ok what the fuck is happening in ukraine

xp if you want to scroll up and read what I said months ago about how I felt about visiting Ukraine and how fucking heartbreaking the situation is, you can do so at any time. You have no control over the situation, what are you going to do?

xp

"anyone else" meaning on ILX, not in the world at large

I think a lot of people on ilx care. And getting back to pressure from "realists." just that nukes's being presented (by Putin's hints, by Chechen Dude etc. saying he should fucken do it, no more Mr. Nice Guy) by gen. chatter, as an option, say, is a reminder of how this whole situation has moved past dealmaking as more than another gamble, with somebody who no longer seems like stone cold transactional Mastermind.

The stone has cracked etc.

it is horrible and heartbreaking and not at all something that we should have to even think about in a reasonable world, and we have little control over it, but maybe some small increase in general awareness can help keep pressure on Russia and be a check on them doing something so massively stupid

Putin will do what he wants. I’m not sure ordinary citizens of anywhere will affect that. It’s not like he even cares about what others who could reach him were saying to him.

soviet unions coming back baby

IT BEGINS: Moscow's TASS news reports that mobilized troops in the Omsk region are electing spokesmen to complain about conditions and lack of pay. These are literally acts of mutiny and insubordination-- and don't bode well for the combat performance Putin’s newest troops. https://t.co/CrCQsqEiJa

— Chuck Pfarrer | Indications & Warnings | (@ChuckPfarrer) October 5, 2022

in all seriousness it does seem like russians do not want to fight and tbf why would they fundamentally what is the reason for the war, now ukraine is taking territory at will, russia is losing the war and more troops wont help if they cant train and supply them or really make them want to fight

maybe they are quiet quitting

lying flat (dying)

i dont want to get too into the theories ive hatched watching war map videos on youtube because thats an obviously deranged behavior, but there are reasonable scenarios where ukraine completely wins the war soon, none of the analysts really want to come out and say it cause its maybe not the most likely outcome and you look like a loser if it doesnt happen, but it is a possibility imho, and no one was predicting the current state of affairs either, pretty funny to think every expert was calling the russian military the second best in the world when this started, thats a good thing for people to believe if youre russia you just cant start believing it yourself

no surprise that if you have a kleptocratic government the military will follow along and when you think you have five hundred thousand sleeping bags you actually have zero

tbh I find it hard to parse too because the US media is overwhelmingly pro-Ukraine and sometimes I feel when someone like Tucker comes out and says "Russia is definitely winning" maybe they're just keeping it real cuz the reality is they have so many more people & resources. but then I see these videos coming out of Russia showing what the conditions in the barracks are really like, with everyone just sleeping on the floor and having to share guns they've never actually used before, not to mention all those saying straight up to the camera "we were lied to, I genuinely believed they wanted us here", I'm not sure how they actually "win"

yeah at this point just with the amount of territory ukraine has taken back i dont think theres much question whats going on, obviously tides can turn and so forth but right now ukraine is crushing them

unfortunately Russia has historically had a heavy tolerance for catastrophic losses of human life, including the unequipped and unmotivated

yeah but not sure catastrophic losses are going to help them in this case, and tbf who knows if that tolerance is still in effect

a lot of political commentators think that part of the formula of putins power is a live and let live agreement with russians, they let him be the dictator and in exchange he doesnt do things like send them to war, that political apathy is harder to maintain when youre asking hundreds of thousands of people to die

also just from a tactical pov fighting a war of attrition is a lot easier when youre defending your land than it is being an invading force

Fortunately, survival is just a phone call away:

Thousands of Russian soldiers have already called a Ukrainian hotline set to surrender in a fresh humiliation for Putin's bedraggled army, officials have said.

Andriy Yusov, a spokesman for Ukraine's military intelligence, said that in just a few weeks some 2,000 people have called the 'I Want To Live' hotline in order to give themselves up.

Calls have come from soldiers in Ukraine, those still in Russia who have been conscripted, and some who have not even received draft orders yet who wanted to check the procedure, Yusov claimed.

