Used to be a big thing in European geopolitics. Even, a Big Thing.
It would take Russia near forever to actually mobilise its troops. But given the fertility of those serfs once it did there would be just so many ill-trained mobs of cannon fodder that no professional military would be able to resist it.
The Germans sorta disproved this in WWI – tech plus training beats numbers. They lost the rematch.
Now?
Vladimir Putin is set to declare all-out war on Ukraine as his military chiefs seek “payback” for their invasion failures, according to Russian sources and Western officials.
Frustrated army chiefs are urging the Russian president to drop the term “special operation” used for the invasion and instead declare war, which would enable mass mobilisation of Russians.
Just how much use is ill-trained, or even untrained, infantry on a modern battlefield? My best guess is close to zero, and that approaching from the negative side.
Actual military minds here might be able to illuminate…..
Just to add from personal observation. Yes, Russian conscription, supposedly all adult males (except those with any connection to get them out of it, ie, near all the urban middle classes and above) have had that basic training. But the idea that the Russian military actually believes they’ve done anything other than hand lift potatoes in that time is absurd. What probably matters here is how much Russian politics believes they’ve done anything other than hand lift potatoes. One of those things about autocracies, the autocrats might not be all that well plugged into reality.
A large part of the Ukrainian armed forces are also effectively untrained too. Fighting from static positions or amongst their homes, they can be effective, but not in the attack. For rear area security, which I presume is what the Russians want the reservists for initially, they could be effective enough. Two questions to be asked at this stage: how many troops do the Russians have *now* that are still capable of attacking effectively (they have suffered a lot of casualties amongst their effective units like the VDV), and what is the state of their ammunition reserves. The Soviet stuff is aging out and they have production problems, plus corruption may mean much of what they “think” is in the stockpiles “isn’t” 🙂
This thread is worth a read:
Will Belarus be dragged in I wonder and what would the Poles do then.
I see I stuufed up the HTML, again!
Being wary of the spam trap…
And this is good news for Ukraine, if true:
One of the problems with mass mobilising conscripts is that you can train them in the simple stuff very quickly, but you can’t train the Cpls, Sgts and WOs needed to lead them in to the fight. Its even harder to get good generals, they need years of experience.
Its one thing defending against a massive attack on your own soil when you’re fighting for survival, as Russia did against Hitler and Napoleon when their supply lines are extended, it takes a well trained coordinated Army & Air Force to attack and hold ground when you’re logistics chain is stretched.
This is another good thread on that subject:
It is still not clear to me what Russia’s War Aims are in this conflict.
If they were to secure the Donbas and clear up the Crimean hinterland, then they seem to be succeeding. This approach suggests that the assaults on Kiev, Kharkhov and so on were really feints and that if the big cities of the east fell into their hands, then that was all profit frm the exercise.
If Russia wanted to conquer the eastern half of Ukraine and leave its rump to be governed from Lemberg, then they did not commit nearly enough troops and materiel to the job. Also they did not use their air superiority and tried to bomb Ukraine into submission.
Now it may be that the Russian General Staff seriously thought that they could conquer Ukraine without trashing the place and that there was suffcient support for them amongst the Russophile section of society to allow this to happen. But if they really believed that then they were suffering from the same delusion that Hitler did with “kicking in the door and the rotten building will collapse.” Putin is not Stalin, he does not have the terror apparatus nor the cold disregard for the lives of his people that Uncle Joe had, nor anymore are the Russians the peasant sheep-folk of the past.
I am minded of that bit in Spartacus where Kirk Douglas says “the Romans think they are on a picnic !”
I would like to point out that this one of the those modern wars in which there are no “good guys”. I believe that Putin and Zelensky are both gangsters. This is (or indeed is already ) becoming a proxy war, fought like thos revolutionary conflicts in South America or Africa during the Cold War. It is in the interests of the USA under Generalissimo Biden to keep this war going for as long as possble, which is exactly why it may prompt the Russians to go “shit or bust” and perform a general mobilisation and just swamp the country.
I would have thought one of the essentials for retaining your status as supreme leaderP is a weak military. From that point of view all the corruption and siphoning off of funds from the armed forces is a feature of the Putin system, not a bug.
Once you declare war and institute martial law, then the generals are in charge, and that’s the last thing a dictator wants.
