The Ukraine war thread
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How nice that Fox patriotically edited out the comment.
Journalistic excellence FTW!
Oh, sorry, sorry, mustn't shoot the messenger.
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As John Bolton stated in a recent interview “Putin thought Trump was a fool who could be easily manipulable if he could get him the right situations”. Putin certainly recognized that Trump admired the other strong man leaders like Erdogan, Xi and Kim. Moreover, he saw Trump as a force set out to weaken if not altogether dissolve NATO.
Trump sold out the Kurds to Erdogan so why, in his little narcissistic brain, should the Ukrainians be not be sold out to Putin?
“Little by little I am learning the art of being quite content by doing very little slowly” ~ Lionel Hardcastle
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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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"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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Given the Byzantine nature of Kremlin politics, I don’t think anyone on the outside knows. Suffice to say though that Prigozhin accumulated a lot power over the course of a dozen or so years. Up until recently he has been treated as a palatine prince. That privileged status appears to be waning as of late.
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Russia has lost an estimated five men for every Ukrainian soldier its forces have killed in the battle for Bakhmut, according to a Nato official.
Speaking to CNN on condition of anonymity, the official said that Nato intelligence showed that Russia’s losses in the assault on the eastern salt-mining town far outweighed Ukraine’s.
The official also said, however, that Ukraine’s losses defending the city were significant.
Russia’s use of costly wave attacks have prompted comparisons to the First World War and the commander of the mercenary forces leading the assault has described the battle as a “meat grinder” for Russian troops.
Russia has been assaulting Bakhut since August, in what has become the longest and costliest battle of the war.
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"My pronouns are FA/FO." - Mik, 2024
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Good and concise presentation. The author is, of course, saying what John Bolton, Timothy Snyder and several other analysts have been saying for awhile now; that the West remains fearful of enabling Ukraine to obtain a decisive military victory over Russia and a return to the 1991 borders.
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Is Putin losing control of the message? Interesting note from two days ago:
Russian Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Maria Zakharova confirmed that there is infighting in
the Kremlin inner circle, that the Kremlin has ceded centralized control over the Russian information space, and that Russian President Vladimir Putin apparently cannot readily fix it. Kremlin journalists, academics, and Novorossiya supporters held a forum on the “practical and technological aspects of information and cognitive warfare in modern realities” in Moscow on March 11.[2] During a panel discussion Zakharova stated that the Kremlin cannot replicate the Stalinist approach of establishing a modern equivalent to the Soviet Information Bureau to centrally control Russia’s internal information space due to fighting among unspecified Kremlin “elites.”[3]Zakharova’s statement is noteworthy and supports several of ISW’s longstanding assessments about deteriorating Kremlin regime and information space control dynamics. The statement supports several assessments: that there is Kremlin infighting between key members of Putin’s inner circle; that Putin has largely ceded the Russian information space over time to a variety of quasi-independent actors; and that Putin is apparently unable to take decisive action to regain control over the Russian information space.[4] It is unclear why Zakharova — a seasoned senior spokesperson — would have openly acknowledged these problems in a public setting. Zakharova may have directly discussed these problems for the first time to temper Russian nationalist milbloggers’ expectations regarding the current capabilities of the Kremlin to cohere around a unified narrative — or possibly even a unified policy..
Source: https://understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-march-11-2023
“Little by little I am learning the art of being quite content by doing very little slowly” ~ Lionel Hardcastle
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@Renauda in the early stages of the war, it seems like the Russian populace bought Putin's rhetoric and flag-waving. "De-Nazification!" "Re-uniting Russia!" all sounded pretty good.
And now, 13 months later, with tens of thousands of body bags flowing into Russia it might be hitting home that, well, this was a bad idea. Probably everyone knows someone who has lost someone in the war, or who has sustained a life-crippling injury.
You can't keep that shit up forever with rhetoric.
You have to show gains and "winning." The current battle in Bakhmut is, from what I gather, not strategically important, but from a morale standpoint, it's a must-win for Russia.
"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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Regardless, Putin still has widespread domestic support in his war effort. He has been successful in conflating this war with the war against Hitler in WWII. From what I can tell, problems in the field are seen as the politicians and military leadership lacking in Stalinist resolve to annihilate the enemy.
There needs to be a lot more losses and body bags brought for that attitude to change.
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The most horrible thing you'll read today.
Ukraine has accused two Russian soldiers of sexually assaulting a four-year-old girl and gang raping her mother at gunpoint in front of her father, as part of widespread allegations of abuse during the more than one-year-long invasion.
According to Ukrainian prosecution files seen by Reuters, the incidents were among a spree of sex crimes Russian soldiers of the 15th Separate Motorized Rifle Brigade committed in four homes of Brovary district near the capital Kyiv in March 2022.
Russia's Defence Ministry did not respond to a request for comment. Phone numbers listed for the brigade were out of order. Two officials at the Samara Garrison, of which the brigade is a part, said they were unable to give contacts for the unit when contacted by Reuters, with one saying they were classified.
Most of the alleged atrocities took place on March 13, when soldiers "in a state of alcoholic intoxication, broke into the yard of the house where a young family lived," the prosecutors alleged.
The father was beaten with a metal pot then forced to kneel while his wife was gang raped. One of the soldiers told the four-year-old girl he "will make her a woman" before she was abused, the documents said.
The family survived, though prosecutors said they are investigating additional crimes in the area including murders during the same period.
President Vladimir Putin's government, which says it is fighting Western-backed "neo-Nazis" in Ukraine, has repeatedly denied allegations of atrocities. It has also denied that its military commanders are aware of sexual violence by soldiers.
The soldiers were both snipers, aged 32 and 28, the files said, adding that the former had died while the younger, named as Yevgeniy Chernoknizhniy, returned to Russia.
When Reuters asked for the identities of both soldiers, prosecutors provided only the name of the younger man. When Reuters called a number in online databases for him, a person saying he was Chernoknizhniy’s brother said he was deceased.
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