Russia-Ukraine war and related tensions Megathread

[Former Dean Phillips Supporters for Haley (I guess???!?) 👁️]

Holy crap jaichind could it seriously kill you to merge your posts?! That’s 4 post in a row in a 10 minute span and 3 of them could of been 1 as it’s just the same overlapping topic

Jaichind's handler has mandated that jaichind must reach 50,000 posts.

Gotta get the post count up somehow. Plus I would bet payment is done by the post.

[Former Dean Phillips Supporters for Haley (I guess???!?) 👁️]

Building up defenses and rebuilding to attack are different things jaichind

In Putinist mythology, resisting Russian attacks constitutes an attack on Russia, because Russia is right to attack.

The definition of Nazism is that which resists Russia.

Hence defending oneself against Russian attacks constitutes a Nazi attack against Russia.

Simple as that.

[Former Dean Phillips Supporters for Haley (I guess???!?) 👁️]

So anyway, in the past couple of days there have been several Russian jets which have mysteriously disappeared over Ukraine.

https://news.yahoo.com/isw-russia-reducing-aviation-activity-123228541.html

Russian forces are decreasing aviation activity and use of glide bombs after Ukraine’s military shot down three Russian Su-34 fighter-bomber jets on Dec. 21-22, the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) reported on Dec. 24.

The ISW cited Ukrainian Air Force spokesman Yurii Ihnat and military observer Kostiantyn Mashovets saying that Russian troops have limited their use of glide bombs and air strikes in southern Ukraine as well as manned aviation near occupied Crimea.

Ukraine’s Air Force Commander Mykola Oleshchuk announced on Dec. 22 that his troops had downed three Russian Su-34 supersonic fighter-bomber aircraft on the southern front. Three days later, the Air Force reported the downing of another Su-34 plane and a Su-30 fighter jet.

At the same time, an Australian E-7A Wedgetail electronic surveillance plane - a significant upgrade over the old E-3 AWACS that previously had been flying around the Ukrainian border - has begun flying around the Ukrainian border instead.

https://www.defence.gov.au/news-events/news/2023-12-19/trusted-eyes-european-skies

Night has fallen at Ramstein Air Base in southern Germany, and the temperature plummets towards freezing, but the cold weather does not deter the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) maintenance crew hard at work on the tarmac.

Their efforts are to prepare the RAAF Wedgetail E-7A, a twin-engine airborne early warning and control aircraft, which has deployed to Europe under Operation Kudu.

The Wedgetail E-7A and a contingent of about 100 personnel have deployed to Germany with a mission profile of protecting humanitarian and military assistance bound for Ukraine.

Their flying missions have successfully commenced.

...

The aircraft has deployed at the request of the United States Air Force (USAF) to integrate with the effort of Australia’s partners, including the United States and NATO, to support the multilayered protection of an eastern European logistic hub. 

Of course, there couldn't possibly be a connection between these two things, nor could there be a connection with the fact Ukrainian F-16 pilot training has been going on for a while now. I'm sure the Russian planes are just crashing themselves due to random mechanical failures.

[Former Dean Phillips Supporters for Haley (I guess???!?) 👁️]

It could well be Patriots or other air defense, but there were in fact reports that Ukraine would receive F-16s this year (and prior to Christmas).

https://www.twitter.com/shashj/status/1735679442981200371

Shashank Joshi (@shashj)
F-16s by xmas: "the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway and Belgium have already committed to donating F-16 fighter jets...While the total number of the jets is undisclosed, the first deliveries are scheduled to take place before the end of this year" https://kaitseministeerium.ee/sites/default/files/setting_transatlantic_defence_up_for_success_0.pdf

If so, seems like a good Christmas present!

Russians were freaking out at the prospect, so no wonder bilaps wants to pretend that it is all fine:

https://www.twitter.com/Azovsouth/status/1739041785324671353

АЗОВ South (@Azovsouth)
❗Z channels claim their Su-34 over the Black Sea was shot down by a NATO-Ukrainian F-16

[Former Dean Phillips Supporters for Haley (I guess???!?) 👁️]

USA authorities should quickly end the war in Ukraine or Ukraine will lose more territory.

