Ukraine

[heimlaga]

"The Russian authorities want everyone to toe the line. No-one is allowed to have their own opinion. If you disagree with what someone thinks, then don't read their social media posts. But don't put that person under house arrest and their child in a children's home."

Is the BBC reporting that similar things are happening in Ukr ??

There is a strong likelyhood that they decided not to report it because they found no indication that it had happened.........

[YukonHarbor]

It's like a cowboy show. Whoever draws first wins. Definitely the Russians are the bad guys. If someone came into my house destroying the furniture, killing my family, and saying it was their house, I would definitely enjoy killing them. And I wouldn't settle for allowing them part of my house.

[WX]

"The Russian authorities want everyone to toe the line. No-one is allowed to have their own opinion. If you disagree with what someone thinks, then don't read their social media posts. But don't put that person under house arrest and their child in a children's home."

Is the BBC reporting that similar things are happening in Ukr ??

Dunno, have you looked, and are they? I know they treat POWs a lot better than the Russians do.

[Peerie Maa]

Have we now progressed from historical Whataboutism to totally made up whataboutism?

[dutchpp]

Some facts, the ISW Russian offensive campaign assessment, March 24.
https://www.understandingwar.org/bac...-march-24-2023

Key Takeaways

• Prominent voices in the Russian information space are increasingly setting information conditions to prepare for a potential Ukrainian counteroffensive.
• Crimean occupation head Sergey Aksyonov has reportedly formed a Wagner Group-affiliated private military company (PMC) in occupied Crimea.
• Some prominent Russian milbloggers criticized the Russian military command for continuing to impale Russian forces on Vuhledar with ineffective human-wave style frontal assaults.
• Russian President Vladimir Putin held a meeting with the Russian Security Council likely as part of his effort to portray himself as a present and effective wartime leader.
• Russian forces conducted limited attacks along the Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna line.
• Russian forces have made gains in and around Bakhmut and conducted ground attacks in the Avdiivka-Donetsk City area.
• The Ukrainian General Staff corrected its March 23 statement that Russian forces withdrew from Nova Kakhovka, occupied Kherson Oblast.
• Russian occupation authorities announced the creation of a pro-Russian militaristic youth movement aimed at brainwashing children.
• The Russian government is adopting new measures to revitalize and eliminate corruption, lethargy, and resistance in Russia’s defense industrial base (DIB).
• The United Kingdom Ministry of Defense (UK MoD) reported on March 24 that at least 1,000 Russian personnel training at the 230th Combined Arms Obuz-Lesnovsky Training Ground in Brest, Belarus, redeployed to Russia.

[skuthorp]

War crimes on both sides, but by far the majority done by the Russians….so far.
There's a whole page to look at here
war crimes in ukraine

[WszystekPoTrochu]

336799612_1306314693560354_3196571059848372764_n.jpg

I have a feeling that putin's last year's demands of creating a buffer of neutral states won't materialize
If anybody's curious, where exactly are they stationed - here

[skuthorp]

Russia demonstrably cannot be trusted to honour any such arrangement any more than America would in similar circumstances. Hence US 'pilot' garrisons in unlikely places. OTOH in Aus we have invited them in and sub-contracted our military forces to them.

[Tom Hunter]

Though the picture of the Challenger and T54 is very cool it would be better to show a Challenger and T62. T62s are showing up more and more often on Twitter and Telegram, the Russians are clearly using them at some scale. Not everywhere, and the Russians still have plenty of better tanks. But they don't have enough T72s and higher.

Ukraine does not (will not) have enough of the 4th generation NATO tanks either. They will have to do a lot of things right to get the maximum value out of what they are getting. It's within their theoretical capabilities but there is no guarantee they will achieve a major success.

It's more or less 100% that Ukraine can pull off a minor success with a force of Challengers and Bradelys. If that is all they do their information warfare team will try to make it look like a major success.

[dutchpp]

The ISW Russian offensive campaign assessment, March 25.
https://www.understandingwar.org/bac...-march-25-2023

