Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
On its face, and from my comfy armchair, consuming my western news, the invasion of Ukraine seems like such a colossal waste of human lives and military power.
When I think about other recent conflicts, the ones that come to mind were also incredibly wasteful, but they make sense to me in a way that the Ukraine war does not (maybe because I'm not russian?). The recent examples that come to mind are the American invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and the American defense of South Vietnam. These were arguably also very wasteful but maybe not on the scale of the Ukraine war. Are these good analogies for the war in Ukraine?
My initial ideas relate to the idea that Russia had a lot of military power that was sitting around unused and a bunch of petro income that made any sanctions less meaningful. Maybe the invasion/war hasn't actually been costly? Perhaps Russian leaders (and the hawks among them) saw nationalist fracturing of the tech supply chain coming anyways and this just accelerates it?
What does Russia get for the tremendous expenditure of resources in the invasion and following conflict? Is there some piece of context that helps the invasion make sense to a westerner?
What you are missing here is that "waste of human lives" is not a big deal for Russian powers. It's how Russia has always conducted its wars, and if it requires a million people sacrificed to achieve the geo-political goals or internal goals, whatever they are, it's a success. So for them, it's not a downside - it's an acceptable price, maybe even beneficial in some sense - they send criminals, troublemakers, rabble-rousers, poor people, etc. to die in battle, so they won't be a problem for Russian government inside Russia. Of course, they'd prefer to do it "in 3 days with no casualties" as they bragged, but if that's not on the table, what's happening now is still acceptable to them.
Not really. US actions in Iraq and Afghanistan were aimed at (whatever flawed execution followed) removing a hostile and belligerent government and installing a new one, more calm and less aggressive. US did not plan to make Iraq a state of the Union and force Iraqis to become Americans. Yet it's exactly what the ultimate goal of Russia is in Ukraine - for Ukraine to cease to exist as a country and be assimilated into Russia, both politically, culturally and in every other sense. It should be no more independent than Buryatia (which supplies a lot of troops dying now, btw) or Novgorod oblast - once upon a time, those were independent states, with their own governments, cultures and policies, now they are just zipcodes in Russia. Nobody ever wanted to make Afghanistan a zipcode in the US.
We need to define "Russia" here. With "Russia" as the fascist criminal syndicate holding the power there currently, a lot:
Unprecedented political consolidation - most of the population doesn't dream of opposing Putin now, it'd be treason! It's a long standing tradition to start a war whenever the throne feels a bit shaky. What is a democratic dissent in peace time, is a capital offense at war time.
Unprecedented level of totalitarian control over the society, which may not have been accepted if there weren't a war.
Unprecedented level of control over the economy and opportunities for profiteering, while the population has to accept everything as "the hardships of war" and doesn't dare to raise questions about grotesquely corrupt actions of the syndicate.
Grandiose global actions on the geopolitical arena - Russia is not just bombing Ukrainian villages to dust for no reason at all, they are striking a blow in the heart of NATO. Or at least that's what the propaganda says, and at some level they believe it. They hate the West and want to hurt it. Since they can't meaningfully do it directly, they do it by hurting it by proxy - by attacking westernized Ukraine.
Restoring the Russian Empire. It's one thing to be a Fuhrer of some oversized half-frozen gas station, and another - to be an Emperor. Putin wants to be an Emperor and continue the long Russian tradition of conquering whatever neighboring lands they can, just because they can. It is what, in their opinion, great Empires do, and they want to be a great Empire.
Destroying Ukraine is important because Ukraine being westernized and successful (or at least not a hellhole) would destroy a main staple of Russian propaganda - that the western democracy is unsuitable and culturally unacceptable for Russian people. Since the same propaganda holds Ukrainians are just Russians too stupid to realize it, if they have a functioning democratic westernized state, that means Russia could too. But the staple of the state ideology is that the current arrangement is the best fit for Russia and changing it would lead to unspeakable havoc and anarchy. If that doesn't come to Ukraine by itself, Russia has to bring it.
Reliving days of the past glory - WW2 and the Soviet Victory in it (it's only Soviet victory, all the others were at best cheering on the sidelines) is a full-blown fanatical religious cult in Russia, more strong that the Christian Orthodoxy. Giving a chance to the younger population to participate in the re-enactment of the religious sacrifices their ancestors did does great for consolidating the society around the glorious leaders. That's why Ukrainians must be "nazis" - the cult demands it, otherwise it doesn't fit.
With "Russia" as Russian population, a chance of living in "great country" that opposes the decadent West and stands tall and is feared by all. For some, this is enough to die for (or live in squalor for). For others, 10 years imprisonment is threat enough to keep silent and get on with the program.
More options
Context Copy link
Obviously they have little to show for it now. Because they failed at the blitzkrieg. They were never supposed to expend this many resources - just as they didn't in Crimea 8 years ago. We would be in a different world if they hadn't. Just as Iraq wouldn't look so inexplicably silly if Cheney and co. really had been able to make it into a functioning democracy.
As for what Russia wanted, it's still unclear how maximalist their goals were but there are some solid potential benefits Putin was looking at :
Annexing eastern Ukraine and gaining a land bridge to Crimea - which is currently being served by a bridge that - as this war has proven - can be disabled, creating problems for supplying Putin's "big win". The first part of this we can be relatively confident of cause Naryshkin accidentally spilled the plan when Putin was hammering him
Placing a puppet on a diminished Ukraine's throne to prevent or rollback any flirting with the EU and NATO.