Urban warfare is expensive in terms of casualties no matter how well they are trained. Basic training and team building is all you need plus numbers. A bit of remote tech like drones and robots will help tip the odds too and that needs skilled operators but there is no need to put them at risk.
Idk. Can I start by highly recommending Arthur Ponsonby’s 1928 book, Falsehood In Wartime?
Every single example of official bullshit he detailed from the 1914-18 kerfuffle also applies to this war in spades. So,
according to Russian sources and Western officials.
We have no reason to believe “Russian sources” (i.e. Slavs talking shit on the internet) or the “Western officials” who’ve frequently lied to us in the past, and continue to do so several times a day.
For example:
“The military are outraged that the blitz on Kyiv has failed,” a source close to Russian military officials told The Telegraph.
If they were planning to blitz Kiev, they’d have blitzed Kiev, or at least tried to. Instead they sent a small percentage of their smallish forces to fart around on the outskirts of Kiev for a while and pop off a few shells before withdrawing. They might have been hoping to scare the Ukie government into fleeing for Lvov or surrendering outright, but unless they’re completely insane this would have been an optimistic stretch goal.
The actual purpose of the northern tentacle seems to be a feint to tie down Ukie central and prevent it reinforcing the east and south in quantity. Which, btw, worked.
Defence Secretary Ben Wallace on Thursday said Putin was likely to announce general mobilisation of the Russian population within weeks to make up for military losses.
If Ben Wallace says it, you can take it to the bank and then get arrested for fraud.
It’s very unlikely Russia needs general mobilisation to make up for losses in Ukraine. They already had the world’s fifth largest military in terms of active duty personnel going into this war, and have committed a fraction of that to the war (~200,000).
The Ukies claim they’ve killed 20,000 Russians (and about 3 million tanks and a billion warplanes). Rooskies claim they’ve lost something like 1,000 men (I can’t be arsed to check, they’re both lying). Reality will be somewhere in between, but likely on the lower side based on casualty rates in other wars.
But even if Ukraine is telling the truth for a change, and they’re not – 20,000 is a ridiculous number as are all their other numbers – Russia doesn’t need general mobilisation to replace them.
Just how much use is ill-trained, or even untrained, infantry on a modern battlefield? My best guess is close to zero, and that approaching from the negative side
Conscripts are worthless. The Russians are aware of this, tho they’ve only been partially successful in professionalising their forces. I think the high casualty rate of general officers of the Russian army is a legacy of this – the urge to micromanage makes sense in a horde of dumb conscripts. Western armies have more faith in their NCO’s and junior officers.
One of those things about autocracies, the autocrats might not be all that well plugged into reality.
Sure, which is why when our rulers tell us:
* We have to pay shitloads more tax to control the weather
* Islam is a religion of peace
* Men can be women
I’m a wee bit suspicious.
But back to this Russian steamroller thing. I have no idea and neither does Ben Wallace if Russia is about to do a general call up. But if they do, it’s a very bad sign – for us, and everybody in Europe.
Russia doesn’t need mass mobilisation to defeat Ukraine, the target of a major escalation would be NATO. NATO is practically begging for WW3, so it’s possible the Russians will take them up on it. Normalcy bias has tricked fat, unhappy Westerners into thinking peace is the default, but historians know better.
We are not smarter, or wiser, or better led than the people Baron Ponsonby was talking about from 1914. If anything, we’re operating at much lower cognitive levels than the geniuses who brought us Passchendaele and the Somme, retrospectively justified it as a war to end war, then went back right at it with manmade horror beyond human comprehension just two decades later.
What Steve said, if you believe anything, literally anything, that the Ukrainians (or their masters, the USA) says about this war, then you are a dupe. The information available isn’t of high quality, but basically, the Russians are so far winning by grinding down the Ukrainians and have seriously restricted Ukrainian tactical and strategic mobility. Can they keep it up, almost certainly, and unless NATO intervenes directly, Ukraine will be forced into peace talks. If NATO does directly send troops, all bets are off and I’d be digging your bunker now.
The actual purpose of the northern tentacle seems to be a feint to tie down Ukie central and prevent it reinforcing the east and south in quantity. Which, btw, worked.
A silly thing to say immediately after talking about wartime falsehood and bullshit. Unsurprisingly to many here, it’s also the pro-Russian thing to say. Just massing forces on the border would have had the same tie down effect, and if it worked why aren’t they still doing it? Why make it look like you underestimated, overextended and just failed? Why then drag those damaged and depleted forces all the way around to the south and east to face the Ukrainian forces that have now moved away from the centre? Gaping logical holes much?
