Russia-Ukraine war and related tensions Megathread

[Damocles]

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The spirit of Josef Gabcik and Jan Kubis lives on.

[Damocles]

https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/03/26/its-time-to-bring-back-the-polish-lithuanian-union/

"It’s Time to Bring Back the Polish-Lithuanian Union"

Foreign Policy magazine article on bringing back the Polish-Lithuanian as a counterweight to Russia. Note that the old Polish-Lithuanian did include Western Ukraine which was part of interwar Poland until it was annexed to Ukraine SSR after the 1939 Germany-USSR deal and confirmed after WWII.

Cleave off the Kaliningrad Oblast and make it a joint Polish-Lithuanian condominium. Two presidents serving as joint heads of state, one each appointed by the respective parliaments, and a local unicameral legislature elected according to EU transparency and accountability standards by party-list proportional representation.

[Damocles]

It's a good thing Kennedy and Khrushchev didn't have this casual of an attitude towards conflict between nuclear powers or we wouldn't be having this conversation at all. Is it just a strange coincidence that there has literally never been a conventional conflict between nuclear powers? India and Pakistan's wars ended, the US and USSR resorted to proxies and even North Korea became untouchable when their nuclear program achieved success.

Even if both sides want to keep it conventional, the problem is that all you need is a single submarine cut off from communications to make a fateful decision and at that point de-escalation becomes impossible. If Washington, New York, Moscow or Paris were to be obliterated is there any question whether the victim would instantly retaliate? In that situation Putin's rationality becomes irrelevant and the Dead Hand activates regardless.

Putin said that the West sending armaments to Ukraine would result in nuclear retaliation.

Putin did not resort to nuclear retaliation.

Putin said that NATO membership for Finland and/or Sweden would result in nuclear retaliation.

Putin did not resort to nuclear retaliation.

Putin said that Ukraine retaking Kherson city would result in nuclear retaliation.

Putin did not resort to nuclear retaliation.

Putin said that international attempts to hold Russian civilian-military leadership to account for war crimes since 2014 would result in nuclear retaliation.

Putin did not resort to nuclear retaliation.

It’s almost as if Putin has a pattern of bluffing about Russian nuclear readiness and repeatedly issues “Chinese final warnings”. He has nothing effective or viable enough to manage escalation between zero and nuclear annihilation, and he knows it. The state of the Russian conventional forces is a shamble of its former self, and he knows it. The western world does not take him seriously as a person or as a president, and he knows it. But he can do absolutely nothing about it.

[Damocles]

Why are you spending so much time talking about Putin's idle threats? Putin could also say the sky is blue. Just because someone is a liar doesn't mean that everything they say is untrue. I'm talking about reality:

No conventional war has ever been raged between nuclear powers, because it's understood that the risk that it would escalate to a nuclear conflict is, in fact, very high.

Putin doesn't need to make the decision, in an actual war the decision would ultimately fall down to the most paranoid nuclear submarine crew that happened to lose contact with command. America hasn't even risked a direct conflict with North Korea, a regime whose conventional forces are infinitely weaker, whose nuclear stockpile is a fraction that of Russia's and whose threats are even more bombastic. Even a rat while strike back if you force it into a corner.

It isn’t the West backing Russia into a corner. They have done that themselves. This whole siege mentality, this bizarre obsession with an apocalyptic final struggle against “the West”, this revanchist idea of God coming to “save” an “innocent” and “divine” Russia… it’s something they made up, not us. The west are not the aggressors here, and never have been, especially not after 1991.

I’m sure some folks living in South Ossetia and Abkhazia know full well what a “sovereign” Russia means for them. It is a Russia so “sovereign” that it disregards theirs, invades and occupies their homes under false pretenses, and cleaves off their countries’ rightful, internationally recognized territories.

It’s the delusions of grandeur, gross entitlement, and disrespect for other countries’ sovereignty that really lay at the heart of the conflict here. Russia is not a “great power” any more than Britain is, especially not after Putin publicly kowtowed and prostrated himself to Xi Jinping.

[Damocles]

Ah yes, that Ukrainian offensive that, according to certain posters in this thread, will certainly be bled white and mown down by Sergeant Bicepsky and Private Conscriptovich dual-wielding PKMs while screaming “Uraaa!” and dropping out the back of an IL-76 onto Hostomel Airport like something out of that Alexander Buinov propaganda VDV video.

[Damocles]

I love seeing Perun memes in the wild. Well done sir.

I love my weekly dose of hour-long Ozzie-accented PowerPoint presentations about defense economics in the context of a conflict taking place halfway around the world. It just… hits different. He is a titanium FF.

[Damocles]

Woodbury and spouting RuZZian propaganda while holding the rules-based international liberal-democratic order in contempt. Name a more iconic duo.

