One Year into the War in Ukraine
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acoup.blog
Actually, if you read Western mainstream media front line reports, past the headlines and between the lines, a picture of very heavy losses emerges. Units completely depleted or rebuilt several times. Territorial Defense volunteers sent into the trenches with hardly any preparation [0]. And so on. But somehow such reports never manage to shatter the Conventional Wisdom.
[0]: Just one recent example: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/20/world/asia/ukraine-russia...
You don’t even have to read “past the headlines and between the lines”.
The most common estimates I’ve seen are around 120K killed+wounded for Ukraine, which are very heavily casualties.
Not as heavy as the 200K the same sources are estimating for Russia, but still very high. This is a meatgrinder of a war. This is very clear.
There's no part of Russia bordering Ukraine that Ukraine could take as a bargaining chip to trade for Ukraine's own territory. There's nothing but farmland and mountains. Which is why this war is so stuck.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/97-of-russia-army-in-ukraine...
I would have reconsidered my approach to making connections if that happened to me :)
2) I'm not in touch with these people anymore though I've tried to reach everyone I was able to and get their opinions. My conclusion is: the propaganda is extremely effective. People there easily pronounce self-contradictive statements and easily turn to aggression.
Essentially they are sure that noone would vouch for Poland (also for Baltic countries). I've been shocked that well educated people, like software engineers, scientists, etc easily repeat the narrative of various propagandists and, moreover, they say that these are their own conclusions.
The people are convinced that NATO won't hold up to its promises.
Re nuclear weapons. I really doubt that this shit is still functional.
Ohh how I wish I could believe that. Once you have the fissile material together my understanding is that it's not that hard to actually build a bomb. The success rate of countries that have decided to start a nuclear program is pretty damn high, and through all those years of nuclear testing, there weren't a whole lot of duds that I know of.
Ed: rockets, targeting, etc are also tricky failure points.
Anyway, I agree it's not a great cause for optimism. It would only take a couple of them going off to give the world a bad time. If nothing else they're dirty bombs.
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/us-allies-step-up-sanct...
Some people have questioned the legitimacy of that request and of the breakaway governments, but a Washington Post poll in 2021 found that over half of the respondents from those breakaway republics wanted to join Russia and only 12% wanted to rejoin Ukraine:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/02/12/new-surve...
The separatists are under Russian control. The Russian army has been fighting alongside them since 2014, when they invaded Donbas.
In the 1991 referendum, voters in Dontesk and Luhansk overwhelmingly voted against being part of Russia. Per your source, in the Ukrainian-controlled part of Donbas, 75% want to be part of Ukraine. In the Russian-controlled part of Donbas, 57% want to be part of Russia.
First point, why such stark difference? I think it's because Russia is very good at propaganda and they exercise it heavily in areas under their control.
Second point, this changes absolutely nothing about my claim that what Russia did and is doing is completely immoral, pure evil. They don't care about the people in the separatist republics, that's just a marketing spin that almost everyone can see through. It's about imperialism, revenge, power. Putin has been planing to absorb at least Belarus and Ukraine since a very long time.
After all, Russia invaded the non-Russian controlled parts of Ukraine, which, per your source, are heavily against joining Russia.
Even if some parts of Ukraine wanted to join Russia, it wouldn't give Russia the right to annex the territory.
I'm curious why you have this view, what's your background - nationality, ethnicity, feelings about the West? (I'm from the Czech Republic.)
I think this dehumanizes them. They chose to become part of Russia and the fact that they have mostly become part of Russia doesn't erase that choice.
> In the 1991 referendum...
A lot has happened since 1991. Don't you agree that a poll from 2021 is more relevant now?
> First point, why such stark difference?
An obvious explanation would be that only the areas where enough people wanted to leave Ukraine were controlled by the separatists.
> Second point, this changes absolutely nothing about my claim that what Russia did and is doing is completely immoral, pure evil.
If you mean that it's never moral to support separatists, I disagree completely.
