All Things Russia & Ukraine

[jhu72]

PWC from MSNBC:

https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opi ... e-n1290831

...never thought I'd see MSNBC publish something like that.
They normally mock it as disinformation from Russiam agents.
The worm is turning when confronted with the obvious.

... don't understand your surprise. Doesn't surprise me even a little. It is a very obvious "observation".

[jhu72]

Were the Germans in on it also -- blindsiding the US, or did the Poles blindside both allies? It makes a difference as to what is really going on!

"Breaking news" in the middle of US/PBS feed of DW News : " Poland had agreed to give it's entire fleet of Mig-29's to the US. The US is expected to let Ukraine use the planes to defend itself. Part of the deal between Poland & the US that would see Warsaw receive F-16's as replacements. "

No mention of transfer via Ramstein.

... interesting. Not sure what it means. Could be German non-denial denial. I guess we will see some reporter ask the question in the next 24 hours.

[jhu72]

McDonalds has declared a No Fry Zone in Russia.

Didn't see the mention around here of a couple Republican Senators ignoring secops and Zelenskyy's request and posting screenshots of their ongoing zoom call, including one of the Moscow 8.

... was pretty dumb. Rubio is a real mess.

[seacoaster]

McDonalds has declared a No Fry Zone in Russia.

Didn't see the mention around here of a couple Republican Senators ignoring secops and Zelenskyy's request and posting screenshots of their ongoing zoom call, including one of the Moscow 8.

... was pretty dumb. Rubio is a real mess.

Mario is on the Senate Intelligence Committee. Sigh…

[jhu72]

McDonalds has declared a No Fry Zone in Russia.

Didn't see the mention around here of a couple Republican Senators ignoring secops and Zelenskyy's request and posting screenshots of their ongoing zoom call, including one of the Moscow 8.

... was pretty dumb. Rubio is a real mess.

Mario is on the Senate Intelligence Committee. Sigh…

... I know. I know.

[Essexfenwick]

McDonalds has declared a No Fry Zone in Russia.

Didn't see the mention around here of a couple Republican Senators ignoring secops and Zelenskyy's request and posting screenshots of their ongoing zoom call, including one of the Moscow 8.

... was pretty dumb. Rubio is a real mess.

Mario is on the Senate Intelligence Committee. Sigh…

... I know. I know.

“Liddle Marco”, “Crooked Hillary” “Sleepy Creepy Biden” and “choked like a dog Romney”

All great examples of concentrated dum dum juice.

[Farfromgeneva]

https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/67331.html

Day Eight of the Russian Column Held Hostage (by the usual Russian incompetence)
March 5, 2022 by Trent Telenko

Welcome to the third installment of the Russian invasion of Ukraine series. Since Napoleon stated that the moral is to the physical what ten is to one.

I have posted on twitter about the Russian Army columns North of Kyiv decaying into immobile blobs due to the Rasputitsa, poorly maintained Chinese truck tires and shear “follow the plan” Russian incompetence.

The head and first dozen or so kilometers of the southernmost column north of Kiev have been stuck there for EIGHT DAYS. The Russians have since rammed more and more vehicles into this monster traffic jam (idiotically “following the plan” Soviet-style) so the whole thing is now 65-70 kilometers long (almost 40 miles).

And, because the trucks can’t go off-road due to the Rasputitsa mud and tire problems, they’re stuck on the roads and the roads’ shoulders three vehicles wide for the whole @40 miles. That means fuel and resupply trucks can’t move on or off road to deliver anything to anybody.

So all the columns’ heads are now out of fuel and battery power. They can’t move north, south or sideways, and everything behind them is stuck because of the mud, and rapidly running out of fuel and vehicle battery charge too (assuming they haven’t already). Nor can any of those columns defend themselves because they’re too densely packed. They’re just targets waiting for the Ukrainians to destroy them.

Only the Ukrainians had something better to do. They opened the floodgates of reservoirs around those columns to flood them and turn the surrounding areas into impassable quagmires for months – probably until July or August. (See photo below) Probably several thousand Russian vehicles in those columns will be irrecoverable losses. Hundreds of Russian soldiers might have drowned.

This was not just a debacle, but an EPIC one. About 1/5th of the Russian force in Ukraine is now flooded or trapped, and are definitely out of the war for good.

To start with, the Russian Army’s logistics are just hosed. The Ukrainians destroyed or still have possession of (in their cities) all the Russian/Ukrainian railheads, save for Kherson and Berdyansk, since the first day of the war. So Russian rail logistics are not possible into Ukraine without either/both a major battlefield success and a major rail engineering effort the Russians did not think was necessary.

