Big serge substack

In the last 72 hours or so, the pro-Russian side of the internet has been sent into an tailspin of panic over a new Ukrainian counteroffensive which is currently being launched in the Kharkov region, big serge substack, with the intention of compromising the Russian army grouping at Izyum.

Check this out me korosho drugies: bigserge. This guy is fucking hilarious. Kyive was a trap. Kharkiv was a trap. Lyman was a trap. Kherson is a trap. He never gives up!

Big serge substack

As the calendar barrels into another year and we tick away the days of February, notable anniversaries are marked off in sequence. The nature of the war changed dramatically after a kinetic and mobile opening phase. With the collapse of the negotiation process whether thanks to Boris Johnson or not , it became clear that the only way out of the conflict would be through the strategic defeat of one party by the other. Thanks to a pipeline of western support in the form of material, financial aid, and ISR and targeting assistance which allowed Ukraine to transcend its rapidly evaporating indigenous war economy, it became clear that this would be a war of industrial attrition, rather than rapid maneuver and annihilation. Russia began to mobilize resources for this sort of attritional war in the Autumn of , and since then the war has attained its present quality - that of a firepower intensive but relatively static positional struggle. The nature of this attritional-positional war lends itself to analytic ambiguity, because it denies the most attractive and obvious signs of victory and defeat in large territorial changes. Instead, a whole host of anecdotal, small scale positional analysis, and foggy data has to suffice, and this can be easily misconstrued or misunderstood. This suggests that Russia is winning meaningless, pyrrhic victories which will lead to its exhaustion, so long as Ukraine receives everything it asks for from the west. At the same time, the Z-sphere points to these same battles as evidence that Ukraine can no longer hold even its most heavily defended fortress cities. This is the way of such an attritional conflict, which burdens armies with cumulative and constant stressors in a test of their recuperative powers. Wear and tear and the raging of the waters will erode and burden the dike until it bursts.

See the map below, which I made in December before the capture of Avdiivka.

It is probably safe to say that the current week June , is shaping up to be one of the most significant of the entire Russo-Ukrainian War. On Monday, all eyes were on the Ukrainian Armed Forces and their much anticipated summer counteroffensive, which began with a series of battallion level attacks across the breadth of the theater. Instead, the entire Ukrainian offensive was overshadowed by the sudden and entirely unexpected failure of the dam at Nova Kakhovka on the lower Dneiper. In any case, the legalities are not the main point here. The destruction of dams has the potential to impact civilians on a scale which is an order of magnitude higher than anything which has yet occured. Through May of this year, there were fewer than 9, recorded civilian deaths in Ukraine including both Ukrainian and Russian controlled territories.

I want to draw attention to a fine, thoughtful article by Big Serge. The Age of Zugzwang. Zugzwang, of course, is a term from chess. It simply describes the situation in which a player is forced to choose between two bad alternatives. In other words, the player is in a strategically unsustainable position that inexorably leads to defeat. Obviously, Big Serge is talking about the position the American Empire finds itself currently. The catch is, for the tripwire strategy to work, the threatened response has to be credible and deterring.

Big serge substack

Military history writer Big Serge has published an excellent essay that explains much of what has puzzled observers of the conflict in Ukraine—why does Russia appear to be hanging back, what happened to that much touted offensive, and some other matters as well. First, however, here are some basic points that will serve as guide posts. Big Serge is an amazing commentator.

Influencers gone wuld

Portaging a boat on the middle Dnieper in AD was dangerous. Russo-Ukrainian War: Dam! With the dam now breached, they have lost this control. This is all very interesting, of course, and perhaps might help demonstrate that the relationship between these countries is far more convoluted and nuanced that most westerners assume. Meanwhile, Ukrainian forces are increasingly undermanned , with understrength brigades asked to perform increasingly heavy lift. This means that a given Russian unit Furthermore, the only safe supply line to Izyum ran through Kupyansk, making this a vulnerable position indeed. Putin apparently either does not want to do something similar or lacks the legislative support to pass a law permitting the outright drafting of its mobilized reservists into its regular army formations. Men are killed and vehicles are destroyed in such affairs, but there is little evidence that this occurred at abnormal or alarming rates for the Russian Armed Forces. They have also been rebuilding Mariupol and Donetsk, which Ukraine tried this past week to invade again with tanks and troops that Russia destroyed. Lacking the ability to operationally compromise Russian forces here, Ukraine will find itself in a good old fashioned shootout against an enemy with vastly superior firepower - not only that, but it is in fact Ukraine that now faces operational complications, having blasted their way into a salient with no prospects for crossing the Oskil in force and exploiting. Expand full comment Reply Share.

The Phalanx CIWS SEE-wiz is an automated gun-based close-in weapon system to defend military watercraft automatically against incoming threats such as aircraft, missiles, and small boats. This is essentially the ships last layer of defense against any incoming attacks. A smart commenter asks the right question, which leads to this exchange:.

The sooner the better. In its natural state, the Dnieper is a deeply difficult and turbulent river, characterized by a series of essentially unnavigable rapids. Over the summer, supposedly at the same time that Zaluzhny had concluded that the counteroffensive was failing, he continued to push Ukrainian mechanized forces into the Russian defenses in small, company sized battlegroups. Developing a concentric offensive towards the Ukrainian agglomerations around Chasiv Yar, Toretsk, and Kontyantinivka. The prototypical example of this is of course the Nazi-Soviet War. That works out to more than , shells per month - more than three times what the NATO bloc is hoping to produce. Furthermore, the only safe supply line to Izyum ran through Kupyansk, making this a vulnerable position indeed. The Russian power of suffering is to willingly fight wars that devolve into bat fights, knowing they have a bigger bat. While disembarked and laboriously dragging the boat downstream, a trading party would be highly vulnerable to attack by the various warlike tribes which inhabited the region at the time. Russia had captured an exposed position which jutted out into Ukrainian territory, and there was talk of a Ukrainian counteroffensive to take advantage of this.