Maquisard manqué

Don’t want to give the teacher an apple but well said Steve. And it’s not to detract from the evils that Russia is doing in/to Ukraine. 

Although I think the terms 'left' vs 'right' are inadequate and lead to narrowmindedness, this description is far from accurate or complete.
Anarchists are generally considered / see themselves as extreme left while those that want state enforced rules  for discrimination and oppression of specific groups of people (fascists) are generally seen as extreme right.
FYI large parts of Western Europe have been or are successful social-democracies for a long time. 
To not go off topic too much conceptually left is more about social equality while the right is more about each men for himself. But then there are many more perspectives. Generally the 'extreme' variants of either spectrum are considered to be conceptually similar if implemented in practice by a state. It always leads to autocracy / dictatorship.

Anyway to describe right as freedom and left as control is far to simple besides plain wrong.
 

Don’t want to give the teacher an apple but well said Steve. And it’s not to detract from the evils that Russia is doing in/to Ukraine. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocaust_trivialization

If the Germans had won, not a single ukranian would exist today. Most of the people in this thread would not exist. The nazis had an extermination plan for practically everybody.

Don't let the American police see that, or they'll order rocket launchers for routine traffic controls.

It is the Jomini of the West profile on twitter :
https://twitter.com/jominiw
Personally, I use "nitter" instead of "twitter", which makes it possible not to need an account, as a forum member previously suggested (thanks to him)
https://nitter.net/JominiW

we actually have had Russians here speaking up.  Doing joint events against the war with local Ukrainian student and community groups.

Yes. Bolstered by immigration. 

Every time I think I am getting a bit hardened to the reality of how brutal this war is I see something else that just leaves me gaping.
 

A few things I noticed. Her opinion seems to be that the levels in the Red Forest could not lead to acute radiations sickness. Interesting. I have to do about 3 sets of conversions from that map to come up with something I can use for dose. I'll see if I can do that (that's just external dose from contamination, not internal, which is a real wild card - how much dust inhaled/swallowed). 
Another thing is her comment about the worst case at Zaporizhzhya being a nuclear explosion. No, absolutely not. That plant is similar in design to western PWRs and it CANNOT under any circumstances ever, explode in a nuclear explosion, nor can any other reactor plant anywhere in the world. It's physically impossible. Even Chernobyl, with its bizarre and unsafe design, was a violent steam expansion followed almost simultaneously by a massive hydrogen detonation. It was a huge explosion that spewed fission products all over Europe but was not a nuclear explosion. The firefight there was concentrated around office buildings. The containment structures are extremely robust, designed to shrug off the impact of a jet airliner crashing on them. Note that Fukushima's containments were of a MUCH older design, and the spent fuel was stored outside the containment - still in a closed building but not the robust reactor containment. The Zaporizhzhya plant and other Ukranian plants are a much more recent design
Comments about worst case at Chernobyl sound reasonable, with the exception that the IAEA said that even without power, the spent fuel is safe being cooled by natural circulation. The major worry would be dust and particles carried aloft by conventional explosives as part of a battle, and while that's not good, the scale of that would be pretty minor compared to the original Chernobyl accident.
As for the research reactor, I don't know much about the design but I read that it's a subcritical assembly. So my guess is fuel rods made of low enriched uranium, that require a neutron source to operate it in order to made scientific/physics research data readings. We had one like this in college. It was in the basement of our academic building, with classrooms on the same floor, no shielding. You can hold the fuel rods in your hands safely. A direct hit on it would scatter pieces of those around possibly. Little danger from those - it would be hard to turn them to dust. There are most likely many other small sources used for experiments and calibrating instrumentation. These tend to be encapsulated in resin or plastic. In explosions, they could surely be scattered around, but we're not talking about a huge number or amount - discrete pieces. Caveat here - I don't know much about the actual facility but what I've read sounds very similar to if they blew up our department building at college.
Since the Russians have left Chernobyl and no more shooting is happening at Zaporizhzhya I think the worst fears are past. Seems that everyone has taken a step back and realized that the reactor plants should be left alone. I know that the IAEA has been doing a lot of diplomacy to encourage this attitude, so hopefully things will be more sane. Surprise this article dated today didn't mention any of the withdrawal, rotation of personnel, etc.
Hope that helps.

Dave

'Necrophilic Western consciousness'.  Really?

It was easy. And cheap.
But it was also politics that was in itself rational and reasonable at each step. In Germany, we had quite a few discussions about increasing the amount of LNG vs. Russian natural gas.
It was never really a viable option, and that goes through most of the political spectrum here. LNG was seen as a more expensive, envirenmentally problematic (because of fracking) and even politically undesirable option (especially during the Trump presidency).
So we stayed with the Russian gas because it always worked out fine until it didn't. 

Yup, and the Russian Army culture where sergeants are selected (as in nearly all non-Western armies btw) for their ability to bully the ranks and act as toadies/bagmen for the officer capos.
The Phd tweetstorm Steve posted a few above seems to nail it.
When you have both an unrestricted mandate and obligation to obey orders without question, BUT you are also treated like the scum of the earth day to day by everyone above and around you, it leads directly to what we're seeing here.
No warmed over Austro-Hungarian phrenology spittle about Mongoloid forest primitives is required.
There are no evil races, only evil cultures. Or more accurately, cultures broken either by privation or to serve the designs of evil men. (Or the pure convenience of careless or self-deluded ones, which amounts to much the same thing).

Well Clausewitz kinda left these parts out.  War is personal and worse it strips off all the veneer of civilization pretty quickly.  Military discipline is not just about keeping people from running away, it is just as much about ensuring they can still see which way is up. 

