by Simplicius
The ink has yet to dry on the signed Ukrainian aid, but it has finally passed both House, Senate, and the final Biden rubberstamp. As predicted here, the list of new items is “long” but mostly constitutes the secondary munitions types which aren’t as easily expendable and therefore still exist in some quantity. The primary ones, i.e. artillery shells and such, are still heavily backlogged.
As you can see, much of the munitions above represent ones which have long lost their effectiveness and have done nothing to really make a dent of any kind in the battlefield.
In fact, just days ago Ukraine’s head of the aerial reconnaissance support center, Maria Berlinskaya, stated that “most Western systems have proven to be [worthless]” because Russian EW neutralizes them all. Listen for yourself:
It was also revealed that much of the gear was already forward-stationed and merely awaiting the final approval, and has begun streaming in from Poland. In fact, some of it was already secretly given a week or two ago, such as in the case of the ATACMS missiles, which were already used as most had guessed since the strike on Dzhankoi airbase a week ago.
There was footage showing the offloading of about a dozen M2 Bradleys from Poland, ready to be sent to Ukraine.
What difference will that make? There is hardly more than that to be sent, and most of them looked worn out and probably the non-working write-offs as we’ve already come to find out from AFU servicemen themselves, who admitted many of the previously sent Bradleys/Abrams were in non-working condition.
The problem is, amid the wave of drunken excitement over the new aid, there have been many sober voices making efforts to temper the wild flights of exaggerated optimism.
This has spurred calls for NATO to totally reconfigure itself into a full war footing because cooler heads have recognized that this aid will amount to nothing more than a brief respite for Ukraine, but will do nothing for actually equalizing the forces, much less overwhelming Russia with some kind of superiority or material overmatch.
Even Dmitry Kuleba echoed the sentiment:
“No [aid] package can stop the Russians,” he said in an interview with the British publication The Guardian, commenting on the US aid package.
Kuleba added that the West needs to increase arms production, since Russia is ahead of it. “When I see what Russia has achieved in building up its defense industrial base over two years of war and what the West has achieved, I think that something is wrong on the West’s part,” the minister noted.
And the main issue is now rearing its head more than ever: out of the several disastrous problems plaguing the AFU, the supply issue is not even its biggest; that dishonorable distinction goes to the lack of usable manpower.
Polish general named Ukraine’s main problem at the front lines
Ukraine faces a great challenge, first of all having someone to fight with…. There are 150-200 thousand soldiers missing at the front.This is a big challenge for the Kiev government,” said former Polish commander General Waldemar Skrzypczak on air on FM radio station RMF.
This has brought conversations back to the topic of mobilization. Even though Zelensky has signed the bill, there appears to be a dragging of feet as nothing drastic is yet being done, just a slow boil of increasingly draconian street gangpressing as usual. But commanders and other authoritative observers on the front continue to bellow in strained voices that the situation is grim and Ukraine needs more manpower most of all.
Without being privy to the discussions of Zelensky’s cohort, we can only assume that they deem the civil situation to be so pessimistic that they’re terrified of announcing anything too overtly forceful, particularly given that Zelensky’s legitimate hold on power is set to soon expire less than a month from today. In fact, it technically already expired, as the elections should have been held by now—but May 21st is officially when a new president would have been sworn in.
As for mobilization, here’s Ukrainian lawyer Rostislav Kravets and Arestovich both separately revealing that there are reportedly over 100,000 deserters in the AFU:
This is utterly shocking because they are talking about actual deserters who were already fighting on the front or in military units—not men who fled the country to avoid service; those, as we all know, already number in potentially the millions. For instance, this headline from the start of the SMO in 2022 states 500k had already fled:
No, this is much worse. These are actual deserters from the already-thinning frontline, which is said to have a measly ~250-300k men or less. As such it represents a catastrophic morale. It’s another wake up call to those who actually believe Kiev’s casualty numbers. Tens of thousands of confirmed POWs, 100k deserters, but only 30k killed?
