11:26 – MatsExtrude
+100 Well written as usual!
Unfortunately, I have to spoil a bit, the translation for the link about the drone reads like this:
“According to current reports, Chinese engineers are involved in the development of a system to drop artillery mines from Russian drones from the company Ural Drone Hub.”
11:31 – Johan No.1
What the heck 😐
(I thought it was Asian English but took a chance…).
12:20 – Johan No.1
Yes indeed and everywhere – Kazakhstan is a huge country.
I have earlier in the thread tried to argue that a full war in Europe when the Soviet Union stood on the NS line Berlin, or Czechoslovakia was even further west, would have been exciting.
Considering it was before the missiles and the Soviet Union had the weight in tanks and artillery, it probably could have gotten lively. Rumor maybe but it was said that they had divisions of tanks fueled and ready in barns along the border to the West so there would never have been the buildup the West would see and that preceded a war. True or not no idea.
I got shot down pretty hard but maybe it was early 80s or something?
12:31 – Johan No.1
But it should maybe have said early 80s or something.
12:53 – Johan No.1
So, that bit of information about the drones was not in my morning text last night and the computer was logged in when I got to the workstation.
Checked the surveillance camera but the only thing I saw was something burgundy metal with two decimeter-sized wheels and a basket on it in the corner of the house, you could only see half of this mysterious thing and it was gone after five minutes. I wonder if I have been hacked or something here, a little worried.
13:06 – Johan No.1
Now Skator has clarified that the 284,000 dead Russians were a nothing burger, thanks Skator.
14:23 – Johan No.1
Is it the same as this one?
https://twitter.com/golub/status/1688494721415413760?s=46&t=qiW0PwqFvxIusL9HrlylBw
Johan’s take on this – the Russian criminal clan is starting to feel that what was supposed to be a quick smash-and-grab coup of Ukraine is starting to shake under their feet. They are seriously nervous now.
15:42 – Johan No.1
It’s chaos in Belarus 🤣🤣
(better than four on this and I take it as a big win).
https://twitter.com/casualartyfan/status/1688516001824956416?s=46&t=C6FqklLQbaTWbsCc87xKkA
21:10 – Johan No.1
Hello Thread 😁
India and China agree that peace talks should be based on Ukraine’s territorial integrity.
Bus meets running screaming little Putin.
https://twitter.com/TheStudyofWar/status/1688588528505044998
22:06 – Johan No.1
Medvedev got caught
https://twitter.com/mldiascosta/status/1688544468666929152?s=46&t=7dQ0lgNFWBHNHOMfvqRydA
22:23 – MatsExtrude
😆👍
11:14 – Johan No.1
This one was exciting, a bit heavier stuff than 82mm drone-dropped wing grenades ahead, the Russians must tremble when one of those drops straight down into the pit and the fuse starts to hiss.
https://twitter.com/antiputler_news/status/1688146723955253250?s=46&t=XDuLUFJv2lVi4k5LtaGMAw
It was an interesting discussion with MXT where we talked about how the goalposts have shifted.
At the beginning of the war in the sea of all injustices, we discussed that if RU got a single square meter of land in the end, they could claim victory, and it looked like that for quite a while.
Right now, Russia is trying to talk the West down, and the narrative is that Ukraine cannot win when the truth is that it is Russia that cannot win.
Their last revised, for the tenth time, end goal was to take at least Luhansk and Donetsk oblasts – they are not even close and are being pushed back every day.
Russia just flips the argument, changes the name, and then launches it hard in an influence operation and everyone takes it as truth and repeats it.
Kind of like with the fortifications on the southern front, it is the Russians who are trapped rather than them luring Ukraine into some kind of Russian (suicide) trap, and exactly the same with the whole war.
Despite trying to reverse the narrative with their influence operation that Ukraine’s spring offensive is going terribly and everything is lost, the meeting in Saudi signaled a bigger shift in how the world receives this influence operation.
This actually runs through everything – “Russia has unlimited soldiers, they simply cannot lose”.
Oh really – that argument sounds super exciting, so can those who claim this explain why they just raised the age to be drafted into the war if you have been an officer to a full 70 years!
70 years for a Russian is a bit like a dog year since they are deeply marinated in bad mash and have smoked unfiltered cigarettes since early teens – like a 90-year-old Swede with arthritis who can’t even get out of the pit.
Another lie – “they will be able to bomb Ukraine for decades to come, this will never end”.
