THE ATTACK ON ADIIVKA: Russia’s latest Ukraine probe looks like it targets the Trump Administration.

WINTER WAR: Russia’s slow war in Ukraine heats up.

Ukrainian forces and Russian-backed rebels clashed heavily for a third straight day at a flashpoint town Tuesday, as thousands of locals remained without power after a deadly surge in fighting.

The industrial hub of Avdiivka came under attack on Sunday from insurgents seeking to wrest back territory controlled by Kiev during the nearly three-year war.

It’s cold. “…temperatures drop to -15 degrees Celsius (5 degrees Farenheit) at night and the homes in Avdiivka are in dire need of heating.”

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko “is worried that Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential election and praise for Russia’s Vladimir Putin may add fuel to a conflict that began shortly after Ukraine’s 2014 ouster of its Moscow-backed leader and tilt toward the West.”

There are back and forth accusations over which side started the fighting in Avdiivka but “An AFP reporter saw the separatists shell the town of about 20,000 people with repeated rounds of Grad multiple rocket systems and artillery fire from the early morning.”

RELATED: The EU says the fighting in Avdiivka is a blatant violation of the Minsk ceasefire accord.

France and Germany helped broker the Minsk accords with Moscow and Kiev, and European Union leaders tied implementation to a series of sanctions, including very damaging economic restrictions, against Russia.

Fighting in eastern Ukraine has waxed and waned since then, with Brussels insisting repeatedly there can be no change to the sanctions regime until the accord sticks.

Another supposedly indefinite ceasefire went into effect December 23, 2016. But it hasn’t been respected.

DEEP BACKGROUND FROM AUGUST 2016: Russia is paying an economic price for the Ukraine war. That price has domestic political implications.

For example, in 2014 the government announced a $70 billion ten year program to revive the moribund Russian space program. That has since been cut to $20 billion. What a lot of Russians noticed (and discuss on the Internet) is that the $70 billion spending plan was announced right after Russia had taken Crimea from Ukraine and while world oil prices were plunging. The government apparently did not consider either of these developments would do any long-term damage to Russia. So many Russians wonder what else their leaders have misinterpreted.

Scroll through the update and you’ll find a section devoted to Ukraine. It has background on the Donetsk People’s Republic and Luhansk People’s Republic — two state-lets within Ukraine the Kremlin created.

REMITTANCE INCOME AND THE MEXICO-U.S. TUSSLE OVER ILLEGAL MIGRANTS: Jim Dunnigan weighs in with facts:

The Mexican central bank tracks how much money Mexicans abroad send home and in 2016 it was $25 billion, almost all of it from Mexicans in the United States and much of it from Mexicans in the United States illegally. That remittance cash accounts for more foreign exchange than Mexican oil exports…Mexico has for decades tolerated illegal migration to the United States because the corruption and bad government in Mexico did little to provide jobs for the growing number of unemployed Mexicans and created a lot of potentially troublesome young men and women. Tolerating and, for many Mexican politicians, openly supporting the illegal migrants, was a popular policy and the government came to regard it as a right. But it was also about money and the remittances created a huge source of foreign currency flowing back to Mexico.

His analysis includes a look at the impact of Operation Sur on Mexico’s southern border which was designed “to curb illegal Central American migrants from entering Mexico.” He argues it had an impact on American politicians who “found themselves under increasing pressure to enforce American migration laws as vigorously as Mexico (and Canada) did.”

Read the whole thing.

WHITE HOUSE SAYS IT’S AWARE OF IRAN’S LATEST MISSILE TEST: Well, as January 2017 ends the White House staff is rather different than the staff when the month began. Trump’s in, Obama’s out. Trump disdains Obama’s so-called “Iran nuclear weapons deal,” and well he should. Note that Vice-President Pence is meeting with Jordan’s King Abdullah and the missile test is a likely topic. A White House spokesman said that the administration will comment officially on the missile test later.

Here’s the Fox News report the AFP story quoted.

Iran conducted its first ballistic missile test under Donald Trump’s presidency, in yet another apparent violation of a United Nations resolution, U.S. officials told Fox News on Monday.

The launch occurred Sunday at a well-known test site outside Semnan, about 140 miles east of Tehran, Fox News was first to learn.

The Khorramshahr medium-range ballistic missile flew 600 miles before exploding, in a failed test of a reentry vehicle, officials said. Iran defense minister Brigadier Gen. Hossein Dehqan said in September that Iran would start production of the missile.

