"Mark Sleboda: Russia-Ukraine SITREP, Missiles & What Comes Next"
The New Atlas (December 7, 2022) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ew6HVVGaa-U

3:50 The Kiev Regime is having a real problem with that because they moved some 30 to 40 000 troops South into the Kherson region which, actually, if you take a look at the transportation maps, has a relative paucity of railroad lines in the area compared to other, in particular the east, and the area around Kiev in the country. And the principle reason for Russia’s strikes on the Kiev Regime’s electrical infrastructure has been to inhibit their military logistics and communications. And a lot of people may wonder how that is possible. But the mass movement of troops and fuel, ammunition and military hardware, everything is done in this part of the world by trains. Because these are extremely vast distances. The roads aren’t always in the best of repair and are just not suitable for mass movement of tanks and anything in any part of the world. So, everything has to be done by train. And that is why trains, control of train junctions and everything is such an important part of this war. Everyone agrees that it is a war of logistics and attrition.

5:21 When you’re fighting a war of logistics and attrition then obviously, then obviously the logistics matter. And Russia’s strikes against the Kiev Regime’s electrical infrastructure are meant to inhibit this because the majority of the trains in Ukraine are powered by electricity. You take out the electricity, you take out the ability of them to move their troops around the battlefield. Russia has done exactly this, and this is the primary purpose – you could say there is a secondary purpose [weakening] civilian morale – but that is the primary reason. And that is exactly the same reason that the U.S. gave when they were bombing the electrical infrastructure of Serbia. … exactly what the NATO spokesman James Shia said at the time.

6:24 So, obviously Russia is following established military precedent set by the arsenal of Freedom and Democracy when they’re conducting the strikes, however much they might now try to paint it as a war crime now that Russia is doing it.

But this is particularly inhibiting them [the Kiev Regime] in Kherson because they’re having a hard time moving their troops that they moved into that area out now. And of course right after Russia withdrew, there was essentially a race to move the troops that were there on either side to areas where they could now be used because the Dneiper is such a significant geographic obstacle. So to Zaparozya to Donbass to the northern Lugansk, somewhere where they could be used. And Russia has obviously won that particular [race]. Some people are calling it a trap … but certainly it was factored into the Russian command’s strategic locations. … and the artillery exchanges over time will pretty much ensure the destruction of Kherson City.”

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13:02 The other area where Russia is on the offense is Bakhmut …

15:00 ... memories of Verdun and WWI . . . the meat grinder works very well for demilitarization . . .

17:00 Bandarite Nazi units enforcing conscript discipline

20:00 early Russian successes in the South with relatively little fighting . . . Russia now happy to have Kiev Regime feeding their troops into Russian defense lines . . .

. . .

26:22 “One of the things that has come out in recent weeks is that it was always assumed, first of all, that the Russian economy would collapse, and quite obviously that didn’t happen. Not at all. The Russian economy was originally predicted, at the start of the conflict ,to be facing a 20 to 30, 25 to 30 percent drop in GDP for the year and they’re now saying, actually, it is going to be something between two and four percent. And while that is true for the economy overall, actually, the Kremlin coffers, the government budget, is flush because of the increased price of oil and gasoline, which is either State industries or the ones that are in private hands with heavy windfall taxes. So the Kremlin is actually flush with money. They’ve actually built up the reserves, that half of which were stolen when their reserves were frozen by the West at the beginning of the conflict. They’ve been feeding back into their reserves over the last nine months because they’ve had so much money coming in, and they’ve almost built back up to the 600 to 700 billion level. It’s just not in Dollars or Euros anymore which, to be frank, it never should have been in the first place. And some people in the Ministry of Finance should have lost more than their jobs over that, but that’s another story.”

27:52 The West is not geared for this type of war. … and they’ve been admitting it. Their military industrial complex was geared up for the last couple of decades for high-tech boondoggles like the F-35 and this B21 “Doolittle Raider.” Maybe it is a good stealth aircraft. We don’t know because it has never even flown yet. But “stealth” is obsolete with modern air-defense systems, particularly that possessed by Russia and China which uses Russian air defenses. So the thing is kind of pointless. And I think you’ve pointed that out as well.

28:56 The other thing they were geared up for was low-intensity counter-insurgency struggle in third world countries that were not near-peer competitors running around with AK-47s in deserts and that’s all they had to deal with. So, that is what their Military Industrial Complex has been geared up for. And they’ve just seemed to realize that. They have not stockpiled ammunition. They have been operating on an idea that they could produce on demand what they needed. Which was completely false. And now the industry people from Raytheon and from these other companies, they’re all admitting to the Western media now that actually we don’t have the ability to turn production back on after decades since the end of the Cold War where we have not stockpiled these unsexy, basic things like artillery shells, ammunition, and the like. Not only can they not do it, but because they are driven by the profit motive, this is not a wartime economy for them. The U.S. hasn’t declared war [not since 1941]. They haven’t nationalized businesses. This is not a WWII-type situation. They have to provide enough incentive to these companies to completely restart production lines, hire new workers, buy out new factories, new equipment, hire mass numbers of new people to do this. And they can only do that if they are promised long-term contracts of supply, which the government, the European governments are all like ‘Yes, we need to build it all.’ And then when it comes down to actually doing it: ‘No. That’s too expensive. So, we’ll put it off and make a decision next year sometime.’ So, obviously, that’s not happening. And even in the U.S., the amount of long-term contracts needed to supply these things is still being talked about. It’s not being done.

31:03 And once those contracts are signed, it will take years. And we heard from Raytheon just this week in Politico that current U.S. artillery production is 30,000 155mm shells a year. That is the amount that the Kiev Regime is going through in a week. And that is half the amount that Russia is expending a day. And they expect to bump that up to 20,000 shells a month by Spring. That is four days’ supply. What are they going to do for the other 26 days of the month. By 2025 they expect to have that number up to 40,000 artillery shells a month, which is still less than Russia is expending in a day.

32:18 Meanwhile, Russia not only has their Soviet stockpiles of this type of shells which were enormous because they were preparing for exactly this type of war, but they also have the productive capacity to do this, because that is what their military industrial complex is still aligned to produce. So the war that is being fought is on the terms that Russia wants to fight it. So, in effect, they are demilitarizing not just the Kiev Regime at this point to a very real and substantial extent they are demilitarizing NATO. . . .”

. . . 37:23 “… the West does not have the industrial capacity to wage this type of war here and now.

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45:24 The war doesn’t touch most Russian’s lives, much like the Iraq and Afghan wars did not touch American lives.