Russia-Ukraine War 2022 - Page 357 - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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#15242483
Wels wrote:Maybe Grom..



On the other hand who knows exactly how far Himars systems can strike, when it is depending on the missiles used.
Who would openly publish true numbers of their capability, especially in this situation.
Who knows whether it was russians not content with the situation?
Who knows whether it was ukrainian saboteurs?
No russian is safe. Keep them guessing.


It was an accident, ammunition set off by fire. The fires burned before any explosions took place. It was not an attack. At first they thought it was sabotage but more likely negligence. Meh. Plenty more where that came from. The amount of ammunition they've moved to Crimea is probably cosmic in scale.
By Rich
#15242487
So the Russians have captured parts of Soledar north east of Bakhmut. They are now in the outskirts of Bakhmut and have captured the village of Vershyna south east of Bakhmut. These are not places that have been going back and forth for weeks or even months. If the western liberal media tells you this they are flat out lying. This is ground that has not been controlled by pro Russian forces since 2014.
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By Wels
#15242489
Igor Antunov wrote:It was an accident, ammunition set off by fire. The fires burned before any explosions took place. It was not an attack. At first they thought it was sabotage but more likely negligence. Meh. Plenty more where that came from. The amount of ammunition they've moved to Crimea is probably cosmic in scale.

Accident may be, the latter sure is true.

Rich wrote:So the Russians have captured parts of Soledar north east of Bakhmut. They are now in the outskirts of Bakhmut and have captured the village of Vershyna south east of Bakhmut. These are not places that have been going back and forth for weeks or even months. If the western liberal media tells you this they are flat out lying. This is ground that has not been controlled by pro Russian forces since 2014.

SH!t happens.
Russia is slowly grinding forward, but then its tactics are to start an ammo barrage, destroy all people and infrastructure indiscriminately, then send some soldiers into the rubble and claim it to be "theirs". Big win.
While Ukraine does pinpoint attacks on russian military and is quite effective with that.
It may be that Russia wins with just heaping so much missiles and russian corpses on Ukraine ("quantity has an own quality" and all that), but i doubt the latter until a russian mass mobilization.
#15242497
Wels wrote:Accident may be, the latter sure is true.


SH!t happens.
Russia is slowly grinding forward, but then its tactics are to start an ammo barrage, destroy all people and infrastructure indiscriminately, then send some soldiers into the rubble and claim it to be "theirs". Big win.
While Ukraine does pinpoint attacks on russian military and is quite effective with that.

It may be that Russia wins with just heaping so much missiles and russian corpses on Ukraine ("quantity has an own quality" and all that), but i doubt the latter until a russian mass mobilization.


This is utter nonsense. They employ artillery on Ukrainian trenches, and precision strikes on high value targets all over ukraine. There are thousands of them dotting the landscape. It is Ukraine that is firing indiscriminately at Donetsk.
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By Wels
#15242505
Rich wrote:So the Russians have captured parts of Soledar north east of Bakhmut. They are now in the outskirts of Bakhmut and have captured the village of Vershyna south east of Bakhmut. These are not places that have been going back and forth for weeks or even months. If the western liberal media tells you this they are flat out lying. [...]

Oh, harsh words, the "western liberal media".
So you prefer "russian autocratic dictatorial media", the well of truth?

Also does not quite look like it. Russia tried to take Bakhmut but were not able to.
https://www.understandingwar.org/backgr ... t-august-8
https://edition.cnn.com/europe/live-new ... 898f06ff55

Russian autocrat state media tell this and free other media of the world tell that. If you read more than one media outlet you quickly get quite a good overall view, just a proposal.
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By Wels
#15242514
Shrouded in secrecy for years, Russia’s Wagner Group opens up

"Founded by intelligence officer Dmitry Utkin in 2014 to back Ukrainian separatists, Wagner has since represented the interests of Russia and its allies across Africa and the Middle East, taking part in Syria’s civil war on the side of President Bashar al-Assad and its fighters are accused of several atrocities."

“It’s always been a part of either military intelligence or the special operation forces,” Russian military expert Pavel Luzin told Al Jazeera. “It’s never been private or somehow autonomous.”

