The Duran Podcast
FAB-3000 is breaking the Ukraine military
All right, Alexander, let's talk about the situation in Ukraine and maybe we can start with what is going on on the front lines and then we can talk some geopolitics, maybe dig into this Trump peace plan or this peace plan that was given to Trump from Kellogg and flights I believe is his name. Yeah, Reuters reported on it and maybe talk a little bit about what is the fake news in and around Korea sending an engineering unit to Ukraine. From what I understand, this was started by South Korea. Anyway, let's start. What do you want to start off with the front lines? Well, let's talk about the military situation. Now, as we've been discussing in many programs now, the Russians are advancing right across the front lines. They suddenly and completely unexpectedly, but this is now becoming the pattern. They opened up a new advance towards a town, an important town, a town of about 30,000 people, one of the main lynch bins of the Ukrainian defense lines, a place called Torresk and they suddenly attacked Torresk. The Ukrainians had thought that this was a quiet line, a quiet place on the battle fronts so they'd withdrawn most of the troops that had been defending or had been charged with defending Torresk. The result was that when the Russians did attack, the place was not as fully garrisoned as it needed to be. The Russians were able to make very rapid progress captured in all of a lot of the fortifications and positions around Torresk very quickly. Things have calmed a bit because the Ukrainians have rushed troops back, but it's the story that we see right across the front lines. The Russians hold the initiative. They attack wherever they want, whenever they want, they get steadily capture more and more territory. They have apparently reduced control by the Ukrainians of the micro district in Chassafyar, which it turns out is the most heavily fortified part of Chassafyar, to just seven buildings. These are high-rise buildings, so it's not, when we're talking about small buildings, we're talking about big ones, but it looks like the battle there is close to completion. They are closing in, in fact, they practically reached a road that lies between the Tancol Bakrosk in the west and Chassafyar in the east, which is apparently a major road. They're gradually closing and circling two important fortified Ukrainian towns, Civersk in the north and Vuglidar in the south. But for me, the big story over the last couple of weeks is the terrible casualties that the Russians claim the Ukrainians are suffering. Now we've reached a situation where the Ukrainians are losing men at the rate of about 2000 to 2000 a day. Now we discussed a short time ago that Ukrainian's suffering loss is faster than you can replace them. If it continues to lose men at the rate of 2000 a day, then it is going to lose 60,000 men in a month. Now the Ukrainians have rushed out the claim that they're mobilizing 5,000 men every day. I don't believe that claim, by the way, but that's what they say. I think the reason they've released that is because in effect they're admitting that these Russian casualty figures are essentially correct and it gives us a sense of how fast and how rapidly their forces are becoming depleted and so they want to foster the idea that despite everything their army is growing in size when all of the evidence shows that it's shrinking. Which is why are the weapons make no difference? Which is why all the weapons make no difference and cannot make any difference. And of course the Russians have still not committed their major reserves. We've again discussed this in a recent program, but my sense is that there's perhaps 300,000 Russian troops fighting on the front lines. The Ukrainian forces are about the same in number, perhaps a little less, but there's about 400,000 Russian troops. In other words, at least as many, perhaps more Russian troops still in reserves, big heavy mechanized units, still not being committed to the battle. And in the meantime, you're talking about weapons, the way the fact that the Ukrainian weapons cannot make any difference over the last couple of days, the Russians have unveiled a new weapon, the FAB 3000, and apparently its effects are devastating. And having a lot of people explaining to me what it is doing, it's an enormous bomb. It wastes three tons. It can be carried by tactical aircraft. It's the kind of, it's apparently the heaviest bomb that a tactical aircraft carries anywhere in the world. The big strategic bombers are able to carry even heavier bombs. But basically the purpose of this bomb is that it's a fortification buster. It can destroy the most heavily fortified positions. The blast wave kills any soldiers that are inside those positions. So it is devastating in terms of the casualties that it can cause. And it can also be used to target civilian infrastructure that's been used for military purposes like bridges, the big bridges across the deeper, the major railway hubs, the railway stations and places like that, you drop one of these things on one of those. And as I said, the results are terrible. And we now have lots of filming of these FAB 3000s being used on the front lines. And the effect is devastating. And the Ukrainians seem to have tried to respond to this by again deploying their Patriot missile systems close to the front lines. There was a very strange report by the Russian Defense Ministry, which people seem to have missed that the Russians have succeeded in shooting down Patriot air defense missiles after launch. I wonder whether that means that they are, you know, that this was, that they're being positioned so close to the front lines that the Russians are able to shoot down these missiles as they try to