Ukraine Open Thread 2024-102

Back to Main

April 7, 2024

Only for news & views directly related to the war in Ukraine.

The current open thread for other issues is here.

Please stick to the topic. Contribute facts. Do not attack other commentators.

Posted by b on April 7, 2024 at 12:49 UTC | Permalink

Comments

Posted by: Urban Fox | Apr 9 2024 13:43 utc | 301

Posted by: psychohistorian | Apr 9 2024 7:18 utc | 275

Will control of Chasov Yar by Russia occur before Orthodox Easter in early May? I posit it will and will take the rest of Ukraine down with it.

Not the rest of Ukraine but the last two cities of the Donbass, Slaviansk and Kramatorsk, will certainly follow within a relatively short time frame.

Posted by: Johan Kaspar | Apr 9 2024 13:44 utc | 302

Russia is not booming they are in tough as well. Spending billions on gear that lasts a week is not a good long term model. They had a large military monopoly for years but everyone makes their own now.
It ain’t easy going up against the majority of the money bags in the world.

Posted by: OohCanada | Apr 9 2024 13:46 utc | 303

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3OvAweDI7SQ
Tiny moves on the Chasiv Yar outskirts. Nothing at the zeroth line of defense outside of Avdiivka. (Still haven’t even reached the “unprepared first line of defense”, since Russia is still hung up in the little villages like Berdichi that Duran/Kalibrated reported conquered over a month ago!)
Realize that small improvements at Chasiv Yar (perhaps culminating in a big summer push to take the city) are very small, when looked at on the totality of the front. It’s not even that Russia is only advancing a couple hundred yards per day. It’s that they are doing so on only a couple points of a very long front. That’s why you end up with 0.01% territory gain last month.
Then again…facts and math are “trolls”. Yeah. Enjoy that alternate reality.
Posted by: Anonymous | Apr 9 2024 11:40 utc | 293

Besides, as some posters are keen to remind us upon, territorial advances are meaningless. It’s attrition that matters. By that logic, Stalin and the whole Stavka in WWII were incompetent amateurs, as they kept pushing the German army back to Berlin when they should just have stayed in place and let the Germans impale themselves on their defense. Alas, they did not have the brilliant military geniuses which we can now find in abundance in the MoA forum.
More seriously, it’s great to see Russia still progressing at some places, especially important ones like Chasov Yar. We should also not discount the progresses in Berdychi or Semenovka. But these are tactical progresses and do not change the calculus of the war ; the main intractable issues, which are 1) NATO ISR and 2) FPV omnipresence, haven’t yet been solved. It simply is not possible, with current Russian matériel and war doctrines, to have significant breakthroughs. So these minor progresses are better than nothing, but at this rate it’s only in 5 years or more they will reach the shores of the Dniepr.. And for what goal exactly ? What it is concretely the Russians are aiming at, if you put aside empty buzzwords like demilitarization and denazification ?

Posted by: Micron | Apr 9 2024 13:49 utc | 304

Posted by: OohCanada | Apr 9 2024 13:46 utc | 303

It ain’t easy going up against the majority of the money bags in the world.

But Russia ain’t going against the majority of the money bags in the world: BRICS is richer than G7.

Posted by: Johan Kaspar | Apr 9 2024 13:56 utc | 305

Posted by: Micron | Apr 9 2024 13:49 utc | 304

By that logic, Stalin and the whole Stavka in WWII were incompetent amateurs, as they kept pushing the German army back to Berlin when they should just have stayed in place and let the Germans impale themselves on their defense.

Faulty silogism. Stalin was in a race against the West to get to Berlin. This time there is no competing force closing in the poor target. So Russia can simply stay pùt, attrite, and advance slowly.

