Ukrainian War Developments

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Lapin

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Temstar said:
I think Melissa Chan here is missing the point about realism. Realism cares not for your feelings or morality or toxic masculinity or any of that, realism looks at historical patterns and nature of people and use it to predict the future. Historical pattern says when a small nation next door to a large nation gets uppity and start causing trouble, sooner or later it will be slapped down. It happened to Cuba, it happened to Vietnam and now it's happening to Ukraine. Is it fair? Maybe not? But realism is not concerned with fairness or niceties. You can say Mearsheimer’s argument is basically the “she wore a short skirt” justification, but guess what? He predicted there will be a war in Ukraine decades ago and he was right on the money. Can you say his theory is wrong? Just because it hurts your feel feels?
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I cannot read Melissa Chan's mind or speak for her.

As far as I can infer, Melissa Chan's argument may go like this:
1) Ukraine is a victim of aggression by Russia. As a metaphor, Ukraine is being raped (violated) by Russia.
2) John Mearsheimer's attempting to excuse Russia's aggression by implying that it's understandable, perhaps even inevitable.
3) When a woman gets raped, some misogynists attempt to excuse the rapist by claiming that he was provoked by her short skirt.
Blaming the victim is common.

Even if Ukraine's like a woman with a dubious reputation who appears 'provocative' by wearing a short skit, she's still innocent.
She does not deserve to be raped. I suspect that's Melissa Chan's point.

I suspect that Melissa Chan has a visceral aversion to Putin's calculated public displays (going shirtless) of his robust masculinity.
Some women may be turned off by it; other women may be turned on, apparently:

"I'd have loved to have been [Putin's mistress] ... he's a very attractive man. Such a strong, male energy."
--attributed to Anna Netrebko (a Russian opera soprano who's now widely banned in the West)
 
Temstar

Temstar

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Lapin said:
I cannot read Melissa Chan's mind or speak for her.

As far as I can infer, Melissa Chan's argument may go like this:
1) Ukraine is a victim of aggression by Russia. As a metaphor, Ukraine is being raped (violated) by Russia.
2) John Mearsheimer's attempting to excuse Russia's aggression by implying that it's understandable, perhaps even inevitable.
3) When a woman gets raped, some misogynists attempt to excuse the rapist by claiming that he was provoked by her short skirt.
Blaming the victim is common.

Even if Ukraine's like a woman with a dubious reputation who appears 'provocative' by wearing a short skit, she's still innocent.
She does not deserve to be raped. I suspect that's Melissa Chan's point.

I suspect that Melissa Chan has a visceral aversion to Putin's calculated public displays (going shirtless) of his robust masculinity.
Some women may be turned off by it; other women may be turned on, apparently:

"I'd have loved to have been [Putin's mistress] ... he's a very attractive man. Such a strong, male energy."
--attributed to Anna Netrebko (a Russian opera soprano who's now widely banned in the West)
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The point is countries are not people and morality that may be valid for people do not apply to countries. Mearsheimer as a realist doesn't deal with what's right and what's wrong or who's guilty and who's innocent. He deals in "if you do A, then B will happen down the track" and he said if NATO expand eastwards then there's going to be a war in Ukraine. Was he not correct?
 
A

Abominable

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Botnet said:
The only reason heavy weaponry isn't flowing into Ukraine is because both sides have agreed not to escalate this any further which is why the US has only been sending in MANPADS and such, and balked at the MiG deal. But if Putin started carpet-bombing cities, NATO would be hard pressed not to escalate in turn, and such floodgates will be opened.

Apparently Patriots do have dubious accuracy.
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I think you misread my post. I said carpet bombing Ukrainian lines, as in military positions.

Not that bombing cities would change America's position. According to the official American line, Putin is already Hitler number 2 and deliberately bombing civilians and hospitals.
RottenPanzer said:
at this point, i doubt that Mariupol would be taken in a few days...
Perhaps even months...
Or even another case of Courland Pocket....
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The administrative buildings have been taken over. There are still a lot of civilians being evacuated. The one thing I'm keeping an eye open for is Mariupol theatre, where apparently hundreds of civilians are trapped under rubble in a bomb shelter for days now. Russian lines are close to it but haven't reached it yet. The stories coming from civilians are horrific, but you'll never hear them from western media.
 
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Botnet

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RottenPanzer said:
at this point, i doubt that Mariupol would be taken in a few days...
Perhaps even months...
Or even another case of Courland Pocket....
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We're a few days away I think. Russians have reached the city center. I'm curious to the casualties sustained, though we wont know these numbers until well after the war ends
 
SampanViking

SampanViking

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Absolutely furious! I came to see if any real news and information had been posted and instead found a riot in a kindergarten!
If a poster starts posting like that again, just report it but don't respond or quote as these posts need to be deleted as well. What a waste of an evening!
 
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semiconprof

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Zichan said:
I don't follow this logic. If you're using minimum force and the other side is numerically superior and using maximum force, you are basically setting yourself up for defeat.
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Not a student of history, eh? Plenty of time generals using numerically inferior forces to tackle enemies. Usually not because they want to but because they had to.

