Kiev Is Burning

[Detonable]

On 9/18/2023 at 1:58 PM, Roman Alymov said:

Meanwhile central Donetsk under HIMARS strikes, as usual. "Arrivals" is direct translation of Russian slang for incoming shells, "volfram" is tungsten

 

  What is HBN on the billboard 30 seconds in?

[KV7]

4 hours ago, Roman Alymov said:

Coup by whom? If by pro-Western forces - it makes no sence as they are allready in power, so why overthrow themselves? If by pro-Russian forces  - it is highly unlikely since for last 30 years the whole "vertical of power" was constructed of people loyal to pro-Western forces (or, at least, very well hiding their real beliefs). Of course there could be skirmishes between "towers of Kremlin" for the role of Kronprinz, but it is not major political change.

One remote possibility is some division between those in power, where one faction adopts a more populist message, along the lines of what Putin did in the late 1990's. If this involves empowering actual populist-nationalist forces, it might lead to some change. In the late 1990's, these did not really exist, except perhaps in the CP form. But I have no idea if these are a force today.

One thing that I seem to notice is that Russian non-liberal dissident (populist-nationalist ?) commentators are very pessimistic, almost as if they are setting up some narrative along the lines of "we tried but it was really impossible, it was a noble but doomed attempt to fix our society" which seems also to present a little in your commentary. 

[Roman Alymov]

4 hours ago, Detonable said:

  What is HBN on the billboard 30 seconds in?

Beauty studio in central Donetsk

 

[Ssnake]

22 hours ago, Stefan Kotsch said:

the extreme fortification of the current defense line by Russia shows that they now want to hold on to what they have conquered.

That's literally textbook Clausewitz for the aggressor.

[KV7]

1 hour ago, Ssnake said:

That's literally textbook Clausewitz for the aggressor.

I am not familiar enough to comment, but defensive works in theory would allow reduced troop concentrations in those areas, and that can allow for greater concentrations elsewhere for some offensive. So the construction of defensive works cannot be good evidence for a lack of offensive intent, but could indicate a willingness to make an offensive more safe from counterattacks conducted at other points of the line. 

[Stuart Galbraith]

12 hours ago, glenn239 said:

I've warned you for maybe five years that if Ukraine got into a war with Russia, they were risking everything.  

They have been in a war with Russia for the past 9 fucking years. Was I the only one who noticed?

[ink]

2 minutes ago, Stuart Galbraith said:

They have been in a war with Russia for the past 9 fucking years. Was I the only one who noticed?

See Spiegel seems to think the war started in 2008 😋

[seahawk]

8 hours ago, glenn239 said:

I warned you for five years prior that if Ukraine got into a war with Russia that it could lose everything.  You didn't listen to a word of it.  Now it's increasingly possible Ukraine will lose everything, and you trot out philosophical questions about whether it was weak and small Ukraine's job to fight on behalf of the world for fear of stop Russian aggression elsewhere.    The answer is no, it was not Ukraine's job to decide its course based on the nebulous criteria you outline.  Ukraine's choice solely was whether appeasement or war would be better for Ukraine in the crisis it faced. 

  

Ukraine should have been settled peacefully, because now it is only the beginning of series of long wars. Russia will take control of all Soviet territories. Russia now sees that the west is bend on destroying Russia and the only way to protect Russia is to widen Russian influence and create a large buffer zone. The final objective should be reseting the clock to 1980 and have the frontline well within Western Europe. Western aggression has given Europe a war that will last decades.

[Stuart Galbraith]

7 hours ago, glenn239 said:

I warned you for five years prior that if Ukraine got into a war with Russia that it could lose everything.  You didn't listen to a word of it.  Now it's increasingly possible Ukraine will lose everything, and you trot out philosophical questions about whether it was weak and small Ukraine's job to fight on behalf of the world for fear of stop Russian aggression elsewhere.    The answer is no, it was not Ukraine's job to decide its course based on the nebulous criteria you outline.  Ukraine's choice solely was whether appeasement or war would be better for Ukraine in the crisis it faced.  

