Gain.
Printable View
Gain.
Not a chance.
I see Vlad's back to terror bombing civilians.
https://www.understandingwar.org/bac...ment-october-9
This is a good write up about the Russian domestic response to the bridge explosion and pretty much explains why they've shelled cities overnight.
Old Russian basketball coach mate of mine has just sent me a message.
He "escaped" Russia to the only country he could buy a ticket to, being Kyrgyzstan. Had to leave his wife behind in Russia. Brutal.
Now looking for a coaching gig to earn some dosh.
Terror bombings don't actually achieve anything in this context (they might do in Syria with a more downtrodden population, I don't know). It's just a sign they've run out of ideas.
Russia = toast.
We should tactically nuke them instead.
Putin's credibility depends on him winning the war, the war is unwinnable, and so the bread is toasting. When it pops out of the toaster is a matter of time and events, but it'll pop. There's no turning toast back into bread.
Unless he turns us all into the spread first.
He’ll be dead within a few months.
The footage of the bridge bombing that killed those civilians was quite good fun but twitter seems to be quieter on footage of these Russian missiles which is a shame. Hopefully they can make a commemorative coin or something.
German consulate hit.
I’ve no idea what Putin’s goal is, does anyone?
Yes, reunite the old Soviet empire and murder all the "Nazis" in Ukraine.
The Nazi stuff is what he's said publicly, but Christ knows what he actually wants behind closed doors.
How it will end up playing out is anyone's guess but the aim was absolutely to restore the old imperial borders.
All the Russian nationalists think they have a claim to the entire Soviet land. Ukraine (and Georgia some years ago) were getting too anti-Russia for their liking.
You'd think they'd be grateful for the 40 odd years of stagnation and poverty they gave them.
He wants land. Irradiated land is not worth having.
If there's one thing Russia aren't short of, it's land.
If I had to guess - which I do because Vlad isn't taking my calls - it's 50% about rebuilding the Soviet Union and 50% about not having a massive Nato member on his doorstep.
I stumbled across this from back in May. Some interesting tidbits.
Quote:
Annexation of Ukrainian lands is likely the only “off-ramp” that Putin is interested in pursuing at this time. Even this face-saving option, which falls far short of the Kremlin's initial war aims of complete regime change in Kyiv, would be a devastating blow to Ukraine and is likely the minimum outcome that the Kremlin is willing to accept. If Putin can declare victory by annexing large swathes of Ukrainian territory, he can better sell the costs of the war to the Russian population and to any sympathetic global audiences. The Kremlin absurdly justified its unprovoked war of aggression against Ukraine as defending the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics from Ukrainian “Nazi” aggression and an alleged planned genocide against Russian speakers.
Quote:
After annexing Ukrainian territory, the Kremlin will frame Ukrainian negotiators’ demands for the return of Ukraine’s sovereign territory as absurd requests for Russia to give up its own land and dismiss them.
Quote:
A Russian military collapse combined with further Ukrainian battlefield successes or the Kremlin's acceptance that a military collapse is imminent are likely the only other circumstances under which Putin would accept something less than his stated objectives for this phase of the war. Collapse does not necessarily mean a mass surrender or rout of the Russian military. A Russian military collapse would more likely be roughly analogous to the state of the French army from April to June of 1917 during the First World War, when over half the divisions in the French army refused to go on the offensive due to shattered morale and poor leadership. Russian forces in such a state would be extraordinarily vulnerable to concentrated Ukrainian counteroffensives, and the Ukrainian military would be able to pick the battles of its choosing if Russian forces were unwilling to attack.
This was written in May but pretty much accurately predicted where we are up to right now. The rest of the article floats more ideas about what will happen even further down the line.Quote:
The Russian military will not be completely destroyed, nor would it have to leave Ukraine before reaching a state of collapse. However, a collapsed Russian military would lose its ability to function as a coherent fighting force. If that happened, Putin might well find himself obliged to accept far less than his current stated objectives.
Well Finland have already fucked that concept, unless they’re not sufficiently massive.
This isn't 'terror bombing'. They have bashed a load of infrastructure in. They ought to have done this for about three weeks straight prior to invading like the Americans would have done (or maybe whilst invading accounting for them invading a worthy country), and you can't just cook it up over a Sunday afternoon, so this will have been on the books for a while.
Putin has said it’s retaliation for the bridge attack. Which isn’t completely untrue, but reading between the lines, he’s under a lot of pressure, and for the first time ever open criticism, domestically, so he kind of needed a pretext to show the nationalists (Wagner etc) he still means business. Because really, the missile attacks didn’t really serve a purpose other than posturing. Infrastructure wasn’t massively damaged, they’ve just seemingly launched a random rocket at every city.
All out war doesn't really fit with the 'special military operation' narrative does it? Nor does it really make sense to liberate people by razing their cities to the ground.
Using deterrents like nuclear weapons encourages retaliation. It doesn’t discourage it because the cost of action is now priced in. So Putin would be begging to not simply be fighting NATO weaponry but also NATO troops.
It is why everyone always complains that the strongest sanctions are not used at the outset.
It's like Jimmy said a fair whack ago; we've forgotten how bad WW2 was. Hiroshima is just a word now and "mutually assured destruction" has lost its fear factor. We now live in the age of "lol, they wouldn't use them anyway, it would just be a conventional war". Which is probably true, until it isn't.
The terror bombing is the bit where they hit parks and traffic jams in central Kiev, and apartment blocks in Zaporizhiya (every night for the last several).
Didn't think you and Evo Morales would have found common ground so soon.
I’m just saying that force stops being a deterrent when you use it and a different set of calculations get used by policymakers. Russia isn’t worried we may put the current sanctions regime on …. Why would they, we’ve done it.
This weekend Ukraine blew up a bridge and killed innocent bystanders by either putting explosives in some poor unsuspecting cunt's lorry or recruiting a suicide bomber, and the global reaction was for people to piss themselves over it. What was that?
The destruction of military supply chain?
Terror bombing, yeah. The Royal Air Force missed a bridge in the Gulf War and killed a hundred Iraqis in a market. It happens.
I'm just amazed Russia didn't build a second bridge in the years since annexing Crimea.
Y'know, that thought occurred to me but more posts >
More of those infrastructure targets here. https://news.yahoo.com/russia-launch...162249496.html