Topic search isn’t helping me much, so apologies if this has been answered. What could Putin do after declaring war that he can’t do now? My understanding is that currently Russian soldiers can quit without formal consequence. They couldn’t under war. Also, if he declares war there can be a draft and we could see hundreds of thousands of new soldiers.
Shrug
Who knows. I think the question since the Moscow apartment bombings over 20 years ago has always been a question of “What could Putin do?”
We all know those bombings were staged by him and his FSB to initiate a new Chechen war. Would he blow up his own people and blame it on Ukraine? You bet your patooty he would.
This is the issue with just about any professional army, though I’m hesitant using the word professional to describe the Russians. A lot of the equipment and ammo we donated to Ukraine were old stock. Ammo doesn’t really get old if stored properly, speaking as a gun owner myself. The other stuff that uses computer systems may have been sitting there for years. I’m not sure how reliable even our own equipment outside the “simple” stuff would be if we went to a full blown war today, and I say this as Trump supposedly wanted to quietly bomb Mexico.
Attrition always favors the country being invaded; your enemy will lose more soldiers to you while you defend. That is the basic premise of any war.
I’m not defending Russia here, or Ukraine. What’s happening is sad and debating who’s doing better than who and whose equipment is failing or succeeding sheds little light on the actual victims of this war, the Ukrainian people.
My only concern is how crazy the next guy will be if Putin dies. People have this weird dream of the next guy being sane or that Russia would give up their nuclear weapons. I’d love to be smoking whatever those people are smoking. They’d sooner nuke the planet than give it all up.
FWIW:
Two word reply, begins with “no” and a colorful term for excrement. I’m not lobbing this at you here but various news groups seem to be stating the obvious as if their readers are stupid. The quality of journalism has fallen way low since the recession.
There’s been a few long-form articles that went into deep dives on the war. NYT did a brilliant article on Kyiv a couple weeks ago, showing the animal like destruction and carnage the Ruskies did.
Well…whatever your opinion about the reporting I think the important part here is this is the opinion of CIA director Bill Burns. I think that comes with some weight.
No idea, and I doubt our gov even knows either. In the case of Soviet T62’s the Russians supposedly scrapped them when they couldn’t find more buyers of their junk. I followed this up a few weeks ago after I’d read it but there’s nothing on what happened. I’m not entirely sure if they’re supposed to put out a notice of how scrapping happens or what the end product was turned into since it’s still useable steel once melted down again. But in true Russian fashion I imagine the radios are originals on their equipment and the engines can’t be that complicated to work on today if they’re 60s and 70s era tank engines. I’ve never seen an old tank engine FYI, just the newer stuff, well, “newer” in our M1 tanks with the turbines. I don’t think the Russians use anything advanced like that.
The term is Pyrrhic victory. It means Ukraine will win, but the win won’t be much of a win when you consider the economic toil, the vast destruction, the thousands of lives lost in the civilian sector and often a generational wipe down, seasoned and green troops who laid down their life against criminals, the list goes on.
The last estimate I read of how much it would cost us and Europe to invigorate Ukraine is about $600B, which isn’t much It’s going to cost more than 25-30B it took during the Marshall Plan, but with modern ingenuity I think the dollar can be stretched a lot further than the late 40s to early 50s.
I work in a field where my work has been impacted by the pandemic and now this war atop that. I’d prefer Russia to just give up on May 9th declaring the special operation (seriously wtf?) has been completed and everything goes back to normal.
I never considered my career to come to an almost stand-still but here we are.
The figures I’ve seen are that Russia has closer to 12,000 tanks, and many are not operational. A lot of their military equipment seems to be pre 2014.
A Russian shop that builds and repairs tanks had to shut down due to lack of parts.
The Russians seem to be losing. If they have some more advanced soldiers and military hardware, where is it? Why were they shipping in pickup trucks with machine guns welded to them rather than new APCs and tanks if they have them?
I’ve seen that figure too, but I’ve never seen solid attribution outside of wikipedia. I’ve heard the 20-25K term referred to tanks, not all their moving weapons.
The same could be said about Ukrainian shops being blown to bits. I’ll admit I know next to nothing about tanks, but if it’s exterior repair isn’t it just welding steel to steel and going with it? I don’t think either side will put the time in to retrofit brand new parts. Bore/barrels will be harder to replace.
I never claimed they had more advanced hardware? I merely pointed out to some of the ridiculous claims that were being thrown around. 20B a day in the first month of war, and now it’s 900M a day. These figures supposedly do not take into consideration the economic downturn Russia is experiencing. These are pure war/materials expenses.
