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Notes -
Ukraine.
By now, wise people, people who avoid reading the newspapers (newspaper generally lie) have noticed that the news out of Ukraine is bad. After years of relentless and very stupid propaganda, even 'The Sun' ran an article which was basically fine. Torygraph ditto. A bit of lying around the end, some lies by omission but generally thoughtful and not grossly incorrect.
That's means something. Not at all clear what. Obsessive observers of the war believe Ukraine is likely to hold out until end of '26, early '27. However:
1- There's a financing issue, sure - Americans, unwilling since Trump inauguration to keep paying for what they started now only want to deliver weapons if Europeans, who were against it initially, pay for them.
Europe, as everyone knows, is mostly broke, with the exception of Germany, which isn't only because it typically doesn't shower money around. Paying through the nose for overpriced weaponry like e.g. Patriot or Aster 30 missiles ($ 2mil per unit) which then are going to be fired, best case, at cruise missiles of equal worth doesn't seem like a winning strategy, especially with the Geran spam being able to destroy anything that doesn't have a rare cannon SPAA sitting on top of it. If there's 50 of them in Ukraine, that's probably too much.
There was a plan of 'magicking' up money by making a loan to buy more weapons, covered by the frozen Russian assets, thus 'risk-free' because 'Russia is going to release those assets as war reparations'. Belgium, which would have ended up having jurisdiction over it refused to go along..
2- Materially, it's bad. We know the gist of the situation: Ukraine has too few men -line infantry is at 20-30% staffing , is outmatched in drones, artillery and air attacks. Russia, being larger, is able to mobilize troops and sustain operations. There is shortage of everything on the Ukrainian side. Civilian cars, drones, men. -save perhaps small-calibre ammunition which is barely used in this war. (allegedly <5% of wounds are from gunshot). Why there is a shortage of cars seems.. mysterious. Germany surely should be able to keep Ukrainians knee deep in cheap trucks. E.g. Dacia Duster cost €20k and there's 100k made per year. A mere 2 billion € a year could give Ukraine 1 4x4 car for every 5 servicemen. What gives?
Ukraine drops some bombs using their few planes, possibly even daily , but Russians sometimes delivers up to 300 a day, although the mean is 160 in 2025. Any bunker, HQ, supply dump close behind the front can be hit. That's pretty modest- just 40 sorties in an Su-34. Ukraine doesn't have what to use - France supplied 800 glide bombs... for the whole of 2024. Promised 1200 for 2025. 4 a day. If Americans have given more, we'd have heard about it. If GDP so high, why so few bombs? Where's the American UMPK? Does US have no huge pile of old bombs you can stick sheet metal & gps modules to? Are cheap, effective, good enough weapons only something despotic alcoholic nations can make ?
The true rate of attrition is unknown. Ukraine armed forces, internally seem to believe it's 8 Ukrainians for 10 Russians or something along those lines, if we go by the testimony of this International Legion guy who deserted earlier this year after being allocated to an especially dire 1st rifleman battalion with 50% odds of surviving one rotation. (or so he says). In any case, as Europeans and Americans have shown themselves unwilling to go and risk death, the required rate needed to have been something like 2:10 just to break even, demographics wise.
3- the front. right now, a some amount of troops is encircled at Pokrovsk. Supposedly very few (AMK_mapping, an autist who follows the war hourly says Ukrainians mostly withdrew), but then, it's unclear how dire the situation is, however GUR fed their spec-ops team to the front near Pokrovsk, in an effort to make evacuation easier, to probably little avail (there is an FPV montage of these guys getting blown up already). They operate 3 Blackhawk helos, one of them was apparently downed.
Overall, as you probably know, the situation on the front is bad. Ukraine cannot hold territory, cannot counterattack effectively. Previously, Russia was only being able to push one place at a time, now it's multiples. If you want an overview, here's an interview of AMK_Mapping, a rare pro Ukrainian OSINT account respected by people on both sides. Honestly he seems autistic. The 'mapping' means he's one of the people keeping track of the war online by obsessively reading Telegram channels, geolocating etc. The interviewer is pro-Russian, somewhat overly optimistic I think.
Going by the aphorism 'If you're reading this, it's for you', it looks like the American press is preparing the public for a closing act of the majestic capeshit arc that started with the Maidan massacre. Ukrainians are generally eager to negotiate, nobody believes in winning anymore, though the demands Russia has are not viewed as acceptable. I wonder what the frontline troops and officers would say in private.
I know absolutely nothing about Ukraine or Russia and I don’t even follow the news about it outside of Motte comments. Through the years though it has been obvious that pro-Russia commentators have generally made fools of themselves. They always adopt this cynical, smart and worldly tone, sneering at the soyfacing West. All I know is that I’ve been hearing them say for like 4 years that Ukraine was on the verge of total collapse and the war only had months left. Or that Germany would totally collapse come winter 2023.
Being ignorant of absolutely everything else, I have heard vastly more false predictions from the pro-Russian side. Given that, I’ll register a prediction based solely on the commentariat's track record: if the war ends in the next year it will come from a diplomatic resolution, there will be no large scale collapse of Ukrainian forces, Russian commenters will keep being wrong about literally everything.
Are you any idea of what a 'selection effect is' ? What gets covered, what gets pushed in the media?
Completely forgotten evergreen hits such as 'Russia is running out of missiles', washing machine chips , 'Crimea beach party' (the 'summer offensive' of 2023), 'Russian economy will collapse bc of sanctions (any year, really) etc?
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I must have hallucinated the Russian Tanks rolling into Ukraine originally, were those a CIA op? These types of posts would be more convincing if you could resist falling into even the most absurd Russian propaganda positions.
Is the implication here that you believe Russia is richer than Europe? Because that's uh... and interesting take on relative world economies. A sanity check through claude and grok both come up with Russia having about 10-12% the economy size of the EU. If you insist on PPP then at best 20%.
We've been hearing a steady beat of these triumphant "the ukrainians are definitely beaten now, they'll submit any day now" on the motte for years at this point. It's not happened yet. Would you be willing to make a bet?
What part of
Is hard to understand?
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And yet, despite being 1/5th of the population and 1/5th of the economy, they're still winning what EU leadership is painting as an existential conflict.
What, does it say about the EU that it can't win a war against a foe 5x weaker ?
Russia is not fighting the EU, Russia is fighting Ukraine, a country with a tenth of its GDP and a third of its population pre war: your logic is precisely backwards. Why can Russia not defeat Ukraine after nearly four whole years of fighting, what does that say about its military, economy and politics?
This is a way too good joke to be buried this far down the comment chain late in the week, but here goes. Two Russians were sat on a bench in Moscow chatting gravely:
"They say we are fighting the EU and NATO now, but they say Russia is still winning even after nearly four years!
Wow, has the fighting been hard?
Well, we have taken over a million casualties, hundreds of thousands are dead, and we have lost: Tanks (4217, of which destroyed: 3131, damaged: 159, abandoned: 390, captured: 537), Armoured Fighting Vehicles (2321, of which destroyed: 1884, damaged: 38, abandoned: 124, captured: 275), Infantry Mobility Vehicles (411, of which destroyed: 329, damaged: 18, abandoned: 12, captured: 52), Towed Artillery (537, of which destroyed: 333, damaged: 101, abandoned: 5, captured: 98), Self-Propelled Artillery (988, of which destroyed: 820, damaged: 53, abandoned: 7, captured: 108), Rocket and Missile Artillery (535, of which destroyed: 435, damaged: 44, abandoned: 2, captured: 54), Surface-To-Air Missile Systems (352, of which destroyed: 264, damaged: 60, abandoned: 4, captured: 24), Radars (111, of which destroyed: 69, damaged: 32, captured: 10), Aircraft (168, of which destroyed: 146, damaged: 22), Helicopters (166, of which destroyed: 132, damaged: 32, captured: 2), Naval Ships and Submarines (28, of which destroyed: 21, damaged: 7), and Trucks, Vehicles, Jeeps, and Trains (4302, of which destroyed: 3560, damaged: 107, abandoned: 54, captured: 581).
Wow, that's a lot: a big chunk of our reserves held since Soviet times, and a lot of those strategic airframes we do not even make anymore, that is going to take a lot of replacing! How about the EU and NATO? What have they lost?
They haven't turned up yet. However, the USA (the biggest contributor) has been spending about 0.2% of GDP annually. It's about the same for the EU too.
Ha, fucking rekt am I right?"
Without foreign supplies and finances, the war would have been over by fall of '22.
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It says that they haven't committed troops because they think Russia will spaz out and start lobbing nukes.
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EU is best described as a person living paycheck to paycheck that uses payday loans. It is not about the size of the economy, but what the countries have spare. And it is not much. This is why funding for Ukraine has been sluggish. EU is big, but a lot of it's resources are tied in welfare, EU projects, the countries do have steadily increased debt to gdp ratio, growth is anemic at best and so on. France is in fiscal trouble, Germany's export oriented economy is not doing terribly well. We are also in a trade war with USA, with China while bearing the bulk of the negatives from sanctions on Russia.
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The tanks were downstream of the coup, which was downstream of the bloodbath at Maidan, after which every major western government demanded Yanukovych steps down. The coward he was, he did so, thus in a way, bears partial responsibility for the utter shitshow that followed.
Who do you think asked for the bloodbath at Maidan?
You should read the narrative of it, even the semi-official one.
The riots units initially, despite having plate carriers and body armor suffered 2x many casualties as the 'peaceful protesters', to the point they retreated despite having partial cover. Then they got the whole of blame for the massacre of the protesters on the square despite being outgunned, withdrawing etc. As mentioned previously, even the obviously not very neutral Ukrainian court found that some of the dead protesters were shot by other 'protesters', and not by accident, deliberately.
I believe that others have called you out on this completely insane narrative around Maidan that is needed to make it into an original sin for Ukraine rather than Russia and Yanukovych fucking up (on the 21st of Jan they sent US$2 billion on condition he cracked down - which he did), I guess it is now my turn:
We have the full list of deaths, and the days they occurred - it's ~108 for the protestors and 12-18 for the police depending on your start and end points. More details emerged in 2023 to fill in the gaps, but some remain. However, the fact there are gaps, does not mean that every area of uncertainty was a CIA op.
The 2x casualties claim of security forces vs protestors is clearly not true as a narrative, unless you cherry pick an exact tiny window, as you have from one source that otherwise highlights how insane and unprovoked the attacks on the protestors were, and only look at casualties not deaths for the three hour window - remember it started with 3 protestors being shot on the 22nd of Jan (plus the tortured body of Yuriy Verbytskyi being found), then on the 18th of Feb you have the police using live rounds to stop a march - 11 protestors and 4 police were killed, then you have the police trying to clear the square - 17 protestors, 5 police died then, including actions by police and "titushky" irregulars. They were certainly not outgunned then, though they failed to break the protestors' lines and clear the square.
The "obviously not very neutral Ukrainian court" records you mention but not cite (https://reyestr.court.gov.ua/Review/114304164 for those who can read Ukrainian) found that 10 protestor deaths could not be attributed clearly to gunfire from police lines (Berkut) over the full period, but that other positions (Alfa in particular) or irrgular titushky fire from government supported could have done it, or perhaps friendly fire, accidents or deliberate protestor action. I do note that the Canadian academic Ivan Katchanovski (who really hates Ukraine, fine he can, but it's his theories being spun as some kind of fact from the court when they are his own supposition and it did not go through peer review) who cites parts of the 2023 verdict left those comments out and jumped straight to the false flag idea and that it was all a trick, despite that not really working - the fighting was already in full swing by that point.
Even best case, that still leaves 98 deaths directly from police and government action, who definitely deserve the blame for starting and escalating each major event in the timeline. They used live ammunition first, attacked the square, disappeared and tortured to death protestors prior and all of this was with Russian support and backing.
Last iteration was about two months ago.
Possibly because a previous case cited brought awkward citations on who might have been responsible.
The previous english-language translation copy link provided no longer works, but Katchavonoski excerpts are here, though I can't promise they are the same translation previously reviewed.
From two months ago on a case, which was a summary for FCfromSSC-
///
This is one of the cases which Ivan Katchanovski likes to cite as proving his Euromaidan-culpability false-flag thesis that he's spend his last decade publishing on. His inclination to refer to parts of it is directly correlated to how the contents support his thesis that the government was falsely accused for shooting protestors. For example, Katchanovski likes to gloss over section seven, and particularly the Court's scope exclusions that begin on page 13 noting-
Aka, any action not found guilty in a Ukrainian court of law is excluded from the verdict.
Which, in a steelman, is defensible in the judicial process, but not necessarily in a truth-seeking process where whether something happened as opposed to whether it was proven in a court of law. Particularly when the court of law approach might be complicated by things such as known evidence destruction or defection of key witnesses / perpetrators to a country outside of the court's jurisdiction, like Russia.
As such, Ivan Katchanovski is inclined to ignore, not comment on, or push past the court record's acknowledgement of an unproven-but-not-disproven, but highly relevant claim, of-
I.e., an alleged- but never proven and thus disregarded for this court's purposes- core thesis of the 'government false flag' theory.
Now, Person_376 is not one of the person-descriptors identified in no_one's document. But, in short, the RSP were one of the armed elements in the Maidan Protestors, who were generally in the back / the deterrence for the police to charge and clear the square by force. Their existence / presence is about as old as Euromaidan itself. One of the sniper attacks on the morning of 20 Feb came from a building they had a heavy presence in, which is what this court case is about, which is also old news.
The anti-Euromaidan propaganda narrative is that these RSP key actors were Euromaidan provocateurs / foreign agents (of western powers) who staged in waiting for orders to conduct a false flag attack against Euromaidan protestors to blame the Yanukovych government and escalate the situation, with the intent to bring about the consequence the collapse of Ukrainian government as ended up happening.
The pro-Euromaidan propaganda narrative is that these RSP key actors were Ministry of Interior provacateurs / agents who were staged in waiting for orders to conduct a false flag attack against Euromaidan protestors to blame the protestors and escalate the situation, with the intent of suppressing the protests as part of the broader Ministry of Interior crackdown buildup, but which had the unintended consequence of collapsing the Ukrainian government as ended up happening.
