Eddy

Fellow forum readers, you only have one life (probably). Do not waste any of it reading this absolute bollocks.. I will summarise:
Premises:
A minister went to HMS Clyde on a super secret mission, taking a reporter with him! The UK has a submarine called HMS Ambush that the minister visited The submarine had a tarp on it The UK has trained underwater bomb disposal divers Liz Truss said something     Conclusion: The UK blew up Nord Stream.

Fellow forum readers, you only have one life (probably). Do not waste any of it reading this absolute bollocks.. I will summarise:
Premises:
A minister went to HMS Clyde on a super secret mission, taking a reporter with him! The UK has a submarine called HMS Ambush that the minister visited The submarine had a tarp on it The UK has trained underwater bomb disposal divers Liz Truss said something     Conclusion: The UK blew up Nord Stream.

Fellow forum readers, you only have one life (probably). Do not waste any of it reading this absolute bollocks.. I will summarise:
Premises:
A minister went to HMS Clyde on a super secret mission, taking a reporter with him! The UK has a submarine called HMS Ambush that the minister visited The submarine had a tarp on it The UK has trained underwater bomb disposal divers Liz Truss said something     Conclusion: The UK blew up Nord Stream.

Fellow forum readers, you only have one life (probably). Do not waste any of it reading this absolute bollocks.. I will summarise:
Premises:
A minister went to HMS Clyde on a super secret mission, taking a reporter with him! The UK has a submarine called HMS Ambush that the minister visited The submarine had a tarp on it The UK has trained underwater bomb disposal divers Liz Truss said something     Conclusion: The UK blew up Nord Stream.

Fellow forum readers, you only have one life (probably). Do not waste any of it reading this absolute bollocks.. I will summarise:
Premises:
A minister went to HMS Clyde on a super secret mission, taking a reporter with him! The UK has a submarine called HMS Ambush that the minister visited The submarine had a tarp on it The UK has trained underwater bomb disposal divers Liz Truss said something     Conclusion: The UK blew up Nord Stream.

Recently, I noticed that my UKR listening skills have improved noticeably. With the aid of translators and some effort, I can watch and translate UKR videos. So, let check the following interview with UKR AFV expert (former AFU tank officer)
 
 

I want to discuss that RU DOLBOYEBIZM  with formations of troops on a training ground within HIMARs range. I was reading the RU Nat conversations and came across an interesting comment. As usual, RU Nats were arguing that RU generals should be executed. Then one man added, "Don't make blind claims about generals. These formations are common. They [training ground officers] do it regularly, and not only for generals".
I began to wonder why they did it (if it was true). The explanation is actually rather simple: an AWOL problem. There is minimal transportation on the front lines, thus little opportunity to go AWOL. The training grounds are different. It is several dozens of kilometers behind the front line. There are many more possibilities for transportation, including civilian cars.
So, how do you know if somebody is missing? You regularly arrange soldiers in formation and count them. Why can't subordinate commanders count soldiers in small groups and report back to you? Because that is the RU army. Your subordinate commander is full of BS; they take bribes and declare that everyone is present. The only accurate method is to count soldiers oneself.
Dolboyoby. 

Here we go again. 

https://bsky.app/profile/noelreports.bsky.social/post/3klmt52fyau2i
Apparently, the Czechs have persuaded various countries to sell 155 shells. Someone just needs to pony up the money
The President of the Czech Republic says that he has found 800 thousand shells for delivery to Ukraine | European Pravda (eurointegration.com.ua)
According to Pavel, the Czech Republic has found artillery ammunition for Ukraine - Seznam Zprávy (seznamzpravy.cz)
 

https://bsky.app/profile/noelreports.bsky.social/post/3klmt52fyau2i
Apparently, the Czechs have persuaded various countries to sell 155 shells. Someone just needs to pony up the money
The President of the Czech Republic says that he has found 800 thousand shells for delivery to Ukraine | European Pravda (eurointegration.com.ua)
According to Pavel, the Czech Republic has found artillery ammunition for Ukraine - Seznam Zprávy (seznamzpravy.cz)
 

From the last article you linked:
 
 

