On the North River

On Tuesday, Poland said it was ready to deploy all its MIG-29 jets to Ramstein Air Base in Germany and put them at the disposal of the United States, urging other NATO members to do the same. The Pentagon later dismissed the offer as not “tenable”.

Now, why did Poland want to do it this way?

Here’s my speculation: Poland wanted the US involved because they feared a Russia attack if they supplied Ukraine with the jets. And they also feared the US would fail to come to their defense as Article 5 of the NATO charter demands we must.

You know, because America is Back, Baby! Because Biden has totally regained the trust of the world.

So they wanted the US directly involved in this operation so that the US would have ownership of it and could not walk away from it if Russia attacked Poland. So that the US could not claim, “Poland in effect attacked Russia by transferring those planes without NATO’s blessing, so in effect Poland was the first attacker, Russia was counter-attacking, not attacking, and therefore Article 5 does not apply and we do not owe collective self-defense action to Poland.”

Day Eight of the Ukrainian War

I have posted on twitter about the Russian Army columns North of Kyiv decaying into immobile blobs due to the Rasputitsa, poorly maintained Chinese truck tires and shear “follow the plan” Russian incompetence.

The head and first dozen or so kilometers of the southernmost column north of Kiev have been stuck there for EIGHT DAYS.  The Russians have since rammed more and more vehicles into this monster traffic jam (idiotically “following the plan” Soviet-style) so the whole thing is now 65-70 kilometers long (almost 40 miles).

And, because the trucks can’t go off-road due to the Rasputitsa mud and tire problems, they’re stuck on the roads and the roads’ shoulders three vehicles wide for the whole @40 miles.   That means fuel and resupply trucks can’t move on or off road to deliver anything to anybody.

So all the columns’ heads are now out of fuel and battery power.  They can’t move north, south or sideways, and everything behind them is stuck because of the mud, and rapidly running out of fuel and vehicle battery charge too (assuming they haven’t already).  Nor can any of those columns defend themselves because they’re too densely packed.  They’re just targets waiting for the Ukrainians to destroy them.

Only the Ukrainians had something better to do.  They opened the floodgates of reservoirs around those columns to flood them and turn the surrounding areas into impassable quagmires for months – probably until July or August.  (See photo below) Probably several thousand Russian vehicles in those columns will be irrecoverable losses.  Hundreds of Russian soldiers might have drowned.

This was not just a debacle, but an EPIC one. About 1/5th of the Russian force in Ukraine is now flooded or trapped, and are definitely out of the war for good.

I’ve attempted to do a search on the photo, a lot of war photos and videos have been found to be fakes (other times or other places).

Google recently replaced Google Search with Google Lens.  Google Lens says this is a lake in Colorado.  But Google Search has links to sites reporting that the Ukrainians have flooded a area to trap the Russians, as does this article.

Let’s hope it’s true.

John the River