If an individual is concerned enough about tax implications of a new acquisition, the individual probably has enough foresight to consider the cost of fuel.
Having lived in the US for almost a decade, I did not see any less bureaucracy (for example, two tax returns - Germany is a federation too but I only need to file one).
I also hear nightmare stories from other countries far surpassing anything we Germans could cook up, for example from India or from some African countries (not exclusively). "German bureaucracy" is a nice meme, I highly doubt that it even remotely reflects reality accurately. I don't mean that there isn't a lot, I mean that I doubt it's significantly or even any more than elsewhere. It's also highly subjective, depending on what part one is exposed to. Everybody only ever interacts with a tiny part of the overall system after all, and it very much depends on the context, so I doubt there can be a single answer that is meaningful except for media headline generation and effortless quick comment posting.
Also, the exact same bureaucracy and rules can save effort, be good for society overall or even lives, or (and) it can be a great hindrance to progress, again depending on the exact context.
I doubt you have ever penetrated deep enough into the favorite German pastime. I have a dedicated Nextcloud just to store and maintain order in my postal communication. I‘ve moved to the Netherlands in recent days though and the difference is very notable.
> I doubt you have ever penetrated deep enough into the favorite German pastime.
You don't know me.
Many years ago, early nineties, I worked in the kitchen of a New Jersey summer camp for over two months through a student exchange program.
At one point I decided to show them what "German" and "order" really means. I cleaned up the large pantry. Before, it was what you expect when you hear the term. A somewhat dark place with lots of food stuff in a lot of shelves. When I was done it was a bright room with every single can and every single label of hundreds of different cans and packages aligned to within less than a millimeter with the edge of the shelve and with each other. Every single label pointed exactly forward. Nut a speck of dust anywhere, and light flooded the room and between shelves. The contrast between before and after was stark. The camp manager walked through and did not say a word. My work as an ambassador of German-ness was done :)
I picked up my new German passport two weeks ago, It took less than ten minutes total.
When I ordered it though - last October - I had to make an appointment just to order a new one - two months later, middle of December. Then it took 8 more weeks to actually get it. Still, I did not have to wait there for long. Also, this was all due to COVID measures. Without those there would not have been all those appointments for an appointment online registrations.
The paperwork for getting a new one itself did not take long either . and I was a special complicated case. I had let my mandatory registration slip for over a decade. I was surprised - I got zero complaints and they just entered the residence data retroactively and that was all. I had thought I'd at least have to pay a fine, since I actually violated law.
The Ukranian government seems to be very media-savvy, but for me this is noise compared to signal (important government declarations about the conflict, not about income tax on seized equipment), I feel like saying "My god man, can't you be a little serious, there's a fucking war going on!".
Morale is very important in a war, especially if you're the side with the technological disadvantage. I feel like a lot of the Ukrainian gov communications tries to keep up the morale.
It also shows that the Government is still able to work, also an important signal to the country.
It's a great little piece of propaganda. It conveys that ordinary citizens have been capturing abandoned Russian vehicles, and tacitly encourages them to continue to do this. It gets Westerners sharing it because of the black humor of having a tax policy on captured enemy vehicles.
(And there seem to have been a lot of them; those interested can follow along on https://twitter.com/UAWeapons who post identifying captions in English. As always, take with a pinch of salt.)
They wont be reading this. Russia is informationally closed and now it became crime to spread "disinformation about war". This would likely fall in that category (regardless of whether true or not).
Also, Russian soldiers are dying too. It is fair to guess they are more likely to die then become POW.
Improvements in propaganda operations are significantly counterbalanced by ease of access. The Internet is a wild place, and there are lots of venues like Telegram available for largely unfettered conversations. Plenty of Russians still on Reddit; the chances of them remaining entirely unexposed to external information is slim.
