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Crow Buddy posted:Oh no, not the "Russia should invade" party. How will their democracy survive this? What about the party that warned that if Ukraine went in a Western direction, they may end up having... Black priests?
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Feb 26, 2023 06:20
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spacetoaster posted:Out of curiosity what do you mean by barely trained? I haven't really kept up with the conscription going on in Russia but I seem to remember it being a few months ago, and the majority of them haven't been deployed yet? During the manpower shortage Russia started redeploying people normally involved in training to the front, which did not help their overall quality of training. Additionally the mobilization largely happened in 3 parts because the need for manpower was so acute: they sent the first third of mobiks basically straight to the front with a few days to a week or two of training. Another group appears to have gotten ~4-6 weeks and the final third got ~3 months of training and they started hitting the front around new years. The first third got almost nearly no training, but by the 3rd they had ironed out many of the issues, albeit that also wasn't bringing the experienced training cadre back. We know the relative training times because Ukraine started capturing people with papers showing their mobilization dates within days of the mobilization starting and because of wives and families of the mobilized complaining about the quality and length of training Ukraine's mobilization was conducted similarly and both saw a significant wave of combat power as the final group made it to the front, which for Ukraine resulted in the Kherson and Kharkiv successes and for Russia it got the frontline moving, albeit very slowly, around Bakhmut. Herstory Begins Now fucked around with this message at 08:39 on Feb 26, 2023 |
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Feb 26, 2023 06:21
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spacetoaster posted:How is Ukraine a democracy if the ruling party banned opposition parties, confiscated their resources, and took over the media? An interview with a still-sitting member of Parliament from an opposition party seems like a poor way of establishing that opposition parties are banned and Ukrainian democracy has been strangled in the cradle.
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Feb 26, 2023 06:23
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spacetoaster posted:How is Ukraine a democracy if the ruling party banned opposition parties, confiscated their resources, and took over the media? Setting aside whether or not this is an accurate representation of the linked article or whether those things are appropriate on the merits, is there a common definition of "democracy" where those things would exclude Ukraine? In particular I think several countries that are uncontroversially considered democracies have banned opposition parties.
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Feb 26, 2023 06:23
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James Garfield posted:In particular I think several countries that are uncontroversially considered democracies have banned opposition parties. Ukraine has the legal and moral advantage of being under both martial law and hostile invasion. Anyone saying "Actually the people shelling our cities into rubble are cool and good" can gently caress right off, suppressing them is the right thing to do. Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, with Constitutional authority to do it; I haven't seen Ukraine's statues covering martial law, but I'll bet Zelensky has the enumerated authority to do what he did unless they were written by idiots.
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Feb 26, 2023 07:10
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Jasper Tin Neck posted:This one? (It starts with avocados, but eventually meanders over to the mining machines that ended up being outsourced to the Czech Republic.) remember, galeev is something of a "i turned some wikipedia articles into a twitter thread for socials clout" hack who is notorious for blocking every academic who calls him out for not really understanding what he's talking about cinci zoo sniper posted:Conservative estimates place the number of Russia émigrés at 0.5 million. A particular problem demographic here is IT workers, which are estimated to have departed in the number of 100k, or 10% of the industry manpower total. https://thebell.io/skolko-rossiyan-v-2022-godu-uekhalo-iz-strany-i-ne-vernulos IT is kinda weird though, because between existing pandemic remote work patterns and the general nature of IT work being particularly amenable to it, haven't a bunch continued to work for their previous employers from outside the country? i imagine hard data on that is nigh-impossible to find, but anecdotal discussion of emigre populations is that IT workers in particular are a large factor in emigres consuming housing stock in central asia because they make bank compared to locals and don't need to find local work
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Feb 26, 2023 08:25
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NTRabbit posted:According to the guy and his sources, the Russian forces fighting near Vuhledar degraded below combat effective after multiple failed assaults and defending against Ukrainian counters. Reinforcements to push the assault forwards were ordered up from Mariupol, but they and their supply dumps were hit while assembling by new long range Ukrainian rockets, so that when they arrived they lacked the combat strength to make any difference, and now they're out of time with nothing left to move up. Also; Mud Season says hi!!! 
