This story had me scratching my head and picking through memories of history books I read years ago.
[guard]
Concern is mounting over the movements of a huge column of Russian military vehicles outside Kyiv, amid a lack of fresh information about its position and the threat it poses.
While a US defence official suggested it appeared to have “stalled”, there was also speculation that an estimated 15,000 troops attached to it may be regrouping, and potentially waiting for logistical supplies before an assault on Kyiv.
The column is clearly identifiable and locatable on commercial satellite systems. In principle, that means that any modern artillery within about 20 miles of the column could obliterate it and a significant number of the troops that comprise it.
When I read Cavalie Mercer’s accounts of the Waterloo campaign, and Marbot’s memoirs, one of the things that really jumped out at me is the sheer amount of space that a significant military force requires for its maneuvers. Two interesting things have happened: armies keep getting bigger, which means that it takes more road space for them to move through, but it also takes longer. Dan Carlin gives a mind-blowing account of the German troops moving through Belgium in WWI: a small town experienced an unending, uninterrupted, river of German troops moving at high speed through the town for 3 days. Imagine the Russian column above, 40km long, and how long it’d take just to get it moving. Each row of vehicles has to be fired up and ready, watching the vehicles in front of them, and waiting for them to pull away – then, they start rolling and the vehicles behind them put it in gear, and the next and the next. Carlin points out that logistics and road usage were art forms that the German army had developed to a high degree; everyone else was still stuck in the Napoleonic mode, in which everyone marched toward their destination and re-deployed when (or if) they got there. In the Napoleonic mode (or the US Civil War mode, if you prefer) units maneuvered as wads of people moving toward a destination, masked from direct contact with enemy forces by clouds of light cavalry outriders that served as both concealment and as a sensor-web looking for the enemy.
You’ve probably already figured this out, but there were two great changes to warfare after WWI: radio and aviation. The old model of light cavalry screens no longer applies – an airplane (or a satellite) can find an enemy maneuver element in realtime. And, of course, a radio can quickly communicate contact size, orientation, and direction – surprise is still possible, but it’s harder. Surprise is a strategic issue more than a tactical one; at the tactical scale maneuver elements ought not experience surprise unless their reconnaissance webs have been disrupted, in which case they’re not really a maneuver element anymore; they’re blind lunch-meat waiting for someone to put them on bread and add mayonnaise, i.e.: artillery or air strikes.
There’s another form of nightmare that a column can experience: the classic ambush. We don’t know who invented it but it goes back to Roman times at least. You’ve got a large serpent of men, cursing and sweating and marching along some trail, and suddenly they are attacked at the head of the column, and the rear. The object is not really (at this point) to “win” a battle – it’s to stop the column from maneuvering as such, and encourage the body of the column to, well, there’s really nothing very good to do. The column can’t disintegrate and people start moving in all directions, because they’re almost certainly going to walk into secondary ambushes set up along the sides and length of the column; then, there’s real trouble. The column can’t exactly keep going, either, and there’s a natural human tendency to go to ground and fight back. I talked about this with my Vietnam-era friend, Sazz, and he said that small bodies of troops knew that if they got hit at the front and read simultaneously, they had a matter of a few minutes to punch out of the entire situation as fast as they could, so they could re-assemble on new chosen ground. Also, if your patrol came under fire you could be fairly sure that jumping into the safety of the ditch on either side of the road (admittedly an attractive option) meant that you were almost certainly jumping into a ditch laced with landmines, or covered with a machine-gun positioned so that it could walk up the line of the ditch. He lived through an ambush like that, and felt he got off lightly, with only an AK round in the neck.
