Russia/Ukraine War Update - May 16th, 2022

*** MILITARY SITUATION ***

Ukrainian TVD, Day 77-79. The past 72 hrs has seen the Ukrainian military press the advantages made by their limited Kharkiv counteroffensive to push Russian forces into the Belgorod Oblast. Russian offensive action along the Siverskyi Donets Line has achieved little success.

Russian forces have been thoroughly defeated north of Kharkiv. Russia has been conducting a fighting withdrawal since the start of the Ukrainian counteroffensive rather than trying to establishing a new defensive line. The redeployment of 1st GTA & VDV units to the Vovchansk & Kupyansk areas indicates an eastward defensive shift tying into the natural barrier of the Siverskyi Donets River to augment the defensive capability & capacity of Russian forces to guard their rail & road GLOCs.

Russian forces have suffered a series of significant setbacks with a few marginal successes over the past several days. Attrition & redeployment of 1st GTA / VDV units from the Izium Axis has forced Russia to assume the defense in this area. Further east in the Severodoentsk Salient two attempts to ford the Siverskyi Donets NW of Severodoentsk and envelop the Salient from the NW and west resulted in a decisive defeat of at least one guards brigade, possibly two.

Russian forces may be coming close to a culmination point in which they will have no choice but to halt offensive action for a more extensive refit to reconstitute combat losses. Before this occurs, they will likely shift to an all or nothing effort to seize Severodonetsk.

The Russian offensive in the Donbas may likely culminate in the next 2-3 weeks, with the forward line of contact relatively unchanged along the Izium & Lyman Axes.

The Ukrainian Ministry of Defense publishes an infographic every day where it “reveals” how many enemy tanks, trucks, heavy guns, troops, and aircraft they have “destroyed” each day. The infographic also comes with a running tally.

So according to Ukraine’s MoD it has so far “liquidated” 27,200 enemy personnel including 300 in the last 24 hours. Along with 200 aircraft, 1200 tanks, and 5000 other kinds of vehicles. There are actually people who take these releases seriously or pretend they do. The English-language Kyiv Post features the numbers prominently on its main site (Like covid “deaths” and “cases” used to be highlighted for us before.)

Of course, the idea that the Ukrainian MoD has an idea of enemy losses is silly. The only thing sillier is the idea that Ukrainian MoD has any reason to be truthful even if it could know them (which it can not).

The Ukrainian MoD is naturally engaged in waging an information war, upholding morale, and covering its own behind from domestic criticism. What Ukrainian MoD is somewhat able to do is estimate its own losses but those it is not publicizing. — Again for precisely the same reasons it is pulling laughable numbers for enemy losses out of thin air.

The Russian MoD does the exact same thing. Every day RUMOD publishes a running tally of how many armored vehicled, “field artillery and mortars,” and other types of weapons it has “destroyed” in Ukraine.

The RUMOD tally differs from the UAMOD tally in that it does not keep track of enemy soldiers “killed”. However RUMOD does publicize the number of “nationalists eliminated” in their daily reports for that day. RUMOD does also occasionally tally up these numbers. The last time was on April 16 when RUMOD claimed to know that Ukraine had until that point suffered “23367 irrecoverable losses” (dead, missing, POW). For some strange reason some people who rightly laugh at UAMOD numbers then accept and bandy around RUMOD numbers. RUMOD has absolutely no way of even ballparking Ukrainian losses (except by extrapolation from its own losses). And even if could know them (it can’t) it has every incentive to exaggerate them several times over. The number that RUMOD does know somewhat well — the number of its own dead — that’s the one number it will not share. Because that one isn’t propaganda.

Basing the losses of a warring side on what *their enemy claims about them* (during active hostilities no less) is just the most bizarre thing ever.