Russia is facing demographic and imperial decline. Russian Ukrainians would - if assimilated - be a boon and keeping Ukraine (the second largest post-Soviet state) onside are more than reasonable goals.
More options
Context Copy link
Russians believe they're protecting Russians in historic Russian lands from a campaign of anti-Russian hatred by a populous poisoned by western-backed Galicians. They think, or at least thought, of Ukrainians as wayward little brothers who also needed to be protected from western poison seeking to rob both them and Russia generally of real sovereignty.
Russia is facing something of a demographic cliff and as time goes on their power will wain so they were more time limited than the West. Since 2014, they've been preparing their economy for just this. They attempted over years to come to a diplomatic solution ethnic protections and autonomy for parts of eastern Ukraine (Minsk agreements), but Ukraine and the West used this time to heavily fortify eastern Ukraine, using soviet strategy of using cities (and their populations) like fortresses, and raising and training the largest army in Europe behind only Russia while engaging in an 8 year long terror campaign against the populations in Donbass and Lugansk (not to mention the slaughter of pro-Russians in Odessa in 2014).
The Russian perspective is explained by Putin in his speech at the start of the war. And further reinforced in his speech in September (text here). Tl;dr: protect ethnic russians, russian land, fake state and identity, western poison, failed diplomacy, and some more
Minsk agreements were never intended to be anything but delays and Russia never seriously considered itself bound by any of it, no more than Budapest agreements.
That is pure fabrication, nothing like that ever happened - that's why Russians initially captured so much land, especially on the south-east - because there was no serious fortification ever made. In fact, quite the opposite - a wide publicized campaign of road building and enhancement was performed just before the war (which roads were then gladly used by the advancing Russian troops). Some opponents still can't forgive Zelensky this.
Again, nothing like that happened - this didn't even happen in Soviet times, and certainly nothing like that was happening during post-soviet times. They did not believe there would be a war, and did not build anything to prepare for it. There were - and still is - some stuff left from Soviet times, but some "city-fortress" dreams are pure fabrications.
This is complete bullshit, Ukrainian army in 2021 numbered under 200 thousands, and only part of it was combat personnel. See e.g.: https://www.ukrmilitary.com/2021/02/utrymannya.html
This not "largest army in Europe behind only Russia", and that's not accounting for acute lack of materiel and weapons - all the Western weapon supplies came after the start of the war, before it was "helmets and blankets" policy. While Russia had the standing army of over a million.
Russia also had the military budget of $65bn/year, Ukraine had 1/10th of that. And that's not counting "private contractors" - which proved to be the only combat-capable parts of Russian military - which are financed completely from black budgets and aren't counted as official military. And the "special forces" which did the bulk of the job in Ukraine before 2022.
Not that Ukraine weren't justified in upping their army after 2014, when Russia conquered part of their territory - but they didn't. Turns out it was a huge mistake, but that's not the reason to lie and pretend exactly the opposite happened.
Again, nothing like that happened. What happened is Russian army, Russian special forces along with a bunch of local criminals seized control over some areas. Russian aren't hiding it for a long time, and yet you insist on repeating their stale lies, which even they since abandoned. Later, some fissures developed between local criminals and their Russian handlers, due to misalignment of their goals. Also, both forces were determined to keep the conflict active, so they periodically attacked Ukrainian forces - which were unable to take back control over their territory. Locals gangs weren't also shy of shelling residential buildings and so on - to keep Russia more involved and pouring in more resources, since they reasonably assumed if Russia withdraws its troops, Ukraine would make short work of them and re-establish control. So the population turned into hostages locked between local gangs and Russian military, both intent to control the territory and both determined not to allow any resolution of the conflict - because creating the conflict is what they were there for.
Imagine Sinaloa cartel, aided by Mexican special forces, taking control over southern Texas - that's what it happened. Except drug cartels have the main purpose to sell drugs, and warmaking is only secondary for them. So maybe not the cartel but Sendero Luminoso or some other pungent group like that. It's pretty terrible thing, but Ukraine has nothing to do with it.
Again, there was no such thing. There was an attempt to do in Odessa what they did in Donetsk and Lugansk, instigated by the same sources in Russia, of course, and it did not work out well, and in the process some of the people participating in it - some unwittingly as they didn't know what was happening at the time - died. It's regrettable as much as all loss of human life is regrettable (or almost all) but constantly digging it out as some kind of justification of Russia atrocities only reveals the weakness of Russian propaganda efforts.
It sounds like you are just reading from a sheet of standard Russian propaganda, hitting all the prescribed notes in prescribed sequence. Which, of course, are all lies.
The first one of course is grotesque lies again - there are millions of ethnic Russians who are Ukrainian citizens and don't want to do anything with Putin, and many now are fighting him. Yet more are suffering from the atrocities inflicted on them by Russia. Some are already murdered by their "protectors". The second one is of course his wishes - he thinks any land Russia can conquer, or ever conquered in the past, is "Russian land". The third however is the most revealing - he wants to achieve this by cultural and ethnic genocide - since "Ukrainan" identity is "fake", destroying it is good, it's reveling the truth. This also reveals all the other lies - since Russian does not believe that Ukraine is a legitimate state and Ukrainian people exist, all their other claims are unnecessary - it's not because West behaved bad or Ukraine behaved bad, it's because they think it's Russian land and the people are Russian and thus are legitimate property of Putin, and Putin just comes to take his rightful property. That's the real reason. And the "we heroically fight Western decadence" is just the sugar coating for the plebes - maybe you live in shit, and will die in shit for Putin's grandiose ideas, but at least you are not a corrupt soul-less Westerner!
for Germany and France (and likely most of NATO), it surely was a delay game and they've admitted as much
whether or not Russians considered themselves "seriously bound" by any of it, they did implement their part of it
I can see the fortifications built in the Donbass and Lugansk on archived google maps. I read press covering their construction. Were those there in 2014 or did they magicked into existence?
