By John Helmer
Sends U.S. an SOS with huge military losses expected in Russian winter offensive
A leading Ukrainian government official has admitted that a demilitarized zone to divide the battlefield, protect the Russian east of the country from the U.S. and NATO long-range assault, and partition Ukraine is in negotiation.
“’We are currently being offered the Korean scenario,” Alexei Danilov announced on January 8.
Danilov, a native of Lugansk, is the deputy chairman of the National Security and Defence Council, and second in rank to President Vladimir Zelensky. “[This is] the so-called conditional ’38th parallel,’” he told local reporters. “Here are Ukrainians, but there Ukrainians are not like that. The Russians will now invent anything. I know for sure that one of the options they can offer us is the ’38th parallel.’”
Danilov claimed one of the sources for the proposal is Dmitry Kozak. Officially, he is a deputy head of the presidential staff. In 2020-21 he was the Kremlin’s chief negotiator on the Minsk accords with the Kyiv regime and in the Normandy format with Germany and France; for Kozak’s detailed record of those negotiations, read this.
Danilov now says Kozak “meets with former politicians in Europe and conveys through them the message that the Russians are ready to make concessions in order to fix the current status quo and force Ukraine to a truce.”
Danilov did not say that he, Zelensky and the Ukrainian-U.S. general staff have rejected the idea.
Instead, he claimed the Korean DMZ has proven to be a mistake: “Danilov said that during a recent meeting, Korean representatives noted that establishing the division of the Korean peninsula into two parts along the 38th parallel was a mistake as the concessions made in the 1950s after the end of the war between North Korea and South Korea are currently leading to problems.”
It is unclear what meeting Danilov was referring to, if any. U.S. press reporting has identified the mistake of Vice President Kamala Harris last September in misnaming the “Republic of North Korea.”
Moscow sources suspect Danilov is attempting to relieve the pressure now growing on the Ukrainian generals from the U.S. and the NATO command to consider an armistice before the Russians launch their anticipated general winter offensive.
By exposing and trying to sandbag the Americans, Danilov’s remark is a signal that the real U.S. assessment is that a much bigger loss of military capacity, territory and viable economy will be the outcome of the Russian offensive—unless the Ukrainians buy time with a ceasefire and protracted armistice talks to commence.
The reaction of the Stavka to that has been President Vladmir Putin’s explicit condemnation of the buying-time tactic after former German chancellor Angela Merkel revealed it last month, and ex-French President Francois Hollande repeated it on December 28.
“The West lied to us about peace,” Putin said in his New Year address on December 31, “while preparing for aggression, and today, they no longer hesitate to openly admit it and to cynically use Ukraine and its people as a means to weaken and divide Russia. We have never allowed anyone to do this and we will not allow it now.”
Putin also confirmed the message with a Korean gloss. “Russian servicemen, militiamen and volunteers are now fighting for their homeland, for truth and justice, for reliable guarantees of peace and Russia’s security.” The narrow 4-kilometre depth and short 240-km length of the Korean DMZ are not, Putin implied, “reliable guarantees of security.”
Danilov’s disclosure has been altogether missed by the mainstream western media, by the alternative media, and by U.S. think-tankers claiming to favour negotiations.
Moscow sources believe Danilov’s signal indicates anxiety in Kyiv, not only at the collapse of their front at Soledar and Bakhmut, but at the prospect of the following Russian offensive striking simultaneously north from Sumy to Kharkov and Poltava; in the centre around the E50 highway into Dniepropetrovsk; and in the south to blockade Odessa.
“I have not seen a serious discussion in Moscow about a DMZ at all,” according to a Moscow source and Donbass sources. They believe Danilov is reporting what the Americans are telling Kyiv.
“Kozak has been de-activated in Moscow since last July,” according to another source. “That’s why it makes all the more sense [for the Ukrainians] to refer to him and not to genuine negotiators, not to a credible Russian figure. Danilov is attempting to refuse a proposal from a non-person. He and Zelensky are putting the Pentagon at that level—in other words, they are sending a message to [Secretary of State Antony] Blinken, [Deputy Secretary Wendy] Sherman and [Under Secretary Victoria] Nuland, or whoever the Ukrainians think will save them from the U.S. military pressure now.”
The Russian sources note there has been no other public acknowledgement of the change in U.S. thinking; they interpret press reporting of promises of U.S. armoured fighting vehicles (AFVs), German and British tank deliveries to mean the reverse of the appearances. “Time will have run out for the delivery of the Strykers and Bradleys, Leopards and Challengers in the east. So these press promises of delivery are for the last-ditch fortification of the western lines defending the regime between Lvov and Kyiv. That’s between Zhitomyr and Vinnitsa, then Rivne and Chernopil.
