Butschi

Sorry but why do the Russian speaking members of this forum have to be held up to a higher standard than anyone else? They are not obliged to provide anything, although I am very grateful they do. 
Can we just keep it civil please? Disagreement is ok, and being disrespectful to people who you disagree with is not a good way of encouraging a free conversation. 
Edit: just to be clear this is not aimed at only you, it's just I don't want this thread turning into a self-reinforcing echo chamber and I want to hear the "russian" narrative as long as it is expressed respectfully 

Grigb, if I am correct, you have provided some interesting translations, for which I thank you.
Your points against @Slaughterhouse-Five :
The first I think is a misunderstanding of what he wrote - he said there is no such thing as RU nationalists, only RU imperialists.
The second was apparently entirely a quote from a RU forum of some kind.
The third is ascribing intent without evidence.
 
The purpose of any real RU propaganda would be to create division, in fact to denegrate the idea of truth itself.  It would be instructive to know if someone was a propagandist of course, but this is not something that will be obvious, and making accusations of this sort with no evidence only serves it's purpose.  I believe in fact I was suspected of the same simply because I have a 'Russian' quote as my signature.
In the end, the origin of any specific idea does not matter - they should be critiqued on their own merit.  Of course the technique of the 'firehose' of random stories with truth mixed in is also a propaganda strategy, and things that are true can be grouped together to serve a narrative if received uncritically, but the solution is in the way you assimilate, critique and sort through it, how you choose and create sources etc.
This is why I find the idea of 'useful idiots' etc. damaging if carried too far.

I don't think it is exactly the same angle... may be wrong though... If, for instance, the images are taken from a video and the rotor frequency happens to be the same as or close to the fps of the video (or a multiple or something) that could happen.

I don't think it is exactly the same angle... may be wrong though... If, for instance, the images are taken from a video and the rotor frequency happens to be the same as or close to the fps of the video (or a multiple or something) that could happen.

I don't think it is exactly the same angle... may be wrong though... If, for instance, the images are taken from a video and the rotor frequency happens to be the same as or close to the fps of the video (or a multiple or something) that could happen.

I don't think it is exactly the same angle... may be wrong though... If, for instance, the images are taken from a video and the rotor frequency happens to be the same as or close to the fps of the video (or a multiple or something) that could happen.

I see how my post can be interpreted in that way... I modified my post a bit because it didn't nake much sense. Proof reading helps... My intention was not to discredit Kraze or making up some strawman argument. I was referring to some of Kraze's previous posts. If you look through them, you will find that he more or less literally said that Russians in general have some those negative traits. That is something I find extremely irritating and not very helpful for the discussion. Which is a pitty because of Kraze's otherwise valuable insights.

Since we are almost 1000 pages in, I was wondering if a few guys could post some links to previous posts in this thread that are:
The most important/informative The most predictive of what would or did happen Those of strategic importance  I ask because some folks have recently joined us here and may need to do some catching up. 1000 pages is A LOT of catching up to do. Please upvote if this would be useful to you. 
Thanks a bunch!
Probus

I fail to see what the Jews and their neighbors have to do with it. I don't deny that Ukrainian have suffered a lot at the hands of Russians. I even said explicitly that I don't trust the current Russian government at all.
But I do not accept categorical statements like that it is impossible to come to an agreement with Russians because they never honour them. We know this isn't true because there were agreements with Russians that were honored in the past. That is the whole point I want to make.

Two of the three parties (social democrats (SPD) & greens) are historical roots in pacifism. The SPD was for example the only party to vote against Hitler as that was still possible. The greens were even founded out of the pacifist movement. The greens have surprisingly adapted to the new situation very fast and with negligible internal rumbling.
The SPD has however a harder time. Make that 50 instead of your mentioned 20 years of investment in ‘Ostpolitik’. I said it before: from the outside it looks like glacial speed but from the inside its lightning. Parts of that party are still literally shell shocked.
The economic impact is bad but meanwhile an accepted fact (see my last post)
If Russia would attack a NATO state freighter it wouldn’t necessarily mean instant WW3. NATO could for instance declare a no-fly zone over Ukraine & the Black Sea.
More difficult are the more ‘grey’ problems like Russia wanting to stop the freighter for an ‘inspection’. Does it stop or is that piracy? What happens when during that action one ship rams the other? Will the freighter be escorted by, say, a Turkish warship?

