kraze
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Posts posted by kraze
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2 minutes ago, Butschi said:
There is nothing "fine" about this. Perhaps humanly understandable. And I doubt you would say the same if the situation was exactly the same only that Russians had killed Ukrainian POWs.
Except they do much much worse for no actual reason and without any provocation, save for sadistic pleasure or something. After all they came here to brutally torture and murder all of us.
Also, you know, just a thought - but if those russians didn't come here to kill people in the first place - all of them would've lived. What a wild idea is that?
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If 10 russians come at AFU and one of them attacks - all of them going dead in that very instant is perfectly fine.
It's very easy to question why weren't Ukrainian soldiers taking down one guy and leaving the rest to surrender or doing it in any better way from a perfect safety of calm, warm home thousands of miles away where war is just a show on TV - but in an environment of a maximum stress and a maximum hazard to life where split-second decisions mean life or death, especially when it comes to an enemy as deceitful and barbaric - thinking things through is a non-existent privilege, so all russians should've died on the spot the moment one of them posed any kind of danger. And so they did.
I'd rather have russians bury their dead than us burying our own only because we should've looked good on TV.
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10 hours ago, Beleg85 said:
On the other side, Ukrainian gov. stubborn insistance it was not theirs raise doubts
And that's another thing. Our government plays foreign policy really safe since February but here are they going all out - raising stakes, taking risks that are otherwise avoided - now why would they do it if they knew they would gain nothing from it but trouble if it's just our malfunctioned missile?
Yes it's obvious that Ukraine, we want as much NATO involvement as possible, while NATO wants as little of it as possible - but this wouldn't be the way to play this - it's just going to piss people off if there's nothing to base it on.
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9 hours ago, Beleg85 said:
Very selective reading. I met nobody claiming it was 100% Ukrainian, even now they say investigation is ongoing and that it is just most probable outcome. "Two missile" theory indeed raise concern, but can fail under sructiny: no official with direct knowledge of the events was talking about 2 missiles as far as I know; in fact there was no "official" preliminary version till well after midnight, just rumours like the ones given to beforementioned MP. It seems like they had no idea what fall there for long hours, so news about 2 missiles could be echo chamber and gossips taken from panicked witness or rationalized cause that was pushed upward; in our era it takes literally 20 mins to create massive storm based on rumours only.
If it was indeed Russian missile shot down, everybody around would know about it, as it would probably leave large debris field around the village or crater size of two-story house in case it expolded. All Kalibr-types are large beasts with massive warhead, not something one can easily hide. Place is pretty well photographed now, and the only place of main fallout we know so far seems this hole under tractor, where clearly were remnants of S-300. Meanwhile even windows and roofs of a building 10-20 m apart are intact.
Unless somebody send Men in Black that within 1,5h completelly cleared evidence of impact of other big misile and used neuralyzer on all witness (remember, it's not Russia: witness do not fall from windows nor are bound to remain silent, while in such small community info is close to impossible to hide) I find it hard to believe they would be able to cover it. Plus we know from pictures that regular firefighters, policemen and medics were securing place of the incident from beggining well into the night, not some SpecOps.
On other side, if Russian missile fall/was shot down within Ukraine borders close to PL (perhaps Ukrainian members have some info about it?) it would be entirely possible one AA rocket could go dumb. Would be nothing strange in this in fact.
All of it is very mysterious, but perhaps sometimes cigar is just a cigar. We can be sure more than one book will be written about the incident in the future, though.
This also raised suspicions in Poland, but can be explained on legal basis. Danilov demanded (in quite boorish words, to put mildly, considering the circumstances...) immediate access and right to conduct his own investigation. As I understand it, both states lacks even legal acts for conducting separate independent full investigations on each other territory, as it is literally undermining one's trust into sovereignity (which btw was one of reasons why exhumations of Wolhynia massacres were so difficult to conduct on UA soil for so many years). After several hours somebody in PL (or more likely US) side finally figured out it looks pretty bad to block them given gravity of the crisis, so Ukrainian investigation teams were given access to crash site and status of auxiliary investigation with wide insight into collected evidence. I frankly don't know if they have rights to interrogating witness, as couldn't find any info; they could be theoretically given such right on informal courteus basis,as it sometimes happen in such cases. They spend there at least several hours today.
