Russo-Ukrainian war: Strategic and economic theatres

[astralis]

Putin has termed this as a course of national survival ... and the Russian population agrees.

maybe, maybe not.

I notice Putin hasn't officially announced that second wave of mobilization, after all.

and in any case, it wasn't enough for WWII USSR to just throw humans into the furnace. they also needed US Lend-Lease.

I suspect in a few months we will see just how much the Russian populace agrees with Putin. it's something when they're advancing, albeit with insanely high casualties; it'll be another when their lines are ripped open...and taking insanely high casualties.

[Officer of Engineers]

I suspect in a few months we will see just how much the Russian populace agrees with Putin. it's something when they're advancing, albeit with insanely high casualties; it'll be another when their lines are ripped open...and taking insanely high casualties.

And there is the point. There is a difference between Russia CANNOT afford and Russia NOT WILLING to pay.

I suspect in a few months we will see just how much the Russian populace agrees with Putin. it's something when they're advancing, albeit with insanely high casualties; it'll be another when their lines are ripped open...and taking insanely high casualties.

We're not going to see VII Corps surrounding entire Russian armies. Even the touted Kharkov OP failed to surround even 1 CAA. I said it before, if the Ukrainians use LEO 2s in the manner of the T-xx, then LEO 2s are going to die in the exact same manner. I see very little tactical difference between Kherson and Bakmut.

[Officer of Engineers]

I don't see an NK like starvation state ever developing but I do see everyone but it's elites stagnating economically if sanctions etc aren't dropped.

Ain't going to happen in the long term. There's too much money to be made. Something call bargain basement prices. China used the exact same strategy to get out of the Tianamen Square era money pit and China was worst off than Russia is today. All it takes is one (China or India) to be making riches off of Russia and before long, everyone else will be jumping back in. In China's case, it was Japan who lead the money making charge into China.

China was set to lead the money making charge into North Korea but the Kims were too stupid/scared to let go of the money purse. To stay in power, a dictator needs 2 of 3 power holdings - the army, money, and the people. The Kims got all 3. However, to lose a single one (money) is a sure way to lose another (the people).

Putin doesn't have the same hold as the Kims and as a consequence, doesn't have the same hold on the money and the people, thus allowing an opening for others to start making money. China and India are already grabbing at bargain basement prices. I don't see Tokyo and Seoul far behind once this war ends. Expect an European floodgate opening once the Asiatics are making more money than them. It happened to China.

I remind you that SUKHOI made 2 mints in China and India, not LOCKHEED.

[astralis]

We're not going to see VII Corps surrounding entire Russian armies. Even the touted Kharkov OP failed to surround even 1 CAA. I said it before, if the Ukrainians use LEO 2s in the manner of the T-xx, then LEO 2s are going to die in the exact same manner. I see very little tactical difference between Kherson and Bakmut.

no, I don’t think they will surround entire Russian armies either.

I will be pretty happy if they can surround entire brigades. The Kharkiv operation did do that much at least.

and the Ukrainians will have improved in both platform capability and training since then.

the Russians? I doubt it.

Milley and Austin’s (conservative) assessment is that for this campaigning season, the Ukrainians can at least seize the land bridge to Crimea. Implication here being that they believe the Ukrainians can overcome the Russian defenses in the area despite some 100-150k Russians sitting there.

[Monash]

no, I don’t think they will surround entire Russian armies either.

I will be pretty happy if they can surround entire brigades. The Kharkiv operation did do that much at least.

and the Ukrainians will have improved in both platform capability and training since then.

the Russians? I doubt it.

Milley and Austin’s (conservative) assessment is that for this campaigning season, the Ukrainians can at least seize the land bridge to Crimea. Implication here being that they believe the Ukrainians can overcome the Russian defenses in the area despite some 100-150k Russians sitting there.

At a guess? That means achieving a breakthrough and advancing far enough south through Russian lines that their LOC's are threatened and they are forced to withdraw or risk being cut off. Not attempting to engage the bulk of those forces directly.

[Officer of Engineers]

Milley and Austin’s (conservative) assessment is that for this campaigning season, the Ukrainians can at least seize the land bridge to Crimea. Implication here being that they believe the Ukrainians can overcome the Russian defenses in the area despite some 100-150k Russians sitting there.

