Posted on 03/17/2022 3:42:22 PM PDT by vmirog91
When I went through ROTC training we were were obviously taught to respect the numerical superiority of the Soviet bloc Armour units deployed across the Iron Curtain. But I remember some of our NCO instructors mentioned that Russian enlisted personnel lacked strong NCO guidance....that they were heavily dependent on top-down leadership. After all these years...this holds true today.
(Excerpt) Read more at wsj.com ...
You’re wasting breath on the cold warrior 2.0 crowd here
I’m still thoroughly ashamed of NATO’s savage brutality against the Serbs.
It’s so much easier to just turn on the TV and be told what to think than to do some research, educate yourself on an issue, and then think for yourself before forming an opinion. We apparently have a lot of lazy “intellectuals” on this site.
“Putin’s got a little man complex neurosis with the US. We did shock and awe in Iraq and had tanks in Baghdad’s center in a few days and he wanted to show they could do that too.”
Wouldn’t surprise me.
[Colonel Douglas MacGregor would disagree with your assessment, it appears. You might want to check out his latest comments about the war to educate yourself on the matter.]
Then there’s the issue of Russian corruption, which has eaten like a termite infestation through its stated equipment inventory and training schedule. Realistic training costs money and fuel.
If someone of MacGregor’s caliber were in charge of operations in Ukraine, Putin might already have won in Ukraine. Of course, if someone of that caliber were in charge, he might already have deposed Putin and taken the throne for himself. That’s why Putin is so wary - the robotically obedient underlings of the the West are not the pattern in Russia, or dictatorships in general.
Note that Beria was Stalin’s right-hand man *and* a fellow Georgian. And yet he is suspected to have poisoned Stalin.
Just as famously, Yeltsin was a member of the nomenklatura during Gorbachev’s rule. And yet he turfed Gorbachev first chance he got.
A Russian guy with MacGregor’s personality would never get to command the invasion of Ukraine. Too independent-minded in potentially dangerous ways for Putin.
So how do you know what you’re being told by the media is the truth? Unless you’re on the ground in both Ukraine and Russia, you can’t possibly know what the reality is. After 2 years of Covid mania, only a fool would think that the media’s goal is to report the facts.
[Putin’s poll numbers have gone up 10% since this operation started. Sounds like the Russian ppl support this. IJS...]
Estimates from active and retired NATO military on various forums are higher. The Biden number is conservative.
It is really that the Russians are using super-soldiers that that will just not stay dead. They need Darryl Dixon.
It’s been that way for my entire life (61 years this month) and before. Can’t imagine what my folks must’ve felt during the Cuban Missile Crisis, with a kid a year and a half old. But the distrust of each country for the other goes back over 100 years at this point in time. It cannot easily be turned around.
However, until very recently I thought that we had a shot at it; the simple fact is that we and Russia were quite friendly toward each other up until the Communists took over. They sold us Alaska, and you don’t do that with a country that you don’t trust. We leased them space in New Jersey to test their artillery with Dupont powder that was hauled from Delaware via rail line. We have common enemies in China and the radical Muslims, and we are both continent-sized powers with a very well educated, mostly white population. It would have been a long process, extending over probably two generations, but if we had the wisdom to start doing a few things together that didn’t require much risk on either side, we could have gradually built up enough trust to at least not be hostile toward each other, and possibly to become a natural allies that we should be now that Communism is gone. Clearly, that’s impossible at this point, especially with the genius Biden calling Putin a war criminal in public - how can you possibly deal with him now? Phucking idiot, he just dumped a bunch of poison down the well, ruining it forever. At this point, the only thing that can possibly bring us together is an alien invasion (and that ain’t bloody likely).
Just as an FYI, my paternal grandparents were born in what is now Ukraine (though they considered themselves Russian, as well as Jewish). The Communist bastards would have executed my grandfather if he didn’t escape from a battlefield where he was picking up their very numerous dead and wounded (because he knew too much just by being there, and because he was using one of the many horses and carts that his father owned that were stolen by them - IOW, great grandpa was a rich capitalist, whose entire family deserved death). He fled to an aunt’s house, got some money to go to America and some gold rubles to bribe guards where necessary - I have the one that hat he didn’t have to spend). He never saw his parents again, and some surviving siblings only once, on a trip back in 1969. That trip, btw, was when he found out that his father didn’t die in 1937 because he was sick (with cancer), but because the NKVD beat him to death for the “crime” of renting out part of his home to have money for food. They had not only taken his horses and carts, but 14 houses that he and his sons built themselves and he rented out, so when he was old and sick he had no income - in 1930’s Ukraine, just coming out of a Stalin-engineered famine. 3/4 of my great grandfather’s descendants were effectively held in a giant open-air prison for 3 generations. So you can probably see where my great love for Communism, it’s sister ideologies and all Leftists comes from.
Note that I have very mixed emotions about Ukraine - it has a long history of pretty severe anti-Semitism, and grandpa got his ass kicked a lot by groups of anti-Jewish kids (though he was proud that “I could always take care of 2 of them myself, but more than that was a problem”). Lots of Ukrainians helped the Germans identify and execute Jews (including some of my distant relatives). But today’s Ukrainians are not those of 80 or 110 years ago - they elected a Jew as their President with nearly a 75% majority. Plus, they’re just a bunch of people who wish to rule themselves…so how can one oppose that?
