“A Russian unit was recently deployed with no food and no socks, and not many guns. That is catastrophic for a person going in the field..." COMPARED TO: it would be in the Ukraine’s interest to maintain momentum through the winter,” Wallace said. “They have 300,000 pieces of arctic warfare kit, from the international community”—a crucial requirement for any winter offensive. As I posted the other day, the jury is still out as to whether the war will come to standstill or the Russians have the advantage during winter. The conventional thinking is that the mud and cold and the fact that the Ukrainians are on the offensive says that they are disadvantaged. But some argue that the Russians are so poorly equipped that they are the more vulnerable. And the conventional thinking is that the Russians are dug in hard in trenches and have the advantage over Ukrainians on the offense who have to deal with the cold and mud. However, there are some pundits that argue that their being dug in to trenches makes them (with lots of experience to back this up now) more vulnerable to drones. Before javelins and drones, the best place was to be hunkered down in a tank or a trench. Now you are a sitting duck. We shall see. There is a lot of brain fog that sets in even when the body is only moderately below normal temps. So some of those Russians need to upgrade from those flip-flops or it is going to be nothing but frostbite and gangrene for them.
Hey... does anyone know how to use this artillery system? Anyone? Hey... can anyone figure out these instructions? Does anyone even have a high school diploma and can read & handle basic math? Shiat. Well... let's just go drink and steal some more washing machines. Russia’s High-Tech Artillery System Was Supposed To Win The War In Ukraine. But Troops Didn’t Know How To Use It. https://www.forbes.com/sites/davida...oops-dont-know-how-to-use-it/?sh=6957a36356ac
The United States has a longgggg tradition of building capability at the NCO/platoon/squad level. Where the teams are expected to be think for themselves, be capable of being trained and help their fellow platoon members to come up to speed. They move, attack, regroup, re-assess, move on. Keep thinking and adjusting over and over. Let there be no doubt who the Ukrainians were trained by and adopted this same operational mindset. Let us not forget that most of the Ukrainian soldiers are also recent conscripts who had no training and were totally untrained on any weaponry. Since February though they have learned to operate in an environment whether there is equipment from over a dozen countries spanning the last fifty years. Some of it very old, some of it state of the art. No shame in not being trained. The shame is in an army that is just clueless on everything. The Russians still follow the old Medieval style of warfare. Where you conscript a massive, massive number of untrained peasants and send them to the frontlines. And at the same time you select officers in Moscow- and send them out to command the peasants. That is exactly what the Russian soldiers are dealing with. Unlike the Ukrainians who followed the American model, the Russian soldiers have no idea how to function independently at the platoon or company level. If they show where they were sent and is there no senior officer there to point out where to go, they just wander around lost. Often the officer leaves after giving them instructions and the battle scene changes for some reason, and the Russian soldiers just wander around dazed because some truck from somewhere was supposed to come with something, sometime and it didn;t. If it happens to the Ukrainians or the Americans, if there are ten men there, they put a plan together- or better yet use the plans b, c, d that they had gamed out beforehand.
