Why do you find UK intelligence fishy? The briefings regarding the state of the war/front lines regarding the war have been pretty well corroborated by other sources.
2) Every intelligence agency is trained to put out disinformation, to their own publics no less, and what’s worse they actually foment the revolutions and destabilize countries which leads to these very wars that create so much havoc
UK spy agencies are behind the astrotufed revolution in Iran, for instance, which took out their democratically elected government. CIA helped arm and train Mujahideen and has been involved in every war since Laos … whether it is Laos or Nicaragua, or Panama or Israel or Cuba, the CIA or KGB was on the case, fomenting revolutions and training insurgents. NPR did a great piece on this:
CIA has been arming and training far-right extremists in Ukraine for years before Russia’s invasion… because of the proxy war in Donbas, but also because of the larger geopolitical goal of flipping all Russia’s neighbors against them:
Russia’s spy agencies have probably helped astroturf the recent protests that caused pro-Western governments in Moldova and Slovakia to resign, which few people in the West are talking about for some reason.
And China is next (QUAD). China’s own intelligence agencies pressure Chinese all over the world, threatening their families back home:
This is a big reason why I am a libertarian. Not so much taxes, more like actual violence and destabilization of order. Thess agencies are unaccountable and the politicians fail to prevent chaos by doing all their deals behind closed doors. They are supposed to work for the people but all they do is fail to make deals and then gaslight their own public about their own failures when wars or pandemics break out.
Most regular people don’t want to kill each other over a flag. I think that, in the future, we will abolish this idea of killing in the name of nation states just as we have largely as a species moved past the Crusades and religious wars.
As programmers you can recognize when a system is broken. I suggest a simple fix … our governments want to know what we do when we transfer our $600? Sure. I want to know what goes on behind closed doors when they make deals. Put it all on CSPAN. Biden-Putin on CSPAN. Bennett-Putin-Zelensky on video. Normandy format meetings on video since 2015. Ukraine-Russia negotiators publicly on video. Why’d they disband after only 3 hours? Imagine if the NATO-Gorbachev talks were public? We would all know what was said. Imagine if Russia publicly applied to NATO in 2001 and was denied and we all knew what they’d have to fix to enter? None of these wars would happen.
Most of these wars happen due to lack of transparency and these spy + “intelligence” agencies thrive on the secrecy!
And also this environment enables “unspoken” bullcrap rules like “NATO is really a military alliance against Russia and is working to flip all its allies”, and “QUAD is really a military alliance against China and is working to flip all its allies” and “BRICS is an economic alliance against USA and is working to flip all its allies”. This just destabilizes the world and smaller countries pay the price, but they get to do these multi-decade plans because we the people allow them to.
And as a stretch goal I’d like to PUBLICLY audit th...
Ironically you also listed most the reasons I'm not a libertarian. As more things move from the public sphere to the private one, there's less transparency, not even a hope of public control (such as providing a moral direction via elections), and no obligation of improving anything. Structures like KGB and CIA will still exist, they'll just be completely outside the law, multiply in numbers and intensify the violent acts, because no public controls will be in place.
I don’t want concentrations of power in unaccountable corporations, either. I want housing cooperatives, credit unions etc.
But given that we have large states and corporations, let’s use that “public control” to vote body cameras for all cops and make ALL negotiations by our politicians publicly accessible. They work for us! We should know why they failed to prevent a war or a pandemic! Do you agree w that?
PS: It hasn’t happened, democracy wasn’t able to even get term limits for Congress despite overwhelming agreement it should happen. MAYBE they will outlaw insider trading. I would say that the problem is large concentrations of power in the hands of those who put profit / ideology over human lives — this whole “democracy” thing is just the system (organizations) pacifying people. Sometimes it can even make things worse as administrations change (eg Clinton’s deal with North Korea and Obama’s deal with Iran were killed by the next administrations… and USA has been doing this for centuries, eg Andrew Jackson renegging on Jefferson’s promises and causing the trail of tears). A small kingdom like Morocco or Monaco may actually be more stable and peaceful and less belligerent than a large democracy. The UK was a democracy during the British Raj and that didnt make it any nicer than when it was less of a democracy.
I commented somewhere a few weeks back[0] that we should probably be making it easier for Russians who are vulnerable (those who left during the mobilisation push, are vocally critical of Putin, or who simply want to not be part of it) and want to defect. There's not a great deal we can do to make it easier on their end - presumably there are some controls on the Russian side on the way out - but if someone does make it to the UK or the EU and doesn't wish to be part of the war we should help them do so.
[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35154243, was unfortunately misunderstood by one user who thought I wanted to punish Russians who remained in the country after the invasion, rather than simply extend additional help to those who had left
edit, a flagged comment raised this question "Why are you helping these people compared to the other billion around the world in far worse positions?"
If you're upset that some country is about to get special treatment because I made a comment on HN, then you needn't because what I've suggested probably won't happen. I don't think "You want to help $groupA? Why not $groupB?" is a very helpful way to look at this, and furthermore it's a little presumptuous to think that I'd exclusively want to assist one nationality but not another just because I didn't mention it. There are dozens of ways the UK, the EU or "the west" are not helping or are actively hindering other parts of the world. To expect me to address any or all of the others when I want to talk about one is ridiculous.
I’m confused about what group of people you’re wanting to offer this to. The Russians who already left Russia to dodge the draft probably don’t need help leaving Russia.
The people critical of Putin and who are in Russia, and the people who don’t want to be a part of the war and who are in Russia would probably appreciate being able to more easily leave.
What do you mean when you say “vulnerable?” Is it just verbal flourish?
Well those who have left are effectively stranded where they are, unless they want to return. If you left as mobilisation was announced and you're in Georgia or Armenia right now you likely do not have permanent residency - many applied and few got it. So you have a temporary visa on which the clock is ticking. If you want to go to the UK or Germany you'd have to return and apply for a suitable visa in the embassy in Russia. One good change in this specific case would involve permitting Russian citizens to apply abroad - at the UK embassy in Yerevan or Tbilisi (or wherever).
And those who haven't left, I'm sure there are ways they can be assisted too that we should also do. I'm not sure why "let's help this group" keeps getting interpreted as "let's punish this other group" :-/
I have a Russian friend working in IT in Poland and he fears deportation.
Unfortunately these things are reportedly happening, the sentiment should be anti-Putin but ends up being anti-Russian, mostly thanks to Russians like these: https://t.me/glavredinfo/61841
> Unfortunately these things are reportedly happening, the sentiment should be anti-Putin but ends up being anti-Russian, mostly thanks to Russians like these: https://t.me/glavredinfo/61841
If you don't mind me asking, why should the sentiment be anti-Putin? What makes you think that the war is not being supported by a significant fraction (if not majority) of the Russian population?
There is no question there is broad support for senseless violence, as evidenced by the video. But I know my friend for example, and he considers Putin and his enablers to be fascists. But of course there are also many people privately against this while publically showing support.
The point of my post was that it is not enough to help anti-Putin (and by that I mean anti-current-power-system-of-russia) leave Russia. They are as much victims here as Ukrainians who fled the war, but are sometimes treated badly.
Brexit happened for many dumb reasons. The current government has been going through a patch of being deeply unpopular and have decided that banging the anti-immigration drum can help shore up their base. So in truth yeah it's unfortunately quite unlikely they'd do much to make it easier to come to the UK, particularly if you're from Russia :-/
I'm in Canada and there has been a big push to help Ukrainians flee... but also one to take in Russians seeking asylum. The Ukrainians are the ones helping with that, funny enough, via Orthodox Churches.
