The US is faring better than most of the world right now. Inflation is up and energy prices are higher than they were before the war, but the scale of the hurt in the US is much smaller than most of the world.
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Russia/Ukraine conflict
- Thread starter amolina
- Start date
The US is faring better than most of the world right now. Inflation is up and energy prices are higher than they were before the war, but the scale of the hurt in the US is much smaller than most of the world.
BitJam
Active Member
Please listen to what Zelenskyy said:
He does not lie. He wants to see the evidence and he says Ukraine will take responsibility if it was their missile.
Denys is convinced the missile was Russian which explains the title but Denys does not speak for Zelenskyy.
BitJam
Active Member
More details about the ongoing, extremely slow Russian meat grinder offensive on Bakhmut:
Intelligence estimates place approximately 30,000 Russian forces deployed in the offensive against Bakhmut making it their largest concentration of forces in the country.
[...] Estimates place the Wagner advance at a slow one kilometer per week.
It is truly depressing how much wasted pointless death this war is causing.
We all sort of cheer when Ukraine kills a bunch of people and we use terms like meat grinder to describe the situation. But ultimately this is just Putin killing the minority and underrepresented ethnicities in Russia. Imagine if we had a war and sent millions of native Americans and black people to invade Canada. We joke about them stealing washing machines (I have too, I know), but that’s just a sign of how poor these people are.
I can’t help but wonder how many mobilized soldiers Russia has driven to their deaths trying to take this one town. The Ukrainians can’t move forward against the sea of bodies in their way, so they just wash the ground with blood day after day.
It’s almost understandable that you could indiscriminately kill your enemy. But Putin is doing it to his own people.
I agree.
There are a lot of news stories out there about children maimed, the Jewish death survivor from WW II who was killed by a Russian missile, the soldiers killed and maimed for life on both sides. It's depressing to think about.
Putin isn't the first leader to throw away lives in an unwinnable war of aggression. Things looked pretty good for Hitler's Germany for a little more than 2 years, then things got wobbly for another year or so and finally the last two years was one disaster after another. A lot of Germans died for a lost cause in those last two years. In late 1942 the Germans got sucked into the Battle of Stalingrad, the British won at El Alamein, and the Americans landed in Morocco and Algeria. They briefly tried to recapture the momentum at Kursk, but that turned into a big loss.
After the Battle of Midway it was pretty clear to anyone who could see reality that Japan had lost the War in the Pacific. It would take another 3+ years, but the end was inevitable. Millions of Japanese, both civilians and military died in that downhill slide.
If Putin and his inner circle end up swinging from a lamp post, I won't shed a tear, but I do feel for the poor Russian schmucks most of whom never wanted to fight this war and if they did volunteer, they had no idea what they were getting themselves into. The Russian troops have all been told that the Ukrainians are monsters who will torture them if they surrender so in many cases the Russians have shot their wounded than leave them for the Ukrainians when retreating. It's a senseless waste.
Early on in this war I was thinking the theme song for this war for Russia should be "It's a Mistake" by Men at Work.
We are seeing all the loss in this war, but there have been many wars in the last few decades that were also quite brutal, but didn't get the coverage this one has had, so we don't think about all the lives lost in those wars. There are wars in Africa that have waged on with little knowledge from the outside world. The Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s was incredibly intense, the Iraqis burned through artillery ammunition at a rate greater than Russia was using it at the peak in this war. The USSR sent most of their old artillery ammunition and most of their left of WW II artillery to Iraq.
Most of the ammunition in storage in Russia is post Iran-Iraq War. There is a lot of it made in the late 80s because the Soviets wanted to replace what they sent to Iraq quickly.
Iran tried to win with human wave attacks like WW I over the top type attacks which got a lot of people killed. Both armies may have lost as many as half a million troops.
War is one of humanities worst endeavors.
lolachampcar
Well-Known Member
You can only oppress so much before the oppressed get out their pitch forks. Russian history should make that perfectly clear to P.
cookiefactory
Member
Russia's missile attacks on the Ukrainian grid are curiously under-reported in Western mainstream media. There as been an absolute barrage of such attacks in the past week: Massive Russian Missile Barrage Plunges Much Of Ukraine Into Darkness (Updated)
We shouldn't underestimate the level of apathy in Russian people. The oppressed just want to be left to their oppression because it's what they're used to.
