BTW the Ukraine war just Escalated, again
Ukraine’s Invasion of Russia Could Bring a Quicker End to the War
https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/08/09/ku … otiations/
Ukraine Changed the Course of the War with KURSK Offensive
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TAPs6V5Nv_A
What will be the response... what will Russia do now that the war is in Russia and moving toward Moscow?You probably know I would weigh in on this.
It was a brilliant move. russia is being forced to move troops from their from lines to help defend the Ukrainian incursion. That means their front lines are now vulnerable.
This militarily move is brilliant, and it is also very damaging to the russian psyche. It is a huge moral boost for the Ukrainian army and the Ukrainian people. Trust me, it was cheered by many Ukrainians.Very well thought out plan of attack, I agree.
This is very similar to how I always operated any offensive or defensive effort, whether in simulation, field training, or real world.
That was long before drones, cell phones, or GPS (though we did have Pluggers back then... sometimes, when they could find enough satellites and when you had the right comsec).
Back then it was the most effective way to disrupt an enemies advance, or to raise havoc in their rear where they thought everything was secure.
But ultimately you have to be able to hold ground and defeat the other army's capability to re-arm and re-supply itself.
In order for Ukraine to accomplish what it claims it wanted to do (regain Crimea and all other territory and force reparation demands on Russia) this war was ALWAYS going to go deep into Russia.
Much smarter minds than mine knew this all along... it is still a fools game IMO... one that gets us closer to Civilization's fall every day, I don't believe Putin or the Russians will for one second ever accept Crimea going back.
They will use nukes before it ever gets to that point... the alternative is to be the next Iraq, or worse, a miserable existence compared to what the Russians enjoy today.I follow the war daily.
The russian army has demonstrated it is not the fearsome force it was believed to be.
Their generals and senior officers are badly trained. Their troops fight with buffer troops behind them. If the russian troops leave the battlefield too soon, the buffer troops are ordered to eliminate them. The buffer troops are usually Chechens or from a poor Eastern European country. The ranks of the russian military has been so degraded they are now paying mercenaries from Africa to come and fight for them. The russians are lacking so much in knowledge of battlefield tactics they are using human waves to take territory. This is done when an army is desperate.
This was the right time to do this. The russian military is demoralized and lacking in equipment.
As far as Crimea going back, there may come a time when putin does not have a choice.I have two mindsets Mike... the one that recognizes your perspectives and beliefs... that would be a pro-American and pro-Ukrainian one.
And then I have my military experience and my effort to put myself in Russia's shoes so that I can try to understand their viewpoint and what they might do tactically.
The Russians haven't done anything close to what I would have done if I had their arsenal to work with... but I recognize they are working with their partners in this effort (China, Iran, North Korea, etc.) and they have some larger plan at work.
This is a World War, currently involving Iran (Houthis, Hamas, Hezbollah) and Russia against America/UK/Israel ... Turkey is shifting toward them, UAE and Saudi have already shifted toward them, North Korea is in a military alliance with Russia...
Things are warming up, the next move on the chessboard will be Russia's response to this latest effort.
Russia has nukes... I believe Putin will use them in some fashion before he would allow Crimea to be taken from Russia, he will end Ukraine before he allows Russia to be ended by the West.
The people who are driving this effort against Russia do not believe that he will do so, or do not care.When it comes to russia's nukes. There is always the doctrine of mutual destruction. If he launches on Ukraine, Europe will have no choice but to launch on him. That has been made clear. That leaves a conventional war.
russia did plenty to Ukraine. I think things would have been different if Ukraine attacked inside russia since the beginning of the war. The desertion rate for russian soldiers is extremely high.
My military experience tells me the Ukrainian soldiers are more motivated that russian soldiers. Their tactics and movements on the battlefield are far superior. The russian population is beginning to turn against the war. The Ukraine incursion was a real mental blow to them.
Crimea will be a tough one, but I don't see Ukraine backing down from russia on this or ever.Its a conventional war... until its not.
And we are getting closer to that... until its not... scenario.
