Raskolnikov38 posted:

its been a month and they still haven't cleared the skirmish line

quote:

Sergey Shoigu has checked the organization of combat training for soldiers from newly formed military units, the Russian Defense Ministry has reported

Read more: https://on.rt.com/cf1s

Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu has inspected newly formed military units during drills based on combat experience gained during the Ukraine conflict.

In a statement on Saturday, the ministry said that Shoigu had checked “the organization of combat training of contract soldiers in newly formed… military units” at the training grounds of the Southern Military District, without specifying the exact location.

The military personnel are receiving instruction in tactics and weapons proficiency while learning how to drive and fire from tanks, with a focus on how to destroy Ukraine’s Western-supplied hardware. The entire intensified combat training course takes 38 days, the ministry said.

Shoigu inspected troops that are honing their combat skills on Russian T-90 tanks, the ministry noted, adding that servicemembers have a high opinion of the advanced armor, the statement read.

The ministry also shared a two-minute clip from the training ground, featuring a long line of tanks as well as intensive combat exercises with a lot of shooting in an urban environment and in field trenches.

“All training involves new military hardware and modern equipment,” the minister stressed, adding that soldiers are being instructed by veteran officers that have gained battle experience during the Ukraine conflict.

According to the statement, all of the soldiers have already undergone individual battle training, with operational coordination training now underway.

Shoigu said last month that Russia was recruiting a massive reserve force. At the time, the minister said that on average about 1,300 people – roughly equivalent to one regiment – join the military under a contract every day. In total, some 114,000 contract soldiers and 52,000 volunteers had enlisted in the army, he added.

His remarks came after Russian President Vladimir Putin said that Moscow did not need to call up more soldiers for now, noting that the army was enjoying a steady inflow of volunteers.

Danann posted:

https://twitter.com/pevchikh/status/1678008982563061761

russian liberal surprised that racist trolls are racist

Cao Ni Ma posted:

Im drawing a blank on when this thread could be calling out "Nazi Mines" but I'm going to guess it was during the siege of Mariupol when Azov surrounded the city with them to the point that people couldnt be evacuated out of it, they refused to clear them to establish said evacuation corridors and then retreated to positions with civilian shelters in them when the poo poo hit the fan. Also some idiots saying that it was russia that put the mines there in the first place, because thats something you totally do, put mines in front of the territory you are about to siege.

Thats a fair bit different than putting anti vehicle mines on no mans land since people can still evacuate through corridors that aren't mined to poo poo.

Also I think that countries that dont sign anti personnel mine bans are terrible but the ones that do and then renege on their treaties to be worse.

galagazombie posted:

I don’t find much believability, in this thread in particular, decrying the cluster bombs (which are bad and I condemn Ukraine for using them) after watching the threads opinions on landmines go from “vile Nazi terror weapons” when the Russians were launching offensives, to “Noble shields of the proletariat used by keen strategic minds” when the Russians started using them against Ukrainian offensives.

gradenko_2000 posted:

Frog Act posted:

I’m probably not paying close enough attention but I do think whatever proRussian sentiments are expressed here are pretty different from the way outside interlocutors describe them. I like this thread because it’s one of the only places I can passively consume news where there is a general agreement that eighteen year old kids being mulched is bad irrespective of partisan particulars. it’s pretty nauseating reading the discussions on reddit and in other threads, where the universal element is sidelined and permissible empathy parameterized by national origin. characterizations of this war as a human tragedy primarily victimizing the working class on behalf of two discrete and evil groups of oligarchs and its concerning how few people can agree with that basic premise

Lostconfused posted:

Frog Act posted:

I’m probably not paying close enough attention but I do think whatever proRussian sentiments are expressed here are pretty different from the way outside interlocutors describe them. I like this thread because it’s one of the only places I can passively consume news where there is a general agreement that eighteen year old kids being mulched is bad irrespective of partisan particulars. it’s pretty nauseating reading the discussions on reddit and in other threads, where the universal element is sidelined and permissible empathy parameterized by national origin. characterizations of this war as a human tragedy primarily victimizing the working class on behalf of two discrete and evil groups of oligarchs and its concerning how few people can agree with that basic premise

Endman posted:

It fucks me up that there's no way to enforce the cluster munitions ban because the only states powerful enough to do it haven't signed the loving convention.

