dan/california

Marching like men who expect to win

https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-belarus-morgue-soldiers/31750455.html I would file this under Putin not winning.

A big part of it is intelligence services have a hard telling when an Army/country is lying to itself. Or if the leader is lying to absolutely everybody. So say, for instance, some three letter agency of the U.S. government has broken in the STAVKA email system and is reading all the readiness reports and battle plans. It is really hard to tell that these are wrong because the lying originates at the very lowest levels and and just percolates all the way up. No intelligence agent thinks the way to make his career is recruiting corporals at a motor pool in some might well be nameless base on the far side of the Urals. I think they new the readiness reports, and the plans were optimistic, but they just couldn't comprehend that it was fiction from top to bottom, and no one including Putin, new it. The people who new the most were the ones stealing the money, which is an obvious and effective incentive to just lie harder. Some of the other aspects of this particular pointless criminal slaughter, and even more relevant to Saddam Hussein in the Second Gulf War, is that the leader is lying to absolutely everybody. The U.S.thought Saddam had WMD because almost all of the Iraqi military and government apparatus thought Saddam had WMD. Most of of them were as surprised as we were when it wasn't true.

Really the game is batting a thousand on every single issue except the pretense that Russia has a functioning military, and they sort of had to fudge that to make a playable game.

The Russians complete lack of secure coms is getting REALLY expensive.

This is the meme for the entire Russian war in Ukraine. Watch till the end.

Private Pavel is in a great deal of trouble, a body cast, or the the ever popular both.

Steve has a MUCH, MUCH better model.

https://dearmrputin.substack.com/p/yes-vladimir-putin-parkinsons-disease?r=8fxpv&s=w&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web Really good article. She has a source, or is doing a heck of a job of pretending.

https://twitter.com/EnglishUkraine/status/1502513184351084547/photo/1 That is at least 25% of the total force deployed isn't it?

I have a pretty strong impression there were a fair number of these troops in the invasion force, and that they got chewed into little tiny pieces. https://www.rferl.org/a/russian-soldiers-ukraine-cannon-fodder-governor/31739187.html

https://militaryland.net/ukraine/invasion-day-16-summary/ Still stalled, But Mariupol is getting hammered.

Again won't the logistics of trying to feed "troops" of this unimaginably bad quality do more harm than good? Or is this all BS to convince Putin they have tried everything and then some before they admit they lost?

https://www.unilad.co.uk/news/putin-is-preparing-a-terrorist-attack-on-chernobyl-says-ukraine-defenc-20220311?source=facebook&fbclid=IwAR2U06z4O83ZSeOPyXB671ScoPXbFHKO7LVkmZaK6eGHU1lT4KGJipvLwpI So is this an excuse to leave? Or to launch a nuke? because his entire army is camped around it. I know he is peeved at their performance, but irradiating them seems unlikely to improve it. Though it would obviously suck for Kyiv, too.

They literally are not worth the logistical cost of importing them. On the off chance this isn't pure hype though, I want tape of them experiencing their first cold, wet night in Ukraine That will probably take care of ten or twenty percent of them right there

Many Belorussian soldiers will mostly be interested in surrendering as quickly as possible, and then escaping to take shot crossing the Polish border. The others are just making sure their ancient, badly maintained equipment clearly, really doesn't run. So they can just stay home.

But once there is coup you just get the next question. How many bits of non Russian ethnicity decide it is great time not be a small part of big country. Decision influenced by the fact that the Russian military is currently getting the crap kicked out of it somewhere else. Lots of people get ideas when the Tsars mailed fist looks like it made out of tissue paper.

It is not so much a question of the Russians reacting very badly, as it a significant attritional loss For the Russians. A small infantry team took out at least two vehicles, and inflicted at least 6-8 casualties on the Russians. The Ukrainians don't seem short of infantry, or missiles. The Russians are getting very short of people who will stay in their tanks and fight. This is a clear UKR win if the team didn't get away, and an overwhelming one if this team is still around to do it again.

There are two kinds of Western companies in Russia, resource extraction, and consumer goods/services. The oil/gas/ metal companies will be fine because cutting Russia out of the world market automatically increases the value of their other assets/production. For Starbucks, and McDonalds the Russian market is just not big enough to matter in the first place. I am sure some investment bank somewhere is overcommitted to the Russian Market and is very sorry, but in the big picture that just doesn't matter.

was their a single piece of gear that wasn't forty years old?

You need to know a lot more about the market to answer that question. Who is buying, who is selling, what the volumes are, and probably twenty plus other things. The Russian government has basically seized all the hard currency it could reach in the Russian economy, all bank accounts forcibly converted to rubles and so on. This of course completely impoverished every person and private business in Russia that was functioning much above subsistence level. The Russian Government may be using some of this newly seized foreign currency to defend the ruble in what is left of its currency markets, but it is a clear case of eating your seed corn.

Based on the quality of their operations so far it would take most Russian units an hour to call for fire from the battalion mortar battery, if they even have those in this disaster of an army. Definitely want be cautious you haven't found one of the two competent units in the whole mess though.

https://militaryland.net/ukraine/invasion-day-15-summary/ Good maps, detailed layout. If anybody gained ground today it was the Ukrainians.

"Russian tactics" is going to be a term of derision for a long time.

Steve mentioned twenty or thirty pages back that in addition to murdering women and children wholesale, that Putin's timing was very poor in relation to his personal life. It is reason 19,123 to encourage comrade Tokarev to get it in gear.