alanjjohnstone
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And don’t you think Zelensky is not trying to speed up the delivery of new military hardware by presenting a pessimistic view?
The analysis of others which you fail to present is that Russia has not got the reserves or supplies available to take advantage with a follow-up offensive.
One big reason why they are not by-passing a besieged surrounded town and going for the bigger targets just waiting for them, practically defenceless as you earlier claimed.
In many ways he is perhaps using the same ploy as Prigozhin is scaremongering to get more support. A few days ago Prigozhin was saying Wagner is
“the cement…holding the Ukrainian army in place…If the Wagner group pulls back, then the following situation will unfold. It is clear that the front will crumble, the front will crumble for the Russian borders, perhaps it crumbles even further.”
This is entirely contrary to your argument that Russian regular forces are in sufficient numbers to not only repel a Ukrainian offensive but to make advances against it.
But I think both Zelensky and Prigozhin were playing politics rather than offering realistic military scenarios.
You have repeatedly expressed the view that the only good Ukrainian is a dead Ukrainian turned to fertilizer because they are all Banderite fascist nazis.
Robbo challenges that opinion saying that just like the Russians the motivation is the mistaken concept of nationalism. I tried to demonstrate that also applied to Germans in WW2, mis-guided nationalism and how that was manipulated by the Nazis to justify their aggression. You fail to recognise the similarities to Putin’s claim of pre-emptive self-defence. You ignore Hitler used the persecution of the Sudetenland and Danzig Germans as a pretext for his aggression and portrayed himself as a humanitarian liberator of German speakers in his propaganda.
And the reason he said he launched 1941 Barbarossa because it was a pre-emptive assault against the threat of a Soviet attack and was claimed as self-defence also passed you by, too. to
I can see now why BD believe you don’t have the capacity for nuanced thought
Regardless of the indoctrination and control of media, dictators still require the consent or acquiescence of their citizens and falsely declaring the enemy as a threat is an old tried and tested way of brainwashing.
Your claim is that during WW2, being German was sufficient to be called a Nazi. Again I presented a fact, something you cannot appreciate. More than half of Germans were not Nazis.
Even the Nazis knew the truth
From a 1938 government report on the mood of industrial workers in Nazi Germany:
“Among industrial workers there are many who do not give a damn about the successes of the Hitler system and have only scorn and contempt for the whole show. Others, however, say: ‘Well, there are a lot of things Adolf does not know about himself and which he does not want’. But one is never quite sure with them whether they mean it seriously or only want to protect their backs.
Naturally, there are also many who have become un-political. In particular, a large number of the skilled workers who were unemployed for a long time are not enthusiastic Nazis. They often complain about the fact that they earn much less now than in say 1929 but, at the end of the day, they always say: ‘It’s all the same to us; at least we have work’.
The further one goes down into the poorer sections the more opposition there is…
Those who are still Nazis in the plant are subdued. One has the feeling that many of them only stay in the Party to get an easier life…”
A *lot* of Germans supported the Nazis BUT the majority of Germans did *not*.
Last free election of March of 1933, the Nazis got 44% of the vote, with a voter turnout of 88.7% of registered voters, which tells you, that at that time, 56% of the people that voted didn’t support the Nazi Party
When war came most Germans fought for their Fatherland, not for Hitler and many believed it to be a war of defence. Even Barbarossa was depicted as a pre-emptive strike for domestic propaganda consumption.
Hitler said in Reichstag
“I have already told the nation of the build-up of Soviet Russian military power in the East during a period when Germany had only a few divisions in the provinces bordering Soviet Russia. Only a blind person could fail to see that a military build-up of unique world-historical dimensions was being carried out. And this was not in order to protect something that was being threatened, but rather only to attack that which seemed incapable of defense …”Goring put it well when he said
“Why of course the people don’t want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally the common people don’t want war neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship.
Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.”TS “Great anecdote. Good on you for punching a Nazi.”
Did you read that post?
Chelmsford -“I don’t think they were really ‘Nazis’…”
Much like your supposed Ukrainians all being Nazis – they weren’t.
Like in all wars, there is the need to de-humanise the enemy with labels. As race or religion won’t do it in this war, then it must be an ideological demonisation.
TS “Which will be soundly turned in to fertilizer as Russia has a 10:1 artillery shell advantage.”
Such a shame that Russia isn’t sharing it with the Wagner mercenaries.
Prigozhin has said he is “knocking on all doors” for replenishing arms and ammunition for his forces.
Prigozhin said his men feared that they were being “set up” as scapegoats in case Russia lost its war in Ukraine.
“If we step back, we will go down in history as the people who took the main step to lose the war,” he said.
“And this is precisely the problem with the shell hunger [ammunition shortage]. This is not my opinion, but that of ordinary fighters…What if they [the Russian authorities] want to set us up, saying that we are scoundrels—and that’s why they are not giving us ammunition, not giving us weapons, and not letting us replenish our personnel, including [recruiting] prisoners,” Prigozhin said in a video
And the Wagner liaison officer is unceremoniously thrown out out of Russian army HQ.
