Russia-Ukraine war and related tensions Megathread

[FEMA Camp Administrator]

I’m pretty sure these Russian troops who are currently engaged are the professionals (the Russian army is much less reliant on conscripts than it once was), which makes me highly sceptical of these reports of surrendering and low morale (especially since that’s obviously the kind of impression the Ukrainian government would want to create).

Per a podcast discussion among alleged experts last week, Russian conscripts mostly perform support functions while combat is undertaken by contract soldiers.

[FEMA Camp Administrator]

Zelenskiy's IG confirms the planned talks.

[FEMA Camp Administrator]

Glad that now there will be talks.  Most things Putin has been demanding are reasonable in my view and Ukraine should try to meet him halfway on that.  

What is not reasonable and I hope Putin drops are

a) Ukraine demilitarization (not even clear what that means, does it mean no Ukraine army or a Ukraine army with no weapons) - this is not a reasonable demand on a sovereign nation  
b)  Zelensky has to go - this does not benefit Russia anyway.  Unless Putin wants to annex Ukraine whole (then why have talks at all) Putin will need someone on the Ukraine side to make the deal (which most in West Ukraine will be negative on) to make it stick.  Zelensky sounds like the man for the job.  For sure a Russian puppet cannot make the deal stick in Western Ukraine

I mean I don't get the purpose of wanting a closer Ukraine to Russia but annexing the most Russian parts of Ukraine. With Crimea and Donbass out Yanukych loses in 2010 right ?

By a lot. A 800000 votes win becomes a 3 million votes loss. Crimea was 78-17, Donetsk was 90-6 and Luhansk was 89-8.

So this makes no sense at all. If Russia wanted to keep influence in Ukraine why are they trying to remove the most Russian parts of Ukraine?

Because humans are imperfect perceivers and judges of the world around them? Because a territorially-fragmented Ukraine cannot join NATO? Because maybe it was expected the Maidan government would agree to the terms of Minsk and basically grant the east of the country substantially more power?

[FEMA Camp Administrator]

I'll be real honest, while Putin has brought this upon his forces and himself, i can't help but be unnerved by the huge amount of major weapons NATO+allies are supplying both directly and openly.

Kinda freaks me out to think where the Russian perspective crosses the line from "Ukrainians are using some NATO weapons against us" to "NATO is basically at war with us"

Not to further freak you out, but this strikes me as a totally legitimate fear. For the first, say, 24 hours or so I was surprised that an overtly NATO-supplied Ukraine fighting Russia was basically "fine" when we know that direct NATO-on-Russia combat would get out of hand very quickly. Thing is, aside from the obvious option of leaving Ukraine to its fate, I'm not entirely sure what the other options are, except gradations of sanctions or appeasement.

[FEMA Camp Administrator]

I started translating TASS articles as a way of practicing Russian, but looks like they're under DDoS attack as right now they're not coming out. I noticed earlier today that RT had a DDoS guard on.

[FEMA Camp Administrator]

https://twitter.com/TheInsiderPaper/status/1498063410189250563

Freedom fries all over again.

Gahddamnit. It was only a matter of time.

[FEMA Camp Administrator]

What is happening now in Ukraine is the genocide of the Ukrainian people. If we talk about me, everything is calm in my region, except for the shelling of military units. I have now signed up for territorial defense and am preparing to defend my country

Good luck, and God bless.

[FEMA Camp Administrator]

Don't know if this has alredy been reported on here, but the 40-mile long Russian mega convoy (I guess Putin would call it a Freedom Convoy ) that was advancing on Kiev from the north has come to a halt apparently. They've run out of fuel.


https://twitter.com/JackDetsch/status/1498690292568018952


https://twitter.com/TristanSnell/status/1498774395644428296

"What if Visser Three from Animorphs got really into the Keystone Kops, then became real and was put in charge of a real military?"

This was supposed to be the logistics convoy!

Thank you, sir, for reminding me that animorpha exist!

[FEMA Camp Administrator]

https://twitter.com/PopulismUpdates/status/1499864150515720196?t=cnei7SItoGln3ok...

Кошка 

[FEMA Camp Administrator]

https://twitter.com/MenshevikM/status/1500533387999813635?s=20&t=cIh-IKxKNoD...

DO NOT REMOVE THIS LABEL

[FEMA Camp Administrator]

https://mobile.twitter.com/vptevo/status/1500307182818054145

Nixon should have never resigned.

[FEMA Camp Administrator]

This might very well be the best time in decades for nations to engage in "reclamation efforts" against long-term Russian expansion. One can only imagine what might happen if there was a coordinated effort where Japan tried to retake the Kurils, Georgia in South Ossetia and Abkhazia, Finland with Karelia (maybe even Kaliningrad by Germany, Poland and/or Lithuania)...

