9 minutes ago, ToastJenkins said:

So who in russia would be willing to

go after putin? And could anyone get close enough?

Sleeper agent Steven Seagal?

 

4 minutes ago, Mlodj said:

Putin has pretty much eliminated anybody with the balls to do that and based on all the oligarch "accidents" lately he's doubling down on the message just in case.  Even if Putin was disposed of, whoever replaces him will almost certainly have the same mindset about the Ukraine War,

I tend to agree they'd have the same mindset.

However "fresh" leadership would give them a plausible offramp as an option, as blaming current troubles on the "last guy" is pretty standard politics. Failure in Ukraine make Putin look weak regardless, and the last thing a would-be csar can look is weak. 

I have my doubts they would take that route, but if Ukraine is going badly enough it may be the right option.

21 minutes ago, JohnSnowsHair said:

I tend to agree they'd have the same mindset.

However "fresh" leadership would give them a plausible offramp as an option, as blaming current troubles on the "last guy" is pretty standard politics. Failure in Ukraine make Putin look weak regardless, and the last thing a would-be csar can look is weak. 

I have my doubts they would take that route, but if Ukraine is going badly enough it may be the right option.

This. New leadership would get to define it as "Putin's war." It costs the oligarchs money, it costs the common folks' lives. They could keep throwing resources at Ukraine, hoping that the Western alliance buckles...or they could go home and try to patch up their economy. 

But yeah, seems an unlikely path. 

In Kyiv, Ukrainian missile defense shot down a building. 

2 hours ago, ToastJenkins said:

Regulate to get less of your money?? As if

I blame McNabb

10 minutes ago, Abracadabra said:

Translation - Abbra supports the side that completely misjudged what the response from The West would be to Russia invading the Ukraine. 

20 minutes ago, DrPhilly said:

Translation - Abbra supports the side that completely misjudged what the response from The West would be to Russia invading the Ukraine. 

We absolutely had an obligation to defend them

the bonus was exposing putin as a floundering cuck

2 minutes ago, ToastJenkins said:

We absolutely had an obligation to defend them

the bonus was exposing putin as a floundering cuck

Thing is Putin misjudged the response regardless. They can make whatever claim they want but their mission is a failure to date and it isn’t going to get any better going forward. 

Another one bites the dust

Quote

Vladimir Putin’s proclaimed "rocket man” became the fourth top Russian official to die under mysterious circumstances in the past seven days, RadarOnline.com has learned.  Vladimir Nesterov, 74, pioneered the "world’s best” Angara rocket for Russia. He also formerly served as general director of the Khrunichev Center, a state research and production space center created to help Putin facilitate the nation’s first successful manned mission to the moon.

According to Daily Mail, Nesterov passed away mysteriously on December 28. His cause of death has not been revealed.  Nesterov was also reportedly embattled by allegations of fraud and embezzlement in the years leading up to his passing on Wednesday.  Russian authorities accused the "rocket man” of pocketing more than $68 million, and he was ordered to remain under house arrest in 2014 as his allegedly illegal activities were investigated further.

As RadarOnline.com previously reported, Nesterov’s mysterious passing came less than seven days after the equally mysterious deaths of three other top Russian officials: Pavel Antov, Alexander Buzakov and Alexei Maslov.  Antov, named Russia’s "highest-earning elected politician” in 2019 as a result of his lucrative sausage tycoon, was declared dead on Saturday, December 24 after falling out of a hotel room window in India while on holiday to celebrate his 66th birthday.  "On Saturday…deputy of the Legislative Assembly of the Vladimir Region, Pavel Antov, fell out of the window,” the Russian Consul General in Kolkata confirmed. "We are closely following the investigation and receiving all the information from the Odisha police.”  Later that same day, 65-year-old Buzakov – who served as director general of Admiralty Shipyard and was in charge of building submarines for Putin’s war against Ukraine – was found dead of unknown causes.  Then, on Sunday, December 25, 69-year-old Maslov passed away suddenly in a Moscow military hospital also of unknown causes.  Like Buzakov, Maslov was in charge of creating tanks for Russian troops to use against Ukrainian forces.

Maslov’s sudden and mysterious death was also shocking because he was scheduled to have a meeting with Putin just hours before his passing to discuss the ongoing war in Ukraine.  Putin canceled the meeting unexpectedly at the last minute before the two men were able to meet. Following his death, social media posts made by Maslov criticizing Putin and the Russian leader's war in Ukraine resurfaced.

