The Daily Telegraph lays its own propaganda minefield
Hamish de Bretton Gordon blows a claymore in the DT and his own face
Another of the DT’s contract 77th Brigade operatives has put his name to an overdue projectionist piece of propaganda that instantly backfires on the entire Western narrative. Hamish de Bretton Gordon usually publishes on a weekly basis but it’s taken him 15 days to put his name to the latest state sanctioned story. Interestingly, the article damages the preceding Western narrative and predominantly employs projection as its primary tool.
Let’s take a look.
Destruction of preceding Western narrative and destruction of self
de Bretton Gordon destroys the Western narrative in two ways and again destroys himself.
First, he cites a specific range of Russian casualties as true and sets the time when those casualties were sustained. Second, he deliberately avoids applying his “thinking” on any matter raised to Ukrainian forces and in doing so demonstrates that he is a propagandist so bad that he can’t keep track of his own lies, inconsistencies, and past sources, let alone think through the ramifications of the drivel he spouts.
Russia’s losses are far higher than anyone could have believed
Putin’s meatgrinder tactics have taken a horrendous toll
Reporting from independent media outlets suggests that somewhere between 40,000 and 55,000 Russian men have died on the frontlines, before the start of the current counteroffensive. In addition to these losses, there are another 80,000 or so very seriously wounded, incapable of further fighting.
In these two sentences, he deals a huge blow to the credibility of all Western narrative, the Ukrainian government and Western governments. He then self-destructs.
Up to June 1, 2023, dBG believes that Russian deaths totalled 40-55k. He cites no references or sources of independent media while putting his complete faith in them. This means that any “independent media outlet” that ever cited these figures might be trustworthy in not just those numbers but in other things they say.
So, prior to June 1st, 2023 when the current Ukrainian offensive began, a maximum of 55k troops had been killed and 80k injured. That totals 120-135k “liquidated” or removed from the battle.
As of June 1st, 2023 the Ukrainian MoD claimed Russian personnel combat losses totalled 208,370, which is 54% higher than the independent media outlets that dBG claims are true. dBG has just destroyed the Ukrainian MoD’s credibility, called them liars and said he doesn’t trust them. dBG was spouting Russian tank loss numbers that were exactly in line with Ukrainian MoD when he said on June 9th, “nearly 4,000 Russian tanks have been destroyed”. The MoD’s figure then was 3900.
By ignoring the Ukranian MoD’s June 1st kill count, dBG has discredited and called out the MoD’s credibility. In doing so, he has just rubbished his own claim on June 9th of “nearly 4,000 Russian tank” kills because it comes from the MoD source that he’s not prepared to reference today for manpower kills.
If dBG is prepared to use the Ukranian MoD’s tank figure last month, why isn’t he prepared to use its June 1st troop figure today? Why does he resort to unnamed “independent media outlets” and fail to show how those sensitive figures came to be known or calculated, or explain why they should be trusted?
The Western narrative up to June 1st maintained that Russia’s losses were exorbitantly high and secret because of it. It also maintained that the losses were unsustainable, that Russia was inept or even bound to lose, and that the Ukrainians were conversely better and more likely to win with the right support. Russia did on perhaps two occasions state their combat losses which were in the 40-60k range in 2022. Scott Ritter’s calculations tracked similarly and he suggests that injuries occur on a 3x multiplier, putting Russia’s count at 40-60k dead and 120-180k injured up to June 1st. These numbers are in dBG’s ballpark so are strengthened by that.
In Q3, 2022 none other than Ursula Von Der Leyen publicly stated that approximately 100,000 Ukrainian soldiers had been killed.
So that’s 100k Ukrainian dead and 300k wounded, according to her, as of around Nov 2022, if we apply Ritters 3x wound multiplier.
That means Ukraine’s dead and wounded by Nov 2022 were 3.6-4x higher and 1.7-2.5x higher respectively, than Russia’s total losses 7 months later by June 1st, 2023.
dBG has just radically undermined the Ukrainian military and all of its sponsors on casualty count alone. But he doesn’t stop there.
These are the sort of casualty rates we associate with the First World War, and completely unprecedented in modern times. It’s little wonder Putin’s regime wants to hide the true numbers from the Russian people. His “special military operation” was supposed to be a near bloodless – on the Russian side, at least – coup over in a matter of days.
So, assuming the figures dBG cites are “true”, according to him they are devastatingly bad for a nation of 147m with a mobilizable force of circa 27 million, and completely unprecedented. How bad then are Ukraine’s losses for its now 36m population, 200k active personnel and 250k reserves?
If we use Von Der Leyen’s 100k figure for Nov 2022 (it will be much higher now), we arrive at 400k dead or wounded. That’s the destruction of Ukraine’s original standing army if Global Firepower’s estimates are correct. That’s also 150k into Ukraine’s reserves, which begs the question of how far into Ukraine’s conscripts are we as of June 1st? At Nov 2022, 80% of Ukraine’s manpower was taken out, depleting its trained reserves by 40%.
