Ukraine Invasion 2: no more Black Sea fleet for you

You and almost everybody else. I don’t mean this critically and it was predictable, it’s just kind of amazing what we can normalize. Easily a top 3 fundamentally world reshaping geopolitical event in our lifetimes, with both tactical and full blown strategic nuclear attacks still very live, and people are like, “Oh, is that still going on? Huh. Hey, did you hear about that rich guy buying Twitter?”

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You’re not wrong, though. I should be following it more closely and I definitely feel bad about it.

There is a reason the AFU announced they are switching from Soviet to NATO equipment, NATO is running out of Soviet stuff to send them.

I don’t think Russia has thousands of tanks in reserve, they sent the ancient stuff from Siberia a month ago. However, if Ukraine can’t win the war in the next couple months and Putin can maintain domestic support to the extent that matters, Russia does in fact have an endless supply of manpower.

They don’t, though. You can’t just take a guy off the street, ship him to the front lines, and expect to get results. They don’t have the training infrastructure established to train up a substantial number of new soldiers, and training them up is a 6+ month process in the best of times and at the best of operations. Maybe Putin will elect to do this, but doing so comes with a substantial political risk. Doing so is an outright admission that the glorious army he said would crush and is crushing Ukrainian opposition has failed miserably. Maybe he can keep lying through that one, but it’s a lot harder for people to believe that things are going according to plan when you’re forcing people off to war.

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Idk if this fits in the flow of the conversation, but there’s reason to be skeptical of predictions. I mean we had experts saying there would be no invasion. Then we had experts saying it would be over in days. Now we have predictions about what Putin will do about mobilization and the likely course of the battle for the Donbas.

I don’t have a lot of confidence in what people are saying is going to happen but at least it’s not just some guy’s opinion this time. We have a lot more information even if it’s far from complete. The big unknown is Putin and how likely he is to do something really stupid if it’s clear he’s going to lose.

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I don’t think wookie was saying those will be right, but that they were credible people making testable predictions.

To balance things out, I feel bad for following too closely.

A bit like that John M fella?

the ukraine account clearly delineates a difference between aircraft (planes) and helicopters. not “of those 150 are helis”. at one point helis exceeded aircraft.

oryx counts units down to serial numbers , which is why they need the remains. a large number of downed or damaged aircraft and helicopters are unrecoverable in enemy territory. i made an error earlier, some aircraft were destroyed while on the ground at airfields. eg chernobaevka 1, chernobaevka 2, etc. you get the idea

No, the opposite of him, because he apparently isn’t falsified even when his predictions are dead wrong.

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ukraine mobilized in the beginning of the war and has been training reinforcements in the west for 2 months now.

Not at all. Measheimer says that a people standing up for their security and safety are to blame when an imperial power decides to try to subjugate them. That’s not a falsifiable prediction, that’s simply a cowardly asshole who isn’t under any sort of threat and thinking only of themselves. There’s zero percent chance he’d have the same position if his homeland was under threat.

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Yes, and the predictions seem reasonable based on what we know. I’m just saying there’s plenty of room for doubt. If I had to guess, it’s maybe as high as 40% Putin defies logic and announces a general mobilization, either before or on May 9, or if as seems likely the Donbas campaign goes badly for him.

I said drones and missiles, not helicopters. Is Ukraine really shooting down a lot of planes in enemy territory?

drones are yet another lineitem way below everything else. missiles are not, although in my understanding there’s no way ukrainian word “лiтаки” in no way refers to missiles. could be wrong. we’ll see who was right in their estimates

This is incorrect. Russia is in a demographic death spiral and a general mobilization would have far ranging social and political consequences. Time is and will continue to favor Ukraine.

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Artillery battle
Western artillery surging into Ukraine will reshape war with Russia (msn.com)

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Fucking around.

Still no confirmation on the two reported killed in Kherson a week ago, but here’s a claim from today.

https://twitter.com/olex_scherba/status/1520463695813484545?s=20&t=hUNf3_p25fpr7bPIR2c4kg

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How did they know that the invisible banners were not “Z”?
https://twitter.com/tkesho3/status/1520117348891570177