Rat u Ukrajini

Drodzy, #nowaPolityka już na Was czeka w wydaniu cyfrowym https://t.co/NUq5yDPZuW
A od środy tradycyjnie znajdziecie ją w kioskach.
Wciągającej lektury! pic.twitter.com/QBhYxFX21J

— Tygodnik POLITYKA (@Polityka_pl) January 31, 2023

U.S. readies $2 bln-plus Ukraine aid package with longer-range weapons -sources

WASHINGTON, Jan 31 (Reuters) - The United States is readying more than $2 billion worth of military aid for Ukraine that is expected to include longer-range rockets for the first time as well as other munitions and weapons, two U.S. officials briefed on the matter told Reuters on Tuesday.

The weapons aid is expected to be announced as soon as this week, the officials said. It is also expected to include support equipment for Patriot air defense systems, precision guided munitions and Javelin anti-tank weapons, they added.

One of the officials said a portion of the package, expected to be $1.725 billion, would come from a fund known as the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative (USAI), which allows President Joe Biden's administration to get weapons from industry rather than from existing U.S. weapons stocks.

The USAI funds would go toward the purchase of a new weapon, the Ground Launched Small Diameter Bomb (GLSDB) made by Boeing Co (BA.N), which have a range of 94 miles (150 km). The United States has rebuffed Ukraine's requests for the 185-mile (297-km) range ATACMS missile.

The longer range of the GLSDB glide bomb could allow Ukraine to hit targets that have been out of reach and help it continue pressing its counterattacks by disrupting Russia further behind its lines.

Reuters first reported on Boeing's proposal to field GLSDB for Ukraine in November. At the time it was expected GLSDB could be in Ukraine by spring.

GLSDB is made jointly by SAAB AB (SAABb.ST) and Boeing. It combines the GBU-39 Small Diameter Bomb (SDB) with the M26 rocket motor, both of which are common in U.S. inventories.

GLSDB is GPS-guided, can defeat some electronic jamming, is usable in all weather conditions, and can be used against armored vehicles, according to SAAB's website. The GBU-39 - which would function as the GLSDB's warhead - has small, folding wings that allow it to glide more than 100km if dropped from an aircraft and hit targets as small as 3 feet (1 meter) in diameter.

The USAI funds would also be used to pay for more components of HAWK air defenses, counter drone systems, counter artillery and air surveillance radars, communications equipment, PUMA drones, and spare parts for major systems like Patriot and Bradley, one of the officials said.

There was also a significant amount of medical equipment to equip three field hospitals being donated by another ally, the official added.

The White House declined to comment.

In addition to the USAI funds, more than $400 million worth of aid was expected to come from Presidential Drawdown Authority funds, which allows the president to take from current U.S. stocks in an emergency.

That aid was expected to include mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicles (MRAPs), guided multiple launch rocket systems (GMLRS) and ammunition.

The U.S. has sent approximately $27.2 billion worth of security assistance to Ukraine since Russia's February 2022 invasion.

rumbeando wrote:I evo, izašao je konačno taj 6. broj poljskog nedeljnika, naravno s drugačijom naslovnicom.

Drodzy, #nowaPolityka już na Was czeka w wydaniu cyfrowym https://t.co/NUq5yDPZuW
A od środy tradycyjnie znajdziecie ją w kioskach.
Wciągającej lektury! pic.twitter.com/QBhYxFX21J

— Tygodnik POLITYKA (@Polityka_pl) January 31, 2023

Polytika wrote:Ни купити, ни изнајмити

Станови: истинита драма, лажни рецепти власти

Zostań żołnierzem Rzeczypospolitej 
Stań w obronie prawdziwych ziem polskich
Zostań czołgistą Leopard
Broń Polski w Ukrainie 

Bivši premijer UK Boris Johnson je tokom razgovora u Atlantic Councilu komentarisao dešavanja u Ukrajini, ali i prijetnje koje Moskva može imati po druge regione u svijetu.

