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FishBulbia posted:Sociopathy to view this war as anything good Surely; I think that some people are just beginning to think they see a light at the end of the tunnel, as opposed to nothing but the prospect of continued unrelenting horror that it had been for so many months. But personally I think that as bad as Russia’s recent losses have been, it’s still way, way too early to think the end is in sight.
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Oct 12, 2022 01:07
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I think we should at least stop using the terms “suicide boat,” “suicide drone” etc, because those terms are really goddamn stupid and confusing and I wish the media would stop using the latter. Nobody is committing suicide. Even “kamikaze drone” which I’ve seen the media use seems questionable. It’s an airborne loitering munition. It’s an explosive drone. I know this just seems like stupid semantics, but I was skimming the thread and 100% thought that one poster was suggesting the Ukrainians blow up the bridge repair machines with a suicide bomber.
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Oct 12, 2022 23:22
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cinci zoo sniper posted:“Talked to Putin” thing stands on thin legs, as with many other Musk’s embellishments. Given that, I’d like to avoid overanalysing his politics in this thread, and focus on the more tangible, like this weird attempt to shake down Pentagon in order to garner negative PR for the Starlink service. As silly as it sounds, the most likely explanation here to me is that Musk irks really upset about getting ratioed by Zelenskyy in a poll on his own account. Both Elon Musk and the Russians have denied that Musk actually talked directly to Putin, IIRC.
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Oct 14, 2022 08:03
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the popes toes posted:For connoisseurs of Ukraine's historical complexity: This is a very good article and I think everyone should read it. I like the point at the end where I think the author really hits it on the head about how empty Putin’s imperialism is, and thus partly why it’s failing; that it’s imperialism for imperialism’s sake, or maybe just imperialism for Vladimir Putin’s sake. The Soviet Union could at least try to justify its imperialism with a grand narrative of spreading Communism. The US justified and justifies its imperialist actions by claiming to stand for the Western liberal order or more shallowly to at least be anti-Communist. Putin’s Russia doesn’t have any grand narrative for why it ought to be conquering its neighbor. Maybe if he lived 200 years ago he could claim he was doing it all in the name of Christianity, but nobody buys that kind of stuff now. But aside from some lovely lies about Nazis that only fool his domestic audience because he controls the media there, Putin doesn’t appear to have any ideological narrative to propagandize why he ought to conquer half of Ukraine, other than that it would make Russia look bigger on a map. And I really do think that’s a big part of why it’s all failing.
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Oct 15, 2022 06:34
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cinci zoo sniper posted:Also, a military commissar was found hanging off a fence, having passed away due to his heart stopping. In a cruel twist of fate, that happened in the city of Partizansk no less. https://t.me/partizansk_go/9984 What? Do they mean he had a heart attack and was found slumped over a fence, or that this guy had hanged himself or was hanged?
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Oct 15, 2022 22:23
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Why would Poland send troops into Ukraine in response to Belarus invading Ukraine any more than they’d send troops in response to Russia invading Ukraine? That doesn’t make any sense.Pook Good Mook posted:Will Poland even have divisions left to spare after they retake Lwow? Lol, does anyone remember that map allegedly posted on some Russian TV channel showing how Ukraine could be erased off the map via partitioning by its various neighbors? Sucrose fucked around with this message at 03:06 on Oct 16, 2022 |
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Oct 16, 2022 03:00
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Edit: nevermind, some other posters explained it.FishBulbia posted:I wouldn't read too much into the martial law thing. That was already the de facto state. Will Russians still be able to leave the country with these new restrictions? Sucrose fucked around with this message at 15:47 on Oct 19, 2022 |
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Oct 19, 2022 15:29
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FishBulbia posted:It's a geolocation showing that Igor Girkhin (n.g. "Strelkov") is back in Ukraine. He was one the policy entrepreneurs that initiated the Donbas war. No, it shows him hanging around in Rostov-on-Don, in Russia.
