Ukraine Conflict - "There is no instance of a nation benefitting from prolonged warfare"

[Malcador]

4 minutes ago, BruceVC said:

Well mostly its because we want Putins War to epic fail because it represents everything we say we opposed to like attacks on the right of sovereignty and we dont like the killing of civilians, war crimes and we believe in Democracy

So these things matter?

 And yes, you right. NATO does matter and it can effectively support Ukraine ...well hopefully

 

Yes, yes Ukraine must win lest the Shadow overtake the world and bring us a 1000 years of darkness, I read Masssaro's OTT nonsense ocasionally.  Mostly surprised at seeing people that were somehow convinced Ukraine are still ill-equipped and outnumbered right now.  Than again I think most are just underestimating Ukraine or saying people do so they can then elevate them further.  All just the nature of this being a spectator sport I guess.

Still waiting to see what if anything Russia does now.

[Lexx]

Center of moscow has been closed off:

/Edit: Nevermind, just some city festival. Nothing unusual.

 

Edited September 10, 2022 by Lexx

[Malcador]

It says in the replies it's for Moscow's City Day.

Edited September 10, 2022 by Malcador

[Mamoulian War]

A briefing from alternate universe was intercepted today

 

[BruceVC]

12 hours ago, Malcador said:

Yes, yes Ukraine must win lest the Shadow overtake the world and bring us a 1000 years of darkness, I read Masssaro's OTT nonsense ocasionally.  Mostly surprised at seeing people that were somehow convinced Ukraine are still ill-equipped and outnumbered right now.  Than again I think most are just underestimating Ukraine or saying people do so they can then elevate them further.  All just the nature of this being a spectator sport I guess.

Still waiting to see what if anything Russia does now.

" 1000 years of darkness" 

 

 

[Mamoulian War]

On 9/7/2022 at 2:25 PM, Mamoulian War said:

During this push deep into Kharkiv Oblast, UA army captured Lieutenant Colonel of Russian army

 

There are emerging rumours, that this captured Russian officer is actually not Lieutenant Colonel, but Lieutenant General Andrei Sychevoi, which commands half of the forces, deployed in Ukraine. If this is true, it would be a big chunk of the reason, why the Russian defense collapsed so quickly and then performed chaotic retreat, because, there is no one to command the troops right now. Also if UA liberators raided his office as well, there will be a lot of documents available about past and future actions of RU army, which could be tremendous help to the war-crime investigations. So fingers crossed, that this is more than another tabloid rumour  

Ukrainian command has commented on these rumours with “We are looking into it.” statement. So for now, only speculative news are available.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11196837/Russian-general-likely-captured-Ukraine-according-local-media.html

 

In the other news, Leader of the DPR, Pushilin, has fled the Ukraine as well.

Edited September 11, 2022 by Mamoulian War

[xzar_monty]

On 9/8/2022 at 3:58 PM, Malcador said:

Well why go with the banal explanation when it must be something else.

I can't help it if your interpretation has very little to do with what I wrote.

Edited September 11, 2022 by xzar_monty

[xzar_monty]

On 9/9/2022 at 12:14 AM, kanisatha said:

This is the fundamental problem with all social and behavioral sciences, and I have begun to question the science of social/behavioral research. And I say this as a social/behavioral scientist myself.

Yep. It's a very interesting wake-up call from the naive days in which these sciences began. Mind you, they can only be called naive in retrospect; the methodology just wasn't there in the beginning, nor were the means to develop it. It's going to be very interesting to see how everything develops in the future.

(Like a physicist friend of mine once pointed out: there was no way the Romans could have known how the lead in their pipes, cups etc. hurt them. A deadly poison that works slowly was essentially impossible to detect.)

[xzar_monty]

22 hours ago, Mamoulian War said:

It depends. If enough people start to feel, that their position is threatened by his actions, there is a possible treatment by lead incoming. Or if the new leaders would want to ease the sanctions as much as possible, they send him to Haague. But IMHO this will not gonna happen before the end of this winter. If ever

The implosion / collapse can be rapid, if the system is flawed and corrupt enough. I am almost certain that Russia qualifies, but obviously it doesn't follow that a rapid collapse is forthcoming.

The Russian people could also do a Romania / Ceaucescu here, but again, there's no way to know whether this'll happen.

If there is a "treatment by lead" by someone else in the regime, or close to it, it's anyone's guess what happens next... (Well, it is anyway, I suppose.)

I do think that a lot of people around the world are at least surprised by the rapidity with which Russia has surrendered its positions, and happy about it, too. Let's see how this continues.

