The Duran Podcast
Kiev blame game. Kharkov debacle
All right, Alexander, let's talk about what is going on in Ukraine and we have to start with what is happening in the Harkiv region. 12 villages have been captured and it looks like Volchansk is about to be surrounded or is surrounded. It's about 70 kilometers away from Harkiv. And everyone is trying to figure out what is Russia up to in the Harkiv region. What is this offensive? If you want to call it an offensive, I think it's an offensive. What is what is this all about? Is Russia planning to make a move on Harkiv, the actual city? Are they looking to create a buffer zone? Given all the recent attacks on Belgorod and we had a horrific attack on Belgorod just the other day, we're at an apartment building collapsed. And is this also about stretching the Ukraine forces across the front lines? We know that Ukraine is starting to divert military resources from various other areas on the front line to Harkov in order to try and slow down the Russian advance. So what are your thoughts as to what is happening in Harkov? Alexander, we're going to have to also talk about the finger pointing that is now taking place in Kiev. Wudanov is playing Maksiski. Zolenski is talking about a difficult situation in the Harkov region. We've had articles in the hill asking questions about where is all the money that we've been giving Ukraine? Where is it all going? How come fortifications? We're not built up in this region, given so many billions that have been given to Ukraine over the past year. Anyway, we can get to that later on in the video. Let's talk about what's actually happening on the ground. I guess we can start off from there. Absolutely. Well, I think the first thing to say is that we don't fully know what the ultimate in Russian intentions are. But I can remember that there was a discussion at the Ministry of Defense, the Russian Ministry of Defense board some months ago, which basically gave us an outline of Russian tactics in which they said they were engaged in many places in what they called active defense and that when it looked to them that the line was weakening, the Ukrainian lines were weakening in one particular place or another, then they would take advantage of that with offensive actions. So I think there's something of this. Now, I think the origins of this, the point of beginning on the Russian side was to create a buffer zone along the border. There have been, as we know, repeated incursions by the Ukrainians or attempted incursions by the Ukrainians into Russian territory in Belgorod region. This started last year in May, literally a year ago, on the eve of Ukraine's own big offensive in the south, in Zaporozia region. The Ukrainians tried to do the same. Again, in this precise area about a month ago, they tried to advance into Russia to capture some border villages. There's lots of speculation about what the Ukrainians were up to. Of course, they pretended it wasn't they who were carrying out these incursions. They pretended that it was Russian dissident units, but of course everybody knew that it was the Ukrainians. And there were some theories that they were trying to capture a base near Belgorod where the Russians store tactical nuclear weapons. There were all kinds of speculations about it, but Putin came out and spoke about the need to create a buffer zone to protect Belgorod and the Russian villages from this kind of incursion along the Russian border. And the initial indication suggests that that is really all that this incursion was about. The number of troops that the Russians have committed to it appears to be around 55,000. And this is stretched out along the entire border with Kharkov region. And these are motorized rifle troops, mainly drawn from the Leningrad military districts, so I understand. So we're talking about relatively lightly equipped troops. There is armor. I mean, they do have tanks and other things in the rear, but initially this was not, I think, intended as a really big offensive. What has happened is that when the Russians crossed the border, the Ukrainian defense is collapsed. Now, when I said Ukrainian defenses, the main Ukrainian defense line is somewhere distant from the border. But what tends to happen in this war is that you create a defense line and then you establish fortified positions and minefields and locate special forces units and advance units in a control zone, an advance of it, which is exactly what the Russians did if you remember in Zaporogia. And you try and slow down and entangled and complicate the other side as it advances in this entangled with this control zone. Well, there was no control zone. The Russians walked in, 12 villages immediately, pretty much immediately fell into their hands. There was apparently minimal resistance Ukrainian troops retreated fast. I've seen film in which Russian soldiers are saying that they entered one village and that the Ukrainian soldiers who were supposed to be their turned in fled. And there's been dozens of prisoners taken, which is unusual in this war. So the Russians have now advanced much faster and much deeper than I think that they would imagine that they would do in such a short time. And, well, the Institute for the Study of War, no less, is telling us that they've encircled Volchants. That's the Institute for the Study of War. You could take that with a heavy dose of salt, but they're usually people who put an optimistic spin on events from a Ukrainian point of view. Anyway, they said the Russians have encircled Volchants. It seems that they have actually entered Volchants. This is a fairly big, well, bigish town, around 17,000 people near the border. And all the indications that Ukrainian defenses are