> I'm curious why you have this view
I'm from the US. We are, first of all, a nation founded by "separatists", who also fought against other separatists to remain a single nation. I think each separatist cause needs to be evaluated on its merits, but in general (when something like slavery isn't involved) I think the people of a smaller region should be free to leave a larger nation if they wish. If I didn't believe that, I'd have to apply for British citizenship.
And the US is also a nation that's done exactly what Russia is doing, many times. We nearly started a war because Russian weapons were too close to the US (in Cuba), just as Russia demands that Western weapons stay out of Ukraine. And we've invaded many nations on pretexts weaker than Russia's in this war. If we accepted those actions as precedents, they would justify Russia's actions in this war. Everything I hear seems to be tinged by a bit of an "it's only OK when we do it" attitude, so I feel that this war is about power and imperialism for the US as much as it is for Russia.
And perhaps also for Ukraine. Ukraine has even demanded the return of Crimea, where even in 1991, only 54% wanted to be separate from Russia. After all that's happened, do you think Crimea really wants to return to Ukraine?
My ideal solution would be a fair and binding vote on separation for all the regions in question, but I know no party would accept that.
What 2021 poll is that? I am aware of the ones in 2014 and the one in 2022, both of which could be described as meaningless Russian shams, and totally irrelevant .
2014 sham: https://www.thebulwark.com/what-really-happened-in-ukraine-i...
2022 sham: https://www.voanews.com/a/voting-ending-in-sham-annexation-p...
Paywalled, described as a "survey" in the headline, so not actually a poll. Why pick that specific one?
I picked this one because it's one of the few I've seen that seems the least bit trustworthy. If you know of a better one, I'd be happy to read it too.
What are the regions in question?
Should the about 25k of civilians murdered by Russia in Mariupol be automatically counted as votes against joining Russia?
No. I said they were under Russian control. Not that they're not human. The invading army is under Putin's control, that doesn't imply they're not human (although they regularly commit inhuman acts).
> A lot has happened since 1991. Don't you agree that a poll from 2021 is more relevant now?
The poll is heavily skewed by Russian propaganda in areas under their control.
> An obvious explanation would be that only the areas where enough people wanted to leave Ukraine were controlled by the separatists.
First, area of control is primarily determined by military, not civilians. Second, why would there be such a stark difference in opinion within Donbas? Doesn't make any sense.
> If you mean that it's never moral to support separatists, I disagree completely.
I don't mean that, it depends on the specific situation. But the separatists are just a distraction, it's not what this war is about. Russia invaded the area which was against joining Russia, simply because Putin wanted to subdue Ukraine. He couldn't care less about the separatists, they're just a tool. In fact, he brutally crushes actual organic separatist movements (Chechnya).
> so I feel that this war is about power and imperialism for the US as much as it is for Russia
You feel wrong then. What Russia is doing is bordering genocide (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_genocide_of_Ukr...). The US is doing everything to help them. If Ukraine succeeds and becomes a prosperous liberal democracy, it would make the alliance of liberal democracies stronger and the US would benefit from that. That doesn't change that it's mostly right to help Ukraine.
Russia is effectively a dictatorship run by a psychopath who kills his opponents and uses mass torture to achieve his goals. The US is a democracy whose current leadership has a normal level of empathy.
> only 54% wanted to be separate from Russia
That's a majority... In any case, the annexation by Russia was wrong and should be reversed. After that, there may be talks about independence and a proper referendum.
Does not dehumanize at all. Ukraine fell into political turmoil similar to January 6 riots in the US, and Russia used intelligence operatives to instigate further violent riots, quickly invaded parts of Ukraine taking advantage of the confusion, and established a military occupation. The so-called separatists were directly funded and supported by Russia in the earliest days, and then under the full control of the military admin after tanks rolled in.
As I've told before, the European Court of Human Rights has confirmed the same when they were investigating whether Russia is responsible for MH17 shootdown, which happened on occupied territories. Since Russia had full control, ECHR found them responsible.
Locals have had as much freedom to choose their future as Parisians in 1940.
That tells us nothing about whether the people of the region want to be part of Russia.
