Western media have finally change course. They are now admitting that the much promoted Ukrainian counter-offensive has failed. In fact, the acknowledge that it never had a chance to win in the first place.
The Hill, the Washington Post and CNN now agree that the Ukrainian army will never achieve its aims.
western MSM has a rare encounter with reality!
That makes it difficult for the Biden administration to get Congress approval for $24 billion in additional ‘aid’ to Ukraine. It does not make sense to pay for a cause that is evidently lost.
b seems overly hopeful regarding the rationality of US congress, but i think hes right- why would we throw more money at them, US politicians have made it clear they do not support bringing Ukraine into NATO if they do not win this conflict. of course, US politicians are prone to lying and misleading
Nothing has come from the ‘peace conference’ which Saudi Arabia arranged on Ukraine’s behalf
lol. lmao even. props to big dog MBS for trying
Despite the onslaught of bad news the Ukrainian army is still trying to take Russian positions in the south and east of Ukraine. But it simply does not have enough in men and material to break through the lines.
Even if they would manage to get a local breakthrough there are not enough reserves to push for the necessary follow up. Just one of the NATO trained brigades has still been held back. All others have been mauled in their various deployment zones.
nothing has changed it seems
In the northeast around Kupyansk the Russians have started their own offensive which has the Ukrainians on the run. Ukraine has ordered the evacuation of the area
But Kupyansk is a Russian city and people refuse to leave.
show this to the libs claiming Russians are committing genocide in the regions they capture. curious that these civilians are content with Russian occupation when you believe what western media claims
The Russian campaign is slowly speeding up. As the Ukrainian Strana.news reports (machine translation):
Also in Ukraine, it is recorded that from Kupyansk to Bakhmut, Russia has increased the number of attacks.
"Over the past month, the total number of attacks in the Kupyansk, Limansky and Bakhmut directions has grown significantly. In July, during the week there were 6-6.5 thousand attacks, during the last week-9 thousand attacks, " - said the representative of the National Guard Ruslan Muzychuk.
According to him, the Russian Federation does not experience “shell hunger”.
Aviation is also actively used, and over the past few weeks, more than 50 air attacks have been taking place every day, and sometimes more than 80.
That is bad news for the Ukrainian side which lacks the reserves to counter the Russian onslaught. There are also less weapons coming in from the West. F-16 fighter jets will be delayed for another nine months due to training issues. Tanks and other material are in short supply.
these supply issues sure bode well for the west’s performance in WW3 
Strana also report of an interview with a knowledgeable Ukrainian soldier (machine translation):
Continuing the topic of the situation at the front, an interesting interview was given by a Ukrainian sniper fighting near Bakhmut with the call sign “Grandfather”. On the air of political scientist Yuri Romanenko, he was introduced as Konstantin Proshinsky (this is a pseudonym).
The fighter spoke in detail about his vision of the situation of the Armed Forces of Ukraine and the Russian army.
- Mobilization. In his opinion, it is conducted incorrectly. Recruits are sent to the front who have never been trained, and they are often over 50 years old and with a whole bunch of diseases.
- No rotation. The soldier says that “the same brigades” are fighting at the front, and people are not taken out of the front line for six months or more. Whereas by Western standards, they can be kept in a war zone for no more than three months.
- Behavior of mid-and high-level commanders. According to Proshinsky, many of them are trying to arrange a “mini-Stalingrad” on the positions, forcing them to go into frontal assaults on well-fortified Russian positions.
- The Russian Army began to fight better.
- Proshinsky believes that Russia has not yet used much of what it has against Ukraine.
The soldier thinks that the Russians will not move from their positions and that a stalemate peace like in Korea would be the end result.
UAF in real dire times— recruiting the elderly, poor logistics, engaging the enemy at inopportune times, and Russia has yet to waver
I believe that to be wrong. Russia’s aim is to liberate at least the four regions that it has claimed for itself. For political reasons it can not stop before that is done.
