Dmitry Rogozin has been dismissed as director general of Roscosmos
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Currently this trend appears to be reversing. The country is getting increasingly authoritarian [0], the economy is switching from a highly corrupt trickle-down-oil-money model, to centrally managed industrial economy driven by the war needs.
I don't like where this is going. If Russia is pushed back into its borders, it will take a couple of years to ramp up weapons production and will retry. If it manages to successfully take over Ukraine, it will very likely press forward to attack other ex-USSR states. If China decides to join the party and rally out against Taiwan, we pretty much have a guaranteed WWIII until mutual exhaustion.
[0] https://meduza.io/en/feature/2022/07/14/vladimir-putin-enact...
This will take much more than just a few years.
Putin has too many points to cause pain for European politicians.
For example grain shortage caused by his naval operations will cause hunger in North Africa. Revolts and refugee influx to Europe will follow.
It’s enough for Europeans to put pressure on Ukraine to surrender. If it doesn’t they will spoon-feed it arms so it will surrender by fall.
This will not motivate Putin to push forward.
What we've seen so far is the US and its allies forcing Russia to pay a "price" for its adventurism. The value of this is both to act as a deterrent against future actions and to strengthen Ukraine's negotiating power when it ultimately surrenders.
I suspect that at a certain point everybody will be satisfied with the level of pain exacted, Ukraine surrenders, and Russia ends up with at least a large chunk of Ukraine.
But bombing so many civilians means after a while a tremendous loss as well.
It's just speculation and the hope would of course be Putin just getting out of Ukraine but Putin just has much less to loose besides his own death.
Feels like Europeans (namely Germany and France) will provide as little weapons as possible to exhaust Ukrainians so they get tired and surrender themselves.
Once Ukrainian public is ready, Biden will pressure Zelinsky. Biden has already said “we told him but he didn’t want to listen” hinting that he can throw Zelinsky under the bus if he doesn’t behave.
Surrender (“peace”) would be an awful option for Ukraine because Putin will regroup and in a couple of years launch a new assault on the remaining part of the country.
There won’t be mercy from him, judging by executions on occupied territory.
But i do agree it could become dangerous if China gets stupid ideas too.
But, they currently don't have the capacity to strike an amphibious assault + their military seems to be similar to the Russian one.
So yes, it could become worrisome if it happens. But i don't think that China has much to gain with attacking Taiwan from my POV.
Ukraine had found a gas supply in Crimea in 2008, that could replace all Russian gas imports in Europe. That's very different than a chip factory that is set to selfdestruct during an invasion and that needs machines that are literally made by ASML+ Imec ( Europe)
Ps. I was more worried about that part at the start of the war than now.
China has been backing Russia and it's anti-Western allies in the region (e.g., Serbia). Mostly, I think, for the value of keeping the West focussed on Russia in Europe to any “stupid ideas” they might try in their region.
Ukraine gets massive support from the club of the richest countries on the Earth, and, unlike Germany or France, the Anglo-Saxon behemoths seem to be committed in full. So is Poland, the necessary logistics hub for supplies. Russia is alone, even Iran refused to sell their drones to them.
The full impact of this economic and military imbalance cannot be seen yet. The Ukrainian army is in midst of switching their entire weaponry from the old Soviet models to the new Western ones. This is a grueling logistical task even in peace, much more so in war. But with each new type of equipment mastered (HIMARS, M-777, Panzerhaubitze 2000, in the future possibly Western tanks and jets), the total capability edge of the UAF over their Russian counterparts grows.
You can already see how the Russian offensive momentum has evaporated. They only managed to take very modest pieces of land over the last month or so, and basically none in July.
"White House says Iran is preparing to supply Russia with weapons-capable drones"
https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/11/politics/iran-russia-weapons-...
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/iran-says-refused-supply-dron...
