Thread: Russia launches Ukraine invasion

Originally Posted by thailazer

Russia is the country destroying stability in the region, and to what purpose?

It is not the first time. All the yellow countries in the graphic above were attacked and occupied by Russia in the past, they have good reason to seek the protection of the NATO alliance. Now they are seeing Russia do it again, they lived through it already and do not want to relive those horrors that are happening in Ukraine right now.

Humiliated Putin purges more than 150 intelligence staff as key ally JAILED

VLADIMIR PUTIN has purged more than 150 intelligence agents and jailed a former key ally over the botched invasion of Ukraine.

In a clear sign of Putin's fury over the failures of the invasion, the Russian leader dismissed more than 150 officers and the head of department responsible for Ukraine. The service’s former chief, Sergei Beseda, 68, has been sent to Lefortovo prison in Moscow, which was used by the NKVD, the KGB’s predecessor, for interrogation and torture during Stalin’s Great Purge of the 1930s. The move comes after a string of military failures which prevented Russian forces from making any significant progress since the invasion began February 24. Putin's troops announced they would be scaling back their invasion of Ukraine to focus on the Donbas region.

Ukraine LIVE: Humiliated Putin purges more than 150 intelligence staff as key ally JAILED | World | News | Express.co.uk

Originally Posted by sabang

Russia on Monday said it destroyed an S-300 air defense system, delivered to Ukraine by a European country, near the central city of Dnipro the day before.

That's OK, according to hoohoo it was shit anyway.

Originally Posted by sabang

Russia destroys S-300 air defense system delivered to Ukraine from Europe

Slovakia, which had donated such a missile system to Ukraine last week, denied that the one it supplied had been struck. The prime minister’s office issued a statement calling Russian reports that its S-300 system had been destroyed “disinformation”. It was unclear, however, whether both sides were referring to the same strike.

Russia says it struck S-300 systems given to Ukraine by EU state | Russia-Ukraine war News | Al Jazeera

Originally Posted by misskit

Ukraine War: Russia warns Sweden and Finland against Nato membership

Russia has warned Finland and Sweden against joining Nato, arguing the move would not bring stability to Europe.

It beggars belief . . . luckily for Putin and his henchmen there are fools who believe this crap, even here on this forum

(Reuters) - Russia can afford to wage a long war in Ukraine despite being hammered by Western sanctions aimed at crippling its ability to sustain the campaign, defence experts and economists say.

Russia's invasion has driven up the price of the oil, gas and grain it exports, providing it with a substantial windfall to fund its "special military operation" - now entering a new phase as Moscow focuses on the eastern Donbas region after failing to break Ukraine's defence of the capital Kyiv.

As the war grinds on, rising casualties and the need to rotate fresh troops into battle may prove more pressing challenges than the financial cost.

"This type of low-tech war can be financed almost entirely in roubles, which means they can continue pouring troops and heavy artillery into Ukraine at least until there's a more general collapse of the economy," said Jacob Kirkegaard, economist at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington.

Johan Norberg, senior analyst at the Swedish Defence Research Agency, said: "The sanctions will not affect this war in the short run, because Russia's military is fighting with tanks it had already built and soldiers it had already trained."

Sanctions are expected to shrink the economy by more than 11% this year, the World Bank says, but revenues from energy exports are actually increasing. The Russian finance ministry said on April 5 that Moscow expects to earn $9.6 billion in additional revenue from energy sales in April alone thanks to high oil prices, which remain around $100 a barrel.

There is no doubt, however, that Russia's vaunted military machine has taken a huge and costly hit.

The United States assesses that Russia has lost about 15-20% of its combat power during its invasion of Ukraine, a senior U.S. defence official said.

That includes everything from tanks, armoured vehicles, artillery systems, fighter and bomber aircraft and helicopters to surface-to-air and ballistic missiles, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

LOST TANKS

According to Oryx, a closely watched military blog which tallies both sides' losses based on verifiable visual evidence, Russia had lost at least 2,770 items of military equipment as of Tuesday, including at least 476 tanks that had been destroyed, damaged, abandoned or captured.

