The Russian commander of the “Vostok” Battalion fighting in southern Ukraine said on Thursday that Ukraine will not be defeated and suggested that Russia freeze the war along current frontlines.
Alexander Khodakovsky made the candid concession yesterday on his Telegram channel after Russian forces, including his own troops, were devastatingly defeated by Ukrainian marines earlier this week at Urozhaine in the Zaporizhzhia-Donetsk regional border area.
“Can we bring down Ukraine militarily? Now and in the near future, no,” Khodakovsky, a former official of the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic, said yesterday.
“When I talk to myself about our destiny in this war, I mean that we will not crawl forward, like the [Ukrainians], turning everything into [destroyed] Bakhmuts in our path. And, I do not foresee the easy occupation of cities,” he said.
Then. Just. Fucking. LEAVE!
If only the little man at the big table didn’t have such a Napoleon complex
It’s all such a waste of human life and resources
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Putin is a sadistic bastard. But his time will come and when it does I hope the Gadaffi-like death he fears most will seem like a picnic.
Meh, I’d rather he saw trial and the rest of his life in jail. Justice is important. More than revenge IMO.
He’s a sadistic fuck, yes, but this blade cuts both ways. Ukraine is now and for the foreseeable future going to be staunchly and unrepentantly anti-Russia, and Ukrainian strategic leadership are taking the Finnish approach in the war and have more or less committed to shattering as much of the Russian military that Putin sees fit to throw at them as an overall strategy. It’s an existential struggle for Ukraine, and they are committed to either winning, or taking Russia down with them to the greatest degree possible.
Even if support for Ukraine dries up and Russia is able to pull out an eventual “win”, it’s going to be a decade at least before Russia poses a credible threat in any meaningful sense (and realistically, I’m not sure Russia will recover from this in anything less than about a half century, considering how many unique points are contributing to their strategic failure).
In some way yes. I would expect he’s more sadistic with Russians than Ukrainians at this point: imo the point is to hold as much as he can, especially crimea, until Ukraine ask for a cease fire, or even better a frozen front with a frozen war until everyone forget about it.
I think many people are forgetting that the larger army, vastly outnumbering Ukrainian resources in numbers, has not won a victory since the beginning of the invasion. And only presents a problem because the 2 countries cannot reliably use air power to overcome 1st WW trench warfare. Russia has defenses, but no ability to move forward. They are just trying to hold on to what they took in those first few months and are very slowly failing at that. If Ukraine can keep going, supported by the West, Russia will lose. I do not think Russia will use nukes – any use of a nuke is basically on Russia’s own land – according to them – and will affect them as much as Ukraine. But the question of ending the war is an interesting one. Do we see Russia continuing the war if they lose most of their ill-gotten territorial gains? What happens to those insecure areas? Are people going to rebuild, i.e. invest scarce resources in unstable areas? Or will they just become dead zones, DMZ borders?
And only presents a problem because the 2 countries cannot reliably use air power to overcome 1st WW trench warfare
The US has just approved the transfer of F-16s to Ukraine. So that might change soon. IIRC, Ukraine has had a shortage of airplanes to use. Russia has been very reluctant to use the airplanes that they have because they keep getting shot down, and they simply can’t replace them at the speed necessary (especially since their economy has crashed, and China is the only country that can supply them with the circuitry that they need).
A bigger problem is that Russia has air defenses and air bases inside Russia. NATO in general has been very reluctant to transfer offensive weapons to Ukraine that would make it possible to strike those–entirely legitimate–targets inside of Russia, because that would be an escalation. But to have air superiority, you need to ensure that those SAM batteries, RADAR installations, and forward air bases are not in the picture. So to break the stalemate, Ukraine has to be able to make strikes against Russia, in Russian territory. That’s potentially very dangerous.
If it’s allowed to grind on, Russia wins eventually, because they have a population many times the size of Ukraine, and can keep throwing bodies at them. So Ukraine needs to win air superiority, which means striking targets inside of Russia.
Regarding the F16, Ukrainian pilots are going to start testing the Gripen as well, although that path is obviously far behind the F16s given the glacial pace of such developments…
The F-16s will need parts, logistics, and weapons, the pilots and ground crews will need extensive training… those jets will do nothing this year. Perhaps next year though. I agree that Ukraine is fighting with one arm tied due to NATO fears of nuclear retaliation. Is that a reasonable fear? I think so. Putin is not a sane or reasonable person. And Ukraine has shown the capability to hit Russian targets within Russian territory. If the Ukrainians were allowed to hit harder, deeper, more sensitive targets in Russia, the war would escalate – Russia would not want to be seen as beaten by its little neighbor. A shame, agree or disagree, but right now, those are the rules of war that Ukraine must abide by for continued support from NATO.
Russia has been beaten by most of the smaller countries that it’s gone toe-to-toe against. The only particularly big win that Russia (or the USSR) has had in the past century was WWII, and that was because the USSR was getting an enormous amount of material assistance from… The US. source Russia’s aggressive actions against the Baltic countries are precisely why Estonia, Latvia, etc. joined NATO. And countries have to ask to join NATO. Without Russian aggression, there is no NATO.
The entire world (with a few exceptions) is fighting a proxy war against Russia via Ukraine. Of course you can’t win, that’s the whole idea.
More than just that, Russia has already lost because they revealed themselves to be a paper tiger AND that the rest of the world is sick of their bullshit.
They won’t be invading any more countries for a long time. I’d wager more regions will declare independence from Russia, knowing they can.
Putin massively miscalculated.
Its possible he miscalculated.
It’s also possible that his cancer is accelerating and he wanted to go out with a bang.
I think it’s likely a combination of the two. He thought it would be a quick skirmish and he’d be able to reunite the USSR.
