How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?

[dan/california]

10 minutes ago, FancyCat said:

i would warn against rehashing the same arguments over the future of Russia and how to best manage its collapse since its one that goes quite a long number of pages (i kid). but one thing is clear by the current crisis, neither side, for varied reasons, wants to undergo a full scale civil war, or general collapse, which is surely a good thing that both sides understand that despite jockeying for control, both will lose in the event Russia descends into chaos. 

The question is about the third, fourth, and fifth sides who think they are looking at something between impoverishment, and dying very slowly in a gulag. It is entirely possible their risk tolerances might be different.

[fireship4]

5 hours ago, Beleg85 said:

They are banned by constitution, but there are many loopholes.

I found the episode, if it's of interest:

Mark Galeotti - Sat, 29 Apr 2023 - In Moscow's Shadows 98: Dogs of War (and Racoons)

https://www.buzzsprout.com/1026985/12746196-in-moscow-s-shadows-98-dogs-of-war-and-racoons.mp3

Wherein, with regard to the Russian constitution, article 5, @ 00:04:10:

Quote

"The creation and activities of public associations, whose aims and actions are aimed at a forced change of the fundamental principles of the constitutional system, and at violating the integrity of the Russian Federation, at undermining Its security, at setting up armed units, and at instigating social, racial, national, or religious strife, shall be prohibited".

He makes the point that Wagner was not in violation of the spirit of this law, and then moves on to Article 259 of the Russian criminal code, @ 00:05:20:

Quote

'Those people who are convicted of organising, training or financing mercenary groups face 4-8 years deprivation of liberty, those people who do so on the basis of an official position, 7-15 years, and those people who participate in mercenary operations, 3-7 years.'

Well that seems pretty cut and dried - but there is a little note after that article that says this:

'A mercenary shall be deemed to mean a person who acts for the purpose of getting a material reward, and who is not a citizen of the state, in whose armed conflict he participates, who does not reside, on a permanent basis on its territory, and who is also not fulfilling official duties'.

He suggests territory may be the relevant point, and refers to the preceding annexations of territory, and that they (were) acting on behalf of the state.

 

5 hours ago, Beleg85 said:

Of course this is Russia, so legal ramifications are valid as long as ruling mafia wants them to be.

He does make a similar point earlier in the program.  It brings to mind two factors I've read about here and there: that Russia is very bureaucratic, with many laws that are actually followed, and doing things by the book can be important for avoiding blame; and that things may be illegal but selectively enforced.  This is something that is generally frowned upon in a country where the rule of law is seen as important.  It seems plausible to me, for a system to work positively, laws should only be enacted if they can be enforced, and then they must be enforced, in part to avoid it becoming selective.  For the similar reasons laws should be unambiguous.

[billbindc]

The Biden administration has decided to put a little more sand in the works: 

 

 

 

[dan/california]

1 hour ago, cesmonkey said:

A longer argument on how the war should end from this UK think tank:

 

I seem to agree with virtually every word of this.

Quote

Absent an unlikely change in strategy and/or leadership in Moscow, a comprehensive defeat of Russia’s threat to countries in its neighbourhood needs to remain a key objective for the West. Rather than offer Russia inducement to negotiate, the effort to drive up the costs of its deluded strategy must be continued and enhanced. 

I really like this bit. 

Quote

Western policy cannot be premised on the belief that internal instability in Russia is a greater evil than the war itself and the Kremlin’s domestic repressions. In fact, Russia’s defeat in Ukraine is a necessary condition – if perhaps insufficient on its own, as mentioned – for the demise of Putin’s regime. 

And this one.

I agree with so much of it there must be some terrible flaw...

[JonS]

6 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:

  A dumb mine can be made in the hundreds of thousands, millions even.  Not the same with drones.  Meaning, you can cover way more territory with mines than you can with drones. 

Mmm ... it's kind of like the difference between dumb artillery rounds and PGM: fire a million rounds and get the Somme vs a few rounds that actually hit the problem you want to just go away.

A gazillion dumb mines will just sit there waiting for someone to maybe hopefully fumble into it. A single Precision Guided Mine will go out hunting ...

[JonS]

I've seen MAGA rallies more connected to reality than this clown show.

[Battlefront.com]

1 hour ago, billbindc said:

The Biden administration has decided to put a little more sand in the works: 

 

 

 

Heh.  It's funny that I knocked NYT's earlier article for not even speculating that something "seems off" about the official/common story and now NYT is breaking the news of exactly what I knocked them for

From the article:

Quote

American officials also said there are signs that other Russian generals may also have supported Mr. Prigozhin’s attempt to change the leadership of the Defense Ministry by force. Current and former U.S. officials said Mr. Prigozhin would not have launched his uprising unless he believed that others in positions of power would come to his aid.

