Russia-Ukraine war and related tensions Megathread

[Florida Man for Crime]

https://twitter.com/NotWoofers/status/1496731416272457732

These are not accurate rockets, but they cause a lot of damage over a wide area.

[Florida Man for Crime]

https://twitter.com/michaelh992/status/1496733164412313603

[Florida Man for Crime]

Horrible.

https://twitter.com/christopherjm/status/1496741994609135627

[Florida Man for Crime]

https://www.twitter.com/ralee85/status/1496744600677011459

[Florida Man for Crime]

https://twitter.com/DeItaone/status/1496762091566678018

[Florida Man for Crime]

https://twitter.com/NotWoofers/status/1496731416272457732

These are not accurate rockets, but they cause a lot of damage over a wide area.

Since when does the Ukraine operate American MLRS?

It is not American I don't think (?). MLRS does refer to a particular American design specification, but it can also refer more broadly to the category of mobile truck carried rocket artillery, ultimately descending from the Soviet Katyushas of WW2.

[Florida Man for Crime]

Artillery strike in Uman, Cherkassy

It is particularly sad to read that. Uman for example is a place where in 1941, Russian and Ukrainian soldiers fought together side by side and were encircled by the early German advance into the Soviet Union. And now some of their grandsons/great grandsons are attacking their other grandsons/great grandsons, in the same places.

For shame.

[Florida Man for Crime]

https://twitter.com/DeItaone/status/1496770643236638724

[Florida Man for Crime]

https://twitter.com/DeItaone/status/1496773025832009728

[Florida Man for Crime]

Ukraine seems so far to be putting up surprisingly strong resistance, and the Russian military is not performing impressively. Hats off to the brave defenders of Ukraine. Those of us in other countries should urge our governments to do everything we can to support them in defending themselves from unprovoked aggression.

[Florida Man for Crime]

We probably lack the info needed to put a (likely) Russian defeat at Hostomel airport in a wider context. It's definitely good for Ukraine on net in terms of winning or losing this war, but it's not necessarily good enough for Ukraine. We shall see a more complete picture in due time.

Even the significant tactical successes that Ukraine is achieving are, in my opinion, striking, regardless of whether it is realistic to expect them to lead to any sort of immediate strategic conventional victory.

There is a marked contrast between e.g. the US/allied military performance in the First Gulf war, the 2nd Gulf War, and whatever you call what Russia is doing right now.

Russia should be able to eventually win the conventional part of the war (the occupation and potential insurgency being another phase and another matter), but this looks a lot more like a fight between semi-equal/competitive powers, not the sort of curbstomp that I think a lot of people were expecting.

Russia is showing surprising weakness. Unless they have something significant up their sleeves, this can't have been what Putin had hoped for when he put this into motion.

If Russia is having this much difficulty already, they may have a lot more difficulty if and win urban combat gets going.


And by the way, just because I really need to get it off my chest and feel like I really need to say this, F*** Putin.

[Florida Man for Crime]

Considering that the war doesn't seem to be that popular in Russia, is it possible that at least some Russian troops just don't put that much effort into it?

I think that may be the case. I imagine at least some of the troops are thinking to themselves: "what the hell are we doing this for in Ukraine of all countries? These are our friends, cousins, in some cases family, with whom we have much in common"

Many online communities of Russian speakers include many Russian-speaking Ukrainians in the same sort of way that online communities like this one (Atlas/TalkElections) includes people from many friendly countries, and Russian soldiers will have interacted in those communities. I have to imagine that experience makes it a lot harder to view Ukrainians as really being their enemy or as posing any sort of real legitimate/justified threat to Russia that they are protecting against.

[Florida Man for Crime]

Stepping up:

https://twitter.com/oscarrickettnow/status/1497235841692971009

[Florida Man for Crime]

...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.

It would be nice if it were the case that all that Putin really ever wanted was for Ukraine to not join NATO. If so, there would have been a fairly simple solution - Ukraine not joining NATO, with peace otherwise prevailing.

However, this is really more wishcasting as to what would be nice if it were the case, as opposed to being actually the true. Rather, Putin's ambitions seem to have been pretty clearly quite a lot larger. If you (and anyone else reading this) has not done so, I would recommend reading Putin's pre-war essay, which should make that clearer (especially if you also watch/re-watch his speeches late February from the beginning of the invasion).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Historical_Unity_of_Russians_and_Ukrainians

There is really no indication that Putin ever had any interest in some sort of deal where Ukraine would stay out of NATO in exchange for territory, because that was never his real goal. His goal was rather to either annex Ukraine outright, or to annex significant parts of it while de facto annexing the rest as a puppet state similar to Belarus but with more direct control over than Belarus. And then likely moving on to consolidate control over other areas (such as Belarus, since I already mentioned it) as well.

