Zoraptor

It will also be the average (well, median) tax payer who will freeze if gas runs out. Doesn't matter if the government is paying you 1000€ subsidy for gas heating if there isn't any. Guess at least many of the truly vulnerable have already died of covid which will keep deaths down (this is what trying to think like a politician does to you). Every time there's been stimulus money in the past 20 years it's gone into the back pockets of the rich either wholesale or mostly, and who is going to profit off the increased gas prices and passing it along to consumers? Why mom and pop investors, of course, if you listen to politicians with massive numbers of shares in energy. Just another step on the road to completely overt neo-feudalism. Or maybe just print more money so poor people can get a 1% wage increase with 5% inflation; a 4% pay cut. Funnily enough the biggest producer missing apart from the US hasn't been mentioned by anyone: China. Much like the US, doesn't export much though. Otherwise, Qatar, especially for LNG.

There's also the small matter of mercenaries literally being illegal in Russia (unless they've changed the law recently) and Wagner still existing... But they also aren't officially part of the Russian military, and aren't ideologically neo nazi in the same way Azov is.

Well yeah, and Putin has also said 'nice' things about Stalin too which won't have gone down to well in Ukraine much as Bandera doesn't really appeal to Russians. Wagner isn't an official part of the Russian military though, and most of them are run of the mill mercenary ex soldiers- both occupations that disproportionately attracts the hard right. Not the same as a wholesale (c)overtly nazi formation being added to a country's army.

The problem with Azov is that it's a specifically nazi (ok, they don't call themselves nazis, they just use related symbology and share its ideology etc) formation. There will be nazis scattered through every military, but they're scattered rather than in a formalised part of the armed forces which was added wholesale despite already being nazi. Ukraine also has an... interesting history when it comes to Bandera; albeit most of his ethnosuperior thuggery was aimed, ironically given the current situation, at Poles. He's an extraordinarily unpleasant guy to be naming streets and the like over, and there is definitely a lot of pretty odious hero worship of someone who is basically an extremely unpleasant mass murderer especially in the western bits of Ukraine.

Our own Kiwi version of the Canadian antivax protest is finally getting moved on like the bunch of hobos (apologies to actual hobos) they are. It's exactly the same as Tiananmen Square, you know when the Chinese used a bit of pepper spray and riot shields instead of running protesters over with tanks and flushing them down the drain with firehoses... Should ship the lot of them off to Ukraine to see what real problems are. Only problem is, something like 80% think Ukraine is some sort of global elite conspiracy to get them off the front page and would probably end up joining up with the Russians...

Pretty close to it though, as it would at minimum Demand a Response. If the other side decides that response is disproportionate then you've started a cycle of escalation. If the current situation has some people demanding an armed response and no fly zones imagine what the public would want if the Russians nuked a Polish airbase Ukrainians were flying out of... I doubt they'd care that the first part makes it a justifiable target and skip straight to wanting a mushroom cloud over the Kremlin. Then again I had an argument here a while ago who someone who thought the US literally nuking Moscow wouldn't necessarily provoke an escalation, so there are varied opinions on the matter.

The geographic divide of Europe runs through the top of the Caucasus. I know that's fuzzed for a lot of political stuff like Eurovision (hi Israel and, uh, Australia?) but geographic Europe ends at the top of the Caucasus and it's pretty obvious it does from any relief map. That excludes Georgia and everything south of it (exc Azerbaijan, to be fair, that does have some geographical European territory). If you include places like Armenia you have to end up including most of Anatolian Turkey too, Iran, even down to northern Syria and Iraq. Otherwise you have the Indian subcontinent extending most of the way to Siberia due to how high the Himalayas are and how many subsidiary ranges it generates. Which would be a good way to troll the Chinese, at least. More directly relevant, you never get Europe defined as being the Urals, and its subsidiaries. That line runs down the highest altitude line (and in political terms, generally excludes Kazakhstan which like Turkey/ Azerbaijan has some European territory, in the geographic sense). And yeah, racial theories == stupid. But you still get plenty of people using terms like Caucasian, and many are amazed that people from the Caucasus are white.

