Russian invasion of Ukraine | Fewer tweets, more discussion

The absolute horror the buzzing of these drones must instil I can't imagine. Knowing upon hearing one that someone is about to die and there's no escape, just hoping it ain't you.

 
tomaldinho1 said:
Front lines haven’t really moved in like a year now?
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Unless and until the Ukrainians have enough resources and guts to launch an air assault (think helicopter-airborne troops here) behind enemy lines to wreak proper havoc and open up corridors for the ground forces, we cannot expect a change any time soon.
 
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Another big missile attack on Dnipro region.

Obviously Russians are ready for peace talks, tons of evidence is supporting that.
 
Just seen BBC documentary Ukraine: Enemy in the woods

Harrowing. The horror of war filmed by Ukrainian soldiers defending a railway line. Unimaginable what these brave guys are having to go through.
 
Are there any major differences between Putin and the Nazis? Russians believe that he is only person capable of governing Russia, because he killed or jailed all the opposition. He lies all the time. He blames "the West" for a war he started. Ukraine did nothing to provoke Russia, as Poland did nothing in 1939 to provoke Germany.


 
I don't think we have a German politics thread. So I will post this here since it will also have repercussions on Ukraine.



Scholz is such a pussy.
 
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frostbite said:
Are there any major differences between Putin and the Nazis? Russians believe that he is only person capable of governing Russia, because he killed or jailed all the opposition. He lies all the time. He blames "the West" for a war he started. Ukraine did nothing to provoke Russia, as Poland did nothing in 1939 to provoke Germany.


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You ok bro ?
 
Expected.



I would personally be surprised if he gets anywhere near 150,000 conscripts in the 18-30 age range without enlisting women in the service.
 
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Jeez, this is a grim BBC doc. It follows a group of Ukrainian soldiers who defend a railway line.

 
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Looking more likely that the House is finally moving ahead with Ukraine funding. Johnson seems to have agreed to bring it to the House floor (meaning near certain passage).
 
VorZakone said:
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To their 'credit' more and more of the mainstream outlets are starting to report actual reality rather than the nonsense coming out of NATO/Zelenskiy. The turning point, so far as I've observed it, was Zelenskiy's statement back in February about 31,000 dead Ukrainians. While it's understandable he wants/needs to keep bullshitting his Western backers, it didn't go down well in Ukraine, where people see with their own eyes that the cemetaries in single towns and cities have vastly more fresh graves than Zelenskiy claims have been killed throughout the entire country. When literally every single family in Ukraine personally knows somebody who has been killed in this war...

https://www.itv.com/news/granada/20...s-been-killed-two-years-of-the-war-in-ukraine

...who does he imagine he is gaslighting with his 31,000 figure?

Since then, there has been a shift in the media by even the staunchest Ukraine supporters towards reporting facts rather than Ukrainian propaganda. I was personally gratified to see Ben Hodges reduced to spreading his delusional gibberish on some obscure Canadian Youtube channel the other day (the title of his 'presentation' was "The Siege of Crimea Has Begun" and it remains the funniest video posted anywhere on the internet in the last month).

2 notable (for different reasons) examples of the shift are:

https://www.politico.eu/article/ukraine-great-risk-front-line-collapse-war-russia/

That article is worth a read because its sources are Ukrainian commanders. Sample quote:

"They spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak freely.

“There’s nothing that can help Ukraine now because there are no serious technologies able to compensate Ukraine for the large mass of troops Russia is likely to hurl at us. We don’t have those technologies, and the West doesn’t have them as well in sufficient numbers,” one of the top-ranking military sources told POLITICO"

The other article that caught my eye was this one, and it's because of the source:

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13248937/Sanctions-Moscow-hurt-European-economies-Russias-GROWN-encouraged-Putin-form-stronger-ties-China-aggressive-West.html

Ordinarily I wouldn't promulgate anything to do with the Daily Mail but this is actually quite an amazing article precisely because it is coming from the Daily Mail. For the first 24 months of this war they were the biggest cheerleaders of Ukraine and the Russian sanctions, and their sources were vacuous morons like Ponomorenko, Podolyak, Yellen, Sullivan, and, naturally, Ben Hodges. For this article they've somehow managed to get Ksenia Kirkham and Alan Cafruny (i.e people who actually know what they're talking about and with a record to back it up) on the line. No way they'd have sought people like this out for their opinions even a few months ago.

Proper news agencies like The New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal have been reporting facts on this war for over a year now - and they've been occasionally pilloried for it - but it's good to see that even those outlets that spent the first 2 years of the war serving as Zelenskiy's uncritical stenographers are now starting to face reality.
 
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You know what I find funny about that kind of stuff? It's the fact that those clowns from Russia and other like-minded dictatorships out there can say whatever bullshit against their enemies and then come out immune from criticism because no one from the media is calling them out or because the media are outright ignoring them. But if someone from the US government used that kind of language against geopolitical rivals or wartime enemies on the other hand, that person would get ripped to shreds in the media and then sacked in the morning.

