How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?

[billbindc]

17 minutes ago, LongLeftFlank said:

Also extraordinarily helpful and eloquent 'facts on the ground':

1.  Black Horse HQ redeploys to IVO Izium, with cantonments and training grounds sharing defence responsibility with fully 'Westernised' UA mech forces deployed in the central Karkhiv-Izium-east Luhansk oblast 'bulge' of Ukraine.  Think CENTAG -- UA [Bundeswehr] fully integrated with US commands. Fulda Gap. Whatever 'heavy' means, it is deployed at full scale right heah! Go ahead, make our day....

2. Polish-Czech heavy armoured division IVO Dnipro and Poltava (which btw is also a forward TAC base and EW command centre). Attach heavily subsidised Romanian pioneer brigade (come on, you DID get your frontier restored to the Dnistr postwar in 2025, by popular referendum. Do your bit!)

....Here, my pathetic little US satrapy  can even contract some cranky old EOD sea lawyers to manage private contractors (I could accurately name the nations providing the actual sappers, but it would be distinctly nonwoke) clearing about ten bazillion mines/UXO in Donbas... that is actually the most dangerous postwar work, no joke.

3.  101 AB RCT in Kyiv backstops UA forces on the frontier from Chernaiv to Kyiv. TBH, the UA has nothing really to learn about  combat from the 101st, but it's always nice to professionalise and integrate the 'tail'.

4. Ideally, Anglo-US HQ advisory and training elements -- perhaps Étrangère as well? --  are based around Gomel, in a newly democratic but utterly Anything Goes Belarus. 

Minsk becomes the weirdest, edgiest and most violent city in Europe, the sole entrepot of the post-Soviet Mafiyas.  Tombstone 1889, or Shanghai 1924....

Я твой Гекльберри.

...Notice that 'NATO' plays no formal role in any of this for 10+ years.

****

So now we wander off the map of military into Emerging Markets possibility space.

1. By about 2032, Ukraine, Europe's GMP compliant manufacturing hub, has already reached middle income status on a national average per capita GDP basis.

2. Fantastic yakitori, chaat and vegan Texmex, plus gourmet coffee, is standard fare in youthful hi-tech edge cities exploding in quaint Old Town / university areas of all Ukraine's major cities.

3. Ukrainian biopharma / biotech eats China's (and India's) lunch with amazing speed, moving to the world's R&D leading edge (daily nonstop flights Odessa-Tel Aviv). 

4. With avid lobbying from the private sector (fine, just say George Soros if you're into that kind of thing, but it's pretty ecumenical in reality), Ukraine achieves EU membership by 2028, well before NATO becomes feasible.

5.  @kraze , realising that Living Well Is the Best Revenge, claims 'reparations' from ambiguously legal Muscovite massage therapists, one lap dance at a time.

In addition to his tireless custom but stingy tipping, he also gains some notoriety in the trade by insisting the 'visiting artists' recite verses from Pushkin and Bulgakov on the karaoke machine whilst Performing, with the bass reverb cranked up to Eleven....

Ни мамы, ни папы, ни газировки с виски. Нет русской возлюбленной!

6.  Coincidentally, rumour spreads that certain videos are embedded as easter eggs in CMBS2 scenarios. Shall we say, ahem, 'Enemy Condition' finally becomes meaningful in achieving Total Victory.  Whose grass mod are you using, winkwinknudgenudge?

7.  CM product sales soar faster than a  Stalinist pig iron quota, particularly for the Professional Edition. Steve retires to Stalin's former palace at Yalta (several degrees warmer than Vermont) and makes bank as a docent, with the grudging assent of his wife, while obdurately refusing to fix the PzKwIII turret rotation bug, or sumfink.

6. Meanwhile, across the bristling 2023 frontier, maquiladoras flourish, first in Crimea and Kuban, then in Belgorod and Voronezh... and, wait for it, Chechnya (where Kadyrov  has finally achieved martyrdom after enjoying too much lamb with apricots at the halal buffet).

