Moon of Alabama [MoA]

The knives are out in the fight over the Ukrainian throne.

Various Ukrainian media (in Russian) report of plans to fire this or that general. Andrei Yermak, Zelenski’s chief of office and the real power behind him, is currently in the U.S., allegedly to get the okay for firing the commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian army General Zaluzny. Other Ukrainian media are calling for Zaluzny to become the new president. Tomorrow CIA director Burns is expected to be in Kiev to tell Zelenski that his time is up and that he, Zelenski, will have to go.

Simplicius writes:

It appears obvious that two competing factions are trying to outdo each other in the sphere of Western media. Zaluzhny fired his shot in the unsanctioned Economist piece, and it would seem that Zelensky backers are doing their own parallel counter-work.

Larry Johnson reminds of the larger powers who are behind this fight:

One critical point I failed to make in yesterday’s article regarding the competing narratives regarding Zelensky and General Zalushny — it looks like the Brits are backing Zalushny while the CIA is trying to save Zelensky and dump Zalushny. I base that conclusion on the fact that the Economist, a British publication with close ties to MI-6, gave Zalushny the celebrity treatment, while the Washington Post, the go-to rag for the CIA, blamed Zalushny for Nord Stream.

Fun to watch, unless you are on the front line.

There, things are getting worse for the Ukrainian army day by day.

The Ukraine wasted so many troops for impossible endeavors, to hold Bakhmut and in its the senseless ‘counter-attack’ against impregnable Russian lines, that it now lacks the troops to hold its defense lines.

Six weeks ago the former British defense minister Ben Wallace urged the Ukrainian government to draft more young people to fill the lines:

The average age of the soldiers at the front is over 40. I understand President Zelensky’s desire to preserve the young for the future, but the fact is that Russia is mobilising the whole country by stealth. Putin knows a pause will hand him time to build a new army. So just as Britain did in 1939 and 1941, perhaps it is time to reassess the scale of Ukraine’s mobilisation.

In a recent interview with the Ukrainian Pravda the Economist writer Shashank Joshi took a similar line:

Q: Are there resources to escalate trainings of Ukrainian soldiers abroad?A: I would say that one of the biggest challenges, really, right now is, first of all, being able to mobilise more young Ukrainians, which, as you know, is a challenge, and a political issue and a social issue.

The ignorance displayed in those British statements becomes evident when one takes a look at the Demographics of Ukraine:

When the Soviet Union dissolved in the late 1980s the economy of Ukraine went into a tailspin. People were suddenly very poor with no jobs available for them. They thus refrained from having children. Others fled when the war started and some of the young men were killed in the war.

While there are now some three hundred thousand Ukrainian men at the age of 40 there are less than a hundred thousand men at the age of 25.

As there are so few men and women of that reproductive age there are also only few new babies. Becoming independent was a social-demographic catastrophe for Ukraine that will haunt the country for the next hundred years.

 

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2023/11/ukraines-demographics-dictate-to-end-the-fight.html#more