Russian invasion of Ukraine | Fewer tweets, more discussion
- Thread starter Wednesday at Stoke
- Start date
Cutting it off would be a precursor to eventually reclaiming it. Beyond the obvious logistical win for the Ukrainians of course. It would also means Ukraine likely reclaims all of Kherson oblast.
It would be hard to use it as a bargaining tool since the Ukrainians likely view Crimea as getable, and won’t want to stop fighting until they reclaim it.
Would be interesting to see if these are Russian sponsored commies or just French ones.
This is welcome news to the Israelis, who can now bomb Iranian sites into oblivion without the Biden administration batting an eyelid.
Interesting piece from Ben Hodges suggesting Ukraine can't win the war without taking back Crimea
Yes. We post Russian propaganda videos in here all the time, mainly for entertainment purposes.
Spot onJust I pointed out previously, Crimea is to Ukraine what Manchuria was to Japan in 1904: a direct threat to their sovereignty for as long as Russia has its hands on the region.
Good point, and I would agree. There likely won't be a lasting peace between Ukraine and Russia until either Putin falls and/or Ukraine takes back Crimea. Putin has pretty much forced the situation to where one of the two has to happen.
Putin's desperation for a win seems to involve going all in on Bakhmut. Much like Mariupol, it won't be much of a win if there's nothing left of the city.
UA war monitor on Twitter, who seems to have some accurate information, has hinted that there will be little good news from the eastern front in the coming days. I believe UA will leave the city on their own terms.
Bakhmut seems a pointless hill to die on for both sides.
This is supposedly the latest : The Russians don't seem to be making much progress in the present compared with the early months of the war.
At this point, I agree. It is mostly symbolic stuff for both.
Months ago, I thought the UA had a territorial advantage and should waste the RA's combat capacity by holding the city as much as they could. But once the outer defense lines were broken in late December, that advantage was gone, and UA has to look at whether it is worth fighting for. Even if the casualty ratio is something like three RA criminals for one UA defender would be too much for that city at this point.
It is probably symbolic for the Russians... But for the UA it is not dumb at all to keep Russia concentrated on Bakhmut, this means men and ammunition being spent by the Russians that they won't have available for more important battles. Time is on Ukraine's side...
I'm no expert but an age old tactic was to recommend never completely encircling an enemy - as they only have one tactic left - dig in and fight to the death.
The idea was to leave a narrow escape route and monitor it. Infantry escaping in a panic will help overwhelm the logistics of your enemy. You just intervene if they are trying an ordered retreat with hardware....then you lay into them like the road back to Baghdad in the gulf war...you've created a target rich environment across a narrow field of operations and can cherry pick the juiciest targets
I mean you read the second paragraph right? No one said it was dumb.
Exactly. If you do manage to encircle the enemy, you don't really know where they would try to break out. Whereas if you don't do that you pretty much know where they are going to do so.
It's a quote from Sun Tzu "When surrounding an army, leave an outlet free. Do not press a desperate foe too hard ".
In such a scenario, the Russians still would have an escape route via the Kerch Bridge and by sea.
You'd think if they wanted to look credible they'd switch the NATO trainers and soldiers numbers around, strange choice. The death number is vaguely similar to casualty numbers thrown around, so could pass. NATO are helping with training, hard to know exactly where and how much so you could claim a bunch of those, and you could probably get away with a low number of NATO soldiers and thereby imply that they're fighting in secret. Thousands is just bizarre.
Works on Musk, though, so maybe it just doesn't matter.
So, do we think he's a complete dumbass or that he's just on the Russian side?
I'm not such a huge fan of old military adages or universal "truths". This particular one gets repeated a lot, but Germany basically conquered France in weeks in WW2 through encirclement. And all of the biggest German victories in the invasion of the Soviet Union were based on total encirclement, as was perhaps the turning-point of the war at Stalingrad. If you've truly trapped someone to the degree that they can't escape in any way, then you've also cut off their supply lines, and in modern warfare you can't usually win then.
This adage might have worked in ancient warfare, but I just don't think it applies that much anymore. Then again plenty of the greatest ancient victories came through encirclement as well (hello Cannae), so maybe it was never that profound to begin with.
He's more in the attention seeking "aren't I alternative" mold, who thinks its important to combat the woke mind virus, or more broadly, say things that counter prevailing narratives, and in the process draw attention to himself.
This guy is usually very trustworthy.
It depends a bit on the relation of the fighting troops/countries. WW2 in France was relatively civilised - mostly surrendering troops where taken POW and didn't get harmed. If you know that you can expect such a treatment you are more likely to surrender than in a situation like Mariupol where the encircled troops had to expect being killed either way.
Okay so that explains the one example, but it definitely doesn't explain the other two. Most POWs taken from both of those died, though more from malice with the Nazis (some malice from the Soviets as well, though it also had a lot to do with the 6th army just dying already from starvation, disease and the cold).
Arguably Stalingrad was completely cut off very late in the battle as it was tried and to some degree worked to supply the encircled German troops by the air force. It didn't work as well as the Reich would have needed, but it was that small lifeline that wasn't cut off for a long time.
Yeh that's the other option, I hope that's the case.
UK MoD had to respond to this one because of him.