...

“There were just too many weird things that happened that, in my mind, suggest there was collusion that we have not figured out yet,” Michael McFaul, a former U.S. ambassador to Russia, said in a phone interview.

Gee... now where have I seen that before?  Oh I know, here... at 8:30 on SATURDAY:

"There's no chance AT ALL that this was all Prig."

More explicitly in the last dozen pages I've said that Prig must have THOUGHT he and his loved ones were safe.  Otherwise, he'd never have done things this way.  He knows what happens.

 

Now, much of what I've been hammering on for the past few days has been mostly about obvious questions that remain unanswered due to a lack of credible information.  This NYT article has some of the first information we've seen so far.

I still think my post from Saturday and since are largely correct, at least as a general narrative.  However, the last few days I've been refining my theory about how exactly Prig was betrayed.  Either his conspirators in the Kremlin fell apart (a common coup problem) or they were never really on his side to begin with.  I'm starting to lean more towards the latter than the former, though this is Russia where often the "All Of The Above" option applies.

 

I do NOT want to quote The_Capt's RomCom (it makes me queasy to even think about it!), but I think we all recognized that there is something in it that sticks -> Prig has a jilted lover mentality.  He carried a LOT of water for Putin over the years, including some pretty significant battlefield successes when the Russian Army had almost none to claim as their own.  Prig also truly, and correctly, believes that Russia will lose the war if Putin doesn't get rid of Shoigu and Gerasimov.  So that's two things making Prig willing to risk it all.

Powerful people within the MoD and FSB share Prig's perspective on the war and where things are headed.  They could either try for a "real" coup or they could have a patsy stir things up enough to get leverage on Putin without a hard collapse.  The latter is way, way, way safer for all involved so they opt for leverage and not overthrow. 

These powerful Kremlin people provide provide cover for Prig to rant and rave the past few months, possibly building up some trust with him.  They come up with a plan that satisfies Prig (focused on Shoigu and the war, not regime change) and Prig goes about doing his part.  At the right moment they call up Putin and offer him a way out, he agrees, they call up Prig and tell him it's over BUT they have his ass covered only if he plays ball.  Prig is an insider, he knows when he's beat so he agrees to play ball.

Since then negotiations have been going on between the conspirators and Putin.  Putin's trying to rebalance things in his favor, but he's finding it tricky and difficult.  The conspirators must have something other than Prig's military moves as leverage otherwise they'd all be dead.  Maybe the FSB as an organization informed Putin they're not on board with him any more?  Maybe Surovikin has the explicit support of the frontline commanders and Putin knows he can't get do a purge in the middle of Ukraine's counter offensive?  Whatever the case, this leverage is why they aren't hanging from meat hooks and Prig goes off to Belarus as agreed to.

 

Although my views are all informed speculation, most of the other informed possibility would already see people going out windows, having heart attacks, being arrested, or simply not being heard from in a long while.  Someone is preventing Putin from making it happen.  At least for now.

Steve

[Battlefront.com]

8 minutes ago, JonS said:

Mmm ... it's kind of like the difference between dumb artillery rounds and PGM: fire a million rounds and get the Somme vs a few rounds that actually hit the problem you want to just go away.

A gazillion dumb mines will just sit there waiting for someone to maybe hopefully fumble into it. A single Precision Guided Mine will go out hunting ...

Sure, but until someone figures out how to produce PGMs in the quantity needed to hold a huge front like this over a prolonged time, dumb munitions will remain the backbone.  Theory and reality often don't play nice together.

I can see smart mines being used like other PGMs in that they are used for the most important tasks while the dumb mines are used everywhere else.

Steve

[Artkin]

All that fake kit... cant beat the real thing.

[link removed]

[Battlefront.com]

1 hour ago, Artkin said:

All that fake kit... cant beat the real thing.

[link removed]

Not sure what that post was referencing, but as a rule we don't allow links to commercial services.

Steve

[DesertFox]

Sorry OT. Just a reminder that we have to be very careful about what we see or hear online. Not every time it is what it appears to be.

 

 

[kraze]

1 hour ago, DesertFox said:

Sorry OT. Just a reminder that we have to be very careful about what we see or hear online. Not every time it is what it appears to be.

 

 

Nah, it's horribly uncanny valley.

[DesertFox]

Informative summary thread about the mine threat UAF is facing since advancing.

 

 

[The_MonkeyKing]

1 hour ago, kraze said:

Nah, it's horribly uncanny valley.

That is something I, or anybody can do with a couple of $ 20-a-month subscriptions and a couple of hours of time.

