Русский корабль - иди нахуй

[MillerEP 30,447]

You in here?

 

[cactusflinthead 27,598]

 

[Hook1997 5,351]

14 minutes ago, Rimbo said:

The reality is, Russia is continuing to advance, and isn't being pushed back. Not yet. For all the news I want to read about how well the Ukrainians are fighting, about how Russia simply has no way to win, they still advance.

See two post below you..  Everything I’ve read from this thread and other places say Russia advances are being pushed back in most locations and digging in and not advancing.   

[berlinerbaer 670]

12 hours ago, 956 Worldwide said:

The main problem with this theory is similar to theories about how the U.S. invaded Iraq for its oil.  The old saw about catching more flies with honey than vinegar applies.  If Russia’s primary interest here was to keep itself secure as Europe’s leading energy provider, tools such as corrupt networks in Ukraine and other forms of economic coercion would have been more successful and far cheaper. Russian firms could have easily been in place to control the development of these resources and integrate them into Russian energy networks. 
 

Russian aims are not economic in nature, as evidenced by the fact that Putin embarked on an economically ruinous war that destroyed his biggest EU energy project— a scenario that was utterly predictable.  Unavoidable, even.  We need to look elsewhere for Russian motivation. 

I think the economic arguments hold water considering coercion was working out just fine for Putin until his buddy in Kiev got the boot in 2014's uprising. One of the things Yanukovich was doing until then, IIRC, was putting development of the country's O&G infrastructure on ice.

[MillerEP 30,447]

 

[Etexhorn13 3,045]

So, actually a semi serious drunk question. Why are all the videos we see of Russians fighting in grocery stores over sugar? Not like they can wipe their asses with it or anything. 

[Hook1997 5,351]

Just now, Etexhorn13 said:

So, actually a semi serious drunk question. Why are all the videos we see of Russians fighting in grocery stores over sugar? Not like they can wipe their asses with it or anything. 

To make Vodka?  Idk really, seems like flour, rice, ect would be more important.  

[grazinhorn 472]

48 minutes ago, MillerEP said:

You in here?

 

[Etexhorn13 3,045]

4 minutes ago, grazinhorn said:

This is straight out of Lil Dicky’s “Dave” show on FX… that’s awesome. 

[Sbbruin 21,829]

15 minutes ago, Etexhorn13 said:

So, actually a semi serious drunk question. Why are all the videos we see of Russians fighting in grocery stores over sugar? Not like they can wipe their asses with it or anything. 

Sugar is a fundamental ingredient in many many things.  Seems clear to me.  They probably have to import 100% of it and no more is coming in

[tx 3 putt 76,874]

4 minutes ago, Sbbruin said:

Sugar is a fundamental ingredient in many many things.  Seems clear to me.  They probably have to import 100% of it and no more is coming in

 

cuba ?

[conVINCEd 21,469]

7 minutes ago, Sbbruin said:

Sugar is a fundamental ingredient in many many things.  Seems clear to me.  They probably have to import 100% of it and no more is coming in

So says the guy who has a better plan for the apocalypse than 99.9% of the population.  How much sugar do you have on the boat?

[Etexhorn13 3,045]

 

9 minutes ago, Sbbruin said:

Sugar is a fundamental ingredient in many many things.  Seems clear to me.  They probably have to import 100% of it and no more is coming in

The only time I have to think like a third world citizen is during a bad hurricane in Houston, and I’ve honestly never thought to stock sugar in my pantry. I can see it for baking bread, but what else? Russians trying to get their farm to table jelly business going?

Edited March 20, 2022 by Etexhorn13

[staboner 4,969]

5 minutes ago, tx 3 putt said:

 

cuba ?

damn. the long long game there

[tx 3 putt 76,874]

3 minutes ago, Etexhorn13 said:

 

The only time I have to think like a third world citizen is during a bad hurricane in Houston, and I’ve honestly never thought to stock sugar in my pantry. I can see it for baking bread, but what else? Russians trying to get their farm to table jelly business going?

