Russia Invades Ukraine. Again
POSTED BY: captaincrunch
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 21:09
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Quote:Russians are not capable of learning:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
SECOND is not capable of learning.
The 1967 Outer Space Treaty bans putting any weapons of mass destruction into orbit or into outer space. Russia and the US signed the treaty but Russia broke it and lies about breaking it which is standard operating procedure for Russia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_Space_Treaty
Kremlin dismisses U.S. warning about Russian nuclear capability in space
https://www.reuters.com/world/kremlin-dismisses-us-warning-about-russi
an-nuclear-capability-space-2024-02-15/
MOSCOW, Feb 15 (Reuters) - The Kremlin dismissed on Thursday a warning by the United States about Moscow's new nuclear capabilities in space, calling it a "malicious fabrication" and a trick by the White House aimed at getting U.S. lawmakers to approve more money to counter Russia.
"It is obvious that the White House is trying, by hook or by crook, to encourage Congress to vote on a bill to allocate money, this is obvious," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters.
"We'll see what tricks the White House will use."
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Meanwhile, in the real world...
Avdiivka has been cut into three cauldrons, with a fourth cauldron developing.
One Russian advance cut Avdiivka into a northern and southern portion, by occupying the largest supply road that runs north-south on the western edge of Avdiivka. Troops and supplies can no longer reinforce each other from the north or south
In the southern portion, a former air defense base has been pinched off. All supply/escape routes are under physical Russian control.
Supply/ escape routes from the west into Avdiivka are under Russian fire control. And in the far eastern portion, a major stronghold's supply lines are almost cut off.
Any place not under Russian control is being heavily bombed.
Some reports say that the local Russian commander has given a "surrender or die" ultimatum, and that while none of the local Ukrainian commanders have ordered a surrender, Ukrainian soldiers are either self-evacuating or surrendering.
Meanwhile, Chasiv Yar, the next biggest city west of Bakhmut, is being advanced on.
And Ukraine has chosen to abandon Krynky, that small toehold across the Dnieper in Kherson that they maintained at great cost.
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger
Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM
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Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
SECOND is not capable of learning.
Yup.
--------------------------------------------------
Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.
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Military Summary Channel says commanders in Avdiivka have given the order to the appx 8,000 soldiers remaining in Avdiivka to withdraw, but there are no credible routes, and that soldiers can only withdraw if Putin allows it. (And why would he?) So either they run a gauntlet hoping to survive, or surrender.
Also, the 3rd Brigade (Azov) was supposed to run an "unblocking" operation, but when they saw there were no prepared defenses and that Russians were surrounding them nearly 360deg, they refused orders.
Anyway, Avdiivka, according to Dima, is toast.
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger
Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM
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Russia Depicts Wounded Soldiers as Heroes, or Not at All
Troops with amputated limbs or serious injuries return home to find a patchwork system of treatment and, often, efforts to keep them out of the public eye.
By Neil MacFarquhar, Milana Mazaeva | Feb. 15, 2024, Updated 12:25 a.m. ET
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/15/world/europe/russia-soldiers-ukrain
e-war.html
A shell slammed into the ground just feet from where the Russian soldier was deployed, and the explosion tossed him into the air.
“I felt my arm fall off, then a blow to my leg, everything slowed down, just a frozen picture in my eyes — no sounds, no other sensations,” said the soldier, Andrei, a 29-year-old former convict recruited into the Wagner private military company.
Drifting in and out of consciousness, he was convinced that death loomed, he said in an interview, requesting that only his first name be used because of a fear of retribution by the Russian authorities. As shells exploded on all sides in the fighting near the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, fellow soldiers dragged him to an evacuation point. He eventually spent more than a year in hospitals, with the remnants of his left arm amputated and one leg still at risk.
Cases like Andrei’s do not receive much publicity in Russia, where — as in Ukraine — the total number of war wounded is not disclosed. But, according to American and Ukrainian officials and numerous military analysts, the number is staggering, perhaps in the hundreds of thousands. And one senior Russian official estimated that amputees represented more than half of the seriously wounded.
Because reporters and aid groups have little or no access to hospitals or rehabilitation centers in Russia, information is scarce, often limited to community news reports and Telegram channels.
The Kremlin, military analysts and some medical personnel say, wants to avoid a repeat of the antiwar movements that forced a halt to earlier wars in Chechnya and Afghanistan.
“The Russian state has learned by experience that if it wants to maintain domestic stability, it should suppress that kind of debate,” said Nick Reynolds, a research fellow for land warfare at the Royal United Services Institute, a London-based military think tank.
Military analysts say the high number of wounded also reflects the striking indifference that Russia exhibits toward its soldiers as it sacrifices huge numbers to make small gains across the 600-mile front in Ukraine.
“The Russian leadership on every level does not care much about soldiers,” said Pavel Luzin, a Russia military expert with the Center for European Policy Analysis, a Washington-based research group.
Wounded veterans are not ignored entirely. They are occasionally featured on state television in the service of war propaganda — invariably presenting an upbeat account of how they are readily adapting to life with their injuries, including missing limbs.
