Ukraine war mega thread

[OhOh]

And why would Russia solely rely on a single road and rail bridge crossing the Kerch Strait to Crimea, when they can just drive across a long land border (if you can still call it that) join

Russia has a two road link, from Russia to Crimea.

From Russia, Taganrog to Crimea.

North of the Sea of Azov, in blue. Which also goes on to Kherson

The other route, south of the Sea of Azov, where the railway and road both go, crossing over the Kerch bridge, in grey.

[David48atTD]

And why would Russia solely rely on a single road and rail bridge crossing the Kerch Strait to Crimea, when they can just drive across a long land border

Russia has a two road link, from Russia to Crimea.

Agreed, some of the road egress is still available at the moment.

HOWEVER

The vast majority of Russia's Military Logistics is by rail, hence why it's such a big deal that the bridge has been hit.

Below is a map of the major rail lines in Ukraine. There appears no major rail link between Russia and Ukraine which Russia has complete control over.

There might be some minor, secondary rail links which the map doesn't display.

The map's date is May 2022 and Ukraine has regained significant territory since then.

Just how much damage was done to the rail link is as yet, unknown.

Russia said they'll have it operational in a few days

[OhOh]

For me, nothing showing on that link

My apologies, the videos are embedded in a poster's tweets. No YouTube links.

Just how much damage was done to the rail link is as yet, unknown.

In the videos, the cars are shown using one lane of the road bridge. The road bridge has 4 lanes, two in each direction

Also a train is shown pulling a string of wagons off the bridge. The engine and a long line of wagons. Although none of fuel wagons that were burning.

Some could be still on the bridge, and only the undamaged wagons are currently being taken off. Towards Crimea and back off in the other direction, away from Crimea.

The bridge span across the water, with access below for ships to pass under, seems undamaged. Which one would have thought would be the best part to target. Making the demolished bridge fall into the passage below and blocking it.

There is also a report that the truck driver survived the explosion.

[helge]

Just how much damage was done to the rail link is as yet, unknown.

Russia said they'll have it operational in a few days

Yes, No or maybe

But now it has been shown that capability and will to attack the bridge is there.


Doesn't Russia have an answer to this hit ?

Apparently not

[Troy]

^^ The road bridge damage was to one carriageway, it has reopened for cars and busses only, lorries are having to use the ferry.
The rail bridge has apparently reopened this evening but not sure if this is restricted until damage is fully repaired.
Need to wait and see how much it is used in the next few days and how long before it is fully repaired. I don't think Ukraine has weapons with enough range to hinder repairs.
A lot depends on current stockpiles in Crimea as to whether this gives an advantage in the current offensive.
It would have been great to have seen both bridges out of action for an extended period but I'm not so optimistic.

[David48atTD]

The railway part of the bridge - where oil tankers caught fire - has also apparently reopened.

On Saturday evening, Russia's foreign ministry published a video, seemingly showing cars using the bridge.

Crimea bridge partly reopens after huge explosion - Russia - BBC News

[David48atTD]

[OhOh]

^
Those are some of the videos I couldn't post.

8 Oct, 2022 16:45 HomeRussia & FSU

Crimean Bridge reopens for traffic after explosion (VIDEO)

Cars and buses have already started moving, and the railway part is expected to reopen later on Saturday.

"Road traffic on the Crimean Bridge, which was damaged by a truck explosion earlier on Saturday, has partly resumed, and trains are expected to start moving later in the evening.

“The movement of vehicles along the Crimean Bridge has resumed. At the moment, traffic is open to cars and buses with a full inspection procedure,” the head of the Republic of Crimea, Sergey Aksyonov, announced on Telegram.

Truck drivers are advised to use the Kerch ferry crossing, he added.
Russia’s Transport Ministry said that road traffic had been reopened on the bridge, with one lane available for traffic alternating in both directions."

Continues with a video of the cars:

Crimean Bridge reopens for traffic after explosion (VIDEO) — RT Russia & Former Soviet Union

[OhOh]

Doesn't Russia have an answer to this hit ?

Apparently not

Having seen a "checking of the truck prior to being allowed to cross the bridge" video, they will want to question the inspecting soldier about his "inspection technique". Open the doors, look in for a minute, close the doors and walk away.

If the truck was allegedly full of "fertilizer", he wouldn't have been able to see past the first row.

