Good. Fuck russia. And fuck the republican traitor filth. Send them to the russian front, where they belong.
The people are victims too. Even if they’re mislead and sent into the meat grinder, they’re not the ones who benefit from the hate and anger.
That's why fuck Russia and not fuck Russians
I think saying “good” about the death of so many Russian soldiers has a hint of “fuck Russians” in it. That loss of life is senseless and tragic, not good.
Agreed. I want Ukraine to win, but I'm still sad for the parents, partners, and children of those were used to fight. It's horrible to celebrate the deaths of so many
I understand that in a life or death situation it's kill or be killed, so I don't have anything against the fighters themselves. But to be a person on the outside saying "good" is just ick
This is why we need continued/more support for Ukraine. I want this to be over for them as soon as possible, but the US/NATO should see the strategic advantage of russia continuing to exhaust their resources and military/prison population being thrown into the meat grinder in Ukraine. The longer russia wages war with Ukraine, the more definitively impossible it becomes for them to invade any NATO nations.
I mean, let's be real.. it's already an impossibility for russia to wage war with the US or European NATO countries alone... But it doesn't make any strategic sense to stop supporting Ukraine in a fight against our greatest enemy, who continues to threaten their neighbors with invasion. Let them further erode their military, munitions, and resources. Then maybe they won't be able to commit/assist in genocides like they have in Syria.
The Republicans fighting aid bills for Ukraine are just traitors. It's in the world's best interest to support Ukraine.
it’s already an impossibility for russia to wage war with the US or European NATO countries alone
Some (!!!) EU NATO members have underinvested in defence for decades and now severely depleted their stocks to help Ukraine.
If Russia wins in Ukraine and if Trump withdraws from NATO or implies he won't intervene in Europe again, then Russia is not unlikely to invade one of the Baltics. Putin's allies say as much on a regular basis. The Suwalki Gap is basically indefensible by NATO allies anyway.
Even if Putin doesn't actually invade, he'll do constant military provocations, troop buildups, military exercises near the border, just to fuck with Europe and the US. A constant stream of shit, basically. That increases the likelihood of mistakes, and without the US nuclear umbrella, and even without Russia deliberately invading a (former) NATO country, that actually increases the chance of an all out war in Europe. The reason to have a strong conventional military, is so that you're less likely to be existentially threatened and need to use unconventional(nuclear) weapons. The best case scenario is that Europe will be perpetually distracted. We'll have to triple or even quadruple defense spending.
Of course, as a European, I can confidently predict what will actually happen in that case: with Russian support right wing populists will gain even more ground. "Our people first! Why are we spending so much on defense?" The EU project will die, a divided Europe will end up kowtowing to Beijing (even more), the US will lose market share in one of the world's most important markets, and the likelihood of de-dollarisation will increase significantly. Beijing will also be far likelier to invade Taiwan. And no that wouldn't be a cakewalk for the US.
Obviously, this is just me regurgitating stuff, but I don't think anyone can argue that the stakes aren't infinitely higher than Afghanistan or Iraq. If the US was able to spend thousands of billions fighting and dying in those wars, it's a no brainer to spend tens of billions so that Ukrainians can have the 'privilege' of dying in a war against Russia and fighting to further European and US interests.
It's not just the moral thing to do. You don't need to care about war crimes. You don't need to care about democracy or whatever. It's in the west's interests.
Trump won't be able to withdraw from NATO; Congress is currently revoking the Presidents ability to unilaterally leave the alliance specifically in case Trump or another like him is elected.
Leaving NATO will now require an act of Congress, which makes it much more difficult for any president to do so.
