Russia - threadbanned users in OP

Looks like a successful night for the Israeli F35s ....

Bet nobody saw that coming 🤣🤣🤣🤣

Well that's the main idea of the F-35. ;-)

The whole fighter thing is so weird. Every single time they make a fighter, a huge effort is put into extending their range. The F-16 was alovely looking jet, now it's a fugly abomination.

All fighters are just basically small bombers these days and as soon as they come off a production line, someones trying to turn them into an F-111 or B-2

They should go back to the YF-23 design, add range and make it into a stealth F-111 which is what most really want in the first place.

Who could it be?

Tonight's episode of Warship BBC2 9pm looks interesting & involves our Russian friends.

On its way to the far Pacific, HMS Queen Elizabeth ventures into the eastern Mediterranean. Britain's biggest warship is exercising its rights of navigation in international waters, but almost immediately Russian warships are diverted from the Black Sea to intercept it, while. Russian fighter bombers are also scrambled from their base in Syria to buzz the British task force and a tense stand-off unfolds

In contrast to the Ukr side

We're not going to find out what the terrorist state did in Mariupol until the city is liberated. The suspicion must be though that many tens of thousands of civilians must have been killed when they were flattening the place.

The Russian army is still present in Ukraine, is learning from it's mistakes, is adapting and retains personnel and equipment superiority over the Ukrainians. If that sounds like might is right, very often it is, whether we like it or not. War is incredibly wasteful of resources and peoples lives and while you might look on Russians tactics as stupid, brutal and excessively wasteful (they are, war tends to like that), it does seem the government retains significant support across the population of the Russian federation for the time being and will not withdraw.

There is a lot of focus in this thread on the latest wonder weapon from NATO countries, being the solution, there is much less discussion about the current moral and damage to the Ukrainian army over the last 12 months. In the last 2 months, there have been an increased frequency of dead Ukrainian heros showing up in my feed, I'm using that as a proxy to indicate are taking significant casualties.

I doubt the Ukrainian army has enough manpower or resources to drive the Russians back across the border, after this year they will reach a point where they need manpower from NATO countries to finish the job. Right now, no one is interested in playing for stalemate. Wars of this scale take about 5 years to come to an end. I expect boots on the ground in 2024 and an overall conclusion by 2027. That also means that the countries within the EU (not just NATO) after this current phoney war will be forced to align and it won't be so easy for "Irish neutrality" to circumvent this.

What the conclusion to the war will be, I have no idea, I am working on the premise, that for the next 5 years we will be living with a war economy in Europe, as more resources are sent in that direction. Even though we don't do the direct fighting in Ireland, the key features of that economy are shortages and rationing and more of a move to command and control economy. You can see this is the shortages of energy and accommodation, and the political response will align if nothing else for expediency and needing a diversion.

Note, thats just 50 days in. Apply the principle of not wanting to scare the children and I think there are good reasons no one want's a realistic number for civillian deaths. As they say, the numbers can't be established until an area is recaptured and then there's the problem of the filtration camps and the 2 million that made it out of those and were kidnapped to Orcistan.

I think it will be found that filtration camps were death camps and a lot never left on two legs, or that there were two streams shipped to Russia, with one ending in graves or crematoria there where the attrocity could be effectively covered up. I wonder if US intelligence has been monitoring the heat output from known crematoria for any significant increase?

It's not a nice topic to think on. I said days into this conflict that a Ukrainian Orc expert at a university in Paris said that they had a comprehensive data set (names, addresses, phone numbers, social media ac's) of at least 2 million people in Ukraine who comprised the core of civil society, that they would be looking for and eliminating. And she was right. We had stories of Orcs knocking on doors in captured areas clutching lists and looking for specific people. It's what the filtration camps are partially for.

Scholz just can't help himself

An SUV with a z-swastika burned down on Altufiyevo Highway in Moscow. Ukrainian DRGs work while Muscovites sleep.

Nice.

You mean at a fraction of the cost of Afghanistan don't you.