https://archive.is/avbh1
Russia’s success is partly a result of a shifting recruiting message, as it now relentlessly tells would-be soldiers that the war in Ukraine is really a fight against NATO, U.S. officials said. Russian bonuses have also drastically increased. By combining these strategies, Mr. Putin may not need to order a politically unpopular broad draft, U.S. military and intelligence officials say.
dirty tricks like fairly paying your soldiers
Ukraine also drone striked Chechenya lately, i bet this will really discourage Chechens who were per capita most numerous volunteers to that war.
Ukraine also drone striked Chechenya lately
Not really sure of the politics here but it seems they did this trying to play off the fact that Russia has been trying to subjugate Chechnya for the past century, and the current Chechen head Ramzan Kadyrov is a pro-Putin puppet that some Chechens hate. Therefore, by striking a "special forces training center" run by Kadyrov, I'd imagine they'd want to signal support to his detractors and encourage them to continue volunteering in Ukraine to fight against Russia.
Despite this it was indeed a very stupid move because now anyone who is patriotic and doesn't hate Kadyrov would be fucking pissed at this long range attack on their homeland and will probably enlist at greater numbers (the "special forces training center" apparently provided civilians with military skills too).
It is as if your only source on Chechenya was a wiki article about it. How nice of you to call unprecedented era of people and advancement during USSR as part of "Russian Subjugation". Origins of "independent" Chechenya is a coup against its pro-soviet leadership (Checheno-Ingush ASSR under their leader Doku Zavgayev supported the opposition against Yeltsin and the illegal dissolution of USSR). Coup was armed and violent, with murders of communists. New regime was also dumb as hell and do stupid things just for the sake of hating Russia (like adopting latin alphabet). It also wasn't popular, Ingushetia seceded from them and joined the RF, there were also many attempts to depose them, including from their own parliment (govt was in reality just a prowestern military clique). I wouldn't be surprised at all if US immediately started their good old "muslim extremist terrorism" routine (also how many of Chechens later surfaced as members of various pro-US terrorist groups), help by the incredibly indolent actions of Yeltsin, like assassination fo Dudayev which paved the way for really evil fuckers to take the power there.
Even if you look at the history of last century there, Chechens were always divided people. October Revolution, WW2, destruction of USSR, Chechen Wars, current war. And sure as hell the current state of Chechenya is far removed from the worst possible option. Calling Kadyrov "pro-Putin puppet that some Chechens hate" also seems straight up from stormfrontpedia, guy is way more legal than any Chechen leader since Zavgayev and also seems to have more public support than any of them.
It is as if your only source on Chechenya was a wiki article about it.
Well I'm sorry ngl admittedly I read two books about it and I would be happy to learn more about the truth.
The first was that soy book written by some condescending brit that inspired the first dune book (sabers of paradise), about how the russian empire fought a 30 year colonial war to conquer chechnya so they could have ez access to some trade routes/resources. The second was a russian soldier's (arkady babchenko) account of his nightmarish experiences during the 1st and 2nd wars that russia launched to retake chechnya. This is what informed my opinion of the relationship between imperial/modern russia and chechnya being one of attempted subjugation, although it is true that chechnya must have willingly joined the ussr so this is an overall incorrect description.
Calling Kadyrov "pro-Putin puppet that some Chechens hate" also seems straight up from stormfrontpedia
Well that checks out because I got this from NPC consooooming some random video on youtube (in english ofc) from a western news channel one day about how the kremlin "installed the kadyrovs as puppets" (come to think of it they had no source for this and interviewed nobody from chechnya) after russia won the 2nd war. There was also another random soy video on youtube by cnn about how there are anti-kadyrov chechen volunteers who fight on the side of ukraine. Putting the two and two together I got an image of kadyrov as a proxy leader who doesn't have 100% of his citizens behind him.
So could I please know the non-propaganda QRD of the situation? From what I gather already:
There was an anticommunist secessionist coup in chechnya as soon as the USSR dissolved.
The people who did the coup took power, people didn't like them, RF wanted to smash them.
1st chechen war against the government, russia makes tactical blunders and loses.
2nd chechen war, russia wins, the unpopular guys who did the coup were kicked out.
Kadyrov Sr. appointed as leader by the people.
Also what were the reasons behind the 1st coup?
about how the russian empire fought a 30 year colonial war to conquer chechnya
I mean Russian Empire did tried to conquer entire Caucasus since like Peter the Great, and that surely do cause some resentment even today, but considering large part of the region remains in Russia that leave us with one or both of conclusions that: it's mostly irrational russophobia like in Poland or it's been stoked by foreign powers... again like in Poland so if you look at countries around Russia you would notice those that those versions are basically one and the same.