The Ukrainians have been slamming every fuel truck they can find with every method available to them, which is big trouble for the Russians as they didn’t have many of those to begin with, and brought only the ammunition & food for a three-day operation.

The Russians have ditched their original 3-day “special operation” plan and have definitely shifted to “set-piece” battles requiring significant preparation, as those are better suited to their poorly trained troops.

The weak link is in doing that is the Russians plain lack the force density in the Ukraine to defend their rear areas, and in particular the bridges over the Ukraine’s many rivers and streams.

The Russian inability to suppress Ukrainian’s integrated air defense system stems in part due to the pathetically poor planning of missile launches which have mostly expended their pre-war inventory of Iskander & Kaliber Ground/Sea/Air launched cruise missiles plus the 500km ranged Iskander ballistic missiles for limited results.

It is also due to the (unknowable before combat) collapse of Russian emitter locating systems for hunting SAMs, intensely used by the Soviets, and Support Jamming capability, also heavily used by the Soviets.

And finally, the tenth day of combat has been showing the vast under-performance of radar threat warning receivers, defensive jammers and infrared missile warning systems on the latest Russian jets. All these deficiencies were visible before this campaign (since 2015) but their severity was difficult to assess before combat operations started over Ukraine.

Planning for RuAF suppression of air Ukrainian defense was keyed to human agents with cell phones and visual/radio beacons to locate UAF mobile SAM batteries pre-war for attack. A few batteries were hit but most seem to have survived. Ukrainian ground forces know of this trick now and it will not be repeated.

The slowness with which the Russian Air Force (RuAF) are showing in deconflicting their aircraft and their mobile integrated air defense system, after losing by capture several intact (with their codes and IFF) Pantsir-S1 and Tor short range missile complexes means the Russians lack air reconnaissance coverage of their rear areas in the Ukraine west of the Dnieper.

This means the Ukrainians can slip company-sized mobile raiding forces into the Russians’ rear areas and take out the bridges required to supply the Russian set-piece attacks being prepared. And they are doing so.

This doesn’t stop Russian set-piece attacks, but it increases their preparation time and, in particular, upsets their timing so the set-piece attacks cannot be coordinated for mutual support. Each will be a one-off.

I.e., the Russian advance has been slowed down in a major way. This buys the Ukrainians time to do other things to defeat the Russians. The most important thing the Ukrainians need is time. They have to take it from the Russians with ground operations & airstrikes.

For various reasons, I have the distinct impression that the Russians are now operating on a three-day decision-reaction cycle. If a major attack being planned is suddenly down to one key bridge connecting its assembly area to supply bases in Russia. It takes three days for the Russians to send a ground combat battalion to defend that bridge.

That is more than enough time for the Ukrainians to move one of their raiding companies there to destroy the bridge. I.e., the Ukrainians are clearly operating inside the Russians’ Observe, Orient, Decide, Act [OODA loop] a la USAF air strategist John Boyd. [More on this when I get to the counter factuals.]

The RuAF simply no longer has, for whatever reason, the air superiority it needed and had to stop Ukrainian mobile forces from counter attacking in the 1st three days of the war.

There seem to be no rear area security forces behind lead Russian columns anywhere save close to Crimea in the south. But even there the lead Russian columns heading for Odessa just got annihilated in a kettle battle. Mykolaiv was reported cleared of remaining Russian troops, with a large haul of captured Russian equipment trophied at Kubalkino AB near the city.

Elsewhere in the Russian occupied Kherson and Berdyansk cities, we saw major public protests with flags and Ukrainian anthem being sung, ruining Russian planned propaganda spectacles. The sieges of Mariupol and Volnovakha continue with Russians violating agreed ceasefires by moving ammo in ambulances.

Intensive combat was reported both NE and NW of Kyiv as the forces going around the two Russian armored column “Schwerpunkts” attempt breakthroughs, with engagements reported at Irpen as ongoing, and a defeat of the Russians in Chernihiv to the NE.

An attempted Eastern thrust from occupied Luhansk to envelop Kharkiv was reported to have failed today.

The 2nd Russian strategic echelon and the Belarusian Army cannot come from the north and Russia doesn’t have either rails or the truck park in the west or south to sustain anything trying to reach the out-of-supply forward columns because Ukraine owns the skies west of the Dnieper.

