Ukraine - Russia Conflict
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L’ébouillantement de la Crimée
Scalding the Crimea
It wasn't a completely new idea, but after the First World War, questions began to be asked about how to achieve strategic gains against opposing powers without triggering the catastrophe of another Great War. The problem became even more acute when this new world war could be nuclear. This led to the invention of the "reckless pedestrian" strategy, in which an unwary pedestrian suddenly steps onto the road and blocks traffic, or the "artichoke" strategy, in which the target is seized leaf by leaf, often by reckless pedestrians. Nazi Germany practised both in the 1930s, ripping off every leaf - reintroduction of military service, remilitarisation of the Rhineland, Anschluss, annexation of Bohemia and Moravia - in blitzkrieg operations, right up to the attempt to overrun Poland. The Soviet Union-Russia has often done this, with the blitzkrieg annexation of Crimea in February 2014, for example.
Since last summer, the Ukrainians have undoubtedly been testing a new modus operandi precisely to reconquer this same Crimea: the gradual boiling of the frog. The problem is a complex one for the Ukrainians, as they have to win back a territory that a nuclear power considers to be part of its national territory. On 17 July 2022, the deputy secretary of the Russian Security Council and former Russian president, Dmitri Medvedev, declared that an attack on Crimea would be considered an attack on the heart of Russian territory and that touching its two strategic sites: the Kerch Bridge linking the peninsula to Russia or the Sevastopol naval base would provoke the "day of reckoning" in Ukraine, in other words nuclear strikes. Even if we are already used to Dmitri Medvedev's outrageous statements, the nuclear threat, which Vladimir Putin and his Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov have been making since the start of the war, is nevertheless taken seriously by many experts. The possibility of a Ukrainian attack on Crimea from the air, let alone on land, seems remote, but many believe that in a context where Ukraine has no means of retaliating in the same way, a nuclear strike would be possible in order to deter any further aggression on Russian soil or supposedly on Russian soil. According to the principle of "escalation for de-escalation", this strike, possibly purely demonstrative to reduce the political cost, would also frighten the Ukrainians and perhaps above all the West, and impose a Russian peace.
And yet, just a few days after Medvedev's statement, on 9 August, two explosions ravaged the Saki air base in Crimea, destroying at least nine aircraft. Seven days later, a large ammunition depot exploded in the north of Crimea in the district of Djankoï, accompanied by sabotage. It is still unclear how these attacks were carried out, especially as no one has claimed responsibility for them. This allows the Russians to save face and play down the events by talking, against all evidence, of accidents. Nevertheless, these initial attacks demonstrated that Crimea could be attacked without provoking a large-scale response. So they continued. On 1 October, the Belbek military airport, near Sevastopol, was hit in turn, again without provoking any serious reaction. All these attacks have an obvious operational interest in the short term, as Crimea is the rear base of the Russian army group occupying part of the Ukrainian provinces of Kherson, Zaporijjia and Donetsk. Their logistics and air support are obviously hampered by all the attacks on the axes and bases of the Crimean peninsula. But these actions must also be seen in the context of a longer-term strategy to make the war in Crimea commonplace.
The Ukrainians then carried out the ultimate test. On 8 October 2022, the Kerch Bridge was severely damaged by a huge explosion, probably caused by a lorry full of explosives. This attack raised the temperature around the frog, but the water was already warm and the rise was lessened by the absence of any claim to responsibility and the ambiguity of an attack carried out a priori using a lorry full of explosives from Russia. The affront is therefore not as great as a direct attack claimed and carried out by surprise, but the slap is violent and almost personal towards Vladimir Putin, whose name is often attached to the bridge he inaugurated in person at the wheel of a lorry in 2018. However, this is not enough, or not enough any more, to defy the opinion of other nations, particularly China - which is very sensitive on the subject - or the United States, which have clearly announced a conventional response to such an event. So there is no Russian nuclear strike, and we don't even know if this option was seriously considered by the Russian decision-making collective. But the Russians did have a conventional strike force. On 10 October, more than 80 ballistic and cruise missiles hit the interior of Ukraine. This was the first in a long series of weekly strikes on the energy network. This operation was not organised in two days, but the link is immediately made between the attack on the bridge on the 8th and this response.