Both pro- and anti-Euromaidan narratives are largely in agreement that the RSP key actors at the center of this case were staged false flag elements waiting for orders to conduct a false flag attack against Euromaidan protestors to escalate the situation, with the consequence of collapsing the Ukrainian government as ended up happening.
The difference is in whose false-flag agents they were, and the intended result of the orders.
The court case doesn't take a position on this distinction, but Ivan Katchanovski likes to insinuate it does, and he is one of the main Reputable Scholars (TM) for the Euromaidan Is To Blame propaganda narrative.
///
End report.
And for clarity on the difference in theory intended results. The anti-Euromaidan conspiracy is that the false flag was intended to collapse the government and usher in the pro-Western government as happened IRL, even though that included various other factors beyond the control of western conspirators such as the local party mayor withdrawing city riot police from the conflict area rather than supporting state security. The pro-Euromaidan conspiracy is that the false flag was intended to sow chaos and amongst protestors and help legitimize the otherwise planned lethal force crackdown, which included security force authorization for live fires and other shootings, which was expected to suppress the Euromaidan but instead backfired as happened IRL.
Given that Yanukovych was content to wait out the protests, and did not need the massacre, and given the timeline on the day of the massacre given by Ukrainian themselves first shots around 5 am, then a lop-sided exchange between riot units and the 'snipers' which saw the riot units retreat bc they incurred 2 dead, 20 wounded despite having serious body armor. Mind you, the 'snipers' were not very discriminate, as in, BBC published a video of their crew under fire.
That's a novel claim that the police withdrew because of an order by a .. local city mayor, and not because they were facing a pretty serious gun battle during which they incurred, what, 20 wounded and 10 dead were somehow in the chain of command of Berkut, which was run by the ministry of interior, which, for Americans is the ministry that runs law enforcement, prisons and so on.
I see you're back to ignoring the Yanukovych administrations actual actions in the final days, the external state (Russian) pressures and incentives that were used to drive his changes towards those actions, and claiming as novel the mechanical form in which the Maidan Revolution succeeded, which was that there was a critical lack of elite and and party support for the lethal force crackdown that Yanukovych and the Russian-aligned interior ministry had attempted to initiate.
Unsurprising, and I look forward to your next attempt to claim that perfidy was obvious at play but that it couldn't possibly have been at the behest of the sitting government.
I ask you again, does the initial shootout on that last day that saw 20 wounded riot cops, who mind you, were wearing assault-rifle proof plates vs 10 wounded 'protesters' look like an 'attempted lethal crackdown' or more like unprepared riot cops attacked by a stronger force amply armed with assault rifles and worse. (.308 /7.62x54mm rifles also feature in the testimony iirc).
@Dean seems to have covered everything important, and did a great job doing so, but one last hanging point to not leave any elements unaddressed: How were the police wearing "assault proof plates", why does that even matter, and why do you keep claiming the police were outgunned as a narrative?
It is rare for riot police to wear heavy plates, although some might and I do not see many photos of Berkut in plate carriers or vests at the level 3/4 Russian GOST (that can take a few 7.62 hits before shattering) in the famous photos from the days, it's all soft kevlar stuff so they can move. See for example: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bd/Riot_police_Berkut_on_Euromaidan.jpg .
It's not a central or even relevant point though, why does it even matter what armor people were wearing? Lets say we can prove all Berkut casualties on all days were wearing the thickest plate possible to buy, what changes? We have the deaths 108 for protestors, 12-18 for police - which we all surely agree on, and there was no day where more police died than protestors, often by large margins, which we all presumably also agree on. Something like 50 protestors were shot fatally on that last day (I assume you mean the 20th of Feb?) so far far more died than the police - whatever equipment you give to Berkut/the government none of that changes, this was security forces firing on large numbers of protestors with equipment well below theirs by any narrative, even your own.
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And I see you're still inclined to ignore the Yanukovych administrations actual actions in the final days, as well as @The_Golem101's points on the broader events of that morning, as well as all the other previous exchanges and your own court case documents you used to link to so proudly.
As such I look forward to your next attempt to claim that perfidy was obvious at play but that it couldn't possibly have been at the behest of the sitting government.
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Was Yanukovych a Russian citizen? How does a Riot in Ukraine justify annexing Ukrainian territory and then invading Ukraine? Ukrainians killed Ukrainians over some corrupt bullshit and therefore Russia should get to conquer all the territory? If this is how Russia conducts business then no wonder so many Ukrainians saw fit to violently oppose a corrupt deal pulling them into the Russian sphere of influence.
https://old.reddit.com/r/polandball/comments/5jjswq/the_refugee/
The sacred innocent Russian must be protected from all by force, and this sacred innocence means Russia is never ever in the wrong. Subjects of the Russian sphere are rewarded with largesse, how said largesse gets distributed internally isnt Russias problem. Chechnya is a financial dumptster fire that Russia drowns with oil sales because Kadyrov cracks his own peoples skulls on Russias behalf not just for own benefit.
To be in Russias imperial sphere is great for ruthless rulers that have no qualms subjugating their own people, since Russia does not care and in fact often helps out directly. The problem of externally aided subjugation of course is that beyond a certain point it becomes external support required subjugation, and if the patron falls (Yugoslavia, Soviets) or loses interest (USA, British India) then the internal tensions boil over beyond the local authorities executive capability. Unsurprisingly smarter countries recognize the futility of this bargain and try for internal stability rather than seeking fickle external patronage. Ukraines misery is borne from Yanukovichs mistake in assuming he could use his internal repression tools and that his Russian patron had enough strength to overcome escalating dissent.
Turns out Russia underestimated its internal leverage within Ukraine in 2014, and spent a decade rebuilding its levers of influence and subversion to prosecute a more direct extermination of Ukrainian independence. Its easy and very fun to clown on Russias massive failures in the Kyiv axis and Kharkiv/Khereon reversals, but Russia did have a successful lightning campaign past the Kerch strait bottleneck and even up to Kherson because of successful infiltration.
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One can argue that countries have no right ever to forcibly intervene in another country based on that country's own internal affairs, and many do, but it is a rule more honoured in the breach than the observance.
"Forcefully intervene" as a euphemism for conquest is cowardly. Russia is attempting intervention here in the sense that forcible rape is a form of spirited disagreement about sexual relations. Russia is not intervening in Ukraine's internal affairs, they are attempting to obliterate entirely the concept of Ukrainian internal affairs.
Go and talk to the Yugoslavians, the Iraqis, the Iranians, the Afghanistanis, the Libyans. The Cubans, the Argentines, the Bolivians and the Brazilians. Hong Kong, if you like. Nobody likes being the subject of conquest, 'military intervention' bombing campaigns, foreign-backed coups or assassinations; no nation capable of carrying them out refrains from them.
It is simply a fact that strong nations see themselves as being justified in violently reordering other countries to suit themselves, while making spirited denunciations any time it's done by anyone except themselves. Nobody except members of the country in question are fooled by the old Russel conjugation of 'I am saving the people of poor Country X from their tyrannical leadership and bad upbringing / you are installing a puppet government and will be taking a warm interest in future cultural affairs / he is a conqueror embarking on a program of annexation'. There have been no formal declarations of war since 1945, do you think that 'good' nations have embarked on no wars? Let us not forget that Russia is no conqueror but is only, aha, 'embarking on a special military operation to protect Russian-speaking citizens and rid the world of the Nazi scourge'.
I think that your view is too cynical by half. Your view, which I would paraphrase as
is not so different from
Both the IRBO and the state of law in the US are not perfect, but they are clearly distinct from their respective baselines.
While some of the conflicts you have mentioned were clearly waged by powerful states for ulterior reasons, and I have been opposed to GWBs adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq from the start, I also notice that most of the wars waged by the left were not for outright conquest and annexation. A few of the wars might even have been net positive, like interfering in the genocidal mess that was the Yugoslavia civil war. In retrospect, I can not say I am especially proud of NATO for sitting out the Rwanda situation, for example.
Russia's war in Ukraine is one of straightforward annexation. This is markedly different to what GWB did. Thus, it is in the interest of the proponents of the IRBO to make Russia pay as high a price as possible, to deter both them and other states from trying the same in the future.
If this also means that Putin fails to conquer Ukraine, that is a bonus, but for the international supporters of Ukraine that is not the essential outcome. The goal is to make the war net negative for Russia by making them pay a high price in blood and economy.
As long as the Ukrainians are fine with dying for that, it seems like a no-brainer for the West to give them the materiel to continue their war.
I take your point, and would prefer to split the difference by saying that the international rule-based order is a polite fiction that constrains smaller and weaker countries most of the time, but doesn't change the fundamental reality that larger, more powerful nations have international interests and will find a way to justify violent warfare, regime change and other such things in pursuit of them. This is true IMO regardless of one's feelings on the morality of the matter.
I personally am not sure I find straightforward annexation in the general case to be clearly worse than regime and culture change as America tried to carry out in the Middle East (for example). I am quite willing to believe that Russian are fairly unkind and extractive rulers, and among the people you would least like to be occupied by, although I also find @Botond173's point convincing:
On a personal level, I find the West's attempts to destroy their enemies (and their friends) through slow corrosion to be... unappealing, perhaps. Having long since lost faith in the liberal project, the attitude of, "Don't worry, you* will choose to dissolve your country" repels me as much or more than blunter, more ham-handed attempts to do the same thing.
*or the leaders who pass our filtering process.
I have heard this argument before, and acknowledge its force, but I think it's important to acknowledge that 'the Ukranians' are not a homogenous group. There was a huge exodus of young men who fled recently when Zelensky relaxed the borders, and apparently it has become commonplace to Ukranian families to send their male children abroad before they reach 18. As with many wars, I am not convinced that the young men actually doing the dying are doing so voluntarily, and being a young man myself that weighs upon me with disproportionate force.
In short I find your position broadly reasonable and defensible, but disagree.
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There are a lot of links here, but at least the helicopter one seems to be a Russian psyop - Ukraine used helicopters close enough to the front for Russia to film, with footage released of their landing, this then became claims of helicopters lost in the comments with no footage, instead all I saw was grainy footage of FPV attacks on individual soldiers from another location? Have you got any footage of an actual blackhawk being downed or a clear continuity? Ukraine certainly loves to publish their helicopter kills.
Pokrovsk itself has been fought over for 1 year 3 months now - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pokrovsk_offensive (I hate Wikipedia too, but that start date seems pretty fair, surely?), and while pressure is mounting along the line there's hardly crazy breakthroughs considering Russia is still outside of Bakhmut (which was hoped to open up new offensive options), and the Donbass is ~10% Ukrainian? It seems like Ukraine is launching a limited counterattack, like with the 47th at Andriivka, where they use fresh elites to push up and hold a pocket open, and get the last men out before withdrawing - a pocket it should be stressed that is hardly Stalingrad.
I think it is still unclear how this will end as a war, Ukraine is under a lot of pressure but Russia is seriously underperforming and taking a lot of strategic hits with a base that might come apart over years more fighting (have you seen the refineries campaign? How many haven't been hit at this point?). However, you seem certain that this was all folly, and Ukraine will crumble with a situation worse than surrendering at letting Russia do what they will? This time next year, do you think there's going to be a lasting peace agreement? What broadly would be its terms - unconditional Russian wargoals from day 1?
Total collapse of the front and Russian annexation all the way to Lyviv. The 2014 fortifications are about to fall, after that it’s going to be very hard to prevent major collapses of the undermanned front line. Ukraine has no leverage left for a settlement. Insurgency is unlikely given the amount of casualties.
Once Severodonetsk/Popasna/Bakhmut/Avdiika/Chasiv Yar fall the kokhols will be shattered and they will fall back like the cornered rats they are. They totally won't fall back to the next defensive line that, undermanned and underprovisioned as they are, still managed to hold off the unsupported spears.
It'll work this time! This time the kokhols really are on the ropes and going to collapse! Once Kramatorsk falls then Russia will have finally achieved the territorial victory they achieved in 2014!
"And then the enemy will lose the will to fight" has got to be one of my favorite theories of victory.
It's such a refreshing evergreen classic, compared to the largely discarded 'Trump is going to force Ukraine to accept terms or else cut off all support,' theories, or the 'Ukrainian desertions will lead Russia's massive manpower to roll over the defenders like a tidal wave' predictions, or the 'Russia strike campaign will crush the Ukrainian power grid and leave them to freeze to death over the winter' variants.
Worked in Afghanistan.
Dean isn't wrong.
There's always going to be 'will to fight' in Ukraine because the alternative to almost certain death on the front is getting dumped in an unmarked grave by the military administration.
Except they're going to run out of people to busify eventually.
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And the people who try to model Ukraine after Afghanistan are so high on copium it's adorable. Hence, favoritism.
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A clan/warlord-militia-based army is rather different in this respect than an organized military, though one could argue that a clan/warlord-militia-based army did exist in the territory of Ukraine at one time (the Donbass "people's republics", before Russia put the chaos to an end)
I have a suspicion Nybbler was thinking of the US army ...
Yes, it's the United States which lost the will to fight in Afghanistan. Also the Afghan National Army but I'm not sure they had any to begin with.
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And which outcome do you think is most likely to happen?
I know nothing of military, tactics and so on - but my impression is that the things are way more orderly on the Russian side than the Ukrainian in the last couple of months.
It's a fair question. Asking people to stake their position is reasonable, and it's been awhile since I have on Ukraine expectations.
Short version- none of the above. I believe the war is more likely to go on for political reasonings rather than end due to a military collapse. I think the more likely consequence of the next year is a continued general grind with advances but no decisive victory for Russia over the next year, with decisive being a front-wide collapse as opposed to the natural operational advancements following the fall of Pokrovsk or similar settlements. The dynamics that didn't lead to those decisive victories happening in previous years generally still apply. Russia has continued to de-motorize/de-mechanize which has negated their operational maneuver to exploit gaps or withdrawals. The drone military revolution continues to disrupt concentration of forces to a degree few appreciate for both offense and defense. Ukraine's key means of external supply were changed rather than cancelled by the Trump administration, and in a way that supports sustained support over time as long as key European capitals support it, which they are liable to.