This is all sort of “academic military theory” it’s such a well-known topic. And, there are two incidents that are generally cited as absolutely awful examples of what can happen to troops in a column, that are dropped to reduced speed by attacks at the head and tail. One is the “Highway of Death” in Kuwait (1st Gulf War) in which US artillery and A-10 strike/support planes strafed and shelled an Iraqi force to pieces as it tried, moving slower and slower, to get back to Iraq. The Iraqis quickly learned that the force composition against them was nothing they’d ever be able to see or talk to, so there was nobody to surrender to, thus they didn’t even have the vague hope that someone on the other side would respect the laws of ‘civilized warfare’ and accept their surrender. The other example is one in which nobody involved had any intention of doing anything remotely like ‘civilized’ so it didn’t matter: it was fight or die and since there was nobody to fight, die was the only option: the Battle of Raate Road. During the Winter War, in which Russia attacked Finland (1939) the Finns found the Russians strung out in a long column on a road that woods, ravines, and deep snow on both sides. In strategic terms, it may as well have been a tunnel. The Finns were outnumbered but it didn’t matter, because they didn’t have to engage with the entire Russian column – they could just grind the head and the tail to a halt and, then what?
Then, the Finns – who were capable of moving cross-country in the snow – cut the Russian column in the middle, and set up ambushes at the middle, and mined the road. The Russians weren’t stupid, and did the best they could to regain initiative but really the battle had been lost the moment before it started. On the other hand, the Finns had lost before the war started – Russia VS Finland is one of those “Bambi VS Godzilla” scenarios no matter how plucky the Finns were.
I’m not sure how much of a point I have, here, it’s just a bunch of thoughts that I have been having. They’re not particularly organized (maybe you can’t tell, but I often spend months thinking over the stuff I post, and I’m not usually trying to write about cutting edge news because I don’t think it gives enough time to really think about it) – anyhow, did the Russians manage to not learn anything from the Winter War, or Afghanistan? It seems to me that the “great big column of light armored vehicles with minimal air cover and no apparent anti-aircraft capability” is straight out of the waning days of WWII. It certainly does not reflect what we’ve learned about modern battlefields.
I sincerely hope that NATO (or anyone else, except the Ukrainians) does not send in a screaming wave of artillery and aircraft, and cost the Russians a major military disaster. Because that could trigger WWWIII, for real. If Putin’s forces were to suffer a horrific defeat due to command incompetence, that could actually end his career, and he strikes me as the kind of person who’d rather see the world burn than have to suck it up and admit he failed. There’s another aspect to all of that, which I have teased repeatedly, which is that I think Putin knows that the US has been preparing for a 1st strike knockout nuclear war. I don’t think that there’s a secret cabal in Washington, rubbing their hands together and cackling (except John Bolton, hopefully in a padded room somewhere) but I don’t think US nuclear strategy has changed fundamentally from when Curtis LeMay said glibly that he never planned to stand a Soviet strike and always assumed that he’d pre-empt any attack that looked like it was about to happen. I wonder if, right now, US submarines are moving to within cruise missile range, instead of intercontinental ballistic missile range. Our lords and masters, over here, are the same kind of nasty pieces of shit who unnecessarily nuked two Japanese cities (to show the Soviets what’s what) and I’m not confident that they wouldn’t summon up a great deal of deep regret and wipe Russia off the map, if Russia looks like it’s actually getting ready to do anything more than bluster.
A world after a nuclear war will be a terrible place. The science behind nuclear winter, crop failure, and fallout is incontrovertible. But what if the gamesmen at RAND corporation have quietly concluded that the new, more precise variable-yield warheads can be delivered accurately enough to ‘decapitate’ Russia? They’d argue that mutual assured destruction (MAD) may not apply, and unilateral destruction of a massive number of people is, well, the lesser of two evils. After Waterloo, Wellington supposedly observed that the only thing worse than a battle won was a battle lost. Personally, I don’t believe that a military aristocrat like Wellington actually felt that sort of remorse – he could not have been as effective a battlefield commander as he was unless he was able to detach himself from feeling much about what his troops were experiencing. He was, I am saying, a cold-blooded bastard – and we’ve still got a few of those skulking around, today. I’d actually almost support the US raising the banner of global hegemon, if I thought that the US would actually try to run the world peacefully, democratically, and honorably; maybe do a little bit about climate change and cut back the nuclear arsenal – that kind of thing. It could be that a last horrific spasm of warfare could move humankind past this stage in our development, and on to the next. But I simply cannot be optimistic about that, at all. After all, the US’ moves to contain Russia (which are one of the many causes of the current war in Ukraine) and China, are not being made in the interest of humanity as a whole. To be blunt: it looks like it’s just dick-waving.
