introduced in 1983 appears to have taken five years of circulation before it began to cryptically create active cases.

However with the COVID-19 Pandemic, it’s only taken about a year for scientists to notice that “the sequential increment of concurrent mutations from early lineages to descendent lineages as the pandemic unfolds still remains as an enigma,” in a study which also noted the appearance of epistatic gatekeeping mutations, as well as what appears to be a similar hierarchy of mutational development as deattenuating OPV. After a year of transmission, the authors noticed what appears to be a five-tiered hierarchy of evolution. Or as the Director of the UK’s Covid-19 Genomics Consortium observed, “Lots of mutations have just lit up almost at the same time, which is really fascinating.”

However perhaps this is due to bottlenecking in general and is simply a result of attempting to return to full V-1000 virulence in the form of a VDCV because of a natural environmental bottleneck, and not due to having originated in live-attenuated vaccine program?  

How would we be able to tell the difference? But it sure would be weird if the exact same mutations all started to appear across several different species almost simultaneously, because that’s certainly not something the flu or any other human virus on earth has ever been observed to do.

Which is exactly what eventually began to happen, as not only does COVID-19 also display these coordinated, simultaneous, epistatic mutations across many different regions of the globe within human populations, these exact same mutations are also appearing in lab mice as well as on mink farms. There is absolutely nothing even vaguely approaching a natural parallel to this phenomenon, viruses do not use the same mutations to adapt to three different species simultaneously – different species require different mutations to establish active sustainable infections within a population, which is why diseases don’t just jump instantly and randomly between species, even ones living near each other.

So the fact that the exact same mutations which appeared in the UK and South Africa in humans, also appeared within the laboratory as SARS-CoV-2 was passaged through laboratory mice, is entirely unprecedented. And in mice, not only did repeated serial passaging make the same epistatic mutations that were seen in humans in the UK and South Africa appear, these mutations gave COVID-19 the ability to transmit through the air between the mice.

This kind of “gain-of-function” from serial passaging is a very direct sign of laboratory engineering, there is no natural way for the same mutations that cause a virus to become airborne between mice. would also show up simultaneously in a human population as well as mink, or the population of any other discrete species. Different species require different mutations for a virus to adapt to it and establish active infections, that is why zoonosis is such a big deal.

Although primarily a threat to poultry, Newcastle Disease has also been observed to reassemble itself and form active infections from attenuated vaccine strains, although this has been researched far less since it primarily infects chickens and poses no threat to human life. And classically, Marek’s disease has proved impossible to vaccinate against, as the attempts have all been “leaky,” and lead to a quasispecies swarm that’s one of the most virulent on earth – killing its hosts faster than Ebola kills humans, in just 10 days.

Another airborne viral disease, this one a coronavirus that also primary infects poultry named Infectious Bronchitis Virus (IBV), provides one of the best templates for transitioning from the classical view of “wild type” viruses to quasispecies swarms, as between any two strains of IBV, “only a few” amino-acid differences in their spike-proteins may lead to the establishment of a separate serotype, another obvious class of variants within the swarm that will need a vaccine that’s at least adjusted if not replaced entirely.

       5.1 Symphisian swarms.  

    And as COVID-19 quasispecies mutant swarm builds in complexity and new variants continue to emerge, perhaps scientists should keep in mind that when trying to vaccinate a poultry farm for IBV, another airborne respiratory coronavirus passing between crowded hosts, that often 10% of chickens fail to develop any protective immune response at all and that a less than 5% change in a strain’s spike-protein can lead to poor cross-protection. And this is with incredibly effective vaccines that target the virus’s entire genome, not just the spike-protein like our current experimental wave of mRNA vaccines.

So isn’t it strange that there’s no discussion at all about the issues controlling incredibly transmissible viruses on factory farms, even if they don’t threaten human life? After all, avian influenza infects most of the commercial poultry farms on earth at one time or another.

Now that’s an RNA virus that poses a threat to human life, as its quasispecies mutant swarms are regularly able to produce the highly pathogenic variants which jump into farm-workers, despite the fact that poultry farms have spent decades running ubiquitous vaccination programs for their flocks which are carefully monitored and adjusted in the attempt to suppress the emergence of highly pathogenic variants. Poultry farms are under no illusion that they can ever come close to eradicating avian influenza on their farms given the extreme population densities involved, so their vaccine programs are designed to suppress the formation of the fittest highly pathogenic variants and test enough to catch and isolate the chickens which are inevitably infected with them.  

Jam enough prospective hosts together in an industrial setting, add an airborne RNA virus that doesn’t create instant mortality in healthy hosts, set the conditions so that the virus spreads no matter what like on a chicken farm when the countless chickens just can’t help themselves from running around to keep on pecking their way up the order, and you don’t get herd immunity. You get a quasispecies mutant swarm that spreads and grows in virulence continually, requiring continual surveillance and ongoing vaccination programs not to eradicate it – just to prevent its most lethal strains from forming. Strains which are evolutionary chomping at their bits to become more lethal and escape, as “one of the first observations derived from passaging viruses sequentially in cell culture was that when a virus was allowed to replicate at high multiplicity of infection (MOI) (high viral inoculum), the whole population tended to increase its fitness in an exponential manner.”

The additional bad news is that IBV arguably models SARS-CoV-2 far better than avian influenza, since both are within the same family of coronaviridae, and our COVID-19 Pandemic quickly seems to be spitting off the same sort of antibody-evading variants that IBV does as its quasispecies mutant swarms grow, offering the same issues with vaccines – not to mention ones which only target the spike-protein as the mRNA vaccines currently do, since they don’t offer complete protection. After all, much like the military, “the poultry industry prefers to use live vaccines rather than inactivated ones. The former are cheaper to make and buy, and easier/cheaper to apply.”

And so in the case of COVID-19, its unusual asymptomatic spread made isolating infectious individuals impossible except in the most diligent nations, and so that element of ideal vaccination programs has been impossible for most of the world. But, luckily for humanity, a massive semi-collaborative international effort occurred to produce vaccines, including a brand new class of mRNA vaccine that skipped the final stage of animal testing because it was just so gosh-darn awesome. And so humans responded to a crisis the way we almost always do, applying our ingenuity to push back against yet another threat from nature, determined to impose our indomitable will one more time.

Because certainly, humans are smarter than chickens on poultry farms running around infecting and shitting all over each other, and humanity won’t end up in the same Sisyphean immunological cycle of never-ending illness and death. Weird that poultry farms made Soylent Green come true, and they’re actually fed each other’s carcasses.

Wonder if there’s a message there.  

Wall Street on Parade: https://wallstreetonparade.com/2023/08/mega-banks-take-down-stock-prices-after-a-fitch-warning-about-a-possible-downgrade-to-jpmorgan-chase-and-its-peers/

Yesterday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average took a tumble of 361 points by the closing bell. Numerous headlines attributed the big decline to a weakening economy in China. But the actual trigger for angst among traders was a headline at 5:30 a.m. EDT yesterday at CNBC. The headline read: “Fitch warns it may be forced to downgrade dozens of banks, including JPMorgan Chase.”

JPMorgan Chase is not just the biggest bank in the United States in terms of assets and deposits. It is the biggest bank in terms of its derivative exposure. According to the federal regulator of national banks (those operating across state lines), the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), as of March 31, 2023, JPMorgan Chase Bank had assets of $3.2 trillion and derivative exposure of more than $59 trillion notional (face amount).

The OCC report also makes the following frightening statement:

“A small group of large financial institutions continues to dominate trading and derivatives activity in the U.S. commercial banking system. During the first quarter of 2023, four large commercial banks represented 89.0 percent of the total banking industry notional amounts and 66.5 percent of industry net current credit exposure (NCCE)”

And now Fitch is sending a message to the market that it may have to downgrade those big four banks. What could possibly go wrong?

