According to the analysts, the actual number of Russian troops in Ukraine is around 50000-60000 men:
One such U.S. military expert has created a brand new interactive map that shows unit dispositions all over the country. Of course it demands the usual caveats, being from an anti-Russian source, BUT it can give us a few useful pieces of information.
The most significant of these is that, I have counted every single brigade and BTG listed on the map and have come out with a startling find that correlates exactly with what I’ve been saying for a while, and have written in detail about in the last report. Namely: there appears to be only about 50-60 total Russian BTGs in Ukraine. Considering that a Russian BTG is listed as having an estimated 600-800 men, this would amount to 50,000 – 60,000 troops in total deployment. The author himself has stated these are all the confirmed groups in the country.
Also, I’ve seen reports that satellite pictures within Russia and Belarus show much more troops there than before the invasion.
My conclusion is that this adds weight to my initial assessment that this is all in fact a ruse, or, as we would say in former Yugoslavia, “navlakuša”. The majority of the military is in fact standing by in preparations for something bigger; the ones in Ukraine seem to be more preoccupied with locking the situation up than actually conquering, but something will have to be done with all the hornets’ nests they have stirred. The 50-60k numbers don’t actually surprise me because that’s perfectly in line with my expectations, if my initial assessment was correct, but since much larger numbers were mentioned online I thought, well, I must’ve been wrong and they are doing a much more serious job than I assumed. Apparently not.
It’s difficult to think through all this war noise, but let me try; for starters, what reactions did this invasion provoke, what’s the new status, and what’s likely to happen next?
Sanctions. America basically sentenced Europe to resource shortages, which will destroy their industry and forment social unrests. I expect more totalitarian clampdowns on freedoms, following the precedents set after the covid response. Normally, people would protest the self-inflicted shortages and the lowering of the standard of living, but now the military will control the streets and just shoot them. No protests will be allowed, and protesters will be publicly derided as selfish and ignorant, following the established covid patterns. So far, the effect of sanctions on Russia has been negligible; basically, they lost the Western fast food and fashion chains, and are left with better and cheaper local alternatives. They have cheap energy, cheap and good food, they are not dependent on credit, and what technology they don’t produce, they can get from China, which is a good and reliable ally. If the Russians didn’t know what happened, they could be excused if they came to the conclusion that some plague wiped out the collective West, and that is actually not far from reality. Russia lost some of its gold and foreign reserves, but honestly they could afford it; it’s mostly used for foreign trade anyway. Their economy is stable, and their currency has recovered to pre-invasion levels. American and EU economies, on the other hand, are flashing with warning signs. Things are not yet in free fall, but the forecasts are dire.
Petroruble. Putin is forcing the EU to either buy gas (and, likely, all other imports are to follow) in Rubles. This gives the Ruble the same kind of commodity-backing that the Dollar had since the 1970s. Nobody in the West expected this, and it’s a serious blow. America will try to stop this by all means at their disposal, but it’s questionable what they can do short of nuclear war. This situation is still in development and it’s unclear what direction things will take.
Ukraine. The Ukrops are rabid and murderous, and there is increasing support in Russia for wiping them all out with heavy weaponry – basically, if Putin stopped pussyfooting around them in attempts to protect the civilians, and simply levelled everything, there would be a loud cheer in Russia, especially after the videos of Ukrops torturing Russian POWs came out, along with increasing evidence of general Ukrainian population’s widespread hatred of the Russians. The helicopter incursion and bombardment of an oil depot in Russia didn’t help things one bit. The atmosphere in Russia changed regarding the Ukrainians, and the Ukrops will regret that very dearly in the following weeks. Other than being rabid and murderous, they are mostly incapacitated, fragmented, surrounded and unable to do anything of military significance. Basically, they wait for the Russians to decide what to do with them.
