Russia - threadbanned users in OP

Like I was saying earlier MM, during the Cold War the Soviet Union were very good at supporting/infiltrating/preaching to groups in the West that suited their aims. When the Soviet Union fell it wasn't just supported nations like Cuba that felt that loss. The number of pro Russian/Left/Peace outfits that faded away without that support was interesting.

Over the last few years Russia has been looking at minority groups in the West to support and peddle their spin and again they've been very good at it. Social media makes it so much easier for them too. Groups like conservatives, MAGA, Right and Left on the fringes and of course the WEF/Globalist elites/Covid/Fake News/NWO/The Gays are after your kids conspiracy types. the latter are fertile ground, because you can spin pretty much anything that isn't in The Mainstream Media(tm) and they're likely to buy it wholesale. They're already true believers before you even show up. They're also helped by too much and increasing Newspeak in the West itself.

When putin rattles on about the "liberal west with all their genders" he's certainly playing to the home crowd, but also to the wider world including the above groups and conservative nations outside the West. The old Cold War was on the surface at least(it's always about power) about Communism Versus Capitalism, this Cold War 2 is more along the lines of Liberal Democracy Versus Conservative Authoritarianism. An easy choice some might say. Yep, if you believe one is superior and don't understand that the person who doesn't is just as sure of their position. That's why exporting "Freedom" of any type doesn't tend to work out so well for the exporter.

Yes and no Threeball. Search out the groups I mentioned above, the WEF/Globalist elites/Covid/Fake News/NWO/The Gays are after your kids conspiracy types and it's a near cast iron guarantee they also support Russia in this. Go on twitter and find a few random Russian supporters and again it's a near guarantee their timelines, tweets and retweets fit into the above.

And again we see people with an allergy to opening a history book(they likely see it as "Globalist Elite Mainstream History"). The joke is the Soviet Union from its foundation, on paper at least, was far more "progressive" and "liberal" than the majority of "capitalist" nations. EG equal rights for women, anti racism laws and the like. Oh and the Soviet Union decriminalised homosexuality in 1920, long before the US and most of Europe, though Stalin recriminalised it in the 30's.

Vids like that also seem to show a serious lack of anti tank kit among the Russian forces. Manic Moran, our resident actual tank and military expert, noted earlier how Russian and Ukrainian tankers seem to have forgotten the maxims of combined tank and troop movements and that was clearly a major screwup on the Russian side early on in this war where we saw encounter after encounter where Russian tanks and armoured vehicles not backed up by infantry were blasted by anti tank weapons.

What I've noticed more recently is again tanks and armoured vehicles out on their own, only this time it's the Ukrainians doing it. However what's different, at least in the encounters we're seeing is the Russians aren't firing back with anti tank weapons. A video a few days ago had a Ukrainian tank moving about in fields, at one point smack dab in the middle of one, pounding Russian positions for ages(the video was actually speeded up to get it into the twitter time limit). A perfect target, yet we don't see it taking fire from those Russian positions and judging by the actions of the Ukrainian tank crew, either they're just mad/madly brave, or they feel confident enough that incoming anti tank fire is not the threat it was in that area. What also seems to be clear is that Ukrainians still have anti tank weapons.

In the end it doesn't matter IMHO. The back and forth minutiae of the lines moving in either direction is in many ways a truly horrific sideshow taking attention away from the wider realities. Numero uno of which is Russia has lost this war and it lost it this time last year. Even if their "feint" hadn't happened, they had taken the capital and Zelensky ended up needing that "ride" rather than ammunition. That's when their real battle would have started.

Look at America and her allies in Iraq. They won that war comprehensibly. They achieved their aims of taking Baghdad, removing and executing Saddam, secured the oilfields and took over the country, and did so in a matter of months with truly remarkably light casualities on their side. Game Over. Only it wasn't. They lost more people in the occupation than in the war and in the end they left, leaving behind an Iraq that is massively unstable with fighting between groups still going on and a state that is arguably far more unstable and fecked than it was under Saddam. Look at America and Soviet Russia in Afghanistan. Both stormed in, took the capital with relative ease, got a regime change and Americans and Russians kept dying, never mind the countless locals. And in the end both America and Russia had to leave. America lost trillions and thousands of lives, Russia lost even more lives and the Soviet Union itself. And on both cases the invading forces were overwhelming with tanks and troops and full control of the air.

Taking a country is the "easy" part, occupying a country? That's by far the most difficult. Russia have failed at the first hurdle, they have zero hope of achieving the bigger one. The thing is nobody has been able to jump that hurdle, or at least not for very long. You can win all the battles you like, but you quite simply can't win a war against people who don't want you there. Nobody ever has in wars of the modern era. You'd think Russians of all people would understand this, but nope. The imperialism, hubris and historical amnesia gets in the way. Just like it always does with every such invasion, no matter how just the cause seems to be for the invaders.