Russian amphibious assault flotilla to transit English Channel

As do you lol

Correct.

Yep, hand put up there. All getting a bit silly, but we let the children play.

TBH it is pretty obvious who is who.

Look at the use of the definite article. It doesn’t really exist in Russian. So native Russians don’t really use it and it disappears in some complex sentences in odd places.

Nuff said but very amusing all the same.

Those lading ships are about as up to date at the Round Table Class. So basically a small ferry with a gun on the top.

No actully the tell sign for me was that JohninMK thinks Salisbury poisonings was done by the UK government ,and to be honest every one of his comments has bias towards the kremlin.

The Duck test.

lol yep.

Very true on the Turkish front, we can only really trust Turkey to do what is best for its new religious government, so quite frankly I don’t think anyone knows which way Turkey would jump at any time ( I suspect though the direction would be less favourable to EU and NATO) but Turkey does still need NATO and the EU to be a balance that keeps Russia honest ( Turkey is playing both sides). So Russia does need to play into its game plans that Turkey could be forced by NATO to enact its rights under the 1936 convention, its not likely to happen, but NATO partners are just about at the end of it with the present Turkish government and may come down hard and say Do it or your out, and I do not believe for a second the Turkish government thinks it would stay an independent Muslim Theocracy if it was cast out of NATO, Russia would not tolerate for that long such a state controlling its access out of the Black Sea and so close as a land neighbour if it could remove it from the board. So I think longer term Turkey knows it needs to stay in NATO and if forced would act to do so.

Very good reply. A lot of real politic would come into play.

When I’m thinking through geopolitical stuff I always try and use an investigation method I was taught and use a lot. It’s called the five Whys. What you do is if you have an event or a first answer you ask yourself why and keep on digging down till you get to five iterations or if your not sure you can keep asking why till you hit a set of root causes. It’s mainly used to review critical failures but it’s also a great mental exercise for thinking through likely or potential outcomes and causes in complex systems like geopolitics.

this is very simple but it gives the idea of the thought process:

why did the patient die = nurse gave the wrong dose of medication

why did the nurse give the wrong dose of medication= 1) the Prescription was wrongly written by the dr.

why did the nurse not recognise and challenge the faulty prescription= the nurse was newly qualified and did not recognise incorrect prescription.

why did she not look up a drug she did not know the correct perimeters of= that ward was busy she was behind by an hour on the drug round and had been told by seniors to just get on with it.

Why was the nurse busy and the seniors tellIng her to just get on with it= the ward was 2 staff nurses and a nursing assistant down, the nurse in charge had already informed trust leadership the ward was unsafe, had done a double shift and was looking after 16 sick patients of her own.

Why did the trust nurse leader ( matrons and directors) not intervene and make the ward safe when informed it was unsafe = they had 7 wards understaffed and even more unsafe had called in all bank staff and gone out to all agencies. The hospital was full so they were unable to transfer patients out of the ward to another ward.

next you would go onto to look at the workforce planning in the trust, were they gapping staff recruitment to save money, was staffing unsafe, were they lossing staff because no one wanted to work for the organisation any more.

you would then do the same for the Dr ( five whys the causes of his mistakes).

The same with the pharmacy etc. You also look at causes at each level, so was the nurse poorly trained, and why…. the ward leadership poor at planning Rotas etc…….so you get causes and ways to solve the problem at every level…..it does work.

Lol. It works in a structured, cloistured environment. It doesn’t work in the real world where the “why’s” can be purposefully established to create confusion, fear, and miscalculation. Your analysis is your own undoing. It is the same in sports where you have to make a quick assessment and go all in or be left behind or on the back foot.
Putin wants Ukraine. He has bought Europe off with cheap gas and tried to buy the US off with the arrest of the Russian hacker group, all in an effort to get them to look the other way. It worked on Europe, not so much on the US. He didn’t think Trump would be ousted without some serious internal strife in the US, distracting them when he made his move.
Every international analyst knows what he wants to happen. It isn’t hard to see.

