Have we talked about the sinking Russian tankers yet?

Wow so scary. I can't watch those YouTube videos of ships on the high seas trying to survive huge waves. The videos are accompanied by the song Hoist the colors.

Russians go PLOP

I feel badly for the merchantmen on the ships. They’re not fools. They know the ships are not designed to withstand the open water.

I feel sorry for the Russian people. Too often lately they have been fools, and those who know better are pretty powerless against Putin.

It’s been fun to watch. Surprised Puddin Head Putin hasn’t blame Zelensky or Biden or maybe he has?

Welp.

They could solve all of this by getting the fuck out of Ukraine. But Putin thinks his orange bitch is going to save him.

Nah, honey. You’re too far gone. You’re going to drag everyone down with you who owes you.

Like a sinking tanker, there will be no escape from the depths for anyone who claimed aboard the ZS Putin.

R6, if they withdraw from Ukraine with nothing after years of fighting, half a million casualties and billions of dollars spent, it’s likely Putin would be overthrown. And he doesn’t want that.

Все это благодаря моей подруге Джули. Она сказала капитану и штурману плыть на север. Последнее, что я слышал, Джули смеялась всю дорогу до Киева. Джули — настоящая пизда.

Making such a shitty choice as to invade Ukraine and learning nothing other than to not only continue on the journey of destruction with that toilet bowl of a plan, but to double down and ask for more turds to be added in with all of his new "genius" ideas for winning the "3 day excursion"? You need flushed.

R9, thanks to flyover American white morons, it’s likely the USA will pressure Ukraine starting January 20 to accept territorial loss. So Putin will win.

Putin’s gonna be booted anyway.

Even his orange bitch and the GQP cunts can’t save him. He’s a dead man walking.

[quote]Russia must export petrol to survive.

What's "petrol"? Is it a nickname for "petroleum"? How adorable!

Go back to the drone thread, Defacto. You’re less out of your depth there.

R8-I’m quite sure that’s French.

Russian Luxury Liners Experiencing Difficulties

[quote]Все это благодаря моей подруге Джули. Она сказала капитану и штурману плыть на север. Последнее, что я слышал, Джули смеялась всю дорогу до Киева. Джули — настоящая пизда.

Я не пизда! Но да, я сказала навигатору ехать на север, и я смеялась всю дорогу до Киева!

Шерил, у тебя все еще проблемы с вонючей вагиной?

For such a supposed "world power," that country and its infrastructure is seemingly held together by scotch tape.

That's the thing, R17: the ONLY reason Russia's a world power in the first place is because they devoted such a farcically huge percentage of their GDP – over a 100+ year period – towards their military, hence the reason they still have more nuclear ICBMs than we do. What they do *not* have is much in the way of actual home-produced product, aside from oil and mineral deposits. 99% of the country is unpopulated for a reason: it sits atop tundra or semi-tundra that makes it impossible to grow anything outside of something like a greenhouse.

One of the main reasons the Soviet Union collapsed was because of economic collapse at the hands of dictator-like "comrades" who routinely trafficked in unvarnished graft. Sound familiar?

Most people somehow don't remember this, but while the Berlin Wall fell in '89, it still took over two more years for the Soviet Union to collapse – and it only happened after Soviet hardliners attempted a coup against Gorbachev, who responded by formally dissolving its remainder (though IIRC all of Eastern Europe had escaped the Iron Curtain by then).

So: their economy is fucked, and their most plentiful natural resource is the one that's just as fucked, namely oil. And regardless of how the war ends, Russians will be pariahs for the foreseeable future, much like Israelis will (though at least they have an actual justification for retaliating, if not slaughtering tens of thousands of Gazan women & children).

The biggest question remaining is whether there's any real chance China would be willing to prop them up, and the worse the war gets, the less likely it gets that that'll happen. Much like Mariah Carey, China has problems of her own.

[Quote] That's the thing, [R17]: the ONLY reason Russia's a world power in the first place is because they devoted such a farcically huge percentage of their GDP – over a 100+ year period – towards their military, hence the reason they still have more nuclear ICBMs than we do.

Yes, and when the Soviet Union fell and the smoke cleared on the independence of many of the former “socialist republics,” the Russians had to figure out how to conduct themselves.

They decided they couldn’t possibly maintain the colossal military of Soviet days. What they did instead was form a smaller military to work patiently toward bringing some of those breakaway republics or regions back into the Russian orbit. Basically a colonial army like that of the British Empire in the late 19th century.

So if the tide was right for it, they could do stuff like intervene in Chechnya. Or invade Georgia.

If things got bad with the west, they had an enormous stockpile of Soviet-built equipment they could pull out of storage, parked in lots across Russia. Vast fields of thousands of armoured vehicles.

The attack on Crimea was another good example of an essentially colonial venture to bring an historic zone of the tsarist empire back into Russian hands. After that, intervention in the Donbas and other areas of southeastern Ukraine all continued to work according to plan.

Then came the act of hubris, the assumption that Ukraine was ripe to fall. A grave miscalculation.

This has spelled disaster for Russia’s post-Soviet roadmap. The smallish army just wouldn’t do. And as the war progressed, and equipment was destroyed, the Russians needed to tap that reserve of old Soviet vehicles. Some of them had sat for decades, rusting away, rodents nesting in them and chewing through the electrical system. Those that could be made to run again were sent off to Ukraine — and promptly destroyed.

So Ukraine has wrecked their colonial plans. No more small army for eastern adventures. No more reserve of vehicles in case of a wider war. Everything is being burned like firewood in the furnace of the war.

Their only hope at this point is Trump pressuring Ukraine to accept territorial losses in exchange for peace. But even if they get that, and can regroup and reinvade Ukraine in a few years, their reputation has been dragged through the mud.

