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

[TV and credit cards]

Russian sources claimed that the division waited two hours in one location while waiting for 20th Combined Arms Army Commander Major General Sukhrab Akhmedov to arrive and deliver a speech

It goes on to mention something about HIMARS.

 

[Cheerful Charlie]

The Russian Government is turning into a pack of drunken alcoholics.

...
Another interviewee described the trend as follows:

“Well, let’s put it this way: in the presidential administration, just about everyone used to start the day with a shot of vodka. I know many such people, and for some, a shot has (now) turned into a bottle.”

Verstka provided several specific instances of officials who have developed a noticeably increased affinity for alcohol.
....

Alcoholism wave hits top officials and elite in Russia ‘like never before’ amidst war, media reports

In the 18 months since the start of Russia’s extensive invasion of Ukraine, top Russian officials, politicians, and influential government-aligned businesspeople have noticeably increased their alcohol consumption, as revealed by the independent Russian publication Verstka in a story published...

news.yahoo.com

 

[DrZoidberg]

During ww2 many Ukrainians saw Germany as a way to break free from the Soviet Union. So many Ukrainians joined up. To me that looks like, the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

Back in the '90s, I spent a drunken evening in the company of a friend's elderly father, who came to Australia as a refugee after WWII. He was a Ukrainian, and was captured by the British in Germany in the last weeks of the war in Europe.

He had a lot of romantic reminiscences about his youth in Ukraine, and how much the local girls loved a man in uniform who was fighting to defend his homeland against Stalin.

He wasn't a Nazi, or even particularly anti-communist; He just wanted an adventure and to do his bit to liberate Ukraine from Stalin, so when the Soviets were pushed out, and the Germans gave the young men in his village the "choice" of joining their army or being shot as communists, he joined up.

He was embarrassed, but unrepentant, about having ended up fighting for the Germans. It wasn't as though he'd had any real choice, and he'd mostly been fighting Soviet forces, which he certainly didn't object to. He was absolutely ecstatic about the (then recent) collapse of the USSR, which he still hated some five decades later.

None of his unit were Nazis. They were given lots of political instruction by Nazis, but they didn't care much about it; Politics is a priority for political officers, but soldiers ignore them as much as possible (and of course, that was true on both sides of the Eastern Front). He saw a lot of "very bad things". He didn't draw any distinction between those motivated by politics, and those motivated by ordinary wartime viciousness; he just kept his head down and hoped not to be ordered to do too many things he would later feel shame over.

I don't think his experience was radically different from the experience of young men at war in any era; Certainly it sounded a lot like the way Vietnam veterans describe their time as soldiers. Lots of boredom, lots of asinine orders and irrelevant training in stuff nobody cared about, punctuated with occasional fun adventures, and occasional pants-shitting terror.

Let's not forget Touko Laaksonen who also fought with the Nazis against the USSR. I think it's safe to say that he, aka Tom of Finland, was not a Nazi.

 

[Copernicus]

It's also important not to forget that those Ukrainian nationalist allies of the Nazis were also used to commit atrocities against Jews and others. There was a fair amount of antisemitism among Ukrainian nationalists (OUN) that fed into that. However, the Nazis did consider Slavs to be subhuman, so they had used the OUN as auxiliaries to support them and then turned around and purged their ranks after they had successfully invaded Ukraine. The Nazi regime did not want an independent Ukraine. The rich farmland was to be taken over by Germans, although there was never any population of Germans identified that would actually go there to carry out the ideological fantasy. Bandera was spared execution during the purge of the OUN and imprisoned. Eventually, the Nazis freed him in 1945, hoping to get him to reorganize the OUN against the Soviets on the eastern front. At that point, Bandera ceased cooperation with the Nazis, fled Berlin, and was ultimately elected leader of the OUN. However, the leadership decided he should go into exile. He ended up in West Germany, where he served as a Ukrainian nationalist anti-Soviet agitator for the remainder of his life. He was assassinated in Munich in 1954 by the KGB.

 

[TomC]

There was a fair amount of antisemitism among Ukrainian nationalists (OUN) that fed into that.

It wasn't just Ukrainians.
It was everywhere in the western world.

A big part of why Hitler got away with all that he did is because his policies were wildly popular at the time. Including the anti-Jewish parts.
Tom

 

[Copernicus]

There was a fair amount of antisemitism among Ukrainian nationalists (OUN) that fed into that.

