The Booker prize-winning author of the Wolf Hall trilogy, Dame Hilary Mantel, has died aged 70. read more
Christian nationalism, a belief that the United States was founded as a white, Christian nation and that there is no separation between church and state, is gaining steam on the right. read more
Jennifer Rubin: "Identifying the MAGA movement as "fascist" or "semi-fascist," on the other hand, is not to accuse it of planning genocide, but rather to point to its playbook as reminiscent of those that authoritarian movements and leaders have deployed across the globe." read more
President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia said on Thursday that Moscow understood that China had "questions and concerns" about the war in Ukraine ... read more
According to two sources close to the Kremlin, the Russian authorities have postponed their plans to conduct "referendums" on Russian annexation of the self-proclaimed Luhansk and Donetsk People's Republics and of Ukraine's Kharkiv, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson regions "indefinitely." read more
From the Institute for the Study of War's "Russian Offensive Campaign Offensive, September 2022)" (www.understandingwar.org
Russian authorities continue to send newly-mobilized and undertrained recruits to directly reinforce severely degraded remnants of various units, including units that were previously considered to be Russia's premier conventional fighting forces. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that newly-mobilized Russian men arrived to reinforce elements of the 1st Tank Regiment of the 2nd Motorized Rifle Division of the 1st Guards Tank Army in unspecified areas of Ukraine with no training at all.[8] Social media footage from September 27 shows a Russian soldier mobilized into the 1st Tank Regiment explaining that he will be sent to fight in Kherson Oblast within two days without any basic training, as ISW reported yesterday.[9] The 1st Guards Tank Army was considered Russia's premier mechanized force prior to February 24, and that fact that its elements are being reinforced with poorly disciplined, untrained men is consistent with ISW's previous assessments that even Russia's most elite units have sustained substantial losses in Ukraine and are therefore increasingly degraded.[10] The addition of newly mobilized forces to elements of the 1st Guards Tank Army is unlikely to lend these units any decisive combat power.
The outfit referred to has long been held up as a model, a real gun-ho, ready-to-go formation.
Peter Olandt's "The Russian Mobilization is Best Understood in the Context of the BTG" (www.dailykos.com), that army's standard Battalion Tactical Group arrangement of forces, is an interesting read.
In order to function as designed, the BTG requires "meat shields," troops whose job it is to get the enemy to start blasting away at them in order to reveal positions.
The conscripts are the new "meat shields" for the BTGs, the others having become ... unoperational.
Secretariat in the third at Belmont.