 

 

 

 

 

  

Oh, now you are claiming the mantle of Tankets Nostradamus.

Lets say I warned, for 9 years, ad nauseum, the threat Russia presented to the West. You all laughed and mocked. You in particular Glenn were obsessed with the idea I wanted a war with Russia. In fact I was convinced the ONLY way we would avoid a war with Russia was by seriously arming up, and giving as much help to Ukraine as we possibly could. We failed to do that, just as you and you other arch appeasers wanted. And we got a war, just as I predicted. Well, it wasnt such out of left field prediction looking back.

No, it doesnt make me Nostradamus. It does me capable of observing the bleeding obvious and calling it how I see it, which seems to still be wholly beyond some on the grate site, whom seem to observe reality through the obfuscative fluff in their navel.

You havent predicted anything. You didnt predict just how generally nasty Putin was. You didnt predict the arms buildup. You didnt predict Crimea. You didnt pedict the war of attrition in the Donbas. You didnt predict the invasion, and christ almightly, there was more than enough indicators of those. I think only Josh here got that one right.

So pardon me If I look on your claiming the mantle of Tanknets wise man with incredulity. You are of course entitled to your opinion, and as always I respect it. I dont respect the certainty that you are always right, when you invariably arent.

1 minute ago, ink said:

See Spiegel seems to think the war started in 2008 😋

It depends how you define it. Putin certainly started trying to shake up his armed forces on that date, and of course he invaded Georgia at that time. Its as good a date as any.

For me, Ive never liked, respected or thought the best of Putin, so for me thats what, 23 years now? Certainly since Litvinenko anyway. But If im honest, the turning point came in 2007, at the Munich security conference.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Munich_speech_of_Vladimir_Putin

That was, one way or another, a declaration of war. We just were too dumb as rocks to listen to it. Even now we dont seem to quite get it.

Putin is at war with our values. That he isnt bombing us yet, doesnt mean he isnt employing all the means he can to destroy them.

[Stuart Galbraith]

1 minute ago, seahawk said:

Ukraine should have been settled peacefully, because now it is only the beginning of series of long wars. Russia will take control of all Soviet territories. Russia now sees that the west is bend on destroying Russia and the only way to protect Russia is to widen Russian influence and create a large buffer zone. The final objective should be reseting the clock to 1980 and have the frontline well within Western Europe. Western aggression has given Europe a war that will last decades.

That would mean reinvading Afghanistan again, right?

If they start with that, im all for it personally.

 

[ink]

8 minutes ago, Stuart Galbraith said:

In fact I was convinced the ONLY way we would avoid a war with Russia was by seriously arming up, and giving as much help to Ukraine as we possibly could. We failed to do that, just as you and you other arch appeasers wanted. And we got a war, just as I predicted. Well, it wasnt such out of left field prediction looking back.

It's a bit of security dilemma, isn't it? Everything's peaceful and Russia and Germany are getting on like a house on fire but you (not you personally, the US in this case) are convinced the only way to deal with Russia is to tool up. The Russians see this, they think, "shit, these guys are out to get us" and tool up too. 

Never ends well.

Anyway, we can argue til the cows come home about who started tooling up first but it doesn't matter ultimately, does it?

Makes me have a lot of sympathy with Merkel (for all her many faults). She saw it all spelled disaster and turned to the only trick she had to stop it. Now she's under fire for trying to turn the heat down on a geopolitical confrontation of epic proportions - which is ridiculous, frankly, as that's ultimately the only moral path to take.

[Stuart Galbraith]

Except, it was fairly obvious, even with a fairly cursory glance of the security situation post 2007, nobody was getting on with Russia. Why the need for a reset button if they were?

