Russian Special Military Operation in the Ukraine - Mark IV: The Partitioning of Discussion

Can't quote @quaawaa for some reason
 
No, I mean I couldn't select the particular sentence that I wanted to reply to so as to trigger the quote function that normally appears; it simply was not working for that one post.

It worked with other posts. idk, it's one of those wonky things Null warned about after the update.
 
No, I mean I couldn't select the particular sentence that I wanted to reply to so as to trigger the quote function that normally appears; it simply was not working for that one post.
Oh, gotcha. I've seen this bug once since the new update, but usually a refresh or two fixes it. Sorry about the misunderstanding.
 
This was the problem from the start: A bunch of out-of-touch warhawks in NATO countries assured Z-Man that they'd come rushing to aid Ukraine, so long as the Russians struck first as the "Aggressor", so it would be a defensive war.

The Ukranians tried to exploit that by provoking Russia beyond all reason until they invaded. They did this despite KNOWING they couldn't win the war they were starting. They were just that confident that the West would storm in, save them, and welcome them into NATO.

Cue Surprised Pikachu face from Ukraine when the West says "Wait, we didn't mean we'd send troops or let you join NATO! Are you crazy? Russia has nukes and that kinda stupid shit would start WW3!

Here, we'll send some new missiles so you can field test them for us. And we'll give you some of our old military hardware that we were gonna scrap anyway. You guys got this! We believe in you! Slobber Ukrainia or whatever!"


The whole war is basically if Taiwan decided to exploit the "Security Guarantee" from the US by launching rockets and staging terror attacks on China, suicidally confident that if they piss China off enough to attack, the US will be forced to swoop in and fight them.
As someone not deeply familiar with the background of the war or the Russian perspective, do you have recommendations on reading material about its start? I understand there was an independence war in Donbass and Luhansk, lots of nationalist extremism in Ukraine and cultural discrimination against ethnic Russians, not so much familiar with attacks on Russia.
 
Ukrainian as a language isn't standardized; for example, I sometimes come across posts in Russian making fun of the various ways pretentious hohols write the exact same thing in Ukrainian. I can't recall atm where I read it recently but it was discovered quite a lot of folks on both sides of the border regions who believe they're speaking Ukrainian are in fact actually using surzhik
The English language wasn't standardized until Webster came out with the first dictionary. Is there not one for Ukrainian? How can they be a real language if there isn't a commonly accepted dictionary?
 
The English language wasn't standardized until Webster came out with the first dictionary. Is there not one for Ukrainian? How can they be a real language if there isn't a commonly accepted dictionary?
Ukrainians are making up words yearly. They are missing quite a lot, and the ones they have end up getting changed quite often. Most of the time its just letters replaced with other letters in russian words to say that they have a true and honest language.
 
Ukrainians are making up words yearly. They are missing quite a lot, and the ones they have end up getting changed quite often. Most of the time its just letters replaced with other letters in russian words to say that they have a true and honest language.
Case in point: https://slovotvir.org.ua/
A website where people post suggestions for words they don't have and vote for preferred substitutes. Obviously using Russian as a base.
 
Good luck understanding your "same" language on the ground, especially west of Kiev. Dunno why posters here just can't believe it's not butter it's not the same language. Portugese and Spanish are literally the same by comparison. Dialects vary (russian also has a pile of dialects) but UA and RU are not considered mutually intelligible.

To expand on that, Polish, Slovak, Czech, and maybe even Croat are more similar to Ukraimian than Russian is. Belarussian is the closest thing, and that is also derivative enough from Russian to not-really-be mutually intelligible.
Doesn't matter since everyone in Ukraine speaks Russian.
 
Ukrainian as a language isn't standardized; for example, I sometimes come across posts in Russian making fun of the various ways pretentious hohols write the exact same thing in Ukrainian
Somewhere along the lines of ~2 years ago there was a big surge of social media post mocking ukrainian language, they came along after war related news media coverage rose up in volume, and there was one thing in particular that stood out, how the hell do you say "helicopter" in ukranian?

The big one is this collage of different news headlines
af6bc018526769a29fc52ecf8168bcc2.webp
Going by left-to-right and up-to-down we have
Vertol'ot ( essentially one-to-one to russian Vertolyot, derived from verb "Vertetsya" - to spin and noun "Lyot" - fly i.e. "Spin Flyer" )
Vertolit ( same as above )
Gvintokril ( "Gvint" - rotor and "Kril" - wing i.e. "Rotor Wing" )
Gelikopter ( transliteration of the word "helicopter" )
You be the judge of how the nation that was the birthplace of the man LMAO, despite their best efforts the cuckipedia still lists him as "russian" :story: who literally pioneered the fucking thing can't figure out how to call it.
 
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As someone not deeply familiar with the background of the war or the Russian perspective, do you have recommendations on reading material about its start? I understand there was an independence war in Donbass and Luhansk, lots of nationalist extremism in Ukraine and cultural discrimination against ethnic Russians, not so much familiar with attacks on Russia.
In my simpleton view, it's a battle between those who believe in the rights of nations and those who believe in internationalism. Russia being the former, the west being the latter. If you want a more eloquent explination I'd point you to Glenn Diesen and John Mearsheimer.

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I retardedly mispelled the word "explanation". I'll leave it as is as I'm a proud retard.
 
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As someone not deeply familiar with the background of the war or the Russian perspective, do you have recommendations on reading material about its start? I understand there was an independence war in Donbass and Luhansk, lots of nationalist extremism in Ukraine and cultural discrimination against ethnic Russians, not so much familiar with attacks on Russia.
Unfortunately, I don't have any specific reading material for it because a lot of it has been deleted and redacted by Western propaganda. Just look into the recent history of Donbass from the "Separatist" side, mostly. I'll spoiler most of this for length:

Basically a lot of the Eastern regions of Ukraine were fed up with the way things were being run (Corruption, anti-Ethnic-Russian discrimination, ect), so they split themselves off.

