Ukraine will now see ruthless city battles – Russia’s Plan B
theprint.in
theprint.in
1) Neutralize and disarm the "territorial defence" militias who currently have about 30K assault rifles.
2) Maintain police precence on a large and hostile territory.
3) Provide food, shelter, and medical aid to thousands, if not tens of thousands of people displaced by the war.
And they'll have to do that without oil and gas money, and without western medical supplies (which I assume will not be readily available anymore).
Why wouldn’t Ukraine attack the Russian gas pipelines? I understand that a conventional strike with an army is never going to happen, but there are many other options.
Nord Stream 2 is history. The company behind it went bankrupt two days ago or sth. like this. Everybody who still held to that project in Germany has turned it down. Nord Stream 2 won't happen, instead NLG from Saudi Arabia seems to be a thing now, anything but supporting Russia and its war.
Also, Germany declared that it wants to be energy-independent by 2035, 15 years earlier than planned as a result of the Russian aggression.
As for Nord Stream 2, a small underwater autonomous vehicle could easily be built in a Ukrainian refuge’s garage in Poland.
Russia has underestimated how easily attacks can be performed by individual actors, who are properly motivated, against thousand mile long soft targets.
Not really. It is still possible technicaly but traders are afraid of buying / making market as they predict sanctions to escalate and traders could be left with unsellable assets on their hands. The price of ural went as low as 20 dollars per barel (with 115 dollars for WTI and Brent)
So the only country that is at the moment actively contracting ural (Russian brand of crude oil) is India. Shame on you India... China scooped one or two tankers but that's it.
Also shipping companies aren't waiting for sanctions and refuse to contract Russian exports...
https://www.wsj.com/articles/russia-scrambles-to-maintain-oi...
https://www.freightwaves.com/news/shipping-isnt-waiting-for-...
1. all citizens in the conquered territories will need a new id card. That card will be required everywhere. You want to send your kids to school, you need the card. You want to take a subway, you need the card. You want to buy groceries, use the ATM machine, the internet, pay your bills, make a phone call, you need your card.
2. the card will need to be re-validated periodically. At the time you need to make an attestation that you don't know the location of any hidden weapon, or any resistance fighter, or foreign agent, etc. The penalty for lying would be jail.
3. set up a system of informants. The rewards for information don't even have to be monetary, it could be: if you want your brother out of jail, you need to tell us 3 useful pieces of information. We decide what we consider to be useful.
How do I know Russia can do all these things? Because Russia (Soviet Union at the time) conquered my Eastern European country right after WW2, and the resistance was minimal. A country with millions of weapons (WW2 just ended), with forests, mountains, lots of places to hide. Well, guerilla warfare still requires you to eat. You can hide in a forest, but from time to time you need to go down to the village. If one person informs, you're finished.
You think Russia doesn't know how to do what the Soviet Union did in '45-'48? They lost the institutional memory? You haven't been paying attention. Putin is ex-KGB. As we speak, he's putting children (!!) in jail for going to a protest with their parents.
Why didn't this work in Afghanistan ? Because Afghanistan is quite different. People don't live in apartment buildings (well, some do, but most not). They know each other. Internet, subways, grocery stores, are nice, but not essential for many, many people. Informants work both ways. The reprisals from the resistance can be worse than those from the occupiers. Etc, etc. This is not racism. Afghani people are absolutely the same as Ukrainian people, or like me and you. They bleed just as much when you put a bullet in them, and dislike that just as much. But the bullet can come from more places. If the Ukrainian resistance were to have an iota of a chance of success, the resistance fighters should be willing to shoot their compatriots who inform on them. The Taliban were willing to do just that.
Resistance would have to setup operations to flush out moles with false intelligence at this point.
Would we (the West) still support them if we hear they kill informants? Or if we hear hey tar and feather them?
Who knows, maybe in today's world the threat of being canceled on the internet is enough of a dissuasion, that the Resistance fighters can use that. But will it be enough to balance the threat of going to jail?
People were willing to put up with a lot for peace in 1945-48.
Russia will probably try but there's so many key details between now and then it's hard to make any confident predictions.
And then secondary to that, will the greater Russian population tolerate doing that to Ukraine?
You'll have problems well before a full blown revolution.
The deciding factor is just the population's will. With so many millions of people that's all this comes down to. Russia couldn't possible enlist or conscript enough people to make this work if the Ukrainians decide they will not tolerate it.
But there is much that remains to be seen, unfortunately. This sucks. We need to solve this disinformation problem. Hopefully sanctions will start working too.
Big if.
99% of the people just want to live their lives. But media had a selection bias. You only hear about the 1% who go and pick up a Kalashnikov, and do some patrol duty around a hospital or a bomb shelter. But 99% just want this to be over with. They want to go home, sleep in their bed, eat some warm food, take a shower. They hate the Russians, but love their children, and know that being a hero can very easily translate into their children growing up without a parent (and maybe the other parent in jail).
