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Everything posted by dimyh
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Unfortunately France and HRE are different culture groups so even after annexing Crimea and starting another no CB war its not going to generate enough AE to trigger a coalition.
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Quality video from Perun that covers a lot of the manpower issues on the Russian side that atom has been talking about since the start of the war. I'm not quite as optimistic in the overall outcome as you are due to concerns about western longterm support (money and heavy hardware) and stomach for a prolonged conflict if this turns into an attritional stalemate. But definitely agree that the Russian manpower/machinery ratios are out of whack and a severe limitation on an extended offensive push.
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Tl;dr - I wish there was a game where I could stab Putin in the face. And express the duality of man.
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As bullshit it may be, I can understand some of the sentiment. Personally I feel entirely weak and ineffectual watching this shit rage on in Ukraine. Aside from donating a little cash, I feel like I'm pacing the sidelines, unable to do anything but keep up with news reports. So I daydream about making my own story, fighting the good fight, or better yet, a game that allows me to live in that fantasy. In that regards I do have a game pitch to sell to a developer like Naughty Dog. A game like the Last of Us: a linear storyline with survival gameplay mechanics. It would be inspired by Man on Fire, Apocalypse Now, and Going After Cacciato. Basically a revenge story but mixed with alt-history fantasy of trying to survive in a major warzone as an average citizen. Prologue: You start out as a normal Ukrainian dad, with wife and a couple of kids, living in Odesa. You have a normal office type job, possibly a software engineer, someone moderately well off but not an exceptional individual. A typical Ukrainian everyman. There are rumors of the Russian invasion but you are blowing it off as just a political scare and not a real threat. Which is shattered on Feb 24th and you quickly have to scramble on a plan to evacuate your family and figure out what you are going to be doing. A tearful goodbye to your family as you ship them off on a bus ride to Lviv and eventually over the border to Poland (with an Easter egg of @Brisketexan's kid handing out breakfast burritos and chatting up the ladies in the background). The local militia doesn't have any concrete plans for you so you take the opportunity to go check on the rest of your family: your parents and your brother living in Kherson. Act 1: As you journey east, you keep checking on news updates as you struggle to figure out what is going on and what best to do. Tidbits of news are dropped at different checkpoints. Finally making it into Kherson you find your parent but your brother has already moved east to report to duty in Mariupol. After a long discussion you can't convince them to evacuate, they think they are safe as long as they don't do anything wrong. You decide to push on to Mariupol to find your brother. Now you are starting to see more of war first hand, Russian troops are setting up checkpoints, you are seeing protestors stymy the invaders, some light shelling of cars and residents, and you are having to be more careful moving east. Eventually you make your way to Mariupol only to find it surrounded and under siege. You manage to find your way in, making connections with resistance groups and running various missions to help civilians in need while you still are trying to figure out what happened to your brother. You get to witness first hand some of brutality as you are still not enlisted to fight but simply someone trying to help people where needed. You are running around, bedding down in various places each night, meeting new people and hearing their stories when you get captured by a couple of Russians. They are marching you back when you get rescued by a couple of Azov guys and your...brother. Act 2: Reunited with your sibling you find he's been learning from a few of the Azov guys and fighting throughout the city but everything is clamping down. Morale is down and while many are still steadfast they understand if people can get out then they won't hold it against them. So y'all hear about some of the humanitarian corridors and plan to sneak out that way but witness first hand the Russians reneging on the deal. It becomes one clusterfuck after another, sneaking through lines, but finally escaping from the city only to find y'all bouncing from town to town, trying to stay clear of the heavy action. You get picked up by a couple of Ukrainian soldiers making a resupply run to Sievierodonetsk where you connect with the other defensive forces in the area. Again caught in the action, you are running small missions supporting the regular ops teams, and learning to handle rifles and seeing NLAWS in action. Everything seems to be holding fine when a Russian artillery barrage catches everyone by surprise. Y'all are both knocked unconscious and wake up to find yourself firmly behind Russian lines as POWs. Also with you is a Russian deserter who is being held for refusing to fight. Between torture sessions that you and your brother are going through, you find out more of the perspective of the Russian soldier - originally a conscript deceived into signing a contact and never quite understood the full magnitude of the "special operation". Things are looking bleak when a counterattack levels part of the base and all 3 of y'all manage to escape. Deep in enemy territory y'all continue to evade forces until a Ukrainian drone strike ends up killing your brother. Now its just you and the deserter in a full panic fire drill. Act 