Ukraine

[indy]

Apr 1, 2022 17:10:18 GMT jackd said:

No reason for it? They mention an oil depot and Russia has logistical issues.

It didn't make sense to me because it seemed like a pretty risky mission with valuable assets that are particularly vulnerable to anti-air weapons. But maybe they knew something about the air defenses or had help (e.g., AWACS) that made it less risky.

[jackd]

I seem to recall that our last administration didn't show much respect for international organizations as well and seemed to admire Putin.

[pnwguy]

Apr 4, 2022 19:05:16 GMT jackd said:

I seem to recall that our last administration didn't show much respect for international organizations as well and seemed to admire fellate Putin.

FIFY

[LFC]

I guess these kinds of stories need to be introduced with "take it with a grain of salt" but it seems like an awful lot of prior stories about the Russian military have proven to be true. Putin really does have some serious political concerns to weigh if he wants to put Russia itself at war rather than keeping a bit of a barrier between the country and the military.

Some conscripts to the Russian war effort from the Donbas region are turning on their commanders and refusing to fight on, after being handed antiquated rifles designed in the 19th century, and forced to drink from ponds littered with dead frogs.

One student draftee was given an automatic weapon but no instructions on how to fire it. The student, speaking to Reuters, said he was ordered to repel an attack by Ukrainian forces, but told a reporter: “I don’t even know how to fire an automatic weapon.”

The student said he was put in a mortar unit but was “taught nothing… Up to that point I had only seen mortars in movies. Obviously, I didn’t know how to do anything with them.”

The wife of another untrained Donbas draftee told Reuters: “He doesn’t even really know how to hold an automatic weapon.”

The report follows dozens of Western intelligence briefings and information shared by Ukrainian officials, which suggest that morale within the Russian forces is at breaking point and supply lines are a disaster.

Reuters said that it spoke to six people for the report. In addition to the student it spoke to “three wives of conscripts who have mobile phone contact with their partners, one acquaintance of a draftee, and one source close to the pro-Russian separatist leadership who is helping to organize supplies for the Donbas armed forces.”

Draftees from the separatist Donbas region are not part of the Russian army but are fighting alongside them.

The overall picture that emerges from the report is of untrained and expendable conscripts providing ineffective support to their Russian counterparts. Reuters says Donbas conscripts “were given the highly dangerous mission of drawing enemy fire onto themselves so other units could identify the Ukrainian positions and bomb them.”

The claim tallies with a video published by Ukraine on March 12 in which a prisoner of war, who said he was an untrained civil servant from Donbas, said he was ordered to draw enemy fire in Mariupol to give away Ukrainian positions.

Reuters said that “several” of the draftees have been armed with bolt action Mosin rifles, which were first produced in the 1880s by the Russian Empire, and were the workhorse firearm of the Russian army for decades. Production ceased after World War II, however large stockpiles of the weapon survive. They were last manufactured, in small numbers, by Finland in 1973.

The student conscript said: “It’s like we’re fighting with World War II muskets,” adding, “I hate the war. I don’t want it, curse it. Why are they sending me into a slaughterhouse?”

In another episode that clearly illustrates weak morale, Reuters says a group of some 135 Donbas conscripts in Mariupol mutinied by putting down their weapons and refusing to continue to fight. The men were kept in a basement by their commanders before being released.

[LFC]

More horror stories from Ukraine.

Donning a flak jacket and flanked by military personnel, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky toured Bucha, a newly liberated suburb of Kyiv, on Monday, seeing firsthand the devastation there that’s shocked the world.

Zelensky grew visibly emotional as he surveyed the carnage inflicted on civilians, and accused Russia of genocide.

“Every day we find people in barrels, cellars,” he told reporters on the street. “Some strangled, some clearly tortured… We know of thousands of people killed and tortured with severed limbs, raped women, murdered children.”

As Russian forces retreated last week, Ukrainians and the rest of the world began to see the magnitude of the cruelty inflicted on the occupied town, where Russians have been accused of indiscriminately slaughtering civilians. Photos showed the bodies of civilians littering the streets, with some Ukrainians found bound with fatal gunshot wounds to the backs of their heads. Bodies of women were found stripped and burned.

