There’s a lot of whistling in the dark in these comments. The actual assessment of the report is quite bleak: yes, Russia has morale issues, and hasn’t achieved success with its initial plan, but it may be breaking through in the south, and ultimately it has enough forces to overwhelm the Ukrainians on every front.
Ukranians are receiving military and financial aid from a multitude of countries while the international community is moving swiftly to cut off major financial lines to Russia, including the SWIFT system which was discussed here a few days ago. I've seen some threads hypothesizing if Russia can't prevail quickly enough they will begin to have shortages of critical supplies not to mention that the collapse of the ruble may serve to make a longer term invasion politically untenable.
After only a couple days, Russia is on the cusp of encircling Kyiv, and has potentially gained control of strategic airports, and hasn't even used any of their big weapons yet. If you track the timeline of the Russian developments versus against something like the Iraq invasion, Russia is actually ahead of schedule in many ways.
People are claiming it's a victory when Russia hasn't totally taken over within 72 hours, but is that really any kind of victory?
1.) Kyiv is 50mi from the border, Baghdad is 200mi.
2.) Iraq was a numerically far superior force to the coalition, with >500,000 active soldiers and >1.3 million total. Clearing out that many people simply takes time.
3) The coalition moved slowly and largely neutralized resistance along their way, they didn't skip settlements or cities. Russia is trying deep strikes and bypassing/avoiding many of the larger cities/settlements. And those places are not necessarily under any kind of coherent siege at this point either.
4) Coalition losses in the entire war, where they were again, fighting a numerically far superior force, were tiny. ~200 killed. Estimates of Russian losses so far are 10x+ that and with a lot of lost equipment.
I'm not suggesting I think the Ukrainian position is great or that they're poised to win other than via long insurgency, just that I don't think the comparison works.
Coalition losses in the entire war, where they were again, fighting a numerically far superior force, were tiny. ~200 killed. Estimates of Russian losses so far are 10x+ that
The latest figure reported by Ukraine was they have killed 3500 Russians already. So allowing for a few hours of losses, about 20x.
I find those estimates very hard to believe. The real number of deaths is probably in the mid hundreds on both sides. Bear in mind for each soldier killed you’d expect several times that injured and I doubt the Russians have 10,000 total casualties at this point. That would be the equivalent of several dozen Battalion Tactical Groups disabled.
Last I read was 4500x a few hours ago.[0] I agree it's hard to place faith in the figures. However, one would assume the majority of the fighting hasn't appeared online. Browsing the mediaverse today I did see a few (like 3 different) videos showing what appeared to be unique columns of disabled Russian vehicles. Apparently these were unique, owing to different surrounding environs. That could easily have added to 300 casualties in itself... IIRC one column was a failed Russian push in to Kiev, one was outside Kharkiv and a separate one I can't recall the location. Widely reported were 200 dead Russians at yesterday's airfield. And there was subsequent fighting there too. So it's roughly in the anticipated order of magnitude.
Ukraine is calling on Red Cross to come and help them return the bodies, another brilliant move from them. It means - as far as I can see - that they are ready to show their cards to Red Cross and the international community.
Also we see Russians ask for unconditional talks, which wouldn't be happening if they felt they had a good chance.
I think, as I have hinted to before, that Russians would be wise to break a leg instead of going down to Ukraine.
Same for Russian factory workers, store workers and railway workers: if one can delay/prevent young ones from being sent down to the righteously furious Ukrainians, that might save many lives.
The latest figure reported by Ukraine was they have killed 3500 Russians already.
My understanding was that this number was their claim for total casualties (meaning mostly WIA). And that this got lazily cut-and-pasted all over the place to mean KIA.
Iraq saw lots of Civilian casualties and we are not seeing it in this invasion. As someone who opposes this invasion 100% it has been quite stark to see cordial behaviour of Russian soldiers until now with the local populace. They are not hostile. Infrastructure is intact, electricity and internet is working. There is no vibe of an occupation. There are no massed artillery barrages. Civilian casualties are probably lower then Russian Army’s. There seem to be no embedded journalism from Russians. (I don’t follow Russian propaganda outlets and have avoided the tankie echo chamber). Contrast this with so many blue ticks and Ukrainian media outlets spreading outright lies and going viral. If US was directly invoked, 10 fact checking orgs would have propped by now and started warning on game videos being spread. At the end it is still an invasion and Ukrainians will be killed and come under an occupation, but US is more ruthless with its occupations. US media machine can whip anyone into a frenzy with their reporting. I absolutely don’t support sanctions on Russia, only Russians are going to beat the brunt of it. On one hand we are seeing visuals of Russians protesting and want them to stand up against Putin and Western governments seem to be ok with brutalizing those same people, even if in minority.
War is a nasty virus on brain for people away from all this. It is a privileged take but mental faculties are overloaded with the emotional language being used. A TV station was showing how to make Molotov cocktails to non-Ukrainian audience. Is that helpful at all?
So much thoughts on this invasion. Have seen maybe 4 conflicts (Kargil, Iraq, Afghanistan and Ukraine); numerous military mobilizations and small scale strikes between sworn enemy nations. It is just bile churning to see the whole events play down with no accountability.
you should tell it to ukranians in general, they seems not to share your sentiment. or to my wife's family and friends who sleep in shelters in kharkiv. or to old neighbors of my wife who discovered leftover smerch stuck in ground between buildings.
i guess they should they wake up and realize that this is actually russian spring comes to free them from occupation by neo-nazi benderovzis that are chaired by jew president?
In the end it is still an occupation, they are brutal there’s no disputing it. Degree of brutality was my point, I have seen how Armies behave and Russian way of capturing towns is brutal which they have yet not displayed in Ukraine.
While Russians are shelling and hitting civilians, that particular tank incident is debunked, it was actually a ukrainian vehicle that was making a really hard turn and accidentally ran over him, also the guy survived. Was just a crazy accident. I think it was used as propaganda earlier on as "russian tank rolls over civilian car". There is a video of the old guy in the car getting rescued, and there is another video of whole incident from a different angle, and it looks pretty clear.
>Did you see those tanks rolling over civilian cars trying to escape?
There's one famous video of an APC going over a car, and it's not clear, but some people have mentioned that it was an Ukranian APC (in any case, the crash looked like a mistake). I don't know whose APC it was, but without having deep knowledge it's really hard to tell just from the footage.
Also, for the record, there are many videos of american tanks rolling over iraqi cars, even one particularly notable video where they were doing it on purpose as a punishment.
I guess? The basic concept of a tank is you take a bulldozer, put a gun on it, give it to a bunch of sleep-deprived teenagers, then tell them that if they stop moving at any point they're going to be hit by a RPG and burn to death.
There is no embedded journalism by Russia because they don't have an incentive to do so. At home the war is not carried by the public, it has been decided top down, abroad the only news the Russians want to send out is "crisis adverted" and "look at the monsters we defeated". That doesn't work very well when you fight against school teachers armed with Kalashnikovs in breach of international law.
You always need PR for both internal and external audience. Internal discontent has to be managed a lot more than external one. Russians have started putting out videos but there not in the way CNN did in Iraq. Sitting on Abram Tanks and singing praises of glory.
In the end it is still and occupation and people fear Putin’s purge. There will be refugees. Compare how Iraq, Afghan invasions were and this one is. I am not aligned with Russia one bit but difference is indeed stark.
NATO's conduct in Iraq war should be compared to Russia's conduct in it's war in Chechnya. (Hint: off-white skin color people were involved. Something about "Sand N-----", and "Bandits".)
And speaking of Iraq, Biden's "minor incursions" [1] comment before the invasion reminds of US ambassador's 'it's not our business' [2] input to Saddam Hussein before he attacked Kuwait.
"[Biden]: I think what you're going to see is that Russia will be held accountable if it invades. And it depends on what it does. It's one thing if it's a minor incursion and then we end up having a fight about what to do and not do."
> Iraq saw lots of Civilian casualties and we are not seeing it in this invasion.
Yes, we are.
> Infrastructure is intact, electricity and internet is working.
Yes, the concept of operations is a quick decapitation (“Demilitarization”, “Denazification”, or “Decommunisation”, depending on Putin’s mood at the moment) strike followed by installing a productive puppet regime.
> There is no vibe of an occupation.
That’s because they haven’t gotten to the occupation point, they are still trying to achieve initial control.
> There seem to be no embedded journalism from Russians.
As if all the information being canned, centralized propaganda, that doesn't require any contact with the real facts on the ground is a good thing?
> If US was directly invoked, 10 fact checking orgs would have propped by now and started warning on game videos being spread.
Numerous fact checkers have done that.
> At the end it is still an invasion and Ukrainians will be killed and come under an occupation, but US is more ruthless with its occupations.
It's sad people don't realize how careful with civilian casualties Russia is, and how in contrast US was brutal in Iraq war.
As you mentioned, civil services are all operational, there are no drone strikes based on questionable intel, artillery strikes are focused and kept on the minimum.
On the other side, we see Ukraine giving weapons and instructing citizens on how to fight, which can only become a disaster.
>On the other side, we see Ukraine giving weapons and instructing citizens on how to fight, which can only become a disaster.
Just so i'll understand, mobilization of citizens (i believe all countries have laws like this) in order to fight invading force and arming them is a disaster ? Could you please expand a bit on more appropriate approach that should be taken instead ?
That is not mobilization. Mobilization is giving them proper military equipment, in the very least they give them uniforms and weapons.
They're effectively camouflaging soldiers as civilians, don't you see a problem with that? How can invading force make a distinction between a civilian and a soldier?
did you actually see what exactly is going on there right now ? my 15 years old nieces in law making molotov cocktails right now to protect their city(kharkiv) . this is after sitting under shelling for past few days.
and you complain that mobilization is not done orderly enough.
Mobilizing should’ve been finished weeks ago. I hope your family stays safe, though I don’t think it’s a good idea for 15 year old to do that. It’s not up to civilians to defend.
Russia is suffering massively higher attrition then US did in Iraq. Ukranians are actually successfully counter attacking in places. It is all a lot more even. In Iraq it was like a fully grown man beating up a 10 year old.
Their plan in general seems unnecessary complex and risky. They are burning through VDV at a fearful rate.. why in the hell did they try all of those unsupported helicopter landings? It all seem like Market Garden all the way to Kyiv.
Southern axis are a problem. Order needs to be given for a breakout of the forces holding line of control in the east. Of course we have no idea what reserves and where Ukraine has. Hopefully they did not keep too much too close east and there is a strategic reserve being held somewhere west of Dniepr
Amazingly, from the stuff I've seen, Ukrainian air defense is still a thing! It's not anywhere near gaining superiority, but it's not suppressed either.
Russian air forces are mostly not seen. They mostly supported some paratroopers and now they stay away from action (i guess stinger factor and some leftover Ukrainian air defense) There is only one video of helicopter taking out ukranian buk on the road
Why do you believe that? I am just assuming that many Ukraine troop concentrations visible from satellites has been bombed (vehicles, tents ...) without anything indicating that.
The videos available seems very onesided. I.e. Ukrainian civilian or soldiers' videos of victories. It is probably hard to tell much from the videos on the overall progress of the invasion, except where there are fights.
There is filming of everything. Any movement of troops, any helicopter, any plane and any missile flying.
After first day and a half all videos of russian planes disappeared. probably due to still functioning air defense which down some amount of them. currently seems to be the only use of planes by russians is strategic bombers shooting cruise missiles from belorussian skies.
there is also enough of videos of ukranian equipment blown up.
another point, russia doesn't really have much precise ammo for ground attacks. and there is no signs of carpet bombing in cases where ukranian tanks are blown
You're right, but that "victory" messaging isn't there for you, it's designed to bolster Ukrainians and demoralize the Russians, and western media sources are just parroting this message.
This is also why normally-classified intelligence was leaked by the US goverment.
The intelligence was leaked so that the world would know that the invasion was pre-planned by Russia, rather than some organic response to some act by Ukraine. And I think it was very successful at that.
Historically when something like this happened, it was always hard to understand who really started a violent confrontation. In this case, the US has been successful at showing that the invasion was pre-meditated.
>Of course it's "on the cusp of encircling Kyiv" - it's less distance than the average US drive to WalMart.
I doubt it. I checked the distance from the center of Kyiv to the closest Belarus border and it was around 55 miles. The actual distance is probably higher because I'm taking the distance over the lake/river that's north of Kyiv. Meanwhile...
>For most people in the United States, a Wal-Mart is literally just down the road. The median distance to a Wal-Mart in the United States is 4.2 miles
A degree of pragmatic language impairment – inability to detect hyperbole/exaggeration/sarcasm/etc leads to responding in a literal manner to comments intended to be taken non-literally. Commonly associated with autism, but people who aren't remotely autistic can also display it when tired, drunk, stressed, emotional, using a foreign language in which they have imperfect fluency, etc. It is even more likely online, due to lacking other cues (such as tone of voice).
> If you track the timeline of the Russian developments versus against something like the Iraq invasion, Russia is actually ahead of schedule in many ways.
Iraq had a much larger military in 2003 than Ukraine does now, the US wasn't able to come at it from all sides, and was doing it from the far side of the globe, with a smaller force than Russia deployed in and around Ukraine. And Baghdad is 350 miles from Kuwait, Kyiv 70 miles from Belarus.
So, yeah, Russia is expected to be way ahead of the Iraq War schedule.
> People are claiming it's a victory when Russia hasn't totally taken over within 72 hours, but is that really any kind of victory?
Yes, when the decapitation portion was expected to be much shorter, with Russia’s problems expected to be more guerrilla-ish resistance after the lightning-fast takeover that the massive paper imbalance of forces suggested, it is, especially when there is evidence of serious logistical and morale problems contributing, which will also make the phase after a takeover harder than they would otherwise be expected.
Kazakhstan rebuffing Russia’s request for additional troops, and a number of previously relatively pro-Russia governments not aligning the way Putin might have hoped also is a complication (Hungary, one of the more pro-Russian EU/NATO governments, coming down hard against Russia on this is particularly significant, and the pro-NATO swing in Swedish public opinion is a hard backfire on Putin’s attempt to capitalize on the invasion with further threats.)
While it is still very bad for Ukraine, this has the early signs of a massive debacle for Russia.
> and the pro-NATO swing in Swedish public opinion is a hard backfire on Putin’s attempt to capitalize on the invasion with further threats.
I am positive that those threats are also purely for internal consumption. There's no possible way where this invasion would not result in Sweeden joining NATO. (Other than a complete and total Russian defeat, that revealed it to be a paper tiger, and no real threat to anyone. That's not quite the outcome we're seeing, though.)
> People are claiming it's a victory when Russia hasn't totally taken over within 72 hours, but is that really any kind of victory?
What else are they going to claim? That everything's fucked and there's no realistic hope of even a partial victory?
Regardless of whether or not the war goes well or poorly, the news will be positive, right up until the end. If it turns out to be the latter, everybody who spent the past few weeks listening to it will be struck with one hell of a cog-dissonance hangover.
>Regardless of whether or not the war goes well or poorly, the news will be positive, right up until the end. If it turns out to be the latter, everybody who spent the past few weeks listening to it will be struck with one hell of a cog-dissonance hangover.
I am cautiously optimistic for Ukraine based on early reports. But I am also aware of the history of war propaganda.
The front pages of US and UK newspapers during the Battle of France, for example, were filled with headlines talking about French successes in repelling the Hun. Anyone paying attention to the details, however, could see that the successes were constantly occurring closer and closer to Paris.
