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d64 posted:I might be repeating something that was already said but re: the gas situation in Europe, hs.fi reported two facts that I thought brought some perspective: The Economist has had a bunch of pretty good articles about this lately ( https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2022/10/11/the-countries-most-at-risk-from-europes-energy-crunch ; paywall but you can stop while loading and you get around the paywall, like NYT). Here's a couple maps of it, for this winter: The legend is missing; left panel is "direct exposure to gas shortages" and the right panel is "indirect exposure". Color code is presumably obvious; darker red color is more affected.  Looks like Denmark and Luxembourg won't care much, but everyone else seems to be affected. Also I guess Norway is unaffected/actually benefits, but since they're not EU they're not in whatever dataset The Economist is using. The article does, like you mentioned, say that gas is not likely to return to normal until winter 2024. I've seen other articles projecting for winter 2023 saying it is likely to be worse than this one in terms of energy supply (e.g. https://www.economist.com/europe/2022/09/29/europes-next-energy-crunch ). I was surprised that the Baltics were not more directly affected. I thought they were getting like the vast majority of their gas from Russia? E: Also NL is surprising, since they produce a lot of gas and didn't import much from Russia, so I'm not really sure on how The Economist is calculating these metrics. Saladman fucked around with this message at 11:16 on Oct 12, 2022 |
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Oct 12, 2022 11:10
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Dick Ripple posted:Doesn't German place an artikel infront of many countries names? Edit: ^^^ [snip] The explanation above is better. It looks like there are only four countries that have unclear non-rule-based reasons for their article in German: Iraq, Yemen, Ukraine, and Kosovo. So Ukraine's not alone, but in a small batch. I don't know why they mention Sudan and Lebanon in their list for "still unclear", both of those have obvious known geographical and historical uses for the article, and both were referred to as "the Sudan" and "the Lebanon" in English until quite recent times. Saladman fucked around with this message at 11:48 on Oct 12, 2022 |
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Oct 12, 2022 11:38
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KillHour posted:Apologies if this is getting too USPOL but aren't there literal laws against a private citizen trying to do diplomacy with a foreign country? I can't imagine the state department being amused with that kind of poo poo. Diplomacy? He made a tweet and may have talked with Putin, although I'm super skeptical of that report. Why would Putin even want to talk with Musk, to try and convince him to shut down Starlink in exchange for... giving Germany gas for Tesla's plant? I would assume Putin gets enough bullshit talks with Macron to not want more talks with someone completely bonkers. I also don't really see why disallowing Starlink in Crimea is a big deal right now anyway, besides optics -- Ukrainian government control is nowhere close to Crimea, so if it was accessible there, it anyway would only be accessible to Russian forces. I mean optically it's a dick move, but Ukraine isn't exactly driving down the countryside to Simferopol yet. Worrying about that now seems like putting the cart before the horse, especially since it's a decision that takes 1 second to enact and change one way or the other and it's not like it requires time in advance to prepare.
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Oct 12, 2022 18:09
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Popete posted:Would you say construction workers in the U.S. are performing a military task anytime they fix a pot hole or perform maintenance on an intersection? If they’re fixing critical, road-closing potholes on the only road connecting a US military base to another US military base, in an active war zone, then… yes, 100% absolutely? An army engineer is still part of the military even if they’re not shooting a gun. But yeah weird to be so eager for anyone’s deaths, especially non-combattants. E: also wtf South Africa abstaining? Otherwise looks like the typical abstainers plus some countries that I wonder if it was an "idealogical abstain" or "don’t care" like South Sudan. I guess blank means "not present" although what’s up with Azerbaijan not showing up to either vote? Saladman fucked around with this message at 21:57 on Oct 12, 2022 |
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Oct 12, 2022 21:51
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cinci zoo sniper posted:https://twitter.com/chriso_wiki/status/1580303771208339456 I don’t understand some of this, especially this one: https://mobile.twitter.com/ChrisO_wiki/status/1580303806339854336 They show a photo of the truck but it is like 80% empty. So they unloaded like 18 tons of acrylonitrile styrene, photographed the last couple palettes, then loaded it back up? I mean maybe they actually do that to mitigate smuggling, but drat looks like a ton of effort if they unload and reload every truck at every border. The scans in Yerevan also are still showing a largely empty truck. So when did it get the 22 tons of explosive? I get it’s not the same truck as the one that exploded, but it’s also not enough explosive to make any sense. The rest of the story is rather convincing so I might be missing something obvious. This is the FSB’s version of events? I’m surprised at how plausible it sounds. Saladman fucked around with this message at 08:02 on Oct 13, 2022 |
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Oct 13, 2022 07:56
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cinci zoo sniper posted:It’s just 22 pallets, ABS is denser than than water. 16 of them are visible on the photo, with at least 2-4 more behind the curtain if I had to guess. Wait, that's 22 tons of material in the photo? I guess I just have absolutely no clue how heavy anything is. But yeah makes sense now that I think about it. 1x1x1m of water is 1 ton, so 22x meter cubes would be a full load. I guess I just always expect lorries to be full to the gills, but the only time I've ever loaded or unloaded a mid-sized lorry has been when they're full of furniture and household belongings.
