Comments by "Ash Roskell" (@ashroskell) on "Russia Can Do Nothing About Crimean Bridge Strike" video.
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 @nomcognom2414 : Much of that, “incompetence,” you are observing is a result of straight forward corruption on rather grand scales. That’s why people like Shoigu get to run the armed forces, despite having no military background, other than the creeping militarisation of the emergency response department he was put in charge of. His background is civil engineering and he was responsible for architecture projects before then. His one qualification is that he has been unerringly loyal to Putin, who ignores his dipping into the coffers for personal gain, as Putin does that himself.
It’s the reason why Putin was suddenly faced with the stark reality that his armed forces looked better on paper than in reality, back when he was wondering why his best troops at that time, the Spetsnaz were being wiped off the map by Kyiv’s home guards. Not many generals had the tanks and weapons their paperwork claimed, but many of them had lovely homes in London and Florida, with polished sports cars and tremendous yachts.
Putin’s hopes that a long, protracted war will weaken the west’s resolve seemed reasonable at first, given the west’s behaviour in recent history, especially our flaccid response to his invasion of Crimea, but his problem is now about finding enough cannon fodder to throw in front of Ukrainian guns. It was all fine and dandy while he had stacks of people from the outskirts of the empire that no one in Moscow or St Petersburg would miss, and the Wagner Group rounding up rapists and murderers from Russia’s jails. But they’re running desperately low on that resource now, which was the primary reason for Prigozhin’s, “negotiating tactic,” in the first place.
Neither Prigozhin or Putin want to be seen as plunging people of the main metropolitan areas into this war, bringing it home and making it so real for every Russian. How to maintain the illusion of a, “special military exercise,” when everyone in every city in western Russia has lost someone, and now the mothers grouping together to make those videos appealing for better conditions for their sons include the mothers of famous people, or politicians? Yet they have already been forced to dig into the student populations of urban areas, making the receipt of their degrees conditional on accepting their signing up papers, in person.
And how long can they use these units of inexperienced young troops for all the logistics and administrative tasks, away from the worst of the action, while they burn through their experienced veterans and the last of their expendables?
That clock is ticking more loudly for Putin, as his atrocities sicken and enrage the western world, stiffening our resolve and causing entire battalions of foreign volunteers to spring up in Ukraine. The west grows increasingly impatient with the pusillanimity of their politicians, constantly demanding more weapons and resources for Ukraine to win this war, while Russia is the side growing exhausted and wondering if any of this was worth it?
Now that NATO has doubled its border length along the Russian frontier, and Russia’s coffers are running lower each day; now that the Ruble is worth one US Cent, literally, and the standards of living get worse; now that oligarchs are just not having any fun abroad anymore; now that incursions from the Russian Brigade have exploded the myth of Russian invulnerability and the Wagnazis have humiliated Putin, still defying his direct orders to this day, with Putin powerless to do a damned thing about it . . . I think the last straw for Putin is the day when Ukraine takes a patch of land back that Russia had control of before they started this war. On that day, even your average Russian on the street will see that it is empirically proved on every front, be it propaganda or fact, that Russia has gotten the exact opposite of what it wanted, all for the sake of one, easily replaced, oligarch.
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