dan/california

I think they are trying to sand bag the Russians, but who knows. From Seattle, with Osint only sources? Worth noting the Russians are not screaming about any glorious successes though, and they find it worthwhile to throw missiles at Kyiv, which implies either a lack of better targets, political interference, or the ever popular both.

It seems to me this spot needs to get hit with absolutely everything the Ukrainians haven't specifically promised not to shoot across the Russian border.

The_Capt has been giving us bits of a staff college course to see if it is capable of improving even reprobates likes us. And we should be very grateful for that.

The way urban vs rural politics works pretty much anywhere in the world free enough to HAVE politics must say something fairly deep about human nature, this moment in the grand sweep of history, or both.

Everything is going to plan.......for Ukraine.

The incomprehensible thing is the one of the RUSI reports made it very clear that a great many of the preconditions for a successful coup de main that would have let Russia succeed before opposition mobilized had not been achieved. They not anywhere close to being achieved. In particular the Russian plan called for creating real civil strife on the streets of Kyiv before launching the invasion. That simply didn't happen, and Putin was so drunk on his own special cool-aid that he pressed the go button anyway. The entire Russian disaster in Ukraine follows from that one decision. https://rusi.org/explore-our-research/regions-and-country-groups/ukraine As an aside I finally looked at the entire index of reports on the RUSI website, and there is a LOT of stuff there. It would take you a month to read it all kind of lots. Indeed there s so much I couldn't find the exact peace I remember reading, but it was posted in the thread when it was first issued.

Ukraine is getting ready to throw EVERYTHING at some unkown portion of the Russian lines. Everything includes the kitchen sink and the creation above. It can still follow along in the third wave and help make the remnants of some Russian strongpoint miserable until the survivors give up.

https://news.yahoo.com/president-belarus-hospitalised-meeting-putin-204642610.html There is a rumor, emphasize rumor, that Lukashenko went straight from a meeting with Putin to a hospital in Moscow. There are two theories floating around, that Putin did it, or that they are desperately trying to keep him alive so they won't be blamed for doing it. Not sure which one I find funnier.

https://kyivindependent.com/illia-ponomarenko-why-some-ukrainian-soldiers-use-nazi-related-insignia/ Well known Ukrainian war reporter takes on the nazi symbol problem. I wouldn't say he says anything the thread hasn't discussed, he doesn't approve of it at all. He does have a very fine grained view of the problem from following the war closely from 2014 on.

That is a pretty big deal, calling for Putin to step down on State TV.

They have been talking about various aspects of the deal for a year more or less. They do seem to be moving along with at least the speeches and paperwork side of things. I think you need a security clearance to have the slightest idea if they are moving any actual hardware around. It doesn't really change anything, Russia has nukes, launching them from Belarus doesn't really change the return address.

This is also very good, and wasn't behind a paywall, at least for me.The short version is pretty much The_Capt's post earlier today "empires built on skulls and ashes", but this is an excellent long form version. Also consider this a formal statement that I am stealing that quote from The_Capt, it is brilliant.

Artillery in the Urban environment, by two serving U.S. officers who have observed Ukraine as closely as is possible without resigning and joining the Ukrainian military. My nominee for podcast of the year. If anybody has a handy way to do voice to text it would be worth the time.

This is the important bit. if they have any utility to speak of they are cheap enough to just flood the zone with them. A very basic home on jam guidance and a 40 mm grenade would be bleeping irritating if someone launched a thousand of them. They say they have several hundred kilometers range. That would equate to quite a while flying circles waiting for something that cost a LOT more to start emitting.

Putin seems to be trying to see how far he can roll it back towards some approximation of real Stalinism. He has gotten a further down the curve than I thought he could with having a "heart attack". Going to attempt a bike racing analogy here, please forgive me. Real pros can do ~350 watts all day long. But they have a limit, and every watt they exceed the limit by reduces the amount of time they can hold a given power level by exponentially. So your all day power is 350 watts, but one hour at four hundred watts would completely cook them, 500 watts they are five minutes and done. A thousand watts for one minute is considered very strong, and nobody expects you to do much afterwards. When you try to ride all day at a power level you can't hold bad things happen, even when the margin you are exceeding your limit by is quite small. The higher defense spending caused by competition with the West put the Soviet union over its all day limit.

Jeffery Sachs has had attack of this very nonsense. And in a just world it would end his career. I also heard him spouting about how wasteful defense spending is on a podcast this week. He just doesn't get that Xi or Putin would send him and anyone remotely like him to a comp to starve to death. The man, and a lot of people like him, just are not operating in the real world.

Apologies if I am misreading you, but you seem to imply that the Soviet Union did not deserve the opposition it got. A Soviet conquest of Western Europe would have looked exactly like the nightmare Russia has inflicted on the parts of Ukraine it has managed to overrun. The only differences would have been in the flavor of propaganda. And nightmare is really too kind of a description. You can argue the details of strategy and tactics endlessly, and it is good we didn't blow up the planet. But but never ending horror descended on every square meter of territory the Soviets conquered. Putin has steadfastly set out to remind us of what that looked like. They needed to be opposed at every turn.

And even then you have to tune the details just right. There are several countries that set their thresholds for getting sets in Parliament too low, and they wind up with tiny parties elected and run by crazy people playing kingmaker in weird coalitions.

If this is the kind of CAS the Russians intend to fly against the main part of the Ukrainian counter-offensive, they won't have an air force left on the morning of day four. A Gephardt would have swatted them like flies, much less a manpad of any kind. I have some real question about if this was even filmed during the fighting. Because the most generous thing I can come up with is that this was done for propaganda after the fact, and they missed intentionally because somebody didn't want the buildings knocked down.

In terms of Ukrainian unit badges that is about a 2 on a 10 point scale of misbehavior. Edit: And if every officer and NCO in the unit has an accent from "west of Lviv", I won't lose a moments sleep over it.

I am missing something...?

I don't agree with General Milley about some things, but he has this bit 100% correct. It is actually a fairly long article about the current and future status and effects of global defense spending. Worth your time.

These articles are excellent.

The pardon power is written directly into the Constitution. And since there ZERO chance of passing a constitutional amendment anytime soon, we are all just going to have live with that one. There is a fundamental problem with the Constitution, the founders did not understand political parties very well, and opposed them as a matter of principle. Of course within a decade they had founded several of them. It worked better before both parties became very sorted by ideology. And all the problems are worse when the balance of power is so close.

Author, chef and TV personality, Anthony Bourdain is known to have a special dislike for vegans and vegetarians. In his book Kitchen Confidential, he wrote “Vegetarians, and their Hezbollah-like splinter faction, the vegans, are a persistent irritant to any chef worth a d*&^.