Russia - threadbanned users in OP

Turkey’s president, Tayyip Erdoğan, has said Turkey cannot abandon its ties with Russia or Ukraine, adding that Ankara would implement a pact on maritime passage from its straits to prevent an escalation of the war, and limit Russian access to The Black Sea.

"We offer Russian soldiers a choice: to die in an unjust war or a full amnesty and 5 million rubles in compensation. If they lay down their arms and surrender voluntarily"

https://twitter.com/DefenceU/status/1498359087184109572?s=20&t=UZihzbPiuVWNbQo_GkyoFw

I was wondering if anyone would notice!

Wow

Ehhh, what is this Twitter page exactly?

What the f**k did Putin think was going to happen? Russia would invade the Ukraine, a large European country and everyone would just shrug?

There's a thing going around about how the Russians thought the troops would be essentially welcomed. I don't buy this because if they genuinely thought that, the call would have been made to go into the whole country during the 2014 revolution, rather than just Crimea + a chunk of the Donbas region.

If the West cannot confront Russia directly due to MAD, then the country must be economically sanctioned into dust. The farmers living out by the Urals might not feel the pain too much, but the ones living in large cosmopolitan Russian cities are going to be asking WTF fairly quick.

Will be interesting to see how the Ukrainians will handle it......for sure, I would not like to be in the lead vehicles and the Ukrainians have plenty of javelins. Will be a lot of gaps in it by the time it gets to its destination, I'd say.

wow now thats a potentially tempting strategy for some russian soldiers if they are not shot by their own side first

The biggest sacrifice of all

My contention is that this war, from Putin’s point of view, has to go now one of two ways, it has to get much bigger or much smaller, not go the way its going. You see the popularity of Putin in Russia is not limitless, he is vulnerable, because all Russian leaders are, to an overthrow if the war goes badly.

When Russia did badly in the Russo-Japanese War in 1905 it led to a minor revolution and some mutinies. When they suffered mass casualties in WWI it led to a major revolution and the overthrow of the whole ruling class. Widespread casualties in the Afghan War was one of the major causes of the downfall of the USSR in the late 80s/early 90s. Similarly widespread casualties, both civilian and military, in the First Chechen War of 1994-6 was a big cause of the downfall of Yeltsin:

“As a result, the Russian media coverage partially precipitated a loss of public confidence in the government and a steep decline in President Yeltsin’s popularity. Chechnya was one of the heaviest burdens on Yeltsin’s 1996 presidential election campaign.”

( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Chechen_War .)

Putin knows this very well and generally did not get involved to date in any kind of quagmire war involving mass Russian casualties. His involvement in Syria for example is mostly by airforce and sometimes via mercenary units whose casualties do not have to be listed as Russian ones.

But the trajectory of this Ukraine conflict is that Russia must now take the big Ukrainian cities and it realistically cannot do that without massive civilian – fellow Slavs, who didn’t invade Russia – or Russian military casualties or both. So something has to give, I think it has to get bigger or smaller maybe:

a) An early agreement and cease fire is cobbled together between Russia and Ukraine. Russia might be content to add to its Crimean enclave a bit, guaranteeing water supplies etc, and maybe to allow Russian troops stay in their two breakaway Republics or even in some shape or form in Ukraine proper.

If it is true that the main Ukrainian army is surrounded near the Eastern border, then they could be a sitting duck for Russian rocket and other attacks and they might very well agree to such a settlement.

Obviously Putin lives to fight another day in that scenario

b) It escalates rapidly, because again if it became a huge potential conflict involving much of the rest of Europe or even the US, then the Russians would probably rally around the flag and all that and Putin would be ok.

The reason why it could escalate is now not too hard to guess at. Most of the rest of Europe has now pledged serious supplies of lethal equipment to Ukraine, which is surely an act of war? Also the latest sanctions are looking more like a blockade than sanctions, all airspace around Russian denied to their aircraft, all banking and hence trade transactions stopped etc etc, again it could be interpreted as an act of war? Its not just me, some are genuinely speculating that things could go further than they already have, the US State Department is advising all US citizens to leave Russia now, for example.

