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Ukraine and the Russian invasion, 2022-24

planetgeli said:
They stopped you closing the next box (they removed the x) weeks ago.

But something changed or isn't consistent because today I could read DLR's twitter thread - but LBJ couldn't.
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I still get an "x" so I just don't know then. Maybe depends on your browser or other factors.
 
two sheds said:
Not that outrageous I remember at work seeing an ad in a military magazine ooo 40 years ago for a landmine "distributes more lethal shrapnel at man-head height than any other". I decided then I didn't want to work on military stuff.
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True, completely would not put it past Raytheon to actually say that.
 
Last edited:
Putin's in a bind now. The Donbas attack has stalled and the new weapons for Ukraine will change everything. The returning embassy staff in Kyiv, the new confidence of Nato countries that they're backing the winning side, the UK's encouragement of Ukraine to attack targets in Russia....Putin's going to do something extreme. He's already told his public that Nato is attacking Russia. He needs to wipe out a Nato arms convoy or flatten Kyiv or something.
 
Article detailing on just how much intelligence info the US is sharing with Ukraine - and how effective it has been. Also noteworthy in how open they being about this, not least this little nugget -

Earlier this month, for example, the director of National Intelligence withdrew and replaced a memo that prohibited intelligence sharing for the purposes of regaining captured territory or aiding Ukrainian strikes in Crimea or the Donbas, officials said.
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Im guessing that this is deliberately sending a message to Putin that the US can - and will - cause the Russian military a lot of pain.
 
David Clapson said:
Putin's in a bind now. The Donbas attack has stalled and the new weapons for Ukraine will change everything. The returning embassy staff in Kyiv, the new confidence of Nato countries that they're backing the winning side, the UK's encouragement of Ukraine to attack targets in Russia....Putin's going to do something extreme. He's already told his public that Nato is attacking Russia. He needs to wipe out a Nato arms convoy or flatten Kyiv or something.
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I don't often agree with you but agree it's looking very grim right now.
 
planetgeli said:
I looked up who uses it (the transmitter) because I don't think a false flag would involve blowing up your own media content. It's also used by Vesti FM which is Russian, broadcasting to over 60 regions. But maybe they're expendable. Who knows?
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My memory may be playing tricks, but didn't the Germans blow up some radio transmitters to create a provocation at their border just prior to the invasion of Poland?
 
David Clapson said:
Putin's in a bind now. The Donbas attack has stalled and the new weapons for Ukraine will change everything. The returning embassy staff in Kyiv, the new confidence of Nato countries that they're backing the winning side, the UK's encouragement of Ukraine to attack targets in Russia....Putin's going to do something extreme. He's already told his public that Nato is attacking Russia. He needs to wipe out a Nato arms convoy or flatten Kyiv or something.
Click to expand...
I think it’ll end up going nuclear. He’s an ideological 70 year old so not a lot of skin left in the game. He’s already stated years ago he fights when cornered And is emotionally invested in the return of The Rodina. Scary times.

www.marketwatch.com

How Putin learned to govern from growing up in the war-torn city of St. Petersburg

At an early age, he found that projecting power was the key to survival, writes Reva Goujon.
www.marketwatch.com www.marketwatch.com
 
David Clapson said:
Putin's in a bind now. The Donbas attack has stalled and the new weapons for Ukraine will change everything. The returning embassy staff in Kyiv, the new confidence of Nato countries that they're backing the winning side, the UK's encouragement of Ukraine to attack targets in Russia....Putin's going to do something extreme. He's already told his public that Nato is attacking Russia. He needs to wipe out a Nato arms convoy or flatten Kyiv or something.
Click to expand...
I take it all back, the FT has the opposite opinion. They say Putin has no idea how bad things are, because nobody dares tell him. He'll dig in for a long war, on more fronts, in Transnistria as well. He'll tell his public that they're at war with the West, call up the reserves and draft more conscripts.

Despite Russia’s failure to break down Ukraine’s defences, heavy casualties and a series of military defeats, the Kremlin has kept up a refrain: the goals of Vladimir Putin’s invasion will be reached in full.

Russia’s territorial targets have appeared to shift depending on the short-term gains Putin feels his troops can achieve on the battlefield. He scaled back an initial plan to seize central areas including the capital, Kyiv, in favour of a new assault focused on the eastern Donbas region.

But Russia’s goals, which the Russian president has made clear include ending Ukrainian statehood, remain unchanged, according to people involved in efforts to broker a peace deal between Moscow and Kyiv.

This means, they assessed, that he is prepared for a protracted conflict going much further than the recently outlined target of “liberating” the Donbas. Putin wants to capture all of south-eastern Ukraine to cut the country off from the Black Sea and create a platform for further attacks, they say.

“He’s a tactician . . . a judoka . . . He wants to feint and throw you over his shoulder,” one of the people said, referring to Putin’s love of judo. “He’s not reasonable, he has a distorted picture of the world in his head [ . . .] and the scenarios have changed. Appetite comes during the meal.”

An influential Moscow-based tycoon said the conflict would go on as long as it took for Putin to sell it as a success domestically. “If you can’t make it look like a victory to the electorate, you can’t save face,” the businessman said.

Russia appears to have learned from some of its military mistakes in the early days of its invasion of Ukraine on February 24. This led to a redeployment of its forces to the Donbas and the appointment of a single field commander.

But Putin’s view of the situation on the ground appears distorted by inaccurate field briefings and state television reports, the people involved in the talks say.

Events are not reported up the chain accurately, said Pavel Luzin, an independent military analyst. This in turn is likely going to hamper Russia’s offensive and force it to pause operations at some point in the next month.

