Who is winning?
Since the launch of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the information space around the war has been obsessed with this deceptively simple question, and the constant new iterations of answers to it.
In the hands of those fighting the narrative war, from officials on both sides, online cheerleaders, armchair generals, and a certain world leader who likes to talk about who has the cards, the answers differ radically, but all are delivered with consistent venom, emotion, and
Because it didn’t halt, m*scovia can and will throw people into war, we literally can’t. Out of 10 conscripts 5 will leave or aren’t fit enough due to medical condition, 3 more will be incapacitated in the first weeks-month after basic training, that leaves 2 at best. And those soviet fucks generals are still there, Syrsky - our commander is one of them. We still train and deploy insane amounts of infantry, our doctrine when it comes to (fpv) drones is behind m*scovites. They are taking remains of dumb Donbas slowly. We are insanely lucky that at least some small amount of sane people can force at least some of the command to do something not out of soviet books. We are lucky that they (enemy) have same problems but worse. And our drone forces are insane in how inefficient they are when it comes to people, because they have almost carte blanche on technical and educated people we are in situation that ground forces (dunno how to translate) are lacking in not just technical but in generally smart people, when drone forces use people with decades of technical experience as simple drone pilots. There are like two people (including myself) in my whole batallion that can deploy vpn and explain what and why are they doing. It’s all very bleak tbh.
ugh, Putin’s mouthpiece-- I was wondering when you’d show up.
so, dismissing all of your uncited and uncorroborated Russian propaganda, your mischaractarizations of… well, everything, and your obviously and, frankly, treasonous characterizations of “your” country’s war disposition (despite years’ worth of evidence to the contrary), I wonder: since you’re posting these comments in English-- who do you think is your audience?
I’m curious because I really don’t know how your efforts could bear any fruit here (in the English-speaking world), and if you’re either being paid to troll or are doing it for person gain, I simply can’t imagine what benefit that would be. You’re spinning such a fantastic fiction, I don’t know who could possibly be delusion enough to believe it…
The only result here, in particular, is that you come off as a joke.
ugh, Putin’s mouthpiece– I was wondering when you’d show up.
I would say that esc is most likely being sincere here, and on Ukraine’s side and against putin.
It is a known problem in ZSU that many of the high-ranking officers were trained before year 2014. Before year 2014 the military in Ukraine was trained just the same was as it still is trained in Belarus and in the Russia. The further towards the very top your officers are trained post-2014, the better it is for you. But if you are in a unit where all the officers all the way to the top are pre-2014-trained, then yes, the only thing they can do is to rotate the handle of the meatgrinder. That’s why the Russia is not able to win the war.
But, changing the highest officers in middle of an actual war would cause such a chaos, that only more soldiers’ lives and only more territory would be lost in the chaos during the transition from old officers to new, too inexperienced, ones. They are doing that change, but because of the war, that change is horrendously slow.
There really isn’t much anything else that can be done than live with some units using the unnecessary meatgrinder-y pre-2014 tactics.
If esc is in one of those units where the leadership is merrily using him as a feed for a meat grinder, then yes, I can see why his motivation is not the highest. But even there: A meat-ground unit is doing more to defend Ukraine than not having any unit at all would. It is useful and important that also those units are manned! Esc-am slava for that! Maybe his units is not managed well enough to actually gain any new ground, but it’s keeping the orcs distracted from elsewhere, where better-managed troops are making progress.
So, homes, please be kind to esc. A soldier in one of the most exceptionally mismanaged units in the whole of ZSU is understandably disgruntled. Let’s be happy that he has the unimaginable willpower it takes to not flee under such conditions. He is needed and he is important. They are maybe using only 10% of his capability, but with the capability he has, even those 10% are a LOT!