“These are war crimes and they will be recognized by the world as genocide,” Zelensky told reporters, adding that the Russians “treat people worse than animals,” CNN reported.

Do we really have to still say "allegedly" about Russian war crimes? Zelensky also just upped the NATO ante.

He said that “key leaders of leading countries” deciding on whether “Ukraine should be a NATO member” should come to Bucha and see “how this flirting with the Russian federation ends.”

Seeing the barbarism of the Russian troops would also affect negotiation proceedings, he said.

“It is very difficult to talk,” Zelensky said, “It is very difficult to negotiate when you see what they did here.”

If Ukraine survives this and joins NATO it will be Putin's doing.

[LFC]

The evidence of war crimes bodies continue to pile up. Russia makes a ridiculous false flag accusation because of course they do. Putin really is just a psychopath. (Links inside the actual story.)

A gruesome, horrifying topic but also a stunning, remarkable piece of data, visual and explanatory journalism. The Russian defense ministry has released a statement claiming that the bodies of executed civilians left on the streets of Bucha in Ukraine are another Ukrainian ‘provocation’, a hoax engineered by Ukraine meant to discredit Russia. They claim that the killings happened after the Russian army evacuated the city. The Times has an article that graphically and dramatically refutes these claims. You’ve likely seen those videos of drive-throughs through the shattered city in which the bodies, most shot execution style and many with bound hands, are visible on the side of the road. Times journalists cross-referenced these harrowing videos with satellite imagery which shows very clearly that the bodies were there when the town was under Russian occupation. It feels unseemly to to be so praiseful of something that is about chilling war crimes. But the work is still remarkable. The dispositive nature of the refutation is hard to fully appreciate without seeing it. See it here.

[LFC]

Equipment destruction update:

3/18 : 1574 (244) 20.3%

3/19 : --

3/20 : 1616 (254) 21.7%
3/21 : 1662 (263) 21.9%
3/22 : 1676 (268) 22.3%
3/23 : 1721 (271) 22.6%
3/24 : 1785 (280) 23.3%

3/25 : 1831 (289) 24.1%

3/26 : 1920 (300) 25.0%
3/27 : --
3/28 : 2015 (318) 26.5%
3/29 : 2059 (331) 27.6%
3/30 : 2104 (345) 28.8%
3/31 : --

4/01 : 2175 (359) 30.0%

4/02 : --
4/03: 2394 (410)

4/04: 2414 (416)

4/05: 2433 (425)

[LFC]

Resourceful, aren't they?

Working in IT I love this comment

E Pluribus Brian
@briancribb

User testing is always a surprise, because users do weird stuff.

[LFC]

One of Putin's propaganda outlets is effectively calling for the genocide of ethnic Ukrainians for being "Nazis", using the term "Nazi" to mean anybody he wants dead. It's now pretty clear that Putin is willing to slaughter millions to protect his ego.

In his Tuesday newsletter for the Bulwark, commentator Charlie Sykes walked through a recent piece by the Russian "mouthpiece" RIA Novosti that makes the case for using Nazi-like methods to purge Ukraine.

Russia has been accused of indiscriminately killing anyone who stands in their way. Their actions are being investigated for war crimes or crimes against humanity, but the new language out of the Kremlin is about genocide.

Sykes quoted Steven Pifer's translation of an excerpt blaming Ukrainians for a genocide against the people of Russia, claiming they aren't playing by the "rules" of war.

"All of them are equally involved in extreme cruelty against the civilian population, equally guilty of the genocide of the Russian people, do not comply with the laws and customs of war," the pro-Kremlin writer said. "War criminals and active Nazis should be exemplarily and exponentially punished. There must be a total lustration. Any organizations that have associated themselves with the practice of Nazism have been liquidated and banned. However, in addition to the top, a significant part of the masses, which are passive Nazis, accomplices of Nazism, are also guilty. They supported and indulged Nazi power."

When speaking to MSNBC, Timothy Snyder, a Yale historian and expert on authoritarianism, explained that Ukraine isn't being overrun by Nazis. Instead, a "Nazi" in this case is actually anyone Putin says it is.