Please don't always state so indifferentiated stuff about everything Russian. I guess they won't suffer too much from hurt feelings but for me it just doesn't add anything useful to the discussion. Of course it is possible to have agreements with Russians in general. It is not like they were somehow genetically unable to. There were quite a lot in the past that weren't broken. I wouldn't trust the Putin, his cronies and quite a few others farther than I can lob a 155mm shell at them but that doesn't mean we can never try to reach an agreement with any Russian ever again - which would be a very bleak outlook indeed.
EDIT: Modified one sentence. Didn't make much sense. My bad.

Visegrad is often inflamatory on purpose, and it quotes yesterday article from Reuters, that we already criticized here. Until officialy signalled, it's a non- story. 

IIRC you already said that in the past, but that doesn't make it true. Speaking for Germany, the public has accepted that Russian gas will be gone sooner or later. Preferably later, because the switchover will take time and the hurt will be a bit less if we have more (time).
But it is an accepted fact that Russian gas has no future here. The war has accelerated many things energy wise, but it has not changed the direction of it.
The time necessary to re-normalize the relations to Russia is much bigger than the time necessary to switch around our energy sector (this year for Russian oil, 2-3 years for Russian gas (or whenever they cut us off - that is the expensive part)).
Apart from gas & oil, Russia is not very important for us economically. For some the damage is big, but as a whole it doesn't matter much. There is no political interest to 'scream for peace' apart from the usual useful idiots.

Can we please stop this? I'm seriously tired of reading every few pages how we mollycoddled, money-grubbing "old" europeans have no idea and want to happily sacrifice a few of the wise and strong eastern european countries (who don't need us anyway because they are now allied with the invincible USA) so we can finally go back to trading with Russia in order to let the party continue.
Very much exaggerated on purpose. As I already said here, several times, this helps noone. I am guilty of having discussed politics here more than once but let's keep it civil, shall we?
 

Can we please stop this? I'm seriously tired of reading every few pages how we mollycoddled, money-grubbing "old" europeans have no idea and want to happily sacrifice a few of the wise and strong eastern european countries (who don't need us anyway because they are now allied with the invincible USA) so we can finally go back to trading with Russia in order to let the party continue.
Very much exaggerated on purpose. As I already said here, several times, this helps noone. I am guilty of having discussed politics here more than once but let's keep it civil, shall we?
 

Apparently, this reworked campaign still isn't integrated into the Steam version. Can we expect this at some point?

Contrary to what Hollywood stereotypes show us, not all German soldiers were fanatic SS Nazis. Many were, many more lost all empathy by what they saw and did (and got away with) during the war. Some were to weak to speak up or went along because of false loyalty to their comrades. But some retained a measure of decency.
Nowadays I regret that I didn't ask my grandpa about what he had experienced. By the time I was more into history, he was too far gone with dementia. An interesting character actually, born in 1900 he was in WW1 and as a musician/entertainer for the troops in WW2.
But I digress, sorry for the off topic.

Ok your wife and relationship are worthy of their own thread if you wan to start one. There is a book in that somewhere.

A whole lot of Russian officers have been telling too many lies for too long to quit now. I am sure there is an entire racket built on getting soldiers they never had "KIA" in order to explain their absence when someone finally comes to check. I fully expect there is a secondary scam to collect the death benefits for these soldiers that never existed.
Taking Kherson back as the number one priority makes sense for a LARGE number of reasons. The three simplest being that it is the only Russian presence on that side of the river, It is the largest Ukrainian population under Russian control, and it brings the Ukrainians much closer to Crimean land bridge.
Aragon2002 has come around! 💪
There is no logic, the Russians aren't escalating because even they can do math and it says they either they don't have an army in three days, or they don't have a country in a week. Tens of thousands of Russian casualties is inflicted with NATO supplied weapons all the casus belli any country in history has ever needed, if they wanted one. They clearly don't.
Yes, but real analysis of it English is EXTREMELY lacking. For that matter neither of the regimes involved were noted for their introspection.
Boris has a PANAMAX cargo ship worth of flaws. But I will give him this, he understands that once you have picked a side the best answer is to ensure that they actually bloody win.
I am going to let the politics of the last twelve years go, for now. The inexcusable mistake that the entire civilized world has been making since AT LEAST 1973 is the refusal to bite the bullet and do what is necessary to quit buying hydrocarbons from absolutely awful regimes/governments. Oil and natural gas consumption could be less than half its current level if rational polices had been implemented decades ago. We have not been willing to take the short term economic pain of doing it rationally, So we are caught in doom loop of crises when these god awful regimes do something god awful. And then we learn NOTHING. Bleep me I hope this time is different....

