Who would have thought the Russian military machine would be able to continue the fight after recently having "basically its entire air force" destroyed by a clever theatrical production?
Can you think of an ethnic group that reinvented predatory lending in Venice, migrated to the Netherlands for just about the period you are talking about, and then finally transplanted itself to London at the time freemasonry was organizing? Because I can't.
I would add that the changes for success of this attempt are minimal. Of course this is a personal feeling as it is difficult to make predictions, 'specially about the future" as Marx
Btw, Jewish, first Sephardic then Ashkenazim, massive immigration into Holland during the 16th century and on surely had influence in its local and foreign policy. No need to be Sherlock Holmes to find some parallels between pre Mandela's South Africa and today's Israel regime ( btw, most of the white guys in the Springboks team look, almost without exception, like members of the israeli IDF)
That is called eristics: you are deliberately pretending to be stupid enough to misunderstand the points being made, so that you can then pretend to have the upper hand in the discussion. I have bad news for you: the stupid is showing.
I understand the points being made perfectly well.
By the way could so kind as not to go the way of personal insults?
Try to be civilised, if you can.
I am old enough to have a professional experience and I assure you that no-one has considered me stupid. On top of that my academic curriculum speaks for itself.
Now, the point made is that Western countries have been specially violent in the last 600 years. This is false. Due to their technological superiority during that period they had the longest reach, which is a completely different matter. Some people like to speak of the Western colonial empires as the highest form of violence and something unique.
They are not. How did the Muslim Arabs conquer the formerly Christian lands of the Levant and North Africa?How Zoroastrian Persia was conquered?
How many north-african invasions of Spain?
How did the Turks conquer Anatolia, Constantinople and then the Balkans?
Ever heard of Gengis Khan or Timur Lenk?
Did the bad Europeans take part in the Mongols conquest of China and attempt against Japan?
The most extraordinary thing however is reading how someone, who is lamenting non-stop that Russia has abandoned stalinist methods, suddenly start denouncing bloodbath half a millennium ago.
Actually, it did start earlier; the Greek 'colonies' around the Med, fx. And it was the shit-eating Romans who perfected the "Invade and genocide the locals with professional militaries" model.
And the Assyrians were so not-nice that their neighbors happily tore them to shreds once weakness set in. They innovated on terror as state weapon, genocide and the forced relocation of peoples, as well as the promotion of their singular, formerly city-based god over other regional gods.
Quite inspiring. The Babylonians who eventually absorbed the Assyrians added crucifixion to the mix, which was eventually perfected by the Romans.
If you want to blame the Europeans for the last 600 years of colonialist warfare, point back to the expansion of merchant interests funded by trade and usury, which both funded a technological and organizational renaissance and demanded constant new resources for their "business model."
My scarcely polite "use your brain" was a answer to your kind elementary arithmetic lesson. Now I know how to subtract 600 from 2025. Thanks indeed, although I suppose that I could always use the Google calculator for difficult mathematic operations. Cela va sans dire.
I am convinced of the importance of good manners, but I am even more convinced of the expediency of answering in the manner that I am addressed to. You know for sure: Nemo mihi impune lacessit.
About the actual debate.
1. What makes imperialism post 1425 so different from imperialism pre 1425?
Crystal clear. Around the XV century the Europeans obtained a decisive military superiority. There was a gradual change of tide. They were no longer the object of invasions from North Africa (destruction of the Spanish kingdom and three subsequent invasions of the Peninsula) or Central Asia (destruction of the Byzantine empire and homeland in Anatolia, conquest of the Balkans, annihilation of the Rus of Kiev) and, like others before, they expanded their power.
Limiting the debate to events post 1425 is a transparent trick to predetermine who the killer is and who the innocent victim.
2. The successor empires of the conquests of Gengis Khan in Central Asia, China and India were present many years after 1425.
A. In fact, the British Raj replaced the Moghul empire in India.
B. The Ottoman empire finished in the Balkans at the end of the XIX century, in the Arab world after the I WW.
The picnic that was served to the Armenians took place in the XX century.
C. The Japanese attempt to create an empire in Asia, which started with the aggression against China and Corea, began in the last quarter of the XIX century and finished in 1945.
That's much better. And even Latin too? You DO want us to think you're smart, don't you!
Unfortunately, I'll provoke you as much as I want, and you'll do what?
You may have a case that limiting the discussion to the last 600 years is an irrelevant distinction, but that's what the OP chose to do. So those are the terms of the discussion. Sorry I don't make the rules.
And your post 1425 examples only prove that the West doesn't have a monopoly on bestiality, which is true, but that was not the argument. The argument was that the West has had a bloody history over the last 600 years.
That's what got you in your feels. Also it's "Korea".
The limits of any discussion are set by the inherent logic that the nature of the question prescribes.
Being know abundantly clear that you lack every quality neccessary for pleasant and intelligent debate, I am glad to put an end to any communication with you.
Considering that, just how many Guantanamo detainees are in there for actually doing anything wrong i.e. acts of terrorism. Afaik they were mainly in the wrong place at the wrong time.
I think this is true, there will be a lot of blowback when Ukraine's Nazis finally have to surrender or flee. They will likely be extremely bitter and vengeful towards the NATO leaders that caused the total destruction of their country.
I certainly hope so. If they can 'blow up Nordstream’, they could do much worse to Three-Queer Keir than merely burn his former car. The profiteering poltroon Boris Johnson could be in the cross-hairs too, along with much of the UK's regime media and inSecurity apparatus. Same goes for most of the rest of NATO Pact, Germany and France especially.
Nazi hang together. They will be working with MI5/6, Mossad, CIA and NATO to attack civilians across Europe to cause chaos, that the CIA political puppets will then use to impose martial law.
Ukra-Nazis have no problem with their own population being wiped out - they stood behind those conscripts themselves to shoot any retreaters.
Pretty sure they will just form criminal gangs (which is basically not a change), and continue with trafficking people, guns and drugs into Europe. Then, when the time comes they will do jobs here or there for intelligence agencies in exchange for looking the other way. Why cause any issues when you can turn those criminals and guns into a profit machine.
Bigger problem, this war is showing how the high tech is losing to mass low tech. Russia is well known for mass low tech and darn good mass low tech at that. The AK47 being the highlight of that work. It does not surprise me that the US military just spent a bunch fighting off ONE, not a swarm but ONE Yemani/Iranian Shahed Drone vs a US Navy Seahawk with a machine gun.
This is rubbish. Russia is literally out-teching both Ukraine and Nato for most of the last 3+ years.
They've used roughly similar amounts of guided MLRS, except where HIMARS gets shot down or jammed over 90% of the time, the majority of Russian guided MLRS hit their targets and none of them gets shot down, because the west doesn't have anything capable of reliably doing so, nor do they have the interceptor numbers to try.
They've used at least a magnitude more guided artillery shells.
They use 1-2 magnitudes more cruise missiles. And they produce so much cruise missiles, that if the west TRIED to do the same, those alone would bankrupt the entire Nato military spending! The combination of considerably lower price than even PPP would suggest, and buying largescale at manufacturing cost, zero profit involved, is what allows Russia to do it. And the west doesn't even seem capable of understanding even the concept of building war material without profit...
They're the only ones with hypersonics, which are literally hypereffective.
They use 2-3 magnitudes more guided airdropped bombs.
They're the only ones to use anything like the TOS systems, which has been utterly devastating every time they have been used in largescale battles.
The Russian airforce and airdefenses are completely and utterly dominant in the air anywhere near the frontlines. Both in quality and quantity.
Lots of western wunderwaffen, like Javelin and tanks have shown to be no better than Russian equivalents, and in some cases, like Javelin vs Kornet, grossly inferior instead.
Russia also repeatedly keep coming up with innovation for drones, rapidly achieving small but useful edges of superiority. Like those watches that warn about incoming drones AND provide their control frequency, that is simply an amazing advantage.
Russian drones cause most casualties at night because they're the ones with lots of thermal imaging and nightvision on their drones. While the biggest most speedy Russian advances tends to happen during bad weather, fog, rain and snow, because Nato and Ukraine does NOT have anywhere near enough such even for their forces, much less their drones.
Also, what we've seen during the entire conflict is that Russian military training is definitely superior to that of Nato. Only the most elite Nato and Ukraine troops fight evenly with the Russian military.
And most of the time, not even them. As was seen with the Mozart debacle, where hundreds of elite soldiers formed up with all the support possible to counter Wagner, and Wagner couldn't even tell the difference between facing them or regular Ukraine troops.
And less than 4 months later, the USA colonel in charge had literally become a crying drunk, giving several interviews and putting up a few videos of his own after his desperate escape from Bakhmut in December-22. Incapable of staying sober or not crying or blatantly breaking apart for even a single video.
Because his entire unit was completely eradicated in just a bit over 3 months.
So no, there's also a huge quality superiority reason why we're looking at Ukraine KIAs approaching 2 million while Russia+RF allied are somewhere between 80 and 130 thousand.
Low tech. It is not space based. does not cost billions and does not need lots of people spending their entire life to produce something. Like watches that do not require millions to be spent by Lockheed Martin or some other DOD mega company. Its faster and it works
It appears that your definition of "high tech" hinges on how much money is wasted on graft, inefficiency, and poor engineering. The more waste, the higher the tech. In that case yes, Russia is very low tech.
thats my point. Spending more money does not make it better. It makes it more tech. It is obvious that the US Defence industry has an amazing ability to make very cool expensive stuff. But in the end of the day, sometimes you need a hammer. A good hammer.
I think his point is that Russia is out-pacing the US tech AND making it cheaply. As we know, the US MIC is just a racket. Like the $10,000 toilet seats
The US defense industry has an amazing capability to inflate the costs of things to unreasonable degrees, which is approved by contracting officers who know there are political and career implications to controlling things... at all.
A few years ago I did a totally scientific bit of googling and concluded a "toilet metric" cost conversion suggesting the costs for Western kit are inflated by roughly 13x Russian costs. Others have found 5x inflation. A "proper" measure would benchmark mission-similar equipment and compare their costs, regardless of actual effectiveness.
Dave. What's low tech about a Kinzal hypersonic missile? Or a S400? The T64 at launch was literally a decade more advanced than any NATO tank. The BMP1 created the category of IFVs. It's Western cope to pretend our technology is always the best.
The Kinzal is not winning the war. It is the watches that look for frequency and warn of drones. It is the new tactics. It is soldiers on motorcycles, tanks with crap attached to them, interceptor drones made with off the shelf and not custom made by NASA.. 3D printing in the field using off the shelf stuff. Drones using go kart motors. The use of fishing radar to track drones. The list goes on and on of stuff no other military has let alone has even thought of. No one else is ready for what the new war will look like with thousands of rockets and attacks with a 1000 drones made in a closet on the battlefield.
All of that is low tech and awesome. The entire plan is not to attack Ukraine with a billion dollar device. That is the point you all dont seem to see right in front of you instead of having your ego hurt that the US has some crazy awesome shit like the B2 which is now obsolete in the new way of war.
By not having morals, ethical standards, or even a conscience hypocrisy is always the fall back strategy.....They can always spin a narrative and Hollywood will make a movie.
Wow, you guys certainly went to town on my plaintive and rather naive supplication for some kind of morality to be applied! Clearly, we can cast such impossibly hopeful aspirations aside, accept the eternal and inescapable brutality of it all and call each other stupid while we're at it.
How many smart people does it take to screw in a lighbulb?
But seriously: is it just me, or is the term 'colonialism' just a fig- leaf term for CAPITALISM?
As the flow of Western arms narrows and time goes on we see a duplication of patterns to the 1861-1865 War of the States, the American conflict. The larger industrial base combined with larger population and military prevails. When the conflict was into the third year the more powerful party started to dominate the battlefields in both conflicts.
