Here we go again-Ukraine once again

[Onkel Neal]

I hope this isn't accurate, but it's crazy scary to think Putin is this effectively strategic.


What if Putin Didn’t Miscalculate?
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/29/o...war-putin.html

The conventional wisdom is that Vladimir Putin catastrophically miscalculated.

“Under the guise of an invasion, Putin is executing an enormous heist,” said Canadian energy expert David Knight Legg. As for what’s left of a mostly landlocked Ukraine, it will likely become a welfare case for the West, which will help pick up the tab for resettling Ukraine’s refugees to new homes outside of Russian control. In time, a Viktor Orban-like figure could take Ukraine’s presidency, imitating the strongman-style of politics that Putin prefers in his neighbors.

Rest of the article

 

He thought Russian-speaking Ukrainians would welcome his troops. They didn’t. He thought he’d swiftly depose Volodymyr Zelensky’s government. He hasn’t. He thought he’d divide NATO. He’s united it. He thought he had sanction-proofed his economy. He’s wrecked it. He thought the Chinese would help him out. They’re hedging their bets. He thought his modernized military would make mincemeat of Ukrainian forces. The Ukrainians are making mincemeat of his, at least on some fronts.

Putin’s miscalculations raise questions about his strategic judgment and mental state. Who, if anyone, is advising him? Has he lost contact with reality? Is he physically unwell? Mentally? Condoleezza Rice warns: “He’s not in control of his emotions. Something is wrong.” Russia’s sieges of Mariupol and Kharkiv — two heavily Russian-speaking cities that Putin claims to be “liberating” from Ukrainian oppression — resemble what the Nazis did to Warsaw, and what Putin himself did to Grozny.

Several analysts have compared Putin to a cornered rat, more dangerous now that he’s no longer in control of events. They want to give him a safe way out of the predicament he allegedly created for himself. Hence the almost universal scorn poured on Joe Biden for saying in Poland, “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.”

The conventional wisdom is entirely plausible. It has the benefit of vindicating the West’s strategy of supporting Ukraine defensively. And it tends toward the conclusion that the best outcome is one in which Putin finds some face-saving exit: additional Ukrainian territory, a Ukrainian pledge of neutrality, a lifting of some of the sanctions.

But what if the conventional wisdom is wrong? What if the West is only playing into Putin’s hands once again?

The possibility is suggested in a powerful reminiscence from The Times’s Carlotta Gall of her experience covering Russia’s siege of Grozny, during the first Chechen war in the mid-1990s. In the early phases of the war, motivated Chechen fighters wiped out a Russian armored brigade, stunning Moscow. The Russians regrouped and wiped out Grozny from afar, using artillery and air power.

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Russia’s operating from the same playbook today. When Western military analysts argue that Putin can’t win militarily in Ukraine, what they really mean is that he can’t win clean. Since when has Putin ever played clean?

“There is a whole next stage to the Putin playbook, which is well known to the Chechens,” Gall writes. “As Russian troops gained control on the ground in Chechnya, they crushed any further dissent with arrests and filtration camps and by turning and empowering local protégés and collaborators.”

Suppose for a moment that Putin never intended to conquer all of Ukraine: that, from the beginning, his real targets were the energy riches of Ukraine’s east, which contain Europe’s second-largest known reserves of natural gas (after Norway’s).


Combine that with Russia’s previous territorial seizures in Crimea (which has huge offshore energy fields) and the eastern provinces of Luhansk and Donetsk (which contain part of an enormous shale-gas field), as well as Putin’s bid to control most or all of Ukraine’s coastline, and the shape of Putin’s ambitions become clear. He’s less interested in reuniting the Russian-speaking world than he is in securing Russia’s energy dominance.

“Under the guise of an invasion, Putin is executing an enormous heist,” said Canadian energy expert David Knight Legg. As for what’s left of a mostly landlocked Ukraine, it will likely become a welfare case for the West, which will help pick up the tab for resettling Ukraine’s refugees to new homes outside of Russian control. In time, a Viktor Orban-like figure could take Ukraine’s presidency, imitating the strongman-style of politics that Putin prefers in his neighbors.

If this analysis is right, then Putin doesn’t seem like the miscalculating loser his critics make him out to be.

