saratoga posted:

Accidental explosions at explosive factories during wartime production were historically fairly common. Frequently these things are blamed on saboteurs but are really just incompetence in the rushed handling hazardous materials. I would not jump to conclusions that this one is any different than what happened during the world wars.

Bremen posted:

Yeah. I mean, an ammunition factory is totally a legitimate target during war, and if this was Ukraine's doing I'm certainly not going to hold it against them, but in this case it might really be an honest to god smoking accident.

spankmeister posted:

Keep clutching those pearls buddy.

spankmeister posted:

Not for nothing but if the immediate surroundings of the factory that experienced an unfortunate explosion is strewn with unfilled artillery shells, I'm not so sure the factory should be called a "pyrotechnics" factory.

Vox Nihili posted:

Any word on the Russian advance near Kupyansk? It seems like Ukraine refocused any initiative away from the Kupyansk-Svatove axis and the Luhansk-Kharkiv theater in general and now find themselves on the back foot there.

quote:

Q: And can you give us an update, like, has the Pentagon run through all of the PDA and USAI funds for this year? Are you all essentially out of money now?

MS. SINGH: So in terms of any requests for a supplemental, I'm just not going to get ahead of any conversations that we're having right now.

In terms of PDA funds, we're not out of money. We still have the money that we have from the reevaluation that we did earlier this year. So you'll remember that was approximately $6 billion. So we still do have that to spend down, in terms of PDA, and we're going to continue to do that.

Again, that is still a substantial amount and we feel confident that we can continue to supply Ukraine with what it needs on the battlefield, but I'm just not going to get ahead of anything in terms of any supplemental or any additional requests to Congress.

Q: So that's all that's left for this year, is just the excess $6 billion?

MS. SINGH: For the PDA, yes.

Q: For the PDA ...

MS. SINGH: Yeah, that's right.

Q: ... USAI?

MS. SINGH: I would have to check that one. I just don't know that number off the top of my head right now.

Moon Slayer posted:

Hey now, I'm sure he's just someone who thinks that war is very bad and should be ended as quickly as possible _{by an imposed peace that favors Russia because Ukraine is a Nazi state and NATO puppet.}

saratoga posted:

Frequently these things are blamed on saboteurs but are really just incompetence in the rushed handling hazardous materials.

Kaal posted:

Levada does good work, but I don't think their surveys mean much of anything anymore. People can't be polled if they have a realistic fear that their answer will land them in prison. Russian public opinion has basically been the same thing for decades: "Just leave us alone". For all of Putin's effort to create a patriotic culture, I don't think he's succeeded at all. Certainly there are hardly any left who would willingly march on Ukraine at this point - and that includes their army which is well-known to have massive morale issues.

Dick Ripple posted:

Even in the West some are calling this an existential fight for Russia, being that depending on how or if they lose it could lead to the further break up of Russia or worse. We are also seeing that said more from Russian media and Putin, though how they balance that between it only being a Special Military Operation requires special Russian logic I guess.

Dick Ripple posted:

Even in the West some are calling this an existential fight for Russia, being that depending on how or if they lose it could lead to the further break up of Russia or worse.

Dick Ripple posted:

Even in the West some are calling this an existential fight for Russia, being that depending on how or if they lose it could lead to the further break up of Russia or worse. We are also seeing that said more from Russian media and Putin, though how they balance that between it only being a Special Military Operation requires special Russian logic I guess.

I would also guess that a good percentage of Russians know or see this and do no want to see their country humiliated in losing a war, especially to what was preserved to be as a weaker and smaller neighbor. There are a multitude of consequences for your average Russian if their country comes out on the losing side of this, the worst probably being a civil war and all the misery that goes along with it. For all the mistakes Putin has made going into this war, binding Russia and its peoples fate to it probably is his strongest play.

I am sure there is also a good percentage that just want to war to stop and life to go back to normal, but that is probably as likely as Russian marching through Kiev by next month.

quote:

In addition to drawing up evacuation plans, officials in Kupiansk are working on a way to keep education programs going for those who choose to stay. That includes a mixture of remote and in-person learning.

“Shelters in all educational institutions of the Kharkiv region that plan to conduct classes offline will be checked for compliance with safety requirements,” said Synegubov.

“Preschool, school, professional pre-higher and higher education institutions should promptly inform law enforcement agencies and the State Emergency Service authorities about their decisions regarding mixed or face-to-face education because all ready-made shelters must pass an inspection,” said Synegubov. “Currently, 11 institutions of general secondary education in the Kharkiv region are planning to start the educational process using a mixed form of education. But this will be possible only if the shelters meet the safety requirements. The same applies to 18 preschool institutions and five institutions of higher education, which plan to work in a mixed format.”

WarpedLichen posted:

The Ukrainians have issued an evacuation notice around Kupiansk.