For that, we have to look to polls, like the one I cited, which tell us that the people living in the region do support Russia.
Which isn't that surprising, considering that the elected President they supported was driven out of office by a revolution. That kind of thing would make anyone question their democracy. If you must compare it to Jan 6th, it's as if the Jan 6th riots had lasted for weeks and at the end, the President preferred by the rioters took over.
Nor would I put much value on polls conducted in conditions where people can get murdered for publicly supporting some of the answers. I wonder what Parisians in 1940 would've answered if they got a phone call asking if they wanted to be a part of Germany - while people were disappearing.
> Which isn't that surprising, considering that the elected President they supported was driven out of office by a revolution. That kind of thing would make anyone question their democracy. If you must compare it to Jan 6th, it's as if the Jan 6th riots had lasted for weeks and at the end, the President preferred by the rioters took over.
Yanukovych was removed from the office by the parliament. It's as if Congress had voted Trump out of the office after January 6th riots, Trump fled abroad and some unhappy Trumpers stormed further goverment buildings, and then Mexican army rolled in to support "separatists" and occupied Arizona and Texas, and then Mexican intelligence operatives cosplaying as independent freedom fighters asked Mexico to annex Arizona and Texas into Mexico.
That's a fair point - polling is difficult and unreliable in a contested region - but what other evidence can we look to?
Perhaps this: "an occupation against a hostile local population requires far more soldiers than a peaceful occupation of territory" as we've seen recently when Russia occupied regions not controlled by the separatists.[1]
And the Russian forces in the separatist regions before 2022 were far from sufficient to hold the regions if the local population had been hostile, especially with Ukrainian forces also fighting them.
> Yanukovych was removed from the office by the parliament
This isn't accurate. "On 21 February 2014, Yanukovych ...left the capital for Kharkiv, saying his car was shot at as he left Kyiv, and travelling next to Crimea, and eventually to exile in Russia."[2]
Then, because he had fled, "the Ukrainian parliament voted to remove him from his post...on the grounds that he...effectively resigned."[2] He was not impeached.
It's more accurate to say that he was driven out of office by the riots, a fact that Parliament merely recognized.
(Also, your analogy to Jan 6th makes no sense, because in any such analogy, the rioters have to end up with the President they want, just as they did in Ukraine.)
1: https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/01/politics/ukraine-assassinatio...
The key part is Mexican army invading Arizona and Texas under the pretext of separatism, seizing the oppurtunity that internal turmoil offers. The specifics of that turmoil are largely irrelevant.
Do you have sources for that? It's the first I've heard of it and I'd like to learn more.
> The key part is Mexican army invading Arizona and Texas under the pretext of separatism
Ok. Then to use an analogy that actually happened, perhaps the US invading Cuba under the "pretext" of separatism from Spain?
Or the US sending the navy to Panama to support its independence from Columbia (in exchange for the canal zone)?
Perhaps the best analogy is the Mexican-American war, in which the US took Texas (already de facto separate from Mexico but still claimed by them) and other territory from Mexico.
Anyway, what's the point of this analogy?
* Arsen Pavlov, bomb in elevator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arsen_Pavlov
* Alexander Zakharchenko, bomb in cafe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Zakharchenko
* Mikhail Tolstykh, rocket lauched at his office https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Tolstykh
* Aleksey Mozgovoy, car bomb and ambush with machine guns https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksey_Mozgovoy
Resistance mostly takes the form of hit-and-run attacks and sabotage against infrastructure. Here's a 2019 video of DNR communications facility being blown up: https://medium.com/dfrlab/blast-highlights-mgb-detentions-in...
The video was posted on social media with the following message:
> This was done with the goal to draw attention to the inhumane torture in the basements of the MGB. Cruel treatment and tying wires with electric current to peoples’ extremities in the “people’s” republics has become the norm. The people of the Donbas must protest against torture, or the fascist republic will remain unconnected.
The very effective use of long-range weapons against targets deep inside occupied territories has also been attributed to intelligence provided by locals.
