Russian Invasion of Ukraine - tactics and logistics

[Copernicus]

Russia still occupies 10% of Finland's territory, which they nabbed in WW2. These are ethnically Finnish and still Finnish speaking regions. Neither Finland nor Sweden have forgotten this.

nope.

That's correct. Even a broken clock is right twice a day!

Finnish population was evacuated and those who refused to leave were sent to Siberia or forcibly russified. That war is in the past, but if Russia wants to keep Finland out of NATO, here is my suggestion: give back Karelia and Pechengsky in exchange for Finland remaining out of the alliance, and I'm 100% sure that we'd take the deal.

Russia still occupies 10% of Finland's territory, which they nabbed in WW2. These are ethnically Finnish and still Finnish speaking regions. Neither Finland nor Sweden have forgotten this.

nope.

Well, I was leaning towards agreeing with DrZoidberg, but the depth and detail in your rebuttal has truly given me food for thought. It clearly required considerable diligent research on your part, and the links to the original research that supports your position make it truly compelling.

DrZoidberg is well known for talking out of his ass.
All finns left soviet occupied parts of the Finland.
There are no finns there, none.
Same way there are no germans in territories Poland got from Germany after WW2.
None.

So who are the Ingrians and Karelians? When did they vacate their homeland after WW2? Have they stopped speaking Finnish?

Ingrians were massively persecuted in USSR and practically eradicated. According to Wikipedia 98% of them speak Russian now. Karelians have their own language, though closely related to Finnish.

Ingrian is essentially a dead language now, but Karelian is still active. 98% (or more) of Ukrainians speak Russian, but that doesn't mean that they consider themselves Russian or want to be part of Russia. The Ingrians briefly declared themselves a republic before they were subsumed by the Soviets and their territory formally ceded to the Soviet Union after the Revolution. Karelian is so closely related to eastern dialects of Finnish that some classify it as a dialect of Finnish. However, there is no clear distinction between separate dialects of a language and two very closely related languages. The question of ethnic identity is not determined just by one's native language, nor can we know how people living in that area feel about remaining in Russia without some kind of objective survey. Most Ukrainian citizens living in Crimea voted to leave Ukraine and become part of Russia after the "little green men" appeared to help them count votes in their referendum. I suspect a similar referendum in Karelian areas would produce similar results with similar accuracy. Opinions on such matters change.

To say that Finland (or Sweden, the original owner) should get Karelia back because of ethnic groups is simply false. There is nothing left, they're ethnically cleansed from the annexed territories. It's the same thing Russia is doing in Crimea and fake "people's republics" in Donbas (and elsewhere): most who Ukrainians who don't speak Russian or don't agree with Russian rule have left, the remaining people are being "filtered" (i.e. anyone who could resist the occupation is killed or deported) and brainwashed with Russian propaganda.

I'm not saying that Karelia should be given back to Finland. That was DrZoidberg's suggestion. Ethnic cleansing is not just about moving an entire population out of an area. It is also about intimidating and subduing a local population to the point where they voluntarily assimilate. I believe that the Soviets went back and forth on whether Finnish would be a recognized language in the Karelian ASSR, and they attempted to use Karelian to suppress the use of Finnish most of the time. They have even tried to impose the use of a Cyrillic writing system on Karelian with limited success. I know that about 100,000 Karelian speakers exist in that area of Russia (and some pockets northwest of Moscow), but I would be curious to know how many Karelians also listen to and/or read standard Finnish media. I know that Finnish media was quite popular among Estonians during the Soviet period as an alternative source of news and entertainment. Ingrian speakers near the border of Estonia may simply have replaced their language with Estonian, given the similarities between the two languages (e.g. more vowel and consonant lengths than in Finnish).

 

[bilby]

However, there is no clear distinction between separate dialects of a language and two very closely related languages.

Sure there is; a language is a dialect with an army and a navy.

 

[barbos]

That's correct. Even a broken clock is right twice a day!

I am always correct, it's DrZ who is usually talks out of his ass. And you who demonstrated that you don't know your own history on a few occasions.

those who refused to leave were sent to Siberia or forcibly russified.

