Russia is withdrawing from Kherson City (apparently). Why?

This could all be tentative information as of yet, but I have strong reason to believe that Russia has now withdrawn from Kherson city. Without a fight. I think this is big enough news to warrant a post.

General Surovikin, the commander of the Russian army in Ukraine, suggested that this was a decision he was contemplating a month or so ago. Kherson possesses some strategic significance, but its principal importance to Russia has been is its political/motivational value. It is the largest major city Russia has managed to capture in Ukraine outside of the Donbass region. Ukraine has been repeatedly attempting to break through to Kherson for months now, practically to no avail. Ukraine’s so called ‘Kherson offensive’, launched at the beginning of September, over two months ago now, and has thus far yielded practically no ground other than a handful of villages adjacent the Dneiper river. The Russians have been sending mixed signals about Kherson for about a month now; they evacuated the city of its civlians, and even its zoo. This has also corresponded with the partial evacuation, allegedly, of Nikolaev, the Ukrainian occupied counter-part to Kherson that Russia was also threatening.

But this evening (our evening), practically without warning, multiple signals started emerging that Russia was withdrawing from Kherson entirely. At first I thought this could have been Telegram/Twitter noise; but after all, Ukraine has allegedly launched another major offensive in the area, which started yesterday. According to preliminary reports this offensive assumed the trajectory it always does; Ukrainian units get swatted by artillery and the Russian Air Force, and fail to make much progress at all. But today there has been an eerie silence; little to no fighting is going on, but Ukraine is now entering villages adjacent Kherson uncontested. Clearly, there has been a withdrawal by the Russian army from the now (civliian abandoned ) Kherson city to the other bank of the Dneiper river, the waterway in which Kherson city sits. It simply looks like Russia has let Ukraine have Kherson city back, presumably and hopefully ‘for now’, for reasons I do not completely understand. Even if it is an unnocupied husk of a city, it has significant political value.

Multiple theories on Twitter/Telegram have emerged already, only in the last couple of hours, to explain what is going on. I can’t vouch even for what’s going on so far, nor for any of these theories, but here is the jist of some of them:

1 Russia has brokered some sort of peace agreement / negotiation with Ukraine, and is letting Ukraine have Kherson back

2 Russia’s mobilised forces are still not meaningfully in theatre yet (true), and Russia does not want to engage in heavy battles with a still numerically superior force where it would risk self-asssessed tactical losses

3 Supplying Kherson city across the Dneiper is too difficult at the moment given Ukrainian artillery range. Russia has also allegedly built significant fortifications on the other bank of the Dneiper river, which will be easier to supply/defend while the mobilised arrive. Photographic evidence of this has already been presented on Twitter, whether real or not: https://twitter.com/COUPSURE/status/1588924419002740736

4 The commanders of Russia’s army is simply too casualty averse and does not want to engage in heavy fighting with the Ukrainian army at all, or that there are structural issues with Russia’s army (or perhaps, its’ high command, and the political capacity of the Russian state to provide for the army) that does not bode well for its long term prospects in Ukraine

1 in my opinion is improbable, likely the answer lies between the other 3 points. Long term, I do not think decisions like this, which mirror the withdrawal from Kharkov months ago, bode well for the long term success of this war. It is especially notable in Kherson’s case, because Russia has formally ‘annexed’ the region; if this annexation is to mean anything at all, the army is now legally obligated to get the territory back. Otherwise the annexation is a pure gesture. I have revised my estimates for Russia’s success downwards following this nadir (assuming it is occuring; almost guaranteed now in my opinion given what I am seeing on Telegram etc, but I hope not) in this war. I give them a SUB 50% chance of winning the war, possibly sub 45%. I will not get into the full reasoning for this assessment, but unfortunately I am starting to come to the view Coming has been insisting to me for several weeks now. Hopefully it is wrong, even if it doesn’t really matter.

A Russian loss in Ukraine would be the end of Putin’s regime as we know it, and possibly the current incarnation of the Russian federation, whatever that genuinely represents. Certainly if there is a Kherson withdrawal (may have already happened in the time I have been writing this honestly) there will be severe political recriminations and criticism of Putin in Russia, and justifiably so. The internal response for this move will be even angrier than it was over Kharkov. But I do believe an overall Russian defeat now to be a distinct and reasonable possibility, and will be re-assessing the situation around New Years or afterwards.