This inability to see that the Russians are just shit and at the limits of their shitness is very odd; now we’re supposed to believe that fully embroiled in failing to defeat Ukraine they’re about to storm NATO.
The problem with “lots of ill-trained infantry” is that they are squishy, lack mobility, and without proper leadership and integration with other arms, end up dying or being rounded up en masse.
For one example, look at the Red Army in the West in 1939-41. Huge force – millions of men, twenty-five thousand tanks, masses of artillery. Yet Finland handed them their arses on a plate (rather like Ukraine, turned a “three days of marching, then tea, medals and victory parades” operation into a gruelling bloodbath) and the Wehrmacht basically obliterated the Western Army District – by the end of 1941 Germany had wiped four million troops and 30,000 troops off the Soviet order of battle.
The Soviets had to accept – and implement, at the rush – a process of professionalisation to develop units that could actually fight usefully (replacing the politically ‘sound’ but hopelessly incompetent Budyonny, with Zhukov who’d just spanked the Japanese soundly at Khalkin-Gol). They ended up with a similar laydown to the Germans, with a handful of highly mechanised combined-arms formations supported by a mass of light infantry; the difference being that the Soviets had more of them, and crucially had enough fuel for their motorised formation to remain fully mobile in 1944.
The Germans – being pushed back from mid-1943, and facing invasion from the West – tried to use the “interior lines” gambit of moving a lot of their mechanised forces to France, hoping to be able to smash the Anglo-US landings they expected and then move the Panzers back to the East.
In fact they got the worst of both worlds; two-thirds of their tank force was tied up in France when the Soviets began a big offensive, and OVERLORD destroyed most of the German tank force in northwest Europe. As a result, the Germans had an infantry-heavy static defence to try to hold the Soviets with… and failed dismally, with Zhukov demonstrating how “deep battle” should really be done with Op BAGRATION that encircled and destroyed a mass of German forces in similar style to the glory days of Barbarossa (but in the other direction).
The Soviets kept the doctrine that had won the Great Patriotic War, but – to avoid the risk of a military commander being able to use capable forces to seize power – downplayed the professionalism and experience that their better units had developed, sticking with two-year conscripts managed by a small officer cadre. As a result, their drills became very simple – effective as long as they were winning, with an extremely short decision cycle, but unable to respond to the unexpected.
The concern was that their model (massive artillery barrage, heavy armoured attack, reinforce success until they can break the Operational Manoeuvre Group through into the enemy’s rear to cause “shock” and collapse the enemy’s fighting front) would work simply because there were too many tanks and APCs swarming forward, for the surviving defenders to deal with before being overrun.
In practice, it didn’t work when their proxies tried it in the Middle East; the lack of flexibility, meant that Arab and Iraqi operations had to be planned top-down and then went according to script, whether the story was changing or not. Forces that didn’t collapse when flanked proved very hard for the Soviet model to cope with, needing initiative at lower levels to either screen them or smash them – which wasn’t part of their system, meaning that follow-up forces would be getting hit from positions that had survived the first wave; and they proved very poor in defence due to the sclerotic decision cycle required for anything more than “hold your position and fire at targets within arcs”.
And even at that level, it required troops to be able to operate T-72s, BMPs, and BTRs, and to make guided weapons work effectively – difficult skills to pick up quickly. We’ve seen that even the troops sent into Ukraine in the first wave, were not exactly stellar in their skills and drills: there’s little time (and probably less will) to improve the survivors’ skills, and a horde of hastily-mobilised troops (equipped with what? Rifles and RPGs OK, but how many of the reserve vehicles are functional? How much of the maintenance and upkeep has actually been done, instead of the money spent on hookers and vodka? And how trained and experienced and current, are the troops on the kit they’d be supposed to be using?) are of limited value against a force that keeps its nerve and doesn’t run out of ammunition.
“Lots of infantry” against a competent opponent, die under artillery fire or are pinned down to starve or surrender. Their ability to win is pretty much limited to “the enemy ran out of bullets before we ran out of men” as seen, for instance, at the Imjin River (where our 29th Brigade was attacked by three divisions of Chinese infantry, and inflicted ten to fifteen thousand casualties before the ammunition ran out).
