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Russia/Ukraine conflict

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Superb post

btw: there was a recent post re: impact to tires from shelling with metal remnants all over the road. Id suspect that is impacting Russia too with less tires in reserve. Trent Telenko:

btw2: good post perhaps highlighting impact of new USA artillery:


I expect the 155mm are being used to take out vehicles and the HIMARS are being used to take out supply infrastructure.

NATO reaches a deal with Turkey to admit Sweden and Finland, secretary-general says

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said Tuesday that the world’s most powerful military alliance reached a deal to admit Sweden and Finland after resolving the concerns of holdout Turkey.

I smell the Turks were bought off with some sort of deal. In the end I think the alliance will be stronger.
 
NATO reaches a deal with Turkey to admit Sweden and Finland, secretary-general says

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said Tuesday that the world’s most powerful military alliance reached a deal to admit Sweden and Finland after resolving the concerns of holdout Turkey.
What was the price

That seems to be unclear...

They've officially signed a Letter of intent, so as I understand it – no kind of binding contract...

AND: We are not full members yet...

Source (in Swedish):
 
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  • Informative
Reactions: nativewolf
There is some talk that the Russian artillery is going to need to be serviced soon, if not needing so already.


TL;DW - Given how much they have relied upon them and the number of shells used, Russian artillery is going to become even less accurate unless they can swap out the barrels and send the used ones off for refurbishment.

Russian doctrine makes heavier use of artillery than western countries. But Russian guns tend to have short barrel lives. I have seen some stories of Russian gun barrels bursting from metal fatigue. When that happens it's a bad day for the gun crew.

NATO artillery have a barrel life of a few thousand rounds. Russian artillery is probably less than that. Though they may just be junking artillery as the barrels wear out and putting in guns from the reserve pool.

Trent Telenko has estimated the Russians have fired 7 million artillery shells and rockets so far. That has to put a big dent in their supply of rounds, plus that's a lot of barrel life on the guns.

According to Wikipedia the Russians had about 2500 active gun and mortar artillery at the beginning of the war with another 6100 guns and 4000 mortars in reserve.
List of equipment of the Russian Ground Forces - Wikipedia

They had a lot of reserve guns. Even if a bunch of them are rusted junk, they probably were able to bring some of those out or reserve.

I estimate each of the original guns have probably fired about 3000 rounds at this point.

Edit: I forgot to add in the SP artillery. There is quite a bit of that too, about 2000 active and another ~2200 in reserve. Even factoring that in they have probably added 2000 rounds to the life of most of the barrels at this point. Most of their guns probably had some wear on the barrels at the start of the war, and they didn't commit all their active guns to the fight so it's hard to come up with an exact number.

In any case, wear has probably been high. Russians are also probably not doing the routine maintenance NATO gun crews perform even when in combat. That's going to contribute to wear.
 
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Compare maps from April 2022 to now . . . not exactly large land gains for Russia, but at high prices in terms of men and equipment (by Russia's own admission).

Just curious - how do you think this is going to end? The Ukrainians now HATE the Russians more than at any time in history. They are never going to accept an occupation. Is Russia prepared to put 10 million men in Ukraine to occupy the territory forever? Because that is what it would take to squash any resistance.
 
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NATO will expand, Finland and Sweden joining, Turkey drops objection, more stuff on east flank, full strategy paper released

Worth re-reading old NATO releases, this from 2008 was re-affirmed today, "NATO welcomes Ukraine’s and Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations for membership in NATO. We agreed today that these countries will become members of NATO. "
 
The US government has announced new sanctions on Russia including a price cap on Russian oil, limiting the amount of money Russia makes from the places it is still exporting. In addition NATO has announced that Sweden and Finland will be admitted. And on Monday, Russia defaulted on its foreign debt. Russia just keeps winning. 🤣

US unveils new Russia sanctions, implements ban on new imports of Russian gold
 
Compare maps from April 2022 to now . . . not exactly large land gains for Russia, but at high prices in terms of men and equipment (by Russia's own admission).

Just curious - how do you think this is going to end? The Ukrainians now HATE the Russians more than at any time in history. They are never going to accept an occupation. Is Russia prepared to put 10 million men in Ukraine to occupy the territory forever? Because that is what it would take to squash any resistance.
I'm a bit worried Donbas, or at least parts of it, will go like the Karelian isthmus of Finland.

That land was given to Russia after ww2, all Finns living there migrated to Finland, cities were in ruins. Russians brought some people in but they didn't really stick. Quite sad really, the whole area is poor and underdeveloped now.

And now we can't use Saimaa Canal anymore, it goes from lake Saimaa to Baltic Sea through Russian territory (which used to be finnish territory), was rented to Finland until now but it's closed now.
 
Compare maps from April 2022 to now . . . not exactly large land gains for Russia, but at high prices in terms of men and equipment (by Russia's own admission).

Just curious - how do you think this is going to end? The Ukrainians now HATE the Russians more than at any time in history. They are never going to accept an occupation. Is Russia prepared to put 10 million men in Ukraine to occupy the territory forever? Because that is what it would take to squash any resistance.
Resistance from who? The people of Donbas and Luhansk are all russians.
 
According to this website (in Swedish):
...and the BBC, the missile Putler used in the mass murder of innocent children, women and men at the shopping mall in Kremenchuk was the Kh-22/AS-4 Kitchen(!)...
Putler used a missile designed in the late 1950s and early 1960s that was initially designed to attack US carrier groups with a nuclear warhead and can be off the intended target with as much as five kilometers (!)... And he used that missile against a city that had a population of about 219,000 before the war started...
 
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