Russia and its “Special Operation” in Ukraine

[Chindie]

The issue with Russia is always scale. It doesn't really matter if their top end kit is thin on the ground, they have numbers of older kit to the extent that, to paraphrase Napoleon, it has a quality of its own. The same is unfortunately true of troops, and even though Russia's population of fighting age men is lesser than ever, it's still a lot of people.

And then the size and unwieldy nature of Russia means that you'd never really defeat them, if push came to shove and you couldn't get them to give up on their objectives through defeats on the battlefield, you wouldn't be able to conquer them entirely.

If the combined forces of Europe took on Russia they'd probably win in the decisive battles, but you'd be relying on Russian leadership being logical and accepting that defeat on the battlefield. You wouldn't have a WW2 Germany/Japan situation where the country is totally defeated.

[tinker]

The way to control a country is to install leaders and use the media to get the population to accept them and their politics. 

[Mandy Lifeboats]

2 hours ago, Spoony said:

I think an argument could be made that the UK alone could take out Russia based on this showing…

Our entire army is less than 100,000 strong.  That would barely be enough to take a major Russian city.  

[BleedClaretAndBlue]

Russians actually admitting that Belgorod was attacked by its own su34  

[Mandy Lifeboats]

1 hour ago, BleedClaretAndBlue said:

Russians actually admitting that Belgorod was attacked by its own su34  

Russian Ministry of Defence said:!

On the evening of April 20, during the flight of a Su-34 VKS aircraft over Belgorod, an abnormal descent of aviation ammunition occurred."

An abnormal descent of aviation ammunition 

[blandy]

 

[PussEKatt]

21 hours ago, tinker said:

The way to control a country is to install leaders and use the media to get the population to accept them and their politics. 

Or,in Putin s case "force them to accept"

[tinker]

33 minutes ago, PussEKatt said:

Or,in Putin s case "force them to accept"

I know a Russian who's in the UK and they follow the Russian media and are pro Putin, blame the war on the west.

People's opinions are based upon the information they are fed, everyone thinks they have formed it themselves but in reality they haven't.  

[sidcow]

21 minutes ago, tinker said:

I know a Russian who's in the UK and they follow the Russian media and are pro Putin, blame the war on the west.

People's opinions are based upon the information they are fed, everyone thinks they have formed it themselves but in reality they haven't.  

I've done my own research and that's just wrong. 

[HKP90]

24 minutes ago, tinker said:

I know a Russian who's in the UK and they follow the Russian media and are pro Putin, blame the war on the west.

People's opinions are based upon the information they are fed, everyone thinks they have formed it themselves but in reality they haven't.  

How do they reconcile that Russia attacked first, and no fighting has ever taken place in Russia?

[bickster]

26 minutes ago, tinker said:

I know a Russian who's in the UK and they follow the Russian media and are pro Putin, blame the war on the west.

People's opinions are based upon the information they are fed, everyone thinks they have formed it themselves but in reality they haven't.  

Ask them if they'd care to go home to Russia and live right now, maybe they should even volunteer to fight if they feel like that.

[Genie]

5 minutes ago, sidcow said:

I've done my own research and that's just wrong. 

A: Where’s you evidence?

B: Here

A: I don’t believe that evidence, it’s fake. 

[tinker]

49 minutes ago, bickster said:

Ask them if they'd care to go home to Russia and live right now, maybe they should even volunteer to fight if they feel like that.

It's a woman so I doubt she would. I think she's wrong and so does her partner, who's English. My point is she has formed her opinion using  Russian media in the UK. 

I have laboured this point time and time again but doing your own research using Google etc doesn't work. Google shows you results that are biased on articles you have read before and what it thinks you want to read. This algorithm entrenches points of view, even extreme views, maybe its part of the reason we get home grown terrorism.

[bickster]

4 minutes ago, tinker said:

I have laboured this point time and time again but doing your own research using Google etc doesn't work

Nonsense, its perfectly possible to search articles from both points of view. But in this specific instance it's pretty obvious which country invaded the other one. You don't really need Google for that. It only doesn't work if you're lazy and don't want to balance the views yourself. That isn't a search engines fault it's the fault of the person doing the searching

[chrisp65]

7 minutes ago, tinker said:

It's a woman so I doubt she would. I think she's wrong and so does her partner, who's English. My point is she has formed her opinion using  Russian media in the UK. 

I have laboured this point time and time again but doing your own research using Google etc doesn't work. Google shows you results that are biased on articles you have read before and what it thinks you want to read. This algorithm entrenches points of view, even extreme views, maybe its part of the reason we get home grown terrorism.

Google works perfectly well if you use it to find verifiable, proven accurate sources.

Google doesn’t work if you use it to look for random shite, well, it does, it shows you random shite.

People that ‘believe’ google would probably also ‘believe’ newspapers because they either don’t understand how the world works, or choose to pretend not to understand.