attack Russian aerial targets. It has been suggested that this was a mistake and that when the Russians refer to Patriot missiles, they really met at Atacom's missiles. But I get the sense that these Russian Defense Ministry reports are very, very carefully edited. And that looks to me unlikely. How was Ukraine doing on the mobilization side of things? There was a lot of talk on mobilization months ago, a lot of talk, a lot of reports on Ukraine's mobilization from the collective US media and from Zelensky's administration. Not much talk about it anymore. What's the point on there? Well, I mean, they're claiming that they're mobilizing 5,000 men a day. But I don't, to be frank, I don't believe that. I think that is, I think that's an absurd figure. As I said, I think it was released because they wanted to show that they're mobilizing twice as many men as they're losing. I think that was really what that was all about. What I am seeing is, yes, they are mobilizing quite a lot of people. Those people are being sent into battle with just a few weeks training. Many of them are. We've been hearing a lot about the very young people who have been mobilized, but it looks like increasingly they're being mobilizing men in their 60s. It's really not going at all well. That's my own sense of this. And these old men are sent to fight without much training. Many of them, apparently, are refusing orders to attack. There have been reports, including from some existing previous Ukrainian military units, that more and more battalions and brigades are just refusing to be sent to attack into battle when they receive orders to attack. And it all looks very sad and perhaps reflecting this and the dissension in the Ukrainian army. There's reports now that General Sierzky, who took over from General Zelusioni a few weeks ago, that his job is now on the line that he might also be sacked before long. And one of his major allies within the military, another general called Saldol, he's also just been sacked after being criticized by the Azov Brigade. They said that this general had killed more Ukrainian soldiers than any Russian general had done, which makes it seem as if more and more Ukrainian soldiers are losing faith in their high command. So this story from Ukraine media actually, because they picked this up and they amplified it about North Korea centing engineering specialists and troops to Ukraine to help out Russia. This originated from a journalist, a South Korean journalist actually, and I think it's already been pretty much debunked. But you take these reports that these stories that are getting amplified, that it's Russia that needs help of North Korea. So they do the North Korean weapons and the artillery and the troops. And then you get stories about Ukraine mobilizing 5,000 men a day. I mean, what's the purpose of these types of narrative constructions from the Zelensky regime? I mean, is this all about more money and more weapons and keeping the collective West invested in the conflict of Ukraine, which means that Zelensky in his mind gets to remain in power another couple months more or what's going on here? Right. On this particular story, I think the first thing to say is that anybody who follows Korean news should be extremely careful about accepting any report about North Korea that comes from South Korea. South Korea has, I mean, I visited South Korea. It's a very vibrant, very prosperous country. There's a lot of good things to be said about it. But the media information that comes out of South Korea, about North Korea, it's very clear to me is tightly controlled, not by the South Korean government, but it basically is controlled by the intelligence agencies in South Korea, which essentially are a local branch of the intelligence agencies of the United States. I've seen many claims that come out of South Korea about North Korea that are true. They've reported people in North Korea, top officials in North Korea who have been executed, and then they should turn up a few months later at the side of Kim Jong-un alive and well. So you should never pay any attention to this kind of thing. This story about the engineering unit being sent from South Korea to Russia, it's exactly, it's in purpose, is exactly the one that you imply. It's to basically show that the Russians are on the ropes, that they're running out of weapons, that they are running out of men, that they need top people. So they're hunting everywhere to find people and to find weapons to continue the war. So they're going to North Korea to do it. And yes, probably possibly the Russians are importing large numbers of shells from North Korea, which has a massive ability to produce shells. But it's inconceivable that they're asking the North Koreans to send engineering troops, because the North Koreans wouldn't send them anyway, because I understand that that's against their policies, and the Russians don't need them. They have huge numbers of highly qualified engineers and engineering troops and engineering construction troops. They built the sort of beacon line right across the front lines in just a few weeks. They don't need troops from North Korea. Yeah, good point. Very good point. So this brings us to another piece of misinformation, I consider it misinformation from Reuters, because they wanted to imply with this report about a Trump ceasefire in Ukraine, that this was a Trump type of planner that Trump has signed on to this plan. But when you dig into the story from Reuters, you uncover that this was two former Trump foreign policy, national security advisors, Kellogg and flights. And they put together this think tank policy paper is the best way I can describe it about how they believe a ceasefire could work in Ukraine, and they gave it to