The four commercial banks the OCC is referring to are JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Citigroup’s Citibank, and Bank of America.

But if you look at the OCC’s breakdown of derivative exposure at the bank holding company level, a fifth bank emerges – Morgan Stanley – which somehow manages to remain below the radar on its derivatives – until things blow up.

These five bank holding companies hold $238 trillion of the total of $285 trillion in derivatives held by the top 25 bank holding companies with exposure to derivatives, according to the latest OCC report. To express that another way, 84 percent of the danger of derivatives blowing up as they did in 2008 is concentrated at just five U.S. banks out of the 4,096 federally-insured commercial banks in the U.S.

Unfortunately, the bad news doesn’t end there. Back in 2010 when the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation was passed, banks were supposed to do two important things with their dangerous exposure to derivatives. They were required to “push out” the derivatives to another unit of the bank holding company, other than the federally-insured bank, so that this unit could be wound down if the derivatives blew it up. Citigroup was able to get this Dodd-Frank reform repealed in a sneaky maneuver in 2014.

Dodd-Frank also was heralded as forcing the mega banks to move these dodgy derivatives to being centrally-cleared in order to bring stability and transparency to this dangerous market. Instead, the latest report from the OCC notes that “In the first quarter of 2023, 40.5 percent of banks’ derivative holdings were centrally cleared…” meaning that 59.5 percent of derivatives are still an opaque black hole, also known as OTC (over-the-counter) derivatives.

It is assumed by savvy derivative traders that if a counterparty to a derivatives contract gets a credit downgrade, that counterparty may well have to cough up more collateral on its open derivative trades. Just how much additional collateral the bank might have to post raises the specter of liquidity issues. But since the terms of these private derivative contracts are opaque to the market, nobody, including regulators, can readily assess what the full impact of a credit downgrade would be.

One way to get a little market color is to see how the mega derivative banks traded on the day the Fitch news came out. The chart above shows that the two mega banks taking the biggest tumble yesterday were, indeed, two of the five with the largest exposure to derivatives: Bank of America (ticker BAC), closed down 3.20 percent, and JPMorgan Chase (JPM), closed down 2.55 percent.

Back on June 27, when Fitch lowered the credit rating on the operating environment (OE) for U.S. banks by one notch (from AA to AA-) it warned that if it had to take the rating down further in the future it might have to cut the credit rating on some banks as well. It wrote at the time:

“We do not expect the lower OE score to negatively impact the ratings of U.S. banks, although it reduces ratings headroom. As indicated in a previous report published in February 2023, whereas a one-notch downgrade of the OE score would not necessarily result in bank issuer rating actions, a multi-notch downgrade would revise Fitch’s financial performance benchmarks for banks and would lead to lower financial profile scores, all else equal.”

The last time Fitch took a rating action on JPMorgan Chase was on September 19, 2022. Its long-term issuer default rating was affirmed at AA- and its Derivative Counterparty Rating was also affirmed at AA-.

Unfortunately, the banking industry environment has dramatically deteriorated since the fall of 2022, as has negative news surrounding JPMorgan Chase.

In the span of seven weeks this spring, running from March 10 to May 1, the second, third, and fourth largest bank failures in U.S. history occurred. In order of size, those were: First Republic Bank (May 1), Silicon Valley Bank (March 10) and Signature Bank (March 12). (The largest bank failure in U.S. history, Washington Mutual, occurred in 2008 during the financial crisis.)

Doing significant reputational damage to JPMorgan Chase since its last Fitch rating action in September of 2022 is the fact that three federal lawsuits have been filed against the bank alleging that it played a key role in perpetuating the sex trafficking operation of the late Jeffrey Epstein, over the span of the more than 14 years that it kept him as a client, by funneling to him more than $5 million in hard cash (sometimes as much as $40,000 to $80,000 a month), when it knew or should have known that he was using that money to pay off victims, accomplices and recruiters of underage sex slaves. The bank also held accounts for some of his victims and accomplices and transferred millions of dollars from Epstein into these accounts. None of these transactions resulted in the bank filing the legally-mandated Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) to law enforcement, despite the fact that dozens of internal emails at the bank have turned up during discovery showing that numerous compliance and money-laundering personnel at the bank were aware of Epstein’s revolting history of sex with minors.

The three lawsuits, one filed by Epstein victims, one by the Attorney General of the U.S. Virgin Islands where Epstein owned his own island and compound, and one by two pension funds on behalf of JPMorgan Chase shareholders, have been making headlines for months and raising serious governance issues about the largest federally-insured bank in the United States. The bank has already admitted to an unprecedented five criminal felony counts since 2014 – raising the question as to just how accurate that AA- rating is from Fitch.

The official report from the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, following an in-depth investigation of the 2008 financial collapse, had this to say about the role of derivatives:

“OTC derivatives contributed to the crisis in three significant ways. First, one type of derivative—credit default swaps (CDS)—fueled the mortgage securitization pipeline. CDS were sold to investors to protect against the default or decline in value of mortgage-related securities backed by risky loans…

“Second, CDS were essential to the creation of synthetic CDOs. These synthetic CDOs were merely bets on the performance of real mortgage-related securities. They amplified the losses from the collapse of the housing bubble by allowing multiple bets on the same securities and helped spread them throughout the financial system…

“Finally, when the housing bubble popped and crisis followed, derivatives were in the center of the storm. AIG, which had not been required to put aside capital reserves as a cushion for the protection it was selling, was bailed out when it could not meet its obligations. The government ultimately committed more than $180 billion because of concerns that AIG’s collapse would trigger cascading losses throughout the global financial system. In addition, the existence of millions of derivatives contracts of all types between systemically important financial institutions—unseen and unknown in this unregulated market—added to uncertainty and escalated panic, helping to precipitate government assistance to those institutions.”

It is nothing short of a national disgrace that Congress and the U.S. Department of Justice have done so little since 2008 to rein in the dangerous — and unconscionable — activities of the mega banks on Wall Street.

*********

A lot going on these days. Consider S&P walked away from ESG last week. Meanwhile, yields build.

Clear enough?

Mark Wauck provides a nice update on the US air assault on Russia. Before turning to that, let’s remember the RMS Lusitania.

RMS Lusitania (named after the Roman province in Western Europe corresponding to modern Portugal) was a British ocean liner that was launched by the Cunard Line in 1906 and held the Blue Riband appellation for the fastest Atlantic crossing in 1908. It was briefly the world’s largest passenger ship until the completion of the Mauretania three months later. She was sunk on her 202nd trans-Atlantic crossing, on 7 May 1915, by a German U-boat 11 miles (18 km) off the western coast of Ireland, killing 1,198 passengers and crew.^[2]

The sinking occurred about two years before the United States declaration of war on Germany. Although the Lusitania‘s sinking was a major factor in building American support for a war, war was eventually declared only after the Imperial German Government resumed the use of unrestricted submarine warfare against American shipping in an attempt to break the Transatlantic supply chain from the US to Britain, as well as after the Zimmermann Telegram.

On the afternoon of 7 May, a German U-boat torpedoed Lusitania 11 miles (18 km) off the southern coast of Ireland inside the declared war zone. A second internal explosion caused her to sink in 18 minutes, killing 1,198 passengers and crew. The German government justified treating Lusitania as a naval vessel because she was carrying 173 tons of war munitions and ammunition, making her a legitimate military target, and they argued that British merchant ships had violated the cruiser rules from the very beginning of the war. The internationally recognised cruiser rules were obsolete by 1915; it had become more dangerous for submarines to surface and give warning with the introduction of Q-ships in 1915 by the Royal Navy, which were armed with concealed deck guns.

