(97 votes)

What do you think is the endgame for Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Hungary, and other nations in the immediate area?

It’s an interesting question given current developments, which this recent thread by Pawel Wargan gives very fascinating insight into. In light of all ongoing events, most people naturally defer to the most basic and well-trodden theories about geopolitical origins: for instance, that the U.S. wants to retain imperial hegemony over Europe, and has seeded it with GLADIO-style structures bent on doing that.

But one less-examined aspect, which is increasingly playing a bigger role, is that of the Polish involvement. This is particularly important now since, as of this writing, a new report has been sending Twitter into a stir which states that Poland has now surpassed France as the third largest NATO force, behind the U.S. and Turkey:

It is in light of this that we examine the earlier-mentioned thread which explains how one of the key overlooked factors driving the current geopolitical tides in Europe is Pilsudski’s dream of the Intermarium, which was sublimated into the specter of Prometheism that, according to the author, continues to haunt Europe. For the unaware, a quick definition:

Prometheism or Prometheanism was a political project initiated by Józef Piłsudski, a principal statesman of the Second Polish Republic from 1918 to 1935. Its aim was to weaken the Russian Empire and its successor states, including the Soviet Union, by supporting nationalist independence movements among the major non-Russian peoples that lived within the borders of Russia and the Soviet Union

As you can see from the above, Prometheism very neatly overlaps with the CIA’s Operation Belladona, Operation Aerodynamic, etc., which sought to work with nationalist groups like OUN to counter Soviet influence and, essentially, create a breakaway state.

Pawel Wargan believes the Prometheists were involved and are resurging today behind the overlapping interests of subduing Russia once and for all:

“New Europe” became an important vehicle for containing these impulses. And their strategies — and the myriad institutions created to advance them — increasingly echoed those of the Prometheans from a century ago. In 2015, Croatian President Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović and Polish President Andrzej Duda launched the Three Seas Initiative — the NATOfied brood of Piłsudski’s Intermarium. The Initiative would seek to shift trade across the Eurasian landmass from an East-West to a North-South axis, advancing the US objective of decoupling Europe from Russia and China — and securing a degree of political muscle for states slighted by the “two-tier Europe” agenda. At that time, Donald Trump — facing a cool reception in Western Europe — turned East for new partnerships. Endorsing the Three Seas Initiative in 2017, he said that the project would “transform and rebuild the entire region and ensure that your infrastructure, like your commitment to freedom and rule of law, binds you to all of Europe and, indeed, to the West.”

He concludes:

As the war in Ukraine escalated in February 2022, that transformation gained new strength. Emboldened by the US nuclear umbrella, and elevated politically within a fragmenting order that continues to disadvantage its peripheries, the Prometheans emerged as the lynchpins of a new, militarised, and subordinated Europe. In 2023, Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki warned that Europe’s pursuit of strategic autonomy “means shooting into our own knee and making with China the same mistake as with Russia”. So here we begin to see why (certain) Eastern Europeans are so excited about a federated Europe that auspiciously excludes Russia — even while extending into Turkey and Azerbaijan. And we see why that story may be far from over. A Trump presidency will bring challenges to NATO that might see European strategic sovereignty reappear on the agenda. Will he turn to the New Prometheans to keep Europe in check once again?

It’s clear that Poland is seeing its chance amid a dying, deindustrializing Europe to take the reins of a new kind of leadership, replacing Germany as the geopolitical spearpoint. Massive new infrastructure is reportedly being built in Poland to support a future coming European war against Russia, though the same reportedly goes for other nations in the region like Romania.

By the way, as a quick aside, one point people miss is how Russia’s full victory over Ukraine could eventually allow some form of direct access to a friendly Hungary and even Serbia, the latter of which is currently totally locked out of receiving Russian military aid of any kind:

After all, it’s possible Hungary could leave NATO eventually; the Polish foreign ministry just stated this today:

The Polish Foreign Ministry proposed that Hungary leave the EU and NATO, – Polska Agencja Prasowa

Deputy head of the ministry Teofil Bartoszewski criticized Orban’s Saturday statements.

“I don’t really understand why Hungary wants to remain a member of organizations that it doesn’t like so much and allegedly treats it badly. This is, of course, the anti-European, anti-Ukrainian, anti-Polish policy of Hungary.”