We are in an attrition phase, the outcome is still in doubt, and Russia still has an eight times bigger army.

Examining the Counterfactuals

I am seeing a number of people I formally trusted as military experts go sideways, hard, in Ukraine.

Bluntly, these “Experts” simply cannot get their group mind around the implications of the rotted tires of the Russian army’s truck fleet nor the fact that the Russians only control the ground they are actually standing on. These facts are utterly decisive for mechanized combat in Ukraine.

The key thing about the Russian truck fleet’s ill-maintained Chinese manufactured tires is they are not on Ukrainian trucks.

Short form counterfactual: Ukrainian logistics have superior mobility during the Raputitsa (Mud Season) because their tires will not disintegrate in the mud!

This is a huge Ukrainian advantage in mechanized combat that stacks quite nicely with the second counterfactual.

When you look up the relevant data about how ground combat power degrades from casualties in places like Trevor N. Dupuy’s books “Numbers, Predictions, and War: Using History to Evaluate Combat Factors and Predict the Outcome of Battles”, you find that the vast majority of mechanized ground forces’ fighting power disappears with the vehicles and not the people.

Vehicles are combat power in mechanized war.

Those who suffer less vehicle force attrition than their enemy win battles, and win wars, despite being smaller.

There are safe rear areas for the Ukrainians in Ukraine while there none for the Russian.

The Ukrainians are only losing vehicles to combat and capture. Their operational losses are being repaired and returned to them.

Meanwhile all Russian operational losses wind up either permanent losses to Ukrainian Territorial “Road Burning Details” OR AS CAPTURED UKRAINIAN MECHANIZED POWER.

Ukraine is winning the war of mechanized ground vehicle attrition with Russia inside Ukraine.

And who the h–l would have thought that!

I shared this with a West Point friend who flew choppers in the first gulf war (then got into finance super smart dude) and he thought this was an excellent piece. He also is pretty middle, center right but not like Brooklyn or Pete Brown would describe center right more like MD/Afan would describe center right

[old salt]

Also interesting to note with all the NATO / USA victim blaming in this thread, Moscow removed the three most pro-Russia voting regions in Ukraine in 2014. There wasn't much support for joining NATO prior to that, so removing those elements really pushed Ukraine policies west-ward.

The 2014 invasion was also about a trade issue, not the near or long term issue of Ukraine joining NATO.

NATO "expansion" is more of a distraction. The real issue all along has been EU economic expansion. We've seen a much greater emphasis by Russia to break up the EU than breaking up NATO. Brexit, Hungary, Poland, etc. EU economic policies at the border would do more to destabilize Russian politics and economics than NATO at the border ever would.

You can use EU & NATO interchangably. There's been a push to join both since the Orange Revolution in 2004.
The Euromaidan revolt & subsequent regime change was triggered by the failure to implement the EU-Ukraine Association agreement.

[old salt]

What a cluster-F :

https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukrai ... dc4410664e

The Pentagon on Tuesday rejected Poland’s surprise announcement that it would give the United States its MiG-29 fighter jets for use by Ukraine, a rare display of disharmony by NATO allies seeking to boost Ukrainian fighters while avoiding getting caught up in a wider war with Russia.

Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said Poland’s declaration that it intended to deliver the 28 jets to the U.S. Ramstein Air Base in Germany raised the concerning prospect of warplanes departing from a U.S. and NATO base to fly into airspace contested with Russia in the Ukraine conflict.

“We will continue to consult with Poland and our other NATO allies about this issue and the difficult logistical challenges it presents, but we do not believe Poland’s proposal is a tenable one,” Kirby said in a statement.

The proposed gift of more warplanes would be a morale booster for Ukrainians under pounding Russian assault for nearly two weeks. But it also raises the risk of the war expanding beyond Ukraine.

Russia has declared that supporting Ukraine’s air force would be tantamount to joining the war, and could spur retaliation.

White House officials were blindsided by the Polish announcement on the MiGs. The proposal did not come up during talks with Secretary of State Antony Blinken when he was recently in Poland, according to a U.S. official familiar with the talks.

The U.S. official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said White House officials did not think the proposal would easily solve the logistical challenges of providing aircraft to Ukraine.

U.S. Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland told lawmakers at a hearing on the Ukraine crisis Tuesday she learned of Poland’s plans only while driving to the hearing.

“To my knowledge, it wasn’t pre-consulted with us,” Nuland told senators.

The Polish Foreign Ministry announced the plan in a statement, which said the jets would be delivered to Ramstein free of charge.

