Letter from Prague

And unless Russia get kicked out of Ukraine or Russia collapses as a nation, this is completely correct lesson. Not only are the Russians (the citizens) completely fine with doing things that way, looking at Western nations letting them go in for vacations and Western companies happily trading with Russia, the West is fine with Russia doing things this way as well, just not openly. I guess I'll go tell my friend it's actually fine she will never see her parents again and that her younger brother will be used as cannon fodder for Russia in a few years, because it's just a small strip of land after all, no biggie.

I think that makes sense - I didn't think about it that way, but the current state of the war looks very different whether you consider the 2014 borders or the 2022 borders as the base state. ... https://novayagazeta.eu/articles/2023/12/01/hiv-infection-rates-reach-epidemic-levels-in-19-russian-regions-en-news On an unrelated note, here's another (not entirely new) way in which Russia is ****ed. I would hypothesise that rate of HIV is a proxy for number of intravenous drug users, sexual violence and prostitution, and those are a proxy for a general level of despair in the population.

They're not at risk of going to go to prison in their home countries if they're dead, so ... That was my question. In what way is it not a missile? Because you can directly control it and because it can loiter?

I think this is really the big point of disagreement. My line of thinking - and tell me in which ways I'm wrong - is that if the objective of Russia is to take over and/or destroy Ukraine, anything than Russia being kicked out from basically everywhere (other than Donbas, I guess) is a major Russian victory. Russia holding Crimea means there will be basically no maritime trade. Any large disputed territory means no Ukraine in NATO and/or EU(*). Any other result than Russia being decisively kicked out in a way that shows "try again and we will kick you out again" means there will be no reconstruction, because Russia will try again, and who would rebuild stuff when Russia is just going to blow it up again? No investments, no industry, no refugees ever returning. Yes, Russia will not take over rest of Ukraine militarily. Yes, Russia is paying a price (though the payments are not evenly distributed - the people in Moscow likely don't even notice). We obviously can't read Putin's mind, and if he planned massive Soviet restoration then he failed, but if the objective was abusive spouse being "I'll have you and if I can't have you then I'll kill you." then I find it hard to see current state as anything other than success. Of course Russia wanted more. But if I buy a lottery ticket for five bucks (few hundred thousand minority and prisoner lives) and win 10k (significant part of Ukrainian territory and destruction of its future) is it a failure because I in my dream I saw myself winning the jackpot (all of Ukraine forever)? ... I mean I can also go back to lurking if I'm annoying you people. _____ (*); this is orthogonal discussion to whether extending the EU without figuring out some way out of veto bullying is even a good idea

Probably, but you need to look on vkontakte rather than instagram. However, I would not expect the average Ivan-soldier to have a face once Ukrainian drones and artillery and ATGMs and later weeks of rotting and local dogs are done with them.

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/henry-kissinger-war-criminal-dead-1234804748/ Well, no more insane pro-Russia takes from this guy. I'd have a shot if I didn't have to drive to work in an hour.

Given the ... ahem ... teeny tiny war crime track record from the previous wars, maybe the US is as much defending Canada as it is defending the world from Canada?

I meant Trump and similar voices in EU, not you. And Donald and similar probably are the best advertisement for "spend money on defense and don't rely on US", just not necessarily the way they think they are. Anyway, it's a bit offtopic.

Or when you're not close to anyone that does. I work with quite a few people whose families are stuck on the occupied territories. Their aging parents are getting no healthcare, because that is limited only to people with Russian passport. their younger siblings will become cannon fodder for the Russians once they come of age, if they live that long. They might also ended up forcibly moved to Siberia or in a mass grave any day. I see the toll it takes on people every day, so it somewhat makes my blood boil when people say things like "it's just territory, might not be worth it". I think we talked about this in here as well, and there was even a Perun video on this topic: this "other countries are freeloaders on NATO" is bull****. From the point of view of US, NATO is most of all an investment. The US wants a certain world order - mostly one where world is stable and American companies are making truckloads of money all over the world - and NATO is one of many levers it uses for that (the huge fleet that makes it safe to do international shipping is another one, for example). The return of investment is huge - in NATOless world, I would not be writing this on a Macbook while having Amazon.de open in a second tab, I would not pay my lunch using a Visa card, and people would not be watching Hollywood movies so much they ask European police to read them their rights. No idea what the alternative would be - maybe I'd be living in fully automated luxury gay space communism (*), maybe the world would be radioactive wasteland - but it would not be this. Just the amount of money US has made selling military hardware to its NATO allies pays for the alliance several times over. Anyone who is complaining about "freeloaders in NATO" is playing some very strange political game, because that is not what NATO is for. (*): like Star Trek or something

Would the secret service hunt him or protect him? We won't know until the fateful day ...

