re: Latest Updates: Russia-Ukraine Conflict

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That’s on Russia win or lose.

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I think Russia should pay for it, but not participate in actually doing it. But Russia won’t feasibly be able to pay for all of their damage anymore than Germany post WWI. That gap should be filled by Europe and private investment for mutual gain imo. The rebuild will help shape the future of the country, I do not think Russia should be trusted to do that in practice. Funds, sure.

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Only if the outcome is Ukraine holding on. If Russia somehow manages to conquer Ukraine, then American money and capital should go elsewhere.

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Agree. Russia wins, none of this discussion matters on who pays and does rebuild in Ukraine.

Girgkin is saying internet has been cut in Luhansk and the advance has started towards Lyman.

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However, to me that's a secondary concern right now to defeating an aggressive Russia.

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Which is a situation we were dominant in from the start, end helped create.

We are using Ukrainian young men's bodies to fight a war with Russia. It is a proxy war between the US and Russia.

That is not Russian disinformation.

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But Russia won’t feasibly be able to pay for all of their damage anymore than Germany post WWI. That gap should be filled by Europe and private investment for mutual gain imo.

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I expect a lot of that to come from Germany. About a decade ago I had work in Romania. What struck me was that Romania went from having crappy stores and gas stations to having big box stores and massive gas stations everywhere with no in-between phase. Communism to hyper capitalism in a generation. Most of the investment was German, and I'd expect a similar model for Ukraine.

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Russians historically have poor performances in the early parts of their wars. However eventually they start to figure things out and towards the end become a juggernaut. This happened in WW2, the Napoleonic Wars and several wars with the Ottomans. This is the closest thing to a peer to peer conflict we have seen since Iraq v Iran some 40 years ago. So much has changed with technology since then and the Russians and Ukrainians are both learning firsthand how this is affecting the modern battlefield. Experience like this cannot be understated and just because Russia has performed poorly so far doesn’t mean they will continue to do so.

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Still the overwhelmed Germany with numbers up to the very end. Marching units through minefields to clear a path was quite common by Russians. The only thing they learned was to mass overwhelming forces, which was all they have ever done.

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Girgkin is saying internet has been cut in Luhansk and the advance has started towards Lyman.

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I read a report about 15 minutes ago that Russia is attempting to stage a massive offensive along almost the entire front. No news at this point.

I hesitated about sharing this here but some you seem interested in this type of stuff so, here it is.

From Simplicius The Thinker

An exploration of how Russia's warfighting doctrine differs from the West.


An important distinction has been long overdue in the making, as pertains to a topic of much confusion and misinterpretation to a great many people.

There’s an inherent misconception about the conceptual differences between Soviet/Russian military systems (read: weapons) and those of NATO/Western equivalents. Endless debate has been made not only about which side’s weapons are ‘better’, but the doctrinal purpose behind their respective philosophies.

The most inane of these debates revolve around the reductive arguments that Russian weapons are made ‘to be mass-produced’ and ‘cheap’, like some chintzy dollar-store toy, while Western weapons are made to be high-value, advanced, but prohibitively expensive, complexes. This is often supported with the usual assortment of examples, like mass-produced Russian tanks in WW2 getting killed in 10:1 ratios against the much more advanced but fewer in number German tanks. And a generous handful of mis-attributed quotes is then sprinkled in to justify this view. Like Stalin’s purported “quantity has a quality of its own”, etc., not to mention the tired references to Soviet ‘human wave’ tactics.



One of the problems with this framing is that it indirectly, and erroneously, aims to suggest that Russian doctrine has always treated soldiers as ‘cannon fodder’, and lives were never important to Russian commanders; so believing that weapons systems were manufactured around that faulty premise is a natural extension of this fallacy. To wit, the belief that Russian weapons are designed with the barbarically callous philosophy that soldiers’ lives are expendable.

There is a very basic and often eye-opening way of reframing this miscomprehension:

Russian weapons are made with the doctrinal purpose and philosophy known as: Total War. Whereas, Western weapons are made for ‘limited’ war.

Surprisingly (or not), this is a concept quite alien to the standard Western nous; their countries were never involved in a civilizational, existential war of extinction. That’s not to denigrate the acknowledged valor of their own heroes, but simply to aver that, by and large, America’s involvement in major conflicts has never been of an ‘existential’ nature, but rather one of opportunity or—if you choose to parse it that way—support for some allied cause. But America itself was never in danger of total annihilation, its people never faced with complete genocide or enslavement.

But the Russian people bear an ancestral, hereditarily ingrained remembrance of World War 2, the Great Patriotic War, and the type of existential plight it entailed.

There are many things Westerners don’t understand about the Russian people (cue rhapsodies of the ‘great Russian soul’, etc.). One of them is the sheer religious fervor with which Russians regard the Great Patriotic War. The war itself can almost be elevated to the status of national religion in the Motherland; or that of the National Myth. The fallen heroes are consecrated as saints, and venerated with a holy reverence—if partly for the reason that Christianity and religion itself were famously curtailed during the Soviet era, leaving the hagiography of the Great War to naturally inscribe itself on the donnée of the Russian soul.



So this brings us to the idea of Total War. The brunt of which hinges on the acknowledgment and belief that war will be fought in a long, ‘all-out’, uncompromising engagement against an overwhelming peer force. But most inherent to this idea, is the all-important grounding in the acceptance that such wars are fought over the course of years, and that they are intrinsically production wars. The decisive idea that encompasses them is: sustainment.

The paradigm shift is one that focuses on war being an action which requires sustainment on a broad front, to an enormous amount of troops, who may not all be long-term highly-trained ‘professionals’, and for a protractedly long time. In essence, it is the implicit acknowledgment of a peer adversary utilizing overwhelming force to totally destroy you.

Secondly, given the understanding that ‘Total War’ as a rule results in mass casualties on all sides, the other point of prevailing philosophy is that weapons systems must adhere to strictures of practicality, ease of use, and ergonomic design.

In Western thinking, large exclusively professional armies of contract troops can afford the luxury of more ‘complex’ systems, which take longer to learn, longer to set up and use, etc., mostly because those systems are destined for scenarios where various luxuries afford their usage within the prescribed boundaries of a limited conflict. But in the paradigm of ‘Total War’, a system must be one that can be picked up and learned quickly by new conscripts in a scenario where a lot of the more experienced ‘professional’ force might have already perished in a protracted peer conflict.

This is very long but, it has many videos embedded that may amuse some of you.

LINK

I would be interested in your thoughts. Especially those of you with knowledge of Tanks. There are some interesting videos that show some key differences.

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We are using Ukrainian young men's bodies to fight a war with Russia.

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Russia used a puppet to thwart Ukraine joining the EU, which led to a civilian uprising in 2014 by Ukrainians.

Now Russia has straight up invaded them. Do you really think Ukrainians want to give up their sovereignty to Russia and have no desire to respond to Russian aggression?

At this point, I don't think there is any chance of Russia continuing its expansionistic ambitions after the fighting stops in Ukraine.

Russia will not attack the baltic states as that would initiate a conflict with NATO that Russia wants no part of based on their performance in Ukraine.

Had Russia steamrolled Ukraine at the start, then yes, continuation would have been a major concern; however, that didn't happen. Russia got punched in the nose and kicked in the gonads. Regardless of the outcome in Ukraine, they aren't going to be invading anyone in the foreseeable future except for possibly Moldova, but they would have to capitulate Ukraine for that to have any chance of happening.