A place for aggregated discussions of a possible conflict, it’s implications and effects, news updates and personal accounts if any. If the expected conflict kicks off, I will change the title but the function will stay the same.
lol. I wonder what would happen if the Ukrainians built a NATO standard F-16 capable runway literally 10 meters from the Polish border. This would require the Russians to risk bombing Polish territory whenever they send some of their highly inaccurate missiles to try to damage it.
Lol, Russia finally takes Bahkmut and promptly loses Belgorod? Lots of reports of Russians fighting Russians in and around Belgorod today.
Lol, Russia finally takes Bahkmut and promptly loses Belgorod? Lots of reports of Russians fighting Russians in and around Belgorod today.
Support independence for Belgorod Oblast.
Badferret wrote:Lol, Russia finally takes Bahkmut and promptly loses Belgorod? Lots of reports of Russians fighting Russians in and around Belgorod today.
Support independence for Belgorod Oblast.
I make an Oblast whenever I hear about Russians fighting Russians.
Maybe this is in response to being bombed by the Russian air force in April...
*shakes head* Boy, red-on-red violence, I dunno. Those people never learn.
Ukraine has the best propaganda. Russia has the most devious and widespread.
Those pics would make great avatars.
Those pics would make great avatars.
Combine them with the Quaker name generator and you are halfway through your DnD character creation.
‘We are Russians just like you’: anti-Putin militias enter the spotlight
As Russian militias opposing the Kremlin readied a daring cross-border raid into the Belgorod region this week, a man with slicked-down hair, in full camouflage and holding an automatic rifle stared into a camera lens.
“We are Russians just like you,” the man said in the video, later posted online. “We are people just like you. We want our children to grow up in peace and be free people so they can travel, study and were just happy in a free country. But this has no place in modern Putin’s Russia, rotten through and through from corruption, lies, censorship, restrictions on freedoms and repression.”
That man was Maximillian Andronnikov, the self-proclaimed commander of the Freedom of Russia Legion, a paramilitary group that, until this week, was chided for its outsized internet and media activity. Under the nickname “Caesar” he has also served as a media spokesperson for the group, which has sought to largely act in the shadows and keep its membership a secret.
But with the raids into southern Russia this week, the spotlight has been turned on both the Freedom of Russia Legion and the Russian Volunteer Corps, another group composed of Russians who now say they are fighting against Putin.
Profiles have shown that a number of the Russian guerrillas are veterans of anti-Kremlin groups and many, particularly in the Russian Volunteer Corps, have connections with Russian far-right organisations. In a photo taken last month, Andronnikov stands next to Denis Nikitin, a white nationalist prominent in the MMA fighting scene who heads the Russian Volunteer Corps.
Andronnikov himself was previously a member of the Russian Imperial Movement (RIM), an ultranationalist group that is publicly opposed to Vladimir Putin but has also fielded pro-Russian fighters in the war since 2014.
Agentstvo, an independent Russian news agency, earlier this year published a 2011 photograph showing Andronnikov at a Russian march with Denis Gariev, the head of RIM’s paramilitary arm. A member of RIM who knows Andronnikov said that he left the group before the war in Ukraine began in 2014.
Andronnikov, who was born in Sochi and later lived in St Petersburg, was also called as a witness in a 2012 case about an alleged military coup being planned by several men in the Urals city of Ekaterinburg. Andronnikov, who was then the head of a St Petersburg “military-patriotic club”, was not charged in the case.
The plot was linked to Vladimir Kvachkov, a retired colonel and hardliner. He was jailed after members of his group, the People’s Front for Liberation of Russia, were accused of training with crossbows in a plot to overthrow the government.
Andronnikov was working as an archery trainer in 2022 when the war began and quickly left for Ukraine, fighting on Kyiv’s side since and saying earlier this year that his ultimate goal was to remove Putin from power. Prior to the raid, he said he had been fighting near the city of Bakhmut.
“I am a good Russian, and on the other side are bad Russians,” he said in another interview earlier this year. “And I kill them every day.”
Wagner chief warns of revolution and says 20,000 fighters killed in Bakhmut
Consistently shocked that Prigozhin is still alive, at this point.
The head of the Wagner mercenary force has said that 20,000 of its fighters have been killed in the battle for the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, and warned that Russia could face another revolution if its leadership does not improve its handling of the war.
Yevgeny Prigozhin said 20% of the 50,000 convicts Wagner had recruited, and a similar number of its regular troops, had been killed over several months in the fight for Bakhmut.
Prigozhin pointed to the social disparity underlined by the war, with the sons of the poor being sent back from the front in zinc coffins while the children of the elite “shook their arses” in the sun.
“This divide can end as in 1917 with a revolution,” he said in an interview posted on his channel on the Telegram messaging app. “First the soldiers will stand up, and after that – their loved ones will rise up. There are already tens of thousands of them – relatives of those killed. And there will probably be hundreds of thousands – we cannot avoid that.”
Prigozhin is known as “Putin’s chef” because he once provided catering services to the Russian leader, but he said that “Putin’s butcher” would be a more fitting nickname. He claimed his men now controlled all of Bakhmut – a claim disputed by the Kyiv government, which insists its forces still have a foothold in the ruined Donbas city – but he warned that Wagner would pull out at the beginning of next month.
