I Visited Bucha Today
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> I took the metro as far as I could go, which is about half-way,
> and a bus from there. The center of Bucha all told is about 30km
> from the center of Kyiv.
But in truth it's more like a suburb. The distance from Bucha's rail station to the Office of the President of Ukraine is about the same as San Francisco to Millbrae.
It puts into perspective how fraught the early days of the invasion were, and the true weight of Zelensky holding his ground in Kyiv.
Nowadays, Kyiv is a 8 or 9 hr drive from the major fights, like going from New York City past Philadelphia past Baltimore past DC past Richmond and all the way to Raleigh, NC.
In a slightly different world, if a couple dozen people had been less committed to stopping the blitz, it could have ended very differently.
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/russian-invasion-ukraine-battle...
My impression as a layman is that Ukraine has been fighting this war with a lot of creativity and innovation, surgical precision and excellent coordination. Unlike Russia, which tried to be fast and clever but failed at it, and has since relied on just massive firepower to destroy everything in their path.
It's not going to change anything. I hope you figure out sooner rather than later that you're living in an information bubble that will inevitably pop.
That’s decisively not what happened. Ukrainian army and in some cases territorial defense blocked them
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Hostomel
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Antonov_Airport
And as close the Russians got, the fog of war made it seem like they were even closer. One the night of February 25th - one day into the war - the New York Times had the headline: "RUSSIAN TROOPS ENTER KYIV"[1].
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20220225122446/https://www.nytim...
It's really shocking to see how people are easily manipulated. Half of the russia thinks that they are at full fledge war with US, EU and rest of west. Simple logic check like ok... their army is here, but have you heard of Western Rockets, F-35's , Tanks. Nope. Still we are under atack
Are you sure about those numbers? It sounds a bit like a strawman argument to me.
Younger more educated people are more immune ( although equally passive and "stoic" ) but the vast majority believes what Kremlin says ( with varying degrees ).
But it's not "magic", with 20+ years of constant propaganda in pretty much every TV channel every population would believe the same. Do not underestimate the sophistication and the level they can shape the minds of their people. The Internet was a new "challenge" but it's mostly under their control although not at the level they control TV and every newspaper.
Also, the "story/reality" they spread in Africa, most Asia and South America is completely is completely different to the one they spread on the West. China does something similar.
To my knowledge in the West their low effort blatant lies doesn't get much traction, but the way they feed the disenfranchised, contrarians and "influencers" fostering discontent has been effective. Don't know about TikTok.
Most people hardly understand the nuances between "war", "military operation" or "proxy war".
For 8 years it wasn't called a war, so what?
It just always amuses me what the same people who cry about a war which isn't called a war completely ignore previous eight years when it was called a war everywhere... except officially it was ATO.
Like, come on.
It might only surprise people, who can't quite wrap their heads around the fact that other people are individuals with their own opinions, regardless of geography.
I just don't really understand why would one assume that such near-to-margin-of-error numbers could be indicative of anything other than an obvious fact that Russia isn't 100% homogenous (duh!).
https://mobile.twitter.com/nastasiaKlimash/status/1575649514...
(This is just one example across many I've seen since February)
All in all, Russia is a very weak country with less than 1.5T GDP. As a result, any infusion of huge sum on money by external actors will tilt the balance in the favor of the party that gets the money .
https://www.defense.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/317337...
Dated Sept. 28, 2022
"In total, the United States has now committed approximately $16.9 billion in security assistance to Ukraine since January 2021. Since 2014, the United States has committed approximately $19 billion in security assistance to Ukraine more than $16.2 billion since the beginning of Russia’s unprovoked and brutal invasion on February 24."
I'm not sure that all of the money/material has yet reached Ukraine. But that is what is said to be committed.
CBS published this report on the missing weapons stolen by corrupt groups operating within Ukraine. Shortly afterwards they were forced to amend a statement that someone is trying to track the newer shipments, without explaining any sort of actual plan for accountability.
War is racketeering. https://youtube.com/watch?v=ZWzxbS8eUKc
But even going down that path of thinking, it’s amazing Ukraine has decimated the Russian armed forces with only a fraction of the weapons they were supplied with!. /s.
You seem motivated to hide corruption lol
You also never mentioned the quote is from the very start of the war and how the situation of supplies is very different now.
Russia is a corrupt aggressor, but that does not mean Ukrainian abuses should be ignored. Zelensky is not allowing Ukrainian citizens the freedom to leave the country for safety.
How is it different now?
Interpol chief is Russian??
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jun/02/ukraine-weapon...
lol you have no idea what you’re talking about.
You have added some useful links to this discussion but this is the second time you’ve undermined your own argument by laughing at the person you’re responding to. Please be aware of the Hacker News Guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
CBS is American but this idea that the majority of weapons aren’t being in Ukraine cause they are being sold or stolen or lost _is propaganda_. Nothing supports this idea for the current phase of the war and people have generally moved on from this narrative.
