War Invasion of Ukraine News Megathread - Thread is only for articles and discussion of articles, general discussion thread is still in Happenings.

President Joe Biden on Tuesday said that the United States will impose sanctions “far beyond” the ones that the United States imposed in 2014 following the annexation of the Crimean peninsula.

“This is the beginning of a Russian invasion of Ukraine,” Biden said in a White House speech, signaling a shift in his administration’s position. “We will continue to escalate sanctions if Russia escalates,” he added.

Russian elites and their family members will also soon face sanctions, Biden said, adding that “Russia will pay an even steeper price” if Moscow decides to push forward into Ukraine. Two Russian banks and Russian sovereign debt will also be sanctioned, he said.

Also in his speech, Biden said he would send more U.S. troops to the Baltic states as a defensive measure to strengthen NATO’s position in the area.

Russia shares a border with Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.

A day earlier, Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered troops to go into the separatist Donetsk and Lugansk regions in eastern Ukraine after a lengthy speech in which he recognized the two regions’ independence.

Western powers decried the move and began to slap sanctions on certain Russian individuals, while Germany announced it would halt plans to go ahead with the Russia-to-Germany Nord Stream 2 pipeline.

At home, Biden is facing bipartisan pressure to take more extensive actions against Russia following Putin’s decision. However, a recent poll showed that a majority of Americans believe that sending troops to Ukraine is a “bad idea,” and a slim minority believes it’s a good one.

All 27 European Union countries unanimously agreed on an initial list of sanctions targeting Russian authorities, said French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian, and EU foreign affairs head Josep Borell claimed the package “will hurt Russia … a lot.”

Earlier Tuesday, Borell asserted that Russian troops have already entered the Donbas region, which comprises Donetsk and Lugansk, which are under the control of pro-Russia groups since 2014.

And on Tuesday, the Russian Parliament approved a Putin-back plan to use military force outside of Russia’s borders as Putin further said that Russia confirmed it would recognize the expanded borders of Lugansk and Donetsk.

“We recognized the states,” the Russian president said. “That means we recognized all of their fundamental documents, including the constitution, where it is written that their [borders] are the territories at the time the two regions were part of Ukraine.”

Speaking to reporters on Tuesday, Putin said that Ukraine is “not interested in peaceful solutions” and that “every day, they are amassing troops in the Donbas.”

Meanwhile, Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky on Tuesday morning again downplayed the prospect of a Russian invasion and proclaimed: “There will be no war.”

“There will not be an all-out war against Ukraine, and there will not be a broad escalation from Russia. If there is, then we will put Ukraine on a war footing,” he said in a televised address.

The White House began to signal that they would shift their own position on whether it’s the start of an invasion.

“We think this is, yes, the beginning of an invasion, Russia’s latest invasion into Ukraine,” said Jon Finer, the White House deputy national security adviser in public remarks. “An invasion is an invasion and that is what is underway.”

For weeks, Western governments have been claiming Moscow would invade its neighbor after Russia gathered some 150,000 troops along the countries’ borders. They alleged that the Kremlin would attempt to come up with a pretext to attack, while some officials on Monday said Putin’s speech recognizing the two regions was just that.

But Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told reporters Tuesday that Russia’s “latest invasion” of Ukraine is threatening stability in the region, but he asserted that Putin can “still avoid a full blown, tragic war of choice.”

Article

 

[Secret Asshole]

So I like many thought Russia would roll Ukraine and this would be over but holy shit was I (and most of the world) wrong. The Russians are taking it in the ass, Jesus. They're running out of shit and their logistics are still garbage, while Ukraine is constantly getting resupplied by the West.

I've got no love for the Ukranian government, NATO, Zelinsky, nor the Russian government or Putin, but the people of Ukraine seriously should pat themselves on the back for basically embarrassing a former superpower.

 

[No. 7 cat]

source (well, dunno, we'll see).

 

[MarvinTheParanoidAndroid]

The Russians are taking it in the ass, Jesus.

Yes, but what does that have to do with losing the war?

Oh, you were being figurative.