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Oct 19, 2022 15:49
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Risky Bisquick posted:If you remember this guy Say what you want about these POW interviews, you can tell they’re not scripted. Russians all believe the same bullshit lies. I’m sure Ukrainians don’t particularly want to send thousands of ordinary 22 year olds like this one back to Russia in zinc coffins, but they have to because Putin and his cronies have filled their brains with gunk. What a disgusting waste of life. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Oct 21, 2022 01:47
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POW intimidation, gore
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PC LOAD LETTER posted:They're supposed to be Dragon's Teeth obstacles. If properly implemented they work as obstacle by breaking the track on tanks by concentrating the weight of the tank onto a point when driven over. What would the Russians have to do if they actually wanted to dig in and build up the defenses of a particular area, if they actually had time to do it? Is such a thing actually possible in modern war, or does defending an area all just rely on having enough masses of artillery and troops in a given spot?
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Oct 22, 2022 03:16
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cinci zoo sniper posted:If you go into comments on her Telegram post announcing the firing, you’ll see that the consensus there is that being gay is what made the guy say that, i.e., it’s being swept under as a quote-unquote mental illness, which is not a novel turn of “thought” for bigotry in Eastern Europe on one hand, but on the other it shows that they’re *really* keen on backpedaling away from this one. The same Simonyan quote that Paladinus cites above does read decidedly more barbed in its original, than the translation could lead one to believe. I was half wondering if this was all set up: have some guy call for genocide and then be immediately fired and censured as proof that the Russian government is totally not genocidal towards Ukrainians and that that sort of attitude is actually totally condemned. But if that was the case they’d probably have made some random shmuck the fall-guy, not the head of RT Russia.
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Oct 24, 2022 04:49
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cinci zoo sniper posted:I don’t think this is a setup - in my opinion, the guy just went off the old script while Russia is seemingly trying drain it’s PR ditch with a tea strainer and Shoygu is running his “forward this message to 3 more defence ministers or a dirty bomb explodes in Ukraine” thing. For a fall guy they’d do the normal thing where some “audience member” gets invited to be defeated by facts and logic. Yeah, they wouldn’t have chosen such a high-ranked propagandist for the role if it was set up. That translated Medusa article posted upthread about Krasnovsky is really good; rather than being a true ideologue it makes him out to be an apolitical, amoral man who works as a propagandist to avoid persecution and for the extremely sweet paycheck it gives him, who takes whatever viewpoint he thinks will make his bosses most happy. He’s been saying rabid pro-war anti-Ukrainian bullshit for the whole course of the war; he probably wonders why he’s now suddenly in trouble. The really scary thing is that regardless of this guy’s personal motivations for saying such hideous stuff, you know that there’s a subset of the most murderous extremists who probably think he’s right on when he talks about killing Ukrainian children and wiping Ukraine off the map, who will be further emboldened to commit war crimes by hearing him on TV openly saying it. Sucrose fucked around with this message at 05:46 on Oct 24, 2022 |
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Oct 24, 2022 05:30
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Owling Howl posted:Of course but it's fun to throw the initial propaganda back at them because it makes the current situation seem so much more depressing. I think it shows conclusively why bigger and stronger countries don’t just gobble up much smaller and weaker neighboring countries. Because wars are to a large degree about how engaged the population is in them, and nothing motivates people to fight like the threat of their country being annexed and culture wiped out. A country has to have some massive advantages over the locals in order to take and permanently hold territory where the populace really really really doesn’t want them there. An ruling power has to try and build legitimacy among the people it rules, and a sovereign state taking territory from another sovereign state has zero legitimacy. It would be a tall order even if the populace started out with a highly unfavorable opinion of their current government and a positive view of the annexer’s government. Trying to control even a small territory where the population hates your guts without it turning into an endless deathpit for your occupying soldiers is hard. Russia trying to gobble up all or most of Ukraine, a sovereign state of 40 million people, was pure delusional insanity. It would have been insanity even if Kyiv had fallen in the first assault. Russia would have had its work cut out for it even if from the very start they had only tried to annex and deployed all their forces to enough of Donets, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson oblasts to make a viable land bridge to Crimea. That’s why the invasion caught so many major intelligence agencies like the French and the Ukrainian ones’ off guard: they were thinking “Surely the Russians can’t be this loving crazy/stupid.” Not that we can or ever could just sit back and consider the war to be a foregone conclusion; while I don’t think the Russians can exactly “win,” they absolutely can turn Ukraine into a broken wasteland full of corpses. Sucrose fucked around with this message at 01:11 on Oct 26, 2022 |
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Oct 26, 2022 00:58
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fez_machine posted:Because they believe themselves capable of genocide (or at least capable of enough atrocity that near pacification like in Chechnya is possible). Maybe they thought they couldn’t win in Afghanistan, but can win in Ukraine because Ukraine is…..flatter? Owling Howl posted:Which isn't a completely irrational thing to believe for Russian leadership. Russian democracy was after all successfully strangled in part through assasinations and Chechnya was successfully pacified. Chechnya also has a population of less than one and a half million people. Sucrose fucked around with this message at 06:16 on Oct 26, 2022 |
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Oct 26, 2022 06:14
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The muddy season means that military offensives will be really difficult until the ground freezes , but on the other hand the longer it lasts the longer Ukraine will have to prepare before civilians are sitting in freezing houses with no electricity.
