Russian invasion of Ukraine

[jagfox]

 

[Detournement]

All of these 'experts' remind me of the Pandemic Readiness assessment that had the USA miles ahead of anyone else. 

Anyway.... hopefully we get a photo of big Aslin with MBS before he leaves Saudi. 

 

[vikingTON]

1 hour ago, Thane of Cawdor said:

Hello again sailors, time for round 2?  I'm not a trained historian, so my question to better-informed posters is: are there any parallels between the disastrous Russian defeats in the Russo-Japanese war and Putin's misadventures in Ukraine. The former had strongly negative outcomes for that regime, is anything similar likely to bite Vlad on the arse?

Not particularly likely, because (among other reasons):

1) The Russian state has far greater surveillance and censorship capacity than the hopelessly overstretched and amateur hour Tsarist regime could offer. Although the Okhrana were at least a legitimately effective arm of state security most of the time.

2) The political opposition has now been decapitated as per the modern autocrat's playbook, rather than just pensioned off into internal Siberian exile. 

3) Transport links in 1904-05 were a bad joke which made the Tsar's control over the countryside entirely conditional on deference to local elites. 

4) The regime is able to channel Russian nationalism to a far greater degree in its historical sphere of influence, than a multinational Tsarist state could for a war of naked greed in the Far East. 

It's also worth bearing in mind that the regime outlived the Russo-Japanese war by 13 years, and was advancing spectacularly in terms of economic and military potential. 

A world war and the defection of the army was required to bring down the Tsar. Neither of which is likely to end well for the planet when there's an enormously armed, nuclear superpower involved. 

Edited September 21, 2022 by vikingTON

[ICTChris]

Reports saying that Russian men aged 18-65 are barred from leaving the country. Similar laws were passed in Ukraine immediately after the invasion.

Nonetheless, large queues are appearing at border points into Finland and Georgia. Prices of flights to Yerevan and Istanbul have shot up, ten times in some cases. Apparently in Yerevan 3-5% of the total population are Russians who arrived in the last six months.

[Shadow Play]

1 hour ago, HalfCutNinja said:

Ukraine is absolutely Putin's business. That's his job. He's president of the Russian federation, if a country is inviting a hostile military alliance to station nuclear weapons along Russia's border that is absolutely one million percent his business.

 

Do you think that justifies Putin sending his forces into Ukraine? 

[welshbairn]

2 hours ago, Thane of Cawdor said:

Hello again sailors, time for round 2?  I'm not a trained historian, so my question to better-informed posters is: are there any parallels between the disastrous Russian defeats in the Russo-Japanese war and Putin's misadventures in Ukraine. The former had strongly negative outcomes for that regime, is anything similar likely to bite Vlad on the arse?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Reminds me more of the Finnish war which the Soviets thought they could wrap up in weeks. Their air power and tanks didn't prove much use, their troops didn't know why they were there whilst the Finns were massively motivated. Around 25,000 Finns died to the Soviet's 150,000, Finland lost 25 tanks, Soviets up to 3 thousand. It apparently convinced Hitler that Operation Barbarossa would be a doddle. Eventually ended up with Finland conceding about 10% of its territory to the Soviet Union, and adopting a neutral status.

Edited September 21, 2022 by welshbairn

[ICTChris]

A number of Ukrainians detained at Azovstal have been released in the latest swap, including Mariana Mamonova, a paramedic who is currently eight months pregnant.

[welshbairn]

Over a thousand arrests so far.

 

[HalfCutNinja]

2 hours ago, welshbairn said:

Even if this happened, which I seriously doubt given that they voluntarily gave up their nukes in the 90's, there is zero chance that NATO countries would have agreed to it. Ukraine voted for independence by a large margin, Putin can't accept that.

 

2 hours ago, renton said:

What nuclear weapons were going to be stationed on Russia's borders, again?

Not Ukraine's ours. We have been arming Ukraine for years, this was the obvious endgame. He can't allow that. Would we allow that?

Look at it this way. Lets say Russia had spent the last eight years heavily arming the republic of Ireland after overthrowing it's pro British government in a coup and installing a pro Russian puppet government. What would we do about that? How would we react?

Would we allow Russia to station nuclear weapons in Ireland three minutes flight time from London? No we wouldn't, we would be doing exactly what Russia is doing in Ukraine right now.

None of this is laudable and there are no good guys here. But we caused this, we wanted it and we have expended a lot of time, money and energy to bring it about. We should be asking our leaders why rather than blaming big bad crazy Russia.

