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Ukraine: Slava Ukraini!!!


Ser Scot A Ellison

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7 hours ago, Maithanet said:

Lack of ammunition is always relative.  Whatever amount of ammunition that Ukraine has saved up, if they had 20% more, the offensive would be easier and that would save Ukrainian lives.  I do not blame Zelensky for lobbying as hard as he can for more. 

But at the same time, you fight with the army you have, not the one you wish you had.  The offensive will go forward when they feel it had the best chance of success.

Yeah, the problem with waiting until your army improves is that your opponent's army will do the same.

Ukraine has a window of opportunity during the next month or so, before Russian Army and Wagner replenish their losses with a new wave of mobilization. I'd be very surprised if they don't take it.

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6 hours ago, Gorn said:

Yeah, the problem with waiting until your army improves is that your opponent's army will do the same.

Ukraine has a window of opportunity during the next month or so, before Russian Army and Wagner replenish their losses with a new wave of mobilization. I'd be very surprised if they don't take it.

They have to wait for the ground to dry. It's way to muddy now.

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7 hours ago, Gorn said:

An actual Katyusha was spotted on a highway in Russia, in 2023, presumably not going to a WWII movie shoot.

 

 

Forget the Katyusha, look at those Russian knock-offs of Studebaker US6 trucks.  Beam axle technology for the field of conflict in 2023!

Or maybe ACTUAL Studebaker trucks, since we sent them 200,000 of them during the WW2 Lend-Lease.

This has to be headed for a museum display, no way it is headed for Ukraine.

 

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1 minute ago, Wilbur said:

Forget the Katyusha, look at those Russian knock-offs of Studebaker US6 trucks.  Beam axle technology for the field of conflict in 2023!

Or maybe ACTUAL Studebaker trucks, since we sent them 200,000 of them during the WW2 Lend-Lease.

This has to be headed for a museum display, no way it is headed for Ukraine.

 

I'm fairly sure these ARE Studebakers, looking at the pronounced shape of the hood.

I guess they could be moved for a parade or something, but given the sightings of the T-54s, I... really wouldn't put it past Russia at this point. Also while searching for proof I found a video by the DPR forces using Katyusha launchers like this last year already.

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For the function of lobbing metal or explosives around, WW2 or even earlier tech can still be fairly useful.  Small artilley, machine guns, etc.  Obviously only in certain situations (thier mobility and range are terrible by modern standards).  But they can still get the job done in a lot of situations.

I'm certain if given the chance, Ukraine would be delighted to make use of a couple brigades of ww2 era artilley pieces (assuming ample ammunition supplies).

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There's some irony in Russia using equipment it received via lend lease to fight the country that's receiving similar modern international assistance to defend against their invasion.

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20 minutes ago, karaddin said:

There's some irony in Russia using equipment it received via lend lease to fight the country that's receiving similar modern international assistance to defend against their invasion.

A bit like how the Afghanistan 'Freedom Fighters' received weapons from the US in the 80's before becoming the Taliban.

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26 minutes ago, karaddin said:

There's some irony in Russia using equipment it received via lend lease to fight the country that's receiving similar modern international assistance to defend against their invasion.

But in a much smaller scale than the irony of all the former Warsaw pact nations sending thier Soviet era equipment to Ukraine to resist a Russian invasion.  

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25 minutes ago, Maithanet said:

But in a much smaller scale than the irony of all the former Warsaw pact nations sending thier Soviet era equipment to Ukraine to resist a Russian invasion.  

It's just irony on all the way down

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Okay...

I've been starting to wonder about this lately...

Much (most?) of the Russian military machine turned out to be rusted junk. The vast majority (?) of their artillery shells, bombs, and rockets appears to have been spent on this single conflict. 

Likewise, Ukraine is dependent on western military gear and old soviet equipment to keep up the fight - and many of those stockpiles are becoming critically low. Maybe.

Collectively, that is one hell of a lot of munitions and military equipment that is just gone, no longer a... greater geopolitical factor or available for sale to this or that third world despot. Additionally, this gear has been shown to have severe limitations, especially when in the hands of corrupt militaries - something true of all despot's armies.

Furthermore, given strained military budgets and...'political factors'...replacing all that gear will take decades if it happens at all.

So...maybe a good thing? In a limited sense?

 

 

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1 hour ago, ThinkerX said:

Collectively, that is one hell of a lot of munitions and military equipment that is just gone, no longer a... greater geopolitical factor or available for sale to this or that third world despot.

This war is an attack on the "old" world order of treaties and international cooperation. It's an effort to shift the political gears back into 19th century mode and if that succeeds, then we will (and we already do) see a significant increase in production and supply of arms worldwide. To cite Mao: "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun". And in an unstable world order, most countries will need more, propably a lot more, guns - if only to protect themselves from neighbours like Russia.

