Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

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hn_throwaway_99

Curious honest question, has there ever been a successful urban attack in the past, say, 30 years, where the urban population by-and-large really doesn't want the attackers to be there?

I mean, when I look at urban warfare, I think of the following possible outcomes:

1. Total annihilation, e.g. Warsaw at the end of WWII.

2. Splitting the city up into factional neighborhoods. Possible but given the situation in Kiev, there don't seem to be many Russian supporters there anong the native population (this is not true in Eastern Ukrainian cities)

3. Subduing the defenders and installing a puppet government. I think the best model here appears to be the Soviet Union crushing the 1956 Hungarian Revolution.

#3 seems like the most obvious intention of Putin, but I just don't really see how that is possible in modern Kyiv. In 1956 Budapest there were plenty of Communist supporters - indeed, they were the ones in power before the revolution.

The "best" outcome I can see from this war is that Putin completes the annexation of Luhansk and Donetsk, with possibly some other eastern regions e.g. a full land bridge from Crimea to Donetsk, as well as Kharkiv, but I just don't understand the attack on all of Ukraine. If anything you'll just get a further sorting of the country where everyone who despises Russia moves to the west and everyone else decides to stay/move to Russian-occupied areas.

Battle of Grozny (1994-1995) may be called "successful", but overall it was a Pyrrhic victory. It also took an extremely talented general Rokhlin to take command of a large part of operation. I don't think Russia has military commanders of his proportion now due to 20 years of negative selection.

Negative selection seems to be a Russian specialty. In particular, Stalin's era.

I don't know the details, but it also apparently leveled Grozny.

I’m confident the attack on the whole Ukraine is to prevent Western weapon supplied counter attacks. I doubt they have long term plans for occupation for the entire country.

You think it's easier to invade a country in home territory, while they had years to prepare between the previous invasion and now, than it is to defend against some attack that Ukraine might hope to mount against Russia? That sounds... unlikely. It's apparently also what supporters of Russia are saying, so I doubt this is the whole truth, even if there were a grain of truth to an all-out attack being "self defense".

Of the three options of don't invade, invade a little, or invade the whole country, invading a little would allow Ukraine to mount an attack against the breakaway regions and the West was bound to supply advanced weapons to make sure they would be successful at it. So when Putin said they were going to secure the breakaway regions my first thoughts was that there would be no way to do that unless you neutralize the entirety of Ukraine.

That's not the main thing. Ukraine was edging to the EU.

Without Ukraine, Russian naval fleet would become worthless as it can't leave the black sea anymore.

The map seems to show that Russia has ports on the Black sea especially since they took Crimea. Turkey owns the mouth of the Black Sea and it is already part of NATO

When your enemy tells you what he is going to do, it is best, to a first order approximation, to believe him.

Do you mean what they said or what others said that they said because unfortunately they are different and not enough people know that despite how easy it is to check?

https://web.archive.org/web/20220222212015/http://en.kremlin...

That page is what people are using to suggest he is reestablishing USSR which is not my read of it. On the subsequent page which I’m going by memory because it is inaccessible they state that they will neutralize and de-nazify the country. From that I don’t see how people are getting to long term occupation (except for the breakaway regions). Their objectives can be met by demilitarization which is what I assume they mean by neutralization of Ukraine and I think that is something everyone could come to terms with as a reasonable compromise. If Ukraine starts re-arming then Russia would come back and prevent it.

De-nazify a country with a Jewish president? (His grandfather's father and brothers were killed in the Holocaust.

Russia doesn't have the logistical power to have an occupational force. They need to implement a strawman government and hope that the military falls into place.

Russia has the Donbass separatist militias, which would make for a perfect occupation force - they are ideologically motivated, but also, they know that they'll be treated as traitors by any Ukrainian state with more than a semblance of independence.

You gonna need to explain how a region with a population of 2 million will occupy a country with a population of 44 million.

Many of those 44 million will become refugees in Europe. And some - not many, but probably at least a couple million more - will support the occupying forces.

Authoritarian regimes manage to keep their population in check with forces smaller than that.

Aleppo?

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