Doggydogworld
Active Member
Video shows partly cloudy skies. Maybe worried about Stingers. A high altitude flyby would be unimpressive and a tacit admission of weakness.
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Russia/Ukraine conflict
- Thread starter amolina
- Start date
A very emotional story but it is hopeful that like the Allied Forces who destroyed the Nazi's and made them pay for their war crimes is a mirror of the Russian invasion.
The fossil fuel oligarchs are just seeing the tip of the iceberg for the crimes against humanity that they will have to make amends for.
Many people around the world are seeing something that would never have been expected in a civilized society.
www.nature.com
The fossil fuel oligarchs are just seeing the tip of the iceberg for the crimes against humanity that they will have to make amends for.
Many people around the world are seeing something that would never have been expected in a civilized society.
How three Ukrainian scientists are surviving Russia’s brutal war
Helping, healing and fighting: researchers have become refugees, soldiers and activists in the face of a horrifying conflict.
www.nature.com
jabloomf1230
Minister of Silly Walks
Does anybody remember the Korean War? I don't, but I've read enough about it and I'm worried about potential parallels. Before I go into this far-fetched analogy any further, I want to clearly state that this has nothing to do with China entering the Ukraine War.
In 1950, North Korea crossed the border and invaded South Korea. After initial retreats the South Koreans and the US (euphemistically called the UN) pushed North Korean forces back and pressed on towards the Yalu River, which was the North Korean border with China. This incursion was so close to its border that it brought China into the conflict and eventually resulted in a military stalemate. The leader of the US forces, General Douglas MacArthur was on the side of antagonizing China and President Truman was the voice of caution.Truman wanted to end the war as quickly as possible and stop the fighting while MacArthur wanted to continue the fighting and invade China. Truman relieved MacArthur of his command.
Anyway, the Ukrainians may not be content with pushing Russian out of Ukrainian territory. The Ukrainian army may get so close to the Russian border that it may trigger a bigger conflict. Crimea could also be a trigger point.
There's a tendency to believe in the West that Russia's invasion has failed solely because it has just been inept. But although I agree about ineptness, it's also true that Russia is fighting a limited convention war. They haven't thrown all their forces against Ukraine yet. I believe this is mostly due to fear of excessive Russian casualties and a severe domestic political backlash.
Is Zelenskyy a latter day Douglas MacArthur? Can anyone stop him from becoming too adventurous? I hope that we don't have to find out.
In 1950, North Korea crossed the border and invaded South Korea. After initial retreats the South Koreans and the US (euphemistically called the UN) pushed North Korean forces back and pressed on towards the Yalu River, which was the North Korean border with China. This incursion was so close to its border that it brought China into the conflict and eventually resulted in a military stalemate. The leader of the US forces, General Douglas MacArthur was on the side of antagonizing China and President Truman was the voice of caution.Truman wanted to end the war as quickly as possible and stop the fighting while MacArthur wanted to continue the fighting and invade China. Truman relieved MacArthur of his command.
Anyway, the Ukrainians may not be content with pushing Russian out of Ukrainian territory. The Ukrainian army may get so close to the Russian border that it may trigger a bigger conflict. Crimea could also be a trigger point.
There's a tendency to believe in the West that Russia's invasion has failed solely because it has just been inept. But although I agree about ineptness, it's also true that Russia is fighting a limited convention war. They haven't thrown all their forces against Ukraine yet. I believe this is mostly due to fear of excessive Russian casualties and a severe domestic political backlash.
Is Zelenskyy a latter day Douglas MacArthur? Can anyone stop him from becoming too adventurous? I hope that we don't have to find out.
Oryx is conservative in their estimates. They only count vehicles destroyed that are verified with images. They admit they are almost certainly under counting losses on both sides. Even though it's coming from one of the combatants, the numbers the Ukrainians report might be more accurate. They are larger than Oryx's count, but only by a plausible degree.
In any case, Russia's losses have been staggering.
I doubt anybody has smuggled Stingers to Moscow. Russian security throughout the city was probably on the highest alert.
