[Ukraine] Thread, Dedicated to the memory of Juice and Moonfish.
Inquisitor77
2 x Penny Arcade Fight Club ChampionA fixed point in space and timeRegistered User regular
2 x Penny Arcade Fight Club ChampionA fixed point in space and timeRegistered User regular
This thread is for discussion of the illegal and immoral Russian invasion of Ukraine, the latest large-scale action of a broader conflict that started in 2014 with Russia's "annexation" of Crimea.
Here is the previous OP for this thread: https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/249751/unborking-the-ukraine-discussion/p1
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Global Thermonuclear War:
Azov Nazis:
Fuck Putin:
Crazy P is Awesome:
News & Information:
Gore and NSFW/NSFL Content:
Perun:
Here is the previous OP for this thread: https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/249751/unborking-the-ukraine-discussion/p1
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Global Thermonuclear War:
- Please note that while discussion of nuclear weapons and nuclear proliferation are inevitable, there does exist a G-ddamn Separate Thread for that topic.
Azov Nazis:
- Previous mod declarations have included not discussing the Azov Regiment in the context of it supposedly being a Neo-Nazi group, and a general call for decorum against personal attacks.
Fuck Putin:
- Acceptable topics include saying, "Fuck Putin!" and all permutations thereof, including just repeating the phrase "FuckPutinFuckPutinFuckPutinFuckPutinFuckPutinFuckPutinFuckPutin" ad infinitum (no promises you won't get banned for spam being too awesome, though).
Crazy P is Awesome:
- If you Awesome a post by CrazyP, it is assumed you are Awesome-ing the fact that CrazyP is alive and well, not that you are Awesome-ing the contents of his post. (CrazyP is a Russian forumer who currently resides in a place that is not Russia.)
News & Information:
- While the fog of war always exists and it is very difficult to verify all reports, there does exist a standard of credibility. Major, established news outlets such as The New York Times or Reuters are generally accepted sources. Independent journalists, open source intelligence analysts, and official government sources should be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. Blog posts from J. Random Dickbag should be avoided or placed in the correct speculative context. All news should be prefaced with the source and, where appropriate, caveated as unreliable or speculation. Niche or less well-known sources should have corresponding descriptions of their reliability and sourcing.
- Please remember that many forumers visit this thread precisely because it typically eschews random internet speculation and propaganda talking points.
Gore and NSFW/NSFL Content:
- In addition, all content which shows gore, horrific injuries, corpses, mass graves, and similar themes must always be spoilered and tagged appropriately. Failure to do so in the past has resulted in moderator intervention. Inflicting trauma on other forumers is not cool. Please remember that this place is still considered PG-13.
- Also, be cautious when viewing such content, as you can inflict trauma upon yourself in doing so. Please take care of your mental health.
Perun:
- Videos from Perun have proven to be a very good source of analysis for this war, particularly in the contexts of logistics and procurement. He has received the PA Thread Seal of Approval.
Inquisitor77 on
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The Swiss Federal Department of Defense issued a report yesterday regarding the situation in Europe and their recommendations for going forward.
Specifically, they recommend a deeper level of cooperation with the EU and NATO, and additionally that
Russia is truly NATO's top recruiter.
- John Stuart Mill
I know LazerPig is a little bit of a shitposter and usually focuses on military history or technology, but the first half of this is a pretty excellent little travel doc on what civilian life is actually looking like in Ukraine
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/30/world/americas/venezuela-ukraine-military-russia.html
Russia is charging them with being mercenaries, odds are Venezuela basically just killed those two.
I'm just going to close that one and nudge people over to this one. I don't want to risk more Vanilla wobbliness from merging threads, especially since this thread theoretically means you'll have escaped TOTP bugs for the first time in awhile.
Ref to that thread in case people want to respond to any of the posts already there
Anyways Maduro's bullshit is all about currying favor with Russia, in hopes that Putin's evil ass still has enough clout to allow Maduro to still an election and cement himself as dictator of Venezuela. I strongly suspect though that he has likely now really pissed off Columbia, since his actions liked sentenced two of their citizens to death.