I’ve been remarkably unimpressed with the US foreign policy establishment. After all, you have to be pretty incompetent – insanely incompetent – to let John Bolton and David Frum (let alone Shaun Hannity!) anywhere near the levers of power. It’s been weird to watch the media try to claim that Putin’s a genius, or Obama’s a genius, or whatever, when it’s impossible to see the situation as anything other than remarkable incompetence and inability to learn from mistakes in the recent past. I know we’re all supposed to be very impressed with the plucky Ukrainians, but they don’t seem to me to be doing such a great job defending themselves. Apparently they still have some air assets and a lot of antitank weapons, but where is the artillery? For that matter, it sounds like they actually had months in which to prepare; it would have been a good idea to have buried some IED traps and distributed military explosives, instead of teaching people how to make pathetic molotov cocktails. Anyone who has studied how Russia goes to war would have expected columns of armor and trucks, air dominance, and huge artillery bombardments. It seems to me that Putin actually was not really trying to start a war so much as that he hoped he could shove Ukraine really hard and they’d fold. Maybe Ukraine expected to get shoved so hard they folded, too.
mjr, 2011 – vegetable market in Kyiv
It’s a great big mess all around; it seems as though nobody’s learned a damn thing from recent history so now we’ve got a lot of high-level anger among the rulers of the world, and none of them have the sense to pour piss out of a boot if the instructions were printed on the bottom. If there’s one thing that gives me optimism, right now, it’s that England and France are not really world powers, anymore, and we don’t have to take seriously the feeble gyrations of Macron and Johnson. The horror.
I still think it’s not likely that this will trigger WWIII, but a lot of people are going to get killed and in the long run the lines on the map won’t move very much and in a few decades things will change again; all the costs paid will be footnotes.
Unlike Finland, Ukraine’s army could (and might) do like Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, saying “Drop your guns. Please.” and let them all walk back to Russia. A massive loss of hardware, hundreds of abandoned vehicles with no corpses or blood (and photos of the marching retreat), wouldn’t just be a military win. It would be a huge public relations win, Putin’s lie about “nazis” would be exposed in the most embarrassing way possible. It would embarrass Putin’s generals as much as him.
I agree with radio and airplanes as the biggest game changers, but one could add landmines and IEDs (and grenades to a lesser extent). When oncoming troops are constantly afraid of the very ground they walk on, it changes movement and morale. Even without such devices, Russian troops know how exposed they are every metre on that bottleneck of a road. I doubt it would take much to make them abandon their position, knowing they won’t be shot in the back.
One of the reasons the convoy is stuck there is that it seems that the Ukrainians have dropped bridges here and there. And apparently the soil outside the roads is not very passable at the moment.
Destroying such convoys is standard NATO tactics, as Beau of the fifth column pointed out in one of his videos. As to why the Ukrainians haven’t done that (yet) we simply don’t know.
BTW, in a bit of curious irony, the Soviet troops who fought on Raate Road were mostly not Russian but Ukrainian.
Generally, though, the invasion force that fought in Winter War was mostly gathered from northwestern Russia. These included a number of ethnic Finns and related peoples, who were collected into a special propaganda unit called “Finnish People’s Army”. They were nominally separate from the Red Army, representing a socialist Finnish puppet government that Stalin planned to install in Helsinki.
