Russia's War Against Ukraine

[Gusington]

^Seriously, why would they publish that at all??

[MengJiao]

The Rusks have been training overtly for exposure to fallout in the past week, which signals they think the explosion will be near their troops.

the soviets are also conducting their annual nuclear drills this week including ICBM test launches.  exposure/nbc training could be connected to that.

Certainly that could be the explanation, but normal training wasn't the explanation the Russians themselves gave for their exposure training. Of course, they could give a false explanation for otherwise normally scheduled training, too!


Meanwhile, the Washington Examiner reports that Russia has started walking back its dirty bomb allegations and warnings: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/russia-walks-back-risk-of-dirty-bomb-plot-amid-nato-warnings/ar-AA13ndvl?ocid=entnewsntp&cvid=d2418d7d12d743a797109b4d4e9660f1

"We have got what we wanted," Russian deputy ambassador Dmitry Polyanskiy told reporters at the United Nations. "If this all does not happen, I do not mind people saying that Russia is crying wolf because we are speaking about a terrible disaster that might potentially threaten the whole Earth." {snip} "There are a lot of claims that we made about things that never happened," Polyanskiy acknowledged. "But shouldn't we view it through the perspective that they never happened because we had raised those claims and Ukrainians were afraid to proceed with those provocations?"

  It's kind of interesting that for once they gave themselves credit (in a round-about way) for not doing something insane.  Now if they just stop the war they can figure out some way to get credit for
saving all mindkind for that as well, I guess.  They stopped NATO from blasting a crappy army out of existence or something right?  By just all going home and so on.

  PS...I think I mean "mankind" not "mindkind"...but who's to say?

[SirAndrewD]

^Seriously, why would they publish that at all??

As someone that works in the media/relations side of publishing I'd never allow something that out of date to make it past an editorial staff.   That goes a very long way to endangering credibility even if that take might've been not so unusual a few months ago.

[Gusington]

^And they look like morons!

[Crossroads]

Reuters with an in-depth analysis on paperwork found from an abandoned Russian command post.

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/ukraine-crisis-russia-base/

[Gusington]

^I read that earlier today. Could the Russians be so incompetent to leave literally 1000s of pages of their documents just lying around??

[GDS_Starfury]

Could the Russians be so incompetent

thats a silly question to ask at this point.

[Dammit Carl!]

^I read that earlier today. Could the Russians be so incompetent to leave literally 1000s of pages of their documents just lying around??

Let me tell you about the reams of PII left behind by our HQ Company as we mobilized outward through Bragg years ago whilst in the Reserves, so yes, can most certainly see forgetting crap by a group looking to beat feet muy pronto.

[Jarhead0331]

^I read that earlier today. Could the Russians be so incompetent to leave literally 1000s of pages of their documents just lying around??

No less incompetent than the billions of dollars in advanced military weapons and equipment the United States left in Afghanistan for the Taliban. But, I digress...

[al_infierno]

^I read that earlier today. Could the Russians be so incompetent to leave literally 1000s of pages of their documents just lying around??

No less incompetent than the billions of dollars in advanced military weapons and equipment the United States left in Afghanistan for the Taliban. But, I digress...

At least that stuff has a chance of killing its user when they're not properly trained.   

[GDS_Starfury]

worth the read.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2021/08/23/staggering-costs--us-military-equipment-left-behind-in-afghanistan/?sh=40da624641db

[Gusington]

The equipment left in Afghanistan by us was quite...incompetent. To put it mildly. I wasn't comparing it's just...unbelievable.

[Jarhead0331]

worth the read.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2021/08/23/staggering-costs--us-military-equipment-left-behind-in-afghanistan/?sh=40da624641db

What is your point?

https://www.cnn.com/2022/04/27/politics/afghan-weapons-left-behind/index.html

[FarAway Sooner]

I think, when your allies are THAT unreliable, there is no good exit strategy. 

I'm not making excuses for the botched withdrawal--there were a zillion things wrong with it.  I'm just not sure this was one of them.  Rather, this was an almost inevitable outcome of having made material investments into unreliable allies, who had a profoundly different agenda than we did, from the very start of the war. 

Would it have been practical to, before we left, insist on taking back all of the equipment we "gave" to the Afghan forces?  How would that have worked?

Besides, we already had a precedent set for leaving lots of US-made weapons with the mujahedin after they kicked the Russians out in the 80s.  Look at how well that worked out for us!      :pullhair:

[SirAndrewD]

^And they look like morons!

They do.  But it may not be entirely their fault.

I say this because I know that anyone in non-fiction publishing, whether it's books like me or magazines, we all know the issues of how fast a subject can sour and we usually have some contingency plans in place in case a topical book or article becomes stale.

For us we stick with what we internally call the A.U.T.H.O.R. frameworks, where A stands for "Accelerate the publishing process".  We're very cognoscente that a book on a topic based issue, like say, solutions for the 2018 data breaches, came out before the topic was stale or some of the takes were out of date.

We had one of our most high profile authors (who will remain nameless) who was a leader in the biomedical world whose book was ready to go to our printers when the pandemic hit.  We actually hit the breaks on it because it instantly invalidated a lot of his material and went right back to the writing phase.  That was an extreme example but we weren't about to release a book by a PhD, MD and one of the leaders in vaccine development in the world that was behind the times on a subject in which he was directly involved. 

Clearly, can't do that with a magazine, but that's why you always keep open as an editor pulling an article before it hits the printers.  As someone said, better to just cut it from the cover and TOC and remove the pages and have a short issue.  I know from our typesetter and Creative Design department we can do that in hours as long as the book isn't being printed. 

I'm not sure how their model works and how much lead time they go before their runs.  I do know our printers are slow because of the pandemic and spend more time printing box paper than books for our authors.  Maybe that was it, possibly they had to have their Nov-Dec issue submitted finalized to the printers in August.  We have to do a lot of early submissions too, much to the chagrin of some of our authors that have promo events planned and we can only get changes to the digital versions to say they've been on say, Good Morning America or Dr. Phil or somesuch that they might want to pop an "As Seen On" in their print cover or blurbs. 

Still makes them look bad.

Anyway, enough about my boring day job.