Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Random_Dragon]

Not in the mood to feed the troll any further, thanks. :V

[King Zultan]

Guess it's time to ask that question I've been wondering about for awhile, have any more Russian generals died or have they finally realized you don't put them on the front lines.

[Strongpoint]

Guess it's time to ask that question I've been wondering about for awhile, have any more Russian generals died or have they finally realized you don't put them on the front lines.

Sadly, no confirmed dead generals recently. But it may be because Russians don't like to announce this.

https://twitter.com/KilledInUkraine - this is a good source for fresh confirmed KIA Russian officers

[King Zultan]

Damn, guess the must have finally run out.

[Strongpoint]

Looks like ATACAMS's have finally arrived and were used in tonight's strike on Russian airbases near occupied Luhansk and Berdyansk destroying some helicopters.

[Telgin]

I read that the US was being quiet about it to try to keep the Russians ignorant of the weapons' arrival so they wouldn't try to move things out of range.  Maybe that strategy worked if airfields were hit, but then the Russians can't really move a lot of stuff away from the frontlines since they kind of have to use it.

Anyway, good to know that more capable long range missile systems were delivered  I'm sure it'll make a difference, depending on how many missiles we were willing to give.

[Great Order]

Wouldn't surprise me, all warfare is based on deception etc. etc.

Although then again, I'd be unsurprised if Russian intelligence already knew about them being moved (And I'd be unsurprised if the alert got lost somewhere in the system and it still caught Russia off-guard). Suppose it'd make no major difference either way - The moment you fire the first volley the Russians know you've got serious long-range capability. Unless you do a truly staggering alpha strike with them you're not going to make a massive difference to the overall outcome.

Still wars can be, and often are, won by a lot of small differences piling up.

[Strongpoint]

It is interesting. I am a native Russian speaker. I consumed a lot of their culture. I had regular contacts with them. And yet I fail to understand them.

Why the hell do they continue this war? I can understand Stalin's Red Army didn't rebel against being used in meat attacks, they had no ways to coordinate, they had no way to know what is happening where and the enemy was actually of the kind that you can't just stop fighting.


Why do modern Russians agree to go in suicide attacks like the current one on Avdiivka? They know what is happening because internet. They can coordinate. They know that no one is going to invade Russia. Why the hell do those suicidal morons keep fighting?

[anewaname]

That's not a Russian thing... it is what has been happened with every military for thousands of years. The guys who are conscripted as "cannon fodder" don't have a choice. If you do not obey, you are a traitor and may be killed, and your family may be imprisoned or killed. If you obey, it is just you that will be killed.

Every military has some type of "military police" and Putin has called himself a Chekist (Lenin's Cheka). You can bet that the Russian military includes covert military police and political officers, and they point machine guns at the suicide wave and tell them to charge the enemy.

This is the most dangerous thing about living in a nation that allows conscripted citizens to be used in offensive wars, because the people in charge of the conscription always send "unwanted citizens" into the most dangerous units and most dangerous conflicts, and the leaders start offensive wars as a reason to send those unwanted citizens to their death. During the first Russian conscription, the Russians who protested on the street or tried to avoid conscription... how many of them do you think were part of those suicide attacks?

[Maximum Spin]

Russian law actually forbids using conscripts in combat, and I am not aware of any cases where conscripts were found to have been deployed on the front lines, although there was a small scandal early on where some conscripts were deployed behind front lines but in Ukrainian territory, in supply positions. Based on the reaction to that, I doubt they're still doing it.

[Random_Dragon]

The Russian constitution also grants freedom of assembly, so saying that Russian law forbids anything is functionally meaningless. :V

[Strongpoint]

That's not a Russian thing... it is what has been happened with every military for thousands of years. The guys who are conscripted as "cannon fodder" don't have a choice. If you do not obey, you are a traitor and may be killed, and your family may be imprisoned or killed. If you obey, it is just you that will be killed.

No, this explanation doesn't work. It worked for Stalin's time, but it doesn't work now. No one in Russia will bother imprisoning or killing relatives. It is not how their current incompetent fascism works.  And no military police is enough to control a sufficiently unhappy army that can easily cooperate and communicate. Also, Russian professional army is also sent into suicidal attacks again and again.

Even in the Ukrainian army, as people are getting tired and as less and less motivated categories are getting mobilized, we are getting steadily increasing numbers of deserters and disobeyed orders. And it is natural. People want to live.

Maybe it is the explanation, their lives are so awful that all are just suicidal.


______________________

Russian law actually forbids using conscripts in combat

It is kinda true for annual conscription but I think anewaname meants conscripted as non-professional aka mobilized

[anewaname]

I meant conscription similar to what America did during involvement in the Vietnam war. The government had a list of some 25 million available (people who had never been in the military) and conscripted about 2 million from that list, and many were in combat over the years (about 25% of the guys in combat zones were people who had not volunteered).

I am still not sure how that compares to what Russia is doing, but I meant the Russian conscription that happened about 6 months into the war, where you saw videos of people being grabbed off the streets. Those that resisted the conscription or protested the conscription, probably were sent into the ever-dangerous infantry units. It is a buy-one-get-two bargain for the Russian government, to have a cannon fodder guy and to lose a protestor.

It would be interesting to see if a larger ratio of Russians were conscripted from the more culturally diverse Russian regions than from the Moscow area.

[Duuvian]

Everybody needs lawyers

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-october-19-2023

A prominent Russian information space voice targeted two members of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s inner circle with accusations of corruption. Russian lawyer Kirill Kachur, whom the Russian Investigative Committee charged in absentia for embezzlement and bribery in 2022 and who claims to have insider knowledge about internal Kremlin politics, accused Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) Head Sergei Naryshkin and Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin of causing over one trillion rubles ($10.3 billion) of damage to the Russian economy through bribes and tax breaks from Russian businessmen since Mishustin’s appointment as head of the Russian Federal Tax Service in 2010.[33] Kachur also criticized businessman Alexander Udodov, Federal Security Service (FSB) General Ivan Tkachev, and FSB Colonel Sergei Natarov for enabling and protecting Mishustin.[34] Kachur’s complaint notably focuses on the current poor state of the Russian economy and the negative impact of such a high monetary loss amid a broader Russian focus on the federal budget.[35] Kachur claimed that the Russian Investigative Committee and FSB are currently investigating Mishustin and Naryshkin; ISW has observed no corroboration of Kachur’s claims from other Russian sources, and Russian officials have not commented on these claims.[36]

[Strongpoint]

I am still not sure how that compares to what Russia is doing, but I meant the Russian conscription that happened about 6 months into the war, where you saw videos of people being grabbed off the streets. Those that resisted the conscription or protested the conscription, probably were sent into the ever-dangerous infantry units. It is a buy-one-get-two bargain for the Russian government, to have a cannon fodder guy and to lose a protestor.

No, Russian drafting doesn't work like this. Millions of people received draft summons. Smart people promptly ignored those and to this date, the number of people imprisoned for ignoring a draft summon is ZERO.

Russia mobilizes loyal citizens. Russian opposition is not there. Ethnic minorities are disproportionally represented, yes.