[ICTChris]

17 minutes ago, welshbairn said:

Over a thousand arrests so far.

 

Apparently one of the men arrested at the protest was served a mobilisation order at the police Station. 

Not sure who Ukraine captured on Kharkiv but the Russians have released the CO and deputy CO of the Azov Regiment in the exchange.

Apprently Medvedchuk has been handed over the Russians.

Edited September 21, 2022 by ICTChris

[welshbairn]

12 minutes ago, HalfCutNinja said:

 

Not Ukraine's ours. We have been arming Ukraine for years, this was the obvious endgame. He can't allow that. Would we allow that?

Look at it this way. Lets say Russia had spent the last eight years heavily arming the republic of Ireland after overthrowing it's pro British government in a coup and installing a pro Russian puppet government. What would we do about that? How would we react?

Would we allow Russia to station nuclear weapons in Ireland three minutes flight time from London? No we wouldn't, we would be doing exactly what Russia is doing in Ukraine right now.

None of this is laudable and there are no good guys here. But we caused this, we wanted it and we have expended a lot of time, money and energy to bring it about. We should be asking our leaders why rather than blaming big bad crazy Russia.

Why would we risk putting nukes in Ukraine when we can launch them from subs in the Baltic or the Arctic? Same as Russia can do to us..

[ICTJohnboy]

Fantastic speech from Zelensky in his address to the UN General Assembly.

[tamthebam]

4 hours ago, Elixir said:

China and Xi won't let Putin start lobbing nukes.

Considering his country got covered in a lot of radioactive shite when Chernobyl blew up I don't think Lukashenko would be terribly happy either. But he's an expendible patsy 

[Mr Waldo]

An unmanned mystery drone boat has washed up in Crimea. Maybe surveillance?

[Mr Waldo]

31 minutes ago, ICTJohnboy said:

Fantastic speech from Zelensky in his address to the UN General Assembly.

Just watched it. 

Oooft that was impressive.

[jagfox]

 

[Dev]

5 hours ago, Todd_is_God said:

I'd be slightly wary of citing Ukraine as a bastion of "the freedom of the Western Way of Life" tbh.

Make no mistake about it, Western intervention in this war stems from Anti-Russian sentiment emanating from the Cold War.

It is not, and never has been, about Ukraine itself.

I have never been to The Ukraine or Russia so I don't know but I agree this is about what happens elsewhere if Russia takes any part of another state they will not stop there.

[renton]

1 hour ago, welshbairn said:

Why would we risk putting nukes in Ukraine when we can launch them from subs in the Baltic or the Arctic? Same as Russia can do to us..

I never understood this distance argument for missiles. 

Flight time has only a very weak effect on the liklihood of a missile hitting a target. Detection time is far more important and that is only a subset of the overall engagement time. 

What does it matter if a ballistic missile is launched from half the world away or from 5 minutes away if the radar horizon of the former only gives a 5 minute warning anyway?

What does any of that matter when there is no anti ballistic system with a reasonable chance of stopping any given warhead?

In actual fact, having a strategic, ballistic nuclear missile system close by is better for the defender: easier to detect and track for a start, not to mention that launching one of these on a basically flat trajectory massively increases the circular error probability anyway.

The notion that Ukraine was invaded because the Russians got squeamish about being subject to a short window of being hit by nuclear weapons is ultimately laughable when they've been  under the same pressure for more than 50 years since the deployment of the first ICBMs.

[Dev]

38 minutes ago, jagfox said:

 

One way for the Israelis to get real-time practice against the Iranian drones.

Would not be too surprised if the Israelis have some direct input into the drones production lines in Iran in the near future.

[TxRover]

10 hours ago, Detournement said:

There's a guy I follow on Twitter who is convinced that nuclear armed nations all have low radiation nuclear weapons in their arsenals. We might find out soon.

The guy has documents showing that the US were working on this in the 70s but the main focus is the 43m deep crater from the Beirut explosion which is far bigger than it should be going by the official account. 

 

The issue with this is there is but one type of “low radiation” nuclear weapon, and that’s the neutron bomb….which has immense radiation in bands harmful to life but is on a low yield weapon…which means a smaller than expected crater, not larger. The size of the explosion is directly related to the fusion or fission that occurs in a nuclear weapon, and this develops set amounts of radiation. There is no way to magically reduce radiation emissions from nuclear explosions, but you can enhance radiations in certain bands…neutron weapons do this with tritium, but it has a problematically short half-life.