Should the Ukraine continue to fight after that, Russia is likely to set new aims and take more land.
more editorializing, but it doesnt seem unreasonable. i thought Russia would stick to its original goal of Donetsk and Luhansk, but if Zaporizhzhia and Kherson are receptive to Russian governance, it would be foolish for Russia to give them up
Mod reports so far:
Reporter:
Reason: Go away tankies with your editorialized commentary
Reporter:
Nate [email protected]
Reason: propaganda
Hey @[email protected] and @[email protected] Why don’t you show up and defend your beliefs in the free marketplace of democracy instead of crying for the authoritarian Stalinist mods to silence everyone you don’t like.
Its just so much fucking blood spilled.
I can’t get over how many people are throwing their lives away over some dipshits in their respective capitals putting new lines on a map. Nightmarish to see Ukrainians and Russians alike march to their deaths over this shit.
some Ukrainians are being coerced into serving. libs will call me a Russian bot for this, but i dont think the same can be said for Russia. they have enough active military personnel to avoid drafting; they havent even deployed them all
but yeah, war is depressing. hopefully before we go extinct we will achieve communism and end war
there were tens of thousands of casualties from wagner’s prisoner troops. they recruited a lot out of prisons - how is that not coercion
You’re right of course but it’s a significant degree of coercion away from the way Ukrainian recruiters were grabbing people on the street and throwing them in vans.
tens of thousands of casualties from Wagner alone? that sounds spurious
Bakhmut was a literal meat grinder of human lives, absolutely brutal battle with mass casualties on both sides. Definitely was no where near worth the life lost.
They’re also still fighting in Bakhmut too. Some asshole from my state just got mortared to pieces there about a week ago. Many news stories about him. The dude was maybe fifty, had been rejected from the US military for undisclosed health issues decades earlier, was estranged from his wife, and went to fight in Ukraine because he wanted to help the children 😬
i stand corrected
I mean prigo might be overselling it with 20k+ dead but tens of thousands of casualties seems in line. It was a long and vicious battle.
Yeah there really hasn’t been a war like this in a long time.
fair, but also they arent part of the Russian military. and they stopped recruiting prisoners
Does Ukraine really need to coerce people into serving? I was under the impression that the country had huge numbers of bloodthirsty fascists salivating at the thought of killing “RuZZian orcs.”
The Ukrainian leader said all officials responsible for military conscription in each region of the country were dismissed.
Mr Zelenskyy said a probe into military recruitment centres across the nation exposed illegal dealings including bribery.
The investigations also unveiled reports of officials helping men dodge conscription by fleeing across borders.
There is currently a wartime ban on travel for draft-eligible men.
“This system should be run by people who know exactly what war is and why cynicism and bribery during war is treason,” Mr Zelenskyy said on Friday.
‘recruitment’ lmao
Ah, that answers the question.
No they definitely need to conscript. Most people don’t want to give up their lives for some war, no matter their ideology.
There are a huge number of racists in Ukraine but that doesn’t make it a monolith. When you see things like 76% approval for Bandera, some people support him killing Jews but some were genuinely miseducated on him.
Also, a lot of these people have families in places where bombs have fallen, will fall, or are currently falling. In the face of a massive enemy like Russia, even as a Ukrainian reactionary there is a good case to be made to just stay and protect your family since you aren’t going to stop the bombs. Being there to rescue a survivor right after a bomb hits is much more likely to help them than making sure a thermobaric missile kills 17 people instead of 16 on the front lines.
It’s a country of like I think forty million people. It’s not a monolith. The Banderites are strongest in Galacia, which varying amounts of support beyond that.
some Ukrainians are being coerced into serving. libs will call me a Russian bot for this,
Nah they can’t, even western news outlets acknowledged that zelenskyyyy banned all working age men from leaving the country, effectively condemning them to die in the war as cannon fodder for NATO.
libs will call me a Russian bot for this, but i dont think the same can be said for Russia.
I think they were talking about libs calling them a bot for saying Russia didn’t have to rely on coercion. I’d still disagree with that though because afaik Russia actually has been (or at least was at one point, correct me if that’s changed) using conscripts in Ukraine.