A North American veteran source urges patience. “The Bradleys may be rushed, so the question now is whether everything the Ukrainians throw into their fight west of the Artemovsk-Soledar- Seversk line to Dniepropetrovsk, including the press-ganging of civilians in Kharkov city, is just a rearguard action to hold up the Russians and create time for the reinforcements to arrive.”
A Canadian military source says that Ontario-made Strykers “have already been delivered to the eastern lines. They know the danger of a breakthrough and are determined to at least stall it. They cannot do that without AFVs.” Russian sources published sighting one on December 31.
A Canadian press reporter took a week before acknowledging that 39 Canadian APVs had been delivered, most of them to “rear-area units for training and familiarization,” and then, after they were revealed in the local media, “in thick mud at an unidentified section of the Ukrainian front.”
A veteran of NATO tank operations in Afghanistan adds: “By necessity, the tanks come later. It takes much longer to train their crews, let alone maintenance cells. Setting up the logistics will be much harder too. In Afghanistan it took a lot to support tanks—even just a squadron of them.”
A Moscow source adds strategy: “The Pentagon might want to fend off a general Russian operation with a DMZ but the Ukrainians, the Germans and the State Department want to see the rearguard action because they believe they can exact a heavy loss of life on the Russians. I’m convinced they don’t want a DMZ until the Russians fight their way to the borders of the regions they have already incorporated. Their perception is that the Russians will be too weak to take any more. They won’t mind another meat-grinder like Bakhmut. It’s not their children dying. At worst, the Ukrainians think a DMZ would be inside or at the limit of the Russian zone. That would free them to start preparing for the next big war in a few years.”
The consensus of the Russians sources is: “These are all lose-lose propositions for us and that is why we have not heard this being discussed seriously. What’s needed is Ukrainian capitulation. This is why most Russians see armistice as a Russian surrender because it means none of the stated goals of the operation has been achieved. More than at Minsk in 2015, the Ukraine will be re-armed and prepared for the next big fight.”
Danilov’s disclosure puts into quite different context Putin’s Orthodox Christmas truce between January 6 and 7. “Upon consideration of the address from His Holiness Patriarch Kirill,” the president said, “I instruct the Defence Minister of the Russian Federation to introduce a ceasefire along the entire line of contact in Ukraine from 12.00 on January 6, 2023 to 24.00 on January 7, 2023. As a large number of Orthodox Christians reside in the area of hostilities, we call on the Ukrainian side to declare a ceasefire to allow them to attend church services on Christmas Eve as well as on Christmas Day.”
For the text of Kirill’s message, which avoided a recommendation of this kind, click to read.
In retrospect, the truce was dismissed by Kyiv, and the Russian side recorded numerous violations, including the movement of heavy artillery into range of Lugansk and Donetsk region targets. “Pigs have no faith,” Dmitry Medvedev, the ex-president and now deputy head of the Security Council, responded. “and no innate sense of gratitude. They understand only brute force.”
Following the fall of Soledar on the evening of January 10, there are signs that the Ukrainian General Staff will not continue following the orders from either Washington or Zelensky and Danilov to continue the meat-grinder defence of the eastern front, at least not until a “second line of defence” can be formed, according to the leak.
The evidence of the battlefield map is that the Russian General Staff has decided to leave open the corridors for NATO troops and arms to be resupplied from Poland, and to let Ukrainian refugees leave. However, the rail and road junctions, warehouses, vehicle lagers, electric grid units, and fuel and other storages are being hit repeatedly, west and east of Kiev.
Just think… if idiot Biden hadn’t curtailed our energy production, there would be no war. Something to really consider.
Ever hear of (soon-to-be-dead) Ryan O’Leary?
He’s blown the whistle on black market weapons and drug sales by Ukrainian military officers.
He says his men’s unit is unarmed as their CO sells their weapons to 3rd parties like in the ME.
He say’s he’s tried to go thru the “chain of command,” only to be mocked and ignored.
The money-laundering we saw going on with Hunter, Romney’s son, etc., and Burisma is also going on in the military.
Ukraine needs to be kicked to the curb, while allowing refugees from there, who don’t want to live under Putin, get into other countries.
10 million already have but millions more should get out.
Ukraine is a money pit unless you are getting a kickback, a la joe.