Russia and its “Special Operation” in Ukraine

[bickster]

1 minute ago, Panto_Villan said:

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.

tbf to this debate there are plenty of Military Experts who have been saying for years that the Russian Military isn't what it claims to be, I was reading one such article minutes ago which was written 4 years ago, saying exactly this. It's very interesting in that it doesn't suffer from the fog of war

Quote

5 ways Russia’s military is literally falling apart

1. Their planes keep falling out of the air.

2. Their only aircraft carrier needs a tug boat escort and can’t launch fully-armed planes.

3. They rely on conscripts and soldiers forced into contracts.

4. Even their domestic displays of power keep going wrong.

5. Their funding situation is bad and getting worse.

wearethemighty.com

Yes, its very UScentric and very much clickbaity too but it does provide some interesting detail in between all that

[KentVillan]

5 minutes ago, Panto_Villan said:

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.

What were those demands, though?

Putin is a classic bully, he presents his victim with a Hobson's choice. He has a long track record now of using military campaigns to drum up public support. Once he's decided he's going to proceed with one of these adventures, a lot of the "diplomacy" is a facade.

I struggle to understand what exactly Ukraine could have done differently, short of agreeing to become a Belarus-style puppet state.

There are plenty of reasonable arguments that Nato expansion and US/EU/Russia relations could have been handled better over the last 30 years. But a lot of this stuff has been baked in now for some time. The idea that there was a realistic path out of this in recent history (e.g. opportunities for Biden to handle this differently) seems pretty farfetched to me.

[magnkarl]

14 minutes ago, Panto_Villan said:

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.

I trust people inside Russia (1 of whom is now in jail after protesting) way more than I trust Americans or hot-takers from the West on Russia's actual capabilities. Coupled with having been in the army, experiencing the cold war and all the faux outrage about Russia's fighting machine then, it doesn't take a genius to figure out that people have overrated both Putin's qualities as a leader and Russia's army on the back of the mind boggling corruption in Russia. 

The first few weeks of the Afghanistan invasion is actually eerily similar to what has happened over the last few weeks. Russia (or USSR), sent in a tonne of soldiers, 'high-tech' equipment and expected to win in days. Instead they were bogged down, undersupplied and withdrew with their tails between their legs after being beaten by RPG's and AK47's. This eventually contributed to the USSR collapsing.

Having been to Russia many times myself I can tell you that you won't get anywhere without paying someone a bribe. What do you think happens to resources diverted to say cycling the wheels on heavy artillery every two weeks to avoid dry rot, or actually training in a manner that isn't just for show towards NATO?

Russia is scary due to nukes. It's scary that nukes are in the hands of a potentially ill madman, but that doesn't mean that we need to fear his undersupplied, overstretched, low-morale army. Conventionally I don't even think Russia is top 20 in the world anymore. A defensive war against Russia will cost lives and resources, but it won't be anywhere near the threat that it used to be.

To be honest, I think a lot of young people now a days should try to get the irrational fear of Russia out of their heads. For anyone living through the 50's or 60's it's very similar to what many people including myself felt back then. 

Edited March 14, 2022 by magnkarl

[Panto_Villan]

3 minutes ago, bickster said:

tbf to this debate there are plenty of Military Experts who have been saying for years that the Russian Military isn't what it claims to be, I was reading one such article minutes ago which was written 4 years ago, saying exactly this. It's very interesting in that it doesn't suffer from the fog of war

wearethemighty.com

Yes, its very UScentric and very much clickbaity too but it does provide some interesting detail in between all that

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).

[bickster]

Just now, Panto_Villan said:

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).

Most of the evidence surfacing says this "special operation" has been a fairly long time in the planning

[HanoiVillan]

35 minutes ago, KentVillan said:

What were those demands, though?

Putin is a classic bully, he presents his victim with a Hobson's choice. He has a long track record now of using military campaigns to drum up public support. Once he's decided he's going to proceed with one of these adventures, a lot of the "diplomacy" is a facade.

I struggle to understand what exactly Ukraine could have done differently, short of agreeing to become a Belarus-style puppet state.

There are plenty of reasonable arguments that Nato expansion and US/EU/Russia relations could have been handled better over the last 30 years. But a lot of this stuff has been baked in now for some time. The idea that there was a realistic path out of this in recent history (e.g. opportunities for Biden to handle this differently) seems pretty farfetched to me.

