Russia-Ukraine war and related tensions Megathread

[NOVA Green]

Looks like some more Turkish drones might have likely arrived in Ukraine, including possibly on a flight on 4/10/22:


https://twitter.com/TheStudyofWar/status/1515419777724002304?s=20&t=tvEXJ84d...

[It’s so Joever]

Looks like some more Turkish drones might have likely arrived in Ukraine, including possibly on a flight on 4/10/22:


https://twitter.com/TheStudyofWar/status/1515419777724002304?s=20&t=tvEXJ84d...

BAYRAKTAR

[pppolitics]

Moskva is pronounced “Moscow” in Russian.

So, Ukraine sank Moscow. 😀

[Storr]

https://twitter.com/OzKaterji/status/1515450435804487692?s=20&t=aMK4sXxIWoL7...

[2952-0-0]

A dark joke on Chinese social media is that Putin has decided to retaliate for the sinking of the Moscow, by ordering the sinking of a warship named the Kyiv.

The Soviets had a carrier named the Kiev, which was retired and now has a new life as a tourist attraction off China's northern coast.

[NOVA Green]

How are they losing so many commanders?

From what i understand the Russian military doctrine doesn't encourage innovation among its officers instead preferring soldiers and officers to do strictly what they're told which meant that as the Russian army begin to run into trouble at the beginning of the war the generals had to go to the front lines to get a read on the situation and subsequently opened themselves up to being targeted by Ukraine.

I'd also imagine the intelligence failure that Russia has been experiencing since before the war even started also probably doesn't help the life expectancy of Russian generals.

Russia has been less than circumspect regarding the exact cause of death of their highest level military officers.

Seem to recall at least one who died being run over by a tank by his own military unit, quite likely at least one dead at the hands on the trigger of a Ukrainian Sniper, others possible targeted by drone strikes or artillery strikes targeting Russian CoC vehicles and possibly structures as well.

Bottom line ugabug does a great synopsis of the situation, based upon the limited data available, whereas Ukrainian Military formations since 2014, which includes various NATO level military training courses, tends to emphasise the role of NCOs and lower level level commanders to be able to make quick military decisions on the fly.

[NOVA Green]

So typically try to minimize posting of "human interest stories" on this thread, but this one is from Bucha courtesy of the Washington Post today with four different contributors on the ground telling a simple story of a Man, his Wife with a small child that lived separated under Russian Occupation for over a Month.

It also provides an added perspective to the ongoing coverage about major Russian War Crimes within this leafy suburb of Kyiv of only 37k residents.

The story is framed around Ivan and his wife Yulia, (with their young daughter Sasha getting a brief cameo), but yet also includes many other themes and information which perhaps are all too common among other cities formerly or currently under Russian Military Occupation.

Long read, but well worth one of your "Freebies" if you don't have a WaPo subscription.

*** Spoiler Alert ***

Ivan did not survive, killed by Russian soldiers a day before Yulia was "allowed to go home", as part of a new policy which allowed women with children under the age of ( to leave the basement of the occupied building which they along with (100) others had been living in certain the Russian Tanks first arrived.

Police found the body in an abandoned Russian military camp where occupying soldiers had sat around drinking wine, their laughter so loud that neighbors seethed as it echoed down Yablunska Street.

They had known for weeks that there was a body in the camp, yet another among so many corpses the Russians left behind. Overwhelmed crews picking them up simply hadn’t gotten to it yet. So no one knew it was Ivan Monastyrskyi.

His neighbor was the first to identify him, recognizing the unshaven face of a man who had watched his beloved street become a killing field. When his wife, Yulia, approached the body, her blue eyes froze.

There were bullet holes in his calves and his arms were stretched out at strange angles between slats of wood with nails through them. His wife looked at the thin sweater he was wearing and couldn’t help thinking how he must have been so cold in his final minutes.

Yulia and Ivan lived a love story. When Ivan moved into the young woman’s apartment block just off Yablunska Street, he knew that her father was skeptical that anyone would be good enough for her. But he won him over in the end, she said. The couple married on a spring day in 2017, and took wedding-day photos in Bucha’s warm, leafy park. They had a child, Sasha, whose eyes were as blue as her mother’s.

When she walked back home to her daughter on April 7, Yulia had tried to stay calm but Sasha was there at the door, and she was asking questions almost immediately. Her mother had told her she would see her father again.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/04/16/russia-ukraine-war-news-putin-live-updates/#link-BOURR2XXOBCGTGAUD23U6CJQQU

[NOVA Green]

Meanwhile, another "Human Interest Story", even within "Nazi Governed Ukraine" (WTF???), are the stories about how Jewish Ukrainians are celebrating Passover.