Like with Kherson, we can expect detailed stories after LNR and DNR are liberated and it's safe to reveal what went on and how it was accomplished.
> Anyway, what's the point of this analogy?
The war in Ukraine has nothing to do with separatism. Whatever seeds of that may have existed in the first days, they were hijacked by Russian intelligence services and armed forces very early to prepare the stage for military invasion and occupation. The treatment of representatives of occupied territories as independent leaders even as late as of February 2022 (when they supposedly called Russia for help) is unsupported by facts. You can stage such "separatism" anywhere in favorable conditions when police and armed forces are overwhelmed and won't react fast enough.
No, it's a toy movement.
> There's no part of Russia bordering Ukraine that Ukraine could take as a bargaining chip
Transnistria could play precisely that role.
All a Ukrainian invasion of Transnistria would do is give Putin's claims about Ukrainian aggression some veneer of legitimacy and annoy Moldova, which doesn't want to see something which is constitutionally part of their territory fought over and then bargained back to Russian control...
They basically are. They speak Russian and act like Russians. I doubt they'd mind being annexed.
They don't have russian passorts. How can they be russians?
You clearly are not familiar with how things work in Transnistria.
Just because Putin says those people are Russians so he can claim some clay, doesn't make it a fact.
Sure some are ethnically Russian, but that doesn't make them Russian citizens of the Federal Russian Republic.
They are Moldovan citizens. Transnistria is a rouge separatist nation that's not internationally recognized and only exists on paper because Russia is a nuclear power which has troops and weapons there and Moldova is too weak to do anything about it.
Not sufficiently familiar then.
"It is estimated that about 250,000 out of 500,000 people living in Transnistria hold Russian citizenship."
That's as of 2020, "passportization" has continued since then.
https://warsawinstitute.org/russia-hands-passports-diaspora/
Case in point, no other UN nation recognizes Transnistria or Transnistrean passports. Transnistrean citizens travel with Moldovan passports.
Transnistria isn’t part of Russia and Ukraine isn’t going to take it from Moldova.
It is controlled by Russia.
> Ukraine isn’t going to take it from Moldova.
What is that based on?
And Ukraine obviously supports the Moldovan government’s opposition to that condition, but Ukraine isn’t going to unilaterally invade Moldova to fight Russians while its got plenty of Russians in Ukraine to deal with.
https://www.arnika.org/en/hotspots/moldova/the-largest-illeg...
Cobasna is a huge problem in waiting but it's not an urgent problem.
The real solution is for Russia (as the Soviet Union's biggest successor state) to handle the cleanup and reparations when the region is handed back to Moldova.
???
That’s errr... going poorly.
An investigation via open sources by the BBC and Meduza (an anti-Putin media outlet based in Latvia) has confirmed the deaths of about 15k Russian soldiers since the start of the war, and estimates the true number to be up to 60% higher.
What sources do you have that the widely reported media number of 200k+ is actually true that doesn’t ultimately come from the government of Ukraine (who would have an interest in over-inflating their victories) or by a western government that is militarily supporting Ukraine?
Where do you get the estimate of the true number? Your cited source only has the count of the named individuals identified, not anything corresponding to your claimed total KIA estimate. (Also, the investigation was published, as you linked, by Meduza, but conducted by the BBC and Mediazona, not the BBC and Meduza.)
> What sources do you have that the widely reported media number of 200k+ is actually true that doesn’t ultimately come from the government of Ukraine (who would have an interest in over-inflating their victories) or by a western government that is militarily supporting Ukraine?
Who else (besides sources with opposite biases, like official Russian sources – who haven’t provided casualty estimates since September) would have the kind of information necessary to make a meaningful estimate? (Also, the most commonly cited figure, which is sourced to the UK Ministry of Defense, is “up to” 200,000 casualties, with 40,000-60,000 KIA, not 200K+ KIA.)
But even if we go by that confirmed-by-name count as the full count of KIA, it roughly matches the Soviet KIA in Afghanistan, which was instrumental in the collapse of the USSR, so, going quite badly.
