Jimmy_D

Some of them being sent to the front with no training, under-equipped, and sanitary products in lieu of bandages. Meanwhile Ukraine’s recruitment looks slightly different.

New $1.1B aid package from the USA, including 18 HIMARS and 12 Titan anti-drone AA/EW systems. That’s going to be a significant improvement in capability for Ukraine, the Titan system in particular is unbelievably cutting edge defence tech. I’m guessing the timing of the announcement is to coincide with the sham referendums.

There aren’t any ‘winners’ in a war. Russia could stop fighting today, cut their losses more or less instantly, stop throwing people away for nothing. Russia wouldn’t be invaded, they’d be safe, and sanctions would be eased on them. Ukraine could stop fighting today. They’d be leaving hundreds of thousands of people under the occupation of people that have been murdering, raping, and torturing Ukrainian men, women, and children. Whatever the conditions of surrender would be, Russia would likely try to take more territory in the future, and no one would even begin to feel safe under those conditions. In terms of energy, the EU is already weaning itself off of Russia. For this winter, Germany already has full stores of gas, well ahead of schedule. https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/germany-reaches-october-gas-storage-target-despite-extended-nord-stream-1-halt-2022-09-03/ Going forward LNG terminals are being built to replace much of the Russian energy shortfall. https://www.ft.com/content/27db90f5-a62e-4cbc-bfde-10b30d5e15c6 This is as well as the huge number of ongoing projects that were already starting to decarbonise energy production, and had already started to reduce reliance on Russian gas. That’s likely to be accelerated now. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Energy_statistics_-_an_overview Meanwhile, Russia has lost one of its biggest sources of income, and also one of its biggest sources of soft power in the EU. https://www.russiamatters.org/blog/numbers-where-do-russias-energy-exports-go Russia simply doesn’t have the infrastructure in place to transport most of that EU supply anywhere else, and are unlikely to anytime soon, especially with the sanctions they’re working under. They’ve also lost the perception that they had of being a reliable energy supplier. They won’t be getting those sales or that reputation back.

I already read the transcript. I’m not quite sure how you think it even begins to refute any of the problems with the referendum, and that’s if we accept that it’s in any way genuine, which of course it isn’t to begin with.

Regardless of what you think (or falsely claim) the result of a free and fair referendum would be, this is a referendum held during a war, with less than a week for people to make their case for either side, with voters voting at gunpoint, and hundreds of thousands of people who would be eligible to vote unable to, and the actual votes not actually making any difference to what Russia will claim the result is. Using it as any sort of argument in Russia’s favour is ridiculous, it won’t be accepted anywhere else in the world. You’re just making yourself look even sillier now.

At this point I’m genuinely curious whether manji has seen that and been daft enough to believe it’s true without taking the 30 seconds it takes to debunk it, or has posted it knowing it’s false but is daft enough to think we’d believe it without taking the 30 seconds it takes to debunk it.

Now look at the map of countries that support it.

That’ll cause upheaval because they’re still dealing with the results of joining the Dutch at the moment.

That’s just the reported figures from the FSB themselves. Can’t imagine for one moment they’d be inflating that figure, far more likely to be severely underreporting it.

Seems Ukraine had quietly been supplied with at least eight state of the art NASAMS by NATO, which has been contributing to Russia’s increasingly heavy aircraft losses the last few days.

There’s definitely some aspects of C, D and E there too though.

So if you’re not going to accept any evidence that goes against you, why would I bother taking the time to collate it to refute a steaming pile of manure when a meme works just as well?

Every single point you make has been thoroughly refuted, with evidence, earlier in this thread. I refer you to it.

Igor Girkin and Margo Simonyan certainly aren’t Ukrainian.

Looks like there’s an awareness that these mobilised troops are going to be sent underprepared and under-equipped, but if they couldn’t do better for their initial invasion forces after preparing for eight years in peacetime conditions, it seems unlikely that they’ll do better during a war under the heaviest sanctions ever imposed on a country in a matter of weeks.

