re: Latest Updates: Russia-Ukraine Conflict

Russia's Looming Serious Tank Shortage - Tank Count Using Latest Bought Satellite Imagery

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWCEZUQtUwE

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You are not wrong. The Enlightenment basically skipped over Russia. There have certainly been many great Russian artists and individual thinkers but collectively the country has never taken that leap forward. That’s why people like Lima Whiskey love it. It represented this atavistic ideal of a society “uncorrupted” by western liberal ideas of individualism and modernity. And I don’t mean liberalism like today’s Columbia university, I mean liberalism like the idea of individual freedom versus the collectivism of a theocracy or subservience to a monarchy.

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The Russians I know (ex-pats, people here on work visas trying to become naturalized, and some poor souls who had to return during the COVID shutdown and got trapped there) are academics, artists, orchestral musicians and brilliant, modern, and Westernized people... but they say the same thing you're saying here about their country.

There's a quote by Chekhov or somebody about how "The Russian people will always be slaves as long as they retain the mentality of slaves." They went from Tsarist Feudalism to Communism to a Kleptocratic PetroState. There has not been another mentality that wasn't punished in all these systems.

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what is the endgame for Russia in this war and will it ever end?

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At this point, bomb and shell Ukraine into rubble, inch my inch... make it an uninhabitable wasteland that its citizens have to flee, and park some tanks and missiles and troops in it, then move into Moldova...

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Russia's Looming Serious Tank Shortage - Tank Count Using Latest Bought Satellite Imagery

LINK

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just to point out someone shared this a few days ago... but yeah

I know some here laugh off the "plug that gaps/geographical defense" reasoning that has driven every Russia leader EVER in history...

but I think it is the thing.

Russia is facing a demographic collapse and that means dwindling supplies of military-age men.

Also, if Putin did not realize his military was a paper tiger at best and a completely incompetent and corrupt shitshow at worst, he's aware of it now...

Russian leaders have always seen the West, and its bordering western neighbors, and later NATO, as aggressors towards Russia. Putin himself is highly paranoid so he takes that to extremes.

So, faced with a military that is not a peer to Western or NATO armies, and with fewer and fewer fighting-age men, that just makes the "close the gaps" thing even more desperately imperative. The Russian military - especially an ever smaller and smaller one, since the defense has always just been throwing bodies at the enemy - could not protect the wide, expansive flat Eastern European plain - devoid of any natural barriers like mountains or rivers - from movements straight to capture Moscow. So that makes them desperate to push outward to physical barriers where they could mount their limited defensive capability only in the gaps.

Of course, no one wants to invade Russia, except maybe China on the other end... but you have to think like a Russian... "of course they want to invade us. We're the center of civilization and the prize of the world!"

A great, in depth explanation of all of this warning in 2016 that there was more to come from Russia in Ukraine, and why:

FORBES 2016: "10 Maps That Explain Russia's Strategy"

I saw Peter Zeihan on Rogan's show the other day (it was recently posted but seemed like it was from months ago) and while nothing he said will be a surprise to anybody following this thread, Rogan reacted to everything like "Dude... Wow... Oh my God... Whoa..."

As Zeihan summed up about Russia: "there is no way for them to feel secure - and this is Russia the State, not just Putin - without them occupying or controlling Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, half of Poland, Belarus, Slovakia, Hungary, Ukraine, Moldova, Romania, Bulgaria, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Kyrgyzstan... and that is not compatible with the modern world, and even if Russia had the military might to storm into those countries and reclaim them immediately after the Soviet Union fell apart, they could not afford to control them all, financially, which is why the Soviet Union fell apart in the first place. So, there just is no way the Russian state can be satisfied. But the bright spot is that the Russian ethnicity will be pretty much extinct in 20 years, anyway..."

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I'll add a Plan F that seems to be working pretty well.
A) Embarrass NATO/the west by not being driven back/defeated by all of the weapons systems flowing into Ukrainian hands. Makes one rethink how well NATO would hold up in a face to face fight with Russian.
B) Impact the west (especially American) economy by sending billions of dollars in weapons/supplies/support to Ukraine that could have been used in other places.

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A) you think "the 2nd strongest military in the world" not being able to roll over a much weaker enemy before western weapons ever arrived, and especially not now, is somehow an "embarrassment to the West and NATO? Au contraire.

B) We would've had to spend money disposing of the arms we're sending to Ukraine, which were paid for long ago. And that "money," were it actual cash, would not have been spent anywhere else for the same reasons it wasn't spent anywhere else prior to February 2022...

so nice COPE, but nah

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Jean-Luc Melenchon seems like quite the nasty guy himself. Supported Russia's annexation of Crimea, amongst other things.

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France is about France and doesn't give a hoot about anyone else. It took in lots of immigrants especially in the 1990's because it didn't have enough workers for a booming economy.

Everything is unionized in France, even farmers

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Russia proposal at the talks in Turkey were to keep oblasts including unoccupied territory and demilitarization just for a ceasefire to begin talks.

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And obviously we are at a different moment in time now. And the talks in Turkey point is funny since what actually happened at those talks gets changed by both media and some on this board based on what would best support 'the narrative' currently.

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Feels mean nothing the facts say the opposite

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Facts are few and far between here.

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He is a bit extreme in some ways, and he's actually a Centrist compared to the Communists who are now part of the Left Coalitio

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I’m not going to pretend to be very knowledgeable about the shitshow that is French politics but Melenchon seems like a tankie. The Pyrrhic victory the center left coalition is celebrating will be short lived and things are going to get ugly real fast.