How should west respond to potential (likely) Russian invasion of Ukraine?

[Swammerdami]

Russia would like to pretend that its opponent is the US or NATO, but that's just an attempt to rationalise the fact that their supposedly fearsome military machine is getting its arses kicked by a bunch of Ukrainian farm boys.

That would not have happened without the US showering Ukraine with advanced weapons and many billions of Sacagaweas. 1/2 the US stockpile of Javelins went to Ukraine. The US also provides vast intel.

I suppose information is so widely held that keeping the size of Javelin stocks secret is difficult. Has the U.S. munitions industry gone into over-drive? Will the U.S. continue to meet Ukraine's needs?

The U.S. needs to find ways to hurt Russia without driving the sociopath to a nuclear option. Russia may have launched a cyber-attack against the U.S.; can the U.S. retaliate to that effectively? Anti-Putin sentiment is growing among Russia's elite: Is the U.S. stepping up its rewards and sanctions to influence Russian politics?

Russia is dependent on trade with China. Should they be forced to pay a price for helping Putin's aggression?

The Russian madman is now torturing and targeting civilians. When will he be indicted for war crimes?

 

[bilby]

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán yesterday called for direct talks between the U.S. and Russia, saying that only former president Trump could end the war in Ukraine. Speaking at a panel discussion in Berlin, Orbán said President Biden had gone “too far” in calling Putin a war criminal and saying in March that he “cannot remain in power.” “That would make it very hard for [Biden] to make peace,” Orbán said. “This is going to sound brutal, but hope for peace goes by the name of Donald Trump.” Guy Chazan and Marton Dunal report for the Financial Times.

The cuckoo for cocoa puffs crowd should latch on to this one.

I dunno.

I agree with you. If Mr. Trump had been re-elected, there would be no war between Ukraine and Russia by now. Russia would have invaded Ukraine and the Mr. Trump would have left Ukraine out to dry. Without our help, Ukraine would have folded by now.

If Trump was Russia's puppet, why didn't it invade while he was in office? Wouldn't that have made a lot more sense?

Putin doing anything dramatic while Trump was in office would have been a contravention of the principle "When your enemy is making a major blunder, don't interrupt him".

 

[Jayjay]

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán yesterday called for direct talks between the U.S. and Russia, saying that only former president Trump could end the war in Ukraine. Speaking at a panel discussion in Berlin, Orbán said President Biden had gone “too far” in calling Putin a war criminal and saying in March that he “cannot remain in power.” “That would make it very hard for [Biden] to make peace,” Orbán said. “This is going to sound brutal, but hope for peace goes by the name of Donald Trump.” Guy Chazan and Marton Dunal report for the Financial Times.

The cuckoo for cocoa puffs crowd should latch on to this one.

I dunno.

I agree with you. If Mr. Trump had been re-elected, there would be no war between Ukraine and Russia by now. Russia would have invaded Ukraine and the Mr. Trump would have left Ukraine out to dry. Without our help, Ukraine would have folded by now.

If Trump was Russia's puppet, why didn't it invade while he was in office? Wouldn't that have made a lot more sense?

From what I've read, Putin considered Trump to be unpredictable. And he was right. This war didn't end up the way it did because Biden did something unexpected, it's due to a combination of Russian military blunders, Zelensky's and rest of Ukraine's decision to stay and fight, and western unity in sanctioning Russia.

Even the US president doesn't control everything, though Russian propaganda would have us believe otherwise.

Also about the timing: The war started soon after Nord Stream 2 was completed (though gas was not flowing yet). That could have played a part why it didn't happen during Trump's term.

