The Russian commander of the “Vostok” Battalion fighting in southern Ukraine said on Thursday that Ukraine will not be defeated and suggested that Russia freeze the war along current frontlines.
Alexander Khodakovsky made the candid concession yesterday on his Telegram channel after Russian forces, including his own troops, were devastatingly defeated by Ukrainian marines earlier this week at Urozhaine in the Zaporizhzhia-Donetsk regional border area.
“Can we bring down Ukraine militarily? Now and in the near future, no,” Khodakovsky, a former official of the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic, said yesterday.
“When I talk to myself about our destiny in this war, I mean that we will not crawl forward, like the [Ukrainians], turning everything into [destroyed] Bakhmuts in our path. And, I do not foresee the easy occupation of cities,” he said.
That's outside the separatist regions.
It is Russian-speaking like OP specified, though, as well as Ukraine's 4th largest city.
If they only cared about Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk they had them and could have done nothing new, but they tried to take the whole country and so now here we are.
They never tried to take the whole country. That's just fantasy and doesn't make sense for a dozen reasons.
About two thirds of Dnipro speaks Russian at home, but ethnic Russians are only 25-30% of the population (see "Demographics"). I would imagine this is why the city is predominantly not separatists.
I mean, it used to be more pro Russian, but then Russia changed a lot of minds by actually showing up in 2014.
Riiight.
So you acknowledge it's not part of the separatist regions. Why would Russia want to occupy hostile territory?
And don't take my word (and common sense) for Russia not trying to conquer the whole of Ukraine; that's what U.S. military analysts think. Or are they Russian propagandists?
I wouldn't trust those US Military Analysts!
I don't know, ask the Chechens, or any number of similar ethnic minorities that are part of the last intact European empire. Also, hexbears stop linking me to the same weird compilation of illegible and irrelevant crap.
That link is perfectly legible and incredibly relevant. You just want to pull the "if you don't have sources I demand them and if you do they don't matter" bullshit.
I never demanded sources, because you're right, it's incredibly easy to produce a shitty source. They're mostly useful for uncontroversial things where there's a lot of subject matter experts with no real stake in the exact answers.
If you actually wanted to convince me Russia wasn't trying to conquer Ukraine, I guess you'd have to convince me I don't remember the winter of '22 right. I saw the shit happen, and I can read behind the lines well enough to know that when someone launches a full-scale invasion of a smaller neighbor starting with their capital, they mean to put it under their control, one way or another.
I didn't say you demanded sources; I said you're doing the reddit debatelord bit of "if you don't have sources I demand them and if you do they don't matter." I had already provided a source, so of course it didn't matter.
I see you're still refusing to read that source, which talks in detail about the various parts of the initial months of the war, including the northern attack towards Kiev.
I'll admit I've done that before, but... yeah, it's useless and I found that out. Same story if I gave a source for my thing unprompted. You'd tell me it's just CIA propaganda or something.
I literally can't read it very well. Does it expand on hexbear or something? I guess I could download it and zoom in, but why? You know as well as I do that one magazine photo won't change either of our minds. If Biden himself came out and said it I'd say Biden was wrong. There are no special authorities on Putin's motives.
Now, if you want to avoid being a debatelord, we could just stop now. Debate is useless, I just didn't want to agree by silence.
And you know this because...? It is actually possible to dismiss some unreliable/contradicted sources, accept others, and view more iffy sources with skepticism but not write them off entirely.
It's extremely easy to read on your phone if you zoom in. You also mentioned that you could download it, like a PDF. You just don't want to read it for some reason.
Yeah, I don't buy it. Even if I thought you were a big thinker and not just an internet person, what somebody meant by something is a judgement call, inherently.