Most of my sources for news on the war are European. It was quiet for a bit, but then just after I said that Russia hadn't launched many missiles lately, they launched a barrage. Hopefully Poland doesn't blame me...
Over the last 20 years Putin has been careful to make sure that life has improved for a lot of Russians, especially in the larger cities. As long as people were getting their stuff, then he and his buddies could go and steal the rest of the resources.
During the war he's been careful to try and keep things as normal as possible in places like Moscow and St Petersburg. When McDonald's pulled out of Russia, they took over the abandoned restaurants in Moscow and created a knock off McDonald's with all the same food. The economy is getting weaker though and he won't be able to keep the plates spinning much longer. When they started getting volunteers for the war, they were giving them lavish sign up bonuses. They still tell people they are getting them, but there are a lot of complaints that they aren't getting them. In some cases the families are getting food instead of money, like 30 pounds of potatoes.
Russia is still getting money from selling oil, but on top of their normal expenses, the war is a huge strain on their economy. They are trying to spool up production of all sorts of war goods, they are buying arms from other countries, and their international revenue is down.
Right now the protest levels can be handled by the city police, but if they get protests like Iran is seeing, they won't be able to contain them and Russia will be in trouble. What is happening now is a scenario similar to 1917. The army is worn out and over stretched, morale is deteriorating by the day. The Russian Revolution started with a revolt in the army.
The Russians don't seem to be thinking about the potential for revolt though. I notice a lot of mobiks from the same place are all put into the same units. Those men have some things in common coming from the same region, even if they don't know each other personally. It makes it easier for them to organize themselves into revolting units. Another thing is a lot of Russians are complaining there are no leaders of any kind around, that forces the mobiks to organize themselves and natural leaders are beginning to emerge in these units. They probably don't know all that much about fighting, but if and when mobik unit start to rebel, these men will become the leaders of their faction.
The smart thing to do if they were concerned about revolt would be to divide up the mobiks from each region and spread them out among units so they don't have natural allies within the units.
petit_bateau
Active Member
Court says Russia had overall control of the separatist forces in eastern Ukraine at the time when the plane was shot down [in 2014]
www.theguardian.com
Three men found guilty of murdering 298 people in shooting down of MH17
Court says Russia had overall control of the separatist forces in eastern Ukraine at the time when the plane was shot down
www.theguardian.com
(Good post)
Just wondering. Is the massive breakthrough victory in Kharkiv Oblast Ukraine's "Battle of Midway"? Seems like the breakout in that Oblast was the very decisive breaking of the back of the Russian army and Russia has not had a significant win since then. It's very clear this war was won by good tactics and control of logistics from the start, but that one battle defined the moment where it was clear Russia's pre-war military might was exhausted.
It's not just apathy. Much of it is poverty and oppression. More than half of Russia is a third world country that hasn't enjoyed the benefits of modernization that the Moscow region has. Many of the places where Russia has gotten their army from lacks internet or in many places reliable electricity. Russia uses these regions as cheap labor and for conscription. They could no more rise up against a modern military than sheep could rise up against a shepherd. Russia keeps them poor and as ignorant as possible on purpose.
Artful Dodger
"Neko no me"
Indeed, not to mention Russian civilian prisoners, mentally ill patients, temporary guests at Moscow youth hostels, and now even foreign nationals:
Zambia seeks answers after student imprisoned in Russia dies in Ukraine war
The 23-year-old student was serving a jail sentence at a medium-security prison on the outskirts of Moscow, Zambia’s foreign affairs minister said.
www.nbcnews.com
Good question. We don't have any clear information what was going on inside the Kremlin during different stages of the war, but it's hard to pinpoint the exact moment when the army fell apart. The retreat in the north was one point where Ukraine definitely had the upper hand. The Russians used their advantages in artillery ammunition to pummel the Ukrainians in the Donbas and they made some small gains there, but the price for every inch of ground was very high.
The Kharkhiv offensive might have just been when the bandage (plaster) was ripped off and the Russian army was exposed as a hollowed out force.
The Russian army has been through a Lanchester Square Collapse. They are replacing lost equipment with antiques 40+ years older than the original equipment, they are replacing lost personnel with untrained conscripts many times with 80 year old equipment or cheap consumer grade equipment, leadership is absent in the combat zone, and they appear to have severe supply problems everywhere.
