Russian invasion of Ukraine

[Breccia]

<shrug>

It all goes back to the Russia...strategy?...in the invasion. Russia has reserves, I remain convinced of it. They're just not mobilized. Ukraine's reserves, also known as "the people of Ukraine" are already there, and seem to have what supplies they need -- which isn't saying much when they're getting results with thrown rocks and rebar while the Russians don't have food or bullets.

[Barzotti]

It all goes back to the Russia...strategy?...in the invasion. Russia has reserves, I remain convinced of it. They're just not mobilized. Ukraine's reserves, also known as "the people of Ukraine" are already there, and seem to have what supplies they need -- which isn't saying much when they're getting results with thrown rocks and rebar while the Russians don't have food or bullets.

Either they don't have reserves, or they are unable to mobilize those reserves in Ukraine. We're three weeks into the invasion and the Russian army is stuck in a quagmire, I seriously doubt they are hoarding any reserves at this point. Otherwise they would have used them already.

[AntiFascistVoter]

The growth in mindless reactionaries globally in western democracies is wild to me.

Oikophobia has always been there. Part of both ends of the reactionary horseshoe. It really deserves a thread of it's own.
When you understand it better, it's unsurpriding how the New Right shares the same underlying precepts of the old hippie left (which the Grifter Left is tying itself too):

• The US is incapable of doing good in the world, and historically has been a force for evil
• Everything that happens in the world is the direct result or responsibility of the US

The Putin fans (in temporary retreat, sublimating their views via Ukraine criticism) really think Russia some anti-woke example, despite having lower birthrates and suffering even more from postmodern ills than the West.
the Berkeley hippies who really thought Cuba an egalitarian utopia, when it was precisely the opposite.

Of course neither camp has any reason for knowing the reality: they both stay in the bosom of the capitalism they claim to despise, never venturing to Havana or Moscow.

[Pann]

Russian media reporting that nearly 10,000 troops have been killed and 16,000 injured!

https://twitter.com/yarotrof/status/1505972650786672648

Although there is some doubt as to the veracity of these figures.

https://twitter.com/KevinRothrock/st...74840737644557

[Breccia]

So this happened on russan TV. It doesnt look like propaganda/fake to me.

UPDATE: Marina Ovsyannikova manages to give an ABC interview without dying.

Ovsyannikova was detained after she interrupted a live taping at Russia's state-run Channel One broadcaster — where she worked — to hold up a sign reading, "Stop the war. Don’t believe propaganda. They’re lying to you."

Ovsyannikova was taken into custody overnight and subsequently fined 30,000 rubles (about $280)

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA (deep breath) MUAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA holy shit their currency is fucking worthless

for an “administrative offense” related to an earlier video she had filmed, per ABC News.

Earlier this month Russian lawmakers passed legislation allowing journalists and people to be punished with up to 15 years in prison for publishing what Moscow deems to be "fake" information about the war.

Ovsyannikova could still be charged under this new law, per ABC News.

Ex post facto is bullshit.

"The Russian people are really against the war. It's Putin's war, not Russian peoples' war," Ovsyannikova said.

Ovsyannikova said her protest on live TV was "spontaneous."

I mean...if a dam is overloaded for 10 years and one day it finally breaks, was it really an accident? Maybe she didn't wake up that morning prepared to make that exact sign, but I'm 100% convinced she didn't wake up that morning saying "oh yeah, another day in Putin's Russia, this is always the best and have always been forever".

"But the dissatisfaction with the current situation has been accumulating for many years, because the propaganda on our state channels was becoming more and more distorted, and the pressure that has been applied in Russian politics could not leave us indifferent."

— Marina Ovsyannikova

Ovsyannikova said her action was meant to "demonstrate to the world that not all Russian people believe the same. And I believe that many people — more than half of the people in Russia — are against the war."

She called the global sanctions levied against Russia a "correct decision," but stressed that these sanctions also hurt ordinary Russians who oppose the war.