Over the course of 1121 pages of this megathread (so far) you have posted a lot of dumb things. But (aside from not being what the RAND report says), this is right up there with the dumbest of them (at least that I can recall).

The report says "USA should avoid a “long and brutal” war between Ukraine and the Russian Federation. It "will have long-term and likely irreversible adverse consequences for the United States."

As per usual from you, this is NOT an accurate reflection on what the report says.


What it actually says is e.g.:

A longer, more violent war would lock in adverse consequences for U.S. interests

For example, a longer war could significantly undermine Ukraine's postwar recovery.

This is a pretty obvious point they are making. And it also does not necessarily imply that Ukraine should give up. Rather it can just as well imply that the best way to avoid a long war is to increase our aid dramatically to enable Ukraine to achieve a quick and decisive victory, rather than slow walking insufficient aid in dribs and drabs as we have been doing.


Also, nowhere does it use the phrase "long and brutal," despite you misleadingly putting it in quotation marks.

If you do a search of the word "brutal" both in the summary article and also in the 153 page PDF, the word only comes up a single time, and even then it is not the word brutal, but "brutality" (and the context is in this sentence on page 13 of the pdf "Although reconstruction and economic development are not neglected as national goals, the government’s focus is first and foremost on territorial reconquest and avenging Russia’s war crimes, occupation, and brutality."

This is just one illustration of how as per usual, you are just bad faith making sh** up.

At some point when you are literally just making stuff up, you should get sanctioned by the mods for it.

How much do you get paid to do this? Is it by the hour, or by the post? Are there any job openings?

[Former Dean Phillips Supporters for Haley (I guess???!?) 👁️]

snip

Thanks for going to the effort to copy/paste that. It was very good quality content and I for one definitely would never have seen it otherwise.

[Former Dean Phillips Supporters for Haley (I guess???!?) 👁️]

https://talkelections.org/FORUM/index.php?action=post;topic=469771.29050;num_replies=29053

"Ukraine’s $61 bln lifeline is not enough"

The bait and switch is already starting.  Now the $61 billion is not enough.

Say what???

We never said it was enough. Much of that "$61 bln lifeline" is not even actually going to Ukraine in the first place.

Congress should 100% definitely pass additional legislation to further support Ukraine, and should get to work on it today.

[Former Dean Phillips Supporters for Haley (I guess???!?) 👁️]

I’m shocked our resident “Putin is my favorite world leader and I’d totally invest in child brothels if I could get away with it” poster would engage in bad faith

This, except... He won't actually engage. Instead, he will just ignore and keep posting his spam stream rather than to actively discuss with other posters.

[Former Dean Phillips Supporters for Haley (I guess???!?) 👁️]

And indeed, sure enough. 0 attempt to engage with other posters, the spam continues instead.

[Former Dean Phillips Supporters for Haley (I guess???!?) 👁️]

At this rate Putin's Russia will have conquered all of Ukraine in only another couple decades, at the cost of only 10 or 20 million Russian casualties.

At the current speed, more like centuries.

This is an old meme from early in the full-scale war:



Well, we are about to the start of summer 2024 now. So the snail is on pace to soon reach the Polish border.

Meanwhile, the Russian army... well... it's on pace to soon reach 16,000 visually confirmed equipment (armored vehicles, helicopters, planes, radars, etc) losses:

https://www.oryxspioenkop.com/2022/02/attack-on-europe-documenting-equipment.html

That Soviet legacy stockpile is getting run down hard.

The more those equipment losses mount, the equipment situation should tend to become exponentially worse, because they will pull the most useable equipment from the Soviet stockpiles first, meaning subsequent stuff requires more work refurbishing it. In addition, the more the stockpile is run down, the more they will start lacking spare parts for repairs, because they will cannibalize equipment most useful for spare parts first. So as a result, not only is less stuff available over time, but it also takes longer and is more difficult to make the stuff that is left useable.

