kraze

T-14 broke down at their victory sect parade a few years back and had to be towed (what a foreshadowing) - and only the best and most reliable models are usually used at parades. Russian propaganda surely made T-14 and Su-57 look like an unstoppable force of nature, but the same they did to their whole army.

Wow, so it means those planes got effed up badly, didn't they? With russian euphemisms a la "hard landing as a result of slightly touching the ground" meaning Il76 got smashed to bits.

I wouldn't be surprised if other numbers are just as legit. As we know everything in Russia adds up not to 100% but to 146%.

Pretty sure that's just an excuse to invade other countries and steal stuff. No asshole ever wants to admit that he's an asshole, while acting just like one. This "under siege mentality" argument doesn't work anymore after putin basically proclaimed himself the new emperor and that all wars he started are the wars of "returning our land". It's not like anyone in Russia ever thought about their immediate neighbors differently before. Everyone and everything was always 'theirs'.

They were always russian troops with only a very small part of local collaborators, russians decided to "mobilize" locals only now. Easy proof of that is a russian "union of Donbass volunteers" which as far as 2018 already had 40000+ members, all of which are citizens of Russia. Whole Belarus army is about that same number for comparison. The only home turf advantage of "LDNR troops" they have is that of russians living in houses they "liberated" from locals 8 years ago and now consider their own. But I'm not sure if some buryat or kalmyk stealing someone's apartment thousands of kms away can really be considered as gaining a 'home' mentally even by him. Judging by how Donetsk decayed over 8 years of occupation - they certainly don't really treat it as their home (...or maybe they do and that's why it is like that hurrr hurrr).

"LDNR forces" are predominantly russian soldiers from regions far away, there's no home turf for them.

And there are 140 mln russians, ready to die for the Emperor. Besides ideology - toilets won't just deliver themselves to Russia. Russia has been running very real, albeit covert mobilization, for months. Also pulling standing troops from as far as Vladivostok just this month. Their casualties are huge, but unlike western society - russian culture has zero value for human life. They don't really care how many die, just that they can be proud of some achievement in conquest. Just to get why my cynicism isn't far off from the truth - ask yourself - what makes a russian come die at a war that has no point but to exterminate other people, for being too different from him? Even Peter I Remastered and his cronies pretend no more - they say it's their goal directly. He could've lived his life, but instead he had his head blown off by some Javelin and that was it. Zero f... value given.

Not losing and not remove him from power. Nobody considers anything but victory with feb24 frontlines as a minimum. One lobby just wants to keep things as they are in Ukraine, isolate us from EU and NATO and they need Russia with anyone but putin to guarantee them this "stability". They are just blind to the obvious facts (anyone in power in Russia will always want to destroy Ukraine) and want to risk another war to keep all the cash from corruption deals they have flowing. Coincidentally these are all Kolomoysky's people too. The other lobby wants to wall off Russia forever, fully turn to EU and NATO, accept any demands to fight corruption and be safe from war for the foreseeable future. And thank god these people are in charge of military (Danilov, Reznikov and, well let's be honest here, Zaluzhnyy as well) and hence you see Danilov finally lashing out at the "make russia good again" lobby and just saying that only guys who are directly in charge of fighting the war can make any statements about the war.

SBU was purged hard. It's a bit more complicated than that and involves nepotism, incompetency, cowardice, all under a 'pro-russian lobby gaining some power back' sauce. Part of that "pro-russian"* lobby is Gerashchenko hence why I, just as Haiduk, strongly advice you to avoid him. Same as I advise you to ignore Podoliak, Arakhamiya and Arestovich as they are from that very same lobby. It's our burden to deal with them. *It's in quotes because they don't exactly want us to become a territory of Russia like Belarus de facto did, but those people realize they won't be able to be corrupt if Ukraine goes for EU and NATO and hope that they can simply deal with Russia instead, like it was before 2014, with someone more "moderate" than putin at the helm. Of course this will never work out because there are no "moderate" russians as 300 years of history show, but politicians aren't always the most intelligent and educated bunch.

More like everybody realizes russians are either stuck in Ukraine or lose the stability in the empire completely if they pull the forces out. They threw everything they had at us and won't stop, because stakes are too high. So everybody just figured they can treat russians how they deserve it, without consequence, as it was a very long long time coming. Lithuania in particular has a thing or two to say about the now classic "Lithuanians were killing themselves, so we came to save them"

Ugh nope. It's like "Warsaw pact" - every single country in it was occupied by russians, with their soldiers committing countless crimes over the decades, but they pretended Poland and Czechoslovakia were sovereign on paper. Because Europeans are more willing to trade with you if you are pretending hard enough you follow their rules. But since this is Russia and russians are always russians - that pretense always goes out of the window eventually. Oh and they consider everything up until Berlin their territory too, don't you forget that. "Warsaw is a russian city" (c)

Empires either expand or they die. So he isn't wrong. When previous russian empire failed to expand by losing war of occupation in Afghanistan - it was soon no more.

