Ukraine 13: Pavlov's Bellum

[ThinkerX]

11 hours ago, Werthead said:

I suspect it's teeing up mass reforms in the Russian military post-war.

Problem is, reforming the military would require competent leadership - which is automatically a threat to Putin. Factor in discontent from sanctions and a whole bunch of pissed off profiteers...'doomed from the start' might not be far off.

[Wilbur]

8 hours ago, Werthead said:

There was another report yesterday of something approaching a riot in Rostov. The new recruits who'd shown up had a lot of people who were too old to fight, reportedly some who'd been fired from their old units for prostitution (!) and a whole ton of people who believed their job wasn't to fight but to loot, starting off with their own training base. Apparently someone was stopped from making off with a training boat. One instructor had a complete meltdown over it.

That sounds like a recipe for successful team-building, particularly if you want to build of crack team of coffin-dodgers, man-whores, and looters.

Someone watched The Dirty Dozen and wanted to replicate it with modern-day Russians?

[Werthead]

48 minutes ago, ThinkerX said:

Problem is, reforming the military would require competent leadership - which is automatically a threat to Putin. Factor in discontent from sanctions and a whole bunch of pissed off profiteers...'doomed from the start' might not be far off.

Yup, we have to be grateful that the combination of "professional and logistically-driven army" and "amoral autocratic dictator" hasn't really recurred since 1945.

[Matrim Fox Cauthon]

10 hours ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

This could be a big deal… or not given that it is coming from internal Ukrainian sources:

 

Maybe the Separatists will eventually get wise to the fact that Russia doesn’t actually care about them at all and sees them and their kin as disposable human shields. 

[Maithanet]

Ukrainians are making a big counterattack east from Kharkiv.  They are seeking to cut the supply lines of the Russians in Izyum.  Considering Russia has been massing most its best forces in Izyum for the big offensive in the Donbas, this is a huge problem.  Those forces aren't really likely to be truly encircled (Ukraine lacks the strength and it would be a huge pocket).  But if the supply lines to Izyum are cut or even just hampered, then an offensive southward is impossible.  This has the potential to be an incredibly successful spoiling attack.  

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

Okay folks with better information than me… is this significant?  Does crap like this happen commonly to Russian State run Television stations?

 

[ThinkerX]

1 hour ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Okay folks with better information than me… is this significant?  Does crap like this happen commonly to Russian State run Television stations?

 

Memory is hazy, because it was a long time ago...but that seems similar to what happened when a very high ranking (politburo level) politician in died in the old USSR.

Then again, it could be and probably is a technical issue of some sort.

[Toth]

Apparently a photo of the hit Moskwa: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FQlGQR7WUAwEvNK?format=jpg&name=medium

[broken one]

On 4/16/2022 at 2:07 PM, DMC said:

Right, the natural intuition is they're trying to provide cover for something, I just don't get why they think that's going to actually change anybody's reaction.  "Oh, well ok, you sent a formal letter, we're good now."

Maybe it is adressed at Russian public.

[Loge]

1 hour ago, Toth said:

Apparently a photo of the hit Moskwa: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FQlGQR7WUAwEvNK?format=jpg&name=medium

So there was some kind of rescue operation. But no storm.

Meanwhile, I found a video on Youtube that I found quite interesting. An interview with the commander of a tank brigade, produced by the German army's ground forces. It's in German. A few bits. He states that a successful attack usually requires a superiority of three to one. If the defender is ready to give up ground and merely slow you down that figure goes up to somewhere between four and six to one. If you are trying to take a (defended) city it's ten to one. Needless to say, the Russian forces never had that kind of strength.

 

[DireWolfSpirit]

A lot of Americans just get pissed when we hear the former Commanding General of European Forces confirm to us the Administration is not doing enough, making excuses and footdragging. Really shitty optics, as the General says, let's start concentrating on winning and have the courage to commit optimum effort and support to Ukraine.

Quit with the excuses.

Retired Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, the former commanding general of the US Army in Europe, said Sunday in an interview on CBS' "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan." While the latest round of US aid was "substantial," he said it was not enough.

 Hodges said. "I would really like to hear the administration talk about winning and having a sense of urgency on getting these things there. Otherwise, this window of opportunity we have, the next couple of weeks, to really disrupt Russia's attempt to build up is going to pass."

[broken one]

I've listened to a podcast of a military analyst, claiming that Moskva has been never really modernized/upgraded, just renovated in Ukrainian shipyard in Mikolaiv (where it was built). As Russians did not want to pay for the service Ukrainians dismantled some systems and sold them.  It is not known if they were all replaced. A computer on the bridge was said to be analogue machine, I think it's possible since such devices were developed and used in the Eastern block some time after they had been dropped in the West.

