Cnn reporting Ukraine has pushed into Luhansk.
i don’t think you can make the case that it worked as intended. the scale of the war was so huge that it’s almost impossible to pin any one factor to global events, but it would probably be wise to say that lend-lease was a better contribution to victory than Order 227.
also, geneva conventions following the war regulates treatment of prisoners, which may also outlaw such orders. it’s not lawful to shoot prisoners or those who surrender, probably from both sides. no idea if this has been tested in actual cases.
that’s exactly the idea. there’s a version of such antidrone weapon built in ukraine, and an MP fundraised $$$ for ten of them in under 10 days recently. meanwhile, in RU families are scavenging first aid kits, because mother russia didn’t have enough for the mobilized.
Add to the list of people who thought Russia was going to roll over Ukraine …
the CIA
Yet U.S. officials have simultaneously downplayed their intelligence failures in Ukraine — especially their glaring mistakes at the outset of the war. When Putin invaded in February, U.S. intelligence officials told the White House that Russia would win in a matter of days by quickly overwhelming the Ukrainian army, according to current and former U.S. intelligence officials, who asked not to be named to discuss sensitive information.
The Central Intelligence Agency was so pessimistic about Ukraine’s chances that officials told President Joe Biden and other policymakers that the best they could expect was that the remnants of Ukraine’s defeated forces would mount an insurgency, a guerrilla war against the Russian occupiers. By the time of the February invasion, the CIA was already planning how to provide covert support for a Ukrainian insurgency following a Russian military victory, the officials said.
Also Biden is doing the Obama/Trump thing of taking some finding and bending it to fit what he wants to do without going through the correct channels
Secret U.S. operations inside Ukraine are being conducted under a presidential covert action finding, current and former officials said. The finding indicates that the president has quietly notified certain congressional leaders about the administration’s decision to conduct a broad program of clandestine operations inside the country. One former special forces officer said that Biden amended a preexisting finding, originally approved during the Obama administration, that was designed to counter malign foreign influence activities. A former CIA officer told The Intercept that Biden’s use of the preexisting finding has frustrated some intelligence officials, who believe that U.S. involvement in the Ukraine conflict differs so much from the spirit of the finding that it should merit a new one. A CIA spokesperson declined to comment about whether there is a presidential covert action finding for operations in Ukraine.
Let’s see what RAND Corp has to say about the strategic picture.
Ukraine should fight and win.
This continuously updated map is nifty.
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this is a bit speculative. ukraine has released some footage and documents about the blitzkrieg that kicked off the war. it was a much different situation than in the months that followed, when effects of corruption became obvious.
there is evidence that VDV were somewhat closer to capturing the airfield, and tilting the battle for kyiv than we are led to believe in hindsight. certainly, without US intel about how RU planned to capture officials in Kyiv, AFU wouldn’t have prepared and potentially lost the center of the city. but even after VDV failed, Kyiv could have had only a 50/50 chance of holding.
Maybe Putin’s latest plan is to overwhelm Ukraine with POWs?
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The Neocons and the Woke Left Are Joining Hands and Leading Us to Woke War III | Opinion
I feel like if you call it Woke War 3 then you’re not really serious about it being World War 3, but it’s where the right’s opinion is headed.
Also the Woke Left’s motivations seems a bit unclear.
I’m not sure they can even get them to the front to be captured. It looks miserable.
https://twitter.com/kromark/status/1577758999319089156
Thread on this. Seems like the video is a bit more fake than it seems.
Lots more reports of what looks like is a complete collapse. Russia needs to pull back hard if only so they can get organized.
War is expensive. Keeping a lot of troops in the field through the winter in foreign country could be a strain on resources. Genius move not to bother supplying them!
Or paying them.
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Don’t know if this is true but don’t much care. Internal friction is good. The RAND article from Lawfare I posted yesterday goes into the dispute some.