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+--- Thread: Ukraine (/showthread.php?tid=9725)
RE: Ukraine - bigpaul - 26 February 2022
yep, the Nato countries in Europe are being reinforced because of Putins threat.
RE: Ukraine - Straight Shooter - 28 February 2022
Been keeping a eye on some American preppers on ytube ......not looking good over there according to their reports on haphazard food shortages and empty shelves .....prices rising every week even daly ....inflation running up and out of control ......many are struggling and this is just the start of it , credit cards are used yurt to get by and that will not last long ....but they have next to no choices ....some with a bit more common sense are scaling down living in RVs and taking to the roads and land to simply survive and feel blessed .....many with kids .
We are not immune here in the UK ! And see similar events here and getting worse ...little evidence of things getting better any time soon , with all countries suffering a similar fate ! Ukraine for all the horrors of war is more of a distraction and will undoubtedly be held up high as a major construct of blame for all our wows along with covid and the rest of the crap dished up for us to feast on ! .
There will be a lot more really bad stuff to come the likes of which most would not have thought possible just a few years ago ......and all coming to a head right now ! The pin has been pulled and the financial grenade has been thrown .
RE: Ukraine - bigpaul - 28 February 2022
many people are living above their means and expect too much, a good scaling down of expectations is long overdue.
look at all the food that is wasted, we never threw food away when I was growing up, we couldnt afford to, nothing wrong with good old "bubble and squeak" to use up leftovers, but no, people are fixed on use by dates even on spuds !!
RE: Ukraine - CharlesHarris - 28 February 2022
I usually like Hariri’s work. It’s well documented and makes sense. The following runs contra that assessment.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/feb/28/vladimir-putin-war-russia-ukraine
I see a lot of projection in the Western press. They’re projecting the US failure in Iraq, A-stan (and probably Vietnam for some) onto Russian and Ukraine. That’s a dangerous habit.
True that Zalenski is defiant. So was Saddam. So were the many Taliban chieftains. Gee, they’re all dead. What they built is in ruins. Defiance and martyrdom don’t win battles or wars. Skill, perseverance, a willingness to be utterly and ruthlessly violent, and modern weapons do.
I’m not rooting for Russia, but pointing out that one ought not leap to conclusions based on emotional projection. Right now it’s a toss up. Could go either way. Russia is taking a methodical and disciplined approach to conquest without destroying everything in their path. Siege warfare is a time honored tradition.
Ukraine is resisting mightily and pleading for neighborly help. That’s a good COA for a small nation built on a historical invasion route (much like Korea). It’s the right thing to do and I hope they do well.
The one point arguing for UW resistance is that a lot of older Ukrainians remember living under USSR and don’t want to curse their grandchildren with that suffering. So they may fight long and hard. Or not. Someone with direct experience in Ukraine could better make that call.
My main point is that commentary should look at capabilities rather than intentions when forming assessments. Emotional narratives lead to foolish conclusions and bad investments. My model of this is the Cuban Missile crisis in reverse; NATO threatening to place weapons in range of Moscow and Russia saying nyet. This time the result is war rather than capitulation. Since the stakes are high, Russia is proceeding cautiously and Ukraine is working hard to stop them. Limited war for limited objectives.
Many good lessons are emerging: need for a strong European defense, the value of meaningful civil defense stocks and training, the need for electronic warfare skills, etc. Hopefully the people in power are paying attention instead of following an emotional narrative.
I wish more people remembered the Soviet evils, Stalin's treatment of Ukraine, the Hungarian uprising, Czechoslovakia, all object lessons. These excesses are why I don’t root for tyrants, even when camouflaged in the banner of supposed democracy and freedom. Realist doctrine dominates my analysis of international relations. I reserve Christian charity for neighbors, kindred souls, and members of my tribe.
I’m hopeful that the promised negotiations sponsored by Belarus will produce an workable solution. Calls to bring Ukraine into NATO immediately aren’t helpful in that regard. I am concerned that expanding the war benefits powerful interests in the US and EU.
