kraze

Maybe an example of that russian paper might - I mean sending in T72B from early '80s when on paper you have thousands of more modern variants already leads to questions - but maybe the corruption in their army is so hardcore - that some tanks were outfitted with ERA only on paper as well. Add to that the testimony of that pilot, who said that on paper their squadron has 24 planes but in reality it's only 15 - and the real picture may be just that

Even if the tank is killed by literally anything else but Javelin, especially RPG7 - that makes the cope cage make even less sense because you essentially make it a huge target loudly announcing its presence - so at least it should make an ATGM crew laugh uncontrollably, messing with the guiding.

Order of courage for courageously fighting neonazis inside Syrian kindergartens and children hospitals

According to that map it looks as if russians occupy every single village and town they have passed on the road. Which is not true, especially in the northern half of Ukraine - they have no effective holding force in any number, not even a good protected rear - hence why their supply convoys keep burning daily. And in the south they were stalled by several dozens of parked choppers suddenly catching fire - to a point where their whole VDV had to f off back to Crimea because they have nothing to drop them into Odessa with atm. Mariupol itself is surrounded and is getting the beating bordering on genocidal, yet hardcore vets of Azov still manage to go out and mess up russians bad, taking whole trophy tanks. This map is true if it is WW2 era thinking, but this isn't WW2. The only frontline that can be drawn semi-reliably is in the south, the other area is a mess of surrounding forces getting surrounded themselves.

Fact is - russians already used chemical weapons in Syria and there was zero reaction from anyone.

Because russian attacks slowed down. No more huge pushes towards anywhere. They are now in a full warcrime mode where they just bomb and shell civilians from afar where it's very hard to get them. Obviously they are either trying to regroup for that magical kamikaze push on Kyiv or whatever - or it really is that bad for russians at this point.

Wow, OK I think I'll begin feeling sorry for the serial murderers of my people, who are "just following orders" including the order to ring home and boast to their wives about how they execute people they just robbed. I guess all those belarussian soldiers who still riot and refuse to enter the war and do warcrimes simply don't know they can just excuse being human filth by claiming that it's all TV's fault.

People who order killings are not the ones who do the killings. Every soldier has a choice to not follow criminal orders, to not be a soldier - and russian soldiers choose to kill. Quite happily.

Nah, it's just for show, nobody will get punished because these are putin's orders. And it's not like conscripts themselves minded - they kill, rob and rape quite happily as is.

Good thing that's just all putin casually talking to himself about robbing and executing people and not "poor, common" russians, who are just "suffering" under "putin's tyranny". But what do I know.

Admittedly it's hard not to feel happy seeing insane genocidal trash turn into a sunflower fertilizer. For us it certainly helps with morale in a face of a very real existential threat. Russians did come here to murder as many of us as they can after all.

In case you thought I was exaggerating about genocide This is just a single russian strike on a nursery: (No need for translation, self explanatory NSFW photos and videos) https://censor.net/ua/news/3323280/okupanty_skynuly_aviabomby_na_dytyachu_likarnyu_i_pologovyyi_budynok_u_mariupoli_videofotoreportaj This is what they do to people that have our army protecting them. They target children like it's nothing and they don't give an f. Imagine what they will do to people in Mariupol if it falls.

They use thermobarics, HE and throw human trash at a much smaller Kharkiv daily - still eat dick there, couldn't surround it in any way. They do the same at Mariupol, which is even far smaller, in fact going full genocide in there - bombing nurseries and children hospitals to murder our kids - and throw their human trash at it from three directions at once - they killed 1300 civilians and who knows how many more were wounded in just two weeks - and it still doesn't fall. So no, short of using nukes and making Kyiv a land owned by no one - they have no chance at being there except in a form of a sunflower fertilizer.

Kyiv right now has a lot more people enlisting than a number of weapons and equipment that can be provided. To a point that military accepts only people with previous combat experience before anyone else and even those have problems with aforementioned weapons. And not because there is a small amount of rifles. Add to this about a thousand foreign volunteers arriving in Kyiv and already scoring first victories and trophies. So not exactly sure how russians expect to take and, most importantly, hold Kyiv with what they have.

So according to him Ukraine totally asked a russian crew to go and die in a fire so we could make a great movie. On multiple occasions.

Can still hand them off quietly. Could've pretended Luxembourg is giving us planes and see how Russia falls all over itself trying to somehow retaliate at a landlocked non-NATO member in the middle of Europe, surrounded by two nuclear NATO countries.

