Panto_Villan

Yeah, something doesn't quite add up. She's been let off very easily and it's deeply strange she's still being allowed to speak now. But it does seem a really odd tactic on behalf of the Kremlin to actively undermine their own propaganda efforts. I guess they think most of the population won't believe what the TV editor was saying and will continue to believe the propaganda - but it seems an awfully big risk for very little gain. Even if the BBC take it at face value the coverage still ends up being "ordinary citizens are standing up to the Kremlin" which makes Putin look weak and Russia look divided, which surely weakens their hand in any negotiation to end the war.

So one of the theories going around is that Ukraine doesn't actually really care about joining NATO because there was no real chance of them joining NATO even before the war started, which means it's something they can easily give up in negotiations to hand Putin a superficial win (although in reality Putin is almost certainly threatened by Ukraine joining EU rather than NATO, hence the war). The whole "no fly zone" allows Zelenskyy to prepare the ground for that concession with his own people by saying "I'm not sure NATO is actually worth joining anyway" which apparently he actually said recently. So it may just be theatre. NATO's big and strong enough to weather a bit of self-serving criticism to help out the Ukrainians here. I mean, obviously the Ukrainians would like NATO aircraft patrolling their skies and firing missiles into Russia to knock out their air defences but I'm sure the political and military leadership were well aware that wasn't actually going to happen. As Awol mentioned earlier it would be an outright declaration of war on Russia by another name.

I guess the more optimistic take on the same set of facts would be that rich democracies that value the lives and wellbeing of their citizens are always going to struggle with this problem to some degree because they're not willing to sacrifice the lives of their soldiers as easily as poorer authoritarian regimes are. But this weakness (and I'm not sure it's necessarily that bad a thing overall) hides the fact that democracies are stronger than they look; once you push them too far public opinion changes and solidifies behind firm action very quickly. The endless divisions of a democracy also mean they rarely fall foul of what appears to have happened to Putin - he's been in power too long and eliminated all his opponents so he's surrounded by yes men who tell him what he wants to hear. When you read articles about how Putin has seen off five US presidents (or whatever) that's as much as weakness as it is a strength given autocrats tend to hang on well beyond their sell-by date, much to the detriment of their country. It'll be really interesting to see what happens in terms of geopolitics in the next 20-30 years as military forces becomes increasing robotic. If the rich decadent west doesn't actually have to risk the lives of their soldiers to wage war on their enemies, the patterns might change significantly (which we've already seen with Predator drones and the like). It'll also probably cancel out the massive population many developing nations have; what will matter will just be the size and sophistication of the industrial base in each country.

Fair enough. I certainly see the logic, I just think the risks are too high for me to think it's worth trying. I kinda think that if the major players in NATO aren't actually willing to start a shooting war with Russia it'll be quite obvious due to public squabbling or a domestic backlash from the public, which is why I say that if you're going to start issuing threats I personally think you have to be willing to stand behind them. Paradoxically if you are then I think Putin would be very likely to back down. If not, then I think there's a chance he'd call the bluff and it would backfire massively. There ends my expert opinion as a random on a football board

Fair enough. I personally see that as a political limitation more than an operational limitation, and it's my assumption that the orders to keep the troops in the dark came from the very top. I don't know if it's true or not. It'd be interesting to know whether the troops going to Syria were briefed on it beforehand or just herded onto the plane without warning, or what the situation was for the Georgia invasion, etc.

I did deliberately try to phrase it so it wasn't victim blaming but it clearly didn't work as multiple people have taken issue with it. The problem with what you're saying is that the only course of action open to NATO is starting war with Russia - unless Russia happens to have picked a fight with an opponent that they have massively underestimated, and could defeat them if equipped with Western weapons. And that didn't happen in Georgia or Ukraine 2014 or Syria or Chechnya. The only time it has happened is right now. Even regarding sanctions I doubt there'd have been European support for totally cutting off Russia from the world economy due to their adventures in Syria or Georgia. So the only option is a direct conflict with Russia where you're shooting bullets and missiles at their forces and they're shooting them back. And if you think that was the appropriate solution to Russian adventurism in Georgia / Ukraine / Syria then that's fine, it's a valid position but a very risky one and not one I can see many democratically elected politicians making after the Iraq / Afghanistan wars (or, indeed while they were still going on). But if you're not willing to start that direct fight with Russia then there was never actually any option to stand up to Russia. You'd be escalating a war and then backing out as soon as Russia did the same, which would have made the situation even worse.