[Damocles]

RIP

Kurpasi had been Missing In Action since April 26, 2022 and just now declared dead.

Wilton died on April 7th in Bakhmut.

Titanium, eternal FFs.

[Damocles]

Yeah well, if Ivan isn’t firmly b#%ch-slapped, shown his place, and put back in line now, he’ll go off rampaging throughout half of Europe and try to reassert imperial domination over tens of millions of Slavs, Caucasians, Central Asians, etc. that he had historically dominated.

The state propaganda regularly shown on RuZZian television channels is incredibly chauvinistic in nature, depicting RuZZians as some sort of eternally innocent and pure people, while in the same breath talking about how the Chechens *totally* had it coming in 1999, etc.

Did some posters in this thread learn nothing from the last time when authoritarian leaders proudly proclaimed the superiority of their country’s primary ethnic or racial group, and then claimed that additional living space for their people must be made at the expense of others?

[Damocles]

The only permissible way for this war to end is for RuZZia to evacuate its army and abandon its territorial claims to the Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson regions of Ukraine; for Ukraine’s 1991 borders to be restored in their entirety; for RuZZian forces to permanently leave the Sevastopol Naval Base; for the Russo-Ukrainian land borders to be enforced as a demilitarized zone; for Ukraine to join NATO as a full member; and for NATO to maintain a permanent border policing and security mission in Kharkiv, Donetsk, Luhansk, Kyiv, Rivne, and other cities along the RuZZian-BelaruZZian border.

Also, while we’re at it, Finland and Estonia should hurry up and press their respective maritime territorial claims in the Gulf of Finland according to the principle of equidistance. Permanently claiming and enforcing those maritime claims opens the possibility of permanently connecting Tallinn with Helsinki through an undersea tunnel, enabling stronger economic connections between Finland, the Baltic states, and Central Europe.

It would also permanently block RuZZian military and civilian maritime traffic from transiting out of Saint Petersburg without crossing through the territorial waters of NATO member states, further isolate the Kaliningrad Oblast and make the geopolitics of its maintenance steadily more untenable, etc etc.

[Damocles]

Ah yes, let’s expend enormous resources of men, material, and time, and essentially create a massive meat-grinder that demolishes the capabilities of our army, only to capture… a town of maybe 72,000 residents? And we took how many thousands of casualties, expended how many millions of cartridges, took eight months just to get to this point, and utterly denuded every other section of the front to do this?

Pyrrhus of Epirus said it best, 2,300 years ago: “One more such victory, and we are undone.”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_cost

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escalation_of_commitment

[Damocles]

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If what this man is saying is true, then he needs an invitation to come to The Hague and testify on behalf of international war crimes prosecutors against Prigozhin and the various officers of ChVK Wagner and its associated organizations.

It is also clear that he was deeply disturbed and personally f#%ked up mentally by what his commanders ordered him to do. He is not an angel, and he is not by any means an innocent man. However, protective custody in a Norwegian prison is probably a better outcome than potentially being executed in Russia for speaking out about the truth of the war crimes Prigozhin and his associates were responsible for planning and carrying out.

[Damocles]

WTF I love Joe Wilson now.

He was always a fairly mainstream, old-school Republican, that one moment aside.

Obama: “There are also those who claim that our reform efforts would insure illegal immigrants. This, too, is FALSE!”

(lawmakers whispering and chattering seemingly disapprovingly and skeptically)

Obama: “The reforms… (Wilson: “You lie!”) The reforms I am proposing would not apply to those who are here illegally.”

Wilson: “YOU LIE!”

(lawmakers hooting and hollering and booing, general commotion)

Obama: “…It’s not true. Not true. And one more, misunderstanding I want to clear up. Under our plan, no federal dollars will be used to fund abortions. And federal conscience laws will remain in place.”

[Damocles]

Russia in my childhood (mid-2000s) seemed like it had calmed down and got its sh#%t at least somewhat together. Its power and influence relative to what it had as the USSR was diminished, sure, but it still seemed like an important part of Europe's economy, culture, and society. There were real reasons to be hopeful, then - oil revenues were high, European countries signed gas transmission deals and new projects for more pipelines, the IT sector was actually booming, and t.A.T.u. had been a viral success, and just represented the country in Eurovision. Young Damocles saw Putin as a powerful president, and maybe a bit authoritarian, but otherwise he seemed like a normal leader of a powerful country, and a decent counterpart to President Bush.

Of course, I was disabused of those notions when the Putin-Medvedev duumvirate conspired to escape the restrictions of the 1993 constitution. It seemed rather upsetting to me at the time that despite having a two-term restriction embedded into its constitution, that Putin returned to that post for a third term. Then it was, hey, the President's term is now six years, instead of four. That was what started ringing alarm bells that maybe Putin isn't a normal president, and in fact is more of a dictator than anything. Oh, and Putin's invasion of Crimea after Yanukovych got ousted in a popular revolution.