Ultimately, I see such developments creating a domino effect which causes more countries to increasingly join ‘Eastern Bloc’. The reason is, we are living in a sort of reverse Cold War, economically speaking. Back then, the West was economically strong, and countries who were pried away from the Iron Curtain began to see immediate economic benefits. Now it’s the opposite: anyone staying in the diseased EU is subjected to economic suicide via mass austerity, migration, intentionally economically damaging policies, etc. And anyone joining the Russian-Chinese bloc, immediately gets an economic boost and growth via real trade partners.

Thus, if Russia can open up this corridor, as above, more countries in the immediate vicinity will see the economic strength of the countries connected via the Russian bloc, and will begin having second thoughts about being EU-aligned. It will cause long-term cracks to form, with increasing political pressure to look East.

For the shorter term future though, it seems we’ll see increased desperation from the EU in trying to attack and isolate Hungary, as they’ve been doing, like with the recent stripping it its chairmanship for the next EU council:

Ultimately, everything will depend on how decisively Russia finishes with Ukraine. If Russia cannot defeat Ukraine in totality, and is forced into some kind of Khasavyurt Accords-style deal again, then it will vastly strengthen the EU position and its ability to continue dominating its army of vassal states. But if Ukraine completely collapses in a total Russian victory, we could see the precipitation of vast changes, such as a highly weakened EU brought to the point of panic and turmoil, which will have a lot of the secondary actors questioning their long-term commitments to the anti-Russian vector.

Additionally, upon such a victory, a trove of evidence will likely be uncovered to show Ukraine and the U.S.’ complicity in various acts like the Nord Stream attacks that will create further divisions. For the next 10 years or so, I foresee the EU autocracy continue to hang on by a thread, getting more desperate and despotic, using an increasingly heavy-hand to try and punish ‘uncooperatives’ like Hungary; but ultimately, it will all only weaken the EU even further as its countries descend into deeper economic and social turmoil.

But in the immediate future, I don’t see many drastic changes as the current course continues on for likely many more years.

(74 votes)

From your last report, it seemed that the advantage Ukraine has in terms of AI (thanks to the US) is quite significant and it seems like it has been effective in stopping Russia in Kharkov. If it gets deployed on the entire Front, one could imagine the situation getting worse for Russia leading to eventual stalemate (or God forbid) defeat. What do you think the likelihood is and can you expand on how Russia can defeat AI (and AI powered drones no longer susceptible to EW)? What can Russia do to stop it and what are the chances it has a big effect on the entire front.

Corollary, what do you think is the likelihood of China providing Russia with its AI developments to “even out the field” so to speak?

Firstly, let me state for the record that I personally don’t think the AI ‘stopped Russia’ in Kharkov. In that report, I was merely relaying the thoughts of a couple other correspondents—but ultimately, they are just two voices in a sea of opinions; that’s not to mention the fact that they have a certain microcosmic view from their corner of the front that can be detrimentally limited in scope.

My personal opinion is that the Kharkov front has thus far accomplished its main goal, which was always to draw Ukrainian reserves away from the Donetsk region, where the real offensive would be launched. One can clearly see that this is working, as the past week has seen a torrent of Ukrainian reports about unprecedented breakthroughs happening everyday, particularly in the Toretsk and Ocheretino directions.

I do think Russia likely would have wanted to get a bit further in the Kharkov assault, no doubt. Unlike what some misinformed ‘analysts’ have claimed, Russia hardly intended to push hundreds of kilometers deep or even encircle Kharkov, after all, the provided force was no where near the size to indicate such a maneuver. But I do think Russian military planners likely would have wanted to at least capture Volchansk and the surrounding area, while instead they got bogged down halfway through Volchansk. But ultimately, I don’t think they had a real particular set of objectives like “capture X” or “get to point Y”. The only true objective was: create as much of a disturbance as possible to draw Ukrainian reserves away from the real key fronts—and they did exactly that: all of Ukraine’s most elite units flooded to the north to repel the attack.

So, what I’m saying is, I don’t think your assertion is completely wrong, but that there’s a bit of truth in both. The AI stuff may have played a role in slowing things down a bit, but not as omnipotent a role as some seem to suggest, given Russia’s misinterpreted objectives there. Recall, the AFU itself admitted Russia utilized only ~30k forces for the breach—this is hardly enough to make the types of vast gains some suggest were intended.

