Field Oggy

Where I am in the UK I have not heard folk on the street mentioning this, but to be honest I don't tend to hang around listening 😉.
What I have seen is an increase in numbers of blue and yellow flags outside houses.  Of course what happens in one area may not represent wider regions.

Just seen this on another site I follow and just made me smile...
 

Best cartoon of the war so far!

Ah yes that old chestnut which the Americans in particular were, quite rightly, thoroughly bored to death of.  For some reason the British Army decided it was the master of counter-insurgency in the early 2000s because of the master tactic of wearing berets/soft hats in Northern Ireland.  Funny old thing was that in my two tours there (1989-1990 and 1992-1995), every time I left a patrol base I was required to wear a helmet.
There is a lot more to it clearly, the security force footprint in Northern Ireland was massive compared to the deployments in Basra and Helmand.  Off the top of my head there were at least eight regular battalions, about six or seven Ulster Defence Regiment Battalions, and god knows how many RUC of various hues at any one time.  Then of course the opposition was smaller than anything faced in either Basra or Helmand, was less liberally armed and not prone to employing suicide bombers.
Add to that the environment in Northern Ireland was familiar and well-known with handy things like accurate census records, vehicle licensing offices, property/land ownership records, telephone books and no massive linguistic, religious or cultural differences on the scale of those seen in Basra and Helmand.
Then there is the border - while there was certainly quite rightly a lot of sympathy in the Republic of Ireland for the nationalist cause, the Gards (Gardai - RoI Police Force) and Irish Defence Force were helpful in their dealings with us and the Republic of Ireland was a benign neighbour compared to Pakistan or Iran in the Afghan and Basra contexts.  The border was; therefore, relatively secure, particularly when compared to Afghanistan and Iraq.
I remember running pre-deployment training for both theatres and the number of people who looked at me blankly when I talked about 'Charlie 1s' (a form that was filled out by patrols in NI every time a vehicle stop was made with details such as make colour model VRN driver details, location of the stop etc).
Masters of COIN indeed - although coming second in Basra and Helmand was personally disappointing for me, I hope that the particular COIN competence trope has been thoroughly killed off in grown up circles in the British military and that lessons have been learned.

so stealing washing machines is actually a plan to get around sanctions... devious.

I agree w Vanir Ausf B.  One is called panzerfaust.  Other is called Russian tank.  Land is Ukraine.  That's a pretty good similarity for me. 

cleanliness is close to godliness and hopefully a few more of RFA troops are now closer to God.

Bitterly funny.

BINGO!



I didn't see Gerasimov, but could easily be that I just didn't recognise him

Amen.  I have been skipping most of the posts on the last few pages.

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

Or my favourite Soviet war monument from Bulgaria:

I think one of these generals is no longer among the living but it's still funny...😀

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.   
 
 

You see, that's the fundamendal flaw in the whole Russian perception of the world. NATO is not moving to the east, it is invited, sometimes desperately begged to come, cause the alternative is living in ruski mir, which really really sucks, in any imaginable aspect.
Also, nobody is really there to get you. Nobody really cares, all we want is for Russian Empire/ USSR/ Russia to piss off and stop being a problem. 

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.
 

I will start to take you seriousely after you condemn the BS propaganda of your own regime and the fact that they are brutally bringing war and terror over defenceless civilians. But you carefully stay away from that. Again I would like to point out that your personal avatar is showing NKVD thugs, the tool of terror and massacre of Stalin. You're not objective, you're a coyote in sheep clothing.

Yep great point!
Quack Quack Quack...
Watch out for ducks, lots about and I hope justice will catch up with the foul creatures in Ukraine. 

Even if i ignored these accusations of rape, (which I ain't) I think I'm comfortable calling Russian soldiers savages when they go thru town and kill every male below the age 50.
Or bomb a theater full of civilians. Or deport thousands of Ukrainians to Russia without proper ICRC supervision and monitoring. Or any other number of warcrimes being done with evidence piling up.

But, can we can think it?

Gimme a break. May he burn in hell with the rest of them. Any pity was buried alive with those children under the theatre and the ones who terrified and filthy under Azovstal.
**** him. I hope it was agonizing and he was in despair the entire time.

Germany testing their latest foreign aid package. The recipient is kept classified at this stage.
 

Tom Hardy put on a lot of weight for that new Mad Max movie.

Love this humour...
 
 

you guys are making me feel depressed.  Can we get another picture of a tractor hauling a tank?