Russian lawmakers authorize Putin to use military force outside the country, Part II

[Labster]

A lot has happened since I last wrote here, from a mobilization to liberation of vast amounts of territory.

But let me start here:  Russia is like a fractal of crappiness, and the closer you look, the more plain awful it gets.  Unlike other places called plain awful, they do not have square eggs, but they do have a "partial mobilization" of their country.  This is important to to defend the borders of Russia from silly Ukrainians who still think that the this newly eternal Russian clay is theirs.

So what is a partial mobilization?  Basically a full mobilization, done poorly.  Last time I shared a video of press gangs walking out with a class of university students.  Police officers are getting draft notices that their superiors are telling them to ignore, army recruiters are ignoring this because the police superiors didn't fill out the requisite paperwork.  Basically, it's drafting anyone and everyone of an appropriate age, except Muscovites, naturally.

This looks a lot like a full mobilization, especially to those who didn't expect to be drafted.  This has led to long lines of people leaving the country at any place that will still take them.  Due to new visa restrictions, that's mainly Georgia and Finland right now, at least in the west.  These people aren't necessarily anti-war -- some of them have big ol' Z's on their car in solidarity with fascism.  They're anti-me-being-in-war.

But in a way, who can blame them?  It's starting to become well-known that people exempt from the draft have been conscripted, despite the law saying otherwise.  But this is Russia, right?  Some recruitment officers gave and interview saying that yes, they have made some mistakes, but the conscripts are already at the front lines, so what can you do?  What can you do, indeed.  Well, this is Russia, so it's going to get worse.

Papa Putin has noticed this, and he is going to punish these recruitment officers severely for implementing his plan to draft everyone in sight.  And how are they accomplishing that?  Well, they're reassigning them to press gangs in different oblasts entirely.  And here I thought they were an Orthodox country, but that is straight out of the Catholic playbook.

But let's go deeper here.  Those conscripts are already in Ukraine Novorussya?.  I mean, it's been like a week, right?  They don't need all that much training, because why would a backwards country like Russia train its soldiers.  Actually, the Soviet design pre-2010 was to have a standing army heavy on officers, and rely on mobilizations when they need armies.  Training was supposed to happen when conscripts joined these armies.  But then Russia decided that they wanted a professional army, like all of the cool countries.  They did this poorly, of course, resulting mainly in saving money on the armed forces.  They acted like they could call the conscripts up like in the old days, but had a decade or so to lose all of the expertise and records needed to do that efficiently.  Thus the disgrace of drafting today.

Okay, but they have the conscript now, somehow, and could send him to the front line.  The only problem is, well, they don't have equipment to send.  This is the country that recently misplaced 1.5 million winter uniforms.  A few months ago, we heard about them handing out hundred year old guns to recruits, now we hear about conscripts making it to the front with no guns.  But hey, they can do like in Halo, just take guns from dead allies or enemies -- I'm sure Private Conscriptovich can handle it just as well as a fully armored Master Chief, right?

HIMARS kept destroying all of the large depots and ammo dumps, so Russia got smart and started spreading them out all over the place.  There is one small problem with this: if your logistics are garbage, you can't get anything out of the ammo dump.  And then you run away, and leave it behind for Ukrainians to find.  So that's not going to help arm the conscripts, either.

So what people are doing is buying their own gear and arms to take with them, and taking loans to do it.  Will these soldiers even make it to their first payday?  So we have got to the stage that random people off the street have to take out loans for the glory of dying for mother Russia.

But as our good friend Professor Mikage would say, "Go deeper, much deeper."

None of this is going to make a lick of difference to the war effort.  I suppose some of these conscripts might get lucky and kill a Ukrainian or two.  Reinforcements can't get in to reinforce the southern Kherson front due to bridge damage, and the army is in a full rout now on the northern Luhansk front.  About a week ago we called it the Kharkiv front, but Kharkiv oblast has been fully liberated, and Ukraine has crossed the Oskil River.  What difference will they make now?  With zero training, they can only lower morale in an army that is already retreating advancing backwards.

And of course, the war is fundamentally unwinnable on a grand strategic level, as it has been for months now.  Russia continues to show weakness, the West continues to show power projection.  Yet the war continues for domestic policy reasons.  And now they're sending civilians to the front with no training and pretending they are soldiers.  On the bright side, it's doubtful they actually have the logistics to send 300k men to the front right before winter.

Does it get any worse?  Well... Russia just annexed some land, so those people are perfect recruits for the Russian Army.  They're already there, even.  I mean, fuck the Geneva Convention, right?  Russia is giving them 30 days to opt out of Russian citizenship, which sounds a lot like opting for a firing squad to me, but perhaps not.  Perhaps just a gulag.