Meanwhile Putin is giving oil to North Korea for a few ratty troops, is having his generals taken out in Moscow streets by Ukrainian covert ops and his Middle Eastern and Mediterranean strategies got rolled over in about a weekend with Assad's fall.

He might relocate his Mediterranean presence to Libya, R20.

The warlord running that failed state is apparently quite deceptive.

I forgot to mention, the Russians are giving the Norks access to more current military tech than their current ancient hardware.

Which the South Koreans are thrilled about.

If he wants to throw bad money after bad, R21

[quote] I feel sorry for the Russian people. Too often lately they have been fools, and those who know better are pretty powerless against Putin.

Soon, Russians will be in a position to feel sorry for Americans for the same reason.

Let’s hope not, r24, but I think we all know what you mean.

Something I was just thinking about — as I mentioned above, the Russians are pulling old vehicles out of storage to send to Ukraine. Including a kind of tank called a T-62, which hasn’t really been used by most powers as a frontline vehicle since the Yom Kippur War.

When some Russian 19 year old backed those T-62s into the lot and then sealed up the hatches, Bill Clinton wasn’t even president yet. Let that sink in.

With all this talk about Russia's outdated military apparatus and horrible equipment, why the hell would Ukraine sit down and agree to give up territory at this point? They could hash out a plan to stop the war, with elements that both sides can agree to (no NATO membership for now, etc) - but why give up land? Return Ukraine's boundaries to what they were two years ago.

R4 seriously? There's enough of them that if they actually get out in the streets in huge numbers and riot, Putin will collapse. I want to see their gas and electric infrastructure bombed, St Peters Square in flames and their airports inoperable. Expansionist, fascist, racist nation.

R26. Ukraine made HUGE leaps in defense after the walkover in Crimea, and during the low intensity conflict in Donbas. They are even better now after two years of desperate national defense and after being given some advanced weaponry by the U.S. and European countries.

But all that said, Russia has over TEN TIMES the GDP as Ukraine, and six times the population. Also Russia is a military industrial state. They have a big fleet of bomber, they have cruise missiles, they’ve got major tank production capability.

So it’s truly amazing they’ve fucked up this badly, and truly inspiring that Ukraine has done so well. But this is still a huge country picking on a small country.

What’s really holding Putin back is a kind of unwritten agreement between him and the Russian people — I mean the western Russians. They have abdicated political rights, and he has to keep them out of his military adventures. So he can’t go full-on conscription.

He’s mostly been using illiterate, poor easterners so far. Those Koreans were a godsend.

If Russia really wanted to, they could annihilate Ukraine. But then Putin might be facing his own 1917.

Just for clarity’s sake, I should point out it’s not just shitty old tanks that Russia is sending. They are also doing everything they can to send the latest T-80BVM there as well.

But they need so many tanks, they have to send the old ones too. Tanks are getting destroyed super fast.

One thing you might have seen is that a lot of Russian tanks lose their turrets when hit — this is because Russian tanks are quite small. Everything is very close together, so if there’s a fire inside the tank, it reaches the ammunition supply almost immediately. And the ammo supply is right under the turret.

Thanks r28, that was informative. So basically, his unspoken agreement with the wealthier, better educated western Russians is keeping him from a full-tilt invasion of Ukraine? Because he'd have to conscript the privileged sons of wealthier, more prosperous Russians.

That’s pretty much it, r30.

If Russians have no say in politics, they don’t want to go die in his wars.

You probably remember the Russian troops stealing dishwashers and other household appliances from Ukrainian homes. Seems ridiculous until you realize these Russians are dirt poor and backward easterners who have never seen a clothes dryer.

There is some conscription in the west but it’s often foreign workers (!!!) and criminals (!!!). The mobiks (cannon fodder) were usually from the east.

When they fought alongside Wagner, the Wagner commanders would send them in waves to be slaughtered. Then they’d note where the defenders were and send better equipped Wagnerites. So basically recon using human bodies as bullet magnets. Pretty heartless.

One ship was built in 1973 and recently refitted. Cut in half and then another midsection welded in. It seems like an unsafe thing to do. I hate to think of all the Marine life events like this destroy.

That really just adds insult to injury, r32. They took these craft, already unsafe on the high seas, then lengthened them — making them even less safe.

Yes, R33 I agree. The thought of working on one of those ships is terrifying.

There’s a lot of talk about the two that sank. (Obviously.) I wonder how many got through?

Seeing conflicting reports of a third tanker either sinking or discharging petrol into the Black Sea.

The Russians are an interesting people. They’re often painfully inept, but they are so persevering, they often win anyway.

terrible

The Ukrainians FORCED Russia into this war. Vladimir Putin had no choice!

Yes r38, that’s like the people who apologized for the nazi invasion of Poland that started WWII. There’s always someone around who’s keen to craft their own self-serving version of reality.

Tulski is a Russian asset, which was my point. And Dump wants her in charge of all of the intelligence agencies. What could possibly go wrong???

The Black Sea is not the "high seas," OP.

Try to keep up.

What? The Black Sea is the high seas in both senses of the term.

Legally it means seas out of any nation’s territorial waters. The Black Sea is so, and for instance the U.S. Navy regularly operates there despite its proximity to Russia. (And other nations.)

And the Black Sea is both very deep and very turbulent. Here’s a video of waves on the shores. It’s as turbulent as the Atlantic Ocean. It’s very funny when a clueless person says something wrong and then smugly adds, do keep up. 🤡

Russia has lost four or five ships in the past week. Most of them were old or poorly maintained, but the most recent explosion and sinking happened to a newer ship.