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It seems that the only option left for Putin is the "nuclear" one (no pun intended) now that the whole world is seeing that the Russian army lost its morale, an

• megous 5y ago
  Other options for Russia are always negotiation and withdrawal. It's not like there would be an counter-attack.
  • tasubotadas 5y ago
    For Russia? Yes. For Putin? No.
    • trompetenaccoun 5y ago
      That depends entirely - what was the goal of this attack in the first place? Did he think he could quickly take Ukraine and the West wouldn't interfere? It's possible. His soldiers look unmotivated, even unprepared though. Maybe it's part of a larger strategy. We might see more crisis popping up soon.
      • jnsaff2 5y ago
        In soviet times (and possibly any other tyrant dictator era) the dictator was told what he wanted to hear or be (literally or figuratively) dead. So perfectly valid assumption is that command chain inflated the capabilities and morale of the army wildly. Also, I think it would be naive to think that the army is the one place were kleptocracy is not stealing from. So who knows, maybe the tyrant is playing 5D chess and shit is going to go really bad or he could be playing 1D chess because ...
      • hunterb123 5y ago
        > Did he think he could quickly take Ukraine and the West wouldn't interfere? No and yes. He's taking it slowly because he knows the West won't interfere. It's not a blitz, it's a siege.
        • pjc50 5y ago
          The initial paratroopers at the airports plus fast armor columns all indicated a blitz approach. Those have already been destroyed. It's no longer on the original plan, and the West is interfering. The longer it takes the more weapons we can ship them, and everyone's running around looking for new types of economic sanctions which can be applied against Russia.
          • hunterb123 5y ago
            Russia is no stranger to sanctions, it doesn't mean much. Ukraine can barely get people out much less weapons in. The main point was he knew there would be no military response from the West so surrounding, cutting off the capitol, and slowly taking it through attrition is possible. Paratroopers/fast armor columns and sieges aren't mutually exclusive, they can be used to probe weaknesses in a siege.
            • pjc50 5y ago
              > Ukraine can barely get people out much less weapons in There's a traffic jam of refugees at the border, but the roads, railways and airports are still there and in Ukranian control? I don't see what obstacle there is.
        • bigodbiel 5y ago
          It was always blitz. They expected capitulation by Sunday, with some ongoing attrition medium term. This is both from US Intel and now confirmation via a deleted, but luckily web archived, article/commentary on one of their major state-media sites, praising the (now impossible) “success” and their resurgence, while also flaunting the west.
          • 5y ago
      • BLKNSLVR 5y ago
        I can't help but think there's something else happening in the background, or that this is part of something larger. It feels like a distraction because the "goal" seems ... both unclear and not worth the reputation damage.
        • bigodbiel 5y ago
          A small elite of oligarchs can now completely buy the whole country cheaply using up the dollars they stacked under their mattresses, having all been forewarned of what was to happen.
          • BLKNSLVR 5y ago
            How much more cheaply, and will they be saving more than the sanctions cost them? I would have thought that if they could buy it now / soon, then they could probably have bought it at not much a percentage premium prior. I'm not across the realpolitik of this kind of thing though, but interested to learn.
        • koonsolo 5y ago
          An old colleague once told me, if it's either really stupid, or extremely genius, most of the time it's the former. In all those years after hearing this, it has always been the former :D.
      • bigodbiel 5y ago
        Liberate the country (well half the country up til Dniepr river).
        • ascold 5y ago
          Liberate from who? We have a russian-speaking president of Jewish origin who is voted by 73% of the population, most of them from the russian-speaking South East. All of the ultra right wing nationalist parties could not even get into the Parliament. Putin calls nazis everyone who is against his plans to fulfill his dreams about rebuilding the empire. Today (Feb 28) he was bombing the russian-speaking cities, the population he said he wants to free from some imaginary "nazis".
• godmode2019 5y ago
  Your take is very surface level, its like you are looking for faults. Assaults on massive countries are not won overnight. USA had a quick win of a month in Iraq by using shock and awe. Blowing everything up and killing any civilian who got in the way. This created a massive insurgency, which was fine because they didn't plan on occupying only destabilising. Russia plans on occupying, to reduce NATOs ability to out flank them over the European plane. So it takes longer. Secondly, the young soldiers. Its called training, they are battle hardening the next generation in a 'easy' war, for if they ever need to use them in the future. Russia is clearly taking the slow and careful approach, he wants these people to be part of the union eventually.
  • hef19898 5y ago
    For a country not planning to occupy, the US lead coalition sure stayed for quite some time.
    • b112 5y ago
      I think maybe parent is maybe combining info from the first and second invasion into one.
      • hef19898 5y ago
        Could be yes, didn't think about it. But didn't they create a Shiit uprising in the south during the first one? An uprising they allowed Sadam to shoot down with whatever limited forces he was left with?
        • kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
          That would have been outside the boundaries of the UN mandate and Bush Sr. wouldn't violate it.
          • hef19898 5y ago
            Ah, yes. The good old days when UN mandates still mattered.
• jansen555 5y ago
  Pollonium and thermobaric bombs easily come to my mind. Funding terrorism on steroid making Iranian look like absolute kindergartener are something I immediately think of after the previous 2 options. I can probably write a master thesis in an afternoon for possible options Putin can take. Imagine people doing this kind of think tank on daily basis for Putin. Remember when Soviet were dirt poor then they can match USA militarily, Russia now is sig ificantly richer with more sophisticated weapons. Look up who ferry American to space for the past 2 decades. Hint...not Elon.
