dan/california

Well when we want his friend at CGSC to turn off the cloaking device and join the discussion it behooves us to be nice to him...

All of this absolutely true, but it almost cuts both ways in term of Ukraine taking Crimea back. Because if they get it without setting off a nuclear exchange, and OK that is literally one of the bigger IFS in human history, Russia isn't getting it back this century.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/09/21/world/europe/ukraine-maps-momentum.html The most irritating thing about the NYT's usually bad Ukraine coverage is that they can do great work when they try. The above article proof, very well done. They do seem to have finally noticed that Russia ISN'T winning this war.

Any indication what the Russians bill was? Someone should consider using some precision munitions on a grouping of Russians with that competence level. They can't have may of them left.

This is the thing that angered me the most about the Russian attack on Ukraine. Ukraine, with very little help, was making the transition from a badly run country to a truly decent one. That is just about the hardest thing to do in the entirety of human history. Our utterly failed attempts to even get a good start on the process in the middle east being exhibit A. For Russia to try and abort that process is pretty much the greatest crime imaginable.

This is VERY well put.

Ghirkin's head is going to explode! The Ru Nats lost it when they exchanged that one female medic a month or two ago. I can never remember her name. This is an orders of magnitude bigger deal. It will become apparent to the Ukrainians themselves rather quickly whether they are going to have to pay for Crimea by the centimeter, or in hundred hectare chunks. If they can take it in 20k tactical bounds, well the Russian empire probably isn't a thing anymore. They have proven to be anything but stupid, they will make a deal if it is clear we are looking at the by centimeters plan. As the Capitan has ably pointed out the Donbas is not worth having, other than the moral victory. 90% percent of the people who needed saving there are either dead, or long, LONG gone. My recommended negotiating position with the L/DPR would be they are 100% Ukraine, or they are 100% Russian. There is no middle ground, no autonomy, no special status, no lingering anything. If they are stupid enough to choose Russia, well, they never were very bright. And again this is assuming the Russian army doesn't' just rout off the field. If they do there is no need to negotiate with anybody in the Republics. Just march in and apply Ukrainian law fairly, 99% of the L/PDR leadership have committed entire law books worth of crime. If they are stupid enough not to retreat with the Russian army, just prosecute them. What WE need to do is stay on on our congresscritters/MPs and ensure Ukraine has enough support that this conversation is actually relevant, by late spring of next year if not sooner.

I think the english word is mortgage. The loan used to buy a house. Having to keep paying that if you take a big pay cut when conscripted would definitely put morale the rest of the way into the &E^&##@Q@

Haiduk your english is usually better than mine, but could you clarify this one? It didn't come out right. The bleeping youngns seem to THINK in music videos, and their taste sucks in every language i have had the "pleasure" of experiencing them in. Sadly the condition appears incurable.

I one hundred percent agree with The_Capn that multiple years of High intensity trench warfare are not worth it. I am not talking about taking back Donbass and the Crimea centimeter by centimeter and paying out in blood the same way. I am saying that we owe the Ukrainians one fully supported winter/spring offensive. By fully supported it I mean enough gas, I mean enough ammo, I mean as many NATO weapons as they can physically absorb. Steve's point about being cautious at the very end there's also quite relevant but I just don't think we can afford to leave a total victory off the table if it's there for the taking. There are two somewhat conflicting long-term goals about managing the end of this conflict. We do want Russia to remain in existence and more or less its current form, simply because it's break up entitles us to who knows how many more unpleasant wars, and that's while we get to chase nukes around like very dangerous marbles. At the same time we really really, really want to crush Russian imperial ambitions forever, and convince them right down to their bones that they are done playing superpower. These goals are somewhat in conflict. So much of the question comes down to does the loss of Crimea get the point across, or does the loss of Crimea either collapse Russia completely or result in an utterly in embittered post Versailles type situation. Does letting Russia keep Crimea make better or worse outcomes more likely? I am not sure our crystal ball is that good. Given the difficulty in predicting longterm outcomes I am strongly inclined for the total the Ukrainian victory scenario if it on the table soonish, and at a reasonable price. To repeat NOTHING is worth three years of grinding trench warfare. In regards to Ukraine's future, as opposed to Russia's I wrote a post 1000+ pages ago agreeing with everything The Capn just said about quitting at the 2022 lines. At the 2022 lines Ukraine is a unified, relatively easy to run country. If fully incorporated into the EU and NATO it would be a very prosperous one, I just don't think we can get the Ukrainians to realize that easily, not after Russia has turned every square mile they've taken into a badly run concentration camp. But perhaps The Capn is correct and checks with enough zeros on when will work their usual magic. And as I have also been saying for a 1000 pages, a successful coup/revolution in Belarus that pulls it into the Western camp would be the ultimate, absolute, drop the mic victory in this war. It is worth a lot of money and at least some risk to pursue that. Success in Belarus would be worth 100 times Crimea in terms of long term stability and prosperity, even for Ukraine, never mind the rest of us. Lastly let me remind everyone how lucky we are that people like Steve and The Capn even talk to us, with as many other things as they must have going on. RAILROAD SABOTAGE!!! It is the only thing that moves the needle. Can somebody do some nice how to videos in Russian and plaster Telegram with them? Shoving the army full of unhappy, unwilling people does seem quite unwise, but wisdom has not made an appearance in Moscow just lately.