There is no deterrence that will keep Russia from using a limited nuclear strike.... when the alternative is imminent defeat.
China, India and Russia are not in the decline like generally the west. The BRICS is now half of the worlds population, most of the land mass and surpass the G7 economically. They have most of the natural resource and fossil fuels. They dominate in almost every way. The West has turn into the Roman's. Give your children to Ceasor and their will be like Roman's. American had a good empire imperlism run, now it's too corrupted to continue.
[vm.tiktok.com]
Africa no longer needs Europe and Americain colonization.
India, Russia and China have replaced fairness trade to these African nations.
US is the only country to used nukes.
This is not Japan who were ready to surrender to US back in world war 2 .. This is Muslim nations, just starting to fight back to change history again. Brown People of the earth and spirit, they won't give up like the indigenous brown people of North America. Being the greatest genocide ever in human history. Who were brought down to 2% of their population. The BRICS are also in the wings for the Africa and middle east as back up.
It's a world War,, now, yet not even the wealthy want to their families totally nuked. Even though crocodile love their young more so.
War solve nothing and a great hazard to most peoples health. .
Russian state TV makes rare admission over Ukraine war
Russian state television has aired an unusual moment of criticism and self-doubt about the country's military campaign in Ukraine.
During a political talk show this week, film director Karen Shakhnazarov made several candid statements that challenged the prevailing positive narrative while discussing Ukraine’s advance into Kursk.
"If there are more blunders like this one, Russia might lose the war," Shakhnazarov warned.
The director went on to criticise the rose-tinted view often presented on Russian media. He said: "We must stop saying that everything in our country is fine. There's a lot that isn't fine."
In a particularly candid moment, he addressed the mischaracterisation of Ukrainian forces, stating: "On TV, we're always showing Ukrainians who don't want to fight.
“But now we can see: they're fighting well. And they're highly motivated. Why are we kidding ourselves?"
It comes as Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky claimed his country now controls at least 75 Russian settlements and 400 square miles of land following its incursion into the Kursk region. More than 2,000 prisoners have been taken.
On Thursday, he said his troops had taken full control of Sudzha, around five miles from the border and the largest town captured by the Ukrainian military so far.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/ru … c&ei=9Yup, not a good thing, it is only going to put pressure on Putin and his cohorts to escalate the violence visited upon Ukraine... substantially I'd imagine... it gives him the excuse to hit back hard.
We will see what will happen... will Russia resort to more severe WMDs they use against Ukraine?The only thing russia has left to hit Ukraine with is their WMDs.
Escalate the violence? Hit back hard? Are you kidding me? They can't do any more than they have already done.
russia's military is degraded. They are down to using conscripts and mercenaries to do a lot of their fighting. They're using barrier troops from other countries.
They are not what they were at the beginning of the war.If that, if your entire post is true, then that IS what they will use.
If you go back a couple years I said as much then.
And that will be all that is needed for the implementation of the dystopian world they want to create, within the EU, UK, America.
In fact, if Putin isn't willing to oblige as the attacks move closer to Moscow, I am sure our own Ops will provide that cataclysmic event for him... giving Putin credit for it, of course.
Soon.
This is really a fight between US and NATO team vs Russia and BRICS in the long run.
Even though Ukraine is one of the greatest fighting forces in Europe.
It's a war of eastern traditionalist vs woke and tech culture, mostly over economics.and power. The worlds top leading homelessness per capita is Ukraine, Syria and Gaza. because of war. These refugees take up 1/3 of the homelessness in the capital of Canada of homelessness Toronto. A person has to make $33 an hour to make ends meet, Imagine that wage anywhere in North America's cities. If North America doesn't like being over run by immigration and refugees . Imagine that time 10s of the immigrants from the US and NATO invading with centro banks, military bases and bombing up 1/3 of the world countries since World War 2.
North America is cutting their nose off to spite their face. Karma is a real betcha.
Part of an interesting review of the war as it relates to China and the US:
The Russian and Chinese economies, these experts now reckon, have largely avoided crippling harm from Western sanctions. Russia is reconstituting its defense industrial base and has avoided the extreme diplomatic isolation that once seemed a plausible outcome of Putin’s gambit.
