Live data from Hacker News

Russia confiscates passports of senior officials to stop defections

ft.com

71–80 of 177 posts

Re: Russia confiscates passports of senior officials to stop defections

#71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sure. we should all put on uniforms and go to war for ukraine because if ukraine loses it will be the end of the world as we know it ... not

It will not be the end of the war, but the West, and especially Europe, will have an aggressive bully at its borders who already proved it can murder and torture people ruthlessly. So the economy will focus on arms race once again until someone in Russia finally understands it doesn't make any sense.

that agressive bully was much further west 30+ years ago and western europe managed fine then

Re: Russia confiscates passports of senior officials to stop defections

#72
post #27
post #9

I commented somewhere a few weeks back[0] that we should probably be making it easier for Russians who are vulnerable (those who left during the mobilisation push, are vocally critical of Putin, or who simply want to not be part of it) and want to defect. There's not a great deal we can do to make it easier on their end - presumably there are some controls on the Russian side on the way out - but if someone does make…

How was this handled for Nazi Germany defectors?

Top level defectors are "always welcome" and have special treatment, especially those willing to talk (and you bet most are very willing)

For low-level ones, it's usually waving the white flag then POW camp (if you're lucky)

Re: Russia confiscates passports of senior officials to stop defections

#73
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do we still depend on raw manpower to 1. increase productions of specialized hardware which anyhow depends on specialized technology, and 2. win wars by sending 'infinite' amount of soldiers to the front ? At the same time, the assumption is that there will be no backlash inside the country if 'infinite' amount of soldiers die ?

[flagged]

Protests were not necessarily loud but Afghanistan had a heavy impact on Soviet society. Read Zinc Boys, and on the Committees of Soldiers’ Mothers.

> according to Western propaganda in Wikipedia

Yeah, OK, I see.

Re: Russia confiscates passports of senior officials to stop defections

#74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Determination. Ukraine has no air force, Russia has. Russia has almost 10 time more soldiers. Unless western countries start sending soldiers to fight Russians, there should be no way for Ukrainians to even withstand. Nonetheless, Russia is definitely not winning after 1 year. Maybe Russia will end up controlling the majority of the land. Just rubbles and ashes. This is not winning IMHO.

> Russia has almost 10 time more soldiers. I believe this is wrong. Russia doesn't have 10 times more soldiers now, and regular army isn't deployed in Ukraine; only volunteers (including prisoners), mobilized soldiers and contract army is.

> regular army isn't deployed in Ukraine

May you elaborate on what your understanding of "regular army" is?

Re: Russia confiscates passports of senior officials to stop defections

#75
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

It really isn't. Russia has gone backwards for a year now. There isn't a single parameter where things doesn't look bad for them. Sure the fog of war makes things somewhat unclear, but saying that its hard to gauge who is having the most trouble is nonsense for anyone following the conflict.

Rusia has been inching forwards for months. That's just a fact. Propaganda has got to you.

Re: Russia confiscates passports of senior officials to stop defections

#76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Any discussion as to who is winning is meaningless without defining what victory means. And apparently it not only means something very different for each side, but also changes with time. Suppose Ukraine manages to push Putin's army back to original pre-2014 borders. Is this victory? With a large part of the country in ruins, a terrible GDP decrease, thousands of men with PTSD, not to mention those dead. There is si…

Loss/victory is far too simplistic to discuss the possible outcomes and their consequences.

Putin seems to have painted himself into a corner where now his continued rule over Russia depends on being able to paint this as either a victory or a loss that's in no way his fault (because NATO started it and he was just defending himself). But also it seems that at the very least, he needs Crimea.

For Russians in general, they don't really need anything here. The real loss for them is that Putin is willing to sacrifice their entire country to bail him out of his fiasco. A win for them would be getting rid of Putin and not replacing him with someone even worse.

For Zelensky, the bare minimum is of course independence from Russia, and he seems to have won that at least. But millions of Ukrainians have been captured and often deported/abducted by Russia, and that's a loss too. He wants those people free, and he's absolutely right to. And he wants to keep Ukraine whole; accepting any loss of Ukrainian territory is a loss to him. Not to mention that it sets a precedent; Putin has a history of making small land grabs, and without hard security guarantees, it's likely that Putin will try another land grab in the future. And indeed Putin is still trying to grab more land right now. Putin wants that corridor to Moldova, and then Moldova itself. Leaving Putin in a position where he can try this again and again, is also a loss for many countries in the future.

So even if on the short term it would be good for Ukraine if the fighting stopped; if it's really just a temporary cease fire during which Putin can regroup in order to try again, that may be worse for Ukraine than trying to completely block Putin right now.

Re: Russia confiscates passports of senior officials to stop defections

#77
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really isn't. Russia has gone backwards for a year now. There isn't a single parameter where things doesn't look bad for them. Sure the fog of war makes things somewhat unclear, but saying that its hard to gauge who is having the most trouble is nonsense for anyone following the conflict.

Rusia has been inching forwards for months. That's just a fact. Propaganda has got to you.

> Rusia has been inching forwards for months

Emphasis on inches. Ukraine War Mapper [1] does a good job documenting the line of control. It's not a good look for what, until recently, looked like a dominating regional power.

[1] https://twitter.com/war_mapper

Re: Russia confiscates passports of senior officials to stop defections

#78
post #69
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean yeah they tend to actually have reactive armor and don't tend to be quite as vulnerable to the "turret tossing" as those operated by the Russians. But this isn't about western vs soviet tanks. The point was the "many thousands of high-quality Soviet tanks" appear to be quite vulnerable to very inexpensive and widely available equipment that Ukraine have become adept at using.

It also doesn't help that those tanks are employed in a completely inane way by the Russian side.

[deleted]

Re: Russia confiscates passports of senior officials to stop defections

#79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> has many thousands of high-quality Soviet tanks You men the ones that go extra-boom whenever something hits them? (just to be clear I mean having the auto-loader under the turret make things extra-spicy when hit even by a grenade or something)

Any modern tank can explode when hit by an anti-tank missile. There are little Western tanks in Ukraine (Ukraine also has Soviet tanks) so you don't see such videos often.

> modern tank can explode when hit by an anti-tank missile

The T-72's jack-in-the-box design flaw is being productively exploited on the battlefield. That's not a "can explode" problem.

Re: Russia confiscates passports of senior officials to stop defections

#80
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Russia has almost 10 time more soldiers. I believe this is wrong. Russia doesn't have 10 times more soldiers now, and regular army isn't deployed in Ukraine; only volunteers (including prisoners), mobilized soldiers and contract army is.

> regular army isn't deployed in Ukraine May you elaborate on what your understanding of "regular army" is?

An army of people conscripted for 1 year for training; they are not sent to the war. Every man must serve for 1 year. There are also soldiers hired by contract and well paid for their service. They are sent to the war and they cannot refuse or break the contract. Sometimes they are called "professional army".

Army of conscripts is around 1-1.5 million soldiers; professional army was about 300 000 soldiers before invasion. It was not enough to win so there was a mobilization of about 400 000 (official numbers) and recruiting volunteers from prisoners.

Post reply on HN