Russia and Ukraine

[Fireball]

To think that we were at the point of MAD with the USSR in the past. It's where the US may be headed if the chump gets elected. I'm hoping not, and I'll say this- the hard right assholes aren't the only ones with guns and marksmanship skills. I can put yer eye out with my Daisy® rifle!

[The Grand Nudger]

Russia isn't the ussr. To put it bluntly, ukraine was the ussr that we were at the point of MAD with. They produced half of the shit that went bump in the night. Their demilitarization and deproliferation was both a global example..and probably one one of the worst mistakes such a nation could make.

[Jackalope]

It started out with brand new factory fresh bmp3s.  When those went bavovna bmp2s showed up..and when the last of those were a smoldering wreck they kept trying with mtlbs.  Each of those vehicles would be carrying between 6 and 10 dismount infantry, who knows how many riding on top (have to count em 1 by 1 from drone footage).  Ukraine followed up by busting through the teeth in small teams with two brads and an abrams to rake the treeline for rearguard under drone cover.  It was probably the majority of recorded casualties across the entire front that day.   The whole area has been a mechanized graveyard for years now - illinsk being just past vuhledar.

To be fair, I don't think it's accurate to call the russians soldiers at this point....and that singular fact is what allows for these kinds of outcomes.  Then again, a small construction company in a podunk town held the actual russian army at bay for 72 hours without any weapons at the very beginning of the full scale invasion...erecting barriers and ambushing them with bulldozers and loaders when they tried to cross the bridges...so it's not like russian soldiers do great work themselves.

I hope the nations that buy their military garbage are shitting their pants.

To your second paragraph, true. They are probably poors who received little or no training - just another tragedy perpetrated by Putin.

Completely aside from Ukraine, I served as a TOW mechanic a lifetime ago, and I very early came to the conclusion that when the shooting started, I didn't want to be anywhere near anyone's APC or IFV, especially not riding on top of one.

[Jackalope]

Russia isn't the ussr.  To put it bluntly, ukraine was the ussr that we were at the point of MAD with.  They produced half of the shit that went bump in the night.  Their demilitarization and deproliferation was both a global example..and probably one one of the worst mistakes such a nation could make.

I fully admit I am biased in the matter but trusting Russia seems like a mistake.

[Fireball]

Russia isn't the ussr.  To put it bluntly, ukraine was the ussr that we were at the point of MAD with.  They produced half of the shit that went bump in the night.  Their demilitarization and deproliferation was both a global example..and probably one one of the worst mistakes such a nation could make.

Well, I'll be dipped. But back when I worked in the defense business, we didn't make much of a distinction. Of course, I worked in the engine room of Navy ships and knew jack all about where we were going, etc. And as an engineer, I only knew the names of big players, without that kind of granularity. #REMF 

[Thumpalumpacus]

Russia's main tank factory sailed for the horizon when Ukraine split off. Antonov and MiG aircraft factories, ditto. Oh, and that tungsten and titanium you need for shells and high-performance aircraft? Yeah, it came from Ukraine as well.

It's a shame they gave up the nukes. They built them and were perfectly capable of maintaining them, thus guarding their independence.

Mark my words, once Russia loses this war -- and I believe they will, in an Afghanistan-style, "honestly, Guv'nor, we were here to keep peace and now we're going home" -- a decade after that Ukraine will have ballistic nukes capable of hitting Murmansk or the Urals, if not further.

As well they should, after this shitshow.

[The Grand Nudger]

Russian arms export peaked in 2011, matching us round for round, tank for tank, plane for plane. France is now the second largest weapons exporter, china is third. What the war in ukraine did was prevent russia from selling weapons because it needed those weapons, while also demonstrating the design flaws in said weapons. Today, the only weapons export title russia can legitimately claim, is being the single largest provider of weapons...to ukraine. It's a homecoming. While the russians may not be able to do shit with those tanks ukraine's engineering sector is still top notch - so the russians find themselves being fired upon in their little holes by vehicles they'd abandon the week prior.

Even now, with the outcome of the war unknown, western arms manucturers are investing alot of money and setting up licensed production of western arms in ukraine. Ifvs mbts tube and rocket artillery from the us, france, uk, and germany will be produced in ukraine post war, to suck up the lost russian arms market. A cheap toasters selling point is that it's still a toaster, and it turns out that russian weapons are just cheap. The ruined cities look like proof of concept, but you can take apart a city brick by brick with hammers faster than russian artillery has been able to tear them down, and at a lower price point.

[Leonardo17]

Pocaracas:
 
BRICS is (for now) some sort of attempts to challenge the West dominated world order. Some sort of alliance of non-democratic or not totally democratic countries against the established world order. Without China, there isn’t even any BRICS if you ask me. It’s not an empty shell either. India, Brazil, South-Africa are also a part of this BRICS. I guess we will have to wait and see what happens in the future. But for now, Russia is still very isolated. Even China and India are critical of Putin’s expansionist policies.
 
