11:50 – MatsExtrude
Thanks! 👍
It will be interesting to see if Ukraine launches a counteroffensive soon. It would be a show of strength so I hope you are right!
Trump has probably liked most dictators for a long time. I would guess he would prefer to join that group himself.. Putin is one of the “worse” ones so of course he likes to be friends with him.
Regarding Orbán, Trump’s affection is nothing new:
Four years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FewGyHBPMcg
Two years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tp9zmKz6Svk
(I’ve seen MAGAs interviewed who highlight Hungary as an example country that they think the USA should emulate.. They don’t seem to mind an autocrat, as long as it’s Trump..)
13:04 – Johan No.1
I still don’t know if I should call it a switchgear or something else 😐
13:23 – Johan No.1
Now they are too dumb to understand it but the dictator you want because you think you will be the one who gets all the advantages and doesn’t get arrested has a high probability of affecting you too.
Quite often a dictator cleans out those who first supported him, ask SA and the left in Iran how they thought that went 😀
13:28 – MatsExtrude
Thought it was obvious, it’s called: “Transformer station distribution switchgear installation”
NOTE! Add signal at the beginning if you mean railway instead of electricity!
🙂
13:29 – Johan No.1
That one is always tricky –
-you will lose – the F10 basketball team gives up.
-you have won this – the F10 team feels they don’t need to fight at all and lose.
What has been consistent is that at the first sign of adversity, a collective West throws up their hands and says there is no point in supporting Ukraine.
Therefore, I have developed a certain way of writing.
But yes, the West and especially the EU will have to deal with Russia for decades to come so nothing will return to normal.
However, the collapse in Ukraine will come much faster than everyone currently thinks, it is no longer a wet sandbag they are kicking that barely moves but a bag of those white rice cakes.
13:34 – MatsExtrude
Yes, the supporters who have shown they are willing to do anything to put “their” dictator in power are known to be potentially very dangerous in the future. Better to get rid of them.. 🙂
13:37 – Johan No.1
Well 😀
Putin will not give up – correct.
Has the Black Sea Fleet retreated from Crimea?
Has the elite air force stopped flying over Ukraine (not completely but reduced missions)?
Has the army air force stopped flying over Ukraine?
Has RU stopped this year’s missile rain (maybe…)?
Has RU already retreated from 50% of the conquered territory?
They will not “give up” but they will first lose the southern front, then lose Crimea, then lose Belgorod, then northern Luhansk and finally the darkest Donbass.
At the same time, the intensity of liberation deeds and drone bombings has only increased.
And many sub-republics and oblasts have taken the opportunity to free themselves.
That’s roughly how it will play out, maybe Russia turns inward earlier.
14:58 – Johan No.1
Very hard to choose between the two proposals 😀
15:16 – Johan No.1
Wow today half the text got pushed back, I need to start setting aside more work time to proofread and fact-check before I post 😅
15:20 – Johan No.1
That is very interesting, the more I learn the more I understand that they are a simple criminal clan who also happen to be a country with nuclear weapons.
That they were responsible for large-scale drug smuggling into the EU at the state level I would never have understood, I thought it was the mafias and not the security services. That means in the long run that all smuggling via embassies that I thought was mostly the inner circle was also sanctioned?
Imagine how large an amount must have been brought in through diplomatic mail over the years?
16:02 – Johan No.1
😲 the stench of corpses surrounding oneself with about a dozen corpses to hide must be indescribable along with rats and maggots.
Yep, I can’t understand how the Russian soldiers can accept this, it also exceeds my comprehension actually.
In your description above, we are not very far from the orcs in Mordor actually.
Worth noting that the Russians have gone from mechanized combat to “mole tactics,” doesn’t feel like winning a war directly.
16:13 – Johan No.1
Ukraine themselves have stated that they were not allowed to enter Belgorod with Ukrainian units so they sent in ethnic Russian and Belarusian units with some UN peacekeepers and some reinforced vehicles from the USA.
They received enormous criticism for the Belgorod raids and there were no more after that. It far exceeded the Western materiel used and the criticism could only have been about the actual invasion of Russia.
At the attack in Novorossiysk it was Ukrainian-built marine drones and drones (maybe) that struck and they received a yellow card from the West Zelensky himself has stated.
16:28 – MatsExtrude
They almost have to be on drugs if they are going to survive such an environment for a longer time..
The few who possibly survive will have wonderful memories of the successful SMO in Ukraine for the rest of their lives..
Putin really doesn’t care about his population. Those who don’t die will come home as broken people even if they have no physical injuries..
