dan/california

That is why Putin created both the Rosgvardviya, and the Federal Protection Service whose sole job is guarding him. If you need a fourth competing armed force your dictatorship isn't running very well.

Can't forget U.S. issues either . Putin spread money far and wide. He was winning right up until he believed his own hype about a tree day war.

There were only so many people in Russian prisons that could meet even an utterly minimal fitness test. They have simply been expended. What I would really like to know is how many of Wagners experienced cadre got killed in the process. Because Russian standards of of training, expertise, and motivation those are pretty good troops, and Russia doesn't have nearly enough of them to go around. Any more word on this? I expect a significant backlash against the MOD if it is true. If it is true it is absolute proof Russia still has the same problem with completely inadequate junior leadership, and communication. Given the HIGH risk of any truly large concentration of troops drawing fatal GMLRS attention, what ever the Russian MOD expects to happen if they aren't concentrated under the eye of a major or lt. colonel must be worse. Worse in this case is rather bad.

Senators, not Governors, a very different thing.

The Baltic States

Sometimes all the choices are poor, of course if Ukraine actually wins a lot of politics could hopefully move on... You have to love people who feel underprivileged because because of the size of their plane.

I fully agree that Ukraine needs to press as hard as it possibly can, as soon as it can. Unfortunately there is ample video evidence all over the board that the ground simply hasn't frozen hard hard enough for large scale operations. That being the case Ukraine just needs to be as ready as it can be when the weather comes around. Attacking and failing when the ground won't support large scale operations doesn't help at all.

Scholz is in a political vise, the screws are being turned, and he has neither the talent or the courage to escape it. His party, the SPD is essentially for peace at any price. Or something close to it, at any rate. The rest of his coalition, the political opposition, the German people at large, the rest of NATO, and the entire Western world disagree with this stance, albeit with varying degrees of vehemence. Scholz has been paralyzed by this, and just can't seem to make a decision and explain it. And there a very old saying about the worst decision is no decision. Yes, Butschi, I think the man should resign, he isn't up to the job. But if that isn't his decision, what is?

Not even the epidemic of stress induced strokes and heart attacks in Berlin is a sufficient inducement? Just kidding, mostly. Belarussians have by far the most to gain, and only Mr. Potato to lose.

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/ukraine/dont-fear-putins-demise By Kasparov, and not paywalled.

Prigozhin's rise and , probable, fall.

You know Poland, The Baltics, and Ukraine were one country once. Could we extend that to a once and future formulation? Just to be clear I am talking about a purely voluntary federation that coincidentally tucks Ukraine into the E.U.and Nato the week after the shooting stops.

Well that would be why nobody is launching a real attack in that section of the front just yet. Global warming is simultaneously wrecking Putin's strategy to freeze Europe in submission, and keeping Ukraine from exploiting the mobiks while they are frozen and disorganized. I think Europe not freezing matters more, but it is an interesting question.

Obviously they need to extend this offer to Britain on the Challenger 2s as well. Those might get there in time for tis summers fighting season. Of course maybe they already have, and people just need a few workdays to get the announcements in order.

ATACMS and GLSDB are plug and play for the HIMARS. Send them both and lift the prohibition on hitting the closer logistics nodes in Russia. If Ukraine has any airframe that can use the Storm shadow, get those in there too. Last but not least round up literally every 155 tube in Europe that isn't in a frontline line country and send those. Start training on Abrams very publicly, and in quantity. A LOT of this is about demonstrating political will. Make it absolutely clear to the Russians that Ukraine is just going keep getting more stuff, and better stuff, and if Russia wants to draft 500,000 more people well those sad excuses for trenches make pretty good mass graves. And build the the bleeping ammo plants!

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/21/opinion/russia-ukraine.html Times editorial on the state of the war. Best position they have taken in the entire course of the war. They state the war is 100% Putins fault. They imply in about five different ways that if Putin won't quit the war, the Russian people should quit him, and sooner rather than later. Worth a read.

They have taken a lot actually, and did it very quickly and smoothly in the early going.