Bored, totally unfunded Russian generals are only too happy to put their mobiks/zeks/ fanatical brainwashed Third Rome Zoomers to profitable (for the generals) work in sweatshops, picking and packing pills and chips, since 'hohols' can no longer can be found to do those jobs across the (densely fortified and mined but increasingly porous) frontier.

....So yeah, about that combat Readiness for that Next War, against peoples who are presently funding your commanders' beach houses in Cyprus.

8.  Sadly, the shattered and depopulated Donbas will take at least 12 years and billions in reconstruction aid and subsidies to start showing signs of economic life again. 'Clean energy' on the steppes is probably the thin edge of the wedge.

(copains, please don't take this too literally, it's presented more as a counterpoint to the last 20 pages or so.  But such trajectories did /are happening in Asia, in spite of dysfunctional rulers and seemingly shattered infra and social contracts. Take a look at today's Cambodia, which quite literally devoured about a third of itself nearly half a century ago!)

Within the humor is an excellent point. Anyone who told you in 1979 that Asia was going to be the peaceful, prosperous engine of global growth in 2023 would have been laughed out of the room. While I remain a pessimist on Russia, there's plenty to see in Ukraine and the rest of Eastern Europe that suggests a better future.

[kevinkin]

Reality sucks:

https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-war-one-year-lives-of-5-friends-0443aac32251e86a595cf2da23f8faef

We can't allow this to become normal. (Cold stare at our political - military - industrial elites.)

Seth's sort of coming in out of the dark:

https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2023/02/16/the_long_term_fight_881975.html

Russia wants not a “grinding war of attrition”, but rather to make Ukraine look like an attritional war, because this evokes images within Western historical memory of the Russian bear’s indomitable will.

So the perception of a war of attrition. Um, have to think on that. Tell that to the mom who's kid lies under another mom's kid in front of an UA trench. 

Ukrainian skill-at-arms can defeat Russia’s strategy on the battlefield.  The West must also defeat this strategy in the domain of political perception.  If Russia is to be forced to the bargaining table, it must be convinced that the West can and will sustain Ukraine in the long-term.

An MQ-9 transfer, properly conceived, would demonstrate the West’s commitment to long-term Ukrainian sustainment.  It ought to include, however, fighter jets and long-range missiles alongside it to protect Ukrainian airspace, enable Ukraine’s southern and eastern offensives, and after the current phase of conflict ends, ensure that Ukraine can strike targets within Russia. 

Holy out of left field batman.

 

 

Edited February 17, 2023 by kevinkin

[LongLeftFlank]

7 minutes ago, billbindc said:

Within the humor is an excellent point. Anyone who told you in 1979 that Asia was going to be the peaceful, prosperous engine of global growth in 2023 would have been laughed out of the room. While I remain a pessimist on Russia, there's plenty to see in Ukraine and the rest of Eastern Europe that suggests a better future.

Xactly! 

As I think we've touched on before (and you mentioned you have spent time on the ground out here as well), I live this stuff on a daily basis.

There's plenty of greedy and frustrating own-goals out here still (did I mention I live this on a daily basis?). But across the board it's dawned on ordinary people that their best years are still to come and that their children will live far better than they do.

....Sadly, I can't say the same about our own native lands.  But I guess that's why I haven't lived there for nearly 20 years.

But Ukraine (ironically for far rightists who idolise Tsar Vlad) may in fact prove to be the 'Great White Hope' and displace Moscow as the centre for the next iteration of 'Slavdom'. Culture follows the money.

While there is a Core-Periphery dynamic, this isn't a 'Polish plumbers (with PhDs)' migrant/remittances multigenerational development model, it's a lot more direct, and based very much on home soil.

... and btw, Poles (and Czechs and Slovaks) with access to capital and ability to mobilise talent across borders will do quite nicely out of all this as well.

[Taranis]

15-30/01/23, for History

[The_Capt]

38 minutes ago, kevinkin said:

Russia wants not a “grinding war of attrition”, but rather to make Ukraine look like an attritional war, because this evokes images within Western historical memory of the Russian bear’s indomitable will.

