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.
This all seems familiar.
Looks like a rapucha class landing ship and kilo class submarine were destroyed in Sevastopol overnight
Am going to try and watch some vids/reactions about that sub blowing up but good gawd that is hilarious that you fancy yourself a world power and have now lost a submarine...
To a country with no navy!
This particular sub was the newest in the improved kilo line. Completed in 2014 at a cost of $300 million, its price tag could almost pay for half of Abramovich’s second yacht.
Soldiers guarding the dry dock were so convinced it was an act of Ukrainian sabotage that they engaged in a firefight. With each other. Four confirmed dead, others injured.
This is your “near peer adversary”
Actually, it was worse. Soldiers were alerted to patrol the area of the docs looking for armed saboteurs. Police were hurriedly organized by their own leadership to do the same. A team of police mistook a patrol of soldiers for attackers, and killed 3 of them, losing one of their own, before it got sorted out.
Ukraine took out another S-400 battery in Crimea last night.
ATACMS finally coming (supposedly) and F-16s as early as this winter. I don't think many Russian officers will be getting restful sleep anywhere in Crimea ever again. They might as well drive back over the bridge to home.
"Bridge? ...what bridge?" - ATACMS extended range crew, probably.
I talked with my nephew who is in Georgia finishing up training on Bradley APCs this week and mentioned the ambush outside Robotyne where four Brads took out an entire Russian armored column without even taking return fire. He said they got some really good video of that engagement that he didn’t think were necessarily public yet and commented that it was like watching humans playing against Age of Empires AI. He mentioned that the Bohemia Interactive software they train on has much more competent adversaries and can only imagine what the OpFor folks are like.
Sweat in training or bleed in war.
<8 miles to Tokmak airport.
Little bit of insight into why Russia has not been able to establish air superiority there
Moscow has been withdrawing it's peacekeeping troops from Azerbaijan, and bam! Azerbaijan commenced military operations against Armenia this morning. It's not clear which side the US and Israel will support this time around. Azerbaijan has had strong political relations with Russia, but also is a strong military partner of Ukraine. Armenia is also supported by Russia but I believe has fewer Western ties.
And, yes, this is an "anti-Terror" operation. Right. You heard it here first.
And, yes, this is an "anti-Terror" operation. Right. You heard it here first.
Man, we really handed every nation on earth the perfect justification for whatever the hell they want, didn't we?
I am wondering whether we could do some 4D chess here.
My only concern and its a doozy is it will escalate the conflict and harm/kill many people.
But since Putin is so hell bent on disrupting US aid to Ukraine, make it look like it worked.
Say something public about how supply issues have been delayed and that the US is scrambling to find help from Europe to bridge the gap but that it will be months instead of days/weeks.
All the while supplying Ukraine normally or even boosting the supply.
Putin can't help but overstep and gets caught with his pants down. Hopefully ending the war sooner.
From reports on both sides of the conflict, it appears that the Russians continued to feed unsupported troops into Klischivka from the NE despite it being a wide open approach surrounded on three sides by hostile high ground. This was basically sending folks into a dry gulch/U-shaped ambush. The Ukrainians reported that the concentration of Russian dead was so dense that the entire area stunk of rotting meat that they said could be smelled multiple kilometers away.
The actual objective of Klischivka is of little to no tactical or strategic value. It is a small settlement that has been reduced to foundations of buildings. It is in low ground between fortifies heights. And the roads connected to it are cut off from Russian fire control at multiple spots. Far more important would be taking the fortified heights. But that isn't what they did. Instead, they sent human waves of terrified conscripts to their deaths and mowed them down with artillery and barrier troops when they broke and ran. The losses had to be in the tens of thousands from the description.
This begs the question why they would commit to such madness.
The answer, I propose, can be found in the writings of General Valerii Gerassimov current Chief of the General Staff of Russia. He wrote the definitive work on "hybrid warfare" and, at least before the full scale invasion, was widely regarded as a military genius. In it, he emphasizes that militarily important objectives should be regarded with lesser importance to that of symbolic ones that reinforce a narrative. This helps you dominate the information space and erode the political will of the enemy's political center of gravity. He has correctly identified that center as the American attention span and the low information voter. And the narrative he has chosen to attack it with is that the "Ukrainian counterattack has failed".
To this end, it is less important to defeat the Ukrainians militarily or stop its advance and more important to hold onto or recapture towns and landmarks that have names identified and repeated on the nightly news. The fact that the names Andriivka and Klischivka have been mentioned enough to create map pins in the American collective consciousness makes them important enough to sacrifice tens of thousands of terrified vatniks to hold onto the obliterated visitor sign.
The Russians sincerely believe that populations in the aggregate (not in the individual) are "hackable" with the appropriate application of misinformation. You can get them to believe anything or nothing at all with enough bizarre conspiracy sh*t and blatant lies being spouted at them with sufficient frequency. In the case of their own population, their aim is to create a population entirely divorced from and incapable of meaningful political action. They have turned their entire population into bovines to the abattoir. To the US population, the idea is to paralyze us with the idea that nothing is knowable so believe what makes you feel better about your disempowerment.