Do you forget Alexander LItvinenko? The poisoning of him with Polonium 210, in central London. They irradiated a restaurant in Central London, as well as a London hotel. Not to mention the airliner seat on the way there.It reinforced an opinion of mine that was underlined when the Salisbury incident occurred. A leadership that is crazy enough to do this, is crazy enough to do anything. I pointed that out in 2018. Who listened?

Russia created its own insecurity by invading its neighbours, or trying to intimidate them into compliance. Nobody forced them to do it, not NATO, not the international security situation. If they hadnt, NATO would have disappeared. You can read the threads from 10 years ago, proposing we dispose of NATO. Who was it that made it relevant? And wouldnt NATO have done its primary mission so very much better, if we had tooled up in the expectation Putin was going to try something? If nothing else, Ukraine right now would have a considerably bigger pool of equipment to reclaim its territory.

We dont need to argue about it, we know who started rearming first. It was Russia. We were busy trying to convert our armies into light infantry to fight the war on terror.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Russian_military_reform#:~:text=Key elements of the reforms announced in October,staff%3B 7 elimination of cadre-strength formations%3B More items

And whilst most people would say 'he is reducing troops, that isnt rearming!', in reality it was to free up considerable sums to reinvest in the military, and buy the high tech equipment to compete with the West. This was obvious at the time. But who else called it as such? Certainly not Bush, certainly not Obama. They were really only interested in the Pacific.

Merkel is typical of lazy, self centred, complacent leadership that led us up the blind alley of trusting Putin. None of this was doomed to happen. Our unintelligent, vote obsessed leaders made it so. Russia would never have competed with us if we had correctly inrepreted what he was doing say, 2009, 2010, and we met the challenge, not least through energy diversification. Instead we waited till Crimea, and even then, we are still haphazardly meeting the challenge, with nothing like the weight in resources we could, or should have committed.

Wars are not there to be fought. They are there to be deterred, and if you didnt deter them, then ultimately its your own fault. You dont deter a damn thing from disarming, and that, until very late in the day, is precisely what most of Europe, and to a considerable extent America too, has done.

Ultimately Its not Russias fault, its ours for leaving the gate unlocked and telling them we had fallen asleep in the snow.

 

Edited September 26, 2023 by Stuart Galbraith

[ink]

I don't know about that sequence of events. Who withdrew from the ABM treaty, for example? And when?

I remember rather a lot of tension since then over the US ABM shield and where radars would be sited.

That all went down rather early on in the game ... and continued through your kick-off date in 2007.

Also, building an ABM shield that obviously antagonises your "counterpart" (not to say, "opponent") doesn't sound much like beating swords into ploughshares to me.

Anyway, Russia helped the US quite a lot in Afghanistan initially*. Where and when did that good will evaporate?

 

* Indeed, not just initially.

[ink]

As an addendum to the above:

Given how successful fundamental and deep-rooted trade relationships had proven to be in toning down European security dilemmas, and how beneficial for all of Europe it would be if Russia could be dealt with peacefully, I can't see what other option Merkel had. A bit hard on a German chancellor to suggest that they should jump on the US bandwagon and start arming against enemies in the East without first giving diplomacy a go.

[Stuart Galbraith]

2 minutes ago, ink said:

I don't know about that sequence of events. Who withdrew from the ABM treaty, for example? And when?

I remember rather a lot of tension since then over the US ABM shield and where radars would be sited.

That all went down rather early on in the game ... and continued through your kick-off date in 2007.

Also, building an ABM shield that obviously antagonises your "counterpart" (not to say, "opponent") doesn't sound much like beating swords into ploughshares to me.

Anyway, Russia helped the US quite a lot in Afghanistan initially*. Where and when did that good will evaporate?

 

* Indeed, not just initially.