I broadly concur with Michael Koffman that the war has transitioned from a war of attrition to a war of exhaustion. The war is no longer about depleting critical military capabilities (artillery ammo / air defense munitions / manpower) into such a shortage that it would lead to collapse via some critical overmatch (uncontested fires / close air support / fix-and-bypass maneuver), but is transitioning to a contest of long-term systemic support constrained by both internal and external factors. This is a contest where Russia still has various advantages, but not such a wideset spread at the ratios required as to crush/break as opposed to grind/push back the Ukrainian lines forever / until the front is pushed to the western border.
This doesn't mean attrition doesn't matter / collapses can't happen, as unlikely things still happen some times, but absent one it's liable to be a long-term grind, and the dynamics for that are closer than many people realize/accept. Ukraine's manpower is not as desperate or 'last bits of the bottom of the barrel' as the more popular anti-Ukrainian propaganda portrays, nor is Russia as awash in manpower as many believe, given its self-imposed limits on conscripts that have only grown clearer over time. Both states have relatively resilient but potentially vulnerable war-industry basis as this point, with Russia's better-known advantages being tempered by the steady depletion of its less-well-known transitory advantages, while the Ukrainian vulnerability to diplomatic cut-offs from not-guaranteed European support due to election turnovers mitigated by the fact that most European and American military-economic support to Ukraine remains beyond Russian ability/willingness to directly disrupt. There's enough vulnerability for either side to feel they could shift things in their favor / the other may collapse, which leads to the bargaining tension of mismatched expectations which complicates any peace prospects.
On the political front, the war remains in a political equilibrium. Putin maintains maximalist demands that the Ukrainian government cannot as much as will not agree to, but which are also beyond Putin's ability to compel by force of arms in the near or medium term. The war is ruinous for both Ukraine and Russia on national levels, but not politically dangerous to Putin on a personal level for the relevant time frame, which allows Putin's bad habits of sunk cost fallacy and strategic procrastination to manifest. No territorial gain or harm to Ukraine is self-evidently worth the material, economic, political, social, or strategic costs Russia is paying now and incurring for the long term, but Russian zero-sum-ism will frame any Ukrainian harm/defeat as a win and so cutting losses is for losers. There are and are likely to continue to be enough Russian visible wins (cities taken over time / favorable electoral cycles in Europe) that Putin is liable to variously feel he's in a position of relative strength that will get better over time if he waits / a position of relative weakness will get better over time if he waits, with no falsification metric outside Russian economic collapse (which is unlikely in the near or medium term). The wildcard of Trump's effect on Ukrainian support has largely played out, and with it the prospect of any near-term peace (particularly via Ukrainian concession), which I thought was possible but unlikely this year and believe is far less likely next year absent major changes beyond the current discussions of Pokrovsk or even all of Donbass falling. (Which- to be clear- I don't think will force a political end to the war.)
Again, fair question, and it could merit a far deeper response. But I've about two months left on my self-imposed sabbatical on Ukraine War effort posting, and this already pushed it. I may allow myself one end-of-year post to follow up some predictions from late last year (on the Ukraine front) and earlier this year (on the Trump-on-Ukraine front), but it could also be early next year.
Thank you for your awesome response. Just one question (if you decide to continue the sabatical, I will understand). Which will be the next Stalingrad in this war that already had 5 or 6 of those?
None, but that's because my view of what a Stalingrad is implies something distinct and I wouldn't view any of the fortress city battles to qualify.
The shorter version is that Russia's manpower limits are clear enough now that the Russian military isn't going to do the sort of Bakhmut storm/siege that they did in '22/'23 where Russia prioritized high-casualty urban operations to move the urban gains map forward. Instead, the model is more likely to be the Pokrovsk, where the strategy was to try and isolate the city by advancing around the edges, interdict the supply lines, and force the Ukrainians to withdraw or risk a closed pocket.
The advantage of the Pokrovsk approach is that it's a lot less casualty-intensive in the way that Bakhmut was. The downside of the Pokrovsk method is that it takes a long time as the ability to effectively push flanks to isolate a city, which means it's still a very bloody process it's just extended over a longer time, which is more sustainable in a force-generation perspective.
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Снами Бог! Скоро все бананы будут нашими!
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Why do you believe the EU is broke? It is the second largest economy in the world, containing multiple countries with very high GDP's. It seems more likely that it was not a lack of money that caused the hesitancy to spend more on military equipment, but rather that they did not want to divert money from social services, schools, hospitals, and other government expenditures. It is worth remembering that the EU countries generally care a lot more about welfare, pensions and so on than the US. Making these services worse present a huge election risk for the leaders, even if the countries at large could technically afford it.
Furthermore, the EU struggles with making big decisions due to needing a majority of member countries to agree, with some decisions requiring unanimous agreement. As long as a sizeable amount of members don't view the war as a territorial threat, action will necessarily be limited to individual member countries.
Even so, the EU members have largely picked up the slack from the US in monetary terms. The real issue is with actually getting their hands on equipment in a timely manner. As everyone is rearming at the same time, there is preciously little materiel available to actually send. No amount of money can magick guns out of nowhere. Production takes time.
Generally you paint a very dire picture. So in addition to questioning your narrative of "EU poor", I also wonder if any of what you are writing here is correct? You write that newspaper's generally lie, then immediately quote a tabloid without establishing why this one speaks the truth. The rest of your sources are a mixture of newspapers (which you have yourself said are untrustworthy), chatbot conversations (probably trained on social media and newspapers, and known to be politically biased by their training data), and random tweets ("seal of the apocalypse" doesn't exactly sound like a trustworthy source). Without you establishing the credibility of what you cite, why should I believe anything you have to say?
We have known this since the start of the war. We could have, and in fact should have, started production immediately. Arguably we should have seen it coming and started before the war.
We did not do any of those things. I thought the war would motivate us to get our shit together, but it didn't. Maybe the US reducing their involvement will, but I'm increasingly cynical. I wouldn't be in the slightest surprised if the great majority of the military investment will just be de-facto wasted.
As a european, I say the EU is fucked. It's dedicated to pointless virtue signaling and otherwise just eating the seedcorn (which increasingly gets produced elsewhere), and then rage impotently when other countries throttle the tap. But there is a lot of ruin in a nation, so we're still fairly advanced. But I don't really see a any way but downward for the EU. The conservatives will at most manage the decline.
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It's not 'broke' as say, Argentina (of big countries, France seems irreversibly doomed), but the outlook is very grim.
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They also - just like the US - really don't want to be seen as escalating. The Germans debated endlessly about giving Ukraine a couple of long range Taurus missiles. But they are afraid of what the Ukrainians are going to do with them, and the Russians told them they would consider a Taurus hitting deep infrastructure as Germany having entered the war.
So, no Taurus. They got Iris-T air defense systems and another $2B in military aid instead.
This is Putin being better at playing chicken than the West.
Putin will not start WW3 over some Taurus hitting his infrastructure. It is not exactly on par with Kennedy's fear of Cuban nukes hitting US cities. Of course, it does not help that the commander in chief of the largest nuclear NATO power is seen as an unreliable ally, especially for a non-nuclear country like Germany.
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Maybe yes? Or more specifically a middle-income thing- you need a workforce with some amount of training, tools, and quality control so that they can make the things work, but not too much or they'll expect better jobs. Working in a munitions factory seems like a terrible job- all the brutal, physical pain of working in a factory, plus the chance that it might blow up. 1st world nations can sort of solve that by using elaborate mechanization and safety controls, but that skyrockets the price.
Something that always shocks me is reading about artillery shell production in WW1. Britain was producing something like 100,000 a month at the start of the war, and that was insufficient, leading to the Shell crisis of 1915. They were able to masively ramp up production by recuiting a million women to work in munitions plants and crank out shells like crazy- more than 1 million a month by the end of 1915. France and Germany did similar things.
So today, after a century of technological advance and 4 years of the war in Ukraine, you'd expec their shell output to be even higher right? Well... not so much. It's like 500,000 for the UK and 1 million from Germany per year. People in 1st world countries really don't want to go to work mass-manufacturing explosives.
Automating making 155mm shells is really rather easy. In comparison to cars, it's a very, very simple product.
E.g. I know that French plants for that are basically automated (saw some video), just low throughput.
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There's no shortage of middle income countries in the US orbit, though.
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Is it this, or that there hasn't been much demand for capital production of mass munitions in decades? The last war that used them in bulk was what, Vietnam? Every Western war since has been dominated my high-complexity munitions that often seem designed to separate the explosives from the fiddly bits. You can presumably build JDAM kits on any electronic assembly line.
I don't know much about the explosives side of things, but my understanding of history is that the shells are made in one process that isn't special, and then filled. There are some dangerous parts there, but I suspect it's similar to videos I've watched of amateurs making high power solid rocket motors: you want to be smart about safety and choose a remote site, but it isn't necessarily messy or dangerous if you're smart about it --- but those guys aren't worried about enemy action. Also the chemistry is presumably a bit different.
ETA: The HPR and explosive folks presumably both have similar linear-ish scaling concerns: if you want 10x production, you really don't just want to buy a 10x bigger mixer. Past a fairly small scale, it means duplicating lots of equipment and space because you want to bound the size of the boom if something goes wrong.
Artillerymaxxing is what you do when you can't maneuver and have an excess of shells and barrels relative to other assets. Ukraine going artillery isn't due to inherent superiority, its due to availability. Even now we've seen a reduction in Russian artillerymaxxing because artillery spares aren't as rich as they used to be and glide bombs have proven to be a much more effective weapon at the operational and even tactical level. Artillery duels have given way to FPV ambushes or glide-bomb centric strongpoint degradation.
Stocking artillery isn't great because primers degrade, but for the west they just churn out new bags, whereas for the soviet stuff you can't tell if the shell is dead untill its inside the tube. Yes, soviet stuff stays in better shape longer than fiddly western stuff, but slathering stuff in cosmoline is its own utter hell and even rugged 80s era stuff doesn't survive 40 years. 10-2 year preservation windows could be stretched under PERFECT conditions to maybe 30-35 years, so the vast parks of Russian equipment hit a reactivation wall. Artillery is used early, used fast, and now gives way to whatever can actually be produced. Given the vids of the fronts, that ends up being Chinese golf buggies and FPV drones, not T14 terminators.
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"the last ware that used them in bulk" is the one currently going on, where both sides have been chonrically short on shells for years now.
But I'd argue it was always an issue during the cold war too, where both sides were very much preparing for war, but the Soviet side prepared with far, far more shells than the NATO side did. It's a good thing we never had to fight them a conventional war. Good thing we've got most of the old Warsaw-pact countries on our side now.
I keep thinking of the Toyota war where Libyans bumrushed tanks in the first week and then couldn't keep up logistics and maintenance tempo so they got stomped by cheat Hiluxes. Libya had supplies... in Libya. Logistics depth and reach under threat has not been stress tested at all so it remains to be seen how exactly things will pan out in a kinetic peer engagement requiring flag planting.
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I suppose one could quibble about what "in bulk" means, but there was plenty of use of artillery by western forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. That was the operational point of establishing firebases, outposts, and forward operating bases out in the hot areas: that's where you site your artillery, and then everything within a 30 km ring of that can be shelled within minutes.
This would be precisely where to quibble about what 'in bulk' means. McBig Number in isolation can easily be small in relative contexts.
At an industrial volume level, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were pretty small consumers of artillery. The counterinsurgency era firebases and outposts were far more for sending patrols out from rather than artillery firing out from. There absolutely were artillery points, but the usage of artillery was also highly limited in the sort of residential and urban neighborhoods that defined the conflict, whereas in the mountains of Afghanistan the terrain slope defense was a regular restriction even outside of villages.
This was one of the reasons that the pro-Ukraine coalition had such a hard time providing shells during the Ukrainian shell hunger of the early years. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had the US producing more artillery ammo than it otherwise would have had it followed the European example, but it was still far, far behind what the shell demand for a relatively static front line war was.
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I just don’t understand why there was such an intense effort to keep people in a state of delusion regarding the progress of the war. Wouldn’t people have been more willing to give aid if they had known this was a difficult uphill battle? That technique worked very well when the UK was trying to play on American sympathies during the early parts of WWII.
My understanding: pushed primarily by the US, meant to obfuscate what the cost of the war is for Ukrainians, so the public goes along with whatever the level of support is at any given time. Easy war, only ork hosts are so numerous it takes time to swat them away; great individual sacrifices, some indiscriminate destruction ( per ork nature), but all well under control - no urgency, which fits US goals (keep Russia and Europe apart, keep Europe subservient, don't get pulled into something costly). Once Ukrainians are expended, reassess.
Be more realistic (early on) and you'd see more pressure to either stay completely out (Ukrainians make their choices without being goaded) or to treat Ukrainians as you would your own and acting accordingly (full involvement).
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This is framing the state of the war as a difficult uphill battle, as opposed to a doomed downhill battle.
Now it is, up until 2025 it was always delusional copium about total Ukrainian victory and 14:1 kill ratios.
Not wrong. Propaganda was pushing the insane efficacy of Ukrainian troops vs. the broad incompetence of RU troops for at least a year into the war.
And this was back when Twitter might actually ban you if you tried to point out facts about Russian capabilities that read as too 'Pro Russian."
And what’s so odd about it is that I think the opposite tack would have played much much better with the American public, who never met an underdog they didn’t like.
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I've banged this drum for a while, so excuse me for repeating myself, but...
What are the Ukrainian people afraid of, being conquered by Russia? I mean I understand the process of being conquered is violent and deadly, but post surrender, what are they afraid of? Their government is already among the most corrupt governments in the world, and their "Democracy" was already a proxy battle between Russian and USA color revolutions for most of their lifetimes. If they stuck with Western Europe their Jewish President will just adopt a program of flooding them with 3rd worlders as "Replacement Migration" and they'd be ethnically cleansed inside 50 years anyways. The only hope the Ukrainian people have of surviving as a people as opposed to a label on a map is with Russia.
It, frankly, blows my damned mind that European leaders will let virtually every nation on Earth walk all over them, colonize their lands, commit mass rapes, murders, terrorism and ethnic cleansing, but somehow Russia's action are a step too far. There are nearly less English left in London than their are Ukrainians left in Kiev. What's been the greater crime?
What if world leaders just put on blinders, and let Russian people drive all the way to Kiev without firing a shot? What if they told fictions about how they are just immigrants looking for a better life? How dare you accuse them of having dual loyalties? They're perfectly capable of it. It's what they've been doing the last 50 years.
