Maciej Zwolinski

Yeah, because that worked for them so well when they tried this last time in 1917/1918

And the more tanks Russian take out of storage/manufacture/otherwise procure, the more they have to pay, even to restore the old crap to the working conditions. According to the latest video from the Inside Russia channel, the financial troubles have finally come to Russia, and a huge component of that is the costs charged by the military industry. Apparently by August the Russians already burned through their military budget for the entire year 2023 and had to increase it by 100%. So Russians increasing military production is not entirely a bad thing.

Or that he was dying long enough to say the traditional last words of Russians who die of natural causes or suicide: "Comrades, don't shoot, I too am a Communist". Nowadays it has probably been updated to "a Putinist".

Were HARMs inegrated with Frogfoots at all? I heard that only MIG29s

I have been thinking of using this kind of drone to clear, not avoid minefields. Instead of a soldier, each would pick up a demo charge, designed to blast mines like the explosive in a bangalore torpedo or a MCLIC. Let them fly over the minefield under artillery cover and a smokescreen and just have them drop the charges one after another at precaldulated distances. Say 10 meters between them. You use 40 drones at a go and demine 400 meters, then they fly back, reload and blast another 400 meters. Rinse and repeat, as long as the suppression/smoke cover lasts. Sort of a longer, hovering, robotic, very mobile MCLIC without a single expensive vehicle for the enemy to concentrate fire at.

Sure. And my point is that while this is correct for those countries, it is quite a limited set. And Ukraine's situation is totally different. Anyway, this seems to be going in circles, so I will probably leave it at that.

I will add an actual example instead of hypothetical. Northern Ireland is part of the UK, and not part of the Republic of Ireland. Therefore, when Brexit happened they left the EU, whereas the people a few kms south of the border did not. Both countries are democracies and people made their choices to live on the northern or southern part of the border not based on life or death matters, but on tax, proximity to workplace, etc. Yet the Brexit happened for some of them, and did not for some others. Border mattered.

Which still misses the point, that borders delineate the area under control of a nation, which can and will decide on its political course also for the future. Assuming "Russia were a modern secular welfare state with a functional democracy and rule of law" in 2023 and someone took up residence within Russian borders on that basis, he would throw his lot with the Russians and run the risk of Russia reverting to its authoritarian ways. If he is a German national of liberal persuasion in 2023, so far he runs only the risk of AFD forming a government, which is probably less probable.The point is trivial, but somehow was missed anyway - borders matter beyond the immediate political horizon. This seems similar to Fukuyama's "end of history" fallacy of the early 1990s. Everybody seemed to be happy with liberal democracy, so liberal democracy will carry on everywhere forever. Well, it has not.

Do you agree that it invalidates your original point then? It was "I do not care about what country I am a citizen of". Well, you do care yourself, if that other country could be Russia. So in fact, your original point should be narrowed down to "I do not care about what Western European country I am a citizen of". Yet you expressed that in universal terms, without realising that it was a view limited in time and place to a specific corner of the world. That is the hidden bias I was talking about, which I am afraid colours the thinking about Ukraine a lot. They are not in Western Europe and have different perspective.

I totally do not understand the point you are making here. Mine is simple: a country's borders limit the area of that country's political control. If Ukraine wants to be a democracy, people within its borders will live in democracy. People within borders of other countries will be unaffected by Ukraine's political choice. Hence, If you cede part of land within that border to Russia, the people living in that part will be afffected by political choices of Russia, which currently is putinism. How "not real" that factor is? How "derivative" that concept is? You have lost me there mate.

There were a lot of societal tensions arising from Rome's armies being based on conscripted citizens. Especially in the case of longer wars which did not result in territorial conquest, the soldiers who had left their farms for years came back as paupers. Hence the political campaigns for debt forgiveness and land reform, and plebeian strikes. However, they always managed to patch things up sufficiently to keep the conscription a viable model until a series of defensive and colonial wars around the time of Marius.

Do you think it is worth fighting for being a citizen of Ukraine or subject of Putin? That is a consequence of being on this or that side of a border, just a different one.

The Russo-Ukraine War shows precisely why this point of view, while ostensibly based on deep,universal insights, springs from a very specific set of circumstances. Namely, one where one's country and nation is free of any actual danger. Apologies for saying the obvious, but it seems necessary. A country is a territorial pollitical organisation within which lives a group of people, called a nation. If you do not care about your country, you do not care about whether that group of people - including you- is self governed, or subjected to other country, therefore another nation. Alternatively, you do not care whether your nation gets to use a particular territory, or is deprived of it by another nation - thus impacting e.g. the natural resources, trade routes, etc. avaliable to the group, which includes you. Not caring for your country does not therefore make much rational sense, because things which affect your country affect you, your family, your descendants, etc. It seems to me, that in fact, people say "I couldn't care less about my country" because either they consider the risk of having to defend their country as practically non-existent and therefore they do not seriously think about it, or at the back of their minds there lies is an unspoken assumption, that it does not matter whether you are German, French, or Dutch. I am not sure, but I am not going to dispute that about those 3 countries. However, it is absolutely clear to me that it is crucially important whether you are Ukrainian or Russian, as this war abundantly proves. And as regards the random lines on the map called Ukraine, they decide e.g. whether the nation called Ukrainians will have access to ports of the Azov sea and able to export their grain through them. Or whether the Crimean Penninsula will be within those random lines, or on the other side of random lines and therefore under the control of whoever at the time is the tyrant of Russia, threatening the nation of Ukrainians with naval invasion. By defending those lines on map they are defending their future well-being. The position "I support your right to decide for yourselves but Ido not support your fight for the borders" is self-contradictory and thus obviously wrong, because the right to decide for themselves obviously includes the right to decide how to develop Ukrainian land.

