Eventful 24 Hours: Moscow Terror Attack Follows Massive Ukraine Grid Strikes

Let’s begin with the tragic event that has eclipsed everything else: a large terrorist attack on a packed Friday night shopping center at the outskirts of Moscow. But while there are many dead, and the event is clearly momentous, there is actually not much of substance to be said on it yet, without rehashing the same baseless gun-jumping discussions from Twitter and elsewhere.

There’s simply too little solid verifiable information, so we’ll only gloss it over for now, and tie it into events on the ground in Ukraine at the end.

The more directly salient events occurred last night, when Russia launched one of the larger and more impactful strikes of the war, hitting numerous Ukrainian hydro-electric power plants, including the big one in Dnipro—one of the largest in Europe—Zaporozhye, and a plant in Kharkov, as well as dozens of other military production sites in Kiev and west Ukraine.

You can see the Kh-101 missiles spitting their trademark countermeasures as they slam into Dnipro HPP:

Dnipro HPP machine/engine room:

The city of Kharkov was said to be entirely de-energized and even Ukrainian figures again confessed that little of the strikes was actually stopped by AD:

Zaporozhye NPP plant:

All the top pro-Ukrainian pundits were of course freaking out as usual:

The important question revolves around why these sudden attacks?

There are a few possibilities:

1. It’s merely part of the pre-planned campaign to degrade Ukraine’s infrastructure, particularly in advance of a planned larger Spring military campaign. The attacks’ association with Ukraine’s recent provocations, i.e. terror strikes on Belgorod, are merely coincidental.

2. The strikes are a direct response to Ukraine’s recent provocations, including targeting of Russia’s oil and gas infrastructure, terrorist actions against Belgorod region, etc. This is Putin’s way of signaling to Ukraine that they’ve crossed a red line.

3. Or a combination of the two.

One of the reasons for the third option being most likely is that it’s very plausible that Russia was forced by political necessities to make at least some kind of show of repaying all the recent criminal actions of the Kiev regime.

However, at the same time, there are increasing reports about various Russian mass buildups and preparations for a large offensive later this year. One of the interesting little mentioned aspects is that—if you’ll recall—both before and after Kakhovka dam was destroyed, Ukraine played water level games with the Dnipro dam by opening the sluices to further exacerbate the flooding and destroy Russian positions all along the Dnieper River.

I reported on it at the time:

Note Shoigu’s statement at the time about the Dnipro dam:

What is my point? That even without the functioning Kakhovka Dam to control Dnieper River water levels, Ukraine still retained an ability to do that with the other dams upriver, like this Dnipro one. That means, we can surmise that Russia’s disabling of the Dnipro dam could potentially have something to do with taking away Kiev’s abilities to mess with the Dnieper River water levels.

Why would Russia want to do that?

Logic would suggest one possibility being that Russia intends to cross the river, and doesn’t want Kiev to have any further abilities to ‘flood them out’ and destroy supply lines.

Recall that the current locus of the conflict revolves around Odessa: there is a race to the city, with NATO now licking its chops to capture it. Macron has even reportedly made a new statement that Ukraine could “collapse very quickly”, which answers one of the questions I posed in the last report about why the sudden urgency:

And Ukrainian Rada Deputy Goncharenko made the most official admission of potential NATO involvement when he posted that, while in Paris, he had meetings specifically about a French military contingent potentially being sent to Ukraine:

He even specified what the purpose of the troops could be, which is exactly what we projected last time:

This was followed by Orban indicating the possibility that France/NATO could send troops in 2-3 months’ time:

Though I must say the above is somewhat taken out of context and sensationalized, because Orban was merely rhetorically remarking that it “wouldn’t surprise him” if that happened rather than implying some confirmed information. Similarly, anything told to Goncharenko will have been morale-boosting wishful thinking meant to convey ‘European strength’ and ‘solidarity’.

But to get back to the point at hand: Given that there’s even a potential for NATO involvement in the semi-near future, Russia could be poised to attempt an assault toward Odessa via the river, as outlined earlier.

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Now, the second biggest matter.

Financial Times stunned the world with this report at the time of the Russian strikes last night:

Apparently the White House was ‘increasingly frustrated’ by Ukraine’s drone strikes on Russian oil refineries, owing to what many suspected was the following explanation:

I have a somewhat different take on it.