The Germans argued that Lusitania was regularly transporting “war munitions”; she operated under the control of the Admiralty; she could be converted into an armed auxiliary cruiser to join the war; her identity had been disguised; and she flew no flags. They claimed that she was a non-neutral vessel in a declared war zone, with orders to evade capture and ram challenging submarines.

Something to think about.

Like when US MQ-9A Reaper drones operating over the Black Sea start getting taken out.

Here’s Mark’s update for August 10 2023: https://meaninginhistory.substack.com/p/ukraine-update-81023

Before we get to developments on the ground, so to speak, here’s a brief account of the air assault on Crimea by the United States. The Russian account makes a major point of emphasizing how this assault on Russian territory was extensively directed by the US. A time will come when the US will want to come to sort of understanding with Russia, and this won’t help:

— GEROMAN — time will tell – 

@GeromanAT

Ukrainian drone raid on Crimea Early in the morning, after a comprehensive reconnaissance by the US Air Force and NATO Air Force, Ukrainian formations again attacked the Crimean peninsula with Mugin-5 PRO drones launched from the Odessa region. As a result of the joint work of units of the 31st air defense division and the electronic warfare calculations of the Russian Armed Forces Armed Forces, 12 targets were shot down: ten were suppressed by electronic warfare at Cape Tarkhankut and Evpatoria, one was shot down by the Tor air defense system over Khersones, and the other on the way to the Novofedorovsky airfield over Sakami by the Pantsir air defense missile system. Unlike previous attacks, the AFU slightly changed tactics: this time the UAVs were launched in small groups from several points, starting from the Shkolny airfield and ending with the jump base in Vilkovo.

The attack was again preceded by active reconnaissance in the Black Sea area. In the southwest and south of Crimea, the French Atlantique 2 base patrol aircraft, as well as three US Air Force MQ-9A Reaper drones, operated. Despite the repulsed raid, the attacks are highly likely to continue. According to some reports, a large batch of drones has been delivered to the Odessa region, which they plan to use in combination with unmanned boats.

@rybar_force

3:49 AM · Aug 10, 2023

Turning to the ground war, briefly, what we’ve been seeing for a week or more is that the Russian forces continue to conduct an “active defense” in the Zaporozhye and Bakhmut regions:

The Department of Defense defines active defense as: “The employment of limited offensive action and counterattacks to deny a contested area or position to the enemy.”

The goal, as usual, is to inflict heavy casualties on the Ukrainians. That strategy is now being widely acknowledged in the collective West to be highly successful. A report on CNN, to offer just one example, referred to “staggering losses” for the Ukrainians.

Global Thinker

@talkrealopinion

The Washington Post and CNN are now repeating Russian talking point that Ukraine isn’t winning.

Hopefully the FBI conducts serious investigation to find out how this Russian propaganda made it to US media.

9:53 AM · Aug 10, 2023

However, at the same time, the Russian side has taken advantage of the continued Ukrainian attempts to launch an offensive. Russian forces are advancing in the Kharkov oblast toward the town of Kupyansk, which has strategic value for further advances. What follows are some updates on that activity.

This first account is based on Ukrainian sources. Other reports indicate that the Ukrainians are planning on withdrawing from the entire area east of the Oskol river:

— GEROMAN — time will tell – 

@GeromanAT

The Russians have created a fist for a breakthrough in the Kupyansk direction, – Syrsky, commander of the Ground Forces of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, reports. “The goal of the enemy is to break through the defenses of our troops and go to Kupyansk. The fighting is now very intense. Separate positions changed hands several times these days,” he said.

3:38 AM · Aug 10, 2023

The Ukrainians have announced evacuations from numerous villages to the west of Kupyansk, as shown on this map:

OSINTdefender

@sentdefender

A Map showing the Settlements in the Kupiansk District of the Kharkiv Region which have been placed under a Mandatory Evacuation Order by the Ukrainian Government.

7:34 AM · Aug 10, 2023

Russian forces continue pushing forward. Russian reports state that the momentum is increasing and that Ukrainian morale is low, with increasing surrenders. Ukraine is being forced to shift reserves to the area:

The Russian offensive in the north in the Kharkov region is gaining momentum. The Ukrainian general Syrskyj speaks of a huge group of Russians breaking through the front here.

Slightly southwesterly, the Russian units are already close to Kislovka, a center of concentration of Ukrainian armed forces. Ten Ukrainian bases were captured here yesterday.

As of yesterday, the Ukrainians stopped trying to attack the Russian bridgehead on the Zherebets River. Another Russian offensive is to be expected in the near future. The whole front section from Kupyansk to Svato is in motion, the Russians are increasing the pressure, the Ukrainians are giving way. The Russian artillery and air force are very active in the whole area up to the river Oskol. The Ukrainians are slowly withdrawing, still holding the front, although there have already been cases of panicked desertion. Thus, the units of the 101st Territorial Defense fled from the front.

Finally …

We appear to have documentary confirmation that the US did, in fact, pressure Pakistan to remove its elected president, Imran Khan, for the sin of trying to maintain neutrality in the US war on Russia. Pakistani officials in DC were told that if the vote of no confidence against Khan were successful (wink, wink), “all would be forgiven.” The US and EU would once again smile on Pakistan. Because, democracy!

Michael Tracey

@mtracey

After a year of denials, evidence finally emerges showing US officials *did* in fact pressure Pakistan to oust Imran Khan because he met with Putin the day of the Ukraine invasion. This was done at the express direction of the White House, the cable claims https://theintercept.com/2023/08/09/imran-khan-pakistan-cypher-ukraine-russia/…

5:02 PM · Aug 9, 2023

Here are some key excerpts from the leaked Pakistani “cypher”:

I asked Don if the reason for a strong U.S. reaction was Pakistan’s abstention in the voting in the UNGA. He categorically replied in the negative and said that it was due to the Prime Minister’s visit to Moscow. He said that “I think if the no-confidence vote against the Prime Minister succeeds, all will be forgiven in Washington because the Russia visit is being looked at as a decision by the Prime Minister. Otherwise, I think it will be tough going ahead.” He paused and then said “I cannot tell how this will be seen by Europe but I suspect their reaction will be similar.” He then said that “honestly I think isolation of the Prime Minister will become very strong from Europe and the United States.

This revelation will undoubtedly be intensely embarrassing for Pakistan, since it tends to portray this nuclear armed nation as a puppet of the US.

SIMPLICIUS THE THINKER: https://simplicius76.substack.com/p/sitrep-8523-projecting-the-intermediate

SITREP 8/5/23: Projecting the Intermediate Future

SIMPLICIUS THE THINKER

AUG 5, 2023

There aren’t a whole lot of significant battlefield updates just yet, so I wanted to take this time to project what the medium-term future will look like based on Ukraine and the West’s signaled plans for the next 6 months and more.

But first, let’s summarize roughly where things stand, particularly vis a vis the grand summer ‘offensive’ so that we’re all on the same page as to where the conflict currently stands narratively.

Early this year, Ukraine began to outfit two separate ‘army corps’ of maneuver brigades specifically for the coming ‘counter-offensive’. These were the 9th Corps and the 10th Corps. The 9th Corps was meant to be the—mostly—NATO-armed and trained one which was famously revealed in the Pentagon leaks. It consisted of the 9 named maneuver brigades, which were the 116th, 47th, 33rd, 21st, 32nd, 37th, 118th, 117th, and the 82nd air assault.

Out of these, the 47th was said to be the most elite, cobbled from all ‘volunteers’ who signed up specifically from other units and were trained in the UK and were armed with 99 x M2A2 Bradleys as well as American M109 Paladins for artillery.

