Bellingcat’s Christo Grozev: ‘Prigozhin will either be dead or there will be a second coup’
Financial Times skrev:I ask Grozev whether he thinks Russia would have the means to influence next year’s US presidential election. He replies without pause: “Putin’s strategy in the Ukraine war is clearly to delay any military outcome until the US elections. He hopes western support will be throttled by a Trump victory.”
I press him, a little sceptically, on whether Putin can sway the 2024 outcome. “The risk comes from the engagement of AI [artificial intelligence] in election interference, which is the first time we will see it,” Grozev says.
“The problem is that AI is in the hands of people like Elon Musk. What they say is correlated with Russia’s interests but their actions so far have not been. Both he and Peter Thiel are supporting Ukraine even though they are unconvinced that they should be. Their ideological brethren are criticising Ukraine. I am afraid of the moment when they will start supporting the other side — ‘Let’s give some of our unpublished AI tools to the Russians as well.’ That’s my fear.”
I suggest another possibility is that Putin will not last that long. The recent attempted coup by Yevgeny Prigozhin, Putin’s former caterer, whose business empire included the Wagner mercenary group, was predicted by Grozev. “I said last January that Prigozhin would turn on Putin within six months — and it just fit within my time frame,” he says.
Här är en intressant intervju med Christo Grozev, en grävande journalist för Bellingcat. Grozev förutspår att Putin och Prigozjin inte är klara med varandra.
Enceladus skrev: ↑måndag 10 juli 2023 13:12
Putins blodiga köttkvarn fortsätter att mala. Här är en ny uppskattning av stupade i kriget, dock exklusive separatister, saknade samt lätt skadade soldater.
30K Russian Soldiers Confirmed Killed in Ukraine – Independent Tally
The Moscow Times skrev:Over 30,000 Russian soldiers have been killed in Ukraine since the start of the Kremlin’s invasion a year and a half ago, according to an independent tally conducted by the independent Mediazona news website and the BBC’s Russian service.
[...]
Among the 30,003 dead servicemen identified by the outlets are more than 2,400 officers of the Russian Armed Forces, 284 of whom were in the rank of lieutenant colonel or higher.
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Last month, in a separate tally, Mediazona and the independent Meduza news website reported that the number of soldiers killed could be around 47,000. The journalists used a surge in probate cases opened for men under the age of 50 since the start of the war to calculate this figure.
Antalet bekräftade stupade ryssar i kriget har precis passerat 30 000. Sannolikt finns det minst lika många obekräftade. CIT gör
följande uppskattning:
Conflict Intelligence Team skrev:Mediazona [independent Russian media outlet] and BBC News Russian, in collaboration with a team of volunteers, continue counting confirmed Russian losses. We believe that it would not be entirely accurate to refer to it solely as the count of killed Russian servicemen, as it includes, among other, convicts, for whom the wounded-to-killed ratio is very different. It would be more correct to call this count the overall human losses of the Russian side. It is worth noting that it does not include killed volunteer fighters from the “LPR” and ”DPR” as there is almost no information available on them. As of Aug. 3, the reported death toll is 29,217. Subtracting 2.5 thousand Wagner Group mercenaries and tentative 4 thousand Wagner convicts (we believe that only a fraction of 5.5 killed convicts were associated with the Storm-Z units of the Russian MoD), we get 22 thousand killed servicemen confirmed by obituaries. Using our methodology, which we explained earlier, we get up to 60 thousand killed and 180 thousand wounded Russian servicemen.
The Chief of Staff of the Wagner Group with the call sign Marx has claimed that 78,000 mercenaries participated in the current invasion, with 49,000 of them being former convicts. As of the seizure of Bakhmut on May 20, 22,000 mercenaries were killed and 40,000 were wounded, resulting in an approximate wounded-to-killed ratio of 2:1.
Russian losses in total:
Killed: Roughly 60,000 soldiers + 22,000 Wagner Group members = 80,000 people.
Wounded: About 180,000 soldiers + 40,000 Wagner Group members = 220,000 people.
Therefore, the cumulative tally of killed and wounded on the Russian side, which can be designated as the total losses, exceeds 300,000 people at the moment. It's worth noting that those repeatedly wounded might be counted several times in this calculation.
Därtill tillkommer alla separatister som skickades i mänskliga vågor ukrainska ställningar. Enligt Rob Lee har ryska styrkor äntligen
lämnat Urozhaine!
Ukraine is winning the war with Russia, but it won’t be over by Christmas
The Times skrev:The artillery war remains crucial. The Russians are still firing more rounds overall but the Ukrainians now have the better weapons: the Kremlin’s forces are having to adapt to the unfamiliar experience of being outgunned and outranged. With their new supplies of cluster munitions and such hard-hitting weapons as the British AS-90 self-propelled gun and the M777 howitzer, the Ukrainians are slowly winning the counterbattery fight. They are also wearing out gun barrels faster than they can replace them.
[...]
The problem is that neither side is ready for meaningful negotiations. Kyiv thinks it will be in a better place for talks once it has liberated more territory and begun besieging Crimea. Moscow is confident that it will weather this year’s counteroffensive and hopes that the stalemate will make the West think twice about open-ended support for Ukraine. Besides, the potential that Donald Trump could regain the White House next year has some Russian strategists (and western analysts) anticipating that the US might back away from the war.
It is therefore all the more clear that this war will be fought to a longer, harder timetable. One could argue that this summer’s fighting sets up the Ukrainians for greater success next spring. They will have even more western equipment, including US M1A1 Abrams tanks and maybe F-16 fighter jets. More importantly, they will have had more time to train on them and develop their own doctrines for their use.
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Meanwhile, the Russian economy is overheating. Although Moscow has worked its way around some production bottlenecks, including domestic production of Iranian “suicide drones”, it cannot replace destroyed systems at anything near the rate they are being destroyed.
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Everything depends on the long-term capacity of the Ukrainians to fight — and there are signs of war-weariness as it becomes harder to recruit or conscript soldiers — and the West’s willingness to support them. Kyiv’s prospects still look the better, but anyone who hoped or expected the war to end this year is likely to be disappointed. Instead, it is time for all those involved to think more seriously about their long-term plans for war, which may, finally, create the conditions to consider some sort of peace.
Mark Galeotti har skrivit en balanserad artikel om krigets utveckling. Tiden är på Ukrainas sida, men det kommer att ta tid att vinna kriget.
