Europe War in Ukraine - Thread 4 - thread rules updated

[Gethelred]

This is the thread for discussing the War in Ukraine. Should you want to discuss the geopolitics, the history, or an interesting tangent, head over here:

Europe - Backdrop to the war in Ukraine

This is the thread for the geopolitics, history and framework around the Russia-Ukraine conflict. If you want to discuss the events of the war, head over to this thread: https://www.bigfooty.com/forum/threads/war-in-ukraine-thread-4-thread-rules-updated.1376293/page-146

www.bigfooty.com

If a post isn't directly concerning the events of the war or starts to derail the thread, report the post to us and we'll move it over there.

Seeing as multiple people seem to have forgotten, abuse is against the rules of BF. Continuous, page long attacks directed at a single poster in this thread will result in threadbans for a week from this point; doing so again once you have returned will make the bans permanent and will be escalated to infractions.

This thread still has misinformation rules, and occasionally you will be asked to demonstrate a claim you have made by moderation. If you cannot, you will be offered the opportunity to amend the post to reflect that it's opinion, to remove the post, or you will be threadbanned and infracted for sharing misinformation.

Addendum: from this point, use of any variant of the word 'orc' to describe combatants, politicians or russians in general will be deleted and the poster will receive a warning. If the behaviour continues, it will be escalated. Consider this fair warning.

Finally: If I see the word Nazi or Hitler being flung around, there had better have a good faith basis as to how it's applicable to the Russian invasion - as in, video/photographic evidence of POW camps designed to remove another ethnic group - or to the current Ukrainian army. If this does not occur, you will be threadbanned for posting off topic

This is a sensitive area, and I understand that this makes for fairly incensed conversation sometimes. This does not mean the rules do not apply, whether to a poster positing a Pro-Ukraine stance or a poster positing an alternative view.

Behave, people.

 

[Sir_Loin]

Pre war, one of the guys was a teacher and the other a motorbike engenieer.

Have to respect their bravery. Some of that footage is unreal. Taking an IFV up against a T90 takes brass cojones and they bloody did it. I think I read they also took out some BMPs in the same action.

 

[Visions]

Don’t know what he was expecting. A charmed life on the frontlines?

His own government has abandoned him, not that it is a surprise. They dont give a sh!t about their citizens either like the Kremlin.

 

[Millky95]

Have to respect their bravery. Some of that footage is unreal. Taking an IFV up against a T90 takes brass cojones and they bloody did it. I think I read they also took out some BMPs in the same action.

I'd post the video but I think it is against BF rules but Reddit's r/CombatFootage has it and my god it looks like something out of a movie

 

[wannabejack]

Such a shame that one of those drones couldn't have be redirected towards Vlad's palace.

From Business Insider

Ukraine sent a drone over President Vladimir Putin's palace at Lake Valdai during an attack on St. Petersburg oil depot, a military source claimed on Friday.

On Thursday, Ukraine sent Ukrainian-produce drones 775 miles into Russian airspace to strike an oil depot near St. Petersburg, Oleksandr Kamyshin, Ukraine's minister of strategic industries, said, according to The Kyiv Independent.

En route, one of the drones also flew over one of Putin's palaces, an unnamed special-services source told the Ukrainian news agency RBC

 

[wannabejack]

Don’t know what he was expecting. A charmed life on the frontlines?

His own government has abandoned him, not that it is a surprise. They dont give a sh!t about their citizens either like the Kremlin.

You have to feel sorry for the guy.
Sounds like he's got a bad case of man flu.

 

[Sir_Loin]

Don’t know what he was expecting. A charmed life on the frontlines?

His own government has abandoned him, not that it is a surprise. They dont give a sh!t about their citizens either like the Kremlin.

He’s going up against Ukrainians and then on top of that is surprised that they’re battle hardened and motivated to fight?

 

[Sir_Loin]

I'd post the video but I think it is against BF rules but Reddit's r/CombatFootage has it and my god it looks like something out of a movie

Looks like the ERA did a pretty decent job but couldn’t withstand the rate of fire. Some of the comments indicated they were armour piercing rounds which if true, would be hugely problematic for a tank like the T90

 

[wannabejack]

Interesting video, reminds me of reports from Libya where Technicals (utes with weapons on the back, like chariots) would form a Cantabrian circle (think Indians riding in a circle firing in the old cowboy movies), peppering Main Battle Tanks with fire while moving too fast to be hit by the MBT.