"I wanted to show to the world that it's not just black and white in Russia, and I wanted to show to our Russian people that they need to think critically and analyze the information that is being presented to them," she said, adding that state-run media present a "very different" picture of reality.

I get her point, but I don't think it's realistic to assume there are punishments that will apply to Russia's ruling elite...and somehow, affect nobody else. If the literal majority of Russians are against the war and are being punished for Putin's actions, it would be nice if they had some kind of way to make that ire known without being arrested or shot. Easier said than done, this is Putin we're talking about.

- - - Updated - - -

Russian media reporting that nearly 10,000 troops have been killed and 16,000 injured!

Wait...Russia posted a Russian death count higher than America's?

[YUPPIE]

the majority of russians are not against the war. the people protesting do not even come close to those numbers.

you people have to remember for how the rest of the world sees him, Putin is a national hero in Russia

[PhaelixWW]

It all goes back to the Russia...strategy?...in the invasion. Russia has reserves, I remain convinced of it. They're just not mobilized. Ukraine's reserves, also known as "the people of Ukraine" are already there, and seem to have what supplies they need -- which isn't saying much when they're getting results with thrown rocks and rebar while the Russians don't have food or bullets.

Better to say that "it all goes back to Russian logistics". What use is it for Russia to try to send more troops into Russia if it can't even supply the ones that are there with the tools necessary to do the job?

The sad part is, late winter/early spring in Ukraine has created this bottleneck where Russia can't really field the overwhelming force that it must have assumed it was able to. If Russia keeps trickling in reinforcements and resupplies, Ukrainians will keep picking them off, along with aid from the West. Sure, more Ukrainians are dying, but they're not giving up.

And Russia simply can't send the increase of forces that would be necessary to really punch through the resistance for the same logistical reasons the start of the war went so poorly for them. So now they're stalled, relying on more long-distance bombardment of civilian infrastructure, attempting (more than at the beginning of the war) to simply pound the resistance away.

Basically, Russia is pretending Ukraine is Syria. And I think everyone (except, perhaps, Putin, and there's no guarantee of that) realizes that that's not going to end well for Russia.

And I've said it from the beginning here: Russia absolutely has the capability to beat Ukraine... as long as they don't care about the various different "costs" of doing so. They certainly have the military might to just flatten Ukraine; it all really depends on what Putin's goals are in Ukraine.

That being said, Putin has definitely miscalculated, and it's also clear that Russian equipment isn't necessarily at the level it was assumed to be:

Russian forces are beginning to have “inventory issues with precision-guided munitions,” a senior US defense official told reporters on Monday. Precision-guided munitions refer to missiles that target a specific location, as opposed to “dumb bombs,” which do not have the technology to focus on a specific target.

The inventory issues around their precision-guided munitions supply are why “you’re seeing the increasing use of what we would call dumb bombs,” the official added.

Some of their precision-guided munitions are “failing to launch, or they’re failing to hit the target, or they’re failing to explode on contact,” the official said.

They have used “quite a bit” of their “cruise missile, air launch cruise missile” supplies and have seen a significant “number of failures” of those munitions, the official said.

I grow more optimistic by the day that Russia will eventually cut its losses and abandon the invasion.

[AntiFascistVoter]

No Biden don't ride your bike into the tank OH GOD HIS HEADPHONES ARE ON HE CANT HEAR US.




Fox NEWS desperately wants WWIII to distract from the GOP shitting themselves in senate hearings.

[Pann]

Wait...Russia posted a Russian death count higher than America's?

The numbers have been swiftly deleted so it is anyone's guess as to why they were published or whether they are accurate.

[Easo]

Ukraine says killed in their reports, Hell their ministry of foreign affairs posts daily counts. Though to be fair they aren't saying 1k daily killed. Rather 300.

Ukraine ladies and gents. Wonderland 2.0.