You're severely underestimating how brainwashed they are. They're being brainwashed with fake history and nationalism since kindergarten. They will read the truth on the internet, and immediately dismiss it and then tell you that you're wrong about events you yourself or your parents have observed. It took me several years to undo some of the damage with one Russian person who moved here - they simply couldn't believe their state is such a horrible aggressor, in their mind it was so outlandish it must be totally fake.
I think you're underestimating how much that same sensation comes up when talking to many Americans about the Founding Fathers, Constitution, Civil War, and things like Iraq/Afghanistan.
There are many rulings against 4chan in Russia and while I'm not sure about the status right now, they used simple DNS blocks back in the day what is somewhat easy to avoid for semi computer literate people. VPNs are also obviously popular. If you end up in a blacklist it's forbidden to read, distribute etc these links.
You can check rublacklist.net for more detailed stuff and rulings.
The Ukranian social media propaganda operation is just incredible, and they should keep at it because I think it's been a big part of the massive popular support in the West causing rapid government and NGO response to the invasion.
Conversely they've been pretty effective at stopping information about their own disposition of forces being posted to social media, or at least it's not being retweeted anywhere I've seen.
Which is a pretty bold claim, completely unsupported by evidence. The Ukraine has a ton of highly-proficient very online people, the idea that they need shadowy outside help seems like an attack more than a serious claim.
CIA cannot defend USA from Russian propaganda. CIA are noobs in this war. They used our (Ukrainian) help to catch Russians. I know Russians inside out. I have 15+ years of experience in defending of Ukrainian informational space. Who has more years of experience than me? Nobody.
Them doing anything is not the same as them doing everything, as claimed. This shows every sign of being a lot of organic activity and the Ukrainian government – unsurprising as they have entire groups whose job it is to do this and more people who are mother-tongue fluent in Russian.
This illustrates the danger of conspiracy theory thinking: you’ve got yourself arguing a more complicated explanation with absolutely no evidence, and if we’re going by institutional reputations as portrayed by Hollywood wouldn’t the same logic have lead you to expect a massive Russian counter-campaign?
Who was handing out cookies in Maidan Square during the Euromaidan? Just the tip of the iceberg of the outside help.
In another forum, someone said to watch for the coming "let's roll" vignettes. Of course they were right, the US corporate press seems to be looking for narratives of heroic Ukrainian resistance, whatever the evidence - the defiant Snake Island defenders (who there later emerged video of them surrendering and Ukrainian officials saying they may still be alive), the Ghost of Kyiv fighter ace (who does seem like an actual ghost) and on and on. Of course it's difficult to verify the facts of these heroic narratives spun from rumor and propaganda during the fog of war, where the first casualty is the truth.
There are also many reports from almost the first day about how the Russian military is on its last legs and so forth, which sounds absurd. There may be one or two small there's there, but from US corporate media reports you'd think they were on the verge of defeat. Kind of like how the NLF were said to be on their last legs in 1968, prior to the Tet Offensive.
> Who was handing out cookies in Maidan Square during the Euromaidan? Just the tip of the iceberg of the outside help.
Yes, who was? (Hint: not the CIA)
You’re talking about Victoria Nuland, who was assistant Secretary of State at the time. She visited the protests at the time her boss was decrying the treatment of protesters and openly voiced support for democracy as opposed to how Yanukovich’s government was treating them. She helped distribute food – the cookies claim is a tell that you spend a lot of time consuming Russian propaganda since they’ve tried to spin this as America wanting compliant Ukrainian lapdogs - but that’s hardly a secret: all of this was in public in her official capacity, hardly some shadowy CIA plot.
> the cookies claim is a tell that you spend a lot of time consuming Russian propaganda
It's not a claim, there's video of her doing it. So "Russian propaganda" means a video of a US assistant of secretary of state handing out cookies in the Maidan Square where the Azov battalion etc. were overthrowing the elected Ukrainian government.
> It's not a claim, there's video of her doing it.