It brings us to your next point. If the AI was so overpowering, then why hasn’t Ukraine already scaled it up to other fronts and used it to dominate Russian forces there? Why are the breakthroughs in the Donetsk direction still accelerating in pace? To play devil’s advocate, we can perhaps suppose that if the forces were equal, the AI could be the deciding factor, but it can’t make up for the vast overmatch in man and materiel on this front. After all, we must understand what the AI actually does: it speeds up identification and relaying of targets to be hit—but if you don’t have any weapons or ammo to hit those targets, then the AI can’t really do much for you anyway.

It may seem like I’m beating around the bush, but I was setting up the main point: which is that, as good as the AI might be, it has to be considered within the larger force disparities at play. None of us know for 100% certainty how much Ukraine might be overplaying or exaggerating its troop woes, but if the situation is as bad as it sounds, then AI may simply not be enough to overcome the lack of adequately trained troops needed to actually convert the AI’s intelligence into action.

Everything we hear states that Ukraine is losing more men than it recruits, and that the troop situation remains dire. While an AI advantage can give an asymmetrical edge that theoretically makes up for the troop disadvantage, it’s likely to be too little too late, particularly given that Russia is not exactly completely at zero in this regard—Russia too is increasingly using AI of all kinds, including the battlefield management variety, by all accounts.

Recall that in the very last report, I highlighted the head of Ukraine’s entire drone program’s statements which mostly downplayed Ukraine’s AI developments, and asserted that AI would not be some magic silver bullet against Russia.

But there are two main types of AI we are talking about here, the battlefield management variety, and the autonomous drone swarms which can seek targets even while suppressed by EW. To answer your question, while autonomous AI drones can operate in a jamming environment, they are not immune to everything—the future of microwave style electromagnetic weapons will be able to defeat them en masse by simply frying their electronics; it’s just that for now such systems remain heavy and expensive, and cannot be easily distributed all across the frontline. Many countries have already been working on such systems—from the UK:

But you can see how big and bulky it is, and the range isn’t great. For now it will remain for point defense, like guarding bases and C2 nodes, etc., but not really useful for assaults. Russia itself is testing various weapons—just a week ago I posted a photo of a burnt Ukrainian drone with the caption that some new Russian laser system which was being tested had taken it out.

Also, keep in mind that Russia has already been using AI-powered drones arguably even longer than Ukraine.

And this isn’t just the variety Ukraine has, which has to be manually guided to the vicinity of the target and ‘locked on’, after which the AI can independently continue driving the drone into the target. But in fact, the Russian Lancet has already long reportedly been operating under a much more fully autonomous version that even scans the entire battlefield on its own, or at least designated sector grids, which can be many kilometers in size. Western reports confirmed this development when they found specialized NVIDIA-sourced AI chips inside the latest Russian Lancets.

Another consideration: in the recent paid article I wrote about how certain insider sources have stated they believe that FPVs may lose relevance within the next 6 months to a year. Here is a French army general stating the same thing:

“According to the Chief of Staff of the French Army, Pierre Chille, FPV-drones will soon lose their dominant role on the battlefield. Now FPV drones carry out up to 80% of strikes during the Ukrainian conflict, but already this year at the Eurosatory-2024 exhibition dozens of systems for combating drones, both kinetic and electronic warfare. According to Schill, all French vehicles in two years will be equipped with anti-drone systems capable of hitting them with missiles or ammunition with a programmable detonation…”

As for China, I do think they’ll share their AI developments with Russia only because it’s of critical importance for China’s own national security to see what works and what doesn’t on the modern battlefield. China has a very brief window of this war to test their best stuff, to see what can work against NATO in a potential Taiwan fight. Thus, China would be crazy not to give Russia its best AI tricks to test and fine tune so that Chinese experts can gain invaluable experience from real world conditions. There are many indications of China covertly helping Russia already:

▪️In 2023, China exported $390 million worth of metalworking machines to the Russian Federation compared to $94 million a year earlier.

▪️According to Tufts University scientist and Russian Army expert P. Luzin, 90% of machine tools imported to Russia come from China. And those produced in Russia contain Chinese parts and engines.

