Ukraine war mega thread

[misskit]

Yeah. If they lost only 6,000 troops, it doesn’t make sense they would be scraping for recruits from prison, now does it?

[harrybarracuda]

Yeah. If they lost only 6,000 troops, it doesn’t make sense they would be scraping for recruits from prison, now does it?

You have to remember that hoohoo is as dumb as a doorhandle.

[HermantheGerman]

Big win for Putler!

On Friday, the U.N.’s largest body voted to let Ukraine speak (193 member states approved)
Russia was able to get six dictatorial countries — Cuba, Eritrea, Belarus, North Korea, Nicaragua and Syria — to vote against it.

[HermantheGerman]

Comical Putler !


Today I am addressing you – all citizens of our country, people of different generations, ages and ethnicities, the people of our great Motherland, all who are united by the great historical Russia, soldiers, officers and volunteers who are fighting on the frontline and doing their combat duty, our brothers and sisters in the Donetsk and Lugansk people’s republics, Kherson and Zaporozhye regions and other areas that have been liberated from the neo-Nazi regime.

[David48atTD]

From ...

[bsnub]

[bsnub]

Putin is having his ass handed to him on a plate.

[OhOh]

This is a NATO publication from 1983. Nothing has changed, allegedly.

A few days /5 days of, "conventional battle, then tactical nukes", if "conventional defensive measures fail"

Reinforces our site idiot bsnubs, calling for a short war of extinction.

No wonder THE LORD has his own nukes kept warm.

[harrybarracuda]

This is a NATO publication from 1983. Nothing has changed, allegedly.

A few days /5 days of, "conventional battle, then tactical nukes", if "conventional defensive measures fail"

Reinforces our site idiot bsnubs, calling for a short war of extinction.

No wonder THE LORD has his own nukes kept warm.

Poor hoohoo.

Being as thick as shit, he still hasn't grasped that it's Putin that's doing the invading and that for NATO to get "defensive" he would have to have the balls to *try* to invade a NATO country.

Which of course the fucking pussy hasn't.

What *is* guaranteed is that if the Russian generals see Putin anywhere near the nuclear button, they know they would be toast.

I'm pretty sure their sense of self preservation will take care of things from then on.

[David48atTD]

Link please.

[hallelujah]

our site idiot bsnubs,
.

There's possibly only backspit on here with less credibility than you.

You weird, brainwashed wanker.

[hallelujah]

"Our independence and freedom will be defended."

This warmongering c.u.n.t must be on glue.

[sabang]

The Future of Eurasia

[baldrick]

The Future of Eurasia

I reckon they will be taller than 5' 4" in future

[David48atTD]

The Future of Eurasia

Media link please?

[bsnub]

The Future of Eurasia

Putin is having has ass handed to him on a plate.

[harrybarracuda]

The Future of Eurasia

Obviously that's before the chinkies and Modi got cold feet.

[pickel]

The Future of Eurasia

Putin has no future. Russian Mothers are already in the streets, or flying their sons out of the country, and it's not even full mobilization. I give Putin a year at most.

[sabang]

Did ya miss me?


While our media calls recent gains a turning point, be warned this might be headed for something more ‘frozen’ and less satisfactory.


Last week’s offensive to liberate the countryside east of Kharkiv was an impressive win for the Ukrainian military and government, as well as its sponsors and managers in the Pentagon, State Department, CIA, and other U.S. intelligence agencies.

Ukraine’s seizure of the Izium rail station was especially key, as Russian forces rely heavily on trains for transport and supplies. Not since the successful defense of Kyiv has the Zelensky government scored such an important battlefield victory. But triumphalist reports in the U.S. media portraying the counteroffensive as a major shift in the direction of the war overstate the significance of these developments.

Russia had already lost the war in the north. After the collapse of their assault on Kyiv in March, Russian soldiers abandoned the Chernihiv and Sumy oblasts, and never came close to full control over Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city. Their continued occupation of the countryside north and east of Kharkiv was a leftover vestige of that failed first phase of the invasion, which could explain why it was so lightly defended, and why Russian forces, caught off guard, were so quick to retreat.

