Showing posts with label Baltic Sea. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Baltic Sea. Show all posts

Thursday, September 29, 2022

Hubris and Strange Coincidence.

There is, I'd note, no proof that Donald J. Trump is a Russian agent.

Nonetheless, two days after the Russians (we suspect) blew a hole in their own gas pipeline to Germany for no rational reason, our former President, who is now in trouble for all the classified information he packed home to his golf resort dwellings, come out with this steaming pile of pooh.


What the crap?

And what hubris.

"I will head up group???"

You have to be joking.

What idiot would want the same man who betrayed Afghanistan into Taliban hands and made twenty years of American, and Allied, effort there meaningless to head up a delegation to try to sort out the war between Ukraine and Russia, a war we might note which Trump buddy Putin is losing badly.1 

What would his solution be?  Russia takes half of Ukraine, 3/4s of Poland, and a slice of Lithuania to go?

Only a diehard Trump loyalist seriously would believe that Russia would not have raped Ukraine if Trump were President, although you can surely believe that the United States would have done nothing whatsoever to stop it.  Nothing.  The war would be over, alright, with Ukraine in Russian hands and a followup guerilla war in Ukraine going on right now.  Biden's leadership on this topic at least has been monumental.

And why does this come out now?

That's the odd thing.

As noted, there's no evidence that Trump is a Russian agent.

There's reason to suspect he's a Russian asset, probably unknowingly.

But it's sure easy to have suspicions, if, for no other reasons, his own actions, which is in fact probably the only reason, which is why it probably also isn't true.

Anyway you look at it, this offer is beyond absurd.

Footnotes:

1. After posting this, I actually saw a recycled Twitter, or maybe Truth (sic) Social tweet in which somebody cheered "this is how a real President acts".

Not a really good President.

Also, according to the Washington Post, Tucker Carson suggested, which is different from actually stated, that the US may have sabotaged the pipeline.  I'm not going to link into the original Carson broadcast as I can't stand him, but if Carson suggested that, I find it difficult in the extreme to believe that he believes that's possible. At this point, anyone still listening to him, really ought to stop.

Nord Stream Sabotage

So this occurred:1

Danish defense video of gas venting to the atmosphere from severed Nord Stream pipeline.




But why?

This assumes, of course, that the Russians did it, in which case, they sabotaged their own pipeline.

The Nord Stream pipeline refers to two natural gas pipelines, now both severed, that run under the Baltic from Russia to Germany, supplying gas to the latter.  Nord Stream 1 is owned by Nord Stream AG, whose majority interest owner is the Russian state gas company Gazprom.  Nord Stream two is planned to be operated by Nord Stream 2 AG, which would be wholly owned by Gazprom.  If the Russians damaged it, they severed what amounted to a stream of revenue. . . save for it being shut down right now due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Wars don't last forever, and logic would presume that the Russians would want to open the spigots back up after the fighting is over.  Now, they can't.  Or they can't until it's repaired.  And now it might never be.  Liking burning the boats, right now they can't go back, and neither can Germany.  The Germans are going to have to get gas somewhere else.

Well, they've already started to, but they'll have to further look for it. They actually have to do it.

So why?

Well, right now, it's pretty darned hard to figure out why the Russians actually do anything whatsoever.  They seem to be on a rampaging ride of ineptitude and incompetence.  Their army, once presumed to be one of the best in the world, has been proven inept, with thin depth, in Ukraine.  They have been outfought and outmaneuvered right and left by a smaller power.  They're calling on reserves that they must not really have, as they're sending men who have only a year of service right into combat.  They're actually bringing back blocking units to keep their army from retreating.  Their equipment, which I was never impressed with, has been proven to be junk.

And rather than attempt to declare victory and go home, or negotiate a sane face-saving peace, they're doubling down and annexing territory they may very well have no ability to hold on it, while at home men are voting with their feet.  

Nothing they've done has worked, and everything that Russian military pundits have called for has failed or is failing.

What good could blowing up your own pipeline serve?