Key Takeaways

• Russian President Vladimir Putin launched the predictable next information operation to discourage Ukrainian resistance and disrupt Western support for Ukraine as Russian offensives culminate and Ukraine prepares to launch counter-offensives in an interview with a state-owned Russian news channel on March 25.
• Putin pushed the false narrative that the West cannot sustain weapons provision to Ukraine due to limited Western production and hyperbolized Russia’s potential to mobilize its own defense industrial base (DIB).
• Putin advanced another information operation by announcing that Russia will deploy tactical nuclear weapons to Belarus by July 1 and renewed tired information operations about the potential for nuclear escalation.
• Russian conventional forces may intervene in Wagner Group’s offensive around Bakhmut to prevent the offensive from culminating prematurely.
• Russian forces do not have the degree of fire control over Ukrainian ground lines of communication (GLOCs) to Bakhmut, Avdiivka, and likely other areas of the front that Russian milbloggers claim.
• Russian forces conducted limited attacks along the Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna line.
• Russian forces continued to conduct ground attacks in and around Bakhmut and gained limited ground in the city.
• Russian forces reportedly conducted a mass rotation of forces in Nova Kakhovka on the east (left) bank of the Dnipro River.
• Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin accused Russian authorities on March 25 of rewriting history to cut out Wagner by forcing state-controlled media outlet RT to cut some coverage of the Wagner Group.
• The Ukrainian Resistance Center reported on March 24 that Moscow elites are competing for funding to “restore” occupied territories and really plan to use the projects to further their own interests.

[WI-Tom]

War crimes on both sides, but by far the majority done by the Russians….so far.

Indeed. The International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg had this to say:

"War is essentially an evil thing. Its consequences are not confined to the belligerent states alone, but affect the whole world. To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole."^[

To initiate a war of aggression...is the supreme international crime...it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.

That's the thing to remember when we read about potential war crimes arising from the invasion of Ukraine.

Tom

[heimlaga]

I agree with you Tom

[skuthorp]

And I see that there are moves afoot to establish the Putin Youth…..
https://www.newsweek.com/putin-youth...ciples-1724624
Using abducted Ukranian children they have already established the РОЖДЕНИЕ ЖИЗНИ movement

[Osborne Russell]

The supreme international crime, and whatabout is not a defense. If it were, the crime couldn't be prosecuted.

[Chip-skiff]

They Left Town as Convicts. Will They Be Buried as Heroes?

As thousands of ex-prisoners fight and die in Ukraine, honoring their memory is becoming a patriotic imperative in Russia. But some committed crimes their old neighbors cannot forget.

Neil MacFarquhar
March 26, 2023

When the corpse of a Wagner mercenary fighter arrived in his small Russian village in late February after he was killed fighting in Ukraine, some residents wanted to give him a hero’s burial. Others could not forget that the former prisoner had stabbed his father to death.

The ruckus prompted a stream of acrimonious comments on social media, with those demanding military honors for the fighter, Ilshat Askarov, flinging words like “Shame!” or “Traitor!” at opponents. Detractors called it a travesty to treat convicts who went to war for money as if they were regular soldiers.

Disputes like this one are erupting across Russia as convicts killed in the war are returned to their hometowns — dividing villages and pitting neighbors against one another. The diverging viewpoints underscore the difficult moral calculations involved in releasing criminals to fight for their country. Some villages have vetoed the presence of a military honor guard at the burials, while others denied relatives the use of public spaces to accommodate mourners. One remote Siberian village balked at providing transportation to bring home the coffin of a man formerly imprisoned for beating his girlfriend.

In the southwestern Rostov region, Roman Lazaruk, 32, was buried in February in the local “Alley of Heroes” after dying in the battle for Bakhmut. But his violent criminal record — he was convicted of burning his mother and sister to death in 2014 — outraged some local residents. A former classmate of the sister was appalled that convicts were being buried in the area of the cemetery once reserved for soldiers from World War II. “What did this Lazaruk or other guys do?” she told a local online newspaper. “They killed, stole, stabbed, raped, went to jail and went out to continue killing. What kind of heroes are they?”

Russia wandered into this thicket by allowing the Wagner private military group to recruit tens of thousands of convicts from penal colonies to fight and die in Ukraine, many near the eastern city of Bakhmut. The move allowed the Kremlin to replenish its ranks and postpone a conscription of civilians until last September, but it also alienated some Russians.

With President Vladimir V. Putin deepening the militarization of Russian society, soldiers are being put on a pedestal. Both the Kremlin’s propaganda machine and Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, the founder of the Wagner forces, have sought to portray all those killed as heroes defending the Motherland, no matter how sordid their backgrounds. In Russian schools, new patriotic education classes have been named “Heroes of Modern Russia,” and fresh plaques on some school walls honor former prisoners who died.

“Designing the image of a hero has always been a matter of state policy,” said Elena Istyagina-Eliseeva, a member of the Civic Chamber, a Kremlin organization that steers civil society, at a recent Moscow conference about heroes.

The tension between that jingoistic narrative of the war and the grim realities of coping with soldiers’ deaths is an especially acute phenomenon in small villages. Residents tend to remember the chilling details of the crimes committed by men who were subsequently recruited from prison to fight. “They know who is a criminal, who is a danger to the community, and they want to protect their everyday lives,” said Greg Yudin, a Russian professor of political philosophy currently doing research at Princeton University. “It is a kind of moral protection of their community.”

