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Seems unlikely that we'll see Barbarossa-style encirclements with thousands of captured troops. Even the Ukrainians didn't manage that during the Kharkov offensive. It's even less likely now, where movement and holding territory are both carried out with small infantry units (or even individual soldiers), which means the territory "held" by Russian forces on the map (showing Myrnohrad to be encircled) is sure to be quite porous.

In a formal sense, they do not hold the town, that's true. However, if you take 30 or so secs to look at the town on the map, you'll see that the northern part, where the Ukrainians are still clinging on, is just a few streets of a low-density residential suburb (of an already pretty tiny town). I'm not saying the Ukrainians aren't about to pull off an Operation Uranus (they might be, for all I know), but the banks of the Volga in Stalingrad it is not.

The Institute for the Study of War* posted the below about 6 hours ago: It does appear to show a small counterattack relative to previous maps (visible in the top-left corner of the second map). * Think of them what you may, but they're a tad more reliable than the BBC or Times when it comes to... I was going to say "military matters", but they're actually more reliable in every possible way (while still being firmly pro-Ukraine).

Oh, I don't think it's "ethnic" either. Wasn't really ethnic in the Balkans either. But, a few rare exceptions aside, Slavs of all stripes have had atrocious political leadership throughout history, and that has resulted in a ton of problems - sometimes wars, sometimes famines, sometimes genocides, and at almost all other times, total political backwardness. Thing is, currently, some Slavic nations (Poland especially) are enjoying more or less well-ordered societies for the longest stretches in their histories. It would be a terrible shame if that were to end, and it would be much better if that state of affairs could spread to other Slavic nations.

As a Polish former colleague said to me a couple of years ago, Russians who live in Poland can now blend in quite easily because so many Ukrainians who live there speak Russian, or at least surzhyk. I fully agree, however, that history is full of complicated nuance... That's what makes it so tricky (and fun?) to discuss. Anyway, the pan-slav in me laments most the Russia vs. Poland divide. Balkan squabbles, bloody though they may be, are a sideshow really.

Ghastly, of course! I am reasonably well acquainted with stuff the Soviets did in Poland. And I am duly horrified by it, of course. Nevertheless, sadly, my point that the Nazis were still worse stands. However, my main point, that this is the lowest of low bars for how to treat an occupied population, is still what I'd really like to remain highlighted.

Sorry but I couldn't disagree more. Yes, of course the Soviet occupation was abysmal across a huge range of levels, but the Nazis had formulated and were putting into action an actual extermination plan. Not relocation, not class war, not even small local genocides (as Stalin had done elsewhere), but the full and permanent destruction of the Polish nation. The Soviets, bad as they were*, were never going to commit genocide in Poland on that scale. * For the record: I think they were very very bad indeed - countries across Eastern Europe are still recovering. But there were some silver linings too. There were no silver linings with German plans for Poland. Unless you count "we'll let some of you live to be our slaves" a silver lining. No, the reason Poland exists is the same reason Hungary, Czechia, Slovakia, the Balts, Romania, Moldova, etc., exist. And that is that however bad the Soviets were as occupiers, they weren't as bad as the Nazis (especially so when it comes to Poland).

For the record, I think you have a point, broadly speaking, when you say that Soviet occupation of Poland would ultimately have been better for the Poles than German occupation - even, probably, during Stalin's time. But I think you're going to have a very hard time convincing any Pole to accept that. And, given that the Germans had an actual 30-year plan to utterly destroy anything recognisably Polish, that's a bar that literally couldn't be any lower.

Sorry Roman, but this doesn't make sense in the historical context. While some sort of break between the European powers and the US is eventually inevitable (see, for example, current events), that was not going to happen in the 1930s/40s... The British and Americans, for example, were no threat to one another at that time (and any rivalry that may have emerged would, at best, take decades to develop into anything approaching an armed conflict). The big problem in Europe at the time was clearly the Germans. And they were mostly a problem in the context of the other threat to European powers - communism (+the USSR). Of course, the capitalist countries would have been fine with a Nazi-Soviet war, and ultimately hoped that would take place first. Looking back, it is the most natural war to emerge on the continent, and whole books can only scratch the surface in explaining why that wasn't the war that actually broke out. Additionally, some in the West were also keen on bringing fascism to their countries - see the Business Plot in the US, for example - as a way of protecting themselves against communism. Instead, we're seeing that happening now (but sans any threat of communist revolution breaking out). Fun fun! The real reason I raised the possibility of the Nazis being stopped at the Sudetenland is because it's a reasonable parallel for the Ukraine war... And because it seems fair to assume that, had anyone less nuts than Hitler been in power in Germany, that might have been enough to stave off a broader European war.

Not fair to compare them to the French - by that stage they had the experience of operations in Poland and Czechoslovakia - it's a different ballgame when everyone down the chain of command knows what they're doing and what to expect.

I think you're a bit harsh on Chamberlain - he ended up being not a bad pre-/early war prime minister in the end. And, unlike the French, who were just in a shambles, at least he did what he could to go for peace - not a bad aim for a politician, if you ask me. Besides, if you see the run-up to WWII as something of an inverse race to see who could stay out of the war the longest - and plenty of historians do - then Chambers was only doing the smart thing by the British Empire.

Jus a quick additional quip: Since I believe it to be fair to state that inter-war French society was plagued by serious cleavages between political extremes (left and right), widening wealth/income inequality, and falling living standards for broad swathes of the population, those might be things to watch out for in one's allies in this conflict.

Bloch is also critical of the Allies, specifically of the behaviour of British soldiers and of the High Command in the retreat in Belgium. In a revision, he added a footnote that broadened the blame to non-HQ officers (p. 68 of the printed French edition, p. 145 of the manuscript, footnote dated July 1942) failures in the troop command were substantially less rare than I had wanted to believe in the aftermath of the defeat. ... Certainly a certain morality crisis in class groups (among reserves as well as active officers) was deeper than one dared imagine. Looked at another way, France was defeated by its pyrric victory in WW1. I think we already know that, but perhaps not the depths to which it utterly eroded French society and its determination to do what was right. Perhaps not wholly dissimlar to that of Italy, that of course led to Mussolini as a means to try to fix it. Sounds like a very interesting book, thanks for the recommend! Yeah, I wouldn't necessarily put too much faith in the French at the moment. Macron strikes me like a man with less backbone than a trifle in a blender.

I couldn't agree more. And in the Anglosphere that aspect of WWII is understudied. The French basically imploded as a country, and it changed the whole course of the war. Of course, the legacy of WWI plays a role, but also the unsuccessful interwar years really took their toll. They probably would have been ripe for some serious political shenanigans even if WWII hadn't broken out. So, militarily, there's nothing (all that serious) stopping them from taking a bigger role in stopping German expansion, but politically they were barely keeping it together.

Since we all love our WWII analogies, and since this thread is a bit of a dumpster fire anyway, what about this one: What if the Western allies had backed the Czechoslovaks to fight after the Sudetenland invasion, and they'd managed to hold the Germans to just those territories, would it be worthwhile supporting them to try to recapture the Sudetenland?