Reply With QuoteCrazy Russia. People falling out of windows, accidentally crashing planes, getting caught with drugs....
Must be something in the water
It's not a crash, it's a special landing operation.
Crazy Russia. People falling out of windows, accidentally crashing planes, getting caught with drugs....
Must be something in the water
Drug charges in Russia are the equivalent of corruption charges for anyone in China that is politically opposed to the current leadership.Originally Posted by Azaran
"100% true but selectively enforced"?
I'm sure in Russia if the proper bribe is paid the selection is more favorable.
And the anonymous text message on Putin's phone "The Albatross has landed".
Da. Daaaaaaa....
How is the war progressing, CommChat? I find it too emotionally draining to follow regularly.
Not great. Front lines aren't really moving much.
The emotional drain and various headline grabbers (especially the Israel/Hamas conflict) are two of Ukraine's biggest enemies at the moment, with the the war being in risk of relegation to a similar status as the west front during WW1 (All Quiet on the Western Front). If that happens, Russia will gain a massive long term advantage as support for Ukraine slowly drains out. Zelenskyy has even said as much this last week.
Yeah, that's what I was worried about. A stalemate favors whoever's stronger economically. That'll be Ukraine up until the US withdraws its support, and US policy is... not exactly stable.
We know that Trump favors Russia and if by some crazy off chance he got elected again the Ukraine could suffer a complete loss. What is the wildcard is if some other Republican runs for office and somehow gets elected. The Biden administration will continue with aid unless it becomes too unpopular. The only thing that will help the Ukraine is continued global support and potentially the war becoming unpopular with the Russian people in the same way Afghanistan did, and maybe the off chance that Putin leaves office by one means or another.
It has been difficult. Western aid has been a great help, but Russia is getting help too, in ways that the West with all its bureaucracy and hand-wringing can't really match at the same pace. It looks very much like there is a lack of political will to end the conflict too soon, because people in the West don't want Russia to become desperate or fall apart.
Right now, Russia is pushing hard at Adviivka, taking heavy losses. Their hope must be to take the rest of the Donetsk oblast for a propaganda win to present to the Russian people before Putin's next term. But also, unlike Bakhmut, Adviivka actually has some tactical/operational value as a staging point and is easier to defend.
Also, it looks like Russia has saved up drones and missiles to once again try to freeze Ukrainians in the winter, but this time, Ukraine has been producing and saving up drones as well and is threatening to retaliate, so there's some potential for escalation there.
Ukraine has pretty much won the sea battle for now, with several Russian ships having been sunk and the rest having retreated from Crimea. For now. But still, without a navy, Ukraine managed to sink the flagship of the fleet, destroy a submarine, and, apparently, kill the commander of the fleet (who Russia claims is still alive, but who hasn't been seen for months).
Ukraine has been trying to counterattack and repeat their earlier successes from last year, but the battle now is mostly going along heavily fortified lines, with some of the defences having been built up for over 8 years (on both sides). With drones and all kinds of surveillance available, it isn't really possible to concentrate troops without the enemy knowing and every time Ukraine tried it, they took heavy losses. So for now they have switched to more opportunistic attacks with smaller units.
As for Ukraine's chances in the war, they are better than they were at the start, but everything is still very much up in the air. We are only year 2 into what could possibly be a multi-generational conflict, after all. Russia has massively increased its military budget, and it looks like they can go on for a decade or more, as long as they keep getting support from China and manage to keep selling oil and gas. But the most they can do, really, is grab some dirt and hold it for a time, at great cost. In every other respect, Russia has already lost the war, pretty much. They failed to stop NATO expansion, they failed to change the political leadership in Ukraine, they can't even conquer Ukraine. The best they can hope for is a freeze in the conflict and a partial normalisation of their relationship to the West, so they can try again after building up their army, as they did with Chechnya.
Thank you for the broad overview Starker, that's exactly what I was looking for.
I kept trying to type up further thoughts, realizing I could not back up the assertions I was making, then deleting them. That happened like three times. Anyway, I hope people do continue this thread, because I learned quite a bit from it back when it was active.
Okay, here's a question. What do y'all think China is trying to achieve by supporting Russia's war effort?