That, said Yohann Michel of the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), is more than the combined tank strength of NATO members France (222) and Britain (227).

Russia, which had around 3,000 tanks before the war, according to IISS figures, is not about to run out. But experts said some of those are likely to be old, in poor condition or held for spare parts, so the effective number available for combat is lower.

Mathieu Boulegue, a specialist in the Russian military at Chatham House, said Moscow had so far held back its most modern weaponry, which it is reluctant to lose, and relied heavily on an abundance of more expendable Soviet-era hardware.

He said it could take "a decade or two at least" to rebuild equipment levels to where they were before the war - a task complicated by a host of factors including design and innovation challenges, corruption, the indebted state of defence companies and a lack of access to Western microelectronics because of sanctions.

DEFENCE BURDEN

Russian military spending will need to rise both because of the war with Ukraine and the resulting sharp increase in tension with NATO, which has sent thousands more troops to eastern Europe, said Richard Connolly, an associate fellow at RUSI in London and director of the Eastern Advisory Group consultancy.

He said defence spending as a share of GDP could rise significantly from its current level of around 4%, potentially doubling in the next few years.

Connolly said ordinary Russians would feel the impact but the state could comfortably pay for the war effort, even if its economy is plunged into recession. If necessary it could commandeer resources like fuel from state-owned companies.

The more pressing question, he said, was the level of casualties and the difficulty of sustaining a war involving up to 150,000 troops at a time.

Russia has so far acknowledged only 1,351 troops killed and 3,825 wounded, although Ukraine and Western governments believe the toll is many times higher. Its army and airborne troops have a combined strength of about 325,000.

Eventually, Connolly said, it may have to take the politically unpopular decision to dip into its reserves, which the IISS estimates to number 2 million men under 50 with military service within the past five years.

"If you’ve got 150,000 committed to Ukraine, you’ve got half of your effective army currently in combat operations, many of which have experienced significant losses," Connolly said.

"So they’re going to need to replace, they’re going to need to rotate them. They're using their entire army, basically - or they will be if this goes on for very much longer."

Analysis-Even with sanctions, Russia can afford to feed its war machine (msn.com)

Ukrainian border guards say they have prevented about 2200 men of conscript age from leaving the country, which has been forbidden since the start of the war.

Ukraine's border guard agency says about 2200 Ukrainian men of fighting age have been detained so far while trying to leave the country in violation of martial law.

The agency said on Sunday that some of them have used forged documents and others tried to bribe border guards to get out of the country.

It said some have been found dead while trying to cross the Carpathian mountains in adverse weather, without specifying the number.

Under martial law, Ukrainian men between 18 and 60 are barred from leaving the country so that they can be called up to fight.
Ukraine detains 2200 conscript-age men | 7NEWS

They bsnubbies of warfare.

Originally Posted by Shutree

There is a lot of text there and I might have missed it but a key point in all this is that despite the sanctions there is an exception to Russia's inablity to access it's offshore dollar holdings and that exception is to allow them to be drawn to make interest payments on sovereign debts. This has already happened, time will tell if it happens today.

It seems the US Treasury blocked that exception:

NEW YORK/WASHINGTON, April 5 (Reuters) - The United States stopped the Russian government on Monday from paying holders of its sovereign debt more than $600 million from reserves held at U.S. banks, in a move meant to ratchet up pressure on Moscow and eat into its holdings of dollars.

Under sanctions put in place after Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, foreign currency reserves held by the Russian central bank at U.S. financial institutions were frozen.

But the Treasury Department had been allowing the Russian government to use those funds to make coupon payments on dollar-denominated sovereign debt on a case-by-case basis.

U.S. stops Russian bond payments, raising risk of default | Reuters

So they are now in 'selective default':

Russia slips into '''selective default''' on some foreign debt

It's up to Russia what they actually do, but the obvious thing I reckon would be to suspend coupon payments- and just log them as debits against the reserves held/ frozen with US financial institutions. "So if you want to collect your interest, chase the US- because they are holding the money".