It is possible the flyby was just canceled because of the weather. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
The Russians have committed the vast bulk of their army to this war. At the start of the war their army had 170 Battalion Tactical Groups (BTG) and it was confirmed they had committed 120-125 to the fight, leaving ~50 to defend the entire country. The Russian army is built around BTGs, it's their primary combat formation.
The Russians struggled from day 1 to keep those 120 BTGs in the field. Their supply system is built for a defensive war against a foreign invader. It's based around the railroad system with trucks just delivering supplies from a nearby rail head. As a result they started the war with vastly fewer trucks that similarly sized armies around the world.
The Russians have always been weak on supply transport. In WW II they relied on seas of American made trucks to move supply for their offensive. Without American trucks their offensive would have stalled at the Polish border.
Russia's combat arm is also a very supply hungry system. They make heavy use of rocket artillery. That requires a massive supply chain to keep the artillery supplied. Gun artillery requires a lot of ammunition supply too. Add in their large fleet of tanks and you add a giant fuel requirement on top of the heavy ammunition requirement.
By comparison the Chinese army of 1950 was much easier to supply. It relied heavily on foot soldiers with little heavy equipment.
The Ukrainians knew about this weakness from the start of the war and they hunted Russian trucks behind the lines in the first weeks of the war. They have destroyed a vast swath of Russia's military truck fleet. A number of civilian trucks have been seen on the battlefield in recent weeks. This is a sign of major weakness in the Russian supply system. Military trucks are built for abuse on a battlefield. They have some offroad ability and have overbuilt suspensions and such. Commercial trucks are designed to always drive on finished highways and city streets.
When a war starts the wear and tear rate on trucks goes up 20-30X. Trent Telenko has written a lot about the logistics of this war. He was involved in rehabbing American trucks in the Iraq war. He found they showed signs of 20 years of wear after 1-2 years of use in Iraq and the US is hyper about maintenance while the Russians aren't. Those commercial trucks have been in the field for a month or so now and they are probably beginning to break down.
As a fleet of miscellaneous brands and models of trucks break down, repairing them is going to be difficult. The country is under sanctions anc buying replacement parts is difficult. Plus any parts that are available have to find their way to the correct supply depot to go on the correct truck. With an army that is poor at logistics, good luck with that adventure.
Russia's supply logistics is breaking at the seams trying to keep the 75 or so BTGs left in the field. They don't have the trucks and they don't have the means to make many more. The remaining 50 or so BTGs left in Russia have probably been stripped of all their ammunition and supply vehicles to feed into the cauldron in Ukraine.
Russia also has a serious manpower problem. The birthrate is so low and has been for so long that they struggle to conscript enough soldiers to fill out their peacetime conscription program. Russia has about 140 million people. France in 1914 had about 45 million. Russia's pool of conscriptable soldiers is about the same size as France's in 1914. It's a country of old people. That also makes it more difficult to build up factories to make war goods, even if they can with the sanctions. They simply don't have the workforce to scale up production.
There is a myth that Russia has been working with one hand tied behind its back, but it hasn't. This is a full on war effort on the part of Russia and they have nothing left in the tank after their current force is used up.
Interestingly I saw a couple of articles on just this before coming here today
Thread by @PhillipsPOBrien on Thread Reader App
Thread by @PhillipsPOBrien on Thread Reader App
If Putin's government is allowing analysts to say on TV that they can't mobilize, Russia is admitting they can't scale up their military. They may be preparing the population for something like coming to the negotiation table in good faith. Though they are going to try and hold onto the parts of Ukraine they took in the war.
Not even close. Zelensky is his own man, but if you're looking for an analog, Winston Churchill is far more appropriate.
X Fan
Active Member
Ukraine should negotiate with Putin to protect German economy, VW boss says
Herbert Diess sparks outrage with call for negotiations to protect Europe's economy
www.telegraph.co.uk
pay wall…headline
Volkswagen chief calls for Ukraine deal with Putin
Herbert Diess sparks outrage with call for negotiations to protect Europe's economyArticle start:
“The chief executive of Volkswagen has called for a negotiated settlement between Russia and Ukraine so that sanctions can be lifted to avoid damaging the German economy.”
VW again….German industry is good at thinking what’s best for themselves.
btw: I wonder how long the Russians can continue their war?
