Putin's Russia is closing in on a devastating victory. Europe's foundations are trembling

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

We need to talk about Ukraine. While the world’s attention has been focused on the war between Israel and Hamas, grim tremors have been shaking that rich, black soil. Ukraine’s counteroffensive has failed – or, in Volodymyr Zelensky’s words, “did not achieve the desired results”.

As exhausted Ukrainians fall back from Russia’s ramparts and minefields, the initiative is swinging to the invaders. Russia is advancing through the skeletal remains of what used to be Marinka, a city in Donetsk, perhaps of greater psychological than strategic importance. Missiles are again hitting Kyiv. Ukraine’s first lady, Olena Zelenska, has taken to the BBC to warn that her country is in “mortal danger”.

Now, it is the Ukrainians’ turn to dig in, to try to hold what they have. As in 1914, a fortified line runs the length of the front, from the Dnieper delta to the Russian border. And, as then, military technology favours the defender, so that tiny gains are bought at terrible cost.

-snip-

This time, the demographic advantage is with Russia, whose population is three-and-a-quarter times the size of Ukraine’s. Russia has switched a third of its pre-war civilian production to weapons and ammunition, and may now have the edge when it comes to drones – that modern equivalent of the barbed wire and machine guns that gave the defending side such a lethal advantage in the Flanders mud.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/putin-russia-closing-devastating-victory-170326959.html

[Deuxcents]

1. This is depressing as hell. There is no excuse for this headline

Ukraine should have unlimited support fighting for their country. And, Ukraine will not be the last to be invaded by Russia. Where is the foresight with the world’s democratic leaders?

[PatrickforB]

11. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, Mike Johnson, Jim Jordan and the others in the

clown car don't have anything like what you could call foresight.

All they seem to have is random electrical impulses dancing around their brain stems.

[CousinIT]

2. Republicans diddle & whine while Putin destroys Democracy abroad

...and Republicans work to destroy it in America.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

3. The Telegraph is not centered: right wing biased with mixed facts and falsehoods

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/daily-telegraph/

RIGHT BIAS

These media sources are moderately to strongly biased toward conservative causes through story selection and/or political affiliation. They may utilize strong loaded words (wording that attempts to influence an audience by using appeal to emotion or stereotypes), publish misleading reports, and omit information that may damage conservative causes. Some sources in this category may be untrustworthy. See all Right Bias sources.

Overall, we rate The Telegraph Right Biased based on story selection that strongly favors the right and Mixed for factual reporting due to poor sourcing of information and some failed fact checks.

[Maraya1969]

5. Well that is a relief but I hope whoever was posting the videos from Ukraine starts again

[Maraya1969]

4. Why did the US not send money/arms that the US said they should....or something

like that.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

7. CONservative isolationist Rs who kinda like "strong man" Putin. They naively think that

They naively think that they can let the world go to hell in a hand basket and it won't touch them.

They are blocking aid to fight the murderous invaders.

[progree]

6. A Ukrainian soldier says he stopped shelling small Russian units because he is running out of US-made artillery ammo

Business Insider, 12/9/23 (no paywall)

The 31-year-old mortar gunner said that he and his comrades from the 47th Mechanized Brigade "had ten times more ammunition over the summer." per the newspaper.

"American rounds come in batches of almost identical weights, which makes it easier to correct fire, with very few duds. Now we have shells from all over the world with different qualities, and we only get 15 for three days. Last week, we got a batch full of duds," said the soldier. The lack of shells, Fizruk said, has hampered his unit's control over the northern flank of Avdviivka in eastern Ukraine and their ability to shoot at Russian troops.

And Western supplies are now at the "bottom of the barrel," Admiral Rob Bauer of the Netherlands, who chairs NATO's Military Committee, said at a Warsaw Security Forum meeting in October.

The issue has been compounded by Republicans in Congress, who are threatening to withhold crucial aid to Ukraine, including ammunition ...

