(Image by NEIVANMADE)

.⁦@yarotrof⁩ writes that on the eve of war the US have Ukraine a paltry 90 Javelins, compared to 2,000 NLAWs supplied by the UK. https://t.co/mrG05xvTHr

— Shashank Joshi (@shashj) January 9, 2024

The Washington Post has an excerpt from Yarislov Trofimov’s forthcoming book on Russia’s genocidal re-invasion of Ukraine: (emphasis mine)

Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, was flying home on a Turkish Airlines plane from New York when Russia invaded. He had just been welcomed into the White House by President Biden. It felt like he had been diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer, he thought. The warm handshakes, the empathetic smiles were meant to be final farewells — for him, and for his country.

In Washington, and in most European capitals, no one expected Ukraine to survive in February 2022. The CIA director, William J. Burns, had secretly flown to Kyiv at Biden’s request, warning Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that Russia was planning to assassinate him.

“They spoke about the physical liquidation of our leadership, about the creation of filtration and concentration camps,” said Zelensky’s national security adviser, Oleksiy Danilov. “But what could we do? We kept asking: give us weapons. But they didn’t really give weapons to us.”

As the United States shut down its embassy in Kyiv ahead of the invasion, it did ship some weapons to great fanfare, such as Javelin antitank missiles. But the quantity was puny: only about 90 Javelins, according to Danilov. Then-British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, while also briefed about the hopelessness of the Ukrainian cause, had overruled internal objections and authorized a heftier load of about 2,000 NLAW missiles. Still, those were weapons best suited for a guerrilla campaign, not a conventional war.

At the time, Ukraine’s military leadership, under Gen. Valery Zaluzhny, had successfully kept Kyiv’s war planning secret — and not just from the Russians. Neither Washington nor many senior officials in the Zelensky administration knew Zaluzhny’s blueprint. “We were pessimistic about Ukraine holding out in part because the Ukrainians didn’t share any of their preparations or planning with us,” a senior Pentagon official told me later. “And the preparations and plans that they did share with us were military deception.”

Poland, perhaps because of its history, was the only nation that didn’t despair in these early hours. Rerouting his connecting flight, Kuleba attended Poland’s national security council meeting on Feb. 24, the day of the invasion. The Polish government, like other NATO members, had been told by the alliance’s intelligence that a swift collapse of the Ukrainian state was near certain. Still, Warsaw refused to give up. Immediately, Poland sent several truckloads of ammunition and heavy weapons. “The Poles believed in us more intuitively than fact-based, because all the facts spoke against us at the time,” Kuleba recalled.

The mood was very different in other European capitals. “Nobody was giving the Ukrainians any chances,” Johnson said. “If this is going to happen, the best thing is that maybe it should happen quickly,” a senior aide to German chancellor Olaf Scholz told him at the time.

There is much more at the link if you can stomach it.

We should be ashamed. We did nothing of significance to deter Putin, nor to assure our allies and partners. Then we provided a parting gift of 90 javelins, turned tail, and ran. That shame has now been compounded by the wreckers that are the House majority GOP caucus:

What an absolute moral cesspit the Republican Party has got itself into with Ukraine. Treating the survival of a country as a political weapon and bargaining chip. For shame. https://t.co/2ZHoPVjD12

— Shashank Joshi (@shashj) January 9, 2024

The Ukrainians are not going to stop no matter how often we continually let them down.

Here is President Zelenskyy’s address from earlier today. Video below, English transcript after the jump.

Every aspect of logistics in the army needs to be expedited – address by the President of Ukraine

9 January 2024 – 19:32

I wish you health, fellow Ukrainians!

I will begin with the Staff.

Today was a special meeting – with the direct, in-person participation of all major commanders and heads of operations.

Together with the Commander-in-Chief, the General Staff, the Ministry of Defense, the Ministry of Strategic Industries, and the Ministry of Digital Transformation, we analyzed the supply of shells and drones in detail. Distribution between brigades and units. Daily needs. Actual costs. The bottom line is that every aspect of logistics needs to be expedited. We also discussed the launch of new production lines for weapons and ammunition in Ukraine – at our enterprises and together with partners.

