>>2481060>As I've mentioned previously, any anxiety that this conflict ends with Ukraine the victor and fresh as a daisy is almost certainly a result of the complete media blackout in the west about the effect this conflict has on Ukraine, all we're *allowed* know about the frequent nights of hundreds of drone strikes against Ukraine is the targets are all civilian and we're *allowed* to see the results only when they imply the target was indeed civilian and we're assured that Russia is unsuccessful at even that because there's always minimal reported civilian casualties that prove 99% (or 110% some days) of Russia's drones are failing to hit their civilian targets, attention is completely directed away from even entertaining the idea that the targets might not be civilian after all and that's why casualties are low and there aren't 1000s of photos of craters caused by downed and ineffectual Russian drones.. because there aren't any. I don't think they leave much in the way of craters (they just don't have that kind of kinetic and explosive power), but just a general comment about war propaganda: I was hanging out with my brother over the weekend, and he follows some of the media/propaganda more than I do (and a bit more sympathetic to the Russian side than I am), but he was showing me a lot of stuff on the Ukrainian side about how "their hateful kamikaze drones murdered our civilians" but then you read about it, and it's like one guy got hit by a drone. (The enemy drones are always kamikaze drones, our drones are just FPVs.) He also recently tried calming down an older liberal woman that we know who was hyperventilating about imminent war because those Russian drones entered Polish airspace… like Putin is trying to kill us!!! But we don't know if those drones wound up there because of electronic warfare jamming or they just lost the connection or went off course for whatever reason. (And this liberal woman was like "DO YOU LIKE PUTIN.") That said, modern weapons are really destructive and a missile loaded with cluster munitions that explodes in a populated area can just massacre everybody on the street. I've seen videos of the aftermath of that stuff in Donetsk after Ukrainian impacts and it's really ugly, of course that has happened with Russian missiles that have landed in Ukrainian cities.
>Kellogg and the Ukrainian military is just directing attention towards the seemingly immovable front as indicative of Russia's suffering, but then the Ukrainians have the considerably more aggressive military in this conflict with its military goals being expressly territorial based (i.e only 1991 borders counts as victory and nothing less, to now considering any amount of territory to be worth meatgrinding for) compared to Russia's more open ended goals. Like Russia retracted from Kiev and regrouped in the East as soon as it was obvious Ukraine wanted to do this the hard way, while Ukraine is institutionally incapable of cutting their losses with villages. Attention directed that way, not the way Kellogg wants, begs the question of who is likely losing more retain this "stalemate"?Well open-ended goals can be dangerous. I think the question regarding Russia's goals is, like, what is Russia's political objective? So that's the first question because the aim of the military is to align with that objective. But political objectives can also evolve during the war as a result of a mismatch between what you're trying to accomplish (as an ideal) and what you *can* accomplish in actual material terms in reality. So, in the beginning, I think it was pretty clear that the Russian objective was regime change in Ukraine and that was the "why" of the war, and they had a plan to take Kiev early on or at least put enough pressure on the city (and other Ukrainian cities) to collapse the government so Ukraine would give in. This plan could've worked because Kiev wasn't particularly well defended. But they underestimated the Ukrainian army, and didn't commit enough forces in the beginning, so there was a mismatch between means and ends. So now Russia was involved in a war with a geographically huge country with its original objectives having gone kablooey, so the Russian government modified its objectives to seize and consolidate territorial gains in the east and southeast, because Russia's forces can accomplish that much. Which is logical.
On the Ukrainian side, the battle of Bakhmut has figured highly here because it consumed a lot of their most experienced soldiers and they lost the "fortress" city anyways, when it would've been a better move to abandon the city and save those soldiers. They just couldn't flat-out hold the city. That was really demoralizing because they put a big propaganda effort into it (for political reasons), and Zelensky seemed to imagine the defense of the city as important for morale and they thought the back of the Russian army could be broken there. So that was probably the biggest error the Ukrainians have made in the entire war.
>>2481076>I suppose the real question is, why aren't Russia playing the same propaganda game? Why aren't Russia providing lists of its targets and photographic evidence of their destruction in these constant drone attacks? Why are they letting Ukraine direct attention away from 800+ drones striking largely with impunity with flashy imagery of a drone hitting an oil facility with a claim that this is destroying Russia. The latter is certainly adding to the morale of Ukrainians and NAFOids as is the lack of the former.A few questions. First, how will Russia acquire this photographic evidence? Russian agents on the ground filming it, if caught, or going to be imprisoned or killed. Most footage of Ukrainian drone attacks in Russia is filmed by Russian civilians and uploaded to the internet. It does appear to be the case that Russia is trying to discourage this. The Ukrainians seem to discourage civilians (and may have some laws or other coercive means) from filming and sharing footage of attacks on anything sensitive, but they encourage Ukrainians to share footage of a strike that hits something like an apartment building, because they use that for propaganda.
Secondly, it might not be the case that the 800+ drones are mostly getting through. Most of them might not be getting through and get shot down by the Ukrainians. On average, the number of drones is much less than 800 (that's relatively less common), and there's a network of thousands of sensors across the country + NATO radars and then a layered anti-aircraft system. Missiles and planes on the high end, then relatively big flak-type cannons in the middle, then at the lowest layer are thousands of Ukrainians in mobile gun + missile trucks (literally thousands of them) spread across the country and manned by older guys who have civilians jobs, and firefighters.