And the Ukrainians have destroyed an untold number of Russian ammo dumps in the last weeks. Some of the explosions have been truly spectacular. This isn't something you can easily remedy. Any new ammo dump in range will be quickly spotted by either American spy satellites or local Ukrainian spies that are probably still active in Donbass - and get blasted to hell.
HIMARS is not enough to reconquer the lost territories, true. But it is enough to give Russians a forced operational pause.
This makes people angry, but does not significantly contribute to attrition of the Ukrainian military.
The recent cruise missile hits in Ukrainian cities haven't helped the Russians acquire even a square inch of new territory.
* It will only more cement Ukrainians against them
* It will have no negative influence on Ukrainian military nor aviation.
* Ukraine will use those attacks in their own propaganda to get more weapons and money from the West.
So those attacks are a waste of military assets with marginally negative gain. Who in Russian leadership is planning those dumb attacks?
We are too rational here on HN to try to emulate/parse/analyze the decision making involved. There is a big dollop of madness there.
The fact that the intelligence needed to give them valuable targets is a secondary concern. Their main concern is the readiness and cohesion that come from pressing the fire button.
In the case of this war at this very moment, it is long range high precision artillery. HIMARS eats rockets like crazy, it needs to be supplied constantly.
Once those supply chains are fully built and safe, they can talk about adding tanks to the mix.
Others are itching for a fight. I wonder if this is true:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ukraine/comments/vzp17b/in_poland_a...
Poland is certainly one of the countries that would love to drive Putin to madness.
Do they still have them or have they used most of them up?
IIRC, for all the attention they get, the US has surprisingly few cruise missiles and would use up its stockpiles pretty quickly in a war like that in Ukraine.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/russia-now-firing-s-30...
But a lot of those missiles have been stored somewhere in Siberia for 40+ years. Their condition is probably less than stellar. Who would regularly inspect and maintain random ammo dumps located five timezones away from Moscow in the middle of nowhere?
I suspect that at least some of those missiles are outright out of commission and others are unstable enough to be a danger to the Russians themselves.
Also, see this anti-aircraft gun in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IwqmezeSuQ
From what I get, Western stuff delivered to the Ukrainians is in working order, while the Russians shells seem to have a fairly high percentage of duds - usually an indicator of a fuse degraded by long and inadequate storage.
And if shells frequently fail, so will other long stored equipment.
The US almost certainly does, but the Russians might not. They've been shown to have neglected routine maintenance in ways that caused very critical problems for their military (e.g. they lost a lot of expensive advanced vehicles, because their unmaintained knock-off tires disintegrated).
Both these videos are long, but they had a lot of interesting ideas and insight on this topic:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9i47sgi-V4 [specifically 33:10] (How Corruption Destroys Armies - Theft, Graft, and Russian failure in Ukraine)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJkmcNjh_bg (All Bling, no Basics - Why Ukraine has embarrassed the Russian Military)
Europeans drag their feet on arming Ukraine and pressure it to surrender (“peace”).
The reason is gas and fear of refugee influx to Europe from hunger in Africa.
Plus Germans paying Russia billions for gas beats any arms supplies possible. And they will not stop doing it.
Very observably not. Russia seems to be actually incapable of buying any modern weapons for the billions of euros it receives from Germany. Even China considers such cooperation too risky.
The technical level of Russian equipment deployed in the battles in Ukraine has gone downhill since February. Now they are pulling really old stuff (designed or even manufactured in the 1950s-1960s) from storage. And some of their auxiliaries from the separatist republics literally use WWI and WWII small arms.
Money matters in war, but it cannot substitute for a missing/inadequate supply chain. You can't bury the enemy in an avalanche of euros, you actually need to procure the necessary equipment.
A year of slow territorial gains? Two? More? Not a problem as long as economy is propped by European money, Germans don’t bother sending enough weapons and Western media is tired of war and looks elsewhere.
Russia as a low prospect J-curve state might not be entertaining to the western media but it is basically the outcome the US has been gunning for since Gorbachev left, always with a lot of resistance from Germany. After a few more years of setting up alternative gas routes, I'm not sure Germany will even have a way to offer Russia yet another chance.
