Russia attacks Ukraine

How the fuck did this dude get his application accepted by the Ukrainian Embassy? He looks like he's constantly so fucking drunk he can barely talk:

 
This is really getting out of hand ...

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Crni Vuk said:
But Starlink saved Ukraine.
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Starlink might actually save my ass while you are talking shit. Once my internet guy totally loses his mind and tries to fuck me over even more I am switching to Starlink.

“The chances are low but rising,” said Ulrich Kühn, a nuclear expert at the University of Hamburg and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “The war is not going well for the Russians,” he observed, “and the pressure from the West is increasing.”

Putin might fire a weapon at an uninhabited area instead of at troops, Kühn said. In a 2018 study, he laid out a crisis scenario in which Moscow detonated a bomb over a remote part of the North Sea as a way to signal deadlier strikes to come.

“It feels horrible to talk about these things,” Kühn said in an interview. “But we have to consider that this is becoming a possibility.”

Washington expects more atomic moves from Putin in the days ahead. Moscow is likely to “increasingly rely on its nuclear deterrent to signal the West and project strength” as the war and its consequences weaken Russia, Lt. Gen. Scott D. Berrier, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, told the House Armed Services Committee on Thursday.

President Joe Biden is traveling to a NATO summit in Brussels this week to discuss the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The agenda is expected to include how the alliance will respond if Russia employs chemical, biological, cyber or nuclear weapons.

James R. Clapper Jr., a retired Air Force general who served as President Barack Obama’s director of national intelligence, said Moscow had lowered its bar for atomic use after the Cold War when the Russian army fell into disarray. Today, he added, Russia regards nuclear arms as utilitarian rather than unthinkable.

“They didn’t care,” Clapper said of Russian troops’ risking a radiation release earlier this month when they attacked the Zaporizhzhia nuclear reactor site — the largest not only in Ukraine but in Europe. “They went ahead and fired on it. That’s indicative of the Russian laissez-faire attitude. They don’t make the distinctions that we do on nuclear weapons.”

Putin announced last month that he was putting Russian nuclear forces into “special combat readiness.” Pavel Podvig, a longtime researcher of Russia’s nuclear forces, said the alert had most likely primed the Russian command and control system for the possibility of receiving a nuclear order.

It’s unclear how Russia exerts control over its arsenal of less destructive arms. But some American politicians and experts have denounced the smaller weapons on both sides as threatening to upend the global balance of nuclear terror.

For Russia, military analysts note, edgy displays of the less destructive arms have let Putin polish his reputation for deadly brinkmanship and expand the zone of intimidation he needs to fight a bloody conventional war.

“Putin is using nuclear deterrence to have his way in Ukraine,” said Nina Tannenwald, a political scientist at Brown University who recently profiled the less powerful armaments. “His nuclear weapons keep the West from intervening.”

A global race for the smaller arms is intensifying. Though such weapons are less destructive by Cold War standards, modern estimates show that the equivalent of half a Hiroshima bomb, if detonated in midtown Manhattan, would kill or injure half a million people.

The case against these arms is that they undermine the nuclear taboo and make crisis situations even more dangerous. Their less destructive nature, critics say, can feed the illusion of atomic control when in fact their use can suddenly flare into a full-blown nuclear war. A simulation devised by experts at Princeton University starts with Moscow firing a nuclear warning shot; NATO responds with a small strike, and the ensuing war yields more than 90 million casualties in its first few hours.

No arms control treaties regulate the lesser warheads, known sometimes as tactical or nonstrategic nuclear weapons, so the nuclear superpowers make and deploy as many as they want. Russia has perhaps 2,000, according to Hans M. Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists, a private group in Washington. And the United States has roughly 100 in Europe, a number limited by domestic policy disputes and the political complexities of basing them among NATO allies, whose populations often resist and protest the weapons’ presence.

Russia’s atomic war doctrine came to be known as “escalate to de-escalate” — meaning routed troops would fire a nuclear weapon to stun an aggressor into retreat or submission. Moscow repeatedly practiced the tactic in field exercises. In 1999, for instance, a large drill simulated a NATO attack on Kaliningrad, the Russian enclave on the Baltic Sea. The exercise had Russian forces in disarray until Moscow fired nuclear arms at Poland and the United States.

Kühn of the University of Hamburg said the defensive training drills of the 1990s had turned toward offense in the 2000s as the Russian army regained some of its former strength.