Yeah, we need less not make him mad, and more crush Russia's hopes of victory utterly. The response to anew Lada is going to become "I am so sorry for your loss". Bad regimes whose unhappiest people can leave last a lot longer than ones where they can't. Cuba is exhibit A. But yes the balancing act is complicated. What he said! The only effective means of protest is railroad sabotage. It actually has an effect, even at a relatively small scale, and you might get away with it. There needs to be a significant effort to push this message. At least until the opposition can put a crowd of hundreds of thousands into the streets of Moscow. 100% agreement otherwise, they are going to throw bad soldiers after good ones until much of the territory beyond the Urals cans just stop taking Moscow's calls, drop a couple of railway bridges, and go on about their existence. This, this, this. The biggest threat to the regime is unhappy draftees who think it i safer to fight the Russian regime than the Ukrainians. An epic round of mass surrenders would be almost as bad. And everything they just announced is going to make it worse, as the average unit quality plummets. I just don't think the Chinese are going to provide enough support to move the needle. The Russian performance has been so awful Xi just can't support it with a straight face. And a completely failed Russian state is less of an effective ally, but easier to exploit at a profit. If the Russians can stabilize their front and start losing territory in an organized and military fashion this might work. But the Russians haven't done ANYTHING in an organized military faction. All the steps the Russians are taking to generate more manpower make their force less effective, and less motivated, less responsive to orders, and generally much worse by any military metric you would care to apply. There is a GREAT risk that at some this ever more pitiful excuse for an army rotus/surrenders in mass. A medium big piece of it just DID. The Ukrainians aren't going to stop at the 2014 lines with the Russians are in full rout unless the West is prepared to write some truly LARGE checks. We need to choose up sides in the big post war multiplayer CM tournament based on musical taste. We are going to get multi player per side co-op, right? I agree with most of this, it is REALLY important that Russia unambiguously lose. And we are still treating this whole mess as something that will respond to small tweaks in a predictable manner. I am just not sure that is the case.

You learn things on this forum!

The single biggest fact that is going to help is the AWFUL way Russia has treated the Republics. Among other things they tried to get every male of military age killed, and they have succeeded in a vast number of cases. The ones that aren't dead or crippled for life have still had the harshest possible lesson what mother Russia thinks of them. This going to matter a great deal in my humble opinion. Just rule of law and the tiniest hint of peace and, not even prosperity, just not desperation is going to go a long way. And the guiltier the conscience, the better Rostov on Don is going to look. Throw in the fact that Zelensky is just good at this and will probably settle for the trials of relatively small number of people who utterly deserve it, and I have hope. Crimea is different, More Russian, and less abused, but I still have hope for a generally decent outcome. Harder to take in the first place, too. Although I am becoming ever more certain the Ukrainians can take almost anything with enough HIMARS pods.