No. The Russians have stopped the UKR bridgehead from expanding, but the UKR have stayed on the other side of the Dnieper

No, they are still good lads in my book. Their enthusiastic use of cluster munitions suffices to keep a special place for AFU in my heart. From time to time they also throw in some extrajudicial killings of Russian propagandists or "no prisoners" policy for some Russian units, and my bloodlust is satisfied.

Possibly, my enthusiasm might be premature. I would not use the phrase "to lay a mine" in respect of setting up a Claymore, but things can happen during translation that are not dreamt up in my philosophy.

Who-hoo! And f.u. sideways Ottawa Treaty. I was sure the UKR have been using anti-personnel mines in quantities, it is good they have come clean. I hate sanctimonious, knee-jerk, pseudo-moralistic pseudo-solutions to real life problems, which the land mine ban applied to a full-scale conventional war certainly is.

A "think-tanker"? Is that rhyming slang?

I do not think the US Navy has ever had fast ASMs. Ever since the first variants of Harpoon and Tomahawk they have gone for low altitude, low RCS and overwhelming numbers attack style.

That's true. However, this is something that UKR has been advocating for since very early in the war and is not getting from the Western allies. It is still quite likely such missiles will not be provided at all. In light of the stubborn opposition among the allied countries, I am wondering why UKR are not trying to create an ersatz long range strike capability in the form of Shaheed style drones. Ukrainian drone strikes happen, but in small numbers (some MUGIN drones, some converted photographic recon drones from 1970s), aimed mainly at factories in Russian countryside and governement infrastructure in Moscow. They clearly are intended to create morale effects. On the other hand, if the UKR stopped those penny packet attacks for some time and instead gathered say 100 cheap kamikaze drones to be launched as a single go e.g. at the Feodosia airfield, that could conceivably saturate the Russian defences and smash e.g. 20+helicopters. Would it not be more valuable than even a month's worth of pretty pictures of explosions on the Internet? Of course not all targets are suitable for cheap kamikaze drones - bridges are not, but airfields without strongly fortified hangars, ammunition dumps, POL storage areas, could be attacked in earnest, not just for laughs. I think that Shaheed clones could be manufactured in the Ukraine without significant problems, even using distributed manufacturing techniques like the Japanese in WWII. This and mortar bombs - I am wondering why we are not seeing more of them.

There was a popular joke during communism about a worker in a sewing machine factory, who was stealing parts from work and bringing them home to build a sewing machine for himself. Except he could not, because every time he tried to put the parts together he came up with a machine gun. It was funny because it was true -there is a factory in Radom where they used to manufacture literally both weapons and sewing machines

There have been reports of Russians shifting units from the Kherson group to the Tokmak direction to supplement the reserves which are running out. I think the primary reason for raids in the area of the "Dniepr" grouping is to remind the Russians that they cannot keep removing soldiers from there.

Judging by the frequency of that kind of scenes appearing on the TV, it looks like it is very easy to get public displays of support in Africa, no matter the cause. It seems people there are generally bored and will do a lot just to generate some excitement. A few EUR will help, but I honestly think some are there just for a lark. During the battle of Mogadishu, many US soldiers who fought there reported with astonishment civilians flocking to the sound of the guns to see what was going on.

WW1 was undoubtedly a period of defensive primacy in the context of the Western Front yet it cracked. It took 4 years of economic blockade, 2 years of very unscientific attritional warfare, 6 months of somewhat more intelligent attritional warfare and some technical development (I would argue it was the least important element) and the Germans were finally forced to make an all-out effort to revert to manoeuvre warfare, which finally did them in. I think that (at least for armies incapable of obtaining massive air superiority) the era of defensive primacy has indeed returned, but Ukrainians are already fairly well advanced in the intelligent attritional warfare stage, to borrow your quote - they are already playing it. At the same time Russians are extremely wasteful with their assets, so it should not take as long this time around. PS. On a slightly related note, regarding the Zaporozhe offensive, there seems now a consensus among the commentators that the UKR have started with an attempt to make a NATO-style mechanised breakthrough, once that did not work out they had to come up with plan B which turned out to be their tried and true attack-by-artillery with limited objectives . However, it was a very quick and smooth transition, to me surprisingly so. I am wondering if the original mechanised push was not something which the the Ukrainians did mostly to appease their Western advisors, while all along they were preparing for the attritional, Kherson style slog, having always seen it as the more realistic approach.

That may be a language issue, but I do not see the contradiction between fear and selfishness. Fear is often (perhaps mostly) a very selfish emotion. People may fear for others, but mostly fear things which may cause harm to themselves. And when one fears for others, it is mostly for people who are close to him in some way or another, so arguably also in those cases it is not exactly altruistic.