Real World Event Discussions

Russia Invades Ukraine. Again

POSTED BY: captaincrunch
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 21:09
VIEWED: 562266
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SIGNYM

Thursday, March 2, 2023 10:53 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
The other nuclear threat you might have missed from Putin’s speech

Easy to miss in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s speech to parliament last week was a glancing reference to the possibility of Russia resuming nuclear testing.

In a surprise move, Putin said that Russia was ready to resume nuclear weapons tests if the US conducted one first.

While most of the media focus has been on Russia suspending its participation in the New START nuclear arms treaty, this announcement was just as significant, with potentially devastating consequences.

It would signify a further step towards escalation in Ukraine by demonstrating Russia’s intent to use nuclear weapons and could begin another, more devastating, nuclear arms race.

https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/02/opinions/russia-nuclear-test-putin-mess
mer/index.html

OMG!!!
Russia might resume nuclear testing if we start testing first!!!

/snicker

Do you realize what a ninny you sound like?

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE someone poor - William Blake

SIGNYM

Thursday, March 2, 2023 11:52 PM

Quote:
NBC Reporter Goes To Crimea, Shocks Viewers By Telling The Truth
Mainstream media correspondents for major US networks rarely, if ever, report from inside Crimea and certainly are nowhere near Russian-held territory in eastern Ukraine. However, this week NBC News chief international correspondent Keir Simmons went to Sevastopol, surrounded by a significant Russian military presence given it is home to the Russian Navy's Black Sea Fleet, and in a live segment admitted that it's not at all realistic Zelensky and Ukrainian forces can ever hope to take Crimea.

This is especially as the "the people there... view themselves as Russian." Simmons noted that "This is the closest that any US news crew has got to the Russian Black Sea Fleet in many many years." He explained that "Vladimir Putin will be determined to defend that port - to not have it take it away from him - he may well do pretty much anything to try to achieve that."

BREAKING: NBC News / MSNBC concedes that Zelensky’s goal of retaking Crimea is unrealistic and dangerous.pic.twitter.com/fb2RCRBHOn
— David Sacks (@DavidSacks) March 1, 2023

"It is a very, very dangerous standoff.. it's hard to see how you reach a negotiation over that. There's military absolutely everywhere, it is a military town," he continued, before saying...

"When for example Victoria Nuland talks about that at the very least we [the US] want Crimea to be demilitarized, I find myself standing there and wondering, how on earth does that happen?"

Ukrainian officials and pro-Kyiv media pundits are said to be outraged at the segment, given it repeatedly and bluntly referenced that Crimeans see themselves as Russians. Even a separate write-up filed days earlier from inside Crimea and posted to NBC's website included the following:

MORE AT https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/msnbc-reporter-goes-crimea-shoc
ks-viewers-telling-truth

Quote:
A view from Crimea, the Russian-annexed territory Ukraine is hoping to seize back
By Keir Simmons, Natasha Lebedeva and Tatyana Chistikova NBC

SEVASTOPOL, Crimea —
...
Crimea is a territory teeming with Russian forces.
Nowhere is that truer than in Sevastopol, a city that has long embodied naval might in the Russian imagination.

Fishermen watch as Russia’s Black Sea Fleet docks and sails. “Special Military Operation for the future of Russia,” a billboard declares en route to the port. Sevastopol’s “Victory” cinema now also sports a massive Z. Roads like Lenin Street are lined with red, white and blue Russian Federation flags.

This is not Russia...

But Praskovya Baranova, 73, speaks Russian, feels Russian and lives here.
"This is our land,” she said Monday. “We will all put on uniforms and will go to the border to defend ourselves.”Her comments echoed those of most people NBC News spoke to in Crimea this week. While the government of President Vladimir Putin has cracked down on free speech everywhere,

Uh huh.

Quote:
including in Crimea, the peninsula’s majority Russian-speaking population was considered more pro-Moscow than in other parts of Ukraine when it was annexed.

...
But Zelenskyy has said Crimea is one of the reasons he wants more powerful weapons from the United States and NATO. “Crimea is our land, our territory,” he said in January. "Give us your weapons — we will return what is ours." And if Ukraine does try to take the peninsula back by force as its leaders have promised, many of the 2.4 million people living here will be caught in the middle.