The ironic use of the beautiful Andrea Bocelli song, Time to say goodbye in the video of drones chasing an armored vehicle in open field is a devastating testimony in support of drones. The driver and companions are caught in an open field, desperately speeding toward some cover to hide. The drones loitering around hitting them one by one and the fifth and sixth explosions if I count it right, kill machine and men as well. The drones are low expense and the hunters are sitting in protected environments, like playing video games. War strategy involving tanks and armored vehicles has to be completely reworked for the future.
As long as Ukraine has an untouchable rear, it will not collapse.
Who cares the drone production workshops inside Ukraine get hit? A lot of the drones are not produced there anyway, and that will grow.
It was absolutely imperative for Russia in early 2022 to secure the Polish border, but they didn't even try.
Having failed that, the next mandatory step was either a credible nuclear threat against Poland and Romania, forcing them to close the borders, or actual nuclear strikes, first at the border crossings, then at Poland and Romania themselves if they still did not get the message.
But with these traitors/cowards in the Kremlin, the war was lost, from an entirely winnable position.
hate to quibble here, but the Confederacy was most definitely being supported by the British who used their Caribbean network to not only resupply and base Confederate ships but also to buy Confederate products like cotton and tobacco.
This is a NATO vs. Russia war fought on the territory of Ukraine, with Ukrainian cannon fodder.
And the Russian rear is no longer untouchable, but the NATO rear continues to be.
Because a deal was originally made that both rears would be untouchable, then of course the West reneged on that deal, but the cowards/traitors in the Kremlin didn't have the courage to act reciprocally because their oligarch masters' interests would not allow it.
Quite right too. The US violated British neutrality and sovereignty with its act of piracy against the RMS Trent. Lincoln, the Man of Blood who 'made war…. on his own peeeepul' was lucky London didn’t send the RN to sink the whole US Navy.
And furthermore, they probably thought about it, but the Tsar sent the Russian fleet across to the USA to provide what turned out to be an effective deterrent.
Again with the nuclear strikes like a broken record. Like I mentioned time and time again, that only works if you are the only country who has them. This is why the US used them in WWII, no one could retaliate back with another nuke.
Poland and Romania are satellite Nato countries and America has troops and bases around that area. It does not take a rocket scientist to figure out that if you nuke those countries which have American/Nato assets, troops and bases, you are attacking the whole beast. Nato/America has missile launchers in those countries,
If you nuke those then you have to be ready to receive Nukes on your end.
The Kremlin is playing this wise and not going crazy with the nukes. You have to be blind not to see the existential endgame on both sides if one country launches a nuke.
The Russian strategy in 2022 was paralyzing Ukraine with fear by showing them thousands of tanks. When that did not work out it came to the surface that Russia was very poorly prepared for a major conflict. They simply were unable to project real power to the Western borders of Ukraine, as they are unable to do the same today. You are correct, Russian hopes for victory mainly depend on cutting off supplies at the border. That would involve taking full control of Western Ukraine and the South with Odessa as well. If America did not nuke China and North Korea in the early 1950s, there is even less chance that Russia will nuke Ukraine today. Remember the Carlson – Putin interview, Putin and Russia looks at the Ukrainians – and Russian speaking minority there – as the same population as their own historically. They are not going to nuke them unless major intrusion of NATO forces take place.
He writes: ‘Having failed that, the next mandatory step was either a credible nuclear threat against Poland and Romania, forcing them to close the borders, or actual nuclear strikes, first at the border crossings, then at Poland and Romania themselves if they still did not get the message.’
In my dictionary that is a proposal to nuke Poland, Romania and Ukraine. A nuclear strike at the border crossings will unavoidably involve Ukrainian territory as well.
>A nuclear strike at the border crossings will unavoidably involve Ukrainian territory as well.
With practically zero casualties. Russian territory has been nuked by Russia itself plenty in the past, some of the early surface tests were not even in Semipalatinsk but in quite densely populated (for Russian standards) areas.
The critical issue would not be the dropping and effects of a single or even a few small tactical nukes. It would be the crossing of psychiatrical borders that exist in human minds. This would be immediately exploited by the Western media, spanking the beloved leaders to answer in kind.
>Russia was very poorly prepared for a major conflict.
Which immediately raises some questions:
1) Whose job was it to prepare Russia for a major conflict given that it was known that is the trajectory for 20 years prior?
2) Whose job was it to deal with Ukraine before it became such a tough nut to crack?
3) Whose job was it to prevent the Banderization of Ukraine in the first place?
4) Who spent untold billions on Winter Olympic and soccer World Cup pointless stunts that in the end did zero to improve Russia's image if that was the intention?
5) Who allowed trillions to be transferred from Russia to the West all throughout that time instead of investing them into local industry and the military.
Such difficult questions with non-obvious answers...
I think the Russian leadership existed in the comfortable understanding that they were living under their own nuclear umbrella. Domestically, they were focusing on economic and cultural developments while externally flooding Europe with cheap fossil fuels. You are right, there were major signs showing that Ukraine was getting into an unacceptable territory. However, although it was clear to Russia that the Western leadership was composed of a bunch of mentally unhinged psychopaths, they were not counting on them opening a major proxy war against Russia. This was where Russian leadership miscalculated. Still, the US/NATO initiation opened a surprising new dimension of warfare that can only end in Russian victory or a nuclear war. It remains to be seen if the Western Oligarchic Classes and their puppets are willing to move into nuclear basements for an extended period or walk away from the Russian conflict. The way I see it today, they are divided and in chaos. They have a hard time to get used to the idea of eating canned food and sleeping in dark holes. If they are smart enough (and this is not guaranteed) they will understand that there will be millions of hungry and angry hands digging them out of those holes to share their supplies and punish them.
These deep bunkers are safe against bombardment, but they are utterly defenseless against sustained demolition by ground forces, even civilian ones. As the simplest recourse, their accessways and air intakes can be flooded or sealed with concrete. As a second step, a gas storage compressor can be set up, and CO2 pumped into the ground around the bunker, as in fracking, at 300 bars pressure. There is no bunker in the galaxy airtight enough to withstand gas infiltration under such conditions. And CO2 is not even, technically, a poison gas, so it wouldn't spoil the hoarded supplies.
It is because of this defenselessness against ground assault that the hohols, for all their doggedness, have not even attempted to hold out in the various mines that have been taken over. Not even they are that stupid.
Russia wasn't trying to get to the Polish border. Russia did get an agreement in place that Zelenski quickly reneged on.
The Banderan army will continue being resupplied and it will continue having to give ground as it's forces are losing untrained men faster than they can be replaced.
Russia isn't going to bother taking any more of the Banderan territories than what Lenin forced Russia to cede to create the original Ukraine SSR borders.
Romania, Hungary, Slovakia and Poland will be taking control of western Ukraine and Putin will support them doing so.
The Confederates were being armed and supplied by France and Britain.
Russia didn't need to secure the Polish border then and doesn't need to now.
Lviv is about as far in the Banderan rear as it gets and regularly gets attacked.
The Banderan army will retreat and it will be a cascading effect.
So in your mind Russia will continue losing the SMO and liberating more land daily while the Banderan army continues to consolidate its winning position and retreating?
You do believe yourself to be an analyst. So tell me the minimum sized land force Russia needed to march to the borders of Romania, Hungary, Slovakia and Poland?
In 2022 it would have taken an addition 300,000 going south from Brest. But guess who tried to wage war on the cheap and to bluff his way on to yet another shitty deal.
Today you need 2 million, as you would have to go east to west all the way, as Lukashenko is wisely staying out of this shit show (if Belarus is again used to launch an attack on Ukraine, thousands of drones will be flying into Belarus the same way they are flying into Russia, and Lukashenko is not an idiot, unlike those in the Kremlin, he wants no part of that).
Which is why you would not be going all the way east to west.
You would seal the border with stand off weapons. The big ones.
You are amusing. Another 300,000 coming from Brest and they were going to seal all the borders. No need to fight, just drive up and close the entry points? Was going to take many more than that. I will let your lack of imagination ponder why that was so.
Russia isn't going to need an extra two million men for the debellation of Ukraine. It only needs to complete liberating Novo Russiye. Romania, Hungary, Slovakia and Poland will do the rest.
Where is Ukraine going to get those thousands of drones targeting Belorus in addition to the few occasions it can launch hundreds of drones at Russia?
I get it. You start typing and you just let the stream of consciousness flow. Doesn't need to make sense.
That peace deal that Putin tried to get "on the cheap" meant Ukraine only had to give up Crimea. This new deal is going to be the end of a nation.
Gotta feel sorry for those hapless conscripts in the APC. They hadn’t a chance. One of my Uncles got 'brewed up' in a Sherman in the Netherlands in late ’44: 88mm shell through the hull. Luckily for him, he was sitting half in, half out of the turret hatch at the time. He was the only survivor: burns, shock, serious leg injury, nearly died. The effect must have been much like that, though of course minus the two minutes of terror before the denouement.
That said, that was like watching, in miniature, the mighty Prince of Wales and Repulse get sent to the bottom by 97 cheapo Japanese torpedo bombers (of which PoW and Repulse managed to shoot down three). Again, it's the end of an era in warfare.
Dude didn't you read the whole article. Drone warfare has changed the way combined arms warfare is waged in modern times. Why would anybody "rush" mobilize a concentration of forces into thinly defended lines when the enemy can swarm drones and artillery your way.
The first time I wrote anything on t'interweb was on IMdB and I was accused of trolling, I didn't know what it meant. All I wrote was that Star Trek is a creation allegory. The Enterprise looks (from certain angles) like a jet-powered sperm that whooshes across space to a planet (an egg) and then Kirk beams down to fertilise the egg with his er, genetic material. Couldn't see what the fuss was about.
The lone Ukrainian APC was attacked by 6 drones on day-time. According to the chart most of the FPV-killing is done during night.
If Ukraine sent, or for that matter Russia, 6 APC and Tanks what will the opposing side to then? Can they even control 36 drones at the sam time?
It was an incident, a few days ago, at Konstantinovka where Russia lost a couple of vehicles so trying moving in the open is still deadly. But no one has dared to try a breakthrough with 40 vehicles. You will lose some but not all. But if you do it will be courtmartial and a shot in the neck, of course.
It's also not so much about breakthroughs. Breakthrough is the easy part--it's about the logistics train to support the newly broken-through troops after that. Logistics is by far the most vulnerable to drones. You can break through with assault troops and 'dig in' into some hedgerows, but then the unit will be isolated by drones and destroyed if logistics are stretched.
Indeed. What is striking, for me, is whenever Russia does a hidden
”breaktrough” as was the case in Avdevka and Schuzda (tunnels) the front crumbles almost instantly. Those troops takes a lot of punishment but are able to hold on enough time for the rest of the front to move.
I am aware of the kill-zone behind front line and that logistics is essential to endure and prevail at the front. I may lack patience but I am worried about the timeframe for Russia. If Russia is going to spend less on War industry the coming years it is a clear signal that the War industry has taken a toll on the whole society. War isnt producing anything that lasts or builds the country. The secret of Putins wonder in Russia where they rebuilt the Vodka-ridden ruin from the 90ties into a modern society was that he didnt spent to much on the military and did short effective Wars in Chechnya and Georgia.
>If Russia is going to spend less on War industry the coming years it is a clear signal that the War industry has taken a toll on the whole society.
>did short effective Wars in Chechnya and Georgia
Georgia was Medvedev, not Putin.
And it could have been a short and effective war here too.
But spending less on War industry in the coming years is not an option, unless the decision has been made to unleash the nukes.