Thus, I don’t think Ukraine’s AI “edge”—if it even has one—will ultimately turn the tide of the war, as there are simply too many other negative trend factors going against Ukraine for it to remain competitive in the future.

(59 votes)

Very little is written about partisan activity by pro-Russian people in Ukraine or pro Ukraine people in Russia.

It is being reported that the cars of the people doing the forced recruiting in Odessa are being torched. Is this by Russian partisans or by Ukrainians themselves who do not want to be forcibly recruited.

What is known about partisan activity, and can this be used to find out who the people on the ground are supporting?

You’re right that there’s been a huge upsurge in this ‘partisan’ activity, as it’s being called, in Ukraine. Not only the cars of TSS mobilization officers, but more importantly, railway relay boxes are being torched—I think half a dozen or so of them just in the past couple weeks. This is helping to put major strains on Ukraine’s embattled railway system, which is already suffering from the de-electrification issues surrounding Ukraine’s energy grid. John Helmer just covered this in great detail a day ago.

Now they’re even trying to tie it into the wider ‘railway panic’ of Europe after multiple tracks were disabled in France:

As you said though, in Ukraine not much is written or known about the attacks, precisely, so we don’t actually know if it’s random partisans or Russian coordinated attacks. Most likely it’s a combination of both as it’s simple SOP of special services to organize these types of attacks on an enemy, so we know Russia is always actively working on this. On the other hand, we also know for definite that there has been a huge swell of organic dissatisfaction, protests, etc., against the mobilization campaign in Ukraine. We’ve seen dozens of videos now of various instances of unrest in the past few weeks, particularly ever since the new mobilization law was signed a while back. So it’s only prudent to assume there are cases of both.

But to be honest, far more is known about Ukraine’s efforts in Russia than the reverse, probably because Russian OPSEC has always been better. This is a consequence of Ukraine needing PR glory much more than Russia, and so Ukraine advertises its successes for victory points, while Russia does everything covertly and doesn’t care to fight the ‘propaganda war’ on Twitter.

But in recent times there has been a slew of Ukrainian “partisan” attacks in Russia—if you can call them that. Almost in every case they are the same: Ukrainian intelligence services contact a random pliable Russian citizen on Telegram and offer them money to do some “act”. Recently, a 62 year old Russian man was paid a few bucks to throw some burning cocktail at a Russian military recruitment center, which is one of the most common gags for these types of attacks.

The most noteworthy was the assassin just caught in Turkey, who blew up the car of the Russian Deputy Chief of Satellite Communications Andrei Torgashov. The now-captured Russian ‘partisan’ was a member of a Navalny youth organization and was said to have been promised “$10k to $20k” for the attack by the Ukrainian SBU. But of course, that isn’t really a “partisan” in the classical sense, acting of their own initiative, but more like a paid dupe.

But in Ukraine, the partisan activity you mentioned is truly surging, with one Ukrainian military volunteer writing the following earlier in the week:

It seems to me that the arson of military vehicles has gotten very out of control.

As a person who collected and handed over more than one car for our army, it is very painful for me to look at each such arson.

Each such car is very difficult to obtain – you need to raise money for it, then drive it, repair it, take it away, and issue all the papers. I put my soul into every car I sell.

And here some minor idiot can burn it for 100 bucks. It shouldn’t be like that!

Urgent changes are needed in part of the Criminal Code, including lowering the threshold of responsibility to 14 years for similar crimes.

This is subversive activity, not just destruction of property.

And it’s not just that psychological warfare is hostile. It has long since become something we cannot control.

But to firmly answer your question, we don’t actually know much about this latest surge of partisan activity as there haven’t been any concrete details. It’s simply my professional opinion based on a priori knowledge of the conflict’s development that this is likely a combination of both organically rising brazenness of the fed up population, as well as Russian intel services’ work. In particular, randomly torching cars parked on the street can be chalked up to organic action, while the deliberate targeting of train relay-switch boxes is far more likely to be a coordinated intelligence effort where location data for the boxes is fed to someone on the ground from Russian intel sources.

And by the way, Ukrainian troops have been complaining recently about the rise of such partisan actions not in the cities, but even in the frontline towns in Donbass. They say the remainers always give up their positions to the Russians, who strike their HQs, so it’s a growing problem but isn’t quite a critical mass enough to make a deep impact just yet.

