Ukraine: Slava Ukraini!!!

[mormont]

Did she fall twice?

[A Horse Named Stranger]

On 2/14/2023 at 7:18 PM, Werthead said:

There's been withering scorn in almost every NATO country at how mind-bogglingly slowly the arms companies are ramping up production, with people asking what the fuck would have happened if NATO had been attacked directly in a high-intensity war on multiple fronts, would the "greatest military alliance in history" have run out of bullets, tank shells and missiles five weeks into the conflict? The Czechs, Slovaks and Americans seem to be doing okay at ramping up production rates, but Germany, France and Britain need to be doing better.

 

Going back to this.

The problem with the tank shells (for the Leopard II) in particular is, that they produced in Switzerland.

And the Suisse like a few things.

Neutrality, Banking (and financial crimes).

The Suisse are not allowing the export of shells into Ukraine. A more cynical observer might assume, that this is somewhat related to billions worth of Russian assets being managed by their banks. 

[Which Tyler]

53 minutes ago, mormont said:

Did she fall twice?

 

[maarsen]

18 hours ago, ThinkerX said:

Maybe the Russian high command really was stupid enough to send 90%+ of their military to Ukraine? 

Considering they were stupid enough to begin this conflict in the first place, the above is not much of a stretch.

 

[ThinkerX]

2 hours ago, maarsen said:

Considering they were stupid enough to begin this conflict in the first place, the above is not much of a stretch.

 

Okay, let's play this out a bit further. 

1 - The emptied garrisons are in frontier/outlying areas.

2 - The Ukraine War is extremely unpopular in those areas.

3 - So, should internal dissent in those areas reach the point of rebellion, or even local bosses telling Putin 'screw you,' then how does Putin prevent this? There are no troops left to send.

[Kalbear]

14 minutes ago, ThinkerX said:

Okay, let's play this out a bit further. 

1 - The emptied garrisons are in frontier/outlying areas.

2 - The Ukraine War is extremely unpopular in those areas.

3 - So, should internal dissent in those areas reach the point of rebellion, or even local bosses telling Putin 'screw you,' then how does Putin prevent this? There are no troops left to send.

They still have a whole lot of police, plus they still have a whole lot of fairly corrupt people in charge. 

Also the notion that the Ukraine war is extremely unpopular is not borne out by facts on the ground. Even in some of the minority provinces. There are no protests worth a damn to speak of, there is no real dissent that we've heard of. 

[ThinkerX]

27 minutes ago, Kalnestk Oblast said:

They still have a whole lot of police, plus they still have a whole lot of fairly corrupt people in charge. 

Also the notion that the Ukraine war is extremely unpopular is not borne out by facts on the ground. Even in some of the minority provinces. There are no protests worth a damn to speak of, there is no real dissent that we've heard of. 

True for the immediate time being. 

[Kalbear]

22 minutes ago, ThinkerX said:

True for the immediate time being. 

It's been a year. When do you think the massive unrest is going to start?

I mean, right now Russia has shown more protests and unrest in Moscow than in Siberia. What is going to change that dynamic?

[ThinkerX]

2 hours ago, Kalnestk Oblast said:

It's been a year. When do you think the massive unrest is going to start?

I mean, right now Russia has shown more protests and unrest in Moscow than in Siberia. What is going to change that dynamic?

About the time Putin orders a second mobilization and it dawns on a significant portion of the populace that getting sent to Ukraine is pretty much literally playing Russian Roulette with half the chambers loaded. 

[Werthead]

Additional mobilisations are going to be another big testing point, especially as those troops will be going into battle with even shittier equipment and poorer logistics.

Afghanistan got unpopular in stages and the conflict being long and drawn out and the drip drip drip of body bags coming home. But the Ukrainian War has killed many times the numbers killed in Afghanistan in a much more concentrated time period, so the shock to the system from that will be greater. It's not really kicked in yet because Russia is framing this as a more imminent threat on its very doorstep, not thousands of miles away. Also, they did a good job (at least early on) of focusing the casualties on the provinces, not the cities.

Against that, the Afghan conflict was going on when the Soviet Union was actually opening up and allowing more protests and more free speech, which is very much not the case right now.

