If you compare the Russian budget for upgrading and maintaining their nuclear arsenals,and Russia have more than US,you will understand why there is something not right.
Russia spends 10% of what US have in their budget,that doesnt add up.
And with Russias corruption and state of the rest of their military,i am still doubting the condition of Russias nuclear weapons.
And if you compare it with UKs nuclear upgrades,it gets even more obvious.
Why would they not? They are the ones who are suffering under Ruzzian brutality. Ruzzian POW's are treated humanely by Ukrainian military in accordance with IHL, but the same cannot be said about Ukrainians captured by the Ruzzians, on the contrary, in fact. But if any Family who had lost members or suffered under Ruzzian occupation got their hands on Ruzzian's, the same humanity could not be guaranteed. And who could blame them? I'm pretty sure that every time its shown on TV, Internet etc. where a Ruzzian tank, fuel depot, or group of Ruzzian soldiers being destroyed by Ukrainian forces, a big cheer goes up. Seeing Moscow buildings being bombed would cause even greater celebrations. You can imagine the amount of suffering it takes to destroy the natural humanity in people, to make them behave like this. But this is what Ruzzia has done to the Ukrainian People. Slava Ukraine.
That still leaves about 140 warheads reaching their targets (of their land based missile forces, I haven't included the submarine launched stuff). Total deployed forces, including SLBM capability, is 524 missiles with 1461 warheads. Allowing for your (pessimistic) success ratio (12%) thats 175 warheads hitting their targets. Total stockpile of their nukes is c6000. This would allow for warheads that you suggest are in storage, under maintenance, other uses etc.
I know it's not so optimistic JM, but I'm still running with my take of months ago that it'll likely end up with Russia keeping Donbas, currently Crimea is so far off the table it's in the next room, if not next door. The bit that's still up in the air is the landbridge between them. Now I certainly didn't imagine how quickly the Russians would be routed in Kharkiv and Kherson(never mind Kyiv and elsewhere in the north east), but even that IMHO reinforces my early position.
I think the Russians are playing for the same outcome. They know unless Ukraine gives up and so does NATO they can't take the country and pulling back/running like hell to reinforce the bits they're likely to keep and/or will be bargaining chips is their overal strategy. I'll bet now that this promised "300,000 Russian troops" coming in will be reinforcements for those areas, not anything like a force to push forward. It doesn't really matter if they're half trained oulfellas, reinforcing a position requires a lot less than gaining ground and more about meat puppets behind walls and trenches. IMHO they're so crazily hellbent on getting Bahkmut because they want to keep it down the line, rather than its actual strategic value for another push forward.
Hitting civilian structures and civilians would also play into this strategy. It's nada to do with moving forward and taking more of Ukraine, because that's a busted flush. It's to try and speed up the likelihood of "talks". Then putin can claim he never wanted Ukraine anyway, that was a trick, that he has "defeated NATO", "denatzified" Donbas, kept Crimea and created a land bridge between them for the Glorious Russian Empire.
Now Ukrainians have buggered his plans from the start so they could do it again, but IMHO trying to take back the land bridge to the coast would be like Bahkmut times eleventy over hundreds of miles against a dug in and reinforcing enemy. NATO forces could do it in a month, if not less, but not without casualities, because as we've seen Russia gives two fecks about their human wave bulletstoppers and that's off the table anyway because of MAD and political reasons too. There are enough moaning about supplying weapons to Ukraine, even though it's a bargain to bugger Russia, that would ramp up considerably if flag draped coffins were coming back to NATO airfields.
Hmm... not convinced by your bona fides. But each to their own.
No i suggest 60% failure rate of the 30% you mentioned
And alot of the warheads needs to be maintained more than the missiles,and some are even used in nuclear powerplants and ships,submarines etc.
Would you fire a armed nuclear missile knowing it could come in return?I sure wouldnt
And that link you sent i wouldnt trust at all,sorry
That looks like a misinformation and propaganda site
Maybe you should ask the Brits who were caught up in the Blitz. What would they have preferred, to sit there and let the Luftwaffe attack without much restraint. Or have an air force to help defend the airspace??
Exactly,NATO expansion,nazis,bio labs etc etc is all part of Russias disinformation and propaganda
Putins invasion of Georgia,Moldova and Ukraine was planned for many years and at the right time
As I already said to you yesterday, I support current NATO policy. Why would I want to see Ukraine's current strategy "undermined"? They're doing pretty well I would have thought.
So what you made it up ??
"one of the first things that would happen is putin would send a few sacrificial lambs in aircraft to be shot down by NATO."
And what would happen then Wibbs? Assuming NATO & allies apply a defensive no fly zone, would Putin keep sending in sacrificial planes? Obviously NATO would have to destroy any ground based Russian military units seeking to down the NATO planes. But assuming they could limit this to occupied Ukrainian territories, there would be no direct attack on Russian territory. The point is that Russia would like to avoid confrontation with NATO etc, why not put the ball in their court and let them decide whether to take the gamble. It's a logical next step and one that needs to be taken quickly.
A no fly zone leading to a direct NATO-Russia confrontation would arguably be worse for the Ukrainian citizens, as they would be caught in an even worse crossfire.
I approve of this.
So you're allowing a 40% success rate for their nukes too (better than my guess, 30%) which would suggest about 475 warheads reaching their targets? Outcome is still devastating for those on the receiving end. Here's an interesting piece from 2005. It believes there was an 8% failure rate for all missiles launched by the Strategic Rocket forces.
So you believe that Ukrainian civil society should just suck it up and be collateral damage? Even if that affects their military capacity to drive the Russians out?
How would you propose to have them defend themselves? Or maybe you don't and would be happy to see the military effort undermined?
