Varinn posted:

Kill All Cops posted:

ukraine is the underdog that will be utterly annihilated by the grand might of the russian army, and simultaneously the anti-Russian government is a threat to Russia's existence

Southpaugh posted:

No dude you surrender.

dads friend steve posted:

that’s exactly what’s happening, correct

Le Saboteur posted:

I don't really see what the end goal is for Russia at this point. They in all likelihood are not equipped for a long occupation in a country the size of Ukraine. So it's either replace or pacify the Zelensky government into a puppet state and then gently caress off and let the cycle started in 2014 start again. All eventualities seem terrible here.

Le Saboteur posted:

I don't really see what the end goal is for Russia at this point. They in all likelihood are not equipped for a long occupation in a country the size of Ukraine. So it's either replace or pacify the Zelensky government into a puppet state and then gently caress off and let the cycle started in 2014 start again. All eventualities seem terrible here.

V. Illych L. posted:

there's enough ultras on the ukrainian side that trying to surrender is basically inviting a coup or assassination

Varinn posted:

Mafic Rhyolite posted:

So like do people not realise that cities can't really support themselves if they're cut off from the rest of the country? It's not hard at all to cut off power and food from entering a city. The people inside will finish killing off any jewish people and settling their old grudges with the free guns the government gave them and then they'll get bored and hungry and have to surrender. What exactly am I missing here?

WrasslorMonkey posted:

Mafic Rhyolite posted:

So like do people not realise that cities can't really support themselves if they're cut off from the rest of the country? It's not hard at all to cut off power and food from entering a city. The people inside will finish killing off any jewish people and settling their old grudges with the free guns the government gave them and then they'll get bored and hungry and have to surrender. What exactly am I missing here?

WrasslorMonkey posted:

WrasslorMonkey posted:

WrasslorMonkey posted:

Cup Runneth Over posted:

Frosted Flake, make this make sense for me:

https://fxtwitter.com/Liveuamap/status/1497485623225200640

Why is this Russian tank just sitting alone on the road? Shouldn't it be in a company with at least four other vehicles, at minimum? Did they leave it behind to continue their advance?

Southpaugh posted:

No dude you surrender.

nawilo_420 posted:

totally normal thing for some guy in america to post

Chuka Umana posted:

Ever tankie in this thread has given up on anything remotely challenging in their lives so they don’t know the meaning to actually fight for anything. They can’t comprehend politics beyond begging people give them free stuff.

(USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)

(USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)

Atrocious Joe posted:

https://twitter.com/apmassaro3/status/1497666462366023685?s=20&t=WiCznbJb5kp0JAxVc1WSYg

icantfindaname posted:

The full return of Cold War Liberalism is a death sentence for the planet, for anyone who doesn’t want to be disabled by covid, and for anyone who needed more govt spending in the US on anything other than defense contractors

Freezer posted:

As the West has escalated it's response and rethoric I start feeling more and more dread that someone is going to do something stupid and things will spiral out of control.

And it will be hard to put the brakes on it after weeks of calling Putin "the embodiment of all evil" and poo poo.

Imagine a situation like the Turkish shooting down of the Russian jet in Syria, but happening on the Polish border.

V. Illych L. posted:

it does not look to me like this is going to end in any other way than basically ukrainian capitulation, but i've been wrong before and i know even less about this kind of purely military matter than about international politics

Frosted Flake posted:

Agreed. They haven’t fought a withdraw to Kiev or the Dnieper either, so I’m wondering what the situation is there. The longer they wait, the harder it’s going to be. Not that I expect Operation Konrad or a Death Ride to Kiev, only that an intact army is a bargaining chip for Kiev in ceasefire talks, an encircled army is the opposite - a hostage. Conversely both Kiev and the Donbas are things Ukraine needs to have control over to have a hand to play in peace talks.

Flavahbeast posted:

Is that an option though? The 'denazification' lines make me think liquidating government ministers and the officer corps is a real possibility if the Ukrainians surrender

WrasslorMonkey posted:

1stGear posted:

That Chechen general is alive.

https://twitter.com/ashenslinky/status/1497715927277654016?s=20&t=1RvRJbnD1z2KmNZcSjjfbg

Crusader posted:

if you're in the ukranian ministry of defence, what are your real options here? the eastern forces are pinned and almost encircled from crimea, the kyiv front can be reinforced in short order (?), there may be a new line of advance in the west from belarus to stop additional lethal aid... so, do you just already start to plan for and begin to execute a bloody insurgency phase?

