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

 

[Badungus Kabungus]

America has no state religion, and China is reliant on trade with them, not the other way around. America can shift production of consumer goods to other nations like Vietnam, and they won't skip a beat. Can't say the same for Russia and China.

Also, American rich boys are nowhere near as corrupt as Russian oligarchs.

Beijing Biden and his son Hunter would disagree on pretty much all points, lol.

 

[LORD IMPERATOR]

Beijing Biden and his son Hunter would disagree on pretty much all points, lol.

Not when Russians who have more than two brain cells to run run away to America or Western Europe to start their business since they can't do it back home because the Russian oligarchs have the mob and the state backing up their monopolies.

 

[IAmNotAlpharius]

Beijing Biden and his son Hunter would disagree on pretty much all points, lol.

The Russian oligarchs are on a whole another level. Russian soldiers aren’t getting their basic necessities because of corruption. Their corruption is part of the reason why Chernobyl happened. It wasn’t just a couple of drunk Slavs it was poor policies pushed to embezzle some extra funds. Their corruption is so immense that it’s shriveled their economy.

America has no state religion, and China is reliant on trade with them, not the other way around. America can shift production of consumer goods to other nations like Vietnam, and they won't skip a beat. Can't say the same for Russia and China.

Also, American rich boys are nowhere near as corrupt as Russian oligarchs.

It’s why they’re freaking out about the decoupling. Funny thing is that many American executives opposed the pivot, unlike their Indian counterparts, but because of 0 covid policies, they have no choice but to move production elsewhere. And once they’re gone, they’re not coming back.

If/when they fight India in a war, China will probably be stupid and treat their soldiers as cannon fodder. Except this time each soldier is an only child and is their parents’ retirement policy.

 

[Techpriest]

US mulls release of the M270 MLRS and HIMARS to Ukraine.

https://edition.cnn.com/2022/05/26/politics/us-long-range-rockets-ukraine-mlrs/index.html

I want the BAT to get tested here. It’s a fucking magical weapon.

 

[thx1138]

I want the BAT to get tested here. It’s a fucking magical weapon.

This some Twilight 2000 shit. Tankbreaker first, now Assaultbreaker? What's next, they gonna put the RDF/LT into production and start shipping those over?

 

[DumbDude42]

Their corruption is part of the reason why Chernobyl happened. It wasn’t just a couple of drunk Slavs it was poor policies pushed to embezzle some extra funds.

chernobyl didn't blow up because someone embezzled their security budget, it blew up because the reactor type they used had a fatal design flaw that could under very specific circumstances cause the emergency shutdown mechanism to bring the reactor core to a state of supercriticality, which would result in a meltdown and subsequently trigger an explosion followed by an open reactor fire due to the fuel rod channels being made of graphite.

there was corruption involved, but not of the financial kind: soviet engineers discovered this design flaw long before the accident happened, and they had warned about its potential dangers, but the state authorities shut them down and suppressed their findings, for two reasons: first, because retrofitting all the reactors that had been built already would have been a major headache, and second, because publicly admitting to such a big flaw would have been seen as a loss of state prestige that they were unwilling to accept. so they suppressed the information, and because of that the operators at the plant did not know about it. so when they eventually found their reactor in those very specific circumstances, they pressed the emergency shutdown button because they thought it would shut down the reactor like it's supposed to, but instead the whole thing blew up.

so yes, in a way it was caused by corruption, but not simple "lol imma steal this money to live in luxury" financial corruption, instead it was political corruption related to notions of state prestige and an ideology that insisted on the infallibility of soviet socialism in all matters.

 

[Tinfoil]

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10820573/Vladimir-Putins-no-1-fan-Australia-Simeon-Boikov-arrested.html

 

[76LD910]

Also, Russian attack with incendiaries:

That has to just be some kind of flare/smokescreen designed to obscure vision or fuck with optical sensors, because that looks incredibly ineffective if its meant to be weapon.