On rare occasions, President Vladimir V. Putin visits the wounded in hospitals, pinning medals on their crisp, cobalt blue military pajamas. He sometimes acknowledges problems in the system, and he unfailingly promises solutions.
“As for prosthetics, there is still a lot to be done,” Mr. Putin said last month while talking to veterans. He had recently learned, he added, that former soldiers issued with prosthetics received reduced government payments, which he called “unacceptable.”
After the war’s first month, the Russian defense minister, Sergei K. Shoigu, announced 3,825 wounded, a figure Russia has never updated. So estimates of the wounded from both sides are extrapolated from the number of dead, which already involves significant guesswork.
William J. Burns, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, wrote in an article published in Foreign Affairs last month that Russian dead and wounded soldiers numbered 315,000.
Numerous doctors, veterans or relatives, when contacted, declined to speak about the wounded, lest they breach Russia’s laws against revealing confidential information or denigrating the milita
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Russians signing military contracts sell their souls cheap:
Russian officials continue efforts to use benefits to incentivize Russians to sign military contracts. Russian opposition outlet SOTA reported on February 15 that Chairman of the State Duma Committee on Defense Andrei Kartapolov and Russian State Duma deputies Vasily Piskarev and Sergei Neverov introduced a bill to write off debts of Russian personnel who are receiving certain categories of disability benefits.[83] Rostov Oblast Governor Vasily Golubev stated on February 15 that Russian officials will increase the one-time signing bonus for Russian contract soldiers from 200,000 rubles ($2,168) to 500,000 rubles ($5,420) in Rostov Oblast.[84]
https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campai
gn-assessment-february-15-2024
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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60-year-old Russian T-62 tanks in Ukraine. Via social media
With its economy on a war footing and mothballed factories coming back online, Russia now is generating around 4,500 armored vehicles a year for its 470,000-person invasion force in Ukraine.
That’s one finding of a new study from the Royal United Services Institute in London.
4,500 vehicles a year isn’t quite enough vehicles to make good the 10,000 or so tanks, fighting vehicles and armored personnel carriers that, according to the analysts at Oryx, Russia has lost in the first two years of its wider war on Ukraine.
But it’s close. And it’s for that reason the Kremlin “believes that it can sustain the current rate of attrition through 2025,” RUSI analysts Jack Watling and Nick Reynolds wrote.
The catch is that, according to Watling and Reynolds, 80 percent of those 4,500 vehicles the Russians generate every year aren’t new vehicles. They’re “refurbished and modernized from Russian war stocks.”
And those stocks, once bursting with leftover Cold War-vintage vehicles, are finite. “The number of systems held in storage means that while Russia can maintain a consistent output through 2024, it will begin to find that vehicles require deeper refurbishment through 2025,” the RUSI analysts wrote.
“By 2026 it will have exhausted most of the available stocks,” they continued.
RUSI’s conclusions are consistent with the conclusions of a recent report from the Estonian defense ministry. In Russia, “production of new equipment is largely giving way to refurbishing equipment from the long-term storage,” the ministry found.
Old war stocks could hold up “for several more years,” the Estonians concluded. Open-source analysts, who scour satellite imagery to count active, destroyed and stored armored vehicles, posit trends that point to Russia’s vehicle reserves running out in 2025 or 2026.
Russia can shift more resources into producing new vehicles, of course. But where refurbishing a vehicles mostly requires a little metalwork, an engine overhaul, replacement of radios and—if the crews are lucky—a few modest upgrades to the optics and armor, from-scratch production is much more labor- and resource intensive.
For the Russians, “significantly improving production quality under international sanctions is likely unrealistic even in the medium term,” the Estonian defense ministry explained. Sanctions “have limited the Russian [military-industrial complex]’s access to high-quality components, especially machine tools, production lines and factory equipment.”
Yes, Russian can import more machinery from China, but Chinese tools might not be as good—or even as available—as the best German tools. “In the short term, the MIC is likely incapable of significantly expanding the production of new armored vehicles.”
“This will necessarily mean a significant decrease in vehicles delivered to the military,” Watling and Reynolds wrote. But not until the old war reserves run out, potentially in a couple of years.
If Russia intends to fight the way it’s been fighting, with large mechanized forces in the lead, there is—barring major industrial surprises—a ticking clock that’s counting down to the day when the Kremlin spends its existing combat power ... and can’t replace it.
Ukraine could aim to outlast Russia. But Ukrainian industry is far more constrained than Russian industry is, so Ukraine depends more on its allies than Russia does.
All that is to say, Ukraine can win a grinding war of attrition, but only with help. “If Ukraine's partners continue to provide sufficient ammunition and training support to the [armed forces of Ukraine] to enable the blunting of Russian attacks in 2024, then Russia is unlikely to achieve significant gains in 2025,” the RUSI analysts wrote.
And “if Russia lacks the prospect of gains in 2025, given its inability to improve force quality for offensive operations, then it follows that it will struggle to force Kyiv to capitulate by 2026,” the analysts added.