According to Luzin, Wagner serves two purposes.

The first is to make use of hot-headed individuals who might otherwise pose a security risk at home.
The second is to redistribute the balance of power away from the official armed forces.

“We deal with the fragmentation of military power that is typical for authoritarian regimes,” explained Luzin.

“Wagner are neither elite forces nor well-trained commandos, they are just another sort of cannon fodder with the purpose of counterbalancing any political threat from the generals. The Kremlin just does not trust the armed forces.”


Also one might add that due to the inofficial use as mercenary cannon fodder, casualties do not show up in any statistics.
Interesting article, at least they seem more motivated than russian ordinary soldiers. By money.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/8/1 ... s-military
#15242515
Rich wrote:If the western liberal media tells you this they are flat out lying.


They haven't been saying this. The western media has generally been pretty negative on Ukraine. As in, they often lead by saying Russia will eventually prevail.

I feel like those of you that are claiming the western media is lying (I'm sure they are on some things of course) aren't actually paying attention to what they are saying and just assuming. This is your biases showing more than anything.
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By Rancid
#15242518
Igor Antunov wrote:negligence


That's not something to brush off though. The entire campaign by Russia has been riddled by incompetence and negligence. This is exactly what Ukraine (and the west) can/will exploit.

It is precisely this negligence (and Ukrainian resolve) that has emboldened the west to continue giving support to Urkaine. The more fucks ups on the Russian side, the more Ukraine (and the west) will want to capitalize. The more Russia fucks up, the more the west will "invest" in Ukrainian defense.
#15242536
Wels wrote:Russia is slowly grinding forward, but then its tactics are to start an ammo barrage, destroy all people and infrastructure indiscriminately, then send some soldiers into the rubble and claim it to be "theirs". Big win.

This is correct. Of course war is an ugly business both for the soldiers and the civilian populations that are caught up in it, but even from a purely militarist perspective the Russians are fighting in an ugly way. However these advances, modest and halting as they are with enormous damage to the infrastructure of the captured territory as you have pointed out have to be pointed, as some people want to pretend they are not happening.
#15242547
Rich wrote:This is correct. Of course war is an ugly business both for the soldiers and the civilian populations that are caught up in it, but even from a purely militarist perspective the Russians are fighting in an ugly way. However these advances, modest and halting as they are with enormous damage to the infrastructure of the captured territory as you have pointed out have to be pointed, as some people want to pretend they are not happening.


If you fight a war ugly, you run the risk of facing a never-ending insurgency in your wake. From the start there was no one in the West who believed that Ukraine could resist this invasion for any prolonged period of time, but most, myself definitely included, believed that Russia could never sustain an occupation forever. Russia was successful in Chechnya despite heavy losses and using brutal tactics. I was firmly in the camp that the Russian army was even more powerful today than 20 years ago with the large scale investments and modernization that had happened. Or so we thought.

Ukraine is far larger and more populous than Chechnya. Logistics broke their first offensive and the more narrow focused operations over the past 2 months or so have been more successful in achieving their objectives. Can Russia stabilize and incorporate the territories it now possesses? Can it handle any more? Can they break the Ukrainian's fighting spirit? That is what it will come down to, hacking each other to pieces until either one or both lose their will to fight. So far, the Ukrainians have gone much further than anyone anticipated (especially the Russians, me thinks) in not backing down. Killing tens or hundreds of thousands more civilians is more likely to add fuel to that fire than the other.
#15242548
Ukraine has stated they intend to take back Crimea eventually. They also claim they will take Kherson by the end of the year. It looks like their plan is to just grind Russians slowly in Kherson over the coming weeks versus a full scale counter attack (this is just my speculation). This would minimized losses on the Ukrainian side. After all, Ukrainians have all the time in the world so they could afford to do it, they have no choice but to keep fighting however long it takes. On the other hand Russia doesn't have all the time in the world, and they certainly do have a choice to pull out if they want it to end. Anyway, this approach would minimize Ukraine losses for sure.