Well neither Ukraine nor Russia did anything to put the Minsk 2 agreement into practice. Would that have made a difference? I don't know, but it's at least plausible. Would it have made a difference if Zelenskyy hadn't had Viktor Medvedchuk, Putin's point man in Ukraine, put under house arrest? Probably not, but who knows?

History is obviously complex, we can never really know exactly how alternative histories would have gone. It's certainly *possible* there was nothing Ukraine could have done that wouldn't have led to either 'capitulation' in the eyes of the Ukrainian nationalists on whom his government relied, or Russian invasion. Not every situation has a possible happy ending. But we can't assert this as fact, both because a] we don't know, and b] it serves to rob the Ukrainian government of any agency for their actions.

[Panto_Villan]

53 minutes ago, KentVillan said:

What were those demands, though?

Putin is a classic bully, he presents his victim with a Hobson's choice. He has a long track record now of using military campaigns to drum up public support. Once he's decided he's going to proceed with one of these adventures, a lot of the "diplomacy" is a facade.

I struggle to understand what exactly Ukraine could have done differently, short of agreeing to become a Belarus-style puppet state.

There are plenty of reasonable arguments that Nato expansion and US/EU/Russia relations could have been handled better over the last 30 years. But a lot of this stuff has been baked in now for some time. The idea that there was a realistic path out of this in recent history (e.g. opportunities for Biden to handle this differently) seems pretty farfetched to me.

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.

42 minutes ago, bickster said:

Most of the evidence surfacing says this "special operation" has been a fairly long time in the planning

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.

Edited March 14, 2022 by Panto_Villan

[bickster]

1 minute ago, Panto_Villan said:

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.

Yes but foot soldiers don't plan military campaigns. I suspect they weren't told because they'd have suffered lots of desertions. It doesn't alter the fact that this was planned well in advance and the wheels came off from the outset

[The Fun Factory]

So Russia's plan to liberate their brethren in the east of Ukraine is to completely batter and destroy all the major towns and cities? Great plan lads. 

[KentVillan]

13 minutes ago, HanoiVillan said:

Well neither Ukraine nor Russia did anything to put the Minsk 2 agreement into practice. Would that have made a difference? I don't know, but it's at least plausible. Would it have made a difference if Zelenskyy hadn't had Viktor Medvedchuk, Putin's point man in Ukraine, put under house arrest? Probably not, but who knows?

History is obviously complex, we can never really know exactly how alternative histories would have gone. It's certainly *possible* there was nothing Ukraine could have done that wouldn't have led to either 'capitulation' in the eyes of the Ukrainian nationalists on whom his government relied, or Russian invasion. Not every situation has a possible happy ending. But we can't assert this as fact, both because a] we don't know, and b] it serves to rob the Ukrainian government of any agency for their actions.

No, not at all - I'm not saying Ukraine don't have or deserve to have agency. I'm saying that we were so far down this path that whatever Zelensky did was going to get him in trouble with Putin. He still had considerable agency within that, but as I said, it was Hobson's choice - maybe there were some less violent options, but my feeling is Putin just would not tolerate a Zelensky type individual in power in Kyiv regardless of which scenario played out.

Of course we can't ever know this, but I was pushing back on the idea that there is a counterfactual where Nato and Ukraine give into Russian demands, and avoid war. I've just not seen a particularly convincing version of this counterfactual (except for the ones that go right back to the 90s / early 2000s, where yes it's true massive mistakes were made by the West & Nato).

[HanoiVillan]

16 minutes ago, KentVillan said:

No, not at all - I'm not saying Ukraine don't have or deserve to have agency. I'm saying that we were so far down this path that whatever Zelensky did was going to get him in trouble with Putin. He still had considerable agency within that, but as I said, it was Hobson's choice - maybe there were some less violent options, but my feeling is Putin just would not tolerate a Zelensky type individual in power in Kyiv regardless of which scenario played out.

Of course we can't ever know this, but I was pushing back on the idea that there is a counterfactual where Nato and Ukraine give into Russian demands, and avoid war. I've just not seen a particularly convincing version of this counterfactual (except for the ones that go right back to the 90s / early 2000s, where yes it's true massive mistakes were made by the West & Nato).