Johnson upozorava da akcije Moskve na destabilizaciji mogu biti veoma skupe za Zapad i Ameriku. Na pitanje N1 kazao je kako mnogo brine za region Zapadnog Balkana.
“Jako mi je stalo do zapadnog Balkana. Brinem se zbog ruskih provokacija tamo. Sjećam se šta se desilo u Crnoj Gori. Svašta se dešavalo dole. Oni će nastaviti da se mešaju i provociraju. Ali da se vratim na prvobitnu poentu, sve će to biti smanjeno, sva ta nestabilnost, koja bi mogla biti veoma, veoma skupa za Zapad, za Ameriku. Sve će se to smanjiti kada Ukrajinci pobijede“, kazao je Johnson u odgovoru na pitanje N1.
Govoreći o trenutnoj situaciji u Ukrajini i njihovim potrebama Johnson je još jednom kazao kako se zalaže da se Ukrajini to prije pošalju borbeni avioni.
Johnson se također zalaže da se Ukrajini dostavi još tenkova jer kako je kazao nema svrhe da patroliraju po SAD-u, Njemačkoj ili nekoj drugoj savezničkoj zemlji koje su trenutno sigurne i ne suočavaju se s onim s čime se suočava Ukrajina.

Downing Street i dalje isključuje mogućnost isporuke britanskih zrakoplova Kijevu

Mór Thököly wrote:Ali koliki je to fejl na svakom nivou. Ti vodis kao nekakav odsudni civilizacijski rat protiv "zapada"...a tamo ti zive rodjena deca. Nivo autenticnosti - nula. A desetine i stotine hiljada da izgube zivot. Nitkovluk level beskonacno

Blinken’s message on Ukraine contains only calls on Russia to 'quit and stop' — Lavrov

It is reported that Jens Stoltenberg said in one of his speeches that Russia must lose, must be defeated, and that the West cannot afford to let Ukraine lose, because in that case the West will lose and the whole world will lose

MOSCOW, January 31. /TASS/. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken's message on Ukraine, handed over by Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry, contains only calls on Russia to "quit and stop," Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told a media conference following talks with his Egyptian counterpart on Tuesday.

"Mr. Minister, while answering the previous question, said that he had conveyed a certain message from Secretary of State Blinken, who was recently on a visit to Cairo. I confirm this," Lavrov said, answering a question from TASS. "Russia is ready to listen to any serious proposal that is aimed at resolving the current situation in its comprehensive context."

"We have had one more message Egypt’s foreign minister has handed over to us to the effect that Russia should stop, that Russia should quit, and then everything will be fine," Lavrov went on to say, adding that at the same time "Blinken omitted something."

"The other part of the message, showing the true interest of the United States and the West, was stated by NATO Secretary General Mr. [Jens] Stoltenberg, when he was in the Republic of Korea yesterday," Lavrov noted. "He said in one of his speeches that Russia must lose, must be defeated, and that the West cannot afford to let Ukraine lose, because in that case, he argued, the West will lose and the whole world will lose." Stoltenberg, as Lavrov pointed out, "took the liberty of speaking not only on behalf of the North Atlantic Alliance, but also on behalf of all other countries of the world."

"Everything is quite clear here. It’s not about Ukraine at all," Lavrov emphasized. "The Kiev regime, which has no independence, fulfills the will of the sovereign - the United States and the rest of the West, which Washington has subjugated - not permit any events in the international arena that would somehow call into question the US claims to hegemony in the modern world."

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-02-02/on-ukraine-s-battlefields-will-russia-or-ukraine-make-the-next-big-move

By Leonid Bershidsky
February 2, 2023, 5:00 AM UTC

In Ukraine, Now It’s a Matter of Who Attacks First

Both Russia and Ukraine face different kinds of pressure to launch a major, and most likely premature, offensive.


The biggest question hovering over the battlefield in Ukraine for the first three or four months of this year is whether the Russian invaders or Ukraine’s defenders will launch a major, and likely premature, offensive. Both belligerents are under different kinds of pressure to do so.