It also makes sense of his strategy of targeting civilians. More than simply a way of compensating for the incompetence of Russian troops, the mass killing of civilians puts immense pressure on Zelensky to agree to the very things Putin has demanded all along: territorial concessions and Ukrainian neutrality. The West will also look for any opportunity to de-escalate, especially as we convince ourselves that a mentally unstable Putin is prepared to use nuclear weapons.

Within Russia, the war has already served Putin’s political purposes. Many in the professional middle class — the people most sympathetic to dissidents like Aleksei Navalny — have gone into self-imposed exile. The remnants of a free press have been shuttered, probably for good. To the extent that Russia’s military has embarrassed itself, it is more likely to lead to a well-aimed purge from above than a broad revolution from below. Russia’s new energy riches could eventually help it shake loose the grip of sanctions.

This alternative analysis of Putin’s performance could be wrong. Then again, in war, politics and life, it’s always wiser to treat your adversary as a canny fox, not a crazy fool.

[Jimbuna]

Huge crisis: Russia seizes about 600 aircraft by order of Putin!

[Commander Wallace]

^ This action alone will make it that much harder, if not impossible for Russia to do business with any country or entity, long after this war is over.

[Jimbuna]

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has played down any hopes of a breakthrough in continuing peace talks between Russia and Ukraine.

He’s been telling reporters that Russia had not noticed "anything really promising," but says the chief Russian negotiator will provide an update later.

The Ukrainian governor in Donetsk says there's been Russian shelling along all the cities and towns on the front line that separates the two sides.

Shelling is also reported in the Luhansk region. Authorities there say there have been 35 artillery attacks on local towns in 24 hours.

Despite Russia's pledge to "drastically reduce" military combat operations, Chernihiv's regional governor claims Russian forces carried out strikes on the city "all night long"

The sound of artillery could be heard on the edge of Kyiv city centre this morning.

More than four million people have fled Ukraine, according to the UN's refugee agency.

[Jimbuna]

[Buddahaid]

Originally Posted by Jimbuna

Huge crisis: Russia seizes about 600 aircraft by order of Putin!

That has been building for three weeks already and those aircraft will become worthless to the west and will likely never fly outside of Russia again as they will be deemed not airworthy.

[mapuc]

I think that this increase of Russian military activity could mean two thing either they want to win as much land they can before any ceasefire or they have changed tactic in the war

Markus

[Jimbuna]

[Skybird]

It became known that on March 2nd, 2 Russian Su-24 and 2 Russian Su-27 violated Swedish airspace with course plotted to Gotland, and then got intercepted by Swedish Gripen interceptors in Swedish airspace. The Russians than showed the Swedish plane their armaments and revealed that they were equipped with nuclear missiles. Photos have been shot by the Swedish that prove the incident, says Sweden. The incident lasted for around 1 minute inside Swedish airspace.


This rabid psychopath manages to launch a nuclear war by accident only to get his wanted thick entry in the history books.



Europe needs to get more US-independent nuclear deterrant. Germany shouold get it. Maybe Italy, Poland. Finland and Sweden also are candidates in my book. They both should not be too hesitent anymore to join NATO.

[Buddahaid]

This is how Trump gets tough on Russian aggresion.

11/26/2018
https://www.cnn.com/2018/11/26/europ...ntl/index.html

[mapuc]

An intense fire is burning near Kharkiv after two major explosion around 20.40
(I saw it and follow the fire live-Hopefully no one was killed or hurt in the explosion.)

Edit
"Russian missile destroyed oil depot in Dnipro city, no casualties - Head of regional council "
End edit

Markus

[Skybird]

Originally Posted by Buddahaid

This is how Trump gets tough on Russian aggresion.

11/26/2018
https://www.cnn.com/2018/11/26/europ...ntl/index.html

Don't be unfair, he recently commented on the Ukraine: he demanded Zelenskji to invent for him the dirt Trump wants to smear the two Bidens with.

Interesting set of priorities.

Before that he had suggested that the assault on Ukraine showed that Putin had cojohnes.

And didn'T he once suggest that drinking chlorine bleacher may desinfect the body from within? My all-time great quote by him.

[Buddahaid]

Russia is apparently now using technicals. I'm looking for better reporting but this is all I've found so far.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ukraine/com...ng_technicals/

[Skybird]

https://www.bbc.com/news/live/world-europe-60923158

A Ukrainian refugee from Mariupol has told the BBC that she and others from her area were taken to Russia, despite making it clear they did not want to go.
[...]
Their bus continued to travel to a refugee camp in a sports centre in Russia.
There they were told they would be sent to economically depressed areas in Russia where people were needed for work.

