The Duran Podcast - Ukraine air defense collapse. Zelensky's counter counter offensive Crimea plan

Episode Date: January 11, 2024

Ukraine air defense collapse. Zelensky's counter counter offensive Crimea plan

All right, Alexander, let's do an update on what is happening in Ukraine. So we have a lot of Russian missile strikes throughout Ukraine. We have indications. I believe Zelensky himself has also stated that Ukraine's air defense is in a state of collapse or is heading towards a state of collapse and depletion. And you have a lot of, in terms of... fighting taking place in Kiev. It seems like there are different factions trying to take power as support for Zelensky fades and not only support within the government, but even the popular

support of Zelensky is starting to collapse as well. So all around a very difficult situation for Zelensky. And as this difficult situation, is unfolding. We're hearing more talk about, I guess you would call it a counter to the counter offensive that is being planned, which is Herson Bridgehead, F-16s, and a march towards Crimea. There we have it. All right. Where do you want to begin, Alexander? I think let's start with the missile strikes, because we've now had three big ones in the space of three weeks, and they have been absolutely devastating. And I can say, without any equivocation, that they're creating shock right across the entire NATO system, because Ukraine has been supplied,

apparently this is correct, with more than a third of the entire missile arsenal, air defense missile arsenal that NATO has. Again, I can say with a fair degree of confidence that they've been supplied with some of the most advanced radars that NATO has, including air defense radars that apparently they got from Israel. They've all been shuttled off to Kiev. They've all been shuttled around Ukraine. This is supposed to replace the air defense system that Ukraine had last year, which was the old Soviet one, which proved pretty resilient. I mean, it got through the whole, it brought Ukraine through 2002, sorry, 2022. It got Ukraine through much of 2023. It began to break down in the spring of last year. The West painstakingly replaced it with all of these

weapons. And three Russian missile strikes, three big Russian missiles. strikes have brought it crashing down. And, you know, it's difficult to be certain that all of these reports that are, you know, because I'm getting private reports from all sorts of people who are fairly well informed about things. It's difficult to verify exactly what they're all saying. But now we're getting a cascade of open source material and they're all telling us exactly the same thing, that the Western Air Defence system has been completely overwhelmed. that the hypersonic missiles, the Kinshaw, are able to smash through and are doing colossal damage. And the very last bulletin, the very last briefing provided by the Ukrainian Defence Ministry,

they admitted, or rather they claimed, that they shot down only 18 out of 51 missiles launched. Now, typically they claim that they shoot down around 90% of them. of the missiles. So fewer than half this time. And it's, it is, it's creating shock waves right across NATO, right within obviously Ukraine itself. And even Zelensky is now coming forward. And he's saying that the air defense system is becoming dangerously depleted. Ukraine is running out of air defense missiles. And of course, the air defense missiles they have aren't working. And they're no longer claiming, way that they're shooting down all the kinshals of the last missile strike they admitted that all the kinshals that were launched against them got through so it it is a crisis and this is happening

alongside increasingly aggressive actions by the russian air force you remember in the first year of the war there were a lot of people who were saying the russian air forces you know disappeared it's not potent force on the battlefronts. Now it is all over the place. It's bombing Ukrainian positions every single day, agonized articles about it in places like the Daily Telegraph. So the Russians are winning control of the air. And they're able to strike military industrial facilities right across Ukraine. They're able to attack command bunkers, radar stations. They're able to do huge damage to Ukraine's military industrial infrastructure and the soldiers on the front lines are being now regularly and intensively bombed. So a catastrophic picture. And that's

the situation with the war in the air. And of course, it's combined with this policy of what I call aggressive attrition that the Russians are conducting all along the front lines. advancing in all sorts of places, attacking the Ukrainians, giving them no rest, no opportunity to rebuild, forcing the Ukrainians to throw in more and more of their reserves, weakening their overall battlefront position, cumulatively increasing the pressure on the battlefronts, even as the Russian military gets stronger. And I should say that just before we did this program just about, you know, half an hour ago, I saw that Choygu, the Russian defense minister, has given another speech to the Russian defense ministry. And maybe he follows our programs

because he doesn't exactly use the words aggressive attrition. When you read it, that's exactly what he's describing as being what the Russians are doing. Can you explain then why do read articles from the New York Times or from CNN, and they claim that the Patriot systems are knocking down Kinsal missiles. And then can you explain the plan that Zelensky is talking about, which, once again, a lot of the collective West media is picking up, the plan to make it to Crimea. Yes. If everything is going so poorly in the air and on the ground, then why is the media continuing to push out the stories about Kinsal's getting shot down and Kremaya building this bridgehead and Ukraine building this bridgehead and marching all the way to Kremaya as the new military strategy that the West should back? I mean, where is this coming from?