Posted by: Johan Kaspar | Apr 9 2024 13:59 utc | 306

Russia is demographically screwed. Believing the country could afford to lose more than a thousand young people per year in an endless war is delusional.
All Russia is doing is weakening itself and killing Slavs, not ‘defeating NATO’.
Posted by: Eklipsë | Apr 9 2024 6:57 utc | 273
################
Apply the same analysis to Ukraine, please.
All Russia has to do is legalize polygyny and the Muslim regions can improve the replacement rate. Maybe the Orthodox Jews, and some Old Believer Christians as well. All of those cohorts have allowances for polygyny based on their faiths.
Polygyny is the solution from antiquity for population collapse. Women can only have a child every 9 months, one man can impregnate dozens of women per month. 1:1 is an arbitrary gender ratio for family construction and suicide in a crisis scenario.
Ukraine, on the other hand, is in big trouble. Thousands and thousands of its women have fled to the West where they are in no rush to return home.
And then they are dumb enough to put other young women on the front line during the war.

Posted by: LoveDonbass | Apr 9 2024 14:00 utc | 307

Posted by: blueswede | Apr 9 2024 14:02 utc | 308

Ukraine, on the other hand, is in big trouble. Thousands and thousands of its women have fled to the West where they are in no rush to return home.
And then they are dumb enough to put other young women on the front line during the war.
Posted by: LoveDonbass | Apr 9 2024 14:00 utc | 307
_____
You know Banderastan is in trouble when streetwalking in Western European cities and bride scams are better careers than anything Banderastan offers its own women.

Posted by: malenkov | Apr 9 2024 14:03 utc | 309

In one way, the first Cold War was a freezing out of the Naughty Country who wouldn’t join the western capitalist system, just like NK is. Present day sanctions are the hybrid war Putin talks about. Even beyond any ceasfire, sanctions will remain, not as an SMO punishment but as an isolating mechanism.
Posted by: Jake Blanchard | Apr 8 2024 4:29 utc | 123
#########
This is quite amusing. Russia’s economy is booming relative to Europe right now. Unsurprisingly, the grand threat and strategy of the West’s sanctions have not only failed but have supercharged the opponent.
At this point, the sanctions remaining say more about the inability of the West to escalate kinetically and a lot of bureaucratic inertia.
Posted by: LoveDonbass | Apr 9 2024 13:14 utc | 298
——
Your response is ambiguous. What is amusing? My comment that you quoted … which was only a PARTIAL EXTRACT of a longer argument I was making in #123, or the backfiring situation I was originally describing? Have you been an equal kneejerk idiot like Canuck, or are you simply reiterating what I had already extrapolated in #123.
Jeezuz I wish people would read carefully, think clearly, and write clear English. It would save a lot of unnecessary to and fro frictions round here.

Posted by: Jake Blanchard | Apr 9 2024 14:04 utc | 310

Anonymous | Apr 9 2024 11:44 utc | 294
I never advertised a Normandy on Odessa…not saying it won’t happen. But an air assault combined, way down South Odessa Oblast below Zatoka bridge is a hanging in the air possibility, probably a priority too.
In a Russian media often mentioned after Kharkov is done.
Amphibious assault is probably the second wave, comprised of a mix of military and civilian cargo ships. After there is no more Ukrainians left in the area. Armor airdrops are practiced daily in the training grounds near Kazan. What for?

Posted by: whirlX | Apr 9 2024 14:05 utc | 311

“Russian Investigative Committee announced on Tuesday that it has opened a criminal case against high-ranking officials from the US and other NATO countires for financing terrorism following the deadly Crocus City Hall attack in Moscow.
It has been established that the funds received through commercial organizations, in particular the Burisma Holdings oil and gas company that is operating in Ukraine, have been used over the past few years to carry out terrorist acts in Russia, as well as abroad”
( sputnikglobe.com/20240409/money-from-ukraines-burisma-used-for-terrorist-attacks-in-russia—moscow-1117830703.html )

Posted by: rk | Apr 9 2024 14:07 utc | 312

If the US could, it would.
Posted by: Peter AU1 | Apr 9 2024 13:30 utc | 299
##################
Yes. The simplest statements make the most powerful arguments.

Posted by: LoveDonbass | Apr 9 2024 14:12 utc | 313

Posted by: LoveDonbass | Apr 9 2024 14:00 utc | 307
Precious bodily fluids?

