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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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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