Also, an interesting article in the Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/sep/10/ukraines-publicised-southern-offensive-was-disinformation-campaign

[xzar_monty]

On 9/8/2022 at 9:55 PM, Sarex said:

When it starts affecting their everyday lives, they will not care about political parties, only about the solution. People in the west are too used to comfort.

There's an interesting precedent to your last point, which is true, by the way. The point, I mean. (There's a bit of a bitter paradox here: I am fully in support of the Scandinavian model of the welfare state, because it works extremely well and solves an awful lot of problems, but one problem that it itself creates is the fact that a certain number of people will turn into fat apathetic whiners, to put it in less than kind terms. I suppose there's a kind of a Gaussian distribution of temperamental variation in this regard, and some people, when they are provided with enough support, will not do anything themselves and will eventually lose all capacity for proper effort. I don't think this problem of the welfare state can be solved. The opposite problem is true in a situation where support is not provided at all: it tends to produce tough people with good initiative, but there is a certain class of people who'd need a certain amount of support to get going and realise their potential, and these people will simply be crushed in a situation where support is not available. I don't think this problem can be solved, either.)

Anyway, the precedent: during WW2, psychiatric breakdowns were most common among the Allies. It was the Brits and the Americans who broke down, sometimes terminally. The Germans had the Nazi ideology to rely on, the Russians knew that life is terrible, and the Japanese had their code of honor which provided suicide as a respectable means of escape: these three groups suffered far less psychiatric problems and psychophysiological meltdowns than the Allies did.

[BruceVC]

As the Russians are retreating they abandoning huge amounts of military equipment that include tanks. Very useful for the Ukrainians and there war effort. I assume this is legitimate 

 

[BruceVC]

1 hour ago, xzar_monty said:

The implosion / collapse can be rapid, if the system is flawed and corrupt enough. I am almost certain that Russia qualifies, but obviously it doesn't follow that a rapid collapse is forthcoming.

The Russian people could also do a Romania / Ceaucescu here, but again, there's no way to know whether this'll happen.

If there is a "treatment by lead" by someone else in the regime, or close to it, it's anyone's guess what happens next... (Well, it is anyway, I suppose.)

I do think that a lot of people around the world are at least surprised by the rapidity with which Russia has surrendered its positions, and happy about it, too. Let's see how this continues.

Also, an interesting article in the Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/sep/10/ukraines-publicised-southern-offensive-was-disinformation-campaign

Great article and good summary, I love this part 

It was successful in provoking Russia to move equipment and personnel to the southern front, including partly from Kharkiv region, said Berezovets.

“Meanwhile [our] guys in Kharkiv were given the best of western weapons, mostly American,” he said.

Putin must be absolutely loving the US at the moment, the military hardware and  assistance provided to Ukraine has made a huge difference 

[xzar_monty]

4 minutes ago, BruceVC said:

Putin must be absolutely loving the US at the moment, the military hardware and  assistance provided to Ukraine has made a huge difference 

...also proving that some predictions haven't aged well, to put it mildly. For example: https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/01/21/weapons-ukraine-russia-invasion-military/

[BruceVC]

33 minutes ago, xzar_monty said:

...also proving that some predictions haven't aged well, to put it mildly. For example: https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/01/21/weapons-ukraine-russia-invasion-military/

So true and you can see the main reason the journalist got things so wrong is he egregiously overestimated Russia's military strength and performance and completely underestimated the Ukrainian resolve, to quote 

"The nature of the reported Russian buildup suggests the expanded war, if it happens, will differ fundamentally from the past seven years of simmering stalemate. Russia has the ability to carry out a large-scale joint offensive operation involving tens of thousands of personnel, thousands of armored vehicles, and hundreds of combat aircraft. It would likely begin with devastating air and missile strikes from land, air, and naval forces, striking deep into Ukraine to attack headquarters, airfields, and logistics points. Ukrainian forces would begin the conflict nearly surrounded from the very start, with Russian forces arrayed along the eastern border, naval and amphibious forces threatening from the Black Sea in the south, and the potential (increasingly real) for additional Russian forces to deploy into Belarus and threaten from the north, where the border is less than 65 miles from Kyiv itself."

In short, this war will look nothing like the status quo ante of conflict in Ukraine, and that undermines the first justification for U.S. aid: deterring Russia. The Ukrainian military has been shaped to fight the conflict in the Donbass and thus poses little deterrent threat to Russia; provision of U.S. weapons can do nothing to change that. If Moscow is willing to launch a major war, invading the second-largest country in Europe with a population of over 40 million, all while absorbing tremendous economic punishment from the West, then it is unlikely to be deterred by whatever U.S. military assistance can be delivered in the coming weeks. The only weapons systems that could plausibly impose costs that could change Russia’s calculus, such as surface-to-air missiles and combat aircraft, are ones that the United States would be highly unlikely to provide the Ukrainians. And, regardless, they could not be procured, delivered, and be made operational—to say nothing of getting the Ukrainian operators trained up to use them—in time to have an impact on this crisis. Large, modern systems require extensive training and material support.