Same reason Ukrainians began modifying cars and trucks. Cheaper to attach a machine gun on a crappy turret on a car or truck that you can dismantle and carry the gun off vs risking an armored vehicle you’re low on or need to preserve. UA is also doing this despite getting vehicles from other countries.
Both sides need to preserve their fighting vehicles, this is just a good way to do it. The concept of a technical is nothing new. Even the US made some out of Jeeps in the 70s and 80s. The Russians began showing off their technicals in Belarus before the war, contrary to them state they’re now being used whereas they were being used prior to the war too. USM currently uses the M1161. The Growlers are a fancier Jeep and use some Jeep derived parts. A Tundra or F150 isn’t going to be largely different. The big difference is it likely won’t get stuck in the still muddy conditions Ukraine has. It’s a cheap approach to developing a IFAV fast.
I daresay that even such a victory still wouldn’t be Pyrrhic compared to the alternative of living under the Czar’s bootheel.
And then kiss the Russian airforce goodbye.
Can the Russians actually carpet-bomb anyone? Do they have a bomber fleet?
Nothing good can come from Putin’s speech. If he makes some sort of concession, like a ceasefire, we cannot trust him to keep his word. He will not give up trying to take over eastern Europe. This war will continue until he, and Russia, are defeated.
Depends how you define things. They have a lot of aircraft that can drop bombs, but on paper they do still have a fair number of actual ye olde time bombers. Wikipedia suggests 15 Tu-160 (which are in production and are quite large), 42 Tu-95, and 66 Tu-22, though who knows how accurate that count is day to day. But they can potentially drop a lot of bombs.
The problem is unsuppressed Ukrainian air defenses. Bombers on a steady trajectory and altitude carpet bombing shit don’t tend to be very comfortable when they are getting shot at by sophisticated high altitude missiles like the S-300. Which is one of the reasons carpet bombing isn’t much in vogue these days and those aircraft have been modified and are more often used to fire cruise missiles at a good standoff distance.
Russia has air superiority, meaning they have more power in the air than Ukraine does. But what they don’t have, and what they would desperately need, is air supremacy, where their control over the air isn’t even challenged. Ukraine still has too much anti-air for Russia to achieve that.
As for reserve equipment, it doesn’t matter how many tanks they have, if they can’t support them. How many fuel trucks does Russia still have?
bear in mind, a lot of those bombers are:
a.) not able to fly (if we extrapolate the observed russian maintenance excellency - and airplane maintenance is an order of magnitude more complex/expensive that taking care of a truck)
b.) their delivery vehicles for nukes (which they would like to hate seeing taken down while bombing Joe Doe’s chicken shack)
so, that is probably not going to happen …
FWIW - I recently read an article that stresses that the russians don’t really have an Air Force, rather they have a “Flying artillery” that reports to the ground troops and are mostly doing point-to-point sorties.
If you go by Wikipedia, Tu22m is the only type whose bomb bay can carry freefall bombs. Tu160 and Tu95 can (could?) only carry various cruise missiles, so stocks would run out if the russians started an intensive aerial bombing campaign.
They did use the Tu22m for several strikes in Syria and recently in Mariupol, but they seem to favour artillery for terror bombardements (see Grozhny, Alippo, varous cities in Ukraine). Recen UAF counterattacks seems to have aimed at driving russian forces out of artillery range of Kharkov.
Oh, and Tu22m is a swing-wing plane, which are notorios for being maintenance intensive. The number of operational planes during an intensive campaign won’t be anywhere close to 66.
So about what time is the fool’s speech?
Speech and parade over, nothing new was declared, nothing changed. End of that particular dreaded anticipation, we can move on.
My belief is the reason there was not some calamitous announcement was because Putin is aware that it would make no difference if he “declared war”. What is happening now is all they’ve got, and full mobilization would take months before it took any effect. Russian doesn’t have months.
The sources I have been following all seem to believe that Russia has nowhere to go but downhill in this war. Its efforts have been astonishingly incompetent, they seem only capable of atrocities and shelling empty cities to rubble while their soldiers and war machines get destroyed, and while Russia is bleeding itself dry, Ukraine is being supported with everything the western powers can provide except boots on the ground, more and faster all the time. And Ukraine has plenty of willing boots of its own.
Although we will continue to deny it, Putin is right in this one thing: it is a de facto war between Russia and NATO. But there is only one person to blame for it.