Welcome to earth, Canuck.
Posted on 05/06/2022 12:05:06 AM PDT by UMCRevMom@aol.com
Warning: Contains graphic descriptions of war | A former Canadian soldier, identified as Shadow, tells CBC’s David Common about the violence he’s witnessed, the courage of Ukrainians and why he went over to fight.
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VIDEO Canadian fighting in Ukraine describes the ‘hell’ he witnessed
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zN2NdiFJFh0
Welcome to earth, Canuck.
Brutal.
No intent to entertain:
Primary source video is first person testimony of the account of a person who actually participated in an event. Not, freeper arm-chair aggressors supportive of invading Orcs.
One advantage to being in combat is all the great-tasting, high-calorie food. Nothing at IHOP can compare with a hearty breakfast of Ham & Eggs, Chopped. Served cold but with lots of Tabasco.
That depends on what’s left at the objective site. If you didn’t take decent rats with your, you need theirs. IF you destroy theirs while taking the objective, you go hungry.
Best to bring your own - that leaves food out of the OPLAN.
Planning on theirs usually sucks. Bigly.
The irony is that these dolts travel 1000km’s to supposedly fight for freedom,whilst everyday of the week the freedoms in the west are being eroded,expunged and obliterated. Freedom in the west (and eventually for the parts of Ukraine under western values colonialism) will ultimately consist solely of the freedom to kill womb life and the freedom to practice perversion.All opposed freedom deprived. Sooner or later those fighting the west’s wars, like those brought into fight Romes, will question the rationale of fighting to ‘free’ others so they can be slaves of the humanist world order
Well said. Not discounting this guy’s account, but he is merely a mercenary fighting because of manufactured emotional outrage.
Yes, the invasion and wartime loss is real, but there are way too many lefties that want this war, and want it to continue.
Your perspective is badly skewed by your obsessions.
Not everything consists of what is in the social media controversies of the day.
“values colonialism” is a weird statement. Or maybe one that has to be unpacked? Because from a deep, deep well of European culture you seem to care only about the scum on top. My Europe is that of Aristotle and Plato and Marcus Aurelius, of St. Benedict and St. Thomas Aquinas, of Shakespeare and Cervantes and Sebastian Elcano and James Watt and Henryk Sienkiewickz.
The “East” is impoverished here, tremendously so, in spite of the western-fuelled rennaissance of the 18th-19th centuries. This was thoroughly crushed by the Soviet union.
Big picture - Everyone there needs the depth of all of Europe, in its full glory. I think the Ukrainians understand all this massive value proposition than most of Russia. Imperfectly and vaguely, but there we are.
If you do not yet understand the “big picture”, you should try.
I think it is great to see “on the ground” testimony of this conflict and this man’s story seems to be exactly the same as the other soldiers from both sides have given. Here are two videos from a soldier on the Russian side:
https://twitter.com/AZmilitary1/status/1519984803122188290
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6XvM_fFwbA&t=83s
Here are two articles from the Ukraine side:
May 02, 2022
Ukraine’s Army Is In Very Bad Shape - More Fighting Will Only Destroy It
The French news agency AFP has published a report by Daphne Rousseau from near the Ukrainian frontline. It allows us to gain some realistic view of the state of the Ukrainian armed forces.
Exhausted Ukrainian soldiers return from eastern front
Packed with exhausted Ukrainian soldiers with clenched jaws, the truck drives away at full speed. The troops from the 81st brigade have just received an order to withdraw from the eastern front where Russian forces advance.
The brigade walked 12 kilometres (7.5 miles) Saturday, camouflaged in the woods and under crossfire, until their point of retreat at Sviatoguirsk.
The 81st Airmobile Brigade consists of 3 infantry battalions equipped with BTR-70 armored personnel carriers that can be loaded onto a plane. It also has a strong artillery group with 3 gun and missile battalions, and the usual hodgepodge of support units.