Endman posted:

It fucks me up that there's no way to enforce the cluster munitions ban because the only states powerful enough to do it haven't signed the loving convention.

Horseshoe theory posted:

Maybe they were in the OUN-B/SS Galicia as well?

Raskolnikov38 posted:

its been a month and they still haven't cleared the skirmish line

Endman posted:

It fucks me up that there's no way to enforce the cluster munitions ban because the only states powerful enough to do it haven't signed the loving convention.

yellowcar posted:

the cynical take is that the ban was never intended to appeal to humanitarian sensibilities but used as a bludgeon by the west criticize their enemies and destroy their credibility

Raskolnikov38 posted:

its been a month and they still haven't cleared the skirmish line

Endman posted:

If you can't win a war then you should lose it quickly so the nightmare isn't prolonged for the civilian population. Unless you're one of those clowns with the brain of an infant that really thinks Russia is going to genocide Ukraine for some unknown reason.

Starsfan posted:

I am genuinely a bit confused why Russia hasn't fallen back to their 1st defensive line yet.. why keep fighting over this supposed "contact zone"?

Like.. Russia's MO all along has been fall back to avoid taking casualties when it's required.. land can be retaken, getting a bunch of your soldiers surrounded and killed can never be undone.. etc etc. They've spent all this money and time and effort building up this massive trench network and they aren't really taking full advantage of it.. Ukraine has driven them back in sectors before but Russia just counter-attacks and re-takes the positions the next day.. but surely at the cost of alot of casualties that might not be necessary if they just continued letting Ukraine be the ones to push. Do we think that Russia is maybe letting Pride get ahold of them and is simply not willing to give Ukraine any sort of success to lean on since we know how much Ukraine and their allies will crow about it, or is it part of the plan to fight tooth and nail for the contact zone and make Ukraine earn every 100m of territory they pick up?

Endman posted:

I'm sure at least some of the people behind it had cynical intentions, but that's neither here nor there for me, the actual material effect of the ban is much more important. That said, either end can't be guaranteed since the West's boss refuses to sign it and so we lose both the benefit of no cluster munitions and the moral high ground to poo poo on our enemies for using them.

DancingShade posted:

Puts on child's spinning cap with the nice suit my mom bought for me.

Starts screeching NAFOishly like a banshee:

They're just probing attacks! Ukraine's secret army of western wunderwaffe just out of sight, waiting to pounce!

Cuttlefush posted:

/

Danann posted:

https://twitter.com/pevchikh/status/1678008982563061761

russian liberal surprised that racist trolls are racist

galagazombie posted:

I no more believe this threads claims for the past year that Ukraine will lose in just two more weeks than I do the other threads claims for the past year that Russia will lose in just two more weeks. At this point we’re pretty clearly in a stalemate and in a sane world someone would be implementing a ceasefire between the two instead of wanting the war to continue.

Horseshoe theory posted:

Maybe they were in the OUN-B/SS Galicia as well?

quote:

In 1998 Congress passed the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act [P.L. 105-246] as part of a series of efforts to identify, declassify, and release federal records on the perpetration of Nazi war crimes and on Allied efforts to locate and punish war criminals. Under the direction of the National Archives the Interagency Working Group [IWG] opened to research over 8 million of pages of records - including recent 21st century documentation. Of particular importance to this volume are many declassified intelligence records from the Central Intelligence Agency and the Army Intelligence Command, which were not fully processed and available at the time that the IWG issued its Final Report in 2007. As a consequence, Congress [in HR 110-920] charged the National Archives in 2009 to prepare an additional historical volume as a companion piece to its 2005 volume U. S. Intelligence and the Nazis. Professors Richard Breitman and Norman J. W. Goda note in Hitler's Shadow that these CIA & Army records produced new “evidence of war crimes and about wartime activities of war criminals; postwar documents on the search for war criminals; documents about the escape of war criminals; documents about the Allied protection or use of war criminals; and documents about the postwar activities of war criminals”.

quote:

