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Ghetto SuperCzar posted:After seeing that interview with the mayor who had Bandera portrait behind him I wanted to dive a little further into learning about how prevalent the far right is in Ukraine. It seems like the 2 biggest far right groups are the Svoboda political party and the Azov Battalion. Theres a number of other groups but they seem more fringe. After reading a number of sources, it sounds like Svoboda in around 2010 had about 10% of the national vote in parliamentary elections, which sounds real bad. But after Euromaidan, in 2014 that dropped to 4%, and in 2019 it dropped to 2% with no representation in parliament. It seems like that is going in a good direction already. Pretty much. edit: oh God, this isnt worth a page snipe. Sorry guys.
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Mar 5, 2022 21:50
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the popes toes posted:On that topic, jet-setting US goons can/should check in at a US Embassy or Consulate to subscribe to "alerts" that might be useful while in-country. You can otherwise enroll for alerts online with something called STEP (go to the embassy website). Is there a difference between these two? The STEP e-mail from the Ottawa embassy about the invocation of the Emergencies Act several weeks ago came 20+ hours after the fact, even though it was plastered all over the news from the moment it happened, so I'm not convinced that those alerts are sent in a reliably timely fashion.
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Mar 5, 2022 21:52
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https://twitter.com/christogrozev/status/1500209804878430208?s=20&t=k7ZyXUPiLZkPRreP0P4Bbw My brain is stuck in a simulation, and the AI has been trained on 24 reruns.
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Mar 5, 2022 21:52
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At some point the cops are going to start asking why their entire salary can't buy a loaf of bread and start thinking why exactly they should be arresting protestors who can also not use their entire salary to buy a half loaf of bread.
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Mar 5, 2022 21:52
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Russia exports wheat and imports meat, so I guess the real issue would be why they can't afford anything but bread
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Mar 5, 2022 21:58
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Kavros posted:Ye I mean, this is the forty mile convoy. Right here. Shoving more troops into an already clogged pipe doesn't make them move any faster, it just makes the clog worse. I said it up thread but I expect the next couple weeks are gonna be the Russians blowing up Ukrainian cities and the Ukrainians blowing up Russian soldiers and we will see which side runs out of targets first. Either way there is no way for Russia to "win" this war, not anymore. The only real question is whether Ukraine can survive it. If they manage to counterattack, wear down, and repulse the current Russian offensive, it seems doubtful to me that Russia can mount a second offensive before the West has resupplied Ukraine thoroughly enough to make future onslaught by Russia futile. If on the other hand the Russians manage to turn the whole nation into a crater, then it will probably continue to be a battle zone for a very long time.
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Mar 5, 2022 21:58
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Antigravitas posted:Huh? We don't know the exact model of Panzerfaust 3 they got, but it'll punch through ERA and can be launched from within buildings. And the Stingers are, well, Stingers. Only the Strelas are sketchy as gently caress. Germany sent some decent stuff, but also a fuckton of literally 32+ year old Strela missiles of Soviet Union manufacture that have been rusting away in a depot for...probably the entire time. Kind of a dick move. Edit: oh, you mentioned them. My bad. Still, dick move.
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Mar 5, 2022 21:58
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Antigravitas posted:Huh? We don't know the exact model of Panzerfaust 3 they got, but it'll punch through ERA and can be launched from within buildings. And the Stingers are, well, Stingers. Only the Strelas are sketchy as gently caress. And Ukraine most likely agreed to receive them with the line of thinking being "We know how to operate them, and if 1 in 10 works, that's a win."
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Mar 5, 2022 21:58
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ronya posted:https://twitter.com/christogrozev/status/1500196510054637569 It's an interesting read, but I loved this expression: "We go further. Syria. "The guys will hold out, everything will be over in Ukraine - and there in Syria we will again strengthen everything in positions." And now, at any moment, they can wait there for the contingent to run out of resources - and such a heat will set in ... Turkey blocks the straits - to transport supplies there by planes, it's like heating an oven with money."