I can see that. The Russians are currently lacking in manoeuvre RES units necessary to plug holes and to exploit counter-attacks, exactly like Bakmut. The key to any fortification. A manoeuvre RES.

[TopHatter]

What Happens When Russia’s Criminal Soldiers Come Home
The widespread use of criminals as cannon fodder could transform Russian society for the worse.

by NATALIA ANTONOVA


Russian military and pro-Russian separatists keep watch as civilians are being evacuated along humanitarian corridors from the Ukrainian city of Mariupol on March 24, 2022.

Recently, a Russian friend who left the country years ago got in touch to ask me if I could talk to her former colleague, a woman was finally ready to leave too and needed some advice and reassurance. This colleague, let’s call her Maria, did not want to abandon her home and her various volunteering jobs, but now felt she had no choice.

At first, I was not especially interested in talking to Maria—as a native of Ukraine, I prefer to leave pep talks for Russians to someone else—until I found out what had prompted Maria’s decision. Maria had a relative who had gone to prison for murder. After PMC Wagner began recruiting cannon fodder for the war against Ukraine in Russian prisons, he had signed up. He was wounded in Ukraine, and was coming home a free man. Maria was terrified of him.

I have a bit of a history with Wagner. They killed my friend Sasha Rastorguev, a filmmaker, in 2018. After I published an article in 2021 about Sasha’s death and what it meant in terms of Wagner’s overall activities, a Wagnerite sent me rape and death threats. Today, the scourge of Wagner has been unleashed in my native country for more than a year.

Reliable statistics on how many Russian prisoners signed up to go kill Ukrainians are hard to come by. A Vice report says it was around 40,000. Nobody is certain as to how many of these men have managed to make it home alive since the recruitment drive began, and how many are still fighting.

Maria told me that her cousin was a “vicious” man. He had, she said, “always resented” Maria’s side of the family, who were successful, well-connected, solidly middle-class people. Their successes and connections proved illusory as the Russian government took a hard turn toward fascism years ago. Today, most of Maria’s family lives abroad—the ones who don’t drink and commit violent crime, anyway. She told me that she feels that Russia is “losing its best people” and that “the government wants it this way.”

And why not? I wondered after I got off the phone with Maria. A criminal regime has an easy time ruling over fellow criminals.

According to Reuters, the convicts recruited by Wagner are passionately loyal to the company’s founder, CEO, and thug-in-chief, the wealthy war criminal Yevgeny Prigozhin. While Prigozhin squabbles with the Russian Ministry of Defense over ammunition and who controls what, the war drags on. The convicts who make it out head back to Russia, to sow more violence.

---

There was a time when I could have told different stories about Russia. I could have told you about Russian theater and film, about ghost stories from the Urals, or fashion labels started by my friends. I could have told you about rooftop parties, old graveyards, long train rides, a Siberian shaman in a Metallica t-shirt, and a brave hospice worker who loved to quote Joseph Brodsky. But now my stories of Russia are reduced to revulsion.

Still, I felt bad for Maria. She didn’t want me to think of her as a “good Russian.” She had nothing to prove. She was just heartbroken and scared. She was convinced her cousin would do her harm: They’d never liked each other and she was told he had designs on their grandmother’s dacha, a summer house, now that he was free. Murder for real estate has a long and sordid tradition in Russia, and I found Maria’s story believable. “If something happened to me, nobody would question the war hero,” Maria mused darkly. I had to tell her that she was probably correct.

Thugs going mainstream has greater implications down the line—both for Russia, and for the world. The security climate will remain unstable, and likely worsen. Crime in Russia will probably go up, and spill outward. Processes that have been set in motion with the disgusting invasion of Ukraine will not be stopped any time soon.

Many of those Russians who cheered on the invasion—the academics, the eager propagandists, the patriotic singers and actors feeding at the trough of the Russian state budget—will not fare well in the darkness that’s now coming for them too. These people have no idea as to what they’ve helped unleash. And however much they suffer, the innocents and the vulnerable will suffer more. They always do.