Putin isn’t a strategic genius, but he knows his own mind and knows what he’s about. Determination will count for a great deal in this fight. Unlike Bismarck, Putin doesn’t have a lot of tools to work with. He’s pretty much left with limited war for limited objectives, backed by energy sanctions against his enemies. Classic European small wars approach, like the pre-1866 wars of German Unification after Napoleon wrecked the Continental system.
These things have deep roots. WW2 wrecked the Colonial and Continental system, and their economies. The US and USSR were winners economically and politically. The Cold War harmed Russia deeply. Maps were drawn and redrawn in the wake of world wars, and will continue to be adjusted by powers great and small. I suspect Putin has an off ramp in mind. It’s easier to gain concessions when threatening the capital directly.
So far the Russian Front Commander is following a fairly standard approach in that terrain. Get across of the Dnieper. Control the southern amphibious approaches. Encircle the capital (ala Paris 1866 or the Schlieffen plan of 1914). Narrow the western approaches by pinning forces to the mountains that form border with moldova and belarus. Wait.
If NATO wants a fight it will be on a narrow front through the Warsaw valley gap. A traditional invasion route going back to days of kings and tsars. Not ideal.
Russia can then negotiate to gain the independence of the republics east of Dnieper. Its a win for Putin and an end to the internal Ukranian war thats been raging since 2014. I think the off ramp is pretty obvious.
I sincerely hope our elected officials have the wisdom to let Europe handle this internally
Read also:
Shattering the myth of Vladimir Putin as a strategic genius
Thursday Feb 24, 2022
https://www.defensepriorities.org/
Andrew Latham
There is a myth, in wide circulation throughout the Western world, that Vladimir Putin is a strategic mastermind - a geopolitical genius more astute than Clausewitz, more subtle than Sun Tzu and more audacious than Napoleon.
According to this myth, the Russian leader is the strategic equivalent of the chess world's greatest grandmaster, able to grasp the big geopolitical picture, anticipate his adversary's moves and move his own pieces around the board in ways that not only guarantee victory but leave his opponents sputtering in awe at his mastery of the great game. He may be evil, but no matter. Like Machiavelli's ideal prince, though he is perhaps not loved, he must be feared. For as a master of the dark arts of strategy, he will always get his way.
For those who have bought into this myth, the latest Russian jockeying over Ukraine is simply the pudding that proves the point. Once again, the purveyors of the myth would have us believe, the canny Russian leader has wrong-footed the bumbling and divided leaders of the West, this time outmaneuvering them so thoroughly that he is poised not only to prevail over Ukraine but to remake the entire European security to suit his own diabolical purposes.
Like most myths, however, this one is more fantasy than fact. Putin is by no conceivable definition of the term a strategic genius; in fact, quite the opposite. Even a cursory survey of his record clearly reveals that the Russian leader is something of a strategic fool.
Although we would have to go back to the very beginning of his tenure as paramount leader (his formal title changes occasionally, but for the past two decades he's always been the one calling the shots) and survey his entire foreign policy record to prove this conclusively, a review of Putin's mishandling of the ongoing Ukraine crisis will be sufficient to illustrate the basic point.
To begin with, we need to bear in mind that it was Putin who needlessly transformed a simmering political conflict with Ukraine into a war. That conflict, itself caused by Putin's blundering efforts to compel Ukraine to join its Eurasian Economic Union, had become frozen in the aftermath of his failed 2014 effort to permanently halt Ukraine's westward drift.
But, in a clumsy attempt to force a permanent solution to his "Ukraine problem," in recent months, Putin deployed a massive military force that could neither be maintained in the field indefinitely nor withdrawn without significant internal and external audience costs. Now that, all too predictably, neither Ukraine nor NATO has acceded to his demands, he has found himself with no choice but to use the massive military force that he originally thought he could wield bloodlessly to bully his way to victory. These are not the fruits of strategic genius.
That Putin would attempt this gambit in the first place was plausibly rational - at least in the sense that inferences flow logically from premises. But its rationality depended on a totally flawed premise. Putin completely misjudged the temper of the U.S. and its NATO allies and wildly misread what the Alliance was willing to concede and what it was not. And those strategic misapprehensions, in turn, were based on a shocking misinterpretation of both the causes and consequences of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Again, these are not the kinds of missteps that one would have expected from even a run-of-the mill strategic genius, let alone a grandmaster of Putin's caliber. A merely average strategic genius would have accurately read the geopolitical room and grasped that NATO was not going to knuckle under to the demands Putin has made.
