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Russia pulled back from Kyiv and shuffled feet south towards Donbas. That was a few weeks ago and being put into effect currently, which is why CNN won't shut up about Mariupol. Dynamite wrappers containing wood, no dynamite. Anyone have that footage of that russian guy running away from the UAV and leading it back to his unit before the Ukraine army leveled their hiding spot? Also Chernobyl trophies and possible radiation sickness of a bunch of russians.
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Apr 21, 2022 01:50
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TheWeedNumber posted:That’s hot. Also thank you for the well wishes friends. Worth noting that these missiles are brand new and of Ukrainian design. This was their first operational use. The Ukrainians also cleverly used a Bayraktar drone to distract the Moskva's crew, who appear to have not even bothered to deploy the systems which would have defended the ship from the missiles before they smacked dead center amidships. They breached the hull at the waterline, set off an ammunition explosion, and likely destroyed the main damage control compartment, which prevented the crew from mounting an effective response to the damage.  The Russians claimed she sank in a storm (in 6 knot winds and calm seas). Ukraine is also now getting fighter parts and ammunition from NATO, along with a giant heap of other toys including artillery and drones. (Which continue to demonstrate that they have Arrived as a battlefield weapon and that air defense has some catching up to do in this regard). Russia has failed to take Kyiv and is now focusing on Donbas and the east, laying waste to the city of Mariupol where only a small holdout of Ukrainian forces remains in a steel plant on the edge of town. They have brought the Wagner Group mercenaries to bear and are trying to recruit mercenaries from elsewhere. Meanwhile, Russia lacks the ability to replace many of the expensive weapons systems it has lost due to sanctions. Putin insists on pressing on. Kesper North fucked around with this message at 02:02 on Apr 21, 2022 |
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Apr 21, 2022 01:59
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Russia’s losing, somehow.
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Apr 21, 2022 02:17
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FrozenVent posted:Russia’s losing, somehow. https://twitter.com/DarthPutinKGB/status/1516747090294149129#m
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Apr 21, 2022 02:18
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TheWeedNumber posted:Sup, I’ve been in rehab this past month and cannot possibly get caught up with the thread. Can someone please help a brother out by giving me the skinny on what’s going on with the war? I’ll read back a couple of pages but that’s the most I can manage. Appreciate y’all. good job on rehab, I know from experience it sucks, drugs and booze is fun as hell up to a point, but eventually it just turns everything to poo poo for, like, 95% of people A month ago Ukraine had held Russia to basically a stalemate at the end of their supply lines. Russia has since withdrawn completely from Northern Ukraine and much of the NE. Signs of looting and war crimes and other depressing poo poo was naturally found in Russian-occupied areas. A russian encampment was also found in the red forest in Chernobyl where Russians had been digging trenches and fighting positions and so on. In the East North East, Kharkov somehow has not fallen despite being 10 miles from the Russian border and Ukranians have started launching occasional helicopter raids into Russia to blow up fuel depots and command sites. Russian reactions to this were hilariously 'they can't do that!' lol In the South East, Russia is about to launch a renewed offensive in the Donbass. In theory they want to encircle the extremely entrenched Ukranian positions. This offensive is apparently underway, but not a lot is coming out of it and the area is absolutely saturated in advanced anti-vehicle weapons. In the South, Mariupol has mostly fallen but there's still a bunch of UAF actually fighting there and still conducting armored operations somehow that have basically turned the city into a huge meat grinder for the ~25 Russian BTGs it is keeping occupied. The Russian push never made it past Kherson into Mikholaiv, nor did it make it into Zaporizhia. This axis has been stalled out for weeks and Mariupol has been an apparently impossible nut to crack, though it's days are almost invariably numbered. In the Black Sea, Ukraine somehow sank the Russian flagship Moskva by distracting it with a drone and then hitting it with a pair of anti-ship missiles. They also blew up a 120m Russian landing craft in Berdyansk. The Moskva sinking seems to have been the 'poo poo just got real' moment for Russia. Sanctions are doing work to the extent that Russia's main tank plant has ceased operations due to supply shortages. The rest of their economy wrt international trade is on fire, though as they're increasing autarkic, there are limits to how much that may matter. There's also a kind of massive cyberwar going on and it isn't particularly visible because it's mostly Russia just getting their poo poo turbo compromised. like GRU personnel lists getting released on twitter levels of compromised. FrozenVent posted:Russia’s losing, somehow. Herstory Begins Now fucked around with this message at 02:27 on Apr 21, 2022 |