 

i dont think ive ever bought a bag of sugar in my life 

[atomheartbevo 89,629]

@MillerEP tying into your Belarus tweet

Of course, as commentators pointed out, Western Ukraine's terrain favors the defenders, and weapons shipments can simply shift to Romania.

But no way is the Belarus military going to drive to Lviv.  And that's a helluva long logistics line in and of itself, at a place where a shitload of Javelins are coming in.

And if Russia's military is an utter shitshow, doubt Belarus is going to be any better, and they'll be even less motivated to fight.

[MillerEP 30,447]

11 minutes ago, tx 3 putt said:

 

cuba ?

https://www.reuters.com/business/vessels-head-toward-russia-with-big-sugar-cargoes-store-shelves-empty-2022-03-17/

Brazil

[atomheartbevo 89,629]

This makes me wonder if this is the type of false-flag stuff that Rubio was tweeting about

 

[atomheartbevo 89,629]

This is the kind of stuff that will make Putin even more paranoid than normal, and it's a shame this didn't happen after Crimea in 2014.

This is huge - Russia gets 20% of its alumina from Australia.

 

[tx 3 putt 76,874]

5 minutes ago, MillerEP said:

https://www.reuters.com/business/vessels-head-toward-russia-with-big-sugar-cargoes-store-shelves-empty-2022-03-17/

Brazil

 

if they're depending on brazil. they are very fucked 

[atomheartbevo 89,629]

Ukrainian farmers, LOL

 

[atomheartbevo 89,629]

I've seen people saying they are holding back their best troops, and yet we keep seeing dead officers and NCOs from their airborne units, Spetsnaz, etc.

Little thread discussing that

And a really good point about Grenada freaking out the military - lots of problems with radio communications between the services as well as even between individual units.  People do not understand just how much was learned from Grenada.  It's a little footnote in history, but if you read up on the aftermath of it, a lot of changes in the US military, and those changes helped tremendously in the first Gulf War.

 

[Spankytoes 1,739]

1 hour ago, Etexhorn13 said:

So, actually a semi serious drunk question. Why are all the videos we see of Russians fighting in grocery stores over sugar? Not like they can wipe their asses with it or anything. 

Unsweet chai is shit

[atomheartbevo 89,629]

Going down the Wikipedia and twitter and other rabbit holes about why Russia sucks so bad, and a couple of things keep popping up.

First, a lot of us here and elsewhere that are everything from random internet posters to various military and European analysts are shocked, and it's because we are biased because we are in our 40s and older, and so the Soviet Union was a real bogeyman. Many of us remember the duck-and-cover bullshit.  

It was in our culture - we remember the stuff that Ronald Reagan talked about in his speeches, and particularly for those of us growing up in the late 70s and early 80s, we had Rocky IV, Rambo III, Red Dawn, Top Gun, The Day After Tomorrow, Falcon and the Snowman, Firefox, Invasion USA, and Spies Like Us, Hunt for Red October (technically filmed in 1989).  It's really hard to explain to younger people what it was like to have the biggest ass-kickingest movies being about us facing off against the Russians in various ways.

Two things kept jumping out.

1. Russia hasn't fought a real enemy since WWII.  Sure, they had advisors in the Korean War, Vietnam, all over the Middle East, Cuba/Angola, and they've been very active in Syria in recent years.  None of them prepared them for a stand-up fight against a well-organized and well-equipped army backed by a determined populace.

2. The Russian military being incompetent is by design, because the civilian leadership fears the military.  This is where it gets interesting - quite a few people believe the Russian military, at least the combat troops (Army, Naval Infantry, etc.), are, by design, meant to be shit, including the more elite units.  They are meant to be poorly led, and their structure is designed such that it's not necessarily the most competent and driven who wind up in the upper ranks, and the system basically allows for the kind of shit like officers stealing the men's rations and selling them on the black market, etc.. The whole conscript system also really hurts the military, due to a very high turnover every year, again completely by design.  There's even some speculation that the high number of Russian generals/senior leaders being killed is because they just weren't that good (OpSec, situational awareness, etc.) and they didn't have good officers below them to keep the fuckups from happening in the fist place, that caused them to have to go to the front.