This is not from NATO or Ukraine but from the horse’s mouth who Scott Ritter praised for never exaggerating.
To paraphrase Shakespeare, there is something is rotten in the state of Russia.
As I stated, I await the Russian follow-up advance and ensuing victories if the war is going according to your own predictions.
If the expected offensive began weeks ago then Scott Ritter has re-defined an offensive to make the word meaningless.
I haven’t changed my view that the war has not progressed for either side. That is amply demonstrated by the battle for Bahkmut.
Odessa was indeed an objective but was an example of Russia’s bungled invasion. It was to be a planned amphibious landing. The sinking of the Moskva, finally put an end to that plan.
We should see the Russians taking advantage of the encirclement of Bahkmut and by-passing it to capture the more strategic cities, towns and highways that were the reason offered by TS for such a relentless and sustained assault on Bahkmut.
Having sacrificed the convict battalions of Wagner and leaving them to mop up the depleted defeated surrounded Ukrainians in Bahkmut, I await the Big Push by the Russian regular army to gain ground.
Unless substantial progress is made, then indeed it is a Pyrrhic victory. As YMS indicated by mentioning Vuhlbar, Russian successes on other parts of the eastern front have not been resounding successes.
It seems an early Spring has brought the mud to bog down any armour advance which can only benefit the defenders. The drawn-out defence of Bahkmut has allowed defence lines to be strengthened and new ones to be built.
TS may have forgotten but I recall he predicted a Winter offensive when the ground was frozen. Now it will be Summer before the ground hardens again and by then the West-supplied armour will have been deployed to the battlefront and will prove an obstacle for the Russian tank thrust. Ukraine’s shell shortage may also be resolved by Summer.
But once again we should not assume we are the Chairbourne Generals but if it took almost a year to take Bahkmut, I’m guessing any swift capture of crucial cities is unlikely to develop.
TS refers to Mariupol. Not to the loss of Kherson or Kharkiv. And never has he mentioned the total failure to take Odessa.
I already indicated my suspicions about the comparison The heavy consumption of vodka was normally previously given as the cause of earlier deaths of Russians. On this occasion the fall is attributed to not just Covid but to the war fatalities and reduction of men of fighting age generally because of dodging military call up.
It seems it is WHO and UN procedure to calculate life expectancy at 15 years. I suppose this is to counteract infant and child mortality rates.
https://gateway.euro.who.int/en/indicators/hfa_49-1030-life-expectancy-at-age-15-years/
https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy-how-is-it-calculated-and-how-should-it-be-interpreted
Yet another criteria is the ‘Average healthy life expectancy’ defined as ‘the average number of years that an individual is expected to live in a state of self-assessed good or very good health’.
For Glasgow men, it is 54 and that was at Jan 2021, a drop also because of Covid. I wouldn’t say it was due to drinking Buckfast, Scotland’s other national drink for the poor.
https://www.glasgowlive.co.uk/news/average-healthy-life-expectancy-glasgow-19693673
Rather than dismissing facts why not search for causes?
TASS, a source I expect you to accept, reported that Covid led to average life expectancy in Russia falling by 2.8 years for men
https://tass.com/society/1452239This was corroborated by the British Medical Journal research, a scientific source rather than ideological, which said the drop in Russian men’s life expectancy was 2.33 years, the highest of the 37 countries it studied.
https://www.bmj.com/content/375/bmj-2021-066768
Since the pandemic, we have had excess deaths of males due to the war.
Also affecting statistics is the migration of young healthy men avoiding the mobilisation.
Therefore, the Economist article’s reference to a fall of 5 years isn’t too far-fetched.
You should have asked whether Haiti’s civil unrest or Bangladesh’s climate crisis in the last few years reduced their male life expectancies in comparison but instead, you prefer ad hominem responses.
Like many countries around the world, Russia is suffering a demographic decline in population.
It is speculative if widening its territory and adding people is a motive for Russian expansionism.
China will increase military spending by more than 7% this year, while warning of “escalating” threats.
“But facts are chiels that winna ding,
An downa be disputed”Robert Burns
English translation
‘But facts are fellows that will not be overturned,
And cannot be disputed’.According to The Economist The life expectancy for young Russian men is now as low as for men in Haiti and lower than in Bangladesh.
Women outnumber men by at least 10m.
No mention of the Chinese invasion of Vietnam or the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia that saw USSR and China on opposite sides
Could the reason be a continuation of the discord between Wagner mercenaries who appears to be the most prominent unit fighting in Bakhmut and the Regular army forces, YMS?
I’m surprised that the 2008 Russian-Georgia war has not been raised. After all, it was about Russia militarily backing breakaway republics and accusing Georgia of genocide.
As they did in Crimea, regular Russian troops were infiltrated into South Ossetia and portrayed as liberators.
Georgia, too, had sought NATO membership.
Ukraine invasion was not unique
