loving Moron posted:

Does this sack of fetid poo poo live in the US? If so they need to hit him up for aiding and abetting our enemies and lock him away for like 20 years.

BigBeefCity posted:

why would a corpse need an oxygen mask

Pine Cone Jones posted:

To look cool as hell

Neddy Seagoon posted:

The only way it could be funnier is if it turns out most, if not all, of the Russian army is already in Ukraine and these guys just have relative free reign to run around inside Russia.

Those good troops have gotta be around there, somewhere, in wait...

Sedgr posted:

Molothecat posted:

you can't just ignore the global south, you'll pay for this

Alan Smithee posted:

what global mouth doing

Shogeton posted:

Yeah, I understand that is the awkward thing. It'd be really nice if the Russians that are causing all that ruckus to the Putin Regime were good people, but there's some stuff that suggests it's just awful, fascist shitheads who happen to not get along with the fascist shithead in the kremlin. Ukraine isn't exactly in a place of being picky who they accept help from I suppose (See also, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, who invaded a neighbour themselves) but let's not get lured in the 'if someone is against the evil folks we hate, they have to be good' trap.

Keisari posted:

But why the hell would they close bomb shelters? I mean what the actual gently caress?

HonorableTB posted:

the tankiesphere is fuckin stunned silent lmao, I barely even see any aggrandized flailing and rhetoric. its crickets lol, I guess they havent received the latest moscow talking points yet

Deki posted:

I've seen a few "oh of course they go for the easy unguarded villages and bases. " takes which then begs the question of why border outposts and villages on the border of a nation you're invading are undefended...

the popes toes posted:

Incisive analysis about the corrupt warmongering proxy of the US and the Western Globalist Elite

https://twitter.com/mtracey/status/1660694460013920264

Neddy Seagoon posted:

The only way it could be funnier is if it turns out most, if not all, of the Russian army is already in Ukraine and these guys just have relative free reign to run around inside Russia.

EorayMel posted:

Gwarver

Neddy Seagoon posted:

The only way it could be funnier is if it turns out most, if not all, of the Russian army is already in Ukraine and these guys just have relative free reign to run around inside Russia.

Those good troops have gotta be around there, somewhere, in wait...

quote:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/05/29/two-weeks-at-the-front-in-ukraine

Two Weeks at the Front in Ukraine
By Luke Mogelson
May 22, 2023

...

Syava’s battalion, which numbered about six hundred men, was posted on the edge of a village south of Bakhmut... Within weeks, the battalion faced annihilation: entire platoons had been wiped out in close-contact firefights, and some seventy men had been encircled and massacred. The dwindling survivors, one officer told me, “became useless because they were so tired.” In January, what was left of the battalion retreated from the village and established defensive positions in the tree lines and open farmland a mile to the west. “Wagner kicked our asses,” the officer said.

The Russian mercenaries subsequently left for Bakhmut, to shore up other forces there, and the conventional troops who replaced them were far less numerous and suicidal. By the time I joined the battalion, about two months had passed since it had lost the battle for the village, and during the interim neither side had attempted a major operation against the other. It was all the Ukrainians could do to maintain the stalemate. Pavlo estimated that, owing to the casualties his unit had sustained, eighty per cent of his men were new draftees. “They’re civilians with no experience,” he said. “If they give me ten, I’m lucky when three of them can fight.”

...

He [Artem] was a forty-two-year-old father of three who managed a grain elevator in a small farming community in central Ukraine. Men who have three children are legally exempt from conscription but, in December, Artem was still in the process of adopting one of his daughters when he was summoned by his local draft board. A physician, citing a skull fracture that Artem had once suffered during an ice-skating accident, deemed him medically unfit to serve; the board dispatched him to a military training center anyway. His training lasted a month and consisted of tutorials and marching drills—“theoretical stuff, nothing practical.” He shot a total of thirty rounds during two trips to a firing range. From the training center, Artem was assigned to the 28th Brigade, and a day after joining Pavlo’s infantry battalion he was on the Zero Line.