"When Putin talks about denazification, he doesn't mean getting rid of Nazis," he explained. "What he means is 'I, the dictator, have the right to say what the word Nazi means.' By denazification, he means getting rid of any Ukrainians who are willing to resist anything he tries to do. He means destroying the state and destroying the nation. So, he's reached the depths of schizo-fascism. But he's operationalized this to mean he has the right to determine when this war will be over. It will only be over when Ukraine is so humiliated that it's willing to accept his characterization of it. And, of course, the Ukrainians are not going to do that. So, we're in for a very long struggle. Unless Mr. Putin himself starts to feel that his power might be threatened. I think that's the moment where this might start to change."

The pro-Kremlin post goes on to say that the purge must be more than just one generation of Ukrainians.

[andydp]

Apr 5, 2022 18:42:00 GMT LFC said:

Resourceful, aren't they?

Working in IT I love this comment

E Pluribus Brian
@briancribb

User testing is always a surprise, because users do weird stuff.

I’m assuming the chopper they shot down wasn’t moving or flying “nap of the earth” (low altitude) in other words they exposed themselves long enough to be targeted and tracked.

[LFC]

Equipment destruction update:

3/18 : 1574 (244) 20.3%
3/19 : --
3/20 : 1616 (254) 21.7%
3/21 : 1662 (263) 21.9%
3/22 : 1676 (268) 22.3%
3/23 : 1721 (271) 22.6%
3/24 : 1785 (280) 23.3%
3/25 : 1831 (289) 24.1%
-- 7 days --

3/26 : 1920 (300) 25.0%
3/27 : --
3/28 : 2015 (318) 26.5%
3/29 : 2059 (331) 27.6%
3/30 : 2104 (345) 28.8%
3/31 : --
4/01 : 2175 (359) 30.0%
-- 14 days --

4/02 : --
4/03: 2394 (410)
4/04: 2414 (416)
4/05: 2433 (425)
4/06: 2516 (434)
-- 19 days --

[andydp]

I don't subscribe to Twitter but this sounds doable.  As I tell people, take anything out of a war zone with a large grain of salt.

Ukrainians use 'Find My iPhone' to see where Russians took their stolen Apple devices

[LFC]

Drone footage of the trenches dug near Chernobyl by Russian soldiers. How many of them will this eventually kill?

[pnwguy]

Apr 6, 2022 16:39:21 GMT LFC said:

Drone footage of the trenches dug near Chernobyl by Russian soldiers. How many of them will this eventually kill?

Returning soldiers often brought back STDs or drug addictions to their home country.  These fools will bring back cancer to their families.  I suppose I can't really call them fools in that many were conscripts that had to do as told or get shot on the spot.

[LFC]

Equipment destruction update:

3/18 : 1574 (244) 20.3%
3/19 : --
3/20 : 1616 (254) 21.7%
3/21 : 1662 (263) 21.9%
3/22 : 1676 (268) 22.3%
3/23 : 1721 (271) 22.6%
3/24 : 1785 (280) 23.3%
3/25 : 1831 (289) 24.1%
-- 7 days --

3/26 : 1920 (300) 25.0%
3/27 : --
3/28 : 2015 (318) 26.5%
3/29 : 2059 (331) 27.6%
3/30 : 2104 (345) 28.8%
3/31 : --
4/01 : 2175 (359) 30.0%
-- 14 days --

4/02 : --
4/03: 2394 (410)
4/04: 2414 (416)
4/05: 2433 (425)
4/06: 2516 (434)
4/06: 2573 (450)
-- 20 days --

[LFC]

The House almost unanimously approved an investigation into Russia's war crimes. Before you read the quoted part below do you want to guess who the 6 Representatives were who felt the need to protect rapists, torturers, and murderers? Spoiler Alert: There aren't any real surprises in the list though there is one name from OH that I don't recognize.

Congress Passes Bipartisan Call For Investigation Into Alleged Russian War Crimes In Ukraine

The House approved a call on Wednesday for an investigation into war crimes allegedly being committed by Russian forces in Ukraine after the Senate passed a similar bill last month.

• Only six House lawmakers (all Republicans) voted against the measure: Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), Paul Gosar (R-AZ), Thomas Massie (R-KY), Andy Biggs (R-AZ), Warren Davidson (R-OH) and Scott Perry (R-PA).

