My bad.
The correct numbers are $33,830 and $14,500.
What's the time frame? Per month? Per year?
Why do you state incorrect figures for the number of aircraft the Ukrainian Air Force had at the start of the war?
The correct numbers are
51 MIG-29s and about
60 other fixed wing combat aircraft(!)...
(Source:
Ukrainian Air Force - Wikipedia)
And no matter what, or how much you write, you are for whatever reason siding
against the Ukrainian Air Force.
I am not going to do that.
I am going to continue to side
WITH the Ukrainian Air Force.
I know more about military aviation than I do anything else. Military air power was my entry drug. I want to be an idealist, but I'm trying to be a realist about it.
Ukraine did have 71 fighters at the beginning of the war, but I have read that about 20 were grounded and in poor condition.
Ukraine - Air Force Equipment
Ukraine inherited a large force of aircraft from the USSR, but they started downsizing in the mid-90s because maintaining such a large for was too expensive. Ukraine also inherited a Slava class cruiser that was incomplete. It's still sitting at dock in Mykolaiv. They never had the money to complete it.
Russia isn't getting enough parts to keep everything flying though. They have a lot of airliners grounded due to lack of spares now. With the incidents happening due to lack of maintenance, it's only a matter of time until the Russians have a commercial aircraft accident.
IIRC no country can join NATO while in active conflict. Ukraine will have to have this conflict end before they can join.
If I rememebr right the criteria for joining NATO is not being in any active conflict and no active territorial disputes. I think that's one reason why the Russians have created frozen conflicts in Georgia and Moldova. They had one in Ukraine until they unfroze the conflict last year.
How did the West manipulate Putin into invading Ukraine?
The West was very timid about allowing Ukraine to join NATO, and about supplying weapons. before the war.
NATO is a defensive alliance which protects member states from invasion.
And why did Russia invade Crimea and the Donbas in 2014?
Usually when you want to find the party in the wrong look at who is invading a sovereign nation. That is also true when the US is the country doing the invading.
There is no need or excuse for invasions, and colonial territorial land grabs, in the modern era. There is no excuse for a military invasion which seeks to topple a democratically elected government.
It's a popular pass time to blame the US for everything wrong in the world. The US is guilty of a lot of wrongs, but there are also a lot of problems that had nothing to do with the US. Timothy Snyder has pointed out that Putin has to blame someone outside of Russia for all the woes and the convenient target is the United States. It doesn't matter what the US does, Russia will continue to blame the US.
This plays into a guilt a lot of Americans feel for the wrongs the US has done.
Both the US and Britain have collective guilty consciences about their past. A history podcast out of the UK I listen to was talking about this once. Other former colonial powers don't have collective guilt about what they did. It's an Anglo-American thing apparently.
One very common thing I hear a lot is blaming the US for NATO expansion eastward. The US resisted this very hard, but Poland forced their hand. Poland told NATO that either they get into NATO and under the NATO nuclear umbrella, or they would develop their own nuclear weapons.
For countries that are threatened by a nuclear power, whether that be China or Russia, the only choices are to either get under the US' nuclear umbrella or develop their own. India and Pakistan developed their own to protect themselves from each other. It's rumored that Israel has nuclear weapons, though not proven. Iran being isolated from the rest of the world and unable to trust being under Russia's nuclear umbrella are developing their own. North Korea did the same thing because they can't trust being under China's umbrella.
The west avoided helping Ukraine with much of anything before 2014. After 2014 NATO started training Ukraine troops and providing some other military aid, but it was only after Russia had occupied part of the country.
With all the changes with Eastern Europe, the Eastern European countries or Russia have taken the first steps and the west has been scrambling to keep up.
Russia is effectively going to run out of equipment before they run out of manpower. Watching this play out is like watching a giant realtime game of RISK play out.
Ukraine doesn't need to keep all the economy going. Large parts of the economy has been shuttered for the duration of the war.
Russia needs to keep the economy going. Russia's outside support is very minimal compared to Ukraine's. If Russia did mobilize all the men of draft age, large parts of the economy would grind to a halt. I think it was a ChrisO thread from the other day that Russia wants to expand their military production, but just trying to keep production at pre-war levels is proving very difficult.
There are some shortages of parts and raw materials, but the biggest problem is a shortage of labor. Military production plants are paying peanuts. An engineer only gets around $500 a month in pay. Line workers get less than that. With the government strained for money, they can't afford to pay anything more than that.
If Russia mobilizes more people than they have, the labor shortage will get worse. But you are right that the shortage of weapons is a limiting factor on mobilization. If they mobilized more people, they would run the risk of draft riots because the draft is very unpopular, and they have nothing to give the new recruits and nobody to train them.
There are many stories of mobiks only getting an AK and one clip of ammunition before being thrown into combat. There are stories of Russian troops scrounging the battlefield for unused ammunition on dead bodies.
There are units like the VDV units that are better equipped. But there are probably more units equipped with minimal gear than well equipped units at this point.
When an army starts running out of basics like rifles and rifle ammunition, it's in trouble.
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