Yes, we see it – missile attacks went down from 100 every other week to maybe 10-15 every other week and all are now shot down.
And Ukraine is knocking out bridges, sinking ships, disabling the rail network and war-important industry in Russia, and absolutely destroying all maintenance within its territory.
When Ukraine gets Grom 2 production going, Kremlin is in trouble.
“They have as many tanks and artillery as they want”. Yes, we see that too, T54-55 on the battlefields and Oryx has the first destroyed ones on picture.
All the Ahkp they deployed on the southern front were shot down in two weeks, they have broken the back of the artillery and they are presumably very short on armor because they are like an endangered species in the Amazon – completely impossible to capture on camera.
Russia cultivates the image of its own invincible army worse than an organic farmer. Since around 2010, Western media have willingly showcased new Russian rearmament and everyone has been terrified. I bit on that bait and it took a week after the war started before I calibrated myself to reality, or maybe three days.
We have seen very little of this equipment on the battlefield and one might suspect that was all they had shown at the parades.
At least no Satan 2 have been fired and we haven’t seen that tsunami torpedo either.
Just like during the Cold War until the country collapsed on its own without anyone doing anything and the West to its great surprise realized that the army, navy, and air force had been in absolute decay for quite a while.
There was an active war under the surface in our archipelago even though history was somewhat adjusted both because our governments probably didn’t want to blow it up and the Russians denied everything. A strong memory I have is parents watching the news with the skirmishes in the archipelago – everything in different shades of gray on TV, early autumn before the heating was turned on so cold indoors and then the parents’ worry on top of that..
The Russians have thrown themselves at weak neighbors, it has always been absolute chaos and sky-high losses but they have been able to absorb it in the military power they have and then turn loss into victory.
Google the New Year’s attack in Grozny which makes this war look like a huge victory.
Zelensky has stated that the entire Russian army is fighting in Ukraine – you can choose to believe him or not. Something that supports this is that the garrisons are empty, that Belgorod was undefended and that Wagner operated without seeing a single Russian soldier for two days, a bit like that animal species in the Amazon.
I know that the 285,000 death tolls are up for discussion but NOEL has credibility. I’ll gladly follow up on this because if so RU losses are almost spot on or how and how one of the worst warmongers can go out with it on TV made me drop the rum bottle on the floor but I managed to scrape up half a glass at least so not a total loss.
https://twitter.com/noelreports/status/1688442647260651520?s=46&t=qiW0PwqFvxIusL9HrlylBw
Since I was fifteen, I have been spoon-fed first the Soviet myth and now in recent years the Russian myth. If you have had an unhealthy fixation on something, it is probably the Soviet Union and Russia after figuring out that the internet was invented just to check swimsuit pictures.
Russia always plays high stakes and when they lose, the fall is straight down to the bottom of the pit.
I believe everyone here agrees that Ukraine should be allowed to beat Russia on its own but they must get the means to do so and without a bunch of shady conditions. Ukraine has the personnel but they need the equipment.
The communication around the meeting in Saudi was higher-level signal politics and very encouraging – more of that.
More criminal cases to The Hague, more sanctions and more weapons.
It seems at last that the Germans will take the lead again, with a bit of luck it will be Taurus. Scholz suits are setting new fashion worldwide and his hairstyle is the latest craze among Berlin hairdressers.
That the USA has been braking as hard as they have done the last six months is a mystery to me but then the EU must increase the pace instead. The USA has also sent by far the most of everything and was driving for a long time before the EU got going and this IS a bit our war, the USA has China to keep in check.
It must not stop at a smashing victory (unfortunately) – the West must classify Russia as a terrorist state because this subversive activity is an absolute poison that must be removed.
Now it has become generally known that it is Russia driving the Quran burnings and then surely everyone understands how many of our internal conflicts they are behind, right?
That the whole West shut down its electricity production and then buys Russian dirty gas doesn’t require a doctorate to understand that it is Russian influence. Especially when Greenpeace sold Russian dirty gas as environmentally friendly gas…
All influence operations always reveal themselves in the end because they benefit Russia.
Saw Kleo on Netflix and realized how chaotic it must have been when the country was merged and how easy it was for subversive elements to get high positions in society – that was probably why Scholz had such a hard time in the beginning, much sympathy for him and those who had to mop the floors after cabinet meetings and collect all the knocked-out teeth.