Eventually the Russia will leave all of Ukraine, including Crimea. That will happen once their logistics are destroyed using long-range sanctions. The military action is only a small-ish part in the whole victory, but it is one without which the victory would be impossible. There is no way for the Russia to avoid having to eventually leave Ukraine, because the Russia will eventually crumble from within. In 2022 it was said that it will happen late 2025. That turned out to be an optimistic assumption, but it looks like 2026 is really the year where either there will be a conclusive victory, or we will at least be in a situation where the victory is already unambiguous, but the enemy will still fight until the last centimetre, just like their spiritual predecessors mindlessly did until May the 8th, 1945.
Oh, ok. I just assumed because of the context and because I could tell that English isn’t your first language— sorry.
But I enjoyed the dry wit ツ
But the Ukrainians do have a great sense of humor— especially their president, Vladimir Zelenskyy, who, before he was president, was an accomplished satirist and comedian. If you have Netflix, you should check out his show, Servant of the People, which almost predicted how he became president, and he had to quit because he became president. Which is also, itself, kind of funny.
I’ve watched all of season one, and part of season two. A very recommendable thing to watch indeed, also partially because it shows very well what kind of place Ukraine is in the eyes of Ukrainians!
There is a big gap between what news report and what people in the military see. I’m writing this in english because it’s an english speaking forum, and discussing what I personally see and feel isn’t in any way treasonous.
I don’t know what you think that this is supposed to prove, because it doesn’t prove anything.
The proof is in what you have done, by posting what you have. And you are judged by us seeing the absurd things you post and say in contradiction to the mountains of evidence to the contrary.
Now show a similar photos with a military id, lol. (fyi camo on the background is ММ-25, and the costume itself is штурм-1 iirc which are very recent and won’t be in any ai training materials)
Anyway, what I was trying to explain in my first post that you dismissed as pro-m*scovian propaganda, is that 1) most ‘analysts’ operate from very far away and with very limited and often public information. 2) m*scovites are dangerous and inhuman to their own 3) they are adapting very well to drone warfare and have a lot of resources put into this war. (examples where they are far ahead of anyone including us are: visual odometry and non-gnss positioning systems, fiberoptics fpv drones, crpa/anti-spoofing gnss antennas)
It’s very simple to say meh they are dumb fucks that are going into meatcube, they are, but not all of them. There are sadly plenty of very well trained people and smart engineers. There are “judgement day” pilots and “rubicon” for example and “rubicon” now has like 10 of drone pilot schools, and they train decent pilots by hundreds every month.
m*scovia isn’t struggling, they aren’t losing ground every week, they don’t actually feel the war, it’s not even funny when news report that they are losing and soon there is going to be peace. At best we get another ten years before another war in such scenario.
Yeah why on Earth would anyone want to pretend to be Ukrainian and sow distrust and criticism.
It’s not like Russians ever do that. Like Davel@lemmy.ml for instance, a pure born and bred American who just happens to spout things like “reality has a well-known Russian propaganda bias” among others. It’s not like Russians would just go online and tell lies, right. Right…?
You should try reading Sun Tzu, swell guy, for his time, he explained in plain terms things like: you should supply your army, it’s better not to go into obvious trap, etc., among other things there are statements about not dismissing abilities of your enemy. I do get it that you aren’t in military and probably really far away from this war, so any news that you get are extremely biased in the direction of “soon this conflict will end and everything will return to how it was”. Anyway, yes, we are in strategic offence, in no way does it make this our win. There is a single win condition for Ukraine as a nation - collapse of the fucking empire, and nobody will allow this. It will be preserved in some way.
Win condition for m*scovia is essentially obtained, proles will gladly eat whatever, biggest cities are alright - nobody cares about some siberian or whatever natives dying. And we are under constant pressure to not hurt the enemy too much under threat of witholding help.
Reality holds a realpolitik bias, so we are being supported just enough so we won’t fail too fast but not enough to win in any meaningful way (cue kherson offensive plans leaking out and blocked by unpredictable chain of events that slowed down material supplies, zaporizzha offence being stopped and other funny stories).
