If it were not so racist, the "Tankie" explanation of the Russian defeat near Karkiv would be 'funny' but Ukraine soldiers did the job: Free men
This racist underestimation of the valor and intelligence of Slavic men and women from a relatively free society, Ukraine, as opposed to Putin's man made criminal empire is offensive and deserves a rebuke. The so called "tankies" whom are out right Putin Fan boys, are really becoming offensive and so I am going to say something about it: While the Buryats and other Mongolian non Slavic people have been exploited by Putin, the failure is not due to NATO units in Ukraine or Buryats not being able to stand up to NATO units.
That sort of talk is GARBAGE
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Today we’ll?start with ?Will Schryver, a Utah resident with 27,000 followers on Twitter.?
I will simply note that the United States and its willing NATO vassals have deliberately raised the stakes of this conflict such that Russia will very likely now feel compelled to make a momentous decision in deference to the power of perception and narrative.
The empire has played the "ace up its sleeve" in Ukraine.
Over the past several months they methodically constructed a modest strike force of hoarded NATO weaponry and a briefly trained new cadre of Ukrainian soldiers – most of them fresh conscripts.
In addition to these new Ukrainian brigades, they also assembled multiple brigades of NATO troops – “foreign volunteers” – to serve as shock troops for an envisioned “counter-offensive”. The total count of these NATO soldiers is unknown, but is likely at least 3000 - 5000.
I'm persuaded the Russians were clearly cognizant of this build-up. They also clearly provided an irresistibly tempting target for the assembled force, and deliberately created a vacuum into which it would be permitted to advance. What they plan to do next remains to be seen.
“A handful of Ukranians?and THOUSANDS OF NATO SOLDIERS took Kharkiv, even?though the real number is unknown so I’ll just make up something that sounds good. Oh, and Russia let them, for reasons that even I can’t make up, so give me time to come up with something good!”?
This is an ongoing theme—one American Foreign Legion guy took video at Izyum’s entrance, so therefore they’re all NATO. Most of those reports also insist on mentioning that?the blacks?were also there, likely referring to Malcolm Nance (who has also?featured in Russian state propaganda ). We know why they need to stress that.
end of quote
Ahem, but this "Tankie" racist meme does a whopping injustice to Ukrainian army units whom are not riddled with decades of corruption due to oligarch stealing from Russian army supplies
As low as this sort of racism is, the even worse matter has been what I have seen, i,e. Putin exploited the Buyats
FTR
The Buryats (Buryat: Буряад, romanized: Buryaad; Mongolian: Буриад, romanized: Buriad) are a?Mongolian people numbering at 516,476, comprising one of the two largest indigenous groups in Siberia, the other being the Yakuts.
Of course the "Tankies" can gush over the contribution of SLAVIC Russian soldiers as MAGA would and of course bash victims from the Russian Federation, like Buryat military formations as not being representative of some imaginary "real" Russia
Go for it . Just see if anyone believes it.
Also
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From Wednesday to Sunday, Vladimir Putin’s military forces saw at least 338 pieces of important military hardware – from fighter jets to tanks to trucks – destroyed, damaged or captured, according to numbers from the open source intelligence website Oryx, as Ukraine’s forces have bolted through Russian-held territory in an offensive that has stunned the Russians in its speed and breadth.
Ukraine’s top military commander claimed on Sunday that more than 3,000 square kilometers (1,158 square miles) of territory had been retaken by his country’s forces since the beginning of September. And for more perspective, just “since Wednesday, Ukraine has recaptured territory at least twice the size of Greater London,” the British Defense Ministry said Monday.
Ukrainian reports say Putin’s troops are fleeing east to the Russian border in whatever transport they can find, even taking cars from the civilian population in the areas they had captured since the start of the war in February.