He wanted his legacy to be the founder of a reborn Soviet Union. Now his legacy will be that he was a sad, sad old man who destroyed Russia on the world stage in front of everybody and broke the illusion that Russia was any sort of global superpower. The aftereffects of this invasion will be felt for decades to come. Ukraine will be rebuilt stronger and better than ever before, while Russia will likely splinter apart or collapse.
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I guess then it becomes a scramble for anyone on their borders not already in NATO to get their applications in before they launch their next “special operation”.
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Georgia, Aserbaijan. Then don’t forget the east, that is, the -stans and Mongolia. China and Japan are safe and who even wants NK.
The stans traditionally looked towards China for protection (also see Silk Road initiative) but they’re making moves to make themselves more palatable to the west. Mongolia is the odd one out they’re actually a proper democracy, and very much NATO-aligned though they (just like Japan) don’t qualify because geography. They’ll continue being a buffer state between Russia and China as long as they’re west-aligned neither will suspect them to be in bed with the other.
Last one in Europe other than those two. Georgia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, China, Mongolia, and North Korea all remain in Asia. None are likely to join NATO anytime soon. Georgia may be the most likely, but they have the same problem with outstanding Russian occupation that Ukraine has/had going into 2022. Azerbaijan is aligned with Turkey, who is a NATO member, but does not have contiguous borders with NATO. Kazakhstan has distanced itself from the Ukraine invasion, but is otherwise more similar to Belarus than Finland in terms of alignment. China and North Korea have nukes. Mongolia is up shit creek without a paddle hoping that China and Russia continue to rival each other enough to not want the other to expand into Mongolia really
“We can [though] enter a phase that is most unfavorable for Ukraine in its ‘independent’ state: a phase of neither peace nor war. We could be in this phase if, instead of the special military operation, the [currently occupied] territories were recognized and officially taken under guardianship. But it would require a completely different twist of history,” Khodakovsky said.
I find it consistently amazing and hilarious that Russian strategic leadership appears entirely incapable of recognizing that they can’t simply dictate geopolitics, warfare, and international borders to external parties. Ukraine - and to a lesser degree, its allies - get a vote too, and they’re not going to be “freezing” anything for the foreseeable future.
Unfortunately there are those in the west that agree. Either because they are paid/blackmailed to agree. Or they have been misled by the former.
this thread is wild
can we remember, everyone:
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discussion on who is winning has no bearing on discussion of who is in the right, and vice versa
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Russia, Ukraine, and NATO can all be evil and wrong for separate and true reasons
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criticizing NATO does not amount to supporting Putin
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criticizing Putin does not amount to supporting NATO
Can we also remember that Russia is a country and Putin is it’s head. You don’t even know the name of the top leadership of NATO. You don’t say this is Biden’s proxy war but you imagine every single decision is Putin’s.
And also, stop psychologizing world leaders as though you have a parasocial relationship with them.
A democratically elected president and a dictator don’t represent their people with the same legitimacy nor do they have the same concentration of powers at their personal disposal.
So the Russian Federation, a republic, built in the aftermath of the dismantling of the largest bureaucratic democracy in the world built under the eye of the West for the purpose of liberty and freedom and economic capitalism, that Russian Federation is so different than the West that we can attribute nearly all bad things done by Russia to Putin, but in the West it’s such a complex and nuanced situation that it’s really the whole system to blame?
Keep buffing cope. You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.
I don’t imagine that every decision is Putin’s, and it’s just as much Biden’s proxy war as Putin’s except that Putin has been head of government for the entire duration of the build-up whereas the build-up started 4 US heads of government ago. I’m just using the terminology most frequently used in the discourse.
Also I will psychologize any world leader I please, any leader of a bourgeoisie state is a horrible wretched ghoul
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He’s gonna jump out d window soon
Russia allready lost. They just keep ignoring it
If we ever lose, so does the world lol
Keep in mind, that he is a mouth for some factions inside russia and his message is mostly for internal consumption. There are motives behind what he speaks. Probably testing the reaction of local population towards this idea. And yes, a person saying that (without someone’s protection or even order) may be easily presecuted under new laws.
Why do officers in the Russian army have Telegram channels?
For the same reason they have Strava, and for that we thank them.
This was obvious on February 25th, 2022, he realized now?
It was definitely not obvious that early.
It became obvious once the EU and NATO committed to sending aid and supplies.
Yeah… even with it’s atrophied industrial muscles, you don’t out-build the US and Europe combined. Worst case scenario comes when the US and Europe actually start committing to wartime production. We’re still not doing that. Almost everything so far has been from old stocks and supplies.
During World War II, the US sent 1,911 locomotives, and 11,225 railcars to the Soviet Union under the lend-lease program, just as an example of the scale of production we have achieved in the past. The US has many many many flaws, but we’ve demonstrated a history of being able to out-build everyone once we’re committed to it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lend-Lease
Another phenomenal one was that the US shipyards put out an average of one Liberty Ship every TWO days (every other day…) from 1941 to 1945. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_ship
Hell, we made 270+ destroyers during WWII. It’s a mind bending quantity of ships produced: https://destroyerhistory.org/fletcherclass/
We can’t afford healthcare, our cities are rotting out, and our schools are being undermined by small minded bigots, but we can sure as hell build weapons. If there’s a will to fight, and NATO is committed to supplying you, you’ll never lack for hardware.
Still wasn’t a very long time for Russia’s military to show how out of practice they were. Two weeks? A month? Amazing they lasted this long at all, crazy dictator aside.
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NO SHIT
I’m glad to see that incessant and pervasive whataboutism is welcome in the Fediverse. I was afraid for a few weeks that I had left it behind with Reddit but clearly that’s not the case.