Militarily, Russia would probably benefit from going slow. It is the bigger country with large but often untapped internal resources. It needs time to boost military output, source the electronics necessary for modern weaponry, train and properly equip the hundreds of thousands of troops mobilized since last September — and to fix the chaos in its mobilization system, an issue that General Valery Gerasimov, the Russian invasion’s overall commander, has acknowledged in a rare interview. It also requires time to straighten out its unsettled propaganda narratives: Many Russians are still unclear about what they’re supposed to fight for in Ukraine and what the end goals of the war are. While the initial propaganda line — that Ukrainians are “fascists” — appears to have fizzled, no new one appears to have generated mass enthusiasm.

One of the most coherent emerging propaganda lines is meant to prepare Russians for a long-haul conflict.

“Our most important task is to move our industry to a military track as quickly as possible,” pro-war blogger Gherman Kulikovsky wrote on his Telegram channel, which has more than 620,000 subscribers. “A decade of wars awaits us, and these wars will boil up in different parts of the globe. The Special Military Operation [in Ukraine] is only the first hot stage of World War III.”

The Russian case for strategic patience is helped by the somewhat counterintuitive idea that Ukraine’s main financial and military backer, the US, may feel that it benefits, or at least doesn’t suffer too many adverse effects, from a protracted conflict. According to a recent Rand Corporation report entitled “Avoiding a Long War,” the potential benefits of a long conflict for the US include the weakening of Russia as well as decreased dependence of US allies on Russian energy and higher defense spending. These need to be weighed against costs such as an elevated risk of nuclear war, more Ukrainian deaths and adverse economic effects including higher inflation. The report assesses the possibility that Russia might, given time, seize more Ukrainian territory as a “minor” cost.

Depending on how cynical you are — and Putin and his cronies are very cynical — you might conclude that the Biden administration’s calculus discounts the threat of nuclear war, cares little about Ukrainian casualties, prioritizes the weakening of Russia and underestimates its fighting and military industrial potential. Such an assessment would suggest to Putin that he should clench his teeth and dig in.

The counterarguments are psychological in nature, but since in Russia one person takes the final decisions, they are not unimportant.

Any growing perception of Putin’s weakness — both at home and, more importantly, in the non-Western world which he considers its ally in what he frames as an existential battle with the West — creates an element of pressure that he must feel. A string of military defeats last year led the leaders of India and China to show irritation and impatience with Putin; once always late to official meetings, he is now the one forced to wait even for once docile post-Soviet leaders. Asian customers now buy Russian oil at large discounts born of Western embargoes: A barrel of Urals oil is about $31 cheaper than the Brent benchmark, the biggest difference since August. Russia’s reputation as a global power is at its post-Soviet nadir. A weak strongman is an oxymoron.

Ukraine’s Western allies, too, have done their best to light a fire under the Russian strategists who had fallen back on preparing grimly for a long defense of already seized territories. Ukraine has busted through one Western psychological barrier after another, most recently securing supplies of tanks. Now, warplanes are not out of the question, with Poland trying to ram through this new level of Western involvement in the war. That increases the temptation for Gerasimov, the foolhardy planner of the failed initial assault on Ukraine, to act preemptively — and for Putin to endorse such action. Whether he will do so in the near future is another matter.

Ukrainians have been warning for weeks that a big Russian offensive is coming. The latest such warning comes from the head of Ukraine’s National Security Council, Oleksiy Danilov, who says Russia will attack close to the anniversary of the invasion — simply because the Russian leadership is so thoroughly Soviet that everything they do is linked to significant dates. That notion isn’t grounded in the current conflict’s reality: Rumors have repeatedly circulated that Putin would launch attacks on one anniversary or another, and the attacks never materialized. Ukrainian officials, however, have consistently used talk of an impending Russian offensive to boost their chances of quick Western weapon supplies and to try to sow panic in Russia, where a major boost to military efforts would almost certainly mean a new wave of mobilization.

The Russian military commanders appear to realize they cannot start anything big with the forces they have. In January, regular Russian units tried their luck with tactical offensives near Orikhiv in the southern Zaporizhzhia Region and in parts of the Donetsk Region, but achieved only minor success, running into tough second lines of Ukrainian defenses. Without a decisive advantage in the air and in infantry numbers, Russian generals cannot hope for more. Air superiority has been elusive, though, and the Ukrainian military still has more boots on the ground than the Russian invasion force. The only Russian success in January — the conquest of the salt mining town of Soledar — was achieved by the Wagner private military company, which fed the convicts it had been allowed to draft from prison camps into vicious, bloody frontal assaults on Ukrainian fortifications and city blocks.

