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The Battle for Bakhmut
The battle for Bakhmut has lasted for about nine months. It is the bloodiest and most intense fight in Europe since WWII. Advances and retreats are measured in two to six kilometers increments.
Thousands of Russian and Ukrainian forces have been killed in this battle as Russian forces try to encircle the city, and Ukrainian forces try to prevent the taking of the city.
Once again, the following video shows the grunts in the field. I’m not interested in the policy wonk views in the West, nor the Kremlin’s perpetual aggrievement of losing the old Soviet Empire. This fight has become like WWI trench warfare with newer and more deadly weapons.
My opinion is that this war is not going to end anytime soon. Regardless of the past history between Russia and Ukraine, it should be obvious that Ukrainians are fighting for hearth and home.
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Published in Military
Actually the difference you are ignoring is guns and polity.
Britain ruled India during the Raj because it had better guns and a coherent polity.
The West may (or may not) have better guns, but when it comes to Ukraine I don’t think our polity is that coherent. If it were the US wouldn’t have needed to blow up Nordstream.
So no problem, right? Russia didn’t expand its empire by conquering Central Asia, Siberia, the Far East (Vladivostok etc), the Baltics, Poland (wherever this damn borders were), Eastern Europe (including Ukraine), etc.
So pleased you cleared that up! Apparently the West is schvitzing for no reason at all. Back to the culture wars, everybody, enough of this distraction that logic tells us cannot really exist.
Russia blew up Nordstream.
Why not, next they’ll blow up Moscow.
The Russians seem to be shooting down their own aircraft. So, why not?
well, there military is so incompetent bombing Moscow is conceivable since they:
Ikr?
I disagree with your analysis except for the observation that Russia has both a 2nd rate economy & bad weapons & a poor polity- so Ukraine should surely win with a reasonable level of support.
adddendum – I disagree b/c you are making the claim the GDP is determinative-ie Russia is major player b/c of its GDP- I think it will not be b/c not only is its economy not robust enough, but b/c it is a poorly run kleptocracy.
20 percent, actually. $4.5 trillion vs. $22 trillion, PPP-adjusted.
And?
Current relevance factor: Zero.
Is this rhetorical? The USA can spend a lot of time and money, if the correct people are profiting.
So tell me how we get out of this, and how we get Zelensky from tapping into our military inventories.
We continue to supply military aid to Ukraine’s military and applaud as Ukraine’s military destroys more of Putin’s military.
At some point the Russian people might decide that they don’t want to devote all of Russia’s resources towards conquering foreign countries.
Keep supplying Ukraine’s military for as long as it takes. Don’t give up.
Yup. It’s not about a country’s GDP in and of itself, but about how it uses it. And how it uses it depends on the country’s politics at any given moment, which in turn depends on its history/culture/etc., etc..
Stark case in point thereof:
Afghans don’t got much GDP (either aggregate or per capita) and stuff, and never have. Yet, they managed to beat back the Soviets in the ’80s, and then the US in 2021. And, of course, the Brits had a similar experience, way back in the 19th century.
Heh. Well played.
How should we explain the breaking apart of the Soviet Union and the breaking apart of the Warsaw Pact and the fact that the nations that used to be part of the Warsaw Pact are now supplying military aid to Ukraine against Russia?
So you’re saying there is no end to this donation of our military capital to Zelensky.
How would you explain their formation in the first place?
History is not static. Why would you expect it to be? Will the US still be dominant, will NATO still exist twenty years from now? Who knows? Depends, right?
They also had a much more productive economy, which enabled those guns to be produced and their empire to be logistically maintained on a global scale.
Russia’s own rulers acknowledged that they were backward compared to Western Europe, but their immediate neighbors were either more backward, smaller, or both. The way in which Russia expanded might even have been facilitated by their backwardness (Cossacks as the vanguard, and serfs to fill land after military consolidation, with incentives and coercions that would probably not have existed in an a more urban/industrial context, with autocracy and dependency to hold everything together).
Not while it turns a profit for your Deep State, no.
The Brits first took over India in the guise of the East India Company. At the time the British armed forces were about 100,000. The Company’s Sepoys were 200,000.
And it didn’t happen in a vacuum. The Mughals had 40 (?) years previously been conquered and sacked by Nadir Shah (from Afghanistan?). They were broke!
So how to explain these advanced countries’ rather brutal colonisation of Asia and Africa?
It was the following 1985 Wendy’s commercial that done it, of course:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FpypTXccG2I
Perhaps, some day, the history books will acknowledge Dave Thomas et al.’s crucial/pivotal/seminal/terminal/whatever/etc. role in the “breaking apart of the Soviet Union and the breaking apart of the Warsaw Pact and the fact that the nations that used to be part of the Warsaw Pact are now supplying military aid to Ukraine against Russia”.
