I do not think moving nukes to Belarus is going to promote peace. The people of Belarus may decide to get rid of Putin's puppet and take control of the weapons then turning them on Moscow.
I actually think it's a fairly inconsequential matter with regard the current conflict over Ukraine. The intention is for Ukraine to join NATO, at which point nukes were already going to be on NATO's border. It may become an issue later on should the Belarus / Russia relationship deteriorate, or should Belarus' leadership become a serious concern for NATO. I.e. as long as Russia maintains control of the nukes then there's not really an issue, is there? They may, but I'm assuming Russia will maintain strict control as part of any agreement.
Moderator note: Saint has been warned for posting pure propaganda, as if his expressed opinions are self-evidently true. Controversial claims should be supported by appropriate argument and/or evidence.
Two kids stood on the opposite sides of a street spitting on passers-by. One succeeded 5 times, the other 8 times. The moral: (the) good always wins.
Just skimmed all this, it's interesting to see all the confident predictions from a year ago that haven't held up. It's also interesting how confident certain people remain despite having been consistently wrong. But perhaps the most interesting thing of all is how Saint has been transparently trolling everyone for over a year and STILL people seem to be engaging with him instead of just ignoring/blocking/banning him. Wild stuff...
The special military operation continues to go precisely as planned, it's just that the plans are made after the battles rather than doing it NATO's way and planning ahead.
I think that my original post in this thread, made about a month before the actual invasion, still holds up. http://sciforums.com/threads/putins-invasion-of-ukraine.165158/#post-3690830 It explain's Putin's motivation rather well. It details his military options as he probably saw them at the time. And it predicts that if it came, the invasion would 'go big', which is what we saw. Where it went seriously off track, is in overestimating Russian military prowess. But in my defense, I'll say that the US Pentagon was making similar assessments. (They figured that it would take Russia maybe six days to enter Kyiv and replace the existing Ukrainian government.) That's probably what Putin was expecting too. In January 2022, nobody was predicting that a full-scale war would still be in progress more than a year later, or that Ukraine would have dealt Russia several major defeats in the interim.
Russia has obtained NATO's war plans for Ukraine and totally not altered them in any way before presenting them to the public. With only 12,000 casualties in total, Russia is having such an easy time in this war that they decided to make it more of a challenge by taking thousands of T-62's out of museums and storage depots to send to the front.
And now Finland has joined NATO and Sweden is not far behind. This could not be going worse for Putin.
Leaked reports seem to suggest that there have been a total in excess of 310,000 so far in the war - killed and injured. c.190k+ on the Russian side, c.120k on the Ukrainian. The report says, however, that "the Pentagon says it has 'low confidence' in the figures, due to gaps in information, operational security and deliberate attempts, probably by both sides, to mislead." In terms of deaths, the leaks (if genuine) suggest 16-17.5k on the Ukrainian side, although on a pro-Russian site those numbers appear to have been assigned to Russian fatalities, with the numbers reversed for Ukrainian (so 61-71.5k).
I was initially very skeptical (oh no! I'm turning into JamesR!) that the leaked reports were real. But the reaction of the US government suggests that they were. Or at least that they want somebody (the Russians?) to think they are real secret information. I expect that deep within the US and allied governments, somebody has a good idea what actual casualty figures are. The President of the European Commission Ursula Van der Leyden famously blurted in November 2022 that "more than 100,000 Ukrainian military officers have been killed so far." (She probably meant military personnel in total, not just officers.) https://twitter.com/thenobodyz/status/1597895930165878786 Then in January 2023 the Norwegian Army Chief of Staff said that Russia has suffered over 180,000 military casualties (both killed and wounded) and the Ukrainians "over 100,000". Ukraine keeps their casualty numbers a closely guarded secret, tells outsiders not to believe any numbers that don't come from their government, and say that they will release the figures when the time is right. Somebody clearly seems to have altered the figures. The question is whose hands these documents have passed through, what else was changed, and how good the information was in the first place. I'm hugely doubtful. The more interesting details in the documents seem to be revelations about Ukrainian ammunition shortages. They make it sound like Ukraine is very low on surface to air missiles and the GMLRS precision-guided rockets fired by HIMARS. For their part, the Russians are very skeptical about the whole thing. They believe that the leaks were made intentionally and are low-balling the Ukrainian supply situation in hopes of enticing the Russians into making mistakes. A psychological-operation in other words. And if so, it seems rather amateurish in my opinion. (A Minecraft site on Discord?) If these were real briefing papers for the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, it's even worse, since by all accounts the information they contain seems to consist of little that couldn't have been gleaned from open sources. If that's the best that vaunted US intelligence can do, it's just sad.
The altered figures falsely showing Russia taking low losses compared to Ukraine's apparently originated from a New Jersey woman named Sarah Bils who recently retired from the US navy, and even before retiring had been running a pro-war podcast pretending to be a separatist Russian Jew from the Donbass, "Donbass Devushka". Apparently she was also the one originally responsible for alerting the general public to the leaks coming from Discord. Personally I would have actually considered her little scam to be brilliantly patriotic if she'd taken all the money donated by the dumbass Russian fascists drooling over her and given it to Ukrainian war victims and defenders instead. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/ar...n-running-pro-Russian-group-posted-files.html
Hi, Who is dying (and in what numbers) - look at who is not dying. - The Statistics That Kept Countless Allied Fighter Planes In The Sky https://worldwarwings.com/the-statistics-that-kept-countless-allied-fighter-planes-in-the-sky/ - The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable https://archive.org/details/10.1.1.695.4305/mode/2up === Never waste a good crisis. (never waste a (good) war to learn) === Think much, say little, write less.
