iirc, some of the Sea Peoples maybe have come from Crimea. It's time for them to take it back.
James Cameron had yet another insight into the future!!
They were roundly defeated by a GI Joe strike force back in the 80's
you know what go for it. I don't think they could mess things up more
welcome to another war that would definitely be over in a few months a year ago
We'll be home in time for Christmas!
is one of those phrases that crops up again and again in European history, both colonial and continental. It's practically asking fate to guarantee a years-long conflict.
:inconceivable: you fell victim to one of the classic blunders
it was a reasonable assumption at the start of ww1 as the thinking was that Germany would run out of nitrates for explosives. Then Haber comes in and figures out how to make nitrates artificially at about the worst possible time for everyone in Europe
Tbh I think Putin is probably regretting the fuck out of all of this, he was probably duped by his generals into thinking it's gonna be over in a few months. Also Ukraine was duped into thinking they were gonna get proper support from the West and here we are now.
Well Russians were boasting it was gonna be over by summer 2022 or whatever so it's definitely not all going according to plan. I agree that long term Ukraine doesn't have a chance but it's harder than the Russians were expecting for sure.
Russian randos. Never saw official Russian government sources claiming it was all gonna be over by summer. Stop taking the claims of random Russian commenters so seriously as if they have any extra knowledge or power
Pretty sure there were pretty high up people claiming that. Might be misremembering can't really find any sources from a few minutes of googling.
The Ukrainians are now admitting that the hammer is about to fall on them.
don't they say that every other week
Nah, they usually brag about how Putler is about to run out of missiles or how some overengineered wunderwaffe from Burgerland will turn the tide.
The Ukrainians are now admitting that the hammer is about to fall on them
The UA Defence Minister (Reznikov) who gave that quote about a 500k strong spring offensive has a poor track record of telling the truth. He recently claimed that Russia was covertly launching a second wave of mobilization, despite no such thing happening, and is often in the news hyping up the threat of Russian forces as a justification for why Ukraine needs more western weapons.
500 thousand is going to be the approximate number of all Russian forces deployed to Ukraine after all conscripts are trained, and there is no way all of them are going to launch an attack at once. Both because it'd be stupid and because the actual number of soldiers available for any offensive will be significantly lower than the total given the need to maintain reserves and defend.
Maybe the spring will bring a Russian capture of Bahkmut and further gains in the Kramatorsk/Slovyansk direction, but most accounts of the ongoing fighting makes it seem more likely that we'll see a continuation of the World War 1 style trench warfare than anything like an Operation Bagration. Regardless, if Russian leadership think the strategic defeat of the Ukrainian Army is imminent their relatively modest and conciliatory statements regarding peace don't show it.
Destroying the Ukrainian army and inducing their government into unconditional surrendering is by far and away the most humiliating outcome for the west and beneficial for Russia. If Russia had the capacity to do that in the next few months, I can't see any reason why they wouldn't as I don't think the prospects of blowing up a few Leopards and F-16s in the future is worth continuing a costly and destructive war.
Destroying the Ukrainian army and inducing their government into unconditional surrendering is by far and away the most humiliating outcome for the west and beneficial for Russia..
It really isn't. Say tomorrow the Russians just annihilate the Ukrainian army and waltz into Kiev. Congratulations, you've won a decades long insurgency!
Not sure what "proper" support from the west would be. They've done everything short of sending in regular troops. As far as Putin, I think he had to know that he was never going to de-nazify Ukraine, because it's full of them and the invasion just made more, and he probably never truly believed he would demilitarize it, either. I think Russia has accomplished what it set out to do, establish a buffer between itself and NATO on its souther border.
They have secured a land bridge to Crimea, unblocked the water to Crimea, destroyed Azov Battalion & retaken a bunch of territory in the Donbas. They have achieved or are achieving all their goals.
The only people who think Russia is losing are people who believe Russia’s goal is to annex all of Ukraine
I think their ideal would be to annex all of "Novorossiya". So they're at like 50% right now. Though I can see them scaling back that goal to just the four oblasts they have.
If literally killing every single Nazi doesn't denazify a country, what would even work? A cultural shift perpetually reinforced from the outside? I think that's just religion...
Basically the only way to de-nazify is to do what the Soviets did in East Germany. Massive culling of the state apparatuses, large scale re-education, sending all the open Nazis to prison or execution.
Think that the current "representative" "democracy" form of Russia is still capable of that?
They would have occupy the nation for decades and annex it, so I don’t think they are going to be able to, no.
However I won’t cry over nationalist battalions getting liquidated left and right. Russia will likely break the political and organized power of the NATO-backed Nazi organizations, but there will be lingering Nazi ideology in Ukraine (especially Western Ukraine) for a very long time
As fun as it is to talk about Russian military dunking on American over-built and over-priced weapons, we have to remember that any large bureaucracy in a capitalist country is going to inevitably be taken over by dumbasses.
Land connection from Crimea to the districts that are now effectively Russian is a win though, the circumstances and side effects might be pretty bad though.
(another meme that pretends the war is between Ukraine and Russia when it's between NATO and the entire global south at this point)
(another meme that ignores that the only reason Ukraine is still fighting is because NATO keeps sabotaging the peace process and the entirety of NATO is arming, training, and funding, and fighting alongside the AFU)
i suppose it's cute in that it makes fun of the type of people who treat this as a spectator sport. the truth is american capitalist hegemony is in rapid decline and is desperately lashing out by trying to destabilize and balkanize former soviet contries (like ukraine and russia) to more easily pull them into their geopolitical orbit, subjugate their labor markets to imperial capital, and extract superprofits through privatization, deregulation, austerity, and loan debt. America is like late Qing China and late Imperial Britain, but with 6000 nukes. It's depressing and scary.
