The war in Ukraine
+ The above map shown by the Russian army is interesting in two ways:
(1) It confirms the maps we use from different sources.
(2) It illustrates perfectly the double level of deployment of the Russian strategy: precision strikes to destroy the Ukrainian military potential (main objectives destroyed in yellow). Gradual takeover on the ground, east of the Dnepr, while staying close to the borders.
+ According to Russian figures, the country has lost 1380 dead soldiers and 3800 seriously wounded. And the ratio of Russians to Ukrainians who have been put out of action remains at 1/6 (30,000 Ukrainian soldiers killed or seriously wounded)
+ The other essential elements of the balance sheet of one month of war drawn up by the Russian Ministry of Defense - we reproduce it because in a part of the media and expertise, at least in France, the Russian point of view is never quoted:
"The Russian special operation is conducted strictly according to the approved plan, the priority is to exclude unnecessary casualties among the population ;
Kyiv, before the start of the special operation of the Russian Federation, began large-scale preparations for the offensive of the shock group of troops fired into the east of Ukraine;
The special operation of the Russian armed forces disrupted the large-scale offensive of Ukrainian troops on the Lugansk People's Republic and the Donetsk People's Republic and saved thousands of civilian lives;
It was impossible to stop the genocide of the Kiev regime by political means;
Russia considered two options for conducting a special operation: within the borders of the DPR and the LPR or throughout Ukraine;
If the special operation was conducted only inside the LPR and DPR, then the Ukrainian authorities would constantly feed their military group;
Russian armed forces during the first two days of a special military operation gained air supremacy over Ukraine;
Armed forces of the Russian Federation have blocked Kiev, Kharkov, Chernihiv, Sumy and Nikolaev, Kherson and most of Zaporozhye region are under full control;
RF Armed Forces cause damage to the facilities of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in the blockaded territories, so they can not strengthen the grouping in the Donbass until its complete liberation. The RF armed forces will focus on the complete liberation of Donbass ;
The RF armed forces have no plans to storm the blocked Ukrainian cities, but such a possibility is not excluded;
276 localities that were previously in the Ukrainian army's area of operation have come under the control of the DPR and LPR people's militia;
Ukrainian air force and air defense system were almost completely destroyed, the country's navy ceased to exist;
All 24 formations of the Ukrainian ground forces suffered significant losses, Kiev no longer had organized reserves;
During the month, the losses of Ukraine amounted to about 30 thousand people, including more than 14 thousand - irrecoverable and about 16 thousand - sanitary ;
16 main military airfields of the Armed Forces of Ukraine were defeated, 39 arsenals were destroyed, which contained up to 70% of all stocks of military equipment ;
Ukraine is compensating for the losses at the expense of mobilized people and personnel of territorial defense troops who do not have the necessary training;
Modern Russian weapons in Ukraine have shown high accuracy, reliability and the possibility of operational use;
At least 10 Ukrainian mines have broken their anchor and are drifting in the western part of the Black Sea;
127 bridges were destroyed in the war zone in Ukraine, all of them were dynamited by Ukrainian nationalists"
The Russian Ministry of Defense wants to remain credible. For example, the table below gives precise figures on the quantity of equipment and weapons not yet destroyed by the Russian army.
+ According to Belarusian sources, Ukraine would need 13 billion hryvnia (400 million euros) to be able to finance its military effort in the coming weeks and it has only 600,000 euros available! In addition, most of the army's fuel depots have been destroyed.
+ The Russians continue to systematically destroy the fuel depots of the Ukrainian army. For example today in Slaviansk and in Kiev.
+ Photos or videos show the extent of destruction following the battle between Russia and the secessionist Republic of Donetsk against the Azov battalion in the center of Mariupol. (See also
here).
+ The Azov Battalion's defense broke down in almost all the quarters they occupied in Mariupol. The Ukrainian militias have been split into small groups across the city. Their main stronghold is the Azovstal industrial facilities in the southern part of the city, which Russian troops are in the process of making the final assault on.
