Here we go again-Ukraine once again

[Catfish]

^ Thank you Commander Wallace, i would like to say the same to you

A lot of good information and videos here in this thread.

The Sun (yes i know lol, but..) posts this from 2 hours ago, not sure but.. Mariupol can fall every hour now, it needs help.
When this city falls Putin's troops will be on their way to the rest of Ukraine.

[Skybird]

Turkey claims there has been progress made at the negotiatiosn, with Russia claiming it wants to reduce its attacks on Kyiv and Chernihiv.

Earlier there were reports Moscow intends to shift its military focus away from Kyiv and towards the Donbass.

I believe it when I see it.

Also, neutrality of the Ukraine, possible EU membership, but no NATO membership, no denazification LOL, and no disarmament are reported to have been agreed on. Kyiv also seems to have accepted the reality that the Crimean is lost anyway, and forever. On the Donbass, Kyiv still seems to will to fight and try.

I believe these too when I see them.

It further gets reported when Abramovich met Putin earlier in March and handed over Ukraine's demands, Putin should have thrown a tantrum and yelled at Abramovich to deliver his answer: "I will destroy you!"


The G7 clearly said they will not pay in rubels for Russian oil and gas. A Kremlin spokesman said from fridfay on ther ecould be stops of any deliveries. - I say: Okay, bring it on.



German chancellor Scholz attracts plkent yof cricism and suspicipon from Eastern #Europpean head sof states for his handling of the German positiuon. He is accused, not only by these states, to not do everything thjat germany can do,m and to nbtentionally delay and put his foot on the brake. This led to recently the Ukraine loosing patience and buying weapons directly from Germany , with green econoym minister Habeck giving it the green light to go. Scholz was said to not like Habeck's decision. - I always said and still saY: Do not trust Scholz, he plays foul, and thats what he has done his whole career long. That he is also very arrogant and blasé ist just the cherry on top of the cream.



Politico has a piece, german media say, where the author mercilessly foots a bill with Moscow'suseful idiots in German politics, including Merkel, Steinmeier, Scholz, Merz. What I think of Merkel, everybody should knbow by now: the worst political desaster in German and European politics since 1933ff, and I say that since over one and a half decade.

[mapuc]

Danish TV made a huge mistake some days ago.

In a news issue from the war they showed a video clip of a helicopter being shut down.

The problem with this video was-it wasn't real. It was from the game armA 3. Danish TV had taken it directly from the Ukrainian MoD twitter profil, without checking it.

Markus

[Onkel Neal]

News is now reporting Nazi Russia is claiming they will "scale back near the capital"...

... probably out of pure necessity. Is that what we're calling a retreat these days?

Hopefully the negotiations can build a ceasefire.

[mapuc]

Originally Posted by Onkel Neal

News is now reporting Nazi Russia is claiming they will "scale back near the capital"...

... probably out of pure necessity. Is that what we're calling a retreat these days?

Hopefully the negotiations can build a ceasefire.

LOL I was thinking the same-What an excuse it's going terrible for them outside Kyiv. I also hope they will come an agreement and a ceasefire

Markus

[Otto Harkaman]

Repositioning troops. Find out where the fuel depots are and you have some idea of the next axis of advance.

[tmccarthy]

Originally Posted by Commander Wallace

We, the U.S certainly could have handled this much better than we did. There really isn't a lot we can do about this right now, though.

Sadly, I agree. The most important moment, trying to find a reasonable compromise for all sides, that could have prevented the destruction of Ukraine and loss of life has passed.

Personally, I'm hoping to catch up, understand this conflict and be ready before the next one, one of the now obvious many planned conflicts in our future. If we keep doing it this way I think eventually we are going to be ruined.

[Commander Wallace]

Originally Posted by tmccarthy

Sadly, I agree. The most important moment, trying to find a reasonable compromise for all sides, that could have prevented the destruction of Ukraine and loss of life has passed.