I get the nato bit but how is it between them and the whole of the global south?
87% of world doesn't support West's new cold war on Russia. Two ex US diplomats admitted 87% of the world’s population refuses to enforce the West’s sanctions on Russia, showing neutrality over the proxy war in Ukraine. They said “the outbreak of Cold War II” has led countries “to become increasingly multi-aligned,” especially in the Global South. In a Newsweek op-ed titled “Nearly 90 Percent of the World Isn’t Following Us on Ukraine,” ex diplomats Michael Gfoeller and David H. Rundell wrote:
While the United States and its closest allies in Europe and Asia have imposed tough economic sanctions on Moscow, 87 percent of the world’s population has declined to follow us. Economic sanctions have united our adversaries in shared resistance. Less predictably, the outbreak of Cold War II, has also led countries that were once partners or non-aligned to become increasingly multi-aligned.
The "West" (NATO/EU/US/Australia/New Zealand) openly opposes rest of world in UN votes for fairer economic system, equality, sustainable development. Latin America refuses to send Ukraine weapons, despite US pressure. US is preparing for war on China, and soon. BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, is building a financial counter-hegemony that challenges US dollar, and even the (former?) US puppet state Saudi Arabia is considering selling oil in other currencies: Financial multipolarity. The Entire world votes 185 to 2 against blockade of Cuba - US and Israel are rogue states at UN. An EU leader admitted the new cold war is not ‘democracy vs autocracy’: Many 'authoritarian regimes on our side' . An EU leader confessed 'our prosperity was based on China & Russia': cheap energy, low-paid labor, big market, and that the disappearance of this dynamic has necessitated this imperialism. The lashing out at the loss of financial and military hegemony over the globe. In neocolonial rant, and EU leader said Europe is 'garden' superior to rest of world's barbaric 'jungle' . The West killed a potential peace deal in the Ukraine. Russia and Ukraine agreed to a negotiated settlement to end the conflict in April, but British Prime Minister Boris Johnson intervened to stop the peace deal, and the US and EU escalated the proxy war to try to weaken Moscow. China forgave 23 loans in 17 African countries, debunking the debt trap myth while the USA continues to coup countries (Ukraine in 2014 for example) who refuse their poisonous IMF loans. I hope this shows you that it really is the west vs. the rest. Russia/Ukraine is just a flashpoint for a global war between the imperial core and the imperial periphery.
I don't see neoliberalism wining in any war situation due to how it predates on its own productive capabilities by massive rent extraction on its own productive forces at home in very real terms a long term war with a near peer rival stresses the neoliberal structure in ways never done before its purely theoretical what happens long term, industry state captlism has been tested in this way before and it did quite well.
The ties the Russians have to countries like India and Brazil as well as the dozens of other countries in the middle east, Africa and South America. America is trying to entice global south countries to shift their economies away from Russia because they’re fucking them less than the Americans are.
There's basically only 4 non-Western countries (Japan, South Korea, Georgia, Turkey) that aren't friendly with Russia. Westerners really think the world revolves around them. Just because they don't like Russia doesn't mean the rest of the world shares their opinion.
I can't speak for Indonesia (although a glance at the Wikipedia article on Indonesia-Russia relations seems to suggest at least cordial relations), but India and Brazil are at least extremely friendly with Russia. Like, they're all part of BRICS, so there's absolutely nothing to gain from India and Brazil being hostile to Russia. India in particular has a long history of cooperation with Russia dating back to the 1960s when the Soviet Union supported India during its wars with China and Pakistan. They didn't even bother to condemn Russian invasion in the UN. And for Brazil, the most anti-Russian thing they did was condemn them in the UN, but actual relations, under both Bolsonaro and Lula, have been positive.
And as for Chile, I forgot about Boric being a bootlicking stooge for the US.
its pretty funny watching both sides in this conflict with completely different reports
I feel like we may be in an era of military technology that is similar to the eve of WWI. Like Russia learned the hard way that all of the maneuver warfare that we developed in the mid 20th century has been rendered obsolete by all of the man-portable anti-air and anti-armor weapons that were developed in the late 20th century, resulting in any war between peer or near-peer opponents inevitably bogging down the way that this one has because all of the ways we know to break open a battle line have been answered. A hundred years of military advancement and we're right back to trenches and artillery barrages.
A hundred years of military advancement and we’re right back to trenches and artillery barrages.
I dunno I'm certainly not as vocal about this stuff as other people because I'm very much a wait and see type of person, but I think I wouldn't characterize it this way. It seems to me we're seeing the new horizon of combat in this conflict, it's not a strict regression. Hypersonic missiles, the uh complexity of the international supply lines for the MIC, evolution of drone warfare and EWAR, social media and war reporting propaganda unlike anything we've seen, the breakdown of the old blocs and alliances, etc.
I've been thinking the same but with regards to drones as the modern equivalent of the machine gun. Both drones and machine guns were used extensively in colonial wars where their victims had extremely limited access to those same weapons. Tactics and strategies evolved around this, as well as a false sense of superiority due to their battlefield advantages. Now peers are facing off against each other, both with access to drones, and we're seeing how that turns tanks and armoured vehicles into coffins
Well, they have hypersonic missiles that kind of eliminate anti air. I guess this war is kinda like how the US Civil War prefigured WW1 or the Boer War did, just no one at the top paid any attention to how it had changed.
I've intentionally been avoided actually reading about the war and this meme is exactly some conversations I've accidentally read.
It reminds me of the reporting about the Syrian civil war. All news reports either described a situation where the rebels or Assad were going to win and take over the country next week. No-one even suggested an outcome similar to what actually happened. It seems like war reporting as it currently stands has almost no predictive value.
If the front stays about the same, Russia "wins." Thinking anyone will win soon is silly, though.