Whatever outcome is fine as long as it's proven to be true. If it's 100% malfunctioned Ukrainian missile - fine. Nobody will ever complain if it's true.
But if actual downplaying is even remotely possible - it opens a whole can of worms, as russians will realize the envelope has been pushed the other way quite a bit.
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17 hours ago, chris talpas said:
Why the reluctance on Zelensky’s part to admit it was an accident and move on?
No one is blaming Ukraine, but continuing to say it isn’t theirs is doing them no favours.
Because it suddenly went from 2 missiles striking Poland to one and 100% malfunctioned Ukrainian S300 missile before the investigation is even remotely over.
Because there's a huge opposition among certain NATO countries to "escalating", which we can also clearly see in a very neutral verdict by the court in Hague, which doesn't even remotely try to put the blame on Russia, but just 3 guys instead who may or may not have acted all alone using Buk they may or may not have had in their garage. You know, every random russian soldier has one rusting next to the bear cage.
After 8 years.
As opposed to literally everybody saying "ah it was Ukrainian S300" just a few hours after the thing - before investigators even started working.
So the real truth will be at the end of investigation. As much as I don't like Zelenskyy for a HUGE myriad of reasons not seen in his carefully recorded videos - pretty sure he would agree to whatever outcome of the investigation. If there was one missile and it was indeed a malfunctioned Ukrainian one - no problem. There will be a great video apology made, like y'all desire it to be. But if Russia is way more to blame than it already is - then why keep enabling them?
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3 hours ago, Tux said:
c) missile malfunction..?
d) accidental/mistaken launch?
If it was a Russian missile there will be some response. At least enough of one that Russia should be quietly wary of risking it happening again.
russian missiles were mass flying right in that area. An area which has power lines coming from Poland, severing which would be very in line with russian goals. So c and d are doubtful considering other variables.
Now if it was a russian missile there will be no response, just like there's no response for russian terrorist act in UK that resulted in deaths of two British citizens or killing 300 people in MH17 or shooting down Kaczynskyi's plane. Anything short of russian invasion will be downplayed for the sake of avoiding bigger war and that's exactly what happened today.
I mean russians have been doing things that couldn't be written off as accidents should the victim decided not to do it, all 3 examples above were very deliberate and a lot worse than what happened yesterday.
Nord stream attack wasn't accidental either.
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There are only two ways a SAM missile would ever go towards Poland:
a) it was launched there deliberately in an "artillery mode"
b) it was chasing a target going towards Poland
It can't be an 'a' for a ton of obvious reasons, so only 'b' is reasonable.
But even if it was a russian missile alone - it's also reasonable that NATO will want to downplay the issue and kind of shift the blame without actually shifting the blame because the only other option is war with Russia and a lot more dead Polish citizens.
Realpolitik sucks and as I said there will be no response even if it's 100% of russian doing.
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11 minutes ago, Vet 0369 said:
OK, let's put this in prespective. Putin WANTS NATO to respond. He lacks even passive support of the majority of Russian Federation populations, BUT, historically, any attack or threat to the "Rodina" causes ALL the populations to rise to the defense of the "Mother Russia!" Perhaps that's exactly what he wants. Then, he'll be able to say that Russia (and by extension he) were beaten by the evil west NATO, and not the subhuman inferior Ukraines.
Seriously who cares what putin or russians think?
Russia is already going through the total mobilization, they already throwing cannon fodder in droves to die at the frontlines, 700 a day.
What will russians do? Die 1000 a day? Oh no.
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4 minutes ago, Beleg85 said:
Nobody gives a damn what propagandists say other than for joke. Officially they are not involved.
And that's a huge mistake. They are an official position of Kremlin, every single word they say goes through a dozen of filters personally selected by putin.