So we do have a couple of examples of modern wars of attrition:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yugoslav_Wars

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran–Iraq_War

And if one looks at the damage we are probably right between them in this war.  And neither of these came anywhere near the two world wars.

I think the authors point is valid in that Russia/Putin knows the West pretty well, they have been studying us for a long time even if it was through a skewed lens.  I am betting in Putin's head we are soft, entitled, selfish and indulgent - and in some ways he is not wrong.  So the theory here is that if Russia can make this look like a hard war and not the easy ones we are used to, we will back out.  A bluff if you will.

The question is just how much Putin-theatre can Russia tolerate?  It is not a bottomless well despite our fears otherwise.  If that were true there would be 3M poorly trained and equipped Russian troops in Ukraine right now.

Edited February 17, 2023 by The_Capt

[billbindc]

19 minutes ago, LongLeftFlank said:

Xactly! 

As I think we've touched on before (and you mentioned you have spent time on the ground out here as well), I live this stuff on a daily basis.

There's plenty of greedy and frustrating own-goals out here still (did I mention I live this on a daily basis?). But across the board it's dawned on ordinary people that their best years are still to come and that their children will live far better than they do.

....Sadly, I can't say the same about our own native lands.  But I guess that's why I haven't lived there for nearly 20 years.

But Ukraine (ironically for far rightists who idolise Tsar Vlad) may in fact prove to be the 'Great White Hope' and displace Moscow as the centre for the next iteration of 'Slavdom'. Culture follows the money.

While there is a Core-Periphery dynamic, this isn't a 'Polish plumbers (with PhDs)' migrant/remittances multigenerational development model, it's a lot more direct, and based very much on home soil.

... and btw, Poles (and Czechs and Slovaks) with access to capital and ability to mobilise talent across borders will do quite nicely out of all this as well.

The foundation of reactionary politics in US is that many ordinary people live in relative luxury but imagine it is penury and that their kids won’t do as well as they did (Trump support was overwhelmingly from folks making above $50k/year). Their antipathy to immigrants is that they worry they might actually do this whole America thing better.

Ukraine’s reactionary politics is being crushed by this war. The oligarchs simply can’t compete in a society where corruption is a barrier to throwing out the hated Russian bear. And regular people are learning they can fight a war, use social contacts to supply an army, self fund tank destroyer units. It’s civic empowerment in the most accelerated way. You can see in things like that video from a few months ago where a police checkpoint was shaking down drivers. The local TD unit found out and came and arrested them all. 

One can see this sort of attitude in Vietnam. For all of that nation’s problems, people have a sense of identity and a confidence that is pretty amazing. It makes them much more powerful than their mere numbers suggest.

 

[Yet]

 I cant wait for a war-economy to turn things upside down a bit. Maybe we will finally find out that we dont need 17 different electronic toothbrush factories, and that we do need drones and shells for UA. When the bear is kicked out.. lets produce stuff that really improves life on this big blue egg.

[Lethaface]

1 hour ago, LongLeftFlank said:

Also extraordinarily helpful and eloquent 'facts on the ground':

1.  Black Horse HQ redeploys to IVO Izium, with cantonments and training grounds sharing defence responsibility with fully 'Westernised' UA mech forces deployed in the central Karkhiv-Izium-east Luhansk oblast 'bulge' of Ukraine.  Think CENTAG -- UA [Bundeswehr] fully integrated with US commands. Fulda Gap. Whatever 'heavy' means, it is deployed at full scale right heah! Go ahead, make our day....

2. Polish-Czech heavy armoured division IVO Dnipro and Poltava (which btw is also a forward TAC base and EW command centre). Attach heavily subsidised Romanian pioneer brigade (come on, you DID get your frontier restored to the Dnistr postwar in 2025, by popular referendum. Do your bit!)

....Here, my pathetic little US satrapy  can even contract some cranky old EOD sea lawyers to manage private contractors (I could accurately name the nations providing the actual sappers, but it would be distinctly nonwoke) clearing about ten bazillion mines/UXO in Donbas... that is actually the most dangerous postwar work, no joke.