3: Y'all manage to escape to a calm zone. You are crushed, seeing your brother fragged right in front of your eyes. You are sick of all the bullshit witnessed first hand and you see the only way to make it stop is to cut the head off the snake --- kill Putin. The Russian is sick of the war too and he just wants to go home. So y'all concoct a new plan: help each other get through Russia until y'all reach his hometown of Kursk. Once there you will be on your own to infiltrate Moscow and perform the impossible. Y'all do make it to Kursk and you get to meet his parents with you disguised as a fellow soldier that was "released" from duty. However his parents are full propaganda swallowers and don't believe their own son's description of the war. Sick of his refusal to fight they kick y'all out. Now he is crushed too and decides to join you on the crazy assassination mission. Working into Moscow you do find out that there is a growing resistance movement upset about all of the crackdowns ("Once you have taken away our voices all we have left are our fists"). Y'all manage to hook up with this group and take on some sabotage missions and getting some precious intel on Putin's estate. With the resistance growing into a full bloom near civil war, you and the Russian deserter manage to make it into the compound. Putin's security forces are lighter than normal due to either busy dealing with protesters/resistance attacks or simply being paid off/jumping ship due to Putin's treatment, you have a slim chance of success. Artfully working your way through the compound, hiding under dramatically long tables, you manage to take out the guards and corner Putin where you proceed to: Bash. His. Disgusting. Goblin. Face. In. Epilogue: Once the climatic thrill of the kill subsides, you and your new Russian buddy realize it is not going fix everything but it is a big step to ending this nonsensical war. You invite him back to your home, to start up a new life in Ukraine, and rebuild from this misery. Y'all leave Moscow with Z symbols crashing down or being burned away to make it back to Kyiv where you wife and kids are returned. After a nice tearful reunion, the whole gang loads up in a car for a road trip back to Odesa, with new uncle Yuri laughing it up with your kids. So yeah a full-fledged happy ending but hopefully a sobering journey through the helplessness of war. Gameplay is not going to be a Call of Duty run-n-gun type of action game but more focused on stealth and survival against the backdrop of a near total war. There should be enough time to meet the other common citizens caught in the crossfires and to hear their personal stories. The first half of the game could be very factual, including real events from the conflict so that those stories are not forgotten. Plus interspersed nuggets such as the Bucha massacres to highlight that this is the first major war to fully include social media. Towards the midpoint it will veer into alt-history territory, where we can imagine your little journey becoming this epic assassination mission. At a meta level the story would have an underlying theme of how media/propaganda can be manipulated. Gamers should check out the events in the game and try to figure out which events were based on real moments and which ones were just pure fiction. Because one thing is very clear about this entire war: manipulating the propaganda to entice the population is dangerous enough, but for Putin to buy-in so deeply as well is catastrophic. Not all Russians buy-in to this nonsense but enough do to make this war possible. Getting people to (rationally) think for themselves is an important first defense against willful misinformation.
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Quality New Yorker article covering the amassed push in the Donbas. https://www.newyorker.com/news/dispatch/the-fight-to-survive-russias-onslaught-in-eastern-ukraine RU using local numerical superiority in men but mainly artillery to grind out incremental gains. Without the heavy equipment UA is in a bind to defend longterm plus we are in a race to see which side can mobilize their bench into the game. Not sure how much longer before we can see some of those UA reserves deployed to the front. Problem is they are losing much of their experienced troops and that will be hard to replace. Russia is doing the one thing that they excel at which is mass artillery to combat bomb areas. We'll see how long they can ride that one trick pony. Some experts were previously predicting that mid June would be the point that the Russian advance would start to stall. So hope that comes to fruition before Putin clamps down on current territorial gains and starts negotiating for a cease fire plus annexation terms.
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Ukrainian version of a lowrider. Gotdamn they ridin low!
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In honor of Ray, this is my new fantasy if I run into one of these Z fucksticks in person. Especially some of these annoying TV pundits.
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Still concerned about the Russian push thru Popansa area. Here is a video of UA withdrawing from Lyman area but unlike the Ruskies they will stop and pick up their own guys.
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So I have been watching this channel for the past couple of weeks. American guy giving a pretty standard daily recap, frankly most of his stuff s already covered by this thread, but what he does well is updating a map with all of the changes on the various fronts. Now he is adding a new 3D topographical map which is very cool to see. Just needs a couple of smoldering tanks to make it feel 100% authentic. https://youtu.be/Vrg1KAk4PUM
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Not sure if already posted but too fun to pass up. One of the better Hitler-Putin mashups.
