Posted on 10/05/2022 9:48:59 AM PDT by Timber Rattler
Hi.
I don’t know either. Propaganda out the ying yang from both sides. And imho both leaders are corrupt.
Just like Congress and the alphabet agencies.
From a military standpoint it seems like Russia wasn’t prepared for a long term conflict. To wit:
Poorly trained and equiped consripts
No NCO cadre
Logistics failures too numerous to list
No combined arms doctrine or tactics
Absolutely no battle space management.
The whole thing is a charlie foxtrot.
5.56mm
Prigozhin and Kadyrov laying the foundations for a coup.
Sorry, avoiding war was worth entertaining
[Sorry, avoiding war was worth entertaining]
Putin just arrested Prigozhin’s top media guy. Brutal arrest by Spetnaz, not FSB. Civil war is coming.
That wasn’t needed, we weren’t in this situation till Putin crossed that border
Putin just arrested Prigozhin’s top media guy. Brutal arrest by Spetnaz, not FSB. Civil war is coming.
[Putin just arrested Prigozhin’s top media guy. Brutal arrest by Spetnaz, not FSB. Civil war is coming.]
Prigozhin is working with Kadyrov and they can destabilize the ethnic territories in a minute. Don’t be surprised if FSB is on Prigozhin’s side after Putin threw them under the bus for botching the pre war intelligence.
Putin and those around him conceived of the Russo-Ukrainian War in existential terms from the very beginning. It is unlikely, however, that most Russians understood this. Instead, they likely viewed the war the same way Americans viewed the war in Iraq and Ukraine - as a justified military enterprise that was nevertheless merely a technocratic task for the professional military; hardly a matter of life and death for the nation. I highly doubt that any American ever believed that the fate of the nation hinged on the war in Afghanistan (Americans have not fought an existential war since 1865), and judging by the recruitment crisis plaguing the American military, it does not seem like anyone perceives a genuine foreign existential threat.
What has happened in the months since February 24 is rather remarkable. The existential war for the Russian nation has been incarnated and made real for Russian citizens. Sanctions and anti-Russian propaganda - demonizing the entire nation as “orcs” - has rallied even initially skeptical Russians behind the war, and Putin’s approval rating has soared. A core western assumption, that Russians would turn on the government, has reversed. Videos showing the torture of Russian POWs by frothing Ukrainians, of Ukrainian soldiers calling Russian mothers to mockingly tell them their sons are dead, of Russian children killed by shelling in Donetsk, have served to validate Putin’s implicit claim that Ukraine is a demon possessed state that must be exorcised with high explosives. Amidst all of this - helpfully, from the perspective of Alexander Dugin and his neophytes - American pseudo-intellectual “Blue Checks” have publicly drooled over the prospect of “decolonizing and demilitarizing” Russia, which plainly entails the dismemberment of the Russian state and the partitioning of its territory. The government of Ukraine (in now deleted tweets) publicly claimed that Russians are prone to barbarism because they are a mongrel race with Asiatic blood mixing.
Simultaneously, Putin has moved towards - and ultimately achieved - his project of formal annexation of Ukraine’s old eastern rim. This has also legally transformed the war into an existential struggle. Further Ukrainian advances in the east are now, in the eyes of the Russian state, an assault on sovereign Russian territory and an attempt to destroy the integrity of the Russian state. Recent polling shows that a supermajority of Russians support defending these new territories at any cost.
###
A political consensus for higher mobilization and greater intensity has been achieved. Now all that remains is the implementation of this consensus in the material world of fist and boot, bullet and shell, blood and iron.
###
Putin, very simply, could not have conducted a large scale mobilization at the onset of the war. He possessed neither a coercive mechanism nor the manifest threat to generate mass political support. Few Russians would have believed that there was some existential threat lurking in the shadow - they needed to be shown, and the west has not disappointed. Likewise, few Russians would likely have supported the obliteration of Ukrainian infrastructure and urban utilities in the opening days of the war. But now, the only vocal criticism of Putin within Russia is on the side of further escalation. The problem with Putin, from the Russian perspective, is that he has not gone far enough. In other words - mass politics have already moved ahead of the government, making mobilization and escalation politically trivial. Above all, we must remember that Clausewitz’s maxim remains true. The military situation is merely a subset of the political situation, and military mobilization is also political mobilization - a manifestation of society’s political participation in the state.