Concurrent with its new offensive strategy, Russia embarked on a modernization of its nuclear forces, including its less destructive arms. As in the West, some of the warheads were given variable explosive yields that could be dialed up or down depending on the military situation.

A centerpiece of the new arsenal was the Iskander-M, first deployed in 2005. The mobile launcher can fire two missiles that travel roughly 300 miles. The missiles can carry conventional as well as nuclear warheads. Russian figures put the smallest nuclear blast from those missiles at roughly a third that of the Hiroshima bomb.

Before the Russian army invaded Ukraine, satellite images showed that Moscow had deployed Iskander missile batteries in Belarus and to its east in Russian territory. There’s no public data on whether Russia has armed any of the Iskanders with nuclear warheads.

Nikolai Sokov, a former Russian diplomat who negotiated arms control treaties in Soviet times, said that nuclear warheads could also be placed on cruise missiles. The low-flying weapons, launched from planes, ships or the ground, hug the local terrain to avoid detection by enemy radar.

From inside Russian territory, he said, “they can reach all of Europe,” including Britain.

Over the years, the United States and its NATO allies have sought to rival Russia’s arsenal of lesser nuclear arms. It started decades ago as the United States began sending bombs for fighter jets to military bases in Belgium, Germany, Italy, Turkey and the Netherlands. Kühn noted that the alliance, in contrast to Russia, does not conduct field drills practicing a transition from conventional to nuclear war.

In 2010, Obama, who had long advocated for a “nuclear-free world,” decided to refurbish and improve the NATO weapons, turning them into smart bombs with maneuverable fins that made their targeting highly precise. That, in turn, gave war planners the freedom to lower the weapons’ variable explosive force to as little as 2% of that of the Hiroshima bomb.

The reduced blast capability made breaking the nuclear taboo “more thinkable,” Gen. James E. Cartwright, a vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Obama, warned at the time. He nonetheless backed the program because the high degree of precision lowered the risk of collateral damage and civilian casualties. But after years of funding and manufacturing delays, the refurbished bomb, known as the B61 Model 12, is not expected to be deployed in Europe until next year, Kristensen said.

The steady Russian buildups and the slow U.S. responses prompted the Trump administration to propose a new missile warhead in 2018. Its destructive force was seen as roughly half that of the Hiroshima bomb, according to Kristensen. It was to be deployed on the nation’s fleet of 14 ballistic missile submarines.

While some experts warned that the bomb, known as the W76 Model 2, could make it more tempting for a president to order a nuclear strike, the Trump administration argued that the weapon would lower the risk of war by ensuring that Russia would face the threat of proportional counterstrikes. It was deployed in late 2019.

“It’s all about psychology — deadly psychology,” said Franklin C. Miller, a nuclear expert who backed the new warhead and, before leaving public office in 2005, held Pentagon and White House posts for three decades. “If your opponent thinks he has a battlefield edge, you try to convince him that he’s wrong.”

When he was a candidate for the presidency, Biden called the less powerful warhead a “bad idea” that would make presidents “more inclined” to use it. But Kristensen said the Biden administration seemed unlikely to remove the new warhead from the nation’s submarines.

It’s unclear how Biden would respond to the use of a nuclear weapon by Putin.

Nuclear war plans are one of Washington’s most deeply held secrets. Experts say that the war-fighting plans in general go from warning shots to single strikes to multiple retaliations and that the hardest question is whether there are reliable ways to prevent a conflict from escalating.

Even Clapper, the former director of national intelligence, said he was unsure how he would advise Biden if Putin unleashed his nuclear arms.

“When do you stop?” he asked of nuclear retaliation. “You can’t just keep turning the other cheek. At some point we’d have to do something.”

A U.S. response to a small Russian blast, experts say, might be to fire one of the new submarine-launched warheads into the wilds of Siberia or at a military base inside Russia. Miller, the former government nuclear official and a former chairman of NATO’s nuclear policy committee, said such a blast would be a way of signaling to Moscow that “this is serious, that things are getting out of hand.”

Military strategists say a tit-for-tat rejoinder would throw the responsibility for further escalation back at Russia, making Moscow feel its ominous weight and ideally keeping the situation from spinning out of control despite the dangers in war of miscalculation and accident.

In a darker scenario, Putin might resort to using atomic arms if the war in Ukraine spilled into neighboring NATO states. All NATO members, including the United States, are obliged to defend one another — potentially with salvos of nuclear warheads.

