Ukraine will attack ZNPP very soon
Propaganda co-ordination of the “Russian intent to attack the ZNPP” is now at fever pitch from Ukraine and across western media.
Expect strikes on the facility, and a refusal of the IAEA to enter the ZNPP and verify that Russia has not “mined the 4th and 6th power units”. By the way, this claim was made in August 2022.
Right now, what does the IAEA say?
June 21, 2023
The IAEA has increased its presence at the ZNPP in order to monitor compliance with the five basic principles for protecting the plant during the military conflict that were established by Director General Grossi at the United Nations Security Council in late May.
The IAEA is aware of reports of mines having been placed near the cooling pond. No mines were observed at the site during the Director General’s visit, including the cooling pond. However, the IAEA is aware of previous placement of mines outside the plant perimeter, which the Agency has previously reported, and also at particular places inside - which security personnel at the plant explained were for defensive purposes. “Our assessment of those particular placements was that while the presence of any explosive device is not in line with safety standards, the main safety functions of the facility would not be significantly affected. We are following the issue with great attention,” Director General Grossi said.
Zelensky et al claim that Russia has mined powerplant 4 and 6, yet the IAEA says it is on site, has no access issues, and that no such thing has been observed. So, according to Ukraine, the IAEA are categorical and persistent liars, yet it has failed to make specific statements about the onsite IAEA teams in any of its public statements about ZNPP. This does not make any sense and nor does the lack of an IAEA statement that directly refutes the Ukrainian accusations against Russia.
What does this mean?
The Ukrainian accusation is bullshit;
Any western source that repeats it is lying;
Ukraine and its sponsors are projecting and telegraphing their intent to now attack the powerplant in the same manner as the dam;
The IAEA is complicit with the above;
The event will be immediately followed by Ukrainian demands for NATO troops and more materiel, combined with demands for UN intervention and whatever else Ukraine thinks it can put on a list;
The EU has largely done and said nothing to avert such a disaster. If it believes Russia will blow the plant, common sense would demand political intervention to get Russia to step back. There is no such action. If the Ukraine is going to attack the plant the fastest way to get it to back down is to use a public-private strategy that undermines Ukraine’s claim without absolutely humiliating it. The EU has not done anything. The EU will allow an attack;
The absence of the admission that all attacks to date have been carried out by Ukraine, while Russia has occupied the ZNPP since it invaded, demonstrates constant narrative collusion involving the IAEA. IAEA reports also ignore Russia’s reality in occupying the plant and the territory, and fail to address the nonsense claim that Russia has ever or would ever bomb itself in the location of the largest nuclear power plant in Europe;
Russia is so bad at war it will bomb itself and a nuclear power plant, when doing so confers zero benefit to Russia.
Caesium-137
According to Ria Novosti and reported in western outlets, the FSB has caught a team trying to purchase caesium-137 in Russia for use in a dirty bomb in Ukraine. If true, this is likely to remain an ongoing effort by Ukraine until something massively changes in the regime and it sponsors’ tactics.
Monthly Change in Russian “Losses”
In the month since VST last referred to Ukraine’s “glorious kill count”, Ukraine claims to have killed or destroyed a further:
10% Personnel
6.5% Tanks
5.3% APCs
23% Artillery
1.6% Aircraft
22.6% UAVs
24.5% Cruise Missiles
9.8% Vehicles & Fuel Tanks
29.2% Special Equipment
It’s impossible to fully verify these numbers or fully discount them but few if anyone is looking at the rate of change in Ukraine’s figures, particularly in a time of active engagement post Artyomovsk, where Russia is holding defensive positions. We leave it for readers to decide how they feel about the credibility of these rates of change.
The Coup
To save you some time, on balance, VST finds Alex Mercouris’ take on yesterday’s coup to be most credible. It was some kind of attempt by Prigozhin to take political power within the MoD, but it attracted zero wider support, involved small numbers of Wagner troops, spilled practically no Russian blood and never had a cat in hell’s chance of doing anything.