> Russia confiscates passports of senior officials
... which passport? Russians have two passports, one is for the internal matters and other one for traveling abroad.
Add: lol downwotes. Sure, guys, you are always concentrated and read the article, filled with the fillers and stating what the water is wet to the brim, because, you know, someone may wake up from 20 years coma and suddenly need to read this article.
And to those who missed that part, like me:
> Alexandra Prokopenko, a former Russian central bank official, said passport restrictions had now expanded beyond individuals with security clearance.
> “Now they are coming to certain people and saying, ‘please hand in your red civilian passports, because you have access to sensitive information for the motherland, so we want to control your movements’,” she said.
> “Now they are coming to certain people and saying, ‘please hand in your red civilian passports, because you have access to sensitive information for the motherland, so we want to control your movements’,” she said.
Can you quote the update? The nearest phrase that can be interpreted as the internal passport is "please hand in your red civilian passports" (full context below), but this refers to the red-coloured external passport (as opposed to green diplomatic, blue service, and maroon internal passport).
Quotation follows:
> Alexandra Prokopenko, a former Russian central bank official, said passport restrictions had now expanded beyond individuals with security clearance.
> “Now they are coming to certain people and saying, ‘please hand in your red civilian passports, because you have access to sensitive information for the motherland, so we want to control your movements’,” she said.
(sorry for answering here, replies are disabled under your last comment for me, I guess the flood/flame protection)
> Can you quote the update?
'civilian' is a direct translation of 'гражда́нский'[0] which would be a typical mistake for someone translating from Russian to English without context or the knowledge. So I think it's the internal one referenced here.
Honestly, taking the external passport wouldn't make sense, because the only place where it would be needed officially is after the border crossing and someone in the stop list would be stopped long before that by checking the internal passport. And at least some neighbouring countries allows crossing by Russian internal passport, so the external one isn't even needed.
But still the article reads as a cheap propaganda so until a more solid evidence shows up I would chalk it under the usual exaggeration of 'everything is bad there'.
> but this refers to the red-coloured external passport
I think both the red and maroon are referred as red there.
Russia has many thousands of high-quality Soviet tanks
I've got a high quality 486 processor here but it still gets slaughtered by a cheap, ropey CPU I bought last year. A high-quality Soviet tank is a high-quality outdated tank that's very vulnerable to modern weaponry.
Ukraine is not a small country. And Russia is also relying on imported weapons from Iran despite its "infinite" resources. And finally it does not matter how many men Russia has, what matters is how many soldiers they have. Just because they hand rifle to someone doesn't make him a soldier.
You are completely leaving out social factors. Are Russian citizens willing to support the invasion no matter the cost? Are they willing to dedicate their lives to it? Or is there a point where they would decide it's just not worth it? Without the support of the populace, the government wouldn't be able to pursue this for long.
I am not making any claims about that whatsoever. I am simply saying that judging a conflict solely based on the mentioned numbers while completely ignoring social aspects is an oversimplification.
Any modern tank can explode when hit by an anti-tank missile. There are little Western tanks in Ukraine (Ukraine also has Soviet tanks) so you don't see such videos often.
By equal measure, who'd have thought the assassination of an Archduke and Duchess of two reasonably low priority places by a Bosnian student would have even been front page news.
What precipitates from these issues isn't always clear at the outset.
It will not be the end of the war, but the West, and especially Europe, will have an aggressive bully at its borders who already proved it can murder and torture people ruthlessly. So the economy will focus on arms race once again until someone in Russia finally understands it doesn't make any sense.
It is very clear cut. All Eastern European countries support Ukraine. In Czechia (and I believe in Slovakia) there are some groups convinced that if their countries stop support Ukraine, somehow miraculously peace will manifest. Moreover, millions of Ukrainians fled the war - it's a miracle there weren't any mass backlashes or provocations yet given the number of people that relocated and lives on foreign soil. But Ukraine has enormous support in the whole East Europe because these folks know they're next in line - they can even hear such threats from Russian TV and some politicians.
> that agressive bully was much further west 30+ years ago
And Putin wants all of that back.
> western europe managed fine then
But eastern Europe didn't manage fine, and they're the ones now pushing western Europe into putting more effort into stopping Putin.
Western Europe mostly just wants to trade with Putin. This is most visible in Germany of course (technically central Europe, but the old east-west divide is suddenly relevant again), but also France. They've been slow to accept that Putin is not really a trade partner but an aggressor. They ignored it when Putin destroyed Chechnya. They ignored it when he took chunks out of Georgie. They ignored it when Putin took Crimea. Only when he tried to take Donbass did they finally start to see there might be a problem. Meanwhile Poland and the Baltics have been pointing out that Putin is a threat for two decades now. They were undeniably right to join NATO.
Only Putin wants this war. US, UK, Poland, the Baltics and many other countries want to defend Europe against Russia. Nobody outside Russia would complain if Putin suddenly quit his war and withdrew from Ukraine.
How? So far, it's just costing everybody, including the US, a lot of money. What profit is there for the US in having Russia destroy entire Ukrainian cities?
If Putin thought the US profited too much from this while his own country suffered, maybe he'd stop his war. But his narrative is that the US and the entire West is suffering just as much as Russia and they'll soon give up, so victory is within sight. It's not of course; it's just bullshit to let him prolong his war for just a bit longer.
all i did is google "us profits from war in ukraine"
also by "us profits" i dont mean the us people profit. the war is costing the us people a lot
in the end if ukraine wins they will be so indebted to us and nato that their independence wont be worth the paper its written on. if they lose, well its definitely gonna be shit for them. talk about being stuck between a rock and a hard place, and all for nothing. whats absolute worst for them is if they win on the battle field and putin decides to wipe them off the face of the earth out of spite. somehow the us is managing to convince ukraine that this isnt a possobilty, just like they convinced them that they will join the eu and nato. apparently putin is a very predictable monster with nuclear morals
i mean honnestly, this is a question for you, what do you see as a realistic outcome for ukraine?
It's not the US convincing Ukraine, it's Ukraine convincing the US. I don't know if you've noticed, but Zelensky is constantly asking, begging, every country to support Ukraine.
You're trying to spin this as something the US wants, but it's not. It's something Putin wanted. Zelensky and the people of Ukraine are (obviously) far more determined to defend their country than anyone else. And many European countries are mostly supporting Ukraine because their own citizens are demanding that they do so.
There's tons of popular support for Ukraine, because most people recognise the terrible injustice of the Russian invasion and the atrocities committed by Russia.
How things will look after the war is impossible to predict, but US support has helped western Europe quite a lot after WW2. And even the defeated enemies of that war, Germany and Japan, are doing extremely well because of the way they've been rebuilt after the war. In the long run, the best outcome for Russia would probably be to be utterly defeated and rebuilt the same way. But of course that can never happen because Russia has nukes.
you didnt answer my question. what is the end game for ukraine if putin decides to nuke it? you cant rebuild a nuclear wasteland. chernobil will look like an untouched nature reserve in comparison. people need to honest with ukranians in what to expect from this. this is what makes the whole situation tragic
> what is the end game for ukraine if putin decides to nuke it?
Yes, this is what Putin's propagandists are repeating all the time, threatening to use nukes not just on Ukraine but also on Great Britain and other countries. Apart from the obvious absurdity of contaminating their own land, the big question is, should we agree to all Putins says just because he can use nukes? Is there any limit on what we will do to please him?
