Letter from Prague

So you're telling me this is inaccurate?

What is a time on target for ballistic missile? I would intuitively expect them to be quite slow, so this destroyed HIMARS sounds like Ukraine making a mistake and reusing a hiding place, instead of Russian ISR getting faster. But I dunno.

Why would you assume they're telling the truth? Remember when Moskva went down they were pretending the crew survived using old and faked videos and stuff. Or maybe, hitting the ships while under the bridge means they can't maneuver and are easier to hit but it's also easier for crew to survive.

I don't want to pretend I'm an expert (unless we're talking machine learning or build a data warehouse) but even before the war, I read that the difference between Russian and Western navies is how much crew they have - Russian run much leaner and (at that time the article presented it as a good thing) rely on machines and automation instead having many people around "watchstanding". I think now we (possibly) see that this is not because the Russians are smarter than us, but because they lack the ability to attract competent people for their navy, train them and retain them (and have for decades) and this is how they make do. So they might not actually have that many guys with guns to go out and shoot drones.

I think the specific timing will depend on how successful the Ukrainian strategic strike campaign will go. Every factory, refinery and gas terminal out of commission shortens the Russian lifeline.

I'm not sure there were any attacks on the bridge at all, I think Ukranians are just using the limited ability of ships to maneuver in the limited space to hit them. We've seen it a few times already. The Russians are spinning it as "attack on the bridge but the bridge is fine, so it failed" for obvious reasons.

I think even with just 5 confirmed, we can count this as Sukhoi February. (Sukhoi mans dry).

Yeah, the Germans are always good at finding excuses not to help too much.

Hmm. Did the casualties finally reached the percentage where everyone knows someone who hasn't come back and are they starting to realize it's pointless?

I think just yesterday I saw some allegedly important metallurgical plant hit, and today few Russian cities reported "we repelled all drones" so the campaign is definitely still going on. The key to look for these is they rarely report "Ukraine hit important factory in Moscow" but you often read "Refinery in Blahovsks on fire, government denies attack". I guess calling everything Of course we would need aggregate view to be able to estimate better how this is going strategically, and I don't know if there's any numbers in OSINT sphere.

I think a lot of it is just matter of height. Horizon is hundreds of kilometers away if you're few kilometers up. And that's just the ground, planes can see planes (or at least have line of sight) from really far, compared to ground stations. ... There's news on Transnistria declaring itself part of Russia soon. https://www.eurointegration.com.ua/news/2024/02/22/7180220/ I'm not sure what impact that has, other than further destabilization of everything.

With regards to mobilisation, I think Putin mobilising million dudes with rifles wouldn't honestly change much - we've seen dumb mass not work way too many times. I'm more concerned with him mobilising million semi-skilled or skilled workers info drone, missile and ammo factories. I'm not sure Putin would do that since it's not glamorous and whatever, unlike tanks and mobiks. But that just makes Ukraine's strategic strike campaign really really important, since if dumb mass doesn't work, it is important to make sure Russia stays one. (I'm sure you people who understand the stuff already knew that)

Yeah, no way it was West. I think this really really shows the disconnect in thinking between Russia and the West. Putin is already saying this is existential war for Russia, he is already saying his objective is to destroy the West, and his people - whether random Russians or weirdos and traitors and useful idiots everwhere in the world - are already believing it. He is already doing everything in his power to do that too - from propaganda to interfering with elections to financing fascist parties to helping Hamas to working with Iran and China to assassinating people in other countries to attacking food to cause famine in Africa because refugee crisis empower Western Fascist to whatever else I have lost track. Russia already escalated as high as they dared. If they could do worse, if they could do something more despicable, if they could do something more monstrous, they would have done it years ago. I remember all these red lines - nuclear war if West gives Ukraine Javelins, nuclear war if West gives Ukraine tanks, nuclear war if West gives Ukraine planes, nuclear West gives Ukraine gets HIMARS, nuclear war if Ukraine attacks Russian warships, nuclear war if Ukraine fires missiles into Russia ... So really I think if West shot down Russian plane they would do nothing like every time before. At the same time, the Western decision makers think (or behave as if they thought) that Russia is a country and not a mafia, and that they are not actually at (hybrid) war with us, and that they can be reasoned with and that keeping some kind of "civilized behavior" with Russia is something that makes sense. This is of course wrong - Russia only understands strength and considers humanity a weakness to be exploited - being civilized or nice only makes you hurt. So no way it really was West - if West had balls to engage Russia directly, our current conversation topic on this forum would be "do you think the warlord Ivanov will also take south of Moscow?" and not "it's not good that Ukraine is losing ground and people because West decided to not supply them with enough ammo but what can you do, it could be worse". ... Anyway, one thing I wanted to say: This actually is an existential war for Russia in a way. It is existential for Putin, sure, but as we came to understood during the war and as we discussed a few times, the common (but by no means only) mindset in common Russians is "things are ****, they used to get better and now they don't, but you know what, at least we are a badass empire". They might be even deluding themselves into thinking that things being bad is a voluntary sacrifice for that badass empire. Lot of people are willing to suffer a lot for being part of something they consider greater than themselves. Being decisively shown that Russia is not in fact a cool badass empire they be proud of even if they don't themselves have indoor toilets might really break their worlds. Whatever comes out of that would not be Russia as we know it anymore. This is not existential war for Russia because they will end up in mass graves or enslaved if they lose (like it is for Ukrainians), but it is existential for the Russian imperial mindset.