I’m not quite clear on how much Ukraine was a willing participant vs. occupied nation in the Soviet Union. Generally, the fact that Ukraine was a part of the USSR adds a twist of irony into the comparisons between Winter War and the current conflict. These comparisons have been made in both Finland and abroad, and there’s an eerie number of similarities. Fundamentally, of course, the USSR was very much a Russian project, and for geographic reasons Russia was always the part of USSR that faced Finland in particular. Therefore, it’s not too inaccurate to say that “Russia” was the invading party in Winter War.
Indeed, it took a great combination of pluckiness, strategic savviness, sheer luck and threat of a Western intervention that we “only” lost some of our territory in the end. Unsurprisingly, in subsequent Finnish collective memory, the whole affair is framed as a “defensive victory” rather than a “partial loss”, and there’s widespread perception (even outside of Finland) that we “defeated” the Red Army.
Also unsurprisingly, Finnish Winter War mythologizing puts disproportionate attention to these wilderness battles that halted Soviet advance in areas north of Lake Ladoga. Much of the war was in fact fought on Karelian Isthmus, the strip of land between Ladoga and Gulf of Finland, where it was more like regular warfare. There, after some steep losses and learning curve, the Soviets managed to break through a Finnish fortification line colloquially known as “Mannerheim line”.
Again unsurprisingly, in modern Russian perception of the Winter War (inasmuch as the whole embarrassing affair is remembered at all), there is almost total focus on the Mannerheim line and its breakthrough, which tipped the war toward a (slow, painful) victory. The Russian Winter War narrative also implies that the goal all along was to seize just the amount of territorial concession that was won in the end, no more or less. I imagine this would be the best case scenario for the future Russian-Ukrainian relations, after the annexation of Crimea and perhaps some eastern parts.
The fact that the Russian column still exists is pretty solid evidence for the Ukrainians not having any relevant artillery or air assets anywhere near there.
So far Ukraine has put up a pretty good defense, following the playbook of protracted war where a weaker defender drags out the conflict and shifts the focus to a battle of will; there’s every reason to expect this turning into a Vietnam/Afghanistan-esque quagmire. I recommend this post on the topic: https://acoup.blog/2022/03/03/collections-how-the-weak-can-win-a-primer-on-protracted-war/
As Ukraine is not a NATO member, and Russia continually claims to feel threatened, Ukraine does not have Western aircraft. They have Russian products including the MIG 29, Su-2[4,5,7], Mi-24 (says Google). You can be sure that they do not have the newest and best, that Russia is not supplying them with spare parts and maintenance, and that they are not superior to what the Russians can deploy.
Ukrainian drone enthusiasts sign up to repel Russian forces
Just off the cuff, I can see some compelling reasons for the Ukrainians to just let the column sit there.
First, until it starts moving again its not a threat. It’s a liability for the Russians. They can’t pull their troops off the column without losing the equipment. They can’t retreat without looking like they giving up. And they are blocking the road for any other Russian forces which may want to use that route.
Second, not attacking it allows the Ukrainians to use their resources elsewhere.
Third, as long as they don’t attack it, it makes Putin and his generals look like fools for stranding a column on the road for so long. The longer that lasts the better the propaganda war will go. Once the Ukrainians attack it, that appearance of incompetence may be increased if the battle goes well for the Ukrainians, or reduced if the Russians do well. Right now the Ukrainians have positive solid PR, which gets better the longer it lasts. Why would they take the risk to lose it?
If the column does start moving again, then it becomes a threat.
Now my own suspicion is that this column does not consist of fighting troops, but of supplies and equipment for passivation after Kyiv has been taken. I think the Russian generals started this column moving a day after the initial assault with the expectation that Kyiv would fall quickly. Since Kyiv has not fallen, this column has stopped to wait until it does. As Marcus says, even with radio communication, getting a column of this size moving takes time and it can’t cover a great deal of distance each day. It may have started moving even before the initial assault.
