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Bulletins and News Discussion from January 23rd to January 29th, 2023 - Tanks For Nothing

With it being overwhelmingly likely that Ukraine will receive Germany's Leopard tanks (whether from Germany itself or Poland), German tanks once again roll into battle against Russian forces after nearly a century.

Can the Leopard succeed against the Russian army where it failed in Syria? We'll find out soon enough.

Here is the map of the Ukraine conflict, courtesy of Wikipedia.

Here is the archive of important pieces of analysis from throughout the war that we've collected.

January 23rd's update is here on the site and here in the comments.

January 25th's update is here on the site and here in the comments.

January 27th's update is here on the site and here in the comments.

January 28th's update is here on the site and here in the comments.

3 comments

  • I don't know if this is the right thread, but posting must commence. I work as a teacher in Sweden and I've been assigned a group of refugee children to work with. Four students are from Ukraine, and it has been a very interesting experience to observe them and their interactions with the war. They all regularly consume war-related content through TikTok, and I've been talking a lot with them about their feelings in some kind of makeshift Russian/English/Swedish mashup language. Three of the students speak Russian as their mother tongue, but all three are very flexible in switching to Ukrainian, and the fourth student only grew up with Ukrainian. The three "Russian" students are from Dnipro, Zaporozhye and Cherkasy and they only interact with each other and barely interact with the guy from Ternopil. Funnily enough, the pure Ukrainian guy has become friends with Uzbek and Chechen guys and they speak broken Russian with each other despite being from two opposite sides of the former USSR.

    The most interesting part for me is the fact that the three students that grew up with Russian language and culture are way more hostile towards Russia as an entity than the Ukrainian guy. In the beginning when they were trying to gauge my "russophobia", they only used Ukrainian pronunciations and were very insistent that they wanted Ukrainian default language on the translation app on their school Chromebooks, but now they've dropped the act and openly use Russian terms for cities and so. They're still very "anti-Russia" in their own way, and call Putin all kinds of nice Russian insults. The Ukrainian guy on the other hand seems pretty chill about the whole thing, he even shows me anti-Zelensky memes on TikTok and made fun of Klitschko after he claimed that Ukrainian AD stopped all missiles, "khwhy no electicity if 50 rocket no boom?".

    The main takeaway for me is that the conflict is way deeper than just "oh russians live in this part, so invasion good" or the opposite NATOoid "le big bad putler" narrative. Another big conclusion is that the fall of the USSR is truly the biggest tragedy in modern history, it's a crime against humanity that some fake ass administrative borders leads to brutal dumb wars when all these people lived in peace and harmony under the USSR. Asian-looking Uzbeks, ginger Chechens and a blond Ukrainian guy whose ancestors were probably Polish all shared a common destiny and even today watch Hasbulla clips together and share the same Telegram memes, despite growing up with three different languages and cultures.