Gorn

I was excited about Victoria 3, until I learned that the game prevents you from personally managing armies, and instead forces you to give control of your troops to the (idiotic) AI to manage. Why, oh why would Paradox make such an awful design decision?

"Ethnic Russian" is a fluid term, and Russia already has millions of members of non-Russian ethnic groups within its borders. A good example is Shoigu (Putin's defense minister) - he is of Tuvan descent, but declares his ethnicity as Russian, and is accepted as Russian by other Russians. Minorities in Russia are under heavy pressure to assimilate, there are plenty of "mixed marriages" between Russians and non-Russians, and children from those marriages consider themselves as Russian in a vast majority of cases. This process was muted in the Soviet Union, which for all its faults made a great show of being multicultural and of respecting different nationalities. Few such pretenses remain in today's Russia. Although that process works both ways. Those same people who now declare as Russian may stop doing so in the future. Kharkiv has a large Russian population, but has fiercely resisted the invasion, and I'm willing to bet most of Russians in Kharkiv will declare themselves as Ukrainian in the next census.

I like the idea of DA2, but I have zero desire to replay it. My memories of playing DA2 are 10% fun, 90% fighting off waves of one of three types of enemies in the same fucking warehouse/cave map with the boxes and walls rearranged slightly.

@Rippounet Here's a hypothetical situation to consider. Russia invades Ukraine based on an unrealistic expectation of its own strength and Ukraine's weakness. The rest of the world responds with condemnations and sanctions. The war doesn't go as well as Russia expected and it comes significantly short of accomplishing its goals, but it still ends up with annexed parts of Ukraine that it can use to declare "victory" and to justify the war to its population. During that time, it uses its intelligence resources to internally subvert Western states, incite and finance the rise of fascism and far right globally. Seven years later, it rearms and tries again, with a different strategy and different weapons than the last time. Only guess what? This is not a hypothetical, this is exactly what happened last year.

To follow up on Mormont's example, saying that "it's just about eastern Ukraine now" is the equivalent of a killer giving up on murdering its victim and now trying "just" to cut its right arm off. And well-meaning observers from the side now say "well at least he's not killing them now", and "they can still live with one arm", and "is one arm really worth fighting for", and "surely the killer won't try to chop the other one off later", and "maybe we can get them to promise not to chop off any more parts", and "if we toss the victim a knife, are we the real bad guys here?".

Regular reminder about the treaties that Putin's Russia has violated within the recent decade that I like to trot out every time the subject of negotiations comes up: - 4 out of 5 points of Budapest memo (they haven't nuked Ukraine yet, that's the 5th) - Minsk 1 Agreement - Minsk 2 Agreement - Helsinki Accords - Belovezh Accords - Black Sea Fleet Partition Treaty - Russian-Ukrainian Friendship Treaty - Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter Besides, by annexing four regions of Ukraine (only one of which they fully control) they've backed themselves into a corner and made any reasonable compromise impossible.

Russia started the war by launching an illegal aggression, and it can end the war tomorrow by ending it.

An actual Katyusha was spotted on a highway in Russia, in 2023, presumably not going to a WWII movie shoot.

Most of Rowling's income actually gets donated to things like women's shelters, orphanages, and supporting single parents. People are complicated, and shades of grey exist. Yes, her views on trans people are wrong, but the Twitter-fueled need to declare someone an unperson over having crappy views should be resisted. 90+% of people on this planet who live outside of big cities in the West have far more abhorrent views than Rowling does. Should we boycott all of them? Since I see a lot of logistical hurdles if we should.

Yeah, the problem with waiting until your army improves is that your opponent's army will do the same. Ukraine has a window of opportunity during the next month or so, before Russian Army and Wagner replenish their losses with a new wave of mobilization. I'd be very surprised if they don't take it.

Lack of fuel was pretty much what destroyed Russia's elite 1st Guards Tank Army (the first time, they were reinforced and then effectively destroyed two more times in this war). They were supposed to attack Kyiv from the east, so they bypassed the city of Sumy in their rush to get there. Big mistake. Defenders of Sumy (basically civilian volunteers) would sneak out of the city and ambush fuel convoys that were intended to supply the tanks. Leading to a whole bunch tanks being abandoned without fuel, and the tractor brigade doing its thing.

T-55s won't become the Russian mainstay. Other than the ammo issue I mentioned, I doubt there are more than 50 of them in Russia that are operational (in the minimal sense that they can move on their own and fire their main gun). The remaining ones that weren't scrapped, (and we are talking about hundreds, not thousands) would need a major overhaul to become operational. Overhaul assumes that Russian tank repair plants won't be busy with other work (and I think they kind of are at the moment), and that are enough still-living tank maintenance technicians who know how to overhaul a T-55.

If ammo for it exists in sufficient quantities, which is not a given. It's been an obsolete caliber for decades, and old shells have expired a long time ago and were probably scrapped. Maybe Russian factories kept producing some for exports, but they didn't keep large stocks of them. And sure, new shells can be produced, but that takes production capacity away from modern 125mm shells. Similar problem exists with Leopard 1s, no-one has 105mm shells in stock anymore.

Studies show long COVID to be less frequent and of shorter duration than originally feared: https://slate.com/technology/2023/03/long-covid-symptoms-studies-research-variant.html

Religion and fatalism play a major role. Either the climate is not changing because us mere humans don't have the power to cause such a change, or the climate is changing because it is God's will and there is nothing us mere humans can do to stop it. Also, some people will never be reached by scientific arguments or evidence. There is a non-insignificant percentage of flat Earthers out there, despite the fact that this particular theory can be disproven by merely looking at the horizon.