RobStark
Well-Known Member
So Herbert thinks Ukraine should give up ~15% of its territory so VW wiring harness can start to flow westward to VW factories.
BTW I was watching footage of the Russian military parade. Roughly 10% of Russia's population is Asian. Armies all over the world draw disproportionally from poor and rural areas of their country.
Which means ~15% of Russia's Army should be Asian soldiers. The Army on Parade looks like Hitler's dream Aryan Army. Ironically, only Gen Sergei Shoigu looks part Asian.
BTW I was watching footage of the Russian military parade. Roughly 10% of Russia's population is Asian. Armies all over the world draw disproportionally from poor and rural areas of their country.
Which means ~15% of Russia's Army should be Asian soldiers. The Army on Parade looks like Hitler's dream Aryan Army. Ironically, only Gen Sergei Shoigu looks part Asian.
The Ukrainians are hyper aware of the optics of everything on the world. They are working overtime to always appear like the good guys here. Even if the Russian army collapses and leaves the road to Moscow wide open, the Ukrainians are going to stop at their borders.
I doubt they would even move to take back territory they lost in the 2014 grab.
Ukraine should negotiate with Putin to protect German economy, VW boss says
Herbert Diess sparks outrage with call for negotiations to protect Europe's economy
pay wall…headline
Volkswagen chief calls for Ukraine deal with Putin
Herbert Diess sparks outrage with call for negotiations to protect Europe's economy
Article start:
“The chief executive of Volkswagen has called for a negotiated settlement between Russia and Ukraine so that sanctions can be lifted to avoid damaging the German economy.”
VW again….German industry is good at thinking what’s best for themselves.
btw: I wonder how long the Russians can continue their war?
Because this isn't a declared war the Russians can't keep contract troops past the end of their enlistment unless they re-enlist. Many thousands of Russian enlistments end June 1 and rumor has it that very few people are re-upping. So they will lose a huge chunk of their army to people going home June 1 unless they declare war in the meantime.
Even if they could retain them at the rate of losses in battle, they will be critically low in many types of equipment in a month, plus their personnel losses are staggeringly high too.
If they were to try and put the entire country on a full war setting and mobilize everyone, they won't get much to the front lines for 6 months, if they're lucky. By then the army they have will be ground to dust. That may be why they are making noises on Russian TV about how its impractical to mobilize. They know they can't do anything substantive in time.
They will have to pull back due to lack of manpower after June 1 if they don't get pushed back before that.
The parade troops are different from the combat troops. The army is heavily made up of Asian and Muslim minorities.
RobStark
Well-Known Member
The Chechens I see on TV look ethnically indistinguishable from Russians.
They look like bearded hipters from Seattle.
JRP3
Hyperactive Member
How likely is it that the government cares about that rule? Maybe they will be forced to "voluntarily" re-enlist.
Zelensky is already on the record as saying Crimea belongs to Ukraine. He's going to want that back at the end of this, in addition to the occupied Donbas. He's not dumb enough or naive enough to trust Putin, he knows that if he lets Russia keep any part of Ukraine, he'll just be asking for another invasion someday.
Ethnically they consider themselves a different group from the Russians. Their ethnic identity is closer to the people of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, etc. than Russian.
The "white" Russians are descended from a mix of the Serbs and the Vikings who explored and traded in Russia during the Viking Age. The name Russia comes from the Vikings who called the people who were living there the Rus. Kyiv was founded by the Vikings.
The ethnically Russian population is primarily Russian Orthodox and the Russians have the attitude that Russian Orthodox is the "true religion" and all other religions are inferior. The Ukrainian Orthodox church is different and that's one of the beefs the Russians have with Ukraine. For centuries there have been ethnic tensions between the Russian Orthodox population and the Muslim population.
I know an ethnic Russian who was born in Kyrgyzstan in the late 70s. She doesn't really remember the USSR. Her family emigrated when she was a teenager in large part because of the religious persecution they got for being Christian in Kyrgyzstan. Her father once got arrested for making the sign of the cross before eating.
The reason for the Chechen wars was Chechnya wanted to break free from Russia like the other republics and since they were part of Russia pre-break up instead of being one of the Soviet Republics, the Russians didn't want to let them go.