+ Full control of Izum is confirmed. In addition, most of the fighting on the ground is focused on the conquest of key points that will close the noose around the Ukrainian army in Donbass.
+ The Kievians, when they are entrenched in the cities, camouflage their equipment in commercial or industrial sheds. As in Kiev, a few days ago, a Russian strike destroyed a warehouse of the Ukrainian army in Kharkov with a precise strike.
+ Negotiations between Russians and Ukrainians are not progressing.
+ Courageous but not reckless: no more foreign volunteers have come forward for a week to fight with the Ukrainian army. The strike on the Yavorov base on 13 March 2022 had a devastating psychological effect.
The global geopolitical confrontation
+ The Russian spoofing duo Vovan and Lexus (Vladimir Kuznetsov and Alexei Stolyarov)
has struck again at a member of the British government: after Ben Wallace, Minister of Defence, the Home Secretary Priti Patel. They impersonated Ukrainian Prime Minister Denis Chmigal and one of his staff. Ms. Patel was no more professional than her colleague Ben Wallace. She criticizes the Interpol representatives for their cowardice and warns that the "Five Eyes" alliance (the cooperation platform of the American, Australian, British, Canadian and New Zealand intelligence services) will put Interpol under pressure. In passing, she calls the Russians 'Barbarians' and, in the rest of the conversation, she seems to agree with the idea of making Russian students studying in Britain take an ideological test. The conversation ends in a zany way as the two mystifiers get the minister to say that "Vovan and Lexus are incredible heroes".
In the planning of the "hybrid war", the Russians have added the mockery of the adversary!
+It is extremely sad to note that the government of Boris Johnson is wasting in a few weeks, on the Ukrainian issue, all the political capital accumulated thanks to the Brexit. A British delegation was received very coldly in India because it came to ask the Indian government to join the sanctions against Russia. It seems that, from Washington, London or Paris, we no longer understand the world that is happening.
+ As far as we are concerned, in any case, we are going, as we do every night, to the diplomatic school of M.K. Bhadrakumar. Tonight, he masterfully summarizes the growing isolation of the United States and the European Union:
"The international community is avoiding taking sides between the United States and Russia. The Islamabad Declaration, issued Wednesday at the end of the 45th meeting of foreign ministers of the 57 member countries of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, refused to endorse sanctions against Russia and called for the cessation of hostilities in Ukraine, prevention of loss of life, strengthening of humanitarian aid and "intensification of diplomacy" - almost the same position as China and India.
Not a single country on the African continent and in the regions of West Asia, Central Asia, South and Southeast Asia has imposed sanctions on Russia. After a visit to Hanoi, Malaysian Prime Minister Ismail Sabri Yaakob said: "We discussed the Russian-Ukrainian conflict and agreed that Malaysia and Vietnam would remain neutral on this issue. As for the sanctions against Russia, we do not support them. The parties do not support unilateral sanctions; we only recognize restrictions that could be imposed by the UN Security Council." This is also the consensus within ASEAN.
Interestingly, Chinese advisor and foreign minister Wang Yi was the chief guest at the OIC meeting in Islamabad. In his remarks, Wang Yi said, "China supports Russia and Ukraine in continuing their peace talks, and hopes that these talks will lead to a ceasefire, end the fighting and bring peace. Humanitarian disasters should be avoided and any spillover of the Ukrainian crisis should be prevented so as not to affect and harm the legitimate rights and interests of other regions and countries."
The Chinese Foreign Ministry's press release on Wang Yi's meeting with Saudi Foreign Minister Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud said, "Regarding the issue of Ukraine, both sides agreed that the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all countries should be respected and their reasonable security concerns should be taken seriously. It is imperative to prevent any humanitarian crisis, to maintain the peace talks process and to resolve conflicts through dialogue and negotiation. Both sides stressed that all countries have the right to make independent judgments, to resist external pressure and to move away from the simple logic of "black or white" and "friend or foe.