But they didn't didn't just go independent. They held a referendum and overwhelmingly voted to join the Russian Federation. Russia agreed and accepted them. This meant that all of the people there were now Russian citizens.

Saying Ukraine was unhappy about this was an understatement. So they started covertly using paramilitary groups like the Azovs to attack and harass the people in those regions.

This escalated things. In Russias eyes, these were no longer just attacks on "the separatists", these were now attacks against Russian citizens in a Russian territory. So Russia would push back with special forces and the like.

But the Ukranians just kept escalating. It went from beatings to shootings. Then to grenade/mortar attacks.

Until it really kicked off in 2014. They started launching rocket attacks all over the Donbass region. The people in Donbass formally requested Russian military assistance this time, so Russia moved troops into a lot of cities in the area.

Ukraine said that the Russians had actually invaded, "Siezed control" of the cities, and that Donbass was now "Occupied Territory" that they were somehow going to get back.

So they dropped all pretense of "It's not the Ukranian military, it's those rogue factions like the Azovs!" and sent in their military... and were soundly beaten.

Since then, the Ukranians have been doing airstrikes, bombings, missile attacks, ect against Donbass constantly. And Russia repeatedly told them "Stop or you're going to leave us no choice but to invade".

Ukraine kept it up, Russia invaded to stop it once and for all. And here we are.

@Dave The Diver
I imagine most folks will be interested in skipping the foreplay so below I pasted a chart that summarizes comparison of T-90M and Leopard 2A5 MBTs. I hope this information will be more useful than "World of Tanks" BRs if you decide to join online discussions on which tank is "better".
Keep in mind that, like I posted a LOOOOONG way back, Ukraine was sent stripped-down versions of most of these vehicles. Features disabled/removed, older parts substituted in, ect. At least from the US.

The "Abrams" we sent them were M1A1s that had been replaced by M1A2s since 1992!

The Bradley's we sent them were M2A2s that hadn't used since Operation Desert Storm. The current one isn't even the M2A3... it's the M2A4.

We literally gave them stuff that was going to be either scrapped or demilitarized and sold to private collectors.


I'd HOPE this was the case in with the UK/EU vehicles too. But their stupidity always seems to surprise me.
 
Apparently fines issued by the "Territorial Recruitment Center" or the TCC (The agency responsible for carting boys off to die or be crippled on the front lines in the so-called 'meatwagons') have skyrocketed, indicating a collapse in morale in much of the population. I haven't seen this talked about anywhere else, but if it's true it's a very revealing indicator of the actual mood of the population. This article (archive) from Assembly which is an underground paper operated out of Kharkiv reported on it.

According to the article there has been 9658 enforcement proceedings on overdue and unpaid fines for violation of the rules of military registration opened since the beginning of this year. That is already almost the same number as in the whole of 2023, when there were 10,541 in total. Only 1259 fines issued in 2025 so far has been paid, according to an Opendatabot infographic dated March 10. This is only one in seven against one in two last year. They also show where in the country most fines were issued:

1744842105385.webp

Since the beginning of the year, most TCC fines have been issued in the Dnipropetrovsk region (1053 proceedings), in Kiev (1003) and in the Poltava region (918 proceedings). The Kharkiv region with almost 450 unclosed fines shares eighth place with the Volyn region. This really says a lot if this is the case, there is a pure sense of apathy from all of this. Not only are more violations happening but more people also seem to be telling them to fuck off too.
 
As someone not deeply familiar with the background of the war or the Russian perspective, do you have recommendations on reading material about its start?
There is not and will not be complete reading material. For the most part, people only scratch the surface. But in short.

Ukraine could not get out of the anarcho-capitalism of the 90s.

The oligarchs continued to wage racketeering wars among themselves and used nationalists from the southeast of Ukraine, which was hit hardest by perestroika and somewhat susceptible to financial and ideological manipulations, as foot soldiers, whom they created, financed, and promoted through government positions.

During yet another Maidan of 2013-2014, some of the Ukrainian oligarchs, with the support of the West and the muscles of a loose coalition of diverse nationalists, carried out a successful coup against the weakling Yanukovych.

Demonstrations and protests against the de facto illegitimate government, which came to power through violence and whose policies contradicted the Russian East in many ways, swept through a number of cities. Most of the Ukrainian military and police were also not very keen on obeying the not-so-legitimate authorities, and they didn't really want to shoot and crush their own compatriots with tanks, so the new government in Kiev had to rely on sadists from the national battalions who had no such qualms—see the fire in Odessa. Radicals killing people scared eastern people, and so they distanced themselves from the government more and more, and so the government increased support of nationalists to get the situation back to control, and so people distanced themselves from the government...

But at some point, the golem got out of the control of the master, and the nationalists got enough power to order the oligarchs themselves what to do.
For example, the previous president of Ukraine, Poroshenko, who opposed the blockade of the rebellious east because he had made illegal deals with them on coal, spoke very negatively about the proposal of the nationalists about the blockade and about themselves... within a week, the blockade was started.

Or Zelensky, who was openly threatened with hanging in his first year of office if he tried to disarm nationalist battalions again.

Or the oligarch Kolomoisky, in fact, the creator of the Azov battalion in its current form, is now in court.

And now you have an unholy alliance of weak, corrupt oligarchs, on whose backs the Nazis are riding straight to hell, taking the whole country with them.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1w70uhB47nqAWgwkJyzMolYXxzzTjcD-NeXvm3axDU6s/edit?tab=t.0
 
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