They surely got one now: 

It is, of course, a planned action preceding referenda of four oblasts (regions) of former Ukraine to join Russia, which they will join most likely by the 1st of October and will need troops stationed at the new borders of the Russian Federation while the further roll towards Nikolaev and Odessa commences. Kharkov could be the target too.

For those who still drink Kiev's regime Kool Aid, Shoigu today went on record and stated the number of KIAs of Russian forces since the start of SMO (in Russian)--it is 5, 937 KIAs. Shoigu also stated that number of VSU KIAs is counted as 61,207 per Russian (usually very conservative) estimates. It was also confirmed that Kremlin refused to speak to Macron after his call to Moscow today (in Russian)--there is nothing to talk about with Europe. I am sure they are preparing new "package" of sanctions, like... like... not buying Russian... beer or something. To give a bit of a context to all that:

They cannot stop inflation, because they don't know how. Because they don't know how real economy works, but sense where it is all going--not a very good destination, to put it mildly.

 ... but Moscow held yet another festival of military orchestras Spasskaya Bashnya (Spasso Tower) two weeks ago and, boy, did Egyptians kill it.  

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So much changed. But then again, Mireille's voice never dies. Unlike France...

From me today. This is how the strategy (not just military strategy) is implemented on the national level. 

Now, that the hysteria about "losing" Balakleya and Izyum (quotation marks are deliberate) due to this famous VSU "offensive" has subsided, and once the issue of the Kherson catastrophe for VSU is considered, we may confidently state that the whole thing was very deliberate on the Russian side. Fast backward to the start of SMO--this is for those who already forgot--and recall what was the main issue then? Right, if you recall--it was the question of how the Russian Army will be "taking" urban centers, such as Kiev or Kharkov. This was also the issue of both Pentagon planners and Western propaganda which was built prior to SMO on the assumptions (wrong ones) that Russians will go for the jugular and start taking down the regime by means of taking its main cities. Naive (and incompetent) people, what can one say. They thought that by prodding Russia to get into the cities where they prepared (for Pentagon and British General Staff it means hiding behind civilians) "defenses" Russians would bleed and provide a copious amount of propaganda fodder. 

There was one issue with that--neither US or UK ever fought real defensive battles on a strategic level, Russians wrote a book on them. They didn't read this book in D.C. and in London. Apart from inevitable peeling off VSU "defenses" in Donbas, with all those towns and hamlets turned into one huge fortified area (укрепрайон) where VSU could and did hide behind the backs of civilians, the Russian Army never went INTO any large urban center as Western planners hoped for using a primitive cliche thinking that if Russians took Grozny, Russians and SAA took Aleppo, Russians took Crimea, then they surely would take Kharkov, Kiev etc. So, for Pentagon "thinkers" who do think in cliches, the fact that every Soviet and Russian officer was and is taught to apply historic military lessons CREATIVELY (творчески применять уроки военной истории к современной войне) to the modern war, was and is unknown. After all, the image of Russian automatons with arithmometers who cannot think beyond the framework of instructions...

This study was prepared for the Historical Division, European Command, by a group of former German generals and general staff officers. The names of the contributors are not announced at this time. The principal author, who by the end of the war had attained the rank of full general (Generaloberst), served on the Eastern Front throughout the Russian campaign and the subsequent retreat into the northern plains of Germany. He was successively commander of an infantry brigade, of a panzer division from November 1941 to February 1943, and of two different corps in the battles for Kharkov and Belgorod during 1943. Appointed commander of a panzer army on 1 December 1943, he participated in the withdrawal in the south until the Germans reached the Carpathians. In August 1944 he was transferred to Army Group Center, and his last assignment was with Army Group Weichsel. During this final phase of his military career he played an important part in the retreat from Lithuania, East Prussia, and Pomerania.

The reader is reminded that all publications in the GERMAN REPORT SERIES were written by Germans from the German point of view and that the procedures of the German Army differed considerably from those of the United States Army. Authorized German tables of organization and equipment, official German combat doctrine, or standard German staff methods form the basis for improvisations throughout this study. As prepared by the authors, this study consisted of a collection of 157 examples of improvisations which were screened by the editors for pertinence, clarity, and interest to the American reader. Moreover, an attempt was made to establish common denominators for the great variety of examples. Although the manuscript was completely reorganized during this editorial process, every effort was made to retain the point of view, the expressions, and even the prejudices of the authors.