It gets really interesting when you get into the upper ranks, who are not what you would think the military would be - feels like the old Soviet Union days when it was more about who was loyal to the state/party than who was the most competent.

Hell the top guy, Sergei Shoigu, Minster of Defense and General of the Army, was not a military man.  He was a construction worker/manager who made his way into some minor roles in the Communist Party in the USSR days, and then post-breakup, worked his way up through various political positions.

Why do they fear the military?  Plenty of empires/large countries have been undone by the military during times of revolution (after all, in those times, the military would be the most powerful entity) and Russia is no exception.  Lenin and Trotsky both discussed what would happen if you had military officers who were ambitious (think Napoleon) and the Red Army of the USSR was designed with political officers whose job was to make sure that soldiers were 100% loyal to the USSR and the Communist Party, and that their loyalty was first and foremost to the state and not their leaders/officers.  They would spy on soldiers, and they had power over those soldiers, and they were constantly giving soldiers lessons that indoctrinated them into Leninism, Marxism, etc.

Putin basically revived this concept of having a part of the military whose job it is, is to ensure the loyalty of the military to Putin and Co., back in 2018 (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-russia-military-politics/in-soviet-echo-putin-gives-russian-army-a-political-wing-idUSKBN1KL1VA)

Right now, an extremely competent Russian Army could really fuck with Putin's plans.  What would stop them?

1. The National Guard of Russia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Guard_of_Russia) created in 2016, which is independent of the military and reports directly to Putin.  340,000-strong private internal military meant to protect the government and operate internally within Russian borders.

2. The FSB (Federal Security Service  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Security_Service ) again, reports directly to Putin.  Successor to the KGB, and basically Russia's federal police force, FBI, Border Patrol, etc., all rolled into one.  Hundreds of thousands of members.

If Russia had an extremely competent military, with extremely competent senior leadership, who had come up through the ranks of the military, which made made them more loyal to the military (or Russia) than Putin, that's an incredibly dangerous thing for Putin.  And Putin would be well aware of countries like Turkey where the military has taken matters into their own hands in the past.

And Putin would have also been keenly aware of the assassination attempts made on Hitler by his generals.

Putin has nothing to fear from civilians themselves rising up.  He has too many internal security forces (FSB and National Guard).  His biggest threat is ultimately from the oligarchs and the military, and he's went to great lengths to make sure that if he goes down, the oligarchs go down, so they are loyal (at least the ones remaining in Russia).

Next post I'll include some interesting tweets from somebody who wrote a lot about this kind of stuff, and about Putin's fears/problems. This guy has written a lot about this, about how the Russian military was kept in check, and how it harkens back to the Soviet days

https://twitter.com/kamilkazani

 

Edited March 20, 2022 by atomheartbevo

[atomheartbevo 89,629]

 

[atomheartbevo 89,629]

And people have posted this before in the thread, but in the last 30 years, including under Putin, Russia has had a lot of senior officers/generals die in mysterious circumstances.

 

[atomheartbevo 89,629]

And lest we forget, Putin has ordered the assassination of rivals, journalists, etc.  It's not out of the realm of possibility that the generals that have died on his watch were assassinated (well the ones in Ukraine were just fuckups).  

Hell, the motherfucker had ex-KGB agents poison somebody in England with fucking polonium in 2006.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_of_Alexander_Litvinenko

I'll leave you with a photo of Putin speaking at his rally, clearly with a lot of body armor on.

 

[Chad Fuck 17,659]

 

Getting dusty in here.

[956 Worldwide 34,704]

2 hours ago, Sbbruin said:

Sugar is a fundamental ingredient in many many things.  Seems clear to me.  They probably have to import 100% of it and no more is coming in

Russia makes tons and tons and tons of sugar out of sugar beets. This pure hoarding because of war fears.  

