https://twitter.com/vitalii_rybak/status/1520310887709618182?t=vwHgrvPQCH7G-hqSV07MhQ&s=19
Blimey, almost as big as Texas.
I watch videos of russian tanks being blown to pieces knowing some Russian tanker just got turned to mush and I enjoy watching those videos.
I would also enjoy watching the moscovy sink into the ocean too if there was a video.
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https://mobile.twitter.com/JackDetsch/status/1520376263399071744
They won’t be getting donbas either.
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Ghost of Kyiv killed in combat
Ukraine’s Ghost of Kyiv Pilot Was Killed in Battle, the Times Reports (businessinsider.com)
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I suspected that if the “Ghost of Kyiv” was real that he must have died because every mention of him stopped suddenly. Having shot down 40 aircraft is a let’s call it embellishment. There is no evidence that Ukraine shot down that many planes.
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ukraine claims that it shot down 150 planes and 150 helicopters, but most with shoulder-held rockets like stingers and other SAM. only a fraction via air strikes
They make those claims but where is the evidence? Plane/helicopter wrecks don’t just disappear.
there are tons of videos with downed aircraft. CIT examines those and adds them up to provide the floor of such numbers. and they come up with about half or 3/4 of VSU official releases for all sorts of military equipment. true numbers are likely higher that the floor. so far noone has caught VSU outright lying for some nefarious reason
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Don’t the downed aircraft stats (currenlty ~180) include missiles and drones? Do you have a link that claims 40 downed planes?
Oryx says 26 planes and 38 helicopters to date (that they have verified).
I’m not following this as closely as I once did. What are the odds that most (or at least a lot) of the reports of Ukranian success that we are seeing are also morale-boosting propaganda.
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Just because something is morale-boosting doesn’t mean it’s false. I think big picture stuff, like the relative progress of each side on the various fronts is relatively reliable, because there are a lot of different eyes on that that are all saying about the same thing. And if that all is true, then it’s entirely consistent with substantial Ukrainian success. Forcing the Russians to abandon Kyiv is a massive victory, and the “offensive in the East” clearly hasn’t gone much of anywhere, or to the extent that it has, it’s not clear that Russia has achieved much other than opening themselves up to counterattacks while being overextended.
The actions of knowledgeable actors tells the same tale: Biden isn’t asking for $33 billion to help a lost cause, and we can expect that he and the US military have very, very good intelligence as to the state of the war. Other NATO members are also continuing to supply Ukraine rather than simply shoring up their own borders, and that only makes sense if they think Ukraine will win, or at least will win conditionally on getting continued arms and other supplies.
And we know even from the Russians that things aren’t going well. While the Russians haven’t confirmed Putin assuming direct control, they did announce the change of general. They don’t do that if things are going according to plan. The Russians have publicized losses that, while well under Ukrainian and 3rd-party-but-sympathetic-to-Ukraine sources, still amount to devastation, embarrassment, and a great deal more attrition than most western sources would have guessed on the day the invasion started. Given how obviously and flagrantly the Russians have lied to make things look more favorable to how things are going for them than they are, it’s hard to think that their numbers are either more accurate than 3rd party numbers or an overestimate of their losses. That would be wholly inconsistent with everything they’ve been doing. But those sorts of losses are a substantial percentage of the total available force positioned around Ukraine on the eve of invasion, so it’s hardly surprising that Russia’s overall capabilities are diminished.
So, no, while there may be some modest inflation about particular details and isolated stories within the story, I don’t have any doubts that Ukraine is succeeding and Russia is failing. It’s not clear yet how this is going to end up, but it’s pretty clear how it’s going.
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official ukrainian government account
https://mobile.twitter.com/DefenceU/status/1520300047757459458
Again, I believe Ukraine counts missiles and drones as aircraft. They are hardly an unbiased source either. As zikzak has pointed out only 26 airplanes have been independently confirmed when providing proof of a downed airplane should be easy.
I believe to this day we haven’t seen any evidence of the An-26 that was claimed to have been shot down in the early days of the war.
If you want to see if we’re getting fed bullshit, here are some testable predictions made recently that could be falsified in the next few weeks:
https://twitter.com/PhillipsPOBrien/status/1519560504712253440?t=jwjjSNjPNWO-V2Qv3yUqOw&s=19
Russia doesn’t have a bottomless supply of troops that it can mobilize and send to the Donbas, so don’t expect to hear about tens of thousands of reinforcements.
https://twitter.com/ThreshedThought/status/1519944100149137409?s=20&t=FcmoONx7NBTvmJ2VsmjJ_w
Ukrainians are predicted to make meaningful territorial gains within 4 weeks.
https://twitter.com/MMazarr/status/1519160806751014912
This guy thinks Russia will announce a national draft on or around May 9th because the war is going so badly for them. It’s a testable prediction, although him being wrong is not necessarily evidence that the war is going Russia’s way.
What I am afraid of is that Ukraine doesn’t have a bottomless supply either. They have been quite mum about their own losses and I do not know how much we can trust the few announcements of losses they have made.
That assumes an endless supply of equipment by the West but that isn’t a given either. Poland is delivering 200 tanks now but Russia has thousands in reserve. Not all of those will be operational but I bet they are working on that. There has to be a breaking point for Ukraine, too.