3.  101 AB RCT in Kyiv backstops UA forces on the frontier from Chernaiv to Kyiv. TBH, the UA has nothing really to learn about  combat from the 101st, but it's always nice to professionalise and integrate the 'tail'.

4. Ideally, Anglo-US HQ advisory and training elements -- perhaps Étrangère as well? --  are based around Gomel, in a newly democratic but utterly Anything Goes Belarus. 

Minsk becomes the weirdest, edgiest and most violent city in Europe, the sole entrepot of the post-Soviet Mafiyas.  Tombstone 1889, or Shanghai 1924....

Я твой Гекльберри.

...Notice that 'NATO' plays no formal role in any of this for 10+ years.

****

So now we wander off the map of military into Emerging Markets possibility space.

1. By about 2032, Ukraine, Europe's GMP compliant manufacturing hub, has already reached middle income status on a national average per capita GDP basis.

2. Fantastic yakitori, chaat and vegan Texmex, plus gourmet coffee, is standard fare in youthful hi-tech edge cities exploding in quaint Old Town / university areas of all Ukraine's major cities.

3. Ukrainian biopharma / biotech eats China's (and India's) lunch with amazing speed, moving to the world's R&D leading edge (daily nonstop flights Odessa-Tel Aviv). 

4. With avid lobbying from the private sector (fine, just say George Soros if you're into that kind of thing, but it's pretty ecumenical in reality), Ukraine achieves EU membership by 2028, well before NATO becomes feasible.

5.  @kraze , realising that Living Well Is the Best Revenge, claims 'reparations' from ambiguously legal Muscovite massage therapists, one lap dance at a time.

In addition to his tireless custom but stingy tipping, he also gains some notoriety in the trade by insisting the 'visiting artists' recite verses from Pushkin and Bulgakov on the karaoke machine whilst Performing, with the bass reverb cranked up to Eleven....

Ни мамы, ни папы, ни газировки с виски. Нет русской возлюбленной!

6.  Coincidentally, rumour spreads that certain videos are embedded as easter eggs in CMBS2 scenarios. Shall we say, ahem, 'Enemy Condition' finally becomes meaningful in achieving Total Victory.  Whose grass mod are you using, winkwinknudgenudge?

7.  CM product sales soar faster than a  Stalinist pig iron quota, particularly for the Professional Edition. Steve retires to Stalin's former palace at Yalta (several degrees warmer than Vermont) and makes bank as a docent, with the grudging assent of his wife, while obdurately refusing to fix the PzKwIII turret rotation bug, or sumfink.

6. Meanwhile, across the bristling 2023 frontier, maquiladoras flourish, first in Crimea and Kuban, then in Belgorod and Voronezh... and, wait for it, Chechnya (where Kadyrov  has finally achieved martyrdom after enjoying too much lamb with apricots at the halal buffet).

Bored, totally unfunded Russian generals are only too happy to put their mobiks/zeks/ fanatical brainwashed Third Rome Zoomers to profitable (for the generals) work in sweatshops, picking and packing pills and chips, since 'hohols' can no longer can be found to do those jobs across the (densely fortified and mined but increasingly porous) frontier.

....So yeah, about that combat Readiness for that Next War, against peoples who are presently funding your commanders' beach houses in Cyprus.

8.  Sadly, the shattered and depopulated Donbas will take at least 12 years and billions in reconstruction aid and subsidies to start showing signs of economic life again. 'Clean energy' on the steppes is probably the thin edge of the wedge.

(copains, please don't take this too literally, it's presented more as a counterpoint to the last 20 pages or so.  But such trajectories did /are happening in Asia, in spite of dysfunctional rulers and seemingly shattered infra and social contracts. Take a look at today's Cambodia, which quite literally devoured about a third of itself nearly half a century ago!)