Elements of planning are done at lower ranks, no? Clearly the high-level planning was done for the operation. The Russians knew which cities they wanted to target and and which units needed to be placed where in order to reach those places, etc. But military planning ranges all the way from that down to the really grainy stuff. If the Colonel is the only person in the unit who has looked at a map of the objective before you start attacking it there's no way all the individual soldiers are going to end up where they're needed and the artillery will know where their targets are and the supply trucks will be arriving on time with the correct items on board. All of those things going wrong are a failure of planning. Tactical rather than strategic, but it's all still planning. For whatever reason, the Russian army wasn't given the time it needed to adequately prepare for the invasion before it started and so it didn't perform at full effectiveness. Do you disagree with that or am I misunderstanding the point you're trying to make?

Oh, there’s absolutely nothing Ukraine could have done except surrender without a fight and become a vassal state of Russia. I just mention it because people often say you need to stand up to bullies like Putin, because then they’ll back down because they’re just posturing. But clearly Putin isn’t scared to go to war in some situations, so perhaps if we’d stood up to him more earlier on we’d just have ended up getting to war faster. So if you want to stand up to him you do have to be prepared to follow through with it. Yes, this is true. But most of the planning was done at a high level or by the intelligence services. It seems like most of the soldiers and junior / middle officers were only told about it the night before or even after they’d crossed the border. There were stories that the Russian soldiers in Belarus were siphoning off their diesel and selling it to buy vodka because they thought they were doing training exercises the next day rather than going to war. I can’t imagine that would have helped performances much.

Yup. There’s been a variety of views on Russia and a lot of military analysts have been left looking pretty stupid by what’s happened in Ukraine. As I mentioned before I was expecting the more recent Russian hardware to perform better than it has given all the spending on it. I’d certainly be curious to know how the invasion might have unfolded if the Russian military had had time to plan properly and set their own objectives. It may well have still been a complete shitshow but I do wonder how much is strategic rot (bad hardware, bad training, corruption) and how much is tactical (no time to plan, unrealistic political expectations, etc).

Yes, I get that. But again this is the problem - NATO and Ukraine refusing to give into Russian demands has just led to a war starting. I’m not saying that we should have conceded to this specific set of demands, but clearly if Putin cannot achieve his goals via diplomacy then he’s willing to do so via outright warfare (at least in certain instances). In that case you’re putting an awful lot of faith in the word of a few mates you have in Russia that the Russian army won’t perform as expected, especially when a lot of paid military analysts had different opinions. The costs of getting that call wrong are potentially enormous. So when you advocate for standing up to Russia you’re doing so on the assumption that the worst-case consequences for doing so would be minor, because you’re confident that if it comes to outright war then the Russian military is a paper tiger. But no sane military planner or politician can afford to take that risk. They have to ask if they’re willing to fight a competent Russian army. But you’re accusing people who point this out of being in love with Russia. When you couple that with you posting misinformation about the capabilities of the Ukrainian forces it just seems like your evaluation of facts vs risks is way off.

Yup. My comment was meant to refer to the Ukrainian player specifically - like, what if he currently has family sheltering a basement in Mauripol with no food and water? What if the Russian player thinks the invasion was justified, etc? Personally I think how the Ukrainian player feels is up to him. Hopefully both players think the invasion is wrong and there’s no ill feeling between them, but we don’t know the circumstances and nor do the fans holding up the banner. I don’t think they should be telling the Ukrainian player how to feel when presumably their main motivation is just to try to minimise any disruption to Atalanta’s season. As I said, that feels a bit self-centred to me.

To be fair, Facebook temporarily lifted restrictions on calls for violence against the Russian government and Putin specifically, and only in Ukraine and the areas immediately around it. They're not allowing calls for violence against average Russian citizens, just the Russian state. Which is perfectly reasonable imo given the Russian state is inflicting rather a lot of violence itself right now. I don't think many peope support the idea of random Russian citizens in the West getting abuse for the crimes of their home government (unless of course they're making statements in support of the invasion). But I do think you're giving the Russians a bit of a free pass here if you're claiming the "us and them" narrative is a creation of the media rather than the fact Russia has 200,000 troops on the wrong side of their border. I think the banner is also a bit insensitive if I'm honest. Saying "why can't we all just get along?" while a neighbouring country is flattening all your major cities with artillery and cruise missiles is probably going to provoke anger, because there's nothing they can do to get along with the Russians and asking them to stop complaining about it so we can enjoy our football comes across as a bit self-centred. If the Ukranian player wants to take that stance then that's his choice and good for him, but I don't think its the job of the football fans to tell him that.

TL;DR: wars have real costs for real people, and it's better to overestimate an opponent than underestimate them. Following those two rules is not "bragging about Russia". I could have saved myself about 15 minutes if you'd said that earlier!

