antaress73

Who's upset ? I'm not upset It was very civilized ( I always try to remain civilized) compared to what you can read elsewhere on the internet

we agree to disagree and you are right, this is tiresome. I prefer to talk about the game too. We do agree that the oligarchs are bad for Russia and bad for Ukraine.

Banks are banks.. May i suggest reading the foreclosure affair in the US in 2008 ? They should check them out more because if banks are left to their own devices... Anyway , crimeans probably prefer this to donbass , where they live in caves under bombardment from Kiev forces. You expected Russia to swallow the loss of their Sevastopol base without reacting ? The new Ukrainian government was probably going to denounce the treaty leasing the base to Russia. The US would have done the same thing. I dont pick sides here. I'm looking at the situation coldly. Putin was a product of the nineties. Pretending that he approved of it because he was part of it like everybody else in Russia is disingenous at best. How do you suggest he coyuld have handled the situation ? He did seize the sectors that were strategic but he was walking a fine line between staying alive to complete the process and a car bomb on a gray morning. His rule is far from absolute. The reasons he didnt go all in in the Donbass is because there were people under him that didnt want that and actually made a difference in preventing an intervention in Donbass. Remember that russian parliament resolution giving him the authority to use military force in Eastern Ukraine ? He looked like a fool when they started bombing and attacking the separatists and he didnt do it (at least not overtly). That whole policy of acting covertly was a compromise between him (and other nationalists) and the oligarchs that were taken by surprise in Crimea and didnt want to lose even more of their personal wealth in another round of more severe sanctions. Didnt work out for them anyway. Coldly speaking, he should have intervened right there. Shock the world. Now he's giving his enemies ammo by dragging things out. Most Russians are really convinced that the people in the Donbass were going to be ethnically cleansed by the government in Kiev which does include many shadowy and very unsavory characters. I dont say they are right but right now people are living in caves and Ukraine probably lost for good the territories that they dont control because of the way they handled it. Giving them a lot of autonomy would probably have killed the project of separating outright and made Russia really look bad if they intervened anyway. They wanted to act like thugs so now they must deal with the loss of most of their industrial base. If you bomb people instead of talking to them in the end you are going to lose the little sympathy you had. It's a mess.

Putin inherited the kleptocracy from yelstin's years and always had to navigate a thin line between them and thé needs of the people. To run Russia you need to be a bastard. As for prosperity, the russians are much better off now than before. I visited russia 2 years ago and I was pretty shocked at how better things were. Anyway, I dont believe russians are real westerners in the philosophical sense of the word. I wont go into detail but you cant expect things to ever be like on western Europe.

Sorry, dan/Californiawho posted an article written by an Economist

you trust economists ? I trust astrologers better than economists

Putin didnt get rid of the incompetent oligarchs soon enough. Russia is in a much better position right now than before but his refusal to understand that the West doesnt care about an independent minded Russia and his insistence in integrating Russia to the west while at the same time trying to navigate an independent foreign policy was naive at best. THe west has always considered Russia an adversary and wanted it as a 'gas station' and nothing else. He made Russia vulnerable to pressure by trying to integrate it too much with the west instead of crushing the oligarchs and replacing them with REAL entrepreneurs able to develop their businesses and diversify trade with other non-western nations. Now that the gloves are off and illusions shattered, he's trying to do it but maybe its too late. Btw, our supply lines in Afghanistan have been and are still passing through Russia. Putin is really an ******* isn't he ?

The rest of the world would back the west. Russia would be facing the rest of the world alone. like the Iraq invasion and occupation ? iraqis will welcome us with flowers and milk and honey. It will cost no more than 60 billions. We will rebuild the country and it will become a beacon of democracy in the middle east As for air power destroying the russian army in Ukraine.... there are LOT's of ways to mitigate western air power when you have a strategic capability to do so. Hitting airbases with ground to ground missiles which are way more accurate than SCUDS, special force raids at the beginning for closer airbases, cruise missiles air raids etc.. Even tacticals nukes if necessary. The Russian doctrine calls for nuclear weapons at the onset of ANY conflict with a serious and dangerous adversary. Also, you severely underestimate the capabilities the anti-air weaponry the Russians have. It would have an attrition and effectiveness limiting effect not before seen. We have only faced crappy air defenses so far. In the 1999 war in yugoslavia, which I admit is long ago, Serbs with an air defense system from the sixties and seventies forced us to fly too high to effectively hit their army in Kosovo. We switched to strategic targets in Serbia proper to force them to withdraw. No such luck with Russia. We would also hit dummies half the time and lose aircrafts in doing so. We dont even know their exact capabilities in ECM and EMP weaponry. We could have some nasty surprises. BTW, NATO almost ran out of ammo (precision guided) in Libya (think about it): http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/04/sunday-review/what-libyas-lessons-mean-for-nato.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 Russia would also not invade the parts of Ukraine that are hostile to them. Not necessary nor desirable and politically stupid. They would expand Novorussia to the areas dominated by ethnic russians that's all. No trouble with insurgency either. THe Ukrainian army is not as bad as at the beginning. But there is a reason why Novorussia or the DOnbass, (call it whatever you want) is not being ethnically cleansed right now and back under control by Kiev. And no, it's not because they are holding back. Putin only have to wait for the winter to have its effect on Ukraine. It will become a hellhole soon enough unfortunately. We havent bailed them out yet and we wont bail them out either. The west has its own economic problems to deal with. Now that the initial strategy of denying Sevastopol to the russians has failed, all the US wants is to create a permanent problem for Russia to deal with on its borders so Russia doesnt meddle in the West's business elsewhere in the world.They dont give a damn about ethnic Ukrainians or the Ukrainian state. Americans are nice people. You guys are nice people. But your government isnt. That's not an attack on you. Governments are governments. Including the Russian one.