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  • 1792-1797: Napoleon Bonaparte's first campaign in Italy during the French Revolution, in which the French army of 37,000 men defeated 52,000 Piedmontese and Habsburg troops with rapid advances that prevented the two nations' armies from combining.
  • 1862: Stonewall Jackson's Shenandoah Valley campaign, in which Jackson defeated three Union commands (a combined 60,000 men) with his own command (17,000 men), by fighting each of the enemy columns in turn while the Union commands were separated from each other by impassable terrain or significant distance.
Zichan said:
I think that Russian plan honestly expected the Ukrainian resistance to collapse within days and the Russian soldiers to be welcomed as liberators. They sent token forces deep into Ukraine expecting that the local populace would overthrow the local government at the first sight of the Russian liberation army. It was quite obvious that their orders in the opening days was to be as gentle as possible.

Russia committed 120 of its battalion tactical groups to Ukraine out of about 170. BTGs are the core of the ground forces, which are not that large at 280,000 active duty in total. They also have about 45,000 Airborne troops, 12,000 naval infantry and an undisclosed number of SOFs.

Ukraine started the war with about 200,000 active duty soldiers, bolstered by a paramilitary force at least 100,000 strong. They have been mobilizing for a full month now and thanks to a deluge of small firearm supplies arriving from the West they won't be running into a problem equipping those troops anytime soon. From what I've been able to gather they've already mobilized an additional 150,000 troops. The war has entered a phase of attrition and it's not looking good for Russia right now.
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Your numbers proved my point. Even if Russia throws in its entire BTG forces plus airborne and naval, which is 337,000 troops, it's only 7,000 more than Ukraine's 300,000. So basically both countries were at parity right before the war. Of course Russia can't throw in all its force because it needs the reserve for defending its own border. So either Russia never meant to invade Ukraine but only being forced to because it didn't raise a sufficiently large army for the job or Russia never intended to invade Ukraine with a numerically superior force.

(But damn Russia is even weaker than I thought it was.)

Your explanation doesn't make sense because if Russia's invasion plan was so poorly conceived, I would expect the Ukrainians punch through Russian positions already, being so over-extended and severely outnumbered, not to mention the Russian military actual performance has been downright embarrassing to say the least. Yet, the Russians not only held their gains, they are continuing pushing for more advances, however slowly. So either they had a working startegy to begin with, or they are the luckiest army alive.

Plenty of people posted much better explanations than mine on how Russia could possibly use their numerically inferior force to accomplish their objectives. I guess you just want to see what you want to see. Here is an example.
FADH1791 said:
For why I’m seeing the first phase was to encircle the main cities to prevent freedom of movement and allowing the Ukrainians to reinforce the forces at the Donbas area. Once Mauripol is liberated(any day now) these forces will be used to help with the offensive to encircle the Ukrainian forces in the Donbas region. There is about 65-70k fighters there and that’s Ukraine’s most battle hardened and best fighters outside of their special forces in Kiev. Once their are encircled and wiped out the next step is the cities in the east. This will be bloody and probably be the longest phase. We are talking about Khariv, Chergniv, Sumy, Dnipro etc. However the thing is Ukrainian forces will be fragmented and separated in different cities. Surrounded with no hope of getting relief forces to save them. They will do what they did in Syria. Surround the city, allow the citizens to flee, bomb the city to weaken enemy defenses and send ground troops to finish the job. It won’t be pretty and it will be ugly. The Ukrainians will likely not surrender and make the Russians pay for every city they take. After much of the east is taken the next step is Odessa. The city has a large neo nazi armed presence there so I expect Russia to take it. But the assault will be by land and sea. After all of that Putin will likely give Zelensky a choice. A peace settlement or Kiev under siege and bombed. At that point Ukraine would be cut off from the Azov and Black Sea and more than half their territory is gone. And their economy ruined. So it’s far from over and I believe the pause is to fix their supply lines, solidify the territories they control, bring more manpower and firepower to bear for the next phase.
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I know you made up your mind already. So let's just agree to disagree.
 
Maikeru

Maikeru

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Lapin said:
Who's winning the war? As Zhou Enlai might have said, it's too early to tell for certain.
Who was winning the Battle of Marengo? The perception would chiefly depend upon when the question was asked.

Should Russian losses in armor be attributed only to alleged Russian incompetence or to basic vulnerabilities of armor in modern war?
I suspect that the best explanation is likely a combination of factors.

In my view, when armored vehicles become exposed to a broad range of modern anti-armor weapons, losses are inevitable.
If Iraq had many of the most advanced anti-armor weapons when it was invaded by the USA, US armor losses would have been higher.

My impression (which is partly based upon the experiences of friends or acquaintances who served in the Russian armed forces)
is that the Russian Army is generally not very efficient, apart from a few elite units. So I am hardly surprised that most Russian
soldiers may have been far from prepared at first to deal with harsh realities of fighting a hostile population in Ukraine.

I had a friend (a member of the intelligentsia) in St. Petersburg (his mother was a curator at the Hermitage Museum), who told me
that he was terrified of being conscripted into the army because he did not expect to survive. He said that one of his friends, a
conscript, had been beaten to death in a brutal ritual of hazing in the army. He said that his family could not afford the bribes
needed for him for avoid conscription. His hope was to marry a young woman with a foreign passport and leave Russia.
He asked me to help him. But I could not give him the relationship that he sought, and so we parted ways.
Wherever he may be today, I feel sure that he would not wish to die--or to kill anyone--in Putin's war.
A Russian woman friend said: "Putin does not stand for all Russia any more than Hitler (an Austrian) stood for all Germany."
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This thread, and the Guardian article linked therein, is directly on point. Apparently this "tradition" started in WW2 when the prisons were emptied to fill the ranks:

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1507524865959788545
 
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