Yeah, of course. The photo evidence is just there to serve as a baseline rather than a complete count of casualties for both sides - I just mentioned the numbers to illustrate that relying on verified data doesn't necessarily imply you're trying to talk down Ukraine.

I'm aiming at you, because you accuse me of pessimism because I point out the factual inaccuracies in what you post - the most recent two being unverified claims of shooting down loads of aircraft and the one before that being that the M-72 was some kind of super-Javelin. And there's been plenty more I just can't be arsed to correct you on. I can't see anyone in this thread "bragging about Russia", just people trying to temper their (and your) optimism with reality. Since day 1 of this crisis you've argued that the Russian army is weak and lacking in effective hardware compared to NATO despite the money spent on modernisation. You're right about that. In fact, I'm happy to admit that your assessment of the hardware limitations of the Russian military was closer to reality than mine. But you probably think our views were worlds apart on that front, but we're not - I never thought the Ukrainians would be a pushover, I just thought the modernised Russian tanks would be more resistant to anti-tank weapons, etc. Nothing that changes the fundamentals of the war. What was different between you and most other people on these forums is that you looked at that shortcoming and thought NATO should just start a war with Putin over it, whereas everyone else is understandably a bit concerned about the chances of nuclear war or substantial NATO troop losses in a confrontation with Russia. You've been saying stuff like "I don't get why we're scared of the Russian army, we shouldn't make concessions to Putin" as if nobody else thinks we could win a war with Russia. Actually people are just worried about the cost of doing so. And they're right to be worried - you might not think Putin is going to start firing nukes around but the costs if you're wrong are absolutely enormous. The same principle applies to evaluating the competence of hostile military forces. The Russians have just shown you exactly how badly things can go wrong if you underestimate an opponent, yet you're still deriding people who made the entirely reasonable assumption prior to the war that the Russians would be able to use their military forces competently. In this war Putin spent months telling the Ukranians he was going to invade them, giving them time to prepare and recieve significant amounts of Western anti-tank equipment, and then lied to his own forces about whether the invasion would happen which prevented them from planning effectively, and then sent them in with suicidal orders to try and blitz Kiev and other major cities, causing them to take heavy losses and give the Ukranian forces the opportunity to rally even more international support behind them. Now the Russians are in a quagmire they can't get out of. The fact Russian forces are now in a quagmire does not mean that they weren't superior to the Ukranian forces on paper, and that people shouldn't be trying to avoid a conflict with them. Even the best army can be hobbled by political factors; if the Russians had attacked sooner and conducted a competent operation from start to finish then I suspect things would be very different. Instead Putin did literally everything wrong and the Ukranians and the West did pretty much everything right. This is basically the dream scenario for the West. And yet the Russians are still fighting and killing hundreds of Ukranian civilians and causing billions of dollars of damage to Ukraine every day. I'm sure all their lives and livelihoods are a sacrifice you're willing to make, but not everyone is so blase about that sort of thing. At the end of the day sensible people plan for the worst and hope for the best, whereas you just seem to plan for the best and imply anyone who has reservations is a cheerleader for Russia.

There's nothing pessimistic about sorting the Ukrainian propaganda from the independently verifiable information that Ukraine is doing well in the war. I'm actually pretty optimistic about the way the war is going but you're so hilariously keen to believe anything negative about Russia that you make me look pessimistic by comparison. Maybe try checking out some of these accounts, which as far as I can tell rely on verified facts to come to their opinions: @oryxspioenkop (who has collected actual verified evidence of over 1200 different Russian vehicles being destroyed vs about 300 for Ukraine) @UAWeapons @Osinttechnical @KofmanMichael Case in point: last night the mayor of Mykolaiv claimed a convoy of 200 Russian vehicles was destroyed on the outskirts of the city. Kiev Independent has already reported it true. Great victory if it actually happened, but everyone with a brain is still waiting to see photos of it before they celebrate - because it's not exactly going to be hard to spot 200 wrecked vehicles with a drone or a satellite, it is? But I guess that's just pessimism from a Russia fanboy as far as you're concerned, because why on earth would Ukraine want to inflate the damage they have supposedly inflicted on their enemies?

I do take the point you’re making here about the easy profits made by the military industrial complex in the US, but it’s worth pointing out that it’s *preparing* for war that is good business. Actually fighting a major war is about the worst possible thing you can do for business, as both Ukraine and Russia are finding out! The US military spending is a mind boggling amount but it’s also really hard to view in isolation because the alternative (spending little on your military) is only possible precisely because the Americans spend so much and other allied countries can basically freeload off it if they choose. I’m not necessarily sure the world would be economically better off if America spent less on its military. We might well end up with more war rather than less. I think there’s certainly a good argument to say America gets good economic value from its total military spend. Although obviously totally impossible to prove either way.