10:57 – Johan No.1
When you look at the amount of equipment in the Wikipedia list, you understand the astronomical level the support has been and still is at, but it’s only good if it’s enough to fight the barbarians. The Poles seem to have understood this and have ordered 1350 new tanks. The only thing one could criticize is that maybe they should have sent these 1350 tanks to Ukraine instead of taking up a lot of industrial capacity.
https://x.com/jurgen_nauditt/status/1749122329492308478?s=46&t=Vah3JXV31B9lXwZOK5gF7w
30 tanks are fun but if the Russians on the other side of the forest just got five hundred, it’s a meaningless gesture.
Up until the spring offensive 2023, the support was quite well thought-out – key capabilities were added that would make a big difference at the right time and increased gradually – there was a plan behind it.
One of the most amusing things during the whole war was seeing the Russians move all ammunition depots in a sweat to 50km-80km-100km behind the fronts and then Ukraine got what reached further than the Russians thought and everything started again with big mushroom clouds and lots of death. The most dangerous job in the war – depot workers.
After the spring offensive, it seems to have collapsed, F16s are delayed, artillery ammunition has completely stopped (that’s wrong but it’s the narrative being spread and I go along with it), hard vehicles are coming in small numbers and there is a big fight over Taurus.
It might be that the West thought the war would end during the summer but if you don’t send the equipment to achieve that, you have to expect a certain result, right?
This FAB1500 bomb is extremely destructive and a terrible weapon. F16s had completely denied RU from using this weapon and they take their time to arrive.
https://bsky.app/profile/johanno1.bsky.social/post/3kjj3oxcbje2v
Then basically everyone who can think independently has understood that unless Russia turns inward, there will be a round two and since the West has not allowed UA to make Russia turn inward, a round two was always given.
Not sending enough material and then not starting new production and modification programs on a large scale is absolutely collective negligence by the entire West.
I know what I believe and that is that Russian subversive activities have been a major contributing cause to this.
Now things are starting to move and I think we can loosen the grip on the boards a bit going forward and rejoice at the amount of heavy weapons Ukraine will buy or manufacture themselves as well as the improvement of armor protection generally against the hordes of barbarians.
But…
Ukraine is treated differently and when you see things like 1350 tanks to Poland or 1000 hard vehicles to Morocco, you get completely tearful.
I can maybe on one level accept that the West does not see Ukraine as a country to wholeheartedly support since it’s old Soviet or something but it’s smart politics to get Ukraine into the EU and if Ukraine were to be included in future defense against Russia, that would be jackpot.
The same with geopolitics – it’s crystal clear that Ukraine is just a stepping stone for further Russian shiny conquests and that if it stops at Ukraine, the world will be a better place to live in.
There is absolutely no excuse for the tardiness and the West has accepted a very high risk which is strange behavior.
Right now, the spirit of Bomber Harris has resurrected in Ukraine and they are hitting Russia’s infrastructure hard, I keep nagging that this should not be underestimated because it should not be underestimated.
Translate that to Stockholm and Gothenburg being blacked out for a few weeks this winter, the PREEM refinery exploding together with Forsmark and Hägglunds industries burning down for a few weeks while the Norwegians we are fighting post mocking messages on social media and our soldiers freeze to death in the Norwegian mountains. There is simmering unrest among the broad masses right now and the Siloviki are thinking about how to handle this.
The repressive apparatus is not enough for both Ukraine and domestic unrest. Ukraine is quite smart because they try to make the price for waging war in Ukraine so painfully high that RU throws in the towel. The West’s low-intensity response and respect for Russian barbarian mentality has only given Putin more genocide energy so now it’s really time to try something new and see if it goes better.
Today RU seems to have only one factory that makes all tank engines, one for all aircraft engines and so on and a striking number have already been visited.
Everything is dismissed as “a small fire that could be extinguished” and then you see a picture of a huge mushroom cloud hundreds of meters high on Twitter where it’s quite clear that manufacturing has now stopped.
We all understand that if a tank lacks a gearbox there will be no fighting, or other smaller components for that matter.
Right now Ukraine is taking the oil embargo very seriously when the world did not – just learned that the Baltic Sea is trafficked by a large number of ships transporting Russian oil and LNG – naively thought there were sanctions against Russian oil?
Who is actually buying now when India no longer buys Russian oil?
Let Ukraine take out terminals by pinpricks so that no oil can be transported (which the West seems to accept now) and a major revenue source for Russia goes towards zero. If you have ever walked around an oil terminal, refinery or something else, you have also been struck by the complexity of the construction and it takes a drone in one place to cause at least damage that takes weeks to repair and the operation is on pause. Follow up with attacks or get a bullseye hit and you can shut down the entire operation for a long time and that’s probably what Ukraine is campaigning for right now.
