The War in Ukraine

[Skysix]

Ouch

https://twitter.com/x/status/1824508649168920819

Kerch practice

 

[Skysix]

Many have been noticing these events and drawing the same conclusions for tens of months. Myself included. Yet the NATO establishment (at least publicly) are channeling a flock of ostriches. The Baltics Poland, Finland Sweden being the exception.

Add the repeated actual statements of Russian leadership and deliberate cruise missile or drone overflying (and even striking) NATO territory it seems glaringly obvious that even if NATO flat out refuses to acknowledge it, Russia has declared war on NATO.

Are they planning a mechanised breach and invasion of a NATO state, not soon. But what they ARE trying to do in my estimation is to weaken the trust and cooperation (such as it is) between NATO states and ideally make it even more dysfunctional than it is now.

Then in 20 or so years taking back former USSR republics becomes a lot easier and NATO's willingness (and ability) to stop Russia greatly decreased.

I am not factoring in the current state of affairs of the Russian army and its equipment as Russia has been on a total war footing with its economy converted to a war production economy - and these long term strategies and their current tactical operations were set in motion a decade ago or more and are part of a many year long plan. Fortunately Putins desperation has led to parts of the plan being implemented weakly or early and thus being discovered after the fact).

 

[Colin Parkinson]

I note that Ukarine is adopting a interesting standardized "Cope cage". It appears to be able to fold and likley is meant to be dual purpose, meant to snag FPV drones and be used as a framework for cam nets. Likely Ukraine looked at the efficiency of several adhoc designs and adopted this as the best effect to weight/complexity ratio.