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Oct 13, 2022 09:58
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Deteriorata posted:The average high temperature in Kherson in January is 34°F, so I would expect it would. The flowing water will work against it, so it might be patchy or thin in places. Probably solid enough to walk on, but I doubt cars or trucks would make it. Ukraine is really not that cold, especially not Kherson. Kharkiv is similar weather to Chicago and Kherson is about the same as Pittsburgh. It’s chilly but not even remotely arctic. Rivers also are pretty challenging to freeze over, especially deep ones and/or fast moving ones. The January 24h average -1 in Kherson. The 24h avg in Stalingrad is -6; those 5 degrees extra make a huge difference. Might there be a cold snap that makes it possible to walk across? Reasonably likely, but it’s not going to be crossed in heavy trucks, no unless we get a freak once in a century coldsnap, which global warming is making ever so less likely. E: Kherson also gets an average 1.3 inches / 3cm a year of snow - less than Nashville, although when it falls it’ll last longer since you rarely get huge temperature swings like you get in the US. Like total, for all winter. North Americans tend to have super wrong impressions of how snowy and cold Europe is. Saladman fucked around with this message at 21:43 on Oct 13, 2022 |
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Oct 13, 2022 21:37
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Deteriorata posted:http://www.encyclopediaofukraine.com/display.asp?linkpath=pages%5CD%5CN%5CDniproRiver.htm I’m not sure if you posted that to agree or to disagree with me, but a river freezing over does not mean what I think you think it means. There’s ice on the riverbanks and a thin veneer of ice, and there’s actually frozen solid. Like what you just linked said it does not meaningfully freeze over most years.
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Oct 13, 2022 21:44
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Deteriorata posted:That's exactly what I said. It may be patchy, and perhaps possible to walk on. It depends on the severity of the winter and is not terribly predictable. Yeah my bad, I thought you were implying that it was going to be a likely route for soldiers to cross on foot for the entire winter. E: I also don't mean to be a dick about 'lol North Americans think Europe is cold and snowy'. Europeans also think that the US is a lot warmer than it is. I don't think any Swiss would guess that upstate New York would get more snow than Chamonix and Zermatt. Saladman fucked around with this message at 21:59 on Oct 13, 2022 |
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Oct 13, 2022 21:52
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Musk is a tantrum throwing idiot, but he also has a lot of good ideas, or at least has been able to hire a lot of people with good ideas and have effective managers. Throwing money at the problem is obviously not the only way of doing it, see: Bezos & Branson. Also what on earth at the idea of nationalizing Starlink because of ??? reasons instead of just paying the honestly quite fair commercial operator fees. Also if Starlink is nationalized, there will be zero service for Starlink in 5 years because the government has no way of sending up new satellites on their own and the minisatellites don't last very long in LEO.
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Oct 14, 2022 10:18
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There was never any real doubt that Hungary would have to approve them eventually, right? If Hungary threatened to leave, my main response would be "lol," like if my four year old threatened to leave the house and go off into the world on their own. Turkey seems like a much bigger stumbling block though, since NATO needs Turkey about as much as Turkey needs NATO, and trading Sweden+Finland for Turkey would not be a no-brainer, unlike trading them for Hungary.