proving much more fragile in this area than anyone has imagined. So, again, following on Russian tactics and what they do, and given the size of the Russian army now, the fact that they have enormous reserves in the rear and are far stronger than they've been at any point previously in this war, there's every reason to think that they will do what they have always done, which is exploit success and advance further and more deeply than anybody had, than they had perhaps themselves intended. And, of course, along the way, the desire to stretch Ukrainian defense lines is always there. So, they've created a new front line in the Khadukov region where non-existed before. The Ukrainians are forced to redeploy forces from everywhere else along the combat line. They're pulling troops out of Hurson region, from the Ochiretino of Devka area, from the Bachma-Jasaf Yar area, all critically weak positions where the Ukrainians are already under immense pressure. They're being forced to pull troops from all these places and rush them to Harkov to try to, you know, slow this thing that's happening on the borderlands down as weakening their front lines. And, again, you know, that's, I'm sure, I'm sure that was partly one of the Russian intentions from the start, but it's happening at a far faster speed and in a more, on a much bigger scale than I think the Russians ever imagined or would have expected. So, you know, it's interesting. And I think the overall story to take away from this is that this affair has demonstrated the fragility of the Ukrainian military at this point in the war, that unless really top level units are deployed in an area, then Ukrainian resistance crumbles very fast. It's now becoming very difficult for the Ukrainians to hold all the positions along the front lines. If they're attacked in force somewhere that, you know, they don't have their best units positioned, then a collapse comes quickly and that is now over stretching and exhausting the limited elite units that they still have left, which is still capable of putting on a real battle. And that will take us now. I think that the next part of our program, which is the recriminations and the anger and the panic because there is now general panic, I think, in Ukraine about what has just happened. Can we say that this incident, this advance, has not only exposed the fragility of Ukraine's military, but it's also exposed the fragility of Ukraine's government, of the Zelensky regime? Absolutely. No one likes each other, everyone's trying to blame everybody else. It shows that there really is no unity in Kiev. Absolutely. And I mean, not just they're all blaming each other, but one gets the sense that they all hate each other. Now, what's happened is that firstly, we were hearing for weeks about this offensive that was coming in half. I've thought after before, I've been discussing it on my channel. You've been discussing it on your channel. We've talked about it on the Duran. Every single war reporter has talked about this. There's been articles about it in the Western media. And yet the Ukrainians completely unprepared, it's as if they were taken by surprise by something that everybody has been commenting about and discussing for weeks. So there really is no excuse to be caught out in this way. And of course, the great fortified lines that we were talking to, bearing about. Zelensky, a couple of weeks ago, was saying that Harikov was a place where we're really setting up these wonderful fortified lines. And all other theatres of the war needs to copy what Harikov is doing. We've been healing lots of reports from other places that, in fact, there are no fortified lines to speak of, that the money is being embezzled, that there's been no equipment to make them, that it really comes down to Ukrainian soldiers with shovels trying to drink trenches. But the exception was supposed to be Harikov region. There, there were supposed to be real fortified lines having been created. And it turns out that that's simply more such a truth. In precisely the area where the Russians were meant to attack, expected to attack in Belgorod, in, you know, close to the city of Belgorod, there were no, there were no effective fortified lines. The villages along the border had not been properly fortified. Minefields had not been laid. There was no plan, proper operational plan about how to defend. And what we're now hearing is that the fortifications that the Russians are now approaching, the really important ones that we've been led to, understand, we're going to be the barrier that was going to hold the Russians back. The Ukrainian equivalent of the sort of beacon line exists almost entirely on paper. So it's clear that Ukraine is not organized and capable of reproducing anything like the kind of sort of beacon line that the Russians built in across their front lines in the winter of 2022, 2023. And the funds and the resources that were committed to doing that have been embezzled. And that of course points us again to the people who were responsible, the people who were in charge of creating those fortified lines. So huge amount of criticism of them. Note that so far they haven't yet been identified. But already the commander in this area in Halka for Egypt has been sacked. Officers apparently are being arrested. Bodhanov is now openly criticizing Siski. Siski is getting his people who run their social media channels to criticize Bodhanov. They're saying that it was Bodhanov's men who ran first the, you know, so-called dissident Russian units, the special forces units. They turned Talon Bran as soon as the Russians appeared. Bodhanov is said to be furious with Siski about all of this. And Zelensky, for his part, is making speeches