This is what I was referring to earlier: she gave out food, as was reported at the time, but the Russian sources you appear to be repeating LOVE to describe it as cookies for some reason and have continued doing so for years. Nobody else does that because it's an absurd thing to be upset about in any case: a U.S. State department official tours a rally in support of pro-democracy demonstrators is hardly unexpected and if it was something shameful as implied they wouldn't have done it in front of a ton of reporters. (… and, if you recall we were talking about a CIA conspiracy theory when they rarely do things literally in the public square using real names)
Similarly, it's pretty telling that you try to link this to the Azov battalion rather than the groups which actually lead the protests and you continue to characterize it using the terms which the Russian state media favor rather than how most independent observers do.
Your misplaced faith in the competence of the CIA is almost adorable. Small countries like Israel or Ukraine actually have to have competent intelligence services because their survival depends on it.
> yossarian1408 means that CIA/MI6 are almost certainly running Ukraine's PR.
Ukraine's PR is much better than CIA/MI6’s own PR.
OTOH, I bet they and other Western intelligence service are feeding Ukraine Intel that is instrumental in both the material (compared to expectations) and PR success that Ukraine is having.
You're flattering yourself too much. Ukrainians had the last 8 years to train and practice. They're one of the best now. Others will be coming to ask them for help, not the other way around.
It's a combination. The US releasing intelligence early on as it came out cut the knees out of the Russian disinformation campaign. So much so, I suspect it may become the new doctrine. Ukraine, and Zelensky in particular, have also taken full advantage of social media.
> Conversely they've been pretty effective at stopping information about their own disposition of forces being posted to social media, or at least it's not being retweeted anywhere I've seen.
I'm a bit twisted about this. In school, as a German, we were told that the Nazis only reported their wins, not their losses, and how this was such a terrible thing to do (I'm not saying Ukrainians are like Nazis of course.)
Disposition doesn't necessarily mean wins and losses - in this case it means where the forces are located, their strengths and capabilities, and what they are planning to do. It is entirely appropriate that this kind of information is kept secret.
I don’t know about you, but the point the teachers made when I was in school in France was more that they were censuring things like soldiers letters to their relatives and journal articles, which is bad, rather than officials emphasising victories without mentioning defeats, which is not ideal but understandable when morale plays such an important role.
More then one bad things can happen at the same time. The genocide was not the only very very bad thing that happened either - the conquest for living space would be major even if genocide of Jews did not happened.
In this case, OP likely refers to false impression that the conquest was going well while it was already lost.
Ukraine reports losses only traditionally, because Ukrainians worry about their relatives, but losses are hard to count in real time. Dead soldiers are declared as missing until remains are found. Dead civilians are not reported by invaders at all. For example, we lost one MiG-29 just a few hours ago[0]. This morning report[1] is quite correct. Here is information[2] about death of Oleksandr Oksanchenko, one of the best pilots. And so on.
When dozens, if not hundreds, of soldiers and civilians die every hour, it's hard to track all of them. Usually, most information about losses will be available after the end of an intensive firefight, when officers will have time to fill reports. Some information about shootings is reported by civilians, but it is hard to verify it.
It's all fun and games until Putin totally rages and dials it up to 11 without even a "no fly zone" being offered by the rest of the world. They have almost the military power of the US and look at the total decimation we did to Iraq.
I mean they are already bombing civilian areas so thousands are dying, just not being reported to keep moral up.
Putin will threaten maybe nukes in response but there has to be a no-fly zone over Ukraine or they are going to be destroyed by end of March.
Putin doesn't have to occupy Ukraine, he just has to destroy it, that's way easier. It will take at least a decade to rebuild if not multiple.
> I mean they are already bombing civilian areas so thousands are dying, just not being reported to keep moral up.
All dead Ukrainians are accounted and reported immediately, as time allows. We are doing that for last 8 years, day by day. We are outnumbered by Russians, so nobody interested in how many Russians died today, but every single dead Ukrainian soldier or civilian is a tragedy for us.
