Re: Russia has invaded Ukraine
 

They appear to have that covered.

https://euromaidanpress.com/2023/03/...says/?swcfpc=1

In other news, you gotta love the Britidh sense of humour.

https://www.cableforum.uk/board/atta...7&d=1680295229

Re: Russia has invaded Ukraine
 

Yes, losing their **** whilst Ukraine loses it's best and brightest at a slightly slower rate...

Re: Russia has invaded Ukraine
 

They must also be saving money by emptying their prisons. So a win win for Russia's cash flow.

Re: Russia has invaded Ukraine
 

Ukraine’s high command still seems to think the gains are worth the losses. It’s a dreadful calculation to have to make but unavoidable in the circumstances. It’s also worth noting that Russia isn’t just losing people in Bakhmut, however poorly trained - it is losing equipment, lots of it. This is not so easily replaced as touring prisons or press-ganging peasants from the far east. However, on the human calculation, even Russia can’t quickly replace 5,000 killed or seriously wounded per week, every week for months on end. Their last desperate tactic has been to use human waves to overwhelm Ukraine’s defences and this hasn’t worked, even though they have been throwing their people into the meat grinder far faster than they can replace them.

Re: Russia has invaded Ukraine
 

Well there is talk of them not being able to pay the soldiers anymore so perhaps those carefully harvested reserves have run out :shrug:

There is a vicious rumour the T50 is about to make an appearance, things must be bad and they'll get worse from next week when Japan bans the export of metal and electronic components to them

I like the way twitters algorithm has downgraded ukraine as misinformation since elmo bought it too

Re: Russia has invaded Ukraine
 

I think this war will drag out until the west joins in are Putin is ousted.

Re: Russia has invaded Ukraine
 

https://wapo.st/3U5UBrW

Re: Russia has invaded Ukraine
 

And that’s why Ukraine’s best and brightest are going to the meat grinder. An easy decision in Langley.

Re: Russia has invaded Ukraine
 

Easier decision in Kyiv - the other option was to be subsumed by Russia…

Re: Russia has invaded Ukraine
 

Unfortunately not a decision Zelensky’s conscript army was allowed to make for themselves, of course.

Re: Russia has invaded Ukraine
 

Yeah, I’m sure the desire not to have their language and culture erased, or watch their wives and daughters getting raped by gangs of Russian mobiks has had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with it. Those Ukrainian lads are only heading down to Bakhmut at gunpoint.

Re: Russia has invaded Ukraine
 

Do you mean just like the U.K. and the USA during WW1, WW2, and the Korean War?

Conscription is normal practice when an existential threat is happening to your country…

Re: Russia has invaded Ukraine
 

What about the men whose wives and daughters are over here, never to return?

---------- Post added at 17:41 ---------- Previous post was at 17:31 ----------

I lose track are we back at all powerful Russia that could march on Berlin within weeks or Russia on the brink of defeat if only Europe would donate more American weapons?

Here I thought the notion of young men being sent to the slaughter in the name of competing global ideologies died out after Vietnam but I guess as long as it’s not American blood dying for their interests that’s fine.

---------- Post added at 17:45 ---------- Previous post was at 17:41 ----------

It’ll never end. Ukraine ends up a hollow shell of a state acting as a de-facto NATO outpost. It’s women and children in Europe and it’s men in graves.

America will hyper-privatise everything to US multinationals to pay off the ever increasing amounts of debt it is accumulating.

Re: Russia has invaded Ukraine
 

So do you think Ukraine should have just allowed Russia to take their country?

Re: Russia has invaded Ukraine
 

J.F. is trapped in a great powers mindset, pretty much like Russia itself. Minor states have no agency, they are only allowed to be pawns on someone else’s chessboard. The idea that the strategic interests of sovereign democracies might coincide and align just doesn’t compute.

In reality, the pattern of military training and equipping undertaken by Western nations between the 2014 and 2022 invasions shows pretty clearly that the USA/NATO/Collective West had no intentions of trying to destroy the Russian army if/when it tried to overrun Ukraine. The AFU was trained and equipped to fight an insurgency against a presumed Russian puppet regime. To the extent that Great Power Politics were at play, they were aimed at keeping Russia off balance, and no more.

Western nations have only moved to supply and train Ukraine with heavy weapons as it has become clear that Ukraine has the will and the capacity to fight. Notably, they are still not supplying Ukraine with systems that might *actually* destroy the Russian military (ATACMS long range artillery rockets, F-16 fighters, anything that can reach a significant distance into Russia itself and start taking out airfields and other strategic assets). Aid is confined to that necessary to push Russia back to the Feb 2022 ceasefire lines, while admitting the possibility that Ukraine may wish to go further, into the eastern Donbas and Crimea.

There is a happy strategic realignment in that Ukraine wishes to continue to exist and America would like to see Russia dissuaded from creating mischief in the west, leaving America free to think about China. However, if Putin were to order his forces out of Ukraine, the war would end there and then. It is Putin who is sending Russian people and equipment to destruction, not Joe Biden.