The role of the two army corps was that the 9th was meant to be the breakthrough brigade which reached the first ‘main line of defense’, the notorious ones with dragon teeth that Russia spent months constructing. Upon reaching this line, the 10th Corps was meant to be the ‘breakthrough’ force which then took over for the 9th, pouring in another fresh 9-12 brigades through the gap to create an unstoppable opening.

💥💬💥Yaakov Kedmi on why Western instructors have taught the Ukrainian armed forces nothing:

“Neither the British nor the French, no one has ever trained and tried to break through echeloned defence systems. They don’t know how to do it, they’ve never done it. So it is unlikely that they can teach it. Yes, there are certain units in the American army – armoured units. But much more organised, with professional soldiers.

The American armoured division practised how to break through an echeloned defence line. But they’ve never done that in any war, not even in World War II. They fight differently. So there’s nothing to teach them.

To break through Russia’s echeloned defence, you have to throw at least one division into the breach and after a while replace it with another. Because it will be all destroyed in the first stages of the breakthrough, having advanced in just one or two lines. Further on it needs more and more! They can’t do it. Firstly, they don’t have that much force. Secondly, any attempt to concentrate large formations before attacking makes them an excellent target for artillery and air attacks.

Western armies are not ready for the kind of war, the kind of military actions that are being waged in Ukraine today and will be waged tomorrow. They are not ready for modern serious military operations by large army formations against the Russian army.”

The 9th experienced catastrophic losses from the start of the offensive on June 4th onward, as we all know. There are rumors that entire brigades were wiped out—for instance, this odd headline about the 32nd (one of the 9 from 9th Corps) which apparently was ‘mysteriously’ shipped out to a dead frontline:

Or this one, which details how several of the 9th Corps brigades seemed to be completely missing in action:

What was interesting is that, as per the 32nd brigade above, yesterday some new documents were leaked online which appeared to show that the 32nd was remanded due to mass desertion/mutiny and refusal to follow orders:

Furthermore, there were reports online from alleged loved ones and relations of the soldiers from the 32nd that an entire battalion was completely ‘destroyed’:

According to captured documents and confirmed by social media messages from distraught loved ones, an entire battalion of the 32nd Separate Rifle Brigade of the Ukrainian Army has been wiped out. 🪦🇺🇦

So the 9th Corps was not able to reach Russia’s first line of defense and the brigades had appeared to be too degraded to go on any further, many of them withdrawn to refit/reconstitute in the rear. The 10th Corps was then injected prematurely to take over, which is what this new ‘second phase’ has been all about since the end of July.

Keep in mind, no one actually knows for certain regarding the 10th Corps, but the above has been the main narrative not only of NYTimes reporters who first broke the story but Rob Lee and Kofman who’ve now certified this narrative of the 10th Corps’ take over.

Some context: Ukraine had, according to the Pentagon leaks, about 34 maneuver brigades, with another 27 TDF (Territorial Defense Forces) brigades likely capable of mostly holding trenches and without much heavy weaponry or armor, and 9 artillery brigades total left in the war. This is 61 total infantry/armor brigades which are meant to hold a frontline 1,300km long. This averages to 1300/61 = 21km per brigade. Note that in Soviet doctrine a brigade should hold something like no more than 2-3km at most and an entire division should hold 10km. Not to mention that Ukrainian brigades are at most 4000 men when they should be 5000, most are 3000 and apparently, even according to MSM articles covering them, some are 2000.

Some will ask, how is it possible that Russia is not overwhelming the AFU with such thin lines and battered brigades. Recall that Russia is only fighting this war with a percentage of its armed forces. The Russian army has classically had anywhere between 50-65% contract with 50-35% conscripts, and as you know, the MOD is not allowing conscripts to fight here. That means Russia is only using about ~60% of its total bayonet strength while Ukraine is using everyone—all Ukrainian troops are conscripts force-mobilized straight from the street.

Not to mention there are still hundreds of thousands (official number 340k) of ‘National Guard’ that Russia is not utilizing while Ukraine uses its full national guard, police force, and everything in between as frontline assault. Russia has typically only used small specialized Rosgvardia ‘special forces’ like FSVNG rather than the regular national guard itself. Thus, Russia is fighting this entire war as an exclusively contracted, professional military force while leaving hundreds of thousands of troops not committed. Ukraine on the other hand is committing everything imaginable.

This segues into the next section. For those who’ve followed my recent reports you’ll note I’ve been keeping track of Russia’s ongoing ‘stealth mobilization’. In June, Putin had the roundtable with reporters where he answered about a potential future mobilization—I’ll repost his response here again:

Vladimir Putin:

Is additional mobilization needed? I don’t follow this closely, but some public figures say that we urgently need to raise another million, two million. It depends on what we want. At the end of the Great Patriotic War, we had almost 5 million in the armed forces.

It depends on the purpose. Our troops were at Kiev. Do we need to go back or not? I am asking a rhetorical question, it is clear that you have no answer to it. I can only answer it myself. But depending on what goals we set for ourselves, we must decide on the issue of mobilization. Well, there is no such need today.

We have started work since January of this year – we have recruited over 150,000 contract servicemen. And together with volunteers – 156 thousand. And our mobilization was 300 thousand. Under these conditions, the Ministry of Defense reports that, of course, there is no need for mobilization today.

Firstly, note that he says at the moment there’s no need for mobilization, leaving the door open for the future. This is because Russia has been conducting the stealth mobilization which, a month later in July, Shoigu said saw 1,336 signups per day in Russia, which is just over 40k a month. Shoigu famously said “This is enough to complete a regiment per day.”

Shoigu had also previously stated:

“In fact, by the end of June, we will complete the formation of a reserve army and in the near future we will complete the formation of an army corps. Five regiments have also been formed by more than 60%. In this case, I am talking about personnel and equipment,” the head of the military department emphasized. .

Such data inspire confidence in the resilience of our defense in the NVO zone, especially against the backdrop of off-scale losses of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. In addition, the following phrase flashed in the minister’s speech: “Preparations are underway for further offensive actions … On our part as well.“

The reason for refreshing your memory with the above, is to contextualize the new update below. Medvedev has now released a new video where he confirms that from January 1 to August 3, Russia has now recruited a total 231,000 contract servicemen. Watch the end of the video:

He further allegedly said that 400k by the end of the year is the goal. Now, keep in mind, Russia potentially lost 30-50k men with Wagner’s departure, not to mention Shoigu’s new reserve army and army corps, which could swallow as much as 120k of those men. In fact, I recall he specifically said last month—though I can’t find the quote at the moment—that out of the 160k+ recruited at the time, 40k would be sent to the front while the remaining would go to these reserve armies. This likely breaks down as ~30k for the new reserve corps of three divisions or so, with another 90k for the new field army of 3 army corps.

So, with the new 231k signups that Medvedev announced, how many men are the actual net positive? 30-50k lost from Wagner’s removal plus 120k for the reserves = 150-180k, subtract from 231k and we’re left with about 50-80k net troops for now. However, if Russia achieves the 400k figure by the end of the year, that will begin to turn into a game-changing amount.

But, here’s the wrinkle. In light of this, Ukraine plans to desperately try to match Russia as reports now claim the following:

In Ukraine, a large-scale mobilization may be announced in winter.

The “big mobilization” in Ukraine, which was announced by the deputy of the Rada Dubinsky, is, apparently, general raids on everyone who can still hold weapons, and no longer with campaigns in certain cities and districts, but on a large scale, everywhere and constantly.