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Feb 26, 2023 08:36
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The campist tendency in the Western left is headed for strange places in the next decade Specifically: said left today still habitually gives more credence to Russia's narrative on current events rather than China's (i.e., hence the talk about Ukrainian fascists, rather than the American threat to multipolar strategic autonomy and legitimate security interest; what do you think Beijing feels about hypothetical invasions to liberate people from alleged fascisms?), but of course it is the latter which is the de facto leader of the anti-Western camp A lot of it is Soviet nostalgia at work but there's got to be some generational tipping point where the campists switch to talking up the Chinese path to modernity and whole-process people's democracy
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Feb 26, 2023 08:38
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A lot of that is generational, at least in my area. The Green Party where I am is 100% in support of Ukraine and reject the Russian narrative, and demographically is generally skewing younger and represents modern leftisms fairly well. By contrast the local Socialist party is taking a Both-Sideism approach, and has an average age of well above 60 (not helped by a lot of younger people leaving over the issue).
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Feb 26, 2023 08:53
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Maybe China should spend more money on English-language troll farms and conspiratorial shills, and less money on couching their particular victim complex in a way that sounds like a think tank consisting of the most boring bureaucrats on the planet thought it up.
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Feb 26, 2023 09:00
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Bug Squash posted:A lot of that is generational, at least in my area. The Green Party where I am is 100% in support of Ukraine and reject the Russian narrative, and demographically is generally skewing younger and represents modern leftisms fairly well. By contrast the local Socialist party is taking a Both-Sideism approach, and has an average age of well above 60 (not helped by a lot of younger people leaving over the issue). Yeah, traditional social democratic parties seem to be dead for good across wide swathes of Europe, and their relative reluctance on this issue compared to the more dynamic / hawkish "new" green left is only deepen the alienation between them and younger voters. E: outright post-Soviet hard left doesn't represent European left, is not a contest between them and and the new left, is between the parties of the welfare state and the new left. steinrokkan fucked around with this message at 09:07 on Feb 26, 2023 |
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Feb 26, 2023 09:04
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ronya posted:The campist tendency in the Western left is headed for strange places in the next decade Worth noting that China has found virtually no traction in any large scale promotion of their narrative or greater world view in the anglo world whereas Russia was doing so relatively adeptly and in a multitude of ways for ages and they've had a particularly effective last decade. Despite their successes Russia's efforts have been undermined by the, uh, caliber of people that they can get to push their messaging, but the quantity of it all has been reasonably effective and they have an entire ecosystem of influencers and substack 'independent journalists' in addition to their openly branded stuff.
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Feb 26, 2023 09:12
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I don't think the Western left is going to be predominantly campist in an unreconstructed pre-1968 way, to be clear, but even amongst would-be campists, their campism is not terribly loyal to the programmatic messagingQuixzlizx posted:Maybe China should spend more money on English-language troll farms and conspiratorial shills, and less money on couching their particular victim complex in a way that sounds like a think tank consisting of the most boring bureaucrats on the planet thought it up. 讲好中国故事 "telling the China story" has been a policy mandate... albeit not very successful... Russia's strategy of incoherent "very well then I contradict myself" messaging that allows its local partners to cherrypick messages has worked much better than China's rigid enforcement of message discipline. the recent "US Hegemony and its Perils" essay may represent a break in that strategy perhaps
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Feb 26, 2023 09:21
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Herstory Begins Now posted:Worth noting that China has found virtually no traction in any large scale promotion of their narrative or greater world view in the anglo world whereas Russia was doing so relatively adeptly and in a multitude of ways for ages and they've had a particularly effective last decade. Despite their successes Russia's efforts have been undermined by the, uh, caliber of people that they can get to push their messaging, but the quantity of it all has been reasonably effective and they have an entire ecosystem of influencers and substack 'independent journalists' in addition to their openly branded stuff. you would think that, as someone who actively follows this space, i would be less "wait, really?" about friends (who are, admittedly, in the "disenchanted left" market) sharing the Hersch pipeline story with the expected "why is nobody else reporting this" angle and current students from my (elite-ish) alma mater sharing Duginist articles, but eh on one hand, yeah, everyone (rightfully) shits on the "buff Bernie" garbage, but it turns out you don't need that to be effective (at anything other than securing graft funding for the IRA owners) because the straight up "everything you know is a lie and actually russia good" content is far more effective
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Feb 26, 2023 09:23
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ronya posted:讲好中国故事 "telling the China story" has been a policy mandate... albeit not very successful... Russia's strategy of incoherent "very well then I contradict myself" messaging that allows its local partners to cherrypick messages has worked much better than China's rigid enforcement of message discipline. Exactly, and they are chasing different objectives. China is genuinely trying to 'tell the China story'. Russia's propaganda efforts are aimed at amplifying every voice saying 'challenge the orthodox narrative' in the West to reduce national coherency and political resolve. There is no end objective they are chasing other than 'make it hard for Western Democratic leaders to do anything'.