Technology. Russia was seriously slacking with regard to attaining technological independence from the West, and this is a real source of concern. This includes payment technology, which consists of licensed Western stuff implemented by their people who were educated in the West; basically, it’s all completely vulnerable to all kinds of pressures. Agriculture, industry, finance, even military industry – they are all vulnerable. Apparently, the reason for that is that they were following the path of least resistance and greatest short-term effectiveness; why waste limited resources on producing your own tractor when you need those resources to produce something you can’t readily buy for reasonable prices? Well, now they can’t buy either the tractors or the spare parts, and when things start failing, things will start degrading and eating up resources in order to get fixed. Also, they have problems with the production of seeds for agriculture – they import those from America, which is a mind-boggling oversight; also explainable by following the line of least resistance. I can understand that, because I’m also practicing this approach in daily matters, where I organize things to be economical in a business-as-usual environment, instead of a doomsday-SHTF environment, which might bite me later, but I would expect Russia to have figured out that America is neither a friend nor a partner, but a geostrategic enemy. You don’t buy seeds, tractors, software and payment protocol licenses from a geostrategic enemy. Things are very, very bad in this segment, and this is the only segment where I’m scratching my head in “what the hell were they thinking” ways. They have ten times more vulnerabilities than strengths here.
Phase 2. It’s generally assumed that by this the Russians mean cleaning up of the remaining Ukrainian military east of Dnepr river, and possibly Odessa. I’m not so sure about that, regardless of the fact that those Ukrops will absolutely end up pushing up daisies in the short term, because it would be strategically imprudent to either leave them there, or to allow them to evacuate. What I mean is that it might be more strategically prudent to just keep them surrounded until phase 3, and deal with America and NATO in phase 2, because something might be imminent from that direction. America just won’t allow things to go Russian way as much as things seem to be going now. They will intervene, Russia will respond, and all kinds of shit will hit the fan in very short order. This might mean that the Ukrops in Donbass will have to wait for their initiation into perfect unity with the earth.
BTW, no CIA propaganda will be allowed here, I already banned one.
A pretty good summation, but I wonder about the thing about sourcing seeds from the US.
Russian agriculture is completely non-GMO. Major supplies of food seeds in the US are not.
Also, Russia makes it’s own good tractors, combines, etc. and Belarus makes good ones too.
So why would imports of tractors from the west have been more than a very minor % of the market?
Russia already had an alternative payment system ready to go, and it’s now coming online, including inter-bank non-US dollar payment system that China, India and probably many more countries will join in the near future.
An example of hi-tech is the composite wings for the MC-21, that are now completely sourced in Russia.
Semiconductor chips may be a problem for a time, but together with China that will be worked thru,
So if you can provide some info sources to back up your statements in your Technology paragraph, then I might give it more credence, but until then I can only ‘take it’ with a huge grain of salt.
I don’t really care what you will “take” or not, so here it is for the audience:
1. Seeds:
https://edwardslavsquat.substack.com/p/up-next-global-food-crisis?s=r
2. Tractors and other agricultural equipment:
https://www.nakanune.ru/articles/118453/
(google translate)
“Min most enterprises now, off-discount, employ about 50% of imported special equipment. Mostly, these are popular brands of American manufacturers such as Massey Ferguson and John Deere. They supply mainly seeders, sprayers and tractors. There are no Russian analogues at the moment. The second point is the spare parts for these machines. During operation, the equipment always fails, it is unclear how to buy components now. Foreign manufacturers provide certain standards and give guarantees for certain units for a period of 10-15 years. Any replacement with analogues leads to the disruption of guarantees. The remaining 50% are domestic agricultural machinery of the Rostselmash group and freight transport from KAMAZ,” the representative of the industry outlined the situation in the market.
