No country should underestimate their enemies after all.

Indeed. Yet that is exactly what the collective West is and has been doing for decades, and its current leadership class seem psychologically incapable of doing otherwise.

I am not sure that the West can reindustrialize. They are structurally and ideologically wedded to the neoliberal financialized economic model that has hollowed out their industrial base and there is no economic impetus to change that. They are and remain slaves to the profit motive, and even as that is proving to be their downfall they keep doubling down.

he’s in full suffocating repressive control of his country

judging by recent opinion surveys from the independent Levada pollster, has the backing of most Russians with a current approval rating of 86 percent

Soooo…then why does he need to “suffocate” and “repress” the country if most Russians already support him?

According to Ponomarev, this only boosted participation in the sham election

Huh…I would have thought that high participation made an election more legitimate, not more of a sham.

Guess i don’t really understand democracy. Glad I have Politico to tell me that democracy is actually when low election turnout and low approval ratings for the government.

Additionally, I have to wonder what is the purpose of this bomb.

The FAB1500 has proven exceptionally effective when equipped with guidance modules at breaking Ukrainian fortified positions. It looks to me like the Russian military is simply learning what works and doing more of that.

And what happened to using cruise missiles the way it was in 2022

They are still being used. Just yesterday there was another massive wave of missile launches, if i am not mistaken. Missiles are deep strike precision weapons, very useful for striking targets in the rear like logistics nodes but they don’t pack quite the same punch and are in shorter supply.

Whereas cheaper and more abundant ordinance like the FAB are more appropriate for large scale everyday frontline use. You have to use the right tool for the right job.

They may as well call it doing a Hobbit, because every time they tried that they went There And Back Again. After Napoleon tried it Russian troops ended up in Paris, after Hitler tried it Soviet troops ended up in Berlin. Do they somehow hope third time’s the charm? Doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results is usually not a sign of sanity.

Unless you’re Ukraine announcing months in advance exactly where you’re going to launch your big “counter-offensive” giving Russia all the time in the world to prepare defensive lines.

If they wanted to they could have bullied Algeria into letting them through.

It’s like that scene from Monty Python with the suicide squad. They collectively stab themselves and then say “that showed them, huh?”.

Lol at anti-communists being so over the top that they would even try to paint Honecker, one of the most boring, bland and inoffensive socialist leaders ever as some kind of supervillain mastermind.

By the way, i thought this was a very good comment from someone on Twitter on the topic of Russia responding to western provocations and escalations:

"“Why don’t the Russians do [x] in response to [y] provocation?”

Because they’re serious people and not in the mood to be led around by their enemies.

“Reflexive control” is the control that you exert over an adversary’s actions when they feel compelled to retaliate against you. The Iranians are quite good at it, they recently managed to get the US Navy to literally steam out of the Persian Gulf and Mediterranean and get into an ever-deepening engagement in the Red Sea - far from Iran, Syria, and Lebanon - by suggesting the Houthis start taking potshots at passing merchant ships. If every military action you take gets a symmetrical reaction then you can control the nature, venue, and tempo of conflict to your benefit.

Any observer of the Ukrainian War can tell you that the Russians rarely if ever launch operations that are directly retaliatory despite provocations - some of them as flagrant as obvious cross-border attacks from NATO countries - that are too numerous to list. If they did, WWIII would have started in 2022. Instead, the Russians have largely ignored these provocations, absorbed whatever minor damage has been inflicted, and carried on with their actual objectives. And because of that, who is in the driver’s seat of the war right now?

Russia."

Minus the part about Iran telling the “Houthis” (Ansarallah) what to do, which i am skeptical is actually the case, this pretty much nails it why you don’t want to be drawn into the trap of waging a reactive war.

This coming from the same France that was too chickenshit to intervene to reverse the Niger coup that evicted the French from one of their most important neo-colonies. Excuse me if i don’t take their threats too seriously… I’ll believe it when i see it.

Sure, but that’s not a particularly interesting question in my opinion. I mean there are plenty of good reasons to not like Trump, or Biden, or Putin for that matter. Hating them is easy. The better question is “do you understand why their supporters like them (or at least prefer them to the alternative)?”. It’s in answering that question that we learn something valuable. Your ability to give a reasonable, non-caricature answer reveals whether or not you have the ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes, to understand their situation and their point of view. Even or perhaps especially when you consider the other person your enemy, it is useful to be able to do that.

Is there any difference between this and how all the chuds were denying the result of the 2020 US election? In both cases it was just asserted without evidence that the claimed result was a lie because they felt it couldn’t be true. Same for Russiagate and 2016. The same pattern repeats:

“Me and most people i know hate this person, therefore it is impossible that they legitimately won the election.”

When asked to produce evidence of actual fraud: crickets. When confronted with how the other side feels: deny, dismiss and demonize. It’s an emotional kneejerk reaction.

We can all have our opinions about what Russia should do, but bear in mind you learn more from looking at what is happening and thinking about what could happen than by deciding what ought to happen when you have no way to influence the outcome.

You may think that Russia should be more aggressive but you don’t have available to you the full picture that Russia sees. There is more to this conflict than just the military side, there is a larger diplomatic, geopolitical and economic game being played.