It wasn't just Ukrainians.
It was everywhere in the western world.

A big part of why Hitler got away with all that he did is because his policies were wildly popular at the time. Including the anti-Jewish parts.
Tom

Actually, antisemitism was mainly widespread in Europe. Germany itself had a relatively small Jewish population, but the Germans suddenly found themselves confronted by a very large population of Jews as they invaded Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, and Lithuania. That's when the so-called "Final Solution" replaced the Nazi plan to deport the Jewish population.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Sounds lie WWI trench warfare.

Except in WWI they didn't have a viable deep strike option. Ukraine does--they're ignoring the trenches and concentrating on the supplies. All those fancy trenches do you no good if bypassed.

 

[bilby]

The Russian Government is turning into a pack of drunken alcoholics.

What, is this your first day? I don't think there's been a Russian Government that wasn't mostly comprised of drunken alcoholics, at least not since the introduction of vodka in the 1500s, and probably for as long as any place called Russia has existed to be governed.

 

[bilby]

The rich farmland was to be taken over by Germans, although there was never any population of Germans identified that would actually go there to carry out the ideological fantasy.

I think the idea was that land would be granted to any German who wanted to farm it; And that if insufficient volunteers came forward, selected Germans would be told to want to farm it.

 

[bilby]

Actually, antisemitism was mainly widespread in Europe.

There was plenty of it in America too. The list of powerful US industrialists who thought that Hitler and Naziism were the duck's nuts is long, but the list of US institutions that denied membership to Jews (and blacks, and Irishmen, and anyone else who wasn't a white anglo-saxon protestant) is even longer.

Until war broke out in Europe in 1936, there were plenty of people all around the globe who thought fascism and Naziism were a top-notch idea, and represented the shining future of humanity*.

Even after it became apparent that fascism would lead to war, it was another few years before many people realised that it would lead to a war on a similar scale to that seen two decades earlier. A little local trouble in Spain wasn't the wake-up call it should have been, and even general war in Europe didn't alert many Americans to the problem; That took the sinking of the US Pacific fleet to bring about.









*Well, of the bits of humanity that they considered worthy of the name, which admittedly was only the handful of humans who looked and sounded most like themselves.

 

[Cheerful Charlie]

The Russian Government is turning into a pack of drunken alcoholics.

What, is this your first day? I don't think there's been a Russian Government that wasn't mostly comprised of drunken alcoholics, at least not since the introduction of vodka in the 1500s, and probably for as long as any place called Russia has existed to be governed.

If you read the article I linked to, witnesses are saying since Putie's war went South the government has become beyond the usual shot of vodka for breakfast stage. There is a lot of serious bottle of vodka a day drinking now. That should help Russia a lot. This makes me laugh. It tells me a deep sense of despair and hopelessness has settled into large parts of the Russian government.

 

[bilby]

The Russian Government is turning into a pack of drunken alcoholics.

What, is this your first day? I don't think there's been a Russian Government that wasn't mostly comprised of drunken alcoholics, at least not since the introduction of vodka in the 1500s, and probably for as long as any place called Russia has existed to be governed.

If you read the article I linked to, witnesses are saying since Putie's war went South the government has become beyond the usual shot of vodka for breakfast stage. There is a lot of serious bottle of vodka a day drinking now. That should help Russia a lot. This makes me laugh. It tells me a deep sense of despair and hopelessness has settled into large parts of the Russian government.

Again, despair and hopelessness have also been a permanent and persistent feature of Russian government for a very long time. This really isn't new.

 

[lpetrich]

The Russian Government is turning into a pack of drunken alcoholics.

What, is this your first day? I don't think there's been a Russian Government that wasn't mostly comprised of drunken alcoholics, at least not since the introduction of vodka in the 1500s, and probably for as long as any place called Russia has existed to be governed.

Prince Vladimir of Kiev decided on Christianity instead of Islam because that religion would let him and his subjects continue to consume CH3CH2OH: How the Love for Drinking Drove the Kievan Rus to Christianity | Lords of the Drinks

 

[Jayjay]

Russian sources claimed that the division waited two hours in one location while waiting for 20th Combined Arms Army Commander Major General Sukhrab Akhmedov to arrive and deliver a speech

It goes on to mention something about HIMARS.