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Mar 5, 2022 21:59
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Drone_Fragger posted:At some point the cops are going to start asking why their entire salary can't buy a loaf of bread and start thinking why exactly they should be arresting protestors who can also not use their entire salary to buy a half loaf of bread. I don't disagree with the sentiment here, but Russia produces its own wheat in enormous quantities. The ruble losing currency exchange value means that imports get super expensive, but bread is one thing Russians should still be able to buy.
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Mar 5, 2022 22:01
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Ghetto SuperCzar posted:After seeing that interview with the mayor who had Bandera portrait behind him I wanted to dive a little further into learning about how prevalent the far right is in Ukraine. It seems like the 2 biggest far right groups are the Svoboda political party and the Azov Battalion. Theres a number of other groups but they seem more fringe. After reading a number of sources, it sounds like Svoboda in around 2010 had about 10% of the national vote in parliamentary elections, which sounds real bad. But after Euromaidan, in 2014 that dropped to 4%, and in 2019 it dropped to 2% with no representation in parliament. It seems like that is going in a good direction already. It's comparable to a lot of European countries really. UK has the EDL and BNP and also the extreme end of UKIP/Brexit party/Whatever they are now. Germany has AfD, France has Front National. Having an extreme right/nationalist section of society is just the reality for basically every country on earth. To use it as a justification to excuse the kind of thing we're seeing in Ukraine is just falling for propaganda.
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Mar 5, 2022 22:03
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ImpAtom posted:Russia has more. That is it. The massive flood of NATO stuff + the unexpected underperformance of the Russian forces has evened things but if Russia wants Ukraine they will get it, it just depends on how much they will have to pay to do it. Ukraine's hope of victory has always relied on making it too costly, not in any sort of conventional victory. That's very much an "on paper" thing and people keep loving saying this looking at the total size of the Russian armed forces and not what they actually committed against Ukraine. They are superior in terms of number of armored vehicles and aircraft, but the latter they seem to have been barely able to make count, the Ukrainian AF and their air defences still contend the air and are causing steady attrition to the Russians whenever they appear in any strength, and when they do that they don't seem able to put enough into action at once to make their advantage overwhelming in any case. In tanks and armored vehicles the gap was never as huge as with aircraft, and the terrain at the moment and the proliferation of highly effective AT weapons for the Ukrainians appear to have mostly rendered what edge the Russians have negligible, except in cases where the Russians are able to advance across roads without significant opposition (but even there in the south they are now splitting up into separate weaker echelons that can not effectively support each other or possibly have a decisive effect on the overall battle). In terms of manpower in Ukraine the Russians simply have no advantage over the Ukrainians whatsoever, they invaded with about 200 000, which is more or less the same as the standing Ukrainian army which by all accounts is rapidly mobilizing its reserves (who probably number around 1 million give or take) which will allow that army to probably double in size if fighting goes on, and in addition they are supported by tens of thousands of paramilitaries and armed civilians, and unlike the Russians will not have to devote significant strength to secure cities and supply lines against partisans attacking or maybe outright seizing controls over poorly garrisoned towns. Finally if those pics showing some of the most modern weapon platforms of the Russian army being so poorly maintained that their tires are rotted and the wheel assemblies totally hosed are anywhere near representative then the degree to which Russia even has a notable material edge over the Ukrainians might also be largely illusory. It doesn't matter how much and how fancy poo poo you have if it just doesn't loving work because it's standing idle rusting and rotting in a field.
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Mar 5, 2022 22:05
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Kraftwerk posted:Is the west fully expecting Ukraine to collapse soon once the Russians snap out of it and get their poo poo together? I thought Ukraine was winning. Russia has a lot of artillery and a lot of dumb munitions, and a lot of soldiers. They can take a lot of losses, continue loving up and still win, and if they go totally mask off they could reduce most Ukrainian cities to piles of flaming rubble and call it a win. They've been playing relatively nice so far. Ukraine isn't winning, they're losing slower than anticipated. It's still an open question what the end result of the war is, but the major question is something like "do you consider everything east of the Dnieper including Kiev being Russian" a Ukrainian victory? Because right now that looks like the "good" outcome for Ukraine. Also obligatory gently caress Russia, I'm not saying this as some Russia Strong type thing, just that is a realistic assessment.