link below. Man, what a clown show this whole thing has turned into. Putin has been telling men that there would be no further mobilizations, mostly to stop men from fleeing until their turn came up. Yet there are official reports circulating saying that 5 million are needed. Try to wrap your head around that if you are an engineering student in St. Petersburg or a potato farmer's teenage kid in Siberia. You are in the crosshairs. C'mon man. 5 million. At that number, every 15 men would be sharing the same rifle, the same one pair of boots until they can take more from the dead soldiers, and sharing the one ready-meal ration for the day left over from the Crimea war. And who the hell is making the domestic economy work with everyone dead or off in Ukraine? Putin is just driving his people nuts and not producing any real soldiers out of even the first batch. The only way he can accomplish that is by bringing in massive troops from one of his neighboring former allies, but they want NOTHING to do with it. They are all stupid but not that stupid. They will be talking about drafting women before long. So the mother crying over her son being Ukraine will need to be careful she does not get called up too. Think it is contrary to the macho male Russian culture? Think again. Almost a million Russian women- a little less- served in WW2 and it was not all in non-combat roles. Everyone who knows their history knows that the best snipers in WW2 (not counting the Japanese part of the war) were Russian women. Start thinking about it mama. Of course the women were tough in that war because they were defending their homeland, not off killing innocents in Ukraine. Russia Has Admitted It Needs 5 Million Troops to Win War, Ukraine Says https://www.newsweek.com/russia-ukraine-mobilization-five-million-putin-troops-1762285 "Lady Death" 309 confirmed kills
Putin’s supporters call for the liquidation of Ukraine as ‘genocidal rhetoric’ swells https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/25/putins-supporters-call-for-the-extermination-of-ukraine.html Prominent supporters of Russian President Vladimir Putin are using increasingly “genocidal rhetoric” when discussing and demonizing Ukraine, analysts note. One commentator called for the “liquidation” of the Ukrainian state. Ultra-nationalists have come to the fore in Russia particularly since the outbreak of war, continuously pushing the Kremlin to take a harder line with Kyiv. Prominent supporters of Russian President Vladimir Putin are using increasingly “genocidal rhetoric” when discussing and demonizing Ukrainians, analysts note, with some pro-war commentators cheering the concept of the “liquidation” of the modern state of Ukraine. Ultranationalists have come to the fore in Russia particularly since the Feb. 24 invasion, continuously pushing the Kremlin to take a harder line with Ukraine and overtly critical of Moscow’s military leadership following a series of withdrawals or defeats during the war. Well-known commentators, ranging from military bloggers and journalists to politicians and officials, belonging to a nationalist faction in Russian politics have repeatedly called for Russia to adopt a more merciless approach to Ukraine, with some promoting the use of nuclear weapons and others advocating its complete annihilation. ‘Cockroaches’ and ‘pigs’ One of the most closely followed pro-Kremlin blogs belongs to former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev who has over 900,000 followers on Telegram and is one of the staunchest supporters of the war and most vociferous and vicious critics of Ukraine. The rhetoric he uses to characterize Ukraine and Ukrainians has also become increasingly dehumanizing; this week he characterized officials within Kyiv’s government as “cockroaches” (because they wanted to retake Crimea, a Ukrainian peninsula illegally annexed by Russia in 2014) while he used the term “grunting pigs” earlier in November. He has denied “mythical” Ukraine’s existence, telling his followers this week that “Kiev is the capital of Ancient Russia” and that “Kyiv is just a Russian city where people always thought and spoke Russian.” That sentiment is widely echoed by other officials and military bloggers, or “milbloggers,” as they’re known. “I have repeatedly said that, by and large, the Ukrainian nation does not exist, it is a political orientation,” Moscow City Duma deputy and pro-Kremlin journalist Andrey Medvedev told his 150,000 followers on Telegram Wednesday. “To be a ‘Ukrainian’ one does not even have to speak the Ukrainian language (which is also still being formed). Ukrainians are Russians who have been convinced that they are special, more European, more racially pure and more correct Russians,” he claimed. “All this can be stopped only through the liquidation of Ukrainian statehood in its current form,” Medvedev said. The rhetoric has heated up in the last week following the circulation of a video on social media that Moscow says shows Ukrainian forces killing Russian troops who may have been trying to surrender. Ukraine’s deputy prime minister said Kyiv would investigate the video but said “it is very unlikely” that the edited snippets show what Moscow claims. Nonetheless, the