Russia Invades Ukraine. Again by captaincrunch

REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

Russia Invades Ukraine. Again

POSTED BY: CAPTAINCRUNCH
UPDATED: Friday, November 7, 2025 08:43
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Thursday, November 6, 2025 2:43 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

Russian security services say that NATO is planning to sabotage the Zaparozhiy NPP and cause a Chernobyl-scale meltdown, creating a "no go" barrier across central Ukraine, redirecting the entire Russian army away from fighting to stabilization, and (BTW) blaming the "accident" on Russia.

I'm fairly certain that this is indeed one of the plans being considered by NATO, and that Russia issued a preemptive warning.

Kiev is pouring troops into Pokrovsk, intending (presumably) to unblock the siege and allow troops to escape. Kupiansk is in trouble too.

But that doesn't mean the Ukrainian army is broken or that the defense will collapse all the way to the Dnieper river. Izyum is another major (high ground) objective that supports logistics to Slaviansk and Kramatorsk. Since Izyum, Slaviansk, and Kramatorsk are still standing, there's a long way to go for Russia, assuming the Ukrainian army doesn't collapse outright in the next couple of months or the ZNPP doesn'tget blown up.

Bullshit...

T

Which part?
Pokrovsk is almost surrounded. There's a gap of only 300 meters, according to some sources, between the two Russian forces bottlenecking the city. Most of Pokrovsk is under Russian control. Zelensky has ordered more forces to the city. Ukrainian forces outside of the city are attacking both at the bottleneck and further north, and Ukrainian forces IN the city are trying to fight their way out, Kiev says. (But take that with a pound of salt, since Kiev has a tendency to post weeks-old footage of better positioning as if it were recent.)

Kupiansk isn't in much better shape, because altho Russian forces don't surround the city, the Oskol River, with its bridges blown, forms a significant barrier, trapping Ukrainian soldiers on its eastern side while Russia advances along the western bank.

I added a comment about the Zaparozhiy nuclear power plant (ZNPP). Yanno, Ukraine has been actively shelling and droning the ZNPP all along, hoping to hit something important and cause a radiation release, even while IAEA inspectors are there. Every time they cause damage, Kiev blames RUSSIA. (Just like Russia was blamed for blowing up it's own pipeline and destroying a major dam that it controlled.)

And just to show you how "neutral" the IAEA is, even tho IAEA inspectors know better, they refuse to push back on Kiev.

So why wouldn't NATO want to up the ante? As a military, they should be looking at ALL contingencies, right? And that Ukie invasion into Kursk... it was aimed at a Russian nuclear power plant just a few miles down the road. What do you suppose Kiev would have done with it, if they succeeded in capturing it?

I've said before and I'll say again: If anyone considers a "nuclear option" in Ukraine, it'll be NATO. Russia has superior conventional forces. Zelensky has threatened nuclear weapons before, even tho the best they could possibly manage would be a dirty bomb. How much better would it be to arrange for a ZNPP "accident" with plausible deniability?

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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger

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Friday, November 7, 2025 8:08 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Are War Crimes and Ranged Fires The Future Of War?

Phillips P. Obrien | Nov 07, 2025

https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/are-war-crimes-and-ranged-fires
-the

Hello All,

I’m going to share this early summary on the future of war with subscribers today. It might be one of the least uplifting pieces I have written. Sorry. It is about the direction of warfare, particularly in light of what we are/have seen from Russia and the USA. There are many elements in this summary that need to be thought through, and the plan is to eventually turn these ideas into a longer, publishable piece. However, I think it is important enough that I would like those who read my work seriously to have a first look. The central point is that the future of much state-state warfare is emerging right before our eyes and it is frightening indeed. It is a combination of ranged fires and war crimes, which will obliterate the whole idea of there being a clear battlefield while at the same time allowing states to target anything they damn well want, civilian or otherwise.

Russian Attacks On Civilian Infrastructure
Donald Trump posted images earlier this week of a suspected Venezuelan vessel targeted by the US military. Pic: @realDonaldTrump/Truth Social
US Attacks On Non-Combatants

The argument is that what we are seeing now across the globe is an indication of where war is going. And what we are seeing are states increasingly unconcerned (maybe even excited by) the commitment of war crimes while using ranged weapons. This template is something we are seeing by the USA in the Caribbean and which we have seen by Russia for years, and which is typical of all sides in the Middle East.

What is important about this is that as technology and weapons improve, ranged fires and war crimes are likely to become more and more the norm. It will be relatively easier, cheaper, and arguably more effective to use them—all the while destroying the paradigm that you need to have lots of “boots on the ground” to have strategic effect. I have always thought this last point completely wrong-headed and based on a misreading of World War II. The constant stress on “boots on the ground” helps explain why the USA at the height of its power has constantly lost wars.

And the relative imbalance towards defensive firepower makes this shift even more likely to grow. The front line is now far more dangerous than at any time in war. Constant surveillance and weapons that can hit accurately and quickly after detection, means keeping troops near the front line results in grotesque casualty numbers as we see in the Russian military. Any country that wants to preserve its military, which the Ukrainians are trying to do now, will actually move towards limiting the number of troops they send forward into what is a growing “kill zone” where the armies meet.

Are You Basing Your Future View Of War On Packing The Kill Zone?

If having lots of troops in the front line is a loser’s game, what we are seeing is the power of ranged fires to have strategic effect. Again, this should not have been a surprise, but for some reason much of our understanding of how World War II was won (and lost) missed out the importance of ranged fires such as strategic air power. However, what we are seeing around the world is that ranged fires can have significant strategic effect. By far the most effective campaigns by both the Russians and the Ukrainians have been their ranged efforts. The Ukrainian campaign against Russian oil production has been discussed in great detail here, as well as the Russian campaign against Ukrainian power generation and production. This winter, for instance, these campaigns will almost certainly define the course of the war. Certainly in cost/benefit terms, the ranged campaign is proving far more important for both Ukraine and Russia.