Are you deliberately trying to prove my point, if so, thanks. They're literally literally European- unlike Georgia. Ironically, Chechens are also white as anything, being, well Caucasians- from the Caucasus- a lot more than the average whitey. Loads of gingers too. What's the difference that makes them not European? Let's see if we can get an answer which doesn't boil down to them being uncivilised muslims... Some people today would get a bit of cognitive dissonance if they searched for Avala Tower or RTS, but I suspect there'd be a lot more "but that's just different, because." Maybe, even if they thought back a year or so to when Israel destroyed the AP building in Gaza. Best to manage expectations though. That's because it's a personal opinion/ observation, and not really analytics. I might think it's founded on objective reasoning, but I would think that or it wouldn't be my opinion. I wouldn't dispute that a lot of the level of coverage is because it's happening in Europe, it's also impossible to think there's anything apart from racism at work when reporters specifically say that they're trying not use racist terms to describe something they think. "Surely I can't be racist, I used People of Colour to describe arabs being inherently violent...".

Australia bans Rimworld! (Oh OK, refuses to classify unannounced console port of Rimworld, to save you a click. Untold harm to Ocker youth prevented, anyway, and I'm sure those hundreds of hours saved will go into joining church volunteer groups or similar)

Yeah, or a bit less than 2 days for the EU/ US alone. Not completely insignificant, but only ~0.5% of annual supply even if limited to the west alone.

On the question of the EU admitting Ukraine: would the EU admit Sri Lanka? Assume it had been towed to the Med, if you like, and its population had got a lot whiter. Population can stay the same, even though it's half of Ukraine's. What's that you say, there'd be snowballs in hell before Sri Lanka got in? Because that's the closest economic equivalent to Ukraine, and a pretty close political one too. One of the more amusing things has been seeing people mocking Belarus for its economy: per person it's ~40% larger than Ukraine's. It's the poorest country in Europe and has been unbelievably badly run for 30 years. Accession to EU is a pipe dream on their side; and blatant virtue signalling on the other. On grain prices, last time they spiked so high we got a load of unintended consequences: the Arab Spring for one. Oh no, some Euroweenie is going to have to forgo buying Elex 2 on release due to energy prices (mate, just give something else up, plenty you can live without before Elex); meanwhile people elsewhere are going to starve. Which leads nicely onto: Yes, but they're brown, and understand that violence is just a part of life. Plus they live on the west's resources, not Russia's. One of the less edifying parts of the coverage is watching all the reporters trying to find ways to say how odd and disturbing it is to see white people getting bombed instead of brown people, without sounding racist. If you're having to go out of your way to try and not be racist via semantics there's a good chance that you actually are racist, guys. That's... a day's supply? Maybe sanctioning three of the biggest oil producers in the world simultaneously isn't such a good idea, and dealing with them one at a time would have been better? Better put that leverage to work on the Gulf to pump more gas (already done, and they won't, couldn't even get the UAE to vote against Russia at the UN; and after all those F-35s and Patriots too).

Poor old Lord of Flies, subsumed wholesale in the collective consciousness of the Obisidian Forums and replaced by a pale imitation. Am I the only one to keep the flame of memory burning? (fricken oby posted 'virile russian men in front of hot MiG' to the sexy men thread and the whole thing was ruined permanently because they were toting decidedly non virile Swiss SIGs instead of AKs/ Grozas/ Vintorez or something suitably appealing. LoF never would have made such a mistake, never)

Putin is divorced as of... 2013. Weird divorce too, as iirc it was either signed or announced on live TV by both of them in something reminiscent of a Treaty signing ceremony, though I could be misremembering. (I thought it was quite funny that no one seemed sure how many daughters he had for absolute ages with some quite serious speculation the second one might not exist)