The second was a russian soldier’s (arkady babchenko) account of his nightmarish experiences during the 1st and 2nd wars that russia launched to retake chechnya
I didn't read that, but i would remain very careful about the source. There's a lot of antirussian propaganda being printed even in Russia (yay wonders of private publishing, Lenin and Zhdanov were right about it) and Chechen wars remain one of prime source of that (though Ukraine is replacing it because westerners can't even pretend they care for Chechens) since i don't deny they were hard and brutal.
This is what informed my opinion of the relationship between imperial/modern russia and chechnya being one of attempted subjugation
This is probably when you went incorrect. Russian Empire was, well, an empire which tried to conquer left and right, but back then the world and especially remote places like Chechenya weren't in the imperialist, let alone global imperialist phase of development meaning it was between Russia and Chechenya. In 1991 situation was entirely different though, Russia was a defeated country being plundered by victorious world hegemon and its own compradors but it still had the potential for resurgence. Standard US doctrine (and in fact every hegemonic doctrine since Assyrian Empire) uses places like Chechenya to destabilise regions, and it worked, looking at the wars. First Chechen war was probably a blunder, that could be solved better but it would also required better people at the helm of Russia, however even without the war it could as well turned into local ISIS considering who was in their govt and army and how they held power by sheer force of arms. but then look at what happened after war, Chechenya DID turned into local ISIS, so the 2nd war was in reality about the very same reason that intervention in Georgia in 2008 and SMO in 2022.
So could I please know the non-propaganda QRD of the situation?
This was from my own perspective as i observed the events, publications i have access to in Poland are junk, basically "evil Russia does evil because they are evil".
There was an anticommunist secessionist coup in chechnya as soon as the USSR dissolved.
This is actually even in main wiki article about Chechenya :) Though it was during, not after.
Also what were the reasons behind the 1st coup?
There was ton of fuckups during the destruction of USSR so i don't exactly remember, but likely the same as in other republics. Key point that led to 1st war is that Chechenya didn't legally seceded from USSR like other republics which did but declared independence unilaterally later, and not from USSR but from Russia, probably prompting Yeltsin govt to feel endangered that whatever left of USSR will further disintegrate. As we know they were wrong, Russia didn't further break up even though they lost that war, but the danger was real from that point of view, especially after feeling the embrace of shock therapy.
Given the context you mention, could you explain why so many Chechens volunteered in the first place? Was it poverty?
This entire war was a useless bullshit excuse for NATO countries and arms dealers to dump their military surplus and profit off of the needless slaughter of tens of thousands of people on both sides using Ukranian civilians to fight a proxy war with Putin. This utter waste of life would never have happened if the west didn't interfere in Ukrainian politics in the early 2010s, or allowed peace talks to occur unobstructed between Russia and Ukraine in the early days of the war. Total deaths on both sides now is estimated to be 1 million people and a lot of Ukraine has been destroyed. How fucked is this.
It hasn't even begun to be fucked
Wait until the blowback from shipping Nazis an arsenal
I wonder how much of this is building to a "welp, no point sending military aid to Ukraine anymore, let's redirect it all to Israel" propaganda push.
I'm sure that's a big part of it coupled with the fact that it's becoming impossible to pretend the war is in a stalemate when Ukraine is losing kilometres of territory on daily basis.
At what point was this a stalemate? The eventual outcome was obvious about 2 weeks in. I remember thinking that surely Russia's capacity to actually do the production needed for this war was more important than American financial dominance, but I kept hearing otherwise from all of the news. I was shocked to see that I was clearly right and I was being lied to, again.
This happens to me all of the time. It's like when the news kept telling me that any day now the ghettos of Caracas would rise up and demand the privatization of Venezuela's oil fields. I kept thinking it didn't make any sense and I must be missing something. Turns out I was right again.
It was never a stalemate, but while the war was in the attrition phase calling it a stalemate was a convenient narrative to keep drumming up support for it.
when was it ever a stalemate? is that what they've been deluding themselves with?
Russia has just been bleeding Ukraine and NATO the whole time i thought
Well you see there have been no Big Arrow Movestm for a while, so clearly it is a stalemate and Russia isn't just pursuing a strategy of steady attrition which infinitely favors them.
Stalemate is when one side kidnaps people off the street to die within a month, while the other side uses one year renewable contracts.
"Russia bad, keeps people in military for all year while Ukraine only for month."
how do i know if this is just propaganda to get more money for ukraine
They were going pretty badly even before that, but Kursk stunt was likely the catalyst for an all out collapse we're seeing now.
