On first read, I assumed they were doing it to provide emotional closure. Respect.
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I’m for anything that breaks through to the Russian populace that the war is not going as well as advertised.
John Oliver had a clip that I haven’t seen anywhere else of a Russian officer in the audience on one of those propaganda shows who was allowed to speak for some reasons. He starts saying we should honor the dead Russian soldiers in Donbas, and the host starts trying to cut him off immediately.
The officer persists though. You can tell he’s very emotional and pissed off that Russia won’t acknowledge or honor the fallen soldiers. He may have gotten in trouble. Maybe the clip was from before the invasion I dunno.
They certainly wouldn’t want to lose the ship if they could avoid it. That means fighting the fire. You probably need some crew on-board to do that effectively. It’s possible some crew were not allowed to leave the ship, so some might have died needlessly. But I don’t see the majority of sailors not being taken off if possible. What would be the point, trying to hide the loss? They just came out and said it was lost, so no.
Humor in Ukraine is now mainly of the darkest kind. At certain moments, Zelensky appeared stunned by the cruelty of it all. He tried to explain why he cannot feel—why most Ukrainians cannot feel—much sense of satisfaction in their underdog battlefield victories. Yes, they expelled the mighty Russian army from the northern part of the country. Yes, they killed, by their count, more than 19,000 Russian soldiers. Yes, they claim to have captured, destroyed, or damaged more than 600 tanks. Yes, they say they’ve sunk the flagship of the Russian Black Sea Fleet. Yes, they changed the image of their country, and their understanding of themselves. But the price has been colossal.
Too many Ukrainians, Zelensky told us, died not in battle, but “in the act of torture.” Children got frostbite hiding in cellars; women were raped; elderly people died of starvation; pedestrians were shot down in the street. “How will these people be able to enjoy the victory?” he asked. “They will not be able to do to the Russian soldiers what [the Russians] did to their children or daughters … so they do not feel this victory.” Real victory, he said, will come only when the perpetrators are tried, convicted, and sentenced.
But when will that be? “How long do we have to wait? It’s a long process, these courts, tribunals, international courts.”
Abruptly, he made it personal. He has two children, he reminded us. “My daughter is almost 18. I don’t want to imagine, but if something had happened to my daughter, I would not have been satisfied if the attack had been repelled and the soldiers had run away,” he said. “I would have looked for these people and I would have found them. And then I would feel victory.”
What would he have done when he found them?
“I don’t know. Everything.”
Then, as if remembering the role history has given him, as an avatar of democratic civilization confronting the cruelty of a lawless regime, he became reflective. “You realize that you want to be a member of a civilized society, you have to calm down, because the law decides everything.”
But he feels, viscerally, what so many Ukrainians feel. “There will be no complete victory for people who lost their children, relatives, husbands, wives, parents. That’s what I mean,” he said. “They will not feel the victory, even when our territories are liberated.”
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we can discuss unfalsifiable scenarios (better in another thread), but IMO ussr would not win any large scale war without lend-lease, or some other allies.
Get a look at the digs of Putin’s main man in Ukraine.
this depends on lot on the context. it makes a world of difference if ussr was attacked and had to defend, or if it invades someone else and has to fight as an aggressor.
if the soviet army deployed with the optimal tactic and strategy (ie western command doctrine), i think it’s fair to expect them to do better than if they were deployed with the same “drown-our-enemies-in-our-blood” doctrine. that mindset dominated the soviet generals throughout WW2, and apparently has survived all the way to 2022.
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That is certainly the conventional wisdom. But how much of that assessment is based on the same kind of analysis that said Ukraine would be overrun in a week or two (which was also what everybody thought up until about 6 weeks ago) is what I’m wondering more and more now.
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Me neither. But crazy dudes like this have probably saved the world at some point.
There was never going to be a conventional war in Europe vs. the USSR. It would have immediately turned nuclear. That’s why the conventional war scenario is irrelevant and why NATO didn’t need to prepare for it.
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it’s virtually impossible to gain credibility within russia without actually being there. it’s considered cowardly to call for a revolution from beyond the borders, in relative safety.
that’s why navalny did it. the only way to lead russia out of fascism is to do something like mandela, and bring people to his side.
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I guess that’s real patriotism, putting the good of your country above your own safety.
Isn’t that what national hero Lenin did?
i have no such high regard for russian drones, because i think in russia corruption eats everything. plus most “unboxing” videos that ukraine put out show that the drones are simply not military grade.
Lenin famously went back. in historical works, they usually say that germany let him go back to fuck around during ww1.
but yes, in general there is a looooong tradition of revolutionary resistance by the diaspora from abroad. it just doesn’t resonate with russian population unless you come back. a government in exile is not a thing people can accept as legitimate.
He spent most of the pre-revolution years all over Europe and only came back after the March revolution and three months later he tried to flee to Finland again.
guess which aspect of his journeys resonates with russians?
I don’t really know if he’s a good guy on the whole or not but he expresses more empathy in the quoted paragraphs than Putin has or ever will feel.
This is Turkey’s state-run media. I assume those sailors are being debriefed 8 ways to Sunday by NATO so we might be getting the full story of exactly what happened fairly soon.
Turkish ship rescued 54 sailors on damaged Russian naval cruiser Moskva
A Turkish ship evacuated 54 personnel onboard the Russian Black Sea Fleet flagship cruiser Moskva, which was reportedly hit by Ukraine, Lithuania’s Defense Minister said Thursday.
The Russian cruiser sent out a distress call at night, Arvydas Anusauskas said on Facebook.
“At 1.14 a.m., the cruiser lay on its side, and after half an hour, all the electricity went out. From 2 a.m., the Turkish ship evacuated 54 sailors from the cruiser, and at about 3 a.m., Turkiye and Romania reported that the ship had completely sunk. The related loss of Russian personnel is still unknown, although there were 485 crew on board (66 of them officers),” Anusauskas said.
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