Posted by: anon2020 | Apr 9 2024 14:14 utc | 314

Posted by: LoveDonbass | Apr 9 2024 14:00 utc | 307
Precious bodily fluids?

Posted by: anon2020 | Apr 9 2024 14:14 utc | 315

And for what goal exactly ? What it is concretely the Russians are aiming at, if you put aside empty buzzwords like demilitarization and denazification ?
Posted by: Micron | Apr 9 2024 13:49 utc | 304
#######
You will have to forgive me if I believe you’re a troll because it is unlikely that you’re this literate and this clueless.
Demilitarization and denazification are not buzzwords. “Democracy” and “Rules Based Order” are buzzwords.
The former are tangible and measurable aims. The latter are slogans whose meaning change as it becomes convenient to do so.

Posted by: LoveDonbass | Apr 9 2024 14:17 utc | 316

If the US could, it would.
Posted by: Peter AU1 | Apr 9 2024 13:30 utc | 299
Yes. The simplest statements make the most powerful arguments.
Posted by: LoveDonbass | Apr 9 2024 14:12 utc | 313
They still think they can, if only French and British would go ahead first.

Posted by: whirlX | Apr 9 2024 14:17 utc | 317

Posted by: Urban Fox | Apr 9 2024 14:30 utc | 318

From a Telegram post linked earlier.

Brian Berletic’s New Atlas Channel
🇺🇸🇬🇧🇪🇺🇺🇦🇷🇺Threat of Direct Western Intervention in Ukraine
▪️This is a prospect I’ve warned about since the Special Military Operation began in 2022;
▪️This began as a proxy conflict in 2014 when Washington specifically overthrew the elected government of Ukraine and began militarizing the country to menace Russia on its own borders. This is a US conflict;
▪️However, the US narrative has always been it is “defending” Ukraine from “Russian aggression,” and cannot afford to be seen initiating direct conflict with Russia, it must be “European” nations that do so with the US appearing to assist only as a reluctant afterthought;
▪️The US is using a UK-French-Baltic front. Germany for obvious historical and political reasons must appear reluctant but will most certainly support the conflict as it has already been doing all along;
▪️The US will also pose as reluctant to enter what is in fact a US intervention with British-French “leadership” designed to afford the US plausible deniability just as the US uses Israel in the Middle East to fan the flames of what is essentially a US conflict with Iran and its allies;
All of this is discerned from decades of US foreign policy documents which regularly attempt to initiate conflict by proxy to absolve the US itself of starting the very wars it itself engineers – whether in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, or Asia-Pacific.
Whether or not this is a bluff or a serious, desperate attempt to reverse a failing proxy war remains to be seen.
Worst Case Scenario:
NATO cannot survive a long-term protracted conflict with Russia and would instead seek to break Russian forces with a large-scale rapid attack – much like the Ukrainian 2023 offensive attempted to do, but with additional capabilities like air power and larger quantities of long-range cruise missile attacking both along the front and deep within Russian territory.
Russia has carefully preserved its fighting capacity almost certainly for this very contingency.
The collective West has consistently and severely overestimated its own capabilities and underestimated not only Russia’s, but the state of the rest of the world outside the West.
It would be a mistake for Russia to underestimate how far the West will go and what they will do to reverse their flagging fortunes.
It remains to be seen whether the US and its proxies are setting a trap for Russia, of ultimately for themselves…
Follow The New Atlas on Telegram: “>https://t.me/brianlovethailand

Posted by: LoveDonbass | Apr 9 2024 14:36 utc | 319

>>>Russia’s economy is booming …
Posted by: LoveDonbass | Apr 9 2024 13:14 utc | 298

Posted by: Jake Blanchard | Apr 9 2024 14:38 utc | 320

Some can even loose or win a war he supposedly don’t fight in.
Janet in Beijing was a lot a fun to watch … no she didn’t overdosed the shrooms this time 🙂 but fun anyway ^^.

