People are claiming it's a victory when Russia hasn't totally taken over within 72 hours, but is that really any kind of victory?
1.) Kyiv is 50mi from the border, Baghdad is 200mi.
2.) Iraq was a numerically far superior force to the coalition, with >500,000 active soldiers and >1.3 million total. Clearing out that many people simply takes time.
3) The coalition moved slowly and largely neutralized resistance along their way, they didn't skip settlements or cities. Russia is trying deep strikes and bypassing/avoiding many of the larger cities/settlements. And those places are not necessarily under any kind of coherent siege at this point either.
4) Coalition losses in the entire war, where they were again, fighting a numerically far superior force, were tiny. ~200 killed. Estimates of Russian losses so far are 10x+ that and with a lot of lost equipment.
I'm not suggesting I think the Ukrainian position is great or that they're poised to win other than via long insurgency, just that I don't think the comparison works.
The quick two week land grab by Iraq that turned into an 8-year slog that they got nothing out of?
Yeah, I can see that.
War is a nasty virus on brain for people away from all this. It is a privileged take but mental faculties are overloaded with the emotional language being used. A TV station was showing how to make Molotov cocktails to non-Ukrainian audience. Is that helpful at all?
So much thoughts on this invasion. Have seen maybe 4 conflicts (Kargil, Iraq, Afghanistan and Ukraine); numerous military mobilizations and small scale strikes between sworn enemy nations. It is just bile churning to see the whole events play down with no accountability.
What sort of lies are they spreading out of curiosity?
cordial behaviour of Russian soldiers There are no massed artillery barragesThere's one famous video of an APC going over a car, and it's not clear, but some people have mentioned that it was an Ukranian APC (in any case, the crash looked like a mistake). I don't know whose APC it was, but without having deep knowledge it's really hard to tell just from the footage.
Also, for the record, there are many videos of american tanks rolling over iraqi cars, even one particularly notable video where they were doing it on purpose as a punishment.
Empty cars, you mean.
you should tell it to ukranians in general, they seems not to share your sentiment. or to my wife's family and friends who sleep in shelters in kharkiv. or to old neighbors of my wife who discovered leftover smerch stuck in ground between buildings.
i guess they should they wake up and realize that this is actually russian spring comes to free them from occupation by neo-nazi benderovzis that are chaired by jew president?
In the end it is still an occupation, they are brutal there’s no disputing it. Degree of brutality was my point, I have seen how Armies behave and Russian way of capturing towns is brutal which they have yet not displayed in Ukraine.
Yes, we are.
> Infrastructure is intact, electricity and internet is working.
Yes, the concept of operations is a quick decapitation (“Demilitarization”, “Denazification”, or “Decommunisation”, depending on Putin’s mood at the moment) strike followed by installing a productive puppet regime.
> There is no vibe of an occupation.
That’s because they haven’t gotten to the occupation point, they are still trying to achieve initial control.
> There seem to be no embedded journalism from Russians.
As if all the information being canned, centralized propaganda, that doesn't require any contact with the real facts on the ground is a good thing?
> If US was directly invoked, 10 fact checking orgs would have propped by now and started warning on game videos being spread.
Numerous fact checkers have done that.
> At the end it is still an invasion and Ukrainians will be killed and come under an occupation, but US is more ruthless with its occupations.
That is rather premature.
As you mentioned, civil services are all operational, there are no drone strikes based on questionable intel, artillery strikes are focused and kept on the minimum.
On the other side, we see Ukraine giving weapons and instructing citizens on how to fight, which can only become a disaster.
Just so i'll understand, mobilization of citizens (i believe all countries have laws like this) in order to fight invading force and arming them is a disaster ? Could you please expand a bit on more appropriate approach that should be taken instead ?
They're effectively camouflaging soldiers as civilians, don't you see a problem with that? How can invading force make a distinction between a civilian and a soldier?