Western press reports have portrayed Ukraine’s “lightning offensive,” as it’s invariably called, as a major turning point in the war. Nearly all of them use the word “humiliating” to describe Russia’s loss of the area. Russian defenses “collapsed” and they “fled in panic,” we’re told. This was widely attributed to the supposed “exhaustion” and “low morale” of Russian troops. As a result, the battle lines have been “redrawn,” the war’s contours “reshaped.” Putin is said to be “livid and “isolated.” In the maximalist language of the Atlantic Council, the “Ukrainian victory shatter[ed] Russia’s reputation as a military superpower.”

There’s a fair amount of wishful thinking in all of this rhetoric. Since April, it has been clear that Putin, after failing to take Kyiv and Kharkiv, pivoted to a downsized Plan B of securing a land bridge to Crimea in the south. Not only can this be gleaned from a glance at a map of troop movements, but Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov said so explicitly in July.

Going forward, the success or failure of that strategic gambit is how the regime in Moscow will define victory or defeat. And Ukraine’s retaking of the Kharkiv countryside will have little significant effect on Russia’s ability to hold critical southern port cities like Kherson, Melitopol, Mariupol, and Berdyansk. At this point, Kharkiv is not nearly as important an objective as Mykolaiv or Odesa. The Russians can easily make do without the Izium railway.

The Ukrainian army and reserve militia showed extraordinary bravery and endurance in their defense of Kyiv — awe-inspiring courage, really — and punched well above their weight again in last week’s drive to push the Russians east of the Oskil River. But to win the war outright — which would be a miraculous underdog victory — they would need to break through to the Sea of Azov, or retake a major hub like the cities of Donetsk or Luhansk.

Under current conditions, that’s unlikely to happen. A Ukrainian offensive against occupied Kherson, launched in tandem with the blitz east of Kharkiv, has produced no appreciable gains. The battle lines around Mykolaiv and Zaporizhzhia have changed very little since March. Even if Ukrainian forces in the northeast conserve their momentum and continue to press the counteroffensive east of the Oskil, they could retake all of the Luhansk oblast north of the Donets River and still not seriously imperil Russian control of the coast and Crimea.

War is unpredictable, and it’s always possible that an unexpected concatenation of Russian losses really could precipitate a total collapse of Moscow’s expeditionary force, and a complete retreat from the Donbas. There’s a scary unanswered question of how the Putin regime would respond in that eventuality, because they have held certain highly destructive munitions in reserve, but it’s probably premature to go there unless and until Ukraine racks up additional territorial gains.

The coming winter weather, which can be brutally cold and icy in Ukraine, is likely to slow troop movements, and perhaps bring them to a near halt (as would happen in Afghanistan every winter). In a more metaphorical sense, the conflict might already be frozen. Since about May, this has increasingly seemed to be the cold, hard reality, loathe as propagandists on both sides are to admit it.

A “frozen conflict” is a term for a war whose battle lines have hardened and congealed, but without any truce or treaty to formally cede conquered territory to the aggressor, resulting in a kind of gray zone on the map of the globe — dead spots in the international order. Examples include ex-Soviet territories like Transnistria, Abkhazia, and South Ossetia, which legally belong to Moldova in the case of Transnistria and Georgia in the case of the other two, but which have been occupied by Russia for years.

Russia’s puppet states in the Donbas are only the most recent addition to this curtilage of quasi-sovereign vassalages in countries that used to belong to the U.S.S.R. It will be very difficult for Ukraine to win back the swath of coastal land from Luhansk to Kherson, in part because the people there are culturally, ethnically, and linguistically inclined towards Russia. That is why Putin targeted them in the first place.

“Frozen conflict” can also describe fractured, balkanized states like Iraq, Syria, Libya, Somalia, Yemen, Mali, and other sites of U.S. and NATO intervention. In these countries, the U.S. military and intelligence agencies, often acting through proxies, successfully ousted or badly destabilized the existing government, but failed to fully install a replacement regime that was both subservient to Washington and able to govern effectively.