video has caused a storm among pro-Kremlin commentators, with Russia’s State Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin taking to his Telegram channel to condemn Ukraine and repeat baseless accusations that the Kyiv government is led by “fascists” and “Nazis” despite Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy himself being Jewish. Another popular motif being used by pro-war, pro-Putin bloggers is characterizing Ukraine and Ukrainians as “evil” or “sadists” or “Satanists.” Blogger Ilya Varlamov, whose Telegram channel is followed by 360,000 people, has described Ukrainians as “the grunting pigs of Satan” (the same derogatory language and terminology is often shared across the blogosphere showing the pervasiveness of anti-Ukrainian propaganda) while another popular blogger, Vladlen Tatarsky, followed by over 500,000 people, characterized Ukraine’s raid this week on a Russian-backed monastery in Kyiv as illustrative of “evil” Ukraine’s apparent disdain for Russian culture. “It is impossible to negotiate with Satan, he takes everything without a trace,” Tatarsky said, alluding to the monastery. Ukraine’s security service said the raid on the monastery was part of operations that it said were intended to counter suspected “subversive activities by Russian special services,” Reuters reported. ‘Genocidal rhetoric’ Analysts agree that the widespread use of such language by pro-war commentators in Russia is tantamount to “genocidal rhetoric,” as analysts at the Institute for the Study of War noted Wednesday. “This rhetoric is openly exterminatory and dehumanizing and calls for the conduct of a genocidal war against the Ukrainian state and its people, which notably has pervaded discourse in the highest levels of the Russian political mainstream.” “As ISW has previously reported, Russian President Vladimir Putin has similarly employed such genocidal language in a way that is fundamentally incompatible with calls for negotiations.” Using dehumanizing and animalistic descriptions of Ukrainians, and espousing baseless claims that they pose a threat and danger to Russians, is reminiscent of the language and debate seen in Nazi Germany prior to the Holocaust in which millions of Jews and other perceived “enemies” of Nazi Germany were murdered. The U.N. describes genocide “as a crime committed with the intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, in whole or in part.” Ultranationalist propaganda has become a part of the mainstream in Russia, one analyst said, with anti-Ukrainian ideology and symbols becoming ubiquitous. Max Hess, fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, told CNBC Thursday that “there has always been rather extreme language in the sort of Russian blogosphere and amongst the Russian nationalist crowd ... but what’s changing is how much of this the Kremlin is pushing into the mainstream.” “The Kremlin is really almost endorsing a lot of this rhetoric. I mean, we saw just yesterday, you know, the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs tweeting a meme about Zelenskyy and the missile that landed in Poland. But doing so in the most anti semitic tropes possible,” he noted, adding that “while we’ve seen the Kremlin dabble with this kind of rhetoric before we haven’t seen it [previously] in the mainstream to this extent.” “And it’s not just in the sort of blogosphere or on those Kremlin social media channels, it’s in state museums, it’s in the rhetoric on the main state talk shows. So it’s really the mainstreaming of it,” he noted.
I see in several instances, the Ukrainians are now actively fomenting paranoia within Putin's inner circle and amongst and his allies through various information/disinformation making everyone seemingly the target of a plot to kill them while simultaneously outing them as part of a plot to remove others as well. More and more "sources within say" articles about plots to kill Putin and Putin's plots to kill others, including his own generals, etc. etc. It is part of strategy to create chaos on the home front as Putin pursues his strategy of depopulating and flattening Ukraine. Poor old Lukashenko. He has been trying to please Vlad but also not commit suicide by going into Ukraine for him. That little balancing act getting harder by the day. The Ukrainians are putting his paranoia level right through the roof. They are doing the same in Kazakistan which spends more energy and money now defending itself against a potential Putin takeover than worrying about NATO. Ukraine us in a bad spot these days though, and will be for the forseeable future so this is not just a game so I am not presenting it as such. This comes from a U.S. think tank. but Ukraine picks it up as circulates it for its purposes. Imagine Belarus Boy reading this with his morning coffee and wonder about his buddy Vlad- or not-so buddy Vlad. Kremlin plotting to liquidate Lukashenko, seize control of Belarus army - think tank 26.11.2022 09:29 Sources within the Russian military leadership say the Kremlin has made a decision on a radical “solution” to the issue of dragging Belarus into Russia’s armed aggression against Ukraine. https://www.ukrinform.net/rubric-at...seize-control-of-belarus-army-think-tank.html