Terrifying imv that Truss and Wallace have said that the UK would support UKR in an attempt to capture Crimea militarily. Two American top bods have said this too in the last week, can’t recall names.
Utter scum – 40 years on from the Falklands War where the primary justification was that the legal residents there don’t want to be Argentinian, now we have an insistence that Crimea is part of Ukraine.
As for conscript Russians, if you recruit enough then there will be some who are really good really quickly. I’ve got 7 years experience in the job I do, and amazed that a small number learn the job so fast they overtake me in 1, and good on them too.
Modern armies need far more remfs and loggies than front line fighters. If it’s untrained manpower you need, conscription works.
It’s fun to go back and see how well previous arguments have held up. This “SitRep” from day 10:
https://meaninginhistory.substack.com/p/ukraine-sitrep-day-10?s=r
That map with the big red zones is hilarious. “It’s Russia executing textbook Soviet military doctrine.”
It’s now day 66. The Russians have given up in the north. Elsewhere they’ve barely advanced from the positions they gained in the first week. The Ukrainians still block the main highway through Mariupol, so most supplies for the southern theatre still have to come via Crimea. The Russians couldn’t take Kharkiv so their eastern “pincer” on the Donbas is having to come via abysmal infrastructure.
The Russians still can’t achieve full combined arms operations with integrated ground, air and naval actions, despite being one country operating from their own territory. NATO could do this thirty years ago, with multiple nations deployed abroad.
Those who claim the the attack of Kiev was a feint need to acquaint themselves with Pyrrhic.
Sending in your elite and special forces to capture key installations and hold then while the rest of your forces blitzkrieg up to support and relieve then and hold the ground isn’t a feint.
I’m also reminded of those that claimed that it was a pincer movement on Kiev with Russian forces mopping up the south and then coming up from the south east and then went quiet. They’d obviously never even looked at the scale on a map, let alone considered the relief and geography.
Re Ottokring’s comment that there are no good guys here, remember that there are more people involved in this than just Putin and Zelensky. The good guys are the ones who over a period of 30 years have evolved a system whereby they can both elect and dismiss Zelensky.
I always try to bear in mind PJ O’Rourke’s contention that there is only one system he’d ever encountered that gave ordinary people a shot at a decent life, and that was Western-style democracy. Ukraine are the good guys. We’re the good guys. Not the ones who were disgusted when their looting uncovered evidence that ordinary Ukrainians could afford Nutella.
. . . now we have an insistence that Crimea is part of Ukraine.
In addition to the decades of Soviet designation, there was twenty years of international acceptance that Crimea is part of Ukraine, including by post-Soviet Russia which actually guaranteed Ukraine’s borders. Until great dobs of oil and gas were discovered under Donbas in 2010 and then suddenly it was all ooh, “Russian-speaking self-determination”.
Forcing Russia to defend Crimea would actually be a smart theatre move. Even the Kherson Oblast above would be a good first counter-offensive target.
PJF – A silly thing to say immediately after talking about wartime falsehood and bullshit. Unsurprisingly to many here, it’s also the pro-Russian thing to say.
No, not really. It’s just the obvious explanation for why they went in light, attacked on several fronts, and sent a small subsection of their forces to moderately menace Kiev.
Just massing forces on the border would have had the same tie down effect, and if it worked why aren’t they still doing it?
I don’t know. None of us do (Ed Snack is correct). But if I had to guess, and I do, they wanted to ensure Ukie High Command couldn’t focus on the main action in the East during the critical early stages of the war. That’s no longer necessary, because Ukraine has since lost the ability to coordinate large scale troop and vehicle movements, their rail infrastructure is in shreds, and there’s nowhere in Ukraine safe from Russian missiles and rockets.
Btw I’m pretty sure the Russians have made tons of foolish fuckups too, because it’s a war and that always happens. And because they’re Slavs.
This inability to see that the Russians are just shit and at the limits of their shitness is very odd; now we’re supposed to believe that fully embroiled in failing to defeat Ukraine they’re about to storm NATO.
They’re so shit that they’re about to run out of fuel and ammo and lose the war any day now, you’ll see. And Putin will be couped in a spontaneous eruption of pro-Western sentiment. And the Ghost of Kiev will give you £100.
I don’t think Russia would “win” against NATO, but obviously NATO is their enemy, NATO is openly supplying weapons and intelligence to people trying to kill Russians, and it’s very likely NATO special forces are already in Ukraine if not Russia itself. We are at war with Russia in all but name.