Personally, I'm hoping to catch up, understand this conflict and be ready before the next one, one of the now obvious many planned conflicts in our future. If we keep doing it this way I think eventually we are going to be ruined.

With much regret, I share your views on how horrific and stupid the attack on the Ukraine was and remains. The Ukraine, much like other European countries after war, can and will be rebuilt. The loss of life of course can't be replaced. Nothing good or of any consequence will come from this stupid war.

I will take this time to say thank you, Tim for the great information and insight you have presented in this thread and others including those regarding the Ukraine. Other Subsim members including Catfish, Aktung, Markus, Jim, Neal and many others have presented great information and video's. I and I'm sure many others have gained some terrific insight into this war from your efforts and those of our other Subsim members who have posted. Certainly, we all have more to think about.

[August]

Originally Posted by Gorpet

Who in the hell is tucker carlson?

Apparently he's somebody that Catfish thinks has unapproved opinions.

[Skybird]

Excursion.


Mikhail Shishkin was born in Moscow in 1961 and is one of the most important contemporary Russian authors. He studied German and English at the Moscow State Pedagogical University, where he received military training as a translator. Shishkin has lived in Switzerland since 1995 and has been critical of Vladimir Putin's policies for years.
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Starving, suffering, fleeing: Putin's army is a slave school

Ukrainians know what they are fighting for. Do Russian soldiers know? In my time as a Soviet officer I learned: the good recruit first gives up his human dignity.

The war plan of the Russian General Staff foresaw that NATO would not interfere with its forces in the so-called liberation of Ukraine. Why should the world end in nuclear inferno because of some Mariupol? This calculation worked out. There would be no no-fly zone in Ukrainian skies either.

The U.S. intelligence agencies, in turn, knew exactly how many tanks, fighter planes and missiles Russia had. They assumed that Ukraine would be defeated after a few days. In this respect, the Americans miscalculated. The war is not decided by tanks, but by soldiers.

The Russian army has failed. Ukrainians know what they are fighting for. Do the Russian soldiers know it?

Russia's army is still an army of the hungry

Russia is losing the war in Ukraine. Russian soldiers abandon their tanks out of fear and flee. The offensive is stuck, soldiers are demotivated, lack fuel, lack food. A glaring example of the desolate state of the Russian army is its rations.
Live on your cell phone Get all the latest news on the Russian attack on Ukraine with the Tagesspiegel app. Download it here for IOS and Android.

The whole world was amazed to see pictures of 2015 expired field rations that killed and captured soldiers carried on them. Putin's army has to maraud in order not to starve. All this says that the new army of Russia has remained the old Soviet army, the army of the hungry.

I graduated from the military training as a military translator at the Moscow Pedagogical College. I am an officer of the Soviet Army, a lieutenant of the reserve. I will never forget reading in the military camp in Kovrov at the swearing-in ceremony: "I swear to defend my socialist fatherland to the last drop of blood." Thereupon I kissed the flag, it smelled of smoked fish. Our commanders had drunk beer, eaten fish with it and then rubbed their hands on the flag.

The food in the military was miserable, incessantly gruel and an indefinable swill, so that we always ran around with a growling stomach and on Sundays committed raids on the nearest village. There we stole vegetables from the gardens, shook apples from the trees and almost all got diarrhea from it.

Kitchen duty was very popular, it was considered a feast, because we could eat as much as we wanted. When we opened the tins of stewed meat in the kitchen, we secretly ate half of it ourselves. The other half went to the officers' table. For the common soldiers there remained only porridge without meat. No one was offended by this, no one thought it base to steal the food from the other's bowl, after all, everyone did it when it was their turn at kitchen duty.

Each army reflects the quintessence of the social order. The Russian army plays an important social role in the country, it is a focal point for Éducation sentimentale. And the Russian army was and remains a school of slaves.

The deeper meaning of military service lies in the "non-regulatory rules of conduct," those unbreakable, unwritten army laws called dedovshchina. A soldier's position in the social hierarchy depends on the amount of time he has served. The older soldiers have virtually unlimited power over the new recruits and take advantage of it by forcing the recruits to perform heavy labor on a daily basis.