Here the 25mm chain gun of the Bradleys is unable penetrate the armour of the T-90 MBT. But it is quite capable smashing up the outside, damaging the ERA panels, vision slits and causing the white phosphorus smoke launchers to cook off. The result a mission kill as the MBT is combat ineffective.

I wonder why they did not use the TOW anti-tank missiles, maybe they have none left, it was to close for effective use (min range 65m) or they simply did not want to slow down enough to fire one.

Battling A T-90 Tank, A Ukrainian M-2 Ran Out Of Armor-Piercing Ammo

Unable to penetrate the 51-ton T-90, M-2 gunner Serhiy targeted the tank’s fragile optics. “I started blinding him so he couldn’t leave.”

www.forbes.com

“We fired with all we could,” Serhiy, the gunner, told TCH. “At first with anti-armor. And then we started having issues.”

Despite having completed his training in Germany just a few weeks prior to the fight with the T-90, Serhiy adapted fast. “I remembered everything,” he said, comparing operating an M-2 to playing video games.

Hammering the T-90 with one-pound autocannon rounds, Serhiy triggered some of the tank’s explosive reactive armor and destroyed the optics.

Its turret spinning, the tank rolled out of control—and into a tree. The three crew bailed out. One, the driver, reportedly got captured. Later, a Ukrainian first-person-view drone finished off the T-90. Its wreck still was on the battlefield days later.

 

[Zidane98]

He’s going up against Ukrainians and then on top of that is surprised that they’re battle hardened and motivated to fight?

Russia are supposed to have troops galore in reserve apparently.

Yet they are resorting to conscripting foreigners to keep the war effort going. Putin is even giving citizenship to anyone who fights for Russia.

This is inconsistent with Russia having large amounts of reserves ready to fight in Ukraine.

 

[Chief]

Putin doesn't want to send in the good people from the metropolitan areas. Only prisoners and the plebs from remote areas.

He's running out of small Russian town and village populations to decimate.

 

[Sir_Loin]

Putin doesn't want to send in the good people from the metropolitan areas. Only prisoners and the plebs from remote areas.

He's running out of small Russian town and village populations to decimate.

Yeah his power structure is based in Moscow and St Petersburg particularly.

Question is when do they think it’s time to move against him when it’s their kids that get thrown into the meat grinder.

 

[Andre]

Russia are supposed to have troops galore in reserve apparently.

Yet they are resorting to conscripting foreigners to keep the war effort going. Putin is even giving citizenship to anyone who fights for Russia.

This is inconsistent with Russia having large amounts of reserves ready to fight in Ukraine.

There needs to be a steady stream of bodies until after the ‘election’. Then Putin can call either another partial mobilisation or a full one.

 

[BlueE]

I have not changed the goalposts, I just have to keep repeating the same things over and over because you are either unable to unwilling to take it on board, and I may use different terms to try to get it across that what you are quoting does not justify your claims.

I don't give a fig:

- if you quote western leaders saying that NATO expansion should not occur, or that they believe Soviet leaders wouldn't like it, yeah cool story, that's not any kind of assurance

- if you have to join the dots between references to conversations and assume the detail of such conversations, without there being explicit detail about any assurances you think were discussed (e.g. the story about Baker trying out his "not one inch eastward" line, not specifying that it wasn't about East Germany, and noting vaguely that the Soviet response was good)

- and to cover your concern about goalposts, if you refer to "assurances" of any kind, without it specifically being an actual quote, from NATO to Soviet reps, that NATO would not expand generally, as opposed to a vague references to assurances that could have been about East Germany or something else

The latter includes the "spirit of" quote from Gorbachev, which shows absolutely nothing other than potentially he saw the East Germany assurance, which I agree occurred, as an implication that NATO wasn't going to expand eastward elsewhere, but again that's on him, not an assurance (and undercut by the fact that NATO was already further eastward in general from the 50s, than any future possible expansion, outside a potential Georgian membership).

Not only is "assurances, "definite assurances", to now "slam dunk assurances" is changing the goal posts and the totally misrepresenting the argument, you didn't even understand who was giving the assurances, which they did, proved in actual quotes.