I think most of this would be a straight out bad idea for similar reasons to why Russian invading ukraine was a bad idea, but even more so (vague casus beli, hostile populace, invading nations with little experience about wars of conquest, flying in the face of international law) which is why it won't ever happen, but the one exception is Georgia. If Russian troops are indeed flying out of the puppet states to back up Ukraine, what is really stopping the Georgian government just waltzing in, like when Italy simply walked into Rome when Napoleon III's Papal Protection Guard were recalled for other purposes?

I mean, they won't (most Georgians, even though they have little sympathy for russia and want their country united, do not really want war, especially to be the aggressive party) but perhaps in the longterm this means Abkhazia could edge closer to Tbilisi if Moscow is a less reliable backer. The current government in Georgia has a lot of prewar Zelensky vibes, so who knows how the actual population would react

I've been thinking to myself for a while that this might be an opportunity for smaller nations to "resolve" a few frozen conflicts. AFAIK, Azerbaijan, well-armed and flush with enthusiasm from recent victories, appears the only one with such an appetite--a development I view negatively.

[FEMA Camp Administrator]

...some territorial accommodation via say real referenda in exchange for Russia accepting that Ukraine become a NATO member might have some merit.

I don't say this to disagree with your proposal. The opposite in many ways. But: this kind of thinking demonstrates the absurdity of the Kremlin's apparent play here. The secessionist status of Donetsk and Luhansk was a viable way to prevent Ukraine's accession to Western supra-national institutions only if it remained not-entirely-successful, or somehow forced a deal on Kiev. It was already extremely risky, in that the Crimean, LNR, and DNR secessions already removed voters living there from any political input in Kiev, and meanwhile the ongoing situation contributed to a substantial surge in Ukrainian popular support for NATO accession. A world where Russia managed to cleanly break off its rump republics, sans a permanent gun to Ukraine's forehead regarding its "neutral" status, left open the risk that the new rump state would flee right into NATO's arms. The need to force a deal on Ukraine was, I presume, the source of the "feint" at Kiev early in the war. Of course, the state of the war now has rendered discussion of Russia's stated aims essentially moot; how could either side now tolerate some milquetoast federalization and multilateral exchanges of neutrality for security? In Georgia and Moldova, by contrast, there has been little evolution of the situation for 1-3 decades, and, all else being equal, neither is likely to join NATO sans major paradigm shifts.

[cue unstructured rant]

With this in mind, my theory is that, if we take the Russian government at face value (this is not a given, of course) we would have to assume some additional precipitating actions leading Putin, et al to think that now was the time to strike. If it had truly been about chemical weapons or genocide, surely the Kremlin had had eight years to rectify the situation! I have heard some cite a February 2022 statement made by Zelenskiy on the acquisition or building of nuclear weapons, but if that speech had any role in Putin's calculus, this only serves to emphasize the way in which Russian leadership (and, one is forced to concede, Ukrainian leadership) had already trapped itself in an escalatory circle--no such comment would have been made in a non-wartime Ukraine. At other points, it has been noted that the Biden administration had placed additional pressure on Zelenskiy to prosecute public figures with ties to Russia. But was the prospect of losing a few key voices in an already anti-Russia Ukraine so apocalyptic? I am not sure. (Ironically, at the time I had been mentally working on a fictional writing project that involved similar elements, so maybe it is in fact likely)

A third theory--of my own authoring--relates the war to events in the South Caucasus, where the Artsakh and Armenian militaries--armed with ancient Soviet hardware--were absolutely pummeled by an Azerbaijan fueled by natural gas revenues, ethnonationalist unionism, and shiny new drones from Israel and Turkey. In the aftermath of the 2020 war, there was talk among Western-leaning academics about what Ukraine could learn in the realm of military reforms from Azerbaijan, and as we all know Ukraine was set to buy the Turkish Bayraktar drone (hero of the Azeri war effort) before Putin's 2022 invasion even began. I don't propose this as a standalone motivator, but it may have helped to introduce the idea that, against all odds, a Ukraine with the right minds and money might win, and that it was best to pull the trigger now than wait for that day to come.

We can't ignore additional influences--the signing of Nord-Stream 2 making Russia feel secure i its place in European energy infrastructure; the pullout from Afghanistan revealing that Western-backed institutions would crumble at a moment's notice without external military support; etc.--so who knows?

[unstructured rant has petered out]

[FEMA Camp Administrator]

It is ironic that given how many Russo-Persian wars took place between the 1650s and 1820s now Iran emerge as a key ally for Russia.

Fascist Russia and Theocratic Fascist Iran agree on one thing: the western world order of democracy and human rights, not to mention US power, must be overturned.