If the Rooskies have convinced themselves that open war with NATO is unavoidable, or at least likely, mass mobilisation makes sense from their point of view.
For some reason you don’t seem to want to consider the possibility of Russia having its own point of view, which differs from yours. I don’t blame you, our government is even more autistic and seems to believe it can bait the bear all it wants, but the bear’s not allowed to bite back. Which is something a Chinese guy who wrote a famous book on warfare might’ve smiled at.
Speaking of the unspeakable Chinese, Liz Truss is now openly threatening them with “global NATO”, which is about as smart as we’ve come to expect from Liz Truss.
Paul – Ukraine are the good guys. We’re the good guys.
Lol.
@Paul, Somerset
‘… and that was Western-style democracy…’. In a coma these last two years?
I wonder where people who talk about ‘freedom’, democracy’, have been of late, or if they even understand what these words mean.
We the good guys? State sponsored child abuse, elder abuse, psychological warfare on the citizenry, coercion, shaming, terrorising people to muzzle themselves, take untested experimental drug without informed consent, deliberately causing misery, hardship, death by driving up energy and other commodity prices to change the weather and play we hate Russia.
Ukraine are the good guys. We’re the good guys.
We stopped being the good guys when Blair declared war on Serbia. Every military adventure since has just made matters worse.
Ottokring,
“It is still not clear to me what Russia’s War Aims are in this conflict.”
This is why I bought a bunch of Russian mining shares as they were collapsing. It made no sense to me. It still doesn’t make much sense. Like people think ISIS were religious fanatics, but really, they just wanted oil (so money) and women. Lebensraum was about taking arable land, when arable land was worth some good money. So not that crazy. But arable land isn’t worth much today.
The only theory I have is that the fall of Soviet Union left Putin with some scars. He suffered in terms of career and thinks it’s the worst thing that happened to Russia. And he’s getting old, so better get around to it.
And he’s a tough guy who rules the place and while it’s not getting in the way of his underlings having a nice house, money, girls from the Bolshoi sent to them, they’re not going to do much about it. The problem is that if you start escalating it, that can be under threat. Maybe the people take to the streets and protest and you all get nervous that the army will join them and you’ll all be dangling from lampposts. At which point, either that happens, or one or two deputies break and decide that Vlad has to go, and all the other guys join in, and pretty soon, he’s gone.
“Paul – Ukraine are the good guys. We’re the good guys.”
That made me laugh too. We’re the good guys who have just spent 2 years treating our own populations like criminals and as guinea pigs for experimental drugs. Yeah, Western governments really are the good guys……. /sarc
Orwell:
“In intention, at any rate, the English intelligentsia are Europeanized. They take their cookery from Paris and their opinions from Moscow. In the general patriotism of the country they form a sort of island of dissident thought. England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality.”
Ukraine are the good guys. We’re the good guys.
Riiiight.
We’re such good guys that we (our closest ally anyway) threaten a sovereign nation with a “response” if they do something we don’t like.
https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/us-adviser-campbell-visits-solomon-islands-after-china-pact-signed-2022-04-22/
Gee, that sounds awfully like something that Putin said. But he’s the bad guy…
We would be better off just staying out of it. Shipping arms, training, providing intelligence, these things just legitimise us as a target. Instead we’re running down our stocks of weaponry against Soviet era vehicles. Sure we might be able to make more, bit how fast and for how long?
And I have zero desire to go off and slog through a meat grinder to die horribly so that Boris Fucking Johnson can pretend to be Churchill MkII.
Sending thousands of people to kill thousands more would be bad enough, but I also don’t want to die peacefully in bed from Russian (or anyone’s) carpet bombing or worse.
“Let’s play the cloud game daddy! That one looks like a car!”
“That one looks like a lion!”
“Look daddy, that one looks like a mushroom!”
the end
That is still obviously true, if by “intellectuals” we mean “the 2020s establishment” – ie pro-eu, Brexit-hating, fanatical rejoiners; those pro unlimited immigration from third world shitholes to “rub the right’s nose in diversity”; climate armageddonists; the crazies determined to make everyone say out loud that men can magically become women even though they know that is nonsense (shades of another Orwell work there.)
The responses above to your previous comment are, in my reading, ashamed of the intellectuals claiming to speak in our name, and not ashamed of our nationality (assuming the nation can be rescued and recovered from the “intellectuals”).