Listen to Zelensky lie out of every orifice below. Not only does he lie about mobilization being for replacing brigades but also that it’s merely about getting younger soldiers to operate drones, since they’re ‘better with technology’. We now know the mobilization bill in fact eschewed the ‘demobilization’ clause, so yes, the new men are to replace brigades but not in the way he implies, i.e. not to rotate them out, but to replace destroyed/deceased ones:
Of course the most disgusting of the lies is the suggestion that the young will only be used to operate drones and technological things, implying they’ll be safely in the ‘rear’ as most drone operators are. In reality, they will be sent as fodder to the zero line. Drone operators take the fewest losses and therefore require the least ‘replacement’—it’s the storm troops and meatshield contact line defenders that need constant replenishment.
Speculative, but Rezident UA reports:
#Inside
Our source in the OP said that the Syrsky asks the Office of the President to prepare a bill on the mobilization of Ukrainians from the age of 20 for autumn. The General Staff believes that reducing the age to 25 will not allow the TCK to recruit the necessary number of men to replenish reserves, and now young people are needed for assault crews who are able to carry out offensive operations without equipment.
Other rumors continue to plague the struggling Ukrainian project:
So, we come to the natural extension of all the above. Given these issues, and the slow-creeping realization that even the present U.S. “aid” will not amount to much, what are NATO ‘partners’ to do? They continue talks of deploying troops to save Ukraine:
Here’s how the above article begins:
It is 2026, and in a downbeat speech at the Kremlin, Vladimir Putin finally announces a withdrawal from Ukraine. Russian troops have done their best – or worst – but a fresh influx of well-trained Ukrainians have finally prevailed. The Donbas is now in Kyiv’s grip, Crimea’s fall only days away.
What has turned the tide, though, is not just the long-awaited F16s, or Washington switching the funding back on. Instead, it is the presence of thousands of European troops across Ukraine’s western half, protecting cities, ports and borders, making Ukraine feel reassured and Russia unnerved. As Kyiv celebrates, Europe quietly pats itself on the back too: after 80 years clutching America’s coat-tails, it finally stepped up to win a war in its own backyard.
Do you see what the sneaky method behind the madness to this wildly delusional stretch is? They are slowly conditioning not only the public but their own leadership to accept the already propositioned ploy of slowly worming ground troops into the equation, by first using them ostensibly to “free up” much-needed Ukrainian “rear” troops. Of course, when those troops, too, depart the temporal realm or ‘desert’ as 100k of their compatriots have done, it leaves the question of what calamitous next step the NATO troops would take. Many have rightfully recalled that this is precisely how Vietnam’s intervention began, with U.S. “advisors” gradually escalating their mission creep and presence in the country.
But just as I had written a while back, such troops would not enjoy the benefits of Article 5, which only applies to NATO’s home soil, and the authors here bitterly admit to this fact:
The big question is this: what would happen when bodybags started coming home? Troops stationed in significant numbers would be an obvious target for Russian missiles, and with no Article 5 to protect them, the Kremlin would surely be tempted to attack. Mr Grant says that any contributing European government would have to accept possible loss of life.
The article is mostly a nod and hat tip to the more weighty piece from CFR’s Foreign Affairs, penned in part by Substack’s own Phillip P. O’Brien, whom many of you are probably familiar with:
This article goes a step further, outlining the ‘benefits’ of European forces not only providing logistical support in the rear to free up AFU, but also “defensive combat” work, such as operating AD systems to shoot down Russian air attacks.
One interesting aspect presented here is the vindication of my own prophetic words from some of my very earliest articles. Some may recall I once wrote that when the time comes, NATO could easily sell the conflict as a non-Article-5 exception in order to help Ukraine without the fear of nuclear exchange. I said there are many mechanisms and technicalities by which this could be done. Lo and behold, this very article presents the same idea: that NATO could enter Ukraine not under the legal umbrella of “NATO” but simply “Europe”—an important distinction for the sake of deliberately not invoking the Russia/NATO dichotomy and attendant legal responsibilities of Article 5.