As the Ukrainian troops had to walk 12 kilometers a question arises. Where are their armored carriers? Even when infantry is deployed in dugouts and trenches its transport should always be nearby (~3 km) to be able to quickly pick it up when necessary.
The most likely answer is that those BTR-70, as well as the brigade’s artillery, no longer exist. From today’s ‘clobber list’ as published by the Defense Ministry of Russia (emphasis added):
In total, 146 aircraft and 112 helicopters, 683 unmanned aerial vehicles, 281 anti-aircraft missile systems, 2,756 tanks and other armored combat vehicles, 316 multiple launch rocket systems, 1,234 field artillery and mortars, as well as 2,563 units of special military vehicles of the Armed Forces of Ukraine were destroyed during the operation.
Those numbers will be, like all such counts, somewhat exaggerated. But they do tell a story.
Sviatoguirsk, the extraction point for the troops, is some 10 kilometers southeast of Izium which the Russian forces have taken a while ago.
More from the AFP piece:
For a month, the 81st — whose motto is “always first” — battled to push back the Russian advance in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region where Moscow’s troops move forward slowly, taking villages one by one.
“Everyone understands that we must guard the line here, we cannot let the enemy move closer, we try to hold it with all our force,” says lieutenant Yevgen Samoylov, anxious that the unit could be hit by Russian fire at any point.
“As you can hear, the enemy is very, very near,” he says, pointing to the sky. The line of Russian tanks is on the other side of a hill, around seven kilometres (4.3 miles) away.
The troops walked 12 kilometers and are now on trucks. The enemy is currently 7 kilometers away. Simple math will explain that with a 5 kilometer deep gain by the Russian forces.
At 21 years old, Samoylov, an officer from the Odessa military academy, finds himself managing 130 conscripts, often twice his age.
“It’s my first war. I was supposed to graduate in four months, but they sent me here,” says the baby-faced officer with a short black beard.
What a disaster. 130 conscripts up to age 40+. These ain’t well trained warriors but teachers and car mechanics or farmers drafted into the war. With 130 troops the unit has about the size of a company. Infantry companies in the Soviet/Russian/Ukrainian army are relatively big:
[T]he strength of a tank company is 31-40 people, and the number of servicemen of a motorized rifle company ranges from 150 people. Often a company is commanded by an officer with the rank of captain, and only in some units this position is occupied by a major.
The junior lieutenant Samoylov, who did not even finish his officer course, is leading a unit that is usually led by an officer two to three ranks higher than his. Where are the higher officers?
“Some really difficult battles,” says the quiet Samoylov.
In this brigade, like the others, they don’t say how many people have been killed. When the subject comes up, Samoylov’s gaze becomes misty. The pain is raw.
And there is an article from Politico from a Ukranian First Lt. Ivan Skuratovsky, serving in the 25th Airborne Brigade, told POLITICO that help needs to come immediately. “The situation is very bad, [Russian forces] are using scorched-earth tactics,” the 31 year-old married father of two said via text. “They simply destroy everything with artillery,
shelling day and night,” he said via text. He fears that if reinforcements in the form of manpower and heavy weaponry particularly air support don’t arrive in the next few days, his troops could find themselves in the same position as those in Mariupol.
Skuratovsky described his soldiers’ situation as “very desperate.” “I don’t know how much strength we will have,” he said, adding that the troops under his command around the city of Avdiivka, near Donetsk, have gone without rest since the start of the war. At least 13 of them have been wounded in recent weeke be said and they are running dangerously low on ammunition, reduced to rationing bullets. The day before, he told POLITICO his soldiers were being bombarded with Russian howitzers, mortars and multiple launch rocket systems “at the same time.” Just hours earlier, he said, they had been attacked by two Su-25 warplanes, “and our day became hell.” Skuratovsky had a message for the United States and other NATO countries: “I would like to tell them that grenade launchers are good, but against airstrikes and heavy artillery we will not be able to hold out for long. People can no longer endure daily bombardments. We need air support now. We need drones.”
