Desertor

Incredible.
Haiduk's in for a hell of a surprise when he gets back on his pc...
FUNDED!

$1500 to get him a new laptop. Amazing. Thank you, everyone who donated.
 

Thanks ) Just became some more of work, my wife turned back and often occupies PC because her work, also it's hard to live three months 24/7 as war news translator, so I took small vacations 

Nice response to NY Times suggestion of appeasement.
Ukraine Newspaper Warns New York Times Not to 'Appease' Putin (msn.com)
 
The Kyiv Independent, an English-language Ukrainian newspaper, hit back on Tuesday with a fiery editorial of its own. The paper's editorial board slammed the "disappointing" article that is said "attempts to pass off appeasement and betrayal of the free world's values as pragmatic reasoning."
The Independent accused the Times of calling for the West to "appease" Putin by "giving up" in the conflict, which would have wide-reaching consequences, the editorial said.
"Make no mistake: If you appease a dictator, whose troops regularly indulge in war crimes, it will lead to a catastrophic geopolitical shift," the editorial reads. "A Russian military victory would lead to land grabs and brutal conquest becoming the new norm. Allowing a power-hungry fascist dictatorship to succeed will encourage other dictatorships to try."

It is obvious theres no discussion to be had with purpheat23.
Now may I ask everyone not to spam another 3 pages with this, it is hard enough to keep up to date.

MAGA.  Lol.  No intellectual defense of anything, just talking points, confrontational attitude and dismissiveness of anything contrary to their delusional reality.  Not worth arguing.  Seriously.

Like I've said before, this is all ignoring the fact that Putin was not preparing for war at all.  He was preparing for a coup.  If he thought he was gonna have a fight he wouldn't have crossed the border. 
His goals could not be achieved militarily but he was so in love w his KGB-style internal subversion and assassination squads he wasn't worried about that. 
He's not the only blind planner in modern history, paraphrasing below:
Professor of modern middle eastern studies "what are you going to do when the shia and sunni start fighting each other?"
Dick Cheney lacky:  "We won't let that happen.  Why would they want to fight each other anyway?  It won't happen."
(not picking on Bush here, he was sold a bill of goods.  I don't think he's a bad guy, he just got conned.  he should've stayed as CEO of the Texas Rangers baseball team -- a great gig for sure.  I would way rather run a baseball team than be president)

Seconded and thirded. Please wade in, @SeinfeldRules!

I maintain very fiercely that one cannot use math to describe human behavior, which is illogical and anarchic in even regimented institutions. And so the push to 'model all the things' ultimately leads to an intellectual dead end and the wrong kind of solutions. Math, data, modeling is good for examining how to make small changes to systems (what weapons should we send to Ukraine, what will produce the most effect in the shortest time). But it cannot lead in a strategic sense (how does Ukraine protect its independence) because you cant properly factor every variable. Take Afghanistan. You can do all the wonderful calculations you want about how to win the war. Except what does winning look like? How do you even describe the word? Is it democracy? If so what kind, one led by elites in Kabul or one that works for every community at the expense of the center? One that we can control or one that may make its own choices? Or is just killing the Taliban and keeping China and Russia out? All of this reflects the uncertainty, variability, and contingency of our own thinking but the same is also true of the other side, who always gets a vote and is constantly reevaluating their vote. You can count things, bodycount, ammunition expenditure, relative strengths. But ultimately even Clausewitz himself dismisses this mathematical approach to war. Because at its heart the Soviets were wrong and the Germans were right: war is an art first, not a science first. Math and numbers sing you a siren's song of certainty, but war is uncertain because humans are in turn noble, courageous, inventive, stupid, cowardly, and lazy. And so the whole affair is more like a sports match or a game of poker than it is like running a Walmart or manipulating the stock market. 
All this is to say that this line of thinking, at least in the US, predates powerpoint and really goes back to the 60s. But I find its durability in the defense system quite disheartening. There is the constant pressure to manage war and the DoD like a business, when really it should be run like a military (duh!) But making change is next to impossible thanks to a whole host of factors not worth digging into. 

I much preferred this thread when it was discussing the current conflict between Ukraine and Russia.