 

[Harry Bosch]

For those who think they know what Russian public opinion is, I offer this interesting article from the Moscow Times:

Startup Pollsters Challenge Accepted Wisdom on Russians’ War Support​

Of course, The Moscow Times is an anti-government news outlet that has been banned in Russia, so you can take their bias FWIW. However, no source is more biased than the Russian government itself. My point is that there is no effective means for measuring public opinion, so you sometimes have to look for alternative points of view. The easiest thing is to read a lot of news articles and then come away with some superficial impression based on the few sources your have been exposed to. Russia is a huge, complex country, and there is much more variety and diversity there than most outsiders are aware of. So these alternative pollsters have some interesting methods to apply to the problem, but they are necessarily limited in their sources of information. The most common estimate for Russian public opinion is that about 70% of the public is pro-war. These alternative pollsters claim that a more realistic estimate would be around 40% or even lower. The truth is probably in between those figures.

Yes, the above seems reasonable to me. We don't know how many Russians want peace. I suspect (my opinion) that 40% want war. Certainly the side that wants war seems louder than the side that dosn't. But 40% or even less can easily control a democracy (like the US) let along a dictatorship like Russia. I think that it's best to continue assuming the worse, and flood Ukraine with weapons so that they can defend themselves.

 

[Harry Bosch]

I think that Putler's biggest flaw is that he doesn't understand people. Shocking that a person so steeped in the KGB and intelligence has such little understanding of westerners. His brilliant idea now is to want to sell gas again to Europe:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/mar...sedgntp&cvid=ace6b5ab66f8443bae6e2693b5a5205f

Hopefully Europe will never again trust Putler or any of his successors to deliver gas to them again.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

I think that Putler's biggest flaw is that he doesn't understand people. Shocking that a person so steeped in the KGB and intelligence has such little understanding of westerners. His brilliant idea now is to want to sell gas again to Europe:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/mar...sedgntp&cvid=ace6b5ab66f8443bae6e2693b5a5205f

Hopefully Europe will never again trust Putler or any of his successors to deliver gas to them again.

Lets hope so.

But history is full of examples of populations buying into the Big Lie. Hitler is the best modern example. Trump and Putin could likely also have succeeded to a far greater degree given different circumstances. In the U.S. it was freedom and perhaps to a lesser degree the availability of arms at the citizen level. In Putin's case his rise to power was also part of a Big Lie but more notably an absence of the legacy of freedom. The answer is freedom, democracy. NATO is an example of free nations uniting in the cause of freedom whereas Putin spins this to be an act of aggression against Russia. That's his big lie that would not succeed were it not for brutal repression and an absence of the legacy of law.

 

[ZiprHead]

 

[Jarhyn]

This reads to me like Kherson and all outlying areas have, as I have warned, been posted with anti-war Russians.

 

[ZiprHead]

 

[ZiprHead]

I thought mines were supposed to be hidden. ???

 

[Jarhyn]

I thought mines were supposed to be hidden. ???

Not necessary when they have anti-removal mechanisms on the base of them. Visible mines allow people to savely traverse the field while denying it to armor.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

Another pig for Putin.

 

[ZiprHead]

Another pig for Putin.

And most likely a Trump supporter.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

Kherson: Russia to evacuate civilians from occupied region as Ukraine advances

The article states that Ukraine has taken parts of the city in the northwest. Great news.

Kherson is the only regional capital seized by Russian forces since Moscow's invasion began on 24 February.

Ukraine's military has been tight-lipped about its troop advances in the key region that borders Crimea - the southern Ukrainian peninsula annexed by Moscow in 2014.

 

[Jarhyn]

Kherson: Russia to evacuate civilians from occupied region as Ukraine advances

The article states that Ukraine has taken parts of the city in the northwest. Great news.

Kherson is the only regional capital seized by Russian forces since Moscow's invasion began on 24 February.

Ukraine's military has been tight-lipped about its troop advances in the key region that borders Crimea - the southern Ukrainian peninsula annexed by Moscow in 2014.

Remember what I've been saying? Kherson is about to get nuked by Russia. First comes the inevitable advance of the UA on the city, while Russia populates the city with nothing but soldiers conscripted of protestors, then comes the UA assault, the antiwar conscripts let them in, and then RU nukes the lot of them.