[helge]

Having seen a "checking of the trucks prior to being allowed to cross the bridge" video, they will want to question the inspecting soldier about his "inspection technique". Open the doors, look in for a minute, close the doors and walk away.

If the truck was allegedly full of "fertilizer", he wouldn't have been able to see past the first row.

Ohoh, you have a way too civilized way of thinking.


What I meant was: Millitary answers, retaliation.....REVENGE.

How long can Russia afford being on a defensive, which some russians must see as a humiliation.


The americans would have bombed the fuck out of some milk plant by now

[OhOh]

Below is a map of the major rail lines in Ukraine.

They do not show any Russian railways on the Ukraine map.

However, Rome to Rio provide Travel Time, Frequency, Train Number, Cost, for travelling from Moscow to Simferopo

From Moscow station to Simferopo station

34h 0m by train 3 times a day

192M007А092М

US$45 - US$160

Simferopo

Moscow to Crimean Peninsula - 5 ways to travel via train, plane, bus, and car

and a route map which shows the railway line is in pre-referenda Russia.

[helge]

Cheap trip that

I might push it down the 'to do list' for a bit

[OhOh]

How long can Russia afford being on a defensive, which some russians must see as a humiliation.

A lot longer than the 16%.

He has just added a few million more productive and virile new citizens. He has vast assets the world requires and knows how to extract the correct pound of flesh from. Likewise, he has a very well-educated population, he has excellent relationships with many world leaders. Furthermore, he has excellent diplomatic, financial, military team of professionals at his side. He is a stickler for legal equality and opportunities for all.

How many other countries leaders have such wealth around them for assistance and opinions? Very, very few.

which some russians must see as a humiliation.

His Russian citizens, due to the 16% demonising them all so blatantly, have been demanding a heavier hand. Which some have suggested has enabled him to show not only China, a country, and it's leader, he has many but not all the same views.

He has long relations with many of the rest of the 84% of the world's citizens, which are watching and hoping for his success against the 16%. The 84% have been subjugated, exploited for centuries they want change and inclusion, not 16% treats of extintion.

The americans would have bombed the fuck out of some milk plant by now

NaGastan ha a different miliary view. Bomb the shit out of every third world county, they only fight countries with no military to speak of. Killing hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians. Then walking away from the shit they have caused.

Russia not only intends to win the newly released areas from the 16%, but show it's growing allies, the 84% of the worlds citizens, his actions are measured, delivered, consistent .... with their thoughts and aspirations.

IMHO.

I'm off to bed, the cocks are crowing.

[OhOh]

Cheap trip that

Purchasing Power Parity, the prices mirror the wealth of the citizens. In the UK it would be 100's pounds. And they boast they are well off. Delusional.

[harrybarracuda]

He's got 3 hotties in there? Doing better than you then.

You're right, I don't have a basement.

[Hugh Cow]

There is a long border which allows Russia to ship supplies by road but russian military doctrine has used and is over reliant on trains. The military logistics beauracracy has shown itself to be slow, corrupt and inflexible with little foresight, which means it does not have enough road transport vehicles to replace train shipments. Road transport will require the need for more strategic fuel dumps to fuel supply convoys, both of which increases vulnerability of supply and no doubt will be targeted by the UMF and partisans. This will only increase the level of misery for ill equipped Russian troops in the coming winter and sap morale even further, if that is possible.I wonder how those smiling gung ho conscripts faces will look as they finally see the difference from their russian TVs propanganda and the harsh reality of the war.

[sabang]

After the attack on the Crimean bridge, Zelensky tries to hide in a Kiev bunker



Zelensky spends the night time of the Kyiv regime in a bunker in Kyiv due to fear of retaliation after the SBU took responsibility for attacking the Crimean bridge. Recall that today after 16:00 on the bridge in reverse mode, traffic was resumed along the highway lane, and after 18:00, rail traffic resumed. The train Sevastopol - St. Petersburg has departed.

Against this background, it became known about the strikes on the objects of the Ukrainian regime in a number of territories. Thus, it is known that the RF Armed Forces carried out strikes on enemy targets in the city of Zaporozhye.

It is known that the strikes on the territory of the 55th artillery brigade in Zaporozhye were carried out using Geran-2 unmanned aerial vehicles. It is reported that strikes are being carried out on enemy personnel accommodation facilities and territories where they have been delivered recently weapon and NATO-made ammunition.