3. Payments: Russian Mir card network is AFAIK locally built system and design. But having local cards and international cards processing is order of magnitude or two different. Chinese UnionPay is a licensed Visa (American) technology and now Russians have to piggy-back on it for international card transactions (by co-branding Mir with UP; co-branding means that all foreign transactions go via UP network and are vulnerable as I will write next). Meaning Visa probably has a clause in the contract with Chinese to stop providing services/fixes/maintenance for it. Or, networks with whom UP entered into network access deals in the West can block UP transaction if card’s BIN is from Russia. I would not be suprised *at all* if the UnionPay was not only Visa technology but also is *running* its core network processing completely on software (and some hardware such as HSMs) from some US software provider. eFunds comes to mind, or somebody similar who has cards processing know how.
As for SWIFT replacement, I think Russian system is literally a copy of SWIFT messaging specification (actually just part of it, because SWIFT is much more than just payments, it also includes securities transfers and other things). This was done for ease of integration (with existing systems locally and abroad), but it has some risks as well. In any case I think it is just now slowly starting to be used, and before it was just on standby mode. For example this new payment scheme for gas (rubles for gas) does not really need this new “SWIFT” system from Russia, it can all be done almost manually.
I don’t really care what you will “take” or not, so here it is for the audience:
1. Seeds:
https://edwardslavsquat.substack.com/p/up-next-global-food-crisis?s=r
2. Tractors and other agricultural equipment:
https://www.nakanune.ru/articles/118453/
(google translate)
“Min most enterprises now, off-discount, employ about 50% of imported special equipment. Mostly, these are popular brands of American manufacturers such as Massey Ferguson and John Deere. They supply mainly seeders, sprayers and tractors. There are no Russian analogues at the moment. The second point is the spare parts for these machines. During operation, the equipment always fails, it is unclear how to buy components now. Foreign manufacturers provide certain standards and give guarantees for certain units for a period of 10-15 years. Any replacement with analogues leads to the disruption of guarantees. The remaining 50% are domestic agricultural machinery of the Rostselmash group and freight transport from KAMAZ,” the representative of the industry outlined the situation in the market.
3. Payments: Russian Mir card network is AFAIK locally built system and design. But having local cards and international cards processing is order of magnitude or two different. Chinese UnionPay is a licensed Visa (American) technology and now Russians have to piggy-back on it for international card transactions (by co-branding Mir with UP; co-branding means that all foreign transactions go via UP network and are vulnerable as I will write next). Meaning Visa probably has a clause in the contract with Chinese to stop providing services/fixes/maintenance for it. Or, networks with whom UP entered into network access deals in the West can block UP transaction if card’s BIN is from Russia. I would not be suprised *at all* if the UnionPay was not only Visa technology but also is *running* its core network processing completely on software (and some hardware such as HSMs) from some US software provider. eFunds comes to mind, or somebody similar who has cards processing know how.
As for SWIFT replacement, I think Russian system is literally a copy of SWIFT messaging specification (actually just part of it, because SWIFT is much more than just payments, it also includes securities transfers and other things). This was done for ease of integration (with existing systems locally and abroad), but it has some risks as well. In any case I think it is just now slowly starting to be used, and before it was just on standby mode. For example this new payment scheme for gas (rubles for gas) does not really need this new “SWIFT” system from Russia, it can all be done almost manually.
Since I “outsourced” this part of the research to Božo, and I see that he already answered, I have little to add except that I didn’t put all sorts of links into the article not because there aren’t actual facts behind every claim, but because there are so many researched facts behind every claim, I would have to make several pages of footnotes for every article if I wanted to adhere to scientific publication standards, but that would slow things down significantly, and add more work for me, which is not an insignificant problem since I’m overworked and overstressed as it is. In any case, I see from the blog stats that many new visitors arrived from Saker’s blog, and I welcome you, but do have in mind that people here are used to my way of doing things – basically, I go through so much data every day, it’s impractical to reference everything, and I rely a lot on others who are doing parts of the sieving process. Basically, feel free to be as skeptical as you like, but I’m not making stuff up.