 

[DumbDude42]

What the fuck is up with the paranoia?

some background on this:

New Soviet man - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_Sovieticus

According to Leszek Kolakowski, the Short course history of the CPSU(b) played a crucial role in forming the key social and mental features of the Homo Sovieticus as a "textbook of false memory and double thinking". Over the years, Soviet people were forced to continuously repeat and accept constantly changing editions of the Short course, each containing a slightly different version of the past events. This inevitably led to forming "a new Soviet man: ideological schizophrenic, honest liar, person always ready for constant and voluntary mental self-mutilations".[8]

tl;dr the soviet union spent the better part of the 20th century inflicting heavy handed social engineering on its population, thoroughly fucking them up in the process. the ruling and political classes were exposed to it even more than random civilians, so they got fucked up even harder. that's how the country ended up with people like schizo dugin and monke putin in charge.

 

[KiwiFuzz]

I know there's a duty to render assistance, but I'm sure all the cargo vessels that the Russians have been shooting at for the last 6 weeks have better shit to do right now.

 

[дядя Боря]

Ukraine, just two days ago, presented a stamp with the ship (cruiser Moscow) ...


all I am saying, may they try presenting a postage stamp with Vlad ... you never know

 

[дядя Боря]

holy shit this guy published a timely article:

https://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/why-russias-navy-ukraine-war-doomed-or-irrelevant

I screenshotted it just so you don't accuse me of lying, literally like an hour or two before actual attack.

Neptune's range extends all the way to Sevastopol (180mi)

Ukraine is about to get (or maybe now just started receiving) Western anti-ship missiles and may even have its own advanced anti-ship missiles almost ready for deployment. A small number of such missiles could wipe out all of Russia’s big surface warships near Ukraine in the Black Sea and Sea of Azov or push Russian ships out of range and too far away to be able to meaningfully support Russia’s war effort. This missile technology in the hands of Ukraine’s competent and adaptive fighters will be a game-changer much like Javelin and other anti-tank missiles have been for Ukraine against Russian armor thus far in Putin’s failing war.

fucking psychic this guy is

As the above map shows and implies, Ukraine would have excellent coverage with many of these systems. For most of these systems, many, perhaps even all, of Russia’s twenty remaining large warships in the region—including Russia’s most powerful naval ship, the Slava class cruiser Moskva—are well within striking range from Ukrainian-controlled territory. Even if Ukraine will receive only Harpoons, though they have much smaller range than the Neptunes, they should effectively prevent any Russian naval assaults if the Russians are smart (but they are so often not
). After such Harpoons would arrive, they would still secure Ukrainian coastline and push Russian naval operating areas far from Ukrainian-controlled coastal territory (unless Russia is stupid and keeps its ships within range, inviting their destruction) all while, presumably, the Neptune rollout, training, and deployment finishes, possibly in just a few weeks if the invasion has not derailed Ukraine’s timetable.


At this crucial moment, when Russia is desperate to turn the tide in the face of its massive failures, the soon-to-arrive unspecified anti-ship missiles have effectively killed any realistic Russian hope of a successful naval assault on Odesa or elsewhere on the Crimea-to-Moldova corridor (Russia has illegally stationed some military forces

in another breakaway region, Transnistria in Moldova). These missiles will either prevent any assault from happening or virtually doom any would-be assault. This new round of aid with these anti-ship missiles has, thus, basically closed the gap between the Russians collapsing on three fronts and the Neptunes’ presumed deployment.


If (and hopefully when) Neptunes can be eventually deployed, a large portion of the entire Black Sea, including most of Russian-occupied Crimea—where many of Russia’s naval vessels are based and resupplied

—as well as the Sea of Azov, would be vulnerable. And if Ukraine is able to push Russian forces in the south back closer to Crimea, even missiles with shorter range could threaten Russia’s ability to dock its ships and the entirety of Crimea more of the Black Sea could be vulnerable.


Soon, Russia’s navy will almost certainly have to turn tail and run to the southern Black Sea, unable to offer meaningful support in the ground war, or even move to port back in Russia proper (as in, the non-illegally occupied/annexed parts of Ukraine) to avoid near-total destruction. If there will be any problems or delays deploying the Neptunes, NATO should ensure longer-range anti-ship missiles, including some of the Norwegian NSMs, are provided to Ukraine so they can either destroy Russia’s navy or render it irrelevant, putting more Russian ships under range or pushing them even further back than would be the case with just, say, Harpoon missiles.