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/ukraine-situation-report-kharkiv-oblast-city-planning-evacuation-as-russians-approach

But what struck me is that they are thinking of organizing school for the people who stay:

A war is just a weird absurd place to be.

ethanol posted:

seems a little much to put the Iraq war on the media. 9/11 put this country into hyper revengeance mode. I remember tons of dissent on the news networks. it also seems presumptuous to make claims about what the majority of Russians really believe because as others pointed out saying the wrong thing out loud puts you in forced labor for 10+ years. propaganda rarely work on its own I guess, not without some form of state terror

Qtotonibudinibudet posted:

a significant segment of the media certainly didn't help. i think the broader takeaway for both conflicts (and plenty more before) is that mass sentiment about people and events far far away from them are abstracted and quite malleable, and that elites with the ability to mold them have limited qualms about propagating views that are, in hindsight, considered reprehensible by most, even those that espoused or agreed with them at the time

WarpedLichen posted:

The Ukrainians have issued an evacuation notice around Kupiansk.

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/ukraine-situation-report-kharkiv-oblast-city-planning-evacuation-as-russians-approach

But what struck me is that they are thinking of organizing school for the people who stay:

A war is just a weird absurd place to be.

WarpedLichen posted:

The Ukrainians have issued an evacuation notice around Kupiansk.

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/ukraine-situation-report-kharkiv-oblast-city-planning-evacuation-as-russians-approach

But what struck me is that they are thinking of organizing school for the people who stay:

A war is just a weird absurd place to be.

Flavahbeast posted:

I think they've toned it down, but earlier in the war Solovyov's black-and-red newsroom segments with the camera panning around the guests and multiple cut-in screens of jets and cruise missiles were an incredible caricature of Iraq-era Fox News, if it was fiction I would have thought they took the satire too far

quote:

When he meets George W. Bush the first time, Bush says he looks in his eyes and sees Putin’s soul. We think maybe there was great hope in Putin, that he would have a relationship and America would show respect to Putin and Russia. Is that right?

I wasn’t there when they looked each other in the eye. I don’t know what happened between them. I don’t know. But then Putin was most likely sincere in his desire for new relations with America, for friendship with America after 9/11. Putin sincerely admired Bush. I can tell you that quite definitely. He looked up to Bush Jr. as I was looking up to Putin, in admiration. This was a role model for him, the model of a president who took the challenge and was starting a big war in the world arena. Putin liked that, and he was prepared to be an ally.

Bush did not really need allies very much, especially allies of Russia. And Putin wanted to be an ally. So that caused trouble. Putin was hurt that he was not understood by Bush, and that became worse after Ukraine. "Ukraine is more precious to you than Russia?! I was prepared to do anything. I was prepared to join NATO, and you are intriguing with Ukraine?!" That’s, I think, how Putin looked at it. And after that, he lost interest in Bush.

There were some other real problems there. Bush did not fully control his secret services, or he did not think he needed to fully control that, so in the Caucasus, American intelligence services had been sometimes helping Chechens. Putin certainly thought that this came as Bush’s order, and that Bush was a hypocrite. Those kinds of things happened. But in the beginning, Putin wanted to have an alliance with the West. He wanted an alliance.

The story I love about that meeting, of course, is the story of Putin’s cross, left over from the fire in the dacha, the family fire. Had you heard that story before? Did you know that he planned that story and to tell Bush about it, because he knew Bush was an evangelical Christian?

I knew that story, and I think this was not the first time that he told that story.

I know at least two more people that he told it to before Bush. This was always told out of a desire to make an impression. I think that story was true. He did not make it up. But as any good popular actor, Putin quickly realized that it impresses people, and he used it. He had another trick, when he would take a person to his room in a "chapel," where he had icons. This seemed like an act of trust and confidence.

One politician asked me why he did it, why he did it at all. He was not a religious person, and he was not so impressed. He said: “Why did Putin take me to his private room? Why did he show me that icon and that cross?” This must have been a way to establish emotional links and emotional relations.

And it did. It worked.

It did work. It did work. In most situations, it does. He doesn’t do it very frequently. If he told everyone about the cross, then people would make fun of him.

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/interview/gleb-pavlovsky/

quote:

The next megaterror attacks by Osama bin Laden and Shamil Basayev gave the authorities of this world the "right" to counter atrocities. President Bush turned the "war on terrorism" into a global one. He started two wars, did not win a single one and ended up supporting "color revolutions", none of which gave a democratic nation. But to his apprentice - the novice president of Russia - Bush Jr. taught a lesson in unilateral politics, extorting a deal on your own terms. The price of the Bushist military actions in Iraq and Afghanistan was the transfer of the waypoint of the development of the Russian Federation. Before Bush, it would never have occurred to Putin that international lists of villainous countries could be drawn up by personal decree, including either Georgia or Ukraine.

The student went further than the teacher. An isolated weak Russia demands for itself the role of a guarantor of global security and dictates conditions to the world, rejecting obligations for itself.

President Medvedev proposed to the West to create with Russia a "single Euro-Atlantic security space" from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific. President Saakashvili tested his peacefulness with the war in South Ossetia, and our Euro-Atlanticism evaporated. Another era has come - our military neozoic.

Now the “enemy” is placed in front of the authorities. He disguises himself as an internal enemy, in fact he is an Alien - an "alien", a foreign agent or a non-human pervert. The excesses of terrorizing the population are recognized as legal: the authorities are not afraid of dehumanizing personnel. She welcomes their sadistic fantasies, finding them useful. There is an expansion of torture, secret murders and private violence in the zone of deliberate criminalization.