How it has been handled by Russia does not demonstrate weakness. It’s shown that under such circumstances, the establishment stuck together and Putin’s administration refrained from brutality, with aid, support and intervention from allies, specifically Belarus’ Lukashenka. It has not alienated the entirety of Wagner fighters, meaning some will be able to be reabsorbed into the Russian military and still used, while Prigozhin is parked elsewhere. Also, there remains a thin possibility that there’s a theatrical element to this, but VST doesn’t buy that this is a “5D chess move” that positions Wagner forces nearer Kiev (Jackson Hinkle et al). Wagner forces could have been placed anywhere, irrespective of the narrative. All of this still comes down to the simple, ongoing measure of the conduct of war. Has Russia’s ability to fight on its terms been diminished? Wagner were off the field when this happened, so they weren’t frontline critical. It may have less than 50,000 troops now, within over 300,000. It’s not the defining factor right now.
What the event has also exposed (again) is all the laughing stock western media outlets who have instantaneously made myriad false claims and assertions about what was going on. Not only were they willing to issue instant “analysis” despite not being credibly able to do so, but within 12 hours, they were all eating humble pie. This is a ludicrous indictment of the western propaganda machine. Anyone who believes and repeats what they read there is a functional moron. They can still be found occupying at least half of Twitter subscriptions.
VST Predictions Update
Things can happen quickly in war.
VST now predicts that Wagner’s future and that of Russian PMCs has been guaranteed and lies outside Ukraine. Over the next decade, Russian interests will cement across Asia, Africa and South America in line with the Belt and Road Initiative, and trade and strategic relations through various programmes and bodies e.g. BRICS+. VST suspects that Russian PMCs will play a key, growing role in providing contract asset, service and force protection of Russian interests and relationships.
This has already turned out to be a mixed bag, so let’s take a harsh stance. Wagner’s fate has been impacted by multiple circumstances, not just yesterday’s coup attempt by Prigozhin. Outside of that, Russia was looking to bring Wagner troops onto MoD contracts in order to control/legitimise those troops under Russian law (it’s illegal for PMCs to operate on Russian territory, apparently). Prigozhin had pushed back against this but Wagner troops still face this requirement and offer. The actions of the few Wagnerites and their now former CEO does not spell the end for Russian PMCs abroad. This is a learning moment. Most of this prediction still has a massive period in which to play out.
VST is on record saying Sept/Oct is when the vast majority of currently allocated US money will dry up, so the war is likely to peter out by then, absent of a big swing in narrative. ZPP (below) is one part of that swing, and there are crazy attempts that relate to western activity to take things as far as they can.
Russia will, if it hasn’t done so already, switch targeting to every airfield across Ukraine, including all civil airfields. It will also expand air defences in anticipation.
At least two, possibly three specific airfields have been directly attacked with airstrikes over the last month and western reports have cited UAF claims to be able to do nothing against Russian airpower, which has been spun in to demands for F-16s.
Some form of “counteroffensive” will take a maximum of three months of substantial fighting at two points along the front.
There’s a north fight and south fight, with contacts taking no significant ground and happening on a piecemeal basis. The narrative doesn’t stack up becuase the losses incurred, reported by both sides and admitted to by Ukraine make “multi-directional probing/recon-by-force” tactics unsustainable. Russia has shown it can and has destroyed every type of imported weapon. Britain has asked that Challenger 2s be “held back”, while its DU ammo may have been blown up over a month ago. One month in to the latest offensive and it looks like Ukraine is being hammered on the battlefield, as was easily predicted.
Russian forces will surge and try to breakthrough a different point on the front to ensure that no matter the progress elsewhere, it is uncontained in country somewhere, saturating Ukraine’s management and resources.
This may be starting to occur around Kupyansk in small part, but unlikely. What appears to be effective is Russian defensive doctrine, which the Ukrainians have thrown themselves against without any ability to penetrate the initial “gray zone”. They haven’t even gotten to the first formal layer or Russian defence. On that basis, if Ukraine is dumb enough to keep fighting like that, Russia shouldn’t take offensive breakthrough risks. However, this may change soon. Ukraine has now issued blanket draft instructions that criminalise any man between 18-59 who does not report to a military recruitment point within 10 days of the decree, at least in the Chernihiv Yar oblast and possibly wider. This is conscription desperation, meaning internal manpower is on its last legs.