I forgot weekend starts early when it's 7+ hours later  Sure reads more pleasant than about the nukes but not sure if Kraze can get warmed up listening to Bulgakov while getting a Russian massage. Nothing impossible though.

Salut!

[danfrodo]

Sharing this for the two videos.  One showing rather impressive mud/water capability of a TOS-1A.  The other of someone that will grow up in a free democracy because of the sacrifice of a lot of her countrymen.

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/2/17/2153405/-Ukraine-update-New-Western-armor-is-just-days-away-from-arriving-in-Ukraine

 

[Beleg85]

1 hour ago, LongLeftFlank said:

Also extraordinarily helpful and eloquent 'facts on the ground':

1.  Black Horse HQ redeploys to IVO Izium, with cantonments and training grounds sharing defence responsibility with fully 'Westernised' UA mech forces deployed in the central Karkhiv-Izium-east Luhansk oblast 'bulge' of Ukraine.  Think CENTAG -- UA [Bundeswehr] fully integrated with US commands. Fulda Gap. Whatever 'heavy' means, it is deployed at full scale right heah! Go ahead, make our day....

2. Polish-Czech heavy armoured division IVO Dnipro and Poltava (which btw is also a forward TAC base and EW command centre). Attach heavily subsidised Romanian pioneer brigade (come on, you DID get your frontier restored to the Dnistr postwar in 2025, by popular referendum. Do your bit!)

....Here, my pathetic little US satrapy  can even contract some cranky old EOD sea lawyers to manage private contractors (I could accurately name the nations providing the actual sappers, but it would be distinctly nonwoke) clearing about ten bazillion mines/UXO in Donbas... that is actually the most dangerous postwar work, no joke.

3.  101 AB RCT in Kyiv backstops UA forces on the frontier from Chernaiv to Kyiv. TBH, the UA has nothing really to learn about  combat from the 101st, but it's always nice to professionalise and integrate the 'tail'.

4. Ideally, Anglo-US HQ advisory and training elements -- perhaps Étrangère as well? --  are based around Gomel, in a newly democratic but utterly Anything Goes Belarus. 

Minsk becomes the weirdest, edgiest and most violent city in Europe, the sole entrepot of the post-Soviet Mafiyas.  Tombstone 1889, or Shanghai 1924....

Я твой Гекльберри.

...Notice that 'NATO' plays no formal role in any of this for 10+ years.

****

So now we wander off the map of military into Emerging Markets possibility space.

1. By about 2032, Ukraine, Europe's GMP compliant manufacturing hub, has already reached middle income status on a national average per capita GDP basis.

2. Fantastic yakitori, chaat and vegan Texmex, plus gourmet coffee, is standard fare in youthful hi-tech edge cities exploding in quaint Old Town / university areas of all Ukraine's major cities.

3. Ukrainian biopharma / biotech eats China's (and India's) lunch with amazing speed, moving to the world's R&D leading edge (daily nonstop flights Odessa-Tel Aviv). 

4. With avid lobbying from the private sector (fine, just say George Soros if you're into that kind of thing, but it's pretty ecumenical in reality), Ukraine achieves EU membership by 2028, well before NATO becomes feasible.

5.  @kraze , realising that Living Well Is the Best Revenge, claims 'reparations' from ambiguously legal Muscovite massage therapists, one lap dance at a time.

In addition to his tireless custom but stingy tipping, he also gains some notoriety in the trade by insisting the 'visiting artists' recite verses from Pushkin and Bulgakov on the karaoke machine whilst Performing, with the bass reverb cranked up to Eleven....

Ни мамы, ни папы, ни газировки с виски. Нет русской возлюбленной!

6.  Coincidentally, rumour spreads that certain videos are embedded as easter eggs in CMBS2 scenarios. Shall we say, ahem, 'Enemy Condition' finally becomes meaningful in achieving Total Victory.  Whose grass mod are you using, winkwinknudgenudge?

7.  CM product sales soar faster than a  Stalinist pig iron quota, particularly for the Professional Edition. Steve retires to Stalin's former palace at Yalta (several degrees warmer than Vermont) and makes bank as a docent, with the grudging assent of his wife, while obdurately refusing to fix the PzKwIII turret rotation bug, or sumfink.

