The Ukraine war thread
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@George-K said in The Ukraine war thread:
Interesting choice, Sergei Surovikin. An Air Force General no less.
Elbows up!
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Desert Storm in 1990 was the CNN War. Is this the Twitter War? The use of memes and 5 second video clips with Ukrainian Pop Songs is so strange…
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Sadly from what I can see in Russian language media and online sources this is true:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-63205446
For example:
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As bad as the damage looked from the Kerch Strait Bridge explosion, Russia is still using the bridge:
- The rail bridge has two tracks going each way, and they ran a test 15-car train on the other span. I have a civil engineer/bridge inspector friend who thinks it’s probably unwise to use the rail bridge at all, as the fire has almost certainly weakened the structure through spalling. But Russia doesn’t have a lot of options.
- The destroyed train hasn’t been cleared yet.
- They’ve opened up the surviving lane for traffic. “It’s been said that the road span can handle 20 cars an hour and has a weight capacity of 3.5 tons.” That’s rural mail route capacity, not “support a major front in a war” capacity.
- Russia is trying to repair the bridge.
- They’re using passenger-only ferries to cross, but the run rate is so low they may only have one ferry in service.
Peter Zeihan says it’s potentially a turning point in the war:
- “By far the most significant development of the war to date.” I would say that the failure to take Hostomel Airport in the opening phases of the war was bigger, as that meant Russia’s high risk/high reward decapitation strike had failed.
- “The Kerch bridge is the only large-scale rail connection between mainland Russia and the Crimean peninsula, which is home to about two and a half million people.”
- All other rail lines are under threat of Ukrainian artillery.
- He reiterates that everything in Russia runs on rail, as they never built a modern road network in most of the country.
- “With Kerch being the only real connection, it is the primary primary way that the Russians Supply Crimea in the southwestern front with not just troops and equipment, but with food and fuel.”
- He estimates the bridge spans couldn’t be repaired without several months of work.
- “Now that the Ukrainians know it can be done, you can bet they’re going to try to hit other parts of it to make sure the thing stays offline.”
- “For the first time we have a path forward for the Ukrainians here to win that is not long and windy.”
- Russia finally has a problem it can’t just shove bodies at. “You don’t throw a half a million people at logistics. This is something where either you have the connections or you don’t.”
- Russian troops in Zaporizhzhia, Kherson and Crimea are “suddenly on their own.”
- They can now only supply those regions in two ways. “One is by truck, and we know that because of all the Javelins that have been put into Ukraine, and all the RPGs, that the Russians are almost out of their entire military tactical truck fleet, and they’ve started using city buses and Scooby-Doo vans, and those just can’t take the volume of stuff that an active frontline needs.”
- The second way is by ship, and if they can’t supply anti-ship missiles, then Ukrainians can Muscova “every single cargo ship that the Russians try to bring in.”
- “Losing cargo ships in that volume, losing trucks and buses in that volume, is hollowing out the entirety of the Russian internal transport system. This is the sort of thing that if you bleed this fast, it takes a decade to recover from, and in a war zone that is not going to happen.”
- And sanctions make everything harder.
There still seems to be some confusion over just what blew up the bridge. While truck bomb is still the most widely accepted theory, supposedly Russia scans all trucks before the enter the bridge. And Suchomimus has a video up showing something in the water just before the blast (what isn’t clear).
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Funny you should say that. A close friend of mine from undergrad years worked on the Russia and East European desk and embassies for 25 years with Min. Foreign Affairs in Ottawa. His comment to me when this war started last February was that Putin’s actions were irrational and absent even the distorted logic of his Soviet predecessors when they invaded Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan.
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I'm wondering how long Russia will be able to escalate short of nukes. They have to be running short of long-range precision missiles. Maybe they have a lot of non-precision missiles they can launch at civilian targets, much like the Palestinians do. I really don't know.
