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In this mornings episode of Ukrainians lie about absolutely everything. The corpses of 1500 Russian soldiers are claimed to be at the morgue in Dnipro. The BBC is almost exclusively relying on the map from ISW as far as Russian troop presence/movement, let’s take a look.
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Red circle is where Dnipro is, around 50 miles beyond the claimed Russian front line. In their infinite generosity, are the Ukrainians using their very finite resources to drive around the countryside collecting dead Russians? I swear these retards heard about the forthcoming global fertilizer shortage and decided they would make bullshit their new #1 export.
Eh. It's not all that implausible. Dead bodies lying around rotting is a health hazard, so Ukraine's gonna wanna clean those up as soon as possible. Particularly while the weather is still getting cool enough that not much rot has started. If they're going around collecting their own dead and civilian dead, they might as well collect Russian dead while they're at it. Particularly the Russian dead that's in the same area as their own dead. Since ideally Russia would be taking and burying its own dead, it makes sense to ship them to a central location for identification, reducing costs of refrigeration as the weather warms, etc. It'd also be worthwhile to do this instead of dumping them in mass graves. If Russia accepts the dead and returns them home, they have to admit to more casualties than they wanted to admit to. While more people inside of Russia get to see firsthand the soldiers who've died for Putin's ambitions. Even if Russia keeps refusing the accept the dead, Ukraine can still show to the world they've killed that many Russians, while making Russia look like the asshole for refusing to bury its dead.
Plus given the number of Russian soldiers that Ukraine claims to have killed, and the number of death's Russia's admitted to(and presumably brought a body home to bury), that speaks to a lot of dead Russians still lying around Ukraine somewhere.
Was this posted here before or linked to before? Because I want to say I skimmed it before and dismissed it as laughable. But if you're fishing for comments on it, sure I've got some time to kill.
Just at the start, Russia's demands for peace #1 and #3 are absurd on their face. For #1, when a country diverts a resource to one of its regions for better economic development in the area, and you invade and conquer that area, of course that country is going to cease diverting that resource to the region now held by a hostile power. Enough water for large scale commercial farming is no different from a crude oil pipeline in this regard. If you want to keep the resource flowing, you need to make a deal with them. Which since you're an invader with whom hostilities technically still haven't ended, they're going to have little reason to do so, and as the owner of the resource are free to set a price of "fuck off and return our land" to get it flowing again. For #3, Russia's demanding "neutrality" when they have a recent history of invading nearby countries they see as "theirs", rhetoric about how Ukraine shouldn't exist as a separate country, and has in fact invaded Ukraine and taken territory from them. Under such circumstances a demand of a "neutrality" that would satisfy Russia is tantamount to a demand that Ukraine disarm, renounce its potential allies, and accept the invasion that Russia obviously intends to do. So of course its rejected. #2 is a bit of a thornier issue, but given even cursory research says the continued shooting at Donbas has involved both sides shooting at each other, its dubious that anything Russia wanted would actually fix the situation
The next segment is a bunch of blaming the US for things that are Ukraine acting in its own interests and what hand the US had in it would do nothing if it didn't have sufficient support in Ukraine. Also rather skips over Putin's role in the lead up to all this with his attempts to prevent Ukraine from strengthening relations with Europe directly leading to the 2014 ouster of his preferred leader, and his invasion of Crimea and later support of the eastern rebels directly resulting in the drawn out tensions that lead up to the current war.
Then the talk about China's unimpressive. They're papering over an incredible amount of their own economic cracks with their strong exports and cheap factory labor. With a government that's still less trustworthy than America's. People will buy into it, but they aren't going to be in a rush to wholesale abandon the US in favor of China or India. Then there's the ridiculous suggestion that China will be "forced to act as Russia did" "when Taiwan declares independence". Taiwan ain't declaring independence any time soon. China made it clear decades ago that was a "fuck diplomatic solutions, time for military solutions" line of theirs, and the vast majority of Taiwan has little interest in a formal independence as they're happy to maintain the status quo.
But back the Russia where was get to the real laughable stuff. The US shocked that Russia's winning a war against an army three times its size? What the hell has he been looking at? Ukraine's ready army was nowhere near three times the size of Russia's when the invasion began, and the US was surprised that Ukraine held off the blitzkrieg attempt. And saying they're "winning" is a rather generous interpretation. Russia's doing badly enough that their entire northern front basically collapsed to the point they were forced to withdraw because they couldn't unfuck it.
Russia will have achieved its objectives, withdraw and invite the UN in to maintain peace? LMAO. As soon as Russia "withdraws" then the same thing that happened in the north will happen. Within days Ukraine will move in, secure the territory that Russia withdrew from, and they'll be back to square one - including Ukraine shutting off the water to Crimea - with nothing accomplished except a lot of pointless death and destruction. UN to maintain peace? The UN will be happy to disregard any referendums that took place under the auspices of Russian occupation and the peacekeepers - who'll likely be 9 out of 10 from NATO countries" will be happy to secure the territory that Russia captured so that it can be properly restored to Ukraine. Including again cutting the water to Crimea. Perhaps he means that Russia will withdraw only from the areas it doesn't want to hang onto? Well good luck with that, In that scenario the UN won't send peacekeepers, NATO will happily continue to back Ukraine, and the war will continue as Ukraine attempts to reclaim their territory.
Really he doesn't seem to get that this war will end only when both Russia and Ukraine are unwilling to continue to fight. The time where Russia could "achieve its objectives and withdraw" ended when Russia failed to take Kiev at the opening and the fighting turned into a real war. People are outraged enough at Russia that Ukraine will have backing until everything that Russia's accomplished in this war is void. If Ukraine is "neutral" when the dust settles it won't mean they're no threat to Russia. It'll mean that they're theoretically neutral, but in practice arming themselves to the teeth with modern equipment and functionally very little different from being part of NATO.
The further talk of financial stuff is more pie and the sky stuff. As he says, some of those things were going to happen eventually, but the current situation hasn't spend them up nearly as much as he thinks. Nor is the likely result of them the US influence being utterly destroyed. Rather the global financial system will have increased redundancy, and the US will have a slightly smaller slice of the pie. And then of course more fantasies about China and Taiwan when China's plans for improving its military is decades long and Taiwan has no reason to rock the boat.
All and all it's borderline fantasy.
