Russia Invades Ukraine. Again
POSTED BY: captaincrunch
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 21:09
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Kremlin Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov stated that Russian President Vladimir Putin's annual live "Direct Line" forum and annual press conference will occur in tandem on an unspecified date by the end of the year, potentially to set conditions to cancel the events as the Kremlin sees fit.[23] The Kremlin canceled Putin's annual press conference in December 2022, which ISW assessed was likely in order to preempt the informational risks of Putin addressing difficult questions about the war and international situation live.[24] Similarly, in early June of 2023, Putin postponed the "Direct Line" until November or December 2023.[25] The vagueness with which Peskov announced the two live events suggests that the Kremlin may desire to have the flexibility to cancel them if they deem the informational risks of holding them to be too great. The Kremlin may hope for a wider operational victory in Ukraine to frame both the "Direct Line" and the press conference in a positive light and is likely trying to leave itself room to mitigate if Russian forces cannot secure meaningful battlefield success in Ukraine in the coming month.
https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campai
gn-assessment-november-9-2023
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Ukraine’s Getting Nearly 200 Leopard 1A5 Tanks. Now It Needs New Tank Tactics.
By David Axe | Nov 9, 2023, 10:16pm EST
https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2023/11/09/ukraines-getting-near
ly-200-leopard-1a5-tanks-now-it-needs-new-tank-tactics/?sh=3f4e9a74dbe5
The Leopard 1s just keep coming.
In the nine months since a German-Danish-Dutch consortium announced it would donate to Ukraine’s war effort an initial batch of 100 German-made Leopard 1A5 tanks, the consortium—as well as Denmark acting alone — have added 95 Leopard 1s to the total.
The most recent pledge, by Germany last week, includes an extra 25 tanks. The first 20 or so Leopard 1A5s already have arrived in Ukraine, where they apparently equip a company within the new 44th Mechanized Brigade.
Ukraine now is set to receive no fewer than 195 of the lightweight, 1980s-vintage Leopard 1A5s. They by far will be Ukraine’s most numerous Western-style tanks, and will be outnumbered in the Ukrainian inventory only by Ukraine’s homemade T-64s and by various T-72 models that Ukraine either inherited from the Soviet Union in 1991 or recently has acquired from its European allies.
All those Leopard 1A5s represent an opportunity, albeit a risky one. Five months into its widely-anticipated counteroffensive, Ukraine has lost at least 13 of its best Leopard 2 tanks out of just 85 of the heavy tanks its allies have pledged, and 71 that they’ve delivered.
Something must replace those tanks. There are no indications any of NATO’s allies are willing to part with any more of their Leopard 2s; nor are there are any signs the United Kingdom will add to the 14 Challenger 2 tanks it has donated to Ukraine — one of which the Ukrainians already have lost.
Yes, the United States easily could double, triple or multiply by 10 the 31 M-1 tanks it has pledged, but Republicans in the U.S. Congress — increasingly apologists for the regime of Russian president Vladimir Putin — could slow or even block additional U.S. military aid to Ukraine.
Unless and until Ukraine can resume construction of its own tanks — an unlikely prospect given the massive investment that would be necessary — German Leopard 1s, Czech T-72s and various Soviet-style tanks from Poland are the only tanks Ukraine can count on receiving in large numbers.
Which means Kyiv must figure out how best to use these tanks: mitigating their weaknesses and leveraging their strengths. For the nearly 200 Leopard 1A5s, enough for three battalions, that means deploying the tanks where they can move quickly, stay behind cover and shoot at range.
“The advantage of the Leopard over, for example, the T-64 is in accuracy, range and speed,” a Ukrainian tank gunner named Oleksiy told ArmyInform.
It’s true: the 40-ton, four-person Leopard 1A5 is a fast and accurate shooter. It’s not for no reason that one Danish tank instructor advised his Ukrainian trainees to fight while on the move. The Leopard 1 “is made for driving and shooting,” the instructor said.
German tank-maker Krauss-Maffei Wegmann gave the Leopard 1A5 what was, at the time, one of the world’s leading tank guns: the rifled 105-millimeter L7 from Royal Ordnance in the United Kingdom. Forty years later, the L7 still is an effective weapon, if a bit less powerful than the latest 120-millimeter guns are.
But it’s not the gun itself that makes the Leopard 1A5 such an excellent shooter. It’s the tank’s whole integrated combat system, which includes the gun and its stabilizers, the gunner’s optics and the tank’s computerized fire-control system.