“It’s a huge hierarchy, and when some low-ranking analyst . . . writes a report about what’s really happening, it goes through 10 bosses and when it comes out at the top, it says everything is going great. That’s how the system works,” Luzin said.

“They need a break just to work out what they have. They don’t know how many contract soldiers they have left, they don’t know the full extent of their own losses, and they don’t know how much equipment they have left or what state it’s in.”

Assessing that Russia needed to regroup, Ukrainian officials initially thought Putin would look for a way to declare victory by May 9, when he celebrates the Soviet Union’s victory in the second world war with a military parade on Moscow’s Red Square.

But with few military gains secured so far and peace talks faltering, there are signs the Kremlin is preparing for a protracted conflict that it sees as a proxy war with the west. Putin said this month that “the most important thing [happening today]” was not the “tragic events” in Ukraine, but “breaking the unipolar world system that was created after the collapse of the Soviet Union”.

Rhetoric on state television has changed accordingly. With few triumphs to boast of beyond the capture of the port city of Mariupol — which required all but destroying it — presenters have blamed the lack of progress on the west’s support for Ukraine.

Some of them frequently muse about using nuclear weapons against the west, trumpeting Russia’s recent test of a new intercontinental ballistic missile, the Sarmat, and quoting a 2018 comment by Putin in which he joked about destroying the world in a nuclear holocaust because “what is a world without Russia good for?”

To gain ground on the front lines, Russia needs a significant manpower boost to protect its higher-value equipment. This can only be done through retaining conscripts, calling up reserves or mobilising volunteers — all of which require the Kremlin to admit it is waging a full-on war, rather than a “special operation”, according to Jack Watling, a senior fellow for land warfare at the Royal United Services Institute think-tank.

“If you’re going to go to war, then you need to explain to people what you’re doing and why the sacrifice is worth it,” Watling said. “Because it’s going badly and they’re taking very, very high levels of attrition, they’re going to have to explain to the Russian public why they’re taking casualties and what they’re taking the casualties for.”

Rather than signalling a push to end the war, the Donbas offensive may also be the prelude to broadening the conflict.

When Rustam Minnikayev, a top Russian general, outlined plans to seize south-eastern Ukraine last week, he also suggested an attack on neighbouring Moldova was planned, indicated Russia was preparing for a longer war of attrition against what would remain of Ukraine, and that Moscow saw the conflict as part of a greater geopolitical clash.

“All things considered, we are now at war with the whole world, like we were in the Great Patriotic War, [when] all of Europe, the whole world was against us. And it’s the same now, they never liked Russia,” Minnikayev said.

While Minnikayev’s analogy makes little sense — the US and its European allies fought the Nazis alongside the Soviet Union — it indicates a belief the Ukraine conflict is “just an episode of a greater confrontation with the west”, said Tatiana Stanovaya, founder of political analysis project R. Politik.

“Until Putin manages to seal a new Yalta” — the summit that divided Europe into US and Russian spheres of influence after the second world war — “Russia will dig in, and it won’t be limited to Ukraine,” she said.

“That doesn’t mean they’re going to conquer Moldova or the Baltics — it means they could escalate in any way through sabre-rattling, testing weapons or maybe even using them.”
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www.ft.com

‘At war with the whole world’: why Putin might be planning a long conflict in Ukraine

Stalling peace talks and new offensive suggest Kremlin could escalate its ‘special operation’ into a ‘war’ against the west
www.ft.com www.ft.com
 
Yossarian said:
A Soviet-era monument in Kyiv to Russian-Ukrainian friendship was torn down Tuesday - starting with the Russian figure's head.

View attachment 320260

www.reuters.com

Kyiv pulls down Soviet-era monument symbolising Russian-Ukrainian friendship

Ukrainian authorities on Tuesday dismantled a huge Soviet-era monument in the centre of Kyiv meant to symbolise friendship between Russia and Ukraine, a response to Moscow's invasion, according to the city's mayor.
www.reuters.com www.reuters.com
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Think that may get covered in the Russian media through a slightly different lens.
 
Article detailing on just how much intelligence info the US is sharing with Ukraine - and how effective it has been. Also noteworthy in how open they being about this, not least this little nugget -

"Earlier this month, for example, the director of National Intelligence withdrew and replaced a memo that prohibited intelligence sharing for the purposes of regaining captured territory or aiding Ukrainian strikes in Crimea or the Donbas, officials said."

Im guessing that this is deliberately sending a message to Putin that the US can - and will - cause the Russian military a lot of pain.
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Here's a link to that interesting article - U.S. intel helped Ukraine protect air defenses, shoot down Russian plane carrying hundreds of troops
 
I am sure the Russians must have other agents operating in bordering countries, but at least two seem to have been caught.

Poland’s government has issued a statement to say that it has arrested “a citizen of the Russian Federation and a citizen of Belarus who were engaged in espionage activities in Poland” and that a court has “ordered their detention on remand for three months”.

The statement says:

"The men detained on 21 and 22 April are suspected of espionage activities for the Russian secret services. The material collected by the military counterintelligence service (SKW) indicates that a Russian and a Belarusian, acting on behalf of the Russian intelligence against Poland, carried out activities aimed at identifying the functioning of the Polish Armed Forces, including the presence of the army in the Polish-Belarusian border zone." LINK
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Kaka Tim said:
Article detailing on just how much intelligence info the US is sharing with Ukraine - and how effective it has been. Also noteworthy in how open they being about this, not least this little nugget -



Im guessing that this is deliberately sending a message to Putin that the US can - and will - cause the Russian military a lot of pain.
Click to expand...

I think the radical intelligence openness policy must have been a decision Biden made. It would have needed his personal authorisation pre-war to do all that info-sharing about Russia's plans, which was quite unprecedented.
 
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