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‘We Cannot Win’ Says Top Russian Commander
(www.kyivpost.com)
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this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2023
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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?
You have a whole entire counteroffensive that shows the exact opposite.
Also
Have you taken a look at a map of the current situation? That's just straight up bullshit
Muscovites? Is every Russian soldier from Moscow? What?
It's some stupid historical revisionism Ukrainian nationalists are trying to do. The medieval Rus was centered around Kiev, and both Ukraine and Russia share that tradition, but Ukrainian nationalist hate the thought of sharing history with Russians. So they have created this new history where Russian Empire was actually just a creation of "violent Muscovite conquest," often alongside the racist implication that "the Moscovites" (including modern day citizens of the Russian Federation) were unable to shake off their "asiatic/Mongolian" influence and that's what makes them uniquely savage and evil etc etc... While the wholesome Ukrainians are of course enlightened and western
That medieval argument is utter nonsense, Moscow was one of the just few significant Russian culture centers which wasn't conquered, just vassalized... and Kiev wasn't even among them. It was burned down by Mongols so hard that the center of Kievan Rus was moved to Halych and even the orthodox metropolitan bishop moved from Kiev first to Vladimir and then to Moscow. Then it was conquered by Lithuania and after the Union of Lublin passed down to Poland from which it was partitioned between Austria and Russia.
So if Moscow, which was vassal of Golden Horde for 200 years is a "Mongol Horde" then what is a Ukraine which was part of GH, Lithuania, Poland, Austria, Russia, USSR for over 700 years? Are they "Mongol-Lithuanian-Polish-Austrian-Russian-Soviet Horde" or what?
I think it just means people from Moscow and references Muscovy.
Outside of the historical context of pre-Russia Grand Duchy of Moscow (and the "Muscovy" itself is a latin exonym), it's the dogwhistle for the "asiatic hordes" nazi slogan. Think about the contexts when it's used in current times and it checks out nearly every time.
Nah, they have some bizarre choose your own adventure version of history. Don't worry about it, it's really stupid.
The language means "those aligned with the Moscow regime"I think
No, it's a race thing.
The Russian Empire started with Muscovy. They have age-old traditions such as forcing people they conquered to conquer more territory for them so, no, generally speaking Russian soldiers are from anywhere but Moscow.
You're describing every empire that has ever existed. This is not a special thing "they" and they alone do.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orientalism_(book)
Yeah but at least in Europe we generally stopped doing that shit. Serbia had a bit of a go at it but generally it's been quiet since WWII... with the exception of Muscovy.
Imperialism didn't stop with WWII, I was a bit imprecise, see e.g. Algeria. Also ask Estonians and Poles and... a ton of others how much imperialism had stopped before the dissolution of the USSR.
imperialism isn't "when a country goes into another country", it's a specific relationship of domination and resource extraction and impoverishment of the people living in that country in order to exploit it for the benefit of the imperial core (more often, its bourgeoisie).
it's really disgusting to see people using the language of the left to describe the USSR abolishing homelessness and poverty in their constituent states, and building schools and homes and providing jobs and extremely low costs of living, as if this is even remotely comparable to the horrors that the Europeans and United States have wrought in developing countries around the world, including sweatshop and plantation slavery, forced starvations, and genocides.
"but they did those good things authoritarianly!" a) literally who gives a shit, and b) every government does everything authoritarianly, it's the definition of authoritarian. ripping away resources from the rich landowners and distributing them to the poor is extremely authoritarian and I definitely support doing that
Imperialism is when USSR tells the GDR to send over cars in "fair exchange" for canned fish the GDR has no interest in. End of story. And yes that trade happened.
I'm not sure why you think that's damning, there's some proportional amount of canned fish which is worth as much as a car, right?
In principle yes. But that ignores that the GDR built those cars to use, and has no need for the fish. Nor had it any say in whether to do the trade. The USSR messed up their own planning so they pressured the GDR. Inside the GDR it was a meme that you bought a car for your kid no later than when it got born so it'd get delivered on the 18th birthday but frankly speaking the GDR did produce a fuckton of cars -- but couldn't keep them. Which is why they stopped investing into developing the thing which is how you ended up with the same Trabants being built in 1990 as in 1958.
Other trades were more equitable, including the steady stream of raw materials coming in from the USSR in exchange for industrial machinery. The GDR also traded a fuckton with the west, more or less washing machines, fridges, textiles and industrial machinery, against the Prussian necessity: Coffee. Until they kick-started the Vietnamese coffee industry to be able to afford bananas better but that investment didn't pan out because 1990 came along, coffee plants take something like 10 years to start bearing fruit. The Vietnamese produce excellent coffee, btw.
Main point though is that yes the USSR was treating all the other bloc states as vassals: If they wanted to do a trade, they got it, no matter how insanely lop-sided it was.
Do Germans not eat canned fish?
They ultimately did, though state TV needed to include it in their cooking show as otherwise the fish would've rotted on the shelves -- the cans had Russian labels and while people learned Russian in school that doesn't mean that you know the name of a random fish. People didn't know what it was, what to do with it, so they didn't buy it.
Also you might've noticed that the GDR had a coastline.
In any case, and you seem to be trying hard to not address it: The point is not the fish. And it wasn't always fish, but other random shit. The point is that the GDR didn't have a choice. And the Russians didn't even have the decency to ship the cans with German labels. Probably were sitting in some warehouse collecting dust in Russia in the fist place.
I guess I'm just hard time what point you want me to take away from this when everything you've told me is unsourced and anecdotal. Random stories from random people on the internet don't really mean much to me.
My source is German TV documentaries if that helps.
And details actually are unimportant there's a multitude of ways to establish that the likes of Poland and the GDR were vassals of the USSR. How about Hungary? Yugoslavia wasn't, insert Tito quote about sending a single assassin to Stalin if Stalin doesn't stop sending dozens to Tito.
Well, that's not what the person you were responding to was disputing, was it? Vassal state relations are not necessarily imperialism, by the standard he laid out.
Lmfao
A global system of exploitation exists that starves millions every year and disposses even more.
"But I had to buy fish once in my industrialized country with a high quality of life".
You don't know what imperialism is even though it was just explained to you.
So that wasn't exploitation? How is it any different from trading beads for gold under force of violence?
Yes, the GDR largely had its shit together. Doesn't mean they didn't get exploited. Western workers also tend to have a decent standard of living, yet I bet my arse you wouldn't say that bosses don't exploit us.
I recommend reading my words again and giving a real good think - as difficult of a struggle as that might be - and decide whether you internalized them or just grabbed a piece here and there and plodded along anyways like a child.