I think it’s fairly safe to say that the invasion of Ukraine hasn’t gone the way that Putin (or anyone else for that matter) had expected it to. Will this lack of apparent military might embolden any other countries or regions to change their approach to dealing with Russia?
Russia has fought in Ukraine with extreme ineptitude and seems unable to achieve its objectives. On the other hand, it has inflicted catastrophic damage and has no compunctions about causing the deaths of civilians or, indeed, its own troops.
So if the question is, for instance, is this a good time for Georgia to try to take back Abkhazia? I would say no.
But it might be a good time for insurgencies in the annexed areas to up their game. If the Ukraine military prevails, there will be a lot of caches of unused weapons of insurrection left over that might find their way to those disputed territories.
I don’t think it will. Ironically, Russia didn’t, and other than Ukraine and Georgia still doesn’t, have any real enemies along it’s border. They don’t really need to worry about being invaded by the European countries (Finland, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania). China and North Korea are allies. Kazakhstan in the same boat as far as being an authoritarian country who’s leader is more interested in oppressing his own people than invading a much larger neighbor. I’m not sure what the situation is with Mongolia, but I doubt Russia has anything to worry about from them either. AFAIK that about covers the Russian land borders.
ETA: I forgot that there is also a tiny border with Norway, which would be in the same situation as the Baltic borders.
Could Ukraine see this as a good opportunity to reclaim Crimea?
That depends on what day of the week it is.
With allies like that you don’t need no enemies.
Neither do you need them when your Head of State is called Vladimir der Giftzwerg Putin.
Giftzwerg: Poison Dwarf or Poisonous Dwarf, that is what they called him when he was a KGB officer in Dresden, GDR, before the wall fell. Cite (in German).
The Russian military action ( there are lots of ways to phrase it ) in Ukraine is not failing. So far at least. It was actually very quick to establish it’s initial objectives. Just getting things to where it wanted. It also quickly took out most targets distant from the ground forces. Those targets being things that would lend support to the Ukraine forces.
The overall pace of the operation has slowed due to the repeatedly said self imposed conditions of not killing civilians or destroying non military infrastructure. Ukraine has a large portion of ethnic Russians and not anti Russian people. Particularly in the Donbass.
Russian forces got to their positions around Kiev extremely fast. They also took open territory along the southeast areas quickly. They are sitting outside civilian areas on purpose. That looks like they are stalled. But they are intentionally paused.
They have reinforced the forces in the Donbass regions with material. And appear to be coming in from the northeast and south east behind the Ukraine forces that massed on the borders of the Donbass for what was to be an attack on those regions. That seems to be the real trigger of this mess.
It appears the forces round Kiev were to keep western Ukraine forces around that area and away from supporting Donbass forces.
The Russian forces may have encountered more resistance and losses than they wished. But not more than they can handle.
The endgame is to have a neutral Ukraine. Ukraine has a lot of Russian folks. Especially in the east. To most likely have an after action population of Ukrainians and Russian/Ukrainians be somewhat amenable to that. You do not want to kill massive amounts of them or destroy their country.
Russia is muting it’s force and tactics to hopefully have that outcome. Who knows if it will happen.
This is demonstrably untrue.
This is demonstrably untrue.
Demonstrably untrue.
Demonstrably untrue.
Demonstrably untrue.
This may have been true before Russia invaded and started indiscriminately annihilating the country and its people, but it is no longer true.
Demonstrably untrue.
Demonstrably untrue.
The fact that the future in Ukraine is murky is the first wholly true statement in this entire post.
Have you not seen what’s been done to Mariupol? Have you not heard of the hundreds of civilian corpses being discovered in previously Russian-held areas, some with their hands tied, just as at Katyn 1940?
Do you seriously believe anyone is fooled by Russia’s lies?
Well, Kedikat seems to have been fooled, for one.
Kedikat, your bias and your ignorance both appear in your very first point, where you talk about “self imposed conditions of not killing civilians or destroying non military infrastructure”. As others have pointed out, Russia has not been observing either of these restrictions. But how can you possibly imagine that these are “self-imposed conditions”? Attacks on civilians and on civilian infrastructure are banned by numerous treaties by which Russia is bound. This is the kind of basic knowledge that, frankly, is difficult for anyone to avoid acquiring if they have the remotest interest in such matters.
This is just not true and there is lots of evidence available to disprove all of it.
After Russia leaves, Ukraine will now have a host of foreign fighters in its country who came to kill Russian, but who now have the potential to further destabilize Ukraine. If I were Ukraine, I would try to encourage these fighters to move on to Chechnya to take the fight in to Russia’s borders.
It’s hard to imagine Russia ever being welcomed again into Europe, certainly not with Putin as its leader.
When someone gets every statement wronger than I could manage on purpose I must wonder why. Your name seems to be a Turkish-English pun, this makes no sense.
And now I see reports emerging of rapes - something in which the Red Army has a previous record.
And while we’re on the subject of lies, who was it who insisted Russian troop movements were just routine exercises and dismissed all warnings about possible invasion as just fantasies?
It is a war.
If it’s not failing why are the Russians retreating from around Kyiv and other cities?
Uh… WTF?
Plenty of documentation of the deliberate destruction of civilian housing, churches, hospitals full of patients. Streets full of people lying dead. Video of people attempting to flee the fighting being killed in the street, old people, women, children killed and left to rot. Mass graves with the hands of the dead tied behind their back and shot in the head.
Many of whom are now anti-Russia because they’re getting bombed and shot. There is no sign the Russians are sparing “ethnic Russians” and Russian speakers from indiscriminate slaughter. Kherson is a majority-Russian city and yet Russia is bombing it to pieces. Mariupol was Russian-dominant and the Russians have besieged the city, bombed everything, and is now starving those ethnic Russians to death, when they aren’t shooting dead those attempting flee.