Even if (and that's a big if) Ukraine can regain their occupied territories and there is some kind of armistice, both sides will dig in at the LOC and prepare for the next round some years down the road. The destroyed equipment is going to be replaced by more and modern gear and this is not going to take decades. The sanctions against Russia are already being undermined by China and this will continue, and Russias production capabilities, while hampered by sanctions, are untouched by war (unlike Ukraines industrial production);  meanwhile all countries in Europe are ramping up their military budgets and production, Japan is massively increasing military spending, so does China and the US are preparing for a confrontation in the Pacific.

When this war is over, every side will have more than sufficient gear to supply their favourite dictator for a new war in an effort to stake out their claims and the more instable the old world order gets, the worse it will be. 

 

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Russia won't be able to replace all that soviet gear with modern weapon systems. If it were it would already have done it. But Putins wonder weapons have showed up on Red Square only, not on the battlefield. And the economy needed to support a large modern army just isn't there. Russia started this war in an attempt to become a world power again but it has only accelerated its decline. That seat on the UN security council and the nukes still give it some relevance but it reamsins to be seen how much longer they can hold on to those.

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2 hours ago, Alarich II said:

This war is an attack on the "old" world order of treaties and international cooperation. It's an effort to shift the political gears back into 19th century mode and if that succeeds, then we will (and we already do) see a significant increase in production and supply of arms worldwide. To cite Mao: "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun". And in an unstable world order, most countries will need more, propably a lot more, guns - if only to protect themselves from neighbours like Russia.

Even if (and that's a big if) Ukraine can regain their occupied territories and there is some kind of armistice, both sides will dig in at the LOC and prepare for the next round some years down the road. The destroyed equipment is going to be replaced by more and modern gear and this is not going to take decades. The sanctions against Russia are already being undermined by China and this will continue, and Russias production capabilities, while hampered by sanctions, are untouched by war (unlike Ukraines industrial production);  meanwhile all countries in Europe are ramping up their military budgets and production, Japan is massively increasing military spending, so does China and the US are preparing for a confrontation in the Pacific.

When this war is over, every side will have more than sufficient gear to supply their favourite dictator for a new war in an effort to stake out their claims and the more instable the old world order gets, the worse it will be. 

 

This gets a bit beyond just Russia and Ukraine, but the world is interconnected.

First, Russia is a kleptocracy - a 'government of thieves' - that is in the midst of a demographic collapse. By the end of the century, and possibly well before that, Russians will be an endangered species. Combine this with the massive corruption and oppression at all levels and it is highly unlikely Russia will become a technological powerhouse unless they are the pawn or puppet of some other power. 

Second, China's demographics, are, if anything, worse than Russia's - a result of 40+ years of the 'one child' policy, plus their leadership is completely clueless about technology - they are about to dismantle their high tech industries, for want of a better term. This is ignorance from the top inflicting calamity. Plus, corruption is rampant in China as well. I have seen claims (which I attempt to research now and again) that China is likely to fragment within the next couple of decades. 

Third, in terms of spent war material and munitions, it doesn't matter if Ukraine regains the rest of its territories or not - that equipment is gone. Expended. The shells are fired, the tanks and trucks and many of the artillery pieces are scrap metal. At a minimum, given their diminishing industrial capacities, it would take Russia multiple decades to replace those munitions - and that would be the older, lower tech material. The higher tech material is beyond their capability to replenish and there are severe limits to what they will be able to obtain elsewhere.

In the interim, that means far, far less munitions in the world - both east and west bloc. Furthermore, the weakness of those munitions has been made clear. 

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On 3/25/2023 at 8:52 PM, A True Kaniggit said:

I wonder if Lukashenko was aware of this before it was announced by Russia. 

Russia putting nukes in Belarus seems like big news for Belarus but fairly unimportant beyond that.  Kaliningrad is still part of Russia and they have nukes there.  Which means that there are already nukes well forward into Europe in the event that Russia wanted to launch a strike with minimal warning.  This seems akin to the US striking a deal to put nuclear missiles outside Vancouver - it would really only be threatening to Canadians. 

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6 hours ago, ThinkerX said:

This gets a bit beyond just Russia and Ukraine, but the world is interconnected.

First, Russia is a kleptocracy - a 'government of thieves' - that is in the midst of a demographic collapse. By the end of the century, and possibly well before that, Russians will be an endangered species. Combine this with the massive corruption and oppression at all levels and it is highly unlikely Russia will become a technological powerhouse unless they are the pawn or puppet of some other power. 

Second, China's demographics, are, if anything, worse than Russia's - a result of 40+ years of the 'one child' policy, plus their leadership is completely clueless about technology - they are about to dismantle their high tech industries, for want of a better term. This is ignorance from the top inflicting calamity. Plus, corruption is rampant in China as well. I have seen claims (which I attempt to research now and again) that China is likely to fragment within the next couple of decades. 

