10:05
The link to the drone weapon was wrong but it had a lot of explosions too 👍
13:26
Just when you thought castrations were the worst we would hear, here comes this 🤬🤬
https://twitter.com/kremlintrolls/status/1670374341844893696?s=46&t=ZYFmjWIoQH_KIIsgWeG3_g
13:34
Yes, they train on them for a few months and then order a thousand directly 😀
It feels like the vehicle impressed them; they haven’t ordered 1000 Marders, Bradleys, or anything else, so they probably intend to have that one as their standard IFV in all mech and armored brigades.
Ukraine is also the one field-testing weapon systems against a qualified enemy, and we already wrote in spring 2022 that the CV90 was the world’s best IFV when we tried to entice deliveries.
Fram i Natten should post more snake-hawk emojis so we don’t lag with the Gripen training, exactly.
It would be incredibly fun if the CV90 could become some kind of standard IFV in NATO; the only less fun thing is that they probably sold Hägglunds to BAE Systems, but there will probably be work and then all the service agreements?
16:11
From Kiev Independent that RU is moving units from Kherson to behind the southern front.
I think we already knew that but it’s a bit semi-official now.
https://twitter.com/kyivindependent/status/1670427021585838088?s=46&t=49Cda3MFVmVegHQATweJeA
16:17
Yes, we have known about this for a long time and it drives you completely crazy when you think about it 🤬🤬🤬 Do you remember the story at the start of the war about the mother who was tied up and then they took her five-year-old daughter and abused, tortured, and finally murdered the child in front of the mother and then released her and stood laughing when she tried to take her own life and failed.
So many barriers have been crossed in such an act and it is almost a normal state, murder of children is something few can handle but in the Russian army it is an ordinary day among all the sexual sadistic diagnoses they have.
Yes, good that it is starting to come out broadly and can no longer be dismissed as stories, Ukraine has prisoner lists and there are surely several thousand who will not return and then it is not easy to hide that prisoners have been castrated and hundreds have come back.
Russia has to take the full reckoning for this and they shall do so 🤬🤬
22:07
Flagging for a short break, there were no gasoline protests strangely enough and our panic purchases ahead of weeks in isolation were completely unnecessary – the colleague bought cheese for 800 SEK and I a bottle of rum. So the trip will proceed as planned and we all know that these will be the most important weeks of the war that we miss 😀
09:31
This is probably the most important piece of the puzzle this week if it turns out to be true, according to the below the Russians do not have enough to fully secure the rear defensive lines – a defensive line without a tired Russian lying around sipping from the mash jug is even worse than with a Russian in it.
https://twitter.com/pstyle0ne1/status/1670205909333688324?s=46&t=ZYFmjWIoQH_KIIsgWeG3_g
Then the drone weapon starts rolling out over the southern front and we KNOW they do enormous damage – sometimes we get reports of a drone group (size unknown) that during a night shift takes out 5-6 tanks.
https://twitter.com/pstyle0ne1/status/1670183309534539777?s=46&t=ZYFmjWIoQH_KIIsgWeG3_g
Then the question is whether Russian counterattacks have started up a bit quietly in calm front sections as relief?
There has been a lot of Storm Z and Kadyrovites so I don’t know exactly what has attacked but up in northern Luhansk and between the city of Donetsk – Horlivka they have at least tried and failed spectacularly as usual. It is supposed to be relief for the southern front and Bakhmut but UA takes the hit with existing units so RU only loses soldiers and materiel they cannot spare.
Yesterday there were two flashes in the thread that RU is moving units from northern Luhansk and “from the south” up to the southern front. Accentmannen and Gregg are usually quick on such things and I haven’t seen anything else either so if anyone has information about units being sent to the southern front I’m curious. It seems some general “don’t talk to Johan No.1” order has gone out from you-know-who, extremely resentful…
Now the discussion about RU air supremacy is heating up which I don’t really think is air supremacy except very locally at some active front.
They have basically denied RU air supremacy over Ukraine with LV and then acquired their own “air supremacy” with the drone weapon and long-range guided ammunition – we guessed it would probably be like that last autumn.
The role of the air force is no longer dominant in the way it was in the Gulf War – you can both deny the opponent air supremacy with LV and you can achieve the same effect with other capabilities which Ukraine has done.
I have tried to figure out why Russian attack helicopters get to guest star at the southern front but really have no good answer for that.
New aggressive tactics?
Bradleys, CV90, Gepard and certainly BMP-2 and 3 are not harmless for alligators and we know Poland quite recently gave a big batch of manpads.
In March 2022 RU lost 100 helicopters and 100 aircraft and since then they have flown very sparingly but now they had deployed 30 attack helicopters at the southern front, probably more, and CAS as well presumably?
UA has better LV capability today than at the start of the war and at the southern front they have all vehicles from the West.
I think since the target videos come directly the Russians probably post lots of videos now of some knocked-out vehicles and it becomes a big deal among the desk generals, a bit like the knocked-out maintenance company that made the rounds.