The ABM treaty was a huge mistake. I called it at the time, to general Tanknet mockery from the smart guys who supposedly knew better

. The problem comes when you recognise that the Russian have far more offensive firepower than could ever possibly be overcome by a European based ABM. I qualify this as clueless on Bush's part, but not a gamechanger. And its worth remembering, the Russians were perfectly in favour of it, at long as the radar for it was based on Russian territory. So the Americans went on a tour of the site they proposed for it, and it was derelict. They were basically looking for the Americans to build an ABM to warn them of America attacking them, so not surprisingly the Americans could see it was a shakedown, and said no thanks.

Answer me this. If this WAS the cause of the dispute, then why did Russia continue to enable Western Units to transit through Russian territory, and use former Soviet bases, in Uzbekistan IIRC, to get to Afghanistan? Wouldnt that be the logical first thing to shut off?

Imho, its a contrived dispute, to drive a wedge between the west and Russia. If you think about it, just as China is currentlydiscovering, if Russia prospered and became more interdependent with the west, then it must politicaly liberalize. To trade with the west, that is precisely what happens, you adopt western practices. And for the guys Putin represents, who like to shake down businesses, apply arbitrary violence, then this simply wouldnt do. Like the Chicoms are finding, it suddenly makes them irrelevant. So, dispute with teh west has to come. But dont interefere with our nice rate of return on our western bank accounts.

None of this means Putin didnt want to acquire Ukraine or Belarus. Im quite sure he did. Im saying the start of the dispute was very convienient for a man trying to establish his control over Russia, which is essentially how he used it. 'You want rights like a westerner? You are gay homosex Nazi!' It just wrote itself from that point on.

[Stuart Galbraith]

7 minutes ago, ink said:

As an addendum to the above:

Given how successful fundamental and deep-rooted trade relationships had proven to be in toning down European security dilemmas, and how beneficial for all of Europe it would be if Russia could be dealt with peacefully, I can't see what other option Merkel had. A bit hard on a German chancellor to suggest that they should jump on the US bandwagon and start arming against enemies in the East without first giving diplomacy a go.

As you can read from what I wrote, I think it was the deep rooted trade relationships that were the problem.

Even there are problems. See the Russians laying down the terms of the relationship, by demanding payment in roubles? So, not exactly 'free trade' at all is it?

Merkel grew up in the East, and like many people that grew up there, they still see Russia in a light that the rest of us in the West do not. And ultimately it turned out to be a false light, like most other people seemed to see in 1989.

Its not about jumping on an American bandwagon. The Americans were at least as much as a sellout to Russia as the Europeans were. The point was about perceiving the danger, and doing something about it, and clearly nobody in Europe (other than commenably Poland and the Scandinavians) were inclined to see it that way. We were all making too much money, without seeing that we were not liberalising Russia through trade, just in the same way we made precisely the same mistake with China.

[ink]

16 minutes ago, Stuart Galbraith said:

 

Answer me this. If this WAS the cause of the dispute, then why did Russia continue to enable Western Units to transit through Russian territory, and use former Soviet bases, in Uzbekistan IIRC, to get to Afghanistan? Wouldnt that be the logical first thing to shut off?

 

It's possible - not to say child's play - to spin that whichever way one wants. I could easily say, for example, that Russia was concerned about the ABM thing, that US assurances that it was aimed at Iran were unconvincing, but that it still held out hope that, by offering an olive branch and helping the US fight world terrorism, it could still repair the relationship and that everyone could be friends again.

Let's not forget that it was only a year or two before the ABM treaty was cancelled that (worried, I assume, about threat of an unstable power transition) the US and UK helped Yeltsin install Putin as his successor.

Jesus, I'm starting to sound like Roman. See what you did Stuart? 

Edited September 26, 2023 by ink

[Stuart Galbraith]

Lets look at it the other way. If they didnt want ABM on their doorstep, they could have been partners in stopping Iran getting the bomb. Instead, they prefer to arm Iran with long range air defence missiles, so they can get the bomb. Talk about making your own problem.

Im convinced you are Romans alter Ego, when he is trying to sound reasonable. Just kidding.

