• 179 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: December 9th, 2023
  • supersquirrel@sopuli.xyzOPtoUkraine@sopuli.xyz•Breaking: Zelenskyy Counts Record 25,000 Russian Losses in October—Pokrovsk Turns Into a Mass Graveyard
    6·
    3 days ago

    For Russia, Pokrovsk is definitely a logistical and defensive objective.

    However, as you have said, you have to consider the political context. Russia is clearly trying to posture to begin negotiations while desperately trying to appear strong and thus uninterested in negotiations. Simultaneously, internally Putin has to promise something to the elements that keep him in power, and part of that promise must include some specific reference to timelines and objectives at the front… which I think we are clearly seeing the real world impact on military actions from in Russia’s focus on Pokrovsk.

    It is also just as simple as… well if they can color in the city on their maps and say “we filled in that whole shape therefor we own it!” that is part of the logic here. International relations, politics and war is sometimes literally that dumb. Trump is certainly that dumb and that is who Putin will be negotiating with in large part here.

    For Russian propaganda it is massively important to take the next step and fully capture Pokrovsk so propaganda and fearmongering towards the enemy can begin to focus on “After Pokrovsk Russia Will _____”. For the story to work, with an intense mood of inveitability towards Russian advance, they need to hit the next beat in the story and the real world failure of the Russian military is so catastrophically bad that the broader strategic Russian story of victory is falling into pieces as it blatantly diverges from the timeline of reality in Russia’s immense losses in and around Pokrovsk. The consequences of this are severe enough that you can see Russia doubling down and accepting even more massive losses to try to force the capture of Pokrovsk faster to preserve the crucial Russian narratives underpinning the Russian war effort.

    I think this is why Zelensky keeps emphasizing how existentially important the expedient capture of Pokrovsk is to the Russian war effort and why it is worth fighting so hard to destabilize the intensity of the Russian offensive here. Russia can maintain the alternate reality that sustains its war effort if it captures Pokrovsk quickly, if.

  • supersquirrel@sopuli.xyzOPtoUkraine@sopuli.xyz•NATO Now Outproduces the Russian Wartime Defense Industry in Missiles and Drones
    132·
    3 days ago

    I mean, diversification is good but there is little structural, organic support for Russia in the US anywhere along the political spectrum, there is only so much cronies like Trump can do to stop the undeniable momentum of normal everyday people both civilian and military in the US seeing Russia as the enemy here.

    I think people in the international community misunderstand the current love affair between the US rightwing leaders in power and Russia, there is definitely one don’t get me wrong, but many rightwing groups whose equivalents in Europe would have material connections and cultural points of commonality Russia could exploit, in the US tend more to have the attitude “y’all sound like dictators to me” reaction. There is no support for Russia on the US left… and the center of the US either is neutral or sees a general appeal to national values in helping Ukraine at least to a moderate extent. This creates a hard limit on how much Trump can refuse to help Ukraine, especially with general logistics support.

    My point here is that what Trump will try to do here is find chokepoints to stall processes that help Ukraine, but Trump can only do that in so many places when he is surrounded by a nation of people that are actively working towards the opposite goal.

  • supersquirrel@sopuli.xyztoUkraine@sopuli.xyz•What does the casualty count matter to Russia? Hidden or not, if human life has little to no value compared to land and glory - the calculus of cruelty will keep grinding on.
    5·
    4 days ago

    But it won’t stop because of casulaty figures.

    My argument is specifically that Putin not valuing the lives of his people actually rapidly decreases the ability of Russia to sustain war, far more than if Putin actually visibly valued the lives of his soldiers and Russia had actually bothered to make armored vehicles and tanks that don’t suck so much that Russian infantry prefers to just ride on top of them rather then risk going inside a deathtrap anywhere near battle.

    What I am saying is that for Putin there is no number of casualties that will be too much, but that doesn’t mean that for the effective war effort of Russia there isn’t a number of casualties that will be too much, there most definitely is. I don’t know what the consequences of that will be, I am not an expert on Russia, but the simple reality is that no matter what Putin thinks there is a limit and the more Putin throws away soldiers carelessly the faster Russia races towards that limit wherever it may be.

  • supersquirrel@sopuli.xyztoUkraine@sopuli.xyz•What does the casualty count matter to Russia? Hidden or not, if human life has little to no value compared to land and glory - the calculus of cruelty will keep grinding on.
    19·
    4 days ago

    However, the larger issue for Russian President Vladimir Putin, according to a retired US Army Russian military analyst in Washington, is that “he needs a win somewhere. He needs some dramatic change in the disposition of the front line to somehow justify these casualty numbers,” he explained.

    “His army is bogged down almost everywhere and the domestic situation continues to worsen as these Ukraine attacks on Russia’s oil industry have caused shortages of petrol and other disruptions of people’s daily lives,” he continued.

    See here is the thing, yes Putin doesn’t care about the lives of his soldiers, yes theoretically this means if he can retain an iron grip that the war can continue indefinitely and yes that means english language publications can wax poetic about the unstoppability of Russia… however human lives ARE valuable, Russia and Putin not seeing the value in the lives of their own people is a WEAKNESS not a strength.

    It should disturb all of us all over the world that even in our own countries there are rightwing people that similarly cannot see the value in human beings, who cannot see refugees or people with a different colored skin or ethnicity than them as having any generative potential rather than just being a burden. It is this ideology precisely that makes Putin weak and it is the same ideology that makes all rightwing ideologues weak.

    Human beings are the valuable thing, it is the genius, strength and will of living breathing human beings that gives rise to power in this world, and to pretend otherwise is to participate in a delusion that makes you weak relative to those who treat human life as valuable and build coalitions based on that principle.

    We should treat human beings as human beings because it is the right thing to do, but beyond that it is also the thing that powerful militaries do to their own soldiers. The more a military treats its soldiers as human beings and does not cast human lives away under a cynical delusion that shitty AI war machines that can do nothing but kill are more valuable than motivated, professional human beings, the more powerful that military becomes.

    …so in my opinion, it is a tragedy, but let Putin continue to see no value in the lives of his soldiers, it will only doom his war effort faster.

    Edit I also want to add another point that other than oil and just raw space all Russia really has is its military technology industry. With that in mind imagine for a second you are a leader of a nation looking to buy weapons for your nation’s military, for the purposes of this hypothetical let us say you don’t care about the Ukraine war either way you are simply looking to purchase military arms to equip your military and gain the political benefit that comes from doing so and advertising it to your people.

    Imagine you look at the news and see Russian military equipment getting blown up one after another in rapid fire in humiliating ways where it is obvious that the Russian soldiers are basically walking into deathtraps given how badly suited the equipment and doctrine they are using is to the current war.

    Even if you don’t care about the military equipment actually working and you just want to do business with Russia and get some PR for buying shitty military machines that don’t really do the job they advertise they do, the fact that there is footage ALL over the internet of these machines bursting into horrific flames and killing everybody inside makes any purchase of Russian arms actually a potential political liability because citizens could turn around and say something along the lines of “Wait, you got us tanks that are going to give our family members a false sense of safety and end up killing them from ammunition cooking off inside when they climb into them and defend our country? What the hell? Why?!? Are you corrupt? Do you want us to lose?”.

    TL;DR Lack of empathy is not strength, it is admission of weakness and lack of vision.