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Russia/Ukraine conflict
- Thread starter amolina
- Start date
The Russian group Pussy Riot is touring North America. Here's their version of Swan Lake. Sums up life under Putler and his"Special Operation" well. And they've tasted life in Putler's prisons so they have intimate knowledge. The English lyrics are under the description.
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Anders Puck Nielsen's latest video:
“In this video I reflect on the context of general Zaluzhny's comments, and what he is really trying to say.”
His Main Points:
“This is going to be a long war”
“We should understand this interview as a call to action for the West”
“…Zaluzhny is reminding us here: That if the West does not get on board with a sustainable long term strategy for the war, then the alternative is not a peace deal but it is that Russia will start to make progress again.”
“In this video I reflect on the context of general Zaluzhny's comments, and what he is really trying to say.”
His Main Points:
“This is going to be a long war”
“We should understand this interview as a call to action for the West”
“…Zaluzhny is reminding us here: That if the West does not get on board with a sustainable long term strategy for the war, then the alternative is not a peace deal but it is that Russia will start to make progress again.”
X Fan
Active Member
Clearly, Ru's leadership is not losing sleep about the losses.....since WW2 they have always sacrificed manpower for yards.
Also, the deaths are not Moscow centric and as a result not important to the leadership nor their view of the future.
Literally prison meat for the grinder according to Kremlin rules.
‘They’re Just Meat’ – Kremlin Regulations Confirm Storm Z Units Are Just Cannon Fodder
‘They’re Just Meat’ – Kremlin Regulations Confirm Storm Z Units Are Just Cannon Fodder
navguy12
Active Member
There is an interview by a Swedish military instructor in Ukraine. It's 40min long in Swedish and talks about the situation in Ukraine. Basically he confirms the Time Magazine story with losses, low moral, corruption etc.
Fredagsintervjun: Vi måste öppna ögonen, kriget går inte bra i Apple Podcasts
Program: Fredagsintervjun, Avsnitt: Vi måste öppna ögonen, kriget går inte bra – 3 nov. 2023
podcasts.apple.com
X Fan
Active Member
I guess the question is how deep and pervasive is the corruption.There is an interview by a Swedish military instructor in Ukraine. It's 40min long in Swedish and talks about the situation in Ukraine. Basically he confirms the Time Magazine story with losses, low moral, corruption etc.
Fredagsintervjun: Vi måste öppna ögonen, kriget går inte bra i Apple Podcasts
Program: Fredagsintervjun, Avsnitt: Vi måste öppna ögonen, kriget går inte bra – 3 nov. 2023podcasts.apple.com
Corruption is a Global scourge and countries such as the US are not immune.
Per UNDP, 25% of US Public spend is corrupted: The cost of corruption
X Fan
Active Member
From funds for items/supplies allocated but not delivered. Also since a lot is from storage or items targeted for replacement they can adjust pricing. What's an old manpad worth especially if it's so old its been marked for destruction?
khorton
Member
And if it has been marked for destruction, it is certainly cheaper to ship to Ukraine than destroy it.
Tam
Well-Known Member
The Press is citing stalemate from General Valery Zaluzhny
www.politico.eu
Ukraine’s top general: War with Russia has reached stalemate
‘There will most likely be no deep and beautiful breakthrough,’ says Valery Zaluzhny.
www.politico.eu
Even the most loss tolerant cultures still have problems with losses. Russia's army and population got fed up with the losses in WW I and rebelled. Sending few men from Moscow and St Petersburg isolates those cities that are more media savvy from the war, which helps them keep going. The people in the more remote provinces have little education and are kept in a state of helplessness. But people who are kept in a state of helplessness have revolted before. History is full of slave revolts.
Even if people don't revolt, the ability of the power to keep fighting degrades with losses. Imperial Japan was culturally the most loss tolerant in modern history. They suffered staggering losses in WW II and kept on fighting. When the Allies took back the various islands in the Pacific, the garrisons were usually wiped out to the last man. A few who were disabled in some way might survive.
On Saipan an American who had been visiting family in Japan when the war started and was drafted into the army managed to surrender. He had to slip away from his unit because they would have executed him. He had tried to convince his fellows that the Americans treat prisoners fairly, but nobody believed him.
The Japanese did a lot of things that showed little regard for the lives of their men. At a time when every other air force were doing things to make their planes more survivable, the Japanese continued to fly aircraft that had no armor plate or self sealing fuel tanks. They did issue parachutes, but few ever wore them. The Japanese got more range out of their aircraft, but the trade off was that if the plane was damaged, it probably wasn't coming back and the crew were killed.
Japan had the best pilot training program in the world at the start of the war, but it wasn't sustainable during war and so their excellent pool of quality pilots withered away under combat and were replaced by pilots who could barely fly. One of Japan's few top pilots to survive the war was Suburo Sakai who wrote a book about his experiences after the war. He started the war as a member of the Tainan Kokutai which was a fighter unit made up of top pilots. When based on the north shore of New Guinea early in the war they racked up a lot of aerial victories over the Allies.
By the end of 1942 they had taken heavy losses and only a few of the original pilots were left. The new pilots were vastly poorer quality and the unit became ineffective. Sakai was wounded near Guadalcanal in late 1942 and sent back to Japan. He lost an eye and was taken off flight duty. He returned to combat late in the war, but he was the only pilot from the original unit to survive.