Warlords, gangsters, jihadists, mercenaries, slave traders, arms dealers, drug traffickers, paramilitaries, and spies flowed into the power vacuum. In Syria, which is partially occupied by U.S. forces to this day, Russia also intervened, resulting in a split with two-thirds of the country governed by a Russian-backed coalition, and the remainder controlled by American proxy forces and special operations soldiers.

That’s been the status quo in Syria for the better part of a decade; and at this juncture, the Kharkiv counteroffensive notwithstanding, it seems to be the most likely future for Ukraine, too: a war that never ends, in an unlucky country caught between two past-their-prime superpowers, neither of which has the ability to win outright, nor the humanity to negotiate a compromise, with the result that many thousands die in vain.

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/20...d-perspective/

[misskit]

Russia Implodes After Putin Summons 300,000 to Die for Him

Vladimir Putin’s “special military operation” against Ukraine hit a turning point Wednesday—but not the kind the Kremlin wanted.


Instead, the Russian leader may have inadvertently put the final nail in the coffin of his decades-long reign with his bombshell announcement that hundreds of thousands of citizens will be called up to face likely death in the war next door.

While Putin’s most loyal allies rallied around the leader with calls for unity and defense officials bent over backward to provide dubious assurances to the general public, ordinary Russians rushed for the exits and took to the streets.


Airline tickets out of the country sold out within a matter of hours. There were myriad reports of men of conscription age being barred from buying bus and airline tickets, and human rights groups reported that draft notices were already being handed out to people at bus stations and train stops in some areas.


Street cleaners and homeowners associations were reportedly tasked with delivering the notices in other areas.


Anton, a manager at a Moscow-based IT company, was nervous while waiting in line for passport control at Vnukovo Airport on Wednesday morning. He was fleeing to Armenia just hours after the mobilization announcement.


“Unfortunately, this is my war, although I never asked for it: victims of this war are my people, I have been helping suffering people; and the bastards who started this war are my enemies,” he told The Daily Beast after passing through border control.


He was constantly checking a “Border Control” group chat on Telegram, made up of about 15,000 Russian middle-class professionals making plans to escape Moscow following the announcement.


Anton’s friend, 35-year-old Alexander Koryakin, another Russian IT tech, had also left for Armenia earlier on Wednesday. Koryakin said he was now “breathing freely and thinking straight” in Yerevan.


“This war, this is definitely not my war, this conflict has been artificially blown up, Russia does not need it,” he said, adding a message for others still stuck in the country: “Run away, there will be nothing good in Russia for a long time. This is not a betrayal, this is your survival.”


Valentina Melnikova, the head of the Union of Committees of Soldiers’ Mothers of Russia, said the mobilization shows Putin only wants to escalate the war.

“Today Putin mobilizes people, tomorrow he will employ nuclear weapons, our job is to help those who do not want to serve,” she told The Daily Beast.


Dozens of demonstrators were detained in Moscow as well as cities as far-flung as Ulan Ude, Izhevsk, Irkutsk, Chelyabinsk, and Perm, among others, according to the monitoring site OVD.info. Protests continued to erupt across the country despite prosecutors in the capital warning demonstrators they could face up to 15 years in prison for speaking out against the war.


Outrage only intensified amid reports that some public workers had already begun receiving draft notices en masse. Medical staffers in Moscow have already been called up, according to human rights lawyer Pavel Chikov, who also called BS on the Russian defense ministry’s claims the mobilization would only be “partial.”


The Insider reported that doctors and nurses at one private clinic in Moscow had also received draft notices.


The actual text of the decree declaring mobilization puts no cap on the number of people to be called up and does not limit the draft to reservists, as defense officials claim. The document also contains one “classified” clause that keeps the number of those to be mobilized concealed.


The backlash was swift: “The crazy old man is going all in, his bets–are our lives. They promised us to take Kyiv in three days. The Ukrainians took in three hours what we took in three months. Now there is a mobilization for ‘fresh meat’ in order to bomb civilian sites,” hackers wrote in a statement posted on the homepage of St. Petersburg’s Pulkovo Airport.