This is what I often hear on Russian TV. Their narrative is that the war was started bu Ukraine and NATO and Russia is just defending itself. It would be just ridiculous, the problem is I know some people who actually believe it.
in 2008 nato said that ukraine will become part of nato. in 2014 the us supported an overthrow of a democraticaly elected ukranian government. i wonder what makes people suspicious
It was the people of Ukraine who overthrew him because he broke his election promise and moved to make Ukraine a vassal of Russia. That is absolutely the last thing the people of Ukraine want, so they had no choice but to overthrow him. I don't think the US had anything to do with it.
The only reason NATO says that some day Ukraine can become a member, is because Ukraine keeps asking about it. Constantly. They desperately want to join NATO, and while they don't and didn't meet NATO's criteria, it's not impossible that some day they will, and then they can join.
And considering the consequences of not being in NATO, I think it's clear that Ukraine is absolutely justified in wanting to join NATO. Things would look very different if they had indeed joined in 2008.
you seem to be pretty keen to excuse anything nato does. i think nato purpousefully did a series of things to piss russia off and ukranian people are suffering as a result, being stuck between two imperialism. also are you aware that in 2008 the vast majority of ukranian population opposed joining nato. had ukraine joined then the war would have really been over in three days, i think
I'm not excusing NATO, I'm just explaining what happened. Putin fanboys love to pretend that NATO is aggressively expansionist, but it's not. Most of eastern Europe begged to join NATO, to the point that Poland practically blackmailed Clinton into letting them join (which Clinton originally wasn't a fan of).
NATO extended its mutual defense to these countries. The only reason why that should piss off Russia is if Russia had plans to conquer those countries. Turns out they do. But that's not NATO's fault. Don't try to shift the blame to NATO here; this war is entirely, for the full 100%, Putin's fault.
you obvioisly drank the nato coolaid but please tell me whats wrong with my understanding. here goes
1990. nato makes the not one inch eastward promise
1999. in disregard for international law, nato bombs russia ally yugoslavia and takes over its southern teritory
1999. nato expands into poland and several other ex warsaw countries
2004. nato expands into ex-ussr, taking baltic states as members
2008. april. nato said it will take in georgia and ukraine
2008. may. us and majority of nato countries recognize the unilateral declaration of independence by kosovo, in disregard to previously signed un agreements, and in disregard to international law forbidding unilateral secessions
2008. august. georgia tries to retake control over autonomous ethnic-minority regions. russia stops this. georgia looses any chance of becoming part of nato
2010. ukraine government abandons plans to join nato
2014. people from west ukraine are driven by busses into kiev to overthrow an elected government. us publically supports the coup. elected president flees to russia. the goverent is overthrown. east ukraine opposes the overthrow and begins to rebel against the new government.
2014. crimea unilateraly seceeds from ukraine, citing the kosovo precedent. simultaneously it becomes part of russia
2014. civil war accross eastern ukraine, centering around donbas
2014. minsk agreements signed
2016-2019 nato suffers from being perceived as irrelevant.
2018. nato requests substantial funding to improve its information campaign. huge effort to rewrite the history of 'not an inch eastward' promise
2022. january. ukranian government publically states it has no intension of fulfilling minsk agreements
2022. february. russia invades ukraine
to me this timeline of events strongly suggests that ukraine and its people are a mere chess piece in US imperial ambissions
> 1990. nato makes the not one inch eastward promise
Never happened. In fact, Russia and NATO have explicitly in writing (1997 treaty) that they respect the right of third parties to seek security as they see fit. Nor did Russia ever bring it up until Putin needed a justification for invading Georgia.
Even any notion of such talks is absurd, given that you place it a year before the USSR collapsed. Collapse of the USSR and parts of it applying for NATO (and eventually becoming members) was inconceivable at the time. As participants have recollected, the context of talks at the time was German reunification and stationing NATO forces in Eastern Germany. Nobody could imagine that the USSR itself would soon cease to exist.
This directly ties to another point:
> 2004. nato expands into ex-ussr, taking baltic states as members
(1) NATO didn't "expand", but those countries were hell-bent on seeking security to protect themselves from getting occupied ever again through cooperation in international organizations. That was set as a foreign policy goal in 1993.
(2) How did Putin react to that in 2004 when he met Schröder days after the Baltics became full members of NATO? He said that it's fine, never brought up any alleged promises. http://www.en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/30678
Yup, pretty hard to come up with a meaningful reply when Daddy Putin said at the time that it was fine. Even hardcore Russian nationalists have grown tired of Putin's constant whining how the whole world has now wronged him: https://youtu.be/DRE8f5JzDAE
apparently unlike you, i dont pay much attention to what putin says. all you said in your last post is that something which clearly happened didnt in order to more nicely fit with your world view. hard to argue with that so i will leave it at that. an internet discussion is highly unlikely to change the course of events. my reason for posting is just to show that there exist people who think differently. but i guess to people like you i must be a paid foreign agent. uncle joe taught you well
It's not that Russia was always bad - there was a period when people really hope we could all live together in peace, Scorpions even recorded a song about it.
> 1999. nato expands into poland and several other ex warsaw countries
And the people in these countries (almost half of Europe!) still celebrate this day, just like the day they managed to liberate themselves from Russians. No wonder it makes Putin mad.
i think most people accross eastern europe have bigger problems than nato celebrations or russia hating. like for example, making ends meet. i wonder how many people in eastern europe would have a home today had it not been for the socialist period
Do we still depend on raw manpower to 1. increase productions of specialized hardware which anyhow depends on specialized technology, and 2. win wars by sending 'infinite' amount of soldiers to the front ?
At the same time, the assumption is that there will be no backlash inside the country if 'infinite' amount of soldiers die ?
I have seen a video from Ukraine where they bragged that a net above a tank has caught two Russian kamikadze drones (they got stuck in it and didn't explode).
I mean yeah they tend to actually have reactive armor and don't tend to be quite as vulnerable to the "turret tossing" as those operated by the Russians. But this isn't about western vs soviet tanks. The point was the "many thousands of high-quality Soviet tanks" appear to be quite vulnerable to very inexpensive and widely available equipment that Ukraine have become adept at using.
Some soviet tanks are supposed to have reactive armour. The same way the Russian troops were supposed to be issued with body armor and the tank columns invading Kiev from the north were supposed to have fuel.
I don’t think anyone’s particularly hopeful about any breakthrough from either side, and the Russians do not seem to be the comically inept force they’re sometimes portrayed as. But it’s no secret that they’re poorly resourced and were ill-prepared for the conflict.
Not immune, but far better protected and safer to operate than an aging rust bucket with a cope net that has to advance to close range just to hit it's targets.
I have seen a video from Ukraine where they bragged that fishing net over a tank has caught two Russian kamikadze drones (they got stuck in it and didn't explode). That's why I wrote that comment about a fishing net.
So you're saying they've got this enormous fleet of tanks that they've yet to deploy but which could turn the tide of the war ... and they're just sitting on them? I don't buy it.
Its a classic russian strategy for coping. They will state that they are choosing to loose and that they could win if they wanted. It's unclear what exactly this helps, other than making them seem incompetent and willing to let people die when it could have been avoided.
> It's unclear what exactly this helps, other than making them seem incompetent and willing to let people die when it could have been avoided.
How exactly is the massive deployment of mobile artillery supposed to result in less deaths?
In any case, the end of the war would obviously not be the end of the world. Isn't the whole point of the aid for Ukraine that it is supposed to contain Russia and deplete its military and economic capabilities?
The point of the aid is to assist Ukraine in its defence. Whether Putin chooses to continue to exhaust Russian military stockpiles and crater the Russian economy in pursuit of a war that looks increasingly unwinnable is his choice.