the Trump team. And we had statements from the Trump team saying, we're looking at the plan, Trump looked it over, he seemed to be positive about it, or he was okay about it. But no official statement from Trump or one of Trump's close advisors saying that this is the plan that we're going to go with if I'm elected president. It was, it was a paper a foreign policy paper about a ceasefire from two former Trump advisors presented to Trump. And Trump is looking it over as I'm sure he's looking over many ideas. But the ceasefire itself was laughable if you go through the points of the ceasefire plan, constructed by Kellogg and flights. So what are your thoughts on this whole, this whole story that that Reuters broke a couple days ago? Right now about Reuters. I should say that just as one should be extremely careful about anything about North Korea that is published in South Korea, I'm afraid you should be very equally careful about anything about the Ukraine war, or indeed Russian politics, that's published by Reuters. One way or the other, in some, through some means or rather, Reuters follows very, very closely to the orthodox political line of the British authorities. It's a British news agency. So it's going to take a very, very British line on events in Ukraine. So be very careful. I mean, Reuters can be interesting and useful, and they can sometimes provide some interesting information about the situation on the battlefront from time to time. But always, you must always take what they say with a great deal of skepticism. Now about this plan, you're absolutely right. It's not a Trump plan. It's not a Trump plan commissioned by Donald Trump. It's basically another plan repackaging this freeze of the conflict, this proposal that's been floating around now for well over a year, by the way. I first started to hear about it around April of 2023. Before Ukraine began, it's great offensive, the one in the summer which eventually failed. And the people who have been pushing it, pushing it relentlessly, are people like Richard Haas at the Council for Foreign Relations. They floated it to the Russians many times, and they're trying to float it this time to the Trump, to Trump, hoping that perhaps a Trump administration will officially adopt it as US policy. It won't fly. I've been trying to explain this now for well ever since this plan was first floated. I mean, what he basically says is, we freeze everything on the existing front lines. Russia remains into fact a control of what it has. Ukraine retains all of the rest of its territory. We enter into no long-term binding commitments about Ukraine. So Ukraine one day can join NATO, maybe not immediately, but at some point in the future. We can rearm Ukraine to the full extent that we wish. We can refuse to accept what the Russians have done, and we prepare for the next war. Now, this is the same plan that this plan, the Kellogg plan, is just a repackaging of that plan so that he can be presented to Donald Trump. There is nothing in this plan that the Russians would be interested in. They have already rejected it many, many times, but there's been endless attempts to try to get it flat to fly. You remember a couple of months ago, there was even an attempt to try to suggest that Zaluzni and Gerasimov were actually negotiating with each other for a freeze, and Seymour Hirsch was roped in to publish an article which basically said that, even though obviously, that wasn't true. So this is the plan that's been repackaged. Reuters tells us, or wants to imply to us, that it's the Trump plan. It's not the Trump plan. I hope Donald Trump, if he becomes president, is going to listen to people who have a more realistic understanding of the situation and will understand that, yes, the war does have to be brought to an end, but that he can't be continued. He can't be brought to an end in this way. Yeah, that's my final thought, is what you just said as well, which is that, whether you're looking at the Democrats, the Republicans, neocons, people like Haas or Kellogg, these guys, they don't really have any understanding of what Russia wants or what they've been saying. It seems like they haven't been listening to any of the statements that Putin has been making over the past month or over the past year, for that matter. I just find it really, really shocking, really hard to believe that they're still to this day coming out with these types of freeze plants. They're not listening at all. They're not listening at all. I remember, again, a couple of months ago, we discussed an article that has appeared in Moscow Times, several places, tiny little newspaper published in the Netherlands now. It's not based in Moscow at all, but there was one of these people who just been to Moscow. He came back, he was so angry about the fact that the Russians weren't interested in the freeze plant that he was saying, what we've got to do is get rid of Putin. We've got to get rid of Putin so that we can implement the freeze plant. I mean, they're not listening. They continue to obsess that it's Putin who's somehow standing in the way of acceptance of this plan. But they're sold on it. They've completely bought into it. I think at some level, they generally believe that the Russians will buy it, that this will be the plan, that in the end is going to be implemented, which I mean, they're completely wrong about. I think Donald Trump hopefully will understand that if he's elected. However, this will end. It's not going to end with this plan. I agree. All right. We will end the video there, the duran.logs.com. We are in Rumble Odyssey, but you tell the Grand Rock fan and Twitter X and go to the Duran Shop. Use the code football24. The link is in the description box down below. Take care. [music]