On ex-German and ex-Danish Leopard 1A5s, the FCS is the EMES-18, which also equips the much heavier Leopard 2. Ex-Belgian Leopard 1A5s, which account for 30 of Ukraine’s pledged Leopard 1s, have unique SABCA fire-controls.
The EMES-18 after all these years still is one of the best tank fire-controls. It combines a laser rangefinder with a ballistic computer. To aim the gun while stationary, the gunner — peering through his optics — uses a joystick to lay his crosshairs on the target, fires the laser
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Putin’s New Story About the War in Ukraine
How Russian Propaganda Went From “Denazification” to Fighting the West
By Mikhail Zygar | November 10, 2023
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/ukraine/putins-new-story-about-war-ukra
ine
Since invading Ukraine in February 2022, Russia has changed the story it tells itself about the war. In the beginning, Russian President Vladimir Putin explained to the Russian public and the world that he considered an invasion of Ukraine justified because there was a need to “denazify” the country. Putin claimed that a Nazi junta had seized power in Kyiv and was terrorizing the people, especially those who spoke Russian. To rescue Ukraine, Putin argued, Russian troops had once again been dispatched to save the world from Nazis.
But today you don’t hear much talk about Nazis. After the Russian military suffered a series of defeats at the outset of the war, the Kremlin quickly adjusted its propaganda. It was no longer helpful to assert that Moscow was fighting Ukrainian Nazis after the Russian military failed to take Kyiv. Being defeated by Ukrainians was too humiliating for Putin’s propagandists. Therefore, Russia changed the enemy it was fighting: the Kremlin began to say that Russia was at war with NATO and even the United States. In this telling, the war in Ukraine was a proxy war, and the Ukrainians were in the hands of “overseas puppet masters.” For Russians, this was a familiar story, reawakening the Cold War mindset of us versus them.
As the message has changed, so has the audience. Putin is no longer speaking only to his people, trying to justify an ill-conceived war. Today, he is competing with the West for allies across the developing world, where his allegations of Western hypocrisy are resonating. And in recent weeks, Putin has found new material to exploit: the United States’ unconditional support for Israel in its war in the Gaza Strip.
DENAZIFICATION
When Putin announced his goal of denazifying Ukraine, it was not the first time he and his propagandists had described Ukrainian nationalists as fascists. In 2014, when a popular uprising forced Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych from office, Putin and his supporters on Russian television claimed that there had been an armed coup in Kyiv, launched by radical nationalists. It was a laughable falsehood: if an anti-constitutional junta had seized power, why did the new government in Ukraine hold democratic elections in 2019, and how could the incumbent, President Petro Poroshenko, lose if he was an autocratic leader? And if the government in Kyiv was made up of Nazis, why did it have a president who was Jewish, Volodymyr Zelensky? But Putin doesn’t let facts get in the way of a good story.
In 2022, in the early months of the war, denouncing the Ukrainian “Nazis” was mandatory for Russian officials and news anchors. Vladimir Solovyov, one of the most odious Russian propagandists, established a tradition: every day in his Telegram channel, he would add “Denazification is inevitable!” as the final sentence for the Russian army’s daily report about the casualties on the frontlines.
But it soon became clear that the Russian public wasn’t buying this message. On June 16, 2022, at a pro-war rally organized by the authorities of Dalnegorsk, a small provincial town in the far east, the mayor, Alexandr Terebilov, tried to quote Putin, but stumbled three times on the Russian word for “denazification,” at one point unintentionally calling for the “denazification of Russia.” As the crowd broke into laughter, he corrected himself, but it was too late: the video went viral online. The furious mayor tried to punish the journalist who uploaded the video by sending him to the army, but the journalist left the city before he could be caught.
After this scandal, the Kremlin conducted a special study that revealed that the majority of Russians neither understood the term “denazification” nor believed that it applied to Ukraine. The study revealed that post-Soviet society is very pragmatic, if not cynical. The Russian public does
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So it doesn't get lost in SECOND'S blizzard of shit.
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
I think these Russian milbloggers - assuming that they're actually Russian - don't take their MoD stated goals seriously. They make the same mistake that Dima (Military Summary Channel) makes: they interpret everything in terms of territory taken or lost.
There`s a reason why the MoD recounts a list of Ukrainian losses every day on every active part of the front, and NOT meters gained or lost: they're trying to reduce the Ukrainian military, NOT take territory. Once the Kiev army collapses, the Russian army can roll thru as much of Ukraine as they want, almost without opposition.