By “intellectuals” I mean “they take their opinions from Moscow”, the same as Orwell did.
No one has conscripted you to die in a trench, and no one has forced you to take their vaccine. I know I didn’t, any more than I ever wore a mask, as much as they tried to force me. They can make their rules, but if one of them looks just wrong from a common law point of view I can simply ignore it without getting beaten up or novichoked.
That’s why ours is the one and only way of life that’s decent for ordinary people. Not perfect. But worth the people of Ukraine fighting for.
There won’t be a sea of conscripts. The Russian birth rate tanked with the fall of the USSR and it’s been below 1.5 for most of the last 30 years.
Talking of good guys and bad guys, given the support for Ukraine, I am a little surprised to find Ukraine at no. 122 on the Corruption Index (where 1 is squeaky clean). There was a way to go in nation-building even before the Russian invasion. Russia (pre-invasion,) was at 136.
Some things about wars and generals are a puzzle to this outsider. Frinstance this discussion on Streetwise Professor after I suggested that guided cruise missiles, such as sank the Moskva, could be used against, say, bridges.
‘PGMs have made it easier, but not easy to drop bridges. It’s amazing how much ordnance the allies expended trying to destroy bridges to isolate the Normandy theater, and how little success they had. The Germans launched many sorties to try to bring down the Remagen Bridge. In VN, attacks on the Thanh Hóa Bridge with early model PGMs (Walleyes) failed to bring it down. Later attacks with the “Fat Albert” version of Walleye did some damage, and eventually 2000 lb. laser guided bombs finally dropped the main span’ said the blogger, in support of another commenter.
To which I replied ‘In WW2 the RAF had success against bridges with their “tallboy” and “grand slam” bombs. The idea was that they penetrate soft earth and then explodeth the bomb, shaketh the local earthquake, tumbleth the bridge.
Why on earth didn’t the US use the idea in Vietnam?’
Well: why didn’t they? Why in God’s name not use a technique developed years before, the details of which could probably be yours for the asking? I hesitate to suggest that generals are dim; but are they, on the whole?
“No one has conscripted you to die in a trench, and no one has forced you to take their vaccine.”
Apart from the people who worked in care homes and had to face the choice of getting jabbed or losing their jobs. And indeed people who worked in the NHS and were pressured into getting jabbed because they were told if they didn’t by a certain date they’d lose their jobs. And indeed even now after the NHS vaccine mandate was dropped many people face pressure from professional standards bodies declaring if they aren’t jabbed they will lose their professional registrations, which are required for work.
And this is just in the UK, which is probably one of the countries that has demonstarted far less anti-unvaccinated behaviour. How about Austria, with its legal vaccine mandates for all, or Italy with its Green Pass system required to go to the shops or even leave the house, or France with Macron’s aim of ‘pissing off’ the unvaccinated’ or the USA with its attempt (illegally) to force workers to get vaccinated under Health and Safety rules?
But of course none of this happened according to you………….
The Yanks forced all (or almost all) their armed forces personnel to get jabbed. Did we?
Because if so the medical people in the armed forces will have a pretty good idea of how much (short term) harm jabs have done to healthy males of working age.
Yet HMG doesn’t tell us about these data. Why not? If you want to claim that jabs are safe and effective why not publish the data?
BoM4 – The only theory I have is that the fall of Soviet Union left Putin with some scars.
No doubt, the 90’s were extremely traumatic for Russia. But I think his geopolitical outlook owes more to NATO’s nasty little war on Yugoslavia in 1999 (he mentioned it again just yesterday).
Nautical Nick – I am a little surprised to find Ukraine at no. 122 on the Corruption Index
Ukraine is one of those places that seems a lot better the less you know about it.
Paul – England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality.
It’s mostly the people who consider themselves “intellectuals” who are frothing for Russian blood.
Interestingly, there was an opinion poll in the US recently that showed people who are most strongly pro- Covid health authoritarianism are also most strongly in favour of conflict with Russia. Coronasceptics were a lot less enthusiastic about war. I’d bet a fiver the same holds true in England.
Russian logistics seem to be crap. You can see it even in the way they package their munitions – wooden crates, nothing ready for quick and easy reloading or transport.
IMO, mobilizing for a *defensive* war inside Russia – they can turn any invasion onto a meat grinder for the invader
Right now though, it looks like if they mobilized a million reservists and conscripts these guys would barely be able to get to the front and would likely starve when they did.