Goebbels was even more official than the moustached guy himself after all
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9 minutes ago, Beleg85 said:
I would wait for official info, we really know almost zero now. There a huge difference between Russian missile went astray, Ukrainian AA chaisng him or deliberatelly targeting NATO border. If Putin indeed escalated today deliberatelly (small chance, but possible regarding other events) it will not be left just like that. It would be sign of weakness from NATO, and we can't afford that.
Russians already basically admitted it was deliberate via their propagandists, saying it was revenge for NATO helping Ukraine strike Belgorod
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2 minutes ago, Letter from Prague said:
Exactly.
My biggest concern is that this will clearly show the world that act of war murdering NATO citizens will go unpunished because NATO is always unwilling to act. Even more clearly than MH17 and poisoning people and sabotage of Nordstream and power cables and ammunition depots and so on. And when Russia does attack Europe again in ten years, they will know, and there will be no NATO.
I think that was the whole purpose of the attack on Poland. Poland is known to be the most "antirussian" NATO country and will cry for blood. But NATO will back down and it should create first cracks in the alliance. And that's why russians escalate like this.
After all Simonyan herself basically said this is revenge for Belgorod being hit with the help of western arms - they came out guilty as charged.
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There will be no article 5.
There will be no western tanks or ATACMS.
It will be "deeply concerning" and will be highly downplayed.
Behind the curtain we will get some more weapons but nothing "escalating".
Would like to be wrong, but it's been almost 9 years of this.
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54 minutes ago, Yet said:
Given that orcs have tusks it doesnt seem all too far fetched.
Now now, teef are a valuable commodity here. And da bigga da boy - da more teef he 'as.
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https://s1.webmshare.com/WqwX1.webm
This deserves a 2022 remake.
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3 hours ago, TheVulture said:
The Russian Orthodox church turned into a fanatical apocalyptic death cult so gradually that we never noticed it happening...
It was always like that since its inception in 1943. Stalin ordered the creation of it to help brainwash soldiers into dying with little remorse and so it began. It was always (and to this day) ran by the highest ranking KGB officers, so all sermons were properly crafted by the agency and so it never put any value into human life with maximum militarism and dehumanization of both the enemy and the listener in its "religious" texts.
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3 hours ago, Beleg85 said:
Just a snippet of old Dougie fantasizing about killing a king that stopped making rain flowing and cows giving milk...
"we give the ruler absolute fulness of power"
I mean he is not wrong and says what an average russian thinks and what's important to understand - dictatorships are in fact much more 'democratic' than democracies, because they absolutely have to answer to demands of all (or at least absolute majority) people, whereas democracies would never have a ruler that represents 80-90% of people. Hardly even a half much of the time.
And what this also means is that an average russian (as also evidenced by their cries full of pain elsewhere and anywhere) becomes disappointed with the ruler because he doesn't seem to follow people's wishes. And in a dictatorship-based state only rulers with 80-90% support can ever stay alive.
"
"Surrendered at Kherson, gonna surrender at Moscow"
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5 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:
Debaltseve
Just to put some things into perspective about how our army still was at the time of Debaltseve
One of my friends was serving in the battalion of Kulchytsky at the time. Because it was the first 'new' battalion of the army that came to be and started enlisting as early as March of 2014 - it was also the longest target for all the volunteer help, so guys had the best personal equipment among whole AFU in 2015: american uniforms and boots, consumer grade IR vision, hunting aiming sights, piccatini rails for AKs etc - basically anything a civilian could legally buy here. You can tell they looked impressive compared to most of the army wearing Dubok and old AKs.
