Ukraine war mega thread

[bsnub]

As it was for Napoleon when he invaded Russia in 1812.

Indeed. The worst is yet to come for the Russians.

[bsnub]

The press has arrived in Kherson. An excellent video of the Russian supporting citizens celebrating their liberation in the streets...

[Loy Toy]

I am concerned that the dam will collapse as it has recently been bombed. Kherson would be washed away.

[Norton]

I am concerned that the dam will collapse as it has recently been bombed. Kherson would be washed away.

Sure it's a concern for Kherson folks as well. Not looking good and not clear what can be done to fix in near term.

New damage to major dam near Kherson after Russian retreat -Maxar satellite | Reuters

[baldrick]

who the traitors are.

who will you support when the chinese start encroaching on russian territory ?

[cyrille]

'They ran away like goats', said a villager in Mylove, Kherson.

[Takeovers]

I am concerned that the dam will collapse as it has recently been bombed. Kherson would be washed away.

Kherson is on high ground. Very little of the City would be affected. It is the left side, the side where Russia has built defensive lines, which would be much more affected. Plus unfortunately a few left bank small settlements on the russian side.

[Norton]

who will you support when the chinese start encroaching on russian territory ?

North Korea.

[panama hat]

who will you support when the chinese start encroaching on russian territory ?

Iran . . .

[OhOh]

when the chinese start encroaching on russian territory

What makes you believe they will?

[misskit]

Russia's Vladivostok Celebration Prompted An Online Backlash In China: Another Dispute From The Past

Russia's Vladivostok Celebration Prompted An Online Backlash In China: Another Dispute From The Past


North Korea ‘belongs’ to the Chinese, too.

[harrybarracuda]

Russia's Vladivostok Celebration Prompted An Online Backlash In China: Another Dispute From The Past

Russia's Vladivostok Celebration Prompted An Online Backlash In China: Another Dispute From The Past


North Korea ‘belongs’ to the Chinese, too.

I don't have a problem with Mr. Shithole threatening to invade Russia.

[HermantheGerman]

What makes you believe they will?

Because they are like a pack of wild dogs?

[HermantheGerman]

OhWoe, a mainland Chinese living in Thailand and a halfwit Canadian getting their jollies from mass-murderers trampling on people's lives.

Well, that explains his adoration's for dictators.

[panama hat]

What makes you believe they will?

A good knowledge of geo-politics would do you a lot of good instead of just swallowing Beijing's agit-prop.


After the way Russia has collapsed militarily against a non-entity I doubt China is the least bit worried about Russia, aside from supplying oil and gas. And even there Chia can see how to get around it.

1904/5 it was Japan, the next time it will be China

[bsnub]

Russia has collapsed militarily against a non-entity

Ukraine is hardly a non-entity. A quite formidable army and getting stronger every day.

[bsnub]

This feel good stuff doesn't get old...

[Shutree]

What makes you believe they will?

Because Manchuria was part of the, erm, Manchu dynasty and before that was ruled by China's Ming dynasty. Xi might need some overseas adventures in this spell of his rule to distract the (non-)voters at home and surely there would never be an easier time to go for Vladivostok. Easier than Taiwan. Putin is struggling to fight a war on one front, he could not possibly hope to overwhelm the world's largest army on a second front. And who doesn't prefer the Chinese name, 海參崴, sea slug cliffs?
I'm not saying they will, how would we know? Only that some hawks will be whispering into Xi's ears.

[Shutree]

This feel good stuff doesn't get old...

The usual suspects will be along to tell you that this was all staged somehow.

[sabang]

Consortium News hughie, as should be obvious if you checked the Link. As for Patrick Lawrence, well he has been around the block a few times-

Lawrence was a correspondent and subsequently a columnist overseas for nearly thirty years, chiefly for the honorable and now defunctFar Eastern Economic Review,the (also honorable, also defunct)International Herald Tribune,andThe New Yorker. He covered nearly every country in the region, a number of them extensively over many years. He won an Overseas Press Club Award for his reportage from Korea during the last years of the dictatorships.Lawrence served asNews Editor of theHerald Tribune’sAsian edition before returning to the United States, in 2010.

Apart from his staff work, Lawrence’s reportage, commentary, essays, criticism, and reviews have appeared inThe New York Times, Business Week, TIME, The Washington Quarterly, World Policy Journal, The Globalist, The Nation, Asian Art News,and numerous other publications. He is now foreign affairs columnist at The Nation.He makes frequent television and radio appearances.

So have another dose of Mr Lawrence . Hot off the press-


Patrick Lawrence: Why Are the Russians Retreating in Ukraine?




The most opaque war in my lifetime and probably yours, the war we can hardly see because the reporting is so bad, just took an unexpected turn. There must be someone somewhere who anticipated the retreat of Russian forces from Kherson, the key Ukrainian city along the southern end of the Dnieper River, but I haven’t run across such a person. Russia’s move certainly came as an abrupt surprise to me.