Furthermore, we don't need to keep the moral up. I was second officer at my recruit center at day 1 of war. I was promised that I will be sent to front line on next day, but on next day some soldiers are returned back, because all military units are full to top.
We need more weapons, armor, planes. We have plenty of man, who want to kill Russians, because after 8 years of war we all lost somebody we know.
This. The war is treated as some kind of theatrical performance, with gags, magical heroes killing Russians by the thousands a day and God knows what else. It's crazy.
So in other words, they spend about the same as UK, and 12x less than US alone.
They are still riding the old Soviet days. We believe their military is a world power, they (probably) believe their military is a world power. Until you look at the actual numbers. Their tanks are Soviet, their planes and helis are Soviet, their walkie-talkies are customer products. Their entire nuclear arsenal is inherited from the Soviets. It's all old, and they don't have the budget for a modern big army.
That might als explain why they are struggling so much in Ukraine.
Entertainingly, in 2019 a general went to jail because the supposed "made in Russia" radios were Chinese cheap consumer Baofeng radios which had had the labels swapped.
Any negative new related to ukraine is either shot down, assumed to be russian propaganda, not talked about. There has been widespread racism faced by blacks and indians. If you goto reddit any news related to it are downvoted as russian propaganda, uncivilized people not following orders etc. Even HN did not pick it up.
> There has been widespread racism faced by blacks and indians.
This unfortunately appears to be true; there's a number of people there, especially international students, who've been trying to flee and report getting blocked at the borders.
Ukraine is not a flawless guilt-free country, nowhere is, but that should not be used to distract people from the reality of the invasion.
We have a big country, they have 0/10 logistics. Rations and fuel of invading forces were reportedly at best for three days at invasion time.
Supply chains are being disrupted due to civilian resistance and lack of air dominance. It's not only social media, it's a total war situation, unanticipated by invader.
Let's see how "endless" it will look in a week or two.
Allowing Russia to do whatever the hell it likes because we're too afraid of MAD will be what kills the West. He'll push against a NATO member soon enough. If we can't stand up for them, he won't stop. And even non-military, these punitive sanctions drive us all closer to midnight, as we plunge the citizens of Russia into a deep economic depression.
Short of a friendly and broadly supported coup or a complete ideological u-turn from Putin, there is no way forward here that doesn't risk everything. Trying to ignore it seems the least helpful.
> Allowing Russia to do whatever the hell it likes because we're too afraid of MAD will be what kills the West. He'll push against a NATO member soon enough. If we can't stand up for them, he won't stop.
This is fear mongering, why the hell do you want a nuclear war so bad. I hope NATO officials keep sanity and do not start a war with russia.
> there is no way forward here that doesn't risk everything.
Yes there is, NATO can provide arms to ukrainian people and they need to fight for their freedom.
Saying ~"don't take any direct action or he'll nuke us all" is also fear-mongering. He might. From what we've seen recently, we need to understand that he might anyway.
Sitting on the sidelines and expecting the tiny countries that surround Russia to individually win wars, or expecting the beaten and suppressed peoples of Russia, Belarus, etc to rise up is inhumane… because they will fight. And die.
And say we do sit it out. Do you think the restoration of the USSR is what's going to bring us nuclear peace? Or just another border, more tension, more of this?
We've played this game before. As a European, my life would be extraordinarily different if the world hadn't eventually come together 81 years ago. Just imagine if Europe and the US had drawn together two years earlier.
I don't want nuclear war but holding up the threat of that as a cause for inaction —heaping guns on Ukraine while they're outnumbered 20:1 doesn't count— is the rank cowardice that nuclear dictators count on to get away with murder. It's not good enough.
This conflict is not about restoring USSR, It is about Ukraine joining NATO. No Russian leader is going to allow Ukraine to join NATO, because it is a serious danger to their own country.
Er, Moscow surrounded by subservient states seems an awful lot like the later iterations of the USSR and the route they're using to get there is demonstrably more dangerous than anything NATO would do. The more violent Russia is, the greater the call for NATO and missile shields on its doorstep.
