Russo-Ukrainian War 2014-25

[DGuller]

Enemy at the Gates got some things right.  The Soviets were indeed the ones defending Stalingrad, and the Germans were the ones attacking it.  However, when it comes to the finer details, the historical accuracy leaves everything to be desired.

[Josquius]

I think the point is valid though.
It wasn't the Soviet soldiers doing these insane death sentence things out of nowhere. They knew not to do it would also spell death, whether from their own side or the nazis.
At least this way their families maybe got to live.

A big advantage for Ukraine in the current war Incidentally.

[Duque de Bragança]

Enemy at the Gates got some things right.  The Soviets were indeed the ones defending Stalingrad, and the Germans were the ones attacking it.  However, when it comes to the finer details, the historical accuracy leaves everything to be desired.

Historicity almost as good as 300 I guess.

[grumbler]

Enemy at the Gates got some things right.  The Soviets were indeed the ones defending Stalingrad, and the Germans were the ones attacking it.  However, when it comes to the finer details, the historical accuracy leaves everything to be desired.

Kinda like Languish! 

[Crazy_Ivan80]

https://www.economist.com/europe/2022/07/21/germans-have-been-living-in-a-dream

The story is old and takes many forms. A fairy-tale version, recorded two centuries ago by the Brothers Grimm, tells of a certain Karl Katz, a goatherd in the Harz Mountains of central Germany. One night a straying goat leads Katz deep into a cave. Tempted by strange men, he drinks a potion and falls asleep. On waking he finds that not hours, but years have passed. The world around him has changed.
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The bewilderment felt by Katz is now shared by many Germans. Some years ago Europe's richest country slipped into a state not quite of slumber, but of sleep-walking. Newly reunited and lulled by their own economic and diplomatic success, Germans settled into a comfortable belief that their system was working near-perfectly. Governmental policies came to be guided less by pragmatism than by self-deception, as leaders plied voters with intoxicating talk of perpetual prosperity with minimal friction and, of course, zero emissions.

The awakening, to the sound of Russian tanks grinding into nearby Ukraine, has been rude. In some ways Germany finds itself not, like Katz, years in the future, but decades in the past. Instead of cruising on an Autobahn towards liberal democracy, much of the wider world has skidded into ugly kinds of populism that Germans recall all too well. Rather than enjoying an era of peaceful co-operation, Germany is finding that guns and soldiers—including American ones—are suddenly back in demand. German prosperity turns out to rely not solely on the industriousness of its people, as in the cheering fairy-tale version, but also on cheap imported energy and manpower. And of course that nice Vladimir Putin, who gift-wrapped whole pipelines full of natural gas, turns out to be a wolf.

Put simply, years of complacency have landed Germany in a pickle. Yet even as the establishment comes to terms with the scale of its dilemma, and with the immense challenge of changing course, Germany's conversation with itself remains strangely parochial and lacking in urgency. Even more odd, in a country that prides itself on the openness of its democracy, is the failure to account for what went awry. Yes, some public figures have rightly been scolded for looking at Russia through rose-tinted lenses. But the systemic nature of Mr Putin's deceptions and of Germany's wilful blindness have hardly been explored. No one seems to want to talk about what happened "in the cave".

Consider Germany's woeful dependence on Russian fuels. This came about not only because Mr Putin seduced businesses and politicians with low prices, so boosting Russia's share of Germany's natural-gas consumption from 30% two decades ago to a 55% chokehold. Decisions were also taken to shrink the supply of energy from other sources. Among numerous examples of such foolishness, the best-known concerns nuclear power. When a tsunami hit the Japanese nuclear reactors at Fukushima in 2011, the government of then-chancellor Angela Merkel flippte aus, shutting down half of Germany's nuclear generation capacity virtually overnight. It set a closing date for the last three plants of December 2022, a target that is only now being questioned, as crippling power shortages loom. Reflecting the peculiar absence of urgency in German politics, one mooted compromise calls on the Greens to drop their insistence on closing the reactors in exchange for their liberal coalition partners dropping objections to speed limits on the Autobahn.

Yet perhaps Germany's biggest own goal was scored against its own natural-gas industry. Germans lack the luck of the neighbouring Dutch, whose giant Groningen field, a mere bicycle-ride from the border, has gushed out some $500bn worth of gas since 1959 (allowing this newspaper in 1977 to coin the term "Dutch Disease"). But neither are Germany's own reserves puny. At the turn of the millennium Germany was pumping out some 20bn cubic metres (bcm) of natural gas a year, enough to meet close to a quarter of national demand. But although geologists think that Germany holds at least 800bcm of exploitable gas, production has not grown but rather collapsed, to a mere 5-6bcm, equivalent to just 10% of imports from Russia.
Fear of fracking

The reason is simple. Geology dictates that nearly all Germany's gas can only be extracted using hydraulic fracturing, but the German public holds an irrational fear of fracking. Not just a fear: in 2017 Ms Merkel's government passed a law that essentially bans commercial fracking, even though German firms have been using the technique in the country since the 1950s, with not a single reported incident of serious environmental damage.

The causes of the public's fear are not hard to find. In 2008 Exxon, a big American oil firm, proposed expanding the use of fracking at a site in northern Germany. As environmentalists piled in to protest, the increasingly influential Green party joined the fray. So did Russia Today, a pro-Kremlin channel, blaring warnings that fracking causes radiation, birth defects, hormone imbalances, the release of immense volumes of methane and toxic waste, and the poisoning of fish stocks. No less an expert than Mr Putin himself declared, before an international conference, that fracking makes black goop spew out of kitchen taps.