That is the only scenario in which Russia will be allowed to not spend even more on war than it is now. Because there is a long series of wars being set up now.
Dear old Putin should declare what Russia wants to happen.
* What is the new security order they prefer?
* What is the peace they want after the War?
* What idea do they have about a disarmed Ukraine - how will they denazify and then unite the country after 4 years War (or seven as Putin talked about 2027)?
I see these scenarios:
* Russia realise that western Europe is so infected with Russophobia that the War will never end volontarly. It must be forced to end and EU/NATO must be subdued in good time before they are rearmed (2030). Probably waiting for a democrat entering presidency in 2028. Until then poking around in Ukraine and taking the losses from strikes into Russia.
* Hoping for better times and that people will get bored with the War. EU-citizens waking up and refuse to pay for the Ukraine War. Trusting Trump to abandon Ukraine and focus on his favorite beach (Gaza) and looming War with China (would not happen). Russia poking around and take whatever opportunity to gain more squaremeters of Ukraine. A pragmatic and phlegmatic way with the goal to not stir up the enemy even more.
* A sudden change in Kreml (or Ukraine) which spirals to unforseen events and possibilties we havent thought of. I include Trump in this. He can change history and already has. For the better or the worse.
Oh, it has been clear for a long time that a Soviet tank army would have been in Kiev in days.
Yes, it would have lost a lot of tanks in the process of getting through the first line of defense, but here is the thing -- the rate of fire of drones is much lower than artillery and once you punch through you can rapidly exploit the advance.
Quantity has a quality of its own, etc. Still true.
But this goes together with all the other obvious things that should have been done in the first months of the (not)war, such as disabling logistics, taking out the prominent Nazi individuals and paralyzing the command structure, taking out command-and-control centers, etc. etc. All those things have still not been done, instead we have "negotiations", even though the events on June 1 and June 13 clearly exposed the "wisdom" of engaging with the West diplomatically.
Tank warfare going into major cities is a dangerous proposition. Go back to 1956, October, November in Budapest. Men from the top of the buildings equipped with rifles and Molotov cocktails were able to hand down major damage. I know about one case where a single individual disabled two Soviet tanks without explosives or even a rifle. He jammed heavy metal bars between the wheels of the tanks. A machine gunner from a third tank killed him. These were old T-34 tanks often with auxiliary fuel tanks to extend range. They just sent a couple of rifle rounds into the the fuel tank, as the fuel started to flow they throw a Molotov cocktail from a building and soldiers were forced out good as dead within seconds.
Russia was in no state to take Kiev then because Ukraine blew the bridges. And the formations was not prepared for a War (they were going from a drill to something unknown). Russia was not aware of how much troops Ukraine had and all those AT wiped out entire formations. Remember Kadyrovs elite formation being wiped out?
Russia didnt plan the SMO as the Israeli plan their Greater Israel - years in advance and absolutely unscrupulous. They bungled, had to retreat, gained consciousness, established new lines, defeated the Ukraine offensive and since then they are on a slow move forward. But problem is that Russia has no real objectives other than to press Ukraine out of the four new oblasts and maybe securing a cordon sanitaire. Maybe they have hidden objectives and a grand strategy achieving it - the thousand cuts and sudden defeat may be the one.
Situation since one year ago and up to now is that should be able to crush Ukraine. But they dont or they cant? Sumy is showing us they cant. Other sectors is proof that they can continue the slow advance. Slow but steady.
Biggest problem is that Putin may believe in his friend Trump and that ”peace” would come in form of a negotation. Russia has no clue what peace would look like and I doubt they have a strategy to secure a peace. There will not be an agreement - just one side crushed. And once Russia make the decision things will move faster.
Guys, you should stop looking at war as a computer game!
And BTW, your theory is not right, since the goal of surrounding Kiev (with a couple of thousands men only!) was to force Ukraine to the negotiating table. The goal was reached, negotiations in Istambul were successfull, negotiators agreed on practically everything - but then Boris Johnson flew in and convinced Zelensky to continue the war. In a word, the West did not (and does not) want this war to end. "Russians are dying!" Lindsey Graham was jumping from joy, and so are the rest of the psychos in Washington, London, Brussels, etc. Psychos see this war as a computer game, since they sit somewhere far away in a safe place. We should know better - for ordinary people war is always only destruction and suffering.
It is impossible to surround Kiev. You always move fast to the TV-center and the goverment quarters. Russia failed.
The negotiation started when it was clear that Russia was in a exposed situation. So was Ukraine. But Ukraine actually shot one of the ukrainian negotiators so I dont think they were earnest at all. The Boris was only the icing of the cake.
No, I dont think War is a computer game. Therefore it should be short instead of a 4-year long shitshow with millions dead&maimed.
>it should be short instead of a 4-year long shitshow with millions dead&maimed.
As I keep explaining to people, the damage incurred (when you remember that most Ukrainians are Russians) by Russia is the equivalent of multiple regional capitals being nuked. It just isn't happening in a single big boom (but there is time for that too).
Also, someone very high up in the leadership used to swear there will never be another major war on Russian territory.
“It is impossible to surround Kiev.” Your premisses seem to come from western MSM. Russia’s goal was NOT to surround Kiev, but to scare the enemy enough to bring him to the negotiation table. Russia wouldn’t be sending only 25.000 troops, if they wanted to surround Kiev.
I have been following military experts describing real situation on the ground. So I know all the phases Russian army went through. If Russians wanted to conquer Ukrainian land, they would use completely different tactic. They would do what NATO does before sending in their troops: carpet bomb everything. It wouldn’t be dificult with all FABs (FAB-3000, etc.).
Who is prolonging war by sending weapons although it is clear that Ukraine lost and will never win? The West.
Who wants 1-month ceasfire in order to rearm and restructure Ukrainian army? The West.
Who pressures Zelensky to enlist 18-year-olds? The West.
Because the Russian field commanders are afraid of ruining their careers by ordering a failed assault. Going slowly and surely is much safer, careerwise. This is the result of flawed reward structure within the officer corps, at the tactical level, not in the Kremlin. Putin probably doesn't even realize, he thinks the slow, methodical creeping is the pinnacle of operational art, so his generals tell him.
Comedically, the Ukrainian perspective is quite the opposite. The Ukrainian commanders are rewarded in proportion to expending their troops in pointless assaults. You can't make this shit up, the two sides are pushing things well past the bounds of absurdity, but in opposite directions.
Where is Stalin when you need one? Stalin wouldn't have put up with this bullshit, he knew how to scare his general staff into vigorous initiative.
There is some of that, but ultimately the strategic failure is on Putin.
You can be sure the General Staff has been telling him about the need to make strategic moves for years, and from what I have read, seen and heard (with the caveat that none of us has inside info) it is more likely than not that they did give him a proper invasion plan back in 2021 but Putin vetoed key parts of it and butchered the rest.
Also, Karaganov is likely the unofficial public representative of the 12th GUMO, and what he is saying reflects the mood there.
Putin understands very well that this is a HYBRID WAR. Russia is not only fighting on the battlefield, but also in the information sphere. Putin is wise because he first tries all the peaceful possibilities, and only if that doesn't work, gives green light for grinding. This is how Russia is winning in the diplomacy and, consequently, economy - it is the most popular country in the Global South - and this is the reason why Russia is not isolated and suffering under thousands of heavy sanctions. This is why such masses flow to BRICS and SPIEF meetings - and business deals are made at those events! This is why Russia's economy is doing much much better than EU and US economy! If economy colapsed, military would colapse eventually too. See Syria.
If you act slowly and timidly, you seem to conserve manpower in the short run; but by stretching the campaign interminably, you lose more manpower in the long run. It balances out.
No, the British in the Western Desert, the US and British in Italy and the Allies in Normandy smashed German armies for far less casualties, despite the caution. The Allied generals were mostly survivors of the Great War who thought that war could be fought far more cheaply, weren't interested in the flashy trivialities of the German army and wanted to maintain the morale of their wartime conscripts, who were far from the ideological soldiers opposite them. Attrition has a bad name but won two world wars. The British also needed to participate in the creation of post-war Europe and this precluded more ambitious methods because ending the war with a destroyed army would reduce British bargaining power.
Russia is in serious trouble. No breakthrough is going to happen. Russia can't take all of Ukraine if they wanted to.
This is what Russian 'winning' looks like.
I just wish they would drop something on Ze's head. Seeing that putz waltz around every A-list party on earth in his green sweater makes me sick that no one has taken him out yet. For those who say don't kill him he is an idiot; he is probably the most successful beggar in human history. I would love to see the story of his demise, along with his entourage of SAS bodyguards.
It's the range of the weapons that hold ground, not the number of men. Remember all that Simples wrote about the difficulty of concentrating forces for attack or defence when you have everything from mobile phone triangulation to satellite surveillance watching the ground?
Is Lieutenant Colonel the normal rank for a fighter pilot? Say in the US and Russian air forces? Or does the pilot who was shot down being a Lieutenant Colonel indicate something in particular?
But in between lieutenant and lieutenant and lieutenant colonel lies captain and major (and maybe more: my knowledge of the armed forces only applies to the 18th century). There is a huge difference in seniority and presumably responsibility between a lieutenant and a lieutenant colonel.
a fighter pilot is around 22 ... 25 years old, when he graduates from military school as a lieutenant. As long as he is fit [and his army and planes to fly with exist] he can fly. Getting older and getting experience he receives ranks (and some upgrade in payment). Especially in war, ranks [and medals] are cheap and add up quite fast. So, nothing strange when a gentleman at 31 after 3 years of war holds a Lt.Col. - we may assume he got one rank alone for his qualification for the F16
Ridiculous amounts of dollars and euros are being poured into the purchase of mercenaries to fight this war now, one of reasons Ukraine has no interest in repatriating the dead. But it illustrates the shame of proxy warfare when it reaches this denouement. Russia's NK ally fought with Russia with pride, and NK regiments stood alongside Russian comrades at the grand honouring of the dead. Where is any acknowledgement of a bunch of nutty foreigners from Poles to Columbians, dying on the Russian front in order to claim vast cash prizes? And you have to wonder how much of what is promised ever gets paid out.
Neither the US nor europe can put its own armies in here, or even wants to. As Putin said, NATO has decided to turn its addled gaze on some never-never land where a vast european army perches menacingly on whatever headland is left of the old western empire by then because although Russia has never had any interest in eroding existing NATO boundaries, if the idiot Baltic states continue to chest thump and pour in mercs with european tax payer money, it knows it might have to take appropriate action to secure peace.
The european warmongerers believe Daddy will bail them out, even though the role of good parenting from time immemorial requires the good parent to bring idiot children to heel, even if that means cutting the strings and leaving them to manage with their own resources. It is part of growing up..
I LMOA in '23 when some Colombian knuckle draggers were paid with fake dollar bills and they only discovered that once they were back in their burrios.
One minor addendum - those watches aren't detecting anything. They're being relayed information from nearby detectors. I have no idea how effective the watches are but the image shows "3 minutes" presumably until arrival, indicating the detector is deployed somewhere forward - could be very useful tech, indeed.
Also, for the record, been a very dry June in Ukraine - no problems with mud, that's for sure!
The bottleneck has actually always been intelligence rather than strike assets themselves. Russia has more munitions than it has targets to hit. Most everything has been struck already and the remaining strategic assets are aggressively dispersed and hidden underground, etc. It's pointless to have 1,000 drones striking if the OODA loops, HUMINT, satellite ISTAR, etc. isn't agile enough to identify worthy targets day in and day out.
That being said, there are always entire classes of assets on the no-strike list that will eventually be opened up, just as the 'Legitimny' post in the OP claims has happened in last night's strikes.