Also I think I will be the first Australian ‘journalist’ (lmao) to actually have reported on this in an Aus media source, so go us!!!

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Coming

Internet edgelords around the world recoil in horror as their god king Putin is exposed as incompetent , crypto is confirmed as a daisy chain of ponzis, and the red wave is a sad fizzer

If the unvaxxed start dying , and global warming starts up again, I think we need to permanently close this website down

more dignified than how MB handled their constant failures

Coming

I think the most important thing for you to do is dispassionately assess why and how you got it so wrong

what were the cognitive biases that led you to that

I couldn’t even locate Ukraine on a map , and I knew it wasn’t going well for Russia
so it wasn’t your ignorance or stupidity

youve fallen into a trap(s) somewhere along the way

maybe it was your narcissism and need to be different (like the vaccine retards here)

just so you avoid the same error in life in the future where it might be more personally consequential

Coming

ok, then we can do this in real time

at this point, with russia ceding territory to ukraine, why do you believe you are still CORRECT in your initial assessment?

Coming

ok so you have definitely changed your position
quite radically

i think you can reflect then on why you were wrongly so confident before

its not like the material circumstances have changed

Coming

well we saw how that played out over the last 10 years for the crowd at MB

they refused to buy a house, and cost themselves millions of dollars

I’m fascinated by the phenomenon , and how they have mentally coped with being wrong for a decade while ruining their entire lives

if you recognise you are a reflexive contrarian then you need to consciously act to repress it when appropriate

Coming

im talking about all the members there

david/leith have hinted that they own houses and weren’t getting high on their own supply

Its very unlikely that anyone there outperformed housing since 2009, purely because of the relative size of the investment and leverage
You have to be ballsy to sink your entire life savings leveraged 5x into any other kind of investment

unless they went all in on bitcoin pre2016

Coming

After having studied them for the last 10 years, i believe differently

i think they are narcicisists who think they deserve to be of higher standing/stature in life
They are smarter than the average punter and therefore believe they deserve more

they couldn’t achieve this by getting in on a lower rung of the property ladder, so instead they decided to believe that the whole thing was due to collapse and they could scoop up a bargain and live grandly

the same phenomenon exists in the full-retard antivax crowd here, who think they will inherit the earth when all the sheep are dead from graphene 5g nanobots or whatever

Coming

Yeah the conspiracy theorists are entertaining at least

bjw678

the same phenomenon exists in the full-retard antivax crowd here, who think they will inherit the earth when all the sheep are dead from graphene 5g nanobots or whatever

Who thinks this, other than the strawmen in your head you use to justify your own bias’s

Last edited 2 years ago by bjw678
A fly in your ointment

…they will inherit the earth when all the sheep are dead from graphene 5g nanobots or whatever…

miocarditis or clots or stroke… the rest of those causes is in the loony box.

imagine a life sitting on a ticking time bomb which may never go off but may go off right now.
Life is full of surprises beyond our control. We’ll never know what tomorrow brings.
However,
Injecting oneself with something that from the begining was dodgy and known to have zero benefits but carried a lifetime risk – is beyond pushing the envelope. It is outright playing chicken with the death or worse, with disability.

Aussie Soy Boy

At best the vaccines are entirely useless. At worst we don’t know there’s no long term data. Your profession has no credibility and you’re completely untrustworthy.

Jam

Have to agree soy. I let it drop today I am unvaxxed at work. Apparently everyone needs to be. I laughed out loud, and said I look forward your next move, mumbling at them ‘cucks’ I swear architects are the biggest bunch of cucks there is. This was after I quit three weeks ago and I was convinced to stick around. I said I’d stay till end of year and see how next year starts off.

Coming

I let it drop today I am unvaxxed at work. Apparently everyone needs to be. I laughed out loud, and said I look forward your next move, mumbling at them ‘cucks’

fucking lol I can 100% believe this happened

all of you 2% holdouts are such weirdos and this paints the picture perfectly

nobody heard you call them cucks but you wanted it that way because you’re too cowardly to say it to their faces

Coming

I’m a digital anthropologist

Peachy

at least the unvaxxed werent trying to legislate ppls jobs out of existence over a dud pharmaceutical product

not being allowed to go into a store lmao

no one should ever be allowed to forget this

yes. Many people were outed as being as right cunts.

it is important to not forget who those people are.