If Russia wins, there is going to be (as you said) a lot of cognitive dissonance among those whose worldviews are entirely shaped by Reddit headlines and Twitter takes. I'd hope that having their worldviews shattered so abruptly and violently would cause such people to reexamine all of their preconceptions, but given how previous such cases (notably Brexit and Trump's election) mostly caused them to double down rather than seriously self reflect, I am not hopeful.
Thanks for bringing the contrast with the Iraq invasion up. I was discussing this with a friend today and brought up how a comparitive analysis of Iraq and Ukraine against the US and Russia would look. I don't have the answers and maybe my intuition is completely wrong, but it might look a lot more favorable for Russia than the media outlets are lettibg everyone believe. I recall similar stories of ambushed convoys happening to US troops in Iraq, too.
I don't think Ukraine can beat Russia in a regular war and has to eventually shift to full guerrilla warfare, with which the Russians would have to deal with for years.
Some in the Kremlin might have expected the takeover to be as swift as the Taliban taking back Afghanistan with little to no resistance, before other countries can agree upon any sanctions or reaction. If that were the case, I think sanctions from the west would have been much tamer, due to the war already being over and less political pressure from their own constituencies. E.g. German government needed at ton of public outcry first, before they changed their mind.
Also the longer it takes, the more Putin has to deal with opposition in their own ranks and populace.
Yes, it's fascinating to watch the West impose its own culture into everything - even warfare.
By this I mean the West's addiction to immediate gratification. If Putin hasn't conquered every last inch of Ukraine within 72 hours then he has "failed" according to Western media.
To some degree I don't blame them. In Iraq for example, the war tempo was intentional rapid. The US decided that maneuver warfare[1] would be the doctrine to use and it worked out okay only because they largely dealt with demoralized forces - but in areas where they encountered a willing opposition, it crushed the tempo.
Then, less than a year after "victory" they had terrible battles lasting months where the US lost and public sentiment flipped[2].
I keep two things in mind: in war, the first casualty is the truth.
The second: that it was only a year between "freedom fries" (because the French did not want to help invade Iraq) and "no blood for oil". What will US sentiment be a year from now when the crushing energy and food prices caused by this have worked their way through the system and the Democrats and their media go into the elections with full weaponized Russia-paranoia all over again?
When China is now even stronger because the West weaponized the financial system against an enemy that didn't warrant it?
When China leapfrogs the West even further because they benefited from the sanctions while not having deal with any material suffering?
Could Putin maybe have had an iota of a point about the enlargement of NATO suffocating Russia and backing them into a corner?[3]
Is there perhaps a shred of truth to the claim that there are neo-Nazis in Ukraine - some even trained by the West - even if its understood that this is just an excuse?[4]
These are questions that will inevitably be visited, but not today.
As an Israeli that has lived in Russia and Ukraine you had me til the "neo-nazi comment in ukraine", I don't even know any russians that believe that one.
Gee, let me remind you that the west can suffer from rise in oil prices than Russia can survive from Euros. They need the money more than the west needs oil.
Ukraine and the west have an incentive to share news about the war, about civilian and russian casualties. Russia has no incentive at all to share such news before they have a definitve symbol of victory (e.g. a surrender signed by Zelenskyy).
This means it could be that the news we are getting are quite overly optimistic (although I personally hope the Ukraine is really doing as well as it seems).
I would add that at the same point in the war with Chechnya, the Russian forces were faring similarly. Ukraine is not Chechnya so there's reason for hope. It's also worth noting that although Russian soldiers aren't with their backs to the wall (whereas the Ukrainian soldiers are), Putin's back certainly is to the wall, and he is not democratically-elected. He has been subject to geopolitical constraints (as will be any Russian leader).
Post-war (if it concludes favorably for Ukraine), Putin can still create pain for Ukraine (and Europe) by cutting off gas supplies. He can still do much to hold back Ukraine economically and politically. If we want to score one for democracy, then we would do well not to 1. "win the fight" and 2. get triumphant. If there is a positive resolution for Ukraine in terms of military outcome, the leaders over nonetheless need look for an endgame.
> Putin can still create pain for Ukraine (and Europe) by cutting off gas supplies
If you stop pumping gas through the pipeline, you have several options: abandon the field (not reversible, I think), pump it to the atmosphere, burn it, store it in gas form, store it in liquid form. Russia lacks the infrastructure for the last two options.
Yes. Long term it's hard to imagine Ukraine holding off Russia. The best hope is that a costly invasion causes Putin enough domestic issues that he is forced into some kind of compromise.
If the west keeps supplying when with weapons they might actually hold at least way past the point where Russia can continue the fight.
Bellingcat reports that the orders are to take Kyiv by Monday regardless the losses if Ukraine can hold out for longer they might just be in the clear.
It’s also clear now that the Ukraine is getting direct intelligence from NATO especially from the global hawk drones and the sigint/elint aircraft it’s been flying their ability to avoid Russian offenses, hit key targets and to mount effective counter attack seem to indicate they do have map cheats enabled.
The training they got from NATO forces seem to be paying off in spades too.
Russia seem to be closer and closer to the point where their only winning condition is a Grozny scenario and if that happens then there is no chance that NATO would stand by.
Conventional warfare with limited civilian casualties would be tolerated leveling cities wouldn’t this isn’t Syria.
The EU and NATO knows that even if Russia takes Ukraine they won’t be able to hold it it might take another decade but it eventually would be free again even without major insurgency.
Puppet regimes don’t hold and Ukrainians have been far more interconnected with the EU especially through Poland than say Belarus.
To add to this, I got some unconfirmed reports from Kyiv and Lviv of “very obviously American operatives” supplying intelligence, training, etc. to Ukrainian forces.
> Russia seem to be closer and closer to the point where their only winning condition is a Grozny scenario and if that happens then there is no chance that NATO would stand by.
If that happens we are facing the very real possibility of escalation to some kind of nuclear war per Russia’s doctrine.
If we do not save Ukraine due to our own fear, then that’s the effective precedence Putin will have just set. Russian conquering Ukraine is an _escalation_ from NATO perspective.
Probably not if they let people surrender and treat them reasonably when they do that. It's not like in WWII, where people would be sent to the gas chambers in some concentration camp, if they surrended.
I'm actually surprised Russia isn't patrolling the air along the Polish border and bombing arms shipments. They have to have intelligence of where they are coming in.
I have a strong feeling that NATO has signaled them that if they move westwards they’ll find themselves in direct conflict.
They can’t risk it especially considering they can’t control the skies over central and eastern Ukraine.
Russia hasn’t been able to stop Israel from controlling the skies over Syria either and despite the fact that there is probably a major political component there (Russia doesn’t want Iran to establish themselves in Syria either since it would diminish Syrian dependence on Russia) there is also a very much practical component to it too.
Israel can knock Russia out of Syria even if it can’t do it without any losses it can do it without major losses and other than a symbolic attack most likely a Russian sub sinking Israeli naval assets or attacking Israeli gas platforms in the med Russia cannot wage a conventional war on Israel due to the distance and the vulnerability of their logistics chain.
The situation in Ukraine isn’t that different Russia knows that it only can operate there as long as NATO allows it too and know it probably knows that better than ever.
If we to assume that Russia does not want a nuclear armageddon then we can assume that they would respect which ever red lines NATO has telegraphed to them in private.
Doesn't Ukraine have too many anti-tank missiles to make occupying Kiev tenable without a scorched Earth campaign? The operator of a javelin can immediately move to civilian cover after firing -- fire and forget. Russian forces can't really be motivated to take those kind of casualties for long.
Tanks are ineffective in an urban environment but it also impacts ATGMs that require a line of sight and a relatively long arming distance.
Javelins would probably not be that effective if the tanks enter the city but other anti tank weapons like the NLAW are. Also barricades could have them bogged down.
But still if the numbers of 500 tanks in Kyiv are true and the Russians are under orders not to retreat under any circumstances holding the city might be difficult.
If Russia takes Kyiv even if they don’t kill Zelenskyy they’ll have a bargaining chip to play in the negotiations that would surly have to happen sometime next week if they don’t they don’t have anything.
Right now Russia is running out of win conditions or even a way to get out of this situation at all and that is the most dangerous part.
If they have nothing to bargain with they can’t come to the negotiating table to get the sanctions removed and they will not issue an unconstitutional surrender under any circumstances other than if there to be a regime change in Russia.
you should look at javeline specs (Top Attack: 164 yd (150 m) Direct Attack: 71 yd (65 m)) and nlaw specs (minimum 20m?). do you find them long ?
also kyiv is built from very long and very wide streets (i was born there). if you have enough javelins/nlaw, it will be not too different from shooting range in urban environment
It’s not just the minimum attack range it’s other factors too.
Javelin or any ATGM with DFA doesn’t like power lines.
Line of sight can also be a problem.
IR seekers are more difficult to use due to interference from other IR sources.
Wire guided missiles don’t like urban environments either fences, power lines etc.
Wireless guided missiles actually do get interference from WiFi.
Then you have the tactical issues.
Fear of collateral damage, fewer firing positions which make your actions more predicable etc, and due to the nature of the urban environment you have much fewer enemy vehicles exposed at any time.
It’s not that ATGMs become totally useless it’s just that they aren’t nearly as useful as on an open battlefield.
2014 revolution outlook was also dark, especially closer to the end. I was there on maidan since the beginning until the end. I tell you, the level of motivation is underrated by the world. Victory for Putin is unachievable without genocide.
I don’t think the expectation is that Ukraine won’t eventually fall and become occupied (I think that is likely). However a spirited resistance that is outside of the Russian expectation seems to me could be a deterrent to Putin taking this imperialism beyond Ukraine and test NATOs resolve in the Baltics. That’s a good thing. Stopping the imperialism with Ukraine I think may also deter other possible bad actors from taking advantage of western and NATO chaos to say lob misses into South Korea and Japan…and other make incursions into Taiwan.
> I don’t think the expectation is that Ukraine won’t eventually fall and become occupied (I think that is likely).
I think Russia probably can succeed in occupying significant parts of Ukraine, but I think the idea that it will ever succeed in occupying the entire country is much more dubious – especially the westernmost regions, such as Lviv. Far Western Ukraine is the culturally most dissimilar from Russia – being dominated by Ukrainian speakers and with relatively few Russian speakers; having an Eastern Catholic rather than Orthodox majority, and with most of its Orthodox population belonging to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU) rather than the Moscow-linked Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC-MP); a lengthy history of rule by Poland and Austria – all of which makes it a hotbed of Ukrainian nationalism whose population are among the most likely to give sustained resistance to any attempted Russian occupation or rule by a Russian puppet government. Added to that, it is geographically protected by its borders with NATO member states (Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania), which prevents Russia from encircling it, and gives it guaranteed supply lines; and Russia must be wary of fighting near those borders, given the risk that NATO might be drawn into the conflict. Moldova to the south also provides some protection – although Russia could conceivably invade Moldova as well (and indeed already de facto occupies the breakaway Moldovan region of Transnistria), doing so may risk overextension, and given the deep cultural and linguistic links between Romanians and Moldavians, risks drawing Romania (and hence NATO) into the conflict.
I really don't think Russia has fully thought this through. It is conceivable the war may end with a split of Ukraine in two, one internationally recognised but with significantly diminished territory, the other a Russian puppet regime only recognised by Russia and its close allies. It is conceivable the war may end with Russia annexing further large chunks of Ukraine, especially the South and the East and maybe even significant parts of Central Ukraine. It seems very unlikely it will end with Russia, or a pro-Russian regime, controlling the whole of Ukraine.
You are writing as if Putin is a rational actor. That presumption could not be more wrong. Russia invading Ukraine is already so illogically asinine that nobody should claim to have even the slightest idea what Putin will actually do in the future. He is chaos.
NATO receives no benefit by standing by and letting Ukraine fall. The next fight would be on NATO soil, against a battle hardened, victory spirited aggressor. Oh, and he would know for a fact his nuclear threat worked like a charm.
Now is the time to stop Russia’s aggression once and for all, nuclear threat or not. Putin has never gotten less crazy. There is zero reason to assume a Ukrainian victory would pacify him. We will win handily against any future conflict. But why choose a harder victory tomorrow with one less ally, when we could have lasting victory today?
> You are writing as if Putin is a rational actor.
If he is rational or not I do not know but there can be a great deal of difference between what he wants to do and what he can do because of resources and capability.
The nuclear threat only takes you so far since it’s understood as a last resort response. Even an irrational actor realizes the minute he unleashes nukes he…and everyone else loses.
Are Russians really motivated to roll through Kiev and play real world 'Russian Roulette' with javelin missiles reigning down? I pray the hostilities will cease.
I think the Russians are pretty unmotivated. I doubt they signed up to attack a peaceful neighbouring democracy to replace the government with another brutal dictator. On the other hand they can't refuse orders without being court martialed or worse. However a potential way out is general incompetence - getting lost, running out of fuel etc which seems a thing https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2022/02/26/russias-li...
This is a very myopic view of the situation. Russia has been preparing and strategically planning exactly for such a scenario to unfold for over a decade.
They have created their own domestic equivalent of SWIFT (called SPFS) which went live in 2017 and which is connected to a handful of foreign banks including a few in Germany and in Switzerland. Whilst it is not as great, SPFS works. China has created their own SWIFT equeivalent (CIPS), and it is likely that Russia will cut over to CIPS soon and start funneling USD and EUR into China either to convert the foreign currency reserves into the Chinese yuan or simply use the Chinese financial system as a bypass / proxy.
Some years back the Putin goverenment had also forced Visa and Mastercard to make the Russian branch of their networks fully self-reliant and operational even if the financial link to the global payment networks is severed. Which means that domestically issued Visa and Mastercard cards will continue to operate domestically. They also have their own payment network operated by the major commercial bank albeit the uptake is not as great compared to Visa and MC.
Yes, there will be inflation and a financial chaos but they are prepared and are dug in deep. There will be a mayhem but it might also end up being short lived or have a fairly limited impact – we don't know yet.
> I think the world should push for this.
It is irresponsible to make such statements. Global peace has not looked so fragile and so close to turning into an irreparable mess. West is not playing its card right at the moment by continuously imposing more and more sanctions, by moving NATO troops into bordering countries and not even attempting to offer/signal its willingness to start any negotiation talks. West has fallen into the exact trap Putin had set up for it to justify the current situation and stir up cheap domestic populism and support his «see, they have ganged up on us like we have been telling you all along» rhetoric. Putin's long game is unclear but if he is resolute on the doomsday scenario or if he starts feeling cornered with no escape hatch anywhere near him, what would happen next would happen for all of us, and it would be terrible.
West can't continue to impose sanctions endlessly whilst also continuing to villify and demonise an agonising bear without attempting any currently viable alternatives. People from all sides, with no exceptions, have to start making every single attempt to get everyone to sit down around the table and talk. All parties need to start talking to each other to resolve their differences and compromise. Only talking can avert a much bigger disaster.
Which attempts of the dialogue are you referring to, specifically? Examples of such a dialogue would include NATO and Putin officials discussing new NATO memberships, future roadmaps to the regional stability and/or compromises. I don't have a recollection of such talks talking place in my living memory of the last 10 years, but I am also not a walking historical archive, either.
If you could point to concrete instances of such talks, that would be great.
> Which attempts of the dialogue are you referring to, specifically?
For example Macron's, Biden's or Scholz's talks to Putin prior to the invasion (and also after).