I live in the freaking Siberia, nobody who was sent here was russified.
And there were no finns here. Some small number of baltic states people were relocated here. Russian-Germans were too, relocated here, and they speak perfect german.
I remember crazy old lady who spoke german.
No finns, they all left for Finland, why would they choose to go Siberia?

 

[barbos]

Russia still occupies 10% of Finland's territory, which they nabbed in WW2. These are ethnically Finnish and still Finnish speaking regions. Neither Finland nor Sweden have forgotten this.

nope.

Let me guess - they're Nazis too.

I laughed for five minutes regarding the above! But the Russians can manufacture any excuse to invade any country that they deem that they can bully. And Putin has no credibility to negotiate with. The only thing that Putin understands is force. The west has to continue sending the arms to countries willing to stand up against Russia. Russia won't invade Finland once it joins Nato.

Compared to US, russians are amateurs at excuses.
US trained nazis were murdering russian population for 8 years before Russia decided that was enough. Well, Putin would have waited more but not after Ukraine took a notice of Azerbaijan success in Karabach and started buying Bayraktars in large numbers.
And yes, US military were training nazis (Azov) in direct violation US Congress ban on doing so. There is a photographic evidence of that.

 

[DrZoidberg]

Russia still occupies 10% of Finland's territory, which they nabbed in WW2. These are ethnically Finnish and still Finnish speaking regions. Neither Finland nor Sweden have forgotten this.

nope.

Let me guess - they're Nazis too.

I laughed for five minutes regarding the above! But the Russians can manufacture any excuse to invade any country that they deem that they can bully. And Putin has no credibility to negotiate with. The only thing that Putin understands is force. The west has to continue sending the arms to countries willing to stand up against Russia. Russia won't invade Finland once it joins Nato.

Compared to US, russians are amateurs at excuses.
US trained nazis were murdering russian population for 8 years before Russia decided that was enough. Well, Putin would have waited more but not after Ukraine took a notice of Azerbaijan success in Karabach and started buying Bayraktars in large numbers.
And yes, US millitray were training nazis (Azov) in direct violation US congress ban on doing so. There is a photographic evidence of that.

Your "evidence" only comes from pro-Russian pro-Putin propaganda. Nobody is buying it. Nobody besides you believes Nazis have been a problem in Ukraine. Don't forget that after the illegal seizure of Crimea there's been a Russian backed insurgency in Donbas and Luhansk. Which Ukraine have been trying to put down. Fighting a patriotic war, isn't being a Nazi.

I can understand that if you are Ukrainian living in a country where a minority is fighting an armed insurrection funded by a neighbour of the same ethnicity, members of that minority might become targets for hate crime. I'm pretty sure Putin understood this would be the result if he funded the separatists. If Putin wanted this to stop, wouldn't a better idea to stop funding the Russian separatists in Donbas and Luhansk rather than invading? This whole thing looks awfully lot like it was planned right from the start by Putin. As conspiracy theories go, these dots are easy to connect.

 

[Rhea]

I live in the freaking Siberia, nobody who was sent here was russified.
And there were no finns here.
[…]
No finns, they all left for Finland, why would they choose to go Siberia?

Isn’t Siberia a really big place?

Isn’t this like me saying, “I live in the northeast US, there are no Russians here”?

 

[barbos]

Isn’t Siberia a really big place?

One more time, no Finns were deported to Siberia.
Also, there are regular people living here, so stop implying that it's a hell on earth and people are miserable here.
Summer is pretty great here, better than most of US, it's just too short.

 

[Elixir]

I don’t think Barbos cares that nobody at all is buying his drivel. He’s getting his assignment completed, and that’s what counts. Trying to correct or inform him is a total waste of time. But hey … low hanging fruit, softballs… that kind of thing is always in demand.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

I laughed for five minutes regarding the above! But the Russians can manufacture any excuse to invade any country that they deem that they can bully. And Putin has no credibility to negotiate with. The only thing that Putin understands is force. The west has to continue sending the arms to countries willing to stand up against Russia. Russia won't invade Finland once it joins Nato.

Finland and Sweden are distractions, just like barbos. The Russian Hitler knows his chances of territorial expansion there are zero. All the talk about fortifying the border with nukes is a feint. The Pig wants Ukraine's east. That's all he wants right now and is satisfied that we're spending so much effort paying attention to his distracting us.