On the positive side, the two surviving soldiers said that the speech was awesome and well worth waiting for.

 

[DrZoidberg]

There was a fair amount of antisemitism among Ukrainian nationalists (OUN) that fed into that.

It wasn't just Ukrainians.
It was everywhere in the western world.

A big part of why Hitler got away with all that he did is because his policies were wildly popular at the time. Including the anti-Jewish parts.
Tom

Actually, antisemitism was mainly widespread in Europe. Germany itself had a relatively small Jewish population, but the Germans suddenly found themselves confronted by a very large population of Jews as they invaded Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, and Lithuania. That's when the so-called "Final Solution" replaced the Nazi plan to deport the Jewish population.

In Germany Jews made up about 1% of the total population. In Eastern Europe it was between 5 - 10%. That's enough to pose an actual existential threat to any government based on antisemitism.

When I was in Dachau (and the Dachau museum) I learned that the Holocaust was an afterthought. Intitially the point of the concentration camps was to get some free cash out of troublesome Germans. They saw it as a win-win. But they quickly ran into trouble. The problem was that these camps were run by the German Nazi government. An incredibly inefficient and corrupt mess of a system. For example, if a camp had been allocated 100 tonnes of grain, by the time those trains ran into a camp, only 10 tonnes would be left. The rest had been skimmed off and sold along the way. This is how the entire German government worked. Or didn't work. All this talk of Prussian efficiency and discipline was just propaganda. The camp commanders did their best to keep the inmates alive, while also meeting their quotas. But they just didn't have the food to do it. So prisoners died.

The Wansee conference is an after the fact justification. Since they had accidentally killed a whole bunch of people, (through mismanagement) they now reformulated the story as if that was the plan all along. This was the basic operating principle all fascist states worked with. It was all propaganda, spin and image. Zero substance behind anything. Certainly no self reflection or re-evaluation of policy.

Jewish Population of Europe in 1933: Population Data by Country

Before the Nazis seized power in Germany in 1933, Europe had a richly diverse set of Jewish cultures. Learn more about the Jewish population of Europe.

encyclopedia.ushmm.org

 

[TV and credit cards]

The first of two chambers of the Swiss National Council voted on June 14 to decommission 25 Leopard-2 tanks and send the tanks back to Germany, which would then export the tanks to Ukraine.

Even the Swiss look to get in on the act.

Republican and Democratic members of the U.S. Congress introduced legislation on Thursday that would make it easier for Ukraine to fund its fight against Russian invaders by using seized and frozen Russian assets.

As the EU works toward this same goal.

You've only yourselves to blame.

 

[Copernicus]

When I was in Dachau (and the Dachau museum) I learned that the Holocaust was an afterthought. Intitially the point of the concentration camps was to get some free cash out of troublesome Germans...

Actually, that was true before Germany invaded Poland and was confronted with a Jewish population that couldn't possibly be deported. Dachau did not start out as a death camp or  extermination camp. I believe that the first death camps were set up in Poland specifically to execute the huge number of people quickly and efficiently. Prior to WWII, Stalin developed an efficient program of mass extermination for Polish, Ukrainian, and other populations that he targeted. Most were killed by shooting and planned starvation. The Nazis developed their own methods. See Tim Snyder's Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin for a gruesomely detailed history of what really happened. It can be a very depressing read, but it is probably one of the best histories of the subject that you can find. Most histories are skewed from the perspective of the Western side, which tended to treat Stalin's brutality lightly, but Snyder tried to give a fair account of what Stalin did in comparison to Hitler's atrocities.

 

[SLD]

Russian units in Kherson Oblast and Crimea, stricken in cholera outbreak, ‘losing combat effectiveness’

An epidemic of cholera is spreading among Russian military personnel in Kherson Oblast and Crimea following a Russian terrorist attack onthe Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant, the Atesh partisan movement reported on Telegram on June 17.

english.nv.ua

This is a Ukrainian source, but if true it is a hilarious joke on the Russians. They blow up a dam, and it causes their own water supply to become contaminated. I hope it spreads rapidly and seriously impacts their operational capacity.

 

[TV and credit cards]

Once the waters have receded and the banks have dried, this river might offer many more points of crossing.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

The Russians are being told by their government that Ukraine is now sufficiently demilitarized and Russia is safe from all the Nazis. Good stuff. Sounds like an attempt at softening a hard landing, or should I say crash landing.