They put tremendous pressure on conscripts to enlist and enlistees to reenlist, but they are careful not to cross the line. Conscription and military service in general is not popular in Russia. Authoritarians can only rule as long as enough people go along with their rule. Viktor Yanukovichin Ukraine found out the hard way when he went too far and had to run off to Russia in the middle of the night when the Ukrainians got fed up with him.
Putin has been careful to give enough bread and circuses to the Russian people to remain popular enough that he doesn't get removed via revolt. He's treading carefully around manpower and the war because he knows mass conscription could trigger mass revolt when he's short of riot police.
This thread caught my attention. I know others see this in their daily readings but thought it worthwhile to highlight for those that otherwise would have missed it.
Ukraine created a software program to assess and disseminate target information across their weapons in real time. Amazing.
Ukraine created a software program to assess and disseminate target information across their weapons in real time. Amazing.
RobStark
Well-Known Member
Chechens/ Dagestanians can consider themselves whatever they like but Caucasian Muslims look....... well Caucasian.
True. But ethnicity is what a person feels they are more than facial features.
My partner identifies as Mexican-American. Her cousins look very Hispanic, but she got a weird roll of the genetic dice and way more of the European side came through than the American Native. She looks more Irish than anything else (red hair and blond skin tone). She had a great grandfather who emigrated from the Basque country to Mexico 150 years ago who had red hair (it's rarer than the British Isles but does happen in the Basque population) and somehow those genetics came through with her.
When we did the 23andme DNA test she was paranoid her genetics were something other than she was told and her father wasn't really her father or something, but her genetic mix is virtually all native to the Americas and Iberian peninsula (which also include North African which is part of the mix there since the Moors invaded). No Northern European detected at all.
White people dividing themselves into different racial groups is less common today, but it was very common when my father was a kid. He grew up in a small town in Michigan which was 100% white, but deeply divided racially based on where in Europe people came from. With genetic testing it's very difficult to tell whether somebody is from England, Wales, Scotland, or Ireland today, but those nations all identify as separate ethnic groups.
The Nazis made a big deal about how different the Jews looked from other Europeans, but in reality a lot of Jewish people were able to hide form the Nazis with new identities because they looked just like native Europeans after living there for 2000 years.
The far eastern Russians do look different from the rest of Russia, but ethnic identity is more than just looks. Heck the Ukrainians and Russians have been mixing for 1000 years and are probably just as genetically mixed as the British Isles at this point, but the Ukrainians identify as something different from the Russians.
Tiger
Active Member
People are constantly moving so the concept of origin is quite silly. At different times, people will be in different places, depends on what time period you are comparing to. Add to that the eath is travelling through space.
Tiger
Active Member
Ukraine is economically so weak after the war that unless condoned by the west, such thing cannot occur. Lot of it is in the air, though:
A significant number of humans are xenophobic. At one time humans were contending with other hominids, but the last of our hominid cousins went extinct before recorded history started. And other groups of hominids could be dangerous.
Instinct is difficult to override. It can be done with education and thought, but a lot of people are somewhat lacking in both and authoritarian leaders encourage it. Unthinking and ignorant populations are easier to control.
UkNorthampton
TSLA - 12+ startups in 1
Attachments
petit_bateau
Active Member
Please ...... .... in my house when I grew up there were people who had war medals from Korea, not just for turning up. They were British medals. There was no euphemism about it being a UN action.
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1. My personal expectation is that Ukraine will seek to take back all the occupied territories, including Crimea. Whether they will succeed is another matter.
2. I also expect Ukraine to make further strikes on Russian territory against more military targets - airfields, transport infrasructure, logistics, SAM sites, headquarters. My expectation is that those strikes will always be focussed on those assets that are clearly relevant to ongoing fighting so that they have a valid target selection file in case of post-conflict legal action.
3. If Ukraine is successful in pushing Russia back towards the pre-2014 borders (i.e. the 1991 ones) then I expect Putin (if he is still in charge) will order a symbolic tactical nuclear release, for example targetting Snake Island. The Russians simply won't have anything left in the toolbox in that scenario. Whether he will be obeyed by Russian armed forces is a different matter.