Prigozhin was speaking after two Russian rebel militias, the Russian Volunteer Corps and the Freedom of Russia Legion, had made a dramatic incursion into the Belgorod region along Ukraine’s northern border, crossing into Russia with apparent ease, although the Wagner boss did not refer directly to the raid.
The Russian defence ministry claimed to have routed the raiding force, killing 70, but the militia leaders said they had only suffered two deaths. After withdrawing from Belgorod, Denis Kapustin, a commander of the Russian Volunteer Corps, told reporters on the Ukrainian side of the border that the raid had demonstrated the fragility of Russia’s defences.
“We can see that the military command as well as the political establishments of the Russian Federation are not ready for this situation,” Kapustin said. “They have invested billions in strengthening their line but when it comes to action, everything falls apart and nothing is working.”
Oryx reports that the number of Russian tanks visually confirmed as destroyed or captures has crossed over 2000 (2002).
For context, the massacre of Saddam's army in the Gulf War was largely considered an unmitigated disaster for the Ba'athists. Roughly 500 tanks were destroyed then.
How many tanks/IFVs lost in Afghanistan in the 80's? Chechnya in the 90's?
655 armored vehicles and 340 tanks between 1980 and 1985, in Afghanistan, according to Key Military.
So, 6x as many tanks in 20% of the runtime.
Good job, Pooty!
By most sane estimates, the Russians have lost a little over half of their prewar stock of operational tanks while the Ukrainians have gained well more than 50% of their starting number. Not that these rates are sustainable, but even at rough predictions, many analysts believe the two combatants will reach something approaching parity in gross numbers the next six months.
The Chinese border has to be practically empty at this point.
Seeing Ukrainians on Twitter who aren't getting any sleep, really makes me wish someone would nuke Iran's drone factories.
The Putinite trolls are really active on social media. I have been speculating publicly that if some drunk vatnik with a truck full of stolen fertilizer had a "smoking accident" in front of Prigozhin's Leningrad bot farm, most of the pro Putin voices would go silent immediately.
Or if a cruise missile flew into the window...
Prigozhin definitely appears to be preparing the information conditions for military/political defeat and a post Putin Russia. He definitely seems more keenly aware of aspects of regime fragility that analysts in the West are not.
Vexler observed that Western analysts routinely overestimate Putin's actual power. His regime stability relies on consistently depoliticizing the public and allowing them a viable alternative to freedom by outsourcing politics to Putin in exchange for their being left alone to watch YouTube and open kombucha bars in Moscow and Petersburg (those two cities being the political center of gravity of Russian political life).
That is why he has disproportionately leaned on the colonies for the flesh for the grinder. The strikes in the wealthiest neighborhood in Moscow, however, appears to have changed the dynamic. Though it did little or no actually meaningful damage of military or economic significance, it did reveal and widen an ideological divide not widely examined in the West. Apparently, folks in places like Belgorod are acutely aware that this war is not fought for their benefit and despise the "Pampered smoothie drinking class" more than they hate the Ukrainians. In that sense, Putin's attempt to turn the clock back to 1941 may have accidentally overshot to 1918.
Apparently, folks in places like Belgorod are acutely aware that this war is not fought for their benefit and despise the "Pampered smoothie drinking class" more than they hate the Ukrainians.
A world where Putin encouraged culture war divisions in his younger, stronger adversary, whereby the little people harbor extreme distaste for the elites because of their effete, weak, extravagance...while being undone by the same dynamic in his own house is something.
Paleocon wrote:Badferret wrote:Lol, Russia finally takes Bahkmut and promptly loses Belgorod? Lots of reports of Russians fighting Russians in and around Belgorod today.
Support independence for Belgorod Oblast.
I make an Oblast whenever I hear about Russians fighting Russians.
2021: Russia has the second best army in the world.
2022: Russia has the second best army in Ukraine.
2023: Russia has the second best army in Russia.
This might be the rare exception to how killing civilians doesn't usually break the country's will to fight. It might actually work here.
This might be the rare exception to how killing civilians doesn't usually break the country's will to fight. It might actually work here.
Killing civilians for the sake of killing them is rarely the key to military or political victory. Doing so with a purpose of disrupting one's enemy's political, economic, social, or military center of gravity otoh can be an extremely powerful action. Similarly, killing soldiers for the sake of killing them likewise doesn't necessarily get you closer to victory.
Neither side is going to kill their way to victory in a pure numbers game. There is no practically achievable magic number of soldiers or civilians that, once exceeded, will result in the political outcome either side is trying to achieve.
Ben Hodges thinks we should identify every last mfer in the chain of command that touches a decision to bomb civilians in Ukraine and sanction them for life under the magnitsky act. I’m with him.
But not for Ukrainians who do the same? I am fine with it, since they were attacked without any provocation other than existence. Just curious on your thoughts?
The Ukrainians are documenting all instances they can find of attacks on civilians, including from their own side. There are ongoing investigations. I doubt they will be perfect but .
Note the massive disparity between Ukrainian and Russian violations.
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