Posted by: Savonarole | Apr 9 2024 14:45 utc | 321

That comes to mind when I see the F-35 fanboys club. If the US could, it would.
Posted by: Peter AU1 | Apr 9 2024 13:30 utc | 299
———————-
The flying Albanian mushroom, is the best name for that great aerospace boondoggle I’ve heard.
Posted by: Urban Fox | Apr 9 2024 13:43 utc | 301
C’mon, now! You’re gonna hurt the F-35 Fanboys’ fan club president’s feelings. There, there, Milites, don’t cry. It’ll get better.

Posted by: Zippy the Pinhead | Apr 9 2024 14:48 utc | 322

To clarify for anyone unfamiliar with the concept, Polygyny in the Abrahamic religions is multiple marriages, not having several hookups. A man having sex with many women has always been legal in the West. No one goes to jail for having 3 girlfriends who do not know one another. No one goes to jail for impregnating 5 different women in 5 separate cities and financially maintaining none of the mothers’ lifestyles.
One might think that multiple wives means more sex, and while there will be more diversity, it also comes with the cost of sanity and money to maintain all of those relationships simultaneously.
Polygyny is about large and extended families, about posterity.
Exactly the sort of institution that globohomo cannot abide by.

Posted by: LoveDonbass | Apr 9 2024 14:52 utc | 323

Sure, let’s replace Orthodox Slavs. ‘Russian’ elites would seem to actively worki on that in both of Russia and Ukraine.

Posted by: Eklipsë | Apr 9 2024 14:59 utc | 324

A man having sex with many women has always been legal in the West.
Posted by: LoveDonbass | Apr 9 2024 14:52 utc | 323
_____
Well, that’s not quite true. Extramarital sex was illegal in several American states, particularly in the ex-Confederacy, until a generation or so ago, although only sporadically punished.

Posted by: malenkov | Apr 9 2024 15:42 utc | 325

All Russia has to do is legalize polygyny and the Muslim regions can improve the replacement rate.
Posted by: LoveDonbass | Apr 9 2024 14:00 utc | 307

Posted by: Jake Blanchard | Apr 9 2024 15:54 utc | 326

@Newbie #247:

Just started reading but looks as I thought, gunship diplomacy finds an harder resistance, both sides are exhausted by the first week of march and an agreement was in order.
Bojo in, good sense out.

No, that’s not what the article is saying at all.

Posted by: S | Apr 9 2024 16:06 utc | 327

@Lavrov’s Dog #255:

I have a request fro S (whoever you are) would you mind creating a normal Unique Nym with multiple letters please? It is impossible to go search for comments by someone calling himself * S *

You can search for my comments using the search string “ S ” (note the spaces around “S”).

Posted by: S | Apr 9 2024 16:13 utc | 328

“Polygyny in the Abrahamic religions is multiple marriages…”
Posted by: LoveDonbass | Apr 9 2024 14:52 utc | 323
No it’s not. That’s polygamy — a man *or a woman* sustaining *simultaneous* multiple marriages with other men or women. It’s more like a web of partners, perhaps at different properties. It was an equality of love and betrothal concept.
Whereas Biblical and Koranic and Mormon Polygyny is the hyper patriarchal system of multiple wives to one man WITHIN just the one marriage under the one roof, hence the harem concept (the women and children’s quarters).
Get your terms straight before you try to educate others.

Posted by: Jake Blanchard | Apr 9 2024 16:15 utc | 329

@ Posted by: Julian | Apr 9 2024 9:32 utc | 289
I’m sorry what?!?
“How exactly do all these Russian troops get to the Western side of Odessa?!?”
Ah mysterious ways of moving have green little men 😉
Seriously though, I think that is what the backstop plan if got the natzos and our Royal Navy being so over committed with the most upto date sea drones and sinking ‘Landing craft’ ships. It does seem that’s where the action is going to go. How it ends is variable.
Anything from nukes going off to a swap for Odessa to RF capitulating.
Just idle speculation at this stage.