Colonize Russia economy like USA never dreamt.
Russia will become for China what UK is for USA.
China wants to destabilise and undermine the current power dynamics. Especially as US paying more attention to Russia means it will be paying less attention to China. Also, Russia becoming more and more dependent on China is beneficial to China in various ways, not the least of which is cheap oil and gas. So they will support Russia all the while pretending they aren't taking sides. Also, it seems that when they initially pledged their support, they thought it might just be a short affair, maybe something like happened in Georgia in 2008.
Now though, they might be getting some second thoughts, as Ukraine just disabled a major trade route between Russia and China by blowing up a train in a tunnel in Siberia and also a railway bridge used as an alternative route: https://www.politico.eu/article/ukra...-russia-china/
China doesn't give a shit about anyone but China. If that means countries get taken over by dictatorial nations so they can have cheaper oil and sell weapons then fine. A more drawn out conflict with more deaths? China doesn't care.
What I worry about is the stupidity of Republicans drawing out the conflict by withholding funding. It gives Russia hope that Ukraine funding will be dropped entirely (as it will if Trump is elected) and thus Russia has no problem putting more into winning. It makes the war longer and Republicans don't care. They are as for sale to Russia as they are to any country.
Lowenz and Starker: That makes sense, thank you. A Russia economically dependent on China is a clear gain for China.
Tocky: Ascribing motives to countries is a useful shorthand, but you make it sound like China's a person. But yeah, on top of all the domestic worries I have about Trump, now I'm also worried for his possible international consequences.
Well, in executive terms, it kinda is; Xi sets the policy and doesn't really have any checks on his power.
China's UPR presession was this last week in Geneva, when all of the real works gets done, and I was there doing the things one does for UPR presessions. Uh ... UPR is a 5-year cycle at the UN Human Rights Council where very country in the world gives human rights-related recommendations to every other country, and the presession is when the NGOs and at least democracies come up with a unified strategy for dealing with, in this case, China during its upcoming UPR session itself.
Anyway, one pitch that we gamed out was boiling everything down to a slogan like "Xi has to go", as if he's the root of all evil there. Things have gotten a lot worse under Xi, but on the other hand there are reasons you might not want to say it's all and only him (there are different factions and forces in China beyond just Xi you may want to appeal to or against), and there are limits to saying it's all and only him (it's a very politicized message, so it's not going to be easy for people to share, and it may give more fodder to government to crack down more than give any foreseeable route to getting remedy to victims).
Anyone whom T***p identified as a good, strong, national leader needs to go. Donny can smell a fellow autocrat through an unsecured phoneline.
People have been disappeared for far less egregious stuff than "Xi has to go". Even if you managed to get someone in China to say it, all it would do is paint a fat target on them. They would be "interviewed", their families would be harrassed and shamed, and depending on how brazen or unlucky they are, they might face years of jail under the picking quarrels and provoking trouble law.
This is how things work in the autocracy -- you are under the mercy of the government all the time and you have no rights whatsoever. If the authorities want to arrest you, they can do so arbitrarily and without having to justify themselves or even tell your family where you are or what you're being "accused of".
And meanwhile, in Russia, LGBT people have been marked as extremists and basically banned from any kind of organising:
https://apnews.com/article/russia-lg...ebc7c42efe6335
To put things into perspective, it's not messaging for people inside of China to begin with, but it's for the UPR process, which is all about external comments by democratic governments and NGOs.
The more central issue though is strategic. Right now the field of issues is very fragmented, so paying attention to one takes attention away from others. But in practice there really is just one connecting thread, which is Xi's personal bullshit "rule by law" doctrine, out of which the other problems flow in their current form.
Yeah, I guess I'm just extremely suspicious of anything coming out of OHCHR since I learned they were giving out the names of activists coming to speak in their sessions:
https://twitter.com/LBC/status/1322928964273348610
I'm unhappy with China's overall depiction in this thread, so I will offer some praise. Its space program has surpassed that of the US. For example, their vibration isolation technology was an order of magnitude better than ours, as of half a decade ago. I had the honor of editing the paper explaining that technology to a Western audience.
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