Ukraine Situation Report 4/24/24- Comedown After Post-Aid 'High' Brings West Back to Reality
The ink has yet to dry on the signed Ukrainian aid, but it has finally passed both House, Senate, and the final Biden rubberstamp.
by Simplicius
The ink has yet to dry on the signed Ukrainian aid, but it has finally passed both House, Senate, and the final Biden rubberstamp. As predicted here, the list of new items is “long” but mostly constitutes the secondary munitions types which aren’t as easily expendable and therefore still exist in some quantity. The primary ones, i.e. artillery shells and such, are still heavily backlogged.
As you can see, much of the munitions above represent ones which have long lost their effectiveness and have done nothing to really make a dent of any kind in the battlefield.
In fact, just days ago Ukraine’s head of the aerial reconnaissance support center, Maria Berlinskaya, stated that “most Western systems have proven to be [worthless]” because Russian EW neutralizes them all. Listen for yourself:
It was also revealed that much of the gear was already forward-stationed and merely awaiting the final approval, and has begun streaming in from Poland. In fact, some of it was already secretly given a week or two ago, such as in the case of the ATACMS missiles, which were already used as most had guessed since the strike on Dzhankoi airbase a week ago.
There was footage showing the offloading of about a dozen M2 Bradleys from Poland, ready to be sent to Ukraine.
What difference will that make? There is hardly more than that to be sent, and most of them looked worn out and probably the non-working write-offs as we’ve already come to find out from AFU servicemen themselves, who admitted many of the previously sent Bradleys/Abrams were in non-working condition.
The problem is, amid the wave of drunken excitement over the new aid, there have been many sober voices making efforts to temper the wild flights of exaggerated optimism.
This has spurred calls for NATO to totally reconfigure itself into a full war footing because cooler heads have recognized that this aid will amount to nothing more than a brief respite for Ukraine, but will do nothing for actually equalizing the forces, much less overwhelming Russia with some kind of superiority or material overmatch.
Even Dmitry Kuleba echoed the sentiment:
“No [aid] package can stop the Russians,” he said in an interview with the British publication The Guardian, commenting on the US aid package.
Kuleba added that the West needs to increase arms production, since Russia is ahead of it. “When I see what Russia has achieved in building up its defense industrial base over two years of war and what the West has achieved, I think that something is wrong on the West’s part,” the minister noted.
And the main issue is now rearing its head more than ever: out of the several disastrous problems plaguing the AFU, the supply issue is not even its biggest; that dishonorable distinction goes to the lack of usable manpower.
Polish general named Ukraine's main problem at the front lines
Ukraine faces a great challenge, first of all having someone to fight with.... There are 150-200 thousand soldiers missing at the front.This is a big challenge for the Kiev government," said former Polish commander General Waldemar Skrzypczak on air on FM radio station RMF.
This has brought conversations back to the topic of mobilization. Even though Zelensky has signed the bill, there appears to be a dragging of feet as nothing drastic is yet being done, just a slow boil of increasingly draconian street gangpressing as usual. But commanders and other authoritative observers on the front continue to bellow in strained voices that the situation is grim and Ukraine needs more manpower most of all.
Without being privy to the discussions of Zelensky’s cohort, we can only assume that they deem the civil situation to be so pessimistic that they’re terrified of announcing anything too overtly forceful, particularly given that Zelensky’s legitimate hold on power is set to soon expire less than a month from today. In fact, it technically already expired, as the elections should have been held by now—but May 21st is officially when a new president would have been sworn in.
As for mobilization, here’s Ukrainian lawyer Rostislav Kravets and Arestovich both separately revealing that there are reportedly over 100,000 deserters in the AFU:
This is utterly shocking because they are talking about actual deserters who were already fighting on the front or in military units—not men who fled the country to avoid service; those, as we all know, already number in potentially the millions. For instance, this headline from the start of the SMO in 2022 states 500k had already fled:
No, this is much worse. These are actual deserters from the already-thinning frontline, which is said to have a measly ~250-300k men or less. As such it represents a catastrophic morale. It’s another wake up call to those who actually believe Kiev’s casualty numbers. Tens of thousands of confirmed POWs, 100k deserters, but only 30k killed?
Listen to Zelensky lie out of every orifice below. Not only does he lie about mobilization being for replacing brigades but also that it’s merely about getting younger soldiers to operate drones, since they’re ‘better with technology’. We now know the mobilization bill in fact eschewed the ‘demobilization’ clause, so yes, the new men are to replace brigades but not in the way he implies, i.e. not to rotate them out, but to replace destroyed/deceased ones:
Of course the most disgusting of the lies is the suggestion that the young will only be used to operate drones and technological things, implying they’ll be safely in the ‘rear’ as most drone operators are. In reality, they will be sent as fodder to the zero line. Drone operators take the fewest losses and therefore require the least ‘replacement’—it’s the storm troops and meatshield contact line defenders that need constant replenishment.
Speculative, but Rezident UA reports:
#Inside
Our source in the OP said that the Syrsky asks the Office of the President to prepare a bill on the mobilization of Ukrainians from the age of 20 for autumn. The General Staff believes that reducing the age to 25 will not allow the TCK to recruit the necessary number of men to replenish reserves, and now young people are needed for assault crews who are able to carry out offensive operations without equipment.
Other rumors continue to plague the struggling Ukrainian project:
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