Germans do seem to like fairy tales. "Eventually we gave up trying to explain that fracking is absolutely safe," sighs Hans-Joachim Kümpel, a former head of the main government advisory body on geoscience. "I can't really blame people who have no understanding of subsurface geology, if all they hear is horror stories."

German gas producers say that given a chance, with today's even cleaner and safer new fracking methods they could double their output in as little as 18-24 months. At that level Germany could be pumping gas well into the next century. That would trim imports by some $15bn a year. And that is no fairy tale.

Well played Russia, well played.
And of course the Greens, as always, aren't innocent either in the energy debacle.

[The Minsky Moment]

Enemy at the Gates got some things right.  The Soviets were indeed the ones defending Stalingrad, and the Germans were the ones attacking it.  However, when it comes to the finer details, the historical accuracy leaves everything to be desired.

Khrushchev was at the real battle as well as the fictional one, although without the Cockney accent. 
And everyone knows from Death of Stalin that he spoke English in a Brooklyn accent, as is appropriate.

[DGuller]

Here is a heartwarming video of the day: https://www.reddit.com/r/ukraine/comments/w4r36m/muslim_and_jewish_defenders_of_ukraine_sitting_in/.

[Zanza]

And of course the Greens, as always, aren't innocent either in the energy debacle.

How so? They were not in power for the last sixteen years and a very junior partner before that.

The decisions that led us to where we are now were made by others: Most damage was made in 2011, when Conservatives and Liberals shut down nuclear power and fatally damaged the prospering renewables industry Germany had back then.

The Greens on the other hand were the one voice critical of natural gas and pro renewables. Their stance on nuclear power is not helpful,but right now, Germany has a gas problem, not an electricity problem.
 

[Crazy_Ivan80]

And of course the Greens, as always, aren't innocent either in the energy debacle.

How so? They were not in power for the last sixteen years and a very junior partner before that. 

by steering public opinion of course. It's not because you're not in power, you don't have any power.

[Crazy_Ivan80]

And of course the Greens, as always, aren't innocent either in the energy debacle.

How so? They were not in power for the last sixteen years and a very junior partner before that. 

by steering public opinion of course. It's not because you're not in power, you don't have any power.

killing the domestic gas-extraction industry (fracking) and thus pushing Germany into the Russian arms even more.

[Zanza]

Ok, I would assign most blame to the democratically elected governments of the day, not to an opposition party that for most of the last decade was barely in the double digits in surveys and elections. But I understand that you have a different view on their effectiveness in guiding policy.

[viper37]

I'm not sure that is heroism properly speaking.  It seems like a Stalingrad situation, charging the enemy with an empty gun or with only the ammo and picking up whatever you need from the body of your fallen comrades.


It wasn't exactly willingly.  It's either do it or you'll be shot by the Commissar.

You are describing a scene from a fictional movie.  That sort of thing didn't happen in the real Battle of Stalingrad. Late 1941, maybe.  But, by the Fall of 1942 Soviet small arms were not in short supply.

It wasn't 1 weapon per 2 man like in the movie, but it did happen that Soviet soldiers were sent to the front unarmed during the early stage of the wars because just like today, the high command couldn't approvision its army decently.  It happened frequently enough to be noted by some historians.  Battle of Smolensk is one place.

As for shooting their own soldiers, is that even in dispute?

I am not denying there were acts of heroism.  But we could find such acts in many armies of WWII.

Be my guest.  Make sure it's an act that even the enemy is awed by.

Léo Major, for one.  Liberated an entire city by himself.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A9o_Major

[DGuller]

As for shooting their own soldiers, is that even in dispute?

The way it was shown in the movie?  I think it is in dispute.  The idea that Soviets would send human waves at the enemy machine guns, and use own machine guns to gun down the ones that balked, has never been reality.

[viper37]

As for shooting their own soldiers, is that even in dispute?

The way it was shown in the movie?  I think it is in dispute.  The idea that Soviets would send human waves at the enemy machine guns, and use own machine guns to gun down the ones that balked, has never been reality.

Did they show machine guns?  I thought it was a commissar and some officers shooting their retreating soldiers.

Waves or unarmed soldiers, likely not, but a good number of unarmed soldiers in some of the early battles, yes.  Some soldiers were reporting for duty without their weapons and they were either sent to combat without their guns or held back in reserve until enough soldiers died so they could advance and pick up the weapons on the filed.

I don't doubt Russian soldiers fought bravely.  I doubt they were braver than any other armies, without the threat or being shot by their own officers.

[grumbler]

It wasn't 1 weapon per 2 man like in the movie, but it did happen that Soviet soldiers were sent to the front unarmed during the early stage of the wars because just like today, the high command couldn't approvision its army decently.  It happened frequently enough to be noted by some historians.  Battle of Smolensk is one place.

As for shooting their own soldiers, is that even in dispute?

Feel free to make a relevant point whenever you finally think of one.

Léo Major, for one.  Liberated an entire city by himself.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A9o_Major

That was one guy.  Every army has individual heroes.  Not every army awes its enemy with the stubborn courage of its solders. 

The Russian Army was naturally not unique in that, though.  The important point is that that spirit is missing in today's battles (in fact, it is on the opposite side; the defense of the Azovstal steel plant rivals that of the Grain Elevator or Tractor Factory at Stalingrad).