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Feb 26, 2023 09:37
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As a reminder, Russia and China started actively coordinating their propaganda systems just a couple years ago. https://theintercept.com/2022/12/30/russia-china-news-media-agreement/
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Feb 26, 2023 10:04
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spacetoaster posted:Out of curiosity what do you mean by barely trained? I haven't really kept up with the conscription going on in Russia but I seem to remember it being a few months ago, and the majority of them haven't been deployed yet? Sounds like you need quite a bit of research ahead of you, since conscripts are still not being deployed to Ukraine by and large. The most recent manpower infusions have been (1) prisoners shipped almost directly to the frontline, (2) the mobilization wave announced on September 22, that saw 150k people deployed to Ukraine by December 7 according to the man himself.. That's 11 weeks from the first of 300k people beings served papers to tens of thousands being on the frontline. Hell, by October 28 Shoygu said that the number was 80k already, which is 5 weeks from the public announcement. Many of them are virtually untrained, and all the Z-bloggers have been badgering Kremlin about very much the same for months, as the mobilization training quality is highly dependent on the instructor corps of any local army base being competent, or even just alive really. Edit: Qtotonibudinibudet posted:remember, galeev is something of a "i turned some wikipedia articles into a twitter thread for socials clout" hack who is notorious for blocking every academic who calls him out for not really understanding what he's talking about Yes, but this coin has two sides – once they have a non-Russian bank account, they can simply find a random Western job that's going to pay way more than anything the Russian market could offer them. Also, they can't do remote-unfriendly IT jobs, like running the digital infrastructure for SORM, Roskomnadzor's censors, MIC IT and development, and so on. The big government has some very specific dependencies in all of that. cinci zoo sniper fucked around with this message at 11:19 on Feb 26, 2023 |
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Feb 26, 2023 11:01
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the holy poopacy posted:An interview with a still-sitting member of Parliament from an opposition party seems like a poor way of establishing that opposition parties are banned and Ukrainian democracy has been strangled in the cradle. especially when compared to the bastion of free elections and democracy that is russia! anecdotal to the ruble discussion previously, but my wife works here in the czech republic with tourist groups from mainland china and taiwan. and recently, they just had a problem with a tour leader who came to europe from china with some roubles and wanted to know where they could exchange them and didn't like when people said "nowhere". an isolated incident, to be sure, but i'm not entirely sure it won't be the last.
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Feb 26, 2023 11:23
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Qtotonibudinibudet posted:IT is kinda weird though, because between existing pandemic remote work patterns and the general nature of IT work being particularly amenable to it, haven't a bunch continued to work for their previous employers from outside the country? i imagine hard data on that is nigh-impossible to find, but anecdotal discussion of emigre populations is that IT workers in particular are a large factor in emigres consuming housing stock in central asia because they make bank compared to locals and don't need to find local work Yes and no They usually tend to continue to work for their Russian employer remotely BUT same employer usually either has a divested company in the EU jurisdiction or Armenia/Kazakhstan/Turkey where they land relocants and do foreign business without fear of failing KYCs. After 6 months abroad, a Russian citizen loses tax residency and, if still employed at Russian company, starts paying income tax at increased rate, so if the employer does not provide them with a job at a company (which also allows them to stay in country on a work visa/get a long-term permit), they register as the independent contractor in the country that they stay into and stop paying Russian taxes altogether. As cinci said, people employed in information security at companies close to the government are poo poo out of luck so they are better off looking for foreign employers.