The only reason that didn't happen is that Putin greatly overestimated the capability and competence of the Russian military (as did many others), while underestimating the Ukrainians.

[Florida Man for Crime]

Kinda confirms my opinion on the whole situation tbh.

Crimea would likely now be 60% + for Russia (the '91 one vote did not assume that UA would be perceived as RU hostile). It is majority ethnic Russian, after all.

Same could be true for pre-Feb occupied Donbas, but certainly not as likely as Crimea.

Many pro-Ukrainian people who lived in Crimea were forced to flee, and Russia moved in lots of Russians (from Russia), providing incentives for people to move there, after it was taken over. So it is certainly quite plausible (I would definitely say more likely than not, speculatively) that a majority of the people in Crimea now do support being in Russia as opposed to Ukraine.

However, there is a word for that process of kicking out pro-Ukrainian populations and replacing them with Russians - ethnic cleansing.

So you can't approve of that unless you want to legitimize doing that as a way to justify other countries ethnically cleansing and annexing other territories in the future.

[Florida Man for Crime]

[Florida Man for Crime]

The Russian strategy in the  Donbass is interesting.  Historically, in the Russian Civil War as well as the Germany-USSR war SE Ukraine changed hands multiple hands between the Reds and Whites in one and the Germans and Soviets in the other.  In all cases the attacking party always avoided doing a frontal attack in the Donbass due to the heavy urban nature of the area which makes it favor the defense.  In all cases all sides tried to go around the  Donbass with encirclement attempts.  This time around Russia is trying to pound their way through the Donbass at a very slow pace.  I assume this is a combination of Russia not feeling confident at its ability to pull off an encirclement given the satellite intelligence that the Collective West can provide Ukraine as well as Russia deciding that it has the time to turn the Donbass into a meat grinder to try to inflict Ukraine causalities even if it means that the battle will take a long time.

The Russian strategy was not different.

Their initial plan way back in February was to do a vast strategic scale encirclement of the Donbas (and basically the entirety of the rest of eastern Ukraine) by taking Kyiv from Belarus and eventually linking up with their southern front which was pushing to the north-west from Crimea, through Kherson and ultimately reached as far as Voznesensk for about a day before it collapsed at the hands of Ukrainian militia wielding anti-tank guided missiles. So Russia didn't have the infantry manpower or logistics to support this enormous strategic encirclement, and got BTFO.

If they had been able to pull it off, they probably would have linked up their northern push and their southern push near Uman, which is the midpoint in the major highway connecting Kyiv and Odessa, and is also the exact same place the Germans made a huge encirclement in 1941 (albeit attacking from the opposite direction, but the fundamental reason of it being a junction was still the same).

The next step was then for a short time they were trying to do a slightly smaller scale encirclement by trying to secure control of the Dnieper, to trap all the Ukrainian troops to the east of it. They couldn't do this either and ground to a halt a bit south of Zaporizhzhia and on the outskirts of Kharkiv.

Russian ambitions continued to shrink to a smaller scale operational encirclement in he Donbas, earlier in the year when they were taking Severodonetsk and Slovyansk (before Ukraine eventually pushed back here in follow up operations stemming from the Russian collapse in Kharkiv).

Russian dreams of an encirclement continued to dwindle in the following months down to hopes for encircling Bakhmut, or even just taking a few little local villages and road crossings here and there in the vicinity of Bakhmut to sort of partially surround it, which is basically where we are today.

So anyway, it is not that Russia did not want to do an encirclement and bypass grinding urban warfare or that they have different strategic ideas, it is that they can't, because they are incapable and pathetic losers. So all they have left is sending poorly trained conscripted infantry and literal prisoners on infantry attacks with very little (if any) and poorly coordinated combined arms support.

[Florida Man for Crime]

https://sports.yahoo.com/ukraine-needs-thousands-western-tanks-164300856.html

"Ukraine needs ‘thousands of Western tanks’ to change course of war, says Ambassador Prystaiko"

Now Ukraine needs thousands of tanks?

Of course they do. And fortunately, we just so happen to have thousands of unused tanks (as well as other non-tank vehicles like Bradley IFVs) just sitting in storage stockpiles, doing nothing. And although the US military considers many of these to be obsolete and we have no real use for them ourselves, with trained crews they are superior to anything the Russians have. This even includes things like M60 tanks that the USA was barely even still using a few of in the 1991 gulf war and which were made obsolete by the Abrams 40 years ago in the early 1980s, but which even despite being so old that the last war in which they saw significant use was VIETNAM, will be at least as good if not better than most of what Russia is using if we even just bother to give them a tune up and maybe a new paint job.

And the best part is it hardly costs us anything to give them away, since we are no longer really using these ourselves and the procurement for these was budgeted already literally decades ago.

