Democracy For Nepal: 25: Ukraine

Thursday, May 25, 2023

25: Ukraine

Wagner Group boss, "Putin's butcher," says Russia at risk of losing Ukraine war and facing a "revolution"

The Wagner group forecasts disaster if Russia does not move into total war footing. Yevgeny Prigozhin has been ramping up pressure on Russia’s military leadership and extending his criticism to the country’s moneyed elites. .

The U.S.-Chinese Economic Relationship Is Changing—But Not Vanishing How “De-Risking” Can Preserve Healthy Integration .

Two Weeks at the Front in Ukraine In the trenches in the Donbas, infantrymen face unrelenting horrors, from missiles to grenades to helicopter fire. ......
If you want to live, dig.
........ shock waves and shrapnel had reduced the surrounding trees to splintered canes. Artillery had churned up so much earth that you could no longer distinguish between craters and the natural topography. ......... A log-covered dugout, where the soldiers slept, was about five feet deep and not much wider. ........ As for the infantrymen, their mission was straightforward: not to leave and not to die.......... The village was controlled by the Wagner Group, a Russian paramilitary organization notorious for committing atrocities in Africa and the Middle East. ......... “They were like zombies. They used the prisoners like a wall of meat. It didn’t matter how many we killed—they kept coming.” ........... and the conventional troops who replaced them were far less numerous and suicidal ........ “A lot of the new guys don’t have the stamina to be out here,” Pavlo said. “They get scared and they panic.” ........ The uncanny extent to which both men had adapted to their lethal environment underscored the agitation of the recent arrivals, who flinched whenever something whistled overhead or crashed nearby............ Taking out his phone, he swiped through a series of photographs: “Killed . . . killed . . . killed . . . killed . . . killed . . . wounded. . . . Now I have to get used to different people. It’s like starting over.” .......... He’d been there for six weeks and had not so much mastered his fear as accepted the illogic of running: there was nowhere to escape to. All the same, he was so timid by nature that it was difficult to imagine him repulsing a Russian attack. “I hate weapons and violence,” he said with wide-eyed incredulity, as if he still could not believe where he was. “I’m just trying to stay alive until I can get home.” ......... I spent twelve days with the 28th Brigade, and I never once saw Tynda, Odesa, or Bison put on body armor or a helmet. When I asked Bison about this, he replied, “If I’m going to die, I’ll die.” ........ the veterans had so internalized the soundscape of the war that they knew instinctively where each munition was coming from and where it would land .......... The gun’s operator, a rawboned soccer hooligan with brass knuckles tattooed on his hand, spoke of the Maxim like a car enthusiast lauding the performance of a vintage Mustang. ........... In the course of the past year, the U.S. has furnished Ukraine with more than thirty-five billion dollars in security assistance. Why, given the American largesse, had the 28th Brigade resorted to such a museum piece? A lot of equipment has been damaged or destroyed on the battlefield. At the same time, Ukraine appears to have forgone refitting debilitated units in order to stockpile for a large-scale offensive that is meant to take place later this spring. At least eight new brigades have been formed from scratch to spearhead the campaign. While these units have been receiving weapons, tanks, and training from the U.S. and Europe, veteran brigades like the 28th have had to hold the line with the dregs of a critically depleted arsenal. .......... it was “more important to focus on the accumulation of resources” for future battles. “May the soldiers in the trenches forgive me,” Zaluzhnyi said. .............. his mortar teams had fired about three hundred shells a day; now they were rationed to five a day. The Russians averaged ten times that rate. ............. The most important element of any dugout is the roof. Raw logs are brought on trucks as close to the front as possible, then carried by soldiers to the trenches. A proper roof consists of three layers of logs stacked crosswise under three feet of dirt—a thickness greater than the distance that most projectiles can penetrate during the millisecond between their impact and their detonation. Railroad ties serve as vertical posts. The dugout should be deep enough that the top barely crests the ground; from outside, all you see are steps descending to a subterranean door. ................ “I’d seen how people burn alive inside,” he told me. “One R.P.G. or mortar strike, and that’s it.” ........... and as we approached a white church outside Kostyantynivka I noticed Volynyaka crossing himself. In town, I asked him if the war had made him more religious. “No, the opposite,” he said. “I’ve started to question the existence of God.” ........... According to Volynyaka, “almost everyone” who had not already fled the town was pro-Russian. A clerk at the local grocery store had told him, “We don’t want you here.” I asked him if the hostility had eroded his motivation to keep fighting. He shook his head. “I know it’s my land—why should I care what they think?” ............... and asked me if the soil in the United States was as rich and arable as theirs. The fact that this same soil now shielded them against injury and death had only deepened their attachment to it. ............. In his spare time, he tended the vegetable patch, which he hoped would be sprouting when the homeowners returned. ............. He later told me that his preferred avatar in his favorite video game, Skyrim, was an archer. “grove st 4 life,” a reference to Grand Theft Auto, was tattooed on his forearm. When he found enough bandwidth, he planned to download a game called World of Tanks onto his phone. ........... Then, on the eve of the offensive, a young member of the brigade posted a video of himself and his comrades in which he announced where “we will be attacking.” By the time the video was deleted, it had been viewed more than eleven thousand times. ......... When a sergeant overheard a draftee telling me that he was sick, the sergeant interjected, “Everybody is sick.” .......... “Maybe the drone saw the Starlink satellite,” Ivan said. “Or they saw our toilet. It’s obviously for officers.” (The toilet was just a pit that had been dug deeply enough to afford its occupant protection while squatting.) .......... Ivan grabbed a pastry from the food rations. “I want to eat some cake before I die.” ......... Morale was as crucial an asset as any in the infantry. One day, while I was on the Zero Line, an “Army psychologist” had visited. He did not have a degree in psychology, and his role was limited to identifying soldiers who were incapacitated by fear and could not “overcome their paralysis.” He explained, “I try to convey to them why they must follow their orders. If that doesn’t work, then we send them to a real psychologist.” ............. Ivan claimed that men often faked injuries in a bid to escape the trenches. “It happens all the fucking time,” he said. But, he allowed, such desperation could arise from genuine psychological damage. ............ Almost all the veterans had suffered multiple concussions, but, as Kaban had told me, “If we get sent for treatment, who will stay in the trenches?” ............ Post-traumatic stress disorder did not seem to be an apposite diagnosis for anyone on the front, because the traumatic event was still happening. .................. “It’s easier psychologically to stay here. It’s hard to come back after visiting civilization.” ........ Kaban had recalled going to Odesa a few months earlier and experiencing a panic attack as soon as he exited the train station. The overwhelming stimuli—bustling crowds, speeding cars, jarring city noises—felt like an onslaught of potential threats. Strangers were rifling through their bags, making phone calls; Kaban instinctively reached for his Kalashnikov, only to realize that he was unarmed. When he spotted a group of soldiers patrolling the station, he ran to them, pale and shaking. “Don’t worry,” a soldier assured him. “You’re not the first. This happens a lot.” ........ At the start—when there were no Five Hundreds or fainthearted draftees, and everyone was still a volunteer, galvanized by a profound sense of patriotic duty—Oper had commanded twelve extraordinarily courageous men. He had loved them all, and all of them had died. The losses had broken something in him, and he no longer permitted himself to form comparable attachments to his subordinates. ............. The whole country has been affected by the war, but nobody has absorbed its misery and horror the way infantrymen have. ............ and he did not think that having three children should exclude a man from serving. “It should be the other way around,” he said. “They have more to fight for.” ............. “Just like the Battle of Saratoga, the fight for Bakhmut will change the trajectory of our war for independence and for freedom.” This March, Zelensky told the Associated Press that if Ukraine lost the city Putin would “smell that we are weak” and “sell this victory to the West, to his society, to China, to Iran.” .