The Western media needs to start calling out that cnut Medvedev in public if they want to be fair and equal to everyone.
 
RedDevilQuebecois said:


You know what I find funny about that kind of stuff? It's the fact that those clowns from Russia and other like-minded dictatorships out there can say whatever bullshit against their enemies and then come out immune from criticism because no one from the media is calling them out or because the media are outright ignoring them. But if someone from the US government used that kind of language against geopolitical rivals or wartime enemies on the other hand, that person would get ripped to shreds in the media and then sacked in the morning.

The Western media needs to start calling out that cnut Medvedev in public if they want to be fair and equal to everyone.
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No need to waste any time with Medvedev. He's irrelevant and is only saying this stuff for domestic consumption.
 
RedDevilQuebecois said:


You know what I find funny about that kind of stuff? It's the fact that those clowns from Russia and other like-minded dictatorships out there can say whatever bullshit against their enemies and then come out immune from criticism because no one from the media is calling them out or because the media are outright ignoring them. But if someone from the US government used that kind of language against geopolitical rivals or wartime enemies on the other hand, that person would get ripped to shreds in the media and then sacked in the morning.

The Western media needs to start calling out that cnut Medvedev in public if they want to be fair and equal to everyone.
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Well, there are some politicians that are inmune. A guy named Trump, I don't know if you heard about it, young fella with a lot of energy, grabbing woman by the pussy, who would be able to kill someone in 5th ave in broadday light and people would still vote for him and he is of the opinion that Russia should be allowed to do whatever they want, also has a very nice opinion about mexican immigrants like they are rapist and murderous.

Sacked in the morning, doubtful
 
Matthew Blackburn's (senior researcher at NUPI) latest article was quoted by The Telegraph which is why I'm linking the whole thing here. It's another example of what I wrote above, about how more and more fiercely pro-Ukraine mainstream outlets are starting to use actually informed and rational people for their reporting rather than Ukrainian and/or NATO Raytheon board members "retired generals". As with the Daily Mail in my previous post, the Telegraph has been an uncritical stenographer for Zelenskiy since 2022 so it's notable that even they are starting to present reality.

https://nationalinterest.org/feature/looming-ukraine-debacle-210160

The overall gist is that the West went into this war with absolutely no idea of what they were getting into and is now equally bereft of any semblence of a coherent strategy for getting themselves and Ukraine out of it.

Sample passages:

Another established pattern is the repetition of moralistic binary language. The West “cannot let Russia win.” The “rules-based order” could unravel. Then there is the new domino theory: if Ukraine falls, Russian hordes will flood further west. The personalization of the conflict onto one evil man, Vladimir Putin, continues with the death of Alexei Navalny. It is a Manichean struggle of good and evil, democracy and authoritarianism, civilization and darkness. There can be “no peace until the tyrant falls.” The Western alliance must not waver in its commitment to Ukraine.

What is lacking throughout the discourse is realism. What is the real balance of power between the warring nations, and what can be concluded from two years of Russia-NATO hard power competition? Unsurprisingly, Western leaders are reluctant to admit that the dire situation facing Ukraine is related to their own fundamental miscalculations about Russia. Russia’s multiple blunders in this war are well-known but what of those made by the Western alliance?

And:

Overall, NATO was not well prepared for the war in Ukraine; its military doctrines foresaw interventions in civil wars or conflict with weaker opponents, not a proxy war of attrition with a peer competitor.

In contrast, Russia was better prepared for the long haul of military production and has also successfully innovated in response to the military setbacks it has experienced. The Russian military has adapted to conditions of near total battlefield visibility, the mass use of drones, and the vastly reduced power of tanks and aircraft. This includes innovative infantry assault tactics, new methods of using and countering drones, and, more recently, the devastating use of glide bombs that allow Russian air power to be used while evading anti-aircraft fire. On the tactical and operational level, Russia is engaging many parts of the front simultaneously, forcing Ukraine into an exhausting and constant redeployment of troops. Presenting Russian military successes as “human wave” or “meat assaults” is clearly inaccurate. Russia’s approach is gradual, attritional, and anything but mindless.

And:

The lack of realism in Western discourse is clear. There is indeed a serious risk that, rather than the West teaching Russia a lesson and putting Putin in his place, the opposite may occur. Is Russia, in fact, educating the West on what it means to use hard power and wage interstate conflict in twenty-first-century conditions? Russia advertises its version of great power sovereignty, in which a united, resilient, and unwavering state can defeat the pooled sovereignty of the EU and NATO.

We have all heard the objection that Putin simply cannot be trusted and that he wants nothing less than the complete elimination of Ukraine as an independent state. Yet, does not the blind continuation of the West’s dysfunctional Plan A also threaten the total physical destruction of Ukraine?


All of these observations are as obvious as stating the sky is blue, but we're 2 years into the Orwellian era of truth-telling being a radical act so it's good the mainstream outlets are finally starting to report reality, even a little.
 
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