If this is the case, then it’s not really important for the Ukrainians to destroy the column. It is more important to defend Kyiv. The column will camp where it is until Kyiv is taken. If Kyiv falls, then ambuscades along the column would be something for the resistance.
Of course, I’m just an arm-chair quarterback so everything I say is speculation. But I would be surprised if the Russian’s didn’t have a passivation plan for after the capture of Ukraine, and it seems clear to me that the Russian’s also didn’t expect as much resistance as they got. So I suspect the column is sitting because it has nothing to do until Kyiv is taken.
Reginald Selkirk @5: Some of the NATO countries which were in the Warsaw Pact still have some Soviet-era planes, either in service or in storage. They may well be supplying them with spare parts. No, not the latest, but not nothing.
@8: Interesting. I just ran across these headlines:
U.S., Poland look at providing Soviet-era Aircraft to Ukraine (WSJ)
White House weighs 3-way deal to get fighter jets to Ukraine (Yahoo)
The idea is that countries formerly under Soviet control give their old stock (e.g. Mig 29) to Ukraine and have them replaced with shiny new American kit. Apparently not a done deal yet.
When I wrote this, I was thinking a lot about Simo Häyhä, the snipin’est sniper ever (100+ kills in one day) [wik] who was involved in the fighting along Raate rd. While it’d be pretty easy for a sniper team to find the Russian column, it’s still 15,000 Russians and their idea of sniper suppression probably involves thermobaric barrages.
You can probably tell I’m waffling all over the place on this issue. I just want peace, not more killing – and I hardly care who comes out “ahead” because I don’t think there’s a lot of “ahead” to come out. Just stop dropping artillery on cities full of people, OK? Nobody can occupy the moral high ground while they are doing that. But I don’t want a bunch of dumb Russian conscripts to get killed any more than I do Ukrainian civilians. It seems to me that a lot of the things the US and its allies are talking about amount to turning the Ukrainians into a meat-grinder – something that we’ve pulled before and nobody ought to fall for.
flex@#7:
First, until it starts moving again its not a threat. It’s a liability for the Russians. They can’t pull their troops off the column without losing the equipment. They can’t retreat without looking like they giving up. And they are blocking the road for any other Russian forces which may want to use that route.
Exactly.
It’s probably not much of a threat if it does start moving again. Unless the Ukrainians are complete idiots the path from that road-head into Kyiv is going to be like the WALMART of IEDs. The Ukrainians have had ample opportunity to learn whatever lessons can be squeezed from Iraq and Afghanistan.
I think part of what’s going on here is this is a (at the meta-level) war where neither side can be seen to win too hard – it’s one of those weird things like when protesters come to a protest and the cops bring the clubs and they bring the bandages: nobody is going to fight to “win” but both sides have to be there and be fighting or they are considered to have lost. Russia is already dailing back its aggression to keep from going complete carnage on the situation, and the Ukrainians have to resist pluckily without pissing the Russians off so thoroughly that they do go complete carnage.
lumipuna@#3:
BTW, in a bit of curious irony, the Soviet troops who fought on Raate Road were mostly not Russian but Ukrainian.
It’s as if human history was scripted by a mad god, who hates us and just loves to fuck with people.
I speculate that Ukraine is busy dealing with the stuff that’s currently on fire, so it’s higher priority. A convoy that’s breaking down while the whole world watches is great PR for Ukraine. They are showing mercy to those who would oppress them.
Isn’t the Battle of the Teutobourg Forest the classic example of a professional military column being annihilated by a plucky underdog force of mostly civilians? Nobody knows how many “barbarians” were waiting in the forest, but they miraculously managed to destroy two Roman legions. The people who leave reviews on google are excellent at snark.