The good recruit first lets go of his human dignity

If you want to survive as a recruit, you must first become a slave, let your human dignity ride. Later, you go from being a slave to a master, and now it's your turn to beat the new recruits, to piss in their boots, to make them eat a slice of bread smeared with shoe polish, to take away the food sent to them from home.

Most Russian men complete this slave training and carry the acquired skills and abilities into each family. The brutality in everyday conflicts in my country is frightening. Tolerance is virtually unheard of.

In its 2006 report on the "Situation of the Russian Armed Forces," the Konrad Adenauer Foundation published the following figures: About 130,000 criminal offenses were committed annually. Criminal proceedings were initiated against 15,700 soldiers and officers, and 15,000 of them were convicted.

More than a thousand soldiers and officers received prison sentences for the theft of weapons, technology, equipment and financial resources. Physical violence accounted for 40 percent of all crimes. An average of 88 soldiers and officers died monthly (in peacetime!), making 1064 soldiers annually, 276 of them by suicide and 16 by physical abuse of superiors and other soldiers.

These were the figures from open sources. Later, Putin's army reform began. In recent years, such data were kept secret, according to the opposition Novaya Gazeta. The Minister of Defense swore several times that Dedovshchina had been eradicated in the army. That it is not so, testifies regular media reports about soldiers shooting and fleeing their so-called brothers in arms.

To be fair, it must be said that the army in Russia also plays a civilizing role. On February 15, 2006, then Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov told the Duma: "Many draftees see a toilet bowl, a toothbrush and three meals a day for the first time in their lives. Therefore, it is not easy to educate such soldiers."

Now this Russian generation also has its war

Who said that every generation needs its war? In Russia, it's true. Two friends of mine fell in Afghanistan. The next generation had to participate in the wars in Chechnya. Countless reports from veterans present the same picture of the Russian army: Hunger and corruption. It was common for commanders to sell weapons and information to Chechen rebels, in other words, the lives of their own soldiers.

The well-known journalist Arkady Babchenko, who himself had fought in Chechnya, formulated the now-famous principle of soldier morale in the Russian army: "Your homeland will always let you down, son, always."

Now the next generation has its war. The image of the reformed, modern, combat-ready army proved to be a self-deception of Putin's propaganda. If the whole criminal regime was based on the corruption and embezzlement of state funds, it was primarily related to the immense expenses for the reforms and re-equipment of the army.

The opaque practices of money allocation brought down all attempts at reform. Even the horrendous military expenditures could not change the critical state of affairs. The embarrassment of the defense industry became famous when a new-generation Armata T-14 tank broke down during the military parade in Red Square in May 2015 and had to be towed away. Production of this new development stalled. Moreover, much of the equipment is outdated and dates back to the Soviet era.

As for warfare in Ukraine, the same tried-and-true tactics apply to the Russian army as in all previous wars: tirelessly firing masses of soldiers. Russia has an advantage that the entire civilized world is deprived of: Putin does not care how many thousands or tens of thousands of soldiers he sacrifices in Ukraine. The famous "victory marshal" Georgy Zhukov put it most clearly: "Never mind. Russian women will give birth to even more soldiers."

Putin rejected the ICRC's offer to transfer the bodies of Russian soldiers from Ukraine to Russia. That's all you need to know about relations between power and the rank and file in my country.

Just when I was thinking how to conclude this text about the Russian army and its soldiers, my son came and asked, "Dad, why was a Greek foot soldier on the battlefield stronger than a dozen mercenaries of the Persian king?" I answered, "He was a free citizen defending his freedom, and these were slaves."



Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Der Tagesspiegel
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

[Skybird]

[Catfish]

^^ re NZZ: good article (imho )

[Onkel Neal]

Good article. Corruption weakens everything.

Originally Posted by Skybird

The well-known journalist Arkady Babchenko, who himself had fought in Chechnya, formulated the now-famous principle of soldier morale in the Russian army: "Your homeland will always let you down, son, always."