Tannenwald, the political scientist at Brown University, wondered if the old protections of nuclear deterrence, now rooted in opposing lines of less destructive arms, would succeed in keeping the peace.

“It sure doesn’t feel that way in a crisis,” she said.

© 2022 The New York Times Company
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Oh I can't wait for the civil war,

I hate anyone who is not poor,

I hate all women

and hate all men my age

Dead in a ditch is all the wish me

I hate all minorities

They don't have the mind to comprehend anything

beyond their identity.

So I hope they breathe fire in

At the earliest hours of dawn,

before they knew what hit them,

A dynasty of rot takes its final form

I pray to the darkest ones,

beneath the mantled crust,

encompassing the brigthest stars above

to inflict half the pain that is in my bowls

my bones and soul

To every creature that walks upright

So I can watch them cry for a thousand years

to satiate my selfish thirst that they thrust upon me

It's down to survival now,

and I wish you no tomorrow.
 
TJQKA said:
♬
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I wanna die... in a waaaar
I wanna die... innn a war
Just war? Sure
I just want war
Unjust war, sure
I just want war

Let me die, in a war please
There's a really blatant untapped need
For some purpose, societally
Release pent up feelings, inside of meeeee

All these young men with nothing to do
Why not give them a war to give their lives to
You can start a war with any country
If that won't do - a civil war's plenty
I'm not prepared for martial combat
But maybe in a war a tank will roll me flat
Then I can be like Flat Stanley
Except, like, fuckin' dead
Yeah!

Don't worry, this is just a joke.
Who want's a war?
Heh, I sure don't.
I'd hate to develop camaraderie
With a community that thinks like me
Shares my values and morality
Tells me who to kill and what it means
But oh shucks, then I'd have to kill and die
For a cause that's far far greater than mine!

I'd much rather work my shitty 9-to-5
Watch Netflix and play games with my time
Get depressed and take it all out on my wife
I'm a really big fan of modern life!

Race war, cyber war, space war
Cyber space race war
Proxy war, world war, class war, great war
Guerilla war, gorilla war, total war, religious war
Cold war, hot war, nuclear war?
Yeah, sure!

I wanna die... in a waaaar
I wanna die... innn a war
Just let me dieee innn a waaaar
(It kind of sounds like you just want to die)
Ha, hA, HA, ha!





Yup.




Please I can't do it myself
 


"This is a fucking circus, not a military operation"

You mean not a SpECiaL MiLiTary O P E R A T I O N.
 
eissa said:


"This is a fucking circus, not a military operation"

You mean not a SpECiaL MiLiTary O P E R A T I O N.
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Three things:

1) "Even Chechnya wasn't this bad". If a Russian soldier is saying this, especially if it's one that experienced either of the Chechen wars, you know that either shit is really fucked up, or they're being extremely hyperbolic. Either way thing's would have to be shitty to make that statement.
2) "Cargo 200" is military slang, primary for ex-Soviet states, which basically means "corpses of your own fallen combatants". Which means that, if this is real and not fabricated, there are Russian vehicles and convoys which have been lugging around corpses in their vehicles for days because they can't evac them. This brings me to my next point:
3) I can't say for certain that this isn't a fabrication - and so while I would love to take it "come as is", that's a very easy trap to fall for. In reality, it's not that hard to get some dude speaking Russian (plenty of Ukrainians speak perfect Russian) over audio, and then clip that audio to a slideshow video and tell everyone it was an intercepted phone call. I may sound overly paranoid, I've seen people - especially people who've never covered a war before, try to cover this war and just get swamped into believing every shit piece propaganda article they find during their coverage. I've seen at least three YouTubers now who have totally ruined their credibility because they fell for the trap and started parroting propaganda videos from both sides thinking they were reporting actual news, and then had to come out and make an apology video promising to do better all the while just being shell shocked at the realization of just how fucking crazy and deep the propaganda hole goes.

Not to mention that, but that video is from news.com.au, which is about as credible as a source in this war as CNN or FOX. I think I'll adopt a 'wait and see' method for that video (and many others) to see if it get's verified by more credible sources, or if further proof pops up to verify it. I know it sounds crazy to take that approach to every single media clip you see, but at this point I've found more fact in the fucking YouTube comments that I've taken the time to fact check than I have in certain media outlets.

That all being said - Russian soldiers not being able to evac their dead and wounded is certainly a believable story, it's something that's happened many times before to many different militaries. I've heard similar from US and AUS vets who served in Vietnam.
 