Also the mercenary charges are absolute fucking bullshit on a number of levels. First, there is the fact that Russia has war criming shitheads as mercenaries not just fighting in Ukraine, but in Africa and the ME as well and those fuckers are committing various heinous crimes where they operate. The other thing is those two were likely serving in the Ukraine foreign legion, which means their conduct is lawful under international law and both Maduro and Putin are breaking it, but shouldn't be a surprised when you consider both are shitty equal pieces shit that belong in a prison cell for the rest of their god damned lives for all the crimes they have committed.
I thought before they specifically mentioned feeling uncomfortable about things like this.
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
Also, per catholic traditions a catholic only becomes a saint after they die a typically brutal death which... I'd really rather he not have that happen
https://mil.in.ua/en/news/ukrainian-paratroopers-capture-seven-russian-tanks-in-the-kursk-oblast/
Does anywhere have a good tally of how much salvageable and usable Russian equipment has been taken by the Ukrainians?
Obviously the West has provided vastly more expendable resources (ammunition and the like), but in terms of hard assets (mostly vehicles), and the number of killed vs captured is likely ridiculously different, but I'm curious how things compare with what Ukraine have just up and taken from the enemy, and then been able to put back into use.
There's a certain dark irony in using an invading nations equipment to kill or capture more equipment.
Yikes! Point taken - I shall delete.
1 air defence systems IRIS-T SLS
14.000 rounds 155mm ammunition
10 unmanned surface vessels
26 reconnaissance drones VECTOR
material for explosive ordnance disposal
6 High Mobility Engineer Excavators
1 armoured recovery vehicle Bergepanzer 2
55.000 first aid kits
700 assault rifles MK 556
10 precision rifles HLR 338
50 rifles CR 308
Note that the brutality is not mandatory. It's just people love themselves some martyrdom stories in the religion whose main figure is a martyr, funny how that works.
But yeah, you have to be dead to become a saint. So let's not go in that direction!
So it's been a couple of hours and I've had a chance to properly read the article and can now offer a better take.
Switzerland, due to a combination of good terrain and the invention of the halberd were able to pretty much ignore the rest of Europe for centuries after their founding (and beating the crap out of the powers of the day that tried to seize their lands) and this worked out pretty well for them; they showed that a country can be neutral and that there were advantages to this. Even during the World Wars, Switzerland did it's best to hold this ideal, refusing to allow itself to fall under the sway of either power. This wasn't perfect of course since the country had sizable populations of Italian, German and French citizens and they all very much supported the home team leading to a morass of espionage but overall they were able to keep out of things.
The world wars also proved to be a boon to the Swiss however, in that the Franc became the only remaining internationally solvent form of currency and as such the country got paid in gold by various powers... though in the case of Germany a lot of this came from plundered assets including "melmer gold" which... it's a nice morning you don't want to look into that I think. And with this gold Austria was able to build up it's industry by buying materials from abroad.
Kinda hard to casually find information on the cold war, but it looks like the Swiss viewed the Warsaw pact as a thread and went to great lengths to ensure that any attempt to threaten them was met with disaster by entrenching and fortifying every pass and tunnel, but by the same coin they didn't join NATO (which would have been the single biggest boon to their defense) because "neutral".
And that kind of leads us towards the modern day wherein they entered the MiC market exporting weapons... but also passing Edicts that these weapons can't be given to Ukraine because it would jeopardize their neutrality. They could take steps to twist Putin and his inner circle's balls by doing things with their mountains of ill gotten wealth hidden in their banking system, but they won't because neutral. They could offer anything more then thoughts and prayers to Ukraine but they won't because neutral. And after a certain point the whole affair doesn't come off as neutral but rather a sort of selfishness wherein the country doesn't care about the rest of the world unless those events directly benefit themselves and require them to not actually get their hands dirty in any way.
The article implies that this policy might actually be changing. That they're recognizing that the situation in Ukraine is dire and that their populace want's to actually respond to the utter monstrosity of this invasion by amending policy. And those are good things.
But let me be clear: I didn't cut Germany any slack until they started sending actual hardware and recognizing that they could no longer treat with Putin. I sure as fuck won't give the Swiss any respect until they do the same and acknowledge how wrong they were to sit around with their thumb up their ass while Ukrainian citizens fight and bleed and die for their cultural identity.