“Beyond 2026, attrition of systems will begin to material
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Nato members are sounding the alarm on Russia’s aggressive posture
Feb 15, 2024 | https://www.ft.com/content/83f8a7e9-dd41-4976-be39-cfd2c9b3a899
Denmark’s defence minister Troels Lund Poulsen said last week that Russia could test Nato’s mutual defence clause “within a three to five-year period”. That followed similar warnings from colleagues from Sweden, the UK, Romania, Germany and senior officials at Nato itself since the start of the year.
“We’re going to have to get used to the idea that it’s realistic that [Russian President Vladimir] Putin will [attack a Nato country within 5-8 years],” said Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann, chair of the Bundestag defence committee. “The man is driven by a kind of imperialism we never believed could exist in the 21st century.”
“It is a credible threat, and we need to be prepared for that,” said one senior Nato diplomat of the warnings of a potential Russian attack on an alliance member. “I do not find such predictions fantasy . . . We do not have the luxury to think that Russia would stop in Ukraine.”
One senior European official went as far as saying that Russia’s “intent and capability” to attack a Nato country before the end of the decade was “pretty much consensus” within the US-led military alliance. “Opportunity is the only variable,” the official said.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Three Million Shells. That’s How Much More Artillery Ammo Russia Thinks It Needs To Defeat Ukraine.
By David Axe | Feb 15, 2024, 06:32pm EST
https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2024/02/15/three-million-shells-
thats-how-much-more-artillery-ammo-russia-thinks-it-needs-to-defeat-ukraine/?sh=6300a415a5b3
15,000 shells per day. That’s how much artillery ammunition the Kremlin believes it needs to blast Ukrainian forces into surrender and win the war in Ukraine in 2025.
That’s 5,000 more shells than Russian batteries currently are firing every day in Ukraine—and 9,000 more shells than Russian industry produces every day.
To make up the shortfall, the Kremlin has two options, neither without its limits. One, it can try to restore some of the roughly three million old shells that still are sitting in long-term storage in Russia.
Two, it can try to secure additional shipments from Iran and, more importantly, North Korea—on top of the two million or more shells Russia already has acquired from those countries.
It’s all easier said than done, and Russian forces face “a significant shortfall” of their main 152-millimeter shells next year, according to a new report from the Royal United Services Institute in London.
The Russian army’s thousands of howitzers fired with abandon in the early months of Russia’s wider war on Ukraine beginning in February 2022. According to the Estonian defense ministry, Russian batteries initially fired as many as 60,000 shells per day.
That incredible sustained barrage quickly burned through millions of rounds in just a few months, more or less consuming every 122-millimeter and 152-millimeter round Russian forces had on hand before the war.
Eighteen months later in late 2023, the Russians were shooting just 10,000 shells a day—and the Ukrainians, flush with a million South Korean shells the Americans had bought for them, roughly matched that firing rate.
Before 2022, Russian industry was capable of producing, or generating from war reserves, just 400,000 shells per year, according to the Estonian defense ministry. As old shells run out, the Russians must compensate by building more new shells.
And they are. Two years of investment, which has contributed to the doubling or tripling of the share of its national wealth Russian spends on its armed force, has expanded annual artillery production to 2.1 million 122-millimeter and 152-millimter shells.
But that’s less than half of the 5.6 million shells that, according to RUSI, Russian officials believe they need to sustain a winning strategy in Ukraine through this year and into next.
There may be another three million old shells in storage in Russia, but “much of this is in poor condition,” RUSI analysts Jack Watling and Nick Reynolds wrote.
Do Iran and North Korea have another few million shells they’re willing to part with? Can Russia afford the multi-billion-dollar price? It’s unclear.
If there’s any comfort for the Russians in this dire projection, it’s that the Ukrainians are struggling even more to supply their biggest guns. In particular, they must find some way to make up for the abrupt end of U.S. aid to Ukraine late last year.
The Americans were the Ukrainians’ biggest supplies of artillery, donating around two million shells in the first 18 months of the war. But then, last fall, Russia-aligned Republicans in the U.S. Congress blocked further aid to Ukraine.
Ukrainian batteries went from firing 10,000 shells a day to firing just 2,000 or so.
The U.S. Army had been counting on U.S. aid to Ukraine to pay for a huge expansion of its main ammo plant in Texas—an expansion that would have increased output to 1.2 million shells a year.
Now that expansion is in doubt. And even if it proceeds, the shells the Army produces in Texas won’t be going to Ukraine. Not unless, and until, Republicans finally agree to vote on aid.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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‘Serious questions’ for Russia: World leaders react with horror to reports of Putin critic Navalny’s death
Published Fri, Feb 16 2024, 9:26 AM EST
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/02/16/world-leaders-react-to-reports-of-puti
n-critic-navalnys-death.html
“Whatever story they tell, let us be clear, Russia is responsible, and we will have more to say on this later,” U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris told the Munich Security Conference on Friday.
The number is now 62 million Russians plus one more Russian murdered by Russians. Putin is sending a message to the world that there is no alternative to his rule. Navalny will not be in line to eventually replace Putin, who wins by a landslide in the March election.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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