ok what the fuck is happening in ukraine

Let the fraggings begin...

In retaliation for death of 50% out of 1,500 servicemen of his 37th Russian infantry brigade at #Makariv near #Kyiv, a Russian tankist with his tank ran over his brigade commander Col. Yuri Medvedev. He survived but his legs were broken. Source: #Ukraine journo R. Tsimbaliuk. pic.twitter.com/nE9Wgad1vB

— Victor Kovalenko (@MrKovalenko) March 23, 2022

Meantime another leading officer just outright killed in Mariupol (also where that deputy commander of the Black Sea fleet died)

https://t.co/t2TE7fCogO

— RichardPhippsArt (@RichardP_Art) March 23, 2022

suicide by invasion

Is there anything to this stuff about a plot by the oligarchs to replace Putin with Alexander Bortnikov? I only see British articles about it.

In the Russian-speaking media, the source for this story seems to be Ukrainian intelligence. Bortnikov is the head of the FSB, which makes this somewhat unlikely, but then again this kind of thing has been forecast as a more "realistic" scenario as opposed to a mass movement/revolution. Replacing Putin with an equally repellent strongman, but one "we can do business with," would probably work for the Russian elites as well as the wider world.

Had better be a strongman prepared to suck up god knows how much in reparations before the West will do business with them.

anything to this stuff about a plot by the oligarchs to replace Putin with Alexander Bortnikov?

When stories like that emerge from an "intelligence" agency, they might be true, but consider the source. otoh, it is easy to understand that in circulating such stories they seek to plant seeds of mistrust among Putin and his closest personal allies and seeds of uncertainty among those a bit lower down who carry out the orders of the ruling elite.

I agree, Aimless.

xpost@Matt #2

https://history.state.gov/milestones/1921-1936/dawes

They've done it before for WWI German war debts, creating a self-licking ice cream cone with American loans to Germany which paid reparations to the Allies, who promptly used them to pay off war debts to America. It's doable as long as America doesn't have another Great Depression.*

If something like that doesn't happen, and Russia (and possibly Ukraine) are left to rebuild their economy and infrastructure with little to no American/Western financial backing, I'll see you all back here in 10 years or so to discuss the Russian invasion of Azerbajan and Turkmenistan.

*a big if

Getting interesting here

The amazing Ukrainians.

40K out of 190 K Russian troops killed, wounded, taken prisoner or missing (deserted). More than 20%

If anyone has the military prowess NATO needs today, it's Ukraine. https://t.co/4jcVtb9QyL

— toomas hendrik ilves (@IlvesToomas) March 23, 2022

If this is right; the Russian Army in Ukraine is now on the point of institutional failure. Expect more soldiers to stop fighting. https://t.co/SWje31KtXR

— Phillips P. OBrien (@PhillipsPOBrien) March 23, 2022

One thing that stuck out in that intercepted phone cal from the Russian soldier was that their orders were to not target civilians and how that was making the fight a lot harder.

It also sounds like the military commanders are probably waiting for things to fall apart and hoping someone else gets the blame

I could see invaders surrendering just to get a hot meal and some sleep

did these people really think this would be over in a day?

You're an 18, 19 year old conscript, you've only ever known Putin's Russia in one form or another...

Meantime, stuff like this happens.

#Ukraine: Some quite curious captures of equipment in #Mykolaiv Oblast; a BREM-1 armored recovery vehicle towing a IMR-2 military engineering vehicle, both captured by the Ukrainian Army from the Russian forces. pic.twitter.com/F44BGAewso

— 🇺🇦 Ukraine Weapons Tracker (@UAWeapons) March 23, 2022

"up to 40,000 Russian troops have been killed, wounded, taken prisoner or are missing in Ukraine"

Isn't that like

"ticket prices from £5" ?

The ticket you actually buy turns out to cost a lot more than £5, and "up to 40,000" could mean anything below 40,000.

The phrase “fucked around and found out” springs to mind

And that was needlessly glib of me.

"up to 40,000" could mean anything below 40,000.

yes, but on the other hand an exponential distribution could mean anything above zero.

One thing that stuck out in that intercepted phone call from the Russian soldier was that their orders were to not target civilians and how that was making the fight a lot harder.

Not a dig at you, Keyes, but if their orders were to NOT target civilians, they've done a pretty shit job. There's videos circulating of tanks shooting at individual civilians as well as cars full of them. Until the last few days, there were constant news stories about civilians being shot when they tried to evacuate Mariupol using the humanitarian corridors - which were then also found to be mined. Or that story I linked above about Kharkiv, when they'd start shelling a few minutes after people came out of their shelter to stand in lines for food.