The problem is that "escalation for de-escalation" rarely works. Not only do the attacks on Crimea continue unabated, but they are even increasing in scale, in numbers through the harassment of small aerial drones and in quality through more complex attacks. Just a few days after the attack on the Kerch Bridge, on 29 October, the naval base at Sevastopol, Crimea's other major strategic site, came under attack from a combination of aerial and naval drones. At least three ships, including the frigate Admiral Makarov, were damaged. What can we do to mark the occasion when we are already doing our utmost? In order to establish a link with the attack on Sevastopol, the focus is on Ukrainian ports, the departure bases for naval drones. However, this was not enough to stop the attacks, especially as the West, also accustomed to the idea that war could be waged in the Crimea without provoking a nuclear reaction, began to supply long-range weapons.
On 29 April 2023, a huge fuel depot was destroyed near Sevastopol. On 6 and 7 May, the Sevastopol base was again attacked by aerial drones. On 22 June, the Chongar road, one of the two roads linking Crimea to the rest of Ukraine, was hit by four Storm Shadow airborne missiles, a first. On the morning of Monday 17 July, the Kerch Bridge was attacked again, this time by naval drone. This new attack on a strategic target was fully claimed this time by the Ukrainians in an official statement that also retrospectively acknowledged all the previous actions. Two days later, a large ammunition depot in Kirovski, not far from Kerch, was blown up, followed by another on 22 July in Krasnogvardeysk, in the centre of the peninsula.
But as the attacks on Crimea multiply, Russia's non-nuclear response capability is now reduced, as its stock of modern missiles is now at its lowest. The Russians are scraping the bottom of the barrel, mixing the few dozen modern cruise missiles they still produce each month with drones and anti-ship missiles, including the very old and very inaccurate KH22/32. To establish a link with the naval drone attack, these disparate projectiles are launched over several days at Ukrainian ports, Odessa in particular. These strikes have no military value and further damage Russia's image by hitting cultural sites in particular. Above all, they are a far cry from the crushing capabilities, even conventional, that we imagined before the war, or even from the salvos of Iskander or Kalibr at the start of the war. The strikes on Odessa are also a demonstration of powerlessness.
The Russian authorities have also lost a great deal of credibility in their ability to go beyond this impotence and go higher. Michel Debré explained that it was difficult to be credible in threatening to use nuclear weapons if you were otherwise weak. In this respect, it is not clear that the handling of the Yevgeny Prigozhin and Wagner mutiny on 24 June, from the terrible punishment announced in the morning to the arrangement in the evening, strengthened Vladimir Putin's nuclear credibility. To be a deterrent, you have to frighten people, and by dint of empty threats, the Russians are becoming less and less frightening. In short, Crimea is now fully part of the war, and if one day Ukrainian forces land there, first occasionally during raids, then in force - a very hypothetical and distant prospect for the moment - we already know, or at least we now believe, that this will not provoke a nuclear war. That's already a lot.
Scalding the Crimea
It wasn't a completely new idea, but after the First World War, questions began to be asked about how to achieve strategic gains against opposing powers without triggering the catastrophe of another Great War. The problem became even more acute when this new world war could be nuclear. This led to the invention of the "reckless pedestrian" strategy, in which an unwary pedestrian suddenly steps onto the road and blocks traffic, or the "artichoke" strategy, in which the target is seized leaf by leaf, often by reckless pedestrians. Nazi Germany practised both in the 1930s, ripping off every leaf - reintroduction of military service, remilitarisation of the Rhineland, Anschluss, annexation of Bohemia and Moravia - in blitzkrieg operations, right up to the attempt to overrun Poland. The Soviet Union-Russia has often done this, with the blitzkrieg annexation of Crimea in February 2014, for example.
Since last summer, the Ukrainians have undoubtedly been testing a new modus operandi precisely to reconquer this same Crimea: the gradual boiling of the frog. The problem is a complex one for the Ukrainians, as they have to win back a territory that a nuclear power considers to be part of its national territory. On 17 July 2022, the deputy secretary of the Russian Security Council and former Russian president, Dmitri Medvedev, declared that an attack on Crimea would be considered an attack on the heart of Russian territory and that touching its two strategic sites: the Kerch Bridge linking the peninsula to Russia or the Sevastopol naval base would provoke the "day of reckoning" in Ukraine, in other words nuclear strikes. Even if we are already used to Dmitri Medvedev's outrageous statements, the nuclear threat, which Vladimir Putin and his Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov have been making since the start of the war, is nevertheless taken seriously by many experts. The possibility of a Ukrainian attack on Crimea from the air, let alone on land, seems remote, but many believe that in a context where Ukraine has no means of retaliating in the same way, a nuclear strike would be possible in order to deter any further aggression on Russian soil or supposedly on Russian soil. According to the principle of "escalation for de-escalation", this strike, possibly purely demonstrative to reduce the political cost, would also frighten the Ukrainians and perhaps above all the West, and impose a Russian peace.