Hence we can see that it could go wider like this, involving NATO countries, but how would such a conflict go?

Obviously the first question is the nuclear one. I think its possible that the US could go for some false flag thing, blaming some nuclear explosions in the US on Russia? or it could just prove to be a dead letter. i.e. everybody agrees that there is no nuclear option in this conflict, because obviously it could wipe everybody out, so the conflict just becomes conventional.

And a conventional conflict, between Russia and the rest of Europe, looks like advantage Russia. Take a few simple statistics, the largest armies in Western Europe are the French, British, Italian and German, possibly in that order. Taking the British then, who probably have the best kit and training and certainly the most experienced army, they have according to the Times 28/2/2022: 73,000 troops and 148 tanks. The Russian army in contrast, while it generates many different statistics, has maybe a million under arms now, a quarter or a third of which are conscripts. But it possibly also has access to maybe 2 million reserves, or even more.

The reserve figure comes from the fact that over many years Russian males have had to give a years military service, and hence have military experience, generating roughly 300,000 men a year. If you give that say 10 years, at a conservative estimate you would end up with a pool of approximately 3 million men in their 20s or early 30s with military experience in Russia. Most of the rest of Europe ended that service a long time ago, with the exception of some smaller countries like Switzerland and Finland. However, while yes you can do that kind of reserve calculation for many countries, its usually only nominal in most countries, for two reasons:

Firstly calling them up is one thing, equipping them is another. Your average yearly conscript is getting the rifle held by the previous years conscript and the same with tanks and APCs etc, in most countries there isn’t enough equipment to expand suddenly your army like this. Not so Russia, it has huge stockpiles of old Soviet equipment, as you can see in a few quotes from a website on this here:

“Russia currently has about 2,800 [T-55 tanks] in reserve...[T-62 tanks] 2,500 in reserve ...[T-64 tanks] 2,000 in reserve...[T-90A tanks] 350 active...and 200 in reserve...[T-80U tanks] 450 in active service and 3,000 in reserve...[T-72B3 tanks]...Russia has about 1,900 T-72s [tanks] in service and 7,000 in reserve...”

(https://www.businessinsider.com/here-are-all-the-tanks-russias-arsenal-2017-6 .)  

They are only some of the tanks (which have been upgraded and expanded markedly since that article came out in 2017), they also have huge stockpiles of Armoured Personnel Carriers and artillery etc. So yes, unlike nearly all similar countries, they could equip the pretty vast army reserves that they could potentially call up.

Secondly most of the large armies of the world, especially the US army but also Britain and France for example, are not in a position to actually put into the field anything like their overall nominal strength. That is because they have huge commitments all over the world, the US for example has an enormous number of military bases spanning the globe which couldn’t be completed denuded of troops to supply any future emergency. Incidentally the US bases abroad include some 36,000 troops in Germany, which is actually not many to face the Russian bear.

This is much less true of Russia which only has Syria as a major foreign commitment, it could indeed deploy some of those millions to invade Western Europe. Incidentally in the figures given above, not mentioned are about 500,000 Russians in the other branches of the armed forces, navy, airforce, missiles etc, so they can still be in their bases in Russia and it doesn’t detract from the above figures. Also in the above figures you might be able to include troops from Belarus and possibly Armenia, as fighting on the Russian side.

So you do the maths, look at the size of the British army for example and ask yourself how they could possibly face Russia in a conventional war? Yes there are other countries in Europe of course but their militaries are frequently in a very dilapidated state. Ireland for example maybe could put into the field only 10,000 or so soldiers, no tanks and no practical offensive air or naval forces. In places like Ireland there are no guns to be had among the civilian population at all either, as another point, unlike Ukraine where at least they have many small arms.

Bottom line, this war could end soon, or it could get much more serious. If you hear about the large Russian reserves been called up, or heaven forbid a serious nuclear confrontation, watch out!