The best thing Ukraine can do besides holding onto their territory is expand the fight into Russia along their eastern border with the Pig. Keep hitting strategic points in their supply lines and depots. That will get the Russian Nazi Pig's attention more than anything.

 

[DrZoidberg]

I laughed for five minutes regarding the above! But the Russians can manufacture any excuse to invade any country that they deem that they can bully. And Putin has no credibility to negotiate with. The only thing that Putin understands is force. The west has to continue sending the arms to countries willing to stand up against Russia. Russia won't invade Finland once it joins Nato.

Finland and Sweden are distractions, just like barbos. The Russian Hitler knows his chances of territorial expansion there are zero. All the talk about fortifying the border with nukes is a feint. The Pig wants Ukraine's east. That's all he wants right now and is satisfied that we're spending so much effort paying attention to his distracting us.

The best thing Ukraine can do besides holding onto their territory is expand the fight into Russia along their eastern border with the Pig. Keep hitting strategic points in their supply lines and depots. That will get the Russian Nazi Pig's attention more than anything.

I think you are overthinking it. I don't think Putin wants to expand Russian territory. He wants to control as much of the former USSR as possible. That's not the same thing as making Russia itself bigger. He wants to control politics in these states. Place puppet leaders in positions of power, and just suck them dry of wealth. Oligarchs has the true power in Ukraine, just as much as in Russia. I think this invasion is a demonstration of power. As long as the other ex Soviet states, in Putin's control, are scared into obedience, Putin has succeeded. I think that is his goal. I think he seized Crimea because Yanukovich was toppled. But instead of the Ukraine being cowed and came back into the fold, they were continually trying to ally themselves with the west, more than with Russia. I think that's what the current war is about. And Putin must win. If he loses this war all the ex-Soviet states will, as quickly as possible, seek allies far away from Russia. Then Putin's empire is doomed.

This is exactly how USSR operated and kept their vassals obedient. Putin is just continuing a tried and tested method.

I think Putin's main goal with his war was to replace Zelenskyy with his own man. Not to expand Russian territory.

 

[Copernicus]

Isn’t Siberia a really big place?

One more time, no Finns were deported to Siberia.
Also, there are regular people living here, so stop implying that it's a hell on earth and people are miserable here.
Summer is pretty great here, better than most of US, it's just too short.

Stalin deported a lot of different populations, and a great many of those were to Siberia, including Finns and Karelians. See  Population transfer in the Soviet Union

Looking at the entire period of Stalin's rule, one can list: Poles (1939–1941 and 1944–1945), Kola Norwegians (1940–1942), Romanians (1941 and 1944–1953), Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians (1941 and 1945–1949), Volga Germans (1941–1945), Ingrian Finns (1929–1931 and 1935–1939), Finnish people in Karelia (1940–1941, 1944), Crimean Tatars, Crimean Greeks (1944) and Caucasus Greeks (1949–50), Kalmyks, Balkars, Italians of Crimea, Karachays, Meskhetian Turks, Karapapaks, Far East Koreans (1937), Chechens and Ingushs (1944). Shortly before, during and immediately after World War II, Stalin conducted a series of deportations on a huge scale which profoundly affected the ethnic map of the Soviet Union.[25] It is estimated that between 1941 and 1949 nearly 3.3 million were deported to Siberia and the Central Asian republics.[26] By some estimates, up to 43% of the resettled population died of diseases and malnutrition.[27]

 

[Loren Pechtel]

However, there is no clear distinction between separate dialects of a language and two very closely related languages.

Sure there is; a language is a dialect with an army and a navy.

And what happens when the borders change?

And Swiss must only be a dialect since they most certainly don't have a navy.

To me, it comes down to whether a simple substitution can convert one into the other. (I won't say 1:1 because it might be a different number of words.) A British rubber is an American eraser, the British go to hospital, we go to the hospital etc. While there is an issue of determining substitutions by context it basically can be robo-translated without much trouble. The substitution might need to be total (I've seen my wife drop into a different regional dialect to defeat eavesdropping--different enough that I noticed it despite not knowing either dialect) but it's fundamentally the same language with different sounds attached.

