Hopefully this turns out better for Kyiv then it did for Grozny...
Unless Putin has decided that 2022 would be the last year of record of the Gregorian calendar at least for a while he isn’t going to bring on the apocalypse.
As horrible as this conflict is it’s pretty much the death knell of Russia as a superpower and probably for good.
It almost lost in Georgia in 08 which brought it a lot of army reforms and its performance in Syria has emboldened them to think that they can play in the big leagues again but it seems that they aren’t able to perform on the modern battlefield at all.
I have a feeling that a lot of people in the pentagon that have been concerned about Russia becoming a near peer to the US are now sighing in relief.
I almost want that once this conflict is over for the pentagon to release a statement in jest that it officially downgrades Russia from near peer to junk like the credit agencies did.
Honest question because I don't know: Does Putin listen at all to public opinion, or to the sentiment of his military.
Stalin was probably the most powerful man on Earth during his lifetime, but even he didn't always get his way in the Politburo. Sometimes Stalin was on the losing side of a debate. But win or lose, the Soviet leadership emphasized speaking with a unified voice regardless of whether one had supported or opposed the outcome.
Is there a Politburo for Putin? Is there a group of people around him who can influence him and, sometimes, change his mind?
If he is completely deranged and wants to start a nuclear war he could’ve done so without sacrificing so many Russian troops.
He can sit in his bunker and order a nuclear strike and even if most forces would disregard that order it only takes one launch to bring on the end of the world as we know it.
He knows he is running out of time and he wanted a new Russian empire to be his legacy but I don’t think turning Europe and North America into glass is on his todo list.
At least I hope not.
Quite a lot of people said he seemed like he was going to, for quite a few weeks in advance, though they were trying to dissuade him, just counting people in the US government, NATO, etc.
> The president of Ukraine said like two days before hand that it was unlikely.
He said that the West needed to move forward the sanctions threatened for after an invasion to before, and that Russian behavior depended on immediate, united Western action.
The US media played up the part you refer to and downplayed the I assume our friends will heed my clearly-correct and urgent advice context, because they had a narrative they were selling of “Biden Admin sees imminent invasion, but the Admin is paranoid and everyone else, even the people who would be attacked, disagrees”.
[0] https://fakty.com.ua/ua/ukraine/20220220-reznikov-meta-kreml...
Some had very strong hunches. But that's not the same as "knowing".
I'd been concerned about the buildup for a year, but was practically certain once the abrupt demands to NATO and Alperovitch's analysis came out 3 whole months ago:
It's not so much that he "wants to" start a nuclear war.
The concern is whether he may end up doing that anyway -- if the moment arrives when he is sufficiently cornered and feels he has nothing more to lose.
Not in the Pentagon, but I'm still very worried about their capabilities on the cyber front.
I doubt anyone in the pentagon was woried about Russia becoming an near peer in conventional arms. The US economy is 14 times the size of the Russian economy. The US spends about $800 billion on its military each year, the Russians spend about $60 billion.
The fear of near peer came from their reforms following 2008 where they decided to modernize their army especially their infantry adopt modern combined arms and maneuver warfare and basically mimic the US individual squad battlefield doctrine.
They shifted on paper form a conscripted army to a professional one and have revamp their NCO core.
And their relative success in Syria did make it seem like they were making a lot of progress now it’s clear that what ever progress they have made was either all a smoke screen or limited to such a small number of units that it doesn’t make an impact on the battlefield.
This war has shown that even what the west feared the most the so called elite airborne troops which were always a key part of Russias military doctrine aren’t effective at all at taking and holding military objectives.
Russian armor seems to also be extremely vulnerable to western ATGMs so the fear of Russian APS systems has also now proven to be completely unfounded and Arena/Afganit seems to either be non existent in the field or utterly and completely useless especially when compared to western battle proven APS systems like Trophy/Windbreaker which have seen great success against Russian modern ATGMs.
Basically they aren’t even a paper tiger at this point they are a wet tissue.
We have now hard indisputable proof that they aren’t capable of anything more than leveling cities from 100 miles away which they won’t be able to do due to NATOs total air superiority or bringing a nuclear annihilation which hopefully they aren’t mad enough to do.
Did anyone publish, prior to the invasion, a timeline of how they expected it to go that had Russia far ahead of where they are on day three? If so, can you link it? If not, how do we know they are behind schedule?
They are behind schedule they couldn’t maintain objectives they captured and are still fighting over the same cities.
They have given up on many objectives in south Ukraine and failed to secure a land bridge to Crimea.
They have already given up on taking many primary objectives and are now bypassing them and pretty much concentrating nearly everything on Kyiv.
The Pentagon, UK MoD and plenty of other entities have been publishing daily analysis.
The fact that they lost so many assets and haven’t been able to establish air superiority (despite Ukraine having pretty much no Airforce and very limited AA) is a also clear indication of their current capabilities also.
And I find it laughable to claim that they are limiting offenses on civilian targets when they are using MLRS and cluster munitions on cities and have been since the war began.
What assets have they lost and what are reasonable expectations for losses? The kind of stuff I'm seeing here seems like half an analysis. "Russia has done X" okay, but what should we be expecting? How do we know if X is good or bad? I just haven't seen it. How much was this expected to cost Russia?