Steiner's counter attack will stop them.... 
“....appears....”
*shakeshead*
The P-mills and printing presses working overtime to grasp at straws.
All part of Putin’s piss-poor planning.
“When Steiner attacks, all will be well.”
@ 10 minutes. https://youtu.be/RrNt0lioLwA
These threads always devolve into ugliness and nasty. It is a shame.
This war is a tragic waste and there is blame on all sides from where I sit. That does not make me a fan of Putin so save your keyboard clicks.
Absent the tragedy I am beginning to rethink my objective assessment about the inevitable victory of Russia given their size and resources vs the Ukraine.
IF your soldiers refuse to fight it does not matter if you have a million men under arms. The will to fight is the foundation of any military action.
I don’t know that this is true and its difficult to decipher what is propaganda and what is real. I don’t think many people understand the apathy of the Russian people towards their leaders. The leaders are the oligarchs and they have become extremely wealthy. The people are dirt poor with few prospects and I don’t think they have much loyalty to the leaders.
If Putin can not sell his people on the idea that the Ukraine is a hill to die on AND that he and his administration are capable of prosecuting the war successfully then he has lost. What comes next might be far more dangerous because it will be hard for him to survive anything viewed as a “defeat”.
I don’t know if this is happening or maybe I am just flat out wrong, but that now seems to be the biggest question that will be answered in the coming weeks.
But has Biden admitted wasting $100,000,000,000, money we do not have and therefore the national got bigger by same amoun
“an elite Russian military intelligence unit may have lost up to three-quarters of its reconnaissance manpower in Ukraine.”
The Russian version of my old unit, this is cheering news.
“We are working on the assumption that the situation in the new territories will stabilise.”
I’m no expert but that doesn’t sound like a wise assumption during a war.
Steiner's counter attack will stop them....
Ukraine ping
Interesting video re a pre-arranged surrender of a BMP-3 posted by Igor Girkin:
https://nitter.net/GirkinGirkin/status/1577709040246947842
Not a huge gain, but the fact this vehicle is fueled, in running condition and presumably not booby-trapped is a plus for the sappers and mechanics charged with checking out abandoned Russian equipment.
Note: The nitter.net link basically vacuums up twitter content without the slow twitter load time and requirement for a twitter account for certain content.
When you look at a map of Ukraine and ask yourself “what would MacArthur do?”, straight south out of Zaporizhzhia to Melitolpol, seems pretty obvious.
Lobbing HHIMARs in the direction of the Kerch bridge along the advance, so the thousands fleeing Crimea would see the splashes get closer and closer as they are stuck in a traffic jam.
Second, let me tell you what I think is going on with the Russian Special Military Operation in Ukraine. Let me start with Captain Obvious–Russia is grudgingly giving up territory in Kharkov, Donetsk and Kherson, but is avoiding set piece battles. What do I mean? Consider what happened at Liman, for example. Five hundred Russian allied troops help off over 6000 Ukrainians for more than a week and then conducted a tactical retreat. It is true that Ukraine has deployed more forces to these areas than the Russians. But Russia, through its superior fire power with artillery and combat air, slows these attacks and inflicts heavy casualties on the Ukrainians in terms of men and equipment. At the same time, Russia is suffering minimal casualties. This certainly is a break with the sad tradition Soviet troops established in World War II. Millions of Soviet soldiers were killed and wounded in the battles of Kursk and Bagration, for example. Conserving force was not a priority then, but it is now.
The United States and NATO are having a field day with these events, touting these successes as “proof” that Russian troops are poorly led, poorly supplied and lacking motivation. But that is having little effect in rallying public support in the United States and Europe. That lackluster support among the general populace will fade even more in the coming months as inflation, unemployment and recession escalate in those nations. Ukraine capturing a city that most Americans cannot spell is not a recipe for whipping up public support among Americans for sending more billions of dollars to Kiev while prices at home soar and the economy grinds to a halt.
