I suspect it will be within full Ukrainian control within less than a year. It’s not a strategic priority. And it is costly to try and take inch by inch. So Ukraine is not going to be in any rush to take it back. But I also expect the priorities for Russian troops will be stretched extremely thin. Wagner appears eager to leave and blame the Russian MoD for failing to hold it.
The news today of Russian freedom fighters “liberating” a Russian settlement around Belgorod is the most interesting thing to happen in a while. Keep an eye on that one.
This sounds like outright coping. As far as I can tell (having paid next to no attention to this conflict), the media got the entire invested US population hyped up about some Ukrainian counter-offensive, retaking Bakhmut, Russian army out of ammo...and this is the result? Spinning the loss of the city while realizing the aftermath was near as makes no difference a human woodchipper?
I really hope we have an Iraq-style mea culpa over this conflict very soon, because far too many people are up to their chins in moral hazard by walking straight into the fog of war equipped with only talking-head propaganda and Hollywood-informed notions of how and why wars are fought.
They lost it inch by inch and paid a very high price. Why do you think they sent some of their best units there, like the “Da Vinci Wolves“, and lost good chunks of them, including, incidentally, said unit’s founder and national hero “Da Vinci“? This is not a secret, the obituaries are all public.
The NYT at least provides a historical record, though their day-to-day reporting involves a lot of historical amnesia. Take a look at this from 2002:
> "President Bush heads to Moscow this week for his first summit meeting there, one that his advisers call a historic start to Russia's integration with the West... By breeding and experience, Mr. Putin may be the most Westernized leader in Russian history... The American view, as espoused this month by one senior Bush administration diplomat, is that the summit meeting 'really puts the Russian-U.S. relationship on a firm course of long-term partnership, even a long-term alliance.'"
It's curious how little interest the media has in examining why this one-promising 'alliance' failed to materialize, and instead broke apart, with arms control treaties torn up by both sides and escalating belligerence as bad as the worst episodes of the Cold War, such that an outbreak of nuclear war is now an ever-present risk. Any cursory news search will reveal that both Russian and American nuclear forces have moved to what looks like a hair-trigger status, as evidenced by various large-scale nuclear drills, public statements, etc.
Some plausible issues are economic conflicts over who gets to sell fossil fuels to European markets (and where that oil money ends up), the general desire of military-industrial interests in both countries to keep military spending intact, and the general political opportunism involved in nationalistic chest-beating and demonizing of the enemy, etc.
Looks exactly like Grozny in 1995. As a child, I was told stories about Chechen atrocities that let to first Chechen war. I was led to believe that Chechens are wild, uncivilised, dangerous people who wanted to kill Russians in neighbouring regions. I was 7 years old, so I didn't question it.
After Russia's invasion in Ukraine and completely crazy propaganda which painted LGBT-friendly country with a Jewish president as literal Nazis I don't have any other choice but to confirm that Russia has been doing literal genocides in regions that wanted independence since 1995.
Let's see, in 1994 Ukraine supports military uprisal in Chechnya and aids separatists and their terrorist field commanders arriving from Saudi Arabia and Middle East [1] in a war against Russia on the territory of Russia. Namely, UNA-UNSO (a nationalist “patriotic” [2] organization in Ukraine [3]) leaders Anatoli Lupinos and Dimitro Korchinski led Ukrainian delegations to Grozny to meet with Chechen leaders. Fast forward in 1995, the UNSO fighters organized as the “Viking Brigade” under the command of Oleksandr Muzychko (a man who vowed to fight "communists, Jews and Russians for as long as blood flows in his veins" [4]), are illegally crossing the Russian border in Chechnya and join Mujahideen terrorists in their fight against Russian regulary army.
Twenty years after, when the chickens of the foreign policy had come home to roost in Donbass of 2014, someone nicknamed "golergka" thinks that everything that contradicts his worldview must be a "completely crazy propaganda".
Are you, or anyone you know, arguing against its actions in any forum that is Russian-operated and overwhelmingly pro-Russian in this war? Few people have a taste for deliberately exposing themselves to overwhelming social disapproval and hostility, and HN is not even primarily a political forum. As a hypothetical pro-Russian user, why would you choose getting yourself dogpiled and possibly risking a ban which would prevent you from using HN to discuss technology, rather than just steering clear of the topic?
Any such post is immediately flagged and dissapears. Actually it does not have to be in favor of Russia, it is enough that you contest "facts" as they are presented in the western media.