How shall we understand this development? What comes now? As we attempt answers, it is important neither to underestimate nor overestimate the significance of Russia’s withdrawal from the only provincial capital it has held since its intervention began last February.

The New York Times ran a piece covering this development last Thursday. It is worth reading for some of the detail the reporter included; it also has a map of the Kherson region and a useful photograph of the Dnieper River that shows Kherson City on the west bank and the east bank opposite, to which Russian troops have retreated.

Straight off the top, it would be incautious to conclude that Russia’s pullback across the Dnieper represents a dramatic turn in the course of the Ukraine conflict. We heard this kind of thing last summer, when the Armed forces of Ukraine made swift territorial advances in northeastern Ukraine. The AFU is beating back the Russians, we read. Victory is suddenly within the Kyiv regime’s grasp. Only gradually did it emerge that Russian forces had abandoned the northeast and the AFU had shadow-boxed an enemy who was no longer there.

No one seems to be trying this one on in the Kherson case, which is wise. There was no “Battle of Kherson,” no Stalingrad revisited, as Ukrainian propagandists have put it about in recent weeks. As of Friday morning there were no Russian troops left in Kherson, according to the Russian Defense Ministry, and none in the surrounding region on the river’s west bank.

I don’t see any caviar-eating surrender monkeys here. This looks like a tactical retreat ordered by people who study maps, not newspaper headlines. Based on what we know, it is likely to have little impact on the long-term course of the war. In my reckoning, the odds are no more in Kyiv’s favor now than they were a week back.

Let there be no question: The Kherson withdrawal is a far bigger deal for Russia than the events to the north last summer. Russian forces took Kherson early in the war because it was key to advancing elsewhere, notably to Odessa, the historic, significant Black Sea port. Kherson is a big shipbuilding center and was founded in the 1770s by Grigory Potemkin, Catherine the Great’s lover and empire builder. So, practical value and cultural and historical significance all at once.

I was immediately interested to note how Moscow announced its decision to pull troops out of Kherson. This was last Wednesday, when Sergei Shoigu, Russia’s defense minister, conferred with the Russian military’s top officers. Among these was Sergei Surovikin, the general who was named the overall commander of the Ukraine operation just a few weeks ago.

Here is the strange thing. Shoigu’s meeting with his top uniformed officers was broadcast live on Russian state television. Neither President Vladimir Putin nor any other civilian official was there. A photograph released by the Defense Ministry showed Shoigu listening intently as Surovikin, leaning over a map with pencil in hand, appears to explain circumstances on the ground to his boss. This photograph is also in the Times piece. Shoigu and Surovikin are both in olive drab.

The decision to withdraw was difficult, Surovikin said, but it would preserve the lives of servicemen and the combat readiness of forces: “In the current conditions, the city of Kherson and nearby settlements cannot be fully supplied and function.” Shoigu thereupon gave his order to withdraw.

What is conveyed in this odd, evidently ritualistic way of announcing a shift in military policy?

Neil Macfarquhar, a Times reporter who had a tour in Moscow some years back, wrote a piece Friday under the headline, “When It Comes to Bearing Bad Tidings, Putin Is Nowhere to Be Found.” Putin, the wily coward in political trouble, was his theme. But during his time in the Moscow bureau, MacFarquhar proved the sort of correspondent who could find darkness in a First Communion ceremony. He once covered a Putin press conference by noting that the Russian president wore an expensive watch. Always a sign of evil, an expensive watch.

Setting this kind of amateur nonsense aside, it seems to me the message Shoigu and Surovikin sent is pretty clear: This was a strictly military decision taken on the basis of conditions on the ground with no regard to—I detest this phrase, but here you go—the optics.

As to Putin, it seems he has come under fire from the hawkish wings of Moscow’s political firmament. This is nothing the Kremlin will welcome, but we must bear in mind: Vlad the Horrible is in fact a liberal Westernizer in the Russian context, or was until Washington threw a custard pie in his face, and he has been fending off his nationalistic right flank for years.

Conditions on the ground, as we all know, are difficult to discern. But three of them seem to have been on Surovikin’s mind. One, while Ukrainian forces were not making significant advances toward the city, they were shelling it with increasing intensity, as was their wont during the eight-year artillery campaign they waged against civilian areas in the Donbas region—the campaign we are supposed to forget about.

Two, Russians have been increasingly worried of late about signs that the AFU had plans to bomb the Dneprostroi Dam, a huge Soviet-built hydroelectric complex upriver from Kherson. Any such action would flood the city and claim many thousands of civilian lives.