Firstly, as many have pointed out, hitting Russian refineries doesn’t really affect oil deliveries or prices that much. That’s because refineries are processing Russia’s crude into usable gasoline style products mostly for Russia’s own domestic consumption. The product which gets exported to world markets is just the crude itself, and that is delivered by pipeline to the export nodes, whether they’re seaports, or directly to the receiving countries like the famous Druzhba pipeline which runs through Ukraine, Belarus, Slovakia, Austria, Poland, Hungary, etc. Thus, Ukraine isn’t hurting Russia’s crude exports.

In fact, some contend it’s quite the opposite:

Russia is apparently making more money after the oil refinery attacks.

No, the likelier explanation behind the warnings is that the U.S. knew Russia was on the verge of a massive retaliatory attack and the Biden administration is desperately trying to keep Ukraine from being “finished off” by a vengeful, ‘no more Mr. Nice Guy’ version of Putin. The blistering nature of last night’s attacks once more proved that Russia has continued fighting with velvet gloves, and could, if it chooses, take the ‘war’ to a whole ‘nother level.

Biden is desperate to keep Russia from escalating too much as the administration is scrambling to keep Ukraine from total collapse right on the eve of elections. They would much rather either the war fall into some kind of stalemate simmer phase and get swept under the rug, or that Ukraine be convinced to settle the conflict for now in a way that could be portrayed as a victory for Biden.

We’ve covered this before, but to reiterate: how can they portray the seemingly catastrophic situation as a ‘victory’? Easy. They’ve now drummed up the fear that Russia was set to conquer all of Europe all along, likely convincing their gormless constituency of this ludicrous ‘fact’. Thus, by freezing the conflict at the DMZ line they can proclaim: “See, we stopped the madman Putin from taking over the world! Our combined efforts equipped the heroic AFU with the capability it needed to stop this unprecedented historic-level lethal force dead in its tracks. If it weren’t for our efforts, Putin’s blood-soaked flag would be hanging from the Eiffel Tower, the Reichstag, maybe even from Westminster Palace. This victory is a testament to the solidarity of Europe and the Western world, and the Biden administration’s unflagging determination for Peace, Freedom, and Prosperity of the Rules Based Order.”

But what the Biden admin doesn’t want is for Putin to go “gloves off” and turn Ukraine into a giant skidmark on the eve of what could be a historically catastrophic election for the Democrats.

It’s the age old ‘Escalation Management’ at play.

Rezident UA:

#Inside
Our source in the OP said that British intelligence recommends the Office of the President to stop the ground attacks of the GUR and the RDK on the border, and the SBU to stop the special operations inside Russia.

Unfortunately, they may have been too late, as Peskov has apparently let the cat out of the bag last night, seemingly inaugurating Russia’s new posture toward the conflict when he announced that this is no longer a Special Military Operation, but is now a proper War:

Here’s the actual clip:

He was followed soon after by Rogozin:

Euro-technocrat, President of the European Council, Charles Michel chimed in, using Peskov’s quote as an act of self-confirmation bias for his warped globalist agenda:

Naturally, many are making a big deal out of this. Some even believe Putin will soon “declare war”—as always—on Ukraine, because now that his election is over, and his six years’ rule solidified, he can act with a “free hand” and really ratchet up the war without fear of political repercussions. That could be, or it may very well be Peskov putting his foot in his mouth again.

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One way or another, things definitely feel like a corner has been turned recently, and the conflict is entering a new more dangerous phase. Recall that the last American military aid disbursement to Ukraine was in October, which is now coming up on almost six months soon. This explains the dire shape Ukraine is in and how desperate the West is becoming to save them.

This is why rumors of French troops in the next “two months” abound, because as soon as Rasputitsa wears off in April/May, Russia could begin a powerful campaign of offensives which could totally break the AFU’s back, forcing NATO to strongly consider intervening. There have been reports that Russia is heavily stockpiling missiles for this, as it has launched relatively few large scale attacks, particularly ones utilizing Kalibr missiles, whose stocks should be swelling by now.

Lastly:

SEE VIDEO HERE

Yaroslav Dronov, better known as Shaman, has pledged to pay not only for every single funeral of today’s terror attack victims, but even for the rehabilitation of all the wounded:

It’s times like these which separate the ‘liberals’ from the patriots and will further solidify Russia’s patriotic core.

CONTINUE READING HERE

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Published to The Liberty Beacon from EuropeReloaded.com