… a lot of people are going to get killed and in the long run the lines on the map won’t move very much and in a few decades things will change again…
I always enjoy the sunny optimism to be found here! (Uh, no snark – that is the best-case scenario…)
Every time I think about that dude, I wonder why there still isn’t a big budget Hollywood movie about him. I mean come ON – five foot nothing in his socks, he takes an iron sighted hunting rifle into the woods and spends the three months he was active basically killing a Russian about once every daylight hour, seven days a week in conditions that would kill unprepared penguins. The Russians send all kinds of anti-sniper forces against him, and he… kills them all. Well, almost all. They did get him, eventually.
And despite having his war ended by an exploding bulllet to the face he dies in his bed in the 21st century. How is there not already a film about this guy, especially given that the Russians gave him the cool nickname “The White Death”? They made a film about Chris Kyle, who took YEARS to build up a kill count less than half that of Hayha… or about a quarter if you believe his official count.
Actually, I think I know why there’s not a movie about him. He wasn’t an action hero. He wasn’t a gung ho “hooaah” type, and there’s probably not a lot you could do to make his story actually entertaining, consisting as it did of years of practice, meticulous preparation, patience, persistence and endurance beyond most people’s imagining, combined with a quiet, humble nature. It’s not really a Hollywood story, however impressive it may be on paper. Shame, kinda.
How quaint that you think that would be an obstacle to Hollywood. Do you not smirk every time you read “based on a true story”?
You’re right, of course. I’d just hope in an age of wiki we could avoid a repeat of the affront that was “U-571”. But then the Cumberbatch Turing movie was almost as dreadful in its revisionism. So why no film then? Baffling.
flex #7
I’ve been thinking the same after I heard that the Russian troops are keeping the engines idling, to stay warm. It made me consider how may resources it costs to just keeps them sitting there. They still need food. They still need fuel. They still need friggin’ toilet paper.
However many thousand Russians, taking at least one shit every day. That’s a lot of toilet paper. That’s a lot of trucks, carrying toilet paper. That’s a lot of fuel, to drive those trucks. Just to make sure they can sit there and do nothing useful.
Chechens Fighting Chechens in Ukraine
The 65 km long convoy? It’s a flagrant boast and a threat.
It says to the Ukrainian Armed Forces, especially the Air Force, you are now irrelevant. We do not even need to get out of column of march.
To Kiev, it says we can invest you at any time. Want to deal?
Ukraine has lost the war and Russia is trying to reduce casualties as it starts negotiations.
did the Russians manage to not learn anything from the Winter War, or Afghanistan?
Of course they did but they seem to think a very small risk is worth not having to attack Warsaw and kill a lot of Ukrainians plus Russian troops.
US generals and armchair analysts keep saying Russian tactics are bad/incompetent/whatever but they fail to see the object. If Russia had gone in US-style “shock and awe” all of Ukraine would probably be in the bag in 100 hours. The thing is, the Russians see themselves as a liberation force there to help the Donbas Republics and its sympathizers, not as invaders. ( Yes I know). They are doing their damnedest to keep civilian casualties and infrastructure damage to a minimum. Heck, they are trying to keep Ukrainian military casualties as low as possible (with the exception of the Nazi militia brigades like Azov whom they may have hunter-killer troops pursuing)
They also remember Grozny and have no desire to repeat that.
This confuses any US soldier who was at Al Fallujah.
@1. Intransitive says
I love that idea I really hope it happens.
@jrkrideau
If the plan was to be welcomed as liberators, then it’s hard not to argue that the plan failed. That at least should be something the US can relate to.
@ ^ LykeX : Russia may destroy Ukraine’s army. It may “win” and occupy Ukraine.
But the Ukrainians will not forget or forgive and they won’t let Russia keep their land.
Hearts and minds huh? Putin has lost both it seems – assuming he had them to begin with. Which given the heartlessness and counter-productive utter folly of this invasion so far seems in huge doubt.
Also far from demonstrating Russia’s military strength, looks to me so far like its actually highlighting it’s weaknesses.