“Ukraine already won. The question is how badly we’ll lose,” the statement read.

Protests also broke out in unexpected places, with customers of one jewelry store chain reportedly receiving a message that read, “Today Vladimir Putin announced a general mobilization. This means your husbands, children, and fathers can be sent by force to fight in Ukraine at any moment. Into the war that Putin started and he is losing…”


The company, 585 Gold, later blamed the messages on hackers.


Meanwhile, anger seems to be growing over Russian lawmakers who cheer on the war but let ordinary citizens do the dirty work.


Dmitry Vyatkin, a lawmaker in Putin’s United Russia party, raised eyebrows with a speech Wednesday claiming it’s “easy” to decide to head to the frontline in Ukraine–but arguing that he and other lawmakers can’t do it because they’re too busy explaining the “importance” of the war to people.


The family of Putin’s spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, was also put on the spot over their apparently untouchable status during the mobilization.


A reporter for Popular Politics, a news program created by allies of imprisoned Kremlin foe Alexei Navalny, phoned up Peskov’s son, Nikolai, during a Wednesday broadcast and impersonated a military commissar, telling him he was being called up for military service in accordance with the mobilization.


“You must understand, if you know I am Mr. Peskov, how entirely wrong it is for me to be there,” Nikolai responded. “Basically, I will decide this on a different level.”

https://www.thedailybeast.com/russia...ine?ref=scroll

[misskit]

Moscow trades 225 prisoners of war to Kyiv in exchange for 56 men, including Putin’s close friend, Viktor Medvedchuk

Pro-Kremlin Ukrainian opposition politician Viktor Medvedchuk (whose youngest daughter is Vladimir Putin’s goddaughter) has been freed from captivity along with 55 Russian soldiers. The men were traded to Moscow on September 21, and all it cost the Kremlin was the release of four times as many prisoners: 215 Ukrainian POWs (including members of the Azov Regiment and defenders of the Azovstal iron and steel works), plus 10 foreign combatants captured while fighting for Ukraine. Following the prisoner exchange, Ukraine’s armed forces said in a statement that Medvedchuk can still be prosecuted in absentia for treason and the attempted looting of national resources in Crimea.


In a video shared on social media, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said, “We are bringing home our people. There’s no question that this is a victory for our state and for our whole society. And most importantly, it’s a victory for 215 families who will be able to see their loved ones returned to safety.” In a video conference with Azov’s commanders, Zelensky said the terms of the prisoner exchange stipulate that five of the regiment’s senior officers will stay in Turkey until the end of the war under the personal protection of President Recep Erdoğan, who helped mediate the prisoner swap.


At the time of this writing, the Russian authorities have not commented publicly about the deal.

https://meduza.io/en/news/2022/09/22...tor-medvedchuk

[bsnub]

The backlash was swift: “The crazy old man is going all in, his bets–are our lives. They promised us to take Kyiv in three days. The Ukrainians took in three hours what we took in three months. Now there is a mobilization for ‘fresh meat’ in order to bomb civilian sites,” hackers wrote in a statement posted on the homepage of St. Petersburg’s Pulkovo Airport.

“Ukraine already won. The question is how badly we’ll lose,” the statement read.

So true. Putin is doomed.

[HermantheGerman]

Comical Putler!

The goal of that part of the West is to weaken, divide and ultimately destroy our country. They are saying openly now that in 1991 they managed to split up the Soviet Union and now is the time to do the same to Russia, which must be divided into numerous regions that would be at deadly feud with each other

a 400 mile protest line says different

[HermantheGerman]

[QUOTE=David48atTD;4432415]



Love it

[bsnub]

In a video conference with Azov’s commanders, Zelensky said the terms of the prisoner exchange stipulate that five of the regiment’s senior officers will stay in Turkey until the end of the war under the personal protection of President Recep Erdoğan, who helped mediate the prisoner swap.

The Russians do not want to face those guys on the battlefield again.