I saw the door thing. Quite entertaining. No Techno House for you!
But the usual caveat applies - Russia is taking more time and greater losses than it expected to win this invasion. That doesn’t mean they won’t win - in fact, the only way to save any face after such humiliation is to win, even if it’s ultimately a Pyrrhic victory.
. . . armed with sunflower seeds.
And I wonder (and I fully admit it is an unworthy and dark thought) whether a Pyrrhic victory for Putin that ultimately damns him in the long run may be the “best” way out for the wider world.
It is ultimately a terrible thought because it requires the Ukrainians suffer horribly and for thousands to die with no actual guarantee of their future.
I was surprised that anyone didn’t recognize that highly specific question as rhetorical, as a way to draw unpleasant parallels between Putin and a previous disastrous tyrant.
Given what we have seen of the Russian army and equipment so far, the thought of Putin moving on Poland or Romania or Slovakia after this is laughable. And even he could see this.
I think so too. What he is experiencing now should be a hell of a deterrent against further expansionist thinking.
My big concern is that a Putin chewing over that reality after completely failing in Ukraine will be subject to different motivations from one living with a burdensome “success”.
That “success” comes at the price of Ukrainian lives and liberty of course, as I say, a horrible thought and a terrible price.
Okay, if we’re just playing “What if…?” games, what if the US offers free nuclear landmines to every country with a land border with Russia, on the condition that they are permanently emplaced somewhere along that border that the Russians would likely use as an invasion route? Sort of a Nuclear Maginot Line.
This isn’t a threat to Russia itself. Absent a delivery system, they can’t be used offensively. They only pose a threat to Russian assets that have already invaded a sovereign nation.
I mean, if we’re going to try to out-crazy Putin, we’re going to have to step up our game.
I wonder how much of this is because of the general decline in traditional journalism? Back in the 90s and early 00s, CNN had correspondents all over the place. A lot of those people no longer work for CNN. Most of the video I’ve seen has been things like traffic cameras, cell phone footage, and the like.
Hell, I saw one video of the same guy in Ukraine giving updates in a whole bunch of different languages, because he was working for several different news agencies all over the world. Impressive on a personal level, but suggestive of the fact that there just aren’t that many real journalists left out there.
It’s clear that the Russian military at this point is largely a paper tiger.
The only reason they’re not getting completely curb-stomped right now is that they’re a particularly large paper tiger. But that won’t last. Every tank they lose is a tank they can’t replace. They can keep that up for a while if they’re determined to do that, but they can’t keep it up forever.
I don’t know… I’d have thought that phenomenon would really have affected print journalism more than broadcast; people still do go to the CNN website, even if they’re not actually tuning in to CNN. Same thing for NBC, CBS, BBC, etc…
I think part of it may be some sort of operational security restrictions; what the Ukrainian government is releasing seems to be nearly all human interest stuff and minor victories. They’re not publishing casualties, where the fighting is occurring, and so on. Contrast this with say… the 2003 Invasion of Iraq, where the DoD had daily briefings with the press where they described what was going on, where, and how. It’s basically a different sort of information control- one approach is to not divulge anything, and the other is to release a lot, but what YOU want released. I suspect the Russians and Ukrainians are mostly doing the former, and leaving troop movements, clashes, and so on, up to the individual journalists to try and piece together from their places on the ground.
Think about it; we haven’t seen a single interview with Ukrainian or Russian troops yet, or reporters showing them in battle, etc… it’s all Tik-Tok and Twitter videos and posts showing tiny snips of what’s going on.
I’m thinking it’s more of a situation where any one journalist can only see so far without some help from the authorities.
There’s reporting that Russia is considering conscription of those arrested for protesting. I’m not really ready to give it that much weight yet as I’ve only seen a tweet regarding it and there’s no reason to think that it’s any different than a stupid piece of dead on arrival introduced legislation like you see in any body. That said, I can’t believe they’d actually send anyone to the front if this did happen. I’d have to suspect that it would be a way to execute protestors under the color of military justice after a drumhead court martial.