The unclassified security documents were analysed by a slavic group and quoted in the links I given with all the original documents. They clearly show the promises given by the multiple western nations that NATO would not expand closed to the Soviet territory, "not one inch to the East" was different to the agreement on the unification of German.

Gorbechev's actual words, if you read the full interview (which was attached to the first Brookings I think), clearly differentiated between the signed agreement for the unification of Germany and the the "decision of the United States and its allies to expand NATO eastward in 1993" was "of course, violation of the spirit of the statements and assurances that were given in 1990."

"The decision of the United States and its allies to expand NATO eastward was finally formed in 1993. I called it a big mistake from the very beginning. Of course, this was a violation of the spirit of the statements and assurances that were given to us in 1990. As for Germany, they were legally enshrined and they are being respected."

 

[BlueE]

TL;DR

Of course, it's not lazy. It's just you want simple slogans to repeat that reinforce your opinions fed to you by pro war propaganda news.

The documents reinforce former CIA Director Robert Gates’s criticism of “pressing ahead with expansion of NATO eastward [in the 1990s], when Gorbachev and others were led to believe that wouldn’t happen.”

 

[Sir_Loin]

Of course, it's not lazy. It's just you want simple slogans to repeat that reinforce your opinions fed to you by pro war propaganda news.

The documents reinforce former CIA Director Robert Gates’s criticism of “pressing ahead with expansion of NATO eastward [in the 1990s], when Gorbachev and others were led to believe that wouldn’t happen.”

Why didn’t you just say that in the first place and then make a proposition?

You’d be a much better interlocutor if you could keep it very brief and on target.

I’ll dismiss one of your claims now. I’m not pro-war.

 

[Rayzorwire]

Oh yeah that left leaning BBC reporter that reports from Moscow doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

The one quote he came up with to 'prove' anything Putin had said, he had to ' ... ' join two quotes from entirely different sentences together.

' ... ' in the middle of a quote denotes a break in the text being quoted.

Any person educated in studying language on any level beyond high school (and I really hope most high school kids could too) can spot that kind of cheap trick a mile away.

And here it is for you, from your article:


So to get one lousy, not even really relevant to any 'wanting to conquer the world' assertions quote, they had to take "we lost 40% of our territory...' and join it with the end of another entirely different sentence, taken entirely out of context to the rest of the speech, or the half sentence its been joined to. Done solely to pretend a world leader said something he didn't, slipping it straight past anyone who doesn't understand basic grammar.

I wonder what would happen if you put half a dozen mischievous, moderately bright teenagers in a room together with a sack full of Biden sentences, then told them they could take the beginning of a sentence, chop it in half, then use the other half of another sentence to make THE REAL sentence?

Reckon those teenagers would might put your BBC journo to shame with their wit and inventiveness.

I mean, nearly every day Biden uses warmongering rhetoric in whole, unbroken paragraphs. Imagine what you could accomplish cutting his sentences into halves and rejoining them to make him look as evil/stupid/incompetent as you like.

 

[Sir_Loin]

The one quote he came up with to 'prove' anything Putin had said, he had to ' ... ' join two quotes from entirely different sentences together.

' ... ' in the middle of a quote denotes a break in the text being quoted.

Any person educated in studying language on any level beyond high school (and I really hope most high school kids could too) can spot that kind of cheap trick a mile away.

And here it is for you, from your article:

View attachment 1889951
So to get one lousy, not even really relevant to any 'wanting to conquer the world' assertions quote, they had to take "we lost 40% of our territory...' and join it with the end of another entirely different sentence, taken entirely out of context to the rest of the speech, or the half sentence its been joined to. Done solely to pretend a world leader said something he didn't, slipping it straight past anyone who doesn't understand basic grammar.

I wonder what would happen if you put half a dozen mischievous, moderately bright teenagers in a room together with a sack full of Biden sentences, then told them they could take the beginning of a sentence, chop it in half, then use the other half of another sentence to make THE REAL sentence?

Reckon those teenagers would might put your BBC journo to shame with their wit and inventiveness.

I mean, nearly every day Biden uses warmongering rhetoric in whole, unbroken paragraphs. Imagine what you could accomplish cutting his sentences into halves and rejoining them to make him look as evil/stupid/incompetent as you like.

