I am happy to describe Putin as “evil” but I don’t know what this accomplishes and the downside is that when I turn my back for a second you start using this as reasoning for Russia’s actions, eg:
He’s going after Russian-speaking cities hardest because they are strategically important and all this shit about being super concerned for the welfare of Russian speakers is mostly window dressing. Unless there’s something I don’t understand about what you’ve written there it just seems like nonsense and fantasy.
Obviously I’m just speculating on that. Mariupol has obvious strategic value. But the other Russian-speaking cities like Kharkiv almost felt punitive. No I don’t have proof of that of course. But it feels like something he would do in terms of, “How could you fellow Russians stab me in the back and fight for Ukraine?”
Like imagine if Putin thought Mariupol and Kharkiv would just go along with the plan like the occupied territories did, even hoped they’d might be allies in toppling the rest of Ukraine, or at the worst thought they’d roll over like Kherson and Melitopol, and then instead they resisted fiercely? How would he react to that?
Russia doesn’t even have the ability to do something like Dresden with conventional weapons though. The WWII air raids required thousands of long range level bombers. I don’t think Russia currently has any planes that can just fly over a target and dump tons of bombs out on an area target. They’re all either fighter-bombers or cruise missile platforms.
In general, modern weapons are insanely deadly, but there are very few of them relative to what’s around today. I mean, the Nazis used 10k cruise/ballistic missiles over the last few years of the war, and that category barely even existed back then.
I think it’s pretty reasonable to conclude that Russia’s Air Force is working near their effective capacity, and that they’re not indiscriminately bombing civilian areas because air strike capacity is way too precious for that role, especially in places where there’s artillery around that can do the same thing much more cheaply and effectively. You can think about the Mariupol Theater attack as a kind of counter-example to the “holding back” theory. That was a civilian target that required precision strike, and it got it. But for your average apartment block, guns and rocket launchers are the weapon of choice.
If the point is that “a lot of people can’t differentiate between acknowledgement of facts that are positive for person/side X and actually pulling for X to win” then hell yeah there’s tons of truth to that. This is a byproduct of being immersed in propaganda 24/7, when you are used to seeing nothing but effectively advertisements, of course someone saying “spinach is good” must be on the Big Spinach payroll.
It’s been a constant refrain from US observers that they don’t understand why Russian planes are flying so few sorties, at least until the last week or so when they seem to have ramped up considerably. Note these are in areas where the risk of anti-aircraft, Ukrainian jets, or SAMs, are supposedly low.
The general consensus has been that Putin has been holding back for some reason. Could be he doesn’t have enough bombs. But most seem to think they have plenty of those. I wonder if the bottleneck is pilots, as in pilots willing to fly into a zone where there is a reasonable chance of getting shot down.
I lived in Glasgow for a couple of years. There is a reason a headbutt is known as a “Glasgow kiss”.
Also, I had an ex from Dundee, but posh Scottish, she used to call putting on deodorant instead of washing a “Glasgow shower”. Not sure if that was a common thing or she made that up.
It’s definitely a mystery why the Russian AF is doing such a bad job, but “holding back” doesn’t make any sense to me. Holding back from destroying the Ukrainian AF on the ground? Holding back from keeping drones away from the convoys? Why?
It makes a lot more sense to conclude that their Air Force is just operating at its current capacity, and that capacity is just much lower than expected. Maybe it’s some kind of operational hiccup that will get straightened out over time and their capacity will increase, but the idea that they’re just phoning it in while Russia’s front line ground units are being shredded doesn’t add up.
Speaking Sunday in Israel, Blinken said: “As you know, and as you have heard us say repeatedly, we do not have a strategy of regime change in Russia - or anywhere else, for that matter.”
This could be. More generally, if it costs you 0.02 planes for every mission you fly, then there’s a cost-benefit analysis for each target you want to hit. It could be that there just aren’t enough high-value targets to justify the cost? A test will be if the pace of air strikes steps up if Russian units start getting cut off.
Not sure about all this 11th level thinking on the Russian air force when we know they haven’t been able to achieve air superiority over Ukraine and presumably they aren’t flying much because they simply don’t want to get shot down.
so far more russian troops have died than the combined deaths of ukrainian military and civilians. that’s not a successful war. it’s really putin going dresden on his own loyalists first.
winter war did not get spun as a win and really couldn’t have. it simply got overshadowed by russian expansion into poland at the start of ww2, and then all bets were off with great patriotic special operation
Ukrainian air defense set a record for downed targets: out of at least 70 missiles fired by Russia, only eight flew. The rest were destroyed in the sky.
I think I might have an idea why Russia isn’t flying more missions over Ukraine.
russian air force suffered too many losses and pilots. like the rest of armed forces, it’s a paper tiger that’s only half battle-ready. first it was blamed on poor operational logistics, now it’s down to still having enough planes, but remaining stingy on munitions and personnel.