This deterrent effect doesn’t come just from the NATO treaty, a bare-bones document whose signatories simply agree in Article 5 that “an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all.” Deterrence comes from the Kremlin’s conviction that Americans really believe in collective defense, that the U.S. military really is prepared for collective defense, and that the U.S. president really is committed to act if collective security is challenged. Trump could end that conviction with a single speech, a single comment, even a single Truth Social post, and it won’t matter if Congress, the media, and the Republican Party are still arguing about the legality of withdrawing from NATO. Once the commander in chief says “I will not come to an ally’s aid if attacked,” why would anyone fear NATO, regardless of what obligations still exist on paper? And once the Russians, or anyone else, no longer fear a U.S. response to an attack, then the chances that they will carry one out grow higher. If such a scenario seems unlikely, it shouldn’t. Before February 2022, many refused to believe there could ever be a full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine. ... When I asked several people with deep links to NATO to imagine what would happen to Europe, to Ukraine, and even to Taiwan and South Korea if Trump declared his refusal to observe Article 5, all of them agreed that faith in collective defense could evaporate quickly. Alexander Vershbow, a former U.S. ambassador to NATO and a former deputy secretary-general of NATO, pointed out that Trump could pull the American ambassador from his post, prevent diplomats from attending meetings, or stop contributing to the cost of the Brussels headquarters, all before Congress was able to block him: “He wouldn’t be in any way legally constrained from doing that.” Closing American bases in Europe and transferring thousands of soldiers would take longer, of course, but all of the political bodies in the alliance would nevertheless have to change the way they operate overnight. James Goldgeier, an international-relations professor at American University and the author of several books on NATO, thinks the result would be chaotic. “It’s not like you can say, ‘Okay, now we have another plan for how to deal with this,’ ” he told me. There is no alternative leadership available, no alternative source of command-and-control systems, no alternative space weapons, not even an alternative supply of ammunition. Europe would immediately be exposed to a possible Russian attack for which it is not prepared, and for which it would not be prepared for many years.
Massive is right. And Russia has still never recovered the population losses from WWI (at least 1.7 million), WWII (27,000,000), Stalin's purges, believed to be 20-30,000,000) the living exodus from Soviet break up, or the 4,585,000 covid deaths, and now has less than half this place's population, which limits is status as any kind of global power.
Russia ought to be begging for emigration, right now. But, they are a pariah.
Don't forget the brain drain once they officially declared war (special military operation) against Ukraine. There was a mass exodus of scholars and intellectuals not wanting to be trapped in russia.
And it's not only the population, but its GDP is tiny. Back when Russia first invaded Ukraine, I wondered how big Russia would be if it were a US state. I compared the GDP per Capita of all US states to Russia's.
Mississippi's GDP per Capita was almost 4 times larger than Russia's. Mississippi! I finally went into the US territories to find one that Russia could top (American Samoa).
And, in case you're thinking "well, that's GDP per Capita, they'd dwarf all US states in GDP," they'd be the third largest state behind California and Texas and just ahead of New York. The US as a whole has a GDP over 10 times larger than Russia.
Russia's only strenght was its oil reserves, but Putin had to realize he can't blackmail with that forever.
Your comparison is biased because the economy of Russia is quite insular — you're basically saying that if they were to export all they produce and buy all they need from the US, they would reach the wealth of 1/4 Mississippi. But the Russians make a lot of stuff themselves, they just have trouble buying from abroad.
What you want is to compare GDP adjusted for purchasing power parity. Then Russia's economy becomes comparable with California's or Germany's.
However this must be taken with a grain of salt, because GDP-PPP is hard to measure in the first place (because purchasing power is hard to measure), and Russia is undergoing sanctions and running a war economy, and the Russian government is probably fudging the numbers anyway.
If I trade you a car for your truck, congratulations, we've just raised the GDP. Kind of a shit metric just sayin.
peria
"Pariah" might be the word you're looking for.
Indeed, changed
Edited to add. I was in Spanish, in which that spelling is the same word.
Russia lost the ability to do soft power. All it can do is bluster and threaten and attack (with variable likelihood of success). It has no economic opportunities that would attract venturesome migrants, as everything of value happening in Russia belongs to oligarchs who understand that they owe their lives to the Czar, and anybody who gets any ideas about disrupting the incumbents and getting rich is unlikely to live very long. Other than from the poorer ex-SSRs (colloquially known as “the ‘Stans”), very few people were inclined to immigrate to Russia even before the war, and now with foreigners being press-ganged into the frontlines, that isn’t improving.
yeah its strange they kidnap the kids when its like. dudes you do not have to go to war. just do foreign adoptions!
Emigration is to leave, I think you mean immigration.