Beginning in 1953 AERODYNAMIC began to operate through a Ukrainian study group under Lebed's leadership in New York under CIA auspices, which collected Ukrainian literature and history and produced Ukrainian nationalist newspapers, bulletins, radio programming, and books for distribution in the Ukraine. In 1956 this group was formally incorporated as the non-profit Prolog Research and Publishing Association. It allowed the CIA to funnel funds as ostensible private donations without taxable footprints.100 To avoid nosey New York State authorities, the CIA turned Prolog into a for-profit enterprise called Prolog Research Corporation, which ostensibly received private contracts. Under Hrinioch, Prolog maintained a Munich office named the Ukrainische-Gesellschaft für Auslandsstudien, EV. Most publications were created here.101

The Hrinioch-Lebed organization still existed, but its activities ran entirely through Prolog.102

Prolog recruited and paid Ukrainian émigré writers who were generally unaware that they worked in a CIA-controlled operation. Only the six top members of the ZP/UHVR were witting agents. Beginning in 1955, leaflets were dropped over the Ukraine by air and radio broadcasts titled Nova Ukraina were aired in Athens for Ukrainian consumption. These activities gave way to systematic mailing campaigns to Ukraine through Ukrainian contacts in Poland and émigré contacts in Argentina, Australia, Canada, Spain, Sweden, and elsewhere. The newspaper Suchasna Ukrainia (Ukraine Today), information bulletins, a Ukrainian language journal for intellectuals called Suchasnist (The Present), and other publications were sent to libraries, cultural institutions, administrative offices and private individuals in Ukraine. These activities encouraged Ukrainian nationalism, strengthened Ukrainian resistance, and provided an alternative to Soviet media.103

In 1957 alone, with CIA support, Prolog broadcast 1,200 radio programs totaling 70 hours per month and distributed 200,000 newspapers and 5,000 pamphlets. In the years following, Prolog distributed books by nationalist Ukrainian writers and poets. One CIA analyst judged that, “some form of nationalist feeling continues to exist [in the Ukraine] and … there is an obligation to support it as a cold war weapon.” The distribution of literature in the Soviet Ukraine continued to the end of the Cold War.104

Prolog also garnered intelligence after Soviet travel restrictions eased somewhat in the late 1950s. It supported the travel of émigré Ukrainian students and scholars to academic conferences, international youth festivals, musical and dance performances, the Rome Olympics and the like, where they could speak with residents of the Soviet Ukraine in order to learn about living conditions there as well as the mood of Ukrainians toward the Soviet regime. Prolog's leaders and agents debriefed travelers on their return and shared information with the CIA. In 1966 alone Prolog personnel had contacts with 227 Soviet citizens. Beginning in 1960 Prolog also employed a CIA-trained Ukrainian spotter named Anatol Kaminsky. He created a net of informants in Europe and the United States made up of Ukrainian émigrés and other Europeans travelling to Ukraine who spoke with Soviet Ukrainians in the USSR or with Soviet Ukrainians travelling in the West. By 1966 Kaminsiky was Prolog's chief operations officer, while Lebed provided overall management. In this guise, AERODYNAMIC was one of the most effective CIA operations in approaching disaffected Soviet citizens. In the 1960s Prolog's leaders provided reports on Ukrainian politics, dissident Ukrainian poets, individuals connected with the KGB as well as identities of KGB officers, Soviet missiles and aircraft in western Ukraine, and a host of other topics. Official Soviet attacks on the ZP/UHVR as Banderists, German collaborators, American agents, and the like were evidence of Prolog's effectiveness, as were Soviet crackdowns on Ukrainian writers and other dissidents in the mid to late 1960s. By that time Prolog influenced a new Ukrainian generation. By 1969 Ukrainians traveling from the USSR were instructed by dissidents there to take informational materials on Soviet repression in Ukraine only to ZP/UHVR personnel. Travelers to Ukraine even reported seeing ZP/UHVR literature in private homes. Prolog had become in the words of one senior CIA official, the sole “vehicle for CIA's operations directed at the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic and [its] forty million Ukrainian citizens.”