Mate you’re so wrapped up in your own mind you miss the point. Putin has imperialistic ambitions, stated them and here we are. Why are you parsing?

He’s doing exactly what he said he would do. Even if he didn’t he’s still doing it!!!

 

[Rayzorwire]

Interesting note from the Author though.

Isn't it?

Clearly shows she has absolutely no bias whatsoever towards Putin.

Not that a simple fact like that is going to keep some people here from completely ignoring every single inconvenient fact they encounter.

Must be up to at least a few dozen unanswered direct questions by now!

 

[Sir_Loin]

Isn't it?

Clearly shows she has absolutely no bias whatsoever towards Putin.

Not that a simple fact like that is going to keep some people here from completely ignoring every single inconvenient fact they encounter.

Must be up to at least a few dozen unanswered direct questions by now!

Again you’re missing it. Being a historian as you claim you know the last paragraph is your conclusion. What does it say?

 

[Rayzorwire]

Crimea is actually an independent (or autonomous) republic, not an oblast. The concept of an autonomous oblast is a little different, has only been utilised (from my memory) once but this was to collect a culture together, not to provide an existing culture with autonomy - and was a remote spot which never had nor gained much population/development.

The references to "republics" (DPR, LPR, Crimea) are contested outside of Russia, as the actual independence seems to fall very short of what the term defines. Under Russian control, the straight up term of oblast is more accurate, as it operates by no means independent of Russian control - and local cultural input is pretty much non-existent. (You could argue "Krai: is even more appropriate due to its verging on the far reaches, but the terms have melded over the years).

The intention of naming Crimea a republic could still be transferrable in stated intent from that of Ukraine's Autonomous Oblast of Ukraine. I believe in both cases, Sevastopol is distinct from the remainder of Crimea (definitely in case of Ukraine, unsure in case of RF).

Cheers, Mobbs, it's not an easy period to wrap your head around - as you say, when they sat down to hash things out for the Crimean Republic, whose definition of Oblast was used?

There used to be a ton more freely available information about this massively complex period, even the wikipedia page is maybe only 10% the size it used to be from my memory, unfortunately.

99% sure Sevastopol is held distinct under the Russian system as well.

 

[Rayzorwire]

Mate you’re so wrapped up in your own mind you miss the point. Putin has imperialistic ambitions, stated them

As told by a Western journalist who needs to chop sentences up and rejoin them to make his agenda smell less.

If that's the 'truth' you want, you're welcome to it.

Again you’re missing it. Being a historian as you claim you know the last paragraph is your conclusion. What does it say?

The last paragraph of what? - I have zero idea what you're talking about.

 

[CD Xbow]

Article suggesting a stronger case exists to charge Russia with genocide than Israel. Israel was at least responding to an attack.

Trudy Rubin: If Israel is accused of genocide, why not Russia?

If Israel is being charged with genocide at the International Court of Justice, why isn’t Russia?

www.spokesman.com

 

[Sir_Loin]

As told by a Western journalist who needs to chop sentences up and rejoin them to make his agenda smell less.

If that's the 'truth' you want, you're welcome to it.





The last paragraph of what? - I have zero idea what you're talking about.

Holy shit. I’ll give you a tip. When you write a piece of academia or any piece the last paragraph is always the conclusion.

When you spam threads with all this knowledge you’d like to impart on the uneducated masses at least read it first pal. You might be surprised a few of us have got an education.

 

[Aussie in exile]

More bad news for Putin. Happy days.

Putin’s petrodollars dry up as Arab-Russian cartel loses its grip

With Russian forces stuck in a stalemate on the frontlines in Ukraine, Vladimir Putin is facing a drain on the Kremlin coffers that threaten to sink his war machine.

uk.yahoo.com

 

[Rayzorwire]

Both worth a read, particularly the Carnegie piece.

‘Active defence’: how Ukraine plans to survive 2024

After its summer counteroffensive ended in failure, Kyiv is shifting to a new strategy as it prepares itself for a third year of war

www.ft.com

https://carnegieendowment.org/politika/91398

Just in case anyone ever wondered...yes, Central Banks are a whole other level of protected which goes way above nations...even Russia's Central Bank is a sacred cow nobody dares do more than threaten to sharpen the knife around...

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/belgium-pm-says-mechanism-is-needed-confiscation-280-billion-euros-russian-2024-01-17/