Right, I think the first thing to understand about the claims to shoot down the Kinshal missiles, and they originally, they originated within the political leadership of Ukraine. I can remember that when the first claim to a shot down Kynjal missiles was made, the Ukrainian Air Defense Command categorically denied them. They said this simply isn't true. We don't have the means to shoot down Kynjals. And then there was about two weeks pushing backwards and forwards. And clearly, a decision was made eventually from the political leadership,

that the military had to accept and go along with this narrative that they were shooting down Kinshaw missiles. And through clenched teeth, you could see it happen. The air defence leadership finally fell into line and started to run. repeat those claims. Well, they made those claims for, I think, a very straightforward reason, because the Patriot Air Defense Missile System is the U.S.'s best, most effective ground-launched air defense missile system. There are American ones, like on ships, like the Aege's system, which is said to be even more advanced.

But the US Army depends on the Patriot missile system. And it's a major export item. And it's also a key part of the defence systems that the United States is trying to build up in the Asia-Pacific region. And the United States now finds itself up against hypersonic missiles. In Russia, it finds itself up against hypersonic missiles. missiles in China and it has to reassure its allies that it has defences, air defences, against hypersonic missiles.

So the narrative was constructed that the Patriot missile system is successful in shooting down Kinshaw missiles. And this was repeated right across the board. You saw this, an article after article in the Western Commentariat. it has now collapsed. And it collapsed on the 3rd of January when lots of pictures started to appear across the internet. They've not been shown, by the way,

in the media, the mainstream media in the West. But if you go onto the internet, you'll find them. Lots of pictures appearing of missiles, Russian missiles, including Kinjail missiles, but even subsonic missiles, flying over Kiev, you see huge flashes as Kinjail missiles impact caused massive destruction. And anybody who has seen these pictures, and there are now lots of them, you know, the Ukrainian government has been trying very hard to restrict distribution of pictures and films of missile strikes, but there's been a lot of these pictures have now managed to get through.

And what they cumulatively show is that the kinshars are indeed getting through, that they're indeed inflicting massive damage. We've seen pictures of whole factories that have suffered kinshile strikes in, you know, become smoking ruins effectively. And it's become impossible any longer. convincingly within Ukraine itself to continue to preserve, to maintain this fantasy that the Kinshals are being defeated. On the contrary, it is the other way around. And the Ukrainian air defense command, which has never been happy, I think, with this myth. They're now pushing back.

They have been saying over the last couple of days that they have never, succeeded in shooting down the big Russian supersonic KH 32 missiles. These huge missiles which fly at something like a third of the speed that the KINJALs do and they don't not protected from radars by plasma fields. So in theory they should be much easier to shoot down than the KINJALs. They're admitting that they've never managed to shoot down one of these huge missiles, and that already undermines the whole Kinsjaan narrative. And of course, in the last briefing, they finally come forward and said, not a single Kinshaal missile.

In the very last missile strike that took place on the 8th of January, not a single one was shot down. So you could see that the pushback is happening because it is becoming impossible to sustain this pretense based on the facts on the ground. I should say that when the attack on the 3rd of January happened, again, the Ukrainians claimed that they shot down all the kinchals. And this was repeated right across the Western media, except, as I said, we now have film showing kinshals coming to earth, causing massive devastation. There's even a very, very dramatic picture in which you see as sort of what is clearly a kinshaw missile.

It's glowing red because of the speed it's going, coming down and hitting its target. So that myth, that fantasy, has been comprehensively debunked. But of course, it's a fantasy that the media in the West is stuck with. So that's about the Kinshals. Now, about, and the Patriots. Now, about this new plan for the offensive on Crimea, which is this absolute fantasy that has been spun together by Zelensky. And it is Zelensky, who I think is the person who is originating this. But undoubtedly, again, there are some military people who are supporting him.