This is why the Russian army is increasingly using things like motorcycles for assaults (and soldiers even making improvised sidecars using things like pallets):

https://www.twitter.com/Tatarigami_UA/status/1786695144756101325

https://www.twitter.com/Tatarigami_UA/status/1786695144756101325

While Russia remains a serious battlefield threat, their ability to replace lost armored vehicles is limited. A vivid example is the motorcycle abandoned during the assault in the Bilohorivka area, where a pallet was used as a sidecar to transport assault infantry

This is because they are starting to simply not have anything better left. And as a result, the tendency will be (at least if we give Ukraine the ammo we should be giving them) mounting Russian manpower (infantry) losses, because they will be lacking more and more the protective equipment, specialized equipment, and support that can help lower their casualties.

Russian production, even with mobilization, is not sufficient to keep pace with those sorts of extreme losses. The only thing that hypothetically could turn that around would be large scale direct Chinese equipment aid. But it is not really in China's interest to do that because they would be sanctioned to hell, and because Russia uses equipment so wastefully that it would start to pretty quickly run down the Chinese equipment stockpile as well.

As a result, if Russia does not get some sort of new equipment source, by 2025 things may start to turn against Russia, now that the US and European MIC is starting to actually be ramped up, and now that more and more previously "off limits" things are starting to be allowed by the west (i.e. David Cameron saying a few days ago that Ukraine can use British weapons to attack targets on Russian soil now).

Russian manpower losses reported by the Ukrainians have reached well over 1000 per day by this point (of course you have to keep in mind the specific numbers may not be perfectly accurate, but the trendline has been well upwards even despite the Ukrainian ammo shortage).

From what I can tell, probably the biggest difficulty is that Russian electronic warfare is relatively effective - the western MIC will hopefully work to come up with better ways for Ukraine to counter it.

[Former Dean Phillips Supporters for Haley (I guess???!?) 👁️]

Russians were fighting for individual streets in Stalingrad.

Over on planet reality, the Soviet Union was 50% ethnically non-Russian. And especially during Stalingrad, when much of European Russia was overrun by the Axis, many of the Red Army soldiers were non-Russian minorities recruited in territories that the Soviet Union still controlled in Central Asia, Siberia, and the Caucasus etc. A lot of the ethnic Russians in the Red Army had previously been captured or killed in the opening earlier stages of the war.

So no, it wasn't "Russians" who were fighting for individual streets in Stalingrad. Some were Russian, many many were not. Soviets (including Ukrainians) did that, not Russians.

Two years later they were at the gates of Berlin and Vienna.

Literally the guy who took the iconic photo waving the flag over the Reichstag was Ukrainian (Yevgeny Khaldei), and the Red Army soldiers he photographed raising the flag were a Kazakh, a Dagestani, and a Belarussian. Not a single actual Russian among them lol:

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

On 2 May 1945, Khaldei scaled the now pacified Reichstag to take his picture. He was carrying with him a large flag, sewn from three tablecloths for this very purpose, by his uncle.[6] The official story would later be that two hand-picked soldiers, Meliton Kantaria[A 2] (Georgian) and Mikhail Yegorov[A 3] (Russian), raised the Soviet flag over the Reichstag,[1][7][8][9] and the photograph would often be used as depicting the event. Some authors state that for political reasons the subjects of the photograph were changed and the actual man to hoist the flag was Aleksei Kovalev.[10][11] However, according to Khaldei himself, when he arrived at the Reichstag, he simply asked the soldiers who happened to be passing by to help with the staging of the photoshoot;[12][13] the one who was attaching the flag was 18-year-old Private Kovalev from Burlin, Kazakhstan[14] and the two others were Abdulkhakim Ismailov from Dagestan and Leonid Gorychev (also mentioned as Aleksei Goryachev) from Minsk.[13] The photograph was taken with a Leica III rangefinder camera with a 35mm f3.5 lens.[15]