The faster you are, the less good you have to be.

See a problem, fix 60% of it in an hour?
You're a rockstar.

See a problem, hold 3 meetings, spend 2 weeks researching, and use 2 engineers to fix 90% a month later?
You're a problem.

Velocity is sustenance for a startup.
— Kristen Anderson (@FintechKristen) May 24, 2023

I sat down with the @WSJ to breakdown the money behind the Roy family in HBO’s hit show ‘Succession’.

This is definitely one of the coolest things I’ve done in my career. I hope you enjoy it! pic.twitter.com/lNzsX8CK5X
— Douglas A. Boneparth (@dougboneparth) May 25, 2023

Exclusive: A geothermal startup showed its wells can be used like a giant underground battery.

If these field results work at commercial scale, it could become cheaper and easier to eliminate greenhouse-gas emissions from the grid. https://t.co/DkgfPgldZE
— MIT Technology Review (@techreview) March 7, 2023

2020 to 2040 will bring the most rapid and dramatic changes in human history.
— Misha (@mishadavinci) May 25, 2023

I encourage those who believe they are helping Taiwan by hyping the threat of war to read this op-Ed. Hyping the threat does Beijing’s work for it, including by making it harder for Taiwan to attract foreign capital it needs for sustained growth. https://t.co/Kd6XzmO0Nm
— Ryan Hass (@ryanl_hass) May 25, 2023

Prompt: Red Rose In The Style Of Van Gogh pic.twitter.com/PPFE6CvQsc
— Paramendra Kumar Bhagat (@paramendra) May 25, 2023

Anyone against “wokeness” is a bigoted racist.
— Alexis Soterakis (@asoterakis) May 25, 2023

A 3M reach is impressive, glitches and all.
— Paramendra Kumar Bhagat (@paramendra) May 25, 2023

I nearly bought some $NVDA the other week but didn’t because I was like, “How much upside can a $600B company really offer.”

The answer was apparently “$150B in a single day” 🤯 pic.twitter.com/1n7TZdjOkz
— ian 🔮🪤 (@IanRountree) May 25, 2023

In my interview to @ThereseLHSvD @SvD I emphasised we must discredit aggression as a tool of statecraft and hold Russia and its leaders accountable - otherwise Russia's aggression will sooner or later return and there can be no lasting peace in Europe.https://t.co/eEnPdLv1FZ
— Kaja Kallas (@kajakallas) May 25, 2023

My 4yo daughter has discovered Polaroid photos.

They are *everywhere* in our house after 1 day.

So I've decided she needs to start paying for them herself.

They cost me $1 on amazon

I'm going to charge her $.25 (she will earn it!)

Growth at all costs, am I right? #VCmath
— Brian Nichols (@b_nicks11) May 24, 2023

The remote work vs. in office debate is strange.

Pretty obvious to me that the best arrangement is:

- 3 days in the office for meetings / team work
- 2 days at home for deep work
— Peter Yang (@petergyang) May 24, 2023

My laptop is slow as hell and sounds like an airplane taking off.

I think it's time for a new one.

I've always been a Windows man. But I'm open to suggestions.

Apple vs Windows - which and why? 👇
— Kieran Drew (@ItsKieranDrew) May 25, 2023

There's a lot to parse in Geoffrey Hinton's explanation as to why he realized that deep learning systems like GPT-4 are more efficient intuition machines than humans. He formerly believed that we needed to model the brain. pic.twitter.com/aEtUf1O6F5
— Carlos E. Perez (@IntuitMachine) May 25, 2023

NVIDIA popped because everyone underestimated the amount of GPU compute the world needs. I’m honored that Lambda was mentioned in NVIDIA’s earnings call today.

Soon, every human will be using AGI powered by GPUs. And Lambda is going to be the #1 GPU cloud in the world.
— stephen balaban (@stephenbalaban) May 25, 2023

I'm terrified about the possible implications of actual default. But the rating agencies are just irrelevant 2/
— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) May 25, 2023

@GovRonDeSantis announced he’s running for president on Twitter. This was by far the biggest room ever held on social media. Twitter performed great after some initial scaling challenges. Thanks Twitter Team for adapting so quickly to make history!https://t.co/mTJ2INQ1Y7
— David Sacks (@DavidSacks) May 24, 2023

The less you need Venture Capital.

The more Venture Capital needs you.
— Martin Tobias (Pre-Seed VC) (@MartinGTobias) May 24, 2023

Do not aspire to be great.Great people come in different types. Aspire to be a good person. Good person are only one type ,they are about doing good. Be good not great.

Grocer's wife , B.P. Koirala pic.twitter.com/wtZC44oRVG
— Prabhakar Bagchand (@PBagchand) May 25, 2023

Julian Assange is a political prisoner. pic.twitter.com/6Y00oo2d2E
— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) May 24, 2023

I welcome today's decision of the @EUCouncil to extend temporary trade liberalization for Ukrainian products for another year. The full abolition of duties and quotas has been extended until June 2024. As we move towards the EU, this temporary liberalization should become…
— Володимир Зеленський (@ZelenskyyUa) May 25, 2023