> Examples of such a dialogue would include NATO and Putin officials discussing new NATO memberships, future roadmaps to the regional stability and/or compromises.
You realise that Russian Federation is not a member of NATO and therefore has no say in any NATO memberships?
The guarantees Putin was demanding were never at the table. NATO knew that, Putin knew that, everyone who knows how NATO works knew that. Apparently only you did not get the memo.
No, I am asking about attempts of earlier talks. Last minute attempts were not going to succeed, yet they were worth trying.
> You realise that Russian Federation is not a member of NATO and therefore has no say in any NATO memberships?
So why did the US have to have a say when Cuba allowed the Soviets to suddenly stick their missiles on the Cuban territory? Was the US demand somehow more special from Russian demands?
For the historical record, the USSR asked for the NATO membership in 1948, indicated its interest again to join in 1989 and the last time we heard about Russia and NATO discussing such a potential possibility as late as 2009. West rejected all such ideas and since then there have been no executive level talks discussing further options, to the best of my knowledge. Once the Russia membership in NATO was ruled out as an option, the rhetoric of non-expansion has kicked in.
Regional peace in Europe has been a complex, an intertwined and a nuanced subject that has historically involved every single party in the direct and indirect proximity of the potential area of conflict and even included royal intermarriages across the continent in mediaeval times to foster alliances – if I have to go that far.
> Apparently only you did not get the memo.
Personal attacks such as this one, aggressive rhetoric and the rattling of the genticles is what has got Europe into the mess we are facing today in the first place. People unwilling to listen to each other, every party being assertive only about their own rightness and not arriving at something workable is the root cause of it.
> The first chapter -- political and economic issues -- requires candidates to have stable democratic systems, pursue the peaceful settlement of territorial and ethnic disputes, have good relations with their neighbors, show commitment to the rule of law and human rights, establish democratic and civilian control of their armed forces, and have a market economy.
Does this sound like a set of requirements Russia/Putin is willing to meet? If countries want to join the democratic defense alliance, and they aren't democracies... So what? NATO isn't an alliance of violent dictators. It was USA's insight after WW2 that alliances needed to be held together by more than territorial interest - they need to be held together by values.
If you leave your enemy no way to retreat, you force them to keep fighting. It may feel satisfying to prosecute Putin. It would be justice, but it may not be wise. (I hate that it is so, but... leave him an out.)
This increasingly looks like a repeat of a Finnish war (1940), a colossal blunder when the Red Army couldn't push the Finns off their positions for almost two months, taking huge losses.
Russia has a 'tradition' of stating what seems a 'small victorious war', aiming to boost popularity and support for the government, and then blundering badly - Russian-Japanese war (1905), Russian-Finland war (1940), Afghanistan invasion (1980), two Chechnya wars (1994, 1999). So far, Ukraine 'special operation' seems to be a one more addition to this ignominious list.
It's hard to tell this early into the war, because honestly we don't have any reliable sources on how successful or unsuccessful Russia has been. Ukraine might be exceeding expections, but the margin could be greatly exaggerated to keep the morale of the troops and the country high. It's very difficult to tell. I want to believe Ukraine is weathering this very well, but I also know that sometimes you need positive propaganda to keep your people motivated.
Because Russian propaganda is not on Fox news, but in Russian media, of course. Why would they care about the west, unlike Ukraine that badly needs western support? And Russian media is full of the positive propaganda right now.
You broadcast propaganda to your enemy to demoralize them. The fact that Putin has lost control of the narrative in the west is at least a data point. It's good to be skeptical, but there is hope.
I also find it reminiscent of the Winter War (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_War), but it should be noted that the Soviet Union ended up winning that war. Finland far outperformed what should have been expected from a nation going up against an invader so much larger than it, but in the end the Soviets learned from their initial stumbles and overwhelmed Finland with sheer numbers.
I don’t think the Finns feel too bad about that “loss”. They got to keep their independence and 99% of their land against a orders of magnitude more powerful foe. If Ukraine fares as well I’ll be a happy man.
Putin's strategic goals for this war clearly require a puppet regime in Ukraine.
If the war ends with Ukraine ceding some land but staying independent and anti-Putin, then that might be a loss for Ukraine but it would also be a loss for Russia as the strategic outcome would be worse than the pre-war global status quo, as we're seeing a more unified and militarized Europe (Germany just anounced literally doubling its military budget), Finland+Sweden likely joining NATO. I.e. Russia winning a battle in this way doesn't seem to lead to Russia winning the strategic war.
It should be noted that the Soviet Union ended up winning that war.
WP says "Most sources conclude that the Soviet Union had intended to conquer all of Finland", acknowledging that some don't. And also offers the following tasty tidbit:
"Commander Meretskov announced publicly that the Finnish campaign would take two weeks at the most. Soviet soldiers had even been warned not to cross the border into Sweden by mistake."
In any case the narrative I've always heard is that whatever its initial goals were -- the final outcome (and especially the amount of territory ceded) fell far short of those goals and at far greater cost than anticipated.
If you know of an analysis that (cogently) suggests otherwise, feel free to share it with us.
There is almost no chance that Putin will pull off a Grozny that would have no support of the Russian population or the troops and would drag NATO into the conflict directly.
Unless Putin has decided that 2022 would be the last year of record of the Gregorian calendar at least for a while he isn’t going to bring on the apocalypse.
As horrible as this conflict is it’s pretty much the death knell of Russia as a superpower and probably for good.
It almost lost in Georgia in 08 which brought it a lot of army reforms and its performance in Syria has emboldened them to think that they can play in the big leagues again but it seems that they aren’t able to perform on the modern battlefield at all.
I have a feeling that a lot of people in the pentagon that have been concerned about Russia becoming a near peer to the US are now sighing in relief.
I almost want that once this conflict is over for the pentagon to release a statement in jest that it officially downgrades Russia from near peer to junk like the credit agencies did.
>I have a feeling that a lot of people in the pentagon that have been concerned about Russia becoming a near peer to the US are now sighing in relief.
I doubt anyone in the pentagon was woried about Russia becoming an near peer in conventional arms. The US economy is 14 times the size of the Russian economy. The US spends about $800 billion on its military each year, the Russians spend about $60 billion.
The effective purchasing power of $60B in Russia is far greater than of that amount in the US and by many estimations their actual spending is much higher.
The fear of near peer came from their reforms following 2008 where they decided to modernize their army especially their infantry adopt modern combined arms and maneuver warfare and basically mimic the US individual squad battlefield doctrine.
They shifted on paper form a conscripted army to a professional one and have revamp their NCO core.
And their relative success in Syria did make it seem like they were making a lot of progress now it’s clear that what ever progress they have made was either all a smoke screen or limited to such a small number of units that it doesn’t make an impact on the battlefield.
This war has shown that even what the west feared the most the so called elite airborne troops which were always a key part of Russias military doctrine aren’t effective at all at taking and holding military objectives.
Russian armor seems to also be extremely vulnerable to western ATGMs so the fear of Russian APS systems has also now proven to be completely unfounded and Arena/Afganit seems to either be non existent in the field or utterly and completely useless especially when compared to western battle proven APS systems like Trophy/Windbreaker which have seen great success against Russian modern ATGMs.
Basically they aren’t even a paper tiger at this point they are a wet tissue.
We have now hard indisputable proof that they aren’t capable of anything more than leveling cities from 100 miles away which they won’t be able to do due to NATOs total air superiority or bringing a nuclear annihilation which hopefully they aren’t mad enough to do.
How is it possible to draw such conclusions on day three of a war? This article makes it seem like Russia is winning and will soon be in Kiev. I've not seen anything saying the Russians are suffering massive losses, but rather that they are limiting their offense to minimize civilian casualties, have been rebuffed in some places, and are closing in on the enemy capitol.
Did anyone publish, prior to the invasion, a timeline of how they expected it to go that had Russia far ahead of where they are on day three? If so, can you link it? If not, how do we know they are behind schedule?
It’s not a question if they can take Ukraine but at what cost.
They are behind schedule they couldn’t maintain objectives they captured and are still fighting over the same cities.
They have given up on many objectives in south Ukraine and failed to secure a land bridge to Crimea.
They have already given up on taking many primary objectives and are now bypassing them and pretty much concentrating nearly everything on Kyiv.
The Pentagon, UK MoD and plenty of other entities have been publishing daily analysis.
The fact that they lost so many assets and haven’t been able to establish air superiority (despite Ukraine having pretty much no Airforce and very limited AA) is a also clear indication of their current capabilities also.
And I find it laughable to claim that they are limiting offenses on civilian targets when they are using MLRS and cluster munitions on cities and have been since the war began.
Behind what schedule? In my previous comment I asked for a schedule posted before the invasion. Has the Pentagon or MoD published such a timetable for how they expected it to go?
What assets have they lost and what are reasonable expectations for losses? The kind of stuff I'm seeing here seems like half an analysis. "Russia has done X" okay, but what should we be expecting? How do we know if X is good or bad? I just haven't seen it. How much was this expected to cost Russia?
It's clearly time to pivot China into Russia's spot as the globe's #2 military. That seemed to be the case prior to Ukraine, and based on the showing so far, Russia's military may have been exceptionally badly mismanaged by Putin over the years. What did they do with all that supposed upgrade / modernization money? Where'd they funnel it to? The klepto state klepto'd their own military - it'd be a fitting outcome.
Stalin was probably the most powerful man on Earth during his lifetime, but even he didn't always get his way in the Politburo. Sometimes Stalin was on the losing side of a debate. But win or lose, the Soviet leadership emphasized speaking with a unified voice regardless of whether one had supported or opposed the outcome.
Is there a Politburo for Putin? Is there a group of people around him who can influence him and, sometimes, change his mind?
We don't know exactly, but there has to be a head of police, one of secret services, one for the military. All those people need to be trusted up to a point.
Not really as it was clear that he intends to invade for a long time.
If he is completely deranged and wants to start a nuclear war he could’ve done so without sacrificing so many Russian troops.
He can sit in his bunker and order a nuclear strike and even if most forces would disregard that order it only takes one launch to bring on the end of the world as we know it.
He knows he is running out of time and he wanted a new Russian empire to be his legacy but I don’t think turning Europe and North America into glass is on his todo list.
Very few people accurately said he was going to invade. The president of Ukraine said like two days before hand that it was unlikely. Tryin to make specific predictions at this time about what he will or will not do is not a good idea.
> Very few people accurately said he was going to invade
Quite a lot of people said he seemed like he was going to, for quite a few weeks in advance, though they were trying to dissuade him, just counting people in the US government, NATO, etc.
> The president of Ukraine said like two days before hand that it was unlikely.
He said that the West needed to move forward the sanctions threatened for after an invasion to before, and that Russian behavior depended on immediate, united Western action.
The US media played up the part you refer to and downplayed the I assume our friends will heed my clearly-correct and urgent advice context, because they had a narrative they were selling of “Biden Admin sees imminent invasion, but the Admin is paranoid and everyone else, even the people who would be attacked, disagrees”.
The US clearly had some sort of intelligence that the order had already been given, but France and Ukraine, and other countries without access to that or skeptical of the source specifically said it was unlikely up until a day or two before. The point is that unless you have an advanced intelligence apparatus, trying to guess what Putin is going to do is meaningless at this point, you have to prepare for every eventuality. Here's an article clearly saying that invasion was not imminent based on Ukrainian intelligence on 20 Feb.[0]
Unfortunately, most people's predictions are no better than darts, and if you treat them all equally, of course you'd be lost. However if you're informed and know where to look, things start revealing themselves to you.
I'd been concerned about the buildup for a year, but was practically certain once the abrupt demands to NATO and Alperovitch's analysis came out 3 whole months ago:
If he is completely deranged and wants to start a nuclear war he could’ve done so without sacrificing so many Russian troops.
It's not so much that he "wants to" start a nuclear war.
The concern is whether he may end up doing that anyway -- if the moment arrives when he is sufficiently cornered and feels he has nothing more to lose.
The Winter War was not a colossal blunder, the Soviet Union got the territory it needed to protect Leningrad from attack, which happened a year after the Winter War ended.
Also various reforms happened after the Winter War that readied the Red Army for the soon coming invasion of the USSR.
There were military, and possibly political, blunders by the Soviet Union in the beginning of the Winter War, but the result was a successful one for them.
If we look at history, it's closer to Iran-Iraq wars.
Saddam pulled a historical grudge out of the ass, wrapped it in bizarre, artificial semi-religious ideology, and tried to draw an image of "people's war" with propaganda.
Then he started the war with people who 1) actually have a real historical grudge, 2) are real religious warriors, and crack good at that, 3) were much better at "people warring" than him, forcing him to retreat in complete ignomy after poking the beehive, which later causes an existential crisis within his regime.
Heck, I would say Putinism is the closest thing to Baathism. Random nonsense from communism, religion, and fascism glued together, and called an "ideology," which then not even its own members can understand, or explain.
> Russian troops surrender to a local old guy in a village
this is very incorrect description, there is nothing like that in that episode. Local guy (why old?) is saying he will not allow Russians to come close to his house because he is afraid of shelling from Ukrainian artillery.
One of the most annoying effects of modern warfare between developed countries (after deaths, suffering, devastation, etc etc) is that the internet gets filled with all sorts of propaganda crap from both sides. It reaches a point where every day makes me want to turn off the internet like it were April 1 - because you literally cannot trust anyone anymore.
The "Ghost of Kyiv" flight sim footage being pushed by the Ukrainian MoD was a particularly absurd moment. It will be interesting to see how many of the prominent narratives turn out to be bullshit in a few weeks.
We aren't? Obviously the primary goal is to influence Ukrainian morale, but an important secondary objective is to convince Westerners to petition their leaders to send Ukraine weapons, money, and materiel. Part of that involves convincing people that Ukraine has a fighting chance.
Been that way for a while. Have you seen the state of the reddit frontpage? 100% astroturf for the past 3+ years. Just try and participate and watch your comment sit at +1 while the bots all upvote each other and ignore you.
It sounds like the Russian population, and even the soldiers themselves don't know they are there, or at the very least why they are there. This guy calling his parents is just sad. Disposable conscripts sent to be fodder for something they are clueless about.
yeah the general thought right now is that these are just young, mandatory conscripts that were kept in the dark right before deployment by calling it training exercises and then put them into war mode. fighting against a population that wants to live in their homes is hard. I wish all the Ukrainians fighting against this corrupt invasion all the best.
I hope the crippling sanctions will not cause putin to do something drastic but rather force the oligarchs hand to depose him and stop the assault.
How is that any different from some 19yo kid from a opioid infested family in Midwest going to Europe or Middle East in the name of democracy? Do you think those kids know what they are doing?
I think the point of having a serf like population is to allow having a growing military with the elites of the society making the decisions. It goes for ALL countries.
I'm not American (hello from Canada, born in ex-Yugoslavia), but that's silly. You don't get the difference between a conscript and an enlisted soldier? Ask my father if it was propaganda made him chose to defend some warlord's front or if it was armed soldiers forcing him to under threat of desertion. In the instance of these Russian conscripts, it could've been an extension of their mandatory 12-month training rather than a knock on the door, but it's still armed soldiers that made sure they didn't desert.
I truly dislike the way America promotes enlisting like some cool Activision game (the ads are truly jarring from the outside looking in), but the difference is no less black and white.
> How is that any different from some 19yo kid from a opioid infested family in Midwest going to Europe or Middle East in the name of democracy? Do you think those kids know what they are doing?
mandatory conscription vs a decision and desire to join? is that really not clear?