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Apr 21, 2022 02:22
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FrozenVent posted:Russia’s losing, somehow. Turns out that when you aren't interested in the administration of your armed forces past them being able to parade down/through Red Square they might just suck when you put them into real combat against well-trained and well-equipped armed forces that have only "fight and/or die" as options. What people need to be focusing on is the contrast between these and the First and Second Chechen War(s). Russia hosed the doorknob in the first war but the second one went a lot differently. Of course, Chechnya is full of scary Caucasian Muslims with Russian attitudes so I really don't remember hearing much about TBMs falling on markets in Grozny on the evening news. I also just learned that the building immediately across from Lenin's Mausoleum is a loving luxury shopping mall. It is to laugh. BIG HEADLINE fucked around with this message at 02:53 on Apr 21, 2022 |
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Apr 21, 2022 02:24
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I appreciate the well wishes and the summary of the war up to this point. Thank you so much.
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Apr 21, 2022 02:47
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RE: One month war catch up Ukraine's estimates of the number of Russian soldiers KIA is now 20,000. Obviously, those numbers should be assumed to be correct, but... Ukraine has set up a website to catalog the identified Russian soldiers captured or KIA. They seem to have gotten internal Russian military databases, because I've seen some pages with what appear to be the dead soldier's military photo. Ukrainian morgues are apparently full of Russian bodies and they've started contacting these soldiers families to inform them and ask what they want to happen to the bodies. Ukrainian intelligence has also recorded a lot of Russian soldiers talking/bragging about war crimes in calls home and has been able to actually identify these soldier and post their names and other identifying information. edit: For context, Wikipedia lists the estimate of Russian's KIA in Afghanistan as 26,000 (about 10k higher than official USSR numbers) between 1979 and 1989. Russia (a country with roughly half the population of the USSR) appears to have possible lost 80% of that number of troops in under two months. BeastOfExmoor fucked around with this message at 03:16 on Apr 21, 2022 |
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Apr 21, 2022 03:13
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Shipping companies are loaded with stolen goods like video cards, washing machines and so on that are getting shipped back to Russia. Not to the people that stole that stuffed then paid for the shipping of course, it gets re-stolen on the way back. Also Putin is apparently on track to go Full Juche, putting out commandments that companies must divest of foreign currencies and operate entirely in rubles. This seems to not be going over well as the domestic market is getting turbofucked in the ear by sanctions.
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Apr 21, 2022 03:24
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BIG HEADLINE posted:What people need to be focusing on is the contrast between these and the First and Second Chechen War(s). Russia hosed the doorknob in the first war but the second one went a lot differently. Of course, Chechnya is full of scary Caucasian Muslims with Russian attitudes so I really don't remember hearing much about TBMs falling on markets in Grozny on the evening news. There will not be a second invasion of Ukraine at any time in the future. This is the second time. The first time was in 2014. Maybe the Russians learned a lot from the last 8 years, but clearly not as much as the Ukrainians did. As for a round 3: with what army lol. Russia is on day 56 and has taken more losses than in the first and second Chechen wars combined.
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Apr 21, 2022 03:29
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If they attempt to invade again it’s going to be with a bunch of olds and people who were too broken to get conscripted. So even more of a dark comedy than this has been.
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Apr 21, 2022 03:44
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Pretty sure I remember hearing Russia was conscripting another 60k as well. Late last week or early this week. They'll be as useful as a wet sponge and legally not allowed to be sent, but we'll probably see them make an appearance if the war goes on a few more months.