As a result of the impact, an explosion occurred at the base of the 55th brigade of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Loitering ammunition dived onto the roof of a building of a military facility, which led to fire and detonation.

Earlier, the SBU said that it was they who carried out the attack on the Crimean bridge. In this regard, Zelensky, realizing that a large-scale terrorist attack was committed on his behalf, on the night of October 9, he tries to hide from the blow of the Geran-2 UAV. Previously, these drones effectively damaged enemy infrastructure not only in Zaporozhye, but also in Kharkiv, Mykolaiv, Dnepropetrovsk and Kherson regions.

https://en.topwar.ru/203055-posle-udara-po-krymskomu-mostu-zelenskij-pytaetsja-ukrytsja-v-kievskom-bunkere.html

[panama hat]

Not like Iraq and Afghanistan then? Or Vietnam. Those russkies really must be untermenschen.

Whataboutism at its best . . . you really have nothing else left. And 'Untermensch' is capitalised - but nice use of a term you don't understand . . . it's kind of like Schadenfreude seeing you do that at this stage

[bsnub]

topwar.ru

More complete horseshit from another of the Three Stooges bozos. Keep up the lies, you Muppet.

[misskit]

Kremlin, shifting blame for war failures, axes military commanders

Russian Ground Forces Gen. Alexander Dvornikov, who over a 44-year military career was best-known for scorched-earth tactics in campaigns he led in Syria and Chechnya, was named overall operational commander of the war in Ukraine in April. He lasted about seven weeks before being dismissed as part of a wider shake-up in response to heavy losses and strategic failures.


Around the same time, Col. Gen. Andrey Serdyukov, another four-decade serviceman, the commander in chief of the elite airborne troops, was stripped of his post after nearly all divisions of the airborne forces suffered major losses.


And just last week Col. Gen. Alexander Zhuravlev, the head of the Western Military District responsible for Kharkiv, where Russian forces lost huge swaths of territory in early September, was removed after four years on the job, according to Russian business daily RBC.


Far from bestowing glory on Russia’s military brass, the war in Ukraine is proving toxic for top commanders, with at least eight generals fired, reassigned or otherwise sidelined since the start of the invasion on Feb. 24. Western governments have said that at least 10 others were killed in battle, a remarkably high number that military analysts say is evidence of grievous strategic errors.


The upheaval in the upper ranks of uniformed officers highlights Russia’s fundamental mistakes in war planning, and the dysfunctional chain of command that resulted first in Moscow’s failure to achieve its primary military objective — the quick capture of Kyiv, and toppling of the Ukrainian government — and more recently in the retreats on the eastern and southern fronts.


But the dismissals also reflect a scramble by political elites to place blame for the costly and faltering war as open criticism grows louder, particularly among pro-war hawks and propagandists.


Like their badly prepared forces on the front, the commanders in the Russian Armed Forces are turning out to be easy targets, even as senior political leaders, including Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, the Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov, and President Vladimir Putin himself had largely avoided direct criticism.


Recent criticism of Shoigu, however, has signaled that his job, too, may finally be in jeopardy.

Unlike in Ukraine, where the top generals, including the commander in chief, Valery Zaluzhny, and Oleksandr Syrsky, who led the recent Kharkiv offensive, are now revered figures, it has often been difficult to know who in Russia is actually running the war. Personnel changes are often carried out with little public announcement and trickle into the Russia media with little or no explanation.

On Friday, RBC reported that the commander of Russia’s eastern military district, Col. Gen. Alexander Chaiko, had been replaced by Lt. Gen. Rustam Muradov. No explanation was given for the switch.


In a rare public announcement of staffing changes, the Russian defense ministry said late last month that it removed the general responsible for “the logistics support of the Armed Forces,” Dmitry Bulgakov, and appointed in his place Col. Gen. Mikhail Mizintsev.


Mizintsev was an obscure figure before the Ukraine war but has earned the gruesome moniker “Butcher of Mariupol” after Ukrainian officials and activists accused him of orchestrating a brutal siege of the southern Ukrainian port city that has killed thousands of civilians and razed residential buildings.


And on Friday, Russia’s Black Sea Fleet admitted after weeks of speculation that it had replaced its commander, Adm. Igor Osipov, with Vice Adm. Viktor Sokolov who vowed to “increase the combat readiness of the fleet.”


