billbindc

Feeling better every day that my argument that the Russian war has more and more been fought to control the Kremlin instead of to take Ukraine.

Netherlands has 40 it is phasing out for F-35's. Pretty sure they will move them.

Agreed. Stealing it immediately.

If the biological tic exists in a multitude of societies, it's not really a tic at all. It's just the human condition filtered through a particular culture.

Let's grab a beer or six sometime and I think I can dissuade you from the idea that Q-Anon isn't culturally American. We'll start with Hofstadter, go to that whole Mikey and the pop rocks thing and end with modern evangelicalism. But way off topic so, until then...

The pith: culture always wins. The rest is window dressing or post hoc.

Thanks...still pretty Stalinist.

It really starts to look like the Stalinist way of doing things. Missiles don't work? Don't blame the system, blame whoever is close to the project. Recruitment lagging? Don't blame the system, blame a couple of handy recruiting officers. Can't take Bakhmut? Don't blame the system, blame..... Surely Prigozhin can see what's coming. That's what all of the drama about the flanks is about.

It's important not to take Narusova's comments at face value. She knows that the war had a purpose and that Putin explained it pretty clearly at the beginning. It was to stop internal danger to the regime presented by democratic frontsliding in Ukraine. In that light, Russian victory simply looks like whatever safeguards Putin and his picked elite's hold on power. What she is *really* saying is that she doesn't see how the current course leads to that outcome before catastrophic economic or military collapses remove it from the table entirely. And she knows that Putin is convinced that Western resolve will fail before that happens. So...what she is actually saying is "No, the West isn't going to blink and what then?". It's a loud and clear message to the layer of the power structure just outside of those directly reporting to Putin and cleverly done.

Absolutely asinine. Take Telenko with boulders of salt unless he's talking about wooden pallets.

One assumes this would be Day 1 of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan but then again, I've seen lunchbox sized satellites at NASA PR events so...

One estimate puts the cost of the strikes last night for Russia at $120,000,000.

The implications of Patriots being able to handle a complex, dense attack of pretty much everything Russia has contains strategic implications that go far beyond the war in Ukraine. Chinese calculations about Taiwan were just revised negatively yet again.

What I would describe as a very realistic description of the prospects for Belarus: https://jamestown.org/program/belarusian-opposition-preaching-gloom-amid-growing-distress/

My mantra has long been that the only way to understand the strategy of the various players in this saga is to accept that their goal is less about winning in Ukraine than it is about winning in Moscow.

It's notable that this wasn't an intentional disclosure. The GUR talked to Putin, in Africa among other places, and didn't trust him but they also didn't try to burn him. In that sense, it's a pure leak. That will say to other actors in the Kremlin bear pit that maybe he really was trying to use the Ukrainians in their power struggle. They certainly now have every reason to claim to believe it anyway.

It cuts a multitude of ways. Prigozhin certainly would have Kremlin approved reasons for having GUR contacts. Prisoner exchange is the obvious one. Another would be to create provocations and transmit misdirection. But Prigozhin also is operating in a milieu in which such approvals aren't written down anywhere so that they can be turned against one at any time. In addition, he is in an elite power struggle in the Kremlin so it is entirely believable that he would attempt to negotiate a 'victory' in Bakhmut and embarrass his bete noirs, Gerasimov and Shoigu. It is a good example of a pawn imagining that he's a player. I don't rate his long term chances.

The Prigozhin story just keeps getting better: https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/05/14/prigozhin-wagner-ukraine-leaked-documents/

That result is almost certainly due to manipulation. Here is one CHP heavy district in Istanbul undergoing it's 11th recount with the votes unregistered still. AKP is pulling out all the stops to delay results.

I agree. But whether or not he uses state power to ignore that outcome is another question.

As I understand it, the AKP is challenging every ballot box it can that look to be CHP dominated so that they are held out of the count. Andalou and other regime oriented outlets are touting a call based on that total. And of course, on Twitter the opposite view is being choked off because Musk agreed to Erdogan's censorship. The idea is that Erdogan will simply declare victory, try to suppress a full count and stay in office. We'll see how it plays out.

He almost certainly will lose. The question is whether or not he accepts the loss and has the power to get away with it. Istanbul and Ankara aren’t counted yet.

This is interesting:

Putin has consistently made logical choices...taking into account the facts as he believed they stood. There is nobody in Moscow who thinks a Belarus takeover will augment Moscow's strength in any way except as some sort of face saving move in the event of a collapse in Ukraine. So, until the latter happens...

I would be pretty surprised if there Putin was really trying to get Lukashenko out of the way. The bottom line is that direct Russian control of Belarus doesn't help Russia to win Ukraine and has every prospect of hurting. The RA doesn't have the forces to create a new front and the Belarus military is likelier to switch sides, refuse, desert as it is to fight. Maintaining order without Lukashenko would also require extending already overtaxed Russian security forces to keep things quiescent. In addition, Belarussians have shown nothing like Ukrainian's willingness to go the mat to drive out the siloviks. Without a general revulsion against a Russian regime, activists aren't enough to engineer an overthrow. Killing Lukashenko and sending in ramshackle Rosgvardia might just create that revulsion. The FSB is internally wired into Belarussia and knows this...so Putin does too.