 

[bobzy]

12 minutes ago, tinker said:

It's a woman so I doubt she would. I think she's wrong and so does her partner, who's English. My point is she has formed her opinion using  Russian media in the UK. 

I have laboured this point time and time again but doing your own research using Google etc doesn't work. Google shows you results that are biased on articles you have read before and what it thinks you want to read. This algorithm entrenches points of view, even extreme views, maybe its part of the reason we get home grown terrorism.

OK sure, but...

1 hour ago, HKP90 said:

How do they reconcile that Russia attacked first, and no fighting has ever taken place in Russia?

...this?  Surely?  That's not an algorithm, it's just what has/has not happened.

[bielesibub]

32 minutes ago, tinker said:

It's a woman so I doubt she would. I think she's wrong and so does her partner, who's English. My point is she has formed her opinion using  Russian media in the UK. 

I have laboured this point time and time again but doing your own research using Google etc doesn't work. Google shows you results that are biased on articles you have read before and what it thinks you want to read. This algorithm entrenches points of view, even extreme views, maybe its part of the reason we get home grown terrorism.

it's called the filter bubble. I'm not sure if it's still as bad today as it was.

[limpid]

You might like to take a look at this for a source which indicates both sides and bias: https://ground.news/

There is an app.

[Panto_Villan]

On 20/04/2023 at 13:56, sidcow said:

Challenger Tanks are damn hard to kill. 

In fact the only one ever destroyed in Combat was by friendly fire by another Challenger. 

It was designed so 300 or so of them could roam around the open plains in Germany holding back vastly superior numbers of Russia armour in The Cold War. 

I believe the other tanks are not quite as well protected but are more maneuverable and have better guns (Challenger 3 is changing to those guns). 

A combination of them should be pretty devastating even if there is only 300 or so. They are far better than anything the Russians have.  More importantly they should be used properly with proper infantry support and not just sent out on suicide missions like Russia do. 

I would imagine they'll punch a big hole wherever they're sent. 

I'm not sure the "hard to kill" part would be so true against an enemy like Russia, who are more capable than the Iraqi army or the Taliban who I think were the only enemies the Challenger 2 ever faced previously?

My understanding is that Western tanks are heavier and better armoured than Russian tanks, and while this does give some benefits to vehicle survivability, the main benefit is that the crew more often survive the destruction / disabling of the vehicle. Whereas in Russian tanks the ammo detonates and everyone dies in a spectacular explosion. But if you drive over a mine then your tank is still going to be disabled, and if you get hit with a modern anti-tank missile (even a Russian one) then there's a good chance it'll penetrate the armour and damage the vehicle, because armour can only ever be so good.

That said, even older Western tanks are far more capable in terms of accuracy and range than Russian ones, particularly the older stuff the Russians are using these days. There's a famous video of a German Leopard driving around with a pint of beer balanced on the barrel, which shows how well the turret is stabilised while the tank is moving (and therefore how accurately the tank can fire on the move). Which means they should hopefully have the advantage in scoring kills before the Russian vehicles get to shoot back, and therefore it's less likely they'll take a hit at all.

Anyway, the overall point I'm making is that Western stuff is definitely better than the Russian stuff but it's not invulnerable. Once this offensive starts properly we're all going to see videos of Bradleys and Leopards being destroyed or captured by the Russians, but that's to be expected and doesn't mean that things aren't going to plan.

[sidcow]

54 minutes ago, Panto_Villan said:

I'm not sure the "hard to kill" part would be so true against an enemy like Russia, who are more capable than the Iraqi army or the Taliban who I think were the only enemies the Challenger 2 ever faced previously?

My understanding is that Western tanks are heavier and better armoured than Russian tanks, and while this does give some benefits to vehicle survivability, the main benefit is that the crew more often survive the destruction / disabling of the vehicle. Whereas in Russian tanks the ammo detonates and everyone dies in a spectacular explosion. But if you drive over a mine then your tank is still going to be disabled, and if you get hit with a modern anti-tank missile (even a Russian one) then there's a good chance it'll penetrate the armour and damage the vehicle, because armour can only ever be so good.

That said, even older Western tanks are far more capable in terms of accuracy and range than Russian ones, particularly the older stuff the Russians are using these days. There's a famous video of a German Leopard driving around with a pint of beer balanced on the barrel, which shows how well the turret is stabilised while the tank is moving (and therefore how accurately the tank can fire on the move). Which means they should hopefully have the advantage in scoring kills before the Russian vehicles get to shoot back, and therefore it's less likely they'll take a hit at all.

Anyway, the overall point I'm making is that Western stuff is definitely better than the Russian stuff but it's not invulnerable. Once this offensive starts properly we're all going to see videos of Bradleys and Leopards being destroyed or captured by the Russians, but that's to be expected and doesn't mean that things aren't going to plan.

All the adversaries the Challenger have been up against before has used Russian armour.

Sure they're not indestructible but they are hard to kill.  They'll take out multiples of Russian tanks.