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Apr 21, 2022 04:14
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Conscripts being unable to legally deploy outside of Russia hasn’t been much of a deterrent so far. Asking The Russian regime to adhere to laws of war is akin to asking republicans to adhere to election law. They’re gonna do whatever the gently caress they want and scream about how unfair reality is to their cause regardless.
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Apr 21, 2022 05:40
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highme posted:Conscripts being unable to legally deploy outside of Russia hasn’t been much of a deterrent so far. keep score at home and bet on which russia violates more often: a) laws of war as defined by international treaties signed by the russian federation b) the laws of the russian federation
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Apr 21, 2022 08:11
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CommieGIR posted:Man, Fox News Russia is almost worse than ours. Almost. We Russians are real men who tan our balls. Can you say the same for your gay west?
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Apr 21, 2022 08:49
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BeastOfExmoor posted:I really appreciate how Russia's panel TV shows all look like some incredibly weird 80's/90's game show. Yakov Smirnoff: “in Russian game show you slowly lose your possessions over time” https://twitter.com/electricchimp/status/1063438178898472960?s=21
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Apr 21, 2022 09:26
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Herstory Begins Now posted:More significantly: if Russia is at the point where they feel utterly, totally outclassed conventionally to the point where they're conventionally completely ineffective against the US or NATO, I don't think the thinking really becomes 'ah so we should initiate a nuclear exchange, which we will totally win!' It isn't an entirely unfounded concern, because you've essentially described Soviet strategic thinking, which they even encoded into a computer programme called РЯН (R'YAN ) in the 1980s. Ars Technica posted:Even if it was technologically advanced, the thinking behind RYAN was purely old-school, based on the lessons learned by the Soviets from World War II. It used a collection of approximately 40,000 weighted data points based on military, political, and economic factors that Soviet experts believed were decisive in determining the course of the war with Nazi Germany. The fundamental assumption of RYAN's forecasting was that the US would act much like the Nazis did—if the "correlation of forces" was decisively in favor of the US, then it would be highly likely that the US would launch a surprise attack just as Germany did with Operation Barbarossa. You might have heard of the following incident, but it's worth underscoring how this was compounded by the computer saying "NUKE TIME" by then. Ars Technica posted:As if all the tension wasn't enough, on September 26, 1983 the Oko early warning system reported twice that US ballistic missiles had been launched. Lt. Colonel Stanislav Petrov, the watch officer in the Soviet Air Defense Forces' command bunker outside Moscow that night, made a gut call that the launch warnings were a malfunction. (It was later determined the warnings were caused by the way the sun bounced off high-altitude clouds). If Petrov had followed procedures in place, Andropov would have been alerted of a nuclear launch and an immediate launch of ICBMs would have been ordered. It remains to be seen how much of the old paranoia the former spooks running the country retained. The upside is that they've had ample access to western thinking. Ars Technica posted:Some KGB operatives objected to the analyses that they kept getting back from headquarters of the situation—being more familiar with how the West operates, they believed there was no evidence that there was an actual plan to launch a surprise attack. Jasper Tin Neck fucked around with this message at 10:33 on Apr 21, 2022 |
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Apr 21, 2022 10:29
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Jasper Tin Neck posted:It isn't an entirely unfounded concern, because you've essentially described Soviet strategic thinking, which they even encoded into a computer programme called РЯН (R'YAN ) in the 1980s. There's an awful lot of Soviet/Russian leadership thinking wrapped up in the need to believe that Barbarossa was a shock invasion out of nowhere and not the result of Stalin ignoring a decade of Hitler saying 'The Soviet Union is my ultimate enemy and must be destroyed' and the months long German buildup on the Polish border that was fully detected, the spy in Japan saying 'the Germans are definitely going to invade you' etc etc.