“He wouldn’t take it,” Ruslan Nalgiev, 36, said. “Even if there is a war here, we would still defend Sevastopol. Because, if we don’t defend our motherland, we would become slaves. No one wants to become a slave.”
...
Doubts persist, however, about whether the U.S. and other allies are willing to give Ukraine the firepower it may need for such an ambitious operation — especially given the Kremlin’s stance that Crimea represents a red line.

“The

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THG

Friday, March 3, 2023 12:37 AM

T

Hundreds US Bradley Combat Vehicles arrive in Ukraine

SIGNYM

Friday, March 3, 2023 1:07 AM

"They burn, just like any other"

Kiev has already lost thousands of armored vehicles. What difference will a a few hundred make?

/snicker

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE someone poor - William Blake

SIGNYM

Friday, March 3, 2023 5:28 AM

Big Serge is an infrequent poster but ALWAYS worth reading.

Quote:
Schrodinger’s Offensive
A ramble about force design, Moldova, and a fortress on the steppe
Big Serge
Mar 1
Winter War on the Steppe

Where is the big Russian offensive? This is, at the moment, the million dollar question that inevitably intrudes on any discussion of the war’s current course. It is probably not surprising (to those of us that are familiar with human nature, at least) that this question becomes a Rorschach test in which everybody sees their own prior assumptions about the Russian military.

The answers to this question do indeed vary widely. On one extreme, there are those who believe that hundreds of thousands of Russian troops are prepared to launch an enormous “big arrow” offensive at any moment. We see this both from commentators like retired US Colonel Douglas MacGregor and from some Ukrainian sources who are likely trying to foment a sense of urgency to extract more aid from the west. On the other extreme, we have those who claim that the Russian military is so depleted that there will be no offensive at any point whatsoever. There are also some in the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda western intelligentsia, like the Nuland Institute for the Study of War or Michael Koffman, who argue that the offensive has already begun but is so lame and weak that nobody noticed.

Okay. So either a giant offensive will happen any minute now (it might have just started while I was typing that), or it will never happen at all, or it already happened, or perhaps it’s in a state of quantum superposition in which it has both succeeded and failed, at least until we open the box.

A thorny issue indeed. There is, at the moment, a great deal of important and intense combat occurring in many different sectors of front - but what relation do these operations have to any big arrow action by the Russians? Is this an underwhelming entrée or an appetizer?

I would like to suggest an alternative to all these theories, because what the world needs most right now is more opinions.

AND with sense of humor!

Quote:
At the moment, Russia has the initiative across the front. Ukraine’s reserves are in a tenuous state right now (especially given their politically imposed mandate to try and accumulate a force for an offensive against the land bridge to Crimea), and Russia is driving high intensity combat in important sectors right now.

These operations, I would argue, serve three different purposes at once. First and foremost, they are valuable shaping operations in their own right that have important implications for launching future operations. Secondly, they function essentially as spoiling attacks in that they keep the burn rate at the front high and degrade Ukraine’s ability to form reserves. As a sort of metaphor for this, there are already rumors that some of Ukraine’s new Leopard tanks will be sent into combat around Bakhmut rather than held in reserve for a future offensive. Whether the Leopard rumor is true or not, in manpower terms Ukraine continues to pump units into Bakhmut in an unconscionable waste of men. Third and finally, all the combat in the east is occurring under an umbrella where Russia’s supply lines and ISR are robust, creating conditions where Ukraine continues to trade at abysmal loss ratios.

The synthesis of all these points is that Russia is currently driving the attrition of the Ukrainian army and denying Ukraine any chance at regaining operational initiative, while at the same time pursuing important shaping objectives. I believe this is occurring against the backdrop of moderate, but not catastrophic organizational disorder and restructuring in the Russian armed forces, which are delaying its readiness to launch a large scale offensive. In other words, the current pace of Russian operations supports the overall attrition of Ukrainian manpower and implies that there is no need to rush an ambitious operation until organizational issues have been sorted out.