Zalusini, the ground commander, clearly disagrees. he wants to go over to the defensive. There are people in Washington and the Pentagon who are advising the Ukrainians to do the same thing. But Zelensky is in an impossible political position. Now, you spoke earlier in the program about how there are now factions appearing in Kiev. He's coming in for lots of criticism from all kinds of people. We had that statement by Timoshenko that we discussed a couple of videos. ago, we've had reports of Maidan events and coup events and all kinds of things of that kind.

Zelensky, his position politically is becoming very precarious. He promised the Ukrainian people victory. He's now having more and more people coming forward in Ukraine who were involved in the negotiations that took place in March and April of 2020. admitting that those negotiations came very, very close to an agreement. We've had two of the key negotiators, Arahamia and Charlie, coming forward and saying precisely that. He's had a devastating military disaster in the summer offensive. Shoygu, by the way, has now updated his claim for total Ukrainian casualty.

last year. He says that the total number was 215,000. So you can see huge casualties. This is the Russian claims, but they are probably within, you know, the range of what is correct. So, so let's get in very, very serious political trouble. So he is now facing a situation where his hold on power is becoming precarious if the war ends. if there are negotiations. People will come back and say to him, well, if we're negotiating now, what was all that fighting for so long all about?

Why did so many people have to die when we had a potential deal in March and April of 2022? He's got no real answer to that. So he doesn't want negotiations. He doesn't want an end of the war. If the war ends, he's positioned collapses. In order, however, to sustain the war, he can't say we're going to go on to the defensive because nobody wins a war by remaining indefinitely on the defensive, or so he thinks,

he's got to continue to preserve the hope of victory. So he's now doing that by again, resurrecting this story of the Great March on Crimea. And all the bits of this new narrative, and it is a narrative, are being put in place. So the victory in the Black Sea, we've discussed this many times, the defeat of the Russian Navy that is supposed to have happened in the Black Sea. It's, as we've discussed many times, a fantasy, but a fantasy into which many people have bought into,

The Western media has entirely brought into it. Many people in Ukraine have brought into it. Even some people who are commentators, who are more, shall we say, realistic about the war, surprising to me, they brought into it as well. You have the bridgehead in Klinke. So this bridgehead, soldiers there have been smashed. They're dying in their scores.

every day. You see people being bombed. You see the missiles, the air defense systems that are there, they're being attacked every single day. But there is a bridgehead. So you say this bridgehead is preparing the ground for the offensive wishes to come. And you hold out the hope that the F-16s, when they do finally appear, are going to change the entire dynamic in the air of the air. air war. They will enable Ukraine to launch this new offensive towards Crimea, this time from a position of air superiority. The narrative about the failure of Ukraine's summer offensive, the one that happened last summer, is that it failed because Ukraine did not have air superiority. This new offensive, because of the coming of the F-16s, will have air-superiority. We'll have air-superiority.

That's the story. That's the myth that has been propagated. So you put all of these things together and you give people hope. It is a false hope of that. I have absolutely no doubt, but it is a hope. It keeps the war going and it keeps Zelensky in position. Because he can say to everybody who comes forward and tells him, you know, we've got to go on the defensive. We've got to start some kind of negotiation. We've got to do what Timmy. We've got to do what Timmy. Mushenko said, come up with a plan B. Zolensky will say, no, you are defeatists. I am, you know, Churchill, I will win this war. Just give me half a million men. That's what the mobilization is for. Give me the F-16s and I will give you victory. Right. I've destroyed the Black Sea. I've got a bridgehead and I'm going to have F-16s. And soon we're going to be marching towards Crimea, which is only 60 kilometers away. Yeah. And that's probably also why they spun the whole narrative of the grain exports from the Black Sea

and how he's able to move to move grain out of the Black Sea. And ships are able to operate out of the Black Sea because Russia is just not capable of preventing. operations in the Black Sea from taking place because their entire fleet has been demolished by the Ukraine military. It's all nonsense. But, you know, yeah, are you getting the sense that the United States is very nervous about delivering the F-16s to the Ukraine military out of fears that the F-16s are going to meet the same fate as the leopard tanks. And the whole leopard tank thing has been a huge embarrassment

for Germany, but more importantly for Germany, the military industry in Germany has been completely embarrassed by the debacle of the leopard tanks. I'm just getting a sense that all these delays with the F-16s, we've had another delay the other day. There was another delay announcement from Denmark and Norway. The U.S. has said that the F-16s are not going to be ready to the end of uh... two thousand twenty four i'm just getting a sense that the the pentagon is starting to say you know if the f-16s enter ukraine and if we have this this nightmare that we saw play out with the the leopard tanks happen to the f-16s you know if the patriot