By June 1st, Russia was apparently down from 500k troops to 365k, using the figures dBG cites, which is a loss of 27% of in theatre forces. It doesn’t need to resort to conscription of untrained troops when it has 27 million mobilizable reserves who have previously served, regardless of whether they were originally conscripted or volunteers. Ukraine is only able to draw from forced draft of untrained, zero experience civilians.
If Russia wants to hide its figures, what does Ukraine want the world to know about its worse figures?
dBG has also made the fatal error of planting a referential stake in the ground against which to measure Russia. From what VST can tell, he has just confirmed that when Russia has admitted to its losses, it has been relatively truthful, certainly well within a truthful ball park. The same simply cannot be said about USEUNATO. Von Der Leyen’s words were clipped from the EU video stream after release.
At the ultra low end of Russian casualty estimates is a figure assembled by Mediazona and BBC News Russian service of 26,801 up to June 30th, 2023. This Wikipedia page gives broad ranges from Western sources. The Moscow Times cites Mediazona and the anti-Russian Meduza outlet figure of 47,000 Russian dead as of this month.
What is admitted by every Western outlet is that Ukraine has suffered more casualties than the Russians. This means that any judgement dBG chooses to render about the Russians applies to Ukraine to a much greater extent because of its smaller population and armed forces. dBG is such an amateurish and incompetent propagandist that he scores own goal after own goal, decimating his own and USEUNATO’s credibility every time he opens his mouth, to the point that he is the literal Inspector Clouseau of military pundits. And to think that he used to be a British tank commander. Such expertise should be put to better use and tested in Ukraine, where he will no doubt save someone’s day, most likely Putin’s.
dBG’s latest bilepiece is so poor that the DT has disabled comments.
EDIT: Comments are on.
His previous pieces attracted plenty of overt mockery and pushback, including direct requests to cease and desist, accusations of propaganda and publicly declared cancellations of DT subscriptions. You can now currently subscribe to the DT for 99p. It would appear that people who can read and think might be losing interest in the DT’s output and for that, dBG deserves some thanks. Credit where credit is due. Sadly, that’s unlikely to have ever been dBG’s MI6/77th Brigade’s assigned objective.
Projection
The fastest way to demonstrate the projection dBG childishly employees is to rewrite his entire article:
In May, I warned that Ukraine’s losses were far higher than we had been led to believe. Everything – from Putin’s meatgrinder tactics to the drone-derived pinpoint accuracy of Russian ordnance - suggested as much. Kiev’s claimed losses of a few thousand were always blatant propaganda. They’ve now been blown apart.
Reporting from independent media outlets suggests that somewhere between 100,000 and 150,000 Ukrainian men have died on the frontlines, before the start of the current counteroffensive. In addition to these losses, there are another 300,000 or so very seriously wounded, incapable of further fighting.
These are the sort of casualty rates we associate with the First World War, and completely unprecedented in modern times. It’s little wonder Zelensky’s regime wants to hide the true numbers from the Ukrainian people. His defence of Ukraine, Europe and global democracy was supposed to put an end to Russian imperialism once and for all.
There are several reasons why these rates are so high, and why the Ukrainian public seems to be ambivalent about the carnage being inflicted on their sons. The first is that the elites of the Ukrainian army have been multiply shown to be corrupt puppets of the US neocon agenda who have committed the Ukrainian population to death as they fight to “the last Ukrainian” so no sponsor nation needs to commit their own troops to the theatre in the pursuit of the US RAND “Overextending Russia” strategy that RAND itself backed away from just months into the war. These Ukrainian military and political leaders have locked in the population who failed to get when the going was good and now rounds up by force any men between 18 and 59 for conscription. With part-trained manpower it is evident that Ukrainian forces cannot conduct combined arms warfare, where infantry are protected by tanks, artillery and fighter jets that Ukraine has either almost completely lost or is burning through at unsustainable rates. Hence, they appear only to be able to run into minefields, use what drones they have to drop grenades, man trenches, or go over the top WW1 style, where they are decimated by better trained and disciplined Russian troops. Sometimes, they have even occupied trenches that the Russians have booby trapped and deliberately abandoned, only to be destroyed in those very same captured trenches.
These troops, many using drugs and alcohol, are also very badly led – or rather, pushed. In the Ukrainian army, the officers are generally behind the soldiers pushing them forward, backed by hit squads who shoot deserters or those who refuse to attack. It’s little wonder that morale is so low. At Sandhurst we were told officers lead from the front.
Only a few days ago, a group of Ukrainian conscripted soldiers decided to surrender to the DPR troops, but they were shoot in the back by their own colleagues.
In the video 4 Ukrainian soldiers advance towards Russian positions with their hands up, one of them is holding a white flag. Suddenly heavy machine gun fire from the Ukrainian side hits the group killing them. The footage has been posted (https://t.me/novini_zsu/143719) in Ukrainian channels as a warning for other Ukrainian deserters.