[Florida Man for Crime]

Just for the benefit of anyone who does not know that this exists:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sierra_Army_Depot

https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/sierra-army-depot

Nearly a mile above sea level in an isolated corner of Northern California, more than 26,000 armored vehicles stand ready. They form the most noticeable part of the Sierra Army Depot, a 36,000-acre repository for the U.S. Army’s tanks, trucks, and armored personnel carriers.

The Army set up shop at Sierra during World War II and used the base to store vast quantities of bombs and ammunition in hundreds of armored “igloos.” The site made a lot of sense for this type of work. As the Army later recounted in BRAC testimony, the spot was “near enough to Pacific ports, but far enough from the coast to be sheltered from possible attack.” It also had its own rail spur and boasted of a low rainfall climate that minimized the threat of rusting.

Over the decades, the stockpile of weaponry at the Sierra Depot grew as the Army started using the arid base to store an expanding fleet of surplus vehicles. Today that includes some 2,000 M1 Abrams main battle tanks that are parked in neat rows, along with vast lots of armored personnel carriers, trailers, trucks, and other miscellanea.

[Florida Man for Crime]

perhaps the most dangerous thing of all, other than giving Putin his pound of flesh of course, is the war running on and on indefinitely, with each year more dangerous and sanguinary than the last.

There is a countervailing force, though, which is that it is in the West's longer term interest for Russia to get bogged down into a longer term Vietnam-type experience. Every day the war goes on, the Russian military becomes more depleted and less of a potential conventional threat to NATO. And the longer it goes on, also the more anti-Russian attitudes in Ukraine will harden, and the more Ukraine will become a permanently militarized anti-Russian bulwark standing between Russia and the rest of Europe.

I suspect that part of the reason Western aid has been so pathetically lacking at least with regards to certain types of equipment (tanks etc) is that Western leaders do not necessarily want Ukraine to win too quickly and want to keep letting Russia bleed itself. So far a least, it seems like insofar as we are starting to increase aid and send tanks, it is only in small numbers and more in response to Russian escalation (mobilization) to keep the status quo stalemate and keep Ukraine standing, rather than sending sufficient aid for Ukraine to actually kick Russia out of Ukrainian territory. And this also means that Ukrainian troops continue to take unnecessarily high casualties, because we continue to withhold the good stuff that could help them destroy the Russian military while taking fairly low casualties like NATO would do if NATO were fighting directly.

[Florida Man for Crime]

Another thing is that whoever is making that cold-blooded calculation has to contend with the fact that public support in the West for Ukraine is not indefinite.  At some point, we are going to push for a quicker end to the war one way or another.  It is far preferable for western interests if we supply Ukraine with the weaponry and support it needs to end the war more quicky on its terms with as much of its territory liberated and restored to Ukranian control before we come to the peace table (and before the pipeline runs dry)

With regards to Ukraine coming to the peace table, it takes two to tango. Even if Ukraine wants peace after taking back its territory, there is no particular reason to think Putin will want to oblige them. Based on Putin's past history and behavior, I suspect he probably views this partly through the lens of his experience dealing with Chechnya. In Chechnya, Russia was kicked out ignominiously in the first Chechen war, but then later came back again with Putin, and even though it was also a quagmire, Putin simply persisted and outlasted the Chechen resistance. He probably hopes he can do similarly here, and if that is true he won't give up easily.

With his hopes of a quick victory having been dashed in 2022, I suspect something like is Putin's plan that he has mentally "settled for" - to outlast Ukraine and outlast western support for Ukraine. There are currently rumors that Russia may mobilize another 500k men, and may announce this as soon as in the next few days. If that happens, to me that would help confirm that this is indeed Putin's plan.

Even if Ukraine pushed Russia out entirely, Putin might well try to come back a few years later if he thought it was at all possible (if he is still Russia's dictator then). The only way that would possibly eventually change would be when eventually Putin dies or is replaced by some other leadership that may (or may not) have a different attitude.

So it seems to me that the choices for the west are either abandoning Ukraine, indefinite support for Ukraine (which you indicate you don't see happening) at levels sufficient to prevent Ukrainian collapse but not sufficient for them to actually win, or giving Ukraine sufficient support to win decisively by giving providing them a substantial technological and firepower edge, so that they can basically wipe out the Russians from a distance while taking relatively few losses themselves in the manner of the 1991 gulf war. Then that advantage would need to be maintained after Russia had been kicked out of Ukraine, at least for as long as Putin is around, to deter any thought of Russia trying again. But maintaining that advantage during peace would be much less costly than maintaining it during war.

The only reason not to provide that sort of decisive support to Ukraine is if we are afraid that if we do, Putin will use nukes. But if we are deterred from helping Ukraine successfully defend itself and world leaders both current and future draw the conclusion that you can just invade and annex non-nuclear countries (democracies) as though it were the 19th century as long as you have nukes, then what is happening to Ukraine will happen in the future to other countries that don't have nukes. And that means that many more countries will start trying to get their own nukes. In my view, that sort of future is too dangerous to contemplate and I don't see any way that would end well.

