I’ve seen it stated early on that UK asked them to mediate in the beginning (not sure of the reliability of these sources, though)
edit: I see it on Reuters too
vyshka
6136
It is amazing how many tiny islands have planes flying over Russia right now. :) I’m guessing that is something to do with the leasing companies.
I don’t have any trouble believing that Russia will eventually “win”. The question now is at what cost, and what they do with it once they’ve got it.
I read this memoir a while back, it wasn’t huge on insight into the Chechnyan wars, but it painted a pretty good picture of what it’s like serving in the Russian military.
I’m not sure Western military peeps can imagine just how bad it is. If the soldiers did know, they wouldn’t be in a position to do anything about it. In the West we teach our soldiers to think, in Russia, they teach them to shut the f up and obey if they want to keep their teeth.
Israel is also the only “Western” country that recognized Lukashenko as a Belarusian dictator after recent shenanigans.
I think Switzerland is the other one but at least they’ve saved some of their citizens from torture chambers by doing that.
Lurb
6140
I can’t be true, but hey the Z is there…
Timex
6141
It’s important to note that when comparing Russia’s complete logistical failure in Ukraine to US performance in recent conflicts, the US was fighting on the other side of the earth, while Russia is fighting in a country that borders their own. Kiev is less than 500 miles from Moscow.
And their logistics are still this bad.
Krugman is right that Russia is the junior partner in the relationship, but some of his other observations are very questionable. For example their two economies are actually highly complimentary.
In general Krugman can’t be relied on for serious thought on China.
I don’t know if this is true or not, frankly. Krugman links an argument for their incompatibility by Noah Smith with which he apparently agrees, but the article is paywalled. Pity.
And I’m not sure why Krugman would be unreliable about China.
A piece that’s primary discussing what the thinking is like from internal Chinese sources/think-tanks (so not leadership, but potentially reflections of actual leadership thought) citing articles/speeches/documents also disagrees as a side note.
The misalignment between China and Russia is also reflected in their low level of bilateral trade, quantitatively and qualitatively. Chinese-Russian trade increased by an impressive $146.9 billion, or 38.5 percent, in 2021. However, the majority of this increase came from the inflation of energy prices. The volume of trade only grew by less than 6 percent. To put this in perspective, Chinese-Russian trade is smaller than China’s $166 billion in trade with Vietnam. Furthermore, the trade is still unbalanced as natural resources make up more than 70 percent of Russia’s total exports to China.
Imbalance by itself does not suggest misalignment, but Russia’s primary role as a raw materials supplier does. China’s economic transformation is based on high technologies, such as AI and new energy resources. As mentioned, China’s research and development spending is 10 times that of Russia. On new energy, China’s commitment to reduce carbon emission will eventually lead to a decline of energy imports from Russia. In other words, Russia will play a minor role in this economic transformation.
In the context of U.S.-Chinese decoupling, Russia plays no role in substituting China’s losses in high-tech products, and Russia’s position in the global high-tech industry is lagged far behind China, perhaps with the only exception of military technologies.
May be the same video but I saw a line of abandoned vehicles so long that I could not count them all from the perspective of the filmed on the ground. Ominously some vehicles were prisoner transport vehicles and other trucks included riot gear such as helmets and shields.
I read this as agreeing with Krugman, that Russia doesn’t have an awful lot to offer China. Maybe I’m not understanding it?
I suppose that this is one of the things we should be planning for.
A government in exile running an insurgency war against Russia from a neighboring country that is a NATO member is definitely going to make for complications.
Timex
6148
Did someone already post this? A Ukrainian sniper apparently killed the commander of Russia’s 7th airborne.
A high-ranking Russian general has been killed during fighting in Ukraine, in what experts say will be a bitter blow for Russian leader Vladimir Putin.
Andrei Sukhovetsky was the commanding general of the Russian 7th Airborne Division and a deputy commander of the 41st Combined Arms Army, and by far the most senior Russian figure to have died in the conflict so far.
Tire maintenance guy with another thread, this one about how armored vehicle traffic and destruction will break down the roads, make them impassable for heavy supply trucks; and how there is no sign of engineering road-making equipment or units in Russia’s committed forces.
Well, there is that video of a train full of construction equipment headed towards Ukraine posted above by Lurb. Except that most of the equipment is just panel vans …
Aleck
6151
I’m a little surprised they’re not planning to run it from Londongrad, although the FSB probably has that entire neighborhood wired for surveillance.
Yeah, tanks on pavement will usually result in chewed up pavement. Tanks on dirt roads, well, goodbye roads and hello stuck tanks after a while if it is muddy. People often underestimate all of the “tail” necessary to keep the “teeth” biting. Folks used to mock the US and other Western military forces in the Cold War for having a too small teeth to tail ratio. In some cases that might have been true, but as noted above, one, the US when it fought in that period and since has done so a long way from home, requiring a long tail, and two, as this war is showing, any sort of moderately intense combat requires a lot of support or it peters out if not worse.