Fake Messiah:
 
Anyone who could leave Russia, has already left. Western Europe, Georgia, Turkey and Kazakhstan are among the preferred destinations of Russians who simply can’t afford to stay in their own country anymore
 
On Russian Economy
 
The growing economy of Russia is a war-time economy. They will face a recession immediately when the war ends. Putin is still killing whatever is left of the “real” economy.
 
- Greta Thunberg is in Tbilisi / Georgia now.
 
 https://www.yahoo.com/news/climate-activ...11300.html
 
Moldova has just escaped being ruled by a Russia-friendly populist party. The people have re-elected a woman called Maia Sandu who wants to push the country toward the European Union. This happened despite Russian interference with all the disinformation campaigns and direct buying of votes in return for money.
 
The same thing happened in Georgia. The Pro-Russian populist leader is turning his back to the European Union while strengthening his ties with Russia.

Central Asian countries also moving back toward the orbit of Moscow. So I don’t know about Poland, But if Putin is successful in Ukraine, he will probably make a move against Baltic Countries. (And we should not forget Belarus. I don’t believe the people of Belarus are all fervent admirers of Lukashenko’s regime either)

[Thumpalumpacus]

The Kremlin has for the first time distributed a manual to soldiers on how to dig and maintain mass graves as ­Russia suffers growing casualties in its war in Ukraine.

A 20-page textbook, Civil Defence: Urgent Burials of Corpses in Wartime, is filled with diagrams showing mass graves with body bags piled on top of one another. It also features tables detailing the equipment and manpower needed to dig a grave for 100 people.

“Under normal working conditions, burying 100 dead in one mass grave will require 368.5 man hours,” it says.

The manual, which appears to be an updated version of one published in 2021, shows an emergency worker in a protective suit and helmet standing in front of a helicopter on the front cover.

https://www.msn.com/en-ie/news/world/ins...elemetry=1

Up next: how to build a gas chamber.

[Thumpalumpacus]

US officials are now telling Ukraine they ought to negotiate with the Russians, according to the Washington Post.

If this is true, it's a major change, and possibly a good one.

On the other hand, it could be a PR move to pretend that US/NATO/Ukraine are the ones open to talks, simply in order to make Russia look bad.

Or -- Russia was never and is not interested in negotiating in good faith:

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty's (RFE/RL) Sistema project released an investigation on November 4 detailing Russia's initial 2022 demands for Ukraine's total capitulation, further supporting ISW's long-standing assessment that Russia has never been willing to engage in good-faith negotiations with Ukraine on any terms but its own.[10] RFE/RL reported on November 4 that it obtained a draft of the treaty that Russia offered to Ukraine on March 7, 2022, entitled "Treaty on the Settlement of the Situation in Ukraine and the Neutrality of Ukraine." The draft document includes seven provisions, all of which amount to Ukraine's complete surrender and disarmament and the abandonment of its sovereignty, lands, and people. The document calls for Ukraine to reduce its army from nearly 197,000 personnel to 50,000 personnel, which RFE/RL notes would have meant that the Ukrainian army would be smaller than the Belarusian army, despite the fact that the Belarusian population in 2022 was one-fifth of the Ukrainian population. The document also states that Ukraine would not be able to develop, produce, buy, or deploy missile systems with a range of more than 250 kilometers; that Ukraine would have to recognize occupied Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts as independent Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics (DNR and LNR) and cede parts of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts that Ukraine still controlled in March 2022; that Ukraine would have to commit to the financial costs of rebuilding parts of the Donbas that Russia had destroyed following its initial 2014 invasion; that Ukraine and the international community would lift all sanctions and cancel all lawsuits that had been levied against Russian since 2014; that Ukraine would grant the Russian language the status of a "state language" and restore all property rights of the Kremlin-controlled Ukrainian Orthodox Church Moscow Patriarchate; and that Ukraine would re-legalize Soviet and communist symbols.[11] In essence, Moscow was asking Ukraine to willingly give up its military, its offensive and defensive capabilities, its land, a significant portion of its population and economic capacity, and cease protecting its language, history, and culture.

The Kremlin has been incessant in its claims that it set out to negotiate in March 2022 (after illegally invading Ukraine) but that it was Ukraine and the collective West that destroyed the prospect of negotiations.[12] The RFE/RL investigation supports ISW's long-standing assessment that this was never the case, however, and that Russia never intended to negotiate in good faith with Ukraine.[13] Russia presented outrageous demands calling for Ukraine to surrender its security and sovereignty, knowing that Ukraine would (rightly) refuse to do so, and then blamed Ukraine for the supposed "failure" of negotiations. ISW continues to assess that Russia has constructed a narrative around the concept of negotiations that it is using in an effort to encourage the West to make concessions on Ukrainian sovereignty and territorial integrity, and the RFE/RL investigation emphasizes that Russia's "diplomatic" engagements with Ukraine and the West since the full-scale invasion have always been oriented around this destructive objective.[14]

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgro...ct-updates