TheVulture

Also confirmed on pro-Russian Telegram milinfolive:
 https://t.me/milinfolive/103396
As a result of the strike by the British Storm Shadow cruise missiles on the ZKP of the 58th Army in the Berdyansk region, the deputy commander of the Southern Military District, Lieutenant General Oleg Tsokov, was killed.

Not really a surprise in the end. There was too much pressure from just about every other NATO member (Hungary excluded) for Sweden to join. It was always about Erdogan holding out for some concessions on other issues, and presumably they've managed to find an acceptable compromise. I'm going to guess that Turkey is out of luck on its desire to have various PKK members in Sweden extradited, but they've probably got some economically beneficial trade-offs.

Do not get me wrong - the discussion on this forum has been positively scholarly and gentile compared to other corners of the internet right now.  I think we have some leanings among the group, some stronger than others.  I do tend to want to ensure that any discussion around stuff like this be given the broadest treatment possible.  So for example if we are going to start doing maths, let's do all the maths.  If we are going to argue for human security issues, lets call spades, 'spades' and underline the inconsistencies.  You will remember that I was just as hard on the whole warcrimes discussions that hijacked us last year.
The "firmly against DPICM" has not occurred here, it occurred places like my own government.  I am just not a fan of it taking root here without being challenged anymore than the even more distasteful topics we have had to cover.  I am firmly in JonS's camp on "why dumb DPICM, when we have HE PGM?"  Further, I am also in the "PGM DPICM with a 100% (or at least comparable to dumb HE) dud rates" camp.  The issue is that context appears to have changed and we should change with it.  When I start to hear "DPICM bad no matter what because it makes baby Jesus (or certain Canadian political parties) cry", that would be when I start to push back and call out hypocrisy when I see it.  There are weapons that should (and are) universally outlawed - chemical, biological and nuclear/radiation are at the top of that list.  
Finally my own biases are showing when I hear from preachy political parties that basically did nothing to deter Russia from this war, even after 2014, beyond harsh language and finger waving.  "But now that Ukraine is using cluster munitions well we had better speak up!"  How about we worry less about which munitions are being employed in a war and work harder on stopping the wars before they start in the first place?  Perhaps that is my preachy windmill on a hill of sand to tilt at.

So is he a competent General who executed a difficult manoeuvre well (withdrawing the bulk of his men across the river from contact) who paid the price for doing the politically inconvenient but militarily necessary thing? 
Or
Is he the muppet who tried to hold on an untenable bridgehead for far too long and was eventually forced back over the Dneipr leaving most of his heavy equipment behind. 
The impression I got here at the time was thar most people thought that the Russian defence of and withdrawl from Kherson was one of the more competently executed things they've managed so far in this war.

So is he a competent General who executed a difficult manoeuvre well (withdrawing the bulk of his men across the river from contact) who paid the price for doing the politically inconvenient but militarily necessary thing? 
Or
Is he the muppet who tried to hold on an untenable bridgehead for far too long and was eventually forced back over the Dneipr leaving most of his heavy equipment behind. 
The impression I got here at the time was thar most people thought that the Russian defence of and withdrawl from Kherson was one of the more competently executed things they've managed so far in this war.

So is he a competent General who executed a difficult manoeuvre well (withdrawing the bulk of his men across the river from contact) who paid the price for doing the politically inconvenient but militarily necessary thing? 
Or
Is he the muppet who tried to hold on an untenable bridgehead for far too long and was eventually forced back over the Dneipr leaving most of his heavy equipment behind. 
The impression I got here at the time was thar most people thought that the Russian defence of and withdrawl from Kherson was one of the more competently executed things they've managed so far in this war.

And convincing the Russins they can't just outlast the NATO's will to fight is essentially the entire ballgame here.
The head of the IAEA should be the next guy to run the U.N., it is the only international body in this entire war that has done its job. The people who have volunteered to go to the occupied nuke plant and try to keep a lid on Russia's stupidity are as brave as anyone in this war.

If this was anything but a war of national,  cultural and societal survival, I'd understand the concerns. But it is.
Anything that can kill Russians quicker and in more numbers shortens the war.
The longer Russians are in Ukraine  the longer more Ukrainians will die.
The future daily cost of UXO is nothing compared to the current daily cost of soldiers and civilians killed. 
Ukraine needs to Kill & Maim as many Russians as possible right now. We've got a munition that can do that? Send it. 

I've come to find that certain users just default to "HRW and UN not saying anything about Russia", and that everytime they do this is it is an emotional response with no basis in fact. We get it, but people looking at the forum may not do the research themselves and come away with false impressions.

