Working Out Some Issues in Ukraine

[Mongrel]

Just a crazy medical story. Guardian: Surgeons remove unexploded grenade lodged in Ukrainian soldier’s chest.

[Mongrel]

Look, forget about any politics for a moment and just appreciate that whoever is running Ukraine's social media campaigns is just an absolute goddamned genius.

[Z%rø]

Yeah it's sort of funny but I also actually hate it because it jerks off jingoistic american exceptionalism for the masses for public support to help the the military industrial complex sell more hardware paid for by the american tax payer

Haven't been a big fan of the meme horseshit this conflict has in it but this really seems like a new low

edit: like I get it, this is advertising so they can get hardware to defend their country but we're approaching the level of abstraction and distance from what it's for and why when it's about "Send us tanks so we can kill Russians".

Modern advertising principles and designs applied to war shit is just fucking dire, man.

[Mongrel]

Well, that's kind of the point: It's not that this genius because it's a "funny meme", it's that the Ukrainians are playing to their audience to get the help they need, and they're demonstrating that they know exactly how to do that.

Edit for your edit:

Modern advertising principles and designs applied to war shit is just fucking dire, man.

Been this way since mass media (arguably before). WWII had orders of magnitude more, only they're not our memes. That said, WWII memes have persisted and in some cases joined the Permanent Meme Canon (if such a thing exists).
______________________

In any case, it seems the US actually wasn't planning on sending Abrams (with good reason; they're giant fuel hogs given they run on jet turbines), but Germany was looking for an excuse to back out of sending Leopard 2s in spite of an increasing number of countries banding together to pool together their Leopards for Ukraine, and demanded the US send Abrams first. So the US called Scholz's bluff and now Ukraine's getting both, albeit mostly a token number of Abrams. If anyone's going to be making and selling large numbers of tanks, it's Germany.

For all the worry about escalation, Russian reaction has overall been to simply mock the new tanks with boasting they will be destroyed.

This would be a good place to mention that some of the saltier Russian hypernationalists have tallied up Russian claimed kills from 2022, revealing total Russian Ministry of Defence claims amounted to 23 entire Ukrainian armies (which would be more than 2-4 million personnel), including 7500 tanks, 372 aircraft, 750 MLRS, and several other numbers which are either more than the Ukrainians have, or, in some cases more than physically exists in the entire world.

[Mongrel]

Strong Content Warning

Yale Public Health investigation into the ongoing kidnapping of Ukrainian children by Russian forces and agents of the state on an industrial scale.

Short Twitter thread with graphics and highlights if you just want the tl;dr

There are no images of children being harmed or anything like that, but the information on its own may be very distressing.

[Mongrel]

Collaborative effort between journalists from the US, UK, Ukraine, Poland, Germany, and Estonia claims to have obtained leaked documents detailing Russian plans to effectively annex Belarus by 2030.

The "Union State", the nominal military alliance between Russia and Belarus since 1999, is something which was intended to live up to its name in the long term anyway, but Lukashenko (and Belorussians of all political stripes) have resisted further integration since then. While this plan is no invasion, Belarus would effectively cease to exist as a sovereign state. Given just the public Russian actions of the past 20 years, this isn't exactly a bombshell surprise for anyone, but leaked docs of detailed plans would certainly be embarrassing.

Russia of course already has an enormous amount of influence over Belarus and Lukashenko is still a close Putin ally, so it's fair to ask how much this matters, but - crucially - Russian influence has not been strong enough (to date) to force Belarus into being a full co-belligerent in the invasion of Ukraine.

[Mongrel]

No updates in a long while both because we all agreed that when comes to "just reading the news" we don't need a rehash, but also, really because not much has been going on. This is more about journalism than the war itself.

Russia has been trying to continue to attack of course, but mostly failing while taking enormously disproportional casualties in the current attritional stalemate, so the front lines have moved very little. The fighting in Bakhmut is very intense of course, and it may prove in the long run to have been something of a Stalingrad moment given the Russians have spent more than half a year and unthinkable numbers of lives trying to take it, but it's still just a small town where barely more than 10k people lived before the war, and controls no larger strategic points or lines. The Russians want to attack across a broad front but can't, and the Ukrainians can attack but don't want to - for now - and that's about the size of it and has been since the midwinter news that NATO would send Ukraine modern tanks.

Anyway, the main thing is that because "nothing" has been going on, news sources, even some of the more reliable ones have taken to speculating in order to fill daily updates, and while the more responsible ones usually state they're speculating, they don't go especially out of their way to make that clear. Mainstream reports will ignore this at times and print the speculation as straight claims. There's a lot more rumours than usual being presented as facts, and this problem has come to a head with the recent drone strike on the roof of the Kremlin, with various outlets claiming it was this or that party when the honest answer is we just don't know yet.

Could have been a Russian false flag, as some outlets are stating, but would you really pick something that makes you look THAT blitheringly incompetent if you had to pick a false flag target?

Could have been a Ukrainian strike to draw air defences back to Moscow/away from the front lines, but there's been no definite evidence that Ukraine actually has the reach in intel or technology to have carried out any of the attacks on targets as far away as Moscow, and when they do carry out attacks deep in Russian territory, they usually just make a coy "no comment" or a winking inference, rather than the outright denial they put out this time.