The scary thing is that there appears some pretty solid evidence that this approach is working. And scarier still is that we appear to be completely unwilling to do anything to combat it. We take it as a matter of faith that we are smarter than that and will eventually let the fever of cultish idiocy run its course. Mitt Romney, for instance, stated exactly that sentiment in his retirement address. He takes it as a matter of almost religious faith that the Republican Party will eventually come to its senses and recognize that facts and character matter.
I don't think we can rely on faith, but I don't know what concerted, collective action we should be taking. In previous times, we would have taken direct action against propagandists (with lesser or greater degrees of efficacy and some pretty worrying externalities). I am worried though that we are not doing enough.
Come on Paleo, no one thinks a few ranters on the Internet can change minds, and anyway, all countries do it. We are just as guilty of influencing countries so how can we attack the Russians for what we did? We need to just sit on our hands and let that fight on the other side of the world take its course. It's the only moral thing to do. We've done so many bad things in Iraq, in Syria, all over the world, and we *caused* this invasion by meddling with a Russian satellite state (just like Mexico is for the US), so really, it's our fault. We are much worse than Russia, and China, and Putin is bravely showing the world how little we value the Ukrainians by the letting them die for our own amoral diplomatic interests. After all, Ukrainians have had no agency in their own government since, well, for the last 300 years as they were subservient to Russia until we interfered and took them over in 2014, in spite of Russia's attempts to bring them back into the fold. It's their natural state. We should not have tested Russia's resolve to protect its national interests. If we keep the fight going, they may feel that their only choice is to escalate to full-blown nuclear war, and that would be our fault too...
(Argument courtesy of a deeply radical British peacenik and Realpolitik fan acquaintance who has no concept that his mind has been hacked. He's at the point where he supports his arguments with "independent journalism" from Russian intelligence agents who have been producing disinformation as "news" for consumption in the West for their entire careers. It's a possible view of where Republicans are heading if Trump gets back in. And if part of that resonates with readers, it's a good example of how actual issues are salted into the arguments to make them more palatable and raise more doubts due to guilt in the American mind. Be very careful, my friends, what you put into your head.)
I have said this several times before, but it bears repeating each time.
Folks that call themselves "realists" and champion the special hegemonic rights of a country with an economy the size of Spain's and a military budget smaller than India's aren't being "realistic". They are being nostalgic. Moreover, they are being nostalgic for genocidal authoritarianism. This doesn't make them clever. It makes they terrible human beings.
Poland to stop supplying weapons to Ukraine over grain row
One of Ukraine's staunchest allies, Poland, has announced it will no longer supply weapons to the country as a diplomatic dispute over grain escalates.
The nation's prime minister said it would instead focus on arming itself with more modern weapons.
The move comes as tensions between the two nations rise.
On Tuesday, Poland summoned Ukraine's ambassador over comments made by President Volodymyr Zelensky at the UN.
He said some nations had feigned solidarity with Ukraine, which Warsaw denounced as "unjustified concerning Poland, which has supported Ukraine since the first days of the war".
Poland's prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, announced the decision to no longer supply Ukraine with weapons in a televised address on Wednesday after a day of rapidly escalating tensions between the two countries over grain imports.
The grain dispute began after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine all but closed the main Black Sea shipping lanes and forced Ukraine to find alternative overland routes.
That in turn led to large quantities of grain ending up in central Europe.
Consequently, the European Union temporarily banned imports of grain into five countries; Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Slovakia to protect local farmers, who feared Ukrainian grain was driving down the prices locally.
The ban ended on 15 September and the EU chose not to renew it, but Hungary, Slovakia and Poland decided to keep on implementing it.
The European Commission has repeatedly stated that it is not up to individual EU members to make trade policy for the bloc.
Putin:
POL walking those comments back, by the way. And Slovakia and Hungary working out the issues with the grain deal.
The Polish government sought to walk back remarks by its premier that the country had stopped weapons shipments to Ukraine, tapping the brakes on an escalating dispute that’s shaken a key wartime alliance.
After Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said Poland is no longer transferring weapons to Ukraine, his office aimed to lower the temperature following a heated exchange of barbs this week that’s dismayed allies and undermined a relationship that’s been crucial to aid to Kyiv.
“Poland is only carrying out previously agreed supplies of ammunition and armaments, including those resulting from the contracts signed with Ukraine,” government spokesman Piotr Muller said. Those include a contract to deliver locally-manufactured howitzers, he added. “Poland consistently helped repel Russia’s attack.”
Ukraine’s awkward allies: the far-right Russians fighting on Kyiv’s side
For Ukraine, I get it, you need any allies you can get. I'm just not sure what the hell RDK's position is here, is it that Putin isn't racist enough?
Nikitin also blames the media for exaggerating his notoriety. He has never used the phrase “white supremacist”, he claimed, and said he is only called a “neo-Nazi” because he is against “LGBTQ propaganda and cultural Marxism”.
CLEARLY, dude hasn't spent any time on Conservative Twitter, since that's what they say Ukraine is, when they're not saying it's all Nazis.
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