Well, assuming a friend of mine accurately recounted the views his Ukrainian expat friend expressed to him, having their menfolk killed and their women raped by the vile Tatar hordes, and thus having their pure Slavic bloodlines tainted, as unlike them, the Russians aren't really part of the West, but are the degenerate mongrel halfbreed descendants of Genghis Khan's Asiatic hordes.
Well then, you might be heartened to hear that while said expat argues that Putin and his orcish army are the biggest threat to the Ukrainian people, the second biggest threat to the Ukrainian people is Zelenskyy, who was installed by International Jewry to punish and destroy the Ukrainian people in vengeance for the Khmelnytsky uprising back in 1648-1657.
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Well, maybe the recent example of how it went in the Luhansk and Donetsk People's Republics as Russia-aligned puppet states? Reading Telegrams at the time, they managed to degenerate the nicest, wealthiest, most industrialized and most pro-Russian regions of Ukraine into two ridiculous Mad Max failed states of tortuous adventurer warlords, with a drafting effort that makes the current Ukrainian one look tame. The conditions and governance sounded so surreally bad that I'd have chalked it up to shameless war propaganda, except it was all coming from people wholeheartedly on the Russian side of the fence and in on the action.
One can come up with all sorts of arguments a totally overrun Ukraine would end up nicer than LPR/DPR, like another Belarus or something, or arguments it could be about as bad. "As bad" is godawful compared to Europe with migration. The current grinding forever war seems way nicer than LPR/DPR, or even a serious risk of going LPR/DPR.
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In Germany, we had a natural experiment of being either a client state of the US or Russia. The outcome makes it very easy to understand why a lot of former Warsaw pact countries desperately wanted to join NATO as the cold war ended.
For all your whining about Jews enacting the Great Replacement of the White race, I would wager that orders of magnitude more have fled from Kiev to the safety of London to escape the war than have fled from London to Kiev to escape the Great Replacement.
In general, one would think that Belarus would be some White supremacist utopia. No Black or Brown people ruining everything. Nobody replacing anyone. No social justice types pushing gay, immigrant or women agendas (at least outside the labor camps). High religious conformity, in particular 0.1% Judaism and 0.2% Islam. Strong political decisions instead of endless bickering. They would probably let in White guys in exchange for a few years of military service.
But for some reason, while people in most wartorn countries are generally willing to emigrate or seek refuge in a safer country, the victims of the atrocities in London you mentioned are generally reluctant to do so, compared to Ukrainians or Syrians.
I think the party line of Moscow is that culturally there is no such thing as Ukraine, and that they are just a cultural splinter group of Russia which has to be brought back home into the Reich. At best, Ukrainians under Putin can hope to survive as 2nd class Russians with a weird backwater accent.
Does that actually prove one is less likely to result in the end of a nation than the other?
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The Western part simple- nationalism. It's a very powerful ideology, derived from the tribal instinct. You can't discount it, and it's why Russia never intended to conquer all of Ukraine. Basically the interesting parts (strategic, resource, industry) are east of Kiev.
Lot of the people in the eastern part of the country were never that invested into the whole nationalist LARP. You can find videos of Ukrainians executing those traitors weekly. (nsfw, obviously. Two old people and a small dog getting blown to bits trying to cross the front line)
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They are afraid of the same things that all conquered nations of Russian empire were afraid of. That they will become second class citizens only to be exploited by Russian elite centers around Moscow and Saint Petersburg. An actually realistic proposition is that Putin will press them into military service and send them to war against Baltic states. You know - the same thing that Putin did to "liberated" and annexed Luhansk and Donetsk republics.
This is how Russia treats its second class citizens, yes, but eastern Ukraine doesn't actually have young people left. Western Ukraine has demographics that up until recently were at least not worse than average for Eastern Europe(that is, still quite bad). Eastern Ukraine has demographics that are Manchuria-tier. Russia's not raising a big slave army out of it, no matter how brutal their conscription laws. That's why the Russian army is increasingly muslim- same reason.
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Yeah, it wouldn't just be that the Ukrainians would now be Russians - they'd be (considered to be) stupid hick Russians, traitorous hohols who almost sold out their birthright for a song, idiots with a dumb accent with the best of them aspiring to move to the central cities to lose their accent and identity to be accepted in the in crowd and the rest being proles and cannon fodder. Why wouldn't they aspire to prevent this?
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The dissolution of the Soviet Union was as much a nationalist move as it was a failure of the political and social situation in the USSR at the time.
Ukraine is, like many European countries, strongly nationalist. European countries, generally speaking, are very nationalist, even if their elected leaders and the decisionmakers in Brussels aren't - half the anger over the immigration fiasco is that the largesse given to immigrants from North Africa is seen as selling out the country to invaders, so naturally political parties with a stronger nationalist bent are gaining all over Europe.
More importantly, Eastern Europe has felt the touch of Russian control before, and they strongly dislike it. They are going to pick up rifles. Whether the fight was futile, they're being used or gaslit by western intelligence agencies, they still decided to fight when it was largely considered a foregone conclusion that Russia would steamroll them. The fight is not about winning, same as it has since the beginning, but about hurting the enemy and making the Russians pay in blood for every inch.
The older Ukrainians remember life under Russia. They'd rather die than go back to that. The war, and subsequent resistance, caught the limp-wristed bureaucrats by surprise, because they have no idea or concept of what nationalism means anymore, other than a bunch of dimly-remembered, mealy-mouthed paeans about how it was this great evil that was responsible for two world wars.
Further west, the hand-wringing from European leaders is more practical; they worry about Russia's expansionist tendencies not stopping at Ukraine, and America not footing the bill for their defense.
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It blows your mind because you’re looking at a strawman. The Europeans who elected these leaders don’t see it this way. As for the Ukrainian response…
Imagine that your county government gets taken over by—gosh, I know this sounds farfetched—roving gangs of immigrants. Then some keyboard warrior across the pond tells you: “don’t worry! They’re just protecting you from the other scary minorities, the ones who look even less like you. It’s the only way you’ll avoid ethnic cleansing.”
Would you believe them?
Ukrainians aren’t choosing the hard route because they just love the EU. They’re doing it because they hate Russia more. Better to die on one’s feet.
At least the Russian immigrant invasion comes with guns so shooting them is acceptable. If Russia wanted a bloodless victory they should have just plead for asylum endlessly like the entire third world is doing for the west.
That…is utterly facile.
Do you think you could explain how that strategy would serve any of Russia’s goals?
Takeover by the ballot box? Just walk in claiming political persecution, wait a few dozen years until they're sufficiently entrenched as a minority then start agitating for special rights to reengage a 'reformed' Russia. No grand takeover by superior slavic force of arms, but Muscovy managed to paralyze the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth with a single subverted member and they are repeating it with Hungary.
I mean, what IS Russias strategic goal. Subversion of the west relative to Russia? "Do nothing, win" is a leading strategy now. Restore the Russian Empire as a massive dickwaving contest? Say the magic word "anti imperialist" and tankies fall over themselves spreading cheeks to get buttblasted by noble communist Russia. Secure borders forever? Nukes already exist.
Whatever it is, going in guns out dicks out doesn't work. The west is uniquely vulnerable to Magic Words and Russia simply needed to speak human rights claims and they'd be free to run wild within western europe. Europeans can't bring themselves to admit that their experiment in humanitarian superpower leadership has rotted them from the inside, and they are happy to have their people exploited raped and murdered by anyone with the magic lable of refugee.
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The third world manages to reproduce. How's Russia doing for TFR?
Surprisingly low for such a misogynistic culture. Female economic empowerment in Russia is almost an accidental byproduct of rampant alcoholism incapacitating male productivity. Yes Igor you sperm me so good with your vigorous maleness. Go take nap, you stud, I must clean banya.
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Being dead, some of them. Being subject to the same treatment as inhabitants of medieval city would be after being conquered by a foreign army (pillage, rape, all that stuff). Of course, we're in civilized time, so most pillage would not be in the form of literally Russian soldiers going door to door and taking all valuable stuff. I mean, that happened too, many times, but there's just too many doors. The main pillage would be that Russians would own everything and you would have to pay them for being their bitch. And Russia has a flourishing prison culture - in fact, most of Russian culture by now is quasi-prison-culture or heavily influenced by it - so they know very well how to make somebody their bitch and how to extract maximum value from that. If you read the history of the 90s in Russia, it happened all over - until Putin took over. In fact, one of the reasons why it was so easy for Putin to take over was because the shit that's was going on was so bad, people were thinking anything that is going to stop it would be better. So, that's what would happen to Ukraine - and since its the conquered land, it won't stop for a long while. Plus, of course, anybody who has any genuinely Ukrainian nationalist sentiment, would be ruthlessly eliminated.
There's no chance of Ukrainians surviving as "people" - collectively - as opposed to just collection of humans with no common identity, if Russia wins this war (by wins I mean full victory, capturing Kiev, overthrowing the government, etc). The whole premise of the war is that there's no such thing as Ukrainian people - it's just some Russians that are stupid enough to speak in weird broken Russian and sell out to the West, and it's time to put a stop to it. And if Russians win, they definitely will put a full stop to it. I mean, they won't murder everyone, it's not Africa, and they may allow people to call themselves "Ukrainians" if they behave, but no idea of having anything like a nation with independent identity would not be tolerated. Some Ukrainians find it unacceptable. If you want to understand why Ukrainians fight, you need to understand them, as they are, and not some weird caricature existing only in your mind.
That's complete nonsense. I mean, if you know only about problems in a handful of Western European countries, you could conclude every country is like that, but it's not. Ukraine has completely different problems and Zelensky has no intention and no inclination to do any of that, neither did any Ukrainian politicians. I realize how you want to present it as another case of evil Joos doing evil Joo stuff, but that's just ignorant nonsense, not discussing real facts on the ground.
At this specific level, there simply isn't that much difference between the two countries. "Until Putin took over" the trajectories of them were quite similar.
Well, yes and no. You need to look at it in dynamics, not at one moment, but over the time. In early 90s, yes, things were pretty similar, except more money in Russia, but Ukraine had its share too. Then the paths diverged. Russia essentially rejected the "Western" way - in part because people implementing it were also grotesquely corrupt, though Putin's gang (which weren't strictly speaking his yet, just the one he belonged to) were about as corrupt, but not obviously so. There were also other factors, including the Chechen war, terrorism, etc. - and, of course, the conscious choice by Putin to set up Russia in opposition to the West.
Ukraine, while being close beside in corruption, has had also strong independence/nationalist vibes - which at times had been anti-Russian but not necessarily so. There had been a lot of fractions, and most of them were for at least keeping decent relations with Russia, while staying independent. Ukraine leaned towards integrating with Europe (remember, the explosive wokification by that time hadn't happen yet and "Europe" didn't mean "import Syrians, introduce censorship and trans your kids" yet). That said, for a while they hadn't been that far apart - in fact, at one time the most popular politician, among all alive, in Ukraine had been none other but Vladimir Putin. Putin overplayed his hand though, and helped to install Yanukovich, who had proven too much even for Ukrainians that were used to corruption.
And when it went sour, instead of taking a step back and trying to play the same long game he played before - after all, there were a lot of corrupt politicians in Ukraine, and Putin probably could choose another one to puppet and keep manipulating Ukraine while seemingly staying out of the fray openly - he decided to put the boot down. In Russia, putting the boot down worked spectacularly well - billions of dollars invested in Russian opposition led to it having absolutely zero power very soon and Putin eliminating any trace of dissent. Not only that, but the "moral power" that the dissidents held in the USSR, is mostly gone too - except for rare personalities like Nemtsov or Navalny, who Putin just openly murdered with nobody being able to object, there's not ever any influential opposition figures. In Ukraine, however, it did not work at all. That's about where the trajectories, previously following if not the same then adjacent paths, split drastically. Putin chose to build his new Russian Empire, Ukraine preferred to stay out of it.
So yes, the genesis is common, and a lot of common themes, but there are very important differences.
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I'll accept the rest of your post at face value, but this...
Nobody has wanted that anywhere. And yet it's happened regardless. I refuse to accept "That won't happen because nobody wants it" as an adequate rebuttal.
There are many people who do not live in France, Germany, and the Anglosphere countries, but who would like to. On the other hand, Ukraine is a postcommunist balkans country; even the majority of its own population doesn't want to live there, because it sucks. 'Mass immigration to Ukraine' is not a realistic scenario because even the migrants don't want it. Seriously, nobody wants to live in a burnt out rubble heap with a GDP per capita on par with India.
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In fact, not only did they not want it, but they were told by Representatives, Senators, and Presidents, that it would never happen. Just another click on the ratchet.
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That's not true of course. The whole woke blue tribe wanted it and still wants it. We could have a long discussion as to why they want it, but for the purposes of now, it's enough to notice they exist and are politically active and influential - in fact, in the West, they own the majority of the media, the academia and significant part of government apparatus. It is not the case in Ukraine. Yes, there are some voices in Ukraine aping the woke slogans, but they are mostly doing it because they want their European friends to like them, and neither them themselves are not truly woke nor there are any significant woke tribes in Ukrainian politics. Ukrainian politics is a tangled and ugly mess, but woke is not a significant part of it. The situation if very different there, so trying to apply what you see in, say, Germany or Holland, to Ukraine is completely useless.
It is instructive to watch/read/listen to Ukrainian internal propaganda. Machine translation is fine. Very much not about freedom, democracy, and minority rights. A lot about how russians are dirty mongolians that need to be kept out of the White continent.
I don't need machine translation, I speak (and, of course, read) Ukrainian freely. So I know very well what Ukrainians thought about Russians in 1980s, in 1990s, in 2000s and now. And, also, I know how wokeness is not something that is a major concern there. In 20 years, if the war ends, and Ukraine survives, and joins EU, and EU survives that long, it may become a concern. There's much about freedom, but it's only freedom from being murdered by Russians, not about freedom to trans the kids. People think because the wokes prance around with Ukrainian flags, that means Ukrainians are woke. But that's silly - they would prance around with any flags the Central Committee tells them to, be it Ukraine, Hamas, Iran or Mexico. They don't know the first thing about the actual country, and making conclusions about the country based on that is insane.