Incidentally, in the emerging world economies (most of the world population), who is gonna trust the US banking system anymore?

Originally Posted by sabang

Ukrainian border guards say they have prevented about 2200 men of conscript age from leaving the country, which has been forbidden since the start of the war

That could happen in any country. Pointless comment!

In Chinastan they would get shot on the spot. Ask Dingohh Dongohh

Not aware it ever happened in the UK, and certainly not Australia (except for the convicts).

Hubris and isolation led Vladimir Putin to misjudge Ukraine

More than six weeks into his war against Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin is feeling the sting of failure.


Thousands of Russian battlefield deaths. Three front-line retreats by the Russian military. Millions of Ukrainians who will never forgive Moscow. More isolation than ever — and perilously few goals achieved.


Putin is now regrouping to focus his military campaign on Ukraine’s east in what is widely seen as “Plan B,” after his forces failed to topple Ukraine’s government or wrest control of its biggest cities. All the while, questions are mounting about how a Russian leader steeped in security policy and known for railing against the folly of regime-change wars could have sleepwalked into a such a strategic morass.


At issue is a broader quandary that will occupy historians for years: How could Russia — a country with such deep familial, cultural and historic ties to its western neighbor — get Ukraine so wrong?

Officials in the United States and Europe are piecing together the answer to that question. What emerges, those officials say, is a picture of a hubristic and isolated leader, beset by biases and skewed information, pressing forward with a calamitous decision without consulting his full cohort of advisers. Putin rushed headlong into Ukraine, confident in his ability to secure a quick victory and weather any blowback within the authoritarian system he erected at home, they said. Underpinning his assumptions: misconceptions about Ukraine fundamentally rooted in Moscow’s colonial past.


“Historically, there just hasn’t been expertise on Ukraine in Russia at all,” said Alina Polyakova, president and CEO of the Washington-based Center for European Policy Analysis. “When you don’t believe a country’s a real country and a people’s a real people, why would you invest any expertise in a thing you don’t think exists?”

A former spy’s personal fingerprints


In the run-up to the war, some leaders in Europe and Ukraine discounted the possibility that Putin would invade, because they didn’t see sufficient Russian forces amassed along the border for Moscow to succeed with a multi-front offensive and subsequent occupation.


What they didn’t realize was that Moscow was nurturing deeply flawed assumptions, particularly about the fortitude of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and the willingness of Ukrainians to resist, and was indeed planning a large-scale invasion — just an ill-conceived one. The operation, analysts said, bore the personal fingerprints of Putin.


“It’s clear this was a military operation designed by spooks, not generals,” said Mark Galeotti, a Russia analyst at Mayak Intelligence. “It makes no sense in purely military terms.”

According to U.S. and European officials, Putin had been keeping the plans very close-hold, with top military commanders and trusted advisers unaware that Russia was going to mount an offensive.


The Russian leader notoriously doesn’t use a smartphone and rarely accesses the Internet. He spent years snuffing out Russian independent news and erecting an authoritarian system of government devoid of constructive feedback or dissent. By early this year, according to U.S. and European officials, he was operating in an echo chamber, surrounded by advisers who, according to Galeotti, “had learned you do not bring bad news to the czar’s table.” Putin’s isolation, the officials said, had been compounded by the coronavirus and his limited contact with others.


“It’s demonstrably obvious now that there was a combination of people not telling him what he needed to hear and him not listening when they did tell him stuff that he didn’t want to hear,” said James Cleverly, Britain’s minister of state for Europe and North America.


Putin has long viewed independent Ukraine as a quirk of the Soviet empire’s collapse that needed to be handled personally. According to Russian journalist Mikhail Zygar’s book “All the Kremlin’s Men,” Putin for years controlled policy toward Ukraine himself because he didn’t trust anyone else.


“We need to deal with Ukraine or we’ll lose it,” Putin would say at meetings dating back to the early 2000s, according to Zygar, who labeled Putin’s coterie of close advisers the “Collective Putin,” because they tend to tailor their activities to anticipate his desires.


