Again, how do we know he underestimated this. He put 200,000 troops on the border. If he thought he was going to waltz in, why would he have done that?Originally Posted by Ben
Again, how do we know he underestimated this. He put 200,000 troops on the border. If he thought he was going to waltz in, why would he have done that?
No idea what argument you're making other than a confused one.
Do you know how much £££ it costs to invade and occupy another country? Now imagine doing that when your currency is valueless. They're fucked and we're not even a fortnight in.
I've switched off a bit for the sake of my own sanity, but I know he's talking in our parliament today. Are they not just doing the same as we did to try to get the Americans into The World Wars? Churchill went on a tour of America giving speeches iirc.
It should be pretty clear that I'm saying you, me, everyone else, haven't a clue what his plan was or how many losses he sees as a good result and it's ridiculous that we're pretending we do. And even if we did know and we knew correctly, well, he's not stopping, is he?
If the plan was "win at any cost" then Russia are succeeding. If the plan was meant to improve things, then they've failed by every conceivable measure.
No and I suppose that's the important point. You'd imagine he'd be relentless even if they lost every single member of their army. That's how dictators work. Keep on swimming keep on swimming.
They are doing that while their currency is valueless, I'm literally watching it happen on the news now.
Last edited by Yevrah; 08-03-2022 at 11:32 AM.
They've not even lost 10% of what they sent over originally, let alone what they have back home.
With stuff already purchased. It's the replacement and sustaining an army from this point on. They're fucked mate.
This is asymmetrical though, it isn't mutually assured destruction. It might not be pain free from 'The West's' perspective, but the lasting damage will be one way.
Which would be catastrophic to us, but not them. Perspective. I'm agreeing with you. All these stats about 'lol that's more than the Yanks lost in 500 years in Afghan lol' are totally irrelevant.
They literally prematurely published a victory article on the 28th. Fair enough, line up your propaganda ready, but for several news outlets to run it means they got the go-ahead from someone higher up who thought it'd be over much quicker.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-60562240
If Ukraine doesn't join NATO then they win. Obviously they don't want Russia falling to bits in the meantime, but anything short of that, including thousands of casualties, and they win.
I agree Russia are long term fucked if we continue, but are we really going to? I'm guessing our plan was hope Ukraine hold out long enough to get sanctions to bite enough and Putin to therefore negotiate. Whether he will or not, who knows, but we're already looking at an utterly unsustainable position in terms of fuel and wheat prices and we're not particularly renowned for doing things that screw us over for any length of time unless we absolutely have to.
Indeed. I'm genuinely not sure what anyone expects them to do. Zelensky will be dead in weeks so he might as well try anything he can.
I'm still confused as to how effectively turning every single Ukranian (even pro-Russian ones) against your country forever pretty much overnight helps stop it doing something you don't want it to do?
I hope they are tried as war criminals when this is over.
For some reason and I don't know why whenever 'village' is referenced I always think of it as something in the Jungle Book with a couple of straw huts or something. Need to stop that as it's probably the equivalent of Newport or something.
Cool heads would know that NATO aren't going to intervene, and wouldn't use up all their political capital telling them to do so. Instead they'd be pressing for every other kind of assistance and still greater sanctions on Russia.
It's by no means clear that they will lose, and if they do lose, the cost to Russia, and impossibility of maintaining control of the country for any period of time, will make it the most pyrrhic of all victories.
Why do they care? No one is ever going to attack Russia.
Agree the maintaining control bit will be difficult, but it looks like if they didn't realise that before, they have now and have decided to level the whole country as a result.
Then it's just a pointless land grab and a border extension of nothing.
The changes are already happening and will continue to do so.
Take Germany for example. They have reversed a long standing 'stealing a living' policy with regards to defence spending [vee can't be trusted to have an army!] and will in all likelihood also attempt to unwind their equally daft but entirely self-serving [to date] energy dependence on Russia [as will much of the EU]. Suddenly 'strategic significance' becomes a major consideration for Western governments, which, perhaps outside of the US, hasn't really been the case in the let's all be friends happy global community era.
Interesting as well that for all the 'uniting the Western world' stuff, a Europe/Germany that pays for its own defence is ultimately a Europe/Germany that doesn't have to listen to the Americans, and could therefore be pulled away from them.
Are they melted inside that car?
They look pretty comfy considering they just got shelled in the face.
I didn't realise Clive Myrie is still doing in-the-field journalism since taking over on Mastermind. Turns out he's been in Kyiv the last few weeks.
As Russian military operations go this has been a pretty good one, people make the assumption that they care about losing personnel and equipment (be it actual casualties, desertion, or simply flogging their stuff off to the locals) when really that's just how they've operated for as long you care to go back. I've not heard of them actually fighting each other yet so it's medals all round so far.
US set to confirm they'll ban Russian oil. Not a big deal for them because they're a net exporter anyway and barely use Russian oil so a) it shouldn't affect global prices that much at all, but b) they're such an influence that other countries are bound to follow suit.
HOWEVER, the bigger news from this is that they're attempting to normalise relations with Venezuela, and their reserves are absolutely vast and will blow Russia out of the market anyway and drop the global price noticeably.
By normalise I assume you mean stop couping and murdering their presidents.
Precisely.
Viva Venezuela! Viva Chavez!
Drop the global price but not for the end customer who will still continue to be raped.
Any chance of us finding massive gas reserves under the Quantocks?
Aren't they barely able to tap their reserves because their state-run oil company is shit? I think they are also the difficult ones that aren't worth getting unless oil is super expensive, which it currently is, but it makes them both a shit short-term bet and a worse long-term one. The Iranians would be the better ask.
My company is currently tendering on a job in the Lake District and the geology surveys show immense amount of gas. Not sure how that stacks up against our annual usage, but it's there. No doubt we'll contract the mining of the gas out to the Chinese or French.
Probably, but I guess from the American's point of view Venezuela are much more likely to be appeased than Iran. Throw a few dollars at them in exchange for fucking off Russia. Venezuela could play a blinder here if they're switched on.
It seems we've all banned Russian oil and gas. What levers do they have in response to that? Cyber attacks?
Russia are cutting themselves off from the external internet on Friday and all the cybersecurity folk are pretty nervous about it.
Quite right. The real targets here will be public services, and we know how utterly shite they are at security.
And this shit washes in information black holes that have been used to this shit since it's inception, but when you take it away from people that had it and know it...that's a whole different ball game.
What does this mean in practice? Presumably the average Russian can't get on Twitter, do the rest of us lose Yandex? What about VPNs? Can GCHQ no longer fuck with them?
It'll be a closed system, so nothing in or out.
Basically all websites are required to move to Russian DNS servers so it'll be hard to keep any tabs on them.
This is an absolute fucking disaster btw for all those Russian companies using the likes of Microsoft, Apple, any sort of software developed outside of Russia, the cloud, fucking hell. Nightmare.
I read it as a hard disconnect?
We have offices in Russia (including IT security lol) so fuck knows what it means for them.
It's not a great move for Russians either so there's some doubt still that they'll actually go through with it.
PutinOS.
The whole of the last two weeks can be filed under 'not a great move for Russians', though tbh it's hard to think of anything in the last 400 years that has really been in their interests.
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