[Continuation] The Russian Invasion of Ukraine (3)
 

No, it isn't true of most US conflicts. Taking recent examples, nobody relied on Afghanistan for anything, because Afghanistan doesn't produce anything, and isn't even a transit point for anything. Iraq was an oil producer, but its production numbers were relatively low before the war. Taking them offline for a period had constrained effects on global oil markets. Nobody really relied on Iraqi oil. It's also easier to ramp up oil production (or ramp down oil consumption) than it is to ramp up food production (or ramp down food consumption).

(Sung to the tune of Sammy Hagar's 'Trans Am')

Ramzan
Ramzan
Ramzan
Of the High Command!

I'm sure they did know what kinds of planes they were, but you're missing my point. Knowing that a plane is capable of carrying nuclear weapons doesn't tell you that the plane actually is carrying nuclear weapons.

Who said anything about "making up wild claims"? Not me. I already gave a possible explanation for why they might misinterpret information they were given honestly. Alternatively, they could have just been fed wrong information and believed it. There are lots of possibilities for how this could be wrong without them just "making up wild claims".

And how much would your opinion really change if this was just a screwup like I suggested? I suspect very little. Even assuming that everyone in the press is totally ethical in their reporting (and I don't think that's a safe assumption, ever), that hardly discounts the possibility of error. You should still always examine the plausibility of anything that gets reported.

And given that it's basically impossible to tell if a given plane has nuclear weapons, and the advantages of strategic ambiguity suggest Russia is never going to TELL Sweden whether or not a given plane has nuclear weapons, and that if the Swedish government somehow did find out through clandestine means then they aren't going to want to make that knowledge public, it seems incredibly unlikely that the reporting as you described it is accurate. It seems much more likely that some error was made along the way. This would hardly be groundbreaking.

Young people like to be contrarian. The media and government in America is overwhelmingly pro-Ukraine. Plenty of young people like to show how smart they are by being different.

There's also an element of cynicism common in youth. Ukraine isn't exactly perfect, if the truth be told, so they like to go against the grain


I can look back at my former self and imagine the same thing, whereas now, I look and say they may not be perfect, but they aren't blowing up other people's houses, so it isn't really a case of being just as bad.

https://t.co/p5siAvii9L

It's good to be the Prince of Russia, Tzar Putin's most loyal and powerful servant. All Russians envy him and want to be like him. He is their Adonis.

As i said before, the situation with Russia and its aggression against Ukraine to a large degree mirrors Serbia's aggression against other Yugoslavs States. Here's an article in the NYT exploring the basis for Serbs support for Russia:

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/30/w...ia-russia.html

Greater-German-Reich, Greater Serbia/Croatia/etc and Greater Russia... all of these expansionist and imperialist causes for war have more in common than not.

I must admit I had thought there were similarities. And the obvious parallel that Milosevic waged several genocidal wars until deposed.

The White House says it has intelligence that Russian President Vladimir Putin feels he has been misled by his military advisers, which has resulted in persistent tension between him and his military leadership.

"We believe that Putin is being misinformed by his advisers about how badly the Russian military is performing and how the Russian economy is being crippled by sanctions, because his senior advisers are too afraid to tell him the truth," White House director of communications Kate Bedingfield told journalists.

She said it was "increasingly clear" that Russia's invasion of Ukraine had been a "strategic blunder" that would leave it weaker over the long term.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/worl...ost_type=share

Edited by sarge:

edited to indicate that the post is a quote from the linked article

Would flying nuclear weapons over Sweden break any kind of international treaties etc?

He has to be a high priority target on the sniper list assuming he ever gets near the front lines.

Well it would be a violation of Swedish airspace. And could lead to aircraft being shot down. Turkey shot down a Russian strike aircraft that was violating its airspace near Syria and that wasn't claiming to be carrying weapons that could obliterate Istanbul/Stockholm.

Armed forces tend to be wary of potentially hostile nations overflying them with armed aircraft.

https://www.gchq.gov.uk/speech/direc...ion-of-ukraine

A lot to unpack in the rest of the speech. GCHQ is the UK equivalent of the NSA.


ETA: He discusses rapid declassification of intelligence in order to prevent Putin's lies from forcing the narrative - right from the warning of the false-flag attack before the start

That's a massive if.