Number of killed people is total bullshit.
Both aircraft numbers are too high, might be roughly 40%.
Same goes for tanks, roughly twice less.
Cisterns - what do they mean by that? If it is both fuel trucks + train cars with fuel? Then yes, this one is very believable.
UAV - number is realistic as well.
No idea what is special equipment? Stuff like EW vehicles? Then yes, also realistic.
1.5k of all other armored vehicles? Absolute bullshit. 500+ would be likely.
240 artillery pieces - I would say close to realistic count, ~70% of that number.
MLRS systems - realistic number.
1k of soft skinned vehicles - again, too much, but not in lalala land much. Mostly initial days and getting under artillery strikes.
3 vessels - this number changes each day from 2 to 3 and back - and is absolute bullshit, no side has managed to show any proof of even a sunk patrol boat.
45 AA systems? Realistic.

I can also bet that good part of the abandoned vehicles are back in Russian service/being repaired. Best evidence of that is the source of videos/photos - usually civilians, that means soldiers are not near who could do something about them. Later everyone started burning them, which should have reduced recoverable stuff quite a bit.

Russia seems mad bro about all those consequences of their actions.

Diplomacy has to happen until the last possible moment. Most of all - it would suck for any average Ivan and John in the "opposite" countries, who suddenly can't get any help.

That's funny. In the eyes of the Russian government, Meta has now joined the rank of the Taliban and Jehovah's Witnesses.

Another odd thing, the government specifically stated that accessing both services using VPN is not considered a crime. However, advertising on them will be considered to be providing support to extremist organizations. Hilarious.

And, WhatsApp is not banned.

Let's just say while it was likely coming anyway the "You can say "Kill Russians"" did not help. One of the stupid things Zuck's company did, the average person will only see "kill Putler/Russians" and not "kill Putler/Russian invaders currently in Ukraine". They did recall it, as far as I remember, but too late now.

Whatsapp going bye bye would suck a lot, same as with Telegram (though they failed with that before).

sadly they're going to die for that. And yes, death is always a guarantee when we saw recent reports Putin had someone carved into pieces and stuffed into a suitcase among other things for acts like this

You live in an absolute fantasy world.

<shrug>

As I said, the number is unbelievable. If that actually is true in about ~2 weeks you will see Russian collapse on the frontlines.

[PhaelixWW]

the majority of russians are not against the war. the people protesting do not even come close to those numbers.

The number of Russians against the war > the number of Russians actively protesting the war

you people have to remember for how the rest of the world sees him, Putin is a national hero in Russia

You people have to remember that you don't know what you're talking about a large percentage of the time...

...especially when it comes to the viewpoints and inner thoughts of people on the other side of the world.

[uuuhname]

you people have to remember for how the rest of the world sees him, Putin is a national hero in Russia

the loser couldn't even get 2/3rds of the country to back this invasion... what is the point you're trying to make here?

contrast that to the lead up to the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan having 80+% approval from the US population.

[PhaelixWW]

As I said, the number is unbelievable. If that actually is true in about ~2 weeks you will see Russian collapse on the frontlines.

Keep in mind that those figures relate to the past 3 weeks. There's no guarantee that Russia is still seeing those kinds of casualties now that their front lines have mostly stalled and they've changed to a more long-distance bombardment approach. This looks very much like cause and effect to me, because yes, their front line would indeed collapse if they had continued the way they were going.

[gondrin]

Start WW3 over one person? Not a realistic proposition. I mean, humans are stupid so it might lead to WW3, but otherwise with a bit of rational thinking - no.
Something somewhere in Russia might explode, someone might get sniped outside of Russia. But not a war over someone deciding to travel to warzone.
Also - he won't travel there anyway.

Well, it is realistic if you look at history. WW1 was started by the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria. Killing a Head of State, especially when tensions are high, can start a war and has before.