We should not expect details of these upcoming transfers to be broadcast in detail publicly before they happen, as, ideally, NATO would get Ukraine these missiles quietly, so Russian naval vessels will still be well within range and not expecting their use. With a few coordinated deployments, and with open-source intelligence (OSINT), U.S. & other NATO satellite and other intelligence aiding the Ukrainians, most, perhaps all of Russia’s twenty remaining large surface vessels could be targeted and heavily damaged or destroyed.


I am not an expert on these missiles, whether one, two, or three missiles would be enough to knock out a larger ship, but that is only twenty, forty, or sixty or so missiles to neutralize all major surface vessels of the Russian Navy. The first volley could be fired in a few minutes and hit its targets in not much longer than that, and it is also extremely unlikely these missiles, given their sea-skimming technology and Russian capabilities, can be countered, and even double-insurance to effectively damage and destroy all of the Russian Navy’s heavy-hitter surface-vessels operating near Ukraine, is, again, just sixty missiles. Furthermore, only just arming Ukraine with the shortest-range missiles would make any naval assault suicidal for Russia, any competent use ensuring many or all of the amphibious landing ships would be sunk before reaching land and severe damage or destruction for any other major ships that would venture close to support if Russia would not be smart enough to withdraw its vulnerable ships far away from Ukraine, or, as stated, would ensure such assaults do not take place if Russia is behaving less stupidly than it has been for this entire war.





A True Game-Changer: “Bye-Bye Russian Navy!“


These anti-ship missiles will either annihilate the Russian Navy in the Black Sea or push it far away to near-irrelevance (other than its ability to affect commercial shipping

). This will absolutely humiliate Putin and the Russians, crush Russian morale, severely hamper the entirety of the logistical situation for the Russians as well as overall Russian efforts in southern Ukraine and on its coast, allow far more supplies to reach Ukraine’s people and military far more easily, perhaps destroy any hope of building a land bridge for Russia to Crimea (let alone one to Moldova), and also severely hamper Russia’s efforts to secure the Donbas. It could even help precipitate the collapse of the entire Russian war effort and perhaps even mutiny and revolt in the Russian military
.


If you scoff at such an idea, consider the last time Russia suffered such a humiliating naval defeat, in the 1904-1905 Russo-Japanese war,

that defeat precipitated massive loss of prestige, unrest, military revolt, and revolution in 1905 and was a major nail in the coffin of Tsarist Russia; among the units that mutinied was the crew of the battleship Potemkin, stationed at—of all places—Odesa, an event immortalized in Sergei Eisenstein’s 1925 film.

 

[Stoneheart]

Yes, but what does that have to do with losing the war?

Azoov running wild for a while will only mean that russia will be mor inclined to take off the kids glowes and go full grozny.

 

[East_Clintwood]

If true, the loss of the Moskva is huge. It is the largest surface combatant in the Black Sea. The Slava-class carry an absolutely insane amount of Anti-Ship Missiles. I have a friend who got a chance to tour this ship actually, and he mentioned it had some issues with its CIWS systems, but that was a decade ago. He wasn’t too impressed.

It's genuinely hard to quantify how much of a fuck up losing the cruiser is. Aside from it's AShM loadout it's also theoretically their largest and most capable air defense platform in the fleet. In fact as far as I can tell it's the only class, other than their Battlecruisers, which carry long range SAMs, everything else appears to be medium to short range.
Moreover it's literally irreplaceable as, like a lot of the bigger Soviet era ships, it was built in Ukrainian shipyards (the recapture of which i'm sure has no bearing on Putin's desire to denazify Ukraine). Despite perennial talk of building their own nuclear carriers, or building more Kirovs, the fact is since the fall of the USSR the Russian Navy hasn't managed to build anything bigger than a fucking frigate, which is ~1/3 - 1/4 the size of a Slava, with a corresponding reduction in both firepower and survivability.

CONFIRMED. SCRATCH ONE CRUISER!

"Ammunition detonated" well I mean he's technically correct, he just never said it was Russian ammunition doing the detonating

I would say this is partially true, someone noted that it was assumed 4-6 Harpoons would be required to knock this thing out. The Ukrainians are claiming to have achieved it with only two Neptune's. Obviously, they're not the same, but hitting the ammunition stores would explain why they did so much damage with so few missiles.