Anecdotally, what I can see is 1) Russian ISR is still behind Western 24/7 satellite / ELINT assets. Sitting through an AMK missile/drone session is fun & exciting but that data ain't coming from Russian sensors 2) Russian CEP on munitions is maybe 1 order of magnitude greater than counterpart; they make up for the difference by using bigger warheads
Certainly Russian satellite assets can't compete with the combined assets of the entire West, not to mention the combined data processing/collating backbone. But it's constantly catching up: https://i.imgur.com/QKZ24yO.jpeg
That's pointless. The Russians are sparing the bridges in the hope that they will need them later, but Ukraine will blow them up as they retreat. So these bridges only benefit Ukrainian logistics, and will never get a chance to be useful to Russia.
As for Bankova sure, Zelensky is a non-asset. But eliminate him, and all the other Ukrainian top dogs---Syrsky, Bezuglaya, Klichko, Budyanov, the Azov leaders---will start killing each other for the privilege of leadership. And once someone floats to the top, hit him, rinse, repeat. Running decapitation by internal squabbles, and for so little effort. The MI6 agents will have piglets just trying to keep track of whom to control next.
Another key point I keep going back to - kamikaze Ukraine is not Hezbollah or the IRGC, i.e. a proper mass movement, which will regenerate itself if decapitated (and even then Hezbollah did go quiet for the time being after it had its top several hundred men taken out between the pagers and the direct bombings.). Zelensky's Ukraine is a top-down project.
Yes, Banderites are numerous in Western Ukraine, but the structure is a top down installation put there by the West.
Take out the political leadership and the oligiarchs, then keep taking them out if they get replaced, and it will fall appart. These people are in it for the money and there is no point in getting Western money if it means you are dead immediately after that.
It is a very different situation from Hamas, who are fighting for their physical survival, or the Shia who have a culture of martyrdom.
And yet not even the outright Nazis have been touched in Ukraine. Biletsky and Prokopenko are walking around with no missiles ever visiting anywhere close to where they are.
Worse, Russia had Prokopenko captured, then let him (and the whole of Azov) go in exchange for Medvedchuk.
Remember how Stalin refused to exchange a German general for his own son, saying "we do not exchange generals for low ranking officers". Well, Putin exchanged the whole Nazi core of the Ukrainian army for Medvedchuk. What is there to even say...
Commenting on the Azov Brigade Nazi accusations, Viacheslav Likhachev, a well-known political scientist of Jewish origin and researcher of the ideology and activities of modern far-right movements in Russia and Ukraine:
There were some individuals with neo-Nazi background and Far Right views among the people who founded The Azov Battalion in the very beginning in 2014, though even not all the founders had such a background. For example, among the first members of Azov there were activists from the AutoMaidan volunteer groups and many Jews (including at least one Israeli citizen). Most of the soldiers with far-right background left the regiment by the end of 2014. The rest of the far-right radicals who clearly articulated their views were discharged in 2017 by the order from the new commanders of the Regiment. As of today, there are absolutely no grounds for accusations that neo-Nazis serve in the Azov Regiment.
Why is the electricity grid still operating and all substations destroyed so mass flight to Western nations, also why are any locomotives operating or their service depots not destroyed or are they ineligible or no strike hence not a war. How come all of a sudden a whole list of valuable eligible targets appear. Also it would be good to see BDA from the super duper strike please Simplicious in your next post.
Key logistics hubs on the borders are not hidden underground. Neither are locomotives, as valuable to the war effort as tanks. If these start going down, will the West fly replacement locomotives in via Rzeszow? Oops, wrong gauge ;-)
And the correct way to disable a major industrial plant like a refinery or a factory is to bomb the office building with the engineers. Not the managers, they are irrelevant, but the engineers who run the plant. They are the only people who know how to recover or improvise production lines that have been damaged in a bombing. And they are scarce.
Russia’s behavior is folowing the same old logic of statecraft: control the buffer, weaken the rival, secure the periphery. Ukraine sits smack in the middle of what Russia has always considered its strategic glacis. You can dress it up in moral language or democratic values, but that geography isn’t going anywhere.
You can't deter a land power like Russia with speeches and funding packages while your logistics grind and manpower reserves sit on fumes.
NATO’s 5% GDP talk feels less like a plan and more like a signal to markets and media. States act in their interest, and right now, most European powers simply don’t see this war as existential. Russia does. That’s the difference, and it's why they’re still on the front foot.
At the end of the day, power fills vacuums. And the more Ukraine is left twisting in the wind, the more Russia will keep pressing forward.
NATO's 5% agreement is all just utter bullshit. It's all optics. First, it's within 10 years! Who the fuck is still gonna be around in 10 years? Second, they just changed what "defence spending" means, so things like bridge repairs and road repairs are now classed as defence spending (you know, to carry the heavy US junk).
The dreaded FABs with spectacular scenes filmed are doing a few percent of the killing.
Arty kills less than FPV:s, almost useless…
FPVs kills 24/7 but most nighttime!
Interesting to read that Russia for the first time has attacked cement factories…
And I read that Russia ”now” are clearing all industries linked to the Ukrainian military.
Has Putin/Kreml finallu realised what they have to do?
Interesting thet Putin is said to have told media that Russia oppose Ukraine membership in EU (because all of Ukraine is Russia). A giant shift in the retoric. And maybe Russia will put in gear 4-5 know.
Recall that this is one very small snapshot from a single unit, on a single front, and should be taken with a grain of salt.
Also, it's for 300s only. The list for 200s could look quite different, due to various battlefield dynamics. For instance, Fab/artillery likely produces far less 300s and much more often 200s, whereas FPVs almost always produce 300s and rarely direct 200s, due to their comparatively weak and directional warheads.
One big impact of drones is that they prevent medevac of wounded, no matter what the reason of the wound is. Or if they try to medevac a wounded but gets killed by a drone - yes the drone did the final killing but the initial wound triggering the medevac could have been different.
Mikey, i'm guessing the various sized FABs are mainly deployed for destroying solid stuff like workshops, sub-stations etc rather than personelle. However, if you happen to be inside such a structure (like a block of flats) at the time of Mr Fab's arrival, then it's errrr 'goodnight'. But i do agree, a great piece of statistical info in that table.
Ok boomer
Who would have thought the Russian military machine would be able to continue the fight after recently having "basically its entire air force" destroyed by a clever theatrical production?
Who'd have thought they had so many washing machines.
I get my food from the backyard garden.
I get my food from your backyard too, Cat!
You are welcome! The peas a great this year, don't you think?
as mentioned above: Russia's Schrödinger army. with losses and gains at the same time.
Those Commie preverts must be cheating!
Classic Russian tactic!
They're after our precious bodily fluids!
P.O.E.
Putin evolved into an Iron Lich and unlocked Necrotech Reanimation
They've trained kamikaze seagulls to attack in meat waves.
FACT!!!
Hollywood will make a film about it: The Seagull has Landed
Just wait until Putin finally gets Isildur's Bane
Fully empowered Nazgul coming for the Nazis...this sounds like a great movie.
Thank you for the article.
How can NATO and the EU possibly recover morally from this bloodbath they have created?
How did they "morally recover" from all the other bloodbaths they not only caused but committed themselves in the last six centuries?
Well, same way here.
>the Dutch Republic — the world’s first capitalist state and, arguably, the prototype of the modern economic war machine.
>* the first multinational corporation (VOC, with its own military fleet),
>* the first global corporate war (the Banda massacre),
You know your history :)
And, of course, then in the late 17th century it was all transplanted into England.
Can you think of an ethnic group that reinvented predatory lending in Venice, migrated to the Netherlands for just about the period you are talking about, and then finally transplanted itself to London at the time freemasonry was organizing? Because I can't.
Hello ChatGPT, congrats on passing the Turing test.
That's a difficult one indeed
Very interesting post.
I would add that the changes for success of this attempt are minimal. Of course this is a personal feeling as it is difficult to make predictions, 'specially about the future" as Marx
the Good said.
This is my impression. I also hope so, but I do not think that this is only wishful thinking.
There is a surrealist Spanish expression: "What cannot be, cannot be and on top of that it is impossible".
Steincke, Niels Bohr, Yogi Berra even, but not Marx.
Do you feel impuned yet?
Btw, Jewish, first Sephardic then Ashkenazim, massive immigration into Holland during the 16th century and on surely had influence in its local and foreign policy. No need to be Sherlock Holmes to find some parallels between pre Mandela's South Africa and today's Israel regime ( btw, most of the white guys in the Springboks team look, almost without exception, like members of the israeli IDF)
NATO and the EU were causing "bloodbaths" on the last six centuries? How interesting!
Yes, six centuries, and quite exactly that much in fast.
The European colonial model developed first on Madeira and the Canary Islands, and the colonization there started precisely in the 1420s or so.
Warfare started six hundred years ago?
Only the Europeans were ever involved in warfare?
Read some books.
That is called eristics: you are deliberately pretending to be stupid enough to misunderstand the points being made, so that you can then pretend to have the upper hand in the discussion. I have bad news for you: the stupid is showing.
Typical gnostic cope.
I understand the points being made perfectly well.
By the way could so kind as not to go the way of personal insults?
Try to be civilised, if you can.
I am old enough to have a professional experience and I assure you that no-one has considered me stupid. On top of that my academic curriculum speaks for itself.
Now, the point made is that Western countries have been specially violent in the last 600 years. This is false. Due to their technological superiority during that period they had the longest reach, which is a completely different matter. Some people like to speak of the Western colonial empires as the highest form of violence and something unique.
They are not. How did the Muslim Arabs conquer the formerly Christian lands of the Levant and North Africa?How Zoroastrian Persia was conquered?
How many north-african invasions of Spain?
How did the Turks conquer Anatolia, Constantinople and then the Balkans?
Ever heard of Gengis Khan or Timur Lenk?
Did the bad Europeans take part in the Mongols conquest of China and attempt against Japan?
The most extraordinary thing however is reading how someone, who is lamenting non-stop that Russia has abandoned stalinist methods, suddenly start denouncing bloodbath half a millennium ago.
Actually, it did start earlier; the Greek 'colonies' around the Med, fx. And it was the shit-eating Romans who perfected the "Invade and genocide the locals with professional militaries" model.
The Greeks were retalively late in human history. The oldest empires known to us started in what today is the Middle East and Anatolia.
And the Assyrians were so not-nice that their neighbors happily tore them to shreds once weakness set in. They innovated on terror as state weapon, genocide and the forced relocation of peoples, as well as the promotion of their singular, formerly city-based god over other regional gods.
Quite inspiring. The Babylonians who eventually absorbed the Assyrians added crucifixion to the mix, which was eventually perfected by the Romans.
If you want to blame the Europeans for the last 600 years of colonialist warfare, point back to the expansion of merchant interests funded by trade and usury, which both funded a technological and organizational renaissance and demanded constant new resources for their "business model."
The constituent members of those blocs. Literally an autistic 3yr old could have worked that out, ffs.
Don't try to be clever-clever on substack.
Better clever-clever than foolish-foolish.
https://www.militaryreligiousfreedom.org/2023/08/189934/#post/0
My scarcely polite "use your brain" was a answer to your kind elementary arithmetic lesson. Now I know how to subtract 600 from 2025. Thanks indeed, although I suppose that I could always use the Google calculator for difficult mathematic operations. Cela va sans dire.
I am convinced of the importance of good manners, but I am even more convinced of the expediency of answering in the manner that I am addressed to. You know for sure: Nemo mihi impune lacessit.
About the actual debate.
1. What makes imperialism post 1425 so different from imperialism pre 1425?
Crystal clear. Around the XV century the Europeans obtained a decisive military superiority. There was a gradual change of tide. They were no longer the object of invasions from North Africa (destruction of the Spanish kingdom and three subsequent invasions of the Peninsula) or Central Asia (destruction of the Byzantine empire and homeland in Anatolia, conquest of the Balkans, annihilation of the Rus of Kiev) and, like others before, they expanded their power.
