{"id":129386,"date":"2022-10-21T15:47:22","date_gmt":"2022-10-21T22:47:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/?p=129386"},"modified":"2022-10-21T15:47:22","modified_gmt":"2022-10-21T22:47:22","slug":"putins-winter-offensive","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/2022\/10\/21\/putins-winter-offensive\/","title":{"rendered":"Putin&#8217;s Winter Offensive"},"content":{"rendered":"<h2><span style=\"color: #0000ff;\"><em><a style=\"color: #0000ff;\" title=\"Articles, Columns, and Major Blog Posts by Mike Whitney\" href=\"https:\/\/www.unz.com\/author\/mike-whitney\/\" rel=\"author\">MIKE WHITNEY<\/a><span class=\"datewords\">\u00a0 Courtesy The Unz Review<\/span><\/em><\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n<p>Every dead Russian and Ukrainian in this war, every family anywhere in the world that suffers the consequences of this war, every business that shuts down because of the economic damage this war is causing and the increased risk of nuclear annihilation, it\u2019s all US Govt made.\u201d Twitter @KimDotcom<\/p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>Proxy War (def)\u2013 a war instigated by a major power which does not itself become involved.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p id=\"p_1_3\">Ukrainian gains on the battlefield have been met by a widely-anticipated Russian escalation. On September 21, in a rare national address, Russian President Vladimir\u00a0<strong>Putin announced the mobilsation of 300,000 reservists who would be called to serve in the war in Ukraine<\/strong>. In recent weeks, the Russian army has suffered a number of setbacks due to its lack of sufficient manpower in the battlespace. Simply put, the Russians did not have enough combat troops to carry out their mission or to defend the vast area that has recently been annexed by Moscow.\u00a0<strong>Russia\u2019s Special Military Operation was never designed to seize and occupy great swaths of Ukrainian territory. In essence, the SMO was a police operation aimed at locating and eliminating the Ukrainian forces that had been bombarding and killing ethnic Russians living in east Ukraine.\u00a0<\/strong>After numerous clashes with advancing NATO-trained battalions, it\u2019s clear that Russia needs significant reinforcements to roll back Ukrainian forces and impose a security buffer around its new provinces. Russia\u2019s critics see the under-staffing as an indication of military incompetence but, in fact, Moscow is merely adapting to a fluid situation in which both parties continue to raise the stakes. Here is an excerpt from a post by Big Serge at Substack that helps to clarify what\u2019s going on:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Cull Story<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.unz.com\/mwhitney\/putins-winter-offensive\/\">Putin&#8217;s Winter Offensive, by Mike Whitney &#8211; The Unz Review<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>MIKE WHITNEY\u00a0 Courtesy The Unz Review Every dead Russian and Ukrainian in this war, every family anywhere in the world that suffers the consequences of this war, every business that shuts down because of the economic damage this war is causing and the increased risk of nuclear annihilation, it\u2019s all US Govt made.\u201d Twitter @KimDotcom [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-129386","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129386","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=129386"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129386\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=129386"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=129386"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=129386"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}