Russia & Ukraine

gwb-trading · Sep 13, 2022

Better sell your houses quickly Russkies and run for the border...

Russians Secretly Selling Crimea Homes as Counteroffensive Looms: Ukraine
https://www.newsweek.com/russians-s...homes-counteroffensive-looms-ukraine-1742559?

gwb-trading · Sep 13, 2022

Just a matter of time until Kherson is also liberated...

gwb-trading · Sep 13, 2022

UsualName said:
Hertling is good at this stuff. Really informative stuff about black swans, fatigue and moving too fast…

More...

terr · Sep 13, 2022

Latest Russian humor:

"The spokesman for the Russian President announced that he will not attend the Queen's funeral but will be ready to meet her soon personally."

There are four countries that were not invited BTW. Russia, Belarus, Myanmar and North Korea

BeautifulStranger · Sep 13, 2022

TreeFrogTrader said:
Germany extinguishes itself yet again.

Ukraine's foreign minister slams Germany's decision not to send tanks as Kyiv pushes to oust Russia
Germany argues it will be short in defenses if it send tanks to Ukraine

"Disappointing signals from Germany while Ukraine needs Leopards and Marders now – to liberate people and save them from genocide. Not a single rational argument on why these weapons cannot be supplied, only abstract fears and excuses," Kuleba said in an uncharacteristically aggressive message. "What is Berlin afraid of that Kyiv is not?"

https://www.foxnews.com/world/ukrai...y-decision-send-tanks-kyiv-pushes-oust-russia
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Does not Germany consider their long term security as being connected to what happens in Ukraine? How about potential changes in relations with Germany’s neighbors? Is it not a fundamental principle of war to press an advantage when you have it? Our Ukrainian friends have asked for help. Give it too them. Although I do worry about Ukrainian forces becoming over-extended, at least they are certain to stop at Russia's borders. Come on, Germany with the largest economy in Europe, do your part, which is not asking for that much when considering how much the US has invested in Ukraine already and by extension, in Europe, including Germany. Yet again.

BeautifulStranger · Sep 13, 2022

gwb-trading said:
The biggest threat to Putin is likely to be the Russian right-wing nationalists -- who are furious about the reversal in Ukraine and are seeking someone to blame. "Russia’s inevitable defeat, deep economic malaise, and loss of great-power status will be fertile ground for extremists."

Putin Has a New Opposition—and It’s Furious at Defeat in Ukraine
Right-wing nationalists are spreading a dangerous “stab-in-the-back” myth to explain Russia’s crushing defeats.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/09/1...stab-in-the-back-conspiracy-theory-far-right/

A new Russian protest movement is coalescing, but it’s neither pro-democracy nor anti-war. Instead, it’s the most extreme of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s supporters, who have grown increasingly furious at the unfolding military disaster for Russia in the six-month-long war in Ukraine. They want Putin to escalate the war, use more devastating weapons, and hit Ukrainian civilians even more mercilessly. And they’ve openly attacked the Russian military and political leadership for supposedly holding back Russia’s full might—even as they rarely mention Putin by name.

Their push to escalate the war, including widespread demands to use nuclear weapons, is dangerous in itself. But by creating a fantasy world in which a supposedly all-powerful Russian army is being defeated by domestic enemies—instead of by superior Ukrainian soldiers fighting for their own land with modern tactics and Western weapons—the movement has potentially disturbing implications for a postwar and possibly post-Putin Russia. In fact, the narrative sounds a lot like the Dolchstosslegende, the German “stab-in-the-back” conspiracy theory that blamed the country’s defeat in World War I on nefarious enemies at home, including Jews. This narrative of military defeat became an integral part of the propaganda that brought the Nazis to power.

The promoters of the Russian stab-in-the-back myth aren’t a single party, movement, or group. Rather, the protesters are a loose coalition—mostly active online—of far-right ideologues, militant extremists, veterans of the 2014 Donbas war, Wagner Group mercenaries, bloggers, war reporters running their own Telegram channels, and individual Russian state media staff. Some are soldiers or mercenaries fighting in Ukraine, and their channels have doubled as recruitment tools. Others already had a modest following before the war by promoting different causes, some obscure but mostly nationalist or right-wing issues: restoring the Soviet Union’s rule over Eastern Europe, building a new Russian empire, or promoting “Russia for the Russians.”