 

abra is a butt

Quote

The full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022 has provided an invaluable opportunity to assess the capabilities of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation (AFRF) and the implications of a range of capabilities for modern warfare. Many publicly made judgements on these issues have lacked supporting data or insight into Ukrainian operational planning and decision-making. To ensure that those drawing lessons from the conflict do so from a solid foundation, this report seeks to outline key lessons, based on the operational data accumulated by the Ukrainian General Staff, from the fighting between February and July 2022. As the underlying source material for much of this report cannot yet be made public, this should be understood as testimony rather than as an academic study. Given the requirements for operational security, it is necessarily incomplete.

Russia planned to invade Ukraine over a 10-day period and thereafter occupy the country to enable annexation by August 2022. The Russian plan presupposed that speed, and the use of deception to keep Ukrainian forces away from Kyiv, could enable the rapid seizure of the capital. The Russian deception plan largely succeeded, and the Russians achieved a 12:1 force ratio advantage north of Kyiv. The very operational security that enabled the successful deception, however, also led Russian forces to be unprepared at the tactical level to execute the plan effectively. The Russian plan’s greatest deficiency was the lack of reversionary courses of action. As a result, when speed failed to produce the desired results, Russian forces found their positions steadily degraded as Ukraine mobilised. Despite these setbacks, Russia refocused on Donbas and, since Ukraine had largely expended its ammunition supply, proved successful in subsequent operations, slowed by the determination – rather than the capabilities – of Ukrainian troops. From April, the West became Ukraine’s strategic depth, and the Ukrainian Armed Forces (UAF) only robbed Russia of the initiative once long-range fires brought Russian logistics under threat.

The tactical competence of the Russian military proved significantly inferior compared with the expectations of many observers based within and outside Ukraine and Russia. Nevertheless, Russian weapons systems proved largely effective, and those units with a higher level of experience demonstrated that the AFRF have considerable military potential, even if deficiencies in training and the context of how they were employed meant that the Russian military failed to meet that potential. Factoring in the idiosyncrasies of the Russian campaign, there are five key areas that should be monitored to judge whether the Russian military is making progress in resolving its structural and cultural deficiencies. These areas should be used to inform assessments of Russian combat power in the future.

1. The AFRF currently operate with a hierarchy of jointery in which the priorities of the land component are paramount, and the military as a whole is subordinate to the special services. This creates sub-optimal employment of other branches.
    
2. The AFRF force-generation model is flawed. It proposes the creation of amalgamated combined arms formations in wartime but lacks the strength of junior leadership to knit these units together.
    
3. There is a culture of reinforcing failure unless orders are changed at higher levels. This appears less evident in the Russian Aerospace Forces than in the Ground Forces and Navy.
    
4. The AFRF are culturally vulnerable to deception because they lack the ability to rapidly fuse information, are culturally averse to providing those who are executing orders with the context to exercise judgement, and incentivise a dishonest reporting culture.
    
5. The AFRF’s capabilities and formations are prone to fratricide. Electronic warfare (EW) systems and other capabilities rarely deconflict, while processes for identifying friend from foe and establishing control measures are inadequate. The result is that capabilities that should magnify one another’s effects must be employed sequentially.

Beyond assessments of the Russian armed forces, there are significant lessons to be drawn from the conflict for the British and other NATO militaries. The foremost of these are:

In due course, it will be possible to extend this study to cover the later phase of the war when Ukraine moved on to offensive operations. As the UAF expend significant ammunition, however, and now depend on their international partners for equipment, it is important that those partners draw the appropriate lessons from the war so far, not least so that they can prepare themselves to deter future threats and to best support Ukraine. Ukraine’s victory is possible, but it requires significant heavy fighting. With appropriate support, Ukraine can prevail.

• There is no sanctuary in modern warfare. The enemy can strike throughout operational depth. Survivability depends on dispersing ammunitions stocks, command and control, maintenance areas and aircraft. Ukraine successfully evaded Russia’s initial wave of strikes by dispersing its arsenals, aircraft and air defences. Conversely, the Russians succeeded in engaging 75% of static defence sites in the first 48 hours of the war. Nor is setting up a headquarters in a civilian building sufficient to make it survivable. The British Army must consider the vulnerability of higher-echelon enablement. The RAF must consider how many deployable spares kits it has to enable dispersion of its fleets.
   