An important characteristic of propaganda is whataboutism. Consider why you would want to talk about some random US war instead of something that is happening right now? No one is immune to propaganda
You want to talk about what aboutism and propaganda? Right this very moment, there are more than 5 active conflicts going on. Myanmar, South Sudan, Syria, Mali, Lydia. Yet the only reason we seem to care about Ukraine so much is because somehow our American media has convinced us it’s the Democracy that’s at stake. Talk about propaganda. Go figure!
> You want to talk about what aboutism and propaganda? Right this very moment, there are more than 5 active conflicts going on. Myanmar, South Sudan, Syria, Mali, Lydia. Yet the only reason we seem to care about Ukraine so much is because somehow our American media has convinced us it’s the Democracy that’s at stake. Talk about propaganda. Go figure!
because those are all internal conflicts that don't involve nuclear superpowers next to other parties that would trigger a NATO retaliatory strike and likely world war iii.
doubtful. putin is the mob boss and he has them in line up to a point. putin got power and strong armed the oligarchs into giving him a cut of their business and for them to stay out of politics. he made an example of one of them by putting the richest of the oligarchs at the time into prison... everyone else signed up.
this is strictly putin being putin.
edit also, a lot of the oligarch money is invested heavily in overseas banks that would and are being targeted by the sanctions. being a billionaire is not much if you can't access your money
What do they stand to gain? The entire oligarch angle doesn’t pass the smell test anymore these are billionaires that have billions on the line and nothing to gain from Russia which is still the main source of their questionable wealth becoming a pariah state.
They get to gain Ukraine, the pipeline and resources. Ukrainian Oligarchs are in favor of the war because the Ukrainian democracy is a threat to their wealth, they want the same setup as in Russia. Ukraine's wealth in large part comes from taxation on transportation of Russian fuel. This is all about securing Russian / Eastern European dominance in the fossil fuel market while North America is effectively sitting on the sidelines until we get a pro fossil fuel Administration back in Washington.
They want to show a secure pro fossil fuel position and attract the international industry. The US became the leading world power 100% because of our industrial utilization and becoming the center of refinement for fossil fuels.
All of the "green propaganda" has been effective and even though there is not even remotely a variable alternative to meet the world's energy needs the US is voluntarily reducing it's number one power asset and Moscow needs to cement their position now before the US can recover.
Look at Germany, the largest EU economy and their hesitancy to go forward with sanctions. They need Russian fuel, as does the entire EU and in a few years these actions will be overlooked in the face of solid and stable supply. All Russia needs is to create enough Ukrainian turmoil to install a subservient regime that doesn't interfere with fossil fuel projects.
> The pipeline was supposed to be deadlined completely after nord stream 2.
But NS2 hit the brakes last year. Biden probably wanted something for it, like returning the Donbass. Hence Putin going "fuck it, I'll get the old one then".
That timeline and explanation makes more sense than a smart 69yo mafia boss, at the peak of his powers, just throwing it all away over some ideological bullshit.
The first casualty of War is Truth. It could be staged, he could be lying to be seem more sympathetic and avoid torture. The fog of war is there, but know almost nothing.
There are reports that Russian tank drivers are selling the tank's fuel to locals and getting drunk on the proceeds, then abandoning their tanks e.g. [1]
although I can't verify the veracity of these stories.
Just to say for anyone skimming through, that story is from before the war was declared, maybe they really believed they were there for exercises. Still, embarassing.
They can drink and hide and wait for the other Russian oligarchs whose wealth is being seriously threatened to remove their foolish leader and stop the idiotic war. That is more sensible than risking your life to kill your neighbor, all for the benefit of nothing but making a little man feel powerful.
that's a funny story but I have my doubts that superior officers have such little communication with their charges that something like that would happen without said tank occupants being court marshalled immediately
Yes, because why should a Russian soldier risk his/her life to fight a neighbor!? Only to stroke the ego of a small man? Surely the rank and file ground troops do not want this.
Why would US troops risk their lives in the middle of Iraq to simply send a message to the world that the US can invade any country it likes, even for made up reasons, and nobody can stop them?
Clearly nobody actually thinks about it that way. They are professionals and they carry out their legal orders, given to them by a properly constituted government, to the best of their ability.
Yes, even if the orders are to conduct criminal was of aggression. Because at this stage of human history, the rules based international order is a hopeful fantasy.
It seems you're misremembering or discounting the American psyche in the immediate shadow of 9/11.
While later proven to be false, accusations of WMD, and the insinuation they could be used against the US and/or Europe, were widely believed and likely highly motivating to the average American GI in 2003.
I know men and women who enthusiastically signed up to fight in Afghanistan and Iraq who had little prior intention to join the military.
> accusations of WMD, and the insinuation they could be used against the US and/or Europe, were widely believed
Were they widely believed? I know I was told they were widely believed, but I never saw polls that confirmed that. Colin Powell was literally laughed at for claiming there were WMDs when addressing the UN and the UN inspectors were very clear there were none.
They were largely debunked in realtime. The western media (I believe the Guardian specifically) published the receipts on the artillery balloon filling vehicles that Britain sold Iraq that the US/UK were trying to pass of as vehicles of mysterious origin that had to be mobile WMD labs before Powell’s presentation to the UNSC. At which meeting, other US allegations were debunked by UN inspectors. Heck, the British government memos about the way intelligence was being shaped to sell the war were leaked before the war the started.
The American/British public went along with the war because of racist hysteria whipped up after 9/11, not any evidence that was uncontroversial at the time but later debunked.
It's often sold as intelligence or media failure or clever executive deception that brought the public and lawmakers along and was later seen through, but that's largely B.S. The lies were documented in fairly stark terms before the war for the public and lawmakers, and they chose to go to war anyway because they didn't care about the facts. But narrowly focusing the blame on the media and the Bush Administration/Blair government lets everyone else absolve themselves.
I wasn't attempting to relitigate the events of the 2000's. I didn't support the war at the time.
It's important to understand the simple fact that a majority of Americans at the time believed the war was just[1], and that the government spent many months justifying and readying the nation and its soldiers for war. This is an important factor that helps explain the high morale of American troops at the start of the war.
In the anti-war movement I can assure you that they were not believed. And with good reason, no evidence was presented. That is why we protested in huge numbers before the war began.
If you go back and review press interviews with donald rumsfeld at the time you can see that even he could not provide evidence which convinced the journalists. Regardless, the media did their patriotic dtuy and reported them as fact.
Check out the news clip of Rumsfelds "unknown unknowns". A journalist asks: "That is all very interesting but is there any evidence, because that would elevate our bind faith in to something actually reasonable and fact based?" Rumsfeld had nothing to offer.
Well when you're there you risk your life for you friends to your left and right. I'm sure it also helped that the Iraqis welcomed the US and Saddam was a brutal tyrant.
> The total number of deaths and disappearances related to repression during this period is unknown, but is estimated to be at least 250,000 to 290,000 according to Human Rights Watch, with the great majority of those occurring as a result of the Anfal genocide in 1988 and the suppression of the uprisings in Iraq in 1991
> Ukraine is not only bigger but some 50 percent more populous than Iraq, and the Iraqi population included many millions—Kurds, Christians, Yezidis, Shabak, and many of the Shia—who broadly supported the coalition forces throughout our time there. Only a minority of the Iraqi population comprised or supported the Sunni extremists and insurgents and Iranian-supported Shia militia. Though they did, to be sure, prove to be very formidable enemies.
> "Iraq, today, 10 years on from the war, from the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, is not what the Iraqi people hoped for and expected. We hoped for an inclusive democracy, an Iraq that is at peace with itself and at peace with its neighbors," Salih said. "To be blunt, we are far from that."
> "But," he added, "it's important to understand where we started from. ... Literally hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were sent to mass graves. Ten years on from the demise of Saddam Hussein, we're still discovering mass graves across Iraq. And Iraqis are better off without Saddam Hussein—the overwhelming majority of Iraqis are better off without Saddam Hussein."
Glad you mentioned the goalpost moving. If we come back to whether wars of aggression are justified or not. Does a happy outcome justify them?
One interesting example here is in the 80's people could say "South Korea might be a brutal military dictatorship, but it is doing well economically, and therefore that justifies the Korean war"
Which is interesting of course, because in the 1960's, when North Korea was ahead economically, I'm sure North Koreans had the same post-hoc justification.
And if you look in to how US support for the Ba'ath party was justified... Strikingly similar but with the added dimension of US security interests vis a vis maintaining or restoring the Iranian dictatorship.
That all that brings us full circle to whether the Iranian revolution is justified by having got rid of a regime at similarly torturous as Saddam's.
The Iraqi insurgent demands were for the US to promptly leave (not occupy the nation for over a decade) and they were also happy to have Saddam Hussein's regime gone. The mass population of Iraq was very clearly not against the US removing the regime either. The primary disastrous mistake the US made was the very poorly planned occupation and dismantling of most of the existing government structures (amplifying the chaos and civil war risks).
Edit: but I will add that an insurgent is somebody who is fighting against a legitimately constituted government, which did not exist in Iraq, so technically they are resisters.
1.American soldiers are hired professionals, paid well to do a job. Most of the Russians are conscripts which are treated like shit and don’t want to be there.
2.US media had hyped up hatred towards Saddam for months. Soldiers got lots of hate training before being deployed . They got trained to dehumanize and hate Iraqis. This was very effective but backfired because it led to trigger happy soldiers shooting and blowing up way too many civilians, thus undermining the war effort.
3. Iraq is a far away country Americans cannot relate to or empathized with. Ukraine is a country many Russians are strongly linked to with family, culture and language. This is like the US attacking Canada. How do you think that would go? Americans would hesitate a lot more to shoot Canadians than Iraqis.
While I don't disagree at all on the broad points you are making there is definitely some nuance there.
I personally believe that the US military is an outlier in terms of it's professionalism, but it's not completely and uniformly professional, there are lots of people coerced in to joining to avoid jail time and what not. Many standards were lowered to increase recruitment during Iraq war. Recruitment targets disadvantaged communities, etc. But I tend to think that there are other forces countering ill-discipline such as training, esprit de corps, "fighting for the guy next to you." I don't know about the disposition of the Russian military but am skeptical of the notion that it's a rag tag bunch of drunks and fuckups :) I guess time will tell.
As for the excessive violence in Iraq. A lot of the excesses came directly from the top. Shock and awe was apparently a fireworks display with no military rationale. It was violence purely for entertainment value and how it would look on TV. It doesn't seem comparable to the Russian approach which, while everything they do is a war crime, they still need to be conscious of all the international scrutiny they face. I don't think they would be able to start levelling neighbourhoods from the air while boasting about how it would terrorize the population without facing severe condemnation from all sides. Shock and awe was condemned by all sides, but the US seemed completely immune to it and carried on regardless. By all accounts, the distrust built up by the acts of terrorism turned Iraqis quickly against the invasion and made the occupation much more costly than it would have been otherwise (of course, other factors contributed hugely, eg. the corruption and incompetence of the CPA, etc.).
While I agree on the race and culture thing, it's also hard to ignore the fact that a large US political movement is committed to wiping out or overpowering roughly half of their own population based on their political beliefs. The events of January 6 should really have opened up peoples eyes to this. We are quite capable of dehumanizing people of the same race. We've been doing it for as far back as the fossil record goes.
In that case at least Saddam really was a tyrant. Obviously pick your poison but you could make a case of intervention in Iraq - i.e. if it were led by Blair rather than Bush I think we'd be reflecting differently, although probably still negatively
Doesn't matter who leads who, invading sovereign territory means invading sovereign territory.
One of the massive mistakes in US foreign policy after September 2001 was to effectively re-legitimise old-school military power, occupating countries "just because we can", without even a shadow of UN mandate. It makes it very hard to rhetorically argue against others doing the same now.
Right. If an argument can be made for the US overthrowing Saddam. Why can't an argument be made for Iran doing it?
Iran was invaded by Saddam. Why didn't we support them if Saddam was so bad? That is a rhetorical question which really needs no response because the response is: the badness of Saddam has no bearing on the question. That is very obvious in this case, but not obvious when we are seeking self-serving justifications for our own wars.
>In that case at least Saddam really was a tyrant.
You should research a bit what life in Iraq was like prior to GW1 under Saddam's leadership. Most - in fact, nearly all - ME leaders are 'tyrants' according to Western standards but some are rewarded with arms and some are struck down.
Literally nobody seems to care about whatever Saudi Arabia gets up to in human rights violations, for example. People sometimes bring up its repression of women, and I think I've heard people bring that up more than Yemen, for example.
It’s different the US was actually attacked whilst not by Iraq ofc Saddam well was Saddam…
Also a key factor here that most Americans don’t get greeting cards from Iraqis over Easter you’ll be hard pressed to find a single Ukrainian or Russian family that doesn’t have relatives across the border.
An analogy to this situation would be if the US decided to invade Canada tomorrow it would be much harder to explain to the troops or to motivate them.
The US should not have done that, and most of us know that. That has no bearing on and is no excuse for what is happening right now.
But at the time you speak of, there was a concerted disinformation scheme which led many people, likely including troops and certainly including the US Congress, to believe that Iraq was becoming a nuclear threat led by a power-hungry man. Troops probably believed they were fighting for the freedom and safety of the world.
I hope nothing in my comment could be interpreted as excusing criminal wars of aggression. I am just trying to understand and make sense of why people tacitly support, or even actively participate in them.
> I am just trying to understand and make sense of why people tacitly support, or even actively participate in them.
That is a huge topic which I cannot hope to explain (or mostly understand). If you look at the shift in US political ideology in the last 5-10 years, particularly during the Trump era (which still continues), it is clear that some masterful manipulation scheme has been operating effectively.
It is clearly possible to groom a significant percentage of a population to believe in absolute lies. This happened in the US after 9/11 (and surely in previous periods); but it was never so effective as it has been lately. The war in Iraq was easy to justify to Americans, even without WMD lies. Hussein was a very bad man by our standards. That alone, of course, does not justify invasion. So other threats must be illustrated, legitimate or not.
But to the point of understanding, you have to realize that people (particularly older ones?) get their information from very few sources; and they communicate with the same few people. It is much easier to sell disinformation and have them repeat it amongst themselves than for younger, more internet-active people.
The rise of Trumpist political forces is extremely alarming. But they stem from somewhere: mistrust in institutions which correlates hugely with support for people like Trump. If people cannot trust their leaders, they cannot trust institutions, they cannot trust reality itself, it leads them to exhaustion, defeatism, and towards supporting personalist rulers. When Trump lies he says "well everyone else is lying, the media is fake news, the government is the deep-state, but when I lie, at least I am honest that I am a liar" and that gives him a legitimacy in the eyes of his followers because all the complex issues boil down to "do you trust big brother or not?".
So yes, the new era is worse than the old Bush era where Rumsfeld was a circus clown feeding us bullshit, but behind the scenes the institutions basically functioned properly. Because in that world that we have left behind now, we still had wars of aggression, we still had robber barons, but the institutions had a veneer of legitimacy which the public, and the people in the institutions believed in enough that you had countervailing political forces that could protect you from the worst excesses. But that past was a mirage, because during that time, the leaders were draining out that trust like siphoning gas out of your tank (eg. in the Iraq war, NAFTA, on and on..), and they were trading it for political power and dollars.