“At the same time, Poland requests the United States to provide us with used aircraft with corresponding operational capabilities,” it said.

The Polish government also appealed to other owners of MIG-29 jets to follow suit.

Former Soviet-bloc NATO members Bulgaria and Slovakia also still have Soviet-made fighter jets in their air forces.

Additional air-defense capabilities are the No. 1 priority for Ukraine’s military right now, the country’s defense attache in Washington, Maj. Gen. Borys Kremenetskyi, told The Associated Press on Tuesday after returning from a meeting at the Pentagon. “It can be ground-based air-defense systems. It can be fighter jets, whatever possible,” he said.

Ukraine also needs additional anti-tank, anti-armor weapons and coastal defense capabilities to defend against Russian ships in the south, he said.

The handover of Poland’s 28 Soviet-made MiG-29s would signal Western resolve to do more for Ukraine. Militarily, however, the number of planes offered would make it unlikely to be a game-changer. And MiG-29s are inferior to more sophisticated Russian aircraft and could be easy prey for Russian pilots and Russian missiles.

A senior U.S. defense official has said Ukrainians are flying relatively few of their existing aircraft, for relatively little time, as it is. The defense official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the U.S. assessment, said it’s possible that Ukraine does not need more planes and would benefit most from more of the weapons it uses effectively every day, including anti-aircraft Stinger and anti-tank Javelin missiles.

The official also said that Russia currently has the capacity to reach almost the entire country of Ukraine with its surface-to-air missiles, including from within Russia and from ships in the Black Sea.

Any MiG transfer is fraught with complications. Neither NATO nor the European Union wants to be seen as directly involved in such a transaction, which would sharply raise already extreme tensions with Russia.

In order to maintain the pretense that NATO and the EU are not direct participants in the Ukraine conflict, U.S. and Polish officials have been considering a variety of options. One begins with the “donation” of Poland’s MiGs to the United States, as Poland announced on Tuesday.

Under one scenario, Poland would deliver the fighter jets to the U.S. base in Germany, where they would be repainted and flown to a non-NATO, non-EU country. Ukrainian pilots would then come to fly them to Ukraine.

No country has been publicly identified as a transit point, but Kosovo, a non-aligned country that is very friendly with the United States, has been mentioned as one of several nations that might be willing to serve as a middle point.

Poland’s proposed gift would also weaken Poland’s own air force at a time of heightened danger in eastern Europe.

Poland had been asking for the U.S. to provide it with F-16 fighter jets to replace the MiGs.

F-16 production is backlogged, however, and the next recipient in line for new deliveries is Taiwan, which is facing renewed threats from China and has strong support from both parties in Congress.

In its statement, the Polish government specifically asked for “used” planes, a distinction that would allow the Biden administration to bypass congressional opposition to making Taiwan wait to receive its F-16s.

Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said any decision about delivering offensive weapons must be made unanimously by NATO members.

“This is why we are able to give all of our fleet of jet fighters to Ramstein. But we are not ready to make any moves on our own because ... we are not a party to this war,” he said.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said Tuesday that he believed the aid that Congress hopes to approve later this week for Ukraine will include loan guarantees to help NATO allies replenish their air forces after giving MiGs to Ukraine.

Those old Mig 29's are still useful for the grunt work of the NATO air policing mission, defending NATO airspace where they would fly ground controlled intercepts against incoming strike aircraft & would not have to penetrate heavily defended Russian airspace. Romania is still effectively using even older Mig-21s in that role. The NATO countries operating them have an orderly plan to use them in that mission for the rest of their useful service lives as they transition those squadrons to F-35s or F-16s. This would blow up those plans.

[cradleandshoot]

Has anyone been in touch with Hillary? Did she put her reset button in storage someplace?The world sure could use a reset button right now.

[MDlaxfan76]

https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/67331.html

Day Eight of the Russian Column Held Hostage (by the usual Russian incompetence)
March 5, 2022 by Trent Telenko

Welcome to the third installment of the Russian invasion of Ukraine series. Since Napoleon stated that the moral is to the physical what ten is to one.

I have posted on twitter about the Russian Army columns North of Kyiv decaying into immobile blobs due to the Rasputitsa, poorly maintained Chinese truck tires and shear “follow the plan” Russian incompetence.

The head and first dozen or so kilometers of the southernmost column north of Kiev have been stuck there for EIGHT DAYS. The Russians have since rammed more and more vehicles into this monster traffic jam (idiotically “following the plan” Soviet-style) so the whole thing is now 65-70 kilometers long (almost 40 miles).

