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Ukraine Invasion Day 220: even more sanctions and even more combat [1]
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Date: 2022-10-01
Don't forget about these courageous women who were saving the lives of servicemen and civilians in #Mariupol up until russia took them hostages in April. The medics of hospital #555 must be released along with all other Ukrainians who are still in captivity #prisonersVoice @ICRC pic.twitter.com/aP991EffEl
115 buses were burned yesterday after 🇷🇺 shelled a bus park in Dnipro. This will cause serious problems for the functioning of public transport in the city. Kyiv will bring over 30 buses by Monday. European Sister cities of Dnipro will also help. 📷 Dnipro mayor Borys Filatov pic.twitter.com/JF03pQ1KYA
UPD: Three people were killed, five were injured after Russian forces hit the transport enterprise in #Dnipro with Iskander missiles, head of Dnipropetrovsk Regional Military Administration Valentyn Reznichenko reports.
#Ukraine : Ukraine received new rockets for HIMARS/M270- here we can see a pod of M30A1 guided rockets. M30A1 differs from previously seen M31A1/A2 by an alternative warhead with 182000 preformed spheroid steel/tungsten fragments and is designed to be used against soft targets. pic.twitter.com/iAUkjPuaEn
Putin would likely need to use multiple tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine to achieve his desired operational effect—freezing the front lines and halting Ukrainian counteroffensives. But the operational effect would need to outweigh the potentially very high costs of possible NATO retaliation. Putin might try a nuclear terror attack against one or more major Ukrainian population centers or critical infrastructure in hopes of shocking Ukraine into surrender or the West into cutting off aid to Ukraine. Such attacks would be highly unlikely to force Ukraine or the West to surrender, however, and would be tremendous gambles of the sort that Putin has historically refused to take. Ukraine’s government and people have repeatedly demonstrated their will to continue fighting, and the West would find it very challenging simply to surrender in the face of such horrific acts because of the precedent such surrender would set. Putin is therefore far more likely to use nuclear weapons to change the operational environment, if he uses them at all. We assess Putin has two main tactical nuclear weapon use options: striking key Ukrainian ground lines of communication nodes and command centers to paralyze Ukrainian offensive operations, and/or striking major Ukrainian force concentrations near the line of contact. A single nuclear weapon would not be decisive against either of these target sets. Putin would likely need to use several tactical nuclear weapons across Ukraine to achieve significant effects and disrupt Ukraine’s ability to conduct counteroffensives. The scale of nuclear use likely required would raise the risks of Western retaliation, likely increasing the potential costs Putin would have to weigh against the likely temporary benefits the strikes themselves might provide.
Russian nuclear use would therefore be a massive gamble for limited gains that would not achieve Putin’s stated war aims. At best, Russian nuclear use would freeze the front lines in their current positions and enable the Kremlin to preserve its currently occupied territory in Ukraine. Russian nuclear use would not enable Russian offensives to capture the entirety of Ukraine (the Kremlin’s original objective for their February 2022 invasion). Russian military doctrine calls for the Russian Armed Forces to be able to effectively fight on a nuclear battlefield, and the “correct” doctrinal use of tactical nuclear weapons would involve tactical nuclear strikes to punch holes in Ukrainian lines, enabling Russian mechanized units to conduct an immediate attack through the targeted area and drive deep into Ukrainian rear areas. [9] The degraded, hodgepodge Russian forces currently operating in Ukraine cannot currently conduct effective offensive operations even in a non-nuclear environment. They will be flatly unable to operate on a nuclear battlefield. DNR/LNR proxy units, Wagner Group fighters, BARS reservist units, and the depleted remnants of the Russian conventional units that actually exercised fighting on a nuclear battlefield in annual exercises—not to mention newly mobilized replacements shipped to the front lines with less than a week of training—will not have the equipment, training, and morale necessary to conduct offensive operations following nuclear use. NATO is additionally likely to respond to Russian nuclear weapon use in Ukraine with conventional strikes on Russian positions there. Russian use of multiple weapons (which would be required to achieve decisive operational effects) would only increase the likelihood and scale of a Western conventional response.
The more confident Putin is that nuclear use will not achieve decisive effects but will draw direct Western conventional military intervention in the conflict, the less likely he is to conduct a nuclear attack.
www.understandingwar.org/…
So, what nuclear weapons does Russia have at its disposal, and how destructive could they be?
Strategic nuclear weapons
Nuclear weapons have never been used in a war since 1945, when the two atomic bombs dropped by the United States on Hiroshima and Nagasaki devastated the Japanese cities and instantly killed tens of thousands of people.
"That's a 76-year tradition of non-use of nuclear weapons. And that is the single most important feature of the nuclear age, and we really want to keep it that way," Nina Tannenwald, senior lecturer in international relations at Brown University in the US, told Euronews Next.
The horror of the bombings shocked the world into the age of nuclear deterrence, where global powers raced to develop such weapons, all the while knowing that their use would be catastrophic for humanity - and thus refraining from wielding them against one another.
January fact sheet by the Arms Control Association. Nowadays, Russia has the world’s largest nuclear arsenal with around 6,257 nuclear warheads, while the United States admits to having 5,550, according to a
Of these, the so-called "strategic" weapons - those with the largest yield - are deployed on submarines, bombers and intercontinental ballistic missiles.
"Strategic nuclear weapons are the big city busters," said Tannenwald, who authored a book on nuclear deterrence.
