www.newsweek.com
Russian soldiers blow themselves up after getting drunk on resupply run
The men were reportedly tasked with buying military equipment and they had been drinking at the time of the deadly explosion.
www.thedrive.com
I’ve seen a lot of people dismiss those arguments. Somebody on Twitter crunched the numbers and we have the capacity to give the Ukrainians a couple hundred ATACMS regardless of PrSM which itself wont really be available in any significant quantities anytime soon. Now I can’t speak to that personally but certainly no one buys the escalation argument anymore, not with StormShadow and ScalpER in theater.There are reasons and more to the story.
Decision To Give ATACMS To Ukraine Is About To Become Easier
With ATACMS' replacement arriving very soon, one major argument against sending the ballistic missiles to Ukraine would lose its potency.
Multiple journalists who cover defense and former government types seem to believe both the guys I quoted are very reliable in terms of their expertise on this subject. That doesn’t make them necessarily right of course. I get that. But it is frustrating because the administration isn’t really saying why officially - it’s all back channel to reporters with different anonymous sources saying sometimes subtly sometimes wildly different things.
www.thedrive.com
This is all out of date. The European governments have struggled with timely delivery but so has the US. Abrams are only arriving now despite being pledged at the beginning of the year and GLSDB hasn’t arrived at all. NASAMS and Patriots take just as long as IRIS-T to build (and NASAMS are partly European). Yes the Germans have been reluctant to provide new capabilities unless the US also provides them which is frustrating to say the least but they’ve also been the highest volume of aid by far for any European country - even outstripping the UK. And they’ve delivered the systems, it isn’t vapor ware, you can check Oryx or any of the sites that tracks pledges and deliveries. Yes German handwringing delayed things, but so has ours. The EU-nonEU distinction is immaterial to this discussion and really only covers the UK. Calling that a red flag is odd to say the least. Almost all the relevant European countries are EU, including Nordics, Baltics and Eastern/Central Europe, but again is largely irrelevant beyond that some countries have given their aid through EU institutions rather than direct. The above charts are not weighted by GDP, those are total amounts of aid. Normalizing by GDP certainly does make some European countries stand out both good and bad, but again this is about total aid. The only caveat is the one I mentioned in my previous post, which represents both a good and bad point of US vs Europe comparison - good in that it signals plans for long term European support for Ukraine and building that into their budgets, bad in the sense that comparing that to US is difficult as we have only budgeted for the short term but won’t necessarily stop pledging additional funds unless Trump/republicans win. Yes it is appropriate for the Europeans to step up here, but the point of the post is that they are - it’s not that the US should suddenly be ashamed of its meager delivery’s, but rather the notion that Europe is still underperforming relative to the US is no longer true.It indeed will be interesting to see what Trump’s stance would be on this if he were to make it back to the White House. His comments have been all over the place regarding the war and what he’d do- other than solving it in 1 day by talking to Putin. But generally I think at the end of the day the benefits are just so obvious to anyone who thinks about it. Despite the “perfect phone call” Trump was far more supportive of Ukraine militarily than Obama. And for all the speak of Russia collusion, Trump was actually much harsher on Russia than previous admins. Most of the condemnation around Ukraine aid is just the asinine “oppose the policy of the opposing party just for the sake of it” and to draw attention to and exacerbate negative sentiments around domestic problems. Knowing Trump it’s entirely unpredictable. Just look at his recent comments opposing the R’s anti-abortion radicalism.
As for the conclusion “Europe takes the lead”, that smells of misleading statistics. Why would you necessarily compare all/many/most European countries (evidently EU and non-EU) versus the US. That’s an explicit red flag right there. Certainly many of the Eastern European countries have committed a much more significant percentage of the their GDP, such as the Baltic counties. These are low GDP countries to begin with.