The war in Ukraine is serving as both an observatory and a laboratory as the country prepares for heightened geopolitical conflict with the United States. As they analyze events in Ukraine, Chinese scholars seek to assess the United States’ and Europe’s resolve and understand what risks China might be forced to bear in a geopolitical or military crisis.
Some experts, such as the leading military strategist Zhou Bo, have concluded that NATO’s hesitancy to make certain major interventions on Ukraine’s behalf proves that, aside from the United States, Taiwan would lack defenders in a future conflict with China.
Although these scholars tend to be careful not to discuss the contours of a potential war in the Taiwan Strait too explicitly, many seem to be drawing a straight line from the cracks in the United States’ determination to support Ukraine and its likely will to stomach a possible protracted conflict with Beijing.
Chinese scholars consistently concluded that Russia’s invasion would drive a major realignment of the international order. This view was trenchantly expressed by a group of scholars at the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, a think tank known for its high-quality analysis despite its direct affiliation with China’s Ministry of State Security.
In February 2023, these scholars argued that the invasion was a “watershed in history” that revealed the existence of a “latent new order” different from the security architecture that dominated for three decades after the end of the Cold War.
Xi has, of course, spoken of the dawn of a “new era” for the global order. He has repeatedly touted the idea that the world is undergoing “profound changes unseen in a century” that will be marked by growing risks but also potential benefits to China, by overturning the United States’ dominance in geopolitics, technology, and the global economy.
Many scholars initially feared that Russia’s attack could upset China’s ability to steer itself carefully into this new era. The event punctured their sense that China, more than any country besides the United States, enjoys the capacity to decide the trajectory of the global economy and world events.
Moreover, the swift, unexpected assault on Ukraine highlighted the dangers of a sudden, significant rupture in relations between China and the West. U.S.-led sanctions on Russia would hasten “the formation of two sharply opposing camps,” Wang, the former Bank of China vice president, lamented, which would “pose a great threat” to the ongoing process of globalization that fuels China’s economic growth.
In June 2022, the foreign policy scholar Chen Dongxiao worried that a prolonged war would “significantly increase the difficulty for Beijing in handling Sino-U.S. relations.”
Chinese analysts were especially startled by the West’s coordinated push to sanction the Russian economy. That effort offered a “vivid demonstration of the tools of economic power” that the United States could muster, Li wrote. Not all Chinese experts agreed on the sanctions’ likely efficacy.
Some, such as Huang Jing, argued that the West’s “world war without gunpowder” would fail because sanctions on the energy and financial sectors are notoriously “leaky” and because, he contended, disagreements would emerge between the United States and Europe.
But others concluded that the United States still wields unrivaled power over the international financial system. Zhang Bei, an analyst at the People’s Bank of China, predicted that the United States’ leverage over key payment and settlement mechanisms, including the SWIFT system, which handles interbank messaging, would allow it to threaten Russia’s “national financial security.”
The economist Wang Da went further, likening the expulsion of Russia from SWIFT to a nuclear attack. The United States’ capacity to devastate a rival financially would have stark implications for China: in October 2022, one researcher at China’s central bank warned that China must be ready to defend against a U.S. effort “replicating this financial sanction model against China” in the “context of the intensified Sino-U.S. strategic game and the Taiwan Strait conflict.”
Today, however, a substantially more sanguine outlook dominates the discourse of China’s experts. They have noted that the Western response to the war has not produced the most catastrophic outcomes that many had predicted.
The “most intense wave of sanctions [in] history,” scholars at Renmin University’s Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies concluded in a February 2024 report, “did not achieve the expected results, but instead brought a backlash and counter-sanctions” as Russia found lifelines for its currency and trade with China and other countries.
Many Chinese analysts also contended that Putin has evaded truly damaging diplomatic isolation, citing his recent state visits to North Korea and Vietnam and that in July, he hosted Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Moscow. As a headline from the Chinese edition of the Global Times trumpeted after Putin’s trip to Hanoi: “The West’s Isolation of Russia Has Been Broken.”