And, yes, criticizm is normal, our president is a strongman-pussy and we should have made not nukes, god forbid, it’s alien technology unubtainable with modern technology, but at least our own artillery gunpowder plants, our own shells made by millions a month, other things that don’t require alien technology from the last hundred years in some measurable quantities and not in the last year or so (supposedly).
Ask yourself why is it that units themselves manufacture Blyskavka/Molniya/Lightning drones for example. They cost less than $500 apiece, can fly up to 50 km with tank mines, making one requires close to zero technical knowledge, any workshop can make them by hundreds every month. And we are using our own money, and limited time, and limited resources to make them.
So yeah, I think there are plenty of reasons to view our efforts as half-assed at best and treasonous at worst, when facing an enemy that has tens of millions of people in reserve and aren’t afraid to use them.
Oh you’re actually trying to reason that Davel is actually American?
Hilarious. Is it you again, Davel? I wouldn’t be surprised, most of the Ruskis have dozens of alts.
The win condition for Ukraine is “hold on until the world laughs at the pathetic Ruskis so much they collapse inward”
Thanks for the essay, Vanja.
Or are you seriously trying to pretend to be a high military strategist while implicitly pretending that Russian disinfo doesn’t exist? I’ll grant that sometimes Russia is good at spy craft, but your ineptitude to accept reality for what it is always ends up fucking you right in the chulo.
I have no idea who davel is, I’m not a high military strategist, average guy conscripted into military, before that I worked in IT.
What you describe isn’t a win condition, it’s a cope that will prolong this war for another round and we probably will collapse by the end of this round. I’ve moved out of occupation twice, this war goes for most of my adult life (last 12 years). Sorry if I’m a bit less optimistic about m*scovia collapsing soon due to devastating whatever, that surely will work this time. Only real deterrent is nukes - a lot of them, but our only plant that can easily give us usable nuclear device in a months is closed. Because Chernobyl scary.
Because it didn’t halt, m*scovia can and will throw people into war, we literally can’t. Out of 10 conscripts 5 will leave or aren’t fit enough due to medical condition, 3 more will be incapacitated in the first weeks-month after basic training, that leaves 2 at best. And those soviet
fucksgenerals are still there, Syrsky - our commander is one of them. We still train and deploy insane amounts of infantry, our doctrine when it comes to (fpv) drones is behind m*scovites. They are taking remains ofdumbDonbas slowly. We are insanely lucky that at least some small amount of sane people can force at least some of the command to do something not out of soviet books. We are lucky that they (enemy) have same problems but worse. And our drone forces are insane in how inefficient they are when it comes to people, because they have almost carte blanche on technical and educated people we are in situation that ground forces (dunno how to translate) are lacking in not just technical but in generally smart people, when drone forces use people with decades of technical experience as simple drone pilots. There are like two people (including myself) in my whole batallion that can deploy vpn and explain what and why are they doing. It’s all very bleak tbh.ugh, Putin’s mouthpiece-- I was wondering when you’d show up.
so, dismissing all of your uncited and uncorroborated Russian propaganda, your mischaractarizations of… well, everything, and your obviously and, frankly, treasonous characterizations of “your” country’s war disposition (despite years’ worth of evidence to the contrary), I wonder: since you’re posting these comments in English-- who do you think is your audience?
I’m curious because I really don’t know how your efforts could bear any fruit here (in the English-speaking world), and if you’re either being paid to troll or are doing it for person gain, I simply can’t imagine what benefit that would be. You’re spinning such a fantastic fiction, I don’t know who could possibly be delusion enough to believe it…
The only result here, in particular, is that you come off as a joke.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I would say that esc is most likely being sincere here, and on Ukraine’s side and against putin.
It is a known problem in ZSU that many of the high-ranking officers were trained before year 2014. Before year 2014 the military in Ukraine was trained just the same was as it still is trained in Belarus and in the Russia. The further towards the very top your officers are trained post-2014, the better it is for you. But if you are in a unit where all the officers all the way to the top are pre-2014-trained, then yes, the only thing they can do is to rotate the handle of the meatgrinder. That’s why the Russia is not able to win the war.