There’s another thing that might prove to be important: American military is not only having a recruitment problem, it’s also having a morale problem:
https://youtu.be/7ZGkqNBBdWk
Basically, with all the woke nonsense, vax-or-resign ultimatums, disgraceful retreat from Afghanistan, and generally America no longer being a country a virtuous, well informed person would want to fight and die for, I think they are rapidly approaching the point where they either use it or lose it.
How bad the situation is, only the insiders will know for sure, but it can’t be good.
Interesting article. Thanks.
I agree this is much, MUCH bigger than Ukraine. It is a titanic struggle among giants: Russia vs NATO (US), with China in the background.
Russia has laid out its security requirements to the USA, NATO and its European members. These were treated with derision by all concerned and the military operation is an initial result.
Security is still sought after by Russia, which cannot accept “a world without Russia”.
The end of ‘dollar supremacy’ significantly reduces the power of the USA. Will it tolerate this?
So there are TWO imperatives: mutual security and financial supremacy.
Either the USA accepts loss of financial privileged (enjoyed for many decades), or it faces mutual oblivion.
Or will Russia ‘chicken out’ and accept USA hegemony and ‘dollar dictatorship?
I can’t imagine any kind of a reigning world superpower to just accept its demise, especially one as arrogant as the USA, so, as long as they have the military – and they won’t for long, because bankruptcy and big military budgets don’t go well together – they will be willing to use it. As I wrote long before, America knows it’s on the way down, and is working on making everybody else much worse off than they are, in order to emerge relatively ahead after their anticipated collapse. It’s a dangerous gambit that assumes too many things.
Russia, on the other hand, already had its collapse, it tried to have peaceful coexistence with America, but America just won’t have it, they had to have Russia as an enemy, so Russia knows the only way out is through, so I can’t really imagine them backing down. Even if America somehow manages to assassinate Putin, and I’m sure they are toying with the idea, his replacement is absolutely guaranteed to be more radical and hate them more.
Basically, I don’t see an alternative to a world war, and that’s actually a good thing, because what’s the alternative, for us living in the West? Be slaves in Sodom and Gomorrah until we go insane, forget God and become completely spiritually destroyed? I’d take the nukes, thank you very much.
A nuclear holocaust would be the worst thing imaginable. The living, for however short a time, would envy the dead. I doubt even the southern hemisphere would escape the unimaginably horrific consequences following a full on nuclear war in the north.
And yet it’s a bliss compared to living in hell of incoming western totalitarian, twisted, perverted and godless regime.
I’ve seen this argument so many times: nuclear war would be unimaginably horrible, which is why it won’t happen.
It’s a fallacy, and it’s also one I used when people asked me in late 1990 whether I think there will be a war here in Croatia. It would be too horrible, and America wouldn’t allow it.
The idea that something wouldn’t happen because it’s horrible is childish; all kinds of horrible things happen regardless of whether anyone feels good about them or not. The videos of Ukrops showing POW abuse are horrible, and reports of Russian POW castration and finger amputations are also horrible, but that doesn’t mean they are not true. Denial isn’t an argument against something, it’s an emotional response and a coping mechanism. Nuclear war is something that will happen when alternatives become unbearable, and considering how the current damage to the economic system already means increased probability of total collapse, leading to the massive degradation to food supply, energy supply and availability of medical care, which logically lead to massive dying-off of world population, we might have unimaginable horrors regardless.
“As I wrote long before, America knows it’s on the way down, and is working on making everybody else much worse off than they are, in order to emerge relatively ahead after their anticipated collapse.”
The USA elites are still very strong, and I think that their strategy is much simpler, at least in the short-medium term, which is a all they care about:
* A single globalized system was good as long as the USA dominated it.
* There is a risk that China could take over as the dominant power of the single globalized system.
* The USA elites want therefore want to split the single globalized system into a larger USA dominated one and a smaller China-centred one, as quickly as possible, so most countries end up in the larger USA dominated one.
