20764

I must be mistaken, but I honestly thought that you were advocating Germany’s decision to shut down their nuclear plants in the wake of Fukushima.

20765

Why not ten million?

20766

You really think a million people can just live off the land for the entirety of winter along a narrow static front? And then handwave away all the logistics needed to supply all that ammunition and fuel they’d need to actually do anything effective because trucks. Man, you’d make a great Russian general.

20767

Are the Russians going to become farmers, or perhaps hunter gatherers?

20768

Its a rather large front and I think Russia can supply them for now, not sure in the long run.

20769

Come on man, they literally couldn’t supply their forces in the first WEEK of the war.

How could they possibly supply them now?

20770

Don’t forget, they are going to triple the number of people on the front and supply them too.

20771

No, I think their shit broke down Timex, and the soldiers sold the fuel before the war, they actually didn’t know they were going in…
This is stated in one of Peruns videos I belive.

Graft and corruption were their problem, but is that going to be a problem now? I wouldn’t think so, unless they seriously are not giving a shit about it.

20772

20773

This is a logical assumption, in most cases. A nation that found its original practices failing would, under the pressure of military reverses, change those practices to be more effective. The challenge here though is that for Russia, these structural problems–corruption, lack of a professional NCO cadre, junior officers with zero initiative, a politically motivated and constrained officer corps, ossified logistics pipelines–can’t be solved without wholesale changes in culture.

The USSR had its own sets of problems, some of which were eliminated with the fall of the commissars. Some of those issues though have not only persisted, but have been exacerbated; these seem to have much deeper roots in Russian society than just being facets of communist rule. Corruption, lack of initiative, a preference to saying what those in power want to here rather than what they need to hear, a lack of trust of junior officers and senior NCOs–these are not things you can fix overnight. It took Ukraine several years, in peacetime, to unlearn the Soviet system and implement a more modern, flexible, and decentralized approach to warfighting. And along the way they had to unlearn their political culture a bit, too, but they could because they had allies who kind of insisted on it, and because their own leaders were willing to play ball.

Putin is unlikely to free up his officers to look at things with a critical eye, and allow them tactical and operational initiative. Nor is he likely to want to create a cadre of independent junior officers and senior NCOs who gain the loyalty of their troops and can act independently. Both of these things are a huge threat to his power, not to mention his person, he seems to feel.

Even if he could do these things, corruption can’t be eradicated when the entire system is corrupt. There is no baseline like there was in WWII, where a combination of widespread support for resistance to Germany and an efficient and ruthless state security apparatus managed to rein it in sufficiently. And the production, distribution, storage, and maintenance of resources necessary for fighting is a huge system of systems, and one not easily transformed. Especially with sanctions.

It is likely that Russia going forward will do better than it has, if only because the bar is so low. How much better, and whether that will be enough, remains to be seen, but from what we’ve seen so far, it would seem very unlikely that they can do what they need to.

20774

No, your spot price app actually shows pretty much what I stated - that our power prices right now are lower than the power prices where last winter at the same time.

And…? The prices during the summer are not relevant to this discussion. But yes - prices where high during the summer. The reasons for that were low water reserves in Norway after the winter, combined with an extremely mild spring which meant very limited refill + with the extremely high coal and gas prices driven by the uncertainty of the early months of the war + an increase in demand for power in Europe. Basically a perfect storm. Which was bad for industry - for sure - but of limited impact for private persons. Fortunately, Energy Europe acted smartly to improve the situation (thus today’s full gas reserves) + we had some luck during the autumn. What matters for the winter prices are the situation now + what the winter weather ends up looking like.

Predicting the future is always fraught with uncertainty; that’s just the nature of that job. But there is absolutely zero evidence to support your claims. After a wet and windy autumn, water reserves in Norway are now back to normal. EU’s gas storage facilities are fully stocked. There is little uncertainty about gas imports, because we’re receiving absolutely zero of it from Russia (this actually makes the energy market more predictable). Prices will be high as we go into March and we’ll likely see record spikes when we have cold spells, but absent a fimbulwinter or some other unpredictable disaster, Europe is going to be fine this winter.

The bigger question is how the situation looks like for the winter 2023/2024, but we won’t know that until we see how the water reserves and gas reserves recover over the summer.

20775

The argument doesn’t have to make sense. It just has to be the motivation to force Ukraine to make a shitty deal.

20776

We are well past the point of armies “living off the land”. Modern combat is continuous and ongoing. Armies don’t have the time to send large numbers of troops out to scrounge the countryside for food.

20777

But trucks

20778

My understanding is that you just need to find the right trees to harvest artillery shells from - it’s super easy, barely an inconvenience. Rifle ammo requires you to excavate them in the same way you would potatoes, as everyone knows bullets are most like root vegetables.

It’s unfortunate for Russia that the Ukraine is so rich in these naturally harvest-able resources. Hell, in the last year we’ve seen farmers with tractors pulling tanks out of the ground, ready for use by the Ukrainians. How can Russia hope to compete with this?

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20779

Like, +1

20780

If I claim that 1.1 million Russians will soon be at the front, and that they will therefore have a 3.2 to 1 advantage along key points of the line, can I get you guys to argue with me instead of Janster?

20781

Whywouldn’t it be a problem? Is the entire Russian system, which was so fundamentally corrupt, going to suddenly NOT be?

Beyond that, at this point Russia has suffered intense economic damage, as well as actual physical damage to many of their internal factories for producing wartime materials. They aren’t able to buy them from the west now.

Russia’s best bet was at the beginning of the war, 8f they had prepared for the conflict ahead of time before suffering all the damage to their economy and military that they have now suffered.

At this point, it is impossible for them to somehow do better than they did. They situation is infinitely worse now, in literally every way, than it was at the start of the war.

Expecting that Russia is going to somehow do BETTER despite having every aspect of their situation so much worse, is absolutely insane. It makes no sense.

20782

I don’t feel like while you have some points Timex, you might suffer from what I think is confirmation bias, we really want Ukraine to win this, but there are some real caveats to this.

Firstly, I speak of a million men, and most people here ridicule me for it, however, show me the evidence then, cause right now, the Russian army seems pretty well supplied, their problems are stemming from huge issues with command and control, not logistics right now.

So lets take the vaunted 1 million army…firstly… it’s not that much really, I mean the frontline is like
image

It’s huge, and even with 1 million soldiers, that may not be enough to cover the front properly at that…and right now, it’s sparse as heck.
Secondly, Soviet Russia supplied at some point 11,3 (4,8 in 1941)million men…why on earth should Russia have any problems supplying 1/11 of that today with vastly better infrastructure…and remember, the war is on their DOORSTEP!

They are pretty experienced with logistics over distances as it is, the problem with graft and corruption isn’t going to stop everything they do, that’s just wishful thinking.

Last, 3 to 1 odds, Soviet doctrine and most likely Russian now works on those odds, it’s a mathematical system, Perun said so in his video about the subject, it’s not a magical made up number, its the ACTUAL troop number that sets in motion an assault.
It is not some counter on the board with a strenght number…

Last, Strategy, I pointed out the power prices, as compared to last year, I ate those numbers every month, it was crippling…are you sure that you have some info I don’t have on this subject? Winter prices are set to skyrocket, Norwegian power is connected to Europe, and high prices there will affect us…

20783

Why not listen to what the troops have to say for themselves…

I mean, you don’t trust me, so how about this guy?