The thing is Bea I’m a professionally trained investigator in the most complex system created by man. I have investigated and providing learning and improvements around more Deadly events than Is good for my mental health to think off and this method works in the real world, it is evidenced to work in the real world and recognised by every complex type of system investigations across the world.

What Putin wants is less important than what he needs, why and how he will try to get what he wants and the likely ways of preventative measures could fail or succeed, knowing all this is what makes you able to prevent it from occurring also helps you plan on how to react. We then need to think about his needs and our needs ( that where the negotiations will come in, but understanding need over want Is key).

Complex systems are not sport they are serious and have far more drivers than even the most complex sport (although sport has given us some things to think about like marginal gain analysis).

As for complex systems and real world working in fast pace decision making my background is clinal management of an emergency department as well as trauma nurse as well as a patient safety lead responsible for finding out why things did not work in a health system covering almost a million people, so I ‘as they saying goes’ knows my stuff in regards to crisis management ( plan for the crisis know how you will react in any possible situation and know all the likely situations that will occur, making it up on the fly is only used when everything you have planned for has fallen apart and that is scary shit I can tell you. So you find weak spots in strategic planning in complexity as well as reviewing what does or could go wrong and why. That way you don’t fuck up and kill people.

Another way of looking at the “why” problem was suggested by Kipling well over a hundred years ago. In verse.
I keep six honest serving men, they taught me all I knew.
Their names are What and Why and When, and How and Where and Who.
If you are doing an operational analysis it’s not a bad way of looking at the problem, starting with What has been proposed, Why should we do that, When should it happen. How do we make it happen. Where does it need to happen and Who is going to do it.

Yes that’s a very good little way to structure your thinking process, plenty of ways to do it thing is to always use a process to help you think around complexity otherwise you end being done to and reacting without thought and that’s when the bad shit can happen.

And ensure you keep your head when all around are losing theirs .Seems poety for what “is or isn’t ” happening on the borders of Ukraine and Russia

Thank you, I have printed it out and will use it.

So its a system of finding an excuse for the excuse ?

Don’t Be silly it’s the way to find the reasons things happened so you can try and stop it happening again or you can just carry on in ignorance or shout at or sack a clinician, because that’s always stopped shit happening.

every system is designed to create the outcomes it does and if that’s fucked up outcomes then your system is fucked up and you need to find out what’s wrong not blame some poor sod who was trying to do their best in a situation most the British public would refuse to work in or not have the ability or mental fortitude ( it takes a lot to keep working on shift after being attacked or thinking you have helped kill someone or just not saved that kid).

Bleeding heart?

No room in this world for a bleeding heart, hard logic only.

There we differ. In the 1980’s when Quality Improvement was fashionable the company I worked for sent me on a course to become a ‘trained trainer’ for the W.Edwards Deming system. I remember the lectures where he told us to keep asking why, why to get to root cause of problems. He was a statistician by training and wrote standard text books on statistical process control. US industry was not interested in his methods. After WWII he was sent by the US government to help rebuild Japanese industry and there he was spectacularly successful – think Austin Allegro then think Datsun: quality team meetings.The rest as they say is history.
One day a year or two after my company tried to implement Deming Quality Improvement we spoke to another consultant and told him we had implemented Deming. He said ‘ has it stalled yet?’ He was right. He knew that you had to have a transformation of culture in order for a QI system to be effective. The people need to experience a change of heart, stop looking elsewhere for the cause of problems, abandon insularity, defensiveness of their fiefdom, acquire an open mind and be prepared take the plank out their own eye.
The NHS has a long long way to go before I see these traits.

Hi paul

totally correct, it is a tool that only works on a background of a culture that accepts failures in systems. Deming is some great seminal work, but he very much was an engineer and only really look at the system and and not the culture. So as you say you can find the failures in your system but if your organisation does not have that “ok we are making a mistake what do we do about it” culture it’s all for nothing.