Of course, we considered the supplies we expect to receive this year. Despite all the challenges in the world, our careful, clear approach to every requirement and every opportunity can provide the Defense Forces with everything necessary. We see how we can realize Ukraine’s priorities this year: what is needed, who is needed, and what signals can work.

We analyzed the work of our Air Force, all our defenders of the sky, separately and in detail. The results of shooting down Russian missiles and drones. The aspects we succeeded in. And the results we must achieve. We continue to work with all our partners to bolster our air defense. And at the same time, to increase pressure on Russia. The world’s sanctions are definitely working. And they are working well. There is clear evidence of a slowdown in the Russian defense industry. But for the sanctions to be one hundred percent effective, the schemes for circumventing the sanctions must also be one hundred percent blocked. New global steps are also needed against those who continue to help Russia. Everyone in the world knows this small list of terrorist accomplices. We will discuss this further with our partners.

Today I have already held three phone calls with the leaders: the President of Romania, the President of Poland, and the Prime Minister of Belgium.

I thanked Romania for the level of cooperation we have already achieved. We are having remarkable results in the Danube region, in the Black Sea cooperation, and in the overall interaction between us. We appreciate Romania’s support on our way to the European Union. We definitely have the potential to increase cross-border cooperation, particularly in the Ukraine-Romania-Moldova triangle. Today, we also discussed with President Iohannis some promising issues in the defense sector – the ways we can shore up our positions together. In particular, we discussed the training of our F-16 pilots.

There was a good conversation with the President of Poland. I am grateful to Poland for its unwavering assistance to Ukraine in matters of our accession to the European Union. No matter what happens, strategically we are still working together in Europe. Today, we discussed, in particular, our cooperation in matters of NATO – Ukraine must become a member of the Alliance. I briefed President Duda on the situation at the front, on the continued Russian attacks, our defense, and our needs. In particular, our needs for support. I appreciate President Duda’s words about the unity we so critically need.

I also had an important conversation with the head of the Belgian government. Belgium has now begun its presidency of the Council of the European Union, and I am grateful that support for Ukraine and international law is one of the priorities of the Belgian presidency. Together with Belgium, we have achieved some truly groundbreaking things, including the use of Russian assets to support Ukraine. And this is one of those examples where Belgian leadership is of global importance. I am grateful for the support of sanctions against Russia, as well as for the clear support of our European integration. This year, we can make significant progress both in the accession negotiations with Ukraine and in the issue of a more decisive attitude of the world towards Russian assets. The aggressor must pay for what he has done. This is only fair.

Of course, I also spoke with all the leaders about our work on the Peace Formula, as the meeting of advisors in Davos is coming up. We are working to make it both representative and meaningful. We are succeeding, and I thank everyone who contributes to the cause!

Glory to all who work for freedom, to all who fight for freedom! To those who do everything to make freedom stronger and to make terror – namely terror – lose. Every week there should be fewer opportunities for Russia. Every week there should be more opportunities for Ukraine.

Glory to Ukraine!

The cost:

You know, there's a mall in Bucha along the Warsaw Highway.

Not far away from my place of living in town.

The mall, along with endless shops, also hosts a clinic, part of a large private healthcare services brand that often accepts war veterans for rehabilitation care.… pic.twitter.com/JdLYzPJWi8

— Illia Ponomarenko 🇺🇦 (@IAPonomarenko) January 10, 2024

You know, there’s a mall in Bucha along the Warsaw Highway.

Not far away from my place of living in town.

The mall, along with endless shops, also hosts a clinic, part of a large private healthcare services brand that often accepts war veterans for rehabilitation care.

Amputees. Mostly young dudes.

I often see them having a smoke or just sitting in wheelchairs next to the clinic’s entrance, just taking the air and silently looking at people passing by and minding their own business at the mall.

I often see them because I sometimes feed stray dogs that hang around near window shops, waiting for some bleeding heart to buy them a treat.

And every time, there’s a new face of a legless soldier looking at the city in front of him.

So the other day, I was walking toward my car parked near the mall.