> Whether Putin chooses to continue to exhaust Russian military stockpiles and crater the Russian economy in pursuit of a war that looks increasingly unwinnable is his choice.
So yeah, my point to parent asking why Russia might not be throwing everything at once.
Storming the trenches implies they're actually there to fight and win.
In most cases they're there to get shot at enough while drones watch and tag enemy positions for artillery strikes.
In peer- or near-peer conflicts arty accounts for a high, often monumentally high, number of casualties -- easily 75% or more. The prisoners aren't expected to win, that would require lots of training, trust, gear, and planning; they're expected to draw fire, and the VDV or main-line regulars will clean up the rest.
Yep I don’t believe the described enormous, modern tank fleet exists. T-14 exists and probably does work fine, it just doesn’t exist in sufficient numbers to matter.
Tank boneyards. Thousands of tanks but many in disrepair; the US has similar.
Corruption and mixed priorities meant that most of the storage depots didn't see regular maintenance done, so vehicles that should have been "mostly workable" were basically rust-buckets. However estimates put the stockpiles at like 8000 T-72s, 10000 BMPs, etc., and even if only 1/3 of them are viable that still represents thousands of vehicles.
Logistics are another problem though. Even if only 1/3 are viable you have to ship repairs, replacement parts, and the entire vehicle across huge distances and that takes a lot of time. If there is a T-55 in a depo that's closer and it doesn't need parts -- great, get that to the front now; it'll do rear-line duty or something.
"High Quality" is also relative -- virtually all of NATO's, and Russia's, tanks are upgraded late-Cold-War models, but there is a non-trivial difference in the late-Soviet vs. post-Soviet era developments. Getting an old T-72 working might be easy enough, but getting that upgraded to the T-72B3M edition is a different story.
Determination.
Ukraine has no air force, Russia has.
Russia has almost 10 time more soldiers.
Unless western countries start sending soldiers to fight Russians, there should be no way for Ukrainians to even withstand.
Nonetheless, Russia is definitely not winning after 1 year.
Maybe Russia will end up controlling the majority of the land. Just rubbles and ashes.
I believe this is wrong. Russia doesn't have 10 times more soldiers now, and regular army isn't deployed in Ukraine; only volunteers (including prisoners), mobilized soldiers and contract army is.
An army of people conscripted for 1 year for training; they are not sent to the war. Every man must serve for 1 year. There are also soldiers hired by contract and well paid for their service. They are sent to the war and they cannot refuse or break the contract. Sometimes they are called "professional army".
Army of conscripts is around 1-1.5 million soldiers; professional army was about 300 000 soldiers before invasion. It was not enough to win so there was a mobilization of about 400 000 (official numbers) and recruiting volunteers from prisoners.
In some ways, Ukraine has already won; Putin intended to capture Kyiv in three days and completely failed to do that. He turned to some minor territory gain, but that's also going very poorly. Russia's winter campaign is almost a complete failure, with tens of thousands of lives lost for very minor gains.
Ukraine is smaller than Russia, but by no means a small country. Ukraine has 40 million people and is far more motivated to fight than Russia is. Russians really have nothing to win here; it's just about Putin's pride. Meanwhile Ukrainians are fighting for their lives, their country, and the future of their children. These are powerful motivators, and go a long way towards explaining Ukraine's unwavering morale in the face of overwhelming odds.
Ukraine also fights much smarter. Russia uses very primitive tactics: use massive artillery to flatten entire cities, move infantry in, and if they get killed, flatten the place with artillery again. And then they ran low on artillery ammunition, not to mention that many of their barrels have been so overused they can't shoot straight anymore, so now they've resorted to human wave attacks. Ukrainian defenders of Bakhmut have described wave after wave of Russian attackers crawling over the dead bodies of their dead comrades only to get gunned down too. There's no sophistication at all, and coordination is often poor.
Meanwhile Ukraine with its more limited resources executes very smart attacks. Most of the time they target Russian supply lines to make it harder for Russia to fight. But sometimes they've undermined Russian positions so much that they can suddenly grab an enormous swath of territory, like they did east of Kharkiv and west of Kherson.
I frankly don't see how Ukraine can lose this. In some ways they have already won. Although of course it really depends on how you define victory and loss here; both sides have lost a lot, and any end result where Putin is in a position where he can try again later, means that the war for Ukraine is not really over.
> Putin intended to capture Kyiv in three days and completely failed to do that.
What exactly is that assertion even based on?
People talk like it is some kind of a definite fact, but there is no reference to any particular source or a universal explanation of how this was deduced.
We were alive and following the news when it happened. I'm not exactly sure what makes you doubt this. It's pretty well-reported. They fought on the outskirts of Kyiv, lost a bunch of troops and material, and eventually withdrew when they couldn't make any further progress.
I'm looking at his actions, rather than believing the words of a liar.
Just before the war, he said he was not going to invade. Then he did it anyway. His words are meaningless. His actions are what counts. And he obviously did try to take Kyiv. There were paradrops intended to take Kyiv in hours, even. There was a push by more forces to take Kyiv in days. It all failed because they encountered far more serious resistance than they expected, and it turned out they lacked the supplies for a longer operation, and couldn't get those supplies organised in the face Ukrainian defense specifically targeting Russian supply lines. Eventually they couldn't make any progress and withdrew. Though not before murdering lots of civilians in Boucha.
the people trapped in the building were either prevented from leaving or beaten up as they tried to leave, while ukranian nationalists chanted "burn! burn!" on the street
You're framing it as if it's China vs Belgium but Russia has about three times the population of Ukraine. And literally millions of Russian men already fled Russia rather than be conscripted.
Looking at current ratio of Russian and Ukrainian losses, having three times the soldiers is not going to be enough.
Not millions. That number is probably closer to 800k.
Still a lot, esp. you consider the primary draftable age groups (e.g. 18-30), and that not all males in that group would be military worthy, i.e. medical or mental disabilities, etc.
Also a big deal if you consider that most of them are the wealthier, smarter, more mobile parts of the population, which will exacerbate the brain-drain and impact the economy. A lot of those guys aren't gonna go back anytime soon, or at all.
> Also a big deal if you consider that most of them are the wealthier, smarter, more mobile parts of the population, which will exacerbate the brain-drain and impact the economy.
This a post-Covid era. Everything that is "smart and mobile" is also remote. Which means that physical relocation doesn't exactly imply brain drain, especially given that wealthier destinations such as the US or some parts of Europe are harder to reach then ever.
Any discussion as to who is winning is meaningless without defining what victory means. And apparently it not only means something very different for each side, but also changes with time.
Suppose Ukraine manages to push Putin's army back to original pre-2014 borders. Is this victory? With a large part of the country in ruins, a terrible GDP decrease, thousands of men with PTSD, not to mention those dead. There is simply no victory here, just enormous pain because of someone's sick ambitions.
Loss/victory is far too simplistic to discuss the possible outcomes and their consequences.
Putin seems to have painted himself into a corner where now his continued rule over Russia depends on being able to paint this as either a victory or a loss that's in no way his fault (because NATO started it and he was just defending himself). But also it seems that at the very least, he needs Crimea.
For Russians in general, they don't really need anything here. The real loss for them is that Putin is willing to sacrifice their entire country to bail him out of his fiasco. A win for them would be getting rid of Putin and not replacing him with someone even worse.