Their loyalty to the Kremlin varies from veneration of and complete submission to Putin as a godlike historical figure to activism in right-wing opposition movements. But unlike the Kremlin’s mouthpieces on state television and in its troll factories, members of this amorphous war escalation camp are united in their scathing criticism of Russia’s military campaign in Ukraine.

Their demand comes down to this: They want more war crimes—no mercy, no remorse, no pretense to even caring about civilian deaths until Ukraine is completely subdued and the very idea of Ukrainian-ness erased forever. Frustrated by the astonishing, unexpected defeat on Ukraine’s Kharkiv front, many pro-war bloggers demanded a swift retribution without regard for civilian deaths. Some recommended a nuclear strike on Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, to decapitate the government; popular blogger Maxim Fomin (who blogs as Vladlen Tatarsky), called for a nuclear warning strike against Ukraine’s Snake Island. Others called for “total war” against Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure. When the Russian military appeared to oblige by launching missiles at several Ukrainian cities’ electricity grids overnight, an orgy of gloating ensued on Russian pro-war channels.

The level of hatred and derision toward everything Ukrainian in their blog posts is difficult to convey. Ukrainians are described as illegal squatters on Russian imperial lands or followers of the Nazi bandits supposedly governing in Kyiv. Their cities must be “hammered into the Stone Age” while massacres against civilians are gleefully referred to as “pig-butchering.” Even as they throw the Nazi slur at Ukrainians, these Russians’ views are not only genocidal in ways that recall the worst crimes of the 20th century but also, in some cases, openly fascist or neo-Nazi.

Although most of these bloggers are unknown in the West—except to a small, dedicated circle of Russia-watchers—a few of them have caught the attention of the international press. Since they routinely point out Russian military failures in hopes of goading the Kremlin into escalating, some have become highly informative sources of unvarnished news from the front. As I write, I see Western war experts’ Twitter accounts full of detailed maps produced by pro-war Russians documenting the unfolding rout of Russian positions in the Kharkiv Oblast almost in real time while Ukrainian sources are several days behind in their statements in an attempt to preserve operational secrecy. The bloggers, who spout their diatribe mainly via Telegram and YouTube, also stand in sharp contrast to the bland, content-free triumphalism of Russia’s state-owned airwaves. The best-known individual among the critics is Igor Girkin, known by his nom de guerre, Strelkov. He is a retired Federal Security Service officer and a Russian Civil War reenactment aficionado who has proudly admitted that he “pulled the trigger of [the 2014 Donbas] war” when he led a band of armed Russians across the Ukrainian border, seized the city of Slovyansk, and held it for some six weeks.

By all accounts, Strelkov is a violent extremist—and quite possibly a war criminal for carrying out extrajudicial killings in the occupied Donbas in 2014. But he has become much-quoted in the Western press—and even profiled—as a critic of Putin’s war strategy since April, when he openly said Russia’s retreat from the Kyiv suburbs and parts of northeastern Ukraine had made a Russian defeat inevitable. On his Telegram channel, which has some 500,000 subscribers, and in his livestreams on the Russian social media network VKontakte, Strelkov has called Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu a “plywood general” and Russian Security Council deputy chair Dmitry Medvedev a bumbling fool. The lack of a countrywide military mobilization, he said, is a major criminal oversight. But he has mostly steered clear of criticizing Putin directly—not out of respect but only “until the war is over,” as he hinted in a recent post. That may be a reason why there have been no apparent attempts to silence him.

Ironically, some of the least palatable figures in Russia are now the most consistent and insightful critics of the Kremlin’s strategy—if for all the wrong reasons. One of them is Igor Mangushev, a senior manager at the Internet Research Agency, the troll factory in St. Petersburg, Russia, that was responsible for disinformation campaigns and interference in Western elections. One of the most unapologetically genocidal supporters of Russia’s war in Ukraine, Mangushev recently gave a macabre performance in a Moscow club where he presented a human skull he claimed to have harvested from a Ukrainian soldier killed during the bloody siege of Mariupol. “We will burn down your homes, murder your families, take your children, and raise them as Russians” is a fairly typical post on his Telegram channel. He also claims credit for inventing the letter Z as the symbol of Russia’s invasion. Yet Mangushev has no love lost for Russia’s military brass and decision-makers in the Kremlin, constantly attacking them for what he says is their indecision and bureaucratic slumber, which he sees as the main obstacle to the war effort.

