I don’t see the West being willing to engage and lose lives over Ukraine. There’s just too much at stake, and not enough to gain by engaging in open warfare with Russian troops over Ukraine.
I just caught a flash of news this morning, and one of the shots was aerial view of the traffic jams of people trying to leave whichever city was closest to the fighting [didn’t catch where, sorry]
I feel for them, I really do HOWEVER as a number of friends of my parents and grandparents were immigrants more recently than our family [Mayflower, we sort of have been here for a while] were folks of the opinion of ‘fuck my belongings, fuck my friends, I am getting out while the getting is good’ and bailed after selling off everything they could and getting steerage class over, many of the employees of my families mills were eastern European and Jewish - they came over in the pogrom era of 1900ish. I will also note that mrAru and I have commented that we are of the same outlook, bail early and bail fast and live. If you know that asshole is moving troops closer and closer, we would be sort of sidling off the other direction as circumspectly as possible with whatever portable goods we consider important.
I am really not looking forward to this at all. Oddly, mrAru works in a shop that reconditions/repairs Sikorsky military helicopters so he is not going to be out of work any time soon =(
My gut feel or worry, and I really hope I’m wrong, is that things go in such a way that it becomes unavoidable.
I’m curious to see how far west Russia goes. Do they want 50% of Ukraine? 70%? 100%?
The Rhine.The channel. London. The Patomac.
They will go as far as they thing they can get away with.
At the risk of stating the obvious, I will be shocked if Russia gets to stay in the G20 after this. Russia should be treated as a pariah state from this point forward.
Yeah, I agree. They will almost certainly have to give up much of the southeast up to the Dnieper at least. They simply don’t have the anti-air assets to protect any sort of line that far east, and trying to do so would be futile. What they COULD do is to detach some of their man-portable ATGM teams to hide out and ambush Russian logistics assets once the main body has passed through, though these would be almost suicide missions. But trying to defend that far forward they would lose. They will probably lose even defending further west when they can do so with some protection.
The problem with that is twofold.
- It would mean losing most of their industry.
- UAV are very good at picking up hidden ATGM teams and the Russians have a lot of experience im doing that from Syria.
Absolutely. There simply aren’t any good or easy things Ukraine could do. All their options go from bad to worse. I HOPE they have been moving at least some of their vital assets out of southeastern Ukraine since January and preparing better defenses further west, but no idea if that’s true. To a degree, the Ukrainians seemed to be in denial that this all could or would even happen, so hopefully, that was them just playing up to the press while they prepared.
Yeah trying to redeploy west NOW under the russian guns would be practically impossible, If they didn’t do it before they are not going to last long.
Just heard that the Russians have taken over Chernobyl. Why on earth put their own troops in that area?
Well, the reviews have been glowing.
Question: Can/will/should all of the countries opposed to Putin’s Putsch ban all flights of Russian aircraft to their countries, and basically tell Russians they can’t leave the house?
I think there should be a total economic embargo on Russia.
It’s on the approaches to Kiev.
Yeah but still, how many of those troops are going to die of cancer in the next 10 years?
None (at least not due to nuke radiation), unless they decide to live there. Chernobyl is a tourist attraction, now.
About 5000 cases per million. Which is the same as for any other group of 18-45 year old males.
The radiation is fairly tiny. People live in the zone. It takes years of exposure to see a slight increase in the cancer risk.
Unless they are making their people dance naked before the elephants foot, they should be fine.
(Ok, Putin might make Navalnhy do that).
Say, you know how cars and other things are very expensive now because of a chip shortage? Now that selling chips to Russia is banned, maybe we could have them rerouted here (and to Japan, and to South Korea).
Lots of the-raw materials for many electronics come from….Russia.
Also I doubt China will sanction Russia and they make chips too.