In my experience, the median European who "prances around with Ukrainian flags", if we take this to mean showing the Ukrainian flag on their online profiles and such, is a center-right-to-centrist liberal type moreso than an advocate of wokeness.
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I dealt with a violently homophobic Ukrainian probably-an-actual-nazi who said that he would take tiddy skittles and bend over to suck black cock while being rammed by pakistanis if that would ensure Russia gets turned into glass. Its like the Sandanistas pretending to like Juche and gifting Kim Il Sung a stuffed crocodile, any ideology is acceptable so long as it comes with guns and ammo.
I can totally understand it, when your country is being literally destroyed, you do what you have to do. I am sure if conducting daily gay parade in the Independence Maidan in Kiev would somehow get Ukraine enough weapons and power to kick Russia's ass, about 90% of the population would sign up in a blink of an eye. But it's not that simple, unfortunately. I'm just saying there's virtually no organic wokeness in Ukraine politics anywhere. Any wokeness you notice would be because they think it'll help them to achieve some practical purpose (and there's probably just one major practical purpose they need to achieve now). It's completely different from Western Europe where there's a large organic woke support. Again, if Ukraine would get peace and gets into the EU and so on, maybe in 20-30 years they'd develop their own woke class - EU certainly would work hard to achieve that. But right now it's just not the case.
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On the first days Russians fired into random civilian cars, with the BMP engaging pensioners who didn't know they were at war right at the start pretty famous now. This was at the point where it was going to be a 3 day special operation, and at least their command was sure that Ukraine would just fold - then there was Bucha where soldiers ran riot. That was all Feb-March 2022, and things did not get better from there.
There's quite the list of warcrimes now (you may not agree all of these happened, but most Ukrainians would if you're trying to understand their theory of mind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_attacks_on_civilians_in_the_Russo-Ukrainian_war_(2022%E2%80%93present)). In addition, it seems that capture/kill/torture lists were common for the advancing troops. Remember, early on Russia was super confident, and sent in various paramilitaries to remove sections of civil society and kill chunks of them - it seems like they wanted a literal decapitation of civil society so that the puppet regime they installed would last and be able to become another Belarus - (RUSI has a report here: https://www.rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/special-resources/preliminary-lessons-russias-unconventional-operations-during-russo-ukrainian-war-february-2022 - in particular there were standardized torture equipment found in trucks, which is brutal as fuck, these are not people who anyone should be indifferent to ruling over them).
Imagine you believe that, like many Ukrainians do - and there is a solid argument that their resistance prevented Buchas across most of the country. Put yourself into that frame, imagine you believed the above. What would you do if that was your country, your home, and you knew people who were killed or tortured? People here reasonably say that one of the key lessons of the 20th century is do not be ruled over by people who hate you - if its true for the red tribe USA than the Ukrainians should be celebrated surely?
I would fight, and I think the situation is far less bleak than @No_one paints it, both now and over all the past times we've seen this argument (we're almost on year 4 of the special operation to de-nazify Ukraine, and with a few more years of this pace Russia will at last have all the Donbas, is this really a situation where Russia is going to occupy the country soon?). For example, I do note that Russia is taking a lot more long range hits this year, to very difficult to replace refining (only one (1) refinery has not been hit, and those cracking towers are not easy to patch) and strategic air assets no less. We're still in the hard pounding, Ukraine might break but it isn't over yet. It's a very interesting war.
[citation required]
Arresting foreign funded activists is obviously the right thing to do, but it's rather easy to expel them and massively less problematic. That said, I've never seen a single indication they had a naughty list. Although it'd make sense for them to have one, after all that has happened in Ukraine.
There is a citation in my post - RUSI's paper right there. It's open source, and they list where they got the information from where possible. You can disagree (especially where it's author interviews or him with a clearance seeing multiple copies of captured Russian equipment or the same documented instructions), but here you go if you cannot open the link for some reason, it's footnote 70: In Kherson, see BBC News, ‘Inside Russian “Torture Chambers” in Ukrainian City of Kherson – BBC News’, Youtube, https://youtube.com/watchv=AE_45TrZqU8, accessed 18 March 2023; in Kharkiv oblast, see John Ray, ‘Ukrainian Retraces Steps to Torture Chamber where he was “Electrocuted and Beaten for Six Days”’, 22 September 2022, < https://www.itv.com/news/2022-09-22/ukrainian-retraces-steps-to-torture-chamber-where-he-was-beaten-for-six-days>, accessed 18 March 2023; in Kyiv oblast, see Erika Kinetz et al., ‘“Method to the Violence”: Dogged Investigation and Groundbreaking Visuals Document Bucha “Cleansing”’, AP News, 11 November 2022; author observations around Bucha, June 2022 and Kharkiv oblast, October 2022.
In particular, I would also highlight this from right at the start of the war: "The population was divided into five core categories:
Source 69 above, is: The methodology was set out in an instruction issued by the Russian Presidential Administration and obtained by the Intelligence Community of Ukraine. Author interview with Q (Senior Field Counterintelligence Officer in Ukrainian Agency 4), Ukraine, February 2022; author interview with G; author interviews with R (former head of Ukrainian agency 2), Ukraine, February 2022; author interviews with J (deputy head of Ukrainian agency 5), Ukraine, August and October 2022; see also Erika Kinetz, ‘“We Will Find You:” Russians Hunt Down Ukrainians on Lists’, AP News, 21 December 2022.
I am confused how you missed it? I dug through your AI and the links weren't easy to find - or were not there - but this one was directly next to the text.
*edit: Oh, for others of a paranoid persuasion, that RUSI link is also a good overview of what an occupying force of high levels of brutality but using dumb troops of not high numbers and limited time might do to you and your family if you were ever occupied - and its very readable.
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It bears repeating that Western Ukraine(Galicia) is culturally distinct and wants to be a central European country like Poland, Slovakia, Hungary etc, and Russia will not allow them to do so. Russia persecutes the Ukrainian Greek Catholic church, wants to suppress the Ukrainian language, indoctrinate their children into Russian culture with its own historical narratives, etc.
To an outsider it's probably hard to tell the difference. But it's also hard for slavs to tell the difference between the blue and red tribes; why there's so much fighting about the narrative in public schools is likely tricky political analysis for the FSB. It's also vanishingly unlikely that Ukraine will see replacement migration, even Ukrainians don't want to live there, much less non-Ukrainians.
TIL that Galicians have trouble with gaining independence from their cultural overlords from Iberia to Eastern Europe.
Galicia is Latin for "land of the Celts" and was used as a term for difficult to control borderlands inhabited by ethnically distinct peoples in European state formation; at least for some of them, old habits die hard.
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As far as I can see, it’s not Galician nationalists wanting their own Central European country that Putin objects to. It’s rather them wanting to control the entire territory of the former Soviet Ukraine, including the Crimea.
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The best explanation I've seen is that Putin wants Ukraine to be like Bavaria. They are free to yodel and walk around in leather pants and speak their unintelligible dialect among themselves, but they are still an integral part of the German nation and the German state. While Ukrainians want to be like the Netherlands. Who mention the German blood of their ruler in the anthem, used to be in the HRE, but are free to polder and walk around in wooden clogs and speak their unintelligible dialect among themselves in their own country.
Austria might even be closer to Germany than the Netherlands.
I am the first to admit that borders are accidents of history. There is no good principled reason why Austria should be its own thing but Bavaria should be part of Germany. The status quo is sacred merely as a Schelling point. If people want to move borders through democratic means, such as the Scottish movement to leave the UK, that is fine. But after two big industrialized wars, the world has largely realized that moving borders through military action is not worth the effort any more. Eventually, such actions became seen as defection from the club of civilized countries.
For Europe, "stick to the borders however stupid and unfair they are" has been a marked improvement over the ancient, previous method of resolving land disputes, "bash your neighbors heads in every 50 years to see who gets to own the disputed territories".
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Unlike the western globalists who would never ever do something to dismantle a country's ethnic and cultural heritage...
If they want ethnic Ukrainian culture Macron and Keir Starmer are their worst nightmare.
Wrong. If they want ethnic Ukrainian culture, Russia is their worst nightmare. On account of actually having an explicit policy to destroy them as an ethnicity and fold them into Russia, as opposed to whatever it is you're insinuating Macron and Keir Starmer are doing.
Not even close.
While London is 50+% non British? Ukrainian culture will be as deconstructed as western culture and replaced by bland American consumerism while their population will be replaced by Bangladeshis extracting resources owned by western financial institutes. Ukraine's demographics rival South Korea's as the most catastrophic on Earth while they are allying with people who want mass migration with incredible fervor.
Don't think the Black rock owned plantation is going to have an HR department that cares about traditional Ukrainian culture or that the Nigerians working there have any interest in it.
Why would any Ukrainian who cares about his ethnicity care about that, when Russia promises to actively cancel the entire concept of Ukraine and paint it as wrongheaded Malorossian nazi sympathizers as soon as it's done?
It's clearly been too long since you've had an actual existential war if your concept of being replaced is limited to "London is less than 50% British". Try zero percent. Ethnicity null can't take up any percentage of the former country, after all.
I think this almost never works, it just induces resentment. Spanish culture stayed strong despite centuries of Islamic occupation (the staying-power of bullfighting has a lot to do with the Muslims repeatedly trying to ban it), the Irish are still Irish, and Ukraine went straight back to being Ukraine once the USSR was over. If anything foreign occupation seems to solidify native culture, below a certain level. (That is not to say that being occupied is fun or easy, especially by Russians).
What does seem to cause long-term culture change is demographic change. On an obvious level, America and South America changed almost completely once the Europeans moved in, as did the English when the Normans moved in. I don't really have great examples because mass migration is still quite new, but it seems relevant to me that the statues of Robert E. Lee in the South didn't disappear after Civil Rights but only disappeared when the locals became outnumbered by incomers with no connection to the history. There's just something about 50%+ of your capital city and even increasingly your politicians having no connection with your history at all (or negative ones) that's hard to describe. I look out of the window and nobody looks like me. I can't understand what they're saying. If the Nazis had succeeded and tried to wipe out our culture I think we'd still consider ourselves English, but this is different.
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Ukraine was Russia for centuries, it was still Ukrainian. Ukraine now has collapsing demographics and will end up being completely replaced.Their culture will be some washed out American culture and their population will be Pakistani workers extracting resources for black rock. There is no force that is more culturally corrosive than western liberalism.
Ukraine wasn't even a part of Russia. There are parts of Russia with strong cultures. Ukraine would easily have remained Ukrainian.
The parts of Russia with strong cultures have not been painted as literal inheritors of the German Nazi cause who must be annihilated as a state and entity. Also, the parts of Russia with the strongest non-Russian cultures are, you have guessed it, Muslim. Not "Slav convert" Muslim, but Central Asian Muslim.
I am telling you once again since you do not even address it - Russia is not some sort of based trad anti-White Replacement haven. All the trends that make people crow about "replacement" are there at only slightly weaker, combined with the kind of government ideology that is really not promising for newly-subjugated Enemies of the Glorious Fatherland.
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This is of course also true of Russia, the two nations have similar TFRs.
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It was a part of a premodern Russian empire withotu anywhere close to the amount of state capacity (or general ideological development related to modernity) to attempt assimilation, or basically any form of governance beyond letting local atamans and village chiefs continue to do as they've always done. Things are obviously quite different on that front now.
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Weren't many of these areas historically, uh -- Poland?
Give those parts back to the Poles, Crimea + Donbas etc. back to the Russians, and what's really left?
There's no such thing as "historically Poland" and these areas had been everything. These lands were conquered and re-conquered by a variety of states, which bore variety of names, many of them sounding like modern states (e.g. Grand Duchy of Lithuania) but being very different from them. Taking a random moment out of 1000 years of chaotic warfare and conquest, fixating on it as "historical" and claiming that's the "true" state of things is just nonsense. Russian official propaganda does it all the time - if any particular piece of land had been conquered by Russians even for a day over the centuries, it's "historically Russian land", from the time of Creation till the end of the Universe. Of course, if you believe silly stuff like that you may as well start doing land acknowledgments and move back to Africa since that's where "historically" humans lived.
That's kind of the point though -- I know people who's family came from those areas pre-WWI; I think it was an Austrian possession at the time, but they were Polish people who called themselves as such. Later it was Poland again, then USSR, now Ukraine. But the people there were still Poles or Ukrainian as the case may be; it's not as though they were confused as to which depending on which army had conquered the place recently. (we had plenty of Ukrainian emigrees as well; they called themselves according to their history, not what part of the area they had been living in)
So if (some of) the people of Galicia consider themselves still Polish, they are probably right.
Due to all that long and messy history, no border is ever able to express the complexity - you'll always have people that think they are Polish, Ukrainian, Hungarian, Hutsul, Romanian, Ruthenian, Czech, and a dozen of other options leaving next to each other. Sure, in some place people would say "we are Polish and we're living here since year X" and over the hill over there people would say "we are Ukrainian and we're living here since year Y". It's always easy to find some substantiation of some politician's grand "historic" claims - but it's also as easy to find a diametrically opposed evidence which the politician conveniently ignored.
All true -- thus "might makes right" is usually how these disputes are eventually resolved. If Poland wants Galicia back, they would have to come and take it. If Russia doesn't get there first, I suppose.
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My grandmother was born in Przemiwółki, a small village near the Polish city of Lwów, which you probably know as Lviv. My grandfather was born a bit more to the west, in Żółkiew (Zhovkva). There's a family story about how his father and father's brother became estranged for life after the modern nationalities started to crystalize and one chose to be Polish, and the other an Ukrainian - Tolkien's story of Elrond and Elros comes to mind.
Anyways, the known Poles living in those regions faced a simple choice as WWII was drawing to a close - flee, or die at the hands of UPA. There might be some octo- and nonagenarians left who consider themselves Polish deep in their hearts because of the stories one of their parents told them, but that's basically the end of it.