[956 Worldwide 34,704]

2 hours ago, Etexhorn13 said:

 

The only time I have to think like a third world citizen is during a bad hurricane in Houston, and I’ve honestly never thought to stock sugar in my pantry. I can see it for baking bread, but what else? Russians trying to get their farm to table jelly business going?

It’s just pure hoarding of long-life staples in the expectation that prices and shortages will last a long time— not hurricane style brief outages.  Russians do a lot more home preserves, jams, pickles than we do and you need sugar for that but it’s not really the season.  They just expect times to get hard, prices to continually go up, and so they’re spending rubles now to have a pantry full.  Sugar is one of a few staples than will really never spoil if stored right. 

[InkaUtexas 25,874]

8 hours ago, Zonahorn said:

A good boy

We don't deserve em

[atomheartbevo 89,629]

 

[Sbbruin 21,829]

5 hours ago, tx 3 putt said:

 

i dont think ive ever bought a bag of sugar in my life 

I only buy the best.

 

[dimyh 1,874]

Reports that some tracks have been sabotaged in Belarus. Not sure if it's true or the extent of the damage but hopefully they have enough of a resistance force to start fucking up more of the Ruskies logistics.

 

 

[Celery Man 20,933]

13 hours ago, MillerEP said:

 

^Awesome

In Ukraine, country sieges you!

[cactusflinthead 27,598]

First and last of thread

 

[Brisketexan 105,079]

Going down the Wikipedia and twitter and other rabbit holes about why Russia sucks so bad, and a couple of things keep popping up.
First, a lot of us here and elsewhere that are everything from random internet posters to various military and European analysts are shocked, and it's because we are biased because we are in our 40s and older, and so the Soviet Union was a real bogeyman. Many of us remember the duck-and-cover bullshit.  
It was in our culture - we remember the stuff that Ronald Reagan talked about in his speeches, and particularly for those of us growing up in the late 70s and early 80s, we had Rocky IV, Rambo III, Red Dawn, Top Gun, The Day After Tomorrow, Falcon and the Snowman, Firefox, Invasion USA, and Spies Like Us, Hunt for Red October (technically filmed in 1989).  It's really hard to explain to younger people what it was like to have the biggest ass-kickingest movies being about us facing off against the Russians in various ways.
Two things kept jumping out.
1. Russia hasn't fought a real enemy since WWII.  Sure, they had advisors in the Korean War, Vietnam, all over the Middle East, Cuba/Angola, and they've been very active in Syria in recent years.  None of them prepared them for a stand-up fight against a well-organized and well-equipped army backed by a determined populace.
2. The Russian military being incompetent is by design, because the civilian leadership fears the military.  This is where it gets interesting - quite a few people believe the Russian military, at least the combat troops (Army, Naval Infantry, etc.), are, by design, meant to be shit, including the more elite units.  They are meant to be poorly led, and their structure is designed such that it's not necessarily the most competent and driven who wind up in the upper ranks, and the system basically allows for the kind of shit like officers stealing the men's rations and selling them on the black market, etc.. The whole conscript system also really hurts the military, due to a very high turnover every year, again completely by design.  There's even some speculation that the high number of Russian generals/senior leaders being killed is because they just weren't that good (OpSec, situational awareness, etc.) and they didn't have good officers below them to keep the fuckups from happening in the fist place, that caused them to have to go to the front.
It gets really interesting when you get into the upper ranks, who are not what you would think the military would be - feels like the old Soviet Union days when it was more about who was loyal to the state/party than who was the most competent.
Hell the top guy, Sergei Shoigu, Minster of Defense and General of the Army, was not a military man.  He was a construction worker/manager who made his way into some minor roles in the Communist Party in the USSR days, and then post-breakup, worked his way up through various political positions.
Why do they fear the military?  Plenty of empires/large countries have been undone by the military during times of revolution (after all, in those times, the military would be the most powerful entity) and Russia is no exception.  Lenin and Trotsky both discussed what would happen if you had military officers who were ambitious (think Napoleon) and the Red Army of the USSR was designed with political officers whose job was to make sure that soldiers were 100% loyal to the USSR and the Communist Party, and that their loyalty was first and foremost to the state and not their leaders/officers.  They would spy on soldiers, and they had power over those soldiers, and they were constantly giving soldiers lessons that indoctrinated them into Leninism, Marxism, etc.
Putin basically revived this concept of having a part of the military whose job it is, is to ensure the loyalty of the military to Putin and Co., back in 2018 (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-russia-military-politics/in-soviet-echo-putin-gives-russian-army-a-political-wing-idUSKBN1KL1VA)
Right now, an extremely competent Russian Army could really fuck with Putin's plans.  What would stop them?
1. The National Guard of Russia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Guard_of_Russia) created in 2016, which is independent of the military and reports directly to Putin.  340,000-strong private internal military meant to protect the government and operate internally within Russian borders.
2. The FSB (Federal Security Service  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Security_Service ) again, reports directly to Putin.  Successor to the KGB, and basically Russia's federal police force, FBI, Border Patrol, etc., all rolled into one.  Hundreds of thousands of members.
If Russia had an extremely competent military, with extremely competent senior leadership, who had come up through the ranks of the military, which made made them more loyal to the military (or Russia) than Putin, that's an incredibly dangerous thing for Putin.  And Putin would be well aware of countries like Turkey where the military has taken matters into their own hands in the past.
And Putin would have also been keenly aware of the assassination attempts made on Hitler by his generals.
Putin has nothing to fear from civilians themselves rising up.  He has too many internal security forces (FSB and National Guard).  His biggest threat is ultimately from the oligarchs and the military, and he's went to great lengths to make sure that if he goes down, the oligarchs go down, so they are loyal (at least the ones remaining in Russia).
Next post I'll include some interesting tweets from somebody who wrote a lot about this kind of stuff, and about Putin's fears/problems. This guy has written a lot about this, about how the Russian military was kept in check, and how it harkens back to the Soviet days
https://twitter.com/kamilkazani
 