What seems inexplicable to me is that the Ukrainian public doesn’t seem to care much for these huge losses. It isn’t the children of the vocal elites from Kiev or Lvov who are dying in droves, but mainly poor ethnic minorities of Ukraine. Many of the dead are left on the battlefield to rot and clearly their deaths are not reported. They are constantly listed as MIA so that troop commanders can continue to draw and pocket the wages of the dead and disappeared. It is true that Zelensky’s regime fills the airwaves with propaganda and disinformation – hence many believing that the war is going swimmingly and the evil Russians will soon be defeated – but surely at some point the truth must leak out.
When it does, the Ukrainian public may be in for a rude awakening. Far from defeating Russia, Putin’s war has drawn two new, powerful armies into the bloc. Mass has a certain value in modern conflict, but that mass is in tanks, fighter jets and cruise missiles, not human flesh. Here, Russia has Ukraine thoroughly outgunned. A £1 rifle bullet can kill a soldier, but you need precision weaponry to take down command and control centres or drones. Russia makes all of its own munitions and it is not, despite constant claims from Ukraine and its sponsors, running out. Meanwhile, the west admits it is low on ammo, not just for this war but for any others.
Today, Ukraine seems only to have thousands of young men to throw into the meat grinder of its offensives. Some of Putin’s generals might have been picked off by British Storm Shadow missiles, resigned or mutinied, but its troops hold their defensive lines, attack and defend and wage land, sea and air war while keeping the civilian body count below those seen in wars prosecuted by the USA. At some stage, the Ukrainian public must realise the futility and waste, call a halt to this carnage, and rid themselves of their t-shirt sporting, comedic tyrant.
EDIT:
Take solace in some of the comments
“And yet yesterday in the DT we had an article arguing that Putin would win this war. Who to believe, probably not Telegraph armchair warriors.”
“ “ These are the sort of casualty rates we associate with the First World War”….40 or 50k…?? 20k British died in one day in one battle in the First World War - more than a million a year for four years.”
“Er, I seem to recall that a few months ago the Russians were supposed to have lost 200,000 DEAD, plus maybe (according to most metrics of modern warfare) 600,000 wounded. Now actually I think 55,000 dead over 16 months is about the right number, plus another maybe 150,000 wounded, of who maybe a third will be permenantly disabled, the rest can return to the fight. If stats for all modern artillery wars since 1914 hold good.
Meanwhile there is a sort of racist element to reporting like this that suggests Russia is throwing relectant conscripts into the fight armed with gardening implements in human wave attacks. I call ** on that. The reality is that the UAF have been willing to attack with soldiers who have been press ganged and have scant training. They are out matched in the air and in shell fire 10:1, hold (now) no real numerical advantage and are forced to use AFV's designed for patrolling Afghan villages in frontal asaults against RF fortified and heavily mined positions. Exactly how are their losses lighter than those of Russia?
UAF losses are now probably 3 to 5 times those of Russia, certainly in KIA - and their medivac and medical services have proved unable to deal with the tragedy. Of course we keep reading that due to wily leadership, superior western weapons and fantastic training the UAF is winning. Don't believe a word of this blatent propaganda. Well, Ukraine is certainly winning the Twitter War - and whilst I hate to spoil your day - it is losing the shooting one and doing so badly, sufferring losses an order of magnitude greater than Russia - simply because they are at a firepower disdvantage.”
“Good post. This is an artillery war …. The Russians fire 10x more shells every day than Ukraine. They are very accurate and fast now. Whatever the Russians are said to have lost we can multiply that by at least five for the Ukrainians. Time to pick up the phone DC.”
“The propaganda is absurd! If it were true Ukraine would have won by now.”
“Ah okay then … thanks Hamish. But if they are so bad how then do you explain the almost 50% casualty rate of the 60k NATO trained Ukrainian troops and at least 30% of the western supplied armour … in 10 weeks? Surely they should be in Crimea by now? But they haven’t got to the first dug in line of Russian Defense … they have four more after that …. we expect them to do all that without massed artillery batteries nor air support? Maybe the Russians aren’t as bad at war as the west makes out? Maybe we should pick up the phone and stop the senseless proxy war?”
“Thank God nobody is filling our airwaves here with propaganda and misinformation. How is that long-promised big Ukrainian counter-offensive going anyway? Any news yet?”
“Thanks as ever Hamish, for delivering this week's MI6 press release. But in future could you just email?”
“No. Complete Cope Article.”
“Another meaningless, non-fact based piece of drivel. No-one has a clue how many are dead on either side, especially 'independent media'...an oxymoron if ever there was. Let 'em keep going at each other...does it actually matter to the rest of the world?”
“The seemingly weekly dragging out of Hamish or Kemp by the DT. Usual propaganda nonsense that people reading it seemingly love, which is the point of it I suppose. This latest rant by Hamish seems devoid of any facts, just literally a rant.”
“I'm still waiting to see those British made Challenger Tanks sweeping Putin's conscripts aside. Any more news on that Hamish?”
“Well the blood is on the hands of people like Hamish (not that'll he'll care), who constantly push for more war. Horrible. These are young men have families. No one deserves to die on either side because of this mess. Fighting over potato fields. Pointless. One day I hope we return to sound money as it is only the printing of fiat money that supports these endless wars. Fix the money, fix the world.”