Worth paying a subscription to the WSJ or even a small amount to read an individual article, since this is just a fragment of the article.

Ukrainian Rabbi Moshe Azman began this year’s Passover, normally a celebratory holiday, with a funeral: He buried a member of his congregation shot dead by Russian occupiers on the street near Kyiv.

Rabbi Azman then rushed back to the capital to preside over a wartime Seder in the basement of the main synagogue, one of the few that has stayed open throughout the Russian invasion.

On Friday, Ukrainian Jews across the country, like the small group around Rabbi Azman, as well as those now living as refugees in Europe, celebrated Passover with supplies of kosher food and online services provided by American charities.

Before the war, Ukraine was home to one of the world’s largest Jewish communities of around 200,000 people, of which nearly 10,000 had survived the Holocaust. Now, many thousands of Jews have fled the Russian assault, while Jewish sites, including schools, have been damaged or destroyed by Russian shelling.

“I, like many, was born in the Soviet Union, and Russia wants to drag us back there, to enslave Ukraine like Egypt enslaved the people of Israel,” Rabbi Azman said. “Our community is proud of our Jewish president, who united all of Ukraine’s nationalities in the fight for our freedom.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/ukraines-jews-celebrate-wartime-passover-in-defiance-of-russian-invasion-11650116455?mod=livecoverage_web

[NOVA Green]

Meanwhile decent solid read from a free website BBC, regarding how Russia's invasion of Ukraine is basically forcing members of the Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine to reject the hierarchy and split off in other directions.

The Russian Orthodox Church has echoed the rhetoric of the Kremlin in justifying the war in Ukraine. It is a stance that appears to be driving large numbers of Ukrainian priests and parishioners to turn their backs on Moscow.

"I will never forget the moment when I woke up early to go to mass, only to suddenly hear the shocking sounds of bombing," says Father Nicolay Pluzhnik.

But now, he says, has applied to join the Ukrainian Orthodox Church - which was finally granted independence from the Russian Orthodox Church in 2019, in a move never recognised by Russia.

There are religious undertones in much of the Kremlin's narrative justifying its invasion of Ukraine. It is a fight for the conservative ideals of the Russian Orthodox Church based in Moscow, against an immoral outside world. President Putin has said Ukraine is not only an "inalienable part" of Russia's history and culture - but also its "spiritual space".

Dr Sergii Bortnyk, a professor at the Kyiv Theological Academy and an adviser to the Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine, acknowledges that there has been a widespread movement of people and parishes across the country abandoning their loyalty to Moscow.

"I think it is maybe half of the 12,000 parishes [of the Moscow Patriarchate in Ukraine] that have said that they want to break away now," says Dr Bortnyk.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-61109104

[NOVA Green]

Interesting perspective on the "Should I Stay or Should I Go" scene when it comes to Ukrainian Mayors in Russian Occupied Villages, Towns, and Cities...

Free article from The Guardian, but donation suggested and is a totally awesome and fine newspaper which tends to skew a bit more to "The Left" than most other British MSM papers.

Stay or go? Ukrainian mayors’ agonising choice as Russia invaded

The decision to remain can inspire local people to resist, but also have deadly consequences

Vereshchuk said Zelenskiy’s decision to stay behind was one of the first signs that Ukraine was not minded to surrender to the supposed inevitability of Vladimir Putin’s capture of Ukraine, and helped lay the groundwork for the spirited response that led Russia to abandon its push to Kyiv, at least for now.

For other Ukrainian officials in occupied areas, the question of whether to follow Zelenskiy’s lead was a difficult one. Many local mayors and other officials remained in place, sometimes with deadly consequences, while others decided to flee. In a few cases, mayors have expressed willingness to work with the Russians, and may face treason charges if Ukraine regains control over their towns.

In many occupied towns, there were reports of Russian soldiers going door-to-door looking for those with Ukrainian government links. Ihor Kostovarov, the head of the villages of Staryi and Novyi Bykiv east of Kyiv, said that around the same time Sukhenko was kidnapped, he decided to leave his own village.

In Melitopol, one of a string of cities in Ukraine’s south occupied by Russian troops without major battles in the first part of the invasion, the mayor, Ivan Fedorov, remained in place but refused to cooperate with the Russian military.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/apr/16/stay-go-ukrainian-mayors-agonising-choice-russia-invaded

Musical Interlude:

When I was a Teenager back in the '80s might have been more like a "Clash Lite" songs about brake-ups, romantic relations, but really now sounds more like a song about how Ukraine is really "breaking up" with "Mother Russia", and ever single step of the way Russia starts to look more and more like an abusive domestic partner than any type of somebody one would want to be in a relationship with.