But, changing the highest officers in middle of an actual war would cause such a chaos, that only more soldiers’ lives and only more territory would be lost in the chaos during the transition from old officers to new, too inexperienced, ones. They are doing that change, but because of the war, that change is horrendously slow.
There really isn’t much anything else that can be done than live with some units using the unnecessary meatgrinder-y pre-2014 tactics.
If esc is in one of those units where the leadership is merrily using him as a feed for a meat grinder, then yes, I can see why his motivation is not the highest. But even there: A meat-ground unit is doing more to defend Ukraine than not having any unit at all would. It is useful and important that also those units are manned! Esc-am slava for that! Maybe his units is not managed well enough to actually gain any new ground, but it’s keeping the orcs distracted from elsewhere, where better-managed troops are making progress.
So, homes, please be kind to esc. A soldier in one of the most exceptionally mismanaged units in the whole of ZSU is understandably disgruntled. Let’s be happy that he has the unimaginable willpower it takes to not flee under such conditions. He is needed and he is important. They are maybe using only 10% of his capability, but with the capability he has, even those 10% are a LOT!
Eventually the Russia will leave all of Ukraine, including Crimea. That will happen once their logistics are destroyed using long-range sanctions. The military action is only a small-ish part in the whole victory, but it is one without which the victory would be impossible. There is no way for the Russia to avoid having to eventually leave Ukraine, because the Russia will eventually crumble from within. In 2022 it was said that it will happen late 2025. That turned out to be an optimistic assumption, but it looks like 2026 is really the year where either there will be a conclusive victory, or we will at least be in a situation where the victory is already unambiguous, but the enemy will still fight until the last centimetre, just like their spiritual predecessors mindlessly did until May the 8th, 1945.
SLAVA UKRAJINI!
(Tag: @esc@piefed.social )
Ah, Ukrainian sarcasm.
Well done ;) 🌻
Nah. I am a Finn. I do hear Ukrainian almost daily in my life, but my own roots are elsewhere.
Oh, ok. I just assumed because of the context and because I could tell that English isn’t your first language— sorry.
But I enjoyed the dry wit ツ
But the Ukrainians do have a great sense of humor— especially their president, Vladimir Zelenskyy, who, before he was president, was an accomplished satirist and comedian. If you have Netflix, you should check out his show, Servant of the People, which almost predicted how he became president, and he had to quit because he became president. Which is also, itself, kind of funny.
It’s also just a good series.
I’ve watched all of season one, and part of season two. A very recommendable thing to watch indeed, also partially because it shows very well what kind of place Ukraine is in the eyes of Ukrainians!
Dunno, you tell me which country I’m serving.
There is a big gap between what news report and what people in the military see. I’m writing this in english because it’s an english speaking forum, and discussing what I personally see and feel isn’t in any way treasonous.
I don’t know what you think that this is supposed to prove, because it doesn’t prove anything.
The proof is in what you have done, by posting what you have. And you are judged by us seeing the absurd things you post and say in contradiction to the mountains of evidence to the contrary.
Now show a similar photos with a military id, lol. (fyi camo on the background is ММ-25, and the costume itself is штурм-1 iirc which are very recent and won’t be in any ai training materials)
Anyway, what I was trying to explain in my first post that you dismissed as pro-m*scovian propaganda, is that 1) most ‘analysts’ operate from very far away and with very limited and often public information. 2) m*scovites are dangerous and inhuman to their own 3) they are adapting very well to drone warfare and have a lot of resources put into this war. (examples where they are far ahead of anyone including us are: visual odometry and non-gnss positioning systems, fiberoptics fpv drones, crpa/anti-spoofing gnss antennas) It’s very simple to say meh they are dumb fucks that are going into meatcube, they are, but not all of them. There are sadly plenty of very well trained people and smart engineers. There are “judgement day” pilots and “rubicon” for example and “rubicon” now has like 10 of drone pilot schools, and they train decent pilots by hundreds every month.
m*scovia isn’t struggling, they aren’t losing ground every week, they don’t actually feel the war, it’s not even funny when news report that they are losing and soon there is going to be peace. At best we get another ten years before another war in such scenario.
as soon as you do the same 💋
of course! because it’s propaganda!
every info source says otherwise. that Zalinky even says the Patriot Day parade can go on! What pride you must have!
lol
Шановні. Глибокий вдих і видих. До перемоги ще далеко і багато роботи. Дуже багато. Але шанс є і він вимагає працювати гуртом.