With the NHS you have to remember it’s not one organisation but is instead a couple of thousands different organisations, I’ve worked with some that had QI completely down to pat and others that simply blamed staff and used them as the excuse. But a agree most NHS organisations are more at a bureaucratic stage of improvement that a generative state.

If you have an interest in QI and very specificity culture change I would suggest the IHI is a good starting point and the work of Dom Berwick ( they have taken a lot of the seminal QI work and moved it into the more human culture driven processes of healthcare).

But in general I tell most leaders I work with that they are looking at a 5-10 year journey to create a generative organisation.

Thanks Jonathan but I’m well past that now. Retired a long time ago. Got to half way between orange and black belt at the time. Good luck preaching the gospel. As my grandmother used to say, you can take a horse to water but you can’t make it drink.
Its history for me now ‘ il faut cultiver notre jardin’ 😉

I love the Voltaire quote and your grandmother was a wise woman, but I keep on fighting the good fight ( seen to many people hurt by stupid systems to give up) Always a Pleasure to debate with someone who understands that our minds needs to be pushed to grow.

Except for a minority of Catholics of Polish descent in thr west of the country Ukraine is overwhelmingly Orthodox Christian. Putin is in thrall to the Russian Orthodox church ( the Moscow patriarch). Without their support he cannot stay in power. They are the Russian people and are probably very upset that their parishes in Ukraine are ‘deserting’ to join the recently inaugurated Ukrainian orthodox national patriarch with the other two Orthodox patriarchs in Ukraine. Crimea’s population is majority Russian Orthodox with minority Muslims. Donbas is roughly 50% Russian Orthodox 50% atheists. These regions are culturally similar to Russia. This a clash of cultures that makes Northern Ireland look like a simple problem. That said, what is required is a NI style ‘peace agreement’ and a workable ‘devolution’ settlement. The US and Russia need to act as peacemakers. The US needs to take NATO off the table. The Russian troops need to pull back, the Donbas separatists need to disarm and come back to the negotiating table and the Moscow Patriarch of the Orthodox church needs to wind its neck in and accept the formal existence of the Ukrainian national Orthodox church which was established in Istanbul in 2018; aka Ukrainian national sovereignty.
https://research.aston.ac.uk/en/publications/the-ukrainian-national-church-religious-diplomacy-and-the-conflic

Agree with your figures apart from congregations in the Ukrainian church seem to be a lot lower that in the Russian one. Also it is the seperatists who have been desperate to come to the table and talk since the 2015 Minsk Protocol was signed, it is the Kiev Government who has steadfastly (under right wing pressure) refused to do so The current President even promised to do so before the election but has not done so since. The West needs to force Kiev to the table then it can all unwind.

I was using census / survey figures from wiki. The Russian believers probably attend church more often I guess.
Getting the Donbas separatists around the same table as the Kieve government is a bit like asking the UDA to disarm and discuss with the Dublin government about NI becoming a self governing province of the Republic. Good luck.

More like the impossible rask of getting the IRA around the same table as the UK Government. Oh wait!

There we differ. The UK was and is the expeditionary occupying presence. Irish is the indigenous (and Catholic ) culture. The founding raison d’être of the Orange movement which has Masonic roots, was the eradication of catholicism. The UK is constitutionally a protestant state.Go It’s a bit thick for the UK to criticise Putin for being a backward looking imperialist.

I was ignoring the religious element , looking at it just from the position of ‘separatists’ (IRA and DNR/LDR) and Gov (London and Kiev).