Finally, Surovikin, a no-nonsense military man with a reputation for considered but confident decisions, was concerned about the potential isolation of Russian troops on the Dnieper’s west bank. This was his point as he spoke on Russian television about supply lines. Some media reports suggest Surovikin judged extending Russian troops across the Dnieper a mistake from the first.

In hindsight—so often offering insights one should not have missed—there were signs of Russia’s intent from the moment Surovikin got his command. He immediately warned that “difficult decisions” may be in the offing, though without reference to Kherson, which many observers, your columnist included, took to be nonnegotiable as a forward Russian base. Now it is clear what he meant.

Other things started happening soon after Surovikin took over in Ukraine. A large proportion of Kherson’s civilian population—apparently not the entire city—was evacuated. Then Russian soldiers began removing statues and other Russian-related cultural artifacts, including Potemkin’s tomb, out of the city. This was looting and grave-robbing in Western media accounts. When we consider what Ukrainians and other East Europeans do these days to monuments honoring the Soviet Union’s sacrifices in World War II, it is simply prudence and respect for history.

All signs of what was to come. Now to signs of what is to come.

One, there is Surovikin’s concern about protecting the combat readiness of the troops now regrouped on the Dnieper’s east bank. Two, there is the vast call-up of Russian reserves announced last summer: I read some 80,000 of the 300,000 reservists to be mustered out are already in place in Ukraine. Three, there is Moscow’s claim—respect it or not, it is a “fact on the ground”—that Kherson region is Russian territory now and Kherson is the provincial capital.

I add one and one and one and get this: It is very likely Surovikin, who is putting his own plans and people in place like some new-broom corporate CEO, has taken one step back prior to taking two forward. I don’t think anyone too far from the Russian high command can say when, but the signs just enumerated indicate that a major new offensive is in the offing at some point in the new year.

As previously predicted in this space, we hear more and more talk of diplomatic negotiations these days, sometimes coming from interesting quarters. On Friday The Times reported that Mark Milley, Joint Chiefs chairman, has joined the chorus. “What the future holds is not known with any degree of certainty, but we think there are some possibilities here for some diplomatic solutions.” The White House immediately distanced itself from Milley’s remarks, sounding the Ukraine- for-Ukrainians bell once again.

This looks like choreography to me: You put out the idea of talks, General, and we’ll deny any such idea. Then we’ll have the thought on the table but Kyiv can’t hound us about it.

The above is pure speculation, but this is often, too often, what we’re left to do in this war—and with a foreign policy that is well more than half submerged. We have not been told in straight terms what Washington’s policy toward Ukraine has been since Washington cultivated the 2014 coup that set this mess in motion. And we are not being told now.

Patrick Lawrence: Why Are the Russians Retreating in Ukraine? - scheerpost.com

Capiche? And the fact that snubchild will be crowing as if this is the Victory to end all victories- well that's a given. But this war is quite possibly in it's infancy, unless the Diplomats get to work.

[bsnub]

So have another dose of Mr Lawrence

Just another one of your moronic full of shit propagandists. Some of the utter shit in that joke of an article...

One, while Ukrainian forces were not making significant advances toward the city,

Clearly he is smoking something here. The line had been contracting towards Kherson city, and that is well documented. Completely laughable clown car idiocy.

they were shelling it with increasing intensity, as was their wont during the eight-year artillery campaign they waged against civilian areas in the Donbas region

Absolute falsehood of epic proportions. Just a flat out lie. Not surprising.

Two, Russians have been increasingly worried of late about signs that the AFU had plans to bomb the Dneprostroi Dam, a huge Soviet-built hydroelectric complex upriver from Kherson. Any such action would flood the city and claim many thousands of civilian lives.

More outright lies.

A large proportion of Kherson’s civilian population—apparently not the entire city—was evacuated.

No, they were abducted against their will. More lies.

But this war is quite possibly in it's infancy

Completely clueless as always. You are totally propagandized and an utterly complete moron.

[sabang]

I think everyone can tell who is the infant here snubchild. And as for your triumphal bleating.... well time will tell. Not like it's up to you. Or me.

^ There are too many falsehoods there for me to even bother addressing. Why didn't you tell us how clownboy Zelensky is a hero of democracy again?

[Norton]

well time will tell

A very long time I fear.

[Loy Toy]

I can only guess the Russian's who are invading are generally confused about why they are doing so and the Ukrainian's who are defending are doing so with hatred, anger and pride.

[pickel]

The most opaque war in my lifetime and probably yours, the war we can hardly see because the reporting is so bad, just took an unexpected turn. There must be someone somewhere who anticipated the retreat of Russian forces from Kherson, the key Ukrainian city along the southern end of the Dnieper River, but I haven’t run across such a person. Russia’s move certainly came as an abrupt surprise to me.

There is more open source info on this war than any other. Perhaps your friend Mr. Lawrence should ask snubs for his sources, as he's been saying the Russians would retreat for weeks now.

And that must really hurt your ego.