It was always this. Nato encroachment was ever only the thinly fabricated excuse to make it palatable. The same NATO countrys existed before and while Yanukovych was president of Ukraine but was not a problem then. It was only when Putin's stooge was dethroned that NATO became such a threat that an invasion and complete takeover of Ukraine was essential to Putin's plans.
That's assuming NATO wants to get directly involved Furze. They clearly don't. It would be "bad business". So far. Which also takes putin's "argument" that NATO were threatening Russia and that's why he had to start this war and blows it out of the water. Just add it to the existing pile of his bullshít reasons.
A no fly zone is simply a non runner. That's a direct escalation and one of the first things that would happen is putin would send a few sacrificial lambs in aircraft to be shot down by NATO. NATO knows this, putin knows this. Hell, Zelensky knows this. He quite rightly asks for the impossible to get more of the possible and that has worked very well so far. He'll likely get more AA systems than he would otherwise.
How would they feel? I'd say it's a fair bet that the only problem they would have with it is that they could not do it themselves personally. There's a post back a bit showing a twitter feed where an elderly lady who had lived under Ruzzian occupation for several months, showing her handing coils of machine gun ammunition to a Ukrainian soldier, and telling him " Kill the Bastards, kill them all every last one of them". And that would be a very popular mindset in Ukraine now and who could blame them? Let any poster on here who is proposing basically peace at any price, don't bomb Ruzzia etc, go and live in Ukraine (or any bombed city in the world) and see how you feel then about the bombers.
Russias precision guided misses from the soviet era have 60% failure rate in Ukraine,i somehow doubt Russias nuclear soviet era missiles are any better.
You need to maintain and upgrade to be able to make old missiles work,and with russias corruption,i somehow doubt it.
https://www.euractiv.com/section/global-europe/news/up-to-60-failure-rate-for-some-russian-missiles-in-ukraine-us-officials-say/
Then it should have reached the news by now if that was the case,dont you think?
Russia have been using their S300 in a ground attack role for quite sometime. So a Russian s300 missile hitting a Ukrainian apartment building is not evidence of a misfire or accident etc... It's actually evidence of a war crime.
I'm looking forward to the day Ukraine will have peace talks with Ruzzia because it will mean two things: (1) They will have beaten the Ruzzians out of Ukrainian territory completely and (2) Russia will have sued for peace, and the agreement will be on Ukrainian terms.
Slave Ukraini .
I don't work with any russian speakers, but used to work with a load of them in a call centre a good few years back. They were collectively known as "the russians" but in reality, very few, if any of them were from russia; they were mostly from the Baltics, Belarus, Ukraine, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. I got on well with them but was never friendly enough to remain in contact. But by god, I'd love to pick their brains right now.
I don't use FB much but am friends with some of them, and curiosity got the better of me. Didn't see a thing posted from any of them. A few of them seemed to be spending most of the summer on holidays going by the sheer amount of beach-with-drinks selfies, but that's it. Going by their social media output, there isn't any war going on.
To be honest pcardin, that's a bit unfair to animals, but I don't have an apt name to describe them either, except escapees from hell, because the do fit that bill.
100% agreement.
No. No-fly zone equals escalation with all the unintended consequences that that entails as Wibbs has outlined. NATO is absolutely right to pursue its current strategy in my view. Loads of you are saying what an appalling state Russia and its military are in. Why not give it more time to see what happens because of this?
All this is well & good Wibbs but any successful army must also have a civil society behind it. It's not enough for NATO & allies to just supply Ukrainian military with weapons and munitions. NATO & allies have also got to figure out how to stop the ongoing attacks on civil infrastructure in Ukraine. This was anticipated and why Ukraine were calling for a no fly zone over Ukraine early in the war. Russia's tactics are plain to be seen, what will NATO & allies do to stymie these attacks before it's too late.
Yeah, but I still wouldn't want to test the state of their nukes though. According to armscontrol.org (2020 figures) Russia has 320 land based missiles with 1180 warheads. Say only 30% of them worked, thats still about 350 warheads hitting their targets. The resulting destruction would be off the scale.
It's pretty clear that NATO has no intention of getting dragged into this. Not without major provocation, which putin won't do. He's not a fool, at least on this subject. Neither are NATO. They give two hoots about his conventional forces, but the old doctrine of MAD is still in play on both sides.
Two examples: The French stated that even if putin were to detonate a nuke in Ukraine they would not retaliate with nukes of their own as it would not be an attack on France. The US have been pretty open in saying that if putin escalated to nukes Russia's conventional forces would be in serious trouble. But no nukes. The missile that landed in Poland killing two Poles another better example. The US were very quick to say nope, looks like a Ukrainian air defence missile went rogue, even when Zelensky was not happy and saying it was definitely Russian and they weren't allowed investigate the site themselves. Zelensky may want NATO to get "official" or naturally get more NATO help coming out of that, but NATO didn't bite. For all the Pro Russian eejits looking for NATO false flags, that missile in Poland was a gift wrapped in a bow for NATO. If they wanted to take it. Clearly they didn't.
NATO are prefectly happy with supplying intel and weapons to Ukraine. It's bleeding Russia out without having to ramp things up, go in, inevitably lose NATO personnel(unlike Russia this matters) and possibly escalate to nukes. It's also an absolute bargain costwise, even earns money for the arms industry and is a testing ground and major advertising for future sales. Feck all will be buying Russian militay kit after this, that's for sure. NATO 1, Russia 0.
Why would it be in the news? We are only now seeing reports of events that happened in september with missiles accidentally hitting civilian targets, it could be next year before this is reported in papers, if an investigation happens on the ground in the first place.
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