Ukraine-Russia War Take 2
Here is what the preliminary take on the Ukraine thread disappearing is:
The site was hit with a massive spam attack where hundreds of spam threads were created. In the case where, for example, I see a single spam thread and delete it, that is called a soft delete, and mods can still see them but forum members cannot. Those deletion can be undone.
When a massive attack hits with hundreds of threads, an admin uses a different procedure where the hundreds of spam threads are merged and then hard deleted, where the threads are gone, and no note is left behind. As I have mentioned with my own experience of just soft deleting a large number of posts, sometimes a post or thread gets checked or merged accidentally and is deleted by mistake. Dealing with hundreds of spam threads takes a sledgehammer, not a scalpel.
It appears that our Ukraine thread may have gotten caught up in that recent net of spam threads. If so, it is likely gone for good. I cant say this for sure, and am awaiting comments from admins on this issue. Yes, this sucks. And hopefully there was some other software glitch that caused the disappearance, and we may recover it in the future.
But in the meantime, I have created this new Ukraine-Russia War thread to enable the conversation to continue. Obviously continuity with earlier discussions will be lost. There is no way around that. So as best as possible, let's pick up the conversation with recent events and go from there.
If you have any questions about this, please post them in the mod thread, not here. Let's keep this thread going with posts about the war, not the disappearance of the old thread.
Thanks.
Victor is your opinion, in general, that a portion of a country should be allowed to secede if the majority of voters want to?
steadily declining does not forecast such a massive shift in opinion.
you are taking the word of these people https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internatio... and thats your prerogative. I prefer the UN over warmongering far right Neocons.
steadily declining does not forecast such a massive shift in opinion.
you are taking the word of these people https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internatio... and thats your prerogative. I prefer the UN over warmongering far right Neocons.
If you look at what was happening in 2013 it makes a ton of sense, similar to how Ukrainians for joining NATO changed after the first invasion and before the fullscale invasion.
Either way if we accept that 2011 was the most accurate where 41% wanted to join Russia and 37% wanted to stay in Ukraine what point were you trying to make and why?
Seems like a complete non sequitur.
Is one of the "sometimes" a case where a majority have never claimed to want to secede, the number wanting to secede was consistently dropping, and the method of this secession was illegal in multiple ways including forcing people to vote at gunpoint after invading them?
movin as always It Is about getting back Ukraine land.
it's not that talks are "impossible" it's that they are impossible until Russia agrees to at the very very minimum go back to 2021 borders.
not absurd that with the Kursk thing Ukrainian think that could now be the case.
but I won't believe it until it happens ofc
yes I understand. and how do you get back the lands? you either take them by military force something Ukraine has been uncapable of doing because of trench warfare and manpower issues. Or you take land to trade. something they are have just done. how do you not understand this.It makes peace closer if they can hold this land and more if russia is willing to trade.
Russia is clearly not going to give it back for free and total victory seems impossible.
umm no. I see you dont understand how logic works.
Russian soldiers were bad (true)
They have more room to grow ? (debatable on what their ceiling is)
Ukranians are perfect ? (no)
Are you just making things up?
There are plenty of good Russian soldiers, but they are very often used poorly. There is also a lot of very poorly trained Russian soldiers, which aren't as much used as they are sacrificed.
This is a large part of the reason why Russian casualties are enormous.
On average, Russian soldiers have worse training now than they did during the first days of the invasion. In part because Russia sent a lot of their experienced instructors into the grinder early in the invasion and they died, and in part because Russia rushes units to the front-line to compensate for losses. There are plenty of captured Russian soldiers with very little training and even a fair amount with no training, and we can safely assume that the same is true for many of their dead.
Also, even good Russian officers are usually drilled to have very little in the way of autonomy, it is more about following the central command without question. This makes them very different from those trained under a "western doctrine", where officers have great leeway in determining how to proceed (or even not to proceed). This leads to a lot of "Soviet-style" losses with assault groups driving into the same minefields as the day before or bases being reinforced and bombed 12 times in a row.
Russia isn't alone in this though. Ukraine had and still has its share of an old Soviet-era officer guard which have done grave mistakes and sent many soldiers to a needless death. The training time of Ukrainian conscripts can also be low, especially if recruits fresh out of boot camp are sent to units that affords them little additional training. On average though, Ukraine makes far better use of its soldiers.