[Breccia]

Either they don't have reserves, or they are unable to mobilize those reserves in Ukraine. We're three weeks into the invasion and the Russian army is stuck in a quagmire, I seriously doubt they are hoarding any reserves at this point. Otherwise they would have used them already.

Yeah @Gorsameth and I were discussing this earlier. I don't understand how a military-heavy country, a superpower or someone pretending to be, would have 100,000 or so ground troops...and that's it. The US has 1.4 million. Sites I found pre-2021 said Russia had hundreds of thousands or millions in reserve. I don't understand how Russia wouldn't have more troops, but then, I also don't understand why Russia, with such troops, isn't using them. Yes, there is the argument it's more fun to send off Syrians, Belarussians and hired mercs instead of True Yarans, I mean Russians, but it can't be less expensive. Didn't Russia forgive a bunch of Belarus debt for that?

There's no good answer here. Putin appears to be waging a purely optional war he doesn't want to win all that much. Maybe if he was baiting NATO or something to come invade...but we've all discussed that, too.

Everyone has been caught by surprise by how poorly Russia is handling this. It doesn't make sense.

We are seeing a country militarily explode.

Russian casualties have been horrifically high. It’s hard to get accurate information in a war zone, but one of the more authoritative estimates of Russian war dead — from the US Defense Department — finds that over 7,000 Russian soldiers have been killed in the first three weeks of fighting, a figure about three times as large as the total US service members dead in all 20 years of fighting in Afghanistan.

This is not how the war was supposed to go. On virtually any quantifiable metric of military strength, from defense spending to the size of the respective air forces, Russia’s forces vastly outnumber and outgun Ukraine’s. In early February, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mark Milley told members of Congress that Kyiv could fall within 72 hours of a Russian invasion.

But Russia’s military has proven more incompetent, and Ukraine’s more capable, than nearly anyone anticipated.

Oh yeah I'm not in any way dissing the Ukrainian resistance. This is 16-over-1 levels of what the fuck just happened. That only happens when the underdog plays like mad and the favorite sleeps on the job.

There are many reasons things have turned out this way. Generally speaking, it appears that pre-war analyses overrated Russia’s hardware advantage and underrated less tangible factors — including logistical capacity and the morale of the front-line combat troops on both sides.

Morale in particular “is a very significant factor in Russian combat effectiveness, and one that’s being ignored by many military observers,” argues Michael Kofman, director of Russia studies at the CNA think tank.

All that said, it is still far too early to conclude that Ukraine is going to win the war. Ukrainians have suffered significant losses, too; Russia’s numerical and technological advantages remain and could yet prove decisive, allowing the Russians to besiege Ukraine’s major cities and starve them into submission.

But right now, based on the publicly available evidence we have, the momentum is clearly going the other way. An unqualified Russian victory, which once seemed almost inevitable, is looking increasingly less likely.

I still say "inevitable" but...again, that's based on a reasonable, logical outcome where Putin decides he actually wants this enough to earn it. Oh, and his troops obey him, too. That's not a 100% anymore either.

Russian casualties are taking their toll on the invasion. A recent US intelligence assessment found that Russia had lost over 10 percent of its initial invasion force due to a combination of factors like battlefield deaths, injuries, capture, illness, and desertion. According to Phillips O’Brien, a professor of strategic studies at the University of St. Andrews, this is a very ominous sign for the future of its campaign.

“Once they get below 75% their overall effectiveness should plummet,” he writes. “If the Russians don’t send fresh well-trained troops (and this will not be mercenaries or people impressed off the streets in Crimea) very soon, their whole strategy seems pointless.”

Bla bla bla welcomed as liberators bla bla bla corruption

Perhaps the biggest single difference between the Ukrainian and Russian militaries, according to the experts I spoke with, has been morale: soldiers’ belief in their cause and willingness to fight for it.