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Mar 5, 2022 22:07
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PederP posted:The crooks who've grown fat off Russia's feudalized crony capitalism are about to discover just how non-trivial running a command economy is. Planning and executing an invasion may be difficult, but transitioning overnight from laissez-faire capitalism to a command economy? That poo poo is much harder. Mess up the central planning of the economy and you don't just get a bogged down offensive and an embarrasing number of casualties. Bungle the central planning and you get famine, anarchy and/or complete breakdown of society. Would like to second this. My own experience is largely with the tragedy of the North Korean command economy, which is at the very least something that was engineered by true believers and had a strongly ideologically accommodated reality for institution and monopoly adherence. And it's been such a crapshoot that it would have been a failure without pariah-state-level economic isolation and sanction. russia's working from worse conditions. Their imagined capacity to tilt towards or hurl itself to "command economy" from a perilous, pseudomodernized economy that has been intentionally structured for kleptocratic exploitation for decades ... is potentially the stuff of humanitarian nightmares. But I would also caution that command economies can take a surprisingly long time to implode even when they are inherently unsustainable since day one. Once a dictator commits to it, they can't pull it apart for maintenance. They start to stall out like engines running out of oil.
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Mar 5, 2022 22:07
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Ghetto SuperCzar posted:After seeing that interview with the mayor who had Bandera portrait behind him I wanted to dive a little further into learning about how prevalent the far right is in Ukraine. It seems like the 2 biggest far right groups are the Svoboda political party and the Azov Battalion. Theres a number of other groups but they seem more fringe. After reading a number of sources, it sounds like Svoboda in around 2010 had about 10% of the national vote in parliamentary elections, which sounds real bad. But after Euromaidan, in 2014 that dropped to 4%, and in 2019 it dropped to 2% with no representation in parliament. It seems like that is going in a good direction already. A lot of old school leftists are permanently locked in US/NATO BAD because of the soviet union. Those loyalties transferd somewhat wen the state editor at Sputnik etc. changed from the USSR to Putin. Its more common in older movements, especially explicitly marxist and marx/lenisints. Its like someone who still watches fox, or thinks the BBC is unbiased. They havent built a good filter for content so they have been getting the Ukraine is all nazis line from primary news feeds. TL;DR,  people who haven't gotten over it
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Mar 5, 2022 22:09
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ronya posted:https://twitter.com/christogrozev/status/1500196510054637569 If this is fake, my congratulations to the author, its written extemely naturalistic and believable in Russian and very "Russian patriot but capable" type of brainworms 500 000 troops for occupation was also the number cited by insider-whisperer Constantin Gaaze as an impossible number without mobilization (which would be death sentence for every regional administration and USSR-style collapse), probably comes from the same leaky analytics. But whatever, let them all rot, time to gently caress around has ended, let them find out. This country is a syphilis and people should start healing procedures sooner or later. Interesting narrative of SBU turning FSB against Kadyrov - which was also referred in that wild failed assassination plot. SBU turn out to be really capable, at least of projecting that image. edit: Biggest tell that this is real - the throughline of "idiots wrecking things for smart people". It is a VERY popular narrative among Russian government insiders (and probably around the world) for the past 30 years. Its always someone in the next building messing with data, its always an idiot unable to interpret data, its always someone putting the carriage before the horse and not the very ~smart people~ that the insider respects. fatherboxx fucked around with this message at 22:29 on Mar 5, 2022 |
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Mar 5, 2022 22:10
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ronya posted:https://twitter.com/christogrozev/status/1500196510054637569 "And imagine: you can run a hundred meters in a snatch, and to go to a marathon distance and give a snatch with all your might is bad. Here we are with the Ukrainian question rushed like a hundred meteres, and fit into a marathon in rough terrain."  checks out, isn't that right running thread goons?