Red army was equally evil to SS and Wehrmacht. In fact they were so equally evil - they started WW2 together as allies and fought in Poland as allies and even traded captured territories as allies, like it was an open lebensraum market.
Red army soldiers raped Polish and Finnish women, looted, tortured and mass murdered civilians in newly occupied cities and that was before they and their SS brothers had a falling out over who gets to occupy rest of Europe.
And when they did - Red army soldiers raped, looted and murdered not only in Poland (again), Czechoslovakia and Germany, but also in Ukraine and Belarus - because they couldn't give an F. Yes - Red Army was filled with such human filth that they committed war crimes against their own. In Ukraine alone Red army proceeded to kill 300.000 civilians in 1946, after the war was over. And during the war they committed countless war crimes resulting in the deaths of at least as many.
So if you think russians and their collaborators from previously occupied countries came to Germany to fight Nazi ideology - ask yourself a question why millions went to concentration camps and died there in the following 45 years of half of Europe being occupied by the glorious Red army.
Just because one barbaric army fought the other, equally barbaric army - doesn't make one of them the good guys. Real life is not a high fantasy book.

Some of the conversation over the few pages have referenced the former Yugoslavia.  Which brings back... well, not so good memories.
I was a Canadian peacekeeper in Bosnia in latter half of '93.   During the Croatian offensive in the Medak in Sept of '93, I was with the 2 PPCLI when we went into the sh*tstorm to try to stop the ethnic cleansing going on.  The Croatian army attacked our unit during that operation, a thing that the Croatian government denies to this very day.  Despite us photographing the Croatian dead after the battle and collecting their ID, etc.    We had god damn evidence and to this day, the Croatian government position is that they never attacked us.
Part of our job, beside trying to keep the warring factions apart, was to document evidence of ethnic cleansing and I was in charge (I was an officer) of a evidence collection team.  So, literally thousands of photos, videos.  Transcripts of interviews with witnesses and victims.  Six months exposed to that living hell, day after f*n day....
So I had the evidence, because sometimes our official recording devices ran out film or tape and we used our personal recording devices to finish up at a site.
After I got out the military, I found myself sometimes on various military forms about games, such as this one.  Arma forums, military wargame forums... that sort of thing.  And as it happened, I ran into forum members from Croatia and Bosnia Serbs and we would get into it.
Universally, every Croatian or Bosnian Serb forum poster denied what happened there.  And I was called a liar on many occasions for telling them them the truth of that war as I was there and they weren't.  And I have evidence to back up my claims.  No one believed me and if I offered visual proof, they didn't want to see it or they disclaimed it as fake.
I remember a particular Bosnian Serb who was not in the war but we got deep into the weeds discussing what happened during that war.  Deny, deny, deny.  It never happened.  Until videos that the Bosnian Serbs took of them killing civilians and dumping them in mass graves what was recorded by the very soldiers who committed the atrocities surfaced and made it onto their local media and they couldn't deny it any longer.  Those videos were part of the process besides sanctions that resulted in some notable Bosnia Serb / Serbian leaders being turned over to the ICC for prosecution for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.  After the revelation came out, this individual on that forum who I had spent hours engaging with about the culpability of Serbs in the atrocities simply ignored me from that point onwards.  I will never know why.... was it that he discovered that I was right all a long and he was wrong and he was ashamed (as he would have been) or he simply wanted to hang onto his delusion of what narrative he wanted to believe was true and he knew that I would keep chipping away.   
Denial is a powerful thing.   I don't understand why it has such power but it does.  People can dismiss an outright objective reality because to accept the truth is to undermine what they think reality is or should be.   I don't get it and is beyond madding to see the denials in the face of objective reality happen over and over.
Sigh.   I don't know why the hell I rambled on with this.  Maybe it was a story I need to tell to remain sane in light of the same brutality I witnessed back in Bosnia happening in Ukraine now.  Or maybe I still am the greater fool for believing my experiences in Bosnia can be an object lesson to others about holding onto a narrative that is personally comfortable but runs counter to all the real evidence to the contrary.   DMS, I am looking at you....
The truth will come out after all this is over.  At least, I hope it does.  The truth of this war needs to be told and codified so generations that follow can know what really happend.
Now at the end of this and reviewing it, I feel that I should have deleted this or apologize for it.  
I am hitting post. It is my truth.  Let people accept it and learn something from it or ignore it.  I needed to say this for a long time.   
 