There is one more factor to consider here – the Russian missile barrage has completely failed and their artillery does not reach far while Ukraine is wreaking havoc deep inside Russia, both self-esteem and wallet hurt.
The oil industry is a red line for Russia, that is indisputable because it really stings.
Russia can only escalate, we know that, and they have to top Bomber Harris’s carpet bombing somehow which they cannot manage with conventional means in Ukraine.
They now have two options – strike outside Ukraine with or without proxies and hope it scares the West into abandoning Ukraine or resort to nuclear weapons.
It feels more attractive to escalate with or without proxies – a bit more Russian, so expect spectacular terrorist attacks or other unpleasant things ahead on the scale of October 7. A car full of TNT in some densely populated city in the West from a freewheeling terror group is a low-odds bet.
This year they have failed with sabotage against energy in the EU and all major terrorist attacks in the EU were discovered in time this year so the security services are obviously on the ball. I remember many spectacular executed terrorist attacks a few years ago.
But just as Russia due to its enormous size is completely unable to protect itself against Ukraine, the West is unable to protect itself against all terrorist attacks.
A last ambitious attempt to get the West to withdraw its claws that can be blamed on proxies thus.
The million-dollar question – how far is the country Russia willing to deteriorate to continue the war in Ukraine?
The 26th MRR is now doing terribly near Krunky, lying there amid the shelling and the stun effect of the drones.
Now the 36th MRR doesn’t want to be worse off and they are positioned over by Vuhledar.
https://x.com/pstyle0ne1/status/1749194599061422452?s=46&t=Vah3JXV31B9lXwZOK5gF7w
A quick scan of the unit maps shows quite a few thousands of units gone near the Dnieper now, which are completely newly formed from mobilized troops with poor training and probably numbering around 1,000 strong.
At least I expect a UA offensive soon, otherwise my personal profiling of Zalizhny has completely failed and I want my money back from that guy at the FBI who did it and charged way too much.
Following up on my question whether that NAFO tweeter yesterday had a point with his loss ratios, Shusko seems to think that in Avdiivka it is 1:12 in hardware in favor of UA – that is absolutely enormous and maybe the barbarian loss ratio was also correct?
https://x.com/igorsushko/status/1749209233932071326?s=46&t=Vah3JXV31B9lXwZOK5gF7w
Perpetua has the usual 1:5 ratio in barbarian losses and since many of the assaults involve running across fields (again…) the ratio for barbarians should be similar.
https://x.com/andrewperpetua/status/1749319258138365996?s=46&t=Vah3JXV31B9lXwZOK5gF7w
Zelensky has already confirmed this for us and anecdotal evidence supports it.
Can Russia absorb losses of 1:5 to 1:12 over time? No, of course not. I also have the feeling that this ratio has steadily improved over the course of the war and that the time when Ukraine suffered the greatest losses in 2022 has never returned.
Remember here that RU went from 6,000 shells per day to 10,000 and that was considered a big deal. Until Ukraine managed to decimate the artillery, it was probably 50,000 – 80,000 per day or something and that was also where Ukraine took 70% of its losses. They managed through an enormous campaign to decimate the Russian artillery by about 70%, risking mixing up the numbers.
Then we have this very interesting puzzle piece that fits well with what Skator posted earlier in the thread, that RU is making extra efforts to recover abandoned vehicles near Krunky.
https://x.com/anno1540/status/1749227949180473345?s=46&t=Vah3JXV31B9lXwZOK5gF7w
A train with T62s and a dozen recovery vehicles – you prioritize what you send, right?
Partly old vehicles but also recovery capacity, so now they prioritize getting home vehicles that can be repaired.
The guy who always talks about the Russians being short on armor might not be entirely wrong after all?
The rumor that the West has lifted restrictions on long-range weapons doesn’t seem to be true because SS went to Crimea and not targets in Russia, now we know that.
https://x.com/noelreports/status/1749027974865690870?s=46&t=Vah3JXV31B9lXwZOK5gF7w
There are thus 3 million cluster munitions that are to be scrapped and not sent to Ukraine.
https://x.com/secretsqrl123/status/1749229826064470229?s=46&t=Vah3JXV31B9lXwZOK5gF7w
Here you have the number of US destroyers equipped with high energy lasers.
https://x.com/airpowernew1/status/1749161520280297604?s=46&t=Vah3JXV31B9lXwZOK5gF7w
Regarding Operation “Turn Off the Lights,” this post from Erik14 shows how it starts – they take out some “substation” (what is the Swedish word?) and then the heating goes out due to the power outage and everything takes weeks to repair. Heating pipes freeze and burst, drains freeze and burst.
https://twitter.com/LXSummer1/status/1749167591900217441?t=Q_Cr-5Rg1bKNAXfeF5j-8g&s=19
The soldiers’ wives have had enough.
https://x.com/jurgen_nauditt/status/1748919938310410550?s=46&t=Vah3JXV31B9lXwZOK5gF7w
There is another angle to consider – US support has stopped and Ukraine strikes directly at the Russian oil industry.