• Warfighting demands large initial stockpiles and significant slack capacity. Despite the prominence of anti-tank guided weapons in the public narrative, Ukraine blunted Russia’s attempt to seize Kyiv using massed fires from two artillery brigades. The difference in numbers between Russian and Ukrainian artillery was not as significant at the beginning of the conflict, with just over a 2:1 advantage: 2,433 barrel artillery systems against 1,176; and 3,547 multiple-launch rocket systems against 1,680. Ukraine maintained artillery parity for the first month and a half and then began to run low on munitions so that, by June, the AFRF had a 10:1 advantage in volume of fire. Evidently, no country in NATO, other than the US, has sufficient initial weapons stocks for warfighting or the industrial capacity to sustain largescale operations. This must be rectified if deterrence is to be credible and is equally a problem for the RAF and Royal Navy.
   
• Uncrewed aerial systems (UAS) and counter-UAS (CUAS) are essential across all branches and at all echelons. Although critical to competitiveness by providing situational awareness, 90% of UAS employed are lost. For the most part, UAS must be cheap and attritable. For land forces, they must be organic to units for the purposes of both situational awareness and target acquisition. The primary means of CUAS is EW. Another critical tactical requirement is to be alerted to the presence of UAS. For the Royal Navy, CUAS is critical for protecting vessels operating beyond the protection of a task force. For the RAF, the provision of look-down sensing to locate UAS to contribute to air defence is critical. This allows defensive resources to be prioritised on the right axes.
   
• The force must fight for the right to precision. Precision is not only vastly more efficient in the effects it delivers but also allows the force to reduce its logistics tail and thereby makes it more survivable. Precision weapons, however, are scarce and can be defeated by EW. To enable kill chains to function at the speed of relevance, EW for attack, protection and direction finding is a critical element of modern combined arms operations. Sequencing fires to disrupt EW and create windows of opportunity for precision effects is critical and creates training requirements. In modern warfare, the electromagnetic spectrum is unlikely to be denied, but it is continually disrupted, and forces must endeavour to gain advantage within it.
   
• For land forces, the pervasive ISTAR on the modern battlefield and the layering of multiple sensors at the tactical level make concealment exceedingly difficult to sustain. Survivability is often afforded by being sufficiently dispersed to become an uneconomical target, by moving quickly enough to disrupt the enemy’s kill chain and thereby evade engagement, or by entering hardened structures. Shell scrapes and hasty defences can increase immediate survivability but also risk the force becoming fixed by fire while precision fires and specialist munitions do not leave these positions survivable. Forces instead should prioritise concentrating effects while only concentrating mass under favourable conditions – with an ability to offer mutual support beyond line of sight – and should give precedence to mobility as a critical component of their survivability.

LINK

2 hours ago, DrPhilly said:

Translation - Abbra supports the side that completely misjudged what the response from The West would be to Russia invading the Ukraine. 

There's some truth to this:

1. I doubt Russia expected the west to sacrifice Ukraine so brutally. Nearing 150,000 KIA is insane.

2. I doubt Russia expected un-elected European bureaucrats to willingly de-industrialize to serve the interests of Britain and the U.S.. France and Germany, in particular, have been completely neutered. 

3. I doubt the Russians expected their economy to withstand the shock and awe sanctions war so easily. What was supposed to crash their economy turned out to be a mild recession. 

 

2 hours ago, Mlodj said:

Another one bites the dust

 

He killed Abe Froman??

6 minutes ago, Abracadabra said:

There's some truth to this:

1. I doubt Russia expected the west to sacrifice Ukraine so brutally. Nearing 150,000 KIA is insane.

2. I doubt Russia expected un-elected European bureaucrats to willingly de-industrialize to serve the interests of Britain and the U.S.. France and Germany, in particular, have been completely neutered. 

3. I doubt the Russians expected their economy to withstand the shock and awe sanctions war so easily. What was supposed to crash their economy turn out to be a mild recession. 

 

Ok, you are on the way to recovery!  Recognizing your inability to judge what the response would be is step one. We can go from there on the details which clearly need a lot of work based on the post above. 

Russia justifies hitting a hotel in Kyiv by saying it's a NATO base.  There are clear implications to that.