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Apr 21, 2022 10:37
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Alchenar posted:There's an awful lot of Soviet/Russian leadership thinking wrapped up in the need to believe that Barbarossa was a shock invasion out of nowhere and not the result of Stalin ignoring a decade of Hitler saying 'The Soviet Union is my ultimate enemy and must be destroyed' and the months long German buildup on the Polish border that was fully detected, the spy in Japan saying 'the Germans are definitely going to invade you' etc etc. The British saying "here are the units that Hitler is about to invade with", the border guards saying "The Nazis are coming RIGHT loving NOW"...
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Apr 21, 2022 10:54
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Jasper Tin Neck posted:It isn't an entirely unfounded concern, because you've essentially described Soviet strategic thinking, which they even encoded into a computer programme called РЯН (R'YAN ) in the 1980s. I'm not saying it's entirely unfounded so much as I'd emphasize that the gap between Russian military's self-perception of their effectiveness and their perception of NATO/US military effectiveness is entirely off the charts compared to the, uh, ostensible parity that could've been plausibly argued in the 1980s. There was some rationale then that perhaps the US was just waiting for an opening, but no one thinks that the US is just waiting for an opening to invade or first-strike Russia now. Also this is all speaking specifically in the context of escalation within an existing conflict, where it is particularly hard to conceive of a situation on really any scale that would be improved by escalating to using a nuclear weapon. e: except for maybe mariupol Tiny Timbs posted:I know Russians have floated the idea that not being able to retake Ukraine poses an "existential threat to the existence of the Russian state" but I really don't see it. A Russia that doesn't agitate against its neighbors is a Russia the rest of the world would be happy to have productive relations with. The problem is that may not matter if enough of their chain of command is crazy enough to see failure in Ukraine or in some future assault on a NATO country that way but I suppose that's nothing new. Yeah I think Russian decisionmaking being entirely in the hands of Putin and just a few advisors is the biggest risk here. Herstory Begins Now fucked around with this message at 13:07 on Apr 21, 2022 |
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Apr 21, 2022 11:20
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Alchenar posted:There's an awful lot of Soviet/Russian leadership thinking wrapped up in the need to believe that Barbarossa was a shock invasion out of nowhere and not the result of Stalin ignoring a decade of Hitler saying 'The Soviet Union is my ultimate enemy and must be destroyed' and the months long German buildup on the Polish border that was fully detected, the spy in Japan saying 'the Germans are definitely going to invade you' etc etc. Yeah, there was a lot of Trump in Stalin, it seems like he genuinely thought he could strike a deal with the leopard, yet the leopard still tried to eat his face.
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Apr 21, 2022 11:22
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TheWeedNumber posted:I appreciate the well wishes and the summary of the war up to this point. Thank you so much. Russia has at no point in time had air superiority. Some of their stuff might literally be made of styrofoam. Ukraine had 2 helos pull off a deep strike raid in Russian territory. Lol just lmao.
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Apr 21, 2022 12:40
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My prediction for strategic nukes: At some point a nuclear armed country will attack another nuclear armed country with a credible attack that will have a good chance of controlling a decent chunk of territory. At this point strategic nukes will not be used in defence, and then it'll now be considered okay for conventional forces to attack nuclear armed countries, just like it's currently fine to supply arms to countries fighting wars against nuclear powers. Suddenly nukes are not going to be the awesome trump card that they have been for 80 odd years so far. Edit: 
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Apr 21, 2022 13:36
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https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1517092063845752832?s=21&t=LIby8wIDXExRKCy4KLEdxg
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Apr 21, 2022 14:31
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This is going to come back and bite him in the arse. He thinks this is somekind of winning move he's not a military strategist lol.
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Apr 21, 2022 14:39
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Woodchip posted:https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1517092063845752832?s=21&t=LIby8wIDXExRKCy4KLEdxg I'm sure leaving a bunch of veterans with antitank missiles in an impregnable base behind them is a good idea. Pull back Russian forces, it's not like the Ukrainians are going to try to resupply the defenders by helicopter or anything. If nothing else, if Ukraine wants to look at retaking the city they don't have to worry about how in the hell to secure Azovstal.
