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Megathread for news/updates/discussion of Russian invasion of Ukraine - March 30-31
This thread is posted Monday/Wednesday/Friday - please try to post relevant content in here, such as news, updates, opinion articles, etc. Especially significant updates may warrant a separate topic, but most should be posted here.
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In case y'all want to know what it feels like to be a Russian in the country today: here's a thread from a Moscovite, in English, describing the day-to-day in Russia.
I live in small city in the middle of Siberia. It plays out exactly the same here. I can only extrapolate that it's the same everywhere else in Russia, too.
I'm unable to read twitter threads anymore so I unrolled it. Threadreader Link
What if Putin Didn’t Miscalculate? (Opinion)
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/29/opinion/ukraine-war-putin.html
12ft.io doesn’t work on NYT, but this appears to be the same article:
https://dnyuz.com/2022/03/29/what-if-putin-didnt-miscalculate/
The reality is probably more nuanced than either “Putin has lost his marbles” or “This was all a part of his plan”. Early on even I was thinking that a likely scenario was a “compromise” where Russia keeps Crimea and chunks of Eastern Ukraine. I doubt this is how Putin wanted things to go but this is somewhere between a “Russia takes Kyiv, the Soviet Union is reborn” moonshot and “Ukraine beats back Russia, retakes Crimea and joins NATO”.
I just find it very hard to reconcile this making sense on any kind of economic level. Ignoring all the sanctions, just the cost of keeping up this kind of troop deployment is absurd - it's estimated it cost $20b PER DAY for Russia.
Does Russia really need eastern Ukraine's oil reserves that much? Is it just to be ready when Russia's own very large oil fields run out? That just seems off. While it's not as if the West is doing that great of a job going to green energy, it is still happening. Just seems weird from an economical point of view to do this drastic, super expensive step, for future security... in a future where everyone wants their dependence on oil to be ever lower.
It's also getting into hindsight is 20/20 in the hypothetical, but I really wonder if Russia "merely" increased their de facto territory in eastern Ukraine as opposed to trying to blitzkrieg all of Ukraine's major cities (except Lviv), if that would not have been done with much less resistance. The West had a pretty lukewarm reaction (in comparison to right now) to the takeover of Crimea, after all.
That just seems like a much more likely plan of attack - boil the frog and all - if it was just oil fields that Russia wanted.
I think it's a mistake to overestimate Putin's interest in the Russian economy. You have to remember that Putin is a billionaire. In fact, he's probably one of the richest people in the world -- if not the richest. Moreover he's an autocrat, so he's fairly insulated from the effects of poor economic policy to begin with. Putin only cares about the economy insofar that there are potential repercussions to him for not caring (e.g., a coup).
Instead, Putin cares a great deal about his image, as evidenced by his frequent references to historic Russian figures like Catherine the Great. In my opinion, that's what the war in Ukraine is about more than anything else: (re?)establishing the great Russian empire. Ukrainian self-determination (and Polish and Belarusian and so forth) is antithetical to that goal.
I don't disagree, but the article "What if Putin Didn’t Miscalculate?" argues that it is economically minded
Sorry, fair point.
The same newspaper that did the interview tith Zelensky a couple of weeks back has now also done an interview with his wife: https://www.zeit.de/politik/ausland/2022-03/olena-selenska-familie-wolodymyr-selenskyj-krieg-ukraine-frauen-englisch
This is an official translation, that just like the last interview, has been autorized by the Ukranian diplomat in Germany. (The link is in german but it is an English translation that is also available in German and I think Ukranian or Russian).
Russian troops have withdrawn from Chernobyl, says Ukrainian nuclear operator
In case you didn't know:
"rashist" = "Russian" + "fascist"
The withdrawal might actually be due to another (as yet unverified) report from a few days ago about several busloads of Russian troops having already been evacuated to Belarus after showing signs of acute radiation poisoning, which the International Atomic Energy Agency is apparently now investigating:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/01/world/europe/chernobyl-radiation-poisoning.html
The original Ukrainian news report I read (which I unfortunately can't find anymore) suggested that the soldiers likely received significant radiation exposure after digging defensive trenches in the irradiated soil in the area.
Not entirely implausible too - at 6 mSv/h (in the spicies spots), you'll get into the danger zone of 400mSv/h after a few days. Even more so if you're digging up spicy dirt for entrenchment. Keep in mind though that radiation is weird and unintuitive and one burst of 400mSv does not equal continual exposure to 4 mSv/h over 100h.
Looks like at least one part of the story is now confirmed via drone footage:
https://twitter.com/IntelDoge/status/1511602598394085380
The idiots dug dozens of trenches at their camps in the Chernobyl exclusion zone.
I thought "The idiots dug trenches in the red forest" was a meme. No. They actually did that. Also burned the vegetation, just in case digging doesn't create enough spicy aerosol.
I actually kind of feel sorry for the grunts who did that. In all likelihood they were misled about this war from start to finish, never harmed any civilians (at least not in a way you could fault them for, so I won't count if they stopped Chernobyl plant workers from doing a job they didn't know was important) and now they have radiation sickness as a thank you.
The lowest-ranking officer who knew where the fuck these soldiers were and didn't tell them? Fuck that guy.
Apparently the burnt area may be due to wildfires from last year. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Chernobyl_Exclusion_Zone_wildfires
And yeah, I feel bad for those grunts too. Death by radiation exposure is supposedly an absolutely horrible way to go. But speaking of which, the bad news for the Russian troops only gets worse. Apparently their camp, and those trenches, were located in some of the most highly irradiated soil around Chernobyl: https://twitter.com/Nrg8000/status/1511614133476945920