Putin Declared War
He has been planning for this war for a long time.
On Twitter – Rob Lee:
Russia’s current activities are a continuation of the buildup it stared in March 2021, a month before Biden announced the withdrawal from Afghanistan. Units from the 41st Combined Arms Army based in Siberia were deployed in March and never left the Ukrainian border.
If you are going to stage a bogus attack, you need troops with no ties to whoever is being attacked. When the Chinese massacred protesters in Tiananmen Square, they brought in troops from the other side of China with no ties to Beijing. Using non-Slavic troops from the Far East was to be expected as a prelude to the attack. It also means the body bags will be shipped back to Siberia and not to European Russian cities.
During the staged session of Putin’s security council, the head of the SVR (Foreign Intelligence Service), Sergei Naryshin, had a hard time reading his script. He will probably be gone soon as he does not appear to be 100% behind Putin’s plan.
Today, February 23rd is Defense of the Fatherland Day in Russia. It included fireworks, parades, and invading a neighboring country.
16 comments
The irony of Putin claiming that the Ukrainian government of Volodymyr Zelenskyy is a “Nazi regime”… when Zelenskyy is a Russian-speaking Jew. Does he really want us to believe that a Russian-speaking Jew whose grandfather fought the Nazis is… a Nazi? For reals?!
Now we all know that stupidity is contagious: Putin caught it from Trump.
I have been following the coverage for over a week now, with tears flowing freely. When I was child, my mother had friends who were Ukrainian. They fled the Nazis in WWII; I think thy would be outraged at Putin’s words.
Anya, the historical background of Putin’s statements is that the Ukraine Partisan Army of Stepan Bandera rebelled against Soviet rule and tried to create an independent Ukraine between 1941 and 1951. His rebellion was originally supported by the Nazis, then when they declared independence, the Nazis realized that they were faced with a nationalist movement rather than a pro-Nazi movement and the UPA ended up fighting both the Nazis and the Soviets. Nevertheless, because he accepted aid from the Nazis at the beginning, he has been tarred as being a Nazi ever since — even though he was imprisoned by the Nazis from 1941 to 1944 for leading a Ukrainian nationalist movement.
So anyhow, the early collaboration with the Nazis meant that the UPA never got any Western aid in their rebellion against the Soviets because Stalin successfully used propaganda to paint them as nothing but Nazis. Yet it still took the Soviets nearly ten years to put the rebellion down. Putin learned the wrong lesson — he thought he learned the lesson that painting the Ukrainians as Nazis would keep the West from supporting them, when the lesson he *should* have learned is that attacking and occupying Ukraine would be a long and expensive process that would be made even harder if Ukrainian partisans received Western support.
Also, he should have realized that painting a government led by a Russian-speaking Jew as Nazis just gets laughs and giggles from the West, unlike when Stalin painted Bandera’s Ukrainian nationalist movement as Nazis. After all, Bandera had been a guest of the Germans cooperating with them against the Soviets until being imprisoned by the Nazis. While Zelenskyy… is a Jew.
This wasn’t about Nazis, this was about Putin’s desire to become Tsar Vladimir II of the Third Russian Empire. The problem is that you can’t invade countries with draftees. The draftees don’t want to die and the citizens of the country invaded don’t want foreign masters.
There was a Ukrainian Division in the Waffen SS during World War II, made up of Ukrainians opposed to Stalin. This was because of the starvation Stalin caused during the 1930s. They were against Stalin and the Soviet Union for barbaric treatment. They weren’t pro-Hitler. The majority of Ukrainians didn’t want Hitler or Stalin, they wanted their country back.
You and I Brian, know just how brutal Putin is and can be. Life means nothing to him, only his goal matters. “The end justifies the means”!
This tweet from Dmytro Gurin, a Ukrainian MP who lived & worked in Moscow, posted a long tweet thread about what is happening, mostly in Mariupol:
https://twitter.com/DmytroGurinMP/status/1500735642204086275
This is what Trump wants to be. People get no credit to exist unless they are useful to Vladimir. Anyone who questions or annoys him in any way must be eliminated. He is a prime example of a sociopath. He lacks the humanity to be insane.
Now & then, I check Quora to see if anyone sane is posting. This is one that pretty much agrees with you assessment of Putin’s foolish timetable for his invasion & other things. 👍😎
https://ondiplomacywarfare.quora.com/Has-Putin-made-the-biggest-mistake-of-his-life-by-invading-Ukraine
It’s probably why Putin has become a rabid dog! He’s even killing Russians and other Nationals in the Ukraine. He’s been especially targeting Foreign Reporters. It seems that he just wants to kill every Human in the Ukraine now.
Putin has had the FSB people responsible for the preliminary recon of Ukraine prior to the launch arrested for telling him what he wanted to hear. If they had told him the truth, they would have been arrested for that. Working for Trump-like dictators is a lose-lose situation.
Putin wants to kill people in hopes of convincing them to surrender. Kyiv did surrender to the Mongols and got wiped out, so why would Putin expect anything different. Ukrainians still remember what Stalin did to them, and they expect no better from Putin. Now the Patriarch of Moscow, Kiril, claims the Ukrainians are evil because they are Catholics and won’t burn LGBTQ people on stakes and wants them all murdered. Just another “Christian” leader, like Putin.
It’s official: Ukraine has utterly won the propaganda war with the video that President Zelenskyy showed to Congress:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KaUvjZPqd74
Unbearably sad and affecting. Meanwhile Russia continues to rants about Jewish Nazis and weaponized birds. Maybe their own propagandized population will believe such nonsense, but everybody outside Russia just laughs and shakes their head like WTF, Putin?