I do follow your point, and I'm not necessarily saying it's wrong, but I think it's very complicated and that the available evidence may not support the conclusion. If we take the bolded, for example, what is 'a Zelenskyy type individual'? Factually, Zelenskyy was elected - only in 2019! - as a peace candidate; he talked on the campaign trail about negotiating with Putin to end the war in the Donbas.

Now, I'm not some massive expert on Ukrainian politics, so I'm afraid I'm quite hazy on what happened between that campaign and the bit when he summarily shut down Russian language media outlets in eastern Ukraine, placed Putin's surrogate under house arrest, and pushed ahead with Ukraine's NATO application: maybe it was a change of heart, maybe it was that forming a working legislative majority required concessions with people with more hardline views on Russia than he had been elected on, maybe it was a major shift in Ukrainian public opinion, maybe he came to realise Putin would never be negotiated with, maybe some of all of those or something else entirely (*). But my point is that there's agency everywhere: maybe Zelenskyy himself didn't have to be 'a Zelenskyy type individual', or maybe the agency of others meant he did.

A couple of other (a bit disorganised, sorry) thoughts:

Re your last paragraph, what I would say is that the path that western countries took with NATO was a risk, and the risk was of the thing happening that has actually happened. It doesn't even necessarily mean it was the wrong thing to do! (Although I think letting Georgia and Ukraine believe they would be admitted to NATO without actually admitting them was pretty clearly the worst of every possible world). But it was a risk.

Finally, it's nice to be morally in the right, and I'm sure most people reading this feel that Ukraine is morally in the right in this conflict. I do too, even if it is complicated. But the bigger picture is that whatever comes out of the other side of the confict, if Ukraine is still an independent state it will still be located where it is located, and Russia will still be located where it is located, and everyone should be able to see that NATO will not, in fact, directly fight with Russia over a non-NATO-member's sovereignty, so while it might not be fun or palatable to say it or to recognise, if Ukrained is to have a peaceful future it will eventually have to come to some sort of agreement with Russia. That agreeement probably won't be 'morally right', it probably won't feel 'just' to us in the west or to Ukrainians themselves, but we are where we are.

(*) If anyone knows of anything good to read on Ukrainian politics 2019-prewar 2022 I'd love a link!

[blandy]

1 hour ago, Panto_Villan said:

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).

That's not how I see it - that's victim (in the case of Ukraine) blaming.

I demand you give me ownership of your house, and stop talking with your neighbours and if you don't, it'll lead to your house being destroyed by my thugs. Your refusal to bow to my demands has led to the damage to your house.

47 minutes ago, Panto_Villan said:

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.

Being stood up to militarily is what stops him. Every time. It's because he thought (partly correctly) that the West wouldn't, that he went ahead with his misadventure.

And on the long term planning, I accept it's been an aim for a long time, but as for actual detailed plans, I don't think so. It's recent, and the people told to formulate plans and such like (so we're led to believe) didn't perceive the orders to come up with plans as actually seriously, we're going to do this, more "hypothetically if..." and so treated their orders as "yeah, whatever, just tell him what he wants to hear, it's never going to actually happen". The assumptions and underlying tactics and resource availability and such like were just optimistic takes for the Kremlin to read and file away.

[Panto_Villan]

32 minutes ago, bickster said:

Yes but foot soldiers don't plan military campaigns. I suspect they weren't told because they'd have suffered lots of desertions. It doesn't alter the fact that this was planned well in advance and the wheels came off from the outset

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?

[KentVillan]

5 minutes ago, HanoiVillan said:

I do follow your point, and I'm not necessarily saying it's wrong, but I think it's very complicated and that the available evidence may not support the conclusion. If we take the bolded, for example, what is 'a Zelenskyy type individual'? Factually, Zelenskyy was elected - only in 2019! - as a peace candidate; he talked on the campaign trail about negotiating with Putin to end the war in the Donbas.

Now, I'm not some massive expert on Ukrainian politics, so I'm afraid I'm quite hazy on what happened between that campaign and the bit when he summarily shut down Russian language media outlets in eastern Ukraine, placed Putin's surrogate under house arrest, and pushed ahead with Ukraine's NATO application: maybe it was a change of heart, maybe it was that forming a working legislative majority required concessions with people with more hardline views on Russia than he had been elected on, maybe it was a major shift in Ukrainian public opinion, maybe he came to realise Putin would never be negotiated with, maybe some of all of those or something else entirely (*). But my point is that there's agency everywhere: maybe Zelenskyy himself didn't have to be 'a Zelenskyy type individual', or maybe the agency of others meant he did.