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Feb 26, 2023 11:30
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Qtotonibudinibudet posted:remember, galeev is something of a "i turned some wikipedia articles into a twitter thread for socials clout" hack who is notorious for blocking every academic who calls him out for not really understanding what he's talking about He's obviously biased as hell against the current regime, has some questionable interpretations of Soviet history and his speculations on what will happen are obviously wishful thinking, but even so, I do think D&D loves to hate the guy a little too much. Like repels like? Galeev seems to be strongest when discussing mundane recent policies that until recently were of little interest to western audiences. I'll gladly be corrected by more nuanced scholarship on the mechanisms in recent history that led to the hollowing out of Russia's manufacturing base, though. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Feb 26, 2023 11:42
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evil_bunnY posted:Xi has so little to gain in backing Zelensky He might sucker the europeans to not start reshoring if he does that.
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Feb 26, 2023 12:22
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His Divine Shadow posted:He might sucker the europeans to not start reshoring if he does that. Not really. The internal politics and demographics of china are pretty fubar. The CCP encouraged/allowed entrepreneurship only so far that it provided employment to the Chinese people, Xi views the entrepreneur class as the threat to state power. He (rightly IMO) views part of the failure of russia post USSR is the power the oligarchs were allowed to have.
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Feb 26, 2023 12:51
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mllaneza posted:Read the articles you're posting. That's asking a lot.
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Feb 26, 2023 12:57
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cinci zoo sniper posted:Hell, by October 28 Shoygu said that the number was 80k already, which is 5 weeks from the public announcement. Many of them are virtually untrained, and all the Z-bloggers have been badgering Kremlin about very much the same for months, as the mobilization training quality is highly dependent on the instructor corps of any local army base being competent, or even just alive really. It also begs the question of where are they getting NCO's and junior officers to lead the conscripts. Without competent sergeants and lieutenants you don't have a unit, you have an armed mob. And those ranks tend to take at least the same rate of casualties as privates but in many wars even higher because their role forces them to move about the battlefield all the time. So Russia needs tens of thousands of NCO's and lieutenants just for the mobnik units, and ten weeks is not enough for that.
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Feb 26, 2023 13:00
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In re China supplying Russia, I heard a while back that while China sometimes ships dubious quality stuff, when everyone else stopped shipping to Russia, China started shipping some real bullshit with a poo poo eating grin like what are you going to do about it? I seem to recall something like 50+% dud rates on chips etc as per russian complaints. Now this could of course be an information campaign, but I still think it's kind of interesting, given the talk of China possibly supplying Russia with military goods. What if it all turns out to be bullshit and duds that keeps blowing up as soon as you put it in gear? Any sense of the odds of this happening? It's still supplying the failing aggressor in a very unnecessary land war. Will China risk pissing off important trade partners and ruining its reputation as a soft power, for this? What would its interests be? Keeping the west busy wiith a prolonged conflict? It looks like it's going to be pretty prolonged anyway. Would it be resources?
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Feb 26, 2023 13:27
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China might be an authoritarian state, but it is an incredibly decentralised authoritarian state with a myriad of actors with their own interests and autonomy to act without the centre even knowing, much less approving. It's entirely possible there's just a guy with a factory who just wants to make some money on the side.
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Feb 26, 2023 13:48
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There's been a lot of recent coverage about the 1-year anniversary of this war, including a fair bit of great photography. All links are  for reasons ranging from corpses and wounds to the sheer desolation of the war, but I can only recommend sitting down with all of this for a cup of coffee or two, if you've followed the war closely.https://www.lsm.lv/raksts/zinas/arzemes/ukrainas-kara-52-nedelas-52-fotografijas.a498029/ https://www.ft.com/content/2cb05b02-a9dc-497c-b926-51bb291e7d3b https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-02-23/russia-s-invasion-of-ukraine-a-political-year-in-photos
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Feb 26, 2023 14:26
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cinci zoo sniper posted:There's been a lot of recent coverage about the 1-year anniversary of this war, including a fair bit of great photography. All links are The ones in the FT are good for sure. 