[andydp]

Apr 7, 2022 14:03:05 GMT LFC said:

Equipment destruction update:

3/18 : 1574 (244) 20.3%
3/19 : --
3/20 : 1616 (254) 21.7%
3/21 : 1662 (263) 21.9%
3/22 : 1676 (268) 22.3%
3/23 : 1721 (271) 22.6%
3/24 : 1785 (280) 23.3%
3/25 : 1831 (289) 24.1%
-- 7 days --

3/26 : 1920 (300) 25.0%
3/27 : --
3/28 : 2015 (318) 26.5%
3/29 : 2059 (331) 27.6%
3/30 : 2104 (345) 28.8%
3/31 : --
4/01 : 2175 (359) 30.0%
-- 14 days --

4/02 : --
4/03: 2394 (410)
4/04: 2414 (416)
4/05: 2433 (425)
4/06: 2516 (434)
4/06: 2573 (450)
-- 20 days --

I'm assuming the large increase is due to being able to get to, and verify, damaged equipment the Russians left behind.  If they had lost 30% as of April 1 this increase puts the figure at more than 1/3 of their equipment. Once again, coming from a war zone this has to be taken with a large grain of salt.

[indy]

If they do send more troops to Eastern Ukraine, they are going to lose a lot more. Numbers floating around are that there will be 10 or more anti-armor missiles for every piece of armor they have (not just the tanks). And unlike other places, it's flat and open in those areas. Unless Russia can offer good air support, they will be slaughtered, even more than they have been.The U.S is sending the switchblade 600s to them as well. That's the big brother to the 300 which is what they had originally announced and can fly around for 40 minutes (that's the marketing number, so it's probably closer to 30) looking for a target.

[andydp]

Apr 7, 2022 15:19:43 GMT indy said:

If they do send more troops to Eastern Ukraine, they are going to lose a lot more. Numbers floating around are that there will be 10 or more anti-armor missiles for every piece of armor they have (not just the tanks). And unlike other places, it's flat and open in those areas. Unless Russia can offer good air support, they will be slaughtered, even more than they have been.The U.S is sending the switchblade 600s to them as well. That's the big brother to the 300 which is what they had originally announced and can fly around for 40 minutes (that's the marketing number, so it's probably closer to 30) looking for a target.

This is going to be a "target rich environment" for the Ukrainians.  If the Russians repeat their supply column debacle, this is not going to go well for them. All the drone has to do is wait on the Ukrainian side of the border.  As soon as they cross over, they're done with. I would bet money, after a few trucks get hit, they may have a hard time recruiting drivers.  The other part is unlike the separatist activity of a few years ago, this time the Ukrainians have some excellent "combat multipliers" and they don't have to do a face to face slug fest.  


Here's some info on the Switchblade 600


newatlas.com/military/switchblade-600-loitering-drone/

Is there a chance to get the article for your post ?

[LFC]

Apr 7, 2022 14:37:25 GMT andydp said:

I'm assuming the large increase is due to being able to get to, and verify, damaged equipment the Russians left behind.  If they had lost 30% as of April 1 this increase puts the figure at more than 1/3 of their equipment. Once again, coming from a war zone this has to be taken with a large grain of salt.

I gave up on the percentages since the denominator is at least somewhat speculative and is obviously changing. The fact remains that they've lost a verified 450 tanks. That's 3X more in 42 days (since Feb 24) than they lost in the entire 9+ years in Afghanistan (which somebody here said was about 150). This goes a bit beyond a bloody nose for Putin.

So now it looks like he'll concentrate his remaining forces and some new conscripts on Donbas, pound that area to a pulp, and then claim it. He is one sick motherf***er.

[indy]

This seems pretty big.

[LFC]

The president of Belarus just said out loud that they have troops in Ukraine. Is this true? Is it bluster? Is he off his meds?

[goldenvalley]

Apr 7, 2022 16:42:32 GMT indy said:

This seems pretty big.

It's getting to be spring, warmer temps so the demand for natural gas heating is going down anyway.  

[indy]

Largely true for gas but not for oil. Some of the smaller EU countries get 80%+ of their oil from Russia. In a larger sense though, it seems like they are serious about following through with going with alternative sources, and very quickly. Fall isn't that far away.

[AnBr]

Here is the official video for 'Hey Hey Rise Up', Pink Floyd’s new Ukraine fundraiser featuring Andriy Khlyvnyuk.