Coffeesforclosers

Yeah...why do you think that is? The other thing is why the hell is 1st Guards Tank Army deployed near Kharkiv, rather than leading the drive on Kyiv or Mariupol? It's supposed to be Russia's A Team in terms of gear, training, and quality of leadership. But it's doing a fixing/screening mission against Ukraine's best units instead of trying to win the war?

Indeed! The French equivalent of a panzer division, the Division Legere Mechanique (DLM) actually got to fight the Panzer divisions head on in Belgium and stopped them cold... But they couldn't redeploy to Sedan/Meuse fast enough to seal off the German breakthrough, or coordinate counter attacks to cut off German spearheads. Then the French leadership completely imploded into backstabbing and defeatism and that was that. Sorta the opposite of Ukraine so far. *I'm going to be typing "so far" a lot, because I can't see into the future.

List of Russia's Vehicle losses with photo/video evidence for each vehicle As of today, Russia has lost 656 tanks, trucks, APCs/IFVs, self propelled artillery pieces, and anti-aircraft vehicles. That's destroyed, damaged, abandoned and captured. This site has Ukrainian losses as well. If he's right, Ukraine could replace it's battlefield losses with captured Russian gear AND equip new units with the leftovers. Now for the grain of salt. The countryside isn't exactly swarming with Ukrainian civilians looking for pictures of their own destroyed stuff. But if we had lost 656 vehicles and admitted to 498 KIA and 1500+ wounded in 1 week of Iraq, well no one would believe our casualty figure, and conclude we were getting our asses kicked so far. There's really no basis for comparing Russia and Ukraine with the US and Iraq. Our invasion of Iraq is a model of military planning compared to what Russia is trying right now. Which is sad in itself.

Pedro L. Gonzalez? He's got a LinkedIn. He's worked for a Who's Who of news channels, magazines, think tanks and activist groups, all aligned with the same causes and the same ideology. Currently he works for The Charlemagne Institute. Here's their Mission Statement, which he has to align with to work there. Right now it looks like he's trying very hard to be the conservative clone of AOC. You'll find pretty quickly that most of the tweets quote in Triple P, and most of the tweeters who tweet them, are all chips off the same block. Except for Victor Davis Hanson, he's an actual reputable historian with a side game in pot-banging on the internet.

Who really cares if Farwell was quietly pushed out or fell on his sword. He's not a Bill anymore. Put me firmly in the "sometimes folks at work don't get along" camp.

If Tre is ok with it, there's not much reason for us to stay pissed at him.

The only thing notable about this post is a dime-a-dozen alt-right troll like Jack Posobiec retweeting a story from an organization that is a registered lobbying group for Israel. If there is a tidal wave of Pentagon officials attesting to the sort of delusion the author claims is rife, he could quote some. He doesn't. Instead, he rattles off a lot of crap against an assertion he can't prove. What a garbage take.

Neat thread. Russian nationalists think they are invincible, that nothing actually bad will happen, and this is the start of a new golden age. When someone takes a rosy view of a situation, that's alright. When their view of a complex issue is "my side will get everything it wants and win forever"...yeah. Russia thought the exact same thing when it entered WWI.

Why do they need special rules anyway? Just keep playing extra quarters until somebody is ahead and the clock shows all 0s.

The Russians invaded thinking Ukraine would throw flowers and women on their tanks while they drove to Kyiv, shot Zelensky, and installed some stooges. They have no plan for an occupation, they have no plan for an insurgency. They have a stock market they don't dare open, and a currency that's worthless. Unless they plan on using surface to surface missiles, thermobaric rocket launchers, and waves of tanks to fight a COIN operation, they'll have to retool a substantial portion of their army away from a laser focused mission of fighting NATO conventionally. Or they could just start slaughtering their Slavic, orthodox christian brothers until they realizing how much Ukraine missed Russian domination.

