Holien

Court politics...
The fact that they are airing it in public makes it very interesting.
Putler getting revenge or some one else?
One to watch...
 
 

Russia is now protecting there Oil...
https://boards.4chan.org/k/thread/61504997
I wonder if they will protect their Steel plants making these well enough...

Russia is now protecting there Oil...
https://boards.4chan.org/k/thread/61504997
I wonder if they will protect their Steel plants making these well enough...

My Grandad was white feathered during WW2.
He was castigated by quite a few folk in Doncaster a northern industrial town in Yorkshire.
But what those doing it didn't know was he was an electrician and he was refused when trying to join up and had to serve maintaining the electrics in the vital factories in the area. My grandmother never forgave those that attacked him and spat at him, they had their son's dying and saw him as a draft Dodger.
That young lad you mentioned could better serve his country being back home. He can serve behind the front lines...
In fact Ukraine should be looking at what was done by the UK to encourage folk to fight during WW2, it was as vital as any fighting done as if you don't have the recruits you can't fight...
 
 

In what way? 
FWIIW if my country was facing an existential threat at that age I would hope to be fighting not hiding abroad.
But of course that is very easy to say as I approach my 60's about to have my afternoon nap...
As for comments about Obama and his attempt to reset it is easy to say in hindsight that it was a failure. At the time there was hope to try and bring Russia back from the edge...
As for the failure to use a big stick on Russia what do you suggest should have been done? Easy to throw stones at someone's else when you don't have to offer concrete proposals on what to do differently.
People are currently blaming Biden for being too weak and not giving Ukraine more, conveniently ignoring the environment he has to operate in.

Freedom ain’t free.  Someone has to stop Russia from doing what it is doing which is definitely not “perfectly fine”.  In reality the kid did not run away, his family did when he was 16.  Now that he is 18 and of age; he is “staying away”.  I think every citizen has a duty to protect their nation in times of crisis.  A duty to protect each other when threatened.  If they cannot or will not do that then they really are no longer a nation.  This is one thing I think we have lost, and it will come back and bite us.  There is a solemn duty in being a citizen, and even a greater one in a free nation.  It is one that takes sacrifice for the greater good.  Now this kid could be from a pacifist ideology or religion, ok there are a lot of ways to fulfill this duty to serve.
What I disagree with is that is all fine for a young man like this to selfishly protect himself while his own people are suffering.  Running away to “embrace life” when Ukrainian children are dying back in Ukraine does not wash with me.  Personally I have been in two wars that really had not much to do with Canada.  We were really doing it for some greater global good (really did not turn out well in the end) but we all believed in it and honoured kids maybe a year older than this one who died in crappy places no one will remember in 50 years. The idea that one could “sit out” an atrocity like this invasion of Ukraine and still claim citizenship or ethnicity does not sit well with me at all.  It is shirking duty and letting others pay the price.   As we have discussed this kid does not even have to fight.  He can be in a support trade or work in industry or even humanitarian.  But his people and his country need him right now which is more important than how he gets to spend his twenties.  It is more important than him as an individual.  
Mark my words on this, we have more of this coming.  The future is likely going to demand more sacrifice for the greater good not less.  We will have to stand or kneel in the end.  And right now to my eyes, that young man is kneeling.

The tradition pre-dates WW1 by the look of it.  I know in WW1 it was used in the colonies.  This sort of micro-social pressure has tremendous power, both good and bad.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_feather
Sure the young man could still serve behind the lines but right now he is whining about losing consular services on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.  Plenty of work and not all of it fighting.  But, as has been stressed many times here, the UA is running low on fighting troops.  The answer to this is not tell every 18-30 year old Ukrainian male (not sure what the Ukrainian policy is on women in combat) “Gee, sorry to bring it up but you might have heard Russia is intent on destroying our nation. They are also willing to do so in a brutal and criminal manner.  If you feel like it, we would very much appreciate it if you would consider fighting for your nations freedom.”  
There will always be a slice of the fighting age population excluded from combat for various reasons but they should be contributing as directly as they can regardless.  For Ukraine this is a whole of society war, not a “those that kinda want to” war…you know the ones we in the West have been fighting for 30 years.

“Only 20k”?!  Let’s not be hypoboblic either.  10% of a field force is no small measure.  The point of my original post is that there are young Ukrainian men running away from the fight while (only) 20 thousand foreigners are there doing the dying.  That ain’t right.