There's a very large difference between arguing in favor of Russia's actions versus attempting to posit any degree of complexity and nuance in explaining how we reached this point, who shoulders responsibility, what a realistic end to the conflict is likely to look like, etc.
The recent piece in Harper's does a good job of laying out "the other side" i.e. realism and historical context against the "Putin is a delusional Hitlerian madman bent on dominating Europe" theory: https://harpers.org/archive/2023/06/why-are-we-in-ukraine/
On the current trajectory though, the west's belief in its own eschatological hegemony looks like it's already collapsed the "unipolar moment" of the last 30 years and there's a good chance of us continuing to climb the escalation ladder into World War 3, so the narrative that none of the sowing of this conflict was remotely our fault is providing an important psychological bulwark to steel everyone's nerves for what we may reap.
Why bother? Surely the community + mods here would crack down on that, and this isn't a site where you can just throw out a load of nonsense and expect that no one will analyze it to find flaws. Add that to the low user count (a few million a month compared to hundreds of millions or more for things like TikTok, Reddit, Twitter and FB) and limited resources are clearly better spent elsewhere.
Plus ideologically the people who support Russia most vocally online are Western tankies, and I don't think those guys would do well here.
I keep Show Dead on, and I often see one or two pro-Russia posts whenever the topic comes up. However, pro-Russia sentiment on this war is corollary to a trollish sarcastic attitude, so they get flagged.
Zelensky now seems to be talking down Bakhmut, describing it as a pile of rubble not worth dying for...so why did so many Ukrainians die in the last few months trying to retake it?
people continue to not understand the way Russia wages war - since the time of Napoleon, Russia has embraced scorched earth and brutal attrition
Ukrainian military and third party analysts have been very clear on this for a long time. Bakhmut had little strategic value. But Russia was hellbent on taking it. So Ukraine was using it as a way to pin down Russian forces and kill them en masse as they used their stupid human wave tactics. It’s worked well.
Russia spent 9 months on this offensive. They got Bakhmut and lost immense combat power. Now Ukraine is readying a counter offensive.
The original reason for Russia to take Bakhmut was because it's a useful operational point on the way to Slovyansk and Kramatorsk, and pinching those cities out would have enveloped a decent fraction of skilled Ukrainian troops. However, the rout in Kherson and the Russian evacuation from all the towns there meant that there were no longer any forces pushing Slovyansk from the north, so the resulting operational picture no longer makes much sense.
The continued reason for Russia to take Bakhmut at that point is largely attributed to inter-service rivalry within Russia: Wagner was hell-bent on taking it, to prove greater competence than Russia military (conscript or professional) forces. Ukraine continued fighting to defend it because it gave them such favorable casualty ratios, although it has been suggested that the casualty ratio became unfavorable to Ukraine in the past few months. (Whether or not it was still a good idea for Ukraine to continue contesting Bakhmut rather than withdrawing entirely is a question that has no clear answer right now, and will be hard to properly assess likely until well after the war is over. Fog of war is hard!)
Your inderstanding about the way Russia, and the USSR, wage war seems a bit incomplete and influenced a lot by common, and often repeated, internet memes. Most of which are contain just enough truth, among the complete falsehoods, to be incredibly dangerous.
The turning into a pile of rubble was gradual, there was something worth defending not that long ago. But mostly I suspect it is because they have to kill the Russians somewhere. If they have a strategic advantage defending the pile of rubble they will cause more damage to the invaders than they will take themselves. Who ultimately holds the rubble is less important than what the battle cost each side.
It may have been a way to grind down Russian forces. The next few weeks will tell if this was also a trap for the Russians as the Ukrainians look to surround the city.
>so why did so many Ukrainians die in the last few months trying to retake it?
It's called fixing. War involves, many times, sending people to certain death in a hopeless situation to provide room for manouvre and force generation.
> Zelensky now seems to be talking down Bakhmut, describing it as a pile of rubble not worth dying for…so why did so many Ukrainians die in the last few months trying to retake it?
They didn’t die trying to retake it (since it hadn’t fallen to need retaking, until arguably very recently, though even that is disputed), they died trying to pin the Russian Army/Wagner down and kill them (and did kill vast numbers of them) to prevent advances elsewhere. Just as the Ukrainian effort now to encircle the Russian forces that are still fighting the Ukrainian forces in and around the citiy is not because control of the rubble matters, but because cutting off and removing from combat the Russian forces in the rubble matters quite a bit.