In their wake they leave hundreds of pieces of the Russian war machine, which since Putin’s so-called “special military operation” commenced, has not come close to living up to its pre-war billing as one of the world’s great powers.
end of quote
Keep this in mind too this one flew over the kukus nest flight of fancy
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“A handful of Ukranians?and THOUSANDS OF NATO SOLDIERS took Kharkiv, even?though the real number is unknown so I’ll just make up something that sounds good. Oh, and Russia let them, for reasons that even I can’t make up, so give me time to come up with something good!”?
end of quote
BS. No NATO divisions or people are not involved. This was Free people SLAVIC Ukrainians, not NATO 'super soldiers'
And FTR talking sh*t about the Buryats whom were dragooned into Ukraine duty service , if you do that, Tankies, shows how stupid you are
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The rot runs deep in the Russian war machine. Ukraine is exposing it for all to see
Analysis by?Brad Lendon , CNN
Russian soldiers don't have the will to keep fighting in Ukraine, says former head of US Army Europe
For Russia, the numbers are catastrophic.
From Wednesday to Sunday, Vladimir Putin’s military forces saw at least 338 pieces of important military hardware – from fighter jets to tanks to trucks – destroyed, damaged or captured, according to numbers from the open source intelligence website Oryx, as Ukraine’s forces have bolted through Russian-held territory in an offensive that has stunned the Russians in its speed and breadth.
Ukraine’s top military commander claimed on Sunday that more than 3,000 square kilometers (1,158 square miles) of territory had been retaken by his country’s forces since the beginning of September. And for more perspective, just “since Wednesday, Ukraine has recaptured territory at least twice the size of Greater London,” the British Defense Ministry said Monday.
Ukrainian reports say Putin’s troops are fleeing east to the Russian border in whatever transport they can find, even taking cars from the civilian population in the areas they had captured since the start of the war in February.
In their wake they leave hundreds of pieces of the Russian war machine, which since Putin’s so-called “special military operation” commenced, has not come close to living up to its pre-war billing as one of the world’s great powers.
These Russian losses are the accumulation of a multitude of existing problems that are now colliding head-on with a Ukrainian military that has been patient, methodical and infused with billions of dollars of the Western military equipment that Russia cannot match.
And without a drastic, and potentially unconventional intervention from Putin, the Ukrainian victories are likely to accelerate, analysts say.
Many of Russia’s problems – poor and inflexible leadership, sour troop morale, inadequate logistics and hardware beset by maintenance issues – have been evident since the beginning stages of the war more than seven months ago.
The Russian military’s hollow core – including?tanks that were easy prey for Ukrainian ground troops ?and?trucks that didn’t have the right tires ?to traverse Ukraine’s landscape – was quickly exposed by tactics ill-suited to the blitzkrieg Putin had planned.
Remember that?64-kilometer (40-mile) convoy ?that stalled on the way to the capital of Kyiv and was shredded by Ukrainian defenders?
As that convoy stalled, reports filtered out that Russian troops had significant morale problems – some didn’t even know they were in Ukraine, or if they did, why they were there. As the fighting intensified, Ukrainian forces targeted Russian leadership,?killing generals ?and colonels who would have been expected to rally the Russian forces.
And the Russians certainly needed stronger leadership if accounts of troop hardships are to be believed.
An abandoned Russian tank sits in vegetation in a village on the outskirts of Izium, Ukraine, on Sunday.
Juan Barreto/AFP/Getty Images
Pavel Filatyev, a Russian paratrooper who fought his army’s capture of the Ukrainian city of Kherson earlier in the war,?told CNN last month? that his unit lacked even the basics during that operation.
“Several days after we encircled Kherson many of us did not have any food, water or sleeping sacks,” he said. “Because it was very cold at night, we couldn’t even sleep. We would find some rubbish, some rags, just to wrap ourselves to keep warm.”
And their armaments were substandard, he said.
“All of our weapons are from the times of Afghanistan,” where Russian forces fought from 1979 to 1989, he said.
The impact of Western arms donations
Meanwhile, Western arms have flowed into Ukraine, among them powerful advanced artillery systems like?the HIMARS, or High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems.
The wheeled HIMARS offer what US manufacturer Lockheed Martin calls “shoot and scoot capability” – they can fire highly accurate rockets at targets about 70 to 80 kilometers (about 50 miles) away and then move quickly to avoid any counterstrike.
Ukraine has used them with devastating effect on Russian supply lines, ammunition dumps and command posts.
Hear what Zelensky would tell Trump about Putin
“Ukraine’s armed forces employed HIMARS and other Western systems to attack Russian ground lines of communication in Kharkiv and Kherson Oblasts, setting conditions for the success of this operation,” the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) said in a blog post on Sunday.
