On the North River

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

It’s a leave-taking.  The exact circumstances aren’t known or stated, but the inference is that the daughter is being sent to safety, perhaps out of the country and all because of the war with Russia.

No military age males are being allowed to leave Ukraine.  Is the father going off to war?  Or into hiding?   For this particular man we don’t know.  But the facts of life in Ukraine today are many are doing both; some fathers are saying goodbye and returning to Kiev to fight, some are going to try to find a safe place to hide.  In either case some daughters will never see their fathers again.

People living in Ukraine have very good reasons to hate and to fear being conquered by Russia.  Their history of the last hundred years and more is replete with horror,  death, destruction and famine that came from the North and the East.

There is a high proportion of ethnic Russians in many parts of the Ukraine today.  That is not by chance.  Stalin moved millions of Russians into the Ukraine and to make room for them he forcibly moved millions of native Ukrainians out.  Or simply starved them to death in place.  He killed so many that there weren’t enough people left to bury the dead.  Wave after wave of death and oppression has come into their country from Russia, with a brief side order of the same from the West courtesy of Hitler.  If you are wondering why the Ukrainians aren’t surrendering to Putin and handing their country back to Russian control to avoid bloodshed it’s because they know the real blood is shed after they submit to the Russians.

I think of all the good the 85 billion dollars of abandoned American weapons could have done if we had them to give to the Ukrainians.  Fuck Joe Biden.