Ya, those are going to make excellent soldiers to send into a different country.
Or even if they have them working in Russia behind the scenes… talk about introducing a bunch of “soldiers” who are intent on throwing monkey wrenches into the machinery of war.
Yes, this isn’t the Great Patriotic War, when a penal battalion’s troops could count on being shot whether they went forward or backward on the field of battle.
I’m sure Ukrainians would be thrilled to have entire units of protestors surrender and defect to them.
I mean, given Russia’s demographics, they’re running out of people as it is. Last thing they need to do is send more of their young people out of the country.
Google analytics showed that the word “emigration” saw a spike in searches over the last week while countless Telegram channels have been set up in which worried Russians are discussing ways to leave the country.
Andrei Kolesnikov, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment, said it was expected that the country would see an exodus of its “quality working force” who will sense there is “no future” for them in Russia.
“This exodus will mean the degradation of the nation. The country doesn’t have a very large pool of talented people. Without them, Russia can’t develop itself,” Kolesnikov said
Recipe for world disaster.
Step 1: Nuclear landmines…
Note also that a light artillery barrage will clear those quickly. Leaving the host nation with massive falllout.
Not to mention the fun terrorists would have.
Well, I did say, “I mean, if we’re going to try to out-crazy Putin, we’re going to have to step up our game.”
But we can engineer around those problems. Like I said, a nuclear Maginot Line. The actual Maginot Line had pop-up turrets to protect the guns when they weren’t firing.
Build something similar for the nuke landmines. A secure bunker, but designed to pop up to the surface just before detonation. I’m sure there’s plenty of engineers who’d love to work on such a design challenge.
We could even make that part of our psychological war efforts. Link it to a massive alarm/public address system that blares out, “Warning! Warning! Nuclear Landmine deploying! Evacuate the area to avoid fatal irradiation and death!” Any troops approaching ground zero would have to think twice about it when they hear that!
As for Terrorists, we can make these things just absolutely massive. Since they’re never intended to move once installed, use that as part of the counter-terrorist measures. Make it so you’d need something like this to move it around.
Nuclear land mines, you just know they don’t make sense!
Land mines, just regular ones took decades to get out of Viet Nam. Land mines are a pariah of warfare that last for ever.
Nuclear? Really? Are you joking?
This may seem like mindless pedantry, but it is really better to keep in mind that it is more can’t replace quickly or cheaply. The Russian arms industry is large and sophisticated. Even with current production issues Russia can spit out maybe 100-150 modern armored vehicles/year (very rough guess based on stated production quotas published online). What’s holding them back is primarily money, which Russia will quickly start running a bit short on. In this particular conflict it doesn’t much matter - they can replace stuff faster than Ukraine and they have far more of it to begin with. And they have a ton of older crap still mothballed, probably in mostly pretty shitty condition.
It’s just crippling losses will weaken them overall for several years in a conflict with someone else until they can replace those losses. As noted the progress of this war should probably greatly reduce fears of Russia getting cute with the Baltics or anyone else in the near future.
Sure. And a lot of that old crap COULD be refurbished and even upgraded. They have done that with a number of their older equipment, from MBTs to APCs. But it’s been money that has prevented them from either building truly new stuff, new/old designs (with the modern upgrades), or even upgrading existing equipment…and that’s not likely to change in the current environment. Certainly, they COULD build a hundred or modern armored vehicles a year (or whatever it turns out to be), but even when they weren’t under heavy sanctions they were hard-pressed to do so.
This gets into how much are they actually losing, and what types? I’ve heard that, for instance, the Russian air force hasn’t really made a huge contribution, especially with their most modern fighters or attack aircraft, relying instead on things like helicopters and gunships, which have taken more losses. But they can afford to lose those a lot more than their advanced fighters, so it makes sense.
Are you sure? Russia has to make weapons from scratch. I foresee a situation developing where Ukraine just needs to tell the West what they need and in 24 hours it will be waiting for them at the Polish border.