Limiting the debate to events post 1425 is a transparent trick to predetermine who the killer is and who the innocent victim.
2. The successor empires of the conquests of Gengis Khan in Central Asia, China and India were present many years after 1425.
A. In fact, the British Raj replaced the Moghul empire in India.
B. The Ottoman empire finished in the Balkans at the end of the XIX century, in the Arab world after the I WW.
The picnic that was served to the Armenians took place in the XX century.
C. The Japanese attempt to create an empire in Asia, which started with the aggression against China and Corea, began in the last quarter of the XIX century and finished in 1945.
That's much better. And even Latin too? You DO want us to think you're smart, don't you!
Unfortunately, I'll provoke you as much as I want, and you'll do what?
You may have a case that limiting the discussion to the last 600 years is an irrelevant distinction, but that's what the OP chose to do. So those are the terms of the discussion. Sorry I don't make the rules.
And your post 1425 examples only prove that the West doesn't have a monopoly on bestiality, which is true, but that was not the argument. The argument was that the West has had a bloody history over the last 600 years.
That's what got you in your feels. Also it's "Korea".
The limits of any discussion are set by the inherent logic that the nature of the question prescribes.
Being know abundantly clear that you lack every quality neccessary for pleasant and intelligent debate, I am glad to put an end to any communication with you.
Have a nice day.
I expect to, now you have crawled back under your bridge.
I hope you feel both impuned and impotent.
People have short memories. Remember Abu Ghraid in Iraq?
Considering that, just how many Guantanamo detainees are in there for actually doing anything wrong i.e. acts of terrorism. Afaik they were mainly in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Exactly. The news cycle moves quickly and people don't actually really give a shit, they have their own problems
By design.
True, but Iraq is a long way away. Ukraine is on Europe's doorstep. It's going to be much harder for the crazies to walk away and forget this one.
Let's hope so
The Ukie Nazis will spread out all over Europe to help remind them.
I think this is true, there will be a lot of blowback when Ukraine's Nazis finally have to surrender or flee. They will likely be extremely bitter and vengeful towards the NATO leaders that caused the total destruction of their country.
I certainly hope so. If they can 'blow up Nordstream’, they could do much worse to Three-Queer Keir than merely burn his former car. The profiteering poltroon Boris Johnson could be in the cross-hairs too, along with much of the UK's regime media and inSecurity apparatus. Same goes for most of the rest of NATO Pact, Germany and France especially.
Nazi hang together. They will be working with MI5/6, Mossad, CIA and NATO to attack civilians across Europe to cause chaos, that the CIA political puppets will then use to impose martial law.
Ukra-Nazis have no problem with their own population being wiped out - they stood behind those conscripts themselves to shoot any retreaters.
Pretty sure they will just form criminal gangs (which is basically not a change), and continue with trafficking people, guns and drugs into Europe. Then, when the time comes they will do jobs here or there for intelligence agencies in exchange for looking the other way. Why cause any issues when you can turn those criminals and guns into a profit machine.
Good question but simple answer.
No moral to recover. Case closed.
Bigger problem, this war is showing how the high tech is losing to mass low tech. Russia is well known for mass low tech and darn good mass low tech at that. The AK47 being the highlight of that work. It does not surprise me that the US military just spent a bunch fighting off ONE, not a swarm but ONE Yemani/Iranian Shahed Drone vs a US Navy Seahawk with a machine gun.
https://youtu.be/ZXJ9N_aUZvs?si=nD893lZXVzcqSmVa
"Russia is well known for mass low tech"
This is rubbish. Russia is literally out-teching both Ukraine and Nato for most of the last 3+ years.
They've used roughly similar amounts of guided MLRS, except where HIMARS gets shot down or jammed over 90% of the time, the majority of Russian guided MLRS hit their targets and none of them gets shot down, because the west doesn't have anything capable of reliably doing so, nor do they have the interceptor numbers to try.
They've used at least a magnitude more guided artillery shells.
They use 1-2 magnitudes more cruise missiles. And they produce so much cruise missiles, that if the west TRIED to do the same, those alone would bankrupt the entire Nato military spending! The combination of considerably lower price than even PPP would suggest, and buying largescale at manufacturing cost, zero profit involved, is what allows Russia to do it. And the west doesn't even seem capable of understanding even the concept of building war material without profit...
They're the only ones with hypersonics, which are literally hypereffective.
They use 2-3 magnitudes more guided airdropped bombs.
They're the only ones to use anything like the TOS systems, which has been utterly devastating every time they have been used in largescale battles.
The Russian airforce and airdefenses are completely and utterly dominant in the air anywhere near the frontlines. Both in quality and quantity.
Lots of western wunderwaffen, like Javelin and tanks have shown to be no better than Russian equivalents, and in some cases, like Javelin vs Kornet, grossly inferior instead.
Russia also repeatedly keep coming up with innovation for drones, rapidly achieving small but useful edges of superiority. Like those watches that warn about incoming drones AND provide their control frequency, that is simply an amazing advantage.
Russian drones cause most casualties at night because they're the ones with lots of thermal imaging and nightvision on their drones. While the biggest most speedy Russian advances tends to happen during bad weather, fog, rain and snow, because Nato and Ukraine does NOT have anywhere near enough such even for their forces, much less their drones.
Also, what we've seen during the entire conflict is that Russian military training is definitely superior to that of Nato. Only the most elite Nato and Ukraine troops fight evenly with the Russian military.
And most of the time, not even them. As was seen with the Mozart debacle, where hundreds of elite soldiers formed up with all the support possible to counter Wagner, and Wagner couldn't even tell the difference between facing them or regular Ukraine troops.
And less than 4 months later, the USA colonel in charge had literally become a crying drunk, giving several interviews and putting up a few videos of his own after his desperate escape from Bakhmut in December-22. Incapable of staying sober or not crying or blatantly breaking apart for even a single video.
Because his entire unit was completely eradicated in just a bit over 3 months.
So no, there's also a huge quality superiority reason why we're looking at Ukraine KIAs approaching 2 million while Russia+RF allied are somewhere between 80 and 130 thousand.
Low tech. It is not space based. does not cost billions and does not need lots of people spending their entire life to produce something. Like watches that do not require millions to be spent by Lockheed Martin or some other DOD mega company. Its faster and it works
It appears that your definition of "high tech" hinges on how much money is wasted on graft, inefficiency, and poor engineering. The more waste, the higher the tech. In that case yes, Russia is very low tech.
thats my point. Spending more money does not make it better. It makes it more tech. It is obvious that the US Defence industry has an amazing ability to make very cool expensive stuff. But in the end of the day, sometimes you need a hammer. A good hammer.
I think his point is that Russia is out-pacing the US tech AND making it cheaply. As we know, the US MIC is just a racket. Like the $10,000 toilet seats
The US defense industry has an amazing capability to inflate the costs of things to unreasonable degrees, which is approved by contracting officers who know there are political and career implications to controlling things... at all.
A few years ago I did a totally scientific bit of googling and concluded a "toilet metric" cost conversion suggesting the costs for Western kit are inflated by roughly 13x Russian costs. Others have found 5x inflation. A "proper" measure would benchmark mission-similar equipment and compare their costs, regardless of actual effectiveness.
"not space based"? Russia has tons of space assets and has constantly being launching more during the SMO.
You’re not wrong - but that video is unwatchable, bloviating AI-narrated garbage.
I found it hysterical: random footage jumbled together with a moronic narration.
Dave. What's low tech about a Kinzal hypersonic missile? Or a S400? The T64 at launch was literally a decade more advanced than any NATO tank. The BMP1 created the category of IFVs. It's Western cope to pretend our technology is always the best.
The Kinzal is not winning the war. It is the watches that look for frequency and warn of drones. It is the new tactics. It is soldiers on motorcycles, tanks with crap attached to them, interceptor drones made with off the shelf and not custom made by NASA.. 3D printing in the field using off the shelf stuff. Drones using go kart motors. The use of fishing radar to track drones. The list goes on and on of stuff no other military has let alone has even thought of. No one else is ready for what the new war will look like with thousands of rockets and attacks with a 1000 drones made in a closet on the battlefield.
All of that is low tech and awesome. The entire plan is not to attack Ukraine with a billion dollar device. That is the point you all dont seem to see right in front of you instead of having your ego hurt that the US has some crazy awesome shit like the B2 which is now obsolete in the new way of war.
Good answer Dave! 👍
I think a drone detection watch is pretty impressive, but I take your point.
I work in such areas and a drone detection watch set off my antennae. That sounds like a lot of caveats were left out of the description.
The watch isn't detecting the drones, it's relaying datalinked warnings from the nearest EW and airdefence troops supporting the frontline.
Just the fact that Russia has somehow managed to make a secure enough datalink for a personal watch is a huge achievement, regardless if its 1-way.
As long as they are allowed to organize gay pride parades and continue corruption, they will live without nightmares.
"How can NATO and the EU possibly recover morally from this bloodbath they have created?"
Most of the EU has no idea about it. Because obviously, it's all a gloriously successful Russian bloodbath...
By not having morals, ethical standards, or even a conscience hypocrisy is always the fall back strategy.....They can always spin a narrative and Hollywood will make a movie.
There are no morals to recover from, Vinny. These people are psychopaths.
‘How can NATO and the EU possibly recover morally from this bloodbath they have created?’
It is called population, media and mind control.
It's Putin, "the psychopath" who has created, not them. They, the West, were only supporting a democratic nation. That's a sacred thing to do, no?
You'd have got more likes if you'd made it plain that was sarcasm.
Thanks, but im not here for likes. Just being me :)
NPs. :)
Have you tried being someone else?
Their objective is blood baths for the Jew. See Palestine, ukraine Russia Germany Japan
https://www.militaryreligiousfreedom.org/2023/08/189934/#post/0
Bloodbaths are the goal of
the Jew
https://www.militaryreligiousfreedom.org/2023/08/189934/#post/0
I'd point out that very few are actually fighting.
Wow, you guys certainly went to town on my plaintive and rather naive supplication for some kind of morality to be applied! Clearly, we can cast such impossibly hopeful aspirations aside, accept the eternal and inescapable brutality of it all and call each other stupid while we're at it.
How many smart people does it take to screw in a lighbulb?
But seriously: is it just me, or is the term 'colonialism' just a fig- leaf term for CAPITALISM?
This may be the most naive question I've ever asked! Thanks for humouring me.
As the flow of Western arms narrows and time goes on we see a duplication of patterns to the 1861-1865 War of the States, the American conflict. The larger industrial base combined with larger population and military prevails. When the conflict was into the third year the more powerful party started to dominate the battlefields in both conflicts.
The ironic use of the beautiful Andrea Bocelli song, Time to say goodbye in the video of drones chasing an armored vehicle in open field is a devastating testimony in support of drones. The driver and companions are caught in an open field, desperately speeding toward some cover to hide. The drones loitering around hitting them one by one and the fifth and sixth explosions if I count it right, kill machine and men as well. The drones are low expense and the hunters are sitting in protected environments, like playing video games. War strategy involving tanks and armored vehicles has to be completely reworked for the future.
The South was not supported by anyone.
Huge difference.
As long as Ukraine has an untouchable rear, it will not collapse.
Who cares the drone production workshops inside Ukraine get hit? A lot of the drones are not produced there anyway, and that will grow.
It was absolutely imperative for Russia in early 2022 to secure the Polish border, but they didn't even try.