6. Meanwhile, across the bristling 2023 frontier, maquiladoras flourish, first in Crimea and Kuban, then in Belgorod and Voronezh... and, wait for it, Chechnya (where Kadyrov  has finally achieved martyrdom after enjoying too much lamb with apricots at the halal buffet).

Bored, totally unfunded Russian generals are only too happy to put their mobiks/zeks/ fanatical brainwashed Third Rome Zoomers to profitable (for the generals) work in sweatshops, picking and packing pills and chips, since 'hohols' can no longer can be found to do those jobs across the (densely fortified and mined but increasingly porous) frontier.

....So yeah, about that combat Readiness for that Next War, against peoples who are presently funding your commanders' beach houses in Cyprus.

8.  Sadly, the shattered and depopulated Donbas will take at least 12 years and billions in reconstruction aid and subsidies to start showing signs of economic life again. 'Clean energy' on the steppes is probably the thin edge of the wedge.

(copains, please don't take this too literally, it's presented more as a counterpoint to the last 20 pages or so.  But such trajectories did /are happening in Asia, in spite of dysfunctional rulers and seemingly shattered infra and social contracts. Take a look at today's Cambodia, which quite literally devoured about a third of itself nearly half a century ago!)

That sounds almost like introduction to some cyberpunk novel.

 

It must be really difficult for Wagner...every day they seem to record new videos openly complaining that they lack ammo and supplies. Here morgue staff ask for help, claiming they have hundreds of casualties while "your children and cousins record tiktok videos" [beware, blurred by still graphic].

Also interesting info from soldier fighting at Bakhmut to author of the channel; he claims "For first time Russian artillery is barely working. Wagnerites attacked without support, but were turned into meat. They get back for bodies in the night, but were destroyed by fire from m777. They throw "meatbags" now at various sectors but not on whole front."

 

[Lethaface]

11 minutes ago, danfrodo said:

Sharing this for the two videos.  One showing rather impressive mud/water capability of a TOS-1A.  The other of someone that will grow up in a free democracy because of the sacrifice of a lot of her countrymen.

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/2/17/2153405/-Ukraine-update-New-Western-armor-is-just-days-away-from-arriving-in-Ukraine

 

It has the chassis of T-72.

[G.I. Joe]

1 hour ago, LongLeftFlank said:

(copains, please don't take this too literally, it's presented more as a counterpoint to the last 20 pages or so.  But such trajectories did /are happening in Asia, in spite of dysfunctional rulers and seemingly shattered infra and social contracts. Take a look at today's Cambodia, which quite literally devoured about a third of itself nearly half a century ago!)

I am reminded of something from General Sir John Hackett and others' 1978 novel The Third World War. Near the end (I think it was in a nonfictional postscript), the authors offer a parable about a turn of the century burgher accurately predicting the ups and downs and wild pendulum swings of the next seventy years of German history, ending on an up note with the West German economic powerhouse of the Sixties... Naturally, the townsfolk locked him up as a madman.

Edited February 17, 2023 by G.I. Joe

[kevinkin]

35 minutes ago, The_Capt said:

A bluff if you will.

My take too. The monster Putin is throwing his population into a meat grinder and attrition is real for them. While back in the US, no one wants their kids thrown into that type of warfare. While there might be some lack of awareness of what is going on in eastern Ukraine, I think most Americans realize this is ugly warfare right now. Putin may want to make things so ugly Americans will recoil from direct involvement. So is he projecting a perception of attrition or the reality of it? I think more the later. 

[danfrodo]

46 minutes ago, Yet said:

 I cant wait for a war-economy to turn things upside down a bit. Maybe we will finally find out that we dont need 17 different electronic toothbrush factories, and that we do need drones and shells for UA. When the bear is kicked out.. lets produce stuff that really improves life on this big blue egg.