You know, his observations that Russia only “won” the last two big wars - WWII and the Napoleonic war - because it got huge assistance from the great powers at the time (Britain, then the US) is powerful. And while he doesn’t go there, I will: the script is being flipped against Russia. Ukraine is now playing the part of Russia - an undersupplied inferior fighting force turned into the superior one mostly because of a massive influx of materiel from the great powers. And Russia is playing the part of Nazi Germany or Napoleonic France: an aspiring empire limited by its own limited resources and a blind megalomaniac leader.
Russia is being hoisted on the very petard that led it to victory in the past.
Fascinating.

[Schulz2.0 28,951]

10 hours ago, atomheartbevo said:

@MillerEP tying into your Belarus tweet

Of course, as commentators pointed out, Western Ukraine's terrain favors the defenders, and weapons shipments can simply shift to Romania.

But no way is the Belarus military going to drive to Lviv.  And that's a helluva long logistics line in and of itself, at a place where a shitload of Javelins are coming in.

And if Russia's military is an utter shitshow, doubt Belarus is going to be any better, and they'll be even less motivated to fight.

 

 

[Sawbonz 27,542]

If these reports are true, I don’t see how Putin can sustain this for another two weeks

Edited March 20, 2022 by Sawbonz

[Neonmoon 38,129]

They’ve only lost around 500 tanks. They allegedly have 11,000 more. So Ukraine will knock those out by Christmas?

also this 

 

Edited March 20, 2022 by Neonmoon

[Brisketexan 105,079]

They’ve only lost around 500 tanks. They allegedly have 11,000 more. So Ukraine will knock those out by Christmas?
also this 
 

Maybe. But they also don’t have to. A tank with no gas is just a shitty artillery piece likely in a pointless location. And if it can’t get ammo, it’s not even that - it’s an armored paperweight.
Ukraine doesn’t have to destroy every Russian tanks. It just has to take them out of the fight.