Now the tank is empty, and US institutions are extremely vulnerable to collapse. And I think that Trump was just the last drop of gas escaping.
If you actually pay close attention to what Donald Rumsfeld said and wrote, he wasn't a circus clown at all. He was actually quite intelligent and sincere. But he was also completely wrong about everything important. Is that better or worse?
I actually agree with you about him being intelligent and sincere. I am actually fascinated by people like him.
The fact that he believes those idiotic things while having a seemingly very reasonable belief system around the goals and functions of the institutions he serves, and what his role is in them, is something I find quite darkly comical. Actually I think his sincerity makes his one-off performances laugh-out-loud funny.
Watching the Errol Morris documentary with him is tragic and comic at the same time. I mean, take for instance his view on the Vietnam war. He goes from a very touching and thoughtful personal recollection of the evacuation to Saigon to telling us that his reflection over the entire decades-long US involvement in a conflict that murdered 4 million people as being "some things work out, some things don't." And this appears to be after quite a lot of prompting. It is profound, and inane in equal measure. Hannah Arendt would be slack-jawed.
> believe that Iraq was becoming a nuclear threat led by a power-hungry man
I presume you mean chemical threat? Let's not forget that Saddam seems to have done his best to encourage that belief, and actually had a verified history of gassing the Kurds. As someone who was opposed to the Iraq war at the time, I'm still not sure history has fully weighed in on that particular (mis)adventure... the Kurds certainly are entitled to their strong endorsement.
The minor complication there is that the US defence establishment produced intelligence reports (available under FOIA) blaming the Iranians for chemical attacks. I think it wasn't until 2002 when the US intelligence agencies finally switched to publicly/officially recognising Saddam as the culprit.
"Legal orders" are defined by the country giving them (in this case the US) which are a combination of the various treaties that the US has signed and laws. For instance, no soldier can legally be ordered to violate the Geneva convention, and they can be court martial for following such an order.
A war of aggression is about international law, and is commonly not considered something that determines if an order is legal in any military.
Is this good or bad? Does it mean that Russia is not the threat that was once thought? Putin still holds nukes, and we don't want him to feel threatened enough to use them.
The mere existence of nuclear weapons is a threat for the simple fact that if they exist, at some point, they are bound to get used. It is pure luck that they haven't been accidentally or intentionally used in a disastrous way.
If you care about the threat of nuclear weapons, you need to realise that you aren't going to disarm foreign powers who have them through force without unacceptable risk that you cause the scenario you claim to want to avoid.
So the obvious solution is something like if the NPT were to actually be implemented as a good-faith vehicle of global nuclear disarmament. But in order to do that, you are then committed to dealing peacefully with everyone and resolving conflict within the framework of a trustworthy rules-based system. ie. A prerequisite would be acting in a way that leads to building trust in international law and order.
Currently no nuclear state is doing that. And it's hard to imagine any leader or party coming to office running on a platform that proposes it. We have all observed the absolute glee we feel when we act out our own aggressive fantasies (too numerous to mention), and the mirroring (and equally corrosive) sanctimonious pleasure we gain from condemning the aggressions of others and responding in unproductive ways which almost guarantee escalations, if not in the actual conflicts, then in the feelings which engender those conflicts (ie. "they are all against me", "this is unfair", "they never act in good-faith", "they are hypocrites", "there are no rules, only power relations", because "to the extent that there are rules, why should they apply to me, when they don't apply to them", etc).
The best we have been able to achieve, so far, in deterring the aggression of opposing powers is either to:
1. Destroy them so thoroughly that they never reconstitute (eg. Carthage)
2. Destroy them so thoroughly that it takes decades for them to reconstitute (eg. Germany after WW1)
3. Delay/frustrate them with limited conflict or sabre-rattling alone (eg. USA/Taiwan 1996, Ukraine/Russia 2014, etc.)
Nuclear weapons just means that the extermination strategy is off the table. But it doesn't look like the avoidance/posturing/bullshit strategy is going to suddenly start working.
Who is he going to nuke? No one is threatening Russia. Tactical nukes seem pointless in the Ukrainian campaign, and strategic nuking Kiev when he wants it intact seems an odd thing to do.
Ah, but Putin claimed Russia is under threat from Ukraine trying to join NATO, that neonazis have taken over Ukraine, that Ukraine is waging genocide on Russians… Of course all of this is theatre, just to keep in mind the current narrative.
Thankfully, that’s not on the cards. His whole argument around Ukraine is to “liberate” ethnic Russians, not kill them all, and at this point, his own army. Even Russian propaganda would have a hard time with that.
If he doesn't cut russians off from the internet there is no way he can control the narrative to Russian citizens. I am completely surprised he hasn't ordered that yet.
What will he do as he realizes he can't hold Kyiv. When he realizes his plan of quick conquest failed, that the Russian military has been revealed to be an embarrassing mess on the global stage.
I worry that he'll use increasingly vicious attacks on population centers, bombings, as an offset to cover up the ineptitude. He can't afford the loss of face, the show of weakness, that the present circumstances represent. His military is weak, poorly organized, incapable of pinpoint strategy, and he'll make up for it by brute force (which will get a lot of civilians killed).
The US and Europe so far are pulling together (with Germany finally coming around more), so Ukraine appears that they'll have a supply of weapons to fight an occupation. The Ukrainians will hate any pro-Russian regime that gets installed and will topple it; the Ukrainian army will not align with Russia. It's hard to see a glorious winning outcome for Putin from here.
> I worry that he'll use increasingly vicious attacks on population centers, bombings, as an offset to cover up the ineptitude. He can't afford the loss of face, the show of weakness, that the present circumstances represent.
Yeah, I fear this is precisely the danger when dealing with narcissists like Putin. Sadly the idea of deploying effective political strategies to neutralize these dangers appears to be anathema in the west as we begin to mirror Putin with nonsensical, hypocritical and sanctimonious high-horsing.
Politicians who wanted to keep BLM politics out of sport are now proposing full-scale ping-pong boycotts. Anti-BDS people are now refusing to drink vodka. Israelis in occupied Palestine are protesting against military occupations. British politicians who are in an alliance with the DUP are now against military interventions to "defend" separatists. Hawks have become doves and spread their beautiful wings to take flight. It's like part of the world has turned it's principles upside down overnight as soon as they see a chance to kick Russia in the shins.
From the Russian perspective, this must look comical, and I'm sure it all plays handily in to their propaganda: "They are liars and hypocrites and everything they say is stupid, cynical and part of a power-play to disadvantage the legitimate aspirations of Russian people". Retch.
I had zero doubts this invasion was going to happen for at least like, 2 months, possibly more. It’s been reported that a surprisingly large amount of people & even governments truly thought it wasn’t going to happen.
I am now truly worried that Putin is going to completely fucking raze Kyiv to the ground after being made to look like a complete & utter fool with his military’s lackluster performance.
Gambler’s fallacy. You guessed whether he would invade and you were right. That doesn’t mean your next guess is any more likely to be correct.
FWIW, I have had the same concern as you. I don’t really know enough about Putin’s mental state to know whether the concern is valid. I think he would be much more likely to use chemical weapons rather than nuclear.
> Gambler’s fallacy. You guessed whether he would invade and you were right. That doesn’t mean your next guess is any more likely to be correct.
What??? This assumes every opinion comes down to a coin flip. This is clearly not the case. Some people are better predictors for things that don't have guaranteed probability of outcomes.
Meh. I also predicted this invasion would happen, yet I don't see Putin razing Kyiv or using nuclear weapons. There's plenty of opportunity for everyone to be wrong.
This is like a drunk ex bursting into your apartment, smashing furniture and demanding that you stop seeing that new boyfriend. Not a winning strategy by any means.
Anthropomorphizing countries, even for analogies, isn't all that great generally, but:
> This is like a drunk ex bursting into your apartment, smashing furniture and demanding that you stop seeing that new boyfriend.
...who you are not, in fact, seeing because they’ve said that, while they are interested, they won't get involved while you have so many unsettled issues with the ex.
Good analogy, sheds light on the fact that the narcissistic abuser doesn't expect to win the girlfriend back with such a manoeuvre, he just wants to scare off any potential boyfriends and render her alone and helpless. In which case the victory will be purely sadistic punishment with a good chance that she has been so demoralized that she will fall back in to his lap "like a ripe fruit from a tree."
It's why I disagree with various claims of Putin's "genius". I think these sort of stratagems are an instinctive part of the nature of narcissistic personalities.
As a non-military minded observer, my first thoughts were, "How much resolve does the Russian soldier have in this war?" There must be many personal connections between Ukranian and Russian soldiers and citzens of the other country. Relatives, friends, business colleagues. As a soldier aiming his rifle or firing a barrage of rockets, is he wondering if the person on the other end is a cousin? Or college friend?
It seems likely, similarly to the US Civil war. How much does that affect their resolve and is that playing out in the (reportedly) poor performance so far?
I have family in this exact situation. Four on the call a few days ago, two defending in Ukraine and two preparing to invade. My Ukrainian family was trying to educate them on why what they were doing is wrong, and show them all the lies. There was no response from the Russians but silence.
Propaganda is scarily powerful. These videos you see are real, their mental breakdowns are real.
This is actually pro-Russian position today. Both maidans happened to “disprove” this. And now a direct invasion. You don’t imagine how much hate is now on Ukrainian side
on russian side it seems to be combination of conscripts that were ordered to march in and they afraid to disobey the order (while understanding that it's wrong thing to do) and of contract force that believes that ukranians are ruled by neo-nazi junta (with jewish president ?!?) and they come to free them. and those that don't want to be freed they are simply brainwashed.
* based on a bunch of videos of captured solders and general communication between russian and ukranian sides on internet in last couple of days
>As a non-military minded observer, my first thoughts were, "How much resolve does the Russian soldier have in this war?" There must be many personal connections between Ukranian and Russian soldiers and citzens of the other country. Relatives, friends, business colleagues. As a soldier aiming his rifle or firing a barrage of rockets, is he wondering if the person on the other end is a cousin? Or college friend?
This is much more of a factor than what you even say. A significant portion of troops are not interested in killing the enemy. Especially true of conscripts, some conscript platoons were near 100% incapable of shooting at the enemy that the enemy could slaughter them all.
He discovered that either people wont stick their head out of the hole and instead shoot at tree tops. Hoping to scare them off? Or they simply never shot their rifle even once. People certainly criticize this, but I criticize the critics. This guy is 100% right and a large part why conscription doesnt work.
That changes up with general mobilization, if people are defending their own country like vietnam... it's just that much worse because those people are trying to repel invaders. They will shoot the invaders. Their lives have been interrupted and the interrupters must be killed.
So when non-special forces troops actually enter the cities and come up against general mobilization. Russians will take huge losses because those troops will not shoot back directly at the enemy.
I also have a theory, the huge list of allies of ukraine have special forces deployed in proxy war. We will never know the truth obviously. Russian troops who think they are fighting civilians are coming up against some of the best of the best in the world. Russia can't even tell the troops they might be coming up against other special forces. It would be tremendously demoralizing.
What honestly surprised me the most was the shockingly poor state of the equipment I have seen. Some of the APCs in particular look like they have been parked in a barn for 30 years (which they very well may have!)
Given that exporting arms is a huge source of revenue for the government, I would have assumed they would have relatively modern inventory. But the cobbler's children have no shoes, I guess.
This reeks of delusional leadership. They saw numbers on a page, and spent decades bragging about rusting inventory. Meanwhile, the West has actually rotated through three generations of inventory and have prepared for the opponent they thought they were getting
>Given that exporting arms is a huge source of revenue for the government, I would have assumed they would have relatively modern inventory. But the cobbler's children have no shoes, I guess.
Russia doesn't have modern manufacturing capabilities and personal to operate it. Most of stuff that is made it's "one off samples".
As anecdote, they discovered only today that flagship russian cpu elbrus that supposed to be used by military/government is actually made in taiwan and than relabled in russia. Yesterday TSMC announced that they stop manufacturing it.
Russia did buy from AMD old line from German factory a bunch of years ago, but it's still doesn't really working properly(iirc)
I've always wondered what condition their ICBMs and nuclear arsenal are in. Are they all rusting in silos in various states of disrepair? I'd imagine upkeep costs for these things would be astronomical considering the reported size of their nuclear arsenal.
It is either that, or send in replaceable shock troops to tease out defensive capabilities, then send in the real forces. I can imagine Russia, paranoid as always, may have wondered at want technological war machine wonders we were providing Ukraine.
That seems more likely, Ukraine does not have unlimited reserves of munitions and only so many ambushes it can spring. That said, I don’t think the paratroops that have allegedly been shot down / defeated are usually replaceable, but are usually some of the better trained / equipped.
I‘ve seen the „Ukraine is gonna run out of material at some point“ mentioned a bunch in the last few days and am genuinely curious: Aren‘t they getting resupplied by NATO? Trying to run a NATO aligned state who is not physically cut off from western supply lines out of munitions seems insane, am I missing something?
Iraq invasion started on March 19 and Baghdad was formally occupied on April 9. If you look at the timeline, they were fighting over the airports close to the city just days before the city was occupied. Russia looks already to be encircling Kyiv and making attempts to gain control of the analogous airports.
Russia might be looking into doing it, but they don't have enough fuel to do it so far (hence a bunch of neglected machinery that run out of fuel) . Railroads to russia were blown in last few days and there is a lot of pissed of people hunting down fuel tracks.
Also Kyiv is kinda big city. Encircling and occupying it's two very different things
On paper, Russia has significant military advantage. But if you look at the humans doing the fighting, I think you might see some very different levels of commitment and motivation.
The Ukrainian troops are defending their homes. They are up against a wall, so this is a matter of survival. The Russian troops are fighting for something that likely many of them care nothing about. They are being made to risk their lives (and fight their cousins, so to speak). Not only may they have issues with fighting other similar folks, but they certainly don't _need_ to be risking their lives.
Russia can’t do combined arms warfare they don’t have good communication lines even on a platoon level and pretty much no cross branch communications.
They also seem to completely lack modern blue force tracking which is why they still have to rely on recognition stripes it wouldn’t surprise me if the Russians destroyed as much of their own armor as they did Ukrainian.
And most importantly they seem to be completely inept at performing SAED something that the US and some of its allies especially Israel seem to have nearly perfected at least when it comes to Russian/Soviet AA.
But you are also very much right about the morale problem.
This is a surreal exchange between a Ukrainian and Russian soldiers it feels like a scene from a Cohen Brothers movie
I think I saw comments that's a fake with an overlaid audio. In the end he starts driving while continuing talking so dunno about that.
If it's real, it really can fuck up your mind that your enemy that you are supposed to fight are so similar to you. One thing is to patrol a street full of "Muslim terrorists" thousand miles away from home and another is having a casual chat with a dude you could have been drinking vodka last weekend.
There are plenty of videos that show similar interactions. The cultural or indoctrination elements don’t exist here like they might do in the Middle East, there is no hate heck there probably is no real animosity either unless they are forced to engage in combat they have no reason to be hostile.
Hostility due to hate has to pre-exist or has to be built over time.
Nationalism aside they are as close to being one people at this point as you can get, you’ll find it very hard to find a Ukrainian family without Russian relatives and vise versa due to the legacy of the USSR.
Basically if a bunch of marines would be deployed and told to take Toronto would get stuck on the way they’ll probably opt to head to the nearest tim hortons too.