I don’t think comparing GDP is necessarily appropriate when you consider the US GDP is 25T while the next biggest is Germany at 3.8T and a country like Lithuania (one of the highest contributors by %GDP) is $70 billion. Secondly, I think it’s fair to say the US’s interest is in protecting Europe from Russian invasion is important, but is something that we should not be taking more seriously than the Europeans. This is particularly frustrating considering that for decades many of our NATO partners in Europe committed well below the agreed upon %GDP for defense… basically expecting the US military to pickup the slack in the event of conflict. [Heck, I’m not sure there has been an explanation why the US shot down that unidentified balloon over Canadian airspace- obviously NORAD is collaborative but I’d expect the local military to take the shot. It’s been suspected it has to do with their ancient and overdue for retirement CF-18 fighter jet’s older-generation radar limitations. Canada’s defenses are also considered to be very much neglected.] It’s also definitely weird when Japan is donating a higher %GDP than a number of wealthy European countries. At least in respect to military aid, it’s tough for much of Europe to provide when most of Europe, especially Western, has let their military investments and readiness dwindle considerably over the past 30+ years.
The other problem here is the timeliness and specific type of military aid. Take Germany for instance- just one example here- holding up transfers of Leopard tanks… not even German-owned tanks but rather 3rd party nations, went on for months and some might say allowed an extended opportunity for Russia to build multiple lines of defense. And even for that to happen the UK and US had to donate what amounts to a completely insignificant of Challanger and Abrams tanks (14 and 31 respectively IIRC) and which if actually used in battle at those numbers will probably just cause more logistical headaches than worth dealing with.
Another factor is the committed aid and actually dispersed aid. In some cases this can differ as the aid is intended over a period. But what’s less clear is (existing) hardware that is committed but never received months and months and months later.
And there should be some context given too that countries who have donate larger %’s of the smaller GDP’s have in some instances been provided stop-gap measures or US replacements by the US for handing soviet era hardware due of its familiarity with Ukrainian operators. I suspect these types of transfers are not adequately accounted. For example, replacing country’s soviet-era given to Ukraine with Patriot systems or providing regular air patrols courtesy of the US Air Force (on behalf of NATO of course).
To be clear, I am not complaining the US has provided too much aid- more so there are some European countries in particular should be doing more. And furthermore, the history of many/most NATO members expecting the US to bankroll NATO defense in Europe while failing to meet their defense spending commitments is just an unacceptable way to conduct oneself in a partnership.
www.thedrive.com
Hopefully that will also unlock Taurus, but Scholz is being Scholz again.It appears the US is getting closer to sending ATACMS missiles to Ukraine.
Here's an excellent story about ATACMS, its variants, how they work, and when they could be delivered.
Ukraine Getting ATACMS Cluster Variant Would Be A Big Problem For Russia
Cluster munition-laden ATACMSs would be able to take out aprons full of aircraft and key air defense batteries from nearly 200 miles away.
Argus Gadfly said:
He’s almost certainly alive. Sadly. It’d be hard to hide the death of the commanding officer of an entire fleet for very long so pretending he was okay wouldn’t get very far. Even the Ukrainians have backed off saying he was killed.
www.newsweek.com
You’re kidding! It wasn’t super NATO Ukrainian Nazis with biolabs of genetically altered nuclear mosquitoes threatening to encircle the poor Russians of Russia and also Crimea/Donbas who are also definitely Russian? Not to mention the Nazis’ coke fueled Satanic Jewish Gay Atheist allies. Knock me over with a fucking feather.This article is helpful,
Russian state TV lays out plans for new empire
Sergey Mardan has claimed Russia could restore its long-abandoned empire.
I mean, in case you were unclear on this point
I’m on a trip right now, but I gathered that Putin just ordered his claimed Ukrainian territories to be subject to military draft (effective today or tomorrow). WTH? Pro Putin regions are going to have a wake up call. It’s so idiotic and I’m SMH with shut eyes. If you’re going to be a bad guy then be good at it, right? Amateurs