It gets better and better.

Russia is a 100% fascist regime, and Putin is a 100% fascist Duce.

I also move away from thinking all Russians are suffering under Putin - but Putin offered them a deal many years ago. He did not much for jobs and economy, instead he offered again the illusion of glory and global fame from being feared, in exchnage for getting his way to enrich himself and his gang by exploiting the country and abusing the people. And the people let him. They buy the Stalinist cultist garbage and they prefer the illusion of Sovjet glory reinstalled. It does not imrpove their eocnomy, but it is the deal they accepted. So lets call them out over this detail. And midn you, they accepted to fall for it when propaganda was still weak in Russia, and media ciontrol was still low, too.

Well, I often said it in different contexts before: people are to be held acountable for their choices and decisions.

The BBC story above now is, additional to genocide and war crimes, another crime: that of hijacking and enslaving and slave keeping.

How further backward towards the Dark Ages and primitivity and barbary is this Russia to fall? Want they to go back to even before the early medieval?

Here in Germany, our elder, the generation of my grandparents, still know this old proverbial wisdom, this old saying we have in Germany: "Die Gefahr lauert im Osten" ("Danger lurks in the East"), and it was a warning back then and before the second world war and before the first world war, and it still is today. We just forgot it for some years. The behaviour of Russian soldiers in the occupied cities of defeated Germany was not feared for no reason, and became part of the collectivce trauma memory of a whole generation: abuse, rape, torture, plundering, kidnapping, enslaveing, all this in masses and masses, oftehn systewmtically done. We have forgotten all that, but we see the Russian soldiers seem to not have changed much since then.

Now, the long 30 years peace in Europe has come to an end. And the setting we now get is probably even more dangeorus than that of the cold war before, because in the cold war, there were stability, kind of, and buffer zones, and predictability. All this is not there today. No stability, no predictability, and no buffer zones.

Not good.

Putin will continue to attack, if his buddies let him and do not put a bullet in his head. He will attack NATO states, his old arch enemy Chodorkowsky said in an interview yesterday, and he is right. Who said the Russians will attack with tanks and missiles? They could attack by destabilizatoin effort of the sort we have already seen in Germany, the United States, the United Kingdom, the Europe-wide coordination of the right wing movements and even climate activists - we have had all that before in germany: the freedom movement, the Anti-US movement, the anti-atom movement, the ecological awakening groups, the RedArmy faction and other terroism - we KNOW today from documents that the StaSi and the KGB had a very heavy hand in manipulating, influencing and controlling these movements back in the 70s and 80s.

A new cold war 2.0? Forget it. Welcome in World War III. It wages already since many years.

We have seen the instrumentalisation of mass migration to overwhelm control and stability in European states (Poland-Belarus the example). At last here this time the calculation of the villains in the Kremlin may not work, because those many Ukrainians that also come to Germany (and Poland) , many are culturally and regarding moral values far more compatible and indeed integration-willing: different to so many from Africa and Islamic countries. The German authorities say by their first countings it seems half of the ukrainians coming to Germany have academical education, and where of the African and Middle East migrant most still do not work and ask for social wellfare first, of the Ukrainians that arirved the vast majority did not ask for wellfare first, but asked first for jobs to work in. And different to 2015, many of these people now, mostly women/mothers, actually are qualified for better and higher jobs: teachers, doctors amongst them, engineers, even IT specialists. And Germany has a lack of all these groups, its a big economic problem, also qualified craftsman are desperately needed. Germany has a massive brain drain, and a shortage of qualfiied employees! So, if these Ukrainian refugees cannot return to Ukraine, they are indeed highly welcome over here. This is much different than 2015.

[les green01]

instead of a swear Jar Neal needs to put out a Trump jar seem like to me when he was in office the folks over in europe was bending over backwards for putin i didn't hear anything about you all sending military aid or getting tough with Russia with heavy sanctions until after Ukraine was attack maybe you guys would done things sooner Russia wouldn't have went after ukraine you guys log on here slam Trump when yours aint no better this thread starting to be like watching the news you get more bs than not i'm here to read up on the ukraine and russia war and watch the movies the folks posting if i want to read or hear about Trump,Biden and all the leaders seem like they are countries pollical threads if we talk leaders in this one let keep it has Russian and ukraine leaders