Seminole

Putin would be the one tricked into a fool’s errand.

Remember, you’re seeing the battlefield for a minute or two, through a straw. I noticed smoke in the field on their left flank. Most interesting thing to me is that it only appears one Russian made a defense (the grenade tosser) with one more person providing some suppressing fire from the other side of the drain. The Russians gathered to bug out, not fight. Green mobiks? Only two guys provided covering fire while they ran, and it appeared that the runners were drawing more fire from farther ‘south’ on their right flank. Definitely need tank riders in CMBS! Do we know at what level on the battlefield command is seeing video like this? Do we know if a captain/major/colonel is seeing this action and trying to direct response? Or is that more Hollywood/NATO than we should expect Ukraine to be operating?

I think they wouldn’t consider full annexation the best option because it leaves a more western leaning Ukraine. Forcing a federation on them with two vetos to keep NATO out seems more favorable, and leaves door open to swing of the overall country with D+L populations inside it. 2022+ I read the Russian view as NATO now inevitable in Ukraine and clock ticking on forcing any kind of more favorable outcome closing. 2022+ Russian aim as annexation of Donetsk and Luhansk (and likely seize coast through Odessa to make remaining Ukrainian state land locked) and occupying Kiev to install a puppet government and get an Austrian style neutrality from the new government. If CMBB taught me anything, it’s the hyper lethality of modern weapons makes attacking hard, insanely so if you are trying to hurry.

I think their expressed desire was for Luhansk and Donetsk as pro-Russian veto inside a Ukraine federation, giving them their buffer. After the Sept '21 Ukraine-US meeting he tried to force the situation with an invasion (beyond the means of his army) to include seizing Kiev and installing a puppet government to implement Minsk II (and then some) before NATO was in place and any window to force the matter closed.

The plane clearly noses further down right before it makes impact. Maybe they lifted Boeing's Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, but I think they're having trouble sourcing parts for their fly by wire systems.

I believe the phrase you’re looking for is Potemkin Army…

Those entities also paid for about 30% of the internet connectivity, which SpaceX says costs $4,500 each month per unit for the most advanced service. (Over the weekend, Musk tweeted there are around 25,000 terminals in Ukraine.) So top end currently under 80 million a month. 1 billion for a year for this level of connection for a distributed and battle proven comms solution. Let’s compare it to the other Pentagon communications contracts and see how raw a deal he’s offering…

Probably nothing to it, but... All Russian telegrams simultaneously posted that there isn't any panic in Balakiya

To not be misunderstood, NATO serves the interventionist cause as an international fig leaf for aggressive U.S. military action. ‘It’s not America doing this, we’re answering the international call for justice.’ Politicians in part use this concept of multilateral international support to try and sidestep domestic support/authorization. Recall Bush I’s team considered they didn’t have to get Congressional support, and argued the president was already authorized to answer the UN’s call to military action. Now they wisely obtained that support prior to hostilities (unlike Clinton (vote failed for Congressional authorization) and Obama (never even sought Congressional authorization)). Do you think any EU members were going going to initiate a bombing campaign against Serbia without the U.S.? It’s almost as laughable logistically as it is from a military efficacy standpoint. As for the UNSC: NATO countries attempted to gain authorisation from the UN Security Council for military action, but were opposed by China and Russia, who indicated that they would veto such a measure. As a result, NATO launched its campaign without the UN's approval, stating that it was a humanitarian intervention. The UN Charter prohibits the use of force except in the case of a decision by the Security Council under Chapter VII, or self-defence against an armed attack – neither of which were present in this case.[34] With respect to Libya, again the U.S. president failed to obtain Congressional approval, and I already linked the UK parliament’s report on the lies used by Western politicians to justify the bombing campaign and support for the Islamist revolutionaries: An in depth investigation into the Libyan intervention and its aftermath was conducted by the U.K. Parliament's House of Commons' cross-party Foreign Affairs Committee, the final conclusions of which were released on 14 September 2016 in a report titled Libya: Examination of intervention and collapse and the UK's future policy options.[232] The report was strongly critical of the British government's role in the intervention.[233][234] The report concluded that the government "failed to identify that the threat to civilians was overstated and that the rebels included a significant Islamist element."[235] In particular, the committee concluded that Gaddafi was not planning to massacre civilians, and that reports to the contrary were propagated by rebels and Western governments. Western leaders trumpeted the threat of the massacre of civilians without factual basis, according to the parliamentary report, for example, it had been reported to Western leaders that on 17 March 2011 Gaddafi had given Benghazi rebels the offer of peaceful surrender and also that when Gaddafi had earlier retaken other rebel cities there were no massacres of non-combatants. The idea that France would have militarily intervened without the U.S. is not tenable. This military intervention never happens without the White House agreeing to it, for what we have learned are dubious public reason. Regardless, neither the Serbian or Libyan interventions where ‘defensive’ responses by NATO, bolstering the notion the ‘defensive alliance’ was indeed more than that, and used to aggressively intervene in foreign countries that had never attacked a NATO member. That is reality. You can say the Russians are paranoid, but you can’t say truthfully that NATO is just a defensive alliance. Clinton and Obama decided to use it for diplomatic cover when they lacked UN and Congressional authorization for their desire to solve problems with bombs.

The rational argument of the threat from NATO for Russia is that NATO has shown a willingness to engage in wars that are not the result of attacks on members. President Clinton's decision to ignore the stipulations of the War Powers Resolution and bomb Serbia into an ethnic partition is when NATO stopped being merely a defensive alliance, and became a way for the U.S. to present the veneer of an international imprimatur for aggressive military foreign policy. Not even the lack of Congressional authorization is going to stop a U.S. President from using NATO to enact regime change where it seems viable, and in our 'national interest' (we can debate the 'human interest' in what Libya has endured a decade since Hillary cackled about a dictator's death - the Brits did a nice report on the lies and poor assumptions). Our Nobel Peace Prize winning President went along with the neocons in his cabinet and we got to see open air slave camps on CNN. Which brings us to the idea of how NATO can be perceived as a threat to Russia. Russia who watched largely helpless while NATO carried out months of bombing on a historical/cultural ally. The ethnic partition and formation of Kosovo driven by NATO (read: the U.S.) isn't even recognized today by all NATO members (nor all of the EU members). Imagine it's 2035, and NATO has welcomed Ukraine to the fold. Further imagine Erdogan is still pursuing his pan-Turkic and after dreams and is stirring Islamic separatists in the Russian backwaters against Moscow (surely these things don't only happen in Syria, or Libya, do they?). Moscow, as it has in the past, taps their inner General Sherman and starts stomping mudholes in the civilized patches of their backwaters. Is it crazy to imagine NATO (read: the American President who could use a distraction, or just really likes the storytelling of the neocons who manage to festoon every cabinet) rides to the rescue of the media's ratings? We're clearly witnessing the relative weakness of Russia in a conventional war with the West. Would it make sense for them to leave themselves only hope that NATO wouldn't risk that nuclear threats aren't bluff. That they would trade the possibility of smoking craters in place of Moscow and St. Petersburg over some Kazakh border regions? Factoring the demonstrated willingness of NATO to intervene in civil wars, and the history the U.S. has in fomenting civil wars for policy ends, I would think having NATO on your border makes you more susceptible to an intervention by NATO. I can understand why Russia would rather see Ukraine under some kind of guaranteed neutrality like Austria was in the Cold War rather than in NATO.