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This is actually a good sign, good in the sense that Putin still feels threatened by any objectivity. If Putin was orchestrating a shift in his PR machine to explain that the special operation is tougher than expected then that would give him a couple of avenues forward. If he only holds onto minimal objectives (annex donbas, inflict economic pain) then tampering down expectations will make that minor "win" more palatable to the populace. Or if he insists on holding out for bigger gains, then that is only possible through a full mobilization which again is only possible if their general populace feels threatened by Ukraine. Instead they are still playing up super high expectations. All for a war with vague strategic goals. Plus having one of his PR staff go off-script in the first place means there is a lack of oversight with the message. As this war stretches on without major successes then there is going to be more and more opportunities for that war message to drift off point. Or eventually tuned out or recognized as the bullshit that it is.
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Big resupply in motion...probably room for some nice hardware and some newly tailored pants for Zelensky. Current set is still chaffing his nuts and the man needs some room to breath.
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I believe coming payment due is only 500M and Russia is still making billions monthly just from gas and oil so collecting is not going to do anything dramatic to their reserves. Better to have them default and take that long term credit hit. We could roll back sanctions tomorrow but that credit hit is not so easily reversed.
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Here is a pretty long interview with one Russian soldier from the early days in the Kyiv invasion and stationed around Bucha. Talks about officers lobbing grenades at soldier's feets for refusing orders. That his CO was so paranoid about a mutiny that he was holed up in a separate area, pulling off recon troops from scouting UA area and instead had them posted as guards around his quarters. Anyone that tried to visit him was strip searched for weapons. Lots of fascinating stuff in this one. Best part though is when this Russian captive gets to talk with his mother. She starts off concerned about his safety and how badly the Ukrainians are treating him but he's adamant that they treat him better than his own army. She then tells him she's worried now that he may like it over there so much that he might not want to return which got a big round of laughter from everyone in the room. Again another one of those cases where the older generation buys into the propaganda but the front line warriors get to see the truth. This is one of the Russians that I'm rooting to return home, resume a normal life, and be honest about the bullshit reasons for Putin's war.
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Yeah I'm assuming anything on that show is vetted out in advance. It's a chance to soften that hardline rhetoric and temper expectations of the victory goals. Will be interesting if this generates a gradual shift in tone over the next few days. If so then I'm thinking Putin is trying to figure out a suitable off ramp and looking to consolidate whatever gains possible.
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"The couple claims what happened next was the 9-year-old hit the Nashes’ daughter, Jordan Nash, and she defended herself. The child was furious that the girl was fighting back." Gotdamn Russian invasion has already started! Sleeper agents already raising their kids among us!
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Here is a graphic with casualties per region. Noticeably light is Moscow, St Petersberg, and....Chechnya. TikTok warriors still surviving all of those intense firefights with those traffic lights.
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Understood once this is over that we will be adding in the lion share to rebuild but any ideas on their current monthly operational costs? And how much are we floating them right now?
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Agreed if we could get a coup with a full pivot from this dinosaur mentality exhibited by Tyrantsaurus Vlad then there would be a willingness to open up for (limited) western business. #1 avg Ruskie has got to understand the west is not their enemy. We never wanted to invade, just stop fucking shit up with everyone else. We just want to live in a world where we can sponsor both Ukrainian tractors and Russian cam girls. Is that so wrong to want the best of both worlds?
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Anyone have some projections on the financial stability for both Russia and Ukrain? As this meanders along it may be more of an economic attrition that decides this war. Below article covers some of the pending default details for RU. The narrowly avoided default at the start of May but has another deadline coming up on the 25th. What are the implications if they do default? How soon would that impact the purchasing power of the avg citizen? Putin has been walking a tightrope, still trying to ride out a losing ticket, desperately trying to reinforce losses without committing to a full mobilization. He's afraid of public sentiment shifting on him, he can control the mobilization narrative but he can't indefinitely control the economic plunge. Plus with all of the focus on Russia I'm still concerned about Ukraine's finances. Sure they are getting plenty of military assistance but how long can they sustain their economy during a total war? If it becomes a game of economic chicken who balks first? https://www.cnbc.com/2022/05/10/russia-still-faces-high-default-probability-despite-payment-analysts-say.html
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Ukrainian drone in action Knock knock Who's there? Ka Ka who? KA-BOOM!
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Sentiment may be shifting in China. Former ambassador to Ukraine gave some opinions on the war and they don't follow Xi's current narrative. Article was taken down by censors but interesting to see if a different perspective is brewing. Especially interesting are some ideas on the new international world order after Russia's defeat with predictions for a reformed UN or even possibly a new international council if the West can't get the desired changes. Not sure how likely that all is but something to keep in mind as there will be some severe geopolitical shifts once the post-pandemic, post-war, post-recession trifecta circulates across the globe. https://gaodawei.wordpress.com/2022/05/10/fmr-prc-amb-to-ukraine-on-russias-impending-defeat-and-international-relations/
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