Honest Thief posted:

the younger communist militants here can't keep their mouth shuts online and just digging their heels on the most insane posts
why can't people just not post

WrasslorMonkey posted:

Wraith of J.O.I. posted:

[tom friedman voice] the next few days will be crucial

100% pure unc.. ok not sure about that but it's deffo Tom Friedman posted:

The seven most dangerous words in journalism are: “The world will never be the same.” In over four decades of reporting, I have rarely dared use that phrase. But I’m going there now in the wake of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

Our world is not going to be the same again because this war has no historical parallel. It is a raw, 18th-century-style land grab by a superpower — but in a 21st-century globalized world. This is the first war that will be covered on TikTok by super-empowered individuals armed only with smartphones, so acts of brutality will be documented and broadcast worldwide without any editors or filters. On the first day of the war, we saw invading Russian tank units unexpectedly being exposed by Google maps, because Google wanted to alert drivers that the Russian armor was causing traffic jams.

You have never seen this play before.

Yes, the Russian attempt to seize Ukraine is a throwback to earlier centuries — before the democracy revolutions in America and France — when a European monarch or Russian czar could simply decide that he wanted more territory, that the time was ripe to grab it, and so he did. And everyone in the region knew he would devour as much as he could and there was no global community to stop him.

In acting this way today, though, Putin is not only aiming to unilaterally rewrite the rules of the international system that have been in place since World War II — that no nation can just devour the nation next door — he is also out to alter that balance of power that he feels was imposed on Russia after the Cold War.

That balance — or imbalance in Putin’s view — was the humiliating equivalent of the Versailles Treaty’s impositions on Germany after World War I. In Russia’s case, it meant Moscow having to swallow NATO’s expansion not only to include the old Eastern European countries that had been part of the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence, like Poland, but even, in principle, states that were part of the Soviet Union itself, like Ukraine.

I see many people citing Robert Kagan’s fine book “The Jungle Grows Back” as a kind of shorthand for the return of this nasty and brutish style of geopolitics that Putin’s invasion manifests. But that picture is incomplete. Because this is not 1945 or 1989. We may be back in the jungle — but today the jungle is wired. It is wired together more intimately than ever before by telecommunications; satellites; trade; the internet; road, rail and air networks; financial markets; and supply chains. So while the drama of war is playing out within the borders of Ukraine, the risks and repercussions of Putin’s invasion are being felt across the globe — even in China, which has good cause to worry about its friend in the Kremlin.

Welcome to World War Wired — the first war in a totally interconnected world. This will be the Cossacks meet the World Wide Web. Like I said, you haven’t been here before.

“It’s been less than 24 hours since Russia invaded Ukraine, yet we already have more information about what’s going on there than we would have in a week during the Iraq war,” wrote Daniel Johnson, who served as an infantry officer and journalist with the U.S. Army in Iraq, in Slate on Thursday afternoon. “What is coming out of Ukraine is simply impossible to produce on such a scale without citizens and soldiers throughout the country having easy access to cellphones, the internet and, by extension, social media apps. A large-scale modern war will be livestreamed, minute by minute, battle by battle, death by death, to the world. What is occurring is already horrific, based on the information released just on the first day.”

The outcome of this war will depend in large part on the will of the rest of the world to deter and roll back Putin’s blitzkrieg by primarily using economic sanctions and by arming the Ukrainians with antiaircraft and anti-tank weaponry to try to slow his advance. Putin may also be forced to consider the death toll of his own comrades.

Will Putin be brought down by imperial overstretch? It is way too soon to say. But I am reminded these days of what a different warped leader who decided to devour his neighbors in Europe observed. His name was Adolf Hitler, and he said: “The beginning of every war is like opening the door into a dark room. One never knows what is hidden in the darkness.”

In Putin’s case, I find myself asking: Does he know what is hiding in plain sight and not just in the dark? Does he know not only Russia’s strengths in today’s new world but also its weaknesses? Let me enumerate them.

WrasslorMonkey posted:

Raskolnikov38 posted:

loader vehicle for the tos-1

Frosted Flake posted:

So it turns out that the US Army Press’ only recent monograph vis a vis THEE Ukraine was… Survival in the Russian Occupied Zone: Command and Organization in Resistance Underground Operations from October.

To be honest it’s making the hair on the back of my neck stick up because it sure seems like Zelensky was baited into doing what the US wanted.

Frosted Flake posted:

It could mean* they’ve broken out into the open and don’t perceive any threat worth slowing down for. The next echelon will pick them up and they’ll link up at a laager when they stop for the night.

*They are advancing like 3-4x faster than the expected wartime rate of march, and likely feel like there’s no serious resistance along the lines of communication.

All of the manuals say that supply will catch up when you meet stiff enough resistance that you need to deploy for combat. The thing is… uh they aren’t so