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Oct 29, 2022 02:19
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I hate the term “suicide X” because it gets confused with “suicide bomber” and the like. I don’t think anything should be called a suicide munition unless it involves someone driving up in a truck and blowing themselves up. Like, would you call driving a remote-operated car to a location and blowing it up to be a “suicide car bomb?” Of course not, because of how confusing that would be.
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Oct 30, 2022 00:28
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Bloody Pom posted:I apologize if this is bordering on Clancychat or getting away from the topic at hand, but surely there must be a breaking point to this. If Erdogan keeps pushing back against the alliance's wishes in this manner, how likely would it be that they eventually just decide it's not worth the trouble and leave Turkey to the wolves? The only real reason I can find for keeping them around is their control of the Bosporus, and Russia is so depleted at this point that any attempt to exert military influence over Turkey would be even more disastrous than what we're currently seeing. It would be great if only democracies were allowed to be in NATO, but unfortunately it’s not going to happen, because of Turkey’s massive strategic value.
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Nov 7, 2022 05:16
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Opening fire on a whole group of enemy soldiers trying to surrender because one of them was only pretending to surrender and tried shooting isn’t remotely the same as executing POWs who have been captured and disarmed and are helpless, and I can’t believe so many people are trying to equate the two. I’m doubtful that soldiers in any Western army would have had better discipline in the same situation.adebisi lives posted:Lines up with the video of them shooting Russian POW's in the leg and letting them bleed out No, that was an actual, unambiguous war crime. The whole difference is that in the first scenario the Ukrainian soldiers were in actual danger, while in the second they were in none. Sucrose fucked around with this message at 06:52 on Nov 19, 2022 |
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Nov 19, 2022 06:46
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Popete posted:It's more that we really don't know the specifics and a bunch of people going "oh that's totally fine and justified" because it's Ukraine doing it when I would guess if those were Ukranian POWs wouldn't be so flippant. I don’t think it’s justified so much as understandable, unlike brutalizing or killing POWs who have actually been taken into custody and are helpless, which is never even slightly justified and is a clear war crime. Edgar Allen Ho posted:Imagine if an american did that to iraqis on video, or a cop to civilians, or a frenchman to algerians, or a Ok, I haven’t actually seen the video. Were some of them already searched and tied up, and outside the line of fire to those who weren’t? If so that’s different. Dammit, I guess I’m going to have to watch another video of people dying… Some of the situations you listed are not comparable; a policeman is not supposed to be treating the civilians he’s policing like they’re enemy loving soldiers during a war. Edit: Ok, watched the video. No, none of them had been searched or tied up. They were coming out of a building one-by-one with their hands up and then lying down on the ground, when one of them comes out with his hands up and then apparently tries to fire a gun, at which point the Ukrainians immediately open fire and waste the entire group. Should they have done that? No, probably not. Is it the same as executing captured POWs? No, it’s not. Sucrose fucked around with this message at 07:22 on Nov 19, 2022 |
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Nov 19, 2022 07:01
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The guy was in his 60s, it’s not like it’s improbable that he could have just croaked.
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Nov 28, 2022 00:28
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