For Zelensky, the bare minimum is of course independence from Russia, and he seems to have won that at least. But millions of Ukrainians have been captured and often deported/abducted by Russia, and that's a loss too. He wants those people free, and he's absolutely right to. And he wants to keep Ukraine whole; accepting any loss of Ukrainian territory is a loss to him. Not to mention that it sets a precedent; Putin has a history of making small land grabs, and without hard security guarantees, it's likely that Putin will try another land grab in the future. And indeed Putin is still trying to grab more land right now. Putin wants that corridor to Moldova, and then Moldova itself. Leaving Putin in a position where he can try this again and again, is also a loss for many countries in the future.
So even if on the short term it would be good for Ukraine if the fighting stopped; if it's really just a temporary cease fire during which Putin can regroup in order to try again, that may be worse for Ukraine than trying to completely block Putin right now.
I fully agree with you. Someone suggested the only way for Ukraine is to became another Israel, focusing on external and internal security, and developing a strong arms industry so that they can protect themselves efficiently with the help of the West.
Still, it's much easier to protect oneself against Hamas' handcrafted rockets than Russian Kinzhals...
> Ukraine may win... after 5+ years of brutal war and heavy destruction. Is that better than a life back under Moscow's rule?
Considering the treatment they experienced in occupied cities - yes, it might be. Being under Moscow's rule won't be an occupation like Eastern Europe had under USSR, but a brutal regime made the extinguish the concept of "Ukrainians". Putin is clearly signaling that.
If you asked me 10 years ago, I would have said hell no - you could fairly comfortably live in Russia, especially in big cities, and have more or less normal life, unless you are gay or oppose local or state institutions.
But now? They don't have any regard for human life. Not just the lives of Ukrainians, but their own. Putin is knowingly sacrificing tens of thousands for his sick ambition. There is nothing Russia gained from this war. Utter tragedy for everyone.
It really isn't. Russia has gone backwards for a year now. There isn't a single parameter where things doesn't look bad for them. Sure the fog of war makes things somewhat unclear, but saying that its hard to gauge who is having the most trouble is nonsense for anyone following the conflict.
Emphasis on inches. Ukraine War Mapper [1] does a good job documenting the line of control. It's not a good look for what, until recently, looked like a dominating regional power.
100 meters / days is 3.6 kilometers a year. To reach western point of Ukraine, Russians need to go about 1000 kilometers - so at 100 meters a day it would take them nice 277 years.
Of course, they are going slower than that. And also, at the current rate of attrition, Russia will run out of Russians long, long before that.
No propaganda has clearly gotten to you. Occupied Ukrainian territory peaked in march last year. This is a fact, there is nothing to argue. Russia's winter offensive is literally slower than a snails pace.
Please quote the statement that I wrote that you think it's propaganda.
I'll do the same:
> Russia has gone backwards for a year now.
This is false, Russia went backwards, and then went forwards. Maybe you meant to say "has gone backwards with respect to where it was last year". That is true.
Thank you for acknowledging what I wrote is true. When you have two interpretations of what someone write, and one is obviously true and the other is a strawman, please don't choose to argue against the false interpretation. It's against HN's guidelines.
It just reads like a massive cop-out, a "you are misinformed, sheeple"-style of empty platitude trying to sound somewhat smart, or deep, or "more informed".
One of the worst things I've seen happening in my lifetime is this transition to a post-modern, post-truth world. It's just exhausting that people feel it's ok to say "you are misinformed" in different ways, without ever providing a different proper source for information, a source where others could at least try to gauge if they're misinformed or not.
It's simply a thug-of-war between people living different realities, both accusing the other side of falling to some propaganda without basis.
Sorry for the rant, y'all, but this bullshit really grates, hard.
I'm sure there are zero positive signs for the Russians and they are all just idiots instead of your media claiming any they find are russian disinformation and not reporting on it. Same way the Taliban was one the ropes for two decades.
The Winter War is a bad comparison. Finland didn't have massive international blocks backing it, nor did the Soviets. NATO -- 30, soon to be 31 countries -- are backing UKR, while India, China, Iran, and a few others are backing Russia to varying degrees.
The real comparison is probably closer to Iraq-Iran in the 1980's. Iraq launches a huge mechanized offensive, gets into Iran, runs out of steam, and slowly gets pushed back, at high cost for both sides. It gets ugly, fast, and kills a whole bunch of people. It goes in for ~8 years before it eventually just peters out, and lasts that long because of international support for each side: Iraq had the US and similar 1st worlders; Iran had the USSR and COMBLOC.
Iran nor Iraq shelled their own minority citizens leading up to and partially instigating the invasion. Additionally NATO was not knocking on either one’s doorstep.
Let’s see, lower inflation, growth projected gdp, efficiency in military spending, public health care, very low urban crime rates/homelessness, econ partnerships with 70% of world population, and almost no national debt. Compare those points to the US/TheWest…
How did big orange Ben always put it, “nuff said”.
176 comments
[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 216 ms ] threadYour passport is safely and permanently stored in the room 33B, and don't forget comrades are watching very closely - for your own good".
This is a misleading "quote".
UK intelligence is not mentioned in the article at all (https://archive.is/xG0M7)
2) Every intelligence agency is trained to put out disinformation, to their own publics no less, and what’s worse they actually foment the revolutions and destabilize countries which leads to these very wars that create so much havoc
UK spy agencies are behind the astrotufed revolution in Iran, for instance, which took out their democratically elected government. CIA helped arm and train Mujahideen and has been involved in every war since Laos … whether it is Laos or Nicaragua, or Panama or Israel or Cuba, the CIA or KGB was on the case, fomenting revolutions and training insurgents. NPR did a great piece on this:
https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2017/01/30/512449534/...
CIA has been arming and training far-right extremists in Ukraine for years before Russia’s invasion… because of the proxy war in Donbas, but also because of the larger geopolitical goal of flipping all Russia’s neighbors against them:
https://news.yahoo.com/cia-trained-ukrainian-paramilitaries-...
Russia’s spy agencies have probably helped astroturf the recent protests that caused pro-Western governments in Moldova and Slovakia to resign, which few people in the West are talking about for some reason.
And China is next (QUAD). China’s own intelligence agencies pressure Chinese all over the world, threatening their families back home:
https://www.voanews.com/amp/east-asia-pacific_china-tries-mu...
This is a big reason why I am a libertarian. Not so much taxes, more like actual violence and destabilization of order. Thess agencies are unaccountable and the politicians fail to prevent chaos by doing all their deals behind closed doors. They are supposed to work for the people but all they do is fail to make deals and then gaslight their own public about their own failures when wars or pandemics break out.
Most regular people don’t want to kill each other over a flag. I think that, in the future, we will abolish this idea of killing in the name of nation states just as we have largely as a species moved past the Crusades and religious wars.
As programmers you can recognize when a system is broken. I suggest a simple fix … our governments want to know what we do when we transfer our $600? Sure. I want to know what goes on behind closed doors when they make deals. Put it all on CSPAN. Biden-Putin on CSPAN. Bennett-Putin-Zelensky on video. Normandy format meetings on video since 2015. Ukraine-Russia negotiators publicly on video. Why’d they disband after only 3 hours? Imagine if the NATO-Gorbachev talks were public? We would all know what was said. Imagine if Russia publicly applied to NATO in 2001 and was denied and we all knew what they’d have to fix to enter? None of these wars would happen.
Most of these wars happen due to lack of transparency and these spy + “intelligence” agencies thrive on the secrecy!
And also this environment enables “unspoken” bullcrap rules like “NATO is really a military alliance against Russia and is working to flip all its allies”, and “QUAD is really a military alliance against China and is working to flip all its allies” and “BRICS is an economic alliance against USA and is working to flip all its allies”. This just destabilizes the world and smaller countries pay the price, but they get to do these multi-decade plans because we the people allow them to.