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Mar 5, 2022 22:10
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Lead out in cuffs posted:I don't disagree with the sentiment here, but Russia produces its own wheat in enormous quantities. The ruble losing currency exchange value means that imports get super expensive, but bread is one thing Russians should still be able to buy. The issue is that if the value of money collapses, then without massive state intervention most of that wheat won't end up as bread at all — it will be left to rot in the fields, as farmers struggle to afford to pay labor to harvest or transport their crop.
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Mar 5, 2022 22:11
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Please don't conflate anti-war/anti-NATO and pro-Putin sentiments. It's childish.
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Mar 5, 2022 22:13
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Hannibal Rex posted:https://twitter.com/christogrozev/status/1500209804878430208?s=20&t=k7ZyXUPiLZkPRreP0P4Bbw What the heck is going on here
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Mar 5, 2022 22:14
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Maybe he was a B list agent. RIP
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Mar 5, 2022 22:15
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Hannibal Rex posted:https://twitter.com/christogrozev/status/1500209804878430208?s=20&t=k7ZyXUPiLZkPRreP0P4Bbw What's a GUR?
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Mar 5, 2022 22:17
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cant cook creole bream posted:What's a GUR? Ukraine spooks
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Mar 5, 2022 22:18
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cant cook creole bream posted:What's a GUR? Probably GRU, which is the Russian military intelligence agency. edit: GUR is the Ukrainian military intelligence agency so now I'm confused.
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Mar 5, 2022 22:18
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cant cook creole bream posted:What's a GUR? I think it's Ukrainian military intelligence, basically descended from the Soviet GRU, same as the Russian one.
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Mar 5, 2022 22:19
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Rinkles posted:I hope this isn't accurate. I don't get why they would even do this, shooting non-combatants is just a waste of ammo and it makes the remaining people fight even harder for their land.
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Mar 5, 2022 22:20
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Barrel Cactaur posted:A lot of old school leftists are permanently locked in US/NATO BAD because of the soviet union I guess this is where I risk expressing a controversial opinion. US/NATO? Bad, actually. And Putin reviving NATO is bad and incredibly stupid. I just don't think just because one thing is bad, another thing is automatically good. And an imperialist Russia is worse…
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Mar 5, 2022 22:20
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So the negotiator was in the military intelligence? Why is that a plot twist?
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Mar 5, 2022 22:20
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Many leftists refuse to internalize that the perfect is often the enemy of the good. It's a convenient stance, since it's hard to argue against the perfect. And I guess no skin off their back if nothing ever actually gets achieved.Hieronymous Alloy posted:I mean, this is the forty mile convoy. Right here. Shoving more troops into an already clogged pipe doesn't make them move any faster, it just makes the clog worse. They won't 'lose' either. If the war goes poorly Putin will declare that Russia has achieved their objectives of defending the republics against homonazi aggression, and dare Ukraine to do anything about it.
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Mar 5, 2022 22:20
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So basically, we might not know what really went down for decades? And who knows... if he was a Russian mole, it might be better for morale purposes to say that the guy died a hero so everyone on the ground level isn't completely paranoid about their leadership. cant cook creole bream posted:So the negotiator was in the military intelligence? Why is that a plot twist? Maybe they killed another service's double agent? If I start speculating, it all becomes Le Carre-wannabe stuff.
