Current Affairs Ukraine

[stipe]

Indeed - I think I read once that at the height of the battle around Prokhorovka there were around a thousand tanks within a space of a few miles, with some of the fighting between tanks occuring at point-blank range. What the Red Army did that day almost defies comprehension.

If i recall correctly, Soviets knew for months that Germans gonna attack at Kursk salient, so they built something like 10 defensive lines of fortifications and massive mine fields. So Germans absolutely exhausted themselves trying to broke through all those defensive lines, and then came Soviet counter-attacks and news of Allied landing on Sicily that convinced Hitler to end their (last) meaningful offensive on the Eastern front.

Scale was mind boggling, from wiki, 800 000 Germans against more than 2 million Soviets, more than 10 000 tanks and armored vehicles, more than 50 000 artillery guns, 5000-6000 planes, just crazy numbers. I believe it was largest pitched battle in human history.

 

[Spadge Vernacular]

Gorbachev died shocked and bewildered by Ukraine conflict - interpreter

Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, was shocked and bewildered by the Ukraine conflict in the months before he died and psychologically crushed in recent years by Moscow's worsening ties with Kyiv, his interpreter said on Thursday.

www.reuters.com

 

[davids]

Gorbachev died shocked and bewildered by Ukraine conflict - interpreter

Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, was shocked and bewildered by the Ukraine conflict in the months before he died and psychologically crushed in recent years by Moscow's worsening ties with Kyiv, his interpreter said on Thursday.

www.reuters.com

He'd obviously not watched the BBC News Night programs on the Azov and their treatment of the ethnic Russians in the Ukraine. Maybe he thought the BBC was Pravda in disguise.

 

[davids]

Good job the UK are not supplying Ukraine with warships.

HMS Prince of Wales may miss US jet trials after breakdown
1 day ago

Grease the propeller shaft? Who's job was that??

 

[Noisy noise annoys]

Imagine sharing clips from 2014 to further your pro-putin and his murderous regime stance.

??

Desperation

 

[Spadge Vernacular]

Imagine sharing clips from 2014 to further your pro-putin and his murderous regime stance.

??

Desperation

Potato see, potato do.

 

[stipe]

Nord Stream cut off, gas to Europe no more

 

[Noisy noise annoys]

Nord Stream cut off, gas to Europe no more

Madness. Is this off for good or a "taster"?

 

[stipe]

Madness. Is this off for good or a "taster"?

They making some excuse, buy saying its "indefinitely"

Apparently EU wanted to introduce gas price cap and this is Russian response (Medvedev had hissy fit about that earlier today). A lot of political maneuvering behind the scenes of course, but everyone knew they had this card to play

 

[tsubaki]

They making some excuse, buy saying its "indefinitely"

Apparently EU wanted to introduce gas price cap and this is Russian response (Medvedev had hissy fit about that earlier today). A lot of political maneuvering behind the scenes of course, but everyone knew they had this card to play

One of the great downsides of gesture politics is of course that the other side can perform gestures of its own.

Hopefully this results in better policies than the price cap, which was probably unworkable anyway.

 

[Walken]

Putin not attending Gorbachevs funeral seems odd

 

[jaspercabbage]

Putin not attending Gorbachevs funeral seems odd

He probably blames Gorbachev for the break up of the Russian Empire which he is struggling to reconstruct.

 

[Yarrgh]

Putin not attending Gorbachevs funeral seems odd

Gorbachev is not seen with much fondness at all - in fact they hold in contempt to a fair degree. He's only seen favourably outside of Russia.

 

[stipe]

Gorbachev is not seen with much fondness at all - in fact they hold in contempt to a fair degree. He's only seen favourably outside of Russia.

Its not surprising, his action lead directly to Russia losing lots of its power and dark, chaotic 90s. Nobody likes to lose power, plus add to old Soviet nostalgia.

We had similar things here in ex-Yugoslavia. My grandmother, born 1929 (Croat, here on Adriatic coast) had huge nostalgia for old communist Yugoslavia, and despised nationalism. She was always going on how things and life was better in Yugoslavia then modern Croatia.

But its not surprising, two of her brothers and husband fought as members of Partisans in ww2 and she herself survived Italian and German occupation as a girl and she truly believed in whole "Brotherhood and Unity" thing, i guess a lot of similar people in Russia/USSR

 

[tsubaki]

Gorbachev is not seen with much fondness at all - in fact they hold in contempt to a fair degree. He's only seen favourably outside of Russia.

Indeed, though I do think that is somewhat unfair - something had to happen to arrest the decline of the Soviet state, his reforms were mostly sensible and relatively restrained (if perhaps a bit naive given that he was trying to deal with corrupt people).

One can certainly make an argument that the worst thing he did was to bottle suppressing Yeltsin, had he done that he'd probably have managed to contain the new forces and use them to peacefully reform the Soviet Union into something better. Of course though the fact that he could have but didn't made Yeltsin supremely popular and allowed him to do what happened next, ruining the lives of so many people who'd backed him.