So during the battle of Debaltseve in the middle of the night they were called to the local HQ on short notice - turns out a superimportant general had a secret visit to share the battle plan that will be put into action immediately. So that general and whatever supporting officers were showing everybody present the map and talking about how different types of forces will do A, B and C depending on the role. And the most important and toughest task was to be performed by specops that included high risk behind the lines sabotage. Because it's so important - everybody is ordered to leave but Kulchytsky's guys, so the general absolutely seriously explains their "specops" orders to them then says "godspeed" and leaves.Apparently he was told they had specops guys in the area by a whatever guy in the chain of command that had to organize the presence of said specops but because actual 'specops' were in short numbers to put it very lightly - he simply pointed at the best equipped guys they had that did look like specops. Kulchytsky's were yesterday's civilians with 8 months of combat experience gained with little to no prior training in the very best case.
Of course he was laughing while telling that story after the fact, but obviously you can tell at the time anything in AFU was held together nigh literally by the yellow duct tape and it was quite grim.
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52 minutes ago, Haiduk said:
As for me this is inccorrect to explain success of Russians only with UKR "crappy equipment" and say "UKR didn't have army" like this already say followerts of Poroshenko, defendding Minsk agreements. I'm sorry, we raised 350 000 of personnel. And our "scrappy equipment" was not much worse then that one, with which we broke Russians in Phase I in 2022. Javs, NLAWS, drones it's all good, but 24th FEB we have met with the same T-64BV and BMP - and most of theese BMP already was older BMP-1, not BMP-2 like in 2014. The same Soviet artillery engeged the enemy.
If Russian modernized army mod.2022 turned out so "sucked", imagine what it was in REAL in 2014! All Russian and separs sucesses were caused not only traitors and corrupted leadership and military planning mistakes. First of all they were caused by the abscense of political will of Poroshenko to resist by military way. Poroshenko was like Denetor, who looked in Palantir, seen the "power of Mordor" and lost will to fight. Each time he was appealing to West "to influence on Russia", and repaeating "did you see Russian military budget? We can't fight with Russia".
If Minsk-1 can be considered as needed respite (but anyway, this was political success of Russia - they hadn't a goal to conquere Ukraine - only to force our politics to stay in Russian orbit), that Minsk-2 turned out political disaster, which didn't match to result of Debaltsevo battle. UKR group of troops (even not all army, but about 6000 men!), avoided encirclement, but Poroshenko agreed the document, which really was similar to political capitulation, because the document clearly provided a formula "first - local elections, then - withdrawal the troops" and a result of Minsk-2 acomplishing should be establishing of "special status oblasts", with own force structures, own cultural and economy policy, own right of direct relations with Russia and veto on any pro-Western steps of Ukraine - all this with fixing in Constitutin. Ukriane power over thees territories in result would be remained like nominal. And Poroshenko like and Putin, Merkel and Olland signed Declaration in support of Minsk-2. So, he agreed on this BS and set huge mine under Ukriane, giving to Russia formal lever of political pressure.
Except nope. In 2014 we didn't have an army. After russians went in with full ground force they all but eliminated what remained of it, at a price - and same remnants of our forces had to drive all across the frontline and shoot here and there forcing russians to believe there are much more army left than there really was. If they kept pushing - they would've occupied a lot more territories, but they themselves were uncertain. And Minsk-1 won us some time. Of course russians quickly realized that they were fooled and so they renewed the offensive while we still didn't have an army and so Minsk-2 had to be signed to buy some more time, while also being worded in such way that Ukraine would've never did anything to follow it, starting with the very first paragraph that required hostilities to stop at XX:XX on XX/XX/XX. Since russians didn't stop - Minsk-2 was null and void and they got sanctions.
Heck pretending like Minsk-2 didn't buy us an army is hypocritical because up to 2016 I had to buy secondhand uniforms and SOCKS for my friends in the army - because army reform was only in its infancy and volunteer battalions got to be fully integrated only by late 2015. BMP1s? Pffft. Soldiers had to solder metal plates on common civilian trucks to have some kind of an APC because 80% of our APC fleet was in absolute disrepair and parts had to be smuggled in through contrabandists. The law that allowed worse parts of our society to drive "polish" and "lithuanian" cars for a while got voted to allow EU ambulances to be brought in avoiding customs - because AFU had no medical vehicles apart from old soviet trash known as "tabletka".