The other thing is that in Africa, the West must take its damn responsibility pretty soon and not allow the continent to flare up in civil wars and wars.
I don’t know if you follow what’s happening but Wagner is in Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, CAR and Chad (I think) and is either supporting sitting dictators or backing rebels.
ECOWAS tried an intervention but it doesn’t seem to amount to anything worth mentioning.
The countries in this part of Africa are very fragile, different population groups that historically have attacked each other whenever given the chance, income gaps, corruption, and enormous poverty.
Russia will be able to destabilize the entire sub-Saharan region in a year or so if they want to and are allowed to do so.
Having seen how Russia has acted in Ukraine, it is also my strong conviction that the country should be decolonized (by legal means). The oblasts and republics that exist should be allowed to have the relationship with the central power that they want. In this way, a future Russian threat becomes much smaller.
The first step was taken in 1989 but now they have tried to reclaim lost provinces through massive subversive activities that eat up countries from within. That Georgia became pro-Russian completely passed me by.
No prize for guessing that Ukraine, Moldova, and Belarus would soon be fully Russian and Hungary and Serbia loyal allies.
Then Russia would absolutely have tested Article 5 with the Baltics but the biggest problem with Article 5 is if the countries had gotten Russia-friendly governments that didn’t want NATO and instead invited Russia.
Election fraud, dead candidates, and massive influence can turn countries pretty quickly.
That de-dollarization they are doing apparently goes well, Russia sits on a mountain of unusable Indian rupees they can’t spend on anything other than Tata cars they don’t want.
But they push it hard, they push the BRIICS hard and they push their multipolar world hard.
They push the rollback of NATO hard.
They absolutely want a free pass to be able to invade small neighbors or weak countries in the world and then capitalize on chaos and earn their blood money. Just like they have started doing in Africa.
Russia is a criminal clan that has a country and they put all their effort into destabilizing the West, oppressing their own population, rampant corruption, and trying to take over countries by tearing them apart from within.
Then it’s always fun to read PerraG55 and understand that there are plenty of sensible people in Russia who suffer under the central government’s Don Corleones.
If provinces and republics become independent countries or autonomous, there will be as many Ukraines and Georgias as you want in the future that contribute to a more peaceful world – the world becomes a better place.
I get the impression that UA doesn’t find that many armored vehicles to knock out anymore.
https://twitter.com/noelreports/status/1687738679987470336?s=46&t=rNVIDCyRg0VAs5GNd-dTcA
Ukraine is also starting to get tired of the know-it-all West now and you understand them, raised blood pressure all war long for all the idiocies the West comes up with.
https://twitter.com/igor_from_kyiv_/status/1687523312828633095?s=46&t=rNVIDCyRg0VAs5GNd-dTcA
We have suspected this for a long time in the thread but now we have proof – Chinese components in Russian missiles manufactured in 2023.
https://twitter.com/trenttelenko/status/1688375197215121408?s=46&t=qiW0PwqFvxIusL9HrlylBw
Russia will continue to fight until it no longer pays off for them – the West must make it unprofitable.
https://twitter.com/nonamamulashvi/status/1688411445384347648?s=46&t=qiW0PwqFvxIusL9HrlylBw
If we now go against the situation that Russia fails to talk the West down as the meeting in Saudi Arabia suggests, there was only one other factor that drove the Russian departure from doctrine – mobilization.
We have reasoned this to absurdity but I can only see these two options.
I’ll eat my lunch thermos if it’s the same type of mobilization as last year – impossible.
Then it’s basically over but Putin et al. refuse to realize it so it will continue a while longer until it crashes, the Russian army is still running on afterburners.
-The area behind the southern front that will need to be abandoned is enormous.
-Crimea is completely unsustainable to try to defend, Lex Soviet and Lex Germans.
-The darkest Donbass will be entered from below after the Russians have been forced to defend Rostov-on-Don preventively.
-The only thing that seems a bit difficult to work with is northern Luhansk but UA will get through somewhere and there is only one defensive line up there.
It is with quite a bit of sorrow one reads the reports now, we have all along known that Ukraine will take tens of thousands of losses in this spring offensive but that doesn’t make it any less tough. Every day you want this war to end but we all understand that more violence is needed before it’s over.
Remember the discussions last year and those who knew for sure that the Dnieper would never be crossed – lucky that Ukraine doesn’t listen to the pessimists and instead sees difficulties as a challenge to overcome 😀