«Russia, on the other hand, already had its collapse, it tried to have peaceful coexistence with America, but America just won’t have it, they had to have Russia as an enemy»
The USA elites are split on this, some want it as an eternal but weak enemy, some would accept it becoming a set of protectorates like Europe:
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/George_F._Kennan
George Kennan “At a Century’s Ending: Reflections 1982-1995” “Part II: Cold War in Full Bloom” page 118 (1997) ISBN 0-393-31609-2
“Were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the American military-industrial establishment would have to go on, substantially unchanged, until some other adversary could be invented. Anything else would be an unacceptable shock to the American economy.”
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/asia/1997-09-01/geostrategy-eurasia
“A Geostrategy for Eurasia”, Zbigniew Brzezinski, September 1997:
«A loosely confederated Russia – composed of a European Russia, a Siberian Republic, and a Far Eastern Republic – would find it easier to cultivate closer economic relations with its neighbours. […] a decentralized Russia would be less susceptible to imperial mobilization. […] A sovereign Ukraine is a critically important component of such a policy, as is support for such strategically pivotal states as Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan.»
«so Russia knows the only way out is through, so I can’t really imagine them backing down»
That “Russia” is an abstract concept, larger parts of the russian elite (starting with Khodorkovsky) would love for “Russia” to become an USA protectorate, and for their russian wealth to be “protected” by the USA, just as the USA “protect” the wealth of the House of al-Saud or that of the mexican or south-korean billionaires from “communism”.
“MUCH bigger than Ukraine. It is a titanic struggle among giants: Russia vs NATO (US), with China in the background.”
the Russian Federation in this story is not a giant, but a pigmy, with a military budget less than 10% of that of NATO. This assessment is still quite realistic:
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/rachel-maddow-is-bill-oreilly
«On March 26, 2014, Maddow saluted Barack Obama for rolling his eyes when asked if Mitt Romney had been right to identify Russia as America’s biggest geopolitical threat. “America has got a whole lot of challenges,” Obama said, but “Russia is a regional power that is threatening some of its immediate neighbors, not out of strength but out of weakness.” “Serious presidential shade!” Maddow gushed, adding that this was, “President Obama … explaining that Russia is basically a gnat on the butt of an elephant. Calling Russia, in his words, merely a regional power that does not rise to the level of a major challenge for the United States.”»
The main goal for the USA elites is to undermine their real target, China:
* The USA are using domino theory: first Poland and Romania fall and get full of USA bases from which to fund, train, arm “freedom fighters” to take over Ukraine, then Ukraine falls and gets full of USA bases, from which to fund, train, arm “freedom fighters” to take over Belarus and the Russian Federation and Kazakhstan via “color revolutions”.
* Once the Russian Federation has been “yeltinized”/”ukrainized” itself, and split into various siberian and european statelets under USA “protection”, a chain of USA bases on the northern and western borders of China will be used to fund, train, arm various groups of “freedom fighters” inside China, hopefully leading to its collapse into a series of easily “protected” statelets via “color revolutions”.
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/asia/1997-09-01/geostrategy-eurasia
“A Geostrategy for Eurasia”, Zbigniew Brzezinski, September 1997:
«A loosely confederated Russia – composed of a European Russia, a Siberian Republic, and a Far Eastern Republic – would find it easier to cultivate closer economic relations with its neighbours. […] a decentralized Russia would be less susceptible to imperial mobilization. […] A sovereign Ukraine is a critically important component of such a policy, as is support for such strategically pivotal states as Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan.»
https://www.jstor.org/stable/40396396
“Opening and dividing China”, The World Today, May 1992:
«Needless to say, not all these regions are like to have the same views on foreign policy questions. Coastal regions would be less willing to see relations with the United States deteriorate, or take a hard line with Hong Kong or Taiwan.»
Don’t think such goals are delusional: who could have thought in in 1980 that the Russian Federation itself would be “yeltisinized” in the 1990s or in 2000 that in the 2010s Ukraine itself would be “color revolutioned”. These have been astonishingly quick developments.