Reports that Putin has been lied to by his own military about the sucess of the invasion, probaby becuase they are afriad to tell him the truth, and he has found out about it.
I suspect he might go full Stalin with a purge of the military.
Irony is they lied to him because he is the kind that when he gets bad news kills the messenger, and they might well get killed anyway. You can't win with a psychpath.

Having cheerfully presided over a kleptocracy for two decades, he is now shocked - shocked! - to learn that his beloved kleptocrats have sold his beloved country down the river. What exactly did he think his officer corps was doing, if not looting the military the same way the rest of his friends were looting everything else?

Those reports are almost certainly being released to give Putin a way to quit and blame others for his failure. True or not, I doubt correct information would have changed Putin's orders. He wanted Ukraine and was tired of waiting to take it.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/li...08c4416418f090

How freaking stupid does one have to be believe that they are "reducing" the number of their attacks against Kiev and areas around it because of how "generous" they are?

I also note that they still refuse to acknowledge the failure of their offensive against Kiev even though it's obvious to everyone. No doubt the Russian history books will portray it as a glorious and decisive victory. The mobile crematoria were especially useful for simplifying logistics.

Well, looks like Ukraine's forces have begun working on breaking the siege of Chernihiv, if burning Russian armor in some of the Russian-occupied villages south of Chernihiv is an indication. Several more towns to the north east of Kherson have reportedly also been retaken by Ukraine. Still not much in the way of direct attacks on Kherson, though, by the look of it, though Russian efforts to take and actually keep control of airfields despite Ukrainian artillery repeatedly smacking them down hard are probably continuing. It was up to nearly ten Russian attempts to do so a couple days ago, I think. Speaking of Kherson, I hear that the reason it fell involved... pretty much every relevant top person just leaving their post. They had measures that would have halted the Russian assault ready, they just didn't deploy them. Volunteers were lining up to fight, but there was systemic paralysis that pretty much ended up with them being refused and being told that the people in charge had fled.

Edited to add - more ground was reclaimed to Kyiv's east and Ukraine's forces are apparently seeking to take back Nova Basan, which looks like it would cut off the remainder of the Russian forces that were attacking Kyiv from the east. In the eastern part of Ukraine, Russian forces are still pushing at Izyum hard. They haven't taken it, but, depending on the map in question, looks like they may be continuing to gradually encircle it.

Opium.

Oh, hey... Looks like Russia may actually be withdrawing from somewhere! Chernobyl, specifically. 7 buses worth of soldiers who apparently now have acute radiation poisoning were taken away.

In a variation on a phrase I occasionally trot out, "A People gets the psychopath it deserves."

Too scared to take out the murderous tyrant? Then suffer the just desserts.

Some years ago I tried to do a back-of-an-envelope calculation after some guy claimed the US went into Afghanistan because the CIA wanted the opium. At the time I came up with a number which said it would have been cheaper to just turn up at the farm gates with a bag of cash and buy all the opium for the next 600 years. And the occupation went on piling up costs for many years after that.

I notice that now CNN is putting "Donbas" in their chyron instead of "Donbass".

These two often occur together. You can't build a regime based on personal fiefdoms and patronage and expect corruption to not be endemic.



At least one source that I linked to upthread was by a very high-placed intelligence official (https://www.gchq.gov.uk/speech/director-gchq-global-security-amid-russia-invasion-of-ukraine )
which was this.
Director GCHQ's speech on global security amid war in Ukraine
Director GCHQ Sir Jeremy Fleming's full speech from the Australian National University (Thursday 31st March 2022)

The UK equivalent of the NSA.

Seriously? If that's the case then surely that would mean big problems at the containment facility.

I think this is somewhere in the extraordinary claims ballpark.

Not necessarily. There were claims at the time that the Russian troops were driving through the so-called "Red Forest" and that the staff told them that it was risky, but the troops were ignorant of what Chernobyl was - they'd been told it was "vital infrastructure*" not that it was dangerous.



*which is true as far as it goes - its other reactors were still supplying power to Ukraine.

On day 1, there were reports of a major, but brief, spike in radiation around Chernobyl and the explanation was that the equipment rolling through stirred up a lot of radioactive dust.

If the affected people were in the first wave, it's possible that they could be suffering the effects of radiation exposure without there necessarily being an issue with the containment facility - especially if the effects are cumulative as a result of prolonged exposure to that radioactive dust.

Add in additional accounts that the people in question were digging trenches into some of the highly irradiated areas. Apparently, a fair bit of the "disposal" involved just gathering up some of the worst affected earth and burying it beneath fresh soil. Digging trenches into that would make a bunch of completely unprotected people getting radiation poisoning completely unsurprising.