So far Russia’s military has exposed itself as being in really bad shape.
We can’t tell what is happening inside the Ukraine, but the Russian Steamroller thing is a myth. They ran out of men in WWI, because their farming was inefficient. When they called those men up, they ran out of food. Which triggered the revolution.
They can call their youth up, but who will command them? They don’t have the officer corps to do so.
The signs are Ukraine is clearly winning. It is sending its best men out of the country to train. No-one does that if they are desperate.
While Russia continues to attack the Ukraine get to destroy their vehicles at a perilous rate.
The hard bit will be when the Russians go onto the defensive. But that’s when morale comes into the equation. The Russian morale near Kiev was clearly not good. They gave up pretty quickly, face-saving “change of plan” my a**e.
I know the Ukraine is corrupt, but they want to be on our side. Who spurns potential allies? Do we want a whole bank of countries like Belarus facing us?
South Korea in 1960 was similar. 1950s Taiwan too. Pinochet. Nasty dictatorships. But, it turns out, being on our side tends to help people.
NATO is openly supplying weapons and intelligence to people trying to kill Russians
This one sentence tells you everything about Steve; what he is, and who he really supports.
Of course, people are trying to kill Russians, because they have illegally invaded another sovereign country; and that is where they are being killed.
But Stevie leaves that bit out…
As for us being the good guys British Columbia sacked over 3,000 healthcare workers for not being vaccinated and now wants to spend $12m on fast tracking foreign nurses to come and help alleviate the shortages in healthcare. Anecdotal, but I had heard they sacked them by email as they weren’t allowed into the workplace.
The nurses union is running adverts about how stressed and over-worked nurses are, new pay negotiation coming up I think. When the President of the union said they would support unvaccinated staff she was promptly ousted for ‘unrelated’ issues and the new President publicly endorsed the vaccination policy.
Ukraine at no. 122 on the Corruption Index
I’d be interested to know what the metrics are for that.
There’s a lot to be said for places you can buy, or at least rent, the police. You know exactly where you are. You only need the folding stuff. A police that records Non Crime Hate Incidents frightens the fuck out of me.
Looking at history, one part of the “special operation” in Ukraine dates back to 1979: do a combat desant on or very close to the enemy’s capital, have your scary SF mob storm in and kill the enemy leadership and seize the levers of power, rush troops in to secure the gains and protect your selected New Glorious Leader who tells everyone to obey their Russian overlords. Worked quite well (at first) in Afghanistan, that seems to have been the model for Ukraine 2022.
The problems were multiple; the airborne assaults on Kyiv went horribly wrong with lots of VDV dead and they didn’t manage to storm the Presidential Palace, the fast drive down from the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone met unexpected resistance and stalled, then had to deal with “raiding parties of furious locals with man-portable AT and IEDs” meeting “yeah, all that kit you were meant to have, your CO nicked the money for hookers and vodka”, and nobody below field rank had the skills, training or authority to do more than “wait for the General to tell us what to do next” – meaning the General had to get on the ground to see, and get slotted…
One welcome lesson has been the change in capability in Ukrainian forces from 2014 to 2022 – having been handled very roughly back then, they’ve put a lot of effort into “if the Russians have another go we’re going to make them really regret it” (we can genuinely claim some credit for that). By contrast, the Russians seem to have not only rested on their laurels, but gone backwards from some of the skilful TTPs they were demonstrating in the Donbas.
A cynic might wonder if the reward for military victory in 2014, was to be posted to the Far East Military District in obscurity with no budget or authority: “Well done, comrade! Now you as our greatest and most valued commander, can protect the Motherland from the Chinese threat!” while reliable, obedient placemen took over the units in the West to avoid any bright ideas of “it’s that easy to just take over?”
After all, after the Fascist menace was no more, Georgei Zhukov was shuffled off and accused of misdemeanours with almost indecent haste (couldn’t just shoot a war hero but did need to dispose of him, lest he get ideas about running the place…) and the professional units he built, allowed to dissipate home to tea and medals rather than be the core of “this is how the Red Army wins wars, learn from us”.
This VE day parade in Moscow on 9th May 2022 is going to be interesting, actually the build up to it. Presumably there will be rehearsals the days before, and a lot of military top brass will be co-ordinating this and naturally meet and discuss stuff, and wonder if they can replace their Commander in Chief.