Since it the season for nonsensical annexation referenda, I think Poland should hold a vote on annexing Belarus. I think it is 80/20 they could win an honest vote since it would effectively put them in the EU. I am 100% sure they could win the farcical "on line voting" publicity exercise I have in mind. Who knows, with some well placed bribes the Belarusian army might decide to take orders from Warsaw, and that would be that.

A picture of 200 ATACAMS at a warehouse in Poland? And the first 30 precision strike missiles to ever come off the line? A casual mention that they could be streaking across the Donbas sky in 48 hours? Or was it even stronger than that?

Kamil has done a near exhaustive thread on the subject just recently. I will just highlight two points, it is MUCH harder to mobilize after you have gotten your standing army chewed into small bloody pieces, and what is left of it is committed to active operations. And secondly it was units of unhappy draftees who didn't want face German machine guns who actually carried out the Bolshevik Revolution.

I think he is quite close, Drunken idiots though they are, a fair bit of the Russian elite realizes that Putin is systematically trashing Moscows ability to control the Russian Empire. Since that control is what keeps said elite swimming in pools of money and unaccountable power, they are reaching the point where doing something looks safer than doing nothing.

Noted, thank you.

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/09/20/world/united-nations-general-assembly Erdogan seems to be pressuring Putin to withdraw, albeit gingerly.

Stalin was a more effective war time dictator than Hitler was. He was more able to ingest real information, and turn it into rational orders to maintain himself in the seat of absolute power. Rational for Stalins UTTERLY amoral world view that what was good for Stalin was all that mattered. In Particular, after getting ~half his pre war army killed or captured in German encirclements, he realized he could not continuously interfere in the General Staffs war plans. He found some more or less competent Generals, told them to win the war or he would have them shot, and and let them be about it. He also 100% mobilized for a war economy far sooner, and far more effectively than Hitler did. It didn't hurt that his claim that the Germans were coming to kill EVERYONE was more or less true, and provably so. Hitler had this really bad habit of ANNOUNCING it, among other things. He was not in ANY way a more moral/ less awful dictator, just a better one. The Red Army tortured, looted, raped, and mass murdered all the way from Moscow to Berlin, Ukraine very much included. Indeed the only thing that has changed is that the Russians seem to have forgotten the importance of winning battles first. Every attempt was made to massacre as many "politically unreliable" people as possible under the cover of war time conditions. Katyen Forest, and allowing the Germans to crush the Warsaw Ghetto before continuing their offensive are merely the best known examples. Ukrainian, Polish, Belorussian, and Baltic civilians were treated just as awfully as German ones. The addition of cocaine to the vices of the Russian elite has perhaps been detrimental to their effectiveness. I would say it has degraded their morals further, but they never had any, so that isn't really possible.

The army's will to die proved lacking. Lenin became Czar because he promised the units around St Petersburg they wouldn't have to fight the Germans if they backed him. He neglected to mention the fact they were committing themselves to ~ten years of a grinding, brutal civil war, and a few dozen purges for "reasons". Putin knows this, it is why he has held off on this step. His spot between the rock and the hard place is getting ever smaller. NATO/The West must be prepared to stare down his next round of no doubt louder threats. He CANNOT be allowed to pull his gonads out of the fire by waving his magical nuclear stick around, because if it works he will never stop.

Russia has never, EVER been run even minimally well. It has always been some form of horrible extractive absolutism wrapped in some sort of utter B&^%S^$(. They literally have no experience of even barely decent anything, ever, it shows.

Kamil might be wrong, but I think PUTIN thinks he is right about this. That is why Putin just keeps doubling down with ever lower quality cannon fodder. How the other guy THINKS things work, can be as important as how they DO work, at least until somebody throws the red dice, once it is a shooting war reality has rather more weight. Hence Russia is now in the beginning of the find out phase.

I have had a theory for months that most of what the Russians are doing in Ukraine has to do with factional fighting in Moscow regarding A) Who lost Ukraine? B ) Who replaces Putin? Obviously losing the fight about question A negatively effects your faction in B. I think this is the only conceivable explanation for Wagner's suicidal obsession with taking Bahkmut, and the MOD's irrational commitment to Kherson. They aren't about winning the war, they are about being able to blame someone else for losing it.

Interesting short thread from Kamil.