Looking at the various Russian history/culture experts, they seem to agree that the Russian state is very brittle: it looks strong and tough but there's a number of things which could cause it to topple (also the old adage, no repressive dictatorship looks stronger than in the seconds before it falls, and the fall can come surprisingly fast and brutal). We're already seeing open infighting in a way that we haven't seen, at all, at any prior point in Putin's tenure, not to mention the defenestrations. At the same time, it's also possible that the current Russian regime manages to cling on to power and navigate even an outright defeat in this war intact (with some very heavy spin and using it as a call to arms to rearm and restructure its economy etc).

[Derfel Cadarn]

Belarus agrred to basixally let Russia comandeer its factories to manufacture weapons etc

https://news.sky.com/story/ukraine-war-latest-russian-air-force-now-constrained-as-attention-turns-to-putins-major-address-next-week-12541713?postid=5457010#liveblog-body

[Werthead]

There'll be duelling speeches next week from Biden and Putin, the former confirming western support for Ukraine in the long haul. Putin's speech is expected to focus on the need to restructure parts of the economy and to prepare Russians for further rounds of moblisation.

Reportedly Russian college and university students, who were exempted from the last round of mobilisation, are being told they will not be in the future, and people who sign up voluntarily will get better conditions, training and pay rather than those who wait until they are forced into the role.

It looks like the first Leopard tanks could be in Ukraine more quickly that previously speculated.

The Ukrainians are putting it out there that they are annoyed about not getting planes, the west are letting them down etc, but this might be a smokescreen for them to get GLSDB (more quickly, the US is reassigning stockpiles they had built up from Afghanistan) and maybe ATACMS. Some countries are also discussing cruise missiles (!) with the possibility that there'll be a political argument and that idea will be shot down, after Russia freaks about it, leaving Ukraine with significantly enhanced capabilities, just not that enhanced. 

[williamjm]

2 hours ago, Werthead said:

Reportedly Russian college and university students, who were exempted from the last round of mobilisation, are being told they will not be in the future, and people who sign up voluntarily will get better conditions, training and pay rather than those who wait until they are forced into the role.

A Russian former colleague told me (before the war) that one of the main motivations for people doing a PhD in Russia was to be exempt from conscription while doing it.

[ThinkerX]

unconfirmed rumor with no links...

supposedly Russia launched a major missile and cruise missile attack on Ukraine, with some of the munitions being launched from ships in the Black Sea.  

[SpaceChampion]

On 2/17/2023 at 12:30 PM, Derfel Cadarn said:

Another fall from a window

it's not the SAME window again and again, is it?  Someone needs to be one of those caution cones near it.

[Kalbear]

Russia, desperate to go through minefields around vuhledar, uses a thermobaric missile system. Ukraine decides that it should no longer exist beyond weird states of matter.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2023/02/18/when-russian-troops-got-stuck-in-a-minefield-near-vuhledar-they-deployed-a-flamethrower-rocket-launcher-the-ukrainians-blew-it-up/?sh=19275b3c77e5

[Zorral]

One Year Into War, Putin Is Crafting the Russia He Craves
In Ukraine, President Vladimir V. Putin’s invasion has met setback after setback. But its effect at home has been very different.

A long report with many photos.  What follows is the first half.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/19/world/europe/ukraine-war-russia-putin.html

Quote

 

The grievance, paranoia and imperialist mind-set that drove President Vladimir V. Putin to invade Ukraine have seeped deep into Russian life after a year of war — a broad, if uneven, societal upheaval that has left the Russian leader more dominant than ever at home.

Schoolchildren collect empty cans to make candles for soldiers in the trenches, while learning in a new weekly class that the Russian military has always liberated humanity from “aggressors who seek world domination.”

Museums and theaters, which remained islands of artistic freedom during previous crackdowns, have seen that special status evaporate, their antiwar performers and artists expunged. New exhibits put on by the state have titles like “NATOzism” — a play on “Nazism” that seeks to cast the Western military alliance as posing a threat as existential as the Nazis of World War II.

Many of the activist groups and rights organizations that have sprung up in the first 30 years of post-Soviet Russia have met an abrupt end, while nationalist groups once seen as fringe have taken center stage.

As Friday’s first anniversary of the invasion approaches, Russia’s military has suffered setback after setback, falling far short of its goal of taking control of Ukraine. But at home, facing little resistance, Mr. Putin’s year of war has allowed him to go further than many thought possible in reshaping Russia in his image.