…The launch also came a day before Jordan’s King Abdullah arrived in Washington for meetings with Vice President Pence and Defense Secretary Mattis.

As the story notes, the UN Security Council Resolution in question is UNSCR 2231.

A LITTLE CATCHING UP: Here are two photos from StrategyPage’s Battle of the Bulge commemorative series that I either failed to link to or in one case the link was bad. Both are color pictures.

“Return to St. Vith”: An infantry unit in the 7th Armored Division returns to a devastated St. Vith, Belgium. The photo was taken January 23, 1945.

“A Mortar Position Near St. Vith”: This also dates from January 1945.

The series ended last week. Later this week I’ll link to one or two that I found compelling or poignant.

RELATED: I linked to this photo, but it shows another view of St. Vith after U.S. forces retook the town. This photo was also taken January 23, 1945. Lovely snow, tragic landscape.

LINK ISSUE: I put the link to the second photo in again and tested it. FWIW, that’s the photo that had a link problem last month. I linked to it a couple of days later along with a subsequent photo in the series.

THE NSC REORGANIZATION KERFUFFLE: In terms of organizing and sizing the National Security Council, Trump can do just about anything he wants. The NSC works for him. He can staff it to meet his needs. To say he can’t is Fake News.

The UPI dispatch covers the basics.

Trump also has pared the council to six deputy national security advisers, compared to the 23 on Obama’s council.

Long overdue. Obama stacked his NSC with cronies. Loyalty to him came first. Having political chums or relatives in the mainstream media was an additional qualifier. It sure wasn’t military experience or other types of rubber-meets-the-road national security experience.

Last night Glenn fisked Susan Rice’s latest act of naked hypocrisy. “The troika made up of Susan Rice, Samantha Power, and Hillary Clinton was perhaps the most disastrous foreign policy crew in American history.” Glenn was elaborating on this post at booksbikesboomsticks.blogspot.com.

Trump has decided to downgrade NSC participation by the Director of National Intelligence and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. However, they are statutory advisers. Former SecDef Robert Gates is concerned about that.

“My biggest concern is there are actually, under the law, two statutory advisers to the National Security Council, and that’s the director of [national] intelligence, or the DNI, and the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff,” Robert Gates, secretary of defense for Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, told ABC News. “They both bring a perspective and judgment and experience… that every president — whether they like it or not — finds useful.”

However, the mainstream media and usual suspects are acting like the DNI and Chairman JCS are out of the loop. They aren’t. The BBC reports they’ll attend NSC Principals Committee meetings when discussions pertain to their areas.

This ABC News headline indicates we’re dealing with another anti-Trump tantrum. “Trump Gives Controversial Adviser Bannon Seat at Security Council Principals Meetings.

However, ABC does concede that Trump’s reorganization isn’t radical at all:

The invitation-only status of the Joint Chiefs chairman and director of national intelligence is similar to a policy instituted under President George W. Bush.

Another Bush-era policy re-instituted in Trump’s memorandum is separating the Homeland Security Council from the NSC, which President Obama had previously merged.

While it’s not abnormal for presidents to restructure the makeup of their National Security Council, the addition of Bannon, the former publisher of Breitbart News, to the Principals Committee has brought scrutiny over the adviser’s influence in Trump’s inner circle.

I think the Dems and their media pals have gone tantrum-tilt because Trump wants Steve Bannon to serve on the NSC. During the campaign Dems and the mainstream media committed themselves to the narrative that Bannon is Rasputin and Hitler and etc. Is he a political adviser? Yes. However, Bannon was also a naval officer. The UPI release mentions that George W. Bush barred Karl Rove from attending NSC meetings. OK. Rove was a political adviser but he never served in the military. Bush was a USAF reserve pilot. Bush combined political experience and military experience. Like Obama, Trump has no personal military experience. Bannon has political savvy and military experience. In this light Bannon very likely meets a need Trump perceives. So Trump hires him. Did Obama perceive a similar inadequacy in himself? Of course he didn’t. Obama, the purveyor of Smart Diplomacy, was always the smartest guy in the room. Obama’s national security record? Why, it’s dismal. Perhaps he could have used a Steve Bannon.

CARLOS SLIM’S ART OF THE DEAL: Will a Trump versus Slim cage match evolve? Stay tuned.