The pounding meted out by Ukrainian deployed HIMARS on Russian supply lines has been relentless, according to Western analysts.
“Ukrainian long-range artillery is now probably hitting crossings of the Dnipro (River) so frequently that Russia cannot carry out repairs to damaged road bridges,” Britain’s Defense Ministry said Monday.
Trent Telenko, a former quality control auditor for the US’ Defense Contract Management Agency who has studied Russian logistics, said Ukrainian forces used precision rockets fired from the HIMARS batteries to take out key large Russian arms depots near rail lines well back of the front lines.
This meant Russia had to use trucks to disperse artillery pieces and ammunition to smaller depots, making it more difficult to distribute, Telenko said. When Ukraine began its lightning offensive, Russia could not bring appropriate firepower to blunt the Ukrainian advance because its artillery was so dispersed, he said.
But the HIMARS and other powerful Western artillery systems shouldn’t get all the credit, ISW said. They were coupled with Ukrainian feints and ingenuity.
Last week Russia redeployed forces to the south to bolster its ranks ahead of a mooted Ukrainian counteroffensive in Kherson region, according to Ukrainian officials and footage of equipment moving through Crimea.
That opened the door for Ukrainian forces farther north.
Abandoned Russian munitions lie in a village on the outskirts of Izium, Ukraine, on Sunday.
Juan Barreto/AFP/Getty Images
“Kyiv’s long discussion and then an announcement of a counter-offensive operation aimed at Kherson Oblast drew substantial Russian troops away from the sectors on which Ukrainian forces have conducted decisive attacks in the past several days,” ISW said.
Once those Russian forces moved, the Ukrainian military probed for weak points in Russian lines, said Mark Hertling, a CNN analyst and former US Army general.
“What they have been able to do is conduct reconnaissance with a small force to find where to conduct a much larger breakthrough, pushing tanks and artillery through the holes in the Russian front and then getting into the Russian rear areas,” Hertling said.
Supplies for Ukraine to fuel its advance
The quick Russian retreat has enabled Ukraine to capture Russian arms, ammunition, fuel and supplies in those rear areas, said Telenko, adding that the addition of trucks and trains to the Ukrainian inventory will allow Kyiv to “supercharge” its advances.
Analysts have also noted the lack of Russian air support.
Richard Hooker Jr., a nonresident senior fellow with the Atlantic Council, said last month that Ukraine has stitched together a force of older antiaircraft systems already in its inventory with supplies of US and German equipment and “largely sidelined Russian airpower.”
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“Ukraine has been outstandingly successful in denying Russia air supremacy with extremely effective air defense and a strategy of ‘air denial,’” Hooper?wrote on the Atlantic Council’s “Ukraine Alert” blog .
A Ukrainian soldier takes a break to rest in the freed territory in the Kharkiv region, Ukraine, on Monday.
Kostiantyn Liberov/AP
And Russian setbacks are just fuel for even more trouble ahead, a spiral of defeats that may be beyond Moscow’s ability to stop.
Mick Ryan, an adjunct fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a former Australian Army general, terms it “cascading failure” in a Twitter post. “Each battlefield loss and withdrawal leads to further failure,” he said.
As the options dwindle, so will embattled Russian morale.
Map shows how Ukraine pulled off counteroffensive
Map shows how Ukraine pulled off counteroffensive
As retreating forces move back, they’ll bring stories of their withdrawal with them. It will be all but impossible for the Kremlin to keep those stories from spreading within its forces and even to their relatives back home.
The territory Russia captured in Ukraine over seven months, at the cost of tens of thousands of Russian casualties, has been lost in a week.
And Russia’s generals seemingly have no immediate answer.
Even when Putin’s forces were advancing, those advances were slow and grinding. And earlier in the war, Ukraine’s defenders never fled the way Russian troops have in the past week.
“The already limited trust deployed troops have in Russia’s senior military leadership is likely to deteriorate further,” the British Defense Ministry said on Monday.
The ministry’s report said the Ukrainian attacks had made it difficult for Russia to move replacement troops to the front lines.
Where does Moscow find replacements?
The big question is whether Russia has fresh trained troops to move forward.