Equally indignant is Yevgeny Rasskazov, also known as Topaz and a member of the far-right Rusich mercenary unit associated with the Wagner Group. On April 20, Rasskazov posted what appeared to be a celebration of Adolf Hitler’s birthday without naming the former Nazi leader directly. After the Russians’ loss of Balakliya, a city in eastern Kharkiv Oblast, during last week’s surprise Ukrainian offensive, he mocked the Russian defense ministry for attempting to present the defeat as a “tactical feint.” In a monologue, Rasskazov listed all the things that, in his view, the Russian war machine lacks: honesty in admitting a local defeat, a fully reformed defense ministry, more skilled commanders, and a well-oiled military with better coordination among different branches of the military.

In attempting to explain the Russian military’s increasingly desperate situation in Ukraine, the pro-war camp is developing its own “stab-in-the-back” myth that echoes the German intrawar version. Already, voices such the ultra-conservative pundit and RT commentator Egor Kholmogorov are openly accusing the Russian top command of criminal incompetence and demanding purges. The movement’s anger at treacherous “elites”—as of yet unnamed but almost universally reviled—is palpable. Although still marginal, there is even a new emerging subculture associated with the movement; for example, “Bands of Veterans” by singer Pavel Plamenev is a modern rock version of a 1920s German song, “We Are Geyer’s Black Company,” which became part of the official Nazi songbook. In Plamenev’s version, a Russian Donbas veteran returns from the war filled with rage, urging his fellow soldiers to burn the palaces of the rich and pass their wives around among the looters. In a worrying sign for the Kremlin, the new pro-war opposition is increasingly turning to the same indignant anti-corruption messages that fueled the opposition movement headed by now-jailed Russian dissident Alexey Navalny.

Surprisingly, considering the Kremlin’s accelerated crackdown on criticism since the start of the invasion in February, there have been no high-profile arrests of pro-war bloggers or even signs of censorship so far. The Kremlin couldn’t have missed these outbursts; a special monitoring department in the presidential administration watches Russian social media platforms closely and files daily reports to Putin’s aides. Nonetheless, there are signs that Moscow recognizes the problem and will seek to rein in the angry nationalists who are fast becoming what political scientist Tatiana Stanovaya calls “the most significant challenge to the Kremlin” since it crushed Navalny’s movement.

Whether or not the Kremlin now cracks down, the pro-war movement’s toxic narrative will take on a life of its own—especially if and when Russia loses the war, which is now all but inevitable. As the disconnect between official propaganda about an easy, successful “special operation” and the reality of crushing defeat becomes clear, many Russians will be looking for someone to blame. Here, the German example is instructive, where the combination of defeat, national humiliation, and economic collapse was the fertile soil for right-wing, extremist movements that blamed domestic enemies, assassinated liberal politicians, stirred antisemitic hate, and swore revenge on the victorious World War I Allies. This was the vicious brew that Hitler fed on as he rose to power.

Russia’s inevitable defeat, deep economic malaise, and loss of great-power status at the hands of a country whose existence the Kremlin didn’t even recognize will be fertile ground for extremists. That counts double should Putin’s regime fall and a struggle for the future course of Russia ensue. If the pro-war nationalists searching for enemies to blame are the only opposition left in Russia, the world may be going down a dark and dangerous track.
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Himars. Bunkers. WMD threats. Leadership. Escalation. Signal processing. Information versus capabilities gap. Spirit de corps. A book could be written on each of these terms. The interplay between these terms may lead to complications that Russian leadership may not fully appreciate.

Himars is a weapons system known for accuracy. The component responsible for accuracy is part of a system that can apply to other weapon systems, both larger and smaller than Himars.

Bunkers are often considered a safe place when under attack - A popular choice for leaders and military command and control. Bunkers are underground, have a ventilation system, usually have multiple entries, often have an internal power supply, and rely on the periodic resupply of fuel, food, and other consumables.

WMDs are weapons of mass destruction that may have some value as leverage for the possessor against paying direct reparations for an illegal war, but do nothing against paying for reparations over time through sanctions, as in the world goes on while the offending country languishes. The use of a WMD sets in motion a chain of events that inevitably results in the destruction of a nearly globally hated belligerent leadership, even if WMDs are not used in retaliation.