The only reasonable thing is that UA will learn to take them out in the coming weeks so they take big helicopter losses and then they are pulled back. Two on today’s hit list was a good start.
The Russians also don’t seem to shoot their heavy missiles at targets at the southern front, there are ammunition depots, fuel depots and fixed transport hubs but they insist on terror against civilians.
The artillery is clearly heavily decimated and extremely exposed to counter battery fire.
I don’t think we have seen Russian air unload their version of JDAMS over UA yet at the southern front, we probably would have heard that. Maybe they have run out of them?
Then we discussed yesterday that the Russian trump card – most materiel wins – no longer applies.
Russia is now sending T62 and T54-55 to the fronts and we know they use them as infantry support at the southern front.
At the same time Ukraine is getting more modern vehicles and has greater numbers than at the start of the war.
The curves simply point in different directions (green for UA and red for RU) and it doesn’t look good for the Russians.
That they are better than nothing is not an argument you win wars with – T90 everywhere would have been a stronger argument.
The Russians also have old tube anti-tank guns at the fronts and that is not strength either.
MTLB with welded-on LV cannons or those 12.7mm in turrets same thing, homemade builds.
They have simply hit the bottom of the stockpiles and are doing the best they can while Ukraine has gotten 0.5% of heavy stockpiled weapons the West could spare.
Storm Shadows were supposed to be phased out and are an enormous capability increase, the F-16s and other advanced aircraft being discussed are surplus and so on.
Then there is level one – that Portugal, Spain, UK, Belgium, Netherlands give their unit-equipped materiel – if needed they will of course do that.
Then new production of what is starting to come online.
The free West had a peace economy when Russia had already gone into war economy so they had an initial advantage. That then the West’s peace economy with some adjustments was enough to match Russia’s war economy which has an end date is quite obvious and then Russia cannot win or get a draw. Ukraine bought the time needed for the West’s mills to start grinding.
One more Easter egg surprise recently – UA has new electronic countermeasures against Russian drones. That was after they themselves started using drones that RU could not jam. Things are going well now for the Russians when Ukraine’s drone swarms pour in.
BRIICS has somewhat of a cult-like belief that trade should stop in dollars. Right now Russia is sitting on a mountain of Indian rupees that are unusable and a Chinese bank that would facilitate loans outside the dollar is now on the brink of collapse and needs dollars. Becoming free from dollar hegemony seems to have gone very badly so far.
It’s not so bad to have the dollar as the world currency and then other countries find ways to get it if they don’t have a currency that can be exchanged directly – fair for everyone, extra bonus for the USA but the alternatives to trade with each other in worthless currencies feel worse.
If one can agree on a world currency that would be better and one can have more currencies, EUR as well for example?
Renminbi is not a safe currency and China also constantly cooks its books but EUR would probably work?
https://twitter.com/chinabeigebook/status/1670079390493933570?s=46&t=mb1NC8mWKGkJlG9cDvQ9Fg
Then we have Putin’s meeting with the delegation of six heads of state and his little economic forum.
Putin totally embarrassed himself with his usual mix of nonsense, he claimed that the Ukrainian children who were kidnapped and adopted away had been rescued, that it was Ukraine’s fault that the war started and so on endlessly.
The six countries whose heads of state went to Russia will probably see some negative consequences from this and they deserve it.
https://twitter.com/anno1540/status/1670110496450592768?s=46&t=5zh7tZr2RGDizQ4u76b9hw
It is a free world and you can support Putin if you want, but then you also have to expect not to be friends with the free West, that is not a natural law.
Those doing business in Russia are starting to seriously understand the consequences it can have, and the list compiled by Ukraine was actually quite short.
Virtually everyone stayed away from Putin’s economic forum, and it is Erdogan, Orban, and South Africa who openly still support him.
The EU should sort out Orban and Hungary; they have gone in a totalitarian direction when they fired the 100 senior officers in 2022. That is not a natural law either, that you can behave however you want and sabotage the EU from within.
I understand that it is a problem with these organizations that membership is “for life,” UN, NATO, EU, and all the others.
Now bad apples have been let in and cannot be gotten rid of, but at least the EU should be able to unite around Hungary because they are a very active part of Putin’s subversive activities.
Then it’s damn time to classify Russia as a terrorist state so that ALL individuals including heads of state who have dealings with Russia get travel bans and Interpol after them for it.
Then maybe Ramaphosa, Orban, and Erdogan will start behaving.
It was unfortunate that Egypt was involved; it means they have moved from the West towards BRICS. I was out to dinner with that Egyptian entrepreneur and they thought the war was the USA’s fault and that BRICS was good – they wanted to join BRICS. I kept very quiet then as a couple of senior executives from the Netherlands were present.
It will be a long summer but the arrows point in the right direction for Ukraine and bright red downwards (bad) for Russia.