In July, CNN reported that the?call had gone out across Russia for more than 30,000 volunteers ?to join the war effort in Ukraine. The lure was big cash bonuses and no experience was necessary.
But Kateryna Stepanenko, a Russia researcher at ISW, said those new recruits would likely be of little help on the battlefield as there would not be enough time to train them.
For instance, training a tank crew can take several months at a minimum and sometimes more than a year, experts say.
“Short-term training is unlikely to turn volunteers with no prior experience into effective soldiers in any unit,” Stepanenko said.
And those 300-plus Russian pieces of hardware left destroyed, damaged or abandoned on the battlefield over the past several days won’t be easy to replace either.
A Ukranian soldier on Sunday standis atop an abandoned Russian tank near a village on the outskirts of Izyum, Ukraine.
Juan Barreto/AFP/Getty Images
Russian industry has been hamstrung by Western sanctions. Russian arms depots have already been raided to replace earlier losses. And while large numbers of arms may remain in those depots, they are likely old and in need of repair or refurbishment, said Jakub Janovsky, a military analyst who contributes to the Oryx blog.
“In practice replacements are often much older vehicles – likely to suffer from reliability problems and with lower effectiveness in combat,” he said.
Moscow retains manufacturing capacity, but lacks the best components for what it might make, Janovsky said.
“Due to sanctions they might have to replace sensors and electronics with inferior alternatives – and the amount they can produce in the near term is a fraction of what they are losing. Those material losses … are not sustainable,” he said.
So advantage Ukraine, at least in the near term.
But Ryan, the former Australian general, remains cautious.
“It is too early to speak in overly triumphant terms. The Russians still have the capacity to respond. The south & east are still occupied by the Russians. The Ukrainians have won a significant victory, but there is still a war to be won,” he tweeted.
CNN’s Tim Lister, Josh Pennington, Darya Tarasova contributed to this report.
end of quote
Whereas
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/9/13/2122694/-Ukraine-Update-The-Tankies-don-t-have-a-coherent-explanation-as-to-why-Russian-is-losing
quote
?
Daily Kos Staff
Tuesday September 13, 2022?·?8:19 PM EDT
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The situation on the ground is …?hazy. Ukraine continues to mop up in Kharkiv Oblast, maybe it is attacking in Kherson Oblast, maybe it’s attacking in Luhansk, maybe Russian and proxy forces are retreating and/or deserting and/or surrendering. Let’s give it another day or two for some of the fog of war to clear.?
Instead, let’s do another check in on the Tankies.
For those who haven’t read previous installments, Tankies are?people who believe imperialism is bad, and only the United States can be imperialist. Thus, Russia is the aggrieved party here, only attacking Ukraine because NATO something or other.?This tweet encapsulates it perfectly:?
Tankies are named after?communist sympathizers who witnessed Soviet bloody suppression of the Prague and Hungary uprisings, yet continued to defend the Soviet Union.?I’ve written about them?here ?and?here , and they’re always good for a quizzical look askance, and then a surprised chuckle when you realize they’re actually serious.?
Today we’ll?start with ?Will Schryver, a Utah resident with 27,000 followers on Twitter.?
I will simply note that the United States and its willing NATO vassals have deliberately raised the stakes of this conflict such that Russia will very likely now feel compelled to make a momentous decision in deference to the power of perception and narrative.
The empire has played the "ace up its sleeve" in Ukraine.
Over the past several months they methodically constructed a modest strike force of hoarded NATO weaponry and a briefly trained new cadre of Ukrainian soldiers – most of them fresh conscripts.
In addition to these new Ukrainian brigades, they also assembled multiple brigades of NATO troops – “foreign volunteers” – to serve as shock troops for an envisioned “counter-offensive”. The total count of these NATO soldiers is unknown, but is likely at least 3000 - 5000.
I'm persuaded the Russians were clearly cognizant of this build-up. They also clearly provided an irresistibly tempting target for the assembled force, and deliberately created a vacuum into which it would be permitted to advance. What they plan to do next remains to be seen.
“A handful of Ukranians?and THOUSANDS OF NATO SOLDIERS took Kharkiv, even?though the real number is unknown so I’ll just make up something that sounds good. Oh, and Russia let them, for reasons that even I can’t make up, so give me time to come up with something good!”?