My prediction is Putin is out by mid May.
@bongo
Agreed
And what a great target….
BniC – I’d have more sympathy for the nurses and how they’ve been treated by the current gang of thugs if their union hadn’t endorsed this lot, and their members overwhelming voted for him. Because the other guy (or gal, in the first iteration) was obviously BushHarperHitler. Now that you’ve made your bed, ladies, enjoy sleeping in it.
To expand on BiS’ comment, the corruption index has Switzerland at 3 and Germany at 9. There are clearly areas of society where massive and extremely damaging corruption is either not being measured or not being detected.
We don’t have low-level banknote-in-drivers-license kind of corruption, only minimal organised crime gangs doing “community relations”, we just have the type of corruption that costs taxpayers or customers billions and goes entirely unpunished, often played out shamelessly in the open, at the very top.
We don’t have corruption. We have HS2, and levelling up.
BiS – Ukraine at no. 122 on the Corruption Index
I’d be interested to know what the metrics are for that.
There’s a lot to be said for places you can buy, or at least rent, the police.
I dunno how they measure it. But Ukraine isn’t the kind of place where you can get out of a speeding fine by slipping the cop a couple of fags.
It’s the kind of place where the cops kidnap you, take you to a secret prison, and torture you at leisure because they think it’s funny. Probably not for speeding, you understand, but could be for any number of other real or imaginary offences, including if they don’t like your social media posts.
HHG – This one sentence tells you everything about Steve; what he is, and who he really supports.
Blyat! How have you penetrated my secret disguise, comrade?
Of course, people are trying to kill Russians, because they have illegally invaded another sovereign country; and that is where they are being killed.
Da. One kleptocratic shithole run by gangsters has invaded another kleptocratic shithole run by gangsters. We should not want shithole countries to fight each other, we should want peace instead.
I fail to see why this requires me to help fund turning Ukraine into a permanent massively multiplayer first person shooter game, cause widespread misery, economic depression and potential famines due to sanctions, and risk escalation of a local Slavic beef that doesn’t concern us into a general European war, because I am KGB secret agent.
Aga – Russian logistics seem to be crap.
They are crap. It’s probably because, apart from the top tier whizz-bang supervillain superweapons – which get lots of attention from the Ministry and V. Putin himself – the rest of Russian military spending is liable to be stolen by local officials. Low trust societies suck.
One kleptocratic shithole run by gangsters has invaded another kleptocratic shithole run by gangsters.
To try and paint equivalence between where Ukraine was on the corruption / authoritarian axis and where Russia sits on the same axis suggests you are so monumentally intellectually challenged and removed from reality that either you actually are a St Petersburg paid shrill, or a complete window licking retard. Let’s hope it is the former, then at least you are getting paid.
Blyat! How have you penetrated my secret disguise, comrade?
Top tip, repeating the same “joke” ad infinitum doesn’t make it more “funny” sweetheart.
Hmm, well. Ukraine used to be *much worse* on the corruption front than Putin’s Russia. Difficult to believe, but in U there was a continual changing of the power structure. So, no farming of the populace, rather steal now and steal as much as possible. This started to get markedly better after Yanukovich was ditched, Maidan etc. But it really was worse.
That kind of proves my point, Timbo.
Ukraine was heading in the right direction, mainly due to action by the populace.
Russia went the other way years ago, and is basically a full on gangster state.
Stevie’s “they are both shitholes full of Slavs” slur is top draw moronic. Might get some chuckles from his fat arse mates down the golf club but doesn’t reflect reality in any shape or form.
Hardly, Harry. This is one index:
https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2021/
Neither of the scores out of 100 demonstrate any significant difference. Click on either country for a brief trend line.
Others seem to show the same sort of thing (Russia marginally ahead or Ukraine marginally ahead). Here’s another:
https://risk-indexes.com/global-corruption-index/
It’s just the obvious explanation for why they went in light, attacked on several fronts, and sent a small subsection of their forces to moderately menace Kiev.
No, the obvious explanation is they were shite, so shite they were unaware of just how shite they were. It was OK at the beginning to think the Russians were as good as their reputation, even General Miley thought it would be a cakewalk. Only those blinded by some even bigger stupid picture can still think that. But hey, you want to attach your credibility to Russian credibility? Knock yourself out. You can always pretend later you were joking.