And yet, just a few days after Medvedev's statement, on 9 August, two explosions ravaged the Saki air base in Crimea, destroying at least nine aircraft. Seven days later, a large ammunition depot exploded in the north of Crimea in the district of Djankoï, accompanied by sabotage. It is still unclear how these attacks were carried out, especially as no one has claimed responsibility for them. This allows the Russians to save face and play down the events by talking, against all evidence, of accidents. Nevertheless, these initial attacks demonstrated that Crimea could be attacked without provoking a large-scale response. So they continued. On 1 October, the Belbek military airport, near Sevastopol, was hit in turn, again without provoking any serious reaction. All these attacks have an obvious operational interest in the short term, as Crimea is the rear base of the Russian army group occupying part of the Ukrainian provinces of Kherson, Zaporijjia and Donetsk. Their logistics and air support are obviously hampered by all the attacks on the axes and bases of the Crimean peninsula. But these actions must also be seen in the context of a longer-term strategy to make the war in Crimea commonplace.
The Ukrainians then carried out the ultimate test. On 8 October 2022, the Kerch Bridge was severely damaged by a huge explosion, probably caused by a lorry full of explosives. This attack raised the temperature around the frog, but the water was already warm and the rise was lessened by the absence of any claim to responsibility and the ambiguity of an attack carried out a priori using a lorry full of explosives from Russia. The affront is therefore not as great as a direct attack claimed and carried out by surprise, but the slap is violent and almost personal towards Vladimir Putin, whose name is often attached to the bridge he inaugurated in person at the wheel of a lorry in 2018. However, this is not enough, or not enough any more, to defy the opinion of other nations, particularly China - which is very sensitive on the subject - or the United States, which have clearly announced a conventional response to such an event. So there is no Russian nuclear strike, and we don't even know if this option was seriously considered by the Russian decision-making collective. But the Russians did have a conventional strike force. On 10 October, more than 80 ballistic and cruise missiles hit the interior of Ukraine. This was the first in a long series of weekly strikes on the energy network. This operation was not organised in two days, but the link is immediately made between the attack on the bridge on the 8th and this response.
The problem is that "escalation for de-escalation" rarely works. Not only do the attacks on Crimea continue unabated, but they are even increasing in scale, in numbers through the harassment of small aerial drones and in quality through more complex attacks. Just a few days after the attack on the Kerch Bridge, on 29 October, the naval base at Sevastopol, Crimea's other major strategic site, came under attack from a combination of aerial and naval drones. At least three ships, including the frigate Admiral Makarov, were damaged. What can we do to mark the occasion when we are already doing our utmost? In order to establish a link with the attack on Sevastopol, the focus is on Ukrainian ports, the departure bases for naval drones. However, this was not enough to stop the attacks, especially as the West, also accustomed to the idea that war could be waged in the Crimea without provoking a nuclear reaction, began to supply long-range weapons.
On 29 April 2023, a huge fuel depot was destroyed near Sevastopol. On 6 and 7 May, the Sevastopol base was again attacked by aerial drones. On 22 June, the Chongar road, one of the two roads linking Crimea to the rest of Ukraine, was hit by four Storm Shadow airborne missiles, a first. On the morning of Monday 17 July, the Kerch Bridge was attacked again, this time by naval drone. This new attack on a strategic target was fully claimed this time by the Ukrainians in an official statement that also retrospectively acknowledged all the previous actions. Two days later, a large ammunition depot in Kirovski, not far from Kerch, was blown up, followed by another on 22 July in Krasnogvardeysk, in the centre of the peninsula.
But as the attacks on Crimea multiply, Russia's non-nuclear response capability is now reduced, as its stock of modern missiles is now at its lowest. The Russians are scraping the bottom of the barrel, mixing the few dozen modern cruise missiles they still produce each month with drones and anti-ship missiles, including the very old and very inaccurate KH22/32. To establish a link with the naval drone attack, these disparate projectiles are launched over several days at Ukrainian ports, Odessa in particular. These strikes have no military value and further damage Russia's image by hitting cultural sites in particular. Above all, they are a far cry from the crushing capabilities, even conventional, that we imagined before the war, or even from the salvos of Iskander or Kalibr at the start of the war. The strikes on Odessa are also a demonstration of powerlessness.