I’m not sure if there’s been conscription of new soldiers, but Russia has taken some pretty marked measures to ensure they have enough people - Retirements for older soldiers have been postponed, they’ve called in retired technicians and specialists to take over positions within russia to free up young workers for military duties. I think there was some serious resistance to the call up early on. Maybe not widespread, but enough to be noteworthy.
those are typical wartime measures tho. unemployment is currently incredibly low in Russia, so pulling ppl out of retirement is to maintain a reserve army of labor. i dont think this is good and hope Russia has a proletarian revolution, but by capitalist standards, they arent acting inordinately cruel
libs will call me a Russian bot
Everyone who disagrees with me is a lib is great defense. Chuds will disagree with me though
Are you not a liberal? What’s your political views? I wanna hear
I don’t consider myself a lib. Housing should not be an asset for profit. Workers pay should increase based on the value they create. Housing first policy for the homeless. Food prices should not be rising based on corporate profit seeking
I think I’m still pro market economy, but not in a capitalist sense. A market economy can incentivize progress, but workers shouldn’t be forced to participate at minimum wage through the threat of hunger and homelessness.
corporate power lobbying has ruined public infrastructure and that’s bad.
But I’m not backing Russia fully on this invasion thing, so I’m definitely a liberal!
I don’t think anyone here really supports Russia, in the sense that we want them to conquer Ukraine. More that we don’t see prolonging the war as useful for anything but killing more people and selling more weapons. Peace is what we should all aim for here.
Yeah. A Russian victory, or at least a favorabel stalemate, is desirable because it would harm NATO, not because there’s anything good about Russia. There’s some argument to be made that it’s likely better than allowing Ethnic Russian Russian Speaking Ukrainians to fall in to the hands of the Banderites that run Kiev, but that’s kind of up in the air.
Workers pay should increase based on the value they create
Who do you think should get shares from the worker’s fruits of labours, too? Who do you think ought to distribute them on the level of a company and on the level of societies?
Housing should not be an asset for profit
What changes in laws and legislation as well as enforcement of power are needed for that? To de-commodify what Neoliberalism and Colonialism as well as Imperialism did privatize over the last centuries will be a hard fight.
How do you think power can be generated to achieve those goals? Which in itself are idealist or utopist. The question is how to change the world after all.
pro market economy, but not in a capitalist sense
So “Markets Not Capitalism: Individualist Anarchism Against” type?
Quite a leap you do there. Ignoring political science and social science of more than 100 years, ignoring how social democratic liberals in the Weimar Republic did ally with conservatives and the military against party member who weren’t in favour of the war with talk of traitors and propaganda of being the voice of the enemy (which is the back then equivalent of “Russian Bots”) is certainly something.
You also ignore the difference i.e. from USA liberal’s who favour property rights over people’s lives and often espouse values only as long as it doesn’t cost a thing and how they do support the US empire and often its wars.
You also leap since OP didn’t say “all are against me!”, but was precise. That you don’t understand slang is kinda a You problem. You also deny the experience of others, maybe that is something that you also do in your regular life and social interactions? If so you can utilize a change of perspective and behavior to get more from the world. People here - even ones who are far from Russian propaganda - are often called Russian bots by people on many instances, often by people labeling themselves as liberals. I have different views than many on this site and yet I can differentiate what people say.
Finally do you think your argument is in any way new or interesting? Like, what was your motivation to post it?
This is simply the overture of what will turn out to be the ultimate fight between US and China - the showdown between finance capitalism and industrial capitalism. All the geopolitical events revolve around this fundamental contradiction of capitalism, which is now approaching its zenith.
What is happening in Ukraine today is likely a cakewalk compared to what is to come. Biden truly scares me, being so casually ending European prosperity (it won’t recover for the next half a century) and using monetary and economic policies to engineer famines and poverty across the developing world just to slow the decline of the empire. The interest rates hikes, and the sanctions against Russian agricultural products, are literally impoverishing and killing people in the global south.
He will make sure that America will be the last to go down, even if it means total annihilation in a war against China. The real question is, how will the rest of the world respond to this?
