Jump to content

Ukraine 19: In HARMS Way


Werthead

Recommended Posts

15 hours ago, A Horse Named Stranger said:

You haven't seen half of the crazy.

I think this one takes the cake thus far.

 

Seriously, that guy is properly insane. 

It even comes across as trolling. All nationalist memes taken to the brink / absurd. 

15 hours ago, SeanF said:

It’s impressive just how enormous Poland/Lithuania was.  All ruined by their stupid constitution.

The enormous size it achieved was inherently connected with its "stupid constitution". Peripheral, sparsely populated and multi ethnical state... Should it have transformed into second Russia to survive? Impossible for many reasons. And so on.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

3 hours ago, A Horse Named Stranger said:

In unrelated news. I am (unfortunately) sharing another forum with some Polish PiS supporter. 

That guy is proper crazy. Thought I share one of his ramblings, and why Poland should never be let anywhere Nukes.

Just wanted to share it lighten the mood. I am kinda afraid to ask, so I just assume, he is just an outlier on the batshit crazy chart.

I don't know. There are right now *a lot* of polish names writing absolut bollocks on Twitter too. I guess they are drunk on their government doing at least something right for a change. Of course now that they felt the need to back Orban, the moment is gone aniway...

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Allegedly some kind of referendum is going to happen in LPR and DPR to affirm secession from Ukraine, and then Russia will immediately incorporate them into the Russian Federation. That way any Ukrainian attack in those regions will be claimed as attacks on Russian territory, using NATO weapons and hence would mean acts of NATO aggression against Russia.

If so Russia would be clearly looking for a reason to escalate things and be able to justify to itself legitimately targeting NATO countries. Perhaps to try to scare them into not supplying Ukraine any more hardware?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

6 hours ago, The Anti-Targ said:

Allegedly some kind of referendum is going to happen in LPR and DPR to affirm secession from Ukraine, and then Russia will immediately incorporate them into the Russian Federation. That way any Ukrainian attack in those regions will be claimed as attacks on Russian territory, using NATO weapons and hence would mean acts of NATO aggression against Russia.

If so Russia would be clearly looking for a reason to escalate things and be able to justify to itself legitimately targeting NATO countries. Perhaps to try to scare them into not supplying Ukraine any more hardware?

Considering that Ukraine has had the green light to use NATO weapons against Russian targets in Crimea, I don't see what good that will do. NATO considers these territories as illegitimately Russian-occupied territories and NATO only recognizes the pre-2014 borders as Ukraine's sovereign territory. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

6 hours ago, The Anti-Targ said:

Allegedly some kind of referendum is going to happen in LPR and DPR to affirm secession from Ukraine, and then Russia will immediately incorporate them into the Russian Federation. That way any Ukrainian attack in those regions will be claimed as attacks on Russian territory, using NATO weapons and hence would mean acts of NATO aggression against Russia.

If so Russia would be clearly looking for a reason to escalate things and be able to justify to itself legitimately targeting NATO countries. Perhaps to try to scare them into not supplying Ukraine any more hardware?

They've been trying to do that since this began, to no avail.

And there's no way Russia could hold anything that even looks like a credible referendum in those areas right now: they don't have the administrative infrastructure, there's fighting going on in several areas, the boundaries of the territory concerned aren't defined, there's no way to track eligible voters. It can't be done. If it could be done, nobody except perhaps North Korea would recognise the territory as actually Russian and not Ukrainian. It would achieve nothing.

Maybe you could do it in Crimea.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

6 hours ago, The Anti-Targ said:

If so Russia would be clearly looking for a reason to escalate things and be able to justify to itself legitimately targeting NATO countries. Perhaps to try to scare them into not supplying Ukraine any more hardware?

I think that would be a really stupid mistake. They would draw a line into the sand and Ukraine will definitely step over it. Then they will run out options. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

18 hours ago, broken one said:

It even comes across as trolling. All nationalist memes taken to the brink / absurd. 

The enormous size it achieved was inherently connected with its "stupid constitution". Peripheral, sparsely populated and multi ethnical state... Should it have transformed into second Russia to survive? Impossible for many reasons. And so on.

 

The Liberum Veto, which gave any lord the right to veto legislation made the role of the King impossible in the 18th century.  All that neighbouring powers had to do was bribe members of the nobility to keep Poland/Lithuania weak.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

29 minutes ago, Luzifer's right hand said:

Local media reports that Erdogan said that peace in the Ukraine can only be achieved if occupied territory including Crimea is returned. If that is true that is big. Russia is running out of support I guess.

 

Pure speculation by me, but I suspect Erdogan sees opportunities here to shape events both in Azerbaijan's attacks on Armenia and in what I assume would be trying to cool the clash between Tadjikistan and Kyrgyzstan. They've obviously been trying to increase influence in that region for decades, and this is a good chance for it but they also don't want it to set on fire because Russia's looking the other way.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 hours ago, Luzifer's right hand said:

Local media reports that Erdogan said that peace in the Ukraine can only be achieved if occupied territory including Crimea is returned. If that is true that is big. Russia is running out of support I guess.

Turkey has very decisively swung behind backing Ukraine. Turkey has blocked Russian payments using the Russian banking system and is rumoured to be considering joining the ban on Russian visas, although is holding fire on that because of the value of the Russian tourist industry to the Turkish economy. Turkey is also stepping up its military support via drones and is backing Azerbaijan's play in Armenia to the hilt. My guess is that if Georgia wanted to retake its breakaway regions, they might find Turkey to be supportive of that as well.