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Feb 26, 2023 14:53
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Just Another Lurker posted:The ones in the FT are good for sure. Those are fairly exclusive photos, as they're from a Ukrainian photo journalist collaboration that primarily distributes them through sales of printed photo books.
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Feb 26, 2023 15:05
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cinci zoo sniper posted:There's been a lot of recent coverage about the 1-year anniversary of this war, including a fair bit of great photography. All links are I'd forgotten about Luka leaking the full Russian invasion plan on TV. That idiot probably hurt the Russian war machine more than anyone else besides the USA, although maybe I am not giving enough credit to Belarusian partisans that actively mucked up the supplies running through Belarus.
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Feb 26, 2023 16:26
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Saladman posted:I'd forgotten about Luka leaking the full Russian invasion plan on TV. That idiot probably hurt the Russian war machine more than anyone else besides the USA, although maybe I am not giving enough credit to Belarusian partisans that actively mucked up the supplies running through Belarus. See the genius move would've been to leak false plans to him so they could've misdirected defending forces but lmao I guess even the most basic principles of military deception evades the RuAF
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Feb 26, 2023 16:36
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https://twitter.com/niubi/status/1629874706764447748 Full court press on the hegemony thesis - mostly rehashing the same themes
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Feb 26, 2023 17:18
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https://twitter.com/drikssdrikss/status/1629778661879545858?s=20 what does the russian here mean? From my google translate attempts, it seems like an idiom of some kind.
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Feb 26, 2023 17:23
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Jonny Nox posted:https://twitter.com/drikssdrikss/status/1629778661879545858?s=20 "Broads will birth some more" --- often attributed to Zhukov (without a citation), denotes Soviet and now Russian alleged lack of care for personnel costs on military operations --- e.g. in this case that the drone is considered more important than the troops.
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Feb 26, 2023 17:33
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Jonny Nox posted:https://twitter.com/drikssdrikss/status/1629778661879545858?s=20 It means there is free cannon fodder born every second, but equipment cost money
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Feb 26, 2023 17:36
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Jonny Nox posted:what does the russian here mean? From my google translate attempts, it seems like an idiom of some kind. https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%91%D0%B0%D0%B1%D1%8B_%D0%BD%D0%BE%D0%B2%D1%8B%D1%85_%D0%BD%D0%B0%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%B6%D0%B0%D1%8E%D1%82 “ Women give birth to new ones ” (“ women still give birth ”) is a catchphrase meaning the attitude of military leaders to the value of human life [1] and most often attributed by publicists to Marshal Zhukov [2] . Moreover, the phrase existed already at the beginning of the 20th century and has an earlier analogue in French . The Russian version of the statement could have arisen on the basis of the French counterpart, which appeared earlier. Researcher Konstantin Dushenko also points out that the phrase could have a folklore origin [3] . Available sources do not allow us to unambiguously establish whether Marshal Zhukov repeated this phrase .
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Feb 26, 2023 17:36
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Flamethrowers
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Feb 26, 2023 18:10
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Jonny Nox posted:https://twitter.com/drikssdrikss/status/1629778661879545858?s=20 It sounds to me like they are trying to do ww1 stormtrooper tactics but with whoever they can find and with little training and poor arty support. ronya posted:The campist tendency in the Western left is headed for strange places in the next decade
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Feb 26, 2023 18:17
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ronya posted:https://twitter.com/niubi/status/1629874706764447748 quote:For a year, the US defined the conflict between Russia and Ukraine by "the war between democracy and despotism," which has dominated the US and the Western society. Immersed in a carefully choreographed narrative, many people in the West do not know that it was the US-led NATO that gradually lured Russia into conflict with Ukraine over the past few decades.
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Feb 26, 2023 18:19
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RockWhisperer posted:Flamethrowers They're thermobaric rocket launchers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RPO-A_Shmel e: here's a video showing it in action in Mariupol. There's no visible gore on the video, but I recall that in another video they showed the results from close up - a group of Russian footmen who were between the BMP and the stone fence all died, so be warned  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5A1FzlHBWPU Nenonen fucked around with this message at 18:30 on Feb 26, 2023 |
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Feb 26, 2023 18:24
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