That’s around $7.50 per US gallon
I think that much earlier in this thread there was a discussion about what Putin’s war goal was, at least in the beginning.
I came across a series of news articles in Tass, dated February 25, 2022, with a quotation from “retired military expert Colonel Nikolay Shulgin”. Given the context, it might have been a semi-official explanation:
Somewhere, an aged veteran of urban warfare is speechless, thinking “They took the elevator? Seriously?? Guess I can die now, I’ve seen everything.”
Also, if some of those NATO countries have those planes in operational status (as opposed to in storage), it’s not as if they would be able to replace them (or retrain their pilots on whatever the USA/etc. can supply) for their own needs on a moment’s notice.
Somebody needs to be making better fakes. There are only 5 soldiers in the elevator, and there is zero evidence they didn’t make it to the top. All we have is the report by the “building super.”
A slight hijack but, since Tiananmen square I’ve watched the Canadian gov’t constantly suck up to China, and I have constantly asked friends and colleagues if China was really any better since that event.
I think that the west, for some reason, has been too complacent and too Pollyannaish, and now we’re paying for it.
One important difference now is that we’re actually about to start getting electron-guzzling trucks pretty soon. Were I in the market for a new truck right now, that’s the option I would go for, and I felt that way before Russia’s stupidity drove gas prices through the roof. I can’t imagine there are fewer people thinking about this today as opposed to a month ago.
And once we start down that road, it’s unlikely that we’ll come back any time soon.
One of the things I was watching this morning was claiming that Russia has now committed somewhere between 85-95 percent of its staged reserves. If so, that might put a lot of things in a different light. Generally, you want to keep back 30% of your reserves for a variety of reasons (exploit breakthroughs, patch holes if the enemy is counterattacking, replaces losses or support assaults, etc). IF this is true, it might say that things are going a lot worse than some analysists were thinking even as later as Friday. I haven’t seen much on Russia bringing up additional forces from inside of Russia.
A lot of this might be in anticipation of a final push to try and take several of the key Ukrainian cities and, in their own minds, knock Ukraine out of the war. But if so, it’s a pretty big gamble, as fighting inside large urban cities is notorious for large losses in men and vehicles. And the Ukrainian army is still in the field at this point.
Russian vehicles are using cheap Chinese-made tyres and they appear to be failing
You’re probably right and I hope you are. Last time gas hit $4 around here (2008 IIRC) I remember lots of talk about the death of the gas guzzler, but there weren’t nearly as many electric options as there are now.
Sure. But what it demonstrates is that the Ukrainians are way better at producing 21st century propaganda than the Russians are. And when you’re fighting for Western support, that’s important.
Here is a BBC report on people trying (and failing) to flee Mariupol, as well as intensifying fighting in the towns around Kyiv.
I have to wonder if they even have the resources to do that on any kind of a timely scale. It took them like, a month, just to pre-position the resources we’ve seen. How long will reinforcements take?
Russian losses claimed by the Ukrainian armed forces up to the start of today:
Well, they have a really large and extensive rail system, so in theory, assuming they have the forces and equipment and supplies, maybe a couple of weeks to bring up and support additional forces. That’s just a WAG on my part, but that seems reasonable. I just don’t know how many ready forces they have (how many did they originally commit to this thing?), how much ready equipment do they have (based on what we’ve seen, even their ‘ready’ equipment for this invasion wasn’t exactly prepared), or supplies. One thing it seems clear from what I’ve been reading is…Russia already has a pretty big shortage of trucks and supply vehicles. I’m not sure where they would get additional supplies of that from to bolster what they have and replace their losses to date (China maybe?). It certainly won’t be quick or easy to do that. But I’ve heard nothing about large movements to augment their current forces or back them up with reserves going forward. So, assuming that report that they have actually committed 85-95% of their staged forces is true, this could be an all or nothing roll of the dice for Russia. I tend to be skeptical about this, but I don’t really know.
It also makes it increasingly harder to believe more serious information like that in the chart in post 1353 above. The proliferation of these silly and increasingly fake propaganda memes is flushing Ukrainian credibility down the toilet.
I’d seen similar numbers in recent days.Yeah, I kind of wonder if it’s going worse for the Russians than it seemed. Russia could pull more troops into the grinder, but I can’t see them doing any better than the ones they’ve already committed. I don’t doubt that they could pull more reserves up to the border by train, though. It’s just questionable whether it makes any sense to do so.
What I’ve been seeing a lot of experts and talking heads do lately is take an average between Ukraine’s estimate of Russia losses and what the Russian’s are claiming and going with that figure. Basically, no one really knows. I’m highly skeptical of Ukraine’s numbers, but I’m pretty skeptical of Russian ones as well.
If the Ukrainian numbers are close to true though, Russia has already lost more in 11 days than the US lost in the entire time it was in Iraq.
I’ve been trying to track down that story on Belarus, but no luck.
However, there is this negative statement from Jack Detsch, who reports from the Pentagon:
Definitely not, as they would be even less prepared for this. The thing that I see that, if true should really be worrying the Russians are those reports that Russia has fewer trucks and logistics vehicles to move stuff from the staging dumps to the troops in the field…and, along that same line that Ukrainians have been specifically targeting those over combat vehicles. If that is true, then Russia is in deep shit and I don’t know how they would fix this issue quickly or easily. Who would sell them a lot of fuel bowsers and logistics supply trucks quickly at this stage?
Re. getting used fighter jets to Ukraine somehow despite NATO’s not getting directly involved:
PM: Where’d you get those jets?
Air Minister: We found them.