FWIW, I thought Julia Ioffe’s interview on Colbert here :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvxGPczSiHM
Plus :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67jmTjWo_Os
&
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5l2nN0rBpk
Was interesting albeit now a week or so out of date.
PS Oh & also just watching now :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-xuQLPEeZk
Fiona Hill also on Colbert. Esp. 7 minutes mark – and short-sighted Putin? How apt.
Oh yes, what a humanitarian is Vlad the Poisoner.
Moscow says it will let Ukrainian civilians flee – to Russia
SteveOr@#21:
Allegedly Russian troops made a tactical blunder and took the elevator to the top of a building. Ukrainians powered off the controls. Wonder if they are still there.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HemqNvks-vk
Reginald Selkirk@#26:
Oh yes, what a humanitarian is Vlad the Poisoner.
Moscow says it will let Ukrainian civilians flee – to Russia
I’m starting to lean toward the people who say that he’s deranged. I thought he was a fairly rational authoritarian asshole but I’m lapping up the propaganda feed that portrays him as a dangerous authoritarian.
The post-WWII world was full of people pointing at various incidents and saying “we should have realized Hitler was going to be a problem when he did ${thing}” which beg the question of why nobody did anything effective (simple answer: the only thing that would have worked was violence, it was an attempt to delay that) the world should have realized that Putin is an unusually horrible human being, when he began his campaign of murder by poison against people who publicly criticized him. That’s, uh, an red flag.
sonofrojblake@#15:
Every time I think about that dude, I wonder why there still isn’t a big budget Hollywood movie about him. I mean come ON – five foot nothing in his socks, he takes an iron sighted hunting rifle into the woods and spends the three months he was active basically killing a Russian about once every daylight hour, seven days a week in conditions that would kill unprepared penguins. The Russians send all kinds of anti-sniper forces against him, and he… kills them all. Well, almost all. They did get him, eventually.
I hear that they had a script but Mark Wahlberg wouldn’t sign on to it because he didn’t get to “win” single-handed.
This sounds interesting but has a lot of Finnish. [researchnet]
When I was a kid, I read a lot of SLA Marshall’s “history” (I now consider him debunked) and a lot of Napoleonic war histories. The latter don’t concern themselves with the thoughts and emotions of the soldiers – what I’d call “old school military history” pre SLA Marshall – but the introductory paragraph above fascinates me: the author jumps right into the lived experience and interpretive structures of the veterans. That’s going mighty deep.
Do you think what Trump has is contagious?
Some weird prion disease which weakens objectivity, encourages ignoring reality, and strengthens narcistic behavior?
Here are a couple photos of Vlad the Poisoner meeting with some of his closest advisers. I guess when you make a habit of using poison, it colors your perception of other people.
As far as Putin and derangement goes it’s more likely to be something like “There’s no fool like an old fool.” That’s a pretty common thing. No matter what you’re doing, if you get away with it long enough without consequences you start to think it’s fine. And if there’s no meaningful pushback against it and it seems more convenient for you to expand on that idea, even if it’s bad? Well, you’ll expand on it. Because you know there’s no reason not to, right? It’s not like anyone else did a lot when he snatched Crimea from Ukraine. He basically got away with grabbing it. If someone told him that this time it would go very badly I’m sure he could just point at Crimea and say “What’s the difference? Why would it go any worse?” And that could easily sound like a pretty reasonable argument.
It doesn’t take dementia or Trump-like absenteeism from reality to make fantastically bad choices. All it takes is getting older and being used to people not calling you on your BS. Pretty sure lots of people experience that, just usually not with mistakes on that scale.
MR (#29) –
See also Carlos Dardano, pilot of TACA Flight 110. His story was much more interesting and heroic than “sully”, but not being white or English speaking probably had a lot to do with hollyweird never telling his story.
The History Guy’s video completely ignores the fact that Captain Dardano lost his left eye during El Salvador’s civil war. His perfect landing was far more impressive than that old white guy’s.