Putin’s “partial mobilization” decree from last September is still in force, and while it has no public provision concerning the number of troops to be drafted, it has a classified part that likely allows for multiple call-up waves. Those Russian men who haven’t fled or volunteered are watching the news apprehensively; a popular app for Android phones, called Mobilization 2023, even aggregates mobilization news and tips. So far, however, things have been quiet with no recent reports of a renewed call-up efforts. That’s surprising if a major offensive is in the immediate plans — but an irrational Putin order to launch one with existing forces cannot be ruled out, especially given his past hesitancy to exacerbate the domestic situation by press-ganging too many men into service.

Ukraine, for its part, is under greater pressure than Russia to attack first. Danilov — he of the Russian offensive warnings — has predicted on Facebook that 2023 would be the year of a Ukrainian offensive using newly supplied Western equipment. Ukraine simply cannot afford a protracted war. Every week of the war brings more devastation, and every month, millions of Ukrainian refugees in Europe settle further into their new lives. A full-scale mobilization campaign has been running for months, and, at least on paper, Ukraine’s pool of human resources is far shallower than Russia’s. Western military aid is, in practice, contingent on further victories — Ukrainians can see that by its increased flow after their military successes in the fall of 2022. President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s formidable popularity is a finite resource, especially given recent corruption scandals.

So, Russian forces on the front lines expect a Ukrainian offensive soon. Pro-war Russian Telegram channels say that Ukrainians are going to try to invade Russia’s Belgorod region. Western military experts write of an imperative to liberate Crimea in order to minimize the risk of another war. That aspirational goal requires a big southern offensive toward Melitopol and Mariupol to cut the “land bridge” from Russia to Crimea seized by the invaders early in the campaign. A successful Ukrainian push in the south would result in the peninsula’s blockade and perhaps make it untenable for Russia.

And yet any Ukrainian offensive would now run into freshly fortified Russian positions, manned by more experienced soldiers. As the attacker always risks greater casualties than the defender, Ukrainians need more certainty in the face of the potential losses.

With both sides accumulating resources for an onslaught but hesitant to take the decisive step, the fragile balance on the ground is increasingly unsteady. Something, soon, will have to give.

Good Morning from #Germany where the export model keeps eroding. Germany's once sizable export surplus falling off a cliff, more than halved YoY <€80bn in 2022 due to rising energy costs, the lowest figure since 2000 and 5th decline in succession. pic.twitter.com/LjLDnKFLzn

— Holger Zschaepitz (@Schuldensuehner) February 3, 2023

Mór Thököly wrote:Mogli su da ne uvode sankcije nego odmah da posalju 200 leoparda (ne samo svojih) i da sada vec ne postoji kopnena veza donbasa i krima

"Rusija je zemlja nekrofila, oni imaju leš u centru Moskve“, rekao je Aleksij Danilov, sekretar Saveta za nacionalnu bezbednost i odbranu Ukrajine, misleći na Lenjinove ostatke u mauzoleju.

Del Cap wrote:Verovatnije je da nisu nudili, a prilično je verovatno da bi obe strane baš tako reagovale i da jesu.

Filipenko wrote:Tu je nebitno da li su odbili, vec nacin na koji je odbijeno, naravno pod uslovom da postoji zrno istine u jenkijevskoj propagandi. Ako je Putin rekao da ga to ne zanima jer ce ionako dobiti rat, on onda cilja na mnogo vise, na celu ili skoro celu Ukrajinu. To onda retroaktivno dovodi u pitanje sumanuto odbijanje pregovora i dogovor koji je navodno postojao u martu/aprilu prosle godine, a sto se masovno odobrava po ovom forumu. Cak i ukoliko se uzme zdravo za gotovo narativ da to zlog Putina ne bi odvratilo od planova da kad-tad uzme celu Ukrajinu, barem bi dobili dodatno vreme, nesto poput Minskih sporazuma, sto znaci da ne kapiram ni internu logiku odbijanja tih pregovora i ubistva sopstvenog pregovaraca.