Putin’s confidence in his personal expertise on Ukraine came through in a lengthy treatise he published last summer. The article portrayed Ukrainians as a people who are naturally the same as Russians but have been taken hostage by Western governments bent on radicalizing them against Moscow.

“That leads to this belief by Putin and others that if you can just decapitate the Zelensky government, knock out the political leadership, then there will be an outpouring of pro-Russian sentiment by the rest of Ukrainian society,” said Andrea Kendall-Taylor, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security.


Russia got Ukraine wrong “because this was totally a Putin-directed operation,” said a U.S. official who specializes in Russia and like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive information.


Putin, the official said, “is as convinced as anyone can be of his truths.”

‘An enormous amount of arrogance’


The assumption of a quick Ukrainian government collapse undergirded the invasion, according to Ukrainian, U.S. and European officials. In the early days of the war, Russian state news already began promoting the notion that Zelensky had fled, even as he posted videos from Kyiv.

Putin had witnessed a rapid collapse of the Ukrainian government when former president Viktor Yanukovych decamped to Russia in 2014. According to Zygar, Putin shouted at Yanukovych not to leave Kyiv and described him as a “cowardly piece of s---” when he fled the capital in response to a pro-Western uprising. Those events may have led Putin to imagine a similar scenario with Zelensky.


Putin’s misconception about Ukrainian weakness was paired with a swaggering view of Russian power. He famously boasted to a top European official in late 2014 that he could easily seize Kyiv “in two weeks” if he desired — a misconception he appeared to continue believing until he attempted to do so.


“He has an unwavering belief in his ability to control events,” a senior NATO intelligence official said.


Perhaps no moment underscored the level of misconception more than the attempt by elite Russian paratroopers at the outset of the invasion to land at the Hostomel cargo airport northwest of Kyiv — apparently with the intention of sweeping breezily into the Ukrainian capital.


“Just looking at how this played out, it feels there was an enormous amount of arrogance,” a European official said. “You look at the insertion of the airborne forces at Hostomel airport, which was clearly designed to do a decapitation [mission] in Kyiv — and they got smashed.”


Battles may be tougher for Ukrainians as war shifts to wide-open terrain in east
Alexander Gabuev, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Moscow Center, said the Russian leadership doesn’t see Ukraine, a place once controlled by Moscow, as deserving of rigorous study.


“There was this false sense of familiarity,” Gabuev said. “That’s what Russia completely misunderstood.”


Once the assumptions proved false, Russia’s military proved unable to regroup, saddled by fuel, ammunition, transport, food and other logistics problems, as well as demoralized soldiers who hadn’t been told they were about to fight a war.


“If the initial plan is bad and none of the other preparation is there, there’s no durability,” Rand Corp. senior defense analyst Scott Boston said.


Where Russia relies primarily on its foreign intelligence service, the SVR, to collect information about countries such as the United States and China, when it comes to countries in the “near abroad” including Ukraine, Moscow enlists the FSB, primarily a domestic intelligence service.


Andrei Soldatov, a Russian journalist who specializes in Russian intelligence, said the FSB regularly failed to understand the popular and grass-roots movements fundamental to Ukraine’s political culture.


U.S. and European officials said Russia’s poor performance in the initial stages of the war has led to a bad blood between the Russian military and intelligence establishments and a serious search for scapegoats.


What exactly Russian intelligence was reporting to Putin regarding Ukraine before the war is unclear, but multiple U.S. and European officials said Putin’s immediate advisers had shown an unwillingness to give the Russian president information that challenged his assumptions. Individuals lower down in Russia’s security establishment thought the invasion was ill-conceived but their concerns didn’t reach the top, the officials said.


In U.S. and European intelligence circles, the FSB’s reputation stands in contrast to the ruthless, cunning reputation of its predecessor, the KGB. Several current and former officials described the Russian security service as rife with corruption, beset by bureaucratic bloat and ultimately out of touch.


A Ukrainian intelligence official said the FSB had spent millions recruiting a network of pro-Russian collaborators who ultimately told Putin and his top advisers, among them the current FSB director, what they wanted to hear: The central government in Kyiv wouldn’t hold and resistance would collapse.