And I saw yet another disabled veteran in a wheelchair at the clinic’s door. A guy in his early twenties, AirPods in his ears, one leg amputated above his knee.

The guy was petting one of my ‘sponsee dogs.’ He gave the dog a treat, ruffled its head, and wheeled toward the clinic entrance to get back inside.

The automatic sliding door wouldn’t open.

He tried again and again, but nope. The sensor wasn’t seeing the wheelchair vet.

It was pretty late in the evening, and there were few people around to pay attention.

‘Hey, let me do this for you,’ I came along.

‘I’m afraid they forgot about me and locked the door for the night…” the veteran got a bit shy. ‘No worries, I’ll try and call somebody who’s inside.’

I waved my hand up closer to the sensors, and the sliding door opened up.

Yeah!

The guy gladly wheeled into the shadow of the clinic’s entrance.

‘Could you please…’ he also shyly looked at a hinged door into the lobby.

Sure.

‘Oh God, thank you so much for this… Phew!’

No, man, thank YOU for everything.

I mean… I hope on that night, the guy went to bed in his hospital ward without thinking that no one cared about him, never appreciated his battlefield sacrifice, or even failed to take notice of him in the streets.

Who knows how many more of us will have to go to the trenches when it’s our turn. Who knows how many more of us will eventually end up alone in a wheelchair trying to get back in.

For those who will see the end of this fucking war in one piece, it’s going to be a lifetime duty to be helping disabled vets.

I know I’m being idealistic, but I believe true veteran care begins with a very simple sign of respect by a random dude from a parking lot.

The reason:

Ivan: "I am from the village of Oleshnyk in Vynogradiv district, Zakarpattia region. I joined the army on March 1, 2022, despite being 57 years old. I couldn't stay home. My wife assumed I was joking when I mentioned I was heading to the military recruitment office. My call sign… pic.twitter.com/lhWBfgttj6

— Defense of Ukraine (@DefenceU) January 9, 2024

Ivan: “I am from the village of Oleshnyk in Vynogradiv district, Zakarpattia region. I joined the army on March 1, 2022, despite being 57 years old. I couldn’t stay home. My wife assumed I was joking when I mentioned I was heading to the military recruitment office. My call sign is “Vujko” (Uncle), but the lads just call me “Dido” (Grandpa).

📷: Serhii Hudak

The New York Times has a deep dive into the conditions at the Zaporizhzhia front: (emphasis mine)

ZAPORIZHZHIA REGION, Ukraine — Under the cover of darkness, leaning forward under the weight of packs and rifles, a squad of soldiers walked along a muddy lane and slipped into a village house.

They were Ukrainian infantrymen of the 117th Separate Mechanized Brigade, assembling for a last briefing and roll call several miles from Russia positions before heading to the trenches on the front line. Stolid men in helmets and rubber boots, they listened in silence as an intelligence officer briefed them on a new route in to their positions.

“Morale is all right,” said the deputy battalion commander, who uses the call sign Shira, standing nearby to see the men off. “But physically we are exhausted.”

Ukrainian troops along most of the 600-mile front line are officially in defensive mode. Only in the southern region of Kherson are they still on the offensive in a tough assault across the Dnipro River.

But the fighting has not eased and Russian forces are now on the offensive.

The capture of the town of Robotyne in the southeastern Zaporizhzhia region was as far as Ukrainian troops managed to advance in their summer counteroffensive. No breakthrough occurred. Now, in the trenches around Robotyne, Russian units are attacking daily. Ukrainian troops try to counterattack immediately if they lose ground, commanders said.

Indeed, Ukrainian soldiers and commanders interviewed in recent weeks along a broad stretch of the central and eastern front said that Russian attacks were so intense that operating near the frontline has never been so dangerous.

Russia has in recent days turned its focus to bombing Ukraine’s big cities to wear down civilians; for weeks its ground forces have been mounting attacks to claw back territory lost last summer and to seize long-prized Ukrainian redoubts along the eastern front.

Well accustomed to Russian artillery fire, soldiers said that since March they had suffered the additional devastating power of glide bombs, half-ton explosives unleashed from planes that smash through underground bunkers.

