There’s a part of me that hopes that the allies are no longer announcing the donated military aid and Ukrainian capability is being expanded on the sly. But I severely doubt it.
I hope there’s much less posturing around Ukrainian support. Firstly, voters in most of Europe especially are assured that their governments are taking this seriously so there’s less incentive to announce everything. Secondly, I think there’s a much deeper focus on the implications of a Russian victory. Announcing every delivery is counter productive as it gives Russia an opportunity to form a more informed strategy. Leaders are now more focused on ensuring effective support that’s a bit less performative
I think this only applies to Europe though. And even then it’s probably wishful thinking…
Looks like 3 more Russian planes were shot down today for a total of 13 in 12 days. Ukraine is saying the Russians are trying to strike deeper which means they have to fly closer to air defense. The recent success of Russian operations is coming at a serious price. They can build tanks and conscript soldiers but planes and pilots are a different story.
Y’know, the more often Putin says this, the more I begin to suspect that Russia actually has 0 operational nuclear-delivery systems… How many times has he threatened to nuke the West, in the past two years?
But yeah, the problem with crying “wolf” too often is that nobody believes you. The second problem is then you have to demonstrate your resolve by actually doing it.
Massive respect to the brave Russians chanting anti-war and anti-Putin slogans in Moscow at Navalny’s funeral today. The mourners included Australia’s Russian ambassador which I bet irritated a few in the Kremlin.
Heh, and Perun’s video this week cited the Estonian MoD saying that if Ukraine could inflict 50K Russian casualties every six months, they’d be able to “consistently degrade the quality of Russian forces”. Seems like they’re out-doing that by a considerable margin.
I wonder whether part of the higher per-month casualties trend over the course of the war is due to the best of the Russian units being obliterated in the first year and poorly trained recruits hastily thrown into battle to fill the depleted ranks?
While that doesn’t help, it’s more that the Russians are, seemingly more and more as time progresses, making large numbers of poorly coordinated, infantry-heavy advances into Ukrainian fortifications. These advances will have very high casualty rates regardless of how well trained the soldiers are. And the reason they are doing this is that they are (kinda) working. That’s how they took Soledar and Bakhmut, and that’s how they took Avdiivka. That these advances came at ruinous cost doesn’t seem to deter Russian command.
