ukraine is still playing a very cautious counteroffensive game. perhaps too cautious for our appetite, but noone can question Zaluzhnyj. dude is going to come out looking like Eisenhower.
basically, they are less concerned about quickly taking back territory, and would rather focus on controlling the russian ability to fight, which is still very high and mobiks already appearing at the front. this is roughly what happened in Kharkiv. the ukrainian offensive employed smaller numbers of soldiers than russia had garrisoned in the region, and the objective was cutting supply routes. but they ended up capturing more territory than they thought possible in the same time, because the second and third line of russian defense “collapsed” and exposed the russian army hq post to artillery. once command folded, the units retreated in haste.
IMHO, AFU wants to stem the flow of new equipment and ammo into donbass first, and then force the ru lines of defense to collapse/retreat like in kharkiv. this would recapture territory with fewer casualties to both sides.
most independent organizations doing polling in russia were outlawed since about 2020. since 2020, the rest were labeled extremist, foreign agents, and were forced into jail or exile.
SK continuing to bring heat in a topic he has been nothing but completely wrong about without ever acknowledging the size of his errors is truly a sight.
Right, my point is that existence of protests and dissent isn’t a reliable measure of public opinion. The Iraq war protests were massive but the war was still pretty popular. I don’t doubt that millions of Russians are opposed to the war and Putin. Showing the existence of dissent doesn’t show if that dissent is shared by 15% or 50%.
It’s pretty impressive that someone who vehemently argued the wrong side of like every argument ITT leading up to the invasion is now arrogantly arguing the contrarian side ITT again.
Is the consensus here that Putin is unpopular? I thought lots were saying fuck average Russian and their soldiers because they support Putin and the war. I recall people posting lots of TikTok’s where Russians were more concerned about mall closures than dead Ukrainians.
Really a treat where the pro-Putin contrarian can cite the normally very pro-Ukrainian Washington Post and the and the “correct” side is posting videos of a couple of hundred guys rioting as evidence of…something.
I think that the consensus is that the mobilization is unpopular, and that as a result the war has become a lot more unpopular since then. I think the stuff you’re referring to was a couple months ago, right?
Again, I don’t doubt that there are tens of thousands of angry and worried moms out there who didn’t want their sons called up to fight in a war. But that can happen in a Russia where the war is broadly popular.
