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Is Ukraine Winning the War Against Russia?
I have been reading recent posts on social media claiming that Ukraine is recapturing dozens of square miles of territory from Russia, Russian troops are taking heavy casualties, and many Russian troops are cut off from supply lines.
It seems that the western nations are pouring weapons into the Ukraine military, which has outperformed expectations in using these weapons to their advantage. It’s starting to look like Russia’s military is not the second best military in the world, but rather the second best military in Ukraine.
One doesn’t want to read too much into these social media reports of Ukraine’s success. Who knows what is really going on over there? But former General of the US Army in Europe, Ben Hodges, says that Ukraine will recapture Crimea in a year. He seems to have backed off his earlier prediction that Ukraine would retake all of the territory it lost after February 22, 2022, by the end of summer (which would be right about now, it would seem).
Still, I bet that if Putin had known how badly this invasion would go and how unified the liberal-democratic world would be in supporting Ukraine, he would not have ordered the invasion of Ukraine. This shows how wars can start based on miscalculation, the underestimating of the opposition. In any case, we will have to watch over the next month or so to see if Ukraine is able to keep this counter-attack going.
Published in General
It’s amazing that the biggest conflict in Europe since World War 2 is happening because someone who was a mid-level KGB agent thought that he could recreate an empire that already failed multiple times.
As I mentioned, specific trade “deals” might be good or bad, depending on the specifics. Also, we shouldn’t think that because event A preceded data point B that event A caused data point B to happen.
So, maybe there was some other economic shock that damaged Mexico’s economy at some time near the passage of NAFTA and this caused the increase in illegal immigration.
I’m not saying that this is the case, but just saying that it is sloppy reasoning to say that because illegal immigration increased after NAFTA passed, well, then NAFTA’s passaged much have caused the increase in illegal immigration.
If a dog barks and the sun rises 10 minutes later, the dog didn’t necessarily cause the sun to rise.
When did the vehicles end up in the subway? When the people of Kharkiv were using the tunnels as air raid shelters? Did the Ukrainians park them down there when the Russians were taking the city? Did the Ukrainians drive them in when the Russians weren’t looking? I can’t make that make sense in my head.
Also, open trade doesn’t benefit everyone equally. If I am a sugar farmer and my government begins to allow people in my country to purchase foreign sugar, my profits might go down significantly even as consumers of sugar benefit from more competition.
I don’t know if the Russians ever conquered all of Kharkiv.
I don’t think they’ve taken the city. ??
There are military vehicles all over Ukraine. Maybe Russia should be tracking them all, but I have a feeling they aren’t.
They conducted a poll in Germany asking German voters if Germany should continue to support Ukraine despite high energy prices.
Overall the results were 70 percent yes and 21 percent no.
When they broke it down by political party affiliation it was as follows:
Greens 97 percent yes
SPD 82 percent yes
FDP 74 percent yes
CDU/CSU 73 percent yes
Left 59 percent yes
AfD 30 percent yes
I suspect the Russians would be more motivated in defending Russia than attacking another country. And I suspect the Ukrainians are extra motivated because they are defending their country rather than attacking another.
With all due respect to Molly Hemingway this has nothing to do with what is happening on the ground in Ukraine. It is Ukrainians fighting Russians that matters. They don’t give a flying [Redacted] about bots.
If bots shore up support for Ukraine, thereby keeping weapons and funding flowing, they would be foolish to disregard their impact.
Wir schaffen das.
That sentence is epically awesome.
Inshallah, maybe it’s even true.
They didn’t, they were stopped on the outskirts of Kharkiv city, and shelled the **** out of it. The occupation of parts of the oblast west of the city was abandoned when the Russians retreated from the Kyiv attack.
Possible origin of the rumor: Apparently some of the gigantic, little maintained parks of Soviet military hardware were in Ukraine and were abandoned in place when the USSR fell. More than Ukraine had any use for. A large chunk of it they refurbed and sold overseas, trying to bootstrap an arms business. Could be there was still a substantial amount of it left, and there’s been enough time since the start of this round of warfare for some of it to be pulled out of storage and put back into fighting order. Ukraine has been cleaning up captured vehicles and putting them into combat, why wouldn’t they be doing that with stuff they already owned?
Russia is far more corrupt-not only do they rank lower than Ukraine in the typical surveys of corruption (ie more corrupt), just look at their azart radio- it is actually just a plastic case with a fake screen & dummy buttons over a cheap Chinese radio:
someone sold this garbage to the Russian army & it has lead to serious problems with operational security & the deaths of a number of their soldiers.
addendum- found the link I wanted:
some people never got over Ten Days that Shook the World.
But stolen from Ben Hodges….
https://www.newsweek.com/ukraine-will-retake-crimea-within-year-former-us-europe-general-says-1741204
“Here we are, half a year after the start of the full scale Russian invasion, and the supposed second-best army in the world is now the second-best army in Ukraine,” Hodges said.
In terms if quality, it is absolutely true. They only look like Ukrainians and talk like Ukrainians. When the Russian tanks started rolling towards Kviv, they turned into Finns.
The Russians took the city. Before that, civilians spent a lot of time down there because even if the Russians were to be fastidious about avoiding civilian casualties (hey, there’s a first time for everything) their aim isn’t very good. Then the Russians took the city and installed a puppet mayor. Ukrainian vehicles in the subway sound a little like the British parachutists in cousin Sonny’s mother-in-law’s attic. She heard them best when she’d been drinking.
Are you sure you aren’t thinking of Kherson? I know the Russians fought in Kharkiv but I don’t think they ever controlled it or installed a mayor.
Edited to add: the Russians did install a mayor of the portion of Kharkiv Oblast that they controlled, but that didn’t include the city of Kharkiv.
Ah, that’s it. All these towns starting with Ks are all alike. Kviv, Kharkiv, Kalamazoo, Kherson …
Zelensky Zaluzhny…it just goes on and on. And all these leaders named some version of Vlad…
I was informed by a Russian / Ukrainian speaker on another board, when I complained about the zillion different spelling of each dinky village, that not only do transliterations vary, but also the names can be inflected when used in a sentence, and said dinky villages not infrequently change their names. Yikes! For now, I am adopting the Google Map standard – whatever’s on the map, that’s what I’m using. Then I can just blame them.
Real Russian hegemony has never been tried, so you can’t say it failed.
Plus: how many Myrna Dolynas are there, anyway?
(Frankly you’re lucky this isn’t happening in South India, or we would be trying to navigate the doings of Mr Subramanian and Mr Subramaniam – both legit names.)
All empires eventually fail – but the drivers of the Russian State’s desire for a land empire remain.
If the whole country gets lower prices everybody is better off in aggregate.
I believe in the Austrian view, and hardly anybody else gets it.
All of the central banks could create inflation at the same time, too!
Because they aren’t politically set up for deflation. Nobody is.
First of all I chose my words very carefully. That is what the article said. It’s the structure of the economy plus the fact that the country is really poor plus the government. Second of all, you can’t tell me that the corruption in Ukraine isn’t problematic.
Really? You have got data that shows that Ukraine is less corrupt than Russia?
We could spend all day having a link war because everybody knows that Wikipedia lies about everything.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_in_Ukraine
I would say having your own corruption entry in Wikipedia is pretty bad.