Awesome. I've got a backlog of programming tasks that I'd love to have completed for free. What's your github repo and email? You can get started right away.
lol, what are you talking about? You think that news sites should all be free?
If you think they do a good job, then I think it's worth the subscription. If you just dislike NYT in general then why are you complaining you can't read it?
I'll agree til the end of times regarding the asinine craziness of putting facts and journalism behind a financial barrier. That the most in need of correct information don't have the means to stay informed.
It's the worst of all angles. It's like junk food, the cheap and the easy wins to the detriment of all.
This thread stinks of cabbage to high heaven. Can you actually fool even yourselves anymore? Russians have lost the war a long time ago, it's barely a nasty procession that's left.
It's incredible to me how anyone — including Russians — can look at this and decide that Russia is on the right side of anything. Just flatly, what is wrong with you?
This was a real functioning city of 75,000 people. They did nothing except exist. Now it is ruins. What are you bringing to the world? What are you accomplishing? Do you think this city is liberated?
Even if you buy into the full Russian story of Ukraine "shelling Donbas for 8 years", do you see anything in Donetsk that could possibly compare to this? You've destroyed more in a year of war than Ukraine would have shelled in three centuries of skirmishing with the Donbas.
This level of destruction appears to be the outcome of modern urban warfare against an entrenched and motivated defender every time. At https://news.sky.com/story/the-battle-for-mosul-how-the-reca... and https://www.csis.org/analysis/real-lessons-mosul-and-sixteen... you can see similar pictures of Mosul, a city around 50 times the size of Bakhmut, after it was reconquered by a US-led coalition in 2017. Do you have trouble looking at it and deciding that the US is on the right side of anything? If yes, you will run out of "right sides" very fast; if not, your criteria for determining the right side are actually not mostly about the reduction of real functioning cities to rubble.
My guess is that they aren't happy about the day to day, but they've been sold a narrative that NATO's expansion into Ukraine was an existential threat to them.
You can look at it like the Battle for Fallujah. It was horrible and bloody - but in the global narrative of eliminating islamic extremists that pose a threat to the west the battle was sort of seen as an unavoidable
I'm not trying to make a moral equivalence between the two - just explain how one horrible thing in the context of something bigger might feel inescapable
Well, you have at least temporarily stabilized the Russian state (or at least Putin's position within it). I suspect this was the primary purpose, along with the belief that Ukraine and Crimea in particular are fundamentally Russian. Though things didn't go as planned and the longer this persists the more authoritarian (rather than simply depoliticized kleptocratic) the state must become to maintain it. It's a delicate balance, and the economic costs are high, but Putin is quite skilled at maintaining it. Concern for individual lives has never been a great concern in Russian wars.
From a state propaganda point of view, they have patriotically battled the Nazi Jew Gay Needle Freaks who, along with NATO and "the West", are plotting the extermination of Russia and right thinking culture, but are doomed to fail due to their degenerate beliefs. It doesn't need to make sense.
I think this situation is sad for all involved, but I do feel a big part of the blame lies with the USA who have been expanding NATO closer and closer to Russia's borders, even though Russia warned against this many, many, many times in the past. Ukraine was too close for comfort (kinda similar to Russia trying to plant nukes in Cuba during Cuba crises, now USA is doing the same).
All of this could have been avoided if USA respected Russia's wishes regarding NATO expansion [0].
And also, Ukraine bombing Donbass region for many many years prior to the war, also didn't help for sure.
And I don't understand why the USA and UK still tried to push this war, with Boris Johnson personally visiting Zelensky when Ukraine was close to signing a peace deal with Russia [1]. Boris Johnson blocked the deal, but why? What did Boris Johnson believe was to gain here?
These were the people of Bakhmut in 2014 [1], after the events of Maidan in Kiev. Notice the Russian flag. It's unfortunate that the Ukrainian State hasn't allowed the people of the city to choose their own way so that it had to come to all this destruction, I agree with you on that.
As for the buildings, they will be re-built, look at today's Grozny.
By that argument essentially no war, ever, is on the right side of anything. Perhaps that's your position, but I'm sure some folks would differ and believe sometimes war is justified.
If war is sometimes justified, then the argument comes down to goals and values. Russians, apparently, value "unification" and strategic buffer zones more than the world believed, and it might even be the West's fault this is such a protracted war.