Yeah, DAO is a good game. It had perhaps the most generic setting ever made and was a bit long and a bit clunky, apart from that, fine. I actually enjoyed Inquisition/ Andromeda well enough too, for that matter. I'd have difficulty separating them at all as they managed to feel almost identical in every respect except I guess setting. Way, way too long for the amount of actual decent content; but I played them until I got bored, didn't care about not finishing the plot and didn't regret the time spent on them. I don't think it's time for my biennial rant about ME2/3, and I'm too busy watching some bunch of clowns get reamed by the BruceVCs in cricket, but suffice it to say that I outright liked a lot of ME3's structure. The plot was hamstrung by ME2 not advancing it at all until the last dlc, and there were three decidedly bad ideas there- Kai Leng, the star child (mostly because it was unearned, and felt massively pretentious. As a concept it could have worked but it needed a lot better implementation than we got), and Kai Leng. I know I mentioned Kai Leng twice, but to steal a joke from Red Dwarf, it was so important I thought it deserved two points to itself.

Eh, do we really need to note how far off estimates of enemy casualties always are? Russia not having air superiority is almost unique in its level of optimism, which says a lot given the level of optimism about everything else. The correct term would be 'air supremacy', Russia definitely has air superiority.

There's still a lot of cheerleading there, but at least it doesn't completely subsume everything else and there are people willing to label wishful thinking as wishful thinking unlike the half of reddit that still thinks the Ghost of Kiev exists (with most of the other half having forgotten about him already). Far and away the best place to check if there are any obvious problems with footage I've seen though. It's absolutely awful when and nearly only when* it's anything to do with Turkey though, and the general... impression of people who enjoy watching other people kill each other isn't that edifying. I'm pretty desensitised to stuff having followed Syria fairly closely, but at least I'm not clamouring for more and would be perfectly happy- literally, just about- if there was never another combat video made. *yeah, all the big subs are dumpster fires, especially default subs. Completely pointless unless you like circle jerks and imaginary points. I'm not that keen on rating systems like here; except in comparison to the utter disaster that is upvote/ downvote ones. And for some good news it seems just about certain that the defenders of Serpent Island (ie "Russian boat f___ off") weren't all killed as some of them have turned up in a POW video (which to be clear could be faked, but someone has gone to a fair bit of trouble if it is).

Yeah, it's pretty genuine footage wise and we can be pretty sure the explosion happened. There isn't really any proof of what it was though, just a decent theory. I can understand people thinking it looks fake, a lot of night stuff looks fake or weird- case in point that Su27 shot down over Kiev- because it's night and you get effects you can't see during the day and poor perspective/ scaling. The outright fakes tend to be a lot more sensationally labelled though, and show something (at least theoretically) concrete rather than a big bang that requires geolocation for evidence of what it was.

I'd have guessed it was a Buratino, if it was a MLRS going up. I'd be a bit skeptical though with the number of people who've been begging for footage of one of those exploding. General consensus in the more neutral parts of reddit seems to be it that it was an ammo or chemical storage dump on the outskirts of Cherkassy, from the geolocation.