And unless they come in guns blazing I don’t think the local population would try to feed them through a wood chipper…
That's one weird exchange. It seems that the Russian soldiers weren't expecting the car to be armed. There are also videos where cars are moving past Russian tanks without any confrontation.
It’s probably about the same experience as US troops would have if they were ordered to invade Canada.
Also they were probably told not to treat the local population as hostile and even if they weren’t it’s usually not the default disposition of people soldiers or not.
These guys have no fucking idea where they are or where they are headed or what their mission actually is and they probably can’t even call anyone up the chain of command to get new orders and they don’t seem to even want to do that.
There are videos on Twitter of Russian forces seemingly ambushing unarmed civilians who are just driving from point A to B and then using their vehicles as road blocks.
Seems like it really depends on what men are behind the guns. Such is war I guess.
Many of the videos that you see such as the infamous one where you see a group of armed men pull out the occupants from a car are from 2014 and it isn’t soldiers but militia and it’s unclear which side it even was.
It also is very much dependent on the situation these soldiers are stranded and under no threat.
If they were mounting a checkpoint which was coming under attack they probably would treat incoming vehicles very differently.
No I'm talking about very graphic ones involving dead bodies that clearly tried to crawl away and vehicles riddled with bullets.
You're correct though, the fog of war is thick, and it's hard to tell for certain.
I hate to use reddit as a source, but here is a group of civilians encountering a roadblock, being shot at, and then managing to escape. This video is not as graphic as the others.
Although I can't say for certain if this recent, but it seems to fit. If someone could for certain debunk this, I'm all ears, but this same location (red truck and cars blocking road) shows up later in other twitter videos with a destroyed Ukrainian convoy and dead civilians.
Ukrainian forces are taking up defensive positions. It’s the Russians that need to stay on the move. Ukrainian forces are currently blocking roads and blowing up bridges. Russians need to establish supply lines.
Does this abandoned convoy blocked by jack-knived trucks not have Ukrainian "golden block"[0] camo on some vehicles? Could be stolen I guess? None of the typical glyphs of Russian forces though, unless I missed them while scanning the video.
Mind you the passengers speculate some of it is Russian gear. I'm just saying it's possible they were attempting some sort of retreat. This is the same road where civilians were being fired upon. I don't think Ukrainian forces would be shooting at civilians on blocked roads if they had blocked them in this instance.
I believe the relationship between the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland provides a better comparison than the US and Canada. While we share strong cultural ties and a border, Canada is not a former subject of the US (despite our best attempts in 1812). These days the UK and Ireland mostly peacefully co-exist, and you can imagine how outrageous it would seem if UK soldiers started marching south from Northern Ireland because the Republic of Ireland refused to align geopolitically or promoted the Irish language.
If the troops are being kept in the dark about their location and missing, that would go a long way to explaining the abyssmal performance of the military so far. How are you meant to plan logistics in this situation?
Everyone I know in russia declares virtually 0% support for this invasion. You can only hope that this is begining of the end for Putin.
However one should be carefull drawing conclusions about total ineptitude of the Russian military - in a different confrontation, for instance defending Crimea, these issues might not apply.
>the troops are being kept in the dark about their location
considering that that excuse has been practiced at least since 2014, and that the soldiers have smartphones to post selfies, and after watching several of those POW videos with their canned responses, i'm convinced that it is just a trained excuse to get better treatment from Ukrainians when caught.
Even any technical aspects aside. I grew up on a USSR Navy base, and we always knew who goes to fight where. And the military convoys always naturally interact with locals on their route, soldiers talk to the locals, exchange fuel for vodka/cigarettes, children come to get onto/into tanks in exchange for some small favors/goodies/etc.
And to the commenter below: nobody dismantled road signs on the Russian side on the roads to Ukraine :)
Btw, on Ukrainian TV - they are in much better mood today giving their military successes and corresponding Russian failures, i mean they weren't panicked or anything like that yesterday, just seriously somber, it is just today they are really having the blast - they today addressed that overall Russian people habit of playing a powerless victim of circumstances : "Next time you'd think twice about whom to choose President."
(Other quotes from Ukrainian TV today - "We Christened Russia, and we're going to give it the last rites.", "To see Kiev and die. Looks like you're insisting on doing it in that your own peculiar way - well, be my guest.")
And to another commenter below:
>conscripts calling families telling that they are forced to sign contracts (in military operation can participate only contractors)
so, they forced you to signed contract because that is the only way you can participate in military operation and are sending you on "exercises" with full battle ready hardware somewhere close to Ukraine when there is escalation in the air/news. Days later you're driving through Ukrainian villages with clear orders to shoot on Ukrainian tanks and soldiers first and like have no idea where you are and why you're there :)
Most cellphone footage seems to be from the rear lines it wouldn’t surprise me if front line troops don’t have cellphones due to opsec or can’t keep them charged or afford roaming and it seems that Russian soldiers don’t supplement their kit with offline civilian GPS units.
There were also posts of the target marking kits that Russians use and they all seem to be commercial off the shelf laser beacons and reflectors.
The Russian army looks more and more like it’s being supplied through Aliexpress.
smartphones were taken from troops before they were sent to ukraine (there is a bunch of stories of conscripts calling families telling that they are forced to sign contracts (in military operation can participate only contractors) and phones are taken from them. otherwise internet would have been full of russian tiktok videos .
>And to the commenter below: nobody dismantled road signs on the Russian side on the roads to Ukraine
Yeah, sure. It's like when you need to get to bakersfiled but the last road sign its arrow pointing to general direction of california in utah.
Surely militaties don't allow their frontline troops to have phones? That would enable Ukranian side to track and count troops and use that information for artillery strikes?
> mean, you don't have a balanced or unbiased sample
Well we can't exactly conduct a democratic referendum to find out, can we?
There a lot of datapoint that indicate this is the case, the russian commanders being in shock when they learnt abotu the task and their concern for desertions, etc. Ofcourse I could be totally wrong, we are all couch generals here
That's true. There are polling agencies who purport ti be able to handle the logistics of polling Russians. They showed Putin's approval (pre invasion) at just over 50%, which sounds plausible. The fact that it's not Crazy high made me think maybe they are getting real feedback.
Seeing how the Russian army is performing so far, it's starting to make more sense why Putin constantly, oddly whips out the nuclear threat (giving off hints of serious insecurity). Turns out it's very revealing as to the state of their military, it can't properly defend itself against NATO and is badly outmatched today.
China has to be seeing this and eyeing some of that sweet Russian border territory for the future.
Russia has about 145 million people. The US has about 340 million.
The Russian economy is about $1.7tn and the US one is about $29tn. Yup, you read those figures right.
For comparison, the USSR had 286 million people in 1989 to the US 248 million.
And their GDPs were $1.7tn for Soviets (yep, same amount after 30 years of inflation, plus the Soviet one was most likely inflated...) and US about $6tn.
Russia is the world's biggest banana republic. More like oil sheikdom, actually.
Extrapolating from bits I've read online (which means, this is probably completely wrong... but possibly not!)...
Most of Russia's income is from oil and gas. And the profits from oil and gas are received by a very small few people. Those people probably do not pay a lot of taxes.
Therefore, it can be assumed that the Russian military and related systems are not well funded. Russia has for decades had a brute-force approach to military - simpler, less efficient systems which are more robust and which can be field serviced.
If numbers found on the internet can be believed chuckle, in 2017 Russia spent 66 billion USD-equivalent on its military. The US spent $646 billion. Now maybe the US is much less efficient, with grifter middlemen contractors, but still... 10x the expenditures.
As for China, they want the energy and mineral resources from Russia. They are treading carefully to appear supportive of Russia while not alienating the rest of the world (their major trading partners).
It seems to be Putin is terrified that just dust kicked up at Chernobyl will contaminate Russia. There was a battle to secure the facility. Ironically all the military vehicles involved stirred up dust causing a 20 fold spike in radiation compared to the typical level. I can't accept that Putin would nuke any European country. If he were to nuke anywhere I think it would be the US far away from Russia.
Russia wasn’t scared about Chernobyl they captured it because it was on the way to Kyiv and it was before they started bypassing towns and infrastructure due to their poor combat performance.
Putin took Chernobyl because A) it's pretty much on the way from the Belarus border and B) it's a convenient staging area for forces where they're mostly immune to attack from heavy artillery or drones, precisely because of the risk of breaching the containment.
> They are being made to risk their lives (and fight their cousins, so to speak).
From the interviews of people on the street in Russia before the invasion I think it's quite literally fighting actual cousins and aunt,uncles, grandparents. Russian people interviewed remarked that they many Russians have close relatives in Ukraine.
I have heard that a fair percentage of Russians have some level of Ukrainian family ethnicity roots too. I can’t imagine that all of the Russian troops are only of Russian ethnicity. Couple that shared background with command and supply issues, it’s a recipe for morale issues.
I’m not going to shift into armchair general/geopolitical master mode because I am not qualified but you’ve used a Gallup poll from the previous government to try and make a point about the current government, which at its most generous is a silly and careless mistake and at worst is an act of deliberate stupidity and deception.
I don’t quite know what to say about the rest of your comment relating to the desire of ukranians to be in this fight but it would appear most of both unofficial (ie social media, crowd sourced) and official western reports are completely at odds with the case you’re trying to make
> In fact, the regime is currently stopping men from fleeing and trying to force them to fight for them at gunpoint.
That always happens when a country fights for its survival. Universal and compulsory conscription. If this is not the moment to resort to this, then when is?
Are you Russian by any chance? The confidence number you pulled out was (ostensibly) for the previous government at the end of its term. The next (current) President got the support of 73% of Ukrainians: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Ukrainian_presidential_...
In every war where there is conscript you will have scared men running or hiding. It is natural, and not particular to the approval rating of their (current) governing officials. Your comment honestly sounds more like propaganda than the parent's.
Ukraine's warming to the ways of the west makes Russia nervous. Access to the black sea is a strategic issue. Reservoirs in Crimea drying up because their source is in Ukraine proper. I don't defend any of this aggression in the least, but if mexico and Canada started warming up to China, you could imagine how the US would react. Once again, I don't support or defend Russia in this situation, but at the same time I don't think it's the work of a madman.
Putin has clearly stated that he does not believe the Ukrainians are a separate people. That should tell you everything you need to know what this is truly about. Putting that aside for a moment, Germany's economy is almost three times the size of Russia's. The UK's economy is twice as big. Russia's economy is smaller than Italy and is just a bit larger than Spain. Russia is simply not powerful enough, nor important enough, to expect a buffer of satellite states like they had 50 years ago.
The goal is to topple Ukraine's leadership and install a puppet who will be more aligned with Russia than the west (see Belarus as an example). An economically prosperous, stable, democratic, NATO-allied neighbor is Putin's worst nightmare.
I don't recall western missiles bombing Kyiv to support Euromaidan or invading tank columns to overthrow Yanukovych.
Ukrainians are the only ones who have the moral right to choose what they will be aligned with. Perhaps you can coach them or bribe them with trade (or lack of trade), but a violent invasion is absolutely not like that, it's not even comparable to what happened during Euromaidan.
This is correct. Putin has seen Ukraine turn more and more westward. Flirting and thinking about joining the EU and NATO. Which would mean "NATO" (US) troops right over the board and mere hours away form Moscow. Simply unacceptable to Putin.
Only if Ukraine somehow also quickly recovers the territory it lost in 2014. NATO requires that new members have zero disputed territories before they join because territorial disputes could immediately force NATO to intervene.
Ukraine also has a Nazi problem. Putin used it as a pretext for this war inside Russia, but outside of wartime, folks in Berlin and DC consider it a real problem for closer alliance too.
Ukraine also has a corruption problem.
I think NATO will keep Ukraine on the cusp for 20 years like they did with Romania, before they allow them to join.
Aren't there NATO countries right next to Ukraine that are just as close to Moscow already? Having Ukraine join NATO would be a bitter pill to swallow, perhaps, but it wouldn't bring NATO any closer than it is today.
And madman though Putin may seem to be, he knows NATO isn't an offensive organization.
363 miles from Latvia to Moscow, 280 miles from Ukraine to Moscow. I'm not sure if I would call Latvia "right next to Ukraine", since it doesn't border Ukraine.
Maybe in Europe that feels like a meaningful difference, but to me, 80 miles is nothing. Belarus is the odd one out. Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, all NATO members. Having Ukraine becoming a NATO member would not present a meaningful strategic change, it's 100% just a personal thing.
Not as close to Moscow, no. They're closer to St. Petersburg, though.
And I'm going to judge Putin by his own words. He says he's threatened by NATO on his borders? Then he shouldn't have 70% of his military on the border of Ukraine. It leaves him wide open to an invasion from NATO members Estonia and Latvia.
You have to break it down by the parties involved: Russia, NATO, and Ukraine.
1) Russia. Russian power is waning, and at the same time Ukraine-NATO integration is approaching the point of irreversibility. Russia sees the potential for a NATO armed Ukraine with US tropps, missiles, and possibly nukes 5 minutes from Moscow as an unacceptable security risk. From the Russian perspective the window to stop Ukraine is closing, and they have to act before NATO armaments has made Ukraine is too strong, and Russia is too weak.
2) NATO. NATO and the US would like to have the additional leverage over Russia provided by bases in Ukraine in the long term. Each additional country in NATO adds to it's strength, and removes a potential threat in the future. NATO wont give Ukraine full membership today, because it does not have full control of it's territory and widespread corruption within Ukraine. NATO, is willing to provide a slow path to membership because it is a Win-win situation. If Russia doesn't act, NATO slowly gets more leverage over Russia (NATO win). If Russia invades Ukraine, Russian forces, economy, and relations are damaged (another NATO win).
3) Ukraine. Essentially stuck in the middle, with no good options. They can grow closer to Russia or the EU, and each has downsides. Russia is a waning power and offers less economically. EU is more prosperous but they must join a military alliance against Russia. If they ever get full NATO membership, the Russian threat is greatly reduced, but NATO application is an extremely long process during which the threat is greatly increased.
I think this is the real answer though you won't ever hear them say it out loud. Gas was the reason they got involved in Syria too. Keeping Assad in power enabled them to stop a gas pipeline from being built from the middle east through Syria to the EU.
My two cents; If you look past the false rhetoric meant to galvanize the population it is about the ability to maintain coercive influence over their neighbors for economic reasons. To do this they employ intimidation and if all else fails military force. Russia is run like a mob crime family where the oligarchs appeal to Putin to solve their business/economic issues using the power of the state and they presumably give him a cut of the profits which is where his reportedly vast secret wealth comes from. Ukraine becoming closer to the EU economically over the past 10 years is what this is ultimately about.
People saying this is mostly about NATO expansion are missing the real issue. NATO aspirations are symptom not the cause of the dispute. If a country is in NATO it limits the means Russia has to coerce them. ie: it takes military intervention off the table since they would not be picking a fight with only one country but the alliance.
The actual goal of Putin is to do what Bismark did in 1860-70. Bismark used military force to achieve mind-blowing gains. Not only did Prussia conquer a number of territories from Denmark, Austria and France, but the other German states decided it's a good time to join the "Union", and so modern Germany was created. Before Bismark came to power, Prussia was the weakest of the 5 European Great Powers. When he left, it was by far the strongest.
Putin's Russia right now is less than 150 million people. The rest of the former Soviet states have about as much together. If he conquers Ukraine, then most of them will decide it's time to get back to the "Federation", if they know what's good for them (the exception would be the three Baltic states which are NATO members).
