Western media have finally change course. They are now admitting that the much promoted Ukrainian counter-offensive has failed. In fact, the acknowledge that it never had a chance to win in the first place.
The Hill, the Washington Post and CNN now agree that the Ukrainian army will never achieve its aims.
western MSM has a rare encounter with reality!
That makes it difficult for the Biden administration to get Congress approval for $24 billion in additional 'aid' to Ukraine. It does not make sense to pay for a cause that is evidently lost.
b seems overly hopeful regarding the rationality of US congress, but i think hes right- why would we throw more money at them, US politicians have made it clear they do not support bringing Ukraine into NATO if they do not win this conflict. of course, US politicians are prone to lying and misleading
Nothing has come from the 'peace conference' which Saudi Arabia arranged on Ukraine's behalf
lol. lmao even. props to big dog MBS for trying
Despite the onslaught of bad news the Ukrainian army is still trying to take Russian positions in the south and east of Ukraine. But it simply does not have enough in men and material to break through the lines.
Even if they would manage to get a local breakthrough there are not enough reserves to push for the necessary follow up. Just one of the NATO trained brigades has still been held back. All others have been mauled in their various deployment zones.
nothing has changed it seems
In the northeast around Kupyansk the Russians have started their own offensive which has the Ukrainians on the run. Ukraine has ordered the evacuation of the area
But Kupyansk is a Russian city and people refuse to leave.
show this to the libs claiming Russians are committing genocide in the regions they capture. curious that these civilians are content with Russian occupation when you believe what western media claims
The Russian campaign is slowly speeding up. As the Ukrainian Strana.news reports (machine translation):
Also in Ukraine, it is recorded that from Kupyansk to Bakhmut, Russia has increased the number of attacks.
"Over the past month, the total number of attacks in the Kupyansk, Limansky and Bakhmut directions has grown significantly. In July, during the week there were 6-6.5 thousand attacks, during the last week-9 thousand attacks, " - said the representative of the National Guard Ruslan Muzychuk.
According to him, the Russian Federation does not experience "shell hunger".
Aviation is also actively used, and over the past few weeks, more than 50 air attacks have been taking place every day, and sometimes more than 80.
That is bad news for the Ukrainian side which lacks the reserves to counter the Russian onslaught. There are also less weapons coming in from the West. F-16 fighter jets will be delayed for another nine months due to training issues. Tanks and other material are in short supply.
these supply issues sure bode well for the west’s performance in WW3 
Strana also report of an interview with a knowledgeable Ukrainian soldier (machine translation):
Continuing the topic of the situation at the front, an interesting interview was given by a Ukrainian sniper fighting near Bakhmut with the call sign "Grandfather". On the air of political scientist Yuri Romanenko, he was introduced as Konstantin Proshinsky (this is a pseudonym).
The fighter spoke in detail about his vision of the situation of the Armed Forces of Ukraine and the Russian army.
- Mobilization. In his opinion, it is conducted incorrectly. Recruits are sent to the front who have never been trained, and they are often over 50 years old and with a whole bunch of diseases.
- No rotation. The soldier says that "the same brigades" are fighting at the front, and people are not taken out of the front line for six months or more. Whereas by Western standards, they can be kept in a war zone for no more than three months.
- Behavior of mid-and high-level commanders. According to Proshinsky, many of them are trying to arrange a "mini-Stalingrad" on the positions, forcing them to go into frontal assaults on well-fortified Russian positions.
- The Russian Army began to fight better.
- Proshinsky believes that Russia has not yet used much of what it has against Ukraine.
The soldier thinks that the Russians will not move from their positions and that a stalemate peace like in Korea would be the end result.
UAF in real dire times— recruiting the elderly, poor logistics, engaging the enemy at inopportune times, and Russia has yet to waver
I believe that to be wrong. Russia's aim is to liberate at least the four regions that it has claimed for itself. For political reasons it can not stop before that is done.
Should the Ukraine continue to fight after that, Russia is likely to set new aims and take more land.
more editorializing, but it doesnt seem unreasonable. i thought Russia would stick to its original goal of Donetsk and Luhansk, but if Zaporizhzhia and Kherson are receptive to Russian governance, it would be foolish for Russia to give them up
could you elaborate on what you mean by this? Like, they're extremely worried about a large tech gap between the US and China?
Major spoiler for the Three Body Problem
In the novel, the Trisolarians used super advanced alien tech to screw with particle accelerators on Earth and effectively locking out Earth’s scientific progress, to ensure that when the alien invasion fleet arrives some 400 years later, Earth would not be able to invent and build formidable defenses in the meantime.
This plotline was repeatedly raised in Chinese media last year when Biden decided to lock China out of accessing foreign semiconductor technology. A lot of people took the Trisolarian-Earth conflict to be an allegory of a US-China war in the future.
Ok so that is what I was assuming, but it doesn't quite make sense to me, are they afraid to do tech embargos in return for fear of further retaliation?
Also, would this kind of support my idea that part of the reason they haven't accelerated their transition to a fully planned economy is that they want to fully build up their self-sufficient semiconductor industry first?
There is no proportional response to semiconductor technology sanction from the Chinese side. You can embargo certain raw materials and components that are necessary for semiconductor fabrication, but nothing much beyond that.
China is not going to return to the “Maoist planned economy” stage, the era of planners has long gone. To understand China’s economic philosophy of the past two decades, you need to understand Justin Lin Yifu’s New Structural Economics, which touts the principles of 后发优势 (latecomer’s advantage), meaning that China will let the advanced economies to invest in high tech R&D and use its latecomer’s advantage for mass fabrication on the industrial side. Interestingly, Lin himself was a protege of Theodore Schultz, the co-founder of Chicago school of neoclassical economics together with Milton Friedman. He was in fact the first Chinese PhD graduate in the Chicago school of economics.
It is a great strategy to build wealth and prosperity for the country where people can benefit from, but it comes with consequences.
It needs to be said that this was a deliberate economic strategy that China chose. In 2005, when Taiwan’s TSMC first broke through the 80nm barrier, China’s SMIC was only 1 year behind. The gap was extremely close. However, the deliberate policy back then was to focus on export-oriented consumer goods, where much of the investments eventually went into, and so their semiconductor R&D lagged behind. They were naive enough to think that the US wouldn’t dare to decouple from them if the US depends so much on their industrial products. They first learned this lesson the hard way back in 2018 when Trump started a trade war, and they are now learning the lesson again with Biden.
In other words, you can easily think of an alternative timeline where, starting from 2008 during the great financial crisis, when demands from Western consumers had slumped, China could have pivoted towards a self-sufficient self-reliant economic strategy and invested heavily in domestic high tech R&D, which would have alleviated their semiconductor problem they’re facing today. However, it turns out that weaning off the US consumer base proved to be too difficult, or they were being too optimistic of their relationship with the US, and so they now have to deal with the economic trouble they’re facing today.
Once again, actions and consequences.
Underestimating the bloody-minded insanity of European Imperialists is a repeated note in the history of the last few centuries.
Excellent post.
Shit, that sucks
where do they go from here?
Incidentally, Obama really liked the Three-Body Problem book.