On the other side are regional officials who intercede in disputes over burials, pushing the Kremlin’s narrative, as well as relatives and friends of the deceased who want to remove the stigma of the crime. Soldiers who were outcasts in the community can become heroes, Professor Yudin said. “You can get some money out of them,” he said, referring to government payments to families of dead soldiers, “and their reputation is whitewashed. That is a good deal, so you can understand those people.”

In Akhunovo, population 2,500, near the border with Kazakhstan, an extended argument erupted on VKontakte, the Russian equivalent of Facebook, over Mr. Askarov’s burial. One resident, Gulnaz Gilmanova, wrote that she was ashamed of the village administration for decreeing that he be buried without military honors. She said she was grateful to Mr. Askarov for fighting “for the Motherland.” Others were more vociferous. One woman called the village administration “TRAITORS” for withholding honors, while another man noted that purged Red Army officers released from the gulag helped to defend the country during World War II.

Contacted online, Ms. Gilmanova said that no one should criticize Mr. Askarov, whom she described as a sympathetic, simple man who loved fishing and picking berries or mushrooms. She declined to discuss the events that landed him in prison, saying she did not want to extend his family’s pain. Others were just as adamant in their opposition. “They are not the same as soldiers, they are criminals,” wrote one man in the comments on VKontakte, while another noted that mercenary armies were technically illegal in Russia.

Mr. Askarov, 35, a native of the village, had worked at odd jobs like fixing motorcycles and harvesting hay. He killed his father, Ilyas, in July 2020 by stabbing him in the leg during a drunken brawl, severing an artery; he also tried to murder a witness. Father and son had often been at loggerheads, with the older Mr. Askarov accusing Ilshat of being a product of his late mother’s infidelity, and mocking him for an ear deformed by a long-term infection, according to court papers. Mr. Askarov was sentenced to 12 years in prison in March 2021, recent enough that village residents still remember the crime.

Amir Kharisov, head of the village administration, defended the way the funeral was handled. “Everyone who wanted to honored the memory of the warrior,” he wrote in a post that he deleted after The Times asked him about the situation.

Sometimes families ask Mr. Prigozhin himself to intervene in the funeral arrangements. In January, the mother of Ivan Savkin, 25, appealed to Mr. Prigozhin, according to local news reports, after the administration of her son’s village rejected her request to use the recreation center for his funeral; they turned her down because her son had been convicted of theft, the reports said. She buried him in her own village instead.

Mr. Prigozhin responded online later in the month. He vowed that he would “deal with the scum” who failed to honor the Wagner dead and pull the children of such officials “by their noses” to force them to fight in Ukraine.

In the remote Siberian village of Krasnoselkup, another couple complained to the Wagner leader because village officials refused to help transport the coffin of their son or to provide a military honor guard. Instead the family dragged the coffin over a long outback road in a trailer.

Mr. Prigozhin has personally entered the fray over burials repeatedly. He recently threatened to stack bodies in the mayor’s living room in the Black Sea resort of Goryachy Klyuch, near Wagner’s own cemetery, which is rapidly filling with hundreds of dead fighters. The mayor had asked that burials be halted because of the negative publicity, Mr. Prigozhin said.

In Zhireken, a defunct mining community of 4,200 in far eastern Russia, regional officials intervened in the dispute among residents over the burial of Nikita Kasatkin, 23. He was convicted of murder and sentenced to 10 years in prison in December 2020 after stabbing another man nine times during a drunken scuffle, according to court documents. A fracas erupted after Alena Kogodeeva, the local administrator, said that the town recreation center, with large flowers and other artwork for children painted on the walls, was an inappropriate site for Mr. Kasatkin’s funeral.

“Half of the village says, ‘Are we going to make heroes out of killers now?’” Ms. Kogodeeva, the local administrator, was quoted as saying in an online newspaper. “Half say that he atoned for sins with his blood.” As the debate raged back and forth, two journalists held a discussion on a local YouTube broadcast laying out the arguments, with one of them arguing that all fighters should be treated equally in death.

But Georgy Bal, 68, a retired writer who listened to the debate, already had his mind made up. He said the dead man was a mercenary who fought for money, not a hero. “In the village there are graves of people much more worthy of being remembered,” he said when contacted online, repeating remarks that he had written on social media. “What good did he do, what good for the residents of the village, before he was convicted?”


https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/26/w...e=articleShare

[Lugs]

Russia demonstrably cannot be trusted to honour any such arrangement any more than America would in similar circumstances. Hence US 'pilot' garrisons in unlikely places. OTOH in Aus we have invited them in and sub-contracted our military forces to them.

