09:51
When you hear Putin’s threats and how the West has cowered all these years and let Russia mismanage internally and bully its small neighbors.
Ukraine has thus seen through Putin’s hand and he had nothing. Ukraine has done this completely on its own, they did not back down but took the fight.
In the not too distant future, they have completely on their own thrown Russia out of Ukraine.
12:49
A thought that struck me, if the blogger had written a book about a Russian invasion where they got beaten as in real life, no one would have bought that book two years ago and he would have been ridiculed.
We have lived in some kind of vision of a Russia that grew strong.
12:59
Then thought two,
Putin has attacked Soviet-style with Soviet equipment but without the numbers.
If he had had 3 echelons with 300,000 men in each, I think it would have looked different and they could have achieved their attack goals by “saturating” the defense, they simply do not have time to knock out everything that advances and gets overrun.
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It is still not clear to me how this attack was carried out, did he commit everything in one wave without real reserves?
There was talk in the beginning that he committed 60% in a couple of days, were the remaining 40% operational battalions or Rosgvardia and Chechens?
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Then I am inclined to think they have had maximum bad luck due to idiocy. They waited for the Olympics to end and then there was a thaw in February which is unusual and the soldiers got bored and sold rations + fuel and the combat value generally dropped sharply.
If 200,000 men had attacked in a coordinated way and as probably planned, eastern Ukraine would probably have been lost and a larger encirclement in the east would have been Putin’s negotiating advantage.
But then reality knocked and Putin is at best a little crazy so basically everything that could go wrong has gone wrong.
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If it is now true that some kind of general mobilization is being carried out, it is in Ukraine’s interest to defeat the Russian army as soon as possible so expect more initiatives on all front sections with encirclements and surrenders.
If you can throw Russia out of Ukrainian territory before they have brought up reserves, you create a high threshold for Russia to invade again.
13:07
Regarding NATO membership, no-fly zones, harsh statements, I am of the very firm opinion that we should basically let Ukraine defeat Russia and not say/do too much.
Anything that can be interpreted as a stab in the back will give rise to a stab-in-the-back legend.
Getting really beaten badly by Ukraine completely on its own is hard to spin into something credible.
In the long run, we want a more peaceful Russia and Belarus and not a country that retreats, licks its wounds and tries again in 10 years.
Putin has given us a chance to make Russia a better country.
15:51
An occasion like this to change the world for the better does not come very often and is usually associated with a very great effort from others?
I think Napoleon, WW1, Hitler, the Cold War.
Now Putin has on his own gone from invasion to potential national collapse in a few weeks which must be somewhat of a record 🙂
If the Russian citizen feels that the yoke has been thrown off and gets a fair chance, the desire for revenge is probably low, especially if the West does not interfere now when Ukraine has already won completely on its own.
The EU has a big role to play, we are major consumers of the raw materials that Ukraine and Russia have and their neighbors. Ukraine should over (a long) time be admitted to the EU and we have fair trade agreements with Russia.
If I were named Xi Jinping, I would completely give up Taiwan and keep a low profile for quite a few years hoping that the world’s attention does not shift to China.
16:01
These are actually quite funny, this time a Ukrainian on a motorcycle stealing a heavy mortar 🙂
https://twitter.com/dohuyaUmnyi/status/1499725455288582149
16:11
The Russians are rolling through Volnovakha so one can guess that Mariupol is completely cut off now.
Also fighting around Mykolaiv west of the Dnipro and closer to Zaporizhzhia.
So there is still some advance on the southern offensive.
Again it feels like a misprioritization to strike Kherson, Odessa, Mykolaiv when instead one should have secured the crossings over the Dnipro and pushed north east of the Dnipro hoping to encircle the Ukrainian units holding the old ceasefire line and force some kind of freeze where you control eastern Ukraine up to the Dnipro.
“Denying Ukraine the sea” is a very small gain which is also quite hard to defend compared to a couple of crossings over the Dnipro.
09:43
Yes, there is a lot of reporting of Russian information which is propaganda.
I basically only read statements from the Ukrainian side and try to piece them together with videos.
Exactly that when the media reports Russian statements you just become part of their propaganda, “Putin threatens Sweden”, “Russian aircraft over Sweden”, “nuclear power plant threatened, new Chernobyl”, “Russian units in Kiev (OMON who got lost)”, “the Russian convoy threatens Kiev (Winter War 2.0)”.
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Apparently, you are not allowed to criticize state media but I feel that quite a few messages at the beginning came from media channels friendly to Russia. After all, we have had since 2014 to learn to recognize it. Then Samnytt and Fria Tider are definitely puff pieces for Russia, “Ukraine will execute ALL prisoners” etc.