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Ukraine and the Russian invasion, 2022-24

If Trump wins in 2024 I can see him spouting "America First" and cutting back support for Ukraine, and for that matter for NATO also. I think a Trump win could change the balance of support for Ukraine.
Yes because a supine Congress won't stand by the commitments already made. I think you've heard something somewhere and thought how right it was and not investigated any further
 
The key election is going to be the American election in 2024. The chances of a Republican anti-war candidate winning seems to be getting slimmer, but if they did, it would wholly undermine the Ukrainian effort.

I am also concerned how susceptible Europe and Britain is to disinformation campaigns from Russia and her allies. France yesterday exposed Russian disinformation, while it might not change election results, it could lead to a groundswell of people wanting to abandon support for Ukraine.
No American president has been anti-war
 
Can somone explain something to me?

Russia spend 6 months on an offensive in Bakhmut and elsewhere, moving at snails pace, and is it deemed to be an operational success.
Ukraine spend not even 2 weeks in their offensive and it's already a failure.

I just dont get it.
I don't think anyone except Russia and its supporters (and maybe not even them) are calling Bakhmut an operational success.
 
Bakhmut is often presented as a comparative operational success inasmuch as it achieved its objectives, but has strong pyrrhic aspects. The only people labelling the Ukraine offensive one way or the other at this stage are propagandists and people too foolish to realise it's too soon to judge.
 
Can somone explain something to me?

Russia spend 6 months on an offensive in Bakhmut and elsewhere, moving at snails pace, and is it deemed to be an operational success.
Ukraine spend not even 2 weeks in their offensive and it's already a failure.

I just dont get it.
Russia's operational security is pretty poor; Ukraine's, OTOH, has been shown to be pretty good. Russia trumpets victories before their troops have moved off the start line - and that's when they're not fabricating claims wholesale.

So, in the absence of much coming from Ukraine, Russia and its supporters are free to trumpet every little real and imagined setback that Ukraine suffers as a catastrophe for Ukraine. Ukraine, in its turn, isn't saying anything.

It'd be a dumb person who simply took Ukraine's silence to be an admission that Russia's claims have any validity, but then there does seem to be an awful lot of dumb people out there - across the twittersphere, AND within the Russian information space.
 
Interview with Czech President Petr Pavel


— How do you feel about Russian citizens who live in Europe and claim that they do not support the position of the Kremlin? Will they be allowed to renew visas and residence permits? Should students from Russia be given opportunities to study and build a career or business in the European Union?

- I believe that, as in the case of a number of world conflicts in the past, during the ongoing war, security measures for Russian citizens should be stricter than in normal times. So all Russian citizens living in Western countries need to be monitored much more closely than before. Because they are citizens of a nation waging a war of aggression. I may feel sorry for these people, but at the same time, if we look back at the time when World War II began, then the entire Japanese population living in the United States was also under a strict surveillance regime. It's just the cost of war.

- When you say "under surveillance", what exactly do you mean?

- I mean being under the close attention of the special services ( during the Second World War, the US authorities interned at least 125 thousand people of Japanese origin, including tens of thousands of American citizens, in "military displacement centers", which many now call concentration camps. In 1948, the United States paid compensation to the surviving prisoners of the camps, and in the late 1980s made an official apology - NV ).
 
Not necessarily - if Russia thinks it's going to lose, and do so quickly, it may take the view that it would be better to withdraw what remains of its army than leave it smoking on the battlefield. That would also be a negotiated settlement, but one that didn't necessarily see Russia retain lumps of Ukraine.

An army is an expensive asset, and one Moscow might well think it will need if it's to hold onto various bits of its federation/sphere of influence - retaining as much of it as possible is a political/strategic war aim in itself.

NATO is obviously aware that a negotiated compromise that involves Russia maintaining a hold of some Ukrainian territory is a possible outcome, so it makes sense to shape the battlefield so that if that is what happens, the result will be as advantageous to Ukraine as possible.

If you book an outdoor event in November, you make sure you've got some kind of shelter in case it rains.
I wish I could share your sense of sunny optimism. Going by the look on the face of Old Jens last night, he wishes the same.
 
I've met one of the Japanese Americans interned in ww2 and been told some unpleasant stories about the experience.

In April 2001 was in DC and saw the memorial to these people, the thing professed that the US would never behave in such a way again. Six months later and anyone with a beard was having trouble entering or moving around the US...
 
In April 2001 was in DC and saw the memorial to these people, the thing professed that the US would never behave in such a way again. Six months later and anyone with a beard was having trouble entering or moving around the US...
Not anyone with a beard. if you had a beard and a family oilfield in the middle east you could still receive a warm welcome.
 
The only sober comment we can make is that we don't have the foggiest what's going on over there. Probably Ukraine is doing better than they're saying, probably Russia is doing worse than they'll admit. But how much better, how much worse? It will be years before we know for sure.

(But you know this).
 
With reference to people on the thread being too interested in the weaponry, I think I read on MediaMatters years ago that people in the US (Fox News particularly) who knew most about what missiles the US was using in Iraq: range, power etc actually knew least about where Iraq was, why the war was being fought, the casualties and the like.

That doesn't seem to be true here :)
Oh come on. Now Ukraine has these new Storm Shadow rocket things with a much extended range I fully expect them to retake their East African territories that Russia took.
 
Keep all your troops waiting for two hours to hear a motivational speech. Get hit by Himars...

If you're going to give a motivational speech that works, arrive promptly
 
Video is not new, it was on twitter a few weeks ago, but still interesting



There was another video I saw of a Russian soldier walking along with a backpack and no gun when a Ukrainian drone spotted him. He spotted it and waved as if he was on his way home and had had quite enough of all this thank you very much.

May have been staged but looked fairly convincing, I often wonder if he made it.
 
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