The official singled out pro-Russian politician Viktor Medvedchuk, who made Putin the godfather of his daughter, as a significant source of misleading information. Medvedchuk, a Ukrainian politician who has long promoted Russian interests, was charged with treason last year but allegedly escaped house arrest in the days after the invasion.


European officials said the Kremlin was also getting information from out-of-touch former elites associated with Yanukovych, who, like Medvedchuk, stood to gain from a Russian power grab. In the weeks before the invasion, the British government warned that Russian intelligence was plotting with Yanukovych’s former prime minister, chief of staff and deputy prime minister.


Regardless of the information stream, Putin believes himself to be the biggest expert on Ukraine, Soldatov said, noting the tendency of Russian officials to assume they understand Ukraine.


“This level of chauvinism — you can see it everywhere,” Soldatov said. “It’s a direct legacy of this unfortunate imperial past.”

MSN

The Russian generals are under enormous pressure from the Kremlin to finally show successes by May 9 – the “Day of Victory” over Nazi Germany and, according to Putin, the most important holiday in his country. In the time window up to then, Ukraine could strike decisive blows against the Russians with Western help.
U.S. General Ben Hodges

Finland, Sweden Set to Join NATO as Soon as Summer - the Times

Russia has made a "massive strategic blunder" as Finland and Sweden look poised to join NATO as early as the summer, The Times reported on Monday, citing officials.


The United States officials said that NATO membership for both Nordic countries was "a topic of conversation and multiple sessions" during talks between the alliance's foreign ministers last week attended by Sweden and Finland, report added.

Finland, Sweden Set to Join NATO as Soon as Summer - the Times | World News | US News

Russian Railroad Near Ukraine Border Destroyed – Governor

A stretch of Russian railroad near the Ukrainian border was destroyed on Tuesday morning, the region’s governor announced.


The destroyed railroad comes after several Russian border regions including Belgorod raised their “terror” threat level to “yellow,” the second-highest in a three-tier system, as Russia’s nearly seven-week invasion of Ukraine shifts its focus toward eastern Ukraine.


No one was killed or injured in the incident, Belgorod Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov wrote on the Telegram messaging app.


Gladkov did not specify what exactly destroyed the railway tracks along the Belgorod-Nezhegol line. He said a team of investigators has been deployed to the site to determine the cause.

Train passengers were evacuated and brought to their destinations by bus, Gladkov said, and a free bus service will transport locals until the train service is restored.


Citizens of the small town of Shebekino near the railroad reportedly heard explosions at 7 a.m.

Two hours later, kindergartens in Shebekino were evacuated due to a wave of bomb threats, the town mayor told the state-run RIA Novosti news agency.


Belgorod authorities announced the formation of “voluntary militia units” following the news.


Ukrainian military intelligence warned Tuesday that Russia could be planning to stage terror attacks on its own territory and blame them on Ukraine.


“It is quite possible that these attacks will be presented as the Ukrainians’ revenge for Bucha and Kramatorsk and as an excuse for cruelty toward the civilian population of Ukraine,” Major General Kirill Budanov said.

Earlier in April, Belgorod authorities accused Ukrainian helicopters of striking an oil depot on its territory, an incident the Kremlin said would hinder peace talks.

Russian Railroad Near Ukraine Border Destroyed – Governor - The Moscow Times

• Putin: West’s sanctions have ‘achieved certain results’ on Russian economy

Russian President Vladimir Putin said Tuesday that Western sanctions have “achieved certain results” in impacting the Russian economy but projected defiance about the Kremlin’s war in Ukraine.

The Russian leader said during a press conference that the U.S.-led global sanctions campaign is a “blitzkrieg” that has “achieved certain results” and said Moscow “had to increase the interest rate of the central bank to 20 percent” but that it had gone down in recent days, according to remarks translated by state-owned media outlet RT.