Ukraine and its sponsors will carry out some form of near unimaginable outlier act such as a compromise of a nuclear facility, destruction of major dams in the south that flood a vast area, or shocking damage to Russian interests e.g. the eventually successful sabotage of a major ship in the Black Sea fleet or a big terror attack on Russian territory.
The dam has been blown and no evidence that “Russia did it” has been presented to back assertions. Russian interests have been repeatedly attacked using western equipment, now admitted by the west. Two more attempts on Black Sea ships have been made. The Ukrainians have now told the world that they are going to attack the Nuclear Power Plant in Zaporizhzhia and blame the Russians who:
currently occupy the site and have done since the start of the war;
have repeatedly warned of safety threats to the plant from ongoing ukrainian attacks;
have invested time and effort defending, shutting down and structurally reinforcing parts of the plant;
occupy and claim the wider territory and everything in it.
Despite all of that, we should all now expect Russia, the most heavily nuclear-armed nation on earth, to need to blow up a power plant in what it considers its own territory, kill its own people en masse and then blame someone else, while it then has to clean up the event. Unlike Ukraine who will then demand further intervention of the highest order by NATO forces and the UN (under non-applicable NATO article 5) to put boots on the ground and provide more funding and materiel.
The Wagner coup is also an outlier event. Without hindsight, western pundits of all flavours failed to call out Prigozhin as a possible usurper or western agent, which he now appears to have become, despite all his prior ranting.
This outlier act will not have overwhelming military significance, rather it will be an act of childish military desperation gone too far that could not have been done by Ukraine alone, especially when fully embroiled in total war. The world will largely be publicly quiet in the face of such an act, but it will mark the public beginning of the end of the west’s extension strategy.
Nuclear plant aside, nothing to date has proven to have swung things in favour of Ukraine. The dam strike and subsequent flood has indeed been accompanied only by partisan accusations of “ecocide” that are folded into the wider climate change narrative. However, the deception around these labels are shown up by the failure of all western media to label the Nord Stream attacks as ecocide and go after the culprits, now that the culprits are officially Ukraine and Poland, and in reality US, UK, EU Commission and whoever they used to get the job done. The simple fact that Germany, Denmark and Sweden have all, via “investigations” fingered Ukraine and Poland but also U-turned repeatedly (“we will likely never identify who did this”) tells you this is just a massive crock of shit. Poland is paying the price in the public sphere for demanding more WW2 reparations from Germany. This is likely why, in VST’s opinion, it’s been labelled as instrumental in the NS attacks.
Semi-simultaneously, waves of deeper Russian strikes will constantly ramp up on Kiev and other command locations to actively kill more of the capable political, military and security personnel below the primary layer, where the primary layer are not competent. Military supply points further west may be massively targeted to substantially choke off western resupply via road, rail and air.
Well, Zaluzhny’s appearances in public have taken a bizarre turn for the worse and he’s been fingered as the guy who authorised and knew about the Ukrainian Nord Stream attack, yet apparently he’s still in position and still alive. Those two things are diametrically opposed. This means that Zaluzhny isn’t alive, or Ukraine didn’t directly do the NS attack, or that literally everything that’s been said about NS is a crock of shit. Zaluzhny’s appearances have been heavily managed and could be deepfaked.
Budanov also disappeared, with speculation that Russia hit the underwater section of the military intel offices where Budanov hangs out and did damage. Since then, Budanov has “resurfaced” in limited ways that could be easily deepfaked.
Russian strikes did quickly widen over the last month and have covered decision making centres. There are even more threats to increase this to probably engulf more in country NATO heads.
Some F-16s will enter Ukraine.
TBC. Romania is apparently the place pilots will be trained. Regardless, F-16s will not change anything, but could make for entertaining television.
Transnistria will see a military incursion, likely an attempted attack on a Russian ammo dump.
Not yet!