dan/california

It was sunk by our own drunk, idiotic, and undisciplined sailors is perhaps the worst excuse in human history. At least have the sense to claim it hit a mine.
I think the fifty were rescued by a Turkish ship of some description, it is too early to assume that is all the survivors. There were seevral ships flitting around the sinking wreck. I am laughing at the tidal wave of reasons the rescued sailors are spouting for why the should just dropped in Istanbul with a little pocket money, instead of fed back into the Ukrainian meat grinder as the worlds least competent, least happy infantry.

They are going to need Scuba gear.💪💪💪💪💪 Glory to Ukraine!

They are going to need Scuba gear.💪💪💪💪💪 Glory to Ukraine!

They are going to need Scuba gear.💪💪💪💪💪 Glory to Ukraine!

Posted 13 minutes ago

Even if we believe russian "news" that it is afloat and not just its shell of a wreck being afloat - it's most likely in no shape to ever return to service any time soon if ever.

Russians and NBC protection? Let's be realistic here.

This failing seems to be par for the course across the board. Is it possible that Russia decided 30 years ago that they needed to keep their Navy afloat and come out with a few new air and ground toys to act like they were a world power? Looking at it from the aspect of they want to be big and tough but know that they aren't ever going to fight a peer to peer conflict because NATO is not going to attack them? Figuring that they had enough quantity of brute force leftovers to handle their wayward colonies like Chechnya? 
It makes sense when you look at their force compositions and equipment. They come out with a fancy new tank and equip a battalion or two of their "elite" formations and everyone else is in old gear. Same with most of their other platforms. The western army's don't have active units running around in M60's, Chieftains and Leopard 1's. We've seen base grade T-72's on up, a virtual smorgasbord of variants throughout the different units. Same with their IFV's. They make enough fancy stuff to point to and say watch out for us but they don't field 4800 up to date MBT's equally spread across their formations. Why? 
If they were truly trying to defend against NATO or planned on attacking any peer country they would have had to have kept their whole first line up to date. They have to know that, again there aren't a lot of secrets as to what is in the ground forces of their adversaries and the capabilities of most of our weapons systems. If the people on this board know the difference between the air defense systems on the Moskva and an Aegis they certainly have to. If they haven't updated those systems in 40 years then they were never seriously planning to defend themselves from us or attack us.  
I know their corruption is systemic and has caused a lot of their problems as well but they couldn't realistically believe that what they have for an army could have challenged NATO or even the US on it's own. That isn't even counting in the air or on the sea. There have been plenty of examples of western warfighting capability over the last 30 years so they can't be in the dark as to just how far below the bar they would be in an armed conflict with the bigger contestants. They just can't be that stupid or uninformed. Call them what you want but I don't believe stupid is accurate. Staggeringly poor gamblers at the moment, yes.
So with the mindset of looking tough mostly for bluff because they knew their economy couldn't support a rival war machine to NATO (they tried that and lost) but having enough to systematically subdue the former regions as needed looks like a possible compromise that could have placed them in this situation. It also falls in line with what others have said about this being Putin's Pearl Harbor moment. Watching Ukraine they knew that they had a quickly closing window of opportunity to act and if they didn't jump now it would be impossible in a couple more years.
Of course as we have seen their assessments and gambles on western support and the fighting spirit of the UA were a little off the mark. I think a lot of that was based on the assumption that the UA hadn't yet developed much from the conflict in 2014 and the same mistake that most of the MSM "experts" and simply looked at the basic math without accounting for all the other factors involved. The assumption of more tanks and airplanes wins.  
You might say, "But, but, what about the Kremlin's rhetoric of how they are defending against an aggressive NATO and will defeat them!" or "Why would they develop the costly technologically advanced weapons systems if they were only going to beat on Georgia?". Well, to keep up the pretense to their people and have pretty toys on May 9th. Seriously, especially in an autocratic regime you have to have an enemy. You need to be the strong guy protecting the poor people of your nation from those foreign devils. The fancy toys inspire confidence in your leadership and make them feel safe, therefore you make them feel safe. Then smash a small state from time to time and make sure you let them know that you barely saved them from ruin at the hands of the Moldovan masses backed by the dastardly British Intelligence.
And all that would make sense as to how we got to where we are today. 
Thoughts?

