Russo-Ukrainian War

Extent of Russian Advance, as of March 8th, 2022 (source: Wikipedia)*

I came across this analysis of the war in Ukraine from Alexander's Cartographer's Newsletter a couple of days ago, but I just now read the whole thing. It is now over a week old, but it's the only thing I've seen that seems to paint an accurate picture of the situation. I avoid most western major media websites because of all the ads. I get my news second hand from blogs and from RT (formerly known as Russia Today, a.k.a. Putin's mouthpiece). RT has been remarkably quiet about the war, not which is not surprising. Don't want to let the enemy know what you are doing. 

Alexander details troop movements and battles, but the analysis is what interested me. Here's a couple of paragraphs:

    In my analysis, the Ukrainians are mass mobilizing their civilian population to use them as human shields, and then parade their bodies on Western media. These forces will be poorly armed and trained, and have little military usefulness. They will make it more costly for Russian forces to enter Ukrainian cities, but as I mentioned previously, the Russian solution to this problem is the simply level the city. In the end, all of these armed civilians will die, their cities destroyed, with nothing gained.  I believe this is in fact the goal of the Ukrainian leadership, who are being cheered on towards this end either consciously or not by Americans and other Westerners. I think Ukrainian leadership is hoping for Russia to flattened cities and inflict mass deaths among the civilian population for PR purposes. With their mass mobilization of urban populations, the Ukrainian leadership is putting the Russian forces in a similar position that Hamas puts Israel’s IDF in. What Hamas does, is hide their forces in dense urban centers from where they stage attacks on Israel. The Israelis are faced with a dilemma, either they tolerate Hamas’s attacks, or they shoot back which will inevitably inflict civilian casualties. The Palestinians in turn show dead civilians and destroyed building on Western news media with the intention of ruining Israel’s international reputation. Both Hamas and Ukraine are using their civilians as human shields. Civilians throwing Molotov cocktails at Russian tanks will achieve nothing, other than getting themselves killed. This should be obvious. As America is weaponizing its “cancel culture” for foreign policy objectives, Russia will be endless maligned in Western media if the Ukrainian strategy succeeds. Personally I find it quite sick that Westerners are cheering the Ukrainians on with this strategy. What they are doing, whether consciously or not, is to sacrifice endless Ukrainian lives all for a narrative to be built of Ukrainian martyrdom. Of course, none of these Westerner cheering on Ukrainian civilians to die needlessly will go to Ukraine and fight themselves. Instead they are content to fight Russia to the last Ukrainian.

    This strategy will potentially succeed because Westerners are extremely emotional people by and large. From an early age, we are trained to view the world through a hyper-moralized lens. As adults, things that are distant or personally unimportant become the subject of enormous moral significance. Sometimes these things are real, while other times they are entirely fake. For example, the British population was emotionally manipulated into joining the First World War thanks to fake information about German atrocities, the infamous “rape of Belgium”. In the social media age this highly emotional characteristic is intensified, manipulated and exploited. It is very common to encounter people who have strong opinions about topics they know little about. Instead their strong opinions are almost entirely based on the moral sentiments that have received from others, either personal contacts or through the media. Westerners are effectively religious fanatics without any fixed religion per say, and instead their moralism is directed towards whatever is trending in the news or whatever is relevant to them for professional or political purposes. Even at the academic level, often analysis of contemporary political and international events is nothing more than moral platitudes with supporting facts.

. . .

    Several America media companies have chosen to leave the Russian market like Disney, Facebook, McDonalds and others. This only makes America’s ideological subversion of Russian society more difficult to achieve. American media has been the main vector of American influence dating back to the Cold War. It is really quite odd they are doing this to themselves. What they are doing is a favor to the Russian state and society. Frankly, Russian society will be healthier with their absence. In short, the West has effectively torpedoed all of its “soft power” in Russia in a fit of apoplectic hysteria.

There were a couple of terms that were unfamiliar to me. Google's explanations:

'Asabiyyah or 'asabiyya (Arabic: عصبيّة, 'group feeling' or 'social cohesion') is a concept of social solidarity with an emphasis on unity, group consciousness, and a sense of shared purpose and social cohesion, originally used in the context of tribalism and clanism.

ISR aircraft - Force Multiplier Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) Aircraft. The Force Multiplier intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) aircraft is the modified Bombardier Dash-8 Q300 platform equipped with a full mission system to meet the requirements of ISR missions. [what I call Aircraft Military Special]

* I copied the map from Alexander's Cartographer's Newsletter. There is a very similar map on Wikipedia's page labeled March 12. A casual comparison revealed no major differences. There might be some differences, but I did not notice any.