Either a Russian invasion of Ukraine is imminent, or Vladmir Putin really wants us to think it’s imminent:
Russian President Vladimir Putin and top Russian officials for months have been denying that Moscow is preparing to mount an invasion of neighboring Ukraine. But videos posted to TikTok and other social media platforms tell another story.
In areas of Russia and Belarus near the Ukrainian border, onlookers have uploaded hundreds of videos showing sophisticated Russian weaponry and military vehicles speeding by on railways, highways and local roads toward positions near Ukraine.
In recent days, those videos have begun worrying military analysts. The scenes, the military analysts say, appear to indicate that the Russian buildup could be entering its final stages before an invasion. Here is what they are watching.
There have been TikTok and YouTube videos showing Russian military equipment being moved close to the Ukranian border for several months now, but The Washington Post suggests that the latest videos show a buildup in its final stages:
Videos have emerged of Russian armored fighting vehicles driving on roads. Generally, tanks and other armored vehicles are transported long distances by train and then shorter distances by flatbed truck. “You don’t see mechanized units driving down the road unless they are getting near final staging areas,” said Michael Kofman, a Russian military analyst at the Virginia-based research group CNA. “Once you see tanks and infantry fighting vehicles under their own power driving down a road, it means they are not far from where they are intending to be.”
(To be fair, if dash-cam video compilations are any indication, armored vehicles are highly recommended for driving around Russia.)
Video posted online shows Russian troops gathering at a train station in the city of Buynaksk in Russia’s southern Dagestan region. The soldiers are almost certainly from the 136th Motor Rifle Brigade, based in Buynaksk, Kofman said, and were probably heading to Crimea, where much of their equipment, including armored vehicles, had already been prepositioned.
The footage is particularly concerning, Kofman said, because the soldiers appear to be about to board a civilian Russian Railways passenger train. Though soldiers often travel on civilian trains, the footage is particularly concerning, Kofman said, because if troops are moving toward Ukraine in typical Russian Railways cars, there wouldn’t necessarily be any indications of those movements on satellite imagery or social media, he said.
In the initial stages of the buildup, observers were pointing out that equipment was moving but troops were not. Michael Sheldon, a research associate at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, said troops can be moved far more inconspicuously than weapons— and civilian trains is one method.
“They charter them. There are no civilian passengers on the train,” Sheldon said. He noted, “Now we’re seeing military personnel moving in trains separate from that which accompany their equipment.”
Big missile launchers (that look a lot like the ones they used to parade in Red Square on May Day) are being set up, too.
In one video posted to TikTok on Feb. 5, a man walking his dog in a Russian town a few hours’ drive from the Ukrainian border captured what appear to be launchers for Iskander ballistic missiles passing by on a snowy street. According to Scott Boston, a Russian military analyst at the Rand Corporation, Iskander systems are particularly concerning, because ballistic missiles are fast, probably very accurate and can carry an extremely large warhead.
“We would expect them to be used against high-value targets like headquarters, airfields and logistics nodes,” Boston said. “It is still at least somewhat difficult to discern Russian operational intentions from a system like Iskander because one could fire from Crimea against targets anywhere in southern Ukraine or from Belarus anywhere against northern Ukraine. The 400 to 500 kilometers (249 to 311 miles) range of the system means they can hold a great many targets at risk.”
Other footage posted to social media has captured heavy multiple rocket launchers — such as the BM-30 Smerch — moving on roads near the Russian city of Kursk and elsewhere. Unlike Iskander missiles, heavy artillery rockets are generally fired in salvos by the dozen — and a single battalion of six launchers could cause 72 rockets with tens of thousands of submunitions to rain down on a target, all arriving within seconds of one another, Boston said.
Biden is telling Americans to get outta Dodge while they still can, and the US embassy is being evacuated. Other countries, including Canada, are following suit.
At times like this I’m glad there’s an ocean between my country and Europe, and that the superpower to our south has refrained from actually invading us since we taught them a lesson in 1814. (Now you Americans interfere by way of online donations instead of military intervention.)
Which is what I’ll have to tell my kids, who are at the age where they really start noticing what’s in the news. I was eight years old when Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands, and I’m pretty sure that’s the first time I was conscious of a major news story. My younger son is ten, and he’s already worried about COVID-19. I might have to give him a lot of reassurance in the coming days that Russian troops in Ukraine won’t be storming into Canada any time soon.
I just hope and pray that this isn’t a prelude to something bigger that’s still going on when he turns eighteen. This could be a massive bluff and the invasion will be called off, or maybe the coming years could see the Russian military bogged down fighting a Ukranian insurgency. This could just as easily mark the end of Putin as his triumph.
But these days sure do have a mid-to-late-thirties feeling about them, don’t they?
Move the trucks by (checks notes) making the trucks harder to move:
You know my feelings about the “freedom convoy,” but I can’t deny that it is at least a little amusing to see the very same progressives who called for defunding/abolishing police in 2020 and denounced Canada as a genocidal settler-colonial state in 2021 now calling for the police and Canadian Armed Forces to start cracking some heads and screaming with rage about how these protesters are sullying their beloved Canadian flag.
And, of course, conservatives (and Conservatives) with a history of demanding that disruptive protests be broken up with extreme vengeance have suddenly discovered the virtues of peaceful civil disobedience. The old joke about a liberal being a conservative who’s been arrested, and a conservative being a liberal who’s been mugged, has never been more true.
Insert “chef’s kiss” GIF here:
The first major news story I recall being conscious of was that JFK had won the presidential election of 1960. I was 6, and it's a vague memory. The next major news story I recall being conscious of is a much more vivid memory. I was 8, and to this day I haven't forgotten the looks on my parent's faces as they sat and listened to the President address the nation on TV in Oct. of '62. My father was a vet of the U.S. Merchant Service during WWII. He had been aboard one ship that was struck by a German torpedo, and another by a Japanese shell, which ended the war for him due to the wound he received from that. He had a first-hand knowledge of what war and destruction were, and his face was grim and ice cold. My mother's face was no less grim, but it countenanced fear as well. This instilled no small amount of confusion and worry in me, and the simple (and, really the only) reassurance my parents had to offer was that "Things will be OK." What else are you gonna' tell a kid who even at that young age knew what a missile was and that the amount of water between the threat and us was of no consequence.
By all means, offer any and all reassurances you can to your kids. They pay attention to and understand far more than we adults often give them credit for. But in the innocence of their youth, they understand nothing of the way the world actually works. At least this time the threat doesn't involve missiles aimed at us. Not directly or immediately, anyway. So, at least you've got that ocean thing working in your favor.
Not having lived through them, I don't know what the '30's felt like. But knowing of them what I do, I'm sure starting to get the flavor.
There is always a way to explain things to kids at their own level. If they are old enough to worry about it - especially highly intelligent children - then they need an explanation that gives them facts in a way they can understand. Otherwise they will worry silently...and that is not good.
Pointing them to credible news sources to explore on their own after exploring the news with them has also brought good results. My youngest, who has older siblings that learned this from me at a young age, does this automatically - looks it up and then asks questions. Kids can be taught to think critically and seek factual sources from an earlier age than one might think, and one can start them off by teaching them to do this with everyday things where the worry factor is not quite as high. (That's also a good opportunity to teach them over time how to discern credible information sources from...not so credible ones.)