Do you see what those sanctions against Russian cheap energy are doing in Europe:
- Estonia Goverment fell
- Bulgaria Goverment fell
- UK Goverment fell
- Italy's PM resigned
It's not even August. Do you know what will happen when colder months hit ? :)
"Bulgaria Goverment fell" - Bulgaria has had by now four(?) early elections in a row, which predate the war in Ukraine. The Bulgarian political situation is an internal mess.
"Italy's PM resigned" - Italy has had 69 governments since WWII, nothing unusual there.
"Estonia Goverment fell" - Estonia is very anti-Russian in practice. Their next government is likely to be formed by the very same PM.
The EU has some 30 countries. Unlike Russia or odd exceptions like Merkel, their leaders come and go fairly frequently. Even 8 governmental changes in a year wouldn't be particularly strange in a club of 30 democracies.
I predict riots, unrest and MORE goverment changes :)
Also ... quotas for showers, heating ,etc.
TikTok is full of videos show uk guys running from conscription. I know a whole team of developers who fled to Poland early.I think they lost the morale war, and it's just a matter of time until Nato intervenes directly to start Ww3
But "losing the morale war" would probably manifest itself in localized frontline collapses, and this does not seem to be happening. The recent retreat in Luhansk oblast wasn't a rout, and other sections of the frontline are barely moving.
There’s tonnes of HIMARS strikes taking out command and control points of Russias behind the front line. The VDV (Russian paratroopers) and it’s leader ship have been decimated by this war.
Or the current regime will collapse. That often happens with large scale defeats, especially without a democratic outlet for internal change within the system.
The worst it will happen to Putin is that he'll be locked in into Russia and have to kill more and more Russian people.
The reference to MAD makes sense only in the context of foreign armies (and with the M only those of major nuclear powers), but if you look at the two immediate predecessors of the modern Russian Federation (the USSR and the Russian Empire), both fell without a foreign army entering the capital, and are hardly unique in history in doing so. And to the extent status as a major nuclear power is relevant to that, the USSR had it just as much as the Russian Federation does.
Germans finance his war efforts with billions of euros and drag their feet on arming Ukraine.
Europeans generally pressure Ukraine to surrender.
Why risk it? Just wait, time is on his side.
Save for Netflix not working anymore, life in Moscow is even better than pre-war.
Historically—not universally, of course, but frequently enough to be noteworthy—people have been observed to be displeased with leadership that unproductively transforms large numbers of their youth into corpses.
Besides that soldiers send a lot of stolen goods back home. There was an infamous video from the office of a transport company with dozens of soldiers sending loot like washing machines.
Ukraine is getting heaps of weapons and decimating Russian logistics and command and control with it. Enough that even the Russian propaganda is complaining about it.
The subthread was discussing what would happen in the event Russia was forced to abandon the invasion, if you want to object to discussing that possibility as reasonable, the place is several posts upthread.
(Also, Western aid delivered since the major escalation by Russia this year has been several multiples of Ukraine’s annual defense spending and a sizable fraction of Russia’s annual defense spending. It is not “weak” arms supplies by any reasonable standard.)
Same hubris that lead to defeat in Afghanistan
I do. Worst case, we wind up with Russia under China’s thumb. Not ideal. But Pyongyang isn’t rolling tanks over its borders.
Best case: a disassembly of the Russian empire. Why Moscow tells Siberians and Tatars what to do is an anachronism, start to finish. It sort of made sense when the Kremlin had its head screwed on straight. Now, it doesn’t.
not 2 decades. it’s been a corrupt inefficient machine since the bolsheviks. the lying and the corruption persisted throughout the ussr. the whole country and it’s precursor are just lies built one on top of the other and the westerners actually believed most of it.
> according to Meduza’s sources, Dmitry Rogozin will become one of the Kremlin’s supervisors for the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk “people’s republics” and the other Russian-occupied territories in Ukraine
https://meduza.io/en/feature/2022/07/13/the-president-likes-...
