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[nenjin]

You see, there's a strong ethnically Russian presence in Thailand, and Putin is afraid of the Nazis there, so he also invaded Thailand to protect the interests of "native" Russian speaking people.

[da_nang]

A fortnight and still no relief force for Mariupol to be seen.

Is it just a lack of guns? Because it can't be manpower. Reserves alone number in the 900,000s.

[LordBaal]

Russia closing itself for the rest of the world... isn't that how Fall of Men games start?

[Il Palazzo]

I hate to sound like a broken record, but how about we don't speculate off a single tweet, or similarly unreliable information?

[Dostoevsky]

Is Russia really gonna pull out of the global internet tomorrow?
I have seen this repeated but all the sources point to a single unverified tweet, so far it doesn't seem very credible, but if it's true then it's terrible news.
Either way maybe we should start saying goodbye to our online russian friends.

I've been tracking this awfully more than I should be over the last 2 weeks, and I haven't seen anything credible suggesting that. There are various crackdowns and suppressions, but not literally pulling out of global internet.

(And as Palazzo says, there have been an awful lot of games of phone going on with twitter, even with some reputable people getting caught up in the moment.)

[martinuzz]

IAEA director Rafael Grossi expresses great concern, because IAEA headquarters in Vienna suddenly lost all data communications with the Zaporizja nuclear plant.

[Lord Shonus]

Yeah, I had similar thoughts but more oriented towards the "what political gain could Putin gain by pushing troops into a meat-grinder?".

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Putin does what every other political animal has done over thousands of years... He keeps internal political groups from rising against him by getting them to fight each other. Quietly help one community gain economically at the expense of other communities and they will learn to hate each other... example: hire police from one community to enforce unjust laws against another community. When there is a risk of those communities grouping together against the politician, the politician declares an external enemy and sends the young from both communities to die in a meat-grinder. This is usually done with mandatory conscription.

In America, conscription was used to send "liberal hippies" and "non-white" people to fight in Korea and then Vietnam, rarely in command positions and often in infantry positions. In WWI and WWII, the undesirables were sent into more dangerous positions and died at a higher rate.

Russia and Belarus still have a limited conscription system and a question I have is, how many of the Russian invaders were identified by Putin's regime as supporting Putin's internal political rivals and put into dangerous positions?

EDIT: Just read about the news that Russian conscripts among those captured, but still would ask, "how many of them were identified by Putin's regime as supporting Putin's internal political rivals?"

I don't see how any of that checks out. E.g. US losses in Vietnam or Korea, by race, roughly match the general demographics of the population. In WWII blacks were preferentially kept in non-combat units because racism, duh. Or the fact that the vast majority of conscripts are too young to earn the label of a dissident, or even as much as develop concrete political opinions - you're talking kids right out of secondary education.
Where conscription discriminates, it's against the poorer strata of the population. Which are also the most susceptible to government propaganda.

The most charitable read on that is that is a misreading of "McNamara's Morons", officially called "Project 100,000", where Robert McNamara drastically slashed the minimum test score requirements for recruits and the draft in an attempt to make up a massive shortfall in available troops. This was not a "get rid of the undesirables" plan, but specifically a "we need more guys on the ground and think we can make do with these ones" one. Previous experience in WWII had found that soldiers below a certain intelligence threshold were absolutely useless, but McNamara thought they could make up for that with technology-based rote training.

[martinuzz]

The UK is looking for 4 soldiers, one a palace guard for Queen Elizabeth.
They think they might have gone to the Ukraine to fight.
The UK government fears that Russia might see it as a declaration of war.

[hector13]

The Russians aren’t going to see that as a declaration of war because if Britain has to get involved, the rest of the EU and the US now have an excuse to take a more active role in defending Ukraine. Russia are having enough problems with Ukraine, never mind the combined technology of the West^tm.

Putin’s an idiot, but not that type of idiot.

