They get to deplete the Russia military down to a spent force, without risking nuclear war, and without any battle on US soil, and without any body bags coming back to the US.
I am sure that’s true, but if they just wanted to smash Russia they would give better kit to Ukraine. They sent them the 777 howitzers but without the electronics. So Ukraine has to fire probably 2x more of the $1k shells. They are still very good at it though. OTOH, the French Cesar system seems to come with a “computer” of some sort, even though France has sent only a tiny number.
This – survey of positive attitude towards Russia – is interesting and particularly relevant to the Donbass region. I guess “only 4%” of really stupid people is quite a good position 
Not sure of the source.
Graham wrote:
Ukraine has been preparing for a Russian invasion since Russia took Crimea. Finland has been preparing for a Russian invasion since WW2.
But, as all others, ever since the fall of Soviet, defense budgets has dwindled to a fraction of what it was. Finland is a really hard country to fight a war in. The woods and the lakes and marches, it’s only during winter time war it’s possible in some odd fashion
With both Sweden and Finland, article 5 wouldn’t mean much at this point in time. The US would certainly not “allow” Russia to take Finland, and the UK would follow in the footsteps. Norway, Denmark and Sweden along with the Baltic states, probably Poland and Germany as well would go all in if Finland was attacked. Putin would never do this anyway (but I never thought he would actually attack Ukraine either so … )
What article 5 does in practice (in peace time), is more to prepare bases for rapid NATO deployment of large forces. Storage of equipment. Compatible commando structures for cooperation. Compatible equipment, tactics and strategies. None of this would be in place right after signing anyway.
Peter wrote:
even though France has sent only a tiny number.
Actually they planned to send more than 25% of the current Cesar working unities (18 on a total of 72 including not operational ones). I found that was very few, but this small number reflects the global european peace situation – before the 24th Feb…
Have they sent those 18? They are the highest-tech artillery pieces Ukraine has got, and credit to France for sending stuff the US would not send (777 add-ons) due to fear of Russians getting them. Germany has some too which they were going to send but it’s not clear if they were actually sent.
Yes; only the US has really maintained decent armed forces. Everybody else thought
)I expect this will change… I hope it does soon because apparently Ukraine has used up most of the ex-USSR ammo and is now getting through the NATO stuff. Russia has a big advantage in artillery.
This is interesting and probably very good for Ukrainian morale:
This is hard to guess between the lines of news. Some says they have 6, next 6 on the way, and other says 12 and another 6 on the way.
At 5 millions a piece, 18 would make it for the 100M€ France budget declared.
They seems to love it but doesn’t use full potential of it, using it to 10-20km range by team of 3 trucks, fire a 3 to 5 rocket each and kiss good by in 5 minutes turn around (the time for the shell to get down). To get the 40km range, they need self propelled shells they don’t have, but on the current donbass region, 20km is enough.
On TV show also shoed that they have not the complete precision set, I don’t know how it’s based on.
At 2:30, you can see that operator get winds data, set coordinates and a red signal shows that "trajectory correction is red. Operator says “it’s accepted”.
Earlier you can see that driver is putting the truck in the correct opsition to fire at a target, indicated by the software already set to fire a position.
On another video, you can see that these trucks have shells and primer automatically loaded from a cart, with an operator filling the cart for the next round, but they don’t seem to use it this way.
LeSving wrote:
The US would certainly not “allow” Russia to take Finland, and the UK would follow in the footsteps. Norway, Denmark and Sweden along with the Baltic states, probably Poland and Germany as well would go all in if Finland was attacked.
Really? Would they risk nuclear confrontation? Somehow i think the exactly same thing would happen as in the Ukraine, which means outrage and more (what more) sanctions but no military confrontation. Germany? Forget it. The most likely would be Sweden and Poland as they are obviously next, so they might as well fight on their own terms.
LeSving wrote:
Finland is a really hard country to fight a war in. The woods and the lakes and marches, it’s only during winter time war it’s possible in some odd fashion
All that matters in Finland is near or close to the shoreline. I’d say if they want to stop Finlands government, they would have to take out the capital. They don’t have the means of a naval assault right now but they got several submarines with missiles which can be fired with basically no warning.
Finland, with its artificially imposed neutrality, has spent decades preparing for defence in the way to defy the strategy and tactics of the much bigger and stronger enemy’s force. Their military doctrine is based on the avoidance of open direct engagement and a very high degree of autonomy all the way down to individual soldiers. In an interview a couple of months ago, a Finnish volunteer in Ukraine said that while Ukrainians are trying to go the same way, there is still a lot of harmful Soviet legacy in their approach and that Finnish experience could help them a lot. He specifically mentioned that Finnish army is trained to fight in a situation where the enemy has a total air supremacy. For example, he was appalled to see a Ukrainian camp arranged in a dense rectangular grid, being highly vulnerable to air or artillery attacks; being volunteers, the Finns had autonomy in their decisions outside of actual operations, so they camped in the nearby forest, far from each other, at well-masked random locations. It paid off just a few days later, when the main camp had a messy incident, where no one was killed, but only by sheer luck.
At 2:30, you can see that operator get winds data, set coordinates and a red signal shows that "trajectory correction is red. Operator says “it’s accepted”.
I saw that video earlier. It sounded like that menu item was for guided shells i.e. ones with internal inertial nav or GPS, probably like the US Excalibur ones but with fewer config options. Ukraine reportedly didn’t get any Excalibur shells from the US but Canada sent them some. If Ukraine had say 10k of those they could effectively wipe out the Russian capability.
he was appalled to see a Ukrainian camp arranged in a dense rectangular grid, being highly vulnerable to air or artillery attacks
Ukraine does seem to learn though, fairly fast.
This is amazing and puzzling as ever. The US is not likely to ever send Abrams tanks, so tying heavy weapon deliveries to that will ensure that will never happen.
Popasna – the Russian way of fighting a war
LeSving wrote:
Putin would never do this anyway (but I never thought he would actually attack Ukraine either so … )
I don’t think Putin is interested in Sweden or Finland. There are no Russian-speaking minorities and Finland was never properly a part of Russia. It was an independent Grand Duchy in personal union with Russia. There were several attempts to russify Finland beginning as late as 1899 but it never worked out as Russia became busy with other things (the 1905 revolution, WW1…)
On the other hand I find it quite likely that Putin would attempt to seize strategically important parts of Finland and Sweden (e.g. Gotland) as part of an invasion of the Baltic states.
“Popasna – the Russian way of fighting a war.”
Very similar to what the UK and Germany did to each other when they had a war.
A 1,000kg bomb landed very near my mother 39 days before I was born. It did not explode, but the landing shock cracked a house wall.