[+] [-] maerF0x0|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fauxpause_|2 years ago|reply
The news today of Russian freedom fighters “liberating” a Russian settlement around Belgorod is the most interesting thing to happen in a while. Keep an eye on that one.
[+] [-] netbioserror|2 years ago|reply
I really hope we have an Iraq-style mea culpa over this conflict very soon, because far too many people are up to their chins in moral hazard by walking straight into the fog of war equipped with only talking-head propaganda and Hollywood-informed notions of how and why wars are fought.
[+] [-] rainworld|2 years ago|reply
They lost it inch by inch and paid a very high price. Why do you think they sent some of their best units there, like the “Da Vinci Wolves“, and lost good chunks of them, including, incidentally, said unit’s founder and national hero “Da Vinci“? This is not a secret, the obituaries are all public.
[+] [-] api|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] photochemsyn|2 years ago|reply
> "President Bush heads to Moscow this week for his first summit meeting there, one that his advisers call a historic start to Russia's integration with the West... By breeding and experience, Mr. Putin may be the most Westernized leader in Russian history... The American view, as espoused this month by one senior Bush administration diplomat, is that the summit meeting 'really puts the Russian-U.S. relationship on a firm course of long-term partnership, even a long-term alliance.'"
https://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/20/world/in-czar-peter-s-cap...
It's curious how little interest the media has in examining why this one-promising 'alliance' failed to materialize, and instead broke apart, with arms control treaties torn up by both sides and escalating belligerence as bad as the worst episodes of the Cold War, such that an outbreak of nuclear war is now an ever-present risk. Any cursory news search will reveal that both Russian and American nuclear forces have moved to what looks like a hair-trigger status, as evidenced by various large-scale nuclear drills, public statements, etc.
Some plausible issues are economic conflicts over who gets to sell fossil fuels to European markets (and where that oil money ends up), the general desire of military-industrial interests in both countries to keep military spending intact, and the general political opportunism involved in nationalistic chest-beating and demonizing of the enemy, etc.
[+] [-] Hypergraphe|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maerF0x0|2 years ago|reply
It made me think how post war Ukraine is going to be a potential target/victim of Chinese imperialism / evergrande style construction projects
[+] [-] golergka|2 years ago|reply
After Russia's invasion in Ukraine and completely crazy propaganda which painted LGBT-friendly country with a Jewish president as literal Nazis I don't have any other choice but to confirm that Russia has been doing literal genocides in regions that wanted independence since 1995.
[+] [-] ghostwriter|2 years ago|reply
Twenty years after, when the chickens of the foreign policy had come home to roost in Donbass of 2014, someone nicknamed "golergka" thinks that everything that contradicts his worldview must be a "completely crazy propaganda".
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mujahideen_in_Chechnya
[2] https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=una+unso&form=HDRSC3&fi...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainian_National_Assembly_%E...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oleksandr_Muzychko
[+] [-] dirtyid|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] schizo89|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TekMol|2 years ago|reply
Russia has 140 million people. How many of them are in favor of their government? Shouldn't some of them find their way to Hacker News?
[+] [-] 4bpp|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] timaios|2 years ago|reply
First hand experience.
[+] [-] pjc50|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] themgt|2 years ago|reply
The recent piece in Harper's does a good job of laying out "the other side" i.e. realism and historical context against the "Putin is a delusional Hitlerian madman bent on dominating Europe" theory: https://harpers.org/archive/2023/06/why-are-we-in-ukraine/
On the current trajectory though, the west's belief in its own eschatological hegemony looks like it's already collapsed the "unipolar moment" of the last 30 years and there's a good chance of us continuing to climb the escalation ladder into World War 3, so the narrative that none of the sowing of this conflict was remotely our fault is providing an important psychological bulwark to steel everyone's nerves for what we may reap.
[+] [-] maerF0x0|2 years ago|reply
Meanwhile we have distinguished political science professors being dismissed without rebuttal https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrMiSQAGOS4&t=1s
[+] [-] EA-3167|2 years ago|reply
Plus ideologically the people who support Russia most vocally online are Western tankies, and I don't think those guys would do well here.
[+] [-] happytoexplain|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TheLoafOfBread|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 0zemp2c|2 years ago|reply
people continue to not understand the way Russia wages war - since the time of Napoleon, Russia has embraced scorched earth and brutal attrition
[+] [-] fauxpause_|2 years ago|reply
Russia spent 9 months on this offensive. They got Bakhmut and lost immense combat power. Now Ukraine is readying a counter offensive.
