dan/california

The extent, still undetermined, to which China comes to effectively control Russian natural resources could make China's foreign policy much better, or much worse. The smart play for China is to take this as an easy win, and spend the next several decades consolidating this control to maximum extent possible without setting of a massive anti Chinese reaction in Russia. The worst case scenario is they decide they are just sanction proof enough to make a play for Taiwan and wreck the world economy in the process. There are strong and weak versions of both of course.

Ukrainian logistics people must be in a continuous state of losing their minds. Just trying to keep oils, greases, and transmission fluids sorted for their menagerie of a vehicle fleet would drive a person crazy.

All I know is what is in the post. It could well be training. There wasn't a lot of incoming. If it is training though, that is a good sign in and of itself.

Good video, pretty solid tank infantry coordination.

There are clearly quite a few Germans who Understand that Scholz's attempt to find a middle way makes less than no sense. You would think the Russians blowing up their own gas pipelines would get that across. But he is simply immovable. If his own party/coalition is the problem he should resign and let someone else get on with it.

Every time i see a story like thi Every time I see a story like this I think about Olaf Scholz. I don't think i have to explain WHAT i think about Olaf Scholz, or Schroeder for that matter....

I just have to point out that if Ukrainian drones that appear to be a garage built lash up of a 40 year old Russian practice target, and an iphone for a guidance system can hit what ought to be the most heavily defended base in Russia? Then there is no reason to think that real NATO cruise missile would not have effectiveness rates in the mid to high 90% range if it came to it.

Yeah, weather in Seattle has been bad in four separate ways. Regarding the mobiks having a few weeks to sit around it is worth pointing out that all the time the Russians spent sitting around in Belarus before the war started did bad things to their effectiveness. I don't think that starting with vastly lower quality troops, or actually being shelled, is going to make it work out any better this winter.

I don't think we can assume anything about how winter is going to go or not go until the ground really freezes. It just hasn't yet. The Ukrainians are not going get a bunch of people killed trying a large scale attack in the mud. It is at least possible most of the Russians who are that stupid are already dead. At least the the ones who would use up their good troops that way. Five hundred mobiks a day just seems to be the new normal. So large scale stuff is just on weather hold. After a month of frozen ground we will have a much better idea of who has what left.

So very much depends on things we don't know. If they were three day mobiks grabbed off the street, and then frozen and starved for a month, i am guessing their next move is white flag the next time there us a Ukrainian to wave it at. If they are part of something that resembles a functioning unit it could go a 100% the other way. There is just to much context we don't have

Merry Christmas all, and spare a thought for the folks standing dawn watch in a cold trench, right about now.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/12/zelensky-congress-speech-us-ukraine-support/672547/ A most unpleasant might have been. To say we owe Zelensky and the Ukrainians a LOT is an understatement. Truly, some tanks and some longer range missiles are not even a tithe of what we owe them.

It does explain Poland putting in orders for the strongest land forces in Europe rather neatly.

deleted, Steve asked us to stop... edit: But i am owed a real bone about the game for this restraint....

Palantir turning out not to be vaporware might be one of this wars bigger long term changes when we finally get the whole story.

The unanswered question at the moment is which side benefits from the unusually long mud season? That might really matter, and I don't which way it cuts, a lot of arguments both ways. The ANA had a large scale literacy problem among many others. In terms of teaching the Ukrainians to fight like Americans I do hope some is keeping in mind we have NOT given them Abrams, and an air force. If Steve would get at least a BETA of the new game out we could explore what might work best in more detail. Or perhaps that is happening at some government facility or another, and I wasn't invited. Which to be sure demonstrates the competence and good sense of the organizer, if they exist.

Putin is has pulled levers we weren't even sure he had, and then pulled them again. This has forestalled collapse, but only forestalled it. Every one of those levers though make the eventual collapse worse. Every time those levers are pulled the inevitable collapse gets worse. Every former taxpayer turned into Ukrainian fertilizer, or a crippled lifetime drain on the Russian state, is one more brick pulled out of an already rickety wall. Every international economic and technical relationship that severed will take a generation to rebuild, and will have to be enticed back with massive discounts. We won't even discuss blowing up their own gas pipelines. When Putin finally pulls a lever and it comes off in his hand things are going to crash so hard there won't be anything left but powder.

Just remember that Carlson has a boss that could pull him off the air with a phone call, and hasn't.

The world was perfectly content to ignore Russia from 1991 until 2/24/2022. Obama essentially gave him a mulligan on the Crimean takeover and maintained the policy of basically ignoring Russia. Putin was simply to arrogant to realize that was a very good deal. So he has forced us to pay attention. The lesson that this was a very bad idea needs to be severe enough no Russian leader considers repeating this mistake for sixty or eighty years.

The world is engaged in an unpleasant experiment to test the cohesion of the current Russian government. The hoped for answer is that it cohesion is relatively low, and and least some faction in it has the sense to cut its losses in Ukraine and be content with stealing their own country blind while making apologetic noises about the whole Ukraine misadventure internationally. There is no guarantee that is how this ends, though. If the Russian state apparatus is stronger but more brittle it could persits in ukraine until we are talking millions of casualties. But if it breaks then there isn't going to be much left to hold the pieces, and that unpleasant pile of nuclear weapons The_Capt is eloquent about, together. The easy ways out were Putin simply withdrawing to status quo antebellum after two weeks, or suffering an unfortunate case of that odd Russian window falling virus after four. Neither of these easy options were taken. There is nothing for it now but to break the Russian army so badly it it has no choice but to leave. Hopefully this can be done with the kind of military elegance Macarthur showed at Inchon, but quite possibly an absolutely brutal level of attrition will have to do.

I suspect the counter battery radars account for a far bit of the remaining 450. But I am very hopeful there is a surprise or two in there somewhere. And the info op before the Kharkiv offensive should be kept in mind. Despite the endless stream of data that bleeds out everywhere from everything, Ukraine and it backers have demonstrated the ability to conceal and misdirect when they really want to.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/21/us/politics/ukraine-russia-war-stalemate.html I would simply point out that on 2/23 General Miley was firmly convinced Russia would be in Kyiv in three days. I think there is STILL a portion of the Pentagon, and no doubts some other agencies, that just can't wrap their heads around the actual state of the Russian military.

This is another case where we are not trying NEARLY hard enough. Ericsson and Nokia should just wipe every software dependent piece of equipment in Russia. Moscow wakes up with no phone service to speak of, people who actually matter might think a little harder about this little problem in Ukraine.

Heating with oil is almost totally a New England thing as I understand it. I have lived ALL over the South and West, and have never seen a single oil furnace in my life. I admit it completely slips my mind that a pretty good chunk of the country uses oil, and has even more reason to watch every OPEC meeting with a sense of dread.

And very little oil is used for electricity. It is quite possible that LNG shipments to Europe are starting to affect the U.S. gas market. Or since the everything I have read is that their is not enough LNG liquefaction capacity to process enough gas to move the U.S. market very much. PG&E is perhaps trying to sneak an increase through while the European issues are in the news. It may figure in there somewhere that PG&E has a laundry list of other problems.