Was it the US that had the strongest demand that Russia must be made to peace?
It is at least obvious that Ukraine no longer considers it necessary to refrain from taking the war into Russia.
Since the EU promises more support, the countries in the EU presumably have no objection to this.
Worth diving into, but if it was the US’s brainchild that UA should not strike targets in Russia, there are a huge number of wrong decisions from the US in this war, we will see when history is written.
UA is now dealing with this year’s missile rain just like with the Black Sea Fleet’s embargo on maritime traffic – they strike and the Russians dodge and blow a lot of hot air in the media instead.
After this, we will actually see if Russia will unleash more missile rain; the thread’s guess before it started was that it would become a Black Sea Fleet affair if you remember.
T..p praises Orban
That T..p would praise Orban, an absolutely insignificant leader who is only important for supporting Putin, speaks volumes. So much so that I am prepared to claim that T..p is pro-Russian and doing Putin’s bidding.
https://x.com/jayinkyiv/status/1749099176527364192?s=46&t=Vah3JXV31B9lXwZOK5gF7w
I know it is so but one looks for the piece of information that cannot be disputed and here it is; as an engineer you want to prove everything. Putin and Xi are after all world leaders but Orban is nothing – a bit like T..p going out and praising Märta Stenevi – completely unreasonable if he were a somewhat mainstream presidential candidate.
I am prepared to go so far as to say he will never set foot in the White House again.
T..p has said a lot recently that is negative-negative but this statement totally exposes him and if we can figure it out, others have figured it out.
Russia has lost this war but it is not lost until they give up or are thrown out.
The carpet bombings that are spreading will of course not diminish because Budanov has already told us that they have tens of thousands of drones completed and they build many thousands per month.
We also have winter cold in Russia in March, so over two months of freezing.
20% of Russia’s LNG exports went up in smoke in the latest drone attack – does anyone think four successful attacks more are far off?
Russia is completely unable to defend itself while Ukraine can shoot down +90% of all attempts against Ukraine – that is what reality outside the media looks like.
The war is already won.
Ukraine is now the aggressor and the ball is rolling, they strike at Russia’s soft parts and fuel liberation movements inside Russia. They couldn’t manage this in 2022 and in 2023 they weren’t allowed to do it but 2024 finally seems to have opened up.
One of the reasons Putin desperately tries to get his win is that he understands he has stirred up the wrong hornet’s nest and unless Ukraine is defeated, Russia will turn inward.
It will be incredibly fun to see Russia scream and cry at the UN and beg to at least keep Moscow.
The siloviki have a few more months to negotiate as long as they have occupied territories left to negotiate over.
When the country is liberated, no straitjacket in the world can prevent Ukraine from collapsing Russia if they have retaken the country by force.
The only thing that could become an emergency exit for Putin is if they withdraw to the 1991 borders and the West negotiates a deal and conditions it on Ukraine’s EU membership, but they need to do that now.
This emergency exit will close permanently quite soon, it closes when the Azov strike has been delivered.
(I know, a bit dramatic but some talking points cannot be negotiated away with the principals).
The media wants to discuss weapon shortages and that Russia will attack the EU in a few years, I think 2024 started with carpet bombing in Russia and am now impatiently waiting for the next daring offensive from Zalizhny.
If they no longer listen to the admonitions not to take the war into Russia, maybe they have also stopped listening to the bungling NATO officers and will run their own offensive race going forward.
They retake Northern Luhansk by entering the northern Oblasts and the darkest Donbass by moving towards Rostov na Don – there is already low-intensity war in Russia today so crossing the border is much less than we think.
ATESH and SOF are wreaking havoc like an angry swarm of hornets in the rear but they will probably increase and we have only seen the beginning of the drone swarms.
There will also be mechanized combat because there is an offensive reserve that has now recovered somewhat.
The International Legion may have fewer fighters but ethnic Russian units have kilometers-long queues of applicants.
2024 started like a New Year’s fireworks display, roughly.