And, because the trucks can’t go off-road due to the Rasputitsa mud and tire problems, they’re stuck on the roads and the roads’ shoulders three vehicles wide for the whole @40 miles. That means fuel and resupply trucks can’t move on or off road to deliver anything to anybody.

So all the columns’ heads are now out of fuel and battery power. They can’t move north, south or sideways, and everything behind them is stuck because of the mud, and rapidly running out of fuel and vehicle battery charge too (assuming they haven’t already). Nor can any of those columns defend themselves because they’re too densely packed. They’re just targets waiting for the Ukrainians to destroy them.

Only the Ukrainians had something better to do. They opened the floodgates of reservoirs around those columns to flood them and turn the surrounding areas into impassable quagmires for months – probably until July or August. (See photo below) Probably several thousand Russian vehicles in those columns will be irrecoverable losses. Hundreds of Russian soldiers might have drowned.

This was not just a debacle, but an EPIC one. About 1/5th of the Russian force in Ukraine is now flooded or trapped, and are definitely out of the war for good.

To start with, the Russian Army’s logistics are just hosed. The Ukrainians destroyed or still have possession of (in their cities) all the Russian/Ukrainian railheads, save for Kherson and Berdyansk, since the first day of the war. So Russian rail logistics are not possible into Ukraine without either/both a major battlefield success and a major rail engineering effort the Russians did not think was necessary.

The Ukrainians have been slamming every fuel truck they can find with every method available to them, which is big trouble for the Russians as they didn’t have many of those to begin with, and brought only the ammunition & food for a three-day operation.

The Russians have ditched their original 3-day “special operation” plan and have definitely shifted to “set-piece” battles requiring significant preparation, as those are better suited to their poorly trained troops.

The weak link is in doing that is the Russians plain lack the force density in the Ukraine to defend their rear areas, and in particular the bridges over the Ukraine’s many rivers and streams.

The Russian inability to suppress Ukrainian’s integrated air defense system stems in part due to the pathetically poor planning of missile launches which have mostly expended their pre-war inventory of Iskander & Kaliber Ground/Sea/Air launched cruise missiles plus the 500km ranged Iskander ballistic missiles for limited results.

It is also due to the (unknowable before combat) collapse of Russian emitter locating systems for hunting SAMs, intensely used by the Soviets, and Support Jamming capability, also heavily used by the Soviets.

And finally, the tenth day of combat has been showing the vast under-performance of radar threat warning receivers, defensive jammers and infrared missile warning systems on the latest Russian jets. All these deficiencies were visible before this campaign (since 2015) but their severity was difficult to assess before combat operations started over Ukraine.

Planning for RuAF suppression of air Ukrainian defense was keyed to human agents with cell phones and visual/radio beacons to locate UAF mobile SAM batteries pre-war for attack. A few batteries were hit but most seem to have survived. Ukrainian ground forces know of this trick now and it will not be repeated.

The slowness with which the Russian Air Force (RuAF) are showing in deconflicting their aircraft and their mobile integrated air defense system, after losing by capture several intact (with their codes and IFF) Pantsir-S1 and Tor short range missile complexes means the Russians lack air reconnaissance coverage of their rear areas in the Ukraine west of the Dnieper.

This means the Ukrainians can slip company-sized mobile raiding forces into the Russians’ rear areas and take out the bridges required to supply the Russian set-piece attacks being prepared. And they are doing so.

This doesn’t stop Russian set-piece attacks, but it increases their preparation time and, in particular, upsets their timing so the set-piece attacks cannot be coordinated for mutual support. Each will be a one-off.

I.e., the Russian advance has been slowed down in a major way. This buys the Ukrainians time to do other things to defeat the Russians. The most important thing the Ukrainians need is time. They have to take it from the Russians with ground operations & airstrikes.

For various reasons, I have the distinct impression that the Russians are now operating on a three-day decision-reaction cycle. If a major attack being planned is suddenly down to one key bridge connecting its assembly area to supply bases in Russia. It takes three days for the Russians to send a ground combat battalion to defend that bridge.

That is more than enough time for the Ukrainians to move one of their raiding companies there to destroy the bridge. I.e., the Ukrainians are clearly operating inside the Russians’ Observe, Orient, Decide, Act [OODA loop] a la USAF air strategist John Boyd. [More on this when I get to the counter factuals.]

The RuAF simply no longer has, for whatever reason, the air superiority it needed and had to stop Ukrainian mobile forces from counter attacking in the 1st three days of the war.