[+] [-] jcranmer|2 years ago|reply
The continued reason for Russia to take Bakhmut at that point is largely attributed to inter-service rivalry within Russia: Wagner was hell-bent on taking it, to prove greater competence than Russia military (conscript or professional) forces. Ukraine continued fighting to defend it because it gave them such favorable casualty ratios, although it has been suggested that the casualty ratio became unfavorable to Ukraine in the past few months. (Whether or not it was still a good idea for Ukraine to continue contesting Bakhmut rather than withdrawing entirely is a question that has no clear answer right now, and will be hard to properly assess likely until well after the war is over. Fog of war is hard!)
[+] [-] hef19898|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NohatCoder|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ppeetteerr|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ramesh31|2 years ago|reply
It's called fixing. War involves, many times, sending people to certain death in a hopeless situation to provide room for manouvre and force generation.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabian_strategy
[+] [-] andyp-kw|2 years ago|reply
The city previously held strategic value.
[+] [-] rrauenza|2 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJnf_DDTfIVAddjHY3ss1...
[+] [-] dragonwriter|2 years ago|reply
They didn’t die trying to retake it (since it hadn’t fallen to need retaking, until arguably very recently, though even that is disputed), they died trying to pin the Russian Army/Wagner down and kill them (and did kill vast numbers of them) to prevent advances elsewhere. Just as the Ukrainian effort now to encircle the Russian forces that are still fighting the Ukrainian forces in and around the citiy is not because control of the rubble matters, but because cutting off and removing from combat the Russian forces in the rubble matters quite a bit.
[+] [-] samstave|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] cpursley|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wombat-man|2 years ago|reply
If you think they do a good job, then I think it's worth the subscription. If you just dislike NYT in general then why are you complaining you can't read it?
[+] [-] photoGrant|2 years ago|reply
It's the worst of all angles. It's like junk food, the cheap and the easy wins to the detriment of all.
[+] [-] jbirer|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] eMSF|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] justrealist|2 years ago|reply
This was a real functioning city of 75,000 people. They did nothing except exist. Now it is ruins. What are you bringing to the world? What are you accomplishing? Do you think this city is liberated?
Even if you buy into the full Russian story of Ukraine "shelling Donbas for 8 years", do you see anything in Donetsk that could possibly compare to this? You've destroyed more in a year of war than Ukraine would have shelled in three centuries of skirmishing with the Donbas.
[+] [-] 4bpp|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] contrarian1234|2 years ago|reply
You can look at it like the Battle for Fallujah. It was horrible and bloody - but in the global narrative of eliminating islamic extremists that pose a threat to the west the battle was sort of seen as an unavoidable
I'm not trying to make a moral equivalence between the two - just explain how one horrible thing in the context of something bigger might feel inescapable
[+] [-] kurthr|2 years ago|reply
From a state propaganda point of view, they have patriotically battled the Nazi Jew Gay Needle Freaks who, along with NATO and "the West", are plotting the extermination of Russia and right thinking culture, but are doomed to fail due to their degenerate beliefs. It doesn't need to make sense.
[+] [-] wsc981|2 years ago|reply
All of this could have been avoided if USA respected Russia's wishes regarding NATO expansion [0].
And also, Ukraine bombing Donbass region for many many years prior to the war, also didn't help for sure.
And I don't understand why the USA and UK still tried to push this war, with Boris Johnson personally visiting Zelensky when Ukraine was close to signing a peace deal with Russia [1]. Boris Johnson blocked the deal, but why? What did Boris Johnson believe was to gain here?
---
[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/feb/28/nato-e...
[1]: https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2022/09/02/diplomacy-watch...
[+] [-] sampa|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] farseer|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] revskill|2 years ago|reply
Noone said Russia is right, neither the Americans.
[+] [-] paganel|2 years ago|reply
As for the buildings, they will be re-built, look at today's Grozny.
[1] https://twitter.com/CheburekiMan/status/1660124734871453697/...
[+] [-] maerF0x0|2 years ago|reply
By that argument essentially no war, ever, is on the right side of anything. Perhaps that's your position, but I'm sure some folks would differ and believe sometimes war is justified.
If war is sometimes justified, then the argument comes down to goals and values. Russians, apparently, value "unification" and strategic buffer zones more than the world believed, and it might even be the West's fault this is such a protracted war.
for example see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrMiSQAGOS4
or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKpU1fEiTjQ (nb: "today" is Dec 2022 in this)