Russia has historically had a heavy tolerance for catastrophic losses of human life

shades of westmoreland in this declaration gotta say; but also to the extent that this reputation has been earned (mostly 1812 / 1941?) the context has been defensive-- in contrast the responses to 1905 or 1914 or 1979 were not so sanguine.

even the marches to paris & berlin are the reflections of those defensive ordeals, still full of the energy of the enemy push-- the current regime maybe would like russians to think of this the same way (or at least as the liberation of a neighbor-- more like the red cavalry-- who you know-- believed in something) but that's not as easy a thing to order people to feel as the best media theorists maybe suppose.

I'm not sure who you have in mind, but the actual best media theorists would agree with you completely.

More to the point, this idea that "Russia" has some kind of culturally shared indifference to death is kind of silly. Would you say this about contemporary Germany or Japan? The US historically had a heavy tolerance for loss of life as seen in Vietnam, the WWs, the Civil War, etc. Imperialist regimes are barbaric.

^^^

(i was thinking of putin’s media theorists. overrated?)

lol I guess we'll see

lol salute to the russians calling ahead for surrender plans before theyve been drafted

there are some really really garbage and clueless books about Putin's Russia, out of all the ones I attempted to read and deleted after the first chapter a few months back - Bill Browder's Red Notice has to be up there with the worst shit ever published.

#Ukraine 🇺🇦: remarkable footage from the #Kherson front. A Russian BMP crew waves white flags as it rides towards a Ukrainian position, surrendering to the Ukrainians. pic.twitter.com/ZEs7liiVQn

— Thomas van Linge (@ThomasVLinge) October 5, 2022

kherson is supposed to be where the good russian troops are and now even thats falling apart

surely this is part of Putin's plan to populate Ukraine with Russian speakers

I wouldn't get ahead of ourselves here a LOT of Ukraine is still under Russian control.

the nightmare scenario for russia is they have a bunch of their best guys/stuff on the north side of the river there, which they do, they get overrun by ukraine and are unable to retreat because they only have ferries to get across the river and the leadership hasnt planned appropriately because theyre determined to defend that position, which they are

theyve been at a stand still for months and then in the last few days ukraine has broken through

A timelapse of the development of Ukraine's counter-offensive in Kherson Oblast over the past 5 days. pic.twitter.com/HBMjlrTK4F

— War Mapper (@War_Mapper) October 5, 2022

I wouldn't get ahead of ourselves here a LOT of Ukraine is still under Russian control.

― Fronted by a bearded Phil Collins (Tom D.), Wednesday, October 5, 2022 3:23 PM (four minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

sure but ukraine is currently taking it back at will, and its pretty clear based on russia doing a mass call up and sending their guys to the front without training or supplies that theyre really hurting right now, like if they felt they could hold the line for a month or two while they got the new conscripts up to speed they would do that

You guys, maybe read some of Marc Bennetts’ books about Russia? He’s been there for a long while but returned to the UK because of Events.

this reputation has been earned (mostly 1812 / 1941?) the context has been defensive

thinking of Finland actually

idk barbarossa followed just quickly enough on its heels that it seems hard to be certain what the domestic upshot for stalin might have been of continuing to fight a grinding border war in alliance with what had just been awkwardly retconned out of being an ideological enemy, rather than the great patriotic antifascist existential one he was suddenly delivered? unsure. nevertheless again empires look much alike in this dept: extremely willing to throw people into the grinder; sometimes able to sustain it; not in as much control of the latter as they’d like.

xxp this guy? https://twitter.com/marcbennetts1

some interesting stuff in his feed

(also a lot of accounts of torture which I tried not to look at)

Putin orders Russia to take control of Zaporizhzhia NPP
Vladimir Putin has ordered Russia to take control of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant – but Kyiv has urged Ukrainian workers there not to sign any documents handed to them by Russian occupiers.

The Russian president ordered the Kremlin to take control of Europe’s largest nuclear power plant, located in one of the four regions in southern Ukraine that he recently annexed.

Russia’s nuclear power operator Rosenergoatom said it would transfer all the existing Ukrainian employees to a new Russian-owned organisation.

But Petro Kotin, the boss of Ukraine’s state energy agency, announced he was taking over the plant – which is feared to possibly cause a nuclear disaster as a result of shelling in the area that Moscow and Kyiv have blamed each other for.

Ukrainian staff have continued to operate the plant after Russian forces captured it in March, following the launch of the invasion on 24 February.