You guys have pretty much already covered and this post may not be much of contribution. However, please do keep in mind that Russians, including civilian population, think that they are already at war with NATO. Can be debated if proxy or not but that don’t matter, in their minds they are waging existential war with NATO. From the perspective of us average citizens this is absurd, delusional and borderline laughable.
Putin and the whole Russian state are criminals, not meant in the legal sense but in their minds. Been criminals all their lives and they only perceive the World through the eyes of such. Diplomacy is sign of weakness, willingness to negotiate is sign of weakness, lack of retaliation is sign of weakness. The only thing criminals understand is not the law or punishment but sheer force, or if you so wish violence.
But even criminals have self preservation as the rest of us, how would otherwise Mafia families maintain their existence? To this end we must consider the power differential between groups, which may or usually are unconsciously agreed upon by both parties. 
They are both well aware of their own capabilities of dominance, verbal or physical as in threats and violence. What Russians did was to clearly underestimate the effectiveness of verbal dominance - threats. When that didn’t work they retorted to capabilities of violence that were evidently higher in relation to the Ukraine (without willingness of West to engage).
Here the West was clearly not prepared for the actual state of the Russian army. Meaning, everyone has bought into the non-verbal and verbal communication of “they are not to be messed with!”. Which is only useful until you run into someone not afraid of you. Like a bully that gets his *** kicked and exposed by the little guy they picked on, they lose their capability of verbal and in fact physical dominance. Nobody is afraid of them anymore, the group dissolves as the leader got his *** whopped in front of the whole school. He is alone and his reign of terror is over.
Bullies never accept responsibility for their actions, they don’t accept accountability and they will not tolerate punishment. Unless that punishment, third party or not, is kicking their *** and asking if they want more?
Could that bully escalate by using for example weapons? Yes! Is it likely? Most probably not! The bully may name drop someone known to be real bad *** that will retaliate, maybe his big brother, but more often than not. Particularly if knowing the little guy also has bigger, stronger and meaner friends or big brothers.
Putin is an exposed bully, he’s gone silent on the threats of nuclear war. Why? Because when he dropped the name of that badass brother that will retaliate for him - the other side said, you do that! We’ll kick his *** too, then we’ll come after you, and you know our capabilities of violence are far bigger than yours.
Please see this interview for perspectives from someone who was bullied by Putin.
 

Well it will definitely be viewed as an escalation, the question is “how much”.  I think that Russia having some sort of escalation dominance has been a myth since the beginning of this thing.  Repeatedly, Russian escalation has 1) been underwhelming and 2) resulted in a Western escalation that Russia cannot counter.  
I am less worried about Russia “thinking they can get away with it”because of western inaction at this point - we already have far too much sunk cost in this thing to back off now.  NATO is securing the next decades worth of defence spending, industry in the west is ramping up - “war is business and business is f#cking booming baby!”  We are talking trillions here and it all needs a scary enemy to point at.  Russia was dumb enough to put up its hand up in Europe and we are talking ourselves into China one way or the other.  Russia thinking it can get away with WMDs is one helluva leap to make for a below threshold action right now.
My concerns are the other way - Russia figuring out that they have nothing left to lose, or simply losing control of the WMDs in the end.  The end results we are debating are on opposite sides of a spectrum but have the same result…a lot of bad.  So what are we doing…navigating the middle until there is no middle left.  Outpacing escalation can actually drive us out of viable escalation room.  Say we do start green lighting strikes into Russia…what do we have left?  Someone said “strike the Russian Navy and take it out” while an escalation, it is not viable in the current strategic context.  In fact it would be WW3 at that point and we would not stop at the Russian Navy.
Your concern is valid: are we boiling them or are they boiling us?  As this war has unfolded I was more concerned in the early days than I am now.  While the West has been restrained, Russia has shown itself full of BS.  No massive mobilization - millions of Russian troops pouring over the border were a no show.  No carpet bombing of cities, just spiteful lobbing of a mess of a missile campaign which is only demonstrating their weaknesses.  No WMDs, just some crappy flooding and maybe some sort of nuclear “whoopsie” that is just as likely to drift into Russia.  None of this is the ”shock and awe” everyone was going on about a year ago.
As to “silence”, well US Congress made a bilateral statement which in this day and age is a freakin unicorn.  I also suspect that red phones are going off all over the place, the greater worry is that someone in Russia is actually picking up.
As to war damage to Ukraine, Russia does not need to throw a radiation tantrum, great swaths of Ukraine are a century problem right now with RoW and mines.  As I have said repeatedly the Reconstruction will need to be historic or there was no point.  We are talking economic sector re-wiring epic, like Japan post WW2.  And if Russia wants back into any sort of club and not wind up an Eastern European North Korea it is going to have to foot a portion of the bill.
You, and others appear to be pointing out the glass if half empty.  I am not saying the glass if half full. I am saying it is a freakin Christmas miracle that the bar is still standing and we are well past worrying about stupid glasses.  This war has become a great power shaping and positioning exercise in many dimensions.  The stakes got really high, really fast and we are pretty much committed at this point.

