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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   31616 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022

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It is hard enough for people to update with new information. To actually update with new information and remember they used to have the incorrect information is rare.

I absolutely thought that Kiev would fall and fall quickly. (Should I have known this based on information I had available at the time? Good question.)

I absolutely thought that Kiev would fall and fall quickly.

That's only imaginable if there is very little to no resistance. A city can be defended very easily, and unless you're dealing with an extremely casualty insensitive army, no one's gonna just drive in while vehicles are blowing up left and right around them.

Russians thought nobody would seriously fight, and the units weren't ready to steamroll even the modest opposition they encountered.

Mind you, most 'armored vehicles' Russia uses are paper armored due to flotation requirements, everything but the tanks can be killed with a .50 BMG.

So a couple of heavy machineguns inside buildings can be extremely dangerous to an 'armored column'. (NATO is slightly better in that regard, typically their infantry vehicles are armored to withstand the easily man-portable heavy machineguns. But they don't float at all, of course)

A city can be defended very easily, and unless you're dealing with an extremely casualty insensitive army, no one's gonna just drive in while vehicles are blowing up left and right around them.

I also expected Ukraine to fall rather quickly, but I didn't expect anything like this.

I expected cities with major resistance to have their supply lines cut until the majority of the populace went elsewhere (or starved, but the former seems much more likely). Cities don't tend to have the huge food reserves they used to when sieges were more common.

I was also surprised when Kiev didn't fall and the war dragged on. My perception was that Ukraine was a European version of the regime in Afghanistan, and would fold before determined attack because no one was truly loyal to it.

I think a lot westerners just kind of assumed that the Euromaidan and Reginonv parties were functionally equivalent in much the same way that Republicans and Democrats often are in the US or Torys vs Labour in Britain. Unless you were the sort of person who was already paying specific attention to the defense situation in and around the Black Sea prior to the invasion you wouldn't have known who Zelensky was, or that the Yanukovych and Azarov were even on the outs, nevermind why. (assuming you knew who Yanukovych and Azarov were in the first place)

My model was not Afghanistan. It was Crimea. Russia would roll over it, the West would be Really Mad, but then shrug because what can you do?

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