531–540 of 791 posts
I'd be worried that any un-married fighter pilots might just defect. A quick run to Poland, and you're done.
I don't think Russia would let you take the jet with you. I mean whatever their situation is, I'm pretty sure they still can assassinate defecting pilots. And I'm pretty sure the pilots know.
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Without minimizing the awfulness of this invasion and the fact that it must be condemned, it is not nearly as brutal as Russian operations in Chechnya and Syria or the US-led coalition invasion of Iraq, likely because Ukranians are not nearly as much of a racial or cultural other to Russians as Chechens or Syrians. The greater ability of Ukrainians to gain coverage in both traditional and social media may also be a f…
Thank you for articulating this better than I could. You had a CBS* commentator straight up saying this is different than Middle East wars since Kyiv is a " civilized city". That said, I think much of Russia's restraint is due to their end goal. Ukraine's Russian backed president was outted in a coup back in 2014. The new pro West leadership decided to go dancing with John McCain. This entire conflict could of been a…
Syrian cities were civilized, too.
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suzerainty You can't just lob a hundred dollar word out like that! I spent several moments trying to figure out what your typo was before allowing the possibility that you didn't have one. a relationship in which one state or other polity controls the foreign policy and relations of a tributary state, while allowing the tributary state to have internal autonomy
Empires, puppet states, colonies, and territories are mostly pre 20th century relics today, and we've lost the vocabulary for talking about them. Pundits still throw those words around, but mostly as exaggerations. This is a 19th century war with 21st century weapons. It's from the bad old days when various European states built empires - the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the British Empire, Imperial Russia, and the Imper…
And we hope that it doesn’t turn into a 20th century war with 21st century weapons.
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Russia doesn't have a big track military track record in recent years, but there's one thing that they have proven to do really well: leveling a city to the ground while slaughtering the civilians who didn't flee. Having the Ukrainian legitimate government agree to surrender to save Kiev (or “just” Khariv) from such a fate isn't completely impossible to imagine. And giving infantry weapons isn't going to be enough to…
Russia has claimed that the mission is to liberate Ukraine from Nazis, which is why you see videos of unarmed civilians not being immediately run over by trucks. If the mission changes to kill as many civilians as possible, the army is going to have an even worse morale problem and the international community will come up with a creative solution like giving part of Poland to Ukraine, giving Ukrainian citizenship to…
> If the mission changes to kill as many civilians as possible, the army is going to have an even worse morale problem
I agree. This is indeed one of the biggest challenge the Russian army will face if they decide to do so.
> the international community will come up with a creative solution like giving part of Poland to Ukraine, giving Ukrainian citizenship to anyone within that part of Poland and then launching attacks with all the military resources that just happen to now be in Ukraine.
This is hilarious, I love it. Never gonna happen, but I love the creativity here. This is “thinking out of the box”.
They are afraid of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buk_missile_system a very good technology that the Soviet Union developed which punches above its weight in situations like the Ukraine war because the mobile radars are hard to suppress with these methods https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suppression_of_Enemy_Air_Defen... I have seen a huge number of Buks in various conditions in video footage from the war, one of them wa…
Is there something particular about the camouflage on those buks?
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Thank you for articulating this better than I could. You had a CBS* commentator straight up saying this is different than Middle East wars since Kyiv is a " civilized city". That said, I think much of Russia's restraint is due to their end goal. Ukraine's Russian backed president was outted in a coup back in 2014. The new pro West leadership decided to go dancing with John McCain. This entire conflict could of been a…
> You had a CBS* commentator straight up saying this is different than Middle East wars since Kyiv is a " civilized city". Syrian cities were civilized, too.
A nations per capita income has nothing to do with how it's people deserve to be treated.
I think this misses the point entirely. It's their entire strategy, or lack of strategy that is in question. Small numbers of light vehicles entering towns they have not overcome...are then promptly destroyed by irregular Ukrainian forces often with improvised weapons. Seemingly trying to take large cities without first gaining and controlling ground and surrounding areas. Lack of attempts to destroy strategic infras…
So, bearing mind that I'm just shitposting on the Internet and have no military expertise, I do think that they had a strategy; based on the automated release of articles 4 days after the start of the invasion which declared that Putin had provided the "final solution to the Ukrainian problem", they really expected it to be over in four days.
Bear in mind that:
1. Ukraine has different groups with different mother tongues, like Switzerland or Belgium. The east has a lot of people who grow up speaking Russian as their home language. 2. They landed paratroops at key airports across Ukraine on day 1. 3. Ukraine government has claimed they've found significant numbers of special forces disguised as Ukrainians on the first few fays. 4. The large body of conventional forces invading on day one.
I would guess - completely "guy on the Internet" mind you - that what the strategy was is that the paratroops would get a beachhead and destroy the air force, that they and the special forces would hunt down and murder or capture all the key Ukrainian millitary and government officials in the first few days.
Meanwhile the conventional forces in the east would be "greeted as liberators", to borrow an American phrase, by Russian-speaking Ukrainians, who would provide food and fuel. Reinforcements would be flown into captured airfields. Chechen terror units would be used against serious resisters.
By the fourth day, Ukrainian resistance would be a disorganised shambles of cut-off government units, show trials of any captured members of the Ukrainian government could start so they could tell a little story about how the Jewish Ukrainian president was actually a baby-eating Nazi, and Putin could laugh off any attempts to complain as meaningless.
The paratroops were captured or killed, the Ukrainian air force kept flying or escaped to friendly countries (and are now returning), the alleged special forces got nowhere near the Ukrainian government, and Russian-speaking Ukrainians have been telling Russian troops to go away. The Chechen terror units appear to have been killed en masse.
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This exactly. The ABET mechanical and electrical engineering curricula combined would give you all the skills a team needed (perhaps with the aid of a physicist and chemist or two) to build this system. That we have dissolved the word "engineer" to mean "ad salesman at scale" doesn't mean the traditional engineers aren't out there.
I'm teaching in an ABET accredited program using MIT textbooks and I'm not impressed. If engineers want to avoid learning how to integrate by parts or use the chain rule it seems like a great idea. Arubis' comment above seems on point.
I'm not sure I've seen a calculus course that skipped those (granted, it's been more than a decade since I looked at calculus courses). They certainly seem to still be within the remit of the FE - ECE exam.
I guess everyone's weighing in with their view, so why not? Firstly, we should be mindful that the fog of war is now in play, and a good amount of what we think we know is unverifiable. With that caveat out of the way... It seems that the Russian soldiers are making efforts to avoid attacking civilians directly. Counterexamples exist and could be explained by rogue units, incompetence, or hot-blooded revenge on local…
suzerainty You can't just lob a hundred dollar word out like that! I spent several moments trying to figure out what your typo was before allowing the possibility that you didn't have one. a relationship in which one state or other polity controls the foreign policy and relations of a tributary state, while allowing the tributary state to have internal autonomy
I think I have the answer. 2008, Georgia. Russian Air Force loses at least 9 aircraft. Georgian minuscule airforce remained grounded. The losses are considered catastrophic inside Russian military command, and overall performance of Air Force was appraised as the worst among branches of military forces. In 2010s there's a string of assassinations happen in Ukraine and Bulgaria. Different people are targeted, from ex-…