Is it a warning to Germany that they could make things worse, that's supposed to cow the BDR into a greater level of neutrality?  Is it a signal to Europe that they'd better take Russia seriously or Russia will take its ball and go home?  

If so, that isn't working.

Is it a false flag operation designed to provide an excuse for harsher actions against Ukraine?  If so, it's not believable that Ukraine could have severed an undersea pipeline in the Baltic, and it doesn't seem like Russia can be any harsher on Ukraine than it already is trying to be.

Is it to provide an excuse for expanding the war west, under the pretext that the Poles or the Germans did it?  If so, there's no reason to believe that the Russians can do any better against the Poles than they already are against Ukraine, and they definitely can't do better against Germany, let alone NATO at large.

Or is it just for interior consumption in a country that's sending men into combat without training for a cause that rank and file Russians aren't seemingly that keen on?

Footnotes:

1. This entry was started before Donald J. Trump posted his absolutely incredibly hubristic comment that he would serve as negotiator due to this event.

Trump will be lucky if he doesn't end up serving time.  That he's suggest acting as a mediator is, well, simply beyond belief.

Thursday, July 28, 2022

Friday, July 28, 1922. A triple recognition.

The United States established diplomatic relations with all three Baltic States and appointed Evan E. Young as the ambassador to all three countries.

A political cartoon from the July 28, 1922 Chicago Tribune.


Saturday, July 9, 2022

Thursday, July 9, 1942. Hitler splits his forces.

Hitler split his forces by ordering that Army Group South be so divided, with Group A to seize Rostov-on Don and continue into the Caucasus while Group B was to drive through Stalingrad and on to Astrakhan, a city on the Volga near the Caspian Sea.

Stalin authorized strategic withdrawals in the face of advancing Axis forces, the first time this had been done by the Soviet dictator.

To at least a certain extent, the German actions at this point reflected the original thinking behind Barbarossa.  The Germans thought themselves on the verge of capturing the Caucasian oilfield which they needed, to their thinking, to defeat the British.  They had also taken the Soviet grain belt as well.  Beyond the Volga was largely tractless wilderness, in their view, and they didn't fully conceive of the war really extending beyond that point.

The Soviets, of course, didn't regard being driven east of the Volga as defeat.

Sarah Sundin notes the following on her blog:

Today in World War II History—July 9, 1942: US Navy assigns Lt. Cdr. Samuel Eliot Morison the task of writing the US naval history of WWII, which will run to 15 volumes.


Morison was a professional and academic historian, with a profession at Harvard, where he eccentrically became the last professor to arrive at the school on horseback.  His position commenced before World War One, in 1915, but he temporarily left to enlist in the U.S. Army as a private during the war.  Following the war, he served on the Baltic Commission of the Paris Peace talks.  He then returned to Harvard.

He did not enter the Navy until 1942, in which he was asked to take on the role as Naval historian by Franklin Roosevelt.  In his role, he was active in witnessing combat.  His history of the Navy during the war would be fifteen volumes in length.  He retired from the Navy in 1950, and was promoted to the rank of  Rear Admiral.  He retired from Harvard in 1955 and died in 1976.

Of minor note, Samuel Eliot Morison (one "r") is sometimes confused with Rear Admiral George Stephen Morrison, who was a career combat officer in the Navy and who was the father of famed rock star, Jim Morrison.

Morison's history of the Navy is regarded as an authentically important and significant work of history.

German Ju88s damage PQ17's El Capitan and the SS Hoosier, but the first ships of the embattled convoy start pulling into Archangel.  At the same time, Convoy WP 183 comes under heavy attack by German torpedo boats, which sink six ships of the convoy.  German aircraft sink an additional ship.

It's often claimed that torpedo boats didn't live up to their promise during the Second World War, but this event certainly was a successful one for them.

In the Baltic, Soviet submarine S-7 sank Swedish coast freighters ten miles off the Swedish coast, sinking one.  It was carrying coal from Germany to Sweden.

In a part of the war that had grown somewhat quiet, Finns counterattacked a Soviet beached on Someri in the Gulf of Finland and defeated the Soviet invasion force.