Again, the Chinese press release on Wang Yi's meeting with his Egyptian counterpart Sameh Shoukry states, among other things, that "the two sides exchanged views on the Ukraine issue, and agreed to respect the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all countries and to remain committed to a comprehensive solution to the current crisis. According to Shoukry, Egypt opposes pressure from some countries on China and favors increased cooperation rather than an escalation of confrontation."
Curiously, four West Asian foreign ministers visited Moscow last week to discuss bilateral cooperation: Qatar, Iran, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates."
No less finely, Bhadrakumar describes how the war in Ukraine is becoming a bone of contention in Central Europe. The Visegrad group is increasingly divided:
"The bottom line is that Poland also has an axe to grind, ready to carve out certain historical parts of Poland beyond Ukraine's current ethnically mixed western borders - the oblasts of Zhytomyr, Khmelnytskyi and Lviv. If Ukraine fragments or collapses in defeat, Poland will most certainly seize the opportunity to recover its lost territories. Poland's hyper-activism towards Ukraine is obvious. Indeed, in recent days, both former Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski and Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk have accused Budapest of trying to get its hands on Ukraine's largely Hungarian-populated Transcarpathian region. On Tuesday, Sikorski claimed in a tweet that Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and President Vladimir Putin had reached a secret agreement on the partition of Ukraine! On the same day, Iryna Vereshchuk complained in a Facebook post: "The way the Hungarian leadership is treating Ukraine lately is even worse than some of the Russian satellite states of the former Soviet Union. Hungary does not support sanctions. It does not supply weapons. It does not allow the transit of weapons from other countries. It says 'no' to almost everything.
Translate: Viktor Orban is keeping a cool head in the current crisis while the Poles are going into a mild delirium. And the Americans are ready to take advantage of it:
"Mr. Biden can only explore with Polish leaders options that do not extend to outright NATO intervention in Ukraine. The specter that haunts the Biden administration, despite its media bluster, is that the Russian special operation may be on the verge of success after all, creating a vast buffer of regions on the eastern bank of the Dnieper River, and taking control of the Black Sea coastline that prohibits access by NATO ships. Poland becomes a key stakeholder in such an outcome and Washington certainly sees Warsaw as its number one interlocutor in the evolution of the situation, as the fate of Ukraine hangs in the balance."
In the coming months we will witness the political, economic and social implosion of Europe! And the inconsistency of the French policy is one of the first causes of the chaos in which Europe is sinking.
Chronicle of the de-dollarization of the world
+ Having lost his bet to break the Russian economy in a few weeks, Joe Biden launches into apocalyptic announcements; the Russians are reportedly planning a chemical attack; the world should, because of Russia, tighten its belt, to prepare for food shortages.
+ Ursula von der Leyen says that she will oppose the payment of Russian gas in rubles. And she announced that the European Union will buy "one third" of its gas needs from the United States. That leaves the European Union to come to the rescue of the dollar!
+ Russia is blocking capital transfers to countries that have sanctioned it.
+ Qatar refuses to join the sanctions against Russia. Its energy minister says that it is impossible for the European Union to replace Russian natural gas with gas from Qatar.
+ In an interview with Foreign Policy, the IMF's first deputy managing director, Gita Gopinath, warned that Western sanctions against Russia, and in particular the confiscation of dollar- and euro-denominated reserves held by the Russian central bank, could backfire by making other foreign central banks more reluctant to hold such a large amount of their own reserves in dollars and euros.
+ It is becoming increasingly clear that Russia had been preparing for several years for a scenario of even harsher sanctions by the United States and the European Union. This is evidenced by - and we will come back to this in detail - (1) the modernization of the banking system and the speed with which the banks adapted to the sanctions at the end of February/beginning of March 2022; (2) the immediate possibility for account holders who so wished to transfer their savings into yuans or gold. (3) the intelligence with which the Russian government is using the issue of alternatives to settling energy transactions in dollars as a lever: ruble, yuan, gold, bitcoin....
www.rt.com
