The Russians are starting to have success with the Iranian drones. It sounds like Ukraine could use some more of our tech to combat them.
The one thing that nags me a bit is that it seems like Russia has a had a pattern of initially responding poorly to invasions, but in time turning things around. A lot of this is due to the corruption and cronyism that typifies their corps during peacetime. Let's hope that they don't get a chance to turn it around this time.
Technically tampons are designed to stop bleeding but. Bring your own to putins army.
"You got your uniforms and armor from the army. You need to bring everything else."...that's not very inspiring. Obviously she doesn't want those guys to die but does nobody in that room see the issue? This isn't a camping trip.
Was just reading about the the Ukrainians bombing a trainload of the fresh conscripts. Hope the Ruzzians brought Maxi-pads.
02Pilot said:gimpstang said:02Pilot said:stroker said:O2, I'd be curious about your impression of Jordan Peterson's analysis of Putin, here.
It's a very made-for-TV presentation. He raises some interesting questions, but I don't find that he's really exploring the possible answers in great depth. It's more a stream of consciousness sort of monologue. As far as Putin specifically, I agree with his approach in a very general sense, but he doesn't consider the possibility of a negotiated peace at all, nor the leverage of the West on Ukrainian policy.
On a related note, I wonder if people are really paying attention to what Putin has been saying. The language he chooses is instructive. Take his meeting with Lukashenko in Sochi today (link to RT - interestingly, I could not find a Western source reporting this in any detail or providing quotes). The need for "respect" and being unwilling to tolerate "humiliation", along with reference back to 1991, just reinforces my feeling that this goes back to the way the Soviet Union collapsed, the lack of support from the West, and the expansion of NATO creating a sense of a Russia under attack. Clearly, that was not the Western intent, but we would do well to consider that intent and perception are not always perfectly aligned. Putin is clearly willing to take actions that serve his own interests and threaten others, and with a brutality not seen in many years, but it doesn't mean he's not after rational, real world objectives like any other leader.
I see your point and have considered it. Putin may very well have real world objectives and be taking steps to accomplish them. However, he seems to be suffering from a lack of real world awareness. He doesn't seem to see the economic and political losses Russia is incurring due to his actions and he obviously does not see the real world situation on the battlefield. Its perfectly fine to take action to accomplish his interests but if those interests are based in fantasy and not reality, it makes the actions seem irrational to those based in the real world.
Alternatively, we may not fully understand his objectives. If you haven't already, watch that video with Steven Kotkin I posted a few pages back - his discussion of Stalin's logic in carrying out the Great Terror, an enormously self-destructive event, may be helpful in considering the thought processes endemic to Russian leaders.
That said, if the war ends with Putin having reduced the strength of his domestic opponents (who have been helpfully revealing themselves to authorities) and securing a deal that keeps Ukraine out of NATO, I would argue he could claim limited success on a grand strategic/international relations scale, despite the tactical and operational defeat. Yes, there will be many problems to overcome, but Chinese technology transfer and economic linkage will mitigate those (and the Chinese will not hesitate to support Russia more openly once hostilities end, provided Putin doesn't lob a nuke into Zelensky's oatmeal).
Agreed. Additional if his goal is as it seems to prevent a successful and thriving Ukraine, well it will take many many many years to rebuild from this.
Ultimately I don't know if Ukraine can successfully force Russian troops all the way out of Ukraine. I was reading an article yesterday of an interview with a Sergeant in the Ukrainian army. It sounds like they are low of vehicles and stuff too. She was saying that they were using Toyota pickups and vans and the like to move troops around because they didn't have armored fighting vehicles.
gimpstang said:I see your point and have considered it. Putin may very well have real world objectives and be taking steps to accomplish them. However, he seems to be suffering from a lack of real world awareness. He doesn't seem to see the economic and political losses Russia is incurring due to his actions and he obviously does not see the real world situation on the battlefield. Its perfectly fine to take action to accomplish his interests but if those interests are based in fantasy and not reality, it makes the actions seem irrational to those based in the real world.
I think this line of thought is the closest we have had so far to correct. If we assume the following:
then we can see Putin's actions as being both logical and rational towards achieving his goals. The problem is that there is no way to rationally reach his assumptions as a starting point. Your culture can raise you to believe that your country is due something, but that is different than being in a position where he can receive whatever global information that he would like to and still believing it. A narcissist's actions can be considered rational based on the condition of narcissism, but the thought process that creates the narcissism is not rational. A rabid dog's actions are rational based on the condition of being rabid. A rabid dog is not rational.
The world is moving on from the idea that military conquest is an acceptable way of growing an economy. I think we are seeing that the checkers/chess comparison has been backwards. The world is moving to chess and Putin is still trying to play checkers. If Russia had the power of China, Russia may have been able to succeed, but they don't have it. Putin wants more than a little tiny next chunk of Ukraine. He is cutting off his next move. Even if he succeeds and gets a chunk and the world simmers down, the response to his next attempt to do the same would be even larger.
In reply to matthewmcl :
But the assumptions are odd.
If Russia isn't considered a power, given their total lack of economic progress, that's all their own fault.
And then, conquest based expansion is so 19th century, as you point out.
So if vlad thinks like that, he is not in the real world.
Again, any real economic development would have kept Ukraine in their court. Easy, peasy.
In reply to matthewmcl :
I disagree on a few points. One intelligence gathered by FSB showed many in eastern and southern Ukraine liked the Russians and disliked the central government in Kiev. Two many people including in the west overestimated the military effectiveness of the Russian military. I mean I doubt many believed that the Ukrainian air force would still be operating at this point and that the Russian air force wouldn't have superiority over the skies. Three, many in Russian politics seem to believe that the west wants to destroy them and that a western moving Ukraine would have moved them towards that view. Additionally many of these same leaders were trained in a very different world view in us in the West. Four given the west's very limited response to Russia's moves in Chetanya, Georgia and in 2014 with Ukraine, there was the possibility the west would similarly have a limited response to the invasion of Ukraine. So taken that into account, an invasion can be seen as a reasonable move for the Russian government.