We (the West) all profited from tade with Russia to some degree. Even the eastern european countries (including Ukraine) either received Russian oil or gas or profited from transfer tariffs. We are mainly to blame for the illusion (although I don't think most people involved really believed in it, it was just a convenient excuse) that trade somehow leads to everyone with whom we trade will want to join our club of capitalistic democracies.
ISIS was a direct consequence of the mess the USA made in Iraq. On the other hand also we Europeans didn't want to get our hands dirty and didn't care about Syria as long as the refugees could somehow be kept out or conveniently drowned in the Mediterranean.
Anyway, I think it is an illusion (yet another one) that the EU is going to pay for building up Ukraine and whatever else may need to be payed for in the future. Even if Ukraine will join the EU the price will be paid by the net receivers. The net payers will not significantly raise their payments and so what is there will have to be devided amongst more receivers. Maybe the EU will raise some dept financed funds but I doubt it. We will help, possibly via something like development aid and guarantees for investments but not too much beyond that. That is sad but I don't see EU citizens voting to sacrifice their prosperity for a war started by someone else. The whole fallout of having to look elsewhere for cheap energy is a different thing and that is our own fault for being so short sighted.
 

This is a lie. You know the level of knowledge about Ukraine present here.  Can’t believe you would try and trot this out in front of this crowd. Since everything else is just Fox News talking points also, I doubt there is any reason to address this in detail, but broadly:
-Biden worked to end corruption in Ukraine, carrying out the policy of the US and our European partners, including putting pressure on Ukraine to fire the prosecutor who WAS NOT actively pursuing an investigation of Burisma (which concerned issues predating Hunter Biden’s term on the Burisma, and so COULD NOT have been an investigation of H. Biden).
-Trump tried to extort a fake investigation of H. Biden by Ukraine for purely domestic US political purposes by threatening to withhold military aid, in direct contravention of US foreign policy.
If you don’t think the latter display of complete contempt for Ukraine on the part of the US didn’t play into Russia’s plans in Ukraine (which did not start out of the blue in Nov 2020), then I don’t know what to say.