The Russian authorities have also lost a great deal of credibility in their ability to go beyond this impotence and go higher. Michel Debré explained that it was difficult to be credible in threatening to use nuclear weapons if you were otherwise weak. In this respect, it is not clear that the handling of the Yevgeny Prigozhin and Wagner mutiny on 24 June, from the terrible punishment announced in the morning to the arrangement in the evening, strengthened Vladimir Putin's nuclear credibility. To be a deterrent, you have to frighten people, and by dint of empty threats, the Russians are becoming less and less frightening. In short, Crimea is now fully part of the war, and if one day Ukrainian forces land there, first occasionally during raids, then in force - a very hypothetical and distant prospect for the moment - we already know, or at least we now believe, that this will not provoke a nuclear war. That's already a lot.
ChrisO_wiki (@[email protected])
Attached: 1 image 1/ The number of criminal cases for desertion from the Russian army has more than tripled since 2021, according to a new analysis by Mediazona. Meanwhile, likely due to chaotic record-keeping, captured Russian soldiers and wounded men in hospital face desertion charges. ⬇️
mastodon.social
Russia is suing for desertion the people who are captured or wounded in action. Presumably the killed in action are sued, too. How dare they die instead of winning a hopeless and criminal war to save Putin's fragile ego?
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They're on companies that were found to be supplying chips to Russia.
Double down.
NoKo is Russia's patsy in East Asia. Russia could end up arming NoKo in the future.
I'm way behind on this thread.
These guys forget that Congress is even closer to Russia than the BJP.
There was never any intention to arm Ukraine 'cause neither side thought Ukraine will fight back. The idea was Russia will take Ukraine (in 3 days according to Gen Milley) and then NATO would support Ukrainian soldiers in managing an insurgency which will slowly bleed Russia over the long term. That's why UAF were trained in NATO infantry tactics. And it didn't make sense to arm Ukraine with fighter jets and heavy weapons when the US expected the country to fall in just 3 days, transferring all those weapons to Russia instead. In the meanwhile the sanctions imposed will push Russia's exports down for broke.
Basically, this war was planned a long time ago in the West. It just played out completely differently from the original plan. The lack of help was deliberate.
In any case, arming Ukraine would have prevented war in the first place, so that wasn't going to happen by default.
Pakistani tactic. Surround military buildings with civilian infrastructure. And then hide military tech in civilian buildings like schools and hospitals. Even grain warehouses.
"Oh, look, the Russians attacked a shopping mall", while conveniently omitting the fact that the shopping mall was 5m away from a railway platform inside a military complex.
Same propaganda tactic that was gonna be used by the West in case India invaded Pakistan. Even terrorist bases are inside civilian centers with high population density.
Planned for, yes. But just planned, no. That's Russia's victimization bullshit. It's that same old agency-denying conspiracy theory saying nothing happens in the entire world unless it's planned by the CIA. Only the CIA are actors in the world, the rest is just a bunch of NPCs. Sorry, but no. Russia gets to own up its decision to instigate a fake insurgency, and then go on a full-fledged genocidal invasion. That rests entirely on Putin's regime.
Besides it's not like it's an unprecedented trick. They pulled that same fake insurgency gambit in Moldova and Georgia.
You're self-contradicting:
LOL you live in a parallel universe. 5m away? Did you mean 5km maybe? Because five meters away from where the missile dropped is the cheese aisle, not any sort of railway platform or military complex.
When Ukraine bombs a Russian military target, secondary explosions are heard for hours, proving that there were indeed a lot of ammunition hidden there. When Russia bombs a Ukrainian civilian target, where are the secondary explosions? Nowhere. The shopping malls, the hospitals, the schools, the grain silos, the cathedral, none of them exploded for hours from the stored military materiel because there was no military materiel stored there.
Schools and hospitals are the worst place to hide military stuff from Russia because it's proven since Syria that those are Russia's priority targets. You'd have better luck hiding your schools and hospitals inside a military base, in fact.
Prepare to face Russian armour in a potential future conflict with Moscow. This is the objective of Admiral Tony Radakin, Commander-in-Chief of the British Armed Forces. To accomplish this mission, London has asked Kiev to supply it with Russian tanks that have been captured or partially destroyed by Ukrainian soldiers. According to Sky News, these armoured vehicles are then truly "dissected" by a team of scientists and engineers who are trying to unlock the secrets of Vladimir Putin's army tanks.
"Meticulously studying these technologies helps us to answer several questions: how does their military equipment work? How can we defeat them? How can we get better armour to protect ourselves from their shells? How can we disrupt their communications? How can we ensure that we can penetrate their defences?" explained Admiral Tony Radakin.
"Meticulously studying these technologies helps us to answer several questions: how does their military equipment work? How can we defeat them? How can we get better armour to protect ourselves from their shells? How can we disrupt their communications? How can we ensure that we can penetrate their defences?" explained Admiral Tony Radakin.