My Mom had to live as a little kid with har father in jail for 2 years. Because he had been a police officer before the communists took over. Not fun. I can’t even begin to imagine what would’ve happened if he had been an active resistance fighter.
Now imagine we take those extremely conservative numbers and put the number at say, 3%. Whole different ball game. Especially when the defenders are armed to the teeth.
I do agree it's a big if, but I think in this case it's proving to not be in doubt so far. Eventually Russia is likely to "win", though I'm not sure what their victory conditions are... maybe installing a puppet Ukrainian government that's not recognized internationally and then some large number of people want to get on with their lives as you say and maybe 80%+ of the population stops resisting, but if people keep resisting (back to my post) I just don't see what Russia is going to do here. Maybe they'll conscript hundreds of thousands of Russians?
I'm thinking that Russia is likely to add a puppet government and then take the military and keep fighting on to Moldova and march through and bring the Belorussian military to the Baltics. We are only at the opening stage. My fear is that they start conscripting Ukrainians who, as you say, just want to stay out of trouble but get thrust into combat anyway and have no choice but to shoot back. All of sudden by conquering countries and conscripting people, Putin enlarges his army. But I just don't know how the logistics of that work here. Either he will continue and press on and it's going to get really crazy or here soon the entire thing is going to fall apart drastically. Too bad the Ukrainians can't march on to liberate Moscow and Russia.
The top priority (and in fact where much of the damage comes from) for Ukrainian military is to contest the airspace efficiently, which it can only achieve by means of Buk/S-300 air defence systems and the limited fleet of MiG-/Su- fighters available to them, but you have to see that it might just prove enough. Russian officers (Air force) are reluctant to fight this war, after all. They wouldn't want to lose their head in this...
If anything, Ukraine is winning this war. And it _will_ win this war, unless Russia is able to achieve air superiority over the skies pronto, which is very, very unlikely.
So no, this isn't just rehashed pro-Ukraine Western propaganda.
edit: Btw, off topic but I'm curious if these reports about discrimination against people of color fleeing Ukraine are true: https://time.com/6153276/ukraine-refugees-racism/
Take over hearts and souls of Ukrainians in the next 30 years? Maybe. Long-term resistance in Ukraine is now guaranteed.
Stuck in the mud, forests, without food, fuel, and comms. Russia is already mobilising its reserves from all the way back as Vladivostok (7000km away,) which means they had a very, very, very serious, life-threatening reason to do so.
We can also conclude that Russia didn't commit its fancy new weapons to the assault, making the claim that most of them exist only on paper, and to appear on parades so more stronger.
The state or Russian military hasn't changed at large since the Second Chechnya War, except now they lack military veterans from Soviet era.
Russia is blessed by only having NATO as its only adversary, and this gives them ability to concentrate on Ukraine.
If we had a hostile to Russia regime at least in Belarus, Georgia, or Kazakhstan, they would've gone for landgrab in Russia WITHOUT HESITATION now given just how weak is the Russian conventional military. People die, and go, cities fall, and are built again, but borders stay for centuries. This would've been a once in a century opportunity for them.
Kazakhstan can return to being a nuclear state overnight if they capture Orenburg. 50% of Russian nuclear potential is a taxi ride away from Kazakhstan border.
I guess their objectives are pretty straight forward and since they are ethnically same as the Ukrainians do not target civilians.
What worries me is the use of civilians as human shields, even reports of Indian students being locked up by the Ukrainian forces to be used as human shields.
Let us remember that the US was ' ' close to carpet bombing Cuba during the cuban missile crisis. If you share borders with a regional superpower, stop dreaming about getting in bed with their enemies, let alone military ties.
It is not like the Russians have a logistics disadvantage, they are literally surrounding Ukraine.
As much as I might be disillusioned, the very fact of pressing citizens to carry rifle, and making them believe they are "winning" is my definition of human shield.
Nobody is pressing citizens to join territorial defense, they do auxiliary duties, they are not surrogate for proper army.
Ukrainian army uses artillery, attack drones extensively, so your point of people with rifles has no value.
Whatever, you don’t get what is happening in Ukraine.
Unlike the normal way to split numbers
1,234,567,000
123,45,67,000
1 hundred crore, 45 lakh, 67 thousandYou can never forget that war is politics, and not the other way around.
By playing only defense, they are a victim, even a martyr. Who doesn't empathize with someone having to pick up a weapon and fight for their country/survival. It's the stuff of songs and legends.
In asymmetric warfare, the weaker force benefits from being spread out. Concentrating just gives the larger force a bigger target to shoot at. But you need a large force to mount an offense into enemy territory.
Even now ukraine experienced a renewed nationalism only fueled by the common enemy russia. It's the first step for failure, he can't win against the people.
This article misses the point. His objective is not to win militarily, but to influence the nation or take it under his control.
I also wonder whether his opinion on the basics is right. He dismisses Ukraine defence of the cities, but they still get a lot of supplies from western nations. If kiev is flooded with anti-tank weapons and anti-aircraft weapons the assault will be more brutal.