And as a stretch goal I’d like to PUBLICLY audit th...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_socialism
I don’t want concentrations of power in unaccountable corporations, either. I want housing cooperatives, credit unions etc.
But given that we have large states and corporations, let’s use that “public control” to vote body cameras for all cops and make ALL negotiations by our politicians publicly accessible. They work for us! We should know why they failed to prevent a war or a pandemic! Do you agree w that?
PS: It hasn’t happened, democracy wasn’t able to even get term limits for Congress despite overwhelming agreement it should happen. MAYBE they will outlaw insider trading. I would say that the problem is large concentrations of power in the hands of those who put profit / ideology over human lives — this whole “democracy” thing is just the system (organizations) pacifying people. Sometimes it can even make things worse as administrations change (eg Clinton’s deal with North Korea and Obama’s deal with Iran were killed by the next administrations… and USA has been doing this for centuries, eg Andrew Jackson renegging on Jefferson’s promises and causing the trail of tears). A small kingdom like Morocco or Monaco may actually be more stable and peaceful and less belligerent than a large democracy. The UK was a democracy during the British Raj and that didnt make it any nicer than when it was less of a democracy.
https://youtu.be/VP_SpW-DyQg
[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35154243, was unfortunately misunderstood by one user who thought I wanted to punish Russians who remained in the country after the invasion, rather than simply extend additional help to those who had left
edit, a flagged comment raised this question "Why are you helping these people compared to the other billion around the world in far worse positions?"
If you're upset that some country is about to get special treatment because I made a comment on HN, then you needn't because what I've suggested probably won't happen. I don't think "You want to help $groupA? Why not $groupB?" is a very helpful way to look at this, and furthermore it's a little presumptuous to think that I'd exclusively want to assist one nationality but not another just because I didn't mention it. There are dozens of ways the UK, the EU or "the west" are not helping or are actively hindering other parts of the world. To expect me to address any or all of the others when I want to talk about one is ridiculous.
The people critical of Putin and who are in Russia, and the people who don’t want to be a part of the war and who are in Russia would probably appreciate being able to more easily leave.
What do you mean when you say “vulnerable?” Is it just verbal flourish?
And those who haven't left, I'm sure there are ways they can be assisted too that we should also do. I'm not sure why "let's help this group" keeps getting interpreted as "let's punish this other group" :-/
Many of them are in countries that are happy to give Putin anyone he wants. A lot of political activists and detectors get deported back to prison.
Unfortunately these things are reportedly happening, the sentiment should be anti-Putin but ends up being anti-Russian, mostly thanks to Russians like these: https://t.me/glavredinfo/61841
If you don't mind me asking, why should the sentiment be anti-Putin? What makes you think that the war is not being supported by a significant fraction (if not majority) of the Russian population?
The point of my post was that it is not enough to help anti-Putin (and by that I mean anti-current-power-system-of-russia) leave Russia. They are as much victims here as Ukrainians who fled the war, but are sometimes treated badly.
Didn't brexit happen exactly to fight that ?
For low-level ones, it's usually waving the white flag then POW camp (if you're lucky)
your travel out of the window usually
For a fun recent one please turn on caption translations and enjoy this short-film/music-video/documentary by Russian band Leningrad:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5bRPTb3z2rU
You won't regret it. :)
Don't forget about Papers Please https://papersplea.se/
In Soviet Russia, airport official informs YOU!
... which passport? Russians have two passports, one is for the internal matters and other one for traveling abroad.
Add: lol downwotes. Sure, guys, you are always concentrated and read the article, filled with the fillers and stating what the water is wet to the brim, because, you know, someone may wake up from 20 years coma and suddenly need to read this article.
And to those who missed that part, like me:
> Alexandra Prokopenko, a former Russian central bank official, said passport restrictions had now expanded beyond individuals with security clearance.
> “Now they are coming to certain people and saying, ‘please hand in your red civilian passports, because you have access to sensitive information for the motherland, so we want to control your movements’,” she said.
Which to me sounds like bullshit.
It's amusing what you bothered to reply.
Quotation follows:
> Alexandra Prokopenko, a former Russian central bank official, said passport restrictions had now expanded beyond individuals with security clearance.
> “Now they are coming to certain people and saying, ‘please hand in your red civilian passports, because you have access to sensitive information for the motherland, so we want to control your movements’,” she said.
> Can you quote the update?
'civilian' is a direct translation of 'гражда́нский'[0] which would be a typical mistake for someone translating from Russian to English without context or the knowledge. So I think it's the internal one referenced here.
Honestly, taking the external passport wouldn't make sense, because the only place where it would be needed officially is after the border crossing and someone in the stop list would be stopped long before that by checking the internal passport. And at least some neighbouring countries allows crossing by Russian internal passport, so the external one isn't even needed.
But still the article reads as a cheap propaganda so until a more solid evidence shows up I would chalk it under the usual exaggeration of 'everything is bad there'.
> but this refers to the red-coloured external passport
I think both the red and maroon are referred as red there.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D0%B3%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%B6%D0%B...
> Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s spokesperson, confirmed Russia had tightened the restrictions on foreign travel for some who work in “sensitive” areas
/s
I've got a high quality 486 processor here but it still gets slaughtered by a cheap, ropey CPU I bought last year. A high-quality Soviet tank is a high-quality outdated tank that's very vulnerable to modern weaponry.
T-72s and such are also kept updated with modern gizmos like reactive defense, etc.
You men the ones that go extra-boom whenever something hits them?
(just to be clear I mean having the auto-loader under the turret make things extra-spicy when hit even by a grenade or something)
The T-72's jack-in-the-box design flaw is being productively exploited on the battlefield. That's not a "can explode" problem.
What precipitates from these issues isn't always clear at the outset.
Which is, go figure, why Poland, the Baltics, the Czechs, etc. are so eager to support Ukraine...
https://apnews.com/article/czech-ukraine-russia-government-p...
And Putin wants all of that back.
> western europe managed fine then
But eastern Europe didn't manage fine, and they're the ones now pushing western Europe into putting more effort into stopping Putin.
Western Europe mostly just wants to trade with Putin. This is most visible in Germany of course (technically central Europe, but the old east-west divide is suddenly relevant again), but also France. They've been slow to accept that Putin is not really a trade partner but an aggressor. They ignored it when Putin destroyed Chechnya. They ignored it when he took chunks out of Georgie. They ignored it when Putin took Crimea. Only when he tried to take Donbass did they finally start to see there might be a problem. Meanwhile Poland and the Baltics have been pointing out that Putin is a threat for two decades now. They were undeniably right to join NATO.
If Putin thought the US profited too much from this while his own country suffered, maybe he'd stop his war. But his narrative is that the US and the entire West is suffering just as much as Russia and they'll soon give up, so victory is within sight. It's not of course; it's just bullshit to let him prolong his war for just a bit longer.
the us arms industry profits
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-01-21/us-arms-industry-mili...
the us gas industry profits
https://www.politico.eu/article/vladimir-putin-war-europe-uk...
all i did is google "us profits from war in ukraine"
also by "us profits" i dont mean the us people profit. the war is costing the us people a lot
in the end if ukraine wins they will be so indebted to us and nato that their independence wont be worth the paper its written on. if they lose, well its definitely gonna be shit for them. talk about being stuck between a rock and a hard place, and all for nothing. whats absolute worst for them is if they win on the battle field and putin decides to wipe them off the face of the earth out of spite. somehow the us is managing to convince ukraine that this isnt a possobilty, just like they convinced them that they will join the eu and nato. apparently putin is a very predictable monster with nuclear morals
i mean honnestly, this is a question for you, what do you see as a realistic outcome for ukraine?