In the end their decision may surprise you, just as it is meant to surprise their enemies, to keep them guessing and unbalanced.

chuds are easier to convert, but a chud thread would be a miserable idea

I completely agree on both counts.

However, I DO feel that we must have some sort of finale on this.

Reality seldom delivers to us that kind of catharis.

if the liberal elite/believers doesn’t get a serious beating, they’ll never learn

They will probably never learn even if they do get that beating.

Look, on the whole i agree with your sentiment, but i also know to temper my expectations because life is messy and imperfect and the outcomes of complex geopolitical processes are also most often imperfect. It is likely that not everything will turn out exactly as we want. But at the end of the day what matters is the trajectory, the direction of evolution for the balance of power in the world, and regardless of the details of the exact outcome of the Ukraine conflict that trajectory is already clear and set. The outcome of this conflict can at most accelerate or slow down that already ongoing process, but can never reverse or stop the trends that are already in motion, which are those of the global south rising alongside China. Russia has been playing a long game in Ukraine but China is playing an even longer game across the entire world.

The West’s hegemony is falling one way or another. The Ukraine conflict is not the cause of that fall, it is a symptom of it (while of course also being a powerful catalyst too).

This is pretty much my view too. The Duran are a good example, so are the Grayzone, or Pepe Escobar even. They each have their uses where they offer good news or analysis, but they also have instances where they can turn into utter garbage, for instance when it comes to topics like vaccines or socially progressive views on gender. It is what it is. You just have to learn to “eat around the bad spot”. Take what is useful to you and discard what is not.

If we only ever consumed media from sources that we 100% agree with, firstly we would not have any media to consume at all because there is always something to disagree over even with other leftists, and secondly we would be living in a very small echo chamber. You just have to trust that your own ideological convictions are strong enough to not be swayed by stupid, unscientific, reactionary nonsense. And if you are unsure on something you can always come back here and discuss with your comrades.

That’s all valid criticism of the author of this blog who, as i have warned before, is clearly a right winger and comes with all the baggage associated with that position. I stick to posting their military analysis because it has proven to be a good summarization of information from various other sources that i usually read before this blog’s articles and which allows me to verify the accuracy of the summaries that this blog makes. It saves me the time of having to collate all of the disparate info out there from various telegram channels, social media posts, articles, etc. As for whether their predictions are too optimistic… predictions are always difficult and one should be careful with them, both the optimistic and the pessimistic ones. I always take the attitude “wait and see”.

On their second blog, yes, that is essentially sewage that i wouldn’t touch with a ten foot pole and i am glad the author keeps the two separate and the military blog reasonably free of ideological insertions. Also, i don’t ever scroll down to the comments on sites like this, i find that preserves my mental health. Ultimately it’s up to you whether you want to accept sources of diverse ideological inclination or just stick to leftist ones. But if you pick the latter you will have fairly slim pickings. Sometimes good information can come from sources that we don’t agree with ideologically. Hell, sometimes the most useful info comes straight from internal US intelligence agencies or think tanks because internally they are more truthful than in the propaganda they put out to the world. So it’s a question of if it is productive to insist on ideological purity in your news and analysis.

If you don’t find this particular blog’s summaries enlightening or have a better source of up to date summarized news on the Ukraine conflict feel free to make suggestions and i’ll take a look. So far i trust that the readers on this platform are adults who know to consume media critically and not allow the ideological bias of their sources to influence them. And after all, similar criticism could be raised of other sources that are frequently used by anti-imperialists, such as for instance The Grayzone (we had an entire discussion at the time when Ben Norton left them about how Max Blumenthal has some very dubious takes on certain issues…), but they are nonetheless a valuable resource.

I am glad that you raised this concern though because it is important to have these meta discussions every once in a while about the media that we use to keep ourselves informed and how we should treat it.

Some folks apparently really have a vendetta against Brian Berletic, i can’t explain the downvotes any other way considering that this short piece says nothing particularly provocative or new other than pointing out that NED(CIA front) funded polling showed Putin at around 86% just before the election and lo and behold that’s pretty much what he got.

As with every other move they have made so far to try and stick it to Russia, this too will backfire against them, possibly even more disastrously so than the sanctions. In that sense it is likely that such a move would just accelerate Russia and the global south’s victory and the end of Western hegemony. However that does not mean that it is not a dangerous escalation. Indeed i wouldn’t much care if a Mr Kinzhal shall we say “presented his business card” to Macron or Scholz in their offices tomorrow, but i do care that regular working class people would be caught in the crossfire, literally and metaphorically. It is working class people who would be mobilized to go fight their stupid war, it’s working class people who would suffer deprivations of goods and repressions against anyone who would be against the war, it’s working class people who don’t have bunkers to hide in when the bomb drops…

Luckily there is still a good chance that this is just a last ditch desperate bluff, as Europe’s militaries are in critically under-maintained, under-manned and under-supplied condition. Also, Russia has consistently acted like the adult in the room throughout this entire conflict and shown very mature restraint in the face of some extreme provocations. There is reason to trust that they will handle any possible trial balloon of western troops with the necessary finesse to manage the escalation responsibly.