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Oct 17, 2022 09:30
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Rappaport posted:Orban doesn't really have anything to gain (as far as I can see?) from blocking Sweden and Finland, he's more occupied with his tight-rope act between anti-EU / "traditional values" strong-man bluster and not pissing off the EU any further, which could compromise his EU funding streams. Actually on that note, what's up with them having a joint application anyway? I understand why Greece and Turkey would go in at the same time, but I don't understand why Finland and Sweden would have their applications locked together. Kind of like I was confused by why North Macedonia and Albania had their EU applications locked, such that Albania could only go forward after Bulgaria stopped blocking North Macedonia. Are the Finns just like, looking out for their older cousin? NATO also seems a way lot ton more important for Finland than it is for Sweden, even though it turned out the Russian bear was actually just a raccoon.
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Oct 17, 2022 10:55
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PerilPastry posted:if I was the deputy head of the Kherson Military-Civilian Administration I probably would *not* do a poetry slam lampshading the illegitimacy of the referendums and the absurdity of Russia's imperial ambitions So... is he trying to not-so-subtly signal that he is against the Russian regime, or is he a psychotic ultranationalist who seriously thinks that the entire world belongs to Russia, like the Nation of Islam thing where ancient Egypt and all other advanced ancient cultures were ruled by time-travelling African American Shabazzian space wizards?
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Oct 18, 2022 13:07
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Shibawanko posted:this war has had me thinking about what it is actually like to fight in a war, how much balls and determination it really takes to actually do things like this. it's odd growing up with the promise that there will never be another european war, never even considering it and then seeing this reality But… there was major war in Europe in the 1990s that was on par with this one, and then more minor Kosovo related events in the 2000s, then Donbass in 2014. So that’s like not even a decade without war. I guess we had like 27 years (Dayton Accords - Russian official invasion of Ukraine) without any huge fighting, but unless you’re the youngest poster on Something Awful, then war in Europe within your living memory is definitely a thing pre-Feb 2022.
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Oct 21, 2022 18:43
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PederP posted:I'm an old fart, so maybe I can chip in a bit on this. Not to drag this parallel too far off topic, but I took the train from Split to Zagreb a couple months ago. It goes through parts of Croatia that were heavily populated by Serbs until 1996 (Knin) when the population went from 10% Croat/85% Serb to 80% Croat/15% Serb in the space of a few months. The ethnic cleansing/depopulation and ruin of all the little train stops was still striking, still in 2022. I didn’t notice any visible bullet hole damage, which I’ve seen in previous places long after the battles ended (eg Panama City downtown was still a war torn shithole until like 2015; it’s super trendy and fancy and expensive now), but it still looked pretty bad and beaten to absolute poo poo, a striking contrast from Zagreb, Istria, or anywhere on the coast really.
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Oct 21, 2022 21:37
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MechanicalTomPetty posted:Well if he really was an openly gay man in Russia then I can think of a few reasons why he might want to appear especially loyal to the Putin regime. Tbh it makes him and even bigger bag of poo poo, since he’s a massive hypocritical bloodthirsty monster, instead of just a normal bloodthirsty monster. The sci-fi author was trying to give kind of normal answers like "maybe hit the kids with a switch instead of drowning them?" and the TV host doubled down on gleeful murder. His face really lit up while he was saying that too, which particularly sickened me, like the type of person I’d want to see committed to a mental asylum before they end up as a Batman villain. Like that clip I found far more disturbing than any of the Soloyov videos here. At least he’s just bombastic like many American news presenters, I don’t see the same psychotic glee behind his eyes when he discusses killing Ukrainian civilians.
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Oct 23, 2022 22:32
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Sekenr posted:He just was just trying to be a good propagandist but loving fumbled it. They are not mad at him for suggesting drowning children, they are mad for, quoting a RU senator "giving the enemy a propagandist nuclear bomb". Genocide is OK, in their minds, as long as you don't call it as such. Well, there is actually some limit to depravity for Russia in Ukraine. There are some absolutely horrific stories, but it's also not quite Second Congo War level of "torture and eat every civilian you come across."
