Grifman
5787
Thrag
5788
Putin’s favorite season was “A Year in the Life”.
This is something I’ve been rather curious about.
And here I’ve been assuming the cosmonauts have been carefully avoiding any space station windows.
Should have happened a week ago, I think we are just sparing some mods the effort of having to threadsplit 5000 posts.
schurem
5793
Yeah. What the actual fuck. Weren’t the Ukrainian S-300 systems obliterated on day one? Where are the hellducks, the 35s and the big bad 22s? In reserve for another round of escalation? Grounded as untrustworthy? Broken? Sabotaged?
I have seen a bunch of Russian short range air defence bogged down in the mud or abandoned. I have seen wrecked attack helicopters. Where are the jets?
Grifman
5794
There are serious third party implications to the Russian sanctions - take Russian/Ukrainian wheat exports for example:
Some people may go hungry.
Lurb
5795
I’m going to take a break from the news.
I clicked on a very graphic video from the bombing on Chernihiv today just as I was posting on some Spanish language “reddit-like” site I’ve been on for years. Lately it has been overrun with tankies and what looks like straight russian plants. They fill the comments with crap ranging from disingenous whataboutism to plain Kremlim propaganda points and I got myself banned for telling them what’s what. I don’t regret it but being so angry is unhealthy.
And I really really need to get some work done.
Grifman
5796
I’ve read that regarding the “missing” Russian AF, it may be the same thing we are seeing with broken down tanks/trucks and cheap Chinese knock off tires. First, the Russians have always had problems with their development of jet engines. Secondly, they require maintenance at regular intervals, including a major rebuild at half life. It’s entirely possible that they just don’t have the number of working jets that they should have due to lack of spare parts and maintenance, corruption, lack of trained personnel. Still, it is a mystery.
Nor the means to have them detonating over NYC, Philadelphia, LA, San Francisco, Omaha, St. Louis, Colorado Springs, Houston, Dallas, Chicago, Berlin, Paris, London etc. within an hour, and often substantially less. Russia still does.
vyshka
5798
It amazes me that the Russians never developed a tank with better ammo storage. Picture after picture with turrets popped off.
schurem
5799
There were plenty helldu ks bombing the crap out of syria. They even did carpet bombing with Tu-22s. Something change that badly in a couple years? Naw there must be some other reason.
nKoan
5800
Seems cheap for Putin honestly
One would think that would run afoul of federal and CA state criminal laws.
They’d all have to go back to paper maps. /shudder I’m old enough to remember that.
I pretty much can’t stand GPS yammering at me while driving, so I still look up the route ahead of time online and jot down some notes on the back of an envelope if I’m trying to go somewhere I’ve never been.
Maybe? The US military often has lousy availability rates for its air fleet despite all those hundreds of billions spent on defense each year. Maybe the Russians didn’t think they’d need to do that many sorties and thus didn’t worry about working up all the maintenance required for such a surge?
Isn’t that…legally questionable? Don’t the authorities frown on that sort of thing?
Wrt to why this war hits so close to home to many Europeans, apart from just the proximity? I think a big part of it is that Europe has spent the past 77 years trying to ensure that something like what happened back then should never happen again. NATO, the European Communities → EU; a strong driving force for all of these organizations is the desire for a peaceful Europe. It has been argued for so long - and believed, IMO - that economic interdependence makes new conflict of the type we’re now seeing in Ukraine impossible.
So it’s a shock to see that nope - we can still have tinpot dictators in Europe using force of arms to try and reorder international relationships to their liking. And for many (rightly or wrongly - but we see these sentiments also in this thread) the parallels to 1938 are striking. If we allow this wannabe Hitler to conquer his Sudetenland without resistance, where does it stop?
Moreover, both Russia and Ukraine have become quite integrated in European life during the past 30+ years. Certainly if you work in the IT industry, you have a fairly good chance of having had colleague(s) from Ukraine, Russia, or Belarus. Things like this hit closer to home when it affects people you know.
I don’t think this is wrong, so much as that Putin didn’t realize how right it was. Judging by what’s going to happen to Russia’s economy, I mean.