TLDR: This shit is maintainence intensive in a way that russia has likely struggled to maintain if the rest of their military is anything to go by but llikely have enough to wreck people's shit.
Starting with early August users in Russia started complain about ridiculously low download speeds on youtube - down to 128 kb\s
Same day 2 talking heads announced finally banning youtube for refusing to comply with Russian demands (on deleting lots of "anti-Russian" content").
Immediately next day everyone backtracks, delete this posts an announces that Google is at fault - CDN servers in Russia deteriated (Google denies it)
Chaos ensues, as not all ISP have youtube slow speed troubles, users complain and switch to those that have no problems.
Meanwhile IT experts confirm that Russian ISP centralize slow access speeds to Russian youtube CN servers and not youtube itself, for some weir reason
Well, now we have big ISP, still confuse by this orders from above (cause no banned content mentioned, just slowing access to "fast access" cache basically), reroute all internal Russian youtube traffic to EU CDN servers and everyone once again has no problems with youtube. Whole thing makes sense apparently /s
And now we have censorship bureau sending strongly worded letters to ISP about "obfuscating traffic and interfering with internet censorship"
Source:
leaked letter in independent Russian media
https://t.me/sotavisionmedia/35145
Purges in Russian MoD continue. ex deputy minister of defense is jailed for corruption
Source: independent Russian media
https://zona.media/news/2024/08/29/popov
Tomorrow is start of new school year in Russia. And Moscow schools are mass cancelling traditional opening ceremonies due to fear of terror drone attacks on schools. Me thinks someones projecting...
Source:
official Russian media
https://www.rbc.ru/society/29/08/2024/66d088639a794767aec89f7c
Someone posted a video a while back, I forget the source, but it was basically talking about the whole subject of "What does neutrality actually mean in the modern age"? Because practically speaking if you wanted to be a truly neutral nation you probably shouldn't be in the business of selling weapons in the first place because logically you're showing a bias towards whoever you're selling to, but Sweden and Switzerland both do, and both claim to be neutral. The difference in their brands of neutrality though, is that Sweden is "actively" neutral; they are fully prepared to send support to other nations that need help in defensive wars, they just refuse to get involved in offensive ones. Which is a much more sensible attitude than Switzerland whose brand of "neutrality" is incoherent at best and borderline evil at worst. Why the hell would anybody ever buy weapons from Switzerland again if they've made it known that if you ever actually need Swiss weapons to defend yourself, they'll stop supplying you because "muh neutrality".
Edit: Apparently the cat cracker was once again targeted in that strike. No confirmation available on whether it was actually damaged.
I mentioned in the end of the last thread that the cat cracker hardware components required for specific fractions is only available from the West, being hedged about with patents, heavily protected trade secrets, very specific metallurgical and machining expertise requirements etc. So for all practical purposes, irreplaceable by Russian domestic production
Probably not absolutely irreplaceable - where there's a pallet of gold bars, there's a way - but even if there were no sanctions it would be slow and expensive to replace the damaged parts and rebuild the cat cracker, and sanctions won't make it cheaper. Ain't no one doing this on a buy now pay later basis, and not for Rubles either, so this is coming straight out of what's left of the hard currency reserves.
More importantly: With sanctions, the time is increased, with labor shortages the time is increased, with maintenance backlogs, the time is increased, with there already being a quickly growing waiting list of other cat crackers needing urgent attention, the time is increased a lot. Most hilariously of all, fuel shortages are also probably not doing the TTC estimate any favours.
Because it would be crossing a red line to attack something that would have limited tactical value.
It would distress Ukraine's allies.
As has already be noted, better to hit targets will will limit Russia's ability to wage war effectively against Ukraine. Hell, I get the impression that Putin really isn't that popular, so it's likely to Ukraine's advantage anyways that Putin remain alive and in power. That ensures that Russian's will be less invested in supporting the war and might also up the odds of having some sort of popular resistance against Putin's rule, once his grip sufficiently weakens.
-Antje Jackelén, Archbishop of the Church of Sweden