Mστh said:
Three things:

1) "Even Chechnya wasn't this bad". If a Russian soldier is saying this, especially if it's one that experienced either of the Chechen wars, you know that either shit is really fucked up, or they're being extremely hyperbolic. Either way thing's would have to be shitty to make that statement.
2) "Cargo 200" is military slang, primary for ex-Soviet states, which basically means "corpses of your own fallen combatants". Which means that, if this is real and not fabricated, there are Russian vehicles and convoys which have been lugging around corpses in their vehicles for days because they can't evac them. This brings me to my next point:
3) I can't say for certain that this isn't a fabrication - and so while I would love to take it "come as is", that's a very easy trap to fall for. In reality, it's not that hard to get some dude speaking Russian (plenty of Ukrainians speak perfect Russian) over audio, and then clip that audio to a slideshow video and tell everyone it was an intercepted phone call. I may sound overly paranoid, I've seen people - especially people who've never covered a war before, try to cover this war and just get swamped into believing every shit piece propaganda article they find during their coverage. I've seen at least three YouTubers now who have totally ruined their credibility because they fell for the trap and started parroting propaganda videos from both sides thinking they were reporting actual news, and then had to come out and make an apology video promising to do better all the while just being shell shocked at the realization of just how fucking crazy and deep the propaganda hole goes.

Not to mention that, but that video is from news.com.au, which is about as credible as a source in this war as CNN or FOX. I think I'll adopt a 'wait and see' method for that video (and many others) to see if it get's verified by more credible sources, or if further proof pops up to verify it. I know it sounds crazy to take that approach to every single media clip you see, but at this point I've found more fact in the fucking YouTube comments that I've taken the time to fact check than I have in certain media outlets.

That all being said - Russian soldiers not being able to evac their dead and wounded is certainly a believable story, it's something that's happened many times before to many different militaries. I've heard similar from US and AUS vets who served in Vietnam.
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Anything that use OSINT source is fine by me. Especially since Russian losses in vehicles alone have been mapped. https://www.oryxspioenkop.com/2022/02/attack-on-europe-documenting-equipment.html
 
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Thanks, I'll use that list to reference from now on.

I also don't know about the legitimacy of the story, but have you guys heard about the missile strike on the Ukrainian base that was being used to train the "International Legion" volunteers? I believe it was at Yavoriv, and people are saying that around 30 foreign volunteers got pulverized, with about 100 more injured. Though I'm hearing from people that supposedly "know someone" the foreign casualties were higher than 30-35, much higher.

It's clear a missile strike happened, but whether the casualties were minimal, or whether the bulk of the foreign fighters were killed like the Russian MOD says (they're claiming 180-200+), well who can say. I'm willing to bet it's somewhere in between.
 
War has never been covered so well with so much fog of war also getting in the way.
 
TorontoReign said:
War has never been covered so well with so much fog of war also getting in the way.
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Considering the pro-Russian source only just released their own footage, that is from about 24th Feb which then two weeks later only got released. Even though it does not involve any combat at all.

Can't blame us clueless wannabe commentators. Only worked with what were and are currently available.
 
TorontoReign said:
War has never been covered so well with so much fog of war also getting in the way.
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This is as much of a "meme war" as it is an actuall war. Probably due to the very high converage - at least by western media. I don't think social media played such a huge role in previous conflicts compared to this one.
Which of course means that there will be >propaganda< on both sides. Obviously. So yeah. One should also take things with a grain of salt when it's coming from Ukraine.
I would say though when it comes to the media side Ukraine definetly does a much much better job than Russia. You just can't beat farmers stealing tanks.

However, several sources like Pentagon, German Bundeswehr experts have stated that there are very strong signs that something is really not working as intended in the Russian army and that the Ukrainian defense is pretty solid and much better than many expected.

How long they can hold that up? And can Russia regroup their military to be more efficient? I guess that remains to be seen. This is really a fucked up situation. Both sides are basically in a stalemate. Ukraine probaby doesn't have the necessary resources to really defeat Russia. But Russia can not just overtake Ukraine without destroying themself.
 
Here's a tip for my Russian friends.

Memes don't work when you're firing artillery at civilians.

Oh and, don't mess with the best.


Programmed to skip to time for relevance.




 
With Americans you can be sure about one thing. They will always do the right thing after they tried everything else.
 
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