Global SITREP B5-22: Russia's War in Ukraine - Phase II

Russia Targets Civilians and Civil Infrastructure

UPDATE 25 March 2022: Ukrainian forces continue their offensive and advance against Russian forces in several areas on both the east and west banks of the Dnieper River in the Kyiv Oblast. Strong points of massed Russian armor, tanks and infantry fighting vehicles have been over run in the past 24 hours. Mopping up, security and the hunt for fleeing Russian troops is ongoing today. 

At daybreak yesterday, in the port of Berdyansk, a large Russian LST ship (the Alligator-class Saratov) was attacked and sunk by Ukrainian forces with an OTR-21 Trochka ballistic missile. Second and third order detonations ripped through the vessel as tons of ordnance detonated. Two other Russian Navy Ropucha-II class LSTs (the Kunikov and Novocherkassk) narrowly escaped destruction by fleeing the port. This attack was made possible through high-technology recently delivered to Ukraine from the West. This is the most significant loss yet for Russia in the war and will further complicate its already significant logistics problems in Ukraine.

Russian LST Orsk explodes as Two other LSTs escape

Also, the US and EU apparently have reached a deal for the US to supply the EU with American liquid natural gas (LNG) to further divest the EU from dependence on Russian LNG.

Also, it is with due emphasis that the statement made yesterday by Andriy Yermak, head of the Office of the President of Ukraine, be repeated yet again. "It is important for Ukraine that Israel become one of the guarantors of an international treaty on security guarantees, which would provide clear security guarantees for Ukraine after the end of the war with Russia." 

23 March 2022: Recent western MSM reporting has it that the Russian Federation would only use nuclear weapons if it were faced with an existential threat, in accordance with the Russian Federation's concept of what an existential threat would actually be. Well, that intended comforting news is only a half truth, a deliberate omission of the most salient fact. The fact is that Vladimir Putin's primary spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, and the deputy secretary of Russia's Security Council, Dmitry Medvedev, are on record saying that the United States and its NATO allies intent is to humiliate, divide and destroy the Russian Federation. Sounds like an existential threat, albeit a paranoid mindset, but it is what it is. 

By what measure could the NATO alliance assure the Russian Federation that it has no intention to humiliate, divide and ultimately destroy it? That answer gets back to the November 2021 to January 2022 pre-invasion demands Russia made, knowing full well that NATO would never agree to them. Those demands were for the withdrawal of all NATO forces out of eastern Europe and the ejection of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria (i.e. the former Warsaw Pact nations) from the North Atlantic Alliance. 

Here's a little known fact also conveniently omitted from MSM reporting. There were no NATO troops in these same countries prior to the Russian invasion, occupation and annexation of Crimea - exactly eight years prior (23-24 February 2014) to Russia's invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022. One month later Russian mercenary troops (Wagner Group), also known as the "little green men" began the Donbas War in Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts of southeastern Ukraine. Make no mistake, this is a war of Russian aggression which has very similar overtones to what Hitler's Nazi Germany did in central Europe prior to World War Two.

To be crystal clear, the regime holding power in the Kremlin has made it known that it is fighting an existential war against NATO, a war which makes the use of nuclear weapons permissible by its own paranoid concept of an existential threat to itself. Hoping that something does not happen is not a strategy, it is a grand impracticality; a virtual self-fulfilling prophecy. So the world waits to see what NATO's recognition and response to this overt nuclear threat will be.

Completely destroyed Russian T-80UM2 "Super Tank"

22 March 2022: The Russian Federation dictatorship of Vladimir Putin is now telling its citizens that the "special military operation" launched in Ukraine one month ago will continue for an undetermined length of time. Things are not going according to the original war plan - a misguided and abject failure - and as a result Russian generals are being sacked left and right. Better to be sacked than sent to the front lines where expert Ukrainian snipers have been picking off Russian generals at a rate of one or two per week. Putin himself is reportedly in at least a partial seclusion due to fears of a coup d'etat or assassination.

The Russian government is also calling up for service 16 and 17-year old youths who will begin their preparations for wartime military service. This action, in addition to the Russian military's focus on civilian targets instead of warfighting against peer Ukrainian military forces delineates the tactical shift from initial invasion to the attempt to begin siege and hold territory operations in eastern Ukraine in order to force a surrender. The image at the top of a destroyed Kyiv shopping mall is emblematic of the morphing Russian strategy. Ukraine will never surrender to Russia, and therefore Russia now has its very own "forever war."

It may be, as some are suggesting, Russia will of necessity resort to weapons of mass destruction in the coming days.