He's talking about criminals joining the ranks of Russia's army and how he's unhappy about it. Go figure...
He's also upset that the world is not considering him and his people as people.
Deciphering the symbolic was more interesting. He kept his fist closed in the end, but others did not.
The Black/Yellow/White flag is a Russian flag from Tzar Alexander II. The Blue/Yellow/Red flag appears to be related to Germany.
What's amusing is that Russian March an anti-Putin organization. https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A0%D1%83%D1%81%D1%81%D0%BA... - use Google Translate to read this instead of the English version.
Either way, he picked his poison long ago.
The worst part is that both sides have the resources and will to continue fighting for quite a long time (years), unless some hard to predict event turns the tide.
HIMARS 300 km. Destroys the Russian dependency on railroads and with that, Russian military logistics capacity.
Eg. Crimea:
https://warsawinstitute.org/train-crimea-russia-condemned-op...
https://newsbeezer.com/vietnameng/russia-deploys-smoke-scree...
Their priority is also their weakness.
Just look at the slow Russian advance without railroads in eg. Kyiv in the beginning of the war. They were stalled for weeks, because the composition of their BTG's are based on nearby access to railroads infrastructure.
That's a bit too wonder-weapony for me to think that it will actually happen that way.
That Crimean bridge seems like it could be destroyed effectively, but it's out of range. With the Donbas, I wonder if any damage could be repaired relatively quickly, since it would obviously be a priority.
It's clearly a play on the names of African countries Zimbabwe and Uganda, but was is your message?
Is it a show of disparaging attitude towards the people living in the East of Ukraine?
People routinely disappear, being put in the basement (na podval), tortured for smallest reasons.
Drafts when people are being used a cannon fodder.
It’s a disgrace what Putin’s people turned this place into over 8 years.
Same or worse fate awaits newly occupied territories too.
It is a crime against humanity.
There is already vicious spiral of oppression and resistance happening on those parts of Ukraine. He could be +-safe with protection on level of US president, but he won't have that. There are only few situations worse than to be considered occupant or traitor in place like current Ukraine.
So unless he surrounds himself with human shields most of the time, or moves really stealthily around, Rogozin is in for a rather risky career change.
You're forgetting that Russian generals are demoted if they win too much, since they could become a threat to Putin's position if they gain too much influence.
There's no way to win in the Russian military, other than the bribes in your pocket.
"USSR logic"
He has a great experience running Roscosmos which is quite a large corporation.
And he is very patriotic, highly motivated, will not sell or betray Russia. That's why he is ideal for that task.
(Ref: https://www.space.com/elon-musk-spacex-launch-trampoline-com...)
For example, IIRC the UK is the only country that voluntarily gave up all launch capabilities (they're trying to reverse this though). The US had a patch not too long ago where we couldn't launch humans ourselves (getting people to the ISS was outsourced to Russia)
Russia likely lacks the ability to indigenously develop a novel space platform. This is fine. Its economy is between New York and Florida. But for a culture geared towards dignity, it could be dangerous.
There are more... fitting... positions right now for a raving nationalist lunatic, I'm sure he'll land on his feet in the DPR or LPR.
Someone else in this thread linked a video of him giving the Nazi salute (is there a name for this?) after his speech at the rally mentioned in the Reuters article. I can't think of any reason someone would attend or speak at such an event, let alone salute like that at such an event, aside from being a neo-Nazi.
No its not
Here's one counterexample: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hansi,_the_Girl_who_Loved_the_...
It’s has a few connotations. The mildest is proposing to throw all colored people out of the cities. The most severe is to exterminate them.
pretty sure many Turkic, Mongolic, etc. people lived in what is now Russia long before a Russian state existed.
That's treating the phrase an an ethnic thing, you might say "well clearly they mean Russian as a Nationality" but in that case Russia already belongs to Russians.
This distinction is a very frequent source of misunderstanding for both native speakers and English speakers, as Russians might hear one where you imply another, and vice versa.
