Russia - threadbanned users in OP

I would be amazed if anyone has supplied M270s to Ukraine; I give it about as close to a 0 chance as possible.

Lots of reasons:

• Ammo is incredibly bulky and heavy; not conducive to being airlifted and transported easily into Ukraine.
• Gives Ukraine access to much longer range precision strike capability than any of their existing arsenal.
• Are significantly more complicated to operate than the unguided Soviet MLRS systems Ukraine uses.
• Requires dedicated and heavy reloading equipment.

It would be amazing for Ukraine to have that capability but I just don't see it happening anytime in the near term.

Should be easy to drop Molotov cocktails with a simple impact detonator on them. Cheap!

Estonian PM Kaja Kallas says that in her opinion Russia should be driven all the way out of Ukraine and right back to the Russian border - otherwise they will try and spin things as they having won the war and their aggression will have paid off.

That Estonian PM actually comes across very well. Very calm and collected, conducted herself very well from what I have seen.

Just on a point of order: we shouldn't give Poland a pass on all of the frankly awful stuff the PIS government have been doing to undermine the rule of law in the EU recently.

I know all posts on here are full of recency bias but the POles have been pretty bad EU citizens in the last few years before this war kicked off. Second worst after Hungary.

Putin's daughter (albeit no Ivanka) didn't lick her fancy dance moves off a stone. The Putster was "KGB funky-style" champ for 3 years running. It's also the most important class they have in their training so the competition is fierce

By rights, Russia should get off every bit of land that is internationally-recognised as Ukraine. However, I don't know about LNR and DNR, but I would say that a lot of Russians regard Crimea as an integral part of Russia. 'Who cares what Russia thinks?' - yes, but Putin could use entry of Ukrainian forces into Crimea (or maybe even LNR and DNR) to say to his people, 'Russia is being invaded by Nazis!' and use that to stir support for god knows what.

So, yes, in principle I support the idea of Russia being driven right out of Ukraine, absolutely, but in practical terms I would say that the Ukrainian government would be pretty happy just getting things back to Feb 24 in terms of who holds what territory and then negotiate from there.

The thing of it is that Putin is not that worried about ordinary people, generally, so humanitarian actions wouldn't be that appealing. The idea of Ukrainian forces entering Crimea or LNR/DNR he'd just see as a handy excuse to escalate things. Zelenskyy, for his part, is not so maniacal. I think he'd be happy to even push Russia back to the lines of control prior to Feb 24 and negotiate from there.

The comment about airlifting was primarily about ammunition; but also relevant further down the supply chain and not just in terms of getting the ammo near to Ukraine but transporting through Ukraine.

Here's a bunch of artillery shells; with one "pallet" consisting of 8 shells. Granted these shells also need propellant so for the sake of argument let's say each "pallet" could consist of 4 shells and 4 sets of propellant.

And here's a single 227mm rocket pod containing 6 rockets:

A very rough guesstimate might be that you could fit about 8 pallets of 155mm ammunition into the same amount of space as a single 227mm rocket pod: so that's 6 227mm rockets versus approximately 32-64 155mm shells depending on propellant needs.

And there are other considerations such as it being possible to move artillery shells by hand and load them into any manner of vehicle; but 227mm pods require cranes or modified forklifts and large flatbeds for transport; dedicated loading and transport vehicles etc.

Anyway I'm not saying it's a deal breaker by any means; just pointing out it's one of the arguments that could be used against supplying NATO MLRS systems such as the M270 or M142. Especially if we consider Ukraine are running short on 152mm shells and its crucial they start building up stores of 155mm shells around the country in the near term.

Did you ever stop to consider that you're just so biased towards Ukraine you can't approach anything in this thread in an objective or impartial manner?

The video you posted as "evidence" is literal false Ukrainian propaganda; it's from a training exercise in Germany and was copied from this source video:

It is entirely possible to fully support Ukraine and at the same time do so without just immediately believing every bit of positive news whilst claiming every bit of negative news is made up and spread by Russian bots.

I would absolutely agree with her there. Wonder is she saying that publicly just out of hope for an idea scenario outcome or does she have some intelligence that suggest that is actually an attainable goal for Ukraine.

Very fair point and I agree. I would think that having cast iron clauses in an accession treaty on democracy and not allowing the kind of back sliding we are and have seen in both Poland and Hungary would be very much part of any country be it Ukraine or someone else in Europe joining the EU.