Russia-Ukraine war and related tensions Megathread

[Woody]

Some Russian advances along different sections of the front the last 24 hours (Bilohorivka still standing!) - The fight for Kreminna is essentially over - for now as the Russian army pushed the Ukrainians some kilometeres away from the city's outskirts back to Donetsk Oblast's borders along with Chervonopopivka:

https://twitter.com/Suriyakmaps/status/1621968135581536262
https://twitter.com/Suriyakmaps/status/1621982747051819015
https://twitter.com/Suriyakmaps/status/1621983319167569923

[Woody]

Andrew Perpetua - "The Russian Army of now is not like the one of last year"

Brought up some interesting points in one of his videos on how the Russian conventional army is taking lessons from Wagner's assault tactics, main points:

- Units rely more on mortars now, less on armor and heavy artillery.
- Smaller units.
- More simultaneous threats – rather than attacking with a company or battalion, they attack platoon-size. More independent choices for attacking

[KaiserDave]

SirWoodbury YaBB God ★★★ Posts: 4,569

Re: Eastern Front Discussion Megathread « on: June 24th, 1943, 19:53:26 pm » The German Army of now is not like the one of last year that lost at Stalingrad Herbert Burgman brought up some interesting points in one of his radio broadcasts on how the German conventional army is taking lessons from Waffen-SS assault tactics, main points: - Units rely more on mortars now, less on panzers and heavy artillery. - Smaller units. - More simultaneous threats – rather than attacking with a company or battalion, they attack platoon-size. More independent choices for attacking Operation Citadel coming soon - will be wild!

[Hindsight was 2020]

Andrew Perpetua - "The Russian Army of now is not like the one of last year"

Brought up some interesting points in one of his videos on how the Russian conventional army is taking lessons from Wagner's assault tactics, main points:

- Units rely more on mortars now, less on armor and heavy artillery.
- Smaller units.
- More simultaneous threats – rather than attacking with a company or battalion, they attack platoon-size. More independent choices for attacking

It’s funny how you pick and choose when to cite him because just today:
https://mobile.twitter.com/AndrewPerpetua/status/1621914832378204160
https://mobile.twitter.com/AndrewPerpetua/status/1621915288802304001

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

At this point Ukraine might be better off trying to arrange a large purchase of modern main battle tanks from whoever can manufacture (or refurbish) them fastest, rather than just trying to rely on whoever can send them as aid.

They won't get them for a while, but at least they have them as an insurance policy later if the war drags on. If it's proving this hard to scare up ~100 Leopard 2s even with 2,000+ of them around the world, Ukraine isn't liable to find many more after these initial tanks are sent. As we've seen, countries are much more open to sending obsolete equipment, but when it comes to the actual modern-ish tanks/vehicles they use, they are much more stingy (assuming they didn't allow said vehicles to decay in storage).

How much do you think Ukraine would benefit from Abrams?

[Storr]

https://twitter.com/EuromaidanPress/status/1621526681449271300?s=20&t=RHFZLZ...

[Storr]

https://twitter.com/Osinttechnical/status/1621954133606469632?s=20&t=iRB8QFz...

https://twitter.com/Osinttechnical/status/1621954381368250368?s=20&t=iRB8QFz...

[jaichind]

https://www.ynetnews.com/article/s1xttkphs

"Israel's ex-premier say Putin promised him not to kill Zelensky"

“I asked ‘what’s up with this? Are you planning to kill Zelensky?’ He said ‘I won’t kill Zelensky.’ I then said to him ‘I have to understand that you’re giving me your word that you won’t kill Zelensky.’ He said ‘I’m not going to kill Zelensky.’”
Bennett said he then called Zelensky to inform him of Putin’s pledge. “‘Listen, I came out of a meeting, he’s not going to kill you.’ He asks, ‘are you sure?’ I said ’100% he won’t kill you.’”