Flex @31
Only to the authorito-compromised.
@ 22 LykeX
If the plan was to be welcomed as liberators, then it’s hard not to argue that the plan failed.
Yes I know.
In the Donbas Republics and the Donetsk and Lugansk Oblasts overall I imagine they were were hailed as heroes. Something to do with the 13 or 14 thousand mainly civilians dead from the civil war that Kiev let go on rather than implementing the Minsk accords..
The further west they go the more they will be hated.
A commentator on CBC at ~ 2022-03-08 00:10 EST reports that Kiev is just about completely encircled and the 65km convoy is heading that way.
Thought this was a good, in-depth analysis here :
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/02/28/world-war-iii-already-there-00012340
Last paragraph makes for a grim clear summary.
@ 36. jrkrideau : Isn’t that the total death toll not just the Russian one of that RuSSian inspired conflict and uSSian occupied area?
lanir @ # 33: … if you get away with it long enough without consequences …
I haven’t followed Russian politics real closely – but hasn’t Putin, at least since taking power, pretty much won at everything he’s done? Over two decades of that would induce major egotism regardless of gerontological effects.
Pierce R. Butler @ 39: I wouldn’t know either but I can’t recall hearing any reporting that would disagree with your take on it. I tend to think gerontological effects just mean you’re more likely to feel like you have a lot of experience to back up your ideas. Whether they’re good or bad. Although I probably should have noted that I was thinking of people in leadership positions like Putin when I commented. It’s not just about age, I do think the position of high authority and how other people treat you are far more of a selector for this than just getting old.
@ 38 StevoR
Isn’t that the total death toll not just the Russian one of that RuSSian inspired conflict and uSSian occupied area?
I do not understand the question. I am speaking of the 13 or 14 thousand deaths, mainly civilian, that the Donetsk People’s Republic and Lugansk People’s Republic have suffered at the hands of the Kiev Gov’t and its associated Nazi militias such as the Azov Battalion. Kiev’s failure to implement the Minsk Accords is the central problem here.
@ 28 Marcus Ranum
I’m starting to lean toward the people who say that he’s deranged.
I suspect that that is because you are getting most of your information from the US and British press whose coverage of this is worse than their coverage of the build-up to the Invasion of Iraq.
He appears far saner, more balanced and more intelligent than anything on the Western bench at the moment.
Here is a 24 –25 minute video of Putin explaining things from the Russian viewpoint. Bizarrely to me, it seems to be at a luncheon for female aviation staff on International Women’s Day. Seems to be a mix of flight attendants and pilots.
Putin Ukraine Int’l Women’s Day.
Click on the cc button to get English subtitles.
A purely text transcript is available at Full Transcript of Putin’s Remarks on 3/5/22: Includes Comments on Why He Ordered the Military Operation in Ukraine, Why it Went Beyond Donbas, Whether He Plans to Declare Martial Law, etc.
I recommend watching at least some of the video.
@42: Do you get paid for this in rubles or dollars?
Is it OK for a territory, and a people, who feel they are oppressed to break away from the controlling power? Asking for some Chechnian friends. And some Georgian friends. And…
Reginald Selkirk@#44:
Is it OK for a territory, and a people, who feel they are oppressed to break away from the controlling power?
Rousseau’s argument is that a state which does not fairly serve its constituents is not legitimate and can be treated as an occupying power. In the case of an occupying power, it’s not legitimate at all, so it’s not a matter of breaking away so much as it is asking the occupying power to leave. Historically, occupying powers laugh their asses off, when asked nicely.
I tend to prefer Robert Paul Wolff’s argument better, but he rejects the authority of all states, by setting such a high bar for their legitimacy that none of them can achieve it. But that’s the problem with anarchists; they’ve been pointing out the illegitimacy of states since the invention of states, and mostly it just gets them bashed or speared.
Bad news for jrkrideau:
The Spectacular Collapse of Putin’s Disinformation Machinery