And territory isn’t how this war is being fought. Once the front lines do start moving, they’ll move very abruptly. Like, the Ukrainians are inching their way to cutting off the land connection to Crimea, and they’re also whittling away the Black Sea portion of the Russian navy. Once the navy is gone, there’s nothing to stop the complete destruction of the bridge, and with both connections cut off, Crimea would be recaptured, in its entirety, very quickly.
On the eastern front, it won’t be quite that abrupt, but it’ll still be pretty quick once the Russian air defenses are exhausted.
Or once NATO & the West decides this is too hard / expensive for them and walks away leaving Ukraine to expend the last of their ammo then comprehensively implode.
I certainly hope the West is less stupid and shortsighted than that, but it’ll be years before this comes to an end and we need to keep the resolve up far longer than the typical time horizon for public support.
With the additional wildcard of various NATO & EU nations possibly electing know-nothing nativist populists or full-throated authoritarian Russian sympathizers during the many years before this ends.
could be … I still think that it is common practice (even for RU) to have scenario-plans …
kindalike … those pesky UKR sunk another of our ships, take Plan36 and implement tonight - that should show them
I think this was true before RU mined the $hit out of the front line … there is no more place for thunderruns … the UKR tried and lost a lot of materiel in 1-2 days before stopping the whole thing and regrouping in june …
well (and I wont go into debating this) … it is MOSTLY one political party in the USA in a dit-for-dat kind of tantrum - not the whole western world …
of course Denmark upping their part does not off-set any spending freezes of USofA
I’m not talking about thunder-runs, though. F-15s don’t care about mines at all, and torpedo drones care only slightly about them. Right now, we’re seeing the land stalled by mines, but it’s completely different forces securing the sea and air, and while the Russian defenses are still holding on those fronts, they can’t do so forever.
on ground (where 95% of the war happens), RU stalled UKR … and UKR did not manage to dent any of that in the past 6 months of their offensive - the frontlines are completely atomized and cant be taken by some swift-sweep (think WW1)
sea: well UKR did a really good job of poison-pilling the black sea … but they have literally NOTHING to fill any vacuums that are appearing at sea
air: too expensive, too risky for both … we will keep seeing both AF’s being very pragmatic concerning when to get involved and when not (on fringe-territories) - and risk-adverse by AF strategy… I expect the F16 to change very little with this regards - if anything they might also achieve some stand-offs of RU materiel, just like at sea … but a handful of planes will not win you a war against RU
so, unless something dramatically shifts (most likely on a political level) - this conflict is pretty much FROZEN like it was between 2014-22.
those minor gains (net zero?), represent a collective 200.000 - 250.000 casualties (both sides) and a few square-miles of farm-land taken … esp. Ukr did not achieve any mayor gains in any bigger urbanization
The ground is static because the air is static, and the air is static because Russia’s air defense is not yet exhausted. When it is, Ukraine will be able to start flying a lot of planes, which will very quickly turn things around on the ground. We’ve seen what happens when NATO-quality forces with air superiority meet heavily-entrenched ground forces.
And Ukraine doesn’t have much to fill the power vacuum in the sea, but they don’t need much. All they need is something, anything, that can make it out to that bridge and finish it off. It could be a handful of explosive drone boats. It could be a few Special Forces guys in a raft. It could be anything. And once they do that, the battle for the sea becomes irrelevant because it will have been completely and decisively won by Ukraine.
So, regarding the Royal Navy minesweepers the UK was going to donate to Ukraine, I guessed right. Turkey denied the ships passage into the Black Sea, citing the Montreaux Convention, even though the ships were still under the flag of a nonbelligerent (The United Kingdom).
Well, they seem to have done okay with the boat drones. And if you have the materials and knowhow, drones aren’t that complicated to make, relatively speaking. The main challenge is the explody bits.
And what will happen to them once returned to Mother Russia’s tender care? I don’t suppose the full Stalinist treatment will apply, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there are stage-managed public accusations of ill-treatment while in Ukrainian captivity. And I don’t suppose we’d get to hear if any of them start telling their families that conditions in Ukraine aren’t quite as they’ve been told.
So, the country that launched Sputnik and stuck fear into the heart of the free world is now reduced to buying missiles from second-rate countries. That’s just pathetic.
That’s a good point. Buying weapons, that they can make, from other countries is a good sign they are running low of their own/unwilling to mobilize to make enough.
However, as just an observation, they’ll probably get it quickly. I think when they bought a bunch of artillery shells from North Korea it was delivered extremely quickly (compared to getting from US/Europe). No red tape with these countries.
As we apparently have near-certainty that North Korea is shipping arms to Russia in violation of the sanctions, why are those ships not stopped and seized? I doubt NK’s navy is the problem.