Bennett said that during his mediation, Putin dropped his vow to seek Ukraine’s disarmament and Zelensky promised not to join NATO.

[jaichind]

https://news.yahoo.com/ukraines-minister-defence-may-leave-083812096.html

"Ukraines Minister of Defence may leave his office, Chief of Intelligence considered to head it"

[jaichind]

https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/latest-news/british-army-would-last-afternoon-29124780

"British Army 'would last an afternoon' against Russia because we lack ammunition"

Looks like Russia has effectively demilitarized the land forces of GB

[Woody]

Wagner entered the northern districts of Bakhmut - 'Stupky'. Another supply route has been made inaccessible.

https://twitter.com/War_cube_/status/1622211837134622720?cxt=HHwWgMC-7cXEoIMtAAA...
https://twitter.com/WarMonitor3/status/1622194267882938368?cxt=HHwWgICz3fDFmIMtA...

[jaichind]

https://www.ynetnews.com/article/s1xttkphs

"Israel's ex-premier say Putin promised him not to kill Zelensky"

“I asked ‘what’s up with this? Are you planning to kill Zelensky?’ He said ‘I won’t kill Zelensky.’ I then said to him ‘I have to understand that you’re giving me your word that you won’t kill Zelensky.’ He said ‘I’m not going to kill Zelensky.’”
Bennett said he then called Zelensky to inform him of Putin’s pledge. “‘Listen, I came out of a meeting, he’s not going to kill you.’ He asks, ‘are you sure?’ I said ’100% he won’t kill you.’”

Bennett said that during his mediation, Putin dropped his vow to seek Ukraine’s disarmament and Zelensky promised not to join NATO.

It seems Bennett pointed out that after he told Zelensky that Putin made a promise not to kill Zelensky he went out to have a press conference saying "I'm not afraid!" 2 hours later.  Bennett's account seems to make Zelensky look bad which it seems to be Bennett's motivation.

[jaichind]

https://www.ft.com/content/679ba852-1d7e-4d17-890d-2bc6152c96b0

"A problem of logistics: is the US sending Ukraine the wrong tank?"

The intense maintenance and logistics needed to keep the Abrams battle-ready make it less ideal for foreign armies such as Ukraine’s, which simply needs weapons that work well. 

This was the point I was making about the organizational and logical issues Ukraine is going to have to try to integrate these disparate weapons systems.

[jaichind]

https://www.politico.eu/article/ukraine-zelenskyy-war-military-law/

"Ukraine army discipline crackdown sparks fear and fury on the front"

[Woody]

We're now without a doubt in the bloodiest stage of the war - and the next following months is going to be worse.

https://twitter.com/WarMonitor3/status/1622273673502642176

[Woody]

https://twitter.com/WarMonitors/status/1622319588108034048

[NOVA Green]

So "How many times can a Woodchuck before it chucks wood?"

"How many times can a broken clock correctly tell time within a 24 hour period?"

Looks like reports are now official that the Ukrainian Defense Minister has been reassigned.

President Volodymyr Zelensky’s political party said on Sunday that it would move to replace Ukraine’s defense minister, as fierce fighting raged in the east amid what Ukrainian officials say is the beginning of a new Russian offensive.

The fate of the defense minister, Oleksii Reznikov, has been the subject of increasing speculation amid a growing scandal about financial impropriety within the ministry and an accompanying government investigation into corruption.

Davyd Arakhamia, the head of Mr. Zelensky’s Servant of the People party in Parliament, said on Sunday that Mr. Reznikov would be transferred to the leadership of another ministry and that Maj. Gen. Kyrylo Budanov, the current military intelligence chief, would replace him.

Mr. Reznikov has not been directly implicated in any wrongdoing, and Mr. Arakhamia did not link the move to concerns about the corruption scandal. Mr. Reznikov would become the highest ranking official in Mr. Zelensky’s government to be reassigned in the nearly 12 months since Russia’s full-scale invasion began.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/05/world/europe/russia-ukraine-bakhmut-wagner.html

[NOVA Green]

Phillips O'Brien's weekly Ukraine summary on Substack now that he is preparing for Twitter to collapse:

Brief selective quotes of a much larger article (No Paywall).