And when it comes to their artillery and air force targeting civilian infrastructure, the results speak for themselves.

Yeah, speaking of Mariupol, where Russians say everybody should leave, but picky about how (and at all, sometimes, as your post indicates):

A convoy of 11 empty buses — driving towards Mariupol to rescue fleeing Ukrainians — has been commandeered by Russian forces, according to the Ukrainian government.

The Russians have driven the buses, along with the original bus drivers and several emergency services workers, to an undisclosed location the government says.

...Recent days have seen several thousand people make the dangerous journey out of the city in private vehicles, en route to Zaporizhzhia, a city more than 200 kilometers (about 124 miles) away which is still in Ukrainian hands.

However, attempts to get empty buses into besieged Mariupol to collect people and bring them out have so far failed.

Just a whole lot of succinct points about significance of Mariupol:
https://www.npr.org/2022/03/23/1088113318/what-mariupol-means-ukraine-russia-military-campaign

No surprise at this point but anyway

We analyzed dozens of battlefield radio transmissions between Russian forces in Ukraine during the initial invasion of Makariv, a town outside Kyiv. They reveal an army struggling with logistical problems and communication failures: https://t.co/om3U9mGLtW

— Christiaan Triebert (@trbrtc) March 23, 2022

Wow, that NYT video is gnarly... when they shoot that sedan with a little dog running by? Ugh

I'm on a couple of the Discord servers where the radio intercepts are piling up, and that NYT report is just a small sample of the chaos.

#Ukraine: What was once a potent Russian R-330ZH Zhitel jamming and radio reconnaissance station, now completely destroyed by Ukrainian fire.

It is notable that recently Ukrainian authorities specifically requested that citizens help them find these powerful systems. pic.twitter.com/vArxeBX5Ho

— 🇺🇦 Ukraine Weapons Tracker (@UAWeapons) March 22, 2022

Up to 15,000 Russians soldiers have been killed in one month in the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine, two senior NATO military officials said. The officials made the estimate during a briefing with reporters on Wednesday.

The officials specified the range could be as low as 7,000 or as high as 15,000 in total Russian soldiers killed in the conflict so far. Their estimate is based on what Ukraine is telling them, what they know from Russia “intentionally or by mistake” and from “open source” information, one of the officials said.

“The estimate we have is based on what the Ukrainians tell us, what the Russian let us know, intentionally or by mistakes, because mistakes happen in a war, and on intelligence we get on open sources, we think that the Russians have lost between 7,000, up to maximum 15,000 dead,” the official said Wednesday.
The General Staff of the Ukrainian Armed Forces estimates that 15,600 Russian soldiers have been killed in the conflict.

Overall, they estimate that there could be between 30,000 to 40,000 Russian soldiers either killed, wounded or missing altogether.

“Statistically in conflicts when you have one killed soldier, you generally have three wounded soldier, so if you go four fold, it would be, I would say between 30,000 to 40,000 losses, losses killed in action, wounded in action, prisoner of war are missing, you don’t know what happened to the soldier,” the official said.

Other US officials have estimated a similar range of as low as 7,000 and as high as 14,000 Russian soldiers killed, but they have expressed “low confidence” in those estimates.

Neither NATO nor the United States have troops on the ground in Ukraine, making it incredibly difficult to get an accurate estimate on the number of Russian casualties. An accurate tally could take weeks or even months and may only be possible after the fighting has ceased.
The Russian government has not put out a number of total soldiers killed in the conflict. The Russian tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda published — then later removed — a report that the Russian Ministry of Defense had recorded 9,861 Russian Armed Forces deaths in the war in Ukraine.

The report from the tabloid originally read: "According to the Russian Defense Ministry, during the special operation in Ukraine, the Russian Armed Forces lost 9861 people killed and 16153 wounded."

'We are too tired to be nervous': Some Ukrainian refugees return home, despite escalating Russian attacks
https://www.aol.com/news/too-tired-nervous-ukrainian-refugees-080018482.html

This doesn’t necessarily break new ground or get as blunt as it should, but it’s a valid perspective:

https://www.politico.eu/article/ukraine-russia-war-failed-world-order-united-nations-nato-council-of-europe-vladimir-putin/

A wrinkle

The US and allies planned to support a Ukrainian insurgency after a swift Russian conventional victory. Now, they are struggling to sustain a Ukrainian Army that has held its ground and needs more ammo to fight a large-scale conventional war. https://t.co/jczDJzYGUt

— Yaroslav Trofimov (@yarotrof) March 24, 2022

A bit rich for Fukuyama to be lecturing about post-Berlin-Wall complacency!

It seems like that article doesn't have much to say other than "the current world order didn't prevent Russia from invading Ukraine," which is a truism.