Aside from a lucky hit on ammo storage I'd be willing to bet, given what we've seen of the state of the rest of their forces, that the hit was exacerbated by shitty maintenence and safety procedures by the Russians.

Honestly everytime I think the Russians can't fuck up even more, they continue to surprise me. It takes a truly special effort to be losing the naval war against a country which doesn't have a fucking navy.

 

[Techpriest]

Azoov running wild for a while will only mean that russia will be mor inclined to take off the kids glowes and go full grozny.

They've already been going gloves off you fucking idiot.

Also, while this has for sure denied us Dollar Store D-Day, we did get the Bargain Bin Belgrano

 

[Stoneheart]

They've already been going gloves off you fucking idiot.

Ohh sweet summer child, you cant imagine the shittons of explosions modern weapons can produce.
the Russians only used some of their toys on mariupol, mostly because our azov brothers have been using soviet bunkers.
the russians have enough thermo baric artillery to fuck up all of europe, they can burn Kevin down to the ground if they want.
right now the russians only target our brothers n arms and other units of the Ukikian army in the east, they can turn that onto cities if they want...

 

[Techpriest]

Ohh sweet summer child, you cant imagine the shittons of explosions modern weapons can produce.
the Russians only used some of their toys on mariupol, mostly because our azov brothers have been using soviet bunkers.
the russians have enough thermo baric artillery to fuck up all of europe, they can burn Kevin down to the ground if they want.
right now the russians only target our brothers n arms and other units of the Ukikian army in the east, they can turn that onto cities if they want...

This is some real cope here, fresh and hot.

 

[RodgerDodger]

Russian MOD confirms damage to the Project 1164 "Moskva" cruiser.

I can't get Google translate to work on that shitty website, but it appears they are claiming that an ammunition explosion occurred on the ship causing serious damage. They have not confirmed what caused it in the first place.

I would say this is partially true, someone noted that it was assumed 4-6 Harpoons would be required to knock this thing out. The Ukrainians are claiming to have achieved it with only two Neptune's. Obviously, they're not the same, but hitting the ammunition stores would explain why they did so much damage with so few missiles.

Overall, this is close to fully confirmed. Perhaps Ukraine got out ahead of the story to make it look like their doing when it was really Russia incompetence... But I doubt it.

Russia getting clowned on.

Have you looked at a picture of the Moskva? In true Soviet fashion they line the sides of the ship with largely unprotected missiles. Anything that hits it is going to cause an ammunition explosion.

 

[Stoneheart]

This is some real cope here, fresh and hot.

You mean realistic? eussia has giant amount of old artillery they could use to flatten Kevin, but for now they arent.
also im not a russian shill, i just want them to make quick peace so asovtake over and kill all the kikes in ukraine for another Dolchstoß...

 

[MG-34]

They've already been going gloves off you fucking idiot.

Also, while this has for sure denied us Dollar Store D-Day, we did get the Bargain Bin Belgrano

Bargin bin Belgrano? This is Platinum Limited pre-order edition Belgrano. This loss is way worse than some WW2 era surplus. Theres also a rumor on /pol/ there was an Admiral on board (which seems plasuable as it was a flag ship). If I'm not mistaken this is the biggest warship lost since WW2 by tonnage and importance.

Edit: it is the biggest warship sunk in combat since WW2

 

[DumbDude42]

You mean realistic? eussia has giant amount of old artillery they could use to flatten Kevin, but for now they arent.

i think they don't have the industrial capacity to mass produce the amount of shells for their artillery guns and rockets for their grads such an approach would require, nor the logistics capacity to transport that ammo to the front in time

 

[Snekposter]

https://www.yahoo.com/news/ukraine-war-pushes-germans-change-185920084.html

BERLIN — Chancellor Olaf Scholz surprised the world, and his own country, when he responded to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine with a 100 billion euro ($108 billion) plan to arm Germany, send weapons to Ukraine and end his nation’s deep dependence on Russian energy.

It was Germany’s biggest foreign policy shift since the Cold War, what Scholz called a “Zeitenwende” — an epochal change — that won applause for his leadership at home and abroad.

But six weeks later, the applause has largely ceased. Even as images of atrocities emerge from Ukraine since the invasion by President Vladimir Putin of Russia, Scholz has ruled out an immediate oil and gas embargo, saying it would be too costly. He is dragging his feet on sending 100 armored vehicles to Ukraine, saying that Germany must not “rush ahead.” There are new debates in the ruling coalition about just how to go forward with the massive task Scholz has laid out, let alone how fast.