Ukraine is also leaving behind its old Soviet-Era central command doctrine, but this won't happen in Russia. If there is one thing the Russian regime will never allow, it is for an officer corps with an independent streak. And understandably so, that would spell the regime's imminent demise.
Victor is your opinion, in general, that a portion of a country should be allowed to secede if the majority of voters want to?
It depends. If the secession would lead to a rapid decline in human rights like the perpetuation of enslaving humans, no. But to simply have lower taxes or enhance human rights or even have stronger borders, sure. And I'm an open borders guy.
FWIW in the resource provided the majority of voters never wanted to anyways.
Moscow says US missiles used to destroy bridge in Kursk
Yesterday, two key bridges were destroyed in Russia’s Kursk region on the Seim river.
Now, Moscow says Ukraine likely used missiles supplied by the US.
Maria Zakharova, spokeswoman for the Russian foreign ministry, said on the Telegram messaging app:
For the first time, the Kursk region was hit by Western-made rocket launchers, probably American HIMARS.
As a result of the attack on the bridge over the Seym River in the Glushkovo district, it was completely destroyed, and volunteers who were assisting the evacuated civilian population were killed.
I think HIMARS were used on day 1. To me his looks like an AASM or JDAM, probably AASM. Also it was reported by the air force, which means unlikely to be HIMARS.
It's ok when our side murders civilians
In general.
Trust is nice bur rarely required for negotiations. What matter is both sides wanting something and and some inability to renege. Sometimes not even that.
In the case of these negotiations we need a way to compel Russia to not attack again and it's unclear how to achieve that, even if they ended up agreeing on the rest.
It's kinda pointless to get an armistice only for Russia to be able to regroup, get stronger, and attack again in 5-10 years
It's very clear how to deter putin from invading again. He only did it this time because he made the mistake of thinking it would be successful.
If negotiations got him to withdraw it would be great
It's very clear how to deter putin from invading again. He only did it this time because he made the mistake of thinking it would be successful.
If negotiations got him to withdraw it would be great
Very clear how? Because we let him take and keep Crimea in 2014 (thanks Obama and thanks Merkel) so he felt he could do the same later on?
How do you convince him he has nothing to gain from trying to take Ukraine land in the future if you let him keep any Ukraine land?
Idea is he should feel thankful we don't depose his regime this time and understand that any action outside his borders will be met by total war against him by all western allies, starting with a complete embargo at a very minimum, enforced to all third parties worldwide as well, not these silly sanctions which can be triangulated easily.
make sure that even a compete idiot cannot make the mistake of thinking it would be successful.
Real force backed defenses. Everythign else is pissing in the wind. Putin can't begin to take us on if we make an effort.
I can't find anyone saying this. Where are you seeing it said? Which civilians are being murdered? Here's the Ukrainian genocide in Russia so far:
In general.
Trust is nice bur rarely required for negotiations. What matter is both sides wanting something and and some inability to renege. Sometimes not even that.
Trust is incredibly important in negotiations, without it they are worthless. Since Ukraine does not trust Putin at all, they are finding different ways to gain trust: bilateral military agreements and taking things which Putin wants.
Trust is incredibly important in negotiations, without it they are worthless. Since Ukraine does not trust Putin at all, they are finding different ways to gain trust: bilateral military agreements and taking things which Putin wants.
We're not disagreeing here. The point is that negotiations do not rely on parties doing things just because they promised to. So we wouldn't trust putin an inch but we can have productive negotiations with him.
Until Putin actually negotiates instead of giving ultimatums to surrender under the guise of negotiations (so his useful idiots can say that Ukraine is the warmonger) then Ukraine isn't in a position where they can have a productive negotiation.
Well, we'll never know as Russia displaced ethnic Ukrainians, put the loud ones in concentration camps, kidnapped Ukraininan youths and put them in forced re-education, moved in Russians in the now empty housing, put armed militias in front of polling places to dissuade voting against them and infected the region with their not-so-secret police and torture chambers.
Then they blocked international independent observers, and bribed far right nationalists and Nazis from all over Europe and flew them over to give a thumbs up.
This is Victor calls a majority, because like all communists he is very worried about fascism.