I’m not too hopeful about the peace talks unfortunately. I just can’t see what terms Ukraine would accept that don’t result in Putin being utterly humiliated.

These guys aren’t exactly an impartial source. They’ve posted plenty of stuff that’s an outright fabrication (they claimed the ghost of Kyiv had shot down 49 planes) and quite a few other huge claims that were never evidenced - two massive transport planes full of paratroopers shot down in the early war, a spec ops raid destroying 30 helicopters about a week ago, etc. Take what they say with a pinch of salt until videos or photos proving it appear.

@HanoiVillanso my knowledge of the Yemen conflict is a little sketchy, but isn’t that article misrepresenting things? From what I understand: Yemen was previously governed by an Arab-friendly government. Then there was a Houthi uprising (backed by Iran) that tried to overthrow the government. The government doesn’t want to be overthrown and the UAE and Saudis don’t want an Iranian proxy in charge in Yemen, so they intervene. There’s a long civil war and lots of people die. Is that correct? If so, then I can’t help feel NATO would do exactly the same thing in the same position and we’d consider it totally justified. Consider if there had been no invasion in Ukraine, and instead the eastern separatists made a push on Kyiv backed by undercover Russian special forces. In that situation I wouldn’t be surprised if NATO would provide the Ukrainians direct assistance in the form of special forces and air strikes, rather than meekly allow Putin to install a puppet regime. If the conflict then gets bogged down and lots of civilians die, does that make NATO barbarous monsters? I don’t think the formula is as simple as “bloody war = bad”. WW2 was an incredibly bloody war but most consider it justified on the part of the Allied forces at least. A large scale war of conquest is very different from supporting a proxy in a civil war, no? That’s why Russia wasn’t sanctioned too badly after 2014, even though they literally grabbed a load of territory from a neighbour and murdered everyone on board a civilian airliner in the process.

Not been on the forums for a week or so, but I was arguing back then that the government had done a decent job regarding Ukraine. While I still think we did well in the early stages by getting them weapons and training them on how to use them pre-invasion (in the face of EU resistance), and then pushing for stronger sanctions (in the face of EU resistance) after the initial round of sanctions proved very tame, I've been very disappointed with what has happened since then. The EU and US moved much faster with regards to seizing the property of the sanctioned individuals - even other countries like Germany that also have a lot of Russian money sloshing around - and we've also really not done our part with regards to welcoming refugees either. Not a good showing, and there's no real excuse for it either.

I think everyone else around him have some more levels to go up. And once they do, we'll see Coutinho at his best!

That's interesting. He's an active duty soldier? All the news reports I read said they'd all been pulled out, but that could have been referring to the Americans specifically I guess. I might well be wrong on this count. Just seems odd to me that NATO would tread so gingerly with regards to sending jet fighters but be willing to run operations that if discovered would probably be viewed as a much more serious escalation. But who knows what's really going on behind the scenes?

Yeah, but ultimately Chelsea is a business that employs people rather than a piece of property like a house or a yacht. I guess that's what I was clumsily trying to say in my previous post. If Abramovich owned a major factory or bank the government wouldn't just shutter it and put everyone out of work, you'd assume that they'd ensure it continued to operate, right? Likely by transferring it to new ownership. While I wouldn't put anything past the current government in terms of cronyism I think there are good reasons why they'd want to maximise the value of the asset. Firstly, the UK can't really be seen to just hand a major asset over to a politically-connected insider at a knockdown price. The rule of (business) law is pretty fundamental to our economic environment; arbitrarily nationalising foreign-owned companies / property is one of the fastest ways to undermine that. Auctioning it off would seem far more legitimate imo. To be honest I think there's a good chance Russia will be nationalising foreign businesses and some major UK firms are likely to get hit by that (e.g. BP). If there's tit-for-tat behaviour there I wouldn't be surprised if the UK government ends up pocketing the sale proceeds from Chelsea, so they probably want to ensure they get a decent price for it!

Hmmm. The UK and US actually pulled all their trainers out of Ukraine in early Feb for the specific reason that they didn't want to risk NATO escalation if they got killed (and because losing troops would look bad). I know it's fairly standard for NATO to have special forces troops on the ground even if we're not meant to - e.g. in Libya helping to enforce our "no fly zones" - but I just wonder if this time is different. I feel like the stakes are too high. And we've been training the Ukrainians for years and they seem to have pretty capable special forces of their own that might negate the need for us to do it. Personal opinion though, obviously. I'm just a guy sitting at a keyboard who has never been in the military!