At the moment Russians are pushing on most of the front because the Ukrainian army has gone mostly on defense. It's almost like a cat pawing a mouse to make it run some more. Ugly and brutal, but nobody ever said war was was fun, especially when your side is doing most of the dying.
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger
Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Putin’s New Story About the War in Ukraine
How Russian Propaganda Went From “Denazification” to Fighting the West
By Mikhail Zygar | November 10,
Yanno, if I'm trying to convince you that blue is brown, or that something isn't happeing when it is, and you're an "educated" crowd, i may have to spend pages and pages torturing logic to convince you.
But I don't have to spend pages and pages on tortured logic about this. If this war was just a case of Russia v Ukraine that would be one story. But since the west has gone "all in" - until now, when we ran out of weapons and money- it's obvious to everyone except the most dunderheaded that it's now The Collective West v Russia. The story has chnaged bc the facts on the ground have changed. "WE" that is, the collective west, have moved closer and closer to a state of open warfare with Russia.
Capisce?
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger
Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM
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Quote:Signym, it is pretty obvious that neither you nor the EU nor the USA knows much about winning a war. When was the last time any of them won? You don't win by gradually increasing the pressure on your enemy. You win by hitting your enemy as hard as you can at their weakest spot with no warning. Politicians like the idea of being a good sport as if war is a contest at the Olympics. If you decide to conserve your strength by slowly increasing force until you win in a sportsmanlike fashion, you are gonna be in deep trouble unless you can keep increasing force for decades. See just about every war that lasted more than 2 years at how elected politicians screw up wars. They never want to hit anything really hard because that might offend the voters by educating them at how brutal war is.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Putin’s New Story About the War in Ukraine
How Russian Propaganda Went From “Denazification” to Fighting the West
By Mikhail Zygar | November 10,
Yanno, if I'm trying to convince you that blue is brown, or that something isn't happeing when it is, and you're an "educated" crowd, i may have to spend pages and pages torturing logic to convince you.
But I don't have to spend pages and pages on tortured logic about this. If this war was just a case of Russia v Ukraine that would be one story. But since the west has gone "all in" - until now, when we ran out of weapons and money- it's obvious to everyone except the most dunderheaded that it's now The Collective West v Russia. The story has chnaged bc the facts on the ground have changed. "WE" that is, the collective west, have moved closer and closer to a state of open warfare with Russia.
Capisce?
Sergej Sumlenny @sumlenny tweeted
Nico is right. This war can be swiftly won by Ukraine if we finally started to deliver enough weapons, not hoarding them. If we supported Ukraine with 10% of what we’ve sent to the USSR during WW2 to defeat Hitler (10,000s planes, tanks etc), Putin would have been in jail by now.
https://twitter.com/sumlenny/status/1610192222095396865
Stalemate in Ukraine Is the Hesitant West’s Fault
By Boris Bondarev, Russian diplomat who resigned in protest at the invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2023/11/09/stalemate-in-ukraine-is-the-
hesitant-wests-fault-a83049
The commander of Ukraine’s Armed Forces, General Valery Zaluzhny, admitted in a recent interview with The Economist that expectations of a successful Ukrainian counteroffensive were, to put it mildly, overly optimistic. The Ukrainians have run into a powerful line of Russian defense, and the war has finally turned into one of attrition. Ukraine urgently needs new solutions, a new strategy and a ready supply of high-tech weaponry to advance its position.
This sad situation has not come as a surprise to anyone following the course of the war. The Ukrainian army learned a lot and achieved impressive victories in 2022. Since then, they have been unable to repeat those successes. To a large extent, the problem lies in the chronic under-equipping of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, which stems from the indecisiveness, and often cowardice, of Kyiv's Western partners to supply the desperately needed arms and equipment.
As has been said many times — and what Western leaders themselves recognize — President Vladimir Putin's attack on Ukraine is not a local conflict rooted in territorial disputes between two neighboring states. It is an attack on the very foundations of the existing world order, and an aggressive attempt to rewrite the rules that underpin it.
Putin's ideal world is one of “war of all against all,” where might makes right and powerful nations form spheres of influence, ensconcing themselves within an entourage of satellite states. This forms the basis of multipolarity, a concept that Russian diplomacy has peddled for decades. In this effort, Moscow finds support among allies like China, Iran and N
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Quote:How many times has Russia threatened to nuke the USA? Thousands of times. How many years has Russia threatened war against the USA? Every year. That is the blizzard of shit-talking from Russia.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
So it doesn't get lost in SECOND'S blizzard of shit.