Mexico’s richest man is urging his fellow citizens to unite behind the Mexican government in its negotiations with President Trump, Reuters reports.

In a rare news conference on Friday, telecommunications magnate Carlos Slim called Trump a “great negotiator” and said “the circumstances in the United States are very favorable to Mexico.”

But he also said that Mexico would have to negotiate from a position of strength, and argued the country would be okay if it withdrew from the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

BIDI BIDI SETTLEMENT CAMP IN UGANDA: Relief organizations say it’s either the largest or second-largest refugee camp in the world. The camp opened the first week of August 2016.

Just 6 months old, this camp is known as the biggest settlement camp in the world, housing 270,000 or one-fifth of the over 1.3 million displaced people in South Sudan. This means that for the people fleeing war and pestilence, all roads lead to Bidi Bidi camp Uganda, just 40km away from the South Sudan-Uganda border.

The camp exists because of the violence and anarchy in South Sudan. In late December 2016 I contributed to an update on the war. Many South Sudanese fear a “Rwanda-like” genocide. Per my comment of December 27, they have a case.

Here’s a report on Bidi Bidi from September 2016. You can see why some reports call it a “pop up” city.

More here on current conditions at Bidi Bidi.

RETREAT IN THE FOREST: One of the Battle of the Bulge photos I missed during StrategyPage’s retrospective photo series. There are a half-dozen other photos that got skipped during the six weeks the series ran. I’ll play catch up over the weekend. But this photo of German infantrymen retreating struck me as an apt mirror of yesterday’s photo of U.S. forces advancing. The caption doesn’t give the date the action occurred, just January 1945. I’ll bet the date is mid-January 1945, but that’s a guess. This is a genuine combat photo, too.

ANOTHER SINALOA CARTELISTA EXTRADITED TO THE U.S.: Looks like a follow-up to the Joaquin Guzman extradition. Jesus Beltran Leon worked as a bodyguard for one of the sons of the Sinaloa senior commander. But Beltran Leon is a big fish, too. He faces drug trafficking and money laundering charges in the U.S.

END OF THE BATTLE OF THE BULGE: American parachute infantrymen and a light tank continue to push the Germans back. This is the last photo in StrategyPage’s Battle of the Bulge commemorative series. The Bulge officially ended January 25, 1945. Though fighting with remnant German forces in the area persisted, by the last week of January 1945 the US-German front lines were about where they were on December 16, 1944 when the battle began.

RELATED: Over this coming weekend I’ll link to the photos I missed. I think there are about a half-dozen. I promised I’d eventually link to all of them. Next week I’ll select a couple I found memorable. In the comments section of that post Instapundit readers may link to a photo in the series (one each, please) they liked or found particularly striking. And tell us why you selected it. Many of the comments by Instapundit readers on the Bulge photos have been poignant and moving, especially those by readers who had relatives who fought in the battle.

SEWING CLOTHES IS JUST LIKE REPLACING A TANK TRACK: Well, no, it isn’t. I’ve done both. Still, this is a heck of a photo, even if it’s staged. You have to wonder where the soldier got the sewing machine. We know where he got the tank. I’m guessing SGT Phelps had genuine tailor skills as well as tanker skills — all-weather tailor and tanker skills. The caption says the photo was snapped on January 23, 1945. And today it’s StrategyPage’s Battle of the Bulge commemorative pic.

CONFRONTING CHINA’S SLOW INVASION OF THE SOUTH CHINA SEA: It’s long overdue. (Yes, confronting the invasion is long overdue.)

THE ABYSS CALLED NORTH KOREA: A high-level defector says the regime will collapse.

The North Korean regime is on an inexorable decline towards collapse, with its people increasingly disillusioned but its nuclear ambitions undimmed, a top defector said Wednesday.

“I’m sure and I can say that Kim Jong-Un’s days are numbered,” said Thae Yong-Ho, who fled his post as North Korea’s deputy ambassador to Britain in August.

In his first press conference for foreign correspondents, held under tight security, Thae said he was sure that more of his fellow countrymen would follow suit since North Korea was “on a downward path”.

The elite were “turning their backs” on leader Kim Jong-Un, he said, adding: “The traditional structures of North Korean systems are crumbling.”

Again, the source is a defector.

North Korean diplomats are generally compelled to leave one of their children behind in Pyongyang when they are dispatched abroad, but Thae was able to take both his sons, now aged 19 and 26, to London — easing his preparations to defect.