Posted by: DunGroanin | Apr 9 2024 18:36 utc | 330

UWDude | Apr 9 2024 9:14 utc | 287
*** Who flooded Europe with immigrants, to add nitro glycerine to the gasoline? If this is all part of some nationalist American conspiracy to tear down Europe, then why would America be doing the same to themselves?
I think they are all just that stupid, and suicidally out for revenge on each other.***
Those who front the regime and their finance/corporate owners regard themselves as almost a separate species — an Overclass and its overseers (cargo-cultist bought or ideological sycophants whether political, apparatchik or academic) — so why would they care a damn about ordinary people, anywhere, unless these commodities need to be suppressed, replaced or displaced, in the name of the Profit. Bodies to be shunted, alienation to be maximised, divides to be ruled.
They are not stupid or suicidal … just thoroughly and malevolently warped.

Posted by: Cynic | Apr 9 2024 18:53 utc | 331

Jake Blanchard | Apr 9 2024 15:54 utc | 326
*** The western trend to low birth-rates is because of selfish, career-minded, money-hungry women delaying motherhood till their late 30s or even 45 with IVF, by which time they’re too tired and selfish to want more than 1.***
Not quite correct — the economic system … reinforced by a comparatively small number of women wanting *top* jobs and pay, and propaganda pressure groups sponsored by the CIA psychological warfare department … *inflicted* the need for two wage earners per household.
And that is how the problem started. People could less afford families.
Despite automation and the demise of labour-intensive industries.
*** And besides, who says endless population growth is good and necessary for a country or the planet.***
Amazing how the Napoleonic wars, WW1 and WW2 managed to take place with far lower populations.
The argument that people in Western countries should have less children (overpopulation!) seamlessly switched — by the same Establishment — to “we absolutely must import more and more people to make up the shortfall!”
And that of course is where neoliberal-shit economics of monopoly capitalism take command …. in their reality-unbased system, the “growth” figures must be perpetual.

Posted by: Cynic | Apr 9 2024 19:19 utc | 332

Making Europeans live in the cold and dark poverty for thirty years would be just punishment… …as that is what they thought their sanctions would do to Iran, what they have done to Libya, what they have tried to do to Iran, Venezuela and North Korea and Cuba.

Would you wish the exact same treatment on US and Canadian citizens as well, by the same token?
Either way, whatever rows your boat…

Posted by: joey_n | Apr 9 2024 19:44 utc | 333

Posted by: Cynic | Apr 9 2024 19:19 utc | 332
Ooops, we’re straying way off topic, so last …
I could have used feminism as the cause but that would have been too sweeping an *ideological* generalisation. Sure, there were socioeconomic reasons. I am old enough to have lived through that very transformation period of seeing two teenage sisters wanting to marry at 21 and have several kids, but then switching into wanting careers into their late 30s before motherhood and then only 1 child. Many factors switched the female and social mindset. And, I have never swallowed that “having kids is expensive”. It’s only as expensive as you make it. We had 5 budget kids in our very happy budget life. How they were brought up was always more important than what they had.

Posted by: Jake Blanchard | Apr 9 2024 19:54 utc | 334

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2024/04/ukraine-open-thread-2024-099.html?cid=6a00d8341c640e53ef02c8d3abf6fd200c#comment-6a00d8341c640e53ef02c8d3abf6fd200c
What I could’ve added is that appealing to the citizens of another country is not Russia’s job, especially if said citizens want Russia to be as vindictive as the US/Israel already are towards the Palestinians, so let’s let Russia do what’s in its interest.

Posted by: joey_n | Apr 9 2024 22:32 utc | 335

Posted by: Jake Blanchard | Apr 9 2024 15:54 utc | 326
#############
So much ignorance and hatred to respond to so I will leave it like this.
It is difficult for me to take someone from a demographically failed civilization seriously about marriage or families.
You don’t realize that Muslims are there to save you, instead, you’d rather die out than evolve.
So be it. History will not miss your people.

Posted by: LoveDonbass | Apr 10 2024 14:15 utc | 336

Back to Main