13:04
Below is probably one of the more positive posts, it is also speculative until it isn’t. It took a while to get a handle on everything that was swirling, it has been going on for about a week.
We have high-fived for top-shelf armor deliveries and that the free West has closed ranks but much else has also happened, puzzle pieces have come in spurts and have not always been completely clear;
-China clearly distances itself from Russia according to the Financial Times (Surtrutn posted in the thread).
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-The Russians are going all in between Vuhledar – Siversk, they are sacrificing their elite units VDV, Guards, and Marine infantry and showing great willingness to make progress immediately.
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-Progozin continues to act outside the norm, most recently praising Ukraine’s defense capability after a couple of weeks of strange behavior.
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-Russian media reports that Turkey supports Zelensky’s peace proposal which is to the 1991 borders (Surtrutn posted in the thread)
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-A Russian mediator is to go to Turkey and meet a Ukrainian mediator this week (Surtrutn posted in the thread)
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-Ukraine has announced that the terrain supports an offensive in the north and that the units have been topped up with the equipment they requested.
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-Ukraine has announced that the 2nd Army is considering surrender if Ukraine starts sniffing around Luhansk.
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-Russian media on all channels now broadcasts that Russia is at war with NATO and not Ukraine (stab-in-the-back legend and a valid reason to get beaten).
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-Pro-Russian bloggers are completely out of sorts, either quite silent or occupied with other things.
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-The first canary in the coal mine, Girkin, mostly sits and speculates on how Putin will be killed.
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-We have had no missile attacks for a while now (may be unrelated).
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-Ukraine has not started its winter offensive (may be unrelated).
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-Statements that all frozen Russian assets should go to Ukraine (may be unrelated).
The floodgates for Western armor were opened so suddenly there must be underlying reasons, why did my idol Macron choose to go from last to first overnight with the living genius Scholz limping behind as a good second?
If I put this quite speculative puzzle together, Russia will throw in the towel very soon.
Very soon to me means during the first half of 2023 before Russian troops leave Ukraine.
A reasonable middle ground is that they will leave all Ukrainian territory and then get some kind of eased sanctions, immunity from prosecution for the elite and all that. Putin, very doubtful if he will escape hanging, hard to assess but there must be enormous tensions?
Immunity from prosecution for the elite is probably the key, officers and soldiers will be sent to The Hague in a few trains.
The other thing they want to keep is their money. If they can let go of Ukraine to live their lives in luxury they will take it and then they must let go of Ukraine before they get kicked out.
The living gods Scholz and Macron will step up as negotiators and take diplomacy to new heights. Some will feel that Russia is not punished enough but I am confident that these two do what is best for themselves and the ruling elite in Russia.
If I may guess, China has put its foot down very hard right on Putin’s age-sensitive toes. I know the usual narrative circulates that they wholeheartedly support Russia and that I believed they previously had a ban on tanks.
If this agreement existed, it no longer applies (obviously) and China is a power player so it could very well be a course change from China that made Macron and Scholz dare to turn their coats?
Then I think China prefers a weak Russia that they can tie economically in the absence of other options for Russia rather than the Russians coming out of the war strengthened with reinforced imperial ambitions.
If this is even partly true, the Chinese have shown themselves pragmatic and capable of realpolitik – just as I have actually perceived them all the years I have worked with them.
It is impossible to stop smuggling of everything they send to Russia so that is irrelevant, what is however the nail in the coffin for Putin is if China has given up on attacking Taiwan which was needed to continue his little project of taking over the world.
It is in that he stands completely alone and cries so his whole body shakes right now.
I give it a probability of 1 that the war is over in the first half of 2023 instead of the whole year 2023, I join Pasiikiivi.
Do we have Putin with today’s newspaper on moving image the last week (worth a try)?
It would be nice if one could keep one’s lifeline to China and that it didn’t go up in a world war. I know I am a bit biased in this…
We can be pretty sure that suddenly everything happens at once here, one morning like any other Twitter crashes and we sit and chug craft beer straight from the can and high-five in the thread the dullest of Tuesday mornings.
14:00
Yes, it has been like that all the time, Ukraine has quietly pushed forward a bit at Bilohorivka and Erik14 posts that Ukraine is zooming in on Horlivka and what is happening up at Kreminna.