Coming

Lockdowns were worse

there was no way around it

at least the jab you could just man up and take your 1 in 100,000 risk and get on with things

A fly in your ointment

there is no “manning up” in bending over a chair with gov bully bare naked having a massive hard on and no Vaseline. At least 80% of Aussies have not manned up. If majority did man up and said no to the vaccinazism even lockdowns would not be enforceable.

one thing is to make a mistake, another altogether is to justify the mistake as a good choice.

Jam

Your wrong. They were office juniors and wouldn’t know what a cuck is. May have misphrased it, but whatevs. The sound of their shock was Louder .

Coming are you starting to regret the decision to participate in the slave trader vascular bukkake .

I’d hate to be vaxxed and be worried every time a sniffle came along, or chest pain, is is this the end ..

Coming

I agree with all those sentiments

Unfortunately, the vaccine isn’t going to make a lick of difference good or bad to 99.99% of the population

and therefore you aren’t special

bjw678

lol

 think the most important thing for you to do is dispassionately assess why and how you got it so wrong

what were the cognitive biases that led you to that

Says he of the constantly changing opinions and facts.

bjw678

It’s less good to have to change it 5 minutes after posting it because someone points out some clearly ridiculous statements you have made.
(looking at you coming)

bjw678

Bitcoin will likely be still standing after this financing scam blows over.

Peachy

Here’s hoping, anyway 😜

bjw678

I’m waiting for a buying opportunity so the lower the better for me…

A fly in your ointment

…If the unvaxxed start dying , and global warming starts up again, I think we need to permanently close this website down…

LOL, yeah, unwaxed will start dying, eventually, but not from Emma Renay in their body.

Aussie Soy Boy

You go back to March and the invasion seemed idiotic that’s why I never believed he would go through with it. Putin is not prepared to shock and awe so he will lose.

Aussie Soy Boy

I don’t get it. He’s right about the west and for intelligence he leaves any US or western leader for dead. I think he thought the west would roll over for Ukraine and not call the nuke bluff.

bjw678

the problem is he’s too unwilling to ratchet up everything the russian federation needs to finish this fast. and ultimately this aversion is reasonably probable to lead to ukraine pushing russia entirely out eventually. 

The problem with ratcheting up is you piss off the entire local population who will fight asymmetric war with you forever, see vietnam with the US, Afghanistan with the soviets, then the US, Iraq with the US etc

bjw678

ukraine isnt fighting a partisan war

Yet.
France and the UK weren’t fighting a partisan war either until it was fully occupied by Ze Germans. That is kind of the point. You move onto that after you lose in the initial war or invasion if it is lightly opposed.
If the russians go hell for leather and wipe out a whole lot of locals they set the seeds of decades of insurgent activity.
The fact that the ukrainians have held the russians off clearly shows that there is not a lot of local support for the russian invasion in ukraine.

No1

So what is the point of this war. Lmao. Don’t tell me historians are going to write this war happened because Putin was crazy.

bjw678

Why do they say the falklands war happened?

bjw678

Really?
Vietnam seems like a reasonable approximation.
It is clearly a proxy war being backed by various super powers.
Maybe the russkies in afghanistan is a more apt comparison though.

bjw678

You said that putin didn’t have the heart to do what was needed to finish this war.
I think much like george bush(the smart one that didn’t occupy iraq) he understands it is far easier to take territory than it is to occupy it against a local population that doesn’t want you there and the war only begins when you have taken occupation.
That is probably why this is being slowly fought but you’ve got to wonder what the russians intended end game actually is, I don’t think bombing and shelling the population is a great way to convince the locals of how good you are…

A fly in your ointment

not sure why you bother to explain something that is impossible to be understood for the sake of lack of reliable secret information. This could be very well anything spanning the full range from absolute incompetence to a master 5D chess move, all with various degrees of probabilities.

I do not see the relevance of comparison to battle of Malvinas Islands with The SMO. The forces of 5👀 were way too powerful to be reckoned with at the time, unlike the State 404 case…

No1

Sounds like the same kind of master plan guiding our Aussie politicians to screw us in every way 😊

A fly in your ointment

Austin Powers movie in real life…?