Regarding fires at RU fuel plants. Below is Milov explanation (from the interview)
The production of RU fuel began to drop. It has already fallen by 4%, with Lukoil production fallen by 8%. It is a significant drop because the RU fuel market is quite delicate. There are two factors here: UKR strikes and a rise in equipment failure due to unknown [to Milov] causes, but most likely due to poor maintenance and repair as a result of sanctions [sanctions work but more slowly than expected]. All of the equipment used to produce high-quality gasoline is Western. The RU has just about two dozen fuel plants. Thus, critical disruption of RU fuel production is possible. It is possible to achieve this by damaging or destroying two types of infrastructure. First, facilities for catalytic cracking which is essential for high-quality gasoline production (Kstovo plant strike). CC facility can be easily targeted, and RU has few of them (and they are all western, so there is no quick replacement or manufacturer assistance).  As result at the moment Lukoil is unable to repair the damaged CC facility in the Kstovo plant. The second type is the Primary Oil Refinery facility (Krasnodar plant strike). The damage to the POR facility interrupts the entire oil production process, but replacements are simpler to find. It's worth noting that only five main fuel plants supply the European part of RU. Other plants are either smaller, older (cannot produce high-quality fuel), or too far away. So, the present UKR campaign of oil plant strikes is smart and sensible. It is already causing problems for RU. The average price has already increased by 30-50 kopeeks [RU cents] per liter. 
 
The Russian government is going to apply significant pressure on oil companies to keep prices from increasing (which may succeed in the near run). However, the RU gasoline market is in a fragile state right now, and if the UKR campaign continues, it will cause major issues.
 

AIUI, the early war stuff was cash-and-carry, which saw GB liquidating its global assets to pay for. But that tide was rapidly going out, which is why LL was enacted - GB literally couldn't pay for any more kit under C'nC.
The post-war debt resulted from stuff that was delivered after LL finished in Sept 45.
Some LL stuff was actually returned, but by and large the US didn't want any of it back, so what the recipient didn't want anymore and the US didn't want back tended to be destroyed (presumably to keep the accountants and auditors happy?). Some stuff was kept though, since it was quite often the only kit available for the new and smaller peacetime militaries.

UK was just about broke by mid '41.  Forecasting at the time was that we would be broke sometime around Autumn '41. We ordered massive amounts of military equipment from the US, on top of the usual imports like oil, food etc, and then took on the French orders as well all prior to lend-lease. Lend-lease itself came in, from memory , March 41.
The debt that was owed, and paid back, was from early war, prior to lend-lease starting. A big war is just about the most expensive endeavour a country can undertake. 

UK was just about broke by mid '41.  Forecasting at the time was that we would be broke sometime around Autumn '41. We ordered massive amounts of military equipment from the US, on top of the usual imports like oil, food etc, and then took on the French orders as well all prior to lend-lease. Lend-lease itself came in, from memory , March 41.
The debt that was owed, and paid back, was from early war, prior to lend-lease starting. A big war is just about the most expensive endeavour a country can undertake. 

UK was just about broke by mid '41.  Forecasting at the time was that we would be broke sometime around Autumn '41. We ordered massive amounts of military equipment from the US, on top of the usual imports like oil, food etc, and then took on the French orders as well all prior to lend-lease. Lend-lease itself came in, from memory , March 41.
The debt that was owed, and paid back, was from early war, prior to lend-lease starting. A big war is just about the most expensive endeavour a country can undertake. 

