Russo-Ukrainian War Thread - Page 384

On February 19 2023 03:05 warding wrote:

Happy to be pointed toward any data indicating other European countries planning to scale at a similar pace. Which is arguably what we should all be doing.

Greece has a lot of very old ones and no chance to keep up with a Poland growing economically and spending 3+% in its military.

@Manitou to what extent to you think knowledge and experience that Ukrainians are accumulating with this was will spillover westwards? Militaries tend to become complacent over time but there's nothing like an existential threat next door as an incentive.
(Speaking of peacetime complacency, Portugal has 26k personnel in the armed forces and a whopping 110 Generals in active duty+90 in reserve).

On February 19 2023 17:19 sertas wrote:
commercial drones only look this good because both sides have no air force. If the us would fight russia they would bomb them to submission with missiles and aircraft and stealth bombers and drones look puny in comparision.

Then they would use a few thousand tanks to roll over the russian lines. Same as desert storm.

No lessons needed to beat artillery ww1 russia strategy.

US would also use thousands of high tech drones also of course for extra firepower nowadays

On February 19 2023 18:04 Silvanel wrote:
US couldn't bomb into submission little Vietnam and lost almost 4000 planes in the process. I wouldn't be so sure about them succeeding against Russia, despite all its flaws.

Poland has backed Estonia's idea to form a coalition of countries that would provide ammunition for Ukraine, the Polish prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, has said.

Morawiecki and the Polish president, Andrzej Duda, attended the Munich Security Conference on Friday and Saturday.

Morawiecki said he had talked to the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, about the initiative.

"We've talked with President von der Leyen about ammunition production projects," he said. "The issue was raised at the recent European Council meeting in Brussels, but some countries, and I don't want to point fingers, did not react positively to that."

He said he was pleased that von der Leyen was interested in the idea, calling her "an advocate of support for Ukraine.

"At the same time we've been building a coalition of countries - and I've talked about it with the Estonian prime minister, because she's been raising the issue - that would be ready to manufacture ammunition together, to finance or co-finance the production of as much ammunition as possible," Morawiecki said, adding that shortages of ammunition were currently the main problem for Ukraine.

At the European Council meeting "only a few" EU leaders supported the initiative, he said. "Today more and more and countries agree to do that," he added, explaining that about half of EU member states supported the scheme.

At the Council meeting on February 9, Estonia called for a EUR 4 billion investment in a million rounds of ammunition that Ukraine needed to fend of the Russian invasion.

On February 20 2023 19:20 Harris1st wrote:


I think with two somewhat modern countries fighting a war on about equal footing there would just be a fuckton of long rangeartillery on either side and everything in between for like 150 km would be pretty much dead space. Drones don't even fly that far. Everything moving in the dead space bigger than a person would be picked up by satellites and shelled to oblivion

Despite claims from the White House for Biden having “no plans” to cross into Ukraine during his trip to Poland, plans to cross the Polish-Ukraine border began more than a month ago, after Biden told staffers he wanted a public display to show solidarity between the United States and embattled Ukraine as it enters its second year of war. Politically, this trip “needed to happen,” a senior White House official tells Rolling Stone. Over the past year, First Lady Jill Biden, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, and others in the U.S. government have made the trip to the war-torn country while the president himself had not — until now.

On Monday, however, Biden strolled the streets of downtown Kyiv, with Zelensky at his side, and announced additional weapons deliveries.

Biden was presented with an array of plans for this Ukraine trip, says the senior White House official with direct knowledge of the matter. The official was not authorized to speak on the record. One idea called for a meeting between Biden and Zelensky at an undisclosed location at the Polish-Ukrainian border. Another sought to hold the meeting in Lviv, a Western Ukrainian city that has been hit by Russian airstrikes several times since the war began but remains relatively safe when compared to the heavy fighting on the Eastern front.

Given the obvious fact that Ukraine is an active battlefield, both the Secret Service and the Defense Department had security objections to some of the plans presented. The Secret Service did not respond to Rolling Stone’s requests for comment, and the Defense Department referred questions to the White House.

The senior White House official says the concerns stemmed from the “unpredictability of the environment and the reduced security footprint required to support the movement of the president.”

Ultimately, Biden selected Kyiv, a city that stands as a symbolic gesture of Ukraine’s resolve after Russian forces tried and failed to capture the capital city early in the war last year.

In a seven-minute long audio message published on Monday by his press service, an apparently angry and emotional Prigozhin said he was required to "apologize and obey" in order to secure ammunition for his troops.

Speaking at times with a raised voice and occasionally swearing, he said: "I'm unable to solve this problem despite all my connections and contacts."

Prigozhin said Russia's military production was now sufficient to supply the forces fighting at the front, and that the supply difficulties his fighters were experiencing were the result of conscious decisions.

"Those who interfere with us trying to win this war are absolutely, directly working for the enemy," he said.

Since the outbreak of the conflict, Prigozhin has publicly feuded with generals and Kremlin officials, accusing them of insufficient zeal in prosecuting the campaign against Kyiv. He has reserved his harshest criticism for Russia's Defence Ministry, which he has accused of trying to take credit for Wagner's achievements on the battlefield.

In his audio message, Prigozhin said the unspecified individuals he blamed for the shortage of ammunition were "eating breakfast, lunch and dinner off golden plates" and sending their relatives on holiday to Dubai, a popular destination for the Russian elite.

The White House said last week that the Wagner Group had suffered more than 30,000 casualties since Russia's invasion of Ukraine, with about 9,000 of those killed in action. Some 90% of those killed in Ukraine since December were convicts, it said, a reference to Prigozhin's recruitment of prisoners to fight.