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Oct 24, 2022 10:08
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DJ_Mindboggler posted:"Partisan" seems like the right label, it's what I instantly thought. "Rebel" doesn't really make sense given that their not fighting to restore a state/depose a regime, but in support of one. "Insurgent" isn't technically wrong, but is too pejorative unless you're a Russian TV anchor. Insurgent doesn't make too much sense to me either, unless you also consider paratroopers dropped behind enemy lines to also be "insurgents". At least to my ears, to be an insurgent or a guerrilla you need to be active in a country that is entirely / almost entirely under the control of the opposing forces. That also works for "rebel", but "rebel" also makes sense to me in a civil war situation that has front lines, regardless of whether the rebel is on either side of them e.g. the current Tigrayan rebellion. Partisan makes sense, as I'm sure the people setting off car bombs in Melitopol are trained professionals with Ukrainian military or militia affiliations. If the war drags out for years and the front lines stabilize, I guess maybe eventually it would move more into insurgency. Someone from Kyiv working for the Ukrainian military who sabotages the rail lines in Simferopol doesn't sound like either a rebel nor an insurgent to me though. Thinking about it, to me the word kind of depends on affiliation and context; if some grandmother from Mariupol gets a gun and shoots the Russian governor, I guess I'd consider her more of an insurgent, but if some paratrooper sneaks behind enemy lines and shoots him, that seems more like special forces operations, while if some undercover policeman from Mariupol does it, that sounds more like partisan activity. I don't think they're interchangeable terms, like how "freedom fighter" and "terrorist" are matters of perspective.
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Oct 26, 2022 10:43
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It seems kind of dramatic to say that Belarusian hospitals are treating Russian military injuries means they’re being more active in the war. Injured Ukrainian military people are also being treated in hospitals in NATO countries, https://www.kyivpost.com/russias-war/injured-ukrainian-soldiers-arrive-for-treatment-in-poland.html So I don’t really see what’s exceptional about Belarus treating RUF guys. The radiation sickness treatment is interesting but overall it seems like NATO countries are doing exactly that, and a hell of a lot more, for Ukraine.
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Oct 26, 2022 12:23
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Herstory Begins Now posted:That's a really good article and it's kind of wild because, in retrospect, a lot of the rumors about just how full Belarusian hospitals were with Russian service members was a lot truer than I think most people dared to believe early on. It took months for the full scope of the mauling that Russia took in the first weeks of the war to really sink in and be comprehended. Sure there were rumors of entire units getting wiped out and the sheer quantity of wreckage and the footage of traffic jams of ambulances in Belarus leaving train depots made it clear that some pretty extreme stuff was happening, but idk I always took any wild-seeming claims of extremely heavy russian casualties with a huge grain of salt because those numbers always get inflated. Except when they weren't and it actually was that bad. I'd only read the tweets but yeah that's a great article ( https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2022/10/europe/belarus-hospitals-russian-soldiers-ukraine/ again for anyone else). I'm not convinced by the argument that it draws Belarus more integrally into the actual warfare though. I couldn't find any details at all about the actual numbers, but it looks like even hundreds of injured Ukrainian military are also being treated in Germany ( https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/ru...FZ79ljye0ro1zpF and https://www.airforcetimes.com/news/2022/07/27/us-military-to-treat-wounded-ukrainian-troops-at-landstuhl-hospital/). I imagine they are trying to keep it OpSec for just how many people that they are treating.
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Oct 26, 2022 14:44
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Sorry for a kind of OT post, but probably other people have this issue: why do Twitter links show up with a full preview in my phone browser, but on my Mac they just show up as a bunch of bare hyperlinks? I’d have to independently click if I wanted to read them, which is inevitably a hassle and makes the thread way harder to read. I did some google searches and it turned up nothing, admittedly I couldn’t think of a good search term.
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Oct 26, 2022 22:48
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Crosby B. Alfred posted:Hey all, Sunk cost fallacy, plus as others have said, the hope that the US will get tired of giving money to its MIC to give to Ukraine. Unfortunately for him global warming makes Europe care less about gas (this October was 5°C warmer than pre-1980 averages thanks global warming), and the US never tires of funding war.
