billbindc

What event, marker, trend are you looking for that tells you the Russian Army is no longer fit to achieve minimal goals set by Putin and will start losing what little it has already achieved?

Starting to see train flatbeds full of a random mix of civilian vehicles with “V” daubed on them heading West in Russia. Also, Israel clearly acting as some sort of go between.

Been following the OSINT account that only counts verified Russian losses. Those look to be about 100 vehicles a day with about 40% being tanks/afv/ifv. My question: how long would you expect the Russian military to be able to sustain those losses and still operate (in)effectively?

"Well, my commander told me that Nazis had taken over the government and our fraternal brothers in the Russkiy Mir will greet us with flowers and..." <BOOM>

This seems quite compelling to me: https://samf.substack.com/p/space-and-time?s=w&utm_medium=email

Heard from a friend about this who is an expert in IP and related. He pointed out that this is as effective a cyber attack in the medium term as most countries could mount and will take a serious toll on Russia in many obvious and less obvious ways. He seemed a bit awed talking about it.

Significant: https://www.agents.media/rossijskie-vlasti-sanktsii/

Julia Ioffe reporting today that her Russian friends are all racing to the Baltics border bc there are no plane tickets. A friend said to stop texting her until she was out bc they are searching phone for 'anti-regime' material (and then denying exit). The friend was frantically cleaning out her phone cache.

There is an excellent response to this thread that explains they they aren't even the correct tires for these vehicles but instead cheap Chinese knockoffs. So, bad maintenance *and* ****ty procurement.

As I understand it, it's pretty much presumed at this point that Putin will eventually demand attacks on the West because he sees the sanctions effects (i.e. Google Pay and Apple Pay no longer working on the Moscow metro) as essentially the same thing. But...the US can respond in a profoundly big way and that's got to be giving the Kremlin pause. In addition, NATO has clearly stated that a cyber attack on any one NATO country triggers Article 5. So I'd expect some nibbling around the edges but no major swings for the fences yet.

China at this point is overtly being sympathetic to everyone but quietly would prefer this were over with a cleanish Russian victory. One tactical nuke and I think China backs away into armed neutrality toward Putin.

This to me is a huge point. Between Ukrainians inherent attitude, the UA's grit on the field and Russian mistakes Putin has got them thinking they can win outright. That's a huge blunder. The whole point of the decapitation wave was to forestall that. Worse, Putin has made the EU think the Ukrainians can win outright. If the EU didn't think so, if the EU wasn't quite literally inspired by Ukrainian resistance those arms transfers simply wouldn't be happening. There were a lot of factors in this, not least that the US admin did a great job of anticipating Russian actions, pre-organizing responses and priming EU countries but Russia wrongfooted itself from the beginning in really dire ways.

They still have to be fed and resupplied. The smaller cities may not be a good harbinger for the big ones. Expect Putin to want to close this out in a month at most. Sly didn't work. Next frightfulness. Then, he's in an insurgency...with a running down army, sanctions and internal pressures. It's going to be nasty but I'm not sure I'd want to be him given the options.

Gentlemen, Alperovich is quite good and I think has the future mapped out pretty well: https://twitter.com/DAlperovitch/status/1498772954938757121?s=20&t=1cS3z5ZxgXSLO529zLFyqw

My favorite Matt Gallagher line (author of "Kaboom!" inter alia): "Lieutenant Colonels...what are they for?"

I think one partial answer to this question is that the capabilities of the Ukrainian army were clearly expanding in ways that Russia we now know, wasn't really equipped to handle. There are something like 20 Bayraktar's available for use. They've been doing serious damage. Absent this war, there would have been 100+. Gerasimov saw what happened btw Armenia/Azerbaijan as clearly as everyone else did. The Ukrainian missile program was also on the cusp of expansion and increased capability. We've already seen what regular and irregular Ukrainian infantry can do. Certainly a big factor was that if they didn't go now, they were going to be clearly unable to in a couple of years.

Note: The Peter Principle applies to dictatorial sociopaths as much as it does to that dude down the hall from your office.

Another odd thing...the incredibly bad accuracy of the Russian Iskanders:

The_Capt, I think that's really spot on. Another 'odd' issue is the clear reluctance of Russian air assets to engage in ground attack. Part of that may be simply that they don't trust their AA ground assets to not shoot at them...which is a pretty bad commentary on their readiness. Another reason may be that their pilots are averaging under 100 hours/year in the seat and they don't trust them to be able to accomplish the mission. You would think that they'd have trained up for invading a country of 40 million people but apparently not.

Folks...billbindc here...who you may remember from the benighted days of dosomefink. Been talking to a lot of folks and I'd say the "Putin has lost it" thing is over rated and on some level the Russians trying to benefit from madman theory. Putin has been a Russian imperialist forever. It's been his idee fixe since the fall of the USSR. In one "near abroad" country after another, he's either coerced them back into the fold (Chechenia), enforced informal hegemony (Moldova, Georgia, Ukraine) or attacked them outright (Ukraine, Georgia). He has also constantly tested the limits from corrupt influence to outright assassination (Salisbury anyone?). What he's doing now isn't new, it is simply a reflection of the greater abilities he believes he possesses. At no time has he behaved suicidally. He will rattle sabers and he will do what he thinks he can get away with. The smart thing for us to do is remain cool, stay out of direct conflict and give every boot/5.56 round/Javelin/MRE to the Ukrainians we can lay our hands on.