I watched in real-time how Mariupol was used this way, including Ukrainian army and their militia pals attacking civilians trying to flee on backroads.
"large" = number of men and it is indeed true that Ukraine had more men under arms than any other country in Europe in 2021 behind Russia
you talking about Russia being bigger or spending more money is entirely irrelevant to the statement I made
how many men under arms in 2014? in 2021? Claiming the military didn't grow in size is simply nonsense.
I watched artillery shells targeting apartment buildings and city squares in Donetsk for 8 years with Ukrainian politicians bragging about the children in Donetsk hiding in basements instead of going to school. Or are you going to claim they were shelling themselves?
I watched them being burned alive in the Trade Unions House in Odessa on live stream in 2014.
I stopped reading there. Please read my comments more carefully.
They didn't, and they didn't even try to.
Donbass and Luhansk was captured in 2014. You were talking post-2014. Which fortifications specifically do you mean?
How exactly did you watch it in real time? You were present in Mariupol at that time? Where exactly and what did you do there? How did you get out?
No it didn't. Italy has more even if you stretch "men under arms" to include non-fighting personnel. France has more. UK has more. Germany maybe has more too, hard to say since I didn't find exact figures, but I think that's enough.
Not that it would be any problem if Ukraine has 2x more military and above France and UK and Italy taken together - but they didn't.
It is extremely relevant as Ukraine's military was minuscule compared to Russia's and so was Ukrainian military budget, and you're trying to present it as if Ukraine was trying to beef up to wage war on poor peaceful Russia. While what happened was the opposite - Russia has been beefing up their military for years, spending tons of money on it, and Ukrainians were largely dicking around before 2014, and continued to half-ass it after because they believed Crimea is as much as Putin would dare to go.
No, you watched some propaganda lies on TV (or Youtube, same difference). Now you are parroting them. In fact, in 2021 in Donetsk area there were 7 civilian causalities of war and in Luhansk - 1 civilian. For the whole year. This is "official" data from the Russians controlling Donetsk and Luhansk themselves, so they didn't have any incentive to undercount (and also it may mean that "civilians" were same gangsters just without official uniform - but we don't have a way to know it). This, of course, incompatible with constant shelling apartment buildings - what happens when that happens, we can see very well when Russians do it - not in propaganda lies, but in reality. One Russian attack produces more casualties usually than the whole fighting (instigated by Russians) produced for a year before Russians decided to "protect".
From the same source, overall number of casualties since the beginning of 2014 Russian invasion - both military and civilian - was 5038 (likely about 90% of them military). In 2022, the casualties among mobilized in Donetsk/Luhansk were in tens of thousands, and the number of civilian casualties unknowable. I guess this is how the Russian "protection" works.
Could you provide the names of three such Ukrainian politicians and where they bragged about that? This sounds very much like blatant propaganda, next thing you will tell me they crucified a little boy in underpants?
No, the kids in the basement obviously weren't shelling themselves (if such kids existed at all). But very possibly the gangsters that controlled the territory were shelling them, such cases were documented - the reason varying from infighting to just stirring shit up to promote one's own standing among other warlords. Or the Russian military, whose stormtrooper-like aiming capacities are widely famous now. Whatever they did, they probably couldn't top downing of a civilian airliner, so it was all small change to them undoubtedly.
You seem to get around - you were personally present in Donetsk, Mariupol, Odessa... Or wait, do you mean you watched some propaganda videos carefully prepared, edited and narrated to you, by Russian TV perchance, that's what you mean? Oh. I see then. You saw a video of a fire. Somebody told you some narrative about what happened in this fire. Since you saw the picture of a fire, you somehow believed this narrative is the holy truth and now consider yourself an eye-witness. If you don't understand the difference, I probably have no hope of penetrating the armor of your belief. But if you would care to research what happened, you'd know there was a fight between pro-Putin and pro-Ukraine protestors, which unfortunately devolved into throwing Molotov cocktails on both sides. Only one of the sides - the pro-Putin one - fortified themselves in the building. Which turned to be a very stupid idea when having an incendiary device fight - because when the fire followed, inevitably, they didn't have the means to retreat from it. But nobody forced them into the building, and they were giving as much as they were getting - so the "slaughter" here is not appropriate. They went out looking for a fight, they had the fight they were looking for, and they died, because of how they chose to conduct that fight. Regrettable, but hardly innocent lambs led to slaughter.
I don't know any way of carefully reading parroted propaganda lies that would make them anything but parroted propaganda lies, sorry.
pot meet kettle
that ends this discussion
So you admit to deliberate posting of parroted propaganda lies and accuse Jar of doing the same?
no
in the future, if you were looking for something resembling a genuine dialogue, this is not how one would start it
cheers
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The invasion makes more sense if you consider the underlying assumptions at the start of the conflict. Everyone expected the Russian army to roll up the entire country in a matter of weeks if not days. Furthermore, America hadn't sanctioned Russia in any meaningful way after the 2008 invasion of Georgia or the 2014 annexation of Crimea, and it was unclear whether Europe, let alone the world, would go along with anything more sweeping in the event the US tried to do something. It was assumed that Germany's dependence on Russian gas, not just for energy but for the feedstock of its chemical industry would leat to a split in NATO that could potentially be exploited later. All of these assumptions turned out to be wrong, and Putin didn't seem to have had a contingency for the possibility that he wouldn't be able to take Kiev.