Third, in terms of spent war material and munitions, it doesn't matter if Ukraine regains the rest of its territories or not - that equipment is gone. Expended. The shells are fired, the tanks and trucks and many of the artillery pieces are scrap metal. At a minimum, given their diminishing industrial capacities, it would take Russia multiple decades to replace those munitions - and that would be the older, lower tech material. The higher tech material is beyond their capability to replenish and there are severe limits to what they will be able to obtain elsewhere.

In the interim, that means far, far less munitions in the world - both east and west bloc. Furthermore, the weakness of those munitions has been made clear. 

The Chinese have said they have made massive hay on crushing corruption in the last ten years. Corruption was reportedly a huge problem in the 2000s, but since the early 2010s they have gone to town on stamping it out.

How successful they've been is the real question. Certainly an enormous amount of the money they've spent on defence does seem to be materialising in the real world - new ships (their fleet is already bigger than the US Navy in raw numbers, and is getting there in terms of quality), new missiles, new aircraft etc - but my colleagues who live and work in China have indicated that low-level, everyday corruption is reasonably rife, if unpredictable. It certainly does not seem to be on the same level as Russia, and the quality of life for Chinese people is, certainly in the big cities, superior to that of Russians. The freedom of speech and expression is probably lower than it was in Russia before the war, but there's also a lot of pent-up anger and frustration in China and people are willing to hit the streets for far lower cause than I think the Chinese government previously thought would be the case.

The big concern I have is that it's a bit of a (softly-spoken, underground) joke in China in that whatever Xi thinks will be a good idea turns out to be a catastrophically bad one, and a lot of Chinese (particularly younger ones) are very wary of being tied to a bunch of obvious nutcases. There seems to be concerns that either Kim Jong-un or Putin (or both) will either drag China into WWIII with the USA or they'll end up getting nuked and China getting caught in the crossfire even if they're not directly involved. Of course, they're not necessarily huge fans of the US either. If Xi says he's not going to start a war with the USA and will work to avoid that, that alarms a lot of people because it means he's capable of turning around and doing exactly that.

The original point, that Russia has expended vast stocks of weapons it would have used in a war with NATO in Europe just on Ukraine instead, to limited success, is a very good one and some in the US military establishment have made it clear that they're happy for Russia to keep doing that. That doesn't necessarily mean they want to keep the war artificially going and bleed Ukraine for Europe and America (as a geostrategic defeat on Russia and it withdrawing from Ukraine is a huge win anyway, regardless on how much old stock they have available afterwards), especially as it also using up their reserves, but there does seem to be a real thought that Russia has wasted whatever opportunity it had to reclaim more territory elsewhere with much lower-hanging fruit, and it will be years before it can recover, years that could be spent turning Ukraine, Poland, the Baltic States etc into almost unbreachable fortresses.

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10 minutes ago, Werthead said:

The original point, that Russia has expended vast stocks of weapons it would have used in a war with NATO in Europe just on Ukraine instead, to limited success, is a very good one and some in the US military establishment have made it clear that they're happy for Russia to keep doing that. That doesn't necessarily mean they want to keep the war artificially going and bleed Ukraine for Europe and America (as a geostrategic defeat on Russia and it withdrawing from Ukraine is a huge win anyway, regardless on how much old stock they have available afterwards), especially as it also using up their reserves, but there does seem to be a real thought that Russia has wasted whatever opportunity it had to reclaim more territory elsewhere with much lower-hanging fruit, and it will be years before it can recover, years that could be spent turning Ukraine, Poland, the Baltic States etc into almost unbreachable fortresses.

Russia's conventional military is getting completely shredded, and even if this war wraps up fairly quickly (this year), by the end of it, Russia will have just a fraction of the fighting power it did in 2021.  Even in a best-case scenario for Russia, the economy will be in the toilet for a decade, and it simply doesn't have the money to rebuild its army.  Whether they attempt to go down the path of a small, professional army (a la the US) or a more Soviet style artillery/mass approach, they do not and will not have the money for the necessary equipment or training to make that first tier force. 

Russia has been trying to modernize and upgrade its military for 20+ years, and the result is this debacle in Ukraine, where the professional army fell apart within a month and they had to rely on Soviet tactics, equipment and shells in order to continue fighting.  That Soviet fallback option isn't going to be available for Russia's next war (the massive Soviet stockpile will be exhausted in Ukraine).  Russia's ability to use its conventional military to bully its neighbors is waning rapidly, and really only applies to the smaller countries.  For countries like Ukraine and Kazakhstan, they obviously do not want a war with Russia, but they are not going to be simply bullied.  They know that Russia cannot win a war in their country and will stand up for themselves accordingly.  We're already seeing that out of Astana (the Kazakh capital, I had to look it up). 

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