It is a tragedy that the media has misreported every aspect of what led to this conflict and realistically how it is going. The men on Ukraine’s side are being used as cannon fodder and most will die as Scott Ritter keeps pointing out. He has reported that Russian losses are running in single digits per day and Ukraines are running in the hundreds and thousands per day.
And all because the U.S. wants to conduct a “proxy war” in an attempt to take down Putin/Russia. As an American I am devastated that they are taking down America instead...:-(
You would have gotten much the same testimony from US soldiers in frontline combat in WW2, or Korea, or often in Vietnam. And similar casualty rates. Or higher. And the replacement soldiers would have been of the same nature.
This is real war.
Perspective is needed.
I don’t care at all for European ‘culture’.I don’t discount the achievements of the ‘cream’ of the culture during its ascent. But it is now on its descent and the cream has been replaced by the scum which dominates the market place of ideas. Like I said, the great unwashed are having their freedoms restricted by political correctness at the expense of the purveyors of the slow motion dictatorship enjoy increasing freedom to subjugate all to their fake nirvana
Russia isn’t invading Ukraine to save these people from abortion. In fact Russia has one of the highest abortion rates in the world.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/abortion-rates-by-country
Russia 53.7
Ukraine 27.5
USA 20.8
Mercenaries fight for money not caring about the cause, but about a paycheck. He is clearly not a mercenary and volunteering in Ukraine is not a way to earn money.
Call him an idealist or adventurer if you want to give it a slightly deprecating name.
I agree perspective is needed. Here is the accurate perspective. The U.S. has made a fatal mistake. We have developed Ukraine into a puppet state for our purpose of “weakening” (as our Military puts it) Russia. We trained their troops for years to NATO standards. We have been equipping them for years. We (Department of Defense) has been paying for over 30 biolabs. (BTW, Russia has just blown one up...pics on the internet.)
We have invited them into NATO despite the fact that we had promised Russia not to move NATO one inch closer to them after Germany was reunited. We agreed to the Minsk agreement which Zelensky had said he would implement when he was elected. But, we discouraged him from doing that. It did not jive with our intentions for the area.
A month ago when Zelensky was just about to cry “Uncle” and agreed to some of Putin’s demands in negotiations in Turkey Boris Johnson unexpectedly visited Zelensky urging him not to reach an agreement. It was during those talks that we agreed NATO would send him the “big stuff” he had been asking for and A LOT MORE MONEY.
We enacted the “biggest sanctions” programs in history (according to Biden) which has back fired in a way that no one could have expected. It is KILLING US and hurting NATO even more. Meanwhile, Russia’s economy has already begun to repair. 20% initial interest rates dropped to 17% a few weeks later and last week went down to 14%. (They were at 10% prior to to the conflict.) The ruble instead of being at 200 as Biden suggested is now in the mid 60’s...far better than prior to the conflict.
We are working nonstop to threaten and bribe other nations to join our sanctions, though most outside of NATO are not capitulating.
We have made a terrible mistake. This would have never happened if Trump was still in office. He would have pressured Putin and forced Zelensky to accomodate and our disintegration would have been avoided.
Instead we are on the fringe of a world war with a large, nuclear power.
That’s the perspective...:-(
There is no “cream” without that mass of healthy milk. There is an El Greco to be seen in palaces and cathedrals only because there was a horde of lesser artists serving the same market in every little parish church. If you dive in and really look, you will see that incredible ubiquity of creation. In most of Europe this us simply daily life.
And you should care. The culture that underlies all your life, from contract law to due process to your military system to your technology to, well, your pants and shirt - thats all there.
Nailed it. I just cannot understand why Democrats are hell bent on war. It seems clear even to my unsophisticated eye that this could have been totally avoided. What is stunning is there is not one word of negotiations for a peaceful resolution. Not one. Ask yourself why? Why do they want this war? The Party of peacenicks and “no blood for oil” desperately want this war.
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