Biden truly scares me, being so casually ending European prosperity
Biden’s a senile puppet. He didn’t do anything aside from sign whatever was put on his desk by staffers and read whatever was on his teleprompter. Europe was ultimately screwed by its own slavish obedience to deindustrialization, a process decades in the making and orchestrated by the forces of finance. This was enhanced by their millennia-old tangled web of bigotries that made it easy for finance to divide and conquer them. They’d have been fucked over in the exact same way regardless of who sat in the oval office or what colour of lawn sign that person had.
I think many people are seriously underestimating the ghoulishness of Biden.
The Biden administration is significantly a step up when it comes to aggressive foreign policy. There was a clip of Trump telling the Europeans that they have to spend 2% of their GDP into defense and the people in the room were just laughing at him. Biden actually made Europe do it for real.
Trump was also very keen on pushing Merkel’s Germany to build this massive LNG terminal to pivot away from Russian gas - the project eventually went nowhere. Biden actually made Europe depends on American gas and spending billions to build those terminals for real.
Trump started a petty trade war with China in 2018, and was reciprocated upon by the Chinese. Biden started a technological sanction against China that has no proportional response. To understand how seriously China sees this issue, you need to read the science fiction novel Three Body Problem, which is extremely popular among the elite and academic circles in China.
Trump likes to talk big and pretends like he is this genius businessman who can make his adversaries yield, but his “achievements” were literally nothing compared to what Biden had accomplished in just 2 years in office.
I don’t think even Obama would dare to cross this line, and Obama was the one who deleted half of the generational wealth of black community overnight, which as Michael Hudson repeatedly reminded us, made him quite possibly the most racist president in the history of the United States.
My point is that even Obama didn’t dare to step this far, while Biden is picking fight with the entire world. If you look at his entire career, Biden is unequivocally a true believer in neoliberalism, a fanatical ideologue (and in my opinion, a lot more so than Obama).
I don’t think even Obama would dare to cross this line, and Obama was the one who deleted half of the generational wealth of black community overnight, which as Michael Hudson repeatedly reminded us, made him quite possibly the most racist president in the history of the United States.
I don’t think Obama is anywhere close to the most racist president in US history, but that speaks more to the quality of his competition than any lack of racism on his part.
I guess the difference is between someone who actively petitions for segregation to prevent black people from renting/buying houses in your neighborhood, and someone who makes the black community so poor that they can never afford to move into your neighborhood.
Obama has probably done more to prevent the future generations of black families from ever becoming homeowners than the racist Republicans could only dream of. He’s the choice candidate for the “smart” racists.
That’s true, but I still don’t think he’s quite on the level of Andrew “Indian Removal Act” Jackson.
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Obama was the one who deleted half of the generational wealth of black community overnight
Wait, what is this referencing?
How Obama Destroyed Black Wealth by Matt Bruenig and Ryan Cooper
That’s so fucking bleak.
Yeah. Obama is a true monster.
As others have said, much of the personal wealth in America is concentrated in real estate (mortgage debt).
When Obama became president, he could have easily bailed out the 9 million American homeowners (predominantly low income black and Hispanic families), but instead he chose Wall Street, effectively facilitating the largest transfer of wealth from the black community to the private capital in history.
In this sense, Obama has prevented future generations of the black communities from ever becoming homeowners again.
Similar trends are also happening under Biden’s policies today, the so-called “Bidenomics”, where black unemployment has risen much faster than other demographics. These are all austerity measures designed to make poor minorities bear the brunt of the economic impact if only to slow the crumbling of the system itself.
People don’t usually stop being segregationists
Remember when Libs were trying to say the guy who gave Strom Thurmond’s euology wasn’t a racist?
The bank bailout where Wall St got their losses on subprime loans covered, and the largely PoC recipients of NINJA loans got foreclosed.
I think this particular decision is very telling
I joked yesterday about how I’m not getting the simulated liberalism I was promised but like, I remember someone the other day saying it was simulated too well and to please stop and you said on.
