Nah, they were pro-Putin before that. They’re pro-Putin because they love authoritarian strongmen who imprison dissenting journalists, gays, and political opponents.
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They’re cheering on nazis in 2022
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Politicians need to call on Putin to admit defeat and withdraw to box in him and his supporters.
Yeah, Fox News was gushing over topless pics of Putin riding a horse long before the Trump phenomenon. He’s basically everything ethnofascists want in a ruler: an actual billionaire strongman dictator who can do judo and butchers Muslims. Trump is basically the inferior “We have Putin at home” substitute.
Watching MAGA chuds seethe and cope over their daddy losing a war to a Jewish comedian is immensely satisfying.
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Russia doesn‘t seem to have any counter to long-range artillery
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Manpower won’t help with zero morale.
[deleted vid of russian equipment because was in Crimea a month ago, not Izyum.]
They mostly cover that niche with cruise and short range ballistic missiles.
The Russians preferred more numerous but inaccurate and shorter range Grads. They have been hitting any Ukrainian targets they can find, but they don’t have partisans feeding them intelligence and less sophisticated surveillance than the NATO planes feeding Ukraine info.
Na, the whole war so far has been Russia with manpower shortages and Ukraine with equipment shortages. Russia’s manpower situation keeps getting worse and Ukraine’s equipment situation keeps improving.
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I think Russia expected this would play out the same way Chechnya did; they probably didn’t expect the West to call their bluff and actually try to stop them from annexing Ukraine.
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Russia does still have quite a bit more manpower they could deploy to Ukraine, right. These other potentially deployable troops obviously have other responsibilities but I don’t think they need to worry about someone invading in the east if they move all their border troops from there (for example). So I think they could shove more bodies into Ukraine, but they haven’t and it’s not even clear how much that would help.
It would require a real mobilization to do this as well, which probably wouldn’t go well
you should have followed this thread from the beginning. russian corruption problems became obvious. it was a matter of ukraine withstanding the blitzcringe with immediate help from the west and then accumulating enough weapons for their mobilized army. russia had to give up on mass mobilization very early, and sanctions exposed its own MIC deficiencies, so the balance on the battlefield were eventually going to flip.
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Yeah even more basic things like how none of their tires were properly maintained
I think they have already moved many troops from the East to Ukraine. About the only places where they have not recruited mass troops is Moscow and St. Petersberg. If Russia wants to “win” the war, or at least delay its loss, they will need to move to general mobilization.
However, there are good reasons us regular Joes in US do not understand about Russian social and military dynamics that likely explain lack of general mobilization. Putin is not holding back out of the kindness of his heart. In any event, even if such a mobilization were made tomorrow, the troops could not be deployed for months and Winter is Coming.
Afaict, they have been trying to fight this war on the cheap, mainly by conscripting the remaining dregs of Donesk and Luhansk, troops who are ready to surrender at the first opportunity, and by throwing poor ethnics, undertrained and underequipped, into the fight.
Also, with regard to throwing in more bodies, that does not create new roads to Kyiv, air superiority, or new railroads to Crimea. It does not solve, and creates more, logistics problems. It would not generate more morale, which is already massively in the favor of Ukraine.
This whole situation has created quite a pickle for Putin, where most “solutions” would not actually solve anything. Even tactical nukes, without regard to the potentially disastrous political implications, would not seem to offer a lot in terms of war aims. Best they can maybe hope for is to lose Kherson, stem the current bleeding, and declare victory, though that would also involve significant complexities.
Putin has been playing this game like a full LAG and he’s now run into a solid player with a very strong hand. Making more raises will not change the dynamics.
Russia will likely think of something over the next 10 days to respond, but it looks really bad for them.
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General mobilization is tough for many reasons. Generally as an advancing army it is tough to sell that to the people, it would also completely counter all the lies they have been telling the Russian people this whole time.
The odds of a mass revolt would increase substantially as well. Also, the morale among the conscripted may possibly be worse than the current army if that’s even possible. The Russians can’t supply their current army, let alone a mass army of conscripts so man power may not even be their limiting resource
It would take time and resources to train the conscripts and Russia is assuredly terrible at training and probably don’t even have an emergency conscript training program in place since they cannot sufficiently train far fewer troops over a longer period of time.
The newly mobilized troops probably won’t even be available until the war is already lost.
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A very famous Vietnamese sniper as well.
I recall around May/June Russia was sending a lot of trainers to lead troops in Ukraine, and people like Michael Kofman saying that they were cannibalizing their future by doing so. This is not really a war the Russian military was designed to fight, ie, mainly a defensive operation against NATO on Russian territory where they use use nukes once things get real bad. That and beating up on ethnic enclaves with one or two significant cities.
I agree, but I also don’t think you have to go as far back as Chechnya. They took Crimea without a bullet fired or meaningful western objection. That’s the most recent precedent.
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donbass 2014-15 is a better guide than crimea. crimea was a surprise during a ukrainian political crisis.
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