In the remainder of t

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SECOND

Friday, March 3, 2023 6:10 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
The other nuclear threat you might have missed from Putin’s speech

Easy to miss in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s speech to parliament last week was a glancing reference to the possibility of Russia resuming nuclear testing.

In a surprise move, Putin said that Russia was ready to resume nuclear weapons tests if the US conducted one first.

While most of the media focus has been on Russia suspending its participation in the New START nuclear arms treaty, this announcement was just as significant, with potentially devastating consequences.

It would signify a further step towards escalation in Ukraine by demonstrating Russia’s intent to use nuclear weapons and could begin another, more devastating, nuclear arms race.

https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/02/opinions/russia-nuclear-test-putin-mess
mer/index.html
OMG!!!
Russia might resume nuclear testing if we start testing first!!!

/snicker

Do you realize what a ninny you sound like?

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE someone poor - William Blake

Signym, you are sounding very North Korean. On TV and in print, they are dripping with contempt for the US.

North Korea is a mini-Russia. Or Russia is a giant-North Korea. Six of one, half dozen of the other.

A few examples:

North Korea abandons nuclear freeze pledge, blames 'brutal' U.S. sanctions
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-northkorea-nuclear-usa/north-korea-
abandons-nuclear-freeze-pledge-blames-brutal-u-s-sanctions-idUSKBN1ZK1FX

North Korea blames ‘reckless military hysteria’ of US and allies for missile tests
https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/07/asia/north-korea-missile-report-monday-
intl-hnk/index.html

N Korea warns of ‘all-out’ nuclear response to US ‘aggression’
North Korea has promised to ‘resolutely react’ to US threat of nuclear weapons use with its own nuclear capabilities.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/11/19/north-korea-warns-of-all-out
-nuclear-response-to-us-provocation

North Korea’s Kim Jong-un blames US for being ‘root cause’ of tensions
The North Korean leader also accused Seoul of ‘hypocrisy’ and threatening peace in the peninsula with its military build-up
In a speech at a military exhibition, Kim said his country was only increasing its weapons in self-defence and not to start a war
https://web.archive.org/web/20211104164413/https://www.scmp.com/news/a
sia/east-asia/article/3152014/north-koreas-kim-jong-un-blames-us-being-root-cause-tensions

It is easy to see why North Korea is impoverished compared to South Korea. Russians have not yet realized that imitating North Korea is not the path to peace and economic prosperity for them. Perhaps Russians should look more closely at the difference between how the Korean countries go about their daily business?

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

SECOND

Friday, March 3, 2023 6:27 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

Big Serge is an infrequent poster but ALWAYS worth reading.
AND with a sense of humor!
MORE AT https://bigserge.substack.com/p/russo-ukrainian-war-schrodingers

Eliot Cohen is an infrequent poster with zero sense of humor and is always worth reading. He wrote: The Shortest Path to Peace

Supporting and arming Ukraine, and accelerating the collapse of the Russian military, is the most realistic way to end the conflict.

Flawed judgments about military history helped fuel bad policy in the run-up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and through the conflict’s early phases. Bad historical analogies look to do the same now, in the debate over how to bring this war to some kind of durable termination.

One line of argument, advanced by some French and German leaders in recent discussions with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, according to The Wall Street Journal, is that sooner or later Russia and Ukraine can reconcile like Germany and France after World War II. (A German government spokesperson later denied the report, but this is hardly a new recommendation.) It is a terrible analogy. Reconciliation may have arrived a couple of decades after the Second World War, but that conflict had ended with the aggressor not merely defeated but devastated. French troops had occupied Germany, including a part of its former capital. Clear borders between the two countries had been established and German society, if not thoroughly de-Nazified, had moved a long way in that direction.

The Russia-Ukraine case is very different. Russia, as unambiguous an aggressor as was Nazi Germany in 1940, will not, even under the most optimistic assumptions, see its cities flattened, its regime overthrown, its military disbanded for 10 years and only reconstructed thereafter under the supervision of the Western democracies. And the idea that the fighting will conclude with Russia again accepting (as Moscow did three decades ago) the legitimacy of Ukraine’s 1991 borders is barely conceivable.

