Collateral damage

 By Pat Hudson 

I'm just following orders

 By John Darkow

Rockjaw Hegseth

 By Kevin Kallaugher

You started it

 I don't know who created this cartoon.  If you do, let me know.

Dominos

By André-Philippe Côté, a Canadian cartoonist.

Kill more children

 By  David Horsey

Medals

By Matt Wuerker 

Russia's new export

By Christopher Weyant 

Russia's 'operational pause'

 From a Twitter  thread by Dr Mike Martin

Time for a little update thread on Ukraine. We are at a very interesting point.

A couple of weeks ago (or so) the Russians announced an ‘operational pause’ in the Donbas. Op pauses are pretty normal in this type of high intensity warfare, because of the vast supplies required and damages inflicted.

Armies sometime just have to take ‘time outs’ to regroup and build up their supplies again. Although normally you don’t broadcast to everyone that you’re doing it. That’s a big weird an makes it seem like there must be another reason that Russian military activity has decreased.

And decreased it has - Russian artillery fire has significantly dropped, and there are a lot less offensives. (They compensated for this by lobbing a few missiles into cites, just to remind everyone they were still there, and still relevant. As if we’d all forgotten!)

And during this RUSSIAN operational pause, the Ukrainians started bringing into action the longer-range, western-donated artillery systems.

And continuing a theme (of the last two months) - while the Russians were focussing on (regrouping in) Donbas, the Ukrainians started hitting targets on the Kherson front in the south.

Just a quick reminder - Kherson is much more important strategically - it is the only foothold that the Russians have north and west of the Dnipro River - which is the major strategic barrier that runs across Ukraine from Crimea to Kyiv.

It is also the route to Crimea for the Ukrainians, which is where they should put pressure on the Russians if they want to evict them from the whole country. If the Russians feel threatened in Crimea they will strip units out of elsewhere, including the Donbas.

Over the last fortnight or so, the Ukrainians have been hitting Command and Control posts up to the 70km range of the new systems (headquarters, communications sites, air defence radars etc.). This dislocates a military force.

This sort of range means that generally speaking they are hitting Brigade and Divisional HQs rather than company and battalion ones. In a war you keep the more valuable things further from a front line to protect them. Longer range artillery upsets this calculation.

Secondly, the Ukrainians have been hitting supply dumps. I’m sure we’ve all seen the videos and photos on twitter. Judging by the size of those fires they were brigade, divisional and corps level supply dumps - which are predominantly fuel and ammo.

And specifically for the Russians and the way that they conduct war - it means a lot of artillery ammunition.

This has meant that the Russians have had to move all of these supply dumps back beyond the range of the new Ukrainian artillery. And this has one very simple effect.

The Russians now have to transport all those supplies, say, 100km rather than 30km. And if you have the same amount of lorries it means you can only bring up 1/3 of the supplies that you could before you had to move your supply dumps. And what does that mean?

It means that Russia, who rely on a very artillery heavy way of fighting war (and artillery is the most logistics intensive thing ever), can probably no longer get enough supplies up to the front line to conduct offensives; they can probably only defend on the Kherson front now.

And, I guess as the cherry on the cake, the Ukrainians have started hitting the bridges over the river Dnipro that connect Kherson to the other side of the river.

In other words, the bridges to the Russian force’s rear.

There are only two of them. And they haven’t destroyed them yet, they’ve just cratered them making them unsuitable for heavy logistics. But if I were a Russian soldier in Kherson I would be pretty scared right now.

The way to get an enemy force to collapse is to hit their command and control, hit their logistics, and then start playing games with their minds.

I would be watching Kherson very closely over the next ten days. I think we might be about to see another Russian ‘goodwill’ gesture as they pull out of Kherson

Doesn’t end. Seems this was happening as I was typing my thread:

Ukraine refuses the enemy's request for a green corridor for thousands of soldiers to exit Kherson region. Ukraine demands their surrender of troops and equipment otherwise they will be eradicated.

Source: The Economist

Should we intervene to help Ukraine

From a Twitter thread by Jussi Halla-aho, a member of Finland's Parliament.

Russia is terror-bombing Ukraine with missiles, fired from a safe distance, purposefully selecting civilian targets with no military value. At the same time, we are reluctant to give Ukraine weapons with enough range to hit targets on Russian soil. For fear of escalation.

