Kursk Salient & the Battle of the Bulge
Ukrainian army in Kursk surrounded, reminiscent of the Battle of the Bulge. President Trump phones Vladmir Putin and asks the Russian president to spare the lives of the soldiers.
News that the Ukrainian army in Kursk is surrounded prompted President Trump to call Vladimir Putin to beseech the Russian president to spare the lives of the Ukrainian soldiers. I find this to be one of the most astonishing moments in all of military history, and it shows that Donald Trump is, among politicians, a category unto himself.
Remember, the Ukrainian army was able to advance into Kursk largely because the United States supplied it with sophisticated weapons, communications, and intelligence. I suspect that Putin would prefer to spare the lives of Ukrainian soldiers, as he almost certainly regards ordinary Ukrainian soldiers as being little different from ordinary Russian soldiers. Since the Kievan Rus' state of Eastern Slavs was founded in 880, there has been little difference between the two peoples. It was only with the rise of 19th century virulent nationalism that Ukrainians were encouraged to think of themselves as a completely different people. The Bolsheviks didn’t help matters because, though they claimed to liberate Ukraine from the Russian Empire, Stalin (a Georgian) proved to be far worse than any Russian Czar.
Because there is so much propaganda going around, it’s probably very difficult to know the reality of the situation on the ground. Based on accounts I am reading, it seems that the Ukrainian army’s advance into Kursk created what military technicians call a salient. Drawn on a map, this position resembles a peninsula surrounded by the enemy.
This reminds me of the Battle of the Bulge or the Ardennes Offensive— the last major German offensive campaign on the Western Front during World War II, taking place from 16 December 1944 to 25 January 1945. The German offensive took the Allies completely by surprise, and many Allied officers couldn’t help expressing their stunned admiration for the military skill and fighting spirit of the German 6th Panzer Army of Waffen SS Oberstgruppenführer Sepp Dietrich. However, as aggressive and skilled as it was, the offensive was doomed to failure. The outnumbered Germans were ultimately surrounded and outnumbered and suffered around 100,000 casualties.
At this point in Kursk, I suppose the big question is whether the Ukrainian army can be persuaded to lay down their arms and surrender. If so, it seems likely they will be treated well by the Russian army.
The proximate cause of this war is the coup in Ukraine in 2014 engineered by the U.S. Yes, ordinary Ukrainian soldiers should be given the opportunity to surrender and their lives spared. All foreign mercenaries should be summarily shot.
The reporting on Kursk and the peace negotiations in general are so deliberately biased in favor of continuing and expanding the war that the citizens of the world should all throw the MSM to the curb.