And again, allowing Putin to subsume a new democracy doesn't make the world safer. It shows him he can dictate over his neighbours while the West does nothing.
Various Ukrainian people and organizations declared bounties for killed Russians and captured hardware. I suppose the bounties aren't going to be taxed too :)
One can examine each image and see if the object displayed in it is unique. I saw one news report which had multiple photos of the same object but taken from different angles and it must be said, from different people. Authentic very much so, however the number of images needs to be normalised with the number of objects.
There is a whole "OSINT" (open source intelligence) community doing just that and publishing counts. They also try to geolocate the images via terrain and buildings using maps, satellite images, etc to disambiguate.
Pretty odd way to pass the time ... but they seem to be confident in substantial Russian losses.
I am pretty sure Russian losses are very large, no one should doubt that, after all, they entered another country and are taking on their full military power headfirst... however, we cannot expect the Russians will simply go back home on the face of any resistance: we should expect them to fight harder and harder until they get their way, or finally give up, but at a very high cost... I mean, I admire Ukrainians putting up a resistance to a much larger enemy like they're doing, but in my view, if Ukrainians fight til' the end, this will only end with one of two scenarios:
* Russians leave humiliated and broken.
* Ukrainians finally capitulate.
In the first case, Russians are likely to first destroy everything in their path before leaving, because they will want to show they did not go home without inflicting more pain than they suffered.
In the second, the outcome is actually similar, but Russians don't leave for a while at least (Putin seems to intend to install a puppet government, then leave).
In both cases, there's almost nothing left standing in the whole of Ukraine. Unless they stop the fighting and negotiate, this seems to be the inevitable outcome.
Firstly, there are zero tanks on the videos. Secondly, "snatched" is a very bold claim. There is a sizable number of videos of discarded Russian vehicles, but if you watch closely there is no blood and zero dead bodies. It looks like the Russian army simply discards vehicles with technical issues to keep forces mobile (this is why you see the vehicles towed, not moving by themselves). And lastly, in the second half of the second video the towed anti-air system is used mostly by the Ukrainian army (the Russian army uses more modern systems), so it looks like the Ukrainian army simply transports an immobile vehicle using an expropriated civilian tractor.
I was a conscript in a MT-LB. The batalion lost like one per every other day to malfunction when driving alot. So I agree it is probably what is happening.
You seem to have a different angle than most here. I'm not sure I can join you in rationalizing an invading army but I believe in your right to say what you want, and value hearing from all sides. Can you share any sources or background on your point of view?
How do I rationalize it? I simply stated easy observations, which are not obvious to those who mostly form opinion based on the extremely active propaganda.
While I have zero sympathy for the post-2014 Ukrainian regime (it's really far from being a cute little democracy as portrayed by the Western media) and I am fed up with the Western hypocrisy (simply compare the number of invaded countries and how those invasions were performed), based on information I have, I think that Putin has made a huge mistake and miscalculation based on a wrong understanding of situation inside Ukraine, which has evolved significantly in 8 years (not without a bunch of PsyOps help from the West).
Currently I mostly form my opinion based on a number of Telegram channels (I will keep them to myself) and I do not watch ANY TV channels be they in Russian, Ukrainian, English, or other languages. I prefer mostly objective channels which simply repost videos and reports from those on the ground. Also after I see several blatant fakes on a channel or wild speculations, I quickly unfollow it.
Sure, now compare his election promises which got him those 72% with his actions. He did a literal 180 on his promises and made a bunch of clearly unconstitutional moves with zero critique from the West.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 69.7 ms ] threadI also hear nightmare stories from other countries far surpassing anything we Germans could cook up, for example from India or from some African countries (not exclusively). "German bureaucracy" is a nice meme, I highly doubt that it even remotely reflects reality accurately. I don't mean that there isn't a lot, I mean that I doubt it's significantly or even any more than elsewhere. It's also highly subjective, depending on what part one is exposed to. Everybody only ever interacts with a tiny part of the overall system after all, and it very much depends on the context, so I doubt there can be a single answer that is meaningful except for media headline generation and effortless quick comment posting.
