This. Nazi Germany was the the outlier and a very short lived one for all it's impact. Not much more than a decade. So when it was gone, German society reverted to the mean. Russia's mean for all the reasons Thomill outlined is and has been quite different and for centuries. This is a society that had indentured slaves until the mid 19th century. Their mean is a tiny elite in the west of the country raking in all the power and cash while the greater mass of Russia is left with scraps from their table. Communism for all its faults was seen as a new hope for change, but they just reverted to the Russian mean and exchanged one set of Czars and Boyers for another. Though the masses did get more scraps from the table than they had. So they saw it as a step up.
After communism fell and chaos reigned and the country and the people were raped by a new elite, putin came to be seen as a step up. And for your average Russian he actually was. He gathered his own elite, brought them to heel and bumped off any opponents. The upshot was that while Russia was still being bled by his elite, far more ordinary Russians saw improvements and more scraps from the table. They also felt more proud as he tamped down the obvious craziness of the 90's and went international. Your average forty year old and older Russian who lived through the 90's will have seen a better, often much better life under Czar putin and that's where he gets a lot of his grass roots support from.
Russia have been trying to recapture a bridgehead for the last 4 days on the left bank of the Ingulets (Bilogirka-Lozove-Andriyivka)They failed and lost at least one BTG so no movement shown on the maps.Russia are moving forces out of Melitipol towards Kherson,Possibly to reinforce or rotate troops.
More establishment media is starting the inception process on populance to accept the coming loss and the New and not Improved Rump State of Ukraine. It of course didn't have to be this way.
More disscussion on the economic loss, the loss on the ground and the PR loss will follow in the next few months, until the next moral outrage is presented for the dilettantes to obsess over.
There was nothing Putin could have done to prevent all this God love him.
I am making contributions to humanitarian charities. The UAF can probably do without my 50 quid.
This guy tends to have a realistic take on what happens on the ground, bit worrying for ukraine if they've blazed through all their ammo stores, I'm assuming its not a shortage of 7.62 Soviet, there has to be a shedload of that around the world:
..
its good to see both sides come together and swap their dead- 50 corpses for 50 corpses
Probably a false name.
Dronie McBombdrop.
There may also be problems on the Russian side.They are using Artillery a lot and the barrels of these guns have a life span connected to age,use and maintenance.The Americans wore out 2 howitzers against ISIS.https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/15733/marines-burned-out-two-howitzer-barrels-during-the-raqqa-offensive
Any donations to the Red Cross will only be used for humanitarian purposes. They do not support any military/ weapon funding. They are a 100% Humanitarian organization,
Never even thought of the possibility Ukraine could run out of ammo for their soviet weapons.
Yeah, but I'd say that barrel replacement is factored into the normal maintenance schedule in US / EU supplied weapons. But as for Russian maintenance and spare parts supply....
Merkel's argument
‘I don’t blame myself’: Merkel defends legacy on Russia and Ukraine – POLITICO
I'd imagine that all this would have been thought about when making the decision to donate them? Not much point in giving weapons that they have very limited use of?
Not to worry, history will blame her.
Merkel also said she had “at no time given in to illusions” that Germany’s Wandel durch Handel (change through trade) policy would really change Putin’s behavior. “I was not naive,” Merkel said, arguing that she repeatedly warned allies that Putin “wants to destroy the EU because he sees it as a precursor to NATO.”
And yet she still delivered Germanys energy market up to him. So it was all just about cheap fuel or she was bought off.
This is what led the EU.
The first time I heard about Russian gas - many years ago - I knew it was a bad idea. I immediately said it to the person who told me about it.
I don't think it was necessarily a mistake from Germany's point of view to buy a lot of Russian gas. From a risk benefit point of view, I'm sure they've saved billions but the mistake was having absolutely no redundancy and decommissioning nuclear.
Initially, it wasn't. However, persisting with it after Putin had shown his true colours in Georgia was a mistake, and a big one at that. Keeping to "business as usual" after 2014 is simply inexcusable, and that's me as a German saying that!
However, I think there's some context that's needed here. Russia has about the same place in the German psyche that Vietnam has in the US. Leaving aside the obvious moral depravity and unadulterated evil of the Nazis, the fact remains that an entire generation of Germans was killed on Russian soil, large parts of German territory were lost for nothing. A good chunk of the children who grew up post-war would only meet their fathers when they were able to visit their graves at one of the many war cemeteries in Eastern Europe, including one Gerhard Schröder, by the way, as his father was killed during the Battle of Dukla Pass in modern-day Slovakia in late 1944.
This trauma has persisted in some shape until very recently, particularly amongst the older generations, the ones who are currently in positions of power in Germany. In turn, this has caused a certain impetus in post-war west German politics to prevent such a massive amount of bloodshed in the future by ensuring that Russo-German relations never again drop to a level where war becomes an option. Close economic ties were, and in some circles still are, seen as the best way to achieve that, together with intense cultural exchanges and a healthy dose of "looking the other way", something German politicians are particularly adept at.
Nothing of this excuses the vacillating, mealy-mouthed hesitation shown by the Scholz government, my complete and utter disgust for this man is well-documented on this thread. However, I do believe that German policies towards Russia are simply born out of this honest desire to prevent a repeat of '41-'45 and now that their supposed "partner" in Moscow has turned out to be a mixture of Stalin and Mussolini (Stalin for his bloodlust, Mussolini for his pompousness and incompetence), Berlin is simply lost and hoping that by ignoring the issue and pretending nothing has changed, things will go away.
It seems to me that if Ukraine loses it will be Scholz's fault because he is in a position to tip the scales of this war with Germany's considerable resources.
Purely defensive radar and maybe MLRS. Give me a break.
Germany will supply Ukraine with a modern IRIS-T-class air defense system and a modern target detection radar, as well as consider the possibility of supplying multiple rocket launchers in cooperation with the United States.
Scholz says Germany helping Ukraine more than Britain (ukrinform.net)
^^ Good points. If anything, Germany were also overcompensating for the horrors inflicted on the Soviet Union during WW2 and were trying to 'redress the balance' to a certain extent. What they didn't factor in was Putin going completely rogue and turning into a nutty warmonger dictator type in the second decade of his presidency.
...
Id temper realistic in that he seems and publishes negative coverage. I do believe rather than being realistic he's found is niche and gives him the hits he needs. I've yet to see non negative coverage of any aspect of ukraines position for months from him. You'd have to believe he's reveling in notoriety now .
His coverage has been fairly accurate and balanced when you look back on how events transpired from the start. It was when he wound up at the front lines in Sievierodonetsk that his coverage started differing from the positive spin you see everywhere else, probably because he was seeing that it was a meat grinder for the Ukranians as much as it was for the Russians
Yep.
Ukraine are loosing just as many troops as Russia. If not more.
We just aren’t been told since the beginning.
On what basis?
The general view is that in the beginning Russian casualties were far higher as Ukraine were on mobile defensive against disorganised scattered Russian attacks. Now that the conflict is focused in Donbas with concentrated Russian forces it is reasonable to think the casualty ratio is more even. However we have incidents like the Russian bridging attempts which incurred heavy casualties. So it seems a stretch to say they are losing equal or more.
This was Zelensky a week ago
https://www.kyivpost.com/ukraine-politics/zelensky-ukrainian-army-suffering-up-to-700-casualties-daily.html
The “broken” is always the telltale giveaway
I think we’re in agreement they are loosing a lot now.
Who can outlast with sheer numbers is the question.
Ukraine pleading with people not to let those who worked for Russia in senior leadership positions to be let retire without being called out.
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