The Ukrainian Counteroffensive

How will the Russians react?

Day 175 (17 August)

• Russia accuses the RAF of invading the airspace in the Artic Circle, and claims that the action was a ‘deliberate provocation’. A routine operation (by a RC-135 Rivet Joint reconnaissance aircraft was carried out on Monday, when a Russian aircraft (MiG-31)made ‘unsafe close passes’. We are at a stage of the preliminary stages of a war when an aggressor looks for a reason/excuse to attack.

• The Washington Post has published several articles that include interviews from Zelenskyy and others (such as Blinken) that discuss what happened prior to the invasion in Ukraine. I will go into detail on this in another article, but I wonder why they are releasing such information now? Is it to try and persuade neutral countries to support Ukraine? To stop war fatigue? Or to encourage others to accept the fact that Russia does not and never wanted to negotiate.

  

  The article offers a timeline that stems back to October 2021, where behind closed doors US intelligence knew of the Russian plans, confronted them, warned Ukraine and NATO countries, but there does seem to be some blame placed on Zelenskyy. I think it would have been far better to have a neutral outlet to carry the story, say for example an Australian one that would not have been biased. From my first reading, there is a lot of defence of the US players (Biden, and Blinken in particular), and criticisms of Zelenskyy.

  Upon reading it, the question asked is whether lives could have been saved if Zelenskyy had evacuated people earlier, or if he had warned them of the invasion. We are still witnessing the war, and I believe that things could get worse, so to analyse things when they are still in play is not constructive IMHO. The problem we can now see is that if Zelenskyy had informed government staff of the intelligence, the moles/traitors/proxies/ would have fed that back to the Russian army and the slaughter may have been far worse in the first weeks. This is not the time to play the blame game. We know France and Germany believed that talks would work, but they will have to take some of the blame eventually as they already have done for the delay in providing Ukraine with weapons.

  

  

• Reuters, a respected media outlet made a fundamental error in running a video story asking if Ukraine was striking in Russian territory. The error was pointed out by those on social media and Reuters deleted the tweet, but the video remained (some of the wording has changed, but is still inaccurate). Crimea is an illegally annexed region of Ukraine that the Russians occupied in 2014, and the territory is Ukrainian and is temporarily occupied by Russia.

  

  

• NATO have made a statement that the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant needs to be inspected by the IAEA for the safety of everyone.

  

• There are calls from US retired military experts, and former US Ambassadors, for the US to send ATACMS (Army Tactic Missiles Systems) to Ukraine without delay. The range is 190 miles, and is used in deep battles. SACUER stands for Supreme Allied Commander Europe.

• Ukraine has destroyed a Russian occupied base in Kherson (near Nova Kakhovka), as the troops move in to retake Kherson.

• Zelenskyy urges residents in Crimea and other occupied regions to avoid military buildings, which is in a way confirming that Ukraine is mounting a counteroffensive by destroying Russian bases and buildings that the Russians have occupied.

  

• Ukraine has confirmed that the US sent 16 HIMARS and that they still have 16. This is in response to claims that some of the weapons have been lost.

• While sanctions are having a minor effect on Russia, there are calls to designate Russians diamonds as ‘conflict diamonds’ so at to make them worthless and hard to sell. Russia makes billions from the diamond industry that could finance the war, so by tarnishing the product it would devalue it.

• The US will contribute $68 billion to the World Food Program run by the UN, to buy grain from Ukraine to be sent to vulnerable countries. This is in an attempt to persuade other countries to follow suit, and also it helps Ukraine as some of the buyers of their grain have refused to accept delivery.

  

• The UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres has arrived in Lviv, and will travel to Kyiv to meet with Zelenskyy and Erdogan before he visits to Odesa to check on his grain ships. Pity he couldn’t see his way down to Mariupol last time when all the Azov soldiers were trapped and the Russians wouldn’t agree to a humanitarian corridor.

• Russia has been recruiting prisoners as soldiers and are now seeking mercenaries from Central Asia, more notably former Soviet states of Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan. In Chechnya, the Russians are also recruiting locals to join the army and to fight, and are using torture techniques and threats of imprisonment if they do not join.