Per my original post with the link to the Aston University article ( they have gone up in my estimation) the ecumenical conclave of the separate Orthodox Ukraine patriarchs in Istanbul ( Constantinople was the site of the great schism in 1054 between the catholic and orthodox churches) was the pivotal event which in reality brought the Ukrainian state into existence. It was the state ‘Christening’ and as the article says had huge political consequences. People tend to ignore the religious element of events. In fact its crucial. The historian Michael Woods said in his BBC series on English history that ‘the English are English because ( the monk) Bede said so’ in his Ecclesiastical history of the British Isles. Bede Christened the English ( the peoples of this isles the I think was the phrase), He brought a nation into existence.
The 2015 Minsk agreement is not holding because in a real sense at that time Ukraine had been born, but not Christened.

Thank you. That was worth your efforts.

Good debate. Signing off now for the evening. Ciao.

John are you interested in military matters in general or just those appertaining to Russia? As all your posts are on the Russia/Ukraine issue, and general in defence of the former? Intrigued that’s all.

Yes, most military matters, I do comment on other than Russian issues here but it is them that tend to kick up a storm so are more noticed. My interest in military related started back in the early 80s when the office subscribed to International Defence Review, back then a big glossy magazine but now part of Janes’ output. It went doggo for a while as life took over but came back in 2014 Kiev. Since then it has been Russian oriented as they seemed to be moving forward in many ways that were either ignored or downplayed in the West. I track the Warzone and Russiadefence.net as well as more general sites like ZH, conservativetreehouse both US monitoring at both tactical and strategic levels. I watch almost no TV so am online 6/7 hours a day so my comments are based on monitoring a huge amount of information..

Can’t disagree with anything you have said there. Donbas and Crimea is a dogs dinner of transplanted ethic groups over centuries. It’s one one those little tinder box areas that are created by retreating multicultural empires, Northern Ireland is our own little example. it’s going to need a lot of careful sorting out if it not going to end up a trigger point for a general war of nuclear powers. Thats the bit that’s actually really going to be hard geopolitically and what the US, Russia Need to talk about.

Whats getting my goat is the wider Geopolitics.

The stupid thing here is that I don’t believe Ukraine is ever going to get admission to NATO anyway ( if you go through charter 10 with a fine toothcoomb you can see it’s Likely never happening) so a lot of this is more about the West refusing to back down around how far nato is allowed to expand and Russia have a paranoid complex over NATO ( it’s totally fucked foreign policy on both sides and it pisses me off).

Natos problem is that it’s got really big sticks and likes to shout about Things in quite an incoherent way as well as have a lot to say about culture, morality and what’s right and wrong, while at the same time not having a single purpose or world view anymore. I think nato did a great many things for Western Europe and security in the second half of the 20c but I look forward and I’m just not sure it’s fully fit for purpose in a really complex 21C. I never liked trump but I think he had two things right, you need to protect your industrial, wealth, raw material supply’s and knowledge Bases and you own security is more important than changing the world although enlightened self interest can help your security.

I think NATO since it primarily a military entity is clouding the issues. We need Russia to embrace the West; become a European country. Perestroika was an opportunity missed. The EU should be party to negotiations. Instead of threats of sanctions we should be aiming for tripartite trade agreements between Ukraine, the EU and Russia.These should be backed by project to build a high speed rail from Moscow to Frankfurt. Our objective politically should be to separate Moscow from Bejing.

Yes you are spot on, we missed a big opportunity at the end of the Cold War. We need to get to that point where Russia does not see Europe as the enemy and we don’t see them as the enemy.

We should have always been including Russia in decision making on European security as a partner.

As you say China is our ( western liberal democracies) great geopolitical opponent and it wants and needs (without much doubt) world wide hegemony so it can secure its raw materials across the second and third world and markets in the first world. Russia is at just a great a risk ( potentially more, as China will always look at the Russian Far East as an expansion opportunity).we need to hold our noise a bit start the dialogue with Russia and see where we can get to.

Russia wanted to join both NATO and the EU but was rejected by both. Putin was quoted as saying something along the lines of ‘an economic block from the Atlantic to Pacific coasts. But that didn’t sit well with the US which recognized the very real potential threat to its hegemony, as per Mackinder’s heartland theory.