Already doubts are building as to the German government’s commitment to its own radical plans. “Zeitenwende is real, but the country is the same,” said Thomas Bagger, a senior German diplomat who will be the next ambassador to Poland. “Not everyone likes it.”

The changes Scholz announced go far deeper than his commitment to spend 2% of gross domestic product on the military — some 70 billion euros ($76 billion) a year, compared with France’s 41 billion euros ($44 billion).

They go to the heart of Germany’s postwar identity as a peaceful exporting nation — and to the heart of a business model that has enriched Germany and made it Europe’s largest and most powerful economy.


Now Germans are being asked “to rethink everything — our approach to doing business, to energy policy, to defense and to Russia,” said Claudia Major, a defense expert at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs. “We need a mindset change. We need to recognize that this is about us — that power politics are back and Germany must play a role.”

But she added, “Once again Germany is not leading. It is being dragged.”

Truly reorienting Germans for a new world where security has its real costs — not only in terms potentially of lost lives, but also in lost trade, higher energy prices, slimmer profits and lower economic growth — will be a wrenching endeavor that will take time, even a generation, and more than an afternoon’s policy pronouncement.

That realization is dawning, for Germans and their frustrated European partners.

“I don’t understand how anyone in Germany can sleep at night after seeing horrors like this without doing anything about it,” said Andriy Melnyk, Ukraine’s outspoken ambassador in Berlin, referring to the atrocities in Ukraine. “What does it take for Germany to act?”

Even Annalena Baerbock, the self-assured Green foreign minister, expressed concerns that Zeitenwende may be more temporary than fundamental. She said she worried that the consensus was fragile, that Germans who favor close ties to Russia were silent now but had not changed their views.

“You can feel this,” she said. “They know they have to do it right now with regard to sanctions, energy independence and weapons deliveries, also with regard to how we treat Russia. But actually, they don’t like it.”

Since Scholz put forth his Zeitenwende before a special session of the parliament Feb. 27, multiple cracks in Germany’s commitment to change have already begun to appear.

German celebrities made headlines with an appeal to the government against rearmament and the “180-degree change in German foreign policy” that has so far been signed by 45,000 people. Green lawmakers have lobbied to spend only part of the 100 billion euro ($108 billion) special fund on the military, citing other needs like “human security” and climate change. Labor unions and industry bosses are warning of catastrophic damage to the economy and an immediate recession if Russian gas stops flowing.

As the CEO of German chemicals giant BASF, Martin Brudermüller, put it last week: “Cheap Russian energy has been the basis of our industry’s competitiveness.”

It has in fact been the basis of the German economy. Now that German businesses are facing the possibility of being asked to do without it, resistance is quietly mounting. Government ministers say they are being asked discreetly by business leaders when things will “go back to normal” — that is, when they can return to business as usual.

Ever since the fall of the Berlin Wall and German reunification, business as usual has largely meant “change through trade” — the conviction that economic interdependency would alter authoritarian governments like Russia and China for the better and help keep the peace. Prosperity and democracy, the thinking went, go hand in hand.

The link to Russia is particularly complicated by a long and complex history of hot and cold war, including guilt over the millions of Russians killed by the Nazis. This reinforced the belief that the security architecture of Europe had to include Russia and take account of Russian interests.

It was a model that paid off nicely for Germany, too.

“We export to China and import cheap gas from Russia; that’s been the recipe for the German export success,” said Ralph Bollmann, a biographer of Angela Merkel, a former German chancellor who is now seen as having protected Germans from a rivalrous world but not preparing them for it.

Few in Germany, including its intelligence services, predicted that Putin would invade a sovereign European country. But the war has set off a cycle of soul-searching, even among prominent politicians like Frank-Walter Steinmeier, a former foreign minister and now federal president.

A senior member of Scholz’s Social Democratic Party, he was a prominent supporter of the Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline, now halted, that bypassed Ukraine and that the United States opposed.

“We were clinging to the idea of building bridges to Russia that our partners warned us about,” Steinmeier said, after Melnyk, the Ukrainian ambassador, accused him of enabling Putin. “We failed to build a common Europe,” Steinmeier said. “We failed to incorporate Russia in our security architecture.” He added: “I was wrong.”