A couple of other (a bit disorganised, sorry) thoughts:

Re your last paragraph, what I would say is that the path that western countries took with NATO was a risk, and the risk was of the thing happening that has actually happened. It doesn't even necessarily mean it was the wrong thing to do! (Although I think letting Georgia and Ukraine believe they would be admitted to NATO without actually admitting them was pretty clearly the worst of every possible world). But it was a risk.

Finally, it's nice to be morally in the right, and I'm sure most people reading this feel that Ukraine is morally in the right in this conflict. I do too, even if it is complicated. But the bigger picture is that whatever comes out of the other side of the confict, if Ukraine is still an independent state it will still be located where it is located, and Russia will still be located where it is located, and everyone should be able to see that NATO will not, in fact, directly fight with Russia over a non-NATO-member's sovereignty, so while it might not be fun or palatable to say it or to recognise, if Ukrained is to have a peaceful future it will eventually have to come to some sort of agreement with Russia. That agreeement probably won't be 'morally right', it probably won't feel 'just' to us in the west or to Ukrainians themselves, but we are where we are.

(*) If anyone knows of anything good to read on Ukrainian politics 2019-prewar 2022 I'd love a link!

I meant any leader who didn't view their mission as being Putin's representative in Ukraine (a la Yanukovych).

My understanding was that Zelensky negotiated with Putin over Donbas, and the separatists & Russia didn't uphold their side of the bargain... so he got hammered by his own people for being naive... and this all made him lose trust in Putin as a good faith actor.

But I too would love to read something more authoritative on this. My feeling is there has been such of deluge of outright lies and one-sided takes from the Russian propaganda machine that some of it kind of gets through our bullshit filter, even when we are sympathetic towards Ukraine.

[HanoiVillan]

1 minute ago, KentVillan said:

I meant any leader who didn't view their mission as being Putin's representative in Ukraine (a la Yanukovych).

My understanding was that Zelensky negotiated with Putin over Donbas, and the separatists & Russia didn't uphold their side of the bargain... so he got hammered by his own people for being naive... and this all made him lose trust in Putin as a good faith actor.

But I too would love to read something more authoritative on this. My feeling is there has been such of deluge of outright lies and one-sided takes from the Russian propaganda machine that some of it kind of gets through our bullshit filter, even when we are sympathetic towards Ukraine.

All I would say on this is that clearly nobody upheld the bargain . . . the only agreement that was made that I'm aware of was Minsk-2, and no-one did anything to put it into practice. Now I can quite see why the Ukrainians decided they didn't like Minsk-2, because it was not a good deal from their perspective, but factually it was the agreement on the table and Putin could always sit back and say 'well I don't have to renegotiate it', which I suppose is what he did, but again we are pushing at the limits of my knowledge so I'll stop there.

[bickster]

5 minutes ago, Panto_Villan said:

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?

The issue here is that Russia never seems to do that. It isn't what they do. Yes its a failing but no matter how long they had, they still wouldn't have done it. There are also plenty of pre-this war analysis of the Russian Military that you can read about how the different services compete and don't co-operate with each other, which again feeds into this

They could have planned this for years in advance down to your granular level but the point is that they can't and won't. It doesn't appear to be how the Russian Military works, not now and not even towards the end of the USSR

[KentVillan]

4 minutes ago, HanoiVillan said:

All I would say on this is that clearly nobody upheld the bargain . . . the only agreement that was made that I'm aware of was Minsk-2, and no-one did anything to put it into practice. Now I can quite see why the Ukrainians decided they didn't like Minsk-2, because it was not a good deal from their perspective, but factually it was the agreement on the table and Putin could always sit back and say 'well I don't have to renegotiate it', which I suppose is what he did, but again we are pushing at the limits of my knowledge so I'll stop there.

Minsk-2 was 2015, but when Zelensky came to office he tried to get past the stalemate, trying to push through the "Steinmeier Formula" - included stuff like elections in Donbas, and so on.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/10/11/zelensky-pushes-peace-deal-ukraine-war-russia-donbass-steinmeier-formula/

Quote

KYIV, Ukraine—Cast as an unwilling character in Washington’s impeachment drama, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is facing his own political crisis over a compromise deal to end Ukraine’s war with Russia. And he may be losing. 