Having failed that, the next mandatory step was either a credible nuclear threat against Poland and Romania, forcing them to close the borders, or actual nuclear strikes, first at the border crossings, then at Poland and Romania themselves if they still did not get the message.
But with these traitors/cowards in the Kremlin, the war was lost, from an entirely winnable position.
hate to quibble here, but the Confederacy was most definitely being supported by the British who used their Caribbean network to not only resupply and base Confederate ships but also to buy Confederate products like cotton and tobacco.
Nothing remotely comparable.
This is a NATO vs. Russia war fought on the territory of Ukraine, with Ukrainian cannon fodder.
And the Russian rear is no longer untouchable, but the NATO rear continues to be.
Because a deal was originally made that both rears would be untouchable, then of course the West reneged on that deal, but the cowards/traitors in the Kremlin didn't have the courage to act reciprocally because their oligarch masters' interests would not allow it.
100%
British yards were building warships for the Confederate navy and arms were being supplied too.
Quite right too. The US violated British neutrality and sovereignty with its act of piracy against the RMS Trent. Lincoln, the Man of Blood who 'made war…. on his own peeeepul' was lucky London didn’t send the RN to sink the whole US Navy.
And furthermore, they probably thought about it, but the Tsar sent the Russian fleet across to the USA to provide what turned out to be an effective deterrent.
And Austria! Austria sold to both sides. Austria was the reason for the Northern Navy, and it was the Navy that won the war by blockade.
900k P53 Lee Enfield rifles were sold in the war and most of that was to the South.
And what about the Canada/British platform and support operation?
Fun fact; Russia sent naval forces into the Atlantic to keep British and French navy from assisting the Confederacy.
Again with the nuclear strikes like a broken record. Like I mentioned time and time again, that only works if you are the only country who has them. This is why the US used them in WWII, no one could retaliate back with another nuke.
Duke Nukem/General Moron.
>Like I mentioned time and time again, that only works if you are the only country who has them
Do Poland and Romania have nukes? No.
So yes, Russia is the only country of relevance here that has nukes.
Poland and Romania are satellite Nato countries and America has troops and bases around that area. It does not take a rocket scientist to figure out that if you nuke those countries which have American/Nato assets, troops and bases, you are attacking the whole beast. Nato/America has missile launchers in those countries,
If you nuke those then you have to be ready to receive Nukes on your end.
The Kremlin is playing this wise and not going crazy with the nukes. You have to be blind not to see the existential endgame on both sides if one country launches a nuke.
The Russian strategy in 2022 was paralyzing Ukraine with fear by showing them thousands of tanks. When that did not work out it came to the surface that Russia was very poorly prepared for a major conflict. They simply were unable to project real power to the Western borders of Ukraine, as they are unable to do the same today. You are correct, Russian hopes for victory mainly depend on cutting off supplies at the border. That would involve taking full control of Western Ukraine and the South with Odessa as well. If America did not nuke China and North Korea in the early 1950s, there is even less chance that Russia will nuke Ukraine today. Remember the Carlson – Putin interview, Putin and Russia looks at the Ukrainians – and Russian speaking minority there – as the same population as their own historically. They are not going to nuke them unless major intrusion of NATO forces take place.
Read with understanding. He never proposed nuking Ukraine.
He writes: ‘Having failed that, the next mandatory step was either a credible nuclear threat against Poland and Romania, forcing them to close the borders, or actual nuclear strikes, first at the border crossings, then at Poland and Romania themselves if they still did not get the message.’
In my dictionary that is a proposal to nuke Poland, Romania and Ukraine. A nuclear strike at the border crossings will unavoidably involve Ukrainian territory as well.
>A nuclear strike at the border crossings will unavoidably involve Ukrainian territory as well.
With practically zero casualties. Russian territory has been nuked by Russia itself plenty in the past, some of the early surface tests were not even in Semipalatinsk but in quite densely populated (for Russian standards) areas.
The critical issue would not be the dropping and effects of a single or even a few small tactical nukes. It would be the crossing of psychiatrical borders that exist in human minds. This would be immediately exploited by the Western media, spanking the beloved leaders to answer in kind.
>Russia was very poorly prepared for a major conflict.
Which immediately raises some questions:
1) Whose job was it to prepare Russia for a major conflict given that it was known that is the trajectory for 20 years prior?
2) Whose job was it to deal with Ukraine before it became such a tough nut to crack?
3) Whose job was it to prevent the Banderization of Ukraine in the first place?
4) Who spent untold billions on Winter Olympic and soccer World Cup pointless stunts that in the end did zero to improve Russia's image if that was the intention?
5) Who allowed trillions to be transferred from Russia to the West all throughout that time instead of investing them into local industry and the military.
Such difficult questions with non-obvious answers...
I think the Russian leadership existed in the comfortable understanding that they were living under their own nuclear umbrella. Domestically, they were focusing on economic and cultural developments while externally flooding Europe with cheap fossil fuels. You are right, there were major signs showing that Ukraine was getting into an unacceptable territory. However, although it was clear to Russia that the Western leadership was composed of a bunch of mentally unhinged psychopaths, they were not counting on them opening a major proxy war against Russia. This was where Russian leadership miscalculated. Still, the US/NATO initiation opened a surprising new dimension of warfare that can only end in Russian victory or a nuclear war. It remains to be seen if the Western Oligarchic Classes and their puppets are willing to move into nuclear basements for an extended period or walk away from the Russian conflict. The way I see it today, they are divided and in chaos. They have a hard time to get used to the idea of eating canned food and sleeping in dark holes. If they are smart enough (and this is not guaranteed) they will understand that there will be millions of hungry and angry hands digging them out of those holes to share their supplies and punish them.
>I think the Russian leadership existed in the comfortable understanding that they were living under their own nuclear umbrella.
If you refuse to enforce your self-declared red lines, including the official nuclear doctrine, then you don't really have a nuclear umbrella.
That is what the last three years have revealed...
They were not attacked by nuclear forces. Russia was pushed into traditional 20th century warfare.
These deep bunkers are safe against bombardment, but they are utterly defenseless against sustained demolition by ground forces, even civilian ones. As the simplest recourse, their accessways and air intakes can be flooded or sealed with concrete. As a second step, a gas storage compressor can be set up, and CO2 pumped into the ground around the bunker, as in fracking, at 300 bars pressure. There is no bunker in the galaxy airtight enough to withstand gas infiltration under such conditions. And CO2 is not even, technically, a poison gas, so it wouldn't spoil the hoarded supplies.
It is because of this defenselessness against ground assault that the hohols, for all their doggedness, have not even attempted to hold out in the various mines that have been taken over. Not even they are that stupid.
/* 1) Чья работа заключалась в подготовке России к крупному конфликту, учитывая, что такова была траектория за 20 лет до этого? */
30 лет. С начала 90-х предсказывали войну на Украине.
Russia wasn't trying to get to the Polish border. Russia did get an agreement in place that Zelenski quickly reneged on.
The Banderan army will continue being resupplied and it will continue having to give ground as it's forces are losing untrained men faster than they can be replaced.
Russia isn't going to bother taking any more of the Banderan territories than what Lenin forced Russia to cede to create the original Ukraine SSR borders.
Romania, Hungary, Slovakia and Poland will be taking control of western Ukraine and Putin will support them doing so.
You don't even read, do you? So where is Lvov?
You are nothing but a Putin hating troll, with nothing substantial to add to any rational conversation.
The Confederates were being armed and supplied by France and Britain.
Russia didn't need to secure the Polish border then and doesn't need to now.
Lviv is about as far in the Banderan rear as it gets and regularly gets attacked.
The Banderan army will retreat and it will be a cascading effect.
So in your mind Russia will continue losing the SMO and liberating more land daily while the Banderan army continues to consolidate its winning position and retreating?
>Russia didn't need to secure the Polish border then and doesn't need to now.
Sorry, but that is an incredibly stupid thing to so.
Shut down the borders from the West, and where would Ukraine be now?
No long-range drones, no FPVs, no artillery shells, no HIMARS, no fuel, nothing.
Would the war still be fought at the Russian border four years into this?
You do believe yourself to be an analyst. So tell me the minimum sized land force Russia needed to march to the borders of Romania, Hungary, Slovakia and Poland?
Your moronic answer should be good for a laugh.
Now or in 2022?
In 2022 it would have taken an addition 300,000 going south from Brest. But guess who tried to wage war on the cheap and to bluff his way on to yet another shitty deal.
Today you need 2 million, as you would have to go east to west all the way, as Lukashenko is wisely staying out of this shit show (if Belarus is again used to launch an attack on Ukraine, thousands of drones will be flying into Belarus the same way they are flying into Russia, and Lukashenko is not an idiot, unlike those in the Kremlin, he wants no part of that).
Which is why you would not be going all the way east to west.
You would seal the border with stand off weapons. The big ones.
You are amusing. Another 300,000 coming from Brest and they were going to seal all the borders. No need to fight, just drive up and close the entry points? Was going to take many more than that. I will let your lack of imagination ponder why that was so.
Russia isn't going to need an extra two million men for the debellation of Ukraine. It only needs to complete liberating Novo Russiye. Romania, Hungary, Slovakia and Poland will do the rest.
Where is Ukraine going to get those thousands of drones targeting Belorus in addition to the few occasions it can launch hundreds of drones at Russia?
I get it. You start typing and you just let the stream of consciousness flow. Doesn't need to make sense.
That peace deal that Putin tried to get "on the cheap" meant Ukraine only had to give up Crimea. This new deal is going to be the end of a nation.
Gotta feel sorry for those hapless conscripts in the APC. They hadn’t a chance. One of my Uncles got 'brewed up' in a Sherman in the Netherlands in late ’44: 88mm shell through the hull. Luckily for him, he was sitting half in, half out of the turret hatch at the time. He was the only survivor: burns, shock, serious leg injury, nearly died. The effect must have been much like that, though of course minus the two minutes of terror before the denouement.
That said, that was like watching, in miniature, the mighty Prince of Wales and Repulse get sent to the bottom by 97 cheapo Japanese torpedo bombers (of which PoW and Repulse managed to shoot down three). Again, it's the end of an era in warfare.
>He mentions destroyed battalions, low staffing, and that only 10 men hold stretches of ground 5km in length.
And yet nobody rushes through those thinly defended stretches.
Because the grand genius in the Kremlin refuses to mobilize, and even talks about cutting defense spending next year...
Dude didn't you read the whole article. Drone warfare has changed the way combined arms warfare is waged in modern times. Why would anybody "rush" mobilize a concentration of forces into thinly defended lines when the enemy can swarm drones and artillery your way.
The troll knows that. The troll must ignore that to troll effectively for it's payday.
The first time I wrote anything on t'interweb was on IMdB and I was accused of trolling, I didn't know what it meant. All I wrote was that Star Trek is a creation allegory. The Enterprise looks (from certain angles) like a jet-powered sperm that whooshes across space to a planet (an egg) and then Kirk beams down to fertilise the egg with his er, genetic material. Couldn't see what the fuss was about.
The lone Ukrainian APC was attacked by 6 drones on day-time. According to the chart most of the FPV-killing is done during night.
If Ukraine sent, or for that matter Russia, 6 APC and Tanks what will the opposing side to then? Can they even control 36 drones at the sam time?
It was an incident, a few days ago, at Konstantinovka where Russia lost a couple of vehicles so trying moving in the open is still deadly. But no one has dared to try a breakthrough with 40 vehicles. You will lose some but not all. But if you do it will be courtmartial and a shot in the neck, of course.
It's also not so much about breakthroughs. Breakthrough is the easy part--it's about the logistics train to support the newly broken-through troops after that. Logistics is by far the most vulnerable to drones. You can break through with assault troops and 'dig in' into some hedgerows, but then the unit will be isolated by drones and destroyed if logistics are stretched.
