Latest News ‘from the front’
This morning’s edition of the news and discussion program Sixty Minutes on Russian state television opened with the now traditional montage of excerpts from U.S. television reporting on transgender issues. Today this was the latest court decisions on state legislation banning sex change operations in children. That sort of material is now the daily filler on Russian news, providing a nice distraction from the misery of war and a clear demonstration of what degenerates the Americans have become.
However, this distraction was cut short and ten minutes into the program we were shown live images of the ongoing meeting of the RF Security Council chaired by Vladimir Putin. The meeting was virtual not in-person. The President was seated at his desk in his Kremlin office with the other participants shown on television monitors. We caught the moment when Defense Minister Shoigu was reporting to Putin on the summary results of the fighting since the start of the Ukrainian counter-offensive at the start of the month: 246 Ukrainian tanks, including13 German Leopards, have been destroyed and a bit more than 13,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed. Yes, killed. In addition there must be the injured.
This, of course, was the part of the session fit for public dissemination. What really brought the Council together today was something else: to consider Russia’s response to latest developments in the war zone, namely the Ukrainians’ destruction yesterday of several bridges connecting the Kherson oblast under Russian control to the Crimea. It has already been determined that the attackers used the British supplied cruise missiles Storm Shadow. This looks very much like the tripwire that Shoigu had in mind a couple of days ago when he said that Russia will bomb the decision making center in Kiev if its territory is attacked. So we may well expect something to happen now.
Then there was surely another issue on the table arising from developments described in a 5-minute report by a journalist with the German Bild magazine which the Russians put up on the screen. His televised report was devoted to the consequences of the explosion at the Kakhovka dam and the emptying of the vast reservoir behind it, which, per the journalist was, as measured in square kilometers, larger than the Berlin metropolitan area.
After opening his remarks with the Hail Mary assertion that the Russians were responsible for this disaster, he went on to describe very persuasively why the emptying of the reservoir now serves Ukrainian military interests perfectly. Most of the land which had been under water is now dry and can very likely support tanks. In the new conditions, the distance separating Ukrainian and Russian forces in the Kakhovka area has been reduced to zero from what had been a body of water varying from 5 to 31 kilometers in width. Moreover, the length of this new stretch of the front is up to 200 km. And in this new front line, the Russians have no defensive mine fields, tank traps, hidden artillery or well engineered trenches that have been so murderous to the attacking Ukrainian army in the Southern Donetsk and Zaporozhie fronts.
This has to be one of the main “surprises” that the Ukrainian command had in mind as it looks for new ways to achieve a breakthrough. But, this potentially dramatic change is not necessarily what it seems: this is not some German move around the Maginot line that left the French with no response. Russia has the means to respond, but that takes us back to point one: to finish off the regime in Kiev now and not wait further.
Finally, within the broadcast of Sixty Minutes, the leader of a Chechen unit active in the Donbas who appears rather frequently on the program gave his assessment of the personnel and equipment losses on Ukrainian fighting potential. As he noted, the loss of tanks and artillery pieces means that the best trained Ukrainian fighters are now dead. To put an infantry soldier on the front lines, you hand him a Kalashnikov and push him out on the field. But the tank commanders and artillery men are the top soldiers who have undergone long training and war experience. Their loss is irreplaceable and explains the heavy infantry losses comprising most of the 13,000 dead, new recruits who were sent to their deaths as cannon fodder.
The two o’clock feature news program on Channel One provided additional video excerpts from the morning’s RF Security Council meeting, in particular the report to Putin by Nikolai Patrushev, the Secretary of the Council. His discussion of Ukrainian equipment destroyed was far more detailed, listing the numbers of armored personnel carriers, artillery pieces and rapid fire rocket launchers, helicopters, drones and much more. The conclusion was that most of the equipment that has been supplied to Ukraine over the past months is now destroyed. That takes in both US and European manufactured equipment as well as Soviet equipment donated by former Warsaw Pact countries. Ukraine is now living hand to mouth on fighting material coming in from the West.
The two o’clock news also devoted special attention to the commemorative events going on today in Moscow and in cities and towns across Russia to mark the 82nd anniversary of the German invasion that brought the USSR into WWII. We were shown video recordings of candle lightings where tens of thousands of lights were laid out to form powerful images of remembrance. All of this comes in the midst of what is seen as a new struggle to crush Nazism in Europe as did their parents and grandparents in the Great Patriotic War.
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2023