Quote (chopstickz777 @ 2 Apr 2022 00:21)
It needs to be understood that first of all, it was not a military target they attacked, but a civilian oil depot.
Secondly, it should be understood that this "operation" was mainly conducted for propaganda and to embarrass the Russians in the informational sphere. The strike won't change how the war is going for Ukraine (which is not good.)
Now people can scream to the high heavens about how the Russians are retreating and Ukrainian tanks are about to roll into Moscow. It's ridiculous nonsense of-course, but that doesn't stop them from saying it.
Ukraine can't win any real battles on the ground, so they make up victories out of thin air backed up by silly strikes like this, ignoring the fact that the only air assets Ukraine has left are a handful of choppers they've got hidden in some random fields somewhere.
It certainly did take balls from the pilots though, but they were helped out by the fact that it was night-time, they were flying close to the ground to avoid radar detection, and the fact that the flight time to the area they targeted was only six minutes.
That's the point though: it is the invader who has to
win battles to win the war. For the defender (Ukraine), it is enough to
not lose them.
Quote (thundercock @ 2 Apr 2022 01:46)
Ukraine wasn't going to join NATO when there was an active military conflict and Crimea was still in dispute. Ukraine could talk all they want but it just wasn't going to happen.
I've made this point about 30 times in this thread, but they just keep ignoring it.
Quote (ofthevoid @ 1 Apr 2022 21:13)
Send their best troops to do what? To clear densely populated urban areas where literally every apartment building can have snipers picking your soldiers off? Where these apartment buildings can have claymores, and other booby traps? Where western tank busters can basically neutralize armor for little gains? To gain what exactly? It would be an absolute nightmare and would result in a tremendous amount of deaths for Russia, we've already seen that with certain cities there. That's why they parked their armor outside of many cities and after thinking it over in places like Kiev just decided to abandon that strategy.
It's too costly, and whatever gains are probably not worth it. Their strat now seems to basically keep what they took and force Ukraine to talks, while consolidating the south and east.
edit: They failed on some objectives but succeeded on others. Ukraine's armed forces are largely in shambles now, so any offensive on the Donbass is likely to fail, we already know Ukraine conceded NATO membership. To me, imo those are two things they didn't have before the war.
The whole premise of the Russian invasion was that the Ukrainian resistance would be weak and/or their own forces far superior, so that they could just steamroll the country in a blitz. Also note that they didn't need to go into the big cities to capture them - encircling them and then starving them out would have been good enough - but they weren't even able to accomplish that in any of the larger cities, and it took them almost a month before they finally managed to encircle smaller cities like Chernihiv or Sumy.
This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Apr 1 2022 07:01pm