That is solved by mass too.
It should be the drone operators being encircled, not the advancing units.
Which is a matter of mass. And also of ruthlessness in taking out command-and-control and logistics on the other side.
Why Ukraine still has running trains in the 42nd month of the (not)war remains a mystery
Indeed. What is striking, for me, is whenever Russia does a hidden
”breaktrough” as was the case in Avdevka and Schuzda (tunnels) the front crumbles almost instantly. Those troops takes a lot of punishment but are able to hold on enough time for the rest of the front to move.
I am aware of the kill-zone behind front line and that logistics is essential to endure and prevail at the front. I may lack patience but I am worried about the timeframe for Russia. If Russia is going to spend less on War industry the coming years it is a clear signal that the War industry has taken a toll on the whole society. War isnt producing anything that lasts or builds the country. The secret of Putins wonder in Russia where they rebuilt the Vodka-ridden ruin from the 90ties into a modern society was that he didnt spent to much on the military and did short effective Wars in Chechnya and Georgia.
>If Russia is going to spend less on War industry the coming years it is a clear signal that the War industry has taken a toll on the whole society.
>did short effective Wars in Chechnya and Georgia
Georgia was Medvedev, not Putin.
And it could have been a short and effective war here too.
But spending less on War industry in the coming years is not an option, unless the decision has been made to unleash the nukes.
That is the only scenario in which Russia will be allowed to not spend even more on war than it is now. Because there is a long series of wars being set up now.
1) The Baltics
2) Finland and Norway in the Arctic
3) Azerbaijan
4) Kazakhstan.
5) with Poland over Belarus and Kaliningrad
Yes. Dark skies are forming.
There are multiple possible scenarios.
Dear old Putin should declare what Russia wants to happen.
* What is the new security order they prefer?
* What is the peace they want after the War?
* What idea do they have about a disarmed Ukraine - how will they denazify and then unite the country after 4 years War (or seven as Putin talked about 2027)?
I see these scenarios:
* Russia realise that western Europe is so infected with Russophobia that the War will never end volontarly. It must be forced to end and EU/NATO must be subdued in good time before they are rearmed (2030). Probably waiting for a democrat entering presidency in 2028. Until then poking around in Ukraine and taking the losses from strikes into Russia.
* Hoping for better times and that people will get bored with the War. EU-citizens waking up and refuse to pay for the Ukraine War. Trusting Trump to abandon Ukraine and focus on his favorite beach (Gaza) and looming War with China (would not happen). Russia poking around and take whatever opportunity to gain more squaremeters of Ukraine. A pragmatic and phlegmatic way with the goal to not stir up the enemy even more.
* A sudden change in Kreml (or Ukraine) which spirals to unforseen events and possibilties we havent thought of. I include Trump in this. He can change history and already has. For the better or the worse.
Oh, it has been clear for a long time that a Soviet tank army would have been in Kiev in days.
Yes, it would have lost a lot of tanks in the process of getting through the first line of defense, but here is the thing -- the rate of fire of drones is much lower than artillery and once you punch through you can rapidly exploit the advance.
Quantity has a quality of its own, etc. Still true.
But this goes together with all the other obvious things that should have been done in the first months of the (not)war, such as disabling logistics, taking out the prominent Nazi individuals and paralyzing the command structure, taking out command-and-control centers, etc. etc. All those things have still not been done, instead we have "negotiations", even though the events on June 1 and June 13 clearly exposed the "wisdom" of engaging with the West diplomatically.
'No nuking left and right today? "
I never proposed nukes for any 21st century war or conflict.
Tank warfare going into major cities is a dangerous proposition. Go back to 1956, October, November in Budapest. Men from the top of the buildings equipped with rifles and Molotov cocktails were able to hand down major damage. I know about one case where a single individual disabled two Soviet tanks without explosives or even a rifle. He jammed heavy metal bars between the wheels of the tanks. A machine gunner from a third tank killed him. These were old T-34 tanks often with auxiliary fuel tanks to extend range. They just sent a couple of rifle rounds into the the fuel tank, as the fuel started to flow they throw a Molotov cocktail from a building and soldiers were forced out good as dead within seconds.
http://tank-photographs.s3-website-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/t34-85-russian-soviet-medium-tank-london.html
Russia was in no state to take Kiev then because Ukraine blew the bridges. And the formations was not prepared for a War (they were going from a drill to something unknown). Russia was not aware of how much troops Ukraine had and all those AT wiped out entire formations. Remember Kadyrovs elite formation being wiped out?
Russia didnt plan the SMO as the Israeli plan their Greater Israel - years in advance and absolutely unscrupulous. They bungled, had to retreat, gained consciousness, established new lines, defeated the Ukraine offensive and since then they are on a slow move forward. But problem is that Russia has no real objectives other than to press Ukraine out of the four new oblasts and maybe securing a cordon sanitaire. Maybe they have hidden objectives and a grand strategy achieving it - the thousand cuts and sudden defeat may be the one.
Situation since one year ago and up to now is that should be able to crush Ukraine. But they dont or they cant? Sumy is showing us they cant. Other sectors is proof that they can continue the slow advance. Slow but steady.
Biggest problem is that Putin may believe in his friend Trump and that ”peace” would come in form of a negotation. Russia has no clue what peace would look like and I doubt they have a strategy to secure a peace. There will not be an agreement - just one side crushed. And once Russia make the decision things will move faster.
>Russia was in no state to take Kiev then
I am not talking as if the botched SMO was a given and unavoidable.
They could have gone in properly, they didn't. That is the whole point.
>Sumy is showing us they cant.
Not quite, very small froces have been allocated there once again.
And Ukraine has still not been cut off from Europe.
Cut Ukraine off from Europe and mobilize, and it will be crushed.
>But problem is that Russia has no real objectives
Exactly.
> And once Russia make the decision things will move faster.
Yes, indeed
Guys, you should stop looking at war as a computer game!
And BTW, your theory is not right, since the goal of surrounding Kiev (with a couple of thousands men only!) was to force Ukraine to the negotiating table. The goal was reached, negotiations in Istambul were successfull, negotiators agreed on practically everything - but then Boris Johnson flew in and convinced Zelensky to continue the war. In a word, the West did not (and does not) want this war to end. "Russians are dying!" Lindsey Graham was jumping from joy, and so are the rest of the psychos in Washington, London, Brussels, etc. Psychos see this war as a computer game, since they sit somewhere far away in a safe place. We should know better - for ordinary people war is always only destruction and suffering.
Ok, what theory?
It is impossible to surround Kiev. You always move fast to the TV-center and the goverment quarters. Russia failed.
The negotiation started when it was clear that Russia was in a exposed situation. So was Ukraine. But Ukraine actually shot one of the ukrainian negotiators so I dont think they were earnest at all. The Boris was only the icing of the cake.
No, I dont think War is a computer game. Therefore it should be short instead of a 4-year long shitshow with millions dead&maimed.
>it should be short instead of a 4-year long shitshow with millions dead&maimed.
As I keep explaining to people, the damage incurred (when you remember that most Ukrainians are Russians) by Russia is the equivalent of multiple regional capitals being nuked. It just isn't happening in a single big boom (but there is time for that too).
Also, someone very high up in the leadership used to swear there will never be another major war on Russian territory.
And yet here we are...
“It is impossible to surround Kiev.” Your premisses seem to come from western MSM. Russia’s goal was NOT to surround Kiev, but to scare the enemy enough to bring him to the negotiation table. Russia wouldn’t be sending only 25.000 troops, if they wanted to surround Kiev.
I have been following military experts describing real situation on the ground. So I know all the phases Russian army went through. If Russians wanted to conquer Ukrainian land, they would use completely different tactic. They would do what NATO does before sending in their troops: carpet bomb everything. It wouldn’t be dificult with all FABs (FAB-3000, etc.).
Who is prolonging war by sending weapons although it is clear that Ukraine lost and will never win? The West.
Who wants 1-month ceasfire in order to rearm and restructure Ukrainian army? The West.
Who pressures Zelensky to enlist 18-year-olds? The West.
Who sabotaged Istanbul peace negotiations? The West (by sending Boris Johnson: https://braveneweurope.com/michael-von-der-schulenburg-hajo-funke-harald-kujat-peace-for-ukraine)
Who signed Minsk Agreements knowing they would not respect it? The West (Merkel and Hollande publicly admitted that in December 2022).
Who started building and training Ukrainian army in the first place and delivering Ukrainian army weapons to shell Donbass? The West (since 2014).
Who is responsible for this draging this war so long? See the above answers.
Because the Russian field commanders are afraid of ruining their careers by ordering a failed assault. Going slowly and surely is much safer, careerwise. This is the result of flawed reward structure within the officer corps, at the tactical level, not in the Kremlin. Putin probably doesn't even realize, he thinks the slow, methodical creeping is the pinnacle of operational art, so his generals tell him.
Comedically, the Ukrainian perspective is quite the opposite. The Ukrainian commanders are rewarded in proportion to expending their troops in pointless assaults. You can't make this shit up, the two sides are pushing things well past the bounds of absurdity, but in opposite directions.
Where is Stalin when you need one? Stalin wouldn't have put up with this bullshit, he knew how to scare his general staff into vigorous initiative.
There is some of that, but ultimately the strategic failure is on Putin.
You can be sure the General Staff has been telling him about the need to make strategic moves for years, and from what I have read, seen and heard (with the caveat that none of us has inside info) it is more likely than not that they did give him a proper invasion plan back in 2021 but Putin vetoed key parts of it and butchered the rest.
Also, Karaganov is likely the unofficial public representative of the 12th GUMO, and what he is saying reflects the mood there.
Putin understands very well that this is a HYBRID WAR. Russia is not only fighting on the battlefield, but also in the information sphere. Putin is wise because he first tries all the peaceful possibilities, and only if that doesn't work, gives green light for grinding. This is how Russia is winning in the diplomacy and, consequently, economy - it is the most popular country in the Global South - and this is the reason why Russia is not isolated and suffering under thousands of heavy sanctions. This is why such masses flow to BRICS and SPIEF meetings - and business deals are made at those events! This is why Russia's economy is doing much much better than EU and US economy! If economy colapsed, military would colapse eventually too. See Syria.
You should know better than to try to reason with a psycho. (GM).
Yeah yeah. Failing Putin and nukes. Every post...🥱🥱🥱. Boring.
It might have something to do with casualty conservation; humanity rather than timidity.
If you act slowly and timidly, you seem to conserve manpower in the short run; but by stretching the campaign interminably, you lose more manpower in the long run. It balances out.
No, the British in the Western Desert, the US and British in Italy and the Allies in Normandy smashed German armies for far less casualties, despite the caution. The Allied generals were mostly survivors of the Great War who thought that war could be fought far more cheaply, weren't interested in the flashy trivialities of the German army and wanted to maintain the morale of their wartime conscripts, who were far from the ideological soldiers opposite them. Attrition has a bad name but won two world wars. The British also needed to participate in the creation of post-war Europe and this precluded more ambitious methods because ending the war with a destroyed army would reduce British bargaining power.
Russia is in serious trouble. No breakthrough is going to happen. Russia can't take all of Ukraine if they wanted to.
This is what Russian 'winning' looks like.
I just wish they would drop something on Ze's head. Seeing that putz waltz around every A-list party on earth in his green sweater makes me sick that no one has taken him out yet. For those who say don't kill him he is an idiot; he is probably the most successful beggar in human history. I would love to see the story of his demise, along with his entourage of SAS bodyguards.
It's the range of the weapons that hold ground, not the number of men. Remember all that Simples wrote about the difficulty of concentrating forces for attack or defence when you have everything from mobile phone triangulation to satellite surveillance watching the ground?