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Oct 27, 2022 20:56
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E: sorry this is not the eurpol thread. Saladman fucked around with this message at 09:13 on Nov 2, 2022 |
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Nov 2, 2022 09:08
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So what happened with the Russian "withdrawal" from Kherson? It’s been several days and it’s a huge city so there’s no way opsec can keep reliable news from leaking out. I guess Russian military forces have been reduced in the city, but that there was no complete withdrawal, and Ukraine doesn’t want to attack even a lightly-defended city since it would mean it gets smashed to rubble? Seems kind of smart for Russia, they can probably hold Kherson with a fairly limited deployment if they don’t tbh think the Ukrainian military will engage in offensive city combat.
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Nov 6, 2022 15:45
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Paladinus posted:I suspect they read some listicle about LGBTQ+ representation in video games, like maybe a tvtropes page, and just picked games at random. I don’t remember any LGBT characters in any of the AC games and I played most of them. Definitely don’t remember any in AC1. Also they banned TLoU because.. the character came out as a lesbian in TLoU2? Or did they ban both games? Or because the actress/character model for the girl is a lesbian IRL? Fallout also, don’t remember anything LGBT in 1 or 2 except that you could sleep with a prostitute regardless of the sex of the player character. And banning fallout and dragon age but not Mass Effect? E: I realize I'm looking for way more logic than was actually applied. Also I guess Russians can't even legally buy video games anymore anyway from European, North American, or Japanese publishers (i.e. 99 of them?), so the ruling has like zero effect since everyone pirates everything in the first place. Saladman fucked around with this message at 17:13 on Nov 11, 2022 |
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Nov 11, 2022 17:05
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Letmebefrank posted:First they came for the washing machines, now take take even the washing bears Yeah, that was the first post on Twitter I saw under the original tweet too. Unfortunately it looks like in Russia "raccoon" is just a word (Енот) with seemingly no additional meaning, rather than it being a washing bear [German] or washing little rat [French].
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Nov 14, 2022 15:33
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evilweasel posted:it's not about ukranian morale, it's about russian morale. I don't think ineffective "shock and meh" attacks on kindergartens and substations are going to have quite the same impact on Russian morale as the videos of precision bombings of powerplants and bridges* did for Enduring Freedom, or whatever dumb name the US invasion of Iraq had. Like Russian civilians aren't even seeing videos of their country's missiles blowing up Ukrainian powerplants in Lviv, are they? The equivalent stuff was all over the news in the US in March/April 2003. E: Or whatever the US targeted. I spent like 5 minutes looking and couldn't figure out if the US had actually targeted electricity transmission/generation and bridges in the 2003 strikes. VVVV: Yeah, that makes sense. Saladman fucked around with this message at 18:08 on Nov 15, 2022 |
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Nov 15, 2022 18:03
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The NYT Magazine has an extremely long, well-researched but also kind of boring, article about the Ukrainian train network, in case that is up anyone's alley: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/15/magazine/ukraine-trains.html Nothing particularly new but it's a good personal interest piece. Way too long to copy and paste here; if you don't have a subscription then just stop the loading after the article loads but before the paywall loads.
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Nov 16, 2022 17:09
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Anne Frank Funk posted:Kyiv Sviatoshyn Airfield 50°28'19.2"N 30°22'48.0"E https://www.google.com/maps/place/50%C2%B028%2719.2%22N+30%C2%B022%2748.0%22E I imagine that there are military / dual-use locations at a LOT of positions if you can look at an ENTIRE longitude and then an ENTIRE latitude spectrum in a massive and highly militarized country like Ukraine, and then see if there's anything on either of those two lines that you can select as a reasonable military target OR as a "reasonable" (i.e. dual-use) civilian target. Also do Russian missiles tend to use GPS (well, GLONASS) coordinates for missile targeting? Or if that's unknown, what does the US do? Somaen posted:https://twitter.com/Euan_MacDonald/status/1593158987800641536 That video of the anti-missile hit is super impressive. I've seen those Iron Dome and Patriot intercepts, but something about this seemed more impressive to me, even if I imagine the Patriot is much more difficult to actually implement. Maybe the low altitude and high speed of the incoming missile?