Just think what professionals with a budget can do. And indeed are doing.

[kraze]

Just now, The_MonkeyKing said:

That is something I, or anybody can do with a couple of $ 20-a-month subscriptions and a couple of hours of time.

Just think what professionals with a budget can do. And indeed are doing.

Deepfake scare has been going on for at least a decade now, but I haven't seen a single deepfake video that looked legit.  And if so called "professionals with a budget" would be able to do something with all of it - they would.

In any case this particular video looked as if someone took a still Freeman image and simply animated it by stretching and squishing parts of the photo which is what made it look so unreal.

[chuckdyke]

No surprise the Ukraine fight like hell.

Holodomor | Facts, Definition, & Death Toll | Britannica

[DesertFox]

Uups...

 

 

[pintere]

Unconfirmed, but it seems like Surovikin may have been arrested.

https://www.kyivpost.com/post/18817

"A Report has appeared on the “Ukraine” Telegram channel, quoting the Russian rosZMI media channel that Surovikin was arrested on the evening of June 27 and is detained in the Lefortovo pre-trial detention center along with his deputy, Colonel-General Andriy Yudin.

Kyiv Post was unable to verify this at this time and is investigating."

 

 

[TheVulture]

14 minutes ago, DesertFox said:

Uups...

 

 

Assuming I'm reading the translated articles I've found correctly, he was appointed head of St. Petersburg University of the Ministry of Internal Affairs in 2018, suspended in Dec 2022 as part of an investigation in to corruption offences (which took down quite a few high ranking ministry officials) and resigned 'for personal reasons' in April 2023.

And apparently crashed his off-road ATV into a tree yesterday near Leningrad on a holiday with some friends.

[The_Capt]

8 hours ago, dan/california said:

I seem to agree with virtually every word of this.

I really like this bit. 

And this one.

I agree with so much of it there must be some terrible flaw...

“Yet there is no evidence that disintegration of the state would be likely. The preconditions for a break-up are lacking: the regions lack the political leaders, resources, ideologies and instruments to challenge Moscow. The centre’s tight political and economic control, including of personnel and security agencies, provides the regime with significant – though not inexhaustible – capacity to persist, even under extreme stress. Russia’s military intelligence agency, the GRU, is believed to have worked hard behind the scenes to defuse the Wagner Group tensions.”

This is the central argument and it is not only weak, it is inconsistent.  “Putin or a replacement cannot pull out of Ukraine as risk to his regime with the Ultra Nats is too high”. “S’ok though because his grip on his country is so tight that Russia could never fall apart.”….?

Beyond a clear demonstration last weekend the primary condition for a serious uncontrolled collapse of the Russian Federation is the fact that it is a brittle authoritarian regime.  If that fails, and basically it really needs to in order to achieve a Ukrainian victory, the condition for free fall are already built into the system as it basically has a single point of failure.

If you read the rest of Fallacy 6 we get “the republics really don’t want to leave Russia anyway because Chechnya” And “there is nothing we can really do about it anyway.”  That is what we are going to hang this entire thing on?!

This is not grown up thinking.  Russia is very vulnerable to an uncontrolled collapse because every state on earth is as well given the right conditions.  If someone could offer a single coherent mitigation to this in the short term then by all means let’s end this now.  However, I have yet to see one that either does not severely downplay the risk based on confirmation biases or simply dismisses it as “unknowable and un-influenceable” fatalism.  

If Russia has so much built in resilience then they would have cut bait and pulled out a long time ago.  A sudden came rapid defeat will likely cause serious political consequences - hell threatening to take away a mercs toys led to a freakin March on Moscow.  Russian defeat must be engineered in a manner where it can negotiate with that defeat without blowing itself up.  This has led to an incremental pressure approach, which frankly we are still not sure will not result in a sudden failure anyway but it seems to be the best plan available.

[Eddy]

If you have a spare 1 and a half hours this is well worth a watch IMHO.

I'm not going to attempt to summarise it  It does include their take on the Prig thing but much more than that as you can probably guess from the title.

[DesertFox]

32 minutes ago, TheVulture said:

Assuming I'm reading the translated articles I've found correctly, he was appointed head of St. Petersburg University of the Ministry of Internal Affairs in 2018, suspended in Dec 2022 as part of an investigation in to corruption offences (which took down quite a few high ranking ministry officials) and resigned 'for personal reasons' in April 2023.

And apparently crashed his off-road ATV into a tree yesterday near Leningrad on a holiday with some friends.

Unlucky...

[DesertFox]

 

 

[DesertFox]

According to Girkin

 

 

 

[DesertFox]

 

 

Edited June 28, 2023 by DesertFox