dan/california

Ultradave is looking more correct by the minute. I am rapidly getting the impression Ukraine should have pushed a bit harder, and gotten into grad range of some of the more or less military infrastructure around Belgord. Nothing make the news like a burning tank farm/oil refinery.

The best moment for a rebellion in Belarus is exactly when the Russian army is in full retreat towards Crimea, and in a blind panic. Give them another problem a thousand kilometers away. If they commit the last of their reserves to Belarus, THAT is when it needs to get spicy on the streets of Moscow. Be great moment for a 'Secession movement" in Kaliningrad, too.

It all goes back to the fact that for the Russians Ukraine isn't even about Ukraine anymore. It is about who gets the gets the blame for this disaster and an express ticket to the gulag, and who gets to keep living in palaces in Moscow. Indeed there are even going to be some empty palaces to redistribute. A whole lot of the second tier players would like one of those palaces. The fact that this ugly little game is wrecking Russia for a generation, or a century, couldn't matter less to the players involved.

It depends massively on the exact model they get. The announced one has a fairly old radar, I am not assuming that is what actually shows up. Furthermore it is hard to overstate the NATO hard points, avionics, and com links. It does matter a great deal exactly what we give them to hang on those hard points. there are three plus generations of stuff to choose from their, too, and the differences matter.

Would make a ton of sense to circle back that way. Keep the Russians jumping as long as possible, and then drive back over the border right when they are about to drop the hammer. I would love to se another SAM ambush ruin the Russians day, again.

Actual Justice for the upper layers of the Russian and Belarusian governments would involve a lot of hangings.

The risks are very real, but most of the good choices went away when the Russians first started shooting, and most of the rest of them when Putin turned down a very generous Ukrainian offer about a month later. There is now no choice but to break the Russian army into tiny bleeding pieces and send it home in plastic bags. I think there has always been an assumption of more control than NATO, or anybody else, could have over exactly how that shakes down.

They are remarkably stubborn about dying in those holes, at least in a lot of the video we get. They seem to hold out past any obvious military utility, unless making the Ukrainians expend two more grenades counts as military utility. Ukraine is going to need a lot of follow on forces to take reduce entrenched positions while the spearheads keep going.

Japan is supposedly retiring most or all of it FH70 towed 155s as they bring on a new self propelled model. I am sure Ukraine would be delighted with any and all of them they wanted to send.

The U.S. military is not an easy customer...

For the Russian Air Force to be chuffed that it can keep Ukraine from flying serious CAS over the Russian lines is the weakest flex in the history of mankind. The Russian Air Force has comprehensively failed to live up to even the lowest possible pre war expectations. Ukraine wasn't supposed HAVE an air force at the start of week 2, we are at about week ~62, and there are Ukrainian planes flying every day that the Russians have to respect and plan around. When Ukraine is flying forty or fifty F-16s I fully expect the Russian Air Force to park itself in Siberia and drink Vodka.

Ockham's razor would say that it was the same system that was just used to down the two planes and two helicopters northeast of Kharkiv last week. Their is some indication that was a Patriot system, so either they have one for the Southern front as well, or maybe they have one the are driving around to keep the Russians guessing. It also at least possible that one of the long range NATO AAMs has been integrated onto a Ukrainian platform, and they are putting the bit about the Patriot out there as disinformation. The Russians should have been able to figure out what happened last week, right? The could just keep picking bits out of cornfields until they found some pieces of the missiles, if nothing else. If the latest one landed in the water? then either they have the radar tracks to figure it out or they don't. I am more than a little curious if the pilots ever new if they had been fired on?

Very true, but Putin's Russia was not run on Stalinist methods, at least before he started this disastrous war. Stalinism was very much the model of overwhelming totalitarianism. The state tried to dictate virtually everything, to virtually everyone. Jobs, housing, marriage, and to the extent it could, dinner table conversation. Perhaps most importantly there was just no way out. Until he started this idiotic war Putin's Russia was really very different. There were lines a smart person did NOT cross, and a great deal of bad propaganda you had to actively avoid if you wanted to have any idea what was actually going on. Very importantly, you could leave if you wanted to, and a great many did before the war, and even more after it started. Even so, there was actually a great deal of personal freedom if you stayed inside certain well defined lines. To the extent a lot people, including me, have been wrong about the political course of this war inside Russia, it was in underestimating Putin's ability to return to a full Stalinist model without having a fatal mishap of some sort. The next question is will this near complete reorganization of the states relationship to its people withstand the kind of smack the Ukrainians are about to give the Russian military in Ukraine. I think it is fair to state that the old Chinese joke about interesting times is unpleasantly correct. This is a little like telling soldiers not to smoke, they know it isn't very good for them, but it helps get them through one more rough day in a trench. Is it worth the bandwidth of higher command to make this problem go away? I suspect it will be eventually, but not this month. Edit: Here is your NEW patch commemorating your units heroic deeds in in the summer offensive would be one obvious path.

However Putin has had to kill as many as several dozen prominent people to maintain his hold. Falling out a window has become an euphemism for an extra judicial execution for a reason. Like so many others powers and prerogatives, they work far better when you don't have to use them too often, or too publicly. There may be a limit to the extent Putin can pull back the curtain on the way things actually work, he won't enjoy finding out he has exceeded it.

The only colossal risk is the orcs winning, which is why we are being very sure it doesn't happen.

One of the things that make them so effective is that they can fly around and hit the engine deck very easily. While the Ukrainians seem to be mostly using RPG-7 warheads due to some combination of availability, and the power limitations of the converted civilian racing drones they are using. A clean sheet design would not have those limitations. You could easily use an RPG-29 warhead, or fire an EFP straight down at the roof. No tank or a AFV on the planet enjoys getting hit with either one.

Just to get back to a long running theme: Ukraine seems to be turning out these kamikaze quad copters for ~$750 according to published reports. Even if the militarized version from a Western defense contractor comes in at TWENTY times the cost, that is $15,000 to kill an AFV without even poking your head above the berm. So you have to be able to stop these little monsters, or your mechanized forces are just really expensive, really stinky, bonfires.

Apparently this is another case where we multiple viewpoints of the same fight. You have to love the Russians determination to detonate every mine in Ukraine with an AFV.

Jake Sullivan makes his case. They are still hung up on the risk of nuclear escalation. I find the logic of waiting until their casualties pass 500,000, and THEN getting NATO involved and Russia more isolated than North Korea unconvincing.

He states it perfectly.

He states it perfectly.

Wagner needs to be hunted the way ISIS and Al Qaeda have been hunted. If they have a compound somewhere in Africa, it goes boom.

I have this vision of various people watching various ISR assets, and thinking "no way, they couldn't possibly be this dumb". After triple checking that they are in fact this dumb, coordinates were dispatched to the appropriate rocket launcher. "Yes, all of them, we are sure, no we can't believe they are this stupid either..."

Credit where credit is due, The Brits picked a side in February 2022, and have been utterly steadfast since. All the more impressive for having three prime Ministers in that time period.

Among other things we are not talking about bases in the middle of a hard pan desert surrounded by people who don't like you very much. The actual flying would obviously be very dangerous, and I would NOT recommend getting captured by the Russians, but the rest of it would not be a hardship posting.