Newly committed aid to Ukraine reached a "new low" between August and October, with a 90% drop compared to the same period in 2022, according to a report compiled by the Kiel Institute for the World Economy.

More: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/a-ukrainian-soldier-says-he-stopped-shelling-small-russian-units-because-he-is-running-out-of-us-made-artillery-ammo/ar-AA1leYHc

This reminds me of the Flnland - USSR Winter War of 1939-1940. Basically the Finns gave up when they ran out of ammo, at least according to some PBS documentary I saw many years ago.

[Emrys]

8. I'll just cut to the chase and go full ad hominem. The author, Daniel Hannan, is an arse of the first water.

He's a failed UK Tory politician - failed in the way that UK Tory politicians do nowadays in having been elevated to a seat for life in the House of Lords by Boris Johnson.

His career, such as it has been since he began it as a newspaper opinion columnist (on the model of Boris Johnson and Michael Gove), has been marked by very few achievements of any note other than winning a seat in the European Parliament three times having each time been placed at the top of the Tory list for his region of South East England, largely because he was a prominent Eurosceptic. His main claim to fame - that made him a darling of Fox News for a time - was a crack in the European Parliament in 2009 about UK premier Gordon Brown being "the devalued Prime Minister of a devalued government" that went viral online, which wasn't even original, having been stolen from UK Opposition leader John Smith, who'd made the same jab at UK premier John Major in 1992.

He was an arch Leaver during the disastrous Brexit referendum, promising many things that didn't come to pass, including his insistence that there was no way the UK would leave the European Single Market (we did) and that Europeans living in the UK would not have their status as UK residents threatened (it was).

He might count the UK leaving the EU as a career highlight. Nothing he forecast as an outcome of it actually happening has come to pass, so forgive me if I have little respect for his powers of prediction about Ukraine.

I'm actually surprised that Hannan can point to Ukraine on a map as he showed so little interest in the world outside the UK that in 2018, at that time still a Member of the European Parliament, he ranked 738 out of 751 in terms of participation in roll call votes, his time being mostly spent as an ultimately unsuccessful troublemaker who at one point compared the European Parliament to 1930s Germany when he didn't get his way.

He did dabble in US politics superficially, endorsing Obama in his first presidential run as he thought McCain too much of a hawk (a choice he very quickly publicly disowned when his rightwing readership reacted adversely), and Mitt Romney in the next election because he thought Obama's policies were taking the US in a direction too similar to the EU's.

He now, as he reveals in passing in this column, spends his time hobnobbing with "global Centre-Right parties", so it's little wonder his view of the Ukraine conflict is somewhat jaundiced.

A subtext he doesn't overtly explore is that he'd hate Ukraine to succeed and ultimately join the EU because he's done his best to undermine that organization throughout his political career.

[yonder]

12. Thank you for this post.

[Fiendish Thingy]

14. Precisely what I suspected- Tankie nonsense

Ukraine still needs our help, but is nowhere close to losing this war.

[Emrys]

15. To be fair, the ending of the piece is not as negative as the four paras quoted in the OP.

The problem is, it's so contradictory of his clickbait doomy lead-in and inconclusive that he might as well not have bothered writing anything about it. Nothing he says is new or insightful.

Hannan's an op-ed writer. So were Boris Johnson and Michael Gove. None of them ever take reponsibility when their cast-iron proclamations don't pan out, they just move on ready to write another one as if nothing happened and trust that their readership (or enough of the electorate) have no long-term memory.

[Turbineguy]

9. Putin has the GOP working for him.

Trump was a good investment.

[dchill]

10. This is all on GOPutin.

ALL OF IT

[Simeon Salus]

13. The author David Hannen is the conservative party whip in the UK's House of Lords, a man who campaigned for Brexit

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Hannan

He's been dedicatedly wrong on basic facts forever, especially . Think of him as the elected David Brooks of the UK.

And The Telegraph is an historically right-wing rag now being sold to the United Arab Emirates.

Nothing in this opinion piece has any basis in objective reality.