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Let's first imagine the wild success of the SMO. That is, Russian tanks drive all the way to the center of Kiev in 2022, Zelensky escapes
in a dress, Poland props up LNR and VNR. That's where ideologically motivated SBU and military officers escape to along with hardcore nationalists, everyone else shrugs and goes on with their lives.Well, in 2022 Ukraine was a better country to live in than Russia. Not a perfect one, of course, but Russia is a very top-down country where the very bottom of the pyramid is adept at avoiding the attention of the rest of it. Ukraine has a very different ethos of resisting the top layers, and the 2014 revolution legitimized this resistance. Poroshenko's reforms made municipal governments responsible for a much larger chunk of the taxes, further reinforcing the idea that people were in charge of their lives, and this change worked.
Maybe in February 2022 the average Ukrainian could've calculated the QALY drop caused by a prolonged armed resistance and decided to give up, but vibes beat math, and the vibes said, "we're finally doing some cool nation building and we'll lose all this if we don't resist".
Before the invasion Ukraine's GDP per capita was 2-3 times lower than Russia's. Obviously now it's even worse. "Nation-building" aside, is there any particular reason I should believe it's better to be Ukrainian than Russian?
All I see is one corrupt oligarchy feeding its population into a meat grinder to avoid having their power taken away by another corrupt oligarchy.
Russia has South Africa and Mexico tier income inequality with a mostly state controlled economy. I somehow doubt the average Russian was doing better than the average Ukrainian.
I'm not an economist, but Ukraine's Gini Index is 74.4 (as of 2020) and Russia's is 64.5. That's not a huge difference. Is that really enough to overwhelm the difference of Russia having a GDP per capita that is literally double or triple Ukraine's?
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The numbers are as Sunshine says. Better in PPP, worse by exchange rates.
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Setting aside the possibility of skew, since I had a surprisingly hard time finding median data…Is this the right question?
Maybe I’d prefer being a Russian to being a Ukrainian. But I think I’d prefer either to being a former-Ukrainian. Even if Russia wasn’t at all interested in cleansing language or religion, would Russian wealth somehow trickle down? There’s not much reason to think former-Ukrainians would see any benefits under Russian colonization.
All else being equal I assume that both countries are equally exploitative towards their people. Ergo, all else being equal, the population of the richer country will be richer and the population of the poorer country will be poorer.
I would expect Russian elites to siphon more from annexed Ukrainians than from their own lower class.
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I don't think Ukrainians, outside of the max. 3% or so actual nazis (effective as they may be as a fighting force), care for "surviving as a people". The only thing they are fighting, and willingly taking a 50% chance to die, for is the hope of "becoming part of the West", either by uplift like Poland or Estonia, or by emigration once the borders open. Generally, it may be hard for a Westerner who spends all day every day seething about the state of their country to understand just to what extent post-Soviet people, especially relatively poor ones, idolize life in the West. (Maybe take in this prophetic music video for vibes.)
My experience with actual Ukrainians(and this is a biased sample but it is mostly the equivalent of normies, not actual Nazis) is that they do care about surviving as a people, and that that people is, to their mind at least, very different from Russia. Whether there's actually much of a difference or not probably depends on where exactly in Ukraine; Galicia at least is a lot more central European and less east Slavic in comparison.
In what context did you encounter those Ukrainians? Those who have made it all the way to America don't really count, since they have already safely made it to the West and probably are more subject to American memes (which would have you proudly wear the culture of distant ancestors like an Aztec warrior wears a jaguar skin).
(I don't deeply know any Western Ukrainians, but have talked to some of the refugees who are all over Europe now and overheard the conversations of many more. Of course having fled does bias the sample, too.)
Mostly UGCC members, but American residents who speak Ukrainian(not Russian or Surshik) at home. I'll be the first to admit this is a biased pool towards anti-Russian hardcore nationalists, but I also remember them liking Assad for middle-eastern Christian reasons, which points to less influence on their views by the US media and state department.
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4 years ago they probably didn't had too much to be afraid of. Right now ...
Compare the state of the Russian POW that Ukrainians return with the Ukrainian that Russia returns. A full blown conquest has a good chance to devolve Ukraine into the biggest concentration camp on earth.
Thankfully Putin doesn't seem too keen on that. Mostly because oppression is expensive. And economic sanctions on Russia do hurt. So Europe can actually negotiate a peace that is not terrible.
I am not sure if you can comprehend how cruel and ruthless us eastern europeans can be.
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In a word, The Holodomor.
Now, don't worry, I'm not some Ukraine
agentapologist here. I'm just trying to directly answer the question of "What are the Ukrainian people afraid of, being conquered by Russia?" You can absolutely boil Ukraine v Russia down to Red Tribe vs Blue Tribe. The Ukrainians aren't thinking about the future, they're constantly enraged by the past. The "Politics of Resentment" isn't an invention of 21st American politics - it's the de facto arrangement of most human conflict. To many in Ukraine, allowing a Russian takeover is the equivalent of letting all of the people who killed all of your family members move in to your house. It's pretty easy to get fatalist and irrational to prevent that. "I would rather die than ...." Yeah, well.My thoughts exactly. It's vexing how every Red Triber on this forum knows exactly how much they hate their enemy and would not submit to them because the enemy has repeatedly let them know how much they hate the red triber and want their legacy erased... yet all that understanding goes out the window when they look at Ukraine vs. Russia.
Except that whatever things Blue Tribe did, they still did not graduate - at least in the US - to actually engineering a nationwide famine that cost millions of lives, with the explicit purpose of subjugating Red Tribe. Shit like that tends to be remembered.
To interpret the Soviet famine of 1932-1933 as a) artificially engineered (i.e. done on purpose) b) by 'the' Russians against 'the' Ukrainians c) with genocidal intent, as if this was self-evidently the one and true possible interpretation is a clear case of consensus-building. I'm pretty sure you yourself are aware as well that all three arguments are questionable at best.
Unless, you know, it actually was a) artificially engineered and b) by 'the' Russians against 'the' Ukrainians (more precisely, of course, by Soviets - which weren't all ethnically Russian, of course) and c) with genocidal intent. Given as Soviets had actually perpetrated other acts of genocide on purpose, for political aims, and their ideology explicitly allowed and endorsed mass murder for political purposes, and their official position had been that any "nationalism" has to be completely eliminated (which they consistently did in all "national republics" - every single nationalist movement had been brutally repressed) - it looks like duck, walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, so it's not a big stretch to argue it is a duck.
You can question it all you like, but as I noted above, there is very good evidence pointing to it. I am not saying questioning this evidence makes you literally Hitler, I am saying if you have equally strong opposite evidence, you are welcome to propose it. Or you are welcome to just say "I just don't believe it, whatever is the evidence", that's always an option. I know one thing - dismissing all that by just saying "oh, it's consensus-building, therefore you are wrong" is not an argument.
Frankly I find these claims increasingly baffling. The "Soviets had actually perpetrated other acts of genocide on purpose"? Other acts of genocide? Where? When? Their "ideology explicitly allowed and endorsed mass murder for political purposes". Fair enough, there were cases where this applied. But against entire ethnic groups? Which is what genocide is? Also, the elimination of nationalism necessarily entails genocide now?
My lived experience of actual Ukrainians is that they believe this narrative of the holodomor, whether or not you do, and discussion of it would be as welcome as bringing securesignals as a +1 to a bar mitzvah.
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How ignorant are you in Soviet history? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deportation_of_the_Crimean_Tatars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deportation_of_the_Chechens_and_Ingush https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deportation_of_the_Meskhetian_Turks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deportation_of_the_Kalmyks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June_deportation and others.
Dude, Gulag. Purges. I mean, they didn't exactly hide it.
Not necessarily, but the way Stalin did it - it frequently did. I mean, I understand that if you're completely ignorant of history, you find historical claims "baffling". But maybe you should fill up on that before arguing about it?
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The section on
Discrimination and persecution of Ukrainiansin the wikipedia link certainly doesn't provide strong evidence; it shows strongly contested disagreement. If you're referring to your first paragraph, that seems to boil down to 'the Soviets were open to genocide and didn't like countries with strong national identities, so obviously the famine in Ukraine was a deliberate genocide' which seems pretty circumstantial.If it were the only evidence, sure. But there's plenty of other evidence to the deliberate character of food confiscation, and to extreme hostility with which Soviets viewed the kulak class. Of course, to properly consider all that evidence, one would need to write a series of books - and there are many books on the subject, of course. I have neither ability nor desire to TLDR them all here, I am just saying this is a well-supported position, and dismissing it with a formula like "oh, that's consensus-building, therefore all that pile of evidence worth nothing" is not proper discussion of the subject.
I checked Wokepedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor and it says "Olga Andriewsky writes that scholars are in consensus that the cause of the famine was man-made.[46] The term "man-made" is, however, questioned by historians such as R. W. Davies and Stephen Wheatcroft, according to whom those who use this term "underestimate the role of ... natural causes",[47] though they agree that the Holodomor was largely a result of Stalin's economic policies.". Now, I have very low opinion about the veracity of any Wokepedia claim on any politically charged subject, and again, seriously evaluating such claims would take much more than I am willing to give, but in short, virtually everybody agrees Stalin did it. Now, imagine - Stalin comes out and says "we will destroy kulaks, if necessary - we will kill them all". Stalin then does things. Kulaks are destroyed, many of them dead. Many other people are dead to. We can establish the causal link between Stalin's actions and the deaths. Now, you tell me that we should seriously consider maybe it all happened on accident? That somehow he only wanted to build communism, and accidentally took all food from them and accidentally they died because they had no food? I don't know, to me it doesn't pass the smell test.
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I can believe it of the Soviets, but I would certainly like to see some evidence that it’s true.
My recollection is that the ‘famines brought about by collectivisation’ became ‘the Holodomor’ at exactly the same time that Kiev became Kyiv.
Odd. By my recollection, Famine-33 was published in 1991, during the tail-end of the Soviet Union itself. It wasn't exactly subtle that the nature of the famine was artificial or tied to the collectivisation. It's not exactly hard to find academic literature from the cold war either, albeit more from the glastnost period and the de-classification of various historical documents.
I think everyone broadly agreed that the famines were a product of collectivisation, and the difference between callous indifference + culpable stupidity vs. deliberate malice is hard to differentiate at the best of times.
My complaint is more that in the West it seemed to me we switched over from ‘the famines in the USSR were a semi-deliberate result of Soviet malice and mismanagement’ to ‘the Holodomor was a deliberate attempt by the Russians to destroy Ukraine and now they’re at it again’ and this shift seeed to be based on political needs and vibes rather than the production of new evidence.
Like, every country that’s ever been colonised has a story about how the evil oppressor engineered famine to punish them. Britain gets it from the Irish and the Indians, and at least in the latter case I’ve looked into it (I did a post last month) and the case is very dubious. As a result I distrust these maximalist claims being presented as fact without backing evidence.
For example, Famine-33 is a fictional work made 60 years after the events it depicts, based on a novel written by a Ukrainian (Vasyl Barka) who as far as I can tell wasn’t actually there at the time, having gone to work in an art museum in Krasnodar in 1928, four years before the famine.
Again, I’m not asserting anything. I merely note that I distrust very heavy claims (deliberate genocide of Ukrainians) being made at a time of high political tension based on little or no presented evidence. I am quite happy to be shown something more substantial.
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Yeah, that actually makes perfect sense when you put it like that.
A shame there won't be a Ukrainian people in 50 years.
They survived Russian Empire at the peak of its might, and the USSR - twice. And USSR is not known for its gentle approach to conquering people. By Lindy's law, I estimate their chance on surviving Putin as pretty decent.
I'd wager the OP was referring to the future consequences of 50 years of American/Atlanticist/globohomo (and not Russian) hegemony over the Ukrainian people (or at least over the great majority of them). To illustrate what I guess is the same point, I ask you to consider the difference between A and B in the following two cases:
One:
A: The effects of Soviet hegemony in Eastern Germany on the national identity and patriotic sentiments of local Germans, as evidenced by their average propensity to vote for right-wing nativist parties since 1990
B: The effects of US hegemony in Western Germany on the national identity and patriotic sentiments of local Germans, as evidenced by the displayed level of their willingness to preserve themselves as a nation since 1949
Two:
A: The effects of Soviet hegemony in Poland on the Catholicism and patriotic sentiment of the locals
B: The effects of US hegemony on the same in the last 25 or so years
I’d say there’s clear evidence that it’s US and not Soviet hegemony that has the larger detrimental effect on national identity and survival.
It's a bit perverse way of saying things. Sure, if you brutally oppress a population for decades in the service of, say, vegetarianism, and then your vegetarian regime collapses, the people would acquire certain aversion to vegetarianism for a while. And maybe overall eating a more balanced diet would come out as good for them (please, vegetarians, it's just an artificial example!). But concluding from that that to achieve a balanced diet you need to brutally oppress people for decades, and that's actually a good thing because it leads to better diet, is a very perverse way of arguing.
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There isn't a singular 'Ukrainian people' now, there's a collection of different 'Ukrainian people'- and one of them(galicians) might have an above replacement fertility rate(although it's probably just below), one of the major undercurrents of the present conflict is Ukraine's attempts at turning its collection of different ethnic groups into a single ethnic group that's mostly galician aping. That's what started the donbas war.
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My prediction on their demise is more favorable than on the Western Red Tribe - they've actually got around to fighting.
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Russia's native birthrate is largely in the same crater as other European nations, and it also has both Muslim immigration (from its neighbouring -stans as opposed to Middle Eastern, but same difference if you're not into that) and a sizeable resident diaspora. Regarding "surviving as a people" Russia has nothing to offer Ukrainians, especially given that Russia's explicit rhetoric is disintegrating Ukrainians as an ethnicity.
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Jesus Christ what a horrifying implication. I mean, being wounded by a a bullet is surely bad enough. But at least you can generally shoot back at the guy trying to kill you with a gun.
I'd guess, then, the bulk of wounds are from drones, bombs/artillery, maybe landmines, and armored vehicles? Or maybe wounds sustained when your armored vehicle gets blasted?
And this leads me to wonder about that phenomenon we saw way towards the beginning of the war: Western Volunteers who joined up for a chance to fight fascism. Ukraine created a foreign legion for those guys.
As of a year and a half ago it apparently wasn't going well. I daresay the early /r/volunteersForUkraine days where they hyped each other up to grab a rifle and go may have gotten numerous people killed for no major benefit.