Some unconfirmed reports that some of those arrested have been taken to be conscripted. Meanwhile

Oh wow. I don’t know how that exchange was negotiated, but that feels like a huge diplomatic win for Ukraine. Some Russian reaction in this tweet and the thread that follows it.

I thought that name sounded familiar. He’s one of voices that was coming out in support of the January 6 Trump supporters that stormed the Capitol. He’s also been going on about China for years. China is a concern, but it’s one that certainly isn’t being ignored. The argument that they should be a priority and focus should be shifted away from Russia, while Russia are literally in the process of attempting genocide and threatening nuclear war, is utterly ridiculous.

So, in your scenario, Russia kicks off, and Europe, having been honing warcraft for millennia, are suddenly helpless against them. The USA, having put billions in to stop Russia’s current level of escalation, suddenly go, “nah, we’ve done enough, they’re on their own now.” They break the biggest military treaty they’re in, to abandon people and values they like, and let people they don’t like and values they don’t like prevail. They don’t see any threat to themselves from Russia kicking off either, apparently. All this with the background of this being just about the only issue that’s currently enjoying strong bipartisan support in the USA.

A nuclear deterrent requires constant maintenance. In particular it requires tritium to be replaced every 12 years or so. It’s difficult to produce and Russia hasn’t produced enough to service more than about 200 nukes in that time. On top of that, while western nukes are built with the capability to replace tritium when required, Russian nukes are sealed units where that’s not possible without cracking them open destructively. Russia has a good enough nuclear deterrent to make any attack on Russia itself infeasible to the point of being impossible, but they don’t have the stockpiles of thousands they claim they do, certainly not that many maintained. It’s nowhere near enough to ‘win’ a nuclear war they started, or to stop the NATO response that would follow. While Putin has been blaming NATO aggression and the risk of NATO being close to them on their land grab, the fact they’ve been draining air defence from St Petersburg shows that they’re not actually worried about NATO aggression. For a few months now they’ve actually been compromising the defence of Russia itself to fuel this war. Defence that they would need if they were to use nukes, something that would cause NATO countries to be able to justify attacking Russia itself as defensive. On top of that, Putin’s invasion has already cost Russia all the soft power they had from the perception that their conventional military is strong enough to rival any peer. It’s uncovered a culture of corruption, with corners cut at any turn. Their remaining soft power comes from being nuclear armed, so naturally they’re shouting about it loudly. Does Putin want to risk uncovering similar problems and leaving Russia with no military soft power at all? Bearing in mind that the temptation to cut corners on a nuclear arsenal, literally designed to never actually be used, is magnified to a massive extent, how confident would Putin, and the other military leaders that have to go through with it, be that similar problems seen everywhere else in their military aren’t present in their nuclear arsenal? On top of that there are other lines that Russia would cross first that they haven’t crossed. Options that wouldn’t risk Russia being turned into a crater such as chemical or biological weapons. Shouting about the very top of their escalation ladder points more at trying to scare the West in a desperate attempt to cut off the supply of arms they have no answer to more than anything else. Putin might act as if he’ll be in power forever, but reality is that he won’t be, and there will be a point where Putin being in power becomes a bigger problem than Putin not being in power to enough people with the ability to change that.

Aiming for calling up 300k reserves then. Also all current military contacts have been extended indefinitely. Even if they could get anywhere near that number, it’s unlikely to change much. Force multipliers in modern warfare are just too effective, it’s just sending a load of Russians underprepared and underequipped who will be starting with rock bottom morale into an army that’s already breaking. As for the nuclear risk, it would be like someone getting into a punch up in a bar and responding to it going badly by dropping a dozen grenades, after a whole slew of people have agreed to hand them grenades. Even that vastly underplays how much of an escalation it would be. It is vanishingly unlikely it could possibly get anywhere near going that far.

They also need better logistics than they currently have just to supply that equipment (and supplies) just to the troops they currently have. Mobilised troops would only put more strain on that.