And its not just in Ukraine and Russia that the power of ranged campaigns have been felt. The Israeli air campaign against Iran, even after it was short-circuited by Trump, showed what can be achieved by ranged fires through a well worked out plan. Of course Israel is not alone in this—the Houthis have arguably achieved great strategic effect through their ranged fires on civilian and military vessels in the waters off the coast of Yemen.

And you know what might ranged fires even more devastating? It would be the commitment of war crimes (or more accurately what used to be considered war crimes). Right now two of the five permanent members of the UN Security council are committing war crimes regularly with ranged fires. The Russian attempts to make Ukrainian cities unlivable through freezing them is a war crime, and what the US is doing in the Caribbean would normally be considered a war crime.

For instance, the US is attacking with ranged weapons vessels in the Caribbean that represent no threat to US forces, which are in international waters, and which could easily be seized if the US wanted to bother. However what is happening is that those vessels and the crews on them are being destroyed, which the US has tacitly admitted is a war crime.

How did the US admit that? Well, after attacking one of these boats and not killing all the crew, it took one of the survivors and released him back to his country of origin (Colombia). It was a tacit admission that the person was a civilian and any further punishment (which will almost certainly not be forthcoming) would have to come from civil courts in Colombia.

This matters. Why you might ask? Well. one of the fundamental things which used to make a war crime was attacks on civilians (broadly conceived). Such attacks were considered not legitimate acts of war unless the civilians were directly involved in the war effort. In other words, you could attack a factory making war equipment if there were civilians involved, but you were not supposed to attack those factory workers after they were no longer at their place of work.

There has been a grey area on this about dual-use facilities. If you take out power generation to an urban area, for instance, you could affect war production, but you could also disable hospitals, etc. Now the dual-use distinction will come down far more in favor of what is considered strategically expedient.

Indeed, what we are seeing now around the globe is the disappearance of any restraint, what we might call the normalizing of war crimes. Yes, I know war crimes have always been committed. However it was notable that during the period of the International Rules-Based Order (now arguably over) states at least wanted to act like they were not committing war crimes. Now that pretence is over—and that means that the reality will be worse.

As ranged weapons become more numerous, accurate and effective, and as restraints on what can be attacked lessen or even disappear, this will mean the great incentive will be to try and achieve strategic effect through devastating attacks on civilian infrastructure.

Fighting on the battlefield will be seen as a slow, bloody slog through death zones, while ranged, war crimes will be seen as faster and more effective. So when we add up what we are seeing, it's terrifying and ethically bankrupt, but also strategically rational. It may very well represent the future of war.

Thanks for reading Phillips’s Newsletter! This post is public so feel free to share it.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Friday, November 7, 2025 8:43 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Ukraine War: Pokrovsk's Fall Doesn't Have to Be a Defeat

By Marc Champion | November 6, 2025 at 10:00 PM CST

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2025-11-07/ukraine-war-pokr
ovsk-s-fall-doesn-t-have-to-be-a-defeat

First Bakhmut, then Avdiivka, now Pokrovsk. In each of the last three years, Russia’s generals have identified a midsize Ukrainian town as their invasion’s next critical target, expending vast amounts of manpower and hardware to take it. The question is not whether Pokrovsk will fall, but what that will mean for the war.

Pokrovsk’s capture would have significant political and symbolic importance for both sides, as was the case for its predecessors in 2023 and 2024. That plus road and rail links explain why Russian commanders pulled troops away from other parts of the front to concentrate more than 100,000 personnel at a mining town with a pre-war population half that size.

Vladimir Putin needs this win as he heads into winter. Lack of foliage to hide advancing troops from drones and the fallback defenses Ukraine has built behind Pokrovsk will make advancing even more difficult and costly until the leaves grow back in the spring. And for Russia, this has already been a disappointing year, gaining less new territory despite growing battlefield advantages, and at a time when the economy is showing signs of strain at home.

So Pokrovsk’s capture would help sustain Putin’s narrative of ineluctable victory and suppress any sense among ordinary Russians that the gains he’s making in Ukraine aren’t worth the human or economic cost. It would also hit already low morale in Ukraine and could, most dangerously, persuade the US to pressure Kyiv into capitulation.

What it won’t do is, as some have said, open the road for Russian forces to sweep through the so-called fortress belt of east Ukrainian cities that have so frustrated Putin’s invasion. That’s because of the way this war is being fought, which is on foot; it’s been a long time since either side did any sweeping. Indeed, Pokrovsk’s fall could also be seen as another stage in a Ukrainian strategy to bleed Russia’s advantages in manpower and equipment to exhaustion.

To put this in perspective, it has taken Russia’s armed forces 20 months to move less than 50 kilometers (29 miles) from Avdiivka to Pokrovsk – a one-hour drive in peace time. In that period, Ukraine’s count of Russian war dead and wounded nearly tripled to 1.147 million, from 401,350. Those figures are partisan and therefore unreliable, but there is wide consensus among independent military analysts that the trend they reflect is correct; this has, for Russia, been the bloodiest year of the war to date.

Will Pokrovsk prove to have been worth the cost? And how should Ukraine’s allies respond?

These are two parts of the same question, because this war will be decided by the ability and will of each side to remain in the fight — and that’s something Pokrovsk’s fate alone can’t determine, but Ukraine’s allies can. In fact, when I visited to see the town’s coking coal mine in October 2024, the fear at the time was that resistance might not last beyond the end of the year. A defense that continues nine months beyond expectation, against an eight-to-one force concentration drawn from other areas of the front is not a sign of military collapse.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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