A bit interesting how he describes the volunteers.
Everyone (western at least) was pretty great, except the people with American military experience, outside the special forces, who were spoiled cowards. The Americans without military experience were great but people who'd served multiple tours were useless.
Also funny how the British guy makes himself popular by brining equipment to make people tea (and other hot drinks).
What's interesting is that this implies Russian MOD is not lying when they say they've killed 300 Americans that they know of in Ukraine so far.
It's also interesting to note there does appear to be a media blackout; I've not yet seen a single story about the relatives of a fallen foreign fighter in Ukraine.
Different style of war. Your run-of-the-mill US groundpounder is used to having air supremacy and artillery support based on both the combined arms approach the US takes to warfighting and the last twenty years in the Middle East. Sounds like a lot of the Americans that showed up were used to being on the other end of the power spectrum and didn't adapt well to not having the firepower and logistics capabilities they were used to.
I think it worth mentioning that these are all just the takes of one guy (video dude), and as such, extrapolation from them is also just conjecture. I realize this isn't reddit where such speculation necessarily leads to bed-rock convictions, just throwing out a thought.
They didn't want to do mundane work like dig trenches and they ran at the first sign of trouble when they realised they didn't have overwhelming air and artillery support.
Probably less to do with quality of training and more with the quality of the recruits, given that the inexperienced American volunteers and SF were solid but the regular soldiers were not.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
Ioper 1yr ago·Edited 1yr ago
I'd be willing to bet that a lot of those "regular soldiers" were POG/REMF types looking to get their glory on who were then disappointed to find out that they were going to be spending most of their time digging foxholes and standing post rather doing action movie shit. Meanwhile the dudes with actual frontline experience seem to have had more realistic expectations and their attitudes reflected that.
What are they thinking, digging foxholes and standing post massively beats firefights.
Getting into firefights with an army notorious for the quantity of its artillery fire (apparently in summer they were firing US yearly 6" shell production in two-three days) and general callousness seems like .. one of the worse ideas out there, unless one has a death wish or very strong feelings about Ukrainian independence.
And the unconfirmed but probably real casualty figures of 100k+ Ukrainian dead suggest it's a very lethal environment in Ukraine.
Him saying that out his three buddies, one is died also suggests the 300 dead Americans (Russian MOD) figure might be accurate. If there had been 1.2k volunteers at that one base so early, there's probably in total something like 8-9k by now.
It's really surprising that so far I've seen zero sob stories about grieving mothers or spouses from the "international community" whose relation stopped a bullet or shell fragment in Ukraine.
Says 20k volunteers fighting, with only like 80 casualties so far. That seems absolutely implausible, given how bad people say it is, and the 100k+ Ukrainian dead figure that occassionally gets admitted by various non-Russian officials.
Seems perfectly reasonable but why didn't those "regular soldiers" show up from other countries(as much) or did they just have different expectations for some reason (even if that includes less morally upstanding stuff like looting)? Or maybe he just didn't meet them as much for some reason, leading to a skewed impression?
If it's the first thing my assumption would be that either America has to scrape the barrel more than other countries due to higher recruiting requirements (thus ending up with more REMF) or perhaps American (army?)culture encourages glory seeking more.
Unnerving ? He doesn't sound burnt out, or extremely cynical. He looks better now, doesn't seem to be less happy.
Pretty sure after a couple of months in trenches in Ukraine, you get a better perspective on life.
In his newer interview, he seems much more mature. I'd be unlikely to trust his first interview self, but would be willing to give him the benefit of doubt by his second one.
I think it's another reminder of that mankind co-evolved with our warfare, and these days, mechanisation, industrialisation and worst of all, nuclear weapons are robbing us of fundamentally important human experiences, the same way men have never been in a fight don't know what they're missing.
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Notes -
Does this guy remind anyone else of Dave Lister from the Red Dwarf TV show?
A little, if I think about it.
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A bit of a different experience than this guy it seems.
You got a transcript of that somewhere?
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Interesting link, thanks for sharing.
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No submission statement, not reading.
IMO a Bare-Link-Repository is preferable to bare links being the majority of top-level threads.
Why? The top level threads are dead, does it really matter what people are putting in the one per week which gets created?