Leadership is the belligerent and perhaps their enablers and allies.

Escalation is the increased resource allocation towards a goal often as a result of the action of another.

Signal processing is the acquisition and analysis of information of various types in order to gain actionable intelligence for the efficient allocation of resources.

Information versus capabilities gap is the risk the party at a disadvantage may make adverse impactful decision based the lack of knowledge regarding the other side’s capabilities.

Spirit de Corps. Best to ask a Ukrainian what this means.

Extending the thoughts of each item in the partial list above, and putting them together should give pause to those who may be feeling butt-hurt because the war is not going their way. Russia is still Russia. Russian leaders are still Russian leaders. An offer to return Crimea and quickly exit the war will likely keep it that way.

TreeFrogTrader · Sep 13, 2022

BeautifulStranger said:
Does not Germany consider their long term security as being connected to what happens in Ukraine? How about potential changes in relations with Germany’s neighbors? Is it not a fundamental principle of war to press an advantage when you have it? Our Ukrainian friends have asked for help. Give it too them. Although I do worry about Ukrainian forces becoming over-extended, at least they are certain to stop at Russia's borders. Come on, Germany with the largest economy in Europe, do your part, which is not asking for that much when considering how much the US has invested in Ukraine already and by extension, in Europe, including Germany. Yet again.
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Yep. The other thing there is that Germany is a member of NATO, so we are obligated to come to their defense if attacked. But HELLO, they are also obligated to come to the defense of other NATO countries. Of course, Ukraine is not a member of NATO so that is not my point but the fact that they cannot give any resources to another country without leaving their own country vulnerable means that they are worthless as tits on a nun in meeting their obligations to other NATO countries if needed.

Nato has received a lot of pats on the back for standing together recently but a lot of weakness have been exposed too. Actually, everyone knew about them but there was no war going on so they did nothing. You have all these countries that keep their own military capability low because they figure that they are a member of NATO. As a result you have a collection of countries who depend on the U.S to do the heavy lifting but their country alone could not fight off the security guard at Walmart.

You also have the opposite problem than that of Germany in regard to the UK. Boris Johnson was using his support of Ukraine as a way of getting public support in attempt to salvage his PM position. Boris gave lots and lots and lots of stuff freely to Ukraine and the Ukrainians love him for that. So far, so good. Problem is that it was all based on the premise that the United States would take care of business for the UK if they were attacked. Who the hell backs us up if those clowns have given everything away and do not maintain their capability.

Note further, that the U.S. is now supplying Germany with massive amounts of gas to replace their traitorous reliance on Russia. These nato idiots are just getting around to realizing that the purpose of nato is maintain security for the members against adverserial actions by our enemies. It is not all about frigging guns and missiles although that part needs to be taken care of too. Nato should be playing a lead role in energy security planning. Not saying they should be given any power to mandate but it is their job to identify threats to the security of nations. Germany, what the hell were you doing by putting your entire country in the palm of Russia's hand????

BeautifulStranger · Sep 13, 2022

Russia has influence over certain politicians in NATO? We know the way to smoke them out: “You know have decided to help”. “The question is, is it Russia or is it NATO’s friend, Ukraine?

As stated before, Germany and the European Union have a much greater vested interest to support Ukraine than the US, but we cover 95% or whatever of the expense? Maybe Putin was right to cut off gas for a few days, realizing NATO is too weak to stick together even while a mutual friend’s of NATO act of sacrificing their population’s lives and cities while also helping to protect NATOs security. To think the Germany would not even hop on the bandwagon of a possible earlier than expected victory with long term positive implications versus returning to the previous situation with Russia breathing down their backs in almost prima fascia evidence of Russian influence on Germany’s currently in power politicians.

Germany is a major exporter to the US. Do we really need their products that badly that we have to carry their interests to the finish line for them?

terr · Sep 13, 2022

A fairly amazing portion from the Russian propaganda show.

And, in spite of a cold reality shower, inevitably, at the end: "We must win, otherwise we die".

terr · Sep 13, 2022

.. and here is another one.

The guy does not understand. Russia doesn't understand. You're not a "superpower". You're a resource-based-economy third world country with nuclear weapons. Your military budget is about the same as UK's. That's ALL. Your technological prowess is nonexistent. Your economy is pathetic. You're a "superpower" only in your fantasies.