"Dmitry Rogozin (Director General of Russia’s Roskosmos State Space Agency, former Deputy Prime Minister) – comments on his Twitter feed and Telegram channel (June 13, 2022)
“In general, what has grown up in the place of Ukraine is an existential threat to the Russian people, Russian history, Russian language and Russian civilization. If we do not put an end to them, as, unfortunately, our grandfathers did not do away with them, we will have to die, but end up at an even greater cost to our grandchildren. So let’s get this over with. Once and forever. For our grandchildren.”"
https://www.justsecurity.org/81789/russias-eliminationist-rh...
He also was a leader of right-wing party Rodina in early 2000s, see more details in Wikipedia:
>Under Rogozin, Rodina shifted towards the right wing of Russian politics and became the second largest and one of the country's most successful parties. A number of controversies on Rogozin's policies culminated in it being banned in 2005 from standing for election to the Moscow City Duma for using what was considered as chauvinist slogan 'Let's Clean the Garbage!'.
I think I've been hasty to judge other people's positions in the past. I'm guilty of confidently stating a view on a topic despite knowing that I haven't taken the time to really understand the others' position. Probably 80% of the time, my final conclusion matches my initial one. But I'm trying to become more responsible about this kind of thing. So to that end...
I'd like to understand Rogozin's reasons for holding those beliefs. I know basically nothing about that region's history. Is he working from bad factual / historical data? Has he been exposed to specific propaganda / psy-ops? Has he seen or experienced something traumatic that makes him hyper-vigilant about Ukranian leadership or non-Russians in general?
>People say though that Rogozin is not a big believer in anything, he’s just a huge cynical careerist coming from a very privileged nomenclature background riding any wave that brings him to the top. Right now he’s one of the major pro-war hawks.
(quote from this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32108578)
It’s a really easy climb if you share Nazi and homophobic views of Russian elites and being vocal about it.
Plays very well with army generals, old Kremlin elite and general population as well.
Nomenclature was a very small class of people with privileged exclusive access.
It’s either families with relatively short ties to Kremlin: people with high positions, spies, diplomats, nuclear scientists, state journalists, pro-government writers.
Or people like heads of grocery chains, import shops who controlled access to goods and clothes.
People like these could put their children at most successful universities without exams, buy them Western cars and spoil with caviar while most people stood at the queues for hours to get sour milk or bones for soup.
Going down that rabbit hole or learning about things like the "2014 Odessa Clashes [2]" (and think about how we would treat that event, or even call it, had it happened to the side that we're supposed to like) or even the Language Policy in Ukraine [3], and you can actually start to see how deep in information warfare we currently are. And it's unpleasant.
I am avoiding doing much beyond giving references for you to read yourself largely because of what you mentioned. In the current atmosphere it's basically impossible to actually discuss the war in an open fashion, and probably will remain so for years to come.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stepan_Bandera
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Odessa_clashes
[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_policy_in_Ukraine
They then retreated to the House of Unions where pro-Russian opposition was based. Basically taking them as hostages.
The house was set on fire and multiple people died a horrific death.
While immensely tragic, don’t “both sides” this and spread Russian propaganda. The skirmishes were all captured on long live streams.
Afterwards Russian TV used it to further spread anti-Ukrainian hatred.
How the Ukrainian government conducted the investigation is quite telling.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Odessa_clashes#Investigat...
Luckily I decided to look into it a bit.
It turned out that Shahnazarov was saying the reverse -- some evil forces decided to eradicate Russians (and that's why Putin fights the war) and 'they' won't have mercy even for the anti-war activists -- hence 'concentration camps, reeducation and sterilization' for pro-Western Russians too.
Here is the full video from which parts were cut and rearranged -- https://t.me/kolezev/11213 .
The article itself is written by an American and helpfully translated into Ukrainian to let Ukrainians know what Russians think of them.
