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This might be a little tougher than Putin thought...

2. Soon there is going to be big trouble on the Swedish/Chinese border.

Swedish/Chinese? I’m no cartographer but…

R.d45c843813ca62c2485e2233efa829ec
 
I know our tax dollars were used to destroy a lot of their older arsenal. 60 Minutes, iirc, did a story on it 15-20 years ago.

We had to because they were too stupid and broke to maintain them. Gives me less than a lot of confidence they are paying to maintain the rest of them properly through to 2024. Their nuclear arsenal managers are every bit as corrupt as the rest of that backwards POS country’s politicians and military branches.
 
I think that was Russian disinfo and never happened. Hitting refineries for local Russian consumers is not driving crude oil prices up
SIAP-there is a quote supposed to be from a Ukrainian official saying they respect the US input about not hitting the refineries but they have to fight with what they have....which may be a deserved shot at our support these days.
 
First, the Soviets never threatened nukes very much. That is a myth. They did in 73 and Kissenger got the Israelis to stop the advance into Egypt.

The US is about the only nation that saw the Cuban Missile Crisis as a one sided US victory. The Soviets really wanted the US to pull back from nuke missiles in Turkey.... and we did but Americans don't talk about that much.

The Soviet military in the cold war was big enough and strong enough that they were never really threatened by US/NATO non-nuclear forces. What people fail to realize is that Russia is not a threat to most European nations. The Russians truly feel the US/West is trying to take down their economy (which they have a case for but most people are blind to that). Putin does have the power to make US/West air superiority less of a threat (without 5th Gen but we really don't know how 5th gen will perform), but other than that his best hope is a stalemated ground war with volumes of tanks/arty over manpower.

He only has one real hope... nukes. If someone is going to kill you are you going to negotiate? Pull out a pocket knife? Or be like Indiana Jones when he shoots the sword fighter?

The whole situation is insane. Putin without China would never have the power to conquer NATO or any NATO nations. That isn't happening anytime soon. Russia like Putin is dying and old.

I don't think most realize how bad the UA military was at the start of the war. Putin is a threat to use nukes. He doesn't care. How successful that would be? No idea and neither does anyone on this board.

What does seem accurate is that someone (s) on the side of the west almost seems to want WW3.

Two jokes among Ukrainians stick in my head.

1. The US wants to fight Ukraine to the last Ukrainian. (That comes from WW2 when we had the resources to take Berlin but let the Germans and Soviets kill each other).

2. Soon there is going to be big trouble on the Swedish/Chinese border.
We still have nukes in turkey.
Just sayin.
 
We still have nukes in turkey.
Just sayin.
Yes, now but we did remove them at that time. Both sides declared victory and moved on, Kennedy proposing a joint lunar project and Kruscheve going to accept until Kennedy was killed, possibly for that very reason.
 



"A video that circulated on social media last week (Dec 2023) depicts a T-62 with explosive reactive armor blocks, an anti-drone cage and front-mounted mine-plows. The 60-year-old, but upgraded, tank reportedly belongs to one of the Russian brigades and regiments deployed around the ruins of Marinka in eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region.

If there’s a downside to these add-ons, it’s that the T-62s all apparently still have their original 620-horsepower diesel engines, which produce much less power than a modern tank engine produces. An improved T-62 also is a heavier and slower T-62.




It’s obvious why the Russian army in Ukraine is heaping armor and mine-clearing gear onto its aging T-62s, even at the cost of the tanks’ mobility. Every tank on the 600-mile front line in Ukraine, whether Russian or Ukrainian, is vulnerable to artillery strikes, drones and mines. Especially mines.


One open question is the tanks’ habitability. After losing a thousand of its best tanks in the first few months of its now-22-month wider war on Ukraine, and struggling to ramp up production of new tanks, the Kremlin frantically pulled out of storage hundreds of T-62s and speeded them to the front line in southern Ukraine.



In the fall of 2022, counterattacking Ukrainian brigades destroyed dozens of these un-upgraded T-62s, and captured dozens more. The Ukrainians converted some of the T-62s into engineering and infantry-support vehicles, but they also handed over some of the tanks to their own territorial brigades—roughly the equivalent of U.S. Army National Guard brigades—for use as tanks."


https://www.forbes.com/sites/davida...possibly-only-on-the-outside/?sh=14c6507b4b85
 
As I suspected, Russian disinfo. Not at all related to oil prices rising.


Ukraine has rejected claims that a series of strikes on Russian oil refineries risks alienating its Western allies, with senior officials in Kyiv insisting the country is well within its rights to target Moscow’s lucrative fossil fuels industry.

Mykhailo Podolyak, adviser to the office of Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said the government has not received calls from the United States asking Ukraine to halt attacks on Russian energy infrastructure.

Podolyak’s comments, forwarded to POLITICO by the office of Ukraine Energy Minister German Galushchenko, were in contrast to earlier reports by the Financial Times that the U.S. had urged the Eastern European nation to refrain from attacks on major energy infrastructure for fear of sending oil prices skyrocketing and prompting retaliation from the Kremlin.
 
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