War in Ukraine

How’s the counter-offensive ?

https://x.com/djuric_zlatko/status/1693368066619412497?s=61

 

About as good as can be expected. Defeat of Russia still looks likely, if not certain. Devastation of the Russian economy looks fairly certain.

 

Yale says that Russia's economy is screwed. Russia's economy has been described as a "Roach Motel of assets". I suspect that this is not a compliment (although maybe it is by Russian standards).

The resilience of Russia's stock market and its economy is a complete mirage masking deeper pain, Yale researchers say

It may be decades before foreign companies are willing to invest in Russia again.

 

Ukraine continues to target Russian specialty aircraft in Russia's airports, like the TU-22 Backfire it destroyed with a drone that may have been launched from within Russia. The TU-22 launches highly inaccurate missiles that have been responsible for a lot of the civilian deaths in Ukraine.

Tu-22 Backfire Destroyed In Drone Strike Deep Inside Russia

It's a shame that Ukraine can't launch ten drones at a time and destroy all of the aircraft at an airport, because that airport has as many as ten of these planes (now nine).

 

Ukraine is repurposing S-200 missiles to use in a ground attack role. The missiles are 36' long and weigh 7.5 tons, with a range of 190 miles.

Ukraine is re-engineering a 36-foot-long Soviet-era missile system to strike inside Russia, UK intel says

 

Russia's border with Ukraine is defended by . . . fake fortifications that apparently cost $100 million USD. Yes, Russia, Ukraine is laughing at you - again.

National Resistance Center: Governor of Kursk Oblast built fake defense structures

 

U.S. continues to increase production of artillery shells. They have already increased production by over 40%, and will further increase production by another 40% in the near future. By this time next year, U.S. production will have increased by more than 5X than what it was before the war.

US significantly increases production of 155-mm shells to provide to Ukraine – WP

 

Russia has been killing a significant number of their own troops while trying to take back territory that Ukraine has seized, because they are desperately firing into unknown areas where some of their own troops are located.

Ukrainian soldiers detail desperate maneuvers by Russian forces firing on their own troops: 'They buried quite a lot of their own guys'

 

Ukraine to receive 42 F-16 before the end of the year. Not going to be a good Christmas in Moscow.

Ukraine war latest: Kyiv to receive 42 F-16 fighter jets, with first aircraft set to arrive in 2023

 

they have fired a couple of these at the bridge but they are not very accurate

 

That's the knock on the S-200 missile. A bridge is probably not the right target for a low-quality Russian missile.

 

More explanation on why Ukraine's soldiers have a much higher rate of survival than Russian soldiers do. Ukraine has invented a "stretcher drone" that picks up wounded soldiers and hauls them back on a tracked robot stretcher.

The robot stretcher drone saving lives on Ukraine’s battlefields

 

History repeats. Potemkin village

 

"War may sometimes be a necessary evil. But no matter how necessary, it is always an evil, never a good. We will not learn how to live together in peace by killing each other's children."

 

“War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth a war, is much worse….A war to protect other human beings against tyrannical injustice; a war to give victory to their own ideas of right and good, and which is their own war, carried on for an honest purpose by their free choice, — is often the means of their regeneration. A man who has nothing which he is willing to fight for, nothing which he cares more about than he does about his personal safety, is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. As long as justice and injustice have not terminated their ever-renewing fight for ascendancy in the affairs of mankind, human beings must be willing, when need is, to do battle for the one against the other.

John Stuart Mill

My Dad-a career USAF fighter pilot-had that quote in his office. A life long conservative, he would be disgusted with the Putin lovers here in the US and many of today’s republicans.

 

Somehow I keep finding Putin-loving ex-CIA and former Marines, et.al. Would they dare contradict hop-to military dads sneering from their graves ?

Why Russia is Decimating the Ukraine Counter Offensive - A Son of the New American Revolution

 

In desperation, Russia starts robbing its oligarchs to fund the war. Putin is playing with fire, since the oligarchs are the ones that keep him in power. The problem: the oligarchs have their money overseas, so Putin must use a lawsuit to persuade them to bring the money back into Russia. I'm not sure how that's going to work. Russia will seize his company assets, but that does not get the oligarch's money back into Russia. This oligarch is the 9th richest person in Russia.

Putin, of course, will keep all of his wealth. After all, he earned it, while the oligarchs did not. Or something like that.

Russia's so desperate to get its billionaires and their massive wealth back that it just threatened to seize the assets of an oligarch worth $13 billion

 

Send this to your comrades at Putin’s brain trust. And then send it to the Ukrainians whose blood has needlessly been spilled by your Russian friends.

 

Russians are afraid to make advances on Ukraine due to cluster munitions.

Ukraine's use of imprecise cluster bombs is making Russian 'very scared to go on assault', says frontline soldier

 

And the former CIA and former U.S. military observers I’m citing would probably tell you and your sycophantic Murcan buddies to F-O.