In this view, China has avoided paying any significant economic or diplomatic price for propping up Putin’s war efforts. Indeed, the war has created trends that may redound to China’s benefit.
The Russian economy’s ability to weather Western sanctions has impressed many Chinese scholars. After a visit to Moscow in February 2024, Xu Poling, an expert on the Russian economy, remarked that the war in Ukraine “has injected a steroid shot into the lethargic Russian economy, making it stronger and more vigorous.” He even speculated that Putin “is not exactly in a hurry to end the conflict.”
Other analysts have marveled at how the war has reanimated Russia’s languishing military-industrial complex, which, a Global Times analysis concluded, had been “in a state of insufficient investment and production.”
Since February 2022, the analysis observed, it has “accelerated the acceptance of state investment and increased production capacity,” leading to a “comprehensive recovery of Russian military-industrial enterprises” and “significant progress” in the production of new tactical missiles, armored vehicles, and drones.
Although Western sanctions have not broken the Russian economy, the war in Ukraine has spurred further global economic fragmentation. For decades, Beijing has worked to build economic self-sufficiency; Chinese government planners stepped up these efforts around 2018 as they sought to prepare China for the splintering of globalization and the fracturing of supply chains. But China was not ready for the degree to which the war in Ukraine—coupled with growing national security concerns in many countries about technological dependence on China—hastened this fragmentation, prompting U.S. and European governments, companies, and investors to reallocate capital away from China and other geopolitically exposed markets.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine intensified foreign investors’ concerns about the Chinese market as it raised fears that Beijing could also face sanctions or economic repercussions because of its alignment with Moscow and its saber rattling toward Taiwan.
Beijing has continued to double down on its Russian gamble, including by launching a recent joint patrol with Russian bombers in the airspace just off the Alaskan coast. In May, Washington sanctioned over a dozen Chinese companies for their direct support of Moscow’s war effort.
Russia’s war on Ukraine offers general lessons about the complexities of modern warfare, the possibilities for an international response to a purportedly regional dispute, and the costs of a protracted military conflict. What Xi is learning from this crisis remains inscrutable. But Chinese analysts’ views offer a window into the possible lessons the Chinese government is drawing from Putin’s war.
After watching two years of war in Ukraine, however, many have concluded that the West has no stomach for conflict and will grow tired of supporting democracies facing an invading force if the economic costs are high.
[Considering the lack of desire half the population of America has toward protecting its own Sovereignty and democratic processes; I believe China is over-estimating America's ability to wage war... Americans would revolt against their own government before they supported sending millions of Americans off to fight Russians in Russia... unless America is attacked of course (Black Flag event here we come)]I thought about a full scale third world war, if it had broken out. What has war history told us, so far.
What war has US won and benefits from since the Mexican war? That the US won with the six shooter.
What effect has bombs done accept in highest density populated areas like in Japan and Gaza? Gaza had 70,000 tons of bombs dropped on them. Thats more than world war 2 combined . And Palestinians still won't give up. The Zionist and US have about the greatest risk of causing a third world war there among the Muslims countries.
Guns have been the most effective for vast majority killings in war history. .
History has shown the country's with greater size of the miltary personal has won the vast majority of wars.
As of 2024, China had the largest armed forces in the world by active duty military personnel, with about 2 million active soldiers. India, the United States, North Korea, and Russia rounded out the top five largest armies. BRICS wins.
Then we have land mass. Ukraine would be the size of Texas with close to the same population. Canada and US combined would have close to the same land mass as Russia.
Chinese quote. The firey dragon can not defeat the snake in the grass.
Ken, I think we come close to the same conclusion, just in a different way.That is quite discouraging, considering we have very different backgrounds and approach life in a very different way... if we conclude the same things, that lends to the likelihood that our conclusion is correct.
More power to that, it make more possibilities for solutions.
I wouldn't join a club if everyone was like me. And would leave a room, if I was the smartest guy in the room.
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