-- The battlefield is turning into an absolute rout on two fronts, with significant losses in territory in both Luhansk in the north, and north of Kherson in the southern theatre.
-- Bridgeheads across the Oskil River in the north were successful, and Russians continue to retreat east towards their reinforced lines.
-- Meanwhile in the south, advances continued down the Dnipro, over a couple days the front moved 30 miles and Russia is now occupying Mylove.
---- From Russia with Mylove?
-- Russian advance in Bahkmut (middle front) is not doing so well.  Ukraine recaptured six weeks of losses in six hours, as Wagner mercs went north to reinforce Lyman (and were too late).
-- The Ukrainian Surrender Hotline has been getting a lot of calls.  Even newly mobilized Russians call to ask how to surrender, just in case.
-- Conscripted Russian Soldier Immediately Surrenders to Ukraine Forces.  Ah, the plan worked.
-- Russians realized how fucked they are, in real time
-- Russia holds a definitely fake referendum to annex parts of Ukraine.  They didn't even bother to mark the ballots before counting them.
-- Putin holds rally accepting the "offer" of annexation from Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson after "referendum"
-- The next day, Lyman falls to the Ukrainian army, so what part of Donetsk are they annexing?
-- Actually, no one seems entirely clear on what they were annexing, with no borders mentioned, then contradictory borders?
-- Plausibly it was unclear as a way to give Ukraine a chance to negotiate a peace, but, like, Ukraine is crushing it right now.
-- Zelensky says there will be no treaty with Russia while Putin reigns
-- Now that these people are once again Russian, Russia has imposed severe travel restrictions after the referendum in an attempt to stop partisans, conscript, and forcefully control the population that just voted like 99% that they wanted to be part of Russia.  COVID lockdowns were great, why not have some more, voters thought, probably.
-- Slovakia approves NATO accession for Scandinavia.  Remaining are Turkey, Hungary: as expected.
-- Ukraine wants an accelerated application to NATO.  They are just done with Russia's bullshit.
-- So far only Baltics and Eastern Europeans have expressed support for joining NATO.  Oh, and Canada.
-- US and UK are both at: we just can't say aloud that we want you to join because of certain isotopes.
-- It looks like the Membership Assistance Program is all they're gonna get for now.
-- While NATO won't extend protection to Ukraine, Europe is already under the umbrella of Ukrainian protection right now.
-- US Congress approves another $12 billion in aid for Ukraine.  Lend-Lease also goes into effect now, if Congress decides to stop allocating cash directly in the future.
-- UK Foreign Secretary vows, "We will support them until the last Russian tank is dragged away by the last Ukrainian tractor".
-- Sounds like the usual British offer: to defend Ukraine down to the last Ukrainian.
-- Reddit posts a map of a roughly equivalent territorial loss from the US to Canada, and asks if Americans would accept it.  Response in general:  Can our state join Canada too?
-- Zelensky is asked his favorite joke about Putin.  He wants so badly to be a comedian in this clip.
-- Russia and Putin make vague nuclear threats but nothing new is said, no new red lines.
-- Let's just forget about what would NATO would do after a tactical nuclear strike in Ukraine -- what would Russia do?  How would Russian logistics even work around that?  Could they even supply their own armies?  What if it just didn't explode?
-- Czechia annexes Kaliningrad enclave Královec after "referendum", because why not?
-- Seriously, if they want it, why not.  Most countries don't want land with Russians in it, and I'm all for Lake NATO.
-- Ukraine completely destroys 58th Combined Arms Army of Russia
-- Evidence of war crimes is starting to show up.  What to do with a pile of gold teeth stolen from victims?
-- Russian Pravda uses image from old version of Europa Universalis IV game to promote annexation of Novorussia.  The map shows Russia annexed all of Persia and Manchuria too, which I'm sure their allies appreciated.
-- If they like that game, I'm sure this image is the future plan
-- @elonmusk decided to wander in and tweet an appeasement proposal for Ukraine.  Unfortunately, it wasn't successful in distracting from his other embarrassing news, and he decided at long last to buy Twitter for reals this time.
-- Elon is not a Russian apologist, and has had a long twitter beef with the head of the Russian space agency.  He is a media whore, though.
-- Actually SpaceX and particularly Starlink has proved very valuable on the battlefield: Ukraine's GIS-based artillery program can hit targets 100 times faster than US forces can.
-- Russian Navy pretends they exist by hanging out with their mate China in American waters
-- Armenia, Vietnam, and Kazakhstan have suspended payment from Russian Mir payment cards.  Mir: It's nowhere you want to be.
-- Blast from the past: the original "what air defense doing", Mathias Rust flew a Cessna from Helsinki to land near Red Square in 1987.
-- Belarus is, uh, joining the war?  Sometime in winter?  I'll believe it when I see it.