(53 votes)

Many armies have crossed the Dnieper River in times of war, in both directions, but never under current ISR conditions. Assuming the Ukrainian state did not break and its army withdrew behind the Dnieper, how much of a barrier could that river be to the Russian Armed Forces?

I’ve written at length about this long ago, toward the start of the blog, where I pretty much concluded that it’s not possible to do, and for Russia to capture Odessa, it would have to re-invade from Kiev on the western side of the river, then come all the way down to capture Kherson, Odessa, etc.

The main issue is not actually the crossing itself—Russia can fairly adequately launch a mass combined amphibious and air-assault operation that could land tens of thousands of troops on the other side to capture a solid beachhead and lodgement in one. The problem is then supplying the force on the other side indefinitely via a secure logistics route—that’s where things fall apart.

It’s one thing to do the initial operation, which could for instance be aided by a mass scale campaign of various effects to disorient and misdirect the enemy. But once the dust settles, the regular supply routes would be under constant long term drone, artillery, and HIMARS attrition that would make holding or expanding that zone a huge untenable problem. Recall that this is the main reason Russia pulled out of Kherson to begin with in the end of 2022. They weren’t chased out, contrary to Ukrainian revisionist propaganda—in fact, Russia had won all the last battles handily and was annihilating Ukrainian forces there with a huge casualty disparity. But unfortunately, the logistics were so tenuous over the one semi-operable Antonovsky Bridge that the risk was simply too high. And this was all before the advent of the latest FPV improvements, which have tripled and quadrupled in range, and many other goodies like cluster-warhead ATACMS, etc.

However, there are a few potential dark horses that maybe could give Russia the ability to safely establish crossings in the distant future.

1. The water level unknowns. At the moment it’s hard to get a bead on what the exact water level situation is ever since the Kakhovka Dam was destroyed. There continue to be reports that some sections of the Dnieper are totally overgrown and easy to cross via vehicle. The problem is, Ukraine still controls other dams further upriver that it can unleash at any time to create floods again—i.e. the Dnipro HPP in Zaporozhye city.

2. Most discussions of crossing the Dnieper revolve around the assumption that Russia would simply cross somewhere near Kherson, like at the old Antonovsky bridges or Kakhovka Dam bridge. But one possibility, though it would be quite a way’s off, hinges on the Russian capture of the entire river zone—i.e. everything west of Donbass and including Poltava, Dnipropetrovsk, and Zaporozhye Oblasts.

If Russia were to capture the eastern part of the actual cities of Dnipro, Zaporozhye, and maybe even Kremenchug, etc., where a lot of bridges and crossings exist, it could create a kind of mass redundancy of logistics that could make crossing the river long term far more viable.

Of course, Ukraine could blow all those bridges during retreat, as I had outlined they would do in one of my first articles here, then that could put a damper on this plan. But Russia may be able to establish similar “under bridge” crossings as they had done with the Antonovsky, or patch the bridges up with some kind of bridging device, depending. For instance, the crossing in Zaporozhye city is over the Dnipro HPP dam itself, and to disable that ‘bridge’ you would have to blow the entire dam, which would be another catastrophic event. Blowing it would keep the bridge from being usable but could potentially take away the AFU’s last trump card in flooding the river, after which point Russia could cross the dry river without much worry of having its logistics flooded out, though there is another HPP further north in Kamianske.

3. The last possibility is simply attritioning the AFU to such a point where Western arms have long been depleted, and HIMARS/ATACMS, etc., are so few that they no longer present that much of a logistical threat. This could come, let’s say, two or so years in the future, where Ukraine’s drone “edge” could likewise be vastly diminished owing to a far more robust Russian EW/AD net. If such a scenario were reached, Russian military planners could feel satisfied with their ability to protect their logistics lines adequately enough to warrant a long term cross-river campaign of this sort.

The above also applies to Ukrainian air defense systems. If they are depleted enough in two or three years’ time to such a point that Russia no longer fears aerial resupply and air-assault missions, then the general staff could feel much more comfortable in attempting to gain the other side of the river. If large An-124s or Il-76s can airdrop supplies all day—not to mention troops—it could alleviate a lot of logistical woes, but long range air defense at the moment would prevent that from being even remotely possible.

In conclusion, I don’t see it being possible any time soon; b