“They would send them two by two by two, eight in an hour,” said a 27-year-old soldier known as Kit, of the 14th Chervona Kalyna National Guard Brigade. Like others interviewed, Kit identified himself by his call sign, according to military protocol. “It sounds like a jet coming down on you,” he said, “like hell’s gate.”

The destruction wrought by glide bombs is visible in towns and villages near the front line. The town of Orikhiv, about 12 miles north of Robotyne, once served as a command center for the counteroffensive. Now it is an empty shell, the main street deserted, the school and other buildings split asunder by massive bomb craters.

A lone workman, Valera, was riding a bicycle through the town. He said he had stayed despite the heavy bombardment because he had paid work, fixing generators. He lived off humanitarian aid and was feeding 20 stray cats at his home, he said.

Soldiers moved cautiously in the area, mostly living in basements and staying undercover, out of sight.

That is because the latest menace is Russia’s use of F.P.V. kamikaze drones, which has forced Ukrainian soldiers largely to abandon vehicles in frontline areas and operate on foot.

A cheap commercial drone, the F.P.V. — for first person view — has become the latest weapon of the moment in the Ukrainian war. It can fly as fast as a car, carries a lethal load of explosives and is guided to its target by a soldier sitting in a bunker several miles away.

Both the Russian and Ukrainian armies are using them to hunt and attack targets because they cut out the delay of relaying back coordinates and requesting artillery strikes. Ukrainian soldiers said they often use the drones instead of artillery because shells were increasingly in short supply and the drones are a cheap, quick weapon for attacks on nearby Russian vehicles, bunkers and infantry.

The men of the 117th Brigade, who were deployingto the front line in the Zaporizhzhia region on a recent night, faced a four-mile hike through rain and mud, the intelligence commander said. If they were wounded and captured, Russian troops would execute them, he warned them.

The long, arduous slog to carry in ammunition and food to supply troops and to carry out the wounded was one reason Ukraine could not sustain its counteroffensive, a company commander, Adolf, 23, said.

Ambulances and supply vehicles came under fire from kamikaze drones so often that his unit stopped using them, resorting instead to a four-wheeled buggy that volunteer engineers rigged up to carry a stretcher. The buggy was hidden under some trees beside his command post several miles from the front line.

Ukrainian units are dealing out the same treatment with F.P.V. drones on Russian lines and say they were the first to start using drones to attack targets. But the Russians have copied the tactic and flooded frontline areas with drones in recent weeks, to lethal effect, Ukrainian soldiers and commanders said.

“My impression is Russia is interested in drones at the state level,” the soldier known as Kit said, but in contrast, Ukraine still largely relied on volunteers and civilian donors for its drone program. “My sense,” he said, “is the government should be doing more.”

Much more at the link!

Germany:

The pressure on Olaf Scholz to release the TAURUS cruise missile is mounting.

After former German President Joachim Gauck, the opposition leader of the CDU, Friedrich Merz, demands from Scholz to give up his hesitancy on this question.

"I welcome Scholz' call on our allies to… pic.twitter.com/8KAFWfYCxw

— (((Tendar))) (@Tendar) January 9, 2024

The pressure on Olaf Scholz to release the TAURUS cruise missile is mounting.

After former German President Joachim Gauck, the opposition leader of the CDU, Friedrich Merz, demands from Scholz to give up his hesitancy on this question.

“I welcome Scholz’ call on our allies to increase their effort in supporting Ukraine. It is a good message, but it is more credible when we do our part, by delivering the TAURUS missiles.”

Within the government coalition voices among the Greens and the FDP are getting even more louder.

Source (German): https://rp-online.de/politik/deutschland/friedrich-merz-zoegern-bei-der-taurus-lieferung-muss-aufhoeren_aid-104783739

#Germany #Ukraine

Good, Scholz should be ashamed too!