Thae supports regime change:

“The only way to resolve the issue of North’s nuclear threats is the elimination of Kim Jong-Un’s regime,” he said. He called for continued international sanctions on Pyongyang and publicity campaigns to spread external information in the North and encourage its citizens into “popular uprisings”.

UPDATE: North Korea may test ICBM this spring. One analyst thinks the test could come in February on Kim Jong Un’s birthday. Here’s a recent column of mine that discusses NorK weapons programs.

CRETACEOUS UPDATE: Collagen reportedly extracted from 80 million year-old dinosaur fossil.

Utilizing the most rigorous testing methods to date, researchers from North Carolina State University have isolated additional collagen peptides from an 80-million-year-old Brachylophosaurus. The work lends further support to the idea that organic molecules can persist in specimens tens of millions of years longer than originally believed and has implications for our ability to study the fossil record on the molecular level.

More:

The sample material came from the specimen’s femur, or thigh bone. Using mass spectrometry, the team recovered eight peptide sequences of collagen I, including two that are identical to those recovered in 2009, and six that are new. The sequences show that the collagen I in B. canadensis has similarities with collagen I in both crocodylians and birds, a result we would expect for a hadrosaur, based on predictions made from previous skeletal studies. “We are confident that the results we obtained are not contamination and that this collagen is original to the specimen,” Schroeter says. “Not only did we replicate part of the 2009 results, thanks to improved methods and technology we did it with a smaller sample and over a shorter period of time.”

Great work. I hope the confirmation stands up to future tests.

ANOTHER PHOTO FROM THE REAL FIGHT WITH REAL FASCISM: The latest is StrategyPage’s Battle of the Bulge commemorative photo series. This one is a keeper. Soldiers from the 2nd Armored Division use a tank destroyer as an artillery piece. “Lobbing shells.” Note how the tank destroyer is parked on a berm and at an angle. That’s so the cannon can elevate and “lob” the shell like an artillery piece. As the photo series ends I’ll play catch up and post the photos I missed. I posted yesterday’s photo late, the trapped Tiger in Stavelot. It deserved better.

SAMANTHA POWER REINVENTS OBAMA’S RUSSIA RECORD: Samantha Power is going to have to reinvent her legacy as well. She was a failure and she can’t face it.

A KONIGSTIGER STUCK IN STAVELOT: Today’s StrategyPage Battle of the Bulge photo. A U.S. bazooka round didn’t knock out the heavy tank, but the German driver responded to the attack by putting the vehicle in reverse. The tank got stuck in the debris of a destroyed building.

A LATE CHRISTMAS: The latest in StrategyPage’s Battle of the Bulge photo series. The photo shows U.S. Army tankers opening Christmas packages on December 30, 1944. The tank crew has erected a tent next to the tank and is using the tank to anchor the tent.

RUSSIA’S GAME IN LIBYA: The article is speculative. However, Russian diplomatic interest and activity in Libya are for real. Power abhors a vacuum.

Russia has not played a dominant role in Libya since the overthrow of Moammar Gadhafi. Rather, other powers, including the United States and Europe, and regional actors, including Egypt, Turkey, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, have been heavily involved in Libya’s post-Gadhafi transition. Russia has, however, remained focused and engaged in Libya and is now involved there as part of its geopolitical game and expansion of its influence in the Middle East. This is also in part due to Russian companies’ commercial interests.

SINALOA CARTEL SENIOR COMMANDER EXTRADITED TO U.S.: The extradition occurred yesterday. Though the Mexican government had indicated Joaquin Guzman would be extradited, the actual extradition was a surprise and carried off suddenly. Today Guzman was arraigned in federal court.

SIX KILLS: A U.S. Army anti-aircraft gun crew with six Nazi aircraft kills. Today’s StrategyPage Battle of the Bulge photo. Dig the six swastikas painted on the weapon. The photo was taken December 31, 1944.

ENGLISH IDIOMS: Shakespeare, falconry and “under my thumb.”

Good read.

TODAY IN MILITARY HISTORY, 1942: FDR facetiously awards the Iron Cross to New York Daily News reporter John O’Donnell, for his frequent negative reporting on the war effort.

Trump needs to do this to one of the jerks at CNN. If CNN howls, tell’em Dem icon FDR did it.

BILL CLINTON’S KOSOVO WAR ISN’T QUITE OVER: My latest Creators Syndicate column.