IMO most important parts:
"This has led to significant increases in production output. For example, Russia is delivering approximately 1,500 tanks to its forces per year along with approximately 3,000 armoured fighting vehicles of various types. Russian missile production has similarly increased. At the beginning of 2023, for instance, Russian production of Iskandr 9M723 ballistic missiles was six per month, with available missile stocks of 50 munitions."
"Of the tanks and other armoured fighting vehicles, for example, approximately 80% are not new production but are instead refurbished and modernised from Russian war stocks. The number of systems held in storage means that while Russia can maintain a consistent output through 2024, it will begin to find that vehicles require deeper refurbishment through 2025, and by 2026 it will have exhausted most of the available stocks."
"Perhaps the most serious limitation for Russia, however, is ammunition manufacture. In order to achieve its aspiration to make significant territorial gains in 2025, the Russian Ministry of Defence (MoD) has assessed an industrial requirement to manufacture or source approximately 4 million 152mm and 1.6 million 122mm artillery shells in 2024. Russian industry has reported to the MoD that it expects to increase 152mm production from around 1 million rounds in 2023 to 1.3 million rounds over the course of 2024, and to only produce 800,000 122mm rounds over the same period. Moreover, the Russian MoD does not believe it can significantly raise production in subsequent years,"
"This means that to properly resource the armed forces, Russia must – in the short term – further draw down its remaining 3 million rounds of stored ammunition, though much of this is in poor condition. To further compensate for shortages, Russia has signed supply and production contracts with Belarus, Iran, North Korea and Syria, with the latter only able to provide forged shell casings rather than complete shells. Although the injection of around 2 million 122mm rounds from North Korea will help Russia in 2024, it will not compensate for a significant shortfall in available 152mm"
"The Russian theory of victory is plausible if Ukraine's international partners fail to properly resource the AFU. However, if Ukraine's partners continue to provide sufficient ammunition and training support to the AFU to enable the blunting of Russian attacks in 2024, then Russia is unlikely to achieve significant gains in 2025. If Russia lacks the prospect of gains in 2025, given its inability to improve force quality for offensive operations, then it follows that it will struggle to force Kyiv to capitulate by 2026. Beyond 2026, attrition of systems will begin to materially degrade Russian combat power, while Russian industry could be disrupted sufficiently by that point, making Russia's prospects decline over time."

Yes...it's not Ganz's original idea though he elucidates it quite well.

I watched today interview with RU liberal economist Milov
Here are two additional examples of how sanctions affect RU economy.

Export revenue declined dramatically (keep in mind that export is the primary source of foreign currency used to purchase critical items that Russia does not produce), while import costs grew noticeably.
 

The cost of transportation significantly increased compared to pre-war level.
Life has become better; life has become more fun! (Stalin, couple of years after catastrophic famine in USSR)
Another interesting highlight is:
Due to previous savings (from oil and gas revenues) and various government actions RU still has money to continue war spending on the current level for a year (2024) and that's it Due to sanctions and various government actions RU economy is a train wreck in motion and RU government has no means to fix it.  Lest look at the following graph

Critical RU civilian production output is decreasing rather than increasing. The only growth is in the military sector, and the RU government uses it to deceive the western public about the state of the Russian economy.

Sorry for the length but this is well worth reading: 
 
Less Than Meets the Eye - Parsing Tucker's Putin Interview
JOHN GANZ
I was probably one of the relatively few people that sat through the entire two hour Tucker Carlson interview with Vladimir Putin. To call it an “interview” is not quite right: Carlson essentially allowed Putin to discourse at length and only occasionally tried to prod him in the direction of his own preferred talking points about the war in Ukraine. Any appearance of tension or journalistic effort only occurred because Carlson seemed to have the expectation that Putin would cooperate with his own line and appeared frustrated (“annoyed,” he said in his prefatory remarks) when it immediately turned out Putin seemed to have his own ideas . Essentially, the interview consisted of a melange of multiple, sometimes contradictory, lines of propaganda about the war. But to say that it was “propaganda” also might gave a misleading impression: it suggests that there is a “real” underlying motivation for the war, while the justifications are merely self-serving deceptions for public consumption. But what it actually might reveal is superficiality and incoherence of the case for war itself. Instead, there were a number overlapping and shifting messages to different constituencies. is not a single overarching ideology at play, but rather a succession of “ideologemes,” little snippets of ideology: themes from Russian nationalism, Western far right cultural pessimism, anti-colonialism, and Soviet nostalgia all crop up—even little remnants of Putin’s Marxist-Leninist training appear, like when he talked about the “excessive production capacities” of the West. Putin doubled down on the theme of “denazification”—evidently somewhat to the irritation of the America Firster Carlson —while at the same time offering a revisionist picture of the start of World War II, sympathetic to Hitler’s territorial aims and essentially blaming the war on Polish intransigence, saying “they pushed Hitler to start World War II by attacking them.” This speaks to the awkward position of Russia claiming simultaneously claiming to embody the continuation of the Great Patriotic War’s anti-fascist crusade while being the darling of a far right at home and abroad, which views it as the last remaining hope of “white civilization.” 