missile system is an important product of the u s m i c m i c well the f-16s i mean you're talking about this is there core, their core business product. I mean, they base their entire business on this, on this product. The F-16, the F-35. I mean, it doesn't get more important than this product for the MIC in the United States. So are you getting a sense that maybe the Pentagon is saying, you know, let's just hold off on this F-16 thing because if the myth of the F-16, if the F-16, if you're a this gets shattered by the Russians and, you know, our industry's in very big trouble. Absolutely.

There is no doubt about this at all. It's one of the reasons, by the way, why the U.S. was very, very, well, people in the U.S. were very, very nervous. People within the Pentagon were very nervous about supplying Ukraine F-16s at all because they know perfectly well that the F-16 is no miracle aircraft. I mean, it's, you know, it was originally designed in the 1970s. It's been updated many times since then. But nobody who understands these matters seriously believes that even the most advanced versions of the F-16 are a match for the Russian fourth and fifth generation fighter jets, the Suhoi 35s and Suhoi 57s that are now increasing and big 31s, which are including. increasingly, you know, populating the skies over Ukraine, not to mention the enormously powerful Russian air defense systems, the S-400s and the AWACS aircraft and all of those things.

They also know something else, which is the F-16, is a tricky aircraft to maintain. It has huge needs. Its engine, as we've discussed many times, is slung very low, so it ingests for material. it needs to operate from very clean air strips. Those don't exist in Ukraine. You could, in theory, operate them from Poland and Romania, but that would restrict greatly the territory that you could cover in Ukraine. And, of course, if you did that, that invites a whole further set of problems,

because if fighter jets are flying from Romanian and Polish bases, then that might invite retaliation from the Russians, which you don't want to see either. So there's many people in the Pentagon who are clearly very concerned and worried about this. And you're absolutely right. They're seeing all the reports about all the other weapons, you know, the miracle weapons, the Haimars,

the M-Triple-7s, the M109 self-propelled guns, the Patriot missiles, the tanks, and the Abrams, apparently the Abrams tank can only operate for 30 minutes before the engine seizes up and its top armor in this version is very thin. The Leopard 2 has been a fiasco. Now, bear in mind, the Leopard 2 is one of the most widely exported Western tanks around the world. I've never been much of a person taking a huge interest in these things, but I've always been hearing all my life, you know, the one thing I've. I've always known about. One thing I know about weapons systems or thought I knew about weapon systems is that the Leopard 2 was this outstanding tank, you know, based on this great tradition of German engineering, going all the way back to the Second World War, that the Germans knew about tanks, and this was the best possible tank,

and it's failed, and it's failed abjectly. So they don't want to see that happen. But I think there is another factor as well. And that is that people in the Pentagon, by now. have worked out that all of these offensives that Zelensky is talking about and insisting on are moonshine. They've been very, very badly burned by the experience of the summer offensive, which they advocated. Zelensky was keen on it, as it turns out. Some people in the Ukrainian military were keen on it as well, and it ended in disaster. They know perfectly well that the F-16s are not going to change the same.

situation on the battlefronts. They know that there's these huge fortified belts between the NEPA and Crimea. They know that the bridgehead in Kringi has been an absolute complete shambles, and they've been making sure that articles are appearing in the Western media that actually confirmed that. And they know that this story, that, you know, this offensive that Zelensky is insisting on will be another disastrous military debacle. Their concern is not to achieve victory over Russia in Ukraine anymore because they know that is unachievable. Their wish now is to try to keep Ukraine in being at least up to the November election and beyond so that there's some kind of face-saving solution for the United States in all of this.

And they're becoming very alarmed that what Zelensky is doing by demanding these offensives is that he is in fact hastening the point when Ukraine collapses under the weight of its losses, under in the face of this aggressive attrition that the Russians are conducting. So the United States has been telling Zelensky go on the defensive. Zalusini is telling Zelensky, go on the defensive. Husband your forces. Don't think about offensives. Certainly not at this time.

And I think they're concerned that Zelensky's not listening to them. And they're worried that if they supply the F-16s anytime soon, he's going to misuse them in order to conduct an offensive, which everybody who understands the way this war is going, everybody knows is going to fail and fail disastrously. And in terms of the F-16s, the sites are then being shot down, fail in the most embarrassing and humiliating way. Yeah, the F-16 program, it's what keeps countries into the orbit of the USMIC.

