There was a recent uprising against the Kazakh government, which was put down with help from Russian troops. They people in power are probably worried that if they send their people to die for Putin they’ll have another revolt on their hands (with the Russian Army preoccupied and thus less able to save them again).
My goodness, Vlodymyr Zelensky is a mensch.
It is difficult to exaggerate what an unlikely guy he is. His life is basically a Hollywood story; he is as ridiculous a choice for head of state as Kevin Kline in “Dave.” He’s literally a sitcom star who ran for president because he played a guy on TV who was an unlikely president. The guy’s political party is named after that sitcom. It’s insane. It would be like Julia Louis-Dreyfus being elected President solely because of Veep (if Selena Meyer wasn’t a monster.) When he was elected he just openly admitted he didn’t know what he was doing but was willing to learn; all he wanted to do was fight corruption and unite his country.
But this dude yesterday, who by all logic should be shitting his pants four times a day, just flat out told the USA when they offered to evacuate him “I need ammunition, not a ride.” He’s visiting troops on the front line. He is rallying his people in a defense that is probably doomed but is as stiff as anyone could have hoped for; the Ukrainians are fighting like legends. A COMEDIAN is probably going to die defending his country and he appears to know it and he is saying “Can’t lead from behind” and standing tall. I wish my country had statesmen like this. The man is a hero for the ages.
I wIsh my country did, too. What a contrast to trump.
You’re still being awfully defeatist, IMO. This isn’t over. Russia may have just made a huge blunder and may not have been prepared for more than a week or two of fighting (according to various reports on Twitter and elsewhere). If that’s true, Ukraine may even do what was thought impossible - win this war, or fight long enough that Russia has to retreat (or even better, Putin is revealed as an incompetent weakling and falls himself). This may be overly optimistic - we’ll see. But I don’t think you should be nearly so confident that Ukraine or its leader are doomed.
I’m just pleasantly surprised that Erdogan is standing up to Russia at all.
Putin tried to help a Turkish coup a bit back. That sort of thing may not instill happy feelings.
Japan isn’t allowed to fight a war outside of self defense anymore.
Pulling Japan into the fight pulls the US in to fight on their behalf. No doubt with support from the Japanese.
I suspect (hope) that these incidents were genuine accidents. Otherwise it’s attempted escalation and that’s not a road I want to see the world go down.
Apparently faked. There is a LOT of stuff being posted on line that either computer-simulated, taken out of a game, or from prior conflicts in other places that is labeled as from Ukraine.
Some Russian aircraft have, definitely, been shot down. The actual details of how that happened are scant. Be skeptical.
I’m hearing reports that Russia did, in fact, count on a rapid advance with little resistance, a quick “decapitation” of the Kyiv government, and installation of a puppet regime in short order.
One theory is that, instead of engaging with a superior force directly, the Ukrainians “melted” into the local area and did NOT engage and the Russians rolled in, then came around behind them to cut thin supply lines. Thus isolating the invaders and denying them resupply.
Also, even BEFORE the Russians crossed into Ukraine there were reports of Russian soldiers at staging areas not being supplied with food and having to buy it locally. NOT good for morale. Then, if they advanced, had their supply cut behind them… well, that really, really sucks for the Russians.
A hungry army doesn’t fight long. Opportunities to loot food might be sparse. Also, something weird and darkly humorous about invaders attempting to buy gas from the people they’re invading. Wonder when they get to the point they trade arms for food?
Even if that’s true, it would be in limited areas. Troops in cities can probably loot sufficient food and supplies in the short term.
If this IS a problem it’s unlikely to start everywhere in the entire invading army, but rather as we see, in scattered locations. As time goes on, though, the supply situation could get worse for the Russians. It’s not catastrophic now, it could become that in a week.
One of my favorite images is a sign reading (from memory): “Putin: Let’s jump ahead to the scene where you kill yourself in a bunker.”
That’s what I’d do, especially all those civilians who were being handed a rifle on request. At best (for the Russians) they’d have to keep an inordinate number of assets behind to protect their supply lines. More likely we’re going to hear more stories about hungry soldiers and vehicles with no fuel in the next couple days.
This is one of those things that sounds more like wishful thinking myth than reality. It would be weirdly out of character for a Russian army to ignore the importance of logistics to this absurd a degree.
Well, sure, but it’s not like he hasn’t already crossed moral lines.
Yes. Targeting a civilian city and/or burning it down is now considered a war crime. Like Putin hasn’t ordered other types of war crime. Again, I don’t see the ethics of the weapon or situation being an obstacle for Putin if he thinks he can gain by the use of such things.
Arguably, if we used it against a military installation it’s “OK” for certain values of “OK”. However, given how it kills human beings, particularly those on the fringes of its effects, even using it against soldiers is arguably a war crime.
The US use of such weapons is of dubious morality at best, let’s not sugar-coat this.
I believe he would.
I believe Putin’s power base - his real one - doesn’t give flip about human beings outside their protected little circle. I don’t see them having a problem with killing people and breaking things to achieve objectives if that is what must be done to do the job. I mean, it’s not like they’ve shown any evidence of caring up to this point.