Also given how reluctant US and EU was to help Ukraine before the war, and how pathetically US performed in Afghanistan, Putin wholly expected the West to roll over and give him Ukraine. And he wasn't entirely wrong - that was exactly what the West was prepared to do, until it turned out Ukrainians are not rolling over, and then it became too shameful to concede when Ukrainians didn't.
More options
Context Copy link
Interesting, @netstack expressed a similar sentiment below.
That makes sense to me (that the invasion was a miscalculation), but why continue the conflict now? If that were truly the case why wouldn’t Russia seek to de-escalate and extricate itself to rejoin the global economy?
Also, my recollection is that after 2014 Russia began saving up a rainy day fund of a few hundred billion dollars in foreign currency, which when combined with ongoing income from exporting natural resources meant they could withstand sanctions for a few years. Wouldn’t that indicate that they believed a prolonged sanctions regime was possible before they invaded?
From both sides, it’s now a face-saving thing. If NATO fails after giving Ukrainians their most advanced stuff, it looks fairly weak. We’re admitting that our best equipment, our intelligence, and our logistical support couldn’t drive back an army of a country with a third rate military. This would undermine Western hegemony in other parts of the world, countries would be more willing to challenge us openly, or to create groups that are not aligned with the International Community (which is run by and for the west and runs on westerners rules). China would be much more likely to try to take Taiwan and continue to try to control the South China Sea. The Middle East might well dump petrodollars for petro-yuans if the rate is better.
For Russia, their credibility as a cohesive country is at stake. Putin is playing for an empire, though I suspect he’s also sending a warning to other central Asian countries to not stray too far. This only works if Putin can take and keep Eastern Ukraine and prevent the rest of Ukraine from joining NATO and the EU. If that doesn’t happen, he reveals Russia as a weak country that cannot project power to its near neighbors. Which seems to me to encourage Central Asian leaders to look to other places for trade and support and so on.
I think China wins no matter what as long as the war can be dragged out long enough to deplete our weapons stockpiles. Every weapons system sent to Europe is one that cannot be sent to Taiwan.
NATO has not even started doing this (unless modern planes and long range missiles started to be delivered in large volumes - or any at all).
Modernish tanks and artillery was delivered but in small quantifies.
HIMARS was delivered in tiny volumes and had noticeable impact and continues to produce hilarious Russian claims.
That is based on assumption that noone made any procurement based on what happened. This is not true in general, and not fully true even for Germany.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Because the Great Emperor Putin can't just tuck his tail between his legs and admit he'd been beaten. And not just by some mighty American Jedi, but by stupid Ukrainians who are routinely laughed at and despised by Russians as stupid country yokes talking in stupid broken Russian and aren't capable of anything but serving as entertainment for the real great nations. They can not lose, because the whole world model that they have been building for years says they can not lose. And also, losers do not stay in power for long in Russia. If you kill 150 thousands Russians, and win - you are a military genius. If you kill 150 thousands Russians and lose - well, then you'd have to have some answers. So, they can not stop now.
They probably predicted some sanctions, but not as coordinated and deep as it is going to be now, because they expected Ukraine to collapse and the West to accept it with some token protests. Same as happened in 2014 and with Georgia and many times before. They certainly didn't expect the wide boycott, but what they're going to do now - admit it? They'd pretend it's all planned and go begging to China.
Which is particularly interesting, because I saw some commentators talking about how the war in Ukraine was causing big problems for many of the (relatively) poor debtors in china’s belt-and-road initiative, making china unhappy about the war and less likely to aid Russia.
I saw this idea (that belt-and-road debtors would be hard-hit by economic fallout from the war) floating around before the grain deal was struck, so maybe the state of the global economy is different now. There was that big showy meeting between Putin and Xi recently.
Also, isn’t it in China’s interest to have a weaker northern neighbor?
It's absolutely in China's interest to make Russia weaker - Russia has juicy resource-rich Siberia which is much closer to China than to any major Russian centers, and also getting some cheap oil and selling some low-quality phones and weaponry with inflated price tag wouldn't hurt either. China is ecstatic to see the West and Russia fight. But they don't want to lose the Western markets - so they'd help Russia as much as they can (and extract as much cash as they can from it) without pissing off the West enough to cause them to agree to suffer all the economic hardships that detachment from China would cause. Which leaves them not infinite, but pretty substantial space for maneuver. China is clearly the beneficiary there, and is interested in prolonging the conflict as much as possible, but not much in Russia winning (it's probably better for them if Russia loses, but after a very long war).
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
How long did it take the US to give up on Iraq and Afghanistan, nations culturally distinct and geographically distant from it? Now, imagine how long the US would fight to keep Canada or Mexico from joining an enemy bloc
Ukraine is the second largest nation of Russian speakers, it directly abuts Russia. Putin is also an autocrat, he can't just go "my bad" and walk away, unlike Bush (and, even then, a highly critical Obama couldn't just back out of everything).
And what does he get if he leaves? He'll have handed NATO an unconditional win, he would have strengthened the links between NATO and Ukraine and within NATO, left a more formidable enemy on his border and discredited himself at home.
