Comments by "Nattygsbord" (@nattygsbord) on "Ukraine’s Kursk Incursion Continues: Can Russia Halt It?" video.

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  4. Russias dilemma is either stopping the incursion by moving troops used in their offensives in Ukraine, and thereby making those offensive plans take a halt for a few months and losing momentum and valuable time - and time is not on russias side, as the west will soon start to outproduce russia in military gear. The other alternative is to do nothing. And that will allow Ukraine to smash russian conscripts formations that lacks armor support. And more land could be grabbed in the region for very little cost for the Ukrainians. Russia will of course remain silent and pretend that nothing has happened, and that the Ukrainians just have taken control over a few kilometres of farmland or something. However being so deep inside russia is far from meaningless. Not least from a propaganda standpoint. Now can do all vatnik bots arguments fall flat to the ground and those cockroaches arguments gets seen for what they are - russian talking points and not sincere wishes for peace. All talk about trading land for peace can now be used by Ukraine as well. All talk about retaking historical lands can be used by Ukraine as well. All arguments of liberating land where the population speaks the same language as the invading country - can also be used by Ukraine. And all talk about a proxy was is as true for russia as for the other side, if not even more so. I think taking the russian provinces can be understood as simply taking a piece of land, because why not. If Ukraine wins it then it have a bargaining chip in peace negotiations. And if they lose it, then so what? nothing of value has been lost. Ukraine never sincerely hoped to keep any of those lands. Their interest is protecting their own country and restoring the 1991 borders by retaking land that was stolen from them.
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  9. Of course their losses are low. They are walking into a weakly defended part of the frontline. There are no bunkers there. And the russian army has proven itself to be very bad at fighting wars. And its conscript soldiers are of an even lower quality than the volunteer troops fighting in Ukraine. Ukraine has taken 1000 square kilometres of land that is mostly just open fields and is therefore easy to conquer and hard to defend. And its value is very small, so I doubt that Ukraine would just sacrifice men like crazy to take it when it is also fighting against a numerically larger enemy. So with all that vodka logic debunked. Can we say that Ukraine is digging in and try to hold the land taken. But they will not try to keep this land at all costs. Dislodging the large Ukrainian force from this area requires a lot of investments from russia. And that will only be possible by moving troops from other fronts to russia. And that means russia have to abandon its push into Ukraine. And after a year of heavy losses are russian numbers too low to both make costly meatwaves and to defend russia. Now it has to choose what it wants to do more. Putin wants more meat assaults, but he realize that he cannot afford to let Ukraine expand its bridgehead into russia even more. So he now make a strategic repositioning. Which means weeks lost for him. And that means that the west will get time to ramp out artillery production and out-produce russia. And russias last hope was to get saved by Trump and Vance. But now it seems most likely that they will lose the election.
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  12. Ā @worldinsights930Ā  Empire means just taking land by force. And that is a bad thing in itself. Of course can plots of land join an empire out of free will like small states in Germany joining Prussia in creating a new country called Germany. Or how small states joined Giuseppe Garibaldi to create Italy. However things do become problematic with empire when freedom and independence and democracy gets taken away without the consent of the people living in one area. So multi-ethnic empires are mostly just held togheter with the iron fist of a dictator. And if he no longer rules by fear and opression, then do the empire instantly falls apart. This is what happened to Yugoslavia, and to the Soviet union and its dominance over Eastern Europe, or with modern day Iraq when Saddam died which now sees fighting between Sunni and Shia, and between kurds and ISIS. It ends in a tragic bloodbath. To avoid opression, lack of freedom and fascism there must be consent by the people that are being ruled over. They must feel like they benefit from being a part of the empire. Having one country just dictating the rules to another country (like Nazi-Germany ruled over Norway) is not a nice way of ruling an empire. And that is not an empire I wanna be a part of regardless of how nice uniforms the soldiers have, or how amazing technologies that country invents or how nice military parades it makes or how popular the leader is in his home country. So for this reason am I pretty skeptical of the idea of empire. It usually requires someone holding the empire togheter with an iron fist. During medieval times was multi-ethic empires with strange borders often created, like Spain that included the Netherlands, Italy and Portugal, or Austria that included Hungary, Belgium, Italy, and the Balkans. But today we no longer sees that. Multi-ethnic states like Switzerland, Canada and Belgium exists, but nearly everyone from those places are not much in favor of those artifical states. I do not think that diversity is a strength but rather a weakness. If diversity was a strength, then I think that africans would rather thank us Europeans for creating such strange artifical borders for newly created African states that just lumped togheter large numbers of african tribes randomly togheter into one country and thereby creating diversity. It turns out that many instead accuse European colonial powers of having created unnecessary ethnic conflicts by doing so, and hampered Africas development instead of helping it.
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