War in Ukraine

Ukraine breaks new ground with drone strikes on Russian oil hubs

Adrone struck an oil refinery in Russia's republic of Bashkortostan, nearly 1,000 miles from the border with Ukraine, the most far-reaching drone attack on a Russian target in the war so far.
Sources in Ukraine's Security Service told news outlet Ukrainska Pravda it was behind the attack on Russia's Gazprom Neftekhim Salavat oil refinery on Thursday morning.
According to the source of Ukrainska Pravda, it was a [Security Service] drone that established a record by traveling 1,500 kilometers (930 miles)," the publication reported

 

Ukraine war briefing: Zelenskiy fires top bodyguard after failed assassination attempt — Guardian US

gettin’ saucy…

 

So does the Americam Left, but I guess their love for Ukraine makes it OK, since Russia = bad, and they're against Russia. Who's bad.

 

Russia doesn’t know who it’s messing with …

 

I'm glad to see the aid is flowing, but the West needs to start grasping that this is insufficient for the strategic ends desired. Time for the liberal internationalists to accept some hard facts: being nice to Russia failed, deterrence failed, theories about economic interdependence and sanctions failed, international institutions failed, and trying to win by narrative failed. Material aid (the only form of military pressure applied so far) has been effective but only to a limited extent. We need to stop hoping for Russia's defeat and start defeating Russia. We have reached the end of the excuse matrix.

 

Russia unable to sustain scale of losses: ISW

If nothing else this war is significantly depleting Russias war assets.



Russian equipment losses in Ukraine are thought to be so high that it will be difficult to find replacements as Moscow draws down on its vast stores of Soviet-era vehicles.

That assessment by the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) on Wednesday follows reports on how satellite imagery had shown the extent of depletion of Russian militaryvehicles in storage facilities over the course of the war in Ukraine.

Open-source intelligence X account Jompy, which tracks Russian military depots, posted on May 6 that Russian stores of armored fighting vehicles (AFVs) had decreased by nearly a third (32 percent) compared with prewar levels—down from 15,152 in 2021 to 10,389, a loss of 4,763.

The X account said that satellite imagery had also found Russia had pulled most of its MT-LB multipurpose AFVs from storage, where only 922 remain compared with 2,527 prewar.

 

The Economist is sad …

The liberal international order is slowly coming apart

 

A Russian bus driver in St. Petersburg decided to show his support for the Ukraine War by intentionally crashing his bus through a bridge railing and launching the bus into the river below. Check out the video. Word on the street is that he desperately wanted to have his bus follow the lone tank in the May Day parade, but was not allowed to. Western propaganda falsely suggests that he was trying to use his bus to make a water escape from Russia by floating the bus down to the Baltic Sea.

CCTV captures fatal bus crash into St Petersburg river

 

In the Civil War, the artillery units had the option of firing something called grapeshot out of their cannons. It's the artillery version of a shotgun (probably goes a lot farther). This was apparently even used during the U.S. Revolution. It would be impressive if they could automate a howitzer to detect a drone, track it, and fire grapeshot at it from a distance.

Grapeshot - Wikipedia

 

I don't believe a damned thing this administration says... nor what "Pravda west" a.k.a., the MSM says or prints.

 

Yeah, stick with Cletus down at the Waffle House as your source. He seems to be leading you down an informed path.

 

Is that because those voices in your head told you not to?

 

It just became part of the Russian Navy.

 

You have to keep in mind that if the U.S. jumps in there too soon with our own troops, it’ll be too easy to portray that has been the plan all along. For example, we did not foment a coup and regime change in Kuwait prior to Saddam’s invasion in 1990.

 

he didn’t say anything about us troops on the ground. It’s been 2.5 years. By your math how long would the west have to wait to dodge the idiotic narrative that this was “the plan all along?”

 

I don’t agree with any of it, because you would be forcing mostly ethnic Russian population centers to reunify with Ukraine. The people there don’t want it. So you’re not only inviting a war with Russia, but we’ll inevitably have problems in the future even if NATO wins. It’s an illogical proposition that the U.S. has proven time and again it is willing to make.

 

Automatons will regard this as anti-Americans. I’m just saying we would have been doing fine (or at least better) had we not poked the Bear and antagonized the Dragon …

 

1. LOL at "too soon." It's coming up on two and a half years.
2. There are lots of intermediate steps between the virtually nothing we are doing now and conducting hostilities, even more between that and putting in ground troops.
3. If this Administration has had a "plan" other than to hope away the Russian aggression, then that would surprise me greatly.
4. (the bolded part) If you are suggesting that we played any role in the popular uprising that overthrew the Russian puppet regime in 2014, then please introduce some evidence, apart from "Putin says so." I know that whole incident was very embarrassing for Moscow, but that does not mean that any other factor than Russian incompetence played a role. If the U.S. ever pulled off any kind of duplicitous regime change effectively without leaving evidence all over the place, then it would be the first time in history. Also, that would have shown a staggering amount of initiative from the Obama Administration, inconsistent with what we saw over the other eight years and cross purposes to its Russia policy of placation and complacency to that point. Finally, I would like to know how Obama pulled off such a bloodless, perfectly executed coup, even getting the masses to show up with ostensible spontaneity in the streets, and then was caught completely flat-footed by the Russian armed seizure of Crimea and Donbas immediately following. You mean to suggest that the U.S. had this great plan to steal a Russian vassal and then no plan at all for a Russian response? Perhaps, you should remove that last arrow from your quiver. It undermines the rest of your position.