Putin Wants the West to Give Up on Ukraine
By Anne Applebaum | November 10, 2023, 7:30 AM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/11/us-ukraine-support-p
utin-defeat/675953/
The West Must Defeat Russia
Putin hasn’t given up his plans. He thinks Ukraine’s allies will lose interest.
They planned to take Kyiv in three days, the rest of Ukraine in six weeks.
More than 21 months later, Russian forces have withdrawn from half the territory they occupied in February of last year. At least 88,000 Russian soldiers are likely dead — a conservative estimate — and at least twice as many have been wounded. Billions of dollars worth of equipment, Russian tanks, planes, artillery, helicopters, armored vehicles, and warships have been destroyed. If you had predicted this outcome before the war — and nobody did — it would have seemed fanciful. No one would have believed that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, a professional comedian, could lead a country at war, that the democratic world would be united enough to help him, or that Russian President Vladimir Putin would endure such a humiliation.
Ukraine, the United States, and the European Union have achieved something remarkable: Working together, they have not only preserved the Ukrainian state, but stood up to a bully whose nihilism harms the entire world. Putin backs far-right and extremist movements in Europe, provides thugs to support African dictatorships, and colludes with China, Iran, Venezuela, and other autocracies. From the beginning, Putin hoped the war would demonstrate that American power and American alliances can be defeated, not only in Ukraine but everywhere else. He still does, and for this purpose the war remains useful to him.
The fighting creates food shortages in Africa, thereby generating more unrest and more demand for Russian mercenaries. The war stokes discontent in Europe as well, giving pro-Russian parties a boost. Americans and Europeans view turmoil in country after country as a series of isolated conflicts, but Putin doesn’t think that Ukraine and the Middle East belong to different, competing spheres. On the contrary, since the conflict in Gaza erupted, he has intensified his relationship with Iran, invited leaders of Hamas to Moscow, and attacked Israel because of its links with the U.S., hoping that the spread of violence will decrease Western support for Ukraine. Iranian drones have terrorized Ukrainian cities; Iran, in turn, distributes Russian weapons to its proxies. Hezbollah is thought to have Russian anti-ship missiles that it could use against U.S. warships in the Mediterranean at any minute.
The allied fight against Russia in Ukraine has damaged Russia’s ability to project negative power in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. But despite his extraordinary losses, Putin still believes that time is on his side. If he can’t win on the battlefield, he will win using political intrigue and economic pressure. He will wait for the democratic world to splinter, and he will encourage that splintering. He will wait for the Ukrainians to grow tired, and he will try to make that happen too. He will wait for Donald Trump to win the 2024 U.S. presidential election, and he will do anything he can to help that happen too.
Right now, Putin’s bets are on the Republicans who repeat Russian propaganda — Senator J. D. Vance, for example, echoes Russian language about the Ukraine war leading to “global disorder” and “escalation”; Representative Matt Gaetz cited a Chinese state-media source as evidence while asking about alleged Ukrainian neo-Nazis at a congressional hearing; Vivek Ramaswamy, a GOP presidential candidate, has also called Zelensky, who is Jewish, a Nazi. Putin will have been cheered by the new
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Quote:Russian forces continue to struggle with low morale and poor discipline. The Russian State Duma is considering a bill that would impose the same harsh criminal penalties on Russian military volunteers as on Russian mobilized personnel for refusing to comply with orders, voluntarily surrendering, damaging weapons, or deserting.[80] The Ukrainian Main Military Intelligence Directorate (GUR) reported that a group of mobilized personnel of the 20th Motorized Rifle Division (8th Combined Arms Army, Southern Military District) beat their regiment’s deputy commander, ”Lieutenant Muserbekov,” in occupied Simferopol on November 1 and that Muserbekov died from his injuries on November 7.[81] The GUR stated that the mobilized personnel subsequently fled to Krasnodar Krai dressed as civilians.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Capisce?
Russia continues to form new irregular formations to support combat operations in Ukraine. A Russian milblogger claimed on November 10 that the newly-formed “Volga” volunteer artillery brigade reinforced the Luhansk People’s Republic (LNR) 2nd Army Corps in an unspecified area of Ukraine.[82]
https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campai
gn-assessment-november-10-2023
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Zelensky is a dead man walking.
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Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.
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