That story is just the best documented of what happened to all of Japan's early war air units. They went from all highly skilled aviators to a bunch of rank amateurs who could barely take off and land in a little over a year of combat.
The naval sailors didn't see quite the degradation that the air power saw because the navy did actually try to save sailors from sunk ships if possible and their naval losses early in the war were dramatic in some cases, but overall light. They lost 4 aircraft carriers at Midway, but didn't lose any battleships until November 1942 and only 2 until 1944. Similarly the rest of their surface forces had light losses in the first couple of years of the war.
The army and IJN land troops did see a qualitative decline because there were no survivors when the Allies invaded an island. Nobody survived to teach new troops the ropes and so as the war progressed the troops on island campaigns resorted to suicide tactics sooner and sooner. The suicide tactics put fear in the Allied troops, but strategically they were pointless wastes of lives.
Russia is seeing a similar degradation of their forces as Japan. The losses in their officer corps are staggering. They rely more on officers than any other army in the world since there is effectively no NCO corps. Having a large percentage of their junior officers killed leaves them with very poor leadership. A lot of the videos that have come out along with intercepted phone calls translated by Dimitri and ChrisO indicate that a lot of units have no junior officers at all. They have a gaggle of cannon fodder a few top officers who hide in a bunker far from the front lines, and that's it.
Because Russian vehicles are not built for survivability, the crews are often lost when the vehicle is hit. Their tank and other combat vehicle crews are mostly poorly trained men who can barely drive their vehicles. There are few veterans around to teach them the ropes. They are trying to figure it out for themselves with no training.
The Russians have been trying to conduct some offensive operations lately. By sheer weight of the human waves they have thrown at the Ukrainians they have managed to gain some ground, but the losses have been staggering. In many cases the losses have been so high they haven't been able to hold onto ground they took and Ukraine takes it back once the human wave is whittled down.
The only way Russia can continue fighting is to throw away more and more lives in human wave attacks. Short term they get the job done, but long term they are eating their seed corn.
Their generation of 18-40 men is only about 8 million. It's one of the smallest cadre age groups in their population. This age group in any society are the big contributors to the economy. Russia was looking at economic problems ahead even without a war. The economy today is being held together by a group of men who got their education before the USSR fell apart. This generation is reaching retirement age and there are fewer people to replace them. The economy was going to have to shrink because of this, which would make it harder to support the pensioners, of which there is a growing number.
By getting more and more of the 18-40s killed in Ukraine, they are making the coming constriction in the economy worse.
But future problems aside, by taking the young and sending them off to war, those men aren't contributing to the economy now. Moscow has been trying to increase production of war material, but they have been struggling because there is a huge labor shortage made worse by the lack of young people in the economy.
The Russian economy is showing other signs of strain too. Inflation is taking off, goods are disappearing from shelves, etc. What goods there are tend to be inferior to what was available early in the war.
In the modern era I can't think of any country that had to end a war due to economic collapse. Even devastated economies seem to keep limping. But the worse the economy gets the more difficult it's going to be to keep the people from revolting. In the cases where the economies completely fell apart, but the country kept going, the people were all in with the war. That doesn't exist in Russia.
In dictatorships everything looks strong until suddenly they aren't. Things could fall apart for Russia very quickly, but we have no idea when that may happen. It could happen like the dissolution of the entire Soviet empire. Everything looked like it was going to be a gradual loosening of the grip fom Moscow and then suddenly almost overnight, the entire empire was gone.
One can make the case - many have - that economic collapse, or at least pending collapse, of the USSR ended the Cold War. I am assuming that you are separating a normalized economy from a war-machine economy, which certainly is what 1945 Germany was. Or perhaps WWII for you no longer is in the modern era.
Yet Ukraine seems to be fending off Russians pretty well.
How is it we’re able to fight 2 wars at once, but we dither around supplying weapons to Ukraine to fight a proxy war that will make fighting ourselves so much less likely?
IMHO Ukraine needs lots of cheap drones to effectively deliver Russian anti tank mines to Russian targets.
I do consider WW II the modern era. Warfare changed dramatically as wind, human, and animal energy sources were replaced with fossil fuels. It didn't happen all at once. First steam replaced wind to power ships, then the internal combustion engine started to revolutionize land warfare and move war into the air. Though horses were still used for transport in WW II. By the end of the war the Germans had almost completely replaced trucks with horse drawn transport due to fuel shortages.
The cold war was not really a war in the way it impacted an economy. Both sides were preparing for war for 40 years, but they hadn't been at war and consuming war material in the ways that happen in a shooting war.
Germany and Japan's economies were trashed by 1945, but the people were supporting the war for the most part right to the end. Especially in Japan. If forced to opine about the war, the Russians will say they are all in, but in reality public support for the war is very tepid. Getting the economy all marching in the same direction as a war economy isn't going very well. Motivating people to go all in on a war also requires them to become politically motivated and Putin has spent the last 25 years making the Russian people politically apathetic.
Tiger
Active Member
Now should be a good time to start a Drone manufacturing startup in Ukraine.
Tiger
Active Member
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