There seems to be some miscommunication, here.
The incentives and coercions I was referring to were in regards to settlement patterns in the course of military conquests (with what amounted to specific castes based on medieval social organizations playing specialized roles, with different inducements-mostly for the Cossacks-and coercions-mostly for the serfs-from Moscow that revolved around said social organizations), as well the means through which the Russian empire was held together over vast reaches of inhospitable and difficult to traverse land.
I was not talking about the act of subjugating other societies, which has been an aspect of every large human society. In the case of Africa and Asia, advanced Western countries controlled the economies and politics of their colonies, but generally did not have semi-tribal communities of closely related people from within their own borders do the initial dirty work and then settle fortress towns at the frontiers of territories intended to be integrated into the official borders of their country, and certainly didn’t force excess serfs to settle inferior land hundreds of miles away in order to consolidate their annexation. In other words, Russia was building a larger Russia rather than a global system of resource extraction, as was the case with the Western powers in Asia and Africa.
In the case of Australia and the Americas, they did engage in mass settlement, as the lands were relatively thinly populated with peoples who suffered 90% fatality rates from the common flu. And while convicts, indentured laborers, and slaves played a large role, most of this settlement was done by people from social classes made possible or common from industrializing societies, including huge, state-supported merchant consortiums as well as other free migrants who responded to inducements aimed toward individuals and families. Things which held these segments of the empires together revolved around the same largely decentralized institutions and modern expectations which held their core territories together, which came back to bite the British in the Americas. In Russia, the semi-medieval autocracy relied on a centralized system of patron-client relationships (with very weak clients) and force to maintain order, and their entire empire weathered through extreme distances and communication problems until systemic crisis at the national core forced collapse, which ironically came about largely as the result of piecemeal modernization efforts and the better educated and empowered population that came with it.
Then the communists came along, and largely built upon previous systems of coercion, albeit against entirely different categories of dependent populations.
Not sure what you’re trying to say …
The Ukrainian Kozaks put the Commonwealth on the skids when they wrested most of what is now Ukraine away from it, in the middle of the 17th century. However, its proto-democratic institutions left a mark on Ukraine; just as the Mongol Empire’s despotism and brutality left a mark on Russia.
I don’t see why not. If we can be stuck in a decades long Cold War with nuclear armed North Korea …
Until Ronald Reagan saw through the bluff, American Presidents had an exaggerated view of the Soviet economy. It turned out to be smaller, but more militarized, than the CIA had thought.
The problem is, under Communism, every level of the organization lies to the level above. Realizing that this makes economic planning impossible, Mikhail Gorbachev instituted his policy of glasnost, or speaking out.
Biden’s original approach to the crisis was to help Ukraine set up a government-in-exile, while Putin installed a quisling regime in Kyiv.
But Ukraine, armed by Donald Trump (after Obama’s blankets and MREs), refused to surrender, and gradually Biden shifted to a posture of military assistance; though, one might argue, in a sort of half-hearted way.
Yes, I think that’s true. And part of that was inducting people into the Russian nation, often by way of conversion to Orthodoxy. It’s a different definition of nationhood, perhaps? It’s interesting to note that this expansionist instinct continued under the Soviets in Central Asia – with a different binding ideology.
I know this is heresy on Ricochet, but I don’t think the Russian Revolution’s results were all bad, or that Russia would have done better without it.
Russia emancipated the serfs in a series of edicts about the same time as slaves were freed in the US. It managed to do this without a civil war – but arguably their failure with the equivalent of 40 acres and a mule was a major factor in bringing about the Revolution.
Which meant death and destruction and Stalin – but also meant literacy at a much faster pace than would have happened otherwise, as well as significant industrialisation. (Keep in mind that it was the Soviets that developed through universal education places like Ukraine and Kazakhstan – leave aside places like Uzbekistan or Tajikistan [compare them to Afghanistan or Pakistan for a proper assessment of the difference between building a larger Russia rather than a global system of resource extraction.])
Without the Rev Russia would have been at the level of India rather than what it actually became.
But you’re not.
??
I think that’s his point. You don’t care how it’s done or how it affects other people so long as you get what you want.
That’s consistent, but not trustworthy.
Keep sending military aid to Ukraine’s military for as long as Russian troops remain in any part of Ukraine.
More like historically ignorant. The Soviet Union was much more powerful than Russia (& able to threaten Europe) because it included Ukraine. Ukraine has a significant population, resources &, as we all can see, makes better soldiers than Russia.
That makes no sense whatsoever, since Russia had already had possession of Ukraine for more than a century before the Soviet Union came into existence.
Again with the facts, @GPentelie, again with the facts….