For a while now the Russian use of infantry-led assaults has been leading to very high casualties. It might be that this is going to get worse. We either are already in, or should soon be in a phase of increased Russian offensive activity as the soldiers that were mobilized in September are now thrown into the fray. It looks like its going to be a really bloody few months.

Russia has been relying on small unit, infantry led assaults for a while now. Russian vehicle losses have been so extraordinarily high, and one imagines that their supply problems are so complex as they have to keep the large depots out of HIMARs range, that they have decided to rely on what they have lots of, poorly trained human beings. Indeed, more evidence is emerging of the way the Russians were fighting when they had better trained troops and more equipment they could use.

Now the good news for Ukraine in this coming mess, is that the Russians still don’t seem to be able to patiently assemble well-trained and supported assault forces. Instead, they seem to be feeding troops into combat piecemeal up and down the line as they become available. This was similar to what they did in the Donbas earlier in the war, drip-feeding forces as they arrived.

For Ukraine this obviously poses a challenge, though in a bloody way an opportunity. Ukraine needs time to integrate all the new weapons it has been promised, from the artillery systems, IPCs, APCs and MBTs. This will take time, even for the adaptable Ukrainians. What they seem to be doing, and one hopes it continues, is to go on the defensive in the meantime, trying to keep Ukrainian losses down. Btw, if this means that they have to surrender a village here, or a small town there—that is worth doing if what they can do is keep the balance of losses very much in their favor.

Once Ukraine gets these, that should lead to massive logistical problems for Russia. Basically Ukraine could hit every inch of occupied Ukraine outside of Crimea (and much of Crimea as well). If the Russians do have to move their large depots 150kms from the front—that basically spells the end of offensive warfare, unless the can devise the most efficient, well-protected and planned truck convoy system in modern war.

https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/weekend-update-14?sd=pf

[Storr]

Artyomovsk (Artemivsk in Ukrainian) was the Soviet-era name of Bakhmut, from 1924 to 2016.
  
https://twitter.com/wartranslated/status/1621645246298832903?s=20&t=7v_CF9Ds...

https://twitter.com/wartranslated/status/1621645251831123970?s=20&t=7v_CF9Ds...

[Storr]

An interesting piece from a Slovene philosopher/writer. There's some stuff I disagree with, but I found much of his thoughts intriguing.

https://twitter.com/francis_scarr/status/1622249315593846787?s=20&t=Wg7kPZB2...

"I’ll say something awful now. With all that I’ve written against Putin, he once said something that nearly made me feel some sympathy for him. He said, apropos of a Jewish holiday, that Russia wants to build a multicultural society where Jews, Muslims, and Buddhists could all have their place. This framed Russia as a multicultural state instead of your “normal” nation-state, and I think it’s along these lines that Russia should actually construct its identity. It should be an eastern version of the European Union. It could be more centralized than the EU, but I have to say I almost like this, too, because to be effective, the EU itself needs more cooperative centralization "

Also this is certainly correct:

"The ideology of people around Putin, and Putin himself, seems quite clear-cut. It’s Neo-Fascism. They don’t use this term, but the entire framework of Russian imperialist views — with the right to aggressively expand the state borders, the internal politics with regard to oligarchs, etc. — this mindset is the core of what we would call Neo-Fascism."

[jaichind]

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-02-03/germany-studies-tapping-coal-exit-funds-for-defense-projects

"Germany Studies Tapping Coal-Exit Funds for Defense Projects"

Funny. I do not recall that being on the German Green Party platform.
Is Greta Thunberg going to weigh in on this news?

