we will insist on sustaining the current status-quo in ukr. for years and happily keep our youth running into the ukr. wood-chipper (syrian scenario, but somewhat inverted in terms of casualties) - but are not willing/able to escalate things (mobilization, wmd, nukes).
He probably hopes he dies before the steamy mess is unsustainable for russia and they will pull a Afghanistan-U-turn the week after his funeral.
Good thing: the world has a reason to legitimately take away a good chunk of their war-assets - bite-by-bite, week after week - and trim them back so they will not have any military power to project to the west.
I see more territories breaking away in the near future (1-3 years), e.g. once the chechen/belorus/x-istan top dog get their head blown off. It probably takes very little there if the next guy comes up with a “let’s stick it to putin/the russians and fight for our independence” sentiment. Seems like a viable platform to stand on.
He could not really pick Victory Day to declare full on war since he had not really built up a case and momentum for national mobilization. As far as the population is concerned this is still being announced on TV as a pacification operation against fascists who would be gone already if it weren’t for those meddling Western proxies.
He could not “declare victory” either since ha has no real victories worth showcasing.
So he was stuck with just going on with what he has been doing all along and whipping up patriotic idolatry hearing the “oora”s echo around Red Square.
Yeah, there’s some sort of list of Ukrainians whom the Russians have killed or captured, and there’s someone who’s the most prestigious person on that list. Declare that that person, whoever it was, was the Top Nazi in Ukraine, and that now that you’ve killed him, the job is done. It’s no bigger a lie than the whole “de-Nazifying” thing was in the first place.
" Bonnie ( right ) and Clyde ( left ) in an undated photo found by police"
Not the prettiest woman I’ve ever seen, but it’s pretty easy to tell them apart. Jeez.
Carpet bombing would only increase the number of civilians killed. It makes more sense to use standoff weaponry with a designated target. These can be fired within Russia and travel hundreds of miles.
Yes, cruise missiles. But those ain’t cheap. I once heard they cost about $1 million each, but that was a number of years ago, so they’re likely much more expensive today. That’s what the US military pays; perhaps they’re less expensive in Russia. But I also expect they take longer to build than anti-tank missiles and those take quite a while right now (supply-chain issues).
This is actually a very interesting question you posed. I heard the same, but I’ve always heard that the costs endured by us here in the west and Europe is grossly inflated due to middlemen and parts suppliers upping the ante. My general understanding of production over there is continuous production of essentials and working from there. There is no make X amount and stop after that until it needs replenishing. I’d say ammo is the fastest production cycle, but even at the large factories here in the US it took a few days to make one cluster pack for a cluster bomb. I might be wrong, but it takes more than a couple days. My memory is a bit bad at this but there was an incident with a US factory worker who was killed or suffered from limb loss due to a cluster munition pack going off prematurely.