Some deeper questions there. Is there any possible rational benefit for a Non-Ukrainian to join up in an actual combat role? If not... what's the remaining rational benefit of Non-Ukrainians continuing to fund the war effort?
I'm sure there's an object-level argument for it, still, but it probably relies on a black-swan type event that utterly breaks Russia's resolve all in one go, similar to that aborted Prigozhin coup.
Easy access to Canadian healthcare.
The US wants to break Russia up into multiple pieces in order to gain easy access to the natural resources, wealth, etc that a strong Russia prevents them from acquiring. At the same time, they want to make sure that Russia isn't capable of assisting China in any real way, to prevent the emergence of a multipolar world and retain their position as global hegemon. Because most western nations are effectively just client states of the US, they have no choice but to assist no matter how badly it harms their national interest (like Germany destroying their industrial base and economy by not buying Russian fossil fuels).
The US' attempt is absolutely doomed to fail, and Ukraine has no viable path to victory whatsoever - the only way the war doesn't end in a Russian victory is if it goes nuclear and the entire world loses. But to go back to your question, the remaining rational benefit of continuing to fund the war effort is that you are allowed to be elected instead of simply removed from the electoral process (see Romania, Moldova etc). In the long term, this is bad for the nations involved. Hell, it is likely bad in the short term for the people and nations involved... but less bad for the politicians.
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This has essentially been the case since WW1, and only getting worse since. In WW2 something like 70% of all casualties were from artillery, not small arms fire. This is for conventional war, I'm sure insurgencies have much different ratios.
Right, the two world wars basically squeezed all the remaining romanticism out of warfighting. Vietnam crapped on whatever was left. There hasn't been a single piece of media anywhere that I'm aware of that made the fighting in Vietnam look 'honorable' or 'cool.' (note, I ascribe at least part of that to Western Cultural institutions moving left, but even nonfiction accounts make it sound horrible).
Even the video games about the Vietnam war don't try to romanticize it. WWII games do put some emphasis on heroics but don't undercut how horrible e.g. Storming the Beach at Normandy was.
A tiny bit got injected back in with the GWOT and rise of modern special forces doing surgical strikes with high-tech equipment against relatively inferior opponents. The Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Franchise is still a best-seller, at least.
But the Ukraine conflict is NOT THAT. Fair to say that the thought of this precise kind of warfare: long battle lines, grinding attrition to occasionally advance a few hundred yards at a time, and almost all the actual fighting done via 'indirect' means, you'll rarely see the thing that kills you coming... it makes me sick. Inflicting this on your fellow human is probably, dare I say, irredeemable.
Now, I don't think medieval warfare was 'better'. Dying of sepsis or bleeding out face-down in a muddy field after you got gut-stuck with a polearm is not any more appealing. But at least many conflicts of that era got settled with a basic handful of battles and the occasional siege.
Industrialization of the affair just means its an unceasing nightmare.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=2xhfSWEbbhM
Was expecting Rambo but was pleasantly surprised.
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Anti-war media generally makes war look cooler and less horrible than nonfiction accounts of war. I've never seen anything to suggest that the Vietnam War was particularly horrible by the standards of war; it suffers primarily from the way it is seen as a bad war (in much the same way as WW1 is seen as far worse than WW2).
Medieval wars, due to their seasonal nature, could easily go on for years or decades (or, in one famous case, for a century). The short campaign season limited the severity of individual campaigns but also meant that it was incredibly hard to deliver a decisive blow before your opponent got winter and spring to recover. They were also plagued by disease that killed far more soldiers than battle.
I think fighting wars in humid Tropical Jungles so thick you have to use toxic chemicals and Napalm just to clear some space just sucks in a way that fighting in deciduous forest or even straight desert just doesn't. Maybe edged out by fighting in Russia during Winter.
Yep, but that's arguably just a feature of the times, not specific to the warfare. Hell, the fact that the fighting WOULD have to pause for the seasons probably made it a little more bearable for the individual soldiers, as it placed a natural limit on how long they'd be deployed.
Now, of course, we have the capacity to engineer our own diseases to use as weapons... but we just kinda agree not to (or maybe we do anyway depending on which conspiracies you believe).
Napoleon and Hitler failed, but the Mongols, Swedes, Poles and Imperial Germans all won.
Still have to assume it was a miserable affair for all involved.
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The horror of medieval sieges is not to be underestimated. Plenty of death to be had there as well, between starvation, disease, rudimentary artillery, disease, undermining attempts, starvation, wall-defenses (pouring boiling oil down on attackers, etc.), disease, and, of course, night-time sallies/raids.
Also, look up the word "chevauchee" sometime if you want to have your stomach turned.
Yep.
All the worse because it inflicts pain on civilian population.
That said, it would also depend on the nature of the attacker, and whether you could expect decent treatment upon surrender.
The factor that really weighs against joining Medieval armies is the tortures one could end up in if captured by the other side. Although there's certainly evidence that we as humans haven't improved much in that regard.
I just watched a video on Vlad the Impaler and I can say that his existence ALONE is enough for me to not want to enlist to fight on EITHER side of the war with the Ottoman Turks in the mid to late 1400's.
I would not be particularly worried about torture as a medieval soldier (nobles, of course, would get three squares and a cot while they waited to be ransomed) - in times of war it was a rare occurrence limited to some instances of intimidation, like difficult sieges, a few religious conflicts, and, of course, rebels or traitors. You would be much more likely to get a quick death than tortured, but at the luckiest you'd be stripped and let go or, for professionals, offered a place in the other duke's army. Somewhere in the middle would be impressment for war labour or, if the captors weren't Christian, relocation or lifetime slavery. At worst, worse than almost any transient torture, you could be impressed as a galley slave. Harsh or torturous punishments such as blinding were considered shocking enough to Western medieval chroniclers to be specifically noted when they occurred (e.g. Henry I blinding a man who sang insulting songs about him). I'm not saying there was anything pleasant at all about being taken prisoner in the Middle Ages, just that to my knowledge torture is relatively rare in the sources compared to ransom/execution/release/enslavement, all of which are easier and generally more beneficial to the captors. The exceptions, outside of a minority of inter-faith wars, would be rebellions - unfortunately, you probably don't get much of a choice as to whether your war is considered a legitimate conflict or a rebellion...
I think in my book, a 1% chance of being tortured using the most advanced methods a postclassical civilization can devise is intolerably high.
And there are a lot of slave or indentured servant jobs that were also pretty tortuous if only because they were indefinite in length. I wouldn't necessarily be unhappy with being forced to compete in Gladiatorial games, though.
To say nothing of being a Castrato or Eunuch. Not torture per se, but... ugh.
Although another 'fun' debate is how medieval torture compares to stuff the Drug Cartels do in modern day.
Anyway, I just want to stay far away from any battlefield where inflicting excess suffering on enemies is not tabooed harshly.
Castration was done to prepubescent boys(that is, not soldiers).
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Very understandable position! I would say even 1% is a significant overstatement of how likely a captured medieval footsoldier was to be tortured, but we'll never know for sure, and captivity would have been unpleasant enough to count as "cruel or unusual" today, besides a nontrivial chance of losing your head and a far higher chance of dying of disease.
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We're probably in an intermediate period when combat drones are an almighty game changer. No one has come up with an effective countermeasure to them so far. I'm sure this 'll soon change though.
Anduril makes drones that fly into other drones, smashing them. You have a bunch of these waiting and they launch when hostile drones come in. If they don't find a drone to intercept then they land and wait for another attack.
https://www.anduril.com/roadrunner/
Also quite a variety of other military drones.
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I still expect someone to field a miniature CIWS that can be mounted to anything larger than a pickup. Some combination of passive IR search and short-range phased array radar could probably counter the drone tactics I've seen so far. You wouldn't need a round larger than 22LR to take down the drones I've seen, as long as a computer is aiming it and you get enough rounds downrange.
Honestly, I'm still hoping for something novel on this end, like a triple-barrel rotary cannon that uses ammunition like this to emerge as the best solution to this problem.
A similar system has been used for a cannon with an extreme rate of fire before; I suspect it probably scales down better than your typical minigun, doesn't need to run the mechanism as fast for the same amount of projectiles coming out the end, and the rounds can be made of cheap extruded plastic.
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Forgive me for the "akshually" style comment, but this isn't entirely true.
No one has come up with a VERY CHEAP effective countermeasure yet. The ones that do work are 1) expensive and 2) Horded by the US/ISR/China and (maybe) a few other countries because nobody wants to show off their cool-new-shit in Ukraine. We want to save it for when it - yikes - actually matters.
Much like the human element of the Ukraine war, the drone element is mostly one of attrition and competing supply lines. At one point, 10,000 drones were falling out of the skies over Ukraine per month because of effective and cheap countermeasures. The tactical wheel turns, however, and both sides elevated their drone-counterdrone game.
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There's a possible one I saw recently.
Surprise! Its just a more advanced artillery round.
Less a 'countermeasure' to drones and more a way to delete any locations it might be possible to launch or pilot drones from.
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And many didn't, as the names "Hundred Years War" and "Thirty Years War" tell you.
It's not industrialization which makes war an unceasing nightmare; there have been long non-industrialized wars and short industrialized wars. WWI, for all its horror, was only 4 years.
Funny enough interspersed with truce periods.
And the black death, which wiped far more than the actual war itself could ever hope to.
And yeah there were also long-ass crusades with similar death counts. BUT.
Are there any pre-modern wars where a soldier could be sent out to the front line, and then 2-3 years later in the war, find himself in almost the exact same spot, despite regular bursts of fighting?
This might actually be a decent Friday Fun thread topic. "Assume you're drafted into a 5 year stint in the military, and will be spending the duration on the front line, which you cannot desert but can be KIA. which long war in history would you prefer to end up fighting in?
Frontlines are a modern invention, enabled by the existence of railroads. Without them the soldiers would just starve to death.
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Nothing like trench warfare in the sense of two opposing armies in open country, but medieval sieges could last a long time. The song Men of Harlech is about a seven-year siege, and the Crusaders took seven years to siege Tripoli. Three years definitely on the long end, though.
Yes, sieges are a particularly grueling point of warfare back in the day. Seems to inherently suck worse for the defending side, though.
They probably don't come with the sense of futility that arises when you sacrifice dozens of men at a time in numerous infantry charges all to gain a couple hundred yards at a time, which could then be lost, at the same cost.
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The pyrrhic and second punic wars would seem to qualify, given they consisted of the armies chasing each other all over Italy.
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You'd have to define what counts as 'front line', however.
Or else you'd just have people(like me) who'd play with the definition. Do defensive emplacements count? Cause I can think of places in the civil war that were both tactically critical, staffed the entire length of the war, yet saw very little combat.
Where are you thinking of in particular? I'm struggling to think of an option, unless we mean, like, the Washington defenses, which I think would be pushing out the definition of front line a lot. Maybe around Charleston?
Okay, this is where I admit my historical shortfall and getting a few forts mixed up; The fort I was thinking of was Fort Pike, which I had somehow thought was the fort along the Mississippi River. It's not; those forts are instead Jackson and St Philip. In contrast, those two saw one hell of a battle; whereas Fort Pike was taken without a shot.
I had also forgotten how soon New Orleans fell during the Civil War; I could have inexplicably thought it was taken much later.
So! There's a solid argument that Fort Pike wasn't that critical, disqualifying it.
If so, I'd probably pick Vicksburg, which saw... comparatively small causalities and was basically the last Confederate hold-out on the Mississippi.
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The question as I intended it is approximately "manning a post in the physical location closest to the enemy and involved in combat such that the enemy does make occasional attempts to kill you."
And being fair, you also have to pick the war without being sure where you'd be stationed, precisely. WWII had so many theaters of operations you'd have to consider the pros and cons of each one before committing to signing papers and stepping in the time machine, as it could be anywhere.
My ultimate point is I think almost NOBODY would pick WWI as the one they'd suffer through if given the choice.
The question is can you pick a side. The Pacific was no picnic for the Marines, but it was much worse for the Japs.
Did you recently listen to the new MartyrMade podcast episode on WWI? He makes this point at length, mostly summarizing Junger et al on the topic.
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Apparently yes, according to this guy: https://youtube.com/watch?v=XQQy5V0jOkQ
The siege of Candia lasted 21 years. Enough time for someone to be born inside the walls, grow up, and start having children of his own. Turns out, medieval castles were very hard to take.
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The Peloponnesian War featured multiple Spartan invasions of Attica. So, probably not the exact same spot in a trench warfare sense, but certainly seeing the same area over and over again.
Can imagine that getting frustrating for a bunch of guys who really just wanted to stab the enemy.
There is indeed something about drawn-out trench warfare that I find particularly distressing. Probably has something to do with one's fate feeling completely out of your own hands. Regardless of your skills as a warrior you're not really enhancing your own odds of survival since the thing that gets you won't be another dude, specifically, but something you never even saw coming.
Kinda like the Longbow hard-countering the armored knight. Now some illiterate peasant with overdeveloped back muscles can one-shot you after a couple days instruction.
Without that issue, I can sort of conceive of a war as banding together with your bros for an adventure and your odds of survival turning much more on your individual skills AND your ability to plan and effectively coordinate rather than luck of the draw.
The other comments cover the broad point - longbowmen were a hell of an investment, and weren't a war-winning instrument alone - but I don't think they go far enough. The best book on this is probably Sumption's series on the Hundred Years War, and he makes the point that (1) longbowmen as used in the English army were invariably mounted and armored, and represented an investment broadly analogous to that of a armored man-at-arms; essentially, the English and French armies both had proper knights (far more french) and then a significant number of men-at-arms, and the English essentially stopped having traditional cavalry man-at-arms in favour of what are better imagined as primitive dragoons, and (2) the war winning instrument was less longbowmen and more reliable polearm infantry in compact blocks with field defenses. The role of longbows was important, but even without them the English army was incredibly lethal, as were other armies - e.g. the Flemish. Basically, the age of the knight was really coming to an end either way. It dominated the field against unreliable levy forces, but against forces who stand and fight and are professional enough to build consistent field defenses and not get caught out of position on a big field, it was always a somewhat non-viable strategy.