Lebed overtly distanced himself and the Ukrainian national movement from the overt anti-Semitism of his Banderist days. In 1964 he publicly condemned in the name of the ZP/UHVR the appearance of Judaism without Embellishment, published by the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences in Kiev. The book was typical of the anti-Semitic diatribes of the early 20th century with the exception that it actually linked Jews with the Nazis in the attack on the USSR. The book signaled growing Soviet repression of dissident Jews, including the closing of synagogues and prohibitions on Passover Matzoh.106 Lebed actually saw the book as a Soviet attempt to paint Ukrainians with a broad anti-Semitic brush. More to protect the name of Ukrainian nationalism, he publicly condemned the “provocative libel” and “slanderous statements” against Jews, adding in a particularly forgetful note that, “the Ukrainian people…are opposed to all and any preaching of hatred for other people.”107 Ironically, the CIA had Prolog translate sections of the book into French for distribution to left-wing groups in Europe who had been sympathetic to the Soviets. Former Banderists, in other words, now attacked the Soviets for anti-Semitism rather than with it.108

Lebed retired in 1975 but remained an adviser and consultant to Prolog and the ZP/UHVR. Roman Kupchinsky, a Ukrainian journalist who was a one-year-old when the war ended, became Prolog's chief in 1978. In the 1980s AERODYNAMIC's name was changed to QRDYNAMIC and in the 1980s PDDYNAMIC and then QRPLUMB. In 1977 President Carter's National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski helped to expand the program owing to what he called its “impressive dividends” and the “impact on specific audiences in the target area.”109 In the 1980s Prolog expanded its operations to reach other Soviet nationalities, and in a supreme irony, these included dissident Soviet Jews.110 With the USSR teetering on the brink of collapse in 1990, QRPLUMB was terminated with a final payout of $1.75 million. Prolog could continue its activities, but it was on its own financially.111

In June 1985 the General Accounting Office mentioned Lebed's name in a public report on Nazis and collaborators who settled in the United States with help from U.S. intelligence agencies. The Office of Special Investigations (OSI) in the Department of Justice began investigating Lebed that year. The CIA worried that public scrutiny of Lebed would compromise QRPLUMB and that failure to protect Lebed would trigger outrage in the Ukrainian émigré community. It thus shielded Lebed by denying any connection between Lebed and the Nazis and by arguing that he was a Ukrainian freedom fighter. The truth, of course, was more complicated. As late as 1991 the CIA tried to dissuade OSI from approaching the German, Polish, and Soviet governments for war-related records related to the OUN. OSI eventually gave up the case, unable to procure definitive documents on Lebed. Mykola Lebed, Bandera's wartime chief in Ukraine, died in 1998. He is buried in New Jersey, and his papers are located at the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University.

galagazombie posted:

I no more believe this threads claims for the past year that Ukraine will lose in just two more weeks

stephenthinkpad posted:

Isn't it just like how EU is the only one passing laws and banning AI related stuff.

Throatwarbler posted:

I thought Ukraine took back one of the towns near bakhmut or has that been reversed as well

Danann posted:

https://twitter.com/pevchikh/status/1678008982563061761

russian liberal surprised that racist trolls are racist

galagazombie posted:

I no more believe this threads claims for the past year that Ukraine will lose in just two more weeks than I do the other threads claims for the past year that Russia will lose in just two more weeks. At this point we’re pretty clearly in a stalemate and in a sane world someone would be implementing a ceasefire between the two instead of wanting the war to continue.

Starsfan posted:

nah.. there seems to be some translation issues going on where Ukrainian telegram sources say stuff like "Bakhmut will be encircled" and it comes through to the west as "Bakhmut is being encircled" and people get really excited about it for 12 hours until they realize that there's just been the same skirmishing going on as has been done the last month and nothing is happening.

I think that's going on with Klishchiivka right now.. depending on where you look you'll see people claiming that the Ukrainian army has re-captured the north side of the village or has captured the entire village, when in reality they've went forward a couple times and almost reached the outskirts and then got pushed back to their starting points.. there's been no actual progress made outside of former farmland being captured back and forth each day.

Endman posted:

At this point you're right, I was more referring to what could have been avoided at the outset.

Endman posted:

Why are right wing organisations named so shittily these days? Proud Boys?? NAFO Fellas???

It's honestly embarrassing

mawarannahr posted:

extinction rebellion

KomradeX posted:

Starts the story about the shark? This is new to me