In late April, Ukraine sank the fleet’s flagship, the cruiser Moskva, with an audacious but successful strike using two Neptune anti-ship missiles. On Navy Day, in July, the headquarters of the Black Sea Fleet was attacked by a makeshift combat drone that dropped an explosive device on its roof, a symbolic attack that symbolized Ukraine’s ability to strike deep into Russian positions.


The recent public announcements of dismissals may reflect a growing imperative to satisfy demands for blame and accountability. Such calls, and criticism of the war effort in general, have been amplified since Putin’s declaration of a partial military mobilization last month, which led more than 200,000 fighting-age men to flee the country, and set off angry complaints over men wrongly being called to service and conscripts receiving poor treatment, including minimal food and rusting weapons.


After a long string of failures and few significant victories, the knives now seem to be out for Russian generals, amid criticism from prominent Russian military correspondents, state television propagandists and even members of the normally obedient parliament.


Two Russian lawmakers — chairman of the defense committee Andrey Kartapolov and anti-corruption committee Vasily Piskarev — are holding closed-door meetings in the lower house of the parliament, the State Duma, to review the “situation with the supply of the Russian army.”


Kartapolov and Piskarev also sent a written request to the prosecutor general, asking him to investigate “how the financing was wasted in the rear” — alleging that commanders have been looting the military budget.


The head of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, who sent his own fighters to Ukraine, slammed the commander of the Central Military District, Alexander Lapin, as a “talentless” leader and a product of “nepotism” in the leadership of the general staff, for deploying fighters from one of the self-declared pro-Russian separatist areas without proper support or preparation.


“The colonel-general deployed mobilized fighters from the Luhansk People’s Republic and other units on all frontiers of the Lyman direction, but did not provide them with communication, did not ensure coordination and a proper supply of ammunition,” Kadyrov wrote in a scathing post last Saturday.


Critics, including Kadyrov, have accused top officers of lying about what is happening on the front.


“It’s necessary to stop lying,” Kartapolov, the defense committee chairman, said, lashing out on Soloviev Live, an online channel run by top state television propagandist Vladimir Soloviev. “Almost all the border villages of the Belgorod Region have been destroyed, but we are learning this from anyone: governors, Telegram channels, military correspondents. But not the Defense Ministry,” Kartapolov said.


In a different show this week, Soloviev said that “lies on every level must be punished most severely.”


“I don’t pretend to know the art of warfare, but what is the genius idea behind the general staff plans now?” Soloviev asked rhetorically. “Do you think time is on our side? [Ukrainians] have concentrated weapons and mercenaries . . . and what have you done in that time?”


According to Conflict Intelligence Team (CIT), an independent group that has been monitoring Russian military activities in Ukraine since 2014, Col. Gen. Gennady Zhidko took over from Dvornikov in May as the overall commander of the Russian war.


Dvornikov’s dismissal may been linked to the destruction of the 58th Combined Arms Army, normally stationed in the southern Vladikavkaz, which was lauded as one the most combat-ready Russian armies and key to the invasion of Georgia in 2008, BBC’s Russian service reported.


But Zhidko, who also held the title of deputy defense minister, in what appears to be a damning trend for generals in Ukraine, was in charge for about a month before more problems emerged, and he was demoted to the head of the Eastern Military District.


It is not clear which general currently runs the overarching Russian war operation.

Kremlin, shifting blame for war failures, axes military commanders | Stars and Stripes

[panama hat]

at least eight generals fired, reassigned or otherwise sidelined . . . and at least 10 others were killed in battle

A good start . . .

[Hugh Cow]

After the attack on the Crimean bridge, Zelensky tries to hide in a Kiev bunker



Zelensky spends the night time of the Kyiv regime in a bunker in Kyiv due to fear of retaliation after the SBU took responsibility for attacking the Crimean bridge. Recall that today after 16:00 on the bridge in reverse mode, traffic was resumed along the highway lane, and after 18:00, rail traffic resumed. The train Sevastopol - St. Petersburg has departed.

Against this background, it became known about the strikes on the objects of the Ukrainian regime in a number of territories. Thus, it is known that the RF Armed Forces carried out strikes on enemy targets in the city of Zaporozhye.

It is known that the strikes on the territory of the 55th artillery brigade in Zaporozhye were carried out using Geran-2 unmanned aerial vehicles. It is reported that strikes are being carried out on enemy personnel accommodation facilities and territories where they have been delivered recently weapon and NATO-made ammunition.