[Florida Man for Crime]

Today, German weapons manufacturer Rheinmetall has said that they have 88 decommissioned Leopard 1 and 22 decommissioned Leopard 2 tanks in their inventory.

...

After getting the ball rolling that way, the long-term solution could then consist of the decommissioned Leopards mentioned in the first paragraph.

Obviously that would be better than the 0 sent so far, but let's not kid ourselves pretending that ~100 tanks is any sort of long term solution.

[Florida Man for Crime]

The news on Credit Suisse is getting more ominous by the hour.  It could come to it going under or needing to be broken up.  Either way, I can see a significant effort and resources to bail out Credit Suisse or deal with the blast radius.  If it goes that way I wonder if it will occur in the minds of the collective West leaders "maybe we need to spend a teensy-weensy less money on Ukraine"?

Quite the opposite.

If there is a recession, high government spending is a positive thing for the economy, to support aggregate demand and hasten recovery. Whereas if the economy is good and there is inflation, then higher government spending is not so good for the economy, because higher aggregate demand will tend to increase the pressure on prices to rise.

If there is a recession, hopefully we can immediately put the newly unemployed back to work producing artillery shells for Ukraine, much as vast increases in armaments production finally brought the Great Depression to an end more than 80 years ago.

[Florida Man for Crime]

I'm no military expert, but it seems to me if you are pulling 40 year old tanks out of storage you are not winning.

Would not that logic also apply to sending Leopard 1 tanks to Ukraine ?

It might if Germany (or whoever else was sending some Leopard 1's) were at at war with Russia.

So, if Germany were at war with Russia, and all their Leopard 2's had been destroyed and they were forced to rely on pulling out old Leopard 1's, yes, that would be a sign that Germany might be losing.

But that's not what's happening here, is it?

[Florida Man for Crime]

I would argue that it is even worse.  At least Russia is using old tanks that fit with their tank doctrine  and consistent with their logical/repair/spare parts system.  Ukraine is taking old tanks that do not even fit with their tank doctrine. The latter, just looking at this specific case, seems more desperate.

That's a pretty uninformed take.

First of all, Leopard 1s are a heck of a lot better than T-55s (or frankly, even the last remnants of relatively more modern stuff that Russia still has left), and some properly used Leopard 1's can and will wipe the floor with hot ex-Soviet garbage, as you will see in the coming months.

Fortunately for you, you are only a Putinist keyboard commando, not a Russian soldier in a trench, so you won't be the one finding out the hard way.

Secondly, the reason why Ukraine has been given Leopard 1's and 2s is not because there is any shortage of other more modern tanks that could be given, but rather it is because it was thought to be better for Ukraine to get Leopard tanks rather than just giving Ukraine a bunch of M-1 Abrams. There are some good technical reasons for that, most importantly that the Abrams uses a jet engine which is very different from the diesel engines which the Leopard uses, which is much more similar to the diesel engines Ukraine's current ex-Soviet tanks use, and with which Ukrainian mechanics are familiar. And in addition to using a jet engine, the Abrams requires prodigious amounts of fuel.

Additionally, the plan earlier on was to give Ukraine Leopards so that European countries could give Ukraine some tanks rather than having the USA provide 100% of the tanks, while USA would have provided other non-tank AFVs that better fit the requirements of Ukrainian logistics (Bradleys, Strykers, etc).

However, at this point Ukraine is also getting M-1 Abrams, because this was politically necessary to get Scholz to feel comfortable with allowing Leopards to be sent. And even if European countries totally 100% run out of Leopards to give, I can promise you that there is no way we are going to run out of M-1 Abrams that can be given to Ukraine.

Here is a video showing you what we have sitting there idly at the Sierra Army Depot, most of which could be patched up and shipped off to Ukraine if actually needed:

If you spend the 1 minute watching that video, it should be abundantly clear that Ukraine is not going to run out of AFVs even if this war lasts decades.

The US military did not lose a single M-1 Abrams tank to enemy fire in the 1991 gulf war. NOT A SINGLE ONE!!! This is despite those all being models which are now 30 years old, while Russia is currently using equivalent models to what the Iraqi's were using in 1991.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_73_Easting
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Medina_Ridge
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Norfolk

So I think Ukraine will fare just fine if we simply give them even comparatively small numbers of M-1s from our absurdly massive stockpile. And if we were to give them a larger quantity from that stockpile, well... let's leave that to the imagination. If you disagree, I hope you enjoy being wrong (it does seem like you do), because you are going to be proven very wrong indeed.

And tbh, if we really wanted we could probably not even bother sending any more M-1s than the ones already announced, and just send old M-60s instead, and those would also obliterate anything that Russia could throw against them with comparatively low losses.