Posted on 03/14/2022 8:22:41 PM PDT by FarCenter
Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered to refrain from storming Ukraine’s big cities for fear of great losses among civilians, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Monday.
Speaking at a press briefing in Moscow on Monday, Peskov said “nationalist units deploy tanks, artillery, rocket launchers in residential areas,” drawing the combat actions to these areas, but the Russian special operation was planned considering this circumstance.
Peskov blasted as “provocative” the remarks by US national security adviser Jake Sullivan and EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell, who alleged that Putin was “disappointed” about the lack of progress in capturing the big cities.
“The mentioned top officials of the US and the EU, apparently, are pushing Russia to storm major cities of Ukraine in order to hold our country responsible for the deaths of civilians. We believe that such a position is provocative.
“At the beginning of the operation, the Russian president did instruct the Defense Ministry to refrain from immediately storming large settlements, including Kyiv, due to the fact that armed nationalist formations are equipping firing points, placing heavy military equipment directly in residential areas.
(Excerpt) Read more at yenisafak.com ...
Putin doesn’t have the forces to take the big cities. Urban warfare is a meat grinder. He know his armor and troops will be slaughtered. He has to complete operations by the thaw and spring rains.
Someone is LYING, and given the record of our side, particularly Jake Sullivan...
I’ll leave it at that.
Russian forces have kept up their relentless bombardment of Ukraine’s major cities as the number of people fleeing the country neared 3 million, with the Red Cross describing conditions for those left behind as “nothing short of a nightmare.”As Russian airstrikes and artillery fire continued to pound residential areas across the country, Ukrainian prosecutors said 90 children had now died in the conflict. The UN said it had confirmed 636 civilian deaths, but the real toll would be much higher.
UN data also showed that more than 2.8 million civilians had fled the onslaught since it began on 24 February, with millions more internally displaced. EU officials have said 5 million people may end up fleeing abroad and others have put the figure higher.
Sour grapes.
This war is weird....the 40 mile truck convoy makes no sense on either side
If Putin was was so hot and heavy to Slaughter Ukraine... why would he have then just sit there... but the flip side why we’re the Ukranian not riping the hell out of these Russian just sitting there
For all the talk of the Vicious Russians and the Ferocious Ukrainian defense these two sides sure do tiptoe around each other a lot
It sounds like the Russian going light and slow and the Ukrainian forces being not that Ferocious
You should see the record of the other side.
How bout everyone is
“You should see the record of the other side.”
Actually I don’t know the record of the other side, since about everything reported is quickly debunked.
“How bout everyone is”
Time will tell.
“these two sides sure do tiptoe around each other a lot”
The “experts” can’t figure it out because they prefer name calling and finger pointing and because they don’t actually know ^%$#.
“these two sides sure do tiptoe around each other a lot”
The “experts” can’t figure it out because they prefer name calling and finger pointing and because they don’t actually know ^%$#.
I imagine that Putin is amused by the chattering of the JoeLitburo’s flying monkeys like Jake.
Oh, how kind of him and the Kremlin...to put out this propaganda.
I keep wondering if Putin wins he’s got a messed up country on his hands. How is he going to make them submit to his will? They already show they are adamantly opposed to it and he has created such resentment they may be a difficult people to control.
Russians don't want / can't enter the cities. Their army isn't that big and they don't want to flatten the cities to take them. Logistics over such a large country is difficult. Ukraine's army is the product of a corrupt and divided government, kept alive by USA weapons, prodding and propaganda. Its main force in Donbas is already surrounded. No news is coming out of there
Its like two drunks circling each other
And his stated purpose was to demilitarize and denazify Ukraine. So going into the cities isn’t a big part of that.
In any case, the spring thaw is not as big of a deal as you say.
In 2014 Kiev launched the attacks on Donbass and Lugansk through April, May, and on through the summer.
Hitler’s Germany launched their attack on June 22nd.
The “general mud” theory is severely overstated.
Why do you always omit the Russian attacks against the Ukraine in the Donbass regions during 2014 and 2015?
This is why you see pauses and resumptions of Russian advances. Occasionally the Ukrainians force them to retreat or cut off supply lines.
The Ukrainians are also fighting very smart. They never seek open combat against superior Russian numbers, nor do they try to hold big perimeters. They wait for big masses of Russian equipment to split up and attack them in detail. If the Russians try a big mass of vehicles to attack in a single column, they're sitting ducks. The Ukrainains also seem to have very good intel on Russian positions and often seem to be able to hammer Russian command posts.
The Russians pound the crap out of Ukrainian cities because that's all they can do: no precision munitions nor even apparently much effective artillery. So they use area bombardment against a enemy dispersed in small units over a wide area, which fails.
Then the block-by-block slog begins again.
Russian morale or aggressiveness seems poor as does the training. The Ukrainians may be poorly trained but they have the advantage of knowing the terrain and are fighting for their own homes, sometimes literally.
I read about a possible first today: a Ukrainian was dragged to his local gun club to try to force him to cough up the list of firearm owners. He blew himself up along with some of his captors with a grenade. Look for more of this and IEDs if this drags on.
I think Putin must have expected Ukraine to beg for peace on his terms so that he could annex the three disputed enclaves and neutralize Ukraine — the desire to install a puppet government was the ultimate goal but even if that had to be taken off the table, Ukraine is holding out on accepting the other terms. Putin has no actual reason to maintain forces in portions of Ukraine not part of the three enclaves so he is inching forward to keep the pressure on Kiev to settle with him on his terms. Sooner or later the international community will start to get nervous about escalation and put enough pressure on Ukraine to settle that it will happen, and this will end. In any case, I don’t think NATO itself ever wanted to include Ukraine, that would only make sense if they could include Russia and Belarus at the same time, which in the world to come might be a smart move on everybody’s part. China and global Islam are forces that are not friendly to Russia long-term and Russia has nothing much to fear from the NATO partners militarily, the disputes are cultural and social. Being part of a military alliance does not commit you to sharing those values if you don’t wish to do so, and who knows, this might be high-water mark for woke socialism in the west and the pendulum might swing back.
We should have gotten Russia more firmly into the western camp back around 2000 when the opportunity was there. This war is partly a symptom of that failure although nothing really excuses the blatant violations of international law. Putin has some time to pull back from the brink on this, and actually we caught a break with Biden in one way, a guy who can do nothing is probably exactly what we want in this particular situation, if not in most others. If we do nothing we can’t make a fatal miscalculation, so long as total annexation of Ukraine is not on the table, and if it is, then what would anyone have ever done to stop that? There is no point in saying “we won’t stand for this” if in fact we will sit for it.
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