A lot of the things talked about the last day or so need to be looked at in a similar way. We look at everything through our personal lenses that are constructed by what we know. This forum is populated by a bunch of really smart people with lots of experience and input in so many interesting and informative areas, however a lot of what we look at is from a wargaming/military history nerd perspective. Two cases to illustrate the point.
Analysts. Well, they sure did get a lot wrong and there were a couple outlier voices that were closer to reality but weren't in the main stream media. Luckily there are amazing Monday Morning Quarterbacks and Armchair Generals to point all of it out now. But did anybody really know? Did anyone know how bad the soft factors of the Russian Army were? How much corruption there was and to the extent that it crippled the RA? How their Air Force wasn't going to be able to dominate the skies? How their Navy would be ineffectual at best and a liability at worst? This wasn't supposed to be a near peer conflict. It was supposed to be a 1st class huge military versus a 2nd/3rd class underdog using Cold War equipment. No one had seen the RA in a big conflict since WW2 and everyone believed the Russian rhetoric about how awesome they were, mostly because there was no real evidence to the contrary involving a conflict of this size and intensity to base any other assumptions on. The closest comparisons that the western analysts had were probably Desert Storm and Iraq 2003; superpower vs outdated regional power. They didn't know it was actually outdated regional power vs. middleweight contender of the year. So I'm pretty forgiving of their mishaps, plenty of historical examples out there of analysts getting it wrong before the first shots are fired. At the same time I'm with @The_Capt and @FancyCat with the frustration of most of them refusing to rethink their analysis, come up with a little humility and try to put forth a more accurate analysis based on contemporary and existing facts. 
The second one is the assumption that the Russians can not win. Now, bear with me. A military full conquest is out of the question. Full destruction of the UA is out of the question. A Dnepr line is out of the question. But, do any of us have a wire tap on the Kremlin and know what they consider a "win". A win for the Kremlin doesn't have to look like a win to us. A political win can come from what we would consider a military defeat. If Putin's original goals are out the window, which I believe they are, and he decided that control of Luhansk and Donetsk are the goal where he can announce a win to the Russian people then it is still possible for them. Severdonetsk is the last bite of Luhansk. It is a political objective not a military one. Think of it like Stalingrad for Hitler. Even though the RA controls 99% of Luhansk they have to take the city in order to declare control of the whole province. The river becomes the line and forces are shifted south to Donetsk. Grind away again with as much arty as they can bring and take a small bite at a time until they control Donetsk. Then Putin can declare the war is "won", totally switch to the defensive and play the victim every time the UA kicks the RA in the nuts. The RA will be a smoking dumpster by the time it is over but that actually helps Putin stay in power. He doesn't care about his pixel truppen the way we do so it is hard for us to wrap our mind around what we see happening. 
If nothing significant changes on the ground this could be a real outcome in 6 months. Neither side has the capability to overcome the other in a meaningful way and restore mobility to the battlefield. Both sides are eating the elephant one bite at a time because whenever they mass they get hammered. If the UA breaks in the RuAF pummels them. The mobility is determined by fire support at this stage and the battlefield moves at a WW1 pace. Both sides are missing pieces to the puzzle that allow the operational mobility that we are used to seeing. I don't believe the RA will be able to get those pieces due to attrition, sanctions and time. The UA can because of western support but the opportunity is controlled by the western powers. 
It is frustrating to watch and more frustrating because we really don't know what the west has up its sleeve or in the pipeline. A lot of people have referred to the western arty as game changers, but they really aren't. Better arty and missile arty will increase RA casualties and make life more difficult but arty doesn't take ground or solve the problem of getting your breakthroughs bombed. It just makes it a deadlier WW1 battlefield. If the west wants the UA to take back the lost ground and push the RA out they will need to supply it with the capabilities to either totally deny the airspace to the RuAF or gain air superiority. Denial capability is much easier, faster and cheaper than the superiority option and the Gepards are a good start. Is there more missile AA systems in the pipeline that aren't announced yet? Rolands or similar? Something to protect the mobile battlegroups? If not the status quo on the ground is unlikely to change.  
Which goes back to the above quote from @The_Capt. If the UA has to rely on lots of infantry and artillery to make their gains it results in a LOT of casualties. Can and will it be done? Probably, but it will be danged hard for us to watch.

We (the West) all profited from tade with Russia to some degree. Even the eastern european countries (including Ukraine) either received Russian oil or gas or profited from transfer tariffs. We are mainly to blame for the illusion (although I don't think most people involved really believed in it, it was just a convenient excuse) that trade somehow leads to everyone with whom we trade will want to join our club of capitalistic democracies.
ISIS was a direct consequence of the mess the USA made in Iraq. On the other hand also we Europeans didn't want to get our hands dirty and didn't care about Syria as long as the refugees could somehow be kept out or conveniently drowned in the Mediterranean.
Anyway, I think it is an illusion (yet another one) that the EU is going to pay for building up Ukraine and whatever else may need to be payed for in the future. Even if Ukraine will join the EU the price will be paid by the net receivers. The net payers will not significantly raise their payments and so what is there will have to be devided amongst more receivers. Maybe the EU will raise some dept financed funds but I doubt it. We will help, possibly via something like development aid and guarantees for investments but not too much beyond that. That is sad but I don't see EU citizens voting to sacrifice their prosperity for a war started by someone else. The whole fallout of having to look elsewhere for cheap energy is a different thing and that is our own fault for being so short sighted.
 

Who inherited the mess of Bush…who inherited the mess of Clinton…etc.
I will say that the US needs to get past whatever “this” is and find some sort of domestic compromise and unity built on mutual respect…soon.  
Were it anywhere except the US, we would have labeled it as a fragile state by now. And a fragile superpower…isn’t one.

I'm sorry, as a citizen of EU I refuse to go through another decade of economic misery as it happened when the banks failed and people had to bear the weight. We are not responsible for the war in Ukraine. Everyone was dealing with Russia, not only Europe. Even Trump, was apparently involved in business with Russians. Does that make him an American Berlusconi? Should all American citizens pay the price? Also Europe has paid the aftermath of wars that didn't participate in Middle East, has bear the weight of a huge refugee crisis, has suffered hundred of victims from ISIS terror attacks on its soil and Europe has to pay again? I don't think it's fair and we should keep banging our heads on the wall as Aragorn says.