The media doesn’t like to write about it but when a kilometer of potato field and an old open-pit mine are abandoned by Ukraine it becomes war-deciding. Lysychansk or Severodonetsk was a key city and war-deciding when Ukraine left them…
14:15
If you think in terms of grocery store tactics, the attacks on Bakhmut and Soledar are positioning ahead of negotiations, and the mobilization is also an attempt to strengthen the position ahead of negotiations (not so simple, of course).
Russia only has a negotiating position until their army flees across the border and they no longer have any land to give back.
18:12
At first, the winners wrote history and the Soviet Union got to write some WWII history the way they wanted it?
Then during the Cold War, it was in vogue to take the Russian threat seriously, budget submarines were talked about a lot in the 80s and 90s, and it was suspected that the defense dangled the Russian threat to get funding (which I think was perfectly fine if they did).
During conscription, we trained for Operation Garbo style war in Sweden; we were supposed to get up and stop all airborne landings on the Uppsala plains because I1 had already messed things up in the barracks with accidental shootings and ditch crashes and never got going. Then we were probably also supposed to cut them off in Oxelösund just as they landed; my memory fails on how we were supposed to manage both, but since I1 had started fighting among themselves as soon as it got dark and couldn’t say “Bulle,” it was probably needed.
-When I see this as an adult and after the Ukraine war, it’s highly unlikely that the Russians got very far, and had they landed, they would have been their own worst enemy. There was also a whole brigade on Gotland then and one of the world’s better fleets for inland seas + lots of air, artillery, coastal artillery, fixed minefields, submarines, brigades, home guard, coastal missiles, air defense missiles, fighters in all forms, and this was before Iskander et al. made their entrance.
The communism free pass, the great atrocities have never been scrutinized in the same way as Nazism.
In recent years, an extremely well-executed Russian psyops where Russia itself wants to be a big threat. We see it all the time, Ukraine cleans up in Kherson and the media yawns, but when the Russians take a suburb in Bakhmut, the war is almost won and Ukraine occupied. The big missile Satan 2 is basically a game changer that will create high tsunamis, etc.
All of the above is of course wrong, the only thing I know for sure is that they will be remembered for Ukraine and forever have lost their position as a world player, which they really never had. A geopolitical atomic bomb.
18:17
In this war, there is no win for the Russians, there is no frozen front/war or that Ukraine cedes land. It will go painfully fast for the Russians this half-year if they refuse peace.
But I don’t think they will because now we’re talking about the entire future of the influential, their lives, and they have a chance here to save it. You do that by giving back all land to Ukraine and retreating BEFORE being thrown out, that is the only bargaining chip they have. That window is probably closed in a few months max, when the army starts spontaneous retreat from Crimea and LPR and DPR switch sides.
21:05
My Ukrainian is not good and we support Ukraine here but…
If they had seen a Russian in a Russian uniform, it wouldn’t have looked like that.
The translation I’ve been given is that they say something like – “we are Ukrainians, same side,” and then he stands fully visible.
Already there they have lost.
No one likes to see death struggles and here people are upset because they were tricked into thinking it was a Ukrainian.
When the Russian rifle squad ignored that there was a tank coming that the Ukrainians had stolen – then it was good.
13:00
Soledar and Bakhmut are a nothing-burger, there is a line between Siversk – Bakhmut and an anchor west of that. Soledar is somewhere in the middle and Ukraine has turned every community/city into a fortress. The video yesterday with the KSP in the basement is probably completely according to the manual?
The Russians have made breakthroughs in Soledar and Bakhmut and both locations are contested.
The “main line” which is really the “next line” goes via Kramatorsk/Slovyansk and down to Horlivka somewhere. It’s enough to look at the map to understand that it is easier to defend, larger communities that Ukraine fortifies with new units before those tired from the Bakhmut-Siversk line presumably retreat.
It is never whole brigades in these defensive battles but 1-2 battalions from the brigades that rotate. The Russians exhaust one battalion and then bring in the next, so the VDV, Guards, and Marine infantry participating are to be considered spent. How many and which is a bit unclear.
There is no reason for a new big sour day like we had at Lysychansk because there they lost dominant terrain (but the Russians threw themselves over the next line so it didn’t matter). Here the next line goes in a half arc around and is anchored north and south in formidable forts.
-A bit like running into a lobster trap and thinking you have won.
The Siversky Donets is also the protection against northern Luhansk and certainly it should freeze over but it is a large forest area that UA should be able to defend southwards.
Any successes right now are because elite units are being deployed in the battles. Previously it has been mobilized troops running across the fields and that went so-so. Soon the newly mobilized will be all they have if they continue like this.