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this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2023
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When the war started (and I knew jack about this random country) I often wondered why Ukraine wasn't using popular guerrilla tactics a la the NLF against this "imperialist" Russia and instead relying so much on high-tech imported solutions like tanks, planes and drones. Only recently after getting critical sources here, the thought occurred to me that that may be because the contested lands already have very low support for the Ukraine military and Russia has very little interest in marching up to the rest of Ukraine. Is there any public data on the (willing) participation of Eastern Ukrainians in either military?
But since they're now even using cluster bombs, I guess it's clear now which side of the Vietnam war they're more similar to.
Edit: I wasn't aware that "Viet Cong" was used derogatorily in the Northwest. Corrected that blunder there.
I think the breakdown from this lecture from Mearsheimer is pretty telling in that regard. First, we have the demographic breakdown of Ukraine:
and the election in2010:
As we can clearly see from the voting patterns in both elections, the country is divided exactly across the current line of conflict. Furthermore, a survey conducted in 2015 further shows that there is a sharp division between people of eastern and western Ukraine on which economic bloc they would rather belong to:
Just finished watching it and those predictions wrt to China/Russia/Iran/Syria cooperation are so on point I actually started laughing. Only problem is that apparently the USA politicians didn't watch that one, so all his hopeful predictions for how the USA could avoid that didn't manifest. Their loss lol.
Mearsheimer understood what was happening in terms of geopolitics, and he tried to warn US politicians about it. Unfortunately, it's clear that US is run by ideologues who silenced anybody who disagreed with them. Now we're seeing the results of that.
Yeah, those track. I'll watch the lecture but I was wondering if, for instance, there are many volunteers eastern regions in the Russian military. I already assume that very few would be in the Ukrainian one since they've been at literal war, but I hardly hear much about soldiers coming from the LPR and DPR militias in the Russian military or support among new soldiers from there. Those seem like interesting questions, and with the simple fact that the usual outlets aren't screaming at the top of their lungs that "separatists actually hate Russia," I guess I already know the answer.
Yup, and from what I recall LPR and DPR militias did most of the infantry fighting at the start of the war. I guess technically they were fighting since 2014, but it was a frozen conflict for a while.
What do you mean by "popular guerilla tactics"? They've given out guns to civilians from Teroborona at the very beginning, they've been using civilian vehicles to transport soldiers, they've been using civilian buildings to hide ammunition depots and artillery positions, ans there's been at least one case of civilians attacking Russian armour with Molotov's. Plus the whole drone bombings
Well, those you listed, yeah. I admit I hadn't looked too much into it beforehand and was going off on the discourse about tanks and planes, and even now I'm no expert on it. It's just I've hardly seen the international observers talking about traps, "cheap" sabotage or insurrections in the occupied regions.
Wdym, that's not guerilla warfare, where's all the people hiding in the trees and hole traps in the ground
I'm having trouble parsing whether you are being humorous or not
Isn't that why it's called guerilla warfare? Because the soldiers use tactics that gorillas would use like climbing up into the trees and digging holes
Could you lay off the jokes, please? It's a war