The army is bleeding out and the only way they can save it is to pull out of Ukraine and completely rebuild it. Every day they keep the army in the field they are inflicting more severe damage to the entire institution that will make rebuilding all the more difficult.
Extremist regimes consider western democracies weak when they have pulled badly damaged units out of combat and rebuilt them in a rear area. Stalin was very critical of the Commonwealth and US for doing this in WW II. But it preserved the forces and kept their quality up right through to the end of the war.
The USSR, Germany, Japan, and Italy threw their forces into the fight and mostly kept them there until they were destroyed. The USSR did rebuild some units that were hollowed out, but the Axis powers tended to keep broken units going until they ceased to exist. The top fighter aces in the Commonwealth and US were around 40 victories because pilots were rotated out regularly and command rotated out pilots who were seeing too much action.
By contrast the top aces are all German with Eric Hartmann racking up 352. The top non-German ace is Ilmari Juutilainen with 94 (possibly 101) and Tetsuzo Iwamoto with 94. Japan probably had more high scoring aces, but they didn't celebrate them like European did. Iwamoto's diary claims he shot down 202 planes. The top Allied ace is Ivan Kozhedub with 66.
The mortality rate among Russian pilots was very high. Soviet/Russian training does not/did not encourage people at any level to think for themselves. Flying fighters in combat is one area when you want somebody who can think for themselves and act on their own. The Russians tied down their air force to ground control and it probably got a lot of crews killed.
One reason the Ukrainians are winning is they have been trained by NATO to fight like NATO troops. Western armies have strong professional NCO corps who are trained to think for themselves and are given the ability to act independently on the battlefield. In a western army the officers are tasked with the strategic decisions and tactical decisions are delegated to the NCOs. As a result, individual small units have flexibility to figure out their own way of achieving objectives.
Strategy is large scale plans like taking a city and it's the "sit back and think it through" kind of planning. Tactics is real time, in the moment thinking. What do you do if you're leading your squad down the street and an enemy tank comes around the corner?
The Russians don't really have much tactical training. They strategically plan and if things don't go to plan, they don't really know what to do. They can feed one unit after another into a meat grinder because the units themselves have no tactical flexibility and command at all levels is lost when situations change.
Russia went into this war with the plan that Ukraine would fold entirely after three days of fighting and then there would be some mopping up and the army could have some parades and go home. When the Ukrainians put up a fight, they didn't really know what to do next and it's been downhill from there.
There still comes a point where the poor peasant has had enough and revolts. There are signs the provinces are not happy with the way this war is going.
Due to the forces they have spent trying to win this war, a lot of the forces they would use to put down an insurrection in a remote province aren't there any more. If rebellion starts, Russia won't have the ability to stop it. That's when Russia may start to balkanize.
Ahem, that depends on the definitions. In the loosest sense, Constantin Cantacuzino war the top Allied ace with 69 (possibly 77) victories, but that was fighting on both sides. One of the most colorful pilot characters in the whole war, the only guy that managed to fly a BF109 and a P51 in the same day because Foggia airbase couldn't refuel the Messerschmitt. To top it off -as it was his first time in a P51- he decided to do acrobatics and buzz the tower...
For those that need a die hard Ukrainian view of negotations with russia.
This waste of fighting on in a losing war isn't limited to Nazis and Russian and Japanese imperialists. LBJ concluded in March 1968 that the US couldn't win the war in Vietnam. More than half of US casualties occurred after that.
The US war in Afghanistan was obviously unwinnable around 2004. The US let bin Laden escape because they were drawing too many troops out for Iraq (illegally). After that the war was pretty much a pointless exercise.
The various colonial wars after WW II were also lost causes long before they ended. Vietnam was the last of those wars.
adiggs
Well-Known Member
This is Ukraine's "Give me liberty or give me death" / "Live free or die" time. They won't be giving in to Russia any more than the American colonies were going to find common ground with King George that included continuing fealty to the King.
That didn't seem like a particularly hardcore point of view on things to me. It seemed like a pretty obvious and straightforward view that I assume is widely shared within Ukraine. Though I did like the bit at the end about the grass rising up to choke the last of the invaders should all Ukrainians be dead. Now that's hardcore.