Another article has an estimate of 315,000 Russia casualties since the beginning of the war.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/12/us/politics/russia-intelligence-assessment.html
The Russian/Afghanistan war estimates (1979-1989) are: 15,000 Soviet soldiers killed, and about 53,000 wounded source
Oh my god, they were there 10 years? Jesus Christ , and under 100k casualties too. Wow.Tripled that in two years.
13,000 russian casualties just since october?! Holy shit
This is what happens when you're an incompetent dictator/military whose only strategies are war crimes/genocide and throwing numbers into the meat grinder.
They try to take entrenched Ukrainain positions by throwing 100s at them to be slaughtered, hoping they will overrun them. If that fails, they try again! They literally have been sending their prison population to the front line to be meat shields for their infantry.
The fact that they have to supplement their infantry with prisoners tells you all you need to know about their incompetency and how dire their situation is.
that's not a high value at all, just divide the total casualties by the duration of the war and you get to a higher number than that for the average monthly losses. "Since October" is > 1.5 months by now
What usually happens to these bodies? I would assume a lot of them just rot somewhere. It seems insane to me that you find decomposed bodies and guns and shit in the forrest somewhere in 10 years.
Some are lost, buried under collapsed trenches/bunkers or sink into bogs/marshes. The rest, if Ukraine controls the area loads them up into train cars to ship back to russia for identification and burial though russia isn't accepting them last I heard, would look bad for them. Russia controlled areas they leave them on the ground to rot or pile up the corpses and burn them making later identification next to impossible.
I love Biden's work on declassifying Russia Intel all along, here. Really he's done a good job at building an international coalition and undermining Putin. Every time. Putin says something, it seems like Biden's got the documents showing it's a lie.
That's a good one and very interesting. Normally, you wouldn't release intel and assessments to the general public to protect sources. But, this time is different from the very start. Why? Are the sources indestructible? In any case, Putin must be constantly looking over his shoulder and wondering where it's coming from. The release of some of this information has stopped planned Russian efforts.
Sources and methods are never compromised in these releases.
Second, one of the things they teach you in intelligence analysis is to not only read the facts that are being reported (and try to measure their accuracy), but to ask why they’re being reported. Not as in “Why is the NYT making this a headline” - that’s not what matters unless you’re doing media studies or sociology. I mean “Why is the government/organization putting this out there?”
In this case, it’s obvious. There’s a current narrative around the Russian war on Ukraine, and it’s being pushed by some American politicians and news agencies as well as foreign actors, and it’s being used for political effect. There’s perfectly justified reasons for skepticism from numbers published by both Ukraine and Russia for both fog of war and propaganda reasons.
The Biden administration has an active interest in maintaining US and international support for the war, and that’s in danger because of a perception of a lack of success. They need to counter that narrative.
I don’t have any reason to believe that these numbers are wrong - I very much suspect they’re largely right - but the political angle is why they’re being reported, while US intelligence estimates of other conflicts currently going on around the world are not.
I'm obviously not talking about this assessment, which is a product of DOD battlefield analysis.
I'm talking about the hand full of times early on when the US released stories to the press stories about Russian plans. Russia plans a false flag event for provocation, etc. Those events didn't happen because the world knew what they intended. That Intel came from somewhere.
Battlefield analysis in this context would notionally be a product of signals intelligence, photo reconnaissance, and information sharing with allied forces. It’s still sources and methods stuff, and the people doing it are part of the US intelligence community. That includes the branch intelligence services, DIA, CIA, and other three letter agencies.
For something like Putin’s plan on invading on a certain date, those are more going to lean on CIA drawing on resources in the Russian government and military. They will also involve signals and imagery, which often belong to other agencies. In these cases it is still a multi source intelligence product that cannot (in theory) be reverse engineered to leak sources and methods.
Things do leak, of course. I remember a photo published in the congressional record (which made it into Aviation Week iirc) that showed a US Keyhole photo in which you could read the tail numbers on a parked plane. That leaked the resolution of that generation of satellite, which is among the most highly classified subjects.
You are right, though. Sometimes the US will publish otherwise highly classified info, such as was used to document the engineering of WMDs in Iraq. That didn’t work out too well in the end but the general idea was that making a conclusive argument for war justified the potential exposure of that information (and Curveball was I believe already in the US at that time, but it’s been awhile).
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