Also, the exact same bureaucracy and rules can save effort, be good for society overall or even lives, or (and) it can be a great hindrance to progress, again depending on the exact context.
You don't know me.
Many years ago, early nineties, I worked in the kitchen of a New Jersey summer camp for over two months through a student exchange program.
At one point I decided to show them what "German" and "order" really means. I cleaned up the large pantry. Before, it was what you expect when you hear the term. A somewhat dark place with lots of food stuff in a lot of shelves. When I was done it was a bright room with every single can and every single label of hundreds of different cans and packages aligned to within less than a millimeter with the edge of the shelve and with each other. Every single label pointed exactly forward. Nut a speck of dust anywhere, and light flooded the room and between shelves. The contrast between before and after was stark. The camp manager walked through and did not say a word. My work as an ambassador of German-ness was done :)
Just be prepared to spend 5 hours for the paperwork
When I ordered it though - last October - I had to make an appointment just to order a new one - two months later, middle of December. Then it took 8 more weeks to actually get it. Still, I did not have to wait there for long. Also, this was all due to COVID measures. Without those there would not have been all those appointments for an appointment online registrations.
The paperwork for getting a new one itself did not take long either . and I was a special complicated case. I had let my mandatory registration slip for over a decade. I was surprised - I got zero complaints and they just entered the residence data retroactively and that was all. I had thought I'd at least have to pay a fine, since I actually violated law.
The Ukranian government seems to be very media-savvy, but for me this is noise compared to signal (important government declarations about the conflict, not about income tax on seized equipment), I feel like saying "My god man, can't you be a little serious, there's a fucking war going on!".
It also shows that the Government is still able to work, also an important signal to the country.
(And there seem to have been a lot of them; those interested can follow along on https://twitter.com/UAWeapons who post identifying captions in English. As always, take with a pinch of salt.)
Also, Russian soldiers are dying too. It is fair to guess they are more likely to die then become POW.
It is not like average north Korean would routinely watched Marvel movies.
https://www.x-rayaudio.com/x-rayaudioproject/ https://www.dazeddigital.com/music/article/32308/1/russia-x-...
You can check rublacklist.net for more detailed stuff and rulings.
Conversely they've been pretty effective at stopping information about their own disposition of forces being posted to social media, or at least it's not being retweeted anywhere I've seen.
That's like saying there's no evidence the NSA has saved this exact message in Xkeyscore.
This illustrates the danger of conspiracy theory thinking: you’ve got yourself arguing a more complicated explanation with absolutely no evidence, and if we’re going by institutional reputations as portrayed by Hollywood wouldn’t the same logic have lead you to expect a massive Russian counter-campaign?
But if you believe they don't get help from western intelligence agencies, you're looking the other way.
In another forum, someone said to watch for the coming "let's roll" vignettes. Of course they were right, the US corporate press seems to be looking for narratives of heroic Ukrainian resistance, whatever the evidence - the defiant Snake Island defenders (who there later emerged video of them surrendering and Ukrainian officials saying they may still be alive), the Ghost of Kyiv fighter ace (who does seem like an actual ghost) and on and on. Of course it's difficult to verify the facts of these heroic narratives spun from rumor and propaganda during the fog of war, where the first casualty is the truth.
There are also many reports from almost the first day about how the Russian military is on its last legs and so forth, which sounds absurd. There may be one or two small there's there, but from US corporate media reports you'd think they were on the verge of defeat. Kind of like how the NLF were said to be on their last legs in 1968, prior to the Tet Offensive.
