28 Jul, 2023 16:26

Polish Army responds to Wagner deployment

Warsaw is planning to double the size of its military after the Russian PMC decamped to neighbor Belarus

Poland intends to double the size of its army from three to six divisions in response to the deployment of Wagner troops in Belarus, Polish Defense Minister Mariusz Blaszczak announced on Friday. His statement was also backed by Deputy Prime Minister Yaroslav Kaczynski.

Blaszczak said he had already signed a document increasing the number of active service members in the Polish Army from 172,000 to 300,000, and noted that the government was “consistently implementing this goal.”

He added that Warsaw also had plans to increase its defense spending to 4% of GDP.

In addition to the new divisions, Kaczynski said a reserve division was likely to be created at some point, and noted that the government was working on restoring military units that were disbanded under former Polish president Donald Tusk.

He also said Warsaw was working on strengthening the country’s border with Belarus by building a fence and deploying “various types of electronic devices to facilitate the protection of the border,” and to prevent an attack he claimed was being prepared by Minsk with the support of Moscow.

The decision to strengthen Poland’s army comes after Warsaw announced that it would redeploy troops to its eastern border in response to the arrival of the Wagner PMC and its leader Evgeny Prigozhin in Belarus.

The group came to Belarus as part of a deal with the Kremlin mediated by Minsk, which ended a mutiny staged by Prigozhin in late June. Since arriving in the country, Wagner members have begun training Belarusian forces and sharing the battlefield experience they gained from the Ukraine conflict.

Wagner’s presence in Belarus has become a point of major concern for Warsaw, which claims that it now expects “provocations” from Russia, and has said it is “closely monitoring”the group’s activities. Washington has also officially stated that it would play a role in the defense of Polish territory in the event of an attack from abroad.

That was after Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko told his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, on Sunday that the Wagner fighters were keen to “go on tour to Warsaw”to settle a score with those they believe have been providing Ukrainian troops with military hardware.

(Poland acts like the bully until it gets scared.)

https://www.rt.com/news/580476-poland-double-army-wagner/

Mr. Speaker!…

July 27, 2023 | Sundance

I tap my glass loudly with a spoon from the back of the room….

The House Oversight and Government Affairs Committee has a team of lawyers and staff.

Evidence in public shows the sitting president of the United States took payments from foreign business interests in a scheme to use the power of the U.S. government to influence foreign government policy and protect/enhance the business interests of the people who paid him.

To wit…. The Republicans in the House of Representatives have thousands of Joe and Hunter Biden bank records, hundreds of trace records for wire transfer statements and payments, hundreds of reported U.S. Treasury suspicious activity reports, thousands of emails and subpoenaed text messages, audio and video recordings, thousands of photographs, access to the laptop of Hunter Biden and all the content therein, documented witnesses to the activity, testimony under oath corroborating how the Bidens collected tens of millions from foreign nations as unregistered foreign agents which was subsequently laundered through 20 shell companies.

The House committee also has FBI witness reports (FD-1023) from verified and reliable Confidential Human Sources who documented the intent and purpose of the transactions, along with US government attorneys in Philadelphia who investigated and confirmed the substance of the confidential human source allegations therein. Additionally, the Republicans in Congress have sworn affidavits and testimony from two IRS whistleblowers who testified the US attorney in Delaware was working with the U.S. Dept of Justice in Washington DC to bury the results of the investigation.

Lastly, and most recently, the Republicans have a transparently corrupt federal plea agreement rejected as presented by U.S. District Court Judge Maryellen Noreika, because the intent of the construct was to protect the son of the President of the United States from legal exposure within the business that provided the material wealth for himself and the family of the President, providing immunity for their Foreign Agent Registration Act violations…

….And the Republican Speaker of the House is letting the Republican controlled Congress go on vacation for the next two months.

All of this,…. ALL OF THIS…. while the former Republican president and current 2024 election front-runner is being railroaded by the same Dept of Justice the Speaker refuses to confront.