There seem to be no rear area security forces behind lead Russian columns anywhere save close to Crimea in the south. But even there the lead Russian columns heading for Odessa just got annihilated in a kettle battle. Mykolaiv was reported cleared of remaining Russian troops, with a large haul of captured Russian equipment trophied at Kubalkino AB near the city.

Elsewhere in the Russian occupied Kherson and Berdyansk cities, we saw major public protests with flags and Ukrainian anthem being sung, ruining Russian planned propaganda spectacles. The sieges of Mariupol and Volnovakha continue with Russians violating agreed ceasefires by moving ammo in ambulances.

Intensive combat was reported both NE and NW of Kyiv as the forces going around the two Russian armored column “Schwerpunkts” attempt breakthroughs, with engagements reported at Irpen as ongoing, and a defeat of the Russians in Chernihiv to the NE.

An attempted Eastern thrust from occupied Luhansk to envelop Kharkiv was reported to have failed today.

The 2nd Russian strategic echelon and the Belarusian Army cannot come from the north and Russia doesn’t have either rails or the truck park in the west or south to sustain anything trying to reach the out-of-supply forward columns because Ukraine owns the skies west of the Dnieper.

We are in an attrition phase, the outcome is still in doubt, and Russia still has an eight times bigger army.

Examining the Counterfactuals

I am seeing a number of people I formally trusted as military experts go sideways, hard, in Ukraine.

Bluntly, these “Experts” simply cannot get their group mind around the implications of the rotted tires of the Russian army’s truck fleet nor the fact that the Russians only control the ground they are actually standing on. These facts are utterly decisive for mechanized combat in Ukraine.

The key thing about the Russian truck fleet’s ill-maintained Chinese manufactured tires is they are not on Ukrainian trucks.

Short form counterfactual: Ukrainian logistics have superior mobility during the Raputitsa (Mud Season) because their tires will not disintegrate in the mud!

This is a huge Ukrainian advantage in mechanized combat that stacks quite nicely with the second counterfactual.

When you look up the relevant data about how ground combat power degrades from casualties in places like Trevor N. Dupuy’s books “Numbers, Predictions, and War: Using History to Evaluate Combat Factors and Predict the Outcome of Battles”, you find that the vast majority of mechanized ground forces’ fighting power disappears with the vehicles and not the people.

Vehicles are combat power in mechanized war.

Those who suffer less vehicle force attrition than their enemy win battles, and win wars, despite being smaller.

There are safe rear areas for the Ukrainians in Ukraine while there none for the Russian.

The Ukrainians are only losing vehicles to combat and capture. Their operational losses are being repaired and returned to them.

Meanwhile all Russian operational losses wind up either permanent losses to Ukrainian Territorial “Road Burning Details” OR AS CAPTURED UKRAINIAN MECHANIZED POWER.

Ukraine is winning the war of mechanized ground vehicle attrition with Russia inside Ukraine.

And who the h–l would have thought that!

I shared this with a West Point friend who flew choppers in the first gulf war (then got into finance super smart dude) and he thought this was an excellent piece. He also is pretty middle, center right but not like Brooklyn or Pete Brown would describe center right more like MD/Afan would describe center right

Very interesting piece; let's hope he's correct about:

1) Russian strategic ineptitude;
2) Russian tactical slow cycle times;
3) Russian equipment failures for wet, muddy conditions;
4) Effectiveness of Ukrainian cycles and tactics.

And let's hope the Ukrainians get sufficiently resupplied with the weapons, ammo, gear, food etc to fully maximize their advantages above, because 8:1 is brutal odds otherwise.

And obviously, let's hope that some Russian commanders decide that purposely bombing civilians is ultimately a losing proposition, including being war crimes for which they may be personally held to account. And stop.

The last is unlikely.

Also, I agree with Salty that the Polish plane situation is a cluster-F, though I disagree with the various efforts by some commentators in the press and anonymously from 'sources' to whitewash this as immaterial to the war effort. Unless the Ukrainians simply don't have the trained pilots to use them, the resources, properly applied can further contest Russian efforts to control the air and can help enable Ukrainian resupply on the ground. Clearly there are tactical issues about how they can be best utilized, with losses minimized, but these resources are needed for hot war contest not to just sit on the ground.

Where I suspect that Salty is correct is the assessment that other resources are more important than the planes, ala Javelins, Stingers, etc. But I don't think the planes are just a morale booster, though I do think that's important as well.