Another friend of mine has a Russian ex-husband who passionately supported the 2014 annexation of Crimea and blamed Ukrainians for Russia’s decision to destabilize the Donbas before drowning it in blood. The ex-husband is an artist, a sensitive soul when he’s not busy waving his little fist in the direction of Ukraine and the West. When mobilization was announced in Russia last year, he bravely hid from it.

Cheering for war crimes from a distance is one thing. Crawling into a filthy trench is another. Mobilization may be picking up pace again, and my friend sarcastically confronted her ex-husband, asking him if he will finally do his patriotic duty. Without catching her sarcasm, he told her that he doesn’t want to “serve with criminals.”

Who does? But the face of the Russian military is now altered. Despite all of its defeats and crimes, the Russian military used to be able to rest on the laurels of WWII and its ensuing death cult. All of the pretense to greatness is gone now.

As the historian Timothy Snyder told the United Nations Security Council the other day, the Russian government is guilty of the “perversion of the memory of the Great Fatherland war by fighting a war of aggression in 2014 and 2022, thereby depriving all future generations of Russians of that heritage. . . . It has done great harm to Russian culture.”

Without democracy, without a free opposition, without independent civil society, you might think Russian culture is dead—yet it keeps staggering onward, not so much dead as undead. It reminds me of a zombie horde, howling as it searches for a meal. It doesn’t know that it is rotting from the inside.

What do you do when confronted with a disaster of that magnitude? I guess, in the end, everyone makes their own choices. What I told Maria is what I’ll tell anyone else in her position: Get out while you still can.
_________

[Bigfella]

I have a very good friend whose current wife was born in what was then the USSR but is now a Central Asian republic. He met her in Prague, fell in love, married & then spent several years battling the Immigration department to get her into Australia. During that time she was told that the process would be quicker if she returned to her home country. She did so reluctantly.

Flash forward several years and the two were living happily in Australia when the wife gets an online message. What followed must have been the strangest conversation my mate ever had (if you knew him you'd know how big a claim this is). My mate knew his ex had been married, but she didn't talk much about it. Turns out hubby was very prominent in organized crime in her home country. Turns out she has two (now adult) children. Turns out he was a violent man. Turns out she planned to do a runner with the kids, he found out, and she had to literally run for her life with gangsters on her trail. Turns out he threatened her family and she hadn't communicated with her kids or directly with any family for over a decade. She kept all of this a secret.

The message? Turns out hubby got jailed in Russia for a LONG time and the kids decided to track down mum. Several years on there have been tearful reunions, numerous visits home and my mate becoming 'grandpa' to some happily surprised kids half way around the world. No word yet on whether or not hubby has signed up for Wagner, but you can bet everyone in the family is thinking about it and hoping that he is dead in Ukraine if he has. No doubt many people in Russia having similar thoughts.

The world is a very strange place.

[TopHatter]

Man I love a story with a happy ending. Thanks Pete, I needed that this morning.

Turns out hubby got jailed in Russia for a LONG time

As an aside, I wonder which government bigwig that hubby managed to piss off to get sent up the river like that....

[Albany Rifles]

Man I love a story with a happy ending. Thanks Pete, I needed that this morning.



As an aside, I wonder which government bigwig that hubby managed to piss off to get sent up the river like that....

Yeah...I'm intrigued, Pete!

[Bigfella]

Man I love a story with a happy ending. Thanks Pete, I needed that this morning.



As an aside, I wonder which government bigwig that hubby managed to piss off to get sent up the river like that....

I didn't get all the details. I'm not sure my mate did either. I get the impression that hubby was a big fish in a small pond at home, but tried playing with the big boys in Russia and pissed off the wrong person (or people). As he is a non-Russian no one there would much care what happened to him.

The 'happy ending' only happens if he stays in jail. Fingers crossed.

[rj1]

Some long-term anti-American items going on:

-India are buying oil from Russia in rupees instead of dollars.
-France have settled a trade with China buying LNG from them in yuan.
-Saudi Arabia have put out signals they are joining the China and Russia-led SCO
-Brazil and Argentina are creating a joint currency for trade between the two of them called a sur
-CNN and Fox have both ran stories on the "de-dollarization" of international trade. From the list I read every non-Western/non-European country of note are interested or on board. I've read on the issue and what Biden did to Russia with weaponizing the dollar scared shitless a lot of governments-I'm talking governments the likes of Thailand-that they run against American policy on an issue and this could happen to them. So this has incentivized everyone to create trading instruments independent of the dollar.