Are you just using this as your normal account now?
Yes you recalled correctly. A comrade has kindly asked the simulation to end because it is triggering their blood pressure (probably just a joke), and so, the simulation ended.
Can we also end the overarching simulation while we’re turning these things off?
Sorry, this isn’t actually a simulation. We’re all in hell because we wore polycotton clothing.
Thank you, I thought of making a similar remark about blood pressure, lol
When the
bitsimulation is too good
made him quite possibly the most racist president in the history of the United States
multiple US presidents were literal slavers.
Yeah that’s whack, he could say he’s the most racist US president since Andrew Johnson and that would make more sense
even then I’m not so sure it’s clear cut. the US has been responsible for so much horrifying shit in the 20th century too.
To understand how seriously China sees this issue, you need to read the science fiction novel Three Body Problem, which is extremely popular among the elite and academic circles in China.
could you elaborate on what you mean by this? Like, they’re extremely worried about a large tech gap between the US and China?
Major spoiler for the Three Body Problem
In the novel, the Trisolarians used super advanced alien tech to screw with particle accelerators on Earth and effectively locking out Earth’s scientific progress, to ensure that when the alien invasion fleet arrives some 400 years later, Earth would not be able to invent and build formidable defenses in the meantime.
This plotline was repeatedly raised in Chinese media last year when Biden decided to lock China out of accessing foreign semiconductor technology. A lot of people took the Trisolarian-Earth conflict to be an allegory of a US-China war in the future.
Ok so that is what I was assuming, but it doesn’t quite make sense to me, are they afraid to do tech embargos in return for fear of further retaliation?
Also, would this kind of support my idea that part of the reason they haven’t accelerated their transition to a fully planned economy is that they want to fully build up their self-sufficient semiconductor industry first?
There is no proportional response to semiconductor technology sanction from the Chinese side. You can embargo certain raw materials and components that are necessary for semiconductor fabrication, but nothing much beyond that.
China is not going to return to the “Maoist planned economy” stage, the era of planners has long gone. To understand China’s economic philosophy of the past two decades, you need to understand Justin Lin Yifu’s New Structural Economics, which touts the principles of 后发优势 (latecomer’s advantage), meaning that China will let the advanced economies to invest in high tech R&D and use its latecomer’s advantage for mass fabrication on the industrial side. Interestingly, Lin himself was a protege of Theodore Schultz, the co-founder of Chicago school of neoclassical economics together with Milton Friedman. He was in fact the first Chinese PhD graduate in the Chicago school of economics.
It is a great strategy to build wealth and prosperity for the country where people can benefit from, but it comes with consequences.
It needs to be said that this was a deliberate economic strategy that China chose. In 2005, when Taiwan’s TSMC first broke through the 80nm barrier, China’s SMIC was only 1 year behind. The gap was extremely close. However, the deliberate policy back then was to focus on export-oriented consumer goods, where much of the investments eventually went into, and so their semiconductor R&D lagged behind. They were naive enough to think that the US wouldn’t dare to decouple from them if the US depends so much on their industrial products. They first learned this lesson the hard way back in 2018 when Trump started a trade war, and they are now learning the lesson again with Biden.
In other words, you can easily think of an alternative timeline where, starting from 2008 during the great financial crisis, when demands from Western consumers had slumped, China could have pivoted towards a self-sufficient self-reliant economic strategy and invested heavily in domestic high tech R&D, which would have alleviated their semiconductor problem they’re facing today. However, it turns out that weaning off the US consumer base proved to be too difficult, or they were being too optimistic of their relationship with the US, and so they now have to deal with the economic trouble they’re facing today.
Once again, actions and consequences.
A lot of people took the Trisolarian-Earth conflict to be an allegory of a US-China war in the future.
Incidentally, Obama really liked the Three-Body Problem book.
