The Ukraine war thread
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That’s right, virtually no one, not even the experts thought he would invade.
On the other hand Putin’s thesis did spell out to those who read it that he held the West and open democracy in complete contempt. It also laid bare his paranoia wholly warped sense of history. At least that is how I read and understood it at the time. Up to that point I was not only open to some of Putin’s grievances with the West but also the Russian claim to Crimea. His written rant induced me to revisit his actions over the past twenty odd years and during the course of the ensuing months leading up to the invasion, I realized just how much I had been error.
Putin represents a truly malevolent idea and force in the world, there is no dispute about that any longer.
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Don’t know what it means or what gave rise to it but under the circumstances it can’t make things any worse than they are:
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"My pronouns are FA/FO." - Mik, 2024
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My gut feeling is that it had more to do with the current NATO exercises in Europe, Iranian drone specialists in Crimea and recent incidents involving Russian and NATO aircraft in proximity to one another and designated airspace.
Carving up someone else’s country fall within the job descriptions of Heads of State and their respective Foreign Ministers and Sect’y s of State.
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If past actions are any indicator, the Kremlin is the process of blaming Ukraine and, by extension, NATO, for an operation Russia itself is planning to execute:
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Lots of LNG heading to Europe - if they can take it in.
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“Little by little I am learning the art of being quite content by doing very little slowly” ~ Lionel Hardcastle
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@Renauda said in The Ukraine war thread:
At least one Russian pundit appears to be clueing in on reality.
That guy's pretty brave. The clear embarrassment on all the other faces was pretty funny.
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"Now look here, you Baltic gas passer... " - Mik, 6/14/08
The saying, "Lite is just one damn thing after another," is a gross understatement. The damn things overlap.
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"Now look here, you Baltic gas passer... " - Mik, 6/14/08
The saying, "Lite is just one damn thing after another," is a gross understatement. The damn things overlap.
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Abandoned Russian base holds secrets of retreat in Ukraine
In all, the bunker yielded thousands of pages of documents. Reuters reviewed more than a thousand of them. They detail the inner workings of the Russian military and shed new light on events leading up to one of President Vladimir Putin's most stinging battlefield defeats: Russia’s chaotic retreat from Ukraine’s northeast in September.
In the weeks before that defeat, Russian forces were struggling with surveillance and electronic warfare. They were using off-the-shelf drones flown by barely trained soldiers. Their equipment for jamming Ukrainian communications was often out of action. By the end of August, the documents show, the force was depleted, hit by death, desertions and combat stress. Two units – accounting for about a sixth of the total force – were operating at 20% of their full strength.
The documents also reveal the increasing effectiveness of Ukraine’s forces and offer clues to how the eight-month-old war might unfold, with Russia now under intense pressure on the southern front around the Black Sea coast. In the weeks before their retreat, Russian forces around Balakliia, a town 90 kilometres south of Kharkiv, came under heavy bombardment from HIMARS rocket launchers, recently supplied by the United States. The precision missiles repeatedly hit command posts.
A Russian officer who served in the Balakliia force for three months, described to Reuters a sense of menace hanging over the occupiers. One of his friends bled to death in early September after a Ukrainian strike on a command post in a nearby village.
“It’s a game of roulette,” said the officer, who asked to be identified by his military call sign Plakat Junior 888. “You either get lucky, or you are unlucky. The strikes can land anywhere.”