If Putin's gambit works out, he reconstitutes the Soviet Union (itself the reconstitution of the Tsarist Empire), and makes a country of close to 300 million people. For you and me the population is not a very relevant number, but for him it's the number of potential soldiers that he can use to bully Europe.
Putin believes in the old Russian nationalist philosophy of “gathering the Russian lands”. Basically to reform large parts of the ex-USSR into a Russian empire. Because of reasons - he wrote a long article on it but the Kremlin website is being DDOSd
It's easy to just call it Putin's whim but from a strategic point of view and to help see stuff like this in the future is probably worth at least reviewing some issues from the Russian point of view.
A few things that contribute to Russian goals here:
A. "paypack" for the overthrow of the long standing pro Russian Ukrainian government in 2013. Putin would like the status quo returned to 2012 - weak buffer state reliant on Russia (Belarus 2.0)
B. historical significance of Ukraine joining the old western cold war army (nato) would be devastating. Russia may have calculated this is the last chance to stop that or at least delay it for a generation
C. finish the 2014 war. Get the land bridge to Crimea and unify the Russian speaking west and south western Ukrainian regions (imho this is goal number 1 since it give massive economic and political benefits.)
There's probably loads of other goals, but they are the first to come to mind.
Note: I'm not agreeing with any of them, just pointing out they are likely there and we would probably be aware of them.
The immediate goal is overthrowing the current regime in Ukraine. That much is obvious. Beyond that, nobody really knows.
At a very high level, Putin wants to maintain a buffer zone between Russia and NATO. Russia doesn't have the resources to occupy and/or annex Ukraine, at least not in the long term. Putin must know that. He can't hope to install a stable puppet government, because Ukrainians would overthrow the puppet in a revolution. He must know that as well.
Maybe Putin wants to cripple Ukraine permanently. Take Odesa, and Ukraine loses access to the sea. Take control of enough territory that it doesn't matter what NATO and the EU will do with the remaining Ukraine.
Or maybe Putin has become an idealist instead of the pragmatist he was. Maybe his actions are now guided by beliefs rather than expected consequences. If Putin believes that the former glory of Russia must be restored by any means necessary, he may drive Russia into ruin by pursuing that.
As best I can tell, Putin thought that Ukraine was about to be admitted to NATO, and didn't want NATO troops on his borders in both the Baltic states and Ukraine, so he invaded to preempt this. It seems to me that the threat of invasion would have worked as well as actually invading, at making NATO uneasy about admitting Ukraine, and would have involved far fewer downsides for Russia.
I have long thought Putin to be a mean but smart individual, but even if Russia eventually accomplishes the conquest of Ukraine, this looks like a blunder on his part, not only a moral error (although certainly also that).
NATO can't admit anyone with a territorial dispute. Short of Ukraine officially ceding Crimea and the other occupied areas, Ukraine would never be able to be admitted to NATO in it's post-2014 status.
Obviously Putin is trying to put the USSR back together again because he's getting old and has to do something desperate to have any chance of obtaining his dream. If Ukraine were to become a prosperous democracy his fellow Russians might consider that they might have a better life under a self chosen government rather than a dictator like Putin because Ukraine shares a lot in common with Russians and many cultural/familial ties.
My take - you've got two models of running the world.
a) The old one of Empires - Russia controls Ukraine, Belarus etc. It's threatened by Ukraine moving to the west.
b) The current one where countries are independent democracies with governments chosen by the people.
Putin's been reading too many history books about a) The west has to go with b) - we can't really say to the Ukranians you'll never be able to join the EU/nato in spite of your people wanting to because you are property of the Russian empire. Putin needs to get with the times really.
If you will skim through article, it's kinda becomes more clear. Opinion expressed there with regards to Ukraine are shared by many Russians, based on what I observed.
>What is the actual goal here? Can someone please explain to me why this is all happening?
Well in Putin's own words, it seems obvious and clear. Ukraine's government are Nazis who are committing genocide over Russians in the new republics as Ukraine invaded the republics to reclaim the land.
“As I said in my previous address, one cannot look at what is happening there without compassion. It was simply impossible to endure all this. It was necessary to stop this nightmare immediately – the genocide against the millions of people living there, who rely only on Russia, hope only on us. It was these aspirations, feelings, pain of people that were for us the main motive for deciding to recognise the people’s republics of Donbas.”
“What I think is important to emphasise further. In order to achieve their own goals, the leading NATO countries support extreme nationalists and neo-Nazis in Ukraine in everything, who, in turn, will never forgive the Crimeans and Sevastopol residents for their free choice – reunification with Russia.”
While all this nazi crap is absurd. We can also discount the possibility that Putin has been misled. He's ex-KGB. They were actively trained to be able to avoid exactly that. Instead this is obvious propaganda. The president of ukraine is jewish and target #1. Obviously not a nazi, this was more to mislead the russian duma and russian people.
>What an absolute disgrace that we fight each other over BS orders. So many lives, especially of young people, lost for what?
We have to figure out the 'they didnt go into iraq for wmds, they went there for oil'. It's all pure speculation. Go to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Ukraine and throw a dart. Whatever you hit, that's it.
If you have been following... there's about a trillion $ of investment in new chip fabs. Everyone in the world is rushing to build chip fabs. Russia taking this neon production could give them the edge they need... To what end?
Note that his mother barely survived the nazi siege of Leningrad. Lots of Russians have similar intergenerational trauma. That is why he is talking about “denazification”.
Ok, then what I said was not entirely fair to him. But at the same time, it is a common scenario where one human suffers and then shares that suffering upon others.
My privileged perspective is different from that of many other people, but I must believe that the best path to success and happiness for all is coordination rather than force and might. I also know that someone in his position lacks for nothing by any external perspective. We cannot give him benefit of the doubt; he isn't interested in the betterment of his people, else he would not have allowed a few people to get ownership of major public assets, leaving the general population low while a few people became absurdely rich. Therefore, his motivations now are for his own appearance and self esteem. If he makes a more powerful Russia, then he is worthy of the photo of him proudly riding a horse bare-chested.
> it is a common scenario where one human suffers and then shares that suffering upon others.
All too true
His actions over the decades towards potential electoral opposition have put him in a position where the full weight of Russian history is upon him personally. If Russia was democratic, there would be a deep bench of leaders to relieve the stress.
It now is too hard for him to tell the difference between a threat to his ego and a threat which could shatter Russia into civil war. Thus, tyranny.
Putin's whimsy. No other reason, no rational nation state with complex motivations lurking in the machinery of decision. This is 100% Putin with a wild hair up his ass, wanting to return Russia to a semblance of its soviet territories.
Vladdy has been in near isolation during COVID and looks unhinged. Did this on his own, no oligarchs. Now oligarchs are trapped, no assets, cut-off from most of their funds. Gambled, this time he lost it all.
One can hope that history repeats. Tyrants and strongmen aren't known for dying peacefully in bed. Then again, a couple hundred billion dollars can buy a lot of bodyguards, tasters, and body doubles.
This is developing horribly for both Russia and Ukraine and the rest of us. It's pretty obvious that invasion was a mistake for Russia and it's pretty obvious that there is no way back. Putin cannot accept any compromise in this situation for political reasons nor can he accept defeat. Zelensky initially suggested something about neutrality guarantees, but now he has reached the bravery and bravado level of Djohar Dudayev. Not that neutrality guarantees would ever pass Rada in the first place.
Everyone is cheering this nonsensical war on the side lines. Civilians are being encouraged to throw molotovs at Russian invaders and automatic weaponry is being issued indiscriminately. Every country is giving Ukraine weaponry and keeps buying Russian energy.
Both sides have no way back, nobody is going to stop anyone. Ukrainians are extremely proud and suicidal (just look their anthem - "Ukraine hasn't perished YET"). The war will rage on and it will the biggest humanitarian crisis our generation has seen..
So, this seems to be now as I suspected a massive blunder on the side of Putin, whatever his motivations, the US has really played well here, comparable to how Russia had played the US in Syria. The situation after the very risky offensive in Ukraine got stalled fairly quick.
On the mid to long-term: The US has now consolidated its power in the EU and effectively severed Russia from Europe/the West.
China can now take in Russia.
Edit: This just my quick assessment, I could be wrong. The war is still on going and I hope it ends quick.
Yeah, I think it's important to not whipsaw between idealising and devaluing Russian military capability.
To a large extent, even if they lose, they win (eg. as the article says, Ukraine may need to withdraw from defensive lines in the east to defend Kiev, in which case Russia could make a land-grab there). There will be contingencies for all sorts of different definitions of "win".
And in another sense, even if they win, they lose, because in fighting as best they can, they expend capital and expose all their weaknesses to view. And even if they achieve absolutely maximal war aims, like capturing the entire country, they are likely to find themselves in a situation that they are pretty unprepared for. I think states go to war hoping to achieve the maximal goals, but most prepared to achieve some subset of them before time, money, political support runs out.
I'm not convinced Russia is in a hurry here. Also, they have much heavier weapons they can use but have not yet done so because they don't want to use them if they don't have to, especially if the idea is to unite Ukraine with Russia (vaporizing Ukrainian soldiers en masse for example would be a bad look in that case)
With no troops coming to the aid of Ukraine, the Russians have the luxury of time.
I don't think they necessarily do. Ruble is gonna crumble and pressure is gonna mount on them internally and externally. This is not a war that can go on for months. I'm not an expert by any means but I think it's one of those situations were you either win quickly or have to back down.
Agreed. If they did not have limited time, economic pressure, internal division, domestic unrest, disheartened soldiers... there's no question Russia would win. But they do have all those things working against them.
I fear though that the authoritarian state doesn't have the capacity to rationally analyze the prognosis and cut their sunk costs (both economic and political).
I am not sure that somebody going to go CSI Miami style on blown up machinery :) Surprisingly there is very little footage of it (javelines/nlaw/stingers) in the field .
That's not something you can hide from Russia, so why not announce it and give Ukrainians hope and will to fight off the invaders? Joe Biden and other leaders have been making the right decisions by being transparent.
Makes you wonder if that was the point? Get everyone all stirred up about a half hearted invasion so they dump a bunch of currency and weapons into the country to prop up the Ukrainians, then send your real a-list players in to seize the goods. Free resupply and upgrades from all your friends! Now you can move on to the next target.
I'm not an expert but I can't imagine it's worth it for that, factoring in sanctions, increased militarisation of surrounding countries + potential spread of NATO, casualties, Russian equipment being destroyed, equipment that doesn't fit their ammo/can't be supported/etc., and the probability that many of these weapons don't get seized and instead are used against them for years by rebels (the west has even implied they will support this with more - and the weapons we have sent are suited to this and not hugely valuable).
They don't have the luxury of time. With NATO becoming more and more aware this isn't a bluff you can be sure they will be shipping in more and more cheap anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles to Ukrainian ground forces which are highly effective against russia attackers as they stand. If Russia starts firebombing cities I think they might win from demoralization but it could also get Russian citizens and politicians nervous and sick to watch Putin destroying their brethren in Ukraine. You have to remember Putin is a sociopath and while intelligent he doesn't have any real emotions to understand that total war against Ukraine could easily end support from his country and allies like China and neutrals like India.and Turkey
Its Germans that are going to be in the cold, taking the inconvenience and difficulty to help sanction Russia via Swift with all EU member states, and disrupt their ability to purchase gas from Russia.
US is specifically avoiding anything that would cause economic distress to Americans, this is in the President’s speech, and it is because the party will decisively lose politically later this year if there is more distress.
Big win for US intelligence for sure!
Messing with the fossil fuel markets is definitely what is required, amongst other things.
The US has done a lot of horrible things, but this is an obvious case of made up pretexts. Russia knows we weren't letting Ukraine into NATO anytime soon (we would have already), and outside of that we've been playing pretty nicely with Russia these days. This is just imperialism.
Frankly, I wonder if the Ukraine plans were laid with the assumption of a second Trump term, and they decided to just go ahead anyways. The US response seems likely to have been... very different if he was still in power.
Nah, it was Trump who started sending Javelins in 2018. Also under whom the US military smashed a column of Russian mercenaries in Syria, killing 90 of them.
Trump flattered Putin publicly, but his policies were never sympathetic to Russia.
"Zelenskiy chatted about how he wanted to 'drain the swamp' in Kyiv and how he wished the European Union would provide more financial support. He told Trump that Ukraine was ready to buy more Javelin anti-tank missiles from the United States. The next 10 words that came out of Trump’s mouth — 'I would like you to do us a favor, though' — are what triggered the House impeachment inquiry that has imperiled his presidency."
"At the time, Trump had placed roughly $400 million of congressionally-approved security assistance to Ukraine on hold, and the president is accused of dangling the aid over Zelensky as part of a broad scheme to pressure him into launching the investigations. The aid was ultimately released on September 11, less than a week after three House committees launched investigations into his administration's efforts to pressure Ukraine to help his reelection campaign."
> Senior administration officials told The New York Times that several times over the course of 2018, Mr. Trump privately said he wanted to withdraw from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Current and former officials who support the alliance said they feared Mr. Trump could return to his threat as allied military spending continued to lag behind the goals the president had set.
> In the days around a tumultuous NATO summit meeting last summer, they said, Mr. Trump told his top national security officials that he did not see the point of the military alliance, which he presented as a drain on the United States.
It's a little hard to see that as something Putin would've been mad about.
George Bush was actively campaigning for both Ukraine and Georgia to join NATO at the 2008 Bucharest summit in April, likely a direct link to the subsequent invasion of Georgia which occurred immediately after in August.
USA relations with Russia have in general been pretty schizophrenic. Minor sanctions after the Georgia occupation, "Reset button" politics by the Obama administration, larger scale sanctions after the Ukraine Crimea occupation, Trump fighting additional sanctions.
Let's not forget Biden caught flak for actually waiving sanctions on Russia before he flipped into his current role as strong man.
NATO members have been directly bordering Russia through Estonia and Latvia for literally 18 years at this point with no harm or even the threat of harm to Russia.
NATO members, as stable democracies, have zero interest in going into war with a nuclear power like Russia. Even now at the peak of tensions, every NATO member has repeatedly publicly pledged that no NATO troops will be involved in conflict.
The idea that Russia's invasion of Ukraine is Russia acting to protect itself is the height of silliness.
The better explanation for this war is much simpler: Putin has traditionally received a bump in approval ratings after his prior wars and was desperate for another boost after a long and harsh two years dealing with COVID-19.
> Antagonizing Russia (which the US did, to be clear)
Only in the sense that “not abandoning Eastern Europe so that Putin can invade or intimidate with threat of invasion with no plausible check” constitutes “antagonizing”.
Don't get me wrong. This is just a geopolitical assessment. I am not taking sides, here. I am not for any war aggression whatsoever. I'm just trying to see a broader picture in the fog of brutal war, here.
Like the Yemen war being a proxy for an Iran-Saudi conflict, on the humanitarian side it is just horrible.
I had assumed Putin was just testing to see how little effort was necessary to take Ukraine.
If this actually turns into a failure, even if he's successful but it takes too long or costs too much, an era of world history will have clicked over, and the narrative of Russia as a boogey man, or as a peer adversary, will be over.
I don't think that is how narcissistic personalities, or nation states function.
I think they are much more likely to view their failures as humiliations and betrayals and make new commitments to redeeming themselves through acts of aggression which enable them to redefine themselves in a positive light.
I mean, when Clinton sailed the USS Independence carrier group through the strait of Taiwan causing china to stand down her military in 1996, what was the Chinese response?