The reality of the situation is that outside bizarro ledger wars like the American “metrics” quagmire in Vietnam, militaries do not even attempt to track enemy casualties. The reality is that to RUMOD the question of how many Ukrainians have been killed so far is all but irrelevant. This is trivia fixated on by civilians, but to warplanners — who know that wars aren’t determined by losses but by successful operations — it has zero utility. What they want to know is the enemy strength and composition in the present. For that purpose they do reconnaissance. They don’t scour last month’s battle reports to try to tally up how many men the Ukrainian corps facing them may have lost last month. Because that number is irrelevant to them the information is not collected and not tallied up. It’s only important for civilians and for them it can be just made up. In fact it’s better if it is, because then it can be anything you want it to be. In fact, the truth is that the only reason the militaries keep track of even *their own* losses is so that they know which units require replacements and how many.

These numbers are worse than useless. They are propaganda. Its misinformation exposure to which leaves one less informed than he started out. They are published knowing that they will be disbelieved, but with the hope that they will nonetheless color perceptions through anchoring bias.

-Russia plans to send up to 2,500 reservists to the war in Ukraine, trained now at training centers in the Voronezh, Belgorod and Rostov regions- General Staff

-A missile strike hit some military infrastructure in the western Ukrainian region of Lviv early on Sunday, the region’s Governor Maxim Kozitsky said.

*** ECONOMIC & POLITICAL ***

-Following Friday's catastrophic new credit data, which saw the fewest new loans in half a decade, and after this morning's report that Chinese authorities allowed a further cut in mortgage loan interest rates for first-time homebuyers in another push to prop up its property market and revive a flagging engine of the world's second-largest economy, few expected any upside surprises from Monday's economic data dump out of China, but even fewer expected anything quite as bad as what Beijing just reported. With Europe, UK and the US all on the verge of recession, China just boldly took the step to get there ahead of everyone, with Beijing reporting that China’s economy contracted sharply in April, as Covid outbreaks and lockdowns dragging the industrial and consumer sectors down to the weakest levels since early 2020 as millions of residents were confined to their homes and factories were forced to halt production, while the local unemployment rate soared to the 2nd highest level in modern history.

-A Russian lawmaker has issued a fiery warning that Warsaw is next in line for “de-nazification” after Poland’s Prime Minister penned an op-ed calling Russia’s imperialist “Russkiy Mir” ideology a “cancer” consuming Russian society and a “deadly threat” to other countries. Oleg Morozov, chairman of Russia’s State Duma Committee on Control, wrote in a message on Telegram on Friday that the Polish leader’s comments have essentially made Poland a targetIn his remarks, Morozov resorted to the Kremlin’s rhetoric in its military operation in Ukraine of so-called “de-Nazification,” a label Moscow has used to vilify its geopolitical adversaries and justify the war.

“With its statements about Russia as a ‘cancer’ and about the ‘indemnity’ that we must pay to Ukraine, Poland encourages us to put it in first place in the queue for de-Nazification after Ukraine,” Morozov wrote, according to a translation of his statement.

Morozov’s remarks were prompted by statements made by Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki and Polish President Andrzej Duda, who have both been highly critical of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Duda has said Russia should be forced to pay compensation to Ukraine for war damages while Morawiecki said Russian President Vladimir Putin is “more dangerous” than both Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin because he has nuclear weapons and a massive propaganda machine at his disposal.

-Prior to Finland’s decision to court or be courted by NATO, Finland was not a threat to Russia and Russia did not treat it as a threat. Finland is a tiny (population wise), grey country. It is economically unimportant. Here are its top ten exports

    Machinery including computers: US$9.7 billion (14.7% of total exports)
    Paper, paper items: $7.3 billion (11.1%)
    Electrical machinery, equipment: $5.6 billion (8.5%)
    Vehicles: $5 billion (7.5%)
    Mineral fuels including oil: $4.9 billion (7.5%)
    Iron, steel: $4.1 billion (6.2%)
    Optical, technical, medical apparatus: $3.3 billion (4.9%)
    Wood: $2.9 billion (4.3%)
    Plastics, plastic articles: $2.3 billion (3.5%)
    Woodpulp: $2.2 billion (3.3%)

In 2020, Finland’s exports were valued at 66 billion dollars. Finland’s military–25,000 personnel – is the equivalent of two U.S. military divisions. NATO’s desire to move closer to the long Russo-Finnish border in a vicinity of Russian bases in Murmansk and Severo-Morsk. And possibility of entry into White sea in case of open conflict with Russia. Finland’s role in NATO, if it comes to pass, is simple and stark – create a trip wire on Russia’s border for starting a nuclear war.