We've talked about morale before, and it remains important. As I just posted, Ovsyannikova claims the average Russian is against the war. Obviously that would include new conscripts, but apparently, it would also include pre-2022 members.

According to Dartmouth political scientist Jason Lyall, whose recent book Divided Armies examines the role of morale on battlefield performance, you can see its effects in dispatches from the Ukrainian front.

“Russian morale was incredibly low BEFORE the war broke out. Brutal hazing in the military, second-class (or worse) status by its conscript soldiers, ethnic divisions, corruption, you name it: the Russian Army was not prepared to fight this war,” he explains via email. “High rates of abandoned or captured equipment, reports of sabotaged equipment, and large numbers of soldiers deserting (or simply camping out in the forest) are all products of low morale.”

Putin kept the Russian invasion plan a secret from everyone but his inner circle; before the invasion, Russian diplomats and propaganda outlets were mocking the West for suggesting it might happen. The result is a Russian force that has little sense of what they’re fighting for or why, waging war against a country with which they have religious, ethnic, historical, and potentially even familial ties. That’s a recipe for low morale.

"Okay, but the Ukrainians?"

Russian warship, go fuck yourself.

"Ah."

This does not mean the Russian campaign will prove to be a total failure. Depending on how the rest of the military campaign goes, it is possible to imagine them extracting significant political concessions from Zelenskyy in ongoing peace negotiations.

If more major cities like Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Odesa are put under the sort of horrible siege Mariupol is currently experiencing — starved and under constant artillery bombardment — the Russians will have a lot more negotiating leverage. They could use this to extract favorable terms, like Ukrainian recognition of Russia’s annexation of Crimea and a neutrality pledge not to join NATO or the European Union.

But if current military trends hold, it’s the Ukrainians who have the cards — and you can imagine a deal that looks similar on paper actually favoring them significantly. According to Ukraine’s Euromaidan Press and the Financial Times, the country’s negotiating team in peace talks with Russia envisions a very specific version of “neutrality”: one that precludes formal NATO membership but nonetheless commits Western powers to providing weapons and air defense if Ukraine is attacked. This would put Ukraine in a far closer security relationship to the West than it was before the war, when NATO membership was already functionally out of reach — a victory for Kyiv and defeat for Moscow.

It is hard to say how these talks will go, or if and when they will be successful. But the fact that a negotiated end to the war is looking more likely than total Russian victory reflects the success of Ukraine’s defense to date.

[Gaidax]

I grow more optimistic by the day that Russia will eventually cut its losses and abandon the invasion.

Snowball's chance in hell of that happening without them getting major concessions in the negotiations. They are way too invested in it already.

They might choose some exit point soon, like taking over Mariupol and some other locations. But that "exit point" will be digging in and defending, until negotiations give them some wins. It will be a simple hostage situation with entire cities and 2 nuclear power plants under their control, they aren't going to go ahead and throw it away for nothing.

[Edge-]

No Biden don't ride your bike into the tank OH GOD HIS HEADPHONES ARE ON HE CANT HEAR US.




Fox NEWS desperately wants WWIII to distract from the GOP shitting themselves in senate hearings.

Why do they have to brag about his full body coordination like this?

[Breccia]

No Biden don't ride your bike into the tank

Hey, remember that time we saw Trump exercising?

...neither does anyone else. Normally I'd say golf counts, but most people don't use golf carts on the green, so...

logistics

Yeah...it's either "they can't" or "they are choosing not do and therefore losing on purpose" and...I mean, neither answer is redeeming. Also, little scared of that report of Russian duds all over the Ukraine mud.

[gondrin]

Why do they have to brag about his full body coordination like this?

They are still upset that their Dear Leader couldn't walk down a small ramp without help while Biden can ride a bike just fine.

[Breccia]

It will be a simple hostage situation.

This is an interesting point. Like you said, Putin can leave but won't leave. If Putin wants a public victory-like result, he's going to have to change tactics. What we're seeing from him now, isn't working.