Supplies of equipment from the West do not allow maintaining the required level of armament of existing units. If the number of these units increases, it will most likely mean the appearance of several dozen more TrO brigades, where for 3-4 thousand people in a brigade there will be a maximum of a tank company, a howitzer battery and a mortar division. Such brigades will not be capable of anything other than “meat assaults” or sitting in a blind defense.

A certain number of units with more or less normal equipment, of course, will remain — and will probably work as fire brigades.

The other side of the issue is the command of such units. You can recruit tens of thousands of conscripts aged 40-55. It is more difficult to understand who will control these troops on the battlefield. The shortage of junior and senior command staff began long before the start of the AFU offensive, and this problem has not yet been solved. (Older than the Edda)

This is supported by recent statements like from this Ukrainian veteran, who says that the entire male population of Ukraine should prepare for eventual mobilization. He foresees that 90% of males will eventually fight (and likely die, we can infer):

Recall that time is running out for the AFU this year. Many experts believe August and September to be the last real viable months before the second mini-Rasputitsa comes, with similar rain and mud conditions as in early spring. Zelensky fears losing the last vestige of support from the West and in fact, there are some rumors that certain key countries—namely Germany—have already curtailed their support in anticipation of a foregone conclusion. For instance, despite being the 2nd biggest overall supplier to Kiev, Germany has delayed certain critical shipments, like the new Leopard 1s, as well as many other promised items:

🚨Germany continues to delay promised weapons to Ukraine in the amount of 2.4 billion euros. So far, Kyiv has received practically none.

The list of planned deliveries includes 110 Leopard-1 tanks, 20 Marder infantry fighting vehicles, 18 Gepard tanks, 4 Iris-T anti-aircraft guns and 26,350 artillery ammunition.

Reconnaissance drones, radars, tankers and trucks were also promised.

But so far, neither Marder, nor Iris-T, nor trucks have been delivered to Ukraine. Kyiv received only 10 Leopard-1s, one air surveillance radar, 12 Gepards and 850 artillery rounds, as well as 8 ambulances.

Also Germany supplied 11,000 rations, three unmanned drone sensors and five metal bridges for the Beaver bridge-laying armored vehicle.

So now, Zelensky is escalating in order to draw Russia into over-reacting, which would re-engage NATO’s flagging interest. Not only has Kiev stepped up outright acts of terror, like hitting Moscow office buildings with drones:

And yesterday’s hit on a Russian civilian oil tanker by a Ukrainian naval drone.

But now, there are rumors Zelensky intends to escalate his terror war to new heights. It’s believed the Moscow drone strikes were just probing attacks to test Russian defenses, and that a large-scale raid is being planned within weeks:

⚡️Kiev is preparing a massive drone raid on Moscow⚡️

⚡️⚡️⚡️The Wall Street Journal warns of a large-scale attack by Ukrainian UAVs on the Russian capital.

The authors report that thanks to the latest attacks on Moscow, the APU probed the weaknesses of the capital’s air defense in order to send dozens of drones there in the future.⚡️⚡️⚡️

The publication is confident that the city will be attacked in several directions at once. The red date of possible sabotage is considered to be August 24 (the imaginary Independence Day of Ukraine), which is confirmed by the threatening cartoon that recently spread across social networks.⚡️⚡️😡

The goal of this would be obvious: to force Russia into somehow over-reacting with an uncharacteristically rash use of force which could highlight Russia’s “brutality” and wring sympathy and further support for Ukraine from Western nations. For instance, one of the goals would be to get Russia to respond in a ‘tit-for-tat’ attack on civilian buildings in Kiev which would be hyper-focused by Western MSM while completely sweeping under the rug Kiev’s own attacks on Russian civilian targets. This would then be used in a new PR campaign to drum up more weapons aid from the West, with Zelensky using it as an example of why Kiev needs tons of new Patriot missiles and things of that nature.

Obviously, this is pure desperation. It’s the reason that I hardly even cover the drone attacks on the ships, skyscrapers, etc.—because they are utterly irrelevant and barely worth mentioning, having no appreciable effect on the battlefield dynamics/developments whatsoever. They are merely signs of utmost desperation, the frenzied clawing of a dying animal as it foams at the mouth after having been run over.

There’s also a second dimension to it. It represents the unruly actions of a disobedient child thrashing out against their parents. Ukraine wants the grain deal back on as it’s losing huge amounts of money from the deal’s termination. Thus, by escalating past the West’s own delimited ‘red lines’—for instance, about striking Russian territory, etc.—Ukraine is ‘rebelling’ against their own masters in order to force them into action, ideally to coerce them into putting more pressure on Russia to get back to the table regarding the grain deal.

To summarize, here’s what the advisor to the former president of Ukraine had to say about Zelensky’s outlook:

💥💥💥Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy faces civil war if he continues to illegally hold power in the country. A former adviser to Leonid Kuchma, Oleh Soskin, said this on YouTube.

“If martial law is not cancelled and elections are held, this power will be considered illegitimate. And since illegitimate, it is outlawed, and any Ukrainian within the framework of the fifth article of the constitution can destroy the rebels,” he said.

Earlier, Soskin said that the decision announced on 26 July to extend martial law shows Zelenskyy’s fear of losing the election.

The expert also noted that the failed policy of the Ukrainian president was the reason why many spheres of the state, including the economic and military ones, were almost completely destroyed.

“The Kiev regime has no popular support. As soon as the external supports fall away, everything will collapse at once,” the politician said.

In short, Ukraine faces flagging support from the West and is forced to resort to increasingly escalatory ‘gimmicks’ like mass terror drone attacks on Moscow in the same vein as the terminal phase of the Wehrmacht in WW2 vindictively launching V1/V2 rockets at London. This is nothing more than a dying animal, thrashing out its last gasps.

Meanwhile, Russia is on track for 400k new servicemen by the end of this year, with production of all kinds continually ramping up. By next spring, I believe what we’ll see is the slow envelopment of the AFU from every direction. It likely won’t be a massive big arrow campaign but a continual collapse on every single front where the AFU has completely exhausted all combat potential, particularly of the offensive variety, and is desperately trying to hold ground. The dam will slowly break in multiple directions and their positions will be overrun everywhere. Next year will likely look like early 1945 Germany.

Keep in mind, I’ve been on record before stating this conflict could likely go for 3-5 or even 10 years. But we’ve gotten a lot more new data over the last few months, and intelligent analysis requires constant honest re-appraisal in the face of new information. As it stands right now, barring some unforeseen circumstances, I see it happening as described above. The war could still last another year or two past that, but only with a dogged defense and constant retreating on the AFU’s behalf, for instance west of the Dnieper, which would cause Russia to have to take a long hiatus in re-orienting its troops, etc.—but essentially the result will have been decided by that point.

The major, insoluble problem for Kiev is particularly the fact that Russia’s drone production is set for an exponential explosion:

⚡️⚡️⚡️Rising militarist in the use of “Lancets” at the front:

According to Western data, the scale of the use of the “Lancet” stray ammunition is growing. The number of their launches reaches at least 20-25 units per day. For the first time, the use of “Lancets” against trenches, positions and groups of infantry is observed.

At least 50-60 FPV drones and 20-30 lancets are used every day, and dozens of helicopters with 40 or 60 mm bombs drop them into trenches and fixed targets, especially in Donbass and Kherson.

If infantry and sapper posts are also among the targets, then the number of Lancets sent to the front has increased, and the units have been given freedom of action in terms of their use.

