Russia-Ukraine war and related tensions Megathread

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

Putin wrote his entire speech from yesterday entirely by himself.

He is 69 years old.

He is effectively dictator for life.

He has been sitting around isolated for the last 2 years due to COVID, with plenty of time to think and reflect about the world, Russia, his place in history etc.

He is in this for his historical "legacy."

So this (along with the fact that he has systematically amassed the military means) makes it clear that this is just the beginning, and it won't be small. He wants to create new facts on the ground, and that won't just mean messing around with tweaking things on the edges.

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

https://twitter.com/RALee85/status/1496167823755915269

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

Internet rumored to be down in eastern Ukraine. If that is true, that would be a first indication that things are getting going in a very bad way.

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

Russian consulate in Odessa burning documents (also they and all other Russian diplomats in Ukraine have been ordered to evacuate apparently).

https://twitter.com/michaelh992/status/1496193451427340290

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

Russian national guard troops apparently for handling future Ukrainian Prisoners of War.

https://twitter.com/RALee85/status/1496167823755915269

The 110+ Battalion Tactical Groups are the professional full time soldiers who will be doing the fighting. Those are the 150k or so, whereas the Rosgvardia national guard is the extra manpower that they will need to occupy large amounts of territory after the first wave of combat troops goes through, which will end up being much more if they really want to occupy large amounts of Ukraine.

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

Possible major false flag incoming

https://twitter.com/MarQs__/status/1496584567779696643

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

There is a lot of stuff on twitter now, moving too fast to really re-post all here coherently. A lot of stuff regarding possible electronic warfare also, so if you read this message, take a minute to make sure you have up to date anti-virus installed and turned on, and turn on a VPN if you have one to help make sure you don't become collateral damage somehow.

https://twitter.com/sentdefender/status/1496604202147143683

https://twitter.com/Faaytuks/status/1496601501539651584

https://twitter.com/Blake_Allen13/status/1496604829904420865

https://twitter.com/ignis_fatum/status/1496605035685363712

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

https://twitter.com/Blake_Allen13/status/1496605798977445890

Border cameras in Crimea down. Very bad sign.

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

https://twitter.com/ELINTNews/status/1496607723768668162

Text messages reportedly not working in the Donbas area.

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

IF an invasion does occur, I think he'll go for the full, de jure borders of DNR and LNR, not any further.

I hope so, but that does not solve any of the issues Putin talked about in his speech the other night, so I doubt it.

I'm pretty sure Putin wants some sort of regime change in Ukraine, the only question is what kind and to what extent.

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

Any idea of Ukraine's troop/equipment numbers on the border with Crimea / the 2 "republics"?

Curious to know if they're really putting effort into the area or if they're looking to hold back a lot to protect the inland part and limit any attack to the already half-occupied provinces.

No, and the Ukranian military has asked people not to report anything on social media etc about Ukranian troop movements, something which I would urge everyone to respect while things are potentially about to get very hot.

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

US Air Force spy plane (FORTE12) has turned around from Kharkiv and flying suddenly away.

Ukraine reportedly requesting another UN Security Council meeting. https://twitter.com/DmytroKuleba/status/1496608902359756807

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

https://twitter.com/BNONews/status/1496618205804126209

Zelensky tried to call Putin, Putin did not respond. Makes pretty clear Putin is no longer interested in any sort of diplomacy.

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

https://twitter.com/alexbward/status/1496618852687482883

Politico says rumor is Russian attack will start at 4 AM local time.

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

Also suppose Russia conducts a full-fledged invasion. What's their plan a month from now when tens of thousands are dead, there's no end in sight to a Ukrainian insurgency, inflation increases as it always does with war, and there's thousands of people protesting outside the Kremlin?

1) They will use lots of artillery and bombs against any insurgency. If there is resistance in a city, they will bombard it until resistance stops. It won't be like American counter-insurgency efforts where they give fairly high priority to avoiding civilian casualties.

https://twitter.com/RALee85/status/1496614730064183298

2) There won't be people protesting outside the Kremlin because anyone who tries will get immediately arrested before they can even start.