Видео-отчет pic.twitter.com/5iGrv0DWPe

— IgorGirkin (@GirkinGirkin) October 8, 2022

that bridge is looking rather fucked!

Crimean bridge.

"Tolya, I'll be late. The bridge is on fire".

Casual conversations are so amazing sometimes pic.twitter.com/9sU7cY4Omn

— Andro (@ThisIsAndro) October 8, 2022

they took down that bridge thing hardcore damn

some ppl are saying it was a truck bomb but others are saying the explosion was too big to be in a truck but idk seems like you could fit a pretty big explosion inside a truck especially if you had some good stuff for example a missile warhead is smaller than a truck

apparently all trucks entering the bridge have to go through an x-ray and it might be quite difficult to get one rammed with explosives past the security.

ah ok does kind of seem like from the video that the explosion is not coming from the truck but im not sure how reliable that is

Aw shit:

29 min ago
Car traffic resumes on part of Crimean bridge, Russian official says
From CNN's Katharina Krebs and Tim Lister
Car traffic on the undamaged part of the Crimean bridge has resumed, said the Russian-appointed head of Crimea, Sergey Aksenov, in a statement on his Telegram channel on Saturday.

“At the moment, traffic is open to cars and buses with a full inspection procedure. We ask truck drivers to plan their route using the Kerch ferry crossing. The Kerch-2 ferry will begin to sail across the strait in two hours,” he said.

Social media video reviewed by CNN indicates that the westbound lanes on the road bridge were severed, but eastbound lanes appear intact.

According to Aksenov, railway communication on the bridge is set to be renewed by the end of the day.

Russian state media RIA Novosti reported Saturday that the Minister of Transport of the Crimean Republic Nikolai Lukashenko said ships with a capacity of 100 people will be launched to take passengers between Crimea and Russia’s Krasnodar Territory as an alternate method of transport.

Ukraine to issue stamps commemorating Crimean bridge explosion
From CNN’s Xiaofei Xu and Olga Voitovych
The Ukrainian Postal Service will issue new stamps that feature the damaged Kerch Strait bridge, which connected Crimea to Russia, its CEO announced on Saturday.

“I will not wish you a good day, because it is already wonderful. The Kerch bridge is done,” Ukrposhta head Igor Smelyansky said.

The stamp will feature two figures who resemble Hollywood stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet in their iconic pose from the 1997 film “Titanic.”

...There is also an envelope with an image of Crimea breaking handcuffs with Russia in the images shared by Smelyansky.

The price of the stamp will be 18 Ukrainian hryvnia ($0.48) each, and Kyiv plans to print 7 million copies for circulation, according to Smelyansky.

Some context: Beyond being the only bridge connecting annexed Crimea to the Russian mainland, the structure had major symbolic significance for Russian President Vladimir Putin’s objective to take over Ukraine and bind it to Russia forever.

A cargo train in Ilovaisk in the Russian-occupied Donetsk region was hit by a “powerful explosion” Saturday morning local time, according to the adviser to the Mariupol Mayor Petro Andrushenko.

“Not only Crimea. Not only fuel tanks. There is also a cargo train in Ilovaisk. Locals report a rather powerful explosion and subsequent detonation at night. The occupiers now have big problems with supplies from both sides,” Andrushenko said, referring to the explosion involving a tanker on the Kerch bridge that links Russia’s Krasnodar region with the Russian-annexed Crimean peninsula.

Pro-Russian authorities in the self-declared republic of Donetsk confirmed the incident, releasing video Saturday showing the fire’s aftermath at a local railway station. It is unclear yet if there were casualties in the blast.

1 hr 18 min ago
Ukrainian Energy Minister warns of possible nuclear accident at Zaporizhzhia as Russian shelling continues

"The good news, Mr President, is we can repair the Crimea Bridge."
"And the bad news?"
"We'll need your table." pic.twitter.com/XTEVrrJgjd

— Tripe Marketing Board (@TripeUK) October 8, 2022

good one Tripe Marketing Board

I feel like it could be a Matt cartoon

https://t.co/J2SHJ6m3qB pic.twitter.com/fivvgh633X

— 🌇vole, mighty digger🌆 (@anti_minotaur) October 8, 2022

lool!