Fair.

However, either Russia is fighting Ukraine how and for the goals and reasons why *you* would fight Ukraine or Russia is fighting Ukraine how they are actually fighting Ukraine... I think it would be dangerous to conflate the two when making prognostications. 99% of the posts about Ukraine are actually people saying what their values are and what they'd do based on those values with no critical analysis or synthesis.

IOW, your assessment is that Russia is at war with Ukraine and my assessment is that, I don't know, it seems like Russia is at war with the West. These are both falsifiable hypotheses that we use to make decisions and allocate resources with and can check back on later. I also disagree that Ukraine is "losing" and agree with Steve's assessment that actually Russia has already lost, operationally speaking.

E

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Eric Reid AeroFit | Instagram Portfolio
Aerodynamic Retul Bike Fitting

“You are experiencing the criminal coverup of a foreign backed fascist hostile takeover of a mafia shakedown of an authoritarian religious slow motion coup. Persuade people to vote for Democracy.”

Of course it's a combination of both.

Just like the U.S. war in Afghanistan was also a proxy war with Iran, Russia, and even, at times, "ally" Pakistan.

I just came here to say THANK YOU for fixing the thread title, whoever it was. It was driving me nuts.
Carry on.

Yeah I think that's true but it's removed one more abstraction than that. Again, projection. Yes, we're fighting a proxy war with Russia thru Ukraine but the transverse of that is a dangerous assumption. I also think your Afghanistan model needs UAE-KSA in the abstraction somewhere.

I think it's also dangerous to see Russia at the top of any abstraction... if Russia is at war with the US, who would Russia be a proxy for? I can think of several supranational options.

E

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Eric Reid AeroFit | Instagram Portfolio
Aerodynamic Retul Bike Fitting

“You are experiencing the criminal coverup of a foreign backed fascist hostile takeover of a mafia shakedown of an authoritarian religious slow motion coup. Persuade people to vote for Democracy.”

I don't know what you mean by "dangerious" Dangerous as in our various predictions might be inaccurate? Sure, I've been wildly inaccurate. I thought all of Ukraine would fall in about a month or so.

I don't think Russia has a proxy. Russia is acting on its own behalf by all appearances. Those appear to be Russian soldiers with mostly Russian-acquired equipment in Ukraine.

It is interesting how things are evolving. Looks like Russia put all of its forces in one area and Ukraine used that to its advantage and is pushing two major counter attacks, one to the south (Kherson) and one in the north (Kharkiv to Izum). If they pull off the second, they can cut off supplies to Russia's main front.

This guy gives a good summary.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZioTavNy3c

It doesn’t matter. To this bot, er poster, whatever Biden did or didn’t do would be wrong.

please cease with the disgusting trollbait.

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Dan Empfield
aka Slowman

No, who is Russia a proxy *for*.

E

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Eric Reid AeroFit | Instagram Portfolio
Aerodynamic Retul Bike Fitting

“You are experiencing the criminal coverup of a foreign backed fascist hostile takeover of a mafia shakedown of an authoritarian religious slow motion coup. Persuade people to vote for Democracy.”

This is hopefully turning into basic maneuver warfare... I was never really worried about Russia gaining 500m per day in Donbas because I expected a counter attack in Kherson. I wonder if Ukraine has the courage to let them push the Donbas front all the way to the gates of Kiev.

E

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Eric Reid AeroFit | Instagram Portfolio
Aerodynamic Retul Bike Fitting

“You are experiencing the criminal coverup of a foreign backed fascist hostile takeover of a mafia shakedown of an authoritarian religious slow motion coup. Persuade people to vote for Democracy.”

It would sexy and cool for Ukraine to allow Russian forces to advance and then cut them off and surround them en-mass

also Not a very smart move as that is reason #2 for Russia to whip out a tactical nuke.

As much as it sucks for Ukraine---they've got to be careful not to be overly successful.

/r

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Steve

War sucks, but I secretly admit there's something refreshing about talking about war in terms of rivers, artillery movements, flanking maneuvers, supply lines, etc. This is classic European war. The kind where you can model strategery on a map with little green infantry guys and artillery pieces.

Not the opaque hall-of-mirrors insurgent warfare the U.S. has been involved in for the past few decades, where there are no real front lines, and the enemy is hard to find, and even harder to separate from civilians.

Edit: Not that civilians aren't getting brutalized here, and Russia seemingly not giving a shit. But it's different than insurgent warfare, at the moment.

This is funny, I just mentioned this to someone the other day. It's an odd mix of historical "lines on a map" warfare along with modern "drones dropping modified artillery shells" warfare. It has been very interesting to follow it, and Reddit has a couple of good subreddits with footage (most of which is propaganda, but that's also a modern take on an ancient tactic).