As a final third escalatory measure, the article proposes this ‘European army’ to defend Odessa and even attack approaching Russian troops:
One potential Russian target is Odessa, Ukraine’s main port where most of the country’s exports are shipped. If Russian troops were to approach the city, European forces in the vicinity would have the right to defend themselves by firing on the advancing soldiers.
Their excuse for the blatant indifference to threat escalation is the canard that Russia is weak, would never use nukes, and that 90% of the Russian army has already been destroyed. In fact, we now know it’s the opposite:
Meanwhile:
So, it is in fact Ukraine that lost 90% of its army in the literal first days of the war, and has reconstituted it several times, while the Russian army is now bigger and stronger than before.
But the calls are growing louder:
Former British Deputy Defense Minister James Hippy recommends that the country’s leadership consider sending a contingent of the British army to Ukraine for deployment in the rear, far from the war zone. They say that if they find British soldiers near Avdiivka, it can provoke a NATO-Russia conflict.
As well as provocations from NATO and its lapdogs:
Press briefing featuring General Carsten Breuer:
The commander of the Estonian Defense Forces, General Martin Herem, spoke in an interview about his readiness to “blow to smithereens” Russia.
“Estonia, Finland and Sweden will immediately take control of the situation in the Baltic Sea from the first minutes of aggression. If we close the Baltic Sea, how are you going to deliver potatoes from St. Petersburg to Kaliningrad? And we will smash all those who try to influence us from a distance of 50 or 100 kilometers, as is happening today in Ukraine! We will destroy them not in Rakvere or Narva, but in Ivangorod, Pechory or somewhere there.”
Which of course is being skewed by the neocons as Russia being the agitator and provocateur, when in reality it’s them trying to bait Russia to attack the weaker links in order to continue the forever war to destroy Europe:
And though they’re most likely fake, there continue to be various rumors of French troops having already arrived in Odessa:
‼️BREAKING
‼️☠️ French soldiers reported to have arrived in Odessa
The Kherson Resistance, quoting its own sources in the city, reports that around 10 April (the day Odessa was liberated from the fascists) at least 1,000 French military personnel arrived in the port of Odessa on a civilian ship.
According to pro-Russian partisans, these Frenchmen were met and escorted by NATO officers. It is also reported that another transfer of French military personnel to Ukraine is planned in the near future.
One of the reasons for the urgency is that Europe knows only months remain before Donald Trump may take the election, and all aid to Ukraine could potentially be cut off. Thus, Europe is trying to utilize this time to build a coalition of strength to bolster Ukraine. The U.S. on the other hand could be passing the buck onto Europe, with the aid package being a final swollen consolation gift.
The U.S., as some believe, has been desperately trying to pass the Ukrainian buck onto Europe, so that U.S. can concentrate on its more pressing problem of China. Also, it’s a way of throwing Europe under the bus, as a failure in Ukraine could later be chalked up to European failure rather than that of the Biden administration. In fact, precisely this was proposed by none other than Lukashenko himself:
But Europe is unable to stand on its own two feet without the U.S., given that European “solidarity” is in fact a well-staged and managed illusion. Even the above Foreign Affairs piece attested to the danger but admitting that were a single member of the intervening ‘coalition’ to buckle in the face of suffering troop deaths, the entire coalition could immediately collapse. In essence, Europe is like a gang of frightened monkeys hiding behind each other, trying to pull the bear’s tail, drawing group ‘courage’ from each other, but running frantically at the sight of a single member’s panic.
The U.S. tried to do everything it could to sweep the conflict under the rug. They tried to lean on Zelensky to negotiate, they fired Vicky Nuland and even tried desperately to keep Zelensky from replacing Zaluzhny. One of the reasons is they likely hoped to use the tension between Zelensky and his rogue general to force Zelensky into concessions or even overthrow him by backing Zaluzhny at a key moment, should Zelensky fail to follow Washington’s diktat.
But nothing worked, and Yermak succeeded in cunningly consolidating power around Zelensky. One possibility is that, having failed the above efforts, Washington has now fed Ukraine the $60B merely to put off their collapse by a few months so that it doesn’t happen during Biden’s re-election campaign and mar his chances.