This synthetic, “postmodern” quality does not reflect devilishly clever strategy, rather its incoherence directly reflects the fragility and fragmentation of Russia’s entire post-Soviet political project. The Ukrainian sociologist Volodymyr Ischenko writes of “a crisis of hegemony” in the post-Soviet world and that both Putin’s authoritarian, “Bonapartist” rule and its consequent war arise from the same “incapacity of the ruling class to develop sustained political, moral, and intellectual leadership.” His regime is ad hoc: a cobbled together arrangement of veterans of the security services and the rent-seeking oligarchs who accepted Putin’s settlement. Prighozhin’s mutiny made this provisional and brittle nature of “the state” clear. Rather than reflecting position of strength the strongman antics of Putin reveal fundamental political weaknesses and failures. As Ischenko put it in an interview with The New Left Review:

"Putin, like other post-Soviet Caesarist leaders, has ruled through a combination of repression, balance and passive consent legitimated by a narrative of restoring stability after the post-Soviet collapse in the 1990s. But he has not offered any attractive developmental project. Russia’s invasion should be analyzed precisely in this context: lacking sufficient soft power of attraction, the Russian ruling clique has ultimately decided to rely on the hard power of violence, starting from coercive diplomacy in the beginning of 2021, then abandoning diplomacy for military coercion in 2022."
The political fragility and insecurity of the ruling class, its cliquishness and insularity, its inability to shape a single coherent narrative of national development, its preoccupation with finding tactical expedients to avoid the chaos of the 1990s and the humiliations of the collapse are all wedded to the cult of “special services,” from the former KGB officer Putin on down. As early as the 2000s, Dimitri Furman noticed this aspect of the regime, writing in his Imitation Democracy: The Development of Russia’s Post-Soviet Political System, that a growing number of “activities, essential to the maintenance of the system, were in essence ‘secret special operations.’ Rather than rare exceptions, they were fast becoming crucial and lasting dimensions of all political activity.” With that in mind, it’s worth noting Putin’s insistence on calling the war in Ukraine, not a war at all, but a “special military operation” and its simultaneous development of contradictory propaganda campaigns directed at different audiences rather than a single, articulable vision of Russia’s role in the world. Putin can’t escape looking at everything as an “op.” (Not for nothing, this confusion of war, propaganda, and secret police subterfuge along with the subordination of politics to the needs and views of the national security apparatus is something usually associated with totalitarian states.)

In so far as anything approaching a worldview emerges from the interview, it is Putin’s preoccupation with the central role “special services” purportedly play in world affairs, particularly his apparent belief that the United States is not governed by its political leadership but by its national security bureaucracy, which accords with Carlson’s view of a “deep state.” This is less of ideology than Putin’s own déformation professionnelle, one that’s so deeply rooted that he felt the need to bring up Carlson’s onetime attempt to join the CIA. (He even seemed to coyly suggest that Tucker might actually work for the CIA, which I’m sure Carlson found flattering.) 

From the very beginning, Carlson’s generously offered Putin the chance to present the war in defensive terms, asking,

"On February 22nd, 2022, you addressed your country in a nationwide address when the conflict in Ukraine started, and you said that you were acting because you had come to the conclusion that the United States, through NATO, might initiate a “surprise attack on our country”. And to American ears, that sounds paranoid. Tell us why you believe the United States might strike Russia out of the blue. How did you conclude that?"