Gentleman. You can't fight here, this is the war room. (Sorry I had celebratory drink.)

Speaking of boats, I have just now learned that the French have SAM equipped submarines. Maybe they let Ukraine borrow one

Wait, I think there might be confusion of which plane where. There's reports of both A-50 and a transport plane. For example, liveuamap places the A-50 near the front and the transport deep in Russia. Is it one plane or two? It's possible Ukrainian air defense shot down the A-50 neaby and something else happened with the transport plane.

If Ukrainian pilot in a fighter jet snuck 250 kilometers into Russian air defense and shot down AWACS then I don't know how he would fit into his plane with those enormous balls (or ovaries I guess).

But if it was ambush, why would he start firing flares? Is heat-seeker warning something planes normally have? edit: they do and it took two minutes on wikipedia to confirm that. I could have avoided this post.

I don't think anyone reasonable considered the F-16s magical weapons. They are replacements for MiGs and SUs - planes wear down, especially when used in combat conditions and Ukraine has gotten all the spare parts and replacements for their MiGs and SUs that they ever will - there are barely any more in the world and Russia will for sure not make more. The F-16s are reasonable and cost effective way to get Ukraine replacements, to make sure Ukraine even has an airforce because the current planes are probably falling apart as we speak. It would also allow Ukraine to use modern NATO weapons without crazy hacking like getting MiG-29 to launch HARM which is cool but probably lot of bull to handle and to keep it working. While it is very possible the F-16s will change the situation - because for example, the Russians using glide bombs seems to have lot of impact so Ukraine getting easy access to those as well could be expected to push the needle - I think it's disingenuous to claim there's hosts of people who claim they will definitely change everything. Where are those people?

My God, this is like tenth time someone killed a high ranking Russian and bunch of soldiers because they showed up in strike range and someone organized a parade. Why would you keep making the same stupid mistake again and again and again and again. It's stupidity like this that makes me hopeful that Ukraine will win.

The problem with this approach is while it seems to work really well, it is very expensive and it needs a lot of PGMs. There's a lot more JDAMs in the world than Storm Shadows and GMLRSs. This is where the West should come in, but I'm not sure it's happening. The attempts to make cheap to produce "mass market" PGMs like the GLSDB or various drones are step in the right direction I think. But if Ukraine had order of magnitude more of them, we might have been currently discussing rebuilding now that the war ended. Hilarious. If I ever get banned, please do it with as funny message.

That just puts us on the "Russia in freefall" path because I think any hopes of clean Russian coups died with Prig and Navalny. which I am ok with, but lots of people were saying its bad.

The problem is that the escalation management is not getting better. It _still_ looks like West is more concerned with not angering Russia too much, while Russia is openly calling this total war with West and Ukraine is getting weaker. Anyway. I wonder how Navalny's death impacts things. The idea of Putin going down in a coup and Navalny replacing him as West friendly Czar, who would likely be Putin but softer - maybe stopped the war in exchange for removed sanctions but definitely didn't surrender any land back, seems to go out of the window. It looks that letting Russia win or the dreaded "Russia in free fall" are really really the only two ways how this can end now.

If I were Taiwan, I would start building 4 factories for these naval drones this week. They are shockingly effective.

Oil refinery a day leads the russian economy astray. (stolen from reddit)