This reminds me! I was wrong about Russian Air Force. I thought that the losses compared to what the rest of the Russian Army will not damage their fleet so much But seeing so many Su-30SM Su-34 and Su-35 destroyed compared to their numbers made me reconsider. So while 1000+ fleet most of it is old. No MIG-29 and Su-27 downed so about 200 jets from the start clearly not used. While Russia has over 250 SU-24 they barely lost 14 while 26 Su-34 were downed so clearly Su-34 was used waaay more often.\ I won't count the SU-25 losses because that is job that newer jets do not do the same I thought Russia will YOLO their older fleet first but now it is clearly that Russia prefers sending newer stuff so losing 10% of the new stuff hurts. New stuff is less than 40% of their fleet and my definition of new is if its Russian not Soviet Because less jets means --> less are ready --> the others are more used--> which means they need more maintenance --> which means even less are ready My theory is not that they give a sh1t about the Russian pilots just that the weapons that work like the glide kit on Fab-500 only works on newer stuff
The people who don't "believe" in Global Warming have observed that the climate is weird these last few years Their conclusion: "They are manipulating the weather". So do not expect much. His answer to my retort that Ukraine downing 3600+ Shaheds is proof Iran sent Russia thousands of drones was..... it is not true. It is all performance art of Ukraine behalf is my guess
That will never happen. Macron knows it. Putin knows it. That's not 'strategic ambiguity' as Macron said: it's just another dumb statement that weakens even more the European deterrence.
This is all good stuff and it is accurate. I will also add a couple of other factors. The lack of trained pilots in the Russian Air Force and that what pilots they do have, the best are trained to fly the new stuff. Given the saturation of manpads and anti-air defenses in Ukraine, their can't really operate in Ukraine and what does, requires a level of skill that a lot of Russian pilots don't have. Add onto that the lack of trained mechanics. Jets require a lot of maintenance per hour of flight that can't really be deferred, or at least, can't safely be deferred. If there is a lack of maintenance crews to keep up with that grind, slowly but surely the planes are not flight worthy. Also, you can't really park a jet fighter in an open field and store it there for years and have it be operational within a few weeks. There's a lot of complex machinery in fighters and if they rust (or get ripped out and sold on the black market) the fighter quickly becomes little more than scrap.
Stop me if you've heard this before... Russia held an award ceremony near the front. While the soldiers were gathering to observe the ceremony, a HIMARS arrived as an non-invited guest and delivered a gift of tungsten balls. /1. “Yesterday, 02/27/2024, at about 19:00, there was a strike on the gathering place of personnel of the 155th separate marine brigade (military unit 30926, Vladivostok) in the settlement of Olenivka, Donetsk region.The command held an awarding of servicemen. The strike was… pic.twitter.com/mjTwwydNrm— Special Kherson Cat 🐈🇺🇦 (@bayraktar_1love) February 28, 2024
Read that whole tweet down through the part where they apparently knew they were being watched via drone but ignored the threat. The Russians are as dumb as the bad guys in a movie aimed at 9 year olds. One step above the burglars in Home Alone. Ok, two steps above. Let’s not exaggerate.
Unidentified Aerial Phenomena https://www.intelligence.gov/index....phenomena-preliminary-intelligence-assessment
From France's former ambassador to the UN and the USA I am convinced that we have gone too far in our support to accept a defeat of Ukraine. I would bet on a European military intervention in the case of a Russian breakthrough towards Kyiv. Of course, I may be wrong. https://t.co/fUULoAaRID— Gérard Araud (@GerardAraud) February 27, 2024
Of course Putin knows when push comes to shove, NATO and EU will just back off and will call every bluff.
The Soviet era Su-27's and MiG-29's have essentially no air-to-ground capability. They theoretically can drop dumb bombs and fire unguided rockets, but that's not really useful in this war and as Yoshou says they barely get training in their primary duty, let alone practice something not in their wheelhouse. We have seen Su-27's bother American drones and make a few forays almost into NATO space, but I haven't seen any reporting of their use near Ukraine.
The thing is that we now have leaked documents that describe when Russia will consider using nuclear weapons, and it's a lot more of a hair trigger than we thought or the Russians previously acknowledged.
Financial Times was the one that broke it so they have the best article, but it's spread to all the other news sites too so just doing a search in an engine's news section should get you a dozen articles. Here's one free retelling: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/worl...-russian-nuclear-strike-protocols/ar-BB1j1tVz
The Russians know that any use of nuclear weapons on their part means that Russia is turned to glass and no longer exists.
Well, well, well. It’s a bad week to be an SU34 pilot. 11 days… 11 SU34s. Ukrainian forces claim to have downed another Russian Su-34 fighter bomber this morning over the eastern front. pic.twitter.com/BQkzIuOaU5— OSINTtechnical (@Osinttechnical) February 29, 2024
I believe that stated current NATO policy towards any battlefield nukes used by Russia would be an overwhelming, but totally conventional response. We still don't want to trigger the end of the world if we can help it.
Yes this was gamed out a lot if Russia used a demonstration nuke in Ukraine - likely met with conventional airstrikes
What Russia wants is to do something that demands a NATO response, but NATO does nothing, thus rendering NATO useless. Nuking a European city would bring NATO together and absolutely cause a response, as well as unite more of the world against Russia. They would never do something like that now. They think their current plan is working. I don't have much evidence it isn't.
Obviously. Speaking about Macron: instead of making dumb statements, he should make concrete decisions to rearm France. I mean, relying on nuclear deterrence is fine but not enough if you don't have strong conventional forces. Deterrence must be nuclear and conventional.