Russia's Lavrov: Either Ukraine fulfils Moscow's proposals or our army will decide
Hopefully wherever these peace talks are held it's a nice conference room above the 10th floor with an open window to a beautiful view that Vlad and his buddy Sergei can enjoy on the way down.
Their army will decide it, by losing.
Ukraine is spending significantly more money on countering the threat from Shahed-136 'kamikaze' drones fired at its cities than Russia spends on acquiring and launching these Iranian-made drones.
eurasiantimes.com
What a novel strategy
Those drones are must kill targets. You use whatever you've got to kill them because if they get through they will cause serious damage. Everybody is working on cheap solutions to knock down drones. Most of the developed countries will have fairly effective countermeasures against cheap drones within a couple of years, but hardened drones are going to be more difficult to kill. But hardened drones are also more expensive.
There aren't enough of them, but the German Gepard has proven to be a fairly good and cheap anti-drone weapon. There are EMP weapons becoming available too.
It's been speculated, and I think it's probably right, that the Russians are sending the Iranian drone swarms at Ukraine to exhaust Ukraine's supplies of AA missiles so they can increase their air attacks on Ukrainian positions. However the west is starting to supply AA missile systems which negates that strategy.
More tanks rolling in and apparently now Russia is producing more tanks than ever before. So much for those sanctions.
"More than ever before"? The Russians produced over 17,000 tanks and SP guns in 1943 and 1944. Nobody is probably ever going to produce tanks like that again.
This story has to be put into context. The T-72 is an early 1970s design and has been out of production since 1992. Because they have so many of them, the Russians (and other armies) have done various upgrades to the T-72 over time to try and keep them relevant. The T-72 2022 is not a new tank, it's an old tank (probably pulled out of storage) with bolt on armor added.
The T-90M is the latest produced tank. Russia builds 62 a year. At the start of the war the production line had a batch of T-90s being built for an Indian order. Production was halted because foreign sourced parts were unavailable. These parts are used in the sophisticated anti-tank missile defenses and targeting systems. The tank chassis, gun, engine, etc. are all Russian sourced. So the Russians can make basic tanks without modern electronics.
The production line say idle for a while and was restarted with a lot of fanfare. Since then the Russian army has gotten small batches of new T-90s. Probably diverted from the Indian order (none have been delivered to India) and probably with at least some of the electronics stripped out. A T-90 without the modern electronics is not much better in combat than an old T-72.
The Russians are big on fronting. They need everything to look bigger, more lavish than it really is. A handful of new tanks delivered becomes an armada of new tanks going to the front to deliver the Russian army from the Ukrainians. They are never clear on how many, they neglect to say that most of their pre-war trained tank crews are dead and the new crews struggle to drive their tanks in a straight line, and their combined arms tactics being so bad is the primary reason they have lost over 3000 tanks.
The Ukrainians are using older models of the same tanks the Russians are using, but their losses are vastly smaller because they are much better at combined arms warfare and don't unnecessarily expose their tanks to enemy AT fire. When their tanks are exposed to AT fire, they use unmounted infantry to protect them from AT teams using ATGMs.
There has been a lot of talk about the tank being dead, but in reality tanks have not been safe operating without support troops and systems since the 1940s. Unprotected tanks charging into battle got a lot of tanks knocked out in the 1940s too. The Russians forgot that and paid the price.
Is the Russian populace at large aware of these murders, however they may be characterized ?
And another thought -- I realize that many of Putin's inner circle are gangsters, but even mafias need competent leadership
I suppose I am wondering how many more palace murders can happen before effects become apparent.
In a dictatorship news can be buried. Most Chinese in China are unaware of Tianamen Square in 1989, but most of the rest of the world knows about it. On the other hand Russians like strong man leaders and a strong man eliminates anyone who gets out of line. So the bulk of the Russian population probably figure that anyone who meets a bad end probably had it coming to them.
Dima Trolls; Elon Rolls
Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev wrote some Twitter fan fiction over the weekend in which he hallucinated the fall of the West and the rise of the Fourth Reich. Elon Musk thought the thread was “epic.”
Under the US constitution as written today Elon is ineligible to be president. But I guess with the right winning this civil war there will be no constitution. The most laughable part of the whole piece is that Germany will become the Fourth Reich. The reason Germany's defense appropriation process is so broken is Germany's ambivalence about being an armed state.
Also Texas joining with Mexico? An independent Texas might try to conquer Mexico, but they aren't going to join them.
A US civil war is a possibility, but I don't think a shooting war is all that likely. The sides in the last civil war had geographical boundaries they could fall behind. The geographical lines are mostly between urban and rural areas which makes it harder to have geographical areas for the two sides. Hard for Georgia to join the new Confederacy if the entire Atlanta area stays Union. Violence may be possible, but it will more likely take the form of domestic terrorist attacks like the person or persons who took out the electrical sub-station in North Carolina a few weeks ago. There was an attack like that near Tacoma, Washington a few days ago. Another happened in San Jose, CA a few years ago.
www.hurriyetdailynews.com
www.politico.com