Putin is acting like Stalin, so the purges will start at any time. They use Tucker Carlson because he is a better propagandists than the Russian media. The older Russians will remember “There’s no truth in Pravda and no news in Izvestia, which is as true now as it was in the Soviet era.
Some people who attended Putin’s rally were only there long enough to get their admission tickets stamped and then left before the “show” began. They probably had to turn in their tickets to someone in government to prove they were “loyal Russians”.
Yes, Selenskyy (his transliteration) has won the messaging war.
Russia’ s latest propaganda is that Ukraine is causing the death of civilians in Ukrainian cities by resisting Russian force. Russian “logic” around Ukraine is surprisingly similar to that of wife beaters. The wife beater yells at his wife, “look at what you made me do!” as he bloodies her nose, while if someone stops him from beating his wife they are oppressing him and it is their fault because he was not doing anything wrong, he was only doing what his wife made him do.
So Russia kills Ukrainian civilians by bombing and shelling them and yells, “look at what you made me do!” and if someone sends help to stop the beating Russia sulks with a sense of oppression. This is why the world is disgusted with Russia’s behavior around Ukraine right now. Nobody likes wife beaters.
They have lost a third of their generals who were in theater, and now the fragging has begun because of unit losses. The Russian troops aren’t blaming the Ukrainians, they are blaming their officers. Col Yuri Medvedev just got run over by one of his own soldiers in their tank. His legs are crushed and he was evacuated to medical facilities in Belarus. The reporting is the 37th Motorized Rifle Brigade has had a 50% casualty rate in the first month.
The Russian intel was bad. There was not enough food, fuel, or ammo available to supply the troops. They waited too long to start and the frozen ground thawed and became a quagmire. And their stalled tracked vehicles are being stolen by farmers. These morons just blew up a fuel depot in Lviv that they could have used.
It has been one month since the start of the war. One month after the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, U.S. proxies were pulling down the statue of Saddam Hussein and Bush was parading under a “Mission Accomplished” banner. One month after Russia invaded Ukraine, they haven’t even managed to surround Kiyev yet, much less occupied it and pulled down the statue of Stepan Bandera.
This is definitely not the army I watched in the 60s & 70s. The weapons are better, but the people don’t want to be there. There is no comsec, leadership, or ‘good order and discipline’. A general who observed them training said they lack a professional cadre of NCOs. This operation is totally FUBAR, which is good for the Ukraine. Hopefully they will remove Putin, put in real leadership, and build a professional military. China may seize the best land in southern Siberia after seeing this performance.
They don’t have NCO’s. They put butterbars straight out of OCS in charge of soldiers with no help from some crusty sergeant to convert all that theory BS into practice. Furthermore, with the majority of infantry being 1 year draftees (the professional soldiers are the ones who are manning missile batteries and such, the grunts are all 1 year draftees), they barely have time to train up a batch of soldiers before they’re discharged. The draft is very unpopular in Russia so extending the time back to 2 years, which would at least give you time to use trained soldiers, is deeply unpopular. So basically, Russia is sending barely-trained green troops into combat and they’re having their asses handed to them by the much smaller Ukrainian military (100,000 soldiers total), which, recognizing that engaging in set-piece battles where often outnumbered 10:1 would be suicide, has broken up into small groups doing small group actions and coming back together into larger formations only to smite the Russians at some critical point or another, only to break back up into small groups and disappearing into the countryside once again before the Russians can bring their vast artillery and aircraft inventories to bear. The Russians can basically move around at will — there’s no large formations opposing them for the most part — but they and their supply chain are constantly being bushwhacked while doing so, until they lose all combat capability and bog down and then endure constant misery of one small unit after another taking potshots at them.
Then there’s the situation with the Russian generals. With comms totally broken down, the generals are having to go out to the troops to find out WTF is going on. Well, the Ukrainians are good snipers, something they inherited from their Soviet forefathers. If it’s got gray hair and is standing near a bunch of antennas, the Ukrainians are sniping it. Thus far at least 9 senior generals and who knows how many more junior officers have ended up getting a “Welcome to Ukraine” reward, further increasing the leadership vacuum (though the Kremlin is in no danger of running out of generals anytime soon, they have way more generals than they need).
The Russians are basically in the position of the Redcoats during the American Revolution, running around all over the place trying to pin down a much smaller opponent that disappears into the countryside whenever they try to bring overwhelming force to bear only to reappear behind them to take out occupation detachments and supply trains, and eventually the Americans won that one by basically bankrupting the British Crown (with some help from the French and Spanish of course!). I must say that a month on, the situation in Ukraine is not anything like I thought it would be. I thought that Kiyev would be occupied by now and Zelenskyy would have died of lead poisoning. The fact that he’s still alive and Kiyev is not even fully surrounded is absolutely astonishing considering that Russia literally has a 10:1 advantage in number of soldiers available to them.
OT: been under the weather for a few days.
A friend had a son who finished an enlisted tour in the Marines and went back through the OCS program. Mike was amazed that the other officers in his graduation class had no clear understanding of how the Corps worked or how to command troops. He made Captain in minimal time because of his time as a grunt.
The NCOs keep officers out of trouble, and train the new guys coming in. With only a year long enlistment it’s all OJT. It doesn’t matter that units racked up combat time, because after a year the experienced troops would be gone.
No wonder they are getting their butts kicks, they don’t know how to protect them.