Yes, who was? (Hint: not the CIA)
You’re talking about Victoria Nuland, who was assistant Secretary of State at the time. She visited the protests at the time her boss was decrying the treatment of protesters and openly voiced support for democracy as opposed to how Yanukovich’s government was treating them. She helped distribute food – the cookies claim is a tell that you spend a lot of time consuming Russian propaganda since they’ve tried to spin this as America wanting compliant Ukrainian lapdogs - but that’s hardly a secret: all of this was in public in her official capacity, hardly some shadowy CIA plot.
It's not a claim, there's video of her doing it. So "Russian propaganda" means a video of a US assistant of secretary of state handing out cookies in the Maidan Square where the Azov battalion etc. were overthrowing the elected Ukrainian government.
This is what I was referring to earlier: she gave out food, as was reported at the time, but the Russian sources you appear to be repeating LOVE to describe it as cookies for some reason and have continued doing so for years. Nobody else does that because it's an absurd thing to be upset about in any case: a U.S. State department official tours a rally in support of pro-democracy demonstrators is hardly unexpected and if it was something shameful as implied they wouldn't have done it in front of a ton of reporters. (… and, if you recall we were talking about a CIA conspiracy theory when they rarely do things literally in the public square using real names)
Similarly, it's pretty telling that you try to link this to the Azov battalion rather than the groups which actually lead the protests and you continue to characterize it using the terms which the Russian state media favor rather than how most independent observers do.
Ukraine's PR is much better than CIA/MI6’s own PR.
OTOH, I bet they and other Western intelligence service are feeding Ukraine Intel that is instrumental in both the material (compared to expectations) and PR success that Ukraine is having.
I'm a bit twisted about this. In school, as a German, we were told that the Nazis only reported their wins, not their losses, and how this was such a terrible thing to do (I'm not saying Ukrainians are like Nazis of course.)
But there are a lot of ways to shape a narrative in 2022 that involve amplification instead of censorship.
https://www.rewire.org/vietnam-war-media-shapes-public-opini...
Of course, official propaganda of any county at war would highlight wins and dim the losses, if anything but for morale purposes.
Literally every belligerent in WW2 did that?
In this case, OP likely refers to false impression that the conquest was going well while it was already lost.
That is exactly what I was referring to. I should've been more clear.
When dozens, if not hundreds, of soldiers and civilians die every hour, it's hard to track all of them. Usually, most information about losses will be available after the end of an intensive firefight, when officers will have time to fill reports. Some information about shootings is reported by civilians, but it is hard to verify it.
[0]: https://www.facebook.com/MinistryofDefence.UA/posts/26756335...
[1]: https://www.facebook.com/MinistryofDefence.UA/posts/26756335...
[2]: https://www.facebook.com/MinistryofDefence.UA/posts/26701995...
> remnants
I mean they are already bombing civilian areas so thousands are dying, just not being reported to keep moral up.
Putin will threaten maybe nukes in response but there has to be a no-fly zone over Ukraine or they are going to be destroyed by end of March.
Putin doesn't have to occupy Ukraine, he just has to destroy it, that's way easier. It will take at least a decade to rebuild if not multiple.
All dead Ukrainians are accounted and reported immediately, as time allows. We are doing that for last 8 years, day by day. We are outnumbered by Russians, so nobody interested in how many Russians died today, but every single dead Ukrainian soldier or civilian is a tragedy for us.
Furthermore, we don't need to keep the moral up. I was second officer at my recruit center at day 1 of war. I was promised that I will be sent to front line on next day, but on next day some soldiers are returned back, because all military units are full to top.
We need more weapons, armor, planes. We have plenty of man, who want to kill Russians, because after 8 years of war we all lost somebody we know.
This. The war is treated as some kind of theatrical performance, with gags, magical heroes killing Russians by the thousands a day and God knows what else. It's crazy.
I thought so too, until I heard their economy is as big as the Benelux. Then I though, how can they be a "world power"?
I looked at military spending:
US: 778 bn China: 252 bn India: 72.9 bn Russia: 61.7 UK: 59.2
So in other words, they spend about the same as UK, and 12x less than US alone.