The Clash: Should I Stay or Go

[NOVA Green]

More Russian purges:


https://twitter.com/mhmck/status/1515353692219887625?s=20&t=iEtW8Nvl1Cw7WJ6d...

Forgot to mention that Putin also purging elements of his own Intelligence services, even as Senior levels...

Too bad we never arrested those in the US who supported "Intel" for the illegitimate invasion and occupation of Iraq...

Still perhaps at some point in the future, but yet perhaps ironic that in a country such as Russia which has effectively become an extremely authoritarian regime, that Putin is now arresting some of the "Yes Men" as scapegoats for what was his decision and his decision alone.

Russian President Vladimir Putin may be purging elements of his intelligence service and blaming close allies for Russian intelligence and planning failures in the lead-up to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Russian investigative journalist Andrei Soldatov reported on April 12 that Russian authorities transferred Colonel-General Sergei Beseda, a senior official in Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) and the head of the Fifth Service, from house arrest to the notorious Lefortovo Prison.[45] Beseda was reportedly placed under house arrest before March 19 due to the early failures in Russia’s invasion.[46] His Fifth Service is the de-facto foreign intelligence arm of the FSB and the branch responsible for political subversion in Russia’s near abroad, including Ukraine. Anonymous sources told the Moscow Times that the Kremlin is questioning Beseda for his failure to create a viable pro-Kremlin opposition in Ukraine to aid Russia in its invasion. Bellingcat reported on April 11 that the FSB also fired or arrested around 150 officers from the Fifth Service over intelligence failures in Ukraine.[47]

Former Russian parliamentarian Ilya Ponomarev claimed on April 11 that Russian military sources told him that longtime Putin ally Vladislav Surkov is under house arrest in Moscow.[48] The arrests of Surkov and Beseda, as well as the FSB purges, indicate that Putin is increasingly skeptical of the advice that led to Russia’s failures in Ukraine. However, purging longtime intelligence officials with Ukraine expertise may harm the Kremlin’s ability to monitor Ukrainian leadership and to make informed military decisions. Such purges could also harm morale in the rest of the FSB, leading to generally worsened intelligence provisions.

[Torie]

This highly credentialed academic that I have never heard of, and writes in a dry style, thinks the Ukraine war will end in a whimper rather than a bang. I in my relative ignorance am not persuaded that his predictions have that much value. Whatever.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/04/13/ukraine-war-realism-great-powers-unipolarity/

[It’s so Joever]

You know we’ve been at the supposed end of America’s unipolar order about seventy times in the past five years. The reality is that it was never really a “true order” but more of an awkward transition post Cold War.

[The Dowager Mod]

Putin didn't learn a good lesson from Stalin, NEVER purge the military and the intelligence services at the same time.

[pppolitics]

Who would have thought? /s

https://twitter.com/maria_avdv/status/1514882394897235968

[NOVA Green]

Russia has now meanwhile detained at minimum 15,433 individuals in connections with anti-war demos in Russia since 2/24/22.

Many of these individuals face extremely serious charges involving multiple years in prison, including penal servitude for what would generally be considered relatively minor actions of political protest elsewhere in the world.

https://ovd.news/

https://ovd.news/story/ukraina

[NOVA Green]

Ukrainian Rock Star Vadym Krasnooky, lead singer of a band called the "Mad Heads" just came out with a song inspired by the sinking of the Moskva.

https://madheads.kiev.ua/en/history

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/16/world/europe/moskva-sinking-vadym-krasnooky.html

[Hindsight was 2020]

https://mobile.twitter.com/TheStudyofWar/status/1515465352095830016

[pppolitics]

https://twitter.com/OzKaterji/status/1515450435804487692?s=20&t=aMK4sXxIWoL7...

https://twitter.com/Kiborgzzz/status/1514739234921398274

[Storr]

https://twitter.com/NotWoofers/status/1515476196557037568?s=20&t=CdcPaI_A69g...

[emailking]

I wonder if this will become the biggest thread on the site. If the war lasts the rest of the year like Blinken estimates and it keeps pushing 2-4 pages a day, it will get there easily.

[Cashew]

https://twitter.com/RALee85/status/1515275351810875392?s=20&t=RoU8EIFeniYlgo...

[It’s so Joever]

If Putin nukes Ukraine that basically means we may as well go in anyways.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

https://twitter.com/RALee85/status/1515275351810875392?s=20&t=RoU8EIFeniYlgo...

Well, one of those options would be an unvarnished good thing, and the other would only make the current pattern of escalation go a little faster, so...good take, I guess?

[CumbrianLefty]

The point is, does Russia have the ability to "massively escalate" short of WMDs?