Edit: the same analyst claims that if the picture (the one posted by Toth) is authentic then it means the Russians were caught with their pants down - no trace of AA rockets being fired, there should be fair-sized, charred spots on the cover.

[SeanF]

11 hours ago, Werthead said:

Yup, we have to be grateful that the combination of "professional and logistically-driven army" and "amoral autocratic dictator" hasn't really recurred since 1945.

The danger for any dictator is appointing generals on the basis of competence, and allowing independent thought and innovation.

It’s far safer to appoint your own creatures.

[sologdin]

With the Moskva now in the loving embrace of the Black Sea

hope they tagged it first.

[Rippounet]

On 4/15/2022 at 6:04 PM, Werthead said:

The problem with the negotiated route is that it's been tried and it hasn't worked. Most, if not all, of Putin's stated aims when the conflict began were put on the table in those negotiations: Ukraine would stay out of NATO, would agree to be neutral, would accede to a process to recognise Crimea as Russian and in the meantime would de facto accept it as Russia, and seems to have been willing to talk about "denazification" (of certain military units already known to be far right sympathisers) and some kind of limit on the size of their military (albeit a nominal one, probably around the same size as the size of their army on 23 February).

Russia attacked anyway.

That's not quite the narrative that I have. Or, to be more accurate, what little I have learned about this whole mess contradicts key elements of your narrative.

For instance, the US and Russia negotiated over Ukraine in January in Geneva, Blinken and Lavrov, especially. No Ukrainian representative was present, though to be fair, the US did pay lip service to the idea.
At some point during these talks, the Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman said that the US "would not close doors to NATO to anyone," which was a known red line for Moscow. Maybe she was grandstanding, but I see no reason to think that, because generally speaking, the French press has covered many such instances of the US deliberately refusing to accept the "neutralization" of Ukraine, which was the prime demand of Moscow. One oldish article in Le Monde Diplomatique used the word "sabotage."

Of couse, I'm well aware that the French press is itself biased. It defends the EU position, which itself is based on the desire to keep buying Russian fossil fuels. And France, specifically, has always been a reluctant NATO partner (the "Gaullic" style), so it's unsurprising that the media and a handful of officials (such as the former president of the War College) have been very critical of it in the past few years.

On 4/15/2022 at 8:50 PM, Padraig said:

These "people" had to be confident that Russia would actually invade, rather than just threaten to do so.

That is established beyond any level of doubt. It was always clear that should negotiations fail (and they were doomed to fail due to the issue of NATO expansion alone), Russia would progressively escalate and consider military action (at least covert). And the Biden administration leaked classified intelligence about the eventual Russian invasion for months prior to the invasion. See: https://edition.cnn.com/2022/02/11/politics/biden-administration-russia-intelligence/index.html

On 4/15/2022 at 8:50 PM, Padraig said:

And then do a lot worse than expected and Ukraine a lot better.

There's no doubt that no one expected the Ukrainian military to do that well. I've read that intelligence reports expected the Russians to reach Kyiv in two days.
What would have happened then? Presumably the remnants of the Ukrainian military would have regrouped West of the Dnieper and close to the Polish border, where they would have received the supplies they are now getting. And in the east, there would have been a resistance/insurgency to harass Russian occupation forces.
It would have been messy, for sure. This Rand Corp paper from last January says as much, and compares the future war to Afghanistan. Anyway, I don't see how anyone could claim that this was not the US plan since about 2014. Estimates on the amount of aid Ukraine got vary: I've seen 1,5 billion, but the Rand Corp paper above says 2,5 billion. It included weapons, training and advisors. Trump was famously impeached for withholding about 400 million. And it seems the Biden administration sent about 3 billion. Not sure what the final figures are, but we should be at 4 billion at least (from the US alone).

How much weapons do you have to send before it can be described as a "war by proxy" ? Rhetorical question. I'm aware how much most people here will loathe the expression. Of course, it's much more comfortable to see the US as the beacon of freedom assisting other peoples in their fight for individual liberty and self-determination.
Thing is, historically speaking, US decision-makers have very often done both, since weakening a regional power by supporting or fueling nationalism is a rather easy thing to do (Russia has been playing the same game with the EU after all). And while I do support the idea of arming the Ukrainians to resist Russian invasion, I also have this outlandish belief that the moral thing to do is to have the fighting nation's back (so to speak), i.e. to make sure that they fight to achieve specific objectives beneficial to them, rather than to achieve geopolitical objectives that suit everybody else. Hence why I strongly believe "about now" would be the right time to do everything possible to stop this war, before it becomes something truly ugly on every imaginable level, for very wrong reasons. But that may prove naive (wars are easy to start but not to stop).

