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Uncle Joe

(58,111 posts)
Tue Jun 6, 2023, 03:04 PM Jun 2023

Russians Are Unraveling Before Our Eyes



A wave of fresh humiliations has the Kremlin struggling to control the narrative.

(snip)

Then it got even more disturbing from the Russian perspective—and downright bizarre. Two groups calling themselves the Russian Freedom Legion and Russian Volunteer Corps—and claiming to consist of Russians fighting to liberate Russia from the Putin regime—crossed the border from northern Ukraine into Russia’s Belgorod region. At several spots along the border, the fighters encountered weak resistance and took over villages, as most Russian army units long ago abandoned the northern border areas for eastern and southern Ukraine. There, the bulk of the Russian army—or what’s left of it—now awaits the main thrust of Ukraine’s expected counteroffensive.

(snip)

Kyiv is cheekily claiming it has no control over the Russian guerillas, mirroring the claims that Russia itself made about the groups of armed men who took over Ukraine’s Donbas region in the spring of 2014. To add insult to injury, Ukrainian Twitter users promptly proclaimed the “Bilhorod People’s Republic”—using the Ukrainian spelling for Belgorod. Some of them joked that more than 100 percent of the region’s Russian residents had already voted in a referendum for the republic’s creation, parodying Russia’s establishment of its two illegal puppet states in the Donbas. Ukrainian hackers broke into several local networks and broadcast a fake announcement by a poorly imitated Putin, announcing an evacuation, a military mobilization, and the imposition of martial law in Belgorod and other Russian border regions. Meanwhile, the two groups of fighters released a stream of videos showing them inside Russia and promising Russians they would be liberated from the Putinists.

(snip)

And the Russians seem to be unraveling. Exhibit A is the stunning escalation of the bitter conflict between Wagner Group chief Yevgeny Prigozhin and the Russian Defense Ministry. On Sunday, Prigozhin published a video showing a Russian army lieutenant colonel—commander of the 72nd mechanized brigade in eastern Ukraine—who had been captured and interrogated by Wagner mercenaries. On camera, the commander confesses to having ordered his troops to fire on a Wagner unit. Russians firing on each other, private mercenaries capturing a high-ranking officer of their own country’s army—it all begins to feel a bit like a disintegrating state.

Even if the Moscow drone attacks and cross-border incursions do not have much of an impact on the general course of the war, their psychological effect on Russia has been devastating. The mood on the propaganda talk shows on state television, which usually veers between cheerily patriotic and fully genocidal, has lately been tilting toward defeatism. On One’s Own Truth, a daily talk show on Kremlin-controlled NTV, RT Editor in Chief Margarita Simonyan invoked the specter of 1917, when the Imperial Russian Army was routed by the Germans and Austrians in World War I, soldiers rebelled, and the regime collapsed. At a public forum on June 1, a high-profile parliament member of Putin’s United Russia party, Konstantin Zatulin, cast doubts on the war’s progress with unusual candor, calling its goals “unrealistic.” His party promptly announced it was investigating his remarks for possible censure.

(snip)

https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/06/06/russia-ukaine-war-putin-counteroffensive-belgorod-border-drones-moscow/

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AZ8theist

(5,339 posts)
11. Ukraine losses are secret.
Wed Jun 7, 2023, 12:29 AM
Jun 2023

That chart above is an estimate from the Ukrainian Army, so it is speculation.
Take those numbers with a grain of salt.

Russia is getting it's ass kicked, for sure. Just the numbers are in question.

GopherGal

(1,999 posts)
5. If Everything Trump Touches Dies...
Tue Jun 6, 2023, 04:33 PM
Jun 2023

the world may end up owing that sack of stuff a debt of gratitude.

Of course, it'd be a far cry from balancing out all the evil things TFG has perpetrated.

AdamGG

(1,275 posts)
6. The problem is, it seems that the Russians can unravel indefinitely
Tue Jun 6, 2023, 06:00 PM
Jun 2023

Unless it begins to affect Putin's domestic poll numbers and the Russian people become dissatisfied. Putin's game is to outlast the western support for Ukraine and if the Russian people are willing to continue like this, it could go on for a long time.

I wish there was some way we could get truth to people in Russia and influence that.

rubbersole

(6,523 posts)
9. It is still very concerning that Putin is crazy...
Tue Jun 6, 2023, 07:33 PM
Jun 2023

...and his desperation could very easily lead to using tactical nukes. He is insane after all.

Uncle Joe

(58,111 posts)
13. A nation is only as good as its' information sources;
Wed Jun 7, 2023, 02:55 PM
Jun 2023

and it seems too many of them are more intent on rehabilitating a morally and ideologically bankrupt political party just as a means to keep our long known, dysfunctional, corporate-centric (authoritarian) status quo in place instead of letting it die a natural death and for our nation to evolve and move on.

So to answer your question in short, for too many Americans it's no.



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