I’m not sure that NATO is able to eject a member nation. After all, it would undermine Article 5 as they could simply eject a nation that was about to be, or had been, attacked to avoid involvement.

Hi Sean

there is no specific tool for removal of a country from nato, but it has a specific charter around culture and values that Turkey had basically turned its back on. There have been a number of times it’s been considered how Turkey could be removed and my reading of a lot of the reports are basically it’s on its last warning and there has been thought around the how Turkey could be removed.

As Turkey is not being invaded, but is ignoring many of the aspects of its requirements to be a nato member I think at some point it’s going to have to be looked at closely ( it’s one of NATO’s fracture lines that needs either repair or removal).

So Turkey has annoyed the NATO members by buying Russian equipment such as the S400.
Plus Erdogan is on the brink of becoming a despotic ruler with his behaviour – I wouldn’t be surprised if he tried to replace democracy with theocratic government like Iran.

But which requirements of its NATO membership is it not currently fulfilling?

Now historically Turkey was allowed to join NATO to keep it out of Russia’s sphere of influence. Yes the current administration is proving adept at playing off NATO against Russia and vice versa. But given that Erdogan is crashing the currency by running the Central Bank along his interpretation of Islamic law rather than economic science, it’s only a matter of time before Turkey suffers a major economic crash. At which point Erdogan’s regime may come to a rapid end.
Should NATO throw Turkey out, or simply hope Erdogan goes sooner rather than later?

Hi Sean

Nato has since its inception really focused a lot of work on what a member state should look like in a holistic way, best summary of a lot of different NATO publications I have found is:

“nations are expected to respect the values of the North Atlantic Treaty, and to meet certain political, economic and military criteria, set out in the Alliance’s 1995 Study on Enlargement. These criteria include a functioning democratic political system based on a market economy; fair treatment of minority populations; a commitment to resolve conflicts peacefully; an ability and willingness to make a military contribution to NATO operations; and a commitment to democratic civil-military relations and institutions.“

There has been pretty much an ongoing discussion in the west about removing Turkey as it’s using its membership of NATO to undertake Reckless aggression and NATO may end up having to either go to war because a defacto religious dictator forced another nation into a war or weaken itself by refusing to enact article 5. In my view we are better of removing Turkey before It puts this impossible question in front of NATO.

Turkey is also activity working against western interests where it can.

Unfortunately I don’t believe Turkey is coming back from where it is now. Ataturk set up the secular Kemalist state to be resist to religious influences in the running of the secular state as he knew it was always a massive risk due to the make up of the population and that once in the systems of government a secular state with a Muslim population started down a non secular road it would always end one way.

There were two key protections of Kemalism ( the secular Turkish state) one was the judiciary and the other the army. With the army having an almost ( unwritten) constitutional duty to undertake a Coup if a religious leader came to power, with the judiciary required to also remove that said individual. Unfortunately the judiciary had been cut to pieces and the Coup failed with a bloodletting of Kemalist officers and judges.

So I don’t think we can wait for Turkey, if the world stable and western interests not threatened on all sides ( say in the 1990-2000) we could have waited. But the world is one spark away from a conflagration and the west is now in an existential struggle with China and will be for decades to come.

Interesting Youtube: CISAC Stanford.

Movement of troops by train BUT equipment pre-positioned.

Looking at what those ships could carry – must be a nightmare for a commander acting in defense.

As with other ships, very vulnerable, especially on the foreshore, particularily to long range missiles. Or movement by plane to their equipment like NATO.

These ships won’t be operating on their own when heading for a beach head. Even Russia aren’t that incompetent!? They will follow the same methodology as NATO. The amphibs will be escorted by ships with both ASW and air defence, plus there will be air cover. They will try to form a protective bubble around the beach head and to try and prevent any counter to their moves.