This is an ongoing theme—one American Foreign Legion guy took video at Izyum’s entrance, so therefore they’re all NATO. Most of those reports also insist on mentioning that?the blacks?were also there, likely referring to Malcolm Nance (who has also?featured in Russian state propaganda ). We know why they need to stress that.
Moving on.
Patrick Lancaster is an American, a Navy vet, who somehow become a chief Putin propagandist?embedding with the Russian army.?
The actual facts are that Ukraine has retaken 6,000 square kilometers in the current counteroffensive. Russia now controls around 116,000 square kilometers or Ukraine’s total land mass of 603,550, or 19%. I like that he says “internationally recognized,” because it should remind everyone that Russia shouldn’t be there in the first place. Crimea is 27,000 of those square kilometers.?
Now, I guess you can argue that liberating 1 percent of Ukraine’s total landmass isn’t “huge gains,” but Ukraine is a big country. 6,000 square miles is?bigger than the state of Connecticut?about the size of Delaware, or two Rhode Islands, or half a Connecticut. And really, “they haven’t taken that much” is a pathetic retort when Ukrainian forces are on the march and Russia is struggling to firm up new defensive lines in northeastern Ukraine. And look at that big chunk of red east of liberated Kharkiv:?
That’s about 20,000 square kilometers of a?whole lot of big empty. If Russian positions have been abandoned in Svatove, as rumored, that whole chunk of land will be marked as liberated, and Lancaster will then argue that?it’s?still not that much?because blah blah blah imperialist propaganda.
Capturing Kharkiv is a big deal. 6,000 square kilometers is?a lot, but just as importantly, Russia’s northern supply routes into Ukraine have been cut, and?Russia just supplied Ukraine with over 300 visually confirmed military vehicles, including?53 tanks?and 94 armored infantry vehicles.
He had me at “Russian always retreats.” He should’ve quit while he was ahead.
The nut graf:?
BBC.com quotes you as saying that if support for Ukraine is strong the crisis will be shorter. Hmmm? I guess that might depend on what you mean by “support for Ukraine?” If by “support for Ukraine,” you mean the West continuing to supply arms to the Kiev government’s armies, I fear you may be tragically mistaken. Throwing fuel, in the form of armaments, into a firefight, has never worked to shorten a war in the past, and it won’t work now, particularly because, in this case, most of the fuel is (a) being thrown into the fire from Washington DC, which is at a relatively safe distance from the conflagration, and (b) because the “fuel throwers” have already declared an interest in the war going on for as long as possible.
Zelenska curtly replied that he had sent the letter to the wrong president.?
Funny that?Russian state media ?itself is more willing to admit battlefield reversals than RT’s English-facing propaganda shills.?
Yeah, Max Blumenthal thinks this is a GOTCHA moment—“AHA! See??They want Putin to fail!” So, guys? Plot twist! You are all now “US hawks” because we want to see an end to a murderous, expansionist regime.?
Whitmore is a MAGA conservative with 42,000 followers on Twitter. And what better example of their?modus operandi? “I don’t like what I see so I chose to reject it without any evidence. Instead, I will create an alternate reality that better comports to my biases and prejudices.”?
The ol’ “mass surrender so we can rise up from the rear” ploy that has worked so well in about zero past wars.?
She’s talking about RT losing its broadcasting license in some European countries. Keep in mind it can still stream and publish online. Europe isn’t Russia, where all dissenting media has been shut, and myriad journalists imprisoned, along with the opposition party. Also where legislators that express opposition to Putin’s war are arrested and fined and threatened with seven-year?prison terms.
?And #NAFO aren’t astroturf, lol. It’s literally Twitter memes like this:?
The North Atlantic Fellows Organization has certainly done a great job?getting under the skin of Tankies and Russians .?
The Ukrainians appreciate the meme warriors.?
How it started:?
He believed wrong. So how it’s going:?
Attack failed!
It didn’t? Oh...
It’s probably because Super Invisible Secret Army is about to be deployed!?
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Andrew Beckwith, PhD
Chemical Engineering Specialist at Firma-Terra
2 年The super invisible secret army reminds me of the one time this strategy worked...Tolkien's "oath breakers" spector army fulfilling their promise.