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Apr 21, 2022 14:55
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Isn’t that the steel plant with the secret underground tunnel base?
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Apr 21, 2022 14:59
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A.o.D. posted:The British saying "here are the units that Hitler is about to invade with", the border guards saying "The Nazis are coming RIGHT loving NOW"... "I need to go to my dasha for a few days to think about stuff" FrozenVent posted:Isn’t that the steel plant with the secret underground tunnel base? Yeah I read about that. That's gotta be one of the most terrifying combat scenarios in world history.
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Apr 21, 2022 15:00
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The russian air force's strategy think tank has caught fire   https://tvernews-ru.translate.goog/news/284175/?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en-US&_x_tr_pto=wapp quote:April 21 in the Tver region there was a strong fire. The building of the Central Research Institute of the Aerospace Defense Forces (NII VKO) in Tver caught fire. shame on an IGA fucked around with this message at 15:11 on Apr 21, 2022 |
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Apr 21, 2022 15:08
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shame on an IGA posted:The russian air force's strategy think tank has caught fire Brains overheating.
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Apr 21, 2022 15:09
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Woodchip posted:https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1517092063845752832?s=21&t=LIby8wIDXExRKCy4KLEdxg Big, if true. The only realistic way this happens is if the assault troops are in mutiny and less scared of Russia than of fighting. To fail at Kyiv after investing 1/3rd of your forces in it, to lose your fleet flagship and then fail to complete the occupation of what is highly probably your #1 strategic goal for all this mess (the land access) is a great big fat red L on your forehead. The stans are already saying how brilliant this is because it lets Putin put most of those 12 BTGs into his new offensive. As if those units in Mariupol aren't entirely wasted by this point even if not in out right mutiny.
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Apr 21, 2022 15:15
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correction, this is the Air Defense branch's think tank
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Apr 21, 2022 15:16
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Thought so hard that their brains overheated.
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Apr 21, 2022 15:17
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davecrazy posted:At what point do the Russian conscripts say “gently caress this”? Naked Bear posted:Only when the thing in their face is more scary than the thing in their back.
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Apr 21, 2022 15:27
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TBF it seems quite likely that the conscripts have been deserting the entire time, just on an individual level rather than having entire until go into open mutiny. That part may also be coming.
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Apr 21, 2022 15:44
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I would ask the GBS/DnD China thread thread but I think this would be a more appropriate place to ask. How does this war effect the Chinese military? A lot of their equipment is based on Soviet and Russian technology, would they be looking at this conflict and be thinking "holy poo poo we have to make our own equipment to be on parity with NATO standard". Or will they blame training/logisitcs etc..?
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Apr 21, 2022 15:47
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Budzilla posted:I would ask the GBS/DnD China thread thread but I think this would be a more appropriate place to ask. How does this war effect the Chinese military? A lot of their equipment is based on Soviet and Russian technology, would they be looking at this conflict and be thinking "holy poo poo we have to make our own equipment to be on parity with NATO standard". Or will they blame training/logisitcs etc..? China has been forging their own path for quite some time. If anything, this reinforces that decision and perhaps encourages them to push even harder.
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Apr 21, 2022 15:53
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China: "Selling your fuel to some schmoes is bad. Write that down"
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Apr 21, 2022 15:55
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A.o.D. posted:China has been forging their own path for quite some time. If anything, this reinforces that decision and perhaps encourages them to push even harder.
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Apr 21, 2022 15:59
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Budzilla posted:I would ask the GBS/DnD China thread thread but I think this would be a more appropriate place to ask. How does this war effect the Chinese military? A lot of their equipment is based on Soviet and Russian technology, would they be looking at this conflict and be thinking "holy poo poo we have to make our own equipment to be on parity with NATO standard". Or will they blame training/logisitcs etc..? I haven’t seen anything that pointed to the equipment being super bad, just a complete lack of maintenance. From what I heard China’s military suffers from a lot of the same issues, so their might be some corruption purges coming.
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Apr 21, 2022 16:05
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