Global economists say that the Russian government is exercising creative technocratic skills to stabilize the Russian currency and economy amid an unprecedented campaign of sanctions, but that it is unlikely to be able to withstand a large-scale economic contraction in the long run.

Rachel Ziemba, a fellow at the Center for a New American Security, wrote in an article for Barron’s that “Russia’s seeming financial resilience, particularly when it comes to the ruble, is a kind of mirage.”

Former Russian Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin was quoted by state-owned media saying that the country’s economy is on track to contract by 10 percent in 2022, the biggest decline in gross domestic product since emerging from the Soviet Union in 1991, Reuters reported.

Putin, who made his remarks during a press conference alongside Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, also conceded that the Russian government needed “to allocate more resources … in the current situation” to support the economy, but touted working with countries that have not joined the U.S.-led sanctions regime.

“The economy will adapt to the new environment, make no mistake. If you can’t export to one country there’s always a third country. If you can buy something in one country, there is also a fourth country where you can get this, this is inevitable … a single country cannot dominate the world anymore.”

Putin also threatened the global food supply, criticizing Western nations stating that “if they cannot work with us effectively, there will not be enough food on the global markets.”

The United Nations and human rights groups have raised concerns that Russia’s fighting in Ukraine, combined with the sanctions, has interrupted global deliveries and increased the price of wheat and fertilizer and that impacts 1.2 billion people.

“These prices are continuing to grow and this is all attributable to the mistakes by the Western countries,” Putin complained.

“If our Western partners worsen the situation in financial terms, in terms of insurance and sea shipments, the situation will get worse, including for them. High prices on food and these problems will lead to hunger in many areas around the world and this will lead to more migration flows including towards Europe.”

• Russian Railways Becomes First Company to Default in the Country

A global financial committee has ruled Russian Railways has tumbled into default after the company failed to make interest payments on $268 million of bonds, due to Western sanctions that have stymied Russia's access to the global financial system.

The European section of the Credit Derivatives Determinations Committee ruled on Monday that the state-owned company had failed to make interest payments on the bonds due on March 14.

It made Russian Railways the first official corporate default in the country since the invasion of Ukraine began in late February.

The CDDC is a committee of financial institutions who meet to decide whether a company has defaulted. A ruling from the committee is a key step in allowing investors in credit-default swaps — contracts that act as insurance against defaults — to receive payouts.

Despite the ruling, Russian Railways argued in a statement on Tuesday that it had fulfilled its obligations on the Swiss franc bond worth $268 million, as it had tried to pay but had been blocked due to sanctions, Bloomberg reported.

The ability of Russia's companies and its government to pay their foreign-currency debts has been seriously curtailed by Western sanctions put in place after Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine on February 24.

The US and its allies have frozen the central bank out of the bulk of its roughly $600 billion of foreign currency reserves and directly sanctioned companies, including Russian Railways.

Last week, the US Treasury blocked the government from making dollar debt payments using accounts at American banks, further freezing the two countries' financial relationship.

Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, and Deutsche Bank were among the institutions to vote "yes" on the motion that Russian Railways had defaulted on its debts, CDDC documents show.

Russian Railways said in Swiss filings in March that it had tried to make the payments, but had been blocked due to "legal and regulatory compliance obligations within the correspondent banking network."

A similar debate is raging over whether the Russian government has entered default, after it attempted to make $650 billion of payments on two dollar bonds last week, but was blocked by the US Treasury.

The CDDC has been asked to rule on whether the Russian government itself is now in default. Russia still has 22 days remaining of a 30-day grace period in which to make the payment in dollars, although ratings agency S&P has said such an outcome is unlikely.

• Zelensky: ‘New mass graves are found’ almost daily in Ukraine

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky told Lithuania’s Parliament on Tuesday that “new mass graves are found” almost daily in his country, a statement that adds to the grim testimonials of violence experienced during the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

“In the liberated areas of Ukraine, work continues to record and investigate war crimes committed by the Russian Federation. Almost every day new mass graves are found. Evidence is being gathered. Thousands and thousands of victims,” Zelensky said in his address to Lithuanian lawmakers.