Really long three day operation huh
Yeah why on Earth would anyone want to pretend to be Ukrainian and sow distrust and criticism.
It’s not like Russians ever do that. Like Davel@lemmy.ml for instance, a pure born and bred American who just happens to spout things like “reality has a well-known Russian propaganda bias” among others. It’s not like Russians would just go online and tell lies, right. Right…?
You should try reading Sun Tzu, swell guy, for his time, he explained in plain terms things like: you should supply your army, it’s better not to go into obvious trap, etc., among other things there are statements about not dismissing abilities of your enemy. I do get it that you aren’t in military and probably really far away from this war, so any news that you get are extremely biased in the direction of “soon this conflict will end and everything will return to how it was”. Anyway, yes, we are in strategic offence, in no way does it make this our win. There is a single win condition for Ukraine as a nation - collapse of the fucking empire, and nobody will allow this. It will be preserved in some way. Win condition for m*scovia is essentially obtained, proles will gladly eat whatever, biggest cities are alright - nobody cares about some siberian or whatever natives dying. And we are under constant pressure to not hurt the enemy too much under threat of witholding help.
Reality holds a realpolitik bias, so we are being supported just enough so we won’t fail too fast but not enough to win in any meaningful way (cue kherson offensive plans leaking out and blocked by unpredictable chain of events that slowed down material supplies, zaporizzha offence being stopped and other funny stories).
And, yes, criticizm is normal, our president is a strongman-pussy and we should have made
not nukes, god forbid, it’s alien technology unubtainable with modern technology, butat least our own artillery gunpowder plants, our own shells made by millions a month, other things that don’t require alien technology from the last hundred years in some measurable quantities and not in the last year or so (supposedly).Ask yourself why is it that units themselves manufacture Blyskavka/Molniya/Lightning drones for example. They cost less than $500 apiece, can fly up to 50 km with tank mines, making one requires close to zero technical knowledge, any workshop can make them by hundreds every month. And we are using our own money, and limited time, and limited resources to make them. So yeah, I think there are plenty of reasons to view our efforts as half-assed at best and treasonous at worst, when facing an enemy that has tens of millions of people in reserve and aren’t afraid to use them.
Oh you’re actually trying to reason that Davel is actually American?
Hilarious. Is it you again, Davel? I wouldn’t be surprised, most of the Ruskis have dozens of alts.
The win condition for Ukraine is “hold on until the world laughs at the pathetic Ruskis so much they collapse inward”
Thanks for the essay, Vanja.
Or are you seriously trying to pretend to be a high military strategist while implicitly pretending that Russian disinfo doesn’t exist? I’ll grant that sometimes Russia is good at spy craft, but your ineptitude to accept reality for what it is always ends up fucking you right in the chulo.
I have no idea who davel is, I’m not a high military strategist, average guy conscripted into military, before that I worked in IT. What you describe isn’t a win condition, it’s a cope that will prolong this war for another round and we probably will collapse by the end of this round. I’ve moved out of occupation twice, this war goes for most of my adult life (last 12 years). Sorry if I’m a bit less optimistic about m*scovia collapsing soon due to devastating whatever, that surely will work this time. Only real deterrent is nukes - a lot of them, but our only plant that can easily give us usable nuclear device in a months is closed. Because Chernobyl scary.
Between the Eyes- Бойова пісня для України - Battle song for Ukraine Silmien välliin
“Between the eyes of RRRRUUUSSKKKKIIIEEESS, that’s how we deal with NAAAAAZIIIS”