I've been advocating drones as I think that's the best way to strike important targets from afar. Least costly in both materiel and potential lives.

The big issue for both planes and drones appears to be one of attribution to a specific country, or even to NATO generally. No one seems to want to "own" the provision of these capabilities to Ukraine, yet Stingers and Javelins are just fine.

Which to me means we're letting Putin dictate what we can and cannot do to support Ukraine's effort...and he's going to define any support as aggression from NATO as his internal propaganda. The issue for whether he strikes directly at NATO will always be because of what he decides he's willing to put Russia through in return, not whether there's some sort of justification he can sell to his people.

And it's becoming very, very clear that he'd lose badly any direct conflict with NATO. We need to make that increasingly obvious if such overwhelming outcome is what would deter him from doing so.

But, is he a madman enough to choose to burn it all down by going nuclear?

[CU88]

By Thomas L. Friedman
Opinion Columnist

If you’re hoping that the instability that Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine has wreaked on global markets and geopolitics has peaked, your hope is in vain. We haven’t seen anything yet. Wait until Putin fully grasps that his only choices left in Ukraine are how to lose — early and small and a little humiliated or late and big and deeply humiliated.

I can’t even wrap my mind around what kind of financial and political shocks will radiate from Russia — this country that is the world’s third-largest oil producer and possesses some 6,000 nuclear warheads — when it loses a war of choice that was spearheaded by one man, who can never afford to admit defeat.

Why not? Because Putin surely knows that “the Russian national tradition is unforgiving of military setbacks,” observed Leon Aron, a Russia expert at the American Enterprise Institute, who is writing a book about Putin’s road to Ukraine.

“Virtually every major defeat has resulted in radical change,” added Aron, writing in The Washington Post. “The Crimean War (1853-1856) precipitated Emperor Alexander II’s liberal revolution from above. The Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905) brought about the First Russian Revolution. The catastrophe of World War I resulted in Emperor Nicholas II’s abdication and the Bolshevik Revolution. And the war in Afghanistan became a key factor in Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms.” Also, retreating from Cuba contributed significantly to Nikita Khrushchev’s removal two years later.

In the coming weeks it will become more and more obvious that our biggest problem with Putin in Ukraine is that he will refuse to lose early and small, and the only other outcome is that he will lose big and late. But because this is solely his war and he cannot admit defeat, he could keep doubling down in Ukraine until … until he contemplates using a nuclear weapon.

Why do I say that defeat in Ukraine is Putin’s only option, that only the timing and size is in question? Because the easy, low-cost invasion he envisioned and the welcome party from Ukrainians he imagined were total fantasies — and everything flows from that.

Putin completely underestimated Ukraine’s will to be independent and become part of the West. He completely underestimated the will of many Ukrainians to fight, even if it meant dying, for those two goals. He completely overestimated his own armed forces. He completely underestimated President Biden’s ability to galvanize a global economic and military coalition to enable Ukrainians to stand and fight and to devastate Russia at home — the most effective U.S. coalition-building effort since George H.W. Bush made Saddam Hussein pay for his folly of seizing Kuwait. And he completely underestimated the ability of companies and individuals all over the world to participate in, and amplify, economic sanctions on Russia — far beyond anything governments initiated or mandated.

When you get that many things wrong as a leader, your best option is to lose early and small. In Putin’s case that would mean withdrawing his forces from Ukraine immediately; offering a face-saving lie to justify his “special military operation,” like claiming it successfully protected Russians living in Ukraine; and promising to help Russians’ brethren rebuild. But the inescapable humiliation would surely be intolerable for this man obsessed with restoring the dignity and unity of what he sees as the Russian motherland.

Incidentally, the way things are going on the ground in Ukraine right now, it is not out of the realm of possibility that Putin could actually lose early and big. I would not bet on it, but with every passing day that more and more Russian soldiers are killed in Ukraine, who knows what happens to the fighting spirit of the conscripts in the Russian Army being asked to fight a deadly urban war against fellow Slavs for a cause that was never really explained to them.

Given the resistance of Ukrainians everywhere to the Russian occupation, for Putin to “win” militarily on the ground his army will need to subdue every major city in Ukraine. That includes the capital, Kyiv — after probably weeks of urban warfare and massive civilian casualties. In short, it can be done only by Putin and his generals perpetrating war crimes not seen in Europe since Hitler. It will make Putin’s Russia a permanent international pariah.