“Liberalism in Russia is dead forever, thank God,” Konstantin Malofeyev, an ultraconservative business tycoon, bragged in a phone interview on Saturday. “The longer this war lasts, the more Russian society is cleansing itself from liberalism and the Western poison.”

That the invasion has dragged on for a year has made Russia’s transformation go far deeper, he said, than it would have had Mr. Putin’s hopes for a swift victory been realized.

“If the Blitzkrieg had succeeded, nothing would have changed,” he said.

The Kremlin for years sought to keep Mr. Malofeyev at arm’s length, even as he funded pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine and called for Russia to be reformed into an empire of “traditional values,” free of Western influence. But that changed after the invasion, as Mr. Putin turned “traditional values” into a rallying cry — signing a new anti-gay law, for instance — while styling himself as another Peter the Great retaking lost Russian lands.

Most important, Mr. Malofeyev said, Russia’s liberals had either been silenced or had fled the country, while Western companies had left voluntarily.

That change was evident last Wednesday at a gathering off the traffic-jammed Garden Ring road in Moscow, where some of the most prominent rights activists who have remained in Russia came together for the latest of many recent farewells: The Sakharov Center, a human rights archive that was a liberal hub for decades, was opening its last exhibit before being forced to shut under a new law.

The center’s chairman, Vyacheslav Bakhmin, once a Soviet dissident, told the assembled crowd that “what we just couldn’t have imagined two years ago or even a year ago is happening today.”

“A new system of values has been built,” Aleksandr Daniel, an expert on Soviet dissidents, said afterward. “Brutal and archaic public values.”

A year ago, as Washington warned of an imminent invasion, most Russians dismissed the possibility; Mr. Putin, after all, had styled himself as a peace-loving president who would never attack another country. So after the invasion started — stunning some of the president’s closest aides — the Kremlin scrambled to adjust its propaganda to justify it.

It was the West that went to war against Russia by backing “Nazis” who took power in Ukraine in 2014, the false message went, and the goal of Mr. Putin’s “special military operation” was to end the war the West had started.

In a series of addresses aimed at shoring up domestic support, Mr. Putin cast the invasion as a near-holy war for Russia’s very identity, declaring that it was fighting to prevent liberal gender norms and acceptance of homosexuality from being forced upon it by an aggressive West.

The full power of the state was deployed to spread and enforce that message. National television channels, all controlled by the Kremlin, dropped entertainment programming in favor of more news and political talk shows; schools were directed to add a regular flag-raising ceremony and “patriotic” education; the police hunted down people for offenses like antiwar Facebook posts, helping to push hundreds of thousands of Russians out of the country.

“Society in general has gone off the rails,” Sergei Chernyshov, who runs a private high school in the Siberian metropolis of Novosibirsk, said in a phone interview. “They’ve flipped the ideas of good and evil.”

A nationwide campaign urging children to make candles for soldiers has become so popular, he said, that anyone questioning it in a school chat group might be called a “Nazi and an accomplice of the West.”

At the same time, he argued, daily life has changed little for Russians without a family member fighting in Ukraine, which has hidden or assuaged the costs of the war. Western officials estimate that at least 200,000 Russians have been killed or wounded in Ukraine, a far more serious toll than analysts had predicted when the war began. Yet the economy has suffered much less than analysts predicted, with Western sanctions having failed to drastically reduce average Russians’ quality of life even as many Western brands departed.

“One of the scariest observations, I think, is that for the most part, nothing has changed for people,” Mr. Chernyshov said, describing the urban rhythm of restaurants and concerts and his students going on dates. “This tragedy gets pushed to the periphery.” .....

 

 

[Ser Reptitious]

Not sure if any of you know of the YouTube channel "Geography Now", which is doing a video about each country in the world (in alphabetical order). They started a few years ago with Afghanistan and have now arrived at Ukraine. To examine the situation close-up, the host (a guy from California) personally went to Ukraine recently (Lviv and Kyiv) to see what daily life is currently like there. I found the video very fascinating and touching (and since I live in Romania, it's rather close to home). Here's the link: 

 

[Toth]

Whoa! Stealth Biden sneaking his way to Kyiv! That's going to be interesting...

[Maithanet]

According to Twitter defense people, the US notified the Russians of bidens visit a couple hours before it happened.  Interesting.

Edit: Swype disaster