Moscow police arrest lone anti-war protesters within minutes as Russia's propaganda machine ramps up

Muted protests in stark contrast to the Russian public response when the Kremlin annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014

Russian police have arrested several people who dared to publicly protest Moscow’s military escalation in Ukraine, bundling demonstrators in vans for holding up signs reading “No to War”.

While there is little or no public enthusiasm in Russia for active conflict with its neighbour, protests against a potential war have been muted after years of Kremlin crackdown on dissent. 

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

Emergency declared in Kyiv

https://twitter.com/NatashaBertrand/status/1496622412938493953

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

I find myself coming back to the same question: Why now?

Has public opinion in Ukraine shifted to be more pro western?

Has the situation in the east devolved enough that Russia needs to step in?

Are things at home that bad?

The reason Putin did what he did in 2014/2015 with Donetsk and Luhansk was that he wanted Donetsk and Luhansk to influence Ukrainian foreign policy - in particular, to have an effective veto over Ukraine further integrating with the west, via a federal structure stemming from the Minsk agreeement. And since Donetsk and Luhansk are Russian puppet states, that would have meant that Putin in effect could veto that.

However, it became clear that Ukraine was not going to allow its policies to be vetoed by the self-proclaimed Donetsk/Luhansk "People's Republics." And the problem for Putin was also that Crimea and large parts of Donetsk/Luhansk Oblasts were out of Ukrainian control, meaning that those areas (the most pro-Russian areas of Ukraine) no longer were sending representatives to the Ukrainian parliament etc and were no longer influencing Ukrainian policy. So the absence of Crimea especially made the part of Ukraine that was left more pro-western overall.

It would be as though you had Russia come in and annex Texas. That would make America more pro-democrats overall and shift the country to the left.

So this was not working for Putin, and in fact in some ways was making things worse for Russian influence over Ukranian policy. So the only way he can now reassert Russian influence over Ukranian policy is by some sort of regime change, which requires an invasion and war.

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

https://twitter.com/mrsorokaa/status/1496634711992684548

Among them, Ukranian Council of Ministers website hacked, looks like this (do NOT go to any potenttially hacked websites yourself, they may have malware!):

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

https://twitter.com/RALee85/status/1496636644455297026

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

Cyber attacks reported on the Baltic states (NATO members):

https://twitter.com/benjaminwittes/status/1496636609927823360

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

https://twitter.com/phildstewart/status/1496643487395196928

Blinken says invasion tonight.

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

Not immediately, but I think the big concern (aside from concern for Ukraine itself) is the potential for it to trigger the world's first major cyber war. If Russia does cyber attacks against The US and the West in response to sanctions, and the US responds with retaliatory cyber attacks against Russia in response, and Russia responds back etc, then we are in a brave new world, and it is hard to say how that will work out, because we have never had a major cyber war, and there are no "laws of war" or norms established for cyber war, since it has never happened before.

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

The Blinken statement might have been a misinterpretation, he might not have meant to specify tonight. Hopefully he did not mean US has specific intelligence that it is definitely happening tonight.

https://twitter.com/RALee85/status/1496646684222361609

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

CNN says Russia is closing airspace near Ukraine until MAY 18

https://twitter.com/ErinBurnett/status/1496648430575398914

You don't do that just for shi8s and giggles

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

Wouldn't most (or at least a significant amount) Ukrainians choose death over Russian rule?
Urban warfare means high Russian casualties. Ukraine doesn't need to "win", they just need to up the body count to where enough Russian moms/wives get sick of seeing their boys come home in caskets.

They will probably, at least at first, try to surround cities and simply cut off all water/electricity/food supply and starve them out, rather than assaulting the cities. The question is, is that enough to get the Ukranians to actually surrender? If so, a lot of the high casualties of urban combat might hypothetically be avoided.

Read the subtext in the article you linked. There isn't the same fervor when they took Crimea in 2014. Young people are already lukewarm on the administration, fighting for the fantasies of septuagenarian elites looking to relive the USSR glory days they weren't alive for can't help much on that front. The Kremlin can't disappear them all. Mark my words, a botched invasion is one of the very few things which can jeopardize Putin's grip on power.

I agree that many people in Russia will not be happy about this, but the question is how much does that mater in a dictatorship that is willing to suppress dissent. To be sure, that willingness to suppress dissent will probably be tested at some point, to some degree though.