Ramjet

Russia is not going to win, but neither will Ukraine. The winners will be the Western banking cartel and the Military Industrial Complex. This will be a protracted multi year civil war. Exactly what the Military Industrial Complex wants.

Ramjet

Some good analysis by The New Atlas:
https://youtu.be/O_DeH3-H4SQ

LostSocialist

Patience. This is about the 10th time the media have claimed the allied forces (RU/DPR/LPR) were about to be wiped out and it has not happened yet. That is despite Ukraine up to this point having a larger number of troops and being backed extensively by all of Nato with the exception of Turkey.
With the dam upstream under constant shelling it looks like the Russians are very worried about large losses of civilians and military personnel. The Russians are focussing on slowly but surely destroying Ukraine’s military capabilities through a war of attrition, while protecting there soldiers and civilians to the greatest possible extent. That means territorial conquests are not so important at this stage. The only reason Ukraine’s military is still even vaguely functional is through massive supplies of weapons from the west but that is nearly exhausted. There will come a point shortly where the Ukrainian military will not be able to replenish its losses on the front and then they will collapse relatively quickly and that is when the territorial gains will be made and locked in.

BING!

How it started

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BING!

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T

I’d say it is to help out their allies.

(1) Russia needs to keep China/India/Turkey et al on its side. The consistent line has always been, Russia is ready to negotiate. Now, I don’t expect them to actually do this in good faith, but it allows them to say they are ready to negotiate, and it keeps international heat off their allies – See, we retreated from Kherson, we are willing to negotiate!

(2) General Autumn is still in play, and as long as its raining and overcast, the Russian Aerospace Forces can’t do their thing. In this instance, time is very much on the Russian side. Once General Frost arrives, the tanks can roll.

(3) Russia is winning the economic war of attrition – unexpectedly. Why mess with a good thing? Let Europe feel the growing pain, and when they are good and ready, the military can do its thing.

(4) Waiting for mid term results to firm up. New congress does not start until Jan, so the Russians can push hard until then, and getting victories before Jan means they give Republicans the time to firm up ‘lets-get-out-of-war-in-Europe’ arguments.

Why hurry – they have already won, and hasty moves now mean they might snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Taking a small l now might mean a big w later.

My take is its a feint, giving Zelensky / the west more rope to hang themselves. Why bother with the song and dance on Russian TV by Surovikin otherwise?

BING!

..

Screen Shot 2022-01-11 at 07.42.31.png
BING!

Screen Shot 2022-05-14 at 21.44.16.png
BING!

….

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BING!

…..

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emusplatt

I presume G20 will be sans Putin then?

Putin dare not be absent from Rus…

xxxxx

Lavrov will be there. Just as well, I hear the Global south is eating out of his hand. Interesting that the US was pressuring Indonesia to rescind their invitation to Putin, but they refused. Is US losing global influence ?

Ramjet

Yes, if Melbourne is anything to go by. People walking outside with masks on.

Ramjet

I reckon about 1 in 20.

Coming

chincels btfo

Stewie

I saw someone on the train into work the other day who was wearing a mask that was high enough rated that it made him resemble Batman’s nemesis Bane, except he was an overweight 60yr old (was probably 50).

It was ridiculous, I couldn’t help smirking and caught the reflection of several other people doing the same.

Coming

80% got the recommended 3rd and 4th dose, so I think there’s a high chance

Aussie Soy Boy

I like when some big porker like the QLD premier starts dictating health advice to all of us. Hospitals would not be bursting at the seams if not for fat pigs like Pallachuck.

Hoody

Send in the Vikings!

Norwegian-men-768x432.jpg
BING!

……

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Stewie

I would hope some Somalian immigrants ass rape him, except that he probably fantasizes about it.

canuckdownunder

Is Sean Penn giving Zelenskyy an Oscar award the ultimate in high-level trolling that this entire thing is just a charade being played out for the plebs?

canuckdownunder

Non-immunocompromised bedwetter begs for fifth vaxx injection, the hilarious part is that he currently has Covid.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-11-09/covid-booster-vaccine-fifth-dose-atagi/101627966

Drago

Fark me, what a pathetic Bedwetter.

The ongoing costs are criminal, any idea what the $’s are?