If he keeps fighting he can try to lock in his gains, such as they are. Or hope that things get bad enough that the coalition breaks or tires and leans on Ukraine for some sort of peace. Things have gone badly but it's far from over.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Everyone meaning who? The underlying assumptions of who? Many non-western commentators didn't make these assumptions or claims.
The only way this would have been true given the invasion force was for the Ukrainian government to totally collapse. Many people did not think the Ukrainian government would immediately collapse. If anything, such claims from entirely Western sources evidenced their own failures (or ulterior motives) and not some clear outcome absent Russian failure or incompetence. Ukraine had been fortified for 8 years and had raised the largest army in Europe apart from Russia.
If anything, this simply points out how so many fell victim to obvious frame setting by NATO-mouthpieces to portray anything other than something which almost certainly would never have happened as failure and everything since then has been in the same vein.
The western media apparatus' shock and awe campaign was truly a sight to behold and its silliness continues to bear fruit.
absent government collapse, anyone who thinks <30,000 men were going to "take Kiev," a city of ~3m people is not a person worth paying attention to on these matters
how would it seem Putin didn't have a contingency despite having multiple other fronts which immediately took large swathes of land? if he was certain he was going to take kiev in 3 days or whatever with 30,000 men, why did he bother with the other stuff?
What pro-Russian sources or telegrams do you look at?
That's exactly what was expected - governmental collapse. Zelensky flees to the US, local Russian agents placed there beforehand take power, and in the matter of days the population finds itself under the new rule, which is fully controlled by Russia. Of course there expected to be resistance - but not from organized military, but from disorganized bands of poorly armed and poorly organized guerilla fighters, which could be suppressed with overwhelming force. That's why it went so poorly for them once the initial plan failed - some of the troops were "riot control" troops and not military, and the military expected more of "intimidating the guerillas into submission" than "fighting a well-organized military" mission.
It wasn't something that they just dreamed - they took Crimea this way more or less. They expected Ukraine to be harder, but not as hard as it proved to be.
Also, as far as I understand, the Russian leadership was sold a bill of goods about how much support Putin has in Ukraine and how many agents there are placed in key positions in Ukraine, while in reality most of the money allocated to that were stolen, and most of the people Russia bought were either not key people or too cowardly to do anything once the main plan failed. Though some places - like Kherson - were taken pretty easily, and there are still questions to be answered how exactly that happened. And some pretty key people - like the owner of the biggest Ukrainian aircraft engine manufacturer - were indeed working for Russia. So it wasn't total waste, just not as good as it was sold, and thus unable to deliver as promised.
Taking country of 40 million is a lot of work. Decapitating the government is just the part of it. Capturing key strongholds the other part. Controlling the energy infrastructure, the road infrastructure, etc. Even with the collapse it would be a large and complex plan. Russia didn't just intend to destroy Ukraine, it intended to take over - and taking over such a large territory and such a large population is a massive undertaking. Of course they needed a lot if "other stuff" beyond taking Kiev.
I've been following this pretty closely from sources on both sides of the conflict, sources which have proved to make true claims for years, and, frankly, I don't think we have something close to a similar enough view of what happened to really discuss this without getting into bickering "sources" wars about specifics, e.g., the make-up of the <30,000 soldiers in the Kiev push.
The <30,000 soldiers and a few hundred VDV landing at the airport were going to do a decapitation strike, but the entirety of the Russian aeroforce couldn't be bothered to use a single missile to target government leaders? This isn't believable. What is believable is a pinning maneuver to establish a landbridge to crimea if the government collapse didn't happen, except if that is accepted one also has to admit contingency plans.
Ukraine government collapse was a possibility and a hope, it was not a foregone expected conclusion.
Not sure what do you mean here. Russian airforce did quite a lot of strikes. But hitting "the government leaders" isn't as easy as you think - first, you have to know where they are. Second, you need to get there - and these places would be ones of the best protected. Third, you need to actually strike the target - which Russians were consistently dismally bad at, unless the target it "any random residential building in the two-mile radius". Fourth, your strike has to have some effects - and if you saw the actual buildings we're talking about (I did), they are pretty sturdy. Not accounting to what defenses were built in in the soviet times (that I don't know but I am sure there's at least the basement there).
The goal of Russians never was to convince you, so they may have omitted a couple of steps to make it believable to you. They didn't try to carpet bomb Kiev for the chance to hit Zelensky because a) Ukrainians have anti-aircraft missiles and fighters too (which btw Russians declared destroyed but very very soon found out they aren't) and b) they would spend a lot of effort to bomb one place and Zelensky would be in another place. If they had a way to know where Zelensky is at any given moment, they could kill him a hundred of times, because he has been visiting places within direct artillery or missile strike from Russian forces many times. They just didn't know where he is. You, of course, are free to believe whatever makes you feel better.
Yes, of course they wanted the landbridge to Crimea. If they didn't want it, they wouldn't capture it, obviously. But that was one part of the plan. The other was the decapitation. Somehow in your mind, the capturing of the land bridge to Crimea contradicts the decapitation plan, but however I try, I just can't see how.
Speaking of the bridge, btw, the south was where the collapse in parts did happen - that's where the strategy of recruiting local traitors worked the best, and that explains how Russia captured so much territory with almost zero resistance. They expected the same to happen everywhere, but it didn't. So they had to scramble for the plan B - which means mass mobilization, for which their army absolutely wasn't ready (one more proof they didn't expect needing it) - in fact, some in the military now saying if they do another mobilization like that, the army would not survive, because the chaos and disorganization it caused was horrible (for them, of course, for Ukrainians it was what allowed them to stop the Russia's advance).