The problem in the south is that the Russians are- for once- saying almost nothing and aren't leaking all over VK; and the Ukrainians are saying nothing when it's going badly. We don't know if they've stopped or not, we don't know if they're clearing pockets and we don't know if they'll suddenly pop up in Dnipro' or Zaporizhie until some random cellphone coverage that can be verified turns up. For all we actually know the Ukrainians could have chased them back to the Crimea, it's just very unlikely as they'd shout that to the stars. The dichotomy of the invasion is that every single Russian is either elite troops like VDV or Spetsnaz, or a rural hillbilly dragged off the farm and handed a Kalashnikov. Partly it's just their doctrine, with an added dollop of... well, racism*, if you took Russian as a race. Or bigotry, if you prefer. All through the latter part of WW2 they'd do steamroller type offenses where they'd run over the Germans one front at a time. The balance is that in a western force has a far larger proportion of its numbers dedicated to supply and maintenance rather than actually fighting. *compare the Liberation of France with Operation Bagration- one ran out of supplies, in France, because they moved so far so fast; the other ran out of supplies in Belarus because they were disorganised/ wanted the Warsaw Rising to fail, were using human wave tactics, depending on agenda. You don't tend to get much mentioned beyond that, like the massive difference in infrastructure between France and Belarus or the difference in the sizes of land or forces involved. By the US? Or at least anonymous administration/ military sources of the US. Yeah, you'd see a column of destroyed Ukrainian vehicles then a few hours later it would be reposted with Z's photoshopped onto everything. Kind of funny in the case when it wasn't even a 'Z' area. Parked up tank, obviously abandoned by the Russians. Blown up S-300, has to be Russian, obviously they'd deploy an AA system with a range of 250+km at the front lines, and only paint an ID on it after it had been destroyed so the marking was over the burns... And Tokmak was captured 2 days ago. If true it shows there's definitely been another lot of Hostomel like wishful thinking. Russian paradrop at Vasylkiv, but they were wiped out, and the Ukrainians shot down two transports full of paratroops too! Has there been any corroboration of that? Well not so far as I can tell, and it's the sort of thing you'd expect there to be lots of evidence presented of, the Ukrainians announced they were destroying a bridge in the face of the Russians who were wiped out hours ago, and now Russian troops have teleported from Irpin to the Dniepr in a few hours, 50 presumably well defended km. The only conclusion to be reached is that the Russians won at Vasylkiv (may not have taken the airport there though, depends on whether the fuel fire there was really caused by Russian missiles or was blown up by retreating Ukrainians).

They're always going to have logistical issues because... that's what happens to everyone. To put it in perspective, it took the US 15 days to get to Baghdad in 2003. At the rate the Russians are moving at the moment in the south they'd have got to Baghdad in less than a week. Outrunning logistics is pretty close to inevitable. I'd also note that... you quite possibly literally literally won't find a war Russia has ever fought in where they haven't been accused of being logistically underprepared. It's perhaps the most stereotypical military accusation there is. Personally I doubt the Russians will go anywhere near the Carpathians. I'm still of the opinion that any Russian occupation will basically be a crescent from Transnistria up the Dniepr as that's for the most part controllable and way more than enough to force a capitulation. Going UPA in the mountains can't work in that scenario.

I really don't get the number of people acting as if Kiev not falling by day 2 was unexpected. If I'd been told that there would be significant fighting in Kiev after two days, two days ago, I'd have thought I was being trolled. It's a city of 3.4mn people 100 presumably well defended km from the closest border, not a small town a few km away. The Ukrainian army isn't massively outnumbered, and isn't completely hopeless and even if it were presumably its best and most motivated troops will be defending the capital. I'll be frank, while I can see the logic in some of the more pro Ukrainian interpretations the 'behind schedule' stuff reeks of trying to turn a bad defeat into a Winter War moment, ie sure they lost, but they were heroic and lost far less badly than expected. It's not like Putin doesn't have experience with urban combat situations either, given the 2nd Chechen War, Aleppo etc. The biggest problem for believing the Ukrainian version can be encapsulated by the news from Hostomel: successful counterattacks and recaptures announced multiple times with hundreds and hundreds of Russian casualties, but no evidence provided. Instead the video evidence has Russian VDV there both days, and not looking very concerned the 2nd. Indeed, yesterday the Ukrainians were counterattacking there again, despite supposedly having recaptured it the previous night. Places Ukraine supposedly holds are being counterattacked by them, places well behind lines they supposedly hold are then being successfully defended and you get them heroically blowing up a bridge in the face of a Russian force that was meant to have been completely destroyed in Vasylkiv. Meanwhile the units from Crimea are past Tokmak and in the outskirts of Berdyansk, half way to Donetsk and 60km from Mariupol, and going faster than US went in Iraq in 2003. At that rate they could be be at Dnipro' let alone Zaporizhie or Mariupol in two days. Yeah, I've seen lots of people saying that that's just 'lulling them into a false sense of security' and they're all going to get cut off and destroyed by a Ukrainian counterattack. Well, they'd better do it soon, because those troops in Mariupol and facing the DPR/ LPR are going to get very antsy if Russian troops turn up behind them. I'd believe that when I see it- it's a city of ~1.5 million people and you can't just waltz in. There's fighting in the city centre, but then the fighting in Kiev got very close to the centre