Considering Russia supplies and supports Islamic terrorist organizations all around the world incl. Hezbollah and Taliban - you may be very very wrong about their actions towards ISIS. In fact had Russia not "intervene" in Syria - that would've been a stable country in just months, probably a moderately negotiable one like Qatar or Kuwait with ISIS getting a good beating instead of using the chaos and suffering Russia has caused to get in there and use Syrians towards their goals. Assad was nearly done and the guys beating him weren't ideological.

We know what their troops did in occupied towns, I myself can hardly imagine the suffering russians cause in other places they occupy for more than 3 months now. I mean - near Mariupol there are already huge mass graves that cannot be hidden from satellites even if russians tried and that's the biggest city they captured during the full scale invasion - what happens in smaller towns is anyone's guess - but it's not a happy guess at all.

That bottle of champagne was desperately asking to get opened for a while

Yes, exactly. It's not some border dispute or dispute over some political ideas or decisions. If Ukraine stops fighting - they will kill us all, or at least will try hard to do it like they did many many times before. Millions dead and with no place to live for whoever survives is a much worse outcome than hundreds of daily casualties - even though it's horrific either way.

Good for him that russians don't have those, half of the country doesn't have an access to gas they themselves extract.

Hmmm this guy is a nobody in front of an old bookshelf and a worn wallpaper - I can tell he is an expert on reality.

it's a typical russian tactic - whenever there is a good video of Ukraine screwing them in some epic way - they immediately rebrand it as their own. One of the prime examples is a news report on their primary state TV channel Rossiya 24 where they talked about how they completely obliterated Ukrainian forces at Snake Island, while showing... Bayraktar footage with Ukrainian planes smashing their troops and Bayraktar itself dropping a chopper on top of russians, complete with now very recognizable Bayraktar UI perfectly seen.

Ah but no - putin's speech was even more insane, dropping all pretense and saying "I'm just grabbing more land because I'm the emperor now". That's just russians for you, you just didn't have the honor of knowing their true self due to language barrier, but they are surely trying to bring their culture to you without external help, hard.

Every 2nd bullet and almost all supply trucks were US-made. Try winning the war without bullets or literally no trucks to deliver them with. Heck you can even say every 2nd soviet tank past 1943 existed thanks to US because it was made of metals US provided with the factory tools US provided, resources USSR didn't have. The whole turning point happened exactly because of lend-lease. USSR was retreating pants down because they lost most of their military potential in a failed "we gotta attack Germany first" plan. That "one rifle per three men" propaganda wasn't far off from reality after that epic fail of giving most your stuff to Germany to tractor away. And yes - without overabundance of NLAWs and Javelins Ukrainian army would've had extremely harder time defending in the immediate days of the full scale invasion. And yes - we have almost no 152mm shells left - which is the reason frontline is so static because there's not enough western arty and ammo to replace that - YET. Without US/EU support frontlines may have been drawn in a very different place on the map.

During WW2 even that supposedly mighty russian empire (USSR) had to rely almost entirely on USA and its lend-lease to not get steamrolled into oblivion by Germany, people seem to forget that. Not in small part due to a good old russian tradition of killing everyone intelligent enough to actually wipe their ass and leaving the rest.

Hence why you don't see russians pulling any offensives anymore but just spamming a single city and trying to hold everything else. Russia is also doing a covert mobilization for the past 3 months, which allowed them to replace 40k-50k of the losses. Also life has almost zero value in Russia so casualties do not affect their morale, even if it's a low morale, as much as they would in a western army - so they can just throw meat into the grinder and meat will happily comply.

Yes, the issue is that M777s are easy to use, have enough ammo but not enough experienced maintenance personnel / spare parts yet - when they inevitably have issues.

Even that is not true. One of commanders of the infamous 64th that did warcrimes in Bucha got his data leaked and he did jail time for robbery. What is written on paper in Russia often differs from how it really is - as we learned by now. In fact I wouldn't be surprised if that's far from a lone example and convicted guys have little problems getting into army as they are the ones who will be more willing to go an extra mile in doing what russians do best.