  • robertlagrant 5y ago
    > Remember when Soviet were dirt poor then they can match USA militarily, Russia now is sig ificantly richer with more sophisticated weapons They were poor, it's true. Tragically, because they were a centrally planned economy, the USSR could starve its citizens to funnel wealth to its war machine. Russia is richer (about as rich as the state of Florida) but less centrally controlled, so it will find it harder to concentrate wealth into state initiatives at the expense of the lives of its citizens.
    • SideburnsOfDoom 5y ago
      > the USSR could starve its citizens to funnel wealth to its war machine. That would a stronger point, if one could not also unfavourably compare the size of the USA's military and social welfare budgets. And also the ease of expanding the former, vs. the difficultly in expanding the latter.
      • robertlagrant 5y ago
        You aren't talking about the same types of thing: 1. The US also has loads of value which is not mediated by the state. A shop can decide what to sell, and you can decide to buy it, without any central planning or money spent by the state. All of this value could be (and was) decided by the state in the USSR. 2. "social welfare budgets" are not in the same league as what happened with central planning. From Wikipedia: > In 1928, Stalin introduced the first five-year plan for building a socialist economy. In place of the internationalism expressed by Lenin throughout the Revolution, it aimed to build Socialism in One Country. In industry, the state assumed control over all existing enterprises and undertook an intensive program of industrialization. In agriculture, rather than adhering to the "lead by example" policy advocated by Lenin,[31] forced collectivization of farms was implemented all over the country. > Famines ensued as a result, causing deaths estimated at three to seven million; surviving kulaks were persecuted, and many were sent to Gulags to do forced labor. We know that it rarely makes sense for other people to even plan software timelines for teams of 4 developers, and the team members are the best people to estimate timelines, pick tools, and solve problems. How much more does that scale up for a whole country's economy? How much more damage can someone do if they are choosing centrally to deprioritise wealth creation over the latest thing the state wishes to accomplish?
• sharikous 5y ago
  > It's harder to mobilise people behind a corrupt cause once blood starts flowing. I don't know how significant it is. Dictatorships have always been feared and despised. And armies lost motivation many times in history, before the internet. From a military perspective what I think is different this time is how (probably) US intelligence is helping Ukrainians. It seems they know any Russian move in advance in real time and I doubt such a feat could be pulled in the past.
  • javier2 5y ago
    Same. While it is still a bit unclear to me at least why Russia sent their seemingly old gear without proper support and young conscripts in first, the terrible parachute attempts still stand out. When you want it to be over quickly, you have to send in the best soldiers with the best gear first to seal the deal? In addition to live NATO intelligence, it is clear to most europeans that US intelligence tried to warn about this at the start of December, with photos showing large preparations for heavy army movement all around the Ukrainian border.
    • hef19898 5y ago
      Considering how fast things fell in place within the EU and NATO, those warnings (I doubt it was only the US) weren't in vain. Why send not the best, brightest and most advanced? Because you only jump as high as you need. And using your most sophisticated gear in an area that is most likely covered NATO detection gear and consultants / advisors doesn't sound to smart neither.
      • bigodbiel 5y ago
        Disagree. Shock and awe. Remember that this also should have served as showcase of their military tech for arms sales to the world. Only the fact that they used up all their guided missiles in the first two days without achieving anything (resorting to ballistic missiles by the third) shows how in fact it was always smoke and mirrors.
        • 5y ago
• pjc50 5y ago
  > It is fascinating to see for the first time in the modern age what effect modern media consumption and the internet has on a local war. The Russian propaganda effort seems to have involved the internet a lot, and you can see their talking points come out of the mouths of Western speakers in all the usual places on both the far-right and far-left. Remains to be seen how well the domestic Russian propaganda effort will hold. > It's harder to mobilise people behind a corrupt cause once blood starts flowing. Only if that's your blood. If it's someone else's people are often fine with it. The returning dead Russians could make the country go either way - demands for revenge. > from a purely geographical perspective, this is the first war on the European continent in the 2000's. It's not even the first war _in Ukraine_ in the 2000s! Has everyone forgotten Crimea and the Donbass?
• TheAlchemist 5y ago
  While I'm all in awe for Ukraine resistance, I wouldn't dismiss so quickly the Russian army. The loss of morale and teeth, is mostly social media stuff. I do hope it's true, but I wouldn't bet on it. They did encounter much stiffer resistance than they expected, but there are still hundreds of tanks and tens of thousands of troops around Kyiv. Now that the West is sending arms to Ukraine, there is an increasing probability that they will manage to defend themselves. But unfortunately it's far from certain, or even probable at this point.
  • RealityVoid 5y ago
    While I am mildly skeptical as well... There sure are a lot of videos of tanks blown up and of wreckages and of immobile vehicles. And recently Putin removed the head of the armed forces. I doubt things are going as planned for the Russians.
    • anticodon 5y ago
      Can you distinguish burned or blown up Ukrainian tank from Russian tank? Not to mention that Spanish media even used footage from video game to "illustrate" the fake news about the war.
      • RealityVoid 5y ago
        I can't but a lot of other people can. There was exactly this going on in some subreddits where some APC's were presented as russian but it turned out to be Ukrainean. Camo is also different between the countries and they have the russian speciffic markings on their armor. Not to mention the kind of funny videos of abandoned Russian vehicles. That exposes deep problems in the way Russia is conducting the invasion. Most shocking for me was the videos of the TB2's incinerating some BUK systems I think. I was... astonished, it means Ukraine can still operate in the airspace and that does not bode well for the Russians.
    • dncornholio 5y ago
      You cannot base opinion on online media, it's heavily biased! Even though I agree with the sentiment that Ukraine is doing better then I expected. I would not say things are going well. The bombings and shelling looks really, really bad.. Kharkov will be nothing but rubble.