Even the WW2 era 6 pound incendiary cluster bombs that explode on contact would likely do more damage than a bunch of burning fluff deployed hundreds of feet above a target area and limply falling to the ground. Its extremely inaccurate and rain or a strong breeze would make it totally ineffective.

 

[Bass]

Wrong, Temujin was actually a Russian too. Das rite west boi, we wuz khanz n blyat.

View attachment 3323007

I had no idea that Genghis Khan's first name was George.

What was Kublai Khan's real name? Larry or Ralph?

 

[RodgerDodger]

chernobyl didn't blow up because someone embezzled their security budget, it blew up because the reactor type they used had a fatal design flaw that could under very specific circumstances cause the emergency shutdown mechanism to bring the reactor core to a state of supercriticality, which would result in a meltdown and subsequently trigger an explosion followed by an open reactor fire due to the fuel rod channels being made of graphite.

there was corruption involved, but not of the financial kind: soviet engineers discovered this design flaw long before the accident happened, and they had warned about its potential dangers, but the state authorities shut them down and suppressed their findings, for two reasons: first, because retrofitting all the reactors that had been built already would have been a major headache, and second, because publicly admitting to such a big flaw would have been seen as a loss of state prestige that they were unwilling to accept. so they suppressed the information, and because of that the operators at the plant did not know about it. so when they eventually found their reactor in those very specific circumstances, they pressed the emergency shutdown button because they thought it would shut down the reactor like it's supposed to, but instead the whole thing blew up.

so yes, in a way it was caused by corruption, but not simple "lol imma steal this money to live in luxury" financial corruption, instead it was political corruption related to notions of state prestige and an ideology that insisted on the infallibility of soviet socialism in all matters.

Really Chernobyl blew up because of incredibly poor management orders from above that were insanely stupid. But none of the actual qualified experts had the power to refuse. It blew up because someone had put a bug up the Soviets butts about what would happen to their worlds largest nuclear power station should be directly attacked or a similar catastrophe happen. This demand for tests came after Israel launched Operation Opera and destroyed the Iraqi nuclear power plant/bomb factory. Which I believe was being built by the Soviets and using a similar design to Chernobyl. So they wanted to stress test the reactor beyond any reasonable conditions. And then the idiot incompetent Party Apparatchik on the ground made that already extremely stupid test even worse by going way the fuck outside the test parameters. Yes the reactor had some major flaws. The lack of a containment structure being a big one. But even with its flaws it would have safely operated for decades even to today, had they not tried really really hard to break it for no good reason save Soviet tier stupidity.

 

[thx1138]

The Iraqi reactor was the OSIRAK facility and it was largely built by the French. The death of a single French worker caused quite an uproar on the Left Bank. Anyway, as to the plant, itself, I didn't know that's what the power test was meant to determine, interesting. I thought it was just a case of "Well hey, what happens if the reactor can't power its own pumps for a couple of minutes." The testing kept getting pushed back because of grid demand in Kyiv: the Soviets robbing their own empire blind meant end-of-month work quotas were sky-high, and end-of-month power demands were the same. So the reactor had been allowed to basically fall asleep due to Xenon poisoning due to low power states during the day. Normally this takes 24 hours to burn off the Xenon gas, but, again, due to the power demands in Kyiv, the test had to be done at night, without time to bring the reactor up to a warm state and burn off the Xenon.

So what happens is, when the reactor is operated in a low power state, you get Legasov's feedback loop - low power, no steam, no steam, cold reactor, cold reactor, more xenon, more xenon, lower power...until the operators yank every control rod out, get a runaway reaction, then try to drop the control rods and their quite frankly unfathomably stupid design into the reactor. You've got already ruptured rod channels, the rods only go in far enough for the graphite moderator tips to cause a neutron surge and we have our initial thermal shock and steam explosion. This blows off the 60-tonne bio-shield, and exposes the near-molten core to an inrush of cool...oxygenated...air.