Ukraine’s so-called victories are illusory. Yes, they are occupying territory once held by Russia but they are doing so without the benefit of air support and minimal artillery fires. Ukraine is relying on attacking lightly manned Russian positions with a larger force. This comes at a great cost however, in the loss of men and material that Ukraine cannot easily nor quickly replace. Every country in a war suffers casualties. This means a country at war must have a system in place to call up reserves, train them, equip them and deploy them. Ukraine is outnumbered dramatically by Russia on this count. If (or when) the “Special Military Operation” is finally acknowledged as a war by Russia’s leaders, Putin and his generals have far greater human resources at their command. The current Russian special mobilization is calling back to duty experienced soldiers.
Ukraine does not have a secure training facility where it can assemble and train new recruits because Russia has demonstrated repeatedly over the last 7 months the ability and willingness to attack and destroy those centers. That means Ukraine must rely on one or more NATO countries to host a training base. Even with a secure training base someplace in Europe, new Ukrainian recruits will need a minimum of three months of instruction before they are minimally prepared to go to the front to replace lost personnel. I do not believe that Europe has the capability or the will to host 200,000 new Ukrainian recruits. In short, Ukraine has no real chance of replacing the troops already lost in the front lines.
The training requirements for the Russian reservists called back to duty is far less daunting. The Russian soldiers already know how to wear a uniform, march in formation, maneuver as a unit, clean and operate their weapons, and communicate within a chain of command.
The biggest disadvantage for Ukraine is its lack of an economic base to fund the war and to produce the weapons, vehicles, food and medical supplies required to sustain an army in the field. Ukraine is now entirely dependent on the United States and NATO. Those lines of communication must remain open and flowing. Otherwise, their soldiers will be left defenseless in the field.
Russia, by contrast, has a robust economy that is producing all that its army and air force requires to operate. Its factories are operating 24-7 and it is quite competent, despite western propaganda stating otherwise, to move needed troops, tanks, munitions and vehicles to the front.
The west is betting all on the belief that Russia–its leaders, its government bureaucracy and its economy–is a paper tiger that will crumble if only enough pressure is applied. That is a dangerous and risky wager. While Russia is not a utopia, it has invested its capital over the last 20 years in building up its infrastructure, developing modern, cost effective weapons systems and educating its population to a standard that surpasses anything offered by the United States or Europe. Most importantly, it has vast natural resources and minerals and the industrial capability to extract them and manufacture what it needs to fight.
The United States, by contrast, has burned up billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars in fruitless military adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan while American infrastructure deteriorates, its industrial capacity is hollowed out, it is dependent on foreign imports of critical materials to produce key weapon systems and its educational system is in shambles. More time is devoted in U.S. schools, it appears, to learning proper pronouns rather than learning math, biology, chemistry, physics and foreign languages. The recently announced failure of the U.S. Army to meet its recruitment goals (25% below the target) is not an aberration. It is a symptom of societal failure in the west.
So what is Russia waiting for? On paper, it has the full capability to crush Ukraine. I am certain that the events of the last seven months have convinced the Russian leaders and civilians that they face an existential crisis from the west. I believe that Putin’s decision to return the four Ukrainian oblasts to the Russian Federation was not made in desperation. Putin, so far, has shown no sign of panic or alarm. I have seen no evidence to suggest that he is out of touch with reality. Instead, he has worked methodically to shore up relations with China, India and the Gulf States. He realizes he can no longer rely on any hope of a working relationship with the United States and Europe. it appears that the referenda process, which culminated on Tuesday with the acceptance of Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporhyzhia as new members of the Russian Federation, now paves the way for Russia to invoke the defense protocols of the CSTO. That means additional troops from allied countries like Belarusia can join the fight if needed.
It very much reminds me of a game of chess. Russia is now sacrificing pawns in the form of strategically useless territory, while Ukraine is rushing forward to seize symbolic territory without having the necessary reserves in terms of trained soldiers and equipment to sustain the attack and defeat Russia. Russia, meanwhile, is moving its Knights, Rooks and Bishops into position for checkmate. The question remains–what is Putin’s gambit?
Prigozhin and Kadyrov laying the foundations for a coup.
Putin just arrested Prigozhin’s top media guy. Brutal arrest by Spetnaz, not FSB. Civil war is coming.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.