They spin it at home as the west doing the nuking, or perhaps as a necessary sacrifice and "remember the martyrs."

At that point Putin expects the west to cave because it would be the only way to avert the tragic insanity of Russia using nukes

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

More high profile Putin cronies bite the dust not so mysteriously

An energy boss has become the latest high profile Russian to die in suspicious circumstances since Putin invaded Ukraine.

Nikolay Petrunin, 47, dubbed the ‘gas wonderkid’, died after allegedly slipping into a month-long coma from Covid.
Petrunin’s death comes days after leading ‘incorruptible’ judge Sergey Maslov was killed in the Crimean Bridge blast last week.

Two weeks ago, Putin’s former ally Pavel Pchelnikov was found dead with a gunshot wound to the head on his balcony.

We need a new word to describe the kind of state that Russia has become. "Failed state" doesn't capture the enormity of the debacle.

 

[crazyfingers]

More high profile Putin cronies bite the dust not so mysteriously

An energy boss has become the latest high profile Russian to die in suspicious circumstances since Putin invaded Ukraine.

Nikolay Petrunin, 47, dubbed the ‘gas wonderkid’, died after allegedly slipping into a month-long coma from Covid.
Petrunin’s death comes days after leading ‘incorruptible’ judge Sergey Maslov was killed in the Crimean Bridge blast last week.

Two weeks ago, Putin’s former ally Pavel Pchelnikov was found dead with a gunshot wound to the head on his balcony.

We need a new word to describe the kind of state that Russia has become. "Failed state" doesn't capture the enormity of the debacle.

Gangster state

 

[TV and credit cards]

Kherson: Russia to evacuate civilians from occupied region as Ukraine advances

The article states that Ukraine has taken parts of the city in the northwest. Great news.

Kherson is the only regional capital seized by Russian forces since Moscow's invasion began on 24 February.

Ukraine's military has been tight-lipped about its troop advances in the key region that borders Crimea - the southern Ukrainian peninsula annexed by Moscow in 2014.

Remember what I've been saying? Kherson is about to get nuked by Russia. First comes the inevitable advance of the UA on the city, while Russia populates the city with nothing but soldiers conscripted of protestors, then comes the UA assault, the antiwar conscripts let them in, and then RU nukes the lot of them.

They spin it at home as the west doing the nuking, or perhaps as a necessary sacrifice and "remember the martyrs."

At that point Putin expects the west to cave because it would be the only way to avert the tragic insanity of Russia using nukes

That could get ugly.

A Russian nuclear strike against Ukraine would trigger "such a powerful answer" from the West that the Russian army would be "annihilated," said Josep Borrell, the EU's foreign policy chief.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Watch the water in the video. Note that it doesn't react appreciably. Look at the picture here: https://news.yahoo.com/us-battleships-fired-guns-last-163655963.html

Note that the boom is well above the waterline and not pointed towards the water but see what happens anyway. From this I conclude the boom was above something solid and from the video and the damage pattern that something is the road. I believe all the rail damage is simply fire from the train eating shrapnel.

How the boom got to that point I do not know but that truck looks like a likely suspect.

A bomb sitting or landing on the solid concrete pile cap wouldn't appreciably affect the water either. And a bomb on the bridge deck doesn't explain the apparent lifting damage to the roadway - it would have just blown a hole straight through the deck, without pulling the sections inwards, and there would be only one downward pointing break, not two.

A bomb on the landing would be similar to the battleship guns firing--it would disturb the water.

What I think happened to the bridge is the bomb slammed it down and it bounced. Ever hit something loose with a hammer and have it jump up?

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I can't really see all of the detail that others are seeing from those videos. For example, it looks to me like a lot of water was kicked up, and I see something of a shower of water in the video at one point. However, I have no strong feeling about where the bomb was. I'm pretty sure that the Russian government knows, but they never give out reliable information, only what they think will fit with some narrative that they want to promote.

There's a decent amount of chop--but no big disturbance. That's why I think the bomb must have been above the roadbed, not below it.