The Ukrainian comic-turned-president announced on Oct. 1 that he had signed the Steinmeier Formula, a road map to ending the war with Russian-backed separatists in the eastern part of his country. The process, which is overseen by Germany and France, calls for local elections in occupied parts of the Donbass region and its recognition as a special autonomous region.

Yet Zelensky faced an immediate backlash at home after agreeing to the scheme, and he does not yet have the political support to implement the plan, casting doubt on its future.

It was specifically an attempt to break the Minsk-2 deadlock, and involved additional concessions to Russia. Putin just basically let him humiliate himself in front of his people.

https://www.rferl.org/a/what-is-the-steinmeier-formula-and-did-zelenskiy-just-capitulate-to-moscow-/30195593.html

Quote

Specifically, Steinmeier's formula calls for elections to be held in the separatist-held territories under Ukrainian legislation and the supervision of the OSCE. If the OSCE judges the balloting to be free and fair, then a special self-governing status for the territories will be initiated and Ukraine will be returned control of its easternmost border.

The formula was vocalized and had not been put to paper until it was signed on October 1 by representatives of Ukraine, Russia, the separatist territories of Luhansk and Donetsk, and the OSCE in Minsk.

What Did Zelenskiy Say About It?

Acknowledging that the Steinmeier Formula had become a highly charged issue for the Ukrainian public, Zelenskiy said he wanted to clarify what it meant.

Yes, he said, by signing on, Ukraine agreed to hold local elections in the Donbas -- but only under Ukrainian law, and only after Russian forces are withdrawn and Ukraine regains control of the state border -- wording that suggests there may still be ample room for disagreement on the sequence of steps each side must take.

"There won't be any elections under the barrel of a gun," Zelenskiy said, apparently trying to bat away assertions that he had conceded to Russia's demands. "There won't be any elections there if the troops are still there."

And Putin just carried on funnelling arms and troops into Donbas.

Of course there's two sides to every story, but Zelensky appeared to be acting in good faith - taking considerable risks in the Ukrainian political context - and grew frustrated with Putin embarrassing him.

[Panto_Villan]

9 minutes ago, blandy said:

That's not how I see it - that's victim (in the case of Ukraine) blaming.

I demand you give me ownership of your house, and stop talking with your neighbours and if you don't, it'll lead to your house being destroyed by my thugs. Your refusal to bow to my demands has led to the damage to your house.

Being stood up to militarily is what stops him. Every time. It's because he thought (partly correctly) that the West wouldn't, that he went ahead with his misadventure.

And on the long term planning, I accept it's been an aim for a long time, but as for actual detailed plans, I don't think so. It's recent, and the people told to formulate plans and such like (so we're led to believe) didn't perceive the orders to come up with plans as actually seriously, we're going to do this, more "hypothetically if..." and so treated their orders as "yeah, whatever, just tell him what he wants to hear, it's never going to actually happen". The assumptions and underlying tactics and resource availability and such like were just optimistic takes for the Kremlin to read and file away.

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.

 

[Panto_Villan]

16 minutes ago, bickster said:

The issue here is that Russia never seems to do that. It isn't what they do. Yes its a failing but no matter how long they had, they still wouldn't have done it. There are also plenty of pre-this war analysis of the Russian Military that you can read about how the different services compete and don't co-operate with each other, which again feeds into this

They could have planned this for years in advance down to your granular level but the point is that they can't and won't. It doesn't appear to be how the Russian Military works, not now and not even towards the end of the USSR

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.

[blandy]

2 minutes ago, Panto_Villan said:

The problem with what you're saying is that the only course of action open to NATO is starting war with Russia

That's not what I've said. What I am trying to get across is that (for example) if it is clear to Putin (at any time) that if he takes a course of action, NATO will (with its superior forces) oppose this, then he won't take that course of action. I'm not saying NATO should involve itself right now, it's too late. I'm suggesting that earlier (pre-war) steps might have stopped it (though these would have been outside article 5 etc.) and that if (for example) NATO were to make very clear that "so much as a stray bullet lands on NATO soil... then..." this will incentivise Putin not to allow that to happen.

As it is, we are where we are, and we're just randoms talking on a football message board. It's just different perspectives. I don't know what's right or wrong in terms of hypotheticals. Just a view.