Thanks for the tip!
[Yes, Putin is a thug killer dictator like Xi,’Kim and the Ayatollahs but foremost a nationalist who will not be tolerated by the SorosSchwab WEF/NWO.]
It was Putin that took 18 year olds of the Russian working class and put them in 1970s tanks. Then he sent them in the direction of Kiev after lying about how they would be welcomed as liberators.
Only one man doing the killing here and that is Putin.
Just because Putin opposes the West does not mean he values working class Whites.
He sent those 18 year olds in as cannon fodder to soak up anti-tank missiles. He doesn’t want to send the expensive tanks in yet. So some poor farmer’s son is now dead because Putin doesn’t want the nifty tanks to get scratched.
What a guy. Reminds me of Hitler claiming to be pro-White and then starting a war by bombing White Christian women and children. In fact he did that earlier by letting the Luftwaffe practice in Spain.
Nothing says “I love your group” like indiscriminate killing.
Putin is a LOSER just like Hitler. A couple of losers that use the White working class as part of their death games. Losers that are just mad at the world for having subpar genitals.
How do you know the media’s reporting is not true? Do you think all of the videos and photographs of what is happening in Ukraine are made up? It is more of a stretch to believe that than to accept them at face value. Are Christian organizations like Samaritan’s Purse lying too?
You are an idiot.
Ukraine, all of it, west and east left the Soviet Union in 1991. Donetsk and Luhansk were overrun by thugs and criminals and when they were about to lose and be destroyed, Russia bailed them out. Putin wants a land route from Russia to Crimea at the very least. He’d like all of Ukraine, but that will NEVER happen.
I was in Ukraine just after Donetsk and Luhansk were given some level of autonomy. Ukraine at that time became virulently anti-Russian. Since that time, the military has been practicing and planning for a Russian invasion. The war in the East never ended, it has been an ongoing 8 year war.
Most people left Donetsk and Luhansk for other parts of Ukraine and others left for Russia. It is a shell of what it once was. As for it being ethnically Russian, that is where the Holodomir famine was forced on them by Stalin. After the Ukrainians starved to death ethnic Russians were forced to move there.
As for what to do with people that wish to be Russian? Send them to Russia. Same thing we should be doing with the illegal immigrants from Mexico and other latin and south American countries.
If you look seriously at the USSR and Russia (both before and after the Soviet era), there simply isn’t any history of a two-party political system (not one that really took hold anyway). Russia has a fascinating history is a very diverse country. When I was last in the Soviet Union in 1990, I had the opportunity to ride the train from St. Petersburg to Novgorod....to Moscow. Coming across the steppe and looked across the grasslands, I couldn’t help but think about our own American plains. They certainly look quite the same.
But Russia is several cultures and identities rolled into one federation. Stalin tried to make every single republic dependent on the other. It was smart for a communist country but after 70 plus years of Soviet control, those antiquated ideas retarded any real progress.
Indeed, some people claim that Europe ends at the Urals — whatever is situated to the East of the Urals isn’t truly European. St. Petersburg is arguably the most European city within all of Russia.
Ukraine has its own unique history and culture. In many ways it was the breadbasket of the old Soviet Union. It has its own proud military history. The fact that Ukraine is fighting hard should not be a surprise to anyone. The bloodiest fights are always those within the family. This is a slavic family after all.
But I get back to my original point. Russia simply has no background or cultural identity that lends itself to democracy. These are people who have been subjugated for centuries from the Tsar to Marxism/Leninism to whatever they are now. I doubt there is any Thomas Jefferson lingering in there (although I was once approached by someone in Moscow who wanted to talk about Locke, Hobbes, and Rousseau). He even threw in Adam Smith for good measure. As a parenthetical, remind me to tell you about the time we partied with St. Petersburg Police at high speeds in their police car while our passports where locked in the Intourist safe at the hotel. Good times.
You mean the 1994 to 1996 war in Chechnya that Russia lost?
There are a lot of images of dead soldiers. Most media outlets don't show them. You can find them if you look, but even the Ukrainians filming after battles tend to minimize images of dead Russians.
Ukraine has been fighting a war with Russia in the Donbass region since 2014. Many young men have done their military service during that time period, and a a good number of them have served in combat units.
There are an estimated 750,000 recent veterans in Ukraine, so finding people who have the knowledge and experience to serve in the military is not that hard.
That button would be useful to silence the posters who do nothing but regurgitate Putin's talking points and then when confronted with evidence claim it is fake.
Given the relatively small number of troops, the decision to do a broad front advance just made everything worse. It meant that they couldn't really get local superiority anywhere because they piecemealed out the limited troops they did have.
What made it even worse is that by attacking Ukraine from the north, south, and east, the Russians created incredibly long exterior lines for themselves. Impossible to quickly reinforce success, whereas the Ukrainians have much shorter interior lines to prevent breakthroughs. Add to that the spring muds making the shifting of forces even more difficult, and the Russians handicapped themselves right from the start.
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