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A bit interesting how he describes the volunteers.
Everyone (western at least) was pretty great, except the people with American military experience, outside the special forces, who were spoiled cowards. The Americans without military experience were great but people who'd served multiple tours were useless.
Also funny how the British guy makes himself popular by brining equipment to make people tea (and other hot drinks).
What's interesting is that this implies Russian MOD is not lying when they say they've killed 300 Americans that they know of in Ukraine so far.
It's also interesting to note there does appear to be a media blackout; I've not yet seen a single story about the relatives of a fallen foreign fighter in Ukraine.
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Jesus Christ, did you think my one paragraph "take away" was supposed to be exactly what he said? What you say isn't exactly what he said either.
I shared that he made a point of singling out (most)American non expert military personell.
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Different style of war. Your run-of-the-mill US groundpounder is used to having air supremacy and artillery support based on both the combined arms approach the US takes to warfighting and the last twenty years in the Middle East. Sounds like a lot of the Americans that showed up were used to being on the other end of the power spectrum and didn't adapt well to not having the firepower and logistics capabilities they were used to.
I think it worth mentioning that these are all just the takes of one guy (video dude), and as such, extrapolation from them is also just conjecture. I realize this isn't reddit where such speculation necessarily leads to bed-rock convictions, just throwing out a thought.
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They didn't want to do mundane work like dig trenches and they ran at the first sign of trouble when they realised they didn't have overwhelming air and artillery support.
Probably less to do with quality of training and more with the quality of the recruits, given that the inexperienced American volunteers and SF were solid but the regular soldiers were not.
I'd be willing to bet that a lot of those "regular soldiers" were POG/REMF types looking to get their glory on who were then disappointed to find out that they were going to be spending most of their time digging foxholes and standing post rather doing action movie shit. Meanwhile the dudes with actual frontline experience seem to have had more realistic expectations and their attitudes reflected that.
What are they thinking, digging foxholes and standing post massively beats firefights.
Getting into firefights with an army notorious for the quantity of its artillery fire (apparently in summer they were firing US yearly 6" shell production in two-three days) and general callousness seems like .. one of the worse ideas out there, unless one has a death wish or very strong feelings about Ukrainian independence.
And the unconfirmed but probably real casualty figures of 100k+ Ukrainian dead suggest it's a very lethal environment in Ukraine.
Him saying that out his three buddies, one is died also suggests the 300 dead Americans (Russian MOD) figure might be accurate. If there had been 1.2k volunteers at that one base so early, there's probably in total something like 8-9k by now.
It's really surprising that so far I've seen zero sob stories about grieving mothers or spouses from the "international community" whose relation stopped a bullet or shell fragment in Ukraine.
EDIT: went to check, but wiki is .. abysmal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Legion_of_Territorial_Defence_of_Ukraine#Casualties
Says 20k volunteers fighting, with only like 80 casualties so far. That seems absolutely implausible, given how bad people say it is, and the 100k+ Ukrainian dead figure that occassionally gets admitted by various non-Russian officials.
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Seems perfectly reasonable but why didn't those "regular soldiers" show up from other countries(as much) or did they just have different expectations for some reason (even if that includes less morally upstanding stuff like looting)? Or maybe he just didn't meet them as much for some reason, leading to a skewed impression?
If it's the first thing my assumption would be that either America has to scrape the barrel more than other countries due to higher recruiting requirements (thus ending up with more REMF) or perhaps American (army?)culture encourages glory seeking more.
Or its just statistical noise.
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For those interested, here is the video mentioned from before he left to fight in the Ukraine. The change in his appearance and demeanor is unnerving.
Unnerving ? He doesn't sound burnt out, or extremely cynical. He looks better now, doesn't seem to be less happy.
Pretty sure after a couple of months in trenches in Ukraine, you get a better perspective on life.
In his newer interview, he seems much more mature. I'd be unlikely to trust his first interview self, but would be willing to give him the benefit of doubt by his second one.
I think it's another reminder of that mankind co-evolved with our warfare, and these days, mechanisation, industrialisation and worst of all, nuclear weapons are robbing us of fundamentally important human experiences, the same way men have never been in a fight don't know what they're missing.
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