I mean, it's, you know, it's like the, the iPhone of Apple. You know, you buy an iPhone and then everything else, kind of buy everything else around, around Apple products. I mean, that's the F-16 F-35 program. Look at Greece. Look at Turkey. Look at all the leverage and negotiation that they have with Turkey going back and forth all around the F-16 program. I mean, it's all based on this F-16 program that they're fighting over. So, I mean, if that myth is destroyed by the Russian military, then, yeah, I imagine the MIC companies are probably telling the Pentagon, no.

I mean, they want sales. Yes, they want sales. And they want weapons delivered to Ukraine. But I imagine they're also thinking, you know, we can't have a leopard-style debacle happen with this important product of ours. Absolutely. That's exactly what they're saying. And they're opposed to it. so is the US Air Force for the same reason.

And even some of the, you know, the sort of planners in the Pentagon is saying this is a disaster. We cannot risk giving this important weapon to this incredibly dangerous man. And that is increasingly what more and more people, both in the United States and Ukraine itself are thinking about Zelensky. I mean, we talked about the American side of things. The other thing to understand is that just as the Americans are now becoming alarmed about all of this talk about offensives and all of that and starting to have real doubts about Zelensky. Well, I'm starting this, perhaps, an understatement. It's exactly the same in Ukraine. More and more criticism in Zelensky, breaking through all the time.

The television media no longer believed anymore. a Ukrainian official, a Ukrainian parliamentarian coming forward saying Zelensky is a political course. People actually saying that Zelensky is prolonging the war now for his own purposes. There's actually statements to that effect in Ukraine itself. So there is this accumulating undergarant, the wealth, you know, growth, of opposition to Zelensky in Ukraine, which is gathering force. Now, how that will play out, whether there will be a coup or a Maidan event or something of that kind or whether he'll just be able to stagger on because he is still the legal

president of Ukraine and one suspects that people in Washington don't want to see a coup in Ukraine. I don't know, but that criticism is growing. Yeah, you know, just the final point. I understand why Zelensky canceled the elections in March, only a couple of months away. I understand why he did it because if he probably felt that if he was not president of Ukraine, then he would be in serious trouble. But on the flip side, him not running in the elections voluntarily bowing out and saying, look, I can't lead the country anymore, may have been his way out of this mess, maybe. But he canceled the elections. He's stuck. He's, he has to, he has to figure out a way to survive as, as president of Ukraine. Absolutely. Given a collapse that's happening

everywhere. He's trapped himself. I mean, he should have, he should have, he should have, uh, let the elections happened and said that he wasn't standing, and it was time for someone else, and he might have found a way out, but he didn't take that, of course, and he's now trapped, because of course, that's the thing to understand. If the war ends, he has no legal justification for keeping the elections cancelled. The elections have to happen, which is a reason, one of his reasons for keeping the war going. So he's got himself into the situation. He's trapped in office. He's trapped in office. He's trapped office, one suspects that fundamentally deep down he's very, very nervous about his own position if he ceases to be president.

Yep. And what does he fall back on? He falls back on creating a show, creating a movie. Another Crimea, F-16s, bridgeheads, Black Sea's destroyed. Black Sea fleets destroyed, yeah. He falls back on what he knows. Do you remember Alex way back in the late, spring of last year, you were talking about the summer offensive.

And you were saying that this is entirely like a great Hollywood movie. Tanks moving across the fields, huge shells and things that it was a Hollywood movie. The way that Zelensky and his team were selling this great offensive, it was another, it was a film. Of course, it was a film that clashed with reality. They're now making another film. A film, you know, F-16s sweep the sky clear of Russian fighter jets. A Normandy-style landing is carried out of the deeper river.

Missiles sweep the Black Sea and the Ukrainian army fights heroically and manages to get through all the way to Crimea. It's another film. A sequel. A sequel. A sequel. Very rarely did the sequel. turn out better than the original. And in this instance, the original was a catastrophe.

Absolutely. Absolutely. I don't think the sequel would do it much better anyway. All right. That's the video. The Duran.orgals.com. We are on Rumble, Odyssey, but shoot, telegram, rock fin, and Twitter X and go to the Duran shop.

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