‘We Cannot Win’ Says Top Russian Commander Alexander Khodakovsky
www.kyivpost.com
The leader of the Russian battalion defeated at liberated Urozhaine calls for “freezing the front” after his unreinforced troops were devastated in a rout.

https://archive.li/Z0m5m

The Russian commander of the “Vostok” Battalion fighting in southern Ukraine said on Thursday that Ukraine will not be defeated and suggested that Russia freeze the war along current frontlines.

Alexander Khodakovsky made the candid concession yesterday on his Telegram channel after Russian forces, including his own troops, were devastatingly defeated by Ukrainian marines earlier this week at Urozhaine in the Zaporizhzhia-Donetsk regional border area.

“Can we bring down Ukraine militarily? Now and in the near future, no,” Khodakovsky, a former official of the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic, said yesterday.

“When I talk to myself about our destiny in this war, I mean that we will not crawl forward, like the [Ukrainians], turning everything into [destroyed] Bakhmuts in our path. And, I do not foresee the easy occupation of cities,” he said.

  • Cyrus Draegur@lemm.eeEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    … Fuck.

    I really WAS looking forward to blocking you. AND you didn’t give me a good reason not to. BUT,

    the more I think about it, the more I find myself liking your question and feel myself WANTING to explore it.

    At first, I asked myself if I could say “yeah, actually” but clearly THAT would be untrue - and not just for the reason that battle tanks weren’t even invented yet at the time, but because even though lots of people hurl the word “tankie” around as a blanket insult with no real meaning, I’m instead actually honestly trying to mean something specific - It’s not JUST killing your own people because they oppose you politically (using the figurative “you” here, not the literal you). It’s the amount of intentional civilian casualties.

    When people take up arms for a cause, they’re self-selecting into the combat role, after all. Executing a planned, organized attack upon a government’s assets is not a civilian behavior. It’s either the behavior of an enemy (to said government) soldier or the behavior of a criminal. It’s not innocent. The rebels in the American civil war were certainly not innocent bystanders.

    What characterizes it would have to be the intentional and systematic slaughter of non-combatant civilians who were not engaging in battlefield maneuvers.

    While this DID apparently happen in the American civil war, contributing to the civilian death toll of some 50,000 people, it was largely the actions of general Sherman, who unilaterally chose, regardless of actual orders, to burn entire cities.

    I can’t speak for you, obviously, but if a group exhibits all the behavioral phenomenon we presently associate with, say fascism, EVEN IF the actions and events concerned occurred before fascism was ever recognized or named, illuminating these behavioral facets by CALLING it “fascism” still possess communicative utility. Maybe meet half way and call it proto-fascism.

    Likewise, if one were to call Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman’s actions during the American Civil War “proto-tankie”, I’d be hard pressed to honestly disagree with them.

    When it comes to the defining incidents of the term, though - the Prague Spring - the “rebellion” didn’t declare war, they merely elected someone the Soviets didn’t like, and for that, 165,000 troops and just over 4,600 tanks were dispatched and nearly ALL the resulting casualties were civilians, even with the elected leader of the time telling the civilians NOT to resist for the sake of their safety. Thankfully the number of civilian casualties were relatively few, with less than a hundred murdered and only just over 250 severely wounded.

    The other oft-cited incident, the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, actually featured armed insurgency and makes no distinctions clear enough regarding how many of the ~3,000 Hungarian casualties exactly were armed, organized, and mobilized, so I for one hold it in less critical a light than what Sherman did in the American Civil War.

    When it comes to what Petro Poroshenko did in Ukraine, he actually admitted on video that he intended to make civilians suffer and fear for their lives, to make children cower in basements, in order to coerce compliance from them. Them, meaning, people who didn’t even declare any intention to pick a fight with his administration in the first place! Punishing them for the “crime” of merely living in the same municipal area as alleged insurgents.

    If you don’t want to call it “tankie”, fine.

    But this IS a pattern of politically motivated state sponsored brutality that DOES recur throughout history and whatever you DO choose to call it deserves to be named, shamed, and blamed for giving Russia any justification whatsoever to “protect civilians” in the Donbas region by invading Ukraine.

    In short, Lincoln wasn’t a tankie, but Sherman may have been a proto-tankie.