Now three of those four assumptions have been destroyed and that leaves Putin in a difficult spot. He needs something that can he call a win without doing further damage to his reputation within Russia and keeping Russia's limited friends from abandoning him completely. Additionally given the resources of Russia and how this has played out I see another full scale invasion as very very unlikely. Influence campaigns and working with various parties around Europe has been successful for Russia before and I can see them attempting again. There are few nations that Russia could act to take over. Belarus is a Russian puppet state. All the Baltic states are in NATO or joining. Kazakhstan and Mongolia both would not go down well with China.
Conscripts being sent to the front are receiving 1 day's worth of training and supposedly, Russia is already attempting Human Wave attacks in Keherson. What little we know says it's going exactly as well as you'd expect; Sander's Marble's Scraping the Barrel: The Military Use of Sub-Standard Manpower implies that this is even worse than not having them at all.
Women in Durga are beginning to revolt. Lots of videos of them chasing cops for taking their sons away.
Russian state media have announced the preliminary results of the so-called referendums being held in occupied parts of Ukraine. With about a fifth of votes counted, it is reported that an overwhelming majority have voted in favour of joining Russia:
bearmtnmartin (Forum Supporter) said:Russian state media have announced the preliminary results of the so-called referendums being held in occupied parts of Ukraine. With about a fifth of votes counted, it is reported that an overwhelming majority have voted in favour of joining Russia:
- 97% in Kherson region
- 98% in Zaporizhzhia
- 98% in “Donetsk People’s Republic”
- 98% in “Luhansk People’s Republic”
So overwhelming in support, they are not even pretending.
In reply to 93EXCivic :
I don't think we disagree. I agree with the four points you made (five, if you count there being no way for him to try another invasion). He played a hand; it flopped. He won't be able to play another similar hand. Did it first look like the hand might play out? Sure, but it didn't. His next move will need to be adapted to new circumstances. If he would adapt now, I think he could gain more. I count his initial actions at the beginning of the conflict, and his current continued actions, as two separate entities.
Putin has access to accurate historical information, even if the people in Russia do not. He had bold rhetoric that we assumed was covering over the details of a long term game plan, like control of the resources discovered in the contested regions. It now appears that he believes his own rhetoric. Giving indoctrinated people rhetoric as a means of gaining what you want is rational (not nice, but rational). Believing your own rhetoric is not rational. That is the distinction that I was trying to make. He may be just ignoring accurate information that he has access to, but for a leader of a world power, that is not rational, either.
(Edit: striking "all of the" before "accurate information" as hyperbole)
As a separate observation, he was making money for himself and his cronies hand over fist. Adding additional resources to sell would have been golden. He is currently losing money faster than it was being made and also angering the customer base for resources he wanted to sell. If he is currently selling at reduced rates, and gains the additional resources, he is still not making more money. He has to preserve his reputation, but he built his reputation by making money for the right people (and himself of course). He saves his reputation by going back to making people rich. They still control the rhetoric.
In reply to matthewmcl :
It's important to consider the domestic pressures Putin faces as well, as these are arguably more compelling than the external factors. Totalitarian leadership is a double-edged sword, and when things turn ugly, it's the leader who tends to get the blame (unless they can deflect it successfully to subordinates). With pressure now coming on Putin from both right (nationalists) and left (protestors), he is astute enough to know that he can't please everyone; he has to throw his lot in with one or the other, at least temporarily. He has a much better chance of regaining favor with the hardline right than the Western-leaning left, and what the nationalists want is to double down on the war effort. I suspect he is cagey enough to recognize that going soft now is a likely path to a one-way trip from the observation platform in Red Square to the ground.
In reply to 02Pilot :
Russia has no "left". They have what's left.
In reply to GIRTHQUAKE :
The terms very used in a very general sense, hence my clarifying parenthetical notes. But Russia very much has a "left" because it has a "right"; we simply do not define it by typical Western criteria. I would suggest that Russians who are Western-oriented, embracing at least some aspects of Enlightenment concepts of individual liberty and participatory government, would qualify as "left" (liberalizing, change-driven) in that system.
Updates:
Another useful discussion from the Austrian military:
Related? Unknown at this time.
And a snippet from the story:
Seismologists in Denmark and Sweden registered powerful blasts in the vicinity of the leaks on Monday, Sweden's National Seismology Centre told public broadcaster SVT. German geological research centre GFZ also said a seismograph on the Danish island of Bornholm had twice recorded spikes on Monday.
In reply to 02Pilot :
The last fifteen seconds of that were pure gold
In reply to Noddaz :
I read something about both Nordstream 1 and 2 being damaged. If so, that pretty much says sabotage.
tuna55 said:In reply to 02Pilot :
The last fifteen seconds of that were pure gold
Yeah, the deadpan delivery is perfect.
eastsideTim said:In reply to Noddaz :
I read something about both Nordstream 1 and 2 being damaged. If so, that pretty much says sabotage.
Oh no.... looks like the west will have to loosen some of those sanctions to fix that, ey?
In reply to aircooled :
Trapped animals and people often react badly. If you were of draft age and about to be cannon fodder, is it possible that you would resist? Maybe get others to join you? Fight like it was life or death?
Of all the people trying to flee Russia, I have to wonder how many of them would be willing to fight FOR Ukraine as a gesture against Putin.
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