Boom.
All because factory schedules and white-knuckle paranoia ("Is it an attack? Are we under attack?" said by the controllers running the experiment at the CNPP are documented statements; they literally thought the US was going to start nuking their ... well, nuclear power plants) kept vatnik managers and politicians in charge of what should have been left to scientists. Scientists who knew the RBMK was a bad, unsafe design to begin with, because like a great many things Soviet it was made as cheaply as possible, as quickly as possible, just so long as it was a leg up on the West.

 

[JustSomeDong]

Really Chernobyl blew up because of incredibly poor management orders from above that were insanely stupid. But none of the actual qualified experts had the power to refuse. It blew up because someone had put a bug up the Soviets butts about what would happen to their worlds largest nuclear power station should be directly attacked or a similar catastrophe happen. This demand for tests came after Israel launched Operation Opera and destroyed the Iraqi nuclear power plant/bomb factory. Which I believe was being built by the Soviets and using a similar design to Chernobyl. So they wanted to stress test the reactor beyond any reasonable conditions. And then the idiot incompetent Party Apparatchik on the ground made that already extremely stupid test even worse by going way the fuck outside the test parameters. Yes the reactor had some major flaws. The lack of a containment structure being a big one. But even with its flaws it would have safely operated for decades even to today, had they not tried really really hard to break it for no good reason save Soviet tier stupidity.

The French were the primary providers for the reactors at Osirak- and -2, if I recall, but otherwise agree. And the fear of saying "no" to stupidity from above is getting pretty common everywhere these days, which should terrify us all.

EDIT. Ninjad. Got up to let the dogs out. Should have refreshed the tab.

 

[Snekposter]

So I've been watching the maps, such as they are for a few days. I still think this war gets more absurd by the second, and really, I think Ukraine is in the right as much as they can be.

Russia now basically has their land bridge to Crimea and most of the coast. They could literally declare "victory" over the "nazis" and end this bullshit today, but we all know that's not going to happen.

For some stupid reason, whether pride or slavic stubbornness, Putin, for all his faults and good points, seems to want to keep stomping on his wang. If Finland and Sweden join NATO, then a wider confrontation is basically inevitable.

I wish I knew what the endgame or even plan b was from the Kremlin. Their A game never showed up, and now Russia is even more of an international pariah than it was before.
It's darkly humorous that a flagship gets sunk by an enemy with no navy, and it's the same with just about all the rest of this whole thing.

I doubt it will happen, but if WW3 starts because of this nonsense, it was nice shitposting with you autists.

He really can't declare victory. Ukraine would never tolerate it given the scale of the destruction, not without massive reparations and compensation for the lost territory, and whipping up the big bad Russian boogeyman has seriously backfired for any elites who might want to see it called it off because public opinion all across the first world is nigh-universally fuck Russia. Things in the West would need to see a massive, massive dive for people to want to ditch support for Ukraine, and the sending of arms and other aid. So, we have a nasty feedback loop where Ukraine desires blood for Russia being Russia, Russia commits worse and worse war crimes in a desperate attempt to eke out some sort of possible breakthrough in the lines or to break Ukraine's resolve, and the worse their conduct becomes the more motivated the people of the West are to see Russia broken.

Or in other words, similar enough reasons as to why nobody on the Western Front in WW1 could just pack it in and go home.

The Soviet Union was a miserable tyranny that treated their own people like shit. Furthermore, they weren't the "main country" defeating Germany in World War 2. Without the Southern and Western European fronts drawing German forces away from the Eastern European front the war would have ended in a stalemate at best, and without the massive quantities of foreign aid the USSR received from the US, the Russians may well have lost at least some land to the Germans in exchange for a peace deal.

Those highly mobile counter-offensives in 1943 don't happen at all without American aid, and the Soviets would have been facing more German ground and air forces without the US/UK in the war.

