15:56 – MatsExtrude
+100
Johan No.1
News and analysis about the war in Ukraine and other global events in world politics and security.
Johan No.1
News and analysis about the war in Ukraine and other global events in world politics and security.
12:39 – Johan No.1
Maybe a bit off topic so as usual promises of reform and improvement until the next relapse…
I know Vulcan files have been mentioned but it is a good starting point for a discussion about Russian and Chinese subversive activities.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/mar/30/vulkan-files-leak-reveals-putins-global-and-domestic-cyberwarfare-tactics?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other
The Russians are the worst in all categories, they kill political opposition if needed in the countries where they want to increase their influence, this cannot be protected against in a democracy and the Cold War was quite lively. It has always sounded like a good story to me, all the spy rings and disappeared opposition members but now we see from the stands exactly how Russian subversive activities work in Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, and at home in Russia with all the suicides.
The only thing I really missed around Christmas was terrorist attacks on the EU’s soft power infrastructure, I almost think it was a general mistake by the Russians not to carry out any. It hardly would have been an escalation from NS1 and NS2 I think, and a power failure in a transformer station would have been very difficult to escalate anything with. Then again, a large part of the nuclear power in France was offline last winter, we had reactors shut down, Finland’s didn’t start up and so on, and if there had been deliberate attacks by pro-Russian technicians it was probably dismissed as procedural errors first and if it has been investigated further and suspicion of sabotage arose it would probably be classified?
Russian subversive activity is an aggressive cancer and the free West would have been better off without it. They pit groups against each other and fuel discontent and generally try to destabilize our countries. For me, it is quite clear who is behind the wave of nuclear power plant shutdowns even though many unaware have jumped on board for other (to them) nobler purposes.
It was smart and a serious long game – make the EU dependent on Russian gas and force the EU to abandon Ukraine. Didn’t work out but smart thinking.
That Greenpeace sells Russian dirty gas as environmentally friendly gas is astonishing to everyone except the environmental movement apparently.
China is a bit of a different animal than Russia, they are more involved in industrial espionage, trying to buy into Europe and take over Africa economically.
The rumor goes that they cannot build any generation 6 fighter jets because the US and EU have gotten better at protecting themselves against data breaches after they stole the blueprints for generation 5.
Today’s West is probably a bit less colonization with associated oppression and a bit more trade on fair terms?
If Russia (legally) could be neutralized and China become functional it might be quite a pleasant world to live in also for a citizen in any country in Africa?
During my travels to some countries in Africa I quickly understood a couple of things – the citizens are normally functioning individuals with families, jobs and all our everyday problems. Above all, the younger generations have access to the internet and see exactly what we see.
The countries sit on obscene wealth in the form of natural resources, corruption is a poison and “trickle down economy” is a bad theory because it doesn’t work if the top layer steals everything.
Then there is always a layer of shady business in the West that prefers to do business with dictators and corrupt people that keeps it all going as well of course but that seems to be less and less the stricter ethical guidelines headquarters have to adhere to. You don’t want to lose a state contract worth many billions with associated high fines just because a project manager in Congo paid bribes.
Now it is quite a sensitive topic and many dictators paint pictures of themselves as freedom fighters when they actually treat their countries harshly similar to previous European dictatorships.
The truth is that both systems were and are absolutely crap for the citizens, one exchanged one oppression for a rogue regime, if it didn’t get worse maybe it got marginally better and you live on the brink of starvation all the time. Always being hungry is boring.
I guess some -stans and Russian republics have the same fantastic living standards and probably there are provinces in China that would benefit from a little freedom, but China is good at keeping a lid on things.
We will never get a perfect world, just look at how they managed to take our excellent power infrastructure and crash it in 10-15 years. Everything goes in cycles and nothing is permanent. It goes like this – “bad times breed strong hen, strong hen gives good times, good times breed weak hen, weak hen gives bad times” – and the cycle repeats itself at fairly regular intervals.
If you can get more and more countries to the Western mindset that trade is more beneficial than war and decolonize Russia, and maybe China, you have probably come a good way – then the force that fuels corruption, nepotism and war is weaker in the world than it is today.
No system is perfect but there are probably reasons to try to motivate the worst actors to go in another direction?