You're trying to spin this as something the US wants, but it's not. It's something Putin wanted. Zelensky and the people of Ukraine are (obviously) far more determined to defend their country than anyone else. And many European countries are mostly supporting Ukraine because their own citizens are demanding that they do so.
There's tons of popular support for Ukraine, because most people recognise the terrible injustice of the Russian invasion and the atrocities committed by Russia.
How things will look after the war is impossible to predict, but US support has helped western Europe quite a lot after WW2. And even the defeated enemies of that war, Germany and Japan, are doing extremely well because of the way they've been rebuilt after the war. In the long run, the best outcome for Russia would probably be to be utterly defeated and rebuilt the same way. But of course that can never happen because Russia has nukes.
Yes, this is what Putin's propagandists are repeating all the time, threatening to use nukes not just on Ukraine but also on Great Britain and other countries. Apart from the obvious absurdity of contaminating their own land, the big question is, should we agree to all Putins says just because he can use nukes? Is there any limit on what we will do to please him?
i love it how useful idiots from both sides forget about the corruption of people they support
The only reason NATO says that some day Ukraine can become a member, is because Ukraine keeps asking about it. Constantly. They desperately want to join NATO, and while they don't and didn't meet NATO's criteria, it's not impossible that some day they will, and then they can join.
And considering the consequences of not being in NATO, I think it's clear that Ukraine is absolutely justified in wanting to join NATO. Things would look very different if they had indeed joined in 2008.
NATO extended its mutual defense to these countries. The only reason why that should piss off Russia is if Russia had plans to conquer those countries. Turns out they do. But that's not NATO's fault. Don't try to shift the blame to NATO here; this war is entirely, for the full 100%, Putin's fault.
1990. nato makes the not one inch eastward promise
1999. in disregard for international law, nato bombs russia ally yugoslavia and takes over its southern teritory
1999. nato expands into poland and several other ex warsaw countries
2004. nato expands into ex-ussr, taking baltic states as members
2008. april. nato said it will take in georgia and ukraine
2008. may. us and majority of nato countries recognize the unilateral declaration of independence by kosovo, in disregard to previously signed un agreements, and in disregard to international law forbidding unilateral secessions
2008. august. georgia tries to retake control over autonomous ethnic-minority regions. russia stops this. georgia looses any chance of becoming part of nato
2010. ukraine government abandons plans to join nato
2014. people from west ukraine are driven by busses into kiev to overthrow an elected government. us publically supports the coup. elected president flees to russia. the goverent is overthrown. east ukraine opposes the overthrow and begins to rebel against the new government.
2014. crimea unilateraly seceeds from ukraine, citing the kosovo precedent. simultaneously it becomes part of russia
2014. civil war accross eastern ukraine, centering around donbas
2014. minsk agreements signed
2016-2019 nato suffers from being perceived as irrelevant.
2018. nato requests substantial funding to improve its information campaign. huge effort to rewrite the history of 'not an inch eastward' promise
2022. january. ukranian government publically states it has no intension of fulfilling minsk agreements
2022. february. russia invades ukraine
to me this timeline of events strongly suggests that ukraine and its people are a mere chess piece in US imperial ambissions
Never happened. In fact, Russia and NATO have explicitly in writing (1997 treaty) that they respect the right of third parties to seek security as they see fit. Nor did Russia ever bring it up until Putin needed a justification for invading Georgia.
Even any notion of such talks is absurd, given that you place it a year before the USSR collapsed. Collapse of the USSR and parts of it applying for NATO (and eventually becoming members) was inconceivable at the time. As participants have recollected, the context of talks at the time was German reunification and stationing NATO forces in Eastern Germany. Nobody could imagine that the USSR itself would soon cease to exist.
This directly ties to another point:
> 2004. nato expands into ex-ussr, taking baltic states as members
(1) NATO didn't "expand", but those countries were hell-bent on seeking security to protect themselves from getting occupied ever again through cooperation in international organizations. That was set as a foreign policy goal in 1993.
(2) How did Putin react to that in 2004 when he met Schröder days after the Baltics became full members of NATO? He said that it's fine, never brought up any alleged promises. http://www.en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/30678
some people just cant shake totalitarian frame of mind
https://twitter.com/Biz_Ukraine_Mag/status/15801244656647905...
It's not that Russia was always bad - there was a period when people really hope we could all live together in peace, Scorpions even recorded a song about it.
And the people in these countries (almost half of Europe!) still celebrate this day, just like the day they managed to liberate themselves from Russians. No wonder it makes Putin mad.
https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20220404-merkel-defend...
At the same time, the assumption is that there will be no backlash inside the country if 'infinite' amount of soldiers die ?
> according to Western propaganda in Wikipedia
Yeah, OK, I see.
Soviet tanks also have reactive armour. You can easily see those boxes on a photo of a tank. Or did you mean some other kind of armour?
I don’t think anyone’s particularly hopeful about any breakthrough from either side, and the Russians do not seem to be the comically inept force they’re sometimes portrayed as. But it’s no secret that they’re poorly resourced and were ill-prepared for the conflict.
Congratulations now you've traded a soldier with better reflexes than most professional baseball players for a $500 drone.
I'm curious why they have chosen not to deploy them, then.
How exactly is the massive deployment of mobile artillery supposed to result in less deaths?
In any case, the end of the war would obviously not be the end of the world. Isn't the whole point of the aid for Ukraine that it is supposed to contain Russia and deplete its military and economic capabilities?
So yeah, my point to parent asking why Russia might not be throwing everything at once.
In most cases they're there to get shot at enough while drones watch and tag enemy positions for artillery strikes.
In peer- or near-peer conflicts arty accounts for a high, often monumentally high, number of casualties -- easily 75% or more. The prisoners aren't expected to win, that would require lots of training, trust, gear, and planning; they're expected to draw fire, and the VDV or main-line regulars will clean up the rest.
Have you seen that smoking aircraft carrier? Russian military equipment is often in a terrible state.
Of course they also have this brand new super tank, the T-14 Armata. No idea why they're not fielding that one, but I suspect it doesn't work.
Corruption and mixed priorities meant that most of the storage depots didn't see regular maintenance done, so vehicles that should have been "mostly workable" were basically rust-buckets. However estimates put the stockpiles at like 8000 T-72s, 10000 BMPs, etc., and even if only 1/3 of them are viable that still represents thousands of vehicles.
Logistics are another problem though. Even if only 1/3 are viable you have to ship repairs, replacement parts, and the entire vehicle across huge distances and that takes a lot of time. If there is a T-55 in a depo that's closer and it doesn't need parts -- great, get that to the front now; it'll do rear-line duty or something.
"High Quality" is also relative -- virtually all of NATO's, and Russia's, tanks are upgraded late-Cold-War models, but there is a non-trivial difference in the late-Soviet vs. post-Soviet era developments. Getting an old T-72 working might be easy enough, but getting that upgraded to the T-72B3M edition is a different story.
Nonetheless, Russia is definitely not winning after 1 year.
Maybe Russia will end up controlling the majority of the land. Just rubbles and ashes.
This is not winning IMHO.
Not true. They are still flying.
I believe this is wrong. Russia doesn't have 10 times more soldiers now, and regular army isn't deployed in Ukraine; only volunteers (including prisoners), mobilized soldiers and contract army is.
