(This may or may not be Ukraine. They claim it is, but even if not, it is a powerful image this in keeping with recent requirements for strict emotional value).

The information flow spewed at all parties in the UKR conflict is interesting. The energy expended in delivering direct-and-indirect reporting is high. The fighting is supposedly most savage at the moment in one town on a river. It is called Bahkmut. Descriptions of building-to-building fighting are raw and hark back to other momentarily famous towns like Verdun. That place was ground into rubble-flecked mud more than a hundred years ago.

The current kinetic conflict has elements of past and future. It is powerful history. The sorting out of a new world order is a vast process. Part of it is a reflection of global interests. In Bahkmut, for example, a town has become a multiple of “messages.” Thousands of young people are being killed or maimed each week, mostly by artillery or drone strikes.
We are only observers in this carnage, which is, of course, a proxy struggle. It is, as best we can tell, a regional struggle in a place that has known border disputes- on this border- for more than 400 years. The collapse of the Soviet Union thirty years ago left Russia wounded but still enormously provisioned with weapons of mass destruction. The NATO Alliance that opposed the Soviet Union expanded dramatically eastward with little comment about the sensitivity of a defeated foe.

The invasion last year is, in part, a reaction to that and an attempt to restore a part of an old order. Supplies across the spectrum, edible to lethal. That aid is from a variety of national sources, so naturally administrative support is required from the people who produced it. That includes intelligence, of course, which brings the term “proxy” closer to “partner.”
We know. It all depends on nuance for deniability or something else will happen in the branches and sequels component of planning. That is why the strike on the Ukrainian command bunker at Lviv was of interest. We have a pal who produces a daily summary of activity in the fighting. He provides useful discernment of the content of the information stream about what and why things are happening. We are grateful he has to wade through it all, nuance alternating with blunt force trauma.

Here is one that brought the reality home. We accept some information as useful and possibly true. At least confirmable from a distance. The ongoing war on Ukraine’s reliable electricity has featured use of drones and rockets. In early March, the Russian VKS (Aerospace Forces) reportedly used something new. They attacked a deeply-buried Ukrainian command post near Lviv, close to the Polish border. Some reports claim the facility was actually a “shadow NATO communications center.” The weapons used was advertised as a supersonic Kinzhal missile.

(Image courtesy TheAviationist.com)

Mr. Putin rolled out the Kh-47M2 Kinzhal missile in 2018. He stated it was a precision hypersonic aero-ballistic missile. Flight regime could be Mach-10 capable with the capability to carry conventional and nuclear payloads. This strike demonstrated a dramatic change in the myriad of things flying above Ukraine. The aspect that naturally caught our attention was the “deeply buried” capability. Those are the places where some of us worked. The ones left over from the old cold conflict in which defense meant building “hard targets.” The one at Lviv would have qualified. It was 128 Meters deep in the soil.

That was the part that provoked discussion. Press reporting claims hundreds were killed in the facility. It did not say what uniforms they were wearing. We assume it would have been a crowd similar to the NATO ones we worked with. Including people exactly like us. This happened around the same time as the Russian strike on our drone in the Black Sea and may be part of some larger narrative goal. Now that Opening Day festivities have passed, we might find out we are already opening up something else.

Copyright 2023 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com