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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

In the history of the wars in Europe, and the wars in Asia, there has never been a combination like the present one.

When the Special Military Operation began on February 24, the Russian forces at the western border were counted by the western media at about 190,000; roughly half then crossed the frontier into the Ukraine. They were opposed by a Ukrainian force of about 200,000 entrenched and fortified east of the Dnieper River.  Never has an offensive force fought against a defensive force with a ratio of one to one or less; the customary US Army rule of thumb is not less than three to one, and with firepower added to the ratio, preferably five to one.  

The line of contact between the two armies, the Ukrainian and Russian, has been differently estimated from the 672-kilometre distance of the Kharkov-Odessa road, to about 1,000 kms to take account of the salients in and out of the Donetsk and Lugansk territories. Compare the length of this line to the trenches of the Allied and German armies between 1914 and 1918 of about 760 kms; the Maginot Line built by the French against the Germans in the 1930s of 448 kms; the Berlin Wall of 1961 of 140 kms; or Israel’s West Bank Barrier, fortified between 2002 and 2005, of 708 kms. Never has so long a line as the Novorussian one been manned by so few.

Not since the US imposed asset confiscations, export bans, and the oil and fuel embargo on Japan between 1937 and 1941, and the trade blockade against Germany from 1939, has US and allied economic warfare against a target country reached the present scale against Russia.

And never before has Russia proved strong enough militarily and economically to bypass, neutralize, overcome, or defeat all three.

At the same time, not since Woodrow Wilson’s stroke of 1919 has a US president been as incapacitated medically as Joseph Biden. Never before have the European allies been as politically incapacitated as the British, French, and Germans all at the same time.

This combination of strength and weakness has spilled the war for Europe into a war of the world. As Hrvoye Moric asks the questions, listen to the new TNT Radio podcast discussing the why, the wherefore, and what happens next.

Click to listen from Min 19:56.  

Source:  https://tntradiolive.podbean.com/

By the way, at the very end of the interview, as radio time was running out, the comparison is drawn between the British bombing raid of May 1943 against the Mohne and Eder dams in Germany, and the threatened attacks by the Kiev regime against the Kakhovka hydroelectric dam near Kherson; the latter led last week to the evacuation by the Russian army of civilians on the west bank of Kherson.

Satellite image of the Kakhovka hydroelectric dam on the Dnieper River,  October 18, 2022.

The Dambusters Raid, as the Royal Air Force operation is popularly known, targeted the Mohne and Eder hydroelectric dams in the Ruhr region of Germany. Initial British reports indicated that more than 50 towns had been flooded; 4,000 people killed, and 120,000 made homeless. Some of the casualties were prisoners of the Germans being held in a forced labour camp below the dam wall; 53 of the 133 British aircrew involved were killed. The Imperial War Museum summary notes that “although the impact on industrial production was limited, the raid gave a significant morale boost to the people of Britain.”  A 75th anniversary assessment of Operation Chastise, the RAF codename for the bombing raid, has concluded: “For all the raid’s audacity and courage; the technical brilliance behind it; and despite the widespread destruction and adverse repercussions for the German war economy that it certainly caused, it did not bring about the long-term crisis for which planners in the Air Ministry and Ministry of Economic Warfare had hoped.”   

The Mohne dam, before (left) and after (right) the May 16, 1943, Dambusters Raid. 

“Only the defeated commit [war] crimes”, the British novelist John Mortimer wrote not long ago.

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