[Sbbruin 21,829]

21 minutes ago, Sawbonz said:

If these reports are true, I don’t see how Putin can sustain this for another two weeks

God I hope it is true.  Putin is just sending his troops to slaughter.

[Macanudo 12,975]

16 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:

Maybe. But they also don’t have to. A tank with no gas is just a shitty artillery piece likely in a pointless location. And if it can’t get ammo, it’s not even that - it’s an armored paperweight.
Ukraine doesn’t have to destroy every Russian tanks. It just has to take them out of the fight.

What he said.   They don't have to destroy/put out of commission even half of them.   The Russians don't have the ability to crank out modern armaments like they did in WWII.  They specifically designed the T-34 to be cheap and easy to build.   Modern tanks aren't that simple.

[Dbeasy 15,042]

Here is a question. I know very few want the US directly involved with this war. However, if the killing of innocent people continues at high levels, and most of the rest of the free world committed troops and direct involvement in Ukraine, would you support action? In that scenario the force would be overwhelming to Russia. I’m getting pretty damn tired of Russia killing innocent people and lying to the world. 

[Brisketexan 105,079]

Here is a question. I know very few want the US directly involved with this war. However, if the killing of innocent people continues at high levels, and most of the rest of the free world committed troops and direct involvement in Ukraine, would you support action? In that scenario the force would be overwhelming to Russia. I’m getting pretty damn tired of Russia killing innocent people and lying to the world. 

Nope.
Direct engagement by the US and NATO gives Putin what he wants: an external boogeyman enemy that he can use to actually unite Russian support behind him. As much as it pains us to see him taking out pawns, and we could stop him if just bring out our Queen….but that’s what he wants us to do. So…no.
There is no magical choice that gives us a happy ending.

[cactusflinthead 27,598]

12 minutes ago, Dbeasy said:

Here is a question. I know very few want the US directly involved with this war. However, if the killing of innocent people continues at high levels, and most of the rest of the free world committed troops and direct involvement in Ukraine, would you support action? In that scenario the force would be overwhelming to Russia. I’m getting pretty damn tired of Russia killing innocent people and lying to the world. 

To elaborate on Brisket's point

 

[tx 3 putt 76,874]

43 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:

Maybe. But they also don’t have to. A tank with no gas is just a shitty artillery piece likely in a pointless location. And if it can’t get ammo, it’s not even that - it’s an armored paperweight.
Ukraine doesn’t have to destroy every Russian tanks. It just has to take them out of the fight.

How many of those tanks are missing parts ?

[Nicole44 22,059]

10 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:

Nope.
Direct engagement by the US and NATO gives Putin what he wants: an external boogeyman enemy that he can use to actually unite Russian support behind him. As much as it pains us to see him taking out pawns, and we could stop him if just bring out our Queen….but that’s what he wants us to do. So…no.
There is no magical choice that gives us a happy ending.

Yeh there is a happy ending. People acting like Putin has a brief case with the codes 1234 on it to shoot off nukes. Apparently I’ve become a nihilist or something but people are way afraid of death. 

[CHIEF 5,078]

With the Russians now taking defensive positions, this is the opportunity for the Ukrainians to starve them out. I would have armed  civilians covering every convenient store, farm, bombed out market, and grain bin I could find. Have the Ukrainians haul off what tiny amount remains, and stash it, then, ambush every foraging Russian they see. A Russian soldier that hasn't eaten in 4-5 days is already going to be pretty weak, and obviously will take chances to get some food in his belly that he normally wouldn't take.

CHIEF

Edited March 20, 2022 by CHIEF

[NorthLoop 14,183]

3 minutes ago, Nicole44 said:

Yeh there is a happy ending. People acting like Putin has a brief case with the codes 1234 on it to shoot off nukes. Apparently I’ve become a nihilist or something but people are way afraid of death. 

Maybe he does, maybe he doesn't. Right now it's not a risk worth taking.