The former, yes. The latter, no.
A Ukraine invasion of Moldova would result in Ukraine being forced to capitulate by the sudden collapse of all outside support.
I suppose Ukraine supporting a Moldovan effort to push Russia out of Transnistria might be a thing that could happen without that consequence, but it doesn’t seem like something likely to happen while Ukraine is busy fighting Russia over Ukraine.
The UK defense minister said this. https://www.bbc.com/news/live/world-europe-64634760
Frankly, you have no idea about what's actually happening there. All these "movements" are nothing and the only potential sources of real separatism are the regional governments. Though there are multiple measurements in place to make that impossible.
Most successful independence movements are based on some kind of distinct ethnic/national/cultural/religious/linguistic identity. “Ingria” is a historical term, coming from a time several hundred years ago when the area was ruled by Sweden and populated mainly by Finnic and Baltic peoples. However, the vast majority of its current population is ethnic Russian, and the Finns and Balts are now only small, highly assimilated minorities. The vast majority of its population don’t identify as “Ingrian”. That does not seem like a successful basis for an independence movement.
I think the most likely place for renewed separatism is Chechnya. Not right now while Kadyrov and Putin are so close, but if something happened to one (or both) of them, or if they had a falling out, it could easily start again. And spread to Dagestan, Ingushetia too, maybe even the entirety of Russia’s North Caucus region-in most of which ethnic Russians are a minority. An Islamic separatist movement is likely to find international support and funding from the Islamic world.
And internal separatist movements are so tiny you can handle them with 1/1000 of the force they have.
I don't understand how people expect anything different here. Even the US with all it's superpower fanciness spent years in Iraq and decades in Afghan. I am also skeptical over that whole "my opponent is more stupid than me" attitude. We can already see how people made fools of themselves spelling Russia's haste economic demise, while Russia is expecting an economic growth now according to the World Bank.
Idiocy would be setting unrealistic expectations and treating this like a computer game, when a well-fortified Ukrainian army at the Donetsk border (that Zelensky was inspecting a few times in 2021) would somehow de-spawn or vanish in case Russia would hastily take Kyiv.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of...
Its also #22 in military spending as a percentage of GDP. However the US is #3 in per capita military spending.
> An independence movement there could be well supported from Europe. Something to think about.
I was happy to read that since it is constantly ignored by American media.
It is? It seems to be talked about a fair bit for being ignored.
The invasion in 2014 was generally limited to Crimea. After that, Russia held its ground, allowing some level of peace and stability.
The current war, that includes active invasion of the entire country, started in 2022. The conflict began much earlier, but semantically, "war" is generally inferred to mean the current conflict specifically.
By 2021, this much lower rate was a well-established status quo, and this was reflected even in official government briefings from separatist republics and Russia itself. For example, DNR published (https://regnum.ru/news/polit/3467017.html) its own stats claiming a grand total of 70 military casualties and 7 civilians for the entirety of 2021 - a proportion, by the way, that tells you volumes about where that fire was aimed.
But, anyway, Donbas is the primary justification for the population of Russia. The other one - that this is all a pre-emptive strike to forestall some kind of NATO invasion against Russia proper - is significantly harder to believe in and thus doesn't have as many adherents.
> It's hard to say what the "entire justification" even is in this case, since the goalposts have been moved so rapidly since the beginning of the invasion that it's basically all blurry.
At this point, if you don't instinctively assume our CIA/State Dept are actively working to undermine other nations then you haven't been paying attention. Why should we ever trust anything they say or do? Because Putin is a dick? Sorry, that's not quite enough to undo decades of lies I've had to listen to these turds shovel down our throats.
As far as comparisons go, US did a lot of shitty things internationally in the past 50 years, but I don't recall a war to directly annex parts of another country being one of them. And yes, it is far worse than "regime changes" (which are also bad, to be clear) just because of how inherently destructive such a thing is.
But if you want to seek redemption, helping a nation pushing back against another, even more brutal empire trying to bomb it into submission seems like a perfect chance, no?