Washington Post thinks Scholz needs a little push, and if that takes a company of Abrams, so be it.

Ukraine still has the interior lines advantage. An advantage that effectively gets stronger as it air defenses improve, and there is even less risk of a unit getting hit on the move much past ~40km in depth. It would improve even more if the U.S. allowed precision strikes at the rail net work for a hundred kilometers or so into Russia. The new Shaheed 136 copies Ukraine is threatening to roll out shortly might serve here as well. There is at least a theoretical possibility of pressuring Luhansk Until the Russians have to move their major reserves in that direction, and then heading back south to for the real attack at Melitipol faster than the Russians can shift forces to counter. Again the more pressure Ukraine could bring to bear on the rail system in the immediately adjacent parts of Russia the better this would work. The other possible opportunity is if the Southern front has a short period of deep freeze. Ukraine could theoretically attack while the ground was frozen, get all the way to the Sea of Azov, or at least far enough to bring a great many more systems to bear on the Russian logistics across the land bridge. And then the let inevitable Russian counter attack founder as the mud returns. Is this to cute by half? Probably, but it would be MacArthur at Inchon level brilliant if it worked. The big unknown at the moments is are the Mobiks capable of meaningful offensive action. I don't think Russia has enough of its pre war forces left to attempt a large scale anything. So there is a large question about what an almost all mobik force can accomplish in terms of offensive action that does not amount to performative suicide. To put it mildly the plan they have been following in Bakmuht does not scale well, not well at all. I would love to see some specs/test results on these vs Russian DPICM bomblets.

I keep coming back to the fact that we gave some version of the Abrams to both the Egyptians and the Iraqis. The Ukrainians are a LOT, orders of magnitude LOT, better than the Egyptians or the Iraqis. So did we did we figure out a way for those two countries to make it work? Or was the entire idea that they couldn't make it work, and that the Israelis didn't need to worry about it BECAUSE they couldn't make it work?

You have buy in, and the price is ............. 300 Leopard 2s.

That meeting was 40 years ago. I agree this has been a problem throughout the entire third world essentially, and we ought to try to fix it. But the USSR/Russia really is a special case. Only Russia has built an army, and a nuclear arsenal, that threatens the entire world. Zaire/the Congo is an epically, biblically, miserable place, but can barely threaten a border village in a neighboring country. And I know I am cherry picking the example, but it really is mostly true. As a secondary issue I would argue that gas pipelines create more dependence than almost any other form of resource. Although the combination of global warming, and rather new LNG technology and capacity has pulled Europe through, just. Above article is by Paul Krugman fyi. I like it. I think the 120mm gun mortar makes a ton more sense than than the 105 mm high velocity gun they are actually going with. This is the baby Abrams the U.S. actually buying, it seems to address the failures of the Stryker MGS without really rethinking the ROLE of the vehicle. The army seems to really like it because it uses the latest version of the Abrams FCS/thermals virtually without alteration, there are obvious logistical advantages for both crew training, and spares commonality in one of the most expensive bits of the system. However, I am not sure that something that has to show its entire turret to do anything in the modern environment is the best plan.The whole article is worth your time. I would REALLY like to compare to a 120mm gun mortar in the next version of of the game. Hey Steve, about that bone.....

He was in for close to fifteen years, there is a long strange story here somewhere. Virtually no details in the article. Peace to his family Glory to ukraine Napalm to the Russian B^^T^*((DS

One week before the Ukrainians launched an attack that took back all of occupied Kharkiv in a weekend the Pentagon was making somber pronouncements about how the Ukrainians couldn't possibly do two offensives at the same time. It was either the only time in history the Pentagon has underpromised and over delivered, or a conscious deception.

All true. But this a golden chance to do well while doing good, and make the underpinnings of the modern world stronger for generations. The West is still nearly clueless about how to turn a disaster area of a country into anything decent. We have demonstrated this recently, and expensively. But we are also quite capable of supporting a country that had almost finished turning ITSELF into a decent place, and just has this bear problem.