If the new Lancet models come forward more actively, in the coming months we can see a rapid increase to 50 and possibly 100 launches per day as there is a dramatic increase in production and its usage could increase several times⚡️⚡️⚡️

Many sources are saying that in the next few months, Ukraine will drown in Lancets. And there are new models coming which have thermobaric warheads for taking out troops rather than HEAT-style anti-armor warheads now most often used. That means Lancets will soon be taking out trenches and troop deployments along the entire front. We’re certainly seeing a flood of daily videos showing almost nothing but successful Lancet hits. The bottleneck will likely soon be—if it isn’t already—the operators themselves.

On top of which, British intel claims a new Geran drone factory is nearing completion in Tatarstan and it will be pumping out massive numbers of drones. Ukraine will be drowning in drone swarm attacks on a daily basis.

According to British intelligence, Russia has finished a Geran 2 drone factory to 80%.

It’s capacity will allow the production of up to 5,000 suicide drones a year.

— Source ResidentUA

Recall earlier reports from Western MSM that Russia is already building and acquiring 45-50k smaller surveillance and FPV drones per month.

This hugely plays into something I’ve written about before, which is that Russia is primarily using its Geran drones to completely deplete the highly expensive Western air defense systems. Recall, I had stated that there is nothing of note to really hit in Kiev. It’s not like Ukraine stages troops there. Russia simply sends swarms of Gerans to make Ukrainian air defense expend itself so that they have to take AD missiles from other frontlines, thus completely depleting the AD where it matters most.

Ukrainians report that drones over Ukraine are once again using “strange” tactics. Ukrainian monitoring channels report oddities in the use of Geranj-2 drones.

Some of them are circling above the alleged duty zones of the air defense system of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, and the other part of the drones is at a considerable distance from the targets and waiting for AD to be activated.

Now, there’s been confirmation of this in the form of a very informative thread from this Western reporter who interviewed a Lt. Colonel in the Ukrainian air defense command. The shocking revelation he made was that the city of Kiev was very close to being entirely evacuated last December, due to the strength of Russia’s missile barrage—that’s all 2+ million people. The exchange is published in this article:

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/a601271e-32c8-11ee-b04c-88a034803f06

Ignore the fantasy about shooting down Kinzhal missiles, this is merely a fatuous lie meant to butter up Western officials into handing over more Patriots. The real telling information comes after:

“You can’t plan a war with an annual production of 150-160 Patriot missiles. We fired those in a month,” he said, sounding the alarm that his men were running out of ammunition. “If we wait until autumn, until mid-October, they will hit the energy infrastructure again. This is a certainty. This winter will be even more difficult than the previous one.”

What he correctly reveals is that the U.S.’s annual production capacity for Patriot missiles is a mere 150+. Kiev fires more than that in a single month. The U.S. is estimated to only have probably around 3000-5000 total Patriot missiles, in terms of the ammunition. That may sound high but around 2-3k of them are loaded into U.S.’s own 500-1000 active launchers.

Then came the bombshell:

He disclosed that in December Ukrainian authorities had been on the brink of ordering the complete evacuation of Kyiv due to the intensity of Russian airstrikes. “Not many people know this, but Kyiv was on the verge of evacuation,” he said. “There was one battle that, in my opinion, determined the fate of Kyiv and the Russian campaign to destroy our energy sector, when 49 cruise missiles were launched at Kyiv.”

In a desperate 15 minutes on December 16, Ukraine fired dozens of missiles from its Soviet-era S-300, American Nasams and German Iris-T systems to save the city from total blackout in freezing temperatures.

“If we had allowed this strike to succeed, Kyiv would have had to be evacuated. And it is very difficult to evacuate two and a half million people,” the colonel said.

The point of this is to illustrate that this coming winter will be particularly difficult for Ukraine as Russian missile and drone production has ramped up a lot since last year, not to mention the ensuing next year as well. If they were close to evacuating Kiev last December, what will the situation be this coming December?

This is all part of the slow collapse I outlined—as Russia gets stronger by the month. It will be a completely different ball game by next year and Ukraine will be hanging on by a thread, depleted to the bone not only in armored vehicles and artillery but the crucial AD system missiles.

And as of this writing, a massive new round of strikes is being carried out on Ukrainian targets, particularly the Starokonstantinov airfield in western Ukraine where the Storm Shadow-launching Su-24M planes are said to be housed. This is a particularly large strike with upwards of 15 Tu-95s airborne reported, as well as Kinzhal-carrying Mig-31Ks. In almost every strike now, Russian Kh-101 missiles are reported to take extremely circuitous routes, where they ‘cruise around’ the country, changing directions frequently and completely throwing off Ukrainian monitoring systems and defenses.

Starokonstantinov flew to the military airfield around 19:00. Explosions were heard about 8. Something is on fire.

Meanwhile, retired Ukrainian general Serhiy Krivonos believes Russia is on the verge of a major offensive in the next few months which could “take Kiev”:

“Before Kiev in 12 hours“: the ex-general of the Armed Forces of Ukraine warns of the impending offensive of the Russian army “In the coming months, the Armed Forces of Ukraine are waiting for the “worst scenarios,” said Major General of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, retired Serhiy Krivonos. In his opinion, Kiev clearly underestimates the power of the Russian army, which will lead to terrible consequences, including the lightning capture of the capital. The ex-officer is confident that after the failure of the counteroffensive, the RF Armed Forces will strike at Ukraine and are capable of capturing Kiev in 12 hours. OstashkoNews

I don’t know where he got the 12 hours timeline, but many do believe that Russia is gearing up for its own offensive in the near future. For instance, analyst Yuri Podolyaka again voiced his opinion that Russia will launch an offensive before Rasputitsa. Personally, I don’t necessarily see that happening as, given the above longer term prospects for the AFU, I don’t see a big current urgency for Russia to have to ‘rush’ into a series of offensives this year.

It’s possible but only for opportunistic reasons. When you’re playing ‘active defense’, as Russia likes to employ, you have to always be prepared to exploit an enemy’s weaknesses in a given area. So if Russian commanders smell blood on a particular front, then it’s possible. But as of now, it seems most logical to wait out one more winter to allow the aerospace forces to degrade Ukraine economically, militarily, morale-wise, etc., before attacking a much weaker foe in a much more favorable light next year.

In the interim of this winter, though, I could see a lot of intrigues playing out in the void left by Ukraine’s exhausted combat potential. This will include the Poland-Belarus-Wagner vector.

Armed Forces of Ukraine cannot win, faced with intractable problems at the front near Artyomovsk, — Wall Street Journal

▪️Success in the Ukrainian counter-offensive is in doubt due to the fatigue of the soldiers of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in the Artyomovsk direction and serious losses.

▪️Currently, Russian troops use a lot more drones than before. In addition, the communication system has become more advanced, which prevents the APU from intercepting messages.

💬”There are fierce battles, we need more soldiers and weapons. We are tired,” says the Ukrainian doctor.

Earlier, I had mentioned possible ‘unforeseen circumstances’ potentially occurring. As others have stated, Poland is due for their own elections later this year and any major actions on their part are unlikely before then. In fact, several reports ago if you’ll recall, I said that a ‘big’ sudden action is unlikely at all. I explained that the framework for Polish takeover of west Ukraine would be more in line with a hybrid one, like that of Turkey in Idlib and north Syria, etc.

Putin has confirmed my thoughts in a new statement. Watch the end of the video where he explains how Polish units may be brought into western Ukraine under the guise of some ‘internal forces’ or national guard in relation to ‘ensuring security’:

Like I said in the earlier report, this would be akin to Russia’s own ‘little green men’ takeover of Crimea. And since Belarus has now upped the rhetoric and delivered its own threats to Poland in regard to this, it makes it even more likely that Poland would opt for the more subtle and hybrid-style eventual takeover. But I don’t see this option being activated until further down the line, perhaps next year at the earliest when the Kiev regime finally begins to crack to the point where Poland sees an opportunity to exploit a politically neutered and desperate administration.