-Swedish prime minister Magdalena Andersson added she will go to parliament on Monday to seek broad support for an application to join NATO, after her party dropped its long-standing opposition to membership in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

-Nato’s secretary general Jens Stoltenberg said he is confident common ground can be reached to allay Turkey’s concerns over Sweden and Finland’s membership into the alliance.

-805 days after the CDC recorded the first official Covid-19 death in the U.S. on February 27, 2020, President Biden mourned the death of one million Americans, speaking of "irreplaceable losses, each leaving behind a family, a community forever changed because of this pandemic."

-Finland’s president, Sauli Niinistö, told Vladimir Putin that Helsinki plans to join Nato. Niinistö delivered the news during a phone call with the Russian leader. Putin said abandoning neutrality would be a mistake and that there are no current threats to Finland’s security. Russia has described Helsinki’s bid to join Nato as a hostile move that “definitely” would represent a threat – to which Moscow will respond.

-As gas prices continue to break records, the Biden administration’s cancellation of two lease sales in the Gulf of Mexico and one lease sale in Alaska’s Cook Inlet has drawn clashing responses, including an accusation that the administration is “blatantly lying.” The Cook Inlet oil and gas lease would have covered 1.09 million acres in the Cook Inlet, a body of water connecting Anchorage with the Gulf of Alaska. A spokesperson for the Department of the Interior told The Epoch Times the Cook Inlet sale was canceled due to a “lack of industry interest in the area.” “I’m not sure that’s completely accurate,” Kara Moriarty, president and CEO of the Alaska Oil and Gas Association (AOGA), told The Epoch Times. “A lot of times, companies don’t want to tip their hand about participating in lease sales. The only time you really know if there’s interest or not is when you have the lease sale.” “As the former Natural Resources Commissioner for Alaska, I know there is no way they could have confirmed ‘no interest’ until they held the lease sale,” said Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska), who said the Biden administration was “blatantly lying to the American people.” Both he and Moriarty referenced correspondence on the Cook Inlet sale from AOGA, which represents more than a dozen oil and gas producers in Alaska, as evidence of industry interest.

-Egg Prices Soar As 10% Of Nation's Hens Wiped Out By Devastating Bird Flu. Food prices are rising across the U.S., but the latest sticker shock at the supermarket is in the eggs and poultry aisles, as the deadly bird flu wreaks havoc on the country's egg-laying hen flock. Inflation data tracked by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics found a dozen of eggs jumped 23% in April compared with the month before to $2.52. Prices reached levels not seen since early 2016, a period that followed the highly pathogenic avian influenza outbreak of 2014-15, which led to a 50% increase in egg prices in the second half of 2015. Since January, the outbreak has spread to 32 states, killing more than 37 million chickens and turkeys. Of that, 29 million egg-laying hens have died, or about 10% of the U.S.' total flock of 300 million. Bloomberg says the bird flu is "shaping up to be the worst outbreak of its kind." Breakfast has become the most expensive in years. It's not just eggs, orange juice and wheat prices are also soaring.

-The family of a 10-year-old girl who allegedly participated in a viral 'TikTok' challenge in which people choke themselves until they black out has sued the Chinese-owned social media platform, Bloomberg reports. Nylah Anderson, was found unconscious in her Philadelphia bedroom on Dec. 7 and was rushed to a pediatric intensive care unit, where she died five days later, reads a Thursday complaint filed in federal court - which we're guessing will be used to justify more regulations at some point. According to the complaint, the dangerous stunt "was thrust in front" of Anderson when TikTok presented the viral challenge on her "for you" page.

-The US Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, joined the growing list of US politicians making visits to Kyiv. Zelenskiy welcomed McConnell’s visit as a powerful signal of bipartisan support for Ukraine.

-Russia’s blockade of the Black Sea is pushing entire populations toward famine, the G7 foreign ministers have said, and millions of people will starve to death unless Russia allows the export of Ukrainian grain from blockaded ports.