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Nov 17, 2022 11:52
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The most surprising image from the article was, for me, this one:  Caption: "Rafael Mariano Grossi, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, speaks with Russian President Vladimir Putin last month in St. Petersburg, Russia. PHOTO: PAVEL BEDNYAKOV/ASSOCIATED PRESS" What happened to all of Putin's long tables?
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Nov 22, 2022 11:54
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I didn’t see this posted here, but a few days ago a gas pipeline to a major heating plant for ~1 million people blew up outside St Petersburg; https://news.yahoo.com/explosion-gas-pipeline-near-st-214500216.html Gas pipeline engineers lazy with their cigarettes again. Not totally sure how I feel about it if it was actually Ukrainian action, tbh, but definitely it will have a lesser effect on St Petersburg than what Russia is doing to Kyiv.
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Nov 24, 2022 10:50
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sean10mm posted:Strategic bombing is historically a dud even when dropping several orders of magnitude more bombs on civilian infrastructure than Russia is with its missile attacks. It's like people have no sense of scale with this poo poo. It's a tantrum, not an activity that will meaningfully help Russia win the war. Yeah but strategic bombing was super imprecise, even in Vietnam, so even if the magnitude is orders less, it could be as effective in terms of morale and civilian targets. Hitting power plants and water purification plants probably also has a much greater morale effect on a modern country like Ukraine than it does on a pre-industrial society like 2020s, Tigray, 1960s Vietnam, or 1940s Ukraine. But yeah I definitely agree it won't cause Ukraine to roll over and die though, it'll just make people miserable and the time for Russia to pull a US in Iraq in 2003 is long, long since passed.
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Nov 24, 2022 17:22
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Orthanc6 posted:There's a chance he knows his bombing campaign won't work, it never worked in the past. In WW2 several German cities were bombed to dirt, nothing but capturing the entire country and deleting the entire government could force peace. Japan surrendered cause they were an island that had lost the air and sea war, and then with the US on their doorstep the Soviets tagged in. Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki being levelled didn't stop them, they would have made the US bleed for every inch of Honshu if it wasn't for the super-power team up. That's a hell of a long time to wait, especially for what amounts to a Hail Mary that "US GOP outsiders win big AND are able to overpower both the democrats and hardcore US MIC Republican supporters." He's got to have some angle that doesn't revolve around the US suddenly deciding it doesn't like making things go boom. I guess a GOP controlled government might cut off non-MIC financial aid to Ukraine, but cutting off MIC aid seems like a pipedream. My guess is that they don't really have much of a plan for after their original plan of "Ukraine folds like a house of cards" failed. But hey, no one knows except for Putin and maybe some of his innermost coterie.
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Nov 25, 2022 16:09
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Zwabu posted:Don't most tyrants look unassailable right up until the point that they get toppled though? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. For instance it was very clear in Zimbabwe that Mugabe was inches away from getting couped, but it did take about 3 years of it being very clear he had thin reins of power -- ever since he announced his wife as his successor. The overthrow of Bouteflika was also telegraphed for years, but again it was about 6 years that Le Pouvoir was literally doing "Weekend at Bernies" with Bouteflika's embalmed corpse propped up in a wheelchair until they finally let him rest in a vegetative coma. The overthrow of Ould Taya in Mauritania was also preceded by a couple years of major instability. Similar for the overthrow of Alpha Conde in Guinea, which was preceded by just under a year of major instability (albeit Condé had only just recently become a dictator, and I guess had not solidified his control). The other three though had, like Putin, been in undisputed dictatorial power for decades. I think it's actually more rare for dictators to suddenly fall in a surprise flash, like Ben Ali. It rather frequently seems to be preceded by prolonged major protests (Egypt) or civil conflict (Libya). Saladman fucked around with this message at 21:53 on Nov 25, 2022 |
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Nov 25, 2022 21:51
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Hannibal Rex posted:If you want to do some light reading on previous experiences with targeting national power grids. Every situation is very different though. South Korea and either Vietnam didn't really have much in the way of national power grids in 1953 and 1968 respectively and the majority of the population definitely wouldn't have been used to electricity nor central heating (nor would they need it in Vietnam). Iraq would have blown up in a powder keg of ethnic violence even if everyone had their A/C working properly in 2003, and the US still would have annihilated the Iraqi standing army, so there I agree it's pointless - although again a different situation since being really uncomfortably hot is quite different from actually freezing to death. I mean it's interesting to see the article, I'm just not sure there are that many potential parallels to draw in those specific 3 examples.