They prepared the population. Everybody believed Kyiv will fall in 2 days. Including putin himself. In fact russians mocked us for years that it will take 2 days tops. Well ok, putin gave his troops an additional day to capture Kyiv for 3 days total - in case something would go horribly wrong.

Clarification needed about who encircles who - seeing as how rear fuel convoys catch on fire daily

Painting MiG29s in Ukrainian colors and letting Ukrainian pilots fly them home isn't escalation, it's transfer of Ukrainian jets to Ukrainian airspace. If putin really wants to justify a fight with NATO - he doesn't need any real reason to. Just like he never needed one for every single russian invasion ever. He may just come on TV and say "today NATO bombed Voronezh, now we need to invade Lithuania and kill neonazis in there" - and it will work smoothly.

Not sure what exactly has putin done to build up Russia in the past decades... The vast majority of russians live in poverty, it's just that their GDP numbers are written on the other side of a piece of imported toilet paper that has their "modern" army stats written on it, while they fight in an Afghanistan era helmets. According to russian Vedomosti Russia today sees a shortage of cashier check tape due to sanctions because they import the damn thing. As for the "land bridge" - Putin doesn't give a rat's arse about that one, he wants whole Ukraine, it's ideological to him. Not to mention that having a "land bridge" wouldn't quite work a few months down the line when cops that protect the dwarf will have to wipe their butt using the birch tree bark. As for China - russian banks are now mass moving towards yuan as a primary foreign currency. Not sure that being so dependent on one of the least reliable countries similar to yours will be much of a help.

Question is how crazy is everyone in and around the chain of nuclear command. It's not like he has a big red button connected remotely to every nuke in the country - especially considering extremely dated and rusty russian military communication technology. That order will have to go through a lot of people willing to die in a nuclear fire. In fact Cold War history knows a few of such examples with near launches caused by human error and stopped by cool heads.

@sburke Oh I completely agree. In fact I fully agree that this is our fault due to trying to be "friends" with Russia and feeding the corrupt and, in all honesty, the West owes us nothing since we have no defense agreements of any kind. I'm more upset about the West not realizing that a war with Russia is inevitable and it will be much much worse for everybody if Russia is allowed to go without higher army losses in Ukraine. History shows time and again that when an insane dictator that has fanatical following isn't stopped prematurely - it ends with a huge tragedy. It's not like Russia stops being nuclear when it invades, say, Lithuania in a few years. I mean Putin did say his territorial claims extend to everything that wasn't in NATO pre-1997, e.g. whole USSR and its fake "people's republics" aka "Warsaw Pact".

Because everybody in the West is so afraid of Russia (what if it attacks NATO now in 2022 and not inevitably in 2025 or whenever) they barely agreed to supply us with weapons (exception being UK, that just said screw it and went all in with NLAW and Stingers) - so this saga with planes looks more like "we don't want to upset Russia any more, but want to pretend like we are doing something about mass civilian murder"

Russia is an empire. Like any other empire in history - it consists of dozens of different ethnicities. And to keep that all together and not infighting permanently - an empire has to erase ethnicity's culture, language, identity - naturally nobody would agree to any of that peacefully - so an empire has to genocide its way through all the resistance to forced change until people are turned into a grey mass with no past and no roots. It's been like that since ancient Egypt and Rome and it's no different now. Furthermore an empire has to expand to exist, because empires are extremely conservative and improving living conditions among other things isn't the priority because of that - so stagnation is death of an empire. Proven by the USSR and British Empire in 20th century. With Ukraine, however, it's amplified by the ever falsified russian history, where they want their roots to start in Kyivan Rus and not in Golden Horde, khans of which created Muscovy, because for a supposed empire to have its roots among barbarians is degrading or something. So they just have to have Kyiv or their history makes no sense even to them. This thing with ethnic cleansings here isn't something recent - it's been going on for 300 years. Russia first captured most of Ukrainian territories only in 18th century and since then they did continuous genocides with millions of victims, down to literally forbidding us from speaking our native language - in fact it was forbidden as recently as 1991. Hence why you see putin spewing insanity about "Lenin inventing Ukraine" and other fascist nonsense about "borderlands" (Kyiv being a "borderland" of 'Kyivan' Rus was always funny to us). As for us - seriously we didn't hate russians up until 2014, we would've happily never cared about them at all. I mean I personally wasn't even interested in what's going on in their country and even happily ignored their trashy behavior towards us up until 2014.

Russian missiles didn't stop our MiGs from turning a number of russian pilots into the future sunflowers