Russia - threadbanned users in OP

Tbh it could mostly be backlog from the Avdiivka fight. There was a HUGE amount happening over a number of weeks there and not much footage of lost equipment. Now the fight isn't AS intense the footage is coming out.

That'd be my guess anyway.

The fact they have to go scrounging to Iran and North Korea for help says about everything. I mean the global humiliation to be seen begging from one of the world's poorest countries with regards North Korea. Begging for shells they probably sold most of them in the 1950's. Begging for low-quality ammunition from a pariah state that doesn't even have a proper road network.

Economy wise, yeah it's weathered sanctions better than expected, but it's now in a war economy. Anyone with a functioning braincell knows that is not remotely sustainable in the medium to long term and unless I'm missing something Russia shows absolutely zero chance of "winning" in the short term.

So what's the end-game? There is none. Except Putin throwing everything he can at the conflict until he can't.

"Slowly winning" at a snails pace in a foreign country has never worked, even with countries 10 times richer than Russia. So trying to paint this as anything other than a collossal embarrassment and failure for Russia is disingenuous.

Ukraine has less constraints in many ways because it's a war of basic survival. For Russia, it's a botched and humiliating failure of an invasion, that it had no business launching in the first place, it has incomparably less mileage with which to wage this war.

If the Russian army performed as it should have - as everyone expected it would - in February 2022 the war should've been over in a few weeks. But that didn't happen because the Russian army, like the state itself, is absolutely gutted by corruption.

We're in 2024 and Russia's only successful strategy is 1916-era tactics of mass bombardment and infantry assaults. No combined arms. No overwhelming air power. No evidence of even a semblence of high-level command and control. Relative to the modern day they're not even remotely on even the vaguest level of what the Soviet Union was capable of in 1944-45.

No evidence of any modern equipment in even the vaguest meaningful numbers that wasn't built in the Soviet era either. The Russian state is simply rotten to the central core with corruption.

China was shocked - and probably delighted - by how bad the Russian army has proven to be. China is a friend of Russia when it suits China to be a friend of Russia.

Also, if EU could stop buying LNG from Russia, that would have a big impact. 8 billion last year, 15.75 billion in 2022 (however amounts imported are the same, so I assume that means the price has halved).

Source: https://ieefa.org/european-lng-tracker#:~:text=M-,LNG%20import%20and%20export%20volumes,the%20rest%20from%20other%20countries.

...on wrong page and reading an old post there and responded to it! Sorry.

With EU collective defence being so nascent, it would (IMO) be more likely to be some kind of cooperative mission under aegis of NATO between countries that are willing.

We know Hungary won't help at all, but if something like that ever began to look likely (due to prospect of Russia making much greater progress than as yet in East of Ukraine perhaps) it is doubtful they can do anything to stop it. They can't tell other EU countries what to do with their militaries.

I mean at the EU level I am guessing (?), Ireland might be almost as likely to try and block something like a specific EU led mission sending soldiers into West of Ukraine as Hungary is.

Macron has rightly come in for some criticism during this war, but unusually strong words from him now, so let's hope it's followed through with actions:

Are these losses confirmed by Ukraine? These days with the information war and capacity to generate AI imagery, I'm a bit slow to believe anything I see, from either side - till it's acknowledged by the other. And even then, you'd wonder.

Wouldn't that depend on the source of said obituaries?

But yes, supporting evidence if valid.

Spent the weekend in Budapest and despite all the government propaganda posters claiming 99% of Hungarians oppose the EU (on the grounds of Migration, "Gender Propoganda" etc.) there's definitely a feeling in the air that their own Maidan moment might not be that far off. There was a fairly large scale protest against Orban's regime on Saturday and the locals I spoke to utterly despise him and the scale of corruption there would give Bertie Ahern an erection.

What I hadn't realised was that Hungarian citizens who don't live in Hungary were given an electoral mandate by Orban's party since the 2014 elections and that more than 90% of this voting block, who are predominantly made up of the country's diaspora in neighbouring countries like Romania, Slovakia etc, vote for Orban's Fidesz–KDNP party.

Now, all that said, I know Budapest (and the better educated urban areas in general) wouldn't be the areas where the Fidesz party gather their support from but with his power base is so heavily reliant on people that don't even live within the country's borders, it would seem to me that Orban's grip on power in Hungary is nowhere near as strong as the election results would suggest.

Incidentally, we happened to be staying quite near the Russian embassy and this memorial for Navalny at the entrance to the Metro station directly in front of the embassy was growing by the day as we were there. Every time we passed by someone seemed to be adding some flowers or lighting candles.

Jesus, can you imagine if the GOP Irish diaspora in the States had votes here...

oh to be a fly on the wall in the russian operations room