What did you want Clinton to do? Pushing it off for 25 years is pretty good. You want him to permanently remove it from the table? How is he supposed to do that?
Commit to a rules-based international order where disputes are resolved without the use or threat of force while simultaneously pursuing global nuclear disarmament.
But if he did that, they'd call him a "pussy" and he wouldn't be re-elected. Not to mention, it's much more difficult and complex than just "getting your missile out for the ladies."
It's hard to ignore that this type of short-termism is the typical "borrowing from the future" philosophy that got us to where we are with climate change, nuclear proliferation, financial collapse, and the breakdown of the global order.
Edit: in a way discussing this is probably academic, since we will either change the way we approach these problems, or there won't be any "we" left to do anything at all. Here's Tom with the weather :)
If nukes are seen as strictly a doomsday weapon (which in practicality they are since everyone will be on top of you if you use them) then we're back to conventional warfare, which is a lot more drawn out and complicated then most people today seem to think it is. Historically, campaigns like these can last months. It's probably a little early honestly to speculate on success or failure here.
That’s the big open question to me right now. If nobody wants to use nukes then they might as well not even exist. If we’re fighting WW3 without nukes to me it’s almost more terrifying.
Nukes are what would keep NATO out of Russia, even if they got militarily involved. They basically guarantee that the country's leader must be deposed of internally.
The existence of nuclear weapons does really matter. If it weren't for the real threat of nuclear escalation, direct military intervention in Ukraine would likely be on the table.
Nobody wants to use nuclear weapons, but nobody wants to go toe-to-toe with a nuclear state either.
that's only a partial view. Once you have nukes and other countries have nukes. How wise is it to be the first to give up your nukes? Do you trust your enemies to stick to an agreement to get rid of all nukes when it's pretty easy to hide them? One you get them it's almost impossible to get rid of them.
I have no idea at all about the thinking of the people involved in the actual decision making and I'm pretty sure anything I read about Joe Biden or Vlad Putin in this regard is propaganda that should not be trusted. So let's take an angle that leaves them out.
There's a nuclear "exchange", maybe it's one way, that doesn't involve my country. Why would I want to get my country involved in that exchange? That seems to go from utterly terrible tragedy that is almost as bad as can be imagined to so, so much worse for so many more people. In fact it takes it to every bit as bad as possible. Given that reality, how much deterrent are they unless it's mutually assured destruction?
"Is this something for which the only option is to end current human civilization?" Nasty things to think about.
Putin has pointed out in his pre-invasion speech that he is ready to apply some extra forces if Western countries will interrupt him and it looked like he meant nukes with saying all decisions are already approved.
Maybe it was about tactical nuclear missiles.
I'd also note that his threats seem to be quite effective at keeping NATO countries strictly behind a "red line" of supporting Ukraine only with sanctions and resources, but not sending military forces to fire a single shot (which would be quite significant in e.g. air war), as everyone seems to understand that it would be a road to dropping nukes.
I don't see him crossing the red line of going into Poland though, so it's still a stand-off, but I think NATO is going to come out of this much stronger as some had started to wonder about its purpose since it had been so long since there was an aggressor like Putin is being currently.
Putin has done a lot to improve the capabilities of NATO in the last few days. The NATO countries have become more unified, Germany is doubling their military spending overnight, Kosovo has applied for NATO membership, Sweden has stopped its traditional neutrality and delivered arms to Ukraine so perhaps both Sweden and Finland are on the way to NATO, etc.
The last two bullets from the article suggest that Putin still has some higher tier forces and weapons not in play for whatever reason.
Russian forces continue to refrain from using their likely full spectrum of air and missile capabilities. The Ukrainian air force also remains active. Russian operations will likely steadily wear down Ukrainian air capabilities as well eventually taking the Ukrainian air force out of the fight.
Russia has sufficient conventional military power to reinforce each of its current axes of advance and overpower conventional Ukrainian forces defending them.
It's too soon to call it, Ukraine obviously has most of the western world behind it, and Russia is still holding back its higher tier forces. An occupation and insurgency/counter-insurgency would be a disaster for both countries. Hopefully Putin realizes the juice is not worth the squeeze quickly and pulls back.
For Putin this is an existential moment. He cannot afford to lose this fight politically. Russians are already protesting this war. If it turns out to be a loser AND destroys domestic economy, his strongman image is gone.
For a while, sure, much as with the fall of the USSR. But that lasted maybe about a decade before Russia was back in a similar role, after really reasserting itself beginning in the aftermath of the NATO-Yugoslavia war.
There's a sad but perhaps unsaid factor in this war that many on HN seem unaware of.
People seem to think that the fact that the Russian army is disorganized and slow is a problem. It's not - Putin doesn't care about the body count provided he comes away with a victory.
If Ukraine is to win this war, the battle for air supremacy and a constant supply of anti-tank armour is much more important. If they can stop Russian armour using a combination of airpower and anti-tank weapons then they have a chance.
I think both of these things have a critical dependence on Ukraine being able to show the ability to resist Russian advances. If they continue that, then Western support of arm shipments is likely to increase. Significantly, both the Germans and Dutch have started sending anti-tank weapons in the last 2 days.
Putin is fucked. He bluffed with a bad hand with the goal of improving his approval rate and Ukraine called with a better hand. He retreats, he lose. He escalate further, he loses. His only exit is to save face with an ambiguous peace deal while he still can because nobody wants to play russian roulette or nuclear poker. Going nuclear is an even worse bluff. He is a psycho but have kids to worry about. And even if he became completely bat shit, he is encircled by corrupt morons and not suicidal fanatics, he will be murdered.
They seem to be hitting logistics limitations already with the existing forces. However, it seem standard practice in militaries to have prolonged campaigns with a majority of your force backwards in reserve and rotating them; e.g. when your first units get worn down (e.g. being at 90% capacity due to casualties) if you hold them back and have fresh ones take the front, that helps.
Rotation is not part of Russian strategy/approach. Bloodbath is. Common Russian expression is "woman will birth more". Also it looks like there were expectation that after initial cruise missiles strikes it will be walk in a park like in Crimea circa 2014. Mixed with delusions about state of Ukrainian military and general mood of population (big chunk of Russians sure that neo-nazi minority rule over rest of population for militia and population wants to be freed)
It seems to me(not anything) that Russia's failures all around are quite unexpected. Their military is significantly less prepared than they ought to be. General mobilization vs russian military will become very rough for Russia when they bring reg troops into the cities. They aren't even at that stage.
I was thinking about it today, conclusion is that there are proxy operators in the theatre. Ukraine hasn't been left alone military wise. Russia is also fighting how many other special forces of undeclared countries? Probably all of them?
Russia thinks they are fighting against mom and dads, which they are, but they are also fighting against special forces who are probably wrecking the russian troops. They cant even account for this neither. To do so would destroy troop morale, add significant fear, and add tremendous time to the invasion.
Considering this, the probability of even being successful in their plan to take ukraine is near 0. Sanctions and isolation will cripple them before they can overcome this massive degree of proxy war.
It turns out, dictatorship is not a superior form of governance because eventually all important positions are taken by people loyal but otherwise inept. Realistic assessments never reach decision-makers, unfounded optimism sets in and when the plans meet reality, everything falls apart.
Yep, idiots get placed in high positions because they are loyal, not because they have talent. Same with the military. I'm not saying that doesn't happen in the USA and other countries, but it happens much less often because you have other parties to call it out. In Russia, everything traces back to Putin and his talentless goons. I think China somewhat gets around this a bit because they have centuries long bent towards meritocracy, although I'm sure plenty of people reach high level that have no talent for it, just not to the extent that a country like Russia sees.
I think it is safe to assume that most/all (large) modern countries have paramilitary forces that are used to carefully tip the scales toward outcomes that are in their best interest in situations like these.
I don't think this is likely: the upside is small (can American GIs shoot anti-tank missiles better than Ukranian GIs?) and the downside is extremely large (nothing polls worse than Americans getting shipped home in boxes, and nothing would make Russia happier than to have actual proof of direct interference.)
> the downside is extremely large (nothing polls worse than Americans getting shipped home in boxes, and nothing would make Russia happier than to have actual proof of direct interference.)
I think this goes against everything we know about modern warfare. I'd bet money (1) Zelenskyy is being actively supported/coached by the CIA or MI6 (his PR/propaganda game has been absolutely on point), (2) there are covert-ops teams in Ukraine that are assisting the rag-tag paramilitary and civilian groups with advanced urban warfare tactics (e.g. demolishing bridges, improvised armaments, etc.), and (3) the Kremlin is correct that NATO/US UAVs are relaying detailed Russian troop/ship movements back to Ukranian leadership.
You've mashed a whole bunch of things together here.
Is Zelenskyy receiving foreign intelligence from NATO? That wouldn't surprise me.
Is NATO (or separately the US) flying drones over Ukraine for intelligence gathering? That's a step further, but it doesn't seem impossible.
Are there US/British/etc. nationals in Ukraine, doing their own protective sabotage/engaging directly with the enemy? I find this very difficult to believe, for the reasons stated in the previous comment.
"Modern warfare" means a whole bunch of things, including that Ukrainian soldiers don't need months of training to operate the push-button munitions that NATO has dumped on them. NATO has dozens of options to exhaust before doing something as risky as directly inserting foreign soldiers into a war they're not involved in on paper.
> Are there US/British/etc. nationals in Ukraine, doing their own protective sabotage/engaging directly with the enemy? I find this very difficult to believe, for the reasons stated in the previous comment.
Why do you think black ops in Ukraine is beyond the pale (technically even intelligence support kind of drags NATO into this)? I agree with you that they are probably instructed to not directly engage with the Russians, but sabotage and training doesn't really seem that far fetched to me, although..
> including that Ukrainian soldiers don't need months of training to operate the push-button munitions that NATO has dumped on them
..this is actually a great point. With Javelins and NLAWs that just about anyone in this thread could use against tanks and helis effectively, maybe they don't need any on-ground assistance.
Yeah, it's basically just that: Ukraine's armed forces are better equipped to identify and protect/defensively sabotage their own country's infrastructure than NATO would be, and everything NATO has given them shouldn't require training that they can't do themselves (if any is needed at all).
But it's all just speculation on my part! That's what HN does best, after all.
>I'd bet money (1) Zelenskyy is being actively supported/coached by the CIA or MI6 (his PR/propaganda game has been absolutely on point),
Oh man is it ever. Dont know who exactly, but ya no doubt getting coached.
>2) there are covert-ops teams in Ukraine that are assisting the rag-tag paramilitary and civilian groups with advanced urban warfare tactics (e.g. demolishing bridges, improvised armaments, etc.), a
I suspect language barriers would prevent much work together here.
What I have been seeing, there are tons of videos of 'aftermaths' where russians took tons of losses but nothing else. I would expect the spec ops took out the russians and just moved on. They are largely speaking just looking at intel and intercepting ground troops.
>(3) the Kremlin is correct that NATO/US UAVs are relaying detailed Russian troop/ship movements back to Ukranian leadership.
You can confirm this yourself on various ADSB tracking maps. Dont forget geo spy sattelites. The russian troops are tracked in real time. They are sitting ducks who haven't even seen true resistance yet.
There's been some groups raising independent fighting forces in Syria and Chechnya, but I don't think they've gotten to Ukraine yet. Ukraine has been actively recruiting Westerners who have been willing to fight since 2014 as well.
>There's been some groups raising independent fighting forces in Syria and Chechnya, but I don't think they've gotten to Ukraine yet. Ukraine has been actively recruiting Westerners who have been willing to fight since 2014 as well.
I have seen this, roughly 20,000 strong. But they have been specfically instructed to only shoot at nazis. That general ukrainian troops aren't allies, but they are not allowed to kill them.
>I’ve been following this closely and I haven’t seen any mention of non-Ukrainian forces in the country. Seems like pure speculation?
Absolutely pure speculation.
We never know what the navy seals or the green berets or the french dragoons, etc etc are doing. Everyone has many divisions of specops. Seal team 6 were the ones who very illegally operated within pakistan to kill osama bin laden.
Now im not interested debating the legality here. Im just pointing out, they operate wherever the hell they please. I would bet any amount of money specops of all major countries are in ukraine right now. Not 100% of the allies of ukraine and certainly not 0%.
I'd also bet there are constant very high res spy sattelites mapping every step of every russian soldier. You can actively see the global hawks operating. You can actively see the awacs in the air.
NATO response force is active and at the border. Those dude are going to be damn near if not as well trained as specops.
Like, being realistic, Russia already lost the war and they dont realize it.
The thing that got me thinking about this. Spetsnaz blue berets airdropped into that international airport, they took it. Spetsnaz are legit and well trained... and they were routed within the day? I dont believe it. I do believe it when I consider specops from across the world came in and wrecked their face.
I doubt this really - I think it is much more likely that in the past few months specops from other countries were in Ukraine training the hell out of Ukrainian soldiers. I guess I would not be surprised if individual countries that bordered Russia / Ukraine had limited people in the area but the potential political fallout would be huge if the UK for example was caught operating in the country while publicly saying they are not.
Private for hire mercenary groups though who knows
Maybe, however, it’s more likely that Russia’s military is less competently run than previously thought. I wouldn’t be surprised if intel was being shared with Ukraine and weapons definitely are being shared.
>Maybe, however, it’s more likely that Russia’s military is less competently run than previously thought. I wouldn’t be surprised if intel was being shared with Ukraine and weapons definitely are being shared.
There is info that the troops didnt think they were invading. They were either thinking they were protecting against nazi troops or were just training.
This makes sense, if you're planning an invasion, the troops cant be told. They would be security threats.
But at the same time, that lack of knowledge will make them ill prepared at the beginning. But their morale after these massive losses will suffer.
The thing is about proxy spec ops. It's practically 100% they are there but russian troops cant be told. Imagine you're already taking losses, then you get told the world's spec ops are there. You'd shit your pants. You're figthing against farmers and navy seals? You would have to treat every fight like you are fighting navy seals. That would make anyone rout instantly.
i think you underestimate combination of people whole ready to die for their country and modern anti-tank equipment that was shipped to Ukraine (javelines and nlaws) in past month or two
Initially I was looking at this situation as a Napoleonic move, and it most probably still is. Nevertheless, to add some nuance to it, the situation, as it unfolds, plays to the core argument by Putin, in between the anti-nazi fusion with Zionismophobia crazy talk for his Russian/local version of conspiracy theorists.
And that core argument was that he had no choice and that this a survival rather than an aggression move. At the moment, the struggles his army demonstrates, centered on lack of resources, lack of superiority on intelligence etc. are struggles related to capabilities where any of his advantages deteriorate with time. So he is attacking now, while there still is time. The alternative would be to wait 1 year and have Ukraine a member of Nato and a formidable enemy knocking on his door at any time? Doubt it, but it is his storyline to oligarchs. I hope this does not give Putin an argument but it goes to prove that I am at best a bad strategist, only coming up with explanations ex-post and he could be a mediocre strategist, but I sincerely doubt it given his history and his experience out of running a proxy war in Ukraine for 8 years.
The withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan did not help either and is the only thing that would explain timing from my perspective. He knows/feels that US is pulling back in preparation for something, but whether that something is the explicitly stated Asia race against China or an easy win against Russia cannot be assessed. If it was the latter he played right into it. I would think it was worth to him waiting for next US elections, regardless the outcome, as US are hitting some known fault lines in their political discourse, EU could grow more dependent on energy front in the meantime etc.