But! On your broader point, of war as being a fun adventure... the interesting thing is that it very much was viewed as that in this period... but by the English. Edward III was the archetypal chivalrous king, and people from all over Europe showed up to his campaigns against the French and the Scots. The English force was smaller (than the French - much larger than the scots) and much more professionalised, and the main feature of the first few decades of the hundred years war was English chevauchées into France, which tended to be lucrative and highly individual, and often very local - literally the earl of such and such and his friends and a bunch of men from the local towns and villages. I think it's an interesting but very understandable error to match up that image of war-as-adventure with the French knights, when you actually should have that image, but matched with the well equipped mounted longbowmen.
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I'm not going to get into the longbow countering the knight thing as others have already, but it's hard to overstate how much of an advantage noble knights had in battle. You were not going to be given a role in battle that would amount to cannon-fodder/bait, you had presumably access to the best training, a horse, the best armor. It was pretty unlikely you'd be killed or seriously wounded on your feet and most importantly, no one was really incentivized in finishing you off if you found yourself surrounded or knocked down/out, as ransoming you was much more lucrative.
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It really didn't. It meant "charging straight at the enemy's prepared across a muddy field and relying on your glittering form to terrify them into running away" was even MORE stupid than it might otherwise have been, but that kind of thing also failed against armies without longbows.
It just meant that the knights had to get a bit more sophisticated with their tactics. Speed and aggression, as at the battle of Patay, or use of pinning and flanking maneuvers, such as at Formigny, saw thousands of English longbowmen cut down by French chivalry.
Other people have covered how the longbow takes a lifetime to master - and English Longbowmen were capable melee fighters themselves, with coats of brigandine and rondel daggers specifically designed to get at the weak joints of plate armor.
But also, the Longbow did not "one-shot" a man in armor. The advantage of the longbow came from (1) its ability to loose arrows in a ballistic arc instead of just the flat trajectory of crossbow bolts, (2) the incredible rate of fire that seasoned longbowmen could muster for brief periods of time, and (3) the longbow's effective range.
Individual longbow arrows were nuisances to a man in full-plate. But shoot 150 arrows at him and one will likely find a joint or seam, or just ring his bell hard enough that he'll fall down (and in plate, a man on the ground is essentially dead, either to a swarming enemy or to getting trampled by his own side). Also, those arrows were murder on enemy horses.
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It has been a while since I did a deep dive on the literature, but I believe that a traditional longbowman was a skilled fighter that required a significant training investment. It didn't require the capital investment of a knight, but you couldn't grab Any Random Asshole out of the fields and expect him to be effective.
It wasn't until crossbows and firearms that we saw the terrifying power of Armed Masses of Random Assholes.
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No, but this has more to do with feeding and supplying an army than anything else. The modal soldier in pre-modern warfare might spent 2 - 3 years more or less walking in a giant, slow circle, almost starving to death every day. And then actually starving to death.
I have read of that, and hence why it was valid strategy to burn your own fields while retreating.
I also read about, e.g. Alexander the Great's wars of conquest and the distances traveled and I gather that the greatest asset a soldier could have in those days was the ability to briskly walk for days on end and still be combat-effective after a bit of rest.
Are there any movies or T.V. shows that focus on depicting what it was like to just walk, walk, walk through slowly changing landscape on the way to a future battle?
Lord of the rings is kinda an allegory for that... the "war" for Frodo and Sam is mostly just them walking a lot, being very tired and very hungry and very scared for some hypothetical future battle.
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To rephrase/edit a comment I posted here 3 months ago: I think this whole sh*tshow is yet another consequence of Western Europeans generally lacking a perspective on their own continent’s history and acting accordingly. It has been true in almost all cases that the Russian army blunders and stumbles during the initial phase of any war, even regardless of it aggressing or defending, but then shows itself to be capable of gradually learning and adapting even if the final outcome is defeat, as in WW1 for example. See the Brusilov offensive of 1916 in that case, characterized by John Keegan as “the greatest victory seen on any front [of WW1] since the trench lines had been dug on the Aisne two years before” (as quoted in Wikipedia). And there are cases when the important lessons are only learned after the war, such as the war against the Japanese in 1904-5 (which, by the way, wasn’t a cakewalk for the Japanese army by any means). I assume this is the consequence of the intellectual sloth and naïve romanticism that generally characterize the Russian people, the legacy of languishing as slaves for centuries etc., probably the Mongol yoke also has something to do with it, but this is largely beside the point. There are also a few cases when that initial period of incompetence is rather short, like during the naval war against the Ottomans in 1788-91, whom were soundly beaten.
In the case of WW2, the Red Army clearly demonstrated an ability to gradually gain competence, although the results generally appeared only in the final phase of the war. The offensives in the territory of present-day Belarus, Moldova, Romania and Poland in the summer of 1944 or the invasion of Manchuria in 1945 were impressive by anyone’s standards. The Russians are slow to learn maybe, but they do learn. Even the Afghanistan war wasn’t just a series of one blunder after another, just look at the battle for ‘Hill’ 3234 for example.
It seems that Western Europeans apparently have this usual tendency to concentrate on Russian blunders while ignoring every other factor and then assume that winning against them will be easy, and also have a way of convincing their big American brother of this.
What a garbage theory. Astrology for geopolitics. "And on the second moon of the third year of war, the russian, as always, will have learned his lesson and win". Predicting future events from nothing more than the eternal essence of the participants.
So, do the americans, or the french, not learn, in war? You say his essence makes the russian learn slow, yet, sometimes, against the turk, the russian still learns fast. And the theory predicts the russian ends up winning, but of course, russians lost quite a lot of wars, even in wars where they appeared to be slowly learning at first, in accordance with their eternal destiny.
Such as?
It doesn't. I never claimed that. What I did claim is that it's grave folly to look at the initial blunders of the Russians and then assume it's all they will ever keep doing and thus expecting final victory over them as self-evident.
Judging by the German campaign of 1940, the French indeed do not learn, and we don't have later examples to judge. With respect to the US, unfortunately we can conclude that learning anything from Vietnam was quite difficult. American politicans also appeared to have learning from the Panama and Kuwait conflicts that making war can be made easy and bloodless, which is also just hubris.
The customary reward of defeat, if one can survive it, is in the lessons thereby learned, which may yield victory in the next war. But the circumstances of our defeat in Vietnam were sufficiently ambiguous to deny the nation (that) benefit. – Edward N. Luttwak
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Was there a serious core of people who believed in a Ukraine victory though? And by serious, I mean people who don't solely read or work for the likes of NYT or BBC. Mottizens or similar. Outside of a hope that sanctions might eventually force Russia to the table, I would be surprised if anyone believed in a Ukraine military victory.
If by "Western Europeans" you're referring more to the governments than the people, I think the answer is less learning from history and rather the same as for every modern crisis: a large number of incompetent and completely bubbled officials, unable to deal with the complexity of modern life
Western establishment has been knowingly going along with project THD despite knowing it's ultimately futile ?
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I’ve been getting lit up by various Mottezens for two years for saying Ukraine would lose. They’re still mocking me up upthread for saying that Ukraine is going to lose, even now.
As far as I can see, a couple of posters have taken issue with your claims around territorial gains for Russia, with no posters suggesting that Ukraine will turn around and reconquer lost territory.
The line is currently collapsing in five different places, I don’t think predicting major territorial gains by Russia is particularly loopy or controversial at this point.
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Yes, I believe most of the goons in leading positions in the EU, most heads of state and members of government of EU member states are convinced that Ukraine will be able to push the Russians out of the occupied territories and de facto restore the pre-2014 border.
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Back when we were on reddit, I offered multiple times for people to bet that Ukraine would win the conflict and I got no takers whatsoever. If there were people on here that believed Ukraine would win, none of them were willing to put money on it.
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I would say it is a result of hyper moralism, a view of history that reads francis fukuyama as a prophet and the dumbing down of politics. The way Russians are being treated is similar to how transphobes were treated during peak wokeness. They can't be acknowledged to have any legitimate concerns, they are motivated by evil and we all have to performatively show our disgust on social media. It becomes impossible to have a sane, rational and calm debate regarding topics when they go BLM 2020.
We can't have a debate regarding war aims, what the security architecture of Europe should look like, whether pax Americana is feasible in a world in which the US is 17% of global GDP or whether Ukraine in NATO even makes sense. Just like we couldn't have a calm, rational debate about what defund the police will actually look like. There is just people performatively screeching slogans.
This has some roots back to the Afghanistan war. We could never have a debate or calm discussion. It couldn't be treated like a normal war because we were fighting "terrorists" and that apparently justified anything. Nobody could explain a path to victory, just slogans. It is amazing that it took five months from 20 years of Afghanistan fiasco to the start of the next forever war. At least after Vietnam there was a long cool down period.
Also it took years for the true scale of lying and issues in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq to be revealed by whistle blowers. During those wars the media was far more critical than they are now. Sooner or later there will be a Daniel Ellsberg of Ukraine and most likely we will find out the lies and propaganda for this war were at least as spectacular as they were in the previous wars.
There’s no need for moralism when we’ve got tribalism.
The average Ukraine sympathizer sees something like this or this and turns into the staunchest of partisans. No philosophy required.
Honestly, after years of your doomsaying, I still don’t know what you expect to find out. There’s no real equivalent to “saddam has WMDs.” No real wargoal, seeing as we aren’t at war. No American casualties to cover up. So what’s the big reveal? What undermines the premise of “we’ll pay you not to give that guy what he wants?”
Most likely massive exaggerations of Russian incompetence, a massive downplaying of Ukrainian successes, huge depletions of western stockpiles, wild levels of corruption and a war based on slogans rather than reality. It will be hard to sell Russia is collapsing, Ukraine are uber mench as Ukraine is falling apart. They are way more loudly invested in this fiasco than some fiascos in the Middle East. It will be embarrassing when the charade falls apart.
Where exactly are you getting sold that narrative?
Looking at CNN or WaPo or the NYT, they aren’t selling a Russian collapse or obvious Ukrainian superiority. That’s a sucker’s bet. They’re playing the underdog angle where Ukraine is barely (but admirably!) holding out against the aggressor. Supporting Ukraine as an “ought” rather than an “is.”
I think you’re conflating the armchair generals on Twitter with the broader base of support. It’s like assuming that all Christians are about to deconvert because the Branch Davidians got a prophecy wrong.
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Thermostatically relevant moral cause offers avenue for posturing. Its proximate to "demand for racism outstripping supply" and thus every small incident needs to be emphasized as maximally as possible within the attention window before people stop caring.
No one (in general, not the poster specifically but I won't care either way) cared about Maidan or whateverfuck other than its relevance as an anti-CIA USA bad bulletpoint. The relevance of Russia in 2022 due to the invasion is probably the biggest shot of adrenaline to the Russian national psyche because they are now a feared invading monster in the eyes of the west, not a dying gas station surrounded by rotting tank graveyards. Unlike (most) transphobes, Russians revel in being treated as scary enemies of the west, because they correctly calculate that the west is not interested enough in ruining their comfy lives by pocketbook or nuclear hellfire. Playing up the big bad unstoppable enemy is great especially if the only cost is a bunch of Buryats and Dagestanis that you were hoping to get rid off anyways.
The specific tactical strategic macro historical whateverfuck navelgazing about immutable historical characteristics or other personal pet explanatory theories are just fitting a messy situation onto personal prior beliefs. Russia Ukraine offers a delicious discussion ground for Grand Theory on (military/history/racial character/jews) without consequence, because Ukraine and Russia are irrelevant just as Sudan is irrelevant. A choice is being made to pay attention, and a choice can be made to ignore. Can't do that for Israel because of retarded domestic US politics, can't ignore China because Altman needs to justify his ascension to AI Godhood.
Russia being irrelevant implies that the whole of Europe is irrelevant which .. I'm not decided on but is probably true. After all, it's China that matters now. The developed world is no longer just Europe + Northern America and Chinese outsize those two regions by a factor of 2 in workforce and probably more in other ways.
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I think it's more people just not really being able to handle getting live footage of any bad thing happening in the world without wanting to intervene and completely disregarding any sort of a cost-benefit analysis or nuanced view of human conflict. Ukraine and Palestine are both dragging out beyond any sane historical need since there's an overwhelming need to keep rehashing them in the court of public opinion.
If live footage of atrocities motivated anyone at all there would have been a scorched earth campaign to clease Brazil and Mexico of gangs, followed by seperatists in Ethiopia and Sudan. Funkytown remains one of the most gruesome videos out there of human suffering being gleefully meted out by enthusiastic participants fully aware of what they were doing, and there are countless amputated corpses scattered in the vast Brazillian forests where the flayings and murders were filmed specifically to be shared with the families of the deceased. Ukraine and Palestine are relevant for retarded domestic political reasons in any country that professes to care, and for that reason livestreamed mass murders in Sudan are just dismissrd as sandshit.
It’s funny you should mention that. I vaguely remember the bygone days when ISIS captured the attention of the Western media for a relatively short period of time, and the antics of the ISIS executioner ‘Jihadi John’ were getting plastered all over television and online news. There was one TV report after another, segments, outrage, basically just an insane amount of attention, at least for a short time and I was like…really?! Not even 50 or 100 miles away from some of these TV studios, Mexican cartels were torturing, beheading, dismembering and flaying their victims on camera like it was just another Tuesday, and still pretty much nobody in the West cared besides the regulars of a few gore websites. I get it that their victims weren’t white but the imbalance was still sort of crazy.
The unspoken gentlemans agreement of western inviolability actually does hold some weight: do whatever you want to your own people just dont attack whites. ISIS hung up dozens of men on meat hooks and then slit their throats so that their blood ran in rivers down the drain, but its Kayla whateverherface that captured global attention because some white do gooder didn't enjoy the normal aura protection they had during the hippie traip era. Mexican cartels just slaughter paisas in villages so urban fresas (white girls) don't even pay attention. Ukrainians and Russians and that entire warsaw pact area aren't thought as White, they're slavs doing slavshit, so they're unimportant.
Jihadi John and ISIS mistake was to openly declare war on the west and encourage actual action domestically to kill whites. If they stuck with killing Sunnis and Kurds they'd be dismissed as sandshit barbarians unimportant to the west. Kill your own and don't kill the westerner and no media will pay attention. This obviously means Taiwans only line of defense is encouraging as many whites to migrate there as possible, and so their courting of MAGA influencers is to raise the hostage value of white sexpats.
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