And speaking of Iraq, Biden's "minor incursions" [1] comment before the invasion reminds of US ambassador's 'it's not our business' [2] input to Saddam Hussein before he attacked Kuwait.
[1]: https://www.npr.org/2022/01/20/1074466148/biden-russia-ukrai...
"[Biden]: I think what you're going to see is that Russia will be held accountable if it invades. And it depends on what it does. It's one thing if it's a minor incursion and then we end up having a fight about what to do and not do."
[2]: https://www.whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/ARTICLE5/apri...
"Journalist 1 - You encouraged this aggression - his invasion. What were you thinking?
"U.S. Ambassador Glaspie - Obviously, I didn't think, and nobody else did, that the Iraqis were going to take all of Kuwait."
The latest figure reported by Ukraine was they have killed 3500 Russians already. So allowing for a few hours of losses, about 20x.
[0] Similar report https://nitter.net/pic/media%2FFMmXu6eWYAMOSUB.jpg
Also we see Russians ask for unconditional talks, which wouldn't be happening if they felt they had a good chance.
I think, as I have hinted to before, that Russians would be wise to break a leg instead of going down to Ukraine.
Same for Russian factory workers, store workers and railway workers: if one can delay/prevent young ones from being sent down to the righteously furious Ukrainians, that might save many lives.
My understanding was that this number was their claim for total casualties (meaning mostly WIA). And that this got lazily cut-and-pasted all over the place to mean KIA.
Their plan in general seems unnecessary complex and risky. They are burning through VDV at a fearful rate.. why in the hell did they try all of those unsupported helicopter landings? It all seem like Market Garden all the way to Kyiv.
Southern axis are a problem. Order needs to be given for a breakout of the forces holding line of control in the east. Of course we have no idea what reserves and where Ukraine has. Hopefully they did not keep too much too close east and there is a strategic reserve being held somewhere west of Dniepr
Why do you believe that? I am just assuming that many Ukraine troop concentrations visible from satellites has been bombed (vehicles, tents ...) without anything indicating that.
The videos available seems very onesided. I.e. Ukrainian civilian or soldiers' videos of victories. It is probably hard to tell much from the videos on the overall progress of the invasion, except where there are fights.
there is also enough of videos of ukranian equipment blown up.
another point, russia doesn't really have much precise ammo for ground attacks. and there is no signs of carpet bombing in cases where ukranian tanks are blown
This is also why normally-classified intelligence was leaked by the US goverment.
Historically when something like this happened, it was always hard to understand who really started a violent confrontation. In this case, the US has been successful at showing that the invasion was pre-meditated.
Of course it's "on the cusp of encircling Kyiv" - it's less distance than the average US drive to WalMart.
I doubt it. I checked the distance from the center of Kyiv to the closest Belarus border and it was around 55 miles. The actual distance is probably higher because I'm taking the distance over the lake/river that's north of Kyiv. Meanwhile...
>For most people in the United States, a Wal-Mart is literally just down the road. The median distance to a Wal-Mart in the United States is 4.2 miles
https://www.minneapolisfed.org/article/2006/thomas-j-holmes-...
Iraq had a much larger military in 2003 than Ukraine does now, the US wasn't able to come at it from all sides, and was doing it from the far side of the globe, with a smaller force than Russia deployed in and around Ukraine. And Baghdad is 350 miles from Kuwait, Kyiv 70 miles from Belarus.
So, yeah, Russia is expected to be way ahead of the Iraq War schedule.
> People are claiming it's a victory when Russia hasn't totally taken over within 72 hours, but is that really any kind of victory?
Yes, when the decapitation portion was expected to be much shorter, with Russia’s problems expected to be more guerrilla-ish resistance after the lightning-fast takeover that the massive paper imbalance of forces suggested, it is, especially when there is evidence of serious logistical and morale problems contributing, which will also make the phase after a takeover harder than they would otherwise be expected.