They are still riding the old Soviet days. We believe their military is a world power, they (probably) believe their military is a world power. Until you look at the actual numbers. Their tanks are Soviet, their planes and helis are Soviet, their walkie-talkies are customer products. Their entire nuclear arsenal is inherited from the Soviets. It's all old, and they don't have the budget for a modern big army.
That might als explain why they are struggling so much in Ukraine.
Entertainingly, in 2019 a general went to jail because the supposed "made in Russia" radios were Chinese cheap consumer Baofeng radios which had had the labels swapped.
https://warsawinstitute.org/deputy-chief-russias-general-sta...
This unfortunately appears to be true; there's a number of people there, especially international students, who've been trying to flee and report getting blocked at the borders.
Ukraine is not a flawless guilt-free country, nowhere is, but that should not be used to distract people from the reality of the invasion.
Supply chains are being disrupted due to civilian resistance and lack of air dominance. It's not only social media, it's a total war situation, unanticipated by invader.
Let's see how "endless" it will look in a week or two.
Short of a friendly and broadly supported coup or a complete ideological u-turn from Putin, there is no way forward here that doesn't risk everything. Trying to ignore it seems the least helpful.
This is fear mongering, why the hell do you want a nuclear war so bad. I hope NATO officials keep sanity and do not start a war with russia.
> there is no way forward here that doesn't risk everything.
Yes there is, NATO can provide arms to ukrainian people and they need to fight for their freedom.
Sitting on the sidelines and expecting the tiny countries that surround Russia to individually win wars, or expecting the beaten and suppressed peoples of Russia, Belarus, etc to rise up is inhumane… because they will fight. And die.
And say we do sit it out. Do you think the restoration of the USSR is what's going to bring us nuclear peace? Or just another border, more tension, more of this?
We've played this game before. As a European, my life would be extraordinarily different if the world hadn't eventually come together 81 years ago. Just imagine if Europe and the US had drawn together two years earlier.
I don't want nuclear war but holding up the threat of that as a cause for inaction —heaping guns on Ukraine while they're outnumbered 20:1 doesn't count— is the rank cowardice that nuclear dictators count on to get away with murder. It's not good enough.
And again, allowing Putin to subsume a new democracy doesn't make the world safer. It shows him he can dictate over his neighbours while the West does nothing.
Various Ukrainian people and organizations declared bounties for killed Russians and captured hardware. I suppose the bounties aren't going to be taxed too :)
Some of them are surely staged for Psyops, but by sheer volume plenty of them must be authentic.
Pretty odd way to pass the time ... but they seem to be confident in substantial Russian losses.
* Russians leave humiliated and broken.
* Ukrainians finally capitulate.
In the first case, Russians are likely to first destroy everything in their path before leaving, because they will want to show they did not go home without inflicting more pain than they suffered.
In the second, the outcome is actually similar, but Russians don't leave for a while at least (Putin seems to intend to install a puppet government, then leave).
In both cases, there's almost nothing left standing in the whole of Ukraine. Unless they stop the fighting and negotiate, this seems to be the inevitable outcome.
Truth is the first casualty in war, indeed.
While I have zero sympathy for the post-2014 Ukrainian regime (it's really far from being a cute little democracy as portrayed by the Western media) and I am fed up with the Western hypocrisy (simply compare the number of invaded countries and how those invasions were performed), based on information I have, I think that Putin has made a huge mistake and miscalculation based on a wrong understanding of situation inside Ukraine, which has evolved significantly in 8 years (not without a bunch of PsyOps help from the West).
Currently I mostly form my opinion based on a number of Telegram channels (I will keep them to myself) and I do not watch ANY TV channels be they in Russian, Ukrainian, English, or other languages. I prefer mostly objective channels which simply repost videos and reports from those on the ground. Also after I see several blatant fakes on a channel or wild speculations, I quickly unfollow it.
Why? 72% of votes went to Zelenskyy in the last election. What is your problem with that?