Erdogan is calculating strongly on being the real winner here and eclipsing Russian influence in Syria and the Caucasus. Which is good for Ukraine but may cause problems down the road.

Meanwhile, American tanks for Ukraine are "absolutely on the table." The United States has thousands of Abrams in reserve and, unlike the Russian reserve, are better-maintained. The USA could probably ship 500 to 1,000 of them to Ukraine in a matter of weeks from the decision being made, and for all we know some may have been prepped already.

These wouldn't necessarily be state-of-the-art Abrams outfitted with the latest tech, but they'd be comprehensively better than what the Ukrainians have and could probably be trained on them in a few weeks to a few months.

Transferring M1128 Strykers could also be on the cards, as the US Army is getting rid of all of them and they are readily available for use overseas. Slovenia is also transferring M-55S1s, a derivation of the Soviet T-55 with a NATO-standard 105mm gun.

The F-16s are a more dubious prospect in the short-term, training on an F-16 even for an experience pilot routinely takes over a year.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

29 minutes ago, SeanF said:

The Liberum Veto, which gave any lord the right to veto legislation made the role of the King impossible in the 18th century.  All that neighbouring powers had to do was bribe members of the nobility to keep Poland/Lithuania weak.

I got some knowledge on history of Poland. King meant very little in the late XVI century already. Siegiesmund Vasa could not afford to pay his valets at some moment. The state has become property of nobility, and the nobility was not interested in strong monarch, not to even mention absolutism. Even during so called golden age, when the size was big and army strong enough, economically and politically the state was weak. Once upon a time (during rule of Stefan Batory afair) papal legate asked Polish envoy on what sort of code Polish diplomacy used. The answer was: "None. We do not write things one should be ashamed of." Curtain!

EOT, sorry.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

7 hours ago, mormont said:

They've been trying to do that since this began, to no avail.

And there's no way Russia could hold anything that even looks like a credible referendum in those areas right now: they don't have the administrative infrastructure, there's fighting going on in several areas, the boundaries of the territory concerned aren't defined, there's no way to track eligible voters. It can't be done. If it could be done, nobody except perhaps North Korea would recognise the territory as actually Russian and not Ukrainian. It would achieve nothing.

Apparently LNR and DNR are having their referendums this weekend (Sept 23-27). 

There's some speculation that this might be so that Russia has a bit more power to coerce soldiers to fight.  If they are fighting on "Russian" soil, then it is harder to refuse and insist you be sent home. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Russia wants to recruit 50,000 convicts to send them to Ukraine to fight. It is also adjusting the law to make it harder for combat troops to leave even at the end of their contract. Some speculation that they will also move to declare martial law in Belogord and maybe Rostov, and carry out a partial mobilisation of additional forces. It likely won't be a full declaration of war or a full mobilisation because the Kremlin is still very doubtful about the efficacy of that.

Reportedly the United States is preparing to take corresponding actions to any kind of major escalation on Russia's part, including taking the final gloves off the restraints on the military equipment it will export to Ukraine.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

11 minutes ago, Werthead said:

Russia wants to recruit 50,000 convicts to send them to Ukraine to fight. It is also adjusting the law to make it harder for combat troops to leave even at the end of their conflict. Some speculation that they will also move to declare martial law in Belogord and maybe Rostov, and carry out a partial mobilisation of additional forces. It likely won't be a full declaration of war or a full mobilisation because the Kremlin is still very doubtful about the efficacy of that.

Reportedly the United States is preparing to take corresponding actions to any kind of major escalation on Russia's part, including taking the final gloves off the restraints on the military equipment it will export to Ukraine.

 

We have plenty of surplus M-1s… they should be on their way to Ukraine.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Remember the thesis: Putin is not acting in a way that should be considered rational and is instead working on his own idea of what is reality. The notion that Ukraine - or NATO - will balk at taking back Ukrainian territory that was illegally taken is obviously and ridiculously untrue, especially now that Ukraine has had success doing so and we have evidence of major atrocities committed against civilians. 

But that's not the world that Putin is operating under. The better you understand that, the better you understand what Putin may be willing to do as he escalates.

 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

11 minutes ago, KalVsWade said:

Remember the thesis: Putin is not acting in a way that should be considered rational and is instead working on his own idea of what is reality. The notion that Ukraine - or NATO - will balk at taking back Ukrainian territory that was illegally taken is obviously and ridiculously untrue, especially now that Ukraine has had success doing so and we have evidence of major atrocities committed against civilians. 

But that's not the world that Putin is operating under. The better you understand that, the better you understand what Putin may be willing to do as he escalates.

The problem is that Ukraine has launched military attacks on Crimea, Belgorod and Rostov with no problem, and the belief that a referendum will be seen as legitimate in the areas seized since February, even by Russia's normal allies, is ludicrous.

It does look like this is an attempt to stop the war now on terms that are as good for Russia as it is ever likely to achieve, but the mobilisation laws look like the alternative is to risk mobilisation. But Ukraine is happy to risk that because Russia cannot arm all those new recruits and it knows they are taking a huge political risk in the process.

We always knew the end of this war would likely involve some brinkmanship and heated rhetoric as how it started, and this is the beginning of that process.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.

Guest
This topic is now closed to further replies.
×
×
  • Create New...