In the immediate aftermath of Scholz’s Zeitenwende speech, the details of which he had shared with only a handful of people, the resolve to act decisively seemed palpable.

The three diverse parties in his coalition swung behind it, and partisan divisions with the conservative opposition were briefly forgotten, too. Public opinion mirrored the shift, rewarding the new chancellor with better popularity ratings.

But in a short time, the breadth of the change Scholz announced seems to have intimidated even his own three-party coalition. “The government has made some courageous decisions, but it can seem afraid of its own courage,” said Jana Puglierin, director of the Berlin office of the European Council on Foreign Relations.

There is skepticism that the political establishment is ready to break fundamentally from Moscow, or that German voters will happily pay so much more for energy and food for the foreseeable future.

“German pacifism runs very deep,” said John Kornblum, a former U.S. ambassador to Germany who has lived in the country on and off since the 1960s. “German illusions may have shattered, but not its traumas about Russia and the war.”

That “neurotic relationship with Russia may be on pause for the moment, but it will return in full force as soon as the shooting stops,” he said.

Nils Schmid, foreign policy spokesperson in parliament for the Social Democrats, said that Germany’s soft stance toward Russia “reflects German society, and what will remain is this idea that Russia is there and part of Europe, and we will have to deal with that.”

The war has produced “dashed hopes” of a peaceful united Europe, shared by his generation of 1989, he said. But he noted that with this war, “there can be no return to business as usual. No one really wants to go back to the old times of engagement with Russia.”

Still, he said, “We shouldn’t overdo it. The balance will shift to more deterrence and less dialogue. But we must keep some dialogue.”

Puglierin has little patience for such arguments. “People need to let these old ideas go and adapt to reality as it is, and not as they want it to be,” she said. “Russia has shown that it does not want a stable relationship on this existing security order, which is now an empty shell.”

A prominent conservative lawmaker, Norbert Röttgen, argued that Germany must make a complete and immediate break with Russia. “War has come back to Europe, one that will affect the political and security order of the continent,” he said.

Germany must also draw on the lessons of its dependency on Russia for its future relationship with the more powerful authoritarian realm of China, on which key sectors of Germany’s export-driven model rely, Röttgen said.

“The real Zeitenwende,” Puglierin said, “will come when we remake our model for a future of competition with both Russia and China and realize that every dependency can be used against us.”

And the Germans are already starting to cuck, to no real surprise from me.

 

[Exterminatus]

https://web.archive.org/web/20220414004321/https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/us-announces-additional-800-million-military-aid-ukraine-2022-04-13/

US sending a chunkier aid package that's separate from the one they sent in March for 300 million.

The new package includes 11 Mi-17 helicopters that had been earmarked for Afghanistan before the U.S.-backed government collapsed last year. It also includes 18 155mm howitzers, along with 40,000 artillery rounds, counter-artillery radars, 200 armored personnel carriers and 300 additional "Switchblade" drones.

Have you looked at a picture of the Moskva? In true Soviet fashion they line the sides of the ship with largely unprotected missiles. Anything that hits it is going to cause an ammunition explosion.
View attachment 3176854

Listen comrade this is part of Putin's 86D chess game, Moskva is now conducting a special underwater operation to liberate fish held prisoner by Nazi Ukraine.

 

[Stoneheart]

i think they don't have the industrial capacity to mass produce the amount of shells for their artillery guns and rockets for their grads such an approach would require, nor the logistics capacity to transport that ammo to the front in time

all those shells are in some storage and they dont care what truck is taking those to the front.
the Russians do not care how old their shells are and everyone involved in the cold war has giant amounts of shells.

 

[Techpriest]

all those shells are in some storage and they dont care what truck is taking those to the front.
the Russians do not care how old their shells are and everyone involved in the cold war has giant amounts of shells.

You start caring pretty fast when you find out they don't detonate, or detonate in the barrel because of shit storage, or because the fuse was sold for a bottle of vodka. Russians simply can't level a city the size of Kyiv. Kharkiv has been under fire from day one but the Russians can't push in or they'll get mulched. Keep coping nigger, the Ukrainians might not win this but Russia has been humbled in a way akin to fucking 1905.