May you elaborate on what your understanding of "regular army" is?
Army of conscripts is around 1-1.5 million soldiers; professional army was about 300 000 soldiers before invasion. It was not enough to win so there was a mobilization of about 400 000 (official numbers) and recruiting volunteers from prisoners.
Ukraine is smaller than Russia, but by no means a small country. Ukraine has 40 million people and is far more motivated to fight than Russia is. Russians really have nothing to win here; it's just about Putin's pride. Meanwhile Ukrainians are fighting for their lives, their country, and the future of their children. These are powerful motivators, and go a long way towards explaining Ukraine's unwavering morale in the face of overwhelming odds.
Ukraine also fights much smarter. Russia uses very primitive tactics: use massive artillery to flatten entire cities, move infantry in, and if they get killed, flatten the place with artillery again. And then they ran low on artillery ammunition, not to mention that many of their barrels have been so overused they can't shoot straight anymore, so now they've resorted to human wave attacks. Ukrainian defenders of Bakhmut have described wave after wave of Russian attackers crawling over the dead bodies of their dead comrades only to get gunned down too. There's no sophistication at all, and coordination is often poor.
Meanwhile Ukraine with its more limited resources executes very smart attacks. Most of the time they target Russian supply lines to make it harder for Russia to fight. But sometimes they've undermined Russian positions so much that they can suddenly grab an enormous swath of territory, like they did east of Kharkiv and west of Kherson.
I frankly don't see how Ukraine can lose this. In some ways they have already won. Although of course it really depends on how you define victory and loss here; both sides have lost a lot, and any end result where Putin is in a position where he can try again later, means that the war for Ukraine is not really over.
What exactly is that assertion even based on?
People talk like it is some kind of a definite fact, but there is no reference to any particular source or a universal explanation of how this was deduced.
well for starters the fact that there is no record of him saying that
Just before the war, he said he was not going to invade. Then he did it anyway. His words are meaningless. His actions are what counts. And he obviously did try to take Kyiv. There were paradrops intended to take Kyiv in hours, even. There was a push by more forces to take Kyiv in days. It all failed because they encountered far more serious resistance than they expected, and it turned out they lacked the supplies for a longer operation, and couldn't get those supplies organised in the face Ukrainian defense specifically targeting Russian supply lines. Eventually they couldn't make any progress and withdrew. Though not before murdering lots of civilians in Boucha.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/may/02/ukraine-dead-o...
that started after both sides hurled molotov cocktails at each other?
The world is complicated, yes, but your comment reducing this to "one side burned the other side alive" is disingenuous at best.
Looking at current ratio of Russian and Ukrainian losses, having three times the soldiers is not going to be enough.
Still a lot, esp. you consider the primary draftable age groups (e.g. 18-30), and that not all males in that group would be military worthy, i.e. medical or mental disabilities, etc.
Also a big deal if you consider that most of them are the wealthier, smarter, more mobile parts of the population, which will exacerbate the brain-drain and impact the economy. A lot of those guys aren't gonna go back anytime soon, or at all.
This a post-Covid era. Everything that is "smart and mobile" is also remote. Which means that physical relocation doesn't exactly imply brain drain, especially given that wealthier destinations such as the US or some parts of Europe are harder to reach then ever.
The highest quality soviet tank is a rust bucket compared to even low end western tanks from 25 years ago.
Suppose Ukraine manages to push Putin's army back to original pre-2014 borders. Is this victory? With a large part of the country in ruins, a terrible GDP decrease, thousands of men with PTSD, not to mention those dead. There is simply no victory here, just enormous pain because of someone's sick ambitions.
Putin seems to have painted himself into a corner where now his continued rule over Russia depends on being able to paint this as either a victory or a loss that's in no way his fault (because NATO started it and he was just defending himself). But also it seems that at the very least, he needs Crimea.
For Russians in general, they don't really need anything here. The real loss for them is that Putin is willing to sacrifice their entire country to bail him out of his fiasco. A win for them would be getting rid of Putin and not replacing him with someone even worse.
For Zelensky, the bare minimum is of course independence from Russia, and he seems to have won that at least. But millions of Ukrainians have been captured and often deported/abducted by Russia, and that's a loss too. He wants those people free, and he's absolutely right to. And he wants to keep Ukraine whole; accepting any loss of Ukrainian territory is a loss to him. Not to mention that it sets a precedent; Putin has a history of making small land grabs, and without hard security guarantees, it's likely that Putin will try another land grab in the future. And indeed Putin is still trying to grab more land right now. Putin wants that corridor to Moldova, and then Moldova itself. Leaving Putin in a position where he can try this again and again, is also a loss for many countries in the future.
So even if on the short term it would be good for Ukraine if the fighting stopped; if it's really just a temporary cease fire during which Putin can regroup in order to try again, that may be worse for Ukraine than trying to completely block Putin right now.
Still, it's much easier to protect oneself against Hamas' handcrafted rockets than Russian Kinzhals...
Ukraine may win... after 5+ years of brutal war and heavy destruction. Is that better than a life back under Moscow's rule?
> Ukraine may win... after 5+ years of brutal war and heavy destruction. Is that better than a life back under Moscow's rule?
Hey that's a good example!
Considering the treatment they experienced in occupied cities - yes, it might be. Being under Moscow's rule won't be an occupation like Eastern Europe had under USSR, but a brutal regime made the extinguish the concept of "Ukrainians". Putin is clearly signaling that.
But now? They don't have any regard for human life. Not just the lives of Ukrainians, but their own. Putin is knowingly sacrificing tens of thousands for his sick ambition. There is nothing Russia gained from this war. Utter tragedy for everyone.
Emphasis on inches. Ukraine War Mapper [1] does a good job documenting the line of control. It's not a good look for what, until recently, looked like a dominating regional power.
[1] https://twitter.com/war_mapper
This spring will show if they can change the current calculus but if not Russia is going to change the end game.
Something is changing every day as Russia's annual defence budget's worth of modern arms and training are deployed by Kyiv [1][2].
[1] https://www.cfr.org/article/how-much-aid-has-us-sent-ukraine...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_Russia
Of course, they are going slower than that. And also, at the current rate of attrition, Russia will run out of Russians long, long before that.
I'll do the same:
> Russia has gone backwards for a year now.
This is false, Russia went backwards, and then went forwards. Maybe you meant to say "has gone backwards with respect to where it was last year". That is true.
Please write precisely, write what you mean, so others don't have to realize you actually mean something else than what you wrote
In the media you are allowed to see.
It just reads like a massive cop-out, a "you are misinformed, sheeple"-style of empty platitude trying to sound somewhat smart, or deep, or "more informed".
One of the worst things I've seen happening in my lifetime is this transition to a post-modern, post-truth world. It's just exhausting that people feel it's ok to say "you are misinformed" in different ways, without ever providing a different proper source for information, a source where others could at least try to gauge if they're misinformed or not.
It's simply a thug-of-war between people living different realities, both accusing the other side of falling to some propaganda without basis.
Sorry for the rant, y'all, but this bullshit really grates, hard.
You aren't making your point clearer, you are just repeating "wake up, sheeple" with a different word salad...
The real comparison is probably closer to Iraq-Iran in the 1980's. Iraq launches a huge mechanized offensive, gets into Iran, runs out of steam, and slowly gets pushed back, at high cost for both sides. It gets ugly, fast, and kills a whole bunch of people. It goes in for ~8 years before it eventually just peters out, and lasts that long because of international support for each side: Iraq had the US and similar 1st worlders; Iran had the USSR and COMBLOC.
> the US
huh? shill much?