Every journey begins with the first step and every step is a bit closer to the goal – if it wasn’t the Dalai Lama then I’ll take TM on that and get rich on memes.
Back to brutal Russian death –
Came up the other day from the living and shining legend Osten that it is rumored on Twitter that T55s have been knocked out in northern Luhansk – two more on top of that.
If that’s true the argument that they would only be used in defense is immediately discredited, we had that with the T62s too that they would only be used in defense and then Oryx confirmed 75 knocked out so probably double that.
Putting T55s into mobile combat can only mean that they don’t have T90s and T80s to spare?
The smart ones in class quickly say they are saving the other vehicles and look superior to us slow thinkers but the shortage of crews is probably bigger than the shortage of vehicles now?
We have seen old PV guns on wheels at the fronts, we have seen Grad which is from WW2 heading to the fronts. We have MTLB with the old 60mm LV gun mounted which gives a distinct WW2 PV feeling. Then we have old tube artillery from the 40s as well.
When will we see the first JS2 that was captured on a train a few weeks ago?
Shortcuts on armor have almost taken on a new meaning here.
Then I want to remind that when we did the calculation a month ago the 1800 tanks would be zero now this summer in July and then we hadn’t counted all those in the rear with technical/mechanical faults – at least 30%. Now maybe fewer losses are offset by the 30% with technical faults in the rear so July still stands and then it is the number zero (0) we are talking about.
If you want any kind of maintained armored protection at the fronts the T55s are probably necessary to top up the withered team. Especially since all the T80s in storage have not decreased in a few months because they cannot be made operational.
That they would throw in their worst equipment and save the best, tell that to the VDV, the marine infantry, and the Spetsnaz and we’ll hear what they think about it – I believe they threw in everything they had in their winter offensive.
Sure, the Russian team can solve everything if they get time and Chinese components. Iran is somewhat of an expert at circumventing sanctions and in the long run, the optics and what is needed would be delivered and vehicles restored. Apparently, Shahed has a lot of Israeli components in it, so you really have to give Iran A++ for sanction evasion, actually.
There are thousands of vehicles left in the depots but they won’t roll to the fronts before they get a full refit point.
Then a huge rift from the thread’s own Surtrutn – Putin created the Rosgvardia by breaking it out from the Ministry of Internal Affairs a few years ago.
Now the Ministry of Internal Affairs is setting up some kind of own national guard or whatever it might be by buying back former employees with better pay.
That feels like a huge positioning ahead of the country turning inward.
The first point on everyone’s list seems to be to at least have an armed militia that can shoot and is bigger than the neighboring ministry’s.
No one trusts anyone else, the armed branch of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs looks suspiciously at the defense committee’s militia corps – and so on.
Dog eat dog society in the making, if it wasn’t already, and they don’t seem to have any law against unauthorized corps activity.
It also flew by that the VDV went on the defensive whether it was Kreminna or south of Bakhmut. It was in any case a new location and they were consumed there as well.
I am of the opinion that the condition of the VDV today is miserable. They certainly had many divisions consisting of many regiments but they were low in numbers, thinly armored, and probably two battalions per regiment or thereabouts.
I gave up trying to keep track of them but already early March I thought that most VDV probably saw combat in the winter offensive except for an offensive VDV reserve behind the southern front that Defmon never manages to place, if they even exist.
There is a capability increase that I did not see coming before it arrived – guided Russian glide bombs (JDAMS Russian style).
Until they made their entrance, my amateur assessment was that the Russian Air Force would not dare to engage in front-line combat with their dumb bombs because they then came too close to the world’s best air defense screen.
Now these glide bombs are dangling in front of us as a gamechanger and party crasher, so one had to think a bit about how they work and how big a threat they really are.
They are guided and can be dropped from aircraft at a proper distance from the front. The blast is unpleasantly large and a company in too tight a grouping will probably get hit by a bomb or something.
Have you figured out the weakness yet?
The coordinates take too long from observation until they are entered into the guidance system. The West is quite convinced that if they move with 4-5 hour intervals, Russian indirect fire is never a threat.
So all Ukraine needs to do is keep moving around constantly and the risk of being hit by these admittedly quite unpleasant weapons is low.
Then I wonder how many the Russians have because if they had a huge stockpile of them, they would have drowned Bakhmut and Vuhledar in Russian JDAMS?