Rogozin's quote seems real though -- the link leads to what looks like his Telegram channel :-(
He first gained notoriety at 2003 parliament elections leading a pro-Putin ultranationalist party Rodina.
One of Rodina’s TV ads were comparing Caucausus people to street trash.
People say though that Rogozin is not a big believer in anything, he’s just a huge cynical careerist coming from a very privileged nomenclature background riding any wave that brings him to the top. Right now he’s one of the major pro-war hawks.
What are the F words? Fascist?
As for the N-word, there is a similarly sounding but fairly neutral Russian word which was OK to use until the influence of the US culture tarnished it.
I am genuinely puzzled.
N-word as well. Ordinary Russians will fight tooth and nail for their right to use this word.
To be honest I believe the americans promoted the n-word and they still do it MORE than anyone else(i.e russia). Just listen a random rap song or watch a movie with black people. It seems part of the american culture. As someone from a small European country I couldn't really understand how a word can be both "forbidden" and widely used by the offended party.
Nevertheless offensive words are offensives and we should try to avoid using them but talking about F word and N word and B word and M word even in a neutral context seems a bit too much censorship. We are not kids to be told we are not allowed to say specific words.
And it looks like now another word is going to be forbidden: H word.
> One of Rodina’s TV ads were comparing Caucausus people to street trash.
This seems to be a common trait across the political spectrum in Russia. The darling of the west, Alexei Navalny, is just as nationalist and xenophobic, and while he doesn't compare people from the Caucasus as trash, he did compare them to vermin that need to be exterminated in his TV ads.
And any politician who actually wants to succeed is bound to channel this energy or at least address it.
Russia has severe ongoing problems with national tensions and conflicts.
Not only between Russians and other nations but among those nations as well (e.g. ingush vs chechen).
Main reason is that Russia was built as a colonialist empire. Most ethnic regions had nothing in common except for being conquered.
That led to bad blood such as ongoing ethnic conflicts, disputed regions and insurgencies being crushed by Kremlin using mostly ethnically white army.
Multiple bombings of Grozny easily rival current destruction of Ukraine, along with mass rape and pillaging.
Conscripts were executed and tortured by locals which led to army’s brutal retaliation leading to cycle of violence.
Ethnic crime also contributed with some diasporas having immense powers in Moscow.
This boiling cocktail leads to a huge albeit suppressed anger amongst general population.
A politician who proposes disbanding Russian Federation and imposing a visa regime with ethnic regions will ride a wave of support not seen by Putin.
That’s why Putin crushes any nationalist opposition much harder than liberal one. It’s the biggest threat to his rule if there’s one.
Rogozin served mainly as a spoiler. His fake party sponged some dissent votes in 2003 and then disappeared. Once again even if his Nazi views are genuine, he’s a power hungry Machiavelist first.
His dad was a highly ranked general and engineer.
His wife has several prominent realtives that worked in Soviet space programs.
That's a geat example of nepotism, the main social lift in contemporary Russia.
It seems that Russia will concentrate on mostly military space applications from now on. So different kind of management will be required.
Oh, probably that's why in Russia he's known as 'Undertaker of space industry'. It makes sense.
Rogozin was just a typical okay-ish manager of Putin era with an inflated ego, who also liked to shitpost to Twitter. The ones before him were even worse (like Komarov who plundered Khrunichev together with his friend Kalinovsky). His main blunder was that he tried to run it as a for-profit state corporation to cater to the government unwilling to pay more for a hopeless industry; otherwise, some of the decisions he made were sensible enough. But the Russian space industry couldn't have been "saved" by mediocrities like him. It needed to be rescaled and the program re-prioritized. The fundamental reform was long overdue, and it required political will from the government, that wasn't there.
But I wouldn't separate his management from his public speeches. As top-level official, his shitposting may be as important as his management decisions. Before him, Russian space industry were decaying but it was declaring a peaceful goals (I remember ambitious Phobos-Grunt mission that was close to success). Now Roscosmos looks like a department of ministry of defence.