#WORLD #WORLDWIDE #ITALY #ANARCHISM #News #Journal #Update - (en) #Italy, UCADI #164: Raspoutitsa - Thaw ("the time of bad roads") (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 With the arrival of autumn, the mud returns to the front in Ukraine; this

phenomenon, called "raspoutitsa" ("the time of bad roads"), will affect both
sides in the conflict, but while at the beginning of the invasion it
disadvantaged the Russians it could now damage the Ukrainian army . Although the
word that identifies it is Russian, it is well known to Ukrainians but also to
Russians and Belarusians where heavy autumn rains cause several weeks of slush.
The "raspoutitsa" arrives on time, twice a year, in spring and autumn, when rain
and sleet turn the Ukrainian territory into a quagmire, forcing those who want to
move not to leave the streets.
This meteorological phenomenon had already hit the interminable Russian columns
of tanks and troops last spring, forcing them to queue up on roads and highways,
thus becoming an easy target of Ukrainian drone attacks: now it is the Ukrainians
on the offensive who need to move quickly across the territory to make their
weapon systems and troops undetectable; they need to advance quickly and it is
the Russians who can hit the traffic on the roads that the Ukrainians are forced
to travel.
Since the beginning of October, videos broadcast by social networks have been
reporting on the extent of bad weather; the Ukrainians' MLRS rocket launchers
sink into the marshy grounds and the tanks advance with difficulty in the middle
of the fields. It is likely that the "raspoutitsa" will slow down the Ukrainian
counter-offensive in the east of the country, but it was expected. It is enough
to scroll through the military history of these places to know it, starting from
the experience that the Napoleonic troops made of them and remembering that
during the Second World War the great mechanized operations were almost
completely suspended during the great autumn rains or during the spring thaw due
to of the rasputitsa; they resumed in winter, when the ground had hardened again.
It was with the arrival of the winter of 1941 that Hitler was able to launch his
great - and failed - offensive to take Moscow ",
Now technical progress allows belligerents to clash with military or militarized
drones and other "smart ammunition", but weather remains a crucial factor. In
fact, to stop the invasion columns headed for Kiev, Ukraine mainly used a special
unit. called "Aerorozvidka", founded in 2014 during the Crimean war. Formed by
computer scientists from private industry, who developed military drones based on
commercially available models, later integrated into combat troops. equipped with
anti-tank / RPG ammunition "and formed by" 50 teams of experienced drone pilots ".

The causes of a military success

Since the beginning of the conflict, the Ukrainian army has managed to adapt the
weakness of its equipment to the Russian strike force with rocket launchers
installed on boats or commercial drones for diverted use Himars, Javelin, suicide
drones. Since this summer, the Ukrainian army has benefited from important
Western arms deliveries. "Intelligent" devices, the result of the latest
technological advances, which have allowed Kyiv to give a change to military
operations in the east of the country, where the counter-offensive has made it
possible to take over vast swaths of territory. But nothing would have been
possible without it
the adaptability of Ukrainian troops: missiles installed on trucks to be able to
transport them more quickly near targets, rocket launchers fixed on speedboats to
increase its naval strike force, etc.
The most telling example is the US-made AGM-88 High-Speed Anti-Radiation Missile
that the Ukrainians have managed to adapt to their Russian-made MIG bombers.
Long-evoked, this feat was confirmed to the press last August by a senior US
Department of Defense official.
With these missiles, Ukrainian fighter pilots can blind Russian anti-aircraft
systems, destroying them directly, with a radar integrated into the system, or
obstructing them, with a radar attached to the anti-aircraft system.
 From the earliest days of the Russian invasion, Ukrainian skies were filled with
unmanned aircraft assigned to intelligence or combat missions. Produced in China,
Turkey, USA or from Ukrainian shops, they helped the Ukrainian army a lot. The
Turkish drone Bayraktar, or TB-2, shone like this during the battle of kiev. It
would have been extremely difficult for
Ukraine to block Putin's army without drones when it was targeting the capital.
The drones have both strengthened Ukrainian intelligence and compensated for the
weakness of the air force, demonstrating that it has "a ' light aviation
surrogate against a conventional adversary ".
The tool is not new (Americans have used it in Afghanistan and Iraq), kyiv has
supplemented it using commercial drones for purposes of intelligence, damage
assessment, support / guidance artillery and attacks on enemy positions. It used
the technology of British special services and perhaps Canadian underwater drones
to carry out the sabotage operations of the North Sea pipeline (attack not
claimed) and the attack on the Russian fleet at anchor in Sevastopol, attack
instead claimed, which prompted the Russians to block the grain export deal
accusing the Ukrainians of using the grain export corridors to penetrate their
defenses.
It seems that, with British support, more autonomous "agencies" have been created
in Ukraine that carry out unofficial actions such as the murder of Darya Dugin,
daughter of Aleksandr, Putin's ideologist, blown up near the village of Velyki
Vyazomi, at the outskirts of Moscow, unbeknownst to the US secret services.

