181–190 of 225 posts
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Because apparently modern US warfare doctrine and smarter guided weapons causes less civilian casualties.
In the end so many targeted munitions are fired that the final result is the same as conventional bombardment.
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Everything I’m hearing about Mariupol is the opposite of what I want to hear. It’s an absolute disaster that’s ratcheting up day-by-day. The Russian army is using modern artillery to conduct medieval siege warfare. They’re deliberately starving the whole population to death and the city (like most cities today) had zero preparations to deal with a siege. We’ve got to find some way to get these people supplies!
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Another counterview has emerged from Meduza, the press group which was 'blocked' in Russia as part of their silencing drive. https://meduza.io/en/feature/2022/03/12/has-russia-s-invasio... Apparently, according to Meduza we are only seeing the bright side of things - the news we want to hear. The battlefront has several other shock surprises if you look at the Ukrainian losses. It seems bleeding heavily on both sides…
Yes this exactly. I think just looking at a map of ukraine is enough to see that while we are showered by ukrainian success stories to the point where you'd think russia is completely stalled in their invasion... the reality is quite different. Here's a good updated live map with a frontline overlay: https://www.scribblemaps.com/maps/view/The-War-in-Ukraine/09... Keep in mind the war started 3 weeks ago. The american…
But in relative and military terms, they are doing extraordinarily well and have a very good chance to win, maybe without even having to fight a long insurgency. That's incredible given the odds.
Not every war is the same; the comparison with Iraq is meaningless.
> The americans didn't even reach Baghdad 3 weeks into their invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Is that really true?
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No, I just hear to what Moscow has been saying for the last 15yrs and relate it to facts on the ground. No need for armchair psychology.
Why 15 years? You don't need to go futher back than to mid-February and see what they said about the invasion of Ukraine. Or even better, just a few days ago Russia's Foreign Minister Lavrov said that there's no war in Ukraine. Trustworthy chap, no doubt.
2007 MSC
Another counterview has emerged from Meduza, the press group which was 'blocked' in Russia as part of their silencing drive. https://meduza.io/en/feature/2022/03/12/has-russia-s-invasio... Apparently, according to Meduza we are only seeing the bright side of things - the news we want to hear. The battlefront has several other shock surprises if you look at the Ukrainian losses. It seems bleeding heavily on both sides…
All this talk about encircling Ukrainian forces and taking ground would have made sense if the Russians had additional echelons to continue the rapid advance while the first one sieges. Without a second and third echelon the first one will simply have larger and more vulnerable flanks if they encircle cities. But they have only one echelon which didn't get any objectives. Given the bad logistics and attrition it need…
I've read 5:1 or 10:1 as general military theory.
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1. Why is Russia afraid of a defensive alliance with no compulsion to join (unlike the hilariously named Warsaw Pact)? The most enthusiastic members of the alliance are the closest to them... I wonder why... 2. NATO doesn't have hypersonic missiles. Russia has hypersonic missiles. 3. Why does Russia get to bolster their security by ravaging their democratic neighbours? Seems like zero-sum type behaviour. Maybe Russia…
1. If we look at history NATO, it is not a defensive alliance. It is a mostly defensive alliance. Many people here don't even know how the NATO was formed and the promises given to Russia? Russia thinks NATO has expanded beyond control. They don't want to be fully covered by it? Also, there are other strategic interests like Crimea, etc... 2. With this logic NATO doesn't have anything. The power of NATO comes from it…
China could do something similar. Nobody has any interest in invading China or Russia. They don't because they have ambitions for power.
> If we look at history NATO, it is not a defensive alliance. It is a mostly defensive alliance.
When has it attacked anyone?
> Why does China get anxious when the US tries to shrug off its hegemony by making new nato like groups, supply arms, and ammunition.
Those countries join willingly, and in fact there is a line to get in the door (e.g., in NATO, Georgia and Ukraine). That's different than hegemony.
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1. Why is Russia afraid of a defensive alliance with no compulsion to join (unlike the hilariously named Warsaw Pact)? The most enthusiastic members of the alliance are the closest to them... I wonder why... 2. NATO doesn't have hypersonic missiles. Russia has hypersonic missiles. 3. Why does Russia get to bolster their security by ravaging their democratic neighbours? Seems like zero-sum type behaviour. Maybe Russia…
To define NATO as a defensive alliance you need to stretch the definition of the word defensive so much that probably Putin invasion of Ukraine could be considered defensive as well. > 2. NATO doesn't have hypersonic missiles. Russia has hypersonic missiles. I don't know much about this one but wouldn't any NATO member having hypersonic missiles mean that NATO has them?
The title is deceptive- Fukuyama, writing from Northern Macedonia, has an extremely optimistic view that Russia will be "defeated" and Putin will fall- notwithstanding enormous, catastrophic losses for Ukraine- with significant downstream implications. The two subpoints with which I agree are that the NATO decision on the MiGs was wise, and that neither Russia nor Ukraine can climb down from their positions. My expec…
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Total nonsense. Putin is not going to bomb Lviv, much less Estonia or Finland.
I agree that Lviv seems western enough to be spared bombing (since I assume Putin just want the east, and the attention over Kyiv.) Yeah, sure, Finland is fine, as soon as Putin would laid a hand on it, there would be a strong response from... Oh, wait no one. But Estonia, yeah, sure, NATO would jump to trigger WWWIII over Tallin. I can already picture Joe Biden explaining to US voters why they'll have to deal with a…
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I’m not saying he’s a populist, I’m saying that the populists have scored a significant victory by pushing him to the right on cultural issues even if he ultimately wins reelection.
Militant secularism is not a right wing position in France. It's very much part of the shared zeitgeist. This is the country that once had a "Cult of the Reason Goddess" as their state religion, and their modern über-secular laïcité is not very different.