It was an expected occurrence, though not the conclusion of the war, just the decisive phase of it - the composition and arrangement of the forces all point to it, so does contemporary propaganda, which nowhere nearly mentioned the possibility of year-long exhausting campaign requiring sending entire Russian prison population to serve as soil fertilizer. Everybody - including top generals and the Khuylo himself - expected quick collapse of the governmental structure. They certainly expect the war not end at it, but they expected the war to be won. It could take a lot of time from the decisive moment to the full victory - in WW2, it took several years - but the break had to occur quickly. It didn't, so now they need to conduct the campaign which they didn't expect to have to conduct.
Was there even one attempt at targeting government leaders? Your claim is that Russia had an extensive network of people ready to take over who chicken out, but they couldn't feed adequate enough intel for Russians to engage in a specific strike against government leaders in a "decapitation strike"? Instead, you want to claim the VDV + <30,000 soldiers were them doing this. Or was it the mysterious cowardly agents who were going to rise up but didn't? This isn't a strong argument.
What isn't believable is your argument given what actually happened in the opening stages of the war for the reasons I specified in my comment. It is difficult and yet they didn't try to do it at all. Or are you claiming they did try, but it's hard and they didn't succeed a single time? I haven't seen anything to support that. When I read a breakdown of the things destroyed in the opening stage of the war, none of it was government buildings.
Please read my comments carefully. My argument is the claim Russia thought government collapse was a foregone conclusion because Putin "seemingly had no contingency," is poor because the large force moving to take the land bridge is evidence there was a contingency if the Kiev push didn't arrive to a collapsed government. The contradiction is in the claim I originally responded to in a discussion you injected yourself into.
if memory serves, this was at the end of September (6 months post invasion)
What I saw in the opening month makes me think it was a hope, but would serve as a pinning force for Russians to get into position inside Ukraine if this didn't come to pass, which it did.
Not a successful one. Obviously, I can't know about unsuccessful ones. There were attempts to send attack groups to capture/kill the leaders, but those were stopped way before they could reach their goals. That was the part of the decapitation attempt, yes.
Yes, they had a lot of people who kinda liked Russia, even more people that were willing to take money from Russia, but way less, and not enough people to actually do something for Russia, and not high enough to be able to feed that high level of classified info. I'm not sure why it surprises you. If Putin wanted to capture the US and offered some US people tons of money, probably there would enough people who would take the money. There are people supporting Putin in the US right now. None of them would be able to tell Putin the exact location and schedule of the US president. For that, you need completely different level of access. Russia has some scores there - as I said, they gained a lot on the south basically for free, and has - and still have, on the occupied territories - people glad to work for them. But way not enough to achieve their goals.
Part of it, yes. The VDV's mission was primarily to capture the airports to allow reinforcements to land closer to Kiev, which is the standard Russian strategy, and at which they failed. It is also the standard strategy - not only for Russia - to first capture vital points with small and rapid force and then keep it until the bulk of the force arrives, while denying the enemy coordination and ability to mount any defense. That's why their attack looks kinda spiky if you look at the map - the direction is at major centers, like Kiev, Kharkiv, Kherson, Maruipol, Odessa. At those, they had success at Kherson, and after much struggle, Mariupol which by then was undefendable. All others failed.
And the planned size of Russian force was never <30K. It was 150-170K. Of course, only part of it was dedicated to Kiev specifically.
No, it started much earlier. As always, in Russia the official state of affairs and the real state of affairs is much different. At first, as you described, they thought it could be done with small forces and the rest mopped up at leisure. Then they had to involve other army units (remember, they had more than a million at hand, even though obviously they couldn't use them all at once) - initially they publicly promised no enlisted personnel at all will be fighting in Ukraine, only volunteers on contract, since this was not a war, but "special operation". In fact, you could be jailed (maybe still could) just for calling it a war. Then they started "volunteering" other military units. In April, the first summons to reservists started to appear. Those were weakly enforced t first, but for those silly enough to show up, they were pressured to sign "voluntary contracts" with the promise (false of course) that they will be only used as supply units in the rear and never see the frontline. Some were stupid enough to buy it. On May 28 Putin signed an order removing age limits for such recruitment. In June, they started enlisting prisoners. In Donetsk and Luhansk, the mobilization started in February, and by June became compulsory, with frequent manhunts, for any able-bodied man (they surely felt very protected by Putin by then). Most of the mobilized were dead or disabled soon after arriving at the frontlines, because nobody bothered to adequately train or supply them. And only after exhausting all these options, in September indeed, Duma officially passed the law serving as the base for the official mobilization.
Overall, there was a clear expectation at each step that they have enough resources and wouldn't need more, only to need more within the next month or two. Initially, they denied the mobilization would be needed - but with time, they realized this is the only thing that would save them from immediate collapse. Yes, it took time - given severe resource constraints and the vast sizes of the arena (over 1000km battle line). During that time, Russia was persisting in denial that they are at war and that they will need more resources. But gradually they had to recognize it. This does not match the idea that they expected the long at hard campaign from the start - they absolutely did not. They expected a quick win. Then maybe a not-so-quick win. Then maybe a moderately long win. Then maybe a slow win. Then "at least something we could declare a win without losing face". Now they expect maybe at least not lose what they had in 2021. It will get worse for them.
Where, based on what, targeting who and this is proved by what? I have never seen any supporting evidence of anything remotely like this. I have seen lots of evidence of the opposite, i.e., Russians knowing about where government leaders were and not attacking them.
