Live data from Hacker News

President Putin has announced a partial mobilization in Russia

netnewsledger.com

211–220 of 372 posts

Re: President Putin has announced a partial mobilization in Russia

#211
post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I mean is that we need to use diplomacy to allow Russia a way to enter negotiations and stop the war while keeping a modicum of face. There is absolutely no chance Russia just leaves Ukraine on their own while saying "we have lost, we were bad and will now behave as you wish" so there would be little point insisting on that. If what we want is a come back to pre-invasion frontiers we need to give them a way to s…

Russia has plenty of nukes for the US and Europe if Putin decides the murder-suicide path is the only way forward. The problem with your line of thinking is that Russia needs to lose. It's citizens need to understand that it has lost. Germany after WWI didn't and it gave rise to the stab in the back myth and nationalism. If Russia is allowed to spin anything as a victory here, it and it's citizens would learn nothing…

I tend to agree with this. Anything less than unequivocal, total loss will mean that we are right back at this in 8 or 12 years.

Nuclear countries must not be allowed to take what they want and threaten nuclear destruction if anyone tries to stop them.

That would be a terrible outcome.

Re: President Putin has announced a partial mobilization in Russia

#212
post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Russians refer to Ukraine as a territory in their language by using preposition "на" instead of "в". They don't respect sovereignty of Ukraine in their language. This is an old and complicated argument. The Russians have their language. In that language, for several centuries, probably as long as the word Ukraine existed in it, it was governed by the preposition "на". There are other Russian toponyms that are gover…

> It really is a question of whether the language should change because of a new political status of Ukraine (and therefore all its speakers should change their linguistic habits); or whether this word should continue to be among the exceptions that take the preposition "на". No. There is no need to change language. If in any given phrase one means Ukraine as a region, like Caucasus, then it is "на", if one means Ukr…

> If in any given phrase one means Ukraine as a region, like Caucasus, then it is "на", if one means Ukraine as country then it is "в".

There is no such semantic distinction between these two prepositions.

You speak of a human language as if it were a programming language disregarding its history (while even for programming languages, history is important, which is why javascript or php are in the state they are currently in). Just as no-one was thinking of the troubled American past when they were using the word "master" as a name of their default git branch or of the primary database, so no Russian (at least none that I am aware of) relies on the preposition "на" to tell them that something is or is not a country. They do, however, rely on their vocabulary of linguistic collocations, developed through the years of using the language, that tells them that the word "Ukraine" wants the preposition "на".

Re: President Putin has announced a partial mobilization in Russia

#213
post #163

This is really going to screw Russia for generations. Every young Russian I know has either already left, plans to leave, or has to stay but hates their leader. You don't get your country to turn into a superpower by losing the most educated and skilled of the young generations. I only hope as things get more desperate he doesn't feel trapped lash out with the nukes.

In every country there are people who are nationalistic and think withint that framework and in every country there are people who want to be part of the global community of engineers/artists/scientists/professionals etc. and it is as if the nationalistic ones and their political fractions see the others as human resources that they want and have right to use in their ideological goals. In Iran, in Turkey, in the USA…

> It's bizarre and I don't see anything special about Russia TBH. It's just that they seem to be ahead of the west in the direction the world is headed.

On the contrary, they seem to be a century behind. Even China told them they should try to find a diplomatic solution. India told them this is not the time for war. The world has other problems than an old man's ambitions.

Re: President Putin has announced a partial mobilization in Russia

#214
post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We had fantastic experience with humiliated nations before. It worked so well for Germany after WW1 /s The mistake was corrected after WWII by splitting the country into occupation zones. That is the only way to deal with Russia too. Pushing out of Ukraine isn't enough. Russia has to be demilitarized, most importantly - denuclearized, it should lose its place in UN Security Council. It also should be denazified - t…

Having this split happen through occupation would be a disaster. The west does not have anywhere near the manpower necessary to make this happen. The rule of thumb is that the occupying force needs to be 5% of the population, which means 9 million for Russia. However, it could happen naturally. If the Putin regime collapses it is quite likely that a clear successor widely seen as legitimate doesn't materialize. If so…

Of course it can't be done through sheer brute force. One has to use an opportunity of Russia [almost] falling apart on its own like the one 30 years ago or the one that seems to come about right now. This time it comes at a huge cost to Ukrainians, and whether/when another such opportunity would come about and at what cost we don't know, so better to not lose the opportunity this time.

>The west does not have anywhere near the manpower necessary to make this happen.