We note all the fires in Russia, but the war is hitting home ground.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-68899130
Russia can always find useful idiots for money...
There was a fire at an Ammo production facility in Wales recently too...
🙄

In what way? 
FWIIW if my country was facing an existential threat at that age I would hope to be fighting not hiding abroad.
But of course that is very easy to say as I approach my 60's about to have my afternoon nap...
As for comments about Obama and his attempt to reset it is easy to say in hindsight that it was a failure. At the time there was hope to try and bring Russia back from the edge...
As for the failure to use a big stick on Russia what do you suggest should have been done? Easy to throw stones at someone's else when you don't have to offer concrete proposals on what to do differently.
People are currently blaming Biden for being too weak and not giving Ukraine more, conveniently ignoring the environment he has to operate in.

So the story really does not get into his motivations for not fighting.  “I want to be safe” is what we get.  Of course to “be safe” in Ukraine right now means fighting for that safety.  We do not know if the young man has religious grounds or even ideological ones.
White feathers is a poor analogy.  They were used in the British Empire to shame young men to go and fight in a mainland European war.  Many of these young men were in far flung nations such as Canada or Australia.  The peer pressure for them was to go to fight and die in what could be considered an imperial war.
Ukraine is in an existential war. The Russians have left pretty much zero doubt of this based on both their plans and actions.  If anyone wants to “go home to safe Ukraine” as a Ukrainian they are going to have to either be willing to fight for this..or let someone else do it for them.  This young man definitely would have somewhere to live…likely a trench on the front.  Based on how desperate the UA is for manpower he would likely have a job…killing Russians.  
Now it is his personal choice as to whether or not he wishes to do that but this reads a lot like the “cake and eat it too” generations we have right now.  I want all the healthcare safeties but no vaccines.  I want peace and security but not to fight for it.  I want cheap products and lifestyles but no climate change.  If this young man wants to live in a free and safe Ukraine he needs to be willing to do what generations before have done…be willing to fight and die to make that happen. Because it simply won’t be delivered like DoorDash or streaming entertainment.  Don’t want to kill?  Become a medic.  
My fundamental question back to this kid is “if you want to go home to Ukraine one day then what are you still doing here?” 

I assume we are talking about this:

Gotta be honest, I see a lot of potential dangerous salients forming up, which was how the Germans made life miserable for the Soviets.  The RA lacks the logistics to really support a major drive unless conditions have changed there.  I get the concerns but until the RA can take a major operational objective - which based on this map looks like Povrovsk - we have death by a thousand nibbles.
However, I do share the concern that the UA is fully capable of collapse as well.  If that happens things could shift quickly, albeit likely slower than in Fall ‘22 re: Russian logistics.  We need a Deep Battle here to get corrosive warfare happening again.  My sense is that this war has recently shifted to front edge attrition which is not what we want.  This plays to Russian strengths.  The key Russian weakness is systems-fragility and for that we need deep deliberate corrosive warfare approaches.

On more than a few levels to be honest.  The fact that this young (assuming healthy) man “wants to return to Ukraine” once the war is over is particularly irksome.  Essentially the young man is saying that as soon as “others fight and die for his own nation”, he is eager to return home.  Now this is one individual that Canadian overly-liberal media have glommed onto because “if it cries it leads” these days.  However, this sentiment cannot be entirely isolated given the significant number of fighting aged people who have simply run away from Ukraine while the nation fights for its life.
Meanwhile foreigners, many without any Ukrainian connections, fight and die for that nation.  Nope, does not sit well at all.

I was speaking more of demonstrating the high cost of this war.  As to this, well first the situation is not clear but a 10-15 km advance is going to sting but it very much matters which 10-15 kms.  A lot of these Russian advances have had very little operational significance. They have not fundamentally provided Russia positional advantages that can be translated into operational success.  Imagine for a moment if the roles were reversed: the UA was making incremental advances at great costs…oh wait, we already did that last summer.  The hue and cry of “lost summer offensive” was echoing across the infosphere last summer while the UA was basically doing the same thing the RA is doing now.  But with the RA it is “Ukraine cannot stabilize the front!”
From a military viewpoint, objectively, both sides have been conducting small tactical actions and taking bites of what is essentially wasteland.  Neither side has been able to create the conditions for operational breakthroughs or collapse since Fall of ‘22.  From an operational and strategic point of view this conflict has been pretty static.  With this surge of new support we might see Ukraine re-take a few kms etc but unless these turn into something more it won’t mean anymore than costly Russian gains this winter.
 