Could have been anyone else - domestic Russian dissidents, plotting Oligarchs or Russian Siloviki (i.e. Prigozhin, Kadryov, etc.) - even NATO or EU job isn't totally impossible, even if extremely improbable. Again, no one really knows yet, no one among the public anyway. Maybe we never will! Hell, we still don't know who blew up the Nordstream (various investigations have since turned up a fair amount of evidence of Russian activity in that time and location, but ultimately no government source has yet to step up to say they have irrefutable proof or have reached an official conclusion). But, oh well, someone's got to print something and so you may see this or that in the news. Did an attack happen? Well, yes, that much is true, but the rest is speculation for now.

So I just want to say to take most things right now with a bigger chunk of salt than usual, because too many journalists are getting bored, or are even gambling on being "right" by making a guess before any facts come out and hoping they guessed correctly.

All that said, we may see some real activity on the battlefields soon-ish (late May, perhaps, or early June), as the Ukrainians have recently been very aggressively targeting Russian fuel depots and railroads in Crimea or areas of Russia adjacent to Ukraine, presumably to weaken the Russians in advance of any large counter-offensive. But it'll happen when it happens.

[Mongrel]

[Mongrel]

Every soldier's dream: free dinner jumps into your lap.

[Mongrel]

Lots of speculation and repeating of Russian bloggers in the place of confirmed fact again at the moment. Also a huge explosion in seemingly pro-Ukrainian spambots and dummy accounts with clickbait and bad information.

Some of this might get picked up by conventional news sources and not accurately treated as speculative or unconfirmed, so have a little patience before getting too excited or downcast. Meanwhile on Ukrainian government portals, they set the tone with the Deputy Minister of Defence releasing a video of him just sitting in his office, silent for the entire 30 seconds. It's not a long wait anyways, as major movements tend to be properly confirmed via official Ukrainian sources in only a day or two (and any really large change is visible to the whole world on any of the daily-updated public international satellite feeds, such as NASA's).

As for Russian official sources, well, lol (at last count, the Russian ministry of Defence has claimed the entire armed forces of Ukraine has been destroyed two and a half times over).

[Büge]

[Mongrel]

The Swiss are decommissioning their 25 Leopard 2s, and will be sending them back to Germany for Germany to then export to Ukraine. Not with some cheeky, "for the Germans to dispose of as they see fit" line, no they're explicitly arranging this for them to be sent to Ukraine.

The Swiss.

[Mongrel]

Trying not to overdo the posting ITT, but the African peace mission is in Kyiv today (it's afternoon there at the moment, of course) and we got a somewhat Beckett-style comedy out of it.

I can't speak for any of the other leaders present on the mission, but South Africa's Cyril Ramaphosa, who is present as leader, has a long record as a Putin supporter/beneficiary. This resulted in a scene where Ramaphosa had to flee to a bomb shelter for safety during a sizable Russian missile strike (noticed and recorded by Reuters reporters), only to emerge and confidently state that not only Russia is not firing any missiles at Ukraine, they never even heard any air raid sirens.

[Grath]

A loooot of things can happen domestically in Russia, we could see a coup

[Mongrel]

Yeah, saw it. Big news, but I'm hesitant to take it all at face value just yet.

It's not just that Prigozhin spews wild bombastic nonsense all the time. Sure, this is over the top, even for Prigozhin, but he's still never once referred to Putin by name in all his ranting and even when he has made oblique references to Putin, the criticism is a lot softer than it would be if he was really out to get Putin. So much of the shouting is kind of a performance for domestic audiences.

It's hard to tell what's performance and what's legitimate, because most of the loud assholes have backing from government factions competing for Putin's attention and interest, and they each serve as a weird sort of spokesman in many ways. Girkin, for example, isn't dead or in jail yet because he's essentially a mouthpeice for the FSB. Prigozhin has the backing of a faction within the army which is opposed to (Defence Minister) Shoigu's, given Shoigu's abysmal performance and complete lack of military experience, but how large or influential that faction that might be is unknown.

You'll see people talking about civil war, and that's still unlikely right now. But we might finally see someone get window'd, whether it's Shoigu (if he really did order a strike on Wagner positions, which is actually semi-possible) or Prigozhin, or even someone else.

tl;dr, this isn't civil war or insurrection, it's intrigue in the royal court coming to a fever pitch. But that's still good news for Ukraine and bad news for Putin.

[Mongrel]

Wagner just took control of Rostov on Don without a fight and are actually racing north to Moscow in a military convoy headed towards Moscow, while Russian army aviation has supposedly fired on them from the air (Prigozhin claims his men shot down a military helicopter).

So okay, insurrection at least.

EDIT: At least I'm not the only one who's been left wondering what's theatre and what's not in all this.

[beatbandito]

The only thing I've read I trust is "you can't trust any source in russia right now" but war correspondents from other regions I trust have been linking this thread:

[Mongrel]

Yeah, whooooole lotta chaos. Surovikin and Alexeev (two big name Russian generals who were Wagner's primary supporters/allies within the regular Russian army) denouncing him seems pretty fatal though. Interestingly, Wagner's other founder, Dmitry Utkin (the guy with the SS collar-tab tattoos), is nowhere to be found.

Not to make too light of the situation, this thread is pretty great:

[Mongrel]

The current breaking claim is that they're turning around (the highway had already been blocked by trucks) and going back to Rostov. Lukashenko is currently claiming credit for brokering this. All unconfirmed.

[Sharkey]

So I guess you can just... un-cross the Rubicon. Good to know.