To suppose that any real peace between Russia and Ukraine is possible within the next decade, after the horrors of the invasion—rape, torture, murder, the wholesale kidnapping of children—is simply naive. Nor are the Arab-Israeli truces a plausible model for the future. Those truces lasted, respectively, seven years (1949–56), 11 years (1956–67), six years (1967–73), and nine years (1973–82). And that does not count the cross-border raids, aerial dogfights, terrorist attacks, and up-to-the-edge-of-war mobilization crises during those truces. In the Middle East, the great powers were able to put brakes on their clients, and the country whose existence was up for dispute, Israel, eventually became the strongest power.

A rather more popular analogy is the truce after the Korean War, which has lasted for a good 70 years. But here as well the comparison is too flimsy to hold up to a closer look. Stalin approved the original North Korean invasion of the South. Only after he died, in March 1953, did the new Soviet leadership indicate that it was willing to bring the conflict to an end. In July of that year, the armistice was finally signed. Not to put too fine a point on it, although Vladimir Putin’s demise would probably make it easier to conclude the conflict in Ukraine, he is not dead yet.

The analogy breaks down in many other ways, as well. For one thing, China and North Korea couldn’t have imagined victory after early 1951. In August of that year American and United Nations ground forces, coupled with the South Korean army, numbered more than 500,000 troops, half of them American. The front line was about the length that the demilitarized zone is today, stretching through 150 miles of mountainous, and therefore defensible, terrain. The lines had been restored roughly to the prewar demarcation between the South and North.

In Ukraine, the active front lines are about 600 miles in length, but the Russia-Ukraine border is much longer than that. Ukraine must defend not a narrow, mounta

SIGNYM

Friday, March 3, 2023 9:33 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

Big Serge is an infrequent poster but ALWAYS worth reading.
AND with a sense of humor!
MORE AT https://bigserge.substack.com/p/russo-ukrainian-war-schrodingers

SECOND: Eliot Cohen is an infrequent poster with zero sense of humor and is always worth reading. He wrote:

Quote:
The Shortest Path to Peace

Supporting and arming Ukraine, and accelerating the collapse of the Russian military, is the most realistic way to end the conflict.

Hahaha!
He IS funny!
/snark

*****

He stupid.

Altho I WILL say that I did hear about a study that claimed the most durable civil war conflict resolutions leading to the longest peace are ones in which one side is thoroughly trounced. So maybe the real answer is for Russia to obliterate Ukraine.

Not sure if that's correct: Germany was thoroughly trounced in WWI but the terms of peace were so onerous that they led almost immediately (historically speaking) to WWII. OTOH Germany and Japan were destroyed in WWII but forced to rebuild in the American model, with their political and military establishments neutered and THAT'S led to a lasting peace.

Maybe Ukraine needs to be neutered.

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE someone poor - William Blake

SECOND

Friday, March 3, 2023 10:33 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

Hahaha!
He IS funny!
/snark

*****

He stupid.

Altho I WILL say that I did hear about a study that claimed the most durable civil war conflict resolutions leading to the longest peace are ones in which one side is thoroughly trounced. So maybe the real answer is for Russia to obliterate Ukraine.

Not sure if that's correct: Germany was thoroughly trounced in WWI but the terms of peace were so onerous that it led to WWII. OTOH Germany and Japan were destroyed in WWII but forced to rebuild in the American model, with their political and military establishments neutered and THAT'S led to a lasting peace.

Maybe Ukraine needs to be neutered.

Russia needs to have the things it fears most happen to it. That is what it took to knock sense into Italy, Germany and Japan. Today those people are more prosperous and more numerous than they would be if the Axis Powers had won. Absolute rulers absolutely are the worst at making their countries prosper. See North Korea, which has had a series of irreplaceable Kims, compared to South Korea, which has had a series of very replaceable leaders. Which Korea is more prosperous, Signym?

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

SIGNYM

Friday, March 3, 2023 11:33 PM

And you* pretend that your* goal isn't to destroy Russia?

OMFG you're such a liar. Nobody can believe a word you post, you contradict yourself (i.e. lie) every post.

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE someone poor - William Blake