Its worse than that. The US/UK strategic bombing campaign absolutely murdered German production lines by late 1943, and the sheer volume of manpower and materiel (repair crews and raw materiel for such, airplanes and ground crews, AA guns and crews, etc.) dedicated to both homeland defense and repair all throughout 1943 would have easily turned the tide of the war in the East in Germany's favor had it not been tied up in Germany. And that's with Lend-Lease backing the USSR, shipping them not just enough food for their men but roughly half of all expended munitions during the war.

None of these are exactly great signs. It’s also a further strain on Russian logistics as the ammunition isn’t compatible with any other vehicle they have, the parts aren’t compatible either.

Yep. Its 115mm is also far worse in terms of firepower than the 125mm on the T-72.

US mulls release of the M270 MLRS and HIMARS to Ukraine.

https://edition.cnn.com/2022/05/26/politics/us-long-range-rockets-ukraine-mlrs/index.html

Christ, as if the M777's weren't bad enough. I'm sure some of the Russian observers at Storm in '91 are already calling for their brown pants at the mere possibility of those weapons showing up. Protip: the MLRS was explicitly designed to fuck up Russian mass-scale formations. If the Katyusha is Stalin's Organ, the M270 is Uncle Sam's Orchestra. And to be bluntly honest, the UXO problems the MLRS had with its submunitions aren't nearly as bad as the UXO issues caused by Russian ordnance at this point.

 

[ColtWalker1847]

The Iraqi reactor was the OSIRAK facility and it was largely built by the French. The death of a single French worker caused quite an uproar on the Left Bank. Anyway, as to the plant, itself, I didn't know that's what the power test was meant to determine, interesting. I thought it was just a case of "Well hey, what happens if the reactor can't power its own pumps for a couple of minutes." The testing kept getting pushed back because of grid demand in Kyiv: the Soviets robbing their own empire blind meant end-of-month work quotas were sky-high, and end-of-month power demands were the same. So the reactor had been allowed to basically fall asleep due to Xenon poisoning due to low power states during the day. Normally this takes 24 hours to burn off the Xenon gas, but, again, due to the power demands in Kyiv, the test had to be done at night, without time to bring the reactor up to a warm state and burn off the Xenon.

So what happens is, when the reactor is operated in a low power state, you get Legasov's feedback loop - low power, no steam, no steam, cold reactor, cold reactor, more xenon, more xenon, lower power...until the operators yank every control rod out, get a runaway reaction, then try to drop the control rods and their quite frankly unfathomably stupid design into the reactor. You've got already ruptured rod channels, the rods only go in far enough for the graphite moderator tips to cause a neutron surge and we have our initial thermal shock and steam explosion. This blows off the 60-tonne bio-shield, and exposes the near-molten core to an inrush of cool...oxygenated...air.

Boom.
All because factory schedules and white-knuckle paranoia ("Is it an attack? Are we under attack?" said by the controllers running the experiment at the CNPP are documented statements; they literally thought the US was going to start nuking their ... well, nuclear power plants) kept vatnik managers and politicians in charge of what should have been left to scientists. Scientists who knew the RBMK was a bad, unsafe design to begin with, because like a great many things Soviet it was made as cheaply as possible, as quickly as possible, just so long as it was a leg up on the West.

Beautifully explained. But you let them slide on the worst part. The coverup. Whatever the failings were in design and operation were unfathomably worse with Soviet handling of the disaster. Lies that persist to this day.

Long explainer but it does the best job of spelling out how badly they handled it. How it broke a nation and drives the Ukr/Rus conflict of today. Like, the Russians still can't admit they fucked up. That that style of governance is a fuckup. That managing that way fucks things up. The Ukrainians know this better than anyone else because of this disaster. The disaster was their wakeup call. We will never know how bad it actually was because of Soviet/Russian meddling. We don't know what to do about it or how to make things better because of it. It was just inconvenient to the government so it was disappeared and now nobody can learn anything.

 

[Snekposter]

We will never know how bad it actually was because of Soviet/Russian meddling. We don't know what to do about it or how to make things better because of it. It was just inconvenient to the government so it was disappeared and now nobody can learn anything.