[xzar_monty]

Just read a fascinating interview by an academic who's studying Russia, energy and Russian energy politics.

One of the takeaways was the (fairly obvious) fact how geography and resources also shape Russia's politics, and to what extent: the production of gas and oil takes place in the periphery, and because the main source of the nation's wealth is fossil energy, the people in power only need to control fairly small areas of land far away from where people actually live. It is also not uncommon for countries that rely on oil and gas but don't have any sort of democratic history to become more and more undemocratic, as time goes on. "The Russian economy has never been based on the idea that a person, a village or a city is productive, and that the country will do well if it taxes them wisely", as the person said. "The sanctions now imposed upon Russia must be so strong that Russian economy is damaged as badly as possible. This is the only way to create a situation where Russians can reassess their violent history and penchant for martyrdom(*), and thus search for a new alternative."

 

Whether anything like this will happen is anyone's guess, of course.

 

(*) For me, this martyrdom stuff has probably been the most baffling aspect of the war. Russia is the wailing killer, the weeping rapist, the crying destroyer. "Why is everyone so mean to me, what have I done?" it asks while shelling hospitals, raping babies and murdering civilians.

[Mamoulian War]

Looks like the Russian army completely withdraw from Kharkiv Oblast west of river Oskil, for now. Even the highly contested villages north of Kharkiv are reporting the withdrawal of Russian units behind the borders

Screenshot of current Russian MoD military map bellow.

https://t.me/zvezdanews/92222

This offensive must have been a tremendous blow to Russia and their GLOCs, to run so fast away from the rest of Oblast…

[Mamoulian War]

 

[Malcador]

5 hours ago, xzar_monty said:

I can't help it if your interpretation has very little to do with what I wrote.

It actually does, you even mention as much that there may be nothing to his supposed reduction in presence.  People love imagining something from nothing, like closing the city center, or the absence of the air element to victory day.

[pmp10]

Rumors are flying that another offensive might be in the making:

Seems terribly ambitious given the failure in Kherson.

But then again at one point Zelenskyy mentioned a plan to end the war by Christmas and I doubt he had surrender in mind. 

[Gorgon]

Every offensive runs out of steam though, as it moves too far beyond its supply. If this were on all fronts it would be war winning, but it's not. 

[Malcador]

15 minutes ago, Gorgon said:

Every offensive runs out of steam though, as it moves too far beyond its supply. If this were on all fronts it would be war winning, but it's not. 

Only if there's a fear of counterattack, if Russia's weak there as elsewhere that's not likely.

[kanisatha]

There's no "failure" in Kherson. It's a harder fight there, and yet UA is making slow but steady progress.

My analysis is that the Kherson front was always the main front for the UA offensive. Then, when the Russians shifted forces from the Khar'kiv area to reinforce the south, the Ukrainians very quickly organized an opportunistic offensive in Khar'kiv. It's not just the significant quantities of relevant weaponry the US is giving Ukraine but also the high-quality, real-time intel the US is feeding them that is a game-changer.

[Mamoulian War]

7 minutes ago, Malcador said:

Only if there's a fear of counterattack, if Russia's weak there as elsewhere that's not likely.

Well Zaporizhia front is in the stalemate the longest time, practically, the front has not moved there since April. Which might give us a hint, that the Russian presence there should be on par to the presence in Kharkiv Oblast. But Donbas is closer, and there are no natural barriers in between as the Oskil river in Kharkiv Oblast.

[xzar_monty]

5 minutes ago, Mamoulian War said:

Well Zaporizhia front is in the stalemate the longest time, practically, the front has not moved there since April.

To what extent is this stalemate caused by the nuclear reactor, though? This is a genuine question, because I really don't know, but if I had to guess, I'd say the reactor is a fairly important point.

[Mamoulian War]

1 minute ago, xzar_monty said:

To what extent is this stalemate caused by the nuclear reactor, though? This is a genuine question, because I really don't know, but if I had to guess, I'd say the reactor is a fairly important point.

I do not know, but I kind of doubt it plays very significant role in this, because ZNPP is as close to the closest fights in Kherson Oblast as to the closest fights in Zaporizhia Oblast. And Zaporizhia Oblast has the most active partisan units deep in the occupied territory, compared to other Russian controlled places.