I'm sure many here will react with sheer disgust at such shocking positions and throw other insults and labels at me. Go ahead. Just bear in mind that you are being fed a narrative, and I am being fed a different one. I'm well aware that "my" media is doing its best to direct my thoughts. Are you aware of what yours is doing to you?
To be clear, I'm absolutely not sure the narrative I have is correct. For all I know, you guys are right, Putin is a crazy bloodthirsty dictator that needs to be stopped, and it's best to keep the war going to crush the Russians and make sure they don't have another go in ten years. In all honesty, at this point, I don't know for sure, which is also a solid reason for me to revert to my default "let's stop killing people" position, gutless coward that I am.
 

[polishgenius]

You keep saying you're against war but pushing for a 'solution' that would cause other wars in future. And you're doing so because you're so focused on 'America bad' that you can't accept that that can be true and yet in this instance they're still a lot less bad than the opposition.

 

Edit because the last part was angry and unfair but seriously as Scott wrote below: what are you seeing from Putin that makes you think former Soviet-bloc concerns that he won't stop here if he settles are unfounded?

[a free shadow]

33 minutes ago, Rippounet said:

the narrative that I have

 

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

37 minutes ago, Rippounet said:

Hence why I strongly believe "about now" would be the right time to do everything possible to stop this war, before it becomes something truly ugly on every imaginable level, for very wrong reasons. But that may prove naive (wars are easy to start but not to stop).

What has the Russian dictator done recently to suggest he’s open to a negotiated settlement?  How can you ask the Ukrainians to agree to a negotiated settlement after Bucha and Mariupol?  

I see where you are coming from and I respect your desire for peace.  I’m just not sure negotiation is possible with Russian Troops and equipment on Ukrainian soil.  If the Russians want to talk… withdraw.

[a free shadow]

49 minutes ago, Rippounet said:

Just bear in mind that you are being fed a narrative, and I am being fed a different one. I'm well aware that "my" media is doing its best to direct my thoughts. Are you aware of what yours is doing to you?

To be clear, I'm absolutely not sure the narrative I have is correct. For all I know, you guys are right, Putin is a crazy bloodthirsty dictator that needs to be stopped, and it's best to keep the war going to crush the Russians and make sure they don't have another go in ten years. In all honesty, at this point, I don't know for sure, which is also a solid reason for me to revert to my default "let's stop killing people" position, gutless coward that I am.

I find it a common, self-indulgent line of thinking of most people who "did their own research". That is, that someone else did not do theirs. Overwhelmingy, it proves to be the opposite.

It is also worth noting that the realistic goal of all proaganda, which even Russia is now pivoting towards more often than usual, is not to get you to believe the lie, but to make you comfortable in believing (and telling others) that there is no truth, that you can't know the truth, that someone more powerful will always prevent you from learning the truth. It is a comfortable position to take, but it is complacent.

It is also extremely self-indulgent to make yourself into a victim, persecuted for their pacifism (or whatever this is meant to be), while first, this is not about you whatsoever, and second, the criticism here is for your argument not your goal.

I did not quote the bits and pieces about the US, because - just to repeat, who cares? It can be a beacon of goodness, it can be three hedehogs in a trechcoat. What matters is that Ukraine wanted to move towards them rather than Russia. And that Ukraine had such a right, as a sovereign nation. I keep getting more and more bewildered how you keep insisting you know better what is best for Ukrainians than the Ukrainians themselves, including loving their children more than them.

[Gorn]

1 hour ago, Rippounet said:

How much weapons do you have to send before it can be described as a "war by proxy" ? Rhetorical question. I'm aware how much most people here will loathe the expression.
 

Would you describe the Vietnam War, or Six-Day War as "Soviet wars by proxy"? Because US aid to Ukraine still needs to be escalated a few more levels before it reaches the level of aid that USSR was providing North Vietnam and Egypt in those conflicts.

Quote

I'm sure many here will react with sheer disgust at such shocking positions and throw other insults and labels at me. Go ahead. Just bear in mind that you are being fed a narrative, and I am being fed a different one. I'm well aware that "my" media is doing its best to direct my thoughts. Are you aware of what yours is doing to you?
To be clear, I'm absolutely not sure the narrative I have is correct. For all I know, you guys are right, Putin is a crazy bloodthirsty dictator that needs to be stopped, and it's best to keep the war going to crush the Russians and make sure they don't have another go in ten years. In all honesty, at this point, I don't know for sure, which is also a solid reason for me to revert to my default "let's stop killing people" position, gutless coward that I am.

I respect your position, and I respect the fact that you are trying to keep everyone's biases in mind including your own. I'm just not sure what, specifically, you are suggesting. That Ukraine stops invading Russia?

ETA: Actually, I think that Yom Kippur War is a better example than the Six-Day War.