But who heeds those warnings? The idol of the US armor forces, General George S. Patton was considered by Germans themselves to be the most "German" American general, not to speak, of course, about Patton's attitude towards Russians as Untermensch. So, no matter how one plays it, the US Army was mightily influenced by Germans not only in the shape of the US Army helmets which look very much like good ol' Stahl Helmets of Wehrmacht coinage but, most importantly, what was UNDER those helmets, and those are brains. Obviously, the truism of learning from the best does not apply to modern US ground forces and, as the result, the whole plan for Ukraine went belly up first when Russian allied forces managed to wipe out the initial army of several hundred thousands of VSU and their Nazi formations, and are now in the phase of annihilating the second iteration of VSU, which, finally, was lured out into the open first at around Kherson starting from August 27, and now with this "famed" VSU "offensive" drowned in blood and largely extinguished around Kharkov--all in the OPEN terrain, mind you. They were lured out of their safe havens behind civilians in urban centers. 

Now, elaborations start on if those suicidal offensives were done for internal PR purposes in the US, for the benefit of the DNC, or was it a perfectly timed bait by Russians? Here is something to consider. Larry notes today:

Did You Know that Ukrainian soldiers are “routing Russian forces and collapsing Russia’s northern Donbas axis?” Nope, I did not know that. But thank God we have retired General Dave Petraeus to clue us in.

After that he proceeds to demolish the whole "establishment" narrative (a euphemism for BS) and he starts with a phrase because of which I had to wipe my monitors after me spewing my coffee. 

Turns out that General Dave experienced premature military orgasm.

LOL. But apart from obvious slavery to narrative, can we state that most of those retired and serving US generals who "consulted", a euphemism for Command and Control, VSU on those offensives got caught or, rather, bought the strategic "picture" constructed by Russians hook, line and sinker? I say, all signs in favor of this conclusion are there. I reiterate: the US doesn't have real operational experience with strategic, theater wide, defensive operations at all. Mind you, the length of the front in Ukraine is around 1,200 kilometers. After that, ask yourself a question why Russians are content with physical annihilation of the different iterations of VSU and scores of foreign "mercenaries", many of who are merely cadre NATO personnel with a shallow undercover "legend" of a volunteer. 

They are learning about real war with their peers on the job, and those who survive... But, as I already stated, the US simply has NO experience since 1950 in developing a national strategy that is fully integrated with the political, economic and military aims of the state (nation) globally. And here is the reason: not only can we observe a dramatic decline in competence and expertise of America's top brass, but the US political system prevents this in the most radical way by both sacrificing everything at the altar of partisan politics and sheer incompetence and corruption of America's political "elites" who are in the pockets of different interest groups. Moreover, no American military leader ever fought a peer, who, incidentally, if someone decides to do the unthinkable, can psychically annihilate a combination of enemies by wiping their countries off the map. Nor, as empirical evidence shows, did the United States produce a serious geopolitical and military thinker in ages, resorting to promoting sophomoric geopolitical and military BS as some serious scholarly achievement in "strategy". Laughable, who are those "strategists"? Fukuyama? Brzezinski? Kissinger? Petraeus? Ben Hodges? Seriously? What, did they ever win anything?

As the events of the last three + weeks demonstrated so well, US military exists primarily for laundering huge budgets and in the state of a perpetual self-praise against the background of its best-ever peer which is not only ran by NATO but now also is manned with NATO personnel, being obliterated on a scale which NO NATO military can take without disintegrating. It is the issue of REAL operations and of REAL strategy as executed militarily for the benefit of a national strategy as defined by the political top which is working for the benefit of the nation, a notion which is unknown to the United States in the last 60 years, because in the end the United States failed to coalesce into a real nation, and I wrote three books on that. Everything starts from there. But then again, what do I know? 

In related news:

I am telling you, there are still a few competent and realistic people in the US and if one would expect the place where they are, that surely has to be the US Navy and nobody questions its pedigree, for all its problems. So, this is your primer for late Monday. My root canal went really easy, especially compared to one a few months ago.