“Hundreds of cases of brutal torture. Human corpses are still found in manholes and basements. Tied up, mutilated bodies. There are villages, once quite large, which were left almost without inhabitants,” he continued.

Zelensky said that hundreds of allegations of rape have been recorded, even alleging that a baby had been raped by Russian forces.

“This is the Russian military. ‘Defender’ of children. This is a ‘special operation’ planned in Moscow. This is the story of the struggle for the ‘Russian world,’” Zelensky said, mocking Moscow. “This is what the Russian army and Russian paratroopers will now be associated with.”

Zelensky urged that the European Union take strong action against Russia in its sixth round of sanctions against the country.

“We must do everything necessary now in the sixth package of sanctions. The European Union can do that. And it must do that. It must include oil there. It must impose sanctions on Russian banks — on all of them, not part. No demonstrations needed,” Zelensky said.

“Specific deadlines must finally be set for each EU state in order to really abandon or at least significantly limit the consumption of Russian gas, oil, etc.”

Zelensky’s remarks come amid Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine, now in its second month. Zelensky and other Ukrainian officials have shared reports of atrocities in areas like central Bucha and the eastern cities of Kramatorsk and Mariupol.

Last week, Russian forces attacked a train station in Kramatorsk where civilians were being evacuated. The blast from the rocket attack killed and injured dozens of Ukrainians.

UNICEF Emergency Programmes Director Manuel Fontaine said on Monday that close to two-thirds of children in Ukraine alone have been displaced by conflict, which has created a humanitarian crisis.

Originally Posted by sabang

Not aware it ever happened in the UK, and certainly not Australia (except for the convicts).

Are you telling me there is no mandatory military service for young men in a case of war?

There has been a draft before as recently as 1972, for Vietnam- but no "my country is my prison" set up in Australia since it was a penal colony.

Originally Posted by sabang

Not aware it ever happened in the UK, and certainly not Australia (except for the convicts).

What are you on about? Both UK and Australia have had conscription. Conscription covers all males above a certain age. Selection or exemption happens at a stage after the conscription notice. Both UK and Australia prosecuted people who avoided conscription.

Originally Posted by sabang

Ukrainian border guards say they have prevented about 2200 men of conscript age from leaving the country, which has been forbidden since the start of the war.

Ukraine's border guard agency says about 2200 Ukrainian men of fighting age have been detained so far while trying to leave the country in violation of martial law.

The agency said on Sunday that some of them have used forged documents and others tried to bribe border guards to get out of the country.

It said some have been found dead while trying to cross the Carpathian mountains in adverse weather, without specifying the number.

Under martial law, Ukrainian men between 18 and 60 are barred from leaving the country so that they can be called up to fight.
Ukraine detains 2200 conscript-age men | 7NEWS

They bsnubbies of warfare.

And Russia is ready to tap into a few million residents with military experience in the last 5 years. Age limit is 50 years old. (From your earlier BBC quote)

Plus the Labour camps are teeming with disaffected individuals dreaming of Russian combat rations …..

If memory serves the UK ceased conscription in the 1960s. They since relied on anyone who completed less than 22 years service having a liability to complete 22 years if called up in an emergency. They also relied on calling up reserve from the TA.
I believe that has now also been abandoned with the much smaller standing volunteer armed forces being greatly reduced.

We have conscrption in Denmark.

All males will be called up in when 18 years.

Only a fraction gets taken though.


In the present frenzy more will be needed though.

All those billions worth of planned hardware procurements, doesn't drive themselves, you know

Originally Posted by Switch

If memory serves the UK ceased conscription in the 1960s. They since relied on anyone who completed less than 22 years service having a liability to complete 22 years if called up in an emergency. They also relied on calling up reserve from the TA.
I believe that has now also been abandoned with the much smaller standing volunteer armed forces being greatly reduced.

I was waiting a bit to let this sink in to our audience

But my question was???
Or in the case of the Ukraine???

When there is a war, especially being attacked by a war criminal. I don't think any country would let their young men leave their country.
A conscription in peace time is a different thing.

Where are our military experts?