A little more about Arkady Babchenko: Russian journalist 'back from the dead'

Ukraine staged the murder of a Russian dissident journalist in Kiev in what it said was a sting operation to foil a Russian assassination plot.

[Skybird]

Tagesspiegel on the economics of gas-threats and counter-threats:

An end to Russian gas supplies "hits Vladimir Putin harder than the West. And presents him with even greater problems than Germany." So says Andreas Goldthau, an energy expert and professor of public policy at the Willy Brandt School at the University of Erfurt.

And indeed, Putin softened his demand on Wednesday. Deliveries and payment in rubles are separate processes, he says.

First, he said, gas production from classic natural gas fields cannot be stopped overnight. Second, more than 40 percent of Russian state revenues come from energy sales.

Third, Putin can only use these revenues to cushion the economic losses caused by Western sanctions. His regime faces the threat of social destabilization if revenues fail to materialize as a result of the dispute over whether to pay in rubles or dollars.

Technically, a supply freeze is possible, Goldthau says. But Russia cannot stop natural gas production immediately, as would be possible with fracking.

"You can't just close a field that produces natural gas. It takes time to shut down production."

However, the loss of revenue is the even bigger problem for Putin, Goldthau analyzes. The diverse taxation of profits from energy production and sales is the central source of revenue for the Russian state. Putin depends on it to secure his rule.

Putin's shattered dream: Yesterday's friends
New negotiations in Turkey: Ukraine is threatened with dismemberment
The onslaught has already lasted four weeks. Long war of attrition looms - how can the West help?
Putin will stop at little. How far can NATO go without risking a world war?

"It's less about the ongoing financing of the war in Ukraine. It's more about the Russian economy, which is suffering badly from the sanctions, and the social consequences," says Goldthau. Whether the revenues flow or stay away "has direct effects on the stability of the government. This directly affects the leadership circle around Putin."

Germany can go into debt to make up for revenue losses, he says. "It has an excellent credit rating." Russia cannot, "its debt instruments are worth nothing." Now, if foreign exchange revenue fails to materialize, "Russia will hit itself harder than the West."
Putin tries to punch above his weight class

Putin's stipulation that he demands payment in rubles is "nonsensical" in this respect, Goldthau says. But there, he says, a "game of chicken" has been brewing, including the question: Who will give in first? "Both sides say: we won't."

From a purely economic standpoint, Germany and the West are more likely to be able to pull off this bet than Russia. Politically, however, governments in democracies can sometimes expect less from their citizens than autocratic regimes.

"The EU has an annual economic power of $16 trillion, Germany alone $3.8 trillion, Russia only $1.5 trillion," Goldthau argues. "It affords a military that it really can't afford. Putin is trying to punch above his weight class."

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)


Meanwhile German growth prediciotn for this year was corrected from 4.6 down to 1.8%, and I predict it will drop further. Also, the official inflation rate has been corrected upwards to 7.3%, and that is - official inflation rates always are - already a beautifed value, the real inflation is significantly higher. I expected it already before the war to be in the two digit range, and it certainly is. It will not stay at the current status, but rise further. And it wil stay for long time, small fluctuations up and down not counted. The danger of a wages-price spiral upwards is so real now that it most likely will not be avoided.

The days of wine and roses laugh and run away like a child at play

Through a meadow land toward a closing door
A door marked "nevermore" that wasn't there before

[mapuc]

Skybird wrote
"Putin's shattered dream: Yesterday's friends
New negotiations in Turkey: Ukraine is threatened with dismemberment
The onslaught has already lasted four weeks. Long war of attrition looms - how can the West help?
Putin will stop at little. How far can NATO go without risking a world war? "

I say the economical sanction and other things we have imposed on Russia/Putin has pressed him up in a corner. The question is when will he start to bite ? When he does it's a question with what ? Chemical ? Nukes ? Biological ? Or will he increase the use of Thermobaric weapons ?

Markus