This might be a little tougher than Putin thought...
- Thread starter Nole Lou
- Start date
Ukraine lowers its conscription age to 25 to replenish its beleaguered troops
KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Ukraine lowered its draft-eligible age for men from 27 to 25 on Wednesday, reflecting the strain that more than two years of war with Russia has put on its military and the need to infuse its depleted ranks with new conscripts.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy signed three bills into law aimed at strengthening the country’s beleaguered forces, which are trying to hold the front lines in fighting that has sapped Ukraine’s ranks and stores of weapons and ammunition.
The new laws, which will also do away with some draft exemptions and create an online registry for recruits, might add around 50,000 troops to the military, said Oksana Zabolotna, an analyst with the Center for United Actions, a government watchdog in Kyiv.
That would be a tenth of the 500,000 additional troops that Zelenskyy said in December that the military wanted to mobilize. But after signing a security agreement with Finnish President Alexander Stubb in Kyiv on Wednesday, Zelenskyy said an audit requested by Ukraine’s newly appointed commander-in-chief determined that the 500,000 figure was wrong, partly because existing troops could be sent from the rear to the front. He didn’t say why that option wasn’t considered previously.
Ukraine lowers its conscription age to 25 to replenish its beleaguered troops
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy signed three bills into law aimed at strengthening the country’s beleaguered forces.
apnews.com
GOPers on this board ensured us this was not going to happen
It happened.
NY Times just ran an article detailing the death of Kuzminov, the Russian helicopter pilot that defected to Ukraine. As was reported earlier, the guy was a flaming idiot. He knows Russia kills people like him, yet he lived a high profile life right out in the open. Including contacting an ex-Russian girlfriend in Russia to come for a visit. What are the chances the GRU and/or the FSB weren't tapping the lines of everybody Kuzminov ever knew? A safe bet would be "everybody".
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/31/world/europe/russian-defector-murder-spain.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/31/world/europe/russian-defector-murder-spain.html
Another piece of brilliant journalism by the AP. This story is about a man who searches the devastation to find the bodies of dead Ukrainian and Russian soldiers. He, and his team, have paid a very high price emotionally and physically to bring closure to the grieving families of Ukrainian soldiers.
https://apnews.com/article/russia-u...dy-collector-43bfc0848fdaa9b36d63abfa8c24f885
https://apnews.com/article/russia-u...dy-collector-43bfc0848fdaa9b36d63abfa8c24f885
That pussy should read the story I just posted. He's fine with Ukrainians dying on order to prolong his speakership by a month or two.
"But the Leopard 1A5 is, in theory, available in large numbers. The Danish-German-Dutch consortium identified at least 165 ex-German and ex-Danish Leopard 1A5s and 1A5DKs as well as 30 ex-Belgian 1A5BEs, with enhanced fire-controls, that German firms Rheinmetall and Krauss-Maffei Wegmann could refurbish for Ukraine.
That was a year ago. Today, maybe 50 Leopard 1s actually are in Ukraine. It’s possible Leopard 1A5s and 1A5DKs equip the Ukrainian army’s 44th Mechanized Brigade and 5th Tank Brigade; some 1A5BEs apparently equip the 59th Motorized Brigade.
That’s three or four Leopard 1A5-equipped tank companies out of eight or nine the Europeans said the Ukrainians would have before the end of 2023—and out of nearly 20 they ultimately should get.
All that is to say, the Leopard 1A5s are way, way late. And the Danes are blaming the Germans. “The reason is that we had problems repairing the tanks,” Danish acting defense minister Troels Lund Poulsen told Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten. “The Germans were delayed with their repairs.”
We should have know this would happen.
According to Der Spiegel, Ukraine rejected a batch of 10 Leopard 1s owing to the tanks’ poor material condition. Similarly, several other Leopard 1s that arrived in Ukraine last summer immediately broke down. German officials determined that the tanks wore out during intensive, two-week training courses for Ukrainian crews.
The Leopard 1A5s were in worse shape than their donors expected. Worse shape than German industry quickly can fix. Part of the problem is a serious shortage of spare parts for tanks—a shortage that also afflicts Ukraine’s battle-damaged Leopard 2 tanks.
How bad is the parts problem? So bad that, in September, the Brazilian army suspended a plan to upgrade its own Leopard 1A5s. “Global demand for tank parts is high,” the army explained. “No future date set.”
In one sense, the Leopard 1A5 delays hardly matter. The supply of tanks is not a major problem for Ukrainian forces, which still have many hundreds of relatively modern T-64s and T-72s as well as the survivors of those 31 M-1s that the United States donated. The Ukrainian military went to war 25 months ago with around a thousand tanks. Subtracting losses and adding donations, today it has … around a thousand tanks.
No, Ukraine’s main military needs are manpower, artillery ammunition and air-defenses. No quantity of Leopard 1A5s can make good these shortages.
But the tank-delays are embarrassing for the Europeans—and especially for the Germans. A generation of European under-investment in basic military needs, including spare parts for tanks, now is Ukraine’s problem."
"BILD: this year it will be able to use unmanned aerial vehicles with a range of up to 2,000 km and more. By the end of the year, 10 manufacturers will provide APU with drones with a range of up to 2,500 km. And the Kiev design bureau "Luch" has developed the Sokół-3000 unmanned aerial vehicle with a range of 3,300 km."
"1st appearance of an unmanned aerial vehicle that attacked the factory #Shahed in Tatarstan, Russia!The declared autonomy is 3100 km & the warhead is 300 kg"
"1st appearance of an unmanned aerial vehicle that attacked the factory #Shahed in Tatarstan, Russia!The declared autonomy is 3100 km & the warhead is 300 kg"
"Satellite images show the Morozovsk airfield before today's attack, at least 6 planes were destroyed and another 8 seriously damaged. Around 20 Russian soldiers were killed or injured."
Simple answer is they can't get these old tanks operational. All the manufacturers of parts have probably moved on from producing them...getting those supply lines opened back up is probably problematic.
The "west/NATO" can't even ramp up 155mm shell production after 2 years.
This war has exposed a lot of deficiencies in the military industrial capabilities in the "west".
We can produce some of the best weaponry in the world but lack industrial capacity to ramp up.
Hopefully this has been and is being addressed. People will bitch about the billions but national security is in the first level of the hierarchy of needs.
Especially now.
Unfortunately after Afghanistan/Iraq there isn't much appetite for it.
I don’t think it’s as much a matter of can’t.
If you told GM and Ford that car production was halted they’d figure out how to make what Uncle Sam was buying.
There isn’t the political will because there isn’t the public will.
Even in Poland you can’t find 1 in 5 that want to put troops in Ukraine.
This is a pretty hawkish echo chamber for the most part.