This is a very silly way of thinking, for many reasons. As has been pointed out, you can hit targets on Russian soil with a hand-grenade if you go close enough to the border. Ukraine does not need range to attack Russia but to hit Russian military targets.

Secondly, Russia is a country waging a war of aggression. If Russia, for example, launches missiles against Ukraine from its own territory, those launch facilities are relevant and legitimate targets from any perspective, moral, legal, or otherwise.

What exactly is the "escalation" that we fear? That Russia would start bombing Ukrainian cities or infrastructure outside of the war-zone proper? That they would try to hit the Western supplies? Wake up. There is not much that they could do that they are not doing already.

Or do we still respect Mr Putin's "red lines", the crossing of which would lead to WW3? How would that happen? Russia can afford a nuclear war just as little as everyone else, and it can afford a conventional conflict much LESS than the West.

It is a bit late to try and not antagonize Russia. They are already antagonized by the aid that has been and is being given to Ukraine. There is also no specific reason not to antagonize them more. They will not risk a conflict they would certainly lose.

The biggest mistake the West has made during the conflict is that we declare publicly what we are not going to do. "We will not send troops to Ukraine." "We will not send fighters." "We will not send long-range missiles." "We will not send modern tanks."

The effect of these declarations is that they give Mr Putin limits WITHIN WHICH he can do whatever he likes without having to fear a direct confrontation with the West. He has been effectively told that he can bomb and destroy Ukraine for as long as he feels like it.

Earlier in the spring I tweeted my opinion that the civilized world should intervene preferably sooner than later. I was heavily rebuked by pretty much everyone in Finland for "war-mongering", and my resignation was demanded from many corners.

In the spirit of not making the same mistake twice, I will not make such a proposal again. I totally understand why nobody wants to intervene, and it would be politically much more difficult to do so now, after all the declarations that I referred to above.

One should, nonetheless, consider the consequences of a declarational non-intervention, on the one hand, and of keeping that possibility open, on the other.

The war in Ukraine has very many similarities with the "Winter War" of 1939-1940. The Red Army suffered horrible losses but this did not decide the outcome of the war. Stalin did not make peace in March 1940 because of having been beaten on the ground.

The disparity in resources was so gigantic that sooner or later we would have run out of men and material. Stalin could absorb his losses much better than Finland could. We were on the brink of collapse in March 1940.

Stalin made peace because of the growing and imminent threat that the Western powers, UK and France, would intervene and send troops to Finland. (They had their own reasons to plan that, but this is irrelevant.) That would have meant a war Stalin could not afford.

We will never know if UK and France would indeed have joined the fight. But Stalin certainly took that possibility seriously and this is what matters. If they had repeatedly declared that they will under no circumstances intervene, our world would probably look different.

Mr Putin, like Stalin, does not have to care about his image abroad or his popularity at home. Anyway, the majority of the Russian population is zombified and wants war, regardless of its consequences for others or even themselves.

Mr Putin may run out of modern weaponry but he has endless stores of vintage equipment and ammunition that is sufficient for continuing a war of attrition forever. He has no incentive to stop the war, as the rest of the world has made it clear that they will not intervene.

Mr Putin is in his essence a bully who despises the weak and the small but has a lot of respect for strength. He is not a kind of person who would start or even risk a war with his peers.

Conclusion: We must stop asking the invader what kind of and how much aid we should provide to his victim. We must give to Ukraine everything we can to help them stop the invasion. And then we must do some serious thinking on how to incentivize Mr Putin to make peace.

We should also ask ourselves: Even if we do not really care about the future of Ukraine per se, can we afford to lose this battle after everything we have invested so far to win it?

Putin playing card

 

Putin, the world, and that table

By Adam Zyglis 

A banner in Latvia

 

Putler

 

Russia facing colossal losses in Ukraine

 From The Guardian

War criminals: the men around Putin

 

Some of these have since vanished from public view given the failure of the Ukraine invasion

Putin death lord

 By artist Mark Bryan

How does Putin sleep?

A cartoon by SipSip, a Bahamian cartoonist.

 

 

Conservative friends of Russia

 

The return of history