It's "selected Russian banks", officially. Which is kind of weaselly wording, and almost certainly a cut out so all the objectors can have the PR cake while keeping eating Russian gas too, and especially for Cyprus whose main bank iirc is Russian owned (and probably wished for a similar response from the EU and NATO a few decades ago, when they got invaded in similar circumstances). Probably also tailored so that the Russians don't automatically switch systems, and don't have the motivation to trash the system on the way out. Yeah, very probably. The Ukrainians do have a decent number of mi-24 in theory, but it's unclear if any of them were even genuinely operational. Not as definite as the ditched Kamov, but pretty close to it.

Very big grain of salt on that, same as stories of large scale defections and the like (on either side). Not the poor discipline, that's extremely believable and in some cases well documented, but it's unlikely to be because the soldiers were 'conscripts tricked into fighting' or whatever. Most of the claims in the buildup were of Russia building up professional troops, transferred from Siberia etc; claims of conscripts tended to be from those who thought Russia still had a conscript army and any build up would therefore be conscripts.

It could be, but doesn't really pass the smell test. Why would Russia even ask? They haven't even activated CSTO with Belarus. Checked and it's confirmed false, they were never asked for troops. It was also initially associated with a definitely false rumour that Syrian militia were going to be sent to Ukraine to help Russia. Probably both came from the same source which hoped to piggyback the Syrian rumour alongside the Khazak one; I'd bet pretty much anything that it's Turkish source since (1) the militia was meant to be from Raqqa, which is controlled by the US aligned Kurds and (2) Turkey hated the 'rumours' (not really rumours, very little doubt there) about them using Syrian mercenaries in Libya and Arsakh and (3) it amuses me to think of the typical Turkish nationalist reading 'Tengri news'. I wouldn't necessarily say that I would expect large scale defections now, but it's pretty much inevitable that there will have been some defections. Historically, a big chunk of the Ukrainian naval staff at Sevastopol defected in 2014 for example- including, rather embarrassingly, the newly appointed head of the Ukrainian navy and the previous acting head. More generally accusations of 5th Columns and Perfidy are extremely common in confused situations. Somewhat relatedly, I am rather nonplussed by the number of media comments talking about the Russians being behind schedule and bogged down. At the equivalent point of Gulf War 2 the US and friends were still struggling to take Umm Qasr, a couple of km inside Iraq with a population of 100k. I can't see any way there was an expectation to have taken Kiev or any other major city by this point, by anyone. I'd have said they were top end of expectations, not bottom.

The Ukrainians never took it back pretty much for sure*. As for what actually happened... who knows. I was surprised they even tried taking it permanently, but it seems to have worked and it seems that that is where the Russians in north Kiev are coming from. Other sources like the Brits have Russian land forces ~50km from Kiev still (which may be wrong too, who knows). *There's a rather weird video I saw from there yesterday morning of a random Ukrainian in a car asking some very confused Russian Paratroopers where the Russians had run away to, and there were no signs of the VDV troops being at all worried about imminent fighting. To be frank, that's probably psyops. "Run away from the Mongol Chechen horde or Chengghiz Han Ramzan Kadyrov will use your skull as a drinking vessel. Where are they? Well they're all over the place, you never know where they'll be: so you'd better run away wherever you are just to be safe, eh?" The Ukrainians have been asking for a summit for at least a day, I wouldn't take a press secretary saying there is going to be one at face value. Especially so when it's Pomarenko doing the translating/ interpretation, his connection with reality is pretty shaky. Believe it when both sides are saying it, not just one.