Avdiivka, Donetsk Oblast:

Авдіївка, Донеччина
Ворог продовжує рівняти місто з землею pic.twitter.com/kAGKyYipTL

— Мисливець за зорями (@small10space) January 9, 2024

Tatarigami has a new assessment regarding the railroad construction the Russians have been doing in parts of Ukraine that they’re occupying. First tweet from the thread, the rest from the Thread Reader App:

Geospatial Analysis: Railroad Construction on Occupied Territories. 🧵Updated Thread:

1/ Frontelligence Insight examined satellite imagery of railroad constructions in occupied territories, specifically south of Donetsk and in Mariupol. Here is what we know: pic.twitter.com/7oZkOQnr22

— Tatarigami_UA (@Tatarigami_UA) January 9, 2024

2/Burne – Malovodne branch

To enhance logistics between Russia, Donetsk, and Mariupol, Russians are actively constructing a new railroad branch to the south of Donetsk. This branch aims to bypass a risky section of the frontline near Mariinka and Vuhledar.

3/ The new branch starts in the village of Burne and links up with the existing railroad at Malovodne. Based on satellite imagery, significant progress is evident in the construction of this railroad branch, making our team believe that it might be completed in 2024.

4/ Comparative analysis highlights a slowdown due to the construction of a bridge over the Kal’mius River. While composing this analysis, reports from the adviser to the Mariupol mayor suggested that Ukrainian forces had targeted the bridge while still under construction 

5/ The vulnerability of this single point of failure to Ukrainian weaponry increases the likelihood of future strikes even after completion, impacting the functionality of the entire railroad branch.

6/ Taganrog – Crimea

Russians are also working on the railroad connecting Taganrog with Mariupol and Crimea to the rest of Russia. This serves as an alternative to the Crimean Bridge, aiming to shorten travel time. Frontelligence Insight has identified early construction stages

7/ In contrast to the previously mentioned railroad between Burne and Malovodne, this railroad branch is much longer and is still in the early stage of construction. Consequently, we assume that Russia won’t be able to complete this project by the end of 2024. 

8/ Sattelite imagery shows that Russians also successfully restored the gas pump station and worked on the restoration of a gas pipeline between Mariupol and the broader continental region of Russia.

9/ This pipeline is likely a component of the Mariupol-Taganrog natural gas system. The significant investment in infrastructure suggests that the Russians are intending to transform the region into a fortified frontline stronghold with a robust military presence.

10/ To effectively target railroad bridges, Ukraine would require more powerful missiles designed for bridge destruction, like the German Taurus missiles. Overall, Russia is anticipated to improve and expand its military infrastructure on occupied territories in 2024

11/ With Ukraine facing challenges such as ammo shortages, undermanned units, and limited assistance from the US in 2024, a defensive approach will likely be adopted. Concurrently, Russian forces are expected to intensify their efforts in expanding their military infrastructure.

12/ The full analysis is accessible on the website listed in my bio. Kindly consider supporting us through BuyMeaCoffee, as our expenses rely solely on your public support, and maintaining quality without financing is still challenging for us. Don’t forget to share and like! 

13/ This is an updated thread to address inaccuracies and incorporate additional imagery. In the previous version, an image near Mariupol was mislabeled as a railroad instead of a pipeline, which is now corrected. We apologize for any confusion. 

Oryol, Russia:

/2. Results of the UAV strike on Russian oil depot in Oryol. pic.twitter.com/jNh1piGJGd

— Special Kherson Cat 🐈🇺🇦 (@bayraktar_1love) January 9, 2024

That’s enough for tonight.

Your daily Patron!

-20 in Ukraine today 😮🥶 pic.twitter.com/tXW9HHXpoN

— Patron (@PatronDsns) January 9, 2024

And some adjacent material:

47 seconds that may restore your faith in humanity.
We in Ukraine are now having pretty unusually cold weather ❄️
And this dude from Irpin named Viktor saved a dog that couldn't make it out of an iced pond.
The world still has good people. pic.twitter.com/apZr3EIINX

— Illia Ponomarenko 🇺🇦 (@IAPonomarenko) January 9, 2024

Best buddies stand for protecting our freedom. pic.twitter.com/BeUjv3CSiz

— Defense of Ukraine (@DefenceU) January 9, 2024

Open thread!