How is rewarding Putin, after he has killed and destroyed, by giving in to his demands and resuming trade with him “the best possible outcome”? Wouldn’t that result in him pulling this shit again a few years down the line? Who next? Carve a bit out of Moldova? Another slice of Ukraine? What else?
No, worst outcome would be an escalation into WWIII and we all die in a nuclear exchange. In comparison to that, a “prolonged and bloody war” is awful, but not the most awful.
And yet, we’re already seeing examples of vehicles stranded on the side of the road without fuel.
I’ve also noted there are several videos of Russian armored vehicles driving around by themselves kind of aimlessly. Getting cut off from your unit is a good way to get ambushed and killed, and yet, that started happening almost immediately.
It’s not conclusive, but none of that is a good sign. Things breaking down that quickly after weeks of prep work suggests the Russians have a lot of real problems that were not apparent when they were mostly just sitting around.
See, that’s the brilliance of electing an actor - he might indeed be shitting his pants four times a day (or more) but his acting skills can keep him from showing that on camera.
And that is a brilliant line.
Reality can often be stranger than fiction.
This is not a terribly uncommon event for a fast moving motorized army. You’ll note they were not out of fuel before the war started. They got into Ukraine.
That seems like the lowest bar an army could possibly set for itself. Like, “There were no combat casualties before the shooting started” kind of low bar.
I suspect that the problem isn’t the Russian army itself – it’s the Russian kleptocracy. Logistics is one of those areas where it’s fairly easy to skim without any (immediate) noticeable effects.
Like the US Army. During the Iraqi invasion, the US forces regularly outran their supply train.
The war is three days old. 
Here are some US Army 2003 invasions records
page 30-31
The
invasion forces’ operational objective was Baghdad, and success depended on speed and
synchronization as opposed to the emphasis on mass as experienced in ODS.49 …
On March 23, 2003, US forces began taking significant casualties and the advance on
Baghdad slowed immensely. According to Anthony H. Cordesman, “…some outside observers
> concluded that the pace of the U.S. land advance threatened to bog down for days or weeks
> because Iraq was making creative use of asymmetric warfare in attacking the U.S. lines of
> advance.” Concerns arose over the limited amount of available forces, the lack of preliminary air
strikes, and the stiff, albeit irregular, Iraqi counterattacks and defenses encountered by US forces.
These arguments gained validity as elements of the US V Corps paused for several days to
> regroup, and intense urban fighting near Al Kut halted the Marines.50 According to Lieutenant
> General William Wallace, the commander of the V Corps, “The adjustment that we made was to
> actually fight and have a presence in some of these urban areas that we had not really planned to
> do. We planned to bypass them. But we found it necessary to establish a presence to stop these
> paramilitaries from influencing our operations
And more
Attacks by irregular Iraqi forces, a sudden sandstorm, and the sheer tempo of operations
created a challenging tactical situation. The combination of effects “led to continuing
coordination problems between forward combat elements and combat support, service support,
and logistic forces.”56 These problems further affected the operational level and below by poor
rear area communications and digital systems incapable of properly tracking or forecasting the
battlefield effects on logistic requirements. These issues, coupled with the ad hoc nature of the
> flow of logistic units into theater, fostered an extremely complex logistic environment that
> contributed, as in ODS, to a loss of faith in the supply system.
> 57 The logistic measures taken in
> preparation for the offensive failed to negate the impacts of these issues.
Author Walter Boyne wrote in Operation Iraqi Freedom: What Went Right, What Went
Wrong, And Why that “[d]espite all the statements to the contrary, the V Corps and the MEF
outran their supply lines, and this not only hampered their forward movement but also exposed them to the possibility of dangerous counterattack.”58 In Logistics Transformation—Restarting a
Stalled Process, Lieutenant Colonel Victor Maccagnan, Jr. writes that while combat formations
have been outdistancing their supplies lines for centuries, the fact that this situation continues to
trouble the US Army after so many years of transformation efforts directed at preventing just
such an occurrence is particularly troubling. Lieutenant Colonel Maccagnan, Jr. states that there
are a “myriad of stories of units pleading for more ammunition—always ammunition first—and
for other supplies…” during the course of OIF.59 Clearly, distribution of critical supplies did not
keep pace with the offensive and certainly contributed to the occurrence of the pause. However,
before turning to the logistic measures taken in support of the offensive one must determine if a
pause was planned, or even expected.
Wow, look at that. The exact same issues the Russians are facing now. Plus a sandstorm, Clearly the US military in 2003 was heavily pilfering from its logistics dumps. /s
Germany just lifted the ban on shipping weapons manufactured by them to Ukraine. That frees up a lot of the weapons stockpiled in Europe, apparently.
I know what you are saying, but they had lots of fuel dumps and supplies in their staging and drop off locations, so saying they got into Ukraine isn’t really saying anything. Of course they got in…they started where the supplies were. It’s supplying them once they leave those and enter enemy territory that’s the challenge. As AK84 said, this isn’t unique to Russia…the US also has had this issue during large scale operations. I haven’t seen a lot of reports indicating that Ukrainians are targeting logistics, but I’d be surprised if they aren’t thinking about it…it’s more, can they than would they.