There are plenty of publicly available videos that demonstrate how Russia’s Navy and Marines do beach assaults, that includes these ships. Something I’m sure Ukraine is well aware of? But why are these ships that important to Russia’s goal. Firstly they unlike the land based battalion tactical groups (BTGs) over the border in Belarus and Russia, can strike anywhere along the south coast, making it harder to set up defences. Secondly their sheer presence in the Black Sea diverts attention away from the land borders, even if they are not used.

Perhaps what is more pertinent and has been reported widely. Is that Russia have deployed nearly 40 Iskander-M missile system up to the Border. This in itself is not so alarming. What is though, is that there have been lots of tweeted videos showing large numbers of spare/reloads Iskander-M missiles being transported by train towards the border. Iskander is a short range ballistic missile and can be armed conventionally or with a nuke. It has a range between 500 and 600km, which aligns with a number of treaties. This is a first strike weapon, which is designed to take out high value targets. Ukraine have no defence against this missile.

Agree with all you say.

Sorry John but I was replying to Sean.

Thank you, Ulya is a ‘she’ btw 👍

I think you meant to reply to Sean, who is the person who referred to John as Ivan, and who was the person I was replying to.

Always interesting to hear other peoples comments on defence matters, I get to learn something other than my own opinion.

As you quite rightly say, Ulya comments are well balanced and informative and worth reading, unlike some!

Agreed however you also need to do a correct tactical appraisal of your enemy, and John may not be Russkie lol but his continued Russian excusing posts, his often patronising and glib views on UK military capability and NATO in general, and his easily interpreted views which are posted, can be spotted and assessed even by students at the end of week one at chicksands. All you have to do is take some time, read and log. As for Ulya, some very good reasonable posts, and interesting.

Any link for the troops embarked please?

Sure, but I think you misread my post mate. The “Honestly” was not reacting to your jokey post, but some of the other nonsense I’m reading from some here.

And I have just read some quite magnificent contributions from yourself, and John, chewing over Ukraine on the other thread. I can see you have time on your hands!

Though they were some of your in depth geopolitical ones last night, so they must have been pre op?

No that was 5 hours post op, clearly an anaesthetic is good for the brain 🤪

😳🤣

Yes being a patient is so boring, but at the same time it reminds you how lucky we are having a healthcare system that puts you back together.

I know what you mean about the posts, there is a lot of firebrands who have a bring it on view without really considering the consequences. At a minimum Ukraine would be a devastated shell, without power water etc creating a massive humanitarian crisis and civilian loss of life, not forgetting the soldiers on both sides who are just young men doing what they see as their patriotic duty, at worst it spirals out of control and human civilisation ends with untold billions dead by the end of the year. If it’s possible to find a diplomatic solution then actually that’s what is needed, so what if Ukraine never joins nato ( it’s a good decade away from joining the EU and NATO anyway, so we are actually pushing on a point of principle not need) there are otherways to protect its independence that would give Putin his need ( for his people to see him strong in preventing western aggression ) and the west’s need for a strong independent Ukraine that could resist Russian aggression.

Very interesting. Not sure such a large ‘Trans’ state would be a viable political solution for long. No love lost between Ukraine and Russia.

The Russians seem to have a strategy of giving the Ukranians as many potential linesof attack to try to defend against. See Belarus. That way they can’t concentrate against any one threat. Plus it’s just the old gameplan of grabbing as much territory as possible to try to destabilise their opponents. See Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Not saying they will or won’t but that’s the problem.

Yes, I didn’t realise for example that there are Russian ‘peace keeping’ forces in Trans Nistria. See link below.
Good news that Ukraine has S-300 missiles. Russian air superiority is not a given I think.
https://sputniknews.com/20150613/1023333078.html

Yeah it barely gets a mention anywhere. I only heard about watching a travelogue type show about weird ‘states’. Thanks for link did not know that.

The S-300 are quite old and the Russians will be up to speed on jamming them.