Even a less-than-average strategic genius would not have amassed forces on Ukraine's border without leaving himself what Sun Tzu, an actual master of strategy, called a "golden bridge" - an off-ramp that in this case would allow him to exit the highway to war without incurring substantial internal and external audience costs. These are not the fruits of strategic genius.
And let's be clear: Putin's war with Ukraine will ultimately redound to Russia's great strategic disadvantage. To be sure, there can be little doubt that Russian forces will accomplish their military mission as quickly and effectively as did the U.S.-led coalition forces in Iraq in 2003.
But the longer-term strategic consequences are likely to be every bit as catastrophic as that earlier American-led "war of choice." If Russia attempts to occupy the entire country, it will face the task of pacifying a hostile people with a long history of resisting foreign domination. If that sounds familiar, it should - not least to Putin, who knows, or ought to know, the role that the Red Army's bloody occupation of Afghanistan played in the ultimate demise of his beloved Soviet Union.
If Putin's Russia merely seeks to carve out a land-corridor here or a buffer-zone there, it will face an irreconciled Ukraine, a NATO finally stirred from its three-decades-long geopolitical slumber, a hostile U.S. and perhaps even an alienated China. And if it does nothing more than attempt to break the Ukrainian state and its military, the staggering civilian casualties and subsequent refugee crisis will leave Russia a pariah state - one subject to sanctions and condemnations the likes of which it has never before experienced.
And whatever the scope, scale and objective it finally assumes, any military operation Putin launches will carry the ever-present risk that it will go wrong, escalate or otherwise spiral out of control - with even more potentially catastrophic consequences. These are not the fruits of strategic genius.
Even if, by some miracle not of Putin's making, a protracted war can be avoided, the likely strategic consequences of all the grand master's strategy thus far would still be contrary to Russia's interests as Putin has defined them. It will further consolidate a Ukrainian national identity organized around anti-Russianness. It may incline Finland and Sweden - the very definition of neutral states - to seek NATO membership. It has already catalyzed greater NATO solidarity and may well result in a truly far-reaching revitalization of the Alliance as a bulwark against Russian influence and a check on its ambitions. And it may well trigger German - and even a wider European - re-armament on a scale not seen since the depths of the Cold War. These are not the fruits of strategic genius.
In sum, Vladimir Putin may be many things - a capable tyrant, a sometime naturalist, a middling hockey player, an avid fisherman. But whatever else he is, and the prevailing mythology notwithstanding, one thing is for certain: He's no strategic genius.
Andrew Latham is a professor of international relations at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minn., and a non-resident fellow at Defense Priorities in Washington, D.C. Follow him on Twitter @aalatham.
RE: Ukraine - Straight Shooter - 1 March 2022
I am wondering what the effects are going to develop ....with all the sanctions aimed at Russia especially removing some of their banks from the S.W.i.F.T system ? And how that may throw up some unintended consequences for us
Or intended depending on your point of view .
Turkey is now on the brink ( before Ukraine ) this may well be the straw ......interesting times ! More preps !
RE: Ukraine - bigpaul - 1 March 2022
Russia is becoming more isolated by the day, you can tell the sanctions are working by how beligerent Putin and Lavrov are getting.
RE: Ukraine - Joe - 2 March 2022
But we are still buying Russian gas.
RE: Ukraine - bigpaul - 2 March 2022
we dont buy gas from Russia. it comes in from Europe, it might be Russian gas to start with but we dont buy it direct.
RE: Ukraine - Straight Shooter - 2 March 2022
That is why globalisation is not a good idea , centralisation breeds total control of resources and people along with total ownership of any resource or commodity to just a few entities , mainly central banks with zombie companies fronting up and hiding who really owns what ! .
RE: Ukraine - bigpaul - 2 March 2022
globalisation is not a good idea as countries are in hock to undesirable countries like China and Russia and its not an easy job to unravel all the tentacles.