You could get a job doing PR for the Russian military. Write using a tiny dab of truth, surrounded by total fabrications.

[dutchpp]

The ISW Russian offensive campaign assessment, March 26
https://www.understandingwar.org/bac...-march-26-2023

Key inflections in ongoing military operations on March 26:

• Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Malyar called for informational silence regarding a potential Ukrainian counteroffensive.[14]
• Russian milbloggers largely amplified and praised Russian President Vladimir Putin’s March 25 information operations.[15]One milblogger claimed that the deployment of nuclear weapons does not change Russia’s military situation in Ukraine or need to defend against a future Ukrainian counteroffensive, however.[16]
• Russian forces conducted limited ground attacks on the Svatove-Kreminna line.[17] Ukrainian Eastern Group of Forces Spokesperson Colonel Serhiy Cherevaty stated that Russian and Ukrainian forces fought 10 battles in the Kupyansk-Lyman direction.[18]
• Russian forces continued attacking Bakhmut and its environs and made marginal gains within the city.[19] Russian sources claimed that Wagner Group forces cleared the AZOM plant in northern Bakhmut.[20]
• Russian forces continued attacking along the Avdiivka-Donetsk City line and made marginal gains within Marinka.[21]Ukrainian intelligence stated that Wagner Group forces may arrive in the Avdiivka direction.[22]
• Russian forces continued routine fire against areas in Zaporizhia, Kherson, and Dnipropetrovsk oblasts.[23] Head of the Ukrainian United Coordination Press Center of the Southern Defense Forces Nataliya Humenyuk stated that Russian forces in southern Ukraine lack adequate supplies of missiles and drones.[24]
• Russian sources reported the formation of the “Uragan” volunteer battalion of the irregular formation 1st “Wolves” Sabotage and Reconnaissance Brigade, which operates in the Avdiivka area.[25]
• United Russia Secretary Andrey Turchak announced the proposal of a draft law on March 24 that would allow families of employees of the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) who died in the war to be eligible to receive a one-time housing payment.[26]
• The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian occupation authorities in Berdyansk in occupied Zaporizhia Oblast are requiring locals to obtain passes from the occupation administration by April 1 in order to move around occupied Zaporizhia Oblast.[27]

[WszystekPoTrochu]

They Left Town as Convicts. Will They Be Buried as Heroes?...
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/26/w...e=articleShare

In general I agree with the baddies on this one - a criminal that died on war should be treated as hero, his crimes now forgotten. I would even extend that to the "special military operations". I would not extend that to de iure illegal mercenaries, but I do see the reasoning behind whitewashing them.

It's still satisfying to hear of problems caused by that in the local communities. Not only because taking literal murderers to fight the criminal war so early on proves to be as dumb as we all expected.

[sandtown]

War crimes on both sides, but by far the majority done by the Russians….so far.
There's a whole page to look at here
war crimes in ukraine

Come on - get real . . that page covers ONLY Russian offenses, which are indeed worthy of prosecution.

I have sources to back up the points made - for a survey of Ukr offenses I mostly rely on the US State Department . .

this is lengthy . . https://www.state.gov/reports/2022-c...tices/ukraine/

why do some of you persist in launching personal attacks against those of us who are less enthusiastic about the war ????

I got the same sort of stupid crap when I was right about Iraq, . . . .

[sandtown]

Not all the internationals are solid folks . . .

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/25/w...aine-lies.html

[lupussonic]

why do some of you persist in launching personal attacks against those of us who are less enthusiastic about the war ????

I got the same sort of stupid crap when I was right about Iraq, . . . .

Exactly none of us are enthusiastic about this war. Not that that will fit your self imposed narrative that only you can see the light. Keep on making penance for the killing YOU have done, just leave the rest of us out of it ok?

[Canoez]

those of us who are less enthusiastic about the war ????

. . . .

That is a massive assumption about others here on this thread.

[Andrew Craig-Bennett]

At risk of armchair strategising, Russia’s advance seems to have “culminated”, to use a term I learned in the last year.

Unfortunately western enthusiasm for supplying Ukraine seems to have slowed a bit.

[gypsie]

Something can can only be done well with a Russian accent.

Father and son had often been at loggerheads, with the older Mr. Askarov accusing Ilshat of being a product of his late mother’s infidelity, and mocking him for an ear deformed by a long-term infection ...

[gypsie]

War crimes on both sides, but by far the majority done by the Russians….so far.
There's a whole page to look at here
war crimes in ukraine

Come on - get real . . that page covers ONLY Russian offenses, which are indeed worthy of prosecution.