 

Hmm, if we had let Putin join NATO we would now be at war with Ukraine, since they are the agressors. 😆

I get the OPs point, we do need to be mindful of propaganda from all corners of this thing.  However, the facts and evidence are stacking so high at this point that it has changed the character of this war.
War crimes always happen in war, true.  But the frequency and intensity are a direct reflection of the fighting force perpetrating them, who are in turn a direct reflection of the society that produced, sent and supports those same soldiers.  Generally one can accept “anomalies” of abhorrent behaviour, but when it takes on a frequency and pattern of systemic organization, it crosses a larger line that speaks to the qualities of the culture that allowed this to happen - I have in-laws who are German, and they live with this even today based on WW2, these are stains that do not wash easily.
So what about this war?  Well it has become a stain on the Russian people.  You allowed this to happen, either by supporting the current government, or not doing anything to stop them.  This one is on you, each and everyone - of at least voting age and functioning mental faculty.  You can cry “lies” and persecution but you have earned every one of those as well.  Worse, your children, who do not have a voice in this, will live with this for generations.  It is costing a lot more than world opinion, as we have discussed at length and will continue to cost for years.
To the OP my advice is to not waste your time at a small niche wargaming site trying to defend what has become undefendable.  My advice is to resist this from without or within any way that you can.  And I mean resist the Russian government and work towards its downfall because it needs to fall.  You may not succeed but at least you will be able to look in the mirror and know you did what you could to preserve any shred of Russian dignity.
These types of wars can break nations, those attacked and those attacking.  I strongly suggest you spend your energies elsewhere in order to try and preserve what you have left as a nation.
 

Must be hard to be a Russian  and   watching this thread  DMS  . Your attempts to rationalize  or explain away the behaviors of your countrymen is a Herculean task indeed - I don't envy you it .

not to get too snarky, but I suppose if LePen were elected these weapons would've been sent to the Russians?  I thank all the gods she did not win, both for Ukraine and for the world.

Welcome to page 666 of the discussion, thus making this the thread of the beast.

wouldn't that be a coup.  Could be possible if there was a meeting between the two.  One can dream.

Farmers are still finding UXO in northern France from WW1.

But, can we can think it?

But, can we can think it?

It does, but since the Russians have made it ABSOLUTELY clear, that their plan is to shoot every man of vaguely military age, rape any woman or child the they feel like, and then turn the whole country into something worse than a gulag, the Ukrainians are pretty much going to fight to the last twelve year old. The Russians can quit and go home any time, they just need proper encouragement. Watching their #^%^%##hole buddies die in burning AFVs is an EXCELLENT encouragement. ALL of them dying in burning AFVs is ok, too.

This "Easter Offensive" is like watching an old dog eat soup right now.  Slurping and slopping, gum smacking and messy as hell but not much else. 
I do not think the Russian executed a recon-phase so this is "probe-as-you-go" and it is costing them dearly as the probing is being done by the same units that are supposed to be attacking.  Russia has not fundamentally fixed their problem of operational pre-conditions - information superiority being a big one, nor have they demonstrated any level of sophistication in this attack that would suggest some sort of overall operational design beyond "go forward and try and take some ground".  This is tactical piecemeal and largely unsynchronized.
The Russian's reportedly do have indirect fire advantage and have employed mass fires in some cases but it is again unsynchronized beyond some tactical pulses.  I am still waiting for some sort of shoe to drop (at this point a freakin sock would be a major surprise) but this is the slowest and most fumbling "mass operational offensive" I think the world has seen since the Austro-Hungarian Empire tried to invade Serbia in 1914. 
I guess the question is "is Russia just waiting for its moment, or is this it?"  The longer this takes the less likely there is a bold stroke under the hood here as it is costing the better part of a BTG daily burn rate just to do this "leg-humping" exercise.  Now we have deep strikes of some sort into Russia and some weird signals coming out of the Transnistria, while Russia continues symbolic lobbing of a diminishing stock of cruise missiles into Ukraine. 
I honestly expect Russia to announce that this entire thing was a "spoiling operation" to allow them to dig in for the defence of LNR/DNR.
All the while a western arsenal of epic proportions is being pushed into Ukraine, which at this rate will be a greater military power than Russia by the end of May.

... they get used in a conflict to see how they perform without German soldiers getting killed

So by russian logic that must be israeli jewish Nazis??? 🤣

Azov fighters brought some food to children, hiding in underground shelters of Azovstal. You can see systems of passages. Most of civilains say they came here as far as ater 20th of March, but some sit here from behinning of March. Kids say they want to see a sky and sun again - they didn't see it so far two months.