…if you have access to the modern weapons needed to kill them.
How well would Ukraine be doing if they didn’t have Javelins and the like? Tanks and ships are still useful when invading an unsupported lesser power.
So the lesson should be, make sure your target really is isolated from international support before you invade.
Putin probably thought that was true of Ukraine, but then, Putin seems to be believing his own bullshit lately. So I guess that’s the other lesson? Don’t believe your own bullshit.
Because Putin also thinks that NATO and western democracy in general is weak and feckless. That we’re great at talking tough in peacetime, but will run away when the Manly Men start actually shooting.
The only way Putin’s war in Ukraine makes any sense at all is if Putin really thought Ukraine would just roll over for him, and that no one outside Ukraine would risk helping Ukraine.
Which is more or less what happened in 2014. He based his assessment on that, as well as his general disregard for the West. Russia apparently lacked good humint on Ukrainian intentions.
It takes a really long time to fix a severely damaged warship. A big cruiser like Moskva is basically like a very large apartment building except it floats and is actually more complicated and that ain’t a thing you fix quickly. From the perspective of this war, Moskva might as well have sank.
Of course, he managed to forget that he’d also spent years prior to that preparing the ground in Crimea, so that it would be easy for Russian troops to invade, and hard for Ukrainian troops to defend. This involved both overt and covert support for “Russian Separatists” in the area, and fixing the vote to make it look like a majority of residents wanted Russia to intervene. There was just enough BS in the air that, by the time people realized what was going on, Russia was in control on the ground, and getting them out would have been extremely costly.
He didn’t do any of that for the rest of Ukraine. In fact, rather than having a puppet government acting like it wanted Russian intervention, the government of Ukraine had become more independent, with rooting out just that sort of pro-Russian corruption being a major goal of the new government. This was the sort of change that would make an invasion harder, not easier. And yet, somehow none of that penetrated deeply enough to affect Putin’s calculus.
Aside from the fact I have no desire for Russian sailors to die - the important kill is the ship - it’s pretty likely that the casualties were far lower than that.
When HMS Sheffield was hit by an Exocet in the Falklands War, I think 19, 20 men were killed. The reason the ship was lost is that the common effect of an anti-ship missile is starting fires that cannot be controlled, resulting in - as we saw with Moskva - the crew having to get in the lifeboats. HMS Glamorgan was knocked out of the war by an Exocet that killed 14 men. A few years later USS Stark was hit by TWO Exocets; 37 men died. Stark was not lost but was knocked out of action for a long time.
Yep. One common defect in the thought process of those immersed in his sort of social/political culture… even back in Communist times their propagandists would always be going on about “the decadent Capitalists”. There’s a long standing thread to look down on the West as morally inferior. Especially those of a liberal democratic inclination (because, of course, “what kind of man just accepts losing?”) So in their eyes we perfidiously advance by corrupting other societies into embracing our degenerate values because we’re not manly enough to prevail by fear.
One of the reasons Russia fought a number of wars with Turkey (then the Ottoman Empire) in the 18th/19th century was the Russian desire for a ‘warm-weather’ port with direct access to the Mediterranean and the subsequent oceans. Between most of their ports being in the North and via the Baltic or those in the south affected by Turkey’s control of the Straits, Russia has never been a major naval power, either military or commercial (and no, didn’t forget Vladivostok, besides being cold it’s thousands of miles from the main population/commerce centers). And remember the Rus were establishing that port in Syria not so long ago…
I suspect that should Russia (however improbable this appears now) manages to take over Ukraine, pressure on Turkey to ‘come to an agreement’ will increase. Like Lord Palmerston said many years ago and is still true today (IMHO–YMMV):
The perverted thought process is really fascinating. They are a repressive tyranny and kleptocracy rife with corruption with barely even a pretense of democracy, they just invaded a peaceful sovereign nation for no reason except territorial gain and empire-building and committed terrible atrocities against innocent civilians and children in the process, and constantly lie to their own people about that and everything else, and we in the West are supposed to be the morally inferior ones! The only way this works is if their entire belief system is built on a complete web of lies, totally disconnected from reality.
Heavy cloud cover and storms in the area. The US does have images but so far hasn’t tweeted any while sitting on the shitter. [Images might reveal US capabilities, classified information]