That, IMO, is arguably the worst part of Communism. They're so good at covering up shit they did nobody has any idea how to make it whole or even how to avoid repeating it. Its arguably why we have so many unironic Commies, because nobody is allowed to learn the fucking truth about Communist fuckups.

 

[thx1138]

Beautifully explained. But you let them slide on the worst part. The coverup. Whatever the failings were in design and operation were unfathomably worse with Soviet handling of the disaster. Lies that persist to this day.

The design of the RBMK was so fundamentally flawed that it was illegal to talk about in the USSR. It caused a near identical meltdown in a different plant when they ran the same test. Legasov's documented testimony and research (and I mean the real stuff, not just what you see on the generally well done HBO mini-series) outlined that it was known for almost a decade that the RBMK-1000 reactor was a ticking time bomb. But, it worked...and if you poison a province for fifty thousand years because of the bad design, meh, whatever - the Soviet Union will last forever, right comrades?

Russians having anything nuclear is like giving gasoline and matches to chimpanzees. There's this show on Youtube, Plainly Difficult, he talks about various "science disasters" and the Soviets apparently littered Siberia with these little miniature radiothermal power units (like what powers Voyager and Voyager II) to run weather stations, and so on. So they work on heat generated by plutonium, right? Well, the Russians don't know exactly how many they sprinkled around (some were paradropped into the wilderness), nor where all of them even are anymore. So Plainly Difficult did an episode about some hunters who found one, discovered that it was just throwing off heat, so the poor dumb bastards curled up around it for warmth at night with predictable results.

And people wonder why during their "special security operation" an entire battalion got an all expense paid trip to Moscow Special Hospital Number whatever after they dug trenches into the fucking Red Forest. ARS is a bitch, Young Pioneers.

 

[Snekposter]

And people wonder why during their "special security operation" an entire battalion got an all expense paid trip to Moscow Special Hospital Number whatever after they dug trenches into the fucking Red Forest. ARS is a bitch, Young Pioneers.

The Stalker: Anomaly Discord server was making Red Forest jokes about those poor SoB's for weeks following that little disaster. You know shit's fucked when you fuck up so bad a bunch of random vidya players are mocking you for your ignorance. Granted, it wasn't really their fault because absolutely nobody told them just how bad things really were there (and in fact would have been shipped off to a Gulag penitentiary labor camp for telling them how bad things really were), but still..

 

[thx1138]

The Stalker: Anomaly Discord server was making Red Forest jokes about those poor SoB's for weeks following that little disaster. You know shit's fucked when you fuck up so bad a bunch of random vidya players are mocking you for your ignorance. Granted, it wasn't really their fault because absolutely nobody told them just how bad things really were there (and in fact would have been shipped off to a Gulag penitentiary labor camp for telling them how bad things really were), but still..

One of the NPP custodians the Russians were using as a human shield allowing to continue to work there told them to dig their revetments in really, really deep. Which they did. Which put them down in the dirt that the cleanup work buried under layers of sand and clay.

 

[Snekposter]

One of the NPP custodians the Russians were using as a human shield allowing to continue to work there told them to dig their revetments in really, really deep. Which they did. Which put them down in the dirt that the cleanup work buried under layers of sand and clay.

Christ. I would normally say that that sort of thing is just plain evil, and then I look at the shit that's happened elsewhere in Ukraine, and I can't really muster up any sympathy except for the poor NPP custodians.

 

[thx1138]

Christ. I would normally say that that sort of thing is just plain evil, and then I look at the shit that's happened elsewhere in Ukraine, and I can't really muster up any sympathy except for the poor NPP custodians.

Early on in the war I kind of felt bad for those "poor misguided kids" sent in by Putin to fight. Tanks being abandoned after running out of fuel, the awkward stares at and from Ukrainian civilians passing them on the highways...

Then the stories like Bucha and the looting reports and so on began and I lost any sympathy. So take the plant back, I say. Take it back and dig trenches and bunkers and outhouses and whatever else in the Red Forest again.

Stupid gopnik bastards.