Agreed. My strongest evidence that Biden is just immensely cruel and an absolute true believer is that he worked as a mountpiece for the Credit Card industry for literal decades and was still, relatively speaking, poor when he became VP. I think his assets with his wife might have been like 2 million, or maybe even 1 million, and I think a lot of that was from Jill’s career. Biden somehow, working for one of the most corrupt sectors of the economy, never managed to make any money off of it in decades of doing their bidding. Only a profoundly weird man or a profoundly stupid man could achieve that.
Probably hundreds of thousands of people dead for the ambitions of a handful of gerontocrat crooks and their cronies.
If you want a really bad thought imagine what the Red Army soldiers from WWII would think finding out that Ukraine and Russia were at war and Banderites had taken control of the government and were leading the charge?
My american internet friends got so mad at me when I said at the beginning of all this that there should be an immediate ceasefire and surrender to stop the fighting and I was called an apologist for Putin and that this was an unprovoked invasion and you have to protect yourself. These people never experienced military action near their homes.
This is really weird. I just read on quora that Russia has almost no tanks left. I’m not joking.
Using a combined arms NATO style attack tactic for the counter offensive when Ukraine basically has no air force was certainly a very smart and good idea with no potential problems. Especially when attacking entrenched and mined Russian positions. Great idea from the NATO military commander failsons
Disgusting waste of lives.
All of this should have fucking ended but Boris Johnson fucked it all. Fuck him and fuck all the liberals that have been spewing bloodthirsty vile shit calling for tens of thousands of lives to be wasted in a fucking meatgrinder for some lines on a map. I do not give a fuck about the Ukrainian state, I do not give a fuck about the Russian state. Lines on a map are not people.
These people deserved better than bloodthirsty assholes.
All sin starts when you treat people as things.
Yeah even the CIA was saying that Ukraine would be defeated in 48 hours, but Boris Johnson was so commited that he decided to go there himself and mess everyone up.
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Don’t worry guys, I hear they’re bringing in some dude called Steiner to start another counter-offensive, everything’s still good 👍
The counter offensive is more than a military maneuver. It’s an idea. Light itself.
POV: you are a Russian minefield
And if we can harness that light to light up a high school gymnasium, to light up a Starbucks, to light up a Walmart, than perhaps we can light up the world.
stalin shouldn’t have stopped at berlin
The red army should have just kept circling the globe putting bougies and nationalists in gulags or to the wall for
years.
That’s it?
THAT’S the counteroffensive?
THAT WAS JUST THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME!
i don’t understand, its been going bad the entire time, why admit it now? its been 18 months and thousands of lives, wtf
They’ll just drum up some other backwards ass excuse to throw more money at neo-nazis in Ukraine. This war is never going to end anytime soon and frankly your average burger is literally a world away and views it as team sports.
NYT is running an article today saying they are making progress https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/12/world/europe/russia-ukraine-war.html so I am not sure about western media changing course.
NYT, famously always on the right side of history
Right or wrong isn’t the point. The point is the tune hasn’t changed.
Lazy posting on my part tbh.
It’s looking like the consensus is what’s changed. WaPo and the Hill have turned on the counteroffensive while NYT continues to beat the drum.
NYT is just lagging behind the pack.
I do think MoA jumped the gun, tbh. There were attacks all across the front today.
According to Proshinsky, many of them are trying to arrange a “mini-Stalingrad” on the positions, forcing them to go into frontal assaults on well-fortified Russian positions.
Its not that I’m surprised at this point when anticommunist propaganda turns out to be projection, it’s more that im still surprised at how often it pops up
I’m not sure if I fully understood your comment, but here’s my response based on how I read it. Let me know if I’m off base.
Stalingrad was one of the worst and most destructive sieges in human history and I assume everyone in the former USSR knows about it. If your own generals are forcing you in to a hopeless frontal assault against a fortified position Stalingrad seems like an apt comparison. I refer to pretty much any well entrenched strong point as Pavlov’s House, for instance. And if I’m reading this right he’s saying his commanding officers are behaving, foolishly, like the Nazis.
Russia is doing human wave attacks to capture Ukrainian asphalt plants. Of course they’re just going to ruin them. They have no idea how to use this foreign material.
Holy shit that is a call back to an earlier episode.
Never forget