That Vladimir Putin makes bad decisions from our perspective is not the same thing as him making irrational decisions.
In that light, I think you should ask yourself whether or not the Russians would have preferred the US to be still mired in Afghanistan while also trying to support Ukraine. And you should ask yourself whether or not Putin would have preferred a safely pliant Ukrainian government (being coerced not just by the Kremlin but also the White House) over the risks associated with going en banc with a full attempt at conquest. Finally, please come up with a single evidenced example of Trump giving Russia or China pause in their foreign policy behavior. This claim is often made yet nobody can point to one…though moments of pause and dismay abound among American allies during the same time period. 
Putin’s timing wasn’t about losing the restraining hand of what we are supposed to imaging was an intimidating Trump administration vis a vis Moscow…it was the recognition that a window of opportunity was closing. Indeed, events have shown Putin didn’t realize it already had.

From the cheap (and safe) seats, I would go for it.  But, and it is a big “But”, they would need to create and sustain operational pre-conditions first.  The problem with defence only, except for largely symbolic high profile strategic strikes, is that Russia gets to say when it is time to “stop”.  There is analysis out there (and posted here) that points to 2026 as Russia’s out-of-gas moment.  But that is a long way out and conditions could change a lot. So pinning the war on attritional hopes is a strategy but it definitely comes with risks.  The same goes for internal dissent eventually toppling the Russian political power structure.  It can happen but hard to build a plan off of, and we have gone on at length on the risks of another Russian Revolution.
Offensive operations make headlines, signal resolve and play into “we love a winner” in the West.  If the UA sit back and dig in there will be huge and cry on “well we sent them all that stuff and they are doing nothing!”  The real trick is to find where the risk-v-gamble line is.  We do not want a final gamble but a forward leaning risk.  But how to do it?  This remains the outstanding question.  How to do it with what they have and can support?  My money is on light, fast and distributed.  Infiltration, isolation and exploitation.  But the UA will have to do this in multiple areas to increase RA lateral friction.  All the while hitting the backfield.
Tricky, tough and absolutely no guarantees.  Of course we can’t see the hi res picture.  If we had that maybe the choice is far more obvious.

Try living next door.  The short answer is “$$$”.  US has most of it and is the safest place on the planet to put your own.  Or at least was.  I have worked in multinational and bilateral situation with the US and if they have a key fault it is “it has to be our idea”.  The US will operate at a net loss to support allies and partners…if it “is our idea”.  Everytime I have ever run into collisions with US counter parts it is when an idea other than their own gains traction.  I have seen US players take someone else’s idea and make it their own, which also works…but it has to be “our idea”.  Love them Yanks but they need to be “managed” from time to time,
What we are really seeing has a few core dimensions but they all center around where the US sees itself both internally and externally.  In some ways this is a referendum on US global primacy and leadership.  In other ways it is a referendum on US internal identity and democracy.   So essentially what is the “deal of the USA”.  This is nowhere near the first time it has happened, not even close.  This is the first time the US has gone through this while being the last super power though.

That entire theory does not track at all.  The UA already hit that damned bridge and Russia did not buckle.  The idea that if we somehow hit it that it will be the starting gun to internal dissent is the sort of wild theory the critics on the right use against support of Ukraine in this thing.  FFS the UA hit Moscow with long range drones and it did not increase internal dissent.  
Further if the Kerch Bridge is so symbolic that it can topple Russia, then why isn’t the opposite true and it drives support in Russia for this war to all time highs?  I mean if the fate of the Russian people is tied to that bridge Putin should have dropped it himself as a demonstration of just how under siege the greater Russia is by the West.

About the influence of Russia & China into German politics: both the number 1 & 2 for the upcoming vote for the EU parliament of our local fascist party AfD are under the suspicion of taking Russian money. Additionally, the head of the office of #1 has been detained for being a Chinese spy.
And people still vote for them: they get about 15-30% (depending on state). If we had only two parties, I guess the political landscape wouldn't be much different than in the US.

Hmmm he has not fallen out of a window? 
"Russian deputy defence minister detained for allegedly taking bribes"
Power struggles at the top?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-68886406
Quite unusual for corruption charges to be laid against a top table player.
Maybe for mass consumption? 

Yeah, basically stick a little primer shell onto each mine with a cheap timer or some kind of short range remote control trigger.  

Hmmm he has not fallen out of a window? 
"Russian deputy defence minister detained for allegedly taking bribes"
Power struggles at the top?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-68886406
Quite unusual for corruption charges to be laid against a top table player.
Maybe for mass consumption? 

Yet you do!!! Time again you do!
What has it to do with Ukraine?
🙄

Yet you do!!! Time again you do!
What has it to do with Ukraine?
🙄