I... don't think we have. There was some dude on Twitter claiming that. Can we please wait for confirmation on things on such scale? And not jump to conclusions before? Otherwise we can just as well take Russian mil bloggers as truth. Or BILD-Zeitung, for the Germans among us.

The two of you have two narratives -
The Russians are savages who will stop at nothing to destroy Ukraine.
And
The West is sitting around and do nothing while the first one happens, and will continue to do so no matter what.
So if these are true…why hasn’t Russia simply used nuclear/chemical/whatever since day 1?  Why is this war even still happening?  Is Ukrainian resolve and resistance an effective deterrence to strategic nuclear strikes?  
If the West is so useless and, clearly ready to let Russia do whatever it wants (and you can come read justifications of this right here on this thread)…why do we even still have this thread?  Russias are genocidal savages who are being deterred from escalation…by what exactly?  Because we certainly know it is not the bumbling western powers.
Of course if this is the case then why are we spending billions to assist Ukraine?  Symbolism? Boredom?
Look, if you guys want to go bask in narratives that call for bloodbaths and holy crusades/WW3 there is a big ol Internet out there that will tell you exactly what you want to hear.  
If you want something that resembles a grown up conversation, stick around. But if you are advocating that we all jump on whatever crazy train that seems to float your boat right now: nope.
What is it gonna take for the West to directly intervene in this war?  You do not want to know.  And frankly this thread won’t matter if that happens because a lot of us will already be dead.

The forum software very frequently messes up embedded links in quotations and displays the wrong link when updating the page with new posts - forcing your browser to reload the page fixes it. 

Who said they won? Who said this war is existential for Russia? These are future predicting statements, one I would caution people against believing firmly are decided.
A Ukraine where if the front line froze right here is unlikely to get NATO or EU membership, unlikely to get security assurances without a formal peace (which I highly doubt Russia would give if it stopped Ukraine here, mindful of those potential security assurances), it would unlikely to be rebuilt, with a unstable security situation, a dead carcass tied to Europe. Hardly winning.
As for unrest in Russia, the population is cowed, the elites are mindful of the system's benefits, the wobbliness of Putin's regime is there, but definitely less than anticipated.
 

While I generally agree, the nature of this fight is existential. A lot of things have to be put to the side unfortunately.  Reality trumps what may have been desired. I am sure the UA would prefer not to mine their own country, but considering how many Russia is dumping, that earlier figure of them clearing 10x as many as they laid is likely going to be a low ball for the reality facing Ukraine. 

If we want the Ukrainians to be able to afford to make these little distinctions in how to kill Russians, all we have to do is commit NATO's air forces to this war. It will be over in three days, and we can all feel really good that the the Russians died burning in their own diesel instead of something incendiary we dropped. In the absence of that, Ukraine is fighting an existential war where losing means the some combination of rape, torture, a train ride to the a Siberian gulag, and outright murder of essentially the entire country. That is a proven fact, the Russians have made it VERY clear.
Furthermore the sheer quantity of ordinance, whether mines or forty year old artillery shells with a 25% dud rate, used in the parts of Ukraine that have been fought over are already far past the point making vast areas unlivable, and unusable. Either the engineers come up with a better way to do de-mining or it is already a problem. 

The main difference is that the US has a lot more ATACMS that it can afford to deliver to Ukraine than the UK can deliver Storm Shadows.

The main difference is that the US has a lot more ATACMS that it can afford to deliver to Ukraine than the UK can deliver Storm Shadows.

The main difference is that the US has a lot more ATACMS that it can afford to deliver to Ukraine than the UK can deliver Storm Shadows.

About time, innit?
 
 

Controversial opinion, but it is possible that Putin, Prigoszhin and Lukaschenko are all less-than-reliable narrators 😇

Controversial opinion, but it is possible that Putin, Prigoszhin and Lukaschenko are all less-than-reliable narrators 😇

Controversial opinion, but it is possible that Putin, Prigoszhin and Lukaschenko are all less-than-reliable narrators 😇

Controversial opinion, but it is possible that Putin, Prigoszhin and Lukaschenko are all less-than-reliable narrators 😇