Being a different country doesn't mean the Cantonese of Hong Kong is a different language than the Mandarin of the mainland. They are not mutually intelligible, but a Cantonese and a Mandarin speaker can communicate with complete accuracy by writing it down. (Which leads to what I call fingerwriting: Speakers of different dialects of Chinese often resort to using their finger to "write" on the palm of the other hand, drawing the character that they are having trouble communicating.)

 

[Copernicus]

Switzerland has four very different official languages, three of which have armies and navies in other countries. Romansch is a Germanic language that has to rely on just the Swiss army.

Mutual intelligibility has something to do with whether we call the language of two different speech communities a "dialect" of the same language, but so does tradition. So we traditionally call the different languages spoken in China "dialects", even though they are no longer dialects of a single language. Hindi and Urdu are roughly different dialects of the same language, i.e. they are mutually intelligible, but they use different alphabets and have different armies defending each other.

Obviously, this thread drift has gone far from the topic of logistics and tactics in Ukraine, and I fear that I can't drag it back to full relevance. I would only point out that Ukrainian and Russian are sufficiently different to qualify as fully distinct languages, not to mention that they both have large armies backing them up that are fighting in some small part over those linguistic differences. There is also a kind of blended form of the two languages that is called  Surzhyk, which has no army.

 

[ZiprHead]

The second video, not the first.

 

[barbos]

The best thing Ukraine can do besides holding onto their territory is expand the fight into Russia along their eastern border with the Pig. Keep hitting strategic points in their supply lines and depots. That will get the Russian Nazi Pig's attention more than anything.

First of all, your side are nazi pigs, second of all, ukrainians are trying to do exactly that (right after their puppet master visited Kiev)
Results so far are not great. And Russia warned that so far government buildings in Kiev are standing.

 

[barbos]

I think you are overthinking it. I don't think Putin wants to expand Russian territory. He wants to control as much of the former USSR as possible. That's not the same thing as making Russia itself bigger. He wants to control politics in these states. Place puppet leaders in positions of power, and just suck them dry of wealth.

Don't all states want that?
Having said that, that's not what Russia wants in Ukraine anymore.
Eastern Ukraine is gone, it's back in Russia now. The only question is what will be included into Eastern Ukraine. A lot of people being previously on the fence, even if they did not like Russia that much now afraid of Ukrainian government (their "army") more than they dislike Russia in general.
In more less pro-russian regions, they know they are dead if Ukraine gets control back.

 

[Patooka]

Jesus Barbos. You arguments make Qanon sound rational.

 

[barbos]

Jesus Barbos. You arguments make Qanon sound rational.

No, I am parroting former US ambassadors, well known academics and remaining decent journalists. So it's you who is a trumper-Qanon here.
Seriously, does it bother you that former US ambassador to USSR basically repeats what Putin said in that speech prior to "invasion"?

Of course it does not bother you, why do I even ask.



Speaking of tactics, GB sends Ukrainian junta missiles which can only be used on Tornado planes Great move!
Actually, I don't think "junta" is a proper term, it's more like terrorist cells.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

Jesus Barbos. You arguments make Qanon sound rational.

It's the Qputin news channel.

And thanks. I often wondered about Barbos's first name.

 

[DrZoidberg]

I think you are overthinking it. I don't think Putin wants to expand Russian territory. He wants to control as much of the former USSR as possible. That's not the same thing as making Russia itself bigger. He wants to control politics in these states. Place puppet leaders in positions of power, and just suck them dry of wealth.

Don't all states want that?
Having said that, that's not what Russia wants in Ukraine anymore.
Eastern Ukraine is gone, it's back in Russia now. The only question is what will be included into Eastern Ukraine. A lot of people being previously on the fence, even if they did not like Russia that much now afraid of Ukrainian government (their "army") more than they dislike Russia in general.
In more less pro-russian regions, they know they are dead if Ukraine gets control back.

While I agree that Russia keeping Eastern Ukraine is the most likely outcome, I think it would be a disaster long term. The only thing that will stop future attempts of Putin is to reestablish the previous border including giving Crimea back to Ukraine.

China is watching. If we give a weak response now, we will get a bygger mess later