this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2025
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The person you're replying to claimed Russian state media is more reliable than the fiction film Enemy at the Gates. If you've seen a diverse set of Western outlets claiming Russian military strategy is shooting their own soldiers, then I'm afraid the outlets you trust are less reliable than Russian state media.
I mean it wasn't me, but that's because that's a scene in the film. You or your source were confusing the plot of the film for reality.
Russia are not cartoon villains. They are rational villains. No large organisation acts like cartoon villains. When they do evil things, it's for the sake of a goal that makes sense. If someone has told you about atrocities committed by Russia which don't further Russia's goals, then they have lied to you. Those atrocities either never happened or were not committed by Russia.
I'm not. BrainInABox is the one talking about a movie. I'm not.
Russia is not a single rational entity. No organization is. It's made up of people who all have their own goals, which can often be shortsighted and even irrational.
Putin wants to control Ukraine. At any cost. He wants Stalin's empire back. He's waging his war because he lost his puppet, and he wants to prevent Ukraine from making its own independent decisions. And ye doesn't want to hear that that's impossible. His generals and other servants mostly want to please him, and fear bringing him bad news. They throw ridiculous numbers of soldiers at pointless human wave assaults just to gain a couple of meters ground. They can show Putin progress, but the cost is enormous. Because of these deadly assaults, morale is obviously low. Many soldiers don't want to fight, but even if they do, sometimes the tactical situation demands a withdrawal. Generals don't want to lose ground, so they use barrier troops to shoot Russian soldiers if they withdraw or surrender, forcing them to fight. And it's working to some extent; Russian troops are very reluctant to withdraw or surrender, but that also means casualties are sky high. But that also means that soldiers get intentionally wounded in order to get out of fighting, or even frag their officer to get out of a suicide mission.
It's a dysfunctional mess, but every part of it makes sense for the people involved.
And if you pay attention, you can see similar perverse incentives at work in western countries too. People as rational actors is a lazy lie used to justify dysfunctional systems.
Also consider IDF soldiers committing cartoonishly evil atrocities against Palestinian kids because it makes sense in their heads. That doesn't make it any less evil.
God, liberal fanfiction is always the same tedious YA tropes.
Do really don't have anything useful to say, do you? Just piss on whatever doesn't fit your story.
Lol, at least I"m not writing paragraphs of middle school level fan fiction.
I was explaining the joke. BrainInABox was obviously making fun of what you said, because it's a silly thing to say. Imagine a comment saying "They ate mushrooms to grow bigger" and someone replied with "Source: Super Mario".
No, this is wrong, this is a story that is pushed by western pundits, but it's based on nothing. If we instead assume Putin's statements are true, then he has been consistent for decades. In fact, you'll often see a sort of double-reality in the words of western commentators, where they both make fun of Putin for declaring and stressing his red lines (and then not following through with the threats), and at the same time stating that there was no way to predict what actions would lead to retaliation. One thing that has been abundantly clear to me following this war, is that Russia has been able to maintain their narrative in the form of goals and roadmap since the very first day of the war, and that the NATO-aligned countries have to adjust their narrative rapidly.
The much more realistic assumption, rather than Putin role-playing Bonaparte, is that Russia feels NATO in Donbass is an existential threat and wants a buffer region. This is consistent with Russian statements, with Russian war-goals, and with the reality that NATO is dangerous and destroys countries.
This is true.
If this was true, then we should see a large discrepancy in the number of dead soldiers between either side. Russian causalities are published, so the data is easier to gather. But either way, sites like Mediazona and UAlosses.org compile lists of confirmed dead, and it's similar between the two armies, despite Ukrainian losses being confidential and unpublished. Why is Ukraine worse at fighting? They probably aren't, the more likely conclusion is that you've read a stupid article with cartoon-logic, and that in reality Russia uses the most effective tactics available to them.
There's a website called liveuamap.com, where you can see troop positions over time. And something it shows clearly is that prior to fortifications being installed somewhere, the Russian army does not stick around when there is even the slightest amount of heat. The actual evidence is the complete opposite of your narrative. They're extremely willing to give up ground. Why do you believe a narrative that's so disconnected with reality? Is it a one-off or could it be that the bar for evidence is low for the outlet that sold you that particular narrative?
Maybe. But let me pitch you the Russian narrative, and you can see if that fits the reality better, and makes everyone out to be more rational actors.
And since this started with you saying we shouldn't trust TASS, you might think that I'm saying Russia is completely trustworthy. But I'm not. Just that on the war, their interests align closer with being honest. In this news story about POW exchanges, there are only two possible sources, Russia and Ukraine, anyone else wouldn't be able to verify the information. So it makes zero sense to dismiss the Russian account if your goal is to find truth among narratives. You'd be left with a single narrative, and at best your intuition for bullshit.