The Russian response and the change of strategy

Russia is confident in the approaching winter, shuts down the country's power
plants one by one, entrenches itself in the field to buy time, train the
reservists, arm them and take them to the front to compensate for the numerical
imbalance of the forces on the ground. Other will be competing in training with
the Ukrainian army that has been practicing for years in the structures made
available by the British and thanks to the help of NATO personnel. Meanwhile, it
is responding with Iranian Shahed suicide drones, used to attack Ukraine's
cities, power plants and every superstructure. These drones have the advantage of
reducing human intervention and therefore the number of potential victims among
the soldiers of their army.
Initially used for surveillance missions, they have become increasingly
versatile. Some devices can be implemented to weaken or obliterate targets. This
is the case of the Shahed 136, produced by the Iranian company HESA.
A weapon that Tehran handed over to Russia. I know this is a fairly large (3.5m
long and 2.5m wide, suicide drone) of low cost construction that. reaches its
target via GPS coordinates, entered before take-off. Then it evolves
autonomously, flying quite low and reaching a goal that is necessarily set at a
few hundred kilometers. Presumably the launch takes place from a rack containing
5 drones, installed on the deck of a truck. An installation that allows
flexibility, unpredictability and speed of movement and which is low cost.
For Russia, the use of these suicide drones, which entered service in 2020, is a
cost-saving measure, because it compensates for the use of precious and expensive
cruise missiles that cost between 1.5 and 2 million dollars. Coming from
countries subject to embargoes, these drones do not have precise aiming systems
and favor economy over quality control; therefore, their systems tend to have a
fairly high failure rate and appear to only hit fixed targets. For these reasons
they pose a relative threat to troops deployed in the field or on the move, but
are very difficult to detect because they fly very low. They make a lot of noise,
they can be heard coming and they terrorize the population. Like all armed drones
they are very effective when the opponent does not have the means to protect
themselves or take revenge.
which responds to the Russian change of strategy.
The Russians, in fact, no longer consider the Ukrainian population as friendly,
especially that of the cities, and so they use the Syrian method of razing every
infrastructure to the ground; and to do so they even use strategic bombers, armed
with conventional bombs, which fly high enough not to be intercepted, even if
they are necessarily inaccurate, but so be it! The massive use of these drones by
Russia reflects a form of helplessness, but the fact remains that they are
functional to the change of pace of the war that aims by Moscow to leave Ukraine
in the cold while waiting to train the recalled reservists to arms, bring them to
fight and change the balance of forces in the field.

The Ukrainian war and Europe

As Russia retreats on the battlefield, Europe is heading towards
economic-financial disaster and its productive capacity. The exorbitant costs of
energy are destroying its productive fabric, forcing low-wage entrepreneurs to
contain costs and maintain profits, increase war speculation, starve and
impoverish the population, depress consumption, sink the market, while investors
are induced to migrate to safer areas and markets. There is no doubt that Europe
is certainly the great defeat of the war, even if it is Ukrainians and Russians
who are dying.
The solutions that are sought and found to supply energy are worse than evil.
Instead of depending on a dictator (Putin), we depend on many and on a ferocious
monopolist, the United States, which holds us by the edges, and crushes them.
There are those who applaud the Russian decision to transfer the Russian oil and
gas hub to Erdogan's management, gradually building an alliance between the two
dictators that will bury us.
In perspective, the low-cost energy that could fuel industrial production and the
needs of the population will be divided between Europe's competitors: China,
India and Turkey, which will be given room to extend its influence over the area.
Turkish-speaking of Asia, in full compliance with the strategic plan of a part of
US and British politics.
In the light of these facts, the defense of the freedoms of an illiberal country
like Zelensky's Ukraine are rumors, which arouse satisfaction in the conservative
circles of London, but leave the European peoples in misery called to dream of
being able to invest in a territory devastated and polluted like the Ukrainian
one, increasingly unusable, because it was plowed by bombs and war residues,
covered with minefields, with access to mineral resources, however difficult to
exploit because they are located on the front line, with a population poisoned
and massacred by war and
civilian infrastructure destroyed.
Europe faces all this without a strategy to build peace, as a vassal country of
US interests, and feeds the war without asking for anything from its Ukrainian
ally, which in turn acts as a US sub-agent.
In Washinton they rub their hands, satisfied!

The Editors

http://www.ucadi.org/2022/10/31/r-a-s-p-o-u-t-i-t-s-a/
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