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956 Worldwide

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Posts posted by 956 Worldwide

  1. 15 minutes ago, SimonBolivar said:

    Everything seems to be pointing to full blown everything too. No mention of Lviv yet, but certainly looking bad for Kharkiv and ultimately Kyiv.

    For some context, Ukraine is fucking huge and does have some air defenses. Lviv to Mariupol is like Fort Stockton to Beaumont. Lviv would be a stretch for them even just an aerial bombardment if you wanted to be at all precise and not risk losing air assets. It’s also really, really gotdamn close to NATO turf in Poland and Slovakia.  Shooting missiles at Lviv is how you get WWIII with nukes by accident.  Won’t be surprised if the U.S. phones don’t get a ring when this gets kicked off to reassure that NATO isn’t a target. 

  2. 17 minutes ago, Chad Fuck said:

    Go on....

    I think I mentioned, but Putin not using the patronymic “Sergei Yevgenyevich” in favor of just “Sergei” is a pretty big show of disrespect, especially as even earlier in the clip you hear Naryshkin using the polite form.  The context is important. If this was unfilmed, dead of night in the sit room with empty coffee cups, then saying “What do you think, Sergei” is a totally different thing and would express familiarity and a desire for unvarnished thoughts. This is…not that. 
     

    This thing was filmed well in advance. Easy enough for Putin to say “Gotdammit Sergei you’re flubbing your lines and look like a scared kid. Let’s do this take again.” 

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  3. 9 minutes ago, Captainant said:

    Sounds like a repeat of the 2014 playbook

    Information warfare -> cyber warfare -> physical warfare

    Important to note that Kremlin doctrine does not draw bright lines between these types of warfare. The Kremlin views them as inextricably linked and they are all deployed in the service of Russian strategic goals. 
     

    That’s why I laugh at the Russia appeasers. Russia is already in a permanent conflict with us and it’s spelled out in their own documents. It’s kind of like “what if we just don’t ACCEPT their declaration of war?”

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  4. Also of note- several accounts posting OSINT related stuff on Ukraine— geolocation, equipment spotting, etc— were knocked offline earlier today and yesterday via coordinates bots that flagged their accounts as inappropriate to Twitter. Then Twitter’s own bots took over and turned the accounts off, customer service takes hours to review.

    Modern warfare is gonna be a deeply weird thing, folks. 

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  5. Ukrainian banks and state institutions are undergoing a massive DDoS attack right now.  Soldiers in Donbas have been getting texts to the effect of “our army will wipe you out within 2 days, leave while you can.”

    Media reports that a full scale invasion within 48 hours is expected and that Biden called Zelenskyy to tell him. 

  6. 6 minutes ago, InkaUtexas said:

    One thing I did see today was Russian rocket systems going off. Full salvos an reports of them hitting civilian areas. Right now reports of a large explosion in Donetsk. 

     

    They’ve been launching Grads for a couple days and hit a power station.  Nasty things, not a lot of precision at all.  Likely both trying to get Ukraine to respond— and to get the front line off balance and “used” to the heavier shelling and rocket attacks so once the real thing comes, it will take some time to sink in. 

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  7. 1 minute ago, elfenix said:

    *elfenix pictures a ukranian defense minister at the grand bazaar in istanbul haggling with an arms merchant over small glasses of turkish tea

    i, too, can increment the dates and re-record video

    These clowns aren’t even trying. The car bomb they filmed last weekend that allegedly destroyed the separatist’s SUV? They didn’t want to blow up his fancy one so they swapped the plate onto a jalopy. 

  8. 19 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:

    Anybody got more on this story out of Reuters?

    I don't pay for Reuters.  But that would seem to tell me that Putin knows that one of the side effects of this move is that the rest of em (see: the Baltics) are going to be aggressive as shit about defending themselves going forward, and Putin knows that the message he's sent by Russian action here has some repercussions he may not want to deal with later on.

    Putin is going to get a lot out of this.  The question is how much goes on the negative side of the ledger for him, and how will those balance out.  That he's sending a clear message to the rest of Europe of "best be closely aligned with the US for your security needs, or Russia will just conquer your ass" is a risky one for him.

    I wouldn’t read more into this other than that Ukraine is an exception because it’s the one he is talking about right now. The whole idea is fucking laughable because Russia currently has troops stationed without local government consent in Moldova and he had a whole fucking invasion in Georgia and is still there, too. 
     

    Don’t parse Putin’s words and messaging too much when he’s announcing plans or justifying some horrible thing. Western observers do that way too much. 

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  9. 7 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:

    The boy has daily German classes at his language school in Berlin -- hodgepodge of other nationalities in there with him.  Including one Russian girl.  He said that she's been super-quiet today.  I suspect that some Russians living abroad (that is, people exposed to something other than Russian state media) have a feel for how shitty this move it.

    Not that it matters for shit.  Putin has plenty of support at home, and will go as far as he thinks he can, and that's that.

    I was overseas (in Russia actually) at school when we invaded Iraq.  We had what can only be called a struggle session as our small group participated in a “debate” that turned into eloquent verbal beat downs about how stupid America was and how bad it would all turn out. I was ambivalent going in to the debate but the experience made me want to light the fuse on a tomahawk to Baghdad just out of spite.

    Of course, those Russian students were very right about U.S. behavior in 2003 and its consequences and it remains for me a good lesson in humility and also how our lizard brains can take over no matter how smart we are. 

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  10. 31 minutes ago, SmokeyTheBear said:

    My read is that Russia cannot compete on the global stage anymore so their ethos is to bring the world down to them. Destabilize the world's governments, force mass refugees into your enemies lands (see Syria and now Ukraine into Europe), flood the world with misinformation, etc. I even think long term they could win in a climate changed world where their land becomes the new breadbasket of the world once it thaws. This feels like a loss for Russia in the short term but if he can empire build (with possible support with China), long term this could position Russia for some new Cold War that elevates Putin/Russia into real relevance. 

    I am of the opinion that it’s usually a mistake to ascribe true generational strategic thought to decision-makers, in particular when talking about individual events.  Usually this is held up as a supposed “benefit” of an autocratic regime, whose leaders can supposedly thoughtfully guide the nation based on wisdom and long-term vision, while democracies lurch from crisis to crisis.  I do not see real world events reflecting that, and especially not in the case of post-Cold War Russia or even the Soviet Union. When you do see that kind of generational thought, it’s usually megalomaniac and irrational, like Hitler- and the outlier. 
     

    I really think that Putin has decided that a democratic, Western leaning Ukraine is a threat to Russia as he sees it NOW. And he is trying to achieve a goal of ending that threat and hasn’t put much thought into generational development of Russia.  

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  11. NSIAP, it is rare that multilateral diplomacy produces anything of eloquence and thoughtfulness on any side.  The Kenyan rep on the UNSC gave a short and insightful evisceration of Putin’s claims about Ukraine and hopefully will get people in the non-aligned bloc thinking of the implications of all this to not just the post-Cold War, but post-colonial order. 

    https://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2022/feb/22/kenyas-enoy-to-un-cites-colonial-past-as-he-condemns-russian-move-into-ukraine-video

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