Again? Wait not, it's two months old.

US has no reason to fear Russia because Russia was never threat to it in the first place (aside from getting Trump on the throne, that is). Just like US is no threat to Russia - they exist on different continents and will never invade each other. However, I hope that Lithuanians, Latvians, and Estonians (and also Finns in smaller measure) are planting minefields like crazy and buying a lot of drones, because if Trump gets reelected and dissolves NATO by removing US from it, they will be completely defenceless even to Russia's zombie mobik army.

I'm not sure why you'd say "Russia is done". Russia is winning in all metrics they care about - they wanted a piece of Ukraine and they got it, they will get to keep it forever and try again in a few years after West pushes Ukraine to give up this round. They got to send thousands of prisoners, poor men from undeveloped regions and minorities to their deaths. They wanted to show NATO in particular and Western world order in general as a shams and the whole West as weak and corrupt, and they succeeded. They strengthened their relationships with similar regimes like China and Iran as well. Common Russians even get to bully Ukrainian refugees when they visit West for vacations. The only price they had to pay for that was some sanctions that do nothing, and that's about it.

I'm thinking these Mad Max vehicles are probably not official army efforts, but some other group (like TD) being bored and coming up with "improvements". Them doing it is a signal that they are not equipped well enough, sure (if every TD brigade had HIMARS with 10000 GMLRS assigned, they wouldn't need this) but it is a contrast to Russia where this kind of bull jury rigging seems to be the official approach.

And of course hearing these far-right opinions from a Ukrainian is particularly ironic considering how much effort Russia spent on the "Ukrainians are Nazis" thing. Luckily we all know not all Ukrainians are like that.

What are you working out, if you have no flesh?

Of course Russia is winning in all measures, since the West objective is for Russia not to lose, and not for Ukraine to win. Read The_Capt about "we don't want Russia in freefall" (he might be heartless but he is definitely smart). The Western decision-makers never wanted Ukraine to win, despite what some naive citizens thought.

That is actually pretty smart. Previous border closures cause outcry in various pro-Russia circles because of "this is collective punishment" and "if we don't allow Russians to visit Paris on vacation, our commitment to human rights is a farce and we're worse than Putin" (I promise I am paraphrasing only a little), but if it is not noticed then it will not be reacted to. Also, mixing migrants in it is not smart from Russia's perspective, since a lot of Russia supporters are far right who is now beating the drum of "protecting borders" so the very same people now can't complain. It is real, the already delivered a bunch of stuff.

Russia seems to be gaining a lot of initiative lately, meanwhile the Western support is slowly going away. I kind of suspect this war will not see its second anniversary.

3000 pages, one thousand for each day of the three-day special military operation?

That's the big ones, though. Those are basically cheap cruise missiles. Now cruise missiles getting really cheap might be also transformative is the air defense can't be scaled up, but my understanding was that most of the "new world" is because of small battery powered drones used for real-time ISR and the cheap even smaller suicide drones.

I am not so sure. While we might see more wars like Ukraine son, so far it really looks like the next decisive "world war" will be between "West and Allies" and China - and while that one would have ground component for sure, I think the decisive parts would be questions like "can China effectively hit continental US and EU", "can the Allies effectively blockade China into submissions or will it have built enough energy and food capacity to avoid that", "can the allies replace ships faster than China can replace missile factories", and so on. Now I am not military strategy mastermind like rest of the people here, and I'm sure lot of the lessons from Ukraine can be useful, but unless someone can make FPV drones go thousand kilometers, I'm not sure everything is directly applicable. So while shells are important, I think decoupling "Western" supply chains from China and figuring out defense against millions of Shahed equivalents while making millions of ours might be better investment. I think if we're going there, the Russo-Japanese war is even better example of Russia breaking itself in discretionary war. EDIT: while I'm happy to see another Russian ship promoted into submarine, I was wondering why the Ukrainians bother with hitting them, since the grain corridor seems to be going well, the threat of the missiles seems to be enough to keep Russians at bay. Wouldn't it be better to I suppose maybe some of the ammo is just allotted to navy and they hit ships, or they want to have at least some good news. But also I guess they are hitting Crimea while they still can - if they will be pushed to negotiate away the claim to Crimea soon, they will probably be forbidden to hit it with Western weaponry like mainland Russia.

...

Sugar coating might feel nice, but Russia keeping the land bridge is an enormous strategic victory for Russia (even if not a complete one, because Ukraine still exists), and a huge failure of the Western world order. If we can't even (be bothered to) give Ukraine enough to win - Ukraine who is clearly read and willing to fight and just needs _stuff_ - how can we stand up to China? Ukraine losing will prove all the people speaking of Western stagnation and decay right.