The system is steeped in equating everything inconvenient with "terrorism" and "extremism." In the ebullient zone of the "war on terror" evidence is not needed - the presumption of enmity sweeps aside the legal rules of political struggle. The war is being waged inside, war inside . Russian politics is related to the atmosphere of war and does not want to abandon it.

https://republic.ru/posts/101939

quote:

In what sense were these ideas shaped by the collapse of the Soviet Union?

Putin belongs to a very extensive, but politically opaque, unrepresented, unseen layer of people, who after the end of the 1980s were looking for revanche in the context of the fall of the Soviet Union. I was also one of them. My friends and I were people who couldn’t accept what had happened: who said we can’t let it continue to happen. There were hundreds, thousands of people like that in the elite, who were not communists—I, for example, was never a member of the Communist Party. They were people who just didn’t like how things had been done in 1991. This group consisted of very disparate people, with very different ideas of freedom. Putin was one of those who were passively waiting for the moment for revanche up till the end of the 90s. By revanche, I mean the resurrection of the great state in which we had lived, and to which we had become accustomed. We didn’t want another totalitarian state, of course, but we did want one that could be respected. The state of the 1990s was impossible to respect. You could think well of Yeltsin, feel sorry for him. But for me, it was important to see Yeltsin in a different light: on the one hand, it was necessary to protect him from punishment; on the other, Yeltsin was important as the last hope for the state, because it was clear that if the governors came to power they would agree another Belovezhsky Accord, after which Russia would no longer exist.

Putin is a Soviet person who did not draw lessons from the collapse of Russia. That is to say, he did learn lessons, but very pragmatic ones. He understood the coming of capitalism in a Soviet way. We were all taught that capitalism is a kingdom of demagogues, behind whom stands big money, and behind that, a military machine which aspires to control the whole world. It’s a very clear, simple picture which I think Putin had in his head—not as an official ideology, but as a form of common sense. His thinking was that in the Soviet Union, we were idiots; we had tried to build a fair society when we should have been making money. If we had made more money than the western capitalists, we could have just bought them up, or we could have created a weapon which they didn’t have. That’s all there is to it. It was a game and we lost, because we didn’t do several simple things: we didn’t create our own class of capitalists, we didn’t give the capitalist predators on our side a chance to develop and devour the capitalist predators on theirs.

To what extent are these ideas still the bedrock of Putin’s political sensibility, and of the Russia he has brought into being?

I don’t think Putin’s thinking has changed significantly since then. He sees them as common sense. That’s why he feels comfortable and assured in his position; he’s not afraid of arguing his corner. He thinks: look at those people in the West, here’s what they say, and here’s what they do in reality. There is a wonderful system with two parties, one passes power to the other, and behind them stands one and the same thing: capital. Now it’s one fraction of capital, now another. And with this money they’ve bought up all the intelligentsia and they organize whatever politics they need. Let’s do the same! Putin is a Soviet person who set himself the task of revanche, not in a stupid, military sense, but in a historical sense. He set it for himself in Soviet language, in the language of geopolitics, that of a harsh pragmatism that was close to cynicism, but was not ultimately cynical. Putin is not a cynic. He thinks that man is a sinful being, that it is pointless to try to improve him. He believes the Bolsheviks who tried to create fair, right-thinking people were simply idiots, and we should not have done that. We wasted a lot of money and energy on it, and at the same time tried to free other nations. Why do that? We don’t need to.

Putin’s model is completely different from that of Zyuganov, the head of the rump Communist Party of the Russian Federation. Putin’s idea is that we should be bigger and better capitalists than the capitalists, and be more consolidated as a state: there should be maximum oneness of state and business.

https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii88/articles/gleb-pavlovsky-putin-s-world-outlook

Ynglaur posted:

So if Bush Jr. was Mr. Incredible, Putin is...Syndrome?

BrutalistMcDonalds posted:

Xander77 posted:

How the gently caress is Russia (a plutocracy \ petrocracy \ kleptocracy) a capitalist state?

quote:

President Volodymyr Zelenskiy broadened his battle against graft on Friday, firing all the heads of Ukraine's regional army recruitment centres as the war with Russia enters a critical stage.

WarpedLichen posted:

WSJ also has an insightful write up on how Ukrainians are advancing using small unit tactics. I think this is really what I think about when I think "death of the tank." In that it is a useful piece of equipment but its niche becomes more smaller as it is no longer the centerpiece of the offense.

WarpedLichen posted:

WSJ also has an insightful write up on how Ukrainians are advancing using small unit tactics. I think this is really what I think about when I think "death of the tank." In that it is a useful piece of equipment but its niche becomes more smaller as it is no longer the centerpiece of the offense.

WarpedLichen posted:

I don't think tanks are necessarily obsolete but I think this is largely a question of force composition and how nations around the world think wars would be fought.

The question really is how many tanks do you need. Like I somehow doubt the US is ramping up Abrams production after studying this war. Which do you think is more likely, the future tank project end up with a modest production run like the F-22 or work horse unit that's built in the thousands over its lifetime?