Moreover, how would Putin maintain control of another country — Ukraine — that has roughly one-third the population of Russia, with many residents hostile to Moscow? He would probably need to maintain every one of the 150,000-plus soldiers he has deployed there — if not more — forever.

There is simply no pathway that I see for Putin to win in Ukraine in any sustainable way because it simply is not the country he thought it was — a country just waiting for a quick decapitation of its “Nazi” leadership so that it could gently fall back into the bosom of Mother Russia.

So either he cuts his losses now and eats crow — and hopefully for him escapes enough sanctions to revive the Russian economy and hold onto power — or faces a forever war against Ukraine and much of the world, which will slowly sap Russia’s strength and collapse its infrastructure.

As he seems hellbent on the latter, I am terrified. Because there is only one thing worse than a strong Russia under Putin — and that’s a weak, humiliated, disorderly Russia that could fracture or be in a prolonged internal leadership turmoil, with different factions wrestling for power and with all of those nuclear warheads, cybercriminals and oil and gas wells lying around.

Putin’s Russia is not too big to fail. It is, however, too big to fail in a way that won’t shake the whole rest of the world.

[Essexfenwick]

“When I look at how wrong Friedman has been, especially when it comes to foreign policy issues, and how these errors have, seemingly, done nothing to dull the arrogance of his prose, it's striking. Could you talk a bit about how his positions have been modified without a blip, specifically in relation to his columns on Iraq? He doesn’t exactly have a track record readers should feel comfortable about.”



https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.vice.c ... -fernandez

[Essexfenwick]

Since the State Dept confirmed in a Senate hearing yesterday that the US does in fact have a number of bioengineering/bioweapons labs in Ukraine, and that we are concerned that they will fall into Rooskie hands, should we finally come to terms with the fact that they've been lying to us about this whole "Ukraine is innocent" hoax?


https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.timesn ... 097467/amp

[MDlaxfan76]

Since the State Dept confirmed in a Senate hearing yesterday that the US does in fact have a number of bioengineering/bioweapons labs in Ukraine, and that we are concerned that they will fall into Rooskie hands, should we finally come to terms with the fact that they've been lying to us about this whole "Ukraine is innocent" hoax?


https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.timesn ... 097467/amp

What is Ukraine guilty of, RT ?

And who lied about it?

[jhu72]

Is Putin suffering from early stage Parkinson's.

[Essexfenwick]

Since the State Dept confirmed in a Senate hearing yesterday that the US does in fact have a number of bioengineering/bioweapons labs in Ukraine, and that we are concerned that they will fall into Rooskie hands, should we finally come to terms with the fact that they've been lying to us about this whole "Ukraine is innocent" hoax?


https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.timesn ... 097467/amp

What is Ukraine guilty of, RT ?

Well if Russia had a family like relationship with Mexico and had numerous bio-weapon facilities I don’t think we would consider Mexico “innocent” in threatening the United States. If any President allowed that he would be an abject failure.

[Essexfenwick]

Here’s the list of USA liars about Ukraine Bio labs

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2 ... ary-socia/

[MDlaxfan76]

Here’s the list of USA liars about Ukraine Bio labs

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2 ... ary-socia/

hmmm, that appears to totally refute the false claim that these are bio-weapons labs. Biological research labs yes, bio-weapons labs no, much less a plan to release bio-weapons on Russia.

Nuland's testimony is consistent with this refutation.

SEN. MARCO RUBIO: Does Ukraine have chemical or biological weapons?

VICTORIA NULAND: Ukraine has biological research facilities which, in fact, we're now quite concerned Russian troops, Russian forces may be seeking to gain control of, so we are working with the Ukrainians on how we can prevent any of those research materials from falling into the hands of Russian forces should they approach.

MARCO RUBIO: I'm sure you're aware that the Russian propaganda groups are already putting out there all kinds of information about how they have uncovered a plot by the Ukrainians to unleash biological weapons in the country, and with NATO's coordination.

If there is a biological or chemical weapon incident or attack inside Ukraine, is there any doubt in your mind that 100% it would be the Russians behind it?

VICTORIA NULAND: There is no doubt in my mind, senator. And in fact, it is a classic Russian technique to blame the other guy for what they are planning to do themselves.


Why are so many of your claims pulled from Tass, RT, or other far right pro-Putin's Russia publications?

[Peter Brown]

Here’s the list of USA liars about Ukraine Bio labs

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2 ... ary-socia/

Essex. Not sure you know about Politifact. It’s a DNC-sponsored, disinformation-about-actual-facts website.