Perhaps they’re at the stage of clinging on, but with scrabbling feet provoking an ominous tumbling of pebbles as the branch they’re clinging on to starts to creak…
Or is that just wishful thinking?
It might well be true as to the current manner in which the war is being fought.
In the hanging branch metaphor the only possible outcome is the person falls however far to whatever is below.
In the Russian war, they can still do lots of other nihilistic things instead of simply imploding and retreating home. Do a total conventional scorched earth on the way out. Launch nukes for the fun of it. Invade Poland. Launch offensives from Kaliningrad. Stop all sales of energy and food to the outside world and pull an autarkic move a la NK. etc.
None of those moves will will be great military or economic successes. But all will make the worldwide situation worse for everyone who is not Putin or his inner circle. And that’s all that matters. To him.
My bottom line and YMMV of course:
They will find a way to make the world worse before it starts getting better. This dumb war is just Act 1, not the whole show.
Yeah, while there are a few people who genuinely want to kill, those are folks that you really don’t want to have as soldiers, and a competent military will try to weed them out. Obviously sometimes you have to kill anyway, but good soldiers (like any good people) will try to avoid that if possible.
Plus, of course, less ammo used, fewer casualties on your side, better propaganda value, etc.
off-topic hidden by What Exit?
That’s not what I learned from this documentary
I get the impression that the ability and willingness to kill is less important for the Russian front line than just the availability to die.
Moderating:
Beyond the Arlo Guthrie clip, I think the conversation is moving beyond breaking news, please start a new thread if you wish, but end it here.
@abcdefghij, please keep the clips out that are just jokes.
In Russia, the first movie set in the Ukraine war has been released in cinemas, but it has flopped.
Here’s the movie’s plot:
Along much the same lines, there’s a new Russian history textbook out. It talks all about the great work of Comrade Stalin, and Russia’s courageous military action against Ukraine. Propaganda for the youth, a proud Soviet tradition. Story here: Inside Putin's push to rewrite Russian history in favor of his war in Ukraine
An interesting fact I learned from it is that Nikita Khrushchev‘s great-granddaughter, named Nina Khrushcheva, is a professor of international affairs at the New School in New York.
A Ukrainian source uses a headline which tries to put a positive spin on a bad situation
But a western website which links to the SAME SOURCE, uses a headline which is much more blunt , and painful:
So which is true?
Are Ukrainian soldiers being overpowered , or just “bearing the brunt” ?
Whichever one is true…it is not good news.
Russia still has the ability to fight well, and for a long,long time.
The two are not mutually exclusive. One can both bear the brunt of an assault—even relatively well, all things considered—and yet still be worn down and overpowered by superior forces.
that’s what I meant—you can try to spin the words, but it doesn’t work; The final result is the same:
Ukraine is losing the battle in Kharkiv Oblast.
As the soldier in the article says: “Everything is not like what you read on the news”
I’ll just point out that there is a vast difference between losing an individual battle and losing the war.
And of course a new site called The Kyiv Independent is going to try to spin everything positive for Ukraine.
If we had reports from the front lines of Russian troops, they’d be expressing far more despair. By all accounts of facts, Ukraine is slowly but surely destroying the Russian ability to fight and (slowly) regaining territory. War is logistics and morale and Ukraine is winning by far on both counts.
@chappachula’s constant pessimism tells us no more now than it did at the beginning of Russia’s invasion.
Did you actually read the articles? Your first one talks in depth about limits to, and shortfalls in, NATO training. Namely that much of it assumes a combined arms strategy Ukraine can’t replicate with their forces. Aside from how you perceived the headline, it’s not a rosy article.
But, as previously stated, war is rarely an exercise in 100% successes and battles get lost even as you grind towards a win.
A minor rant about front-line reports in war:
Front line reports are useful in showing the terrible challenges and suffering that soldiers experience at war. But they tell us almost nothing about how a war is going overall. That a soldier somewhere feels overwhelmed says nothing about the overall war effort. Even day-to-day territory changes tell us virtually nothing about how an overall war is going (barring massive breakthroughs and overwhelming victories, ala the 1990 Gulf War). The way to understand how a war is going overall is (once again) to look at the measures of logistics and morale. Morale is very hard to measure in real time, so logistics is probably a better real-time measure of a war effort. Ukraine is winning because it’s continuing to be resupplied by the West, and Russia is losing because they have very little resupply capability. Weapons and ammunition are only a part of it – just as important are food, medicine, gear (i.e. boots), shelter, repair parts, and much more. Ukraine is way ahead in all of these, largely because of Western assistance. That’s why they will win. I don’t know how quickly, but they will win unless this overall advantage in logistics and morale disappears, and it’s hard to see how that would occur.
Have Biden and Putin talked? We will never know I suppose.
If a certain election in 2024 goes a particular way, the logistics advantage could disappear. That’s all I’m going to say here. Further discussion belongs in P&E.
Moderating:
Agreed, no more of that here in this thread.
If you judged George Washington’s army by their withdrawals and the territory they lost, you’d conclude that there was no way they could win the war. But win it they did, because, while Washington kept losing battles, he was really, really good at losing battles. All of those battles he “lost” cost the Redcoats more, in ways they couldn’t afford to sustain, than they cost the Revolutionaries, until eventually the Brits just collapsed.
along those lines:
a (obv. biased - he is UKR) reflection of Tendar … quite long but well worth the read
he may be overy optimistic in a few respects, but overall it is a fairly level-headed contemplation of the situation