Counterpoint: Afghanistan. Money and matériel are surprisingly ineffective without the people and institutions capable of leveraging them.
All that spin about NATO fighting Russia to the last Ukrainian is wrong. It's the Ukrainians themselves who want to fight for their country, with or without outside help. The outside help just makes it easier, but they would have fought either way.
NATO provides intelligence, training, counsel and supplies. You can't just pretend it's not involved and that at some point this war didn't become Russia's proxy war with NATO.
You've got to understand that while the current generation of Ukrainians grew up in relative freedom, their parents and grandparents grew up in the Soviet Union. And now with Putin trying to subjugate Ukraine, they fear that their children may grow up in a similar situation, and possibly worse, with all the Russian talk of genocide.
So that's why they're fighting so hard. They're fighting for their lives, their freedom, and that of their children and grandchildren. That's an incredibly powerful motivator, and I'm absolutely convinced that they'd fight just as hard without foreign support. But that support does give them a better fighting chance, enabling them to fight Russia on equal footing, instead of relying mostly on partisan/guerilla warfare, which is actually what NATO expected to happen.
With or without support, I don't think this is a war that Russia could possibly win; there's just too much at stake for Ukraine, and not enough for Russia. People are generally eager to fight for their own lives and freedom, but not to subjugate others. Especially not a brother nation, as Ukrainians and Russians used to see each other before this.
There is too much "nothing happened at Tienanmen Square" kind of stuff for "long-sought freedom" kind of scenarios to be believable.
That the people of China don't fight for freedom like this is a completely different issue, though maybe not as different as the reason Russian don't. For Ukraine, the situation is quite different, though: they have tasted freedom for 30 years, and there's a clear external party who undeniably wants to take it away from them. Can't get much clearer than that.
I'm sorry, but I just feel like your impressions of it are naive, as you reason in categories that don't have weight for real actual individuals in real actual life.
"Fighting for freedom after tasting it for 30 years" is something that only exists in storybooks. In reality it's always powerful people making the decisions and then agitating other people into submission.
Real individuals are preoccupied with much more mundane things, like providing for their families and so on. Ukrainians, Russians, Chinese, whatever. Denying them this is a very typical dehumanization and manipulation tactics, commonly found in western supremacist culture, i.e. "why don't they fight for freedom" tropes.
Yes, powerful people make the decisions, but those decisions are meaningless if nobody obeys them. You see that in Russia without hundreds of thousands of people fleeing the country in order to avoid conscription. They have no faith whatsoever in Putin's war, and don't want to fight in it. Ukraine, on the other hand, doesn't just have much of its own population willing to do what they can, they also have many foreign volunteers who believe sufficiently in their cause to help them. That is not something that happens when the decision only comes from the top. This is a massive difference between Russia and Ukraine, and it's visible in the vastly different morale of the soldiers on the ground.
> Real individuals are preoccupied with much more mundane things, like providing for their families and so on.
Yes, but how are you going to do that when your country is being invaded by someone who wants you dead? This is exactly why Ukrainians are so eager to fight and Russians are not: the effect the war has on them personally.
>on RT's show "Beautiful Russia," propagandist argues that Russia shouldn't worry about the way events like Bucha are being perceived or covered in the West. Instead, he says, Russia should lay into that: "Yes, that's how we are... We'll show you even more. Fear us!"
https://mobile.twitter.com/JuliaDavisNews/status/15712662228...
I think Patton may have had the right idea.
How many satellites, AWACS does UA have?
https://web.archive.org/web/20220929224847/https://www.amazo...
AWS have nothing to do with this site, and certainly nothing to do with its hosting.
I was not expecting a strong response to the post; I took no steps to handle additional traffic.
Experience is the key to performance, and this is the first time I've posted a noticable thread.
I've upped the number of Apache servers to four and increased the thread count per server to 32. Too late now, of course; but I'll know better in the unlikely event I should come again to post something of interest.
I've also moved the CSS link inline. There is no javascript, there are no cookies.
This has broken the link for this story. I added a redirect, but it does nothing. No errors, no logging, just... doesn't do anything. That's an experience I have to say I have had before, with Apache =-)
I've added a couple of words of explanation to the top of the index, and a link there to the blog post.
Found more info here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bucha_massacre
Going to return when the site's back up.
This blog post was scrubbed from the internet shortly after.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Blackout2015/comments/4ylml3/reddit... "Reddit has removed their blog post identifying Eglin Air Force Base as the most reddit-addicted "city" - Eglin is often cited as the source of some government social-media propaganda/astroturfing programs"
Also note the same themed posts on reddit from accounts that are around 1-2 years old and have 4-5 random posts in last one year but are suddenly active posting about the war.