No, they got stuck in the mud.
Also, the idiots arranged themselves in long convoys where all the Ukrainians had to do to halt them is take out the first and last vehicles in the line. Which they did. Because the Russian army is run by idiots and the Ukrainian one is not.
You mean… through the Chernobyl exclusion zone? The most radiation-polluted territory on earth? Without giving their guys any sort of protective gear or even basic information about the area hazards. So they wound up having to withdraw when their guys came down with radiation sickness.
Really? Seven generals dead of acute lead poisoning to the skull. Commanders fragged by their troops running tanks over them. Retreat from Kyiv and the western part of Ukraine. Leaving their own dead behind to rot.
Ukraine was already neutral. It was no threat to Russia. This was a land and resource grab and a sop to Putin’s paranoia.
Fewer than it did - the Russians are killing Ukrainians without distinction.
What you are describing will NOT happen because Russia IS killing massive amounts of people without regard to ethnicity or what language they speak. It is NOT “muting” its force or tactics. It is butchering people and destroying entire cities.
Stop watching RT. It is even more full of lies than Fox News.
Putin is a vicious child.
He will retaliate against the World.
Mass shipments of RPGs & Grail antiaircraft missiles to insurgents may be expected.
I’m going to come back to this, because an official Russian state information agency has published a new overview laying out the rationale for the attack on Ukraine and the objectives to be achieved.
https://twitter.com/sumlenny/status/1510910740261134338
Direct quotes:
“Ukraine must pay for its guilt towards Russia. It must be treated as an enemy, and therefore may develop only in dependency to Russia. No ‘Marshall plan’ may happen. No ‘neutrality’ either ideological or practical. … The history has proven: Ukraine may not exist as a national state. Any attempt to create it leads to Nazism. Ukrainism is an artificial anti-Russian construct. … De-banderisation is not enough… Denazification of Ukraine must be De-Europisation of it.”
“De-banderisation” is a reference to Stepan Bandera, an enormously controversial figure in 20th century Ukrainian history. In this context, it is a double reference — both to Bandera’s efforts in the 1950s to fight Soviet influence over Ukraine, as well as to his collaboration with Nazi Germany and his ultra-nationalist and anti-semitic viewpoints. In other words, it’s saying that any assertion of Ukrainian independence from Russia is inextricably tied up with Nazism, and that the two beliefs cannot be separated. This is delusional nonsense, of course, but that’s the Russian argument.
So that tells you what the article is actually saying with this statement: “Nazis [i.e. anyone who stands against Russia] who took weapons, must be killed in numbers as much as possible. … Not just the elites, the majority of the people are guilty, they are passive Nazis, Nazi enablers. They supported these elites and must be punished.”
Anyone who opposes Russia’s agenda for Ukraine is a Nazi and must be killed. Period.
This is the endgame — the slaughter of Ukrainians and the destruction of Ukraine as an independent nation. If you don’t believe my quotes, you can get the article and read it yourself, and see the unedited words of the Russian government justifying itself to the Russian people. This is not a fringe outlet, either — RIA is a major government news service. This is 100% the official voice of the Russian state.
And you won’t find this article on any of your Putin-loving networks.
While the outlying areas perhaps want independence, I really don’t see anybody wanting to invade to capture Russia itself. I could see China going for Mongolia, Japan for the various islands and such, but Great Mother Russia herself, I don’t think anybody actually wants that huge headache. Especially after all the war losses - Ukraine will want reparations [which I consider well deserved.]]
And I still haven’t been able to get in touch with my friend Sasha, so I fear he is definitely dead. Asshole Russians.
I"m just going to repeat this post from Cervaise, so that you can’t miss it Kedikat:
To make it clear; The goal of Russia now is Genocide of the Ukranian people. That’s it. That’s all. To repeat Russian propaganda now is to help and enable them to commit full scale genocide of an entire culture and nation.
I’m sure you don’t intend to do that. So please stop.
Direct quotes:
“Ukraine must pay for its guilt towards Russia. It must be treated as an enemy, and therefore may develop only in dependency to Russia. No ‘Marshall plan’ may happen. No ‘neutrality’ either ideological or practical. … The history has proven: Ukraine may not exist as a national state. Any attempt to create it leads to Nazism. Ukrainism is an artificial anti-Russian construct. … De-banderisation is not enough… Denazification of Ukraine must be De-Europisation of it.”
“De-banderisation” is a reference to Stepan Bandera, an enormously controversial figure in 20th century Ukrainian history. In this context, it is a double reference — both to Bandera’s efforts in the 1950s to fight Soviet influence over Ukraine, as well as to his collaboration with Nazi Germany and his ultra-nationalist and anti-semitic viewpoints. In other words, it’s saying that any assertion of Ukrainian independence from Russia is inextricably tied up with Nazism, and that the two beliefs cannot be separated. This is delusional nonsense, of course, but that’s the Russian argument.
So that tells you what the article is actually saying with this statement: “Nazis [i.e. anyone who stands against Russia] who took weapons, must be killed in numbers as much as possible. … Not just the elites, the majority of the people are guilty, they are passive Nazis, Nazi enablers. They supported these elites and must be punished.”
Anyone who opposes Russia’s agenda for Ukraine is a Nazi and must be killed. Period.
This is the endgame — the slaughter of Ukrainians and the destruction of Ukraine as an independent nation. If you don’t believe my quotes, you can get the article and read it yourself, and see the unedited words of the Russian government justifying itself to the Russian people. This is not a fringe outlet, either — RIA is a major government news service. This is 100% the official voice of the Russian state.
And you won’t find this article on any of your Putin-loving networks.
Don’t ignore that China would be happy to take over the Russian Far East. There are already millions of Chinese in the Russian Far East.