[Damocles]

iT wAs A cIA cOuP tHoUgH!!??!!!111!!!??!!!?!!!11!!

It's almost like if you refuse treatment for your alcohol problem, keep getting drunk like a sailor, and keep beating up your girlfriend, she'll leave and find another man to be with. And you'll have nobody to blame for that but yourself. You failed at being a good partner and treating them with the respect and courtesy and support that that relationship required to be successful. Just don't be surprised when other men jump in and intervene and start beating the piss out of you when you start a fight after finding her and her new man drinking at a bar together on Pushkinskaya Ulitsa.

[Damocles]

I have a friend who lives in Belgorod that I have known since about 2015. We were originally gamer buddies on a virtual LEGO construction sandbox game. He lived only 200 meters away from where the bomb unintentionally dropped and hit the ground.

I had a very enlightening conversation with him on Discord about this situation. The police and the civil defense troops came to defuse the bomb and remove it and detonate it somewhere else. He said it was a massive pain in the ass and so inconvenient to be woken in the night by the bomb falling and hitting the ground with a tremendous noise.

I informed him about the electronic draft notice law. His lawyer keeps petitioning the court for an exemption, because he has a disability that prevents him from being an effective soldier. I wished him good health, long life, and safety from this madness.

At least Russian civil defense troops seem to be doing their job quite well at UXO disposal. As pro-Ukraine as we both are, limiting harm to civilian non-combatants is a good thing.

[Damocles]

There absolutely should be a crime of aggression. Starting a war unnecessarily is an evil action and all the other crimes pale in comparison to it-they are just flow on effects from the crime. International law is clear that states should not be going to war to conquer or bully each other, and we should all agree that wars are not a good way to resolve disputes.

Generally speaking, when you press the "Justify War" button from the Diplomacy menu, there's a non-zero chance you'll accrue enough Infamy to give the other Great Powers a free "Cut down to size" CB. This is especially true when there's a Crisis war that spawns as a direct result of you using the "Increase tensions" National Focus in a border region.

[Damocles]

Anyone want to take bets on whether Putin will try to escalate the situation even further by killing Lukashenko, annexing Belarus, and installing a puppet regime? Possibly inciting a civil war within Belarus if the local people don't accept Putin's puppet?

[Damocles]

Mostly sharing because doggo:

https://twitter.com/Osinttechnical/status/1658145397078999042?s=20

Dmitry the doggo. Remove heckin’ orcs from Youcrane. Borfva ukrayina!

[Damocles]

Beyond just being a deplorable and disgusting war crime, RuZZia blowing up the Nova Kakhova dam has got to be one of the most monumentally stupid things they've done in this war. You invaded to secure Crimean water supplies and maintain your occupation, and now you just cut off one of the major lifelines they needed. Good job, 10/10.

[Damocles]

[Damocles]

I'd like to remind everyone that any offensive action is always going to be inherently more complex, more manpower and material-intensive, and more risky of greater losses than a comparable defensive action. Abrams and Leopard are not invincible pieces of wonder kit, but they do substantially help make sure their crews are only injured, and maybe a bit shook up if they are hit, instead of killed. Good tankers are far more difficult to replace than good tanks. Writing off every offensive operation as a "failure" after 6 days ignores the realities of the situation on the ground. Ukraine is doing fine, all things considered.

Omaha Beach was rough, yes. But Sword, Juno, Gold, and Utah generally saw good progress and the logistical support was quickly established to support further action. No sh#%t you're going to see losses even among the brigades we equipped and trained. But one has to wonder how long RuZZia can keep this up, given their confused C3, the loss of Goryachev, and seemingly disjointed actions. We're now seeing videos of RuZZian positions captured that were abandoned by the defenders, who left behind the ammunition and food.

[Damocles]

[Damocles]

Translation from the doublethink language: since April 2022, these helicopters have been afraid to cross the front line, they have completely ceased to be used in offensive operations. And surely it makes no sense to use this huge bustling crap from the nineties as reconnaissance and strike aircraft, when UAVs took over these functions a long time ago.

I'm unaware of any drone that can hover in place, pop in and out of terrain features, deliver a Hellfire antitank missile, and skedaddle back across the border at speeds exceeding 300kph.

If anything, it'll probably be like the complements between F-15EX and F-35. Former has the big weapons and radar and everything needed to make the enemy force regret every decision they've ever made, ever, and the latter acts as the eyes and ears that can slip in undetected and conduct some operations independently. Either one could operate in radio silence while the other delivers the actual strike package.

[Damocles]

Did Germany ever get to keep any of its N*zi gold?

No?

RuZZia shouldn't get to keep any of its gold, either.

Stop treating RuZZia with kid gloves.