Kinophile

Yes, absolutely, but still when it comes to Foreign Policy, Biden (and every US president, including Herr Orangeface) have a lot of latitude and financial resources to draw in. Overseas is very much the President's (rather than Congress's) playground.

It's really odd how an autocratic leader like Putin, who relies on fear enforced by selective violence, allows Prigozhin to build up an essentially independent power base with a (for Russia) professional fighting force, while undermining and denigrating his own national military force, including basically decentralising to the republics way more authority and involvement on original force generation. It's likely someone is going to turn on him and he seems to be gambling that someone else will de facto support him in automatic opposition to that attacker. It really feels like he's holding a bag of screaming, fighting cats, and is pulling them out in turn to throw against the UKR - but at some point soon he's gonna pull out one cat thats gonna turn and claw his face off. And woe betide him when the cats realize that getting rid of him let's them all out of the bag... We should watch for when Prigozhin starts publicly identifying with a particular region or city, e.g. Petersburg,ala Kadyrov & Chechnya. That'll be a big alarm bell for me...

@Battlefront.com Which helps lead to the thought that if UKR repels and then counter attacks Wagner, that they'll squeal loudly, demanding (and getting) critical reserves from other parts of the RUS lines. Once those units have been pulled/redirected away from , e.g. Luhansk, then UKR attacks up there again,with better success. Use the fractionalism of the RUS force to mangle and corrupt its allocation of scarce resources. Seems sensible. Hell, I've done that in team boardgames. Threaten the player likeliest to panic, they force oppos to reinforce them, then we kick in the door somewhere else.

Wagner, like everything else in Putin's expeditionary army, is not what it was in Feb. I'd say they're like a lot of the other RUS formations - hard, tough crust, but a brittle one, with insufficient reserves of "good" infantry. Ukraine breaks through and I doubt a bunch of press ganged zeks are gonna hold the line terribly well. They're ripe for a good nutjob.

Mid terms are still not certain, yet. A lot can happen in a month. Even then, the Senate, both parties, is very pro UKR. A republican Congress can get its knickers in a twist all it wants, but the Senate will stay the course.

If it's true. BI would not be the best source for this. They could easily be a week behind,ie the issues in North Kherson last week.

It's a teacup tizzy because Musk doesn't determine foreign policy or the course of events - Biden does. Musk has no pull on Biden and Biden is not facing reelection. Mid terms are coming but foreign policy plays very little effect on congressional elections. Not zero, just very little. Biden and his entire Administrative are very much on a moral crusade viz a vis Putler; its a negative percentage chance they're fretting about the uninformed, Kardashian-level Twitterrings of a fat billionaire with too much time on his hands. Musk is a social media flashmob right now, and about as relevant. This too will pass, and will affect absolutely nothing.

Storm in a teacup.

Quote right. I deleted a silly post that just added to the knee-jerk reaction. I can do better...

(deleted. Funny but wrong)

I know, right!? But those must be for something else... Right?

This is Russia. Like from Blood Diamond:

TiR.

Fascinating article,, thank you

That my friend, is a perfect analogy for the entire Russian war effort. Perfectly good for domestic consumption of a Syria level conflict, but completely unprepared for really angry Ukrainians.

Exactly, and critically - a missile strike is vastly easier to assess, adjust, strike again,, assess, adjust, increase quantity, strike again, ad infinitum. It's a rapidly repeatable and scalable attack method at a difficult target a long ways away begins enemy lines. Truck bombs were used in Iraq etc because front "lines" didn't exist. It was a heterogeneous battlefield of amorphous and constantly shifting competing areas of control, in close knit urban environments that perfectly suit VBIEDs. But there's a lot that can go wrong and if it doesn't do the job then you're literally back to square one (unless you build a whole stable of VBIEDs a la ISIS - but they did that in their controlled territories and used the trucks against attacking forces, not sending them deep into hostile territory to attack far away infrastructure). Suffiently damaging a massive structure like the Kerch to the point where it fails requires far more than an opportunistic, difficult to get right and extremely difficult to repeat, VBIED. We did not see SOF sending truck bombs across the Antonovsky, a structure that still took a lot of HIMARSing and was far closer to UKR territory and physically easier to get to. A truck bomb is a once off. Missiles are repeatedable. The Ketch is a hard (but brittle) nut to crack. One truck bomb woukd be very unlikely to be sufficient, and if it was a VBIED, well - Q. E. D.!

He struck a lightly protected civilian target that was id'd as under very low threat of attack. For sure the SBU could pull this off, but why not the railway? That's the critical logistical threat. Plus, you blow one truck you're only ever going to hit one of the roads. You need two to properly cut the road link, and the railway is so far above your truck that it has a very good chance if surviving. The only way it works is if you hit while a fully loaded fuel train is passing by overhead, relying on essentially shrapnel and a rapidly diminishing shockwave to do the damage, from below. It's not impossible, it obviously happened, but it's a highly inefficient way of attacking the railway. Plus, the railway itself is quite far away from the road, so neither would a truck bomb affect the support piers for the railway. So then was the supposed truck intended to cut the roads, and and railway was a lucky side effect? That wouldn't change the UAs strategic situation to the extent need to justify a truck bomb op, and as the Kerch is very much a strategic asset any attack against it needs to succeed in those strategic implications. So the railway needs to have been the true target. If this was a truckbomb it was lucky to have affected the railway as much as it did, and that seems a bit shambolic for the UA SOF, who are anything but that. So it's still missile for me.

Ref RUS deep strikes on civilian targets - "This, too, shall pass away" . UKR AMD now seems to be in the 40-60% success range, compared to Feb/March when it seemed more 20-40%. That pans out with improvements in the quantity, quality and increased integration and organization of the UKR AMD infrastructure. As with all things long term, it's the trend that matters and the interdiction success rate is very much trending up. Slowly but steadily. Give them six more months and RUS will struggle badly to repeat crimes like this, requiring many more units of a depleted resource that's already suffering logistical choke pints in manufacturing, all at further cost in supporting their frontoviki, and for negligible political and zero military effect.

Rough as it is, the UA is going to kill a lot more RUS soldiers today, tomorrow and afterwards until every goddamn Ivan is gone. Cold comfort to the affected Kyiv families, there's going to be some terrible tragedies tonight. My heart goes out to them.

Thank you. Man, what a prick. Still, unless they hit Zaluzhny UKR will be ok, in the long run.

If it impacted. The span structure is relatively thin between the longitudinal beams. But The explosion is absolutely massive, with a lot of water airborne water, mixed in after so I'm suspicious that a lot of the blast force maybe missed any proper, heavy structure.

@Haiduk....?

I saw a video clip that had a truck wreckage on its side, underside facing towards the blast zone. That plus the clip under the bridge showing the explosion pretty high above the toad surface are two of my current data points. Naturally I'm open to further info. It feels like a missile strike that didn't quite hit where they wanted (the railway). Yknow, I've that engineer relative in Australia... Time for a zoom chat methinks!

Chuck finally letting go of his SOF death tip, to his credit.