China will not attack Siberia unless they want to reduce their population by 1 billion and be back to the stone age.

about food shortages in Russia... that.s what I found: Business Insider october 3, 2014 Those sanctions have barred various food imports from the West. Predictably, this has led to shortages of certain types of food: brie and parmesan being two, according to USA Today. Prices of some staples have risen 36%. It is not the case that Russia is facing the kind of food shortages it saw in the Soviet era — with breadlines — or in the 1990s, after it defaulted on its national debt. But it is the case that certain Western food products are becoming unavailable and domestic products are rising in price. Oh my god ! we are going to die ! no more Brie and smelly parmesan ! Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/russian-inflation-hits-8-and-there-are-food-shortages-2014-10#ixzz3JeOKq919

also, a lot of westerners would not agree to die for Ukraine and risk an all-out nuclear war. Poland has called up reserves and I can say that Polish men in the UK were very mad at seeing their lives being disrupted. I know a lot of military people that find this insane and if forced, would actively oppose such a conflict. You could create lines of facture that could precipitate unforeseen events in the West. It's way more complicated and dangerous. We are not as strong as we think we are. Europeans would not go for a war in Ukraine except for the Eastern part like Poland. Even then, faced with the consequences, the ordinary people would back off. It would be different if Russia invaded a NATO country (which they won't even if they could) but not for Ukraine. But we do need a scenario in which we have to make the two sides fight so we can have a game !

I did not say Russia would prevail. Western forces are spread thin also. RUssia can mobilize a lot of people in a short period of time and equip them with the many thousands of pieces of equipment in storage (just like the Ukrainians did btw). EVen second rate but numerous forces would force unnaceptable casualties and attrition on advancing NATO forces. We would have to call up reserves with second rate equipment too (is there as many in storage ? ). Also Russia is BIG. But that's all irrelevant. Facing defeat, they would use the nuclear option and bring everyone down with them. I dont want to bet civilization on the fact that they won't.

ouahahha I was talking about losing electricity I remember receiving packages from Burlington Vermont back in the old days, waiting for the latest Combat Mission in the mail LOL It would be the end of Russia as a regional power but also the west. Anyway, the temptation to use nukes would be too strong and we would all end up very sorry. As for the SLBMs, the Bulava had problems at the beginning but it is now working and is combat deployed. We are not in the old Soviet days also, Russia imports way more than potatoes and black bread from China and other non-western aligned countries now that the europeans have been cut off. They simply replaced them and there has been no shortages in Russia. They have a free press you know ? they call it the "5th column"

Don't fool yourself guys, a conventional war against Russia near its borders would be a carnage of american and western forces not seen since Korea or WOrld war II and would be shocking. Not to mention strategic escalation even with conventional weapons. A strike on electric installations using cruise missiles in Canada, Europe and the US would bring the war home and would prevent anyone from watching the war on TV with a bowl of popcorn Battlefront is headquartered in Burlington, Vermont. A Russian hit on the Baie James Dams in Québec would affect you. The cost would be simply too great. Not to mention the risk of nuclear escalation if one side starts losing badly. Victory would be phyrric at best.

war is a mess Anyway, 30 000 russians fighting in Ukraine using second rate equipement (they left the good stuff behind), without air or modern artillery support (I guess they dont use precision munitions to maintain plausible deniability) , without preparatory softing up of the enemy using Iskander missiles (nasty, precise and in their submunition variant, grid clearing), helicopter, air assests or the electronic fog to disrupt weapons and radio communication and coordination and suffering 300-400 dead and actually succeeding in their mission to save the breakaway republics is not what I would call a bad performance. Total overt no holds barred engagement of the Russian amred forces would have been nasty to the Ukrainians and losses would have been reduced to 50-100 dead which is about the same we suffered in operation Iraqi freedom on a less difficult terrain and against a less competent enemy.

id like to know your sources for all these tactical successes and major failures that the russians have gone through in Ukraine. I didnt see much credible info in the open source section of the internet. Unless you are using classified info leaked by some military professionnal gamers.

Ukraine has a massively corrupt military.. much like the russians from 10-15 years ago... non-maintenance, lack of spare parts (now), lack of technical training all will play a part in making those missile launchers not working. They are old too.. they date back to the end of the soviet union. Russian ones have been updated many times since.

same as CMSF

that's understandable... I cut corners too when I write on a phone

punctuation is more of a problem with his sentence BTW

maybe english is not his first langage... give the guy a break

I played myth of invicibility as the germans and as far as I can tell.. the improved vehicule external damage change made an impact as THREE heavy tanks were mission kills because either the gun or the weapon controls were destroyed by non - catastrophic spalling hits or weapon mounts partial penetrations. Which rarely happened before with a single hit. The improved long range optics on the jagdpanzer IV also were a factor as I destroyed 16 tanks with the four of them.

in CM x1 there was the shoot and scoot order

exoskeletons ?!!??

russians have Ratnik equipment ?