about this, which for the first time in the war, instead of, you know, conveying weird optimism, I mean, he sounds depressed and desperate. And one gets the sense that finally even he's starting to see that the whole thing is starting to fall apart. So they all hate each other. They're all, again, fighting going on between the various factions in Kiev. And the government in Kiev also apparently very worried that next week Zelensky's constitutional term of office expires. He's canceled the elections. His position as president is up for challenge. And again, with this collapse on the border, we're already hearing reports that he's worried that, you know, the vultures are circling and that there might be an attempt basically to remove him. So, you know, clearly fragility in Kiev unquestionably. And as I said, Bodhanov and Siski openly quarreling with each other. Certainly on the Bodhanov spot, but on Siski's part also covertly. And a huge amount of anger on the Ukrainian side of the Internet as well, you know, criticizing everybody, talking about corruption. And we can see the plans that the Ukrainian government had to create fortified lines have simply not amounted to anything. We were always skeptical that they put a map, by the way, if you go back and follow our videos and look at our programs, you'll see that we were always very, very doubtful that by this stage in the war, Ukraine would be able to put together proper fortified lines on anything like the kind of scale that people were talking about. Hundreds of billions of dollars given to Ukraine over the last two years. And they didn't build fortifications in Harkov. After the great victory of the great Harkov counter offensive that Ukraine scored a year and a half ago, they didn't build any fortifications. I'm shocked. I'm stunned. Where did all the money go? I don't know. I just don't know what they do. All you have to do, Alex, is to follow your own programs. You've been describing this many times. I mean, it's not, it's not, it's not a mystery where all the money has gone, especially, I mean, you know, the world of construction. I mean, as, as somebody who's worked in this area in the past, I can tell you, there is no more corrupt business on earth, on earth, the construction industry. I'm not saying everybody works in construction is corrupt, but I mean, and the opportunities for corruption in any massive building project, especially an over, overfunded one, which this one is, by the way, are legion. And, you know, there's all sorts of people who already probably scarpered, you know, run away. They're doing very well. They've done very, very well out of this. Exactly. You said it perfectly. Yeah, you say it's going to cost us 50 million to build this defensive trench or whatever to build this defensive line. It actually costs 10 million, but you price it at 50. It happens. Yeah, you're 100 percent right. This is how, how, how, how it works. Isn't it interesting that as a Lensky, he, he said that Harkov is an example for, for fortifications and for, for building a defensive line. I mean, that, that's exactly what he said, that all of Ukraine should look at Harkov, because that is, that is the example as to how you build a defensive line. What does that tell you, either as a Lensky has no idea what's going on, or he's, he's BSing everybody, and he understands exactly what's going on in all of the corruption that is taking place. Which, which one is it? I think it's, I, in this case, I think it's the first. I say that because he looks, he looks shocked at how quickly the defenses such as they were collapsed. I think that I think at some level, I mean, he really was fooled into believing that some great fortified barrier had indeed been created. I mean, you know, he's hardly, you know, an innocent, I mean, he clearly knows that things are not always as they seem, and that money gets embezzled. I'm sure he's had a part of that. But I think that he didn't understand that these, you know, great lines that he created on the map existed largely in his own imagination. By the way, the same is true in all sorts of other places. If you listen to Ukrainian, if you read Ukrainian telegram channels and you see their, the tweets of their tweets and things of this kind, they're all complaining that the soldiers who are fighting in the Ubedevka area had been complaining for weeks ever since Ubedevka fell, that there are no fortified lines for them to fall back on. You know, again, this is an area where the Russians were attacking for months. They started their offensive there. In October, it was the key part of their defense lines. Ubedevka itself was fortified. But after Ubedevka fell, it was clear that there were no second or third or fourth or fifth defense lines. There was no real plan on how to deal with the situation once Ubedevka fell. So you had an outer crust of defenses in Donbass, which is created between 2014 and 2022, in which apparently, I mean, I remember a US Army engineer said that the US played a big role in creating those defenses. So there was that outer crust of defense lines that were created then, apparently pretty much nothing's been created since. And you can know anything about Ukraine that really shouldn't surprise you. Yeah. So the person to blame for all of this is Budonov and Zelensky. I mean, you said it in your video update. You did a couple of days ago, and I agree. The person who is to blame is not Siersky. Okay, Siersky takes blame. I mean, he's the commander of the armed forces, but the real two people that should take all of the blame for what's going on in this region is Zelensky and Budonov, because they were the ones that, over the last year, thought it would be a really good idea to