Some of it is apparently inert dummy armor. Take the “explosive” out of “explosive reactive armor” and it’s no longer reactive either. It’s just adding 30mm of rubber and sheet steel to the existing armor. The addition wouldn’t even stop a rifle round.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ukraine/comments/wl3e5e/the_dynamic_protection_of_the_captured_russian/
I’m sure that they wouldn’t cause NATO any inconvenience. This war has proven beyond a reasonable doubt that the Russian military is a hollow shell, with poor troops and bad equipment, and not enough of either.
The only things keeping Russia as a sovereign state is their nuclear deterrent, and if we could somehow overcome that, the economic cost of overrunning them. Why spend that much money to conquer Russia?
Serving in the Russian military is not a good career move.
Guardian blog
A Russian paratrooper wrote a book recently where he describes his fellow troopers shooting themselves in the legs to be able to collect their 3 million ruble payout and escape from combat. This is not propaganda. It’s coming from the Bad Guys side.
“…it would mark one of the most prominent sackings of a military official in the war so far…”
At least he’s still alive, so far.
So this is Russia’s Vietnam, essentially?
I’m sure you’re not the only one to make the comparison, but the number of parallels are striking.
Wasn’t Afghanistan Russia’s Vietnam? Would this be Russia’s Iraq?
In any case, doesn’t this have to drag out for a really long time? It doesn’t seem right to compare to Vietnam, Iraq or any of the many Afghanistan invasions until it drags out for many years.
I sincerely hope somethings ends this fairly soon.
Let’s all hope China’s military is equally bad. The vast numbers of fighting men will always be a concern.
No one knows if their command structure and tactics are better than Russia.
China should be equally concerned as NATO. Does Xi want his country hit with radiation?
This is one time China and NATO need to make a joint statement about nuclear concerns.
Well, by comparison of the relative beginnings, this is neither Iraq or Afghanistan.
In both of those, main military force rapidly seized the capital and all the formal mechanics of state power and natonal identity, and what followed was a protracted insurgency against the occupier.
Russia didn’t even succeed in the first step.
Vietnam is also different because the major power fought primarily on friendly soil with occasionally air or sea power deep strikes into its aggressor neighbor. In this case, Russia is the aggressor neighbor.
I think the clearest historical analogue was the 1939-1940 Winter War between the Soviets and Finland, complete with Russian revanchist and expansionist aggression, an outgunned victim succeeding extravagantly against incompetent and half-hearted attackers, and a near-total lack of strategic success by the invader.
But admittedly, most Americans know nothing about that war, and it doesn’t reverberate emotionally with Anericans like the conflicts of the late 20th and early 21st Centuries.
It’s a real thing, not some wretched attempt at faking ERA.
Hmm…
I hope this doesn’t translate to “we’re going to nuke Ukraine and claim we didn’t nuke Ukraine, so as to hope we don’t have to take the repurcussions of nuking Ukraine.”
and their accuracy with HIMARS. They’re getting amazing targeting intelligence. It helps that its their old security services bldg. They would know the gps coordinates.
I certainly hope this isn’t the closest historic parallel. After all, the way that war progressed was initial failures by the USSR but later on Stalin threw almost everything they had into a new offensive which ultimately prevailed and forced the Finns to sue for peace accepting terms very favorable for the Soviet victors.
I could argue this really is a proxy war the great Cold War tradition, but I guess the bottom line is that while history may not repeat itself exactly, it definitely rhymes.
Well, Finland wasn’t taken over, nor was it Russianized, or even de-Nazified. Losing land area and paying heavily in reparations is bad (if only temporarily so), but there’s much worse fates in store for the Ukrainians, if Russia has its way this time.
On the side of the West it certainly seems that way. The irony is that on the side of the East, it’s now Russia that’s the proxy, and places like Iran and potentially even North Korea sending the arms and (potentially) troops to fight in someone else’s back yard.
Wouldn’t causing a nuclear power accident be the same as firing a nuclear missile? Both should be red line events that would require decisive action by NATO.
A nuclear deterrence policy falls apart if there’s no enforcement.
NATO also can’t just sit back and watch Russia shut off Europe’s largest supply of electric power. That’s a provocation that absolutely requires a response by NATO.
Russia seems determined to drag NATO into the conflict and start a war.
Blowing up that plant would start WWIII. There’s no way severely irradiating half of Europe can be ignored. There would have to be a military response.
Which is why we promptly launched our strategic response when the dastardly Pennsylvanians caused the Three Mile Island war crime.
NATO strategic doctrine doesn’t mean what you want it to mean.
Zaporizhzhia is a conventional pressurized water reactor. A full meltdown, worst case, is still not “half of Europe”. It’s a regional incident at worst.
You’re thinking of Chornobyl. Not the same kind of reactor, with a different failure mode.