[Antonio the Sixth]

If you'd told me a few years ago that Zizek would take the coherent, thoughtful, principled left-wing position while Chomsky would be a mindless hack who speaks in nothing but thought-terminating clichés and seems more interested in owning the libs than making the world better, I'd have a hard time believing you. Then again, maybe that's my bad, because looking back at it, Chomsky's foreign policy worldview has always been morally abhorrent drivel. Frankly, any leftist who opposed NATO intervention in Kosovo should have been excised and shunned forever: that was the great canary in the coal mine for leftist foreign policy.

[CumbrianLefty]

Chomsky started off OK come Feb 24th last year, unambiguously describing Putin's invasion as a "war crime" - but yes, it didn't take long for him to revert to more familiar type. Far too many self-styled leftists just can't seem to process that the US is not the sole source of evil in the world.

[Torie]

Well, to pause for a moment from the day to day body counts, Thomas Friedman with comments from his friend Robert Kagan, has an opinion piece. All I can say, is that I hope his crystal ball is wrong. Putin is throwing in 500K fresh troops to effect his vision of Russia becoming the empire of old, as he remakes Russia into a militarized state, waging a war he can't afford to lose,  no matter what he is given of Ukraine, it will never satiate him, there can be no peace, ever, absent his destruction, all attended with lots of analogies to Hitler and FDR.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/05/opinion/ukraine-war-putin.html

The one thing that I draw some comfort from, and Friedman did not address really, is that I doubt Putin has the power to do all of that. But he does need to be bankrupted, as a top priority, so that he literally loses the means to wage that kind of war. The West needs to be unremitting in cutting off his cash flows, here, there and everywhere, as yes, it affords Ukraine the means to start savaging Russia's military assets outside Ukraine's border that are being used to effect mass destruction on Ukraine, rendering uninhabitable vast swaths of its real estate. It is less and less about who will rule a people, and more and more about what people will be there to be ruled.

I guess I am saying that as time goes on, I am less concerned about "provoking" Putin. His objectives are maximalist. There is no further provoking left to do. In that sense, he is indeed Hitler without the mustache. I am pretty confident however that the rest of the analogy to 1939 breaks down. But at what cost?



"Putin, he once said something that nearly made me feel some sympathy for him. He said, apropos of a Jewish holiday, that Russia wants to build a multicultural society where Jews, Muslims, and Buddhists could all have their place."

If Putin said that, that homophobic bigot as he tries to make the Russian Orthodox church into his own image as an instrument of repression, and "people of color" into cannon fodder, is almost certainly lying.  That's my opinion.

[Stranger in a strange land]

https://www.ynetnews.com/article/s1xttkphs

"Israel's ex-premier say Putin promised him not to kill Zelensky"

“I asked ‘what’s up with this? Are you planning to kill Zelensky?’ He said ‘I won’t kill Zelensky.’ I then said to him ‘I have to understand that you’re giving me your word that you won’t kill Zelensky.’ He said ‘I’m not going to kill Zelensky.’”
Bennett said he then called Zelensky to inform him of Putin’s pledge. “‘Listen, I came out of a meeting, he’s not going to kill you.’ He asks, ‘are you sure?’ I said ’100% he won’t kill you.’”

Bennett said that during his mediation, Putin dropped his vow to seek Ukraine’s disarmament and Zelensky promised not to join NATO.

It seems Bennett pointed out that after he told Zelensky that Putin made a promise not to kill Zelensky he went out to have a press conference saying "I'm not afraid!" 2 hours later.  Bennett's account seems to make Zelensky look bad which it seems to be Bennett's motivation.

Even if Bennett's story is true:
1) Why would Zelensky believe any promise from Putin? Putin has lied and broken promises repeatedly, especially on matters related to Ukraine.
2) Why would Zelensky believe Bennett? During the early days of the war, the thought was that he was trying to broker a ceasefire to enhance his personal standing and that of Israel, and even if he was acting in completely good faith, he would still have incentive to either lie or not tell the whole truth.