attack Belkorot, even though there's no military strategic value in doing it. They did it anyway, and they kept on attacking, and they kept on attacking, and Russia kept on warning them. And Lavrov said, the more you attack, the further back we're going to push you. And they just brushed it off. And they kept on attacking to the point where they came up with these schemes of anti Putin, Russian soldiers invading Russia and taking over villages. Remember that debacle? They're the ones that came up with this. Budonov came up with these ideas. He thought he was being clever. He thought he was being cute. Zelensky went along with this. So they're the ones to blame. They should take the blame for all of this. Absolutely. But so should Budonov's Western sponsors who undoubtedly do exist. I mean, I understand that within the Western intelligence communities, there are people who are devoted admirers of Budonov. I've never understood that myself. I think he's the most dangerous and reckless person. And we see that he's what he and Zelensky hatched exactly, as you said, has been disastrous for Ukraine. You had a quiet area of the theater. I mean, Kharkov, after the Russians pulled out of Kharkov region, this whole area of the border was quiet. It was in Ukraine's paramount interest to keep itself. I mean, the Russians are building up their forces in Donbas, and perhaps in other places, all kinds of rumours about the Russians might be preparing things in Saperogio, Hesson, or wherever. So the one place you need to keep quiet when it is quiet is Kharkov region. You don't want to have to overextend your forces and stretch your lines. So the one thing you should have done after the 2022 offensive, which went well for you, is that do exactly what you said, build defence lines there, build proper defence lines in case the Russians get some idea of coming back. And in all other respects, keep the situation there as quiet as possible. Zelensky, Budonov, and whoever are their minders in London and Washington did exactly the opposite. They attacked the Russian border villages. They shelled Belgorod. They're still doing that as we speak. They made all kinds of casual cycles, all sorts of scary and fantastical plans about capturing Russian nuclear bases, if that's what they were really up to, which I think they probably were, by the way. They went, they did all of that. And of course, all they did was they provoked a Russian reaction, which is now turning into a disaster for themselves. It's a completely stupid strategy. And one that made no sense, and they should have been warned against doing. I mean, you know, always remember Washington and London had the power of veto over this kind of thing, but they never exercised it. All the indications are that they were happy for Budonov and company to do this sort of thing. And the reason is, because the entire strategy, the entire war strategy for Ukraine is to create chaos in Russia in order to bring about regime change in Moscow. And we see what it is doing instead. And also made for very nice media headlines. Excellent. The Collective West. Exactly. Yeah. So one of those people that admires Budonov, or that admired Budonov, I believe may be teaching a course in Columbia University, just saying. But anyway, Alexander, before you wrap up the video, let's talk briefly about this plan from German MPs, Green Party, CDU, actually across the entire political spectrum left, right center, about launching missiles from Poland and Romania to intercept Russian missiles in the west of Ukraine. What do you make of this scheme from the German MPs? You're quite right. It is a scheme. That's the first thing to say. It is not a plan. It makes no military sense. I mean, they're talking about air defense missiles. Air defense missiles have a relatively limited range. If you start installing, say, Patriot air defense missile interceptors, or even THAAD air defense missile interceptors, in this part of Europe, they cannot interfere with the fighting in Donbass or in Eastern Ukraine, or even Kiev. But anyway, it is a disastrous idea. The Russians have already said that if Western forces, if EU, NATO states become bases, actual bases for military operations in Ukraine, then they will consider the territories of those countries to become part of the theatre of the war. And they will attack those air defense positions in Romania and Poland. And all that it will achieve is that it will extend the war into Europe. Exactly what the Germans, the Poles, the Romanians, all of these countries logically ought to want to prevent. Now, why are they coming up with these disastrous ideas now? It's because they're losing the war, and they're getting desperate, and they're becoming more panic-stricken, and they're coming up with these increasingly crazy and bizarre schemes in order somehow to turn things around. And of course, it's very dangerous, because at some point, someone might decide to put one of these crazy schemes into operation. But for the moment, at least, we hope that zenar cancels will prevail. The Americans don't seem to be on board with this one, and I can't imagine that the Poles, and certainly not, the Romanians, will welcome it either. So I hope it's not going to come into play, but it's a crazy disastrous idea, and one which, even if it was implemented, could not change the outcome of the war, but would put countries like Poland and Romania in great danger, and which might easily extend the war to Europe. All right, we will enter there at the Duran.locals.com. We are on Rumble Odyssey, but you tell the grand rock fin and Twitter exit, go to the Duran shop, pick up some limited edition, merch the link is in the description box down below. Take care. [Music]