(I guess the Manchurian Candidate always remained in office.)

https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2023/07/27/mr-speaker/#more-249314

WAS GENERAL MILLEY RIGHT ABOUT THE UKRAINE WAR?

JULY 27, 2023

From a Washington Post column by Jason Willick headlined “Was Gen. Mark Milley right last year about the war in Ukraine?”:

As Ukraine’s counteroffensive struggles to make headway against fortified Russian lines, I found myself going back to remarks late last year by Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Milley spoke at the Economic Club of New York in November 2022 just as Ukrainian troops were completing the expulsion of Russian forces from the southern city of Kherson. Kyiv had stunned the world by repelling Moscow’s initial invasion — forcing Russia back to roughly the lines of control in place today — and the top U.S. general made news by floating a negotiated settlement to the war.

He compared the situation in Ukraine to World War I. Around Christmas of 1914, Milley said, “you’ve got a war that is not winnable anymore, militarily.” Yet European leaders decided they had no choice but to push for total victory. One million deaths became 20 million by the war’s end.

“Things can get worse,” Milley said, adding: “When there’s an opportunity to negotiate, when peace can be achieved, seize it. Seize the moment.”

The next week, Milley again suggested that time was ripe for negotiations. In a news conference, he said that despite Ukraine’s heroic success in driving the Russians from Kharkiv and Kherson, it would be “very difficult” to evict Russia’s army from the entire country by force. There might be an opening for political solutions, however: “You want to negotiate from a position of strength,” Milley said, and “Russia right now is on its back.”

Milley’s trial balloon fell to the ground. The Biden administration promptly distanced itself from his remarks. We don’t know whether Russia could have been open to negotiations. But even the idea of exploring a political settlement was cast in Washington policy circles as undercutting Ukraine’s goal of a total victory. Expectations for Ukraine’s prospects of pulling off a decisive counteroffensive against the remaining Russian positions in the East swelled through the winter and spring.

Powered by infusions of American arms, the offensive finally began early last month. But the hoped-for breakthrough hasn’t materialized. The military analysts Michael Kofman and Rob Lee, who recently returned from the front, describe a grinding war of attrition with entrenched Russian forces holding their ground while relatively inexperienced Ukrainian soldiers are struggling to synchronize their offensive operations.

In public, Western leaders are urging patience. Ukraine’s counteroffensive is far from over. Yet Milley’s skepticism about Ukraine’s ability to achieve total victory appears to have been widespread within the Biden administration before the counteroffensive began.

The Wall Street Journal’s Daniel Michaels reported this week that “Western military officials knew Kyiv didn’t have all the training or weapons — from shells to warplanes — that it needed to dislodge Russian forces.” That tracks: In April, The Post reported on a leaked U.S. intelligence document forecasting only “modest” territorial gains for Ukraine. “Enduring Ukrainian deficiencies in training and munitions supplies probably will strain progress and exacerbate casualties during the offensive,” the document said.

If this is representative of intelligence and military assessments in government, why has the Biden administration not been quicker in providing advanced arms to Ukraine?

One answer is that there is no magical “wonder weapon” that could make a decisive difference. Speaking at the Aspen Security Forum last week, national security adviser Jake Sullivan pointed out that the high quality of air defenses on both sides have made air superiority unachievable. He said American military commanders doubt “the notion that F-16s would play a decisive role in this counteroffensive.”

Another answer is that the West is straining to meet Ukraine’s existing needs, as its military industrial base is not on a war footing. The shortage of 155mm artillery shells is apparently so bad that the Biden administration was forced to send cluster munitions to fill the gap. Sending Ukraine the Army’s ATACMS missile system — one of the last major weapons the administration is holding back — could hurt U.S. readiness elsewhere in the world.

Ukraine is still in the fight, and a Russian collapse could still happen….

But if the prospects for Ukrainian military victory are in fact remote — and if American leaders know it — then let’s hope they can show more wisdom and flexibility than the World War I leaders of whom Milley spoke last November.

https://jacklimpert.com/2023/07/was-general-milley-right-about-the-ukraine-war/