Russia’s success is partly a result of a shifting recruiting message, as it now relentlessly tells would-be soldiers that the war in Ukraine is really a fight against NATO, U.S. officials said. Russian bonuses have also drastically increased.
By combining these strategies, Mr. Putin may not need to order a politically unpopular broad draft, U.S. military and intelligence officials say.
Not really sure of the politics here but it seems they did this trying to play off the fact that Russia has been trying to subjugate Chechnya for the past century, and the current Chechen head Ramzan Kadyrov is a pro-Putin puppet that some Chechens hate. Therefore, by striking a "special forces training center" run by Kadyrov, I'd imagine they'd want to signal support to his detractors and encourage them to continue volunteering in Ukraine to fight against Russia.
This entire war was a useless bullshit excuse for NATO countries and arms dealers to dump their military surplus and profit off of the needless slaughter of tens of thousands of people on both sides using Ukranian civilians to fight a proxy war with Putin. This utter waste of life would never have happened if the west didn't interfere in Ukrainian politics in the early 2010s, or allowed peace talks to occur unobstructed between Russia and Ukraine in the early days of the war. Total deaths on both sides now is estimated to be 1 million people and a lot of Ukraine has been destroyed. How fucked is this.
I'm sure that's a big part of it coupled with the fact that it's becoming impossible to pretend the war is in a stalemate when Ukraine is losing kilometres of territory on daily basis.
Well you see there have been no Big Arrow Movestm for a while, so clearly it is a stalemate and Russia isn't just pursuing a strategy of steady attrition which infinitely favors them.
At what point was this a stalemate? The eventual outcome was obvious about 2 weeks in. I remember thinking that surely Russia's capacity to actually do the production needed for this war was more important than American financial dominance, but I kept hearing otherwise from all of the news. I was shocked to see that I was clearly right and I was being lied to, again.
This happens to me all of the time. It's like when the news kept telling me that any day now the ghettos of Caracas would rise up and demand the privatization of Venezuela's oil fields. I kept thinking it didn't make any sense and I must be missing something. Turns out I was right again.
It was never a stalemate, but while the war was in the attrition phase calling it a stalemate was a convenient narrative to keep drumming up support for it.
Because it's been not a stalemate for a while and they're just now finally admitting it. Things have been going terrible for Ukraine since the foolish occupation of kursk