Meantime:

Port of Berdyansk, large fire. Russian ships have been unloading there to support operations in Mariupol pic.twitter.com/gGBxdknNvh

— OSINTtechnical (@Osinttechnical) March 24, 2022

***BREAKING***

Now beyond any reasonable doubt that a #Russian Navy Alligator Class landing ship exploded in #Berdiansk, Ukraine

Reportedly a Ukrainian ballistic missile strike. Two Ropucha Class ships also present, observed sailing away as fire raged pic.twitter.com/eg8kXp6jfy

— H I Sutton (@CovertShores) March 24, 2022

Big question of how severely the port has been damaged. https://t.co/MNcvG0GU7G pic.twitter.com/BFd9JpFoyJ

— OSINTtechnical (@Osinttechnical) March 24, 2022

Attack ships on fire off the coast of Ukraine

Looks like the Corsairs of Umbar aren't going to make it.

Also, with regards to Ukrainians calling Russian soldiers "orcs," here's what Russians portray them as:

(the crossed out sign on top there says "people")

https://i.imgur.com/9Z8k9nO.jpg?1

Please like, retweet, and subscribe to stop Russian Russophobia against Russians. This is a serious and important issue and we must not shy away from covering it during this difficult and complicated situation.

I watched the NY times video piece just now and I'm wondering - what is the Russian term that translates to "motherfucker"? Is it a calque, or some other Russian term with a completely different meaning that serves the same role as the standard worst thing you can call someone else?

On March 1st, a week after the war to "denazify Ukraine" started, the last independent talk radio in Russia – Echo of Moscow – was shut down.

Now it's former EIC, @aavst20551, a Jew, had this plastered on his Moscow apartment door. "JUDENSAU" is German for Jewish pig (sow). pic.twitter.com/mS7nYRmgnf

— Sergey Sanovich (@SergeySanovich) March 24, 2022

I am beginning to be concerned about the status of the free press in Russia, as well as an increasingly permissive atmosphere where right-wing nationalism and anti-semitic attacks are allowed to happen. If this continues, it could have a chilling effect on leftist politics in Russia for many years, turning it into a mirror image of the fascist, warmongering autocracy that is Zelensky's Ukraine.

Oh yeah, they also left a severed pig's head in a wig on his doorstep. Picture not included, find it yourself if you want.

Maybe we need monthly threads for this now. Not that I plan to post much in any.

Hey MoominTrollin, you contacted me through ILX mail but you didn't include an email address.

So this Times reporter, says that putting pressure on the oligarchs was a time-honored joke, because it just meant putting names on a list, names that in practice were well-hidden behind shell companies---Russian nesting dolls are the appropriate cliche, he adds---also

I mean, let’s take the U.K., for instance. People have been warning for years and years and years that these oligarchs were buying up property — really, really expensive property — all around London. And when our colleague Jane Bradley and I were reporting this story out, she spoke with Phil Mason, who served for decades as a top adviser to the British government on international corruption. And he just said flat out, lawmakers in Britain saw Russian money as a source of jobs and investments.

It was like a willing blindness.

Credit where credit is due

ABC reporter asks Biden if he was too quick to rule out world war 3 pic.twitter.com/OEjl9ijWhu

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 24, 2022

War Reddit was quick to spot that the Alligator-class landing ship that sank in Berdiansk was one of 2 still active after being initially commissioned in... 1964

Also, the sunken ship is now blocking the port.

As tempting as it is, I'm pretty leery of mocking Russia's creaky military capabilities... Putin might just be "Oh yeah? Well check this out!" and start launching chemical, biological, tactical nukes.. like a cornered rat lashing out

That said, BBC had a couple Ukrainian soldiers showing the reporter what the Russians were eating... stolen chickens and MRE's that had expired in 2015

Just sad all around

Yeah I mean...I'm not saying truly world-shattering shit can't still happen, but my feelings a month ago are rather different than now. That ship being sunk is definitely part of it; whether here or elsewhere someone was saying that this was about all the 'victories' they could show on Russian TV, that they were bringing in supplies that way, and now, pfft.

You know, Groucho Marx predicted all this:

"The pay of the common soldier is also reduced to a minimum — determined purely by the production costs necessary to procure him. But he exchanges the performance of his services not for capital, but for the revenue of the state. for Ukrainian carpets, blenders, toasters, TVs, iPhones, and fur coats."

https://i.imgur.com/KtCrMAD.jpg?1

I thought that was Zeppo tbh

I think home court advantage is seriously at play here

Judensau is worse than "Jewish pig." It actually means "Jewish pigfucker."

No? Sau is German for swine.