[Lord Shonus]

Making war over that would have one of two outcomes:

1. NATO sees it as an Article 5 attack and intervenes directly, putting the US Air Force, the US Navy's Air Force, the US Navy's Army's Air Force, the French Air Force, and the Royal Air Force immediately into the war, along with the US Army, the US Navy's Army, the French Army, and the British Army on the ground within a week. This would, assuming a conventinal war, result in total defeat within two weeks at most.

2. NATO doesn't see it as an article 5 attack and lets the UK go it alone. Which "only" gets the Royal Air Force and British Army directly involved, and would extend the time to total defeat by maybe two more weeks.

[anewaname]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Yeah, I had similar thoughts but more oriented towards the "what political gain could Putin gain by pushing troops into a meat-grinder?".

[spoiler]Putin does what every other political animal has done over thousands of years... He keeps internal political groups from rising against him by getting them to fight each other. Quietly help one community gain economically at the expense of other communities and they will learn to hate each other... example: hire police from one community to enforce unjust laws against another community. When there is a risk of those communities grouping together against the politician, the politician declares an external enemy and sends the young from both communities to die in a meat-grinder. This is usually done with mandatory conscription.

In America, conscription was used to send "liberal hippies" and "non-white" people to fight in Korea and then Vietnam, rarely in command positions and often in infantry positions. In WWI and WWII, the undesirables were sent into more dangerous positions and died at a higher rate.

Russia and Belarus still have a limited conscription system and a question I have is, how many of the Russian invaders were identified by Putin's regime as supporting Putin's internal political rivals and put into dangerous positions?

EDIT: Just read about the news that Russian conscripts among those captured, but still would ask, "how many of them were identified by Putin's regime as supporting Putin's internal political rivals?"

I don't see how any of that checks out. E.g. US losses in Vietnam or Korea, by race, roughly match the general demographics of the population. In WWII blacks were preferentially kept in non-combat units because racism, duh. Or the fact that the vast majority of conscripts are too young to earn the label of a dissident, or even as much as develop concrete political opinions - you're talking kids right out of secondary education.
Where conscription discriminates, it's against the poorer strata of the population. Which are also the most susceptible to government propaganda.

The most charitable read on that is that is a misreading of "McNamara's Morons", officially called "Project 100,000", where Robert McNamara drastically slashed the minimum test score requirements for recruits and the draft in an attempt to make up a massive shortfall in available troops. This was not a "get rid of the undesirables" plan, but specifically a "we need more guys on the ground and think we can make do with these ones" one. Previous experience in WWII had found that soldiers below a certain intelligence threshold were absolutely useless, but McNamara thought they could make up for that with technology-based rote training.

@Il Palazzo

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Yes, conscription discriminates against the poor. I wasn't trying to say that a higher ratio of blacks verse whites were conscripted, but that a higher ratio of politically under-represented "communities" were conscripted, where I mean "communities" as cultural groups, by color/ethnicity/religion.

In the USA, in the time-span of the Korean/Vietnam wars, there was growing public support from under-represented white communities for the cause of the black communities, and this was a danger to the ruling political class because there was potential for a single political force to form from the multiple communities that previously fought with each other. This did happen, JFK was elected as the first Catholic president and had significant support from Irish/Italian/Black communities, then assassinated. Then the Vietnam War conscription started and after that 10 year war ended, the conscription laws were revised to disable active conscription.

People need to see conscription from the point of view of the economically and socially oppressed communities, like those that are in Russia and are controlled by Putin's community.

Putin is a political leader who is fighting his internal political enemies by sending their kids to fight an external political enemy.

@Lord Shonus

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

In your statement "...where Robert McNamara drastically slashed the minimum test score requirements for recruits and the draft in an attempt to make up a massive shortfall in available troops", did you look at why there was a shortfall of available troops? The Korean War conscription that Congress enacted had exemptions for those that served in WWII which had ended 5 years before and people were not volunteering for Korea like they had for WWII. But McNamara's thing wasn't what my post was about, it was about how conscription is used by political leaders to send kids from politically under-represented communities to fight an external political enemy.