Why did they do it?  Because they can.  And in the end we are all scared monkeys that are equal parts kind as we are cruel.  You de-humanize your adversary hard enough and it is a slippery slope right to this sort of stuff.

Kind of puts the knee-capping incident into a different perspective.
This was almost inevitable sad to say.  A lot of this has the whole “civilian reprisals” feel to it.  However I would not rule out some old fashion “ethnic cleansing”.  Not much to add on a military assessment as this sort of thing is a blight on the profession.  I would only add that this either demonstrates an extreme loss of control, or Russian high command has gone to a pretty dark, and stupid place.  Stuff like this results in assassinations and reprisal attacks for a century.  Further any hope of normalization with the west has left the building as any easing of sanctions will now be tied to warcrime investigation and prosecution.
This sort of thing also plays into any anti-war support in Russia itself as these tales of atrocities come home.  
This right here is why war is best left to gaming.

Ahh I see. As in Leo Tolstois world classic "Special Operation and Peace" which he published 1863.

This comment...

This is what the PC and Woke Brigade of the West cannot grasp about Russia

...has absolutely nothing to do with Ukrainians being angry about Russian war crimes!

I KNOW exactly what it represents, and it has no place in this thread and that's why I'm calling it for what it is.

That's whether you, or anyone else likes it or not... it is trolling! 

Now I joined this thread after the first week of the war to read others views about the conflict, not to read about this sort of nonsense. Quite frankly, there's nothing that I am going to learn from this sort of socio-political diatribe, but there is a lot that I can learn about the military conflict. But these particular comments have no place here and are irrelevant to the topic. 

Seeing what you’re seeing it’s understandable you’d question the basic humanity of the perpetrators. Every rational observer does but for you it’s even more. I get that.
I’ve also given thought to the comments here to let it go given what you’re country is going through. I disagree. What’s the point of claiming democratic values of respect for humanity and the rule of law if you don’t try to respect them?
But frankly, I’m pretty sceptical about the merit of denying the basic humanity of people. If you don’t do that, it’s got to be pretty hard to get a democracy to work as anything other than a tyrannical majority.
Zelensky is popular because he keeps aloof of Putins’ quagmire of racist crap and promises the rule of law. I’d encourage you to heed his example. It’ll go further with the democratic centre of the EU and US. 
You’re wrong about denazification. People don’t want to know things that are hard to accept. Thats whole “big lie” thing. Ask a German, but the majority of Germans in ww2 ignored or allowed things to happen because the price to them personally was too high to question it. Denazification was about showing to ordinary Germans what was done in their name. Showing them the basic humanity of their victims.
I’m now done.

Tiresome and boring! Stop trolling!

Fair enough. That’s certainly what’s weird about this social media war stream.
But tell me, when the dust settles, is the racism either way going to be right or ok?
No.
So why is it ok now?

Seeing what you’re seeing it’s understandable you’d question the basic humanity of the perpetrators. Every rational observer does but for you it’s even more. I get that.
I’ve also given thought to the comments here to let it go given what you’re country is going through. I disagree. What’s the point of claiming democratic values of respect for humanity and the rule of law if you don’t try to respect them?
But frankly, I’m pretty sceptical about the merit of denying the basic humanity of people. If you don’t do that, it’s got to be pretty hard to get a democracy to work as anything other than a tyrannical majority.
Zelensky is popular because he keeps aloof of Putins’ quagmire of racist crap and promises the rule of law. I’d encourage you to heed his example. It’ll go further with the democratic centre of the EU and US. 
You’re wrong about denazification. People don’t want to know things that are hard to accept. Thats whole “big lie” thing. Ask a German, but the majority of Germans in ww2 ignored or allowed things to happen because the price to them personally was too high to question it. Denazification was about showing to ordinary Germans what was done in their name. Showing them the basic humanity of their victims.
I’m now done.

This is certainly true! Johnson's Govt is desperate to demonstrate that the UK is leading in Europe.

Brexit has been a disaster, exposing many short-comings of British policy introduced on the back of the change, although this hasn't been fully recognised by the electorate YET.... so the Govt is trying to head off the fallout now with any contingency measures it can employ to prevent the inevitable landslide in public opinion.

Very specifically, a strong criticism of Brexit, as pointed out by the remain camp during the campaign was the likely diminished influence of the UK at the European table. The current crisis has obviously threatened to expose this vulnerability. This explains the UK Govt's approach to the crisis, as it attempts to cover up this prevalent weakness in UK diplomatic power. It's a form of over compensation intended for domestic consumption. With that, and other issues that are currently plague the UK Prime Minister, he needs consistently good newspaper headlines.   

Actually, I think it is dumb for the British government / government actors (or any other donating nation) to be claiming credit for “their” weapons in individual incidents.  This lets Russia refocus from “we’re fighting Ukrainians” to “we’re fighting NATO,” which is a narrative they sorely need domestically.  STFU about what you are giving Ukraine, when you are giving it, and when and where it is being used.  Response should just be “the Ukrainians are effectively using all their tools at their disposal to defend their nation” and nothing else.  Britain, in particular, perhaps reflecting the narcissistic personality of their PM, seems to have decided this is some sort of international competition that they (or rather Johnson) needs to win.

The problem in the Russian army as noted isn't that there are a few examples, but rather it is systemic.  It's like the medieval raids of the English into France during the 100 years war or viking raids in terms of the looting etc.  It is a reflection of an army with utterly no discipline.  No wonder they fight like.. excrement.  They aren't soldiers.  They are thugs in uniforms.
Adam Kinzinger Shares Video of Russian Soldiers Allegedly Mailing Loot Home (msn.com)