Neither of those two regimes are even remotely close to fascism.

Schematics. They are authoritarian regimes.

Semantics!?

[FEMA Camp Administrator]

You know, it tells you a lot about the mindset of people who run intelligence/security agencies that they imagine a coup as some kind of esoteric sci-fi battle where those who have the shiniest high-tech toys and the purest psyche will win, even though every coup in Russian history was some variation on this:

And these people are Russians! They should know. But then Putinism is all about historical illiteracy.

I feel this has to in some way be intertwined with the long-expressed view that the definition of a "coup" involves some semblance of a popular uprising--see the way the Color Revolutions and Maidan are classed as "coups". Coups, therefore, must involve some way to trick or incite the masses.

[FEMA Camp Administrator]

.....what?

https://twitter.com/francis_scarr/status/1602324614725734403?s=20&t=0iWsfP79...

OK, blame the gays that Portugal lost a football game if you must (I did have some trouble handling the gear shift from cyborgs to non white Morocco beating white Portugal at football), but given how superior Russian culture is at stamping out the gay, and has been a champion of exorcising Western decadence in general, just why is Russia losing population, demographically?

"We're working to fix that through homophobia!" they insist as more and more people run for the border and couples forego children in times of uncertainty.

[FEMA Camp Administrator]

We're going help Ukraine and make Russia pay for it folks.
https://twitter.com/AndrewDesiderio/status/1605984424717193216

“Those have been worked out” ie it’s the US government and the US government will take what it will.

I love my country.

[FEMA Camp Administrator]

https://www.firstpost.com/world/poland-considered-partitioning-ukraine-says-former-polish-foreign-minister-12038982.html

"Poland considered partitioning Ukraine, says former Polish foreign minister"

If true then this confirms a key Russia talking about about Polish plans on Western Ukraine.

Only if you forget the context.

Anyway, Poles as Europe's rightful masters, etc. Czesc!

[FEMA Camp Administrator]

UN data on Ukrainian demographics for 2021 and 2023

Looks like the 20-35 age group have seen a steep decline.  For the males, it is battle deaths and immigration (although the immigration part must be limited due to Ukraine laws against able-bodied men from leaving) and for females, it must be all immigration.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FsfKVRSXoAAxkP5?format=jpg&name=small

Yeah, either way Ukraine has a disastrous demographic future. Russia is replacing it's losses & has a net positive due to it's annexations, Ukrainian refugees/deportations, and some migrations from the CIS countries. Ukraine even has a lower fertility rate than Japan.

According to the UN, (As of October, 2022) at least 3 million Ukrainians are in the Russian Federation, and that's not counting the territories Russia controls in Ukraine (Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, Kherson).

You can't annex your way to a good birthrate. (At least not in Europe)

[FEMA Camp Administrator]

It's official, Finland will be joining NATO with the last roadblock cleared.

Putin's elective invasion and occupation of Ukraine has effectively caused the opposite result of what he was attempting to stop.... the expansion of NATO closer to borders with Russia.

Finland won final approval on Thursday to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, a major shift in the balance of power between the West and Russia that was set off by Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.

Turkey’s Parliament, in a session that went deep into the night, cast the last vote needed for Finland’s entry into NATO, greatly enlarging the alliance’s border with Russia in a strategic defeat for its president, Vladimir V. Putin. In invading Ukraine last year, he made it clear that he was intent on blocking NATO’s eastward expansion.

With Turkey’s ratification, Finland now faces only paperwork to become a NATO member. There will be an exchange of letters and the filing of Finland’s accession documents, already complete, with the State Department in Washington. The United States serves as the depository of NATO under the alliance’s founding treaty.

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2023/03/30/world/russia-ukraine-news

This is only true if NATO's expansion is actually a thing that Russia is concerned about as opposed to a thing they like to use as an excuse to justify their aggression. Since an unjustified war of conquest against Ukraine, even if it had been successful, would give a fraying and aimless NATO a new purpose to exist there is no reason to believe that that is actually something that Russia worries about.

Well, we know from Putin's own speech that his ultimate goal is the restoration of the Russian Empire, of which Finland was part. If Finland hadn't joined NATO and in a world where Putin actually manages to take over Ukraine (which of course we know he won't, but I'm sure he thinks he can) it's not too crazy to imagine him setting his sight on Finland eventually. Now that it's a NATO member, that door is probably closed unless Putin has really lost his marbles. Ukraine is as far as he'll go unless he wants direct war with the West.

Moldova

[FEMA Camp Administrator]

https://twitter.com/juliaioffe/status/1653090547853148179
https://twitter.com/JenniferJJacobs/status/1653093775944699905

Surely, this reeks of being a typo/misspeaking.