 

 

4 hours ago, Arthur Jackson said:

abra is a butt

Insult to butts 

15 hours ago, Mlodj said:

Russia justifies hitting a hotel in Kyiv by saying it's a NATO base.  There are clear implications to that.

 

 

That sounds like fluff to me. No way they would be trying to (and admit to trying to) instigate a conflict with NATO with their fighting force so battered.

It's just a hotel. Nothing significant about it. Just a small boutique hotel. The kind that you find dotted throughout Kyiv. It's in a typical neighborhood. A city block dotted with buildings from different eras. Old victorian structures with intricate character. Soviet era apartment buildings, built considering only utilitarianism. And modern buildings, both completed and under construction, with their large glass windows, standing as if to show the stoicness of modern society. Just a typical building in a typical neighborhood in a typical city.

I have the rare few days off so I'm in Kyiv. Yesterday I was squaring up my gear listening to music. Made some adjustments to my packs and my plate carrier moving some pouches around. I tinker with my gear. I think it helps with the boredom when I'm not working. I opted for a 2000s pop playlist. F your judgement. It's Brittney, bish. I tinkered, and I heard the booms. I could tell they weren't a threat because the building wasn't shaking. Most i could tell that the air defenses were getting, so i figured we got all of them, but obviously not.

Today I took a stroll around. A quiet city for the holiday. I must have been walking for a bit when I finally found a coffee shop open. And more walking.

Another instructor and I decided to walk to the hotel to see it. I had seen damages in the past, but nothing as recent. The Ukrainians are amazing at getting things as back to normal as quickly as possible. Glass cleaned up. Holed filled in. They work hard.

Walking up to the hotel, it's hard to pick it out. It's just a tiny building surrounded by larger ones. But, as you get closer you become more aware of your proximity because the buildings you're walking past have broken windows, and with each step you observe the tightening ratio of broken panes to solid ones. And then you're there. The corner of a boutique hotel. The corner that doesn't exist anymore. You can't even tell what was on the walls. Stripped of everything down to the core. Collapsed. Rain gutters bent away as if they were reeds in a storm.

News crews out getting last minute footage. Its the same thing with journalists. Every time they're wearing body armor they adjust the fit of it for the view. They straighten the patches to look good on camera. Even if they're wearing their kevlar but they're not about to be on camera they still adjust it. It's interesting being in line at a hotel desk and the news crew behind you keep fixing their vests. It's odd because I do the same. But for different reasons. I adjust my armor to make sure it's covering what it needs to cover. Top of the plate at the notch in the sternum. I adjust my patches to show a military bearing, straight and centered. F your cameras. I do it because I want people to know what caliber of soldier is there for them. But I digress.

Crews were out sweeping debris out of the sidewalk in front of the hotel. But they didn't get the other side of the street. Every step I took I was reminded that the damage wasn't limited to the hotel. Glass beneath my feet from the building next door. A corner coffee shop closed. The force of the blast enough to bend the lid of the fancy espresso machine in the window, or, anyway, where the window was. The sounds of glass being shoveled in the building across the street. Offices that were empty that shouldn't be. In any normal situation the sudden sounds emitted by a shovel full of glass being gathered would have caused physical alarm in the vicinity, but when they occurred people just turned in the direction of the noise, with their reactionary curiosity fading and then their gaze returning to it's prior position.

In a city so silent for the holiday, you'd think you were walking in a forest full of fresh soft powdery snow. But the lull of the void of bustling sounds were broken from the clean up. Shards of glass being moved by hand, shovel, and broom. Being moved by people working diligently on a day they should have off. Being moved by people working so that people don't have to see such things daily. Being moved by people who shouldn't have to move such things.

The things Russians say are in Ukraine aren't here. NATO isn't here. Violence against people speaking Russian isn't here. Fascism isn't here. Well, for the latter I suppose that isn't true wherever a Russian soldier stands or a Russian weapon flies. The silver lining to that is that whenever Russian fascism invades Ukraine, it isn't permanent. The only question remains is one of which to know the length of the incursion.

Just a typical hotel in a typical neighborhood in a typical city. And the dead? A typical grandmother on a typical holiday.

 

 

Regular reminder that everything Russia says is a lie and part of a propaganda narrative.

 

 

If Putin starts feeling Prigozhin sneaking up behind him he's gonna end up having an accident.