Russia’s success is partly a result of a shifting recruiting message, as it now relentlessly tells would-be soldiers that the war in Ukraine is really a fight against NATO, U.S. officials said. Russian bonuses have also drastically increased. By combining these strategies, Mr. Putin may not need to order a politically unpopular broad draft, U.S. military and intelligence officials say.
dirty tricks like fairly paying your soldiers
Ukraine also drone striked Chechenya lately, i bet this will really discourage Chechens who were per capita most numerous volunteers to that war.
Ukraine also drone striked Chechenya lately
Not really sure of the politics here but it seems they did this trying to play off the fact that Russia has been trying to subjugate Chechnya for the past century, and the current Chechen head Ramzan Kadyrov is a pro-Putin puppet that some Chechens hate. Therefore, by striking a “special forces training center” run by Kadyrov, I’d imagine they’d want to signal support to his detractors and encourage them to continue volunteering in Ukraine to fight against Russia.
Despite this it was indeed a very stupid move because now anyone who is patriotic and doesn’t hate Kadyrov would be fucking pissed at this long range attack on their homeland and will probably enlist at greater numbers (the “special forces training center” apparently provided civilians with military skills too).
It is as if your only source on Chechenya was a wiki article about it. How nice of you to call unprecedented era of people and advancement during USSR as part of “Russian Subjugation”. Origins of “independent” Chechenya is a coup against its pro-soviet leadership (Checheno-Ingush ASSR under their leader Doku Zavgayev supported the opposition against Yeltsin and the illegal dissolution of USSR). Coup was armed and violent, with murders of communists. New regime was also dumb as hell and do stupid things just for the sake of hating Russia (like adopting latin alphabet). It also wasn’t popular, Ingushetia seceded from them and joined the RF, there were also many attempts to depose them, including from their own parliment (govt was in reality just a prowestern military clique). I wouldn’t be surprised at all if US immediately started their good old “muslim extremist terrorism” routine (also how many of Chechens later surfaced as members of various pro-US terrorist groups), help by the incredibly indolent actions of Yeltsin, like assassination fo Dudayev which paved the way for really evil fuckers to take the power there.
Even if you look at the history of last century there, Chechens were always divided people. October Revolution, WW2, destruction of USSR, Chechen Wars, current war. And sure as hell the current state of Chechenya is far removed from the worst possible option. Calling Kadyrov “pro-Putin puppet that some Chechens hate” also seems straight up from stormfrontpedia, guy is way more legal than any Chechen leader since Zavgayev and also seems to have more public support than any of them.
This entire war was a useless bullshit excuse for NATO countries and arms dealers to dump their military surplus and profit off of the needless slaughter of tens of thousands of people on both sides using Ukranian civilians to fight a proxy war with Putin. This utter waste of life would never have happened if the west didn’t interfere in Ukrainian politics in the early 2010s, or allowed peace talks to occur unobstructed between Russia and Ukraine in the early days of the war. Total deaths on both sides now is estimated to be 1 million people and a lot of Ukraine has been destroyed. How fucked is this.
I wonder how much of this is building to a “welp, no point sending military aid to Ukraine anymore, let’s redirect it all to Israel” propaganda push.
At what point was this a stalemate? The eventual outcome was obvious about 2 weeks in. I remember thinking that surely Russia’s capacity to actually do the production needed for this war was more important than American financial dominance, but I kept hearing otherwise from all of the news. I was shocked to see that I was clearly right and I was being lied to, again.
This happens to me all of the time. It’s like when the news kept telling me that any day now the ghettos of Caracas would rise up and demand the privatization of Venezuela’s oil fields. I kept thinking it didn’t make any sense and I must be missing something. Turns out I was right again.
Stalemate is when one side kidnaps people off the street to die within a month, while the other side uses one year renewable contracts.