"These are unbelievably destructive weapons. If we got into a nuclear war with strategic weapons, that would be essentially the end of civilisation in both countries".
Smaller tactical nuclear weapons
But some 2,000 of Russia’s nuclear warheads are short-range, so-called “tactical” nuclear weapons kept in storage facilities throughout the country.
These are much smaller nuclear weapons, designed to be used on the battlefield against troop formations, tanks, or military installations and bunkers.
These can be launched on the same short-range missiles Russia is currently using to bombard Ukraine, such as its Iskander-M ballistic missile, which has a range of about 500 km.
www.euronews.com/…
x Ukraine formally applies for NATO membership following Russian annexation
https://t.co/IFrRMSBuuc — National Post (@nationalpost) September 30, 2022
x I wish every single person in the West would listen to Putin's speech. Obviously, that won't happen so let me summarise as a professional translator for 10+ years. He states, as he has done from the outset, what his intentions and complaints are in the plainest terms possible.🧵 — Konstantin Kisin (@KonstantinKisin) September 30, 2022
Setting aside his brief comments on the recent "referendums", he spends most of his speech discussing the West. His primary complaint isn't NATO expansion, which gets only a cursory mention. The West is greedy and seeks to enslave and colonise other nations, like Russia.
The West uses the power of finance and technology to enforce its will on other nations. To collect what he calls the "hegemon's tax". To this end the West destabilises countries, creates terrorist enclaves and most of all seeks to deprive other countries of sovereignty.
It is this "avarice" and desire to preserve its power that is the reason for the "hybrid war" the collective West is "waging on Russia". They want us to be a "colony". They do not want us to be free, they want Russians to be a mob of soulless slaves - direct quote.
The rules-based order the West goes on about is "nonsense". Who made these rules? Who agreed to them? Russia is an ancient country and civilization and we will not play by these "rigged" rules. The West has no moral authority to challenge the referendums because it has violated
..the borders of other countries. Western elites are "totalitarian, despotic and apartheidistic" - direct quote. They are racist against Russia and other countries and nations. "Russophobia is racism". They discriminate by calling themselves the "civilised world".
They colonised, started the global slave trade, genocided native Americans, pillaged India and Africa, forced China to buy opium through war. We, on the other hand, are proud that we "led" the anti-colonial movement that helped countries develop to reduce poverty and inequality.
They are Russophobic (they hate us) because we didn't allow our country to be pillaged by creating a strong CENTRALISED (emphasis his) state based on Christianity, Islam, Judaism and Buddhism. They have been trying to destabilise our country since the 17th century in the Times...
..of Trouble (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_of_T…). Eventually, they managed to "get their hands on our riches" at the end of the 20th century. They called us friends and partners while pumping out trillions of dollars (his irony game is strong today). Time of Troubles - Wikipedia
We remember this. We didn't forget. The West claims to bring freedom and democracy to other countries but it's the exact opposite of the truth. The unipolar world is anti-democratic by its very nature. It is a lie. They used nuclear weapons, creating a precedent. They flattened German cities without "any military need to do so". There was no need for this except to scare us and the rest of the world. Korea, Vietnam. To this day they "occupy" Japan, South Korea and Germany and other countries while cynically calling them "allies".
The West has surveillance over the leaders of these nations who "swallow these insults like the slaves they are".
He then talks about bioweapon research (haven't heard about them for a while) and human experiments "including in Ukraine".
The US rules the world by the power of the fist. Any country which seeks to challenge Western hegemony becomes an enemy. Their neocolonialism is cloaked in lies like "containment" of Russia, China and Iran. The concept of truth has been destroyed with fakes and extreme...
..propaganda (irony game still strong).
You cannot feed your people with printed dollars and social media. You need food and energy. But Western elites have no desire to find a solution to the food and energy crises *they* (emphasis his) created.
They solved the problems at the start of 20c with WW1 and the US established dominance of the world via the dollar as a result of WW2. In the 80s they had another crisis they solved by "plundering our country". Now they want to solve their problems by "breaking Russia".
Russia "understands its responsibility to the international community" and will "do everything to cool the heads of these neocolonials who are destined to fail".
They're crazy. I want to speak to all Russian citizens, do we want to replace mum and dad with parent 1 and 2?
They invented genders and claim you can "transition". Do we want this for our children?
We have a different vision.
They have abandoned religion and embraced Satanism - direct quote.
The world is going through a revolutionary transformation. A multipolar world offers nations freedom to develop as they wish and they make up the majority of the world.
We have many like-minded friends in Western countries. We see and appreciate their support. They are forming
liberation, anti-colonial movements as we speak - direct quote. These will only grow.
We are fighting for a fair world for our country. The idea of exceptionalism is criminal and we must turn this shameful page. The breaking of the West's hegemony is INEVITABLE (emphasis his).
There is no going back. We are fighting for our "great (as in big), historic Russia". Our values are (irony game crescendo): love of our fellow man, compassion and mercy.
Truth is with us, Russia is with us.
x YouTube Video That's the end of the speech. As I said from day 1, the purpose of what Putin is doing in Ukraine is to throw the West off its pedestal. This isn't about NATO or Ukraine, this is the big play to replace the current world order. End of thread. Subscribe to my Substack for more:
Konstantin Kisin Reaction from one of the attendees:
"We'll beat them all, we'll kill them all, we'll plunder all their stuff. It's going to be what we love to do!"
Share this thread as a Substack article:
Oh, and you'll probably want to read this from back in April: Stop Calling Putin Hitler
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