Shades of the Second Pacific Squadron only in reverse. One can only hope it meets the same fate as the original.
It seems to me that they’ve mostly abandoned their goal of taking Ukraine and have now moved to killing as many civilians as possible, and destroying as much infrastructure as possible.
There’s a Japanese anime TV series called Girls in Panzers, no kidding.
From Jack Detsch today:
NEW: U.S. has indications that Ukraine is now “able and willing” to take back territory overtaken by the Russian military: senior U.S. defense official.
Ukraine’s military is now trying to push the Russians out of Izyum, in East Ukraine, and has held Mykolaiv against Russian attack.
Girls und Panzer, actually, (and it’s a title that annoys me for being half-English and half-German) and believe me, I was referencing exactly that.
Now for my next idea, where I explain how we put some alien-derived AI that also look like teenage girls in an F-15, an F-4, a Mitsubishi F-2, and a Saab JAS 39 Gripen and then give them to Ukraine to achieve air supremacy.
That’s probably because he thought he had enough to take Ukraine, because that’s what the lickspittles that he’s surrounded himself with were telling him. Now, he’s face-to-face with the utter failure of his entire country to maintain a proper military force. That’s going to make at least some difference.
He’s stuck in the sunk cost fallacy with regards to Ukraine right now, but it’s unlikely he’ll try to expand the mistake any further than that.
If there is anyone in his inner circle who actually cares about Russia, they need to step up and remove Putin from office, and then end this war, and then beg forgiveness. Otherwise Putin is just going to feed soldiers into the meat grinder until he runs out of them.
I think though there is even more to it, and importantly so.
Most modern wars are civil wars. They are fought WITHIN a state, or are battles between a partitioned state. Yugoslavia fell apart, resulting in war (and those people look like us but the level of concern wasn’t as high a Ukraine, because it was perceived as a problem particular to a failing state.) Syria is a civil war. Yemen is kind of a civil war.
But Ukraine is a sovereign state that was just outright invaded by a country intent on conquering it. That is a very rare event nowadays; even when an imperial power attacks a weak country, like the USA does every now and then, they never intend on annexing it and the target is often a failing state. Ukraine is just being attacked because Russia wants it (Russia has a variety of other excuses they cycle through but they’re obviously bullshit.)
This is, obviously, incredibly concerning to every other nation-state that is not a big military power. It’s a threat to the world order and the fundamental stability of the planet we live on in a way that the Syrian civil war or some kerfuffle inside a nation’s borders is not. This terrifies countries like Poland, Latvia and Azerbaijan, and is concerning to other small countries as well. The fundamental principle that a nation-state has a right to exist in its borders is a bedrock principle of international order.
This. The combination of sanctions and destruction of Russia’s conventional military capability will cripple them for a generation. And many in Russia can clearly see this.
They have an opportunity to scapegoat Putin - put all the blame on him, withdraw the army and claim it was all the work of a single madman. At best, they can hope to keep Crimea, but even that might be in doubt at this point.
The Ukrainians have captured a Russian lieutenant colonel, Alexander Olegovich Koshel.
He’s the head of an information and psychological warfare group. The Russians tried to free him, but failed.
Yes.
It’s absolutely concerning to countries like Georgia for example.
Having a very clear “bad side” and “good side” also helps. In many of the other current wars, it’s not always clear, at least without really digging into the details, who to cheer for. Ukraine is the underdog, a democracy, and the invaded party. Russia is acting as a bully, is headed by a bully, and hasn’t put forth anything remotely justifying the invasion. Contrast that with Syria, where Assad is on one side and a host of unsavory actors at least partially make up the other. It doesn’t make the plight of civilians any less tragic, but it certainly makes it harder to get the average American to care about it in the same way as they do about the situation in Ukraine.
At this point, any deal we make with a new Russian government has to include effectively demilitarizing Russia. I have no idea how we can do that, but they’ve proven they can’t be trusted with any significant offensive capabilities.
I could see us letting them keep enough nukes to deter an outright invasion of Russia itself, but the current level of “Destroy the world” nukes they have is no longer an acceptable situation. China only has about 300 nukes deployed, and that’s sufficient to defend them. Let’s tell Russia they can have that many.
Hell, they’re going to be so strapped for cash, they might embrace no longer having to pay to maintain 6000 nukes.
And not just a democracy; a democracy that was actually improving itself. It got rid of a terrible government, and was making strides towards eliminating rampant corruption in Ukraine. They weren’t there yet, but it looked like they might make it.
And that’s part of why Russia invaded them. Russia can’t tolerate a neighbor who is showing the world that democracy can actually work. And that’s the single biggest reason why we need to help Ukraine. If Russia gets away with this, it just lends credence to their argument that democracies are weak and doomed to failure.
I read recently that some American soldiers who were veterans of the war in Iraq were volunteering to head over to Ukraine because they wanted to fight for a “good war” for once.
We saw a story on a German news channel about a village on the Georgia-Russia border where Russia has been slowly encroaching on Georgian territory. No shots are being fired, but the Georgians will wake up in the morning and find some of the fences have been moved under cover of night, shifting the makeshift border at Georgia’s expense, bit by bit, section by section. Over the course of years, the marked border line has moved by a few hundred meters.
The Georgians will try to replace the fences, of course, but often Russian military police descend upon them and make arrests, claiming to enforce border security. Occasionally, Russian soldiers outright trespass into Georgian territory, grab a random isolated person, and just kidnap them back into Russia. Either way, the Georgian is held for hours or days until a “fine” is paid, which presumably goes straight into the pockets of local officials for vodka money.
The Georgians are unhappy (in a resigned, unsurprised kind of way) that the West has been ignoring (or is unaware of) Russia’s years of low-grade provocation at the border, but they expressed faint hope that the escalation in Ukraine might finally call the world’s attention to Russian aggression all along its frontier, and that this awareness might, eventually, bring some kind of peace.
Now might be a good time for the Georgians to assert themselves in terms of the border with Russia. They are in a tough spot politically at the moment, and I think are watching the situation carefully to see when the time is right.
Frankly, every country who wants part of Russia should do so right now. Georgia should press its border, China should take some of Siberia, Japan should take the Kuriles. Even Mongolia should move its fences a bit, for laughs.
By doing so it would suddenly alleviate all the pressure in Ukraine as Russia is forced to divert forces east.
Well, TBF they’ve demonstrated they haven’t said capability, not what it takes to wage modern warfare, anyway. It’s just that the demonstration has been very, very expensive.
Oh, they’ve proven that they can blow stuff up, destroy billions of dollars in infrastructure and kill lots of civilians. That’s reason enough to take their toys away.
In a Parts Unknown episode, Bourdain visited Georgia and specifically went to this place to chat with the locals, who confirmed that things have been happening much as you describe.