Im not saying we got everything right. We clearly did not. Im just saying that for every mistake we made, there was a Russian regime disposed to spin everything in the worst possible light. Conversely, no matter what Putin did, which was bad mostly, we were headed by people disposed to see Putin's actions in the best possible light.

There was a BBC documentary on the lead up to Ukraine, and it was impeccably produced, but I coudlnt watch it. I couldnt stand the fatuousness of David Cameron and the other European leaders explaining why they couldnt see what was self evident in front of their faces.

[Yama]

55 minutes ago, Stuart Galbraith said:

The ABM treaty was a huge mistake. I called it at the time, to general Tanknet mockery from the smart guys who supposedly knew better

. The problem comes when you recognise that the Russian have far more offensive firepower than could ever possibly be overcome by a European based ABM.

This is true for the first strike scenario, but not necessarily for the second strike, if we assume that say 90% of the enemy's capability is destroyed in first strike.

[Stuart Galbraith]

Considering Russia maintains a submarine deterrent, not to mention Topol road mobile ICBM's, it doesnt strike that there is any realistic way we could destroy 90 percent of the Russian arsenal. To my mind this is strategic thinking that has infected them from the 1980's, convinced we are going to launch a first strike, which of course is impossible for all kinds of reasons.

 

[txtree99]

Key Takeaways:

The tactical situation in Verbove remains unclear amid continued Ukrainian offensive operations in western Zaporizhia Oblast on September 25.

The Ukrainian Special Operations Forces reported on September 25 that a precision Ukrainian strike on the headquarters of the Black Sea Fleet (BSF) in occupied Sevastopol, Crimea, on September 22 killed 34 Russian officers, including BSF Commander Admiral Viktor Sokolov

Ukrainian forces reportedly struck the Khalino Airfield and a Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) building in Kursk Oblast during a series of drone strikes on September 24.

Russian forces conducted a series of Shahed-131/136 drone and missile strikes on the night of September 24-25 against Ukrainian port, grain, and military targets.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky confirmed on September 25 that US-provided Abrams tanks have arrived in Ukraine.

Russian military officials continue efforts to build out the Russian armed forces to suit the needs of Russian forces fighting in Ukraine.

The Kremlin and the Armenian government continue to deflect blame onto one another over the surrender of Nagorno-Karabakh to Azerbaijan amidst deteriorating Armenian-Russian relations.

Russian forces continued unsuccessful offensive operations near Bakhmut, along the Avdiivka-Donetsk City line, and in western Zaporizhia Oblast.

Ukrainian forces conducted offensive operations near Bakhmut, in the Donetsk-Zaporizhia Oblast border area, and in western Zaporizhia Oblast but did not make any confirmed gains.

Russian officials continue to deport children from occupied Ukraine to Russia.

 

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-september-25-2023

[mandeb48]

Change in the front september 21-24

https://t.me/creamy_caprice/2313

[Stuart Galbraith]

Aw man, it's a bad week for NATO.

 

[Stuart Galbraith]

 

[ex2cav]

5 hours ago, seahawk said:

Ukraine should have been settled peacefully, because now it is only the beginning of series of long wars. Russia will take control of all Soviet territories. Russia now sees that the west is bend on destroying Russia and the only way to protect Russia is to widen Russian influence and create a large buffer zone. The final objective should be reseting the clock to 1980 and have the frontline well within Western Europe. Western aggression has given Europe a war that will last decades.

I think you and Glenn are both correct. Ukraine should have accepted the Minsk accord(s), and provided limited autonomy to the break-away areas. The Ukrainians would have been able to join the EU, or EU like benefits, and agreed to not join Nato or host Nato forces in their country. 

Though I don't know if Russia will take all lost territory. I keep hearing runors of a gigantic Russian offensive, but it is getting late in the year. If I hazard a guess, if the Russians do advance, they will primarily seek to destroy Ukrainian miltary power east of the Dnipro to force a decision.