> it's far better than physical occupation.
> “I am not going to pretend to be neutral here. I am on the side of the nascent democracy which was ruthlessly and lawlessly attacked without provocation by a larger and more powerful foreign power.”
I'm not going to quote anything else or what is missing, but overall:
Deep substance, neutral style or “pedantry” is not found in this article.
But there is one sided ideology propaganda, vilification and demonization, black and white thinking, omitting of crucial events, facts, and parties involved not just for duration since 2008 but just in 2022.
Strongly recommend avoiding this article and this author, unless you already wholly agree with him and want to reinforce your information bubble.
> about: Dmitry Wolf, Moscow, Russia
I guess OP thinks that Ukraine "asked for it", that "it's a brother nation that must be one with ruzzia", "Kyiv is ruzzia, thus Ukraine does not exist", "Крымнаш", etc.
Now, if you just had a visceral (negative) response to this, I am with you.
The point I am trying to make is that the Russian people seem to be equally incredulous to the idea that Russia itself is the aggressor. How is it that the Russian media has such a hold over them - in this day of the internet and other forms of communication?
And if Russia can have such a hold, why couldn't OUR government have such an equal hold over US. I want the war to end as much as anyone but I believe that only by informing the Russian people of this can there be real hope for peace and resolution. (And please forgive my naivety.)
You may want to point this crowd to some sources about that incredulity being widespread in Russia.
> How is it that the Russian media has such a hold over them - in this day of the internet and other forms of communication?
There is a language barrier at play here - Russian natives may not be able to avail English-media content, and I do wonder about how much russian language counter-programming is widely available to the average Russian.
> And if Russia can have such a hold, why couldn't OUR government have such an equal hold over US.
Russia is practically a dictatorship, while the US is a functioning democracy. That said, within the last 2 decades we have seen the US invade Iraq for no good reason, with significant support from the population resulting in Bush's re-election. Granted, the US people finally threw those responsible out of power for a couple of cycles (albeit for a mix of reasons, including poor economic performance). Meanwhile the Russian people do not appear to have that luxury of being able to peacefully remove Putin from power for any reason.
The fact that NATO have been loading up the Ukrainian people with debt via forced if not compulsory purchases in all but name of military equipment tells me both sides will be winning out of this at the expense of the useful idiots going out to fight and the Ukrainian people. The businesses already sizing up their contracts when rebuilding Ukraine, the poorest country in the EU, starts in earnest, is going to be lucrative to say the least. You know that Putin is in on it by the seemingly random buildings being destroyed, I see demolition for new shopping centres, car parks and other civil amenities taking place when its reported and spun in the news.
Didnt anyone learn anything from the Iraq war? Govt's especially the US spunking money everywhere like there was no tomorrow? How do you stimulate an economy? Got to war, and force change on people.
> The businesses already sizing up their contracts when rebuilding Ukraine, the poorest country in the EU, starts in earnest, is going to be lucrative to say the least.
Yes I'm sure that's true. The war has happened, the rebuild is going to happen.
> You know that Putin is in on it by the seemingly random buildings being destroyed
No. lol
They are several times bigger, larger military, etc.
The way the Russian forces conducted themselves initially has led to the belief that they believed they'd have local support. Purge of their security people supports this idea too. Putin thought he'd paid for insurgency in Ukraine and instead had some uncommonly wealthy spies.
Ahem,
Stalingrad
Cough, splutter, gurgling blood..
> Ahem,
> Stalingrad
Ahem,
“Russian Federation”.
Not the same thing as the USSR.
There was 6,000 years of recorded history before Munich. It's not always correct to think that "if we appease them here, they'll be in our bedrooms next."
Sometimes in history, the two sides cut a deal, and peace was maintained for a few generations, which was all anyone expected anyway.
Yeah, “Dane-geld” was written long before Munich, and references experiences much longer before Munich. The observation that accommodating aggression encourages more aggression was not first made in regards to Munich, Munich is just one notable example of that time-worn lesson being forgotten at great cost.