Watching Russia get smoked in the propaganda war...well it's a joy. The image of the Russian Army has gone from an invincible wall of tanks and missile launchers, to crying 19 year olds in baggy camies standing next tanks with no gas. I feel awful for those poor kids. Especially when Putin starts rolling out the heavy artillery on Ukrainian cities, and the locals stop seeing boys in uniforms and start seeing Russian invaders on their way to blow up apartment blocks.

https://www.conservapedia.com/Jack_Posobiec I looked at his Conservapedia page as well if you wanted to know. This is what it says about him: "Jack Posobiec is an American journalist who reports for One America News Network. Posobiec is a veteran intelligence official and Mandarin linguist. He is the author of Citizens For Trump and 4D Warfare. Posobiec is Catholic and a victim of liberal censorship." I went to Wiki because the folks who are on his side have barely anything to say about him, and provided no links to sources or any other information. This guy is a dime-a-dozen Trump fan. He's the red-state version of a limousine liberal, but he gets quoted over and over again in this thread like he's somebody to listen to.

So what? Does Trump want a participation trophy? I'll buy him one that says "I couldn't convince a country to defend itself, but I tried really hard!" I looked at Posobiec's Wiki page. He thought Star Wars: Rogue 1 was secretly anti-trump propaganda, and he was a Lt in the Navy that had his security clearance revoked. He's a tool, quote a better person, they're real easy to find.

Who is Jack Posobiec, and why should anybody care what he thinks.

Right, we were watching the battle, and probably feeding the Ukrainians intelligence. Russia should feel free to disagree with the action if they want, and we've got a circular file ready for the their complaints. Why are we playing polling games? There's been 1 poll out that was conducted entirely since the invasion started, by Morning Consult. Biden's scoring a mediocre-yet-positive 48-43 approval on handling the situation. But to paraphrase Walter from The Big Lebowski, Joe Biden and Donald Trump are not the issues here.

Facepalm worthy, even if his heart's in the right place.

Wow, ok. So in the last 48 hours, all opposition to kicking Russia out of SWIFT has collapsed, and Germany has gone from changing it's Facebook profile picture to a Ukrainian flag and ***** off to get high, to actually sending meaningful aid* to Ukraine. *Where meaningful aid means weapons and ammunition. Preach John Adams.

Your guess is as good as mine! I don't know how many more times NATO could have said NATO isn't going to commit troops, but I don't expect the Russians trust us much either, because Putin is nuts and thinks all of Europe are our puppets.

Going with the former. Zelensky is now an international hero, France and Germany look like fools, and Europe is taking action aligned with the policies of the United States. Thats...exactly the opposite of what Putin was going for. Totally agree that there's a ton of propaganda spinning around out there. I'm boiling it down to the very basics. Those are that the Russians want to defeat Ukraine, and haven't, and that means taking Kyiv, and they haven't done that either. Everything else I'll leave to the historians 20 years from now.

The big question is I think is why Russia didn't hit Ukraine with everything they had, all at once. They still tried to end the war in 48 hours, but using only a fifth to a quarter of their available forces. Why commit so little of your available combat power to THE critical operation of the war? And if you only think you need 30-40,000 troops, why mobilize almost 200,000? A professional military should be smarter than this. It's like if Manny Pacquiao wanted to fight me, trained for a year to fight me, but Manny Pacquiao decided to tie one hand behind his back and hop on one leg just because.

No joke, Marco Rubio's Twitter is a gold mine. He's posting vetted information from his Senate intelligence briefings. Anyway, he said Putin's plan was to win the war in 48 hours by seizing Kyiv and all Ukraine's leaders. They'd be dealt with in a suitably Russian way, and replaced with a puppet government of Russian backed Ukrainian traitors. Then the Russian army would leave because they've got more operations planned.

https://twitter.com/marcorubio/status/1497348285333389313?s=20&t=PaoDmuwzfof-H5jiY9HToQ Marco Rubio, managing to dunk on the Russians and not take pot shots at other Americans. At the same time even!

One apparently with the VDV (Russian Paratroopers) still on board. Kinda hard to hide your losses when there's an empty barracks in Pskov where an infantry company used to be.

As culpable as he is, there's really no more point in bashing Trump for what he did in office. That can't be changed. That he can't got a week with smiling like a doughnut over Putin, yeah, that's just him inviting deserved criticism. But we live in a new world now. Let's quit ***** kneecapping each other over Red v Blue BS and figure out how to win.

I hope it all blows up in their face of course. I don't think a single government anywhere took this offer seriously. Meanwhile, Ukraine has declared Martial Law, instituted compulsory service, and forbidden all men aged 18-60 from traveling abroad. Granted they should have done this months ago. I've also heard that Zelensky didn't think Russia was seriously going to invade until about 4 days ago. Anybody else have a good source on that?