The Russian military said they're merely bringing in new troops and equipment, FWIW. [EDIT: but if Kazakhstan can disobey Putin, you have to wonder when some of his soldiers might start.] I heard some interesting chatter on NPR this morning. Apparently some voices in the State Dept. (and in the UK's equivalent) worry that Putin is not receiving the real data on the campaign,... that his generals are too terrified to deliver bad news. Sounds almost comic-book like.
I've been thinking since the beginning of this invasion that with so much Russian resources committed to Ukraine now would be a good time for separatists in other parts of the former USSR and in Russia itself to start taking action.
If you have seen Chernobyl this is exactly what happens in a facist regime. And why for the life of me, do we keep saying this????? "We're not going to engage Russia in direct military confrontation," he said. From a state department rep.........why are we p***y footing around here - we should not guarantee anything if Russia isn't doing the same. DD
Yeah, I'm totally not believing that. Or at least, I don't believe the implication that we armchair generals on the other side of the planet learning about the war from the news somehow have a better idea of how the war is going than Putin does.
A lot of Russia’s generals are corrupt. It would not surprise me that they kept a lot of things from Putin over the years. The amount of money that was spent on Russia’s military ended up in the pockets of many. We are seeing out dated food rations, broken down equipment etc. In 2014 Ukraine’s military was the same. Corruption everywhere. Fortunately for them the west helped reform and train their military.
There's a huge gulf between what we know and what the military commanders on the ground know, and I'm pretty sure the point was that those military commanders are possibly not being totally forthcoming about the realities they face. No way at all to verify this of course, but it's certainly plausible.
US intelligence believes it. Why would it be surprising? If you worked for Putin and knew he'd probably put a bullet in your head if you gave him bad news, would you do it?
Why would a sane and obviously democratically elected leader like Putin, based on Tucker Carlson's candid news segments, harm his own people for telling the truth? Just be honest with him and all will be well.
It’s not some nobody armchair generals but an assessment from the US Intel. There have been reports of intercepted calls on the ground. That I assume is part of the US intel assessment. And of course we, the public, have no ideas what other ears we planted over there.
I find him to be much more like Mussolini than Hitler, if we're comparing him to the great a**holes of history.
Russian soldier dies from radiation poisoning in Chernobyl (yahoo.com) The soldier was part of a team that captured the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, 65 miles north of Kyiv, in the first days of the war. They then occupied the 20-mile exclusion zone around the plant, where people are banned from living, dug trenches into radioactive mud and drove their trucks along dirt roads, kicking up radioactive dust. Now ill and exhausted, they have retreated to Belarus. "The Russian occupiers have left the Chernobyl nuclear power plant," said Ukraine's defence ministry. "Two key reasons: losses caused by the Ukrainian army and radiation exposure." While the disaster of the nuclear power plant explosion at Chernobyl in 1986 is well documented in the West and was the subject of an award-winning BBC drama in 2019, it is relatively unknown in Russia. After capturing the nuclear power station, the Russian soldiers were ordered to camp in the wood, known locally as the Red Forest because of the colour it turned after soaking up radiation from the nuclear explosion. Russian commanders may not have known about the wood's reputation as a radiation hotbed, or may not have cared. Either way, it points yet again to poor planning and poor leadership within the Russian army. Its reputation for competence and as an effective modern fighting force has been ripped apart over the past five weeks of war in Ukraine, in which thousands of conscripts have been killed.
From British Intelligence: Below is a 60 Second Update from the British Army. They do things a bit differently! Spoiler