As a result of the impact, an explosion occurred at the base of the 55th brigade of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Loitering ammunition dived onto the roof of a building of a military facility, which led to fire and detonation.

Earlier, the SBU said that it was they who carried out the attack on the Crimean bridge. In this regard, Zelensky, realizing that a large-scale terrorist attack was committed on his behalf, on the night of October 9, he tries to hide from the blow of the Geran-2 UAV. Previously, these drones effectively damaged enemy infrastructure not only in Zaporozhye, but also in Kharkiv, Mykolaiv, Dnepropetrovsk and Kherson regions.

https://en.topwar.ru/203055-posle-udara-po-krymskomu-mostu-zelenskij-pytaetsja-ukrytsja-v-kievskom-bunkere.html

You really are scraping the bottom of the barrel now with that pro Russian propaganda.

Whataboutism at its best . . . you really have nothing else left. And 'Untermensch' is capitalised - but nice use of a term you don't understand . . . it's kind of like Schadenfreude seeing you do that at this stage

Agree. Noone to my knowledge here has suggested the Russians were sub human. In fact some have shown some sympathy for the deaths of russian soldiers. Certainly many posts by Sabang leaves him open to the accusation of Schadenfreude.

[harrybarracuda]

Comedy moment from Russian telly.

"Ukraine is a cruel, motivated, well-prepared enemy. This is an enemy nation that has been waging a full-fledged war against us for at least 7 ½ months. We keep calling it a special military operation, but they are waging war".

https://www.thedailybeast.com/russia...underestimated

[Takeovers]

Comedy moment from Russian telly.

Well, at least the motivated and well prepared part is correct. For some weird reason they don't like being invaded, killed, raped and their cities destroyed.

[sabang]

The Western party line about a struggling Russia and a resilient Ukraine overlooks hard realities.

By Katya SEDGWICK

Vladimir Putin’s decision to mobilize reserves for the war in Ukraine has stirred feelings around the world. The former politician and Russian opposition leader Gennady Gudkov posted an aerial view of a 15-lane desert highway with a traffic jam pushing into the horizon. “I am being told,” Gudkov wrote, “this is the [Russian] border with Mongolia on September 22. Be sure to zoom in to examine the picture.” Multiple large vehicles, perhaps buses, were mingled among sedans, suggesting that we are witnessing some sort of mass evacuation of Russians unwilling to serve in Ukraine.

A day earlier I saw the same picture passed on by a Russian blue-check account (I forgot which) claiming that it was the Russia-Kazakhstan border. But, as any resident of the Western United States knows, the photograph, which as of this writing is still available for viewing on Twitter, is of neither. It’s the road to the Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert, and the large vehicles are the RVs in which revelers intend to stay at the event.

I can’t say that the incident turned me against Gudkov, or anyone else in liberal Russian opposition. I find many of them well-informed and relatable. It is just that it is an emotional time in Eastern Europe, and pretty much every opposition figure is overcome by feelings, which is why I find their media mostly useless when it comes to this particular conflict. For reasons far less obvious, the Western media is equally emotionally invested in the conflict, and extraordinarily clueless on top of it.


I get the impression that the news stories are written by the same types who spent decades telling me, a Jew from Soviet Ukraine, that I am a Russian. Now that they have found Ukraine on the map, they are equally confident in the feel-good narrative they are concocting. The narrative, as skewered by the satire outlet the Pacific is, “Ukraine just one aid package away from victory.” Underpinning it is the drama of the demoralized Russia and resilient Ukraine. “Russians Are Terrified and Have Nowhere to Turn,” confidently declares the New York Times in the wake of the mobilization announcement. That follows another Gray Lady headline, “Protests in Russia against Putin’s Mobilization Policy Continue.

”No doubt, some are running away. An estimated 261,000 fled the country so far, and perhaps more will follow. The fact of draft dodging is not in dispute. But it is not clear that the types heading for the border are of much interest to the recruiters. More likely, they are educated, liberal men, sometimes with families, and with no military experience.

What should be in dispute is the coverage. Ann Applebaum is an American-Polish journalist and the wife of the former Polish minister of foreign affairs and current Member of European Parliament Radoslaw Sikorski—last seen thanking the U.S. for blowing up the Nord Stream pipelines carrying Russian gas to Europe. Applebaum commented about the difference between the Russian and the Ukrainian conscriptions:

Refugees from Ukraine in February and March were almost entirely women and children; the men stayed to fight. The new refugees from Russia this week are almost entirely men – because they don’t want to fight.

