by Simplicus the Thinker at Simplicus the Thinker Substack
Let’s get right to the biggest news of the day, which will have the concern-troll and 6th columnist mills in overdrive for the next week or so. Big bad Putin released the evil Azov commanders back into Ukraine:
You’ll recall callsign Redis, aka Prokopenko, and deputy Kalyna aka Palamar.
Actually, that’s just the thing: Putin nor Russia had anything to do with the timed propaganda event. Turkiye and Erdogan released them, not Putin.
Oh, but Putin was the one to initially release them to Turkiye, you say. That may be true, but:
- That was 14 months ago, this is now.
- There were different realities back then. With selective memory it’s easy to forget the situation on the ground at the time. Thousands of Azov fighters were entrenched in a deeply complex underground labyrinth which had already squandered a lot of much needed time and manpower on the Russian side, both in needless losses and in the weeks of added siege time.
At the time, Russian forces were in the middle of the bloody Lisichansk-Severodonetsk assault and desperately needed the manpower from Mariupol to be redirected there as reinforcements. It seemed a reasonable compromise at the time: allow a few top Azov commanders to be indefinitely detained in Turkiye in exchange for the entirety of the Mariupol garrison’s surrender and a quick end to the Mariupol Azovstal siege. Given what we now know of Russia’s extremely low troop counts at that early part of the war, any competent commander would have made the same wise decision. A tiny handful of men are not worth hundreds or thousands of your soldiers dying.
In fact, Rozhin aka Colonel Cassad has posted an alleged interview with Commander Serhiy Volyna with Turkish media where he states that the real reason for the surrender of the Azovstal garrison was because Americans made a deal with Russia to withdraw their ‘high-ranking officers’ in exchange for the full surrender:…
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