I have sources to back up the points made - for a survey of Ukr offenses I mostly rely on the US State Department . .

this is lengthy . . https://www.state.gov/reports/2022-c...tices/ukraine/

why do some of you persist in launching personal attacks against those of us who are less enthusiastic about the war ????

I got the same sort of stupid crap when I was right about Iraq, . . . .

What personal attack?
What stupid crap?

Being questions, or 'not being agreed with' is not a personal attack.

What are you talking about?

[gypsie]

At risk of armchair strategising, Russia’s advance seems to have “culminated”, to use a term I learned in the last year.

Me too.
I thought it was something you did with your girlfriend.

[skuthorp]

No one is 'enthusiastic' about the war, but any appeasement will just make things worse or allow Putin et al time to refit and regroup. This war will not be over till Ukraine gets all its territory back, no matter how long that takes. And it may take quite a while. But I do think that Zelensky is vital to the present campaign.
And if the west is getting 'tired' of supplying arms, then they should think on what will happen if Putin prevails and arrives on their doorstep.

[dutchpp]

The ISW Russian offensive campaign assessment, March 27.
https://www.understandingwar.org/bac...-march-27-2023

Key Takeaways

• Rumors about the dismissal of Russian Eastern Group of Forces (Eastern Military District) Commander Colonel General Rustam Muradov on March 27 generated a muted and cynical response in the Russian information space.
• Russian milbloggers also had a muted response to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s March 25 announcement to deploy tactical nukes to Belarus, underscoring that Putin’s messaging is aimed at Western rather than domestic Russian audiences.
• Russian military leadership likely committed limited higher quality Wagner Group elements to the offensive on Avdiivka, potentially to reinforce recent limited tactical successes in the area.
• Russian forces made marginal gains around Svatove and Russian forces continue ground attacks along the Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna line.
• Russian forces continued ground attacks in and around Bakhmut and made gains within Bakhmut.
• Russian forces continued ground attacks along the Avdiivka-Donetsk City line.
• Russia appears to be increasingly deploying elements of conventional formations in a piecemeal fashion along the entire frontline, including in southern Ukraine.
• Russian authorities continue forming new volunteer battalions subordinate to irregular formations.
• Ukrainian partisans conducted an improvised explosive device (IED) attack against an occupation law enforcement officer in Mariupol, Donetsk Oblast.

[ERGR]

Comforting support for Ukraine in the US, in a poll from March 22 - 23:
Skärmbild 2023-03-28 203301.jpg
It's especially positive to read that also the GOP support aid for Ukraine, and that opposition to the sitting government in the US is expressed as "the government is helping too little".
Source (page 14):
https://harvardharrispoll.com/wp-con...KeyResults.pdf
Except that our numbers are different (only our Russian trolls oppose aid to Ukraine), the situation in Sweden is also that we criticise the government by saying that they're doing too little or too late, or both.
/Erik

[ERGR]

I see now that there are more polls regarding GOP support or lack thereof for Ukraine. We're free to chose the one we like, and I like the one I posted.

[sandtown]

No one is 'enthusiastic' about the war, but any appeasement will just make things worse or allow Putin et al time to refit and regroup. This war will not be over till Ukraine gets all its territory back, no matter how long that takes. And it may take quite a while. But I do think that Zelensky is vital to the present campaign.
And if the west is getting 'tired' of supplying arms, then they should think on what will happen if Putin prevails and arrives on their doorstep.

Col. Astore has a response to your views . . . https://www.antiwar.com/blog/2023/03...a-ukraine-war/

[sandtown]

. . . think on what will happen if Putin prevails and arrives on their doorstep.

Now that right there is some Saddam-level hyperbole from 2003, fully worthy of the most frothing-at-the-mouth Neo-Con of that era.

It is just flat-out ridiculous

[birlinn]

You would not think that if you lived in Estonia.

[Garret]

Now that right there is some Saddam-level hyperbole from 2003, fully worthy of the most frothing-at-the-mouth Neo-Con of that era.

It is just flat-out ridiculous

You've got to be joking. That's precisely what his plan is.

[Johan R]

Interesting to watch the committee meeting on the funding of the Pentagon. I am somewhat surprised by how many Senators bought up and complained of the tax payer funding of travel expenses for people in uniform to get out of state abortions, yet no mention of the $38 billion in Ukraine aid, including paying the pensions of Ukranians.

Maybe this ex CIA operative view on economics is accurate?



The session on funding the renewal of the US nuclear deterrent just confirmed how out of touch some people in Congress really are.