...

On February 24, 2022, Volodymyr Zelensky, the President of Ukraine, declared a general mobilization for male citizens between the ages of eighteen and sixty. Civilians of all stripes flocked to military-registration offices, eager to fight. Some waited in line for days, only to be told that no more men were required. Today, popular support for resisting rather than negotiating with Russia remains high, but, as in every war, the burden of sacrifice has fallen increasingly on the underprivileged. Nearly every draftee I met in the trenches had been a manual laborer—farmer, carpenter, dockworker, plumber—and stories abounded of Ukrainians with means dodging conscription through graft or nepotism. “You could find people from the higher classes in the infantry at the beginning of the war,” one veteran told me. “But, after a year, you don’t see an end to this—your chances of dying are higher, you’re loving tired. Now most of the people are being drafted.”

...

Unlike U.S. soldiers in every American conflict since the Second World War, Ukrainian draftees are generally not being contracted for fixed periods of service or deployed on tours with defined limits. They are being indentured for as long as they are needed. One officer told me, “You come home with victory, without a limb, or dead.” A fourth option was desertion. “Sometimes they return, sometimes they don’t,” the officer said.

In January, Zelensky signed legislation that raised the maximum punishment for desertion to twelve years in prison. It is unknown how many Ukrainians have been sentenced to date, but one factor potentially obstructing enforcement of the law is the reluctance of superior officers to denounce offenders. Odesa’s platoon leader, a senior lieutenant named Ivan, told me that he pitied the draftees in his platoon; like Pavlo, he placed the blame for their shortcomings on inadequate training. One of his soldiers, he said, “was just walking down the street when guys approached him and physically took him to the draft center—in less than two days, he was with the brigade.”

Sedgr posted:

quote:

Strelkov Igor Ivanovich #KRP
Well? We can confidently say that our intelligence (of all departments) "again worked for five plus."

Even I - the "ensign-reenactor" famous for my stupidity, alarmism and cowardice - warned about the upcoming enemy attack (by the way - not the last, I'm sure) on our territory ahead of time. AND? And so they invaded. And even, it turns out, successfully. We got in. Now we will knock them out, destroying our own settlements. One word - well done!

The fact that this is not an "offensive" is unlikely to console the inhabitants of those villages that for half a year experienced growing shelling by enemy artillery, and now they have met enemy soldiers on their streets. My congratulations to the GRU General Staff, the 5th Service of the FSB of the Russian Federation, the intelligence service of the FPS of the FSB of Russia and everyone else involved! Keep it up!

Funky See Funky Do posted:

What does "again worked for five plus." mean?

Carth Dookie posted:

There's way too many layers to this onion for my astronomically high brain to parse

edit:

I need to go and see if I can make an AI image generator pop out a good weed leaf/ukranian trident mashup. Writing it down because I WILL forget.

zone posted:

He's sarcastically saying they did a superb job by allowing this to happen instead of anticipating it and preparing something for it.

sebmojo posted:

I'd guess it's like got an A+, but yeah always interesting to get those idioms explained

zone posted:

https://twitter.com/Gerashchenko_en/status/1660679945583034368
Poor fools, that's what comes of thinking your nation of bandits was capable of scaring anyone any longer after the debacle of your "special military operation."

Samovar posted:

A while back but... Chimera? That seems a very specific translation - is it some kind of... Just a common term that is used in Russian that just gets specifically translated as Chimera? Are there any further... meanings behind it other than 'monster'?

Samovar posted:

A while back but... Chimera? That seems a very specific translation - is it some kind of... Just a common term that is used in Russian that just gets specifically translated as Chimera? Are there any further... meanings behind it other than 'monster'?

sebmojo posted:

I'd guess it's like got an A+, but yeah always interesting to get those idioms explained

sebmojo posted:

It's specifically a composite monster, and also can be used as a pipe dream

Bezoar posted:

Perhaps a kind of “five by five” that got lost a bit in translation?

https://www.wordorigins.org/big-list-entries/five-by-five