Even Medvedev now blithely says that west Ukraine will ‘fall to Poland’ in the future:

Colonel MacGregor even has an interesting theory, which is that Poland may use the guise of creating an ‘enclave’ in Ukraine for the purpose of repatriating the Ukrainian refugees as a way to get in the door and effect exactly this type of ‘stealth’ take over I described above, and which Putin hinted at:

Now, that situation is developing as Polish officials have begun to use Wagner’s deployment on their border as an excuse to condition the public for potential future escalations.

🇵🇱🤡⚔️🏴 PMC “Wagner” has already tried to enter the territory of Poland from Belarus, said Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs of Poland Paweł Jabłoński on CNN.

According to him, “the threat from Belarus is very real” and Warsaw is considering various steps, including the complete closure of the border.

“We are considering any steps that will be necessary to protect our territory, protect our citizens, including the complete isolation of Belarus, the complete closure of the border. We expect new attacks on our border, possibly new attempts to violate our airspace,” stated Jabłoński.

Earlier, the Polish opposition accused the country’s authorities of inflating the threat from the “Wagnerites” for election purposes.

Days ago, a Belarusian helicopter was even claimed by Poland to have crossed the Polish border, sparking another round of alarmism and a new deployment of more Polish troops on the Belarusian border.

Meanwhile, Zelensky continues attempting to hatch desperate plans to drag Poland and thereby NATO into the conflict:

💥🤡💥Ukro media:

“The president’s office considers it possible to drag Warsaw into the war in Ukraine if there is a provocation or strikes by unknown UAVs against the Polish military.”

Looks like “unknown UAVs” are already on the launch pads….

💥🤡💥

The SBU even stated that they believe Russia is in fact using Wagner to secretly spur Belarus into the conflict by using Wagner agents to instigate a falseflag in the country which can be blamed on Ukraine. This could be the SBU’s own telegraphing of a planned provocation where they may attempt to attack Belarus in a bid to get them to enter the war, which itself would be a double bid to get Poland to respond to the ‘threat of Belarus’ and likewise enter the war.

Recall that Lukashenko issued a threat to Poland as their presence on Belarus’s southern border can be considered a national security threat. But likewise, we can infer that Poland could consider Belarus’s presence on its own southeastern border to be a similar threat. Thus, the SBU could perhaps be dreaming of coaxing Belarus into a trap in order to activate Poland, and then NATO.

Not that I believe the above scenario is likely, but just outlining the possibilities, given these new developments and rumors.

And as a last update to add to the growing list of problems, Ukraine’s F-16 wunderwaffe hopes have been dashed as well due to Ukraine’s lack of English-speaking pilots:

Politico writes: The weak level of English among Ukrainian pilots proved to be a stumbling block for the start of their training on F-16 fighters, as a result of which language courses to be held in the UK will begin earlier than the training program. At the moment, only 8 pilots are ready to train for the fighter.

In short, there’s nothing good or optimistic coming up in the slightest for the AFU. The Russian army only continues to grow stronger, larger, more advanced, more experienced while Ukraine grows in the opposite direction, with arms shipments declining and no more ‘wunderwaffe’ on the horizon to save them.

In almost every conceivable direction, Russia is solving problems on a daily basis and improving, increasing its sophistication; just as a quick mention of a few of the key ones:

• Russian communications systems are said to be getting increasingly more advanced. The AFU complains that Russian forces on every front have been upgrading their comms equipment, including with better encryption which no longer allows the AFU to intercept much communications
• New Russian anti-drone systems continue to be developed and spotted with increasing regularity on the frontlines and in trenches
• New powerful ability to jam starlink stations on a broader front, which a prominent AFU commander ‘Magyar’ recently began complaining about last week: “the Russians have learned how to jam Starlink at “zero” — Ukrainian commander Magyar.“Now this technology is being tested and prepared for production on an industrial scale.” Starlink on the front allowed our military to coordinate and control the operational situation.At the beginning of the invasion, the Russian Federation had much stronger radio intelligence and communications suppression, but this changed after the arrival of Starlink”
• This includes a new design for an FPV drone zapper being tested on tanks, which is a small unit placed on the back of tanks and armored vehicles which disables FPV drones in 4 channels and neutralizes them before they can make contact

🇷🇺Tank complex for suppression of FVP drones “Triton” from the PPSh Laboratory

According to the developer, the product is designed to suppress the control channels and data transmission of FPV drones in the 868\915\1300\2400 MHz bands (4 suppression bands)

Management is carried out by means of the portable panel for the maximum safety of the operator. Both autonomous operation from the built-in battery and power supply from the on-board network of the vehicle are possible.

Potentially, with the help of such systems it will be possible to protect armored vehicles from one the most deadly threats on the battlefield.

Not to mention the increasing use of Chinese jammers on Russian tanks for the same purpose:

By the way, the servicemen began to solve the problem with the vulnerability of armor to FPV drones on their own and at the grassroots level.

So, the enemy has already published a photo of one of the Chinese jammers, which some of our tank crews handicraftly install on their equipment.

Such systems allow you to create a dome of interference around the tank, which does not allow FPV drones to freely fly up to it. However, such jammers have holes in the zone of protection and are not fully integrated into the on-board network of the tank, so the army needs a serial industrial design installed on each tank directly from the factory.

Military Informant

This includes a new development for ‘hibernating drones’:

It’s said these FPV drones can be placed in forward positions and ‘hibernated’ for weeks at a time. Then when an enemy offensive begins, they can be raised instantaneously, greatly reducing flight time, to strike right at the area where the enemy armor is passing. This way there is very little forewarning or chance to react.

Kuzyakin explained that the hibernation tool minimizes the time to prepare the device for an attack. “Flying time is saved. A few seconds pass between turning on the drone and attacking, which leaves no chance of launching countermeasure systems. One FPV pilot can place, and then ‘wake up’ and sequentially use up to 15 ‘sleeping drones,’” he said.

The drone or drones are placed on “commanding heights and building rooftops or other high-rise structures as prepositions for drone attacks.” “When the time comes to launch the attack, the drone would not need to traverse the distance to the target, as it would already be positioned. This device enables reducing attack preparation time to the minimal amount possible – just a few seconds pass between drone reactivation and the attack, leaving the adversary no chance to launch anti-drone systems,” the report added. 

Not to mention that British intel complains that Russia continues to receive the newest batches of upgraded Ka-52Ms which can now fire the Izdel. 305 LMUR TV-guided missile.

This adds a huge ‘fire and forget’ capability to Russia’s attack choppers.

David Wu, ex-Wall Street and IMF strategist, Ph.D. in economics from Columbia University summarizes the coming situation very aptly:

Now, to move onto a few last disparate items.

One of the other biggest adjacently related developments is the brewing situation in Niger. I’ll summarize the developments quickly for now:

There is a claim that Nigerien ‘junta’ general Mody is requesting the immediate help and deployment of Wagner forces, via Mali backchannels:

Normally, this would perhaps be uncorroborated rumor, however today footage appeared to show a Russian military heavy transport plane landing in the Niger capital of Niamey, with claims that Wagner forces are arriving:

RT has also now covered it.

The Nigerian senate has vetoed the deployment of military against Niger, but I’m not sure how much this matters given that ECOWAS countries continue to take an aggressive posture and threaten a military intervention. More and more, the sides are taking shape. Senegal has now voiced full backing for military intervention while Algeria said that this would be a threat to its own national security and implied backing Niger militarily.

“Waving military intervention in Niger is a direct threat to Algeria, and we completely and categorically reject it,” the head of state stressed. “Problems should be solved peacefully,” he continued, speaking about the events taking place in Niger.

