calbear93 said:
Cal88 said:
Unit2Sucks said:
Apparently the leader of Russia's VDV (elite airborne) accidentally told the truth in a recently deleted video which caused Vlad to cancel the annual VDV celebration.
According to the UK, this disclosure malfunction confirmed that over half of the VDV deployed to Ukraine - which is the vast majority of the VDV - have been wounded or killed. There has been a lot of stupid talk pretending Russia's military is stronger than before, but losing this high a percentage of your elite airborne force is not good for the military or war effort. This is just one small example of how this war has made Russia weaker.
Russian propaganda is working overtime to convince Russians (and useful idiots abroad) that it's having success. If things were really going to plan 530 days into this 3 day war, why would they have to lie so much? I think we all know the answer to that one.
People in Russia are starting to figure it out though. I don't condone this disgusting behavior but apparently a wounded Russian soldier was horribly beaten by Russians accusing him of being a murderer. Shades of Vietnam veteran treatment in the US - this is what happens when you fight an unpopular war with bad motives. It will only get worse in Russia as more of the population wakes up.
Finally, here's a short update from RUSI. RUSI is pretty well regarded British think tank that has been sourced in this thread a number of times. Any time they say anything complimentary of the Russian war effort they become very popular with the shills. This update will have them labeled as neocons who can't be trusted lol.
Your content is usually sourced from highly partisan pundits or neocon-aligned official sources, almost all of that content fails on these two premises:
1- It presents a false narrative of Russian military capabilities and inventory in what is essentially a war of attrition. The question you should ask here is, how does Ukraine compare with Russia in this particular aspect?
2- It builds a false narrative based on very limited and often dubious anecdotal evidence. There is one Telegram video of a Russian military disciplinary case, is that representative of overall troop morale and the conduct of military operations? And once again, how does it compare with the incidence of that occurrence among Ukrainian ranks?
Your material invariably fails to clear these two basic points.
Once again, my posts should not be misconstrued as rooting for the other side, my position is based on the basic understanding that there is no military solution for Ukraine, the country is sinking further every day, and that this war boils down to a cynical, cold-blooded geopolitical attempt to weaken Russia by using Ukraine. But even that attempt is failing and backfiring, as Russia has sustained the economic and military challenge, while Ukraine is getting wrecked.
I believe that calling this out, and pushing for a peaceful settlement is the best and only way to stop this largely one-sided massacre, and if you truly care about Ukraine, you should be on board with this.
When I was growing up in the sketchy parts of LA, there was a policy I had that was critical to my survival and sanity when confronted by a bully.
Even if I was had no chance of winning, I was going to make it so costly for the bully that the bully or another bully had to think twice before trying to bully me again.
I didn't negotiate different levels of humiliation I would tolerate.
There is no way that Russia will negotiate anything short of taking important things from Ukraine because they can.
And if we push for Ukraine to do that, the rest of the world is watching. This is not just an end game with Ukraine and then we all move back to perpetual peace every else. Now, if Ukraine wants to surrender, then fine.
Some may have argued that Civil War was costly and maybe we should have negotiated something to avoid the casualties, but sometimes expedient solutions end up more costly. If you were so outraged by the death in Ukraine, you would have more anger towards Russia. But I suspect this is less about compassion and more about an academic argument.
The reason Ukraine is fighting in the first place is twofold,
1- We have put in place in Kiev through the armed 2014 Maidan Coup the most radical form of western Ukrainian nationalism, an ideology that is hostile not just to Russia but to Ukraine's own Russian and russophone minority, a recipe for civil war, which according to many high-level American analysts like William Burns, would precipitate Russian intervention,
exactly as it happened last year.
2- We have armed Ukraine to the gills, since 2014, building up the largest military force in Europe, and continue to mislead the western and Ukrainian public alike as to their real chances to militarily defeat Russia.
Furthermore, we have actively scuttled any chance for a reasonable settlement to the Donbass and Crimean issues, be it the Minsk Agreements, or the Istanbul peace talks. We are still pushing Ukraine to fight today, even advocating aggressive military tactics that have proven to be exorbitantly costly to Ukraine - the "counteroffensive" in the south.
US foreign policy is more complex than the narrative you've been sold, which reduces geopolitics to moralistic black and white, good and bad binary allegories of the bully/Hitler figure out there we need to stop, tethered with the domino theory - same recipe as in Vietnam, Iraq, Libya or Syria.
