lots of talk on twitter et al about putin holding a speech concerning mobilization and declaring officially war.
- moscow stock exchange tanked today 9%
- russian tv is broadcasting folclore-dances …
- everybody and their dog waiting for putin
Doesn’t that raise the question whether even with mobilization, do they have the equipment for the expansion of the army?
glad you asked… 
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here is a great thread that will answer a lot of your Q’s:
tl;dr : mobilization will create more problems than solutions and is a make-me-or-break-me decision for putin (who has been doing all the right things in the past 6 months ;-))
It seems that the speech was cancelled.
that has to be one of the most improvised events in recent history … (Putin was not to hold the speech live, but it was pre-recorded)
interesting times!!! … and boy would I like to be a fly on the wall there to see what’s going on - and why they called the war off
be as it is … the hole putin is digging is getting deeper
if Russia does full mobilize, then America gotta match that. Merely diverting an extra few percent of that defense budget to Ukraine’s needs will more than compensate for whatever grungy troops Moscow can scrounge up.
Ukraine’s IT monsters have hacked Wagner prisoners’ recruitment website. Now Ukrainians have all personal information of the new recruits, digital transformation minister Mykhailo Fedorov said.
It was the main Wagner site. They also replaced the Wagner Group website’s frontpage with gruesome photos of dead Russian or Wagner soldiers in various states of decay.
Also, on Wagner-affiliated sites, they changed some of the reaction emojis to things like Azov or Kraken logos.
I’d bet large quantities of money that they don’t.
Think about it: If you were to launch a major “Special Military Operation” to essentially conquer a neighboring country that has a population of over 40 million, and a standing army with similar equipment to yours, what would you send to do the job? Personally, I’d send the best troops with the best equipment, particularly if a “full mobilization” would require a lot more political effort that just a regular old “special operation”.
Holding back at best gives you little, and possibly costs you a lot, if things start going south on you. It’s that whole “penny-wise, pound-foolish” problem. So I expect that what we’ve seen is the best they have. Anything they scrounge up now to replace it will be worse.
Putin now set to talk for an hour at 9am Moscow time tomorrow (according to reports quoting a Russian media outlet).
I reckon he’s just going to announce these referenda and witter on for an hour about how these areas have always belonged to Russia. If he’s really desperate he might try to claim that any attacks on these areas would be the same as an attack on Russia itself, and attacks using NATO weapons would have ‘consequences’.
Consequences, all right, but for whom?
If I were a Russian prisoner doing a long sentence, I think I’d definitely take the Ukraine-war-job offer. Just try to slink away to surrender in the darkness of night…
The old Soviet Union was (in)famous for never throwing anything away. Old 122mm artillery pieces from WWII would be rusting in a field in Siberia. T34s - well, most ended up broken down in Eastern Europe, but those that survived the war were mothballed and ended up all over the globe in various wars of national liberation, well into the 70s.
Now, most of that old equipment will be of little help on the modern battlefield - where the half-life of a T55 (for example) can probably be measured in minutes - but I expect they will at least be able to equip whatever troops they raise.
Rusty shit buckets that don’t run hardly count as “equipping” them. Tanks are notorious for breaking down a lot under the best of circumstances. The crap they’ll be able to send? I suspect half of it will have to be dragged and/or pushed across the border.
My reading is that he won’t want to mobilise because a) does he really want to give weapons to countless dissatisfied citizens? and b) why not just announce the referenda and then wait to see what Ukraine does? If they attack these areas then he can try to claim he has cause to escalate and maybe mobilisation becomes an easier sell. If they don’t then happy days for Putin.
Maybe they could get Ukranian farmers to help.
But earlier this month U.S. radio talk show hosts Clay Travis and Buck Sexton promised: “Good luck this winter in places like Berlin and Paris,” “There may well be thousands and thousands of people who are freezing to death in Europe this winter because of the Ukraine war”.
(These two have the most pro-Russian national talk show that I am aware of).
If shit goes down Dominos will hear about it before the rest of us
The one-night record for late-night deliveries at the CIA–21 pizzas–was set Aug. 1, the night before Iraq invaded Kuwait
I read about that at the time. The rumor was, the CIA was so annoyed at people noticing this, they started a program of randomly ordering lots of pizza late at night, just to hide any real events.