There were no drones, no Kropyva, nothing. Heck Aerorozvidka was a paramilitary unit started by my, sadly deceased, friend, who wasn't even in military, just a businessman, and the unit wasn't even accepted by the General Stuff until 2017 as part of the army. Old, zero-combat-experience soviet generals couldn't understand what the hell is a drone and there were no battle generals to replace them with (and 8 years later there were)
Now, 8 years of army reforms and modernization later after Minsk-2, of course it's easy to dump garbage on it and play revisionists - but the situation in 2015 was extremely dire and it was the best outcome Ukraine could've ever had. It bought us time. You could've had any Bandera, Sagaydachny and Petlura running the country and it wouldn't have changed a thing - political will or not.
And thanks to the time bought everyone on this forum can be like "Ukrainian ISR is wow, Hrim2 is wow, Neptune is wow, NCOs are wow".
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36 minutes ago, FancyCat said:
Maybe Russians are trying their version of Severodonetsk, if you recall, Russia attempted a push into the city head on and got bloodied for it.
End of the day, letting Russia leave Kherson quietly is the best thing, no Mariupol, no turning another one of Ukraine's cities into rubble.
Destroy the equipment. The men are useful to kill or maim but forcing them to fight in urban defense is not great vs retreating.
Ugh - they will turn it into rubble should it slip out of their hands either way. They will be blasting it from the left bank with arty and planes until they level it, have no doubts about it. They did it to Mariupol because it was a symbol of their loss in 2014/2015 - Kherson will be a symbol of their loss in 2022 and they won't have it. That city isn't going to be left intact, no matter how it goes.
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12 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:
Propaganda value of destroying a VDV or Marine unit in place would be bad news domestically. Leaving a couple thousand mobiks alone isn't a good idea as they will surrender quickly and give Ukraine an even bigger propaganda victory.
The bigger problem for Russia now is it said its withdrawing. Imagine the propaganda problems Russia will have if it loses several thousand soldiers while "withdrawing". Not good at all.
So yes. I think they will withdraw even though they haven't done so already.
russians don't care about casualties, especially domestically, after all they already lose 700-800 men daily dead by throwing mobiks into the meatgrinder, hoping to solve it by making AFU run out of bullets or something.
them losing 1000 men in a day has zero effect on a desire to occupy Ukraine. But losing Kherson is a huge disaster because it's the only "achievement" they had during this whole year.
And it's why I don't believe they will just suddenly change their tactics to something completely different (and sane, because every other day they've been completely insane) and very not 'russian-like'. But what is 'russian-like' is lying.
What is more likely is them hoping AFU will just rush into a well prepared city via a certain salient and that's where the "trap" should close.
E.g. I would never believe what russians say until they DO it.
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"Actions speak louder than words. Ukraine sees no indication of Russia withdrawing from Kherson without a fight. A large ru-grouping is still inside the city, additional reserves are being pulled into the region. Ukraine liberates territories relying on reconnaissance data, not on staged television announcements."
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44 minutes ago, Harmon Rabb said:
AN-225: Plans to rebuild world's largest plane confirmed
Some more good news. As a fan of aviation the destruction of the Mriya saddened me very much.
I hope to see this plane rebuilt and flying around the world again.
It's a monumental waste of money that we can't and should not afford. Wasting half a billion dollars on a plane that was never profitable and would fly twice a year is even ethically wrong at this point. Especially since we are donating to buy winter uniforms for our soldiers and many of them aren't getting paid for 3 months because MoD is heavily under budget.
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50 minutes ago, Pete Wenman said:
Big if true !
russians die in hundreds daily for bits of ground, they are ready to keep dying for nothing as long as it serves the "greater purpose" - but losing what they stole is never it. I would hardly believe it's not some kind of trap for which they've been preparing for months. Hope our MoD knows better.
How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?
in Combat Mission Black Sea
Posted
Because some people keep desperately looking for that magical equality sign that should make this war of genocide less black and white, just like those are shown in modern Hollywood.