Couple this with the fact the Russia is recruiting fucking prisoners. Ukrainians are still getting trained by the west.... Russia has many many more losses they are going to take. If this is a victory for them, it will be at a cost that has not been seen in modern history IMO.
#15242564
JohnRawls wrote:Image


Only it is not. 8)
Not according to the USA's "current law" , not according to the popular will , not according to the might.

Sorry, guys, don't hate the players, hate your own game.
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By Wels
#15242569
Independent_Srpska wrote:Only it is not. 8)
Not according to the USA's "current law" , not according to the popular will , not according to the might.

Laws have been changed before, especially by Russia. If some megalomaniac decides to change borders and the world why should the latter agree?
The 'might'(power?) is wherever some being defines it. "Popular will" declared by russian state media is anything but.
#15242572
MadMonk wrote:If you fight a war ugly, you run the risk of facing a never-ending insurgency in your wake.

Actually if anything its the reverse. The more willing you are to apply terror, the less risk you will have of an insurgency. Take Germany's occupation of France in World War II. Now no one can accuse the French nation of lacking fighting spirit. Well no one who is not a cretinous retard. From the end of the Hundred Years War France was the preeminent militarist nation in Europe. Yet Germany was able to occupy this huge country with virtually no serious insurgency prior to the Normandy Landings. The resistance groups spent more time fighting each other than they did the Germans. After D-Day when there was the prospect of short term liberation, the resistance groups were a significant help to the allied armies, but on their own serious insurgencies are the exception not the rule if the occupier is willing to use terror.

Civilian militias and autonomous civilian fighters played a major role in the defeat of the Russian offensive towards Kiev, but the key point is that the Russians never established administrative control over the territories in the north. Once the occupier has administrative control it gives them a huge advantage. Putin is not Hitler, but he's still prepared to use levels of violence well beyond what say the British used in North Ireland against the Provisional IRA, and I don't think any reasonable person would accuse the British of fighting a clean war in North Ireland. Yes I don't think the Divis Flats would have lasted long if Putin had been in charge of security in North Ireland.

I think we've established that Putin is no great military leader. Now I could be wrong, but I think you'll find that counter insurgency and security play's much better to Putin's skill set. When you're in administrative control its so easy to turn people, to get people to inform and feed you intelligence. Even if you're willing to die, spend your life in prison and with stand torture, most people have other people that they care about,which makes them vulnerable to being turned. As I said I could be wrong, but I expect you'll find that the urbanised Ukrainian steppe, plays out quite differently to the Hindu Kush and that the Ukrainian nationalists are not the Afghan Mujaheddin.
#15242576
Rancid wrote:That's not something to brush off though. The entire campaign by Russia has been riddled by incompetence and negligence. This is exactly what Ukraine (and the west) can/will exploit.

It is precisely this negligence (and Ukrainian resolve) that has emboldened the west to continue giving support to Urkaine. The more fucks ups on the Russian side, the more Ukraine (and the west) will want to capitalize. The more Russia fucks up, the more the west will "invest" in Ukrainian defense.


Until it matches the 20 year negligence and corruption of the US defeat against the Taliban in the afghan war, you have me bored with your babbling.
By late
#15242577
Igor Antunov wrote:
Until it matches the 20 year negligence and corruption of the US defeat against the Taliban in the afghan war, you have me bored with your babbling.



We have the habit of winning the war, and losing the peace, that goes back to our Civil War.

Russia has a different problem, they want empire, but lack the resources, and inevitably collapse.

'The more things change, the more they stay the same.'
#15242579
Igor Antunov wrote:Until it matches the 20 year negligence and corruption of the US defeat against the Taliban in the afghan war, you have me bored with your babbling.


First of all, it is whataboutism. Secondly Afghanistan had little to 0 impact on US economy overall and society lets be honest here. So I am not sure you can compare Afghanistan and Ukraine in this regard. Sure both are wars but one thing is to wage war on the other side of the globe vs people who are not really close to your own people and the other is a war that you wage against your fellow brothers and sisters which devastates your own economy. US overall is just way stronger economically compared to Russia and has way more powerful allies than Russia. :hmm:
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