Kazakhstan rebuffing Russia’s request for additional troops, and a number of previously relatively pro-Russia governments not aligning the way Putin might have hoped also is a complication (Hungary, one of the more pro-Russian EU/NATO governments, coming down hard against Russia on this is particularly significant, and the pro-NATO swing in Swedish public opinion is a hard backfire on Putin’s attempt to capitalize on the invasion with further threats.)
While it is still very bad for Ukraine, this has the early signs of a massive debacle for Russia.
I am positive that those threats are also purely for internal consumption. There's no possible way where this invasion would not result in Sweeden joining NATO. (Other than a complete and total Russian defeat, that revealed it to be a paper tiger, and no real threat to anyone. That's not quite the outcome we're seeing, though.)
Rewriting this for clarity sake:
It is absolutely that this invasion would result in Sweden joining NATO.
What else are they going to claim? That everything's fucked and there's no realistic hope of even a partial victory?
Regardless of whether or not the war goes well or poorly, the news will be positive, right up until the end. If it turns out to be the latter, everybody who spent the past few weeks listening to it will be struck with one hell of a cog-dissonance hangover.
I am cautiously optimistic for Ukraine based on early reports. But I am also aware of the history of war propaganda.
The front pages of US and UK newspapers during the Battle of France, for example, were filled with headlines talking about French successes in repelling the Hun. Anyone paying attention to the details, however, could see that the successes were constantly occurring closer and closer to Paris.
If Russia wins, there is going to be (as you said) a lot of cognitive dissonance among those whose worldviews are entirely shaped by Reddit headlines and Twitter takes. I'd hope that having their worldviews shattered so abruptly and violently would cause such people to reexamine all of their preconceptions, but given how previous such cases (notably Brexit and Trump's election) mostly caused them to double down rather than seriously self reflect, I am not hopeful.
Because man, a lot of people still don't believe that has happened.
Some in the Kremlin might have expected the takeover to be as swift as the Taliban taking back Afghanistan with little to no resistance, before other countries can agree upon any sanctions or reaction. If that were the case, I think sanctions from the west would have been much tamer, due to the war already being over and less political pressure from their own constituencies. E.g. German government needed at ton of public outcry first, before they changed their mind.
Also the longer it takes, the more Putin has to deal with opposition in their own ranks and populace.
By this I mean the West's addiction to immediate gratification. If Putin hasn't conquered every last inch of Ukraine within 72 hours then he has "failed" according to Western media.
To some degree I don't blame them. In Iraq for example, the war tempo was intentional rapid. The US decided that maneuver warfare[1] would be the doctrine to use and it worked out okay only because they largely dealt with demoralized forces - but in areas where they encountered a willing opposition, it crushed the tempo.
Then, less than a year after "victory" they had terrible battles lasting months where the US lost and public sentiment flipped[2].
I keep two things in mind: in war, the first casualty is the truth.
The second: that it was only a year between "freedom fries" (because the French did not want to help invade Iraq) and "no blood for oil". What will US sentiment be a year from now when the crushing energy and food prices caused by this have worked their way through the system and the Democrats and their media go into the elections with full weaponized Russia-paranoia all over again?
When China is now even stronger because the West weaponized the financial system against an enemy that didn't warrant it?
When China leapfrogs the West even further because they benefited from the sanctions while not having deal with any material suffering?
Could Putin maybe have had an iota of a point about the enlargement of NATO suffocating Russia and backing them into a corner?[3]
Is there perhaps a shred of truth to the claim that there are neo-Nazis in Ukraine - some even trained by the West - even if its understood that this is just an excuse?[4]
These are questions that will inevitably be visited, but not today.
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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maneuver_warfare
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Battle_of_Fallujah
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enlargement_of_NATO
[4] https://www.ctvnews.ca/world/far-right-extremists-in-ukraini...
Gee, I wonder where we learned it from...
"NBC CAUGHT Spreading Literal Nazi, Deep State Propaganda | Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar"
Not a fringe or right-wing source, especially considering their position among Spotify political podcasts.