Probably nothing more than a coincidence but on same day the White House announced they will be sharing intelligence and targeting information the Russian flagship gets hit and sunk.
There is also a squadron of F-18 Wild Weasels operating in Europe and it was mentioned in a report they are capable of using their capabilities hundreds of miles away from within NATO airspace. These aircraft do more than just jam radars…
Like I said nothing more than a coincidence. The US would never interfere like this in a war, just like Russia would never interfere in US elections.

Too funny not to repost it here.

💪💪💪💪💪

The missiles are killing the army they were built to kill, hard to ask for more. This war is lesson 8037 that you need five times as ammo as the most pessimistic planner thinks, maybe ten times. They are either going to have to expand the production lines or move up and expand production of the missile that is supposed to replace the Javelin. Said replacement is actually much further along than I thought, I need to find that article again and post it here. Seems expensive, until you look at the bill for being occupied by orcs.

And we have confirmation:
 

I don't think one Russian tank would make it five miles past the Polish border at this point.

This times 1000.  At no point should we be trying to not annoy Russia anymore than any other country who is bent on dominating it's neighbors.  Every time we have in the past millions paid the bill ultimately.  Which is why giving Ukraine whatever support it needs to not just win, but remind Russia what happens to those who attempt to conquer neighbors by force (Iraq 1991).

No longer credible. At all.
 

If there was point this could have been avoided, it was with truly massive support for the Russian economy immediately after the fall of Soviet union. But everything I have read about it implies that Russia simply didn't have enough rule of law, and technical capacity to absorb a lot more aid in any useful way.  More aid would have just been stolen or wasted. I am almost certain that was never possible for Russia to transition to better government than it got. The Soviet system systematically eliminated decent people from rising to prominence, and the world just didn't get lucky there. Zelensky will have several hundred books written about him, because people like him are not common.

Absolutely!
 
 

Javelin/Stinger inventory and production estimates.
https://www.csis.org/analysis/will-united-states-run-out-javelins-russia-runs-out-tanks

Baltic will soon be a NATO lake, and it looks like the Black Sea will follow, to a degree determined by the outcome of this war. No friendly shores for Russian ships on both those seas, apart from their own.

Ammo issue cuts both ways. It is a different kind of ammo, which is obviously bad, and introduces logistical complications. On the plus side it lets Ukraine draw from modern NATO ammo stocks. Hopefully including PGMs, if you have to ship it all the way across Ukraine in a hurry, you might as well send the good stuff. 

It is the irritating super cut up style video, but it looks like what is says it is. Russian ISR and infantry situation have to improve if they want to even attempt to stay in this war. 

Every major military in the world is reevaluating its procurement plans for the next twenty years, and in one of histories odder accidents our little hobby has suddenly become very important part helping them decide how to do that. If Steve has a tenth of the military contracts I think he has, or is in the process of getting, it is an outright miracle that he TALKS to us. When the war in Ukraine dies down enough that it doesn't look utterly immoral to release a game based on it, or another one, actually. Maybe we will get some benefit from all that Pentagon development money.

Because there was no defeat in Donbas. Russians paid dearly for every meter of the ground to a point they had no way to proceed much further.
Donbas was as much of improvisation to them as it is to us - russians were planning an invasion to occupy whole country in 2015, due to inevitably falsified elections by Yanukovich and protests that would follow but Maidan forced their hand earlier, when they weren't ready enough.
The goal of Russia is always one and the same - complete and total destruction of Ukraine.
If they could they would.
After all it took 8 years of preparations to launch this attack with that very same goal - and yet here we are.

most intelligent thing I've read in this thread. 

I've also taken the liberty of forwarding this over to the GRU as proof their psyop campaign is working.