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Nov 28, 2022 15:09
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Yureina posted:Apparently Putin's terms are to keep the annexed territories. He can go gently caress himself imo. Except for Crimea, the Russian government never actually defined what the borders of the four other provinces actually are, did they? I mean I don't think literally anyone would agree give them one square centimeter of Kherson province or Zaporijjia province, and doubt more than a handful of people would even remotely agree to giving them parts of Donetsk and Luhansk, so kind of a moot point.
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Dec 2, 2022 16:00
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A big flaming stink posted:https://twitter.com/WSJ/status/1598682166241759233?t=hzfsvU3ayLj_NMLjT31AXg&s=19 What's the bad part of the optics? That it took them this long to severe connections with the Russian Orthodox Church after their patriarch said that Ukrainians are genocidal devils that should be put under the heel ( https://www.economist.com/europe/2022/03/21/russias-orthodox-church-paints-the-conflict-in-ukraine-as-a-holy-war )? That he said that any Russian who dies fighting against Ukraine will immediately go to heaven and get 72 virgins ( https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-patriarch-kirill-dying-ukraine-sins/32052380.html )? Churches have had major schisms over way, way less than that. If the Pope declares a crusade on Turkey, I'd be alright if they also banned Catholic churches in Turkey. Saladman fucked around with this message at 17:56 on Dec 2, 2022 |
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Dec 2, 2022 17:54
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Hannibal Rex posted:https://twitter.com/ElbridgeColby/status/1599778801965211649?t=nt6NUrCWVTpwNeKthsB4sw&s=19 For anyone too lazy to click it, it says it will soon be 20,000 artillery shells/month, but not increasing much after - only to 40,000 month by 2025. So I guess Ukraine will have to figure out how to manufacture more, unless Europe starts doing something. What’s the current rate of use anyway? 20k shells is like 10 days supply at average usage, or what?
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Dec 5, 2022 17:20
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Tomn posted:While that's not great, I wonder how Russian production is doing? Part of the problems the article mentions is that the US defense industry isn't currently really geared to easily kick into mass production mode. Is Russian production better capable of doing so? And can they still manage to do so with the effects, direct and indirect, of sanctions? I know Russian ammo usage has dropped off since the early days of the war, presumably in response to shell shortages - how many of their stocks are still left, and how well are they matching the usage rate? The West may not necessarily need WW2 levels of production to help Ukraine win this if Russia isn't capable of matching that either. I doubt we'll ever know, to be honest. Also the US could definitely gear up from 20k shells a month to 40k shells a month in less than the 2.5 years its currently going to take them... they'd just have to want to actually do it. Investing in tooling factories for mass production of artillery shells is not a great investment if they think the war will be over or frozen in a year. For Ukraine it makes more sense to go all-in on production, and hopefully they can do it faster, since the US is only going to maybe supply a quarter of what they need, and the EU is likely to not do anything significant given that the production rate in Germany is like 500 shells/month (certainly an exaggeration - but whether I am exaggerating high or low, that I'm less sure about).
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Dec 5, 2022 18:37
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cinci zoo sniper posted:there’s no telling, as yet, to what specifically happened at the Engels base. Russia is saying that Ukraine attacked the airbases directly, which seems to jive with the videos that came out ( https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-63857451 ). Russia has admitted damage to two airframes, which, based on previous Russian reporting, probably indicates that a handful of aircraft were destroyed. Maybe we'll get satellite images. Otherwise who knows, but in general the trend seems to be that you can multiply anything Russia admits about damage to it by about 10.
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Dec 5, 2022 22:19
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