Vietnam was the first television war. It’s looking like this is the first internet war. Who knows, perhaps videos taken by ordinary people of their lives being destroyed sent to other ordinary people might make war difficult to prosecute by the jingoists.
And for show. I think Russia generally holds its own military exercises in the same area at the same time…just by coincidence. This year though? I doubt they can be bothered. They have some other stuff on their plate that seems to be taking all their concentration.
Came here to write something similar to that, but you did it very well. The Syrian Air Force (per Wikipedia) has a couple of IL-76’s (comparable to C141/C17 planes in the US inventory, and the Syrian Airlines have three Airbuses, 2 A340’s and an A320). So they could probably move 700 or so men, but with minimal equipment and support. So the Russians would have to move most of them, and I have some doubts that the Turks want a bunch of Russian Air Force Transports crossing their borders, so they’d have to go the longer way to get there.
By ship (which is the best way to move large quantities of men and material)? OK, providing you can find enough ships, just go right on through the Dardenelles and wave at Istanbul as you pass by…ah, no, I can’t see that.
Driving (if not through Turkey) means a convoy via Northern Iraq (Kurdish folk live around there), Iran, Azerbaijan and into Chechnya. Don’t see any problem with that, do you? {/Sarcasm}
So a few hundred Syrians, unsupported and with nothing but small arms, might make an appearance, but 16,000? I’ll believe it when you show me how.
“Amateurs study tactics; Professionals study logistics.”
For those who hadn’t seen this one … touching:
[Violins is always at least part of the answer]
Somehow, in a post about Donnie and Vlad, this phrase gives me the willies.
About one million Soviet Jews (and Jew-adjacents) immigrated to Israel after the U.S.S.R. collapsed. Many of them came from Ukraine, and some of those still have family there or just feel a connection to the country.
Touhing my ass. I literally cried.
‘Putin to pull out before he comes to a bad end.’ 
Are we not doing “Phrasing!” any more?
We are, again, reminded of the estimable value – and flexibility – of punctuation.
The chart isn’t predictive. Had the chart been made a month ago, before the war, it would show no cities in orange because none had been captured.
I didn’t know that. Thanks for the info…makes a hell of a lot more sense now!
I could have been 'Dog the Bridge Builder
I could have been 'Dog the Pier Builder
I could have been 'Dog the House Builder
But you forget one comma…
Hey Putin, while you’re begging China for handouts because you can’t organize a sock wash the Ukrainians have organized a world concert in the middle of a war.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Ukraine, Czech Republic, Poland and Slovenia form an alliance. Russia is a threat to all of Eastern Europe.
Traveling into a war zone is a strong diplomatic statement. Risky, but I guess Russia didn’t want to escalate by attacking the train.
Zelenskiy said later that Ukraine knows its true friends.
Guardian live blog
So what happens when Syrians land in Russia and the -20 degree air hits them? It doesn’t matter if they’re wearing the same cold-weather gear as the Russians. They will not be able to hack it.
Melitipol has a new mayor.
The old one was last seen being dragged away with his head in a sack:
The new mayor is a former city councillor, said to have been installed by the Russian invaders.
Her inaugeral statement:
Wonder how long she will last?
She probably has a Chechen security detail.
Consider my stance a reaction to the notion that the military was at best blameless or at worst saw defeat snatched from the jaws of victory as a result of the machinations of inept civilian leadership.
No doubt civilian leadership was inept in both Vietnam and Iraq (as well as elsewhere), but let’s not forget that (1) the most senior military officers are also important advisers to civilian leadership when it comes to military and defense matters and (2) even military officers in the actual theater of war have planning and reporting responsibilities.
In Vietnam, the notion that the military could have won “if only” is something I push back on because it goes too far. It presumes the military could have won. I do not grant that. More to the point, “could have won” leave room to infer that the problem with that particular war was that it was wrongly fought. That’s the wrong lesson in my book. The lesson we should all walk away with from that war is not that it was fought wrong, but that it was wrong to fight. There were very good reasons that half-sane civilian leaders insisted the military fight the war with one hand tied behind its back. Fully sane civilian leaders would have gone a step further and kept the military out of the fight altogether.
Iraq has similar issues, plus the fact that General Franks, as CENTCOM during the invasion and its leadup, totally failed to account for anything but the military aspects of the campaign. He did not plan, or at least he did not see to it that someone else planned, to achieve the follow-on conditions necessary to ensure a lasting victory in the aftermath of the invasion. Whether it was his proper role, as a military leader, to plan out reconstruction and stability operations requiring multiagency efforts is debatable. What is not debatable is that he at least had a duty to ensure that someone, even if just someone working for the Department of State for example, had that for action and that the various phases of the campaign fit together. Had he and other senior military officers done that, he might have come to suspect that a lasting victory in Iraq would be impossible, or at least require a much longer commitment than the invasion by itself might have implied, and thus better exercised his advisory role to civilian leaders. Had civilian leaders nevertheless directed the invasion continue, then he would have found himself in the position to consider whether or not his duty to the nation was to resign in protest or to “just follow orders.”
Bringing it back around to the main point, the impossibility of victory in a war, once waged, by no means supports the proposition that the war (ultimately lost) was nevertheless a military victory. So if Russia doesn’t achieve its aims (whatever they are) in Ukraine… it will have been militarily defeated, whether or not its military ever could have won.