10th Apr 2023

Ukrainian commander reveals true scale of losses – and pays the price

We normally only get the rosy picture of the "heroic" Ukranians who it seems have fought a major war with zero losses while the Russian "lose" every day according to the media, the Neo-cons and the Biden regime.

During the Vietnam war/conflict between 3 and 4 million Vietnamese were killed. Do you think that all of them were soldiers?

In WW2 the United States military dropped atomic bombs on civilian cities Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

The United States military was just as merciless when it rained missiles down on Mosul in Iraq, a city with a population greater than that of Chicago.

By James Kilner, TheTelegraph

Ukraine has demoted a top battlefield commander after he admitted his unit had been decimated in fighting around the city of Bakhmut.

The battalion commander, known by his call sign Kupol, gave an unusually frank assessment of Ukrainian losses in an interview from the front lines earlier this week.

He revealed that all of the original 500 soldiers in his unit had either been killed or injured, a rare acknowledgement from inside the Ukrainian ranks, where losses are kept strictly confidential.

The Ukrainian high command is at pains to present a positive spin on the increasingly bloody defence of the east of the country. US officials have estimated that the Ukrainian army may have taken 120,000 casualties compared with 200,000 by the Russian army.

Kupol told the Washington Post this week that the Ukrainian army training was often poor and that some of the rookie replacements didn’t know how to throw a hand grenade or fire a rifle.

Others had abandoned their positions shortly after arriving at the front line, he said.

“I get 100 new soldiers,” he said. “They don’t give me any time to prepare them. They say, ‘Take them into the battle.’ They just drop everything and run. That’s it. Do you understand why? Because the soldier doesn’t shoot. I ask him why, and he says, ‘I’m afraid of the sound of the shot.’ And for some reason, he has never thrown a grenade. … We need Nato instructors in all our training centres, and our instructors need to be sent over there into the trenches. Because they failed in their task.”

Kupol said what was left of his unit was also facing ammunition shortages.

“You’re on the front line,” he said. “They’re coming toward you, and there’s nothing to shoot with.”

Thousands of Ukrainian soldiers are being trained by the British Army and other Nato countries but thousands more receive more rudimentary training in Ukraine.

Kupol said that he had been motivated to speak out to try to improve training levels but furious Ukrainian generals instead demoted him. The Washington Post said he had consented to have his picture taken but admitted he could face “personal blowback” for his honest assessment.

Valentin Shevchenko, a spokesman for the Ukrainian military, accused Kupol of “disseminating false information”. “The losses announced in the unit of which he had command are significantly overestimated,” she told Ukrainian media.

Shortly after his demotion, Kupol quit the Ukrainian army.

Within hours of his reassignment to a training camp, dozens of Ukrainian soldiers, politicians and journalists had voiced their support for the battalion commander.

“One of the armed forces finest commanders has just been removed,” Yuriy Butusov, a well-known Ukrainian war correspondent, wrote on Facebook.

“Instead of analysing mistakes that will defeat the Russian army, honest comments are suppressed and those who make them are punished.”

The leak on casualty numbers will be deeply embarrassing for the Ukrainian military which has diligently built up a narrative of its outnumbered but highly motivated and well-trained army taking on hordes of Russian soldiers and convicts.

It also undermines confidence in its much-talked-up counteroffensive planned for spring.

The attritional nature of the war in Ukraine has killed and injured hundreds of thousands of soldiers. Both sides have admitted that they are running out of artillery shells and ammunition.

Ukraine and Russia guard their casualty numbers closely, believing that they could undermine morale, although military commanders still hint at the high death tolls at their evening briefings when they boast of killing hundreds of enemy soldiers.

On Sunday, Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, said that Ukrainian forces had killed more than 1,100 Russian soldiers in the past week. Russia’s ministry of defence said that day that it had killed 220 Ukrainian soldiers in the past 24 hours.

It is not possible to independently verify these numbers. Thousands of Ukrainian civilians have also been killed.

On the battlefield, the British ministry of defence has said that Russian fighters led by Wagner mercenaries have broken over the river in the centre of Bakhmut, in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region, but that their advance had stalled because they were exhausted.

Oleksiy Danilov, secretary of Ukraine’s Security Council, said that Mr Zelensky was determined to defend the city despite growing pressure to withdraw.

“This is our land, and we have no right not to defend it,” he told Radio Free Europe.

Joe Biden has appointed warmongers, whose attitude to nuclear war is terrifyingly cavalier, to run the Pentagon, the National Security Council and the State Department.

NATO is essentially going to war with Russia through a proxy and arming that proxy. War means war.

There already exists a de facto state of war with Russia, with Ukraine as a proxy. Media reports have also revealed the existence of a “tiger team” within the White House planning for a direct military conflict between the United States and Russia. Speaking in Warsaw last month, Biden declared that the war would be the start of a “new world order,” which the United States would “lead.”

The Democratic Party has played the central role in preparing a NATO war against Russia for more than a decade. Joe Biden, as a leading Senate voice on foreign policy, as vice president tasked by Obama with running Ukraine policy, and now as president, is deeply implicated in this long-running operation. Now that this policy has produced the war that has long been its goal, America is pressing ahead toward its ultimate aim—the dismemberment of Russia, and the creation of a series of vassal states, dominated by the United States and the European powers—even at the risk of provoking a nuclear war.

Pelosi recently visited Taiwan trying to provoke an attack by China, America is also trying to provoke North Korea to attack South Korea by running continuous live military drills on their borders. America is also trying to provoke Iran to attack Israel by targeted assassinations. READ MORE: Malaysia’s Mahathir says US seeking to provoke war in Taiwan (AP News)

Do yourself a favor. Think for yourself. Be your own person. Question everything. Stand for principle. Champion individual liberty and self-ownership where you can. Develop a strong moral code. Be kind to others. Do no harm, unless that harm is warranted. Pretty obvious stuff...but people who hold these things in their hearts seem to be disappearing from the earth at an accelerated rate. Stay safe, my friends. Thanks for being here.

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