###
The other is the interpretation that I have advocated, that Russia is massing for a winter escalation and offensive, and is currently engaged in a calculated trade wherein they give up space in exchange for time and Ukrainian casualties. Russia continues to retreat where positions are either operationally compromised or faced with overwhelming Ukrainian numbers, but they are very careful to extract forces out of operational danger. In Lyman, where Ukraine threatened to encircle the garrison, Russia committed mobile reserves to unblock the village and secure the withdrawal of the garrison. Ukraine’s “encirclement” evaporated, and the Ukrainian interior ministry was bizarrely compelled to tweet (and then delete) video of destroyed civilian vehicles as “proof” that the Russian forces had been annihilated.
Russia will likely continue to pull back over the coming weeks, withdrawing units intact under their artillery and air umbrella, grinding down Ukrainian heavy equipment stocks and wearing away their manpower. Meanwhile, new equipment continues to congregate in Belgorod, Zaporizhia, and Crimea. My expectation remains the same: episodic Russian withdrawal until the front stabilizes roughly at the end of October, followed by an operational pause until the ground freezes, followed by escalation and a winter offensive by Russia once they have finished amassing sufficient units.
[Prigozhin is working with Kadyrov and they can destabilize the ethnic territories in a minute. Don’t be surprised if FSB is on Prigozhin’s side after Putin threw them under the bus for botching the pre war intelligence.]
Are you really that confused? All that money wasted during pandemic was spent on AMERICANS. 100 BILLION sent to Ukraine supports erotic homo dancer and Soros puppet Zelensky. Since we are more broke than most homeless people, with $31,000,000,000,000 in debt and climbing $3-4 Trillion every year, we can’t send Ukraine one dollar without borrowing it and adding to national debt.
We’ll see.
At this stage a white flag is hugely better than crash and burn as a bankrupt country.
[Are you really that confused? All that money wasted during pandemic was spent on AMERICANS. 100 BILLION sent to Ukraine supports erotic homo dancer and Soros puppet Zelensky. Since we are more broke than most homeless people, with $31,000,000,000,000 in debt and climbing $3-4 Trillion every year, we can’t send Ukraine one dollar without borrowing it and adding to national debt.]
If you think we’re more broke than most homeless people, maybe you should move back to a country that is presumably in better shape - India. Its culture and mores will be familiar to you, and you won’t have to worry about India going against your favorite country on earth (apart from India) - Russia.
[At this stage a white flag is hugely better than crash and burn as a bankrupt country.]
[We’ll see.]
Concur @ post 41 with your assessment.
I was shocked to see the number of trucks with blown tires on the side of the roads at the beginning of this “special operation” or whatever they are calling it this week. Internal reports from Russia pointed out that Putin had been upping the amount of money available for the Russian military to maintain equipment. Those tires were dry-rotted (not shot out as some dumb reporter claimed).
While its hard to decipher media coverage they did not fake those pictures or the interviews with farmers “fixing” large armored vehicles and taking them home.
There was also a story that seemed legit about an armored unit that reached their objective only to find out that the resupply column supporting them had broken down on the road. End result? They abandoned their armor because they were out of fuel. They did not even bother to destroy the tanks so the Ukrainians gained a bunch of armor with jerry cans of diesel.
Charlie Foxtrot indeed! FRegards
The Russian military is displaying all the disfunction and corruption of Russian society at large. I think it really is as simple as that. Russia is a basket case after 20 years of iron fisted rule by Putin and his chosen cronies.
A lot of instructors and top gun instructors used to go to the same bar as I did and they said the frustration with Arab pilots was that they saw appearing to want to learn, as being beneath their station, the pilots said culturally, Arabs had resistance to being good, eager, interested, students, even when it seemed some were secretly eager, it had to be hidden.
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