“There has been a coup [in Niger]. And we have confirmed that we stand for constitutional legality. And it is necessary to return to this legality. We are ready to help them,” Tebboune added.

Meanwhile, the American permanent representative to the UN has reportedly stated that any Wagner involvement or attack in Niger would be “considered an attack by the Russian Federation.”

Clearly, this situation represents a new potential flashpoint which can erupt at any moment. Here’s a good new Grayzone/Klarenberg article on the corrupt Nigerian president, ECOWAS chairman, and U.S. toady who’s leading the push for military intervention in Niger.

No matter what happens, Africans are waking up and it’s the beginning of the end for Western colonialism and free-rides:

Next:

New techniques for estimating Ukrainian losses continue to be innovated. This one studies the expansion of new Ukrainian cemeteries from space:

There’s no telling how accurate it is so take it with a big grain of salt, but it’s an interesting addition to the mental calculus. Certainly, even the top pro-Ukrainian accounts have recently lamented the unprecedented losses, which have been so large over the past few months even they’re unable to sweep them under the rug with the usual techniques:

The other big news which really puts a stamp on all my outlooks for the future is that the new Worldbank estimates have come in, and Russia has now officially once again moved into #5th place in the world’s top economies per GDP PPP, supplanting Germany for the spot:

You can get the official figures here: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.PP.CD

The most startling thing is that Russia is only a hair behind Japan. Recall my article on this topic, where I outlined how Russia is the most sanctioned country on the planet and yet still manages to be close to edging out even Japan for the #4 spot. This latest news confirms my findings. I invite all to revisit this article:

The Truth About Russia’s Economic Power: Is It Really as Small and Weak as the West Claims?

SIMPLICIUS THE THINKER

·

APR 2

Preface: The following article is based on one I previously published on the Saker on this exact anniversary, which I believe bears increased importance in today’s climate. So I have decided to heavily revise and update it with the latest data, tripling its length in the process, to make it as contemporaneously pertinent as possible. I believe this is i…

Read full story

Imagine if the West played fair and Russia was not under the largest economic terrorism attack of any other country in the world? I said it in the article above and I’ll say it again, if that were the case, Russia would likely be the #3 economy on earth after China/U.S., and it will return to that position in the future. It will likely surpass Japan in the next 3-5 years on that list. The end of this war will shatter a lot of illusions and the West will come to respect and be in awe of the military and economic powerhouse that is Russia.

Next:

A Ukrainian post that highlights some of the major ongoing refusals in the military and how drastic it’s gotten:

❗️UKRAINIAN POST❗️

‼️ ABOUT THE COUNTER-OFFENSIVE ‼️

I wondered for a long time why our offensive was not getting anywhere. The main reason, of course, is that our leadership, who knows why, trumpeted about it in all directions. Strange, huh?! No wonder we received such a warm welcome.

But that is not the only problem. The trouble is that our defenders, and I’m not talking specifically about the 93rd separate motorized brigade, would much rather be chilling at home during the offensive.

Let me explain! 👇🏻

Ever since the ATO [Anti-Terrorist Operation] and JFO [Joint Forces Operation] kickbacks to commanders for not going into battle and staying home have become standard practice. The same story continues today, only in a more sophisticated form.

Today, for a tank to be disabled by the crew itself, you need to pay the commander $1,500 and he will turn a blind eye, and the combat vehicle, together with the crew, will go to the rear for repairs. How do you like that?!

I am not saying this out of nowhere. My friend at a repair base near Bakhmut told me that in just a few days of July, four tanks and six armored personnel carriers arrived for repairs. After analyzing the breakdowns, the lads found out that two tanks and one of the armored vehicles were put out of action on purpose. That is, the breakdown was intentional and it was obvious that the crew was responsible for it.

It all makes sense! The guys are simply afraid for their lives, especially when the command sends them into battle in under-equipped vehicles.

This is the next point of our “successful” counteroffensive.👇🏻

The truth is that incompetence, corruption and simply disregard for people lead to a considerable number of non-combat losses.

From the same source, I learned that at least 3 tanks burned out from the inside due to the fact that the fire extinguishing system lacked a special reagent, which we happen to have plenty of in our warehouses.

I honestly don’t know which of the above was the decisive factor, but I do know that we won’t win the war this way.

One more thing! 👇🏻

To all of the above, add more kickbacks for “bonuses” and “sick leaves”. It’s no surprise that such a large number of AWOL soldiers is due to these same schemes. The guys give half of their money allowance to the commanders, and get to sit it out at home. My hypothesis is confirmed by the fact that a very large percentage of AWOL reports are not sent by commanders to the DBR [State Bureau of Investigation] and other bodies. No wonder a whole AWOL commission paid a visit to our 93rd brigade.

UPD: While these fighters, experienced in terms of “dodging”, are sitting at home, the command is recruiting raw and inexperienced lads and sending them into battle. But I am sure that the 30 percent of them that remain after the first battle also become EXPERIENCED (. That’s some vicious circle.

@HolodniyYar

Next:

Both General Teplinsky and Seliverstov of the VDV have now appeared in new videos honoring the paratroopers during Paratroopers Day, which celebrates the August 2, 1930 founding of the Russian Airborne.

Here is Seliverstov:

And Teplinsky:

Recall that these are the two Generals said to have been “purged by Putin” by a bunch of cranks and amateurish 2D blogger-grifters to push some laughable narrative. Now, like every other ‘purged’ figure, they are seen still at their duty and commanding their forces. Consider that narrative fully debunked and dispelled.

And speaking of people said to have been purged, Shoigu has now visited the ‘Center Group’ frontline to meet with General Mordvichev—incidentally, also said to have been ‘killed’ and now miraculously resurrected. Shoigu not only awarded troops with special custom pistols (MP-443 Grach 9x19MM according to one source) but also inspected the captured Swedish CV-90 IFV and its uniquely huge 40mm Bofors rounds:

In the 2nd video above, he quips whether they caught any Leopards then says to the effect of, “Well the other guys are destroying so many of them you may not see any here.”

Meanwhile, the U.S.’s own recruitment is going so poorly that Military.com has urgently called for a new limited draft in order to replenish the armed forces:

Most amusing of all is, after making fun of Russia’s ‘dual’ conscript/contract system for so long, now they’re proposing it for the U.S.

But after two decades of war — both of which ended unsuccessfully — and low unemployment, many experts believe the all-volunteer force has reached a breaking point. And American confidence in its military is at a low.

The fastest and most effective way to resolve this recruiting crisis is to change how we recruit.

Instead of an “either an all-volunteer force or a fully conscripted force” model, I propose a both-and solution.

We should have our military recruiters sign up new troops for 11 months out of the year, and then have the Selective Service draft the delta between the military’s needs and the total number recruited.

Meanwhile, here’s what the latest class of U.S. Marine Corps recruits looks like:

Cue the laughter.

Russia is supposed to be afraid of that? Have you seen what Russian troops look like in the war?

Next:

As many have likely heard by now, it appears that Gonzalo Lira never made it across the Hungarian border, and was in fact stopped by Ukrainian services and has now ‘disappeared’, perhaps for good.

For those who continue to complain that Gonzalo messed up by posting videos while on the run—recall that he set the video on a timed delay for release 6 hours after recording it. By the time the video actually hit the web, he was supposed to have been long across the border. He wasn’t posting the video while still in Ukraine.

I’ll leave you with this aerial shot of the Kakhovka dam area to give an idea how the reservoir is looking these days, although keep in mind this is a bit upriver of the ZNPP plant:

And a closeup view of another of many destroyed M2 Bradleys:

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https://www.bitchute.com/video/WuHZAqWmNtlZ/