War economy?  Why do we need a war economy to defeat Putin in UKR?  A fraction of the US military spending is being supplied, this is mostly money that was already being spent.  The only war economy I've seen is the energy issues in europe and the higher gas prices in US (back down now).   US spending ~$800B just this year on military.  One year.  And we've only sent ~$50B to UKR over year one.  So in two years, with ~$1500B military spending, just in US, we might send $100B of support -- and that can be done within exising spending by slowing down schedules for some of the projects in already in the budget that aren't needed for UKR.  That doesn't require any sacrifice on the US economy whatsoever, except for when Putin messes w energy markets.  

[Kraft]

4 hours ago, Beleg85 said:

It is rather strange they did not spot nor suppress this lone defender.

He has a buddy in the dugout who he orders to reload his rifle and give him his weapon. Possibly wounded, otherwise Id think he'd be out in the trench as well.

Overall very chaotic, I hope the full GoPro will be released, I want to see what happens to the other 3 Russians that approached+BMP crew

[Lethaface]

 

[danfrodo]

4 minutes ago, Lethaface said:

 

I think with all the talk of drones & ISR & such we sometimes forget just how up close and personal this war is.  This is second video shared today showing terrifyingly close combat.  

[sburke]

is it Slovakia bashing day yet?

Slovakia is not allowing German howitzers to cross border from Ukraine for repairs for several weeks (yahoo.com)

[Yet]

1 hour ago, danfrodo said:

War economy? 

ofc. that wasn't the point

Edited February 17, 2023 by Yet
nevermind, dont want to start this discussion

[Lethaface]

26 minutes ago, sburke said:

is it Slovakia bashing day yet?

Slovakia is not allowing German howitzers to cross border from Ukraine for repairs for several weeks (yahoo.com)

It's probably also Germany fault 

[danfrodo]

19 minutes ago, Yet said:

ofc. that wasn't the point

Sorry to have misinterpreted your point, no offense intended whatsoever.  

[Aragorn2002]

48 minutes ago, sburke said:

is it Slovakia bashing day yet?

Slovakia is not allowing German howitzers to cross border from Ukraine for repairs for several weeks (yahoo.com)

Always Slovakia. Such an unpredictable country.

[sburke]

Wagner Group releases graphic video of corpses in desperate plea for more ammunition (yahoo.com)

[Falaise]

8 hours ago, DesertFox said:

Close Combat

 

 

crazy pictures
What interests me the most is to see at least one of these comrades holed up in the shelter frozen in fear
The attack at this point fails only by one who "pête les plombs"
It reminds me of reports that in a combat group there is one or two only that shoots and faces the attack
fascinating your pictures !!!

[Chibot Mk IX]

12 hours ago, Letter from Prague said:

Regarding Russia being even more radicalized in the future. As with other stuff, it seem the Ukrainians have already figured that out a while ago, and are just waiting for the West to realize (or stop lying to itself). Just listen to Zaluznyj (and also some Ukrainians in this very thread) talk about "after this war we need to be prepared for the next time Russian tries it".

Things will never go back to normal again.

I know some Chinese unofficial thinking tank also believe a defeated Russia will keep the expansion posture and can be more radicalized. But in their opinion Russia’s wrath will point to a different direction. And China should be concerned about this.

This scenario happened before. Before 1904 Russo-Japanese War Russian’s strategic focus were on central Asia and far east. They were looking for trouble in Afghanistan/Indian subcontinent, Manchuria and Korea. The Anglo-Japanese Alliance is a direct answer to this Russian expansion. Germany Empire stand behind Russia, German believed their support to Russia would week British empire. But their help to Russia is half-hearted, while British provided solid support to Japan. In the end, Russia suffered a humiliated defeat, they have to abandon their ambition in Far east. Instead , Russia turned around and meddling in Balkan, the German and Austria-Hungary's backyard. And in less than 10 years, two countries previously were in unofficial alliance are now becoming sworn enemies on the battlefield.

 

The lesson and the conclusion? “We should increase our support to Russia, we cannot allow a Russia defeat, we cannot afford China encircled by enemies.”