This is the picture we are getting from the media. But consider that the refugees coming out of Ukraine were almost entirely women and children because men weren’t allowed to leave the country openly (though some clever ones had foreign passports and disability papers ready for just this occasion). The images coming out of the country in the early days of war reassured the Western news consumers that Ukraine is not going to be a Syria, that the Ukrainian men are ready to fight.

Yet the men wishing to leave Ukraine typically had to be smuggled, in which case their “refugee” pictures didn’t grace the front page of Western newspapers. If caught, they ended up in the back pages of Ukrainian media. Here is a sample: a border patrol inspector in Odessa charged $2,500 to transport men abroad; a resident of the western Ukrainian Zakarpatia region illegally moved residents of the Kharkov region across the border; in Odessa, recruiters charged $7,000 to create fake medical excuse papers that allowed fifty conscripts to exit the country.

Not surprisingly, corruption exists in the Ukrainian armed forces; it’s just that Western audiences are rarely reminded of it. I could easily engineer coverage of the Ukrainian mobilization that would look exactly like the narrative of Russian mobilization in our media. In fact, the Russian channels successfully did just that. They amplified, for instance, the footage allegedly showing women from the city of Hust in the Zakarpatia region rioting in front of the military recruitment office.

Typing “Ukrainian soldiers refuse to fight” in both Google and Duck Duck Go brings up a list of articles on Russian defectors. But Russian sources have been circulating videos of enemy forces, allegedly from the frontlines, recording messages for Zelensky refusing to continue fighting and demanding to be rotated out of the battlefield. I have no way of authenticating these videos, and I remember how, in 2014, footage of what appeared to be the same corpulent, middle-aged blond men weeping and asking Putin to intervene was recorded in several different regions in southeast Ukraine. Are the videos of Ukrainian soldiers fake? No idea, but there are a lot of them out there.

Just like there are a lot of videos of Ukrainians running away (and sometimes swimming away) from the recruiters. Interestingly enough, the New York Times once ran an article confirming these stories. It didn’t get as much attention as the ones about grandmas knocking out Russian drones with jars of pickles, but it’s worth a read. If that report is to be believed, the Ukrainian fighting spirit is not as previously reported. Ukrainians complain about being casually approached by government officials in public places and handed draft documents.

Living under martial law with a tightly censored media, Ukrainians nevertheless created apps to map real-time location of recruiters to help each other avoid conscription. In Kharkov, the country’s second largest city and a chief target of Russian shelling, the app has 67,000 subscribers. A similar app exists in Lviv, the hotbed of Ukrainian Nazism and the temporary home of the refugees from the East.

Many men opted to join the Territorial Defense Forces on the promise that these units would not be sent to the front lines (they were). Some even flat-out tell officers that they won’t fight for Ukraine because it’s not a real country. In September, Ukraine banned male students from leaving the country for study abroad because too many falsified college admission documents. On the news of Russia’s mobilization, Ukrainian presidential advisor and a frequent guest of Russian opposition news channels Alexey Arestovich stated that college students who are currently exempt from conscription might need to be mobilized. The social media reaction was overwhelmingly negative.

In any war, a number of men will dodge the draft. I can’t estimate the scope of the problem in either Russia or Ukraine, but if Ukraine has 5.5 million military age men, its neighbor can probably come up with a more massive fighting force. Russia’s stated goal is to mobilize 300,000 reservists with prior military experience. Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu counts 25 million reservists in total. Maybe some of them will head for the border or go underground, but for the war effort to be sabotaged, an overwhelming majority of them would have to do so.


Some darkly sarcastic Americans say that the U.S. is willing to fight Russia to the last Ukrainian. At some point we might just run out of Ukrainians willing to fight. We might also run out of ammo. Since the very beginning of the war, it’s been forecasted that Russiaisabouttorunoutofweapons. Maybe they are. But it’s now being revealed that NATO has depleted its supplies of the kind of weaponry we’ve been sending to Ukraine. Our current appropriations are expected to be delivered to the region three years from now.It does not sound like Putin’s regime is one Ukraine aid package away from crumbling. On the other hand, with Ukraine angling to get NATO involved, it might just fall on the United States to settle this Eastern European border dispute. If that is something we still hope to avoid, then we need to be skeptical of both sides’ narratives and honest with ourselves.

theamericanconservative.com