Instead of taking that route, Putin immediately launched into a nearly half hour disquisition on Russian history, the point of which was to stress the original unity of the Ukrainian and Russian peoples. Carlson averred in his opening remarks that he was “shocked” by this, but Putin has been harping on this theme since before the war. In July 2021, he published his essay “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians,” which states “true sovereignty of Ukraine is possible only in partnership with Russia.” Of course, “sovereignty in partnership” is not really sovereignty at all. Despite Putin’s open and lengthy statement of what the Old Bolsheviks would’ve called “Great Russian chauvinism,” Carlson came away from the interview stating, “Russia is not an expansionist power. You’d have to be an idiot to think that.” From both Putin’s rhetoric and his behavior, you’d have to be an idiot to think otherwise. Carlson is just employing the propagandist’s trick of employing abuse and invective when the facts clearly oppose their case. But, as Michael Tracey’s recent Substack post makes clear, Putin’s open statements of Russian grand imperial ambitions are troubling for Westerners otherwise predisposed to be sympathetic and who have spent a great deal of time rationalizing Russia’s actions or presenting them in a defensive light. 

In the minds of the Russian ruling class, there’s really no contradiction between defensive and offensive conceptions of the war: they both involve securing of their system, and in moments of more grandiose transport, their civilization, against Western encroachment. The other overriding theme of Putin’s discourse, connected to the fixation on “special services,” is the characterization of the Maidan as a “coup d’etat.” The fear is that the example of success of Ukraine’s political revolution might spread to Russia itself. This concern on the part of the Russian elite is not new: it has its origins in the collective trauma of the Soviet collapse. More proximately, it dates back to the “Color Revolutions” of the 2000s that toppled Leonid Kuchma in Ukraine, Askar Akayev in Kyrgyzstan, and Eduard Shevardnadze in Georgia. As Furman writes, 

"These men had headed systems highly comparable to Russia’s, if substantially weaker, and their ousters aroused an irrational panic of the kind seen in tsarist circles after the French revolutions, or in Soviet circles in the run-up to the Prague Spring. To acknowledge the naturalness, the predictability of these regimes’ collapsing would mean acknowledging the inevitability of the collapse of Russia’s regime, too – an impossibility. Those in power in Russia thus concluded instead that these revolutions were all the work of Western security services (very much as Soviet leaders had blamed similar forces for unrest in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Poland)."

Since that time, Russia’s foreign policy in its “near abroad” has since been fundamentally counter-revolutionary. As Ischenko notes the tempo of revolt had been picking up in the run up to the invasion:

"Such uprisings have been accelerating on Russia’s periphery in recent years, including not just the Euromaidan revolution in Ukraine in 2014 but also the revolutions in Armenia, the third revolution in Kyrgyzstan, the failed 2020 uprising in Belarus, and, most recently, the uprising in Kazakhstan. In the two last cases, Russian support proved crucial to ensure the local regime’s survival. Within Russia itself, the “For Fair Elections” rallies held in 2011 and 2012, as well as later mobilizations inspired by Alexei Navalny, were not insignificant. On the eve of the invasion, labor unrest was on the rise, while polls showed declining trust in Putin and a growing number of people who wanted him to retire. Dangerously, opposition to Putin was higher the younger the respondents were."
Again, the war is a piece of domestic policy as much as it is foreign policy: an attempt to consolidate a regime that feels itself to be vulnerable. The acquiescence of the population and the resilience of the Russian economy in the face of sanctions may prove that it was a successful expedient, at least temporarily. It would be dangerous indeed if Russia’s regime concluded that such “operations” redounded mostly to its benefit. 
 
 
 

RU are currently incapable of maneuver warfare. Due to the apparent serious vulnerabilities of their tanks and planes, and serious shortcomings of their artillery and AA their current doctrine is late-World War I infantry-based attacks (+ UMPKs and helicopter ATGMs). They are considering rectifying it eventually, but it would need a large rearmament program, something they cannot afford at the moment (they have money left for around 1 year of fighting).

more on this.
Chinese Bank Deals New Blow to Putin's Wartime Economy (msn.com)
 
 

Article can be found here => The F-16 exceeded the expectations of Ukrainian pilots during the exercise. Interview with the pilot of the Air Force of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Phantom (holosameryky.com)

Article can be found here => The F-16 exceeded the expectations of Ukrainian pilots during the exercise. Interview with the pilot of the Air Force of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Phantom (holosameryky.com)

Democracy is wasted on some people.
Anyway, thanks for the reply and apols for shooting down the US politics rabbit hole