The USA's dominant political forces embraced "actual slavery" until oppressed communities combined their support for the American Civil War, then the dominant political forces accepted "economic slavery" and "social slavery", and that has only started to change recently. Between WWII and the end of conscription in the USA, the USA's dominant political forces considered and still considers, "liberals", "hippies", "communists", and "non-white" people, as undesirables, and since those dominant political forces successfully have gerry-mandered voting districts, bypassed the election system, and fed government funding into their friend's pockets, you can be sure they also worked to ensure the USA's national conscription system took away the children of their political enemies and spared their own children. And Putin, he would do the same...

[Strongpoint]

Today, March 10, will likely be a really bad day. We'll have a meeting between Russian and Ukrainian foreign ministers and Russia nearly always does something major during negotiations.

Amphibious assault on Odesa? Massive air raid on Kyiv? First use of chemical weapons? Public executions of "nationalists" in Kherson? All of above?

[Random_Dragon]

Might as well add the obligatory shitpost I made for elsewhere, as it'll fit for when Russia inevitably blames Ukraine for not being receptive to terms offered while the Russians are distracted committing warcrimes.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[Ulfarr]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

((In response to Ulfarr's accusation of purely serving a narrative, which I wouldn't dismiss as being part of it, but...))

All I've seen as a 'report' is:

Ukrainian government reports that the Chernobyl Nuclear Plant has lost power due to damage to an high voltage power line to Kyiv. They state this could potentially impact the cooling of spent fuel assemblies and lead to nuclear discharge.

...unless you're saying it can not potentially impact the cooling (...etc), Ulfarr, I'm not sure what you're getting animated about.

I will confidently state that it can do this. That it's always a risk, though usually a minor one in modern times when old mistakes (Windscale, Three-Mile Island, Fukushima, etc, and Chernobyl itself of course) have been learnt from and caution is now the watchword in any mature nuclear-operator. Maybe more risky in 'up-and-coming' places with other concerns (Iran, NK...).

In an active war-zone, with prior incident-damage to look after and limited to whatever resources are already on site, yes, there's potential problems at the most basic level (the cooling) that could escalate to further problems.

Better to say this than to ignore it/do the "This is fine" thing. It might be worse at a more recently active power-plant (like Zaporizhzhia, which had all six reactors active within the last month and did have initially worrying damage done to some of its auxilliary infrastructure), or if the Sarcophagus[1] were not there to do its intended job.


[1] Not armoured against attack, but at least preventing further casual damage to the Soviet-era reactor buildings damaged in the original incident by careless invaders.

Spoiler: A slight digression about the CNPP (click to show/hide)

I'm not sure how much of the original buildings are still exposed to environment nowadays. There is supposed to be a newer (completed a few years ago) layer/wall surrounding the damaged building. How protective is that layer, what it can protect from etc, is a different topic and I don't know enough about it.

Back on the topic at hand. I'm getting animated, as you said, about the possibility of getting even more caught in a war that started because some people decided that they want to show the world how much they are packing. A war that I want nothing to do with.

About the report:
If you take the Ukrainian Foreign Minister's tweet about it boils down to* "Heavy duty power line from Kyiv cut off -> back up generations work up to 48h -> potential for nuclear disaster -> rest of the world do something".

Even if you excuse the design problems (from an engineering pov) of having such a critical system rely on outside power sources due to the war, there is still quite a leap of logic between the back generators stopping to going full disaster. Of course due to the chosen medium (twitter) being what it is, there isn't any way for this leap to be explained in detail which make it susceptible to misinterpretation. As it is, it just sets another doomsday clock over some vague potential for disaster, concluding in an otherwise understandable, call to arms directed at the general public.

*I don't speak the language so, I had to do with google translate.

[MaxTheFox]

Is Russia really gonna pull out of the global internet tomorrow?
I have seen this repeated but all the sources point to a single unverified tweet, so far it doesn't seem very credible, but if it's true then it's terrible news.
Either way maybe we should start saying goodbye to our online russian friends.

It's most likely not happening, all evidence points to DDOS protection measures. But thanks for your concern.