Wow!

Putin demonstrating all the concern for his own troops lives as he did for those who murdered Alexander Litvinenko who also suffered acute radiation sickness.

Or indeed the level of concern that the Soviet authorities showed towards their workers in 1986.

They possibly thought that for a quick advance not too many would get too badly injured to reduce their tactical effectiveness.

-----

I am half expecting these troops to be used as evidence that Ukraine is using radiological weapons.

This meme looks to be showing a Russian trench with Chernobyl in the background

https://twitter.com/nogg_the/status/...c3lqR-a8bDy2lQ

No. They were digging trenches in the Red Forest. This can be confidently filed under "Well, DUH!". Radiation levels in the zone are usually manageable but when you drive heavy vehicles through the Red Forest kicking up dust and then send in unprotected personnel to dig trenches afterwards some of them are bound to inhale some pretty nasty stuff (Strontium-90 and Caesium-137) that are present mostly in the surface layers.

Not since 2000, that was when unit 3 was shut down.

Thanks for the correction

Great point.
O/T, but just quickly, because I'm sure I wasn't the only one who was wondering what those figures were:
Afghan opium production is estimated at $4 billion per annum. Over 20 years, that would be $80 billion, assuming they got their hands on every last gram.
The total cost of the US intervention was $2.3 trillion.
If that was the plan, it was a colossal failure.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/...ed/5669656001/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_...%20traffickers.

Seems somewhat obvious, but the costs and profits of war are not equally distributed. People absolutely made a killing off the invasion of Afghanistan, just like all other wars.

People are profiting off the current war in Ukraine. Whoever makes all these anti-tank weapons are probably having champagne lunches for the foreseeable future.

According to the news today, Putin's advisers are apparently too scared to tell him the truth about how badly the war is going, so he's deluded about what's going on. A disastrous war and a dictator they're scared of? It seems the ideal conditions for a coup.

Yeah...but if you had to bet on it, which do you think is more prepared: the Russian military for the Ukraine conflict, or Putin for a coup attempt? He's no Ceausescu, he won't be taken by surprise.

Western governments sure do seem to be pushing this "Putin's advisors are lying to him" meme pretty hard the past few days. I wonder what the underlying message(s) could be.

Some possibilities:

- Even if Putin's people are being pretty truthful, the seed of distrust has been planted, and even accurate information loses its value for him.

- Even if you had Putin's trust, you can't be sure of that. You better not take it for granted, and get to work on some major CYA.

- The jig is up, Putin's advisors! Everyone knows you've been lying. Better get cracking on your coup endgame before Putin brings the reckoning.

- Putin has no choice now but a massive purge, which he can ill afford, and which will effectively take Russia off the pitch for a few years at least.

Seems like these would all tend to synergize with each other, in a cascading series of trust failures and overcorrections from everyone involved.

Nathan Russer on Twitter:

(maps attached to that tweet and subsequent tweets)

As for the Chernobyl: My impression is that the area is not nearly radioactive enough to cause acute radiation sickness, at least not outside a few locations inside the containment structure. During the worst of the meltdown and cleanup, only something like 140 people got enough exposure to show symptoms, and most of them survived.

That said, the Russian soldiers seem to have been digging trenches in the area (including the red forest) and were probably also burning firewood from the area, eating meat from game they might have shot in the area, or fish caught in the waters. That's going to result in ingestion of enough material to pretty much guarantee cancer down the road.

There are reports that many of the soldiers sent to Chernobyl had not heard of it, not heard what had happened there. Full state control of the press can make that happen, especially if you're talking about 18-19 year old kids from small rural towns in the east.

And, back in the day, even as the USSR was fumbling along and avoiding any international discussion of the event, the scientists in the area were having some impact on how the emergency response and containment was handled. (even if it were far below western safety standards). So they wore respirators, showered soon after potential exposure, rotated staff to reduce time spent in the zone, all that.

This time around, it seems as if the Russian military viewed the staff on the site as if they were the enemy, or were naïve children to be ignored. No respirators, nothing. So there might be hundreds or even thousands of young Russian men who breathed in radioactive particles in dust or smoke, or consumed radioactive particles in water or meat or fish. These poor guys are pretty well doomed to get cancer in a decade or two or three or five.

ETA: Started a thread on the subject in the Science Forum