“Should ATAGI advise a fifth vaccine dose (or fourth for under-30s), the government has assured it has enough doses to cover everyone.
The Australian government currently has five separate agreements for the supply of COVID-19 vaccines.
These agreements allow for the provision of 250 million doses collectively from Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Novavax, Moderna and the COVAX Facility.”

Drago

$17 Billion…I’m guessing they have. Use-by date too, so when the majority say no to further Boosters they’ll have to chuck them out?

https://www.health.gov.au/initiatives-and-programs/covid-19-vaccines/about-rollout/vaccine-agreements

Coming

https://apple.news/A_umcARZWRaWkpG96oS_Rhg

our girl Britt out and about at B grade celebrity events

wonder if she spread her legs for the bf afterwards

Aussie Soy Boy

I wonder if she remembered her panties this time

No1

To quote someone on Telegram, Russian troops should withdraw to Beijing to preserve their lives.

Who the fuck is going to risk their lives defending Russia against invasion when they don’t know if the authorities will abandon the city because they might lose the battle.

No1

Yeah it’s fucking retarded.

What is the point of this war?

Russia is gonna lose all the territory it gained. No local Ukrainian in their right mind would collaborate with this bunch of pussies. No Russian in their right mind would fight in a war that doesn’t have any clear purpose and which has turned into a constant string of failures, no matter how casualty averse Putin is. It’s still dangerous as all fuck but now if you die, it was for literally nothing.

Ukrainians will hate Russia forever and will give NATO anything they want. At the same time, they’re blooded and willing to take much bigger risks, plus their nationalism will surge and stay high for generations. Russia looks weak now and won’t ever inspire the level of fear that it did before the war.

This was Russia’s war to lose and they haven’t just lost it, but endangered their core interests through their cowardice.

No1

“It is fatal to enter any war without the will to win it.”

It’s unreal that governments still haven’t internalised this lesson after Vietnam. Surely this will hammer the point home that if you go into a war with your own troops, it can’t be a bullshit SMO. Ukraine and NATO haven’t pulled their punches.

I don’t know how Putin can simultaneously be so risk-averse with his troops, but also not risk-averse enough to realise that the world was trending in the direction of providing maximum support to anyone willing to fight Russia. Ever since the Mujahideen’s victory, the US has been essentially willing to sign a blank cheque. The Ukrainians are less dodgy than the various jihadist groups it backed in Syria.

Putin seems like a smart guy. He’s turning into another Western politician where nobody can understand any of his actions or motives. Only major retards want to die for Western politicians and their games. It’s heading that way for Putin too. People need a simple fucking message to follow, not decisions based on expert advice bullshit, secret intelligence bullshit, secret deals. People won’t fight for that shit.

Stewie

This is incredible. It’s like a real-life testament to that 4chan thread about “people with a sub-90 IQ can’t do X, people with a sub-85 can’t do Y” etc that I posted about a few months ago… just read the comments and draw your own conclusions as to which groups can’t follow basic instructions (which is what the test was testing for)

https://mobile.twitter.com/AfricanArchives/status/1590172322039676928

Don’t know what amused me more, all the Africans going; “Dang, this test is impossible” or all the white people with their first encountering of people on the left hand side of the Bell curve going “Dang, you people are real?”

Stewie

Yeah – I read a similar thread on twitter about a paramedic who claimed that a large part of his dealing with the public is dealing with stupid people.

Most people aren’t aware such people exist, because the reality is most friendships generally self assort on the basis of common interests and pursuits, which are often IQ dependent. Thus most people look around at most people they know and can’t imagine dealing with stupid people.

Apparently the paramedic spent most of his time with people too stupid to take their pills, let alone know what they are taking and what it is for. These people call emergency often to solve simple problems that they cannot find a solution to…. “I can’t breath” “Have you checked that you are not sitting on your oxygen supply” “Oh thanks, that’s better.”

A fly in your ointment

https://m.investing.com/currencies/aud-usd-chart

AUD jumped 3% in relation to USD this morning, and climbing.
Or is it actually other way round?

Coming

inflation rolling over in the USA overnight

looks like aussie house prices are going to be saved

how good hey

No1

They were always going to be saved, if saved = a 0.2% miss in CPI expectations.

emusplatt

OTA…this robodeath Greggery KC is a proper bulldog

https://twitter.com/SquigglyRick/status/1590855596093632513