(Even say a trade between Russia and China in the 1990s, it wouldn't operate in yuan and rubles, it would be rubles converted to dollars, handed over to Chinese, who would then convert to yuan. By doing a direct transaction, it removes the dollar middleman, which reduces the demand for it.)

The dollar is not going to disappear from international trade-it simply can't-but even a reduction of say 20% would have huge ramifications for the government and everyone living here. No one in this country including our politicians really grasp what our reserve currency status allows us to do that pretty much every other country in the world can't. Throw on top of it we've had Presidents Trump and Biden who have governed like economic ignorants.

[TopHatter]

After 18 years, Europe's largest nuclear reactor starts regular output

• 

HELSINKI (Reuters) -Finland's much-delayed Olkiluoto 3 (OL3) nuclear reactor, Europe's largest, began regular output early on Sunday, its operator said, boosting energy security in a region to which Russia has cut gas and power supplies.

Nuclear power remains controversial in Europe, primarily due to safety concerns, and news of OL3's start-up comes as Germany on Saturday switches off its last three remaining reactors, while Sweden, France, Britain and others plan new developments.

OL3's operator Teollisuuden Voima (TVO), which is owned by Finnish utility Fortum and a consortium of energy and industrial companies, has said the unit is expected to meet around 14% of Finland's electricity demand, reducing the need for imports from Sweden and Norway.

The new reactor is expected to produce for at least 60 years, TVO said in a statement on Sunday after completing the transition from testing to regular output.

"The production of Olkiluoto 3 stabilises the price of electricity and plays an important role in the Finnish green transition," TVO Chief Executive Jarmo Tanhua said in the statement.

Construction of the 1.6 gigawatt (GW) reactor, Finland's first new nuclear plant in more than four decades and Europe's first in 16 years, began in 2005. The plant was originally due to open four years later, but was plagued by technical issues.

OL3 first supplied test production to Finland's national power grid in March last year and was expected at the time to begin regular output four months later, but instead suffered a string of breakdowns and outages that took months to fix.

Russia's power exports to Finland ended last May when Russian utility Inter RAO said it had not been paid for the energy it sold, a consequence of the widening gulf between Moscow and Europe over the war in Ukraine.

Russian state export monopoly Gazprom shortly after ended shipments of natural gas to the Nordic nation.
_______

Nice big middle finger to Putin...and a nice knock-on effect for the rest of the region.

[astralis]

a very interesting thread on what the current German foreign minister said back in 2021.

https://twitter.com/visevic/status/1497860541985042436

[DOR]

Some long-term anti-American items going on:

-India are buying oil from Russia in rupees instead of dollars.
-France have settled a trade with China buying LNG from them in yuan.
-Saudi Arabia have put out signals they are joining the China and Russia-led SCO
-Brazil and Argentina are creating a joint currency for trade between the two of them called a sur
-CNN and Fox have both ran stories on the "de-dollarization" of international trade. From the list I read every non-Western/non-European country of note are interested or on board. I've read on the issue and what Biden did to Russia with weaponizing the dollar scared shitless a lot of governments-I'm talking governments the likes of Thailand-that they run against American policy on an issue and this could happen to them. So this has incentivized everyone to create trading instruments independent of the dollar.

(Even say a trade between Russia and China in the 1990s, it wouldn't operate in yuan and rubles, it would be rubles converted to dollars, handed over to Chinese, who would then convert to yuan. By doing a direct transaction, it removes the dollar middleman, which reduces the demand for it.)

The dollar is not going to disappear from international trade-it simply can't-but even a reduction of say 20% would have huge ramifications for the government and everyone living here. No one in this country including our politicians really grasp what our reserve currency status allows us to do that pretty much every other country in the world can't. Throw on top of it we've had Presidents Trump and Biden who have governed like economic ignorants.

So, what are those ramifications that you mention?
Please be specific, because we're looking at uncharted territory here, if that actually happens.