Is Lieutenant Colonel the normal rank for a fighter pilot? Say in the US and Russian air forces? Or does the pilot who was shot down being a Lieutenant Colonel indicate something in particular?
in America, every single fighter pilot is a lieutenant or higher. And there are certainly Lt. Colonel active duty pilots.
https://bogidope.com/the-basics-understanding-air-force-rank-structure-from-an-ang-pilot-perspective/
Without getting bogged down in historical details of how this came to be, all pilots must be officers. I assume it's the same in Russia and Ukraine.
But in between lieutenant and lieutenant and lieutenant colonel lies captain and major (and maybe more: my knowledge of the armed forces only applies to the 18th century). There is a huge difference in seniority and presumably responsibility between a lieutenant and a lieutenant colonel.
a fighter pilot is around 22 ... 25 years old, when he graduates from military school as a lieutenant. As long as he is fit [and his army and planes to fly with exist] he can fly. Getting older and getting experience he receives ranks (and some upgrade in payment). Especially in war, ranks [and medals] are cheap and add up quite fast. So, nothing strange when a gentleman at 31 after 3 years of war holds a Lt.Col. - we may assume he got one rank alone for his qualification for the F16
Those would simply be very experienced pilots. I spent many hours in Oryx helicopters with LtCol training and assessing other ranks up to major.
Ridiculous amounts of dollars and euros are being poured into the purchase of mercenaries to fight this war now, one of reasons Ukraine has no interest in repatriating the dead. But it illustrates the shame of proxy warfare when it reaches this denouement. Russia's NK ally fought with Russia with pride, and NK regiments stood alongside Russian comrades at the grand honouring of the dead. Where is any acknowledgement of a bunch of nutty foreigners from Poles to Columbians, dying on the Russian front in order to claim vast cash prizes? And you have to wonder how much of what is promised ever gets paid out.
Neither the US nor europe can put its own armies in here, or even wants to. As Putin said, NATO has decided to turn its addled gaze on some never-never land where a vast european army perches menacingly on whatever headland is left of the old western empire by then because although Russia has never had any interest in eroding existing NATO boundaries, if the idiot Baltic states continue to chest thump and pour in mercs with european tax payer money, it knows it might have to take appropriate action to secure peace.
The european warmongerers believe Daddy will bail them out, even though the role of good parenting from time immemorial requires the good parent to bring idiot children to heel, even if that means cutting the strings and leaving them to manage with their own resources. It is part of growing up..
I LMOA in '23 when some Colombian knuckle draggers were paid with fake dollar bills and they only discovered that once they were back in their burrios.
Barrios.
Thanks for this.
One minor addendum - those watches aren't detecting anything. They're being relayed information from nearby detectors. I have no idea how effective the watches are but the image shows "3 minutes" presumably until arrival, indicating the detector is deployed somewhere forward - could be very useful tech, indeed.
Also, for the record, been a very dry June in Ukraine - no problems with mud, that's for sure!
The moment sanctions failed, the war was lost. For the West, this was a paper war, only based on assumptions built on Western projectionism.
In my opinion the whole thing was to gain access to the north of China.
Z-man was bribed with the promise of untold riches from selling Russian energy.
The desperate actions of an empire in decline.
'One Quiet Early Morning in Beijing, the Dollar’s Crown Slipped' by Alastair Crooke
https://www.unz.com/acrooke/one-quiet-early-morning-in-beijing-the-dollars-crown-slipped/
A key event that was hardly noticed by the MSM.
The geranium attacks will eventually mimic the strategic bombing of ww2. I think once the 90-kg warhead variant becomes the norm especially
300-500 sounds like a lot, but for a country the size of Ukraine its not really. I wouldn't be surprised if we reach 1000+ per day this time next year
Am still wondering how the AFU is able to conduct counter attacks. And successful ones too (somewhat). The flow of equipment i guess hasn't stopped
The bottleneck has actually always been intelligence rather than strike assets themselves. Russia has more munitions than it has targets to hit. Most everything has been struck already and the remaining strategic assets are aggressively dispersed and hidden underground, etc. It's pointless to have 1,000 drones striking if the OODA loops, HUMINT, satellite ISTAR, etc. isn't agile enough to identify worthy targets day in and day out.
That being said, there are always entire classes of assets on the no-strike list that will eventually be opened up, just as the 'Legitimny' post in the OP claims has happened in last night's strikes.
Anecdotally, what I can see is 1) Russian ISR is still behind Western 24/7 satellite / ELINT assets. Sitting through an AMK missile/drone session is fun & exciting but that data ain't coming from Russian sensors 2) Russian CEP on munitions is maybe 1 order of magnitude greater than counterpart; they make up for the difference by using bigger warheads
Certainly Russian satellite assets can't compete with the combined assets of the entire West, not to mention the combined data processing/collating backbone. But it's constantly catching up: https://i.imgur.com/QKZ24yO.jpeg
Pity, Russia had a no strike list at all.
Well, certainly most would argue the Dnieper bridges are top of that list. As is Bankova.
That's pointless. The Russians are sparing the bridges in the hope that they will need them later, but Ukraine will blow them up as they retreat. So these bridges only benefit Ukrainian logistics, and will never get a chance to be useful to Russia.
As for Bankova sure, Zelensky is a non-asset. But eliminate him, and all the other Ukrainian top dogs---Syrsky, Bezuglaya, Klichko, Budyanov, the Azov leaders---will start killing each other for the privilege of leadership. And once someone floats to the top, hit him, rinse, repeat. Running decapitation by internal squabbles, and for so little effort. The MI6 agents will have piglets just trying to keep track of whom to control next.
Another key point I keep going back to - kamikaze Ukraine is not Hezbollah or the IRGC, i.e. a proper mass movement, which will regenerate itself if decapitated (and even then Hezbollah did go quiet for the time being after it had its top several hundred men taken out between the pagers and the direct bombings.). Zelensky's Ukraine is a top-down project.
Yes, Banderites are numerous in Western Ukraine, but the structure is a top down installation put there by the West.
Take out the political leadership and the oligiarchs, then keep taking them out if they get replaced, and it will fall appart. These people are in it for the money and there is no point in getting Western money if it means you are dead immediately after that.
It is a very different situation from Hamas, who are fighting for their physical survival, or the Shia who have a culture of martyrdom.
And yet not even the outright Nazis have been touched in Ukraine. Biletsky and Prokopenko are walking around with no missiles ever visiting anywhere close to where they are.
Worse, Russia had Prokopenko captured, then let him (and the whole of Azov) go in exchange for Medvedchuk.
Remember how Stalin refused to exchange a German general for his own son, saying "we do not exchange generals for low ranking officers". Well, Putin exchanged the whole Nazi core of the Ukrainian army for Medvedchuk. What is there to even say...
AZOV is a JEW organizaiton.
Commenting on the Azov Brigade Nazi accusations, Viacheslav Likhachev, a well-known political scientist of Jewish origin and researcher of the ideology and activities of modern far-right movements in Russia and Ukraine:
There were some individuals with neo-Nazi background and Far Right views among the people who founded The Azov Battalion in the very beginning in 2014, though even not all the founders had such a background. For example, among the first members of Azov there were activists from the AutoMaidan volunteer groups and many Jews (including at least one Israeli citizen). Most of the soldiers with far-right background left the regiment by the end of 2014. The rest of the far-right radicals who clearly articulated their views were discharged in 2017 by the order from the new commanders of the Regiment. As of today, there are absolutely no grounds for accusations that neo-Nazis serve in the Azov Regiment.
https://www.azovcontrafake.com/myth-5
Why is the electricity grid still operating and all substations destroyed so mass flight to Western nations, also why are any locomotives operating or their service depots not destroyed or are they ineligible or no strike hence not a war. How come all of a sudden a whole list of valuable eligible targets appear. Also it would be good to see BDA from the super duper strike please Simplicious in your next post.
Key logistics hubs on the borders are not hidden underground. Neither are locomotives, as valuable to the war effort as tanks. If these start going down, will the West fly replacement locomotives in via Rzeszow? Oops, wrong gauge ;-)
And the correct way to disable a major industrial plant like a refinery or a factory is to bomb the office building with the engineers. Not the managers, they are irrelevant, but the engineers who run the plant. They are the only people who know how to recover or improvise production lines that have been damaged in a bombing. And they are scarce.
"Aggressively dispersed"? Eh? Perhaps you could consider avoiding adjectives and adverbs, lest people think that you're a septic.
Russia’s behavior is folowing the same old logic of statecraft: control the buffer, weaken the rival, secure the periphery. Ukraine sits smack in the middle of what Russia has always considered its strategic glacis. You can dress it up in moral language or democratic values, but that geography isn’t going anywhere.
You can't deter a land power like Russia with speeches and funding packages while your logistics grind and manpower reserves sit on fumes.
NATO’s 5% GDP talk feels less like a plan and more like a signal to markets and media. States act in their interest, and right now, most European powers simply don’t see this war as existential. Russia does. That’s the difference, and it's why they’re still on the front foot.
At the end of the day, power fills vacuums. And the more Ukraine is left twisting in the wind, the more Russia will keep pressing forward.
NATO's 5% agreement is all just utter bullshit. It's all optics. First, it's within 10 years! Who the fuck is still gonna be around in 10 years? Second, they just changed what "defence spending" means, so things like bridge repairs and road repairs are now classed as defence spending (you know, to carry the heavy US junk).
It's all optics.
I pray for that day to arrive soon when the likes of zelya, rutte, bozo etc are neatly strung up with piano wire, whistling in the breeze.
I will actually savour that moment.
the jew is the problem. these are just shabos goy liek zion don..
Thx, Simplicius!
Interesting facts indeed.
The dreaded FABs with spectacular scenes filmed are doing a few percent of the killing.
Arty kills less than FPV:s, almost useless…
FPVs kills 24/7 but most nighttime!
Interesting to read that Russia for the first time has attacked cement factories…
And I read that Russia ”now” are clearing all industries linked to the Ukrainian military.
Has Putin/Kreml finallu realised what they have to do?
Interesting thet Putin is said to have told media that Russia oppose Ukraine membership in EU (because all of Ukraine is Russia). A giant shift in the retoric. And maybe Russia will put in gear 4-5 know.
Recall that this is one very small snapshot from a single unit, on a single front, and should be taken with a grain of salt.
Also, it's for 300s only. The list for 200s could look quite different, due to various battlefield dynamics. For instance, Fab/artillery likely produces far less 300s and much more often 200s, whereas FPVs almost always produce 300s and rarely direct 200s, due to their comparatively weak and directional warheads.
True!
Easy to be carried away by numbers.
One big impact of drones is that they prevent medevac of wounded, no matter what the reason of the wound is. Or if they try to medevac a wounded but gets killed by a drone - yes the drone did the final killing but the initial wound triggering the medevac could have been different.
Mikey, i'm guessing the various sized FABs are mainly deployed for destroying solid stuff like workshops, sub-stations etc rather than personelle. However, if you happen to be inside such a structure (like a block of flats) at the time of Mr Fab's arrival, then it's errrr 'goodnight'. But i do agree, a great piece of statistical info in that table.
Yes. And as Simplicius corrected, it was only wounded not dead in the chart. Bombs and Arty should do as much killing as they did in WW2.
FPV:s are still prefered I think due to the ability to see the target and get a sure hit.
Horrible environment to be soldier in…!
So FPV drones, eh?
This guy usually doesn't report on the Ukraine war but says there has been some great leap in AI controlled drones with the help of the US and at the last Summit, NATO realized "its winning?" https://open.substack.com/pub/georgewebb/p/the-day-everything-changed-victory?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=4nj8bd
OMG, that article is hilarious! Thanks for sharing.