One of the biggest occupying/controlling power for the biggest piece of territory - Far East and East Siberia - is China. And there is no need to actually occupy whole Russia. Only in Moscow and a bit of force (more like credible threat of it), and that is work for the West and Turkey, to make sure that nobody would prevent those autonomous regions going their own independent way (which in many cases would be just naturally falling into orbit of a near by big country like Turkey, Kazakhstan, China, Ukraine or a block like EU)

Re: President Putin has announced a partial mobilization in Russia

#215
post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It really is a question of whether the language should change because of a new political status of Ukraine (and therefore all its speakers should change their linguistic habits); or whether this word should continue to be among the exceptions that take the preposition "на". No. There is no need to change language. If in any given phrase one means Ukraine as a region, like Caucasus, then it is "на", if one means Ukr…

> If in any given phrase one means Ukraine as a region, like Caucasus, then it is "на", if one means Ukraine as country then it is "в". There is no such semantic distinction between these two prepositions. You speak of a human language as if it were a programming language disregarding its history (while even for programming languages, history is important, which is why javascript or php are in the state they are curr…

Well, i'm a native Russian speaker (left the country at the age of 28). I can only hope that you're too.

Re: President Putin has announced a partial mobilization in Russia

#216
post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In every country there are people who are nationalistic and think withint that framework and in every country there are people who want to be part of the global community of engineers/artists/scientists/professionals etc. and it is as if the nationalistic ones and their political fractions see the others as human resources that they want and have right to use in their ideological goals. In Iran, in Turkey, in the USA…

> It's bizarre and I don't see anything special about Russia TBH. It's just that they seem to be ahead of the west in the direction the world is headed. On the contrary, they seem to be a century behind. Even China told them they should try to find a diplomatic solution. India told them this is not the time for war. The world has other problems than an old man's ambitions.

Apparently not, lives have been shattered because old mens ambitions since ever.

Europeans and British can no longer live and work in their respective countries because of old mens ambitions.

Because of old mens ambitions large number of Americans no longer believe in democratic elections.

Because of old mens ambitions countless people have died in the middle east and other places.

What Russia is ahead of is that they are first in the game of attacking neighboring countries with regular armies for old mens ambitions.

Re: President Putin has announced a partial mobilization in Russia

#217
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

aaaa, the green color is new-ish account? Nice! I was wondering about that for a while now :-D Not to actually google yet it but still :-)

omg holy shit HN still uses tags

Just wait 'til you see all the nested tables!

Re: President Putin has announced a partial mobilization in Russia

#218
post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh yeah, super good idea. We had fantastic experience with humiliated nations before. It worked so well for Germany after WW1 /s FACT: the end of this war must be positive for the Russian people, no matter whether Russia loses or wins the military operation. Putin came to power because the West didnt help the former Soviet republics. If Russia is left alone humiliated again then we will have the next anti-western sys…

> We had fantastic experience with humiliated nations before. It worked so well for Germany after WW1 /s The mistake was corrected after WWII by splitting the country into occupation zones. That is the only way to deal with Russia too. Pushing out of Ukraine isn't enough. Russia has to be demilitarized, most importantly - denuclearized, it should lose its place in UN Security Council. It also should be denazified - t…

This is just silly wishful thinking. It will never happen with nuclear weapons on the table.

Re: President Putin has announced a partial mobilization in Russia

#219
post #209
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

touche. I guess I'm stupid. But Sevastopol is important.

It was important. As the Ukraine already attacked targets there, recently Russia moved their submarine base from Sevastopol to some mainland harbor. That means, effectively this harbor has been lost to Russia as a consequence of the war. Never mind that the Bosporus is closed for military vessels.

[deleted]

Re: President Putin has announced a partial mobilization in Russia

#220
post #5

It’s hard to see where this ends; should things move toward weakening of the Russian government will he go without attempting to escalate his way out of domestic danger? I think mobilisation and moving toward declaring the special operation a war (more mobilisation) could be the beginnings of that slippery slope.

Putin is "committed" so to speak, so this is just following his current strategy through to its conclusion: force the West to give up on Ukraine or accept massive escalation. The fundamental question is - is NATO committed enough to the Ukraine cause to demolish Europe? Probably not. Everyone talking about Russia being "already defeated" knows little of the Russian capacity for misery. Napoleon learned the hard way.…

> Eventually Biden and Blinken will back away from Ukraine...the US public will find another Current Thing to obsess over, and US troop commitments are completely out of the question. Basically, Russia gets Ukraine eventually, its just a matter of how bad the carnage is

Thank you for echoing Russian state propaganda, however your predictions are predicated on false premises that don’t match the commitments already made and fulfilled.

Your scare tactics might have sounded plausible 6 months ago, but it appears impossible for Russia to ever own and manage Ukrainian territory. The occupation has done no rebuilding, hasn’t brought drinking water supplies to occupied cities, hasn’t even managed yet to bury the bodies that still litter many streets and is an oppressive and failed occupation in every sense of the word. Presuming that this occupation is inevitable is itself a point of major contention I can’t see any evidence for.

Russia has already lost. How many more will die before it’s leadership realizes this?

Post reply on HN