billbindc

It's an interesting event on numerous levels. Russia certainly does not want to provoke greater conventional intervention by the US/EU. Knocking down drones well into international waters (I have tracked these drones and they typically do figure eights in the middle of the Black Sea) has every chance of making that happen. It also weakens the argument they must have been happy to hear from DeSantis that the war is a "territorial issue" when Moscow is tangling with US assets well out of either national space. Ockham's razor...they are really worried about upcoming Ukrainian moves and they think it's worth taking that kind of risk to limit US ISR to some degree.

These are precisely the sort of articles that were common in the months before the Kharkiv and Kherson offensives. Maybe it's true, maybe not...but that's exactly what I'd want in the press while if I were planning a Ukrainian offensive.

Luttvak is an absolute clown who isn't taken very seriously by anybody. Great at marketing himself though.

China has been pouring resources into this sector for a very long time with very limited success and as they are cut off catching up will be that much harder going forward.

The US is different in a positive way in a general sense but what happened at the Capitol and what led up to it for the two or three years before was specifically much more akin to the more extreme forms of European nationalism. And trust me, having seen all of it just outside my door it was a lot more than just troubling.

Belfast bap I suppose.

Ok...I'll be in Belfast next week. What am I eating grognards?

This is a great articulation of something I was inchoately working towards in my head. And as usual, it's here on this obscure (ish?) board rather than on the front page of the NY Times.

Just my thought. You won't be seeing these hitting Bakhmut. They are going to be smashing units transiting Tokmak, Polohyi and Melitopol.

Where were Steve, Elvis and Bil that week? And what was all that seawater doing in the scenario folder?

Didn't mean to chuff you, mate. It's early days on this and it's pretty clear that there is a ton of speculation going on. And none of it seems to be getting in the way of a false flag. You can see how the Washington Post (which has quite good connections in US intelligence) is not exactly jumping aboard the train. Or I should say, like most of those taking it seriously, the headline looks blaring and then the articles hem and haw quite a bit. https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/03/07/intelligence-officials-suspect-ukraine-partisans-behind-nord-stream-bombings-rattling-kyivs-allies/

Not sure I agree. At this point, Germany is committed and what would the argument be? That Germany should let Ukraine fall to Putin because a rogue group of Ukrainians and Russians killed Nordstream? If Germany wants to avoid this sort of thing, isn’t it better to get the war won asap?

When it comes to this sort of thing, I'm a big believer in looking at practical questions to test extraordinary claims. For example, is it very likely that non-state actors would be able to work up fake passports, have clear knowledge of what level of boat would require AIS, know something of NATO/Russian patrol schedules, include skilled divers and *underwater explosives experts*? More unbelievably...suppose you've got this cinematic dream team of freelancing, stick-it-to-Putin fire eaters together will all the skillz...are they then the kind of folks to conveniently leave around explosive residue on the yacht they rented? I don't know who did it. I strongly suspect motive, opportunity and available, checkable OSINT suggests Russia. We'll see.

Note: a "proxy force with connections to the Ukraine government" in no way rules out that it was done at Moscow's behest.

Pure anecdote but I was watching an interview the other day with an old Brit war journo nearish to Bakhmut. They were talking about where the front line was and the old chap was saying basically a couple of km that way and a couple the other. This was being done standing around, in the clear by a gas station and I couldn't help but think that really said something about the general state of the Russian attack. It's a blunt instrument right on the line without much penetrative depth at all.

And his personal arrogance around this town does not exactly burnish his reputation.

I personally would not predict a breakup of the core state. The more likely scenario is that the fringes will continue to peel off late Ottoman style. And of course that's what we are seeing already. The near abroad that Russia still held degrees of sway over is now rapidly signing up with other power centers (China, Turkey, the US) with Ukraine being the most obvious example. Even Belarus is in a sort of limbo where Russia actually can't quite seize control without creating a counterreaction is might be unable to handle. The next wave of dissolution is likely to start with Chechnya and other component states in the Caucasus. Why do I think so? Because of those very same nukes. In an early age, stronger powers would be actively prising open Russian sovereignty on the fringes. Nukes force them to wait until internal forces have already frayed Russian state claims on a territory past the point where Russia itself feels able to defend its interests those places in that way. Russia will likely ending up being the Sick Man of Europe whose status remains simply because the dominant powers don't want to deal with the mess its end would create.

It is deeply weird that we going around and around on this. We all agree that even a semi-functional Russian nuclear weapons program effectively is a world ender in a strategic exchange. In other words, it does what it says on the package. No amount of speculation about expert opinion or creative framing changes that at all. Enough Russian nukes will work even in a best case scenario such that fantasies of rolling Ivan back to Moscow are going to remain safely just that. Finis.

It is an underrated factor in the survival of Prigozhin and Girkin that as long as one is around the regime will want to other in order to ensure dissension in the ranks of the hard core nationalists.

Not the same experts and not the same organization they are looking at. Nuclear weapons complexes are very particular things with a predictable and well understood schedule of activity that is tied tightly to facilities that are highly surveilled by US ISR and have been for some 70 years. It's not an apples to apple comp.

And to repeat...the experts who are talking are all saying that the Russian nuclear forces are up to date.

In all seriousness, it wasn't built out of simple grandiosity. They built it because their accuracy wasn't very good. So, the corollary was to just build a much higher yield so that accuracy mattered less. A very Soviet solution.

Exactly...Ukrainian info sec/warfare is pretty good but we see some of their losses and what is not in evidence is that kind of damage to the UA. Sweeney and other reporters are two or three miles behind their lines having fairly relaxed chats and Russian artillery seems mostly aimed at the front lines. Vuhledar cost somewhere north of 130 Russian platforms. Just Vuhledar. If Ukraine is generating forces to a significant degree behind the scenes then this spring is going to be really something.

You don't build Tsar Bomba if your nukes can hit the side of a barn two times out of three.

It definitely felt like the telegraphing was intense on Kherson. I don't think that will happen this time because it's so obvious where the next offensive must be (somewhere between Vuhledar and the Dnieper). If I had to guess, there will be multiple axes that force the RA to choose where to defend. Any one of those axes will be the main effort depending on success or failure with the whole complex being designed to force stressed Russian forces to shift from one sector to another at the mercy of ISR directed arty, etc. And don't sleep on a thrust towards Starobilsk. Northern Luhansk becomes quite hard to hold if that corridor is interdicted.