I never made any claims about people. I made claims about sufficiently large organisations. Rather than blaming dysfunctional systems, you should analyse if there is a reason why institutions you rely on would intentionally fail you when they fail you, and then you should test your hypothesis across as much data as you can test against and adjust as you're proven wrong. Eventually you'll end up with Marxism.
The sadists are people. People don't need to be rational. The IDF is rational. Their goal is genocide. To further that goal, it makes sense to promote, protect and enable sadistic and evil individuals. It's rational for the state of Israel to push dehumanising narratives about Palestinians. It's rational for the oligarchy to direct their servants (USA and European governments) to give Israel as much support as they need, to allow them full reign, while taking on as little responsibility and complicity as possible, and that's exactly what's happening in Israel and in the EU and beyond.
It's also based on the words of Putin himself. He has frequently declared that he doesn't respect Ukraine's independence, that it's not a real country, that it should be part of Russia.
He's really not making a secret of his imperial ambitions. I don't know why you're trying to sell a different narrative.
I haven't seen anyone making fun of Putin for not starting a nuclear war. Because that's what he's threatening. He uses nuclear blackmail to force other countries to let him take Ukraine, which ny itself is an incredibly dangerous precedent, and if it gets rewarded, he might use it again.
He wants entire buffer countries. He wasn't content with just Donbass. It's ridiculous that he wants a buffer, because he already has the largest country in the world. He poses a much larger existential threat to Ukraine and other neighbouring countries than they do Russia. It's an absolute nonsense argument that tries to justify Russian exceptionalism and imperialism.
Demilitarising Ukraine makes Ukraine the buffer-zone. I didn't mean to say that the aim was for Donbass to be the buffer. I just said that missiles in Donbass is particularly scary. Donbass was supposed to become independent from Ukraine to further Balkanise and weaken Ukraine and their ability to threaten Russia. Donbass being independent republics or federated with Russia doesn't change the effect drastically.
Not Russia's problem. Putin isn't the president of Ukraine, and doesn't make decisions for the good of Ukraine.
I'm not saying it's moral. I'm saying it's rational. Conquest is less rational. And more importantly, if your concern is ethical rather than campism, then on top of being more rational, it's also much easier to work with and manage, to prevent wars. If the western powers were acting morally and wanted to minimise suffering among Ukrainian people, then using this model where we assume Putin has been telling the truth since 1999, then we could've given him concessions that would've made this invasion and the annexation of Crimea irrational. That would have prevented all this death, and allowed whatever economic integration with the EEA that Maidan proponents want.
This war is the result of years of intentional provocations by the west. Is Russia guilty for invading? Yes of course, they could've chosen self-destruction. Or perhaps there still was room to extract concessions from the west by grovelling and begging harder. But neither of those are rational actions. Who is also clearly to blame are the NATO powers who engineered and provoked this war, and destroyed off-ramps as they became visible.
This is also not imperialism. Imperialism is creating an empire and extracting wealth from your vassals. The Donbass will not be subject to unequal wealth extraction. That would be too risky with their precarious legitimacy. This is called expansion.
He's using nuclear threats to deter attacks against Russia. Other countries are already trying to prevent him from taking parts of Ukraine. There are foreign weapons actively being used in Ukraine, foreign countries have enacted official sanctions against Russia, and yet Russia has never used a nuclear weapon on anyone. More than just foreign weapons and soldiers, the Ukrainian army is cooperating with the USA for military planning. Clearly no one is deterred.
Okay. If the reference doesn't resonate with you, then your preferred media probably isn't guilty of it.
I'm repeating the Russian messaging as told by TASS and RT, and by Putin in foreign interviews and from what I've seen of the yearly Putin Q&A. Is your impression formed from primary sources like the ones I mentioned or psychoanalyst pundits and 'Russia-experts'? You were upset that OP would link a primary source earlier.
Initially I thought you were arguing in good faith and simply had a skewed understanding on some details. But your most recent reply is very disappointing and shows no effort on your part to consider my arguments or even understand the argument I was making.
Why do you believe Russia won't cede land when it's inconsistent with the map data? Russian battlelines wave in and out, while Ukrainian battlelines stay ridged until collapse. What their specific tactics are isn't moralistic or something we can derive their quality from. I don't know which of the two tactics is better. Perhaps they're both the best tactic for their given army, irrespective of their goals. But you had it wrong. Why?
Why do you claim to want to find truth, but shun primary sources? And if you shun primary sources, why are you linking Ukrainian sources?
Why is it so important for you that Russia be unknowable and irrational? Is the reason that your world-view is built on a shoddy and precarious narrative that doesn't survive scrutiny?
Yup, that’s what the media have told me unceasingly. It’s bullshit, and anyway the USSR wasn’t an “empire.”
No, they don’t. You’re just parroting the “meat wave” propaganda that’s been blasted at us for the last 3½ years. And it’s a canard that goes back at least as far as WWII Nazi war propaganda. It’s as real as the Ghost of Kyiv.