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free"
Reading the whitepapers, you can see the author is really knowledgable about redshift and also hates it with a passion as only someone who spend years fixing it would have :)
You're very kind to say so :-)
I have to say, I think for all of us if we devote all our time to one particular and extra-ordinarily narrow field we may well come know more than others in that field, it always remains the case that the difference between what we know and what there is to know, remains enourmous.
From the outset Russia's war of aggression sets it outside its obligations under the UN Charter, the Budapest memorandum, and Geneva Convention. But once annexation is announced by Russia, the rest of the world has to decide what to do about a violation of the most central proscription in all of international law.
I'm skeptical the UN system avoids defacto collapse if it refuses to strangle the Russian regime at this point. And if the UN system ends, whether 5 months or 50 years, I uave serious doubts about WW3 being avoidable. The UN system stinks. But it's all we have, born from the ashes of WW1 and 2, to avoid it. Since we haven't done the hard work of getting rid of nukes, I'm also skeptical humanity avoids using at least one.
China and India need to show up and defend the Charter. They agreed to be bound by this obligation.
Maybe it simply lacks power? What can they do, except declare the referendum illegal?
It's the physical action problem: when a government makes policy, how does that go from words to actions? In the international relations business it's the same issue: the prime minister or president or whoever wants to communicate a message reliably to other nations - but who exactly do they talk to do it? (this problem was why the hotline system between the US and Russia was setup after the Cuban missile crisis - a major issue driving the decision making was 6 to 12 hour communication delays trying to go through embassies and hoping messages were being accurately sent).
If they become a credible force in the future, I fully expect them to be accepted in the security council.
North Korea isn't even worth mentioning, their weapons are a joke except as leverage enough to get free UN food from time to time.
2. No wonder the UK blocked an inquiry into how the Ukrainians blatantly massacred themselves to provoke Russia.
And under the UN Charter, Russia can't be removed. The Soviet Union were expelled from the League of Nations after invading Finland in 1939.
The General Assembly can and should do more. Or the UN system will defacto collapse into irrelevance.
Morocco annexed Western Sahara, and while most of the world still considers that illegal, the United States has been pretty open about supporting Morocco's control over the area, and Morocco enjoys good international relations otherwise.
https://www.euractiv.com/section/global-europe/news/us-open-...
Annexation has happened a few times over the past few decades.
Seems somewhat disrespectful to me.
I felt I had to go, and it is specifically a feeling, inside me. I've been trying to pin down exactly what it is, and I'm not sure I've succeeded.
It's something like where something so awful happened here, to ordinary people, the horror, the terror, the violence and death, it feels encumbent to - and grimly - witness what happened.
Machine translation:
Thanks to the help of our team of OSINT and GEOINT specialists, it was possible to determine the time of the image for certain.
- A picture from the NYT allegedly from March 19 shows sand alluviums after a downpour that went from the 31st to the first.
- The attached comparison from the NYT is based on two images that have identical shadow positions. They allegedly compared March 19 and February 28. In fact, they compared February 28 and April 1 - the time and position of the shadows coincide. The original dates of the pictures are American time.
- The Maxar website provides information on which satellites have been surveying the Bucha region over the past period. A total of three satellites were involved.
- By checking the angle of inclination of the Sun above the horizon, the SunCalc program was able to find out by searching the exact time of the image and the direction of the shadows.
- The picture was taken on April 1 at 11:57 GMT (14:57 local summer time).
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/04/briefing/russia-ukraine-w...
[1]: https://www.info-res.org/post/disinformation-denial-russia-s...
Do you have similar info about the Kramatorsk train station attack by Tochka-U? I saw explanations that, relatively convincingly imho, attribute the launch to Urkainian forces.
Namely, if one draws a line through the the place where the rocket part fallen and where the warhead exploded, that line points to Ukrainan positions (to Dobropillia).
In addition, Conflict Intelligence Team (an anti-Putin open source investigation group), analyzed the situation based on the orientation of the rocket part itself, as it layed on the ground. Their report: https://t.me/CITeam/2463. According to them, the rocket part can at most change orientation by 45 degrees. So they draw a sector +-45° from the rocket part direction as it lays on the ground, and only on a far side of this sector they find Russian positions (see the map in the report). Given the probabilistic nature of this process, I think the further away from the actual direction of the rocker part (which points almost directly to Dobropillia on the map), the less likely this is the source of the launch. In other words, the Russian positions are in an "unlikely" part of the sector.
Anyways, using two points - the rocker part location and the explosion point - seems to be the strongest argument. (I haven't geolocated the photos myself yet, but those reports claim the line points towards Dobropillia).
Do you know good counter arguments to this?
[1]: https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2022/04/14/russias-kramators...