Comments by "Marc Joly" (@emjizone) on "Ukraine is Being Sent the M2 Bradley, German Marder, and AMX-10 RC" video.

  1. 17:29 Soledar is not just a village surrounded by farmland. It's also a salt mine with extended underground network that can be used to store ammunitions with zero risk of destruction by artillery, and it's also the place of a railroad to Bakhmut. So don't take it as non-strategical.
    95
  2. ​ @peterpan7903  I can't tell if it was planned in advance. In any case, loosing ground near a strategic point is always dangerous, and is certainly not just a trick to kill more Russians. Undergrounds may have been used both for hiding, retreat and surprise counter-attacks. It is also possible that Ukrainians, knowing they had not enought time left to take all the ammunitions they had hidden in undergrounds, made them explode so the Russian forces can't use them. Undergrounds are both a way to strike the rear of an assault and a possible weakness in the fortress. It's a feature of the place that both sides have to manage. The more they use it, the less secret and less useful it will become.
    2
  3.  @joshuaashton1929  They have made progress. A costly progress they may lose very quickly later, maybe, as they collapse. But for now, they actually took more land than they have lost around this city. They also managed to fix many Ukrainian troops there to make sure those same troops don't attack them elsewhere. Giving time to less desperate and suicidal personnel to build defences in many other places. Perhaps their plan was also to buy time for international propaganda to convince foreigners to stop helping Ukraine, by creating a sense of boredom and frustration. But in fact, the methods used only convinced more people that it is necessary to defeat the current Russian government as soon as possible, for the sake of everyone and even for the sake of Russians.
    2
  4. ​ @georgiy7882  Actually, most Europeans care about Ukraine not only because Russia is killing people there at a rate never seen since WWII, but because they see Russia taking the infamous authoritarian path. They've seen this kind of scheme in their history books (Alexander, Julius, Attila, Carolus, Genkis, Napoleon, Hitler, Staline, etc.), and already know how it goes and how it ends. - Transnistria: they barely gave a shit. - Chechnya: they woke up in horror but though it was an isolated event. - Georgia: they turned extremely suspicious and decided to enter prevention mode. - Ukraine: they decided this was the last chance for Putin to prove suspicions wrong, to prove that he genuinely cared about people more than himself. Now that no doubt remains as to the nature of the character, the socio-economic machine to rid Europe of the last dictator is on. It is heating up, slowly but surely. More than 450 million people are contributing to it, in their own way. Europeans are also concerned because the Russian government supports ideologues who explicitly state that their countries are the next enemies to attack after Ukraine. It is not as if they can ignore an explicit threat. Don't be surprise people care when their names are called. You are right about something that hasn't changed for millennia: Europeans don't believe it until they have no choice. They don't do much prevention. European didn't gave a shit about Austria, barely cared about the Czech Republic (despite the admitted feeling of having made a mistake), and needed the invasion of Poland to wake up, very late. And even then, they waited to see if it was magically over. It wasn't, of course. But they are learning. Their response time to attempts at imperial domination is getting shorter and shorter. They are already much quicker to react than before the Roman Empire. Where you are totally wrong is about European being ok with crimes done by US government. Maybe you weren't in Europe when G.W.Bush was considered the man to kill, to see it. The limitation of his mandate in time and the separation of powers in the USA saved the relationship between the USA and Europe. Otherwise, if he had become a permanent dictator in the USA, and if he had started to conquer lands, it is sure that Europe would be at war, at least cold or economic, with the USA, if not worse (hot war, nuclear war, etc). He knew how to make himself hated, but was limited by US citizen. This is the advantage of democratic regimes: it doesn't eliminate the evil at all, but it limits it. A difference between Ukraine and several countries where the USA went to kill people and commit crimes (not as many kills per year as Russia in Ukraine nowadays, but still. It's not a competition anyway), is that Ukrainians don't spit on the face of European tourists, investors, good dealers or weapon dealers, and they send more students in European universities too. I know it's never easy to be friend with everybody, but that's were diplomatic relations and cultural exchanges counts.
    2
  5.  @georgiy7882  And does this great victory of Russia over Finland make Finland part of Russia, now? or an economic and military ally of Russia maybe? or the opposite? It's still a defeat in the hearts and in the heads. No mater what is put on papers, it's a loss of the most important: friends. By attacking first, Russia is defeating itself over and over.
    1
  6.  @georgiy7882  True, true. It worked. It worked mainly because of the nazi regime distracted allies of Finland so they could not help Finland in time, but it worked. I wonder how many times Russian governments can repeat this before the whole world gets so fed up with it that they decide to get rid of it.
    1
  7.  @georgiy7882  "You guys" ??? I wasn't there. I guess none of the commenters here on Messenger was born. Hitler himself distracted allies of Czech. Germany was the military power to fear at this time, not the USSR. It took several years for the tide to change, both in the USSR and in Western Europe. For example, the UK and France where still mobilising their troops for the Czech republic when Hitler decided to invade Poland. So late ! He made the diplomatic game in Western Europe even more difficult as he indirectly helped Poland and Hungary so size Czech land before attacking Poland, knowing allies of the Czech Republics were also allies of Poland or Hungary. It was not only a diplomatic issue but also a logistic one: Germany wasn't going to let enemy troops go there through its territory. The case of Finland is a little different, as the UK was planing to send troops and weapons to Finland by sea, not by land.
    1
  8. 15:41 He did what he could (not what he should, but hey...). Except that war is basically bad, its modest and temporary military success is "not too bad" for a private company fighting a state army of a state that has about 40 economic allies around the world. It was just plain dumb to try.
    1
  9. Sorry for the past tense: it is still plain dumb to try.
    1
  10. 5:36 Don't worry: there is no way for Spain to start a war against Portugal. Not only it's impossible to convince the current Spanish population to conquer land by force, but Spain is now — in spite of its History or maybe because of its History — one of the most democratic country in Europe, with a lot of activism for human rights and against corruption and a lot of international exchanges, so there is no way some militaristic leader stay in charge long enough in Spain to turn as authoritarian as Franco and sacrifice Spain's membership into UN, EU, NATO, etc... and turn all its allies into enemies. The Spanish royal family would certainly oppose such a calamity. The people would very certainly oppose it, too, by all means. There is no more compulsory military service in Spain and most Spanish people have never touched a gun in their life, and just hate real war. The provinces are quite autonomous in Spain, and such an extreme political betrayal at the state level could trigger a new Spanish civil war, to the point that Spain cannot attack any other state without being paralyzed by internal conflicts. Spain has more tanks than Germany mainly because Germany have been demilitarized and then focused in the use of small quantities of very high quality military equipment, while Spain has kept all sort of things, even gifts from the Soviet Union dreaming of using Spain as a military base in western Europe. Trust me, they aren't going to use them, ever, but for military parade or defence as last ressort. Remember that Spain does not have a nuclear deterrent system of its own, and that, although it is a member of NATO, its diplomatic relationship with the United States of North America is more recent and less strong than most western Europe countries. You can therefore consider its armor arsenal as an alternative deterrent system, not so much as a tool of conquest.
    1