They sent waves of missiles which destroyed important military targets all over the country from Karkov to Lvov. There are countless examples of this. And yet not a single civilian leadership building was destroyed? Your entire claim rests on soldiers attempting, but failing, at targeting government leaders, but I haven't seen good evidence of this.
"Government leaders" != only the President, the most guarded and secretive government leader of any country
Lots of those people could indeed say where mayors were, where deputies were, where representatives were, etc. Difficult? Yes, for some. Impossible for all? No.
I have always been speaking specifically about the Kiev push.
My understanding is that summonses to reservists are a normal part of the operation of the Russian military, absent if a war is going on or not. Is this accurate? Russia's hybrid military system is very foreign to me. In the US, reservists are regularly called up for all sorts of functions and are regularly deployed anyway as normal operation of the military irrelevant of wars or whatever else.
So they received summonses, but then they weren't enforced, and if they did show up then they would sign voluntary contracts despite them being reservists and receiving summonses anyway? What happened if they showed up and didn't sign "voluntary" contracts? Do you have any idea how many people this happened to?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I will admit that I don't look at pro-Russian sources very much. That being said, do you have any examples of pro-Russian or otherwise non-Western sources who argued that Ukraine would be difficult to take and likely to lead to stalemate? And what ulterior motives could the West have possibly had for intentionally underestimating Ukraine's defense capabilities? To convince Russia that Ukraine was a soft target so that they'd invade and get bogged down? It's possible, but if that was the case, and there was plenty of non-Western concern about Ukraine's capabilities, then Russia took the bait hook, line, and sinker. I'm not sure exactly what you're trying to argue here. You seem to be at least mildly pro-Russian, but you're essentially arguing that Russia is incompetent because they knew that situation was likely to turn into the fiasco it has become but decided to go in anyway. That's why the OP was asking what the point was, because from where things stand now, the war doesn't look rational.
Simultaneous pressure is a pretty standard military tactic. If he thinks he can take Kiev in a few weeks, his job is made a lot harder if the Ukrainians concentrate their forces there. If he attacks on a broad front from the South and East, in addition to the North, the Ukrainians have to spread themselves more thinly—defending Kiev is kind of pointless if the Russians roll across the rest of the country unopposed. Moscow had also been pushing the idea for years that Russian-speaking Ukrainians were an oppressed minority who would prefer to be part of Russia, and there was some thought that heavily Russian regions of Ukraine would lie down like Crimea did in 2014.
There is a chasm between Ukraine being "difficult to take" and "rolled within weeks or days." No, I do not have a ready list of examples from over a year ago. Do you have a single Russian source making that claim? How many examples of pro-Russian sources would convince you Russians didn't think they would take Ukraine within weeks or days?
If you frame something which almost certainly won't happen as the measure of "success," because it's simply expected, then the thing which won't happen will be evidence of your enemy's failure. It sets up a narrative of the heroic defense and given the laughable propaganda stories pushed by major Western outlets for the last year, e.g., ghost of kiev, spaghetti sauce anti-air, snake island defense, and many more, it sets the opportunity to help. Ukraine is winning, they're engaged in heroic defense, Russian failure is immense, their military is totally incompetent, and they could be defeated with just some help.
The media campaign starkly changed before the invasion and after the invasion. It went from years talking about beefing up Ukrainian defenses and army to Russia conquering Kiev in 3 days or else they're a joke. I have seen nothing to think any of this western "info"tainment had any effect on Russian decisionmaking at all.
I am not pro-Russian. I have been following this war since the maiden coup in 2014. I am arguing none of that. I answered the OP in another comment.
Yes, that's the point. You don't need to wildly speculate about motives, understandings, or anything, you can simply read what Russians are saying. It's odd most of the people on this board refuse to do any of that (they're lying after all) and at the same time swallow NATO talking points through their obvious mouthpieces in western media and have formed their entire opinion based on it.
Not only this - there are Russian sources widely available that had, in the first days of the war, proclaimed this already happened. They already had the content prepared for the collapse of the Ukraine government and the glorious Russian victory, and in the rush to be the first to celebrate, somebody hit the button a little too early and that content became available to all. With all the texts about Ukrainian nazi government collapsing and Ukraine gladly joining the brotherly embrace of Russia and all that. Yes, I saw those with my own eyes, as did everybody in the internet who understands Russian (not sure if it was ever translated? Google probably can do it well enough by now).
You can, just don't believe what they are saying this minute has anything to do with the truth. They say a lot of things, and only some of them can be believed. They also say a lot of diametrically contradicting things, and a lot of things that are plain lies. So you need to correlate what they are saying with what they are doing. If they say "we are going to smash Ukraine because it's fake state and it all belongs to Russia" and then they try to smash Ukraine - then it's clear they were telling the truth. If they say "we are here only to protect the civilian population" and then they blow up a theater full of refugees and a residential neighborhood - they it's clear they were lying.
Neat. So what? I didn't make the claim that no Russian said it.
Perhaps this is true and perhaps you did, but the person I am responding to did not and that's part of the point of my post. He writes as if this was some sort of universally agreed upon outcome and it didn't happen because of reasons X, Y, or Z, all of which he believes because he only looks at particular sources while not seeing anything else even while acknowledging those sources are comically biased and have incentives to lie.
you cannot simultaneously claim these things
I didn't write Russians only tell the truth. What has been done is what Russians are saying now and have been saying for decades is ignored and instead in its place are the rambling speculations of NATO funded "thinktanks" printed in op-eds across Western media to present a narrative to support the debacle in Ukraine.