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Mar 5, 2022 22:20
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cant cook creole bream posted:So the negotiator was in the military intelligence? Why is that a plot twist? The plot twist is that original reports said he was a Russian agent killed by Ukraine, now they are saying UA agent killed by Russia
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Mar 5, 2022 22:22
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ronya posted:https://twitter.com/aviation07101/status/1500157654253064195 This is just a kneeboard. It might be funny if you're a non-pilot but most if not all pilots of all experience levels use something like this. Check out some of the 2019 best kneeboards: https://youtu.be/-bvQBuyYe9k
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Mar 5, 2022 22:22
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cant cook creole bream posted:So the negotiator was in the military intelligence? Why is that a plot twist? Because yesterday people were saying Ukraine killed him while trying to arrest him for treason.
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Mar 5, 2022 22:22
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Threadkiller Dog posted:Russia also has to get all that stuff across the border and maintain and supply it. If they can barely support 200k troops there as it is now, they may never actually outnumber the ukranians in practice. Certainly now as Ukraine mobilizes. I mean, in theory they don't have to do it all at once. The cautious way to handle this war would be to pull back to a defensible perimeter but not out of Ukraine entirely, then start establishing supply depots and bringing in more troops and equipment, then move another 30-40 miles or whatever in, and repeat. It could take months, but Russia has plenty more soldiers than they're currently using and they could probably win that way without much difficulty in normal circumstances. The problem is that these aren't normal circumstances. Russia might not have months, because every week the sanctions are destroying more of their economy and Ukraine is receiving more weapons from the west and mobilizing more of its population/foreign volunteers. And of course what they need to do for the slow and methodical advancement is the complete opposite of what the blitzkrieg strategy requires, so they can't do both and have to choose one.
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Mar 5, 2022 22:23
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Kamrat posted:I don't get why they would even do this, shooting non-combatants is just a waste of ammo and it makes the remaining people fight even harder for their land. Russian command and control seems highly doubtful so if it is indeed true that Russians shelled evacuation points it's as likely to be stupidity as malice. It's still tragic for people killed, but I doubt it's part of a perfidious Russian plot.
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Mar 5, 2022 22:24
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Gorman Thomas posted:Please don't conflate anti-war/anti-NATO and pro-Putin sentiments. It's childish. Maybe it is. My counter point to that it is perfectly alright to say to someone who is preaching no war in a different situation… say in August 1939 Britain, that your argument that we should avoid war at all costs is an argument the, in embryo that also proposes letting Hitler have whatever his heart desires in Europe. If you are an pacifist you should be able to handle and engage such arguments without sitting in the mud and just saying, “that’s so childish.” PS. I am just saying this, I don’t even know what particular conversation you are referring to.
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Mar 5, 2022 22:24
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Kamrat posted:I don't get why they would even do this, shooting non-combatants is just a waste of ammo and it makes the remaining people fight even harder for their land. It's a mix of poorly trained and disciplined soldiers coupled with little accountability for them. Let's say we put you into an active war zone, given a gun and little training. Everyone is going to spook you and eventually you are going to take everything as a target. The US military spends months getting soldiers ready before deployment somewhere to try and avoid these kinds of scenarios and as we have seen in Iraq and Afghanistan it still happens occasionally there.
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Mar 5, 2022 22:24
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steinrokkan posted:The plot twist is that original reports said he was a Russian agent killed by Ukraine, now they are saying UA agent killed by Russia So both sides claim that this guy was actually working for them and that the other side killed him? Yeah, I'm a bit lost here, but I guess, that's sort of the point for these military intelligence types.
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Mar 5, 2022 22:26
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I'd be more inclined to apply Occam's Razor to Russian troops deliberately targeting civilian refugees fleeing a city under siege if they hadn't previously done it in Syria and Chechnya, and if a bunch of posters hadn't predicted that's exactly what they would do.
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Mar 5, 2022 22:27
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Libluini posted:This reminds me of when I tried naming plants in No Man's Sky something-"kraut" and the game didn't let me because "Kraut" is a slur. So I was wondering, who in the hell is still using slurs from the 1st and 2nd World Wars in earnest? You must be new to this forum, Jerry. E:Beaten like the VDV at Hostomel, again and again and again goethe42 fucked around with this message at 22:41 on Mar 5, 2022 |
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