Yes I can. Russians will say whatever serves them at the moment (or at least whatever they think does, most of them aren't geniuses). It could be the truth, or it could be lies, it could be revealing their intent or concealing it. You need to consider who said it, when, why and in what context - and then even lies can reveal some truths behind them. For example, Russian lying about Ukraine being "fake state with fake nation" reveals the truth that Russia wants to destroy Ukrainian statehood and not just secure a couple of enclaves with Russian-speaking population. You can't believe their words but you can believe the intent behind them.
Exactly the opposite. Exactly from studying what they lied for decades and what they are lying now, and identifying the rare cases they didn't lie and when these cases happened, we could deduce so much about their real thought process and their real intent. You are confusing "ignoring" and "taking at face value". One absolutely shouldn't ignore them and also absolutely should never ever take it at face value.
I'm not sure what this means. Nobody on the West supports Russian invasion into Ukraine (at least nobody that has access to op-eds, there are all kinds of people around of course). So what narrative are you talking about?
Okay, you only meant to make a comment on the intent of the speaker. Many Russians and pro-Russians sources do in fact care about how closely their statements reflect reality, i.e., the truth, and this is evidenced by them being consistently correct about statements they have made about the conflict.
No, I mean the Western media literally ignored them for the most part, i.e., didn't bother to address the statements they were making for the reasons they didn't any particular thing or disagreed with any particular thing. I agree no statements should be taken at face value when there are reasons to think they're not. However, this cuts both ways in this conflict.
The narrative of the conflict. How it began, the history of the conflict, how it's going now, which side is good, which side is bad, etc. It is true no one writing op-eds in WaPo or similar "news" orgs support Russian invasion of Ukraine and this has caused much of the problem of perceptions in places such as these compared to realities on the ground or the history of the conflict.
Instead of addressing Russian statements of concern or demands, they're simply waived away and instead convenient narratives about what really happened and what Putler really wants fill the pages of Western media. Looking at both sides of the media complexes, whether or not Russians would love to manipulate and lie or not, their capability to actually do so isn't even on the same planet as the shock-and-awe campaign carried out by Western media on their various populations in order to establish support for proxy war in Ukraine. Almost comical lies have been disseminated and are still believed by large portions of people in the West, e.g., the snake island last stand, ghost of kiev, spaghetti sauce grandma anti-air extroidinaire, casualty numbers, etc.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Small scale, huh?
I’m not an expert, and I think trawling Twitter for OSINT and tell-all insiders is a waste of time. So my suspicion is not specific to Russia. No, I think what we’re seeing today is the natural consequence of two factors.
First, waging war is hard. Consider the Falklands War: one side was a second-rate Cold War navy, and the other was Argentina. In less than 3 months, over 1000 people were killed, three times as many were injured, and millions of dollars of aircraft, ships, and munitions were thrown into the ocean. Ultimately, the UK held the islands and their population of less than 2,000 souls.
For a more thorough write up, I recommend SSC user @bean’s rather extensive series, especially Logistics at Ascension and Siege Pt. 1. Suffice to say that getting materiel in place was hard, avoiding mishaps was hard, but contact with an enemy was harder. Imperfect information and tactics made for a series of bloody jabs rather than any decisive action.
Now compare Russia. More troops, more armor, more artillery. Shorter supply lines and more reliable communications. Which brings us to the second point: people don’t want to believe the first. They want to improve on Blitzkrieg and take out all major resistance with their superior military. Seems like a much better deal, yeah? Especially when imperfect information strikes again. I don’t know if Putin’s advisors are yes-men or incentivized to boast, but for one reason or another they gave the wrong assessment of Ukraine’s durability.
So it is a waste—but it might not have been.
Fair point, I looked it up, and the Vietnam war is much bigger in scale (so far).
If I recall correctly, NATO estimates casualties in the hundreds of thousands for either side in the Ukraine war (to be fair these claims aren’t necessarily accurate because there is an ongoing conflict)
On the other hand, the sum total of the American casualties for the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan (including 1991) are far lower than for either side in Ukraine.
Seems like materiel losses in those conflicts (excluding Vietnam) are similarly much lower. This indicates to me that whatever benefits were gleaned from those conflicts had a lower cost than whatever Russia will get out of invading Ukraine.
(Civilian casualties are another matter, I’m mostly interested in the military cost/benefit here)
I used this resource to estimate American casualties in all of the Middle East conflicts: https://dcas.dmdc.osd.mil/dcas/app/conflictCasualties
More options
Context Copy link
Interesting series on the Falklands War, thanks for that. One of the comments on the glossary mentions a book with the approximate title “A Citizen’s Guide to Stupid Wars” which sounds about like what I’m looking for.
It seems like what you’re suggesting is that:
The expected result of the invasion for Russia was a short conflict (days or weeks) followed by the installation of a pro-Russian regime (Belarus II?), somewhat like the US invasion of Iraq
This turned out to be wrong, and the question for Russia became “What now?”
The new reality has become an attritional conflict to maintain control of the captured territory in the east while the Russian government figures out how to unfuck everything?
I guess the next question is what does Russia do now? It’s more isolated from the global economy than before (and my understanding is that it was already isolated). Does Russia just fade into obscurity as its economy and power wither?
Edit: @rov_scam said essentially the same thing here with additional context about the expected behavior of the west/Germany
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link